Eagles and Swans

When she went for breakfast the next morning, Ruthenia found her boss in his favourite armchair, feet up on the coffee table, face buried in the pages of the Helika Morning Herald. She passed him by without a greeting, and he was too engrossed in the papers to grumble about it.

The man had left her a dish of softboiled eggs on the dining table. It was one of the only dishes he wasn’t utterly inept at preparing, but she seasoned it with copious amounts of pepper and sauce just to be safe.

Upstairs, she discovered that Tanio had lit the bath coals a while ago, their last glow only just fading. With the dying embers to heat the tank, the bath was only slightly too cold.

Tanio was reading something else by the time she returned. She quickly recognised it as a copy of Internal Systems, authored by the one and only T. Calied. The aforementioned T. Calied happened to have three books out in print, and they were selling better across the bridge in Sonora. 

"Morning," called T. Calied, the man himself, as Ruthenia shuffled by scrubbing at her hair with her towel.

She flung the damp scrap over a dining room chair. "Morning," she called back. The man did not offer Ruthenia so much as a glance as she slipped out of the house and across the bridge barefoot in the cool morning air. Frogs croaked by the river, and the wheat rustled. Glancing up at the sky, she decided it wasn't too late for a leisure flight.

With a hand on the doorway, she snatched for her umbrella where it hung from the rack, and her bag from beside it. A gift and a message, her mother had called it, the day she had given it to  her. What kind of message? That she shouldn’t get caught in the rain?

Unhooking it, Ruthenia went back out onto her patio, raising her gaze to the green hills in the distance, and the faraway houses peppering the air above it. Clouds bloomed across the sky like ripples on a pond. On came the goggles, turning the sky a light shade of brown.

She lifted her umbrella so the Threads could catch hold of it, and it barely took half a minute this time. It was easier when she was excited to leave, when the destination didn’t matter. She slipped on and adjusted herself—then, swinging forward,  she thrust herself into the air at an incline, ascending gently towards the clouds.

Sky gave way to emptier sky, cornfields to rivers and scatterings of abandoned ground houses. Astra was half meadows and hills, and for a distance this was all she saw. These grew in frequency and number as Ruthenia passed from the outskirts into the New Town proper, where the houses stood packed together on criss-crossing roads, smoke rising in black columns from their chimneys.

A train whistled far beneath her, the chug of its engine joining the melange of noises that characterised the New Town. Half a mile to her right ran the tracks of the Transnational Railway, which left Astra on endless bridges to Sonora in the west and Aora in the east. A green train was thundering towards the station, gleaming in the morning sun amid a veil of clouds.

Descending through the soot and smoke, she hurtled down the carriage road with eyes narrowed against the wind. The drivers peered out of their windows as she flew; she dodged between shophouses and swerved around the street corner where the Union Bank stood. The Threads began to snap as she made the turn, and she felt her heart leap into her throat, hands grasping frantically at the wind until they tangled in a bundle of Threads and she could pull herself steady again.

On the other side of the bank lay the alley. It looked so different from above; the crates and piles of scrap wood lost their meaning. It stank of acrid chemical ash and rubbish piles. Her friends, who had set up a makeshift table from planks and scraps for a board game, noticed her before she had landed, flinging their stones onto the chalk grid to shout out her name.

Ruthenia tipped and arced downward in an ungraceful landing; Tante was there to greet her with a cigarette-blackened grin, arms behind his back, a telltale trail of smoke wafting from behind him.

“Thank you for coming!” he said in a drawl that gave away his true sentiment. “You just never know with Ruthenia, these days.”

“Hey, I’ve been busy,” she answered.

“Oh, no, I’m not blaming you,” said the knifeman with a twitch of his eye. “Hyder’s the one who cares, anyhow. He’s got a gift for you.”

Ruthenia’s brow furrowed as she turned to Hyder. His head perked up, and his mouth opened. Then he raced off to his corner of the alley and began rummaging through his crate. When he returned, he was holding something in his outstretched hand that made a chill of dread sweep up her back.

