Chapter 1: Sunset and a Drink

The warehouse was on fire.  The rioters were being cut down by the guards, dying ugly and clogging up the passages, so some of the soldiers and saboteurs in the crowd started handing out homemade explosives.  Because nobody thinks clearly in a riot, they handed out firebombs too.  Everybody runs when they are on fire, right?  Set the guards on fire and clear the strong point.  It was logical.  It would have been really good for everyone if the people with the fire had connected the idea “Kill the Ma Clan!”  to “This warehouse is full of radioactive dust, cores, and devices powered by radioactive cores, because it belongs to the Ma Clan.”

            When the guards realized that they weren’t getting out of this alive, they decided that it was time to go out like a Ma.  They rushed the mob, radioactive “hot” weapons melting faces and boiling flesh, leaving the corpses as tumor generating horrors for any that would try to clean the place later.  They swung machetes and stabbed with halberds, pistols cracked out, and the whistles of crossbows accompanied them.  Whatever the guards could use, they used.  And when they were knocked down by the mob, they channeled heat from the radioactive core inside of them, triggering the suicide vests loaded with yet more radioactive shrapnel.  They killed hundreds in seconds.  But the mob numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  The poor and beaten down of Old Radler had risen up, and would kill their overseers today.

            The disguised soldiers pulled back from the warehouse, directed by local traitors to the next Clan holding.  Didn’t matter which Clan, they all had to go.  They plunged through the endless twisting alleys of Old Radler, always in the shadows of the hundred towers that rose up out of the vast hill the city sat on. 

The shortest route was never a straight line- one had to run up the ruins of a sky-scraper that had been turned into a farm, then cross a bridge made of a glass no one had been able to recreate into crude adobe shelters clustered on top of a stone ziggurat.  These shelters were now considered luxury housing, compared to the lightless, airless closets that were “homes” inside the ziggurat, or a thousand places just like it.  The local traitors took the soldiers to just the right hovel.  The soldiers set breaching charges, blew a wall down, and easy as that, they were in a wide piazza.  Rocks projecting advertisements for products that haven't existed in millennia were set amongst the cobblestones, and some little bookstores dotted around a fountain that pumped out flavored water.  No one could quite agree what the flavor was supposed to be, though.  Some neighborhoods are just boring like that.

The crouching hulk of the Ma Clan house was still some fifteen minutes away.  Not to worry.  There were more than a hundred thousand people trying to kill their way in already.  They surrounded the fortified “House” the size of a city block, thick walls layered with defenses against dozens of types of threats.  Not impregnable.  The Ma would be the first to tell you that nothing was unbeatable.  But anyone trying to touch the Ma would pay a hellish price.

The rioters were very willing to pay that price.  Other Clans were hated.  The Ma clan was feared.  Feared for their cruelty, their violence, their disregard for any not of the Clan.  Feared for their command of the ever-present radiation.  So omnipresent it was just called “heat.”  One soldier looked down as he passed.  There was a splatter of flesh and blood on the cobblestone.  Someone had taken a little spill from high up.  Not their problem.  They pushed on.  Until they exterminated the Ma, the “spontaneous popular uprising” would not be complete. 

Mazelton looked down at the departing soldiers from seven stories up.  He was bleeding, and his lips were already turning a faint blue from the poison.  “We never even kissed.”  He said.  The fires were spreading across the city.  The drums and whistles were coming from everywhere.  Safety, today, wasn’t something that existed.  Not for the living.  A trace of bitter optimism tugged the corner of his mouth upwards.  “Good thing I’m comfortable with the dead.”

 

One hour earlier-

 

Mazelton wasn’t an incompetent, exactly.  The useless did not survive in the Ma Clan.  Mazelton was actually fairly talented, just not at anything the Ma Clan gave a damn about.  Mazelton, to the disgust of his parents and confusion of his elders, was an aesthete. 

Mazelton loved to dance.  He loved to make sculptures, draw pictures, paint, recite poetry and his calligraphy was probably the best in his generation.  Oh, he could fight, sort of.  You didn’t survive childhood if you couldn’t.  His internal heat control was excellent, and he could polish cores too.  He wasn’t great at smoothing and carving those little radioactive lumps into useful tools, but he was better than most outside the Clan.  But he wasn’t outside the Clan.  He was of the main line of the Ma Clan, and for the Ma Clan, art was strictly a tool, and nothing more.  It wasn’t what “real” Ma did.

