"Very nearly," said Greppen, lifting the bottle to refill his companion's glass.
"Here's a question for you, Councilor," said Toler. "Does she ever leave the chair?"
"Only to go to bed," he said. "I would think of all people, you might understand best. She shares her spirit with it as you do The Coral Heart. She knows what the world looks like from above the clouds. She can fly."
Toler finished his second drink, and told Greppen he was turning in. On the way out the door the Councilor called back, "Patience." Once in bed, again he summoned Garone and sent him forth to discover any secrets he might. The swordsman then grasped the sheath and the grip and fell into a troubled sleep.
He tossed and turned, his desire for the Lady working its way into his dreams. Deep in the night, her face rose above the horizon bigger than the moon. He looked into her eyes to see if he could tell their color, but in them he saw instead the figures of Garone and Mamresh on the stone bench, beneath the willows, in the moonlight. His tulpa's robe was pulled up to his waist, and Mamresh sat upon his lap, facing away, her legs on either side of his. She was panting and moving quickly to and fro, and he was grunting. Then Garone tilted his head back and the hood began to slip off.
Toler woke suddenly to avoid seeing his servant's face. He was drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. I've got to get away from here," he said. Still, he stayed three more days. On the evening of the third day, he gave orders for the grooms to ready Nod for travel early in the morning. Before turning in, he went to the balcony and sat, staring out at the stars. "Garone, you were right," he said aloud. "I've fallen in love, but tribulation and certain death might have been preferable." He dozed off.
A few minutes later, he awoke to the sound of Greppen's footfalls receding into the distance. He sat up, and as he did he discovered a pale yellow envelope in his lap. For The Coral Heart was inscribed across the front. The back was affixed with wax, bearing, what he assumed, was the official seal of the House of Maltomass, ornate lettering surrounding the image of an owl with a snake writhing in its beak. He tore it open and read, "Come now to my chambers. Your Lady."
He sprang off the divan and summoned Garone to lead him. They moved quickly through the halls, the tulpa skimming along above the blue limestone floors like a ghost. In the Hall of Tears, they came upon a staircase and climbed up four flights. At the top of those steps was a sitting room, at the back of which was a large wooden door, opened only a sliver. Toler instructed Garone to stand guard and to alert him if anyone approached. He carefully opened the door and entered into a dark room that led into a hall at the end of which he saw a light. He put his left hand around the grip of the sword and proceeded.
Before reaching the lighted chamber he smelled the vague scent of orange oil and cinnamon. As he stepped out of the darkness of the hall, the first thing that caught his attention was Lady Maltomass, sitting up, supported by large silk pillows, in her canopied bed. The coverlet was drawn up to her stomach and she was naked. The sight of her breasts halted his advance.
"Come to practice your swordsmanship?" she said.
He swallowed hard and tried to say, "At your service."
She laughed at his consternation. "Come closer," she said, her voice softer now, "and dispense with those clothes."
He undressed before her, quickly removing every article of clothing. When he stood naked before her, though, he still had on his belt and the sheathed sword.
"One sword is useful here, the other not," she said.
"I never take it off," he said.
"Hurry now. Put it right here on my night table."
He reluctantly removed the sword. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and put his arms around her. They kissed more passionately than they had in the clearing. He ran his fingers through her hair as she clasped her hands behind his back and kissed his chest. He moved his hands down to her breasts and she reached for his prick. When their ardor was well inflamed, she pulled away from him, and then slowly leaning forward, whispered in his ear, "Do you want me?"
"Yes," he said.
"Then, come in," she said and, grabbing the corner of the blanket, threw it back for him.
For a moment, Ismet Toler wore the same look of terrible surprise fixed forever on the faces of his victims, for Lady Maltomass, was, from the waist down, blood coral. He glimpsed the frozen crease between her legs and cried out.
Garone appeared suddenly at his side, shouting, "Treachery." Toler turned toward his servant just as Mamresh, bearing a smile, appeared and pulled back the hood of his tulpa's robe. The swordsman glimpsed his own face with yellow eyes in the instant before the thought form went out like a candle. He buckled inside from the sudden loss of Garone. Then, from out of the dark, he was punched in the face.
Toler came to on the floor, gasping as if he'd been under water. Greppen was there, helping him off the floor. Once Toler had regained his footing and clarity, he turned back to the bed.
"Imagine," said Lady Maltomass, "your organ of desire transformed into a fossil."
Toler was speechless.
"Some years ago, my father took me to the market at Camiar. He'd been working on the translation of the spell upon your sword, and he'd heard that you frequented a seller there who dispensed drams of liquor. He wanted to present you with what he'd discovered from the ancients about the sword's script. Just as we arrived at the market, a fight broke out between five swordsmen and yourself. You defeated them, but in the melee you struck a young woman with an errant thrust and she was turned to coral."
"Impossible!" he shouted.
"You're an arrogant fool, Ismet Toler. The young woman was me. My father brought me back here a statue, and prepared the five herbs from his research into an elixir. He poured it down my hard throat, and because it was made of only half the ingredients of the cure, only half of me returned."
Greppen tapped Toler upon the hip and, when the swordsman looked down, handed him The Coral Heart.
"Now you face my tulpa," said the Lady.
Toler heard Mamresh approaching and drew the sword, dropping the sheath upon the bed. He ducked and sidled across the floor, the weapon constantly moving. He turned suddenly and was struck twice in the face and once in the chest. He stumbled, but didn't go down. She moved on him again, but this time he saw her vague outline and sliced at her torso. The blade passed right through her and she kicked him in the balls. He doubled over and went down again.
"Get up, snake," called Lady Maltomass from the bed.
