Her route then forced her to spiral a little around the busier parts of the city, using the lift of cookhouses, bakeries and the smouldering luxury of forges, to gain some height back again. She thought fondly of her partying days in those narrow alleys, drunk on cheap fizzy grog, kissing whoever had looked good in the bath house a few minutes before – and of course they all looked good seen through drunken eyes… Oh, the hangovers! She was smiling as she turned over the Rose, not least because of her clear head, and then realised that she could, if she wanted to, slip over the dark and uninviting draperies that shrouded the infomancer’s Domicile with such exotic glooms. They were old and tattered, fallen away. Shrazade had no intent of spending money on frippery like that when she could be using it elsewhere. Romance be damned. She was known for her hard head and harder heart.
It was dangerous however. They had anti-aircraft defences although none allowed to be used against the palace air corps.
Tralane took a guessed vector and slipped along the edge of their walls. She peered intently.
Between the ragged edges of the drapes she saw into glass-roofed rooms, pristine and white. She saw unknown machines. She saw the infomancers in their grey and black uniform dress at work steadily, lying in slings or splayed on the floor, bodies abandoned as their minds flew far and wide into unknown worlds that they created or which created them; she wasn’t sure how it worked. Their magic was beyond her ability to comprehend. She knew only what was written in stories about them, or in their known records. Down there all the messages of the Empire were passed and sorted, known, fixed, interfered with… The infomancers could build structures from thin air, and speak to each other across infinite distances. And some of them, yes, were more ordinary spies of course. Everything has its darker edges.
Without warning, a shot arrowed up from between the angles of the silk banners. Tralane saw it as a flare of vivid purple streaking into her field of vision, impossibly brilliant like an emergency flare. She tried to avoid it automatically but the Flit was much too slow. The dark bolt clipped the Flit’s wing and sent her into a slew so that she had to fight and think hard to find corrective manouevres. She managed to get into clear air away from the Domicile but she had lost so much height that she’d crash into a building before she made the next thermal source. With a sinking heart she realised two key points. One was that her wing was now on fire. A black and purple flame crept slowly across it in a smokeless menace that looked worse than an ordinary fire somehow. The other was that the only way to gain enough altitude to go home was to employ sorcery.
In a city of mages that was hardly news but Tralane’s Sircene sorcery was something that could not go unnoticed. She wouldn’t care under ordinary circumstances. One matter transmutation was minor, if technically illegal outside a controlled laboratory within the city limits, but now Shrazade would surely know who had been idly looking and, worse yet, Alide would eventually discover her moment of idiocy. What he would do about it…
She was about to lose control, her speed so low. Without a second thought she reached inside for her ability. A powerful draught of hot air bloomed under her wings and shot her skywards in a terrifying piston of speed so fierce the burning wingtip cracked and, with a groan and a sputter, then a thrum and a scream, the Flit’s tiny engine yowled protest as it was simultaneously revved by massively multiplied explosive force within its cylinders. She found herself just north of her own house in a helter-skelter spiral. She heard the engine head crack with a horrible, bone-rattling bang just after. Real, orange fire waved at her from the prop end, black smoke streaking with it. And then she was in a second by second battle to keep her position, using heated blasts of air to stall her, change direction and adjust her angles.
After what seemed a painful age of waiting to die and fighting not to the Flit landed on the deck like the plummeting heap of junk it now was. The undercarriage at least held. It bounced, rolled and skidded to a halt. She had just time to prise herself out of the harness and jump free. A second later and she’d iced the engine and the wing but her pride and joy was a smoking wreck. After so little practice she ought to have been relieved she hadn’t blown herself up. Energy from alchemic conversions was hard enough to manage at the best of times. Reversing was ten times worse. She’d been superlative. She deserved a commendation.
She put her face into her gauntlets and yelled at the top of her lungs.
