City on Fire

FIVE

“Here is our secure room, for our sensitive files.”

The triumvirate and their entourage look into the bronze-lined room with polite disinterest. They have seen secure rooms before, and this one is no different. The bronze sheathing and the bronze-barred door are designed to keep plasm out, and there is a guard and a pass system that allows only authorized people inside.

The shelves are mostly empty. Drumbeth looks at them with a military eye.

“How soon do you anticipate being able to commence operations?” he asks.

“We’ve already commenced,” Aiah says. “Though our operations at present are directed at gathering intelligence.”

“You would seem not to have gathered much,” says Gen-tri, observing the empty shelves. He is the Minister of Public Security, head among other things of the police, and no friend to the Plasm Enforcement Division. He is a balding man in wine-colored velvet, and he looks about with obvious disdain as he strokes his graying mustache with his right index finger.

“It’s early days,” Aiah says. “We’re not up to strength yet.”

“I meant active operations,” says Drumbeth.

She looks down at him—he is half a head shorter than she.

“That’s a policy decision,” Aiah says. “We can start arresting people right away, of course, but there are still some weeks to go in the amnesty, and I’d rather keep gathering information for the present.”

She’s making a deliberate hedge. The triumvirate are traveling with a large entourage, and she doesn’t know how many of them might be conduits to the Silver Hand.

“Can you give me a date?” Drumbeth presses.

Aiah clenches her teeth. “I’d… rather not, sir. May I show you our ops room? It is just down the hall.”

Hilthi gives her an accusing look. He is another triumvir, the former journalist whose opposition to the Keremaths became a byword. A tall man with tilted, supercilious eyes, he jots in a notebook with a golden pen as he speaks.

“You are not prepared to arrest these criminals? The problem of stolen plasm is vast and requires immediate remedy.” He frowns at her. “Totalitarian governments always find their chief allies within the criminal classes. Though the last government is gone, their allies still remain, causing untold suffering among the population.”

It is as if Hilthi were caught between his old profession of journalist, interrogating guilty members of a wicked government, and his new occupation, a politician who makes speeches.

“We can arrest a few now,” Aiah says. “Or many later. No official policy has yet been formulated concerning which of these options we consider desirable.” She casts a glance at Constantine. He has been in the back of the crowd, looming over the triumvirate with an imperturbable expression on his face, and till now content to let her do the talking.

“I’m afraid that’s my fault, gentlemen,” he says. “I wanted better information on the dimension of the problem before taking action. The amnesty is still in place, after all, and we have all been on the job only a few weeks.”

Hilthi scowls and writes on his pad.

“May I point out,” Gentri says, “that Public Security has a policy in place, and that our plasm squads arrest criminals almost daily? Was it not Mr. Hilthi”—he gives a slight bow to his superior—“who issued the directive about eliminating redundancy whenever possible?” He looks at Aiah. “I do not doubt the enthusiasm of these, ah, amateurs, but I very much doubt if they will give you anything like satisfactory results.”

Aiah feels Gentri’s sting lodge in her heart. It would hurt less, she knew, if she weren’t, in fact, such a complete novice at everything she’s done.

She looks at Gentri levelly. “Give us six months,” she says, “and we shall see whose record is better.”

“A bold challenge,” Gentri says, “but my personnel outnumbers yours by tens of thousands. You don’t have a chance.”

Aiah’s response is ready on her tongue—in your pants, perhaps, or call the neighbors, or some other expression from her old neighborhood—but though the words are ready, she manages to bottle them up at the last second. Perhaps Drumbeth senses her struggle, because he chooses this moment to speak.

“Perhaps,” he says, “we will observe an exhibition of the values of competition. Now shall we go on to the ops rooms?”

The ops rooms, one large and one small, are still a shambles: video monitors with their copper cables hanging, plasm connections with hardware yet to be installed, plastic flooring still in huge rolls in the corner. But Aiah finds herself growing enthusiastic as she explains what it will look like when it’s finished, how supervisors will use the monitors to coordinate the actions of mages and military police.

“This is all very well, and you speak with enthusiasm and charm,” says Parq, whose title is not only triumvir but Holy. “The material functions of the room—its mighty purpose and dread, impersonal power—are impressive indeed. But I sense a certain moral uncertainty at work here. Perhaps the young lady stands in need of guidance.” He approaches Aiah and takes her hand.

