“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.