Glorious Angels

by Justina Robson

  ‘Parade cancelled then,’ Parillus said. ‘I think I will go across to the Ministry and see how their research fares. You need to find another dress uniform.’

  ‘I shall locate one, and ready a fresh horse,’ the sergeant said and departed with a click of his heels.

  ‘Horse,’ Fadurant repeated grimly, massaging his aching ass, and took a last look outside at the training yard. He knew what the Empress wanted to talk about. It was the same thing everyone wanted to talk about.

  The Karoo was standing in the middle of the melee arena now, watching recruits grapple with one another as they attempted to disarm opponents of wooden weapons at close quarters. The Empress’ runner ran right past him on her course to the gate in what was a clear detour of curiosity.

  Several of the new soldiers stopped to watch her, though no Imperial boys lifted their heads. The jaw-droppers were the mercenaries from the less developed kingdoms, no doubt wondering that her whimsical flit through their ranks seemed to take precedence over their own importance. The position of women in the Empire was beyond them for the most part, as frequent disciplinary hearings and subsequent lashings made apparent.

  The Karoo paid no attention at all to her, but moved forwards and tripped the two gogglers nearest him so they landed heavily in the sand. Fadurant couldn’t hear him but he could tell they were being treated with fitting discipline for their failings. A second or two later the entire line up was on its face doing pushups and lizard runs from one end of the yard to the other. Lines of sweat marked the ground in brown strips.

  ‘Bottled,’ he said to himself, watching the tall grey and white figure with unhappiness that made him glad he wasn’t given to brooding. He caught Parillus’ eye, ‘I’m going for the bath and to get properly dressed.’

  ‘Aye,’ said his friend, not taking his eyes off the yard. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  TZABAN

  Tzaban was seated beside the mess table’s open end because he was too big for the benches and because it was the only place that marked him apart from the men he was training. The tables were set up on the verandah in the shade and there was a stone seat close enough for him to use so that he wasn’t entirely out of the conversation. The blocks it was made of were cool and he felt calmed by them and connected pleasingly to the earth. For all its brutal daily guests that place was peaceful. Whoever had chosen it and laid out the big square had picked a good spot and intelligent shapes of stability and purpose. Real rage would be hard to sustain there.

  ‘My father was a soldier in the war, a hero,’ a young recruit was saying eagerly. He was seated on the far end of the trestle where the lunch was being laid waste by himself and his twenty-four troopmates.

  Tzaban cradled his dish in one hand and held the spoon in his other, moving his soup about curiously as the boys told their tales. It was a clear broth made from boiling some kind of bird bones, with cut vegetables floating in it and at the bottom were thin noodles which dredged up suddenly into the light. There was a pleasant feeling to it, a wholesome, restful quality. He liked to watch it move under the slow stroke of the spoon as he wondered what he could say in answer to their questions about heroes that would not start an uproar. He said nothing, but gave a nod to show that he was still listening. They were so used to him now that they forgot to ask anything about Karoo; used to him not answering.

  ‘He means the last war,’ supplied a lad further down the row with a graze on his cheek from when Tzaban had put him on the floor for staring at the girl. ‘Not this one. The one against the Maldimanzians.’

  ‘My dad was in that one too. He was a cavalryman.’

  They soon forgot to address Tzaban directly at all with the much more rewarding sport of rivalling each other to distract them, and he was content to be forgotten. Their language was an effort for him to engage with because its patterns so seldom followed routes he found natural. As a result he spoke only if he must, and then with care. When he listened it took so much of his attention that he felt uncomfortable. So much focus was dangerous, drawing him to a point, forcing him out of the world and into himself. Unless it was truly necessary – and it almost never was – he ignored the words that came out of people’s mouths and instead listened to the roll and flow of their voice and watched the signs they made. These things revealed a great deal, though it was not always the same thing that the people concerned were discussing with their words.

