How did I get here? Where are the others?
I walk down the gallery, lit by panels of thready sunlight from the windy apertures in the walls. The apse is dark, and it does not extend far. What grows at the far end is not exactly a tree; a shapeless tree, with roots and branches intermingled and a trunk like a bulging wall, like many trunks grafted together. There’s a charred cavity in the middle of the trunk, a natural crêche, and something I can’t make out rests in it.
The floor intervening is flat and clean, with puddles here and there standing upright inside silver wire frames. That stifling feeling comes back again, like troubled sleep with the heavy covers piled on top of me. The area above the cavity is glowing with luminous moss, a pale sulfur color. As I come near, an all but invisible halo appears in the crêche, a head conforming to it and causing me to recognize other objects there as the outspread arms and legs, the crumpled torso.
Over the breathing, the eyes, living, gaze steadily at me. Their color is obscured by a golden lustre that seems to be an effect of the halo, for beneath it I can see blackness. The face appears through a kind of glare, as though I saw it through a membrane. A pale, spear-shaped nose points down toward black whiskers as straight as straw on a thatched roof. Hollow breath crosses his hidden mouth. His cap and his tunic are black, the light paints two glistening streaks on his black boots.
I imagine he will impassively raise a gun and cut me down where I stand. Just an idle thought, because, though he lives, I see too where the light twinkles on his abdomen, on the blood that soaks the cloth of his uniform, and the ragged spot where the bullet entered. Arms and legs lie on the ground without the slightest visible tension—they are paralyzed, alive but inert. There is an armband on his right arm, with insignia identifying him as a Narrator.
His thought is the same, his eyes, which quiver with life although they barely move, seem to have fixed on my armband, which feels almost to burn or tingle with the intensity of his attention.
His halo shimmers from time to time, like a guttering candle. There is an air of seniority about him, which convinces me the Narrator I met in the clearing must have not been a fully qualified Narrator, but a subordinate officer to this one, an assistant. At the same time, I notice his Narrator’s bars are struck through with a black line, possibly only a loose thread, and I am not about to move it to find out, but perhaps he isn’t yet a full Narrator either. We had no ranks ourselves.
The Narrator before me draws a long breath. A new vigor comes into his breathing, although it may be vigor borrowed against his life. His eyes, brimming with animation, have settled on my face with a heavy-lidded, dead fixity. Suddenly, I look to the side and step quickly to a puddle gathered there in the roots—my own eyes, I see reflected, have those same sooty waves in them, just faintly, there on the whites beneath the irises. His eyes are still on me, pupils halved by lowered lids. There is something so expressive in them, I forget my eyes and walk over to him, drop down on my knees beside him. The hand by my foot is white as snow; the white, powdery skin of his face is yellowed by the halo light.
His eyes seem to see all around me; he does not see me at all. At most, he sees my eyes, perhaps without seeing them either; he may be only staring into a space that seems, maybe, to be watching him from particular point. A faint movement of his chin ... he begins to speak a language I know in name only. His words are clear, but the tone is dull, as though the sound were being absorbed by the air.
Without any urgency I can detect, a distinct, earnest murmur escapes his lips. He may be speaking to me, but he seems instead to be speaking to space, or to an invisible presence. I’ve heard the language, and I recognize it, but something is wrong with my hearing, because it sounds like gibberish to me.
“A, ab ab ab ab a abab ab, ab aba ab abab ab ab ab ab ab ab aba ab ababab ab.”
Some time passes, and I become aware again of his voice, which had not, I think, paused once.
Suddenly, I can’t swallow. I work my muscles, feeling something like a clot in my throat, but my throat won’t clear, and now I feel my lungs stiffening with the effort to breathe, all the while his calm, meaningless droning is in my hearing—there’s something horrible, disgusting in the sound, in his calm, how wrong it is he should speak like that here, as he bleeds to death! I try pulling on the sides of my neck with my hands to open my throat, I swallow convulsively, feeling like I’m dying. I want to stifle his mouth—he’s dying, let him die faster then—but it’s just not in me, my hands just paw uselessly at my asthma. I stand up in desperation and get away from him.
