Ninth City Burning (28 page)

“Irregular energies” is the term used in irrational mechanics for the sort of power never posited or credited to exist before thelemity arrived to upend our general notions of reality. Those forces observed to govern the world throughout most of its history, such as light and heat, gravity and
electricity, we refer to as “regular energies.” With thelemity's aid, we are able to generate and control these in uncanny ways, but in all other senses they remain Nature's accustomed tools. But thelemity has also given us powers Nature herself never conceived or if she did thought it better not to mention. These are our irregular energies.

For our first lesson in irregular energies, Danyee introduces us to a force called “akyrity.” She has chosen it specially because we cadets have a deal of experience with it already from our time on the firing range. Akyrity is the primary ingredient in “null,” the artifice that comprises our lazel's most popular ammunition. I had imagined null to be some deeply complicated concoction, but as Danyee explains, it is made almost entirely of akyrity, albeit with several important refinements. We will study how this power is packaged and amplified and stabalized for use in combat during our fifth class year—for now Danyee only wants us to learn its laws and properties and have some hands-on practice.

I know what it means when Danyee begins talking of properties and laws, and settle in to wait while she fills her blackboard with the usual scrawlings, rousing myself only once she begins circulating handfuls of unshelled peanuts, intended as victims for our practical exercises. I watch Kenut and Chyffe work away at their legumes with excruciating slowness, devoting minutes on end to shaving away a single snowflake-sized sliver from the outer shell. When they and the rest of the class have about exhausted themselves, I decide it is time to sail in. I draw in my steam-like cloud of influence, concentrating it around the peanut I have chosen for destruction. But for the first time since I took up manifestation, I find myself unsure what to do next. In the past, I have always been able to bring off whatever effect I chose, even one I had never tried before. So long as I knew the general specifications, it was like molding a sculpture from clay with a rough drawing to go by: not always perfect, but usually close enough. Here it is as if I have been tasked with bringing out some impossible shape, one that looks fine on paper but won't work in the world of solid things. I hover, searching for some inroad or beginning, feeling the scrutiny of Rhetor Danyee and the whole class as well. Finally, I pounce, and though the peanut does disappear, it is not with the whitish shadow of akyrity I saw other cadets produce, but a rollicking explosion that leaves a dark black smear in the center of my desk.

Kenut and Chyffe assure me this poor performance was a fluke.
Everyone has bad days, and soon no peanut will be safe from me. But at our next session, as my friends pop off pill-bug-sized bits from their targets, mine continue to evaporate in puffs of yellow fire. It isn't long before most everyone around me can obliterate a peanut's shell with hardly any damage to the fruit inside, while I continue to fill the classroom with fragrant, roasted bits.

It is my first real failure in what I had come to consider my area of expertise, and though Kenut and Chyffe seem to consider my disgrace unimportant, my confidence is shaken. I worry that I have reached the limit of my ability, that I am destined to be surpassed by the children of Sixth Class, a group known in Academy parlance as Dodos. I even consider going to Rhetor Danyee and prostrating myself, swearing to follow her tutelage, though I know she will insist I devote as much time to learning algebra and chemistry as I do to violent magic. I can endure all that and more if it is the only way of becoming the soldier I need to be. And then I discover the magic of animation, and I wonder how I could ever have worried at all.

Animation is one of the many strange disciplines of magic made possible by irregular energy. As Rhetor Danyee describes it, animation is “a process of thelemic manipulation whereby human vitality is extended into an inanimate object,” meaning that animation, properly used, lets you take something and move it like part of your own body. Danyee mesmerizes us with a series of impressive demonstrations, riding a chair with animated legs at a crisp trot around the classroom, encouraging a potted plant into a vaguely indecent, belly-waggling dance, causing a human shape to rise from a bowl of ordinary water, even inducing her own hair to stand on end.

