City on Fire m-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  The world does not seem as bleak as it had a few hours ago.

  Aiah sits in the anteroom among the guards and bustle. She has to beg Constantine for military police to take down the plasm houses, and must wait her turn like the other supplicants.

  The door opens and a small woman walks in. Heads turn, and there are double takes. Aiah feels surprise at the sight, then confusion as the woman recognizes her, then walks toward her with an outstretched hand.

  “Lady,” she says.

  “Lady” was Aiah’s code name during the final stage of Constantine’s coup. The other woman’s was “Wizard One,” but her real name is known to almost everyone in the world, for she is famous.

  She is Aldemar, the chromoplay actress, in person a petite figure with delicate wrists and ankles and bobbed dark hair. Across the world, a giant on screens three stories tall, she regularly fights evil in any of a series of third-rate melodramas with titles like Revenge of the Hanged Man and Rise of the Thunderlords. Her publicity has always maintained that her chromoplays are based on fact, hype that Aiah had never believed until she’d met Wizard One and found her competently directing Constantine’s secret plasm house.

  Aiah takes Aldemar’s hand. “My name is Aiah,” she says.

  The other woman smiles. “I know. Constantine has spoken of you. May I join you?”

  “Of course,” Aiah says, and she wonders in what context her name arose in a conversation between those two.

  Aldemar smooths her long dark skirt and joins Aiah on the sofa. Aiah sees flashes of jealousy radiate from others in the room and smiles inwardly.

  “Have you just arrived?” Aiah asks.

  The actress shakes her head. “Oh no. I’ve been here for two days, directing part of the plasm war.”

  Aiah looks at her in surprise. In an elegant long skirt and a white lacy blouse, her face a natural-seeming composition of artful cosmetic, Aldemar hardly looks like a general fresh from the wars.

  “You got here fast,” Aiah says.

  “I teleported in as soon as I heard the news. Had to shut down production on the new chromoplay, but I hope the additional publicity will mollify my investors.”

  Teleportation was one of the surprising skills Aldemar was revealed to possess in the aftermath of the coup. This ability had given Aiah greater respect for Aldemar’s skills as a mage than she’d ever had for her chromoplays. Teleportation is difficult and dangerous, and though there are mages who cheerfully accept large fees for teleporting equipment and personnel, few ever dare to teleport themselves.

  “What’s the new play about?” Aiah asks.

  Aldemar’s eyes glitter with amusement from beneath her black bangs. “Coincidentally enough, I play an actress who helps an idealistic and charismatic political leader overthrow a corrupt government.”

  “Is it good?”

  Aldemar dismisses the production with a little shake of her head. “It’s no Lords of the New City, but it will probably make everyone concerned a great deal of money.”

  They are interrupted by one of the soldiers, who asks for an autograph. Aldemar graciously complies, and this begins a general movement toward the actress, who signs bits of paper or the backs of official requisition forms for a few minutes until Martinus, Constantine’s chief bodyguard, steps into the room and calls her name.

  Aldemar rises, hands the last autograph to one of her fans, and turns to Aiah. “Let’s meet when there’s a lull. I’d like to talk to you sometime.”

  Aiah blinks. “Certainly.”

  “I’ll call your office,” Aldemar promises, and gives a little wave as she walks to her interview.

  Aiah sits back on the sofa and is aware of a new respect in the eyes of the other supplicants. Strange how exchanging a few casual words with a celebrity should suddenly make her so much more interesting.

  She wonders how Aldemar and Constantine happened to meet, and how long-term—and intimate—their relationship is.

  Time passes. Aldemar bustles out after a few minutes, waves to Aiah again as she departs, and then a whole group of officers are called into Constantine’s presence. After they leave, a number of Constantine’s staff exit the inner rooms as well and stand waiting in the anteroom.

  He has sent them out for some reason. Even Martinus stands waiting, his impassive armor-plated face showing no emotion.

  A slow chill crawls up Aiah’s spine. The hairs on the back of her neck rise in shivering terror.