At my back—“A, ab ab aba ab a, aba ab, a ab ab a ab a ab. Ab ab ab ab, a aba, aba ab a ab abab.”
Through one door after another, I put walls between myself and his voice, his calm, because even my body will not listen to him.
I find some water and try to drink. I get over to the blasted window and draw in long breaths against the belts cinched tight around my ribs. But I can’t I won’t listen I can’t won’t decide between can’t and won’t, thinking thoughts that are part of the suffocation.
When I’m myself again—I recovered quickly ... pretty quickly—his words reappear in my memory, but now I can understand them in snatches, or I seem to. The meaning is elusive, because I can only recall what familiar words his speech sounded like, I can’t remember the words he spoke. I can only imagine what they meant.
I begin to think he did see me, and was asking me to do him some last kindness, like carrying him to a breach in the wall, to die in light and air, with arms, no matter whose, a fellow human being’s, around him.
I go back. The hall looks unfamiliar. I return to the stairwell. These doors don’t seem to be the ones I first came through in distress, but I see no others. I return again to the hall, go halfway or so down its length, and turn around, to see if it strikes me as more familiar looking in this direction. Nothing looks familiar.
Rust and a clear, hard elastic substance run down the walls in sheets and covers the doorways; passages are blocked by huge boluses of coagulated rust or massive worms of melted window glass. Fossilized stumps spill out the elevator doors and fill the end of the hall like a petrified wave, tufted with little spurts of roots.
I search for a long time, but I can’t find my way back to the room and the Narrator.
*
I can’t find my way out; I’m blundering around in another wing of the building. Something framed in a window stops me, and the charm strikes against my chest like a door knocker.
Off in the distance a magnetic building looms against a mercury sky; it is the only undamaged building I’ve seen in the city. A huge upright half-circle, its flat diameter turned toward me, stands between two bullet-shaped buttresses on one end of a sweeping, flat foundation structure with windows and vents. The thing reminds me strongly of the Bonant’s sullen gigantism. The diameter of the half-circle is indented, and two deep, narrow grooves stand parallel to each other along its length; the grooves are angled inward, and might perhaps meet inside in a V. Squinting, I can barely make out what might be a pattern on the metal by the grooves; like a sawtooth, uniform row of black soot smudges or scorch marks.
The charm shudders in my pocket, the figure inside is rattling violently against the glass. I pull out the charm and look at it—
... The city is invaded—enemy soldiers in the streets, the buildings shine like new. The citizens have fled or taken refuge in shelters.
Enemy soldiers in the streets. They unwittingly trigger certain machineries.
A group of enemy soldiers, whoever they are, gather at the window of one of the taller buildings—this window—conduct a discussion over a map. One meanwhile surveys the town with field glasses. She sees a light appear in the window of the foundation building.
Moments later, a grating, howling alarm begins to sound from claxons on rooftops. A mottled whiteness spreads in seconds over the entire outer surface of the upright half circle as moisture in the air condenses and freezes on the metal. Flakes of frost break loose from the sides of the structure and fall crashing to the foundation below, where they hiss and bubble, mantling the hooded tower in steam. The two long grooves in its face emit a weak, fitful radiance.
The soldier with the field glasses turns to point this out to the officers, who look up in alarm as the claxons begin rasping—consternation on their faces, they shrink from the soldier, who stares at them in confusion. Rings of blood run down from where she held the field glasses to her eyes. Blood streams from her gums. She takes a step toward them, wavers and falls to her knees, raising her hands to her head. She puts her hands to either side of her head to steady it against the dizziness, and with the lightest pressure of her palms on her scalp, the skin over her cheekbones tears like a wet leaf.
All the soldiers in the room are on the floor now, skin sloughing with the faintest motion, blood streaming from ears, eyes, nose, mouth, smoking pools spreading from their groins. Blood trickles on the floor and boils there.
