City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (74 page)

“
Death
,” Aiah says.

The sister’s eyes turn hard. “Yes. We have felt that one, too, creeping about the plasm mains. An unholy thing, half-unreal, a perversion of plasm itself.”

“Help me kill it,” Aiah says.

Order of Eternity looks up at her, surprise on her face. “You can’t kill Death,” she says.

“
This
Death can be killed,” Aiah says. “And if it is perverting the plasm that is giving you such joy, you’ll want it destroyed.”

“
We do not
act
,” insistently. “We
contemplate
. We observe the things that are, the things that are fundamental. We do nothing in the world. We do not kill, we do not undo, not even the things that are better undone.”

Aiah narrows her eyes as she looks at the smaller woman. Put it, she thinks, in their terms.

“
Death,” Aiah says, “
this
Death, this particular Death, will bring down the Architect. The Architect, the Apprentice, and the Mage are changing the world, building something new, and the plasm is singing to you— the plasm itself is telling you that it approves of what the Architect is doing. If Death and the Shadow have their way, the war will come— the vision of war that haunts your dreams, the vision that you spread across the sky yesterday so the whole metropolis could share in your nightmare.”

Order of Eternity spreads her hands, gives Aiah a helpless look. “We do not
do
,” she says.

The sister’s insistence grates on Aiah’s nerves. She, Aiah, has been on the front lines of one battle or another for months, and she has no patience left for those who can’t choose sides.

“
Then you will be right, by your own lights,” she says. “You will do nothing, and you will be right, and Death and the war will come. People who do nothing are
always
right, they always retain their moral superiority over the rest of us,” sarcasm touching her voice, “but that’s not because it’s right to do nothing, it’s because if you act, you take a chance that your action might be wrong, and you’re not the sort to take chances, are you? You’ve never had your ideas tested, and if you have anything to say about it, they never
will
be tested....”

Order of Eternity merely looks at her. Aiah stares back, anger a dull ache at the back of her skull. She is willing to continue the argument until the sisters give in from sheer weariness, but she knows there must be a better way, a key that Cunning Aiah can find, then turn to unlock the situation. She looks around to view her audience, the group of sisters who stare back at her, expressionless, as if she were but a figure in a dream. Behind them, framed on the wall, is a relief of
The Apprentice
, Aiah’s own frowning face gazing at the book of recipes.

Ah, Aiah thinks. She has forgotten, lost in this maze, that her image possesses power, that she is, to these people, a splinter of their own dreaming....

She turns back to Order of Eternity, straightens her spine, looks down at the smaller woman. “I am an imago,” she says. “An imago stands before you to tell you these things, and the plasm that forms these imagoes would not lie to you. I tell you this:
The Death must die! The Architect must be saved! The war must not come to pass!
I come from your own dreams to tell you this!”

Order of Eternity stares at her, eyes wide, a touch of fear crossing her young, freckled face. She sighs, turns away, takes Aiah’s arm, leads her to the alcove.

“Come sit in my place,” she says. “And explain these things to us. We do not know you, not really, and we don’t know these other people whose images lie in our dreams, and— for the first time, perhaps, in ages— we would hear of the world outside.”

“First,” Aiah says, “tell me about The Mage.”

“The Mage is a powerful imago,” says Order of Eternity. “The Mage is he who reorders nature in accordance with his will, who demands obedience from reality itself. But he is heedless as to consequence— his actions proceed from his own will alone, without regard for what follows. His actions can lead to tragedy as well as glory. His force of will makes him nearly invincible, but he is a dangerous figure to know, and often fatal to those around him.”

Rohder? she thinks. Dangerous? The world-bending will sounds much more like Constantine than the mild-mannered Rohder.

Well, she thinks, the imagoes can’t be right all the time.

Aiah sits in the alcove and gazes out at her audience, two dozen or so women in gray shifts, all looking at her with solemn, youthful faces, the one exception the twisted Avian with the fierce eyes and the brown, barred wings tented over her shoulders. “Please sit down,” she tells them, and as they do Aiah smiles at this reflection of the classroom, with herself the teacher and these ageless, youthful-seeming women in their gray uniforms the students. She remembers herself, seated before a speaker on Career Day, drowsing through a lecture on the joys of being a marketing executive for Colorsafe Soap.

