A Fine Black Sky
CHAPTER FIVE
Within the space of a week, Kid was ready to leave. He wasn't reluctant, though his countenance might have betrayed him, forced into a look of concern - not for himself, but the future, how it contained him, his Brother, and by inference, not his Father. Kid hadn't been forced to look at mortality before, his Mother dying before he could get to know her. She was a mystical figure to Kid, often used by others for truths, lessons and praise, doled out with no regard to emotive content. Therefore his Mother became a spirit of the past - a beacon to it also. An anchor in a storm. It was to her memory Kid now looked. And he drew a blank, much to his own consternation. It was something he always had desired to change, but accepted with grace that it never could be, no matter how much he wished it were otherwise. She could have been cruel, she could have been curt. How was Kid to know? Therefore he didn't look upon her with malice, but curiosity, a slow burning flame somewhere at the back of his mind, reminding him of what could have been, particularly at a time like this, as he was waiting to leave the Tower, that place he had called home for the whole of his life, to journey to a place of trepidation. Of what was to come, Kid could only speculate. And the speculation he arrived at was full of anxious thoughts and mindless people.
The journey was a kind of diadromous movement from the security and understanding of one Tower to the near complete opposition in another. The South Tower. It looked the same from the outside, but then so did many people, who later turned out to be something quite different. Kid was about to discover just how right he was in that assumption.
Kid was led ceremoniously to the secure North Tower door that led to the outside, the foot thick door made of layers of wood and metal concertina’d together many ancient eons ago, held in place by monstrous hinges like bear’s knuckles trapped between the wood and the recessed stone wall. The retinue of neotenous fops gathered there, included four Nobles of vexatious verisimilitudinal verse. Kid needed none of them, and he wasn't supposed to. They were passengers, it would seem, to take advantage of the Lord’s Litter on its way to the South Tower. Kid’s Father was not there, however, to see his Third Son away on his Apprenticeship. He had sent his apologies, but there had arisen an urgent matter he needed to attend to. Kid saw no malice in it. He had grown used to the absence of his Father in any emotional recourse throughout his development. What he didn't know, he didn't miss.
Yet no Son of a Lord would ever take that journey through the City to another Tower alone, not even the Third Son. Kid was loaded into a Litter, too long and wide for him, plumped up with Lordly pillows and delicately threaded throws, silk curtains that covered the dark wood and the gridded windows, devised to keep people out rather than the occupant in, which began to give Kid a distorted view of a world he had only marginally observed from high up in the North Tower, when he would visit the window he had fallen from when an infant, perhaps for nostalgia’s sake, but perhaps more as a memorial to clumsiness and survival. This was the second time Kid had left the security of the Tower, the first being when he fell out of that window, but he remembered practically nothing of that venture.
The constant chatter from the cluster in the Litter washed over Kid like a wave of empty vapid words, constructed of several convoluted layers of gossip, topped with a modicum of destructive venom. The City of Unity was a maze of towering silhouettes, each a forerunner to the next in a mockery of grisaille patchwork upon a shadow theatre, and the pinpoints of light shone like a kind of faultily made macrame pattern that reached out with illuminated fingers into the darkness.
Kid was in another world. He had lost his grip on the microcosm that was the bubble of the Litter, a false sense of protection imbued into every fine silk hanging, bereft of usefulness except to adorn the falsity of supposed Nobility. For the passengers, everything was copacetic. Kid was distracted by the world he could see through the distorted window, and the voices within the Litter turned to static as Kid watched the staggered kinaesthesia click unrealistically from left to right like an animated panel in a comic strip. It was difficult to make anything of certain definability, stolen by the darkness winning against the grey, as the citizens, the Aberrants and Deviators - rife about the shadows - meandered seemingly intentionally to and from their disguised realism. Criminals, thieves, murderers - that was what the continual night contained. At least that’s what Kid had been taught, by the Logic Tutors, the Lord Makers and the Dilemmic Detentes. He was beginning to suspect he was not given the real truth of the matter. They didn't seem as mangled, diseased and abhorrent as he had been led to believe. It was everything he had been kept away from - an untruth that would build a spark in his mind to explore the City further one day - the impulse Kid imbued with his natural curiosity.
In the half light, or quarter light - illumination in some degree still essential for the Night Dwellers - beautiful buildings sprang distinctly from the melee of lesser ones, thronged into a tight space where even the gaps were covered, slanted diagonal lees tiled in brown clay, creating a myriad of alleyways, from down which Kid noticed a group, perhaps a dozen strong, dressed uniquely, strutting meaningfully from one closed in alleyway to another, asserted of purpose despite their location and manner. One might regard them as a lynch mob of sorts, but not Kid, as that aspect of his teaching and vocabulary was deemed inconsequential to the Third Son - someone who was destined to live and die in three small rooms; that of a bedroom, a bathroom and a classroom. Any more than that would have been seen as greedy. Now Kid had the world, but first he needed to conquer the City.
Viewed from above, the City was a kind of diamond shape with flexible edges, with a Tower at each outstretched peak. The South Tower loomed graciously like a sharp edged blade of many sides, high up, virtually lost in the darkness, the blanket of the shadow world; the atramentous, silky black and stained sky, devoid of the light that contained the dread of the forest that surrounded Unity - or Kombayn, depending upon one’s religious, spiritual or chronological bent. Unity felt more - clinical. Kombayn blessed the people with a wool-like comfort borne of familiarity and of something once never questioned - that of the Old Gods and their presence amongst the people, Guardians of the Dark and Repellers of the Light, they defended the people, until the people chose their own destiny, contradictorily placing their faith in a MonoGod, who sat above, in dignity and benevolence. Then there was the Cult of the Darkness, the Veiled - but that was a different story, something that Kid had not as yet truly encountered, in any real significant and dissentive sense.
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