Elemental (18 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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“And have you decided the name for my house?” he asked.
“Ah, my dear Emperor!” she laughed, for so she called him now, after working so closely with him all these years. “That was decided the very day you engaged my services.”
 
 
For weeks at a time Myriel was able to lose herself in the joy of creation, watching her masterwork rise and take shape under her direction. It was always like this—the excitement of the task at hand, to be followed by the inevitable bittersweet melancholy of its end. For her, the creation of a
building was like the act of love—passionate, exciting, exhilarating while it lasted, but leaving one empty and dark inside when it was over.
This time, however, she knew there would be no afterward. Each block set in place shortened her life. Several of her principal artists had died already. Others had slipped away in the night, leaving apprentices to complete the final installations.
This spurred her on, especially in the final days as she and the foreman hurried to complete the last of their unique devices.
 
 
In the end, the Emperor was spared the unpleasant necessity of killing his master builder. Myriel was found dead in her bed with a peaceful smile on her lips, just a week before the dedication. Her old foreman lay on the floor beside her, apparently having killed himself out of grief at his mistress's passing.
The Emperor declared two whole days of mourning, an unprecedented honor for a mere craftswoman, and the people of the city grumbled even as they ate the funeral feast. This foreigner had broken their backs, brought disease and strangers to the very heart of the Empire. In their hearts some even grumbled against the Emperor himself, though none were fool enough to let such thoughts past their teeth.
 