The Dreaming Sisters know nothing of the world outside, and Aiah has to explain who the players are. A few of the younger sisters have heard of Constantine; none have heard of Sorya or Rohder or the PED. She finds it easier, in the end, to speak of the Architect, the Shadow, and the Mage.

She is aware, as she speaks, that the interpretation she is feeding them may not be true— it may not be Rohder’s techniques that are making the plasm sing in the sisters’ minds; it may not be Taikoen that is threatening the peace of their dreaming— every word she speaks might be a lie, a piece of pure manipulation.

But so might the sisters be manipulating her: stealing plasm to create the huge displays that lured her here, diverting her from an investigation by putting her face on the imagoes, all for some subterranean purpose of their own.

Users and the used: who is the
passu
, who the
pascol
? It doesn’t matter.

She needs their cooperation, and she must do what she can to get it.

In the end, the Dreaming Sisters agree to do as she asks.

Death
will die.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Aiah returns from her visit to the Dreaming Sisters and finds Alfeg waiting in the corridor near her apartment, standing uneasily beneath a carving of apricots and carnations. He holds a file in his hand, and his eyes are grave.

Aiah signs him not to speak until she opens her door and leaves the surveillance zone outside her apartment. The scent of massed flowers strikes her as she presses the light switch and she sees the surprising floral blaze, flowers everywhere, on every table, chair, or horizontal surface, their combined aromas heavy in the room.

Alfeg gives a tight smile. “It would seem that someone loves you,” he says.

Aiah wanders to a towering spray of gladiolas, yellow and azure with splashes of red, and touches the attached note, inscribed in Constantine’s bold hand.

“Possibly,” she concedes. She does not want to cope with Constantine right now, and turns to Alfeg. “Something happened last shift, didn’t it?”

He nods. “It’s Refiq.” He hesitates, then adds, “What was that thing? What happened to him? It was terrifying.”

Aiah looks at him. “Tell me what you saw.” She had never seen Taikoen in the act of capturing a human.

Alfeg hesitates. “I was telepresent, had my sensorium across the canal from Refiq’s apartment, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. I had configured my sensorium with farvision, to bring his apartment up close. I couldn’t have got into his apartment anyway, because he’d screened it very thoroughly, but I could peek through the windows. At 14:42 precisely I saw a plasm tether descend from the sky and pause outside the apartment as if it contained a sensorium that was doing some surveilling of its own. Whoever it was, he wasn’t trying to be subtle— I had the impression of haste, if anything.”

That would be Constantine, Aiah thinks, trying to locate Taikoen’s next victim while his government waited outside his office.

“
And then
something
moved behind the kitchen window, something....” Alfeg swallows. “Something very disturbing. I only caught a glimpse of it, but it was menacing, as if someone had constructed an anima for a fright party. And then the window just blew out into the street, like an explosion, and the plasm tether shot in.” He licks his lips. “I wondered what to do. If I should try to break the plasm tether, or follow it to its point of origin, but in the end I decided just to keep watching.”

Taikoen, who could pass through plasm screens, had entered the apartment and opened the screen for Constantine to enter. Then, presumably, Constantine had subdued Refiq and performed whatever unholy midwifery was necessary.

“The plasm tether remained in the apartment for twenty minutes or so, and then it dissolved, as if the mage on the other end had simply broken the connection. A few minutes after that, I saw the subject, Refiq, examining the broken window from the inside. He was disheveled, like he had fallen, or maybe was drunk. He didn’t seem to be walking or moving very well. He brushed some broken glass off the windowsill, then went back into his apartment.”

“Where is he now?” Aiah asked.

“He put on some clothes— lace, studs; you know the way the cousins dress— and then he went to his bank. Withdrew some dinars, I guess, because next he went to a bar and ordered drinks for everybody. I turned over surveillance to Khorsa, and so far as I know, he’s still at the bar— he’s got himself quite an entourage by now, so I don’t think he’ll leave anytime soon.”

