by John Meaney
‘Is Eira inside?’
‘Y-yes.’
‘Never mind. I’ll look anyhow.’
Inside, the hut smelled of herbs and incense. Runes, both painted and carved, formed lines along the ashwood beams. Of course there was no Eira. Poor Ári was entranced, and there could be just one reason; but Eira was too late to prevent Jarl’s death.
At my hand.
But Chief Folkvar had given the orders. What an angry volva might do to a miscreant warrior-chief was unthinkable. If she blamed him—
‘Sorry.’ He brushed past Ári, exiting fast. ‘Relax.’
Ári had gone for his sword - he’d probably forgotten Ulfr was inside - but stopped, perhaps because it was Ulfr and not Eira running from the hut.
Inside the main hall, Folkvar was frozen in his wooden chair, one arm upraised and stiff, while Eira - her copper hair incandescent in the torchlight - stood with tightened fists, tears shining on her suffering face. In a rage she could make Folkvar forget his name or experience paralysis in arms or legs. Once, old Nessa had caused Folkvar’s predecessor to go blind for nine days, as punishment for letting a young cattle-thief go free. The chief had not known the thief was a rapist too.
All of the tribe’s women were fierce, but the volvas, seeress-priestesses, were something more.
‘Don’t do it,’ said Ulfr.
‘Jarl is dead.’
‘I know.’
‘By Freyja . . .’ She stared at his spear’s bloodied point. ‘You.’
‘He was suffering when I found him.’
‘Truth.’
‘Yes.’
She turned back to Folkvar, slipped her fingertips down his eyelids, then touched the back of his upraised wrist.
‘As your spirit lowers your hand, good Folkvar, you slip deeper and deeper into normal sleep, and when you awaken later you will remember all the visiting poet said and did, and be able to tell me free of any ensorcelling effects he left behind as you sink deeper now.’
Folkvar’s hand touched his thigh and his chin lowered, his breathing grew easy, and the softest of snores arose.
‘He was ensorcelled,’ she said, ‘but you were not. I’m sorry, Ulfr.’
‘But Jarl’s pain was—’
‘You told the truth. Let me do the same.’
‘So you see me as your brother’s killer.’
‘I’m sorry.’
There was more to it than that, or she would have struck him down with whatever punishment she’d had in mind for Folkvar. But however much she knew that he had granted Jarl a kind of mercy, she also saw the killing thrust inside her mind, and could not forgive him for it.
At least that was how he understood her words.
When he came to - he hadn’t realized he was drifting into sleep - he and Folkvar were still in the hall, and Brandr was sitting on the rushes beside him, but Eira was gone.
Stígr wept for the beautiful boy he had killed. Seated on a hard rock, staff in hand, he sobbed, while his ravens circled in the darkness above. If only they would leave him alone.
But he knew, by the burning of his left eye - the eye that was missing, that did not exist - that however the darkness chose to manifest, however far it sometimes seemed to drift away, it was bound to him, and he to it, forever.
Sweet Jarl, with lips so soft.
On a mouth that was cold and hardened now, soon to be food for worms, unless the villagers chose an honourable burning.
As he stood, though it was already night, shadows seemed to curl around him, swirling and embracing. Pulling his hat low, gathering his cape, he took a step forward, then another and another, moving as if in dream - call it nightmare - and when his mind cleared, he was at the top of a moonlit slope, looking down upon a village. This would be several days removed by normal walking from the place where Jarl had lived beneath Chief Folkvar’s rule.
One less poet in the world could never be a good thing, but the shadows had spoken and Stígr could only hear and do what they commanded.
It had been so long since things were otherwise.
Another village. Perhaps I can stay longer this time.
Sometimes there were periods of ease, of silence from the voices. He was due another sojourn, a time to recuperate.
Here, someone had posted night-time sentinels - he could sense their hiding-places - and even with his protection, descending to the village would be a risk. In the morning, he would make himself known.
And take advantage once more.
He forced that thought behind him, then sank down to the ground, curled up inside his rough cloak, and pulled down his hat to cover his face, denying the sight of the ravens that circled still, high above in the night.
THREE
FULGOR, 2603 AD
Sumptuous in cream and gold, the hollow sphere was decorated in the neo-baroque mode, and it could accommodate three hundred floating people for a dance or choral evening. At the centre, Rashella Stargonier floated, her skin sparkling with mag-gel, her gown and cape fluttering in a simulated breeze, while symphonic music played, composed on the fly by a part of her mind, performed by the house system, reflecting and elaborating her mood, intensifying her focus during meditation.
