Previous: Interlude II | Next: Chapter 10
Two rows of crimson lights flared into life, guiding us into place. Not flames; they were harnessed, precise, electrical.
We, on the ship, followed their course, slowing to a halt very gradually along the long metal rails running the length of the tunnel. The mortal engineer I was slightly less familiar with, if that were possible, was already knotting long cords to their moors on the sheer stone walls surrounding us. The sails were folded, neatly tied down.
At the other end of the tunnel was the entrance we’d arrived through, deep shadows and silvery beams of starlight trading places around its mouth. Beyond, the runway on which we’d landed a few minutes earlier, raised above the rolling countryside sprinkled with distant signs of life and an icy stretch of rushing water. The river we’d been following by air was arrested by the immense outer wall of Solace, curving to run past and alongside it.
The stone wall ahead, though, was brightly lit, painted in vibrant colours. A complex mural of stormy skies, wind-swept slopes. Brilliant lightning-bolt scars. It caught my stare for a long time, until the ship finally stopped a few yards from it with a resonating crash. It was the most welcoming thing about the place, at the very least.
The mortal who’d been smoking off the ship not an hour earlier came up from below deck behind me, joining in the rigging; they worked together very quietly, harmonizing their action with only a few hushed words. I felt like I should be finding some way of making myself useful to them, but it all seemed… exceptionally complicated. And they were quite occupied. They didn’t pay me any heed at all.
I sensed Marcel and Valerie leaving the bridge, a few moments before they followed just behind onto the upper decks, where we all waited to disembark. They’d both donned their striking uniforms once again, walking in equal synchronicity, rather imposing side-by-side. While Valerie checked the mortals’ work, Marcel stepped towards me. We exchanged a quick glance, but I had nothing to say; the engineers’ low chatter echoed against the walls instead. This wasn’t yet the time to really dig into our mutual curiosities out in the open, I sensed.
I didn’t like being in this long, dim tunnel. An aeroport. We were enclosed in every direction by an expanse of thick stone, and the weight I could feel was oppressive and all-smothering. Nothing like the confinement inside the airship, high above the ground; it was its own variety of scary. Like the weight at the bottom of the ocean on my chest. But I was staying calm.
When Valerie was apparently satisfied, the first of the engineers hopped the short gap between the deck of the ship and the platform running along the edge of the tunnel. She unfurled a chain of metal slats across the gap, forming a simple makeshift bridge. I followed Valerie, and then Marcel, across, our footsteps cacophonous, and when my ill-fitting boots touched solid stone I almost stumbled, head swimming.
That was what prolonged flight did to a person, I guessed. The dizziness was uncomfortably familiar. The others stopped on the platform, thankfully, and I stopped between them, unsteady on my feet.
There wasn’t going to be an opportunity to slip up, I remembered. Not in my position.
Then something came into focus at the end of the aeroport tunnel– mortals approaching, descending stairs from even deeper in the wall (wow, the insulation here was disorienting). The indistinct noise of their hushed conversation cut off, and we all watched as someone hurriedly crossed the platform to meet us. A figure, short and rough-looking in an incongruously stark uniform, grey with a short gold stripe and an unfamiliar cut.
He stopped just in front of Marcel and Valerie, smiling briefly to the engineers before flashing a quick salute. “Good evening, all,” he announced. “Apologies, we… I had to scrounge up whoever I could when I was informed you’d be returning so soon. What with your other contingencies.”
Marcel waved it off. “No trouble. I know we haven’t had the liberty of keeping close to schedule, lately.”
The mortal nodded, quickly, before his focus again drifted past Marcel to the rest of the group. And the. they settled on me. I almost flinched. He seemed to struggle with what to say for a moment.
“And is this…” He hesitated, like he was afraid saying her name would bring her back. Equal parts unsettling and amusing. “Mercier?”
Marcel took a slight step back, extending his arm towards me. “This is Adeline,” he said, “and no. She is a guest here, not our prisoner. River Mercier… remains at large. Everyone who needs to know the details of that situation will, I assure you.”
He nodded again, and then hesitantly stepped up to me, somewhat shorter than I was. I awkwardly avoided taking his extended hand. He lowered it after a few seconds. “Sorry once again, then, ma’am,” he said. “Captain Balancia at your service.”
