Burning Bright

by Melissa Scott

  “That tickles.”

  “Sorry,” Lioe said, and stopped poking, but she did not take her hand away.

  They reached the edge of the Straight at last, a broad stretch of road, quiet now, only a few bicycles and a single flatbed carrier visible along its length. The Old Dike loomed in the distance, towering over the housetops. The noise of the carrier’s engine echoed oddly between the housefronts and the water; a bicycle whispered past, tires singing against the pavement. Lioe caught a glimpse of the rider’s face stern with concentration as he flashed under the nearest streetlamp. They crossed the trafficway cautiously, mindful of bicycles, and Roscha stepped up onto the wide poured‑stone ledge that edged the river. Lioe copied her, more cautiously, and looked down to see the water black beneath her, shadowed from any glint of light by the stone wall that was its bank. Bollards, low iron things with rounded tops like fantastic mushrooms, sprang up at regular intervals along the wall, one or two with a coil of bright yellow safety line looped around them. Roscha led the way along the ledge, Lioe following a little more slowly–the wall was broad, but the black emptiness beside and beneath her, and the low rush of the water, were enough to encourage caution–and stopped beside a bollard that carried a double loop of safety line around its base.

  “Here we are,” Roscha said, and nodded at a rope ladder that was hooked into two of the holes drilled into the bank. Lioe looked down rather dubiously, was reassured to see the soft glow of a steering lamp. In its dim light, she could see most of Roscha’s boat, a long, narrow shape, blunt at both ends, with an arched section at the bow that vanished into the shadows. The deck glowed gold directly under the lamp, and a solar strip glittered softly. Roscha frowned absently down at the boat, one hand buried in a pocket, and a few seconds later Lioe heard the faint double chime of a security system disarming itself. “I’ll go first,” Roscha said, and let herself down the ladder without waiting for Lioe to agree.

  Lioe lifted an eyebrow at that, but waited until the other woman had reached the deck before easing herself onto the unsteady ladder. It took her a moment to find her balance, but then she had it, and lowered herself cautiously onto the deck. Roscha was waiting to steady her, and Lioe accepted the support for a few seconds, until she caught the rhythm of the boat in her feet and legs. She nodded to Roscha–the boat moved less than she had expected, but it was a jerky movement, unpredictable–and Roscha released her, moved forward to the shelter and crouched on the deck to release a hidden latch. A section of the deck came up in her hand, revealing a short ladder and a dim, red‑toned light. Lioe grinned, even though she knew perfectly well why any boatman– or pilot, for that matter–kept red lights in the sleeping quarters, and came forward to join her. Roscha smiled and said, “After you.”

  The cabin space was mostly bed, a thin mattress on top of a good‑sized platform that probably concealed storage space. Lioe sat on the edge of the mattress–there was no room for two to stand in the narrow stairwell, and the arched ceiling kept her from standing upright except in the very center of the cabin–while Roscha secured the double‑doored hatch behind them, and turned at last to face her. One hand was in her pocket still: the security system chimed again, resetting itself, and the red light strengthened slightly. In the comparative brightness, Lioe could see more details, the crumpled blankets and the cases of disks, Rulebooks and session supplements, mounted on the bulkhead just above the bed. Roscha slipped out of her jerkin, hung it on a hook mounted beside the hatch, and seated herself on the mattress beside the other woman. Lioe smiled and reached for her, and Roscha reached back. They kissed, lips meeting and parting, slow and awkward until they’d settled on who would lead. Lioe leaned into Roscha’s strong embrace, let herself be held and touched, Roscha’s callused fingers fumbling under her clothes to free her breasts, pinching her nipples into stiffness. And then they were scrambling with clasps and zippers and catchtape, struggling to get all the way onto the bed without letting go, either one of the other, until they were lying nearly face to face, legs tangled, thigh to crotch. Lioe leaned back a little to let Roscha’s hand between her legs, to let the deft fingers slide between her labia, circling and searching and teasing in the thick wetness until she found the right stroke. Lioe buried her face against the other woman’s shoulder, riding her hand and the rhythm of the boat until she came. Roscha came a few minutes later, driving her crotch against Lioe’s thigh, and they lay tangled, breathing hard, until finally Lioe shifted her shoulders so that she could lie flat, displacing most of Roscha’s weight sideways onto the mattress. Roscha mumbled something, already half asleep. Lioe craned her neck awkwardly to look at her, caught between amusement and chagrin– no particular sense of prowess, I didn’tdo anything–but it was late, and there was no place she needed to be. She shifted again, freeing herself from the uncomfortable parts of Roscha’s embrace, and let herself relax toward sleep.

