Transition (16 page)

She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen; one of the native tribal girls, dressed conservatively ankle to neck
in a black caftanne, her hair gathered in a net, fingers glittering with rings. The girl didn’t look at the older woman as
she approached. She just sat staring straight ahead, across the path. From a few metres away, Jésusdottir could see that the
girl was shaking, and had been crying.

“Hello?” she said. The girl looked at her, sniffing, but did not reply. Ms Jésusdottir tried Hindic. The girl’s expression
changed. She rose, standing, unfolding herself, and smiled at the older woman, who only then felt the first pang of fear in
her gut. “Oh, Ms Jésusdottir, I have some bad news.”

Brashley Krijk disappeared from his yacht while cruising in the Eastern Middlearthean, off Chandax, on the isle of Girit.

Der Graf Heurtzloft-Beiderkern heard somebody come into the opera box behind him. He assumed it was one of his sons returning;
they had both left earlier to indulge their cigar habit in the corridor outside and to flirt with any young ladies they happened
to encounter. Whoever it was, they slipped in while the coloratura soprano was just launching into her final and most heart-rending
solo. But for that, he might have looked round.

Commandante Odil Obliq, peril of the Orient as an admiring enemy had once described her, was dancing with her new lover, the
admiral of her ekranoplan assault squadron, in the moonlit ruins of New Quezon while a blindfolded orchestra did their best
to out-voice the Howler Orangs that were ululating from the tumbled stones and twisted metal frames of the most recently destroyed
buildings. Across the plaza, from which the wreckage had been cleared by chain gangs of defeated Royalists, came a waiter
carrying a tray with their champagne and cocaine.

They stopped dancing, both smiling at the fat old eunuch waddling towards them with the tray.

“Commandante,” he wheezed. “Admiral.”

“Thank you,” Obliq said. She picked the silver straw from the tray. At the ends of her long ebony fingers, her nails were
painted in swirling green camouflage, as a joke. She handed the straw to the admiral. “After you.”

“We shall never sleep,” the admiral sighed, bending slightly to the tray and the first two lines of powder, glowing white
in the moonlight.

She handed the straw to the commandante, who had taken the opportunity to sip some of the champagne. Then the admiral’s expression
changed. She gripped Obliq’s hand and said, “There’s something wrong…”

Obliq stiffened, her hand dropping the silver straw and going to her holstered pistol.

Her earpiece crackled. “Commandante!” her ADC radioed, his voice desperate.

The eunuch waiter hissed, twisted his hand under the tray so that it began to fall, taking the champagne flutes and the rest
of the cocaine with it while the pistol revealed underneath pointed straight at the commandante. Obliq had already started
to drop, going limp in the admiral’s arms and falling as though in a faint, but it meant only that the chest shot the eunuch
had aimed at her became a head shot. The admiral stared on blankly as the first shot was followed by two more before the nearest
guards finally woke up and started shooting.

*   *   *

The assassination teams sent after Mrs Mulverhill could find no recent trace of her anywhere.

The Transitionary

When I wake, I am in some pain and tied to a chair. Altogether, this is not a satisfactory turn of events.

I underwent some training to cover such situations, and know enough to wake slowly without, one would hope, giving any sign
of having woken. This is the theory. In practice I have never been convinced that this is really possible. If you’re unconscious
you’re unconscious – so by no means in full control of what your body is doing – and if you’re unconscious you’re probably unconscious
for a good reason, like some gorilla in a suit smacking you so hard in the face that your nose seems to be broken, you cannot
breathe normally, you have bled copiously down your naked chest, two of your front teeth feel loose and the whole forward
portion of your face feels swollen and suffused with bruised blood.

I am hanging forward in the seat as far as my bonds will allow, my chin nearly on my chest, my gaze falling naturally on my
own lap. I’m naked. My thighs are bloodstained, brightly lit. I become more fully aware, wallowing my way to consciousness
like a nearly waterlogged lump of wood rising slowly to the surface of a cold and sluggish stream. I have taken the most immediate
and rudimentary stock of the situation and am just starting carefully – without giving any outward signs of movement – to flex
the appropriate muscle groups to test precisely how tightly I am tied to the chair, when a male voice says, “Don’t bother,
Temudjin, we can tell you’re awake. And don’t waste your time testing the wires and the chair, either. You’re not going anywhere.
We know what you’re doing because it was us who taught you to do it.”

