CHAPTER 16

Khoriak takes Aiah around Terminal in his two-seater Gedan. Suddenly ravenous, she’s taken the basket of fruit from the Elton limo and sits with it in her lap: juice trickles down her wrist as she peers through smoked windows at people and buildings. But when she reports to Constantine after shift change she has little to tell him; they had followed a few obvious Operation types from one address to another, and otherwise had found a few businesses that, oddly, were protected by well-disguised bronze collection webs, a fact that probably meant nothing at all because it was impossible to determine how old the collection webs were, and whether whatever they were guarding had left the vicinity a hundred years ago.

“We have detected someone sniffing about the neighborhood,” Constantine says. He paces as he speaks, and his boot-heels have already trodden an anxious path in the plush carpet. Behind him mages are locked to their t-grips, eyes closed as they navigate over a geomaturgical landscape; security people stand like potted palms in their corners.

“Whoever he is,” Constantine mutters, “he’s good. Very methodical, seems to miss nothing. We daren’t use the factory.”

“Tomorrow,” Aiah says. Weariness seems to fall on her like a mist of rain. “Collection day. We may find something.”

Constantine stops in the middle of his pacing and gives her another of his intent looks. “Come,” he says, and takes her arm. “A dose of the goods will set you up.”

The bedroom is familiar, with its plump pillows and blue satin spread, and proves to have cables and copper t-grips lying ready in desk drawers. Aiah imagines she can detect the faint scent of blood-oranges. She takes the Trigram from around her neck and directs it through her body, burning away fatigue toxins, filling every cell with blazing power. She looks up at Constantine, sees his dark eyes intent on her, absorbing her. She feels a resonance, her power and his, like buildings set a precise half-radius apart, building a greater charge of plasm than either would on its own.

Her tissues are flushed with plasm and arousal. Aiah’s lips involuntarily draw back in a fierce grin and she laughs. She puts down the t-grip and launches herself at Constantine, suddenly so full of power that she is possessed by the perfect illusion that she can drag his big body toward the bed and fling him into it. The sex that follows is fierce and fearless and leaves the room strewn with discarded clothing.

“You are learning to enjoy your power: good,” he says. He looks at her with lazy approval, eyes half-slitted like those of a cat.

Aiah is feeling a bit feline herself. She draws her claws lightly through the wiry hair on his chest. “I don’t know if I can give this up,” she says.

Constantine laughs, a low, indolent rumble. “Well, sister,” he says, “you could decide not to.”

She considers this. “What is there in Caraqui for me? Nothing.”

“There may be the New City,” he says seriously. “And I hope that in your measure of value I, myself, am rated somewhere above this nothing.”

“You have made me no promises,” Aiah reminds, “except that you might replace my dull government job with another dull government job, and that perhaps in the near future I may hate you. And Sorya knows about our meeting here.”

He frowns. “Don’t worry for your safety, if that’s what concerns you,” he says, “If you are harmed through Sorya’s actions, she will suffer for it. And she knows that.”

Aiah looks into his gold-flecked brown eyes. “Have you told her that?”

Constantine gives a minute shake of his head. “No need — she knows who is under my protection and who is not.”

“She could rat me to the Authority, and no one would know.”

“I would know. And Sorya knows I would know.” His lip gives a little curl, “I know things about her that could send her to the Hell her Torgenil family so fervently believes in. I would use them if she compelled me.”

A chill wafts up Aiah’s spine, “If you know these things about her, isn’t she dangerous to you?”

Constantine’s eyelids half-slit his eyes again, and again Aiah is reminded of a cat, a cat contemplating its prey — cruel and predatory and hard, merciless in its calculation, in its perfect objective need. “Without me,” he says, “she would revert to the life in which I found her — and that life, believe me, was Hell, little though she knew it. No — she needs me more than I need her, and understands that perfectly well.”

Again Aiah feels a chill. She reaches for the sheets, crumpled at the foot of the bed, and covers herself. She rests her head on Constantine’s shoulder and throws an arm across his barrel chest. The silver tip of his braid is cool against her forehead.

“It seems to me there are very many people who need you,” she says.

“And I’m not fair to any of them.” His hand strokes her hair. He sighs, Aiah’s head lifting, then dropping, with the breath. “Well, in another few days, things will be decided — whether I will continue this pointless, rootless life, purveying my fading theories of government and geomancy to an indifferent world, or make use of the gift you, my precious one, have given me. It may be that I will yet make the foundations of heaven tremble, and if so I will have you to thank.” He kisses her forehead gravely.

“Thank you,” she says, and hugs herself to him. “Though I scarcely think I’ve given you the means to trouble the foundations of heaven.”

