Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (23 page)

45 Perses

The train burrowed through heavy fog. Dawn was near.

We jumped out at the switchyard where I’d disembarked with Arges. From there Perses led the way through mountains of cast-off machinery. At the far side of the junkyard we crawled out under a fence and went through several warehouse yards and empty lots.

A gravel embankment loomed up out of the fog. We climbed it and turned to the right, walking between the rails. The tracks veered and then straightened out, passing under the livid eaves of the moss-forest, heading for the crumbling foothills.

The forest had a presence that was monumental yet iterative, like an organ fugue, echoed on a smaller scale by the quincuncial skin of each scale-tree. The understory was a particolored patchwork of lichen and moss gravid with mist-drops. Every leaf, every tendril, every parasol and spear looked as though sculpted from something precious. Nudibranchs like living ornaments slid along the rust-dark rails.

“Who is Vaustus?” I asked, breaking the settled silence.

“The Sun Mage, of course.”

“You used to follow him, didn’t you?”

“What makes you think so?” he asked.

“Your hatred.”

Perses laughed bitterly. “There’s a lot that could make you hate a man.”

“But no hatred, I think, could be as great as that for a teacher you’ve renounced. Perhaps you don’t hate him for that reason alone. But I’d swear to it that you were his disciple, and that you were quite close to him.”

Perses drew his dagger and began running his finger along its edge. He peered at his reflection in the polished metal. “I was his catamite,” he said with a savage grin. “That’s growing up fast. I’m not ashamed of it. It isn’t as though I was at fault.”

“Your face betrays you,” I said. “You don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“Well, what does it matter what I think? What matters is that he’ll soon regret it.” He made an involuntary stab with his dagger. I said nothing, and he went on in an embarrassed rush: “So, yes, I was close to him. What is it you want to know?”

“Whatever you would tell me. I know nothing of the man, not even a rumor.”

“And I know everything there is to know. You’re right. I was his special disciple, his page, and he’s a man for talking. During the day it was all casuistry and astral genealogy and aeonic lore. But at night he’d lie awake in bed and go on and on, telling me anecdotes about himself. I’d just be there in my cot, listening. He didn’t want me to say anything, but he got angry if I fell asleep. Zilla—that’s his cupbearer—liked having me around, because if I hadn’t been there it would have been him listening.”

“Is Vaustus a Druin?”

“No, of course not. He doesn’t know what to do with Druins. His presbyters are all Enochites, and he buffers himself with half-castes like me. He’s an Enochite of Enochites, a phylite of the phyle of Aniseuris, a priestly line.”

“If he doesn’t like Druins,” I said, “why did he go out to the Deserits?”

“I can tell you what he did, but as to why he did it, your guess is as good as mine. That’s how it is with Vaustus.

“When he was young, and still receiving the Agoge, he was earmarked as a future hierophant of a certain sect. As he got older he fell into…irregularities. A double life, if you know what I mean. Those were his dark years, as he calls them. At the same time he was always trying to experience theophanies.

“He had some kind of crisis and decided to go out and make contact with the divine. For some reason he hit upon Nightspore Forest as the most likely spot. It’s unexplored, and he has a taste for the singular. He was living on the Golden Horn at the time, just across the strait from the delta of the Nameless River. Well, he went. I’m not certain what happened, but it was bad. He was bitten by a spider and returned raving. He recovered, but wasn’t ever able to get back into the rhythm of things. Eventually he took to the streets.

“One day he had a vision, or delusion, or whatever you want to call it. He saw the sun setting over the sea, and one of the viaducts leading into it. To him it seemed that Amartas was descending upon Bel, and that the elect of the world were going to meet him there. He started walking in that direction but made little progress. He decided that his possessions were holding him back. So he stripped naked and continued. Still he made no headway. Then the tattoo on his ankle—his mark in religion—caught his eye. He put his leg on the train tracks and—”

“He didn’t,” I said.

Perses smiled and nodded. “It used to be one of my duties to oil and pick the sand out of his prosthesis. Well, after that the Cheiropt got him. He was a phylite, so he ended up in the Palace of Collections. Eventually he got quite a following in there. Somehow he escaped and went into the desert.”

