Promising herself a return visit to the Works later, or at least a good gloat over its story in SankhaGuide, Valkyrie stepped over the broad balcony rail and opened her wings to glide down into Crisscross Street. It was early morning and no being was about except for a single wiry-haired mongrel dog who trotted nimbly away from her. It made the length of the street as far as the spot where the way was crossed by a low railway bridge of black brick, the road beneath closed to normal traffic by iron bollards. There it paused and sniffed, and its ears drooped with a dispirited kind of unease. Instead of carrying on through the tunnel to the street on the other side, it shook itself vigorously, turned and made off along the footpath that followed the railway line.
Valkyrie hurried to the same place and looked carefully at the bridge. Triptrap Bridge was not too far from here—the only means of crossing the Purbright at this end of town—and the troll and the toll were notoriously cranky to deal with, but this did not look like a troll bridge, and it wasn’t in a part of Sankhara that had many leanings towards that kind of thing. She was more worried about its collapsing on her than about magical guardians springing forth to challenge her. But when she put her hand on it and scanned the structure she couldn’t detect anything wrong with it. The shade underneath it was a few degrees colder than she would have expected, but she could see through to the sunny street on the far side. With an eye out for attackers lurking, she walked through.
There was no warning or sensation to mark the join of two realities, but with one step she crossed over from the mildness of Sankhara’s early summer to a startling brightness, the sun at a low angle, the air cool and dry. Instead of the bricks of Crisscross she was looking at vast slabs of marble in her path, all perfectly laid. To her right ran a high stone wall, and across the road to her left she found herself facing a low wall topped with huge and ornate black iron railings.
Beyond these lay extended formal gardens of a magnificence only matched by the building they surrounded. Vast, Baroque, to Valkyrie’s eyes incredibly bold in decoration and majesty, it stretched its beautiful lines of pale stone Corinthian columns and capitals for over half a kilometre. Between the stone pillars and window-frames colour-washed stucco stood out in shades of eau-de-nil, powder blue and rose red. Wild, snow-capped mountains were just visible through gaps in the forests that clustered thickly to either side of the Park boundaries and ran on behind it into the distance.
SankhaGuide’s Image Search found what she was looking at, although it meant little to her compared with the sheer impact of standing there in that sudden cold, all alone in a huge land. Valkyrie was so astonished that she stood still there for many minutes, wondering why the Engine had built this copy of Catherine the Great’s Winter Palace, and why it had chosen to hide it down an alley in the cheapest end of town.
But at least, she thought gleefully, I have something to tell Bob and Belshazzar.
She ran a check on the building’s inhabitants, but the Guide went a little tricky on her and stated that nobody was registered there, as the entire space was officially not part of Sankhara at all, and so lay outside its jurisdiction.
“Well, then, whose is it?” Valkyrie insisted. She didn’t think that the gate left ajar and the footmarks on the paths were due to ghosts.
“I don’t know,” SankhaGuide said. “It’s a relatively new structure.”
Valkyrie felt a tingle of interest and excitement. “And all your unregistered citizens are in here, or in others like it.”
“The University staff are mapping it. Would you like to contact them?”
“Oh.” The glee at her discovery was somewhat spoiled, but she rallied. “Just give me the names. I’ll do it myself.”
She looked over the very short list of a single name: Dr. Greg Saxton. He was part of the department, and involved in the Isol Fragment research group, which ultimately came under Belshazzar’s remit. Saxton was listed as having an apartment in the Montecathedral area. That would have to wait for another day, then.
Valkyrie followed the slushy footprints leading across the massive paving of the road and paused at the centre to look left and right. To her right the road carried on into the distance in a straight line. Close to the point where it vanished into the dark shadow of the encroaching forest, she could see the great park wall stop or turn. On her highest resolution she saw that it had in fact broken down and lay in ruins that were quickly swallowed up in evergreen creeper. Where they lay the road had also begun to decay. Tree roots buckled its perfect blocks and ice had cracked them into boulders. Saplings sprouted in the margins where the thinner paving slabs had vanished.