Aiah cannot conceive of a more perfect image of a spiritual leader—Parq is tall and dignified and handsome, with solemn brown eyes in a long, copper-skinned face. His curling gray beard is long and silky and perfumed, and his soft, satin baritone projects a perfect sincerity. He wears gray robes, beautifully ornamented with silver lace, and a soft mushroom-shaped hat.

If Aiah didn’t know he was a corrupt tyrant who had only been elevated to his position because he was willing to collaborate with the Keremaths, she might well have fallen under his spell.

At close range, Parq gazes into Aiah’s eyes with utter concern. “Wouldn’t your task be made easier,” he asks, “if you had a spiritual guide in your division, one to give you insight into the complex decisions with which you will be faced almost daily?”

Aiah restrains the impulse to yank her hand back from his satin grip.

“I’m sure that’s not for me to say, sir,” she says.

Parq presses on, taking a soft step nearer Aiah so that she can feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. She suppresses the urge to claw his face to ribbons. “You would find such guidance to be of use, I’m certain,” he says, his soft voice like that of a suitor whispering into the ear of his beloved. “You are a stranger here, and so is Minister Constantine, and a wise advisor familiar with the local conditions would be worth everything to you……”

“That’s a decision that will have to be made at a higher level than mine, I’m afraid,” Aiah says, and slides her hand from his grasp.

“Perhaps,” Constantine says, secret amusement glittering in his eyes, “you gentlemen would care to observe a few of our mages conducting a surveillance…”

“A delicate escape from Parq,” Constantine says, “but nicely done. I could tell that you wanted to strike him, and on behalf of the Ministry of Resources I would like to commend you on your restraint.”

The tour over, Constantine and Aiah take refuge in his office.

Weariness and relief beat down on Aiah’s shoulders. She can’t tell if she’s done well or ill, but she is thankful that she will not have to deal with any more triumvirs today. She collapses into a chair, feels leather and hydraulics receive her.

“I wish I felt I could have spoken to them more frankly,” she says. “I would like to tell them I’d make a hundred arrests the very day the amnesty ends.”

He looks at her, fingers thoughtfully touching his chin. Behind him, visible through the huge oval window, plasm adverts glow in air. “Can you make a hundred arrests? Will you?”

“You said you wanted them destroyed. I can’t do that, I suppose, but I’ll do what I can. If, of course, you’ll give me the soldiers to do it. And warrants.”

“Naturally I shall. Geymard’s troops will get bored if they do nothing but guard the Palace.”

She glances up at him. “I have learned something from you and Geymard and Drumbeth,” she says. “A tactic I wish to employ.”

“Yes?”

“Decapitation is best. I want to slice the head of the Silver Hand clean off in one stroke.”

“There are more Handmen than there were Keremaths,” Constantine observes. “And more heads.”

“With their leaders gone, I hope the rest will fight over the spoils. And perhaps even inform on each other, to weaken their rivals.”

Constantine nods. “A policy that promises well. Though you should not count on them to inform—it is the one thing, the one guild rule, that is ruthlessly enforced.”

“I would like to publicize a telephone number that informants can call. With rewards, perhaps. But that means hiring more clerical staff and coming up with reward money.”

Constantine gives this notion a moment’s thought. “Wait until after your first arrests. If they are successful, I will have more leverage with the triumvirate.”

“If you think that’s best.”

Constantine looks down at his ebony-and-gilt desk. He opens a drawer, reaches inside, takes out Aiah’s copy of Proceedings, and pushes it across the desk toward her.

“I have ordered the entire set from the Jaspeeri Plasm Authority,” he says, and his grin broadens. “I wonder what they will make of it? Double-express delivery, and addressed to me personally, a man to whom the Authority police would very much like to talk.”

She takes the heavy book from his desk and holds it in her lap. “I imagine they will take your money and send the books.”

“I imagine they will.” His head cocks to one side, and he regards her from beneath half-closed eyes. “How well did you know this Rohder?”

“Not well, though I worked for him at one point. Catching plasm thieves, because the Authority had given him no other job.” She smiles. “And because he needed a hobby.”

“Would he come to work for us, do you think?”

“I will call him, if you like.”

“An interview first. At his convenience. I will send an aerocar for him.”

“He has almost three hundred years’ seniority at the Authority. It’s a lot to give up.”

“Well.” Constantine shrugs. “We will see how badly he needs a hobby.”

