The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (34 page)

But his sisters tried to express the importance of their visit, relentless. Their lifestyles were in jeopardy. Their colony. Mummu’s fields, his dunes, all of his sculpting: these were also threatened.
Anu has descended
, they said.
Anu is under the clouds
.

Paused in his digging—as drones continued to work the vicinity—Mummu was not alarmed. He did not acknowledge the danger. He wanted only to be left alone, to continue his work. If he had to grant concessions, minor requests, to make his sisters go away, then he would do so.

Cliffs collapsed into the ocean with terrific thunder, boiling the spume and sending rolls of dust out over the waves.

The cylinder he had taken from the seraphim became suddenly warm, and Nahid withdrew it quickly from his clothes. It crackled with a light that made the hair on his head stand on end. His skin tingled. When he tried to release the device, it stayed in the air, at eye level, white tendrils a blur. Bluish light flickered, illuminating the alley.

Nahid was alone.

The cylinder lifted higher, humming.

Then someone saw him from the street, and recognized him, for a voice shouted his name, “Nahid! The ostracon is burning! The ostracon is on fire!”

Pains radiated in his limbs. Anu’s voice had still not returned. Hornblower looked at the dark roofs and darker clouds, toward a huge black structure balanced precariously atop several spindly towers, elevated much higher than all other structures around. From this lofty room, a light had begun to shine, visible through the clouds like a beacon over the city.

He heard the growing roar, approaching from behind. When he felt the shaking at his bones, he turned to see Anu appear, sliding into view, rendering every detail white and harsh. Grinding at the hard material used to roof these structures in the underworld, the blind power knocked down chunks that shattered or thudded heavily around hornblower’s feet. Winds whipped his robes about. He shielded his eyes.

Exemplar! Don’t look at me; look for a place I can land.

“I have failed you,” hornblower shouted. “Now I’m lost in this place. I will never find the exile or what he stole.”

It’s too late
, Anu responded
.
We’ve been set up. Now look at the damn—

Wire fingers screeched against the tin of the worktable as path let himself down to the floor. He had begun to glow. He felt his own heat. Light radiated from him in beams of white so that the room was filled with his luminescence.

Trembling, the castellan cried out, arms extended, as if to embrace the boy, but he came no closer.

Behind him, the taller man continued to clean the tools he had used.

“Sometimes,” said path, “I feel like I’m still in the tank, having the flesh corroded from my bones. Or maybe these memories are from before then, when I was a real infant.”

He sniffed the air.

The open window beckoned.

Three men confronted Name of the Sun as she took scraps out the back of The Cross-Eyed Traveller to dump them in the alley. The men had weapons. They blocked her way. One was young and pudgy, with soft-looking skin and short hair. He had a nasty shiner. The other two, holding stout wooden handles in their fists, were older.

“Garbage fucker,” said the man with the black eye.

“Get away from me.”

“We’re taking back the city. Tonight. We know who you are.”

“Leave me alone.”

Behind the group, in the light from a door that had just opened, Name of the Sun saw the unmistakable silhouette of her landlord, standing with her roommate, Polly. They were watching her. Name of the Sun was more shocked to see them than she was by this confrontation, and in her hesitation she was not quite able to fully dodge the first blow, which glanced off her shoulder, striking the wall behind. She did manage to rake the face of her nearest assailant, one of the older men, with her fingers, but the others were on her then, clubbing.

She went down fighting.

Flames appeared to be sliding down the stone, dripping onto the road, where they continued to flicker and leap. Nahid stopped at the doorway to the ostracon, trying to look inside, shielding his face from the blistering heat that roared through the opening. In the road, other kholics huddled. From a second story window, a woman leaned—a senior called Orlando—shouting down at another group, who were trying to convince her to leap.

There was a cry, very much like his sister’s, but by the time he heard it, Nahid had already entered.

The fires leapt at him as he forced his way down the main hall. He intended to call out but could not open his mouth; heat seemed to shrivel him, sucking the air from his lungs, his nose. Above, part of the ceiling had collapsed and more flames roared through the hole, breaking at its edges, consuming. The ostracon was filled with an almost ambient peace.

His skin might be splitting. He was transforming, emerging. There were no people here, in this landscape of flames and heat. Just him. He tried to mount the stairs, to get to the dorms where he had lived with Octavia for years, but the upper floor was completely engulfed.

Through a damaged wall toward the rear of the building he saw the dark and smoky courtyard. Out there, another kholic climbed the low buttress that ringed the ostracon. Looking over his shoulder, eyes wide and glinting, face reddened, he seemed to look right at Nahid, who stood in the inferno, hair gone, skin blistering and crackling.

When Nahid breathed, his lungs turned to cinders.

Over the roar and shouts from outside, he heard a baby’s cry.

The sisters flew below the clouds. Mummu had lent them a squad of diggers, and the ruthless drones spread out in formation below, rumbling as fast as their treads could carry them over sand and rocks.

Nearing the dark line of the perimeter wall, Kingu and Aspu banked, separating, to flank the city; Anu was within, though his signals were weak. If they could retain surprise, the sisters might be able to hold onto their dream of maintaining a utopia. This seemed their only hope, now that Anu had returned. Though blind, their brother possessed formidable firepower and a psychotic fury the sisters had witnessed—and been victim to—several times in the past. Previously, when they had defeated him, there had been other siblings at their sides, working together.

These siblings were dead now.

Kingu and Aspu suspected their brother was aware of their approach, that he had broken their codes, and was lurking in wait. Anu had most likely taken an exemplar, somehow, in order to penetrate Mummu’s shield and come down to the surface; they imagined this astute, war-faring human keeping watch right now, raising the alarm as they raced toward him. What would the waiting defenses be, the traps, the guns?

The sisters were agitated, twitchy; as soon as the drones confirmed they were within range of this city they were allowed to begin firing. Fear had occluded any chance for strategy.

The first missiles sent massive gouts of sand into the air, melting them into glass spouts, but with slightly tweaked trajectories the weapons soon began tearing out chunks of stone and brick from the wall, followed quickly by the routing of exposed residences and hovels, all of which collapsed, and fused, taking down others of their kind in huge roils of dust and death.

Screaming above the skyline, as the diggers continued to pound their way in, they saw Anu roar up ahead of them, rotating, seeking. Below their brother was a large fire, and the dark night sky around him began to turn in a vortex of sick purple and black. Was this Anu’s doing? A trap? Skittish, the sisters peeled away. Where was Anu’s exemplar? Their brother, as they headed to quadrants beyond the walls, seemed unable to locate them. Small smart bombs hissed toward him, leaving lines of white gas, like tethers, to burst against his skin.

From rear vids, Kingu and Aspu both watched the cannons that had taken down their brothers and sisters emerge from Anu’s ribs, ugly killers, but his shots went wild, tearing out more buildings and streets.

Then a message came though their receivers; they expected to hear Anu’s rage coming through, but it was not Anu at all.