Real Ma, they made things.  Great, terrible things.  Want to speak to someone on the other side of the world?  The Ma would bind the essence of two stones together, and they could call to one another.  Wanted to light your home?  They could carve that core.  Sterilize food, water, wounds?  Ma Clan polishers were there and ready to help.  For a fee.  Slightly bigger fee for weapons that could melt your enemies and ensure that any children the survivors might have would be sickly and die young.  Mazelton just liked to party, dance and enjoy the wonders of Old Radler.  Was that really so bad?

Yes.  Yes it was.  But no matter.  The Clan had existed for tens of millennia.  Any shape of peg could be found an appropriately shaped hole.  You just had to hammer it a bit to make it fit snugly. 

Mazelton was relegated to the outer yards of the Clan, assigned the role of a Hurricane Lily in the Flower Court.  The Flower Court was an affectation the various clans sometimes enjoyed.  A fancy garden of “flowers,” for public enjoyment.  A Jasmine, night blooming and fragrant, served to make the public more favorable to their clan.  Hurricane Lilies did that too.  But those particular lilies had never been associated with anything nice.  No, that was the lily that grew on the banks of the rivers in Hell.

This season’s design inspiration were the mists that flooded Old Radler every evening.  Mazelton found them fascinating, watching the mist boil from the high towers of the Ma clan and roll down the giant hill of the city, around the ruins and into the deep tunnels.  Not the deepest, no one alive could dare claim to have found the true depths of Old Radler, but down into the catacombs, the cool mist winding around the mountains of skulls and femurs left by innumerable plagues and disasters.  Then the fog was pushed back up, back into the vast underground condensers, run through sponges so enormous they could double as apartment buildings.  The radiation and core dust of the city was absorbed by the mist, carried to the giant underground condensers, filtered out and pressed into the cheap slabs of hot stones that were both stove and radiator for the people of a dozen cities.  A civic good provided by the Ma clan, and one that filled their coffers to bursting.  Mazelton understood the mist very well indeed.

Mazelton wore long, flowing robes, so long that he looked like a little cloud.  He sewed tiny cores into it, condensing faint wisps of fog around him, helping him develop the blurred androgynous look he was favoring at the moment.  For the last few weeks he played at seduction with a Jasmine of the Cabell clan.  The Cabells were a small presence in Old Radler, but looking to rise to the status of a Great Clan. 

This Jasmine refused to tell Mazelton their name, or anything about themselves directly.  Such things were to be won, in their little game.  Their features seemed to shift with the light- harshly masculine, delicately femminine.  Insubstantial.  In flux.  Mazelton was honest about his art, and feared that he was falling in love.

One afternoon in early autumn, the Jasmine called Mazelton out for a walk and a game of poetry.  They wandered through the galleries and up twisted spires, competing with vividness of imagery.  The shadows under the arches came alive as Mazelton drew out the Ælfflæd with his bare shimmers of light.  He had implanted tiny cores into his hands, trusting in his superb internal control to keep the heat from spreading into his flesh.  This was generally considered death-seeking levels of dumb, but he was never very good at listening to his elders.  And it made the Jasmine smile and coo at his drawings, so it was worth it.

Mazelton seized the Jasmine’s hand and ran with them, up one flight of stairs, through a gallery of arches, made a quick cut across a dim courtyard and then through a door that could only be seen if you knew which shadow to look in.  He pressed his back to the door, and waved Jasmine towards the empty stretch of wall that once was an elegant window, seven stories above what was once a stylish plaza. 

The sun set over Old Radler, the whole sky the color of a maple leaf turning.  You could see the proud warehouses of the Ma clan, the roaring factories of the Bo, the teeming rookeries whose rents fed the Cabells and the Pellenoils.  The sparkling glass and ceramic towers of the Xia.  The whole social tapestry of the city, or all that was fit for the sun to shine on.

 

A burning heart sets,

And all I can see is the mountain.

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Ah, where are the small flowers and sweet grasses?

Mazelton invited the Jasmine to finish the verse.  They paused, and as drums began to sound in the rookeries, smiled.

 

Perhaps, they lie ‘neeth dilapidated stone.

