Saxton sighed heavily and Valkyrie saw he was holding his Abacand, recording their conversation. The Cylenchar didn’t seem to mind.
“And these changes out here,” Saxton said. “You’ve seen them?”
“It was summer a couple of months ago. You were here. Now it’s winter. The mountains are a hundred kilometres closer and half as tall again as they were. The forest creeps on the house day by day but the land grows bigger and the city more distant. The wolves are perhaps werewolves, or another thing. Other beasts walk here sometimes, but they’re all alone.”
“And how did you know about him?”
“Who?”
“Jalaeka.”
“I don’t know about him. I came here to follow the god.”
“So you keep saying. But you mean him.” Saxton’s frustration showed in his voice. The Cylenchar began to pace off, away from the Palace.
“I know what I mean,” he said and shook drops of water off his coat. He lifted his beaky snout and sniffed the wind. “More snow on the way. Time you went.”
“Come on! You’ve got to tell me more than that!” Saxton shouted after him, his voice muffled quickly to silence by the snow. He ran after Hyperion, stumbling on the uneven ground. “No way are you just here for the darshan. You’ve got a whole other thing going on!”
“Your faith is your own problem,” Hyperion said, pausing and turning his head. “I can’t help you with that.” He left the clearing and Saxton flung his Abacand away. After a time he walked to it and picked it up, cleared it off and put it back in his pocket. With his head low he picked up his own trail and began to retrace his steps.
Valkyrie knew he would notice her footprints. She stood up and made herself conspicuous again and pretended to have just arrived.
“Dr. Saxton?”
He jumped so much she felt sorry and almost apologized.
“Who are you?”
“Light Angel Valkyrie Skuld. Solar Intelligence.” She sent her badge details to his Abacand and waited politely for him to be satisfied with them.
“What do you want?” He was cold. He shivered and walked faster as he came towards her. His face was grey and inward-looking, lips pale. “It must be good if you’ve come all the way out here. Normally you just seize all the AIs and make a run for it.”
“I wondered if you might know anything about the Unity splinter.”
“Depends why you want to know.”
“Belshazzar asked me to verify some information.” Valkyrie decided not to lie. She felt sorry for him. His eyes darted everywhere but at her face.
“Did she?”
“You haven’t been answering her calls.”
“No I haven’t.”
“I was sorry . . .”
He stopped and glared at her, then ducked under a branch and climbed out of the gully between the trees, where she found it much harder to walk, breaking the old dry branches of the conifers across her chest and shoulders with every step.
His voice was sharp and he spoke in a staccato. “Spare me. Ask your wretched questions, then leave me alone. Or better yet, maybe you’ll answer one of mine. Why did she lie in the Metropolis Report? To convince everyone that Sidebars were still a justifiable risk?”
“Yes,” Valkyrie said, keeping up with him in an awkward shuffle. “Surely you must realize there’s no possibility of an orderly evacuation if panic were to break out.”
“And is that what you’re doing? Evacuating all of Unity space? Do you suppose that Theo will notice? Or is this going to be passed off as a lot of holiday time?”
“It won’t help anybody unless you answer my questions honestly,” Valkyrie said, as calmly as she could. “You understand that. I understand your anger.”
“Do you?” He stopped and stared up at her. “Then you understand that nothing you want or do in the human world makes any difference to either of them. You understand that, do you?” He was shivering. His coat had run low on power.
“Here,” she said and reached for its charge tab.
He twitched it away from her. “Get lost. Tell Belshazzar I’ve defected.”
“Defected?” Valkyrie pursued him through the wet, heavy snow, sinking into the soft, mushy ground underneath deeper than he did. “To what?”
He ignored her and marched on.
“Dr. Saxton,” she called. “Wait. Please wait. Can’t you at least tell me something about the darshan?”
“Ask the Cylenchar,” he shouted at her, without looking back. “He knows all about it. Or weren’t you in on that moment?”
Valkyrie stood in her tracks and let him go.
