3. Teliau’s choice of setting here can be taken as an indication of his political sympathies. The Court of Two Colors, in its heyday perhaps the best, or at least the most notable, hotel and restaurant in downtown Hanilat, would have been in operation for perhaps five years at the time of this story. For Teliau’s readers, the Court—having been largely destroyed by an incendiary device in 1142e.r. as part of the ongoing power struggles among the star-lords—would have signified nostalgia for the older regime of land and merchant aristocracy, and would have stood as a covert rebuke to the ruling fleet-families.
4. Rasha Jedao’s family ties and Circle life are explored in depth in the second Jerre syn-Casleyn novel, An Unkind Corpse, which introduces the Center Street Magelord to the series as a continuing character.
5. Aiketh (pl. aiketen): Prior to the pacification of the Mageworlds ina.f. 980, the people of the Eraasian Hegemony made extensive use of these robotic servitors. The aiketen relied upon quasi-organic components rather than silicon for their computational power, making them difficult to mass-produce but capable of handling instruction sets of great subtlety. Whether or not an aiketh could achieve true sentience remains unknown; no aiketen have been made or instructed in the classical manner since the fall of the Hegemony, and even the savants of Eraasi’s own golden age disagreed on theoretical possibility.
6. Uffa: a mildly stimulating herbal drink, similar in its effects and social uses to cha’a, and like cha’a, usually served hot; it comes in dark and pale—or “red” and “yellow”—varieties.
7. Of all the practices of the Mage-Circles, the raising of power through ritual combat—always real and sometimes fatal—is the one most alien to the rest of the civilized galaxy. It is a common misconception, even today, that those Mages who meet their deaths in this fashion are unwilling sacrifices. In fact, such duels for power are consensual and (as Jerre syn-Casleyn obliquely points out in this passage) one of the known hazards of life in a Circle.
8. Once again Teliau’s unstated political agenda makes itself apparent, this time in the attention paid to the autonomy and strong local focus of the Lokheran Circle. Teliau wrote during the Early Transitional period; he would have been a witness (perhaps even a participant—see Hithu and Bareian, Survey of Eraasian Literature, for a good summary of the arguments pro and con in the Teliau-as-Magelord controversy) to the struggles out of which came the Classical and Expansionist tradition of hierarchical structure and of shared and subordinated power.
9. Mages in the pre-Transitional period for the most part dressed in the garments customary to the region or community they served, donning the already traditional black robes only for Circle meetings and group endeavors. Nor did the Circle yet work masked; the geaerith, or full-face hardmask, did not become universally worn until well into the Expansionist period. Then as now, however, a Mage and his or her staff were inseparable, and the black wood cudgels—formidable weapons even without a Circle’s intention to add strength to the blows—were worn even with everyday garb.
10. The so-called great workings—those endeavors and intentions where the combat results in the death of one or more participants—are much less common than popular opinion in the Adeptworlds (and sensational fiction on both sides of the interstellar gap) would have us believe; available statistics (see, once again, Hithu and Bareian for a concise summary) confirm that a Mage in an ordinary Circle could reasonably expect to see only one or two such workings in the course of a lifetime.
11. Domestic and financial arrangements among the Mage-Circles have always been subject to considerable variation. Even in Circles tied to a particular area or institution, it was and is not uncommon for individual Mages to have occupations and business interests of their own, separate from the affairs of the Circle proper. Some Circles, of which the fictional Lokheran Circle was apparently one, live communally; others have only a meeting place in common and—in this latter day—may never have seen one another unmasked.
12. Much of what is known of Circle practice in the pre-Transitional period comes from passing references made by outsiders. Then as now, working Mages preferred to pass on their teachings through personal instruction, and entrusted very little to the written word or to any other archival medium. (As inconvenient as their reluctance may be for interested scholars, it should come as no surprise to anyone on this side of the interstellar gap; the Adepts’ Guild has always been similarly unforthcoming about its own history.) The reliability of popular fiction as a source of information on the subject remains a matter for considerable debate.
13. On Eraasi and elsewhere, Mage-Circles interact with the universe through the manipulation of a complex of quantities and characteristics for which “luck” is the simplest and most usual (though perhaps not the most entirely accurate) translation. The luck is most commonly described, by those Mages willing to speak of it to outsiders, as complex patterns of silver, gray, or iridescent thread, which they call man; Eraasian philologists trace the word’s origins to an unat-tested pre-Archaic root ei or at, meaning, roughly, “to live.”
14. The typical meditation chamber, as described here by Teliau, has changed little over the intervening centuries. Similar circles were in use aboard Eraasian trade and exploration vessels, and in the hidden bases that made possible both the First Magewar and the Second. They are not, however, indispensable. During periods of conflict and repression—such as the Occupation following the end of the First Magewar, or the long struggle in the immediate pre-Classical period between the so-called Old Tradition and the rising power of the New Circles—Mages have often done their work without the use of these obvious and betraying diagrams.
