Being around Constantine had left Aiah with expensive tastes, tastes at variance with the thrifty habits of a lifetime, but then Constantine had also left Aiah with money in a bank account in Gunalaht.
She has spent a lot of money this service shift, almost a month’s wages at her old job in Jaspeer. She’d realized that she needed new clothing—she’d fled Jaspeer with only the clothes on her back, and bought only a few items in Gunalaht on her way to Caraqui—and so she’d crossed one of the graceful arched bridges leading from the Palace on a shopping expedition.
It was an expensive part of the city. When she handed over her checktube in order to pay, it required a certain effort of will.
But at least she will be able to dress as befits her station, whatever that turns out to be.
The waitress brings Aiah the complimentary glass of wine and takes her empty glass. “Another round!” someone shouts. The voice is loud and male, and followed by cheers.
“Another round?” the waitress asks.
“Not yet.”
Aiah sips the wine, and a tingling taste of apples and ambrosia explodes across her palate. A young couple—both in subdued lace and velvet, the man in black, the woman in violet—struggle through the crowd and dump a pair of heavy briefcases under the bench next to Aiah’s table.
“I can’t believe they let him go,” the man says. “After all the people he disappeared.”
“He probably knows something,” the woman says. “Something about Drumbeth or Parq or someone else in the new government.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me.”
The woman smiles thinly. “Are you growing cynical about our new government already?”
“I am a good citizen,” the man says, “and will be pleased to support the revolution if it will support me to a promotion.”
“Plenty more where that came from!” roars the man buying drinks. More cheers. He comes into sight, dancing clumsily in hobnailed military boots. He’s wearing a uniform that Aiah doesn’t recognize, but she gathers from its ostentation that he ranks high. The tunic is unbuttoned, revealing a broad stomach and a shirt stained with wine, and he hasn’t shaved in days. He waves a bottle of wine in one hand and a checktube in the other.
“Let’s dance!” he bellows, and makes a bearlike pirouette. The couple next to Aiah watch with clear distaste.
Aiah half-raises her glass to her lips. The officer staggers, recovers, looks up at Aiah with pale blue eyes…
The hair on Aiah’s neck rises. Ice floods her veins. The blue eyes stare back at her in a terrifying moment of mutual recognition.
The man staggers again, recovers, then turns abruptly and heads for the door. The crowd gives a good-natured groan of disappointment as he stalks out. He wanted to be anonymous, and Aiah has somehow spoiled his fun.
Aiah feels beads of sweat dotting her scalp. Her heart throbs in her throat.
Ice man. Hanged man. The damned.
Taikoen, Constantine’s creature.
Aiah could tell the couple seated next to her that the officer, whoever he is, hasn’t been set free. He’s gone, obliterated, and soon his body will follow.
The hanged man is a creature of plasm, trapped in the pulse of fundamental energy, and so hostile to life, to matter, that he’s cut off from it, from the comforts of humanity or the distractions of the flesh… he can’t escape the single elemental fact of his own existence.
Not without the help of a first-rate mage.
Constantine had put the hanged man in the officer’s body, had sent him lurching out into Shieldlight to seek his pleasures. Thus was the creature rewarded for helping to overthrow the Keremaths.
The hanged man, in the long run poisonous to life, would wear out the officer’s body within a matter of days. The man would be found dead, and the new government would not be blamed. And Taikoen would slip back into the plasm mains, into the heart of the power that gave him life, and wait for his next victim.
Aiah looks down at the wineglass she’s half-raised. Her hand is trembling and the wine splashes over her hand and wrist. She firmly places the glass back on her table.
She wants to leave the bar and flee back to the Palace, but for all she knows the hanged man is still outside, and she doesn’t want to encounter him.
Best wait for her meal, she decides.
She wonders if it will taste like anything but ashes.
SNAP! THE WORLD DRINK LIFE IS BETTER WITH A SNAP! IN YOUR FINGERS
It’s almost sleep shift before Aiah gets back to the Palace. Her room, clean and smelling of paint, awaits her, antiseptic as a room in a hotel.
The walls are bare in the bedroom—all mirrors, pictures, and ornaments have been taken down while the paint dries. Aiah begins to put them back up, but several are chromo-graphs of people—the former occupant, or his family or friends—and Aiah puts these in a closet designed as a pocket garden, with buckets of loam and grow lights but with nothing planted, presumably because the former occupant could afford to buy vegetables instead of growing them.
She goes to her bag, takes out her icon of Karlo, and puts it on the wall.
With its lacy frame of cheap tin, the icon looks incongruous on the wall of the luxury suite, but Aiah finds it comforting. Karlo is her immortal, the hero of the Barkazils—the great first leader of the Cunning People, who man who refused the Ascendancy because it was not granted to all, and was thus condemned to remain with his people when the Malakas, the Ascended, built the Shield as a barrier between themselves and the planet’s teeming billions…
Aiah walks toward the terrace doors. Bronze wire in a diamond pattern is sandwiched between the glass plates of the doors, part of the building’s defense system, and she gazes through the gleaming diamonds at the Shield, the world’s opalescent shell, which provides light and heat but which is also the wall of a prison, at once the world’s savior and warder.
Karlo had tried to prevent the Shield from going up and failed, and that was both his tragedy and the world’s. And in the thousands of years since nothing, fundamentally, had changed: the sky was barred, no human had Ascended, and all was pointless, or folly.
Until Constantine. With him, perhaps, the world could change—Aiah could see in him the blend of ideas, desire, vision, talent, ambition, brilliance, and world-reaching passion that offered the possibility of change. // the New City comes into being, he told her once, then any sacrifice—anything—is justified.
He saw no hope elsewhere. He desired liberation, for others as well as for himself, liberation from the archaic systems that had ruled the world since before Karlo’s day, and—an ambition expressed only in his powerful whisper—ultimately liberation from the tyranny of the Shield.
Aiah thinks of Taikoen, the hanged man, reeling through the floating districts of Caraqui in the body that Constantine gave him, and she tastes the bile that rises in her throat.
What could justify Taikoen? she wonders.
Steel firms her thoughts. She could justify him, she thinks. If she is true to her new life, if her department can do what it was designed to do, if she can break the hold the Handmen have on the people and liberate the stolen plasm for Constantine to use to build the New City……
Only then, she thinks, is a monster like Taikoen justified.