Again comes that lazy, rolling laugh. “You have given me power, which used with care is a means to more power. And the purpose of power, to my way of thought, is to make us free. And what oppresses us more than ... ?” His words fade away, but the hand, stroking her hair, pauses before her eyes, index finger pointed to the ceiling, and beyond.

Her eyes follow the pointing finger, her thoughts flying up beyond the ceiling, climbing higher, past the realm of falcons and airships, aeroplanes and rockets, high aloft to the place where the air is so thin it might as well not be there, and then, beyond even that.

“The Shield,” she murmurs, and then jolts upright, staring at him. “The Shield! You want to attack the Shield!”

“The purpose of the New City is to bring liberty,” Constantine says. “And what constrains us more than the Shield?”

“But how can you do it? Nothing can survive the Shield!”

“Matter is annihilated on contact with the Shield, or so we presume from the subsequent burst of radiation,” Constantine says. “And plasm is destroyed as well, or so it appears. Electromagnetic energy is absorbed and probably retransmitted. But gravity gets through, so the Shield is not perfect in its hostility to nature. And where there is an imperfection, a weakness can be found.”

Aiah finds herself uneasy at this discussion — probably half the priests on the planet would find it plain blasphemy — and she finds herself casting restless sidelong glances just in case spirits, gods or disapproving Malakas are hovering about listening.

“I thought everything had been tried,” she says.

“No records survive from Senko’s time. We don’t even know how long ago that was — thousands of years, anyway. Every so often someone takes a crack at the Shield in a kind of half-hearted, disorganized way, but the last time was eight hundred years ago, and a few years ago I bought the records in a surplus sale in an old warehouse and read them, and they only confirm what everyone already knows.”

“So what can you do?”

“A grand plasm assault, perhaps? Senko tried it, but by the available accounts plasm science was uncertain then, and he didn’t have any great amount of the stuff to work with. If we can unify more than one metropolis in this matter, take the plasm from many states and direct it against the Shield, we might be able to somehow overload its mechanisms.”

“Why not utilize all the plasm in the world?” Aiah laughs.

Constantine smiles. “Well, why not? But of course the New City must first gain control of the world, which perhaps is a greater challenge than dealing with the Shield itself, is it not?”

Aiah is staggered by Constantine’s treating her facetious suggestion with any degree of seriousness at all. “Well,” she says, “let’s hope the Ascended Ones aren’t listening.”

“If they are,” smiling, “I’m sure they’re laughing.”

Aiah smiles uneasily and restrains the impulse to glance over her shoulder.

“We might also approach the Shield through gravity,” Constantine continues, “the nature of which we know little, though we know its effects well enough. Perhaps, through plasm, we might be able to amplify gravity, and direct it outward, use it as a method for exploring the Shield or as a weapon directed against its mechanisms.”

“Can plasm interact with gravity at all?” Aiah asks.

“Thus far,” Constantine concedes, “no. We can use plasm to give impetus to matter— we can shoot our aerocars into the sky— but in that case the plasm is transformed to kinetic energy, and is no longer plasm.

“But alter gravity itself? Who has tried? And besides — who knows what the Malakas were thinking of when they built the Shield? Perhaps it is not intended as an eternal barrier, but as an intelligence test.” He looks at her, his voice rolling on like a deep, inexorable river.

“Why hasn’t the Shield been breached? One may as well ask why there is still poverty and hunger, why war is permitted, why there is such gross inequality in wealth and opportunity. It is because we, as a political species, permit all these to occur. Perhaps we permit the Shield as well. If we can put aside our foolishness, our shortsightedness and greed, we may discover the realm of the Ascended is in our grasp, and has been all along.”

Aiah feels her head spin with the wine of Constantine’s words. The Shield has been there, immovable, irreconcilable, for thousands of years; it is a fact, as assuredly a fact as the bedrock beneath the hotel’s foundations. And Constantine would abolish it. Might as well, she thinks mirthfully, abolish hunger and war, abolish the planet itself.

Constantine sits up in bed and leans toward her, his voice confiding. “I would reckon it a favor if you would not confide to anyone this particular ambition of mine,” he says. “I would prefer not to be laughed out of all respect, or condemned as a heretic by some fanatic. I’m treated with enough skepticism as it is.”

Aiah puts her arms around his neck and kisses him. “Who would I tell?”

He shrugs. “Some inquiring Wire reporter, I suppose.”

“Maybe when I’m an old granny,” Aiah says. “The statute of limitations on plasm theft won’t expire till then.”

