Beasts of the Walking City Read online

  The plain bird preens itself on her palm, adjusting its feathers, and it’s as if she’s singing directly to the bird, imparting to it her hopes. Then as the wind rises up again and the moon lets back some of the sun’s light, as Mircada’s song comes to a natural completion, the bird and her companions again take wing. The group of them dart out across the snow, down the frozen peaks and the green lands and out too sea until finally they are lost to sight in that endless stretch of gleaming blue.

  In the silence after, none of our eyes are dry.

  “Thank you,” Ercan says, simply, after a long, quiet minute has passed. There’s a look of surprise and amazement on his face. “You honor us a great deal, you know.”

  I nod. I try to say something, but no words come. My throat is tight. I step forward and take the dead Kerul’s knife out of my sheath and lay it on his chest, and then I turn and walk out onto the ice.

  I find a place to sit. The song has left me in another place, another time, and like someone lost on a corpse road, I have to work to find my way back.

  9: Ercan

  After the ceremony, the sun hangs overhead, and it warms them even though the air is still cold. In places, the snow melts to show the red, rocky earth beneath. Ercan and Mircada are wrapped in coats, with their black bowler hats pulled low, and they walk along the ruined rail line near the edge of the peaks.

  Ercan shakes his head. “I don’t know what they would say. The council is terribly conservative—I’ve told you that.”

  “You wouldn’t have to tell them, you know.”

  “I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.”

  “So don’t.” Mircada tucks some of her hair back behind her ear, and the sunlight glints off her bracelets. “Don’t tell them, and be damned. Do you know what that Hulgliev would mean to the Akarii?”

  Ercan nods. “I talked with Fehris while you two were out.”

  “So you can’t let them bring him to their cause. Nadrune and her father have so much momentum already. A Hulgliev mage at her side would bring in the Ciordoi, and probably the Framarc Family, too. And it wouldn’t even matter if he had any skill.”

  “The Framarc are Akarii pawns already. Even they know it.”

  “But they’re not happy about it. Nadrune will say that the Hulgliev was a clear sign of her right to rule. She’d stand him up next to her and remind everyone of Dekheret and Farsoth and then she’d be halfway already to standing up the Lunar Council again.”

  Ercan sighs. He takes off his hat, looks at it, and puts it back on. The damn thing would never fit him right. “You’re right, as usual.” He scratches at where his beard is filling in and absently wished he was back in Tamaranth, where he could get a decent shave. “We need to bring him to Kerul and keep him there. I don’t suppose you have any ideas on how we might make that happen.”

  “You want me to sleep with him, don’t you.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “You never actually say it, Ercan.” She stops, and he turns to face her. In the sunlight, with two moons behind her, she is, as always, startling beautiful, even dressed in the cheap clothes of an Akarii drone. He remembers the first time he saw her at the College—wearing second hand clothes then, too, and trying to find a way to buy her textbooks with no actual money. Even then, with all of his money and all of his Family connections, he knew she was out of his league.

  “You always did have those exotic interests,” he says.

  She reaches up and Ercan thinks she’s going to slap him, but instead she cups his cheek in her hand and brings his face down close to hers. She gazes deeply into his grey eyes for a long moment, and then lifts her lips up to his ear. She nibbles on it, and then whispers gently into it. “But wouldn’t you be heartbroken to see me with another?”

  He blushes furiously, and steps backwards. “Quimbii’s Knife, Mircada. I hate it when you do that.”

  “Not all of you does,” she says, with a smile that was both innocent and smug at the same time. She let her eyes run down his body and come to rest below his waist, where it seems that his coat fits strangely.

  Ercan turns away, still blushing.

  Again, she is always right.

  10: Fehris

  Underneath Fehris’s round bowler hat, his fuzzy scalp is tingling. There’s a mystery here, and he knows he can solve it, and there’s nothing Fehris loves more than a good historical conundrum. At last, something that’s worth spending his time on! Yes, his leg is a little sore, and the swelling is pretty substantial, but that’s insignificant with an artifact like this ship amazingly here in front of him. His heart is racing, his eyes are wide and have a little of that phosphorescent glow (which is helpful down here in the dark underbelly of the hold) and his ears are cocked to all the small noises that run through the craft. (Ercan pacing nervously in the control room. Tiny fires in the power conduits, slowly burning themselves out. A strange crackling that he hasn’t identified yet. But he will.)

  He’s supposed to be looking for a tracking mechanism, he knows. But it’s the writing that’s really got his attention. Such a find! He shifts his weight onto the piece of broken conduit that he’s picked up as a crutch, pulls the next hatch door open, and sticks his head in. Simply amazing.

  Yet another hold covered with this mysterious, three-hundred year old script.

  If the truth is to be told, Fehris has never been much of a practical mage. Like many others, he’d been abandoned on the great stone steps of the College at Tilhtinon, the Akarii sky city. But unlike many others—who were invariably destined for the kitchens or the scullery, as some sort of facilities administrator or a butler to some lordling, or maybe even a good career as an Akarii drone—Fehris, who was hopeless with mundane physical labor, quickly lost himself in the ancient stacks of the great library. For weeks he’d wander the dark, musty halls, coming out only occasionally for food at the Great Hall, learning his way around the maze of corridors, tunnels, towers, and warehouses that made up the oldest archives, that most students twice his age thought useful only for clandestine romantic encounters.

