“Shit!” I pushed him under again. My heart hammered against my ribs.
His eyes stared beseechingly at me from under the water and more bubbles came billowing out. He mouthed an obscene and alluring suggestion at me.
I pulled him out. “What did you say?”
He held his hands up, sleeves pouring water, and repeated it.
I kissed him on his wet mouth and he laughed and pulled me into the bath on top of him with the kind of effortless strength that still made me envy him. Tepid water spilled over onto the marble floor and I hit my ankle on the gold taps. “Ow.”
The Palace shuddered like a ship straining against the anchor and the water set up ripples around us: our shape in the water, radiating out in wavelets.
“What was that?”
“Nothing important,” he said, unbuckling my belt and sliding it out of the loops in the waistband of my cargo pants.
I felt deliciously nervous. “What about Theo?”
“Not sure Plan A is working on Theo but at least it’s keeping him busy.” He dropped the belt on the floor.
“Did we have a Plan B?”
He undid my shirt buttons. “Plans B to Z are very much theoretical.”
“Where d’you think he is? What if he does try to use Greg?” The idea of not knowing when he might appear made me sick with anxiety. Jalaeka’s touch was turning me on. Between them I felt as though I was speeding.
“He’s not here. Greg is fine so far. That’s all that counts. But I’m not living as if Theo’s the only thing in my life.”
“Isn’t he?”
He rolled his eyes at me and shook his head, reached around my back and loosened the grips on my underwear. I moved to make it easier for him and his body moved beneath me in a sensual, liquid shudder. He looked into my eyes, a gentle gaze, searching, polite really, and his smile was rather shy this time as slowly his clothing melted away and turned the water a warm, tropical blue. “Happy birthday, Francine.”
When we’d finished there was almost no water left in the bath.
I sat in the old dressing room wrapped in towels, feeling too relaxed to care about much at all as Jalaeka got dressed and became Cadenza Fortitude, my substitute for a girlfriend. I liked her. She was sparky.
She hesitated and then threw me a white dress I’d never seen before. It wasn’t his size. It was all the things a great evening dress should be and it needed massive heels. They fell in my lap in short order, diamond straps barely there, clear plastic soles scattered with tiny, tiny Barbie shoes in pink and emerald green and baby blue. I felt the end of the world coming on.
“You know what I always wondered?” She stepped into her red sequinned dress and it slid up easily over him and shut without a whisper of trouble, even though the body it required was quite different to the one I’d just been adoring. “I wondered what it would be like not to know what other people thought, and not to care. I wondered if all I am is an extension of someone else; their best and their worst, all the things they never got to be or to do. A collection of parts, not a real thing at all.”
He was still Jalaeka then, since Cadenza wouldn’t have given house-room to such an idea. Despite the breasts and the hips, the softened jaw and the sashay, it was still him. “And then I realized it couldn’t be me, thinking that way. It had to be you.”
“I am parts,” I said, and quoted the pitch from my birth certificate.
“We should form a club.” He had put his hair up and it was longer, curlier and thicker than before. Spare coils trailed down his back and around his face.
“We can call it People Who Were Made out of Kits,” I said brightly.
“Francine,” he said softly, sympathetically. He put his hands on his hips and became peculiarly female, halfway between drag and the real thing. “For gods’ sakes, get a move on.”
Cadenza sat me on the edge of the bed and dried my hair, applied makeup but didn’t let me put any clothes on. She had a fantastic cleavage.
“Stop staring at my tits,” she said and her nostrils flared because she didn’t want to smile at me. “Now, when you get up, don’t walk like a Herculean three sheets to the wind.” She took me to the mirror and we stood side by side.
I was still a good six or seven inches shorter than she was, even in heels. She was staring at me, then at herself.
“What are you looking at?”
“You. When I look at me I’m looking at you. Didn’t you know that?”
“Oh fancy words.” I swayed on the high towers of my shoes. “Romantic rubbish.”
“I am fantastic,” Cadenza pointed out, reasonably. “And you are to blame.” She spun me round and kissed me. I hadn’t been kissed by her in a long while. She didn’t kiss like Jalaeka did. Her mouth didn’t move like his at all. She was softer in some ways, harder in others, and she had a vulnerability in her that he’d never had.
“I kiss better than he does, don’t I?” she murmured and I saw both our lipsticks merged together in a slick across her mouth, her eyelids heavy with orange and red glitter.
I didn’t answer. She slid the tips of her fake fingernails across my back in great wavy lines, barely touching. “Now let’s see about this dress,” she breathed, tracing over my skin where the lines of its spaghetti straps would lie over my shoulders and down to the imagined sweep of the neckline. “There, there and there,” she murmured. “Okay. Not above there then,” and she started to kiss me, leaving red tracks on every inch of skin that would be concealed by the white dress.
I daren’t touch her. She was like a viper if you messed with her look.
When she got to my crotch she glanced up from kneeling in front of me and I dared look in the mirror. I looked at her, shaking. “Are you really female right now?”
