Palace (16 page)

The saccule raised a stubby hand, then winked out. On the floor the last traces of the green puddle dried up and vanished. That rev would never play again.

‘Time is running out.’

The voice sounded as thin and cold as a line of the same ice that wrapped him round. Rico turned, heading for the stairs, just as the cavern exploded all around him. A roar, a blast of fire and fiery air lifted him up and out, threw him on a hot wind and a huge billow of black smoke. He could see chunks and pieces of the message hut - hell, of the entire Pansect Media construct - whirling through the air around him and with him. Charging through the smoke and heading straight at him was a towering pillar of flame, so white-hot that he had to look away.

‘Arco sec attack.’

Out of the wreckage the security drones flew up. They buzzed round, firing bolts of energy at the thing, the candle, Rico thought of it, a huge white candle blazing in Mapspace. The energy bolts - a visualized form of erase and delete utilities - bounced off the white wax, but the candle hesitated just long enough.

‘Arco daz dev home reverse now.’

Wrapped in ice the Gate blasted free of the wreckage and flew up in a trail of smoke. When he glanced back, Rico saw the Candle dimming itself to a blood-red, then peeling off a spray of energy. All hundred of his carefully crafted defenders burst into flames. No rev, no iconized utility, nothing at all should have been able to do that! The Gate was swooping up, rushing away, but the Candle began to move, slowly at first, sucking up energy from the shattered icons until it glowed as white-hot as an arc weld. As it moved, as it glowed, it gained speed, rose up and arrowed after Rico and the Gate. Its heat, its immense glowing heat, reached out long fingers ahead of it and clawed through to Rico’s bones.

Faster, faster, it was gaining on them even as they raced and dipped over Tech Sect, heading for the Map terminals clustered round guild headquarters. The membrane of ice round Rico stabilized itself at last, then grew colder still, until the Candle’s heat seem no more than the touch of the sun on a cloud-free day. Still it gained, and to his horror Rico saw it dimming back down, glowing first yellow, then orange, then red. Rico kept seeing the defenders, bursting into flames. He was next, most likely. He thought of the all-meta - was this the ultimate danger? Had Arno known about this Candle thing?

With the chime of a hundred clocks, the Gate swooped into the Interstice and released him, spun him off like a thrown ball into the darkness, where he fell, down and down. No more ice around his skin, he could breathe, but still he fell, could barely think to call out his station number. At last he caught himself, steadied himself in the darkness, and found that he hovered over his own black arch entrance to clan space. He turned and looked back to see the Gate as a thin web of icy-blue lines, flickering through the Interstice, twisting this way and that, heading back up to the Map. Behind it raged the Candle, burning white again as it turned its energy inward for the chase.

In a desperate fear for the Gate’s safety, Rico started after, flinging himself through Mapspace, but at that moment the Gate and the Candle both disappeared, diving through some hidden barrier. He could see nothing, he could do nothing, he could never follow. Once he was back at his station, though, he’d be able to run searches, and see if the Gate had survived or even try summoning the Gate with Arno’s shortcut.

Rico slid down his access into clan space, floating all quiet and orderly with its rim of gates. What would happen if the Candle ever moved through here? He would have to tell his uncle, have to warn the guild - how? Tell them he’d been illegally using the Chameleon Gate, admit that he’d messed around in forbidden areas, confess that he’d directly disobeyed his guildmaster’s orders about forgetting Arno? For a moment he couldn’t breathe, clutched by a worse cold than any the Gate had built around him. As he glanced around he saw other icon bodies hurrying through, and among them were several marked with the gold of masters.

‘Oh my God! Time?’

Nine of the eights. Bad, real bad - Wynn was never this late. What had she done when she jacked in and discovered that he was off Map? Sure enough, he was just heading for the hub and the egress from clan space when Wynn appeared in her tall iconic body, swirling with gold and the simulacrum of blue cloth.

‘Rico!’ she snapped. ‘Didn’t you hear your call-alarm? You’re supposed to be in the guildmaster’s office. You better get over there. Se Hivel implied that this was a very important matter.’

‘Yes, Professor. I’d uh forgotten.’

‘Well, from now on don’t forget! He wants you there physically, so get off the Map now.’

‘Yes, Se.’ Rico had never been so glad to obey an order.

