The Canals are Burning

"Love is of source unknown,(...) The living may die of it, and by its power the dead may live again."

-Tang Xianzu

"I have learned that ridiculous messes arise when there is more than one plotter and more than one plan."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky

Map Sketches at (imgur dot com slash a slash 9A263)

It was late and the largest city in the world was asleep. Outside in the dark, hundreds of oil-fed stars gleamed up from across the jumbled expanse of tiled roofs. They were the lantern-flames of the sleeping city. This ancient metropolis of stone and brick was never truly quiet. Even in these early hours, before the farmers outside the towering city wall awoke to hitch up their beasts, the streets and alleys echoed. Ten thousand subtle nighttime sounds merged together into the silent roar of life temporarily interrupted.

The man who looked out on this scene from his high window did not usually appreciate these nightly noises. It was in his nature to regard any peaceful vista as suspicious. However tonight, as his own oil lamp shone out its happy flame from this private room in a tall tower, he should have had a smile on his lips. A great change was coming to wash away the pervasive impurities that festered in every gutter and alley of the endless miles of the city. The man looking out the window should have been content but he was not. Under exquisite embroidered robes, his clammy arms trembled with apprehension.

There was another person in the room with him, standing in a corner near the lacquered wood staircase that descended steeply to the lower floors of the building. This other figure was less richly dressed than the man who stood by the window and carried himself in a slightly hunched way that marked him as servant rather than master. The subordinate held a sheet of paper in his hand and he carefully stood away from the walls. Even long service had not accustomed him to the uneasy feeling brought on by the decorations hanging in this room.

"I am sorry," he said. "The attack was quick and it seems the assailant was able to escape with their target."

The man by the window was furious as he growled out into the dark. "They let it be taken? The will of heaven places key to remaking the soul of this city in our hands, and that same night it is snatched away again? I might almost think this city's guardian spirits had ironically roused themselves their apathy inflicted stupor just to spite me. But it is still in the city?" Within the cuffs of his robe, hands clenched and unclenched in an unconscious rhythm.

The subordinate paused delicately as he considered his next statement. "Yes, as far as I can tell. Forgive me, but though this is a setback, is it a disaster? I was under the impression that what will happen next is now merely a matter of time."

His master continued to stare out into the dark. Each of those gleaming lights below represented a prize in this coming clash of powers. He could not feel the change yet. That would come soon. "This city has been rotting for centuries. Its traditions have become weak and its people even weaker. Those people are who suffer most from this societal corruption and decline. Now we have opportunity to remake it. In all this city's population there are a bare handful fit to recognize what we have done, let alone to stop it. And none are qualified to recognize the replacement. I doubt the assailant was one of those but perhaps they are working for one of the known authorities." He gestured vaguely behind his back. "I have recorded all the suspect names on that sheet."

The servant held the indicated paper forward in both hands as he bowed. "The names of those marked have been memorized and they will be dealt with accordingly. I will relay it to the servants of your pawn." He moved towards a small brasier that quietly glowed in the corner of the room. "Shall I destroy the list?"

A twitch jerked across the face of the man by the window and he quickly walked over to snatch the list in his own hands. "No, no burning for now. Given the plan it hardly seems appropriate."

He glanced around as if worried about many watching eyes. This near the dim light of the brasier's coals, dark shadows sprang up over his face turning him to an eyeless echo of the rows of silent masks that hung across the walls of this room. The wooden faces were carved with horn and fang in endless colored variety. Then a coal split and in the changing light both the master and his masks bore flickering smiles.

"We have other means of destruction at our disposal."

...

Ayika stood balanced on a lip of an aged residential building's roof, looking out across the tangled streets and canals in the dying shreds of night. In the grey beginnings of the predawn light she stretched her arms up and placed one palm on the rough brick wall of a taller building that that pressed up against this one. Her fingers felt for purchase among the rounded dark tiles above. The chipped edges dug into her hand but she had enough calluses to protect her. Then she shifted her weight as one last push of her foot gained a foothold on the edge of a bricked-up attic window and from there she lifted herself onto the gently sloping tiles of the eaves. Ayika quickly scrambled up this highest roof to lean against the stub of soot-blackened chimneys that formed its peak.

In the dimming dark Ayika could just make out the jagged landscape of roofs that of the sprawling river harbor town below her. Set on a river between fields and rice paddies, this mini-metropolis would in any other place be a large and important town but here it was a limpet clinging to the looming wall of Ba Sing Se, the Impenetrable City. Somewhere out there beyond sight there were twenty other such towns clutching to other parts of the wall. Ayika was not sure whether to feel proud or ashamed of that.

