City on Fire

TWO

“Hello, little bird.”

Aiah looks up and sees Charduq the Hermit gazing down at her. He has been there all her life, on his pillar at the Barkazi Savings Institute, with rain and Shieldlight falling alike on his head, and the wind blowing his long beard up in his eyes.

“Hello, old crow,” says Aiah.

Charduq smooths his beard with a gnarled hand. “A little bird should have more respect for the older birds of this world,” Charduq says.

Aiah is only eleven years old, but she knows better than to let some mangy holy man get the better of her. “If the old crow wants more respect,” she says, “he should fly down off his perch and get some for himself.”

The hermit giggles. “The little bird’s claws are sharp,” he observes. “And she has got herself some new feathers. What is that uniform?”

“For my new school.” Aiah’s new skirt, vest, and blouse are all too large, to allow room for growth, and the long sleeves of the blouse are rolled up to her elbows. She is not proud of her appearance, swathed in acres of cloth, and wishes Charduq had not mentioned it.

“What new school? I haven’t seen that uniform.”

“Miss Turmak got me a scholarship. I have to take the trackline to Redstone District.” She holds up her plastic trackline pass.

“The little bird flies far.” Charduq raises his eyebrows. “Miss Turmak is a longnose, ne?” he says. “It’s a longnose education they’ll give you in Redstone.”

Aiah shrugs. “It’s a longnose education they have in the state school, too. It’s just not as good an education.”

“But if you don’t go to school in Old Shorings, you’ll be away from the Children of Karlo.”

Aiah has heard this argument before, mostly from her own family. “You’ll forget who you are,” they tell her. “You’ll grow up a longnose and lose all your cunning.”

She looks around the bustle of Old Shorings—the crazy old buildings propped up by metal scaffolds, the street stalls and liquor stores, the jobless young men lounging on street corners and the Operation bagman making his collections—and wonders what is so great about this place that she should have to stay here for the rest of her life.

“I’ll still live here,” she tells Charduq. “How can I forget who I live with?”

Charduq smiles down at her benignly. “The little bird will not forget her nest.” He cocks his head. “You’re an Old Oel-phil family, aren’t you?”

Charduq, Aiah figures, is the sort who would care about this kind of silly superstition. The Old Oelphil families are supposed to be the guardians of the Barkazil people, reincarnating from generation to generation rather than continuing on to paradise.

They seem not to have done the Barkazil much good the last few generations, though, Aiah muses. Where were the Oelphil, she wonders, at the Battle of the Plastic Factory?

“I’m supposed to be Oelphil on my mother’s side,” Aiah says. “I don’t know about my dad.”

“I remember your father,” Charduq says. “He looked Oelphil to me.”

Charduq has been on his pillar so long that he knows practically everybody in Old Shorings. And he’s a relentless gossip as well, always happy to retail the latest scandals.

“When you’re in Redstone,” Charduq says, “you remember that you’re one of our people’s guardians. You learn that longnose education now, but remember that it’s for our benefit, so we can grow in our cunning.”

“I’ll remember,” Aiah promises, becoming restless. “I need to catch the trackline now.”

She opens her satchel and drops her lunch into Charduq’s plastic collection bucket—she knows that once she is in her new school she will be too excited to eat—and Charduq hauls the bucket to his perch with his rope. “You’re generous, little bird,” he says. “A blessing on you, and a curse on your enemies.”

“Thank you.” Politely.

Her thoughts are already on the trackline, away from Old Shorings, toward her new life.

Item #1: Get commo array fixed.

Item #2: Arrange for cleaning re living quarters. New mattresses, new linen.

Item #3: New office furniture.

Item #4: Resign from Plasm Authority.

Item #5: Gil?

Item #6: Family?

Items 1 through 3 are the easy tasks, though they take almost until midbreak. Item 4 proves more difficult than she expected—she had been raised on the dole, in apartments provided by the Jaspeeri government in a shambles of a district called Old Shorings. Aiah’s grandparents were refugees from the war that had destroyed the Metropolis of Barkazi, and Aiah had been raised among a people that had lost almost everything: family, tradition, culture, security, hope.

The Plasm Control Authority had been a route out of Old Shorings and all that it represented. Despite its sloth and ineptitude and pointlessness, the civil service provided security, which was of prime importance to a Barkazil girl who had no stability in her young life.

Resigning from the Authority was saying farewell to all the security she had ever known. And in exchange for a job in what is perhaps the least secure civil service in the world—the last inhabitant of this office had probably been pitched out of his job at the point of a bayonet.

But of course it is foolish to think she can ever go back to the Scope of Jaspeer. Not with the police after her for what the statutes quaintly called “crimes against the public interest,” in this case stealing millions of dalders’ worth of plasm and giving it to a political adventurer who promptly used it to overthrow a friendly government.

She sends the wiregram and feels a moment of loss as a part of her former life falls away.

Item #5. Item #6. Her lover, her family.

Two more parts of her former life. By now she doesn’t want to contemplate losing either.

