Glass (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

When the two orange-suited enforcers barred her from walking further along Red Lane, Archivist Subadwan began to worry. The din of the city, groaning and clashing all around, and the inebriating effect of the jellies she had eaten conspired to confuse her mind. It was late at night. And both of the enforcers were armed with serrated scimitars.

‘Halt!’ one bellowed through a megaphone. ‘You’re one of the Gaya girls, ain’t you?’

Subadwan leaned against a scuffed copper wall. Because she was small and slim, some of the Triad’s more officious servants found their zeal difficult to restrain. Yet tonight she wore no Archive clothes, dressing instead in red and yellow striped breeches, a blue jacket embroidered with bells, and a black scarf. Her dark, braided hair was streaked yellow, the glossy locks reaching down to the small of her back. Four opal earstuds glittered as white mote storms passed through the perspex paving below her feet.

Subadwan stood up and with an effort raised her hands for sign language.
I am Subadwan of the Archive of Gaya. I am no child. I have done nothing illegal.

‘Ha!’ came the inevitable response through the megaphone. ‘Show us your fishtail, girl.’

A shocking thought entered Subadwan’s mind.

‘Um…’ she said, hands in pockets, apprehension draining away some of the lethargy she felt. The men approached until they were close enough to hear her voice over the hundred-decibel babble that the Rusty Quarter produced. ‘Um, I seem to have left it at home.’

‘At home? And you so high in Gaya’s estimation? Dear Subadwan, consider yourself under our jurisdiction ’til we can stand you up in front of our top orange.’

‘This is just harassment,’ Subadwan retorted. ‘You were waiting for me. Gaya save us.’

‘Say, quiet, girl.’ Their sweating, Cray-grimed faces leered down at her, framed by dangling black fuzzlocks. Each of them grabbed an arm.

She was forced to move, but when she showed herself able to walk they relaxed their grips. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.

‘Enforcer House.’

Subadwan tried to stop. They tugged her into Feverfew Street. ‘All that way? Why? I’ve got my ’tail at home. We can go there and I’ll show it to you.’ To this the brute pair just laughed.

Feverfew Street was golden bright, illuminating the plastic houses on either side to their upper storeys. Some of the taller towers were shadowy up high, their turrets and spires indistinguishable from the dusty night air unless some blue flickering aerician should swerve around one, or the halogen lamps of an aeromorph, far, far higher, happened to be occluded. Subadwan, as she was marched down the street, tried to avoid the glances of other nocturnal folk, feeling ashamed that once again she – her Archive – had become the target of Triad callousness. Huddled groups of outers lay among cables and ducts stretched along the street, their filthy, dusty bodies clothed in rags. A few lessers, many dressed in the official uniforms of their masters, ran by on errands. A clerk of the Archive of Selene sped by, her white gown rippling.

After a few minutes they reached the part of Feverfew Street that had become vitrified. To Subadwan’s right, panes of glass, bent into spikes and bubbles glittering blue and white, reflected and refracted the light of the street; houses to her left seemed to have avoided the infection. But even from the street she could sense an inner darkness to the glass – its black heart, where luminophages multiplied unchecked. ‘That’s what you should be fighting,’ Subadwan shouted to the enforcers. ‘Why aren’t you doing anything about our city turning to glass?’

‘Say, quiet,’ they responded.

‘Glass can cut people,’ Subadwan continued. ‘Why don’t you get on with clearing it up?’

‘We said
quiet.
’

They hurried on into the Blistered Quarter. The noise was deafening. Subadwan had not had a chance to put earmuffs on. The two enforcers wore radio transceivers over their ears and so were spared much of the din but, as they made south, the screeching, crashing, cacophonous tumult of the Blistered Quarter in collaboration with the sweltering heat reduced Subadwan to tears. ‘Give me earmuffs!’ she yelled.

Casually, as if humouring a lesser or humiliating an outer, one of the enforcers produced a pair of greasy earmuffs, which he then offered to Subadwan upon the point of his scimitar. The gesture was not lost on Subadwan. With poor grace she snatched the covers and put them on.

Entering Ficus Street they passed the Water Purification House, crossed the river into Eastcity, then made up Deciduo Street, a bright alley sparkling red and gold on to which Enforcer House abutted. Here they stopped. A tall figure wrapped in orange approached from the gloomy building, steel boot heels clacking on the perspex street, a fish mask covering the upper half of her face. Subadwan knew this to be a pyuton fellow of the enforcers. ‘What have you got there?’ said a whirring voice.

