Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (7 page)

12 Anakim

It was five days after my encounter with the fish, about time for my next big fight. I was lying awake on my cot. I knew I needed to sleep, but I couldn’t. I was thinking about Seila.

There was a scrabbling noise at my door. I rose and put my ear to the iron. The sound was coming from low down near the floor. I got on one knee and lifted the shutter where they slid me my food. The little person crawled in through it.

She had brought me an offering this time. It was a bronze hand mirror made all of one piece, with a short handle and an ornate back discolored with verdigris. It looked ancient, but the polished front held a perfect image. The concave surface captured me and the cell behind me as though I were part of a diorama made of precious metal and stone.

I set the mirror down on the cot. The girl-creature gave me a look, picked the mirror back up, and thrust it into my hand again. I set it down a second time and she did the same thing. She watched me to make sure I had gotten the point. Then she kissed the backs of my hands and went to the door. I lifted the shutter with my foot, and she vanished.

Back in my cot, I thought about Seila again, making plans to escape, daydreaming. I had a vague idea of going to Narva with her, and—who knew?—perhaps returning to the desert one day to reestablish the House. Eventually I drifted off, but waking was so like dreaming in Hela that I hardly knew the difference.

*          *          *          *          *

I went to exercise as usual that night. I saw Granny on the way to the gymnasium. She came up and pinched my cheek. “Don’t tire yourself, my boy,” she said. “Today’s the fight that makes you or breaks you. I’m venturing it all on you. Don’t disappoint me.”

The guard came to my cell later on. The mirror caught my eye as I rose. “Can I take this?” I asked, holding it up.

“What?” the guard said. “To use in the fight?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “You know the rules. You get two arms in there. It’s up to the old lady to decide.”

“But will you at least let me take it?” I didn’t know why I wanted it, exactly; the girl-creature’s insistence had simply made an impression on me.

“I won’t stop you,” the guard said.

They led me in chains to the bench room behind the pit. I sat and waited as usual, watching the slayers come and go. At one point I saw two guards whispering in a corner. One of them gestured at me. The other glanced my direction and saw me looking. “You’ve got a rare prize tonight,” he chortled. His mate gave him a shove. They both went out, laughing.

Granny usually came to see me before a fight, but this morning she never showed up. That meant I was able to choose my own arms. I held on to the mirror and took up a double-headed pike. When it came to be my turn I strode into the pit and waited placidly while they chained me to the bolt and unshackled my limbs.

The handlers withdrew. Drum beats rolled out of the darkness. The spectators started to chant: “Anak! Anak! Anak!” Their voices were like an evil incantation.

The gate swung open. For a long time nothing came, but I could feel invisible eyes watching me from the darkness, like a funnel spider peering from the black hole of its lair. The helots felt it, too, and fell silent. Together we waited with bated breath.

A tall, pale shadow emerged. It had the form of a man but was twice a man’s height. Short white-gold hair covered all but the palms of its hands, which were dark gray. In its forehead was a single round eye, or rather, two eyeballs pressed against one another in the same socket, sharing iris and pupil. Hairless ears stood out on either side of its head, with long earlobes that hung down to its shoulders.

I looked into the great eye. That was a mistake, for, though I knew it not, the Cheiropt had begun to shrivel my being. It drew on me like a vampire even as I fought for my place in it. The eye before me was like a well dropping to a blank infinity, and I fell into it. My arms hung limply at my sides. The screams of the helots faded into nothing.

The cyclops rushed me, its mouth wide open, its yellow teeth bared. I hardly knew it. It grabbed me with its soft hands and tossed me bodily across the pit. I struck the floor and rolled. It wasn’t a hard fall, but I was unprepared for it. I struggled to my feet.

The giant was watching me, waiting for me to look again. The round eye was like a magnet. Desperate, I looked into the mirror instead. It was a relic from a time when man still lived in the midnight moss-forests, and the infinite was a nightly visitor snuffling at his doors. Its true vision was for the eye of the spirit, that sees unseeing. In its window I saw myself, a solitary figure set against the pit and the shadows. It captured me not as I was in my mind’s eye, but simply as I was. For an instant I felt as though I stood in the Wabe of the Pillar.

