by Bill Adams
“All right, baby, all right,” she whispered. “But only tonight, only now and never again.” And then her mouth broke open beneath mine. The bed was only a few steps away. And there we pooled the strength of the lonely and marooned, made a little space our own, and defended it with velvet strivings for as long as we could against the enemy who had hurt us most of all. We held our moment; we annihilated Time.
Chapter Eighteen
To lie with Domina again, her pale skin that looks so cool and feels so feverish—her figure so slender in clothes, so voluptuous without them—her mouth so greedy and so giving. But what’s that sound—is she crying? I reach for her—
And I awake alone, with a painful erection. Of course she’s not here, and I curse myself for even dreaming of her. We’ve fought for the last time; tonight I’ll be in the Alignment Navy and gone for decades. I’m barely twenty-two, and there’ll be plenty of other women, until Domina’s just a whey-faced witch I’ll hardly remember.
But it’s not light yet. What woke me up? I half remember the intercom buzzing. I pick it up now and it’s dead. Oh, right, I canceled the dorm service, but the bastards could have waited until morning. I shake my head and get up without turning on the light. As I pass the hall door, something sticks to my bare foot: a big piece of linen paper that must have been slipped under the door, where I couldn’t miss it on the way to the toilet.
The bathroom’s fluorescent light is as bright and inhuman as an operating theater. I must squint to read. Domina’s stationery, of course; only the rich even learn to handwrite, much less buy such expensive hardcopy.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing, that she would hand me a victory like this—but my laugh is unconvincing. She’s sorry, she was wrong, she was scared of the Columnard reformers. She doesn’t blame me, but I mustn’t go away hating her. She has to see me, has something important to tell me.
Please, she writes. And she’s never said please before. I know it’s from her, though, because instead of naming the place we’re to meet, she asks if I remember the night I loaned her my jacket, the place nearby where I first touched her; that’s where she’ll be. While it’s still dark. She’ll wait from four till five.
My wristcomp shows three-thirty. If I stand her up, if I leave her waiting by the footbridge over the gorge, how just that will be, how perfect. All these months dancing to her tune, and now I’ll leave her thinking I don’t even remember that first night, and—
It’s all crap, of course. I’m already getting dressed, telling myself there’s no reason to go away mad, we loved each other once, and so forth—not admitting the power she still has over me, that anything can happen if we see each other again.
It’s cool out. There is no moon, but the stars are bright enough to walk by, to one who knows the way. It’s very Domina to pick the footbridge, a touch of Wuthering Heights: the river racing between rocks a hundred meters below in the gorge where stressed-out undergrads have jumped to their deaths and been washed out to sea—the campus sick joke was “Hated the cafeteria food, so he gorged himself”—very Domina, to whom love is life or death.
And the melodrama is infectious. I find myself dodging and sneaking in the dark, making myself impossible to follow. Sure, Von Bülow and De Bourbon haven’t killed anyone yet, but that’s where they’re heading. Nexus isn’t healthy for me; there’s blood in the air. And she said to me, You could have led them! You’re smarter than they are, almost as smart as you think you are, and tougher, more brutal than you let yourself know. I know it isn’t true. It’s been easy to pass as a tough frontiersman among these pampered preppies, but I’m no killer, and a killer is what Domina wants, whether she stays with the wolf pack or stands with me against them. But the forest of the night is spooking me. I’m forgetting it’s all just student posturing, or I wouldn’t be sneaking the long way around to come up on the far side of the bridge. Maybe that’s just to stall for time, to decide what I think and what I feel, because part of me knows I’m going to take her back. All she has to do is place herself on my side, against them, and I will never show up for my navy enlistment.
A new sound above the whispering of the trees—the high-pitched roar of the river, closer every second. And suddenly I’m scared. Not of the Columnards, or the shadowy Few that Summerisle warned me of. I’m afraid of myself, of what I’m willing to do to keep Domina, to not be rejected by the only woman I’ve ever loved.
