Context Page 17

  But Ro, brought up on Norse legends, already knew the tale, except there the Trickster was Loki. And eating contests were a fantasy of starving folk, like 1930s Depression-struck America.

  ‘I am the Trickster, and I dance upon the boundary between Chaos and Order, the Dark and the Light.’ The woman’s whisper, in counterpoint to the Singer’s octave-wide range of chants, became hypnotic. ‘For the Holy People know the Four Houses: Dark Wave to the north, Gravity to the south, Strong Nuclear to the east and Electroweak to the west. And I move among them...’

  Luís had said that ceremonies continued to evolve: he had not mentioned they included unified matrix theory, the Fourfold Way.

  Ro watched him now: face bronze, then gold, in the flickering firelight.

  You’re the one.

  They hadn’t even kissed, but she was sure.

  Around them, the chanting, the flames and the dancing shadows: but she was aware only of Luís, and the tangible bond coalescing between them.

  ‘And the locusts broke through the sky’s blue shell, into the world above where the Yellow Grasshopper People lived

  Different races, ascending through stratified worlds until finally, the dine’ é, the People, were born of First Man and First Woman.

  Hours passed.

  Or centuries. Stars tumbled, nova heat burned, and pulsating darkness took hold.

  Sharp scent of mesquite.

  I’m having a vision.

  But that was a metathought, soon discarded.

  The world faded.

  A chesspiece upon an infinite board. A solitary king—

  The piece. Why was it important?

  Anne-Louise. It floated, above her body.

  Board shrinking, rotating. It was eight-squared now, in normal planar dimensions, and the piece occupied the seventh rank upon the fifth file. The realization came to her: it was not the piece, but its position which held import.

  Keep that thought...

  Fighting to hold the vision: but that was a bagatelle, a surface illusion, before the deeper dream which was to come.

  No—

  But her strength was insufficient to hold the chessboard or reality—the smoke-filled hogan—in her mind.

  And then it was upon her.

  Adrift in a golden sea.

  The universe she had always dreamed of.

  Golden amber, and the floating stars: fractal, black. Spongiform absences of light.

  Her birthplace.

  And the drifting crimson streamers, like nebulae, of vast dimensions. Where place and time vary according to scale, not velocity.

  Where logic was complete, and all that was true could be deduced.

  Home.

  Where self-reflexive recursion, and infinite paradox, might be resolved.

  It called, it called, to the aching void inside her.

  Mu-space.

  Infinite and infinitely complex, it sang.

  It beckoned.

  Home.

  For three nights, they performed the Sing, and Ro’s spirit soared free.

  At the third night’s end, they carried her outside, and laid her down on the supportive ground. Cold air washed over her, as she stared up into the still-dark sky where silver stars shone. Only a touch of lime in the eastern skies bespoke the coming dawn.

  ‘You saw deeply.’ One of the men, his voice serious.

  ‘That I did.’ She looked up at him without smiling.

  He nodded, and walked away.

  Luís reached out his hand—the touch of his smooth skin was like fire: a burst of pleasure, intense and prolonged—and helped her to stand.

  Breakfast—eggs and beans cooked over a real fire—tasted heavenly. They sat cross-legged on the reddish sand, eating in easy silence. Behind them, the horses, saddled up, patiently waited.

  She watched him: the controlled gestures, the centred calm.

  Some fine day, I’ll make you lose control.

  Inwardly smiling, she poured him coffee from the self-heating chemoflask.

  Afterwards, mounted, they took Quarrel and Bolt to the sandstone mesa’s edge and looked down upon the wide, flat desert below. DistribOne was a tiny distant cluster.

  Leaning against her saddle’s pommel, Ro said: ‘The bilagáana world.’ She used the Navajo term for Anglos, not knowing whether it was value-neutral or derogatory.

  ‘And mine.’

  There was a Teutonic exactness to his speech. Ro assumed he meant it was one of the cultural worlds in which he lived.

  Luís slid down from his saddle. Reins in hand, he walked—lean and athletic, his every movement, magnet-like, drawing Ro’s gaze—to the mesa’s edge. The sheer drop seemed not to bother him.

  From his saddlepack, Luís drew a silver/turquoise bracelet, and fastened it round his wrist. Infostrand: like Ro, he had been offline for three days.

  He tapped a silver conch on the bracelet, stared intensely—a lased-in display, invisible to Ro—and nodded once as he tapped the bracelet off.

  ‘Bad news?’ asked Ro.

  Luís looked at her with dark unreadable eyes.

  ‘Not for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Ro swung her leg back and dropped from the saddle. ‘What do you mean?’

