by Brett
Davidson
Part 7
The demand for a sacrifice was none too subtly
reiterated. This time, a formally written document was delivered by
armed proctors. Anarchy must be cauterised with justice, they declared.
It was no matter that the crime saved the city, because now it remained
stranded in darkness and it must be demonstrated that despite there
being an even so, the law
would maintain itself. It was obvious that in these lightless times
they were the enemy, and thus the real target for this lesson.
“What are we to do?” asked Medeis in closed conference.
“Surely we cannot surrender her.”
The Puppet Master man pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I think, I think that there is a necessary turning point here. Timing
is of the essence…”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head, refusing to answer. Clearly he was
troubled. He removed his wand from his sleeve and fidgeted with it,
twisting its segments. Apparently it was a calculating device of some
sort, among other things. When he spoke again, it was in the manner of
someone trying to explain something to convince himself rather than his
audience. “There is a risk… in the long run, it is more theirs than
ours. Talk to them. First stall and then demand haste. We should find a
place… “ He waved the wand about, frowning at the beads of light that
ran up and down its length until he found a combination of measures and
colours that seemed to satisfy him. Then he frowned some more. “Yes,
the remnants of their Tower of Observation.”
“Their Palatine Tower? It’s ruined, torn clean away.
Only the lower chamber survives.”
“Yes, there,” he insisted. “No sooner than a dekahora,
no later than… a diphaos.”
“Very well,” conceded Medeis. “However, I could not
comprehend why you-“
“And with full ceremony and armed guards in formal
ranks. Show that you know that this is a symbolic event to forge an
understanding.”
“Theatre, then.”
“Yes,” he admitted with a shrug. “But it is also an
excuse for me to be present, albeit in a hood, and it will likewise
allow my Companion to be there in armour. I swear, you will need us
both and…” He looked directly at Io. “Her, of course.”
***********************************************
In the best of circumstances, the Theatre of
Illumination and Penitence was, as custom demanded, in near darkness
save for the one bright shaft of light that shone down on the accused.
Now in the indefinite Hiatus, there was not even a thin trickle of
sunset light. In darkness, the Heliomancers often said, there is no
justice - and therefore, Medeis countered, Io should not have to stand
trial. The response to that was to hang a lantern, powered, ironically
enough, by the Earth Current.
And so Io stood exposed, shackled to a bronze disc a
yard across with her breath coming in short gasps and too dazzled to
see more than vague silhouettes about her while the advocates made
their competing bids in the auction of her fate before the Judge-major.
Even before the end of the final arguments, the verdict
was a foregone conclusion. “Although her action was ultimately a boon,
there must be a display of execration, a display so terrible that it
becomes legendary,” the Judge-major declared. “The punishment will be
re-enacted in blank ritual for thousands of generations, the identity
of the saboteur and any possibility of sympathy for them shall be
buried beneath layers of sanguinary instruction.”
“But why, if the primary aim is instruction, is her
suffering essential?” Medeis argued. “Can you not issue a pardon with
the terms explicitly framed? You yourself admit that she saved
Aeiphanes. Allow her this one small mercy.”
The Judge-major spread his hands. “Justice is equally a
matter of popular confidence as it is of scrupulous practice. The very
point of this prosecution is to ensure that people know that it remains
secure in these trying times. The sentence must be carried out in
full.”
Behind her, Io heard the Puppet Master mutter to
himself, “About now, I would think.” Something in his vicinity hummed
and crackled faintly.
Then she smelled the scent and it was almost a relief.
Please, she thought, let it last through-
But it was not a memory of her past life; it was the
present. Shadows flickered and writhed like flames in the chamber. It
spread and smeared itself in the thick air of the Theatre, parts of it
crumbling as fast as they propagated. It could not live long here in
the light of the Earth Current. It burned, screaming - but still it
grew.
A tendril leapt across space like the shadow of
lightning. It touched the first figure - perhaps the Judge-major
himself, she could not tell - and his body was suddenly rigid. He might
have been dead in an instant, but he did not fall. His head turned
slowly and with almost infinite effort, as if the muscles of his neck
were bending steel. Something looked out of his eyes, something that
looking out of eyes for the very first time. It saw the light,
screamed, and raised its fists to grind them out of their orbits. He
staggered, but did not fall. Blood began to leak from behind his hands
and run down his wrists.
Distantly, Io heard her chains being neatly severed by
the diskos and the woman’s gauntlet was hard on her shoulder.