For our own experiments, Danyee provides us with a claylike substance known as “bloog.” According to our rhetor, bloog is a highly complex invention and not the unappealing slime we might easily mistake it for. Different materials pose different levels of resistance to animation, and bloog is made to be as easy to animate as possible, seemingly at the cost of texture, appearance, and smell. We roll the bloog into long, thin sections, our faces screwed up at the distinctly rancid odor, then hold one end, trying to force through enough of our will to set the other end waggling. Most cadets achieve no more than a listless and erratic jerking, but my first try yields the impatient flick of a cat's tail.

After my disgrace in the matter of peanuts and akyrity, such success comes as a welcome relief. I can safely say animation feels more natural,
more innate, than any variety of magic I have experienced to date. Danyee had likened the process to pulling on a pair of gloves, or slipping into a suit, but to me the sensation is more of cooperation, of guidance. Like riding. A person must be in physical contact with an object in order to move it by animation, and so as we progress upward along the evolutionary scale, from bloog worms to bloog pancakes to multilegged blobs of bloog, we begin attaching ourselves by long cords so that our creations might wander freely about. And where most cadets are often reduced to dragging theirs along, mine positively prance.

Sculptures like those we make in class, miniature creatures brought to life by animation, are called “equulei,” and as one would expect from a troupe of militant twelve-year-olds, no sooner have we mastered making our equulei walk than we are making them fight. The battles generally take place just beyond Rhetor Danyee's supervision, but only because to have a rhetor watching cheapens the fun. The Academy is in full favor of cadets battling their equulei, as it develops a diversity of skills germane to our war against the Valentines. Nearly all the Legion's more potent weapons employ animation to some degree or other, and skilled “animi,” as practitioners are known, are in great demand.

My first battle comes during one of our frequent outdoor sessions. I am promenading my equuleus through the Academy courtyards like a lady out with her lapdog, when suddenly Kenut and Chyffe charge from behind a row of hedges, wild war cries on their lips. I'm no stranger to boys' roughhousing, but the visceral sensation when Chyffe's equuleus collides with mine takes me by surprise. My equuleus responds with a decisive counterattack, and in moments has reduced both assailants to formless piles of mud. Cheers erupt from nearby cadets, even as challengers line up to unseat me from my place of glory. After that, not a single lesson in animation ends without my equuleus surrounded by the splattered remains of its rivals.

My renown spreads, and in relatively short order I am the undisputed equuleus champion of the Sixth Class. Even Rhetor Danyee is impressed, going so far as to suggest that if I hone my skills with some extra studies, I might stand a chance of getting into one of the Academy's elite training programs, once I'm in Fourth Class and eligible to apply. My fellow Dodos think I ought to try now, sure the Academy would make an exception, since I'm already nineteen, practically an old lady. The plans I've begun fashioning for myself are even more ambitious. I've got it in my head to join the Legion now.
The way I see it, the sooner I start, the better I'll be when Naomi comes up to fight. Cadets who try to join up early face a good deal of hoop-jumping, but I figure I might have a shot once I show them what I can do.

I'm wrong, though, and it doesn't take a trip to the Legion's Basilica to find out how wrong. A guided tour of the Academy is plenty.

O
ne day, as the revenni of Sixth Class are convening for another afternoon lesson in irrational mechanics, Rhetor Danyee tells us to leave our work at our desks and line up by the door. Today, we will be visiting the Fabrica of Ninth City.

Her announcement is met with considerable excitement, and not only because we'd been expecting a particularly difficult exercise in infusion. The Fabrica is where all the city's marvels of thelemity are designed and created. Normally, Dodos aren't allowed beyond the boundaries of the Academy, but Danyee has secured special permission on the theory that seeing what can be achieved through research and scholarship will motivate us in our studies. Also, she has found a competent and responsible party to act as our guide. Danyee herself will be attending a special training session for rhetors only; from her demeanor, I suspect this “training session” will involve more than the usual amount of heavy drinking for Danyee and her fellow young rhetors.

“Cadets,” Rhetor Danyee says, motioning toward the classroom door, “I'd like you to meet Kizabel, an Officer Aspirant from the Academy's School of Philosophy.”

