Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (43 page)

When he was spent, he sagged back onto the couch and stroked the sweat-sheened skin of the blonde’s hips and stomach, filled with a sense of satisfied peace. The room was silent, the stillness after a storm, and he felt like sleeping.

A moment passed before he realised what was missing: the brunette’s gasping had ceased.

He belatedly turned to see. Xenophou and the woman had stopped moving, although they were still coupled. As Martin watched, the reve levered himself backwards and slid his erect penis from the woman’s pouting vagina. The brunette made a small noise deep in her throat, and, breathing heavily, sank back onto her haunches. Xenophou stood just as wearily, his legs shaking. By the time he was upright, his erection had completely vanished.

Looking around the room — at the brunette, at Martin and the blonde, still entwined — the reve blinked his dark eyes once and shook his head.

“Enough,” Xenophou said, his voice soft and filled with what might have been sadness.

Martin stared up at him, remembering what the Reve Guillard had told him. This was the first word the new reve had spoken in weeks.

Before Martin could think of anything to say in response, Xenophou had gathered his clothes in a bundle and moved for the door. Hastily disentangling himself from the blonde, Martin leapt to grab his arm. The reve’s flesh was uncannily dry and cold. Xenophou looked down at his hand, and Martin removed it.

Without another word, the reve opened the door and left the room.

Martin made sure the door was locked before turning around. Behind him, the brunette had taken his seat on the sofa. Stretching her limbs, ignorant of the significance of what had just happened, she whispered softly to the blonde: business talk. Martin caught a few fragments of the conversation as he walked to the bedroom to regain his composure.

The brunette was exhausted, as was only to be expected. The reve’s performance had been far more than she had anticipated; nothing had prepared her for this, although she had heard occasional rumours. The blonde sounded almost jealous, until one item of gossip caught her attention.

“Not once?” she asked, obviously disbelieving her ears. “After all that?”

“Not even a trickle.” The brunette sounded deeply puzzled. “And you know, I don’t think he ever would have.”

Martin nodded silent understanding to his reflection in the bedroom mirror. No sweat, he thought. No fluids of any kind. Even if they had continued for an hour longer, neither the brunette nor Xenophou could have coaxed so much as a drop from his desiccated, dry flesh.

Even if he’d wanted to.

Enough
...?

Martin went back into the other room to ask the women if they wanted to leave. When the blonde smiled up at him and said no, the brunette agreed. They had been paid for the night and, whether anything else happened or not, his bed was more comfortable than either of theirs. Martin, although his mind was torn between conflicting impulses, didn’t doubt that something
would
happen, if he was up to it. It wasn’t every day he had the chance to spend the night with two beautiful women. Besides, sleep would be a long time coming, and he wanted to be spared the involuntary wakefulness.

Finally, with the brunette beneath him and the blonde stroking his stomach from behind, he managed to forget about Xenophou and remember himself again — hairy, sweating and above all alive ...

And when sleep did come, it was black and empty, like death.

~ * ~

Sudden movement woke him an hour before his alarm was due to go off. Rolling over with a grunt, he realised that the lights were on and the bed was empty.

“I’m sorry to disturb your
ménage a trois,”
said a familiar voice from somewhere near his feet, “but I couldn’t wait any longer.”

He sat up and rubbed at his eyes, fatigue dulling his reactions. The Reve Guillard was a pale blur crouched at the end of his bed, poised like a ghoul to steal his soul. The elaborate ball-gown, along with her airs and graces of the previous night, was gone; in its place she wore a white one-piece suit folded and draped with sashes to hide her figure. It was hard to tell where the fabric stopped and her deathly pale skin started. Her head, like Xenophou’s, was completely bald; the angles of her skull were sharp.

Not a chandelier any more, Martin thought. Rather, a shellfish grown old and crusty beneath its carapace. He wondered whether he could ever come close to the innermost substance of the Reve Guillard, if there was any left at all.

“What are you doing here?” he managed.

“I dismissed the girls so we could be alone,” she said, avoiding the question. Her dark, cold eyes regarded the tangle of sheets about his legs. “Their services were adequate for the price I paid, I gather. Certainly their effect on M. Xenophou was worth every cent.”

Martin slithered along the mattress until his back was flush with the wall. From that position, he watched his visitor closely.
“You
paid them, then? Why? To make your friend speak?”

“My ward, not my friend,” she said, her face closed. Again she avoided the question. “The Change isn’t always easy, and it’s sometimes very hard. The body is a machine, easily upgraded; the mind, sadly, is not. People either want to be a reve or not, and sometimes the only way to find out is to go through the process: when you stand on the other side and look back, knowing that you can’t ever return ... that’s when you know for certain.”

M. Guillard’s potent gaze had drifted across the room as she spoke, and returned to him at that point. “Many choose the fiery path, more than you’ll find in the official figures. Self-immolation is not difficult to achieve, if you have the right equipment at hand. All it takes is a nice, clear flame, and plenty of oxygen, and —” she looked sad for a moment “—
gone.
What might have been centuries, ended in a second.”

“Perhaps that’s what worries him,” Martin said, wondering if he was dreaming. “Spyro, I mean. The ‘centuries’ part. The more I learn about being a reve, the less attractive it seems. The thought of being a...” He swallowed the word
zombie
barely in time. “Being immortal, I mean, does have its drawbacks.”

“Yet
you
want it, Martin,” she said, her voice forceful. “I feel the desire in you more strongly than I have ever felt it before — even if you yourself aren’t yet aware of it, or of what it means.”

“I’m not?” he asked, confused. “That is, I do?”

“Of course. And mod Alkis agrees. Having studied the Change in more detail than most reves, his opinion played no small part in my decision to talk with you here and now.”