“Forward”, she whispered. “Toward the thing. Kill it.” The weapon was
thrust into her hand and reflex closed her fingers about its grip. It
vibrated with its pent-up energy and she tried to raise it. Activated,
it writhed like a live snake, spitting its actinic light about. She
yelped and almost dropped it.
The Heliomancer, or the thing that steered him sensed
her somehow and spun to face her. It let his fists drop to reveal the
ruins of his eyes and his cheeks slick with his own gore. It sniffed
the air and took a step, pointing its glistening finger at her.
She tried to wield the spinning blade, but she could not
control it or herself.
The armoured woman cursed and snatched it from her. The
diskos roared in her hands and the once-man fell in two halves that
splashed their corrupted fluids across her greaves and ankles.
Io was aware that someone was shrieking. It was herself.
The screams poured out of her but they seemed to come from somewhere
else, from out of the wind, from far away, from everywhere. She could
not stop them until they become wracking coughs. It was the man who
held her now, his arms tight about her. Her legs thrashed, but he
lifted her up until she subsided. “You will do this, you will act, you
will destroy this abomination,” he hissed in her ear. “Your terror
becomes power, your cries drive your arm. You, you will reach out and
kill this thing.” Once more the diskos was thrust into her hand and
this time she gripped it tightly.
Already frost was spreading through the blood, making
feathery garnet coloured growths. They begin to advance once more,
gathering into a shape vaguely resembling a crinoid sculpted in broken
glass.
Io took a step forward, holding the diskos like a torch
before her. Strangely beautiful shards of refracted light scattered
from it, beams of blue and red and green that cast bright moiré
patterns across the walls. The unreal colours made the cringing
courtiers look like a grotesque animated relief. She did not notice
them, did not count how many were entangled in the thing’s limbs.
She took another step, pulling hard with her finger on
the trigger and sending forth a still brighter glare.
The Eater made a sound that might have been a chuckle.
It was as huge as an azhdarcho now, spreading wings that were not so
much membranes as undulating fractures in the air. “Sentence,” it said.
“Lesson. Out.”
“No.” Something happened; the odour was in her nostrils,
she realised that this moment was truly an echo of another. Somewhere,
great machines were spinning, driving the energies of the Castle and
something flung her forward. “Eeeeh!” she screeched and her spindly
body erupted into a weird spinning dance. Helices of lightning
surrounded her. The diskos sliced metal that offered no more resistance
than water, ozone was sharp in her nostrils and then the battle
enveloped her.
The experience was strange. One half of her watched as
if detached in some way, too serene and passive to order her actions;
the other half of her acted and did not need to think… She heard the
man chanting somewhere on the edge of her awareness, the syllables of
his words cueing the vector and rhythm of her moves. The dance, she
realised, was the dance that she performed as a Lighter time and again
between the stars. Who was Io? Io was a puppet that she jerked this way
and that at the end of her strings. The torn metal about her dissolved
to reveal a vista of dimmed stars while she flew about the shining
bracelet of the Castle. A shell of armour surrounded her, driven by the
blaze of annihilated matter. Bolts of plasma coursed from her
fingertips along the arcs of the Castle’s intake field, she threw
spears of coherent light through the black hearts of the vast but
fragile dragons. He described her axes and she inscribed her lines of
lightning and the Eaters were seared into the merest ash.
When she came to, her clothes were sticky with
perspiration. She had bitten the side of her cheek and her mouth was
filled with the sweet copper taste of blood. Her joints felt as if she
had been bound upon a rack. She panted and lurched upright and the
diskos fell with a scrape and a clatter.
“Clumsy and unfitted to your frame, but effective in the
end,” the Puppet Master observed.
Io spat a red pearl. “Curse you,” she hissed. “You
knew.”
He folded his arms and nodded, unrepentant, though Io
could see now that his affected composure was a mask. “I never
doubted,” he lied.
She screamed and launched herself at him, but her
fingers and teeth found only air. He caught her wrist from an
unexpected angle, gripping so tight that her bones ground together and
she gasped with the pain.
“Those who survived were those that could - and it was
they who left the descendents who were my ancestors,” he hissed in her
ear. “You are only the first generation.”
The Companion placed her gauntlets on her shoulders and
began to massage them. She must have been discharging some of the Earth
Current through them, because the tension faded almost immediately. “He
knows who you are,” she told Io. “He knows too well how important you
are.”