“The information I have says that he dallies with chimeras. Did he ever mention them to you?”

“Chimeras? No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, what about…nephelim? Or other members of lower orders?”

“Nephelim, yes. The world of spirits was one of his favorite subjects. He fancies he knows all about it. When I was with him he was always trying to find the primordial city of the princes of the air. Eventually he lost interest. That’s how it is with him. Always some extravagant mission that he never accomplishes.”

“And he just wanders the desert with the Sons of Taïs?”

“That’s right. The rank and file are all Druins, of course, though lately I’ve heard he hasn’t been getting new recruits like he used to. He went right through the Deserits, I guess. It used to be quite a horde. They keep a roll of members, and celebrate all the new men they add, but never strike out the ones who quietly desert.

“It isn’t much of a life, that’s for certain. The foot-soldiers ride in steam-driven half-tracks, but the presbyters and Vaustus himself all have cheboth-drawn wagons. They have a portable bridge for crossing ravines, designed, of course, by the Artificer.”

My ears perked up. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“An engineer. Vaustus used to rely on him for just about everything. He designed the half-tracks, too, as well as a water purification system at their base camp below the Deged, and Vaustus’ prosthetic leg. A man of boundless ingenuity. I’d kill him, too, if I could find him.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“I’ve told you plenty enough,” Perses snapped, suddenly surly for having talked so freely.

After that we went on in silence. Our feet crunched on gravel. The trees dripped. The terrain rose and fell in gentle swells. Moss-rich boulders dotted the forest floor on either hand. Bars of sunlight began to press down like organ notes, working through the omnipresent whiteness as a carder works through fibers. Soon ragged tufts and patches of blue were visible through the livid canopy.

We entered a valley. The tracks were heaped with drifts of papery leaves. There were mossy grottos and rockslides overgrown with ferns. The walls grew steeper with each bend, until the canyon finally terminated in a rock face. The rails continued up a tunnel.

“It’s in here,” Perses explained. “The line dead-ends. They never finished the blasting.” He fished a lantern out of a recess and lit it, then led the way into the darkness. We came to a crazy barricade covered with melodramatic warning signs.

“It’s just for show,” he said, flourishing a key. He unlocked a hidden bolt and threw it back. The entire thing swung open in one piece. “This is the secret cache of the Sons of Taïs. Vaustus sometimes sends spies into the city. I think they’ve forgotten about it. But I haven’t.”

We rounded a bend and came up against a dead end. The floor was littered with moldering reminders of the discontinued blasting, shoved aside to make room for the racks lining the walls. Rows of arms and scrap-metal armor glinted dully in the lantern’s light, curiously wrought from junk but all rusted and tarnished. Ranged along the back wall were three handcars. Each had a pair of large pedals radiating from the axle of a suspended gear, around which was slung a chain that passed through a slot in the deck to the driving mechanism.

“Here we are,” said Perses. “They’re quite efficient. Only, you need two riders to make them work. A nephridium engine kicks in once you get going. Also courtesy of the Artificer.”

He set about cleaning and oiling one, then armed himself from the racks. I helped myself to some things as well, but avoided the heavier pieces, as I wasn’t used to the weight. My own armor—which I’d left in my retreat—bore its own weight.

Together we pushed the car onto the rails and set it in motion.

46 A Journey by Rail

The outward journey was mostly downhill. We covered in minutes what it had taken hours to traverse on foot, driving the car with our bodies, up and down, around and around, feet planted on pedals, hands gripping the bars before us. The fog was gone. The gray cathedral spaces had been transformed into a riot of color and hard-edged detail and individual freedoms knit into a coherent whole.

Then we emerged into sunlight, where everything was painfully visible. The smoggy skyline of the coast-long downtown faced us across the flats of Sand City. Two airships crawled across the dirty sky like flies on a bloated corpse. The tracks curved to the north, running parallel to the line of the forest. We crested a low rise, and I saw laid before me the broad valley of the Ilissus River, filled with Enoch’s sprawl.

Soon we were amongst the nearest structures. Other tracks joined ours or diverged from it at intervals. Buildings like blocks of concrete and steel looked down over the fences, peering vacantly at us with clustered windows like spiders’ eyes.