Aiah looks at her watch. 11:41. Almost midbreak, and she suddenly realizes she’s very hungry.

She hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s sandwiches.

She stands, stretches, wonders where in this giant place she can get something to eat. Aiah walks through her empty receptionist’s office into the hallway, and her nerves give a little jump as she sees Constantine bearing down on her at his usual earth-devouring pace—elemental energy, balanced and directed and walking on two long legs.

His black velvet suit, trimmed with lace, makes him look like a pirate at a bankers’ convention. He carries a black leather briefcase with a combination lock.

A smile breaks across his face. “Miss Aiah,” he says. “Are you comfortable in your new quarters?”

Aiah’s answering smile freezes to her face. “As soon as they scrape the former occupant off the walls, yes.”

Constantine looks surprised.

“My apologies. No doubt a mistake was made in all the confusion.”

“No doubt.” Aiah’s tone is meant to indicate that there is a story here if Constantine wants to hear it.

There is an awkward pause. Apparently it is not the time for stories.

“Are you engaged?” he asks finally.

Aiah suppresses a bitter laugh. “Not until I have a budget and personnel, no.”

Tigerish pleasure glows in his eyes. “I am now in a position to give you both. I have just come from a meeting of the cabinet, and your department is approved. You will be pleased to know you are the Director of the Plasm Enforcement Division. Gentri, the Minister of Public Security, objected loudly to your endowment, because you’re in competition with the plasm squads of the police, and therefore in a position to make him look bad—but the rest understand the necessity.” He bows, absurdly formal, and holds out the briefcase. “Your commission, madame. And some documents for your files. The lock combination is on a plastic flimsy inside. Read, memorize, destroy.”

“Sounds serious.” She takes the briefcase and finds it heavy.

“Names, biographies, public information, informers’ reports pulled out of the Specials’ files by Sorya. The Plasm Enforcement Division’s first cases.”

Aiah’s nerves tingle as she feels the weight of the briefcase on the end of her arm.

My commission, she thinks. I have just joined an army, and these are my marching orders.

“Do you have time for a meeting?” Constantine asks.

“I seem to have little else on my schedule.” Except a meal, her stomach reminds her.

Constantine cocks his head and looks at her, intent eyes narrowing. “You lack your usual energy, Miss Aiah. Have you eaten? Shall we have our meeting in the dining suite?”

Aiah rocks back on her heels with relief. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“You skip too many meals.”

“If I knew where to get a meal around here, that might change.”

A smile dances across his face, and he makes another elaborate stage bow. “I shall direct you. If you would follow me?”

Aiah returns the courtesy. “I would be pleased to do so.” “This way, then. The Kestrel Room has a lovely view, and a private room where we may talk.”

Toying with a salad and sipping at a glass of wine, Constantine watches with amusement as Aiah eats. The Keremaths’ kitchen staff are undergoing a screening—no one wants some legitimist partisan poisoning half the new government in one swoop—so the cooking is being done by military personnel, Constantine’s mercenaries. What the food lacks in subtlety and flavor is made up for in quantity, and the vat shrimp with vegetables served on noodles is more than acceptable.

The Kestrel Room—rooms, in truth—is another example of Keremath extravagance. Wood is everywhere—parquetry floors, parquetry walls, carved, beamed ceilings. And the huge outcurving windows of transparent plastic offer a spectacular view of the city.

“I obtained for you a personal plasm allowance,” Constantine says.

Aiah looks up sharply from her plate, suddenly greedy for more than food. “How much?” she asks.

Amusement kindles in Constantine’s eyes. “A quarter of a kilomehr.”

Aiah is impressed. “Per year? That’s good.”

“Per month. Commencing immediately.”

She stares at him. His smile broadens, turns a little predatory, sharp teeth flashing. “Being a part of the power structure has its benefits, does it not?”

“I am beginning to see that it does.” She gives the matter some thought. “Is the cabinet so obliging to every department head?”

“Our job, yours and mine, is the management of plasm. Other departments will not require these allocations.” Constantine shrugs his big shoulders back into his chair and gives a catlike smile. “Oh, it was a splendid meeting, on the whole. Drumbeth backed all my proposals, including your department, and Drumbeth has the loyalty of the army, so the others in the triumvirate have to tread warily when he makes his wishes known.” He toys with his fork, twirling it on the linen tablecloth. “There were some conditions. Allies that want their rewards.”

“Who, in this case?”

“Adaveth. You remember him?”

Distaste tingles its way along Aiah’s nerves. “The twisted man.”

“The Minister of Waterways,” Constantine says. “He will appoint your second-in-command, though I will have a veto if the individual is entirely inappropriate.”

Ten percent of humanity, Aiah knew, had twisted genes. Most genetic alterations were for small things, hardly noticeable—boosted immune systems or outright immunity to certain diseases, cosmetic changes, genetic tweaks relating to the strength of the body or the power of the intellect. But Adaveth and his kindred were different: small, hairless, goggle-eyed. Probably intended to be semiaquatic. It gave Aiah the shivers just being around anyone that inhuman.