The man released her, though the pain still held. She
rubbed her wrist and glared at him. For once, he actually appeared
guilty. “Forgive me,” he said. “My life hangs by the thread of your
life; my life and hers. For all our sakes you must learn how to live in
this new world.”
Io fell into the soft darkness of honest exhaustion.
***********************************************
Io woke once again in the Monstruwacan infirmary with a
sense of resignation her only grasp on familiarity. Her consciousness
had been cast among so many personae, she had no idea of who or where
or when she was in reality, or even if reality meant anything. How
could any one of these places - Aeiphanes, the Castle Lachesis, the
Lighter-capsule, the shadowy arena with the Eater - be more real than
any other?
Someone gave her a bundle of soft fabric and she
reflexively clutched it tightly. It was her old entekora. She peeled
her eyes open and squinted, trying to assemble the pale blur above into
a face. It was the Companion.
She remembered again that neither of the two strangers
had ever revealed their names. “Who are you?” she asked. “Now, surely,
you must be able to tell me.” Her voice was barely a croak.
The woman shrugged and picked up the doll, playing with
it for a while. Various faces came and went: waif, queen, warrior,
idol, seer. “No,” she said simply. “I can’t.”
Io sighed. “Will you answer any other questions?”
“Maybe. It depends on the question.”
That was as obscure an evasion as any. “Will you answer
this then? Did you really summon the Eater to the court?”
The woman looked as if she was going to remain
tight-lipped, but she did answer: “One was going to break in
eventually, somewhere. We decided to choose the time and place.”
“People died, how can you be so-“
“I am not.” She leaned over and stroked Io’s forehead.
“Please do not think that either of us are callous. We grieve for the
dead, but we are happy that the Eater did not destroy all of them
eternally. Remember that you yourself fought them when you were a
Lighter; that is why you fought in the court here. Part of you
remembers that.”
Io closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the same
broad, white-braided head still hovered over her. “I used to hope that
I could be cured, then I hoped that the… memories were just dreams,
then I hoped that they were true after all because there were, under
all the dread, marvels to be seen, then I hoped… I’ve hoped for so many
things. I suddenly feel as if I’m a thousand orbits old and… I’m tired
and I don’t know what I should have to know… I don’t know anything for
sure.”
The Companion put the doll back in Io’s hands and closed
her fingers about it. “I suppose that it will wear out eventually, but
try, as long as you live, to remember that it’s like you: many faces,
one self. As long as you think, feel, ask questions, then you are sane
and… and as whole as you can be.”
Io managed a grin at the woman’s last hesitation. “As
whole as I can be?”
“Should I call you a jewel, shaped with many facets?”
She chuckled. “No, that will have to do, I suppose… What
will happen to me now? Simple me in this scrawny little body here?”
“I imagine that a legend will accrue about you: Io who
destroyed the terrible black Eater-of-Light.”
“I mean the trial, the verdict? Will they still try to
execute me?”
The woman took a deep breath. “No,” she said quietly.
“They insisted on their pride, but the Monstruwacans diverted them.”
There was something strange and terrible veiled by her
words. “What diversion?” Io asked, ready to stop her ears at the
answer.
“We presented them with a substitute and they have
staged the pretence that they have dispensed justice and displayed the
body, your former body, as if their sentence has been carried out. As
for you, I expect that some new lie will be contrived - you will be
determined to be the daughter or suchlike or someone or other, a symbol
of new hopes after the sins of the older generation have been
expiated.” Her offhand manner communicated enough about her own intense
contempt for the trial.
Despite all reason, Io felt hot tears spring from her
eyes. Rationally, she knew that the body was already dead, with only
the most basic biological functions maintained artificially, but the
fact was that she had believed it to be the actual, salvageable body of
her own natural mother. Or maybe she cried for her previous
incarnation, or her ignorance, or the end of the old world. There was
so much to grieve.
“Now, after all that blood, I would have thought-” she
wailed. “I would have-”
The Companion nodded sadly. “One would think that in the
most desperate circumstances, people would become more… if not
rational, at least pragmatic. My…colleague always understood the
importance of theatre better than myself. Once an issue is made a
matter of face, the actors will compete to fulfill their roles most
visibly. The trick is to write the roles in a certain way.”
“I do not think that he likes himself,” Io observed,
sniffing. “If he has to play games with people.”
The Companion gave her an appreciative look. “You are
right. And therefore he does his best to make sure that people dislike
him too - but I am his principle failure.”
“You love him?”
“Always.”
