He stepped through the arch, and a guidemech emerged from a niche to his right. It offered him a tray of assorted intoxicants, hallucinogens, and mood alterants. When he declined these, it said, “Follow please,” and rolled off down the corridor at an easy pace.
“He scents the bait,” said Remint. “He chooses as I would have chosen.”
Corean watched Ruiz Aw, who now moved along briskly behind the guidemech. His face was still unrevealing, but there was now a trace of some additional expression that disturbed Corean by its mysterious familiarity. He seemed even more elementally dangerous than when she had last seen him.
What was the difference? She glanced up at Remint’s face, lit by the greenish light of the spyscreen, and saw that Remint wore precisely the same look.
The guidemech conducted Ruiz to a large rotunda, where the lights were even dimmer than in the entrance hall. In the center of the rotunda was an artificial pool, where luminescent night eels swam beneath cerise water lilies, leaving glowing trails in the black water. The pool exhaled a scent of decay and feverish life. Far above, Ruiz sensed the presence of automated weapons emplacements, tracking the languid movements of the patrons.
“This is the Hall of Pain and Renewal,” said the guidemech, and rolled away.
Around the perimeter were a hundred or more trapezoidal openings, each of which housed a mythagogue. Some of the openings were curtained, indicating that the mythagogue was already occupied with a customer or otherwise unavailable. But most of the beings who staffed this section of the Celadon Wind sat at their doorsteps, awaiting a client. A few other potential customers wandered the perimeter, including the tall woman he had followed into the Celadon Wind.
The first mythagogue to his left was an old scar-cheeked man who bore the shoulder tattoos of a Retrantic enforcer and affected a shock of thin white braids. He glanced at Ruiz with an inquisitive expression. Ruiz looked back, waiting for the tug of recognition that he expected to feel from Remint’s personal myth-maker. He felt nothing beyond a mild revulsion.
Ruiz began to stroll the perimeter, examining each mythagogue as he passed, still wrapped in the chill purposefulness he had assumed in the fabularium’s entrance hall. Some of them met his gaze with a brightly predatory look, some looked away, unease darkening their fey eyes. He passed a spiky-haired woman of the Buffalo Wailers, a blue-scaled Dalmetrian renegade, and a marine-adapted boy with ancient eyes, floating in a giant brandy snifter of murky green fluid — then dozens of others as strange. None of them spoke to him; apparently the management considered the Celadon Wind to be an upscale place and proscribed any undignified hawking of wares.
Still, he sensed a ripple of interest following him around the rotunda, an interest that seemed to be communicated ahead of his slow ambling progress. More curtains popped open in a sudden flurry, and mythagogues craned their necks to get a glimpse of him.
This unexpected attention stimulated him to a higher level of alertness, and he felt more keenly purposeful, more his former self.
He strolled on. Most of the myth-makers seemed to take great pride in their eclectic eccentricity, as though the quality of their fables had anything to do with the originality of their fashion sense. Decadence was in vogue, Ruiz thought — tiresomely so. Some of the mythagogues winked at him, leered expressively, made silent gestures of welcome. None of them seemed to possess the sort of style that would attract the patronage of a man like Remint.
Ruiz began a second circuit of the rotunda.
Remint switched the spyscreen to a different remote. Corean saw a small man with a face prosthesis of hammered silver, who looked up with unfocused eyes and said nothing.
“He is here,” said Remint.
“How will I know him?” asked the man through his metal lips.
“How do you know me?”
The man sighed and nodded. He bent his head for a moment, so that Corean could not see him. When he raised his head, he was wearing a crude skinmask in the likeness of Remint y’Yubere.
Remint switched off the spyscreen. “Now we wait.”
Ruiz was a quarter of the way round the rotunda when a curtain drew back two doors ahead — one that had been closed on his previous circuit.
When he reached the opening and saw the mythagogue, sitting on a tall wooden stool, he felt an unpleasant shock of recognition, and skipped back a step. Above, the automated weapons shifted and whirred, alerted by his too-rapid movement.
Then he saw that it was not his enemy — it was only a small, poorly maintained cyborg, wearing a skinmask. The cyborg took no notice of him; he stared out at the pond, motionless.
Ruiz felt the attention of the other mythagogues and patrons intensify, and he felt a bit unnerved. He stepped closer and peered at the mythagogue, who continued to ignore his presence. What was the proper formula for invoking the mythagogue’s services? At first Ruiz could not remember; he had never quite understood the fascination of the synthesized myths available in the fabularia of Dilvermoon, and thus had rarely patronized them.
Then he remembered. “To whom do you speak, teller?”
The mythagogue’s face shifted toward him slightly. Ruiz realized that the cyborg was blind, an eccentric affectation indeed, when no pangalac need be sightless, except by choice.
The mythagogue spoke with casual unforced eloquence. “I speak to the wielders of the blade, to the soldiers of the night, to the keepers of propriety, to the righteous scourgers of the flesh. To those who hold murder safe in their hearts.”
Ruiz hesitated. His deepest suspicions were aroused. How could he meet a man who masked himself as Remint y’Yubere, without wondering if a trap had been set especially for him? On the other hand, could his enemies be so stupid as to assume that he would enter the mythagogue’s den trustingly? That was hard to believe; he had never been a man who attracted stupid enemies, unfortunately.
Furthermore, how could his enemies have known he would appear in exactly this place, so that such a complicated trap could be laid? For all that he thought he understood Remint, he could not bring himself to believe that his motivations could possibly be so transparent to the slayer. Why not? asked a small rebellious voice, but he suppressed it and stepped forward with a credit wafer in his hand.
“I’m such a one,” he said.
The skinmask was not animated, so there could be no expression for Ruiz to read, but he had the eerie sensation that the mythagogue smiled beneath the dead plastic. “I know,” said the man in a soft voice, and held out his hand for the wafer.
He stepped down from his stool and went inside, limping a bit, the servomotors in his legs whining. He paused with his hand on the curtain, and when Ruiz was over the threshold, the mythagogue let it fall shut.
The myth-maker gestured to a straight-backed wooden chair and settled himself on a padded bench. The little chamber was very dark, the walls hung with tapestries so faded and gray that Ruiz couldn’t tell what they depicted, though gold thread occasionally threw back a subdued glitter from the light of the single yellow lamp that burned on a small table set to the side.
A narrow door led to the mythagogue’s living quarters, and Ruiz stepped to it in one swift stride. He listened at the door for a moment, heard nothing, felt nothing.
“He’s not there,” said the mythagogue.
“Who?” asked Ruiz, the hair lifting on the back of his neck.