 
The great day arrived at last. On the morning of his fiftieth birthday, the Emperor put on his finest new robes and led a formal procession up the hill to the new palace. Accompanied by the court, his two sons, his new favorite wives, and their new favorite eunuchs (a rather sullen company, if he'd chosen to notice), he set about exploring the pillared courts and dazzling chambers. There were 150 in all, not even counting the kitchens and servants' quarters.
Evidence of Mistress Myriel's genius was soon discovered. In the audience chamber, invisible bells tinkled softly as rain, but it was impossible
to find where the sound came from. The elaborate throne was the last work of the famous wood carver, Delio, before his death. On the throne's velvet cushion lay a folded parchment. Inside, written in the builder's precise hand, the Emperor read, “Be seated, and behold.” Grinning with anticipation, the Emperor sat down, and instantly stone gorgon heads on the walls to either side sprang to life as fountains. Water gushed from their eyes and drained away through into marble basins set into the floor.
Everyone gasped and applauded, then gasped again a moment later when a section of wall directly opposite the throne turned on hidden pivots to reveal an elegant mirror of polished silver. It was very large, and positioned so exactly that the Emperor was framed like a portrait. By some trick of the mirror grinder's art, he appeared twice the size of the people standing on either side of him.
“So many devices just in one room alone!” the Emperor exclaimed, admiring the cleverly distorted reflection. “She truly was a genius. What a loss her death is to us!”
Still, none of these devices had revealed what he most longed to know: the name of his great house. Gathering his robes in his hands, this conqueror of nations dashed on from room to room like an excited child on a treasure hunt.
He and his courtiers found more of Myriel's notes here and there. One at the house temple instructed the priest to light the little stack of wood laid ready on the altar. When this was done, the enameled doors of the sanctuary beyond it swung open by themselves to reveal magnificent golden statues of the Emperor's house gods. When the small fire died down, the doors closed again. No one had ever seen such a wonder, and the Emperor ordered that the mechanism be found and implemented in all his public temples to boost the revenues.
He was slightly disappointed to find no obvious devices in the imperial bedchamber, or any hint from the builder. But all agreed it was a magnificent room all the same. The floor, made of blood-red Mylilian
marble, was so highly polished that it appeared wet. The vaulted ceiling was supported by graceful pillars of gilded black marble, and frescoed with a scene of the Emperor's first victory at the age of seventeen, over the king of Mylila.
“I remember that horse!” He craned his neck to take in the scene. His rearing black charger might have been rendered from life, right down to the white scar on its flank. Bound in golden chains, the vanquished king cowered on his knees under the beast's hooves as his wailing family looked on. Following popular convention, the painter had used many of the Emperor's friends and advisors as models for the secondary figures. They chattered and laughed aloud as they found themselves among the conquering soldiers.
“Why, look!” the Emperor said to his eldest son, a strong, bearded warrior. “There you are, carrying off one of the king's daughters.”
“And there's me, pillaging a dead general,” his younger son observed, delighted to find himself immortalized.
“And there's that builder of yours, too. I might have known she'd show up sooner or later,” his Lord Chancellor chuckled. “I suppose it's not too arrogant a gesture, given the rendering.”
It took the Emperor a moment to find Myriel, for the stupid artist had placed her among the prisoners. There she stood, a grave, ragged figure, watching the conquerors with accusing eyes. And wasn't that her foreman lying dead at her feet?
“How very odd,” the Emperor murmured, frowning.
“A statement of modesty, perhaps?” his eldest son suggested.
“Ah, but that's no worthy legacy for her, not worthy at all. Make a note, scribe. We must have that fresco altered. I don't want to stare up at her looking like that year after year, poor woman!”
“The original artist is not longer available, August Majesty,” the scribe murmured apologetically as he scribbled a note.
“My Emperor, the people have filled the plaza, awaiting your birthday address,” his chamberlain reminded him.
“Ah yes!” The Emperor reluctantly let himself be led away; he'd rather hoped to find the secret name and announce it on this most auspicious of days.
The Balcony of Victory lay just down the corridor. It had been fitted with large double doors of oak and gold, matched in shape to the large windows on either side, and secured with a large lock of Myriel's own design. With a flourish, the Emperor took out the key she'd given him. Even this humble article was a work of art, made of polished steel damascened with gold, just like a fine sword. Inserting it into the lock, the Emperor imagined all his descendents doing the same, generation after generation, stepping out onto this place where only royal feet might tread, to survey their people. The key turned easily, and the great doors swung open to reveal yet another marvel. The Emperor's family and ministers gaped and clapped, and an expectant roar went up from the crowd below.
Just as Myriel had planned, the white marble balcony jutted gracefully out from the front of the palace in the shape of a warship's prow. Perfect in every detail, down to the ribs and planking in her sides, it seemed as if the Emperor's own flagship had been sculpted from snow and launched to sail the blue summer sky. Two stone steps had been set into the peak of the prow, so that he might be more visible to the crowds below.
The Emperor's heart swelled with gratitude for the dead builder. “Come,” he said to his eldest son. “Let the people see you, their future emperor, standing beside me this happy day.”
“Look, Father,” his son said. “She's left you another message.”
This parchment fluttered on the white marble deck a few feet from the doorway, secured under a lozenge of red jade carved with the builder's seal.
The Emperor forgot the crowd for a moment as a thrill of anticipation ran through him. “Come, let's see what it says!”
The prince retrieved the folded sheet and presented it to the Emperor. Inside, they read, “Behold the name, writ in gold.”
“The name! But where?” The Emperor looked around again and
caught a glint of yellow light on the top step at the prow. “The secret name! She's set it there so that I can announce it today, just as I'd hoped. Wondrous woman!”
The two men hurried forward and bent to read the lettering.
Farewell
The Emperor just had time to frown over the puzzle before the cables that held the entire balcony in careful balance—cables much tested by the clever builder to be just strong enough to support the stonework, but not the additional and carefully directed weight of the Emperor himself, much less of that of his heir—snapped.
Builders who came to survey the wreckage later said it was a testament to Myriel's skill that the balcony came away so cleanly, arcing out just enough not to damage the impeccable facade. The balcony itself smashed to bits, of course, not to mention the Emperor and his son, and a number of his subjects who'd been standing just below. An expanse of costly paving stones was ruined as well, but an ample supply of replacements were discovered stacked in a storeroom soon after, making repairs a simple matter.
Before the crowd could recover from this catastrophe, the balcony doors crashed down onto the shattered marble. This released several large wooden plugs in the doorframe above, which fell out and in turn released two columns of sand. These leaked away, gently lowering a stone slab into place across the open doorway to seal the aperture. Made of the same shining white marble as the rest of the house, this glistening panel was inlaid with golden letters tall enough to be read as far away as the city market:
Perfection
Which proved in the long run to be an ironic and misleading name for this particular palace. Many people later shook their heads and sucked their teeth in grudging sympathy for the dead builder, who'd left such a misnamed legacy as her greatest work.
For in spite of all the care Mistress Myriel had put into its design, and her considerable personal oversight of each stage of construction, it was not long before a number of serious flaws were discovered, not the least of which was the faulty construction of the ceiling vaults in several rooms, including that of the Imperial bedchamber. While this did solve the problem of the displeasing ceiling mural, it also crushed the Emperor's only remaining heir in his bed.
Stranger still, the hidden passageways of the harems and eunuchs' quarters, which were supposed to lead to the garden pavilions, emerged instead far outside the palace walls, in the oddest and most obscure places.
BY MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
 
Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is best-selling science fiction and horror author Michael Marshall Smith and his alter ego, best-selling psychological thriller author Michael Marshall. The former is responsible for the novels
Only Forward
,
Spares
,
One of Us
,
The Vaccinator
, and the short fiction collections
What You Make It
and
More Tomorrow and Other Stories;
the latter penned
The Straw Men
,
The Lonely Dead
(aka
The Upright Man
), and the recent
Blood of Angels
. He is a five-time winner of the British Fantasy Award and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee. Smith has also worked extensively as a screenwriter, writing feature scripts for clients in LA and London. He is currently working as producer and script editor on a movie adaptation of one of his stories, cowriting a television series pilot, and starting a new novel.
“‘The Compound' is actually quite different to anything else I've ever written,” said Smith, “a speculative kind-of-SF story of a type I've never attempted before or since. I wrote it because a series of images and atmospheres came into my head at the same time—and insisted they were relevant to each other. It turned out that they were, albeit in a strange way.”
Michael Marshall Smith lives in North London, England. Find out more about Smith at his Web site:
www.michaelmarshallsmith.com
.
 
 
Daniel sat on his small
chair by the bed and watched his mother sleeping. Enough light filtered through the drawn curtains for him to see the rise and fall of her chest beneath the bedclothes, and he counted the breaths as they came and went. As long as he could count the breaths she was still alive, and as long as they came, he would count them. He wished his mother had someone else to help her, someone who wasn't seven years old. But she hadn't, and so he had to do the best he could.
He looked at the glass on the bedside table and saw there was enough water there still. If she wanted more he could get some from the kitchen next door, but it was all right for now.
For now he would just sit, and count.
 