Officer Aspirant Kizabel seems far too petite to contain all the achievements Danyee lists to her credit. In addition to having her own workshop at the Fabrica, practically unheard of for anyone so young, Kizabel is an artifex, a maker of artifices, whose creations have been used all over the city. The mildly disheveled state of her black uniform and her unkempt spray of hair convince me she's every bit the prodigy Danyee claims—if I show up to lessons with so much as a hair or button out of place, I can expect hours
of extra chores as punishment. And yet no one blinks an eye over our rumpled pocket officer.

We wait, expectant, to hear what wise words this tiny titan will have for us. Slowly, a wicked grin spreads across Kizabel's face. Her blue eyes glint. “So,” she says, “who wants to blow something up?”

The Sixth Class is overwhelmingly in favor of explosions. We are almost too excited to keep proper formation as we march down the Academy's halls, toward the School of Philosophy, home to pursuits so scholarly that most cadets cannot even pronounce the things studied there.

The Fabrica is a great block of unadorned stone adjoining the School of Philosophy. Aside from its size, it is so unremarkable, especially with the palatial towers of cadet dormitories visible above, that we begin to think the promise of pyrotechnics was simply a ruse, a suspicion that only deepens as Kizabel ushers us through the bland stone interior, plain gray walkways broken only by the occasional door of cloudy metal. At last, Kizabel stops before one of the doors, presses a hand to its smooth surface, and says, “Hey, Ooj, it's Kiz. I've got those Dodos I told you about. Can we come in?”

We are admitted into a wide room filled with icy, sterile light and figures hunched low over enticing pieces of sparking and smoking equipment. At the far end stands a tall man with long curly hair: Philosopher Oojtelli, or “Ooj,” as he prefers to be called.

“Philosopher” is a term used for scholars who have reached the Academy's highest levels of learning, regardless of whether their studies involve the mysteries of existence. Ooj's interests have to do with warding off hostile thelemity. His theories would be exceedingly useful to the Legion if he could only find a way to profitably apply them, but on that account, he is a long way from success.

Ooj directs our attention to a room below, where a lone watermelon stands, adorned with his invention, a circlet reminiscent of a princess's tiara. As cadets crowd against the observation window, Ooj fires a blast of energy at the melon, which explodes spectacularly. “It works about one time out of twenty,” he says, and in support of this claim solicits volunteers from the Sixth Class to detonate several more melons. One lucky fruit does survive, only to suffer a grisly fate during the next trial. Ooj shakes his head in speculative lamentation, then loads a new melon to riotous applause.

Before our tour of the Fabrica is finished, we have witnessed everything from a hailstorm conjured inside of a glass ball to a new and highly controversial brand of magic that purports to create living beings out of pure thelemity, though the results we see are even less successful than Philosopher Ooj's warding crown. We have worn every sort of protective gear imaginable: helmets, face shields, gloves, smocks, small metal tabs we are mysteriously told to hold beneath our tongues in the presence of an experimental lie detector. The Philosophers we meet never seem put out to have their studies interrupted by a gaggle of Sixth-Class cadets. On the contrary, they're only too glad to leave off work to explode things with us. Kizabel they treat as a colleague; often I will notice one of them in grave technical discussion with her while another entertains us with some marvelous trick.

The only thing at the Fabrica we do not see, it seems, is Kizabel's own workshop. “That's because I skipped it on purpose,” Kizabel says when one brave cadet finally mentions this discrepancy. “It's at the far end of the Fabrica, back near the Academy, and if anyone found out what an abysmal mess it is, I'd be thrown out then and there.”

There are a few laughs, but the overall disappointment is plain.

“There's nothing interesting in there,” Kizabel says. “And anyway,” she adds, noting our lack of conviction, “I haven't been working at the Fabrica much recently.” She pauses, apparently coming to some decision, and brings out the mischievous smile that has become a familiar and welcome sign of impending adventure. “Follow me.”

Kizabel leads us down a tumble of hallways, mazelike in their blandness, until we reach a small door set inconspicuously into a long wall. “I'm going to show you what I do,” Kizabel says, hand on the door. “Keep quiet, and don't touch
anything
. Anyone starts acting up, and I take us all back to the Academy. Got it?” Her voice is serious, but she's still grinning, an indication that we are all misbehaving together.

