Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy by Ekaterina Sedia Read Free Book Online

down to shade his eyes, gathers the reins up in both hands again and flicks the beast onward. He can hear the muezzin’s song now, ringing out over the city, echoing off the walls just as the sunlight shatters off the mirror windows of the tower, and though he does not recognise the language of it, the tune is so familiar that he hums it quietly to himself as he drives on, feeling the vibration in his throat, the rhythm in his chest.
    •
    He turns a corner and the tower stands before him, closer now and overgrown in vines, down at the far end of a weed-cracked tarmac street of concrete flats, their balconies all lush with foliage, crawling ivy and cascading flowers. As he rattles down the street, the shrieks and whistles of waking birds rise and fall around the singer’s song, as tumultuous and chaotic as the foliage but somehow, like the foliage, with some solid, ordered structure buried in there, buried deep but present. Under the veins of vines, the morning has a skeleton, articulated in song and stone around him.
    — Hie! Hyah! He turns another corner, and the tower is there again, a shattered ruin, a jagged, broken-bottle shard cutting up into the grey-black smoke that billows from its burning hulk, flickering with red and gold flames, blue-white flashes of electric discharge like lightning lashing its frame with showers of sparks. The chimaera flings its head from side to side, flicks its tail in animal nerves, and he speaks soothingly to it, coaxes it on, turns yet another corner to —
    •
    The tower rises out of and over the old city’s sandstone streets, an obelisk in steel and silver sheen, mirroring the sky it scrapes, but also — in its incompleteness, in the greys of girders and concrete columns, where the mirrors stop but the tower carries on up as a confusion of cranes and portacabins and clear plastic tarpaulins — somehow reflecting the reality of the city beneath it, of streets that even in their dilapidation have a dynamism and a grandeur, a vitality that the modernism of the finished portion of the tower hides behind its mirrors.
    As the carter rides his cart into the confusion of arriving workmen, of machines chuntering into life and spewing petrol smoke into the air, of yellow hardhats and curses and the architect with the blueprints in one hand, pointing upwards with the other, and the gaffer shaking his head, and a hundred other carters, all arriving from different directions with their loads of this morning’s bones, all being pointed at the dumping grounds; as the song of the distant singer echoes over itself and melds into and becomes this cacophony of daily life: the carter follows the line of the tower’s walls upwards past their actual ends and on upwards to the eventual vanishing point in the blue morning sky.

Red, Gold And Green
    Red, gold and green, the city stretches below. From his window in the highest room within the tower, the lord architect watches dawn wash over it, all the greys and blacks of shadows dissipating, mists burned off by morning sun. He sees the cathedrals and the mausoleums, spires and domes, parks and rookeries, docks and dumping grounds, centres of commerce and recreation, malls and stadiums, slums and skyports, office blocks and temple compounds, all the gardens and the ghettoes. Here and there are a few places that he recognises — a building that has kept its place, a street that hasn’t shifted — but the main part of it is utterly transformed. Razed in evenfall and hinter’s night and raised anew with daybreak, the city defies all reason, all attempts to grasp at any sort of certainty within its structure.
    — You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.
    •
    He tries not to, but in these three short years since his designs were made flesh he has seen too much not to regret his actions. He remembers the man-to-man talks with the presidenti, how he’d spoken of the vast potential that these bitmites might have as agents with autonomy.