Walter Williams: City on Fire

Practical, Aiah thinks. It avoids congestion on the bridges, or building expensive tunnels underwater for pneuma and trackline transport.

Images of the Blue Titan and the Lynxoid Brothers brighten the sky, a plasm advert for the new chromoplay…

The buildings grow nicer as the boat approaches the Aerial Palace: expensive apartments, tinted glass and jutting balconies with fancy gingerbread scrollwork on the rails, and broad-shouldered office buildings crouching on their pontoons like animals ready to spring. Buildings don’t reach as high here as in Jaspeer, because it would make the pontoons top-heavy.

And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking: a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.

Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!

The Burning Man had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.

Twenty-five thousand dead. Including the mage. Several thousand soldiers. The rest civilians.

Aiah, in the coup’s headquarters, had watched it happen, had tried to stop it… too late.

Her fault. She had provided the plasm.

Come to mourn the dead!

There are people hanging, she sees, from the ruined buildings. Hanging in what look like sacks, feet sticking out the bottom, the sacks swinging free on lines secured to broken rooftops. They are not dead people, not casualties—they have hung themselves there since the burning.

Mad people? Mourners? Aiah cannot tell—they are all too far away.

Blowing soot brings tears to Aiah’s eyes. She dabs at them with her sleeve.

Then fantastic architecture of the Aerial Palace appears on the horizon, all swoops and spirals like the path of a falcon traced through the air. Shieldlight shimmers off the arabesques of the building’s collection web, bronze patterns set into the building’s exterior and designed to absorb and defuse any plasm attack, defense and ornament in one. The burnished bronze adds lovely bright accents to the building’s design, but its defense aspect failed drastically—the building is scarred, pocked by machine guns and punctured by rockets. Plastic sheeting is tacked up over shattered windows. The Keremaths lived here, and they died here, too. When the assault teams fought their way up the stairways they found only corpses.

Jewels appear in the air behind the Palace. An advertisement for diamonds.

Surprise moves through Aiah as she sees people hanging here as well, dangling from sacks set into niches in the building. When she comes close, however, she sees they are not real people, but statues.

A mystery. When she finds an opportunity she will ask.

The colossal structure is built on a raft made of several pontoons, and the motor launch drives between two pontoons into a narrow, watery alley lit with bright sodium floods both above and below the water. Aiah looks down into the milky water for dolphins and finds none.

The motor launch pulls into a slip alongside other, equally flamboyant craft. The soldier/steward jumps onto the floating pier and holds out a hand.

“This way, miss.”

There are soldiers patrolling up and down the quay in dark gray uniforms and helmets—Constantine’s Cheloki again. Constantine isn’t trusting the local troops that had actually captured the place: they’d changed sides once, and could again.

There are probably telepresent mages scoping the place as well. It would be the safe thing to do.

The door leading into the pontoon, Aiah sees, is an airlock, but it doesn’t look as if the heavy steel portal has been shut in a long time. Inside is a gold-rimmed desk where Aiah is checked in and given a badge.

“Someone is coming down to escort you,” Aiah is told.

The someone appears a moment later, and she recognizes him and smiles. He doesn’t smile back: he looks as if she’s a problem he doesn’t want.

“Mr. Martinus,” she says.

“Miss Aiah.”

He is a huge man, one of Constantine’s bodyguards, not only trained for war but bred for it. His genes are twisted to produce a massive, muscled body and catlike reflexes. His face looks like a helmet, eyes sunk beneath protective plates of bone. Heavy slabs of callus ridge his knuckles.

“Welcome to Caraqui,” he says.

“Thank you, sir.”

Martinus escorts Aiah into the elevator and presses the lever. There is a smell of burning that lodges in the back of Aiah’s throat, a souvenir of the fighting. The elevator doesn’t go straight up, but swoops as it rises to match the building’s architecture: the Aerial Palace, for all its extravagance, is a generator of plasm, built to distill the essence of mage-power. Its alloy structure is a maze of careful, intricate alignments, intended to take advantage of geomantic relationships that increase plasm generation.

The elevator doors open. The deep wine-red carpet is plush and the walls are paneled with dark wood—genuine wood!—broken with diagonal stripes of brightly patterned tile and solid gold wall fixtures in the shape of birds in flight. A percentage of the latter seem to have been torn from the walls by looters.

The corridor is blocked at regular intervals by sliding glass doors set into polished bronze frames. The doors open automatically on approach, though Aiah sees that they can be locked if necessary. Crosshatched bronze wire winks from inside the glass. It is part of the building’s defense system: the huge Palace is divided into sealed compartments to prevent a single attacking mage from raging through the whole building.

Martinus opens a paneled door and ushers her in. “Wait here, please.”

Aiah steps into the room. “How long will I have to wait?” “I don’t know.”

Martinus closes the door. Aiah looks about her. More wood paneling, gold-framed mirrors, two huge oval windows miraculously undamaged by war. The room is intended for meetings: there’s a huge kidney-shaped table—more wood!—and metal-and-leather chairs, gold frames with luxurious brown calfskin cushions. Even the ashtrays, laid out two-by-two down the length of the table, are solid gold.

The burning scent is here as well, like embers smouldering in the back of the throat, and it won’t go away.

Outside, a peregrine dives past the windows, a swift dark streak against the opalescence of the Shield. Aiah steps to one of the windows and looks out, hoping to find the falcon against the backdrop of the city. She doesn’t see it—perhaps it’s already sitting on a ledge somewhere, eating the pigeon it’s just caught.

The room projects out from the Palace and gives Aiah an exemplary view of the world-city, the buildings and towers and water-lanes that go on forever, unbroken to the flat ocean horizon. One of the green aerial tramcars floats in midair between two distant towers. I am on the water, she thinks, having to remind herself of the fact…

The sky blossoms with a giant plasm-image, the stern face of the actor Kherzaki hovering over the Caraqui, his expression commanding. An advertisement for the chromoplay Lords of the New City, based on Constantine’s early life and career. Fire-petals unfold beside the image, become words burning in air.

See it now…, the sky commands.

An advert, Aiah wonders, or a command from the ruling triumvirate? Should it be See it now… or else?

The door opens behind her, and she gives a start and spins, a brief giddy disorientation eddying through her inner ear… and as the whirling stops the false, burning mage in the sky is replaced with the real Constantine, a far more dangerous commodity. He looks almost respectable in modest white lace, black pipestem pants, and a black velvet jacket, and Aiah knows right away that her having come here is a mistake. Her heart sinks.