Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (14 page)

27 Rooftops

“I have a score to settle with you, my friend,” he said. “You’ve set me back a long way.”

“Given another chance, I would do the same thing,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re playing with. We of the desert may be ignorant of Enoch the great world-city and the Cheiropt its divine genius, but we preserve Sephaura, and Sephaura speaks of the Old Ones. The man who procured these ova for you is no friend of yours. He must have some hidden purpose. I have spoken.”

Jairus bared his teeth. “All I need to know is that they’re agents of chaos. My people expect an exodus from the Cheiropt’s divine order. Chaos is the key that will unlock the prison door.”

“You should be careful,” I said. “Chaos is a double-edged sword. And I would have said that the Cheiropt represents disorder, not order.”

“You speak in riddles, my friend. You forget that we city-dwellers are not philosophers like you men of the desert.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know how to say what I mean. Once there was a wise man in Arras who taught that the world began in chaos. It rose out of chaos as an island in the sea, and back into chaos it will eventually slide. Perhaps that’s the truth. Sephaura is silent on it. But when men think of chaos they think of fire and blood, of whirlwinds and earthquakes. And so it is in the beginning. But these aren’t chaos themselves. They’re only the first steps toward chaos. Chaos itself—perfect disorder—is flat and tepid and gray. In Arras we had a saying: All rivers pour into the Sea of Bitter Tears. Here we might say: all rivers pour into the Cheiropt. And the Cheiropt is not filled.”

A curious change had come over Jairus during my speech. His sallow face grew grave and thoughtful; his large eyes turned inward. He opened his mouth, hesitating. Then he seemed to recall his men standing about him, listening to our exchange in silent bewilderment. The moment passed.

He sneered. “That may well be, my friend. But the Misfit chooses no course lightly, nor does he forswear himself. Hand over the woman.”

In Seila’s ear I whispered: “Do you trust me?”

“I trust you,” she said.

I donned my helmet and picked her up in my arms. Jairus smiled sardonically. “What are you doing, little man?”

“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” I said. “Think over what I said. It is truth.” Then, before his men could react, I took a running start, leaped to the parapet, and propelled myself across the gap to the next tower. Seila screamed involuntarily and shut her eyes. My feet touched down. I bounded across the roof and leaped to the next tower, and continued like that for several blocks, bounding from rooftop to rooftop. Seila kept her face to my breast.

All of a sudden my energy flagged again. I was running over a tile roof, nearing the edge, moving too fast to stop. I knew I wouldn’t make the jump. A weather-stained solarium projected from below the top of the next tower. I twisted as my foot left the parapet, turned as I flew through the air. My back made first contact with the panes, so that my body shielded Seila. I landed on my knees in a shower of glass and slid to a stop against the opposite wall. The long room was dark and deserted. There were big puddles where rainwater had leaked through the arched panes.

“Are you hurt?” I whispered.

“No, I don’t think so.”

I set her down and got to my feet. A cloud of buzzing sparks assailed my eyes. I stumbled against the wall.

“What is it?” she cried, leaping to my side.

“Nothing. I don’t know. I feel—ah, it’s worse than before.”

“It’s that armor,” she cried with sudden conviction. “Where did you get it? What do you know about it?”

“Help—help me,” I panted, fumbling with my helmet. She drew it the rest of the way off.

“We can’t stay here,” she said. “His men will be searching the building soon. There’s a place nearby where I think we’ll be safe. Can you make it?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m feeling better now.”

“You look it,” she said, eyeing me critically. “Come. Give me your arm. Come this way.”

She led me to the stairs and down to the ground floor. We went through the building to a door that gave upon an alley. There was no one in sight. We waded out into the thick darkness together.

*          *          *          *          *

“You’re wasting yourself,” Seila said.

“What?” I panted. “What do you mean?” Cold sweat beaded my forehead.

“You’re giving yourself up to the Cheiropt. Can’t you see that? I warned you before, in the dungeons, but you wouldn’t listen. When I first met you, Keftu, you meant something to me. You meant that a new thing could happen here in this old labyrinth. I felt that you were the first sporeling of spring after a long winter. Don’t throw that away.”

“What is it to you? You aren’t part of the Cheiropt. You’re from the Deserits, you said.”

