Context (36 page)

NULAPEIRON
AD 3419

Ninth
stratum, in Bilyarck Gébeet: the vacation’s second day, and its true beginning.
But it started with a disconcerting, overheard conversation.

Breakfast was interesting; they
dined in a low-lit eatery at whose centre lay a pit in which orange-hot liquid
magma flowed. The place was warm despite the insulating clearshell, and in the
lava small hexagonal flukes bobbed occasionally into sight.

Jasirah had excused herself for
the moment, and Quilvox was muttering that perhaps they should have left her—he
referred to Jasirah as ‘Old Misery’—in the Bronlah Hong. Tom was just opening
his mouth to say she was not that bad, when a fragment of speech drifted from a
neighbouring table, as the background chatter briefly faded.

‘... best one, I thought, was “Mincing
Minnie Mixes Metalinguistic Metaphors”.’

Tom froze in his seat.

‘The best from
Playing the
Paradox,
maybe. But the second collection was a lot funnier overall:
Auntie
Antinomy Dances the Fractal Fantastic.
What a laugh.’

‘Subtle, too,’ he heard a woman
say. And something told Tom that they were a group of school magisters, even
before she added: ‘I’d like to try it out on my students, but I’m not sure they’ll
understand it completely.’

‘I’m not even sure that I do,’ said
one of her colleagues.

Tom was holding his breath.
Slowly, he released it.

‘I wonder if he’ll ever write a
third ... ?’

And then Tom was walking away,
having tossed too many cred-spindles upon the table, just needing to escape.
Jasirah was returning, but he brushed past her without a word, into the
spiralling tunnel beyond.

They’re talking about my poetry.

His tutor, Mistress eh’Nalephi,
had caused the first volume to be published, and had presented him with the
crystal-shard on the day he turned twenty-three. At the time, he had been
filled with a nameless j oy which turned the world into magic and for a while
brought perfection into his life.

But that was before he became a
Lord, killed an Oracle, joined and subsequently abandoned a revolutionary
movement, spent years wandering in a fractured, alcohol-deranged daze before
fighting his way back to recovery, only to watch the single living person who
truly mattered to him invoke thanatotropic toxin implants, for her own tangled
and indecipherable purposes, and die before his eyes.

It
was Jasirah, despite her reputation for hostility and jealousy, who sought Tom
out. She found him standing by a long transparent water pipe which ran past a
cloister at shoulder height, watching the silver bubbles and small
bright-yellow cleansing fish, but seeing nothing.

‘Come on,’ she said.

And led him back towards the
eatery, while Tom apologized for his actions without explaining them. But when
they reached the magma-pit chamber, the others had already left.

‘Sorry.’ Tom looked at Jasirah
and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I guess it’s just you and me.’

The colour heightened in Jasirah’s
round cheeks, suffusing her already dark skin. Then she cleared her throat and
told him that she would like to go shopping.

Later, after several hours spent
in fabric emporiums where Tom struggled hard to conceal his overwhelming
boredom, they had lunch together in a tiny piazzetta where quickglass
automaton-birds glided and whistled among the trellises and airplants, dipping
and soaring without ever stopping to reenergize.

Tom listened while Jasirah talked
of her childhood in the Garujahn Protectorate, of her overbearing mother and
often absent father. Then, in a sudden shift of subject which Jasirah seemed to
think was entirely natural, she declared: ‘I really need to get my fortune
told.’

‘I don’t think’—Tom tried to keep
the laughter from his voice—‘you’ll find an Oracle round here.’

She gave him a small, quizzical
look.

‘We passed a scryer’s booth,’ she
said, ‘when we walked through the market.’

The
tent’s interior was dark, lit only by a row of fluorescent bell jars and Klein
bottles in which strange albino serpents with flat crested heads flexed and
coiled, regarding the human interlopers with eyes like blood-red stones. On a
small stool before a triangular table, the scryer sat hunched, a grey shawl
pulled hood-like over her head, hiding her features.

Her voice was ancient, quavering,
and her hand shook as she accepted Jasirah’s proffered fee. Then a young beefy
man came inside the tent, though the scryer had given no signal.

Tom watched as the assistant drew
on heavy gauntlets, then removed the nearest serpent, looped round his wrists.
He held the flat triangular head, pried open the jaws, and pressed the serpent’s
narrow, curved fangs into the old woman’s scarred and bony forearm. The reptile
remained expressionless, unblinking, as venom pumped into withered, punctured
flesh.

Nor did it offer more than token
resistance as it was forced back inside its glowing glass prison. Then the
young man sealed the jar, shed his protective gauntlets and left, having
uttered no word to either his employer or her clients.

Tom looked at Jasirah for her
reaction, but she was intent upon the scryer’s hooded features.

From the three-sided tabletop, a
small collection of crystal dice rose into the air.

Am I supposed to be impressed?

The dice dropped and rolled. Then
the scryer produced a deck of cards, and spread them face down across the
table, and motioned for Jasirah to pick one.

‘Seven of Ships.’ Jasirah looked
up at Tom. ‘But what about its conjunction?’

It was the scryer who turned over
the second card—Ace of Wands—and at the sight of it Jasirah turned away,
shoulders drooping with disappointment. When she picked the final card, it was
the Swordsman—armed nobleman in profile, en garde, foot upon a vanquished
opponent—and it seemed to confirm Jasirah’s expectations.

‘Thwarted,’ said the scryer, ‘in
love.’

Then she pulled back her shawl,
revealing the brass-coloured threads woven across her eye-sockets. And, turning
her lined face towards Tom:

‘Your turn, my Lord.’

Jasirah tried a brave smile, as
though the scryer’s words were a joke.

‘I’m not a noble,’ Tom said.

But deep lines etched curves to
bracket the old woman’s mouth, an expression which managed to combine both
amusement and disapproval. He felt like a miscreant schoolboy, caught
misbehaving by a senior praefectus, trying to hide his guilt before a magister
with lies and indirection, with no hope of success.

Four
of Serpents.

‘A beginning,’ the old woman
said, ‘born of adversity.’

That, to a one-armed client:
anyone could have guessed as much. At least, if she were not truly blind—

But she called me Lord.

‘And’—with a nod towards the
crystals which had rolled once more—‘I see a red-haired woman in your early
life, my Lord.’

Tom’s skin crawled.

Mother.

Giddily, he watched as the old
scryer drew another card from the spread, and then a third.

‘The Sorcerer,’ murmured Jasirah,
‘and the Fool.’

Tom laughed shortly, without
humour, but Jasirah shivered, her round face pinched with concern.

‘We need,’ rasped the scryer, ‘a
five-spread.’

The Nine of Ships.

‘Last card.’

Benoited Chaos!
he cursed.
Irrational
nonsense.

But fine hairs stood up on the
back of his neck as she turned the card over: glossy, baroque patterns
surrounding a central dark-haired figure whose eyes were obsidian, black upon
black, and he did not need Jasirah’s startled exclamation to tell him the card’s
designation.

The Pilot.

‘Gazhe ...’ Jasirah’s brown eyes
were bright with tears, imploring.