City on Fire

TWENTY-FOUR

“Well, honestly,” Sorya says, “what was I to do?” She shrugs her slim shoulders inside her uniform jacket. “Charna supported the Provisionals against us, and so, logically enough, we contacted people inside Charna who were opposed to the government—idealistic officers, as it happens, disgusted with their leaders’ corruption—and we encouraged them to, ah, do their utmost to alter the policy of their superiors. We provided them with a certain amount of cash and logistical support—they already had guns, being soldiers—but their plans took longer than anticipated to mature. Our war was over by the time they were ready.”

She takes a breath, folds her manicured hands in her lap. “They’d risked their lives for us, and we encouraged them. Could I tell them, ‘Stop, we don’t need you anymore’? Or even worse, betray the people who trusted us, sell their names to their government?” She shrugs again. “So we limited our contacts and tried to keep informed. Any assistance we gave to them is deniable, and we now have a friendly government on our northern border. I can’t do other than consider this a positive development.”

Faltheg gives Constantine a cynical look. “The fact that their junta is proclaiming the birth of a New City regime tends to cast something of a shadow on our claims of deniability,” says the late candidate of the Liberal Coalition.

Aiah, still in her gold gown, kicks off her high-heeled pumps and flexes her toes in the soft carpet of the lounge. Despite crossing half the world in the fastest aerocar she could hire, she arrived too late for the cabinet meeting; but she was in time for an informal meeting afterward, a kind of postmortem on the Charna situation, in one of the private lounges in the Swan Wing.

A curved bar, all dark exotic wood banded with brushed aluminum, sits in the corner beneath mirror and ranked crystal; plush burnt-orange furniture is grouped around a low glass-topped table. The Swan Wing’s solid-gold ashtrays wait on tables. The air is scented by the coffee that has been set brewing behind the bar, a fragrance that does not quite eliminate the. sour sweat of men who have been awake too long.

The aged Minister of State adjusts his spectacles and looks at notes he’d made during the earlier meeting. “This has damaged us badly,” Belckon says. “Our neighbors know how to count. The Keremaths overthrown, Lanbola invaded and occupied, the government of Adabil fallen, however constitutionally, and now a violent coup in Charna. They can’t help but wonder who will be next.”

Sorya sips mineral water from her crystal goblet. “Of the four chief supporters of the Provisionals,” she says, “three have been replaced by regimes hostile to the Provisionals and favorable to us. We have firmly established that other governments interfere with us at their peril. It will not hurt us in the long run to have our neighbors wary of us.” She gives her lilting laugh. “I wonder what Nesca’s premier is thinking right now.”

Constantine gives Sorya a heavy-lidded glance. “What should Nesca’s premier be thinking?” he asks. “Are we engaged in anything deniable over there?”

Disdain curls Sorya’s lip. “Nesca’s military, such as it is, remains loyal to its government. But both Nesca and its military are negligible and in matters involving real power may be discounted.”

Belckon runs his hands through his hair, stifles a sleep-shift yawn. “I am disturbed,” he says, “that this convulsion should occur in a neighboring metropolis—apparently with our help, however deniable—and the triumvirate simply not know of it until it happens.” He glances across the table at Constantine and Adaveth. “Unless I am wrong in this assumption, and I was not informed while others were?”

Translucent membranes slide over Adaveth’s goggle eyes. “It came as a surprise to me,” he says.

“And to me,” Constantine echoes.

A delicate smile touches Sorya’s lips. “I apologize, truly,” she says. “The fact is, contact with the Charni officers had been curtailed after war’s end, a single case officer was assigned, here in Caraqui because there was surveillance on our embassy, and he had other work… If I’d had detailed information or a definite date, I would have passed it on. It was a failure, I admit, but insofar as the result was favorable to us, hardly a catastrophic one.”

There is a moment of silence. Sorya reaches for a cigaret, lights it with her diamond-and-platinum lighter, languorously breathes in smoke.

“It would seem,” Faltheg says finally, “that however this happened, we must decide how to react. Denial is possible, so we must deny.”

Sorya tosses her head, exhales smoke over her shoulder, picks a bit of tobacco off her lip. “Others may try to dislodge our friends in Charna, as they tried to dislodge us,” she points out. “We must make it clear that the new government has our support.”

“I would phrase it more diplomatically,” Belckon says. “To the effect, perhaps, that we support the right of any metropolis to change its government unhindered.”

“That should make our point well enough,” Sorya says, and gives her lilting laugh. “That,” she adds, “and all the guns in all the hands of all our soldiers.”

Later, Aiah walks barefoot down the silent, carpeted hall of the Swan Wing, her shoes dangling by their straps in one hand, the other hand in Constantine’s.

“I can tell you what will happen,” Aiah says. “Once Sorya has got us to announce support for the new government in Charna, she will stage-manage a confrontation—or perhaps she’s confident it will occur without her intervention. A countercoup, a threat of invasion from another metropolis, a wave of terror and assassination… some threat to Charna that will force us to respond. And once we respond, the confrontations will escalate, and those fine soldiers and all their fine guns, as Sorya calls them, will get used again, all for her purposes and not our own.”

Constantine looks down at her. “You know this?”

“I know Sorya’s style.” She answers his look with one of her own. “And so should you.”

His brooding eyes look inward. “Yes. Her pattern is there.”

They approach one of the bronze-and-glass compartment doors, and it slides open on silent ball bearings. They pass the door and it rolls shut: Aiah finds herself glancing behind, making sure they are secure from any snooping trail of plasm.

“The last time she had her way,” she says, “she started a war.” She holds his hand more tightly, looks up at him. “You said, once it began, that you needed her to help us win it.”

“Yes.” He nods. “And her service was invaluable, brilliant.”

“The war is won,” Aiah reminds. “She is a danger as long as she remains with the Force of the Interior. You know that.”