  Even as a child of seven, he had no compunction climbing up on a stool next to one of the senior-most researchers and wading through some huge, arcane text on the idiosyncratic symbology of Calistian architecture, a transcription pad in one hand and a juice-box in the other. Researchers were first highly amused by this strange little creature, whom none of them could really quite identify, and then later amazed when they tested him and realized that the transcription pad was just for show. Fehris retained everything he read. He could recite every fact, every detail at a moment’s notice and with no advance preparation. Beyond simple recall, he could integrate many different sources of information, speak to common themes, debate underlying arguments endlessly, changing sides and addressing counter arguments flawlessly, with confidence (if not tact) that was far beyond his years.

  But the actual practical manipulation of the lei’s aether, a skill so sought after by most of the mages at the College, was never something that interested him. In his opinion, modern mages were far too specialized, too simplistic and direct and capitalistic. They had no sense of the wonderful artistry that had taken place in so many centuries past. No appreciation for the subtle beauties to be found in the many different ways the aether could be woven and turned.

  The past, he realized, was where he belonged. So many golden ages had preceded them, so many cultures had once worked on symphonies of arts and technologies that had spanned multiple worlds, so many races had once come together in elegant and graceful exchanges. It was a sad tragedy that they were reduced to a handful of cultures now, a few major Families who fought among themselves like thugs, and the rest of the worlds closed back in on themselves, waiting for something to change. The current age was a poor one, a dark time, one filled up with scheming and politics and this nearly endless war.

  And so the past was where he stayed, deep in the stacks. He spent so much time there, and so little anywhere else
, that he became somewhat legendary at the College. Rumors and stories were passed about him, the little Beast from the Archives. And it wasn’t until Ercan had found him, recognized his brilliance, befriended him, and dragged him out into the light of day that any thought had ever occurred to Fehris about leaving the College, for the first time in his life venturing out into this war-torn world and attempting to make it a little bit better.

  But that’s another story.

  Now, as he reads the glyphs painted across the ship’s lower holds, he’s certain of it: this ship dated from the very time when everything had changed. Dekheret had founded the Lunar Council and brought all of the Families to heel. For fifty years, the Third Transcendency had been an era of great leaps forward in science, technology and culture. Bridges were built to new adjacent worlds, and to worlds beyond them. The Kebi’tr and the Gthka joined their shared minds and replicated a sense of tranquility and calm into all of their linked realities, and all races were free to travel across them in peace, without fear. The sailing arts of the legendary Krihtyn were idolized and emulated on the glowing red seas of Bhul-tie by a people that valued creative expression over personal gain. A new sky-city was raised, the bright and shining Tilhtinora, that far exceeded the small Tilkasnioc or the (even then) crumbling Tilhtinon. Dekheret had brought poetry and music into fashion across all the human, and newly-human territories. Mages dueled with words and mage-embellished violas, not knives and several hundred variations of structured matrices.

  The great Te’loria, a symbol of beauty and strength, was forged by the most skilled craftsmen across three worlds. It was Dekheret who presented the flower to her most loyal companion, Farsoth, (who, interestingly enough, had been a Hulgliev), with a charge of guarding their age against anything that might harm it. And Farsoth had done so.

  Fehris wonders if the Hulgliev with them now has any idea of how many stories about powerful beasts and magical flowers were still told across different worlds even to this day.

  And then, about three or four hundred years ago, it had all fallen. Dekheret herself, or Lasser Arbellin, her sister’s son (while the Akarii would deny it, a man with a mixed reputation to many historians), Dekheret’s Hulgliev, or perhaps someone else entirely had reached too far, opened a bridge to the wrong world, or fought a duel with a creature of darkness that destroyed all that Dekheret had created. Farsoth had failed. Tilhtinora fell out of the sky. Te’loria was lost. Other worlds broke away and were lost in the fire of the aether.

  Or something like that.

  Stories from the Fall were apocryphal, and Fehris has little confidence in their historical accuracy despite them being the very focus of his doctoral dissertation several years ago.

  Until now.

  He runs his free hand back over his closely-shaved scalp, and then traces over the glyphwork again, hesitantly, reluctant to believe.

  The glyphs here are the story of this ship’s creation and naming, of its primary mission.

  And, there’s more.

  He catches his breath. There’s a subtle code in the writing, as well, just like in the last hold. A series of rhythmic patterns, of consonants and repeating glyphs, that holds a mathematical set of arguments that, when combined with the information from the last hold could be interpreted as…

  A map.

  But a map to what?

  Fehris shakes he head, reluctant to believe what’s he’s seeing. This could be what he’s spent half of his life looking for.

  His heartbeat quickens. His mind spins.

  There it is again, too, that same image he’s seen over and over again in the last hold.

  The image of a rose.

  He smiles to himself. The ship really could be what he was hoping.

