In answer, the courier picked up his aerolute, strummed a chord, and began to softly sing:

  ‘A fighting Lord who lacked a limb

  Asked suff’ring proles to follow him

  And glad they were, against the Blight

  To focus their enraged might

  When hope of victory seemed dim ...’

  Then he plucked a final chord, and allowed the harmony to die away.

  ‘You’re a man with hidden depths, Markilon,’ said Tom after a moment.

  ‘Many people are, my Lord.’

  ‘So you’re—’ began Feltima, staring at Tom, but a gesture from Velsevius cut her off.

  ‘We don’t enquire,’ Velsevius said, ‘about our passengers’ private lives.’

  ‘But we have friends, a friend, in common, my Lord and I.’ Feltima looked boldly at Tom. ‘Some people say I manoeuvre vehicles exactly like her.’

  Tom had deduced that Velsevius and Feltima had swapped roles during the day; for part of the time, the vehicle had been flung through some wild, exciting turns that seemed familiar. It was an old memory that surfaced now.

  ‘Limava?’ he asked. ‘Were you trained by Limava?’

  ‘Yes.’ Feltima was beaming. ‘Before she moved on to better things. You know she became a squadron leader during the war?’

  ‘No. Did she—?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware, she made it OK. We haven’t been in touch.’

  ‘Good.’ Tom nodded. ‘That’s good.’

  He and Limava had been short-term lovers. When she broke it off, Tom had felt relief as well as disappointment. Tom had been a delta-class servitor then: not a great prospect for the future.

  Not that I’ve any wealth now.

  Markilon was sitting up and looking watchful, but Velsevius had already tucked himself into his sleeping bag, pulled down the opaque face-visor, and rolled over onto his side. Tom followed Velsevius’s example, sliding down inside his bag and giving an exaggerated yawn.

  He allowed himself to slide into a relaxed trance, superficially asleep but in fact alert. His sleeping bag was military issue, designed to shred itself apart in action, freeing up his limbs should he need to fight. Still, while Markilon’s presence was unexpected, Tom sensed no danger from him.

  Feltima and Markilon chatted softly for about an hour. Finally, they turned in, and the hold’s lights dimmed. Tom’s trance drifted towards sleep.

  Yet he wondered, before he let go of consciousness, just why it was that Lady V’Delikona should summon him on Corduven’s behalf, when Corduven was more than capable himself. Why was the summoning urgent?

  Blackness carried him to dreams which would fade before he woke.

  They travelled through the day, and arrived in what would have been nightshift in almost any other demesne. (Once, Tom had remarked that Terran timezones had depended on where you were, instead of being standard across the globe. His friend Lady Sylvana had shuddered as she deduced the geometry, and said: ‘How deliciously quaint. That’s what you get for grubbing about on the surface.’) But Realm V’Delikona was different: it was known as The Realm Which Never Sleeps. Each of its inhabitants chose which of three diurnal rhythms to adopt; workplaces were continuously open; all public corridors and halls and caverns were permanently and brightly lit.

  The arachnargos slowed before a platform which overlooked a sheer drop: three hundred metres to the cavern floor. This was the largest cavern in the demesne, and one of the most impressive. Glowing morphbuildings slowly altered shape below, and on the cavern walls. The air was strung with crimson tubes hanging in catenary curves, carrying ovoid passenger-cars like corpuscles through arteries.

  Down on the platform, despite the late hour, a regal white-haired figure stood, dressed in a long violet-and-white robe with a raised silver collar. Around her, the Palace Halberdiers were at ramrod attention.

  Tom, squeezed into the rear of the control cabin alongside Markilon, heard Feltima’s gasp. ‘Is that Lady V’Delikona down there? The Lady herself?’

  With a sense of mischief, Tom could not help saying: ‘Well, she is an old friend.’

  Feltima glanced at him with an awe which had not been present before.

  ‘Taking up position.’ Velsevius spoke in a crisp, professional tone. ‘Ready to lower you now, my Lord, if you’ll make your way aft.’

  ‘I will. Thanks for your hospitality and ... entertainment.’ Tom winked at Markilon, who grinned. ‘Take care, everybody.’

  ‘It’s been our honour, sir,’ said Velsevius.

  Then Tom clambered back into the thoracic hold, where a slender tendril wrapped itself around his waist only a second before the floor puckered then gaped open. A cold wind was blowing below.

  The tendril lowered him.

  It was windy, and as his feet touched the ground Tom was almost bowled over, but the tendril lingered long enough to steady him, before whipping up into the arachnargos hold. The vehicle sealed shut, and was already moving away when Lady V’Delikona grasped Tom’s hand and said: ‘Thank Fate you made it, Tom. You need to be here.’

  The Halberdiers closed in all around, providing a shelter from the buffeting wind. High overhead, Tom could see glassbirds being flung against the stalactites. For someone who loved the surface, he was still discomfited to be in a cavern large enough to manifest weather.

