The Stars Askew (23 page)

Nearly a thousand years later Aya looked down at the ruined city, but he was staring into the past. Sensing this, Max surged up, grappling for the controls of his body, feeling for the tiny nerves, grasping here for those that controlled his musculature, reaching here for his respiratory system.

Aya was taken momentarily off-balance. He slipped, lost a grip on things. Max sensed his body contort, his face twitching into a grimace as the implacable struggle occurred within. Max broke through the surface of the deep sea. He took a breath, and his body did also. He felt the cool air on his skin; he moved an arm.

A powerful force knocked Max aside. All sense of his body slipped away, and pressure pushed him down. Again he was drowning in the deep, beneath the water, a remorseless hand on his head.

“I can feel your struggle, stranger,” said the Pilgrim. “You hoped for something else, but I don't know what.”

Aya shook himself, regained a sense of the body.
You are courageous, Maximilian. But I am the stronger of us.

As they followed the road toward Lixus, the vegetation thickened. Wiry trees curled up to the sky. Vines and creepers hung between their branches, a thick wall of green. Springs dotted the eastern side of the Etolian Mountains, feeding the little towns and cities like Caeli-Amur. Around Lixus they were many, feeding the thick vegetation. The city itself had been known for its hot springs and baths, greater even than Caeli-Amur's, and mostly in the open air.

Before long, they began to pass overgrown tombs of Lixii, inscriptions on their sides naming them:
LUCRECIA OF EVADNE TOWER, PERFUMER; MARIUS OF WATCHER'S TOWER, CALLIGRAPHER; TERTIUS OF ISOPA TOWER, GLASSMAKER
. Lixus was said to have been a city divided politically according to its many towers. The tower you inhabited defined your identity.

Lixus was once considered the most beautiful of ancient cities, but now it was said that outcasts from across the world—rag people, madmen, and visionaries—made it their home. Max's imagination had set to work, conjuring all kinds of dangers. The Arbor outpost would make it more dangerous, for who knows what dictatorial structure the Arbor officiate Karol had built here, or how he'd responded to the overthrow of the Houses.

—Let's not go through the city—said Max. —We should pick up the road on its northwest side.

That would require passing over those rugged ridges,
said Aya.
No, the quickest way is through the city.

The tombstones eventually gave way to wildly overgrown spaces that might once have been carefully tended gardens. Occasionally, crumbling espaliers could be seen behind swathes of vines and strange fluttering creepers with purple flowers. Elsewhere, steam rose from hidden springs and wafted across the sky.

Far away, Max heard the crying of tear-flowers. He worried that Aya would not understand the significance, but he felt the mage tense at the sound. Aya knew instinctively that these high wails came from a deadly creature.

Again the Pilgrim sensed Aya's agitation. “They've been crying for some time now.”

The bloodred afternoon sun was setting to the west. Over the sandy desert, the bones of the ruined ships seemed aflame with crimson light. Golden rays caught the giant ruined stones of the once-great towers, painted them in amber.

The city was like a ruined necropolis, each building a tomb long since raided by grave robbers. The towers loomed over them, their black walls warmed slightly by the dying afternoon light, green creepers and mosses climbing up their heights. They kept to the surface level, avoiding the curving walkways that rose up before breaking in midair, vines falling from them like green waterfalls.

“Do you see them?” asked the Pilgrim.

“Who?” Aya looked around.

“The people watching us. Arbor guards, perhaps.”

Aya looked again into the shadows of the towers, through gaping doorways, past broken walls. In the darkness lurked even darker shadows: gaunt figures dressed in shredded robes like the ragged feathers of dying crows. Aya would catch a glimpse of them; then they were gone, fading back into the deep.

“I think you may have trouble converting the population of Lixus, Pilgrim,” said Aya. “They don't look the type to listen. Your friend Karol seems to have failed, unless he's found some hideout.”

“The last I heard, Karol's outpost was surviving well. He sent letters describing his progress. They were rebuilding. They had planted orchards.”

The line of sunlight slowly rose up the towers, leaving dark folds of shade below. Around them, walkways curled up gracefully, but many of them had partially collapsed, leaving a chasm before they began their downward turn.

