The Stars Askew (30 page)

Alerion strode forward, planted his feet wide, a boastful and angry pose.

In the center of the room, Iria faced him. Her chin held high, her eyes challenging—her full beauty on display.

Aya circled the room to see their faces, and Max could feel his terrible tension. The ancient mage had not expected this. Fear and uncertainty were breaking down the mage's defenses, and Max sensed an opportunity.

“You must come back to Varenis,” said Alerion. “You must explain yourself to the city.”

“Explain myself to
you
, you mean. In front of everyone, so that I might be shamed.”

“Panadus agrees. So does everyone.” Alerion relaxed his pose: he clearly thought he had the upper hand.

“It'll be a show trial. Like you'll have for Aya.” Iria didn't take a step back.

Alerion slouched onto one of the immaterial chaise longues and arrogantly swung his heels up onto the table, knocking the vase to its side, breaking it. “Aya is no more.”

Iria shuddered, then froze in position as if she were in pain. She breathed rapidly, yet restricted by a contraction of chest or stomach muscles. Her body leaned a little forward, as if she might sit down at any instant.

“Don't pretend to be surprised,” said Alerion.

“You shouldn't have locked him up.” Her voice was broken now. “He wasn't meant to be locked up. You know that. He was always too much of a free spirit.”

“You can complain now,” said Alerion. “You were the one who betrayed him.”

Aya backed away from the scene, held one hand out as if the images might strike him.

“I didn't want him dead!” Iria screamed.

Alerion stood up rapidly, throwing the chaise longue back. Its cushion flew across the room as it rolled and settled onto its material duplicate. “You knew what it meant. Don't deny it. You came to me, suckered up to me with your honeyed tone: ‘Let me retire to my tower. Let me live in peace, and I'll give you Aya's movements. You will know his army's plans. His strategy.' You even put your hands on me. You remember that!”

Iria turned away from him, closed her eyes. “You said you would treat him with respect. Stop the war. That's what I wanted.”

Alerion's laugh was cruel. “You tell yourself these lies so you can live with yourself. But we both know what you are. You've used the Art too often, and now you have no feelings. Now you care only for yourself.” Alerion's tone softened. “Look at yourself, Iria. You're locked up here alone in the mountains. You were always special. Why waste it?”

Iria turned around, stared at him, her eyes narrow and full of hate. “I won't go back.”

At this, Alerion rushed at her, knocked another of the chaise longues aside. It spun and superimposed itself onto a dusty thing in one corner. His hand grasped her face. He leaned in, his lips running over her ears in a circular, leering touch.

“I'll give you until the morning,” he whispered. “Look outside, Iria. I have brought my bodyguards. They will carry you back if necessary. You will return to Varenis to show that we are again united.”

Iria shoved him off, her voice full of soft anger. “You've ruined this world, Alerion. It was meant to be our paradise, but poison now flows on the battlefields. You've even altered its geological movements. Heat is flowing chaotically beneath the surface. There is no future here, you know. Not now.”

At this, Alerion walked away, his face suddenly stricken with guilt. He wasn't so sure of himself, it seemed. “We'll repair it. We can do anything—you know that.”

“Hubris—that's what swallows you up, Alerion. You do know what that is?”

Alerion paced to the doorway, turned back. “Until tomorrow, Iria. You and I can rule together. We can forget the rest of them. The Aediles will follow us if we unite. We can rebuild. You and I.”

“Aya is my lover,” said Iria. “He always has been. He's the only one I loved.”

Alerion sneered, shook his head. “We both know he only ever cared for himself. Don't make us drag you back.”

With a sweep of his purple cloak, he was gone, through the doors and down the stairs.

Iria stood silently for what seemed an eternity. She was so still that she seemed to have become almost a statue. Abruptly, she looked at one of the overturned chaise longues, as if it might hold the meaning of events. Some part of her kicked into action, and she walked serenely across to the wall, slid her hand across it, revealing a cabinet hidden behind. From within she took two separate jars of semidried leaves and dropped their contents into a glass, into which she poured a honeyed liquid.

