Context

by John Meaney

  You moron.

  If she had struck a few centimetres higher...

  ‘Christ!’—Albrecht, down on his knees, his face white — ‘Ach... I think you’ve broken my wrist. And my chest

  ‘I nearly killed you.’ She turned away from him.

  ‘But you have to—’

  Over her shoulder: ‘Help is EveryWare. Isn’t that what they say?’

  And Albrecht’s strand was a subcutaneous implant.

  She began to climb.

  ‘Comeback!’

  White buildings, low and square beneath the Alpine sky. Deserted gardens: the nuns must be at prayer. The Angelus.

  Will I miss this place?

  Through the Zen garden—always, the Fibonacci swirls leaping into her mathematical awareness—and into her room.

  ‘Damn you, Al.’

  She threw her damp towel into a corner.

  Making me feel like a freak.

  In the bathroom, she thumbed on a mirrorfield.

  Violet eyes—no longer fashionable, apparently—stared back at her. In the irises, minuscule Lissajous figures slowly orbited. Hiding her true appearance. Albrecht was one of the few who knew ...

  ‘Damn you all.’

  She dabbed at her eyes, and the contacts came out.

  ‘Every last one of you.’

  And stared at herself: her eyes their natural jet-black—no surrounding whites, just pure obsidian—then smiled, entirely without humour.

  Black on black, like the depths of space.

  Inhuman eyes.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  7

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  Sturmgard, with its dark, high caverns, lined with statues of the warrior dead: seated rows of brooding figures, their stone broadswords splashed with incongruous bright shades of mutated fluorofungus.

  A light drizzle fell.

  Looking up, it was impossible to tell where the rainfall began. Somewhere between the black shadows crowding the ceiling’s apex and the brighter lit alcoves below, silvery drops condensed into existence, slid down towards the walking pilgrims.

  ‘But the district legato approved my—’

  Behind Tom, an unfortunate freedman’s complaint was shut off. The hall’s guards, not known for their tolerance, barred whomever they pleased.

  Tom limped into the Dringhalle, leaning heavily on his black cane. The leg was hurting again, but Xyenquil had assured him the femtocytes were destroyed; it was merely muscle damage and ordinary infection, responding to treatment. In the meantime, having found his cane, he made use of it; in his current weakened state, it could also be a weapon—

  Tricon projection.

  It leaped out at him, though the pattern was subtle: a mere scratching in frost, a sketched outline upon a rime-coated shield. Already, soft steady rain was dissolving it while Tom watched; the sign must have been laser-etched within the past minute.

  It was crudely two-dimensional—any tricon needed volume and colour and movement to convey true meaning -but this was a projection, an ideogram aspect, and it scared the Chaos out of Tom.

  Danger.

  His skin crawled.

  Trying to be subtle, Tom scanned his surroundings, focusing on the people, knowing that femtotech-array surveillance was impossible to detect by unaided sight. Near the Dringhalle’s main aisle, off-duty militiamen in uniform were handing around a ganja mask within their group: illegal as Chaos in public, but they could get away with it.

  Pilgrims, other travellers, passing by... One richly garbed merchant flanked by copper-helmed housecarls ... Nothing suspicious.

  No-one even glanced at Tom.

  It could be anyone.

  But the melting frost symbol was a code aimed specifically at him: a LudusVitae cipher, active four SY before—when Tom was part of the movement—and surely not used since then. Despite the intervening years, Tom recognized the code tag immediately.

  Request immediate rendezvous.

  While the angled outline modified the content with its own additional warning:

  Fully urgent.

  There were directions encoded in the now dissolved sign, and Tom followed them. Turning right, he followed a tessellated pathway—burnt orange and off-white mosaic—into raw natural caverns which sparkled with mineral seams.

  The air was moist and warm, heavy with vapour. By a bubbling mud pool, a wide raised platform offered bright refreshment tents, and pastel pink and blue ceramic tables at which travellers might sit.

  Tom took a seat with his back to the safety rail, beside a big, painfully fluorescent orange tent.

  ‘Sir?’ A vassal with stunted limbs and heavy brow. ‘Anything to drink, good traveller?’

  ‘Daistral. Any flavour.’

  ‘Can I offer—?’

  ‘Just the daistral.’

  As the vassal went away, Tom watched the other resting travellers. Two matronly women seated nearby, one with a leashed vrulspike at her feet, were giving their order to a barefoot female vassal.

  ‘... of krilajuice for Bubbsy. He’s very thirsty.’

  The reptile’s forked tongue licked the vassal’s bare ankle, leaving a red acidic mark.

  ‘Makes you wonder’—the whisper came from Tom’s side—‘why we bothered, doesn’t it?’

  But he could not turn; the vassal was returning.

  ‘Ah, thank you.’

  Tom passed over a cred-sliver.

  Then he leaned back as the vassal left, stared up at a purple moss-coated stalactite, and murmured: ‘Sentinel. How have you been?’

