'You promised to stop the killings in Youricam, remember?'
'I may have said I'd review our segregation and resettlement policy in the -'
'No,' the young man waved his hand, 'I mean the killings, Ethnarch; the death trains, remember? The trains where the exhaust comes out of the rear carriage, eventually.' The young man made a sort of sneer with his mouth, shook his head. 'Trigger any memories, that? No?'
'I have no idea what you're talking about,' the Ethnarch said. His palms were sweating, cold and slick. He rubbed them on the bedclothes; the gun mustn't slip, if he got to it. The intruder's gun was still lying on the bed's footboard.
'Oh, I think you do. In fact, I know you do.'
'If there have been any excesses by any members of the security forces, they will be thoroughly -'
'This isn't a press conference, Ethnarch.' The man tipped slightly back in his seat, away from the gun on the footboard. The Ethnarch tensed, quivering.
'The point is, you made a deal and then didn't stick to it. And I'm here to collect on the penalty clause. You were warned, Ethnarch. That which is given can also be taken away.' The intruder tipped further back in his seat, glanced round the dark suite, and nodded at the Ethnarch, while putting his hands clasped behind his head. 'Say goodbye to all this, Ethnarch Kerian. You're -'
The Ethnarch turned, banged the hidden panel with his elbow, and the section of headboard flicked round; he tore the gun from its clips and swung it at the man, finding the trigger and pulling.
Nothing happened. The young man was watching him, hands still behind his neck, body rocking slowly back and forward in the chair.
The Ethnarch clicked the trigger a few more times.
'Works better with these,' the man said, reaching into a shirt pocket, and throwing a dozen bullets onto the bed at the Ethnarch's feet.
The gleaming bullets snicked at they rolled and gathered in a fold in the bedclothes. The Ethnarch Kerian stared at them.
'... I'll give you anything,' he said, over a thick and dry tongue. He sensed his bowels start to relax, and squeezed desperately, feeling suddenly like a child again, as though the retro-ageing had taken him even further back. 'Anything. Anything. I can give you more than you ever dreamed of; I can -'
'Not interested in that,' the man said, shaking his head. 'The story isn't finished yet. You see, these people; these nice kind people who are so soft and prefer to deal in life... when somebody goes back on a deal with them, even when somebody kills after they've said they wouldn't, they still don't like to kill in return. They'd rather use their magic and their precious compassion to do the next best thing. And so people disappear.' The man sat forward again, leaning on the footboard. The Ethnarch stared, shaking, at him.
'They - these nice people - they disappear bad people,' the young man said. 'And they employ people to come and collect these bad men and take them away. And these people - these collectors - they like to put the fear of death into their collectees, and they tend to dress...' he gestured at his own colour-fully motley clothes, '... casually; and of course - thanks to the magic - they never have any problems getting into even the most heavily guarded palace.'
The Ethnarch swallowed, and with one furiously shaking hand, finally put down the useless gun he was holding.
'Wait,' he said, trying to control his voice. His sweat soaked the sheets. 'Are you saying -'
'We're nearly at the end of the story,' the young man interrupted. 'These nice people - who you would call soft, like I say - they remove the bad people, and they take them away. They put them somewhere they can't do any harm. Not a paradise, but not somewhere that feels like a prison, either. And these bad people, they might have to listen sometimes to the nice people telling them how bad they've been, and they never again get the chance to change histories, but they live a comfortable, safe life, and they die peacefully... thanks to the nice people.
'And though some would say the nice people are too soft, the soft, nice people would say that the crimes committed by the bad people are usually so terrible there is no known way of making the bad people start to suffer even a millionth of the agony and despair they have produced, so what is the point in retribution? It would be just another obscenity to cap the tyrant's life with his own death.' The young man looked briefly troubled, then shrugged. 'Like I say; some people would say they're too soft.' He took the little gun from he footboard and put it into a pocket of his pantaloons.
The man stood slowly. The Ethnarch's heart still pounded, but in his eyes there were tears. The young man leant down, picked up some clothes and threw them at the Ethnarch, who grabbed at them, held them to his chest.
'My offer stands,' the Ethnarch Kerian said. 'I can give you -'
'Job satisfaction,' the young man sighed, staring at one set of fingernails. 'That's all you can give me, Ethnarch. I'm not interested in anything else. Get dressed; you're leaving.'
The Ethnarch started to pull on his shirt. 'Are you sure? I believe I have invented some new vices even the old Empire didn't know about. I'd be willing to share them with you.'
'No, thank you.'
'Who are these people you're talking about, anyway?' The Ethnarch fastened his buttons. 'And may I yet know your name?'
'Just get dressed.'
'Well, I still think we can come to some sort of arrangement...' The Ethnarch secured his collar. 'And this is all really quite ridiculous, but I suppose I ought to be thankful you're not an assassin, eh?'
The young man smiled, seemed to pick something from a fingernail. He put his hands in the pantaloon pockets as the Ethnarch kicked the bedclothes down and picked up his britches.
'Yes,' the young man said. 'Must be rather awful, thinking you're about to die.'
