Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (12 page)

The place was run by three androgyne neuters, sometimes known as the painted men or the weird women. Altered by surgery and genetic and cosmetic therapy, their traditions stretched back to an
early posthumanist sect. Once upon a time, they had ruled half a hundred gardens and rocks in the Belt but, like so many others, their principality had fallen to the True Empire. Now the last
remnants of their clade recruited children from refugees and poor or fallen families, and ran hostels and caravanserais for transients, or scratched a parlous existence by using an ancient school
of stochastic mathematics to make predictions about the future.

Hari took a bath, standing under a shower and scrubbing himself with a long-handled brush before climbing into the hot black water inside the big tub. He sat on a wooden ledge, submerged to his
chin, and gossiped with the old man who shared the bath with him, a free trader from Porto Jeffre. The old man asked all kinds of impertinent questions, as did the other guests during the communal
meal. Hari was famous, it seemed, in the city’s small compass. He showed them Kinson Ib Kana’s book, explained what it was and how it had fallen into his hands, asked if anyone knew how
he could find the family and friends of the dead man who had saved his life.

One of the guests told Hari about a group of ascetics she’d met on Ceres; another said that she’d once traded with Nabhomani and was sorry to hear of his death; a third declared that
dacoits had been getting too bold lately, and something should be done about them.

A big man sitting back in the shadows, wrapped in some kind of cloak like a warrior out of some saga of the long ago, said, ‘How do you know these hijackers were dacoits?’

‘They behaved like dacoits. I don’t know if that’s what they really are or where they came from,’ Hari said. ‘Not yet.’

The old man from Porto Jeffre said dacoits were getting bolder because cities and settlements and gardens lacked the resources or inclination to deal with them, and the focus of the conversation
moved away from Hari as people argued about which city was the most powerful and which the most permissive, discussed rumours about the resurgence of the black fleets and distant gardens and
settlements that had fallen under the control of dacoits, or were secretly encouraging them to attack rivals, or told anecdotes about run-ins with over-zealous security and customs officials.

By now, the dimming chandelier lights had guttered out. It was night outside the city, too. Beyond the dome’s shadow-web of diamond composite panes, Vesta’s lopsided crescent gleamed
amongst shoals of stars that washed across the black sky. Later, lying on a hard pallet on the hard ground, his head pillowed on the cryoflask, all alone amongst strangers in a strange land, Hari
comforted himself with the small hope that he had taken the first step on the long road to his revenge, and fell asleep in the middle of a fantasy of leading a small fleet of reivers against a nest
of dacoits and capturing their leader and putting him to the question, and discovering who was behind the hijack, and making a great and good crusade against them.

When Hari returned to the bourse the next morning Gabriel Daza told him that he hadn’t yet found anyone interested in salvage rights for the lifepod and gig. ‘But
give me a little time. These are delicate matters.’

‘What about our other business?’

‘You haven’t been to the Almond Pit.’

‘It’s next on my list. What do you have for me?’

Gabriel Daza looked at something to one side of Hari and said, ‘There’s good news and bad. Which would you like to hear first?’

‘Tell me about Salx Minnot Flores and Ivanova Galchan. Have they replied to my messages?’

‘That’s the bad news. I haven’t heard anything from Ivanova Galchan, and the message to Salx Minnot Flores attracted the attention of the police in Ophir. After I established
my credentials, I had a brief exchange with one of them. According to her, Salx Minnot Flores was murdered.’

The shock was slighter than that Hari had felt at the news of Rember Wole’s death and his partner’s disappearance. Hari supposed that he had been expecting the worst.

He said, ‘The police officer, did she say who killed Salx Minnot Flores, or when it happened?’

‘No. But she did ask to speak to you. I hope I haven’t got you into trouble,’ Gabriel Daza said.

‘I’ve been in trouble for some time,’ Hari said. ‘What about my query?’

‘That’s the good news. Your relative is still resident in Ophir. A trader in biologics, widowed, with two daughters. Alive, as far as I know.’

Hari thanked Gabriel Daza for his help; the young proctor reminded Hari to mention his name when he visited the Almond Pit, said that he hoped they would meet again soon.

