He pushes back the corkscrew ringlets of her hair and kisses her neck. “Thank you,” he murmurs as his arms go around her, “for giving me all this.”
She presses her body to his, hesitant because they are in public, an open landing pad with a dozen people standing by. But his lips find hers, and she shudders with sudden desire, all thought of the onlookers gone.
“Do you have an appointment now?” he asks.
“A thousand.”
“Cancel them.”
She smiles. “Yes, Minister.” With a sudden sweep of his arms he picks her up bodily—she laughs from the thrill of it, her gawky legs dangling—and carries her through the long public corridors of the Aerial Palace, past a hundred staring faces, and does not set her down until he reaches his suite, where he carries her into the bedroom and places her, delicately as if she were a piece of fine porcelain, upon the rose satin spread.
SEVEN
Perhaps Aiah should be grateful for the fact that Constantine cannot resist a gesture. After he carries her off through the corridors, things change.
It is hard to say exactly how. People react to Aiah differently—she catches a speculative look here, overhears an expression there, and sometimes she observes mere puzzlement, as if people are trying to understand just where she fits in, or what it is that Constantine sees in her.
She can’t blame them. It is not as if she has not speculated along these lines herself.
On occasion she finds the difference an unpleasant one. People condescend to her, assuming that she is merely Constantine’s plaything and knows nothing, or they try to use her as a conduit to reach him. Sometimes she has to administer a sharp correction.
Constantine himself is almost a daily presence: there are meetings, working lunches, reports commissioned and given. He drives and exhorts, setting an example of furious activity; he works on fifty things at once, somehow balancing them all, keeping them all filed within his capacious mind.
And yet, in their private moments together, he is somehow able to forget all business. He has learned from somewhere—the School of Radritha?—the art of relaxation. In her company he is happy to linger over a meal, or speculate about the implications of Rohder’s theories, or spin absurd theories about sorcery, society, or life beyond the Shield.
Every so often, sleep shift, she finds Constantine in the secure room, or discovers, looking at the log, that he was there the previous shift. Then she knows to avoid him, for when his thoughts are on Taikoen he is abrupt, uncivil, and distracted, and Aiah doesn’t know how to help, how to resolve the forces that are driving him.
Daily the mercenary teams continue their work, the anonymous powerboats slipping out at odd hours, returning with cargoes of Handmen for the prisons. The Silver Hand grows smarter and begins to fortify their plasm houses with bronze mesh and massive armored doors, but it doesn’t help them—the locations were betrayed before the Handmen ever began taking precautions, and thoroughly scouted in the days since. Arrests continue.
Fear of the firing squads makes the Handmen desperate, and when the storming parties arrive they try to defend themselves with the plasm available to them—but Constantine’s mercenaries, and their supporting mages, are professional enough to evade these hasty attacks.
Interrogation reports continue to arrive on Aiah’s desk, along with the occasional request to release Handmen for use as informers.
The soldiers continue drawing lots to discover who will make up the firing squads. Aiah finds grim satisfaction in hearing that the Handmen’s insurance companies have long since canceled their policies.
Six weeks after his escape, Aiah sees a video report of a failed assassination attempt on Great-Uncle Rathmen. The three shooters, Silver Hand types, are all dead. Two of the names are familiar: Aiah’s group had arrested them, and Sorya had asked them to be released as informers.
Deniability has been maintained—no one could connect the Caraqui government to this action. Pity, however, that Sorya had not chosen better instruments.
Aiah takes some comfort, though, in the fact that Constantine has not made use of Taikoen. Though she finds evidence of the creature’s activities elsewhere.
I committed the crime with Luking, but he died. He got the Party Disease, and I hope he didn’t give it to me.
There it is in one of her prisoners’ transcripts, a strange remark in the course of the narrative. The interrogator apparently found this avenue worth pursuing, but the interrogator’s questions are never provided, and the narrative simply continues.
The Party Disease must be new. It’s where you just go mad trying to have fun. You drink and pop pills and chase women and go to the clubs, you do it nonstop till you’re dead. Luking died of it, and I know three other people who died.
Apparently the interrogator found this too bizarre to be worthy of any further questioning, because the narrative then returns to more conventional paths, a list of crimes and accomplices and where the accomplices might be found.
The Party Disease. Enough Handmen had died of it for them to start talking.
Aiah pushes the matter out of her mind. She doesn’t want to know where Taikoen has left his footprints.
And then, after her department has been in existence for three months, Aiah is asked to make a report to the cabinet.
TRAMCAR SCANDAL WIDENS
EX-KEREMATH MINISTER BROUGHT IN FOR QUESTIONING
She hates talking before an audience.
Aiah marshals her statistics, her facts, her anecdotes. She memorizes the faces and biographies of cabinet members. Charts and handouts are prepared. She barely sleeps the shift before her presentation, and she takes a jolt of plasm beforehand, burns off the fatigue toxins and gives herself a dose of courage, a fervid high that sings through her veins. She hopes it will last the day.
Constantine fetches her from her office, along with Ethemark and two assistants to carry the charts. The polished-copper elevator doors open, and Aiah’s heart leaps as, inside the mirror-and-red-plush birdcage, she sees a twisted man, a cripple—no, not a twisted man; a dolphin—a dolphin sitting in a kind of mobile couch on wheels, pushed by a pair of human assistants. The couch is beautifully constructed, a polished frame of brass, and the cushions are upholstered with a colorful pattern of bright orchids.
“Most precious and gemlike greetings to you, illuminous Prince Aranax,” Constantine says.
Aiah has met Aranax once before, when she and Constantine slipped into Caraqui on a scouting mission. Since then Aranax had been named Minister of Oceanautics, a reward for dolphin cooperation in the coup.
Aranax’s beaklike face is fixed in a permanent grin, and his voice is a strange nasal drone. His skin is pinkish-white and covered with scars and open sores. He wears a streamlined vest with many pockets. There is a strange scent in the air, a mineral-laden salt-sea tang.
“Salutations to the godlike and immortal Constantine,” Aranax says. The first consonant of Constantine’s name is pronounced as an inhaled click.
The elevator doors threaten to close, and one of Aranax’s human assistants jumps to turn the brass knob that locks them open.
“Desolate though I shall be without your presence,” Constantine says, “I would not trouble your wisdom nor interrupt your sagacious meditations. Melancholy though I shall be in my desperate isolation, I shall with hope and fortitude await another elevator.”