Чарли Андерс - The Cartography of Sudden Death

Jemima grabbed Ythna and pushed her behind herself, so that Jemima could take the brunt of Trex’s first shot and Ythna would have an extra few seconds to live.

“The penalty for conspiring to assassinate a Beldame is death,” Trex said, chewing each syllable like a nugget of fat. “I am mightily empowered to carry out the sentence at once.”

“I don’t want any reward,” Maryn said. Everybody ignored her.

“Wait,” Jemima said. “You are being duped here. I know you’re an intelligent man, I’ve read about you. Trex, right? I know all about your illustrious career. And I have a perfectly sensible explanation for everything you’ve witnessed.” Jemima was reaching into a tiny holster hidden in the braided piping on the side of her velvet coat, reaching for a object the size of her thumb. A gun.

“Please,” Ythna said to Trex. “We didn’t conspire. I only just met this woman.”

But Trex aimed his valence gun, sparks coming from the connecting tubes, and said, “You are both found guilty, and your sentence is—”

Ythna closed her eyes, waiting for a sizzling noise and the acrid stench of Jemima being torn molecule from molecule. Instead, she heard Maryn scream and thrash the air. When Ythna opened her eyes, Trex’s headless body was falling to the ground, and Trex’s head was rolling to a stop at Maryn’s feet, an expression of supreme disgruntlement forever sealed on Trex’s face.

A man wearing a black uniform, as simple as Trex’s was ornate, was running away, sheathing a bloody sword of a curved design that Ythna had never seen before. An opaque helmet, shaped like a teardrop, obscured the man’s features.

Jemima gave another one of her foreign cursewords and ran after the man. Ythna took one look at the headless Obfuscator and the wailing Maryn—whose screams were likely to bring everybody running—and followed Jemima.

The man with the sword reached the outermost pillar of the M-shaped tomb, and ran through the wall without breaking stride. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. Jemima and Ythna reached the wall a moment later, and Jemima ran straight for the spot where the man had vanished. And then she, too, was gone. Ythna’s momentum carried her forward before she could even think about the insanity of what she was doing. She hit the massive-blocked granite wall at the same point as the other two, and felt a sensation like a million tiny hands tugging at her. And then her senses were stolen away, one by one. But not before she had a glimpse of a million bright threads of different colors, crisscrossing around her in the midst of infinite darkness.

Ythna foundered, unable to see, hear, or touch anything for an age, until those same tiny hands grabbed her and shoved her forward, into the light.

For a moment, Ythna was dazzled and had pins and needles in her hands and feet, then she slowly regained her sight. She was lying on the floor of a long high-vaulted chamber, open to the air on one side and closed off on the other. A giant terrace, or balcony, then. The walls to her left were incredibly ornate, with what looked like molded silver encrusted with countless priceless jewels—and yet, someone had gone to great trouble to make that opulence look as ugly as possible. The silver was smudgy gray, the rubies and diamonds were as dull as you could make them. To Ythna’s left, past the railing, she could see an endless phalanx of people in retainer outfits, not all that different from what she wore every day, marching forward to the grim, repetitive droning of horns.

Next to Ythna, Jemima was on her knees, covering her face with one hand, and saying “No, no, no, no, please no,” over and over again.

“What is it?” Ythna said. “What’s wrong?” She put one hand on Jemima’s epauletted shoulder.

“This is the worst place,” Jemima said, uncovering her face and gesturing past the balcony at the thousands of people walking in neat rows. “I’m sorry. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I wanted to help you, and I’ve just made everything worse.”

“What place? Where are we?” Ythna was still having a hard time thinking straight after the disorientation of passing through the senseless tangle of threads.

“Roughly seventy years after your time. The Glorious Restoration. The worst period in the history of the Gaven Empire.” Jemima straightened up a bit on her haunches. “An attempt to restore traditional values to an empire that had grown decadent. They’ve probably executed another Chief Officiator, and that’s what made the door we just came out of. And those people down there? They’re marching to the death camps.”

“ We’re in the future ,” Ythna said, and now she was pulling her own hair to try and get her head straight.

The whole thing sounded mad. But they weren’t at the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor any more, and the more she looked at the scene outside, the more she noticed little incongruities.

Like, the retainers marching forward across the square wore simpler uniforms than she’d ever seen before, with a different insignia. The banners hanging on the outer wall of the courtyard, opposite the balcony, listed a different Imperial Era: the Great Rejoicing Era, not the Bountiful Era that Ythna was used to. So there was a different Emperor on the throne. But the banners looked old. And the Obfuscators herding these retainers across the courtyard wore helmets with weird spikes on them, and their chestpieces were a blockier design as well, aimed at protecting against a different class of weapons. Their valence guns were much smaller and could be carried with one hand, too. There were other details, but those were the ones that jumped out at Ythna.

“How did we get here?” Ythna said.

“I told you,” Jemima said. “That’s how I travel. But I’ve never killed anyone to open a portal. Trex was supposed to live another few decades, and become the Chief Obfuscator to the Emperor Maarthyon. And I’m sorry, but Beldame Thakrra always died on that day. Her death is in my history book, and I’m pretty sure it was an accident.”

Jemima was searching the terrace for clues to the exact date, while trying to stay out of sight from the people below, or on the other balconies further along. “If we know what day this is, then we can know when the next significant death will be,” Jemima said. “We need to get the blazes out of here.”

“And any death of an important person will make a door?” Ythna said.

“It must be an unexpected death,” Jemima said. “Something that creates a lot of causal torsions.” Ythna must have looked confused, because she added: “A lot of adjustments. Like ripples.”

“So you really are a ghost,” Ythna said. “You belong to no one, you travel through death, and you come and go without being seen. I feel sorry for you.”

Jemima didn’t have anything to say that For the second time in half an hour she had lost her unflappable good humor. She stared at Ythna for a moment.

Then she turned and pointed with one slender gloved finger. “Over there. He’s making for that dais. We must stop him, or he’ll ruin absolutely everything.”

The man with the opaque tear-shaped helmet had his sword out again, with traces of Trex’s blood still on it. He was running along another terrace, just around a corner of the giant building from the one where Jemima and Ythna stood. And when Ythna leaned dangerously out into the open, over the stone railing, she could see the man’s destination: a dais facing the courtyard, where a bald, sweaty man sat watching the thousands of people being herded away to the slaughter. The man’s robes, dais, and throne were like the walls of this chamber: ornate, but ugly and drained of color. Everything about him was designed to show off wealth, without sharing beauty.