'Not the most pleasant experience,' agreed the Ethnarch, putting one leg, then another, into his trousers.
'But such a relief, I imagine, when you get the reprieve.'
'Hmm.' The Ethnarch gave a small laugh.
'A bit like being rounded up in a village and thinking you're going to be shot...' the young man mused, facing the Ethnarch from the foot of the bed. '... and then being told your fate is nothing worse than resettlement.' He smiled. The Ethnarch hesitated.
'Resettled; by train,' the man said, taking the little black gun out of his pocket. 'By a train which contains your family; your street; your village...'
The young man adjusted something on the small black gun. '... And then ends up containing nothing but engine fumes, and lots of dead people.' He smiled, thinly. 'What do you think, Ethnarch Kerian? Something like that?'
The Ethnarch stopped moving, staring wide-eyed at the gun.
'The nice people are called the Culture,' the young man explained, 'And I always did think they were too soft.' He stretched his arm out, holding the gun. 'I stopped working for them some time ago. I'm freelance now.'
The Ethnarch looked, speechless, into the dark, ancient eyes above the barrel of the black gun.
'I,' said the man, 'am called Cheradenine Zakalwe.' He levelled the gun at the Ethnnarch's nose. 'You are called dead.'
He fired the gun... The Ethnarch had put his head back and started to scream; so the single shot pierced the roof of his mouth before it exploded inside his skull.
Brain's splattered over the ornate headboard. The body thumped into the skin-soft bedclothes and twitched once, spreading blood.
He watched the blood as it pooled. He blinked, a couple of times.
Then, moving slowly, he peeled off the gaudy clothes. He put them in a small black rucksack. Underneath, the one-piece suit was shadow-dark.
He took the matt-black mask from the rucksack and put it round his neck, though not yet over his face. He moved to the head of the bed and peeled a little transparent patch from the neck of the sleeping girl, then went back into the dark depths of the room, slipping the mask over his face as he did so.
Using the nightsight, he undipped the panel over the security systems control unit, and carefully removed severa
l small boxes. Then, walking very softly and slowly now, he crossed to the wall-sized pornographic painting which concealed the door to the Ethnarch's emergency escape route to the sewers and the palace roof.
He turned back, before he slowly closed the door, and looked at the bloody mess on the curved carved surface of the headboard. He smiled his thin smile, a little uncertainly.
Then he slipped away into the stone-black depths of the palace, like a piece of the night.
Two
The dam lay wedged between the tree-studded hills like a fragment from some enormous shattered cup. The morning sunshine shone up the valley, hit the concave grey face of the dam, and produced a white reflecting flood of light. Behind the dam, the long diminished lake was dark and cold. The water came less than halfway up the massive concrete bulwark, and the forests beyond had long since reclaimed over half the slopes the dam's rising water had once drowned. Sail-boats lay tethered to jetties strung along one side of the lake, the chopping waters slapping at their glistening hulls.
High overhead, birds carved the air, circling in the warmth of the sunlight above the shadow of the dam. One of the birds dipped and swooped, gliding down towards the lip of the dam and the deserted roadway which ran along its curved summit. The bird pulled its wings in just as it seemed it was about to collide with the white railings which ran on either side of the road; it flashed between the dew-sparkled stanchions, executed a half roll, partially opened its wings again, and plummeted towards the obsolete power station that had become the grandly eccentric - not to mention pointedly symbolic - home of the woman called Diziet Sma.
The bird settled belly-down to the swoop, and, level with the roof garden, flung out its wings, grasping at the air and fluttering to a precipitous halt, talons tacketing down on a window ledge set in the highest storey of the old admin block apartments.
Wings folded, soot-dark head to one side, one beady eye reflecting the concrete light, the bird hopped forward to a slid-open window, where soft red curtains rippled out into the breeze. It stuck its head under the fluttering hem of the material and peered into the darkened room beyond.
'You missed it.' Sma said with quiet scorn, happening to pad past the window just at that moment. She sipped from a glass of water she held. Droplets from her shower beaded her tawny body.
The bird's head swivelled, following her as she crossed to the closet and commenced to dress. Swivelling back, the bird's gaze shifted to the male body lying in the air a little less than a metre above the floor-mounted bed-base. Inside the dim haze of the bed's AG field, the pale figure of Relstoch Sussepin stirred, and rolled over in mid-air. His arms floated out to either side, until the weak centering field on his side of the bed brought them slowly back in towards his body again. In the dressing room, Sma gargled with some water, then swallowed it.
Fifty metres east, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated high in the air above the floor of the turbine hall, surveying the wreckage of the party. The section of the drone's mind that was controlling the guard-drone disguised as a bird took a last look at the filigree of scratches on Sussepin's buttocks, and the already fading bite-marks on Sma's shoulders (as she covered them with a gauzy shirt), and then released the guard-drone from its control.
The bird squawked, jumped back from the curtain, and fell fluttering and frenzied off the ledge, before opening its wings and beating back up past the gleaming face of the dam, its shrill alarm-cries echoing back from the concrete slopes and disturbing it further. Sma heard the distant feedback of commotion as she buttoned her waistcoat, and smiled.