  She walked up to him.

  God, I want you.

  Standing centimetres apart. Proximity: she was aware only of him, of his strength and presence and sheer desirability.

  ‘I’m going to Tehran,’ he said. ‘That message confirmed what the Sing told me.’

  For a moment, Ro could only stare.

  Then, ‘What’s in Tehran?’

  But, spirit sinking, she knew the answer before he spoke:

  ‘The stars.’

  <>

  ~ * ~

  23

  NULAPEIRON AD 3419

  They ended their holiday a day early.

  Some homecoming.

  It hung there, in a man-shaped basket floating vertically in the gloom: blackened, roasted flesh. Hanging above the piazzetta’s black and white squares; once a human being, now flensed and burned, with the cooked-meat stench pervading the still air.

  Behind Tom, Mivkin turned away, retching. Jasirah was stumbling back into the tunnel from which they had come.

  Abomination.

  There were others, floating in two rows. Sixteen black/red forms, some with viscerae spilled forth and burst, glistening like liquid pain where pale beams of light filtered through from the larger piazza. And then one of them moved and Tom, too, dropped to his knees and vomited clear bile.

  Tom cast aside his cloak, stared upwards into the gloom.

  ‘What are you—?’ Quilvox stopped.

  But it was Ryban, the quiet sneaky one, who surprised Tom. From within his broad sash, he brought out a long narrow blade, and proffered it hilt first.

  ‘I’d be honoured, my Lord.’ His voice was a low whisper, but it charged the air.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Looking at you now’—with an ironic half-smile—‘I recognize you, at last.’

  ‘My thanks.’

  Tom took the stiletto, slid it inside his tunic, and ran lightly to the nearest wall and jumped, reaching up to grab. There were shallow grooves cut into the polished rock, and he used them, moving quickly. Reaching the ceiling, he stepped out onto a glowcluster—it bobbed once, beneath his weight -then vaulted onto the first floating lev-cage.

  Its occupant was truly dead, teeth bared in a death rictus where the face was burned away. Denatured white slime nestled in the cooked eye sockets.

  Tom leaped to the next cage.

  No life inside here, either. But this one had torn the flesh from his fingers against the wire-thin bars, scraped down to the gleaming bone, before death claimed him. Tom could not imagine pain so great that he would rip himself apart in the effort to escape.

  And then the next.

  Seventeen cages in all. Tom remembered the schachmati-playing merchant, and the living men who had been his game p
ieces, facing the noble Viscount Trevalkin. And in the piazza, instead of holiday atmosphere, the grim mood of spectators who had sensed that something beyond their ordinary experience was about to happen.

  ‘... traitor,’ the pedlar had told Tom, ‘but there’s no need to draw things out. . .’

  If he had stayed, could he have prevented this?

  Another twitch of movement, from the same cage as before.

  There were glittering flecks in charcoal-encrusted flesh which had bubbled as it roasted. Perched atop the cage and peering down inside, Tom wondered whether the torturers had used femtocytic healing insertions to keep their victims alive longer than any human should endure.

  ‘…er…’

  Tried to speak, but its tongue had been slit in two, and half of it was blackened.

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  Tom held on to the cage, steadying himself. Inside, the roasted remnant moved, and groaned.

  ‘... er... ire…’

  There was only one thing Tom could do for the man.

  ‘... ware ... erk-ire…’

  Braced with his feet, reached inside his tunic.

  ‘…ess…’ Acknowledging Tom’s intent.

  Blade, shining where it caught the light.

  ‘...ah...’

  Entered, and did its work.

  No-one talked to him as they returned through deserted tunnels to the Bronlah Hong.

  While the others went to the communal chambers, looking for company, Tom went alone to his sleeping alcove, pulled the drape across, and lay down on his pallet, knowing there would be little sleep tonight.

  He remained unmoving, aware of the hard mattress beneath his back, eyes open and controlling his breathing, while the long hours passed.

  But sometimes the curtain which separates dreams, thoughts and passions tears a little, rips just enough, and at some point in the grey pre-dawn hours, slipping among those reality-states which are neither consciousness nor sleep, a true memory visited him.

  He is fourteen SY old, sitting alone in a quiet tunnel near the marketplace, closing his eyes and holding the stallion talisman, remembering the day of its creation, his poetry-in-progress floating still above his holopad.

  And a woman’s voice says: ‘Don’t get up on my account.’

  Her chin is elegant, her complexion olive and flawless, dark hair hidden beneath her burgundy cloak’s hood.

  ‘May I?’ And then she is holding the silver talisman. ‘Quite beautiful.’

  ‘It—it’s a stallion. A mythical beast.’