His chin lifts a little, and there is a glimmer in his eyes, as if reacting to a challenge. “She is dangerous, yes. But then,” pensively, “I admire Sorya most when she is dangerous. She is at her best then, superb. And…” He tilts his head, as if to consider the problem from another angle. “Removing her from her position would not necessarily make her less dangerous,” he says. “She knows much about me, about the war… a dangerous amount. She might be more dangerous on her own, given what she knows.”

“Don’t fire her, then,” Aiah says. “Pin a medal on her and promote her. A bigger department, a bigger budget, a bigger salary. Let’s see how dangerous she can be once she’s Minister of Education.”

Mock alarm enters his eyes. “You aren’t terrified by the idea of letting Sorya educate the next generation?”

“Post and Communications, then. Or Waterways.”

A mischievous smile touches Constantine’s lips. “Or let her exercise her humanitarian instincts as chairman of the Refugee Resettlement Commission.”

“As you like.”

Constantine gives a contemplative look. “I will give the matter more serious thought. All these proposals are amusing, but they would not make suitable use of Sorya’s talents, and she would see through the scheme at once. No, I must give her a promotion that would flatter her into accepting it.”

He gives an offhand wave to the invisible security man behind the elaborately framed mirror at the end of the hall, thumbs numbers on the gold twelve-key pad on the door to his suite, and presses the wing-shaped door handle.

Aiah steps into the silence of Constantine’s suite, listening to the whisper of the circulating air, and then Constantine’s voice comes low to her ear.

“That’s a very attractive gown. It suits you well.”

“Thank you. Aldemar recommended the designer. Hairdresser, too.”

His hand sweeps the hair back from Aiah’s ear, sifts through it as if assaying its worth.

“I would not have had you cut short your trip to Chemra. This crisis didn’t require your presence.”

She turns to him. “Well. I’m here now.”

He looks at her, reflective. “I think we may have an hour or two before the next crisis calls me away. But you must be tired.”

“I’m used to being tired.” She puts her arms around Constantine, presses herself to him, his lace fluttering against her cheek. “Since I have known you, I have never been anything but tired.”

His hand speculatively strokes her back. “Officially,” he says, “you are still on leave for a few days. There is nothing in your office that immediately requires your presence. Why don’t you stay away from the PED for that time? I will endeavor”—amusement touches his lips—“to spend as much time as possible with you, except when crises call me away.”

She lifts her face to his, kisses him. “I accept,” she says, and he smiles.

But if she’s right about Sorya and her intentions, she muses, the next crisis will be soon.

“I have done as you requested,” Rohder says. Though he sits at the dining table in her apartment, he speaks in a low voice, as if afraid he might be overheard. He opens the green plastic file cover on the table, glances down at the files.

“I discovered that there is a rather lively scientific literature in regard to hanged men, one that till the present had escaped my notice,” he says. “There is a great deal of arcana and speculation, very little of it reliable, but I have combed through it for articles written by people who might actually be qualified to discuss such matters, and…”

He looks down at his notes, shakes his head. “There was a hanged man operating in Injido about a century and a half ago, killing people at random, it seems, and I read the report from the head of the team that hunted it down and killed it—or thought they’d killed it; at any rate it did not reappear.” His faded blue eyes drift up from the page. “A number of bystanders were killed in the course of suppressing the creature. Several of the team were hospitalized after telepresent contact with the thing. Shock, mental disorders of a type associated with trauma. One remained institutionalized for the rest of her life.

“Another case,” looking down at the notes again, “concerned a kind of extortion ring in Qanibar about two centuries ago. A gang of criminals were working in league with a hanged man, somehow aiding the creature to possess the bodies of living people, wealthy victims. It would turn over the victims’ wealth to its human allies in exchange for a few days in a human body, after which the contact with the hanged man somehow caused the body to fail. But so many people died in this way that the authorities became suspicious, and managed to trace the money to the criminals’ bank accounts. One of the extortionists cracked under interrogation, and the police were able to ambush the hanged man when it turned up for a meeting.” “How did they… dispose of it?”

Rohder turns away, fumbles awkwardly for a cigaret, pats his pocket for a lighter. “Each team developed its own method,” Rohder said. “I do not find either of them entirely satisfactory from an operational point of view—both are based on theories that are in essence unproven, and the only way to prove either was to risk life and sanity.”

“Tell me.”

Rohder sighs, looks unhappy. “Both teams operated on the assumption that hanged men are a kind of living being that exists in the plasm well, a kind of modulation in plasm itself. They assumed that these creatures will die if deprived of plasm, or forced to live outside of the plasm well without a human host.

“In Injido the team managed to locate the hanged man within an office building—it had killed someone there—and then shut off the plasm supply to that building. They then attacked the creature with plasm drawn from outside—they tried to nullify the creature, overwhelm it with masses of destructive plasm. The mages were told to configure plasm using the focus of the Great Bull, which is supposed to aid offensive action. They also intended to compel it to use up all available plasm in the building in repelling their attacks, in effect to use up its life force in its own defense. Wear it out.”

He shrugs. “It was messy. The building was not empty—full of workers—and the hanged man rampaged through it. It killed over a dozen people. You don’t want to see the chromographs of that, and I didn’t bring them. The Great Bull aside, none of the mages really knew how to configure plasm so as to kill a hanged man, and it kept slipping away while they improvised their attacks. Reading the reports, I have the impression that there was a great deal of chaos within the mage team, perhaps some panic. Finally the target creature tried to merge with the plasm that was attacking it… tried to become the plasm, to seize control of it from the minds of the mages who were using it. The mages fought off the thing’s attacks, but several were so traumatized by mind-to-mind contact that they required hospital care, two for extended stays, and one, as I said, for good. Eventually they killed it, or so the team believed. In any case, if it got away, it did not return to Injido.”

A dozen people killed, several mages hospitalized. Hardly a satisfactory solution.

“And the Qanibar group?” Aiah asks.

