A brush of orange peel colored the southern peaks of the Usurper's Palace and, in its hurry, ran down into the residential quarters, where the fading chill of the night mist still rested on the spires. Reflecting in the open windows and filling the arched vaults, it jumped from the signs to the tin pipes and flags of the big market. As if tasting other colors and shades, it refracted in the mosaics of the Old Quarter and finally reached the back courtyards of the lower tier, falling in sparse drops on a corpse lying in the Alley of the Blind.
"Why should we be the ones to clean up the dead?" the fat guard frowned. "It's not our turn today."
His tall, thin colleague made no sign that he had heard his companion. He continued to study the sheet taken from the dead man's hands and muttered to himself:
"This is a page from a prohibited book..."
"From a book?" the fat man said in surprise, rising on his toes to look into the hands of his taller colleague.
"Will enslaving potion," read the tall guard.
"It's all written in weird heretical squiggles."
"Dummy, there's a pencil translation in the margin."
"Oh, I don't like where this is going, Ruchi," the fat man closed his eyes, "Heart forbid if anyone finds out you had that stuff in your hands."
"That's why we have to get rid of him quickly," nodded the tall one. "Grab his legs, Blop, let's carry him to the canal."
Rare drops of light overtook the guards, reaching the once red door at the corner of the canal and the Alley of the Blind and dropping into a room that looked more like a mechanic's warehouse. The rays stained the dust soaring over the old wooden bed, bounced off the copper pipe, and landed in the visor of a doll hanging on an old hook by the door. Like a flicker it ran through the hangers and buckles of the work belts, staining the steel springs. It wandered briefly through several glass flasks and found itself right in the eye of the Magister, junior technician Wolfie.
Galahad Wolfie, a legend among the whole Magistrate, sat down on the bed. He yawned widely with his toothless mouth and raked his hand across the bald head that stretched from his large, wrinkled forehead to the top of his head, framed by a gray pile of hair. His eyes, half-closed with heavy lids, swept the room and caught his reflection in the bulky flask that swelled up on the desk. The Magister immediately made a face at himself.
"Gooth mornin!" he mumbled and glanced at the doll hanging on the wall, but it said nothing.
Galahad determinately shook off the drowsiness, stirred up the frozen dust, grunted, and rolled off the bed onto the wooden floor. Then he sat up a few times and stretched his arm and leg muscles, yawning long and hard.
Outside the window, there was a rustling sound and the smell of spices, but Wolfie had already slammed the door and creaked the steps as he descended the frail wooden stairs to the ground floor, which sagged even under his old man's weight. The water in the small bathroom rattled against the metal trough. "Hmm. Tell me, dear Magister Wolfie, how many heads has Samarius chopped off?" he asked in an acerbic voice, fixing his barely-inserted jaw and heading for the kitchen. "Two thousand and forty-two... I can say it again to you. Two thousand and forty-two," he answered himself gloomily in a sad tone as he put yesterday's porridge on the cooker. "Remind me, how many junior technicians were there?" the acerbic voice clarified again, turning on the gas heater that instantly heated the cast-iron pot. "None," sadly stated the sad one, scooping up the porridge and pouring it onto his plate. "What about the senior technicians?" "Five." "And the superintendents?" "Twelve." "And the foremen?"
"I'm sleepy," the Magister put in unexpectedly, sitting down at the metal table.
"Don't interrupt!" the acerbic one became angry, scooping up his porridge. "Seventy-one," continued the sad one, blowing on his spoon. "Dear Galahad, you do have an innate ability for counting and an excellent memory for dead people!" laughed the Magister and shoved the spoon into his mouth.
Feeling nauseous, he squeezed his eyes shut, made an effort, and forced himself to swallow the porridge. Taking the spoon out of his mouth, he grimaced, placed it on the edge of the plate, and continued the arguing.
"Yes, I'm fine as I am. Innate ability, good position, respect, honor." "Like Alfie." "Alfie would never have let himself rot in that hole." "Well, Alfie's the one who's unlucky, but you're lucky." "He's alive and you're not." "No, you're alive and he ain't." "And that's life?" "What do you think life is, then?"