15. Such deaths, according to statute law in most of the modern Eraasian Hegemony, still count as “by natural causes” provided the deceased is truly a Mage. Since the end of the second Mage-war, the precedent has also been applied elsewhere; see Citizens of Gyffer v. Calentyk, 1009 A.F.
Cold Case
Diane Duane
Diane Duane has written more than thirty novels, various comics and computer games, and fifty or sixty animated and live-action screenplays for characters as widely assorted as Batman, Jean-Luc Picard, Siegfried the Volsung, and Scooby-Doo. Together with her husband of fifteen years, Northern Ireland-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, she lives in a townland in the far west of county Wicklow in Ireland, in company with two cats and four seriously overworked computers—an odd but congenial environment for the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination.
She gardens (weeding, mostly), collects recipes and cookbooks, manages the Owl Springs Partnership’s Web site at http://www.owlsprings.com, dabbles in astronomy, language studies, computer graphics, and fractals, and tries to find ways to make enough time to just lie around and watch anime.
After Rob pulled up in front of the house on Redwood, he sat there in the front seat of the car for a few moments, drinking what remained of his coffee and looking the place over. It was the only single-family house left on this block, and one of very few remaining for some blocks around in this neighborhood—almost all of the rest of the buildings were apartment buildings now, or at the very least duplexes. As he swigged the second-to-last gulp of coffee, Rob tried to imagine what the neighborhood had been like when this house was built, fifty or even seventy years ago: wide lawns, wide new sidewalks, decorously spaced white stucco houses with red tile roofs, tidy front walks leading up to them, poinsettia and dwarf orange planted by the houses or on the lawns…
Not anymore,Rob thought. The frontages of the beige-painted terrace apartment buildings to either side of the house came up to withinabout two feet of the sidewalk, and the tiny strip of what could have been grass between them and the sidewalk was trampled to bare dirt. And the house that seemed to crouch between them had no lawn anymore, either—just a tangle of heat-blanched goatsfoot and crabgrass and a single incredibly stubborn patch of dusty, wilted pachysandra that had refused to die even though no one ever watered it now. The
windows were all barred and curtained inside. The door had been barred, too, but the black iron screen-and-scrollwork gate hung sideways off its hinges, rammed through when the Drug Squad came in last week. Probably the neighbors had been glad to see the crack house go. Most of them, anyway, Rob thought. The rest of them’ll have found another source by now.
He finished his coffee, crumpled up the paper cup, and chucked it into the garbage bag hanging off the cigarette lighter, then got out of the car and locked up. Rob made his way across to the front walk of the house, relieved at least that he wasn’t going to have to go through the usual prolonged explanations to the present residents of the house. Just shy of the single step up to the cracked concrete of the front porch, Rob paused, gazing at the scarred paint on the door, the tiny window with the iron grille just visible inside, the newly split and splintered wood of the doorsills. All right, he said silently to the Lady with the Scales, help me see what’s going to get the job done here.
The shift happened: the air got glassy clear, all the uncertainty and randomness of daily reality falling out of it in a breath’s space to leave everything unnervingly fixed. That fixity had long since stopped bothering Rob, though: he worked in it every day. He stepped up onto the porch and tried the bell. It didn’t work. Rob knocked on the door.
A pair of pale blue eyes, a little watery, looked out that little grilled window at him. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Eldridge?” Rob said. “Mrs. Tamara Eldridge?”
“Yes?” said the soft, uncertain voice.
Rob held up his ID. “I’m Detective Sergeant DiFalco from the LAPD, ma’am. Homicide. Could I speak to you for a moment?”
“Oh! Oh, of course, just a minute—”
There followed the sound of locks and chains being undone from the inside of the door, though one last chain remained in place. The lady standing on the far side of the door peered around it carefully,looking Rob up and down. “Here, ma’am,” Rob said, and handed her his ID, being careful before he let it go to make sure that she could touch it.
She could. She held it in one hand, shaking a little, and looked down at it, while Rob looked her over and readily recognized her as the woman from the picture in the case file. Those watery blue eyes looked up at him again, and the crinkled face, framed by curly silver-white hair, smiled at him. “That’s a terrible picture of you,” she said. “It makes you look like a cartoon burglar.”
Rob had to smile, for this was an accusation he heard often enough from his buddies back at Division. They claimed Rob could display five o’clock shadow five minutes after shaving; and he did have the kind of dark, craggy brawny look that suggested he should be climbing out of windows in a striped shirt with a big sack labeledloot. “May I come in, ma’am?”
“Certainly, just a moment—”
She closed the door to take the chain off, then opened it again. “Please come in Sergeant,” she said, gesturing him past her into a small, tidy living room on the right-hand side.
The room was like her: neat, compact, a little worn but well kept—overstuffed chairs; a sofa with some brassware, half polished, laid out on it on newspaper; antimacassars over the sofa and chair backs; a worn but clean Persian rug in a reddish pattern; and curtains and wallpaper in an ivory shade. The lady herself, as she sat down across from Rob, struck him suddenly as so very frail as to almost certainly make this a wasted trip. She’ll never buy it, Rob thought. She’ll throw a seizure or something, and I’ll have to come back next week. And probably about twenty times after that.
