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  ‘To use the facility, and infiltrate A’Dekal’s group.’

  “This was earlier ...Before you recruited me into LudusVitae.’

  ‘Before you killed General d’Ovraison’s brother?’

  ‘What?’ Sudden rage, his words bouncing back from the glassine walls. Logically, she had always known about the Oracle; yet her raw words now—answering back, in this place, after what she had done—flayed like a deadly insult. ‘You dare?’

  All his anger and frustration expanded, ballooned, and blood-rush pounded in his ears.

  ‘... dare to help you, Tom, with no strings att—’

  ‘Silence.’

  And Elva was rigid then, locked into her attention stance; her contained fury seemed to swell and coruscate around her. Her jaw muscles flexed with tension.

  But perhaps it was not just Elva who had gone too far.

  ‘By the fourteenth article,’ she said stiffly, ‘of the Artifex Conjunctonis, I formally request allegiance-transfer—‘

  ‘No.’

  ‘—to General d’Ovraison, who has already indicated his willingness to recruit me into the new Academy. Failing that -’

  ‘Don’t push me, Elva.’

  ‘—to Darinia Demesne’s interim governing—’

  ‘Request denied.’ Tom reined in his anger.

  His words seemed to hang in the charged air between them.

  Then she gave a small formal bow in salute. ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  Elva turned on her heel, and marched towards her chamber, as though her sweat-soaked training clothes were full military uniform.

  Damn you, Elva. Why did you have to force the issue?

  For some words, once spoken, can never be retracted.

  And behind it all lay an old, old knowledge: that he was Elva’s liege Lord, a position he had seen abused too many times to count.

  Frost-sparkle. Evaporation.

  There was a message-chime, which Tom accepted. Now, in the archway, where the doorshimmer had stood, waited Nirilya and the red-haired medic, Xyenquil.

  A wave of tension washed through the chamber.

  ‘Come in.’

  Tom perched on a lev-stool, and directed the visitors to a couch. Nirilya gathered her black robe and sat; then Xyenquil, fidgeting with his tunic’s silver clasp, took his place beside her.

  Elva entered, stood at the chamber’s rear with her arms folded, leaning against the glassine wall.

  Xyenquil cleared his throat. ‘Nirilya’s reported some fever-like symptoms in yourself, sir. And, ah, we’ve completed our post-op analyses.’

  By the wall, Elva unfolded her arms, re-crossed them.

  Holding out an infocrystal, Xyenquil gestured to the chamber’s systems, and a holo grew into being:

  Splayed shapes, like alien creatures torn inside out: bright beaded lines forming streamers, spirals, twisted glowing knots.

  Xyenquil rotated the image—a shining jagged landscape—then froze it.

  ‘These are the result of Calabi-Yau transformations, my Lord.’

  The holo showed atom-sized femtocytes, ripped apart in ways beyond imagining.

  ‘Is this’—Tom looked up at Xyenquil—‘some kind of logosophical metaphor?’

  ‘At first I thought . . .’ Xyenquil swallowed. ‘No. They really have been twisted through the hyperdimensions. I’m sure of it.’

  It was as if something had reached inside Tom’s body, torn open the hidden dimensions of spacetime, and destroyed the femtocytes in the process.

  ‘And I know nothing,’ added Xyenquil, ‘in myth or reality, capable of that.’

  Elva stepped forward. Where she had been leaning against the slow-morphing wall, a shallow Elva-shaped depression marked the surface.

  ‘Just what’—her tone was flat, professional—‘is the significance of this?’

  Xyenquil shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Wait a moment.’ Tom held up his hand. ‘Are you saying, Doctor, that it’s not your treatment which has destroyed my infection?’

  ‘My Lord, I’m not— Yes, sir. That’s what I mean.’

  Dark fire . . .

  In the cold cavern, the black flames which sprouted from the old man’s staff...that was the moment when a strange change had overtaken Tom. And there was something he was supposed to remember, but could not.

  ‘... on your behalf, my Lord. Haven’t we, Nirilya?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her feline eyes were unreadable. ‘We have an appointment with the Seer.’

  ‘An audience,’ said Xyenquil, almost stammering, ‘is quite unheard of, for, um, outsiders.’

  A Seer?

  There was a hint of triumph in Nirilya’s eyes, but it was her words which captivated Tom. Was this some kind of Oracle?

  And if so, he could see no reason why this Seer would help Tom Corcorigan, whose last memory of an Oracular visit was his redmetal poignard rammed to the hilt in Gérard d’Ovraison’s side, and the hot cupric stench of the surprised Oracle’s death.

  ‘We should go’—Nirilya stood, robes rustling—‘straightaway.’

  We’re going to consult an Oracle?

  ~ * ~

  4

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  The threadway hung in a long catenary across the abyss, spanning the endless drop from tunnel’s end to the great silver-grey sphere which hung at the vertical shaft’s centre. The sphere itself was fifty metres in diameter, maybe more; the shaft in which it floated was immense.