She shook her head. “A chiliad ago that might have meant something. But the Cheiropt is there, too, now. The old ways withered before its machinery. The tribes dissolved. The fathers and mothers in Sheol were forgotten. The shrines were allowed to erode into the gutters. The markets became silent and empty. Yes, I’m a Druin and have no mark. But that’s only because being Druin
is
my mark.”

We turned down another alley. It was completely dark now. I could hardly see Seila beside me. “I haven’t thought of myself as wasting my time here,” I said. “As soon as I escaped the dungeons, I set about…what I set about.”

She gave an angry little laugh. “You set about rescuing me. Is that it? Me! What am I? When have I ever asked for it? When have I ever told you I wanted anything else in life? But that’s just what I mean. You came here on your ridiculous quest, told everyone about it like a baby, and then couldn’t keep to it for even a week. I became your new object.”

“Would you have had me leave you to your fate while I went on with my quest?” I was becoming angry in my turn now. “I’ve done what seemed best at each stage. I didn’t seek you out: we were thrown together by forces beyond our knowing. And I didn’t ask to go to the dungeons. Perhaps it was my fault, but it was a failure of knowledge, not of will.”

“Was it? Was it indeed? You’ve done your best at each stage, you say. To me that only means you’ve selected the path of least resistance in the channels laid out for you by the Cheiropt. It took hold of you before you set foot in the city. Don’t you see that? You were in its toils before you left Arras.”

“I don’t see how that could be.”

“Didn’t you tell me that you came here because you laid eyes on Narva? You see? You submitted yourself to the Cheiropt then and there, when you submitted to the Narvene valuation of things.”

“But what else is there to live for than immortality? What could be worse than annihilation?”

“Immortality could be worse.”

I glanced at her, but her face was only a white blur in the darkness. “What do you mean?”

“There’s a story I heard in Hela. The kind of thing a thaumaturge would dream up. A phylite and a helot—a wicked industrialist-prince and his faithful serf—died at the same moment and went before the judgment seat. Rhanthus ruled that each might choose his own fate. The phylite asked for a palace in a pleasure park, with beasts to hunt, and game rooms, and nightly banquets, and exquisite images to lay beside. The helot asked simply that he might sit on the lowest step of the divine majesty and watch the spirits of flame go back and forth on their errands.”

We both froze. Jingling metal sounded from the darkness behind us. Seila helped me into an alcove. A party of armed men passed by without seeing us. We stepped back out and went on our way.

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, a myriad went by, and Rhanthus went to visit each in turn. The helot he found on his step, still contentedly watching the spirits of flame. Then he went to find the phylite. He searched all over the grounds and palace. They’d been long neglected, and the phylite was nowhere to be found. At last the Judge discovered him in the topmost pinnacle, his eye pressed to a chink, watching the helot. He’ll be there watching for all eternity.”

“Well,” I said, “that only shows that you have to be careful in what you choose.”

Seila shook her head. “But won’t the helot grow bored eventually? If not after a myriad, then perhaps after a myriad of myriads? And then it will be for him as for the phylite. It will be as though he hadn’t even begun.” She shivered.

“He was on the steps of the celestial ladder, though. He could go up a rung whenever he grew weary, and the wonder would increase. And I don’t imagine that it would simply be added to. No, it would be compounded against itself over and again.”

“Add or multiply,” she said, “he’ll weary even of the way in which it increases. Let each rung become an entire world, rising from majesty to majesty without end. It doesn’t matter. All things become static, even as all rivers flow into the sea, as you said to the Misfit just now. No, Keftu. The Druins have their own saying: Between birth and death there is only life, which is the frailest thread in the world. Live life, Keftu, and let death take care of itself. Treasure up the eternal instants.”

We reached our destination, a tower like all the others. Feeble gas bulbs still trembled in the lower stories, breathing out their last gasp before the lines clogged forever. The lobby and stairwells were shades of brown and black and dirty white, with checkered tile floors, wooden wainscots, wrought-iron fixtures, and cobweb-festooned gas chandeliers.

The mechanism that powered the elevators hadn’t been wound in years, so we began to climb from story to story. I had to pause at each landing to catch my breath and wait for the whirling in my head to stop. We reached the highest floor and went into a large, high-ceiled room wrapped in darkness. The three tall windows were three blue rectangles rising side by side from the floor to the shadows above. Curtains of lace hung before them like cobwebs.