  Perhaps it is intuition only, or perhaps there is some tangential connection with the plasm that still warms her blood. But somehow she knows the identity of Constantine’s visitor, the meeting so private he had to send even his intimates out of the room.

  Taikoen. The hanged man. The damned. The creature, once a man, now a disembodied entity living in the drumbeat of plasm.

  Cold terror fills the hollow of Aiah’s bones. The next minutes seem to last centuries.

  Suddenly the terror fades. Aiah looks wide-eyed at the others, wonders if any of them sense the creature’s presence.

  Apparently not.

  The door handle turns, and Constantine appears briefly in the partly open door.

  “Aiah,” he says briefly, then walks off, leaving the door open. She rises from the sofa and follows, closes the door softly behind her.

  Her every nerve is alight, straining for sign of Taikoen. But she senses nothing, and slowly she feels herself relax.

  “Is he gone?” she asks.

  Light shimmers from mirrored walls. Constantine stands in the center of the priceless carpet surrounded by boxes and stacks of files, the work from his office now stacked atop the glittering luxurious Keremath tables, chairs, and shelves. He seems unsurprised by her question.

  “Taikoen?” he says. “Yes.” He cocks his head, looks at her. “You are unusually sensitive to his presence.”

  Aiah hugs herself and shivers. “I wish I weren’t.”

  Concern glows amber in Constantine’s eyes, and then he crosses the distance between them and wraps his arms around her. She rests her head on his shoulder and tries to let her anxiety sigh from her lungs like a breath.

  “I’m afraid of him,” she says.

  He strokes her hair. “I will never let him harm you.”

  The words bubble from her mind, and she can’t stop them. “Have you sent him to kill?”

  “No. Since he can get through shielding, I have sent him to find certain people. The headquarters of the enemy soldiers, the communications center. So that we can disrupt them later.”

  “And you will give him his price.”

  “I will,” simply. “It will save lives, many more lives than Taikoen can inhabit in my lifetime.”

  Aiah presses herself to him, inhaling the familiar, comforting scents of his body, his leather jacket, the scented hair oil. “I wanted to touch you these last few days,” she says. “And I couldn’t.”

  “You were braver than I would have believed, than I wished to believe.” He kisses the top of her head. “I will arrange for some official thanks—a citation, a medal, something trivial but the best the state can do—but you must not take such risks in the future.”

  They fall silent. Aiah tightens her arms about Constantine, pressing herself as close to him as possible, wanting to annihilate herself, to dissolve into him. For once he shows no sign of impatience, seems content to allow the embrace to go on as long as Aiah wishes. Finally it is she who stands back.

  She wants to tell him about Sorya, but she can’t find a place to start.

  “I can take down almost a hundred plasm houses,” she says instead, “but I can’t use just my clerks—I need police to do it.”

  He considers. “I can take some of the military police guard from the Palace,” he concludes, “but they’re not the units you’ve worked with before—those are scattered throughout the metropolis, guarding vital installations.”

  “If you will tell the commanders to get in touch with me…?”

  “Yes. Of course.�
��

  “Secondly, I have sprung Rohder from jail, and he’s either on his way to the Palace or, more likely, has already arrived.” “Excellent. Very fast work.” He turns, fingering his chin, and begins to prowl among the piles of boxes, thinking as he paces. “There is another thing I need you to do.”

  A weak little laugh bubbles up from Aiah’s throat. “Another?”

  His eyes are on her, intent and commanding as a pair of shotgun barrels. “You need to build your department,” he says. “Double it in size, triple it. And you must make it loyal to you.”

  “Yes.” She stands amid the clutter and feels suddenly alone. Objections, perfectly good organizational objections, spring to her mind. “Yes, but—expanding it so quickly, we—”

  He glides toward her, his expression so intent it frightens her. He leans close, takes her forearm in one of his big hands, bends toward her ear. “Do you recall the moment when Sorya was urging me to declare myself Metropolitan?”

