Glorious Angels

by Justina Robson

  ‘You want me to act as your surrogate?’ He had paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth, looking over it at her.

  ‘I want you to keep my girls out of trouble. I don’t care how you do it. I have no knowledge of the water you swim in and it wouldn’t do me any good if I had it. You can find anything here that helps you, then use that. I need an ally.’ She dipped her bread in oil and started to eat. Suddenly she was starving. ‘If I find anything at that pit that might interest you, I’ll let you know. It’s not like anyone else there will see what I see, right? I’ll pay you back, no matter how long it takes.’

  Mazhd put his spoon down and sat up. ‘That’s an easily paid bill, Huntingore. I want only one thing. It’s the reason I came here.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ She paused, braced for the worst, whatever it was, thinking she’d give him anything, even the gun, if that’s what he was after.

  ‘I want you.’

  She stared at him and wondered if he was joking. No, he didn’t have the right expression for that and anyway, it was a bad joke, without premise. She tried to see how she and all she had could fit into the bigger schemes of Glimshard, of which he was a part: the blackmail, the gun, the crystals, the dig – but she didn’t connect that to him. He was an exchanger, not a prime mover. She tried to figure out who knew what and what it was worth but the effort was soon evidently futile. She had no idea. Suppose he were Alide’s agent? It was possible but unnecessary. Alide had her in the corner he wanted already. She saw nothing immediately obvious that he had to gain, so she said the first thing that came into her head.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  His eyebrows came together in a frown that also tried on one side to lift into quizzicality. ‘No, I mean it.’

  Tralane picked up more bread in her grey fingertips. ‘What for?’

  ‘Love,’ he said. ‘I walked into you on a street corner, years ago, and since then you’ve never been out of my mind.’

  Tralane leaned back in her chair, ripping the bread into tinier and tinier pieces on the plate, now at arm’s length. She considered the possibility he was telling the truth. It was such a bizarre statement to try to pull on a woman of her age that she was forced to think of it. She could not in all honesty say the same thing. Mazhd wasn’t unknown to her, but he was like the fine architecture or beauty of a finely planed wing – a theoretical aesthetic pleasure; one of those men appreciated rather universally, as if he was public property. Daydream material. Inconsequential. Until a couple of days ago he had been, well, part of the city wallpaper. She didn’t remember the street corner, but she tried. She tried to imagine loving someone you had only seen.

  ‘But you don’t really know me,’ she said, going for kindness and reality. ‘It’s flattering but – you could only love a fantasy of me. You have no idea what the real thing is like.’

  He leaned forward over his dish. ‘Try me.’

  ‘What?’ She stopped shredding, looked at his dark eyes – what was that colour even called? It was brown, or maybe it was purple. Like the eyes of those huge, malignant black cattle that roved the lower Steppe. She’d seen some once on a touring trip long ago. They had huge, curving horns and shaggy bodies and were known as the most ill-tempered and dangerous beasts.

  ‘Test me, ask me anything.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She felt stumped, and that they were bordering on stalking territory. She raked her mind for some intimately acute and telling fact but nothing came to her.

  ‘Then I’ll tell you one,’ he said after a minute had passed. ‘You are bored, Tralane Huntingore. You have your work, your family, your house, your collection to work with, your lecturing at the University, and it is all you have known for years. The University is no challenge, the objects you find have only random relevance. Until the war you had nothing to struggle against. Now you are squeezed tight on all sides, you don’t even know what your daughters are up to, and still you are not sufficiently interested to step forward. You are a beautiful woman, wasted.’ He hesitated at the end and glanced down, as if he’d said too much.

  Tralane looked at him, very carefully now. ‘What are my daughters up to?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that without betraying a confidence. Ask them yourself.’

  Tralane leant forward suddenly, pushing her plate and dish aside. ‘No, you explain what you mean or this interview is over.’

  ‘I told you all I am able to tell. But it’s nothing to fear.’

