City on Fire

ONE

The car shoots through the InterMet tunnel, flying beneath the world-city as if propelled by the breath of a god. Drowsing on the car as it flies beneath the world, Aiah dreams of the Burning Man.

He stands tall above the neighboring buildings, a figure of fire. A whirlwind surrounds him, a spiral blur of tortured air, flying debris, swirling ash. Holocausts leap into being at his approach; buildings explode into flame merely at his passage. A torrent of fire flies from his fingertips, turning to cinders everything it touches.

Unwilling, unable to help herself, knowing somehow it is a duty, Aiah approaches the Burning Man. A scream comes from the hollow throat, a cry mixed of terror and rage, and Aiah realizes that the giant figure is a woman.

As she comes a little closer, Aiah looks full into the face of the raging figure and sees that the Burning Woman is herself.

She wakes with a start and finds herself in motion, in the pneuma car that hisses along beneath the world. Sweat plasters her collar to her neck. She swabs her throat with a handkerchief and again closes her eyes. Fire pulses on the insides of her eyelids.

The arrow-straight tunnel of the pneuma is surrounded by the eternal weight of the city… brick and stone, steel and iron and alloy, concrete and glass, rising from bedrock and stretching toward the Shield far above. The mass of it all is beyond comprehension. So is the power it creates.

All that is human is a generator—every building, every foundation, every conduit or sewer or elevated trackline. All the world-city, every frame and stone of it, produces and stores plasm, the foundation of geomantic power.

Power which, for a moment or two of brilliant comprehension, Aiah had held in her mind. She had possessed its possibilities, its glories. Felt it change her. Felt herself change the world. Felt its fires scorch her nerves.

Those certainties are gone now, replaced by confusion, hesitation, danger. If she can get the power back, she thinks, even for a moment, all will become clear.

If.

If.

If she can somehow get the power back.

By the time she gets to Caraqui, Aiah has almost talked herself out of it. Foolish, she’s decided, to leave her place in Jaspeer, foolish to run, foolish to think that the new government in Caraqui would give her a place. No Barkazils here—she will be even more a foreigner here than in Jaspeer. And Constantine will not give her anything—he did not love her—he had only used her for what she could give him, the keys to power, and could not possibly have any further interest in her.

But the police had been after her, the Plasm Authority creepers, and sooner or later they would have found something that would put her in prison. It was time to leave Jaspeer. In her mind she had already leaped a hundred borders—crossing them physically was almost an afterthought.

And once exiled, once that leap has been taken, where else is there to go?

Caraqui. Where the New City, consigned to ashes years ago, might undergo an unscheduled rebirth. Caraqui. Where her future waits. Assuming, of course, it waits anywhere.

Gravity tugs at Aiah’s inner ear as the InterMet brakes, drops out of the system, comes with a hum of electromagnets to a stop at the platform. A banner splashed with red letters hangs against a bright mosaic on the back of the platform.

Welcome to Free Caraq… The last letters are obscured by the banner’s dangling upper corner, come loose and fallen across the message.

And that’s it. There is no one on the platform, just the message on the banner.

Somehow Aiah had expected more.

Pneumatics hiss as the car’s doors swing open. The other two occupants disembark. Aiah rises, takes her bag from the overhead rack, and carries it out onto the platform. The bag is light—she had left all her belongings behind as she fled, and only bought a few things in Gunalaht on her way. There is only one heavy thing in her bag, a book, red plastic leatherette binding with gilt letters. Her legacy to her new home.

As she walks past the mosaic she realizes that it’s political, a noble-looking man wearing a kind of uniform and gazing off into the far distance. My father made the political revolution, it promises. / will make the economic revolution.

Covered now by the banner of the real revolution.

She doesn’t know precisely who the figure on the mosaic is supposed to be, but she knows it has to be one of the Kere-maths, the family that had ruled Caraqui for generations. The promise of economic revolution had been a lie—during their years of power the Keremaths ruled by kleptocracy, a government by gangsters bent on looting their own economy, their own people.

They were mostly dead now, the Keremaths. Constantine’s revolution had killed them, and it had been Aiah who had, against every law, given Constantine the plasm necessary to accomplish their destruction.

It is a matter of more than casual interest to discover how grateful Constantine will prove. Especially as she now has nothing to offer him, and gratitude is all she can expect.

The book in Aiah’s bag bangs against her hip as she walks down a short corridor lined with adverts—familiar posters for the new Lynxoid Brothers chromoplay, the Inter-Metropolitan Lottery, Gulman Shoes (“Meet for the Street”), all alongside more exotic promotions for Sea Mage Motor Craft and the New Theory Hydrogen Company. Then suddenly she’s out of the tunnel and into the main body of the station, and her heart leaps as she sees armored soldiers with their guns out, sets of goggled eyes gazing at her. Mercenaries, she thinks, because half of them have the black skins of the veteran Cheloki exiles who have been following Constantine for years.

