Palace (49 page)

‘Yeah?’ Lounging back among the cushions Wan smiled. ‘Well, they say those girls in Pleasure will fuck anything.’

Karlo saw Dukayn leap up and move just in time to throw out an arm and stop him. Behind that barrier Dukayn stood trembling, his lips drawn back from his teeth. Slowly, deliberately, Wan got up and stood facing him.

‘What’s wrong?’ Wan said. ‘You want her yourself? Go ahead. I don’t give a shit.’

‘Shut up,’ Karlo snapped. ‘It’s not the insult to Vida that’s making him angry.’

‘You don’t understand the Garang.’ Dukayn brought himself under control. ‘You don’t understand much, boy, but especially not the Garang. Yeah, Jak’s devoted to the girl, but it’s got nothing to do with raw sex. In his mind she stands for something greater, something fine and pure, something a piece of crap like you couldn’t understand if you tried.’

Bewildered, Wan looked back and forth between them. Karlo considered turning Dukayn loose, then dismissed the thought as unworthy.

‘Go to bed,’ Karlo said to Wan. ‘We can talk about this when you’re sober. For now, watch what you say about the L’Var girl. Do you understand me? Keep your filthy mouth shut about her.’

Wan hesitated, then turned on his heel and strode out of the room. Karlo waited till the door had hissed closed behind him, then lowered his arm. Dukayn sighed profoundly.

‘Sorry, Se.’

‘It’s all right. He can be a little shit when he wants to be. But you’ve got to remember that you’re right: he doesn’t know much about the Garang. He knows even less about their - about your -religion.’

Dukayn brought both his palms flat together and touched his fingertips to his forehead.

‘May She who lights the sky forgive him, then,’ Dukayn said. ‘I can’t, even if he is your son.’

‘I don’t expect you to.’

‘Thanks.’

Dukayn turned to Karlo and looked at him with eyes so full of devotion that Karlo nearly took a step back. You should be used to this by now, he told himself sharply. It had been years now since Dukayn had left to train with the Garang and come back a convert to more than their martial arts style.

‘Please don’t kneel,’ Karlo said.

‘As you wish, of course, Ay-lang Japat.’

Ay-lang Japat. My living god, my god in this world, however you wanted to translate it Karlo swallowed his faint revulsion and said the one thing that would please Dukayn the most.

‘My blessing upon you.’

Dukayn smiled, his eyes brimming with tears close to joy. Karlo was never really sure exactly what he felt at these moments, beside embarrassed, of course. Frightened, maybe, and oddly humble both, that any man, that a man like Dukayn, had decided to elevate him to the status of a god.

With a long sigh the wiretrain slid onto the platform at route end. Kata and Elen quit the car to find themselves on a long concrete platform beside a corrugated metal stadon building, both grey, both stained. Open stairways led down to the ground. Down at the far end of a narrow street they could see docks and a canal, glittering in a shaft of the day’s first sunlight. Elen looked around and shivered in the damp dawn wind. ‘This is it?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Kata said. ‘I was hoping for a little more traffic, so we wouldn’t be so noticeable.’

The sunlight faded as clouds closed. Kata hoisted his heavy web-sling over one shoulder and led the way down the stairs. A shambling village of sorts huddled around the train depot: a few shops, a few houses, a fuel station, all of them settling so unevenly that windows and doors hung angled. The place looked oddly festive thanks to the fungi in green fronded festoons or sulphur-yellow globes stuck under eaves and protrusions. When Kata glanced up, he saw huge bunches of purple fingers hanging from the underside of the wiretrain platform.

‘The swamp is taking it back.’

The voice came from under the stairs behind them. Kata swirled around to find an old human woman sitting on a rusty oil drum. She’d wrapped herself in layers of clothes that were barely more than rags, a dirty medley of red and brown with the odd touch of yellow.

‘I saw you looking at the Hands of God,’ she said. ‘That’s what I call ‘em, the purple ones, the Hands of God. They soften things up, like, because they ooze this acid, and then they pick things right apart. It’s busy busy fingers, plucking here, poking there. The men come and scrape them off, but the swamp sends more right the next day.’

‘Well, it’s a problem, all right, the fungi.’ Elen fished in his websling and found a couple of coins. ‘Here, grandmother, buy yourself something to drink.’