“I don’t think that I love anyone,” Io muttered. Her
self-pity seemed utterly trivial under the circumstances, but she held
onto it for that very reason. It was small, easy to understand.
The Companion was not going away to leave Io wallowing,
however. She continued to watch her. “I suppose that I should pay you
what little I can…” she said, and laid her palm on Io’s forehead once
more. “Sleep, and tell me what you see…”
It came to her then, another fit, but instead of the
sickness, she felt the weight of a colossal weariness descend upon her,
and instead of falling, she almost seemed to slide obliquely into her
alternative awareness.
***********************************************
She was standing in the cove
of an embrasure with her eyes to the lenses of a strange spyglass. Fine
reticulations quartered the vista as she tracked back and forth. Here
and there, some form of censor blocked the sight of things that must
not be seen. In all, there were five of these lacunae; and they were
huge, and close. Between these unknowns, she was able to mark the
recognisable and the strange. While she could not herself ascribe
meaning to them, she knew that someone had carefully charted every one
of them in perfect detail. She turned a wheel, and even though she
stood in a fixed position, the outer eye of her device swept in a
complete circle. From her vantage, she could tell that she was at a
great height - two leagues at least - above the landscape.
Westward was a darkened
heath, traced here and there with wandering strands of green mist. To
the North-West, seven lights; to the North, a circular house with
battlements that were like the stilled flickering of flames. Its door
was open and on the threshold there stood a figure in grey staring back
at her across the plain as if were the narrowest of thresholds. She
started and her hand jerked at the wheel.
When she recovered from her
momentary shock, she continued her scan. Eastward was a city of tiny,
unmoving lights and before it a meandering road and beyond it a plain
of ice. Southeast, there was a dark fortification larger than any city
she had known. It seemed to radiate an intense chill. To the South,
there was the largest of the lacunae and sighting that zone of
blindness, she forgot that she could see or even that she had a hand to
turn the wheel. There was something in the shadow watching her,
something vast in magnitude and still greater in age that had waited
and watched for aeons and would wait and watch until its sight had
absorbed everything in existence…
A hand fell on her shoulder
and gently turned her away from the spyglass.
She blinked, remembering
that she could see and before her was the white-haired man in
embroidered purple.
“Not yet,” he said. “The
Watchers, those masks of the Ulterior, have not passed the outer circle
of the Redoubt yet, Lyreia. We have had so much time and there is still
time to come. I have found the last of all suns, the portal to the
crossroads of time…” He smiled wistfully, lovingly. “I promise you that
we will yet stand in the light of new stars. From there, we will…” He
went on to explain how light waves propagated both forwards and
backwards in time, and how his experiments suggested a practical
application in the transport of living bodies across the ages, once he
had access to that nexus. He smiled, blinking back ill-concealed tears
of joy. “Should we be worthy of access, who knows what history will be
then? Will it be because we make it so, or will it be our duty to
ensure that what is written actually occurred? In either case, it must
be what leads to that end…”
She nodded, agreeing and not
understanding the temporal geometry that he exploited, just knowing
that he was sure in his intent. He took her in his arms and she rested
her head on his shoulder.
“I told you my love,” he
whispered in her air, his breath the gentlest of caresses. “I will
guard you through all time and in every age.”
“I know,” she said.
“Always.”
***********************************************
It was easy enough to find him; she simply walked where
her legs led her.
The man stood at the balcony, his hands clasped behind
his back. He did not turn as she approached, but something in his
stance indicated that he was aware of her.
“You never told me your name,” she said.
“No, I did not,” he replied. “And I will not.”
“Why?”
He turned then. “It does not matter. There has to be a
legend, and that legend must be founded on your name. There may be a
man and a woman - strangers - but there must be you first and
foremost.”
She nodded, thinking for a while. “You seemed simpler to
me then, when I was a child. Kinder.”
He nodded, giving a wry smile. “I am too much the martyr
oftentimes, too ready to take the burden of ignominy for the sake of
the greater good. Thank you for reminding me that I have done it too
well.”
“Medeis shares your sense of humour - such as it is.”
“I see something of myself in him,” he admitted. He
paused then, thinking, and then put his hand on her shoulder, leant and
kissed her forehead. “I know that you won’t hate me in this life, Io,
and I’m glad for that. You will be a legend, as much as that is worth
anything to you. Better, perhaps, you will live, and your line will
lead to my generation and my own true love in a more profound manner
than you can imagine.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Io said, not knowing why
this was certainly a lie. “I don’t understand at all. Why have you done
this? I have been watching you and I can see that this was not just a
duty, there was something in your eyes when you look at me…”
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Haven’t you seen
just a little more?” he asked. “Haven’t you seen how I regard my
Companion, haven’t you seen how I regard you?”