“Will he be twisted?” she asks.

Constantine gives her a sharp glance. “I would not be surprised. That is Adaveth’s constituency.” He pauses, toying again with his fork. “Many of the twisted here were created, by the old Avian oligarchy, for certain tasks. Positions in the civil service are traditionally reserved for them, and many of these have to do with servicing and maintaining plasm connections. Possibly because the workers are twisted, the jobs are low-status, low-pay. But I think they know more about how Caraqui is wired together than anyone, and if Adaveth chooses well your assistant should be invaluable.”

“I understand the rationale,” Aiah says. But, she thinks, she reserves the right not to like it.

“I desire to make use of every opportunity,” Constantine says. “Every untapped resource, every talent, all the ability that has been wasted or suppressed.” His intent eyes burn Aiah’s nerves. “That is why I make use of you, Miss Aiah. Your gifts were unappreciated in your previous life.”

Aiah holds his glance by an act of will. “I would like to think so, Metropolitan.”

Constantine smiles, his gaze shifting to the window. “You should learn to call me Minister. I haven’t been a Metropolitan in a very long time.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

“It’s an overrated title.” He scowls, and suddenly his chair is too small to contain him—he rises and paces the room. “When I was Metropolitan of Cheloki I felt little better than a slave,” he says. “Flung this way and that by circumstance, forced to respond to every shift in the situation. All responsibility was mine, but there was precious little I could do to alter anything—even to aid my own cause.”

Aiah puts down her fork. “My impression,” she says, “is that you were magnificent.”

He makes a growling sound deep in his throat. “Well.” Dismissively. “I’m a good actor. I played a Metropolitan well, and that’s what people saw. But it was far different from what I’d expected when I first set my mind on power.”

He marches back and forth across the room and flings out phrases with tossing motions of his arms. Passion burns behind his eyes, a world-eating force that Aiah can feel in the tingle of her nerves, the prickle of her nape hair.

We are not small people. Sorya had told her that once, and she was right.

“I knew precisely what I wished to do with Cheloki,” Constantine says. “I knew that my ideas would prove correct. I thought that once I achieved position I could snap my fingers and cause miracles to happen, that I could change everything… But no, that did not happen.”

She sees frustration in his glance, thwarted rage. His shoulders have slumped, drawn inward, less in defeat than as if he were sheltering from an attack.

“You had a civil war to cope with,” she says.

“If I’d been wise enough,” bitterly, “there would have been no civil war. If I’d managed it all a bit better…” Constantine’s big hands throw the notion behind him as he makes a contemptuous growl. “//, //… The truth is, I was helpless. Every reform in Cheloki was perceived as a threat by our neighbors. But…” He looks through the outcurved window, hands propped on his hips, and scowls at the world. “In Caraqui we are safer, I think. I can manage things better now, and all the knowledge cost me was the destruction of the Metropolis of Cheloki, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and the knowledge that all the responsibility was mine…”

Aiah pushes away her cooling noodles, stands, approaches Constantine from behind. She puts her arms around him, presses her cheek to his shoulder. “It wasn’t all your fault,” she says. “You had to fight gangsters and your own family and Cheloki’s neighbors. Even so you did well. You lasted for years against all of them, and you inspired millions.” Her tone softens. “You inspired me.”

“You weren’t there,” he grudges, but his tone is softer.

Constantine’s warmth steals into her frame. She can feel his anger soften. “Much better to be a mere government minister,” he says. “I will be responsible only for my own department, and even if I have my way in larger issues, success or failure will be up to someone else.”

For all that he finds this thought comforting, Aiah cannot quite believe that Constantine will find himself this detached when anything important is at stake.

“Everything must be in place as soon as possible,” Constantine says. His voice is low, thoughtful, and perhaps he is talking as much to himself as to Aiah. “We have a new government, and many more actions are possible under martial law than otherwise… but they must be the right actions, not abuses or pointless pursuit of revenge, and martial law must soon enough be lifted, and by then, we must all be ready.”

He turns, puts his arms around her waist, and looks at her levelly. “You must have your department prepared by then. I can guarantee you independence as long as I am minister; but no appointment lasts forever, and after I’m gone—well, you must be in place, with an independent, efficient, and incorruptible force. Once you have that, once you have proved your worth, they will have a much harder time dislodging you.”

Aiah’s head swims. “I understand.”

“Do you need anything right now? Anything at all?”

“I need to see as much of the apparatus as possible. Control stations, broadcast antennae, receivers, connections, capacitors.”

“I will arrange to give you a tour.”

“Of course.”

He kisses her—a moment’s softness brushing her lips—and then Constantine is already in motion, his body moving toward the door, mind focused on another item of his agenda. He reaches the door and turns.

“I will send you an engineer, Miss Aiah. Within the hour.” He reaches for the door, then hesitates and breaks into a smile. “Apologies for my haste,” he says. “By all means finish your luncheon, and order as many desserts as you like.”

“Thank you,” Aiah says, his taste still tingling on her lips, and then he is gone.