I think briefly about this. My captors seem to know exactly how I am trained to react in such a situation, and they appear
to be claiming that they are my own people, or at least that they helped to train me. The individual addressing me is probably
not of first-rank education.

I bring my head up, stare into the darkness between a pair of lights pointed at me from a couple of metres away and say, with
all the fluency I can muster, “It was
we
who taught you to do it.”

I’m expecting a “What?” or a “Huh?” but he just pauses and then says, “Whatever. The point is we’ll know what you’re trying
to do at every stage. You’ll save us both a lot of time and yourself some pain if you drop the tradecraft stuff.”

An ominous phrase. “At every stage of what?” is the obvious question. I can see nothing beyond the lights. As well as the
two to each side of straight ahead there are two more I can see, one level with each shoulder, and from the shadows beneath
my chair I guess there are another two behind me. I am encircled with brightness. The voice talking to me is male and I do
not recognise it. It might be that of the wide-shouldered man who talked to me on the aircraft, but I don’t know. His voice
is coming from directly behind me, I think. Listening to it, I get the impression that I am in a large room. I don’t seem
to be able to smell anything, except my own blood: a sharp, metallic scent. The fragre of the place, the information from
that extra sense that people like myself have, indicates a world I have not visited before, and a place which feels confused
somehow, full of clashing, competing historical and cultural sensations. I check my languages. English. Nothing else.

That is unprecedented. I do not have even the language of my home or my base reality in the house in the trees on the ridge
looking out over the town with the casino, where my original self wanders round the place dead-eyed and monosyllabic.

Now I feel fear.

“At every stage of this interrogation,” the man’s voice says, as though in reply to my earlier thought.

“Interrogation?” I repeat. Even to my own ears it sounds as though I have a heavy cold. I try to snort back some of the blood
blocking my nose but succeed only in producing a sensation akin to somebody having just stuck a large metal spike in the centre
of my face.

“Interrogation,” the man confirms. “To determine what you know, or what you think you know. To discover who is controlling
you, or who you think is controlling you. To find out what it is you think you’re doing—”

“Or what I think I think I’m doing,” I offer. Silence. I shrug. “I was spotting the pattern,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says, sounding tired. “Be clever about it, give cheek, be defiant and even insult the intelligence of the interrogator,
so that when you are put to the question your collapse will be all the more abject and your apparent degree of cooperation
all the more complete. As I said, Temudjin, we did train you, so we know how you’ll respond.”

I let my head drop so that I am looking at my bloodstained thighs. “Ah, the infinite cowardice of the torturer,” I mutter.

“What?” he says. I did mutter very quietly.

I raise my head again. I try to sound tired and world-weary. “How easy it is to be so confident and to sound so in charge
when the person you’re talking to is tied down, utterly helpless and at your mercy. None of that annoying freedom of action
for the other party that might let a person fight back, or just leave, or speak as they want to speak rather than as they
hope – in their desperation and terror – you want them to speak. Does all that make you feel good? Does it give you that sensation
of power people always denied you in normal life, so unfairly? Does it give you what you always missed when you were growing
up? Did the other children bully you? Did your father abuse you? Overly strict potty training? Really, I’d love to know: what’s
your excuse? What aspect of your upbringing fucked you up to the point that doing this seemed like such a promising career?
Do tell.”

I didn’t really expect to get to the end of this speech. I thought he’d appear out of the shadows and start laying into me.
That he’s done no such thing may be a very good sign or a very bad one. I have no idea. I’ve somewhat gone off-piste here.

“Oh, Temudjin, you must have made that bit up yourself,” he says, sounding amused. My heart sinks. “Are you
trying
to get beaten to a pulp?” He gives a snorting laugh. “What in
your
past made you such a masochist?”

It may be time for a change of tack. I sigh, nod. “Hmm. I see your point. Serves me right for extemporising.”

