Resolution (17 page)

In the image, the boy’s skin held a greenish cast, and the eerie lighting lent his obsidian eye a reptilian look which bore no relation to the way he looked in life ... not in his normal healthy condition.

Ignoring the barroom crowd, Ro used her infostrand to call the boys.

‘What the hell happened?’

‘Mom…We weren‘t sure you‘d be
—’

‘—
still up. He’s going to be OK.
’

It was her-ears-only audio, and the drawn but alert faces of both boys were lased directly into her eyes.

‘Willya lookit that?’ came the barman’s voice.

Ro shook her head.

‘It’s young Annette,
’ said Kian.
‘A friend of Jean-Pierre’s.
’

‘From town.’
Dirk swallowed.
‘She’s got some skeletal deformity, a twisted spine they can’t cure. The other kids
—’

‘—
don’t leave her alone. And Jean-Pierre saw them bullying her.
’

Ro let out a breath.

‘How many of them?’

‘A dozen, or more. Bigger boys.’

Kian’s voice deepened in half-controlled rage.
‘Made sure there was no-one else around to see.
’

‘I’ll talk to you again in a few minutes.’

Ro shut down the comms.

‘Devil spawn,’ the big-haired woman was saying in the other booth. ‘Don’t belong with human kids, I’ll tell ya that.’

‘I hear ya.’ Her husband scowled at the HV. ‘Should round ‘em up, and investigate whether they got mortal souls. And if they don’t—’

‘They don’t.’

‘Well, Mary-Ellen, you just could be right.’

At the bar counter, the native NYers talked differently but the sentiment was the same.

‘—Riker’s Island, and lose the key.’

‘Dowse da doity little bastards wit’ gas, and light ‘em up.’

Ro used her strand to transfer payment for the untouched coffee. Slipping from the booth, she passed the midwestern couple without a word and headed for the door.

‘Hey now, miss. Is there a problem at all?’

Her aikido-trained mother had striven for the way of peace. But for Ro, blending with an enemy’s attack was just a way of getting close enough to reach their eyeballs.

‘If the coffee’s not warm enough, I can—’

Golden sparks glimmered, half-visible through her grey contacts.

‘Devil spawn? Is that what you think?’

Potential building.

Now.

There was a flat bang, and a cloud of dense, yellow-tinged grey smoke billowed from above the bar.

‘The HV set just—’

Then Ro was on the street and the bar’s door was shut behind her.

Stars were visible in the sky, even with Manhattan’s bright lights, and the air felt fresh after the storm. Sidewalks, washed clean, glistened with clear puddles.

I’ll show you a storm, if that’s what you want.

Her boots splashed through puddles as she walked.

<>

~ * ~

12

NULAPEIRON AD 3423

In the antechamber, servitors stood in ranks on the polished floor at solemn attention, in stone-cold silence. The doorshimmer leading to Corduven’s chamber sparkled at Tom’s approach but did not evaporate. He stood there, story crystal clenched in fist, hard enough to hurt.

Corduven
—

Inside, his friend lay dying, not yet dead.

Tom stared at nothing, seeing Corduven as he had been last night, sunken and emaciated. It was like Father: wasting away, becoming a wizened skeletal figure that wheezed and breathed fitfully, with those long quiet gaps that made you ask
Was that the final one?
and then the painful surprise of another indrawn, ragged breath ... until the last, and silence.

For a long time Tom stood there, until frosty brilliance slid down the doorshimmer and Sylvana stepped through. She looked regal, incredibly beautiful, and for a moment Tom felt unworthy even to be in her presence. Her shining blue gaze fastened on him; then she gathered up her ivory robe and walked past him without a word.

The priestess, in her purple death-cape, strode into the chamber. Tom followed her as far as the archway, then stopped, regarding the grey-white corpse-thing in the bed. The dead body was no longer Corduven, but a composite of minerals whose structure was already breaking down, a decaying organic sculpture that bore little relation to the man who had been Tom’s friend.