“Yes, ma'am!” the cadets reply as one. By tacit agreement, Kizabel and I have been pretending that her tour of eleven- and twelve-year-olds does not contain a rather large nineteen-year-old girl. I have kept to the back and said little, and she and her philosopher friends have mostly ignored me, something I take as a kindness. But at the sound of my “yes, ma'am!” her eyes momentarily meet mine, then dart away as she whispers a word of passage to the door, and I know she is embarrassed for me, her oversized Dodo.

Our promise of good behavior lasts only until the first cadet gets through
the door. The place beyond is built on a scale for giants, a great open room where we become mice scurrying from a hole. The giants themselves stand in long rows, each in its own stall, dark and still, like statues set into niches along some endless hallway. But I know these are no simple sculptures, that not long ago they were alive, their faces glowing like the light of a brazier. Kizabel shushes the cadets, who are nearly delirious with excitement, though there is still a smile behind the finger she puts to her lips.

“Now,” Kizabel says, “I expect you've all guessed where we are. This is the Stabulum, specifically the wing that houses the Legion's equi. You've all heard of the equites, of course. What you probably don't know is there's a lot more to getting an equus into battle than just finding some hotshot jockey to pilot it. Keeping these big guys in fighting shape is how I spend most of my time.”

When people think of equi, Kizabel tells us, all they imagine are the equites flying around whipping Valentine ass. But equi are complex and beautiful machines, and to help us appreciate them, she intends to introduce us to some of the people who work their tails off so the equites can go out there and steal all the glory.

As Kizabel takes us down the aisles of silent giants, I lag behind, feeling each one a looming, menacing presence. Equi work by animation, same as equulei, but the little clay toys I send running and skipping through my lessons are as different from these behemoths as a puddle from the raging ocean. Looking up into their dark faces, Vinneas's words come back to me:
Eques. It's a type of warrior. The closest word in your language is probably “knight.”

We come to a halt at the feet of a statue built from what looks to be pale greenish stone. It's forty feet tall at the very least and encased in scaffolding, globes of floating light bobbing up and down its frame. Human shapes, lit by intermittent bursts of glowing color, work along wide platforms, or else by some trick of gravity crouch directly on the thing's body, sticking off in all directions like barnacles from the hull of a ship. The equus itself is clearly damaged, the green stone cracked and torn to reveal metal ligaments beneath, all of it looking strangely like wounds you'd see on a person or other meaty creature, not a hulk of metal and stone.

Kizabel is plainly a favorite here. Workers of the Stabulum spot her a good way off and welcome her with hoots and jests. She hollers back, and one artisan leaves off his labors, swinging down toward us on what appear to be
inky-blue tentacles, which retract into an egg-shaped package at the small of his back as he sets his feet on the ground. He introduces himself as Hezaro, and at Kizabel's urging begins describing the highly involved process of returning this equus, named “HeavensHammer,” to working condition.

“Poor girl had a run-in with a Valentine Type 6,” he says gravely, rubbing his stubbly chin. The “girl” is HeavensHammer, which as far as I can see lacks any demonstrably feminine attributes. “Beastly thing nearly tore her in half, but we'll have her up and about in no time. Would have been sooner, but there were a lot of bad cases after that last incursion. We've been working day and night to get through the backlog.”

The cadets are overflowing with questions, though to Kizabel's chagrin, they have more to do with combat than the repair and maintenance of equi. I leave them to it, sinking back from the swell of excited faces and voices bright with inquiries on magical firepower and aerial acrobatics. My attention is elsewhere, fleeing down the seemingly endless gallery of statues. Those nearby are almost identical to HeavensHammer, but farther on I spot several other configurations, different in stature and the lines of their armor. I don't realize I'm looking for one thing in particular until I see it: a familiar shape, last glimpsed silhouetted against the setting sun, head and shoulders above the trees. I glance back toward Kizabel and the cadets, all occupied with Hezaro and HeavensHammer, then slip quietly away into the Stabulum.