'Good night's sleep?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired as it met her at the portico of the old admin block.
'Good night, no sleep,' Sma yawned, shooing the whining hralzs back into the building's marble hall, where Maikril the major-domo stood unhappily with a bunch of leads. She stepped out into the sunlight, pulling on gloves. The drone held the car door open for her. She filled her lungs with the fresh morning air and ran down the steps, boot heels clattering. She jumped into the car, winced a little as she settled in the driver's seat, then flicked a switch that started the roof folding back, while the drone loaded her luggage into the trunk. She tapped the battery gauges on the vehicle's dash and blipped the accelerator, just to feel the wheel motors strain against the brakes. The drone secured the trunk and floated into the rear seats. She waved to Maikril, who was chasing one of the hralzs along the steps outside the turbine hall, and didn't notice. Sma laughed, stood on the throttle and slipped the brakes.
The car leapt off in a spray of gravel, took the right-hander beneath the trees with centimetres to spare, shot out through the station's granite gates with a farewell shimmy of its rear end, and accelerated hard down Riverside Drive.
'We could have flown,' the drone pointed out, over the rush of air.
But it suspected Sma wasn't listening.
The semantics of fortification were pan-cultural, she thought, as she descended the stone steps from the curtain wall of the castle, gazing up at the drum-shaped keep, hazy in the distance on its hill behind several more layers of walls. She walked across the grass, Skaffen-Amtiskaw at her shoulder, and exited the fort through a postern.
The view led down to the new port and the straits, where seaships passed smoothly in the late morning sunlight, heading for ocean or inland sea, according to their lanes. From the other side of the castle complex, the city revealed its presence with a distant rumble and - because the light wind came from that direction - the smell of... well, she just thought of it as City, after three years here. She supposed all cities smelled different, though.
Diziet Sma sat on the grass with her legs drawn up to her chin, and looked out across the straits and their arching suspension bridges to the sub-continent on the far shore.
'Anything else?' the drone asked.
'Yeah; take my name off the judging panel for the Academy show... and send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy.' She frowned in the sunlight, shading her eyes. 'Can't think of anything else.'
The drone moved in front of her, teasing a small flower from the grass in front of her and playing with it. 'Xenophobe's just entered the system,' it told her.
'Well happy day,' Sma said sourly. She wetted one finger and rubbed a little speck of dirt from the toe of one boot.
'And that young man in your bed just surfaced; asking Maikril where you've got to.'
Sma said nothing, though her shoulders shook once and she smiled. She lay back on the grass, one arm behind her.
The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.
She stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the night's exertions. And, like somebody holding something precious, and it slipping from their fingers, but them having the speed and the skill to catch it again before it hit the floor, she was able - somewhere inside herself - to dip down and retrieve the vanishing memory as it slipped back into the clutter and noise of her mind, and glanding recall she held it, savoured it, re-experienced it, until she felt herself shiver again in the sunlight, and came close to making a little moaning noise.
She let the memory escape, and coughed and sat up, glancing to see if the drone had noticed. It was nearby, collecting tiny flowers.
A party of what she guessed were schoolchildren came chattering and squealing up the path from the metro station, heading towards the postern. Heading and tailing the noisy column were adults, possessed of that air of calmly tired wariness she'd seen before in teachers and mothers with many children. Some
of the kids pointed at the floating drone as they passed, wide-eyed and giggling and asking questions, before they were ushered through the narrow gate, voices disappearing.
It was, she'd noticed, always the children who made a fuss like that. Adults just assumed that there was some trick behind the apparently unsupported body of the machine, but children wanted to know how it worked. One or two scientists and engineers had looked startled, too, but she guessed a stereotype of unworldiness meant nobody believed them that there must be something odd going on. Anti gravity was what was going on, and the drone in this society was like a flashlight in the stone age, but - to her surprise - it was almost disappointingly easy just to brazen it out.
'The ships just met up,' the drone informed her. 'They're transferring the stand-in for real, rather than displacing it.'
Sma laughed, plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. 'Old JT really doesn't trust its displacer, does it?'
'I think the thing's senile, myself,' the drone said sniffily. It was carefully slicing holes in the barely more than hair-thin stems of the flowers it had picked, then threading the stems through each other, creating a little chain.
Sma watched the machine, its unseen fields manipulating the little blossoms as dexterously as any lace-maker flicking a pattern into existence.
It was not always so refined.
Once, maybe twenty years ago, far away on another planet in another part of the galaxy altogether, on the floor of a dry sea forever scoured by howling winds, beneath the mesa that had been islands on the dust that had been silt, she had lodged in a small frontier town at the limit of the railways' reach, preparatory to hiring mounts to venture into the deep desert and search out the new child messiah.
At dusk, the riders came into the square, to take her from the inn; they'd heard her strangely coloured skin alone would fetch a handsome price.
The inn-keeper made the mistake of trying to reason with the men, and was pinned to his own door with a sword; his daughters wept over him before they were dragged away.
Use of Weapons Page 4