Forty-One
In the morning I have time for another few hours’ frenzied labor in the workshop before word arrives that we’re to report to the Council Lift. Ky reads the message, eyes wide.
“They’re really doing it. Taking you up there.” She flicks her eyes at the sunlamps, now at full glow.
“Taking us, you mean.” A night’s rest hasn’t fixed all my problems, but they feel a little more bearable now. “Obviously my sponsor has to accompany me.”
“I…” Her eyes harden, and she gives a quick nod. “Of course.”
We ride anti in the carriage, following a road through the seemingly endless manicured estates and tame forests.
Eventually something new comes into view: a metal wall five meters high, topped with razor wire.
A bank of tall trees tries to conceal it from view, like a half-hearted apology.
Behind the barrier, thick cylindrical structures rise even higher, all the way past the sunlamps to the ceiling.
And beyond, I realize, my heart speeding up. Those have to be lifts, reaching all the way through the cap overhead to the surface.
“This is the processing district,” Ky says quietly. “Where bulk cargo comes down from Above and scrap and sigils get packaged for the return trip. It takes up close to a third of the tier, but respectable people ignore it as much as possible.”
“Cargo goes up and down. But not people?”
She shakes her head. “It’s all handled by runics. Only the Council Lift takes passengers.”
For a moment I find myself thinking as Alzimyth and his dwellers Above must; our world, with all its tiers and its people living and loving and dying, is no more than a mechanism like a furnace or a laundry mangle.
Inputs go in—water, mash for the desperate lower tiers, goods and luxuries for the upper—and outputs emerge, reforged scrap and stacks of red sigils bought with the lives of sigworkers.
What happens inside, who lives and who dies, is none of their concern.
Except that every so often, one of them has to come down and watch toy runics batter each other around an arena…
No wonder Alzimyth seems so bored with our honors and entertainments. Imagine descending into an anthill where the inhabitants do their pathetic best to entertain you, and all the while you’re thinking about how you could crush their entire world underfoot.
But why? That’s where my understanding breaks down. Why bother with the Ascent? The whole thing ticks over nicely without any intervention at all, driven by the desire of those at the top to remain on top. Why meddle?
For a while we’re among the trees and I can’t see anything.
Eventually, the carriage emerges onto a strip of clear ground in front of the wall where the road leads to a heavy steel gate.
Arbiters watch us from up above and someone shouts a command; the gate slowly opens.
The runic carriage edges forward into a narrow interstitial space hemmed in by walls on all sides.
There’s another gate ahead, this one flanked by four guards.
They carry long spears and wear sigwork breastplates, and their uniforms are edged with gold.
“Specials,” Ky whispers. “An elite unit that reports directly to the Council. They’re responsible for security here.”
A hard-faced woman raps on the carriage door.
Ky opens it, and the Special looks her over.
For a moment I think she’s going to object to Ky’s presence—no one actually said she could come—but the guard steps back without a word.
We get down and Star skitters closer, protective.
Several of the guards give him dark looks; I imagine they don’t get a lot of fighting runics here. Ky’s sword gets similar frowns.
“Follow me,” the woman says. “Don’t attempt to leave the path, and make sure your runic doesn’t, either.”
“He’ll behave.” Right, Star?
[Objection: I am always impeccably well-behaved.]
She grunts and gestures at the gate, which swings open.
The ground underfoot is metal now, like the lower tiers, not the soft turf of most of Hod.
We follow her down a painted track lined with more fences and wire.
Behind them, workers and runics labor among big warehouses with rolling doors, shifting pallets from one to another or loading them onto wagons.
Ahead of us is one of the tall cylinders, with a square opening in the base.
It looks into a circular room, incongruously carpeted and decorated like a drawing room back at Ky’s estate, with crystal sigwork lamps and framed paintings on the walls.
“The boy’s here,” our escort calls ahead. “He’s brought the Tranto girl.”
A half dozen Specials stand in the doorway between us and a knot of well-dressed people. I recognize Hisham Avaro among them, already sweating and tugging nervously at the ends of his mustache.
“That’s, um, not a problem,” he says, smiling nervously at us. “Miss Tranto will be a member of the Council soon enough, and she is, um, Master Taj’s sponsor. She is welcome to accompany us.”
The guards step aside, and my throat catches.