Perhaps, they call to the sun,

Their tiny hearts thundering like war drums.

Laughing happily, the Jasmine produced a beautiful antique glass flask.  The liquor within was heather and lilac.  They offered it to Mazelton, and he happily sipped it.

The drink uncoiled across his tongue.  Syrupy, sweet, violets followed by bitter herbs.  His escaping breath felt like a winter blast, and his nose was filled with the lingering scent of… Aconite.  Mazelton let the flask tumble from his hand, watched it bounce on the stone floor, wishing it would break like his heart was.

“What’s my prize, oh Jasmine?”

“What have you guessed?”

“The Cabell’s are in half a dozen cities, and looking to climb in all of them.  Old Radler could be their ticket to Great Clan status, and their “loyalty” to the North Sea Confederation would give them time to firm their foundations.  And yet, for some reason, the Cabells decided I must die.  Why?  I must be far more useful alive, seduced and pliant.”

The Jasmine smiled, a little sadly, a little coldly, as the drumming grew louder and whistles started to cry from around the city.  Mazelton pulled a silver whistle from the sleeves of his robe, toying with it.  A single blast, and every clansman and city guard within earshot would pile in, killing the Jasmine without question.

“No prize, you missed the key point.”  The Jasmine slid a black glass blade from a hidden pocket in their flesh.  “I’m not sorry, but I am regretful.  I had hoped the poison was enough.  You weren’t bad company, for a parasite.”

The whistles blew more urgently, and the drums spread.  Smoke shot up from the north, where the Bo clan school was.  The Jasmine stepped between Mazelton and the door.

“A coup?”

“Time for a change.  Goodbye, Mazelton.”

The Jasmine lunged, the knife piercing from under their heart towards Mazelton’s.  Mazelton froze a half beat, shocked by the sudden violence.  He staggered back before the blade, towards the empty hole of the former window, flinging his whistle at the Jasmine.  It bounced off, ignored.  The Jasmine recovered their lunge and closed to grapple.

The Jasmine reached with their left hand, right holding the blade close to their chest.  Mazelton swept his sleeves, countering their left with his, a small circle looking to foul their line of attack.  Instead, the Jasmine grabbed the sleeve of his robe and yanked him into their boot.  Mazelton’s gut exploded in pain, putting him down, hard.  The Jasmine swarmed in, moving to mount and finish him on the ground.  Mazelton flailed, his legs and hands trapped by the robe and the Jasmine’s technique.  The Jasmine straddled his waist, brought the dagger into line, swiftly blocking the one hand Mazelton had worked free a few inches from their temple.  She had won, and he was dead.  Then Mazelton ignited the cores in his hand, burning an entire season’s worth of heat into the Jasmine’s face. 

The Jasmine screamed, their eyes boiling and the flesh sloughing off the side of their skull.  They flailed the dagger around, cutting him, as Mazelton bucked and tried to fight free.  They clung to him, screaming, screaming, screaming, as they rolled towards the window.  Mazelton managed to kick the Jasmine off, scrambling away as they howled and cut, trying to find and kill him.  He scooped the flask from the floor where he had dropped it.  Heavy, solid thing.  He whipped it at the Jasmine’s head.  The Jasmine was exquisitely trained, dodging even when they couldn’t see what was coming.  Their well trained feet moved back and to the side, a perfect dodge- right out the ruined wall that once held a window.  The Jasmine fell for a long time before the screaming stopped.

Mazelton dropped to his knees, his fingers digging into his thighs.  The asinine thought- “I can’t throw up, Father would be furious.” repeated again and again in his mind, putting a little paper bag around the leaking sick of what just happened.  Of the Jasmine’s lovely face rotting away.

Mazelton looked out the window, his brain screeching to a halt.  He couldn’t understand what he was seeing.  This was Old Radler.  His home.  It was on fire, convulsing, slaughtering his kin.  His home wanted him dead.  Mazelton staggered towards the door.  The poison had started kicking in.  He might have some resistance (thank some kind ancestor for buying superior kidneys and livers for their descendants) but he wasn’t immune.  No way he could make it to the Clan House.  All the shops would be a target too.  No healers or apothecaries would see him.   Had to go to ground.  Well. 

He had his own little home- down amongst the dead.  On the banks of the rivers in Hell.

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