“They had an advantage—the extortionist who cooperated with the authorities. He informed them of the body the creature was occupying, and agreed to lure the creature to a place where it was vulnerable. All plasm in the area was used before the creature turned up, and then the host body was attacked and destroyed. The creature was contained and then killed as it tried to escape to the nearest plasm source.”

“Were there any casualties?” Aiah asks.

“No. But the Qanibar police had advantages given them by good intelligence—knowing where the hanged man was going to be—and also by the fact that Qanibar was at the time a totalitarian state. They opened the action by killing the hanged man’s host, something the authorities certainly cannot do in any society that values the rights of humans beings and of victims.” He looks troubled. “Nor am I certain that the creature was, properly speaking, a hanged man or ice man. Perhaps it was a Slaver Mage who had convinced the extortionists he was a hanged man, or maybe it was a…, vampire…” His face twists uncomfortably at having to deal with yet another creature out of superstition. “Perhaps something that has not been categorized,” he continues, “or a delusion. I will continue searching for information, if you like.”

“I wish you would.”

“I also found this… curiosity.” He takes out a sheaf of plastic flimsies, pushes it across the table to Aiah. “It is mostly speculation, but I thought you might want to read it, for reasons of historical and personal interest.”

The plastic flimsies smell of developing fluid. “Toward a Psychology of the Ice Man,” Aiah reads, by Constantine of Cheloki.

Aiah’s mouth goes dry. “How old is this?” she asks.

“It was published thirty-seven years ago, in a journal of philosophy.” An analytical smile touches Rohder’s lips. “There is very little science in it.”

Constantine must have met Taikoen by then, Aiah thinks.

She tries for a moment to read the blue eyes, the ruddy skin, the network of fine lines in the old mage’s face, and wonders what it is he knows. She gives up, looks down at the article, then drops her hand over it.

“I’ll look at it later. Can I see the other reports?”

Rohder closes the folder and pushes it across the polished table surface. The soft plastic cover and the flimsies inside flutter in the brief breeze. Aiah picks up the article by Constantine and slips it into the folder. She feels the throb of her heart, its acceleration to a higher state of alertness, a touch of the Adrenaline Monster upon her nerves… It is as if she is responding to the notion that the file itself is a threat, and she wonders if she will ever have the courage to make use of this information, to somehow put an end to Taikoen, or even to read the article, of historic and personal interest, that Rohder has given her.

She looks up at Rohder, forces a polite smile onto her lips. “Would you like some coffee?” she asks.

Talk turns to other matters, particularly to Rohder’s teams, who are busy increasing Caraqui’s plasm supply, and then the old man takes his leave. Aiah turns up the ventila-■ tion to clear the cloud of cigaret smoke and looks at the closed folder waiting for her on the table.

Her nerves hum louder than the ventilation fans.

She opens the green folder, slips out Constantine’s article, and composes herself to read it: sitting straight in the straight chair, feet flat on the floor, hands framing the pages on the table. As if she were a schoolgirl at her desk.

Constantine’s style, she notices, is informed but not quite at ease. She can tell he’s been to college: he uses words like noetic and mensuration. The later Constantine, with less need to impress, would adopt a less specialized vocabulary, and a more accessible style.

He discusses at some length the legendary attributes of the ice man and discusses theories of how such creatures may be created. The tone is speculative—he endeavors to make it seem that he knows less about this matter than, in fact, he does. And then he addresses the primary contradiction of the ice man legends.

Why would the ice man, he asks, who exists in the core of creation, in the plasm itself, the great transformational substance, the heart of contingent reality that underlies our whole postmetropolitan world, wish to inhabit the body of a human being?

Constantine finds the answer in the hanged man’s lost body itself.

The attractions of plasm are many, but the most intense are those based on sensation. It is these appeals to the sensual, to enhanced and extended sight and hearing, to the stimulus of nerves and groin, that most often impel those who habituate themselves to plasm as an addict to morphia; and this sensual attraction, in subtler form, is a factor in the attraction of plasm to many of its other users, who experience sense gratification alongside plasm’s other enjoyments…

For the ice man there are no longer nerves to stimulate, no sensory organs to enhance, no sexual impulse to satisfy. The vital element of sensory feedback is missing: no longer is the sensual body able to bring pleasure to its now detached, and oddly diminished, mind.

But, Aiah thinks, a protest half-formed in her mind; but Constantine answers her objection before she can properly form it.

It is true that when mages project themselves through telepresence they use plasm to build a sensorium, an array of ectomorphic sense-artifacts used to bring sense-stimulation to the receptive centers of the mind. But the sensorium, however enhanced it may be, is built in imitation of the body’s own natural sense organs, and furthermore upon a series of sense-memories contained within the mind. Without a material body and its sense-organs to apprehend the world, and without a sensual memory, reinforced at every moment by a thousand natural stimuli, how is a detached, immaterial mentality to apprehend the world?

… The ice man must apprehend the world only through a created sensorium. For a human mage, a sensorium will be based on the mage’s own sense-organs and on sense-experience and memory. For an ice man, a sensorium will be based on organs that no longer exist and memories that grow ever more distant. Without an anchor planted in the body’s own sensual experience and memory, the ice man’s perceptions will become ever more distorted.

Aiah knits her brows and contemplates Constantine’s argument. It must be true, she thinks; Constantine knew Taikoen when he wrote this, and must have based all this on observation.

The hanged man lives in a world of erratic, distorted sense impressions. And Taikoen, the real man, died centuries ago. How, Aiah wonders, does he see the world now?

Presumably it takes the ice man a period of time to realize that the old pleasures are no longer there. The ice man at first may be gratified at being rid of the irritations and demands of the body. He can create an artificial sensorium and stimulate it as he wishes. The distortion of perception may not be at first apparent.

But when the realization comes, it must be devastating. The body, the center of perception, no longer exists. Perceptions are growing distorted, even deranged. Even self-stimulation may prove futile, as the ice man, lost in the transphysical plasm well, begins to forget even the nature of pleasure. The ice man may well grow desperate.