She returns to her meal, and wonders how dangerous it is that, after all this, she is still so very hungry.

Constantine sends a Captain Delruss, who is plainly annoyed at having been drawn away from his other duty. Delruss is stocky and gray-haired, a native of the Timocracy of Garshab, where the military profession is an honored and highly profitable tradition among its fierce mountaineers. He is a military engineer with a specialty in plasm control systems—and probably a mage of sorts—and though he has had only a few days to acquaint himself with the systems of the Aerial Palace, he has learned them well indeed. If Delruss performs his new assignment grudgingly he performs it efficiently enough, and becomes visibly happier when he finds out that Aiah knows her business.

The tour starts in the heart of the Palace, deep underwater in the largest of the giant barges that support the extravagant structure overhead. This is clearly the center of Caraqui’s power: the concrete pontoon is armored with slabs of steel, segmented into watertight compartments, laced with a defensive bronze web intended to absorb plasm attack.

There is one compartment after another filled with giant plasm accumulators and capacitors—each four times Aiah’s height, layers of gleaming black ceramic and polished brass and copper that tower into the darkness overhead. Above them are the huge contact arms poised to drop and connect the accumulators to Caraqui’s plasm network, the all-embracing web that can draw all the power of the city into this one place.

The control room is as vast as everything else, one bank after another of controls, levers, switches, glowing dials. In one corner is an icon to Tangid, the two-faced god of power, with a few candles burning in front of it, and in another corner is another icon to a figure Aiah doesn’t recognize, with no candles at all. Looming overhead, video monitors show unblinking views of the outside of the building, of the entrance areas, of Government Harbor several radii away, and of other points deemed important to Caraqui’s security.

Mages, some civilian and some not, sit before consoles, eyes closed, bodies swaying as power pours through them. Captain Delruss’s comrades, the uniformed personnel operating the system, seem dwarfed by the enormity of it all.

“During the fighting all this could have given us a lot of trouble,” Delruss says, “but afterward we discovered there were very few calls for plasm made during the coup.”

“Why was that?” Aiah asks, gazing up at glowing monitor screens. She can’t imagine anyone forgetting to use the colossal power of this place.

“There was sabotage of the communications system and of the plasm delivery network,” Delruss says. “But nothing that couldn’t have been overcome by competent people in the control room. What really won the coup for our side was that the enemy leadership was completely decapitated. There was no one left alive with the authority to make big plasm calls.”

Aiah’s mouth goes dry as she remembers the splashes of red-brown on her bedroom walls. “Do you know how our side managed it?” she asks.

Delruss has clearly been giving this issue a lot of thought. “Very good intelligence, for one thing. It looked as if we knew where almost every last one of the enemy leaders were, and were able to target them. And there were probably holes in the security screen here that our side had discovered, so mages could slip an attack through…” Delruss frowns, shakes his head. “But what sort of attack was used, miss, I can’t say. There are a large number of possibilities. But it was done very well, however it was done.”

Aiah remembers a moment of choking terror in a deep underground tunnel, the appearance of a thing that seemed made of purest black and silver, the chill waves of ice that flooded her nerves…

Ice man. Hanged man. The damned … an evil thing, whatever label you chose to give it. Its personal name was Taikoen, for that wasits name when it was a man—a hero, Taikoen the Great, the leader who saved Atavir from the Slaver Mages. Now debased, beyond humanity, a creature that Constantine could summon out of the depths of the plasm well, a thing deadly to everything that lived……

The enemy leadership was completely decapitated. Perhaps literally. And Aiah has the feeling she knows how it was done. A large part of it, anyway.

From the deep underwater plasma fortress, Delruss takes Aiah to the highest point of the Aerial Palace, where the huge bronze transmission horns are set in clusters like the outgrowths of a strange, intricate forest of gleaming metal. The horns are ornamented with ornate baroque swirls and scallops and, at each end, the sculptured figure of a hawk about to take flight. A cold wind buffets Aiah as she gazes out at the city—pontoons, buildings, roof gardens, long gray-green canals packed with ship and barge traffic—an endless procession stretching all the way to the distant volcanoes of the Metropolis of Barchab. Several of the aerial tramcars are visible in the distance, dancing on invisible wires. The volcanoes, Aiah realizes, are the only object in sight that, on account of altitude and danger of eruption, were not inhabited by the swarms of humanity that otherwise covered the globe.

She looks in the other direction, toward the North Pole only three or four hundred radii away. She sees giant buildings looming up out of the sea, one group twenty or so radii away and another dimly visible in the distance behind a cluster of spires. The Shield glows on their gleaming windows and burnished metal. Jagged transmission horns top almost every building.

“Lorkhin Island, and Little Lorkhin,” Delruss says. “Extinct volcanoes. They build tall here, when they can find bedrock.” He peers out into the distance. “The whole metropolis is ringed by tall buildings where the sea turns shallow. It’s called the Crown of Caraqui.”

