by Simon Kewin
Soon, though, there would be little space to move as more and more people crowded onto the island. A hum of voices filled the air, the occasional word or cry of anger surfacing from the hubbub. The City Guard and the military had cordoned off several of the roads to provide a route for the carnival marchers, and she heard more than one argument as revellers were prevented from crossing roads or from sitting where they wished. The masks the revellers wore were as varied and exotic as Ondo had promised: painted representations of mythical beasts; bird headdresses adorned with brightly-hued feathers; the exaggerated faces of real people, presumably caricatures. One brave soul even wore a purple mask that was, clearly, supposed to be Godel. The reveller barged past Selene, whooping and shouting, running fast, as five guards pushed through the crowd after them. More than one person deliberately failed to get out of the way quickly, slowing the guards down in their pursuit.
She also saw more and more people wearing a completely blank mask devoid of any facial features. They came in a variety of skin tones, but with only eye-holes to see out of. They tended to move through the crowd in groups and, from their body-language, appeared wary, always looking around for possible threats where most people ambled along enjoying the sun.
She'd given her inner Ondo access to her sensory perceptions. She spoke to him inside her head. “Do you know what those plain masks are?”
“I don't. I've reviewed images of previous carnivals, and I could find no one wearing them. It seems to be a new innovation.”
“It looks coordinated. You think they're Concordance agents?”
“They already control the military and the temples, and they have full oversight of events on the ground. Would they need to infiltrate the crowd, too?”
“If they did, I guess they'd wear masks that didn't mark them out. This is something else, rebels or troublemakers.”
“Most likely,” said Ondo. “Stay away from them. If it comes to violence, make sure you're not caught up in it. Remember, the Temple disciples aren't particularly peaceable, either. They're certainly not afraid to attack those they consider infidels. Their approach to religious conversion has traditionally been … assertive.”
She followed a phalanx of the blank-masks, keeping a few metres behind. They were trying to force their way through the crowds filing into a square, but the press of bodies was already too great. One of them indicated a side-passage between two of the taller buildings and pushed that way, leading the others. Intrigued, and trying to look like she wasn't, Selene followed.
A maze of alleyways zig-zagged between buildings, through dusty yards. She had no maps to show where they led, which ones were dead-ends. Several times she caught a glimpse of the rainbow crowds between the walls. The group she was trailing appeared to be locals, familiar with the shortcuts and hidden ways that any city-dweller would know. They ran into a courtyard, high walls obscuring them from the crowd, and stopped abruptly.
Selene stopped, too, a few metres back, hiding behind the corner of a yellow building, trying to understand what was going on. She carried a finger-sized blaster strapped to her ankle, completely illegal on Migdala. She drew it now. Up ahead, there were shouts of rage, and the group of blank-masks were suddenly fighting someone. They'd pulled wooden staffs and short, stabbing blades from within their clothing and were swinging them as they jockeyed for position. They'd been ambushed by a phalanx of the City Guard. The latter were armed with blasters, but in the confined space couldn't safely use them. Instead, they'd drawn charged batons and were swinging them at the blank-masks. The guards were outnumbered, but more disciplined. A blank-mask charged with a roar and the guard stepped back to avoid the attack, then swung their baton round to crunch into the side of the blank-mask's head. There was a spray of blood and the blank-mask crumpled to the ground.
The sight whipped the other blank-masks into a renewed state of fury, and for a minute or more the dusty courtyard was a blaze of clubbing and punching and kicking. The cries of agony from both sides were loud, but would be inaudible to the thronging crowd of revellers only a few metres away.
When it was done, three of the blank-masks lay still on the ground, their blood clumping in the dirt, but all five of the City Guards were down, unmoving. The remaining blank-masks, four of them, limped away from the scene, holding or supporting each other. Selene crept forwards, wary of attack herself but not wanting to lose sight of those she was following.