“And I… am at yours,” I replied. Lowering my voice to alleviate the echo, I added, “I guess I’m a bit of a surprise to everyone at the moment. Hah.”
“Uh,” he said. “Certainly.”
“Well!” interjected Marcel, clapping his hands together, “I’d like to get home as quickly and quietly as possible. Busy night ahead. So if we don’t mind...?”
After taking in my face one last time, Balancia turned back to the other mortals standing at the end of the platform – of a wide range of features, but all in the same grey-and-gold dress, I could see – and without any more delay they started to ascend again. Balancia motioned for us to follow, and the five of us did, leaving the ship behind.
I stayed close behind Marcel as we climbed the stairs, and then as we came out on a landing. It was a long room, stretching out in either direction further than I could see, adorned with electric lights and hanging beds of plantlife; further away there were more closed-off rooms, more staircases, lounges with soft seating occupied by other mortals. It seemed so still and quiet, even with their presence.
It was such an odd room that I wanted to go over and see it all for myself, but Balancia and the Court were already moving on and up a second flight of stairs. I quickly caught up with them as we kept going.
And maybe I would have liked a bit more time to prepare myself. But soon enough I felt the cool night air on my face again, and I could have breathed a sigh of relief.
Wrapping around the edge of the capital’s inner city was the long, sloped wall, curving across the landscape astride the river for much of its length. This was the wall the Solace aeroports were built into, at the same time protecting the city– though whatever threat was implied by that, I didn’t know. We stepped up from the last stair into a small, covered shelter, lanterns hanging from the corners of the roof and swinging in the sharp evening breeze. There were dozens more like it stretching away along the top of the wall, curving into the distance like that long room.
And even more mortals, too. Milling about, arriving and departing, ascending and descending other stairs into the wall, talking amongst themselves or standing alone; even beneath the wind, the noise was much greater up here. I could feel them all around us, almost like it had been in Vermiles; many of them noticed us too, of course.
But I wasn’t in Vermiles. They weren’t closing in around me, because they didn’t have any reason to. Nobody was hurt. Yet.
Deep breaths. Remember where you are and who you’re with. They listen to Marcel, right? It’ll be fine.
Of course, Marcel and the others couldn’t have known anything about that. They seemed as relieved to be in the open air again as I had been.
I turned my attention away from the mortals, the clear night beyond the wall, and finally my gaze settled inward. On the city itself.
Mesmerized, I started toward the sturdy fence running along the wall’s inner edge, and when nobody moved to stop me I went the rest of the distance, leaning against the railing and out as far as I could just to take it all in.
The river wasn’t kept all on one side of the wall, I realized. It was bisected. At the bottom of the vast stone cliff it kept flowing, sluggish, so slow it better resembled a very long, very narrow lake.
Bridges and ramps and glittering silver rails extended from the wall, arcing downward across the water to meet the other shore; and there were low houses, sloping streets, lamplight, people. They all flowed into the distance, upwards to the faraway centre of the city, and they dragged my gaze with them– to the skyline.
Everything got bigger and brighter and louder the further in it was. Dim one-storey houses on the waterfront were pulled from the ground into towers and spires, more bridges spanning between them above treetops and wide streets that never stopped moving, boiling with activity. Embraced by the wall stretching to enclose the sky, Solace was a jagged line melting into the indigo deep. As if the towering architectural knot of Home had been cobbled together with the frenetic energy and golden light of Vermiles, all of it sprawling so wide and so massive that I couldn’t even see the other side. The city becoming its own horizon.
“...Wow.”
Marcel cautiously laid a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back to the here and now, and even though I could’ve stared into the details for much, much longer, I tore my attention from the view after one last vertigo-stricken glance. As the rest of the group was hesitantly moving on, he gently tugged for me to follow, though he pulled his hand away apologetically when he saw the look I gave him.
“Come on. I don’t want to draw too much attention.”
I looked around at the small groups of mortals coming and going from the aeroports and the rails – coming and going from the heart of the city and its inescapable thrall – and saw many of their eyes fixed on us. One of them gave a small wave. “We already have their attention,” I pointed out.
“Yes, well, that’s mostly the usual kind,” he said, fiddling with the cuff of his very bright jacket. I realized my own was just as conspicuous. “The kind that comes with the job. Let’s just be on our way, please?”
I took another sweeping look out at the skyline before following his lead across the wall, to where the engineers were already speaking with another mortal manning one of the rail stations dotting the wall.