She did not have to look over at the city wall to know it was there. She could feel it. The sand colored City Wall of Ba Sing Se was built on an inhuman scale. Even at this distance the weight of its immense stones pulled at the eye as it rose up ten times taller than the tallest building and sliced off the bottom of the sky. Through the cavernous gate lay the wide and prosperous rings of the city proper which Ayika's home town served. If the sun had already risen she would have been able to turn in the opposite direction and look past the harbor, down the river to where in the distance another wall cut across the horizon. That was the Outer Wall; an unending seamless man-built mountain range that encircled her entire world. Between those protecting bounds lay the sweeping plains and hills of the enclosed lands where uncountable farms and orchards worked to feed twenty million mouths within the city.

Citizens living in the seasonal twilight cast by the city walls said the vast cool shadows hiding them from the sun were the divine mantle of the Builder King and his spirit court protecting them. Up on this cold and dirty roof, Ayika smiled slightly at a memory. Ayika's Grandma Aka had not liked that story. She said that teaching people to respect the spirits was fine, but encouraging ordinary folk to rely on them was just asking for trouble. The spirit world was a powerful and unpredictable thing, most often valued in its distance. However, in that belief she represented a minority opinion. Come dawn, Ayika would be able to see prayers chiseled high on the wall above the city gate, at least for a few minutes until the smoke of ten thousand cook-fires reformed the perpetual urban haze that drifted up over those walls like steam from a bowl of soup.

Those who could not afford to have priests carve their prayers in stone came to Grandma Aka. From across the twisted blocks and tangled alleys of the overgrown harbor town that sprouted from the city's flank they made their way towards a dark tiny woman in giant boots who knew the ways of the spirits. Grandmother had never seemed happy in the city, and had often complained that the family should never have left their tribe in the north and followed the flood of migration that the end of the war had unleashed. She snapped and grumbled, stewing litanies against ignorance and helplessness to be unleashed at every supplicant. But still people came and they left satisfied, wether their problems were mystical or mundane. The little old lady had been a mobile fixture of the Bed, audible from around any corner if anyone managed to miss the massive grey-blue smoke cloud which collected above her furiously tended pipe. That bone-work curve that was her one concession to City customs and one loudly self-predicted to be the cause of her death.

She had probably been quite pleased when she finally did pass on after a respectable bout of coughing at an age no one could guess at, that even to her son was "None of your damn business". She certainly would have liked the midnight procession to the docks, sneaking out ahead of the district functionary and his death exam fee, his stamp charge, his mandatory burial sites, and his burial site upkeep fee. So Grandmother finally left the city by boat downriver as she had wanted, now wrapped in a blanket weighted with stones. People of the Water Tribes always returned to the sea sooner or later, if only for the final decent back into the embrace of the depths.

"The People may have our hearts...," Grandma Aka would say from the dim puffing smoke cloud in the corner of tiny apartment that likely contained her chair, every time Ayika's mother would fret about her husband heading out down the river with a storm in the air. "The People may have our hearts," Aka said. "...but the ocean has our bones, sooner or later."

Aka had been of a different, wilder place. The North was a land of storms and seas and mountains where nothing was given that you did not take yourself. She did not understand this land of temples, bureaucrats, and walls. Ayika leaned back against the little chimney on her dark rooftop perch and thought about the river and the sea and places where you could see anything, even a single thing that was not shaped or changed or clouded by human industry. A place where a teenaged girl could stretch out and not hit carved and fitted stone on all sides. A place where she would not have to get up before the sun and flee a the tiny ramshackle apartment to find a single place that was not occupied by a mother cooking or a father stacking his work equipment or a little brother screeching like an injured gull.

The sky in the east was now blushing from purple to red and out of the corner of her eye Ayika caught sight of what she had come up here to see. It was opposite the slowly birthing sun, on the other side of the River Reformed's ship-clogged banks. There, in that distant spot, the gloom of night blazed with an errant sunrise as the foreign furnaces of the great Fire Nation sponsored factories came to life. Ayika's chosen rooftop had a vantage and though it was far away she could see doors and windows belch forth an angry glow: red, writhing, and alive. Dark and soot stained, those growling metal-roofed behemoths of buildings breathed in and out with fire.

Ayika wondered what it was they did in those buildings. There was an intangible power there that she imagined she might feel in her chest; the force of new ideas. In her mind the factories were pulling light towards those mysterious furnaces, feeding a fire that promised to burst forth across the city, burning away all the chains of paper and stamp ink before it in the blinding creation of their fury and leave something young and new. Then, slowly, the blazing display quieted to the tame illumination of pacified fire.