“I used to stay here sometimes,” said Seila. “It’s been awhile, though.” She tried the faucet in the big utility sink. There was a sickening gurgle, and the spigot spat out some water. “This still works, anyway, though I’d think twice before I used it.”

I leaned against it, shivering. Seila helped me remove my armor. With its weight lifted I felt almost ready to float away through the windows. Seila beat the dust off a mattress on the floor and helped me lie down. “Listen,” she said. “I need to gather some supplies if we’re to stay here awhile.”

“No,” I said, hardly able to keep my eyes open.

“But I have to, baby. We have nothing to eat.”

“Wait until I’m strong enough to go with you.”

“No. You stay here. Keep out of trouble.”

“I’ll come looking for you if you don’t return immediately.”

“Please don’t,” she pled. “At least make me this promise. Stay here—here, at the top of this tower—for one full day before you leave. Will you promise that?”

“Yes,” I slurred.

“Promise.”

“I promise.” I was asleep almost before I finished the sentence.

28 The Spire

I dreamed of my uncle, Gyges. I myself was Gyges. I looked into the starglass of Brandobrabdas and spied the celestial palace. It overwhelmed me. I slung a coil of rope through a bar that ran across the domed ceiling, tied a noose, and hanged myself. I felt my face blackening as life fled.

My eyes snapped open on darkness. There had been a furtive noise. The sound of a door creaking, perhaps. I rose without making a sound and padded to the corner beside the windows. I could see nothing, but I knew I wasn’t alone. Something was feeling around the mattress. Suddenly it went rigid. It had sensed me.

Deinothax leaned against the wall beside me, hot in its sheath. I drew it and held it before me, two hands on the grip. My eyes were momentarily dazzled by its light.

On the bed was a thing like a giant horseshoe crab. It squealed and began scuttling about the room like a frightened cockroach, whipping its long, razor-sharp tail. I somersaulted over its carapace whenever it shot toward me.

The thing was afraid of the light. As it tired itself out I was able to corner it in the alcove where the door was. It scrabbled frantically against the sink. I ran my blade in between the plates of its chitinous hull and sawed back and forth until it stopped quivering and slid lifelessly to the floor.

With my toe I rolled it onto its back. Its eyes were on top—there were two compound eyes and a cluster of smaller simple ones—but the head under the shell was distinct from the body and able to swivel. Its long, jointed legs were curled over its soft plastron.

I dragged the creature over to the window and pushed it out, then went back to bed.

*          *          *          *          *

I knew as soon as I awoke the next morning that Seila had never returned. I got up and went to the window. The crumbling, moss-grown crowns of nearby towers were green-gold flames against a torpid, rose-gray sky.

I drank some rusty water from the sink. The light increased steadily. I recalled the fight the night before, wondering if it had been a dream. Seila still hadn’t returned, so I decided to go up to the roof and see the lay of the land.

The mitered crown was weathered almost to the point of obliteration. Its arched openings gaped blackly like clustered mouths overhung with locks of verdure. I wormed my way to the pinnacle and crouched there, my face lit with the golden glow of the rooftops below.

Spires and terraces rose like islands out of a shadowy sea, piles of white and gray stone stained yellow and streaked with orange and black. The sun was a searing eye, lidded now and again by shreds of morning moisture drifting low down over the coastlands.

The city was a strip along the coast, no more than a mile or two from sea to swamps at the widest. I could see to where the foundation fell away into the silvery grid set in its carpet of green and purple and red. Viaducts ran along the moat. Looming over the lowlands were the mountains. I thought of the desert beyond, and of the dead realm of Arras swept eternally by the Pillar’s black shadow.

I turned and looked the other way. There, through the intervening thicket of towers, I saw the vague rim of the sea, blue-gray and green and gold under the morning sky. A viaduct went straight across the city and out over the waves, making its way, I supposed, for the Tower of Bel.

All this I saw like the spirit alit on the pinnacle, looking enviously down into the garden-rift of man’s infancy. I was a wandering warrior in the wilderness of Enoch, the world-city that enclosed the sea on three sides like a giant omega. Bel at the center was the iron-spoked axle of the broken wheel, Narva its pinnacle suspended high in the sublunary sphere. I had plumbed the depths of the city and scaled its heights. Once its slave and refuse, I swore in my heart that I would yet be its master.