Aiah smiles. “I will make the call.”

There is a knock on the doorframe, and Sorya walks in. She wears a silk dress the color of apricots and a belt of linked gold geomantic foci low on her hips, and carries a file folder.

Aiah’s nerves cry an alarm, but Sorya ignores her. She walks past Aiah’s chair with her languid panther stride, drops the folder on Constantine’s desk, then pulls out a chair and sits uninvited.

“The interrogations have gone well,” she says. “I have uncovered a few dozen foreign accounts where these Keremath men, these little losers, have been keeping their millions.”

Constantine gazes at Sorya with a hooded expression, lips turned up in a smile. A cruel little predatory glimmer dwells in his eyes, a twin to the gleam Aiah can see in Sorya’s glance.

“The question is how to retrieve this money,” Sorya says, and draws her legs up into the chair, coiling herself in the soft leather as if it were Constantine’s lap. “We can go through the courts, and, on convincing them that these Kere-math men are guilty of theft, and that the money was corruptly gained, we may in the end retrieve it, or…” She smiles. “Or we may mount an operation. I have their chops. An agent with the right passwords and the right chop can gain the money in a half-shift’s work.” “I will review the files.”

“In my judgment a few of these sums are worth the risk. I have already had my people in the banks here in Caraqui, torn out deposit boxes with crowbars, and found bonds and jewels enough to run the Force of the Interior for a week.”

“Ah.” He deliberately examines a dangling jewel about her neck. Rubies and brilliants, glittering amid a nested serpent design, wink Shieldlight back at him.

“That is very fine,” Constantine remarks, “and new, I believe.”

Sorya gives her lilting laugh. “A souvenir only,” she says. “I will return it to the state when I tire of it. But I think I will wear it to Justice Gathmark’s reception this sleep shift, and let him wonder where he has seen it before, and around whose pretty neck, and wonder as well what has happened to that old crony of his, for whom he did so many favors.”

They laugh at this conceit. A leaden weight sits on Aiah’s heart as she watches these companions at their clever play.

She pushes her chair back and stands.

“I’ll leave you to your work, Minister,” she says.

Sorya laughs again and looks at Aiah from beneath a soft wave of her blonde-streaked hair. “I was sorry to miss the tour last shift,” she says. “I hear good things of your department.”

And I hear nothing good of yours. Aiah burns to say it, but instead says “Thank you,” and makes her way out.

She hears Sorya’s laugh again as she closes the door behind her, and she remembers Constantine’s words: A personal power base in your department may not be a bad thing.

Indeed, she concludes, not a bad thing at all.

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Another plasm house confirmed.

Another tip from the half-worlds proven accurate.

Aiah throws the switch and feels the transphysical world fade, sees the smaller of the two operations rooms come back into focus. The room is a shambles, gear piled everywhere and cables taped to the floor, with only a few plasm stations operational. Even though it’s early first shift, every station is being used by mages on surveillance. Aiah’s own shift ended at 24:00, but she stayed for another hour in order to make notes on a conversation the Handmen were having concerning a hijacking they’d pulled off in Barchab. The Barchabi police would probably be interested to know the names of the Barchabi accomplices.

It takes half an hour for Aiah to write her notes into a form suitable for transcription, next shift, by one of the department’s clerical aides; and then she tucks the file under her arm and makes her way out of the room.

The secure room is down a short hall. She’ll put the file there till work shift, then head to her apartment to take a shower and get some sleep. If, that is, the blazing plasm she’s been feeding into her nerves over the last hours will permit her even to close her eyes…

Aiah nods to the guard and says hello to the clerk, a little goggle-eyed embryo woman, who’s on duty and bent over her desk, keeping the index up to date. Aiah gives her the file number so that she can log it in. Then she steps to the door of the secure room itself, puts her hand on the cool bronze bar, and prepares to punch the day’s code into the twelve-key pad. No, the next day’s code, because it’s after change of shift…

She looks up and feels her heart turn over. Constantine is in the secure room, sitting at a metal desk, head bent as he copies something from a file. There is a cold light in his lowered eyes, and his upper lip is curled, as if in distaste for the task he has set himself.

Constantine, normally so aware of his surroundings, hasn’t even glanced up at her approach.

She steps silently back from the barred door and puts the file on the desk of the clerk. “I don’t want to disturb the minister,” she says. “Could you file this for me after he leaves?”

