Context (28 page)

‘Someday, perhaps,’ said Tom, ‘I’ll
be able to help someone else, the way you’ve helped me.’

He was echoing a promise he’d
once made to Vosie: another woman who had saved him. It was a debt he had not
yet repaid.

‘That’s the only kind of
recompense I’d consider.’ Zel smiled. ‘You’d be a natural, should you ever
decide to join the Church.’

Multi-threaded mantras sounded
intriguing—one of their core practices—but Tom knew that was not enough.

‘Take care of yourselves.’

He hitched the satchel over his
right shoulder, and set off along a plain-walled tunnel.

For
twenty-three days he walked, making better progress as the last of his injuries
healed, until he was trekking thirty kilometres daily between dawnshift and
darkfall. Through crystal caverns with spilling waterfalls, foaming white into
bottomless black pools; along ghostly, empty boulevards and gallerias where his
footsteps sounded hollow, in long-deserted realms—though Nulapeiron held ten
billion souls (and even that was not common knowledge among the plebeian
classes), in previous centuries there had been many more—and among the crowded
thoroughfares and busy markets of three different demesnes, Tom made his
solitary way.

But there were not always public
water pools or Aqua Halls to drink from, and his dwindling supply of
low-denomination cred-needles meant he could not continue travelling this way.
Too many residential tunnels required loyal-subject earstud IDs before allowing
people entrance to eateries and hostels.

He could sleep wrapped up in his
plain travelling cloak, but there was no avoiding the need for food and water.

He found himself standing one day
in a darkened rocky place where reality shifted, a tunnel exit before him
suddenly plunging out of existence, while two narrow clefts sprang into being.
Tom stumbled, falling painfully onto one knee, wondering whether he had finally
lost his mind.

Then everything around him
flickered into a third, new configuration.

Holo illusion?

But he snapped his fingers, and
although his hearing was not astute enough for echo location, the rocks before
him seemed solid. He picked up a tiny pebble, threw it, and it bounced from
hard, gnarled rockface and clattered to the ground.

Then light and shadow flickered
again, and when Tom had re-oriented his perceptions he was surrounded by tall,
bulky housecarls: muscular warriors helmed in polished bronze, allegiance cords
knotted round short tunic sleeves.

Their morphospears seemed to
gleam with an inner creamy light, sharp cutting blades positioned centimetres
from Tom’s unguarded throat.

‘Do you have business’—gravelly voice,
invisible helm-wrapped expression—‘within the Bronlah Hong?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tom.

His
missing arm was the mark of a thief, but there were other ways to lose a limb
and these were warriors. The carls made no attempt to insult or brutalize Tom
as they led him through a series of confusing tunnels—‘Maze of Light and Dark,’
someone muttered—as the source of reality shifting became clear.

It was simple but effective:
strong light sources which flicked off and on at random. Contrast produced black
shadows, hiding all detail; immediate change created the illusion of total
reconfiguration.

The housecarls marched steadily,
surrounding Tom, unaffected by the dizziness which threatened to pitch him
forward every time the illumination changed.

In an interview chamber, they
left him with a wizened man called Shihol Grenshin, whose skullcap incorporated
woven aphorisms in a dozen languages. The Bronlah Hong, he explained, was a
trading house with long-distance commercial relationships stretching across
three sectors, and they were always—when Tom asked about recruitment—looking
for experienced merchanalysts with good linguistic skills.

‘Sukhazhitne na’Noighlín?’
he asked casually, in a thick
buzz of Noileenski consonants, and seemed satisfied with Tom’s reply:
‘Nique
parovihm.’
Just a little.

There was an aptitude test, which
consisted of holomapping cargo distribution and transport requests into complex
labyrinths of tesseract-labelled arcs and nodes. To someone of Tom’s background
it was too easy, and he deliberately introduced errors into his model.

It would not do to advertise his
logosophical training.

‘Hmm.’ Master Grenshin walked
around the model, fingering his chin, sunk deep in thought. ‘Interesting
perspective here’—he pointed—‘and that minimax could save us money right now.
Real credit, I mean.’

Then he turned and shuffled away,
long robe scuffing the dusty floor, and it took Tom a moment to realize that he
had got the job.

That
evening he accepted a towel and a blanket from a square-faced woman, who pushed
them across her pale blue counter top, then directed him towards the male
workers’ tunnel.

‘Third sleeping alcove on the
left,’ she said. ‘Meals are paid for directly from your tendaily credit, in
case they didn’t tell you. And what’—turning to her small holopad and gesturing
for dictation mode—‘is your name, young man?’

‘Gazhe, er ...’ Tom coughed,
throat dry and head pounding with dehydration. ‘Gazhe Fernah, ma’am.’

Something in his tone softened
her expression.

‘There’s an aqua chamber to your right.’
She pointed. ‘Use as much as you like.’

That
first night, alone in his alcove behind heavy drapes, he opened up the stallion
talisman, revealing the mu-space crystal secreted inside, but did not dare to
operate it. He had no idea what emissions it might produce in its damaged
state, or what kind of surveillance the Bronlah Hong’s internal security teams
had in place.

But he fell asleep with the
talisman clutched in his fist, and dreamed he walked beneath Terra’s wide blue
open skies, on Alpine slopes with sweet green grass brushing against his
ankles, and woke tense with disappointment in the real world next morning.

His
new colleagues were pleasant enough: self-effacing Mivkin, who spoke with a
slight lisp and showed Tom around; Jasirah, small and dark-skinned, her smile
bright but infrequent, who told Tom after a few days that he should not chat
with the carls who were on security duty.

‘Not the done thing.’ She
half-whispered, as if she were sharing a valuable confidence. ‘A matter of
status, you know.’

Then she nodded as though
accepting grateful thanks he had not in fact offered.

Later that afternoon, having
strung together a sequence of shipment plans in a profit-optimizing fashion
which owed nothing to the Hong’s usual algorithms, Tom walked out into the
unsettling tunnels which formed the Maze of Light and Dark, and watched the
shifting colours and sliding darkness.

‘Makes me sick just looking at
it.’ The amused voice came from behind him.

‘Hi, Horush.’ Tom nodded at the
young housecarl. ‘I know what you mean.’

‘Old Lafti’—Horush was referring
to the carls’ master-at-arms—‘said you’ve requested permission to go running
here.’

So much for secrecy.

‘I know it sounds crazy—’

‘He reckons you might be a mad bastard.’
Horush removed his helmet, revealing creamy brown features, and rubbed his hand
through his black cropped hair. ‘Which is a bit rich, coming from him.’