The masked eyes pass over Aiah without pause. They’re not interested in arrivals. They’re clustered around the departure platforms.

They’re interested in people trying to escape.

There are counters for customs officials to interview arriving passengers, but no one is there: perhaps they haven’t shown up for work. Outside Aiah finds herself on a promenade overlooking a canal. A pair of ascetics, bearded and grimy, sit on beds of nails before their begging bowls. One of them brandishes a handmade poster about the “Uniting of the Altogether.” The canal water is bright green with algae. There is salt in the air and bobbing rubbish in the water. Caraqui, except for a strip of mainland here and there and some islands, is built across its sea on huge, ancient concrete pontoons, all linked together by bridges, cables, and anchors.

From atop the worn promenade rail allegorical bronze statues, weathered, pitted, and green, gaze down at Aiah from ruined, pop-eyed faces. She is uncomfortable under their gaze, but isn’t certain where to go from here.

She looks up as shining silver-blue letters track across the gray sky: There is no need for alarm. All fighting is over. The curfew has ended. The revolutionary government encourages citizens to go about their normal business.

An elderly female lottery seller, going about her normal business, shuffles toward Aiah on bare, swollen feet. She was probably selling tickets at the height of the fighting. Aiah buys one.

For luck, she thinks.

There’s a sign pointing down some steps, with the legend Water Taxis. She follows it.

The taxi is a small outboard with a tattered red plastic awning, driven by a weathered man of middle years. The hand that reaches for her bag is missing the first two fingers. A handwritten sign next to the meter says, We take foreign currency.

Aiah has read a guide to Caraqui on the Wire, and knows the name of a hotel near the government center. She had tried to call to make reservations but the lines were down.

“Hotel Ladaq,” she says.

He helps her into the boat with his clawed hand. “Can’t do that, miss,” the driver says. “Hotel Ladaq’s full of soldiers.”

“Do you know another hotel in the area?” “All full of soldiers, miss.”

“Get me as close to Government Harbor as you can.”

He starts the meter. “Right away, miss.”

But it doesn’t happen right away. The driver casts off, but then he can’t start the outboard, and as the wind pushes the water taxi broadside down the canal he has to take the cover off the motor and tinker with it, and then try to start it again, then tinker some more. Several taxis leave from the station in the meantime, and Aiah’s taxi rocks in their wake.

The meter, Aiah notices, is still running. She points this out to the driver, but he affects to be too busy with the engine to notice.

He tries to start the engine and fails. Aiah points out the meter is still running, but the driver starts kicking the motor and screaming.

It’s a chonah, Aiah thinks. The driver’s a confidence rigger and there probably isn’t anything really wrong with the engine.

If she were home she’d know what to do. But the fact she’s a stranger in this place makes her hesitate.

Finally Aiah steps forward and turns off the cab’s meter. The driver is stern.

“Can’t do that, lady. It’s government regulation. Only the driver can touch the meter.”

He steps forward to turn it on again. She keeps her hand over the button. “Start the engine first,” she says. “Then you can start the meter.”

The driver shrugs. With showy, large gestures, he tinkers with the engine again. Puts the cover on. Starts it without so much as a cough.

Aiah is entertained. She’s a Barkazil, one of the Cunning People. Her ancestors have rigged chonahs for thousands of years. This sort of thing is in her blood.

The pontoons and barges are old in this district, layered with barnacles beneath the waterline. The buildings on the pontoons are old as well, and as layered, new structures barnacled atop the old, until the form and shape and function of the original building has been completely obscured.

When she arrives at her hotel, she tries to calculate exchange rates, and gives the driver what she thinks is the correct amount in Gunalaht dalders. She knows, from the driver’s sudden bright grin, that she’s overpaid. Suddenly he’s pressing a plastic business card into her hand.

“My name is Callaq, miss! Please call at any time! I will show you the sights, the Aerial Palace, the place where all the battles were fought, anything!”

“Maybe.”

“Please call! I’ll take you anywhere!” “Thank you, Callaq.”

She carries her bag up corroded marble steps slippery with sea slime. Beggars hold out cupped hands on the stairs. From the top she turns to look back at this strange metropolis, sees the taxi churning away, an old moored tugboat that probably hasn’t moved in years and is flying a string of laundry, a flock of scabrous waterfowl staring at her with agate eyes.

And then, in the air above the canal, there forms a pattern, lines and colors interlinking, the pattern flowing like water… It bursts so swiftly in the sky, like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, that she can only catch a fragment of the wholeness, a curve, a maze, a wonderment. Aiah stares openmouthed.

“The Dreaming Sisters,” says a strange male voice.

The colors fade, leaving an imprint on Aiah’s vision, which glows for a few seconds like the afterburn of a photographer’s flash.

