City on Fire

“I regret to say that they did not. The order to attack the Escaliers came from the headquarters of a Provisional general named Escart, but he was killed in the fighting, and we don’t know where he got his information.”

“Who could have told him?”

“Quite a few people, unfortunately. The information could have come from above, which would have meant army group or Provisional headquarters in Lanbola. Or below, possibly his own intelligence section.”

“Is there a way to find out?”

He gives a thin smile. “The Escaliers, too, have an intelligence section. They’re working on it—there is little else for them to do, really—and we’ll let you know if we find anything. Provisional headquarters no longer exists, and a number of their employees are now hard up for funds.”

Aiah returns Galagas’s smile. “The PED has a small budget for informers,” she says.

“Ah.” Galagas’s look brightens. “That is good to know.” He touches his mustache again. “When I was in the Tim-ocracy,” he says, “I looked at the Wire’s piece on you.”

Aiah finds herself making a face. “And?” she says.

“They made no effort to understand Barkazils, but otherwise I thought it was fair enough. And you?”

Aiah tries to banish the tension she feels in her shoulders. The Wire’s investigation had been extremely thorough, though fortunately it was reasonably objective—it gave her credit for investigating plasm thefts in Jaspeer and for her work against the Silver Hand and the militia, even as it raised suspicions about other activities.

Her heart had lurched when she’d seen her ex-lover quoted, but to her surprise, Gil had spoken nothing but praise, and defended her against any suggestion of criminality, something that relieved and gratified her. She should send him a wire of thanks, she thinks.

“I hate to see those old charges raked over,” Aiah says. “But at least they admitted they couldn’t find evidence.”

“The Cunning People leave no trace,” Galagas says. There is a confiding little gleam in his eye.

Aiah can only hope that, as far as the Escaliers and her own activities in Jaspeer are concerned, Galagas is speaking the truth.

MARTIAL LAW TO BE EASED

TERRORISTS, SILVER HAND STILL SUBJECT TO EMERGENCY POWERS

Rohder’s computer gives a rumble, shudders slightly, and at length offers up its data, first in a tentative flickering upon the screen, and then with firmer, shining confidence.

“The trend’s continuing,” Rohder says.

Aiah glances over his shoulder at the columns of figures. “Good.”

“More for the Strategic Plasm Reserve.” Rohder frowns, looks at the data. “If only I knew why. The figures shouldn’t be this good.”

“An element you haven’t accounted for in your theory?”

“Oh, of course.” Dismissively. “There must be.” Rohder’s blue eyes brood upon the figures. “Our original experiments were necessarily on a small scale; but here we see a leap in plasm production beginning…” He traces a line of figures across the computer display with a horny thumbnail. “Here. Almost four months ago. A few weeks after the war started. And with the war destroying so many plasm-generating structures, there should have been less plasm, not more—But still the dip in generation is not as great as it should have been, and now, even though so much of the city has been wrecked, our overall plasm generation is better than before the war started.”

He rubs his chin. “I am straining my mind to find a theory that will accurately account for this rise. And I can think of none.”

“I can’t think of this plasm increase as anything but a blessing.” Aiah shifts an overflowing ashtray on Rohder’s glass-topped desk, then perches on the desk’s corner, crossing her ankles and lazily swinging her feet.

“And your other work?” she asks.

“The atmospheric generation teams continue to report success, and the minister continues to press us to actually erect a building. We are on the verge of achieving a degree of expertise that may permit that, but I will not do such a thing until I’m ready.” He shakes his head, reaches absently into his shirt pocket for a packet of cigarets, and produces only an empty one. Crumpled, it joins other empty packets in the vicinity of his wastebasket. He looks at it with a drift of sadness in his eyes.

“You are going to get a formal report on this tomorrow,” he says, “but I may as well tell you now about the results from our Havilak’s team. You recall we were going to perform some freestanding transformations on an office building owned by the Ministry of Works—retroactively alter the internal structure to bring it in line with FIT —and they found the most extraordinary thing: it had already been done.” Rohder’s watery blue eyes gaze up at Aiah in bemuse-ment. “Some unknown mage, or maybe a group of mages, had already gone into the building and done the job on it!”

Aiah looks at him. She has been in charge of a government department long enough to know that the cause probably lies within the bureaucracy.

“Our people didn’t get the work order mixed up? The job wasn’t done accidentally by another of your teams?”

“That’s the first thing we checked, and the answer’s no. None of our teams had ever done a job that large— we’d only been experimenting with empty, war-damaged buildings until we could be certain we could do the job safely.” He shakes his head. “Besides, the job was done differently from the way we’d planned it. We chose that particular building because it was new, only a hundred and eighty years old, and we had the plans on file—our engineers had planned every change we were going to make ahead of time. And when we discovered the changes already made, we discovered that they were different, though still made in perfect accord with fractionate interval theory…” He shakes his head. “Who would have done such a thing? And why?”

“Fraud, perhaps?” Aiah ventures. “Trying to raise the amount of plasm generated by the structure, and siphoning it off for their own use?” She reaches for a pad and paper. “I’ll have the ministry send a team to inspect the meters—”

“I already have,” Rohder says. “And I checked the building’s records—they show the increase. No one stole it. The excess went into the public mains, just as it ought.”

Aiah looks at him. “So who, then? And why?”

Rohder considers. “The who is most interesting. Who in Caraqui knows enough of fractionate interval theory to make such concrete application?”

“FIT isn’t a secret.”

“No.” Rohder’s voice turns rueful. “Not a secret, but I doubt that more than a handful of people have ever read Proceedings. So far as I know, our own teams are the only people ever to try to apply the theory in practice.”

“Perhaps someone on our transformation team is working on his own? Maybe the office building was just practice, and he intends to strike out on his own?”

“But why pick a building that he knew we were going to alter?”

Aiah looks out the window. Plasm displays shimmer on the near horizon. She bites her lip at the relentless conclusions that fall into place in her mind.

“Altering that building was illegal,” she says. “The plasm used to make the alterations might have been stolen.” She looks at him uneasily. “I regret to say that one part of my department may have to start an investigation of another part.”

Rohder leans back in his chair, looks at the data. “I can narrow the investigation for you. I can safely say that there are only a dozen or so people in my section that could have pulled this off.”

A falcon dives past the window, talons arched for prey. Aiah turns to Rohder again. “Very good. If you would send me the names…?”