Beasts of the Walking City (25 page)

24: Kjatyrhna

W
ork in the Akarii drone pits is eerie, disgusting, and incredibly boring. It’s dark and cold—the chill of the sea comes right through the hull, and the low lights of mage globes flicker and pulse to some erratic heartbeat. It stinks of fish and sewage. Rats move across the floor in packs, dodging pools of bilge-wash that slosh back and forth across the floor planks with the hovering motion of the ship. Kjat takes the mop bucket over to the low sink and empties it, and then fills it again with water from the spigot.

And then there are all the drones. 

They’re strapped in the coffin-sized niches all along the corridors on these lowest parts of the ship. Their hands rest on shelves that close across the niche at about waist height, and each of them holds a cheap knife loosely before them. Their eyes are rolled back in their heads, their bodies are slack, their mouths wide open to the flies and spiders and worse down here. There were thousands of them, mostly naked, all packed in shoulder to shoulder, twitching and shaking as all of the aether from the entire ship-city passed through them.

Rehdr had been right—it was hard not to think they were watching her with those eerie white eyes whenever she turned her back.

She wonders it’s like for them, swimming in that huge sea of energy. Do they talk to each other across the network? Tell stories? Sing? Or was it some sort of quiet hell, filled up with endless slicing and dicing of the aether, parceling it into smaller and smaller branches for the upperdecks?

She can see how it devours them. Many of the drones here look old before their time, with hard, drawn faces and leathery skin, bony wrists and arms and legs that looked nearly skeletal. She doesn't know how long each of them spends in the pits, though there are some she’s come to recognize that are here whenever she comes through. 

Clearly they didn’t get to leave to use a bathroom.

Rehdr said they all made decent money, much better than Kjat would ever see in the scullery, and it was a way of life for many families. And after all, this was how all of the walking cities got their power, and how the flying cities that were left stayed aloft. The role of the drone was a fact of life. 

But Kjat decides she’ll take her own life before becoming one. Better scrubbing shit out of niches than that half-waking existence. 

A week back, Eeg had asked her to help carry out the body of a woman who had stayed too long. They wrapped her in burlap. She was light, her skin crisp, like the dried-out carapace of some insect. They weighted her with lead, and rolled her out one of the hatch doors without ceremony. Kjat had pocketed her knife when no one was looking. No one had known her name.

Other nights, she and Croah roamed through the hidden corridors of the ship. 

She is surprised there are so many, and wonders what that said about the Akarii culture. She is surprised, too, at how intelligent Croah actually is once she got past his bravado, and once he realized she
was
really interested in understanding the inner workings of the ship. He takes pride in showing her ways to get past the stair guards and to the upperdecks, how to sneak into the upperdeck crew galley and raid the food storage there (which was actually no better than Targluck’s food downbelow, and maybe a little worse). They sneak into cargo holds and vast rooms where the engines that powered the ship’s keel lay, and he showed her how to look into certain private quarters of the Akarii upperdecks crew, though they rarely saw anything more than some woman or man sleeping soundly. 

He makes a few passes at her, but after the fourth or fifth time he seemed to get that she wasn’t interested (the knee in the groin may have helped that along) and he settles into their other nighttime explorations with good nature.

Kjat keeps a careful watch for Blackwell, who is the subject of much conversation, but she sees few signs of him. Once they’d been looking out through a spyhole onto a main thoroughfare in the marketplace, and heard some Akarii men dressed as birds discussing Fleet Captain Nadrune’s ‘Beast’. Another time, they lay flat and looked down through the ceiling of a Stona hatchery, and overheard three young Stona strutting and boasting in their high-pitched chirps of how they would exact revenge on Blackwell for the murder of someone called Haramai. And once, she thought she saw him pass quickly just on the other side of the wall from her, wearing some sort of golden collar around his neck. But the wall was thick, and the spy holes were small. And it was only a momentary glimpse.

But it gives her hope. If he is alive, and walking around, then she can find him. Together they will find a way out of here. She will just have to look harder.