She turns to see who was speaking, her tongue poised to ask more questions; but it’s a businessman, sallow and sleek, and from the glint of his eye she can tell he’d like nothing more than a frolic with a strange woman, so she merely nods, then takes her bag indoors.

The hotel is an ancient place that has seen better days. Prostitutes cruise the lobby, either shockingly young or shockingly aged. Ribbed plastic sheeting protects old, broken tiles that were once bright with abstract designs dating from the old Geoform movement. Aiah’s room has a lovely plastered ceiling with a life-size figure of the immortal Khomak brandishing his assault rifle overhead and riding that fabulous animal, the sea horse… but from the sea horse hangs a wire, and on the end of the wire is a naked bulb. The bed has a cheap steel frame and the bedsprings squeak. There is no other furniture. Over the sink hangs a sign: Hot Water Available 05:00-07:00.

It’s 10:31, according to Aiah’s watch. She guesses she’s missed her bath for the day.

There is a communications jack but no telephone. Aiah finds she can rent one by the hour and does so. It’s an unusual piece, with a pair of heavy brass earphones and a trumpet-shaped mouthpiece braced up in front of her face by a butter-smooth brass prop in the shape of a human arm.

Constantine, she knows, is Minister of Resources in the new government. She calls the ministry in Government Harbor, but all they will do is take a message, so she phones the Aerial Palace and asks to be connected to his suite. She can’t even get anyone who will promise to take a message to him.

“Not unless you’re on the list,” she’s told.

“Can I speak to Mr. Khoriak, then?”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a member of Constantine’s suite.” One of his guards. “I’ll see.”

Aiah waits for ten minutes, hoping that Khoriak wasn’t killed in the fighting. “This is Khoriak.”

Relief pours through Aiah, relieving tension she hadn’t realized she’d possessed.

“Khoriak, this is Aiah. Aiah from Jaspeer. You remember?” “Of course.”

Of course. Idiot. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him.

“I’m in Caraqui. Hotel Oceanic. I would like to see the Metropolitan Constantine, but I can’t seem to reach him.” “I’ll tell him.”

Half an hour later, she’s on Constantine’s private launch. Fast work. She’s been in Caraqui less than two hours.

The launch seems to have been liberated from the Keremaths or their supporters: the hull is a shiny black polymer composite with silver trim—not chrome but actual silver, kept bright by the endless polishing of the crew, or perhaps through some hermetic process.

There is a deep whine as the boat accelerates, hydrogen burning through its turbines. It clearly has a lot of power to spare.

The captain is a black-skinned Cheloki, a newcomer. He drives the boat well but doesn’t know the territory: he constantly refers to the map pinned to the chart table next to the wheel. There is a soldier who places a fine white wine and a basket of sandwiches atop the table on the fantail. He is clearly uncomfortable in the role of servant—less than a week ago he was probably in combat—but he’s gracious enough, all things considered. Aiah realizes she hasn’t eaten since second shift yesterday, and she tries not to bolt the sandwiches.

The sleek motorcraft arrows neatly through the green water. The pontoons that loom on either side are painted with fading slogans and the images of dead Keremaths. Our family is your family—the slogan arches above dead, flaking faces. Aiah finds herself looking for dolphins—she had met one once, and spoken with him, and she knows they inhabit these waters. But no pale dolphins break the surface of the water.

Aiah is startled to see a large tram car float overhead along a set of cables. The green car, with its rounded, aerodynamic corners, is big as a bus, and obviously serves the same purpose.

Practical, Aiah thinks. It avoids congestion on the bridges, or building expensive tunnels underwater for pneuma and trackline transport.

Images of the Blue Titan and the Lynxoid Brothers brighten the sky, a plasm advert for the new chromoplay…

The buildings grow nicer as the boat approaches the Aerial Palace: expensive apartments, tinted glass and jutting balconies with fancy gingerbread scrollwork on the rails, and broad-shouldered office buildings crouching on their pontoons like animals ready to spring. Buildings don’t reach as high here as in Jaspeer, because it would make the pontoons top-heavy.

And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking: a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.

Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!

The Burning Man had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.

Twenty-five thousand dead. Including the mage. Several thousand soldiers. The rest civilians.

Aiah, in the coup’s headquarters, had watched it happen, had tried to stop it… too late.

Her fault. She had provided the plasm.

Come to mourn the dead!

There are people hanging, she sees, from the ruined buildings. Hanging in what look like sacks, feet sticking out the bottom, the sacks swinging free on lines secured to broken rooftops. They are not dead people, not casualties—they have hung themselves there since the burning.

Mad people? Mourners? Aiah cannot tell—they are all too far away.

Blowing soot brings tears to Aiah’s eyes. She dabs at them with her sleeve.