The gorge is not very wide for all its great depth, and despite the tall bushes waving at this end of the footbridge in the predawn breeze, I can see Domina skulking at the other end. She faces away from me, her shoulders hunched nervously in a dark jacket. She takes a step away, perhaps fooled by a movement in the trees; above the sound of the river I can faintly hear her cry my name.
“Here!” I say, stepping between the bushes onto my end of the bridge. It’s springy underfoot, a long thin carpet of roped-together planks suspended from two steel side-cables. At the sound of my voice, she turns in a spasm, her white face shocked and scared.
“Luc?” she calls.
She calls Luc.
“He’s on your side!” she screams. “Right next to you!”
And, taking his cue, Luc Kostain bursts from the bushes in a terrible silence, no expression whatever in his sad black eyes, hitting me like an ocean wave, inexorable, driving me farther onto the bridge and then into the suspension cable that serves as a railing. I’m supposed to go over the side, that’s obvious, and I can’t stop him, his head is deep in my stomach and I can’t reach anything but his back, which is as hard as a tree trunk under my pounding fists. I once bragged to Domina that I could outfight him, but she knew his animal strength was all that mattered. He has both my feet in the air now, but there will be a moment, a chance, because he’ll have to let go, and now I’ve got one arm wrapped around the side cable. He heaves me up, and pushes away, but because I’m half-anchored I can kick.
Both bootheels hit him in the face and the impact sends me over, the river a thin phosphorescent snake a hundred black meters down, but I swing all the way around and under the cable and back onto the bridge with a free second to stand up as Kostain lands on his back, and I get in another good kick—to the ribs this time—as he regains his feet. He rushes me again, and beneath my heels I can feel the trampoline ripple of Domina running toward us to help him, but I’ve got a hope now. If I can fend him off with kicks and blows until he’s too hurt to wrestle, his steely arms will do him no good. And I’m faster than he is, and he doesn’t know how to block; once, twice, he tries to swarm forward, and it costs him a cut eyebrow and a hammer-kicked kneecap. But the third time he doesn’t care what I do to his nose and his teeth, and in moments I’m halfway over the cable again, and this time one of his hands, like a crushing tool, is numbing the nerves of the arm I’ve got around the rail.
He heaves his whole body against me until we’re both leaning out over the drop against the angled tautness of the cable. Domina finally reaches us, one hand upraised, and in it, glittering in the starlight, a knife. But she hesitates and I do not, my free hand seizing her wrist and yanking it down with all my strength to drive the captive blade into Kostain’s broad back.
His whole body arches convulsively beneath the blow; the suspension cable whips straight as a bow string; and I am hurled back onto the bridge, knocking Domina flat beside me, while Kostain disappears with a whirl and a snap in midair, like the knot in a rope trick. Gone. Even his splashdown is utterly lost in the river’s usual roar.
Lying beside me, Domina shakes her head, stunned. There’s a warm blue-black stickiness on my hand in the starlight. “Here,” I tell her, reaching into her jacket to wipe some on her white blouse. “You’ve finally got it. Blood on my hands.” And now those hands are around her slender throat as I crouch over her. “But what a screwup, luv. You’d have been back in their good graces, and the Orphan would have had a home with them. But now he’s the student suicide—if no one finds the body. Maybe you should go ove
r with him—a lover’s pact. Then you couldn’t frame me for murder.”
Those beautiful eyes are focused now, and full of hatred. “Go ahead,” she whispers. “You know it all, you do. Go ahead and kill me if you want to.”
My hands, independent of will or thought, tighten their grip. “But I don’t know it all. Where are the rest of them? Von Bülow, De Bourbon?”
“Establishing their alibis.”
I believe it immediately; quick invention isn’t her style. I stand and look down at her. “Pray he goes out to sea, luv. Your kitchen knife. Your bloody blouse. Just let it all go. I will. Maybe I’ll see you in thirty or forty years. I’m sure the class will have a reunion.”