  Even Tom felt vertigo when he stared down.

  Behind them, in the tunnel, Nirilya and Xyenquil waited with an honour guard of Core Dragoons. Only Tom and Elva were invited into the Seer’s dwelling place.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.

  Tom shook his head, unwilling to share his half-formed thoughts, his strange presentiment about dark fire.

  I’m afraid... With ruthless self-honesty. But of what?

  ‘Tactically,’ Elva added, ‘I don’t like this.’

  She grew silent.

  The threadway was a narrow flexible tunnel, quite transparent save for a too-thin strip which ran along its floor. It was one of thirteen, hanging above the abyss: there was no other way into the Seer’s sphere.

  Elva stepped inside first, with no trace of nerves, and Tom followed. The threadway swayed from side to side as they made their way down the curved interior.

  ‘I dare say’—with a trace of Elva’s usual irony—‘the Seer knows we’re coming.’

  Inside the hollow sphere, sapphire lightning flashed and cracked. At the globe chamber’s centre hung a complex silver platform; above, skull-like, an ornate silver throne was floating: armour-encased, helm-like overhang, bristling with inbuilt weaponry and controls.

  And inside its heavy carapace, in a small soft seat, a tiny wizened figure sat, peering at the two visitors with bright, startling eyes.

  A Seer?

  Tom, like Elva, stood frozen on a floating lev-step.

  Like no Oracle I’ve ever seen.

  And it came to him then that he had no idea what he was doing here, what madness—beyond courtesy to his hosts—had drawn him to this place, except perhaps a strange unfocused fear, and the notion that the world was slipping away from him because of his own inadequacies. He had only a local medic’s word that spacetime had unravelled in his vicinity, that some influence had reached beyond reality’s constraints to tear apart the tiny invaders inside him: a cure more mysterious, potentially more dangerous, than the original infection.

  So he shivered, although the air was not cold, while all around the chamber blue lightning danced and played, spat and coldly burned.

  Finally, the helm-throne moved through the air, drawing closer, and they saw more closely the small lined figure which might have been a mortally sick child or an old, old man.

  GREETINGS, LORD ONE-ARM.

  The message grew in huge bright holo-tricons, animated and complex, changing as the Seer’s lips moved, voice unheard.

&nbs
p; WELL MET TO THEE, LORD ORACLE KILLER.

  ‘Well met yourself,’ Tom called across the gap between them, voice raised above the lightning’s crackle.

  ‘We’ve met too many like you,’ murmured Elva, very low.

  OH, NO ... A trace of smile on the young/old wizened face. YOU’VE NOT COME ACROSS ANYTHING LIKE ME.

  Elva swallowed.

  Then she leaped lightly to the next step, deliberately away from Tom, untagging her graser pistol.

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Not yet.’

  He feared there might be defensive femtotech, perhaps a smartmiasma. It would be in defiance of the Comitia Freni Fem’teloram, designed and codified to prevent humanity’s destruction with its own weaponry, but there had been violations other than those of Elva’s former comrades—beyond the destroyed infection inside his body—and there was so much about this place which did not seem right.

  And so, addressing the Seer: ‘You’re not an Oracle, then?’

  SEE FOR YOURSELF, MY LORD.

  The entire chamber flickered.

  And what happened next went far beyond the abilities of any Oracle that Tom had ever met or heard of.

  First vision.

  Tom saw:

  A kaleidoscope of busy bazaars ... crystal ballrooms with nobles dancing ...thermidors flaring in lava ...deserted thousand-kilometre tunnels where only blind-moths move...

  It was a flickering montage of everyday life throughout the world, from every stratum and sector of Nulapeiron.

  Second vision.

  A dizzying switch to other worlds, whose very existence had been mere legend, a fantasy, during Tom’s impoverished youth: mist-borne cities above silver seas ...antlered bipeds communing in an amphitheatre beneath a violet sky ...bewigged tripods dancing on razorstone while their voracious seedlings wait with fangs bared...

  ‘What are you doing to him?’

  Elva’s voice, sounding from a distance.

  Tom reeled at the sense of limitless space.

  I have seen the sky.

  No more than a few dozen people—among ten billion inhabitants—had seen the world’s surface, but Tom was one of them, was conditioned against the agoraphobic response which could reduce an unprepared person to catatonia.

  But, lost amid the Seer’s visions, Tom felt a sense of unremitting emptiness, the insignificance of life amid the vastly greater, infinite universe, and it pressed inexorably down, saddening and overwhelming him.

  ~ * ~

  Third vision.

  He saw the creamy nebuloid drifting in space as flame-tailed comets, the tiny males of her species, wheel inwards to her core...

  ‘Last chance, Seer. Release him.’