The room takes a sudden lurch, as if a giant had just kicked the hotel’s cornerstone. Something in the bathroom falls off a shelf with a crash. Aiah and Constantine scramble erect as the hotel lurches a second time. Aiah’s feet nearly shoot out from under her. And then there are a diminishing series of smaller shocks as the building rocks back and forth on its massive floating foundation, a swaying that continues long after the actual earthquake is over.

Constantine is jumping into his clothes before the last shock fades. Aiah stands silent and still, gulping air in reaction to a sudden wave of inner-ear nausea.

“I must check the factory,” Constantine says. “Have someone take you home—”

“I have to go to the Authority,” Aiah says. “I’m Emergency Response, remember?”

He nods. “Tell Khoriak.” And then is out the door into the busy front room, thrusting one arm through a sleeve of his shirt.

*

It is a middle-sized quake, and in Jaspeer causes only 16,000 casualties, 1,100 of which are fatal, mostly from scaffolding that peels away from buildings in poor neighborhoods and rains down on the off-shift traffic below. Some bridges and tunnels collapse. A food vat ruptures in the basement of a processing plant and drowns twelve workers in a deluge of krill. A few older buildings fall while a rather larger number go up in flames. Among the fallen buildings is a brand-new and very fashionable apartment that will soon be the subject of an investigation to find out which inspectors were paid off and when.

Aiah is assigned to find and repair breaks in plasm lines and spends most of the next twelve hours underground, walking through darkened utility mains illuminated by the jittering flash of her helmet light, old brick and concrete tunnels that smell of disturbed dust. Vertigo keeps tugging at her inner ear, turning the tunnels into distorted, nightmarish places. She performs her job with her heart in her mouth, terrified that a stray spark might set off an explosion in the fine, suspended dust particles in the tunnels, or that an aftershock might bury her and her team alive or flood the tunnel with water.

At least, she thinks, Rohder’s anima won’t be wandering around Terminal, he’ll be busy elsewhere, locating survivors in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

After twelve hours Aiah is allowed to go home. Aside from a broken mirror in the lobby, Loeno Towers is unharmed. The apartment is as she left it. The repaired commo set has logged a call from Gil inquiring as to her safety, and after an hour of trying — commo lines are jammed — she manages to leave a brief message telling him that she is all right.

The plasm energy she’d fed herself at the hotel is long gone. Aiah showers, collapses into her bed, and is awakened only at 1800 when the doorman calls to tell her that her ride has arrived.

She throws on clothing, washes her face, and combs her tangled hair in the elevator on her way down. On the ground floor she finds Khoriak quietly reading a magazine. He leads her to the Geldan and inserts the little car into the late rush-hour traffic. In the wake of the earthquake the sky blazes with advertisements for insurance companies.

“Part of the collection net came down in the factory,” Khoriak says, “but that should be repaired within twenty-four hours or so. No one was hurt.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“The factory. Everyone else is there.”

“Was there a lot of damage in Terminal?”

“Not from what I saw.”

And indeed there is very little. Terminal is sufficiently far from the quake’s epicenter that it’s lost none of its scaffolding, and damage seems to have been confined to broken windows and toppled shelves.

A repair crew is already repairing the bronze collection net. The huge accumulators stand gleaming in their rows, reflecting the sparks that fall from welding torches in multiple golden waterfalls. Constantine and Sorya watch from amid a circle of their followers. As the car pulls in, Constantine crosses the stained concrete floor to open Aiah’s door for her. The others trail behind him. Constantine is smiling, and Sorya is hunched in a faded green brass-buttoned military jacket of an old-fashioned design. She wears a peaked cap pulled low over sullen, slitted eyes.

“Our people at the Landmark have found something useful,” Constantine says as Aiah steps from the car. “When the quake hit, two of the Operation men we were surveying left their clubs and dashed to the same address to see if anything there was damaged. We’ve poked around a little further, and it’s their plasm house.”

“Can you tell how much of the juice they are getting out of it?” Aiah asks.

“It’s in an office building backed up against a huge public housing project. I’d say they’re tapping into the plasm link there.”

A falling bit of bronze rod, cut loose by one of the torches, clangs loudly on the floor.

“Congratulations, Miss Aiah,” Sorya says. “Your solution looks to be the right one.” The shadowed expression beneath her cap brim is unreadable.

“What’s the next step?” Constantine asks. “An anonymous phone call to the Authority?”

Aiah mentally pages through the Authority’s procedures. “That will just put it in a long queue,” Aiah says, “and someone may get around to checking the call in a few months, and it’s very likely that the call will be assigned to the man who’s being paid off in the first place. If you can get someone to lodge a formal complaint for the reward, the Authority will take it more seriously, but if it’s you filing the complaint, Metropolitan, or any of your known entourage, they’re likely to want to know how you know about all this illegal plasm.”