But he’d been down this road before, and patience had always won out. It would win out now. “Please sit down,” Mrs. Eldridge said. She sat there perched on the edge of a big chair done in worn red brocade, looking very proper in a rather old-fashioned pastel tweed jacket and skirt, the effect of faded elegance somewhat thrown off by the tattered “comfy” scuffs she was wearing. “I’m sorry the place is a little messy at the moment: I was cleaning. What can I do to help you?”
“We’re investigating a murder in the neighborhood, ma’am,” Rob said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you much with that, Sergeant. I don’t get out a lot: I don’t really know any of the people living around here these days. And I don’t know much about the neighbors, except that mostly they play their stereos too loud. Especially the people upstairs over at fifteen seven-twenty. I call and call their landlord, but he never does anything…” She shook her head in mild annoyance. “When did this murder happen? I didn’t see anything in the papers.”
“It’s not recent, ma’am,” Rob said. “There was very little physical forensic evidence to help us, so we’re having to do neighborhood interviews and psychosweeps to see what else we can find.”
Mrs. Eldridge looked at Rob with great surprise. “Why, you’re a lanthanomancer!”
It was the usual mistake. “No, ma’am,” Rob said, “that takes a few more years of training, and some paralegal. A lanthanometer, yes.” He would have taken on a night job years ago if he’d thought he had any real chance of getting through the LMT course and making ‘mancer. But his regular work left him tired enough, and Rob was also none too sure he could make it through the entry exams. He’d made it through the lanthanometry course only because of natural aptitude scores high enough to favorably average out the rather low score on his written tests. I like that I do well enough, Rob thought. So why screw with what works?
“So you can sense dead people,” she said. “That must be very interesting work!”
There was a lot more that could be said about the job, but this wasn’t the time to get into the technicalities. “Uh, it is, ma’am,” he said. “Which brings me to the reason I came. Have you noticed anything different about the neighborhood lately?”
“Well, besides the noise from next door…” She laughed a little, shook her head. “The whole place has gotten so remote. I can remember when all the doors on this street would have been open: no one ever locked anything. If you did that now, you’d be dead in minutes.”
Rob thought of saying something, restrained himself. “And if something happens to you,” Mrs. Eldridge said, “well, you’re probably just going to have to handle it yourself, aren’t you? I remember when I felldown, right there, coming in the front door with the groceries. Nobody came to help. I had to drag myself in. It was awful.”
“Can you tell me a little more about that, ma’am?” Rob said.
“What’s to tell? I tripped, I fell down.” Mrs. Eldridge gave him a wry look. “It’s such a joke, isn’t it? ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’” she said, in too accurate an imitation of the old commercial. “But that’s all it was, dear, a fall. I got up.”
“No, ma’am,” Rob said. “You didn’t.”
She looked at him strangely. Now it would come: the part that always bothered Rob the most, but couldn’t be rushed. Without her acceptance, his work could go no further—and Rob’s memory was mercifully dulled as to how many of his cases had gotten stuck for weeks or months right here, at the point where truth met denial.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Mrs. Eldridge said. Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Whose murder are you investigating, Sergeant?”
“I think you know, ma’am.”
She stared at him.
Rob waited. A change of expression, a twitch, at this point could blow everything out of the water.
“It’s mine, isn’t it?” she whispered.
Rob nodded, and waited.
Mrs. Eldridge simply sat there for some moments, looking down at her tightly interlaced fingers. They worked a little, and the knuckles were white.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Who would want to murder me?”
“We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on that, ma’am,” Rob said.
Now, though, the shock was beginning to set in. “But I fell down,” she said. “That was all it was.”
“Ma’am,” Rob said as gently as he
could—for if at any point gentleness was needed, this was it—”as far as we can tell, you were coming into the house when someone came up behind you and struck you in the head. You did fall down. But not because you tripped.” He stopped there, not yet being finished with his own disgust at the crime scene pictures, the tidy rug with its pattern blotted out across nearly half its width. It still astonished him sometimes how much blood even a small human body contains.
Her face was surprisingly still: the face of a woman who’s just received one more piece of bad news in a life that has had its fair share of it. She looked up at Rob then and said, very composed, “Who killed me?”
“We don’t know, ma’am. That’s why I’m here: to see what you know about it. Unfortunately, the department is very backed up, and there were no witnesses in the neighborhood, so it’s taken a while to get around to you. I was only brought on about two months ago to handle the backed-up cold cases—”
She blinked. “Cold cases?”
“Cases where we ran out of leads, ma’am, and didn’t have the manpower right away to follow through. Your case was put ‘on ice’ until someone could be spared to look into it again.”
The look in her eyes gave Rob a whole new definition of “cold” to work with. “Which has been how long, exactly?”
“You’ve been dead for about three years.”
Her eyes widened. “And you’re only turning up here now?”
“Budget, ma’am,” Rob said, truly ashamed. “We’re a very small department yet. The other kinds of forensics have been established longer, and they get most of the funds. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”
She looked at him more with disbelief than horror, which was a relief. “Bullshit!” she said.
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