Then fantastic architecture of the Aerial Palace appears on the horizon, all swoops and spirals like the path of a falcon traced through the air. Shieldlight shimmers off the arabesques of the building’s collection web, bronze patterns set into the building’s exterior and designed to absorb and defuse any plasm attack, defense and ornament in one. The burnished bronze adds lovely bright accents to the building’s design, but its defense aspect failed drastically—the building is scarred, pocked by machine guns and punctured by rockets. Plastic sheeting is tacked up over shattered windows. The Keremaths lived here, and they died here, too. When the assault teams fought their way up the stairways they found only corpses.

Jewels appear in the air behind the Palace. An advertisement for diamonds.

Surprise moves through Aiah as she sees people hanging here as well, dangling from sacks set into niches in the building. When she comes close, however, she sees they are not real people, but statues.

A mystery. When she finds an opportunity she will ask.

The colossal structure is built on a raft made of several pontoons, and the motor launch drives between two pontoons into a narrow, watery alley lit with bright sodium floods both above and below the water. Aiah looks down into the milky water for dolphins and finds none.

The motor launch pulls into a slip alongside other, equally flamboyant craft. The soldier/steward jumps onto the floating pier and holds out a hand.

“This way, miss.”

There are soldiers patrolling up and down the quay in dark gray uniforms and helmets—Constantine’s Cheloki again. Constantine isn’t trusting the local troops that had actually captured the place: they’d changed sides once, and could again.

There are probably telepresent mages scoping the place as well. It would be the safe thing to do.

The door leading into the pontoon, Aiah sees, is an airlock, but it doesn’t look as if the heavy steel portal has been shut in a long time. Inside is a gold-rimmed desk where Aiah is checked in and given a badge.

“Someone is coming down to escort you,” Aiah is told.

The someone appears a moment later, and she recognizes him and smiles. He doesn’t smile back: he looks as if she’s a problem he doesn’t want.

“Mr. Martinus,” she says.

“Miss Aiah.”

He is a huge man, one of Constantine’s bodyguards, not only trained for war but bred for it. His genes are twisted to produce a massive, muscled body and catlike reflexes. His face looks like a helmet, eyes sunk beneath protective plates of bone. Heavy slabs of callus ridge his knuckles.

“Welcome to Caraqui,” he says.

“Thank you, sir.”

Martinus escorts Aiah into the elevator and presses the lever. There is a smell of burning that lodges in the back of Aiah’s throat, a souvenir of the fighting. The elevator doesn’t go straight up, but swoops as it rises to match the building’s architecture: the Aerial Palace, for all its extravagance, is a generator of plasm, built to distill the essence of mage-power. Its alloy structure is a maze of careful, intricate alignments, intended to take advantage of geomantic relationships that increase plasm generation.

The elevator doors open. The deep wine-red carpet is plush and the walls are paneled with dark wood—genuine wood!—broken with diagonal stripes of brightly patterned tile and solid gold wall fixtures in the shape of birds in flight. A percentage of the latter seem to have been torn from the walls by looters.

The corridor is blocked at regular intervals by sliding glass doors set into polished bronze frames. The doors open automatically on approach, though Aiah sees that they can be locked if necessary. Crosshatched bronze wire winks from inside the glass. It is part of the building’s defense system: the huge Palace is divided into sealed compartments to prevent a single attacking mage from raging through the whole building.

Martinus opens a paneled door and ushers her in. “Wait here, please.”

Aiah steps into the room. “How long will I have to wait?” “I don’t know.”

Martinus closes the door. Aiah looks about her. More wood paneling, gold-framed mirrors, two huge oval windows miraculously undamaged by war. The room is intended for meetings: there’s a huge kidney-shaped table—more wood!—and metal-and-leather chairs, gold frames with luxurious brown calfskin cushions. Even the ashtrays, laid out two-by-two down the length of the table, are solid gold.

The burning scent is here as well, like embers smouldering in the back of the throat, and it won’t go away.

Outside, a peregrine dives past the windows, a swift dark streak against the opalescence of the Shield. Aiah steps to one of the windows and looks out, hoping to find the falcon against the backdrop of the city. She doesn’t see it—perhaps it’s already sitting on a ledge somewhere, eating the pigeon it’s just caught.

The room projects out from the Palace and gives Aiah an exemplary view of the world-city, the buildings and towers and water-lanes that go on forever, unbroken to the flat ocean horizon. One of the green aerial tramcars floats in midair between two distant towers. I am on the water, she thinks, having to remind herself of the fact…

The sky blossoms with a giant plasm-image, the stern face of the actor Kherzaki hovering over the Caraqui, his expression commanding. An advertisement for the chromoplay Lords of the New City, based on Constantine’s early life and career. Fire-petals unfold beside the image, become words burning in air.

See it now…, the sky commands.

An advert, Aiah wonders, or a command from the ruling triumvirate? Should it be See it now… or else?

