The Stars Askew (49 page)

The reality of the situation crashed back onto Kata. A gladiator army was marching toward them. Dumas had been right when he'd written that letter: they
would
be ready by the Twilight Observance. They had hoped to lie in wait like a snake beneath a rock, but she had provoked them into action. Would the thaumaturgists march too now that Alfadi was dead? Someone must have sent the letter from the Marin Palace to Dumas. But who, and how many thaumaturgists did that person command? Would the Brotherhood of the Hand rise to help? The questions were impossible to answer.

Ejan turned to his lieutenants. “The conflict between the vigilants and the moderates is over. Take Kata here to the Technis Palace immediately. In my absence, she is to be considered leader of all the vigilant forces there. I'll fight a rearguard action here at the Opera with those remaining.”

Ejan turned back to the stunned Kata. “Save us, if you can. Go now! Go!”

Kata laid a hand on Rikard's chest. She then turned and threw her file into the fire. The flames surged, devoured the papers, and threw warmth out into the room.
At least the file was good for something,
she thought.

Kata then turned and strode through the Opera, Dexion, Maximilian, and Ejan's lieutenant behind her. They climbed onto horses reserved for vigilant leaders. Kata's mind was awhirl. She had misread everything, misjudged everyone. But now all truths had been unveiled, and the decisive clash was at hand. She would not fail this time. She would die before that happened.

Kata rode with the cool wind in her hair, possessing a calm certainty for the first time in her life.

 

THIRTY-NINE

The griffins set Armand and Giselle down on the outskirts of Varenis, for the wild creatures would not approach the vast thrumming metropolis. After a train ride into the city, Giselle took Armand to a boardinghouse in the Kinarian Pocket, where she had been keeping a large room. As she led him through the door, Armand became aware of a massive figure lounging on a soft chair, one hand pointing a gargantuan modern bolt-thrower at them.

“Fat Nik! Put that down, you fool,” said Giselle.

The man shrugged, leaned the chunky bolt-thrower against the chair, took a piece of fruit, and dropped it into his mouth.

Giselle collapsed into a nearby chair and reached over for the fruit bowl, but Fat Nik swatted her hand away with his other arm, which was only a stump. “Get your own.”

Armand thought about his future. In the images, his left arm had been amputated, presumably to stop the bloodstone disease that even now burned within it. Was it possible to change this future without changing his later triumph?
What did it take,
he wondered,
to change history?
Wasn't it happening at every moment? Already he was anticipating the future he had seen. In doing so, wasn't he changing that very future? He shook his head, as if to clear it of these maddening thoughts.

He would stick to his original plan: to conquer Caeli-Amur at the head of one of Varenis's legions. He hoped that this would still allow him some flexibility, to save both his arm and Irik. Would the future allow his victory over Caeli-Amur together with these personal rescues? Could he change his future, altering the visions just enough to keep his victories and avoid his defeats?

He was certainly changing. The dreadful time in Camp X, the pain of losing Irik at the Needles—these ate away at everything he had believed in. He was shedding all his former verities—loyalty, honesty, civilization—and replacing them with cold calculations. One did what one had to reach one's goals. Valentin had been right when he'd said,
You must learn to be
realistic
.
For the first time, Armand reconsidered Valentin's story about his grandfather's betrayal. Perhaps Valentin had told the truth.

“I thought we were receiving reinforcements,” Giselle said to Fat Nik. “You're not all we're getting, are you?”

“Very funny,” said Fat Nik. “Dumas sent me with a secret weapon. It's in the other room.” Nik waved. “I couldn't bear to keep it in here. There's something wrong about it—you know, something unnerving.”

Fat Nik picked up an odd-looking pastry from a wooden board and examined it for a minute before stuffing the entire thing into his mouth.

Through the open door to the bedroom, Armand could see a large brown book lying in the center of the bed. Armand found himself walking slowly toward it as Nik continued to talk, his mouth half full with food.

“Bound in human skin, apparently. Thaumaturgical tattoos all over it. They might have lost their potency, but I'm not taking any chances.”