One by one, the great smokestacks above the hunched factory buildings began to put forth their black clouds of smoke. From her perch on the tiled room Ayika could just hear the low keen of the horns sound across the bridges and canals that carried the local workers to their places of work, performing jobs on those assembly lines that did not require understanding of the foreign machines they tended. The time of secret magics was now over.

The sun now promised to show its self above the low eastern hills of the enclosed farmlands. Ayika stood up on the roof-tiles and stretched her arms behind her as she arched her back, her motions mirroring those of a small cat that sat languidly grooming its fur and wings on a balcony rail below her. The early light bounced off Ayika's long dark hair, front locks tied back behind her head. Those same first rays of sunlight played along the skin of her cheeks whose dark complexion marked her as an immigrant in this land, even though she had been born a ten minute walk from here. Standing straight, she somehow managed to seem taller than she actually was, gaining a few precious centimeters by sheer force of personality.

Ayika looked out wistfully at the panoramic vista of apartments, fields, slums, and factories. Then she took a final deep breath of cleansing morning air. Her reward was a lungful of smoke from the chimney beside her. Someone below had started their breakfast cooking. Her violent hacking shattered the dawn calm and startled the poor little fuzzy cat below her near out of its skin. It launched its self into the air in a hissing flurry of fur and feathers. Ayika could not help but laugh at the reproachful looks it gave her over its wing as it glided off. However, as Ayika was still standing in the lee of the chimney, laughing just filled her mouth with more soot.

She made her way down off the tiles through a maze of roof gardens, rain spouts, and balconies with the swift ease of an exceptionally sure-footed goat or of a city girl born and raised. Landing with a thud in the alley, Ayika took a moment to roll down her dress. It was a poor and simple thing, slitted to the waist from where she had bunched it up over her trousers for better movement, but she could not afford to risk it getting ripped any more than she could risk tripping on it while climbing. Ayika then took another moment to steel herself for returning to civilization.

With one last breath she stepped out onto the streets that were already filling with the daily chaos of the working quarter of the harbor town of the south-eastern section of the capital city of the Earth Kingdom. These streets meandered in their courses and were paved with flat stones beside trickling recessed gutters. Above them, the buildings sat squished together into exaggerated shapes under pointed tile hats, waving their pennants of hanging laundry. Ayika ducked around mothers laying out low tables in the street, barrow-porters pushing passengers in front of them, and knife-grinders setting up their spinning stones. She made her way down the small hill of her factory viewing post; around corners, over canals, through doorways and alleys. As she went along her pace became faster and faster, and as she began to breath heavier a smile came to her lips. Over a bridge, slide sideways through a gap between wagons, and jump down a thin flight of steps, water splashing off her boots.

Smooth as flowing wine she spun around a cursing man carrying a stack of poultry cages, deflected herself past a cart and then stood at the top of short flight of stone steps under a grey stone gateway. Before her was the muddy slope down to the tangled bedlam of the Bed where wooden houses leaned on each other for support, below where the rest of the city thought the ground's surface ended. She was panting slightly as she surveyed the rickety wooden stairs that led to that dingy teeming domain, and grinned. Grandmother may have had her forests and her wilds, but before Ayika was a jungle, and it was hers.

...

Ayika cast herself down those uneven steps on the muddy slope into the warren-like slums of the Bed. In the depths of the old riverbed she ducked around the vaulted stone supports of aqueducts from more prosperous districts and across makeshift plank bridges that crossed over other water channels that ran now above her, now below. This was the chaos of the neighborhood called the Bed.

When the Impenetrable City had been founded between the Four Hills, the Kuang river had been an impressive figure on the landscape; a broad and mighty expanse that had carried the rainfalls of the northern mountains down to water the city's crops and convey its ships out to the bay. However, floods had threatened the farmers on the banks so a king had built canals and levees to tame its fury. Then the city was thirsty so one of the tributaries was rerouted through aqueducts to feed the fountains. A queen thought that water-roads would ease transportation in the growing metropolis so the river was lessened by the lifeblood that filled them. But the sewers were overburdened so another slice of the river was diverted to clean them. After two thousand years until the city was renown for its canals and bridges, gloried for its fountains and pools, and not a single shred of the Kuang was left to be seen within its far-stretching walls.