“I see.”

“Best to give me some time, and I’ll work out a way for the Authority to discover the building in its own way.”

“We do not have time to spare,” Sorya says. “Perhaps there could be an accident in that building, something that might expose the heavy plasm use there.”

A cold warning hand brushes Aiah’s neck at Sorya’s toneless word, accident.

“Give me the address,” Aiah says. “I’ll check to see who’s registered at that meter.”

“An accident is quicker,” Sorya says flatly.

“An accident is more dangerous for us,” Constantine says. “We don’t want to have our business discovered as a result of a tangential brush with the Operation. Nor do we want to attract their attention, having successfully eluded them thus far.” He looks at Martinus. “We’ll take Miss Aiah there,” he says, and then turns to Aiah again. “But not just yet. You look tired, and it doesn’t do my cause any good to have your mind fuzzy. Refresh yourself at the t-grips, and then we’ll leave.”

“Thank you, Metropolitan.”

The plasm charges her body, quickens her mind. She wishes she could dawdle, remain connected to the huge well she had discovered, the awesome reservoir of raw power so fundamentally connected to the life of her world, to both its reality and its unreality. But she reluctantly flicks the switch on the operators’ console that disconnects her copper grip from the well, then pushes back her chair.

She realizes that she has been aware of Sorya’s scent for some time.

Aiah turns to see Sorya standing behind her, hands stuffed in the pockets of her faded green jacket. Aiah rises to her feet, mind and muscle blazing with plasm-courage, and says, “Yes?”

Sorya’s tone of voice carries no hostility but little warmth, either. “A word of warning, Miss Aiah.”

“Yes?” Aiah repeats. She almost laughs at the whole notion of warning. At the moment she feels capable of taking on an army.

“Constantine and I have been together a long time,” Sorya says, “and though he and I are no fit companions for one another now, both being so tied, nerve and heart and bone, to this project of ours, and passionate over our differences, we nevertheless, once this endeavor is concluded, will be together for the future.”

Aiah bites back an impulse to reply, a defiant Are you sure about that, lady? or something equally refined, equally a product of the old neighborhood.

Sorya’s flat green eyes gaze from under her cap brim. “I bear you no animosity for your interlude here with Constantine,” she says. “Insofar as you provide him a little release, a little forgetfulness — well,” she nods, “that is good. You provide a service, if you will, for which I haven’t the time or energy myself. But it is an interlude, Miss Aiah, and it would be dangerous for you to think otherwise.”

Aiah clenches her teeth. She can feel her hackles rise, her hands trying to form claws. “Are you threatening me, Miss Sorya?” she asks.

A touch of contempt enters Sorya’s eyes. “Why should I do that? Do you think you’re the only worshiper at this particular shrine? For it’s worship he wants, make no mistake, and I know him too well to give him quite the credulity he demands.” She shakes her head. “No, I merely wish to reiterate that he and I are both among the powers of this world, those blessed with greatness and the will and means to use it, and that this fact alone makes us dangerous to our friends as well as our enemies.”

“This power —” Aiah gestures toward the contents of the factory, the huge accumulators and consoles and grids, “— this power was my gift.”

Sorya tilts her pointed chin. “Ah, but you gave it away, didn’t you? or rather sold it. If you were one of the great, you would have kept it and made use of it to lay the foundations of your own ascendancy.”

“Perhaps it isn’t power that I want.”

“Does that make you great? I don’t believe so.” She shakes her head. Behind her, sparks fall gracefully to the factory floor. “I ask you but to look at Constantine’s history. How many from the old days are still around him? Martinus and Geymard alone of those who mattered, and Geymard is here almost against his will and only because I worked on him for days.”

Sorya glances over her shoulder at Constantine, who stands in consultation with Martinus and Geymard. Her voice turns contemplative. “Constantine has a way of being fatal to his friends. It is, in a peculiar way, a measure of his greatness that he survives what they do not. Consider: all his family are dead, even those who took his side in the war. All his old advisors, his companions, those lovers who remained with him for any space of time . . .” Her eyes return to Aiah. “All but me. Because I can match him, in terms of will and greatness, in talent and power. Because I am no worshiper of his thought or philosophy or —” her lips twist contemptuously “— or his goodness, but of his true greatness, his will and power and his ability to dominate others; and because . . .” She leans closer to Aiah, close enough for Aiah to scent the spice on her breath. Sorya’s voice turns confiding. “Because I tell him the truth,” she says softly. Despite the silky tone her eyes are hard, pitiless. “He wants worship, he wants the uncritical adoration of those such as yourself, but after he has glutted himself on devotion, it’s the truth he needs, and it’s the truth I give him.”

