A Tale of Two Cities

It was the day before the golden city started starving and Kallimn was on duty patrolling Houndstooth.

Houndstooth was a huge concrete dam cleaving an unfathomably deep valley in two. On this side was Tkalia, cast into shadow this time of day by the dam. The terraced, marbled city was built in a V up both sides of the sharply sloping valley, the buildings like two frothing waterfalls frozen in a cascade into the waters of the Klatkitch down below.

The looming of Houndstooth meant that their glass lamps were already lit, bathing the entire sloping city in gold. The glowing globes were strung between the east and west city cliffs amid dozens of walkways. Kallimn stared blankly at the countless cables of light from his spot at the top of the dam.

He’d never left Tkalia. Nor had his parents, or their parents. No-one left Tkalia. Nobody needed to leave. Tkalians had everything they could possibly want in their white-gold city.

Everything from spices to medicines, from flour to silk, came through Houndstooth. Unmanned supply transports came along with the serene trickle of the Klatitch that came through Houndstooth.

Kallimn checked his watch, taking his eyes from the late-afternoon spectacle of Tkalia to the Klatkich streaming through the dam below him. Right on cue, two sleek, hulking transports rose to the surface and floated toward the magnetic docking bays further downstream on the harbour of Tkalia.

The power for their beautiful light came from the mighty power of Houndstooth. Everything else they needed came from upstream. They had never made anything in Tkalia; no food, no clothing, no furniture for their homes.

Kallimn counted off two, three, four sub-crates; drawing his coat around him as it continued to get darker, he strode away from the edge toward the tower, and flicked on the signalling globe. Kallimn shivered; there were three more sub-shipments due before he could knock off, so he drew his coat around him and turned his back on his golden city, looking out instead from the top of the dam at the behemoth, stagnant river on the other side of Houndstooth. The walls of the valley could be seen for hundreds of metres upstream, before it sloped away and the river was lost to view.

He had spent his life idly wondering what the world was like upstream, where the sub-crates drifted down from and where all of Klatitch’s supplies came from.

And perhaps more importantly, he wondered: why? No-one-ever talked about it. The people of Tkestant never sent anything back, as far as he knew.

Calum’s fingers were numb. To warm them up, he rubbed his fingers absently up and down the worn, looped tag on the inside of his coat cuff.

The tag was printed with three stark words: Made in Tkestant.

***

There was no golden light in Tkestant. The city of soot was clouded in factory smoke, choked by toxic tailings and deafening with the industrial grind.

Contrasting Tkalia, Tkestant was a sprawling plateau city, constantly leeching out into the forests around it as they cut the trees down for fuel and made squalid homes away from the worst of the pollution. Tkestant was a city that ate, ravenously; ate the trees, guzzled the water from natural springs and reservoirs, ground up minerals from the ground, sucked in the oxygen for its fires.

But Ktkestant was never full.

Like Tkalia, nobody who lived here had left Tkestant either, but not because they had everything they needed; the Tkestantans only kept a fraction of what they worked to produce, and they had nowhere to go.

They had no idea where the fruits of their labour went; all they knew was that their factory supervisors would cut off their rations for 24 hours if they asked any questions.

This was life in Tkestant, if you could call it living. That is, until the strike.

Meike had been waiting for this day for years and years. She knew they would pull it off if the true believers held their nerve and gave the other workers strength to follow through.

She wiped sweat from her brow. The furnace flared in front of her as she held her long dark prong, turning it slowly like there was some roasting beast on the other end. Turning constantly, in her strong calloused fingers.

On the other end of the stick was glass. Withdrawing the red-hot globule of glass, she rested it on a huge slate slab and kept spinning; spinning until the globule resolved itself into a globe. Though Meike had spent her whole life making the glass globes, she had never seen them hanging up above Tkalia, filled with the light filaments made by the people down the street.

And after today, she would never make another one.

Usually, she would dunk the globes in the giant vat of water behind her to cool it and fix it in place. Instead, she raised the globe on the end of her rod and brought it down on top of the furnace.

The exploding shatter and the scream of metal on metal was deafening. She brought the rod down on the furnace again. Another metal scream.

There was a moment of silence as everyone around her, up and down the production line, dozens of blistered workers stationed at their own glass-bending furnaces, stopped work.