The door opens behind her, and she gives a start and spins, a brief giddy disorientation eddying through her inner ear… and as the whirling stops the false, burning mage in the sky is replaced with the real Constantine, a far more dangerous commodity. He looks almost respectable in modest white lace, black pipestem pants, and a black velvet jacket, and Aiah knows right away that her having come here is a mistake. Her heart sinks.

He doesn’t love her. They had been lovers, yes, but that was an accident, the chance result of a combination of unre-producible circumstances, a particular time, a particular place, a particular urgency… If he gives her anything it will be because of some horrid sense of obligation, not because he wants her here, or has any real use for her.

“Miss Aiah,” he says, and approaches. The voice is baritone, a rumble that vibrates to her toes. Aiah remembers—remembers in her nerves, remembers deep in her bones—the way he moves, the sense of power held barely but firmly, consciously, in check, strength mixed oddly with delicacy.

“We find ourselves in the Owl Wing,” Constantine says. Irony glints in his voice as he steps around the big table. “Those windows”—gesturing—“are supposed to be the eyes of an owl.”

Aiah is tall, but Constantine is taller, broad-shouldered, with powerful arms and a barrel chest. His skin is blue-black, and his hair is oiled and braided and worn over the left shoulder, tipped with the silver ornament of the School of Radritha. He is over sixty years of age, but plasm rejuvenation treatments have kept his body young and at the peak of health. His face is a bit fleshy, a suggestion of indulgence that serves to make him more interesting than otherwise, and his booted feet glide over the thick carpet without a sound.

The deep voice rolls on, imitating the clipped delivery of a tour guide. “We also have the Raptor Wing,” he says, “the Swan Wing, with its luxury apartments, and the Crane Wing…” His eyes never leave hers, his intent mind almost visible behind them, clearly considering subjects more vital than a verbal tour of the palace.

The voice trails off as he comes within arm’s reach. There is a touch of caution in his fierce glance, a sense again of something withheld. A decision, perhaps. Or judgment. Or both.

“May I ask why you are here?” he says. Aiah’s heart is a trip-hammer in her throat. Mistake, she thinks, mistake.

“To work, I suppose,” she says.

He smiles, and Aiah concludes it’s the right answer. A sudden wave of relief makes her dizzy.

He opens his arms and folds her in them. His scent swirls through her senses, and she realizes how much she’s missed it.

Absurd to care so much, she thinks. Constantine is a great figure, a part of something huge, much bigger than even he—he does not belong even to himself, let alone to her.

Aiah tells herself this, and sternly.

But her lecture has nothing to do with her longings. Her longings are self-contained, and happy within themselves.

Through the embrace Aiah can feel Constantine’s weight shifting slightly, a sign of restlessness. He is not a notably patient man. She releases him, steps back.

Still he watches her, fierce intelligence afire within the gold-flecked brown eyes. “The police?” he says. “Were they after you?”

“Yes,” she says, then, “No. Maybe.” She shrugs. “They knew I was a part of it somehow, but I don’t know if they could prove it. They had me under surveillance.”

“You got away without trouble?” “I got away.” She hesitates. “I had some help. I think. It was easier than I expected.”

“What of your young man? Gil?”

She straightens her shoulders, steels herself against the threat of sorrow. “Over,” she says.

“And your job at the Plasm Authority?”

“I wired them and told them I was taking time off.” She shrugs. “I don’t know why I didn’t resign outright.”

There is amusement in his glance. “You are cautious, Miss Aiah. Wise of you, not to quit until you discover if you have a new job waiting.”

She looks at him. “And do I?”

“I think I have one that will suit your talents.” He puts his hands in his jacket pockets and begins to prowl around the table, his restless movement an accompaniment to the uneasy movement of his thought.

“You know that the last government was worse than bad,” he says. “They were corrupt beyond… beyond reason.” He waves a big hand. “Even granted that they were thieves, that they wanted only enrichment and perquisites… the scope of larceny that they permitted, against their own metropolis, was irrational. The amount of plasm stolen is staggering. It constituted a vast plundering of their own power, a threat to the security of their own state of which they seemed unaware. Well.” He plants a fist on the table and looks at Aiah with a defiant glare. “Well, / am not so blind, not so unaware. The theft of this most singular public resource must stop. But what force do I have to enforce any new edicts—or even the old ones?”

He shrugs, adjusts the position of one of the gold ashtrays, begins to pace again. “My soldiers are not suitable to police work. The local authorities are as corrupt as their former masters, and it is hopeless to expect anything from them until years of reform have done their work. For this purpose I must build my own police force, my own power base. But the New City movement here is limited to a few intellectuals, a few discussion groups—I have no cadre, no organized group of followers ready to step into place. And…” He looks up at Aiah, eyes challenging hers, and she feels ice water flood her spine.

“You,” he says. “You will build this force for me. You have found plasm thieves in the past, and in my service you were a plasm thief. I wish you to find these thieves and return their power to the service of the state.”

Aiah blinks at him across the table. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or simply to be appalled by the suggestion.