I twisted the mirror toward the cyclops. The giant was outlined against the darkness, put in its place in the order of things. I brandished my pike and advanced. The creature shrieked. It tensed for a spring, but I was quicker. I leaped beneath its snatching fingers and stabbed its foot.

Before I could bound away, though, it caught my chain and lifted me into the air. The pike was jerked out of my hand. I took hold of the chain to keep from being strangled by my collar. The cyclops was trying to tear me with its tushes. I lashed out with one foot, kicking it in the eyeball. It dropped me and clapped its hands to its face.

I began raining blows on it with my fists. The cyclops’ body was surprisingly flaccid for one so large. Soon I had it on the floor, crawling on its knees and one hand to get away from me, still holding its eye with the other hand. I dove against it, rolling it onto its side. Seizing my pike, I got athwart the creature and poised the tip over its joint eye. The helots were chanting my name—“Amroth! Amroth!”—and calling for blood. The drums were beating. An instant later and the cyclops would have been added to the list of my victories. But the lips formed a word.

I froze. I hadn’t suspected that I was dealing with a rational creature. I bent closer. The lips moved again, mouthing one word. I drew back, aghast. The thunder of the helots was deafening now. But a wave of revulsion washed over me. “Mercy you shall have,” I said lowly. “The Phylarch of Arras grants it you.” I rose to my feet, snapped the pike on my knee, and cast the pieces to the floor.

It wasn’t money that rained down on me now.

The handlers came out for me. Still streaming with filth, I took up the two halves of the pike and threatened the men, driving them back through the hatch. They locked the inner gate and looked at me through the bars. The other slayers all crowded behind them to gawk.

A renewal of the helots’ cheers brought me around. The great gate was swinging open. Maugrethim poured out of the darkness like fleeting shadows, yowling and baring their widely spaced, backward-curving fangs. They were sickly things next to the beasts of the desert, with gray hides, scaly and bristly, and long, skinny legs, and scraggly manes down their necks and backs, and bony tails ending in stringy tufts.

The pack had been released to make an end of the cyclops. Such was the fate reserved for beasts who survived their defeat in the pit. Anger surged up in my breast, and I stood before the prostrate giant, keeping the maugrethim at bay. One way and another I circled it, a weapon in each hand, skewering animals by the dozen. The helots continued to hiss and jeer and rain filth down on me, but I kept up my defense until the carcasses lay in bloody heaps on the floor and no more came from the gate.

As I stood there, panting, weak from my fury, I found myself pinioned from behind. The pike pieces were yanked out of my hands. The handlers dragged me from the pit. The long monster lay where it had fallen. Its round eye followed me miserably.

13 The Junk Mart

So ended my career as a slayer of beasts. It’s strange how my reputation has come to be so entangled with it, and yet perhaps not so strange. The masses possess a cunning not given to any man.

They secreted me away to Granny’s dungeons before the fights were over, fearing a mob. Granny had never showed her face. I awaited her in the flat cage in the room full of junk.

She padded in after a while, wrapped in her quilt, shivering with ague. She was not pleased. “Where’d you get it?” she demanded, cracking me with a baton through the bars.

“Where did I get what?”

“Don’t play me the fool!” Another sharp tap. “Who do you know?” I shook my head. “Won’t talk, eh? I’ll figure it out one way or another. Fine night I picked to come down with the fever. I should have known better after what you did to my boy. A trouble-maker,
and
a thief.”

“Thief!” I cried.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know that that mirror came out of my treasure case! Thief!” Her eyes were almost popping out of her head now. She shook with rage. All the tendons in her neck were strained beneath their skin-tent. “Cheat!” she screamed, beating me with each word. “Coward! Thief! Liar!” I writhed in my cage, trying to avoid her blows, but there was nowhere to go.

She tired herself out and leaned her head on the bars. She was weeping. “I try to be good to my boys,” she moaned. “No one rewards their slayers like I do. It’s just how I am. But how do they repay my kindness? With thievery and deceit.” She sobbed weakly. “To the Hole with you. Then, when you’ve had time to think about your place here, we’ll find something else to do with you. I’ll recoup my losses one way or another.”