“Baby,” she said. “Are you?” She put her lips to my lips, pressed her tongue insistently, gently up inside me. I was delirious, floating on her mouth.
Then she let go. “Don’t keep thinking how worthless you are all the time. Or I’ll kick your ass.”
She stood up and shook herself. “Now. Fix my face, put on that thing and let’s get the hell out of here.”
I still had to hold on to her because my legs had become weak. “You’re such a bitch!”
“Darling, you said it.”
I took her in my arms this time and watched her frosty surprise.
“He can’t win over you,” I said. “He can’t. It can’t. Even if I don’t get to keep you. The world is a better place with you. I don’t even care how good he is or if Unity means living forever.”
“Darling, if I stuck my tongue up everyone in creation, don’t you think they’d say the same thing?”
“Stick it anywhere you like,” I said. “The birthday girl says that’s how it is and her word is the law.”
“Now you’re talking.” She winked at me. “Let’s go break some hearts.”
50 / Valkyrie
Valkyrie descended from the evening sky over Wadsworth Moor and alighted on the pathway to the Brontë waterfall. Rita, whose call she was responding to, walked out to meet her.
At this hour they were alone and the sunlight lit the hills with rose and cast long shadows. It was quiet, except for the sound of their boots on the stone path and the chatter of the water running over the rocks in its bed.
Belshazzar’s avatar, a magpie, sat on Valkyrie’s shoulder.
“Rumour has it that Hyperion, the Cylenchar, has gone over,” Valkyrie said. She spoke slowly and carefully, as though having to feel her way.
“Don’t expect anything,” Rita said. “What goes in usually stays in, no matter how carefully prepared it’s been.”
“But what goes in changes everything,” the magpie objected.
“There are so many things in Unity that there’s really nothing that hasn’t gone in before.” Rita sighed. “I know what the Corvax Declaration suggested about Isol and the contact with humanity making a difference but nothing’s reliable. You can’t count on anything any of u
s have said about it. Ever. When we’re here, we are no longer it. Our versions are unreliable.”
They walked another quarter kilometre and reached the muddy approach to the narrow footbridge that crossed the beck. It had rained the night before and the water was reasonably high. Rita went across first but instead of risking the bridge under her weight the Valkyrie jumped across to the far bank—hardly more than a large stride for her.
“You were part of Theo,” the magpie began. “The only thing I’m interested in is whether he poses a threat to Sankhara or the other ’Bars.”
“He does. You should evacuate them all,” Rita said, beginning to get out of breath as she climbed the steep field they had come to. “It’s not that he’d do it to spite you, because he is indifferent to you all, but if he thought that closing them would do anything for his cause, he’d do that.”
“I think my boss is trying to fish for anything you could offer that might give us some leverage on him,” Valkyrie said with good humour.
“That’s why I called you,” Rita said. She made the stile in the wall and climbed over it. The Valkyrie stepped over. The magpie flew across. “Hyperion was a good idea. But the people who really get under Theo’s skin are the people that Jalaeka loves. You should protect them. They’re really all you’ve got. If you want to survive—then any influence you have should be directed there. Though it probably won’t matter much.”
“Protect them? Saxton’s already Stuffed, and this girl . . . I don’t see what we can do,” the magpie objected.
“You can guard Saxton, and stop the security services when they go to arrest them.” Rita reached a ridgeline and paused to look around at the sunset. “You can let Metatron smooth things over for them in the AI world. Just in case.”
The magpie moved back to Valkyrie’s shoulder. “Aren’t you asking for protection? You’ve just said yourself there’s nothing we have that could do anything to Unity and here you are, betraying it.”
“Me?” Rita stretched her arms out to the turquoise sky, the trees like black clouds at the horizon, the pale gold of last year’s grass. “I’m bullet-proof. Unity can’t touch me. Theo can’t. The splinter can’t. Didn’t you know? Wouldn’t you like to be?”
51 / Theo
I watched Rita going for her clandestine meeting, siding with the humans. It was peculiar to see her from the outside. I didn’t know that the way she seized on things with such elemental sass was beautiful.
I walked through the night, all over the moorland and across Penistone Park, but in the morning it was all the same. I called Rita. She didn’t answer.
52 / Francine
As we danced Cadenza told me the story of the first person to make her; not in words, in memories. It was a strange story, old, and full of digression, like a slow dance to exotic music from the past.
There was a girl, about fifteen. Her name was Intana although she was called Anna or Annie by her friends.
The farm was in a broad valley that belonged to lands of a fortress whose property had long since fallen to a great Empire although the family who had ruled there kept their titles and ruled in the name of the Empress because they had agreed to serve her. This family had three sons and against her family’s wishes and good sense Intana fell in love with one of them. She went with him to the Imperial City, Koker Ai, where this minor lordling was to pay his respects and his family’s tithe to the Court.
It was spring in the valley. Green and blossom. And she was like that.
Of course her family were right. After a few weeks of fun her suitor dumped Intana for the affections of a lesser princess and, after she was handed around his friends she found herself humiliated and rejected, walking the streets of Koker Ai a penniless vagrant. She could not try to go home, so great was her shame, so when she was approached by a woman who offered her a job scrubbing floors, she took it.