Here on the Palace roof, some of the transmission horns have been blown from their moorings, and others damaged. Engineers are rigging a big tripod of steel beams to hoist the damaged horns in place while repairs are made.

“We tried to take these out at the start, miss,” Delruss says. “We used helicopters with special munitions, but we had only limited success. If these transmission horns had been able to broadcast power to where it was needed, we’d have had a much harder time.”

“But there was no one to give the orders.”

“Correct, miss.”

The cold wind knifes through Aiah’s bones. Somewhere below a ship’s siren whoops three times, like an unanswered call for help. Aiah steps toward the edge, her feet crunching on glass from a rooftop arboretum blown open in the fighting, its rare trees and shrubs already withering in the cold.

Above, between her and the Shield, plasm lines trace across the sky: The Situation Has Returned To Normal. Everything Is Safe. The New Government Asks That All Citizens Return to Work.

“Are we safe?” she asks.

“Against what?”

“An attack.”

Delruss shrugs. “A lot of the collection web has holes blown in it. We’ve got telepresent mages patrolling the perimeter, but they can’t see everything. Twenty percent of the transmission horns are off-line, and a lot of the sabotage inflicted during the coup hasn’t been repaired yet… well, not exactly not repaired.”

He sighs, prepares his long story. “Certain of the sabotage was performed by groups with particular interests, in anticipation of particular rewards. They are making certain they get these rewards before repairing the damage they made.”

“I see,” Aiah says. She believes she now understands how she’s getting one of the twisted as her deputy. “So it’s lucky there’s no fighting going on right now.”

“Yes, miss.”

Aiah steps to the parapet and brushes wind-whipped hair from her eyes. She looks down, sees a statue in a niche below her, hanging from bronze straps. It’s the first time she’s seen one of these up close, and she sees that it’s three times human size, and that the upturned face is set into an expression of agony—eyes staring, lips drawn back in pain. Cold fingers brush her spine as she looks into the featureless metal eyes.

“What are these?” she asks. “They’re all over the building.”

Delruss looks over the parapet and gazes unmoved into the agonized face. He’s probably seen much worse in his time.

“Martyrs,” he said. “The Avians used to hang political and religious criminals from buildings to die of exposure.”

Aiah is appalled. “Hanging off the Palace?” she asks.

“Not the Palace, but other buildings, yes. Originally there were other statues in these niches—gods, immortals, and Avians—but when the Avians fell, they put these here instead. And a lot of the local Dalavites hang themselves off buildings as a kind of ordeal, to commune with the spirits of their martyrs.”

He looks at her, a trace of a smile touching his lips. “There were some tourist brochures in an office downstairs. I read them.”

“I don’t suppose your brochure mentioned the Dreaming Sisters?”

“Sorry, no. That’s new to me.”

The sky shapes into an advertisement for the new Lynxoid Brothers chromoplay, the Lynxoids and the Blue Titan performing a violent dance across the sky. Aiah is freezing, and she’s seen enough for today.

From the roof they descend into the structure, and Aiah inspects some of the local conduits, the electric switches that divert plasm from one place to another, the meters that record consumption for purposes of billing.

She thanks Delruss and returns to her office to see if anyone has called—no message lights on the commo array—and finds that her new office furniture has been delivered. Since there seems little to do, she returns to her living quarters.

The suite smells of fresh paint. The carpet has been cleaned, and a brand-new mattress waits on the bed, still in a clear plastic wrapper.

It occurs to her that the situation is so fluid that she can only discover the limits of her authority by giving orders and seeing who obeys them. That she could so easily get service for her room and office argues for the fact that at least some people are inclined to do what she says.

Get the office window repaired tomorrow, she thinks.

She should make a list of everything she needs. Office supplies, access to the computers, scheduled use of the transmission horns, maybe access to secure files, if she can figure out where the secure files are…

Ask for it all, she thinks. Maybe she’ll get it.

She finds a piece of paper and begins to make lists.

A bar. Middle of service shift, after the stores have started to close. The place is a glittering profusion of mirrors, brass ornaments, crystal chandeliers, black sculpted furniture made of a shiny composite. It’s crowded and noisy, with a good cross-section of the local inhabitants—most of whom seem to possess both youth and dinars—but no twisted, which Aiah is relieved to discover.

During the course of this shift’s explorations she’s found that about half the inhabitants of Caraqui feature the stocky build and copper skin that registers as “normal” here, but the rest are every conceivable variety of build and skin tone, a wide enough variety that Aiah, with her brown skin and eyes and black hair, doesn’t feel as out of place as she would on a normal street home in Jaspeer.

Aiah sits in a corner surrounded by packages and waits her turn in the restaurant section.

“A gentleman is buying drinks for the house,” the waitress says. “What would you like?”

The waitress tugs at the hem of her red velvet vest while Aiah considers. The number of customers leads Aiah to conclude that whoever is buying could afford another round of what she’s drinking.

“Markhand white. Two-Cross,” she says, and taps her crystal glass. Not without a twinge of guilt.