It was an Ordiva revolver, just like the one been threatened with. The wood was branded, and there was a kink in its barrel.

“Think you could fix this?” said Hyder simply.

Before his grin could turn, Ruthenia wrenched the revolver out of his hand and flung it onto the ground beside them.

“Don’t even think about it!” she yelled.

The boy stared back with wide grey eyes. “But—it’s a—what’s stopping us from—”

“I’m stopping us, that’s who!” She stared at the object on the ground. Two guns in four days. Two guns too many.

“Look who’s been eating up all that Arcane nonsense,” sang Tante, stooping to pick it up. “Two years drinking up the poison out of their mouths, and—”

“Do you know what a gun is?”

“It’s power,” answered the knifeman, clenching a fist around the stock. She clenched her jaw. “Power that the Arcanes want taken from us.”

“If this had been working, Hyder could’ve killed me if he’d so much as wanted—”

Tante narrowed his eyes. “Are you becoming a mouthpiece of the Arcanes?”

“You know I'm not—” Ruthenia bristled. “It just never sat right with me, your obsession with killing—”

“—if you don’t want it, that’s your business! How dare you stop us—”

“They were designed to kill, Tante! Fire it and you get no second chances! I can't enable you—”

“—‘Cause that’s what Arcanes do, ya know?" He jabbed the gun at her chin. "They take your things and tell you it’s for your own good—”

“If it'll help me not die then maybe I would, maybe I would listen—”

“—You’re not siding with them, now, are you?”

“Of course not!”

He lunged, teeth bared, like a wild beast. This time she flinched. “The New Town will bite back. Like a hungry naga it will bite back. And the kings will bleed.”

“They're not the ones who will bleed.”

“Not without guns, they won't.”

They glared, and snarled, for many uncomfortable seconds. Finally Ruthenia sighed, snatching the gun out of his hand. “Fine, Tante. I’ll see what I can do. But don’t forget that I warned you.”

Tante sniffed. “Don't matter to me what you say. You don't know nothing. You and your fancy job and your fancy house.” Den shook his head. Hyder was wider-eyed and muter than she ever remembered. Gordo had retreated to his corner.

Gingerly, she brought the gun’s grip up to eye level. The brand on the wood showed its company and specifics, but not the factory where it had been made. Its barrel had been bent out of shape by the blunt force of being flung at some hard surface, scrape marks marring its sheen. Not just terrible engineering, but terrible metal as well.

“It looks like something I can hammer back into shape," she said, shrugging. "We’ll see how long it lasts.” Tante grunted in satisfaction.

“I'm sure you'll do great,” said Hyder with an appeasing grin. But she was long past the age when that smile would’ve assuaged her annoyance. Instead, she yanked at the grip until it popped off, and began shaking  the black powder out onto the stones.

“Ruth, stop that,” Tante growled, reaching out to catch the powder as it fell out. “Do you have any idea how many argents you’re pouring away?”

“Good luck trying to sell this much to anyone,” she answered, letting the rest sift into his hands.

The five did their best to enjoy lunch together in the stench under a bridge over the River Colura. Lying a couple of streets from their usual hideout, the river split the New Town in two and wound across half the island, emptying into the Aora Strait at Baytown.

Sitting in the muddy grit beneath the bridge, they chomped away at their breaded chicken salads, passing stolen packets of herbs between themselves.

Then, with a quiet, rusty creak, the bridge began to sway.

Tante’s head perked up. “Is this one of them...Thread-quakes?” he said. “Den said something or other about those.”

“They were mentioned in the Herald,” answered Den, lifting his head. “Was there just one? I felt nothing.”

“You never feel anythin’,” answered Gordo, and Hyder laughed. Tante was too busy staring at the structure overhead, every muscle pulled taut as if he expected it to come alive and pounce.

Ruthenia tore her gaze from the railings of the drawbridge. “You’ll be fine as long as it’s just Threads,” she said. “It’s those pompous fat-bags who should be worried.” There were nods and self-satisfied grins all around. Then they went back to their salads, considerably less talkative than before.

