“Taxi turning into Cold Canal,” reports Alfeg. Aiah can see it, a dingy white motorboat with a cracked windscreen.
“Stand by,” she says.
The taxi motors to the sisters’ rusting pier. Refiq, Aiah thinks, looks like hell: he leans heavily on the gunwale, one hand swaying over the bright green water. His powerful body rolls listlessly with the waves, and the face beneath the shock of black hair is pale and slack, eyes wide and staring at nothing. For a moment Aiah wonders if he is already dead.
The little gray embryo cabman hops over Refiq’s outstretched legs to tie up the cab, and then Refiq rises slowly to his feet, takes several shuffling steps toward the cabman, pays him, and accepts the little fellow’s help getting to the pier.
Taikoen has nearly worn this body out. Refiq crosses the pier with quick tottering steps, like a man recovering from a stroke, and then takes his time climbing the metal stair to the paved area in front of the Dreaming Sisters’ retreat.
The cabman casts off and motors away. He moves fast, not bothering to look for customers in this battered neighborhood.
Refiq reaches the top of the stair and takes a few steps into the plaza. Once there he pauses and looks with a strange resignation at the mass of carved stone.
And then Aiah’s heart leaps into her throat as the stranger, the telepresent stranger hovering over the copper dome, descends on his plasm tether toward Refiq.
“What’s he
Refiq raises his ravaged face, as if he senses the approach of the stranger, and then the telepresent stranger touches him, coming into contact as if for communication.
Constantine, Aiah realizes. He is here to help Refiq leave this wrecked body and claim another one. No time to lose.
And Aratha, from her hiding place across the canal, fires a silver arrow of plasm-energy straight through Refiq’s heart. It’s the kind of work she is used to. Aiah wanted to do it herself, wanted to take the responsibility of killing Refiq’s empty shell, but she was afraid that she’d hesitate, or do it wrong, and finally gave in to Aratha’s calm insistence.
Refiq gives a cry and flings out his arms, shot in the back by a blast of pure reality. Other shots are already on their way, propelled by the readier reflexes of the military mages. Aiah forms and flings her own bolt, blasting a body already dead, the force of her angry fire lifting the corpse from the stone pathway where it had crumpled. But something is already rising from Refiq’s shattered shell, a kind of buzzing silver madness, insubstantial but infused with dire purpose, like a swarm of scintillating bees, and the next bolt, fired by one of Aratha’s military mages, hits it dead on, spraying bits of silver chaff, Taikoen’s strange essence, through the air… Another bolt strikes, fired from another quarter. Some bits of the hanged man spark off into nowhere, and others, still under his command, loop back to rejoin his form.
But Constantine is reacting, moving with his usual uncommon swiftness and readiness. His anima grows, forms a great amorphous shield that flies across the canal toward the attackers, trying to scoop up the plasm bolts… Aiah ducks around the shield, preparing another attack, but the shield suddenly extends itself in her direction and she contacts it, striking it with a kind of mental concussion that, back in the Palace, sends her bolt upright in her padded ops-room chair. In a brief instant of mental contact she can feel Constantine’s recognition of her, his profound surprise…
And then he’s gone, vanished completely—Khorsa has cut his sourceline.
Aiah looks to the hanged man, finds him unmoved, launches her bolt of fire. Taikoen is either stunned or is having difficulty disentangling his essence from Refiq’s remains.
It is safer to attack this way, Aratha’s manual suggests. Blast Taikoen from a distance, fire discrete bolts and not a steady stream of plasm that he could turn against its user.
A half-dozen bolts blaze into Taikoen. His scintillating body scatters, loops, reforms. Once free of Refiq he will not be able to survive for long without plasm. He floats away from Refiq, lets the blasts drive him toward the sisters’ building, and then, with a sinuous, purposeful little twist of his form, Taikoen slides through the image on the huge door, Enters the Gateway, enters the maze that waits for him…
Aiah pursues, spreading phantom arms wide as she flies across Cold Canal at the speed of thought, fast as one of her plasm bullets. There is a strange high-pitched drone humming somewhere in her senses, and she realizes it’s Dr. Romus, a kind of buzzing battle-cry he’s uttering unconsciously as he flies to the attack. Aiah dives through the doorway—the sisters’ building is transparent to plasm, completely unshielded—and there is one of the Dreaming Sisters on her couch, not Whore but someone Aiah doesn’t know, lying with eyes closed and plasm contact in her mouth, and the sister has lifted a hand to point down the rightmost of the two corridors… Aiah flies in that direction, catches bits of Taikoen’s form speeding along the floor, as if he is in the process of diving into a plasm main just below the surface of the flags. Aiah gives a yelp of triumph and fires a bolt, sees bits of Taikoen flare up and scatter like sparks. Another of Aiah’s team fires a bolt—and Taikoen submerges completely, like a dolphin diving beneath the surface of the sea.
There are Dreaming Sisters in all the alcoves, and with a shiver at their strange knowing Aiah sees that each has raised a languid arm, fingers pointing down the corridor, directing Aiah and the others to their prey. The corridor loops right and down and then branches, but Aiah follows the sisters’ drowsing fingers, all lazily pointing at one spot in the wall, a carved trompe l’oeil of Rohder.
Aiah gathers herself and punches through the image, briefly feeling the chill of the stone around her—and then there is Taikoen, a figure hunched over one of the Dreaming Sisters, the violence already over, a spray of blood dripping down the alcove wall and the sister’s eyes a staring witness to her final terror. In her last instant, torn from her unearthly dreaming and her inhuman serenity, she had become human again, pain and raw emotion plain on her face.
But more eerie than this are the sisters in the other alcoves, all lying in repose, eyes closed in dream, minds far removed from the grisly scene save for the uplifted arms, the fingers pointing in silent, certain accusation, toward the guilty thief who has stolen their sister’s life.
Taikoen has taken the copper contact from the sister’s slack mouth; he is trying to take plasm. Aiah gathers energy, as if filling her lungs with air, and then flings the power at the hanged man, a ball of destruction. The hanged man shudders—the fury of the bolt splatters stone along the corridor, sets afire the dead sister’s mattress. Other animas fly into the corridor, surround Taikoen with a storm of fire. But he’s using the dead sister’s plasm now, creating a bubble shield that surrounds him. The bolts ricochet off the shield, strike sparks and splinter shards from the stone walls.
“Khorsa!” Aiah barks. “Alfeg! Protect the sisters! The rest of you—
The more plasm they fire at the hanged man, Aiah assumes, the faster he’ll use up his available supply. She wonders why he’s making a stand here, why he doesn’t simply dive into the nearest plasm main and run.
Maybe, she thinks, the sisters are making the plasm mains uncomfortable for him.
She fires bolt after bolt. The bubble shield spins, lurches, blazes with strange color. And then frost shivers up her veins at the sound of Taikoen’s insinuating voice.
She doesn’t know whether he hears her or not, whether she is projecting the words to him or just speaking them aloud in the Operations Room, but he acts as if he hears. Taikoen and the plasm-shield make a lunge, straight for Aiah’s anima, and she feels a sudden shock of contact, the touch of the thing’s cold, immortal mind, its dread intention, and knows its goal is to conquer her, nullify her, drive her mind into mad byways and seize her plasm for his own.
