City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (73 page)

Aiah can see the others working out the implications of this offer— and so is Sorya herself, who toys with the silver cuff buttons of her uniform jacket as she weighs this offer. On the one hand, she would be removed from her dangerous position as head of the secret service; on the other, she would serve as the principal advisor to a group of military officers already proven dangerously precipitate and headstrong.... Sorya looks up.

“May I consider this offer before accepting, Triumvir?”

“Yes. Of course.” He looks at the others. “Perhaps I should make that phone call now, yes? Would you all like to listen?”

Constantine is affability itself on the phone, but when coming to the point he is firm. “My government wishes you to know that we cannot support any threats of military action on your part. If you do this, you do it alone, and we will be unable to assist you in any fashion. Our country is too weary and too damaged by war to risk our hard-won peace in another conflict.”

Which seems to bring the Charni to their senses swiftly enough. The rest of the conversation considers face-saving methods by which the Charni can back down from their threat.

Constantine removes his headset. “And that is that,” he says. “May I offer you all some refreshment?”

“You’re giving Sorya her own metropolis?” Aiah asks later, after the others have gone.

Constantine looks at her levelly. “I am giving her a mission to Charna. She will be surrounded by a large delegation, few of whom will be
her
choice— most will be mine, and judging by the interest of Adaveth and Faltheg in the matter, they will want their own people there as well.” Amusement glitters in Constantine’s eyes. “Sorya will be in another metropolis, surrounded by spies hostile to her interests, and separated from her power base in the secret service, which itself will now receive a new head, my choice.” He laughs. “If Sorya makes herself the principal power in Charna, she will deserve her reward.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Aiah says.

He gives Aiah a wry look. “I would give her a challenge. This last attempt— this maladroit attempt to start a war— it was clumsy. Transparent.” He sniffs. “Beneath her, really.”

Aiah doesn’t see how to respond to this save to return to her theme.

“Sorya is dangerous.”

“Danger is what I value in her.” His eyes soften, and he raises a hand to touch Aiah’s cheek. “And loyalty, dear Aiah, is what I most treasure in you.”

Aiah looks up at him and wonders whether he would say that if he could read behind her eyes, if he knew what she was planning.

And then she considers that if Sorya is right about Constantine’s approach to governing, perhaps it
would
be loyalty to deal with Taikoen.

“Constantine,” she says, “you must finish Taikoen.”

The warmth in Constantine’s eyes dies away. He takes his hand from her cheek.

“That is not possible,” he says flatly, and turns away.

“
It
is
possible,” Aiah says, “and it must be done. Taikoen kept us all kicking our heels in the anteroom just now— and in a crisis— while you found him a new body. He’s out of control.”

Constantine frowns out the window, feigning fascination with a plasm display for next shift’s episode of
Durq’s Room
.

“Not now,” he says.

“He’s been seen in the Palace. With you.”

Constantine stiffens in surprise, gives Aiah a look over his shoulder. She shivers under his compelling eagle stare.

“
What
has been seen?” he demands.

“
You have been seen, in this building, in...
conference
... with Taikoen.
Constantine trafficking with a demon for a human soul
. That’s what was seen. And it’s not far wrong.”

Calculation stirs in Constantine’s eyes. “Who saw this?”

Aiah’s mouth goes dry. She will not give up Dr. Romus; she does not want to be responsible for what might happen to the twisted mage if his name were mentioned.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, defying Constantine’s look, which declares, clear as the Shield, that it matters very much. “I managed to contain it for now. But the pieces are already there, for anyone intelligent enough to put them together. Three times, Taikoen was in the bodies of Handmen who were arrested, and whom he killed when he escaped....”

Distaste curls Constantine’s lip. “I know. He demanded new bodies to replace the ones arrested.”

“And there are rumors among the Handmen, rumors that you visit the prisons and interview people who are later released and die of the Party Sickness. All that is necessary for anyone to discover the truth is to put that rumor together with a few other facts, and....”

