Part 3 of "In A Walled City"
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I.

How much do you remember?
Temple under the mountain
Limetree in a shaft of light
Gray robe on the edge of shadow
Bare forearm dragging a branch along the floor
The river of stones, the sound of their shells clicking together

II.

I remember. It was the same day they were captured out near Anchorstore. I was in my office, deep in the corridors of the High Marengo’s palacia. We didn’t know, of course, we couldn’t have and yet, all the same, there was a shift in the light, in the weight of the air.

My office was windowless, lit by two candles, but there were times in between Bells when I could move quietly along the outer edges of fasing departments and make my way to a forgotten balcony facing the arroyo. I had never seen anyone on or near this balcony except for the occasional fellow low ranking shirker from down the hall. I knew and was on good terms with all of my counterparts.

But that day there was someone else. I don’t. I still don’t know who. Couldn’t see them, but their voice was close. The only word they said was “Freyam” – a name I had not heard in decades and was forbidden from using myself. An old trap – and yet I nodded. And then nothing, and then nothing. And then that shift in the air again, a breeze trapped on the balcony, a piece of paper trapped in the breeze.

Like my ancient name, I had not seen or felt a piece of paper in a very long time. I still wonder what might have seent me out there, frantically chasing and flailing my arms. Luckily this scene was short lived. I stuffed the thing into my robes.

I backed into the maze of corridors, disoriented. Faces turned towards me, anonymous colleagues who’d ignored my passage all these years wore masks of suspicion, my gait altered by their weight of their eyes on me. By the time I was back within my own domains I was limping, my robe stuck to me with sweat.

Watcer stood in my door frame, long arm reaching inward, spindle fingers just beginning to wrap around one of my candles. Turning without moving, wearing my face – stale tricks – watchers finger retracted, grin wider than I’ve ever worn it, now limping to mimic my own movement.

I couldn’t take it. And before I knew it in my conscious mind was undoing the watcher. Pulling back into myself and unmaking.

Watchers, you know, they’re just us. That’s no secret. We’re conditioned to forget, but some part of me didn’t forget – I fell back in my mind to the making of my watcher and I pulled and pulled at the threads until the whole process had been undone, and there was nothing left to darken my door frame except remnants of my own doubts and guilt, pooling on the floor, streaming back into my toes.

This act, while not a violation of any written law, was all the same a breech – and one that would leave unwanted resonance far and wide. I could not linger in the office.

I took an old shirt out of a drawer and quickly wove a half vial of dust into it. Propping it over the desk with light finger and shadow work - cheap but it would last a few hours - I backed into the corridors and began my descent. We were pressing up against the Bell of Pink Light, and the air was already orange.

On top of everything else, I was behind in my work. In those days the Auric Coast was coated with a thick film of overlapping microempires, petty kingdoms, experimental societies, agricultural collectives, nomadic bands, and other forms of human organization to ephemeral to be contained by any terminology. The majority of these entities armed themselves with the usual aray of symbol, sign, and anthem. The realm of Pasaedian was no exception and in my days of relevance I worked directly under the High Marengo; for seven years I wove anthems of gilded synthesis and vast ambient cloud at the behest of the crown, performing far across this valley and the next for purposes of solace, sport, and war.

But that was years and years ago – we all fade. My work had become clerical in nature. Cataloging, analyzing, decoding the anthems, chants, and worksongs of our hundreds of neighbors. In this capacity I had memorized everything from the churning dances of Neomassilia to the piercing wail of Astoria, the plastic shining anthem of the Mouselands, the whispered hopesongs of the mountain witches.

So, I was behind in my work. These were the days of bitter rivalry between Pasaedian and Citadel, the High Marengo and High Priestess in constant skirmishes over scraps of the valley. The Ziggurat employed weavers and singers not only from the coast but from all across the rim, and I was barely able to keep up. Now I was thinking this encounter on the balcony – did it even happen? Yes I could still feel the paper within my robes – I was thinking it seemed more and more a trap, some Commersean snare. It would not be the first time I had fallen under suspicion.

Amid shifting tides of colleagues anticipating the next Bell I threaded my way through corridors and courtyards of marble, out into the Marengo’s garden.
A green and violet iris in the ojo of the palacia, this garden contained the last living jacaranda trees on the coast. It was the middle of Sivan and they were in the full of their brightness, the ground thickly carpeted in purple and buzzing with sacred travellers. Stepping carefully to avoid them, looking down, I almost missed the clearing until I was at its edge, and then stopped. At the center, in a column of salmon light, lay Dmina, fourth under the name, High Marengo of Pasaedian, motionless, naked, and closeyed under a sheer gold cloth. Upon the cloth crawled sacred travellers, at least fifty, more than I had seen in this lifeline. It is.. difficult to think now of the age of paper, when they numbered in the millions, when one might see a hundred or two on any summer afternoon. In this garden the travellers were named and numbered, carefully tracked, each lived in its own glass. But their keeper was nowhere to be found. Three of the Marengian guard stood on the far edge of the clearing, intently seeing nothing.