  For there was no mistaking that patrician voice.

  If he wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead.

  He had been highly placed in LudusVitae’s senior command, this Sentinel. Highly placed in society too, presumably, though Tom knew the man only by his code-name.

  ‘My state of health is irrelevant.’ The voice came from the tent. ‘But you ...Have the years of schoolteaching dulled your...’ Sentinel stopped, chuckled. ‘Apparently not, given recent events in Darinia Demesne.’

  There was a narrow slit in the bright orange tent fabric. Inside, a hint of blocky features, cropped white hair.

  ‘What do you want?’ Tom spoke with minimal lip movement. If Sturmgard Security had them under surveillance...

  But Sentinel had never been careless. Grant him that much.

  ‘To offer you a job, Thomas Corcorigan. Perhaps even a new life.’

  A life without Elva.

  Using the cane, Tom levered himself upright without a word, and walked.

  Glowing hexagonal flukes—mating thermidors—arced briefly through the air, dropped back into glowing lava with a liquid plop.

  ‘Look out!’

  Lava splash, but the spectators moved back in time. It hissed, cooled, grew dark, and somebody laughed in relief.

  Maybe I should have said yes.

  Tom stared, uninterested, at the lava pool, at the travellers enjoying their too brief wander-leave. He was blanketed in a thick fatigue that had nothing to do with physical illness or its aftermath. For someone who had killed an Oracle by playing tricks with Destiny, it was stupid: he was trapped in a Fate whose meaning was lost beyond redemption.

  ‘Perhaps even a new life…’

  In four tendays of travelling, Elva had become so much a part of his existence that her absence was like a vacuum: impossible to breathe, and ultimately fatal. Leaning on the cane, Tom watched the bubbling lava without thought, aware only of the pressure of his loss.

  ‘Help me!’

  A heavy woman, gesticulating.

  ‘My bag ...’ Breathlessly: ‘He’s got it...’

  He came fast, weaving through the crowd: a lithe youth, narrow legs pumping, a dark bag clutched in his grip.

  Thief.

  Tom tried to react but it was too late. The youth was already past him—I’m supposed to be a fighter—and Tom had to turn, hoist his cane, and break into a slow jog. Pain flared in his left thigh. />
  And then it became obvious that there was no need to push himself, and he slowed down, coming to a painful stop, and stood there with the cane’s support, wondering what it was that he had just witnessed.

  They moved so fast.

  The trained perceptions of a phi2dao fighter, the art in which he had trained since his early servitor days under Maestro da Silva’ s exacting tutelage, were suddenly rendered useless by four young men who reacted more quickly than he could apprehend, in a way which seemed entirely mysterious, beyond any rational or sensible understanding.

  ‘Let me— Mmph.’

  The thief s face was pressed into the hard ground by a heavy bootheel. He writhed once, tried to buck his captors off; but his wrists and ankles were held in unbreakable grips.

  With the struggling thief locked into place, prone and trapped, the nature of those wrist and ankle holds became clear. What Tom could not understand was the way the four men had materialized from the crowd, shifted into existence around the fleeing thief, and slammed into him in synchrony.

  The thief stood no chance against a sixteen-limbed organism which moved at lightning speed, with absolute determination and not a microsecond’s hesitation.

  Then two more stepped forward from the crowd; one of them picked up the fallen bag and returned it to the woman who had cried out. Another stabbed down with a foreknuckle, and the thief lay still.

  ‘Don’t hurt him ...’ the woman protested, too late.

  Her saviours stood around her, their faces stony blank, with signs of neither victory nor remorse. And Tom could see, as he limped slowly past, that though the men were dressed in drab-coloured mufti, each wore a shining scarlet cravat tied in military fashion round his throat.

  It was bright red, that fabric: the shade of oxygen-rich blood spurting from a dead Oracle’s arteries, or of scarlet jumpsuits worn by children beside a black icy lake, who demonstrated the same ability to move in unison without spoken command, betraying no sign of individuality or weakness, and raised the same sensation of creeping dread in any rational onlooker.

  Tom passed a gloomy corridor, alcoves covered with stained and faded drapes, where a hand-scraped holosign read Scragg’s SleepEasy. Tom would have smiled; but the name was not meant as a joke. Drudges, with careworn faces, walked by: barefoot, every one.

  So much for the revolution.

  There was a short cut, unlit: no fluorofungus on the ceiling. Tom held his breath, walked through the dead-zone, and took a shuddering breath of fresh air when he reached the bright cross-tunnel at the end.

  No sign of anyone following. Shivering, he walked, pain throbbing in his thigh.

  He knew that psychopaths, born without the normal modalities of consciousness and conscience, were neurologically different. Before his logosophically trained analytical abilities, it was impossible to deny the darker aspects of his own obsessive, driven, often violent past.

  But he knew that the men he had seen today were something other than social outcasts, or unfortunate individuals damaged in the womb. Their strange abilities stemmed from more than military training.