It was immediately clear that this was no simple brawl or arrest: the two sides had fought with fury. They'd been trying to kill each other. Her enhanced sensors could pick up the beat of someone's heart, the thrum of blood in their veins and the air in their lungs, even the sparkle of electrical connections in their brains, so she could tell immediately that two of the blank-masks were dead, while the third was in a bad way. Their headgear had given them no protection from the bludgeoning of City Guard batons.
Four of the five guards were dead, crushing blows inflicted on their craniums, vital organs punctured by stabbing blades even through their armour. The surviving one sat propped up against a wall, head slumped in unconsciousness. The fight had been vicious. Selene stepped forwards, senses alert.
She knelt in the dust beside the surviving blank-mask. Carefully, she tried to lift the covering from the person's head. It refused to slip away and the person – a young man – twitched. She saw why: the side of his skull had been staved in, and one side of the flimsy mask was embedded in the wound, snagged on jagged shards of bone. The wound bled freely, which at least meant pressure wouldn't be building up against his brain, but he wasn't going to live long without proper medical attention.
She crossed to the City Guard, who had been stabbed two or three times. Her abdomen was a mess of blood and purple tissue, but her heartbeat remained reasonably strong. She might survive. A red light on a comms device upon her belt flashed insistently: by the look of it an alarm had been raised. Reinforcements and perhaps paramedics would arrive soon, if they could push through the crowds.
This prone woman was the enemy: she might not be a Void Walker or an Augur, but she was one of their soldiers. She was also in Selene's power, and killing her would be a small moment of revenge. The first of many.
Instead, Selene found herself pressing on the guard's wound to stanch the flow of blood. There'd been people like this on Maes Far, too: complicit, widely despised. But also, in their own way, victims, hated by those they'd grown up amongst, perhaps simply doing what they had to do in order to survive, to feed their family. Was that how it was on Migdala as well?
The Guard's head at least was unharmed. Selene unbuckled the strap of her helmet and lifted it clear. The woman's black hair was matted to her skull with sweat. Her eyes flickered open and her lips began to move. Her voice was the faintest whisper, but Selene was able to amplify it to audibility. She hoped for some explanation of what had taken place, a clue as to how such a bright day had descended so rapidly into violence and death, but the woman simply whispered the same word over and over. The name of a lover or a child, perhaps. Selene's flecks could make no sense of the word.
“Aibo, Aibo.”
More shouts echoed down the side-passage. Reinforcements from one side or the other, most likely more City Guards answering the electronic summons. An observation platform hovered around somewhere overhead, the electric whine of it echoing off the hard walls, but it hadn't yet come into view as it homed in on its target. She had to go. Whoever was coming would look after the injured officer. Hopefully they'd attend to the fallen blank-mask, too.
She raced away from the scene, down the passageway the others had taken, slipping her own demon visage back into place. Strange how it gave her a sense of anonymity, the illusion of safety. If they caught her, it wouldn't help much. Her right hand was slick with the blood of the Guard. She needed to find water so she could wash it off before making her next move.
Then a hand seized her shoulder from the shadows, pulling her off-balance. She staggered backwards throu
gh a doorway, while her threat assessment routines kicked in, and she prepared herself to fight.
6. The Unmoving Stars
A blank-mask leaned over her, a woman judging by her slender neck and the swell of her breasts. Two others stood behind her, their faces also hidden, tension visible in their stance. A gash of blood ran diagonally across the woman's forearm, trickling over a tattooed representation of a winged heart adorning the inside of her wrist. The gallop of their real hearts was loud to Selene, the labouring of their lungs elevated.
The newcomer lifted her finger to her concealed lips in a gesture that meant the same on any planet where people spoke through their mouths. Selene remained crouched in shadowy darkness while a squadron of City Guard troopers racketed past in the passageway outside.
When they were gone, the woman waited a few minutes more, then visibly relaxed, the tension in her posture easing.
She spoke in a whisper. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Selene gave her the backstory she'd worked out for herself. She tried to sound alarmed, terrified. “I'm from A'cha. Come for the carnival.”
