Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson

Author:Rjurik Davidson [Davidson, Rjurik]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781429948388
Google: lsJXAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0765329883
Goodreads: 17910065
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2013-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Six House Technis officiates sat in a large carriage, two sets of three facing each other.

Boris sat next to the door facing forward, looking out at the streets of Caeli-Amur and thinking about the Siren, Paxaea. The last time he saw her, a week and a half earlier, he had left her crying on her bed. How she had manipulated his emotions; how she had appeared pathetic before him. Yet in that prostration he had seen something and he had taken pity on her. Everything had turned out wrong: he wanted her to like him; he wanted her to want him. But when he had visited her the following day, she had been as cold as when he had first met her, and had turned away his affections as one would those of a lowly attendant. Furious, he had concentrated on his work—the Elo-Talern had given him license to unite the Houses against the rising insurgency—but each day his thoughts of Paxaea had become more intense.

From the carriage he stared out into the darkness at the warm lights in the apartments, at citizens moving around with their families, each in their own little comfortable world. Then they had passed onto Via Gracchia whose late-night cafés and bars were brimming with clientele. The area’s famous cats sat on the eaves of the buildings, were silhouetted in the windows, or scuttled along the alleyways.

Sitting opposite Boris, the skinny Officiate Matisse waved his insectlike arms in small circular motions without any apparent reason. “You’d better be right about this, Autec. Imagine if this is an Arbor trap and we’re all massacred. You’ll go down in history as the one who presided over the death of the entire House Technis leadership.” Matisse grinned nervously.

Boris glanced unimpressed at the man and remembered the deaths of the tramworker-gladiators in Technis’s amphitheater, deaths that Matisse had organized. He reached into his waistcoat, took a swig from his flask. “I don’t think anyone will miss you too much, Matisse.”

The others laughed uneasily. Like Boris, they understood just how fragile the balance was in Caeli-Amur. The strikes, the meetings and discussion groups, the broadsheets, the subversive plays performed in little theaters in the Quaedian, the new philosophies springing up. If these continued, the populace would take even greater liberties. Two days earlier, Boris had sat at the House Technis executive meeting with the other officiates and argued that it was time for the Houses to unite, to strike together against the restless subversives in the population. The others had agreed. They were hard and efficient men, but none had seen days like this. They had insisted that the suggestion for a forum of the Houses come from the executive itself. They were trying to keep Boris in his place.

Boris held one secret to himself: Only he knew about the growing seditionist group hidden away in some cavern somewhere, planning their demonstrations and their actions against the Houses. The impulsive action of the population was one thing, but a group like that was another.

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