City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) Read online

  And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking: a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.

  Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!

  The Burning Man had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.

  Twenty-five thousand dead. Including the mage. Several thousand soldiers. The rest civilians.

  Aiah, in the coup’s headquarters, had watched it happen, had tried to stop it.. . too late.

  Her fault. She had provided the plasm.

  Come to mourn the dead!

  There are people hanging, she sees, from the ruined buildings. Hanging in what look like sacks, feet sticking out the bottom, the sacks swinging free on lines secured to broken rooftops. They are not dead people, not casualties—they have hung themselves there since the burning.

  People gone mad? Mourners? Aiah cannot tell—they are all too far away.

  Blowing soot brings tears to Aiah’s eyes. She dabs at them with her sleeve.

  Then fantastic architecture of the Aerial Palace appears on the horizon, all swoops and spirals like the path of a falcon traced through the air. Shieldlight shimmers off the arabesques of the building’s collection web, bronze patterns set into the building’s exterior and designed to absorb and defuse any plasm attack, defense and ornament in one. The burnished bronze adds lovely bright accents to the building’s design, but its defense aspect failed drastically—the building is scarred, pocked by machine guns and punctured by rockets. Plastic sheeting is tacked up over shattered windows. The Keremaths lived here, and they died here, too. When the assault teams fought their way up the stairways they found only corpses.

  Jewels appear in the air behind the Palace. An advertisement for diamonds.

  Surprise moves through Aiah as she sees people hanging here as well, dangling from sacks set into niches in the building. When she comes close, however, she sees they are not real people, but statues.

  A mystery. When she finds an opportunity she will ask.

  The colossal structure is built on a raft made of several pontoons, and the motor launch drives between two pontoons into a narrow, watery alley lit with bright sodium floods both above and below the water. Aiah looks down into the milky water for dolphins and finds none.

  The motor launch pulls into a slip alongside other, equally flamboyant craft.

  The soldier/steward jumps onto the floating pier and holds out a hand.

  “This way, miss.”

  There are soldiers patrolling up and down the quay in dark gray uniforms and helmets—Constantine’s Cheloki again. Constantine isn’t trusting the local troops that had actually captured the place: they’d changed sides once, and could again.

  There are probably telepresent mages scoping the place as well. It would be the safe thing to do.

  The door leading into the pontoon, Aiah sees, is an airlock, but it doesn’t look as if the heavy steel portal has been shut in a long time. Inside is a gold-rimmed desk where Aiah is checked in and given a badge.

  “Someone is coming down to escort you,” Aiah is told.

  The someone appears a moment later, and she recognizes him and smiles. He doesn’t smile back: he looks as if she’s a problem he doesn’t want.

  “Mr. Martinus,” she says.

  "Miss Aiah.”

  He is a huge man, one of Constantine’s bodyguards, not only trained for war but bred for it. His genes are twisted to produce a massive, muscled body and catlike reflexes. His face looks like a helmet, eyes sunk beneath protective plates of bone. Heavy slabs of callus ridge his knuckles.

  “Welcome to Caraqui,” he says.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Martinus escorts Aiah into the elevator and presses the lever. There is a smell of burning that lodges in the back of Aiah’s throat, a souvenir of the fighting. The elevator doesn’t go straight up, but swoops as it rises to match the building’s architecture: the Aerial Palace, for all its extravagance, is a generator of plasm, built to distill the essence of mage-power. Its alloy structure is a maze of careful, intricate alignments, intended to take advantage of geomantic relationships that increase plasm generation.

  The elevator doors open. The deep wine-red carpet is plush and the walls are paneled with dark wood— genuine wood!— broken with diagonal stripes of brightly patterned tile and solid gold wall fixtures in the shape of birds in flight. A percentage of the latter seem to have been torn from the walls by looters.

  The corridor is blocked at regular intervals by sliding glass doors set into polished bronze frames. The doors open automatically on approach, though Aiah sees that they can be locked if necessary. Crosshatched bronze wire winks from inside the glass. It is part of the building’s defense system: the huge Palace is divided into sealed compartments to prevent a single attacking mage from raging through the whole building.

  Martinus opens a paneled door and ushers her in.

  “Wait here, please.”

  Aiah steps into the room. "How long will I have to wait?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Martinus closes the door. Aiah looks about her. More wood paneling, gold-framed mirrors, two huge oval windows miraculously undamaged by war. The room is intended for meetings: there’s a huge kidney-shaped table— more wood!— and metal-and-leather chairs, gold frames with luxurious brown calfskin cushions. Even the ashtrays, laid out two-by-two down the length of the table, are solid gold.

  The burning scent is here as well, like embers smoldering in the back of the throat, and it won’t go away.

  Outside, a peregrine dives past the windows, a swift dark streak against the opalescence of the Shield. Aiah steps to one of the windows and looks out, hoping to find the falcon against the backdrop of the city. She doesn’t see it— perhaps it’s already sitting on a ledge somewhere, eating the pigeon it’s just caught.

  The room projects out from the Palace and gives Aiah an exemplary view of the world-city, the buildings and towers and water-lanes that go on forever, unbroken to the flat ocean horizon. One of the green aerial tramcars floats in midair between two distant towers. I am on the water, she thinks, having to remind herself of the fact ...

