Icarus Descending

9 Message from the Country

I DID NOT SLEEP that night, nor did Jane. Several times I saw Giles walking wordlessly from room to room, carrying boxes and objects that trailed wires and cords behind him. He carried them all to the front hallway and left them piled there: every one of the inn’s monitors, video screens, telefiles, and magisters, and last of all the shortwave radio from the kitchen. When I passed the empty rooms, they looked blinded, with ragged holes where the monitors and telefiles had been yanked from the crumbling plaster walls. Afterward I did not see Giles again, although in the hollow hour before dawn I heard soft noises and followed them until I found their source, in the steps leading down to the cellar. A glimmer of light ran along the bottom of the closed doorway. I rested my hand on the wood and paused, listening. I expected to hear sobs, or perhaps Giles talking to himself; but there was only the sound of someone moving down there, as though Trevor still silently went about his work, gathering mushrooms.

Dawn found me alone on the front porch. The sun seemed to flush a certain expectancy from the green shadows of the trees, a quiet foreboding that grew deeper as heat seeped into all the hidden places of the world and the sky burned away from indigo to blue to white. By the time the roosters began crowing in the barn, the morning already seemed exhausted. The leaves curled limply on the oaks; the smell of honeysuckle was everywhere, thick enough that I could taste it in my throat, gritty with pollen and dust.

“Are you packed?”

I turned to see Jane framed in the doorway. She had traded her old clothes for loose cotton trousers and a man’s white shirt, and cut her brown hair so it curled raggedly around her face.

“I thought maybe I’d look different,” she said. No note of apology or even explanation in her voice, just a blank statement. Her brown eyes were smudged with lilac circles, and her mouth was drawn thin with exhaustion. “So the Aviators won’t recognize me, if they come. God, it’s hot. Do you think it’ll be like this in Cassandra?”

“I don’t know.” I sighed, shaking my head at Jane’s appearance. It would take more than a bad haircut to keep the Aviators at bay. “I’ll go gather my things.”

I went upstairs. My body acted as a faithful old servant, caring for a feckless master too dissipated to pay attention to such matters as going about the business of washing, changing my clothes, lying down on the bed for a few minutes’ rest, even ordering me to the kitchen, where I found Giles heating water in the little glass oven for tea.

“Cadence should be here in another hour or two,” he said. He had changed into a white robe and braided his hair with a white ribbon, like a Paphian going to a bed-warming. The Aviator’s gun was slung into a thin leather belt at his waist. I tried to keep my eyes from filling with tears, but he only said, “Please don’t worry about me, Wendy. I told you, Trevor and I had planned for this a long time ago.”

So I sat with him at the table and we drank tea together—a macabre breakfast, I thought, with Trevor’s corpse who knows where and Giles seemingly ready to enact some suicide pact. Even after Giles left, I waited, half-expecting Jane to join me. She never did, so finally I went back outside.

She was still there, sitting on the porch steps, her head bent forward to rest upon her knees. I sat beside her and we waited in silence, while the trees seemed to melt into shimmering puddles and the paint on the porch railings blistered. Once Giles brought out a cracked pitcher of water and stood by to make sure we drank it. After that I must have dozed off, because suddenly Jane was nudging me.

“Look.” Her voice cracked as she pointed to the west, where the road crept up a little hill in a thin red line. “This must be them.”

I heard a faint drumming sound. A plume of ruddy dust rose from the hilltop, and a plume of white smoke. It took a moment for me to see anything else within the haze. But then I could just make out a battered vehicle, rust-colored and with tattered solex awnings extending from either side. It careened down the road, weaving to avoid holes and boulders, the solex shields flapping like the wings of a great drunken heron.

“At least we’ll travel in style,” Jane said drily. She stood, shielding her eyes with her hands.

The vehicle rattled toward us, a big old caravan of the type used during the Fourth Ascension to relocate civilians from the broken lands. Holes gaped in its rusted sides beneath a long window that extended nearly its entire length. There were such long tears in the solex shields, it was a marvel it could still run at all. It must have had some trouble doing so, since it belched foul smoke from what I presumed was a backup engine before finally coming to rest in front of Seven Chimneys.

“Well,” I said, and moved next to Jane. I shivered despite the oppressive heat, and she put her arm around me. “I guess this is what happens next.”

Behind us Giles stepped onto the porch. “They’re here,” he said softly.

The caravan shuddered as the engines shut down. Figures moved inside, and I drew closer to Jane as I waited to see who would come out.