 
“The cold is within you,” Dark thought, irritably. “You are not within the cold.” He was trying to convince himself that it wasn't the snow around him which was making him feel numb, or the fact that it was twenty degrees below, or even that he just wasn't dressed for this kind of crap. It wasn't working. The cold was both within and without him, and getting colder. If he didn't get warm soon, he was going to die.
Getting out of the Compound was proving both less and more difficult than he'd expected.
When he'd woken to find himself laid out on the bed in the small cabin, he had at first no idea where he was. He realized he'd been there some time only when he tried to stand up. The weakness and confusion in his limbs made it clear that it must have been at least six months since he'd last been awake. The alarm this caused was soothed by the room he found himself in, which was cosy, its walls lined with dark pine. It reminded him of something, though he couldn't remember what.
For a week or so he'd been content to sit cross-legged on the bed, helping himself to the food which appeared in the fridge (cold cuts and mild cheese), his mind a content and comfortable blank. Then one day he tried the door to the cabin, and found it was unlocked. It opened onto a small balcony, and when he stepped out into the cold, Dark realized immediately where he was.
The balcony was about a hundred meters above ground level, and on a low mountain, and thus had a very good view. Good in the sense that you could see a great deal, at least. What you could see a great deal of, unfortunately, was snow. Snow and fir trees as far as the eye could see. Dotted over the landscape at irregular intervals, sometimes swaddled in a patch of deep emerald trees, sometimes stark against the ice, were other tall windowless buildings. The sky was black as night, but the scene was lit as if by a dim and hidden winter sun.
It could only be one place. The Compound.
Suddenly galvanized, Dark turned on his heel and walked back into his room. The Compound.
Bastards.
There had to be a way out, and as soon as he found it, he was gone. He made a perfunctory search of the cupboards and wall units first, looking for warm clothing. He didn't expect to find anything. He didn't. The room was plenty warm, and so far as They were concerned he was supposed to stay put. He took a look inside the fridge too, thinking it would be a good idea to take provisions, but for the first time it was empty. He suspected that was not a good sign, and immediately began looking for the door.
It was surprisingly easy to find, right where you would expect it to be. There was no handle, but he was able to get enough purchase on the edge of one of the panels to establish it wasn't locked. Five minutes' jiggling with the end of his knife worked the catch free, and the door popped open. Dark shook his head. Hardly maximum security.
Outside was a corridor, thickly carpeted in an orange kind of way. Unobtrusively banal music trickled down from small speakers in the ceiling. Dark closed his door carefully behind him and set off.
The walls of the corridor were studded with doors, each identical. He realized what his room had reminded him of. It was like a small suite in a dismal resort somewhere cold, a down-market ski village out of season. He considered opening one of the doors to see what was on the other side, but decided against it. It would probably only be someone lying on their bed or blankly munching salami. Also, it might set off an alarm, and in either event it was not germane to his purpose, which was getting out before anyone realized he was on the move. The last thing he needed was a passenger, especially one who hadn't the gumption to make their own way out of their room.
About fifty yards down the corridor he found a door that was rather larger than the others. It was split vertically across the middle, but didn't appear to have any handles. First casting a glance both ways down the corridor, Dark kicked it. Nothing happened. He tried slipping his knife between the two halves, but there was no give there either. Then he noticed that there was a panel on the wall by the door. He pushed it experimentally
and there was a pinging noise, followed by a sound from behind the door. The sound got louder, stopped, and then the two halves of the door divided. Beyond them was a small room.
Dark stepped in to have a look. As soon as both of his feet were in the room the doors shut behind him and the room started to fall. Dark was deeply suspicious of this development, but it seemed to be dropping in a controlled way, and there didn't appear to be anything he could do about it. The room was paneled in the same wood as the suites, and full of quiet music that went “Da dada da, da da dada da,” but was in every other way featureless.
After about a minute the room stopped falling, and the doors opened. Dark cautiously poked his head out, and saw what seemed to be a large foyer of some kind. Had it not been completely deserted it would have looked like the lobby of a hotel. He stepped out into it. There was a
ping
behind him and he whirled, knife at the ready, to see the doors of the room shut again.
An elevator. That's what it was, an elevator.
Shaking his head, disturbed at having forgotten something so simple, Dark put his knife back and walked quickly away toward the large doors at the far end of the foyer. They were about fifty feet high and made entirely of glass, glass which looked six inches thick. Dark peered out into the late winter afternoon for a moment, and then turned back to consider his position.
He didn't know much about the Compound. Nobody did. In all honesty, Dark hadn't really believed it existed. He'd first heard about it from his mother, who'd told him it was where careless people went. His mother had been off her head, though, and he'd felt safe in disregarding pretty much everything she said. Then a long time later, but still a long time ago, he'd heard people mention it when he was in the Corps. Some of the Gillsans, worn out and stretched thin in the middle of a long campaign, had seemed to feel the Compound calling them. They didn't know where it was, or what, but somehow they heard its voice. They appeared to both fear it and desire it, like some heroic kamikaze mission, a
type of suffering that was an end to other kinds. Some had disappeared as the campaign went on: perhaps they'd been brought here, were sitting behind the doors in some of the buildings. Someone else might have thought of launching a single-handed rescue mission, but Dark had left the Corps a long time ago. Other-directed heroics had never been his thing.
He turned back indecisively to the doors and gave one of them a push. Though heavy, it moved easily enough, allowing a stream of extremely cold air to curl into the lobby. He let it swing shut again.
He was going to have to go out there. That much was clear. Wherever an escape route lay, it was unlikely to be within the building. The problem was that he didn't really want to leave. It was going to be very cold, and he had no idea where to go once he got out. Even if he could find the edges of the Compound (assuming edges existed, and it wasn't infinite in its own terms), he had no conception of where it existed in relation to any world he knew.
He shook his head again. Such indecision was unlike him. He hadn't got to his position by being unable to stir himself when the need arose. True, his position was that of leader of the Spartan Bold, an increasingly marginalized group of mercenaries; and yes, they might all be dead by now, but the point still held. Perhaps the Compound wasn't a universal realm, as everyone assumed, applying equally to those from all sides. Perhaps it was under the control of the Goudy, and Gillsans fighters were brought here to take them out of the action. Maybe there was something in the air here that made you unsure, unwilling to go back and fight. If there was, it wasn't going to defeat him.
First pulling what there were of his robes around him, Dark shoved the door open and stepped out into the cold.
 