—What is it?

Etolian hemlock, I'd say, mixed perhaps with vanilla leaves and honey mead.
Aya's tone had a distant quality to it. Some part of him had retreated.

Iria stirred the preparation with a calm matter-of-factness. She held it up, catching its green and gold swirling colors in the light, then stirred it again. Without a moment's hesitation she brought it to her lips, swallowed it in a single gulp. She placed the glass back into the cabinet, which slid closed of its own accord.

Iria rolled her shoulders, walked gracefully to the spiral staircase, and stepped lightly upward.

Aya followed mechanically behind. Max could sense his dissociation, a dull whiteness behind the eyes: everything appeared as if from down a long tunnel, Iria doubly spectral, a recording seen from a distance. And yet Iria seemed to be right before them, her slim figure elegantly stepping, her delicate musculature visible beneath the back of her dress.

The palatial bedroom also offered a panoramic window, this one with doors opening out onto a balcony. But it was to the bed that Iria walked, toward a dry and shriveled cadaver that lay there, the remains of an asymmetrical dress clinging to it. The cadaver lay in repose, quiet and calm, but its sunken eyes filled the room with desolation.

Iria sat on the bed, kicked her legs out, and fell into the cadaver. At times during the following minutes, she shuddered, convulsed. Her image shook itself free of the corpse, settled back onto it, until finally the shuddering stopped and she was still, a ghost settling back into its body and there finding rest.

Aya retreated even more into himself, so that only a fragment remained conscious of events outside. His grief was far away, deep down.

Now,
thought Maximilian.
Now is the time.
He struck, rushing forward like a tidal wave flooding over all the structures of his mind, engulfing them. He scrabbled for the controls of his body—felt them: the muscles of his arms; the skin; the legs holding him up; his back, so long. His neck gave way, and he hauled it back up with sudden focus. The bodily sense—the feeling of corporeality—was strange and alien.

Aya did not fight. Instead he was swept away and he fell down, back to his dark basement of the mind.

—Where's the Core? Show me.

But Aya did not respond. Perhaps he was gone, dead, dissolved into nothingness.
Perhaps that was for the best,
thought Max. Even if he were to lose the knowledge of the prime language, he would be himself again.

For half an hour, he called to Aya. —Where's the Core, Aya?

Eventually Aya responded.
It's a terrible thing, seeing the past. And yet the thing is, I didn't feel it enough. I saw Iria and Alerion, but a distance lay between us. It's an awful thing to be one of the Magi, to lose connection to what you love, to look on from faraway and distant heights. I wish I were like you, that I could truly feel. That I was really human again.

Max made a sudden raid into Aya's mind, riffled through his memories of the Tower. They came to him like fragments of broken glass: he saw the wonder for the first time, needlelike and magnificent; felt Iria's embrace in the bedroom above; listened to snatches of the lovers' conversation. Aya did not resist.

The Core was in the base of the Tower, Max discovered.

He left the body of Iria, the recording still superimposed over it, and followed the stairs, past the doorway to the bridge, and into the darkness below. He lit a lantern, its flickering flame illuminating the stone walls until he steadied it. The staircase turned away from the Tower wall, descended another fifteen steps, and led into what at first appeared to be a narrow passageway, then revealed itself as the walls of two machines. Their irregular sides were covered with protuberances comprised of what might have been complexes of pistons and gearboxes, latticework fanlike components, wheels and cogs and cam followers, all of varying sizes.

Max passed along this space and realized that the basement was a single open room, its many passageways formed by the sides of machines. He continued, making several turns, until he reached the center, where a single wide pillar stood. A wheel was fixed into its flat surface.

Max hung his lantern from a hook on the low roof. The wheel spun easily, and the outline of a door appeared in what had previously been a smooth wall. The door swung outward, revealing a lever, which he shifted up. The previously imperceptible humming slowly stopped; the machines surrounding them seemed to sigh and become silent.

