The Stars Askew (3 page)

Ejan's bodyguard, Oskar, stood behind him, straight like a flagpole. Scars from the House wars ran across his arms, and a long scar ran in a jagged line from forehead to chin on the left side of his face. Kata knew him immediately as a pragmatist, one of the philosopher-assassin schools that had remained aloof from events, mercenaries for hire. Oskar possessed the same cold distance as his employer.

At the rear of the group, the wide-eyed waif edged around the door and looked at the bodies with amazement. For a moment Kata felt as if she were in a play, some surrealist tragedy: enter the leader, enter the assassin, enter the urchin. Each would play his role.

Ejan turned to Oskar. “This must remain secret. The city is already teetering precariously; if the citizens discover Aceline has died, who knows what vengeance they might take? We'll take the bodies back to the Opera and bring the embalmers in.”

“Wait,” said Kata. “There may be answers here we haven't yet discovered. They'll be lost if we move too quickly.”

No one moved. In the silence, Oskar sized up Dexion. Sensing his gaze, Dexion let out a soft and deep grumble, like the growl of a lion. Oskar's eyelids twitched once before his impassive and dark stare returned.

Kata stepped closer to Ejan. “You can't stage-manage everything. Aceline deserves recognition. Her death is not only a personal matter, it is a matter for the entire movement. For the city. If we suppress it, how can anyone judge the truth of things? Freedom requires knowledge.”

“The dead don't have rights,” said Ejan. “You know that people are already carrying out private vendettas. Our guards can barely keep the peace. Once Aceline's murder becomes known, mobs will wreak vengeance on the city. Is that what you want?”

There was truth to his words. In these overheated days, who knew what the consequences might be? But the seditionists had to rule in a new way. Kata shook her head. “We can't continue the secrecies and lies of the Houses.”

“And who are you to make this decision, Kata? Who do you represent?”

Kata froze. She had no authority over Ejan, an acknowledged leader of seditionism. Kata remembered the great demonstration on Aya's Day, which had led to the overthrow of the Houses. She recalled the way he and his troops had placed themselves at the head of the march, a symbolic position gained as much by audacity and assertiveness as by anything else.

But Kata was only a foot soldier with a lifetime of crimes to make up for. She hated to think about the biggest betrayal of them all, informing Technis of the location of the seditionists' hideout just before the overthrow of the old system. How many had been captured or died because of her? Aceline was one of them, Maximilian another. She couldn't bear to think of it. A foot soldier was all she
wanted
to be.

Ejan turned to Rikard. “What do you think?”

Rikard took a breath. “I suspect these thaumaturgists are House agents. Blocking the grain supply and moving their ships up to the Dyrian coast surely isn't enough for them, so they've begun a campaign of low-intensity warfare. Trying to decapitate the seditionist movement to leave it weak and confused.”

“Find out who these thaumaturgists are and who they represent,” said Ejan. “I want to know what occurred here.”

Words tumbled from Kata's mouth. “I'll work with Rikard.”

Ejan shook his head. “You'd only be wasting your time.”

“I'll pursue it on my own, then. Aceline was…” Grief swept over Kata again. She looked at the tile floor, which blurred from the tears swimming in her eyes. She blinked.

“Was?” Even Ejan's inquiring look was unnerving.

“She was my friend, and you have no control over me. I'm sick of people telling me what to do, Ejan. I'll do it whether you like it or not.”

Ejan tilted his head to one side and eyed her calculatingly. “All right, then. You'll work together, and report to me.”

“I'll report to Thom. He is the leader of the moderates now,” said Kata.

Ejan shrugged and turned from her as more seditionists arrived, wrapping the bodies in blankets and treading over the floor with great dirty boots.

Rikard spoke softly to her, as if he might disturb the dead. “Shall we find out what Thom knows about this fatal meeting?”

 

TWO

Twilight fell, and the cool autumn winds blew in from the ocean, swept through the narrow streets, over the white cliffs on which so many beautiful buildings were perched, and up the mountain that overlooked the city. A melancholy air settled over everything as if the city itself were grieving for Aceline's death.