She found Hyperion sitting on the summit of a hilltop deep in the woods, where there was a small clearing. The sky had become completely grey, pale and uniform. It was almost warm to her as it began to snow. The forest crackled with sound; the slide of ice, of dripping water, of branch and twig moving.
“Hello, Valkyrie,” Hyperion said, not moving from his seated-dog position, half-hidden in the soggy snow, his Tek alight with activity she could almost read like semaphore on his skin. He flicked his black ears to rid them of the small flakes of ice as they fell.
“Saxton told me that you were the expert on the god,” she said.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he replied.
She locked her exoskeleton to rest in place and thought about it. “I looked it up. It’s a grace. I don’t even know what that means. And a Cylenchar hasn’t got any listing. I didn’t know you existed. Unofficial Forged. I should report you immediately.”
The Cylenchar turned his goat eyes on her. “Yes. Your duty calls for it. But you don’t do it. And when you know why, then you and I can talk.”
Valkyrie shrugged. “I know my mind isn’t made up. Tupac wouldn’t protect you for nothing. The Earth Unevolved don’t understand the Forged, what it’s like, what we are. Most of the time that’s neither here nor there. Today it’s here. We’re closer to Unity than . . .”
“No,” Hyperion said, breath steaming from his long, near-lipless mouth. “We aren’t.”
“Then help me understand what you know.”
The Cylenchar stared straight ahead, at the woods. “Earth and bone, leaf, stone, dry wood and ebony, charcoal and the first fall of autumn. Do you understand that? Spring green. Is it chemical? Is that its meaning? Saxton looks for a thing he can believe in, meaning that he can understand as he wants to understand himself and all his stories, as things which fit in a greater pattern, the great pattern. He looks for light and form. Not you though. You’re not interested. What does interest you? Who are you looking for?”
“Nobody,” she said, as annoyed as Saxton had been with the answers she was getting. “But if I give you something, will you drop the mystic shit?”
Hyperion inclined his head towards her and she saw the gryphon again in her mind’s eye. He was hard to insult, if nothing else.
“My partner,” she began, thinking she’d say something that wasn’t too hard, “died in service. It was an accident. She couldn’t be saved. I took her to Uluru but she was damaged and now her memory is decaying there.”
“Couldn’t be saved?”
“I couldn’t save her.”
“That will do,” Hyperion said to his trees. “He will give it for you. Ask.”
“Ask what? Who are you talking about?”
“You wanted the darshan. You needed a reason. There it is. Ask him.”
“I thought you had it.”
“Me? I don’t need that kind of thing. That’s not what I’m for, Valkyrie Skuld, just as walking the greenwood is not what you’re for.”
“You’re talking about the splinter.” But from then on no matter what she said the Cylenchar sat still as stone and didn’t answer, and eventually she left him there in the thickening downfall.
At home she sat in the growing darkness and listened to the music her landlady played—sentimental songs and ballads she would never buy herself. She drank hot, weak tea and looked thr
ough her memories of Elinor carefully, feeling distant from them in a new way.
She called Damien. When he arrived he was much calmer than she was used to, though he still batted her charms and the gris-gris playfully with his hand.
“What can I do for you?”
“I need to know more about the cathedral, this Stuffie religion. How the Salmagundi Cylenchar fits into it.”
“It’s not a religion. It’s a faith. All personal. I won’t talk to you about it, none of us will. And the Cylenchar is nothing to it. He’s one of you, no offence.”
“None taken.” She offered him five hundred credits and a cup of peppermint tea. “Are we at war then?”
He sighed and sat down. His green eyes moved all around as he thought, then settled on hers. “We are at war. Not with you though.”
“With the Unity splinter.”
“No. With Theo.”
“I thought he was you. Your voice. Your leader.”
“Many people make that mistake. So does he. The problem is that, once you’re alive, here, you separate out. Everyone has their own ideas. Even him. Most of us don’t want to return to Unity any more than you would. Even if it’s a totally pointless distinction, we want autonomy. You can understand that?”
