house. While I held an umbrella over Clarissa, she unfurled and clipped down our autocarriage’s protective leather hood. We boarded the vehicle and set off with the torrent thundering so noisily on the skin roof we could barely converse. When we reached the main avenue, we found that it was practically a waterfall, so we abandoned the machine and jumped onto one of the new trams instead. It took us up to the third terrace with water sloshing noisily past its wheels. When the conveyance stopped we disembarked, and almost the instant we stepped into the flood, the rain ceased.
To our left—looking out over the rooftops—the choppy sea sparkled under the flushed, inexplicably cloud-free sky. The suns were already, for the most part, below the horizon, with just the molten smears of their apexes showing. Around us, the shadows were dense and purplish.
A short walk brought us to the temple. We mounted the steps and entered. My companion informed a Magician of our appointment. The Yatsill went away and returned a few moments later with Father Mordant Reverie, who said, “I must take you both to one of New Yatsillat’s highest towers that the Saviour’s Eyes may look upon you before they close.”
He turned us around and steered us back out, guiding us to an autocarriage parked nearby. We boarded it, he took the tiller, and moments later we were chugging back toward the avenue.
“Oh!” Clarissa suddenly cried out. She massaged her temples. “It’s stopped!”
“The blueprints?” I asked.
“At last!” she breathed. “I thought I was going insane! But—” She put her fingers to the bump above her right eyebrow.
Father Reverie turned his mask to her. “You feel your thoughts are being muffled, perhaps, Miss Stark?”
“Yes! As if my mind is being wrapped by a blanket.”
I looked at her, shocked. “Please! You’re not coming down with kichyomachyoma?”
“No, Aiden. This isn’t the sickness. It’s something else—a sort of suppression—and I sense it descending upon the whole city.”
Reverie clicked the fingers of his free hand together and said, “The Magicians are sequestered in the temples and are now extending the Saviour’s protection over the city. That is what you feel.”
There was less water cascading down the avenue now, and the autocarriage navigated the slope with minimal difficulty. The Magician drove us to the top level and stopped at a watchtower next to a paper mill.
“Come,” he said, and led us inside and up a long spiralling ramp. It eventually ended in a circular room with round widows set closely together in its walls. A huge lens stood before one of them, mounted on an ornate wheeled brass frame.
From this height, a tremendous vista was open to us: the flame-coloured ocean with the blazing smudges at its horizon; the monumental cliffs at the outer edges of the bay; the broad terraces encrusted with buildings; the mountain range to the north; and a vast expanse of hills and plains beneath a sky that, landward, had now turned the deepest of crimsons and in which two of the moons were set close together.
Reverie pulled the lens to one of the seaward-facing windows. We moved to stand beside him and watched in silent contemplation as the two yellow suns slowly slipped out of sight, leaving a band of orange light over the sea.
The long day had finally ended.
He adjusted the glass and said, “Look.”
Peering through it, we saw that he’d focused the apparatus on the large crowd of kichyomachyoma-infected Working Class who stood at the seashore. One by one, they were slipping into the water, swimming out, and disappearing under the surface.
“Phenadoor embraces them,” he said. “They go to a better world.” He sighed. “As one of the Aristocrats, such rapture will never be mine. My fate lies elsewhere. I, and all the other Aristocrats, will eventually be taken.”
“By what?” Clarissa asked.
I expected her question to be answered with the infuriating evasiveness we’d become accustomed to. Instead, Reverie wheeled the lens to the other side of the room and gestured for us to join him there.
Puzzled, we did so and looked out over the rolling landscape. Three of the mammoth Yarkeen creatures were floating in the far distance. For what I guessed to be five minutes, nothing happened and the magician remained silent. Then he said, “That is what will dictate my future,” and pointed.
On the horizon, the tip of a burning orb suddenly rose into view.
I watched, dumbfounded.
It was a third sun, and it was gigantic—at least ten times larger than Earth’s.