Ninth City Burning (60 page)

1
Lady Jane is weirdly obsessed with old Common Era motion pictures, and often chooses her costumes based on depictions of CE culture therein, something she can do freely and at will, not being constrained by the limitations of material existence.

2
One of the Project's many marvelous and revolutionary innovations; gwayd in the Legion's ranks of battle-ready equi tends to be red or orange, occasionally yellow.

3
Though, admittedly, very little of the corresponding safety and containment equipment. Brewing the components for an equus from scratch (a necessity as most of the parts needed for the Project were nonexistent until I invented them) involves more than a few rather delicate and volatile processes, none of which an aspiring philosopher like myself is authorized to perform on her own. Requesting a viatic ontologressor or plystecratic sheath would have telegraphed what I was doing to the whole Academy, so I decided to do some by-the-seat-of-my-trousers flying. There were a few dicey moments, but it all worked out just fine, not a single disaster worth mentioning . . . luckily. Thelemic toxicity is highly unpleasant and not exactly easy to explain to one's research advisors.

4
Only because of the Academy's ridiculously arbitrary and outmoded requirements, I might add.

5
Constructed mostly out of skeletons scheduled for disposal. Further misconduct for which I could be strung up by my thumbs.

6
Fully functional equi keep their animi in place by means of dampening artifices, with actual physical restraints only activating in scenarios involving loss of thelemity or gwayd failure. The Project lacks all such safeguards, of course.

7
Actually just one of my reading chairs bolted into the Project's chest cavity—serviceable but somewhat hack in appearance compared to legionary thrones with their ergonomic design and exemplary lumbar support.

1
The Academy's policies regarding academic absenteeism are alarmingly strict, and students not in good standing attendance-wise at the end of a given scholastic period are ineligible for advancement exams. I'm dangerously near my limit, which is no good if I ever intend to get my career out of the humiliating state of confusion it's presently in.

2
Yes, that's right:
the
Dr. Afşar, as in Afşar's Theory, the Afşar Effect, the Afşar-Epstein Principle, Afşar's Laws, and so on.

3
Short for “Doctor,” a CE academic distinction equivalent to our “Philosopher;” not to be confused with
medical
doctor, roughly synonymous with a legionary medic of class five or higher.

4
Dr. Afşar has never been in combat, as far as I know; the term “veteran” has come, at least informally, to include anyone who has visited the Realms, and connotes not only a person who has been to war but also someone displaced in time and culture.

5
Splatterhead,
n.
: anyone with a deep technical interest in animation, specifically in reference to equi; derives from the distinctive “splattering” of gwayd that often occurs during the repair, maintenance, and construction of same; used both as an endonym among splatterheads and pejoratively by those who lack proper understanding and appreciation for their artistry.

1
While the past five centuries have seen startling advances in the field of irrational mechanics, not to mention overall military badassery, wartime society has proven a virtual wasteland artistically, especially when it comes to music. With very few exceptions, the only music worth listening to is prewar, as I have been discovering with Lady's help. The two of us have been cultivating a particular taste for CE 1970s British punk rock.

2
CE domestic housekeeping technology.

3
Vintage CE communication device.

1
Revenni can vary drastically in their ability to manifest different energies, and as it's believed a person's capacity to harness thelemity remains relatively constant, we explain the difference in terms of efficiency. The same revenna might be capable of creating a virtual thunderstorm of electric power yet unable to generate enough heat to light a match; we would say such a revenna has high efficiency for electricity and low efficiency for heat. Cadets usually have their basic efficiencies measured sometime during their fourth-class year, but as Rae is old enough to have graduated Rhetoric entirely, it occurs to me she might already have taken this test, in which case I could have just asked for her score and saved us all some time.

2
It would not be wholly inaccurate to say thelemity has a mind of its own. No matter how precisely an artifice is designed, there's always a degree of uncertainty in the execution, and very often whatever quirks come up seem more like the whims of a mischievous personality than the workings of impersonal natural phenomena. The prevailing theory is that thelemity does not actually
want
in any real sense, that what looks like the exercise of free will in a given artifice is in reality the unconscious influence of the revenna producing the power, a kind of human contamination to a force that would otherwise be as sterile and predictable as gravity. But whether thelemity is putatively
alive
or not, it definitely acts that way, and so from a practical standpoint we have to treat it as such if we're to have any hope of getting it to work for us. A great many people never quite come to grips with this—the idea of living inside some deific, semi-sentient amoeba is existentially disturbing, not to mention totally icky—but not Rae.

3
Put simply, compounding (as the term implies) involves layering or combining a series of artifices to create a unified effect. Say, for example, you wanted to use thelemity to whip up a batch of chicken soup. You could compose an artifice to tackle the whole process at once, but that would be a long, difficult process, probably a bigger hassle than just going ahead and cooking the soup yourself. But if you divide the task into a number of smaller components—a kinetic artifice to chop and mix the ingredients, a thermal artifice to heat the broth,
et cetera
—not only would you end up with a much more manageable task, you could also use those pieces, with only minimal rearrangement and alteration, to make beef stew or clam chowder or any number of other recipes. A lengthy chicken-soup artifice, by contrast, would only make chicken soup.

