Empire Dreams (5 page)

For two further mornings this vision is to come to him. He lies alone under the startled scrutiny of cherubs on clouds and virgins pursued by stags, for his vengeful intensity has so disturbed the Infanta Phaedra that she will not consent to any further nights with him. “Like poison,” she describes it. “Like a venom working behind the eyes.” Dom Perellen shrugs and returns to the elaborate drawing out of his revenge. There is no doubt in his mind that the unidentified coffin is that of his enemy.

Just before noon on the second day the pneumatique delivers a message cylinder to his office. It states quite simply,
Work completed, awaiting your Grace’s disposal. Respectfully, Adam Ho
. In reply Dom Perellen gathers together four important pieces of paper: a Mercantile Letter of Credit for the sum of five hundred forents, an importation permiso from the Port Wardens valid for the period of five months, precise instructions on the delivery of the automata collection, and an accompanying letter to the Dom Merreveth in which Dom Perellen extends his apologies to his onetime patron for having been out of sorts at the pageant and begs, for the sake of old affection, that the good Dom overlook his breach of etiquette by accepting this humble gift to his children. He places the documents in an empty cylinder, addresses it, drops it into the slot, and thinks nothing more about it. While the cylinder crosses beneath the city, he amuses himself by composing a set of complex improvisations about a simple, repetitive theme. It entertains him for the remainder of the afternoon.

* * * *

Now the picture changes again, and we are in a Great House of grand halls and spacious galleries. Portraits of ancestors line its walls and the slow lap of water wears away at its stones, grain by grain, undermining the centuries. This is the House Merreveth, and we are in the nursery. Three children sleep by the glow of watch-candles, their faces folded to the pillows in simple dreams of childhood, nannies no more than a whisper away. It has been a good day; new toys to play with, a present from a friend of Papa’s, a gift to make even the most blasé of aristocratic children gasp in delight. A family of mice, perfect in every detail: Grandpa in nightshirt with pipe, Grandma with her glasses and knitting, Mamma and Pappa Mouse, Mamma in apron and mop hat, Pappa in working bib-and-braces, and the three children in their neat little school uniforms. But more wonderful still, by repeating a magic word whispered to them by a tall, soft-spoken artisier in a streetmask, the tiny diorama comes to life. Mamma sews and Pappa saws, Grandpa puffs his pipe, Grandma knits and rocks her tiny rocking chair, and the children scamper about playing Chase and Blind-Man’s Buff, tiny mouse voices squeaking.

The adventures of the mouse family entertained the children until bedtime, and now the minute, intricate automata lie where play has left them, transfixed by slats of moonlight beaming through the nursery shutters. Then two tiny ears prick upright in the moonlight. And two more, and two more, and two tiny red eyes blink open, and a tail twitches. From the frozen postures of abandoned games the mice stretch into animation. They seem almost alive, scurrying across the nursery floor and under the door, but they are no more than precise mechanisms dressed in flensed mouse-skins. It is the boast of the Brothers Ho that their creations cannot be distinguished from reality. By the secret run-ways and traverses known only to living mice they move through the sleeping House, to mice as vast and varied in its terrain as the City of Man to men. In time they come to the Dom’s bedchamber. From behind a plasterwork rose on the coping they absorb the scene with pink sensor eyes.

The Dom Merreveth sleeps alone: this is well known among the Gracious Houses, for the Dom’s attraction to women lies in his potency in the public world of the arts and commerce rather than in the private world of the quilts. The children dreaming in the moonlit nursery are his only insofar that he donated the culture cells to the genetic surgeons. All this is well; the plan hinges upon the Dom’s solitary nature. No harm must be done to the Infanta Serenade. The Dom tosses and turns in the restless dreams of the powerful. The mice scamper unheard and unseen across the carpet, and up the carved legs of the divan. They stand for a moment on the pillow by the Dom’s head; Grandma, Grandpa with his pipe, Mamma with her little apron, and Pappa in his dungarees, the children smart and neat in their miniature pinafores. They move to their programmed positions. Then on some silent order they flex their tiny soft paws and steel blades spring out. With surgical precision they slice open Dom Merreveth’s throat and wrists.

By the time the servitors have rushed to answer the strange, croaking, flapping cry from the Grace’s bedchamber, the toy mice have frozen into position once again, ready for another day’s merry play.

