‘Mages,’ Alide said, two glasses of wine down, his manner unable to conceal envy. ‘They say these things that make no sense and we must trust them, eh?’
‘There is no choice,’ Mazhd said in keeping with the official line. ‘My mistress sees no reason to doubt those who remain on the project. She has had all of them thoroughly vetted. And their predispositions automatically push them towards honesty and cooperation.’ He wondered what Alide’s predisposition really was as he watched a secret smile play across the man’s bulky face. It was like rocks piled, then cut and roughly sculpted, no two angles entirely in symmetry but overall presenting the impression of a bulwark of stone, massive plated forehead, chin, slab cheeks… He allowed his mind to repaint and reform Alide’s face with its own subtler understandings until the Minister no longer looked like a man as much as an earth elemental, his eyes hidden from sight save for glints that shone when the torches and lamps were at the right positions. In contradiction, a long, narrow tongue flickered wetly as he spoke, at odds with the sounds coming from his mouth. Mazhd had had spies painted like this before, snake tongued, but there was no forking, no dual path. This man’s business was peculiarly his own.
He heard Shrazade in his mind, felt her presence near along with other agents and the guard who were sufficiently sensitive to hear the infomancers’ most powerful commands as whispers of conviction. They were watching twelve people who were not citizens and whose subtler auras and chemistries confirmed their recent arrival; at least nine were hostiles inside the building and there were more than forty more throughout the city, nearly all followed by infomancers. Zharazin had to work hard to keep the tension from manifesting in his body. He sat languidly, the picture of vanity, trusting that to annoy Alide out of noticing anything untoward. His only assigned goal here was to watch Alide’s reactions, everything else was simply a play though Alide thought he was there as Shrazade’s representative whilst she struggled to master the deluge of data coming from abroad and sifted false from true.
They discussed the dig, Mazhd prying subtly for information, then less subtly as time went on. He knew that Alide had still not officially disclosed his possession of the storm cannon or its actual whereabouts. An agent in the Defence Ministry said the crystals had passed through the portal but after that had lost track of them. The agents who had been at the digsite were dead. This above all worried the Empress and Mazhd as they had studied Tzaban and read the reports from the site. Tzaban showed no signs of eating anyone or playing a wrong step so far, his word was good. Karoo in the south ate and assimilated for their information, and they had eaten a wide menu. Even Mazhd had flinched to see the list and the implications, which he and Night could read, were sobering. They must only hope tha the Karoo, who were long said to be no more than instinctive animals, would not realise the value of what they could know. But then, Tzaban…
‘It is a shame we have so few weapons that are useful against the Karoo,’ Mazhd said, dilettante with his wine glass, an idle speculator in fine clothes.
‘They are the forest,’ Alide replied. ‘In that the creature is right to warn us against them. I still maintain the object must be extracted or any reliable defence cannot hold but I’m repeatedly informed this is quite impossible. The arrival of the engineers tomorrow should verify that once and for all.’ He had abandoned his drink, pushing his glass around the table at his elbow by its stem. ‘Whatever is in that site is not worth the loss of so many lives, particularly if, as you claim, the Karoo learn by their ingestion and are able to transmit that knowledge amongst themselves. Surely you can see that, you of all people?’
Mazhd knew he didn’t mean because he was part Karoo. Alide did not suspect this of him. He looked much too human and much too like the Steppe ancestors who had beleaguered Alide’s city and families for generations. ‘I believe I do. But until we leave their territory completely I don’t think they will stop. As far as we can gather they have no interest in expansion which is so far the only silver lining to the position.’
‘The Empire cities have wandered too far apart,’ Alide said, his constant opinion. ‘We should regroup more centrally and exert a firmer control over a more united landscape ourselves. Glimshard in particular is too far to the south with acres of warring motley between us and the tower state.’
‘The Empresses have disagreed with you.’
‘Our Empress has, but the Defences of the Southern circle are in agreement. This defiance merely makes all our tasks so much more difficult.’
