Resolution (36 page)

‘What?’

An argument was developing between them, but there were militiamen up ahead, so Tom quelled his anger. He and Trevalkin kept their heads bent forward, and walked on quietly.

Suddenly, off to their left, the air seemed to waver and darken, and then black flames were burning, becoming a whirlpool of ink and shadow. Tom was frozen. The Blight’s other name had been Dark Fire, and the Anomaly must manifest itself in similar—

Trevalkin pulled him onwards.

The creature which moved out of the darkness was formed of metal: black iron talons and bronze flanges, and razor-edged predator wings. It seemed too heavy to fly, but it lifted into the air and sailed quickly over people’s heads, heading for an exit corridor, then passed silently out of sight.

No-one among the passers-by even blinked. Their stares were fixed ahead as they went about their business.

Trevalkin. What have you got us into?

The general population was not fully Absorbed; but the people were no longer normal, either. Just walking among them was risky. Still they continued, with Trevalkin leading the way onto a wide concourse; and here the atmosphere lightened, though the environment was thronged with people.

‘I prefer this place,’ Tom murmured.

Trevalkin nodded, then stepped onto a spiral ramp. It did not flow as expected - perhaps the occupying Anomaly considered such capabilities frivolous - so they walked up in the plebeian way, into a square-edged tunnel where people seemed normal. Most were headed in the same direction; Tom and Trevalkin tagged along.

‘You tried to provoke me deliberately, Trevalkin. Why?’

‘To keep your emotional focus. We can’t stay here for long without being affected.’

As the tunnel narrowed, pedestrians were forced to walk more tightly packed together, so Tom could not ask Trevalkin to explain fully. Was there some general hypnotic malaise surrounding them, trying to infect them?

Then, as they passed through an archway, Tom heard two burly tradesmen talking.

‘I’m a bit bloody old,’ said one, ‘for going to the bloody circus.’

‘S’posed to be great,’ replied his friend. ‘You’ll bleedin’ love it.’ Tom looked at Trevalkin, whose mouth twitched in the suggestion of a grin.

They came out into a thirteen-sided piazza where festive bells were chiming, passed beneath floating streamers announcing a holiday, and joined the slow-moving crowds. On raised platforms to either side, bands of mummers were performing masques and oddly solemn skits at which no-one laughed.

Jugglers and sword-dancers drilled their routines, the clash of blades and showers of orange sparks sounding in counterpoint to the love-poets’ murmurs. People stood aside as a group of pilgrims crossed the piazza, crawling on their stomachs instead of walking. They were either very holy or insane, Tom thought, but their discipline was admirable.

Freemen and women were wearing orange and yellow armbands around their sleeves, brightening up the drab browns and greys of tunics and robes. Trevalkin and Tom had tuned their cloaks to a lesser sheen as they walked; still, they looked like travelling traders rather than local folk.

While Tom’s poignard remained sticky-tagged at the small of his back and out of sight, Trevalkin wore long bodkins, as he had in Realm V’Delikona, enclosed in obvious forearm sheaths. The style offered interesting possibilities in augmenting forearm strikes and facilitating cross-draw attacks from unusual angles, but Tom did not approve.

‘Never use a weapon to intimidate,’
Maestro da Silva had taught Tom.
‘You’ll get killed while waving it around, by someone who’s more direct than you are.’
In phi2dao, a weapon was drawn in order to kill, preferably without the enemy’s having seen it.

Even so, Trevalkin’s blades should have been a warning to thieves. It was a surprise when a hand came snaking out of the crowd towards Trevalkin’s belt, then froze. Tom and Trevalkin both stared directly at the miscreant’s face: it was a girl, aged thirteen SY or even less. Then the girl broke away and merged back into the swirl of passers-by, surely unaware how close she had come to being skewered.

Trevalkin’s right hand was upon his left forearm, ready to draw and throw.

‘No,’ said Tom.

‘I can hit her from here. She’s in my sight.’

‘No.’

‘Too late, now. She’s gone.’