Max pulled the cylinder, which was about two feet long and the width of a birch trunk, from its casing. The object was unnervingly light, and Max sensed it was charged with thaumaturgy. He examined the intricate patterns on its sides. He could see that though it appeared to be a perfect cylinder, it was forged from many parts—delicate toothed wheels and gears, ratchets and clamps—that could emerge to interact with other components from its encasing mechanisms.

Max carried it up and out of the Tower. Once he had slipped it into the long saddlebag used to carry large items, Max looked back up at the Tower. Aya was still hidden down in the depths of Max's mind, defeated by what he had seen.

Now that he had taken the Tower's Core, Max sensed that its protective mechanisms would no longer function. It, too, would begin its slow decline into dilapidation. The winds would beat it, the snows force their way into its cracks, turning to water in spring and melting farther in. Its stones would wear and disintegrate. All that time, Iria's remains would lie on the bed, a symbol for everything that was ancient. One day the panoramic windows would break, opening up the Tower's insides. Then she, too, would be swept away by the unceasing actions of the elements, until finally the rocks would reclaim their own, leaving nothing behind.

Max pulled himself up into the saddle, the Core in the bag beside him. It would provide the power the Elo-Talern needed, the power that would allow one personality to be retracted from Max's body.
All things come toward their end,
he thought. He needed to free himself from Aya. Then he might rejoin history, rejoin the seditionists, finally do something of use. Everything else he had done had been a failure. Yet he knew to free himself from Aya meant abandoning the prime language. An uneasiness filled Max's body, for though he knew this was the solution, deep down he rebelled against the idea.

 

P
ART
III

MIDNIGHTS

When we look upon the Bolt—that terrible construction—then the Bolt looks back into us. When we kill, murder pierces our souls. For this reason, the Bolt is the tragic symbol of our age, an impossible instrument ushering in an impossible world. It is the heart of our contradiction, the contradiction in our heart.

Any revolution is a desire for freedom, a liberation from bonds that hold the citizens too tightly. A new world is invented, where each person is given scope to develop their own talents. Yet from the very beginning, freedoms must be clamped down: there can be no freedom to return to the old state of affairs, no freedom to undermine the freedoms of others. For as long as the old elites are marginal, they can be tolerated, but the moment their actions clog up the levers of liberation, they must be subdued.

On this contradiction we now flounder. When I think of that construction up at the Standing Stones, I feel a shiver run through me, I feel the cold wind blow over my skin, I feel the sun setting over the mountain that overlooks our great city. I feel the shadows lengthening, I feel the darkness falling slowly but certainly, threatening to snuff out the light of everything we've built.

—Olivier Hubert, the
Dawn

 

TWENTY-FIVE

For a moment, as Kata descended the stairs, she thought she saw Henri behind her: a glimpse of his ruffled hair, his pale face, but when she turned, he wasn't there.

Dexion was already putting on his armor, strapping his massive war hammer to his belt. He was scheduled to appear in the finale of the Autumn Games during the Twilight Observance, and his natural charisma and exoticism meant he would be a key player.

Kata moved gingerly past him and pulled up her shirt to examine a great black bruise darkening her side. Seeing this, Dexion grabbed her wrist, held it up in the air, and poked her playfully in the sensitive spot.

“Ow,” said Kata.

“Oh, that's a good one,” Dexion said cheerily. “I don't think they're broken, but they might be bruised right here.”

“Ow! Hey!” Kata wrenched her arm away.

“Don't whine. It's nothing. Look at this.” Dexion raised his own shirt. A jagged scar ran down the curves of his ribs and across his sculpted abdominals. “That's where a Numerian pirate sliced me with his cutlass. We were sailing from Aya to Numeria, but the pirates had been raiding the coast for some time. They snuck up on us in the night, burst out of the low-lying fog. By the time I made my way on deck, they were crawling all over our cutter like spiders. I took two out, but a third hit me from the side. I cracked his head against the mast, though. And here…” Dexion began to catalog his scars and injuries: this one, from another minotaur on the island of Aya; that one, from a lover he'd had on the Dyrian coast.