He hurried out of clan space, raced across the access hall, and slid into the chute numbered for his station. All at once he saw himself standing in the screen with mail icons floating around him. Off to one side lay an exit panel; he touched it and felt as if he dropped from a height into sand, with a crunching kind of thud, a groan, and the abrupt sensation of weight, of gravity, of his flesh body lying in a chair, of clothing, soaked through with sweat.

‘Shit.’

Rico sat up, running his hands through sweaty hair. The backs of his hands stung, he realized, and it wasn’t just the usual pins and needles of returning circulation. His skin was bright red, as if he’d lain under a sunlamp for hours. When he glanced at himself in the monitor, his reflection showed the same burn blazing across his face.

* * *

For his private, inner office Hi kept a cube not much bigger than an apprentice’s, though it did have a dark green carpet on the floor and a programmable leather chair, standing in front of the state-of-the-art Mapstation. Powered down, the Mapscreen looked like a mirror in a chrome frame and nothing more. When Rico walked in, Hi noticed him glance at himself in the mirror and wince.

‘What have you done?’ Hi said. ‘Fried yourself under a sunlamp down at the gym?’

‘Yeah, ‘fraid so. I fell asleep. Guess I’m still tired from yesterday.’

‘Probably so, yeah.’

Hi hesitated, considering him. Ten to one Rico was lying, judging from his nervous eyes, but why? And about what? At the moment it seemed too unimportant to bother with.

‘I’ve got a job for you. Think you’re too tired to do some climbing? Not stairs. Up a lattice-work on the side of a tower.’

‘A what?’

‘Back in Pleasure Sect.’ Rico grinned.

‘Not that we’ll have any time for non-business activities. Your mother wanted you home this afternoon, remember?’ The grin vanished.

‘Well, yeah,’ Rico said with a sigh. ‘If she’s shipping out to Orbital soon, then there’s a lot of stuff about the house I’ve got to know.’

‘Right. Let’s get out of here and up to the roof. Nju’s waiting with an aircar.’

Not just Nju, but another Garang bodyguard and a driver went along with them that morning. As they circled up from Centre, Hi looked down through green-tinted glass at dark streets and found himself thinking about Arno. Hi had spent a lot of time that morning lighting a fire under the Protectors about Vi-Kata. He also had a couple of connections in the Special Services branch of the Military Guild who would be more than glad to know about the assassin’s presence on Palace. With a lurch the aircar steadied out, then leapt forward at top power. Klaxons howled as other ‘hoppers and ‘cars scattered before them. The Garang drove as they lived - full speed ahead.

Rico turned in his seat and seemed to be looking out the window, but from the way he held one hand to his mouth, as if he were going to chew on it, Hi wondered if the boy was quite simply hiding something. He’d never seen Rico this troubled before, not open, honest Rico, a little naive, yeah, as Aleen had called him, but as clean and true as a Colonial gold coin.

‘Something on your mind, Rico?’

‘No, Se.’ Rico glanced at him with a parody of his usual smile, then looked away fast.

‘Yeah?’ Hi hesitated, considering. If they’d been alone, instead of in a small car with three Garang, he might have probed, but as it was, he didn’t want Rico confessing something in front of sapients who couldn’t be bribed to forget it. ‘Well, let me tell you what we’re up to.’

As they headed toward Pleasure Sect and the Carillon roof park, Hi told Rico about Vida’s revenant and the suddenly active Mapstation. To this Rico listened with his usual serious attention, asking, here and there, an intelligent question or two.

‘So you see,’ Hi finished up. ‘that station is so old that the tower’s been sealed off. I dug around in a couple of archives this morning. There used to be another tower on the roof, one with a lift booth in it, and a bridge between the two. The first one had to be torn down before it fell down, about twenty years ago now, and what with one thing and another, and then the war, it’s never been replaced. I tried to access the station through the Map, of course, but it was sealed off as nonfunctioning a long, long time ago, just about the time of the Schism Wars.’

‘That long?’ Rico said. ‘But can’t you get in from above, from the Hypermap?’

Hi sloughed round in his seat and considered Rico, who blushed even redder than his lamp burn.

‘Just what do you know about that, kid? I didn’t think you were that far along in the training.’

‘Well, just what it says in the manuals.’ Rico was suddenly all puzzled innocence. ‘You can always reach any point on the Map from the Hypermap, unless a master cybe’s blocked it with an umbrella, I think they called it.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. And there was an umbrella over this Map-station. I don’t want to close it up just yet, because I want to know who put it there.’

