Mark Newton - The Book of Transformations

Fire exploded across the rooftop, tearing into the heap of junk he’d prepared, and assaulting him with heat. He stumbled back, but was amazed at how well the fire respected the line of blue fluid.

He had saved one chair, of course — he didn’t know how long he was going to be up there — and placed it by the stairway. According to the cultist’s assessment of the liquid, Fulcrom guessed he had maybe three hours at the most. So he simply pulled the chair back towards the view of the city, and waited.

*

The priest said he needed an hour. Just an hour to work through both books to find the links required.

After Fulcrom had left, Ulryk stationed himself at the rumel’s desk beneath a window with a distracting view of the cityscape, and set to work.

With reverence he opened both copies of The Book of Transformations and began examining them. Lan lay on the bed, her eyes half turned to the priest.

‘What exactly are you going to learn in an hour?’ Lan asked lazily.

‘Shush,’ Ulryk replied.

‘Fine.’

He turned the books page by page, switching his gaze between them, assiduously comparing the detail within, and making notes to one side. By the seventh turn of a page, Lan was beginning to embrace the pillows on Fulcrom’s bed. She had no idea how long in real-time she had spent under the city, though it had been a matter of a few of hours judging by the clocks in the library. She dozed off, catching up on some much-needed rest. Dreams flashed in her mind, images of warm and distant lands, leaving her with a craving to flee the city…

Ulryk made a noise that startled her awake. He rubbed his eyes and examined the pages with a new-found zest and a smile.

How long have I been asleep? Lan propped herself up on her elbows. She looked around in case Fulcrom had returned, but there was no sign of him. ‘I take it you’ve worked it all out?’

‘I have, yes!’ His face betrayed his relief, his voice was full of an optimism she hadn’t heard before. ‘It was coded in the woodcuts, just as he inferred.’ He chuckled to himself. Now come, we must get to the tower.’

And then maybe all this can be over, Lan thought as she stretched herself further awake.

*

Lan and Ulryk only had to head across a few streets. It was a simple enough task, but there were plenty of warnings she should have paid attention to: the lack of traffic through the lanes; the line of garudas stood atop the crenellated rooftops, silhouetted against the sky; the distant noises she wrongly attributed to city life.

Ulryk, clutching his satchel containing both copies of The Book of Transformations, steered her towards the shadow of a wall not too far from Fulcrom’s apartment.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Something does not feel right,’ Ulryk cautioned.

‘We should just hurry — the Glass Tower is only over there.’ Lan gestured to the glittering facade over a rooftop.

‘Wait,’ Ulryk said again. Then carefully he pointed at a street corner, behind which a unit of soldiers was waiting, and they were making whistles that she had previously mistaken for the call of a pterodette. From the open door of an adjacent building a dozen archers sprinted, joining the other unit. Two took positions on the corner, one standing, one crouching; they nocked their arrows, ready for whatever was coming.

‘It appears,’ Ulryk sighed, ‘that the Glass Tower is the other side of this incident. Fulcrom was right about the violence.’

Soldiers were now lining up in the open street in two rows, one row kneeling just before a standing row, and they were facing towards her — but it wasn’t Ulryk or Lan they were interested in.

With an effortless, fluid motion, the two archers on the corner released their arrows, pulled more out of their quivers, readied them and released them, repeating the process several times until they ran out of arrows.

The nerves they must have… Lan thought, as a heartbeat later a surge of citizens rounded the corner, a few of them with arrows buried in their crude shields.

The line of archers loosed their arrows and wave after wave of civilians collapsed to the ground. People began to scream — both men and women — their voices intense between the walls around them, and Lan simply looked on, unable to help. People scrambled for cover in twos or threes, shouting for a retreat. Another cluster of civilians came to evacuate the injured, and pull back the dead from the bloodied cobbles, while the army coldly picked off whoever was left, one by one.

Ulryk was whispering a prayer.

Civilian militias were jogging in tight units, heavily armed; carts were being turned up on their sides to be used as crude shelters, spilling produce across the streets. Military archers were sniping from above, while youths with scarves pulled tight across their faces were beginning to launch their own attacks from street corners.

‘It’s so confusing who is fighting whom,’ Ulryk said.

‘Do you have to do whatever you need to on the Glass Tower?’ she asked.

Ulryk opened his eyes slowly. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Lan replied. ‘We’ll get you there. Somehow.’

*

How was it possible not to have an obvious chain of command and still form an army? The notion went against everything Caley had been brought up to believe, against all his instincts. No one was instructing them on what they should do, but there were those who were clearly more skilled than others, ferocious-looking people, those good with a sword, or rogue cultists who had been given a new lease of life. The rest of the Cavesiders clustered around these groups, looking for guidance or advice. Almost everyone wanted to help out — they knew they had come so far, and that they were on the cusp of achieving something significant: bringing down the Emperor and all those who had repressed the people of Caveside.

From the corner of Sahem Road and Gata Social, Caley could see a rim of real daylight where the caves met the city, and he swallowed hard. Surrounded by now-aggressive men and women, he didn’t know what to do, and looked to others for direction. There were hundreds, probably thousands of them, and they seemed to follow each other, as an organic mass. Within the throng he had forgotten just how cold it was — the wind always blew in strongly at the mouth of the caves, as if the elements were aiding the segregation.

I’m in too deep, he thought. I’m gonna get myself killed this time, for sure.

Several individuals wheeled carts up and down their lines, issuing homemade weapons, rough blades that had been perfected in the dark, away from prying, Imperial eyes. Caley took a crossbow that looked pretty neat, and he already had a sword at his side. Another woman came past with a cartload of armour, so he took a crude helmet that didn’t quite fit and was remarkably heavy, but he figured it was better than going without.

The energy here was incredible. People buzzed with nervousness and anticipation, but mostly with a genuine thrill that this was it, this was where they would take over the outer city. Several major groups had gone on ahead — some of the elderly and less able forming more peaceful lines of protest, unafraid of what happened previously because they knew the military would be busy enough; and there were more groups of youths looking to create agitation in almost random pockets of the city, sudden outbursts of violence that would cause chaos and distraction. To them, this was good sport.

A little deeper into this moment of anticipation, a message rippled Caley’s way. It came via one of Shalev’s runners, fast youths who were carrying information around the self-organized units. A letter was handed to him by a tall, grubby blond boy with a long face and a dagger at his hip. Caley unfolded it, then stared awkwardly at the meaningless script. He couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes as he handed it back to the messenger. ‘ ’Fraid I can’t read much.’