Constantine goes on to discuss the phenomenon of possession in some detail, explaining it, after numerous scholarly digressions, as a desperate attempt by the ice man to regain the sense perceptions that had once made him human.

Aiah turns the page, reads Constantine’s conclusion. A metallic taste tingles along her tongue.

What are we, then, to say of the psyche of the ice man, a murderous creature of deranged perception, forever isolated from the humanity that nurtured him, so desperate for a return to a world of sensible appearances and pleasures that it will accept temporary humanity at the cost of a human life?

We now know which taxonomy is appropriate for this phenomenon. This creature that is at once powerful and diminished, ubiquitous and isolated, desperate and raging, deadly but impotent, possessed of being but not truly alive. Hanged man is not the appropriate name, nor ice man. The only appropriate name for this creature is our third choice—the damned.

The conditions in which the ice man exists are, in almost literal terms, hellish. Uncertain as to its own perceptions, its spirit isolated, all pleasures artificial and fading, its only companions either victims or exploiters, the situation of the ice man is a compound of desperation and exile. Although its victims deserve our sorrow, the creature itself—damned—deserves more than a share of our compassion. Given the horrifying conditions under which the ice man must exist, an end to its existence must be looked on not as a death, not even as justice, but as a release, an act of mercy.

Aiah looks down at the last plastic flimsy, at the bottom crowded with endnotes in tiny print, at the slight smear on one corner caused by an error in copying. Her nerves sing with the document’s strangeness.

Why, she wonders, did Constantine write this thing? Even though it is in a speculative style, it still betrays too much knowledge. Anyone who had ever had dealings with an actual ice man would look at this and know without doubt that Constantine was a secret brother…

Perhaps when Constantine wrote this he simply didn’t care—his first encounter with Taikoen had not come at an edifying point of his life—but Aiah senses there’s something else at work here. She looks again over the last paragraph.

… the creature itself deserves more than a share of our compassion.

She wonders if Constantine is trying to make her feel sympathy for the ice man—pity my friend, he only kills because he’s a lonely perceptual cripple! But it doesn’t work, Aiah has actually met the thing. And then she wonders if Constantine wants the reader to feel sorry for Constantine himself, for the person who, out of compassion and at the risk of his life and soul, associates with the damned, with something that others would view as a demon…

That, Aiah considers, seems more plausible. It isn’t as if Constantine has not been known to turn his life into drama.

She scans the words again… an end to its existence must be looked on not as a death, not even as justice, but as a release, an act of mercy.

A crystal comprehension forms in Aiah’s mind, and suddenly she knows.

Constantine was trying to justify an attempt to end Taikoen’s existence. To kill it.

But he didn’t. He never tried. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, or he found a reason to keep Taikoen alive.

The columns of print swim before Aiah’s eyes. She takes a deep breath, tips her head back, and lets what she knows of Constantine’s biography enter her mind. Constantine would have encountered Taikoen in his early twenties, before he met Aldemar and went into the School of Radritha. Constantine had been a member of a kind of cult, and then his cousin and all the other cult members were killed, and Constantine wrote his article and went to university for an advanced degree, and from there, and from Aldemar, to the monkish order of the School of Radritha, where he was taught an extreme self-discipline, a philosophy based on the denial of the world and of passion, a retreat from action and power.

He was fleeing, Aiah realizes. Running from Taikoen, from what with this essay he had promised to do… But the university had not been far enough, nor had Aldemar’s arms; he needed something more radical, like Radritha, a school which maintained that nothing mattered outside the perfectly balanced, passionless mind. If nothing outside the mind mattered, it didn’t signify whether Taikoen existed or not.

Aiah glances out the window, sees splashes of brightness in the sky where disembodied clothing dances in ecstasy over Colorsafe Soap. A cold hand brushes her spine. The thought of Constantine afraid is in itself frightening: he has never seemed afraid of anything.

Of course, she thinks immediately, he was young. Later he left the school and returned to Cheloki to begin his New City campaign, and there were no hesitations there.

But when he reestablished contact with Taikoen, it was an alliance that Constantine offered, a bargain. Two lives per month, two bodies, and then, when he needed Taikoen again, more lives, more bodies.

Color bleeds across the sky. Aiah closes her eyes and wonders if she will have the courage to face the thing that Constantine did not.

Aiah strolls into the antechamber to the secure room, and smiles at the clerk, a huge stoneface who could probably keep the files safe simply through her intimidating presence.

“Hello,” the clerk says. “I thought you were on vacation.”

“Officially. But there was something I need to look at. I need to check the logs and see which files I had out last week.”

The clerk obligingly turns the logbook around to face Aiah, who pages back through the book until she finds Constantine’s signature. Only four days ago. Her nerves hum as she jots the file numbers down—no names are used in the logs, nothing that might reveal their contents to an outsider—and then she turns the book around again and thanks the clerk. “Let me just look one of those up,” she says, and heads for the secure room’s barred gate.

Refiq, Tollan, Brandrag. The names attached to the files that Constantine had read. Cousins—not Handmen, but bad enough for all that. One of these, Aiah assumes, will be Taikoen’s next victim.

She checks the files out just long enough to copy the pages and the cousins’ chromographs, and then returns them to the strong room.

And wonders about the next step.

“Did you have a good time?” Aiah asks. Khorsa nods. “Very fine, yes. Lost a few too many dinars in the casinos, though.” “And the airship?”

Khorsa smiles. “The Dharku was lovely. The smoothest, most comfortable trip imaginable. And the views! We spent half our time in the observation lounge.”

“I’m glad. Would you like some coffee before you sit down?”

Khorsa, just back from her honeymoon, helps herself to some. Alfeg is already present, his notebook ready.

“By the way,” he says, “you have a request from the Sector Gazette for an interview.”

Sector was a euphemism for Barkazi, as the latter did not, officially, exist. The evasion permitted the magazine’s distribution in Jabzi, where the word Barkazi did not officially exist either.

“When?” Aiah asks. She is sick of interviews.

