A Time for Renaissance: Part One

A Time for Renaissance

I

              The air snapped, hissing. I looked up. Nine broad streaks of flame streamed like tears across the sky, slightly arching as they followed this world Thaeron’s spin, trailing billowing smoke behind. They lit my city Kasora as though night had not yet fallen. Their light turned even the High Temple of the History of the Profusion orange and red, the edges of its jade garrets black in shadow. The fire-trails grew rapidly, distending toward the earth; at the tip of each burned a glowing something. The smell of sulfur spread. Hot wind struck me. I tasted ash and charred rock. 

 

              I suspected meteors. I hurried to see where they might hit. The walls enclosing Kasora atop its cliffs offer a legendary view. That’s why I was there. However skeletal, however withered, however thin of lip, I like to wander beyond the Temple grounds at night. The valley three hundred meters below smells magnificent in summer, a glistening gash in ice and stone full of hyacinth and orchid, rice and soybean. And the River Kasora falling from four thousand meters above quite defies description. It roils away there a kilometer to the east at the head of the valley, its water turning to mist far more beautifully than my people’s faith evaporates.  

 

              But you do not want a sermon. Forgive me, we Historians do have vices, sacred scholars though we be. My opponents would say I have far worse traits than verbosity. But I do stray.

              I took up the oculars I carried on a necklace hooked around my neck. Soon enough, they showed me what shot down to us from the stars. And that the spheres that fell were no meteors. Nor were they ships, and they certainly were not men.

 

              They might have been gods, come again to earth. Descending, they tore the star-scattered sky, struck by atmosphere like torches in the dark. When they hit the mountains they split the cliffs. They cracked the grayish mountains overhead with a roar that shook Kasora’s buildings. Rejoice, you rocks, for the world needs gods. 

 

              And what could I do to welcome them, for all my eighty years? What can Salaan of Kasora, the High Historian over all the world, do but chronicle this incarnation? Gods intimidate. They frighten; that is what gods do. As they fell from their impact one could see they had exploded the cliffs with their bare and simple bodies.

              Fool that I am, when they hit the valley floor below I thought they were quite dead.

              But they were winged things, unfolding from their craters like flowers from the earth. Their skin still burned, they glowed like embers. They stood at the bottom of the scars, some thousands of meters long, that they had burrowed in the cliffs. One of them held out a hand.

              They looked small enough hundreds of meters below.  From on high, even gods look mortal, though they shone brilliantly and finely, like delicate insects. I counted nine of them. The one extending a hand held out a small cylinder.

              The night got darker, its blackness more thick around them. Darkness moved. It slid like oil, like a cloud. It spread from the sparks of their forms like ash poured out upon the earth. First it hung around their ankles, swirling and tentative as dust might be. Then it climbed to their knees and waists. The tips of their wings cut through it. Finally it engulfed the gods entirely, and were they not still burning would have hidden them altogether. As it was, the flames of the gods burned brighter from the contrast.

              People cried out. I was not alone, of course. My fellow Historians lined the western wall like chattering statues. They would see what made the sound, and every city has stairs leading to its ramparts, just as every city has its waking souls. Like myself, my colleagues sleep worse than most. Too many of our flocks cannot even name the Paths of Ascension – sacrifice, nobility, wisdom, and trust – by which humans may follow divinity away from this sphere of finite affairs.

              Well, now it seemed they might not need to, though gods should not come back. When they do humanity cannot fare well. Gods return when faith has lapsed. Gods return for an accounting, and an apocalypse is most unsettling.

              Even the blackened shroud in which they came denied created order. The instant and complete profusion of that blackness seemed both lifeless and fiercely organic. Its black mist bloomed and crystallized. It unfolded and it oozed. I still shiver. Several Historians, stoic scholars all, trained in fact to deny the very emotions that fetter higher reason, gasped and recoiled at the sight of it.

              Then the beings rose. Please understand, they did not fly, though their wings still spread. They simply ascended from the earth. There seemed no energy involved. They did not employ our trickery of natural laws. The rules did not apply to them at all. Gravity was something they decided.

              That’s when my fellows, priests of the gods and the purveyors of the wisdom of a lost and holy age, turned and ran from divinity incarnate. “Stop!” I shouted. “Brace yourselves!

Fools! Where will you go? Can prayer save you? Steel yourselves for revelation!”