From up close, the book emanated unearthly power. Armand felt its force as his hand hovered close to its covers. The faded equations and ideograms drew him in, and he found himself staring at it, absorbed by the symbols, which seemed to spin before his eyes.

Excitement filled him, for he had seen this book before, during the Embrace with the Augurer. In that vision, he had given the book to the Gorgons, which was surely a step on the path to his victory.

From the other room, Giselle continued talking to Nik. “What happened to your hand?”

“I lost it fighting a dragon in a pyramid near the Teeming Cities. We passed deadly traps and crossed vast abysses before I lifted the ancient statue of some long lost god from its pedestal. Sculpted from sapphire—you should have seen it. Then the serpent slithered out of the darkness. Gods, the size of it, its awful fangs! It swallowed my hand and the statue whole!”

Then Fat Nik called out to Armand. “Leave it alone, Lecroisier. It'll send you mad.”

Armand opened the book but could understand little of the contents. The language was theoretical and specialized. There were sections about the structure of Alerion's prism, the nature of the life-force within. Detailed diagrams and equations were written in spidery text, many overlapping so that the pages themselves resembled the insides of some ancient technology, all latticework, cogs, and gears of unknown design.

Armand closed the book, but he felt like something had dislocated in his mind.

That night Giselle took the couch, and Fat Nik sprawled his elephantine body over the soft chair. Fat Nik snored like an engine. Every now and then Giselle would sit up from her couch and lash out with a cushion. “Shut up, Nik. By the gods, you're lucky you're my ally!”

“What? What?” Each time Fat Nik raised his head, looked around, and quickly returned to his thunderous slumber.

In the bedroom, Armand tried desperately to decipher the book's contents. He could not understand the theoretical sections of the book, nor the mathematical ones. But, from the preface, he came to understand the prism's history. Once Aya was gone and the other gods had fled the world, Alerion—mighty and angry—had lashed out, wrecking those parts of the world not already broken by the war. When he came to Caeli-Amur, it was clear he was dying. Aya had injured him in the battle at Keos Pass. Some slow-acting, poisonous algorithm was working its way through his body.

As Alerion's soul slipped away, the Aediles found him. Taking his body into their laboratories, they captured what was left of his power and encased it in the prism, hoping the object they made might help them heal the world. Yet the world disintegrated, the works of the ancients fell, and everything was in ruin. Not even the prism could stop entropy. But it
could
ward off the poisoning effects of the thaumaturgy. It also possessed other dark powers Armand couldn't quite understand. How much of Alerion's spirit still resided in the prism was unclear, though the object seemed to possess a personality.

Without this book, it seemed, control of the prism would be at extremely dangerous at best, and perhaps impossible. And so Armand now possessed his trump card. He could approach Controller Rainer and exact his revenge on Valentin. He had been through too many trials to fail.

*   *   *

When Armand and Giselle entered Rainer's vast office in the Department of Satisfaction, he was already waiting on a wide couch, a chess set in midgame in front of him. He had lost weight, revealing huge and muscular shoulders, though his beard was still trimmed and sculpted into sharp and geometric edges, and his head was still shaved.

On a pile of cushions nearby lounged a slight female figure, her hair dyed a brilliant purple—a Trid-Girl. Armand remembered her from Valentin's party, when a group of them had surrounded Rainer. There was something airy and insubstantial about her, as if she might at any moment float up into the air. She stood and, placing her hands on the floor, gracefully cartwheeled once, twice, and pressed herself to Rainer. Once there, she began to croon quietly.

Rainer wrapped an arm around her. “Not now, Siki. We have visitors.”

The woman continued to croon as she turned her head to Armand and Giselle, examining them curiously.

“Miracles never cease.” Rainer brushed his cheek against the Trid-Girl's. “Even here in the Department of Satisfaction. Armand, my friend. Just in time, too. It's amazing how powerful a pawn can be when it finds the right square on the board.”

Armand remembered Rainer's warnings at Valentin's party:
Valentin: he's not to be trusted
, the man had told him, clear as day.

