We walked toward the revolving door, which was still turning. That struck me as an oddness, because I knew how quickly it stopped after someone had come or gone.
The flat-faced desk clerk was slumped down over his newspaper again, just as he had been the previous evening. Fura shook her head. “I wasn’t keen on him, Lagganvor, but you didn’t have to knock him out just to pay us a visit, did you?”
She had her metal hand around Lagganvor’s sleeve, clutching him like a hostage.
“It wasn’t my doing,” he said. “I waited until he was away from the desk, then came straight up to your floor.”
I moved to the clerk, dug my fingers into the hair on the back of his scalp, and pulled his head up from the desk. It came away with a pudding-like slurp, leaving rather too much of him still imprinted on the newspaper. I held his head where it was, long enough to prove my point, then allowed him to return to his earlier restful posture.
“Are you sure about that?”
“It wasn’t me,” Lagganvor said, with a force that encouraged me to think he might not be lying. “I swear. He was a nuisance, and greedy as well, but he wasn’t mixed up in this.” He turned to both of us in turn. “What I did for Bosa was another life. Self-preservation is one thing—I’d have killed to protect myself from her, if I ever thought she’d come back—but I wasn’t responsible for this.”
“It’s all right, coves,” said a voice I felt I had known all my life, and would count myself blessed never to hear again. “It wasn’t ’im. The boy was on the take from Mister Glimmery anyway, so it was high-time he was moved on.”
Sneed had been in the lobby all along—watching us from a dingy corner between two potted plants, his brown-coated presence easily melting into the shadows. He had a weapon, the same gun he had pointed at me in the alley, and this time he was taking no chances. “A twitch from you, Miss, and I’ll take both your arms off before you know what’s happened.”
“Mister Sneed,” said Lagganvor. “You and I can do business. These women are your primary interest, not me. Let me go and I’ll tell you everything, here and now.”
Fura snarled and tightened her grip on him, fingers digging into the leathery fabric of Surt’s suit. “You won’t rat us out, you weasel.”
“Let me help you along, Sneed,” Lagganvor said, persisting in his attempted negotiation. “I even have a gift for you—a token of my goodwill.”
He wrenched free of Fura—before either she or Sneed could react—and held out his right hand in a curious beseeching manner, with the palm raised to the ceiling. Then, with his left hand, he struck the back of his own head.
His right eye popped out onto his palm. It sat there, perfect and glassy, just as I had seen it hovering in the stairwell, with that peculiar look of fixed surprise about it. Even I, who had seen the thing once before, was unavoidably mesmerised. I hardly dared look at Lagganvor’s face, but a glance confirmed all I had feared, which was that there was now a dark socket where the orb had been, and that the production of his eye had been no conjuring trick.
Sneed still had his weapon, which remained pointed directly at me, and I think some slow-geared part of his mind was registering a developing wrongness, a sense that he had been played.
Lagganvor threw the eye into the air.
The orb came off his palm in an arc, reached its apex and stopped.
It was hovering just under the ceiling, the pupil staring out horizontally.
Mister Sneed was torn. He twitched his weapon from me to the eye and then back to me again. Then the eye dropped down until it was level with his own two eyes and swept forward until it was no more than a span from his nose. Then it slowly began to narrow the distance.
Mister Sneed brought his aim back onto the eye, taking a step backward, then another, and the eye slid forward to neutralise his advantage. It was enough for me. I wanted him removed as a problem; wanted him dead. I drew the volition pistol, felt my arm lock onto him, the weapon both responding to my desire to eliminate Sneed and hardening that desire, concretising it as an obligatory act, something that must and would come to pass, and my finger itched and tingled until squeezing the trigger felt as natural and thoughtless as breathing. I shot him at close range.
The pink-white energy bolt lashed over him like the static fire that sometimes plays in the rigging of ships. Mister Sneed dropped his weapon and the rest of him followed, collapsing to the ground with no more than a single attenuated whimper.