              The men ran past me, the slick hot night swallowing the slap of their sandals on Kasora’s jade streets, the startled swish of crimson silk as robes snapped about their fleeing bodies, and the tang of fear in their sudden sweat. Through my soles the vibrations of their panic came.

              When gods arrive, humanity departs. All humans but this one. I have always felt myself exempt. I looked over the wall, into the abyssal night, to see what came.

              Darkness rose with them. The black cloud followed their ascent, still spreading, rolling from the cliffs like mist. Its black vapors continued to spread throughout the valley. Still the beings rose. Briefly I wondered if they might be avatars, manifestations of some Profusionist machine. Thaeron holds so much its inhabitants do not know, and I alone accuse myself of that fading virtue of curiosity. Thus, I stood still while Kasora fled.

              The beings were but a hundred meters below. Their wings must have spread a tenth that distance, from tip to tip. Each would span most rooms. They brought hot wind with them. The iron buckles of my sandals burned. Something like a whisper touched my ear, murmuring. Torsos burned between the wings, and heads with horns shifting from black to red and orange, and swords the lengths of several men, trailing fire in their wake.

              I withdrew. I walked quickly north along the top of the wall, trying not to draw attention. Fool! Gods will find you if they care to. Even prayer cannot invite or avoid divine attention. And I did not even know which way to run. 

              In my confusion I glanced back. They had paused atop the wall, four meters tall if one might say they stood at all. They burned, still. Perhaps they always do. How else would gods live, except in roaring finery, in hot wind and blackest ash?

              There were horns, oh, yes, there were horns, curving down and forward like a bull’s between two spiked ears, about two meters from tip to tip and filled with flowing magma. And below their horns a face with the eyes of a man and the nose of a goat and the cheeks of a dried skull. Their necks continued the uncommon flesh of their faces, blending it into their chest and wings and shoulders. They showed no skin or muscle. They stood on the wall as beings of neither matter or energy, but of elemental strands winding through their bodies like braided wire, until the strands were their bodies, shifting, sliding wire bent in semblance of human form. The strands, twinned red and black, wrapped around each other, the red glowing with stinging heat and the black sucking surrounding light inside them.

              I could not look away. Now I knew them gods. No mortal shape embodies such perfect power, such marriage of oppositions. They lacked all musculature, but their arms stretched out with impeccable grace and balance as they held out nine black cylinders, one in each of their right hands. The cylinders must have been cold because their claws, oh, their burning claws, sent steam from touching them into the night. Below and behind their outstretched arms, their stomachs tapered flat and strong, the dense intersection of abdominal structures more deep and intricate than any man’s.

              They pretended at mortality. Their legs belied this more than any other feature, swelling out from a preternaturally narrow waist to broader hips before tapering to a smaller joint at the knees. All the while the strands, the winding cords of their lower legs growing tighter, denser, thinner and more numerous, more and more constricted until they tapered to an indiscernible tip, their attempted purchase on our soil.

   

           They never touched the ground.

            Eyes burning, stinging with the fire and dark and heat, skin slapped by airborne shards of scorched and broken rock, I began to turn away. From the corners of my eyes I saw them unfold their arms, I call them this because they bore no trace of the mechanical. They looked like living swords. Their right curved out and down and forward before sweeping in again, three meters long or four, tapering like a scimitar to some invisible tip just above the ground between the being’s feet, its cruel edge glinting in their divine light. Behind, the sword of their left arms mirrored this, their sharpest edge the opposite. 

              Well, gods have always killed efficiently.

              They still held the cylinders within their hands, black objects perhaps of Profusionist metal. I recognized Profusionist glyphs glowing along each cylinder’s curving side, glowing orange with unnatural energy. The center god stepped forward and down, leaving a scarred depression in the metal wall. The others followed suit. 

              The black cloud seeped between Kasora’s stones, rising from the cracks.

              I turned toward the Temple, and fled.

The Barren Time: Part Three

III

When the hot winds finally opened fully the leaves of the trees, Ryn Batyst and the boy he carried met another man at one of the Wells of the Dead outside the city. He was standing there beneath the northern cliffs and dressing when he turned astounded toward the sound of Ryn’s heavy footfall and then the infant’s cry. He quickly pulled his trousers back on and looked to run into the darkness. His upper body shone slick with gel. 

“Wait,” said Ryn, as gently as he could and still be heard. The man was younger and of average height and build and lacked even the shoulders of a laborer. And Ryn was aware that his size could frighten others. He suspected it was one of the reasons women shied away from him, not because he could hurt them – many men could do that – but because they never knew any other men who could have stopped him.   