“And you think you’re the only person who tells him the truth.”

“There are truths about Constantine that only I know,” Sorya says. “I know power and wealth and magic, and it is their truth to which the greatness in Constantine speaks.” She fishes in her pocket for her cigaret case. “Believe me,” she says, “I have nothing but the best of wishes for you, and that is why I’m speaking to you now. I wish to protect you from disappointment, from any consequences of broken hopes.” Aiah watches the little bright flame leap up from Sorya’s platinum lighter to ignite the cigaret poised between Sorya’s fingers.

“With all respect,” Sorya finishes, “you are well out of your depth. In the league in which Constantine and I play, you’re not even rated.”

“Thank you for your advice,” Aiah says, managing to speak the words without the sarcasm she feels in her heart, and then simply walks away, toward Constantine and the big Elton.

With an elegant gesture Constantine opens the door. Aiah settles onto the leather seat and Constantine closes the door behind her with that too-solid thunk, that sound of armor falling into place between her and everything outside.

Constantine is buoyant on the way to the plasm house, joking about the dolphins and their pretensions, about the Operation street captains who are about to have an unpleasant surprise. After a few moments of his insistent good humor, and with plasm vitality filling every cell, Aiah feels the tight-coiled anger slowly relax about her nerves.

The plasm house is kept in a nondescript office building, its red-brick walls gone gray with grime. Behind it squats the dark bulk of the housing project, a garden of fortress-like buildings crowned by pigeon coops and roof gardens. As the car pulls up Aiah peers upward out the window to look at the top of the building and sees a thorny, decorative crown of ornate wrought iron. Possibly there are antennae concealed there, possibly not.

She enters through stained bronze doors. Inside the air smells of fish fried in grease. Booming dance music echoes up a tall atrium surrounded by a ramp that spirals all the way to the top. There are young men loitering against the iron rails in the foyer, hoping to find a friend or a girl willing to pay the cover charge for one of the clubs. They look startled at Aiah’s arrival, and she feels a warning cry through her nerves. Insulated by drivers, armor and limousines, she’s grown careless about Terminal, about the Jaspeeri Nation stickers in the windows. But other than the usual whistles and pick-up lines they’re civil enough, and she steps into the building and gazes upward.

The atrium is surrounded by an ancient webwork of wrought iron, an intricate spiral design that, reflecting the Shieldlight brought in by the big skylight above, looks like a silvery spider’s web funneling up to the ceiling. An elevator, a wrought-iron cage, pilots people to and from the restaurants. Aiah walks slowly up the spiral ramp, mentally calculating loads, distances, masses of brick and iron. She’ll have to pull the plasm records for the whole building.

On the second floor she buys some ice cream from a vendor and continues her walk. The businesses here seem to be pawn shops, loan offices, clubs, music stores and bail bondsmen. Pairs of young lovers, pressed against one another in doorways, pay Aiah no attention as she walks by. The plasm house is in an office on the fifth floor, a gray metal door with flaking white lettering, Kremag and Associates. She doesn’t spare it a second glance, but she suspects she sees video monitors concealed in the wrought-iron leaves sprouting from the false iron pillars on either side of the door.

Aiah walks up another couple floors, then takes the elevator back down.

There is power, she thinks as she interlaces her fingers in the wrought-iron elevator wall, and power. Sorya knows of one kind, and Aiah another. And though Aiah wasn’t born to Sorya’s kind of power, she is learning it.

Is she afraid of Sorya? she wonders, and realizes that the answer to her question is no. She wonders why, and suspects this is probably a comment on her sanity.

She leaves the building and dives into the limousine. “Nothing much to see,” she says, “I’ll have to look through the records.”

Constantine nods, “I can take you home now,” he says, “but I have a stop along the way. A meeting.” He lifts his head, and Aiah can see a kind of excitement in him, a fierceness in his look, a readiness coiled in his restless body. He looks at her. “There is an element of danger. You can stay in the car with Martinus.”

“Martinus isn’t going with you? It’s his job to protect you.”

“With this — gentleman — I’m best protected from here, from the car.”

Power, Aiah thinks. This could be an interesting lesson. “Does it matter if he sees me? Is it like the situation with Parq, that he might blackmail me if he knows who I am?”

A private smile touches Constantine’s lips. He shakes his head. “No. Blackmail is not a danger here. My principal worry is that if things go awry, the both of us would be swiftly and certainly killed.”