"How about you all shut up!" the Magister tapped his spoon angrily and lowered his eyes to the cracked plate.
The morning light, rare in these places, was now irretrievably gone, and dusk was once again gathering on the small canal embankments; only somewhere above on the upper tiers was the distant glow of the blazing sun, drying with the laundry on cobwebbed ropes and electric wires. Drawn by the impunity of the half-darkness, two of the city's guards emerged from the narrow Alley of the Blind and dragged the lifeless body past the doors that competed in invisibility. They paused beside a pile of garbage, took a breath, and clumsily pushed their burden into the water, shoving it over the small step that separated the stone sidewalk from the running stream.
The taller one squatted down, leaned on his gun, swore, and said to the dark water:
"Heavy bastard."
"Sometimes I think we're bugs, you know, the ones that... collect shit," the fatter one replied, looking up at the upper floors, exposing their sewer pipes, which, overhanging and puffing with valves, threatened to crush the embankment. The tall one spat into the dark water.
"They build houses out of it, you fool, and our business is to get rid of it."
"The moons alone know how this runoff ends, so we may well reinforce the foundations of the market with our actions," retorted the fat man, pleased with himself.
"You're an idiot, Blop."
"No, my dear Ruchi, I'm a romantic," he looked at his helmet on his hand and, pouting his full lips, he continued with inspiration, "I want to turn all of our... everyday life... into a celebration, at least a little bit. Which I do as far as I can."
On the opposite side of the garbage pile, in the sawdust near the carver's house, there was a gurgling sound and the clatter of receding wooden shoes. The tall guard, obeying instinct, stood up abruptly and looked closely. The fat man looked out from behind him:
"Alive?"
"Of course, not," the tall one jerked his shoulder irritably, "It's a fisherman. Took off like greased lightning. I know his wife; she sells all sorts of stuff from the upper tiers here at the market."
"'The catch from the higher-ups'... Now I see where she gets it from," he walked over to an old canvas bag on the other side of the pile and lifted it up."Look."
Underneath it was a crumpled silver ewer.
"Quite old," the eyes of the fat man who immediately appeared next to him glittered.
"Yes, but if we don't take it to the blacksmith, they'll only give it to us by weight," the tall man answered absently, still staring into the alley where the fisherman's shadow had disappeared, and after a pause, he summed it up: "We should definitely have a word with this fellow."
"What for?" Blop wondered.
Ruchi scornfully and pityingly looked at the fat man.
"What did you call yourself again? Romantic? No, Blop, you're just a fool."
And with these words, the tall one hooked the thin handle of the ewer on the barrel of the gun and moved into the alley.
"Why the fool? Ruch, I don't understand you. Wait!"
The fat man hurried after him. There was an echo of their argument for a long time, drowned in the noise of the market and the howling of the pipes. A mouse, which had barely crawled out onto the sidewalk and had been hiding in a holey boot next to the garbage pile, listened intently, twitching its whiskers.
The stray folds of fog floated by, and a paper ship hiding in them, made up of the debts of a mother of two children whose home was upstream.
That's when the red door at the corner of the embankment and the Alley of the Blind opened and creaked, arguing with the howls of a drawling male baritone that had wandered in from somewhere on the upper floors of the Magistrate's dormitory, rising to the very top tiers. And very few people in the Magistrate remembered that its moisture-fed roots were here, in the half-sleeping darkness of the canal.
A bird, rare in these parts, quacked, and the Magister, junior technician Galahad Wolfie, in a long gray raincoat with a hood and a canvas backpack on his back, struggled out of the spare parts-filled room where he lived, and carefully closed the door behind him. "It's dark and damp and nasty, and you forgot your knee ointment," he muttered to himself. "Give me a break, you'd better find me the key to the lock," the acerbic voice in his head asked tiredly.
He patted his pockets like a bird with wings and started to take off his backpack, but stumbled on a small staircase and hit the door with the wooden head of the doll with a metal visor sticking out of the backpack. Reaching into a side pocket, he pulled out a key, as well as a sturdy puzzle lock, and hung it on the door.
