Чарли Андерс: Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

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.

At least twenty Obfuscators and Officiators stood between the man with the sword and the man on the throne, who had to be a Vice Emperor. They all aimed their valence guns at the assassin, who raised a long metal brace strapped to his left forearm, which he held in front of him like a shield. The valence guns made the scorching sound Ythna had heard before, but without effect. The man’s forearm glowed with a blue light that spread in front of him and seemed to protect him. He reached the first of the Obfuscators, and put his sword through her stomach in an elegant motion that did not slow his run at all.

“How is he doing that?” Ythna said. “With the valence guns?”

Then she turned and realized Jemima wasn’t next to her any more. She was already at the far end of the terrace, opening a hidden door she’d found, which led to the next terrace along. Jemima was rushing toward the assassin and the Vice Emperor. Ythna did her best imitation of Jemima’s strange foreign swear word—“fth’nak”—and ran after her.

In the next terrace, a group of Officiators were holding up ceremonial trowels, symbolizing the burial of the past and the building of the future, and they gasped when two strange women came running into the space, a tall redhead in a fancy coat and a small dark girl in old-fashioned retainer clothes.

“The Vice Emperor,” Jemima gasped without slowing her run. “I’m the only one who can save him.”

For a moment, Ythna thought the Officiators might believe Jemima and let her pass. But they fell back on an Officiator’s ingrained distrust of anyone or anything that didn’t instantly fit, and reached out to try and restrain both Ythna and Jemima. They were too slow—Jemima had almost reached the far wall, and Ythna was slippery as a wet goose—but they called for Obfuscators to help them. By the time Ythna reached the far wall, where Jemima was trying to open the next door, people were firing valence guns at her from the courtyard below. The balcony next to them exploded into chunks of silver and bejeweled masonry.

“Don’t worry,” Jemima said. “They mass-produced those guns cheaply in this era. At this range, they couldn’t hit a Monopod.”

She got the door to the next terrace open, and they were facing three Obfuscators aiming valence guns. At point-blank range.

“Guh,” Jemima said. “Listen. That reprehensible man over there is about to assassinate your Vice Emperor.” By now they were close enough to have an excellent view, as the last few of the Vice Emperor’s Obfuscators fought hand-to-hand against the sword-wielding assassin, surrounded by the fresh corpses of their brethren. “I can stop him. I swear to you I can.”