They rode through empty squares, their patterned marble pavement cracked, weeds standing tall like little sentries. Elsewhere, iron walls that once fenced off gardens were now thick with a morass of green leaves, decorated with wondrous golden, white, and purple flowers. Every so often, wafts of steam rose from shrouded hot springs.

Shadows moved menacingly in the dark doorways or broken gaps in the walls of the towers. Others scuttled between the towers themselves, as if an army of them were following Aya and the Pilgrim at a distance.

“You there! Come and speak with us. Where is Karol?” called the Pilgrim.

No one answered. In distant windows, high in the towers, the firelight began to flicker.

—This is not safe. We need to get out of the city—said Max.

Aya kicked the horse into a trot. Behind them, the shadow-people now took to the street, a shuffling, rambling little army. They began to hum a deep and eerie drone that echoed between the buildings. The frightened horse shook its head, neighed, and broke into a gallop.

“Let me speak to them!” the Pilgrim cried.

“I think this is perhaps not the best time to prophesize, Pilgrim.” Aya let the horse have his head.

The shadows now emitted wild guttural cries, fluttering and waving their rag-covered arms as the horse rode past them. On and on the horse rode, deeper into the city, the crowlike figures running behind them.

“We're nearly at Oppua Plaza. The northwest road leads from there,” said Aya.

—That's what they want—said Max with sudden fear. —They're herding us to the plaza.

But it was too late. A golden glow appeared ahead as Oppua Plaza lit up with light. The horse reared up, came down, and circled wildly. With a flash, the sun's rays disappeared, and the plaza opened up before them. Shaped like a long teardrop, the bricks of its marble pavement were patterned red and white, in forms resembling a school of slender fish.

On a central stage stood a ragged man wearing a crown made from the head of a blood-orchid. His square face was savage and wild-eyed, and his demeanor was both tragic and fierce as he raised his arms in the air, a gesture of triumph.

Silence fell over the plaza, and the hushed scarecrow figures gathered in a wide semicircle, blocking off any escape. Then, in unison, they waved their arms and once again hummed their frightful leaden dirge.

On the far side of the plaza, in the front of a shattered amphitheater, stood a row of tear-flowers, six feet tall with heads like bloodied plates. A couple of them sang their mournful song, just audible above the mob's hum. At their base lay half-dead bodies, slowly being absorbed into the flowers. Max knew that little by little they would start thinking flower-thoughts, until they no longer knew if they were the person beneath or the flower above.

The high call of these magnificent flowers was gently enticing. Max sensed Aya's urge to lie down next to them, to feel their sweet nectar drop onto him as it began to dissolve him and bind him to the flower's aerial roots. But Aya resisted.

The man on the stage swung his arm around, and a dozen or so men quickly approached the horse. They wore the uniforms of House Arbor, but they were so dirty that the green could barely be discerned beneath the muck and filth.

Aya looked up at the man on the stage. “I think we've found your friend Karol.”

 

EIGHTEEN

The Tower rose high into the air, one of the few that stood intact, a graceful curved structure. Once it would have been beautifully patterned with grasses and mosses, but now the walls were overgrown with intermixing flora: orange and green swirling mosses, dangling vines with purple flowers.

Aya and the Pilgrim were herded inside. It took a moment for Max's eyes to acclimatize. Everything inside the massive hall was built from ruined machinery. Massive cogs had been converted into tables. Tree-trunk-sized chains laid out the border of a pathway; the innards of machines dotted the space as carriage-sized sculptures.

On a dais at one end, a giant throne had been built from a complex fusion of latticework, bolts and screws, pistons and gears, and old odd-shaped pieces. Growing over its armrests, sprouting from its back, delicate candle-flowers lit up in the darkness. It was at once menacing and magnificent: lost technology fused so bewitchingly with Arbor's flora.

Furnace trees emitted slight warmth; it was not yet winter, when they would burn hot, like little stoves. On one wall of the tower,
Toxicodendron didion
grew like a vast curtain. Its thick leaves wrapped around a number of rotting bodies, which the vine was slowly devouring. The stench of death mingled with the sickly sweet scents of jasmine and snap-rose.

