When the courtyard gate opens, a gendarme-driven carriage rolls down the lane and exits the palace grounds. Nobody notices the Surgeon clinging to the back of the vehicle, his clothing soiled by dark mud. At the edge of the forest he drops off the carriage, rolling into a pile of rotten leaves. He rises, filthy and crouching like some beast from an ancient world of flesh and bone. He runs across the hills, trying to outrace the carriage.
Just before dawn he reaches the broken door of his estate. The tracks of steam lorries have left muddy ruts in the lawn. Inside the house he finds the corpse of his wife lying among the shambles of furniture. Kalmea’s silver skull blossoms like a rose where the exploding shell hit it. Head shots were the gendarmes’ specialty…the quickest and most efficient way to kill a Beatific. Their silver skulls could not protect the delicate brain from such firepower.
The brain…the last refuge of a stolen humanity.
A humanity fed to seven imperious carnivores.
He smashes a gas lamp and winds his heart-key in the light of the roaring flames. He leaves the mansion burning behind him. Wrapped in a black cloak and hood, an antique blade at his side, he follows the voices singing a clear high refrain in his mind.
Now you see the Truth.
Now you see Yourself.
He stalks carefully through several neighborhoods in the small light of early morning, until he finds the place. No family has lived in the overgrown estate for decades. The name on the iron gate is rusted and faded. The mansion beyond is little more than a ruin…shattered windows, fallen beams, crumbled walls of blackened stone.
In the distance, the mountainous bulk of the palace rises from its central hill. On the opposite horizon, the uneven skyline of the Rusted Zone straddles the lower world. The Urbille is a broken and decaying apparatus that runs on and on, fueled by ignorance and deception.
He lifts a fallen wall and discovers a stairwell that spirals deep into the earth. Far beneath the ruined manor he enters a chamber of damp stone. Along the walls, great carven faces stare at him with shimmering opticals. The floor of the vault is littered with glassy stones of every color, a vast fortune in brilliants left here to gather mold.
Some of the giant faces grin at him. Others frown.
The Ministère de Stone.
Now you see, one of them says. It’s all a lie.
The Surgeon nods.
“What must I do?” he asks.
With granite tongues they whisper ancient wisdom.
The Rude Mechanicals and the Highwayman
It wasn’t the seasonal gravity maelstroms or the swarms of psychic predators that kept us away from the Great Thoroughfare. It was the widespread tales of the highwayman known as the Surgeon.
Rumors of his perfidy rippled like ultrasonic waves from the Greater Urbille to the outer Affinities. In those distant territories where the living and the undead mingled, where villages of despair rotted at the feet of carven mountains, we heard tales from wounded travellers and weeping merchants. He stood tall and lithe as any Beatific, they said, and wielded an ancient blade faster than death. A dark cloak wrapped him like a shroud, and he wore a cruel face of sculpted bronze. To look into his burning opticals was to see your own demise, or so claimed the survivors of his attacks.
One constant ran like a silver thread among the scattered tales of his infamy: Each robbery ended with a single execution. These victims, they said, were chosen specifically by the highwayman. Others claimed they were chosen entirely at random. This point was often debated with dreadful passion.
The leader of our troupe was Sala North, the master performer so famous among the Urbille’s Beatifics, Clatterpox, and Goblinkind. We were fourteen in number: ten Beatific actors and a quartet of Organic apprentices. At the end of this journey we four adolescents would receive our long-awaited Beatification. We would trade in our spongy flesh-faces for the infinite variety of porcelain visages that were the pride of Beatific society. Our fragile calciferous bones would be replaced by gleaming silver skeletons, our living brains housed inside perfectly crafted skulls of that same bright metal.
Some travellers said the Surgeon had once been a maker of Beatifics, a certified Surgeon who served the Potentates of Urbille in perfect faith, until he went mad and abandoned his practice. Now he prowled the outer edges of the Affinities, preying on whomever he chose, sparing some and slaying others. He was a demon, a defiler, a tale to frighten travellers. I only half-believed his legend. Still our troupe took the Lesser Thoroughfare now, staying well away from the Surgeon’s hunting ground. None of us expected to cross his path out here, not even the ones who believed he was real.
The Rude Mechanicals had crossed a hundred Affinities and performed sixty-seven shows since our outward journey began. Our return to the Urbille would be the highlight of the year. The Beatifics would welcome us in their thousands and open their ancient marble amphitheatre, the Théâtre d’ Ames Rire, to the spectacle of our stagecraft. We looked forward to such a grand reception after months of performing in muddy plazas, crowded graveyards, and crumbling ruins. The living and the not-quite-dead, the human and the inhuman, we entertained them all. But there was no audience like a hometown crowd — an Urbille audience.
Several more Affinities stood between us and the city, yet these were the Empty Lands. There would be no more performances until we came to the center of the Celestial Nexus, where the Urbille thrived and pulsed with a thousand different kinds of life.
“What a dreadful place,” Harmona said. She tossed back her cloak and glared at the twin suns dominating a scarlet sky. The gargantuan cacti on both sides of the road sprouted millions of purple-veined blossoms. The wind blew furnace-hot and without mercy.
“You don’t like the desert?” I asked. Teasing her was irresistible. She had complained about the cold for the last three days. Now there was only heat and dust. And thickets of stubborn cacti.
“Is that what this place is?” Harmona said. “I thought we had stumbled into Hell.”
We trailed at the end of the road-weary procession. Half our number walked ahead of the six-wheeled steam carriage. It puttered along rasping and wheezing, belching pale vapors. The rest of us walked behind the conveyance, which was piled high with barrels of oil and coal, crates of costumes and backdrops, and a few bags of dried fruit and meat for the Organics. We always kept the steam carriage in our middle, ever since the time we had lost it for seven days. It ran out of fuel in the middle of an electrical storm, and we crossed into an adjacent Affinity before noticing our machine was missing.
Eventually we backtracked and found it, but looters had stolen all our gear. Not much of a concern for the Beatifics, who required neither food nor water. But for Harmona, Brix, Chancey, and myself — we pitiful Organics — such provisions were essential. Another reason to anticipate Beatification: On the day we relinquished our sweaty flesh for gorgeous clockwork bodies of metal, wire, and springs, we would leave behind our such genetic frailty. On that same great day, soon to come, we would join the ranks of Sala’s journeyman actors. Our apprentice training would be complete, and we would be true Rude Mechanicals at last.
“Which Hell?” I said. “Depending on which culture you study, there are apparently a great number of netherworlds.”