4
The volumes of hyperprecise, legalistic language filling the Academy's libraries are an attempt to turn thelemity into something standardized and generic, something that can be taught and controlled. But you can never completely filter out the chaos and subjectivity from something inherently chaotic and subjective. Standardized artifices try to say everything, to cover all possible avenues, when what you really want to do is say the
right
thing, the way a single line of poetry can hold more meaning than a thousand pages of instructions. To really make an artifice work, you've got to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it.

5
Which even then would have been some agreeable old model, well loved and well dented by a thousand wannabe equites, and not my high-strung and finicky Project.

6
E
nvironmentally
A
djusted
S
trategically
S
ub
a
quafied
C
ity 1 and 2, respectively.

7
The “thumbs-up”—a general signal of acknowledgment and approval among her people.

1
A branch of the Legion tasked with policing activity within the city, composed mostly of legionaries who washed out of more elite fighting units and who thus suffer from feelings of inadequacy and a sense of underutilized potential, which, combined with a frustrated desire to get out and shoot something, often means an unpleasant experience for anyone who happens to fall into their clutches. This is especially true during incursions, when the city's defense force is engaged in actual combat with the actual enemy, and the gendarmes are subsequently both at the height of their power and most aware of their diminished status vis-à-vis the rest of the Legion.

2
Just a normal explosion-type hole to the untrained observer, but I was fairly sure I could trace a few lines of the Project's familiar frame in the blasted-out raggedness Rae and Snuggles left behind as they exited my workshop.

3
With actual metal bars, no less—a precaution to keep me from escaping if the city lost thelemity.

4
Probably because this was her first time in combat. Animi experience damage to their equi much as they would an injury to their own bodies, but what feels like a mortal wound may in fact be pretty inconsequential from the perspective of engineering and repair.

5
A grape-based alcoholic beverage, notable for its effervescent carbonation and popularity during CE festive occasions. Not so different from Fizz, presumably, though I've never tasted it myself.

6
A precarious and maybe only temporary victory, admittedly.

7
It was entirely possible Lady had managed to get drunk. Instari live by the rules they create for themselves; if Lady decides to conjure alcohol, it could very well impair her cognitive functioning.

1
Any device made to store artifices for later use; especially useful for pacifers, since they're unable to create artifices on their own, though revenni like me also find them expedient. Basic cantivels usually take the form of a small metal disk, which can be activated by moving a finger or thumb across its surface.

2
With copious supporting notes and citations, naturally. Never has an urban layout been more thoroughly researched and referenced than that of IMEC-1.

3
A reference to a story popular among Rae's people, concerning the adventures of a CE-period explorer who visits a number of fantastical locales, among them a flying city. I try not to take it as an ill omen that our plan has been anticipated by a satirical fairy tale, or that this explorer, one Gulliver, also encountered a land inhabited by sapient, talking horses, an idea that the story apparently places on an equal level of plausibility with our current strategy for saving the world.

1
Humanity has yet to invent a game of strategy at which I show appreciably more aptitude than a trained pigeon. I am, however, fabulous at badminton. My scores were on record at the statistical cadet register of the Academy of Ninth City, and I hope still are, despite the fact that Ninth City technically no longer exists.

2
Palakesis is a technical process used to alter or enhance a thelemic artifice. Whereas ingenic tools and weaponry, such as the trencher or lazel, employ a steady amount of ambient thelemity to power a predetermined or already existing artifice, palaketic devices magnify and direct new artifices as they are created. The process could be crudely compared to the way a megaphone magnifies and directs sound. Palakesis allows for a higher level of potency and control than ingesis, but can only be initiated by people capable of thelemic manipulation.

3
That is, fueled by the collective energy of seventy-two revenni, an arrangement known as a “seventy-deuce” among people familiar enough with such high-powered weaponry to adopt a slangy tone.

4
For some unknown reason, heavy artillery tends to work best when its gunners come in multiples of eight.

5
Usually eight in number, to be specific. Old Faithful is sometimes referred to as a “9-8'er,” meaning it has nine rows of eight gun monkeys each.

6
A northern-hemisphere stellar constellation also known as Ursa Major.

7
The IMEC's customized gravity is also pretty handy should you happen to find yourself in any significant gravitational field, even one similar to Earth's, but not favorably aligned with same.

8
Essentially a version of the D-87 Pan-Climate Enhancement Armor lacking both the armor and the enhancement.

9
Note, however, that the straps are only helpful in the case of
decreased
gravity. Under increased gravity, D-55s are about as useful as a paper bag—a paper bag filled with squished human remains if the gravity gets too high.

Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!