Context (82 page)

Because it was strategically
inconceivable that he should survive capture long enough to be interrogated.

‘You’re not doing enough here, is
that it?’

‘You know my background. And I’ve
nothing more to gain, training people, giving hints to codebreakers.’

Sending people off to die.

They paused, halfway along the
balcony’s length.

‘But so much of this’—Corduven’s
gesture took in the richly appointed balcony, the small group of servitors who waited
quietly at the far end—‘is what you wanted to destroy, isn’t it?’

Tom said nothing.

‘The noble institutions, the ...’
Corduven looked at Tom, continued: “The world’s founders used pre-logotrope
memetic engineering, yet I think they got the social design essentially
correct. But you ... Surely you don’t agree.’

‘If any system lets human beings
be bartered or sold, Cord, then there’s something rotten in its foundations.’

They stared at each other.

‘Maybe.’ A flicker of sympathy,
or maybe amusement, crossed Corduven’s taut face. ‘So why fight for it? Because
your revolution failed, and you need a cause? Any cause?’

Tom took a deep breath, let it
out slowly.

‘Corduven, my friend, you know
how many realms the Dark Fire has taken.’ His fist was clenched; he forced it
to open. ‘Do you really think, once this war is over, your precious Lords and
Ladies will still hold power?’

I’ve said it now.

Tom felt his own face mirror
Corduven’s expression: a small, hard smile of recognition—of positions taken,
of battle lines being drawn—while down below, amid the jagged, broken rock,
soldiers crawled beneath tracer-fire cover, breathing musty air replete with
the stink of battle, of sweat and fear, laying down desperate skills to be
tested soon for real, wincing when a practice beam harmlessly struck clothing,
seeing instead the last spurt of blood, hearing the silent cry, feeling the
infinite heavy blackness closing in forever.

The
evacuation began: three thousand personnel, many tonnes of materiel, to be
transported to a distant demesne, the Academy’s new home.

But I’ve made the right choice.

For Tom would not be going with
them.

Corridors
grew packed with vast, squat arachnargoi; they teemed with lines of troopers
bearing wrapped bundles: cargo for the great thoracic holds. Pale drawn faces.
Excited children, running among the troopers’ feet, playing beneath deadly
black arachnabugs: one-person military bugs, armed and fast, hanging by their
black tendrils, watching and ready.

Beyond the Outer Courts, Tom
found other folk. Faces pinched with worry, local non-Academy inhabitants,
ordinary people—the sort who, on a lower stratum, would recognize Lord One-Arm
by sight—watching the preparations with dismay. Occasional glares of silent
anger flashed in Tom’s direction, as he walked the stark corridors in his black
velvet cloak lined with silver.

If you only knew.

But they would assume he was
running away, with all the others.

Here,
the children were too cowed to play, hushed when they tried to speak. More
aware than their parents: they had no rationalizations with which to combat
realistic fear.

There was a toy, a fastclay model
lev-car, bent out of shape upon the flagstones. Tom picked it up, handed it to
a wide-eyed girl watching from inside a small—but very clean — dwelling alcove.

‘Is this yours?’

She took the toy from Tom, and
opened her mouth to speak — but a heavy hand, her mother’s, descended on the
girl’s shoulder, and she remained mute.

Tom nodded, walked on.

‘Sir...’

Behind him: the mother.

‘Yes?’

‘My daughter.’ She was a large
woman; when she swallowed, her jowls shook. ‘Would you take her with you,
please?’

‘I can’t. I’m ...’

The little girl’s eyes were blue
and calm, as Sylvana’s might have been at that age.

‘... sorry.’

It
was Jay who conducted Tom’s final briefing, in a blue-grey chamber devoid of
decoration. Both the table and the too-hard chairs were square-edged extrusions
of the same featureless stone. Half-light came from dimmed glowglobes floating
near the ceiling.

It might have been an
interrogation chamber: a reminder of failure’s price.

But Tom’s healed skin remembered
the open cuts across his stomach, the pain weals from the Grand’aume’s
dungeons, the toxin-laden stings of the glistening red paraflesh which lined
the—

He forced his attention back into
the moment.

‘No-one, old chap’—Jay’ s glance
flickered towards Tom’s left shoulder—‘has done better in training. You’ve all
the makings of an effective deep-cover operative.’

Tom waited.

‘I’ve got to ask, though,’ Jay
added, ‘why you’re doing it. Your tech skills are first rate, you can plan and—’

‘I’ve been over this with Psych.’

Not to mention Corduven.

‘Your father was an artisan, is
that right?’

‘A stallholder, many strata down,
old chap.’

‘But he made things, too?’

‘Yes.’

Like his stallion talisman.

The white-hot graser beam, the
spattering of liquid metal and the strong smell of burning grease and oil.
He could see it right now:
Father’s
strong, stubby hands manipulating the cutter, removing metal from the plain
block, bringing forth the stallion’s magical form.

‘You’re asking’—Tom, with a faint
ironic smile, raised his one hand palm up—‘whether I’ve a sublimated desire to
make things with my
hands?’

‘What I’m getting at is—’

‘All I ask, Jay, is that you use
me effectively. Send me into a network where I can make a difference.’

Not into betrayal.

The subtext was obvious, and Tom
had made subtle enquiries to verify his suspicions. Though not everybody
agreed, it was known that Jay considered the Jephrin network in Realm Ruvandi
to be blown: the agents-in-place sending back their encrypted reports under
their captors’ supervision. Which meant that, for the sake of those captured
men and women, he had allowed his own lover Lihru to meet her rendezvous.

I’m no better than he is.

For Tom had known, some part of
him, that there was more to Jay’s shirking of responsibility for the final
briefing than he had claimed.

‘Maybe that’s why I’m conducting
this
briefing, Tom.’

Had Lihru failed to make contact
as arranged, the Blight’s security forces might conclude that their subterfuge
had failed; at which point, there would be no point in delaying execution for
the agents already in their hands.

Jay’s own superiors disagreed
with his assessment of the Jephrin network’s status. But that did not excuse—

‘This particular assignment,’ Jay
continued, leaning his elbows on the stone table, ‘carries an extra risk. If
anyone -or any scanfield—recognizes you, they’ll shut down the surrounding
tunnels immediately, before closing in.’

‘But the Aurineate Grand’aume is
a large realm.’ Tom shifted on his hard stone seat. ‘I’ll be nowhere near the
Core, or any of the upper strata where I was before.’

Jay nodded, then tapped the
tabletop for the briefing models to be displayed.

‘Just make damned sure of that,
old chap.’