He looks at her, eyes sparkling. The thought of death seems to amuse him.

“May I come?” Aiah asks.

Constantine laughs. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

He is daring her. Cheerful defiance rises in her mind on a whirlwind of plasm, and she grins back at him. “Why stop taking chances now?” she says.

Constantine’s mirth answers her own, and then a hint of caution crosses his face, “I don’t know if I want you to see me with this person,” he says. “It may injure your good opinion of me.”

Aiah laughs. Constantine takes her hand, laces his fingers through hers.

“Very well,” he says. “But you are asking more of yourself than you know.”

Constantine has a way of being fatal to his friends. Aiah remembers Sorya’s words, then defiantly dismisses them.

The car takes the Trans-City east, then leaves the highway and heads north. Tall office buildings gleam, white stone and bright metal and glass, on all sides. Off-shift, there is very little traffic. Martinus drives into a parking garage, winds down a spiral ramp to the bottom. He parks but leaves the engine running. Then he drops a panel on the dashboard, takes out a t-grip, and holds it ready.

Surprise floats through Aiah. “There are plasm batteries in the car?” she says.

“Of course. For protection.”

It’s obvious enough, but somehow the idea never crossed Aiah’s mind. She follows Constantine from the car.

“Martinus is a mage?” Aiah asks.

“Martinus is a protection specialist. His abilities to protect me against plasm attack are considerable, and have never failed me.”

Constantine leads her to a steel door inset into the wall, takes the handle, pulls, and the door swings open. A loud buzzing sound rattles out of the darkness beyond. Constantine hesitates.

“I must caution you not to run,” he says, “It may . . . awaken instincts best left asleep.”

Constantine finds a light switch and turns it. The room beyond is full of pumps screened off by mesh cages; apparently the garage is below the water table and needs constant pumping. Aiah follows Constantine past them and to another metal door with a yellow-and-red Authority sticker on it. Aiah pats her pockets for keys, but Constantine opens this door as easily as he had the other, and with a chill Aiah realizes that someone else has preceded them.

Beyond is a utility tunnel, hot and humid, with sweat beading its round concrete walls and a rivulet of water at the bottom. Yellow electric bulbs hang in metal cages every quarter pitch. A bulky shielded cable, held to the wall by huge metal staples, carries a fortune in plasm from one place to another. There is a smell of suspended dust. Earthquake anxieties rise in Aiah’s mind and she tamps them firmly down as she follows Constantine.

Aiah loosens her collar in the hot air. “Who lives down here?” she says. “Who would want to meet anyone here?”

“He said the fourth light,” Constantine murmurs. Even though he has to crouch his pace is rapid and Aiah strains to keep up. The sound of their bootsteps is loud in the small space.

And suddenly Aiah knows something else is there, sharing the tunnel with them, and despite the heat her blood runs cold. She gives a cry and shrinks away, the curved tunnel firm against her spine. It seems to have come in through the tunnel wall just ahead of them, oozing through it as if the concrete were porous.

“Greetings,” Constantine says, his voice firm, but Aiah can see fists at the ends of his arms, fists clenched so tight the nails gnaw at his palms.

Aiah can’t tell what it is he’s talking to. For some reason, even though there’s no obstruction, it’s impossible to get a clear view of it. It seems silver, gleaming under the light, and yet also deep black, black as the deepest abandoned pit, and yet there are hints of other colors, whole spectra running fast through its uncertain outlines, like an interference pattern on the video.

And it’s cold. Aiah realizes her teeth are chattering. She wonders why her breath doesn’t bloom out in front of her, frozen into mist.

“Metropolitan,” the thing says. “Why do you seek me again?”

“I wish you to serve me,” Constantine says. “And in exchange, I will give you what you desire.”

“Four each month,” the thing says. “And for five years.” Its voice is resonant, seems to vibrate deep in Aiah’s belly.

Constantine lifts his head. “Two. And for two years.”

Aiah huddles in her jacket, nerves crawling with fear, flesh crawling with cold. It feels as if her bones have turned to ice.

“Two?” the thing says. “And what is it you wish me to do for this ... token?”

Aiah can hear the steel in Constantine’s voice. “I wish to put the Metropolis of Caraqui in my pocket,” he says.

“You wish me to kill?”

“Certain people. Yes.”

“Bad people?” The question sounds like a taunt. Aiah can sense the creature’s mirth.

“I believe so.”

“Three.” There is hunger in the thing’s voice.

“Two.” Firmly.

“I could kill you,” the thing offers.

Even Constantine’s teeth are chattering now. But he takes a step toward the thing, gestures with one fist.