“People from A'cha carry blasters like that around, do they?”
“I was given it by a friend. They said Senefore could be dangerous.”
“Why are you lurking around in the backstreets?”
Selene rose to her feet, brushing dust from her arms, glancing around warily. “I got lost. I thought this passage might give me a way through the crowds to the central square.”
Another of the group said, “A'cha? I've been there. Where, exactly?”
“Fioren.” A medium-sized city, small enough that it was unlikely anyone would have gone there, large enough for her to be anonymous if anyone had.
The woman appeared to believe the story. “You should stick to the main streets. It's safer there.”
“Why were you fighting?” said Selene. “What's going on here?”
The woman didn't reply for a moment. When she did, her suspicion had returned. “You don't have the troubles in Fioren?”
Selene scanned a brief summary of recent events in her pretend home before replying. “Of course, who doesn't? It's not usually so violent, though.” She adopted the tone of a bored and frustrated parochial. “Nothing ever happens in Fioren.”
“Things are different in Senefore, especially at this time of year. If the revolt is going to kick off, it will be here.”
“The revolt?”
A third blank-mask, a man, stepped forwards. He was tall and powerful, the muscles on his arms sculpted. “You're asking a lot of questions. Are you working for them? Do we need to do to you what we did to those guards? Because no one is going to come to your help if we do.”
She hid her amusement at his threats; they posed no danger to her. Not only was she stronger, she'd also downloaded a battery of armed and unarmed combat routines that her biomechanics could execute if need be. She hoped it wouldn't come to a fight, however; better to remain the wide-eyed, naïve traveller from distant A'cha. “I'm not working for anyone. I've come for the carnival; I just don't understand what's going on.”
The woman said, “You saw Godel's broadcast? All the Templers on the streets? Things are kicking off, there's going to be trouble. The revolt is coming. If you are here to see the sights, then my advice is to stay in the well-lit areas and leave before dark.”
“Those masks you wear. I haven't seen anything like them back home.”
The woman shrugged. “Someone's idea of a way to identify ourselves to each other. A symbol. It's becoming a uniform if you ask me, time we dropped it. Sometime, soon, we'll fight them in the open.”
That troubled Selene; the rebels were hopelessly misguided if they thought they had a chance in open combat. “You can't fight them. You have sticks and – what? – a few antique blasters and maybe some explosives? I've seen what they're capable of. What you have won't be anywhere near enough, not now there are three Cathedral ships in orbit. If they want, they can kill every one of us.”
“Seen it where?” asked the muscled man, his masked face implacable but the suspicion clear in his voice.
“The broadcasts,” she said. “We've all seen it.”
“There are a lot more of us than there are of them,” said the man.
His ridiculous bravado was going to get him killed. “If you fight them on the streets, you'll die, don't you see? It isn't about numbers, it's about weaponry and technology. And you don't have nearly enough of either.”
“You seem to know a lot about what Concordance plans to do,” he said.
“It's obvious what they plan to do. They'll allow you to dance around wearing masks and have a few noisy parades, but open revolt is something else. They won't allow it. You know that's true.”
The woman pulled Selene away from the others, holding up a hand to her two comrades to tell them to leave it. She spoke in hushed tones. “Whoever you are, it's best you go. You may be right about the dangers of rebelling, but that's what we're going to do. At least we'll have tried.”
Selene replied in a similar whisper so the others wouldn't overhear. “I get it, trust me, I do. But getting yourselves killed isn't going to help anyone. There are other ways to fight.”
Through the eye-holes of her mask, the woman appeared to be studying Selene intently. “What ways? Who are you really? I didn't say anything to the others, but that accent of yours isn't right. I spent five years at university in A'cha. It sounds as though you've learned how to speak like a native and you didn't finish the course.”
Which was true. Her brain knew the accent and the idiom perfectly, but it took time for muscles to adapt to the subtleties of pronunciations. Time she hadn't had.