Before she’d met Constantine she hadn’t ever realized that wine could be good, or that food could be delicious as a normal thing, without special effort. When Aiah was growing up, assembling a good meal was akin to a treasure hunt: good vegetables traded for, or plucked from roof gardens; favors exchanged for a good grain-fed chicken or squab or, on special occasion, a goat; fruit acquired through a process of barter too complex to be apprehended by the outsider.

But for Constantine good food is simply part of the background—he can afford the best: fruit and vegetables grown in select arboretums, animals and fowl fattened on food that otherwise would have been given to people, wine grown in rooftop vineyards, fermentation and acids balanced by magecraft.

Being around Constantine had left Aiah with expensive tastes, tastes at variance with the thrifty habits of a lifetime, but then Constantine had also left Aiah with money in a bank account in Gunalaht.

She has spent a lot of money this service shift, almost a month’s wages at her old job in Jaspeer. She’d realized that she needed new clothing—she’d fled Jaspeer with only the clothes on her back, and bought only a few items in Gunalaht on her way to Caraqui—and so she’d crossed one of the graceful arched bridges leading from the Palace on a shopping expedition.

It was an expensive part of the city. When she handed over her checktube in order to pay, it required a certain effort of will.

But at least she will be able to dress as befits her station, whatever that turns out to be.

The waitress brings Aiah the complimentary glass of wine and takes her empty glass. “Another round!” someone shouts. The voice is loud and male, and followed by cheers.

“Another round?” the waitress asks.

“Not yet.”

Aiah sips the wine, and a tingling taste of apples and ambrosia explodes across her palate. A young couple—both in subdued lace and velvet, the man in black, the woman in violet—struggle through the crowd and dump a pair of heavy briefcases under the bench next to Aiah’s table.

“I can’t believe they let him go,” the man says. “After all the people he disappeared.”

“He probably knows something,” the woman says. “Something about Drumbeth or Parq or someone else in the new government.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me.”

The woman smiles thinly. “Are you growing cynical about our new government already?”

“I am a good citizen,” the man says, “and will be pleased to support the revolution if it will support me to a promotion.”

“Plenty more where that came from!” roars the man buying drinks. More cheers. He comes into sight, dancing clumsily in hobnailed military boots. He’s wearing a uniform that Aiah doesn’t recognize, but she gathers from its ostentation that he ranks high. The tunic is unbuttoned, revealing a broad stomach and a shirt stained with wine, and he hasn’t shaved in days. He waves a bottle of wine in one hand and a checktube in the other.

“Let’s dance!” he bellows, and makes a bearlike pirouette. The couple next to Aiah watch with clear distaste.

Aiah half-raises her glass to her lips. The officer staggers, recovers, looks up at Aiah with pale blue eyes…

The hair on Aiah’s neck rises. Ice floods her veins. The blue eyes stare back at her in a terrifying moment of mutual recognition.

The man staggers again, recovers, then turns abruptly and heads for the door. The crowd gives a good-natured groan of disappointment as he stalks out. He wanted to be anonymous, and Aiah has somehow spoiled his fun.

Aiah feels beads of sweat dotting her scalp. Her heart throbs in her throat.

Ice man. Hanged man. The damned.

Taikoen, Constantine’s creature.

Aiah could tell the couple seated next to her that the officer, whoever he is, hasn’t been set free. He’s gone, obliterated, and soon his body will follow.

The hanged man is a creature of plasm, trapped in the pulse of fundamental energy, and so hostile to life, to matter, that he’s cut off from it, from the comforts of humanity or the distractions of the flesh… he can’t escape the single elemental fact of his own existence.

Not without the help of a first-rate mage.

Constantine had put the hanged man in the officer’s body, had sent him lurching out into Shieldlight to seek his pleasures. Thus was the creature rewarded for helping to overthrow the Keremaths.

The hanged man, in the long run poisonous to life, would wear out the officer’s body within a matter of days. The man would be found dead, and the new government would not be blamed. And Taikoen would slip back into the plasm mains, into the heart of the power that gave him life, and wait for his next victim.

Aiah looks down at the wineglass she’s half-raised. Her hand is trembling and the wine splashes over her hand and wrist. She firmly places the glass back on her table.

She wants to leave the bar and flee back to the Palace, but for all she knows the hanged man is still outside, and she doesn’t want to encounter him.

Best wait for her meal, she decides.

She wonders if it will taste like anything but ashes.

It’s almost sleep shift before Aiah gets back to the Palace. Her room, clean and smelling of paint, awaits her, antiseptic as a room in a hotel.

The walls are bare in the bedroom—all mirrors, pictures, and ornaments have been taken down while the paint dries. Aiah begins to put them back up, but several are chromo-graphs of people—the former occupant, or his family or friends—and Aiah puts these in a closet designed as a pocket garden, with buckets of loam and grow lights but with nothing planted, presumably because the former occupant could afford to buy vegetables instead of growing them.

She goes to her bag, takes out her icon of Karlo, and puts it on the wall.