“Metropolitan?” she asks. “Are you sure it’s me you want?”

Cold amusement enters his glance. “Of course,” he says. “Why not?”

“I’m a foreigner, for one thing.”

“That’s an advantage. It means you’re not part of the corrupt structure here in Caraqui.” “I’ve never done police work.”

“You will have people, qualified people, to do the work for you. But I want you in charge. I need someone I can trust heading the department.”

“I’m twenty-five years old!” she says. “I’ve never run anything like this in my life.”

He gives her a sharp look. “You have worked within a government department concerned with plasm regulation. You know where it went right, went wrong. You studied administration at university.” He assesses her with his gold-flecked eyes, then nods. “And I have faith in your abilities, even if you do not. You have never disappointed me, Miss Aiah.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start looking for plasm thieves.”

Constantine bares his teeth. “Start looking in my office. My waiting room is full of people offering me bribes.” He smiles. “I will give you a list.”

“And the Specials—the old political police—their records should be valuable. The instant the fighting was over, Sorya led a flying squad to their headquarters to seize their files. The records belong to us now, and…” Constantine gives a feral smile. “They’re very useful.”

Aiah’s spirit sinks at the thought of Sorya, Constantine’s lover—or rather, his official lover.

“Would I have to work with Sorya?” she says. “Because Words fail her. “Well, I don’t think she likes me.”

A touch of cold disdain twists Constantine’s mouth. “It is in both your interests,” he says, “to cooperate on this project.”

“Yes,” patiently, “I’m sure.”

Constantine’s restless prowling has brought him around the table again, standing next to Aiah. He picks up one of the gold ashtrays, holds it in both hands. “The government will announce an amnesty for plasm thieves,” Constantine says. “A month or so. It will take at least that long for you and your team to set up operations, consolidate your files, make a few preliminary investigations. And after that—” He smiles down at her, suddenly warm. “You have always exceeded my expectations, Miss Aiah. I have no reason to believe this will be different.”

Aiah sighs. “Yes,” she says. “If that’s what you want.”

“Gangsters, Miss Aiah,” Constantine reminds. “What in Jaspeer you called the Operation. Here they are the Silver Hand, and they are a threat to us and to the New City, and they must be destroyed. Destroyed completely. And it is best to do it as soon as possible, before the Handmen make…” He frowns. “Inroads. Inroads into the new structure.”

Aiah thinks of the Operation, the street captains with their stony, inhuman eyes and their utter, perfectly human greed. Their dominance was difficult to avoid; they had injured her family, and her hatred for them had burned long.

Damn Constantine for reminding her.

“I’ll do it, if that’s what you want,” Aiah says, “but only if you want it really done.”

His brown eyes challenge hers. “I said destroyed. Did I not?”

She nods. Fists clench at her sides, nails digging into palms. “Yes,” she says. “I can do that.”

He looks down at the gold ashtray in his hands, and her gaze follows his. His massive hands and powerful wrists have twisted the ashtray, turned it into a half-spiral of yellow metal, all without visible effort. He holds it up and smiles.

“Too malleable,” he comments. “I find myself disliking the useless ostentation in this place more and more.”

Aiah looks at him. “I will bear that in mind, Metropolitan.”

A knowing smile dances about his lips. His arm flies out, and the ashtray gives a little metallic keen as it skids across the tabletop. It strikes another ashtray with a clang and knocks it to the carpet before coming to a halt, spinning lazily on the polished wood.

“I will find you an office,” Constantine says. He takes her arm, guides her to the door. “We can postpone discussions of salary, and so forth, for the moment. Budgets,” he smiles, “are in flux. But I will assign you an apartment here in the Palace. I want you close by.”

His hand is very warm on her arm. Close by, she thinks, yes.

“Congratulations on your revolution, Metropolitan,” she says.

Constantine opens the door. “We have had only a change in administration,” he says. “The revolution is yet to come.” “Congratulations, anyway.”

“Thank you,” he says, and smiles as she passes through the door.

Constantine leaves Aiah to underlings who don’t quite know what to do with her. But by the end of first shift Aiah has an office in Owl Wing. It has a receptionist’s office (sans receptionist), a rather nicely finished metal desk complete with bullet holes, and a communications array that doesn’t work. An Evo-Matic computer sits in the corner, brass with fins, but it requires a three-prong commo socket and the office isn’t wired for them. The plastic sheeting tacked up over the window booms with every gust of wind.

The carpet is nice, though. Gray, with black patterns that look like geomantic foci.

From this office she will direct a team that as yet does not exist, that has no history, no personnel, no records, no budget; but which nevertheless is charged with a task of awesome complexity and importance.

Gathering plasm. The most important element of power, because it can do anything.

Mass transformed is energy—the most fundamental difference is not one of matter, but of perspective. And mass, in the right configurations, can create energy.

That’s plasm.