  While he’s calculating more of the math in his head, one of the glyphs lights up under his hand. It glows for a minute, soundlessly. Then it fades away, while another one, down the corridor, lights up in just the same way.

  Fehris cocks his head, puzzled. He flattens his hand against the glyph and extends his senses.

  Nothing. There is no aether running through these walls.

  And yet farther down the hold is another flicker.

  Some echo effect of energy nearby, being picked up and amplified by the latent neural network?

  He follows the lights deeper. Beyond this hold, the passageways lead into the inner workings of the ship. The ceilings are low, the walls narrow.

  Following the glyphs, he pushes on to a simple closed hatch on a small side passage. If the ship is consistent with others of its time, the general area probably holds neural storage for tertiary and quarternary functions. It had likely seen little traffic even in the ship’s prime.

  But now, tracks in the dust lead into the room beyond the door.

  Someone has been here ahead of him.

  The door was shut, but not latched, and it slides open silently at his touch. Inside is a low, darkened room with a domed ceiling, covered with more glyphs and neural schematics, but these aren’t telling stories—they’re the wiring that makes the ship run. Small niches of varying sizes are set around the room at irregular intervals. A few of them stretch even deeper into the ships interior, and from one of these comes a flickering light.

  Fehris leaves his makeshift cane at the door and approaches silently. The niche extends several steps in, and then comes to an end at a series of routine maintenance displays.

  But it’s not the displays that draw his attention.

  Seated cross-legged in the alcove, and glowing as if she was on fire, is the Hulgliev’s drone, Kjat.

  She is stripped to the waist. Her eyes are rolled back into her head, and the whites of them pulse with an eerie light.

  She holds the pommel of her knife in her hand, with the flat of it directed back up along her forearm, and the point the blade enters the flesh of her upper arm just above the elbow. A thin line of blood drips down her arm.

  Just above the blade’s point of entry into her arm spins a tiny, intensely brilliant vortex of crimson light.

  As Fehris watches, thin tendrils of light reach out of the vortex and crawl across the woman’s body. The light is coming to rest on wounds that the woman must have incurred during the struggle at the excavation site.

  Her wounds are significant. Charred burns across her chest and arms. Broken and blacked skin. Fehris is surprised at the extent of them, a great deal more than what he’d thought a human could bear. He is surprised too that she’d given no indication to anyone that she was injured in any way.

  Under the light from the vortex, however, the burned skin heals itself, going from black to red to a healthy pale brown. And as the light moves on to another wound, a glyph writes itself on the woman’s skin, precisely where the wound had been.

  In fact, he sees that much of her skin is covered with an intricate series of glyphs he’d initially surmised were tattoos.

  And as he studies her, he realizes those glyphs are from the same time period as the writing on the walls of the ship.

  The light from the vortex crackles like an electrical storm, and occasional flickers of it crack against the walls of the alcove, briefly lighting up the glyphs along the walls. A great deal of the light is directed now around the woman’s head, touching on her temples, the center of her forehead, back behind her ears. While there is no obvious signs of injury there that Fehris can see, he knows a great deal of a mage’s work is internal. Strong currents of aether are channeled along chains of neurons and ganglia that each mage structures carefully through long hours of mental and physical rigor, and it was often the brain that was at highest risk in any combat situation.

  The light could be repairing damage. But it could also be doing much, much more.

  Fehris shivers as the hair stands up on the back of his neck.

  This is terribly occult, and, while he’s read about things like this in some of the older tomes, he never thought he’d encounter it in person. He doesn’t want to think through what this means for
all of them right here, right now.

  As he watches, the woman’s lips began to move, as though she’s having a silent conversation. The vortex at her elbow pulses and flickers, shifting across the spectrum to a deep violet that cloaks her in vibrant shadows.

  The tendrils of light all work their way to the center of her forehead.

  The woman’s back arches, sharply, and the blade of the knife cuts deeper into her arm.

  As Fehris watches, the blood flows down along the blade and soaks into the metal. Fehris begins to back away, and then a scream escapes her woman’s lips: a short, high-pitched cry an animal in distress would make.

  And then the light goes out, and everything is dark.

  With afterimages of her still in his eyes, Fehris quickly feels his way down the wall of the room and tucks himself into another of the alcoves. He moves as silently as he can, despite the leg. The alcove is too shallow, but he pushes himself into it as deeply as he can. His breathing is loud in his own ears, and he can smell his own sweat of fear.

  He hears her moving in the alcove. Gathering things, maybe. Dressing herself. And then he hears her make her way across the open floor. She opens the door, and he can see her outline in the doorway. She stops there, and looks at something leaning there against the wall, just inside the doorway.

  Fehris realizes it’s the pipe he’s been using as a crutch.

  He stops breathing.

  His heartbeat thunders in his ears as the woman turns, her hand on the knife now back in the sheath across her chest.

  She stares back into the room and though Fehris can’t make out her face, he is convinced she is staring straight at him. He gropes uselessly at the empty sheath across his own chest and feels his sweat trace tiny pathways down his ribs.

  She’s looking right at him. She can see the glowing of his eyes, looking back at her.

  He shuts them, but it’s too late.

  But then she turns, ducks out into the passageway, and is gone.