When she’d exhausted every swear word she knew and felt that tears threatened instead she made herself fold up the Flit and put it away properly. She had begun to shake and weaken with the ominous onset of aetheric fatigue by the time she was done, but she put up her small werelight and studied her burned wing by its glow. The goggles confirmed the worst. The magical bolt was Lucent technology, a spell of finding and searching, of marking indelibly. Standard shot for spies, she thought. Tracing you this way was easy. If she left it the spell could easily reactivate from the dormant stains in the canvas and wood and slowly creep down through her house transmitting a steady stream of information back into the Domicile. She’d half a mind to let it. Maybe her junk would fill their heads up and constipate them fatally. But no. With a bitter feeling of defeat she extended her hand over the purple marks and dismantled the spell’s structure, taking most of the wing tip with it. A better mage would have been more delicate. Tralane’s efforts were more butchery than finesse. She watched the objects gleam and disperse, felt the hot, buzzing flow of the siphons shift the mass to energy and information, easing them into temporary vaultspace. Her aptitude separated the bolt virals from the originals easily. She let the bolt’s potentials back in as heat, to warm herself, and then she remade the wing without the hex, as it had been when she’d left and it was still antique-but-working. Even if the cost of such massive conversion was going to be hell to pay she’d at least protected her home.
Makto shone down at her through the slats of the shed, flickering not with its own fusion but the dysfunctional fields around its puny body. She had the sense to lie down and put her head on her hands before the fatigue and the dreamstorm of transmutational psychosis hit and she blacked out.
Her final coherent thought was petty and recriminating: why the hell couldn’t she have just stayed in bed with her damn student?
CHAPTER NINE
ZHARAZIN
Zharazin Mazhd sat outside on the lawyer’s balcony wrapped in a bedsheet, smoking. She sat next to him in her half of the sheet doing the same only with much deeper satisfaction. He’d never seen a woman smoke with such focused, intensive pleasure. If he’d had more of an ego it would be bruised by now watching that after what they’d just concluded in the bed behind them. He asked her why she liked it so and she said,
‘Tastes of everything I’m not,’ she grinned at him, knowing he’d appreciate her remark for the pretend tough it was; that it was and was not the truth, simultaneously. We must rebel, we are the law.
He forgave her instantly. ‘Uh huh.’
She slid her cool ankle against his. ‘So what were you really doing there tonight?’
‘Following someone,’ he replied. She had a spectacular view, all over the Glimmering’s best angle, whiskery lights above and blazing buildings beneath: the palace, shining as if it was made of diamond, and behind all that the inky night with the Steppefires too small to see. Above, only stars and the cool regard of Annasmoon, so subtle it was only felt like whispers on the skin.
She had the sense not to ask who. ‘Did you lose them?’
He thought about it. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t sound certain.’
He smiled and was surprised when she leaned over and gave him a smoky kiss. ‘It’s an art, not a science. I found the unexpected. Always good.’
‘Even when the quarry gets away?’
‘Not the quarry. The lead.’
She nodded thoughtfully, eyes slitted against the smoke as she dragged on the expensive stick. ‘Prosecuting is like that. The case, in this case.’
‘Not the defendants, the law, the truth?’
‘Don’t tease me, you bad man.’ She blew out, looking through the smoke haze briefly as the wind bore it away. ‘I defend ideas against other ideas,’ she said after a time. ‘I know it ought to be people against other people, but it never is. An army of evidence is assembled, one locates the key pieces, it is a form of game. If one is lucky one may say convincingly “This Happened” but that is not important compared to how much one wants to believe the ideas of what happened and how much the jury wants to believe.’
‘That’s very cynical.’ He finished his cigarette. He didn’t enjoy smoking enough to go more than halfway down a stick. The first gulp of the herbal smoke was the best, the hit of the deep calm that followed it like a dive into a dark and silent personal lake. After a minute the mind got used to it, the body exhaled, it was only fooling around. He took the rest to show politely that he appreciated the gift. ‘Or it’s very calculated. Are you trying to impress me?’
‘Pah,’ she said quietly. ‘What for?’
