Context

by John Meaney

  ‘Where’s Draquelle?’

  Kraiv shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘She’s supposed -ah, there she is.’

  ‘Hey, fellows. Were you waiting for me?’

  There was a bright shine in her eyes, which Tom chose to interpret as a traveller’s excitement, like his own.

  ‘You’re right on time.’

  But there was a part of him, even then, which recognized a kindred spirit, and remembered how it could be ... Which knew the dragon that lurked still in his mind, whenever he saw a flagon of cool amber beer, down whose side condensation seductively rolled; or he passed by a ganja-mask den, its scent as sweet as sugar, cloying as an overbearing lover’s embrace; or a membrane-enclosed amphetamist chamber, where glowing vapours offered fire in the veins.

  And if he did not smell the fruit-tinged alcohol upon her breath, the sweet tang of orthopeach liqueur, then why was it that he remembered now with cold clarity what eventually followed? The crashing blackness, the trembling inner hurt, the fragility and fractured drabness of the real external world when the bright joy had passed and only the nerve-racking need was left.

  ‘Draquelle, do you want to be official holder of the travel-tag?’

  ‘Sure. Come on, men. Let’s go.’

  And Tom would wonder later if Kraiv sensed some of the same vulnerability in Draquelle. For when they walked in single file, it was with Tom leading and Kraiv in the rear, or vice versa; and where tunnels widened into boulevards, the trio walked side by side, always with Draquelle in the centre, as though two men could guard against the driven need inside her.

  The new year arrived with a flurry of bright exclamations from Draquelle, during the fifth night of their journey, waking Tom and Kraiv from their sleep in a small hostel chamber with three oval sleeping pallets, one of them unused.

  ‘Hey, fellows!’

  Not danger...

  ‘Huh?’ Tom squinted painfully, his forehead throbbing. ‘What is it?’

  In the shadows, Kraiv was already sitting up on his pallet, a short blade in each hand.

  ‘It’s time for celebrating!’ Draquelle poked her head inside the chamber. ‘Why are you two sleeping?’

  ‘Because,’ suggested Tom, ‘we’re getting up early in the morning?’

  ‘Ah ... You two are boring, you know that?’

  Tom looked across the chamber at Kraiv.

  ‘It is the new year,’ Kraiv said.

  ‘But you don’t drink.’ Tom nodded at Kraiv’s huge upper arm, where he knew the dark crossed-axes tattoo nestled, in the hollow between the great bunched biceps and triceps, though it was invisible in this gloom. ‘Or am I mistaken?’

  ‘You know’—touching his tattoo with the flat of a blade—‘about the Way of Rikleth?’

  ‘I don’t know much about the way you worship,’ said Tom. ‘But I’m aware that you don’t use mind-altering agents.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Oh, come on, fellows.’ Draquelle’s voice, unnaturally bright and cheery, seemed to bounce off the dark stone walls. ‘Can’t you relax long enough to see in Tiger Year? For Chaos’ sake ...’

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ Kraiv told Tom, rolling off his pallet and sheathing his blades. ‘Let’s go, Draquelle.’

  ‘Well, thank Fate for that.’ Draquelle was already leaving, pulling the heavy drape aside, revealing the corridor beyond. ‘At least one of you’s got a bit of life in you .. .’ Her voice trailed off as the hanging fell back into place.

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ rumbled Kraiv, pulling on his outer tunic and fastening his cloak.

  ‘Good…’

  Tom lay back and closed his eyes, and slid into a deep yet troubled sleep, populated by silver-scaled dragons who swam in his veins and ate his eyes, and a voice hissed, then whispered, ‘Like swallowing pearls,’ and Tom moaned without waking.

  In the morning, fading dream fragments fell away before him in shards, and he sat up with a headache already forming.

  But that was nothing compared to the way Draquelle looked, pale and trembling over breakfast. Beside her, Kraiv propped his elbows on the table and drank from a daistral bowl, forearm muscles sliding like thick cables beneath taut black skin.

  From Kraiv’s comments, Tom deduced that he had taken Draquelle back to her hostelry chamber just a few hours ago, and stood guard outside. If a night without sleep had affected him, there was no sign of it.

  ‘We’d better get going.’ He addressed Tom, watching Draquelle. ‘Perhaps in an hour or so?’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’ Tom motioned to a waitress, and handed over a copper cred-spindle. “Thank you.’

  ‘You enjoyed it?’ The waitress looked down at Draquelle’s untouched plate.

  ‘My friend’s got a touch of flu,’ said Kraiv. ‘But it was good.’

  ‘Well, Fate’s Blessings, everyone.’ And, nodding at their packs: ‘Travel safely.’

  It was more like two hours before they had hitched their packs across their shoulders and were ready to continue their journey. But by the afternoon’s end, Draquelle’s composure had returned—a decent lunch helped—and she was chatting and pointing out the sights as they walked.

  There was plenty to see and hear. Among the wrought-iron colonnades of Outer Yetrin, locals chattered not just in Cuiliano, but in High Brezhnakh from the northern provinces.