First was a woman who must be Trevor’s daughter, Cadence. Tall and white-haired, she moved languidly yet with purpose as she swung down from the caravan, a puff of dust rising around her feet as though she were about to burst into flame. She flapped the ends of her long skirt and squinted up at the porch.

“Giles,” she called, in Trevor’s low, drawling voice, and walked toward us. Behind her another figure appeared in the door of the caravan.

Jane gasped. “Jesus! What is that? ” I blanched and looked away.

“Hush,” whispered Giles. He stepped forward and put an arm around each of us, hugging us close. “It’s one of their people. A cacodemon. You’ve never seen one?’

“Christ, no,” Jane began, shuddering, but then Cadence was on the porch greeting us.

“Giles,” she said. They embraced, and for the moment I forgot the cacodemon. Because Cadence Mallory looked ancient—far older than her father; older than anyone I had ever seen in my life. Somehow I had expected her to have Trevor’s same bizarrely youthful look; but she did not.

You must understand, in the City of Trees youth and beauty were virtues above all else, and the rigors of life without trained surgeons meant that few people lived beyond their forty-odd years, even among the Curators. And at HEL I never saw an old person—the empaths were all as young as myself, and valued researchers were regenerated long before age could claim their minds or bodies.

But Cadence was not merely old by these standards. She seemed truly ancient, older even than her caravan, though that of course must be impossible. A thin, bony woman, tall as her father, with thick white hair circling her face in a silver nimbus. Her skin was pale but thumbed with dark blotches, as though she had spent much of her life unprotected beneath the sun, and lined and cracked as an old canvas. But it was a fine-boned face for all that: high, rounded cheekbones, strong chin, broad forehead, a sharp, high-bridged nose. Only her mouth and eyes didn’t seem to fit—the mouth too wide, with thin dry lips stretched over those white, white teeth. And her eyes! I suddenly thought how much Trevor had given up for his grasp at immortality, to have lost his eyes for all those years. Hers were round and the richest deepest blue, like wild irises, and clear as well water. She blinked in the sunlight, and I could see at the outer corner of each eye several small straight lines: tiny white scars where she had had cataracts removed, more than once, probably—another tithe given to age and the sun. Over her skirt she wore a simple loose blouse of pale green, patterned with yellow leaves, and ugly black rubber sandals. It wasn’t until she turned from hugging Giles that I saw she had only one hand. The other was gone at the wrist, the stump knotted and badly scarred. That shocked me nearly as much as her age. I had thought the town of Cassandra must be more sophisticated than that, and have access to skilled surgeons and prosthetics. What kind of rebellion could they be planning, if their work was as crude as this?

“Which one’s the empath?”

Her gaze flicked from myself to Jane and then to me again. Before I could answer, she pursed her lips shrewdly. “Ah: this one. I can see it in your eyes. So you caused all that trouble back in the City. You’re older than I thought you’d be.”

“So are you,” Jane said, then blushed. But Cadence only gave a sharp barking laugh.

“Well! This one speaks her mind, and the other one reads them.” She turned to Giles. “Where is my father?” she asked in a softer voice.

Without a word, Giles put his arm over her shoulder and led her inside.

“Damn,” Jane muttered, and quickly turned back to look at the caravan. “What are we supposed to do with that? ”

The other figure still leaned against the side of the vehicle, staring at us impassively with its arms crossed and hands tucked inside its sleeves. It might have been a woman, uncommonly slender and clad in a hooded blue tunic that hung to its ankles, except for the face. A ghoul’s face, skeletally thin, its nose two tiny depressions above a slit of a mouth, with several long white fleshy tendrils growing from its lips like the whiskers of a catfish. It had enormous sunken eyes that took up nearly the entire upper half of its skull, and no hair that I could see.

“What’s the—what happened? Why does he look like that?” I whispered.

“Cacodemon,” Jane said beneath her breath. “I’ve read about them—they breed them for war with the Emirate. Those tubes by its mouth—it feeds and drinks through those, so it doesn’t choke on sand or dust in the desert.”

“Is it—can it talk?”

Jane rubbed her arms. “Not like us. Like this—” She ran her fingers across my wrist. “By touching. They spit poison, too.”

I tipped my head, squinting in the brilliant sunlight and trying vainly to seem as though I weren’t staring at it. A moment later I heard footsteps behind us, and turned to see Giles and Cadence in the hallway. Giles was pointing to the things gathered there, the heaps of monitors and ’filing equipment.

“—all of it,” he said, and Cadence replied, “Thank you. You’re sure you can manage the rest by yourself?”

“Of course.”