“They call me too,” Ryn said again. He walked into the center of the clearing and sat down in the Voidlight, cradling the infant in his lap. After a while, he motioned the startled man to come and sit beside him. The man hesitated before he did and haltingly answered Ryn’s questions about himself and the Well. He worked as a clerk for a moneychanger and had come to perhaps a dozen Wells and did not know what they were. He lived with his sister and did not often go to Temple and had never seen anyone else out in the valley at night. He had not received an infant. Of course he had never woken any Profusionist technology. He agreed that they should tell no one.

After a while, they embraced and when the man left Ryn went into the Well with the boy. He briefly wondered if he lived the same memories the clerk had or different ones. He knew the infant often mirrored his reactions. When he awoke on the hard ground above the Well the other man was gone. The boy, cradled in his arms, cooed happily. 

Three nights later, he met a disheveled baker at the river’s edge just south of the city. In the western hills again two nights after that, he met an engraver and his wife. The boy liked everyone, smiling and gurgling before they went into the Wells and again when they came out. Ryn worried that the strangeness of the Wells would come to affect the boy, no matter how happy and calm the living memories seemed to make him. 

The next night he and Del, as he was coming to call the child, met a woman in a pine clearing far northwest of the city. She was standing in the open center directly above the Well as if making it wait for her. She had her face turned up toward the night and her face was pale and smooth and calm and the curls of her hair were that strange shade in the darkness that meant they would be crimson in the sunlight. When he coughed she turned to face him and her smile was frank and eager, like a current in the river.  

“I enjoy watching the stars,” she said. “They said that you might come.”

“Who?” he asked. He only took one step forward. “What?”

As she walked toward him, her eyes flicked to the ground beneath her feet. “Everyone remembers a blacksmith with a baby. Did you really think you were alone?” 

He had always felt alone. Even as a child his size had set him apart so that the other children shied away from him in silence. As a youth he had come to understand that the only people he did not intimidate were larger men, like those toiling away at the nearest smithy. Women he had seldom dared approach, and as the years passed he tried that less and less until his aloneness settled around him like the cloak of the Guild he had earned through determined and skillful toil. 

“I never thought anything else was possible.”

She took his hand in hers and smiled again. They disrobed and cradled the infant between them and went into the Well together. After, the two of them woke up together in the center of the clearing. They lay side by side watching the sun sweep down the mountains overhead. Del lay wrapped in the bundle of smith’s clothing at his feet. 

“We should call ourselves the Blooded,” he said.

***

After the winds and the rains had stopped there came to the city on its plateau only the warm dry breezes from the southern plains and the calm cloudless skies of early summer. The breezes, as they went, scurried up clouds of white dust and swept them into the corners outside the blacksmith’s shop.  

“I want to name you as my bursar,” Ryn told his friend one day, yawning. Such had been the genius of the first Faith that half the year, the walls of all the buildings in Ariel were bright enough from sunlight that they needed no interior illumination. But not even brightness could keep Ryn Batyst alert when all he deeply wanted was to sleep.

   

Pol frowned, sitting back. “You can’t be running for re-election yet…”

 “And I want to talk to the Thieves.” Ryn leaned forward, finding his friend’s eyes, which went wide when he worked through the first of the smith’s two declarations. 

“You can’t be serious! You want the Chair! You’re too new.”

Ryn nodded. “They stagger the elections just so that this can happen.” The Chair embodied the wishes of the Council and directed its affairs, becoming a personal advisor to the Faith. 

“They stagger them so that…” Pol let out his breath in a sigh. “Well. You were persuasive on Free Cities.”

“I was right on Free Cities.” The day the iron miners of the Fackablest had formed their guild, the first Historian in four hundred years had walked into the port city Wesing, an army of scribes around him. 

“And you’ll need to keep believing that. But why the Thieves? They haven’t had a seat on the Council in fifty years.”

Ryn considered telling him. “I just want to talk to them,” he said instead. 

Pol frowned. “Okay. I might know someone. What’s your issue? You’ll need something. Don’t get me wrong. You stand up, people notice. Lingering grace of the Profusion, you should have heard yourself! Boom, that bass. And presence, I can’t think of the last time the Council actually heard command.”

“I want to campaign for the right of the Council to publically and officially censure the Faith.”