The big eyes lift to hers. “Certainly.”

Aiah walks away. / don’t want to know when it happens, she had told Constantine. / don’t want to know who, or when, or why it is being done.

He is choosing Taikoen’s victims, Aiah knows. Going through the files to find the most deserving of the Handmen. She probably won’t know which.

Until Taikoen is done with each, when Aiah will tell the clerk to retire his file.

Aiah, telepresent, watches the old man snore. He lives in a fashionable district, in an expensive apartment building that presents to its canal a long, sinuous, reflective ribbon of black glass. The ownership of the building seems obscure, and is being looked into. The man himself seems untroubled by the ambiguity. From the corner, an icon of the prophet Dalavos regards this domestic scene with approval. A little glittering jewel of drool hangs in the corner of his mouth as he sleeps, next to his third wife, beneath an expensive Sycar comforter.

It is 02:00, early first shift, and the amnesty on plasm thieves expired two hours earlier, at 24:00. The opalescent Shield is bright overhead, undimmed by cloud, but most of the world is in bed, and few see the purposeful powerboats or the shrouded military convoys leaving the Palace district. The old man has polarized his windows, and his room is dark.

The man in the bed is Great-Uncle Rathmen, the head of Caraqui’s Silver Hand, and he is 111 years old, a thin, precise man fond of handmade boots and sentimental tokaph music. Like Costantine, he has kept aging at bay with regular plasm-rejuvenation treatments. Except that his are illegal, performed with bootleg plasm; one of Aiah’s observers even saw one of the procedures being performed out of an illegal plasm tap in the man’s apartment. The tap appeared to have been in place for a long time, and may have been designed into the building when it was built.

To live longer than a century is unusual in a Handman. It speaks less of his skill than of how comfortably the Silver Hand lives in Caraqui, that none of his underlings has seen any profit in removing him.

He has taken precautions, however: there is a crosshatch-ing of bronze mesh in the glass windows, and other bronze grids in the wall paneling, beneath the floor tile, and hidden behind the ceiling. But he’s remodeled since he moved in, and some of the bronze mesh wasn’t properly reinstalled: one of Aiah’s surveillance teams found a way to sneak a sourceline in. And so Aiah, sensorium configured so as to see in the dark, plays plasm angel and hovers over Rathmen’s bed.

Back in the Palace’s big ops room, she feels her assistant touch her arm. She lets her telepresent sensations fade, nods, and hears a voice in her ear. “The soldiers are in the building.” She nods her comprehension.

Aiah returns her awareness to her anima, and the command center fades from her perceptions.

In a few minutes there’s a crash as the door goes down—with martial law there’s no particular reason to knock—and Great-Uncle Rathmen comes awake with a start. To him it must mean the crash he’s waited for the last eighty years, the sound that marks his assassination and the end of his reign.

“Police!” the soldiers shout. “Police!”

But it’s what Great-Uncle’s assassins would say, whether they were police or not. Looking many decades less than a hundred years old, he throws back the Sycar comforter and vaults over his drowsy wife to the closet at the other side of the bed. There he slides open the door and fumbles for a panel built into the back of the wall.

Tension jolts through Aiah at the sight. She hadn’t known the panel was there, nor what is on the other side of it. She’d expected him to jump for the plasm circuit set into the wall near his desk.

Number three wife is awake. “What should I do?” she screams. “What should I do?”

“Call Gemming!” Rathmen says, but all his wife does is shriek her question over and over.

Call Gemming, Aiah writes automatically, scrawling blindly in loopy handwriting on a pad balanced on her chair arm. Something else for the files. But her nerves are screaming, and she has no confidence that the writing, at the end of the episode, will even be coherent.

At least as agitated as Aiah, Great-Uncle Rathmen is having a hard time with his secret panel. His hands are shaking so hard that he can’t seem to work the mechanism. The soldiers are stomping down the hall, crying “Police!” The beams of their torches jitter into the room.

Rathmen finally tears away the panel by main strength. He reaches inside, and Aiah sees, with her plasm-enhanced vision, the tube of a weapon propped in the interior.

Aiah’s act is instinctual, like a parent swatting from her child’s hands the bottle of rat poison. She forms an ectoplas-mic hand faster than thought and slaps Great-Uncle Rathmen with it, knocking him away from the closet. There’s a strange unreality to it all—if she’d hit him with a real hand there would be feedback, her hand would sting and register the impact, but the hastily formed plasm hand isn’t configured to register sense impressions, and when Aiah sees Great-Uncle Rathmen flying across the room it seems as unreal as an image in a chromoplay.