  He can’t believe he is talking to this woman.

  ‘And this poetry?’

  ‘Mine. I write—’

  ‘Competently.’ The display rotates at her gesture, though it is access-keyed only to him. ‘A nice sense of space, for someone who has never seen the sky.’

  Shortly afterwards, she is inserting a small black ovoid capsule inside the stallion talisman, which has somehow split in half for her. She shows him how to seal it shut, how to open it again with a gesture.

  Then, grimacing: ‘If only I had more—well, I don’t.’ Glancing along the corridor. ‘Life is a mortal pilgrimage, my friend.’

  She places the talisman in Tom’s grasp, clasps her own hand over his fist.

  ‘When the dark fire falls, seek salvation where you—’

  But then she is standing.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ he says.

  Fingertips brush his cheek.

  ‘Good luck.’

  And then she breaks into a silent run, is gone.

  Tom stares into grey twilit shadows, and swallows once, remembering.

  The next morning, in the crowded marketplace, a sudden-hush descends, and he sees her being led to the round chamber’s centre, manacled, head bowed in defeat, surrounded by armed militiamen.

  Then an officer raises his baton, and the ceiling-disk rotates, and a stairway to the stratum above spirals downwards and slats click into place.

  And this is her moment.

  She dabs at her eyes, as though the manacle bar weighs nothing, and flicks something aside. And when she looks back at her captors, everyone can see that her eyes are pure obsidian, black upon black with no surrounding whites, and it is Father who whispers the shocked recognition, a memory of ancient tales: ‘A Pilot!’

  In those eyes, a golden glimmer.

  And Tom looks away, before a blinding flash fills the marketplace and people fall screaming, clutching at their eyes.

  Her cape flies at a trooper, then she whirls into action, ducking low, leaping high, kicking and striking, thrusting troopers into each other’s line of fire, before breaking free and sprinting for the stairs.

  Tom’s two fists are clenched as he screams silently for her to run.

  Her foot lands on the fifth rung, flying upwards fast, and it looks as though she’s reaching freedom but then the spitting, lancing beams impale her, and it is a broken, lifeless body which topples to the flagstones, and lies twisted and angular, forever still.

  Sweat coated his body.

  It was the time he met a legend, and knew that she was real. It was the moment that changed his life. But more: she had given him a warning, fifteen Standard Years before, which he had not recognized until this second.

  For the roast-meat stench of her half-burned face brought back a more recent waking memory, of the poor wretch whose suffering he had ended with a borrowed blade today, and the half-formed words of warning which the dying man had tried to utter.

  ‘...ware...erk-ire…’

  And perhaps Tom did sleep then, and maybe dream, but when he awoke it was with a vision fading before his eyes, of eerie red-clad children who moved in silent synchrony beside an icy lake, of the edelace which had attacked one of their number, and the old man who had used his cane upon it. A cane from whose point black flames had sprouted. As black as those within the spacetime maelstrom which had whirled and roared inside the Seer’s chamber, and bloodily snuffed out his life.

  Dark fire.

  There was an enemy, whose nature or purpose Tom could not know, but of whose existence he was suddenly certain. And for sure, he knew one of its names.

  Dark Fire.

  ~ * ~

  24

  NULAPEIRON AD 3419

  An icy atmosphere had settled in the merchanalysis hall, where dim glowglobes slowly orbited in the dusty gloom. Master Grenshin sat hunched before his narrow desk.

  ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ he said finally. ‘I’d hoped...’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘An you need references, Gazhe—if that’s your name—’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘I’ll provide the references anyway. Call by later.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. The others... I think they’re all renewing, though I’m not sure.’

  ‘I know. They think things might be safer elsewhere.’ Shaking his head: ‘Dark times, my young friend.’

  ‘I fear so.’ Tom stood, pulled his new dark-green travelling cloak around himself. ‘Sir? Do you know anything of a certain schachmati game which took place while we were on holiday?’

  Master Grenshin tugged at his skullcap, adjusting it. ‘You mean Viscount Trevalkin. Against Trader Vulan.’ Then, with ancient weariness veiling his eyes: ‘Vulan lost.’

  ‘And so did his vassals.’

  ‘A sword?’ Horush stared at Tom. ‘What kind of sword?’ Horush looked as bright as ever, taking his recovery for granted. He remembered nothing of his conversation with Tom in the med chamber, yet somehow knew that Tom had been to visit during the long hours in the autodoc.

  ‘What kinds have you got?’

  ‘The kind you slice ‘em with’—a grin crossed Horush’s brown-skinned narrow face—‘and the kind you use to stick ‘em.’