HOW THE MAGICIAN MADE THINGS WORSE
Perhaps I had hoped that if I ignored the Magician’s ultimatum, if I kept avoiding Wick’s attempts to discuss it with me, that both the ultimatum and the Magician would cease to exist, be driven from the city as if neither had ever existed, and some new path would shine out before us, showing us a way to keep the Balcony Cliffs and keep ourselves safe in the process.
But the Magician had other plans.
Ten days after I learned of the Magician’s ultimatum, Wick took me to a secret vantage near the top of the Balcony Cliffs, one that required climbing up an unstable wrought-iron spiral staircase, one so looped and tight it felt a bit like being a contortionist to ascend. But near the top, you came up into a shallow buried pillbox with enough room to stand. Vents in the ceiling led to the surface maybe twenty feet above. A trough of a passageway at our feet headed due west.
It smelled pungent, like mold and earthworms, but a faint light bled out from the far end. We had to inch our way through it, narrow enough that our elbows clashed and the friction against our clothing made us sweat. The passageway led to a blind atop a high bluff, looking out from the eastern edge toward the rest of the city. A tight rectangle of a view so as not to be visible from below or above, but panoramic.
Wick had intel, gleaned from someone who badly needed his memory beetles. I thought perhaps that information was false and Wick just needed a break from his swimming-pool vat, wanted a panoramic view to clear his head. But I went along.
From our vantage there, peering through my binoculars, I can tell you these things were true: The crazy golden gleam of the sun off the cracked dome of the observatory to the northeast, the Magician’s stronghold, was almost blinding—and no longer alone. Below that artificial promontory and somewhat south the gleam had been joined by smaller glints that signified gun emplacements. They hadn’t been there three days ago.
To the southwest lay the Company building, a bloated white oval, the vast egg that had spawned so much discontent and chaos, and yet still fed us at varying rates and in a variety of ways, even if we did not always like the feeding.
At dead center from our vantage sat Mord, at a cleared intersection, cleaning his fur. Even dull or blood-covered or matted, that fur shone in the sun, and moving around that muted god-beacon in a rough arc we saw the burly shapes of Mord proxies, standing guard. Done cleaning his fur, Mord pulled a slender tree out of the ground, grasped the branches, and used the roots to scratch his back. Then he abandoned his sitting position to roll in the dirt. The earth-shattering roars and yawns that emanated from him then were all about scratching a good itch. Who knew how many skeletons lay crushed beneath his dust bath.
Between, the contested ground, the low country: a wide expanse of buildings, courtyards, former commercial structures, museums, business districts, a scattering of trees and bushes, and the telltale muted orange-and-green veins of Company lichen that covered so much of the stone there. There you could see both the blueprint for a return of civilization, of the rule of law, of culture … and how much work that would take.
No dwelling now cleared five stories, as Mord liked to be able to see when he went on a stroll and had brought much around him into compliance with his deranged building code. Some of this jumbled riot, which in places looked like a giant had picked it up and then rolled it across the plain, was broken and stacked while other structures revealed little of the trauma, the level of injury, that must lie within.
That ground wasn’t simple, wasn’t dead or alive, but contested between the animate and the inanimate. Not just communities and scavengers invisible to us from the blind, but waiting there in the sandy soil: the Company life that had been discarded and dispersed like dandelion tufts. It waited for a touch—a drop of water or blood, say—to germinate and to be counted on the battlefield as loot. No one could say where this might happen or when, and so even a derelict, abandoned lot toxic with oil pools and black mold might in a week or a year or a century blossom into strange life.
The sky above was simple, though: It belonged, all the fierce blue of it, to Mord, and wherever he alit and bestrode the ground, he owned that, too, even as he destroyed it. Belowground … well, the proxies now roamed there, wherever they could fit, but otherwise it was a reflection of the allies and enemies above, depending on the extent of tunnels and old subway systems and the basements of buildings now leveled and unremembered by the surface. The Magician’s growing influence led us to believe that there was an invisible wave rising from below that might in time wash us all away.
Seeing the map revealed so nakedly made naked, too, the thought of a growing conflict—to rule the city—and what choices! We were so lucky, after such strife, to be able to choose between a homegrown tyrant in the Magician, who strove to win by any means, and a Company-grown tyrant in Mord, who held the city in stasis, us unable to do more than react to his whims. Neither imagined as rulers could long be tolerated. Yet we could not imagine what lay beyond them except, with a shudder, the specter of the Company itself rising once again from its own ashes.
*
As we watched there came a sound deep and sonorous, and then the sound again, and a third time. Mord raised his broad head, upon which we could almost have built another Balcony Cliffs, muzzle pointed toward the sun, that he might better scent the air, in that swaying, singsong way of ursines.
Was this the sound of delicious protein being reckless enough to announce itself? Whatever Mord believed, he went from scenting to standing at full extent on two stout legs—so tall and so massive—until he’d identified the sound as coming from the observatory. Then, too light to be believed, Mord sprang up into the air while his proxy lieutenants stood on their hind legs as well and scented the air and huffed their approval. Up, up, he flew, until he was but a distant shadow in the heavens, a miraculous traveler, a psychotic inkblot, and then down, down with a plummeting certainty toward the source of the sound, the greatness of his bulk ever more solid.
But as Mord’s dive straightened out, as he swooped in a curve toward the observatory, there came a ragged gout of flame from the gun emplacements. A stuttering fire and a roar not like a bear but like a mighty engine.
The Magician had launched a missile at Mord. The missile came out of the ground corkscrewing and shrieking, incredibly fast, spewing black smoke out behind.