‘Thank you, youngling, I’ll do that. And you remember, when the city comes a-tumbling down, you remember what I told you. The swamp’s taking it back.’

‘We will, grandmother,’ Kata said. ‘And a good day to you.’

Heading for the water, they hurried off down the street, past a straggle of houses, listing and cracking, sporting a fine crop of fungi and moulds.

‘Living out here would make any sape a little crazy,’ Elen remarked. ‘The swamp’s taking this village back, all right.’

‘No-one wants to keep it, that’s why. Spread a few gallons of Megatox over these buildings, and the swamp would get its claws out fast enough.’

‘Well, there are problems with that stuff.’

‘This isn’t a problem?’

‘You win.’

Their destination lay right on the water: a wooden dock, soaked black in what looked like old-fashioned creosote, with a bait and tackle shop perched on the far end. Since most Leps had a taste for flatties, the grey fish that swarmed at the edge of the swamplands, Kata was expecting no fuss over their renting a boat, but when they walked into the crowded little shop, the first thing he saw was a shiny white notice, taped to the wall:

* * *

All Leps must show full ID for any rental transactions. By Order of the Edge Sect Council.

* * *

The brown little human man behind the counter saw him reading it and winced. ‘I’m real sorry,’ he said. ‘That sure wasn’t my idea. You people are my best customers, this time of year.’

‘Well, can’t be helped,’ Kata said, reaching into his jacket. ‘Here you are.’

His fingers touched the smooth metal of his pulse gun, and he debated - no, a death would leave a trail more obvious than a mere signature. When he laid his false papers onto the counter, the fellow barely glanced at them.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘How big a boat will you be wanting, and for how long?’

‘A twelve-footer, and just for the day,’ Elen said, stepping up. ‘What time do you close?’

‘Have her back by the twenties.’

Elen sat in the stern and steered while Kata crouched in the bow of the little hydrofloat with a fishing net out and ready for appearances’ sake. To the soft purr of the solar-volt motor, they glided away from the dock and turned down a tunnel in the bluish-green frond trees, growing on sand bars to form a canopy over the narrow channel of open water. They passed huge clumps of island-roots, so named because their fleshy olive-green stems tangled so thickly at the water’s surface that flying lizards and insects could live on them, and airborne dirt and airborne seeds both collected there to grow into floating gardens, studded with fleshy red flowers and sprays of yellow fungi. As the sun rose higher behind the perpetual fog, the air turned warm and steamy. Kata stripped off his wrap jacket, then took a turn at the motor to let Elen do the same.

‘If we were really fishing,’ Elen said, ‘we’d turn down one of these side channels and anchor.’

‘Ah. But as it is, I’d better take a look at Riva’s map.’

Elen took over while Kata opened his websling and brought out the map and a receptor for the public satellite locator system. Riva had warned him that the data she could provide might be outdated when it came to the ever-shifting channels and bogs of the swamps. Although there was a chance that someone might pick up their transmit signals to the satellite network, it was small compared to the chance of a fatal accident if they should get lost. Go too deep into the swamps, just for one thing, and the worms would be waiting for you.

‘All right,’ Kata said. ‘When this map was drawn, there was a real island straight ahead at the end of this channel. If it’s still there, we turn right around it, but we have to be careful of shallows.’

‘In this part of the swamp, you always have to be careful of shallows,’ Elen said. ‘And it’s going to get worse once we reach the old pumping station. How far is it?’

‘About fifteen miles. What’s that? An hour away?’

‘Sure, if we could open full throttle and head straight there. Here, I’ve set up the motion recorder so we can find our way back. Let’s see what we can do.’

In a few minutes they glided out of the channel and its embracing fronds. Ahead stretched green water and brown land commingled into something neither, all heaped and wrinkled like an unmade bed, stretching to a dirty grey horizon. The openness proved an illusion. They managed to travel about a hundred yards at a time, tacking in one direction only to stop and wait while they puzzled out the next leg of their zig-zag. Dead logs, tangled in vines, floated just under the surface; the murky water turned shallow before you could see the bottom; here and there drowned rocks threatened. Insects swarmed round and whined. Although their scales mostly protected the two Leps, their eyes were still vulnerable, and they kept swatting and hissing the things away as they tried to make sense of Riva’s map.

‘It’s so damn strange,’ Kata growled. ‘She has access to all the data in the world, or so it seems, except a decent map of these shit-ugly swamps.’

