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“Darrow didn’t even look twice at it when he came here,” Glirastes murmurs. “He sees me as nothing more than a tool. I suppose it is human nature. Golds saw me as a novelty to flaunt. Mids let their jealousy label me a social climber. The lows loved me, then hated me, then loved me. All of them thought they understood my work. And maybe they did. But only you really ever understood me.”
“You were the one who told me a great artist can never be fully understood,” I reply. “Even you must suffer the tedium of a medium.”
“Did I ever tell you the story of the blind Copper?”
“I don’t believe so.” Of course, I know the story. It was in his Securitas file, gleaned from his own journals, and was the key to my story of the waves and the Colossus. I forgo a stool and sit on the floor, just as I did as a child. He wants to see me as a curious boy, not a scarred, cunning judge.
“When I was a young apprentice, my Master Maker told me of a Copper with a disease of the eye. One which surpassed even our civilization’s ingenuity to cure. When he felt his vision finally fading, he went to a bench and sat before the Library of Heliopolis. Each day he went, and his world grew smaller and darker until one day his sight was gone entirely. For years afterward he would go to that bench and sit, and in the darkness he could still see the green copper dome, the Philosopher Kings in all their marbled glory, the Water Gardens and the Orbital Torch. Of all the things he wanted to remember, it was the beauty of architecture.” He sighs. “My master told me the story to impress the importance of our craft.
“I was a busy mind. Busier still when I found my first taste of celebrity. Twice a week, I would attend the dinner parties of Aureate. It might seem common to you,” he says with small embarrassment. “But imagine what it meant to me. An Orange from the Sledge. A guest of Votum and Augustans and even Lunes. I was treated with dignity by the finest company in the worlds. The Sovereign herself called me a genius. In their names, I built monuments, libraries, cities.
“Yet at the unveiling of my greatest work…”
“The Water Colossus.”
“Correct.” He continues. “I felt empty standing there listening to the rich tell me what beauty I had made. I could see it. But I could not feel it. I don’t know why, but I remembered the story of that Copper. I sought out my master, and discovered after many weeks of searching that the blind Copper still lived.
“I went to visit him. He was a ward of the state by then, living to die in a government Loyalty Ward. I asked him about the story, and he laughed. ‘I didn’t go for the building,’ he said, ‘I went to feed the pigeons, and watch the children play in the water, and the families line up for sweets, and to see boys flirt with girls.”
Glirastes says nothing, and for a long time, we listen to the rain on the windows.
“He went to see life,” Glirastes says at last. “From that moment to this, that is why I make—to see the life that grows around the dead stone I stack. For what is a building without its audience? What is a city without its people? Now…” He traces the veins in his hands. “Now that life disappears. Those people become dust. Soon there will be nothing left but my stone and the bones of my city.” His glassy eyes find mine. “I’m not a traitor, no matter what you think. No matter what Atalantia calls me. I thought Darrow’s crusade impractical, but inevitable. When he took the planet, I helped him, because I thought I could protect life. I failed. I failed. So terribly. He told me he would only use the Storm Gods for electrical interference and cloud
cover, but he lied and now Tyche is gone.”
His eyes follow motes of dust floating through the light. His robes make soft sounds as he leans forward and runs his hands over his head.
“I’ve been building something with his engineers. Something that will help his army escape the planet they broke. But even if he does escape before Atalantia attacks, what will become of us? Are the buildings to be saved, because they are rare and beautiful, and the people put upon the pale because they are common?” His hands drop from his head and he looks up at me like a drowning old man. “I don’t know what to do, Lysander. Tell me. What am I to do?”
“You can trust in me,” I reply.
“The last time I trusted a man, Tyche was swallowed by the sea.”
“Then trust the boy you knew.”
His eyes are forlorn as they search mine. “Is he still alive, after all this horror?”
“Yes,” I say, reaching up to fold his thin hands in mine. “And he needs your help. The people must show Atalantia that they did not abet the enemy. That they did not simply wait to be saved. They saved themselves. I promise she will see that. I promise we will show that to the worlds with spectacle they have never before seen.”
There’s a knock at the door. “Begone, Exeter!”
Exeter enters anyway. “Apologies, sir, but the dominus requested a nightcap of the fortifying variety.” He strides into the room, followed by the entirety of Glirastes’s remaining staff.
“What is the meaning of this?” Glirastes shouts. “Can’t you see we are—”
Exeter goes swiftly to a knee and bends his head to me. The lowColor staff join him. “The Heir of Silenius has returned,” Exeter proclaims. “The loyal stand ready, my Sovereign.”
I take Glirastes’s hands in mine. “There are more men and women in this city who believe in the order of the Society more than the empty promises of the Rising. I do not know them. But you know them, and they know you. Pick the most loyal and the most influential of each Color, and tell them the Heir of Silenius has returned. He has not forgotten them, and he asks them to join him in taking back their rightful home from the Martian marauders. Not for Votum. Not for Atalantia. But for Heliopolis and the Society.”
“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Volga asks me. Sleet rolls in from the sea to pour down on us. We crouch low behind a jagged scree of rocks, peering through scavenged oculars at a small fishing town. Several hundred homes lie scattered on the coastline like raisins in crumbling pastry. The weathered buildings are made from local rock and domed with metal roofs capped with winter sludge. Warm light glows from slits in their shutters. I scan the air for the Vox patrols that have been looking for us over the past weeks. The sea bucks and heaves, rocking the few small boats left in the harbor. Nothing rides the wind but sea hawks and gulls. I imagine them rushing home, just like the villagers, before the squall comes in full.
I wish we were in one of those little houses, maybe sitting by the fire with big blankets and socks. Not the thin polymer socks they gave out at the camp. The wool ones they gave us in the Telemanus household, so thick you can curl your toes in them.
“Look at that, the Red was right,” Victra says. She jabs her finger at three long metal poles rising up from a gray building hunched along the promontory north of the town. It looks like some old military installation. Several old fliers are parked in front of it, and from the snow piling up, they look like they haven’t been moved in days. “There is a radio tower here.”
I could feel its vibrations through the parasite. Growing in intensity as we crept nearer across the highlands. Aside from those vibrations, the parasite has been quiet since I saw Harmony. But by the fact that Victra even listened to me, I know she knows what’s in my skull.
“All this trepidation is giving me cankers,” she says. “Much as I’d like to give birth in a freezing glen like a sow, it would be a dreary inconvenience if wolves ate my little girl before she could even walk. We use the array to boost our signal, we’re in my fortresses at Hippolyte or Attica by tomorrow morning.”
