City on Fire

overhead. Far above, laundry strung on lines floats gray in Shieldlight. Arrangements of guy wires and planks, sometimes at dizzying heights, connect the buildings over the little canal. A female hermit, long gray hair shrouding her face, hangs like the laundry from a wire in what looks like an old flour sack.

One of the boat’s crew has been listening to the radio, earphones pressed to his head, turning knobs as he stares fixedly at yellow glowing dials. He looks up with a start.

“Listen to this,” he says, and turns another knob, and an official-sounding voice comes from the buzzing metal grid of the speaker.

“—al Government of Caraqui,” it says, “was formed in order to unite those patriotic citizens determined to free our metropolis from the pernicious foreign ideas of the ex-Metropolitan Constantine and his gang of outland mercenaries.”

“Who is this?” growls Davath—large, twisted, a stoneface with features like pitted concrete. The answer to his question is obvious enough.

The enemy has finally declared himself publicly.

“I will now surrender the microphone to our president, Kerehorn.”

“Keretora?” asks Prestley. “Which Keremath’s that?” “Kerethan’s son,” Aedavath says.

“No, Kerethan’s son was Keredeen, and they both got killed.”

“Kerethan’s other son.” Stubbornly.

“No, he’s dead, too.”

“Hush.”

Kerehorn’s voice is reedy and uncertain. “Greetings, fellow citizens. The day of liberation is nigh.”

“Nigh?” someone offers. “Who wrote this?”

The speech is a vitriolic personal attack on Constantine, along with his “gang of foreigners and oppressors.” Other major figures in the government, Drumbeth and Parq and Hilthi, are not even mentioned. But Kerehorn is not much of a speaker, and the whole speech falls flat, interrupted every so often by the rustle of paper as he tries to find his place in his prepared text.

Aiah looks at the others as they all listen: their faces show skepticism, amused contempt, grim humor. They’ve lived under the rule of the Keremaths, and she hasn’t: they know better than she how to take this. Apparently their respect for Kerehorn, or any of his family, is limited.

“We pledge ourselves to the restoration of the ancient liberties and traditions of the Caraqui people,” Kerehorn says, and cynical laughter floats from one team member to the next.

“Why does he even bother to justify it?” someone says.

Cold certainty suddenly floods Aiah’s mind: Kerehorn is not the real leader. This unprepossessing a character could never have organized something as dangerous as the coun-tercoup. He is a figurehead, intended to provide a degree of legitimacy for the coup’s genuine leaders. But whose figurehead is he? Radeen’s?

Perhaps Radeen is using the Keremaths’ money to wedge himself into power. Perhaps they are both pawns of someone else. Or perhaps there is no real leader, only a group of people, each with different reasons for wanting to destroy the current government…

Coel’s Channel comes to an end up ahead, and the waters of a wide canal open out, its water bright green with algae and home to a flock of pelicans preening themselves in the unusual stillness. The boat’s helmsman throttles back. Aiah looks at the map again.

Ideally she wants to go straight on, but looking ahead she can see nothing but the gray slab wall of a pontoon on the far side of the canal. Obviously they will have to traverse the open canal for at least a while before turning west again.

The helmsman reverses the engines briefly to bring the boat to a complete stop, its prow barely jutting out beyond Coel’s Channel. Another crewman airily steps out onto the foredeck and peers left and right past the high concrete walls on either side. Aiah can tell from the sudden stiffening of his spine that he sees trouble. He returns to the cockpit, and Aiah’s mouth goes dry as she sees his grim expression.

“There’s a bridge to starboard, right in our path,” he says. “I can see a police roadblock on it, several cars, maybe a dozen cops.”

“Armed?” Aiah asks.

An unreadable expression passes across the crewman’s face. “Of course.”

An idiot question: Aiah doesn’t know what she’s going to do, what she can do, and is just playing for time. She delays further by going onto the foredeck herself, moving far less surefootedly than the boat’s crewman; she peers gingerly around the corner, heart pounding, and sees the bridge a few stades away. Suspension wires curve in a graceful arc, and the iron uprights are covered with an untarnishable black ceramic impressed with the oval cameo profiles of long-dead Caraquis. Square in the middle of the span is the roadblock: cars drawn across the span with their lights flashing in silence, uniformed men standing with long weapons in their hands. Should they choose to fire down into boats passing beneath them, they could cause a massacre. But getting around them will require an endless amount of backtracking, with little assurance of not encountering another roadblock somewhere else along the way.

“Long live the Provisional Government!” The chorused words ring out from the radio. Aiah gnaws her lip and tries to figure out what to do.

Pelicans drift in the canal ahead, mocking her with eerie pebble eyes.

“We now take you live to Government Harbor,” the announcer says, “where officers and men of the Caraqui Army will swear allegiance to President Kerehorn and the new government.”

There is a pause, a howl of feedback—apparently people in Government Harbor are listening to the broadcast with their speakers turned up—and then a commanding voice, speaking a bit too far from the microphone.

“This is War Minister Radeen!” he says, and immediately afterward, as the techs sense his distance from the mike, his volume cranks up a bit. He has a tendency to shout every phrase and then stop, breaking every sentence up into little exclamations. “I have before me the officers! And the soldiers! Of the Army of Caraqui! Soldiers—!” The volume goes up again as the proclaiming starts. “I will now lead you! In the oath of allegiance to your new government!” He takes a breath. “/, a soldier of Caraqui…”

“I,” a great chorus roars, “a soldier of Caraqui…”

Aiah is struck by the idea of Radeen, far before the issue is decided, actually lining up the soldiers of the Second Brigade—or a large number of them, anyway—in Government Harbor square in order to swear an oath that, judging by the Second Brigade’s adherence to past oaths, isn’t worth a brass hundredth…

“Here in the sight of the gods and immortals…,” Radeen continues.

Government Harbor is a symbol—it’s the official seat of government, with the Popular Assembly and offices for most of the government departments—but it has no real military value. True civil and military power is concentrated in the vastness of the Aerial Palace. During the coup of Drumbeth and Constantine, Government Harbor had been seized, but the Marines then pushed on to aid in the storming of the Palace. Now Radeen seems content with the seizure of deserted office buildings and the mouthing of empty oaths.

Aiah has no military background, but in the past months she has seen real soldiers at work, and if she were in charge of the Second Brigade her soldiers would already be hammering at the doors of the Palace.

She snarls. These people do not deserve to win.

“/ swear allegiance to the Provisional Government, representing the people of Caraqui…”

And then over the radio comes a whistle and an explosion, and then another and another, and then shouts and screams. There is the crackling sound of rolling thunder, and Aiah remembers plasm heat on her face as she recognizes the sound of telepresent mages doing invisible combat. More cries and explosions buffet the microphone. She pictures neat parade formations dissolving in blood and chaos. Perhaps this is the ordinary soldiers’ first clue that they are not unopposed.

Government Harbor, she concludes, is entirely within the range of the mortars that Geymard had readied on the Palace roofs, and Radeen’s mages can’t keep out every round.

She looks back over the boat’s crew and sees their grins—twisted Davath throws back his head and laughs, cold amusement bubbling from his vast trunk—and then quite suddenly she knows what she will do.

“Turn on the flashers,” she says. “Lean on the horn. Everyone put on your hard hat, and stay in plain sight.” A strange, daring humor courses through her, and she gives a reckless smile. “When we see the police, everyone