  The sky blossoms with a giant plasm-image, the stern face of the actor Kherzaki hovering over the Caraqui, his expression commanding. An advertisement for the chromoplay Lords of the New City, based on Constantine’s early life and career. Fire-petals unfold beside the image, become words burning in air.

  See it now.. ., the sky commands.

  An advert, Aiah wonders, or a command from the ruling triumvirate? Should it be See it now... or else? The door opens behind her, and she gives a start and spins, a brief giddy disorientation eddying through her inner ear . . . and as the whirling stops the false, burning mage in the sky is replaced with the real Constantine, a far more dangerous commodity. He looks almost respectable in modest white lace, black pipestem pants, and a black velvet jacket, and Aiah knows right away that her having come here is a mistake. Her heart sinks.

  He doesn’t love her. They had been lovers, yes, but that was an accident, the chance result of a combination of unreproducible circumstances, a particular time, a particular place, a particular urgency ... If he gives her anything it will be because of some horrid sense of obligation, not because he wants her here, or has any real use for her.

  “Miss Aiah," he says, and approaches. The voice is baritone, a rumble that vibrates to her toes. Aiah remembers— remembers in her nerves, remembers deep in her bones— the way he moves, the sense of power held barely but firmly, consciously, in check, strength mixed oddly with delicacy.

  “We find ourselves in the
Owl Wing,” Constantine says. Irony glints in his voice as he steps around the big table. “Those windows” — gesturing— “are supposed to be the eyes of an owl.”

  Aiah is tall, but Constantine is taller, broad-shouldered, with powerful arms and a barrel chest. His skin is blue-black, and his hair is oiled and braided and worn over the left shoulder, tipped with the silver ornament of the School of Radritha. He is over sixty years of age, but plasm rejuvenation treatments have kept his body young and at the peak of health. His face is a bit fleshy, a suggestion of indulgence that serves to make him more interesting than otherwise, and his booted feet glide over the thick carpet without a sound.

  The deep voice rolls on, imitating the clipped delivery of a tour guide. “We also have the Raptor Wing,” he says, “the Swan Wing, with its luxury apartments, and the Crane Wing. . . .” His eyes never leave hers, his intent mind almost visible behind them, clearly considering subjects more vital than a verbal tour of the palace.

  The voice trails off as he comes within arm’s reach. There is a touch of caution in his fierce glance, a sense again of something withheld. A decision, perhaps. Or judgment. Or both.

  “May I ask why you are here?” he says.

  Aiah’s heart is a trip-hammer in her throat. Mistake, she thinks, mistake.

  “To work, I suppose,” she says.

  He smiles, and Aiah concludes it’s the right answer. A sudden wave of relief makes her dizzy.

  He opens his arms and folds her in them. His scent swirls through her senses, and she realizes how much she’s missed it.

  Absurd to care so much, she thinks. Constantine is a great figure, a part of something huge, much bigger than even he— he does not belong even to himself, let alone to her.

  Aiah tells herself this, and sternly.

  But her lecture has nothing to do with her longings. Her longings are self-contained, and happy within themselves.

  Through the embrace Aiah can feel Constantine’s weight shifting slightly, a sign of restlessness. He is not a notably patient man. She releases him, steps back.

  Still he watches her, fierce intelligence afire within the gold-flecked brown eyes. “The police?” he says. “Were they after you?”

  “Yes," she says, then, “No. Maybe.” She shrugs. “They knew I was a part of it somehow, but I don’t know if they could prove it. They had me under surveillance.”

  “You got away without trouble?”

  “I got away." She hesitates. “I had some help. I think. It was easier than I expected.”

  “What of your young man? Gil?”

  She straightens her shoulders, steels herself against the threat of sorrow.

  “Over,” she says.

  “And your job at the Plasm Authority?”

  “I wired them and told them I was taking time off.” She shrugs. “I don’t know why I didn’t resign outright.”

  There is amusement in his glance. “You are cautious, Miss Aiah. Wise of you, not to quit until you discover if you have a new job waiting.”

  She looks at him. “And do I?”

  “I think I have one that will suit your talents.” He puts his hands in his jacket pockets and begins to prowl around the table, his restless movement an accompaniment to the uneasy movement of his thought.

  “You know that the last government was worse than bad,” he says. “They were corrupt beyond . . . beyond reason.” He waves a big hand. "Even granted that they were thieves, that they wanted only enrichment and perquisites . . . the scope of larceny that they permitted, against their own metropolis, was irrational. The amount of plasm stolen is staggering. It constituted a vast plundering of their own power, a threat to the security of their own state of which they seemed unaware. Well.” He plants a fist on the table and looks at Aiah with a defiant glare. "Well, I am not so blind, not so unaware. The theft of this most singular public resource must stop. But what force do I have to enforce any new edicts—or even the old ones?”

