Context (89 page)

Almost
half a Standard Year passed, faster than seemed possible: gathering snippets of
information, gently wooing Velsivith—he handed over confidential crystals of
increasing significance—and every courier got through without mishap.

And Tom, in his role as
merchant-trader Quilvan Nyassen, slowly settled into the local community, on
the outskirts of the Seventh Stratum in the Aurineate Grand’aume.

Then
one morning, buying his usual breakfast from the fruit stall, Tom noticed that
young Rosa’s face was stiff with the onset of a bruise. There was a difference,
too, in the way she had tied her pale green shoulder scarf, but Tom had not yet
deciphered the full significance of the various knots which local women wore.

‘Where’s your mother, Rosa?’

‘At home.’ Her inflection was
flat.

‘Is anything wrong?’

After a moment, ‘My father’s
back.’

‘I see.’

But he saw nothing.

It was later, when he watched
Rosa’s mother walking by the canal, stone-faced, arm in arm with a tall
narrow-shouldered man whose pot belly hung over his tunic’s belt, that Tom
understood. There were few other folk by the water’s edge at this time, but
they moved back unnecessarily, without a word or sign of recognition, giving
the couple more than adequate room to pass.

For the returned husband’s tunic
was grey, as were his trousers, tucked into combat boots. And the cravat inside
his collar was scarlet: the only insignia necessary to identify him as a member
of the Dark Fire’s armed forces, home on leave with his human family.

~ * ~

47

NULAPEIRON
AD 3421

Once
every tenday, Tom ascended two strata—the highest his cover-ID would allow him
to go—and dined in the Club d’Anderquin. Sometimes with business contacts,
where conversation would proceed in the strangled jargon of commerce (which Tom
had perfected in the Bronlah Hong) unless it turned to personal matters; most
often, Tom would take dinner alone, and watch the local bourgeoisie relaxing.

While burghers and military
officers dined in restaurants, alongside bright, airy promenades where polished
glow-clusters floated, most ordinary folk would still be working; the luckier
ones would be trudging home through service tunnels to their tiny alcoves.

On the evening after he had seen
Rosa’s returned father, Tom sat by himself at his usual table by the wall,
picking at a light salad, listening to the soft Kaznin folksongs. The musician
was a traveller—these days, a dangerous occupation—and he was surprisingly
skilled, perched on the tiny stage at the chamber’s rear, picking at his
aerolute, his soft melodious voice somehow reaching throughout the club.

Among the rich gowns, the formal
uniforms—the officers’ braid prominent in the bright light—marked the occupying
forces’ highest representatives. But they sometimes behaved in unexpected ways.

Kaznia was a distant realm
currently besieged by the Blight. Famously (as though the authorities knew they
had no hope of suppressing the news), the inhabitants of one small outlying
community had committed suicide—parents taking their children’s lives before
their own—rather than surrender. That was only six tendays ago, but the
blockaded realm’s core was on the brink of falling, as Duke Broyse and his
subjects starved.

It was the officers who surprised
Tom.

As soon as the musician had
begun, his first sweet ballad threaded with the unmistakable harmonies of the
Kaznin ten-point scale, the uniformed men had laid down their tine-spoons,
ignoring both food and the brittle conversation of their female paid
companions, and turned their attention towards the music.

They did not applaud when the
song ended—a few scattered claps sounded, then fell away to silence, as other
diners followed the officers’ lead—but they watched and listened attentively
throughout the next song, and the next.

One of the officers, lean and
grey-haired with a rigid back, was sitting in profile; Tom saw the bright
glitter of unashamed tears upon the man’s cheek as the musician’s ballad drew
to its soft, sweet, haunting close.

Have I misjudged these people ?

Tom’s impulse was to leave, and
think over what he had seen.

But then a waiter-servitor
stumbled slightly, spilling some water from the carafe he was carrying, and
brushed against the grey-haired officer’s sleeve. Without taking his gaze away
from the stage, the officer whipped his tine-spoon across the apologetic waiter’s
cheek, ripping three parallel welts just below the eye.

Blood was already welling as the
waiter-servitor backed away, hurrying towards the service membrane-door, while
the other waiters stood and watched, not daring to help.

Tom picked a slice of
gripplefruit from his plate, and slowly chewed, tasting nothing.

After
the musician finished, glowglimmers brightened and the ambient noise grew to a
hubbub, over a low background of recorded zeitdeco chorales. The grey-haired
officer resumed eating, using the same tine-spoon which had raised blood in the
servitor’s cheek.

Then, as the music softened, in
one of those sudden unpredictable lulls, a woman’s voice carried clearly: ‘...
Chaos-damned occupation ends, and we’ll all be free.’

The music rose, in counterpoint
to murmured conversations’ fading away to silence.

She was dark-haired, the woman
who had spoken. Slowly she replaced her goblet upon the table where she sat, as
her companions unconsciously shifted in their seats, distancing themselves from
her remark.

Then another woman’s laughter—too
brittle: bright and intoxicated—cut through the silence, and an officer made a
coarse remark, and gradually diners began to converse once more.

But there were watchful gazes
trained upon the dark-haired woman.

Excusing herself, she left her
table and walked, a little unsteadily, to the exit, where a servitor fetched
her cloak and draped it around her shoulders: royal blue and lustrous, with a
spray of silver flecks fanning out across the shoulders, and a brocaded hem
which brushed along the marble flagstones as she passed through the glistening
membrane and was gone, the membrane vitrifying to milky hardness.

Tom, still seated, used his
cred-ring to pay the bill, touching it to the tabletop sensor.

His black cloak was folded on an
unused chair beside him, and he picked it up, carrying it across his forearm as
he stood. Near him, on the wall, an area of liquid texture was subtly different
from the polished stone surrounding it: a servitors’ doorway. No-one—he
verified with a casual scan across the restaurant—was looking in his direction.

Tom crouched down so that the
covered table hid him, rolled sideways through the membrane, and came to his
feet in a dank service tunnel.

His heart beat faster.