“That would not get you what you want,” he says.

There is a moment of silence. Silver and black run through the thing’s faintly humanoid outline.

“Two,” it concedes. The voice is silky. “And when does the killing start?”

“In a few days. I will send you a message by our accustomed route.”

Aiah gives a warning cry as the creature flows toward Constantine, spreading wide its arms, or whatever it uses for arms, but it’s not an attack, it’s a kind of submission, the thing bowing down before Constantine, huddling on the concrete floor.

“I will do as you ask,” it says.

Constantine holds out a hand over the bowed form. “Do this thing for me,” he says, “and I will give you release, if you want it.”

“Perhaps,” it says, and then, “Not yet.”

“As you wish.”

And then it flows away, vanishing through the solid wall of the tunnel, and Aiah cries out in relief.

For a long moment, the only sound in the tunnel is the trickling of water. The cold fades from Aiah’s bones, and suddenly she realizes she’s wet, both from the sweat that covers her skin and from the fact that she’s sitting in the rivulet at the bottom of the tunnel. Her knees had folded and she’d slid down the concrete tunnel wall and she hadn’t even noticed.

Constantine gives a relieved sigh, then turns, sees her on the floor, and smiles. “Gone now,” he says, and offers her a hand.

Aiah isn’t certain whether her legs will yet support her, but she takes the hand anyway, allows herself to be set on her feet. She’s relieved to find them capable of bearing her weight.

The air in the tunnel is very hot. Sweat pours down her face, but her body still shudders with cold.

“Why am I sweating and shivering at the same time?” she asks.

“It’s a cold thing, isn’t it?” Constantine’s tone is light, but Aiah can tell it’s an effort. “The effect is purely mental, though ... your body continued to respond to the heat and humidity here, even though your mind was convinced it was cold.”

He takes her arm and begins to guide her to the exit. Their boots splash through water. A wave of adrenaline shivers through her body. She looks up at him, clutches at his arm.

“What was it?”

“Its kind have different names. Creature of light. Ice man. Hanged man.” He licks his lips. “The Damned. That’s the nearest description, I think.”

“A h-hanged man?” Astonishment trips up Aiah’s tongue. Hanged men are a feature of children’s stories and bad fright chromoplays, monsters that leap out of closets and bring down their victims in a spray of blood. “They’re real?”

“Oh yes. But quite rare.”

“Thank Senko.”

They reach the door, and Constantine pulls it open. Aiah staggers out into the cool air of a pump room. She wipes sweat from her face with a handkerchief and straightens her skirt. A clammy spot, where she’d sat in the water, clings to her thighs.

Constantine walks past, opens the door into the garage. Aiah follows him out. “You knew this one,” she says. “How?”

“There are people who worship hanged men, or make bargains with them. For a time —” He takes a breath, lets it out. “For a time, I belonged to such a cult. It was a period in which I had lost all faith in humanity, and in which I was seeking . . . extremes. But during that time I gained knowledge of hanged men, and what they are and desire.”

“What is it—” Aiah’s mind stumbles on the question, and she has to will it to continue. “What is it that they want?”

“To be what they once were.” They approach the limousine, and Constantine opens the door for her. She seats herself, and Constantine sits across from her. He opens the bar and pours brandy into a pair of crystal glasses.

“Have a stiff one,” he says, and offers a glass. “It’ll do you good.”

Aiah bolts the brandy and welcomes the fiery reality that burns its way down her throat. Constantine sips at his drink with more delicacy. Martinus starts the car, heads toward the ramp leading to the street.

“He was once a man, that creature,” Constantine says. “You knows about plasm’s mutagenic effects, how it can warp things, can create monsters out of ordinary animals.”

Aiah remembers the thing in the pneuma station, the ripple of silver belly scales that, in memory, now glow with the peculiar liquid sheen of the patterns that ran through the hanged man, and suddenly the brandy wants to come up. She turns away, shuddering, acid burning her throat. She forces the brandy back down.

Constantine, gazing into his glass, seems not to notice. The car spirals up the long concrete ramp.

“It can happen with people, but more rarely,” he continues. “Scholars, sometimes, or philosophers, those who live in plasm all the time, who practically bathe in it, and never notice when they slip away from matter and become a prisoner of the plasm itself. A few very powerful people, tyrants or captains of industry, people who can afford all the plasm they can consume, have been brought down that way. Some politicians, leaders, but not as often. The day-to-day realities of politics, of decision-making, provide an anchor on the world’s reality.

