“Sure as fate, sir. I’ve been talking to the tinks, scrimps, blasters and the rest, sir.” Oramen knew that Neguste did indeed frequent the notoriously dangerous bars, smoke tents and music halls of the Settlement’s less salubrious areas, thus far without injury. “They say there’s all sorts of terrible, weird, uncanny things in there under that plaza thing.”
“What sort of things?” Oramen asked. He always liked to hear the specifics of such charges.
“Oh,” Neguste said, shaking his head and sucking in his cheeks, “terrible, weird, strange things, sir. Things that shouldn’t be seeing the light of day. Or even night,” he said, looking round the darkened sky. “It’s a fact, sir.”
“Is it now?” Oramen said. He nodded at Droffo as the other man appeared. Droffo kept to the inside of the platform, next to the wall; he was not good with heights. “Droff. Well done. Your turn to hide. I’ll count to fifty.”
“Sir,” the earl said with a weak smile, coming to stand behind him. Droffo was a fine fellow in many ways and possessed of a dry sense of humour of his own, but rarely found Oramen’s jokes funny.
Oramen leant on the platform parapet and looked over the edge. “Not that far down, Droff.”
“Far enough, prince,” Droffo said, looking up and away as Oramen leaned further out. “Wish you wouldn’t do that, sir.”
“Me too, for all it may be worth, sirs,” Neguste said, looking from one man to another. A gust of wind threatened to pull him off his feet.
“Neguste,” Oramen said, “put that contraption down before you get blown off the damn building. The spray’s mostly coming upwards anyway; it’s no use.”
“Right-oh, sir,” Neguste said, collapsing and furling the umbrella. “Have you heard of all the strange occurrences, sir?” he asked Droffo.
“What strange occurrences?” the earl asked.
Neguste leaned towards him. “Great sea monsters moving in the waters upstream from the Falls, sirs, upsetting boats and tearing up anchors. Others seen downstream, too, moving where no boat could ever go. Spirits and ghosts and strange appearances and people being found frozen into stone or turned to no more dust than you could hold in the palm of one hand, sir, and others losing their minds so that they don’t recognise nobody who is even their nearest and dearest and just wander the ruins until they step off an edge, or people who see something in the ruins and excavations that makes them walk to the nearest electric light and stare into it until their eyes go blind, or stick their hands in to touch the spark and die all jerky, smoking and flaming.”
Oramen had heard all this. He might, he realised, have contributed a strange occurrence of his own.
Just ten hours earlier he’d been woken from the middle of his sleep by a strange, insistent little noise. He’d turned the cover on the candle-lamp and looked round the carriage in the newly increased light, trying to trace the source of the trilling sound. He hadn’t heard any noise quite like it before. It sounded like some curious, metallic bird call.
He noticed a soft green light blinking on and off, not in the sleeping compartment itself but through the ajar door into the carriage’s study and reception chamber. Xessice, the girl he’d favoured most since he’d been here in the Settlement, stirred but did not wake. He slipped out of bed, shucking on a robe and taking his gun from underneath the head bolster.
The light and the sound were coming from a delicately ornate and beautifully turned World model sitting on the desk in the study. It was one of the few ornaments Oramen had kept from when the carriage had belonged to the Archipontine; he had admired it for its exquisitely executed fashioning and been almost physically unable to throw the thing out, even though he suspected it was in some sense a foreign religious artifact and therefore not wholly suitable for a good WorldGod-respecting Sarlian to possess.
Now the object was emitting this strange, alien-sounding warble, and a green light was pulsing from its interior. It had changed, too; it had been reconfigured, or it had reconfigured itself so that the half-open cut-away parts of each of the shells had aligned, creating a sort of spiky hemisphere with the green light pulsing at its heart. He looked round the study — the green light gave quite sufficient illumination for him to see by — then quietly closed the door to the sleeping chamber and sat down on the seat in front of the desk. He was thinking about prodding the green central light with the barrel of the gun when the light blinked off and was replaced by a soft circle of gently changing colours which he took to be some sort of screen. He’d sat back when this had happened; he leant tentatively forward again and a soft, androgynous voice said, “Hello? To whom do I speak? Are you Sarl, yes? Prince Oramen, I am warned, is so?”
“Who is talking?” Oramen answered. “Who wishes to know?”
“A friend. Or, with more accuracy, one who would be friend, if so was allowed.”
“I have known many friends. Not all were as they might have seemed.”
“Which of us is? We are all mistaken against. There are so many barriers about us. We are too separated. I seek to remove some of those barriers.”
“If you would be my friend it might help to know your name. From your voice I am not even sure you are male.”
“Call me Friend, then. My own identity is complicated and would only confuse. You are the prince of Sarl called Oramen, are you?”
“Call me Listener,” Oramen suggested. “Titles, names; they can mislead, as we seem already to have agreed.”
“I see. Well, Listener, I express my fine good wishes and utmost benevolence to you, in hope of understanding and mutual interest. These things, please accept.”
Oramen filled the pause. “Thank you. I appreciate your good wishes.”
“Now, that clarified, our anchor embedded, as it were, I would talk with you to give you a warning.”
“Would you now?”
“I would. In this, I do; there is caution needed in the burrowings you make.”
“The burrowings?” Oramen asked, frowning at the softly glowing screen. The colours continued to shift and change.
“Yes, your excavatory workings in the great city. These must be approached with caution. Humbly, we’d petition to be allowed to advise on such. Not all that is hidden from you is so hidden from us.”
“I think too much is hidden here. Who would you be? What ‘us’ do we talk about? If you would advise us, begin by advising who you might be.”
“Those who would be your friends, Listener,” the asexual voice said smoothly. “I approach you because we believe you are untrammelled. You, Listener, are believed to be capable of ploughing your own course, unrestricted to the furrows of others. You have freedom to move, to turn about from incorrect beliefs and unfortunate slanders directed against those who would only help, not hinder. They mislead themselves who accept the traducement of others by those who have only their own narrowed interests at heart. Sometimes those who seem most funnelled are most free, and those who are most—”
“Hold there, let me guess; you are from the Oct, are you not?”
“Ha!” the voice said, then there was a pause. “That would be mistaken, good Listener. You doubtless think I am of that kind because it might appear that I seek to deceive you. This is an understandable mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. Oh, their lies go deep, to the core, they are most fastly tunnelled. We have much to untangle here.”
“Show your face, creature,” Oramen said. He was becoming more and more sure of the kind of being he was talking to here.
“Sometimes we must prepare ourselves for important meetings. Ways must be smoothed, gradients negotiated. A blunt, front-on approach might suffer rebuff while a more curved and gentle path, though seeming less honestly direct, will break through finally to success and mutual understanding and reward.”