“I should have listened to you,” said Armand. “You warned me, but I was loyal.”

“I thought loyalty was one of your precious principles?” Rainer kissed Siki. She pushed herself away and spun across the floor like a dancer. Another Trid-Girl, this one with orange hair, appeared at a nearby doorway, leaned against the frame calmly, and watched the conversation curiously.

“I have learned there is a higher principle, and that is to face reality, to make use of any means to reach your goal.” Armand's voice had found a new cold and sure equilibrium.

“Ah, Realpolitik—that is the Varenis way,” said Rainer.

Armand walked to the window, looked out over the plaza. A cold wind whipped between the twelve immense black towers. Huddled in the middle stood the smaller tower of the Director. “So, how is my protector, Valentin?”

Rainer laughed and walked over to stand beside Armand. “You should see him panicking in his tower, desperately trying to call in favors from Controllers who do their best to ignore him. The prism is unworkable, of course, bound with arcane sciences no one can unlock. Meanwhile, in Caeli-Amur, the seditionists are destroying the entire city, and Valentin's plans have come to naught. His support has deserted him. We need the Gorgons to call another ritual.”

Armand tried to see through the windows of Valentin's tower. He imagined his betrayer hiding in there, scrabbling to maintain his power. “There is a way to unlock the prism's secrets, and I possess it.”

Rainer smiled broadly. “Are there no end to your surprises, Lecroisier? It seems our pawn has made the long journey all the way to the back row. The question is, what piece are you now?”

Armand placed a hand on each of Rainer's broad shoulders. “I think you know. You didn't believe it back at Valentin's party, but I think I'm probably a Gorgon now. Shall we recapture Caeli-Amur, I at the head of the legions and you in the Director's seat?”

Rainer's voice trembled with anticipation. “Oh yes. The real Gorgons will be keen to discuss it with us, I'd say. Shall we pay them a visit?”

*   *   *

The passages beneath the Plaza of the Sun were labyrinthine, and Armand followed Rainer with trepidation. He had learned not to trust but to be constantly on guard. At first he controlled his emotions, but he became more anxious when they took other, older paths, deeper down. Soon the walls were made of the same black stone as the Sortileges' Towers. Armand knew this was primeval rock, rock that held secrets predating even the ancients. Down here, in the black bowels, lived the Gorgons.

A vast door loomed before them. Its surface was carved with great images from the days of the ancients. The two dragons wrapped and writhed around each other in the embrace that signaled their compact against the ancients of Etolia. For years they had wreaked havoc until Alerion faced them on the rocky island of Culia, not far from Aya. He returned victorious, but he was changed. After that, he was filled with anger—or so the myth went.

Rainer pressed the doors, which creaked open of their own accord. A single thin corridor led into the darkness. Rainer handed Armand the lantern. “I will wait here, for it is you who they want to talk with.”

Armand entered that black passageway, a tightness in his chest. On it went, until, after what seemed like an age, he came out into a vast and shadowy circular hall, flickering torches on its walls. Thinking he might find the Gorgons in the gloom on the far side of the hall, he walked toward the center before realizing that three sections of the floor were in fact large circular pools of black water. Armand stopped, put his lantern on the floor, and knew where he had seen this hall before, in the Embrace of the Augurers.

The pools were shimmering. Something moved beneath the surface. An interminable rolling of the waters, and then something wriggling broke the surface: a serpent, its tongue slithering out of its mouth, its fangs bared. It was followed by another and another, writhing around one another, until finally the Gorgon's head burst from the waters.

Armand heard water streaming from the bodies of the two Gorgons rising from the pools behind him. Terrified, he stood rooted to the spot as the first creature approached him. Its pupils were vertical ellipses, like those of the mad serpents writhing on its head. Though the snakes were horrific, the Gorgon was beautiful, too, with classical features, high cheekbones, perfect skin, full lips. She tilted her head and opened her mouth. Sharp canine teeth brushed her bottom lip.

Now that all three were close to Armand, they circled him, tilting their heads, looking him up and down as if they had never seen anyone like him before.