Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (25 page)

Steal the relic, open the files in Dr Gagarian’s head, discover what the hijackers wanted and use it against them.

The rain was falling harder now. Falling from clouds that seemed to squat about ten metres above his head, driven here and there in unfurling gusts. Hawkers were folding their blankets. Acolytes
and priests and monks scurried about, gathering possessions, pounding loose stays into the ground, ducking inside tents. Tents were closing like flowers, like fists. Tents were altering their
shapes. The tent of the Masters of the Measureless Mind extruded flaps and sealed itself up and hunkered down.

Hari joined several people in the scant shelter of a solitary pine tree. Waves slapped the beach, broke in lines of white foam. Rain billowed through the dark air. Tents flapped and strained.
The silver balloon was hauled down, settling amongst the peaks and crowns of the tents like a clumsy bird. Rain walked and seethed in water running off the white road. One by one the people under
the tree ran off in search of better shelter until only Hari was left.

He turned up the collar of his jacket, clutched it around himself. Water beaded its black brocade, dripped from its hem. His slippers were soaked through. He was wondering if something had gone
wrong, was debating whether or not he should call Rav, when he saw something moving across the dark and restless lake. A tall whirling figure that cut a foaming white groove in the waves, drunkenly
bending and tottering, wandering right and left, but steadily advancing, suddenly towering above the shoreline. Wind howled around Hari and a sudden smash of water drenched him, knocked him down.
He staggered to his feet, spluttering and coughing. A swathe of tents had been flattened, including the butter-yellow tent of the Masters of the Measureless Mind.

Hari ran across the road. He had forgotten Rav’s plan, was caught up in the moment, thinking that he could burrow under the ruin, find the altar, and replace the relic with its replica.
People were beginning to struggle from the pancaked heap of sodden cloth. Hari circled left, and someone loomed out of the pelting rain. It was Rav, gripping his shoulder, bearing down, forcing him
to his knees, leaning over him and saying, ‘My game, my rules.’

An electric shock numbed Hari from head to toe; the Ardenist’s hard fingers had pinched a nerve cluster. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.

Rav shouted into the rain and wind that he’d caught a thief, then reached into the pocket of Hari’s jacket and pulled out the fake relic and held it up. ‘Here it is.
Here’s what he stole,’ he sang out, and when the men and women came crowding up he gave Hari a shove that sent him sprawling, and tossed the relic into the air.

Someone jumped high and caught it as it fell; others seized Hari, hauled him to his feet. He tried to speak, but his tongue was a blunt knot. Men gripped his arms, a woman shouted at him, her
face thrust into his, and a clean cold spear pierced his head.

Light glowed on the blur of faces crowding in around him, sharp blue light that transmuted blowing raindrops into fugitive stars. The men let go of Hari’s arms and stepped backwards.
Several people knelt, knuckling their foreheads. Others stared gape-mouthed, sapphire sparks shining in their eyes.

A shadow stooped down. Hari flinched, saw blue highlights sliding over the fairing of a scooter, felt a wash of air as the machine settled in front of him. Rav leaned from the saddle and grabbed
his arm and hauled him aboard.

The scooter rose into the wind and rain, cut a half-circle above the tents and shot out across the lake. Hari, hunched in the shelter of Rav’s bulk, said, ‘What were you trying to
do?’

‘I improvised. After Riyya conjured that waterspout and smashed down the tent, I dived under wreckage and snatched the relic. And then it occurred to me that there was no need to pretend I
had stolen it.’

‘So why did you pretend I had?’

‘You had the replica. You couldn’t just hand it over, could you?’

‘Where is it?’

Rav held up his right hand, the relic’s crystal vial pinched between thumb and forefinger.

‘I meant the head,’ Hari said. ‘What have you done with Dr Gagarian’s head?’

His own head felt as if it had been split with an axe. A sharp stink of char seared his nostrils.

Rav said, ‘You’re sitting on it. There’s a locker under the saddle. I took it to keep it safe from the angry acolytes.’

‘There was no need.’

‘So I saw. That trick with the light was interesting. Did you mean to do it?’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Hari said.

‘No doubt it was the djinn, stepping in to save you once again. I wonder if that’s what the hijacker saw after she took down the skull feeders. A veil or shell of virtual light.
Luckily, the Masters of the Measureless Mind aren’t the kind of holy fools who give up their bioses so that they might see their god more clearly.’