With more deliberation, Aiah plants the insubstantial hand on his chest and pins him to the ground like an insect until the soldiers, a half-second later, storm into the room—weaponed, in full battle armor, faceplates lowered to guard against explosion or plasm blast. They are followed by a cameraman with a huge spotlight, providing a feed to the ops center. At this intimidating sight the third wife screams and cowers.

The officer flicks on the lights and everyone blinks. The woman on the bed even stops screaming. Aiah stifles a giggle—she’s the only one who sees how silly everyone looks. The captain marches up to Great-Uncle Rathmen, compares him with a chromograph he’s carrying in his file, and informs the Great-Uncle he’s under arrest.

Aiah dissolves her ectomorphic hand and the officer handcuffs his prisoner. The old Handman accepts this stolidly—reassured, apparently, that he won’t be assassinated, at least not yet.

Aiah concentrates on expanding her anima, configuring it into a recognizable human shape. The last time she did this, back in Jaspeer, she failed to provide the anima any clothing and delighted the witnesses more than she’d intended, but in this case she mentally sculpts a more abstract image—female-shaped, yes, but without any detail, like a weathered statue, or a smooth metal abstract. She wills the image to fluoresce, and the soldiers blink again as the room is flooded with golden light. Aiah looks at her reflection in the mirrored closet doors—a glorious figure of shimmering gold—and spares a few seconds to admire her handiwork.

Some of the soldiers shift nervously, take a firmer grip on their weapons. They can’t be sure whether this apparation is friendly or otherwise.

“Can you hear me?” Aiah says, and some of the soldiers clap hands over ears. She tries to speak more softly, and raises a fluorescent hand to point into the closet.

“There is a weapon in there. He was trying to get to it when I prevented him.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the officer says.

She allows her image to fade as the officer peers cautiously into the closet. He reaches in with a gloved hand and pulls out the weapon, a short metal barrel with a functional black plastic grip and a metal stock telescoped to its shortest configuration. There’s a wire that runs from the gun into the hidden closet compartment.

“Shotgun,” the captain says. “Semiautomatic. Wired to a plasm circuit. I’m wearing insulated gloves, otherwise I’d be getting a dose of the goods right now.” He holds it up. “Felk, get a picture of this. And I’ll need an evidence bag.”

The weapon is a nasty one, enabling Great-Uncle Rathmen to smite his enemies with shot and plasm at once. It’s at least a dozen ways illegal, and mere possession of such a thing is enough to guarantee Rathmen a stretch in prison.

Triumph burns in Aiah’s mind. Her anima follows the soldiers as they seal the rooms, then march their prisoners to their waiting boats. Then Aiah thumbs off her t-grip, and the distant quay fades from her mind, is replaced by the busy ops center.

’With some help from Geymard’s mercenaries, the big ops room was finished by the deadline. Though some of the flooring isn’t yet in place, plasm and electric connections still snake over the floor, and the room smells strongly of paint, the place is at least functional. Banks of monitors glow down on the proceedings, and mages sway in their chairs, their eyes closed as they concentrate on telepresent sensations.

She looks down at the form propped on her chair arm, checks the wall clock, and logs the time she finished her part of the operation.

“Very nicely done, Miss Aiah.” Constantine’s voice rumbles in her ear. She gives a start, then turns to see him standing behind her chair.

“Thank you, Minister,” she says. She stands, stretches. Plasm’s fierce glow fires her cramped muscles.

Constantine’s eyes flicker along the rows of video monitors, pausing at each for a brief moment, then going on to the next. There is a pleased, ruthless little smile on his face.

“Your operations are going well. A few of your teams have got lost in crowded tenements, but your telepresent mages seem to have put them all back on the right track.”

“Colonel Geymard’s staff were a great help.”

“They will need the practice. Most of their operations for the foreseeable future consist of arrests. I have persuaded the government to import two more battalions of military police.” He folds his arms, looks at her seriously. “How much thought have you given to what happens to your prisoners after their arrest?

She looks at him. “Trial, conviction, imprisonment. But that isn’t my department’s problem, is it? We just gather evidence, make arrests, present the evidence to the prosecutors.”