So they hauled me off and tossed me into a lightless dungeon with walls of crumbling, mold-carpeted stone. I languished there for days. For food I had an occasional fruitcake. Water I got from the dank pools that collected between the heaped blocks of the floor.

Deep called to deep. The silence rolled over me. A glimpse of something forgotten glimmered in my brain. A snatch of a song. A thread snapped or forgotten. The darkness was a rune, a wordless litany. It told of a kingdom in casual shelters, of an upward-straining in the crannies of Enoch, of an aspiring that was never a doing but simply a potent, self-sufficing
there
.

Granny came for me at last. “Well, now,” she gloated from the door high above. “I didn’t mean to leave you here so long. Must’ve forgotten all about you. Thought you were too good to throw away, didn’t you? Talan told me what you said.”

“Anyone would be too good,” I said. “We had no slaves in Arras.”

“Well, you’re not in Arras now. And you’re not a slave. A slave is something. You’re a nothing. Do you know what that means? A
nothing
.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

She laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to know? What should I do? Eh? What would be fitting? Should I just leave you here? Maybe, maybe. Or should I send you to the choppers? Eh? Like poor old Talan?” I could tell she was just bullying me, that I had the upper hand, so I waited patiently for her to finish. “All the same,” she went on at last, “Granny has a mind that you might turn out to be profitable again one day, once things settle down. So she’s going to hang onto you. Yes, the canneries won’t have you just yet. You’re going to work as a delver.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll go down into the lower levels to find things that Granny might sell in her shop. It’ll be good to have another spry one like you. Though no doubt you’ll have to be schooled into knowing what’s worth trouble and what’s not.”

“No doubt,” I said.

She called her guard and had him manacle me. They led me to her junk store, a suffocating labyrinth of moldering miscellania. Most of it looked, quite literally, like junk. I wondered who could possibly want so many thousands of porcelain idols, chipped kraters, clocks without pendulums, cracked glass plates iridescent with age, seatless wooden chairs, and faded emulsion portraits of people long dead. The main entrance gave upon a different part of Hela. Furtive phylites picked through the wares like fallen angels at a discount market. They came and went through a little corridor at the back.

Granny was rattling on about what kinds of things she was looking for and what her policies were. “We work on a reward system,” she was saying. “You put out, you get out. See what I mean?”

My eyes roved across her dirty white hair, wandering the store. They lit on a row of cage doors set into the wall, behind which were treasures of various kinds. Suddenly I strained against my chain leash. “Deinothax!”

The guard yanked me back. I turned and kicked him in the stomach. He tripped over a bronze doorstop and cracked his skull on a marble end table. Granny swore and called for help.

I made for the cages again, ramming my head against the bars. There was nothing else I could do: my hands were locked behind my back. Another guard came around the corner and struck me on the side of my face with a heavy chain. My world swirled and collapsed.

Consciousness returned gradually. I found myself sprawled across a rickety staircase. I was still in the store. There was no one in sight. I got to my knees and struggled up the steps, which led to a mezzanine full of wicker cages and bed frames in various states of dilapidation. Through a grille I could see the open floor and the treasure cases.

There was movement in the corner. I went toward it. In an iron cage sat a woman.

It was Seila.

14 Conspiracies

“Seila,” I gasped, “what are you doing here?”

“I’m being sold.”

“But I—my plans, I—”

“Too late, baby. It’s too late! Just say goodbye and forget me.”

“But why? Why now?”

“You were bad news for me,” she said wistfully. “People who ask questions always are.”

The old woman came in with a malicious snigger. I turned on her. “You can’t sell her! She said it’s my fault. How—”

Granny lashed me across the face with a silk flail she was holding. “Mind your own business! You need to learn your place. That’s your trouble. I was too soft on you before.”

“Just go, Keftu, just go,” Seila said wearily. “Don’t you see you’ll only make things worse for both of us? There’s nothing you can do. Just go. Try to stay alive.”

Crushed, I suffered them to lead me away.

