Context (12 page)

No sign of anyone following.
Shivering, he walked, pain throbbing in his thigh.

He knew that psychopaths, born
without the normal modalities of consciousness and conscience, were
neurologically different. Before his logosophically trained analytical
abilities, it was impossible to deny the darker aspects of his own obsessive,
driven, often violent past.

But he knew that the men he had
seen today were something other than social outcasts, or unfortunate
individuals damaged in the womb. Their strange abilities stemmed from more than
military training.

They might be more or less than
human, but they were certainly
other.
Even now, concerned only with Elva’s
loss, when geopolitics and eldritch phenomena had never seemed less relevant,
Tom feared them.

Checkpoint.

*** AURINEATE CORE ***

Militia squad. Stone faces,
gleaming graser rifles.

*** TRAVEL-TAGS
REQUIRED ***

Tom’s tag sparked with ruby
light, and then he was out of Sturmgard and back amid the rich security which
pervaded central Aurineate Grand’aume.

A
patio led to moss gardens, overlooking a broad boulevard running crosswise. Tom
walked to the balustrade, leaned over. There was plenty of foot traffic—freedmen,
vassals and servitors dragging smoothcarts—and, in the central aisle,
slow-moving levanquins encrusted with baroque ornamentation. The soft lyrical
mating songs of caged blindmoths floated upwards.

A few lev-cars glided just
beneath the marble ceiling, and some of them were studded with precious rubies
and sapphires, their interiors rich with exotic fabrics, perfumed with
exquisite scents from Sectorin Fralnitsa or the blind chemist sages of
Rilkutan.

The Aurineate Grand’aume was
possibly the most prosperous realm Tom had visited. But he could not help
wondering if scarcity and squalor were likewise absent from the lower strata,
and whether their inhabitants knew anything of the wealth and luxury enjoyed by
those who dwelt above.

Emerald lights strobed.

Tom stepped back from the
balustrade just as a lev-car drew level, hovering, while fluorescent
emerald-green rings pulsed along its hull. Its membrane-door softened and
liquefied; a man poked his head through.

‘Lord Corcorigan?’ The driver was
blond, lightly bearded, with an amber ovoid set beneath his left cheekbone. ‘My
name is Ralkin Velsivith. I’d be honoured, sir, if you would step aboard.’

No weapons were visible, but
there were other means of coercion and Tom could not be bothered to argue with
someone who flew an official vehicle but used the polite forms.

Instead, Tom laid his black cane
on the balustrade, swung his legs over so that he was standing on the lev-car’s
vestigial stub wing, retrieved his cane and climbed inside.

The
cabin was small, furnished in black: comfortable, but not luxurious.

‘What does the flashing green
indicate?’ Tom gestured at the sliding green pulses outside, now appearing
muted: filtered out to avoid distraction. ‘Security services?’

‘Oh, no.’ Velsivith took the car
down a few metres, then stepped up the speed. ‘That’s for civilian use: anyone
can turn on their emergency strobe.’

But Velsivith was not a civilian.
No ordinary inhabitant of the Grand’aume’s highest stratum would travel with a blatant
silver dagger sheathed hilt forward at each hip, in a double cross-draw
position designed for speed and misdirection.

‘So if you’re late for dinner’—despite
himself, Tom was intrigued by the notion of emergency signals for everyone -’you
just turn on the strobe and redplane the speed.’

‘Ha! No... There’s a specified
list of valid domestic emergencies.’

‘Even so.’ Tom looked out at the
boulevard flowing past below.

“The penalty for misuse’—with a
glance at Tom—‘is amputation of a hand. First offence.’

‘Really.’ And when Velsivith’s
face tightened in silence, Tom added: ‘Interesting realm you have here, sir.’

The lev-car banked left,
accelerating hard.

They
touched down in a holding bay lined with marble, where each wall bore a shield-like
crest wrought from iron, surmounted by spikes like black metallic thorns. They
descended from the lev-car and Velsivith led Tom to an octagonal reception
chamber.

Silver security mannequins stood
in all eight corners, their liquid silver skins filled with twisted reflections
of their red granite surroundings, and distorted images of each person who
entered here.

From behind a marble-fronted
desk, the duty officer, a pretty plumpish woman, told Tom to take a seat.

‘They’ll be with you shortly,
sir.’

The Aurineate Grand’aume’s
official seal-of-the-realm, a complex tricon of two hundred hues and convoluted
topography, rotated endlessly above her desk.

Velsivith touched finger to
forehead in salute. ‘I’ll take my leave, Lord Corcorigan.’

The amber ovoid inset in his
cheek, catching a spark of golden light, seemed to wink at Tom. ‘Good luck.’
And, to the duty officer: ‘See ya later, darlin’.’

She sighed and shook her head,
more from tiredness than annoyance.

Tom sat down, and watched
Velsivith leave. He leaned back.

And waited.

Then, driven by a feeling he
could not have named, he stood up with his cane’s assistance, avoided the
receptionist’s gaze and walked slowly out through the square archway which
Velsivith had used. The silver mannequins remained unmoving as he passed.

Outside, Tom found himself in a
ring-shaped chamber around a central well. In the atrium below, Velsivith was
greeting a slender, dark-cloaked, pale-eyed woman, kissing her with the ease of
long familiarity.

They left together, hand in hand.
Tom pondered on them, on the way the woman had moved, the way she cocked her
head at Velsivith’s approach. It came to him that the woman was blind, and
intimate with Velsivith yet not dependent on him.

It gave an interesting insight into
the man, a contrast to his breezy flirtation with the receptionist. Smiling
sadly, Tom returned to the reception chamber and regained his seat.

His injured thigh began to ache
once more, but this time the pain seemed almost welcome: like an old friend
dropping in for a visit, unannounced and with no indication whether this was a
brief reunion or an extended stay.

They
were very respectful. When they showed him into the low-ceilinged chamber,
motioning him towards a plain but comfortable lev-chair, they used polite forms
of address, and couched every order as a humble yet formal request.

But it was clear nonetheless that
he was not at liberty to leave without answering their questions, and that if
he tried he would learn the difference between a social occasion and an
interrogation.

There were three of them, and
they introduced themselves in turn. Feldrif sat to Tom’s left: lean and
black-skinned, his pale silk tunic adorned with ruffles whose frivolity was in
sharp contrast to the gauntness of his face, the watchful intelligence in his
amber eyes.

On Tom’s right, Altigorn was a
plump white man in burgundy robes, with fat-folds squeezing his eyes almost
shut. An off-cycle eunuch, whose implants could flood his body with
testosterone and adrenaline at will, his bulk comprising muscle as well as fat:
not to be underestimated.