‘Yes, otherwise they might have lynched me.’

‘I came back as quickly as I could. You’re angry because you think I set you up. But it was part of the trick. Your surprise, when you discovered that you were the thief and I was
the hero, played very nicely. And now we have Gun Ako Akoi’s trinket, and the Masters of the Measureless Mind think that the replica is their holy relic. Everybody’s happy. All’s
well that ends well.’

Hari was wondering about what might have happened if the djinn hadn’t conjured the shell of virtual light. Wondering if Rav had been planning to run off with the head and the relic, and
leave him to the mercy of the mob.

He said, ‘Where’s Riyya?’

‘Directly behind us.’

Hari twisted around in his seat, searched the dark sky. After a few moments, his bios vectored in on a tiny shadow rising towards them.

Rav said, ‘Shall we lose her?’

‘She knows where we’re going. And she deserves to know what Dr Gagarian knew.’

‘Once again I am reminded that you baseliners think that sentiment is a virtue.’

The two scooters flew side by side through the tattered fringes of rain clouds, crossing the dark lake and flying above the forest beyond, turning to follow a road that cut
through the trees. Hari’s bios enhanced the crepuscular night glow of the sunstrip – everything seemed to be its own ghost, pale and insubstantial. Pale road, pale trees, a scattering
of pale buildings in a clearing wheeling by, vanishing into the gloaming. The pale shadow of a bulkhead rose up, advanced with unnerving speed. Hari felt an airy rush in his blood as Rav angled
their scooter into a steep dive. The bulkhead leaned above and they dropped with a plunging jolt and shot through a square port and began to rise again.

A narrow margin of forest gave way to threadbare grassland punctuated by stands of thorny trees and crests of bare rock like the thrusting prows of ships from the long ago, ships that had sailed
the seas of Earth. The scooters flew on, travelling antispinward, a little faster than the rotation of the world city. Presently, light flared at the horizon and began to fill the skystrip.

Rav said that this sector had been one of the hunting grounds of the True optimates who had ruled Ophir at the height of their pomp. When Hari asked what they had hunted, the Ardenist pointed
off to the left. Hari saw something move in the middle distance, zoomed in, saw large, bipedal animals standing knee-deep in a meadow of ferns. Muscular hind legs and shrunken forelimbs,
paddle-tails fringed with dark feathers, feathers cresting along prominent ridges of their spines. Several stood watch, small eyes alert under bulging foreheads that were mostly bone, while the
rest grazed. His bios couldn’t identify them, but they looked a little like the animals carved into the roof beams of houses of the Nihongoni.

‘I thought all the big dragons had been hunted to extinction,’ he said.

‘They’re better than any dragon,’ Riyya said. She was flying off to their right, matching the long curves Rav that put into their course. ‘The ancestors of birds,
conjured by gene wizards from fossil genes and guesswork. One of the wonders of Ophir. We have more of Earth’s history than is left on Earth. I could show you the Taj Mahal. The pyramid of
Cheops, and the Sphinx. Ankor Watt. The Library of Alexandria.’

‘The whole dismal junkyard of history,’ Rav said.

‘It’s your past too,’ Riyya said.

‘You baseliners are welcome to it. We own the future.’

As they flew on, Riyya told Hari about the treasures of Ophir. She picted images, said that the Climate Corps had a good relationship with the Curator Corps, she could get access to places most
people never saw. They passed over random scatters of little round lakes – craters left by beam or kinetic weapons during the battle for control of Ophir, according to Riyya. And then
something rolled above the close, curved horizon. A town-sized palace hung from the overhead, conical, mostly white. Hari saw sheer walls and broad terraces. He saw flying buttresses and viaducts,
towers, a fringe of horizontal spars, slanting domes of green or blue glass, bridges spanning deep infolded crevices.

It was the home of the tick-tock matriarch, Gun Ako Akoi.

They rose towards it, floated in a long curve around its lower levels. Rows of narrow ports, a terraced garden, its lawns and clipped hedges sere and long-dead, a cluster of cubical buildings
jutting from a vertical wall, a landing field scribed with arcane hieroglyphs. Hari and Rav’s scooter leaned sideways, drifted towards a paved square. Riyya followed, and they touched down
side by side.