I felt a pull, I felt it coming from beneath the ground, I felt the coldness in my tailbone and the heels of my feet, and the sense of forceful, patient inevitability – it was the pull of watersource. I shifted back into the trees, sinking deeper into the soft earth with each step. The little travellers were everywhere, their hum filled my ears.

The sky was darkening, streaked with lavender, and the Bell would be upon me soon. The gardens ran up against the southwestern gates of Pasaedian. I was out and among the free buildings before the ring reached me.

In those fractured days the formal sovereignty and firstlayr powers of a petty realm like Pasaedian would extend only so far as the physical walls of the palacia itself. The majority of the valley’s residents lived in freestanding apartment blocks and houses. Their legience – to Pasaedian, to Citadel, to Mouse or to Rome – marked by a small shield affixed to the right side of the doorframe. This shield could be scanned, the level of one’s legiency determining everything from their healthcare and conflict resolution to their business rights and miliia duties and the sources of their water and light.

Almost all of the doors in my building bore the same crest on their shield as mine – the dark horse forcene of the Marengo adorned with the rose of Pasaedian. But when I reached my door, it was gone. Nothing but a shield-shaped spot of unbleached paint on the frame.

When I was a child I had recurring dreams in which I was struck by lightning. I would die but I would not wake up; changed, I would drift through a photonegative world. In middle age, watcher over a corner of the valley, my dreams were stalked by columns of smoke steadily encroaching, inexplicable formations of machines overhead. Now in old age it was this cutting of lines that haunted my dreamlife, this sudden statelessness – even though I’d dreamed of statelessness all throughout the age of paper, argued for it, pulled for it. This was different. Living in this sea of shifting states, in this age they were no more a part of one’s identity than what used to be called brand loyalty – in fact they were the same thing. But in this valley of no particular consequence there were only two, and they took and took back, block by block by block. This was not the desert nor the vale of Joaquin – to be unlined in this place was death.

I did not touch the door. The lights in the hallway were already dimming. Out on the street I stayed under leafshadow, robes pulled close and matching the tone of the darkening air. Only then did I remember the paper, folded and curled in one of my pockets.

I kept moving until I was south enough and west enough that I could slip into a small park far from sound and light. Unseen, hopefully unfelt, I threw myself beneath a young pepper tree and drew a circle around myself in the rich soil. The velvet sky was lowering itself onto all of us. I pulled the paper from my robe.

It was an airplane ticket. Made not of paper after all, but a very thin plastic. A kind no one had seen for forty years, and the two ports noted on the ticket were less than half an hour apart by car – even in the days when flights existed, this flight did not exist. Even in the thin light of this moment the aged ink – suddenly exposed to it – began to run. In spite of my care, my hands were soon smudged with indigo.

Looking out from under the branches, I realized the ground had begun to tilt. Leaves and pebbles rolled down the street, followed by a pair of Commersean guard, yelling and chasing after some lost piece of equipment. Then, nearly silent and just against the edge of the park, a smooth and darkglassed van, door sliding open, driver unseen. A concentrated light shown suddenly on me, focused on the paper, or the stains on my hands, or both. The pull, when it came, was around the wrists and gently on the back of the neck, with a sense of urgent departure. This time, I let it take me, found myself lowered gently onto ancient cushioned seats. It felt as though the van never stopped moving during this process, and there was no sound of machine within it. Rather, I fell into it, and it fell down the street, along with everything else, as though the world had been wrapped into the shape of a funnel.

III.

A simple square of asphalt, wide and clear
A ring of structures, facades of towers
A defensible inheritance from an earlier time
Fill in the gaps with cargo containers, trailers, and soil
Dig up the center and plant

In our fear of each other and our pasts we will put up walls,
Only to become restless, bound too close together, fractuous and
Uncontainable.

Awake to the flows, these are days of liquid light
Symbols of the previous age still wrapped around us in confusing patterns,
False eyes to ward off predators
As the old state falls apart, the hands of gold that owned it remain strong and grasping, seperated and naked, ever pulling, pulling through blood or tear, carving sigils into the raw stone

But Others, Others take to the mountains and the sands to undo their work, unthread their branding fromt the minds it holds.

The walled cities glow in the night,
hundreds of different colours fill our hills and valleys,
their webs reaching into the darkness in between

Beyond the reach of their light we still have ink and paper – and so into those bright spaces where we dare not show ourselves, we can still toss messages that will be delivered by the wind.

IV.

With concentration, the feeling subsided, and my internal tides regained their balance. With even greater concentration, the tint on the window began to clear, and I could see that we were rolling into Subcontractor City.

Already, low towers of glass and pale blue light surrounded us. Subcontractor City was an exclave of the Bubblestate hundreds of miles to the north. In this place, emotion was muted, the churning flows of life and death were distant, inaccessible. Somewhere inside the ancient walls of the van an engine sputtered to life and the whole thing shook, only to come to a stop minutes later.

