Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

“Stop!” cried Miss Scarlet. “Please, by the Goddess, don’t speak of him.” I could feel her hair bristling beneath her thin garments, and smell her fear—an animal’s raw terror, not a human’s.

“No,” I said slowly. The cold bark of the oak pressed against my back. “They came independently. They are looking for him—all this time went by, and they heard nothing from the City of Trees—”

At that moment a dull boom! echoed across the empty miles. Behind the Cathedral a ball of gold and crimson blossomed. Beneath our feet the ground trembled. In the afterglow a dozen Gryphons glittered like embers circling a bonfire.

“They’re attacking the City!” Jane gasped, and shoved her pistol back into her belt. “Look! There—fougas—”

Where she pointed I could see three of the Ascendants’ dirigibles cruising above Library Hill. Beneath them the air sparkled with an eerie pinkish gleam, as though the fougas were silver needles threading the hill with rain. To the east another ball of flame erupted, and the air shook thunderously.

Miss Scarlet began to weep. I found myself holding my breath, distant as the danger was. Because it was clear that the City was under attack. Fougas spreading the mutagenic rains of roses, and airships bombing the hills where the seven fair Paphian Houses had stood. And Gryphons! Never had I heard of Gryphons being used anywhere within the borders of the Northeastern American Republic. Jane stepped slowly across the road to join us, and together we watched without speaking, unable to move or do anything but huddle there in the shadow of the winter oak.

“They must have thought some powerful enemy was there, holding their Aviator Commander captive,” I said after a long while. “When he didn’t report back to them. They sent him to retake the City and reclaim the lost arsenals there, but when they heard nothing from him, they must have thought some great force lingered here through all these centuries—”

Miss Scarlet buried her face in my neck, shaking with sobs. Her small body contained such an immensity of emotion that she seemed frailer than she was; but in truth the horrors we had witnessed at Winterlong affected her more strongly than they did Jane and me. Though I wept as well, to think of that fair ruined City burning there before us, which had housed only gentle courtesans and the guardians of lost and useless knowledge. Only Jane remained silent, her face twisted into an unmoving mask of grief and rage. I knew she was thinking of her beloved animals at the Zoo, helpless in their cages as their Keepers fell before the Ascendant janissaries.

We might have stayed there until the early December twilight, had not a thrumming sound overhead sent a host of chickadees twittering past our tree. I crouched down against the bole, holding Miss Scarlet tight against the sudden flurry of dead leaves that flew up around us. Jane dropped beside me, drawing the hood of her coat about her face as if it could shield her. The sun seemed to shiver. Across the barren Earth a great shadow crept, so slowly that it seemed we were watching some small eclipse, as the cold yellow light was bitten back and a dead grayness spilled across the ground like poisonous ash. I hardly dared look up; but when I did, I saw a fouga, vast and black and nearly silent, passing overhead. It was near enough that I could make out small figures silhouetted against the windows of its gondola, and see its rearward propellers spinning in a pale blur. Across its bulk NASNA was spelled in grim red letters, and above them the Aviators’ sigil: a black arrow thrust before a blighted moon.

“Can they see us?” Miss Scarlet’s voice shrilled frantically. “Can they—”

“Shh!” Jane’s hand clapped across the chimpanzee’s mouth, and she pressed against me. So we waited, terrified that the dirigible would loose its viral rains upon us; but it did not. It moved quickly, as though to reach the City before nightfall. Its silvery bulk could be seen nosing slowly to the east, so low that I held my breath, waiting to hear the sound of branches scraping against its gondola. Finally it moved on past us. It seemed much longer before its shadow was gone, but little by little the darkness receded. The sun shone brightly as before, and we even heard faint dripping as the ice-bound trees relented; but the birds did not return.

We began walking again, following the old road west. At first we debated returning to the City of Trees. Our friends were there, Miss Scarlet argued, at least whoever among them had survived the slaughter at the festival of Winterlong. Jane said little, remembering the poor creatures at the Zoo, abandoned to starve or be captured by the janissaries, and then turned over to the Ascendants’ bioengineers.

“But if we go back, then we will be captured too,” I said dully. I was not really afraid, not anymore. Justice had been taken from me and I would never see him again, gone to that twilight kingdom where the Gaping One rules. Not even the thought of returning to the Human Engineering Laboratory was enough to pierce the shell of grief and horror that had grown up around me.

“But what’s the point of wandering like this in the wilderness?” Jane kicked at a heap of dead leaves. Behind her Miss Scarlet lifted her torn skirts and hurried through the brush. “We’ll starve, or freeze—”

I nodded glumly. Of all of us, only Jane with her heavy wool coat wore anything fit for traveling. Miss Scarlet and I shivered in the tattered remnants of the costumes we had donned for the feast of Winterlong. Miss Scarlet had the wits to grab a ragged cape from among the rubbish back at Saint Alaban’s Hill, but even so she often stumbled from exhaustion and had to be carried in turn by Jane and myself. I wore only my ripped tunic and trousers. My legs were so numb, I had almost ceased to feel the cold seeping into them.

We continued in silence for several minutes. Before us the sun hung low in the sky, promising early darkness. Finally Miss Scarlet sighed. “Wendy is right. I don’t know if I could bear to see the City in flames. But where will we go?”

There was no answer to this. What little I knew of the outside world came from seeing a few maps and atlases at HEL, but I recalled nothing of the unpopulated lands surrounding the ancient capital.

Still, “The road must lead somewhere,” I said. I pointed to where flames banked around livid clouds. “There may be Ascendant outposts here, or—”

“Very comforting,” grumbled Jane, but she hurried to catch up with me, Miss Scarlet clinging to her hand like a child.

The country we passed through was grim. Hundreds of years before, many people had lived here—too many, to judge by the ruins of huge bleak edifices that rose everywhere from among the stands of oak and maple and pale birch. Mile after mile they stretched, hedging the road like the walls of a prison. Time and the forest had tumbled many of the vast structures. What remained were the shattered remnants of steel-and-concrete blockades where men had been forced to live like bees in hives. None of the ivy-covered houses of the City, or the grand mansions where the Paphians had held court. Only these monstrous squares and the rubble of ancient highways, choked with rusted autovehicles and piles of glass overgrown with kudzu and Virginia creeper.

Through it all ran the road. It was not until the end of our long day’s walking that this narrowed, from a boulevard wide enough to hold many houses and countless vehicles, to a stretch where maybe six of us might have stood, hands linked, and covered it with only a few feet to spare. Before, the highway had often broken into great slabs of concrete and tarmac, leaving rifts difficult and dangerous to skirt. Now the road merely buckled with the shape of the land, or surrendered to small copses of trees.