Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

“Sindhi.”

Kalaman’s heavy eyelids fluttered shut for a moment as he whispered his brother’s name for the last time. Their Ascendant Masters would have done it differently. They would have invoked a god, gods—finned Chac-Xib-Chac with his ax, the gaping maw of Xibalba, and the jawless head of Tlaloc. But the energumens did not believe in gods. They were gods. Soon those upon the Element would learn to worship them.

The kris fell, clattering loudly on the tiled floor that lay beneath the hazy vision of golden sand. Kalaman drew his hands to his breast, blood flecking his face with deeper red. He could feel Ratnayaka watching him, that single eye like an awl boring through his forehead. Now! he thought.

Quickly, so that no pain would have the chance to pierce the shield of opiates and mindlessness slipping over the brother in his arms, Kalaman cracked Sindhi’s skull open. The plates of bone and skin he moved apart as though prying the meat from a nut.

And there it was, their jewel, pale gray and pink like a stony coral, and like a coral trembling ever so slightly, as though in an ocean current. It was surprisingly bloodless, striated here and there where Kalaman’s fingers left ruddy smears, but heavy, much heavier than the brains of their masters had been. He lifted it gently, another medusa tethered by medulla and vertebrae to its stony shadow, and let Sindhi’s lifeless body fall away.

Kalaman! —

The name hung in the air, a whisper, the sound of a serpent flicking across the sands. Then only silence, as Kalaman and Ratnayaka fed.

“ WENDY. WE ARE WAKING now….”

There is a face in the darkness above me. At first I cannot see whose it is, but I am certain it is Justice, my beloved Justice. I start to cry out for joy; but then somehow it comes back to me that Justice is dead, and that this must be that other Boy, the godling whose eyes followed me through dreams to my waking life, and seemingly beyond. And so I reach for him, thinking that somehow he knows where Justice lies now; but before my hands touch his, he is gone. As surely as Justice is dead, so is that other one, to me at least. Only in dreams now will he come to me, as he comes to all of us soon enough. My fingers graze the icy walls of the crude shelter where we have taken shelter, and weeping I start to wakefulness.

Miss Scarlet told me once of a man who said, “I never knew that grief felt so much like fear.” He wrote those words more than six hundred years ago. I wonder sometimes if grief itself has changed as the world has; if this man, were he alive today, would recognize grief, or fear, or love, any more than he would recognize the geneslaves for their humanity, or myself for whatever it is I am, for what I have become.

Almost nine months have passed since Justice died. It is only now, in the unearthly calm and darkness of this somber place, that I have found the strength or the desire to set down what has happened to me in that time. Three seasons have passed since then; perhaps the last bitter seasons the world will know. From Winterlong to a cheerless spring, and thence to summer and the verge of autumn: but an autumn that will bring no harvest to the world, no reapers save only that immense fiery scythe that is poised above us in the violet sky. I do not know if anyone will ever hear these words, or understand them; if anyone will remember me, Wendy Wanders, or understand why it is that I am compelled to leave my history here, when so many others have chosen silence or death. But I have survived madness and the prison of my own mind at HEL, rape and radiant ecstasy in the shadow of the Engulfed Cathedral. I will speak now, and tell of what befell myself and my friends after the carnage of the feast of Winterlong, and of those new terrors that have brought us here where the world waits to end.

The uncanny night of Winterlong gave over to a quick dawn, and then a long and cheerless winter’s day. For several hours we had walked in silence. Behind us Saint Alaban’s Hill fell into darkness, although we could still mark where flames touched the bright winter sky with red and black. That strange rapture that had overtaken me in the shadow of the Engulfed Cathedral stayed with me a long while. About us winter birds chirped—chickadees, juncos, cardinals igniting in fir trees—and sunlight glittered where ice had locked the empty branches of birch and oak. In my arms I carried Miss Scarlet, the talking chimpanzee who had been my friend and guide during the months since I had fled the Human Engineering Laboratory. From her slender black fingers trailed the ruined streamers of her festival finery. Every now and then I heard her whisper something—bits of verse, tag ends of her speech as Medea, the names of companions we had left dead in the City of Trees—but to me she said nothing. At my side strode the Zoologist Jane Alopex—brave Jane!—who had left behind her beloved animal charges, pacing within their ancient prisons in the shadow of Saint Alaban’s Hill. She was stooped with fatigue; her tall figure cast a longer shadow upon the frozen ground, and her straight brown hair was matted and stuck with twigs and dirt. She still fingered the pistol with which she had slain the Mad Aviator, and lifted her broad ruddy face to the cold sun as though its phantom warmth had brought that strange glow to her eyes; but I knew it was not so. We were enchanted, enthralled by the vision of a dark god dethroned back there upon Saint Alaban’s Hill; but even such wonders wither before freezing cold and hunger and grief.

It was Jane who spoke first.

“Wendy. Look.”

She took my arm and pointed behind us. In the near distance rose several hills, here and there streaked where light snow had gathered in dells and ravines. From the dark blur of trees that was the Narrow Forest rose the stained gray finger of the Obelisk, and behind it on Library Hill glinted the Capitol’s dome. Nearer to us was Saint Alaban’s Hill. In the fine clear light of morning the Cathedral seemed a stain upon it, and the smoke rising from its burning smutted the few clouds to umber.

But that was not what Jane meant for me to see.

“There,” she whispered. In my arms Miss Scarlet twisted, her long black fingers icy against my neck. “Above the Cathedral—”

At first I thought they were trails of smoke: threads of black and gray and silver, spiraling downward until they were lost in the haze surrounding the Cathedral. But then I saw the bright forms darting insectlike in the sky above them. Glinting gold and steely blue, invisible save when the sun struck their deltoid wings and for an instant they would blaze like dragonflies caught in a leaping flame.

“Gryphons,” I breathed. The biotic aircraft of the NASNA Aviators. I had never seen them before, save in videofiles of the ongoing wars between the Ascendants and the Balkhash Commonwealth.

“But what are they doing here?” Miss Scarlet clutched the tattered remnants of her cloak and hugged closer to me.

I shook my head, and Jane cursed.

“The Aviator,” she said. “He signaled them, somehow—”

“No.” The day’s cold swept over me as suddenly as though I had fallen into a freezing stream. I shuddered and stepped backward, until I stood in the shadow of a gnarled oak tree abutting the ruins of the old City Road. “He had no way of calling them. He wouldn’t have called them, I don’t think—”

Jane snorted and remained in the middle of the road. One hand closed tightly about her pistol. The other clenched angrily at her side. “There’s nothing he wouldn’t have done,” she spat. “Murdering children and spitting them like rabbits—”