"Please, rise, Ismet Toler," said Greppen, now standing before him.
He lifted himself off the floor and resumed a defensive crouch. He kept the blade in motion, but his hands were shaking. Mamresh attacked. Her hard knuckles seemed to be everywhere at once. No matter how many times Toler swung The Coral Heart, it made no difference.
After another pass, Mamresh had him staggered and reeling from side to side. Blood was running from his nose and mouth.
"I've just given her leave to beat you to death," said Lady Maltomass.
The vague outline of a muscled arm swept out of the air, and Toler slid beneath it, turned and made the most exquisite cut to the ghostly figure's spine. The blade didn't even slow in its arc.
She closed his left eye and splintered his shin with a kick. Toler was on the verge of panic when he saw Greppen standing in the corner, tiny fists raised in the air, urging Mamresh to the kill. The tulpa came from the left this time. The swordsman had learned the sound of her breathing. Before she could strike, he tucked his head in and rolled into the corner where Greppen stood. He could hear her right behind him.
He reached out with his free hand and grabbed the toad man by the ankle. Then, as Toler rose, he lifted the blade, and with unerring precision, gave a deft slice to the Councilor's neck. He turned quickly, and Greppen's blood sprayed forth in a great geyser. It washed over Mamresh, and she became visible to him as she threw a punch at his left eye. He moved gracefully to the side, tossing Greppen's now coral body
at her. It passed through her face, briefly blocking her view of him. Toler calmly sought a spot where the blood revealed his assassin and then lunged, sending the blade there.
Mamresh gasped, and her visible face contorted in terror as she crackled into blood coral. He turned back to the bed, and the Lady was still. He now could ascertain the color of her eyes and they were a deep red. He'd made her mind coral in the act of defeating her tulpa. He dropped the sword and lay down beside her. Pulling her to him, he tried to kiss her, but her teeth were shut and a slow stream of drool issued from the corner of her mouth.
Toler discovered Nod gutted and decapitated in a heap upon the stable floor. After that, he spared no one, but worked his way down every hall and through the gardens, killing everything that moved. It was after midnight when he left the palace in the flying chair and disappeared into the western mountains.
People wondered what had happened to The Coral Heart. Some said he'd died of frostbite, some, of fever. Others believed he'd finally been careless and turned himself into a statue. Seven long years passed and the violence of the world had been diminished by half. Then, in the winter of The Year of Ice, a post rider galloped into Camiar and told the people that he'd seen a half-dozen bandits turned to coral on the road from Totenhas.
It Takes Two
Nicola Griffith
It began, as these things often do, at a bar—a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle's Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead about the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.
She said, "You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal job where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?"
"You forgot Friday."
"What?" They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.
"I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—"
"Right," Cody said. "Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?" An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.
Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. "I just took a job," he said. "A no-travel job."
"Ah, shit." She remembered how they met, just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which didn't really make sense if you stopped to consider that he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein's monster, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they'd both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.
Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.
Cody hadn't told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, bootstrapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.
She sighed. "Where?"
"Chapel Hill. And it's not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really."
"Uh huh."
"No, really. It's with a new company, a joint venture between Wishtle.net and the University of North—"
"See."
"Just let me finish." Richard could get very didactic when he'd been drinking. "Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I've got six months to get the software on the market even if it is garbage."
"I hear you on that." Except that Vince, Cody's COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.
"It's cool stuff, Cody. All those things we've talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms—"
"Yeah, yeah."
"—they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff."
Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn't remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.
"Starts next month," he said.
Cody felt very tired. "You won't be in Atlanta."
"Nope."
"Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus."
"On your own? Think of all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes."
The muscles in Cody's eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. "It's Boone I'm not looking forward to. And his sleazy strip club games."
"He's the customer."
"Your sympathy's killing me."
He shrugged. "I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream."
Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.
"That's what you told us in—now where the hell was that?"
"Dallas." Might as well get it over with.
"You were really into it. Are you blushing?"
"No." Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that coding cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.
She swallowed the last of her tequila. Oily, ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.
"I'm out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone's slimeball games? Didn't think so." She pushed her shot glass away and stood.
"That Atlanta meeting's when? Eight, nine weeks?"
"About that." She dropped two twenties on the bar.
"I maybe could help."
"With Boone? Right." But Richard's usually cherubic face was quite stern.
He fished his phone from his pocket and put it on the bar. He said, "Just trust me for a minute," and tapped the screen. The memo icon winked red. "Whatever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this recording except you."
Cody slung on her jacket. "Cue ominous music."
"It's more an, um, an ethics thing."
"Jesus, Richard. You're such a drama queen." But she caught the bartender's eye, pointed to their glasses, and sat.
"I did my Atlanta research too," he said. "Like you, I'm pretty sure what will happen after you've made your presentations to Boone."
"The Golden Key," she said, nodding. Everyone said so. The sun rises, the government taxes, Boone listens to bids and takes everyone to the Golden Key.
"—but what I need to know from you is whether or not, to win this c
ontract, you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures."
She snorted. "Five figures against a possible eight? What do you think?"
He pointed at the phone.
"Fine. Yes. I can approve that kind of expense."
He smiled, a very un-Richard-like sliding of muscle and bone, like a python disarticulating its jaw to swallow a pig. Cody nearly stood up, but the moment passed.
"You'll also have to authorize me to access your medical records," he said.
So here they were in Marietta, home of the kind of Georgians who wouldn't fuck a stranger in the woods only because they didn't know who his people were: seven men and one woman stepping from Boone's white concrete and green glass tower into an August sun hot enough to make the blacktop bubble. Boone's shades flashed as he turned to face the group.
Eclipse Three Page 17