‘No-one can keep a good map up,’ Elen said. ‘They’re out of date the minute you print them.’

Kata muttered something foul.

Rather than the map, luck helped them out after two hours of this painful progress, when they hit a run of clear water that led them west-north-west, roughly in the direction of the old pumping station, for a good five miles. In time, though, it petered out into a maze of island-roots and real islands, if you could call lumps of mud covered in mushrooms islands. Kata eased back to the middle of the boat, then stood up, looking around them with a pair of binoculars.

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ he muttered. ‘We’re not far from shore. Have we gone the wrong way?’

‘No, there’s kind of a peninsula here.’ Elen was studying the map. ‘Oh, of course! It’s the saccule market, where the Stinkers come to sell their neuters off. That’s stable land, because it’s got pumps. We’ll find an open passage out, too.’

‘There are people there. I can just make them out. We don’t want to go too close.’

‘Do we have any choice?’

‘No. Let’s hope they think we’re just a pair of fishermen.’

When the hydrofloat chugged by, no-one on shore seemed to notice. Kata could see various humans and Leps trotting back and forth around a black airtruck parked on the landward side. In the middle of the tiny peninsula stood a herd of neuters, wearing collars and tied to what appeared to be stakes of some kind with crude-looking ropes. The neuters were shrieking and skirling, and the reek of their fear came close to making him vomit himself.

‘We’re at the channel out,’ Elen said, gagging. ‘Just in time, too.’

Elen slammed the hydrofloat’s gear shift into high. They sped out to the suddenly clean-smelling air of the swamp itself.

* * *

As a souvenir of her childhood in the mines, Sister Romero had trouble sleeping in open spaces. Since she owned almost nothing, she tended to cram her few clothes and toiletries into a dresser drawer and sleep in the closet of whatever room she was inhabiting. Most were long enough for her to make up a bed of blankets and a pillow right on the floor, the only

‘mattress’ hard enough to mimic the sleepnests of a typical Arim house. The actual bed, therefore, ended up as a table - my research planner, she always called it - where she could lay out handwritten notes and heaps of printout, weight them down with data cubes, and generally pile up in plain sight various kinds of evidence for whatever problem she was working on at the moment. Here in her bedroom in East Tower she’d laid out information about the neuter saccules in a pattern that had great meaning for her but that would have no doubt escaped most people seeing it.

Yawning in the early light, a cup of steaming tea in her hand, Romero stood looking over her pattern. Up at the head of the bed she’d added some tangential evidence: a data cube holding a UJU pamphlet and printout from a screen capture of one of their advertisements for their up-coming public rally. Although UJU members focused their multiple resentments on Leps, Romero saw a connection between using one race for slaves and another for a scapegoat. She doubted very much that the citizens of Palace would ever allow themselves to see the same thing, especially if she added the culls of Pleasure Sect into her pattern. Talking with Vida was making her think that Pleasure belonged in it.

On the wall a pale blue oval chimed.

‘Yes?’ Romero said.

‘Good morning, Sister.’ Thiralo’s face appeared on the oval. ‘Se L’Var’s servant is here with a package for you.’

‘Good. Send it in.’

Dressed in a maroon shift and a short green vest, the saccule trotted through the door and bowed so clumsily it dropped the leather case it was carrying. Whistling from its facial pouches, it grabbed the case upside down. Clothes spilled onto the floor, and the saccule moaned and stank of dead animals.

‘Shorry shorty shorty,’ it hissed from a chest sac.

‘It’s all right, Greenie, it’s all right. Here.’ Romero pointed at the case. ‘Take that back to Se Vida.’

Whimpering it clutched the case to its chest and dashed for the door. Romero went to a window and opened it wide to let the smell of saccule embarrassment out. Outside in the brightening light of day, pale green spores fell through the air in long streamers, teased out by the wind.

Although Vida was taller than Romero, the clothes she’d sent fit well enough, a pair of fashionably narrow grey trousers, a plain but expensive blue tunic to go over them, and matching silk brocade shoes and handbag to set them off. For her visit to the pens Romero wanted to look like a prospective customer, not announce to all and sundry that she was not only a Lifegiver but the Papal Itinerant - her headband, therefore, went into a drawer before she left and her hair came down from its usual braid. When Thiralo appeared, he’d procured himself a brown business suit of the sort many factors wore; he carried his scriber and tablet as well.