  He whimpered before the immensity, the vast interstellar scale of his forced perception.

  ~ * ~

  Fourth vision.

  Changes coming faster now ...

  Angular lightning, dancing gavottes on a salt-white desert ... fat green toroids rolling, with tiny bipedal corpses trapped on their digestive rims ... a newborn spindlebug drops screeching from its cocoon...

  ‘I said...’

  Gasping, Tom held up his hand.

  He shuddered, blinked moisture from his eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, Elva.’

  It had begun as revenge, for the loss of his mother and his father’s death. He had studied all the logosophical disciplines - ‘For you, logosophy is a weapon,’ Sylvana once said -including all he could find on the forbidden topic of the Oracles.

  Time flowed both ways in an Oracle’s brain, past and future intermixed, with no tangible difference between past memory and prescient vision—of their own personal future - save that Lords and Ladies could use truecasts as the basis for their formidable political power.

  Poor Oracles.

  They spent most of their time watching and reading news reports and analyses, to be reported (subjectively later) as future-memories to their constant entourage of analysts. Sometimes, now, Tom could see the Oracles as tools, as pitiful victims who were scarcely human, and rarely benefited from the privileged strata their existence helped to maintain.

  But not one of them could see things which did not occur before his or her own eyes at some point in their life, or force their strange disturbing visions into another person’s mind.

  ‘Seer, what exactly are you?’

  It seemed no coincidence that Dr Xyenquil had lately been talking about Calabi-Yau transformations, and the use of spacetime’s hidden hyperdimensions. If the Seer could truly perceive distant places and times ...

  AND WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF EXISTENCE? A mocking smile crossed the Seer’s features. BY ALL MEANS, LET’S ADDRESS THE BIG, ETERNAL QUESTIONS WHILE WE’RE HERE ...

  Sapphire lightning continued to dance.

  An image grew between Tom and the Oracle, and for a moment Tom thought it was another vision. But it was merely holo. Elva, too, was frowning at the sight.

  A membrane separates the chamber from the glowing blue fluid. Inside, drifting shapes move slowly: humans, connected by tendrils to some shadowy central mass.

  Two youths watch, horrified, from the observation chamber... And one of these youths is Tom, visiting his imprisoned schoolfriend Kreevil...

  The holo dwindled, faded, was gone.

  Tom remembered the occasion, and how it had been his fault that Kreevil was among the schoolboy thieves. Poor unlucky Kreevil: imprisoned for a crime he had not wanted to be part of.

  That was real.

  Could the Seer really pluck images from the past, and cause them to be reproduced?

  And why that particular image?

  He noted then that the lightnings and the glowing blue fluid were of the same electric hue. He had seen other hints of it in the past...

  ‘What is that fluid, Seer?’

  A strange expression masked the Seer’s face, was gone.

  Keep your secret, then.

  But Tom was far too familiar with burning, long-held hatred not to recognize its obsessive presence in another human being ... if this Seer could be termed human.

  ‘Just what are you, Seer?’ he asked again. ‘An experiment gone wrong?’

  Silence, while the lev-throne rose higher, almost to the domed ceiling, then dropped down closer. The Seer’s lips moved; Tom could not quite hear his whisper.

  YOUR REPUTATION AS A FIGHTER IS WELL EARNED.

  A half-smile.

  BUT ARE YOU THE LOGOSOPHER THAT PEOPLE CLAIM?

  ‘Try me.’

  Then five, twenty, a hundred holo-manifolds blossomed into being, tesseracts with equations scrolling past at breakneck speed. It was genuine, and it was new, and Tom tried to slip into full logosophical trance, to merge with the gestalten-tao ... but it was too late, and the tantalizing images minimized to dots, and vanished.

  Timewave engineering ? Damn you . ..

  It was some kind of cruel joke, to allow a glimpse of the workings behind an Oracle’s mind, then to take that insight away.

  DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE COLLEGIUM PERPETUUM DELPHINORUM WOULD DO, IF THEY KNEW YOU HAD SEEN EVEN THAT MUCH?

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘Sweet Chaos.’ Elva. ‘Do you have any idea how valuable—?’

  On the next lev-step, Elva went down on one knee, and turned towards Tom. Her eyes held an expression he had never seen: a hunger, a despair, a great depth of sadness.

  ‘Tom, I’m sorry ...’ She paused, then: ‘I’ve another loyalty, and this one goes right back to childhood.’

  Tom stared at her. Beyond, at the edge of his vision, the Seer’s spherical lev-throne dropped, came hurtling downwards.

  NO! STOP HER!

  It shot towards Elva.

  DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT SHE IS?

  ‘I never thought I’d be the one to do this. Oh, Tom, I never once woke up without wondering if this was the day everything would just end. It was always Litha who was the important one. I thought, I really thought—’

  STOP! DON’T LET HER DO IT!

&nb
sp;