White roses foamed down a broad fan of steps and threw tangles of thorny runners across the square. The cool, dry air was packed with their musky scent. At the top of the steps, a square of
light glimmered in a facade of huge stone blocks.

Rav hinged up the saddle of his scooter and lifted out the kitbag and handed it to Hari, then turned to Riyya and told her that she couldn’t enter the palace. Looming over her, smiling his
barbarous smile, saying, ‘Gun Ako Akoi stands at the head of a long lineage that includes Dr Gagarian. She is very old and very paranoid. By any normal measure quite insane. No one sees her
without an invitation, and I confess that I forgot to tell her about you.’

‘Tell her now,’ Riyya said, fists on hips, glaring up at the Ardenist. ‘Tell her that I’m coming in with you.’

‘That isn’t how it works,’ Rav said. ‘I made a bargain with her. The relic in exchange for access to the files in Dr Gagarian’s head. An audience of two. The terms
aren’t flexible.’

Riyya looked at Hari. He felt embarrassment and pity, and said, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m sorry.’

Something hardened in Riyya’s gaze. ‘That’s how it is,’ she said. ‘You shook me down for information. Used my talent for weathermaking. And now you want to get rid
of me because you don’t need me any more.’

‘Wait here if you like,’ Rav said. ‘But if I were you, I’d go back to the Corps. Go back to your mother. This was never really about you or your father anyway. He was, I
regret to say, collateral damage.’

‘I’ll tell you everything that happens,’ Hari told Riyya. ‘Everything. You’ve earned it.’

‘
Earned
it?’

Hari blushed. ‘I mean you deserve to know. As much as I do.’

‘Gun Ako Akoi is expecting us, and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’ Rav said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hari said again, and shrugged the kitbag over his shoulder and followed the Ardenist up the ruined staircase, picking his way between stretches of broken stone and
tangles of roses towards a square doorway framed by massive pillars carved with slaughterhouse scenes. Naked bodies writhing under the blows of armoured troopers. Hacked limbs, spilled viscera, a
trooper in a horned helmet holding up a severed head. The crude, brutal realism of True art. This is this.

A long corridor stretched away inside, stone walls hung with red silk banners that shivered and shimmered as Hari and Rav walked past. Tiny lights hung at different heights in the air. Lights
burned at the feet of statues that stood in recesses, painting highlights and shadows on folds of cloth and straps, on muscles and fluted armour.

‘We wouldn’t be here without Riyya’s help,’ Hari told Rav.

‘She was conveniently to hand, but we could have managed without her.’

‘Is that what we are to you? Tools to be used and discarded?’

Hari was thinking again of the trick that Rav had played on him. His little dominance games.

‘You feel sorry for her because you share a trauma,’ Rav said. ‘In other words, you feel sorry for yourself.’

‘You really don’t know much about people, do you?’

‘I know that your sympathy is temporary, that you will forget about it once you discover what Dr Gagarian stored inside his head. Don’t worry about the feelings of the little
weathermaker. She’ll get over it. And don’t worry about them, either,’ Rav said, as small figures emerged from the edges of red silk banners and stepped out into the corridor.

They were child-sized manikins, dressed in antique uniforms. Scarlet jackets, blue jackets, ornamented with gold braid and tasselled shoulder pads and sashes and starburst badges. Belts hung
with miniature swords and pistols and coiled whips, trousers with narrow stripes down the outseam, puffed breeches, polished knee-high boots with jangling spurs. One small figure was clad in a
white pressure suit whose backpack emitted a jet of steam at every other step. Another, its face painted silver, wore a riveted corselet and a conical cap with a kind of chimney or spout.

‘What are they?’ Hari said.

‘Aspects of Gun Ako Akoi,’ Rav said. ‘Her familiars and companions. They’re mostly harmless, but don’t make any sudden or threatening moves. Be polite.’

‘We are her guests. Of course I’ll be polite.’

Escorted by this miniature army, Hari and Rav entered a huge cylindrical shaft. Soft lights glowed beneath a floor of translucent plastic; a stair spiralled around the curve of the wall, rising
into darkness high above. The little army of mismatched dragoons and paladins gathered at the foot of the stair, looking up expectantly, and a shadow detached from other shadows high above: a
womanly figure descending turn after turn, accompanied by a loose halo of firefly lamps and small machines sustained by gauzy wings.