  ‘Well that right there is one reason you won’t get what you want. Playing games and holding information is not my idea of a relationship I want to be in.’

  He sighed out through his nose and looked at his hands. ‘You don’t understand. I can’t tell you things that are sensitive material to the Infomancy because they will know and after that I may as well jump off your roof right now. I can tell you that I know things but that’s as good as it gets. What’s going on is not illegal or dangerous. It’s just interesting. I promise you.’

  Tralane sat back and thought it over. It was plausible. The Infomancy claimed absolute knowledge and absolute security. The first part was clearly a boast but she could not remember any time that a leak or a scandal had come from that direction. It was one reason that people distrusted and loathed them so much. Their dedication to the city and its cause had a cool, inhuman perfection to it.

  ‘I’m never bored in my lab,’ she said. ‘The rest of life – is more of a struggle. All its boundaries so unclear. But you’re in so deep to everything going on. How can I trust you? It seems more likely to me that you’d be here for the Infomancy running background on me than it does that you… that you… Well, the other thing is just ridiculous.’

  Mazhd looked up, hands curled around his plate, lax and helpless. ‘The other thing is all I’ve got that isn’t somehow connected up to the rest of what I do, or what I know. The other thing is the only way I can help you that doesn’t come with loaded dice attached to it. It’s true. It’s mine. Not theirs. Mine. Nobody can touch it but me.’ He looked at her with a fierce intensity and she felt his will trying to press understanding into her where she didn’t have any; knew it was the gap between one skill and another, one ability and another, that he was trying to shove her across.

  Tralane applied her engineering paradigms. ‘It is not connected. So it can’t transmit. It can’t – be accessed? By others?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They cannot know it or what attaches to it. It is in isolation.’ Relief and anxiety replaced the force in his gaze, but she saw traces of longing too, and loneliness of a kind she knew too – when you wanted so badly to share something you knew with someone else, and you couldn’t because the importance of it escaped them. You were forever making settlements with them just knowing it was a big deal and you the same, for their big deals. You accepted it but you couldn’t see it directly.

  ‘I am your secret?’ she hazarded.

  ‘You are my castle,’ he said quietly, sitting now relaxed, just looking at her over her ruined bread with a gentle kind of hopelessness. She knew that look too. When you just wanted to be understood and knew it was impossible. He gestured vaguely up and around with his hands, indicating the building they were in, her castle.

  ‘Why would you wait until now?’ she asked, still discomforted by the notion he was talking over. Loving her, for all that time. Whatever that meant to him. ‘I haven’t exactly been busy for the last few years, as you seem to have noticed.’

  ‘My business kept me occupied with a lot of other things. And people,’ he said, significantly.

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘I worked my way clear of my indentured status to Shrazade. A promotion, if you like. It means I get to have some life that doesn’t belong to the Infomancy.’

  ‘What if I’d got married to someone else?’

  ‘I’d still have made my bid. I would take second place.’

  Tralane sipped her wine, all interest in food lost. ‘I
f you’ve done your homework you know I haven’t dealt in husbands so far. Why would I start now?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be legal and formal.’

  ‘What does it have to be?’

  He sighed and looked deflated, so much so she felt almost embarrassed. ‘It doesn’t have to be anything. You’re right. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know you. All I have is a fantasy. But it was a fantasy that kept me focused and purposeful through hard times. You never cared for convention. And nothing surprised me more than finding out you had a flying machine. Secret things you had. Such interesting secrets. And who can say why some people are more attractive than others? Many are suitable, but few are wanted. Well, Night always had her theories, but I’ve never figured it out.’ He dipped bread in the stew and ate it. ‘This is good.’

  It was wrong for someone like him to look like that. It was his looks working against him in her eyes. If he’d been ugly, she’d have believed it then, she thought, vain as she was. But he outranked her in this and that made her suspicious. ‘I asked you here because you’re clever, and pretty, and interesting, and you snuck into my house and you didn’t take anything or abuse my daughter. You easily could have. I know you weren’t here on a social call then.’