The floors belonged to a great house built on the Capitol Hill, which was as luxurious as the Palace. It was the home of many beautiful and talented women and men who excelled in the arts, in mathematics, in the philosophical sciences and at the practical disciplines, all of them professional companions to the nobility.
Intana worked at floors. She also cleaned baths, fountains, laundry and furniture. There was no end to the work and it was completed in silence, as unobtrusively as possible, so that the house itself seemed to run by clockwork, without fault or visible sign. Intana saw her young man come there, paying his way, and his friends too, although they did not see her. She understood that the respect between the patrons and the geisha was both formal and false, as her lover had been casual and false. It was better to be invisible.
She became friends with the women and, from kindness, they suggested she might prefer an idler life of good education with occasional inconvenience. They dismissed her notion of the falsity of it all as obvious and trivial and hid their smiles at her naïve ways. But Intana declined until one day she was sent to clean the apartments of the owner.
This woman, Kya, like many people, was a changeling.
She was small, small as a large doll, and as white as marble with the same cold hardness and slight translucency of that stone. But had her appearance not given it away, there was her manner, which was precise and methodical, as cold and feelingless as if she were an object. Like the fabled ice maidens Intana had heard of, this woman was fascinated with the feelings of others because she could not feel anything herself. In particular she was interested in the way that people might be controlled by their emotions and how the feelings themselves might be brought up, used and shaped.
It was said, although never in Kya’s hearing, that there was another part of this changeling who was a tall and powerful woman, full of colour. She was made of flesh and leaf. In her lay all the feelings that this one had rejected as unwholesome, but nobody had ever seen such.
As Intana swept the floor of the obsidian room the owner appeared and asked if she would not like to become a courtesan of the house, rather than a cleaner. It was not a question. It was a command. Intana put her brush aside.
She was gifted at painting, at tapestry, at basketwork and foreign languages. She was fair at mandolin and dance. She was poor at mathematics and penmanship, having been illiterate too long. She could not sing a note to save her life. They showed her alchemical experiments but once, for the safety of all concerned. She had a special talent for polishing lenses and spent many hours in the glassworks and the observatory.
Intana sent money home in long heartfelt letters her family could not read.
Kya watched her and understood that she was lonely, homesick, shamed and angry. Her feelings ran strongly and frequently caused tears and outbursts that others were more able to control. These were all excellent qualities. Kya chose Intana for her project.
At the far end of the continent, in one of the many wars it was engaged in, the Imperial army lieutenants and mercenaries in Kya’s pay had found another splinter. Kya did not know that she and it were the same, nor that they were Stuff. No such concepts existed. They thought in magical terms. She looked to find another sorcerer, one whose powers were great but whose will was weak so that she could use them against the woman of flesh and leaf.
But not everything went according to her plans, because not everything was in her plans.
This other half flung itself towards her all the time. It was quite mad, uncomprehending of anything save its own suffering, fears, pleasures and loss. It took all Kya’s energy to keep it at bay since she had caused herself to be split in two. She had done so as the result of a failure in love. Her lover had scorned her, thinking himself the superior who would rule the magical world and that she was to be simply his woman, an instrument of various uses, for he had been made by crude minds.
Kya had eaten him and then, with his power, she had cut off the weak parts of herself with the razor of cold logic. So it was not that she was unfeeling. She simply had no desire to be hurt. She felt no hurt and no love. And with the same exac
t method she set out to rule the Empire from beneath and to erase every trace of superstition, magic and chicanery from its precincts. She became the force of Empire, and her will shaped its ideals and policies.
The woman of flesh and leaf raged where the Empire had no sway, lost her way, vulnerable to everyone she met, a mirror to their minds. When they loved, she loved. When they feared, she feared. When they felt threatened and attacked her she attacked and ate them and sat holding her belly and crying because they were gone and more than anything she wanted the comfort of others. And then she picked herself up and went on.
One day she came to a dry land of cattle and thorn trees. There was a village where identical twin girls lived. She copied their look and was taken in by the people who thought she was from a far village, but lost and unable to tell them where she came from.
The woman of flesh and leaf had no language with which to think, but she recognized herself in the twins. Two, not one. Two who were one. And when the time came that the people became suspicious of her sorcery and she must consume their spirits before they could enact their plan to trap and kill her, she spared these two.
When the twins woke and found all their kin dead where they lay in their beds they were stricken with grief and terror. They ran to their great-grandmother’s home on the far hillside. This was a hut built on the stone that holds ghosts and was made out of the bones of the family. It held all the knowledge of their line.
The grandmother helped them to wash the dead, and to mourn, and on their pyre the twins burned all their woman’s clothes and all their hair and the nails from their hands and a joint of bone from the little fingers of their left hands. They cut their faces and placed the ashes inside their blood, to gain the power of all the family, that they might search out the ghost-eater and cut her in pieces and release the eaten ones.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 36