  They might be more or less than human, but they were certainly other. Even now, concerned only with Elva’s loss, when geopolitics and eldritch phenomena had never seemed less relevant, Tom feared them.

  Checkpoint.

  *** AURINEATE CORE ***

  Militia squad. Stone faces, gleaming graser rifles.

  *** TRAVEL-TAGS REQUIRED ***

  Tom’s tag sparked with ruby light, and then he was out of Sturmgard and back amid the rich security which pervaded central Aurineate Grand’aume.

  A patio led to moss gardens, overlooking a broad boulevard running crosswise. Tom walked to the balustrade, leaned over. There was plenty of foot traffic—freedmen, vassals and servitors dragging smoothcarts—and, in the central aisle, slow-moving levanquins encrusted with baroque ornamentation. The soft lyrical mating songs of caged blindmoths floated upwards.

  A few lev-cars glided just beneath the marble ceiling, and some of them were studded with precious rubies and sapphires, their interiors rich with exotic fabrics, perfumed with exquisite scents from Sectorin Fralnitsa or the blind chemist sages of Rilkutan.

  The Aurineate Grand’aume was possibly the most prosperous realm Tom had visited. But he could not help wondering if scarcity and squalor were likewise absent from the lower strata, and whether their inhabitants knew anything of the wealth and luxury enjoyed by those who dwelt above.

  Emerald lights strobed.

  Tom stepped back from the balustrade just as a lev-car drew level, hovering, while fluorescent emerald-green rings pulsed along its hull. Its membrane-door softened and liquefied; a man poked his head through.

  ‘Lord Corcorigan?’ The driver was blond, lightly bearded, with an amber ovoid set beneath his left cheekbone. ‘My name is Ralkin Velsivith. I’d be honoured, sir, if you would step aboard.’

  No weapons were visible, but there were other means of coercion and Tom could not be bothered to argue with someone who flew an official vehicle but used the polite forms.

  Instead, Tom laid his black cane on the balustrade, swung his legs over so that he was standing on the lev-car’s vestigial stub wing, retrieved his cane and climbed inside.

  The cabin was small, furnished in black: comfortable, but not luxurious.

  ‘What does the flashing green indicate?’ Tom gestured at the sliding green pulses outside, now appearing muted: filtered out to avoid distraction. ‘Security services?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Velsivith took the car down a few metres, then stepped up the speed. ‘That’s for civilian use: anyone can turn on their emergency strobe.’

  But Velsivith was not a civilian. No ordinary inhabitant of the Grand’aume’s highest stratum would travel with a blatant silver dagger sheathed hilt forward at each hip, in a double cross-draw position designed for speed and misdirection.

  ‘So if you’re late for dinner’—despite himself, Tom was intrigued by the notion of emergency signals for everyone -’you just turn on the strobe and redplane the speed.’

  ‘Ha! No... There’s a specified list of valid domestic emergencies.’

  ‘Even so.’ Tom looked out at the boulevard flowing past below.

  “The penalty for misuse’—with a glance at Tom—‘is amputation of a hand. First offence.’

  ‘Really.’ And when Velsivith’s face tightened in silence, Tom added: ‘Interesting realm you have here, sir.’

  The lev-car banked left, accelerating hard.

  They touched down in a holding bay lined with marble, where each wall bore a shield-like crest wrought from iron, surmounted by spikes like black metallic thorns. They descended from the lev-car and Velsivith led Tom to an octagonal reception chamber.

  Silver security mannequins stood in all eight corners, their liquid silver skins filled with twisted reflections of their red granite surroundings, and distorted images of each person who entered here.

  From behind a marble-fronted desk, the duty officer, a pretty plumpish woman, told Tom to take a seat.

  ‘They’ll be with you shortly, sir.’

  The Aurineate Grand’aume’s official seal-of-the-realm, a complex tricon of two hundred hues and convoluted topography, rotated endlessly above her desk.

  Velsivith touched finger to forehead in salute. ‘I’ll take my leave, Lord Corcorigan.’

  The amber ovoid inset in his cheek, catching a spark of golden light, seemed to wink at Tom. ‘Good luck.’ And, to the duty officer: ‘See ya later, darlin’.’

  She sighed and shook her head, more from tiredness than annoyance.

  Tom sat down, and watched Velsivith leave. He leaned back.

  And waited.

  Then, driven by a feeling he could not have named, he stood up with his cane’s assistance, avoided the receptionist’s gaze and walked slowly out through the square archway which Velsivith had used. The silver mannequins remained unmoving as he passed.

  Outside, Tom found h
imself in a ring-shaped chamber around a central well. In the atrium below, Velsivith was greeting a slender, dark-cloaked, pale-eyed woman, kissing her with the ease of long familiarity.

  They left together, hand in hand. Tom pondered on them, on the way the woman had moved, the way she cocked her head at Velsivith’s approach. It came to him that the woman was blind, and intimate with Velsivith yet not dependent on him.