I walked over, scooped the pistol from his lifeless fingers, and tossed it to Fura.
Lagganvor’s eye was still in the air, turning on its axis like a miniature globe. I had a hundred questions about that eye, about its provenance and capabilities.
“It’s likely he came with others,” Lagganvor said. “They’re most probably outside, covering any possible escape routes. I’ll send the eye out ahead of us.”
It swooped out through the revolving door. I looked down at the still form of Mister Sneed, thinking that my life had just divided itself into two parts, one in which I had not killed a person standing before me and one in which I had, and there was no undoing that separation. Fura and the others had killed before, of course, and we all shared in the unwitting butchery of the Calenture. Yet beyond the conscious acceptance of what I had done, all I felt was a sort of heavy solemnity, as if I had just put my name to a legal document that came with numerous ramifications and responsibilities, codicils and appendices that would likely shape the form of my life until my grave, but which had precisely no impact on the immediate minutes or even hours ahead of me.
I am a murderess, I thought. I was not, and now I am.
Lagganvor held up his hand, palm vertical this time, and the eye came back through the door and sped into his clutch. He pinched it between his fingers, raised the curtain of hair, and corked it back into its socket, just as if it were the most commonplace thing.
19
Glimmery’s men were at the base of the rope-bridge, and were brazen with their weapons. There were a dozen of his thugs, more than I had seen in any one place before, and if they were expecting some trouble from Fura and me they had certainly left nothing to chance.
Fura and I were either side of Lagganvor. We walked slowly up to the men, Fura sticking out her jaw in her most defiant manner, even though all she had by way of persuasion was Sneed’s pistol.
“Where is Mister S?” asked one of the men, who had the handset of a squawk box sticking out of his coat pocket, and whose greasy, gravelly voice reminded me of the man who had demanded our presence. He was a tall, frog-chinned man with a deep dent in his forehead.
“He’s indisposed,” I said, as we came to a halt about twenty paces from the rope-bridge, with only an expanse of muddy ground between us and them. The rain had become torrential since we left the hotel, and now it was coming down the side of the infirmary in continuous brown conveyor belts of filthy water. “Pass a message to Glimmery for us, will you? If he releases our friends and allows us free passage to the dock, there’ll be no more trouble.”
The man started laughing. It was a wet, guttural laugh, slow at first, but increasing in speed as he got into his stride. The bulge of his throat began to oscillate in sympathy. Picking up on his mood, some of the other men began to laugh along with him. But they remained hair-trigger tense, and I could not help but notice that the muzzles of their weapons were sweeping the shadows and corners beyond us, not just the three members of our assembled party.
“No more trouble, she says!” the man said, bending at the waist as if his self-inflicted mirth was more than he could reasonably bear. “You’ve got the wrong end of it, cove.” He had to stop as his laughter overwhelmed again, although it was even more forced than it had been the first time. “The trouble’s coming your way, not ours. Now put down those little toys of yours.”
“If we don’t?” Fura asked.
“There’s two possibilities,” the man said, wheezing a bit as he got his breath back. “Mister Glimmery
wouldn’t like it and, since he knows what’s going on down here, he might decide to take it out on your friends. Or he might tell us to shoot you and be done with it.”
Fura peered up at the infirmary. “Glimmery’s watching, is he?”
“You can depend on it.”
“Then I imagine he can hear us as well. Can you, Glimmery? I have something to tell you. You demanded an audience when we arrived. Now I demand mine.”
*
We were allowed into his presence a final time. It was in the infirmary, not his gold palace, and after we had been searched, and disarmed, and roughed-up enough to know our place, we were allowed our audience.
Glimmery had made a little reception area for himself, with a table, chairs, some curtains for privacy, and a number of his attendants standing around ready to answer his immediate needs. There were drinks on the table, as well as his lacquered box, and the chair he was in was bulky enough to have been his own, brought down specially.