She covers her face so I can’t see her cry, but her shoulders are heaving.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “At least now you know it’s true. He really would kill or die for you. Your kind of love, and all yours, forever.”
By the time I reach the end of the bridge, she can’t control it, a mournful keening broken by endless sobs, and the sound of it—
Woke me up. In Domina’s suite, next to her, as she lay naked and weeping. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she shook it off. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I can’t help it, I didn’t lie, I love him and he deserves better than this. But it was so sweet, wasn’t it, for a moment?”
“I’m the one who’s sorry.”
She turned and kissed me, but then her whisper had the after-ring of metal: “Just keep your promise. Leave Julia alone.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you have to get out of here now. Quietly. She’s just across the hall. She’s not to know of this.”
“No.”
“It didn’t happen. It’s a thing apart.”
“Yes.”
And she was crying again, more fitfully, like a child who’s forgotten why, when I closed the door behind me.
◆◆◆
I felt like the survivor of a great storm at sea, all emotion washed from a body that said only, “I live.” I was immediately spotted by a sleepy guard in the corridor outside Domina’s rooms, but he just turned aside with an embarrassed grin; of course, I looked like his Boss, and my love life was none of his business.
Only a few hours had passed. I took the stairs like a sleepwalker. There was no one in the upper hall. The Pretender had stopped snoring, but slept all the same. Ivan hadn’t left the couch, and barely twitched when I peeled the mask off him. Now that it was all over, I wondered if we had the same blood type, or if that sort of thing mattered to the gyal-wa. I was actually glad to reenter the mask’s vampire embrace. I wanted to lose Evan Larkspur for a long time.
I waited a few minutes for the mask to settle and look better, then half lifted Ivan from the bed until he began to cooperate. Never entirely waking up, he let me help him into one of the spare bedrooms. Then I stretched out in his old position on the couch, just in case anyone was still keeping score. But I couldn’t sleep. Oddly enough, I didn’t think of Domina; we’d made our peace despite all the odds of time and space. That was done. But I’d given my promise about Julia—basically the same promise I’d given to Summerisle about maintaining the status quo. Maybe that made it a promise to both Julia’s parents, though old West might be her real father, or even I…but I had no right to promise, no power to keep Julia from sleeping with the Pretender. I couldn’t tell her the truth, for instance—I couldn’t even tell the truth to Foyle, who moved and risked and feared in the same darkness as I, but trusted me and spied for me and slept with me while I intrigued behind her back. Lussuria, the Venezians would say; they understood which weaknesses were truly sins. I needed sleep badly, no trauma dreams, but all I could do was watch the gray dawn come.
Chapter Nineteen
The long morning at the theater was hell. I seemed to have no capacity for feeling, not even for feeling like Manfred of Otranto. With the Pretender and Ivan seriously hung over as well, we started out a gloomy company. Even the normally silent Renfrew felt compelled to point out several times that we were facing a full dress rehearsal that evening.
Today’s technical rehearsal was demanding enough. Most of the classical-era effects did work. Some of them, like the painted cyclorama of mountain peaks with a gauze screen in front to give it the hazy appearance of great distance, or the “flames” of fan-blown and lamp-lit silk, were much more effective than I had imagined they would be. Not realistic, but pleasing to the eye, and redolent of the whole gaudy history of the dramatic stage. And when three stories of a stone castle turret miraculously disappeared in a passing cloud—dry ice and more gauze—to reveal a shaft of light in a distant night sky, and, descending within it, an ancient cable elevator as beautiful as the inside of a mechanical watch, all the production’s elements of poetry, nostalgia, and elaborate artifice were brought together in a single image.
The Pretender was a great showman, whoever else he was. He had created a world for the audience in which contemporary standards of criticism had no place, where Romantics of a lost era would present their own tale in their own terms. All the other entertainment values, story and spectacle, sex and violence, would be pure gravy—and we had them.