  When they put down their packs to rest, Tom wandered by himself, admiring the carvings on stonework, drinking in aromas of roasting myosticks and tava-cake, watched children playing lightball, while vendors hawked cheap statuettes of Gholad the Conqueror and the Blessed Olivia.

  It was different in detail, yet somehow it brought to mind the atmosphere of Salis Core, the busy marketplace in which Tom had spent his childhood, while Father had made and sold his wares upon their stall.

  Madam Bronlah had given them credit sufficient for supplies throughout the journey, and Tom had his own savings. So when he found himself outside a musty crystal shop—an interlocking series of shadowed chambers, stacked with crystal racks—he could not resist.

  Inside, he found everything from Balkrini epics to scrub-drone repair manuals. An outer chamber sold other gifts: small pseudautomata, in the form of flame-pixies, song-sprites and dream-fleas; an insulated miniature lavarium; armoured gauntlets; a battered board-game entitled ‘Vendetta for the Whole Family’, with a free (ironic, but accurate) guide to common poisons.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘I’ll... be back later.’

  He could spend hours here, but he had obligations.

  He found his companions in a small plaza. Draquelle’s eyes were very bright, and her voice was too cheerful as she said, ‘It’s time we were getting on, don’t you think?’

  Kraiv shook his head: a tiny movement.

  ‘All right,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s go.’

  For the next two tendays they travelled, making slow progress. At lunchtime or in the evening, Draquelle would disappear to drink alone: sometimes enough to slur her speech, but not to prevent her walking on.

  And then, on the evening before they were due to leave civilized tunnels, and strike out into the interstitial territory between Syektor Krafmant and Ghemprogini Sectoro, Kraiv came into Tom’s hostelry sleeping alcove.

  ‘Sit down.’ Tom shifted to one end of the pallet: there were no chairs. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Draquelle told me a little about her childhood.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tom looked at him. ‘Was it bad?’

  ‘Three Standard Years,’ said Kraiv carefully, ‘in the service of an Oracle.’

  ‘Chaos.’

  ‘Precisely, my friend.’

  Ah, Draquelle. How can anyone blame you?

  Tom knew something of the Oracles’ nature: neural groups within their brains experiencing time-flow in two directions. It was hard for anything like a coherent personality to form if the world appeared a kaleidoscopic mess, its patterns discernible only to an outside trained observer.

  Some—perhaps most—o
f the Oracles required extraordinary stimulation to bring their personalities into the normal flow of time.

  Or perhaps that was an excuse to realize the darkest and most twisted perversions which could lurk deep within mankind’s archaic reptilian brain, hidden away by the nature of higher thought and the conventions of society.

  So Oracles were given servitors, and allowed to treat them in ways the Oracles’ noble patrons—Lords and Ladies of exquisite taste and superb logosophical training—cared not to learn about.

  And sometimes the servitors and servitrices, if they had outlived their usefulness but survived relatively intact, were cast loose into a world which could not afford to care about their pasts, and in which they were often ill-equipped to survive.

  It seemed strange that Madam Bronlah would use Draquelle as a courier.

  ‘She keeps an eye on Draquelle, normally,’ Kraiv decided. ‘Maybe she wanted her safely away from the Bilyarck Gébeet.’

  There had been no news, good or bad, of the Bronlah Hong, or the realm in which it lay.

  They spent the next night, and the next, in a dead realm without a name, passing through long deserted gallerias with broken alcoves and shattered pedestals, where ceilings glowed strangely purple, and rustling ciliates disappeared at their approach.

  They slept wrapped up in their cloaks, packs serving as pillows, but fitfully, in grey darkness, surrendering to fatigue yet snapping into wakefulness for no good reason.

  And then they were into natural caverns where the going grew tougher, and they slipped on shale, negotiated cracked and jagged slopes, rarely stopping to rest.

  It puzzled Tom that Draquelle coped so well. But on their third day inside the wilderness, as he took up the rear in a low passageway where moisture dripped from bulbous stalactites into small murky pools, he found a discarded drink-bulb, and knew where her good cheer originated.

  And then they were through a militia-guarded checkpoint and back into populated tunnels, where Draquelle exclaimed loudly that she was looking forward to a long cool aerogel-bath in the first hostel they came to, relief and need adding a tremble to her voice.

  Her crisis came unexpectedly, after days of progress. It was only later that Tom told himself he should have recognized the pattern of self-denial followed by relapse.

  For twelve more days they travelled, and three of those days were easy ones, atop soft flat cargo-slugs, sliding their steady way towards Kizhtigan Praz, a realm which Tom had thought existed only in legend.

  On the fourth day, when the caravan’s route diverged from theirs, Tom and his companions dismounted, waved their farewells to the hooded caravanserai, and continued on foot.

  Draquelle was living cleanly.

  At one point, she opened her belt pouch, and handed all her cred-spindles, and her single cred-ring, to Kraiv.

  ‘I’d feel better,’ she said, ‘with a warrior looking after them.’

