Context (11 page)

Tom limped into the Dringhalle,
leaning heavily on his black cane. The leg was hurting again, but Xyenquil had
assured him the femtocytes were destroyed; it was merely muscle damage and
ordinary infection, responding to treatment. In the meantime, having found his
cane, he made use of it; in his current weakened state, it could also be a
weapon—

Tricon projection.

It leaped out at him, though the
pattern was subtle: a mere scratching in frost, a sketched outline upon a
rime-coated shield. Already, soft steady rain was dissolving it while Tom
watched; the sign must have been laser-etched within the past minute.

It was crudely two-dimensional—any
tricon needed volume and colour and movement to convey true meaning -but this
was a projection, an ideogram aspect, and it scared the Chaos out of Tom.

Danger.

His skin crawled.

Trying to be subtle, Tom scanned
his surroundings, focusing on the people, knowing that femtotech-array
surveillance was impossible to detect by unaided sight. Near the Dringhalle’s
main aisle, off-duty militiamen in uniform were handing around a ganja mask
within their group: illegal as Chaos in public, but they could get away with
it.

Pilgrims, other travellers,
passing by... One richly garbed merchant flanked by copper-helmed housecarls
... Nothing suspicious.

No-one even glanced at Tom.

It could be anyone.

But the melting frost symbol was
a code aimed specifically at him: a LudusVitae cipher, active four SY before—when
Tom was part of the movement—and surely not used since then. Despite the
intervening years, Tom recognized the code tag immediately.

Request immediate rendezvous.

While the angled outline modified
the content with its own additional warning:

Fully urgent.

There
were directions encoded in the now dissolved sign, and Tom followed them.
Turning right, he followed a tessellated pathway—burnt orange and off-white
mosaic—into raw natural caverns which sparkled with mineral seams.

The air was moist and warm, heavy
with vapour. By a bubbling mud pool, a wide raised platform offered bright
refreshment tents, and pastel pink and blue ceramic tables at which travellers
might sit.

Tom took a seat with his back to
the safety rail, beside a big, painfully fluorescent orange tent.

‘Sir?’ A vassal with stunted
limbs and heavy brow. ‘Anything to drink, good traveller?’

‘Daistral. Any flavour.’

‘Can I offer—?’

‘Just the daistral.’

As the vassal went away, Tom
watched the other resting travellers. Two matronly women seated nearby, one
with a leashed vrulspike at her feet, were giving their order to a barefoot
female vassal.

‘... of krilajuice for Bubbsy. He’s
very thirsty.’

The reptile’s forked tongue
licked the vassal’s bare ankle, leaving a red acidic mark.

‘Makes you wonder’—
the whisper came from Tom’s side—
‘why
we bothered, doesn’t it?’

But he could not turn; the vassal
was returning.

‘Ah, thank you.’

Tom passed over a cred-sliver.

Then he leaned back as the vassal
left, stared up at a purple moss-coated stalactite, and murmured: ‘Sentinel.
How have you been?’

For there was no mistaking that
patrician voice.

If he wanted to kill me, I’d
already be dead.

He had been highly placed in
LudusVitae’s senior command, this Sentinel. Highly placed in society too,
presumably, though Tom knew the man only by his code-name.

‘My state of health is
irrelevant.’ The voice came from the tent. ‘But you ...Have the years of
schoolteaching dulled your...’ Sentinel stopped, chuckled. ‘Apparently not,
given recent events in Darinia Demesne.’

There was a narrow slit in the
bright orange tent fabric. Inside, a hint of blocky features, cropped white
hair.

‘What do you want?’ Tom spoke
with minimal lip movement. If Sturmgard Security had them under surveillance...

But Sentinel had never been
careless. Grant him that much.

‘To offer you a job, Thomas
Corcorigan. Perhaps even a new life.’

A life without Elva.

Using the cane, Tom levered
himself upright without a word, and walked.

Glowing
hexagonal flukes—mating thermidors—arced briefly through the air, dropped back
into glowing lava with a liquid plop.

‘Look out!’

Lava splash, but the spectators
moved back in time. It hissed, cooled, grew dark, and somebody laughed in
relief.

Maybe I should have said yes.

Tom stared, uninterested, at the
lava pool, at the travellers enjoying their too brief wander-leave. He was
blanketed in a thick fatigue that had nothing to do with physical illness or
its aftermath. For someone who had killed an Oracle by playing tricks with
Destiny, it was stupid: he was trapped in a Fate whose meaning was lost beyond
redemption.

‘Perhaps even a new life…’

In four tendays of travelling,
Elva had become so much a part of his existence that her absence was like a
vacuum: impossible to breathe, and ultimately fatal. Leaning on the cane, Tom
watched the bubbling lava without thought, aware only of the pressure of his
loss.

‘Help me!’

A heavy woman, gesticulating.

‘My bag ...’ Breathlessly: ‘He’s
got it...’

He came fast, weaving through the
crowd: a lithe youth, narrow legs pumping, a dark bag clutched in his grip.

Thief.

Tom tried to react but it was too
late. The youth was already past him—
I’m supposed to be a fighter—
and
Tom had to turn, hoist his cane, and break into a slow jog. Pain flared in his
left thigh.

And then it became obvious that there
was no need to push himself, and he slowed down, coming to a painful stop, and
stood there with the cane’s support, wondering what it was that he had just
witnessed.

They moved so fast.

The trained perceptions of a
phi2dao fighter, the art in which he had trained since his early servitor days
under Maestro da Silva’ s exacting tutelage, were suddenly rendered useless by
four young men who reacted more quickly than he could apprehend, in a way which
seemed entirely mysterious, beyond any rational or sensible understanding.

‘Let me—
Mmph.’

The thief s face was pressed into
the hard ground by a heavy bootheel. He writhed once, tried to buck his captors
off; but his wrists and ankles were held in unbreakable grips.

With the struggling thief locked into
place, prone and trapped, the nature of those wrist and ankle holds became
clear. What Tom could not understand was the way the four men had materialized
from the crowd, shifted into existence around the fleeing thief, and slammed
into him in synchrony.

The thief stood no chance against
a sixteen-limbed organism which moved at lightning speed, with absolute
determination and not a microsecond’s hesitation.

Then two more stepped forward
from the crowd; one of them picked up the fallen bag and returned it to the
woman who had cried out. Another stabbed down with a foreknuckle, and the thief
lay still.

‘Don’t hurt him ...’ the woman
protested, too late.

Her saviours stood around her,
their faces stony blank, with signs of neither victory nor remorse. And Tom
could see, as he limped slowly past, that though the men were dressed in
drab-coloured mufti, each wore a shining scarlet cravat tied in military
fashion round his throat.

It was bright red, that fabric:
the shade of oxygen-rich blood spurting from a dead Oracle’s arteries, or of
scarlet jumpsuits worn by children beside a black icy lake, who demonstrated
the same ability to move in unison without spoken command, betraying no sign of
individuality or weakness, and raised the same sensation of creeping dread in
any rational onlooker.

Tom
passed a gloomy corridor, alcoves covered with stained and faded drapes, where
a hand-scraped holosign read
Scragg’s SleepEasy.
Tom would have smiled;
but the name was not meant as a joke. Drudges, with careworn faces, walked by:
barefoot, every one.

So much for the revolution.

There was a short cut, unlit: no
fluorofungus on the ceiling. Tom held his breath, walked through the dead-zone,
and took a shuddering breath of fresh air when he reached the bright cross-tunnel
at the end.