  ‘Why’s that, my Lady?’ He let her lean on him as they walked towards the rearing entrance. ‘Why the urgency?’

  ‘It’s Corduven.’ Lady V’Delikona stopped, wisps of white hair escaping from her platinum clasps. ‘He’s here, and ... He’s dying, Tom.’

  ‘No ...’

  ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time. Prepare yourself for a change in his appearance.’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘Tom. You learned to face harsh realities a long time ago.’

  He blinked at the gusts which assaulted his eyes.

  Corduven, my friend.

  But Lady V’Delikona was right. He had long given up expecting fairness from Destiny.

  ~ * ~

  10

  NULAPEIRON AD 3423

  Polished floors were tuned to deep, vibrating purple. Morphsculptures in alcoves stood frozen, their pseudometabolisms halted as a mark of respect. Servitors clad in grey tunics or surcoats dropped to one knee as Tom passed.

  In a hushed pentahedral antechamber filled with ice-like furnishings of frosted glass, a shaven-headed priestess - a senior Antistita - bowed to Tom, sweeping her thurible to one side, dispensing heady violet smoke. At the chamber’s far end, tall doorshimmers evaporated, sensing Tom’s approach.

  ‘Prepare yourself for a change in his appearance,’ Lady V’Delikona had said, but the figure propped up in the bed was still a shock. Corduven’s cheeks were sunken and his eyes were glazed; yet only a tenday ago he had been bright and cheerful, acting as best man at Tom’s wedding.

  Too cheerful. Doped up with ‘tropes. In retrospect, Tom could see it. You‘ve always driven yourself too hard.

  The narrow, skeletal man in the bed was the greatest strategist of the current age, according to some military observers. Always highly strung, he took immense doses of logotropes, especially at the height of the war, sometimes going a tenday without sleep.

  Fragile eyelids fluttered open.

  ‘Knew ... you‘d... come. Tom.’

  Fingers raised weakly, let fall.

  ‘Corduven. Fate, Corduven.’

  Tom knelt by the bed, took that frail hand and held it, head bowed.

  After a time, a low cough roused Tom from his thoughts. It could not be Corduven: he was sleeping, hanging onto the last shreds of life. Tom looked up, blinking. A man was standing at the foot of the bed; and his eyes were reddened from crying. It took Tom several moments to recognize Jay A’Khelikov, his one-time colleague in the intelligence corps of Corduven’s Academy.

  ‘Jay...’

  Tom swallowed, released Corduven’s hand, stood up. Suddenly, he realized what Jay was doing here, and the nature of his relationship to Corduven.

  I didn‘t know.

  Corduven had confessed, once, why his marriage to Sylvana had failed and been annulled. It was a vulnerability that Tom could have exploited: in noble society, men who were close to other men could not hold responsible positions or inherit the privileges of their parents. In that respect, commonfolk in some lower strata had more freedom than their aristocratic rulers.

  Corduven and Jay.

  Tom had not even known they were acquainted. He also knew that Jay had had an affair with a female operative, called Lihru ... but there had been something odd about it, an internal struggle which Tom had thought due to the charged situation in their clandestine, betrayal-filled world, at the height of the war when defeat seemed inevitable.

  Jay shook his head, unable to speak.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ said Tom.

  As Tom walked from the bedchamber, holo images from Corduven’s past sprang into being in the air, circling the bed: happy memories, helping to ease the transition from life. Children playing in a stone piazza, one a girl with blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes whom Corduven would some day marry; another, from a later date, showed a muscular, bearded man dressed in a silken gown, and quaffing wine: Corduven’s brother Gérard, whose ability to function in normal timeflow was greater than normal Oracles’ ... and formed one of the reasons why he was able to steal Tom’s mother from her family, and condemn Tom’s father simply by foretelling his death.

  Corduven.

  Tom stopped in the antechamber, remembering the shock in Gérard’s eyes as Tom’s redmetal poignard rammed into his heart.

  Cord, my friend.

  Doorshimmers froze into place behind him.

  Tom was at the outer doors when a soft female voice behind him called his name.

  ‘What—? Sylvana.’

  She was his age, pale-skinned and blonde-haired. Sylvana blinked her tear-damp eyes. On a couch in an alcove, she was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap.

  ‘I didn’t see you there,’ Tom added. ‘My apologies.’

  ‘No need ... Jay’s with him, is that right?’

  ‘Um, yes.’

  Tom crossed the chamber, knelt on one knee before her.

  ‘We’re closer than ...’ Sylvana looked at the closed doorshimmers. ‘I was closer to Cord than anyone. We could talk about our hates and loves. Including...’

  She stopped, but her meaning was obvious.

  Including me.

  Tom took her hand, as he had taken Corduven’s. Hers was so much warmer, and his skin tingled in a way he did not want to remember.

  ‘We did make love once, Cord and I.’ Sylvana answered a question which Tom could never have asked. ‘Not too successfully. Not like you and me, Tom. I never knew my skin could burn like that.’