“Deadline’s in three days.” Alfeg offers a modest smile. “They must have noticed how much that profile in Corona boosted circulation.”

“I’ll think about it. Next time they should give more warning.”

Khorsa stirs sugar in her coffee and drops into a chair. Aiah pushes files toward them. Refiq, Tollan, Brandrag.

“I need the two of you to set up a rotating surveillance on these three,” she says. “This surveillance involves the highest possible security. Only the three of us know about this assignment. I want the surveillance to be run with extreme caution, from a distance. Configure your sensorium so that you can perceive plasm. Assume that the subjects are wired to plasm at all times, and are aware they might be surveilled. No one else must be permitted to know what the two of you are up to.”

Alfeg picks up a file, looks through it, then glances up at Aiah.

“This is a copy of the original file,” he says. Aiah nods. “Yes.”

“These files aren’t supposed to be copied.”

Aiah looks coldly into Alfeg’s eyes. “Yes,” she says.

Alfeg glances nervously down at the file. “Ah,” he says.

Khorsa pages through another file. “I don’t see anything unusual about this Mr. Brandrag,” she says. “A typical cousin, so far as I can see. Why does the surveillance have to be so secret?”

Aiah looks at them both. “Because,” she says, “one of these three men is scheduled to come down with the Party Sickness.”

Aiah arrives breathless in Constantine’s anteroom, briefcase full of the latest plasm figures, and finds others waiting outside the office door: the other triumvirs clustered with Belckon, Sorya smoking a cigaret in the corner, Geymard and Arviro, both in undress uniform, and Personal Secretary Drusus pretending to look busy behind his desk…

Martinus, the bodyguard, stands quietly in front of Constantine’s door, his callused hands folded quietly. His attitude is polite, but clearly nothing is getting past him right now.

Aiah pauses at the door, catches her breath. The message had said, Come at once.

Come yesterday is what its tone had implied.

And now Constantine is keeping even the other triumvirs waiting outside his door. Aiah can tell from their expressions that they aren’t happy about it.

Aiah walks up to the guard, lifts her brows in a silent query, receives in return a minute shake of Martinus’s armored head. She turns back toward the room and drifts toward Drusus’s desk.

“Mr. Drusus? Is the president—?”

“The triumvir is on the phone,” softly. “It’s urgent.”

Aiah glances down at Drusus’s communications array and sees that no lights shine to mark that any of the phone lines are being used. She bends down and whispers into his ear.

“If the triumvir were on the phone,” she says, “there would be something lit, ne?”

A look of horror crosses Drusus’s face. He picks up a headset from the cradle and presses buttons. Lights begin to flash. Aiah straightens, moves away from the desk, and wonders if anyone else has observed this discrepancy.

Plasm buzzes in her nerves. Before the panic started, she’d given herself a dose to clear her head and burn off the fatigue toxins. Now she finds plasm-energy twitching at her, making her want to do anything rather than sit in a waiting room.

“I fear this will end any funds for compensated demobilization,” Belckon says in a low voice to the two triumvirs. “And we may lose other Polar League funds as well, for rebuilding and refugee work.”

“These military upstarts are jeopardizing everything,” Faltheg murmurs. “They don’t have the slightest idea how to behave.”

“Or to run a country,” says Adaveth. “If our policy is shackled to them, they’ll bring us down.”

“But they’re New City. Constantine can’t disavow them, and…”

Faltheg falls silent, then gives a sharp look over his shoulder at Aiah. Aiah feels herself flush—she had not meant to overhear—she gives him an apologetic smile and backs away, toward Martinus and the door.

Without warning ice water floods Aiah’s spine, and she manages to bottle up her cry of terror at the last instant. Blood hammers at her ears.

Now she knows why Constantine is keeping his own administration locked out.

Taikoen is inside. Making demands, refusing to be sent away, forcing Constantine to deal with him now. Aiah’s plasm-charged nerves are just sensitive enough to detect his presence.

Aiah whirls, gives an alarmed look to Martinus. The man’s face is expressionless, but Aiah sees a knowing look in his deep-set eyes.

And then it occurs to Aiah that if she can detect Taikoen, Taikoen might be able to detect her. The thought sends a pulse of terror through her heart. She wills herself not to flee and, hoping she is not too conspicuous in her haste, backs away from the door.

Aiah gives a start as Sorya’s voice comes low in her ear. “I have received some intriguing news. A religious leader in Charna—a wandering priestess I believe, has just proclaimed that I am an emanation of a god.” A lazy, amused tone enters her voice. “I hope I may have your congratulations, one celestial sister to another.”

Aiah clenches her teeth, tries to control her flailing nerves. The presence of Taikoen doesn’t seem so strong here, and perhaps wouldn’t be detectable at all if Aiah didn’t already know he was just beyond the door.

“Congratulations,” she tells Sorya. “I remember when you predicted the appearance of this, ah, priestess.”

Sorya’s laugh tinkles out. “Superhuman prescience, of course.” A touch of ice enters her tone. “I wish my foreknowledge extended to the point of predicting a fat chromoplay contract like yours.”

Aiah turns to face her. “You don’t need the money.”

“No, not really, though money of course is always useful.” Sorya tilts her head, considers. “But I could use the publicity. That’s the problem with being in the secret service—no one ever knows how splendidly you do your job.” She shows her delicate, pearly teeth in a smile. “Constantine restarted his career with Lords of the New City. You may do well with your Golden Lady chromo—you may even ascend in Barkazi, who can tell?”

“Who can tell?” Aiah echoes.

Sorya touches her tongue to her teeth in languid amusement, and then gives a meaningful look in the direction of Constantine’s door. “And with both of us being goddesses—well, practically goddesses—I wonder what that makes our mutual lover.”

“He was a god before we were, according to some.”

“But did he make use of those people?” Scorn narrows her green eyes. “They were a resource—admittedly a mind-impoverished one—and he threw them away. Something could have been made of them, with proper direction. In contrast,” nodding as if awarding Aiah a point, “you’ve done very well with your moldy old hermit.”