A pale flicker of movement caught her eye, inside the tree-line on the park side of the road. She tracked it, her AI targeting systems automatically coming online, ready to deal help or death as directed by the surge of primitive fear the sight had caused. Old organizations of neurons within her that were still human and Unevolved had recognized the typical gait of the wolf. It was bigger than any wolf she would have thought to find in a Siberian forest though. Composite image enhancers rebuilt it in her mind’s eye. It was huge. On its hind legs it would be taller than she was.
Valkyrie gazed reluctantly at the Palace, cast a single, uninterested glance to her left towards Sankhara Central and found herself not surprised to see the road run on into more glowering woodlands. A big tree had fallen from within the Park at some time in the past and its enormous, fungal-clad trunk blocked the way completely amid a pile of broken stones on either side.
She turned back to where she’d seen the wolf. The pale shape was still there and she felt herself observed. No sooner had the hairs on the back of her neck begun to prickle than she saw the half-hidden figure elongate rapidly and step out of cover.
She was right about the height. It was taller than she was and, like Bob, it was a curious mixture that was human and wolf, eagle and lion and horse and bear and something of the lizard too. She didn’t know what it was, except strange. She took a backward step before she knew it.
The long ugly face stared at her from a slightly sideways angle. She saw it wore some kind of rough clothing and metal decorations on its face and hands. Its narrow, powerful limbs looked more suited to all-fours running, but it had no trouble standing like a man. It had a necklace of bone and stone charms among which were suspended a golden sun and an ankh, a cross and a Star of David, a crescent, a feather and an iron ring. Valkyrie had no doubt whatsoever that she was looking at another Forged.
She accessed her links to the outside world and requested a listing but Who’s What simply replied—image not recognized, component features incongruent with current blueprint archive, refer?
—No, Valkyrie said and dumped the link as the being held up one hand to her, palm out, fingers closed in a clear gesture of warding before turning away. She thought of the golden gryphon and the butterfly. If the blueprint wasn’t listed even for intelligence agents then this creature simply didn’t exist. But she had no doubt that this was one of her cousins and that it had spoken to her in Uluru. It was too much of a coincidence to find it here. Without hesitation she ignited her jets and took off in pursuit as fast as she could.
The strange Forged dropped to all fours and melted into the forest, running. Valkyrie powered on through the icy cross-winds above the treetops and switched vision to heat-enhanced mode. Now she saw that whoever it was ran with real wolves, for they went leaping in yellow and green over the streams and rugged hills beneath the branches like a flowing mantle. The person themselves ran cool, almost at one with the ambient temperature, so that she could hardly see them. As she came directly overhead and looked down she could only tell where they were by the behaviour of the rest of the pack as they struggled to keep pace.
Valkyrie checked her speedo—35kph—that was very fast for such rough terrain. No way could any animal keep it up for long, and, even as she thought this she saw the weaker members of the group start to fall back and peel away. The band divided. Four strong runner
s turned back towards the Palace, while two kept to the line of a minor river, following the banks where she could sometimes pick them out in flashes of sunlit grass. It was then she realized she had been diverted by them, and in that instant of distraction had lost all idea of where her target had gone.
She dropped to earth like a stone and landed on the spot where the pack had broken up. The ground was soft and spongy and coated with a thick carpet of pine needles. Tracks were very hard to pick out but she found one clear mark. It was a wolf print, a pack print by its size, though it was peculiar. It had an extra pad mark, small and narrow, which looked a bit like the mark that might be made by a vestigial thumb.
When she straightened up she saw that something had been left behind for her hanging in the space between two trees. She strode up and snatched the little cloth bag down from the leather strands that suspended it. It was red. Valkyrie sniffed it, sensors on maximum, and discovered red ochre, iron, wolf hair and a cocktail of plant matter she couldn’t immediately identify.
