“Is that what their agents in the Timocracy are telling you?”
Constantine gives a brief shake of the head. “We would never deal with their agents on a matter like this—the agents make their living negotiating for reliable mercenaries; they would turn us down flat. We have approached the Escaliers directly, in occupied territory, and they have shown interest—and furthermore, we believe that their interest is genuine.”
Dread oozes through Aiah’s nerves. She shivers. “And what does this have to do with me?”
As she utters the words she feels she already knows the answer.
Constantine hesitates before he speaks, and Aiah senses the calculation in his mind. “They wish to see you, directly. To negotiate with you, receive their guarantees from you.”
“From my video persona, you mean. Or from Charduq’s Aiah, blessed of the gods and redeemer of Barkazi.” Bitterness flavors her words. “What happens when they meet the real me?”
He takes her shoulders, speaks close enough so that his words puff her cheek with warmth. “You underestimate yourself. You are intelligent and experienced, and your mission will receive the best support I can arrange.”
“And where is this mission? Lanbola, Nesca, Garshab—where?”
He hesitates. “Let me tell you first what is at stake.” She looks at him. The Adrenaline Monster plucks at her nerves. “No. Tell me where I am expected to go.”
Another moment of hesitation. He licks his lips and says, “Occupied Caraqui. Their officers cannot move freely, and they want negotiations in their area, where they can control security.”
Anger flares in her. “Where they can control security!” she mocks. “Where is my security? Great Senko, I need bodyguards even in friendly territory!”
She turns away and walks blindly into the vast room, heels clicking on polished pink granite. Constantine follows, his voice low and urgent. “If we cannot subvert the Escaliers, then we will have to try a direct assault across the security zone the Provisionals have created, and we will lose tens of thousands just crossing the zone, before we can even properly engage them. Or we can attempt Sorya’s right hook into Lanbola, and destabilize the entire region.”
He catches her, takes her shoulders again. She tries to shrug him off, fails, permits him in the end to wrap his arms around her stiff, resisting frame.
“You have created this,” she says. “You created this video image of me deliberately, and now they want this thing.”
Constantine’s low tones sound in her ear. “I did not anticipate they would demand to speak to you directly. I would not have put you at risk in this way.”
“Of course you would have.” Coarse laughter bubbles from her throat. “One must keep one’s true end in view—how many times have I heard you say it? And your goal is not love or peace but victory for the New City, and so…” She waves a hand. “It is a game, and you move a piece, and the piece is me. And even if you lose the piece, your position is stronger. And that is the way it’s always been for me, here in your game.”
There is a moment’s pause, and then she hears Constantine’s sigh, and feels the tension in him fade, the strength ease in the arms that circle her. “If you wish it,” he says, “I will tell them no, and we will try to work out something else.”
She laughs again. A bitter taste stripes her tongue. “You know me better than that,” she says. “You know I won’t want thousands of deaths on my conscience. Of course I’ll go.” She turns, looks up into his face, his guarded face.
A crackling fire, anger and resentment, burns in her heart.
“You say you want me to have my own power base,” she says. “Very well, I’ll have it. If I bring Landro’s Escaliers over, I want them—I want them here with me, and I want command of them, real command, whatever other purely paper arrangements might be made. I want Karlo’s Brigade as well. I want to be involved in any decision involving their deployment. I want Alfeg’s organization to get official backing and money, and any Barkazils he brings over to work or to fight for us—I’ll want command of them, too.”
Constantine considers this, eyes narrowed, fleshy face impassive. “Anything else?” he asks.
“I would ask for your fidelity, for something like marriage and maybe even children someday, but—” She gulps for breath. “You’d probably rather give me an army.”
He nods, as if confirming an observation he has made to himself. He bends and gives her cheek a kiss—not the kiss of a lover but, perhaps, the paternal benediction of a father.
“You have changed much since I first met you,” he says.
“For the better, Metropolitan?” she asks. “Or otherwise?”
There is a kind of sadness in his eyes. “Those sorts of judgments are beside the point. The change happened, and it has made you stronger.”
Constantine straightens, drops his arms, and walks away from her, lost apparently in his own thoughts. Aiah calls after him.
“Do I get what I want, Metropolitan?”
He hesitates, looks at her over his shoulder with a kind of surprise. “Of course,” he says. “I thought it went without saying.”
NINETEEN
Aiah looks in surprise at her own face carved in stone. It gazes down at her with a serious expression, a little furrow of concentration between the brows.
The carving is called The Apprentice, and shows a woman at a kind of crude bench covered with equipment—retorts, burners, the sort of gear that might naively be assumed to inhabit laboratories. The figure looks down into a book for a recipe as she uncertainly holds a beaker in either hand.
Last time Aiah was here, the figure had another face.
“It changed two or three days ago,” says Inaction, the dreaming sister who guides Aiah through the winding corridors. “I recognized the face when I saw it.”
“You didn’t think to call me?”
The sister looks at her. “We meditate upon the imagoes. We do not phone them.”
Aiah looks at her, feels amusement tugging at her lips. “Have you ever met one before?” she asks.
The sister’s dark-eyed gaze is guileless. She looks about twenty, with flawless, silken brown skin that excites Aiah’s envy.
“In our meditations,” she answers, “we strive to meet them all.”
Aiah turns again to the image of herself. She had returned to the Dreaming Sisters’ retreat without quite knowing why, understanding only that she was due to go into Provisional territory within a few days and might never again have the chance to wander through the ancient maze that is the Society of the Simple.
The department’s monitors had failed to discover any sign that plasm was moving into the building in large qualities. But she hadn’t seen any of the Dreaming Sisters’ plasm displays since her last visit, so perhaps they were avoiding attracting any attention to themselves.
Aiah’s image looks back at her, frowning in concentration. It occurs to Aiah to wonder how Inaction recognized her face. She and Inaction haven’t met before; Aiah’s last guide through the Dreaming Sisters’ stone mazework called herself Order of Eternity.
“How did you recognize me?” she asks. “We’ve never met.”
Inaction frowns in thought and scratches herself under the left breast through the coarse gray fabric of her shift. “I don’t know,” she says. “Perhaps I saw you in our meditations.”
The Dreaming Sisters, Aiah has learned, specialize in answers that imply a great deal but don’t actually seem to mean anything. Aiah shrugs, steps back from the stonework imago, looks at it again. “Tell me its meaning.”