Martin thought this over. She and the mod had discussed him after his departure. She and who else?

“Talk to me, then,” he said. “Get it over with. As honoured as I am at warranting such undivided attention from someone as busy as yourself, I object to being rudely wakened when I have company.”

“That’s fine thanks for the fun I gave you last night, Martin.” The reve almost smiled, although the expression was thin. “Fine thanks indeed. But I take your point. I have committed a serious breach of protocol, and should expect brusqueness in return.” She turned away for a moment, and laughed once.

Martin waited in silence.

When her attention returned to him, the smile was gone. “The thing I have to say to you is this: there’s more at stake here than family pride. Whatever you and your uncle have planned, think carefully before committing yourself to it.”

“Plans?” he countered, feigning innocence although his stomach had instantly turned to ice. “What plans?”

“How could there not be one, Martin?” she shot back. “PERIPETY-WEYN, with its heightened attention to detail, has plotted extrapolations of your development given the creative and business acumen of your family’s germ line.
Le Comptable Froid
watches human affairs from afar and sees a world ripe for change. Elaine Bennett agrees: that there is something fundamentally exciting about the idea of a new House to which both reves and mortal humans cannot help but respond. Not even Professor Munton himself, the dear old fool, could possibly miss this one.” This time the smile was real. “You are in a pivotal position, my boy. And the one in the best place beside you to influence future events is the very person behind your application for revenation: your uncle. Coincidence? I think not. You’re up to something, or being forced into something, and it’s my job — no, my
responsibility
— to make certain that you know exactly what you are putting at stake before you even begin.”

“And what’s that, exactly?”

“Why,
you,
of course.” She frowned at him as though he had said something stupid. “It still hasn’t struck you yet, has it? What it means to be a reve?”

“Well —”

“Consider it now. How do you think it will feel to watch your parents grow old and die? Your sister, her partner and her children? Your aunt and uncle?
Especially
your uncle. What will happen if you balance your long future against his short-term gains and come out the loser in the end? Letting a mortal man pull your strings is the most dangerous thing a reve can do, for the time will inevitably come when the strings fall slack and leave you dangling. Regret is the widow of opportunity, as they say, and eternity is a long time in which to regret your mistakes.”

“What mistakes?”

“You’ll know if you make them, I promise you that.”

“Is that a warning, M. Guillard?”

Again, the abbreviated laugh. “Nothing so crude: just stating a fact. There’s every chance we’ll still know each other in a thousand years, no matter what happens in the next hundred, and every time I meet you I’ll be sure to remind you of the actions you are considering now. Persistence alone can be a very effective form of punishment.”

“I’m sure,” he agreed, “if you’re the one behind it.” Then another thought occurred to him: “But that still doesn’t explain why you’ve come to me now. The urge didn’t strike you from nowhere. You must have known where my room was in advance in order to send the women here so quickly. Which means you knew who I was all along.”

“Yes, yes.” She dismissed the allegation with a wave of a hand. “Whether I knew who you were or not is irrelevant. It wasn’t until my team had taken a good look at you, and confirmed my impression, that I knew we had to talk. And why not now, when your memory of last night is so strong? Before your uncle has had time to twist your impressions to suit his will.”

Martin opened his mouth to protest, but she didn’t give him the opportunity.

“He will tell you, no doubt, that we are decadent, fossilised creatures in need of a good shock; that five hundred years of imposed stability has suffocated the Earth and all its living children. But I disagree. It is not change we fear, but
undirected
change. Consider the trends, Martin, and how we embrace them instantly throughout the System. Study how progress
has
been made, in an orderly, rational fashion, without revolution and bloodshed to give it impetus. We acknowledge the need for evolution without allowing chaos to reign supreme, and thereby ground inevitable tensions into constructive endeavours. The short-lived have never had it so good.

“But watch what happens when something takes us by surprise. See how strongly we fight back ... even those of us who may have initially welcomed the change.”

“You’re reactionary by nature,” he broke in, speaking his mind for the first time in her presence. “Nothing I can do will alter that, so I have no choice but to fight it.”

“No. Change is inevitable, and House Winterford may yet prove to be the catalyst for something new and exciting — but do let
us
be the judge of that, not your uncle.”

The Reve Guillard regarded him with something approaching pity, and rose gracefully to her feet. “That is what I came here to tell you. I have no official role in the Plutocracy, but I am not without influence. Nor am I close-minded. If you choose to confide your plans in me, and I find wisdom within them, then I will support you in every regard. I make just as winning an ally as I do an enemy.”

Martin stared at her, stunned by the offer. Discuss his plans with a reve? With
her?
Did she think he was stupid?

His thoughts must have been plainly visible on his face, for she smiled and patted his naked foot. “Do think about it, Martin, at least. I will always be available to talk to you, should you take me up on my offer. But we won’t meet again until after you awake from the Change — when, as one reve to another, we can discuss this properly. If we cannot come to an agreement even then, we will have no choice but to go our separate ways.”

“And if I choose to forgo the Change?”

She blinked once. “Why ever would you do that?”

He took her point. In her eyes, why
would
he?

“Agreed, then. We will talk afterwards.”

“Good,” she said, and suddenly the conversation was over. With a curt nod, she turned and headed for the open door.

“Wait,” Martin called after her. “What about Spyro? Is he still talking? Has he recovered?”

She stopped in the doorway. “Spyro Xenophou is dead,” she stated flatly, her eyes revealing nothing.
“Truly
dead. He killed himself at 06:50 hours this morning.”

“How—?” Martin stopped himself with difficulty. That wasn’t the right question — he could guess the answer: the fiery path. Through his dismay, he forced himself to think clearly.
“Why?”