We turned down the hallway where the phylites came in. On one side was a guarded grille, beyond which was a small room with what I later discovered to be an elevator. We went past it into a bleak ward lined with open cells. It belonged to a more recent time than the rest of the dungeons.

I was released into a cell with two other delvers. One was lanky, with large hands, large, heavy-lidded eyes, and a drooping mouth. The other was Jubah.

“Well,” said Jubah as the guard locked the outer gate, “you lasted longer that I did, at any rate.” He eyed the lash marks on my face. “Been getting into trouble again, I see.”

I forced a smile. “I’ve had a time of it.”

He gestured at his cellmate. “This here is Bulna. Don’t you mind him.”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Keftu.”

Bulna extended his hand. “You’re short,” he observed morosely.

“I was tall for my race.”

“And what race was that?”

“The Arrasene.”

“Ah, Arras,” he said, as though an authority on the subject. “What was it that Techla the Polyhymnist said? ‘Sweet and hope-laden are the winds that sweep the green plains of Arras.’“

“You’ve heard of it, then,” I said, surprised.

“That Bulna!” said Jubah. “He knows something about everything. Don’t you, Bulna?” Bulna nodded sullenly.

“How do you know so much?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t you know a lot if you’d lived in a library?” crowed Jubah.

“He lived in a library?”

“He was researching a global conspiracy!”

Bulna clicked his tongue. “Be quiet, Jubah. You talk too much. You’ll fill him with false impressions. Now I’ll have to tell him my theory in full to set him right.”

“You! As if you minded!”

“Of course I mind. The more people who know it, the more dangerous it is for all of us.”

“Know what?” I asked.

“Sh! Keep your voice down! They’ll hear.” He glanced furtively toward the door.

“Who?”

“My enemies. The ones who put me here. They don’t know I know that they know, but they suspect.” He motioned for me to sit on the bed beside him. I did so, and Jubah sat facing us.

“To begin with,” Bulna whispered, “you’ve seen the readers?”

“Readers?”

“Readers, readers. The machines the phylites use to read.”

“No, I—”

“Well, you’ve seen a book, then?”

“What is a book?”

“A sheaf of papers or a scroll covered with writing. A record of knowledge.”

“Where I come from we have no such things,” I said.

“What! No books at all?”

“It’s a commandment with us. ‘Wisdom dies imprisoned.’“

“That may well be, my friend. But such is not the Enochite philosophy. The Great Library in Enoch Minor holds a thousand million books—a thousand volumes on the narrowest of topics—all arranged in chronological order from the ground floor up. I say books, but I should say cylinders, for the printed word is almost unknown here now, and has been since the Inception.”

“The Inception?”

“When the Cheiropt became functional. Each text is engraved around a metal cylinder in a spiral of microscopic dots. The reader runs a needle along the groove and decodes the dots mechanically, pressing the words against the back of a scale screen using letters on thin metal arms. These cylinders are so expensive that no one but the Cheiropt can own them. It holds the monopoly on their manufacture, for only its readers can decode them. There’s no compulsion in this matter, you understand. It’s just that no attempt to produce a substitute has ever lasted more than a few months. The Cheiropt seldom needs the force of law to do what it wants. Until recently we had no city guards in Enoch.”

“I see,” I said, although I didn’t. I wondered where this was all going, but I was happy enough to forget my misery for a moment.

“Now, your average phylite doesn’t read at all. He’s more interested in music boxes, tone sticks, stereographs, and street bulletins. Certain phyles are known for their erudition, however. Cylinders can’t be privately owned, but they can be borrowed from the library system for a limited time. I think you must see now where this is headed.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

Bulna flared his nostrils. “Why, think about it! Every piece of writing passes through the Cheiropt’s hands on a regular basis. Do you know how easy it would be to alter a cylinder—to change a word here, shade a nuance there—without anyone noticing? Especially if it was done slowly over a great period of time.
Which is just how the Cheiropt has done it.
”

“Oh,” I said.

“As soon as I realized what was happening, I began checking out cylinders based on a scheme of my own devising. I was an actuarial apprentice, and I used my skills to build an engine to predict when a cylinder was slated for modification. I kept a cross-referenced database of the anomalies I discovered.”