Outside the city's wall what was once the path of the great river was left a damp and muddy valley. This depression stretched from the edge of the city's Inner Wall to the harbor levy behind which those well-used waters were rejoined from sewers and canals draining the river back from the city and surrounding fields. This forgotten riverbed in between the city and the River Reformed was so prone to flooding and disease that no sane human would call it home. So inevitably a community of thousands sprang up there filling the depression with a mess of buildings as eccentric and unusual as their inhabitants. The poor, the unlucky, and the immigrants all made their home below the level of the waves while the rest of the city happily forgot their existence. So was born the Bed, and above it massive stone bridges stretched from bank to former bank carrying across on wide spans the life of the town and city that the humble workers beneath supported.

Ayika was below those bridges now. Following the windings and turnings of the crudely made alley-streets she made her way downstream, navigating the twining ways by her experience with the strange logic of growth and necessity that created them. Now familiar faces began to greet her in the narrow dirty streets just as familiar smells assaulted from the thick mud below the raised buildings and walkways. There were faces brown like hers, and hair colors differing from the uniform flat black of the kingdom; a welcome breath of difference in this city. Then her path opened up to the end of this human warren and there was the river-wall rising up into the sky.

From every direction elevated aqueducts and sewer channels converged and merged and angled for this massive stone cliff, green with damp and stained with leaks. The river-wall lay across the undulating course of the Bed as a jarring transition marking the end of one world and the resumption of another. Beyond this protective bulk the River Reformed rushed and gurgled back into existence, reunited from its various imprisonments rather the worst for wear having passed through the artificial organs of the vast city. Past that turbulence of the liquid reconstruction stood the harbor that the sailors and dockworkers of the Bed trudged their way up to every morning by the long slippery river-wall stairs. One of these men up there now was Ayika's own father, Kadat son of Makon. He was able to cast a final look down from the top of the dam towards the last row of houses girding a murky pool of water at the foot of the wall. He saw his teenage daughter now rushing up to the family door in the early morning light. Shaking his head at the general concept of teenagers he scratched his beard and continued on his way to the boats that provided his employment.

Ayika's boot-shod feet clomped on the irregular wooden walkway that served these buildings for a street and skidded to a halt at the lopsided porthole of her family's little apartment.

Inside, Ayika met a conversation already in progress.

"...that they would think I wouldn't notice just goes to show that there is so little respect for the basic sense of the matter..."

Ayika's mother Maekayae was standing with her back to the door. She stirred a little pot in front of her and gestured intensely with her free hand when it was not absently straightening and rearranging the hundred articles of the tiny kitchen space that occupied the largest corner of this small main room in the apartment. Ayika's little brother Oakas was seated at the low table head sleepily propped up by his hands, clearly not the recipient or subject of this lecture.

A quick glance around the room as Ayika slipped off her boots confirmed that there was no one else at home. There was precious little space to hide. Any spot that was not occupied by the small chests filled with their possessions or mother's stacks of leathers awaiting sewing was just floors and walls of dark ill-fitting timbers, the castoffs of the ship yards, sold cheaply or unknowingly to the residents of the Bed for constructing their houses. People said that one day the Kuang river would break free and return to its former home but they would be ready. The houses of the Bed remembered how to ride the waves.

"...and if you can't get Karonak to do that for you, honey, then you just need to go down there yourself and see to it that it's done. Oh, and I know you've been putting it off but we also really need to get a head start on making a decision about.."

"Mom," Ayika broke in before her mother could build up steam on a new topic. "Dad left already."

Her mother spun around and glanced around the room as her arms carried on with their own duties; lifting the pot off the fire, grabbing a ladle, and setting bowels on the table. "Oh," she said, showing no trace of embarrassment. "Well, at least he grabbed his lunch pack I set out for him." Now those eyes focused on Ayika who instantly regretted calling attention to herself.

"And you, young lady," Maekayae continued while ladling rice-porridge into the boy's bowel who began automatically shoving it into his mouth. "What on earth possesses you to head out who knows where all these mornings when you know I need help around the house and you have to head out to work any minute? And is that mud on your dress? Here let me get that. You know you need to look nice for those fancy girls you work for."

Ayika dodged the offered hand. "Mom, it's fine. Look, it's just dust." She brushed absently at the offending mark. "Anyway, it's not like they let me wear this at the school anyway. I am into my uniform the instant I get through that door." She grumbled but she allowed herself to be guided down onto a stool at the table and took the bowel of porridge placed before her.

"Oh, I wish they would let you take that home with you. You looked so pretty in that outfit," her mother said as Ayika half listened, chewing methodically. Ayika's eyes brightened momentarily. There was fish in this porridge today which was a pleasant if slightly extravagant surprise.