 
At four Daniel woke suddenly from a light doze. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and then to realize what had woken him. His mother's breathing was deeper, more labored, and the change in
rhythm had alerted some still wakeful part of his brain. He sat forward quickly and looked at her face. It seemed relatively clear. Last time this had happened he'd phoned the doctor, sure that his mother was going to die. The doctor had told him not to worry, that the change in breathing didn't mean anything. Just before he'd put the phone down, Daniel had heard the sound of a woman's distant laugh at the other end, and wondered whether he'd caught the doctor at a time when patient care was not his foremost concern.
But the doctor had been right. His mother's breathing had returned to normal; and the same, he saw, was happening now.
Daniel made a tour of the bed, checking that the duvet wasn't rucked up anywhere or letting cold air in. It wasn't likely to be, as she hardly ever moved, but he checked it anyway, eyes running sightlessly over the pattern of faint interlocking rectangles. He'd spent too long looking at it to notice it anymore.
Sighing heavily, he picked up her glass and took it into the kitchen, walking quickly past the door to the cellar, which still made him nervous. He changed the water in the glass and put some ice in it, and then set about making a cup of tea for himself. A year ago he'd never drunk any tea, viewing it as a grown-up medicine. Now he drank it all the time. There were lots of tea bags, and his mother never seemed to want it anymore. He thought about looking in the fridge, but he knew what was in there because he'd put it there himself, and he wasn't hungry.
As he waited for the kettle to boil, he looked through one of the leaflets on the kitchen table. It was one of the ones his mother had designed, when she'd still been able to work. He could remember her being proud of it, explaining how she'd done it, why she'd chosen those particular typefaces. To him they'd just looked like words and letters.
They didn't anymore.
 
 
About three hours later, Dark was huddled up against the base of a tree in one of the clumps of firs. He had no way of telling how much time
had elapsed since he'd left the building. The sky was still the same leaden late-afternoon gray, and he'd seen no one. He was telling himself that time had passed because he needed to feel that it had, and three hours seemed about right. He'd given up telling himself that the cold was within him, and had spent the last few minutes in amongst the trees to see if it was any warmer in there. It wasn't.
He realized now that getting out of the building had been too easy. It had been made easy because it achieved nothing at all. At first he'd followed a sort of path through the snow, hoping to find who'd made it. After a few hundred yards it ran out, and since then every pace had been a couple of feet deep. Occasional gusts of wind sent flurries into his already freezing face, and he'd tripped over a hidden branch once and gone sprawling. Twice he'd thought he'd seen more tracks in the snow, but as they appeared to start from nowhere and to just peter out after twenty yards, they couldn't have been real. Apart from those highlights, nothing had happened at all. Nothing except the tramping sound of his boots in freezing snow, and the constant curtain of yet more fucking snow falling against the velvet sky. His legs ached, but aside from that Dark had lost most of the feeling in his body.

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