“We wait,” Perra said.
Shortly afterwards, once tea had been brought, a man approached the table. He wore an elegant suit, black, with brilliant white cuffs. Sad eyes gazed at Mercy, from a patrician face. The countenance of the mysterious Dr Roke flashed briefly across Mercy’s mind, but this man did not, on second glance, bear all that significant a resemblance: it was the suit.
“Madam, forgive me. You are from the Western Quarter?”
“Yes. We’re looking for someone.”
“May I ask who?”
“We do not have a name for her. She is an alchemist.”
“Ah.” The man smiled. “Then there is only one person whom you can be looking for. She calls herself Shadow. Would you like me to introduce you to her?”
Mercy smiled. “Forgive me for my incredible rudeness, but what is in this for you?”
“I am a facilitator, you see. A number of individuals have me on commission. I effect introductions, engineer chance meetings, arrange coincidences and synchronicities. My name is Georgiou Sephardi.”
“So if you introduce us to the woman who calls herself Shadow, she will pay you?”
“If she considers you are worth meeting, yes.”
“Well,” Mercy said, after a pause. “Let’s hope that she will. Tell her that we know about the attack last night.”
Sephardi vanished into the maze of the Medina, while Mercy and Perra sipped tea. “This is going too smoothly,” Mercy said. “I don’t trust that.”
The ka managed a fluid shrug. “Such things happen with grace here.”
“So you say.” And then, because that sounded rude, she added, “I am sure you know this better than I, Perra.” The headache was coming back, like an oncoming warning of storms. Mercy frowned. Yesterday-and then, all of a sudden, she knew what was happening.
“Perra, quickly-outside!”
The ka did not question her. They ran for the door, startling the other customers of the teahouse, but it was too late. Mercy smelled an acrid, fizzy burning, heard a firework hiss, and felt an indefinable sense of wrongness that grew and grew until the explosion itself came almost as a relief. Not again… Mercy and Perra dropped under a table just outside the door and covered their heads. The world was swallowed in a billow of scarlet and for a second, Mercy thought that she had actually been blown up. But it was only the red awning of the chaikhana, torn free by the flower-blast and floating down to cover the wrecked frontage. There was a minute of intense silence, then screams. Mercy started disentangling herself from the collapsed awning, Unseen hands helped, until she was able to free herself from the weight of the material.
“Are you all right?” Sephardi did not have a hair out of place.
“Yes. Perra?” But she knew that the ka, being a spirit, would be all right.
“I am here,” Perra said.
“I lament,” Sephardi remarked, “my timing.”
“Maybe it’s not your timing. This happened to me yesterday. Are they following me around?”
Sephardi spread his hands. He was accompanied, Mercy saw now, by a woman. She was veiled: dressed in a grey tunic and silvery trousers that billowed like a bell. The veil itself covered her entire face, a gauzy blue mist, and nothing at all could be glimpsed behind it.
“This is Shadow,” Sephardi said.
“I’m Mercy Fane. This is Perra. We’ve come-” But there was a flash. Mercy, turning, squinted past the collapsed awning. A lamp hanging above the street illuminated the now-roofless interior of the chaikhana. A pool of light shone on overturned tables and utter chaos. A blossom drifted down, glowing like hot blood, and just as it reached the level of the lamp it burst silently apart, the crimson petals flaring out and setting fire to everything they touched. The awning ignited like dry tinder.
“Oh, shit,” Mercy said, retreating further into the street with the others. Bits of blazing fabric fluttered down.
The veil turned in Sephardi’s direction. “Do we not,” the woman said, “have emergency services?”
“I’m assuming that’s rhetorical,” he replied.
Shadow sighed, stretched out a hand, uttered a long liquid word and the flames subsided into ash.
The core of the blossom had embedded itself in the pavement with a soft, corrosive hiss. The glowing stamen was quivering.
“Don’t look,” Mercy said. She flung up an arm, shielding her eyes, and the thought rushed through her mind, This is too close, we’re going to get-
Her skin was suddenly flushed, her mouth filled with a dry desert heat. She could feel the ends of her hair sizzling. The afterimage of the flash, the white-hot flare of the core, still glared against her shuttered eyelids. But something was between the stamen and herself, a soft rustling wind. Shocked, her eyes snapped open to see she was enveloped in the azure gauze of the woman’s veil. Dark eyes, golden-black, heavily kohled, were staring into her own.
“Good to meet you, too, Mercy,” Shadow said, and to Mercy’s surprise, she was smiling.
They had been lucky, Mercy thought. Shadow stooped to pick up a charred curl. Perfect, the raised lines of the petal still clearly delineated, but as Shadow’s fingers closed a little, the petal disintegrated, showering into a stream of ash.
“Be careful,” Mercy warned, ”Handling those things can hurt you.”
Shadow nodded. “I’ve done it once before. I’m-good with fire.”
“So I saw.” The expression in those troubled eyes was still with her, burned onto her retina like the implosion of the core. “Your veil-”
Saved my life was one of those things better left unsaid. People could expect the honouring of obligations; you had to watch your spirit, living here.
Shadow made a negligent gesture. “It was for the benefit of both of us.”
“I think,” Sephardi said diffidently, “that perhaps we should find another teahouse.”
They followed a disconsolate crowd of those who had been in the teahouse at the time of the attack, those who had been walking by. Mercy looked at two blue faces, serenely displeased, then at a tall person in black, with a ridged and tattooed skull.
“Too many nightlighters living here,” Shadow said. She nodded in the direction of the skull. “But you can’t prevent people from going about their business.”
“I suppose not,” Mercy said. “And speaking of which… ”
“You’ll understand,” Shadow said, “that I’m reluctant to take you to my place. Besides, it’s a mess. May I suggest another chaikhana?”
“We shall be guided by you,” Sephardi told her.
Mercy was relieved that their short trip through the now-crowded streets was without further incident. People were beginning to congregate, knot, then disperse like a kind of tidal flow. Even without the aid of technology, news of the flower attack was spreading throughout the quarter. Shadow ignored covert stares and strode ahead, her veil billowing behind her.
The new teahouse was set into the wall of the Eastern Quarter. Mercy stepped inside to sudden coolness and peace. The chaikhana was spacious, with oak tables and low benches set far apart, and at the end it opened onto a balcony.
“Let’s sit,” Shadow said. Mercy followed her out onto the balcony and found herself gazing out across the expanse of the Great Desert. Dunes hummed and shifted in the tides of the desert, moving imperceptibly, but Mercy knew that if she was to look again an hour later, the landscape would have changed. A kite, in search of carrion, wheeled high above the sands. But the balcony of the chaikhana was shaded and cool.
“Here,” Shadow said to Mercy, “one is able to breathe.”
Mercy knew what she meant.
“Sit,” Shadow said, “Please. You are my guests here.”
“Thank you. By the way, they don’t have an objection to my being armed?”
“They’d consider you foolish if you were not.” Shadow ordered more tea and was still for a moment, gazing out across the sands. Then she said, “Rumour moves faster than anything. A pity they can’t harness it to drive engines.”