Her Lupus Festival celebrations would be complex, taking her guests through subtle changes in emotional state as they passed along the rooms and halls of Mansion Stargonier, the dinner and cognitive entertainments a statement of expertise to surpass even last year’s success. It was taking considerable time to plan, for while - as a Luculenta - she could form in-Skein corporate empires in a matter of seconds, her guests would be Luculenti too. That meant an evening’s extravaganza required coordination on a timescale of deciseconds, backed by femtoscopic technology.
She was having fun.
From a peripheral channel of awareness, a cascading wind-chime sounded.
‘Hello,’ she said, slowing to ordinary human speech.
The holo sharpened into rich colours, real-image rather than virtual, depicting a bearded man’s head and shoulders some five times life-size. The communication channel was in Skein, but only in what Luculenti called Periphery among themselves: simple protocols for simple folk, unenhanced Fulgidi and other humans.
‘Please excuse the interruption,’ said Greg Ranulph in magnification.
Had she wanted, Rashella could have read every emotion from the degree of tumescence in his lips, the lividity of his facial skin, the dilation and saccades - flickering search patterns - of his eyes. But Ranulph was only her gardener, and whatever he thought of his part-time position here - with his doctorates in biomath and ecoform engineering - she considered him a temporary adjunct to the house system’s expertise in landscaping and garden management.
Still, her parents raised her to be nice to the hired help.
‘You’re a welcome diversion, Greg. Have you sent down the borers yet?’
‘Just about to, ma’am.’
So what wasn’t he telling her?
‘Er, I did try a first probe,’ he went on. ‘Just inside the western boundary.’
‘And the result was?’
‘It’s secreting symteria just fine.’
For anyone who wanted a designer ecosystem that combined organisms native to two worlds, symteria seeding was a necessary early step, allowing hybrids access to microlife that combined both biochemistries. From the tension and release in Ranulph’s voice, this wasn’t where the problem lay.
‘What about the borer-probe itself?’
‘It, er, made its own mind up about where to go. But it settled eventually, eight metres down.’
The borers were an expensive model - and their control systems were designed and grown by a company Rashella had inherited from her father, its ownership buried so deep in layers of corporate aggregation and trading proxies that Ranulph could not know it.
‘I’ll be right there.’
‘You mean in person?’ There was unconscious joy and surprise in the widening of his eyes. ‘Physically?’<
br />
‘That’s what I mean.’
Although if she’d anticipated this response, she might have worked in Skein. Could he really find her attractive as well as overwhelming?
Never mind. He could never be more than an employee, for her passion and cognitive powers would burn someone like him: think snowflake, dropped inside a nova.
She cut the comm channel, ran a fingertip along the nine golden studs that arced across her brow, then spread her hands.
Floating forward, she rode the mag-field toward huge golden petals that furled back on themselves, revealing the corridor beyond. There, as her feet touched the patterned carpet, it began to flow, carrying her along. In alcoves stood disparate works of art - bronze sculptures from every Molsin sky-city, a living sand-picture shipped from Sereflex, song-motes from Nulapeiron - forming nested subtle themes. Wanting the exertion, she began to walk, while allowing the carpet to continue flowing, adding to her speed.
A linear gradient of exotic fragrance was replaced by an interwoven series of blossom scents and animal musks from seven worlds, far beyond a professional parfumier to appreciate, not without upraise to Luculentus capabilities.
Entering a vast white-and-glass atrium, she commanded the flow to stop. Then she gestured, and a helix of carpet and quickglass grew upwards, spiralling toward the transparent roof. Just for a moment, she went deep inside herself, accessing low-level interface services the way an élite meditation-trained athlete might deconstruct the minute muscle activations involved in striking a ball or flipping a somersault.
<
Then she was standing on the quickglass helix and it was bearing her upward, spiralling toward the great ceiling that was already softening and pulling apart to allow her exit. At the spiral’s tip, some thirty-three metres above ground, a bud was swelling, morphing into her favoured car design, open-topped with room for only one. She glided up the spiral stalk and allowed the quickglass to deposit her inside the carbud, then relaxed as the seat reconfigured, holding her perfectly.
Other ways of travelling were faster; few were as stylish.
Sailing high over blue lawns and purple topiary where whistling songmoths tended drooping scarlet flowers, the carbud carried her smoothly, finally curving down, past a grove of orange novabeeches, and touched the soft ground. The carbud shivered then melted as she walked clear.
Ranulph was standing at the edge of a long drop, almost a cliff. In one hand, he held a stubby silver trident, a symterial manufactory used to inject mutant colonies into the borers. His attention was on a drone, hovering some way below.
‘It’s about level with the rogue borer,’ he said. ‘The others are inserting fine.’
