by John Meaney
“You boys. Time you left.” A waitress, hands upon her hips, unimpressed by Algrin’s sneer or his cronies’ contemptuous slouching across the U-shaped seat.
The crystal table tipped in the lev-field as Algrin levered himself upright. Bobbing, it adjusted itself.
“Watch your language, you old hag.” Algrin nodded in Tom’s direction. “Our girly’s here.”
“Out!” The waitress looked at him, then walked away, stiff with purpose.
“Better leave,” one of the others began, then shut up. Nevertheless, all four of them slid out from behind the table and clustered around Algrin.
“Where’s Petyo, then?”
Tom shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Chaos!”
That was how Tom felt, too. He was to meet Zhao-ji at Gerberov Santuario, but he could not go without Petyo and his subcutaneous femtautomata.
“Wait. Is that a great tunic, or what?”
Tom looked. In a fluted maze of arching crystalline threads, a small group of handsomely surcoated youths stood among racks of clothing. Beside them, a hovering mirror field and a servitor anxiously watching.
“That’s mine.”
Moving skull. In one eye-socket, a lick of crimson flame.
“Come on.”
The black tunic was certainly Algrin’s style. Why any of these rich lads would want it was another question.
“Out of my way!”
Oh, Fate!
Then everything happened quickly.
Algrin was running, laughing, with the tunic clutched in one hand. On the floor, two of the rich youths lay in shock, too stunned to cry out, while even Algrin’s cronies were wrong-footed.
They hesitated, while on the ceiling shining things moved and a silver light flashed and Algrin reacted instantaneously, changing his run, sprinting towards Tom while they moved again and there was a thud as Algrin crashed into Tom and was gone.
Silver hemispheres.
It took less than a second for Tom to realize that he was clutching the stolen garment, but that was a lifetime too late as the ceiling’s silver hemispheres flowed downwards to the floor, forming elongated quasi-humanoid shapes. Mannequins. Before Tom could move he was caught in the cool, hard/soft embrace of an extended liquid-metal limb, moulded into place around his wrists.
No!
Twisted, distorted face. Pale with shock. His own reflection in the security mannequin’s curved mirror-face.
“Well, now.” The waitress’s brassy voice. “You got—”
Caught.
“—one of the little bastards, anyway.”
Freedom’s end.
“The prosecution”—feminine, cut-glass accent—”argues for death?”
The void is purple and grey.
“Er, yes.” Male voice, coarse and nasal. “Indeed so, my Lady.”
It spins, whirling, filled with motes of sparkling black like a million hungry eyes.
“And the defence?”
“Waives commutation rights, my Lady, in view of the evidence.”
A tiny round shape amid the flowing strangeness—
“You’ll pardon our presence, gentlemen, and conduct the case as normal. My daughter has an interest in judicial matters.”
“Of course, my Lady! It’s our honour.”
—growing larger. A flat ellipsoidal stage, on which Tom can see himself.
“You have your own executioner?”
“Indeed, my Lady. He’s, ah, away right now. But back in three days.”
“If that’s the sentence.”
“Indeed—”
“Then let us proceed.”
He is standing, stolen garment in hand, while the others flee. Two of the victims lie, stunned and hurt, upon the ground.
“—incontrovertible, as you can see. The defendant condemns himself.”
Then from above—from nowhere, in the swirling grey/purple void—silver shapes elongate, take humanoid form, and one of them traps Tom’s wrists.
“Awaken the accused.”
Ice-fire, jolting through brain and arteries—
No!
—slamming Tom into wakefulness.
“Thomas Corcorigan. You plead guilty.”
He hung his head, unable to argue against the fading holos which ringed his chair.
“Is there anything you can say in your favour, as regards sentencing?”
His wrists were embedded in the chair-arms; the chair itself was on a crystal floor, and the sense of vertigo was sickening. Below him, beneath the crystal, lay the District Council chamber’s empty tiers.
Tom shook his head.
“Remove the squid claws.”
Unseen hands pulled away a thousand hard points, tugging Tom’s hair, scraping at his scalp.
“Look at me, Thomas Corcorigan.”
Something beyond fear dragged Tom’s head upright.
She was resplendently gowned, and a platinum-inlaid wimple, from which several silver-grey locks of hair artfully escaped, surrounded her heart-shaped face. Her pale eyes shone with a startling strength.
But it was the maiden beside her who caught Tom’s attention. Golden hair, tied back with a glittering net. The girl he had seen earlier buying the tiny moving figurines.