In the streets, the enemy soldiers sway to the ground slobbering blood. They turn to flee and their skins flap off. They clamber over each other and pull themselves apart, the claxons blaring a long exasperated note again and again.
... I am shown the position of the detectors, most of which aren’t working any more. Those that are, line the streets on the opposite side of the building to me. The traps they are set to trigger were built to last.
*
Glass lobby doors swing apart for me. I swim out into cool rainswept air, fresh smell of rainswept streets, wet pavement ... but there is no rain, only mist ... and that choking feeling still lingers anyway.
I sit on a rustbank. There is no aperture in the rubble, nothing I could have used as a doorway. How did I get in and out? Silence, air moving over fused wreckage. Corrosive, cold fear slides along inside it.
The street is still roughly there, a rust trough through the tossed city bones. I trot down its empty length, looking for the others. I don’t have to look far. I see them walking in orderly files on either side of what once were streets, entering what doorways remain or crossing invisible thresholds pushing open unreal doors. Silichieh darts up a ramp with two-step-at-a-time strides, taking a hasty look at his bare wrist.
The private I once saw stabbing himself with his pen weaves drunkenly to and fro across a broad glass platform to one side of the street, scraping it with the end of his carbine, oblivious to the bloody wound disfiguring one side of his abdomen. He thinks he’s sweeping. As I hurry over, he loses his balance, toppling down hard on the unyielding glass with the snap of a bone breaking somewhere. He’s trying to get up when I reach him, his face bloodless, eyes glazed. His pupils are fixed. I talk to him, put my hands on him to calm him, and he is ice cold. Gradually his struggle to stand erect subsides. Examining his wound, I find it oozing, not bleeding, though it has not clotted. It’s as though he has no blood left. His uniform is soaked with it. I put my ear to his breast, my eyes on his fingers still feebly curling and uncurling around the butt of his gun, but he has no pulse.
Silichieh is looking in my direction as I turn. He comes toward me, seeing me, looking past me to the dead private. Two feet away from me now he is staring into my eyes, and using them—I can tell—to swim back.
“He’s dead,” he says, now looking past me again. “Shot. How shot?” Gives his head a toss—“Who shot him?”
“I don’t know. I heard shooting before, I think ... and I found a blackbird in one of the buildings. He had a bullet in him.”
“They’re here? ... What happened? Was I knocked out?”
“... Let’s see about the others.”
Saskia is in the square, foaming about the enemy to bypassers that aren’t there. One of the asylum soldiers is listening to her intently. Her eyes flick from one spot in space to another, where the faces would be, as she shouts. The others seem to be coming out of it. Nikhinoch strides briskly up to me, but he’s himself again, searching for Makemin.
Not far to look. We find him frenziedly barricading himself inside a sunken building like a roofed basement, all of thick rusted metal. The noise draws us, coming up from behind so that at first the protruding roof, round as a jar-lid, hides from us the bodies littering the ground in front. Most wear Wacagan uniforms, but many wear ours.
Nikhinoch goes cautiously up to the ground-level loophole and calls to Makemin in his high voice a little wavering. The whole structure booms with the report of a gun and I can hear the sharp crack as the shot strikes the inside of the roof. Nikhinoch lunges backward unhurt—Makemin fired right at him, as though the bullet could penetrate such thick metal. Out of the explosion comes a shower of curses.
Rapid footsteps, rattle of armor. Saskia pushes past us, draws Nikhinoch aside by the shoulder, and shouts back, her powerful voice battering through Makemin’s fusillade.
“Wake up Makemin! Wacagan are here! They’ve put us all under their spell and we’ve been cut to ribbons, Makemin!”
She uses his name repeatedly—“Makemin!” she shouts into his silence. Then, as she pauses to listen ... uncoordinated speech, hard to hear, inside.
After a long while, there is a sudden burst of activity as the barricade is pulled apart from the inside. Makemin emerges, slowly and rigidly, his face livid, stony. An ugly wound scars the side of his head above the right ear, and the skin at his right temple, and around his right eye, is scorched red and black.