Outside, a column of men and women were marching in solemn procession along the road that circled the big building, watched by a handful of spectators. They were all more or less baseline, the
marchers, all stripped to the waist. Heads shaven, wearing only sandals and baggy white trousers. Their arms held out before them, a bouquet of drooping wires clasped in each hand, their backs
striped with slick red threads and the waistbands of their trousers soaked in red, they shuffled behind a pair of clerics in sun-yellow robes and a single drummer who beat a slow and simple
heartbeat rhythm on the kettle drum hung at his belly. Boom-
boom
. Boom-
boom
. Boom-
boom
.

As Hari watched, the procession halted, the drum fell silent, the two clerics sang a brief prayer and shook their hands above their heads, and the marchers crossed their arms smartly over their
chests so that the handles of their flails smacked against their shoulders and wires tipped with razor taglets struck their backs, raking flesh and drawing fresh blood. The clerics pressed their
hands together and touched their foreheads with their fingertips, the drum started beating again, and the marchers moved forward, blank faces glazed with sweat, eyes fixed on infinity. Small
children in white tunics followed them, brushing the avenue’s half-life grass with strips of cloth, mopping up spatters of holy blood.

‘You won’t find what you’re looking for there,’ someone said.

Hari turned, saw a man twice his height smiling down at him: the man who had asked him about dacoits last night, in the caravanserai. The leathery folds that fell around him weren’t a
cloak, Hari realised, but wings that stretched from shoulders to hips. Within a second, the catalogue in his bios had matched the man to a posthuman clade that lived in the Republic of Arden, a
garden in the main belt’s outer edge.

The Ardenist told Hari that the marchers were a sect particular to Fei Shen.

‘Exculpationists who believe that shedding blood will help to bring about the birth of a new age. They process through the city every seventh day, and after they’ve flayed themselves
raw their clerics sing about the end times. The usual stuff: a great and holy war, the righteous inheriting the universe, everyone else damned to eternal torment. They’re castrated, the
clerics. Very pure voices. And their songs are very lovely. Very lovely, and so very wrong. I’m Rav,’ the Ardenist said, placing his right hand on a bare, broad chest slashed with the
pale ridges of old scars. ‘It isn’t my real name, but you wouldn’t be able to begin to pronounce that. You of course need no introduction. The youngblood who wants to track down
the people who hijacked his family’s ship. Well, I’m the man who can help you.’

‘Are you a reiver?’

Rav spread his arms and wings wide. ‘Do I look like a reiver?’

‘As a matter of fact—’

‘I’m no more than a humble artisan who travels the Belt in search of honest work. Exactly like you and your family. And we have something else in common. Something that you’ll
definitely be interested in. There’s a tearoom close by. Let’s talk there. I’ll explain our connection, and tell you how I can help you get your ship back.’

‘I have business elsewhere. But we can talk along the way, if you like.’

‘Those charlatans in the Avenue of the Elevation of the Mind can just about manage to implant mundane traits and recover childhood memories, but they won’t be able to get inside Dr
Gagarian’s head.’

Rav’s smile displayed a pair of impressive incisors capped with silver. Hari didn’t like that smile. It was altogether too knowing.

‘You’re thinking, how did he do that?’ the Ardenist said. ‘Is he a magician? Can he read my mind? Well, I can, just a little. You baseliners broadcast reactions and
intentions through posture and pupil dilation, blood flow in skin capillaries . . . You have some training in guarding your thoughts, youngblood, and it might work with other baseliners, but as far
as I’m concerned you’re so leaky that I can’t help picking up tells. But how I know about the head, that’s nothing but basic physics and a little deduction. If you
don’t want people to know what’s inside that cryoflask, you should use better shielding. A basic pair of X-ray spex was all I needed to see that you are carrying the head of a tick-tock
person. And according to the story you told last night, the people who hijacked your family’s ship murdered its only passenger. Dr Gagarian, a tick-tock philosopher. The hijackers wanted
something hidden in his files, they killed him, they cut off his head . . . And you managed to escape with it, and ever since you’ve been wondering what it contains. Why those hijackers want
it so badly. How you can exchange it for your family, your ship. You see? Nothing to it.’