I went back down to the room. Seila still hadn’t returned. I was weary and drained from the previous day’s doings and suddenly felt sleepy again. The mattress called to me. I went and lay down upon it.

*          *          *          *          *

I awoke in a panic. The air had grown stuffy, and the bed clothes were saturated with my sweat. The room was filled with ruddy light.

I rose and went to the windows and pushed one open. Wind from the west animated the curtains. Through a host of pinnacles, battlements, turrets, and spires I beheld the molten-gold bosom of the sea. The sun was just resting its quaking crown on a cloud-wrack.

The end of day was announced by a clamor of gongs and trumpets. Sunset collapsed into dusk, orange to blue-green to indigo. Here and there the descending curtain was pricked by a silver-green light, a window behind which some actuary or accountant was concluding a day’s work. I could pick out the minutest details of distant offices. It filled me with a queer melancholy.

I went and sat cross-legged on the mattress, feeling more alone in the city than I ever had in the desert.

*          *          *          *          *

When it was quite dark I stood up again. I was uncertain what to do. I was afraid of missing Seila if I went looking for her. But I felt in my heart that something must have happened. Reluctantly, I began to don my armor.

It was then that I saw something on the floor by the door. It was a piece of parchment. I took it up and carried it to the windows. My footprint was on it: I must have stepped on it when I returned from the pinnacle that morning. There were words on it, written in the characters of Arras.

A new wind started to stream through the curtains. I put my nose to the paper, straining to read in the dim light. Its message was brief: “Return to the tower where you rescued the woman. Something awaits you there.”

*          *          *          *          *

The streets were rivers of ink. I stumbled every few steps. I was wearing my armor but walking slowly. I hoped it wouldn’t drain me if I didn’t exert myself. It was heavy on my tired limbs.

The tower where I’d found Seila was completely deserted now. The Misfit had covered his tracks, and all signs of recent habitation were gone. I crossed the atrium, which glimmered with the ghostly green glow of the skylight, and began climbing from landing to landing. I went all the way to the top and through the broken gate into the corridor. The darkness was almost palpable. It clung to my face like cobwebs. “Hello!” I shouted. The closed space threw my voice back at me.

Cautiously I felt my way around the square of rooms. The doors were all closed and locked. I dared not batter them down now, afraid I would need my strength later. One door only was open, on the opposite side of the building from the stairs. It led into an apartment overlooking the inside of the square, hardly less dark than the passages. The tube lamps wouldn’t turn on. It had been stripped like the rest of the building, but less thoroughly. The signs that remained—a lingering scent of perfume, a porcelain pot of ointment, a gown in the wardrobe—spoke of Seila.

I went into the next room. A naked mattress sat in a carved frame with a wooden nightstand beside it. The dresser was full of empty, half-open drawers. Faint light fell through a small window. A box sat on the narrow table below it.

A barely audible snick drew me back into the main room. The door was closed and the bolt engaged. Someone had changed the mechanism so that the keyhole faced the inside. I was locked in. There were faint noises now. Inhuman voices echoing from beyond the void. Mirthless laughter. Screeches and crashes. Mindless repetition of meaningless phrases. All at the very threshold of audibility, so that I could have supposed it my imagination, had I wanted to.

The box in the bedroom came to my mind. I had been meant to find it. That was what the message had referred to. I went to examine it again.

The darkness was now complete. My fingers groped across the table. The box was gone. With mounting dread I felt all over the room. I found it on top of the dresser. My hands explored its contours. It was made of some lightweight metal, ornately molded but rather cheap. My fingers found a catch on the base and slid it sideways.

It seemed clear now that I had just walked into a trap. It was senseless, as senseless as everything that had happened since my setting foot in Enoch. Life was senseless. Perhaps Seila was right. Perhaps eternity was only a pointless prolonging.

So now you see, a voice said. There are no songlines.

“No,” I said. “I found the songlines of Enoch.”

And what are they? Avenues of horror, haunted by human vermin.

I had no answer for that. The morning’s sanguinity seemed mere madness now. I was at the end of my story. An obscure end in an empty apartment. A cheap box filled with death. It was too bad.

I thought of Aine and how she had always believed in me. Now Arras and Sephaura would die with me, and there would be nothing again forever.

It didn’t seem to matter.

I opened the box.