We shot out onto a truss bridge over the Ilissus. Concrete quays and foundations formed the river’s banks, with yellow curds choking the stagnant backwaters between them. The sun’s reflection was a dull rainbow on the slick, oily surface. The ebb of the tide had exposed mud flats, and waddling through the ooze was an ehmoth like a gigantic eft with a wide, brutal mouth.

We clattered into a cutting on the northern bank and climbed gradually to street level. Perses pulled the brake as we rounded a bend. There was a junction with another railway running parallel to the river just ahead. We waited in the dank sunshine for half an hour. Then a freighter roared by in the direction of the mountains. We set out to follow it as soon as its tail vanished around a distant bend.

The two parallel tracks were enclosed on the far side by a stone embankment hung with greenery. We pedaled hard until we were going at full speed. The tracks veered away from the river and climbed the wall as the city fell away below, and we passed once more under the eaves of the moss-forest. We were in the great Elodia basin.

*          *          *          *          *

The forest’s atmosphere was like a pall, although here and there a stray shaft of light smote down on the foliage, making the leaves and tendrils glow from within. It was quiet apart from the creak and rumble of our car’s passage, but at times I heard furtive cries, and unseen creatures would crash through the bracken in the shadows close beside the tracks. Slouching beasts would shamble off at the rumor of our approach, always too adroitly to let themselves be seen.

In the middle of the afternoon I descried a light far ahead. I would have abandoned the tracks, but Perses motioned for me to keep pedaling. Soon a freighter was chuffing past on the other side. When I glanced over my shoulder I saw several soldiers on the last car gazing after us.

The terrain became more irregular as afternoon progressed toward evening. We passed a disused path just as the beams of the setting sun began to shoot obliquely through the glossy stems. Perses pulled the brake immediately. We pedaled back, got off, and maneuvered the car down into a mossy dell. A train rushed by from the southwest a few minutes later.

We made our bivouac against the foundation of an old water tower, building a fire from scale-tree coals to keep the roving predators at bay. Darkness fell swiftly in the forest. We supped on dried provisions.

Perses’ manner remained sullen and resentful; he had hardly spoken since that morning. I tried in vain to think of something to talk about. But it was he who broke the silence.

“You seem to know something of spirits,” he observed.

“I know the traditions of my people,” I said. “Little comes from my own experience.”

“What is tradition but the experience of the dead? So, you still claim to be from Arras?”

“I do.”

“Well,” said Perses, staring into the fire, “let us suppose you are. Tell me what the thirsty men of Arras would say concerning spirits.”

“Sephaura speaks of five ranks of spirit,” I said, “one for each of the five elements—earth, water, air, fire, ether—in correspondence with the five regular solids—hexahedron, icosahedron, octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron. These identifications are only metaphors, signifying stages of removal from material existence.”

“Go on,” said Perses. “Tell me of them.”

“The ethereal spirits, or cherubim, are the most exalted. They are pure spirit, and have little to do with the garden of earth. The seraphim, or spirits of flame, are bodiless, too, and see things simply and directly, not thinking in words or using eyes or ears.

“The nephelim, the princes of the air, rely upon the elements to some extent, and reason as we do, discursively. They can matter, but the bodies they assume, while real, aren’t part of their nature and can be shed at will.

“The spirits of water have fluid bodies. They are not ageless like the nephelim and seraphim. Death for them is dissolution. Of them, naiads inhabited the holy wells and hot springs of old, and auraiads were winds of divine inspiration.

“And, finally, the spirits of earth are men. They have solid bodies without which they are nothing, and rely upon their hands and eyes and ears for all that they know.”

Perses poked the fire with the toe of his sandal. “We have old stories about naiads in the wells south of the mountains. They’re said to have vanished from the earth now, though.”

“We had them in Arras, or were said to,” I said, “though I myself never saw one. We scattered gold-dust every time we drew water, as an offering.”

“Keftu,” said Perses, “do you believe that a spirit of flame or wind could…infest a man? Enter into him, and control his body like a puppet?”

“I do believe it,” I said, “for I’ve seen it myself. It’s terrible. This isn’t a good place to speak of such things.”

