Volyova looked, but the crawling complexity of the coffin was too much to take in. It was not that she was uninterested—not at all. But what she wanted was the thing to herself, and Sajaki as far away from it as possible. There was too much evidence here of the canyon depths to which Nagorny’s mind had plummeted.
“I think it merits more study,” she said carefully. “You said ‘first’. What do you intend to do after we make a copy of it?”
“I would have thought that was obvious.”
“Destroy the damned thing,” she surmised.
Sajaki smiled. “Either that or give it to Sudjic. But personally I’d settle for destroying it. Coffins aren’t good things to have on a ship, you know. Especially home-made ones.”
The stairs went up for ever. After a while—already in the two hundreds—Khouri lost count. But just when her knees felt as if they were going to buckle, the staircase came to an abrupt end, presenting her with a long, long white corridor whose sides were a series of recessed arches. The effect was like standing in a portico under moonlight. She walked along the corridor’s echoey length until she arrived at the double doors which ended it. They were festooned with organic black scrollwork, inset with faintly tinted glass. A lavender light poured through them from the room beyond.
Evidently she had arrived.
It was entirely possible that this was a trap of some kind, and that to enter the room beyond would be a form of suicide. But turning back was not an option either—Manoukhian, for all his charm, had made that abundantly clear. So Khouri grasped the handle and let herself in. Something in the air made her nose tickle pleasantly, a blossomy perfume negating the sterility of the rest of the house. The smell made Khouri feel unwashed, although it was only a few hours since Ng had woken her and told her to go and kill Taraschi. In the meantime she had accumulated a month’s worth of dirt from the Chasm City rain, suffused with her own sweat and fear.
“I see Manoukhian managed to get you here in one piece,” said a woman’s voice.
“Me or him?”
“Both, dear girl,” the invisible speaker said. “Your reputations are equally formidable.”
Behind her the double doors clicked shut. Khouri began to take in her surroundings; difficult in the strange pink light of the room. The enclosure was kettle-shaped, with two eyelike shuttered windows set into one concave wall.
“Welcome to my place of residence,” the voice said. “Make yourself at home, won’t you.”
Khouri walked to the shuttered windows. To one side of the windows sat a pair of reefersleep caskets, gleaming like chromed silverfish. One of the units was sealed and running, while the other was open; a chrysalis ready to enfold the butterfly.
“Where am I?”
The shutters whisked open.
“Where you always were,” the Mademoiselle said.
She was looking out across Chasm City. But it was from a higher vantage point than she had ever known. She was actually above the Mosquito Net, perhaps fifty metres from its stained surface. The city lay below the Net like a fantastically spiny sea-creature preserved in formaldehyde. She had no idea where she was; except that this had to be one of the tallest buildings; one that she had probably assumed was uninhabited.
The Mademoiselle said: “I call this place the Chateau des Corbeaux; the House of Ravens; by virtue of its blackness. You’ve undoubtedly seen it.”
“What do you want?” Khouri said, finally.
“I want you to do a job for me.”
“All this for that? I mean, you had to kidnap me at gunpoint just to ask me to do a job? Couldn’t you go through the usual channels?”
“It isn’t the usual sort of job.”
Khouri nodded towards the open reefersleep unit. “Where does that come into it?”
“Don’t tell me it alarms you. You came to our world in one, after all.”
“I just asked what it meant.”
“All in good time. Turn around, will you?”
Khouri heard a slight bustle of machinery behind her, like the sound of a filing cabinet opening.
A hermetic’s palanquin had entered the room. Or had it been here all along, concealed by some artifice? It was as dark and angular as a metronome, lacking ornamentation, and with a roughly welded black exterior. It had no appendages or obvious sensors, and the tiny viewing monocle set into its front was as dark as a shark’s eye.
“You are doubtless already familiar with my kind,” said the voice emanating from the palanquin. “Do not be disturbed.”
“I’m not,” Khouri said.
But she was lying. There was something disturbing about this box; a quality she had never experienced in the presence of Ng or the other hermetics she had known. Perhaps it was the austerity of the palanquin, or the sense—entirely subliminal—that the box was seldom unoccupied. None of this was helped by the smallness of the viewing window, or the feeling that there was something monstrous behind that dark opacity.
“I can’t answer all your questions now,” the Mademoiselle said. “But obviously I didn’t bring you here just to see my predicament. Here. Perhaps this will assist matters.”
A figure grew to solidity next to the palanquin, imaged by the room itself.
It was a woman, of course—young, but paradoxically clothed in the kind of finery which no one had worn on Yellowstone since the plague; enrobed in swirling entoptics. The woman’s black hair was raked back from a noble forehead, held in a clasp inwoven with lights. Her electric-blue gown left her shoulders bare, cut away in a daring dйcolletage. Where it reached the floor it blurred into nothingness.
“This is how I was,” the figure spoke. “Before the foulness.”
“Can’t you still be like that?”
“The risk of leaving enclosure is too great—even in the hermetic sanctuaries. I distrust their precautions.”
“Why have you brought me here?”
“Didn’t Manoukhian explain things fully?”
“Not exactly, no. Other than explaining how it wouldn’t be good for my health not to go along with him.”
“How indelicate of him. But not inaccurate, it must be admitted.” A smile upset the pale composure of the woman’s face. “What do you suppose were my reasons for bringing you here?”
Khouri knew that, whatever else had happened, she had seen too much to return to normal life in the city.
“I’m a professional assassin. Manoukhian saw me at work and told me I was as good as my reputation. Now—maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here—but it occurs to me you might want someone killed.”
“Yes, very good.” The figure nodded. “But did Manoukhian tell you this would not be the same as your usual contracts?”
“He mentioned an important difference, yes.”
“And would this trouble you?” The Mademoiselle studied her intensely. “It’s an interesting point, isn’t it? I’m well aware that your usual targets consent to be assassinated before you go after them. But they do so in the knowledge that they will probably evade you and live to boast about it. When you do catch them, I doubt that many of them go gently.”
She thought of Taraschi. “Usually not, no. Usually they’re begging me not to do it, trying to bribe me, that kind of thing.”
“And?”
Khouri shrugged. “I kill them anyway.”
“The attitude of a true professional. You were a soldier, Khouri?”
“Once.” She did not really want to think about that now. “How much do you know about what happened to me?”
“Enough. That your husband was a soldier as well—a man named Fazil—and that you fought together on Sky’s Edge. And then something happened. A clerical error. You were put aboard a ship destined for Yellowstone. No one realised the error until you woke up here, twenty years later. Too late by then to return to the Edge—even if you knew Fazil was still alive. He would be forty years older by the time you got back.”