The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) (8 page)

The Lord High
Protector looked
down across the rooftops of the Holy City State. In the perpetual sandy dusk,
even at midday, the grey tenements of the periphery remained foggy and
indistinct. He looked down with eyes that had never seen a painting, never read
a poem, never gazed down the nave of a cathedral. He looked down on the massed
grey towers and heavy spires, the mirror glass and concrete blocks of
Providence, and saw an impregnable seat of power and glory. So long—his
brows drew together—so long as there was no enemy within.

The Protector’s thoughts did not turn to Deborah
who, as far as he knew, was safely locked away, and, he was certain, had no
clue as to her power. Nor did they evoke Principal Anastasias who loathed him
to the extent of wishing a mouldering heap of dog fur in his place. The Serpent
Witch was always there, of course, but the Hemisphere would keep her and hers
out. So long—he repeated to himself—so long as there was no traitor
within.

The door flew open, jolting the Protector out of
his reverie. He swung round in a fury, just in time to see the startled look on
his wife’s face disappear and her usual cat-who-got-the-cream expression appear
in its place.

“So this is where you’re hiding!”

“These are the Protector’s official apartments,
madam, where else would you have me work?” His voice was icy, suspicious. “Tell
me your business, then leave.”

Selene glided across the room and looked out across
the city. “Tremendous view you have. What a shame there’s nothing worth looking
at.”

“You must have been expecting to find something of
interest, my dear. And it wasn’t the view from the window.”

Selene turned and let her fingers riffle through
the papers on the Protector’s desk. She picked up a sheet covered with figures
and glanced lazily around the room at the monitors showing street scenes,
temples, and office interiors. Her fingers crumpled the edge of the paper, and
her eyes flicked to the screen of the laptop left open on the desk. The dark
eyes widened. The Protector’s hand slammed the laptop closed, and Selene let
out a startled squeak.

“Found what you were looking for, my dear?” the
Protector hissed.

 
“You
could have trapped my fingers in that thing, whatever it is!” She waved her
hand vigorously in front of her face, as if to stave off the vapours. The
Protector would have laughed had he not been so outraged. Selene turned to face
him, the vapours gone and a cajoling light in her eyes.

“I only came to remind you the director of
Providence Soy Processing is coming to dinner, so not to work too late.” She
placed a hand on the Protector’s collar and ran it down his lapel. “You know
you have a tendency to forget your social engagements.” Her mouth formed a
rosebud pout. The cold glitter of the Protector’s eyes did not soften. The
silence lingered; tension filled the stuffy air. Selene gave an almost
inaudible sigh and let her hand drop to her side.

“Well I at least intend to make myself presentable
for this evening.” She turned, the silvery silk of her robe swirling after her.
“I suggest you give yourself time to change out of that…parade ground costume
too.” Her nostrils dilated in a disdainful sniff. “You know it makes you look
like a medieval chef’s
pièce de
résistance
. All that’s missing is the apple in your mouth.”

With a flash of white teeth and a rustle of
expensive silk, Selene departed. The Protector said nothing, his expression
unchanged, waiting for the click of the door as his wife closed it behind her.

For a moment the tall, silver-robed figure of his
wife filled his thoughts. He clenched his hands behind his back and tapped the
swagger stick nervously against the back of his high boots. Why did she have to
be so…complicated? Why was it not enough for her to be a statuesque beauty, the
consort of the most powerful man in the Holy City? What more did she want?

He knew the answer, of course—power of her
own. She was not his wife for nothing.

He flicked the swagger stick angrily back and
forth. Damn the woman! She refused to fulfil the obligation of all High Caste
women to produce a son to carry on his line, and she mocked him openly. The
Protector was beginning to recognize his obsession with the cold, haughty
heiress for what it was. He still thought about her night and day, but in
annoyance during the day and tinged with fear in the loneliness of the night.
Perhaps the enemy within was a hydra with more heads than he imagined.