“What’s going on?” There was a crack of a whip, and footsteps on a metal gantry above as the whip-wielding Tkalian supervisor came rushing out from his post above. “What’s-”

He was cut off as every single furnace became a drum, with one worker after another brought their rods down on their furnace. The noise crescendoed and the noise, rose to a cacophony, so loud it made Meike’s field of vision vibrate. She grinned.

Soon, everyone in Tkestant would be laying down their tools. This was the sound of revolution. The sound of change.

***

Kallimn was the first to notice that no more food was coming into Tkalia. He was also the first to volunteer to follow the Klatitch upstream in an initial attempt to find out what was wrong.

He had an audience before Lord Kehta to officially bless his mission. He was met only with pity at having to leave the golden city, but no-one seemed to share Kallimn’s curiosity for the outside world.

Even more strangely, no-one seemed to share his curiosity of where their supplies had actually been coming from.

Kallimn was gifted almost more food than he could carry for the journey. After all, they never went hungry in Tkalia. Like everything they consumed, wore and otherwise used, the food was bundled up neatly in cloth and printed in bold dark letters: made in Tkestant.

***

Meike was watching as two of her most loyal companions interrogated the Tkalian guards. They were learning as much as they possibly could about the logistics of the golden city for the next phase of their plan.

That’s when the gong from the west lookout tower started thrumming.

She had been expecting someone from Tkalia to show up at some point. In fact, she’d been expecting an entire army, but they could see only one person now. She hadn’t been expecting him to be quite so haggard, young and so utterly unprepared for the world outside the golden city.

When one of her fellow glass-spinners, now a lookout, reported a figure emerging from a rocky outcrop downstream of the Klatitch, she hiked out to the outpost herself and followed the lookout’s line of sight. Meike snorted. “Well he’s much too fragile to be alone.”

The glass-spinner turned to face her. “Should I accompany you?”

Meike had spent her whole life on the receiving end of orders and she didn’t much like the taste of giving them herself. But this wasn’t about her. “Follow behind, out of sight,” said Meike. “We’ll make use of him, we’ll put on a diplomatic front and get things moving before the Tkalian freeloaders even know what’s happening.”

The glass-spinner nodded. She had been central to Meike’s planning from the start. “I’ll get the bag,” she said.

Meike went out to meet the scout.

“I’m Kallimn, I’m Tkalian.” The hand that wasn’t holding the familiar glass globe was extended eagerly to her. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen, and his eyes were wide as he peered out at the grey industrial expanse behind her. He laughed, holding the globe aloft. “Made in Tkestant, yeah? Well this is the place!” He grinned, still breathless from walking and from the huge pack of food on his back. He dumped it on the ground, and bread and cured meat spilled out. “So what’s your-”

“My people live in squalor because of you! We work in servitude and destitution under Tkalian oppression and what do we see from that labour? Nothing!” She pointed to the spilled food on the grass. So frivolous, it seemed, to care so little about food; to assume it would always be there, if it’s always been given to you. “That should be ours.”

Kallimn was shocked. He didn’t know what he expected to find after venturing out into the world for the first time, but it wasn’t this. It seemed there was a good reason why his questions had never been answered. He bent down and picked up a loaf of bread. “This is yours, then, I suppose.” He held it out to her. “You look famished.”

Meike was too taken aback to do anything but stare, mouth open. It seemed like people really didn’t know what was going on between Tkestant and Tkalia.

***

In the end, Kallimn had invited Meike back to the golden city to meet with the lords there. “Slow down!” he wheezed as he trailed on behind her. “You don’t even know the way!”

Meike turned around and rolled her eyes. “It’s kind of obvious that I’m going to follow the river downstream if the city’s built on the other side of a dam, and it’s not that hard a walk.”

“It was uphill for me, remember? It was harder than this,” whined Kallimn.

Meike glared. “Don’t lecture me on hard work. I’ve spent every day since I was a child working and seeing nothing from it.”

They walked in silence, slipping and sliding down the rocks slightly as they descended further and further into the valley where Houndstooth lay at the end of the Klatitch.

Eventually, Kallimn stopped. “I never knew,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Meike didn’t have time for this. She found it only sickening that a people could live in such complete ignorance of the exploitation taking place right in front of them. But there was something about Kallimn that made something in her twinge; his sort of tender-heartedness was sharply nipped in the bud if one were to survive in Tkestant. So she just shrugged.