The door was pulled open as if by human hands but when I stepped out there was no one. The nearest glass tower was identical to the others except the door was open, the sigil 3172A6 marked in clearscript on the glass panel above. On my way to the entrance I passed through a sort of courtyard - benches on which no one had ever sat ringed around a sculpture – three arcing, unpainted pieces of metal spanned by a tensionless spring. Whatever feeling it might have held for its creator had been stripped, it stood now as a monument to nonmeaning, a warning to all who passed.

Inside, the age of the place filled my nostrils. Very little had changed inside this structure for nearly a hundred years except for the accumulation of dust as the automated filters died one by one. A low ceiling of dirty white squares, occasionally out of place revealing darkness and clutter above. Outside and in the van I had felt alone, but in here I was increasingly accompanied by some unseen presence, a group of figures walking just behind me and in the periphery, heavy, moving fast, burdened with gear – and then the feeling of a finger pressed hard into the center of my back. In this manner I was escorted through warrens of cubicle walls, snaking cables, caved in CRT monitors, all sporadically seen under distant flickering tubelights, past darkened conference rooms and up several broad staircases. It was in these kinds of places the secret work of the valley was done. While there were no longer custodians or air purifiers, the stilling remained in place. Sympathy and resonance fell dead here. Only ambition and bitterness were allowed through the seive, in dull and muted form. Nothing here could take hold or pull and so tracking became difficult, remembering a near impossibility. The walls were covered with notes, details of the most insignifigant kind. I looked down and my hands were still covered in the ink.

As we approached a glowing door I was reminded of the other reason secret work was done here. A large conference table was covered in devices shining under the blue light. Portals to oceans of madness, full of the eyes of manufacturers in the rim states. Long since banned in the valley realms and most of the rest of the coast besides, we had rendered them dysfunctional. If you tried to bring one within the walls of the palacia it would turn to ash in your hand. But in Subcontractor City, they still worked.

One entire wall was covered in a screen, all the imagery in shades of blue, the room was drowning. A dizzying succession of scenes overlapped – singers of the mountain havens, lost in their visions, faces twitching and fingers wrapped chaotically but artfully around their instruments, a spinning map of the city of Avalon and the temple of salt below, the famous scene of the General Mia Marisol smashing through the fascist barricade on the Bridge of Mateo, the subject of thousands of murals and tapestries along the coast, her column of delivery trucks converted into tanks, chariots, once even a dragon, the face of the general herself fifteen years ago and now in her exile, a diagram of the old Grapevine wall, the coats of arms of realms and familias known and unknown, all colours stripped but shades of blue.

I was so entranced by this wall of shifting images that I didn’t see the shadowed figures seated around the table. As soon as I did, the wall went dark and the white tublights in the ceiling shifted into fullness. There were twelve others in the room. I recognized the High Marengo, two of the crowns of Neomassilia, an ambassador from the collective of Joaquin as well as one of their healers and, surprisingly, the High Priestess of Citadel. As far as I knew, the rulers of Pasaedian and Citadel had not been in the same room in a generation, but clearly I didn’t know what went on in Subcontractor City.

In the center of the table was a broad area cleared of all the devices – in it’s center, an empty glass, a small jar holding a tiny sacred traveller, and a translucent pitcher filled halfway with a clear viscous fluid. Voices came from everywhere but from none of them: “we just want you to taste”

From the centers of my feet through my fingertips, the pull was a creature of pure lines within me, a burning wire bent into the shape of my core, drove me as I poured the liquid into the glass, the glass to my self – a slow process, and then slower again – the lights began to fade, as did the presence of my observors. Only the little sacred traveller remained, buzzing in their jar, until the droning of the wings became all there was of reality – my self a loose knot of vibrations held together by pure feeling, falling further apart. The spaces in between the fragments filled with petal and vine, fractal windows into possible worlds. And I could feel all those eyes in the room again, pouring through me, tracking branches, looking for patterns, faces, signs. Cloud formations over the Sea of Cortez. Marisol, a general again, older, returned from exile on the Island of Qatal. Page after page of of flowing prophetic script from the Thinkers under the rock of Morro. A vine, thick and implausible, growing on the outside of the Bubblestate, living on the glass and radiation beneath. The sign of three moons glowing deep beneath the waters of the central Pacific, their light coming up from the depths and shining through blue wave after blue wave, flooding into the room.

The table was empty except for an old coffeestain and broken telephone. The wall a loop of static. The corridors and rooms had filled with a pale gray light, subcontractors sat at their terminals, eyes half closed, processing. The scratchings on the wall were no longer visible. In silence, amid a world of machines, I made my way out into the natural light. When I held up my hand to see if the ink remained, it was on fire.

V.

All these years later I still carry a vial of dust
That dust

In my memory, dust waiting to fall took the form of vast rectangular structures clustured on the edges of rivers and the junctions of arteries, sparkling with hours

O it waited and waited
And you know, what we called, opening the eye

For a lot of people, really just a matter of knowing what was made of dust. A matter of tasting it. Feeling it.