Prozor and Surt were alive, if battered, and we were permitted to examine Strambli and satisfy ourselves that she had come to no additional harm. Eddralder was there, as was Merrix, and he said Strambli was showing increasing signs of lucidity, between bouts of unconsciousness.
“Sit down, please,” Glimmery said, beckoning us to the empty chairs. “There’s much to discuss. You’ll be pleased to hear that the launch has docked. The injured from the White Widow are being brought straight to the infirmary as we speak, as well as the walking wounded, and those deputised to care for them.”
Fura scoffed, but she took her seat as commanded. “Did you think you’d spook us into leaving that easily?”
“I thought I would test the limits of your resolve, and that I seem to have done. Killing Sneed was an ill-considered act, born of desperation, which gives me every grounds to detain you. For which Captain Restral will be most grateful. When he is sufficiently recovered to consider such matters, I believe he will be more than willing to discuss splitting the incentive money.”
“You’re on borrowed time out here, Glimmery. Money won’t help you. Sooner or later the same banks and combines that put up that incentive will decide they don’t like the way you’re running things.” Fura lifted her chin. “They’ll put up with a bit of lawlessness, especially in the aftermath of last year’s banking crash. You’re an irrelevance for the time being. But that won’t last. Enjoy your milk baths, and all that gold you like to surround yourself with. A year from now you’ll be lucky to be breathing.”
Glimmery met this with a tolerant smile. “You’re in a fine position to be making that sort of prediction. You have no weapons, and you barely have a crew. You’ll be breathing in a year from now, I’m sure of it, but only because you’ll be locked up in some Sunwards cell, kept alive while they sweat out every last drop of information about Bosa Sennen and the Nightjammer. Either way, I doubt it will go well for you. They’ll either decide you were close to her but never privy to her innermost secrets, and you’ll lose your usefulness as a living witness. Or they’ll decide that you are, in fact, the current embodiment of her, immune to interrogation and torture as only the truly insane can be, and short of scooping the desired knowledge out of your brain with a fork there’s no way you’ll give anything up. At which point, it pains me to add, you’ll also have exceeded your usefulness to them.” Then, slowly, he turned his gaze onto me. “Of course, they’ll be certain to extend the same courtesy to you. You might just as well be Bosa. They’ll need to make certain, so there’ll be no favours, no dispensations, no special treatment for either of you. I imagine you’ll be locked up separately, on different worlds, to die separately and alone after a succession of miseries.”
“You’re wrong about one thing,” Fura said. “I didn’t come here without a weapon.”
Glimmery chuckled. “You’ve been searched. Thoroughly this time. Your suits and equipment alike, and I told them to be specially watchful for Ghostie gubbins, since it’s rumoured you have such things. I even had them run a piece of lookstone over that arm of yours, just in case there was something lodged inside it.”
“The arm isn’t the weapon.”
“No?” he asked, with the air of one losing patience, even if the topic under consideration was of some minor interest. “Then you’d better enlighten us, because—”
Fura touched her face. “It’s what’s in me, Glimmery. Our mutual affliction. The glowy.”
He looked sad and a little disappointed, as if he had been counting on something more imaginative.
“Then I regret to inform you that you are mistaken. I have studied the glowy in all its guises. Doctor Eddralder has been tireless in furnishing me with medical literature going back many centuries. The condition is rather well documented—as is its progression and the options for treating it, which in my case are now very greatly diminished. It is an affliction, as you will find out for yourself—or would, if you had the luxury of living with it long enough. But it is entirely harmless to the unaffected. It cannot be transmitted from host to host except by unusual means. And it has absolutely no utility as a weapon.”
“You misunderstand me,” Fura said. “I know what the glowy is, and what it can do. It makes me see things differently. Makes me think and act in a way that I wouldn’t, if I didn’t have the glowy, and that’s no different to having a physical weapon.”
“The glowy makes you a little madder, you mean, and therefore less predictable?”
She nodded with uncharacteristic meekness.
“If you want to put it that way.”
