Crystal Heat

6

Holoas swirled under the velvet black of the Node shell in its night phase, reflected in the wet pavements and the glass of the show windows. Lost in the mix of crew off the visiting ships, labor from the factories, off-duty guards, merchants, gamblers, thieves, smugglers, gun runners, druggies and dniggers, Cousins and non-Cousins of every shape, color and attribute, some raucous, some musical, some silent, Shadith drifted along the Marrata Circle looking for the places she and her Hired Man had visited the one night she’d spent here last year. She’d thought about seeing whether he was still around, but decided against it. He was altogether too observant and no doubt had rather close ties to OverSec. If she were just playing, she wouldn’t care, but working this double-trace was complicated enough without that sort of close observation.

Music drifted into the street when doors swung open, sliding into her blood, changing the way she walked, the set of her head, the swing of her shoulders. She rethembered the hushed elegance of the Hegger transfer station and laughed aloud, reveling in the difference.

She knew where she’d start her trace and how she was going to do it. It was music. It was always music. She laughed aloud. “The key to the universe,” she sang. “Shadow’s songs.”

In the next three hours she went in and out of the smaller clubs, listening to the music, looking at the custom, sampling what was sold there, moving on again when the mix wasn’t quite right, zigging from side to side around the Circle, sliding into all the dark holes where the crews blew their pay.

Shadith wriggled to a table the size of a washcloth, pushed up against the wall and continually threatened by the swing gate as the serving girls coming from a back room pushed past her, their trays loaded with everything from pelar pipes to jugs of obat raw enough that a sip would pickle the lining of the drinker’s throat. Just the smell was enough to pucker her mouth.

The gloom was sporadically and inadequately lit by drifting spheres of psuedo-foxfire. Faces moved in and out of darkness as they were touched by the cold green light. Mostly they were the usual Cousinly variety, though a group of Lorrunertoerkans hunched over a table near the door, the deep creases in their faces puddling shadow as if they were filled with ink, and a few male Caan eyes flashed to silver then dark as the foxfire drifted near then away.

The stage was empty at the moment; the players finished a set as she came in and moved into the back where no doubt they were communing with their souls via whatever substance they found handy. They were the group she remembered.

It was toward the end of her Night Out when she was feeling no pain and an urge to sing. Though she knew well enough what working musicians thought of pushy amateurs in the grip of wish fulfillment, she teased them into letting her join them, and the snatches of memory that were all she retained the next morning weren’t that embarrassing-at least not the ones that dealt with her singing… though other images… the pile near night’s end… sari

The table beeped to remind her she hadn’t ordered the rent drink yet. She ran through the menu, chose a white syntha wine that shouldn’t be too poisonous and started to chuck a handful of Marratorium tokens in the slot.

“Uh! What…” She looked up into a man’s grinning face. The swinging door had shoved him against her, but he hadn’t resisted it all that much and he didn’t move away when the server dashed past and let the door whoosh shut.

“Whyn’t you let me buy that, chichi? Then you won’t have to look anymore, will you?”

“Zaz off, grot. If I was looking and I’m not, it wouldn’t be for you.”

He ruffled her short curly mop with a big hand, leaned down till she was nearly choking from the haze of obat thick as smog around his mouth. “Your loss, hunbun,” he said. “You sure?” His voice was amiable and lazy as the yawn of a well-fed tiger in a patch of summer sun.

“Yeah, genman, just want to hear the music.” He shrugged and wandered off.

She waved at the stink he left behind, shifted in her chair as sounds of movement on the stage trickled through the noise.

Flute in one hand, the other shading his eyes, a tall thin man with a bald head and skin that glistened like well-rubbed mahogany ambled along the edge of the stage peering into the crowd. Chali, she thought.

He came round to her side of the stage, grinned, dropped to a squat. “‘E Shadow. Bisa said she saw you come in.”

“Yoh, ’s me. Since I was here a while, thought I’d come give you a listen.”

“We using some of the stuff from last time.” He grinned, broad square teeth flashing white against the dark brown of his lips. “Any more you want to gift us with?”

“Don’t want much, do you?” She chuckled and got to her feet, wriggled past the table. A single step took her to the stage and she held up her hands. “Give me a lift.”

She sang with them several times that night, Chali, Bisa, Herm, and The Max. Flute, viola, keyboard, and bass. At first her hands itched for her harp, then she noticed a change in her singing. She was beginning to develop echoes in the audience, almost weaving dreams again as she had when Kikun was there to give them form. It wasn’t quite right, not yet, but it was coming and it was real, the ache in her head told her that.

She ended the night with just Chali playing and the song she’d written and sung on Ambela not so long ago. “I am fathoms deep,” she sang, and felt those listening come into the circle of her arms, felt them seeing she didn’t know what except it was a dark and melancholy vision as hers had been when she wrote the words.

I am fathoms deep

In love with dark

I fill my mouth with night

And drink the absence

Of the light

Dense and stark

I think

I will not endure

The pure white silence

Of the day

I will sleep the bright away And rise

With the moon

To reprise

The melodies of night.

Stark black and white, her sisters danced for her, the veils they wore swirling about their angular forms. Their eyes were wide and dark with sorrow and farewell, as if they knew they would not come again for her, no matter how strong her gift might grow. They would be wholly dead at last. Dead as Shayalin, burnt to a cinder eons ago, long before her second life in the Diadem and her third life in this body. Dead and gone.

When she finished, the room was silent for several minutes, then the hum of speech rose again and the rapid tinkle of the drink orders and the clunk of the Market tokens in the slots.

She watched the misty outlines of Naya, Zayalla, Annethi, Itsaya, Tallitt, and Sullan fade and vanish. Even with drugs and dreams she couldn’t call them back; the knowledge chilled her to the marrow of her bones, never again, never never never again.

She let Chali and Bisa lead her away. In a little while she was going to tease from them all they knew about the Kliu while she asked them to help find Adelaar’s protegee. In a little while. When she could get her head working again.