Blahblah. Mazhd drifted off as Alide went into a familiar rant about how the Defensive Council was routinely ignored on Imperial whims based on facts and decisions that were wantonly foolish. He countered with the usual – we have had no wars of note in decades – and Alide wearily riposted with the matter-of-time-and-chance scenario in which the Simple Tribes adapted to learning and cooperation and rose against the city to raid it for its wealth and technologies. Glimshard had been lucky, in Alide’s view, in not having to face the enmity that other cities found routinely and this was not the Empress’ influence but merely a circumstantial benefit of chance bestowed on a foolish young woman who was so busy satisfying her sensual curiosities that she ignored pragmatic matters.
Mazhd wondered if Alide knew already about her secret marriage. He thought it unlikely, in which case the vitriol being disguised as sagacious concern was curiously ironic. If there was an oversight here it was probably in keeping Alide out of the loop on the real strategy underway here, of which he himself knew only fragments. He gleaned this from leakier vessels of Shrazade’s, each of whom had been entrusted only with partial knowledge. Thanks to the earlier priming, Alide was rather careless in talking to Mazhd now. When Mazhd steered him to discuss the digsite his eyes lit up with possessive ardour. Mazhd concluded he did want the materials there, the potential power they represented, though he’d never get anywhere without mages to research, develop and operate any findings. So far as anyone knew. Alide had nothing of that sort lined up here, but that did not mean it was not lined up elsewhere.
The screaming came as a welcome interruption to Mazhd’s ears in its way, although it meant the failure of his counterpart outside. It was but a moment after he felt the impulse to get up and move – something was coming. He was looking directly at Alide at the time and noted a genuine reaction of shock followed by a cold shutdown of emotions, at least any transmitted to his body. He was up out of his chair in moments, Mazhd at his heels, as they rushed to the door and out into the mezzanine balcony.
There was at first only confusion as revellers sought to escape to the walls or along the corridors while guards tried to do the opposite and move towards the apparent source of trouble. In the main room a panic had begun, a huge stir of colour and noise. Then for a moment there was a clear path. Mazhd and Alide both saw quite clearly a tall man in celebrant’s robes running towards them. His hand was raised, holding a barrelled device in a manner that suggested it was a weapon though it was nothing Mazhd knew. If the gesture had not been enough his expression certainly was: he would stop at nothing to escape. Instinctively, Mazhd dived to the left, pushing Alide with him.
Alide shook him off, furious and avid. As Mazhd retreated he stepped forwards with a sudden roar of rage and Mazhd saw the other fire his weapon without pausing. The shot went wide, a bolt of searing light which impacted the wall instead, silently, leaving a blistered black scar and the sudden smouldering threat of fire. Alide attempted to trip the running man, there was a brief altercation but momentum won the day, Alide fell back staggering though unhurt and the would-be assassin passed them with a stumble and a surge of sweat-ridden air. Mazhd was watching Alide’s face as he was turned and saw only anger and then resignation at the failed effort. Alide pushed away from the wall at Mazhd’s side, looking down the way the assassin had come, and over into the heights of the ballroom. Lights were suddenly shadowed and their sightline was blocked: they both stood agape as the orange and lilac stripes of the Karoo fille
d the gap and then the corridor.
Feathers vibrant with some kind of fierce charge brushed Mazhd’s cheek and then they were staring after the Karoo, who landed lightly, boots on carpet soft as paws, vast wings folding closed, shrinking, vanishing until he was a man pursuing another man. Flashes of light. Guards falling, the air shocked by silences between screams, stink of burning flesh and metal. Then emptiness, the corridor wiped clean and still, bodies on the ground like a pile of old linen. Alide’s face, whiter now, tinged with grey.
‘Did you see that?’ Boyish excitement, unable to be contained as he asked Mazhd the obvious.
Mazhd nodded. They both rushed to the rail and saw the Empress standing unhurt. A guard was down.