‘Subadwan of Gaya,’ came the smart response. ‘Caught out without ID.’

‘I’ll take her in.’

The pyuton, producing a two-foot revolver from a holster slung over her back, gestured Subadwan into the building. This being the latest of many infractions, Subadwan knew what to do: walk along the stuffy, black-carpeted, so-silent corridor to the door at the end marked ZF1 and then wait – standing, not seated, for if you sat somebody would poke your arm and make you rise.

At the door a pyuter voice said, ‘Enter.’ Subadwan opened the door to room ZF1 then walked inside.

Silvery light greeted her, a light that emanated from the walls and the roof. As ever, the small pyuton with the matted ginger fuzzlocks, the steel tooth brace and the calm, round face that looked as if it had never known a feeling sat at the room’s only desk, sheets of plastic in front of her. ‘Subadwan,’ she said, her voice harsh.

Know your rights, Gaya’s knowledge taught.

Subadwan knew her rights. ‘Call Rhannan,’ she told the triader official. ‘Call her now and she’ll speak for me.’

‘You think Gaya’s lone Triad member will help you?’ came the reply. The pyuton pressed grey pads, inlaid as an arc in the desk melamine. ‘The
only
representative of Gaya on the Triad?’ she continued.

Sensing that the pyuton did not want her here, Subadwan suppressed her own irritation. Maybe it would be best simply to accept this incident and swallow her pride.

‘Show me your identification fishtail,’ the pyuton demanded.

‘I can’t. I accidentally forgot to put it in my pocket.’

‘That is a transgression. Archivists of Gaya must carry a fishtail at all times.’ The pyuton looked at her desk, a portion of which was flickering with information; lines and diagrams of blue and black within the white. ‘I see this is the thirteenth time you have stepped across the Triad’s boundary.’

‘Might be, yes.’

‘It is logged. We shall decide what to do with you within seven days. You had better depart.’

Subadwan left the room, returning to the front of Enforcer House, where she was expelled. A group of jeering enforcers demanded back the earmuffs.

What would happen now? Of course, she did not know: and that was the point. Sometimes there were penalties, other times there were not, but every time, as the Triad knew, the miscreant suffered by not knowing what was in store. Subadwan however, despite her youth, had developed a method of avoiding this subtle mental torture, and that was to follow tenets of personal indifference to the Triad. She did not care. Lord Archivist Rhannan and Archivist Aswaque, Gaya love them, were her only superiors, and so short of assassination she was safe even from Cray’s Reeve, repugnant Umia of the Archive of Noct. She did not care.

Subadwan’s home was a cool house made of bronze and copper in the Rusty Quarter, where Cray’s most ancient metals had been forged into dwellings, courtyards and cloisters. But just walking the streets had stained her clothes black, and her skin, she knew from experience, would be as grimy as any street outer’s. It was late, almost midnight in fact, but the Baths never closed.

She hurried across to Lac Street, followed the road leading around the Swamps – that putrid black heart of Cray – then made south for Peppermint Street. Glass shards crunched under her boots, making her slip and slide. Crossing the bridge into Eastcity she noticed that even this far downstream the river remained a sooty gel, thick enough for a pair of scribes of the Archive of Vein Extraction to walk along it on gridiron shoes. Hastening into the Plastic Quarter, she soon found herself at the Baths. Far above, in the discordant sky, sheet lightning flashed between hovering aeromorphs.

But here stood Cray’s most beautiful building: and it was soundproofed. The clamour of aerial vehicles, plastic buildings, heat exchangers, groaning architecture, electronic devices and speakers, cables and pipes choking every street – the ceaseless noise of Cray – all this was here reduced by means of felt padding and pyuter-controlled anti-sound. Here, at last, Subadwan could remove her head-band and not risk damaging her hearing.

Here also she would find one of her closest friends, Liguilifrey the blind masseuse, who with Calminthan the Laverwoman ran the Baths. Liguilifrey was a little older than Subadwan and beholden to the Archive of Perfume, but these differences had done little to weaken their decade of friendship.

