After twenty years of real people dying, it seemed kind of horrible to go misty-eyed about the roads and sidewalks. You’d have to be pretty stupid to do something like that.
Anyway, there’s one last thing you’ve probably got wrong in your mental picture of Diplomats Row: the buildings. If you’re thinking of human architecture, think again. Yes, the Fasskister embassy was built of bricks; but the bricks were clear crystal, the same sort of stuff as the huts back at that orbital. It wasn’t glass, I can tell you that much — when the front wall had been smashed in, not one of the bricks had broken. They were all perfectly intact, lying on the ground as we stepped into the darkness of the half-demolished building. The bricks’ edges were still crisp and clean despite years of weathering, and I couldn’t see a trace of mortar on them. Don’t ask me how the walls held together without some sort of stickum to attach each brick to its neighbors… but the side and back walls were still intact, and I couldn’t see mortar in them either. Just rows of crystal bricks that let in the tiniest glimmer of starlight so I wasn’t completely blind.
Dim light or not, the Explorers could see fine. Their tightsuit visors had vision enhancers that made the night bright as day. I had to tag along on Festina’s heels, so I wouldn’t walk into a wall or pothole or something… and even then, I had a heck of a time not getting lost, with her practically invisible in camo. Mostly I went by the sound of her footsteps and the smell of her suit — as if I were a full-fledged Mandasar, navigating by nose.
It took me by surprise when we started going upward: a slow-sloping ramp that must have been in the middle of the building. Ramps were pretty common on Diplomats Row — lots of nonhumans (including Mandasars) didn’t do so well on stairs, and no alien species ever liked each other’s elevators; the compartments were either too big or too small, the lift mechanisms were too quiet or too clanky, they went too fast or too slow… and the interior always smelled of something you didn’t want to inhale any longer than you had to. The diplomatic solution was to build your embassy with ramps at easy-to-climb slants, so as not to irritate important visitors.
We went up slowly, switching back four times for each floor. Once we got above first-story level, the side of the stairwell was missing, giving a clear view of the street out front — Diplomats Row in all its glory. The other buildings seemed pretty well intact, even if they were dark and empty: the high silver towers of the Myriapods, like tinsel hanging from the sky; the clear glass globe of the Cashlings, its multicolored interior lights now gone dark and lifeless; the embassies of the Divian sub-breeds, Tye-Tyes in their rock mountain, Ooloms in their giant tree, Freeps in their neon casino; the Unity’s mirror garden where they’d held masked rituals every night; and at the end of the block, the mall of the up-League envoys.
Once upon a time, that mall held a fifty-meter-high flame on one side and an even taller tornado on the other, both real and roaring but never moving from their positions. Gawking tourists used to argue whether the envoys actually lived in the wind and fire, or if it was just a flashy gimmick aimed at impressing lesser species. None of us ever learned the truth… but the night Queen Verity died, the flame and tornado winked out of existence in the exact same second. It was a sign, if anybody needed one, that the higher echelons of the League were turning their backs on Troyen. By dawn, every other embassy had been evacuated too — no one wanted to go down with a sinking ship.
Now, here we were, back again.
There must have been a door or something closing off the stairwell from the roof, but it had vanished into the general wreckage. Still, the roof itself seemed in pretty good shape — at least the back half was. My eyes were getting used to the darkness; as we came up the final ramp, I could see a flat expanse of those smooth crystal bricks, with no dips or sags all the way to the rear edge of the building. Tobit checked with the Bumbler and grunted a few seconds later. "It looks safe," he announced. "If you want to trust the engineering judgment of a stupid machine."
"Any sign of the Explorers?" Dade asked.
Tobit fiddled with dials and peered at the Bumbler’s screen. "No… no… wait. Back there in the shadows," he said, pointing at the far rear of the roof. "I think it’s an Explorer’s backpack."
Dade immediately started forward, but Festina grabbed his arm. "You and Tobit stay here. In case the roof isn’t as solid as we think."
"And in case it’s a trap," Tobit muttered.
"Why would it be a trap?" Dade asked.
"Because anything could be a trap!" Tobit growled "We don’t know dick about what’s going on. Someone may have lured us here with a fake signal so they could blow us to smithereens. And don’t say that doesn’t make sense, junior — stuff that doesn’t make sense can still make you Go Oh Shit."
Festina was already heading toward the knapsack. Since nobody stopped me, I jogged a few paces and caught up with her. Side by side, we walked toward the building’s rear… and the farther we went, the less I cared about the pack and the more I worried about something else.
The smell of buttered toast trickled through the air.
Like I said, the back of the Fasskister embassy faced the palace — just a stone’s throw from the diamondwood palisade surrounding the palace grounds. Shining from inside that wall came the glow I’d thought was cookflres. A dull red glow.
The queen-shaped palace had its tail toward us, but not quite straight on. There was enough of an angle that we could see along its body, past the glass conservatory domes, up the torso, all the way to the head and its outstretched claws.
Moss. Balrog moss. Covering every square millimeter of the building from the venom sacs forward. In the dark, it glimmered a very self-satisfied crimson.
36
LYING LOW ON THE ROOF
"Holy shit," Festina whispered.
I just nodded. The buttered-toast smell was making me dizzy.
"That queen," Festina said. "The one who dumped those spores on the Fasskisters. She must have left some here too — to make the place uninhabitable for the Black Army."
"Kind of hard on her own guards," I said. It gave me a crawly feeling, thinking about that. I could understand a queen setting up a nasty parting gift for her enemies, but not when it would also hurt her own subjects. Protecting your citizens should always be your number one concern, shouldn’t it? A king who didn’t put his people’s safety ahead of his own hunger for revenge…
A queen. I meant a queen who didn’t put her people’s safety ahead of her hunger for revenge…
Never mind.
Festina growled under her breath. "That fucking Kaisho. She had to know about this."
"Why?" I asked.
"She took that damned satellite photo," Festina said. "The whole front half of the palace should have been glowing, for Christ’s sake. But there wasn’t any shine in the shot she showed us. She must have deliberately told the computer to filter out the red." The admiral made a disgusted sound in her throat. "And I never double-checked. I checked the landing site, and the spot where the signal came from, but I never bothered to look at the palace. Sloppy, Ramos — really sloppy."