“Yes, but interrogations of these people would be invaluable, both to your department and to others. The information could lead to many further arrests.”

“True.” She hadn’t considered interrogations, in part because her informers’ information has been so good, in part because she doubted the Handmen would talk, and more conclusively because she hadn’t the time or personnel.

“We can conduct interrogations, of course,” she says. “We have their dossiers, we have a good idea what questions to ask.”

“But you don’t have trained interrogation specialists. Other departments do.” “The police, you mean?”

“Yes, after their fashion…” He nods patiently. “Amateurish, and reluctant to deal with Handmen at all. One could have Colonel Geymard’s people do it, but they don’t know which questions to ask, and they’re not familiar with local conditions in any case.” As he gazes down at her his expression hardens, grows commanding. “It was the Force of the Interior, of course, that I meant.”

Distaste curls Aiah’s lip. “Sorya’s political police.”

“Yes.” He cocks his head and considers, weighing his thoughts. “I wish them to no longer be political police—I plan that soon there will be no more political prisoners, not once the remaining Keremaths and collaborators are dealt with. I wish the F.I. to become merely national police, with a mandate to deal with espionage and crimes against the state. And as the Silver Hand is the greatest organized force that threatens us at present, I wish to direct some of Sorya’s specialists against them.”

A protest bursts from Aiah’s lips. “There was torture in the Specials’ prisons,” she says. “Those people were—”

A fierce light burns in Constantine’s eyes. “The torturers are gone,” he says firmly. “Or in prison themselves. Torture is a pointless and stupid exercise—there are more sanitary methods, and far more effective.”

“Plasm scans.” Grimly.

“Everyone in your department has already had one. You have had one yourself, when I first met you. Are they so inhumane?”

Aiah struggles to form another protest. She couldn’t remember her own scan—Constantine had gone into her head on a ruthless probe of plasm in order to discover if she was a police informer, but if he had found anything else he had kept it to himself.

“I want it understood,” Aiah says, “that civilized methods will be observed.”

“Of course. There is no conceivable reason to behave otherwise.” Warmth kindles in his eyes as he looks at her. “This concern does you credit.”

She looks away. “I still don’t like it.”

“I will arrange the protocols with Sorya’s office, so they will have access to the prisoners and you will have copies of all the interrogations.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Some of Aiah’s people raise a cheer: someone has made a particularly stylish arrest. Constantine looks up at the monitors. “Arrests in future may not be so peaceful, not once surprise is lost,” he says, and turns to Aiah again.

The monitors’ reflection kindles a cold flickering in his eyes. “The government passed a new decree last shift, making it a capital crime to belong to a criminal organization.”

Aiah’s heart gives a lurch. She looks at Constantine in surprise. “Which means what? Some of these people will be executed?”

Constantine makes a dismissive, growling sound. “All of them, if I have anything to say about it. Great-Uncle Rathmen particularly—he was one of the first in my office with his bribes, only a few days after the coup. Smiled, brought me a new jacket of expensive goatskin lined with silk and, for all I know, a fortune in jewels in the pockets… offered me the locations of a couple of his plasm houses under the amnesty program, said it was an oversight. I turned down the jacket, but sent ministry crews to wire the plasm into the circuit—didn’t keep it for myself, as he probably expected.” He straightens, lips curling in distaste. “A plausible, bloody-handed bastard. It never occurred to him that I wouldn’t accept his payoffs. He had probably never met a civil servant who wasn’t on the take.”

Aiah turns to the monitors, sees the jumpy camera feed, half-dressed sleepy-eyed handcuffed men, pompadours hanging in their eyes, being marched onto trucks or into boats.

All condemned, she thinks. She shivers at the thought that she is watching men who soon will die.

“I wish there was another way,” she says.

“Mercy is a privilege of the powerful,” Constantine says. “Our power is uncertain, and theirs is great, and we cannot afford to show them any lenience. If our situation were improved, if we were secure in our power, perhaps then a degree of forbearance would be possible.” He shakes his head. “Besides, the only way to defeat the Handmen is to enlist the population, and these executions are the only way to show the people that the Hand is vulnerable now.” A cold laugh rumbles from his throat. “And for what it’s worth, each of the Handmen will have his fair trial—all your evidence will be considered by the military courts in the next week, and then sentences carried out.”

“They are all guilty,” Aiah says. “We know that.” And therefore will all die, because of her. After Sorya’s specialists rummage through their brains for useful information.