He waited, sensing she wanted to ask something – something that she could have only reached by the path from picking him up for a job, the dinner, the dance, the bed, the view and the cigarette.
‘What is it like in the Domicile?’
He hadn’t expected that one. He studied the night view, avoiding looking in the direction of the building itself. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Like a Library.’
‘No, I mean, the Infomancy, the feeling of it. You must know so much. How do you keep it organised? How do you prevent yourself confessing?’
‘I wouldn’t be much of a spy if I told you that,’ he said.
‘It’s not as if I could use the knowledge. Your aptitudes are beyond me. My interrogation techniques are purely verbal and voluntary. Only infomancers may inquire without permission.’
‘I’m not doing that.’
‘You’d say that obviously.’
‘Obviously. But how can I prove it?’
‘You were Night’s student, I assumed Infomancy was not your primary talent.’
Here we go, he thought. Now we are getting there. Why is it always Night?
‘I’m not her student any more.’
‘Why, what happened?’
He considered answering. Sharper and more agile minds than hers, with claws and teeth, had asked this of him. His refusal had sent him to Shrazade’s personal inquisition. He had resisted her. On nothing else. She knew him inside out and back to front, all except the meaning, the point, the significance and the experience of being Parlumi Night’s student. Weeks of darkness, weeks of pain and silence. Threats, made not with words but nightmares. He had never spoken or shared a single moment of it. Sometimes he wondered why it was so important to him. The details, wearingly prosaic after such a massive build-up, could satisfy nobody. They’d certainly never satisfied him.
‘I’d rather not say,’ he replied finally.
‘They do say confession is good for the soul.’
He was glad she had decided not to pursue it. In gratitude he said, ‘They’re wrong.’
She put out her cigarette beside his in the sand tray by her foot. ‘Come back inside.’ It was a suggestion, not an order, so he followed it obediently. As he turned to close the shutters he saw a streak of purple fire against the blackness of the stars.
A picture built in his mind, behind his eyes, a composite layered and provided for him by the Relay. He excused himself with some bullshit about having an early start, about not crowding her as he collected his clothing from the floor and the chair. He dressed swiftly and she responded with amused grace, not fooled for a second, before seeing him out barefoot at the door.
‘Don’t be too long.’ She swung around the doorframe by one hand, like a kid, smiling at him. He felt he had made a friend, surprised himself.
‘I won’t.’
He waited until the pad of her feet had taken her back and then walked to the fire escape slipway. The doors were alarm bolted but his lockpicks opened them with a flutter of sorcerous binary platitudes. Inside the cool tubular chamber he left the racked heatproof pods alone in their netting and tucked in his stray shirttails before sitting on the low friction polycrete and allowing himself to slip away feet-first around the helter-skelter pipe. Around and down he floated, braked at intervals by the automating adjustment of the polycrete’s surface to the speed of his descent so that he seemed alternately to rush with silent grace and freedom, then be plucked at by sticky hands, the world turned to glue. He arrived in the featureless dark of the safety bay at ground level – as much as there was such a thing as ground in the Glimmering. At surface level anyway. Getting out required only that he push the door. The clockticker whirred and he heard the quiet clunk as it satisfactorily concluded counting one in and one out of the escape.
The door led out into the rear yards, filled with waste bins and at this time of night the carts and busy dark figures of the Gleaners. Zarazin slipped past them in the shadows and they let him go without comment. The infomancers had them on a significant retainer. He heard their cheerful hummed songs pass between them in a susurrus of question and answer, call and response as their rapid fingers passed over every bit of rubbish, identifying it faultlessly and tossing it into the long rows of baskets on the ’osscart. At the cart head the two tug horses chewed steadily from their nosebags, turning one ear only as he passed them by and emerged into the grand sweep of the halfmoon gardens and their meandering road.