“I, I thought, guessed… I don’t know.”
He picked her up, this almost-giant, and held her close
to him, looking straight into her green eyes with his own hard black
orbs. “I love her,” he whispered. “I have always loved her, for all the
ages of all our lives. Without you and your survival, I could never
have had her - because she is you.”
He put her down then, leaving her standing stunned, and
turned back to the dark vista to become one with the shadows and then…
he was not.
***********************************************
It took the detonation of the Aeiphanes’ last
ploughshares to break the new mountains that barred the best route to
the floor of the Valley, and the sight at the end of that projected
path was hardly one that seemed to justify the expenditure. Thick black
smoke filled it like a polluted sea. It would be generations before
they could even contemplate a descent, but they would nonetheless
station themselves here for as long as needs be. Rather than building
hippochalkoi, the clans would compete to construct roads down the slope
to convey whatever remained of the human race to redoubts on the
cooling Valley floor where the Earth Current was close and strong.
Io did not care how long it would take. As she aged as
naturally as she could, she learned a little patience that was
bolstered by her memory of the longer life of her soul. She still read
the books of the Monstruwacans’ library as she had when she was young.
Once they were fancies, seeding great trees of imagination in her mind.
Now they were… what? Opening a book that explicitly described the past
both unfolded wonders and marked the final closure of an impenetrable
door.
There was, she read, a world that had once been a titan
and was still a giant. It had wandered close to its star and the
searing radiation had stripped away the thick atmosphere that had
formerly shrouded it, leaving behind a core of almost pure metal that
was a dozen times heavier than the earth. There, things like flattened
crabs crawled out of yellow-stained oceans and inscribed
incomprehensible diagrams across the rusted continents.
One great world was an icy blue globe where storms of
diamonds rained down through a thick methane sea.
In the clouds of another still vaster giant, things like
enormous medusae fought arrowhead predators with lightning bolts.
Elsewhere, there was a world that was swaddled with an
ocean that was a hundred leagues deep and had no land anywhere. Storms
brewed and raged for a thousand years while in the depths, beasts
larger than cities glided through clouds of luminescent plankton and
lived and died without ever knowing of either surface or seabed. Their
lowing songs circled the globe and overlapped so that they were
immersed in sound as thoroughly as they were in water.
On a sibling of earth itself, there stood an extinct
volcano as wide as a continent and so tall that its peak surpassed the
atmosphere and stood exposed to space.
Close to the face of a hot sun, there was a world that
was on the near half naked magma and on the other, ice.
And far away, in oceans under a sun that was slowly
being destroyed by its dense companion, communities of diverse
creatures gathered about the stuttering heat of volcanic vents, sealed
themselves up in silver membranes and made a new type of gestalt mind
together.
All of these places lay pinned on the pages of the books
that Io read. Neither she nor any of her descendents would ever see
them; each one of them would die in darkness, just as the earth would.
But they would be remembered, salvaged.
Like herself. She was a soul salvaged from a ruin, a
ruin now obliterated. She held her hand before her face, examined it,
spread her fingers and pressed them against her own forehead. She
pinched and pulled at her lips, bit her knuckles.
Aeiphanes, for all its corruption and the terrible
near-ruin that it had suffered, had gained an enormous bounty, she
realised, in its library. It was now the most famous and powerful city
amongst all of the communities that had survived the impact, and under
the tutelage of the Monbstruwacans it was, she thought, a truly benign
and essential force now. It was a champion - as she was supposed to be.
It was an odd feeling to identify with the city, but the Companion had
been right about the entekora; even though it was just a toy, thinking
about it explained much. She had flown and fought with the Castle, been
turned inside-out to be reborn as Io… and the Castle, landed and
stripped, had emerged in the substance and body of Aeiphanes and flown
through the new battle… and the fae-folk had told her that it would fly
again, using the same protection applied on earth to journey through
time in its incarnation as the Last Redoubt.
That was fanciful, but it was true in substance. A
little substance would persist, to be assimilated with the far-future,
ancient fortress-ship of the Night Land. As would she. And he.
She pulled her robe tight about her for warmth. It was
grey, shot with fire.
© Brett
Davidson
21 Feb 2006
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