  In his own home speaking aloud was rare. He longed for silence, but stoically, knowing he wasn’t going to get it. Fanning around his back the disturbed veils of his energy still swirled and curled themselves around the turbulence of the running girl, mulling over the track she had carved through the yard and the shape of the trail she had left behind in him.

  The shock of her transection of him, he knew now, was because of the taint in her energy pattern. It dragged at his sense of personal danger like a hook in flesh. The peace afforded by the lunch break finally let him witness the resulting changes in himself without distraction and he realised that it was not she personally whom he must be aware of, but one close to her, to whom the hook itself really belonged. An obvious deduction would have pointed at the Empress but Tzaban wasn’t familiar enough with her that he knew it was not so. He did not recognise the hook’s maker. Further investigation must wait until nightfall however, for until then he was occupied fully with the men. So for now he stirred his soup and watched the vegetables rolling in its golden depths and felt the drag of the noodles which he decided to save until last.

  The soldiers had finished their own soups and the loaves of bread that had come with it and said they were still hungry. Talk of wars and the morning’s exertion had changed to talk of chops and beer. They looked for a second course.

  ‘Is this all there is?’ the young man who had spoken first asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ Tzaban said. ‘If you live long as a soldier you will often be hungry. Better get used to it.’

  They began to complain. He knew that their own commanders would order silence but he didn’t bother them with it. He had only one lesson to teach them but he knew it was futile to express it aloud, in the words, because this would have no effect. He would simply repeat it over and over in as many ways as he had to until they understood: it was not what the world was which mattered, it was what you believed about it that determined what happened. A meal was not enough if you expected more. It was the stuff of miracles if you expected nothing. It amazed him that in a city of mages and universities nobody had ever bothered to give them the most basic instruction in how to live well, or at all.

  He finished his own soup and put the bowl on the table and glanced out at the sun. It was noon. They had left him his piece of bread. He took this and kept it in his hand. ‘This afternoon we run to Pyaska and back. Those ten coming in last will clean the clothing and boots of the rest as well as their own.’

  ‘But Pyaska is eighteen miles away!’

  ‘Fifteen across country,’ Tzaban said, ‘though there’ll be no penalty for taking the roads.’ He looked at their dismayed faces and smiled and leaned back on the barrack wall, closing his eyes and easing his shoulders where they were tight until he was quite relaxed. Twenty years of spying on the Imperial lands had given him a confident memory of where everything was and how best to cross it. He would not cheat and change his form. ‘I will give you a half hour start on me. Begin whenever you are ready.’

  The sun was lulling, the shade steady. He slept.

  TRALANE

  Tralane Huntingore put her range-vision goggles down and thought about what she’d just witnessed, her mouth hanging partly open. That Karoo must have been there quite a while for those half mercenary and half city lads to look at him as one of their own. Soldiering and male bonding in general were strong however, stronger perhaps than the Empire liked to give credit for. It seemed to temporarily overrule the species issue entirely.

  She remembered the Karoo’s mouth moving and felt a soft, l
iquid glow in her lower belly. She ignored it. He was half naked, powerfully built and spoke to every primal bit of reproductive flesh she had left, and she had quite a lot left, so that was allowable noise, not of interest. He spoke Imperial. That was of interest. The goggles had been able to pick up and interpret his words perfectly well, although they dubbed him with the standard issue male voice synthesis and she was sure he didn’t sound like a twenty-five-year-old city lothario with a high class accent. She would have given a lot to hear what he did sound like.

  She put the goggles up and looked again, the window seat that she was perched in chilly even though the sun was hot. Through the thin silk of her blouse she felt her body tauten, nipples hardening.

  He had claws instead of fingernails, she could see them on his hands as he rested them on his legs. Their dark lozenges were retracted to a fingernail length, the tips deliberately square blunted, but the hands themselves were quite narrow and fine. For all this artistic nicety however they also looked strong, calloused and capable as if they had started out as a delicate watchmaker’s instruments and been adapted by hammering and hard labour into tools for many other purposes, most of them violent.