“There might almost be something in that,” Glimmery said, conceding her point. “The glowy certainly predisposes one to rash action. The circumvention of forethought and analytic thinking. But if that is the case, you have merely regained parity. It is no advantage, when I also have the glowy. We would be as mad and reckless as each other, and any such benefits would be completely …”
Glimmery stopped in mid-sentence. A huge, buttress-like muscle twitched near the base of his neck. He made to speak, then swallowed hard. With a tremendous and visible effort of will, much as if he were passing a large kidney stone, he contorted his features into a smile, directed solely at Fura.
“You do have a peculiar effect on me, though, Miss Ness. I have noticed it twice now. Just being around you seems to bring on my attacks.”
“I noticed it too,” Fura said. She touched her cheek. “I can feel it tingling a little under my skin.”
“Just a tingle? How I envy you.”
“You shouldn’t envy me. It’s going to get a lot worse, so you said.”
“Yes, that is true. I do not wish to strike a pessimistic note, but you may already be beyond the more orthodox therapies.” He shifted in his chair, spasms clearly shooting through his great frame. “Despite what I said about the glowy being useless as a weapon, I admit that there may be some influence between our two colonies of spores.”
“They say lightvine glows more brightly in the presence of more lightvine,” Fura said. “It could be psychosomatic, I suppose.”
“Psychosomatic?” Glimmery twisted in the chair, the veins in the side of his head standing out like luminous worms, as bright, or perhaps even brighter than the surrounding traces of his lightvine infection. “No, I don’t think so. Eddralder—if I might impose on your service. Bring Merrix, and the remedy.”
Eddralder nodded to his clinical assistants, and then knelt by Glimmery, leaning in with great gentleness to assess the condition of his patient. “It seems bearable,” he said, in a tone of hopeful encouragement. “The remedy is available, of course, but if you think you can—”
“I have too much to do. Give me the fix.”
“Each dose hastens the next attack, and depletes our supply of medicine. I must remind you of that.”
“No lectures, Doctor—not now.”
Long vertical grooves formed in Eddralder’s face, bracketing him from eye to chin. “Of course. But just this once … might we spare Merrix? If I
had ever meant to—”
“Bring her.”
Merrix was brought forward, and so were the two gold syringes on their little platter. They had puzzled me to begin with, but now I understood them to be identical, charged with the same drug. Glimmery would make the final choice as to which syringe was injected into him, and which into Merrix. Merrix was being slowly debilitated by these needless injections of the counter-glowy preparation, but the ritual ensured that there was no risk of Eddralder trying to poison his patient. It was no more than a secondary precaution. Even if by some means he had found a way to get poison into one of those syringes but not the other, or had abandoned Merrix to her fate, the doctor had no means of escape. This was a backwater world where Glimmery exercised an iron control over the entry and exit. Short of forcing Eddralder to inject the same drugs into himself—which would have quickly rendered him ineffective—it was the ideal means of coercion.
Glimmery snatched up one of the syringes without hesitation and jammed it into his forearm, the veins already standing out. As the drug hit he reached for the lacquered box containing his biting stick.
“Inject her, Doctor Eddralder,” he said, grimacing as he forced out the words. “You may have the pleasure this time.”
“Please don’t make me,” Eddralder said.
Glimmery ground his teeth together, barely able to speak now that the medicine was taking its effect. “Unless you would rather one of Sneed’s men did it?”
“No,” Eddralder said, resigned. He took Merrix’s arm, which she offered without resistance, not even looking at him, not even flinching as he slid the needle in and depressed the plunger. He withdrew the needle. A second or two later, Merrix began to palsy, her eyes turning to blank whites as they rolled back in their sockets. Eddralder touched her wrist, whispered some plea for forgiveness, then turned back to Glimmery. Two of the attendants took Merrix away and lowered her quivering form into a nearby seat, one of them supporting her head.
“It will pass,” Eddralder said to Glimmery.
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