City on Fire

All fighting is over. The curfew has ended. The revolutionary government encourages citizens to go about their normal business.

An elderly female lottery seller, going about her normal business, shuffles toward Aiah on bare, swollen feet. She was probably selling tickets at the height of the fighting. Aiah buys one.

For luck, she thinks.

There’s a sign pointing down some steps, with the legend Water Taxis. She follows it.

The taxi is a small outboard with a tattered red plastic awning, driven by a weathered man of middle years. The hand that reaches for her bag is missing the first two fingers. A handwritten sign next to the meter says, We take foreign currency.

Aiah has read a guide to Caraqui on the Wire, and knows the name of a hotel near the government center. She had tried to call to make reservations but the lines were down.

“Hotel Ladaq,” she says.

He helps her into the boat with his clawed hand. “Can’t do that, miss,” the driver says. “Hotel Ladaq’s full of soldiers.”

“Do you know another hotel in the area?” “All full of soldiers, miss.”

“Get me as close to Government Harbor as you can.”

He starts the meter. “Right away, miss.”

But it doesn’t happen right away. The driver casts off, but then he can’t start the outboard, and as the wind pushes the water taxi broadside down the canal he has to take the cover off the motor and tinker with it, and then try to start it again, then tinker some more. Several taxis leave from the station in the meantime, and Aiah’s taxi rocks in their wake.

The meter, Aiah notices, is still running. She points this out to the driver, but he affects to be too busy with the engine to notice.

He tries to start the engine and fails. Aiah points out the meter is still running, but the driver starts kicking the motor and screaming.

It’s a chonah, Aiah thinks. The driver’s a confidence rigger and there probably isn’t anything really wrong with the engine.

If she were home she’d know what to do. But the fact she’s a stranger in this place makes her hesitate.

Finally Aiah steps forward and turns off the cab’s meter. The driver is stern.

“Can’t do that, lady. It’s government regulation. Only the driver can touch the meter.”

He steps forward to turn it on again. She keeps her hand over the button. “Start the engine first,” she says. “Then you can start the meter.”

The driver shrugs. With showy, large gestures, he tinkers with the engine again. Puts the cover on. Starts it without so much as a cough.

Aiah is entertained. She’s a Barkazil, one of the Cunning People. Her ancestors have rigged chonahs for thousands of years. This sort of thing is in her blood.

The pontoons and barges are old in this district, layered with barnacles beneath the waterline. The buildings on the pontoons are old as well, and as layered, new structures barnacled atop the old, until the form and shape and function of the original building has been completely obscured.

When she arrives at her hotel, she tries to calculate exchange rates, and gives the driver what she thinks is the correct amount in Gunalaht dalders. She knows, from the driver’s sudden bright grin, that she’s overpaid. Suddenly he’s pressing a plastic business card into her hand.

“My name is Callaq, miss! Please call at any time! I will show you the sights, the Aerial Palace, the place where all the battles were fought, anything!”

“Maybe.”

“Please call! I’ll take you anywhere!” “Thank you, Callaq.”

She carries her bag up corroded marble steps slippery with sea slime. Beggars hold out cupped hands on the stairs. From the top she turns to look back at this strange metropolis, sees the taxi churning away, an old moored tugboat that probably hasn’t moved in years and is flying a string of laundry, a flock of scabrous waterfowl staring at her with agate eyes.

And then, in the air above the canal, there forms a pattern, lines and colors interlinking, the pattern flowing like water… It bursts so swiftly in the sky, like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, that she can only catch a fragment of the wholeness, a curve, a maze, a wonderment. Aiah stares openmouthed.

“The Dreaming Sisters,” says a strange male voice.

The colors fade, leaving an imprint on Aiah’s vision, which glows for a few seconds like the afterburn of a photographer’s flash.

She turns to see who was speaking, her tongue poised to ask more questions; but it’s a businessman, sallow and sleek, and from the glint of his eye she can tell he’d like nothing more than a frolic with a strange woman, so she merely nods, then takes her bag indoors.

NEW GOVERNMENT CALLS FOR EXILES TO RETURN

“WE NEED YOUR SKILLS TO REBUILD CARAQUI,” SAYS TRIUMVIR DRUMBETH

The hotel is an ancient place that has seen better days. Prostitutes cruise the lobby, either shockingly young or shockingly aged. Ribbed plastic sheeting protects old, broken tiles that were once bright with abstract designs dating from the old Geoform movement. Aiah’s room has a lovely plastered ceiling with a life-size figure of the immortal Khomak brandishing his assault rifle overhead and riding that fabulous animal, the sea horse… but from the sea horse hangs a wire, and on the end of the wire is a naked bulb. The bed has a cheap steel frame and the bedsprings squeak. There is no other furniture. Over the sink hangs a sign: Hot Water Available 05:00 -07:00.

It’s 10:31, according to Aiah’s watch. She guesses she’s missed her bath for the day.

There is a communications jack but no telephone. Aiah finds she can rent one by the hour and does so. It’s an unusual piece, with a pair of heavy brass earphones and a trumpet-shaped mouthpiece braced up in front of her face by a butter-smooth brass prop in the shape of a human arm.

Constantine, she knows, is Minister of Resources in the new government. She calls the ministry in Government Harbor, but all they will do is take a message, so she phones the Aerial Palace and asks to be connected to his suite. She can’t even get anyone who will promise to take a message to him.

“Not unless you’re on the list,” she’s told.

“Can I speak to Mr. Khoriak, then?”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a member of Constantine’s suite.” One of his guards. “I’ll see.”

Aiah waits for ten minutes, hoping that Khoriak wasn’t killed in the fighting. “This is Khoriak.”

Relief pours through Aiah, relieving tension she hadn’t realized she’d possessed.

“Khoriak, this is Aiah. Aiah from Jaspeer. You remember?” “Of course.”

Of course. Idiot. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him.

“I’m in Caraqui. Hotel Oceanic. I would like to see the Metropolitan Constantine, but I can’t seem to reach him.” “I’ll tell him.”

Half an hour later, she’s on Constantine’s private launch. Fast work. She’s been in Caraqui less than two hours.

TRIUMVIR PARQ CALLS FOR DAY OF PRAYER

DALAVANS TO FAST ON FRIDAY

The launch seems to have been liberated from the Keremaths or their supporters: the hull is a shiny black