Selene decided to take a risk. “Look, you're right. I'm not from A'cha, and it's best you don't know where I am from. But I'm on your side, truly. I have very good reason to hate Concordance.”
The woman nodded. “You fight them in whatever way you can, but this is all we can do. We have no other choices left to us.”
“If there's trouble, innocent people will die. You've seen how busy the city is. What right do you have to do that?”
“No right,” said the woman, “but what's the alternative? Let them win, let them kill us slowly, let them enslave our children as they've enslaved us?”
More than anything, Selene wanted to explain who she was, what she was doing on the planet. Of course, she couldn't. As well as everything else, she didn't want others – people on Migdala and elsewhere – to see her and Ondo as beacons of hope, when the truth was they might be killed at any moment.
“I should go,” said Selene. “The guards have gone.”
The woman nodded. She placed a hand on Selene's arm. “Whoever you are, wherever you're really from, look after yourself.”
“I will,” said Selene. “You do the same. And, thank you.”
Selene peeped out of the doorway, then stepped into the passageway. The hunt had moved away, following a false trail or distracted by other flashpoints. She wondered how many were going to die in Senefore before the carnival season was over. She concealed her blaster and set off.
She spent the next two hours losing herself in the crowd, savouring the atmosphere of celebration and expectation that consumed the gathered people. More and more spiced intoxicants were consumed from dazzling arrays of liquor bottles with their enticing colours: vermillion and turquoise and blood-red. Each food stall she pushed past engulfed her briefly in a fresh miasma of enticing scents: the smell of fresh bread that instantly transported her to her own world, fifty thousand light-years away; meats and fishes cooked in a seemingly endless variety of spices; heady clouds of steamy smoke that promised a variety of colourful intoxications and miraculous visions.
The carnival itself finally wound into view, heralded by bone-rattling drum beats and blasts from blaring brass horns. Dancers and marchers moved through the crowd in a slow procession, each mask and costume more outlandish than the last. One person had
been transmogrified into a gaudily-plumed bird, another a shining being of mirror-metal. Quite a few costumes glittered and sparkled with their own strings of lights, and one person processed in an outfit that burned with licking orange flames. The others kept well away from her. The mood was of delight and celebration, of wonder at each new outlandish mask and costume.
But always, glimpsed through brief gaps in the jubilant crowds, she saw the stony faces of the watching City Guard officers. Overhead, always, the observation platforms drifted in slow circles, ignored by the crowds.
Selene's threat-monitoring systems remained constantly at peak concentration, and it was they that spotted a subtle sign of action passing through the crowd. The blank-masks, in twos and threes, were suddenly all drifting in the same direction towards a tall, ornate building whose towers she'd glimpsed repeatedly through the trees. The blank-masks appeared to be following some signal, some pre-ordained plan.
Again, she followed them at a distance, doing her best to look like she was meandering aimlessly through the throng. The front of the carnival procession was jangling its way across a wide square in roughly the same direction. She consulted the local maps she'd pulled into her brain. The building with the spires was the Revelation Temple itself, the home of the religion upon Migdala: alien-looking architecture in this town of low, square buildings. The route of the carnival passed right around it in a loop, an act of clear provocation to a church that so strongly disapproved of the practice of wearing masks and the anarchy and licentiousness that went with it.
Selene hurried, pushing past people to try and reach the temple before the main body of the procession. Whatever the revolt was that the woman had described, it looked like it was going to kick off there.
She arrived in time to see the moment of calm before the violence erupted. A jeering crowd of demonstrators, most of them wearing blank masks, were attempting to force their way past the Templer priests who were defending the stone stairs to the building. A rain of stones and bottles spilling liquid flew through the air to smash on the steps or dash against the walls of the Temple. In the shady light of the tall doorway, Selene could see a priest in scarlet robes assessing the situation. He talked to someone in the shadows behind him, nodding his head, but she couldn't read his lips to pick up his words. The tall walls of the temple loomed overhead, the edifice punctuated by small, arched windows and lines of stone statues staring down from plinths built into the walls.