Perses nodded without seeming to have heard me. “In Enoch, the helots sometimes get hold of a young girl who’s been infested. They keep her in a cage and extort oracles from her. These wretches are bartered like draft animals, then driven out once they’re past their prime.”

“To be honest,” I said, “I was nearly infested myself once, and—”

“Keftu,” said Perses, “what does your Sephaura say about creation?”

“The seraphim put all in its place. We call that the dream-time, and also the time of truth. Their paths are called songlines, and we walk them in wisdom.”

“But
creation
,” said Perses, a little impatiently. “You’re talking about ordering the elements. I want to know about how the elements came to be. Why is there something rather than nothing?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, that is different. What Sephaura says is subtle, and hidden deep down at its roots. Even some of the wisest cannot grasp it. You see—”

“I think about it all the time,” said Perses. “Is the world an infinite chain of chance combinations, or does it go toward some end?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“There’s a story Vaustus used to tell about the formation of man. Normally I would discount something like that, but I know for a fact that he didn’t find it in one of his books. The priests of Ursalian Amartas tell the same story.

“In the earliest days, it says, when the world was wild and knew neither axe nor whip, Amartas looked down and said, ‘It is not fitting that the earth should teem with mosses and creeping things and yet have no master.’ And so he came down, and wetted the clay with his spittle, and formed a man-shape and a woman-shape. He quickened their forms with his rays, and they rose and did him homage. And Amartas gave the earth into their hands, commanding them to name all things, and to be fruitful and multiply, and to reduce the earth to subjection. And so it was.

“Now, if that’s true, you see, then man had a divinely ordained beginning, and so must have an end. Like a moss that begins as a spore, and is destined to raise its head to the sky. And there’s good reason to believe it true.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve heard people deride it, saying that no animal could arise from lifeless mud. But they have only to lay a piece of raw meat out in the sun. Don’t the sunbeams engender maggots where before there were none? And haven’t miners found stone shells and bones buried deep in the earth? How else could ammonite shells come to be in the mountains, if not for the sun’s fecundity? True, they’re recovered in fragments, and those of stone not shell, but that only shows that the animals ceased to grow while yet incomplete. For ammonites and crinoids can’t live on mountaintops, nor chebothim deep beneath the floor of the sea.”

“Aren’t you talking about two different things?” I asked. “Even if you could show that man was made by a spirit of fire or light, that wouldn’t prove what you really wanted to know. The same thing would have to be asked of the spirit.”

Perses nodded without having heard me. “Some others,” he said, “insist that the remains found under the hills are actually the petrified parts of once-living animals. But because we mustn’t suppose the gods capricious, there are those who say that the world must be eternal as well, subject to an endless cycle of generation and corruption. Not only that, but some who believe in the eternal world argue that the absence of a beginning renders the gods superfluous. But no human skeleton has ever been found petrified in the earth, so they fall into their own trap.”

“Do you believe in the eternity of the earth?” I asked.

“Of the earth? I don’t know. Certainly the great gods exist, for every day we see Amartas—or his shadow, rather—with our corporeal eye, a burning disk in a heavenly seat. The inner or spiritual eye sees him as he is, enthroned in glory, encircled by spirits of fire and light.”

“But whence came Amartas?”

“He issued from Taïs.”

“And whence Taïs?”

“Why, he has always been,” Perses said, nettled. “He is eternal. What else does it mean to be eternal, than to be without beginning or end?” He was growing sullen again, so I let the matter rest.

We spoke no more, and I tried to go to sleep. The darkness closed in around us, silent, brooding, many-eyed, like a crouching tarantula held at bay by the firelight. The moss-trees swayed under every passing breeze as though driven by a hurricane. It was a long time before I could fall asleep. My dreams were troubled by the plaintive cries of the sail-beasts that lurked beyond the circle of light.

*          *          *          *          *

We broke camp and departed before dawn. It was so dark at first that I wasn’t able to see my hand raised before my face. But the canopy began to break up, and the cold light waxed steadily. We were drawing near to the uplands. The roots of the scale-trees grasped great blocks of stone on either hand.