  Fear crawls over Aiah’s scalp with clinging spider feet. He knows, she thinks. “Of course I remember,” she says, “but—”

  “I turned it down,” he says.

  “Yes, and I wondered why. Because she seemed to make sense—but now—” The words come reluctantly from her throat. “Now I realize,” she says, “that it was because you knew the coup is hers.”

  She feels him stiffen, and there is a dangerous edge to his words. “How can you know this? Do you have evidence?”

  “No. I just know it, that’s all.”

  “And so do I.” His words are meditative. “My dear one,” he says, “I wish you had not come to this realization. Because it is very, very dangerous for you.’”

  “You’ve got to get rid of her,” Aiah says.

  He gives a tight-lipped smile and a little shake of the head. “Firstly, I have no proof of any of this, nothing but an insight that whispers to me that I am right. Perhaps evidence more concrete will turn up in time.” He takes a breath. “But more significantly, I can’t afford to act against her now. She miscalculated, you see—she must have intended that the coup miscarry, and then the perpetrators be disposed of, clearing the field not just of Drumbeth but Radeen and Gentri and everyone else that could possibly stand in the way of my ascension. But elements of the plot must have eluded her—she couldn’t have known the full strength of the enemy, or that the government of Lanbola would permit an invasion from their territory, that it would turn into a real war.”

  He stands back, rubs his chin. “But now that it is a war, I cannot afford to fight it without her. Having miscalculated and permitted this conflict to come about, she will do her best to win it. I can trust her to do that.”

  “But she’ll turn it to her advantage.”

  A calculating gleam enters his eyes. “So shall we all.”

  “You’ve got to look out for yourself,” Aiah says. “What if she decides that you’re standing in her way?”

  “That will not be anytime soon. Aside from her department, which no one trusts, she has no base of support here that does not come from me. She wished me to rise so that she could follow in my wake and gain power and adherents.” He ponders for a moment. “We will watch,” he says. “The war will provide us opportunity to build our own power, and it will also compel her to reveal her tools, her sources, and her methods. We will take note, and use the information when the time comes.”

  “Get rid of her now!” Aiah cries.

  He gives a minute shake of the head. “Unwise.”

  “And I suppose,” Aiah says, “you’ll be fucking her in the meantime.” For some absurd reason her eyes sting with tears.

  Constantine looks at her. Not coldly—not quite coldly—but appraisingly, objectively. “This has not bothered you in the past,” he observes.

  Heat flashes red before Aiah’s eyes. “It’s always bothered me!”

  “The details of the arrangement were known to you before you entered it,” he points out—then shakes his head, throws up his hands. “But what does that matter? Arrangements can change……”

  He considers again, head down and frowning, and then raises a hand and points to the polarized window, the featureless black glass set into the wall. His dark reflection in the window confronts Aiah’s. “I am hiding in this building,” he says, “because there are enemy forces who would be glad to kill me. I cannot even look out a window for fear of some mage flinging a bomb or rocket or plasm blast. And in that world outside, which I dare not look at, there are nightmares forming. Familiar nightmares. Because I have been through all of this before.”

  He licks his lips. A vision of fear seems to haunt his expression as he stares at the black glass, and there is an unfamiliar wildness in his eyes.

  “If I misstep,” he says, “then Cheloki happens all over again here in Caraqui. Endless war, endless misery, a metropolis turned to wreckage, the destruction of all that I sought to save. I failed once—” Bitterness crosses his features. “Great Senko,” he cries, “I can’t let the nightmares loose again!”

  Aiah watches him in astonishment. She has never seen him like this, terror and rage so plain on his face. In battle, even while the assassins’ plasm rattled and boomed overhead, he had been cool and detached, ironic phrases falling from his lips as easily as commands. Now he almost seems someone else, a man overwhelmed…

  He turns toward her and advances, huge and powerful as a battleship, and then to her utter surprise falls to his knees in front of her, bent over like a supplicant, and takes her hands. “If I am to win this war,” he says, “if I am to keep the nightmares out, then / need my generals! Sorya is one, and you are another. I can trust her to fight well, if not faithfully, and you—” He kisses her hands. “You I trust absolutely. You are necessary to my success, to all that I hope to accomplish. You must let me arrange things, for now, the way I need them.”