Valkyrie did. “But you haven’t got any power.”
“Everything leaks.” He reached up with a long arm and flicked her gris-gris again. A drop of red, filthy water fell from it onto his fingers and he wiped them on her bedroll. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
38 / Jalaeka
Francine was sitting at her desk, watching her Abacand spill a light show of twenty-second-century politics. “I’m going to try and catch up on this. I have an exam in three weeks’ time.”
She was worrying the hell out of me. Her show of normality, strong and defiant as it was, sat so out of place with what had happened to her, and to us—but at the same time, I needed her to be functional, because I had a lot to do. I was so tempted to take her at face value. The darshan and the Translation had taken the edge off it. But as Francine, she had a capacity to submerge emotional traumas I could only liken to my own. I shouldn’t wonder at that, most likely, and I didn’t like speculating on the reasons why.
“How’s Greg?” she asked.
“He’s narc-ed out of his head. Been arguing with Damien and Hyperion.”
“How’s Damien?”
“The usual. In trouble. Said he’d come see you later.”
She pretended an enormous absorption in the machinations of early Forged Rights legislation. “You said you had to go out.”
“I do.”
“Well, I can call you,” she said absently and leant more closely towards her arguing politicians. I might as well have not been there.
I looked in on Greg. He was asleep again. His apartment was a pigsty and the bed was a mess as he thrashed restlessly, held in oblivion by the unreliable grip of the strong benzodiazepines he’d taken, their pack open on the table—a man after my own heart. He wouldn’t have woken if the building had collapsed.
I kept thinking about Patrick Black and the way the sun used to shine in on his hardwood floors in summer, leaving pools of intense heat where I’d sleep late and he’d find me and ask me what I was doing there, instead of being in bed or at the Uni or wherever I should have been instead.
Out in the hall Hyperion had left a tangled, lethal mess of carpet and splintered floorboards—a kind of nest. There was a strong smell like garlic too—Ajosacha, a shamanic plant used to aid hunting. His tracks led downstairs, then, in the snow, they led directly towards the distant forest. I walked along the path to the gate, dragging my feet, deep in thought.
Tonight I would still have to simulate Patrick Black, but that was only an act, not a complete transformation. I kept listening, always listening to the mesmerizing shifts of Francie, closer to me than my heart, farther away than a star. But it was painful. She’d discontinued her lesson the moment I left and was reading herself into an exhausted sleep.
My mind was continually visited by old memories, because she could see them, could live them. I seeped tatty history and felt shame.
39 / Francine
In spite of the fact that Greg had explicitly warned me against it, perhaps because of that fact, I waited until Jalaeka had gone, then shut down the Abacand projection and lay down at the fireside. I looked into the flames and let my mind drift, waiting for memory as if it was mine, feeling sneaky and cheating and so very good in giving in to the compulsion. I’d stolen a few lines out of Greg’s file when he wasn’t looking . . .
The last time a lover of mine got punished for my sake I lay on my back in the sun and smoked so much dope that I virtually blinded myself: a huge line across the centre of my vision went completely black for hours, although it took away the pain in my arms where multiple broken bones were trying to put themselves together.
It was a long time ago and remembering it now is peculiar, like watching a film of someone else’s life, and wondering what the director was thinking, and who the hell would be taken in like the poor sap you’re supposed to identify with.
Two days after I tripped off the face of the planet and wrecked my sight the sunburned line was still a violet slash across the world. It cut the guard’s hawk-face in half as he slid back the gate of the spy-hole, then pulled the door back in a silent sweep. I barely registered him.
Now I searched for that memory, to finish it and find out what had happened. Like the previous time, it was more than a human recollection. It seemed perfectly real. I was him.
Kya was standing at the ornate mahogany table, set between two of the huge windows that gave a view onto the garden and across the measured architecture of the city of Koker Ai towards the river, where her dhows ferried cargo day and night from the mightier ships moored fifty leagues down the delta.