---

“Have fun today!” Ruthenia almost missed Gordo's shout while she fought to set her umbrella levitating on the Threads.

Rising out of the alley, out of the smoke and noise of the New Town, Ruthenia gulped in a breath of fresh air. The sunlight burned on her face, and she shot off towards the nearest gate, one hand on her umbrella, the other shielding her eyes against the light.

Sailing through the traffic of the West Wind Tunnel, she stared into the stream at the bottom, watching the circles of light ripple in the reflections below. Beneath the glittering surface, one could make out the rusting remains of objects that had fallen from the belts and pockets of commuters. There were shattered watches, cogs and hands spilling across the stone bed, rust-eaten wheels, and chains. Then there were pieces of what could have been jewellery, and cupre coins glinting. Between them swam the Wind Tunnel koi, pushing the bits about, their bodies glittering.

“This is a strange place for you to be, isn’t it?” she whispered. The carp’s eyes darted about as it drifted between the knobs and chains, but never once to her.

She raised her gaze from the water, feeling the wind howling through the tunnel, echoing overhead like the sound of a choir through a cathedral. It brought a pleasant chill.

She rose again and caught the wind, rejoining the rest of the Wind Tunnel traffic. Windows whizzed past her in flashes of light. She gripped her umbrella tighter and shot off into the blue.

Her detour back to her shed on Beacon Way was for one purpose only: she tossed the gun out of her bag and buried it under wrenches in her toolbox, glancing about to check for incoming blond inventors and blowing out a sigh of relief when none came to catch her red-handed.

Now, with all her daily errands run and no other busines to attend to, Ruthenia figured there would be no harm in attending her classes. She returned to the air upon her umbrella, still suspended from before, and because the wind was in the opposite direction from her destination, she took the aboveground route, floating over the fields and then in and out of the shelter of Tunnel gates as soon as she reached it. Out of gate 53 she shot at last, and with the school on the horizon, she ventured to check her watch.

Ruthenia grimaced. It was one of those days. She was almost forty-five minutes early.

With a shrug, she let her flight turn northeast, towards the centre of the Central Circle, where an inverted granite cone levitated, rotating so slowly the motion was almost imperceptible. Leaping off onto the rooftop right by the entrance ladder, she snatched the umbrella out of the air and clambered down the ladder, hooking it on her elbow.

The dim cold enveloped her, and with it the scent of old paper and mildew. Inside the great cone was a smaller one, almost perfectly slotted into it—a stack of balconies that did not move, upon which the browsers stood, reaching for the books on the shelves of the rotating outer structure. 

Or at least, that’s how things typically looked. Today, entire shelves on the uppermost tier were empty. She saw a library assistant scurrying by with a stack of books in her hands, newly-bound. The tremors had certainly done a number on their collection. She strolled on towards the next ladder down.

Being a protected building, the Science and Engineering collection continued to thrive in the third-bottommost tier, despite the religious Ihirin nuts’ most furious lobbying efforts. Ruthenia scoured every shelf of the tier for books on compact engines, and came away with a bounty of just three. Not that that came as much of a surprise: they were a relatively new innovation from Cin, only just touching Astran shores to the protesting voices of the devout.

Never too early to learn how to build them, however. Ruthenia gave each of the stodgy volumes a quick flip before selecting the one with the best diagrams. She clambered back up the steep staircases, to find the librarian-in-residence shelving new books in the Ancient History section on the fifth tier.

“Could you register this?” she asked, lobbing the book at him.

The librarian let out a strangled cry, tripping over his robes as he dove for it. For some seconds he clutched it close like an infant, eyes wide behind his glasses. With a deep sigh, he opened the borrowing registry along the seam of a bookmark, and copied the title of her book into it. “Name?” he said. She furnished it. “Ruthenia Cendina. I know that name.”

She froze and turned to him, but he didn't seem interested enough in this thought to chase it. Snatching the book out of the petite man’s grip, Ruthenia exited the library the way she’d entered, lifting off into the blue noon like a dandelion parachute sailing between chains of Central Circle sky houses.