  Kraiv nodded solemnly. Tom looked on, smiling at them both.

  It was a tenday later that they entered Verinadshi Demesne—on the ninth stratum, having descended two strata so far -and decided that they needed recuperation. They checked in to a hostel, left their baggage—security was provided by a tall lean M’gasai Lancer, his fealty brand dark upon his left cheekbone, who nodded to Kraiv as though recognizing a spiritual brother—and went to find a nice place for lunch.

  Tom wondered, as they ate, where Elva was now.

  Eating lunch in an officers’ mess somewhere?

  She had been wearing a military uniform in the Seer’s vision. But Tom had not recognized its cut or colours, and the visual background provided no clues.

  Next morning, Tom walked by himself until he found a long twisted tunnel called Bahreen naBringlódi, where dream-shops, love-poets’ booths, and crystal sellers did quiet trade side by side. Passing beneath a flatscript holo which read Chrystalli Andromedae, Tom found himself amid racks of crystals.

  ‘Any recommendations, Roj?’ he heard a freedman ask.

  The proprietor hooked his thumbs into his patterned jerkin’s pockets, then rapidly listed titles. Tom listened for a moment, then wandered among the racks, finally depositing a handful of crystals on the counter.

  ‘This one’s good,’ said the owner, picking through them. ‘But I wouldn’t waste my time with the Rihdal. Yortin’s Temptation is the worst thing he wrote.’

  ‘But that doesn’t—’

  ‘Listen.’ And, inserting the crystal in a slot, he read aloud:

  ‘ “The demon was slimy, its purple tentacles covered with weeping pustules and more slime, its sharp-fanged orifices pulsating, but the mighty-thewed Duke Yortin felt himself grow strangely excited, sword hilt clammy in his—”‘

  ‘All right.’ Tom was laughing, despite himself. ‘Tell me what’s good, that I probably haven’t heard of.’

  ‘OK, then. Pèdd?’ The proprietor called to a tall man stacking racks. ‘Get these for me, would you.’

  A short while later, Tom found himself leaving the shop with three times as many crystals as he had intended to buy, but pleased, certain each crystal would be good.

  He nearly returned straight to the hostel. But something made him continue walking, and soon he was in a low rectilinear cavern of deep-blue polished stone, with rows of shining pools on floor and ceiling. The slow drip, drip of quicksilver droplets falling upwards, into the ceiling pools, was strangely relaxing.

  Then he passed through a series of chambers where abstract shapes coalesced from floating ting-mist, and scintillated.

  It draws me, this place...

  And then beyond, into a votive tunnel where ornate shrines stood softly glowing, and ordinary lay folk came to pray or meditate.

  There was an air of quiet anticipation: a gathering of onlookers including children who nudged each other, whispering, and spontaneously erupted into energetic running, chasing one another, then scampering back to their parents.

  For all that, the tranquillity was stronger here by the shrines.

  So long since I’ve known peace.

  If he ever truly had ...

  Then a child cried out: ‘He’s here!’

  And, in the distance—far along the tunnel’s vanishing perspective—an orange-clad figure came running this way, fast.

  The man’s cord-tied billowing garment was neither robe nor jumpsuit, but something in between. He slowed to a walk, and approached the shrine, his shaven head gleaming, his breathing deep and easy.

  Then he prostrated himself, sat back on his heels, and slid into a meditation so profound that it brought a sense of calm fulfilment to everyone who watched.

  A matronly woman, head covered with a white shawl, looked at Tom.

  ‘He’s very holy, this one.’

  Tom whispered back: ‘How far does he run?’

  ‘This year, he’ll run a hundred klicks a day, one hundred days in succession.’

  Sweet Fate.

  If all the monks ran like this, and their spiritual development in any way matched their physical discipline ...

  ‘The monastery,’ the woman added, pointing along the dark clean tunnel, ‘lies ten klicks that way.’

  Tom watched until the monk rose, ran slowly at first—till the children who accompanied him dropped back, laughing — then accelerated into a smooth, gliding motion Tom could never hope to match.

  Back at the hostel, he spread his new crystals across the sleeping pallet. There were tragicomic Hedolik epics, the entire ten crystals of the Nazalam Chronicles, and a couple of old favourites—Duke Caldwin’ s Ode to a Sword, and Jay’ s Dark Cape.

  From the poetry section, he had chosen Zelakrin’s Twisted Cat and Gone Up In Smoke, along with the infamous Kendrahl’s two-century-old epic, Tantala Daiquiri.

  And some serious treatises. Bioemergenics: An Introduction was far beyond most scholars; its self-effacing title was a joke. Also Conflict Calculus, Count Carnbull’s Originatio in the original Vektrohl, and Mel-Ynchon’s classic Space-Time Tensegrity. />
  Tom picked up Ode to a Sword, inserted the crystal into his holopad, and settled down to read.

  But he had scarcely got as far as the young hero’s first encounter with the eponymous blade when there was a clap from outside, and the hanging drew back. Kraiv’s muscular presence filled the archway.