However, it wasn’t all running smoothly yet. The supernatural effects relied heavily on the use of angled mirrors. But instead of unwieldy glass, Renfrew had procured rolls of a special reflective film that should have been much more convenient. Theoretically, you cut a piece to fit and framed it with an electrostatic strip along the edges, and then a trickle of battery current would snap it into a perfect flat plane. The stuff had worked in tests, but this morning our custom cuttings did the damnedest things, warping, rippling, and in one case bursting into flames. “It’s true, what they said,” the Pretender acknowledged, wearily massaging his temples. “Much more spectacular than glass.”
But nothing could stop him today. It was as if in his sleep he’d acquired all the energy and certainty I had lost. “There was a school of ancient Terran stage magic,” he began, “from China.” And I knew what he was going to say—I should have thought of it myself. But he didn’t need my help. Eyes flashing, he strode back and forth explaining how classical Chinese magicians created many wonderful effects with one simple idea: brightly lit objects or actors on a dark stage, lifted and manipulated by prop people dressed entirely in black and therefore invisible. It was cheap, it was simple and traditional—in line with the Pretender’s low-tech period motif—and besides, we didn’t have time to convert to hologram effects. In less than two hours, with Renfrew just managing to keep up with him, the Pretender devised workable replacements for all the failed magic effects. The challenge only seemed to make him stronger, a warrior of thought, Topolina’s Knight of Swords, who fights the storm and is the storm…
While I could barely concentrate, not even on what I had to do to stay alive.
Report to Rezakhan/Van Damm, for instance. When I reached the Flying Dutchman early that afternoon, I found myself stopping at the cafe next door first. I took a table to myself in the corner and drank the strongest coffee they made while mentally going over the account I intended to give of my imaginary attempt to see the Shy Lock the night before.
“Pray excuse me, Sir and Freeman.”
I straightened up, and saw a solidly built middle-aged man of military bearing with exceedingly shaggy hair, brows, and mustache, sweating in a leather coat and looking down at me with an embarrassed expression.
“Yes?”
“Be you Freeman Sly?”
“I am.”
He lowered his heavily accented voice. “Mistress and Citizen Foyle has sent me to you.”
“Have a seat. I’m almost finished.”
“Many thanks.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met. But am I right in thinking you’re one of my Boss’s Hard Men?”
He raised one hand as if to ward something off. “Not so loud, pray. But yes. I am Lance Sergeant Freiherr Sturm. Recently I’ve had discussions with Mistress and Citizen Fo
yle about certain…irregularities I have observed in the bodyguard corps. She has helped me see what duty demands, even though it involves speaking against a superior officer.”
“Would that be Lew Malatesta?”
The warning hand lifted again, and his head snapped to one side, scanning the crowd. And suddenly I noticed an odd thing.
A brown caterpillar on my table.
As soon as I recognized it, I swept it onto the floor.
Sturm turned back to face me. He looked like he might disappear at the first sign of trouble. “We can’t talk here. The place may be—”
“Bugged?”
He pursed his lips. “Perhaps I am overcautious. But Mistress Citizen Foyle has prepared a room, a safe house, and asked me to bring you there.”
“Let’s go. I have to stop next door for a few minutes first.”
“My apologies, but we are better advised not to delay.”
“I understand,” I said, “but there’ll be trouble if I don’t make this appearance. And I think it will go better if I’m not alone.”
I was already on my feet, leaving some coins for the waiter, and moved on before Sturm could open a debate on the subject.
A minute later I knocked on the side door of the Dutchman. They weren’t quite open for business yet, but a busboy with a broom recognized me as a regular, and when I asked for Van Damm he let the two of us in. He gave Sturm one surprised glance as the big man went by, then returned to his cleaning.
The manager’s office was at the end of a short corridor that served as soundproofing. Van Damm buzzed us in from the security panel on the wall beside his antique desk. He said nothing about my unexpected companion, but his free arm hung at an odd angle.