Somi and Spike are huddled in the rear of the room, under the eye of Quech and two more Specials.
The rest of the people I assume are the other members of the Council; Devon Dreikin is there, his braids tipped with plain silver rings for the occasion, but I don’t know any of the others. There’s no sign of Alzimyth.
Before anyone can stop me I stride across the room toward my family. The Specials tense but only Quech actually blocks my way, tapping the floor in front of me with the butt of his spear.
“That’s far enough,” he growls, leaning over me.
I raise my eyebrows. “How’s the ear?”
His cheek twitches.
“Are you going to step aside?” I ask him. “Or does Star need to move you?”
Star, of course, has followed me. His fighting legs tear holes in the carpet as he moves.
Quech looks up at him and abruptly seems to have the same realization I had facing Vripiai; Star’s not large for a runic, but he’s still a great hunk of sharpened metal.
I didn’t have time for polishing and finish, so his carapace is still marred by streaks and grime from yesterday’s combat, including a few spatters of dried blood.
“No need for that!” Hisham says, hurrying over. “I don’t, um, think there’s any harm in letting Taj speak to his, um, friends, do you?”
“I don’t take orders from you,” Quech complains sourly, but he steps aside.
I drop to my knees beside my family. Somi has his arm around Spike’s shoulders, to either comfort or restrain her.
He looks unkempt but basically intact, but Spike’s cheek bears a deep purple bruise that wasn’t there yesterday, and I can see another creeping up past her collarbone. I look up at Quech, rage suddenly hot.
“What the fuck did you do to her?”
“Nothing she didn’t deserve,” he spits back. “Little bitch won’t stop talking back. Someone ought to have taken a switch to her years ago.”
I surge to my feet. “You like hitting little girls? I’ll kill you, you fucking coward—”
“Taj!” Somi says. I look back at him, and he shakes his head slightly. “Please.”
I kneel again, shuffling closer to him. “Are you okay?”
He nods. “He hit Spike—”
“I’m fine,” Spike spits. “Athie hits harder than he does.”
“We’re all right.” Somi leans closer and lowers his voice. “Taj, what is happening? Rekas and his Clawmarks came to grab us—”
“We thought you were dead,” Spike says, tears in her eyes. “Nobody will tell us anything.”
“It’s hard to explain,” I say, knowing how inadequate that sounds. “There’s a… a terrible person, and he wants to hurt me, so he found you—”
“I figured that out,” Spike says, rubbing furiously at her good eye. “I’m not a baby. But what does he want from you? Why are we on Hod? Where are they taking us?”
“I’ll explain everything as soon as I have a chance, I promise,” I go on. “But he’s promised to let you go as soon as this fight is over.”
“Who are you fighting?” Spike says immediately. “Does Star get to help you? Are you going to win?”
“Do you trust him?” Somi says softly.
My stomach sinks, and I shake my head silently. Somi doesn’t say anything, but I feel the accusation in his eyes.
My fault. My fault.
“How long are we to be kept waiting?” Devon Dreikin demands, to murmurs of assent from the other Councilors. Hisham mops his brow and looks past the line of guards.
“I believe, um, any moment— Ah, there he is.” He waves, relieved. Alzimyth stalks around the corner and past the guards, ignoring Hisham’s gesture. He carries a small satchel over his shoulder.
“Take us up,” he snaps. “I’m finished with this dung heap.”
The Specials step inside, and a door slides smoothly shut across the entrance.
I’d been wondering if the low ceiling with its crystal lamps would slide aside to reveal the lift that would take us to the surface, picturing a sort of basket on a rope like the ones back at Stair #3.
Instead there’s a hum, a faint lurch, and the feeling like my stomach is being pulled down into my guts.
The whole room is the lift, smooth and powerful, its sigwork hidden behind the walls. My ears pop.
The Council, of course, have done this before, but some of them still look a bit queasy. Ky crouches like she’s in a swordfight, not trusting her balance. Alzimyth taps his foot, impatient.
I have no idea how fast we’re moving. We stand in silence for a long while, a few minutes at least. Then there’s the opposite feeling, my gorge rising into my throat as the lift slows.
It comes to a halt and the door slides open without even a chime.
I narrow my eyes, not sure what to expect from my first sight of the surface—blazing sun, the moon shining down, the stars—
Reality is more prosaic. The door opens onto something that looks very much like what we left behind: steel floor underfoot, fences and wire, tall poles with painfully bright sigwork lamps casting a harsh glow over everything.