He turns to face the window again, waves a hand. “Not now,” he says. “There is a crisis, and Taikoen may be needed.”

“
Do
you visit the prisons, Constantine?”

Constantine gazes at the window with narrowed, defiant eyes. “I don’t anymore. I did, at one point.... It seemed best to distract Taikoen with a succession of bodies, keep him occupied. Pay ahead, as it were, on his contract.”

“If this brings you down,” Aiah says, her voice turning hard, “you will have lost everything you have worked for, and you will still be in bondage to Taikoen.”

He looks at her over his shoulder again, plasm displays glittering in his eyes. “Contain it. There is no proof. It is deniable. I need Taikoen now, as I need you.”

“It is not as containable as you think. Even a rumor can wreck you.”

“
Enough!” Fury storms in his voice. “
I will not hear any more of this!
”

Constantine roars from the room, the door crashing shut behind him. Aiah stares after him. Frustration claws at her nerves. And then she looks about in surprise.

I have driven him out of his own office
, she thinks. She drifts toward the side table with the t-grip sitting atop it, brushes the grip with her fingertips. No charge tingles through her nerves; Constantine has switched the plasm off. Her reflection gazes back at her from the polished ebony table.

Taikoen has also driven Constantine away, she thinks, not just from a room, but from the life that he had led. Constantine had tried to work himself up to killing Taikoen, and he’d failed and run, and is still running. Perhaps it is the one great failure of his life, Aiah muses. A failure that he still cannot face.

Aiah takes in a breath, lets it out. Someone, she thinks, is going to have to face Taikoen on Constantine’s behalf.

Startled, she gazes out the window at her own face. It is her image carved in plasm, ten stories tall, looming over the city... and then it fades, replaced by the image of a burning building, of windows shattering as rockets explode nearby... and then Aiah’s image is back, gazing with intensity into the eyeless sockets of a skull wreathed with strawberry leaves.

It is one of the Dreaming Sisters’ plasm displays... but this one is
huge
, covering half the sky. The sober, evolving images are all of carnage and destruction: buildings in flames, staring corpses, armored vehicles poised over stacks of burning bodies. It’s like all the horrors of the late war condensed into a few seconds, with Aiah somehow woven into it, as if she were somehow key to all the terror... and it’s
sad
, not simply in the way that images of war are sad, but in the way a composition can be sad, or a chromoplay; it inspires sorrow not as a polemic about war, but as a work of art. Tears sting Aiah’s eyes, and she feels an ache deep in her throat.

The rolling images fade, leaving behind only a lingering representation of Aiah’s face, gazing out over the city with a stricken look that Aiah knows is mirrored on her own, real face, a portrait of her staring at her portrait, half in fear and half in wonder.

ARMIES STAND DOWN

CHARNI SPOKESMAN CLAIMS “MISUNDERSTANDING”

“I got your message,” Aiah tells the woman called Whore.

Whore raises eyelids heavy with dreaming, and with a languid hand she takes the copper plasm contact from her lips. “We sent you no message,” she says, “but we are pleased to see you here. If you will follow me, I will take you to Order of Eternity.”

Aiah tells her guards to wait in the lobby while she follows Whore into the sisters’ stone maze. As she passes through the first doorway she finds a pair of carved images gazing at her in the glow of the hanging lamps, dim light and trompe l’oeil artistry giving the faces a disturbing air of life. She knows the faces, Sorya and herself,
The Shadow
and
The Apprentice
, confronting each other across the corridor, one with a knife and the other looking up a recipe.

A metaphor, she admits, adequate to describe their relationship.

She approaches an alcove where a dreaming sister lies, and Aiah’s nerves sing in surprise as the woman’s eyes open and turn to face the visitor. It is as startling an effect as if one of the imagoes’ eyes had opened. As Aiah continues through the corridor, the sister puts her plasm contact down, rises from her couch, and with a soft slap of bare feet on cool stones begins to follow Aiah along the winding path.