  Aiah stands in wonder at the massive figure huddled before her. Hot tears splash onto her hands. “Yes, of course,” she murmurs. “Of course I will.”

  He puts his arms around her, pressing his head to her abdomen; she caresses his head, gazing down with a growing sense of astonishment, of a strange rising tenderness at this evidence of his need.

  There is a discreet knock on the door.

  Constantine disengages himself and rises, a startled look on his face. “Is it 17:00?” he asks. “I’m supposed to make a broadcast.”

  Aiah looks at her watch. “16:51,” she says, “yes.”

  “Damn.” He sighs. “I haven’t even worked out what I’m going to say.”

  “You’re good at this,” she says. “You’ll think of something.”

  She reaches for him, wanting to touch him again, to feel again that fragile tenderness. He holds her wordlessly for a long moment, then murmurs into her ear that it is time for him to go. She raises her head, feels his lips press hers, and then he is gone, walking away with his usual decisive tread.

  She looks at herself in the black mirror of the window, and wonders what thing it is, newborn and vulnerable as a child, she sees there.

  “WHAT FOOLS ARE THESE WHO FIGHT HISTORY?”

  CONSTANTINE’S BROADCAST RALLIES FREE CARAQUI

  Rohder is in her office when she returns, smoking the last of a pack of cigarets; the rest of the pack fill Aiah’s ashtray. He is in his shirtsleeves, with circular salty crusts under his arms, but otherwise seems unchanged by his time in jail.

  “Thanks for acting so promptly,” he says.

  “All I needed was to threaten every cop in the station with death,” Aiah says.

  “You seemed to have engaged their attention.”

  Aiah glances out the window for a moment—her office doesn’t face Lorkhin Island, and it’s safe enough to let in light—and then she sits in her chair and glances at the pages placed on her desk: a complete list of every plasm house in the files, a note from Ethemark clipped to the front reporting, “All we need now are some troops.”

  She looks up, sees Rohder watching
her with his mild blue eyes. “Constantine wants you to get your team together and start moving buildings around,” she says. “Hire as many people as you need, and Constantine will also make certain you get enough computer time to complete your calculations.”

  “The calculations are already complete for the district where we made our first attempt,” Rohder says. “I can send our team in there tomorrow. But if I’m going to be closing off bridges, stringing up cable, and rerouting traffic, I’m going to need police, or people like police, to handle that for me, and as I understand it the police are not our friends.”

  Aiah runs her hands through her hair. “Perhaps we could call the Public Maintenance Department.”

  “I imagine they’re going to be busy repairing bridges and public services wrecked by the war, but I will call and see what can be arranged.”

  Aiah makes a note to herself. “I’ll have Constantine call their minister.”

  “That may help.” Dryly. “And the computer time will be useful. I will also need a large number of structural engineers to calculate the amount of mass in each building. Where do you expect we could get them?”

  Aiah stares at him blankly. “Structural engineers?” She shakes her head and writes it down. “I will consult,” she says. “For the moment, you might as well get a good shift’s sleep.”

  He stands, and then his eyes lift from Aiah to the window behind her. He stares for a moment, mouth dropping open in shock, and Aiah swings her chair around, afraid she will be staring straight at a hovering enemy helicopter, its weapon racks loaded with rockets.

  For a terrifying moment she fears it’s worse than that, for the horizon seems to roil with images of conflict. Aiah sees arms bearing weapons aloft, faces distorted in terror or rage, rows of sharp teeth, flashes like bursts of gunfire, shattered skulls in rows, all the images mingled together or following in swift succession, the display’s chameleon form altering too swiftly for any single impression to remain for long.