“That’s another thing we’re going to be asking you about.”

“Extemporising?”

“Yes.”

“Ah ha.”

I have not been entirely open with you, I suppose. There should be a way out of this. A way that they don’t know about, a
way that this faceless, unseen interrogator doesn’t know about. But I think it might have been taken from me. I have hardly
dared to make sure until now, and it has not been as immediately obvious as it would have been had I not been punched so hard
in the face. I put my head down again and move my tongue around in my mouth, probing.

There is a hole in my lower left jaw where a tooth has been removed. It feels gaping, and very fresh. That would be my last
hope of escaping with a single bound, gone.

“Yes,” the man says. I suppose he saw some movement about my mouth or jaw. “We took that too. Thought we didn’t know about
it, didn’t you?”

“So did you know about it?”

“We might have,” he says. “Or maybe we just found it.”

It was a partially hollowed-out tooth, the space within concealed beneath a tiny hinged ceramic crown. I kept one of my little
transitioning pills in there; an emergency dose of septus in case I ever miscounted and ran out of them, or had the little
ormolu box stolen, or it failed to make a transition with me. Or I found myself in a situation like this.

Well, so much for that.

I lift my head up. “Okay. So, what do you want to know?”

*   *   *

I had been here before, in a minor key. I hadn’t been tied to the chair with wire, and the light hadn’t been in my eyes but
there had been a chair and a man asking me questions, something had certainly gone wrong and there had been at least one death.

“Didn’t you suspect?”

“Suspect what? That she might be one of us?”

“Yes.”

“It crossed my mind. I thought—”

“When did it cross your mind?”

“When we were standing in front of a map of the world in the Doge’s Palace. She said something about it being just the one
world, and that being limiting.”

“What did you think then?”

“I thought she was one of the guests staying here, somebody from the Concern I just hadn’t happened to bump into; late arrival,
maybe.” We were back in the Palazzo Chirezzia, the black and white palace overlooking the Grand Canal.

“You didn’t think to ask her this outright?”

“I could have been wrong. I might have misheard or misunderstood. Trying to discover whether she was Aware or not by just
asking her would have been an unnecessary risk, don’t you think?”

“You were not intrigued?”

“I was very intrigued. Masked ball, mystery woman, the back alleys of Venice. I’m not sure how much more intriguing something
can get.”

“Why did you leave the ball with her?”

I laughed. “Because I thought she might want to fuck me, of course.”

“There is no need for coarse language, Mr… Cavan.”

I sat back and put my hand over my eyes. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I breathed.

I was talking to the man who had shot and killed my little pirate captain. He was called Ingrez and did not appear to have
forgiven me for getting the better of him in the bar an hour or so earlier. He wore a neat bandage over his right wrist, where
I’d punctured it with the pirate captain’s sword. He was no longer in the workman’s clothes. He’d changed into a black suit
and grey polo neck. He certainly didn’t carry himself like a workman now. He looked like somebody used to giving rather than
taking orders. He also had to be something of a specialist transitioner, a real adept, if he was able to take something as
substantial as a gun between worlds with him; few of us could do that. I could, just, but it took a lot of effort. It was
his effort, doing just that, that had been responsible for the hit of slew I’d experienced a second or two before he’d shot
the girl. He had a broad, tanned, open-looking face with a lot of laughter lines that looked possessed, haunted by something
much darker and without humour.

After I’d withdrawn the sword from his wrist and helped him to his feet there had barely been time for any explanations before
two of Professore Loscelles’s larger servants had burst through the door of the bar, their right hands rather ostentatiously
inside their jackets. They had looked like they were spoiling for a fight and seemed disappointed that they had arrived too
late, having instead to act as nurses to the two injured members of the team. Ingrez got one of them to walk us to the canal
a minute away where the launch that had brought them sat idling, its engine loud in the narrow spaces between the darkened
buildings. It sat lightless, its driver wearing what looked like a pair of binoculars strapped to his head. It brought Ingrez
and me back to the Palazzo Chirezzia, then sped away again. It kept its light on while it was on the Grand Canal.