So beautiful. . .
“You have nothing to say?”
“My Lady—” Tom cleared his throat, then stopped.
What can I say?
His mind raced, but fear and confusion blocked his throat. Blurred vision, a kind of darkness pressing in; a strange insulation making their voices fade. It was inconceivable that they were talking about ending his life—his life, for Fate’s sake—yet he had to do something, say something.
But what?
There were four ruddy, stern-faced men—two on each side of the Lady and her daughter—sitting behind a curved obsidian table.
What did he know of the nobility? What would move this Lady’s heart?
Wordplay and paradox.
All he knew of their class, besides the fact that they ruled everyone, was that they were master logosophers, wielding massive intellects, hunting abstruse problems for amusement.
“Sylvana?” The Lady addressed her daughter. “Your opinion?”
“That it should be quick.” Piercing glance, with her mother’s strength. “The boy should not undergo cruel or unusual punishment.”
Tom swallowed, strangled by fear, unable to speak.
The briefest compression of the Lady’s mouth, the ephemeral appearance of lines across her cheeks, and then she nodded. “Very well. Take him to a holding—”
“But that’s cruel.” The words burst out of Tom’s mouth before he could consider them.
“You dare?”
One of the men half rose, hand reaching for something at his belt.
“It’s all right.” A languid wave of the Lady’s hand; but her eyes were intent. “Explain yourself, boy.”
Reluctantly, the red-faced man took his seat once more.
“You would have me ...” Tom stopped, swallowing again.
But it’s the only chance.
“..You’d have me taken to a cell, expecting leniency. But I heard one of the councillors say”—Tom reached into his memory of the squid trance—”that the executioner returns in three days’ time.”
All four men were frowning.
“So…” Tom expelled a long, trembling breath. “I expect to be held there, having been told that I will live, thus saving me mental torture, until the time arrives for the executioner to kill me.”
The men were puzzled; but the Lady raised one eyebrow.
Only chance.
“But the wait itself is, er, cruel and unusual punishment, since, reasoning thus, I expect to die. So—”
Go on. All the way.
“—by your own logic, you have to pardon me.”
Stunned silence.
Then outrage erupted. “Damn you, boy!” “How dare you!”
“Kill him now—”
“My Lady.” The men bowed hastily.
Tom’s eyes stung.
And the Lady’s daughter laughed.
“He argues prettily, Mother.” Her voice was both warm and cool, like a gentle fountain’s plashing upon a pool. “And we need more Palace servitors.”
The men were discomfited, but fearful of the Lady, their faces blotched with conflicting emotions.
“Gentlemen.”
They grew still as the Lady spoke.
“I shall buy the boy for a thousand coronae.”
A palpable hush. The amount was staggering.
“Lady Darinia,” murmured one of the men, head bowed. “Enlightened ruler of our demesne.” His words sounded like a traditional formula.
The Lady—Lady Darinia—inclined her head towards her daughter. “The Lady Sylvana will decide the boy’s punishment.” Frank blue eyes, appraising him.
“An arm, perhaps?”
Paralysis encircled Tom’s throat.
“Very well.” Lady Darinia stood, and chairs scraped back as the four men hastily followed suit. “Before you deliver him, remove an arm.”
Her grey gaze swept over Tom.
“Either arm will do.”
~ * ~
17
NULAPEIRON AD 3405
“Catch!”
It arced through the air and Tom reacted late, knocking the light-ball aside. It dropped to the ground with a dying whine.
“Just checking.” The big man, his upper arms swollen with muscle, shook his head. “Don’t seem like either hand’s much use.”
No-
But the mannequin was already hauling Tom across the brick-red chamber’s floor. Its unbreakable grip around his left wrist drew him across a round, flat-topped slab; its other hand pushed implacably down upon Tom’s shoulder-blade, anchoring his arm in place.
Face pressed against hardness, Tom forced out the words: “Executioner’s . . . not here.”
“But I ain’t the executioner.” The man hefted a big, two-handled vibroslash. “I carve stone for a living.”
The shear-field crackled into life.
“Please!”
“Orders, son.”
Ozone stink as the buzzing field burned the very air.
“No!”
Touched his skin.
Burning . . .
Beyond pain, shock hammered into him as the cutting shear-field bit into his upper arm, just below the left shoulder, and it burned as Tom kicked out uselessly at the mannequin’s immobile form but it was too late and fat bubbled and spat while it burned past all imagining and the rising stench of burning meat hauled back memory flashes of the Pilot’s death burning surpassing agony but this pain was his.