  Part Three

  « ^ »

  Early Morning, Day 31

  High Spring: The

  Chrestil‑Brisch

  Palazze, Five Points

  It was very late by the time Damian Chrestil came home to bed, a bored helio pilot lifting him from the Junction Pool helipad up and over the light‑streaked mass of the Old Dike to the Chrestil‑Brisch compound on the headland that was the third of the original Five Points. Most of the lights were out in the narrow buildings, only faint security lights glowing behind the arches of the first floor. The second and third stories, solid walls of dark stone broken by unlit slit windows, looked ungainly, top‑heavy, without light to give them balance. Only the ring‑and‑cross of the landing pad glowed blue through the darkness, and the helio pilot landed them with the rotors barely moving, balancing the weight of the passenger pod against the gas in the lifting cells. Damian nodded his approval– no need to wake everyone in the house–and let himself in through the security ring, raising his hand in greeting to the single human being sitting sleepily at the center of the glowing banks of controls. Like all the Five Points families, and most of the other groups that dominated Burning Bright’s commerce, the Chrestil‑Brisch had good reason to employ a private police force. It was a matter of pride that theirs was smaller than many. The guard nodded back, and said, “Na Damian, there’s a visitor waiting in your suite. She’s on your admit list.”

  Damian lifted an eyebrow at him. The only woman the guard would describe as a visitor whom he would let into his rooms was Cella, and he couldn’t imagine what she would be doing here. Her regular nights were the fourth, fourteenth, and twenty‑fourth. “Is there a message?” he asked, and the guard shook his head.

  “No, sir. She just asked to be let in.”

  “How charming.”

  Damian turned away, made his way down the echoing corridors toward his own suite of rooms. The palazze’s floors were seamarble, quarried from the uninhabited, and uninhabitable, Midseas Islands; his footsteps sounded hollow on the green‑veined stone, and he found himself stepping lightly, trying not to wake the distant echoes. The automatic lamps lit at his approach, fretted globes held in fantastic sconces, and closed down again after he had passed, so that he walked in the center of a moving tunnel of light. His private rooms were at the northwestern corner of the palazze, where short domed towers sprouted like mushrooms, looking out over the old city toward the rising mass of the Landing Isle and Newfields. As he approached them, the security board outside the main door lit, and chimed softly for his attention. The lights glowed green and yellow among the wide leaves and thick clustered fruit of the frieze of sea grape carved around the doorway, spelling out a familiar pattern. Even so, Damian Chrestil slid his hand into his pocket, curled his fingers around the familiar shape of his household remote, feeling for the control points by instinct. He trusted Cella as much as he trusted anyone, but it was as well to be prepared. He palmed the device, cutting off the system’s programmed announcement of his presence, and let himself into the suite.

  Cella was waiting in the reception roo
m, as he’d known she would be, in the corner of the room under the arches that held up the main tower. Moonlight poured in through the window on her left, draping her with the shadow of the fretwork tracery outside the window, drawing blue fire from the seabrights scatter‑sewn across her fractal‑lace overskirt. Behind her, the Old City was spread like a faded carpet, the regular lights of square and street broken by the darkness of the distant reservoirs and the unlit lines of the Straight and the Crooked rivers and the velvet texture of the parklands. She was wearing a violet bodice above the lavender and silver lace, dyed raw silk cut close to her full breasts, rising and sweeping outward to expose her shoulders; braids of the same clear violet were woven into the glossy black of her hair. The double light, the moonlight and the city lights behind her, rounded even further the lavish curves of her body. Damian Chrestil caught his breath as she turned to smile at him, and saw the faint pulsing light of an orbiter rising over her shoulder from the pens at Newfields. It was perfectly timed, it had to have been timed, and he knew he should laugh, tease her for it, but the effect was too perfect, good enough to convince even him. Then she took a step forward, and he saw from the look on her face, the uncalculated, crooked grin so different from her usual cool smile, that effect was the last thing on her mind. He blinked, but touched the remote to light the wall lamps and opaque the windows, and said aloud, “What brings you here, Cella?”