The problem of Selene could wait. The known enemy,
he mused, the dreamers of traitorous dreams, must be eliminated. The Ignorants
must not be allowed to rally to their Queen. It was time to call the Assembly
of the Elders and put into action phase two of the population cull.

“By the
pimply
arse of the Wise God, this is a heavy fucker!” Ezra spat on his hands,
hitched up his dirty grey trousers, and took a firmer grip on the sack of
laundry.

“Shhhh! Ez,” hissed Diarmuid, his teammate. “You’re
not at home here. They chop your tongue out for blasphemy you know.”

“Ah, go on with you. Who’s listening? Just you, me,
and this pile of filthy washing. Unless they’ve got the laundry bugged, of
course,” Ezra added with a grin and nudged Dairmuid in the ribs. “Bugged, bugs,
get it?”

Diarmuid looked round uneasily, not in the mood for
jokes, and lowered his voice. “That might not be such a daft idea. There’s been
a lot of parties busted up lately, and Mother Freyja’s been warned. She’ll only
tell the stories when she’s in…You know…” He jerked his thumb downwards.

“Underworld?” Ezra asked innocently.

“Ssssh!”

“Ah, don’t be so soft.” Ezra spat on his hands
again and frowned. “Bleedin’ hell though, I meant what I said about this sack.
What’ve they put in it, rocks? Does some ape think this is Colditz?”

“Where?”

“Or maybe he thinks he’s the Count of
Monte-Cristo,” Ezra mused.

“Who?”

“Or it could just be what’s left of last week’s
soya bread ration. Let’s have a look anyway.”

After all, even stale soya bread could be made into
a soup. Ezra undid the drawstring of the sack and the two laundry workers
peered inside. A pair of frightened, dark eyes blinked back at them.

The two men looked at one another, then back at the
laundry bag. Diarmuid grinned. “Nothin’,” he pronounced in a loud theatrical
voice for the benefit of the bug. “Just the usual filth. Let’s heave it on the
cart with the rest.”

The two men picked up the sack and laid it
carefully at the front of the cart. Taking care not to pile anything on top of
it, they finished their job, and each settled one of the shafts on his shoulder
and advanced the cart to the door. Ezra gave it a hefty kick and shouted to the
guards on the other side, “Sanitation department, open up!”

To the sound of a key turning in a lock and a heavy
bar being pulled back, the doors swung open onto a side street behind the House
of Correction. A detachment of Black Boys watched with bored indifference as
Ezra and Diarmuid pulled the heavy cart into the street. Black-clad from cap to
boots, the guards slouched against the prison wall, black riot batons swinging
from their belts. Heads turned to watch, eyes hidden behind dark glasses.

“The teams to empty the rest of the wheelie bins
will be along before noon, General, er, Captain, sir,” Ezra called out to the
patrol leader, biting his lip at the guard’s black look. They were about to
brace themselves for the long haul to the laundry when one of the Black Boys,
wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, stepped in front of them.

“Not so fast, yah pair of stinking smart arses!
We’ve been on duty outside this dunghill for three weeks now with no leave,
except to go to the effin’ temple to effin’ pray. An’ it’s time we had a bit of
fun.” He looked around with bleary, belligerent eyes and grinned drunkenly. “I
think we should tip this cart over and search it. Then, I think we should cut
up these Ignorant subhumans a bit for being uncooperative. What say you, lads?”

Diarmuid and Ezra stared at the ground, clutching
the cart shafts hard. The guard lunged forward and grabbed the shaft on Ezra’s
side, at the same time drawing a long knife from his belt. The Black Boys were
too stupid to be trusted with firearms, but they possessed a fine array of less
complicated weaponry. Fear gripped the two laundry workers. A mutilated
Ignorant corpse lying in the gutter was a common enough sight for them to know
the guard meant every word he said. Two more guards stirred, hefting their
short batons. But before they had lurched to their feet, the officer knocked
them both to the ground again with a boot in the chest.