He raises a hand to touch her shoulder. She wants comfort, wants to rest her cheek against his rough knuckles, but is too conscious of the presence of the people surrounding them.

“Save sympathy for their victims,” he says, voice low in her ear.

“I will.” She looks at the video images again, looks for familiar images—the Slug, the Ferret. The images are all those of strangers. Strangers soon to die.

A cold wind seems to blow through her bones. She turns to Constantine again.

“These Handmen,” she says, “they’re like your family, aren’t they? You were raised with people like this. And…” Her tongue stumbles on the words. “You destroyed them.”

Constantine’s face is a mask. The reversed video images of condemned men float through his eyes.

“My family deserved what happened to them,” he says, “and so, Miss Aiah, do these.”

With that, he turns and prowls away.

Somewhere, audio feed from one of her teams, there comes the sound of cheering.

“Well,” Ethemark says, “the suspect just exploded. He was under arrest; our soldiers had him handcuffed and were marching him out of the room—and then…” His mouth twists with distaste. “We had a camera on him at the time. You can watch the video, if you like, but unless you want to see your lunch again I wouldn’t recommend it.”

It is an inquiry on the PED’s only complete disaster: suspect dead while under arrest, the dead man’s wife and children witnesses to everything, everyone involved under suspension pending the outcome of the investigation.

Aiah looks down the table at the three members of the commission she’d appointed when the incident occurred. “The plasm angels saw nothing?”

“Three mages were telepresent in the room,” says Kelban, one of her team supervisors. “They maintain they had configured their sensoriums so as to be aware of plasm, and they saw nothing… not till after it was over.”

“They saw something then,” Ethemark says. “They were all aware of a powerful… presence. It hovered over the body for a moment, then disappeared. No one saw a source-line. And they all say…” He hesitates. “They were all terrified. Not just the mages, but the soldiers, too. The soldiers couldn’t even see it, whatever it was, but they could somehow feel it, and it spooked them.”

“If you ask me,” Kelban says, “a man exploding right in front of them is enough to scare any number of soldiers.”

Aiah’s mouth goes dry. Taikoen, she thinks, or another creature like him. Constantine had put him in the Handman’s body, and when the soldiers came, Taikoen had seen no point in staying.

“Do we have any conclusions?” she ventures.

“I think it’s down to the inexperience of our personnel,” says Kelban. “They got careless, or overexcited, and weren’t paying proper attention. The suspect was killed by some enemy, or by other Handmen who were afraid he would turn informer.”

“I have another theory,” Ethemark ventures, “though I admit it’s very tenuous.”

Aiah looks at him warily. She must protect Constantine, she thinks, and discourage even the notion of a hanged man.

“Go on,” she says.

“It may be some kind of time bomb,” Ethemark says, to Aiah’s relief. “A plasm bomb planted inside him, with the instruction to kill him if he were ever arrested.”

“That kind of time bomb would be very difficult,” Kelban says. “And time bombs have a temporal limit—you can’t confine plasm in a human body for more than a few hours. And who would have done such a thing… to him? And why? He was only a cousin.”

“He might have done it to himself,” Ethemark says. “We know he had access to plasm. And some Handmen are simply crazy.”

“Well,” Aiah says, “if the Silver Hand possesses a mage capable of such a difficult piece of work, then we shall discover it soon enough. The next time…”

Kelban finishes her sentence. “The next time one of our suspects blows up.”

And then he laughs and shakes his head.

Aiah does not find herself amused. She has a suspicion that more than one Handman is going to die this way.

“Finish your report,” Aiah says, “and have it on my desk tomorrow.”

A week later, the first sheaf of typed interrogation transcripts arrives on Aiah’s desk. An eerie sensation creeps up her spine as she reads them.

All of them are in the first person. There are no questions included, as if the Handmen were dictating lengthy confessions rather than responding to interrogators. The typed pages are all in the same format.

My name is such-and-such… On such-and-such a date I committed the following crime… This was at the instigation of so-and-so, and assisting me were the following accomplices… I am aware of plasm houses at the following locations…

The last information, she decides, she can check. She does, and her mages discover it is all perfectly accurate.

The transcripts keep arriving, a new bundle every few days.

Military courts move briskly through the long line of cases.

Eventually soldiers draw lots, and the losers are assigned to the firing squads.