From around the corner, the messengers with fresh pastries whirled and frightened the old man, and with the crackle, rustle, and creak of ever-unlubricated propellers, flew cheerfully over the wooden bridge across the embankment and disappeared around the corner of the canal.
Wolfie exhaled, giving them a look full of sympathy and irritation.
"What an idiot lets them through the canal..."
Another passage of squeaky inner voice was interrupted by a drop that fell on the Magister's nose, barely sticking out from under the hood. The Magister looked up at the damp pipes of the second floor, hanging over his head, which smelled of swamp and moss. Wolfie rubbed his nose with his sleeve, mentally wishing the Magistrate's sewer service good health. Another drop of water separated from the pipe and fell into the dark puddle, where Galahad's foot immediately trod as he hurried past the garbage pile along the embankment toward the loading sector, in time with the baritone that continued to howl languidly somewhere in the air.
Galahad was at that advanced age when the vivacity of his body had not yet left him but made him extremely careful with his exertion. The smooth stones of the pavement, as if they were fished from the sea, still sang their simple rhythms under the wooden soles of Magister Wolfie, just as they had sung so many years before. Still, he picked up a long stick at the carver's house, even if it reminded him of his age. With it, Galahad could walk back and forth along the embankment without difficulty, as his inner voice gently whispered, even with his eyes closed and without slipping once.
Gliding under bridges and arches, Wolfie listened to the noise of the market. A stranger wouldn't have noticed, but something was different in the familiar crisp boil of human voices swearing at each other over thousands of the most important trifles. To the usual cacophony was added some tinkling flavor, almost indistinguishable in this monstrous opera, which only echoed to the back of the canal. Ducking under the Steam Bridge, Galahad saw a group of guards climbing the sooty stairs from the side of the pedestrian zone, where the Magister was frozen.
"Damn Culties, why do we have to do all the dirty work for them? Huh, Captain? I didn't sign up for this," hissed someone's broken, shrill voice.
"Shut up, you punk. Watch your mouth, got it?" the harsh bass voice answered.
Every morning the corpses of those who had not survived the night were thrown into the canal. But usually, it was done by the villagers themselves. The Magister recognized the tension in the air: preparations for another feast were underway. The whistling and rumbling of the locomotive drowned out the voices of the guards, and Wolfie, careful to look out and make sure they were gone, hurried on down the canal to the target already in sight beyond the lock.
In the dim light that filtered in from the Old Quarter, reflected over and over in the stained-glass windows and mosaics, and in every possible shade from emerald to purple, two small birds were playing. Wolfie recognized them as owlies, the city's dependents, who lived in the City in great numbers. They tossed a piece of bread to each other, performing some kind of bird ritual of their own because one would suddenly start chasing the other, but then the other would easily give her the booty and, conversely, chase after the first herself. They circled between the dilapidated metal pilings of the Upper Gates, the upward-spanning flights of stairs around the elevator shaft that led from the canal to the upper tier.
The elevator was built during the Second Renaissance, at the very end of the embankment, where the canal went under the buildings, descending into a giant rusty pipe burrowed deep into the Great Wall. Rays of color illuminated all the splendor of this monument to human thought, along with the obvious impotence of its preservation: they mingled with each other, shimmered, and let the water and metal enjoy the light one last time before disappearing forever into the inexorable darkness of the pipe.
The birds and the rays carried the Magister so far that he nearly fell into the elevator shaft. Wolfie managed to grab the edge of the opening, but the stick flew down, knocking against invisible obstacles in the darkness.
"There you go, an old fool with his eyes closed..." he said aloud to the hushed inner voice.
The shaft descended to the technical floors and ascended to the floor of Sector 77, where the small observatory of the Amun University was located. It was hugged by a rotten and sadly hanging, noodle-like metal staircase. It could be used, if one wished, but not down here, where the steps had long since succumbed to time. There used to be a real electric elevator, but like almost everything made during the Second Renaissance, it was out of order and quickly scrapped. Only the chains remained, long rusted and unreliable, but still good enough to carry one old magister.