Then without warning we shot into open air, crossing a lake that stretched along the bottom of a faultline. The pernathim grew down to the water’s edge on all sides, but looming over the far shore was a cliff cloven by a canyon like a dark crack, brown and black high over the lake, mossily green close above the purple canopy, and all vertically striated like the sides of a broken archway in a ruined temple. The Tartassus spewed its gathered waters from the canyon’s mouth in a cascade of foamy white with cauldrons of blue-green edged by black rock. Our car seemed to float in the air, suspended between twin lakes of silver, and then we passed though the misty rush of the cataract’s breeze into the corridor of ribbed stone.

The lower reaches of the canyon were dark and densely forested. Fallen columns lay in great overgrown heaps which the rivulet sometimes poured over and sometimes passed beneath. As the vegetation gradually thinned, I was able to snatch glimpses in my backward glances of the misty corridor and the nodding forest roof visible through the great portal.

The trees dwindled in size, then fell away altogether. The tracks rose up on iron legs and stepped onto the highlands. Pale green turf grew over sweeps of polygonal steps like a tessellated pavement broken up under age-long convulsions and settled to different levels.

Slowly the great wall of the Tartassus rose into view, square black monoliths rounded by weather and touched with snow. The tracks veered to the southeast to skirt the rampart by passing over a saddle. At its eastern end the ridge swept up to the last bastion, whose sheer faces were deeply scored and striated, weather-stained and dark in the sunshine.

Perses pulled the brake as we entered a forest of prisms, and we came to a stop at a place where a wide path opened on the left-hand side. We got down and dragged the car into a hidden recess. It was almost midday.

“We’ve made good time,” Perses remarked. “The next train from the west isn’t due for a few hours yet. This is the best place to let it pass, though. We may as well rest awhile.”

After we’d eaten and drunk, he rose and motioned for me to follow him. He led me up to a place where broken prisms leaned against one another in great heaps. Now leaping, now climbing, we ascended to the summit of the tallest and looked at the lay of the land.

The world was spread beneath our feet. To the east rose the wall of basalt. To the north and west were the broken highlands, pale green and dark brown beneath a dome of blue. It was like looking at the ruins of an abbey raised by titans when the earth was young, the blackened pillars of stone like broken piers lapped by turf and holding aloft an airy vault.

To the south, beyond a great gulf of space, the crenellated mountains rose up to greater heights, marching southward to join arms with the Asurs. The unseen Ilissus rolled down the floor of the intervening abyss. The rumor of its descent was a low thrumming that I felt rather than heard.

Looking back toward the basaltic outcrops, I saw that my initial impression of masonry hadn’t been entirely mistaken. For there
were
great towers clinging to the sides of the uplifts, linked one to another by winding causeways and walls, all constructed of hewn prisms laid crosswise in rows.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing.

“No one knows,” Perses replied, shouting above the wind. “Some say they were built by giants in the Elder Age, before the coming of men. Others, that they were used by the Eldenes in the defense of their kingdom during the Age of Wandering. The path that the railway follows was a highway of theirs as well, perhaps. Certainly no Enochite had a hand in its making. It may be that the Eldenes had the assistance of giants in these works, or merely found them and used them, for it seems hardly possible that mortal men could have accomplished such things, and there are many strange races in the world.”

For a moment more we crouched there in silence, pondering the spaces of time. Then we climbed back down and waited. The train passed by in the middle of the afternoon, at almost the same moment the west-bound train came through. We lost no time in maneuvering our car back onto the rails.

The tracks veered to the east again. We had regained the Ilissus valley. The river coursed inexorably down its trough thousands of feet below. The tracks clung to the cliff, running over a tiled bed, prisms rising in a solid curtain on the left and falling sheer away on the right. Far out though I leaned, I could never see the river below us, but at times I glimpsed the misty cataracts higher up in the distance, washing dark banks where no man would set foot ere the world’s end.

All afternoon we continued up the canyon. In the evening we approached the southernmost tip of the northern range, which stretched across our path at a place where the river descended from the south around a corner. As the car neared the angle, I saw that the tracks pierced the spur by way of a tunnel.

The wall and the tunnel were still distant when Perses shouted and pulled the brake. I looked where he pointed. The tunnel mouth was barricaded by a portcullis and guarded from above by a watchtower that blended in with the surrounding rock.