  Tom let go of her hand. Slowly, he stood.

  You‘re very beautiful.

  He had thought so even on the day Sylvana had bought him as a servitor, thereby saving his life, while casually mentioning that his arm should be removed as punishment for theft. Her mother’s order confirmed the suggestion.

  ‘Tom. I’m sorry for ... I treated you like a chattel. Something to be bought and sold.’

  ‘Yet you rescued me. Let me attend the Sorites School, have Mistress eh’Nalephi as my tutor.’

  Sylvana swallowed. Her throat was slender, soft-looking.

  ‘Tom ... Stay with me a while? My chamber is nearby.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t mean ...’

  ‘Yes, you do. Take care of yourself, Sylvana.’

  Tom walked away with silent footsteps and did not look back.

  Tom descended.

  There were depths to Realm V’Delikona he had not experienced. Twelve strata down, he accidentally blundered through a security barrier - it would have stopped most people, but his thumb ring of rank had allowed him to pass - and was caught up in a bladed feud. It was Vendettenday, when laws were abrogated for a time in a tightly defined section of one stratum, and three men mistook him for a contestant.

  He left them broken and bleeding in an alleyway behind a tavern. They would live.

  Corduven. My friend.

  Another six strata down, the tunnels grew clean once more. Tom walked, feeling a sense of dislocation, aware that he should sleep but not wanting to: this realm had no sense of the night. Instead, he found a place to sit and rest. From a cosy daistral house, he watched a small marketplace in operation; it reminded him of his childhood days in Salis Core. Before the Oracle destroyed everything. But that was not Corduven’s fault.

  Tom and Corduven. At least they could forgive each other. Perhaps there was more on Corduven’s side, a feeling that Tom could never reciprocate; he hoped it did not cause his friend pain.

  Once before, in a different realm, Tom had descended to the lowest stratum of all. Then, his head had been injured, and he had been fleeing the revolutionaries he had thought were his friends, but turned out to be more violent and vicious than the rulers they sought to displace. It was alcohol, the burning dragon that still tempted him, which had become his new false friend.

  Today, Tom would climb back up. Never again would he give in. He could face everything; even his friend’s death.

  Earlier, walking through the peaceful corridors, Tom had noticed a cultural meme, in that things seemed arranged in fives, and pentagonal chambers were popular here. Several small boutiques had five proprietors’ names on their banners; in the taverns, groupings of five people seemed casual, unplanned, but were more frequent than other numbers.

  It reminded Tom that the proto-logosophers who founded this world had based their society on memetic engineering, seeking to depart from the Terran cultures which gave them birth. Nowadays, such a blatant cultural symbol as a preference for one number was a primitive throwback, a relic of earlier times when manipulation had been cruder and experimental.

  Perhaps Tom, too, was an incidental tool in the great plans hatched by manipulative minds and developed over centuries, handed down among the ruling nobility ... or perhaps he was a man, capable of fighting for what he believed in.

  Corduven ...

  Tom could have faced being there at the end, but it was not his place. Jay deserved that privilege; and it was a privilege, though a painful one.

  In the daistral shop, Tom rose to his feet, left payment and a too-large tip upon the table, and walked out into the market-chamber. Familiar scents of hemp and fabric filled his nostrils as he threaded his way among the stalls. Sweet nuts and boljicream patties on a vendor’s warm tray produced mouth-watering aromas, but Tom fought down the temptation. He stopped briefly before a table filled with secondhand drama crystals, then made himself walk on. Some other time.

  In the centre of the chamber, Tom halted. Then he did something which the child-Tom, in his humble home, could only have dreamed of doing. He pushed back his cape, reached up his hand, and the noble-house ring sparked brightly on his thumb. Overhead, brass ceiling flanges arranged in a circle began to rotate.

  As the flanges descended, Tom stepped aside. The metal slatted into place, forming spiral steps to the level above. All around, shocked marketgoers stared at Tom, mouths open as they realized what kind of man had been walking unrecognized among them.

  I’m just like you, he wanted to cry.

  But perhaps that was no longer true. Tom looked around, gave a solemn bow, then looked up, and began to ascend the steps.

  ~ * ~

  11

  TERRA AD 2160

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  [2]

  The triple towers, with their slow-moving glassine spiral skyways and linking bridges, stood proud above the city, white and gold in the evening sun, framed against bruised purple storm clouds gathering in the north.

  On Ellis Island, the comparatively small statue stood with its once-upraised arm broken off at the elbow and deliberately unrestored. Not long before, Ro had seen the original in Paris, now silver in its flowmetal sleeve, designed to withstand any attack short of an X-ray laser burst. There, it was an open secret that anyone thought to own xaser technology was liable to be gunned down by combat squads of the Police Judiciaire, no questions asked.

  Ro stood on the Manhattan shoreline, by a small jetty reaching out across the choppy waves, wondering where her contact was.