‘Several people have already tried to take it from me,’ Hari said. ‘And at least two of them are dead.’

Rav’s smile widened a notch. His grass-green eyes had the slit pupils of a predator. His mop of golden curls was bushed up by a white rag knotted over one ear. ‘I can see that
we’re going to have fun together. And I also see that you don’t have access to the city’s commons yet – otherwise you would have checked my status. I can fix that for you,
free of charge.’

‘That’s why I need to see a head doctor,’ Hari said

But he knew it sounded weak. He was fairly certain that the Ardenist was going to try to sell him something he didn’t want or need, but what harm could talking do? And he might learn
something. He didn’t know enough. He knew almost nothing, really. He didn’t even know what he needed to know.

Rav told him that there was no need to pay a head doctor to get his bios tweaked. ‘It’s a little scam to bleed the city’s visitors. Easy enough to bypass if you have the ways
and means. I’ll introduce you to someone who’ll fix you up free of charge, and then we’ll talk about our common interests, and how we can help each other.’

She was a small, slight woman not much older than Hari, the sleeves of her oversized quilted jacket cuffed back to her elbows. She yawned when Rav started to explain who Hari
was and how he had ended up in Fei Shen, said every transient had some kind of bad-luck story and none of them were very interesting.

‘Use this, kid,’ she told Hari, and threw a package at him.

His bios caught it, ran it through a sandbox to check for hidden djinns, implemented the simple trait it contained. Layers of information settled through him. Map and phone functions, a ticker
that showed the slow, steady unravelling of his store of credit. The hours left before he had to go to work for the city, or find a way of leaving it.

He thanked the woman (her tag was a wireframe cube that contained a clear blue flame and no readable information, not even her name); she shrugged inside her jacket.

This was in a dark little shop where thick, heavy True lifebooks, bound in metal or manskin or shimmering polymers, were chained to wooden presses. A single volume was spreadeagled on a lectern,
its broad pages spread wider than the span of Hari’s arms and printed with double columns of elegant handwritten script as black as the outer dark. Intricate and colourful illustrations
framed the tall initial letters of the first words of every paragraph, and at the top of the right-hand page a woman with a burning gaze and bright yellow hair looked out of a window, talking about
something that no doubt had been important in the long ago, when she had been alive.

The teashop was next door, an open-air terrace two storeys up, overlooking a hutong crowded with stalls selling flotsam and jetsam from the long ago. Rav and Hari settled on cushions at the edge
of the terrace, Hari with a cup of smoky gunpowder tea, Rav with a glass of hot water into which he crushed acid yellow berries, releasing a sharp pungent odour and giving the water a urinous tint.
Hari’s tweaked bios revealed schools of tags glittering above the stalls, explicating the function and provenance of every item. Machines, machine parts. Antique costumes. The glass
catafalque of an ancient surgical bot. Frayed battle colours. Cases of trait rings. A flock of dead microsats. A p-suit helmet with a slit visor and a pinlight crest, reputed to have been owned by
the Champion of the Tharsis Protectorate . . .

‘I wouldn’t be surprised to find trinkets excavated by your family down there,’ Rav said.

Hari blushed: it was exactly what he’d been thinking. ‘You tailor algorithms to revive old machines,’ he said, reading the information off Rav’s tag. ‘Is that what
we have in common – salvage?’

‘That’s what I do for a living, but that isn’t why I came here to find you. Dig deeper. Begin at the beginning. Where was I quickened?’

‘That I already knew,’ Hari said. ‘The Republic of Arden. My family had some business there, years ago.’

‘Before the Bright Moment, no doubt. Before my people took a wrong turn.’

‘You had a civil war . . .’

‘Now we’re getting to it,’ Rav said. ‘We were philosophers once upon a time, mostly interested in the fine structure of universes. Theoretical work, mostly. And then the
elders became infected with bad ideas about the nature of the Bright Moment, and joined up with an end-time cult, the Saints. That’s when we had ourselves that civil war. I was on the losing
side.’