Alzimyth strides out, beckoning peremptorily for everyone else to follow.
The Council files after him, grumbling, eyes on the floor beneath their feet.
“I suggest that you don’t look up,” Hisham says to me and Ky. “Not, um, immediately, at least. It can be rather, um, distressing.”
Quech and the Specials are pushing my family to their feet. Spike catches my eye and I want to explain where we are, what she’s about to see, but there are too many guards between us. All I can do is follow them out the door.
It smells different. That’s the first thing I notice.
The Heap mostly smells of dust and metal, while Hod has the unfamiliar—to me, anyway—scents of plants and grass and dirt.
But over the past week I’ve become acquainted with all of that; this is something else entirely, the air full of salt and tang and a thousand things I don’t have proper names for.
Through the fences in the middle distance I can see green, trees and grass, the land rolling up into a hill larger than any manufactured hummock on a Hod estate—
“Fuck.” Ky grabs my arm, squeezing it so tight I want to scream. “Fuck fuck ohhh fuck I’m going to fall, Taj, I’m going to fall…”
She has not followed Hisham’s advice, her head craned back, her eyes as big as saucers. I follow her gaze automatically, and a moment later the world around me seems to drop away.
You read about a thing, and imagine you understand it.
The sky, for example. Somi’s Little Forest Stories talks about the sky. There are pictures, too. It’s blue, usually with a fluffy cloud or two. I’m not saying that when I look up I’m expecting to see a child’s pencil drawing, but—
Maybe I am, if I’m being honest. What I get is… not that.
The sky is not one color, but many, teal blue at one horizon fading through violet and midnight purple to black at the other.
The clouds are black streaks like knife wounds, not fluffy at all, and they move as I watch, which makes the vertigo all the worse.
And what the books don’t convey—how could they?
—is the incomprehensible vastness of it, the depth, a chasm bigger than the entire world.
It sucks at the soles of my feet like it wants me to jump and never come down.
All this in an instant. A heartbeat to master myself and think, That’s not so bad, fighting back the wobble in my legs and wondering what all the heavy breathing from Ky is about. Then, still following her gaze, I turn and the… thing comes into view.
I don’t have the words to properly describe it.
At first I think it’s part of the sky, a strangely shaped cloud, or one of those mountains whose nature I was never quite clear on.
My eyes follow it down, down, down until it meets the ground, not more than a few kilometers away.
Seeing it through the walls and fences gives me a sense of scale.
I track it back up, heart seizing all over again, toward the impossibility hanging over our heads—
Breathe, I remind myself. Breathe.
The thing looks vaguely like the lift we just emerged from.
Bigger, certainly, perhaps two or three times as wide, but that’s not the impossible part.
It’s matte black, a cylinder picked out by the last rays of the setting sun as it rises up, and up, and up, perspective shrinking it first to the width of a pencil, then to a thin thread almost lost against the clouds.
Almost, but not quite—rings of red lights shine from it at wide intervals.
The crimson glows, fainter and fainter, let me track the thread higher and higher into the sky.
And then there’s a black disc, like a hole in the world.
If not for the lights it could be a plate held at arm’s length, foreshortened into an oval.
But the line of red lights tracks all the way up to it, meets it, and more colored lights trace out geometric patterns on its underside.
It is a disc, but so, so high up; the mind rebels at the scale implied by those lights, insisting that it can’t possibly be as far away—and therefore as big—as it looks—
Because if it is, the disc must be wider than the entire cavern below us. Much wider, with all those kilometers of tower between us. And it still blocks out a substantial chunk of the sky.
“It’s Above,” I say aloud. “That’s Above.”
I thought I was whispering, but I hear a contemptuous snort from Alzimyth. He turns to look over his shoulder at the impossibility in the sky.
“That is Netzach,” he says dryly. “The first ring on the Tree.”
I blink in astonishment. But he’s right.
Farther up, above the disc, I can see the string of red lights resume.
The thing, this tower, the Tree, continues rising into the sky until it gets too small to make out, an invisible thread that spools upward forever.
Are there other shapes clinging to it, more discs—or stranger things—even higher above?
Or are those only smudges at the edge of vision?
I have no idea. But damn do I want to know.