The Baths were twinned domes of blue-veined marble. Passing through the only entrance, a double door of finest polythene, Subadwan walked along claustrophobic corridors until she reached a set of changing rooms not unlike the cells of a hive in their cylindrical form. She undressed and, following ancient tradition, folded her clothes inside a niche in the polished wall, knowing they would be washed by Bath pyutons then replaced.

At this late hour the Baths would be almost empty. She heard only a few voices echoing. Entering the bathing chamber, two linked circular pools of steaming water with great domes for their roofs, she made for the nearest pyuton. ‘What is the temperature?’ she asked.

The pyuton was sitting on the crumbly stone edge of the pool, its amputated legs in the water. ‘Two ninety-four,’ it replied. Subadwan glanced at the other thirty pyutons, sitting around the pool, gazing into the water. Cables linked their spine vertebrae to the Baths’ power source. Tradition required them to sit here for years at a time, the biomechanical transducers hanging from their ruined legs heating the water.

Subadwan walked into the water by way of limestone steps. Happily naked, in her favourite place, she relaxed, lying against the side to let her muscles loosen. Some people liked massage, but she preferred the anonymous touch of water. Few sensations surpassed water.

‘’Dwan?’

The voice reverberated above gurgling water. Subadwan, dozing, turned around to see a figure she knew, dim against the gleam of discharging glow-beans.

‘Aquaitra. What are you doing here?’

Aquaitra entered the pool and, after hugging Subadwan, lay back until her head was above water. Her skin was dark, her black curly hair damp around her scalp, and she wore as much bakelite jewellery as all three of her superiors put together.

‘I was searching for you,’ Aquaitra replied. ‘I looked all around the Archive–’

‘I’ve not been there since this afternoon.’

‘–then I went up to your house, then down to my house to see if you had passed by, then I went all the way down to the Water Purification House, because I knew you had business there today.’

‘Only some independents in need of shriving.’

‘Then I thought of coming here.’

Subadwan nodded, causing ripples to spread out. They were almost alone, just two men and a sleepy old woman at the far end. ‘What’s so important that you needed to do all that?’

‘There was a pyuton to see you.’

Subadwan looked into her friend’s eyes. ‘What pyuton?’

‘She said she needed to converse with you. I said you might be here, or possibly at the Damp Courtyard.’

‘I
was
at the Damp Courtyard. Well, I expect it’s some Triader pyuton come to annoy me. I got arrested today.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘A couple of enforcers dragged me down to Deciduo Street.’

‘What happened?’

Subadwan splashed her feet at the water’s surface, as if to mask the slight shame she still felt. ‘On a seven-day notice. They’ll probably leave me be. I’ll tell Rhannan, she might put in a word for me.’

‘Was it genuine?’

Subadwan laughed. ‘They were waiting for me, the morons. They knew where I was, who I was. Happened I’d forgotten my fishtail.’

‘But you’re all right now?’

‘Yes, thank Gaya.’

A voice said, ‘That is good!’

They both turned to see a tall pyuton wrapped in a brown shawl that offered little to disguise a voluptuous figure. The pyuton had a pale oval face and spiky black hair, her eyes menacing violet, almost fierce under thick eyebrows; but despite the pyuton’s position towering above them at the side of the pool, Subadwan was not going to be threatened. ‘What do you want?’ she asked sharply.

‘You are Subadwan of the Archive of Gaya?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wish to speak with you.’ The pyuton turned to Aquaitra and added, ‘In confidence.’

Aquaitra splashed about as she tried to stand up. ‘I’ll go–’

‘No,’ Subadwan said, trying to grab her friend’s arm.

‘I have to, ’Dwan. I have an early morning tomorrow. We can meet after breakfast.’

Aquaitra walked off but turned to glance back and sign,
I’ll stay to listen. I’ll lipread.

‘Let us make for the other pool,’ the pyuton said. ‘It is empty.’

‘I’ll swim there,’ Subadwan replied.

Menacingly, the pyuton walked at her side as Subadwan swam without haste through the narrow channel joining the twin pools. The bare plastic feet, she noticed, were clean. The pyuton must have worn boots, must have taken them off before entering the water chambers. So she was following Crayan tradition – this was not official harassment. Most likely the pyuton did not want to cause a disturbance. Interesting.

At the far side of the Baths, Subadwan sat in shallow water, ensuring that her face and that of the pyuton, now crouching beside her on the pool’s edge, were visible from Aquaitra’s position. ‘What do you want?’ she asked for a second time.