* * * *

The Chant Valedictory of the High Requiem dies away in the airy clerestories of the Hall of Weeping and the fog rolls in across the square like a breaking wave. In their white funeral gowns the small groups of mourners seem as insubstantial as ghosts. They are deathly silent as the fog muffles even their footfalls and respectful whispers. Above their heads, unseen in the fog, vast powers are moving: the seraphs of the Pantochrist, risen from Elder Sea in a cloud of mystery to descend upon the City of Man and summon the soul of a dead Dom to the company of the people beneath the sea.

The small group of young Graces part at the water-steps where their boats await them.

“Such a shock to lose your exemplar so suddenly, Perellen,” says Dom Gerrever, the poet.

“Ex-exemplar, citizen; I have not had dealings with the Dom for almost a year. But he did embark me upon my musical career, and I owe him thanks for that. I am sorry he is gone.”

“Oh, come now, Perellen,” says Dom Harshadden, the playwright. “You couldn’t stand the man; he cheated you, slighted you, and humiliated you every chance he could. I’ll wager you’re glad to see him gone. And at such an opportune time too.”

“I would not wish an end like his upon even my worst enemy,” says Dom Perellen, suddenly accused and guilty behind his mask. “He may have slighted me, and we have certainly had our differences in the past, but we are not men who murder on matters of shadowplay, are we?”

There are murmurs of consent, but Dom Hemmenveth the painter says, “Who said anything about Dom Merreveth having been murdered?”

“Well, he was.”

“But not by someone of the Gracious Castes, as you seem to be implying.” Dom Perellen’s brain thumps against the front of his skull. His mouth is suddenly hot and dry.

“By me; is that what you are trying to say, Hemmenveth?” There is a deadly calm in his voice he does not feel. Dom Hemmenveth gives ground.

“Oh no, not at all, not at all, Perellen; as you said, we are not men who murder for shadows. Indeed, given your provocation, you did not even employ satirists; great restraint, citizen, great restraint.”

“It was a Rager killed the gentle Dom,” suggests Dom Perellen, and his friends mutter their agreement. There being nothing more to be said, they go down to their boats and Dom Gerrever calls out in parting, “Perellen, the masque at the House Kerrender, this Matinsday, remember.” As the boats pull away from the mooring Dom Perellen remains awhile, head bent, breathing deeply, trying to regain his composure. He is trembling. It had been close. He forces the fear and the guilt down his gullet and draws himself up. It is then that he sees the solitary figure in white running across the empty, fog-shrouded plaza. For an instant the face is turned to him. Behind the funeral mask are eyes he knows.

“Serenade!” His lunge for shore sets the gondola rocking dangerously. “Serenade!” Far away at the edge of the cloisters the figure turns again for a moment, then hurries on. “Serenade.” Doves explode into the air from the bell-keeps of the Hall of Weeping and the massive buttresses of pale stonework return his cry to him.

* * * *

He is to see her again: spied from a high balcony, singular for a moment among the anonymous faces of the street entertainers and mendicants in the Bourse. Again, as a glimpsed figure hurrying up the steps of a water-gate in Harhadden. She turns for an instant at his call but there is no recognition and she does not wait. Again, on a water-taxi sweeping past his gondola on the Canal St. Nimien. Lastly, alone at a far table in a crowded cafe by the Damantine Fountain. By the time he presses his way between the chattering luncheoners she is gone, leaving only a five-pago tip and a musky wisp of perfume prepared from the powdered wings of night moths.

His discreet inquiries at the House Merreveth prove only that she is gone. Delving into past acquaintances from his rakish days discloses nothing. Her friends know less than he. She has vanished back into the city which raised and nurtured her. Looking out from the music-room window Dom Perellen knows that he can never find the one soul in the city’s thronging millions who does not wish to be found, for what man could explore every laneway and waterway of a city that changes and grows every hour of every day so that it may never cease growing and thus stagnate and die? There is an infinity of canals and channels which reach back into derelict quarters abandoned so long ago by the slow migration to Elder Sea that their names are forgotten and their waterways choked and stagnant, where the funeral grounds of past millennia have, in their turn, become plazas and conventicles, chapteries and arcades, and are now, centuries later, returning to the ancestors who peopled them. The City of Man is upheld by the hands of the dead.

And she is there somewhere. She will come to him. She must. Otherwise Dom Merreveth’s death is a hollow victory. She will come in time, and time is as plentiful as water in the sea.

* * * *

After that time at the Damantine Fountain he does not see her again, not even at the ball in the House Kerrender with every Dom and Infanta in the city in attendance. Though he dances a hundred waltzes and gazes into the eyes behind a hundred masks he does not find the eyes that glow in his memories or the body that quickens the beat of his soul. There are smiling invitations from Infanta and Dom alike but he does not accept them for he had hoped with a sure and certain hope that she would have been drawn here tonight like a moth to a candle. He has not yet found her, but there are still faces to be searched for well-known eyes.