And the science of configuring mass so as to produce plasm is geomancy.

And because plasm exists in a kind of resonance with the human will, it can be used to create realities—create almost anything the human mind can conceive. Cure disease, alter genes, destroy life, halt or reverse aging, creep into the human mind to burn every neuron or, more subtly, to turn one emotion into another, to create love or hate where neither existed before. Plasm can knock tall buildings down, move objects from one place to another, build precious metals from base matter. Or create base matter from nothing at all.

In Constantine’s system of thought, plasm is the most real thing in the world. Because it can make anything else real, or it can take something that exists and uncreate it.

Making something real from nothing would now seem to be Aiah’s job.

Create a police force.

What kind of magecraft is necessary for that? Absurd.

Aiah tries, sketching idly on paper, to make plans. It’s usually easy enough to find out who the big thieves are, but discovering where they keep the goods is another matter.

You have always exceeded my expectations.

After a few hours, she wants to spit the words back in Constantine’s face.

She throws down her pen, stands, paces the carpet while the plastic rattles in the wind.

Welcome to Free Caraq—she thinks. Why is it up to her to fill in the missing letters?

And then Sorya is standing in the door, and Aiah’s heart leaps.

“Hello, missy.” Sorya walks into the room and holds out Aiah’s bag. “This was brought from your hotel.”

“Thank you.” Aiah takes the offering. The cinders in the back of her throat make her cough.

Deliberately, Sorya’s green eyes rove the room. There is a languid smile on her lips. She is balanced like a dancer, hips cocked forward, blond-streaked hair framing her face. She usually clothes her panther body in brilliant colors, apricot or green silk, the coiled muscle and curve of breast and hip garbed brightly as a flower… but at the moment she wears a green uniform with no insignia, a faded military greatcoat with brass buttons thrown over her shoulders, a peaked cap set with deliberate nonchalance on the side of her head. Not a flower, but something else.

A mage, a potent one. A warrior, a general. Powerful and intent on growing more so.

“We paid you well for your services in Jaspeer,” she says. “I was under the impression we had said good-bye.”

“The cops were after me.”

“That was careless of you.” She arches an eyebrow.

Sorya turns, walks to the door, pauses deliberately, and looks at Aiah over her shoulder. “Let me take you to your suite in the Crane Wing.”

Aiah clears her throat, finds her voice. “Don’t you have a more important job to do?”

Sorya gives a lilting laugh. “I am providing orientation to a valued colleague. Please come.”

Aiah follows. Sorya leads Aiah down a corridor with a shallow outward curve, a design feature presumably intended to enhance plasm creation.

“I’ve been appointed head of the Intelligence Section,” Sorya says.

“Drumbeth’s old job?”

“Colonel Drumbeth was military intelligence. I’m civilian, under the Ministry of State.”

Aiah feels a tightness in her chest. “Head of the Specials, then.” The old political police, infamous for their torture and brutality.

“We are going to be renamed the Force of the Interior, I believe.” Sorya throws the words carelessly over her shoulder.

“The commanders of the Specials will be debriefed—they are valuable only for their information, and once that is extracted, I expect they will be tried and shot.” She flashes a cold smile over her shoulder. “Their crimes were real enough, and the population expects no less.”

Sorya comes to an elevator, presses a button. The elevator door is polished copper, and Aiah can see her distorted reflection looming over Sorya’s shoulder—tall skinny body, brown skin, corkscrew hair pulled back in a practical knot. A gangling, hovering, uncertain form, quite the opposite of Sorya, with her perfect body, her exotic dress, her dancer’s poise and ruthless assurance.

“Your principal duty will consist of intelligence gathering,” Sorya says. “I trust you will share any intelligence with my department.”

Aiah gropes for an answer. “I will if my minister consents,” she says.

Her minister is Constantine, or so she presumes. Let him take the heat, one way or another.

The elevator doors scroll open, revealing an interior of mirrors and velvet plush. Aiah and Sorya step inside. The elevator control handle is brass and wrought in the shape of an eagle’s claw closed about a glittering crystal egg. Sorya sets the handle to the desired floor and the elevator begins to move. Then she leans one shoulder against the mirrored wall as she regards Aiah from beneath the brim of her cap.

“You have put yourself in a dangerous position,” she says.

A cold river floods Aiah’s spine. The elevator, moving unevenly along its shaft, causes little flutters in Aiah’s inner ear.

“Are you a danger to me, madame?” she asks.

Sorya’s mouth lights with a cold, cynical little smile. “Why should I concern myself with your destruction? I have repeatedly told you that I have never borne you any animosity—whether you care to believe this is scarcely my concern. Besides”—she gives a lazy shrug—“I reserve my power for dealings with the great and for enhancing my own scope of action—it would be a contemptibly small exercise to destroy you, and I have no inclination to think myself either small or contemptible. Give me credit for pride at least, Miss Aiah.”