With its lacy frame of cheap tin, the icon looks incongruous on the wall of the luxury suite, but Aiah finds it comforting. Karlo is her immortal, the hero of the Barkazils—the great first leader of the Cunning People, who man who refused the Ascendancy because it was not granted to all, and was thus condemned to remain with his people when the Malakas, the Ascended, built the Shield as a barrier between themselves and the planet’s teeming billions…

Aiah walks toward the terrace doors. Bronze wire in a diamond pattern is sandwiched between the glass plates of the doors, part of the building’s defense system, and she gazes through the gleaming diamonds at the Shield, the world’s opalescent shell, which provides light and heat but which is also the wall of a prison, at once the world’s savior and warder.

Karlo had tried to prevent the Shield from going up and failed, and that was both his tragedy and the world’s. And in the thousands of years since nothing, fundamentally, had changed: the sky was barred, no human had Ascended, and all was pointless, or folly.

Until Constantine. With him, perhaps, the world could change—Aiah could see in him the blend of ideas, desire, vision, talent, ambition, brilliance, and world-reaching passion that offered the possibility of change. // the New City comes into being, he told her once, then any sacrifice—anything—is justified.

He saw no hope elsewhere. He desired liberation, for others as well as for himself, liberation from the archaic systems that had ruled the world since before Karlo’s day, and—an ambition expressed only in his powerful whisper—ultimately liberation from the tyranny of the Shield.

Aiah thinks of Taikoen, the hanged man, reeling through the floating districts of Caraqui in the body that Constantine gave him, and she tastes the bile that rises in her throat.

What could justify Taikoen? she wonders.

Steel firms her thoughts. She could justify him, she thinks. If she is true to her new life, if her department can do what it was designed to do, if she can break the hold the Handmen have on the people and liberate the stolen plasm for Constantine to use to build the New City……

Only then, she thinks, is a monster like Taikoen justified.

So, she decides, she had better get busy and make it all work.

Aiah gets only a few hours’ sleep, since she’s up late making lists and plans. Constantine has authorized her to hire a staff of 120 people, of whom a third can be mages, “preferably with specialties in telepresence and police work.” During raids on plasm dens, she is authorized to call on the military.

Forty mages, not to mention soldiers.

She puts aside any doubts concerning whether she can organize and command forty mages, all with more experience than she, and concentrates instead on making lists of what she’ll need.

Aiah looks with a start at the clock, and discovers it’s 03:00. She looks for a window crank and can’t find one, then discovers that the windows polarize against the Shieldlight with the press of a button.

Luxury. Right. She keeps forgetting.

She’s too keyed up to get much rest, and when the alarm chimes at 07:00 she comes awake perfect in the knowledge that she’s going to spend the day thick-witted and dragging herself from one task to the next.

During a search for coffee she comes across a plasm tap in the kitchen, and only a few seconds later thinks to wonder what in the immortals’ name they could have used a kitchen plasm tap for.

Personal plasm allowance. Constantine had wangled her one.

If there’s a tap in the kitchen, there will be taps elsewhere.

Aiah sets the coffee brewing and looks for taps, finding three in the main room alone. A search through drawers discovers a wire, a jack, and a copper transference grip, an “orthopedic” design custom-shaped for a hand somewhat smaller than Aiah’s.

A dose of the goods, she thinks, is better than coffee any day.

She moves an armchair near the tap, puts the t-grip in the seat, and jacks the wire into a tap. With a flick of her thumb she can connect herself to the plasm well, the huge system that creates, moves, and stores plasm within the Metropolis of Caraqui. All the vast apparatus she had seen yesterday—the accumulators and capacitors and control boards, the transmission horns and receivers, the bundles of cable and taps and substations—all of it exists, Aiah realizes, only so that she, and people like her, can do just what she intends to do right now.

Aiah reaches into the collar of her sleepshirt and pulls out the plasm focus she wears on a chain around her neck. She had bought it just a few weeks ago, at the start of her adventure with Constantine, from an elderly man who earned a precarious living selling junk and trinkets from a desk made of a battered door. He had sold it to her as a “lucky charm,” a cheap bit of popular magic alleged, through its connection with genuine magework, to have virtues even without plasm. The token is in the form of the Trigram, and like all plasm foci its scrolling lines are meant to give a pattern to the flow of plasm through Aiah’s mind, a kind of safety device to prevent plasm from taking any unexpected turns.

She sits in the chair, looks at the focus in her palm, tries to relax, let the Trigram center her mind. And then Aiah bends to pick up the t-grip and thumbs the button that switches on the plasm connection. Her nerves come awake with a snarl. Her mind, comes alive with a cold neon glow.

It has been far, far too long since she’s had a chance to touch this reality.

The Trigram burns in her backbrain. Power sings in her ears.

