She looked up through a cloud of grey, moonlit dust. The top half of the apartment block had disappeared. Most of it had fallen into the street in front, entirely blocking it and burying the lobby doors and the ancient steam car under a ten-metre-high pile of dust-clouded rubble; there was no sign of Feril.
She tried going back the way she had come, but rubble filled the dark corridor, blocking the way to the office; her little torch made a white cone in the dry, throat-coating dust. She went back out, coughing and choking, and clambered over the rubble towards the doorway where the figure had been crouching.
Whoever it had been, her shot had killed them; the metal and plastic chest bore only a small puncture mark near its centre, but there was a sticky red mess a metre up the wall behind where the person had been crouching and a slowly advancing puddle of deep; dark-red was making its glistening way across the dust and debris-strewn floor of the doorway, its thickly gleaming surface picking up little particles of drifting, coating dust as it moved.
She kicked aside pieces of rubble and pulled at the figure’s head.
The head/helmet came away after she gave it a half-twist.
A man. At first, with an odd sense of relief, she thought that she didn’t recognise him.
But then she took another look at that youthful but now slack face, and with a feeling of sadness that became anger and then a kind of despair she recognised Keteo.
She was unsure whether she wanted to cry or to punch that smooth, boyish, dead face. Then just as she was about to shove the android-head helmet back over the young ex-Solipsist’s head, she saw something glint at the collar of the olive T-shirt he wore.
She drew the thin chain out.
On the end of it hung a small planet-and-single-moon locket, the symbol of an intern-grade Huhsz Lay Novice.
She looked into the youth’s dead eyes again, then let the trinket drop back to his chest. She stood up and let the hollow android head fall beside him in the doorway.
A large truck drew up in the street behind her, wheels skidding through the glass and stone wreckage in front of the main rubble heap. The truck’s lights picked out the dust-shrouded remains of the building. Two androids jumped out of the vehicle and stood looking at the pile, then moved to a section of it and quickly started to pick up lumps of the fallen masonry and throw it behind them, excavating a trench in the debris.
Sharrow left Keteo lying in the doorway and walked over to the two toiling androids, keeping out of the way of the bits of rubble they were sending flying back behind them. Another truck appeared at the end of the street and roared towards the wreckage. One of the androids stopped working when it saw her.
“You must be Lady Sharrow,” it said. It paused. “I have told Feril you are alive and apparently well.”
“You mean it’s alive in there?” she said incredulously, pointing at the huge pile of rubble as the second truck stopped and half a dozen androids jumped out holding construction equipment.
“Yes,” the android told her as it stepped aside to let two larger androids get at where it had been excavating. “Feril is under the car, between the axles, and although trapped and a little dented is in no obvious immediate danger.”
She looked up through the clearing dust at what was left of the apartment block; dark, glassless windows revealed only a shell behind. The top four storeys had either fallen into the street or collapsed down inside the rest of the building. Timbers stuck out of the rubble like broken bones. One white chunk of plaster lay near her foot, its flowers and trellis-work all cracked and coated grey. One of the androids working at the wreckage threw away something that might have been a piece of the old steam car’s slatted roof. She shook her head.
“Tell Feril,” she said to the android who was still standing looking at her, “that…” She shrugged and shook her head and then sat down on the dusty rubble and put her shaking hands over her head as she half-said, half-moaned, “I’m sorry…”
“Sharrow? Thank the gods you’re alive. You have no idea how difficult it is getting reliable information out of that city. Are you all right?”
“Just fine. How are you, Geis?”
“I’m well.”
“So?” she said. “You left a message; what is it?”
“Yes I did, and thanks for calling back.” The flat image on the old wall-phone in what had once been Vembyr’s Central Post Office waved a hand dismissively. “But dammit, Sharrow, I’m concerned for you. For the last time, please let me help you. I’m still at your service.”
“And I still appreciate it, Geis,” she told him, looking at the walls of the old curtained booth to escape the intensity of those staring eyes. “But I still have ideas of my own I want to pursue.”
Geis looked uncertain. “But Sharrow, whatever your plans might be, can they be more dependable, any safer than accepting my help?”
She shrugged. “Who can say, Geis?”
A pained look passed over his face. “I was sorry to hear about Cenuij Mu, but at least the others are still alive. If not for yourself then for their sake, reconsider.”
“We’ve thought it all through, Geis. We know what we’re doing.”
Geis sat back, shaking his head. He sighed, fiddling with something on the desk in front of him. “Well, I don’t know; now we have Breyguhn refusing to leave the Sea House.” He looked up. “If you want, I might be able to have her taken from there, get her away from its influence to somewhere they can try to make her well again.” He sounded eager. “Shall I do that?”
Sharrow shook her head. “Not on my account. If she’s happy, let her stay.”
Geis almost looked amused for a moment. “ ‘Happy’?” he said. “In that place?”
“I believe it’s always been a relative term.” She shrugged. “And maybe that’s where she feels she can best come to terms with Cenuij’s death. Anyway, as far as I understand it, it wasn’t a once-only offer by the Sad Brothers; she’s free to go at any time.”
“Oh yes,” Geis said, playing with the pen on his desk. “But it can’t do her any good, stuck in there.”
“It’s her choice, Geis.”
Geis looked at her levelly for a while. He seemed sad and tired. “Choice,” he said heavily. A small smile disturbed his face. “We all think we have so much of that, don’t we?”
She looked away for a moment. “Yes, terrible old world, isn’t it?” She glanced at the time display. “Look, Geis, I have to go. I’m meeting the others. I appreciate your offer, I really do, but let us try to do this the way we know best.”
He gazed out of the screen at her for a while, his eyes moving about her image as though trying to fix it in his mind. Then his shoulders drooped a little and he nodded. “Yes. You were always so determined, so hard, weren’t you?” He smiled and took a deep breath. “Good luck, Sharrow,” he said.
“Thanks, Geis. And to you.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then just nodded. He reached out. The screen in front of her went grey, leaving her alone in the darkened booth.
In the grand ballroom of the east wing of house Tzant that winter there was a merry-go-round. It sat in the centre of the huge room’s ancient wooden map-floor, rotundly magnificent, gaily painted, flag-bedecked and glitteringly competitive with the extravagantly carved gilt mirrors and enormous sparkling chandeliers of the ballroom. The most splendid chandelier of all, which normally hung like an incandescent inverted fountain in the centre of the room, had been removed to one of the stables to make room for the merry-go-round. The fairground ride ran on electricity and made a rich humming noise as it revolved. Sharrow liked that noise more than the music of the organ which usually played as the merry-go-round spun.
There were eighty different animals on the ride, all life-size and mythical or extinct. She usually rode on the trafe, a fierce-looking extinct flightless bird nearly three metres high with a serrated bill and huge claw-feet.