  He shrugs, adjusts the position of one of the gold ashtrays, begins to pace again. “My soldiers are not suitable to police work. The local authorities are as corrupt as their former masters, and it is hopeless to expect anything from them until years of reform have done their work. For this purpose I must build my own police force, my own power base. But the New City movement here is limited to a few intellectuals, a few discussion groups—I have no cadre, no organized group of followers ready to step into place. And ...” He looks up at Aiah, eyes challenging hers, and she feels ice water flood her spine.

  “You,” he says. “You will build this force for me. You have found plasm thieves in the past, and in my service you were a plasm thief. I wish you to find these thieves and return their power to the service of the state.”

  Aiah blinks at him across the table. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or simply to be appalled by the suggestion.

  “Metropolitan?” she asks. “Are you sure it’s me you want?”

  Cold amusement enters his glance. “Of course,” he says. “Why not?”

  “I’m a foreigner, for one thing.”

  “That’s an advantage. It means you’re not part of the corrupt structure here in Caraqui.”

  “I’ve never done police work.”

  “You will have people, qualified people, to do the work for you. But I want you in charge. I need someone I can trust heading the department.”

  “I’m twenty-five years old!” she says. “I’ve never run anything like this in my life.”

  He gives her a sharp look. “You have worked within a government department concerned with plasm regulation. You know where it went right, went wrong. You studied administration at university.” He assesses her with his gold-flecked eyes, then nods. “And I have faith in your abilities, even if you do not. You have never disappointed me, Miss Aiah.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start looking for plasm thieves.”

  Constantine bares his teeth. “Start looking in my office. My waiting room is full of people offering me bribes.” He smiles. “I will give you a list.”

  “I —”

  “And the Specials— the old political police— their records should be valuable. The instant the fighting was over, Sorya led a flying squad to their headquarters to seize their files. The records belong to us now, and . . .” Constantine gives a feral smile. “They’re very useful.”

  Aiah’s spirit sinks at the thought of Sorya, Constantine’s lover— or rather, his official lover.

  “Would I have to work with Sorya?” she says. “Because...” Words fail her. “Well, I don’t think she likes me.”

  A touch of cold disdain twists Constantine’s mouth. "It is in both your interests," he says, “to cooperate on this project.”

  “Yes,” patiently, “I’m sure.”

  Constantine’s restless prowling has brought him around the table again, standing next to Aiah. He picks up one of the gold ashtrays, holds it in both hands. “The government will announce an amnesty for plasm thieves,” Constantine says. “A month or so. It will take at least that long for you and your team to set up operations, consolidate your files, make a few preliminary investigations. And after that—” He smiles down at her, suddenly warm. “You have always exceeded my expectations, Miss Aiah. I have no reason to believe this will be different.”

  Aiah sighs. “Yes," she says. “If that’s what you want.”

  “Gangsters, Miss Aiah,” Constantine reminds. “What in Jaspeer you called the Operation. Here they are the Silver Hand, and they are a threat to us and to the New City, and they must be destroyed. Destroyed completely. And it is best to do it as soon as possible, before the Handmen make ...” He frowns. “Inroads. Inroads into the new structure.”

  Aiah thinks of the Operation, the street captains with their stony, inhuman eyes and their utter, perfectly human greed. Their dominance was difficult to avoid; they had injured her family, and her hatred for them had burned long. Damn Constantine for reminding her.

  “I’ll do it, if
that’s what you want,” Aiah says, “but only if you want it really done.”

  His brown eyes challenge hers. “I said destroyed. Did I not?”

  She nods. Fists clench at her sides, nails digging into palms. “Yes,” she says. “I can do that.”

  He looks down at the gold ashtray in his hands, and her gaze follows his. His massive hands and powerful wrists have twisted the ashtray, turned it into a half-spiral of yellow metal, all without visible effort. He holds it up and smiles.

  “Too malleable,” he comments. “I find myself disliking the useless ostentation in this place more and more.”

  Aiah looks at him. “I will bear that in mind, Metropolitan.”

  A knowing smile dances about his lips. His arm flies out, and the ashtray gives a little metallic keen as it skids across the tabletop. It strikes another ashtray with a clang and knocks it to the carpet before coming to a halt, spinning lazily on the polished wood.

  “I will find you an office,” Constantine says. He takes her arm, guides her to the door. “We can postpone discussions of salary, and so forth, for the moment. Budgets,” he smiles, “are in flux. But I will assign you an apartment here in the Palace. I want you close by.”

  His hand is very warm on her arm. Close by, she thinks, yes.

  “Congratulations on your revolution, Metropolitan,” she says.

  Constantine opens the door. “We have had only a change in administration,” he says. “The revolution is yet to come.”

  "Congratulations, anyway.”

  “Thank you,” he says, and smiles as she passes through the door.

  LIFE EXTENSION

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH LIVING FOREVER?

  REASONABLE TERMS—PRIVACY ASSURED

  Constantine leaves Aiah to underlings who don’t quite know what to do with her. But by the end of first shift Aiah has an office in Owl Wing. It has a receptionist’s office (sans receptionist), a rather nicely finished metal desk complete with bullet holes, and a communications array that doesn’t work. An Evo-Matic computer sits in the corner, brass with fins, but it requires a three-prong commo socket and the office isn’t wired for them. The plastic sheeting tacked up over the window booms with every gust of wind.