  Her grin widened. “You told me,” she said, “you told me you wanted Ransome back on the nets, and by the very God, he’s back.”

  “So?” Damian was suddenly very tired, not in the mood for games or the Game. “So you’re good. I knew that, it’s what I pay you for.”

  Cella tilted her head at him, still smiling, but turned away toward the sideboard bar. She ran her hands across the carved border of lions and deer, fingers working deftly on the disguised controls, and then extracted bottles and two ice‑lined tumblers. She poured two drinks, ardentecut with the sweet‑and‑sour syrup distilled from sugarwort, and brought one across to him. The ice in the tumblers cracked sharply as the warmed ardentehit it. She said, over the random noises, “But I didn’t do it, Damiano. He came back on his own.”

  Damian lifted an eyebrow at her, and settled himself on the long, low chaise, deliberately stretching out his legs to keep her from sitting beside him. Cella smiled, not the least put out, and seated herself demurely in a willow‑work chair opposite him. She might, from her expression, have been the perfect salarywife greeting her corporate husband.

  “I’ve been trying to lure him in, get him interested–I even botched a scenario on his account–but he’s been too damn careful.” She grinned suddenly, lopsidedly, an expression as unexpected as her attempts at respectability. “Or at least too busy with those story eggs of his. I was beginning to think you’d do better to commission one, Damiano.”

  “But he came back,” Damian said. “Do stick to the point, Cella, I’m tired.”

  One eyebrow flickered up in mute but pointed question, but Cella said only, “That’s right. He came back because there’s a new notable in town, and she had the temerity to play one of his Grand Types. And she did it well, too. So I think Na Ransome will have his mind on the Game for at least a week–that’s how long this woman is going to be here. Or maybe longer. When I left, he was buying Rulebooks, and I haven’t heard of him doing that in years.”

  “So.” Damian sipped at his drink, considering her news, and slowly allowed himself to smile. The Game, or at least the new notable, would keep Ransome busy in the Game nets, and he could slip the lachesi quietly into the system, and ship without interference from the Republic, local Customs, or Chauvelin. It seemed that ji‑Imbaoa’s interference hadn’t roused anyone’s suspicions after all. “Tell me about this new notable.”

  Cella shrugged, a calculated indifference. “I don’t know much. She’s a Republican, union pilot–from Callixte, or at least she plays out of Callixte’s nets. Her ship’s supposed to be in dock‑orbit for repairs, and she’s planning to spend the time gaming. Decent‑looking woman, if you like them thin and stern. And a damn good session leader.”

  “Find out about her,” Damian said. “Politics, background–whatever.”

  Cella nodded. “Ransome was really interested,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in a club in years, he won’t let it rest at just one session. He’ll be busy with this scenario for the rest of Storm, at least.”

  “Not bad,” Damian Chrestil said, and allowed his approval to color his voice. He considered the invitation that he knew was waiting in his files, added, “Are you working tomorrow–I mean, tonight?”

  Cella frowned slightly, slipped a hand into the folds of her skirt to consult a scheduler hidden somewhere out of sight. “Tonight, no. Why?”

  “Chauvelin is having his annual night‑before‑Storm party,” Damian said. “I’d like you to accompany me.”

  Cella paused, shrugged slightly. “All right. Our usual arrangement, I assume?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Excellent,” Damian said.

  “Not bad,” Cella answered, “not bad at all.” She set her now‑empty tumbler aside, and came to sit next to him, pushing his legs out of her way. “All things considered, I think I have every right to be pleased.”