Blade-throwing is mostly for show; only a tiny percentage of knife-fighters have ever been able to work the techniques in the messy reality of combat. Trevalkin had a certain sadistic flamboyancy, but his goals were realistic and deadly.

So where’s he leading me now?

Then Trevalkin was handing cred-slivers to a vendor in return for two piezo-wafer tokens. When Tom accepted his token, it shone holo tigers and dragons: mythical beasts from the distant past.

The crowd flowed through a portal into a heptagonal auditorium with rough stone benches. Tom and Trevalkin descended to the middle tiers where they took their seats, one either side of a sloping aisle.

At the rear of the stage lay a stone block, pushed into the shadows, bearing discolorations the colour of old rust which made Tom’s face tighten in understanding. But these were relics of other, less festive occasions.

A child nearby asked his father for a drink, and the fresh innocence and simple demand cheered Tom a little.

‘Me, too,’ murmured Tom. ‘Can I have a drink?’

‘Only if you behave yourself,’ said Trevalkin, surprising Tom.

Before the sweetmead vendors with their racks of squeeze-bulbs could reach the cheaper seats, cymbals clashed and streamers of light curled through the air as glowclusters dimmed. People sat upright, their voices fading to murmurs.

The show began.

Cartwheels. Spectacular jumping kicks. Steel whips and glass blades which moaned through the air and left gleaming tracks delineating dangerous trajectories. Monomolecular edges cut dangerously close to skin.

Two female warriors, clad in orange like the male fighting-monks, whipped their swords so close to each other that fine wisps of dark hair floated to the stage.

Tom watched in awe. He saw exactly the meaning of each move, knowing the limitations as well as the athletic qualities of what he was seeing. Choreographed combat fails to deal with the Chaos-laden truth of actual conflict; without seeing the monks under those conditions, he could not tell whether they were trained to adapt.

It was the second time Tom had seen such a wu shu demonstration. On the first occasion, he had been at the Ragged School, soft and unschooled in any physical discipline, and simply awed by the spectacle without understanding what he saw. That was when he had met Zhao-ji’s uncle, and learned a little of his austere family history as part of a secret society whose history reached back through the centuries.

‘Chaos,’ muttered Trevalkin, at the spectacle of a seventy-SY-old monk lowering himself into splits.

That’ll be me some day.

It was the best Tom could hope for. At that moment he remembered the dream of his own death, the dream which had visited him only once, two Standard Years before. Tom shivered as memory swirled like cold fog:
Winds beneath a lemon sky, mu-space vessels dripping fire reflected from the rising sun, before shadows press in from all sides and squeeze the universe from existence.

Tom brought his attention back to the moment. A full-scale battle, carefully arranged, was taking place on stage, but Trevalkin was rising from his seat. He began to climb up towards the auditorium’s rear, and after a moment, Tom followed.

At the rear, a short corridor led to the men’s toilet chambers. Trevalkin was standing in the main chamber’s centre, alone. ‘The contact’s not here.’ Stress tightened his voice. ‘I think we should—’

Grasers spat through the air outside. The electric sound froze Tom, as beams lanced through the auditorium. It was a second before someone screamed.

‘Chaos!’

A wave of coldness pulsed through the air. Tom did not need to look out into the auditorium to know what was happening. Great metallic winged shapes were forming amid rotating black flames as the audience faced the sudden realization that their quotidian lives had ended, not just for the duration of an hour’s entertainment but for ever.

Then a panel at the chamber’s rear liquefied and both Tom and Trevalkin spun, crouching, blades at the ready. The man who poked his head inside was orange-clad and shaven-headed, a Zhongguo Ren monk who said: ‘Hurry, please,’ and ducked back out of sight.

Without hesitation, Trevalkin tucked down and rolled through the permeable membrane. Tom gave him half a second before following.

They were on their knees in a half-lit duct while the panel vitrified in place, leaving no sign of their passage. Already, the monk was crawling quickly but silently ahead of them, leaving Trevalkin and Tom to do likewise or stay and die.