So he dances too much and drinks too much and flirts too little and by the time his friends ask him to take them home he is obnoxiously drunk and bad-tempered. He is so unpleasant that his friends (considerably more drunk than he, but good-humored) drop him on the Florinthian Steps and sail off in his gondola in search of new diversions. The sounds of laughter and merry music recede into the fog. Dom Perellen breathes in the wet air, suddenly alone and vulnerable. It is so late it is early and there is no traffic abroad on the canals. He must walk. St. Devereux’s Preview will take him to Rerren Square and thence over the Bridge-of-the-Virtues to Samtanavya Prospect. From there it is no distance through the Lido to the House Perellen. But this is a gloomy area of derelict warehousing, and Dom Perellen recalls with a shock the friendly face of a fat Guard saying, “Ragers, Grace, carniphages. Traced a chapter of ‘em to this ‘ere warehouse.” That same warehouse which now looms before him. It puts an urgency in his step and a face in every shadow. Footfalls echo deceptively in the cold fog and the gas lanterns hiss like a slow exhalation. Scared sober, Dom Perellen stops, turns. The echo of his footfalls persists too long. They have a wrong sound, like the echo of high-heeled shoes, or claws, tapping on the cobblestones.

“Serenade?”

The scream shatters his soul like glass. He whirls to find himself face to face with snapping fangs and bulbous red eyes. The hot sweet stench of its breath drives him back, retching. The Rager twists its deformed body and hisses in its throat.

Dom Perellen’s mouth is open but the words take an age to come. His heart surges against his rib cage.

“The Rage,” whispers Dom Perellen. The Rage, the alien plague from beyond the edge of the world, brought, say some, by the vessels of the transtellar merchants which splash down in the Lagoon; sown by the agents of jealous foreign governments, say others; and yet others still maintain that it is caused by spores from an alien colonization vessel which crashed in Elder Sea thousands of years before. For the first time he is able to see the creature whole. By its shriveled breasts and wide pelvis it must once have been a woman of the City of Man. The Rage has deformed her skeleton until she stands no taller than a child, her muscles tied into powerful, tight knots beneath her fur. In the swollen bulbs of her eyes, adapted by the disease for better night vision, there dwells a certain unclean madness. Dom Perellen edges away from the creature, hands outspread in a human gesture of placation, but the Rager is beyond the reach of all things human for the plague has harrowed and violated her humanity and warped her body into an obscene travesty. She howls; the flames behind her eyes will not let her rest until she has tasted human flesh. She bares her teeth in the lantern-light and smashes Dom Perellen to the cobbles with a sweep of her arm. Then she is on him. Claws rip at his head, tearing away his flimsy party mask. Teeth the length of fingers snap in his face. The sweet stench of plague gusts hot in his nostrils. The jaws lock like cocked gin-traps for the killing bite through the throat. In his last moment Dom Perellen is aware of two things.

A searing blue flash.

A stench of burning meat.

The carniphage spasms and rolls from him to lie smoking gently on the cobblestones, teeth bared to the moon. The mask is clenched in her fingers. A charred hole has been stabbed cleanly between her breasts. Across the square the St. Charl Guard holsters his light-lance and runs to assist.

“Is His Grace all right? No wounds, bites, or scratches?” For this is the manner in which the Rage claims its victims, through spores transmitted in the saliva of the carniphage which infect the slightest wound. Dom Perellen shakes his head and mumbles, “All right, all right.” Then the trembling starts, a spastic twitching so debilitating that the Guard must help him to the launch. He is taken to the House Perellen where his servitors fuss and fluster with warm quilts and healing broths and sleeping draughts. The Dom orders them out of his sight and shuts himself in the music room. Under the benign gaze of his ancestors he works the spasms from his fingers on the manuals of the Instrument. He commences with small whispering sounds, like the wind and the water and the scampering of mice. At the beginning of Fifth Hour he adds new tones, intricate repetitive sequences of pipes and bells. Then he brings in distant thunderous bass chords: storms and tempests in the mountains of the land beneath the sea from which his people came. Convoluted treble melodies occupy him for an hour or so, then he explores matching harmonies and subtle rhythms. He constructs his music hour on hour, layer upon layer like the strata of ancient sedimentary sandstones until the windows burst open under the pressure of music and the notes pour forth into the city in a waterfall of voices, singing down the empty canals and swirling around the eaves of the ancient houses in search of hidden things.