face.
‘I understand,’ he said to Soper’s latest contention. ‘A cop in his position could manipulate anything. Coming from the Polity we tend to forget how much power such a police force can wield.’
‘There, you see?’
Soper sat back and sipped her drink. Salind sipped his own. It had been topped up twice.
Perhaps it was going to his head.
‘What do you think of my collection?’ Soper asked him.
‘I think it’s wonderful, Deleen.’
Soper stood. ‘But you haven’t seen it all.’
As he also stood, Salind felt a dizziness wash through him. He blinked and seemed to see rainbow haloes around various objects in the room. Soper conducted him around the apartment.
She told him about the grandfather clock replicated about an original pendulum, and showed him carvings from banoak coral that would not have looked out of place in a Pharaoh’s tomb. She showed him lurid paintings and boasted their value. Then she finally came to her most prized possession.
The drowning jar had been the favoured punishment for criminals in the early years of the Theocracy. Criminals were sealed inside to drown in the preservative the jar contained. This one was a fat urn-shape standing four feet high. The man still inside the jar, she told him, was the predecessor of the Banjer reifs, but from the wrong side of the law. She giggled and he laughed with her — surprised at how easily the laughter came. The man, with his bulbous eyes and protruding tongue, shifted and scratched at the inside of the jar. He looked like the reporter who had stood behind Merril in the arrivals lounge. Next, the butler was opening the street door for Salind, and he then walked under a sky that was a sheet of skin flayed from the back of a giant.
He stood on a bridge and gripped the rail, his mouth dry and bitter and terror rising up inside him. The drowned man was coming to drag him back to the jar and there to pull him down into a clammy embrace. And now Geronamid stood over him with treels oozing out of holes in its allosaur body. Salind started screaming, and didn’t stop until a hydrocar pulled up and Geoff leapt out to press a pressure hypodermic against his neck. Then he blacked out. It took him a day to recover from the praist-based hallucinogen. And of course there was no proof that Deleen Soper had administered the drug.
Salind woke instantly and with crawling horror suffusing him. It was the middle of the night so Argus must have woken him with a betawave stim. He still wanted coffee though. He still had a hangover from the drug and still occasionally heard fingernails scratching against glass.
‘What is it? You know I’ve had a tiring day,’ he said, sitting upright on the futon.
‘Yes,’ Salind hissed, standing and heading for the hotel minibar. He took out an Instacup, pulled the tab on it, and by the time he had dressed the beverage was hot. Taking it with him he quickly left his hotel. Standing on the pavement under a leaden sky backlit by green moonlight, he sipped coffee until the hydrocar pulled up.
‘Give me bad news or good news, but give me news,’ he said as he got in beside Geoff.
‘It’s news, whether it’s bad or good is something for you to decide,’ said the staffer. ‘Oh, here, I have something for you.’
Salind took the small container Geoff handed him, clicked out a pill and swallowed it with a mouthful of coffee. He tossed the empty cup out of the window.
‘Tell me.’
‘We’re going to the Groves. Our trusty police force have found Merril Torson.’
‘How?. .’
‘Oh the usual way when the Tronad wants to make a point.’
They had nailed her to a banoak. The treels were in her clothing, peeking from holes in her arms and stomach. A knot of intestines hung from one such hole. Floodlights, and the red and green flashing lights on the squad cars, cast the scene in a lurid glow. The uniformed cops stood by their cars drinking tea from small flasks while awaiting senior officers.
‘She was a hack,’ said Salind. ‘But this is excessive punishment.’
‘The Tronad don’t know the meaning of the word excess,’ said Geoff, as they both stepped out onto the gravel.
‘So this is how they hit people?’ Salind gazed slowly from side to side, making sure Argus was getting everything here and transmitting it.
‘This was how traitors were killed by the underground before the civil war, and it’s now how the Tronad kill people when they want to make a point. The holes were made by whoever nailed her there. The treels have to be pushed inside before they try to feed. They just keep grinding away and pushing through in search of banoak flesh. She probably died when one of them hit an artery. It can take anything from ten minutes to an hour.’
‘You’re very well informed.’
‘We all are here. This is what happens to you if you go piss-off the Tronad. This is why very few people will turn out to vote next Moonday.’
They moved away from the car and closer to the crucified reporter. Salind felt sorry for Merril and a little sad, but nothing more than that. She wouldn’t have suffered. Were they so primitive here they didn’t realize she could have shut off the pain with her aug?
‘Alright there. Keep back,’ said one of the uniformed cops as he strolled over.
Salind turned to him. ‘What’s happened here, officer?’
‘You got eyes ain’t you?’