Two plots of blood-orchid, like columns marking the bounds of a central forum, trembled at their approach. As large as a human, their flowery heads had an unearthly, alien beauty. The pink veins in their otherwise snow-white leaves indicated that they had fed recently. Their vicious mouths, developed out of the staminode in the center of their flower, were hard to see among the other two stamen, themselves like fist-sized purple sponges. Unlike their noncarnivorous cousins, the blood-orchids had developed a long petiole, which they held against their body but could strike out with like a whip and entangle their prey, dragging it into their beautiful and dangerous flowery heads.

Karol led them safely between the rows, to the dais, where he collapsed into the throne as if overcome by lethargy. “Bring them chairs.”

Rickety wooden chairs were dragged onto the dais, and the crow-people gathered around, their faces filled with sinister intent. They had resumed their unnerving drone, an accompaniment fit for the end of the world. Karol's guards stood even closer; some still held pikes traditionally used by House Arbor.

“Karol—you remember me,” said the Pilgrim.

Karol looked on dumbly, his face drained of energy, a certain flabbiness where Max imagined it once might have been square and harsh. His voice came out, a mumbling, rambling thing. “You? Who are you? Is it you, René? Is it really you? Have you been sent to us from Arbor? Has help finally arrived? But no, we don't want help, René.”

Could this man really have been a star, rising through the ranks of Arbor, a favorite of Director Lefebvre?
Max wondered.

The Pilgrim said, “I was once called René, but I no longer answer to the name. Call me Pilgrim. For it is time we recognize our impotence in the face of the catastrophes that have happened, that are to come. We are helpless in the face of the dialectic of nature. I think you understand that now, don't you?”

The words did not seem to have any impact on Karol, who stared out blankly over the waiting throng. He seemed to be talking to himself, rather than to Aya and the Pilgrim. “We were abandoned. Go to Lixus, they said. Colonize. Build an Arbor empire. Bring everything and everyone into the House's fold. Find out what secrets lie in Lixus. But everyone knew there were no secrets here. No technologies ready to be used. Only an empire of madmen and sinners. We begged to return. We begged to be relieved.…”

“Yes, Karol, look where you are: surrounded by ruins.”

Karol looked defeated. “Ruins. But who's to say that the Houses were better than this? When I came out here, I had such high hopes, you know. I would rebuild this place and return to Arbor a hero. But the ruins—you don't know what they do to your mind. They start to enter you. Rubble everywhere, cluttering you up.”

Karol's voice trailed off into a whisper.

“A colony will not withstand the coming trials,” said the Pilgrim. “Nothing does. A language lasts, what, a thousand years? A civilization, five hundred? All the time the workings of matter come to crush us. There is no human act that can withstand them.”

“You're right,” said Karol. “Humanity is finished.” He sat upright, as if stuck with a knife. “And we have built our own civilization! We serve new gods now. Look now at my empire! I am king of the blood-orchids. You should see them move. If you speak to them, they respond.”

The Pilgrim sat back, apparently shocked that the conversation had jumped off track. “But they are only plants. They are semisentient. They're not gods. There are no gods. There's just the coming chaos.”

“No, no, René. You don't understand. They are
evolving
; they are the firstborn on this world, and they will outlast us. You understand that, don't you, Pilgrim?”

“There is a higher order—the universe!” countered the Pilgrim. “And I will take any who will come to the Teeming Cities, where we will spread the word, tell the world of the coming apocalypse. Come with me, Karol—bring your people.”

Karol had now worked himself into a feverish state. “Ah. You don't understand, but you will. Oh yes, you will, René. They are the inheritors. They have needs and wants. And blood-orchids want to eat!”

At this, the mob flapped their arms and hummed their strange dirge louder than before. A wildness came to their eyes and they called out, “They want to eat!”

Max didn't like the sound of that. He felt suddenly vulnerable, trapped in his own mind as these two madmen carried on their disturbing conversation.

Karol collapsed once more into his chair, as if his bones had given way. He looked wearily at Aya and the Pilgrim. He seemed to be snapping between two personalities, a wild, energetic one and a drained, broken one. “I can't do this anymore. It's … I wanted to be, someone, you know. To do something. I could have been. I should have been—something.”