“And then . . .” Constantine’s deep voice turns dreamy. “And then, when they have become plasm only, their material substance gone or used up, they begin to yearn for what they once were. But they can’t manage it — they can’t work with matter any more, their very touch is hostile to life. They can kill, easily and without thought, but they can’t create, can’t touch, and life itself, the life of the warm body, becomes a dream, a yearning, an ever-increasing desire they can’t fulfill.”

An icy hand touches the back of Aiah’s neck. “So what is it they want?” she says for the second time. The car arrives at ground level, Shieldlight beckoning just ahead, promising a world of normality, safety, the company of human beings.

Constantine looks at Aiah, his eyes hard, “It wants life. To be back among living things, to know the touch of the wind, the taste of wine, the joys of the flesh. It can’t accomplish this by itself, because it’s no longer a thing of matter, and cannot work with matter but to destroy. But with the help of a capable mage — my help in this case — it can take a body, occupy it. Use it for a time.”

The brandy tries to rise past Aiah’s throat again, and she fights it back down. “And what happens to the person occupied by this thing?”

Constantine’s voice is toneless. “The body is used up; the hanged man is fatal to life in the long run. In a matter of days the body becomes a husk. And as for the victim’s soul, I suppose it goes wherever it is that souls go.”

Sadness swims through Aiah. She leans back, rests her nape against plush fabric. “And these victims?” she asks. “Who will they be?”

Constantine sighs. “Criminals, I suppose. Perhaps some of Caraqui’s utterly deserving political class. It is a sad fact of political life that once you concede the notion that certain people deserve death, it isn’t hard to find them.”

“And this cult you belonged to? What did it offer this hanged man of yours?”

“My cousin Heromë was the priest. He was also in charge of our political prisons. The hanged man did not lack for souls to eat.”

Aiah shudders. Constantine’s toneless, objective voice goes on. “Years later, at my instigation, the hanged man destroyed Heromë and his whole circle. He did not like them, you see, or the things they required of him . . . he is a distinguished personage, even among his kind. Once he was Taikoen, Taikoen the Great, the man who saved Atavir from the Slaver Mages.”

Aiah glances at Constantine in astonishment. Taikoen is one of the great heroes in all history.

“Cults all over the world worship him.” A cold little smile plays about Constantine’s lips. “Would they still if they knew what he had become? The man I most admired in the last five hundred years, and when I met him he was the all-powerful slave of Heromë, a grubby little prison warden. After Taikoen’s retirement he lost himself in plasm and now cannot live without it. You thought he came out of the wall? No, he was within the cable. That is where he lives now — he cannot survive for long outside a plasm well.”

Aiah runs fingers through her hair. Sorrow wells through her body. “I don’t know what to think,” she says.

Constantine leans forward, takes her hand between his own. He looks at her for a long moment, and Aiah sees pain and longing in his eyes. “It’s the worst thing I have ever done,” he says, “or shall do. And for some reason it comforts me that you know of it.”

There is a long silence. Aiah’s hand is warm between his palms, “I have no right to ask you, I suppose,” he says. “But will you forgive me?

Aiah licks her lips, withdraws her hand. “Will you take me to Old Shorings?” she asks.

Surprise glows in his eyes. “Right now?”

“Yes.”

He turns to Martinus and gives the order. She holds out her glass. “More brandy, please,” she says. “A piece of paper, and a pencil.”

It’s a long ride, and neither Constantine nor Aiah finds much to say. When they reach the neighborhood, Aiah guides Martinus until she finds the place she has in mind, the gray stone temple on its tiny lot. Aiah props Constantine’s notepad on her knee and writes on the thin leaf of plastic:

Let my friend have Caraqui.

She tears away the paper, takes the brandy bottle and leaves the car. Street hustlers peer alertly from doorways, but when Martinus gets out of the car to stand guard they swiftly lose interest. Aiah walks across the empty street, walks up the steps of the temple, looks up at the carvings, the plants and serpents and creatures of myth. Aiah kneels on the cold stones, feels grains of rice against her knees.

Little leaves of paper flutter in the cracks of the huge door. Faded flowers and a few small coins lie scattered on the stoop. Aiah unstops the brandy bottle and pours it across the threshold as an offering. Then she leans forward against the huge iron door, feeling rust against her forehead, and folds the paper very small and inserts it in the crack between the two metal doors.

“Whoever is there,” she says, “please forgive my friend, and give him what he wants.”

She lets more brandy trickle from the bottle and repeats her prayer many times. Her knees grow wet with brandy. When the bottle is empty, she leaves it on the stoop and walks unsteadily back to the car, sits next to Constantine, and lets him take her in his arms.

“I would like to go home now,” she says, and as the big car carries her away to Loeno she falls asleep on his shoulder.