“You want to catch the plague from that stuff? Use
your brain will you, Saul, if you can find it.”

“Try looking up his arse,” somebody sniggered.

Guard Saul twisted his knife threateningly and
glared at the officer with mutiny in his eyes. Some of the others muttered
curses, and their hands also went to their belts.

The officer turned to face them. “Don’t even think
about it,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “As for you” —with a rapid
movement he brought down his baton on Ezra’s back, knocking him into the
dust—“you can get out of it! Go on, get your stinking rags out of here,
before I let these hyaenas loose on you.”

Ezra and Diarmuid set off at a run, the cart
rattling along the pitted asphalt, and only slowed down when they reached the
intersection with the main road to the Ignorant sector. Diarmuid shot worried glances
at his friend. Ezra’s face was drawn and white but he grinned.

“By Good Queen Medb, but that was a close shave,”
he panted. “Me an’ my big mouth! Bunch of bleedin’ savages, though. It’s just a
flesh-wound, Der,” Ezra reassured his friend. “He wasn’t really trying. But if
they’d found our dark-eyed beauty, we’d have been dead meat, if not worse.”

“Too right,” Diarmuid agreed, breathing heavily.
“The Black Boys take their massacring bloody seriously. But we had to do it.
It’s only a kid, did you see?”

Ezra nodded. “Whatever he did, fair play to him, I
say. Now, let’s get our backs into it before they send another squad out
looking for him.”

* * * *

The main streets of Providence were paved with smooth granite, but the war
had taken everyone unawares, and the outer steel Hemisphere had been lowered
before the building work was finished. The back streets, especially in the
poorer quarters, were left mostly unmade, at best surfaced in asphalt that had
become broken and pot-holed over the years. From his position in the back of
the laundry cart, Zachariah was able to appreciate fully the lamentable state
of the roads in the Ignorant quarter. In a frantic effort to reach the laundry
before a roadblock was set up, Ezra and Diarmuid worked up the kind of lather
Victorian cab horses used to roll over and die in. They pulled and strained,
the sweat sticking to their torn and dirty work clothes, the shafts of the cart
rubbing their shoulders raw.

At last the cart rattled off the road onto a
smoother surface, and the jolting stopped. From the hollow echoes, Zachariah
judged they were in a large hall. The human smells of blood, sweat, and urine
that had filled his nostrils since he hid in the laundry room were joined by
pungent chemical smells, sharp and acrid, that irritated his throat. There were
urgent mutterings as strong hands picked up his sack and carried him swiftly.
But where?

He could not help but remember the stories he had
heard about the Ignorants. He remembered too, with chilling clarity, the
unchained fury of the crowd on the day of the trial. It had been the last big
Ignorant trial when twenty of them were accused of the ritual murder of a child
and of drinking the child’s blood. Until now he had never really believed the
stories, but what if they were true?

Zachariah could hear the panting breath of his
carriers and found himself panting in unison as he was bounced up and down in
their arms. He was aware of being in a large room, bustling with activity, and
full of voices and mechanical noises. The air was hot and steamy and he could
hardly breathe through the thick canvas of the sack.

After many minutes the bouncing stopped, and he was
manoeuvred, lowered down, lower, lower, then dropped. His stomach rose into his
throat with a sickening feeling as he fell, slid, down, down. A sharp cry
escaped from him, but almost before it was audible his fall was stopped, the
breath knocked out of him, and once again he had the sensation of being caught
up in a strong pair of arms.

“Gotcha!”

This time he resisted and began to struggle. He had
fallen into a strange place, cool and silent, far beneath the ground. It was
too much, the silence, the darkness, the fear of being trapped. Why had he not
brought at least a knife? Hands turned him the right way up and set him roughly
on his feet.

This
is how they do it,
he thought
,
they’ve got me miles from help, deep in one of their secret places. This is
where they cut my throat.

Clenching his fists as he gathered up all his
courage and his strength, Zachariah gritted his teeth and prepared to fight his
way out.