For another few minutes they stood beside the equipment, talking in hushed tones. Giles looked worried, almost frightened, and I tried to hear what they were saying.

“…says there will be room for all of us. For you, certainly.”

“It is coming, then?” Giles’s voice sounded anguished.

“Oh, yes,” replied Cadence, and she lay her one good hand upon his shoulder and squeezed it. “My dearest Giles: it is practically here.”

Then they turned and walked outside. Giles stopped beside me, but Cadence continued on to the truck, where she bowed her head to speak to the blue-clad figure there. Jane stared at them with slitted eyes. Finally she turned to Giles.

“Is that thing coming with us? Because if it is, I’m not going.”

Giles smiled, a tight smile that made me think of Trevor. “You have to go, Jane. There’s no place for you here now—no place for any of us. He’s part of the Alliance—”

“Well, I’m not part of your goddamned Alliance!” Jane began, but then turned at a soft tread behind us.

“You are now,” said Cadence. She stood with the cacodemon beside her, her one good hand resting on the handle of a sonic gun at her hip. “Please help us load these things into the caravan.”

Jane swallowed and gave me a hopeless look. Without another word we began carrying the monitors and telefiles from the porch and shoving them into the back of the van. The cacodemon worked with us, helping me to lift a magister. It was surprisingly strong for such a slender creature, with extraordinarily long white hands that ended in five tapering fingers with flattened, spatulate tips. Once its hand brushed mine and I jumped, thinking of Jane’s warning. Its touch was cool and dry, like the skin of a glass lizard; but there was also something disturbingly alive about it. When we had pushed the magister into the truck, it looked at me with those enormous eyes, the iris mottled brown and yellow. Its gaze was disturbingly oblique, as though like an infant it could not focus well on things. Later I learned that the cacodemons have superb night vision, but in daytime they are like owls and are easily confused by bright light. The narrow slit of its mouth flapped open and it hissed at me.

“ Suniata. ”

Its breath smelled sweetly of catmint. Before I could move away, it had taken my sweating hand between its own, rubbing it gently. It was like being stroked with a piece of soft, fine leather. Its fingers darted up and down my own, and suddenly I was flooded with a sense of calm, as though I had known and trusted this creature my entire life. “Suniata,” it repeated; and I understood that this was its name, but also a word for the way it was making me feel. Suniata: Peace.

“We’re ready.”

Cadence’s voice roused me. Shyly I drew my hand from the cacodemon’s. As I did so, the sense of well-being drained from me. I was gazing into a huge pair of eyes in a skull-like face, while all around me the noon sun gave things a lifeless cast. Suniata turned away and with a cat’s grace jumped into the van, pushing boxes from its path. Cadence clambered after it.

I looked back at the house, blinking painfully. Giles stood on the steps with his hands at his sides, coiling and uncoiling a loop of wire. He still wore the Aviator’s weapon, and his hair had been loosed, to fall in silvery waves about his face and shoulders.

“Good-bye, Wendy. Good-bye, Jane,” he called softly.

Jane stood half-in and half-out the door of the van. When she heard Giles, she made a small gasping sound, then abruptly jumped down and ran back to hug him. The drone of the caravan’s engines blotted out what they were saying, and a minute later she scrambled in beside me.

“He said they would see us again,” she said miserably, squatting on a metal box and staring out the open window to where Giles had turned and begun to slowly walk inside. “And I guess they will, if we all die soon enough.”

There was a dull roar. Smoke and dust rose in a wall and momentarily blotted out the house. In a spray of brick-colored gravel the caravan lurched forward. I leaned out the window, coughing as I struggled for a last look at Seven Chimneys. It was not until we reached the top of the little hill that the dust fell away behind us, and for an instant I glimpsed the inn as we had first seen it, perfectly drawn against the trees now in full leaf, the blinding sun bleaching the surrounding earth and grass as pale as snow. The van listed dangerously as we made the turn, and I craned my neck, waving, half-expecting to hear the explosive retort of the Aviator’s gun. But there was nothing, just the muted drone of the caravan’s engines and the hooting of doves driven from the trees by our passing.

Neither Cadence nor Suniata spoke as we traveled. Cadence I thought must be grief-stricken for her father, but in truth the harsh lines of her face made her seem utterly resigned to whatever cruelties the world might toss at her, even Trevor’s death. I didn’t know if Suniata could say anything more than his name, and I wasn’t prepared then to find out. I was too exhausted to think about what lay ahead of us; whether we were rebels now or captives. I thought of Miss Scarlet and Fossa, and tried to keep from weeping. War, Miss Scarlet had said; but it was hard to imagine war, or even people, in that lonely country. I used my fatigue to keep from focusing on anything. I was afraid I might go mad and kill myself like Giles, if I let myself think about what I had done through my recklessness.

