City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) Read Free

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    The buildings grow nicer as the boat approaches the Aerial Palace: expensive apartments, tinted glass and jutting balconies with fancy gingerbread scrollwork on the rails, and broad-shouldered office buildings crouching on their pontoons like animals ready to spring. Buildings don’t reach as high here as in Jaspeer, because it would make the pontoons top-heavy.
    And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking: a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.
    Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!
    The Burning Man had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.
    Twenty-five thousand dead. Including the mage. Several thousand soldiers. The rest civilians.
    Aiah, in the coup’s headquarters, had watched it happen, had tried to stop it.. . too late.
    Her fault. She had provided the plasm.
    Come to mourn the dead!
    There are people hanging, she sees, from the ruined buildings. Hanging in what look like sacks, feet sticking out the bottom, the sacks swinging free on lines secured to broken rooftops. They are not dead people, not casualties—they have hung themselves there since the burning.
    People gone mad? Mourners? Aiah cannot tell—they are all too far away.
    Blowing soot brings tears to Aiah’s eyes. She dabs at them with her sleeve.
    Then fantastic architecture of the Aerial Palace appears on the horizon, all swoops and spirals like the path of a falcon traced through the air. Shieldlight shimmers off the arabesques of the building’s collection web, bronze patterns set into the building’s exterior and designed to absorb and defuse any plasm attack, defense and ornament in one. The burnished bronze adds lovely bright accents to the building’s design, but its defense aspect failed drastically—the building is scarred, pocked by machine guns and punctured by rockets. Plastic sheeting is tacked up over shattered windows. The Keremaths lived here, and they died here, too. When the assault teams fought their way up the stairways they found only corpses.
    Jewels appear in the air behind the Palace. An advertisement for diamonds.
    Surprise moves through Aiah as she sees people hanging here as well, dangling from sacks set into niches in the building. When she comes close, however, she sees they are not real people, but statues.
    A mystery. When she finds an opportunity she will ask.
    The colossal structure is built on a raft made of several pontoons, and the motor launch drives between two pontoons into a narrow, watery alley lit with bright sodium floods both above and below the water. Aiah looks down into the milky water for dolphins and finds none.
    The motor launch pulls into a slip alongside other, equally flamboyant craft.
    The soldier/steward jumps onto the floating pier and holds out a hand.
    “This way, miss.”
    There are soldiers patrolling up and down the quay in dark gray uniforms and helmets—Constantine’s Cheloki again. Constantine isn’t trusting the local troops that had actually captured the place: they’d changed sides once, and could again.
    There are probably telepresent mages scoping the place as well. It would be the safe thing to do.
    The door leading into the pontoon, Aiah sees, is an airlock, but it doesn’t look as if the heavy steel portal has been shut in a long time. Inside is a gold-rimmed desk where Aiah is checked in and given a badge.
    “Someone is coming down to escort you,” Aiah is told.
    The someone appears a moment later, and she recognizes him and smiles. He doesn’t smile back: he looks as if she’s a problem he doesn’t