“Good.”

A haunted look comes into Alfeg’s face. “Aiah,” he whispers. “What
was
that?”

Aiah hesitates. “I’ll go into more detail later,” she says. “But what you should know is that Refiq is dead now— he no longer exists. The creature has him. And the creature will take others until we put a stop to it.”

Aiah can see a little muscle jumping in Alfeg’s cheek.

“Tell no one,” Aiah reminds. “I’ll talk to you and Khorsa later.”

After Alfeg leaves, Aiah calls Aratha, the mage-major of Karlo’s Brigade, and sets an appointment for 06:00 next day. Then she heads for the offices of the PED, looks into Dr. Romus’s office, and sees only the man who shares his office.

“Is Doctor Romus in?” she asks. “Do you know if he’s in the Palace?”

“I’m here,” says Romus. His upper body snakes out from behind his desk, gliding with a lithe purposefulness toward Aiah’s ankles, and Aiah takes an involuntary step backward.

“I was sleeping,” Romus says. His body flows into the center of the room, and his face lifts level with hers. “I’m not on duty till second shift tomorrow.”

Aiah tries to calm her startled heart. “Will you join me in my office, please?” she asks.

“Certainly.”

Aiah leads him to her office, trying not to hear the slithering sounds of his body sawing to and fro on the carpet as he follows. She enters the office, holds the door until Romus joins her, and then closes it behind him. She takes her seat, then a breath.

“It is time,” she says, “to move against the creature you saw that first shift in the secure room.”

Romus’s eyes go wide in what looks like fear. His little tongue licks his lips. “I see,” he says.

“We know where it is,” Aiah says, “and we know it’s vulnerable now, for the next few days. I intend to establish a task force— a very secret one— to destroy the creature. My question is, Will you join it?”

Romus hesitates, his head swinging left and right on his long neck. “I have no experience in this,” he says.

“None of us do.”

“Is the triumvir a part of this scheme?”

Aiah hesitates. “He has given me to understand,” she says, “that this action will meet with his approval.”

Romus’s cilia give an uneasy, boneless shiver. “That is, forgive me, an evasive answer.”

It’s also a lie, of course. Aiah reminds herself that she should be more sparing with them.

“The triumvir does not know of this action,” Aiah says finally. “No one does. You do not, and I do not, and the creature does not exist.”

Romus is patient. “That is not quite an answer, either.”

Aiah runs her hands through her ringlets, throws her hair over her shoulders. “If you join this group,” she says finally, “it will be as a favor to me, and at some risk to yourself, and you will be doing immeasurable good to the community. If you choose not to join....” She sighs, shrugs. “Nothing more will be said. I only implore you to keep this a complete secret, both for your sake and mine.”

Romus sways back and forth while the silence builds. Aiah turns away, her nerves crawling with the unnatural motion. Finally, in Romus’s reedy tones, the answer comes.

“I have lived a long while,” he says, “and I am now, long after my first century is past, inclined to wonder for what. I spent years in the half-worlds, hardly ever seeing the Shield, scheming to advance my security, aiding people who have now all been murdered. Even my title of doctor is less than honorary, more a nickname than a real title. Now I have a job, and half an office, and a meal ticket... more than I’ve ever had, I suppose, but it hardly seems worth a century of effort.” Something uncertain flickers in his dark eyes. “If that thing, that demon, kills me now, what will I have lost? Half an office... so why does this half an office seem so precious?”

Having nothing to offer him, no more words of persuasion or consolation, Aiah waits. Eventually Romus pauses in his swaying, looks down at her.

“Very well,” he says. “I will join.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Aiah says.

NEGOTIATIONS COLLAPSE

FUND WITHDRAWAL IMMINENT

“COMPENSATED DEMOBILIZATION” CALLED “DEAD ISSUE”

Rohder blinks at Aiah with his pale blue eyes. “No,” he says.