  ‘Ikasen isn’t dinner.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ She raked a hand through her hair, snagging it on a leftover pin. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I thought that was painfully obvious.’

  He smiled, lopsidedly – a far cry somehow from his usual smile, as if this was his natural one. ‘I was enjoying it.’

  ‘I’ve never lived by my head. That was for work. I lived by my feelings. And that’s what I’m still doing. You were a feeling. Everything after that is just what I say to make it look like reason.’

  ‘It is reason. Karoo would say the only reason.’

  ‘My daughter Issa thinks I’m quite mad.’

  His smile continued, wry on one side, happy on the other. ‘Does she have an alternative to offer?’

  ‘Logically thinking it through, as if I were building an engine,’ Tralane said, with a frown. ‘But life’s nothing like an engine. Not the kind I know anyway. I like my friends, I like my household, I’m happy as I am.’

  ‘And men?’

  ‘Come and go. I never found one I liked enough to keep around. My student notwithstanding, but he stays for the workshop and the knowledge and I wouldn’t think otherwise for a minute.’

  ‘But you share the same skill. You wouldn’t marry him?’

  ‘Oh, hell no. Too young, too…’ She hesitated. ‘Just no. He wouldn’t want to anyway.’

  ‘So you’d still be sleeping with him if I was in the picture?’

  She paused. ‘Are you going to be in the picture?’

  ‘Is that an offer?’

  ‘It’s the kind of woolly suggestion that will place half the responsibility or more on you in case of system failure,’ Tralane said. That damned lopsided grin. It took his handsome symmetrical face and all the calculated grooming and redeemed it. She wondered if he knew. He must know. But if she was going to be sucker-punched this way it wasn’t like she wouldn’t soon find out.

  ‘I will be in the picture.’

  His definite tone caught her by surprise, that and the look of quiet conviction. Her skin prickled with anticipation of something good.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked him.

  ‘Not so much,’ he said.

  ‘Thank goodness I didn’t bother to cook it myself then or I’d be annoyed.’ She took her glass and the bottle and stood up. ‘Come with me.’

  He stood immediately and waited for her to pass him on the way to the door. His hand closed on the wine bottle. ‘Let me carry that.’

  She smiled and tugged at it, taken aback slightly by how close and tall he was, her forehead at his shoulder height. ‘Really I can manage.’

  He didn’t let go. ‘No, I want to.’

  She knew perfectly well it wasn’t about wine or carrying things. She looked into his eyes. They had a wicked glint that made her skin shiver from neck to ankles. She let go of the bottle. ‘Suit yourself.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TZABAN

  Tzaban was staring at the moon when he heard and felt the approach of several people at the door. He had been contemplating leaving.

  All afternoon he’d sat patiently at the Empress’ feet to witness the court she held – part of an effort she was making to show him Glimshard society, and her own position, he felt, though he was not sure why he warranted such an effort. Petitioners had come and gone in a steady stream and she had dealt with their business – usually matters that lesser courts had referred to her. She also held an audience with Borze again, to consider his views on the situations beyond Tzaban’s immediate interest with other humans who skirmished on the city borders and around the region. Tzaban was not consulted. Borze seemed to think matters were getting out of hand, but was reluctant to reveal the truth to the Empress. Tzaban wondered why but as it was not his place, said nothing.

  He guessed from Borze’s looks and energy that the man considered his Empress too young, and that he was attempting to shelter her from matters he thought he would be able to manage alone. Tzaban well knew this was more a hope than a cold calculation. The city’s garrison could hold off one foe, or march out and strike one or two, but it would never hold a concerted, organised attack off if the motley of local antagonists ever organised themselves. Borze gambled that such an attack was impossible, thanks to the mutual enmity of Glimshard’s harassers, but it was not odds Tzaban would have wanted to play. Any canny observer would have seen the endless parade of southbound labour and soldiery and realised what that meant in terms of the city’s security.