  “For whatever it was you did,” Damian said. He eyed her almost warily, recognizing the mood. It was neither drink nor drugs, but the solid high of an unexpected success, and he would reap the benefits of it, whether he liked it or not. She smiled down at him, well aware of her own excitement and his lack of immediate response, and ran two fingers up the inside of his thigh. It was a touch that rarely failed to rouse him; he laid one hand flat against her breast, and felt her nipple already stiff against the palm of his hand, easily discernible through the rough silk. She had done the job he wanted, however she’d done it, and her choice of coin was sex: sex of her choice, for her pleasure, at her whim. He caught his breath as her hand moved higher, brushed past his groin, and came to rest flat against his lower belly, a steady, urgent pressure. Not that it was a difficult payback– a hard one, maybe–but it was unavoidable, if he wanted to keep their tacit agreement. Cella’s smile widened, as though she’d read his thoughts, and she slid an expert hand under his clothes, ending all possibility of protest.

  He woke in his own bed the next morning, to sunlight and the steady shrilling of an alarm. He swore, wondering for a bleary instant why Cella let it sound, then reached across the empty bed for the remote. The time was flashing on the far wall, the red numbers almost drowned by the bright sunlight: almost the ninth hour. He had slept through at least two earlier wake‑ups. No wonder Cella hadn’t waited. He sat up, wincing–he wasn’t hung over, but he functioned badly on fewer than six hours’ sleep–and touched the remote again. His fingers slid clumsily over the rounded surface. It was a pretty thing, shaped like a wide‑web node with a single broad leaf wrapped around it, carved from a brown stone so dark that it looked almost black except in direct sunlight, but this morning the carving distracted him. He found the proper control points at last, launched the program that displayed his schedule on the far wall below the chronometer’s numbers. The ninth hour was given over to the weekly breakfast meeting with his siblings.

  He swore again, checked the time–less than a quarter hour, barely enough time to shower and shave and dress, much less find a wake‑up pill–and forced himself out of bed. Neither the shower nor the pill Cella had kindly left for him helped much, but he managed to dress with reasonable care, and made his way to join the others. He was not the last to arrive, and Chrestillio–Altagracian Chrestil‑Brisch, the family pensionary and titular head of the family by virtue of being firstborn–nodded at him from his place at the head of the long table. Bettisa Chrestil‑Brisch, known as Bettis Chrestil, the family’s representative to the Five Points Bank, did not look up from the workboard where the night’s downloaded trade figures were playing.

  “G
ood morning,” Damian Chrestil said, keeping his voice suitably subdued, and crossed to the sideboard to pour himself a cup of coffee from the intricate silver brewer. The coffee was cut half‑and‑half with milk from the Homestead Island farms–even the Chrestil‑Brisch couldn’t afford to import coffee in bulk–and he added a toffee‑colored crystal the size of his little fingernail from the sugar bowl. Sugar was expensive, too–most of the sugarwort crop went to the distilleries–but there was no point in being stingy this morning. He collected breakfast as well, a wedge of soft, mild cheese, a few thin, chewy slabs of docker’s bread, and a spoonful of sour preserved fruit. There was fish sausage as well, and a bowl filled with half a dozen hard‑boiled eggs, their shells painted with swirls of dye, but he ignored them both, and seated himself opposite Bettis Chrestil. The sunlight, mercifully, was behind him; it streamed into the room, casting shadows across the polished and inlaid tabletop and onto the olive‑and‑gold paneling. The carnival scenes that filled the central medallion of each panel looked bleached in the strong light.

  “Has anyone seen the weather?” Damian asked.

  Bettis looked up from her board. “About what you’d expect, this time of year. There’s a depression to the southeast, but there’s no saying if it’ll strengthen, or come this way.”

  Chrestillio said, “The street bookmakers are saying it’s at forty‑to‑one to hit at all, at any strength, but I hear that’s dropping.”

  And the street bookies would know, Damian thought. They know as much and more than the weathermen, but then, they have more to lose. The canalli bet on the weather with the same passion that he himself played politics.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” a new voice said, and Damian looked up to see the last of his siblings standing in the doorway. She came fully into the room, a broad‑shouldered, broad‑hipped woman in the grey‑green coveralls that anyone wore to visit the distillery, and a whiff of the mash came with her, a sour odor almost thick enough to taste. Damian winced, and Calligenia Chrestil‑Brisch finished stripping out of the heavy coveralls and dropped them in the hallway outside the door. She closed the door behind her, leaving the clothes for a household cleaner, said, “I got caught up in some stuff at the plant.”