She does see the Kerul, Ercan—he is wrapped and skull-capped as a middleclass Akarii, but the sound of his voice and the flash of his eyes is unmistakable. He is kneeling, using a tape measure on a young Stona, flattering the boy on its choice in fabric. He is some sort of tailor, and a multicolor Krukkruk in a tunic that is much too clean was working at a sewing machine of some kind to assemble the Stona a new set of wraps. He pauses in his work and looked up, and Kjat swears he met her gaze directly, through the spyhole. But he doesn't react, and doesn't interupt his flattery. The young Stona, standing on a small, raised platform for the measuring, preens.

This night, Croah is nowhere to be found. He’d been talking about a girl named Sotha for a few nights now, and she’d coached him to not be such an arrogant jerk so maybe that was paying off. Good for him. Kjat scrubs out another rough niche that stinks of urine, and tries not to jump when something scurries across her foot. 

The drones are restless tonight, she thinks. Someone somewhere is pulling a great amount of aether for something. She can feel it cracking around her, flowing through the drones in rivers. Even with the totem the Buhr gave her the blackjackals and the featherwolves kick and mutter in their sleep, roused by so much aether so near.

She dumps another bucket, sighs, and then she sits down and extends her senses out with the old drone’s knife, tracing the paths of aether in her mind. 

It’s like the glowing roots of some upside-down, ancient tree, tendrils moving drone to drone and branching off into smaller and smaller channels that stretch into different sections of upperdecks.

She thinks about it. Power always comes from somewhere.  Where would that be, on an Akarii ship in the middle of the ocean? Truthfully, she has no idea where it came from in Tamaranth, either, and since she has time on her hands it might be a good time to investigate. What has she got to lose? It’s not like someone will miss her down here, at least not for a few hours. 

So she stands and follows the aether upstream, down deeper into the ship with the old knife held out before her.

It leads her down ladders, through sections of drones she hasn’t seen before, lower and lower in the ship, deep into the interior of the stinking lowest hold where it’s cold and utterly dark, and yet full of invisible fire. There’s aether in the air all around her, and with her knife-enhanced eyes it’s so bright she has to squint. No rats scurry here. Her hair all stands on end, and the featherwolves roll and spin. 

She can't tell if the drones here are even breathing. Their eyes glow. Their skin is bright. Maybe they don’t need to breathe? Maybe they’re living on aether?

She makes her way down the long stretch of the chamber, and at the far end of this hold is a huge lead door, shut tight. All the power in the ship flows from behind it.

Maybe this is a bad idea, she thinks. But something is drawing her forward.

It’s not locked. It swings open at her touch.

Inside are children. Floating in the air.

Three of them, two girls and a boy, all human like her. They are dressed in simple shifts and are bound to the bare hull of the ship with copper-colored chains that wrapped around their left ankles.

Their heads are shaved. They’re hovering around a flaming crimson vortex. The vortex is open, like the giant bloom of some otherworldly flower, and tendrils of energy spill out of it and up into the ship.

Kjat catches her breath. 

It’s like the conduits she herself can open, world to world, only this one is open into the space
between
worlds, where the aether lives. 

The ship isn’t drawing power from the lei-lines. It’s going deeper, opening up the world around them, getting the aether directly from the source.

It’s amazingly beautiful. A great hole in the universe.

And children are tending it.

One child reaches toward the vortex and Kjat sees it responding to his gestures. His hand moves in simple waves, his fingers flutter, and deep within the vortex, flame colors shift and move, shapes come and go. And aether flows up through the vortex, out through him, and drone to drone out into the rest of the ship.

Without entirely knowing why, Kjat feels herself reaching out her own arm to the vortex.

She opens her palm, and the vortex responds—it shifts to violet and green, and it reaches out a tendril of fire to her. It touches the skin of her palm, warm and electric.

There’s a sigh from the boy. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?”

Kjat nods, not able to speak.