Wolfie knew the engine upstairs was still running. He jerked the big chain, and it echoed with a tinkling sound. The old man put his foot on one of the links, slipped his hand up to his elbow on the other link, and with his free hand fumbled for the small chain next to it and yanked. Something rumbled from far above, and the alarmed owlies, which had stopped their game, flapped their wings and squealed. Then there was a rumbling noise below, raising the heart dust that had accumulated around it, and one of the birds darted toward the light, into the Old Quarter, and the great chain twitched and crawled upward, taking the Magister with it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement in the darkness of a large pipe, and in the next second a shadow split from it, and the faltering bird vanished into the darkness that engulfed it. A chill ran down the Magister's back. His heart raced:
"It's just the age. Getting old. You imagined it."
"It wasn't an imagination," the voices in the Magister's head screamed. "Don't think about it. After all, the pipe must have something to eat as well."
Full of indecipherable anxiety, he gripped the chain tighter around him as it slowly lifted him floor by floor. "The things you have to do! And they want you to go all fifty-two flights of stairs on those ancient legs?" the voice changed the subject of concern. "They could at least put you in the empty observatory, away from these horrors," another one interjected. "Then it will be too close to where Alfred worked, a bad sign." "Your shoes will soon fall apart, and you won't have anything to walk in," grumbled the third one. "You'll crash," the grim one raised his head again.
But they all fell silent when the first roofs of the houses appeared, and behind them the City began to be seen, gleaming, almost white in eyes not yet accustomed to the light. Flags and statues, glittering palaces and temples, the head-turning architecture of excess, the fine art of the best craftsmen, designed to amaze the imagination. The heart-powered flying ships, balloons, and blimps with tails of colorful ribbons, scurried between columns, bridges, and buildings. With each floor, the panorama opened wider and wider, and Wolfie could not take his eyes off it, as if for the first time he had seen this picture before him.
The shaft rose to the middle tier, where the color of the City — the wealthy merchants, the aristocracy, and the distant relatives of the ruling houses — lived. Children of the eternal sun who did not know the darkness of the lower tier. The chain lifted him past gondolas and promenade craft floating in the air, flocks of aerial scooters flying among them. Huge barges carried entertainment facilities and, at times, small buildings on gravity-gripping cushions. Together with the rooftops of the Old Quarter and the wondrous gardens that sprawled over them, they formed an entire district that surrounded the lower west gate of the Usurper's Palace. People walked through it, dressed in the latest fashions, so happy, laughing, beautiful, knowing everything in this life and not having, not looking for troubles. So... different.
The air was filled with the maddening scent of flowers, and he could hear birds singing in all colors and shades. The Magister even lost sight of the crude metal structures of the old elevator shaft that separated him from this wondrous world.
A shadow crept over the gardens and bridges where people were strolling leisurely. Wolfie threw up his head so that his hood slid back, and to the sound of shouts, he saw a huge, smoking black dragon flying toward the Palace, covered in wreaths and pipes and armor of black-painted metal. It made a great circle over the passersby, frozen in fright and amazement, and, scraping its claws against the stone slabs, it landed on a large platform on the roof of the former Parliament building. Catching its balance, this amazing and frightening engineering feat stood still, studying the frozen crowd. Then smoke billowed from the pipes, the monster's eyes glowed red, illuminating the black clouds floating in all directions, and the creature straightened, thrusting its chest forward, from which an elaborate metal ladder swung out and down onto the stone roof. The people around it bent their knees.
In the ensuing silence, a figure in dark armor emerged from the depths of the dragon. The Usurper had no helmet on his head, his brown curls flowing over his shoulders. He descended the stairs, leaning one hand on his famous sword, which raised the hem of his cloak of the same dark cloth embroidered with gold as his armor. He raised his hand in greeting, and the crowd gasped, and some of the more impressionable fell to their knees. The Usurper lowered his hand and headed for the ivy-covered café table at the edge of the roof. He was said to be handsome, but Wolfie could not appreciate the ruler from this distance, and he had never seen him closer.
The trumpets rumbled. It was the escort ship, and from the gondola that emerged from somewhere behind the Magister's head, the gibberish man's voice began to read out all the ranks, titles, and merits of the ruler. The Usurper raised his hand again, and the gibberish man, coughing, fell silent. "Amazing morning," said the voice in the Magister's head. And Wolfie agreed with it.