In no time six of us were settled into a small, rectangular cabin of a train, nestled on a rail arcing precariously across the water. Outside I watched a few others filing into other compartments attached to our own for a short while; then all the doors slid shut in unison, startlingly fast, and I felt a now familiar kind of rumble beneath my feet as the thing began to carry us into the city.
The wall and starlit wilderness beyond receded behind us as we passed over the inner river, picking up speed; and then we were over the willow-shaded waterfront and the sloping rows of low buildings, houses bright and dim, and the wide, busy streets and gardens woven between them. The further into the city we went the taller and more dramatic the buildings became until their peaks reached high above the rail, so we were practically level with the glittering windows and shaded balconies above the streets. I felt the heat of thousands out there.
Balancia across from me and Marcel to my right watched as I reached up to touch the intricate glass lamp illuminating the cabin, just to see what it was like– oddly lukewarm, actually. The engineers leaned into one another, looking like they were moments away from falling asleep, and Valerie just stared out at the city passing us by, his face blank.
Marcel looked at him for a while, his brow furrowed, before turning to me. “It’ll only be a couple more minutes. Adeline, stick close to me.” For now, I was more than happy to oblige. “...And Val, are you…?”
“I’ll join you. Not for long, I have other business to attend to,” Valerie said. I saw his eyes flick over in Balancia’s direction, in his reflection in the glass, but he didn’t so much as turn his head away from the view. “Captain, I’d like you to join us too. I’m aware you’ll need your rest, but I need a word.”
“Of course,” Balancia replied, maybe a bit too loudly. Marcel raised an eyebrow.
“This have anything to do with any new secret projects of yours, by any chance?”
“If it did,” Valerie said pointedly, “I wouldn’t be speaking about it here.”
“Fair enough. And you two–” The mortal engineers suddenly jolted awake, sitting up straight and glancing at each other awkwardly. I could swear I caught a smirk flash across Balancia’s otherwise stoic face. “Will you be stepping off with us here or heading on?”
“I know I’m going home,” said one, her voice thick and hoarse. “Victor?”
“Same here if it’s no trouble, sir,” said the other. “Gonna get settled back in. We’ll sweep the flagship and finish a full report by tomorrow, Lords willing, yeah?”
“Don’t spend too much time on it, I’m already well enough aware of everything that happened. Oh, here we are!”
As soon as the words left his mouth the city parted around us, revealing a vast courtyard below, ringed by low buildings and manicured trees, criss-crossed in geometric paths. At the far end everything seemed to converge around what must have been the city’s tallest spire, one I could see even from beyond the wall, spearing into the dark sky. Banners in crimson, gold and blue hung from the tower’s tapering floors between reliefs and tall windows, their designs indecipherable.
The train stopped at another platform, high above the street facing the complex; when the doors slid open Marcel, Valerie and Balancia stood in unison, and I quickly followed, out onto relatively-solid ground. Balancia and the engineers exchanged a few quiet words and claps on the shoulder before the doors shut and they pulled away along the rail again. Certainly… strange.
From our vantage above the street I could see the courtyard and the tower on one side, and a wide green boulevard stretching away into the distance directly opposite. We descended into the heat of the city among several other… commuters, stepping off the ramp into the bustling street and mostly losing the view; and then we entered the broad, quiet courtyard, and all the chaos once again began to fade behind us. The energy was calmer, more harmonious. It was… actually sort of nice.
It felt, too, like we were entering a confluence in the atmosphere. A knot in the ley lines, lending to the air a particular hum, fundamentally different from all the rest of the city. But it could just as easily have been noise messing with my head.
I couldn’t help but stare up at the tower as we approached along the main stonework trail through the courtyard, looming higher and higher above our heads. When we were close enough I couldn’t even make out the lights around its pinnacle anymore. “This place is extravagant,” I noted, under my breath. “And big.”
“The mortal government and the Court are both centred here, for the most part,” Marcel explained. “With various other systems key to keeping the continent afloat. We sort of go hand in hand. Some of these buildings are actually the oldest in the city, since…?”
“The first buildings were raised here eight centuries ago,” Valerie finished for him without breaking stride. “During reconstruction and consolidation. This way.”
“We’re not going to the tower?” I asked, as he turned towards one of the long buildings at the edge of the courtyard. Up until that exact moment, it had seemed obvious that it was the definition. Important-looking was perhaps an understatement.