He screamed again and again as the field descended through grinding bone burning until bloody blackness fell and dropped him to oblivion.
And it burned.
For days, it burned.
Over and over, while lightning spat and comets of his imagining fell through blackened space, his pain was an endless fire submerged beneath the deadening blanket of femtocytic invaders in his blood. Sometimes he saw her ethereal face and dared to say her name—Sylvana—but always it became Father, shaking his once fleshy face with a new darkness hidden in his eyes, before licking flames carried Tom back to agony.
And then he awoke.
It was three days later, and the room in which he lay was all of jade, pale and elegant, and his mind felt cold and lucid.
Pain dreams fell away as he sat up in the too comfortable bed. He was naked—though his talisman still hung from its throat cord—and the opalescent sheets were cool and smooth against his skin.
“Fate…” A hideous nightmare.
A bubbling laugh rose in his throat, suddenly cut off.
How could I have imagined . . . ?
So he looked, and saw the short stump protruding from his left shoulder.
Nothing at all, where his left arm should have been.
When he came to for the second time, fresh clothes had been laid out at the foot of the bed.
His outfit was all of ivory and black, his new owner’s livery. Black boots and trews edged with gold; black sleeveless jerkin, loose ivory shirt.
With awful thoughtfulness, the shirt’s left sleeve had been removed, and the abbreviated remnant closed up, trimmed with expensive brocade.
~ * ~
18
NULAPEIRON AD 3405
A tenday had elapsed.
“You’re being assigned permanent quarters.”
Ten days, passing in a lucid dream.
“Yes, Major-Steward.”
They stood at the briefing-chamber’s exit.
“Stop,” Major-Steward Malkoril murmured. “Gentry coming.”
The corridor which crossed in front of them glowed with an opalescent, pearly light. Rich burgundy carpet ran along the floor.
Ten days. Why do I feel no pain?
Puzzled, Tom tugged at his right ear. The feel of the earstud was still strange, but not unwelcome. Malkoril’s earstud was identical: a ruby droplet. Similar to the IDs worn by adults—Mother and Father included—in Tom’s home stratum.
Two small children drew near, laughing. A boy and a girl, hair in golden ringlets, their lace-ruffled smartsatin suits shimmering with deep richness.
The girl, stuffing some confection in her mouth, tossed aside a gold-embossed wrapper.
Neither one showed a flicker of interest in Tom or Malkoril.
“There’s a protocol,” said Malkoril in a low tone, after they had passed, “which lets us pass in front of young nobility—”
The discarded wrapper lay like an accusation on the perfect burgundy floor.
“—if our task is urgent, that is.”
Tom started to pick the wrapper up, but Malkoril was already walking. Tom hurried to catch up.
“Will I learn—?” Tom stopped.
Motion at the edge of his vision: a distortion on the wall.
“The protocol?”
The opalescent wall gathered itself, elongated, reached out an arm for the discarded wrapper and, retracting, took the wrapper inside itself.
“Yes, you’ll learn.” Malkoril glanced back at Tom. “Hurry along.”
A downward-spiralling ramp took them past two levels. Some parts of the Palace were twenty levels deep, Malkoril had said, though it was all within the Primum Stratum. Then they hurried along, turning at half a dozen intersections while Tom tried to memorize the sequence.
Then they stopped dead.
“Very funny.” Malkoril glared.
They were faced with a blank, pearly wall.
“Kitchen complex.” The colour was rising in Malkoril’s face. “Usual way. Now.”
An opening melted away. Beyond, a gold-lined corridor twisted to the right.
“Damned Palace,” muttered Malkoril, “would reconfigure every night, if we let it.”
“I’m Shalkrovistorin Kelduranom.” The bald man’s pate glistened. “But you can call me Chef Keldur.”
Around them, processor towers shone with silver, glowed with lustrous mother-of-pearl.
“Chef.” Tom bowed.
“Corcorigan. Sub-delta servitor.” Malkoril introduced him. “He’s all yours, Shalkie.”
“Right, boy. We’ll start you with—” Chef Keldur stopped, frowning.
“I don’t know my lines!” A distraught man, long-faced and pale, came from behind a processor. “It didn’t take!”
“Hold it.” The Chef was a short man, but when he held up his hand the new arrival stopped dead.
A golden microdrone passed by overhead, then hovered over a row of dessert dishes.