The first thing Aiah does is send the Trigram through her body, flushing out fatigue toxins, filling every cell with energy. Then she simply sits back in her chair and closes her eyes and lets plasm fill her senses, awareness expanding like ripples in a pond……

She can sense the plasm network around her, the Palace delivery system, conduits and branches, that laces the building like a network of veins, arteries, and capillaries. Sense the vast well of plasm beneath, the fiery lake of raw power that floods out into the city…

Hypersensitive, hyperacute, her senses encompass physical reality as well. The texture of the walls impresses itself on her mind, the nubbly surface of a throw pillow, the coolness of the lacy tin frame on the icon of Karlo. The carbon-steel frame of the building, all gentle plasm-generating curves, glows in her perceptions like bones in a fluoroscope. And two people passing in the corridor outside flare in her mind like passing torches. Other, more distant people glimmer at the outside of her awareness.

But there is a curious constraint to her physical sensation. It is as if she is in a box of which her suite is only a component. Focusing her concentration, Aiah expands her senses, gently probes outward… no result. She frowns, draws more energy from the plasm tap, pushes her sensorium outward. The only result is the alarming sensation of power flowing away, bleeding out of her, as if her plasm is spiraling down a drain.

Her heart thrashes in her chest. Frightened, she draws her senses inward and tries to understand what has just happened to her.

And then she remembers the diamond-shaped crosshatch-ing in all the window glass, the shining bronze wire.

Aiah realizes she has run up against the Palace’s collection web, the network of bronze designed to intercept any plasm attack, deprive it of will, break it into bits, and feed it into the Palace’s own plasm system. As long as she was willing to be a passive receiver of outward sensation, the plasm merely amplifying her senses, she was able to enjoy her enhanced sensation; but once she tried to expand her awareness outside the bronze barriers, it absorbed all the plasm she was directing outward.

She hopes she hasn’t wasted too much of her precious plasm allowance. If she wants to use telepresence techniques to carry her outside the Palace, she realizes, she’ll have to schedule time on one of the Palace’s transmission horns.

Aiah allows her passive senses to expand again, swelling to the limit of the artificial constraints imposed by the building’s design. The Palace, she remembers, is compartmentalized, like a deep-sea vessel divided by watertight bulkheads. A breach in one component of the building’s defense will not necessarily endanger the rest. Her own particular compartment seems to encompass her suite, the two suites adjacent, corresponding suites across the hall, and the same units one floor down—twelve suites in all.

Her sensorium—the plasm-generated extension of her senses—is already in place. Aiah concentrates and builds an anima, a telepresent plasm body, a focus for the sensorium that she can move from place to place, and then she floats the anima out into the hallway outside.

A door opens in the suite to the anima-Aiah’s right—just past the bronze barrier—and a man steps out. He is a military officer, middle-aged, uniformed, with a briefcase in one hand. He frowns intently, as if his face had been trained to that expression by long years of practice. Straight-backed, he marches down the corridor, passing right through Aiah’s invisible anima. Aiah feels an illusory tingle in her insubstantial nerves.

The man marches on. Aiah drifts slowly down the corridor, tries to listen to what her sensorium is telling her. Only three of the twelve suites within her compartment of the Palace seem to have anyone in them at present, flares of warmth and life floating in Aiah’s perceptions. She takes a deep breath, exhales, lets the Palace speak to her, whisper in her ectomorphic ear… and then her breath is taken away by a surge of sexual desire that sets her nerves alight.

It originates on the floor below hers. Two people are tangled together in a moment of passion so intense that, once Aiah has opened herself to it, it floods her senses. Her mouth goes dry. For a moment she hesitates, indecisive, uncertain whether she should permit herself to pursue this path, and then she floats downward, passing through floor and wall, and finds the two lovers on their bed.

They are both soldiers, both young men. Uniforms and weapons are stacked neatly on chairs, ready to be donned at the end of their interlude. A bundle of keys sits on a table. Aiah doubts that either one of them is authorized to be here.

The ferocity and certainty of their passion sends a pang through Aiah’s nerves. Her heart is racing. She finds herself wanting to join them, to fling herself onto the bed in a sweaty knot of limbs and furious delight.

Voyeurism, she knows, is one of the privileges of the mage. No one, unless they’re hiding in a room sheathed with bronze, is immune to this kind of observation. She has never known if she has ever been seen in any of her own private moments. The odds are against it—she can’t conceive of anyone with access to that much plasm ever being that interested in her—but there’s no way of knowing for certain.

Watching the soldiers, she realizes, is only making her conscious of her own loneliness…

Aiah draws herself away from the scene, dissolves her anima, allows her sensorium to fade into her own natural perceptions. She thumbs the switch on the t-grip and the plasm ebbs from her awareness, leaving her alone in her silent room, aware of the rapid throb of her heart, the warmth and arousal that flush her tissues, the fiery pangs of lust that burn in her groin.

She closes her eyes. An image of the two soldiers seems seared onto her retinas. Loneliness clamps cold fingers on her throat.

She dips a hand between her legs and, in a few urgent moments, relieves herself of her burden of desire.

Aiah draws her legs up into the chair, hugs her knees, lets her breath and heartbeat return to normal. The scent of brewing coffee floats past her nostrils. She has a whole day ahead of her, a long list of things to do.

She wishes she had someone to talk to.