Context (48 page)

The
new year arrived with a flurry of bright exclamations from Draquelle, during
the fifth night of their journey, waking Tom and Kraiv from their sleep in a
small hostel chamber with three oval sleeping pallets, one of them unused.

‘Hey, fellows!’

Not danger...

‘Huh?’ Tom squinted painfully,
his forehead throbbing. ‘What is it?’

In the shadows, Kraiv was already
sitting up on his pallet, a short blade in each hand.

‘It’s time for celebrating!’
Draquelle poked her head inside the chamber. ‘Why are you two sleeping?’

‘Because,’ suggested Tom, ‘we’re
getting up early in the morning?’

‘Ah ... You two are boring, you
know that?’

Tom looked across the chamber at
Kraiv.

‘It
is
the new year,’
Kraiv said.

‘But you don’t drink.’ Tom nodded
at Kraiv’s huge upper arm, where he knew the dark crossed-axes tattoo nestled,
in the hollow between the great bunched biceps and triceps, though it was
invisible in this gloom. ‘Or am I mistaken?’

‘You know’—touching his tattoo
with the flat of a blade—‘about the Way of Rikleth?’

‘I don’t know much about the way
you worship,’ said Tom. ‘But I’m aware that you don’t use mind-altering agents.’

‘Well—’

‘Oh, come on, fellows.’ Draquelle’s
voice, unnaturally bright and cheery, seemed to bounce off the dark stone
walls. ‘Can’t you relax long enough to see in Tiger Year? For Chaos’ sake ...’

‘Go back to sleep,’ Kraiv told
Tom, rolling off his pallet and sheathing his blades. ‘Let’s go, Draquelle.’

‘Well, thank Fate for that.’
Draquelle was already leaving, pulling the heavy drape aside, revealing the
corridor beyond. ‘At least one of you’s got a bit of life in you .. .’ Her
voice trailed off as the hanging fell back into place.

‘I’ll look after her,’ rumbled
Kraiv, pulling on his outer tunic and fastening his cloak.

‘Good…’

Tom lay back and closed his eyes,
and slid into a deep yet troubled sleep, populated by silver-scaled dragons who
swam in his veins and ate his eyes, and a voice hissed, then whispered,
‘Like
swallowing pearls,’
and Tom moaned without waking.

In the morning, fading dream
fragments fell away before him in shards, and he sat up with a headache already
forming.

But
that was nothing compared to the way Draquelle looked, pale and trembling over
breakfast. Beside her, Kraiv propped his elbows on the table and drank from a
daistral bowl, forearm muscles sliding like thick cables beneath taut black
skin.

From Kraiv’s comments, Tom
deduced that he had taken Draquelle back to her hostelry chamber just a few
hours ago, and stood guard outside. If a night without sleep had affected him,
there was no sign of it.

‘We’d better get going.’ He
addressed Tom, watching Draquelle. ‘Perhaps in an hour or so?’

‘Sounds good to me.’ Tom motioned
to a waitress, and handed over a copper cred-spindle. “Thank you.’

‘You enjoyed it?’ The waitress
looked down at Draquelle’s untouched plate.

‘My friend’s got a touch of flu,’
said Kraiv. ‘But it was good.’

‘Well, Fate’s Blessings,
everyone.’ And, nodding at their packs: ‘Travel safely.’

It
was more like two hours before they had hitched their packs across their
shoulders and were ready to continue their journey. But by the afternoon’s end,
Draquelle’s composure had returned—a decent lunch helped—and she was chatting
and pointing out the sights as they walked.

There was plenty to see and hear.
Among the wrought-iron colonnades of Outer Yetrin, locals chattered not just in
Cuiliano, but in High Brezhnakh from the northern provinces.

When they put down their packs to
rest, Tom wandered by himself, admiring the carvings on stonework, drinking in
aromas of roasting myosticks and tava-cake, watched children playing lightball,
while vendors hawked cheap statuettes of Gholad the Conqueror and the Blessed
Olivia.

It was different in detail, yet
somehow it brought to mind the atmosphere of Salis Core, the busy marketplace
in which Tom had spent his childhood, while Father had made and sold his wares
upon their stall.

Madam Bronlah had given them credit
sufficient for supplies throughout the journey, and Tom had his own savings. So
when he found himself outside a musty crystal shop—an interlocking series of
shadowed chambers, stacked with crystal racks—he could not resist.

Inside, he found everything from
Balkrini epics to scrub-drone repair manuals. An outer chamber sold other
gifts: small pseudautomata, in the form of flame-pixies, song-sprites and
dream-fleas; an insulated miniature lavarium; armoured gauntlets; a battered
board-game entitled ‘Vendetta for the Whole Family’, with a free (ironic, but
accurate) guide to common poisons.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘I’ll... be back later.’

He could spend hours here, but he
had obligations.

He
found his companions in a small plaza. Draquelle’s eyes were very bright, and
her voice was too cheerful as she said, ‘It’s time we were getting on, don’t
you think?’

Kraiv shook his head: a tiny
movement.

‘All right,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s go.’

For
the next two tendays they travelled, making slow progress. At lunchtime or in
the evening, Draquelle would disappear to drink alone: sometimes enough to slur
her speech, but not to prevent her walking on.

And then, on the evening before
they were due to leave civilized tunnels, and strike out into the interstitial
territory between Syektor Krafmant and Ghemprogini Sectoro, Kraiv came into Tom’s
hostelry sleeping alcove.

‘Sit down.’ Tom shifted to one
end of the pallet: there were no chairs. ‘What’s up?’

‘Draquelle told me a little about
her childhood.’

‘Ah.’ Tom looked at him. ‘Was it
bad?’

‘Three Standard Years,’ said
Kraiv carefully, ‘in the service of an Oracle.’

‘Chaos.’

‘Precisely, my friend.’

Ah, Draquelle. How can anyone
blame you?

Tom knew something of the Oracles’
nature: neural groups within their brains experiencing time-flow in two
directions. It was hard for anything like a coherent personality to form if the
world appeared a kaleidoscopic mess, its patterns discernible only to an
outside trained observer.

Some—perhaps most—of the Oracles
required extraordinary stimulation to bring their personalities into the normal
flow of time.

Or perhaps that was an excuse to
realize the darkest and most twisted perversions which could lurk deep within
mankind’s archaic reptilian brain, hidden away by the nature of higher thought
and the conventions of society.

So Oracles were given servitors,
and allowed to treat them in ways the Oracles’ noble patrons—Lords and Ladies
of exquisite taste and superb logosophical training—cared not to learn about.

And sometimes the servitors and
servitrices, if they had outlived their usefulness but survived relatively
intact, were cast loose into a world which could not afford to care about their
pasts, and in which they were often ill-equipped to survive.