The boy’s eyes are closed, but she senses he understands her. He’s right. She thinks she’s never seen something so beautiful. A kaleidoscope of color there, and sound and vibration, too. It wasn’t just fire, just the aether that was beautiful—it was the tunnel too, a tunnel through the fabric of the world and in that fabric were all things
of
the world. It isn’t something she can easily put into words, and yet she can feel it if she lets herself. 

She relaxes into it, and the tendril of the vortex wraps around her arms and legs, across her chest and between her legs and lifts her, pulls her closer in. It was warm and rich and full of life here, warm and pulsing. It is deftly woven from parts of the ship, the ocean, the creatures beneath them in the water and above them in the air, the air itself, the city-ship and all of the people in it and yes and parts of Blackwell too. She feels herself in it, now, her body and parts of what must be her soul intertwining with the children, with the essence of the boy who was so much more than she, who enveloped her with his weaving and who drew her in deeper, deeper.

Yes, yes, Kjati,
the boy urges, and the other children’s voices merge with his too. The girl says
Come! Come and play with us
, and together they all rise up into the air. The boy’s eyes are open now and staring into hers, and they are deep and pale green and flecked with gold and they're spinning, and she can’t tell if they are his eyes or the eyes of vortex itself. Her arms are buried in them now, deep in the aether, and she reaches and touches and weaves herself and himself together, weaves in parts of the ship and pieces of ocean and sky and thoughts of the Akarii and deeper, older thoughts of something far, far beneath them that slept on and dreamed into that tunnel.

That’s right,
whispered the boy.
That’s just exactly right.

But Kjat knows it is, without him even saying it. She knows that this thread, spun from fish and water and whale will go here, up against the essence of air and hair of the beard of an Akarii merchant, wrapped within feathered Stona and sleeping silvereel. This is the way you wove together a hole in the world. And the aether flows through, out into the world, out into the hands of all the mages in all parts of the ship, the way it should.

And she can even draw on the blackjackals within her, the boy says without words. They should not trouble her so now. They were just parts of another world, a place beyond the aether, and it was linked to her with its own kind of vortex, nothing more. It too can be part of the weaving. He reaches into her and pulls a featherwolf free, kicking and howling, and he breaks it apart, weaves it into the great tapestry.

You need not fear it with me here
, he told her, and he was right.

There is a noise now, and she desperately wants to ignore it. She feels warm and blissful, focused and alert and intently relaxed in a way she has never felt before in her life. This is was what she was born for, she knew that now. And yet the sound comes again and with it a sharp burst of pain along her left side.

The boy smiles, and holds her. His eyes spin and he says
It is nothing, Kjat,
you are one of us and always will be,
and yet the tearing now is fierce and sharp, her side is wet, and when she looks down she sees the other children, the girls, ripping at her side with their nails and their knifesharp teeth, drawing flesh and blood away, and weaving her into the vortex too.

Your body is
nothing
,
the boy says, taking her head and facing it back at him, at his golden eyes.
For such as us it is a burden, Kjati! Let us rid you of that. Let us weave together. Let us become one with the world and everything that is beyond it!

No, she thinks. 

Maybe it’s that amulet around her neck from the Buhr. 

Maybe she’s spent too long fighting against the blackjackals to give in to something else so easily.

She throws herself backwards, stumbling, her eyes blinded now by the glow of the vortex that flares up, brighter than the sun. She pushes and scrambles toward where she thinks the door was. She clamps one hand to the wound at her side and throws her weight against it, falls out into the hold and the dark and all the time the children are reaching for her, faces and hands covered with her own blood, and the boy calls
Come back, Kjati! You are one of us! This is where you truly belong!
and they strained at the chains that bind their ankles. The vortex pulses and sparkles, spins tendrils out to her like it’s a living thing as she slams the door closed and runs, tripping and falling, through this hold into the next one and the one after that.

As she runs each drone’s eyes roll forward to watch her, one by one as she passes, closing again only slowly after she’s gone, like sleepers awakened by some terrible dream.