Surfing the intelligence net she found her answer soon enough. This was gris-gris: a voodoun charm.
Valkyrie turned the smelly thing over in her hands. On the bottom a picture was drawn neatly in narrow-line permanent marker. She knew what that was—you saw it all the time in the Temple area. It was an allusion to the first Stuff, which had manifested the same symbol when Corvax, the first human to look at a sample, had observed it.
Halfheartedly Valkyrie scanned the woodland and the surrounding cold hills but she found nothing, as she expected. She hung the gris-gris around her neck, counting it nothing whether it was meant to hex or charm her. She just wanted to keep it long enough to ask Damien some questions about it. As she returned to the Palace area, walking quietly among the trees, it bounced heavily against her breastplate.
She stayed in a chilly, uncomfortable hiding place beneath the overgrown rhododendrons just inside the gateway. As it began to grow dark a shambling figure appeared from the main doorway. It carried a storm lantern and in the bright light Valkyrie saw a most peculiar face, both pretty and grotesque at once, feminine but at the same time brutal and uncompromising in its look. This person wore khaki combat clothing, some white in the mixture so that it could easily trek around in the forests, Valkyrie supposed. Then again, it wore a pink silk sarong around its waist and a soft feathered boa around its neck. There was no connection to SankhaGuide for Valkyrie to use in search for this person’s identity, but she knew well enough the look of MekTek—Unevolved humans who had undergone Forging after adulthood, into some new shape for their own reasons.
The figure set out for the iron gate. Valkyrie came out of hiding and showed herself, her palm up and glowing with the badge that identified her as a Solargov officer.
With a crunch of boots on ice they both stopped a metre apart.
“Who are you?” they both said at the same time.
Valkyrie identified herself.
“I’m Mandy,” said the MekTek in a soft burr of low tones. “I’m the Keeper here. You aren’t welcome, Officer Skuld, no matter what your mission. Be on your way.”
“Not before I know your story,” Valkyrie said. They were roughly equal in size, though Valkyrie packed more weight and armour. She was not intimidated although the other’s face became grim and dark.
“I was a bishop’s wife,” came the unlikely reply in a measured tone. “But later, when we had fallen out, I became a man, and after a man I became Tek, to protect myself from the Church. Before this my name was Amanda Deneuve and now I am known as Mandy Before. I am the servant of the master here and no other. Love has treated me harshly, as I see it has treated you, if your face is anything to go by. Until the master found me I took out my rage on the world. Sankhara’s graveyards are full of my disappointment. But after his light, I am a peaceful servant. Now I will have your story.”
Amanda Deneuve—it was a well-known scandal . . . Valkyrie did not believe it but she could see immediately it must be true. The strange face could be shrunk backwards in delicacy and strength to the features of that missing society woman. Her picture had been in all the newscasts several years ago when she and some church money went missing; the bishop afloat face-down in the Purbright.
“I am a servant of the law,” Valkyrie said.
Mandy Before lowered his lantern and spat on the ground. “Not here you’re not,” he said. “Hide if you like and spy yourself silly, but I am about to close the doors and light the lamps. If you attempt to interfere with the master, the servants of the lights will run to find you and you will not want to be caught. That goes double for the master’s girl. Also, after dark, other things that are his less merciful selves will take to the air. They are not so charming as he is, even though they are mind of his mind. His baser instincts are less than kind.” The huge figure shrugged, massive shoulders making the tiny feathers of the boa flutter and fluff in the icy air. With no more care for Valkyrie Mandy turned and continued on his walk to light the lamps that stood either side of the gate. Valkyrie watched him and he passed her by as if she were not there on his way back.
She returned to her hiding place as twilight came on. Presently another single figure came out of the main doors. It wore a long, heavy greatcoat of grey wool with a high collar and big leather riding boots but it moved very lightly for all that.