He made quick progress through the deserted high town streets, his route more or less direct to the grand upspiral passage from which the Huntingore mansion rose in steady antique bulwarks towards the sky. As he climbed the outer walls, following the path he’d used before, he signalled back to the Relay that he’d take care of this mission. He felt Shrazade’s amusement loitering like a sulky kid in the back of his brain but she had no objections. The Relay’s connections faded out gently, like water running down a clear drain, and he was then alone on the increasingly sheer and derelict walls of the towered rise. Before another half hour passed he was glad he’d left the pitons in position. The slender fibre rope uncoiled readily from the pocket in his overcoat. A gift from the Spiderworks, it came with freerunning grips fitted to it or he’d never have been able use its narrow braid without tearing his hands to pieces.
The coat sagged heavily as he climbed on, weighed down at one side by the book he’d saved from the trashcan. His progress up the wall in this place, with this book, tracking that woman made a pleasant spell in his mind. A brimming anticipation filled him like Twogas, lifting him on. At least this time he did not have to wait for hours at the top of the Array. He wriggled over the creaking safety lines of the tower flight deck and paused there only to gather up his rope.
The deck was empty. He’d expected that. She would have had time to land and secure the Flit by now. The Relay had informed him that their cast had been dispelled or at least spoiled, so it was likely the machine was back inside its shed. Thanks to his earlier suffering he knew which dilapidated hovel that was and made his way directly to it across the weed-strewn paving. The Sircene spellwork protected their doors, windows and apertures, he had determined previously, but they did not invest in rooftop surveillance these days. Why would they? He felt like he’d been the first person to come here in decades. Tralane Huntingore’s foolishness in leaving matters like this worried him. At the hangar’s rotten door he stopped, finding it closed but the locks open. An oversight as she hurried back into the house? He looked over at the stairwell’s iron gate. It was slightly ajar.
He curled his gloved fingers around the slippery wood and lifted the door open, trying to support the hinge in case it failed or gave him away with rusted complaints. Before him, the oddly folded shape of the Flit was just detectable in the near-total darkness offered by the gleam of a dying werelight on the floor near his feet. As he glanced down at it he saw a shining tress of coiled black hair.
He was o
n his knees, stripping his gloves before he had a thought about what he was doing. As his fingers checked the pulse at her throat he conjured his own light, careless of being seen, and set it above them. She lived, but the slow beat and the vanishing werelight that signalled the end of her natural magical energy supply confirmed that she was in hibersleep. The only remedy for it was rest. Zharazin studied her closely for any other signs of injury or infection but he found nothing. Satisfied for now he had to fight a surprisingly strong desire not to leave her side in order to move around and take a tour of the Flit and its condition. It wasn’t the desire itself that surprised him – he knew he’d feel that because he’d been around Tralane enough to know that they were a good match for each other; a strong physical response was only to be expected given his talents and her present total vulnerability.
Meanwhile he studied the aircraft for the Infomancy. It showed fire damage and there was a strong smell of kerosene and burning oil that all confirmed the extinction of a significant fire in the engine. He didn’t know anything about such objects but even he doubted it would fly again any time soon. Of the tracer spell there was no sign. He checked the ground and the walls but the building was clear. The only conclusion he could draw was that Tralane must have burned it out or undone it. He betted the latter. Combined with controlling the fire, landing and picking out the sorcery no wonder she was comatose. But although this deduction satisfied him enough to transmit his conclusions to the Relay it left a much greater question Shrazade at least would want answered: why was Tralane Huntingore overflying the Domicile?
Her lack of care in security inclined him to believe it was an accident. He hoped it was. She wasn’t cut out for covert ops. But it was cold and getting colder, even though the storms had passed. He made his way back around the Flit and bent down again to pick her up, planning to take her into the house and hope that it was uninhabited there and also warm enough to leave her safely. He was just beginning to lift when he heard the scrape of a shoe on wet stone. If he’d just dropped her he would have been fast enough to spin around or duck and roll but as it was he hesitated instead and then felt something blunt, metal and cold shoved against the side of his neck. He didn’t know what it was but it didn’t feel friendly and the voice that went with it had his death in its future, shaky and breaking as it was,
Glorious Angels Page 13