Another imago appears,
The Architect
, with Constantine’s stern face and powerful body superimposed on the image of the man holding the protractor and a pair of dividers, and with a shiver Aiah remembers that
The Architect’s
meaning is
failure
— noble aspirations gone wrong, crumbled into dust.

In the next alcove two sisters lie dreaming. As Aiah passes their eyes open, one set dark and one light, they turn to Aiah with an identical incurious gaze, and after she walks past they rise and follow.

Here is
The Shadow
again, Sorya’s predator eyes, her ambiguous smile. Another dreaming sister opens her eyes, watches Aiah go by, and then follows. Here is an imago called
The Mage
, and it has Rohder’s face, lined and youthful at once, lacking only his ruddy complexion. Aiah appears as
The Apprentice
again, and Constantine as
The Architect
. Two more dreaming sisters, one of them the genetically altered Avian Aiah had seen earlier, rise from their couch and follow. Aiah, following Whore, feels her neck prickle under the gaze of intent raptor eyes.

More dreaming sisters rise from their couches and follow Aiah, feet slapping on stone, faces impassive as sleepwalkers’.

Death
. Aiah’s mind whirls, and she stops dead before the imago. It is Taikoen, a bodiless form, vaguely humanoid, somehow inscribed onto stone, its indistinct outlines fading into the dimly lit scene. As Aiah looks at the image, its contours actually seem to blur and shift, as if the plasm-creature was moving uneasily within its portrait. Terror throbs in Aiah’s throat. She looks wildly after Whore and sees her guide walking calmly away. Aiah almost runs after her.

Rohder, Sorya, Constantine, Aiah, and, stalking them all, Taikoen,
Death
. The forms repeat themselves again and again. More sisters rise from their alcoves to join the silent, dreamy throng that follow Aiah through the maze. Aiah doesn’t see a single
Mage
that isn’t Rohder, no
Apprentice
that isn’t Aiah. And then finally she sees a new face, the dreaming sister Order of Eternity, who waits for her calmly, seated on the mattress in one of the alcoves, legs dangling over the side, crossed at her delicate ankles.

“There is joy in the plasm now,” Order of Eternity says, the words coming in her girlish voice. “We have felt it. There is a change beginning, a change that moves through the heart of reality.”

“I thought you told me that nothing changes,” Aiah says.

“I said that no change is permanent. The change we feel may not last. But it is unlike anything any of us have experienced.” Her pale face lights with joy. “It is as if the plasm were singing to us. Singing of its pleasure.”

“I’ve been using plasm every day,” Aiah says. “I haven’t felt anything different.”

“Perhaps you are not listening.”

“
I may not have listened, but I’ve
seen
,” Aiah says. “You put my face all over the sky, in one of the biggest plasm displays I’ve ever witnessed. Me and war and death. What was that about?”

The dreaming sister hesitates. She looks away, face sober beneath her pale cap of hair. “We have seen you in our meditations. The plasm displays are nothing we
do
, nothing we create consciously.... They are reflections of our meditations, of what we feel in the plasm. And though we feel the plasm’s pleasure, we also sense, through our contemplation of the imagoes, that their present interaction is likely to lead to violence.”

“The plasm is pleased by the idea of war?”

The dreaming sister seems shocked. “No. Of course not. The plasm’s joy is in the present, and the war, if our visions are true, will be in the future. The war is not a dream, it is a nightmare, and it haunts us.”

“My face was all over the sky, and it’s all over this building. And other faces are repeating themselves, Sorya and Constantine and....”

“
Yes.” Order of Eternity rises from her couch and takes a few thoughtful steps. “We are seeing the faces on the imagoes repeating one another. Every
Apprentice
is you, every
Architect
is the same man, the one with the braided hair. You are all important to the plasm, somehow. It has to do with the change that we sense, the plasm that sings to us, in us. This has not happened before, not in the memory of anyone here, and we suspect not in the history of our order.”