Before we had driven more than a few miles, Cadence had pulled on a hooded blue tunic like Suniata’s, and tossed two more back to Jane and me.

“The sun,” she explained. It was the last thing she would say to us for several hours. I shrugged into mine and pulled the hood over my head. The light cotton felt like the heaviest wool in that unbearable heat, but there seemed no help for it—there were not as many trees out here to protect us from the poisonous light.

For a little while I stood by the open window, hoping the wind might cool me, but soon I gave that up and squatted on the hot metal floor. In one back corner the cacodemon had settled among the monitors and cables, its hood flung over its face, so I imagined it was sleeping. Jane crouched across from it, already asleep, her hands curled into fists upon her knees. Cadence was intent on the narrow rutted road. It was like navigating a tiny canoe through one series of rapids after another. The van bounced over rocks and places where the road had been washed away, scraped against the sides of trees, and ground down saplings as though they were tall grass. Branches tore at the solex shields, and once an entire panel was ripped away, to hang like a great black caterpillar’s tent from the limb of a withered pine. Cadence didn’t stop, or even look back. Nor would she answer my questions when I asked her where we were, or who maintained the road (such as they did). From the sun I guessed we were somewhere west and south of Seven Chimneys and the City of Trees. From a few tire tracks in the dried mud, and a single empty canister tossed in a stand of sumac—the sigil of the NASNA Aviators faded on its side beneath the word CONTAMINANT in livid orange letters—I guessed this was a road used mostly by Ascendant janissaries, and perhaps those few traders who came east from the mountains.

So we drove on, mile after mile, the mingled smells of dust and honeysuckle making my mouth dry and sweet as candy ash. Cadence drove without speaking or even seeming to move, except for the light touch of her single hand upon the wheel. Once or twice I heard the crack of a candicaine pipette being opened and inhaled; then the caravan would speed up for a little while, careening perilously over fallen trees and through shallow streambeds. When the road widened and we drove clear of the foothills for a few miles, Cadence activated a DVI program. In a flat drawl she read off a list of coordinates, waited for the blinking code that told her the caravan had registered her vocal commands. Then she leaned back, pulled the hood from her white hair, and shook her head, resting the stump of her wrist on the open window and gazing out at the heat-glazed hills in the distance.

Hundreds of years ago this had all been farmland. But because of its proximity to the nation’s ancient capital, the countryside had very early on fallen to chemical and viral rains that burned the green fields and lush stands of trees, leaving barren, poisoned soil to bake beneath a poisonous sun.

Eventually the trees returned: twisted, blackened things that clawed from the earth like so many grasping hands. Dull-green spines covered them, and waxy leaves pitted and wrinkled as a toad’s skin, their thickened surface a protection against the sun’s killing rays. When the truck scraped against them, they released pungent scents of pine or creosote, and bled a resin that hardened into rusty-looking scabs that gave the trees an even more wounded appearance. It was a vicious landscape, the worse to look upon in that glaring light. Soft brick-colored dust covered everything, settling into the folds of my coverall and getting into my mouth and nostrils, so that my tongue swelled and it choked me to swallow.

Outside nothing moved. There were no birds, no squirrels or darting lizards; not even any insects save bloated wasps the size of my thumb. Iridescent green and black, with huge, evil yellow eyes, their slender wings spanned half the length of my hand. When one flew into the cab, I could see its stinger like a black thorn protruding from its abdomen. I scuttled across the floor, pulling my hood about my face; but it was already gone, buzzing like a fouga’s engines as it flashed out the window.

When I peered after it, I saw for the first time we had been driving up a steep incline. Behind us I could see where the road wound down a craggy fell, sometimes cutting back on itself when it reached a spot where rocks had fallen to block the way, or where an ancient bridge had rusted and collapsed into a wide and fast-running stream. It was like one of those living maps we had played with at HEL: the nearly barren hillside, and then the blasted plain with its crippled trees, and in the nether distance a haze like greenish smoke, obscuring where I imagined Seven Chimneys stood and, far beyond, the City of Trees.

Suddenly the van swerved around a sharp curve. I fell forward, banging against the edge of the window and cutting my chin on its metal cusp. Blood trickled between my fingers. Before I could even cry out, the caravan cleared the turn, shuddering to a stop; and the world changed.