Jay, too stunned to weep, knelt at the bedside, clasping Corduven’s dead hand. Behind Jay, Lady V’Delikona stood, straight and unbowed even in the presence of death.

Tom remembered, as a new Palace servitor, walking into Corduven’s suite to pick up a faulty smartsatin garment, and the astounded joy on Corduven’s face when he revealed a tricon cast in white metal, a joke intended for Sylvana, and found that a common-born servitor like Tom understood the pun: an antinomy cast in antimony. They had laughed together, friends from the first.

Why didn‘t I stay until the end?

Was it because Jay deserved his private grief, or because Tom had been afraid to stay? There would never be another opportunity to talk to Corduven.

‘Tom?’ It was Lady V’Delikona. ‘Walk with me.’

She leaned more heavily on his arm than he expected; a show of frailty and therefore of trust: she would never publicly reveal a weakness. They walked through ebon corridors in grieving silence, then came to a halt at the edge of the Great Courts.

A low moaning passed through the Courts, and the hairs rose on Tom’s neck.

‘What... ?’

‘The Palace knows,’ said Lady V’Delikona.

The moan grew stronger, began to ululate, as morphmarble walls vibrated to sing their wordless grief, to mourn the passing of Corduven d’Ovraison from the world.

There was a guest apartment waiting for Tom, and a retinue of servitors ready to perform his bidding; but he waved them away, back to their dorms. Alone in luxury, he felt more poverty-stricken than he ever had as a child.

I
wasn‘t poor. I had the future, though I didn’t know it.

There was a couch, a kind of chaise longue, and Tom eased himself back on it, lay down and stared at the ceiling, wondering what Elva was doing now. She had not known Corduven well, but she would be saddened by his death.

Tom remembered a phrase his mother used,
too tired to sleep,
which had never made sense. Now, exhausted and enervated, he thought he might never sleep again ...

Thinking that, Tom slipped into a dream. Yet it was a fitful thing, featuring a flensed figure writhing in a vivisection field on a distant hellworld. Soon, he snapped awake, breathing hard, his skin drenched with sweat that was already beginning to cool, greasy and unhealthy

Tom rose from the couch, stripped down to his trews, and in the darkened lounge began to practise his phi2dao fighting forms, striving against unseen opponents, faster and faster as he whirled through kicks, stabbed fingertips into imaginary eyeballs, thrust and snapped and wrenched and threw and locked and strangled, fighting over and over against the deadliest enemy of all, the one that could never be defeated, only held back for a time: the relentless demons lurking in his mind.

Then he stopped, exhausted and panting, and queried the house system for the time. He had been practising for two solid hours.

Tom tugged off his trews, found a glob of cleangel in the bath chamber and slapped it against his bare chest. Then he walked back into the lounge while the cleansing gel spread across his body, exfoliating and disinfecting. He waved open a wardrobe, found a sleeping-robe. By the time he had taken hold of the robe, the gel had already finished its work and was sliding down his body to the floor. He stepped out of the puddle, and pulled on the light robe.

The gel crawled back towards the bath chamber, while Tom found a refreshments cabinet and drank indigoberry-flavoured electrolyte replacement fluid straight from a flagon. Then he headed for the nearest bed - there were at least four bedchambers in the suite - and lay down.

Perhaps he could do more than just sleep. Perhaps he could analyse the captured Pilot’s dilemma.

Corduven ...

Or he might just dream of his dead friend. Either way, as Tom slipped from consciousness, he tried to keep a rational part of his mind in control, directing his dream state. It was a dangerous thing to do, for a trained logosopher.
‘Consciousness,’
Tom remembered Lord Velond saying at the Sorites School,
‘emerges from neural groups observing neural groups. When I talk to myself, when I control my thoughts, who is controlling whom? For I
am
my thoughts, nothing more.’