“I’m sure some others are keen to meet you,” Marcel said, “but for now that can wait. There are a few things we should take care of first.”
I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed, but I wasn’t exactly ready to complain, either. Valerie held the front door open for us and we all entered the empty hall beyond. Then, more doors. More hallways. We passed lots of rooms, most empty, but some I could sense were occupied; what went on here, I couldn’t even imagine. They were more inscrutable than the natural order itself, which was probably saying something, scientifically speaking.
I got the sense that nobody wanted to break the silence. I was feeling myself getting anxious, my discomfort building, so I decided on a whim to break it myself. Walking up between them and swallowing the lump in my throat, I asked, “I’m not really sure about… timescale, here. Are you two that old? Eight hundred years, I mean?”
Marcel seemed happy to answer when Valerie didn’t. “Older, by a bit. You must know we’re remarkably difficult to get rid of; aren’t many of us, but we tend to stick around.” He paused, and then proceeded, gingerly, “...How old are you, actually, Adeline?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, honestly. But the question itself was strange enough. “River, um... she told me... how did you get here? Were you born here, or–”
Marcel started to say something before Valerie cut him off abruptly. “Would you please stop giving her anything she wants without a second thought?”
I felt like I was going to wither where I stood.
“She would have known all of this stuff already, Val,” said Marcel, exasperated. He caught sight of my face as I fell behind again and almost seemed to miss a step. “He’s a little paranoid,” he explained defensively. “And there’s a reason for that, but now is not exactly the place, nor the time.”
We stopped outside a heavy door, beyond which was yet another indiscernible room, but before continuing Valerie very sharply said, “No offense, but I, for one, will not be responsible for putting ourselves at any more unnecessary risk.”
I gathered enough courage to say, at least, my frustration clear, “That’s unfair. I agreed to come here because I didn’t know any of this, and I thought you could tell me, so...”
Deftly avoiding the conversation, Valerie took that moment to slide the doors open and the words in my mouth suddenly faded, my nervous, half-determined conviction pushed to the back of my mind.
It really was a library. An actual library, like I’d had at home; much more sparse and organized, to be sure, none of the rambling stretches of paper I had, but there were books. Rows upon rows and shelves upon shelves lit by the starlight streaming through the arched glass windows, bound in fresh materials and etched with titles and words I didn’t recognize, but just then that was the last thing I minded.
I slowly walked through the threshold and past the towering shelves as Marcel and Valerie followed behind me, oblivious to whatever they were doing, whatever hushed argument they were having that I couldn’t bring myself to care about. I ran a hand lightly along the colourful spines of a dozen books, as if they would disappear if I looked too hard. Some of them felt so new.
I didn’t know the words, but it was clear what they were. Records. Stories. Poems, dreams, anything at all. They weren’t quite everything I’d lost when I washed up on the shore, but to see them all right in front of me, to feel such an astounding wave of relief that there actually was something here I could read… it felt like a start. A good start.
“You and Val can wait here while Captain Balancia and I head upstairs and make arrangements for you to stay here,” said Marcel finally. “Peruse whatever you like here for now, but do stay here. Please. We’ll be back momentarily.”
“Right. Of course,” I said, barely listening. Then he and Balancia left, closing the door and plunging the library into twilight.
I slipped between the stacks, past dark corners and tables clearly made for reading, looking for any title I recognized; any word I recognized. There were none of the former, of course, and not many of the latter. Valerie followed me around for a while, obviously still tense, but he didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother him. At least, not anymore more than I already had, I thought, simply by existing. It was difficult to tell.
The disconnect between me and them wasn’t getting much easier. But after several days of contact I liked to think that I had at least some idea of where I stood with Marcel. He seemed tame, nearly bordering on friendly, occasionally, once I mentally got over that brief stint we’d had where he hunted me across the country. And shot at me with a harpoon. I knew what he was capable of when he was pushed. Valerie, not so much.
My impressions were possibly a bit scattershot, incomplete, to say the least. But I’d forgive myself for grasping, under the circumstances.
Eventually having exhausted a sizable chunk of the collection, I turned to where he’d been following me around – at a distance I wouldn’t quite call subtle – and asked, warily, “Is there anything here I would be able to actually… read?”