‘At least someone did the right thing,’ Alide said with a sneer and Mazhd followed his gaze to the diminutive girl in the white and gold finery with raspberry sashes. He heard from joined minds in the infonet the sudden denoument in the stairwell, saw through other eyes the flashing silent charge of the gun sear the Karoo’s arm and then the gun falling down and down the central well alone, the assassin under the Karoo’s body. A striped elbow pumped once, the two tumbled down a flight on to a landing decorated with heavy china vases, crashing into one. Smithereens of pottery scattering like snow and then Jago and several other guards running up with rope and drawn weapons. Tzaban’s heavy white head came up first from his position on top and dropped suddenly down with a savage lunge. The whites of Jago’s eyes flared suddenly stark and huge in his dark, sunblacked face. Tzaban sat up, discarding the prone man like a piece of garbage and for a moment they faced each other down, ready to kill, until Tzaban moved with inhuman speed, darting around Jago’s group and away.
At the same moment throughout other rooms infomancers signalled soldiers in civilian celebration clothing to arrest their marked men. In streets and alleys, courts and halls glass shattering, fire blaring in plumes – bombs going off.
Alide’s face was excited, grim as well he might be whose defences had failed so well, calculating though he could not yet know the extent of the infiltration and devastation.
‘I must go,’ Mazhd said, though Alide showed no sign of caring now, signalling to his own officers and marching off quickly. He felt Shrazade’s cool, efficient touch in his thoughts.
‘Follow him.’
So he did.
TRALANE
Tralane sat at the table, the slate in her hands cool and solid as she stared at the space through which the Karoo had impossibly taken flight. She was no biologist – the real biologists were gibbering at the table behind her – but she knew what she had expected to see in her life, and this was not among them. Wings, speed, ferocity, the change so sudden it was miraculous. Had they always been able to do that? What was it he had even done? Anxiety, the old feeling of not knowing something curious, made her turn and listen but the professors at her back had no explanations.
Frustrated that way, but seeing no more immediate danger, she looked down at what she held and thumbed the slate, beginning to read her friend’s words in the hope of finding familiarity in there.
‘Lane’, it said simply. ‘You must see this. You must come. Look.’
She looked, and she fell into an abyss constructed of diagrams, layouts, images, schematics, and did not hear even the third time someone spoke to her until a hand landed on her upper arm and shook her gently. There was a clock chiming the hour: two in the morning. Around her the room had changed into an auditorium, quiet but for one voice.
‘Tralane.’ It was Mazhd.
She looked up from an undiscovered world of wonders and blinked into unfamiliar light, faces, places, finally focusing on his face and seeing him concerned, a soft smile of amused, loving tolerance on his face that for a moment made him almost unrecognisable to her. She couldn’t remember being looked at like that since her father had been alive. The sudden temporal dissonance of the memory shocked her out of her stupor. She would have told him what she knew if she’d had words for it but better for now it lay in the slate along with Carlyn’s other note, the one that said, ‘There are monsters here. I’m so afraid I’ll never see you again.’ The pictures of the monsters were nothing like Tzaban. But now even Tzaban was not like Tzaban. Tralane focused hard on Mazhd’s coal eyes, seeing the skin around them crinkle slightly into puzzlement at her intensity of attention. She felt safe with him, inexplicably in the circumstances.
The Empress was making an address. Still Tralane could only make out the essentials, her mind tangled in the slate’s unfathomable masses, Carlyn’s fears, the past. Torada was to be married, to Tzaban, the Karoo emissary. It would unify an alliance it would… She lost the thread as the crowds blundered with celebration and consternation in equal measures, not sure if they agreed, if it was wise, or safe or madness, if it was connected to the attack or not. People had been arrested, there must be an end to revelry and a common effort to regroup and repair. Tralane felt a terrible, bittersweet sense of compassion and union. She looked into Mazhd’s eyes and knew it for the presence of the Empress. She stood up and put her arms around him, a hard, warm body, comforting because she trusted him. That was entirely her, and his gentle, careful arms and soft murmured nothing words were entirely him.