“I work with the material I’m given,” Aiah says, deadpan.

Sorya seems immune to Aiah’s irony. “My prophet has the advantage of mobility—she can travel about, make converts, acquire donations. I expect the faith to be in the black within two or three years.”

“Well done.” One goddess to another.

Sorya glances across the room at Adaveth, Belckon, and Faltheg, and scorn glitters in her green eyes. “I do not understand why Constantine allows himself to be fettered to those… people.” Some residual caution has clearly replaced one description with another. “I would sweep away the lot,” she says, “and both I and the metropolis would be the better. But rather than taking control, Constantine prefers to let events narrow his choices and impel him in the direction he would have taken all along. He rules with one eye toward the history books, and concerns himself with what they will say when he is dead. He wants them to credit him with good intentions.” She shrugs.

“Ah well, that way his hand is not seen in events, though it makes for more confusion than one would desire…” She smiles, pinches out her cigaret with finger and thumb. “He will go where he wishes, but he lets others choose the time. He sacrifices initiative for deniability. I prefer to shape things directly, and will take the responsibility for success and failure both.”

She turns to find an ashtray for her cigaret, and Aiah wonders how much to trust Sorya’s judgment in this: that Constantine has somehow desired the constant crises since his arrival in Caraqui, and has preferred to let others create them… and, Aiah now adds, has put others in a position to solve these crises for him. Taikoen has solved certain problems, it occurs to her, and now—a shiver goes up her spine—perhaps she is to solve the problem of Taikoen.

And take the blame if anything goes wrong.

Sorya drops her cigaret into the ashtray and turns back to Aiah, a delicate smile on her lips. Aiah’s mind is still cautiously palpating this new vision of Constantine. She doesn’t wish to accept Sorya’s views of Constantine, but on the other hand she knows it is a logical enough view and that it fits with the facts, if also with Sorya’s prejudices…

But the proof will be before her today. If Constantine supports Sorya’s provocations in Charna, it will demonstrate he has desired such a thing all along.

Suddenly the door opens and Constantine appears, all smiles and apologies. “I am truly sorry,” he says. “There was a matter of some urgency having to do with…” He waves a hand. “But what does it matter? We must deal with Charna.”

As the others file into Constantine’s office, Aiah wonders if only she notices the t-grip sitting plainly on a side table, its cable still plugged into the socket—the t-grip that Constantine had undoubtedly used to project himself to Taikoen’s next victim and to put the hanged man in control.

But perhaps Aiah is the only one who notices, because the others are concerned solely with Charna. Sitting around Constantine’s spacious ebony desk, the other triumvirs insist that they have no reason to support Charna’s new government, let alone back a demented invasion threat. Belckon also speaks out strongly on the intermetropolitan repercussions of being associated with Charna’s junta and its reckless behavior.

Despite the tension and disagreement, Constantine seems perfectly at ease, almost lounging in his chair, a contrast to the others, who have to edge their chairs up to his desk to make their points. Despite the air of informality, Constantine is clearly controlling the meeting, indicating with a glance or a word who should speak next. Aiah can see Sorya’s face harden as one person after another speaks against her policy.

“I beg to disagree,” Sorya says when Constantine finally allows her to speak. “These people, however inept, are among our few friends in the region. They must be supported—yes, and guided. A communique must be issued promising action on our part if Charna is attacked. As for this foolish invasion threat—well, the invasion will not happen. President Constantine can see to that with a single phone call.”

Adaveth’s nictitating membranes slide partway over his eyes. “I beg to disagree with Madam Sorya’s premise. Charna is not our friend. Perhaps this Council of Colonels is the ideological ally of certain members of our government, but not all of us, and not our metropolis.” He leans forward, jabs the desk with a delicate hand. “I will utterly oppose any statement of support for Charna.”

“And I,” says Faltheg. “These people are out of control.”

Sorya’s lips press into a thin, white line. “What matters,” she says, “is power, and who has it, and who is willing to use it. If we do not support our friends, it will not matter how large our army may be, our word and our counsels will be ignored by everyone, and we will be seen as ripe for overthrow. For I remind everyone here,” tossing her head, “that we took power through force, and maintained ourselves through force, and if we do not show our willingness to use force to support our friends, compel neutrals, and punish our enemies, we will be seen as vulnerable by every pathetic little interventionist in the region; that this misapprehension is far more dangerous for us than any impression that we are dangerous, as our recent history has proved.”

In the quiet chill that follows, Adaveth and Faltheg gaze at Sorya with the same cold expression on their dissimilar faces. Belckon polishes his spectacles. Constantine breaks the silence.

“I will make the phone call that Madam Sorya proposes,” he says. “The best support we can give for anyone in our region is to help them extricate themselves from their difficulties. If Charna backs down, the crisis is over. And we will avoid making any official statements until the phone call is made.”

“Never back down,” Sorya murmurs, scorn on her face, but she turns away, backing down herself.

There is another long silence. Aiah looks at Geymard and Arviro, who are holding sheafs of documents about readiness levels and ammunition and fuel availability, and then down at the briefcase in her lap, with its latest statistics on the availability of plasm in case of military conflict… and feels a wave of thankfulness that the statistics will probably not be required.

Constantine steeples his fingers, gazes frowningly over them at the members of his government. “I have also considered ways in which we may suppress the reckless behavior of our Charni friends—or my Charni friends, if you will it so. They are clearly unfamiliar with the proper mechanisms and conventions of government, and I would help them if I can—make them our friends, then, and responsible friends, too. So perhaps a delegation from our government to their government, a diplomatic and economic mission—clearly not military—to help Charna’s new government control their metropolis.”

Adaveth suspiciously unveils a single eye. “A New City mission?” he asks.