“And?”

“My findings were inconclusive.”

“It was then,” said Jubah eagerly, “that Bulna’s backsliding was noted by the Cheiropt. His mother was a lapsed Recusant, you see, a born member of an antisocial sect. She had accepted certain incentives to bear a child to a donor of the Cheiropt’s choosing. Bulna’s mark depended on his keeping to that course. When his habits started affecting his work, his office ‘lost’ his writs of indenture, and he—”

“He doesn’t want to hear all that, Jubah.”

“He didn’t say he wanted to hear your theory, either.”

“You were the one who brought that up. I didn’t want to tell him. You forced my hand. But I’m under no such necessity with my personal history. Really, I’ve never known someone so interested in other people’s business.”

“Is that so?” cried Jubah.

“You only mentioned my theory because you hoped Keftu here would ask about my past.”

While they were arguing my attention wandered about the room. It was dim: the only light fell from a lamp over the sink in the corner. On the walls were hung garish landscape prints filled with wide-eyed creeping things. There were three mattresses in metal bed frames. The floor and walls were tiled; the grout around where the sink pipe disappeared into the wall looked to have been hastily applied, as though the plumbing had to be worked on frequently.

I became aware that Bulna had asked me something. “What was it?”

“How did you end up here?”

Briefly I told him my story. “How about you?” I asked.

“I told you. My enemies.”

“In addition to that,” put in Jubah, “he spent some time in the Palace of Collections, which is where the Cheiropt puts phylites who happen to slip into the misfit category.”

“I eventually escaped,” said Bulna. “I ended up at the local branch library near here. Granny has people out everywhere looking for misfits. They found me.”

“What do you know about the Misfit?”

“
The
Misfit? He’s the terror of Enoch around here. The Cheiropt has him walled off and surrounded by watchers, like a splinter in Enoch’s finger. All his gain goes toward a new phyle he’s forming. He started under Granny like us, but escaped or was released somehow. Now she’s
his
tenant.”

“She seems not very difficult to get the better of.”

“You noticed that, did you?” said Jubah. We all laughed.

“And what does the Misfit do?”

Bulna shrugged his shoulders. “He’s tied to all the prohibited markets around here. Some say that that’s only a front. I tend to agree, but I have no idea what it could be a front for. He’s an enigmatic man. It’s because of him that the Cheiropt is fast-breeding ghulim again. That hasn’t happened in more than a myriad. After all, this is the Age of Peace.”

“Listen,” I said, lowering my voice. “Have you two ever thought of trying to escape?”

“There’s nothing to escape
to
,” said Jubah bitterly. “I would only end up someplace like this again, only probably worse.”

“What about you, Bulna?”

Bulna smiled. “Come, Keftu. How would you get past so many guards and locked gates? You couldn’t even hold your own in the pit.”

I licked my lips. “Granny’s guards aren’t invincible, you know. But my idea involves strategy, not force. You see, there’s a small…person…who comes to me when everyone’s asleep. It occurred to me that—”

“That imp!” Jubah hissed. “Your plan revolves around her? Look what she did to me?” He exhibited his finger. There were two semicircular rows of puncture wounds stretched between his knuckles.

“So she’s visited you,” said Bulna. “I wouldn’t get too friendly with her.”

“Why not?”

“Those she visits find themselves in the old lady’s bad graces. Perhaps it’s only coincidence. But they say she’s planted items stolen from the store in the cells of inmates she didn’t like. More than one has been torn to pieces in the pit on her account.”

“What is she?”

“Everyone just calls her Granny’s familiar. What she really is I don’t know.”

“She did me a good turn,” I said, “although I did get in trouble for it. Perhaps she doesn’t understand what she’s doing.”

“No,” said Bulna. “No, I think she does. And she has some sort of connection with Granny. You know how the old lady gets ill at times? It’s always when her familiar’s most active.”

“Vicious little imp!” swore Jubah, nursing his finger sullenly.

I shrugged my shoulders and let the matter drop. It didn’t seem worth arguing about.