She heard a second uproar as news of the bombings came. And for the rest of that night the one embrace she had shared was the only peace anywhere, amid the chatter of disaster and shock, the care of the injured, the questioning of the infiltrators and the merciless, beckoning darkness of the pit and its secrets.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TRALANE
Smoke trickled upwards into the air, making straight pillars of grey and black in the windless warmth of the morning. Tralane sat amid the large, sombre group of revellers on the palace’s open terraces where the high hanging gardens formed a background of verdant peace. She was waiting to go home, but everyone had to be questioned before they were permitted to leave, even the most trusted. Meanwhile an endless supply of tea and small cakes circulated via apologetic servants, with fortified spirits for those who wanted to blot out the night’s complexities. She wondered if she had been overlooked. It was only six or so, but she was meant to depart, prepared, at nine. She didn’t drink the spirits, although she wanted very much to. They would have instantly put her to sleep.
‘Professor?’
She looked up, realised she had been dozing. She saw the face and uniform of a female army officer. The woman, looking as smart and polished as a new knife, smiled and sat down opposite her, slate ready. ‘I’ve been looking for you. My apologies. A few formalities and we’ll get you on your way. If you’re ready?’
The few formalities took half an hour of witness statements, through which Tralane stumbled, realising how little she had paid attention to anything that was not concerned with surviving the wearing of her dress and shoes, talking to the Empress or reading the slate. Truly, as an observer she was utterly disappointing. She had not even seen the weapon or the missile in spite of being right there. She realised belatedly that the weapon must have been a gun of some kind. The gun taped to her leg was a dead weight. Her intention had been purely to preserve it and all she recalled of the moment in question was the shock of the flash, the precious slate clutched in her fingers, wondering what was going on. Fortunately the gown’s fishtail had hidden the gun though the gun had bruised her leg.
Isabeau was secure with Night but now that she was out of the palace, Tralane wanted to rush home to look for Minnabar and find out that she was safe. The Infomancy’s carriages were all busy elsewhere however; streets were empty here but the city was loud and busy with the sounds of the clear-up of the night’s events. She was forced to wait as Mazhd hailed a cab, then more delays as closed streets caused detours round and around. She watched out the windows as they passed sweepers and cleaners. She saw almost no other people but several roads were cratered and stained with dark marks, the sight of each one making her guts twist and shudder as they brought the memories of that scat
tering army on the plain, running before the tornado. Now they would be regrouped. Mazhd related what he had seen meanwhile.
As they came to her street she turned to him, desperate for some distraction from her fears. ‘I don’t understand. How does this fit together, or does it? Suppose that army has guns if this was to soften us up?’
‘That one is the only one that we saw.’
‘Yes but Alide is making massive guns, somewhere,’ she said. ‘Who for? And this wedding announcement – it is unprecedented, bizarre… A Karoo. To protect this dig?’ But she knew the answer to that. Surely to protect it. But the price was looking enormous and she couldn’t be the only one to think so. ‘The other cities cannot be at war with us over it?’
Zharazin looked at her. He looked at the slate. ‘Are you sure?’
The loss of the Empire, the fall of the Eight. She couldn’t believe it.
They had halted at her gate. Mazhd paid as she got out and followed her. She was about to protest but then noticed that her door was open an inch, the smoky breeze blowing it a little back and forth on its hinges. She saw then that the lock had been interfered with and the edges of the frame were splintered where crowbars had forced it open. With sick dread in her heart she hurried forwards, all her impulse to run but the dress and shoes wouldn’t let her. She kicked the shoes off and left them where they lay on the path. Mazhd caught up with her as she got to the door and slipped in front before she could object. He pushed the door wider and light flooded the empty hall.
‘Minna!’ She was shouting before she had both feet over the threshold. The quiet that met her voice was unnerving, horrible. She wanted to make noise just to stop it.
Ahead of her, Mazhd paused in the doorway to the kitchen, his body almost enough to stop her ducking under his arm and shoving him out of the way; it was her house, her business. She ignored his word of warning as she hurried through the hall, pausing to stick her head around the kitchen door. It was deserted but otherwise not unusual, she sensed nothing there. Through the far door she could see a figure peep around a corner and recognised Amber Flyght. ‘Amber! Where’s everyone?’
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