She made me wait in the doorway as she decanted wine and water in equal parts into two drinking bowls. Scented evergreen woods burned in the embrace of the iron grate. In the window ranks of cut crystal threw minute beams of light, freckling the rich carpets and disturbing their geometric red and blue patterns. They cast changing colour over a large game board set out ready for play. The jewelled eyes of the pieces glittered in the firelight. It was such an array of low-rate calculated shit it made me feel ill.
As Kya turned I let the violet line in my eyes jag and sever her lips. They moved together like two halves of a spaded snake.
“Jalaeka,” she said and indicated that I should sit on the couch by the board. She stirred the wine/water mixture with a tiny silver paddle and brought both bowls with her, offering me one. I set it aside. I didn’t want to lose my composure and try to kill her before I’d said what I meant to say. Her manners had the desired effect however, and that ideal started to slither off of its own accord.
“Will you play?” she asked.
I glanced over the board. I needed the distraction. My arms hurt in spite of the dope. It was nothing to yesterday, or the day before, but anyway, I couldn’t concentrate. I picked up an Assassin piece, staring at the moves. I made myself look her in the face. The love I once thought I felt for her made me hate myself beyond bearing.
“Did you get your money?” I said.
“My money?”
I set the figure down on the first available spot. “The gold you sent me. You know. The pay.”
“It’s still yours, if you change your mind. I covered my expenses.” Her fingers closed around the shapely curves of a Courtesan. She glanced up at me through colourless lashes in mimicry of that obvious look that women give men when they’re acting out the come-on. “Refusing the pay doesn’t mean you didn’t do the job.” She put the piece down carefully within reach of one of my Judges.
Was she right? I couldn’t put my thoughts together about what it was I’d done at her demand, I only remembered what happened after—the breaking of my arms—and before that a foot kicking a stool, its legs scraping stone with a shrieking sound. No, I coul
d have remembered it. I forbade myself to. “What do you want?”
Kya lifted her bowl to her mouth and drank a sip or two. I watched the gentle convulsions of her throat, saw my hands around it, squeezing, closing until my thumbs pressed through flesh to the column of her spine. She took my Serf, and a Knight.
“You know,” she said, “that nobody else matters in the world to me but you. All you have to do is obey, but you don’t. I can protect you from this, give you all the space in the world to live out your romantic delusions with Intana, or whoever else you find weak enough to tolerate. One more job. That’s all. One submission. But . . .” She shrugged.
I moved a Senator randomly. She knocked it over with a Pirate.
“You can’t do that,” I said, knowing she was only illustrating her point, but focusing on the wrong thing as usual, and not only because of the drugs. I slurred, “It’s an illegal move.”
“It’s my board.” The piece was still in her hand as she set it down, pressing it into the square.
“Then there’s no point in playing you anymore,” I said, mostly to myself. I got it. My arms and my once-broken back and my scarred side and my ruined friendships—oh, I got it.
“Quite.” Her voice was a monotone. It was a chilling, inhuman sound, but the contours of her mouth lent the consonants a lovely delicacy. I found myself wanting to kiss it and vaguely realized it was the imposition of her wishes coming into play against me, but I still had no idea how to counter those. I no longer knew what I thought.
She let me go and moved her Gladiator out of the way. In his path stood only the soft face of a Minstrel, its cheeks puffed round with unspoken messages.
“What do I do?” I asked her.
“Here.” She picked up both Queen pieces and set them opposite one another. “I am separated. I wish to stay that way. This splinter of me, the other Kya, is nothing but Desire. You will find and bring her here, and when you do and she is my prisoner, safely locked away where she can’t threaten me, then you can go.”
I had to stare at the board and not at her. Her size was a product of distillation, not of volume. One drop of her was worth ten of me. I got up. I had to get away somewhere nobody was, so I could think, so I could feel. I wanted Intana but I couldn’t go there, didn’t know what to say or do to fix what I’d done before my arms were broken. I had to fix it. If I tried very hard, I couldn’t even remember what it was, the very bad thing.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 30