  She wished that Carlyn was here with her. Carlyn Loitrasta was her best friend and Professor of Natural Science, which meant that most of the time she was holed up in the University or else travelling around grubbing up dirt and loitering about incognito in tiny hides peering at wildlife. The Karoo certainly counted as wildlife. Carlyn would have loved this. And she would have known what to say about it from a scientific viewpoint, whereas Tralane was ignorant of what she was looking at except to note that all the muscle under the fur and the way that he moved probably meant he was a very fine specimen.

  The goggles hummed, taking readings and measurements for her, directed by the minute shifts of her focal point as she peered through them. They were a wonderful find, from a year ago when she’d had a brief two-day dedication to cleaning out one of the attics. Discovering them had put a joyful end to the tiresome notion of ordering two hundred years of family clutter and begun twelve months of painstaking effort researching and fixing the goggles instead. Their technology was partly revealed in manuals and blueprints she had in her library but most of the effort had been trial and error. Even now they were only partly functional to judge by the inactivity of many of the icons in her display, but the farseeing aspect of them worked just fine. Later she’d invite Carlyn to dinner and tell her the good news but for now it was all hers. The delight of the reward made her toes curl with glee.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  The sound and proximity of her daughter’s knowing, languid voice made her start guiltily. Isabeau was standing there, hands composed before her, the very picture of bookish innocence. The contrast between appearance and vocal delivery was Isabeau’s deadly weapon and Tralane was disappointed to find herself as disarmed by it as anyone.

  ‘The lower city levels,’ Tralane replied, not dishonestly but with the dissembling of long practice. She let the goggles fall into her lap as if it was no matter and patted them. ‘I still can’t activate half their uses. Don’t even know what some are.’

  ‘Can I see?’ Isabeau sounded as if this might be the most boring thing in the world but also something that must be tried out and confirmed by imperial edict.

  Tralane quietly thumbed the key for defocusing. ‘Of course. Help yourself.’

  She held the goggles out now and watched as Isabeau eagerly picked them up. Isabeau was the image of her father, a lanky girl with mousy straight hair that went blond in the sun and skin that easily darkened though relentless indoor pursuits had left it pale. Freckles and a pair of spectacles covered her nose, giving her a tawny owl look. Or so Tralane liked to see her. In truth she was aware that Isabeau, despite being only seventeen, deliberately cultivated the appearance of a middle-aged librarian who probably gardened lettuces as an exciting hobby. Isabeau’s extremely academic school was very keen on both achievement in the exams and formal rectitude in the face of their quasi-religious authority and Isabeau demurely ticked every box. The better to pass unseen, Tralane thought.

  Tralane sometimes wondered whether any of her had made it into Isabeau at all, or if she was going to replicate her father, Desmatras, in every degree. At least she had not turned religious, or if she had, Tralane didn’t know about it. For Isabeau it was, like most everything, just one more interesting human foible for study.

  This was as expected. At thirteen, girls merged into peer group webs of their own within which they socialised and went about most of their daily existence, so Tralane’s influence on her was now even slighter than it had been during her childhood. Isabeau’s web was centred on another maternal house in the Diaspa, the Sorority of the Star, and it was rare to see her at home these days.

  Now that she had a moment to observe her daughter it seemed to Tralane that she ought perhaps to investigate a little more about this web. Only preoccupation and an ugly suspicion that the Diaspan household were Reformists had prevented her. Well, that and a streak of laziness. She trusted Isabeau to have good sense and she didn’t want to have to get up to struggle with idealists. Although probably…

  And then she watched as Isabeau’s mouth fell open at the incredible power of the goggles – so much more than expected – and she wondered if she had been entirely wise to think Isabeau so grown up.

  Isabeau tapped the controls on the rims with the tips of her fingers. Her tone was devoid of calculation, rapt. ‘I had no idea anyone could see so far. How does it work?’ She held the goggles away from her to examine them but there was little to see.