As they approached the Opera, Kata tried to shake off her sadness. Dexion had returned home, where he'd agreed to meet the little urchin, Henri. Kata was sorry that the minotaur was not there to help her process Aceline's death, but she knew he would only ever be a fellow traveler. He would accompany her if he were interested, but otherwise, he'd find his own entertainment.

She still held Thom's letter in her pocket. She could almost feel it, heavy and pulling at her, but she would not open it in front of Rikard, for he would report directly back to Ejan.

The great entry hall of the Opera was a bustle of activity, just as she had left it hours before. Behind a large reception area stood seditionist intendants, yelling over the groups of people pressed up against the long table, begging for help.

“Food parcels in the morning.”

“Yes, yes, we're reopening the trade routes shortly.”

“Blame Arbor—don't blame me.”

People scurried in all directions in the northern wing. Many of the seditionists now lived in this labyrinth of rooms and halls, and Kata and Rikard passed dorm rooms with dozens of makeshift beds, some only piles of rags covered with a sheet. In other rooms, circles of seditionists sat in meetings. Kata caught snippets of discussion.

“They say the New-Men are building a train line east, across the Etolian range.”

“What have the New-Men to do with all this?”

“Maybe they'll help us deal with Varenis.”

“No one can deal with Varenis. Varenis does all the dealing.”

In the editorial offices, the young militant Olivier sat at a large desk, poring over proofs of the new issue of the moderates' broadsheet, the
Dawn.
Paper lay strewn around him, all over the table and on the floor, much of it cut up or scrawled on.

One of the new generations of seditionists, Olivier had been a leader of a university cell before the overthrow of the Houses. Possessing a subtle mind, he had quickly become chief editor of the broadsheet and every day turned out article after article with metronomic efficiency. Kata liked the complexity of his thought but knew he wasn't a man of action. Olivier was at home with the word, not the deed.

Rikard crossed his arms in a gesture of passive hostility. As lieutenants within their factions, the young men held identical positions. Yet they came from different backgrounds. The son of a tramworker, Rikard had a suspicion of the soft and educated. To Olivier, Rikard no doubt seemed like most of the vigilants: inflexible and lacking theory, unable to discern the subtle interplay of ideas and people and events.

Oliver looked up from the sheet and dropped his pen. His bloodshot eyes were like dying coals in a fire. Like most seditionists, he stayed up late and rose early. They all tried to hold on to events the way a rider holds on to an unbroken horse.

Rikard clasped Kata's arm before she could speak. “No details. Remember what will happen if people find out.”

Kata shook the vigilant off. She tried to summon the words, but nothing seemed adequate. Finally she settled on, “Aceline has died. In Marin's great water palace, together with two thaumaturgists.”

Olivier's face drained of its color; his eyes seemed redder than before. He was an innocent when it came to death.

Rikard stepped close to Olivier. “No one must know.”

Olivier stepped around Rikard and spoke to Kata. “How did she die?”

Kata collapsed into a chair, felt despair once again. “Strangled.”

Olivier raised his arm, pressed his face into the crook of his elbow, rubbed his eyes against his forearm.

“Where's Thom?” said Kata eventually.

“Gone,” said Olivier. “I asked him if he was going to the baths, but he shook his head. He had a strange stare—suspicious, you know. I stopped him, but he shook me off. At first I thought he was simply his usual emotional self.”

“What made you think otherwise?” asked Kata.

“That look in his eye, as if I might be an enemy.”

“Where does he sleep?” asked Rikard.

Olivier looked to Kata. “He has a hidden crib somewhere in the Artists' Quarter, I think. He used to joke that it was his hideaway, where no one could find him. That's where he designed most of his lithographs. So it's a workshop, I suppose.”

“Find out where it is, Olivier. Ask everyone. Now that Aceline is gone, he's the leader of the moderates. Without him—” Kata stopped, aware of Rikard beside her. “We need to find him.” This time Kata took Olivier by the arm. “Aceline's death must be kept secret, at least until we've found Thom. Things are bad enough in the city.”

Olivier glanced briefly at Rikard, then back at Kata. “You know who stands to benefit most from this: the vigilants.”