As it came level with her hiding place it slowed down and stopped. Valkyrie peered closer, her eyes expanded to their maximum to see if this was the Master spoken of, struggling to see by the weak light of the lamps. But if she was about to be rumbled then she was saved by a high-pitched shriek from the Palace doorway. The greatcoat turned as Valkyrie did, to see who was calling.
A girl with white-blond hair, who wore combat clothes and an unsuitably thin leather jacket, came running through the icy air, her feet in their oversize boots splashing through the muddy slush puddles that lay on the well-used parts of the gravel drive. “Wait for me! Changed my mind! Ha!”
The greatcoated figure held out the sides of its coat, and caught her up in them as she cannoned into it. “Hnuh! Ouch. You never dress properly.”
“Sankhara is still warm,” she objected. “I hate carrying coats. Greg’s coming but he said go without him. Changed his mind too.”
“Let’s go then.” But he made no move to undo the coat, which now contained both of them. Instead the girl inside it wriggled around to face forward and put her huge boot soles on top of the polished riding boots.
“You’re so silly,” she said and giggled as her companion started moving, doing the walking for both of them, much more easily than Valkyrie would have imagined. They moved like a heavy, clumsy robot.
Valkyrie watched the strange procedure as they went out through the gates. As they came into the lee of the forest wall the blond girl skipped out and jumped onto the pavement. She ran ahead and vanished neatly through the invisible hole into Crisscross Street. The man with her paused and looked back at Valkyrie for a second, then followed her. Valkyrie tried to regain an image capture of his face but found she hadn’t got one. Whenever she tried to resolve her memory it insisted on remaining blurred and indistinct. He had no face. She couldn’t even say with conviction whether or not he had hair or a hat.
She stood and walked to follow when a downrush of air startled her. Blades of darkness swept in from the starry sky and slashed at her head and shoulders. She felt no impact, staggered with surprise. The shadow talons of the invisible attacker passed straight through her armour and flesh. They did no damage to her body at all and she was recovering, her gun ready, when she felt sharp pain. The shadow touch had easily opened her most vulnerable, raw wound. Her heart ached so badly she thought it was stopping. With a roar of jets she made to escape. The dark hands that might be wings or only the shape of wings made by taloned fingers harried her all the way, their soft flutters laying open all the old scars of her past pain.
She stumbled through Sankhara in a state of shock. It took her an hour to return h
ome and then she found a face she didn’t particularly want to see, but she was glad to see someone and he gave her an idea.
Damien met her at her doorway, high in the starry sky, and looked surprised when she flipped over two hundred honour points by way of a greeting.
“Got a job for you,” she said. “Strictly a one-time offer. Here’s the target.” She sent the images she had taken of the people in the bubble envelope to his Tab.
“Nice juju,” Damien replied, reaching out with one long-fingered hand to touch the gris-gris. “Where d’you get it? Looks like the real thing.”
“It’s yours if you do a good job.”
“Nah, nah, I don’t want that! More than my life’s worth to take it off you. Are you crazy?” He stared at her with disbelief, then shook his head, hair whipping in the wind. “You Forged are all the same. No finer feelings for the real forces that slide under and take over. Trust me, you want to keep that. Hey, this image is no good. It could be anybody.” He stared at it a second longer.
“You know who I’m interested in. I have a feeling you can find them without a picture.”
“Yeah.” Damien shrugged and turned a neat pirouette on his section of the high wire. “Mmn, a bit late for shopping on your schedule. I guess I can go like this.”
“I guess you’ll have to.”
“But I get to keep any change.”
“Don’t get caught.”
“Now you insult me,” he said, turned, then came back delicately on his tiptoes. “Is there a special reason you aren’t going yourself? Or the ratman friend of yours?”
“I’m not in the mood for parties,” Valkyrie said. She backed into her cabin and shut the door. The gris-gris thumped on her chest. She took it off and hung it next to the horse bone charms. Then she sat down on her bedding mat with a glass of scotch and the files that Bob had handed her, loaded from the Well’s internal network.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 17