His tu-ring generated a real-image holo of surprising crispness in the sunlight. It was a simple 3-D diagram, topped with a miniature translucent sward representing the ground they stood on, while below shone jagged yellow streaks like lightning, showing the paths the borers had taken. Their descent depended on soil structure, as they sought to optimize the upward growth patterns of symteria colonies, forming the controlled foundation of a new hybrid ecosystem throughout the mansion’s grounds.
There was something half-hearted about Ranulph’s attempt to direct her attention toward the borers that were working successfully. Perhaps it was because he knew that his subterfuge could not work against a Luculenta. At any rate, he was not worth psychophysiological probing - being nice to the hired help had limits.
‘I’m glad the equipment mostly works. Here, let me take that.’ The holo now shone above her outstretched hand, generated by the house system and magnified by an invisible smartmiasma. ‘Thank you.’
This was rude, snatching data from his tu-ring and causing it to power down, but she no longer cared. The borer in question had followed a strange trajectory because it was trying to avoid some obstacle whose nature did not register in the normal parameters. The device had detected something, without being able to tell what it was.
Now given the capabilities of the borer’s control system, whose design Rashella had total access to, this obstacle was an interesting mystery in what had been a normal day. Whatever she was about to find, she did not need her gardener’s help to unearth it.
‘Minor errors aside,’ she said, ‘your work is mostly impressive, and I’m awarding you a bonus.’
‘Really? Well, um, thank you.’
At her summons, a bronze aircar lifted from the south wing and headed this way.
‘And while you’re at home, you can think about planning the eastern expansion. I might shift my attention to the rainbow fungus maze for a while.’
‘Home? Er . . . Sure.’ He looked down at the trident in his hand. ‘Thanks.’
The maze would be vulnerable to shifts in the soil’s microbial population. It would give Ranulph the kind of problem he liked to work on, with no need for him to be here while he worked the calculations.
Can it be what I think?
A host of voices in her head provided answers while rainbow-hued phase spaces and equations danced in her mind’s eye. The borer’s inbuilt scan system was wide-ranging, and the one thing that might disturb its perceptions was a transparency toward scanning, a failure of resonance.
A null-gel capsule, buried on my property?
No one made or used them nowadays - for one thing, the legal penalties were severe - but occasional historical relics turned up, wrapped in gel designed to hide the contents from scan technology. And the thing was, about one hundred standard years before, this area had been witness to some very strange events.
Could there really be an artefact from that period, right here in her mansion’s grounds?
Like giant horizontal saucers dangling from a quickglass tree, circular balconies overhung a plaza near the centre of campus. Roger leaned against a balustrade, staring down. He had dealt with his acrophobic fear at an early age, but there was still an edge of vertigo, and a part of his mind that wondered how it would feel if he jumped.
Whatever the sensation, it would last about two seconds, his last perception ever, unless the flagstones below could soften themselves in time. He wondered how alert the embedded systems were.
‘Are you Roger Blackstone?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I’m Rick Mbuli.’ Dark skin, wide smile. ‘We’re the group, then?’
‘So far.’
They touched right fists and bowed, all very formal.
‘The others probably went to the house first. Have you seen it yet?’
‘No. You?’
‘Thought I’d wait till later. Bet the girls take the best rooms.’
‘More than likely. There’s seven of us, right?’
‘Yeah, and our tutor is Dr Helsen. You talked to her?’
‘No,’ said Roger. ‘What’s she like?’
‘Interesting.’
A circular blue table rose on a short stalk, budded by the balcony floor. Seven stools morphed into being, and Rick sat down. He gestured, and a goblet grew from the table, sparkling liquid swirling inside.
‘Can I get you anything?’ He broke off the goblet and sipped. ‘Mm, nice.’
‘Not yet, thanks.’ Roger pointed to a group of three young women ascending the central stalk by flowdisk. ‘They’re coming this way.’
‘I wonder which one’s scheduled for upraise.’
‘Upraise? But a Luculenta in the group—’
‘Don’t tell anyone I said that. And until it happens, she’s just one of us, right?’
‘I guess.’
The trio approached, their leader pale with white-blond hair, another thin and young-looking, her hair striped in black and cobalt blue, and a heavier girl with downcast gaze.
‘I’m Stef,’ said the blonde. ‘She’s Trudi and she’s Gella, short for Angela.’
‘And I’m Rick, short for Ricardo Mbuli. Hi.’
‘Roger.’
‘Well, good.’ Stef seated herself first, then waited
for everyone else to settle. ‘Has Petra Helsen appeared yet?’
‘Is that what you call Dr Helsen?’ asked Rick. ‘And citrolas all round, does that suit everyone?’
Roger and Trudi nodded, while Stef gave a movement of her lips that was both acceptance and dismissal. Amused, Roger played a mnemonic game that Dad had taught him, exaggerating everyone’s features in his mind while adding their names and keywords. Haughty was emblazoned on his mental image of Stef.