Rico nodded, considering this with genuine innocence. Hi figured that he’d found the reason for Rico’s earlier unease. He’d been poking around and found the keys to some higher level manuals. Apprentices always did, or at least the ones who were worth anything. A sin like that could be safely ignored.

The aircar suddenly changed its whine, hovered briefly, then lowered itself fast enough to turn Hi’s stomach over.

‘Nju!’ he yelled. ‘Tell that driver to take it easy!’

For an answer he got a bump, a scrape, and a jarring sort of thud.

‘We have arrived, Se Hivel,’ Nju called out. ‘Quite safely, too, I might add.’

The roof park stood deserted except for one saccule gardener, who leaned onto his rake and stared at them as they got out of the car. When Hi tossed him a small coin, he honked twice, slipped the coin into the pocket of his baggy grey coveralls, and turned away to get on with his work.

‘I thought saccules didn’t understand money,’ Rico said.

‘Yeah, that’s what we’re told, all right. Hey, for all I know he might like coins just because they’re shiny.’ Hi glanced round, taking another look, assuring himself that they were indeed alone except for the gardener. ‘There’s the tower, and there’s the lattice of vines and grillwork. Think you can get up there and down again?’

‘Sure. Do you have a comm link on you?’

‘You bet.’ Hi reached into his pocket and brought out a transceiver combo, a long sliver of blue metal. ‘Clip that onto your shirt, and head on up.’

Although the climb looked easy enough for someone young and in good shape, Hi watched in a state of nerves until Rico successfully scrambled into the bell tower. If the kid fell, Barra would have Hi’s head on a platter, and he knew it. In his matching transceiver clip, he could see a tiny picture of the inside of the tower and the black slab that Vida had described. Rico’s voice transmitted shrilly but clearly.

‘Okay, I’m running my hand over the slab, like the girl said. Hey, here he is.’

Hi could see something like a revenant form over the slab, but the transmit of a hologram was always muddy, and this was no exception. Hi could, however, hear the artificial voice quite clearly.

‘Greetings, user. I’m sorry, but your deen is a nonpriority. Please give access request that I may triage.’

‘Calios,’ Rico said.

‘You are not authorized for that password.’ The revenant disappeared.

‘Damn!’ Hi said, and simultaneously heard his nephew say the same.

* * *

The Eye of God that Brother Lennos had given her was a simple thing, a wooden disk strung on a leather thong, no fancy holo here, just an inscribed eye rubbed with black paint. The monks and nuns made dozens of these to hand out to children at festivals. When Vida turned it over, she found a small mark scratched on the back - Lennos’s own mark, maybe, or his monastery’s.

‘I still feel so terrible,’ Vida said, ‘thinking he was killed for my sake.’

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Jak said, nodding, ‘to kill a poor Lifegiver for his robes.’

They were sitting in Vida’s bedroom, Vida in the chair by her Maplink screen, Jak on the small blue rug with his back propped against the door. My bodyguard, Vida thought, and the thought made her stomach turn cold. She slipped the Eye on its thong round her neck.

‘I still can’t believe that someone wanted to kill me,’ she said.

‘Why not? God has obviously marked you for great things, Se Vida.’

‘What? Oh, come on! Not me!’

‘Why else would someone try to kill you? No-one hires famous assassins to kill some unimportant little person.’

Circular though it was, the argument rang true. Vida glanced at her screen, where her lesson menu hung in the opalescence. Study ing was impossible. She was just reaching over to shut the link down when her call code sounded. ‘Answer,’ Vida said. The school menu dissolved, and in the resulting swirl of colour a face appeared, a slender young man with ebony dark skin and silver hair.

‘Calios!’ Vida said.

‘Greetings, Veelivar.’ He was grinning at her. ‘Someone is trying to forge your password and access me.’

‘Who?’ Vida went cold, thinking of assassins.

‘A member of a clan whose genotype is not on my priority list. He refuses to identify himself beyond repeating your password.’

‘Is he a Lep?’

‘He is a human.’

‘Well, that’s something, anyway.’

‘I cannot parse your input, Veelivar.’

‘I mean, it’s good that he’s human, but still, this kind of scares me. Please deny any information about me to anyone who asks.’