A new silence stretched between them. Pol frowned again. “I don’t…have you switched sides? The Temple, you mean you want to censure the Temple. Insomnia’s finally getting to you.”

Ryn shook his head. “Everyone already knows what the Council thinks of Historians because they tax us. And the Faith opposes the Temple by judging their laws. But the relationship between the Council and the Faith is not guaranteed. He can say whatever he wants and we cannot stop him.”

Pol brought a hand to his mouth, massaged his chin. “Well. Well. People will wonder where you’ve been all these years. By the Void, come to think of it, I wonder where you’ve been all these years. You don’t want to do this, I drag you every step of the way, now you open your mouth and overturn four hundred years of assumptions about this city. Why?” 

Ryn sighed, his eyes heavy and closing. Again, he considered telling his friend. “During the Profusion,” he said, “there was no distinction between common and adept because there was no need for it. All machines woke for everyone, because everyone could use them. All woke for all. That is what Profusion means.”

His friend’s face darkened. “Well, I don’t know what you just said, exactly. But it sounds…seriously, Ryn, where have you been?”

“I was working, Pol.”

His friend fell silent. Outside the window, the sky was clear and blue and warm, the first perfect summer day. Ryn nodded once, jerking himself awake. 

***

The song of the river ebbed as it carried the last of the snowmelt away from the mountains, falling to its slower summer pace. Ryn Batyst lay beside the woman and the boy and stared into the light and darkness of the Void from whence all humans came. There was no wind that night and the trilling of the birds and the chirps of insects hung in place like the breath of the smith and the woman and the sleeping boy. For a moment, Batyst imagined he could hear the long grasses of the riverbank growing, remembering again that hallucination was one of the effects of prolonged sleeplessness.

            “There’s never anyone else,” he said. “I never see anyone twice except for you and when I do it is only you.” 

            He could feel her shrugging as she smiled beside him. “And never any Historians,” she said.

            He nodded. “No Historians, and no adepts. No one who can wake any Profusionist technology.” The grass was soft and cool and soft beneath him and fatigue wrapped him in its familiar sheets of gauze. 

            “I think we must be adepts of a kind.” She sat with her legs crooked up and the infant lying propped up against them so that she could see his face. “He’s special, isn’t he?”

            “Are you sure you want to do this?” She had given happy attention to the boy from the beginning and he had never asked why she had been waiting for him in the pine clearing that first night or if she had seen any pregnant women among the Blooded.  

             She closed her eyes in the way that meant that she was mostly certain. “He needs a mother and a home. You shouldn’t have to pay someone.”

            “Anything you need, whenever…”

            “Ryn, he isn’t yours! And that’s absurd. I’m a banker. And you know what I meant.”

            “Yes. He likes the Wells. I have not seen any other children.” His eyelids drooped as he said this and he wondered that it was not yet the midwatch of the night. The Well that had called them was almost beside the docks.

            She shook her head. “The first child of the Blooded. I’m pleased to help him. He needs to come back, to keep coming back.”

            “Del Tanich,” he said. “Of the hills. He will know the meaning of his name. But I wonder it’s happening now.” They had not talked, either of them, to anyone who had visited the Wells of the Dead for more than a year.

            She sniffed, thinking. “I have wondered, too. And you know how the Faith balances the Temple when he judges the laws they write? And how the Guardians balance them both when they enforce the laws and when they claim soldiers from among the adepts?”

            The boy’s hand, Ryn felt again, did not even reach around his finger. “Yes.” His mind swerved in the strange way he had nearly forgotten and he felt he could say anything to her or anyone who asked. 

            “Well, what if the machines don’t agree either? We know some of them are sentient. What if something shifts in the balance of maintaining the world, and so now the Wells of the Dead begin to work against it?”

            He grunted. “Then I think he will a very important part.” He smiled to himself.

            Her eyes flashed toward his. “You’re the important part. You’re going to win.”

            “I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know when or if I’ll see you again.” The tacit agreement among the Blooded was that they gave each other no true names.

             “You’ll speak for us.”

He did not ask if she meant the merchants or the common or the Blooded because he was not sure he knew himself, and because the groups were not identical. Maybe she meant everyone, all who were not adept. Or maybe he did.

“There may be a time when speaking ends,” he said, as his eyelids fell closed again, and would not open again until the morning. Carefully, the woman gathered the boy in her arms and left, her bare feet swishing aside, with a gentle hiss, the long blades of river grass.