“I would rather it represented all our metropolis,” Constantine says. He smiles pleasantly over his fingertips, then looks at Sorya. “I thought Madam Sorya would serve as its head, remaining of course under Minister Belckon’s direction.” Alarm flashes into the others’ eyes, and Constantine speaks quickly. “This will unfortunately require her resignation from the Force of the Interior, where she has done such excellent work… but I know she desires a more public role, and head of this special mission would, of course, be a promotion.”

Aiah can see the others working out the implications of this offer—and so is Sorya herself, who toys with the silver cuff buttons of her uniform jacket as she weighs this offer. On the one hand, she would be removed from her dangerous position as head of the secret service; on the other, she would serve as the principal advisor to a group of military officers already proven dangerously precipitate and headstrong… Sorya looks up.

“May I consider this offer before accepting, Triumvir?”

“Yes. Of course.” He looks at the others. “Perhaps I should make that phone call now, yes? Would you all like to listen?”

Constantine is affability itself on the phone, but when coming to the point he is firm. “My government wishes you to know that we cannot support any threats of military action on your part. If you do this, you do it alone, and we will be unable to assist you in any fashion. Our country is too weary and too damaged by war to risk our hard-won peace in another conflict.”

Which seems to bring the Charni to their senses swiftly enough. The rest of the conversation considers face-saving methods by which the Charni can back down from their threat.

Constantine removes his headset. “And that is that,” he says. “May I offer you all some refreshment?”

“You’re giving Sorya her own metropolis?” Aiah asks later, after the others have gone.

Constantine looks at her levelly. “I am giving her a mission to Charna. She will be surrounded by a large delegation, few of whom will be her choice—most will be mine, and judging by the interest of Adaveth and Faltheg in the matter, they will want their own people there as well.” Amusement glitters in Constantine’s eyes. “Sorya will be in another metropolis, surrounded by spies hostile to her interests, and separated from her power base in the secret service, which itself will now receive a new head, my choice.” He laughs. “If Sorya makes herself the principal power in Charna, she will deserve her reward.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Aiah says.

He gives Aiah a wry look. “I would give her a challenge. This last attempt—this maladroit attempt to start a war—it was clumsy. Transparent.” He sniffs. “Beneath her, really.”

Aiah doesn’t see how to respond to this save to return to her theme.

“Sorya is dangerous.”

“Danger is what I value in her.” His eyes soften, and he raises a hand to touch Aiah’s cheek. “And loyalty, dear Aiah, is what I most treasure in you.”

Aiah looks up at him and wonders whether he would say that if he could read behind her eyes, if he knew what she was planning.

And then she considers that if Sorya is right about Constantine’s approach to governing, perhaps it would be loyalty to deal with Taikoen. Perhaps it is what Constantine has wanted from her all along, part of his long-range plan, the way he had planned Parq’s fall months before it happened.

“Constantine,” she says, “you must finish Taikoen.” The warmth in Constantine’s eyes dies away. He takes his hand from her cheek.

“That is not possible,” he says flatly, and turns away.

“It is possible,” Aiah says, “and it must be done. Taikoen kept us all kicking our heels in the anteroom just now—and in a crisis—while you found him a new body. He’s out of control.”

Constantine frowns out the window, feigning fascination with a plasm display for next shift’s episode of Durq’s Room. “Not now,” he says.

“He’s been seen in the Palace. With you.”

Constantine stiffens in surprise, gives Aiah a look over his shoulder. She shivers under his compelling eagle stare.

“What has been seen?” he demands.

“You have been seen, in this building, in… conference … with Taikoen. Constantine trafficking with a demon for a human soul. That’s what was seen. And it’s not far wrong.”

Calculation stirs in Constantine’s eyes. “Who saw this?”

Aiah’s mouth goes dry. She will not give up Dr. Romus; she does not want to be responsible for what might happen to the twisted mage if his name were mentioned.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, defying Constantine’s look, which declares, clear as the Shield, that it matters very much. “I managed to contain it for now. But the pieces are already there, for anyone intelligent enough to put them together. Three times, Taikoen was in the bodies of Handmen who were arrested, and whom he killed when he escaped…”

Distaste curls Constantine’s lip. “I know. He demanded new bodies to replace the ones arrested.”

“And there are rumors among the Handmen, rumors that you visit the prisons and interview people who are later released and die of the Party Sickness. All that is necessary for anyone to discover the truth is to put that rumor together with a few other facts, and…”

He turns to face the window again, waves a hand. “Not now,” he says. “There is a crisis, and Taikoen may be needed.”

“Do you visit the prisons, Constantine?”

Constantine gazes at the window with narrowed, defiant eyes. “I don’t anymore. I did, at one point… It seemed best to distract Taikoen with a succession of bodies, keep him occupied. Pay ahead, as it were, on his contract.”

“If this brings you down,” Aiah says, her voice turning hard, “you will have lost everything you have worked for, and you will still be in bondage to Taikoen.”

He looks at her over his shoulder again, plasm displays glittering in his eyes. “Contain it. There is no proof. It is deniable. I need Taikoen now, as I need you.”

“It is not as containable as you think. Even a rumor can wreck you.”

“Enough!” Fury storms in his voice. “I will not hear any more of this!”

Constantine roars from the room, the door crashing shut behind him. Aiah stares after him. Frustration claws at her nerves. And then she looks about in surprise.

/ have driven him out of his own office, she thinks. She drifts toward the side table with the t-grip sitting atop it, brushes the grip with her fingertips. No charge tingles through her nerves; Constantine has switched the plasm off. Her reflection gazes back at her from the polished ebony table.

Taikoen has also driven Constantine away, she thinks, not just from a room, but from the life that he had led. Constantine had tried to work himself up to killing Taikoen, and he’d failed and run, and is still running. Perhaps it is the one great failure of his life, Aiah muses. A failure that he still cannot face.

Aiah takes in a breath, lets it out. Someone, she thinks, is going to have to face Taikoen on Constantine’s behalf.