Kata spoke with a certainty she didn't quite feel. “It's the Houses who stand to benefit the most. We've overthrown them. But they still wage war on us, even without their palaces and their networks of organization and power. Arbor and Marin are starving us. Where are the grain carts? The fishing boats?”

The truth was, the entire seditionist movement was teetering on the precipice. The longer the crisis continued, the greater the calls to repress House activities. Soon Ejan would have a majority of the Insurgent Assembly, and would let loose violence against its enemies. The tragedy was that Ejan was right. Soon they
would
have to use force. There was no other choice. It was a question of timing, of trying every other possibility first. But the thought of it sent shocks through Kata's body. For, in Ejan's mind, anyone who disagreed with him in some way was an enemy.

“Is this to do with the book?” asked Olivier.

“What book?” Kata frowned.

“The one Thom has been carrying with him. Didn't you see it?”

A creeping feeling ran over Kata. She remembered the way he had looked at his large bag when he had passed her the letter. “His sketchbook?”

“No. It was an old book. There was something sickly about its cover. I only caught a glimpse, but I knew immediately there was something perturbing about it. It had that sheen.”

“That sheen?”

“The sheen of thaumaturgy.”

*   *   *

Deep in the labyrinth of the south wing, vigilants rushed around, a mirror image of the moderates in the north wing. The three corpses lay on tables in a side room, where baths had been filled with ice to help preserve them. Two elderly men stood over the bodies, cocking their heads as they examined them. On a cart nearby lay all the tools of embalming and preserving: cruel-looking knives and scalpels, bowls and long thin tubes.

One of the anatomists turned to Rikard: “We'll have to get the blood out of them quickly, but thaumaturgists—they usually have all kinds of inner decay. You think that the worst of it is the outside.” He gestured to the warped and knobby bodies, so common among those who used the Art. “But the real changes are running wild in the organs.”

Kata forced herself to lean in and examine the two dead thaumaturgists. She gagged at the sight of their blistered and burned faces, the skin melted unnaturally.

She steeled herself and turned back to Aceline, averting her eyes from her former friend's face. The welt around the tiny woman's neck was red and raw. She looked closer: a tiny blue thread was lodged in the skin—a piece of the material that had been used to strangle the woman. Kata turned to the nearby cart, took a pair of tweezers, and gently removed the thread, which she placed in a vial she took from the embalmer's tray. The thread might have come from a strangling scarf, used most commonly by philosopher-assassins connected with the secretive Arcadi sect. These scarves were weighted, allowing the assassin to whip them around the neck of the victim from behind. And yet, they had found no such scarf at the baths.

The doors burst open behind Kata and Rikard. A large bald man strode into the room, the dramatic entrance and the force of his personality drawing everyone's attention. The irises of his eyes were an icy white, a trait common in the Teeming Cities far to the south. Kata had seen the thaumaturgist Alfadi before: he was the former prefect of the Technis thaumaturgists but had refused to attack the seditionist forces at the decisive moment of the uprising. Instead he had bravely led the thaumaturgists through Technis Complex's great double doors and into the surrounding square. There he had embraced Ejan as the seditionists looked on. That was the moment everything had changed.

Like most of the thaumaturgists, Alfadi now lived in the Marin Complex. Unlike most, his loyalties were clear: he frequently came to the Opera building to speak at the Insurgent Assembly. Kata was glad to have him on the seditionists' side.

Kata had never seen him up close, though, and now his presence—fueled by the uncanny power that resided within him—dominated the room. He was one of the few thaumaturgists who did not have any outward signs of the Art: none of the warping or sickly gleam that affected those who invoked its powers. Whatever changes it had made to him were chillingly hidden inside.

Alfadi stood eerily still, his eyes settling on the bodies of the thaumaturgists. He looked slowly at the old men, then across to Kata and Rikard, who stood fixed by his piercing gaze. There was a measured quality to the man, but as he looked back at the melted faces of the thaumaturgists, a hundred little muscles seemed to give way. He reached out, his hand hovering over their bodies. “We'll bring them back to the Marin Palace. Someone will recognize them.”