  After this long afternoon with its circles and half truths, he understood only that the Empress was in a dreadful position that he would not have wanted for the entire world at his feet, not that this interested him much either. There had been only brief talk of the expedition to the dig and no hint given that his words of warning were of any use. He concluded that his mission had failed. Given that, there really was no reason to stay. Even if they wanted him to take their people south they still believed he could protect them or swing things in their favour, and he knew that wasn’t true. He felt torn between attempting the impossible and abandoning them to whatever fell. He had no desire to see it happen either way.

  Now it was dark and a cloudless night, the stars shone through the magelight glow of the high city, and he felt tempted to leap out of the window and into that endless, welcoming sky. His skin was already beginning to itch for the process of metamorphosis when the voices sounded through the door and the unlocking of the bars that kept it solid distracted him. Thin tendrils of scent preceded their entry: the Empress, Hakka, Night and some person who was new to him, a female and a very nervous one at that. A curious conjunx of their energies confused him; he felt urgency and doubt, determination riding over anxiety. Someone was carrying incense and before he even thought about it it made him sneeze three times in quick succession. He got up from the floor where he’d been lying and stood tall, adjusting his clothing.

  Hakka came in first after a moment of grace, though he did not hold his weapon ready and his forehead and chin were low – he was like a ship’s prow breaking the way and although Tzaban would not step back before him he did relax to show no opposition. The tall man glanced at him directly with a fraction of a nod: Tzaban returned the greeting. Then Hakka stepped left and the Empress herself came forwards, Night and the strange woman fanning out to either side of her in silence. The Empress was the determined one, then, he saw, Night was self-contained, subtle, the other a mass of nervous anxiety that made his ears turn back with dislike. He remembered his training in manners and bowed appropriately in silence. It was only as he straightened that he also recalled to check their clothing, knowing how much store and communication they placed in it though it was all hard work to read for him.

  The amount of heavy
beadwork and ceremonial decoration on the Empress made him feel a sudden strange conviction. He glanced at Night – she wore her usual inky coloured, floating attire that concealed so much. Then the one who was upset: also heavily robed and this one carried the censer which was hanging on a chain from her hand, waving slightly and filling the air with the heavy smell of oranges, cinnamon and rose. The words being spoken by the Empress filtered through all this to him very slowly, unwinding their sense in his mind almost as an afterthought. He looked at Hakka meanwhile, just one glance, and read all the grim intent and conviction there that he needed to see. A drop of sweat ran down the censer chain and he noticed it from the corner of his eye. He turned his gaze to the Empress, determined to see the full impact of her proposal written there – his future in those grey eyes, her lips pale under their glistening skim of wax.

  He saw a human girl, hands trembling as she stood as tall as she could, barely up to his chest, looking up steadily without raising her head. He felt an oddness about her, as if the sheen on her face, made of burnished powders, was the only thing holding back a wave. It was so delicate, finer than the dust of a mothwing, but still it held against the tide of contradiction backed up against it. He tasted earth, blood and war. The incense faded as he distended his nostrils and found that she would not use the axe of her chemical command on him. She perspired from the weight of her ceremonial clothes, but this was only a hot, tired, underfed girl declaring wedding vows.

  He bought a little time just looking from face to face to see if this was right, and it was. He searched his body for an answer, remaining still even after her mouth stopped moving to listen for any sign.

  His own voice grated through the air when he finally used it. ‘This will likely carry no weight with the Karoo.’ He couldn’t say none. It might have some. But it could go either way. ‘It cannot of its own force end your conflict.’ Now he thought it over he was not sure that the Karoo would understand the politics of humans, nor care. Marriage was a concept they could only have grasped as mating, and that held no long-term promise for them, nor any lasting interest. They might understand desire and the unfolding of new life and possibility. That was a kind of flower they could see and smell for something valuable.