Startled, she gazes out the window at her own face. It is her image carved in plasm, ten stories tall, looming over the city… and then it fades, replaced by the image of a burning building, of windows shattering as rockets explode nearby… and then Aiah’s image is back, gazing with intensity into the eyeless sockets of a skull wreathed with strawberry leaves.

It is one of the Dreaming Sisters’ plasm displays… but this one is huge, covering half the sky. The sober, evolving images are all of carnage and destruction: buildings in flames, staring corpses, armored vehicles poised over stacks of burning bodies. It’s like all the horrors of the late war condensed into a few seconds, with Aiah somehow woven into it, as if she were somehow key to all the terror… and it’s sad, not simply in the way that images of war are sad, but in the way a composition can be sad, or a chromoplay; it inspires sorrow not as a polemic about war, but as a work of art. Tears sting Aiah’s eyes, and she feels an ache deep in her throat.

The rolling images fade, leaving behind only a lingering representation of Aiah’s face, gazing out over the city with a stricken look that Aiah knows is mirrored on her own, real face, a portrait of her staring at her portrait, half in fear and half in wonder.

“I got your message,” Aiah tells the woman called Whore.

Whore raises eyelids heavy with dreaming, and with a languid hand she takes the copper plasm contact from her lips. “We sent you no message,” she says, “but we are pleased to see you here. If you will follow me, I will take you to Order of Eternity.”

Aiah tells her guards to wait in the lobby while she follows Whore into the sisters’ stone maze. As she passes through the first doorway she finds a pair of carved images gazing at her in the glow of the hanging lamps, dim light and trompe l’oeil artistry giving the faces a disturbing air of life. She knows the faces, Sorya and herself, The Shadow and The Apprentice, confronting each other across the corridor, one with a knife and the other looking up a recipe.

A metaphor, she admits, sufficient to describe their relationship.

She approaches an alcove where a dreaming sister lies, and Aiah’s nerves sing in surprise as the woman’s eyes open and turn to face the visitor. It is as startling an effect as if one of the imagoes’ eyes had opened. As Aiah continues through the corridor, the sister puts her plasm contact down, rises from her couch, and with a soft slap of bare feet on cool stones begins to follow Aiah along the winding path.

Another imago appears, The Architect, with Constantine’s stern face and powerful body superimposed on the image of the man holding the protractor and a pair of dividers, and with a shiver Aiah remembers that The Architect’s meaning is failure—noble aspirations gone wrong, crumbled into dust.

In the next alcove two sisters lie dreaming. As Aiah passes their eyes open, one set dark and one light, they turn to Aiah with an identical incurious gaze, and after she walks past they rise and follow.

Here is The Shadow again, Sorya’s predator eyes, her ambiguous smile. Another dreaming sister opens her eyes, watches Aiah go by, and then follows. Here is an imago called The Mage, and it has Rohder’s face, lined and youthful at once, lacking only his ruddy complexion. Aiah appears as The Apprentice again, and Constantine as The Architect. Two more dreaming sisters, one of them the genetically altered Avian Aiah had seen earlier, rise from their couch and follow. Aiah, following Whore, feels her neck prickle under the gaze of intent raptor eyes.

More dreaming sisters rise from their couches and follow Aiah, feet slapping on stone, faces impassive as sleepwalkers’.

Death. Aiah’s mind whirls, and she stops dead before the imago. It is Taikoen, a bodiless form, vaguely humanoid, somehow inscribed onto stone, its indistinct outlines fading into the dimly lit scene. As Aiah looks at the image, its contours actually seem to blur and shift, as if the plasm-creature was moving uneasily within its portrait. Terror throbs in Aiah’s throat. She looks wildly after Whore and sees her guide walking calmly away. Aiah almost runs after her.

Rohder, Sorya, Constantine, Aiah, and, stalking them all, Taikoen, Death. The forms repeat themselves again and again. More sisters rise from their alcoves to join the silent, dreamy throng that follow Aiah through the maze. Aiah doesn’t see a single Mage that isn’t Rohder, no Apprentice that isn’t Aiah. And then finally she sees a new face, the dreaming sister Order of Eternity, who waits for her calmly, seated on the mattress in one of the alcoves, legs dangling over the side, crossed at her delicate ankles.

“There is joy in the plasm now,” Order of Eternity says, the words coming in her girlish voice. “We have felt it. There is a change beginning, a change that moves through the heart of reality.”

“I thought you told me that nothing changes,” Aiah says.

“I said that no change is permanent. The change we feel may not last. But it is unlike anything any of us have experienced.” Her pale face lights with joy. “It is as if the plasm were singing to us. Singing of its pleasure.”

“I’ve been using plasm every day,” Aiah says. “I haven’t felt anything different.”

“Perhaps you are not listening.”

“I may not have listened, but I’ve seen,” Aiah says. “You put my face all over the sky, in one of the biggest plasm displays I’ve ever witnessed. Me and war and death. What was that about?”

The dreaming sister hesitates. She looks away, face sober beneath her pale cap of hair. “We have seen you in our meditations. The plasm displays are nothing we do, nothing we create consciously… They are reflections of our meditations, of what we feel in the plasm. And though we feel the plasm’s pleasure, we also sense, through our contemplation of the imagoes, that their present interaction is likely to lead to violence.”

“The plasm is pleased by the idea of war?”

The dreaming sister seems shocked. “No. Of course not. The plasm’s joy is in the present, and the war, if our visions are true, will be in the future. The war is not a dream, it is a nightmare, and it haunts us.”

“My face was all over the sky, and it’s all over this building. And other faces are repeating themselves, Sorya and Constantine and…”

“Yes.” Order of Eternity rises from her couch and takes a few thoughtful steps. “We are seeing the faces on the imagoes repeating one another. Every Apprentice is you, every Architect is the same man, the one with the braided hair. You are all important to the plasm, somehow. It has to do with the change that we sense, the plasm that sings to us, in us. This has not happened before, not in the memory of anyone here, and we suspect not in the history of our order.” “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 sisters’ 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.