Kallimn seemed to steel himself. “And that’s why we’re going to the lords. They’ll sort everything out, I’m sure. Not much further to go now!” He set off in front of her this time.

Meike smiled. She had no intention of meeting with the lords. They’ll sort everything out? The fat, self-interested bastards would probably kill her on sight.

No, she would settle for nothing less than justice for her people.

As Kallimn strode on ahead, Meike looked back, stretching both arms above her head slowly, as a single.

The glass-spinner returned the signal in the form of the glinting of a shard of glass in the distance. They were both ready.

“Come on,” called Kallimn. “Houndstooth’s coming into view just now! It’s starting to rain but we can make it to the dam before nightfall.

“Coming!” Meike hurried after him, and her line of sight widened out to show the looming, ornate dam in the distance. And just beyond that, just behind the dam and sloping up the river-less banks of the Klatitch, lay her first glimmerings of clean white-gold Tkalia.

She smiled. The Klatitch was going to be full tonight.

***

Kallimn and Meike sought refuge that night at his old outpost hut on top of the walls of Houndstooth. Kallimn would let the lords and sentries know in the morning that he had arrived back with a delegate from Tkestant.

As the hours passed, it just kept nagging at him: how much had the lords known before sending him out to find out? Why had they so vehemently suppressed any questioning? Why did Tkalians never leave Tkalia, and why did they never have to make anything of their own? What did the Tkestantians get in return?

Nothing, it was now clear. Nothing.

Kallimn suddenly sat bolt upright. Had bringing Meike here been a mistake? He liked her, he was intrigued by her, and he didn’t want her to suffer any more than she apparently already had. “Meike.” He roused her awake. “Meike, I- I think you should go. I’m worried about the-”

Meike put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. There was something hard, decisive in her eyes. “I’m staying. Right. Here.”

“Meike, I- I think the lords already know what you’re going to tell them about Ktestant. I don’t think it’s-”

Meike laughed. “Oh, I’m not meeting with your lords. But I do have something else to do. And I cannot let you stop me.”

Kallimn blinked. He was suddenly uneasy and backed out of the lookout hut onto the wide concrete rim of the dam. Meike followed him and Kallimn suddenly saw her make eye contact with someone behind him.

It was the glass-spinner. She held her long dark rod like a staff and she was standing in the middle of the dam. And in her other hand, she held a small box that Kallimn couldn’t quite make out.

Meike knew it was a match. It was a fairly innocuous object, unless you knew what the glass-spinner had spent the night doing.

The glass-spinner must have seen Kallimn and thought he would instantly raise the alarm, blowing their night-time cover. She wasn’t missing this opportunity to bring justice to her people. She struck a match, and dropped it, starting the fire trail to the series of high-power explosives she had placed along the dam.

Kallimn’s eyes widened.

Meike glanced over the dam wall at Tkalia. It really was beautiful. Seeing each of the hundreds of glass globes complete, so many of which she had made, was almost surreal. And it made her angry.

Then she ran. The glass-spinner was already running, getting off the dam wall before the explosives started going off.

Meike was about halfway across the dam when she realised that he wasn’t following them. “Kallimn!” she screamed. She was about to run back when the glass-spinner caught her risk. “Let him die,” she snarled. “He deserves it.”

“Not-not him,” spluttered Meike.

But in the distance, meeting Meike’s eyes, Kallimn shook his head. He wasn’t moving.

He didn’t say anything in the last few seconds before the explosion went off.

As sounds like huge glacial shifts put a giant crack down the centre of Houndstooth. As the roaring of the Klatitch beat up against the weakened, crumbling wall.

Kallimn was remaining at his post, as usual. It was where he had always been. He had the best view of the golden city from here. But as the mammoth structure of Houndstooth gave way, he wasn’t looking at the golden lights. He was looking at the two women at the edge of the dam who had just sentenced him and the entire population of the city behind the dam to die.

And strangely, he wasn’t mad.

Houdstooth groaned, strained and burst.

The freed might of the Klatitch was something to behold. It tore through strings of golden glass globes; lifted terraces from cliff walls; took peaceful people from their beds and bore them with its great might through the valley it had been held back from all these years.

The two women were in shock. Meike had blinked, and Kallimn was gone.

In that blink, Tkalia was gone.

And it that same blink, Tkestant was free.