There is a delicate chiming chord that hangs in the air for a moment. The elevator comes to a stop and the doors open. Sorya reaches out a hand, twists the brass knob that locks the doors open, and turns to Aiah again. Her brows are lightly furrowed, as if she were contemplating a minor problem.

“I mean only that Constantine’s friends, speaking generally, do not live long. Those who do not have their own share of greatness do not survive for long in the company of the great.”

Aiah steels herself, holds Sorya’s gaze. The elevator seems very small. “You have told me this before,” she says.

“And you had the sense to follow my advice,” Sorya says. “You took our money and went your way. But now…” She shrugs again. “You are in the line of fire. Do not claim you were not warned.”

“Line of fire?” Aiah says. “The fighting is over.”

Sorya slits her eyes. “The fighting is never over,” she says. “All truces are temporary. All wars are the same war, with occasional pauses for readjustment. War and politics are different facets of the same phenomenon, which is the conflict of human will, the will for power, for greatness, for enlarged scope… The rest, the medium through which one will challenges another—war or peace, law or politics-—that is mere mechanics.” Her green eyes glitter. “Learn that if you wish to survive.”

Aiah takes a breath, clears her throat against the smell of cinders. “Do you think there will be a war?”

“There will be conflict. I cannot say what form it will take.” She cocks her head, her look going abstract with thought. “Consider: Constantine knows what he wants, but this new government does not—not surprising, with all the factions it represents—the triumvirate is divided and does not speak with one voice, or act with one will. There is a Keremath party still, though there are precious few Keremaths left to lead it. The Caraqui army is being supplemented by mercenaries long loyal to Constantine. That is opportunity… for someone.”

“You think Constantine will take power himself?”

“Only if he must. Only if the triumvirate fails. Constantine is a foreigner and cannot hope to seize a metropolis that is not his own, not unless…” Sorya shows white teeth in a smile. “Unless the metropolis asks, from lack of any other palatable alternative.” Her eyes flicker to Aiah. “So build your department, find your plasm. It will increase Constantine’s power… and opportunity.”

Thoughts scurry from place to place in Aiah’s mind, alarmed but with no place to run. Sorya seems amused. With an unconcerned roll of her shoulders, she pushes herself from her leaning posture against the elevator wall and steps into the hall outside. Aiah follows. The wood paneling here is beautifully, intricately carved with patterns of fruit and flowers. They pass through two sets of the bronze-strapped airlock doors, which open automatically at their approach and close behind them.

“We’re in Crane Wing now,” Sorya says. “Some of the junior Keremaths lived here, with their dependents and loyalists. All chucked out now, or sent to the Shield.” Her hand dips into one of the greatcoat pockets, comes out with a key on a silver chain. She puts it in a door, pushes the door open.

“Your suite,” she says. “Have a pleasant sleep shift.”

“Thank you,” Aiah says. Sorya drops the key in her hand, tips her cap mockingly, as if in imitation of a uniformed doorman, and strides away.

Aiah stands for a moment looking into the dark room, then reaches in to find a light switch. Her fingers touch cool metal. She turns the knob and the lights come on.

The room glows, all polished woods and gleaming metal and soft, sumptuous fabric. Aiah steps in and her feet sink into deep carpet. The room is three times the size of the apartment in Jaspeer she shared with Gil. Wonderment tingles in her nerves. This place is hers? Hers alone?

She puts her bag down and closes the door behind her: it moves in silence on brass hinges, with a push of the finger. Aiah explores the suite in wonder—the gleaming kitchen, the luxurious lounge, the bar with its shining crystal decanters. There is food in the refrigerator, stores in the cabinets, fruit trees blossoming on the terrace. Her fingertips brush over the smooth, polished surface of wood tables, and she wonders if she will ever get used to so much wood around her.

There had been a revolution, a complete readjustment of power; but it had not touched this room.

There are plasm connections everywhere, as available as electric power outlets. Aiah checks the communications array, the headset with its priceless ivory earpieces and gleaming silver keys, and finds it doesn’t work.

Not everything, she reflects, can be perfect. She opens the door into the bedroom—

—and smothers a scream with her fist.

She slams the door and staggers away on a wave of nausea. The room swims around her, and she sinks into a chair. Soft leather receives her.

The suite’s previous occupant had died in bed, and he had not died well.

Clearly magecraft had killed him. The sheets and mattress were crusted in dried blood, and there were sprays of red on the walls, floor, even the ceiling. The body had been removed, but the mess had not.

Sorya, Aiah thinks. Sorya chose this room for her.

All truces are temporary. The words echo in her mind.

Aiah jumps up from the chair, walks to the door, puts her hand on its bronze handle. And then wonders where she’s going to go.

Beneath a lovely carving of grapes, outside in the hall, Aiah finally catches a few hours’ rest, sleeping on the carpet with her jacket for a pillow.