He seemed to consider whether to tell me for a long moment before, evidently, deciding that it couldn’t do any harm. “Well. You understand Lumil, and speak it fairly fluently, clearly. I presume you can read it too,” he said. “But nearly all of these volumes are in younger languages. I’m afraid you likely won’t find much.”
Not particularly helpful, not what I was fishing for, but alright. I kept paging through titles: E Prêmiè’ lí Òurós. Lí Sol’ Mêlos. Ilse-seli hâtiné-íse. Several times, I found a word I knew – Ílûmorà – but it was always stranded in seas of nonsense. Even as the languages grew more diverse the deeper I went, still, nothing.
Until I found it. A thinner tome laid flat on an otherwise empty shelf. It was bound differently than the books back home, just like all the others, but the grain of the cover and the yellowed pages… in any case, it must have been exceptionally old.
I picked it up gingerly, taking care not to damage it even in my excitement as I ran my fingers over the cracked spine of wood, wrapped in coarse fabric. “What’s this one?”
Confused, he looked closer to make out the title in the dim light before I opened it up, blowing the dust from pages filled with words in dark ink. “The Dominion of the Sun Queen,” I strained to read, turning to the first page. At the front were several pages, of… commentary? Lists of notes and names and numbers, painstakingly written in some kind of code. I flipped through them quickly before finding something better. A section marked as an untranslated manuscript.
“‘Once upon a time, long after the sky was split open and the universe freed’– uh… ‘freed from the tyranny of the bestial titans which once claimed to rule it’,” I read aloud, trying to parse the mythology, “...’there was a realm hung amongst the stars.’”
My gaze flicked down the page, and across to the next, digging through the words. I didn’t know what to think, when I realized how starved I’d been before for even a sliver of something resembling familiarity; it felt like a miracle that I’d found this. Valerie didn’t respond at all as I spoke, but when I glanced back, he was leaning in much closer than before, scanning the words over my shoulder.
“Do you know what it is?” I asked.
“I… didn’t know that was here,” he said. He was stone-faced as usual, but his aura definitely flickered. Like he was uncomfortable, all of a sudden. Well, I thought, now he can see how it feels. “It’s a complicated story.”
That prompted so many questions I had to filter them out to keep another headache at bay. What else wasn’t he letting on about this?
Even if he was listening now… why did he still seem so afraid that I was a threat?
“You should put that back,” he said before I could ask any of them. “It’s antique. And, perhaps, not the most moral reading for someone who’s only just awoken here.”
Then the doors were suddenly, loudly thrown open as Balancia pushed his way into the room, sweeping between the shelves for a few seconds before finding us and stopping abruptly in his tracks. “Valerie! Sir!”
We both squinted against the bright light from the hall now flooding into the library, having long since adjusted to the dark; Valerie’s hand, reaching out to the book I held, fell to his side. When he spoke, it was as subdued as before, but his voice had an edge to it. “What? Where’s Marcel?”
“Our… you and our guest are to convene with the rest of the Court at the upper hall,” Balancia said, doing a very admirable job of concealing the fact he had to catch his breath. “Mr. Marcel sent me down to get you.”
“I was… under the impression this meeting wasn’t happening until tomorrow,” said Valerie, relaxing a little, but clearly still perturbed. “To let us get settled, at the very least–”
“Yes, uh. Marcel and the others have decided it’s happening now. News has gotten around about your arrival – not the Peaceguard’s fault, I promise you, but I’m sure you know how it is – and, additionally, Senna has stated that if he doesn’t get to meet her as soon as possible he’s going to… well, I would prefer not to quote his exact words, but suffice to say, he feels very strongly about this, and he did call you, um, ‘a bastard of a bureaucratic relic,’” Balancia briskly recited. “Sir.”
“I am also still here,” I said.
I felt as though Valerie would have groaned, if that were something he was prone to doing. He rubbed the side of his face with one hand. We both waited for him to respond, the silence drawing out and hanging, until he finally said, “Alright.“
His back turned, he made to join Balancia, already motioning for me to do so as well. For… whatever this agonizingly nonspecific meeting was going to be. “Come on. Maybe it will be better for both of us to get this over with.”
“...Fine.”
I took one last look around the library, and then followed out the door. But I didn’t even think twice about it when I discreetly slipped the book into my jacket.
Previous: Interlude II | Next: Chapter 10
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