Context (43 page)

‘No!’ Lord Sumneriv’s voice. ‘Stop,
barbarian!’

Palm-heel, elbow. Tom knelt on
Trevalkin’s chest with blood-rage filling his vision, the bloodied smoking
corpses in the lev-cages and the black flames which killed the Seer and Elva
falling dead—

‘What is the Dark Fire?’
He roared the question. In his
primordial rage, his lust for bloody death, striking hard, smashing Trevalkin
over and over—

’What power do you serve,
Trevalkin?’

— and again, hard, until hands
fell upon him, grabbing, dragging him away.

‘NO!’

Sumneriv, or another Lord,
yelling in Tom’s ear.

I’ll kill you all.

He grabbed soft testicles,
snarled at the animal yelp his victim gave, elbowed another man—

’He fights the Dark Fire,
Corcorigan!’

— launched himself upwards,
scattering the men apart, save for the one who clung still to Tom’s sleeve,
yelling desperately:

‘It’s Trevalkin’s enemy! He
fights
the Dark Fire!’

Scarlet, fading through orange.

Tom stopped, then pushed Lord
Sumneriv away.

Blood lust fading ...

As his vision cleared, he could
see Trevalkin’s hunched and battered form, curled upon the broken scree like a
child’s discarded toy, smeared with red.

Enemy?

Tom spat, tasting blood which was
not his own.

‘This is over,’ he said.

~ * ~

25

TERRA
AD 2142

<Story>>

[7]

I
can’t lose something,
Ro
tried to tell herself,
that I never had.

Digging her heels in: Quarrel
leaped into a gallop, his great muscles bunching and releasing beneath her,
hooves clattering across the sandstone mesa.

Not something:
someone.
Luís,
leaving to become a Pilot. That was the meaning of the message he had received,
the invitation to Flight School in Tehran.

By the time she reached the
stables, both she and the horse were exhausted, lungs heaving. On her lips, the
sweat-and-tears taste of salt. Alice Bridcombe, the owner, helped Ro dismount,
then—frowning—checked out Quarrel.

‘He looks all right,’ said
Bridcombe. ‘No thanks to you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

I pushed too hard.

Too late to undo that now.

Finally,
someone had removed the bed on which Anne-Louise had died, leaving empty floor
space with the stains cleaned away. Whether they had taken the bed to spare her
feelings or for more forensic tests, Ro had no idea.

As evening fell, she sat down
cross-legged on the fibrous carpeting—forcing herself to occupy the same space
as that poor bloodied corpse—then closed her eyes, bringing her focus inside
herself, acknowledging her conflicting Luís-centred emotions but trying to let
go.

Mu-space. . .

And there was the glory of her
vision: the infinite fractal-dimensioned wonder of that other continuum which
she had dreamed of, or seen for real, deep inside the dream-quest she had not
known she was going to make.

But there was an intrusion,
inside her mystic vision. A chesspiece upon a board. A king, standing one row
removed from the edge. She tried to banish it, dispel the sight, return her
mental focus to fractal infinity ...

Then her eyes snapped open, and
she knew what the vision meant.

‘Not the second row. The
seventh,
counting from the other side.’

Floating, above poor Anne-Louise’s
strangled corpse.

A message.

Perhaps Anne-Louise had been
playing chess when the intruder was suddenly there, and the ligature was
tightening round her throat before she even realized that her world was about
to end, decades before her time. Maybe it was from a story scene she had been
working on, the kind of clue a storyfact might leave for someone else to
decipher, thinking that others might perceive the world the same way as she
did.

Or perhaps it was just a final
act of desperation by some small random-firing neural shard of a once-rational
brain, already fragmenting as the end drew near. A message which could be
formed with a tiny movement of the fingertips, the last gesture she would ever
make.

A twitch before dying.

‘Position K7. Why didn’t I see
it?’

Because Anne-Louise was
Quebecoise, and in extremis everybody, no matter how linguistically talented,
counts and prays in their first—their parents’—tongue.

Not
kay-seven,
the piece’s
position, but
ka-sept.
Pronounced:
cassette.

Like the old-fashioned
crystal-cassette on which Anne-Louise had kept all her primary work.

‘Hey,
purty lady. Howya doin’?’

Subtle overlay: Clint Shade,
Arizona Ranger, seemed to be sitting back on Ro’s easy chair and crossing his
ankles. Highlights made the cushion appear to depress beneath the holo’s
nonexistent weight.

He was an illusion, Anne-Louise’s
fictional creation, and he had appeared as soon as Ro inserted the cassette
into the holoscribe’s waiting socket. But he looked so real, Ro felt she could
almost reach out and touch him.

Which she did, slowly, and her
fingertips passed through the spectral illusion of his sleeve, as she had
expected. But he still looked solid.

‘What,’ she asked softly, ‘are
you doing out of context?’

The Ranger tipped up his hat, and
his eyes were steel-grey, and gleaming.

‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I was thinkin’
you’d never ask.’

For a long moment, there was
nothing Ro could say.

Then, ‘Explain that, please.’

‘I have come across’—
ah have
come acrawst—
‘from the other side. The real world. Can’t say’—with a glance
around the room—‘as I like this one too much.’

Ro shook her head, not knowing
what to say.

If she took the conversation
along a route the programming could not deal with, the holo would vanish and
she would almost certainly lose whatever information was hidden here.

‘What,’ she said slowly, ‘can you
tell—’

‘The answer’—he tipped his
stetson back down to hide his eyes—‘is in Shadowville, fer sure. But there ain’t
no shortcuts, darlin’. Ya gotta see for yourself.’

‘I don’t—’

But Ro was talking to an empty
room.