It was as though the zealous hand of Miss Scarlet’s beloved Goddess had swiped across the earth, tossing away dust and rocks and thorns, all the detritus that remained of an earlier, grosser attempt at creating a world. We were atop a hill, higher than I had ever been in my life. On the horizon immense blue thunderheads rose in dizzying tiers. A steady wind lapped against my face, and for a moment I closed my eyes, forgetting the throbbing pain in my chin. When I opened them, I saw that Jane and Suniata had both awakened. The cacodemon stood and silently walked to the front of the cab, where it crouched beside Cadence. Jane rubbed her eyes and yawned.

“Where are we?” she asked groggily. I pointed outside.

A few feet from the caravan the red clay road ended, sheared off as cleanly as though it had been sliced away with a granite knife. Instead of that infernal plain of thorns, we gazed down into a valley dappled with birch and willows that hugged the banks of a rocky stream. For a moment I could only stare straight down, stunned, trying to figure out what had happened to the rest of the world. Then I slowly drew my head up, looking for the storm clouds brooding on the horizon.

They were gone. They had never been there at all. What I had taken to be clouds were not clouds, but mountains. Huger than anything I could have imagined, stretching in a long line from north to south, they blotted out everything except for their own ranks, until the distance swallowed them in a powder of purple and green. I had only ever glimpsed mountains in cinemafiles or on the yellowing reels of film kept by the Curators for occasional entertainments, but there was no mistaking them now.

“Mountains,” I breathed. When I tore my gaze away, I saw Cadence standing by the open door, staring out with gas-blue eyes.

“That’s right,” she said softly. Her drawl had deepened, and for the first time she looked at me and smiled. “I always stop here. Even in the middle of winter, when I never know if I can get started again.” She pointed outside, cradling the stump of her hand against her breast. “We’re in the Blue Ridge Mountains now—that’s what you see there. And somewhere out there” —she tilted her head to indicate north and east—“that’s where you’ll find your City. If you travel a few days due west, you come to the Appalachians. But I never have done that except once. If there’s anyplace on earth more beautiful than the Blue Ridge, I’m too old to see it now.”

Jane’s voice wafted from the back of the van like a ghost’s. “How old are you?”

Cadence stared at her. Then unexpectedly she laughed, tossing her head so that the hood slipped from her mane of white hair. “You’re not going to rest till I tell you, are you? Ninety-two—”

Jane’s eyes widened. Cadence cut her off before she could ask another question. “But I had a few of my father’s mushrooms to help me through the rough spots.” Abruptly she turned away and sat down. A moment later the caravan was hurtling on once more.

Jane stumbled to her feet. The cacodemon looked at her, then at me. He blinked, his tiny mouth twisting in an incomprehensible grimace—smile? frown? wonderment? He raised one hand and opened it slowly, his fingers uncurling like the long pale fronds of a lily. I stared at it, then lifted my hand and did the same. Suniata regarded me with round guileless eyes, then nodded once, as though completing some ritual, and turned away.

I turned back to gazing out the window. In front of us the nearest of the mountains seemed to kneel. Its outcroppings formed a sheltered valley girded by a river and checkered with pale green and yellow squares.

Fields! I thought in amazement. They really were growing things here; they really had escaped the viral rains and lived to reclaim the wilderness. There was a dappled mirror that might have been a lake, and above it, in the throat of the mountains, a deep emerald hollow like the shadow of a cloud. Cadence’s voice called out over the drone of the engines.

“That’s Cassandra, there—”

She pointed at the shadow, her hand stabbing repeatedly at the air as though to pin the image there for us to see. “That’s where we all live now.” She bent back over the wheel, her blue hood falling over her shoulders.

Where we all live…

For some reason my mind seized those words, as though they held some secret, a message from the country: something that had to do more with green trees and stone than with blood and memory. Something that might show me how the deaths of Justice and Trevor and all those others, how the fall of the City of Trees and even the Mad Aviator’s resurrection, could make sense. There were green places left that the Ascendants had not yet poisoned. There were demons, too; but the only one that I had met was named Peace. For the first time since we had fled the City, I felt something besides grief and despair and rage; for the first time I felt hope, like a small flame licking at my heart.

The van made another sharp turn. The red road dropped away before us, and Cadence’s voice rang out as we swept down the hillside.

“This is where it all begins again!” she cried. Beside her Suniata stood with one hand upon Cadence’s shoulder.

“ This is where it all begins, ” I echoed, flinging my head back to stare into the burning sky; but if she or Jane or Suniata heard me, I never knew.