Maekayae continued, "But still, they really aren't paying you that much and the job is so far away you use up a good portion of your time riding the tram back and forth. And there is not really any room for advancement there. They are hardly going to take you on as a teacher, now are they? See, I was talking to Mrs Anyakya's niece-in-law the other day and she said that Mrs Anyakya said that she would be glad to take you on for a job."

Ayika hurriedly swallowed her mouthful to burst into this one-sided conversation, "I am not going to go back to being a house-cleaner! You know how hard I worked to find this job at the school."

"Oh, it wouldn't be that," her mother carried on. "Mrs Anyakya always needs more pretty Water Tribe girls to staff the counters at her laundries. And there you would get to show them how smart you are. I'm sure you would be helping run one of the places before too long. The money would be better as well. A successful woman of the People will pay properly for sure. Which would be good because these city-bred Tribe boys don't even come sniffing around if a girl hasn't gotten herself a salary."

This time Ayika almost choked. "Mom? I thought we were talking about jobs?"

Her mother paid her outrage no mind. "Oh, you're sixteen, daughter. Stop acting childish. These things bear thinking on."

"Yeah, Ayika. Stop acting childish!" said Oakas, wide awake now that his favorite activity, criticizing Ayika, had began.

"Shut up," Ayika growled as she swiped across the table at her brother. He simply leaned back and stuck out his tongue. For her troubles Ayika received only a rap across the knuckles from a carefully wielded wooden spoon.

"Enough of that. Let your brother eat. He needs his energy before he goes to the school-man. Going to learn enough to sit an exam one day, our little boy," her mother said, beaming distractedly. The little terror just grinned while Ayika silently gulped down another spoonful of her breakfast.

"See, that's my point as well," Ayika said after a moment, attempting to regain her lost momentum in this parental argument. She elected to ignore for now the mention of marriage, her mother was too rooted in the North to accept that working class girls in the city were given much more time. "At the school I can listen in on the lessons and actually learn stuff. Just this week Professor Lizhen was going over this amazing story from the early days of the war from the Islanders' side and I heard nearly the whole thing. I can't go from that to just being a wash-girl or a maid!"

"Honey, you're a maid right now." Her mother replied absently, busy with tying back Oakas' hair as he continued eating.

Ayika had no choice but to grunt at the unfairness of this simplification because of course it was true. She stood up and went about tying her money sash under her shirt as grumpily as possible to communicate that this debate was not het over. Her mother was actually making sense, but that was too frustrating to deal with at the moment. Ayika was pulling on her boots at the door when she looked up to see her mother looking down with concern on her face.

"Look honey, I know you like that school place and that is great. It's just the money and that you don't have time left over for meeting, uh, people, if you are trekking halfway 'cross the city and back every day." She waved away Ayika's response with a tired hand. "We can talk about it tonight. You just be getting going now. Oh!" Ayika spun back from opening the door as she heard the exclamation. Her mother grabbed a small parcel off the kitchen counter and said, "Your father forgot to grab the Bao boys' lunch when he went! Ooh that...! Do you think you have time to...?"

Ayika swiped the pack from her mother's hands. "Yeah, I can swing it. I'll slide by on my way no problem." And then because she didn't want her mother stewing all day over her girl 'giving her attitude' she smiled.

That seemed to comfort her mother who fell back into her normal bustling movements. Maekayae was already washing off bowels and clearing the kitchen as she started saying "Are you sure? You are already not exactly on time and the docks take you a ways out your way. It's just that I worry about those boys..."

"It's fine mom. I got it. I'll see you tonight." With that the door shut behind her. Scrambling up the long river-wall stairs out of the Bed Ayika smiled to herself. She could actually go for seeing Xinfei and Xiaobao today. The two brothers had basically grown up with her, playing in back alleys and being schooled on how to read by the same half blind penny-bronze teacher in a slightly larger alley.

Ayika crested the river-wall embankment into the early morning light and from there set out down the stony confines of the channel that held the river undergoing its rebirth. Beneath this elevated walkway clinging to the side of the stone waterway, tunnels and pipes disgorged their contents into the ever widening expanse, draining the immense city into these confines that wavered with the thick stink of a city of millions. Then she was out of the stone-lined canyon of putrid waterfalls and that waterway now became the expansive Kuang River. Ayika walked along the bridges, canals, and quays in the bustling waterfront of the Impenetrable City's southern docks. Before her stretched an endless lines of ships and the uncountable population that catered to them.

...