  ‘You need the bridge to work with it,’ Tralane said, indicating the junction on the side of the right eyepiece where a bridge’s jacks ought to go.

  ‘Oh that thing. Does that even work?’ Isabeau dismissed any mechanical interest readily now she had found something to look at. Tralane betted she knew what it was.

  ‘I’m getting better at it obviously, otherwise this would still be junk. But half of it seems to be dead, like so much else. I just happened to get lucky the other day and triggered the focusing mechanism.’

  For some reason, Tralane didn’t mention the lipreading function. She wasn’t happy with her own understanding of it yet and she was surprised to discover that she was afraid of humiliating herself in front of Isabeau. Their entire life as Huntingores had been punctuated by discoveries of one device or another in the jumble of crap known as ‘the Archives’, followed by a long list of questions from both children to which Tralane almost inevitably had to answer, ‘I don’t know.’ That in turn was followed by a traditional roll of the eyes and then their departure from the conversation and usually the scene. Now she didn’t want to say that again. She wanted Isabeau to coo over the marvellous, mother-fixed-it goggles.

  ‘What in the hells of the ells is that?’ Isabeau fiddled the focus dial.

  ‘What?’ Tralane waited, smug with knowledge and only vaguely surprised by the swearing, fudged as it was into something almost unobjectionable for public consumption.

  ‘I don’t believe it. Castira Amegzu is walking out with Daraon. That bitch.’ This last was spoken with a kind of cold pleasure rather than rancour.

  ‘Don’t you mean “that dreadful girl”?’ Tralane teased, rather pleased that Isabeau was finally giving in to some genuine womanly feeling rather than kowtowing to the stricture of her schooling.

  ‘I mean “that bitch”.’

  Halfway into a frown at the fact that Isabeau was watching the social whirl of youth on the streets instead of anything worth seeing, Tralane paused. Daraon was a young man who was a part of her household thanks to his tinkery leanings and the willingness of his parents to supply funds for his upkeep and tutelage under Tralane, and he was also apparently devoted to Minnabar. What Isabeau reported did not bode well. Minnabar had no patience for part-timers. Tralane changed her snort of derision to, ‘Why aren’t we saying “that bastard”? And maybe they
just met up.’

  ‘Yes, his face looks exactly like that, the bastard.’ Isabeau’s sarcastic drawl was so cool it almost froze the air around her. She sniggered, a suddenly much more childish expression, and Tralane sighed. The sisters were ferocious rivals. Isabeau now had some rare and valuable ammunition. On top of everything else, now she could look forward to domestic upheaval. She made a mental note to rake Daraon over the coals.

  ‘Right, that’s enough of that. Give those here, I need to work on them.’

  Isabeau reluctantly handed them over. ‘Can I borrow them later?’ She looked back over the view.

  Tralane followed her gaze and saw, as usual, the misty blur of the lower city far beneath them, barely even able to make out people, let alone their expressions.

  ‘If you’re good,’ Tralane said. ‘What are you doing today anyway?’

  ‘I’m going to the Library,’ Isabeau said with exactly the right amount of bored ennui to make Tralane suspect she wasn’t. But the Library would certainly be in the list of destinations even if studying was not the point of going and it was futile to prod and poke; she knew how far that tactic had got her own mother.

  ‘Do I expect you for dinner?’

  Isabeau shrugged. ‘Yes all right.’ Her pale face was already faraway, focused on other plans. She left, turning towards her own room.

  Tralane took another look down. The soldiers had gone. In the shade of the colonnade the strange man slept, in repose looking more human and less like a beast. The mane she had supposed was made of fur turned out to be silky hair that had been waxed or clayed into near motionless submission. Astonished by the details she zoomed even further in. What she had taken to be paint or tattoos was the real colour of his skin. Lilac and burnt orange. Only on flowers had she ever seen such intense hues in nature, or on the wings of birds.