City on Fire

“Onions, olives, smoked fowl. Drumbeth, Parq, Hilthi. Diverse people, diverse interests, diverse tastes. Brought into union with a little skill on the part of your deponent.”

She raises her glass, offers him a salute. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” He tastes his creation, raises his eyebrows in pleasant surprise. “Better than I thought, in truth.”

“Let’s hope it’s an omen.”

“Let’s.” He sips the wine, takes a few more bites. Looks up from his plate. “And how are you getting on with Ethemark?” “It was—” She takes a breath. “An interesting day.”

“Tell me.”

She tells him. They finish their meal and take the wine bottle to the couch. “So what have I done?” she asks. “Have I sold the department to some little gangster in return for a handful of names?”

He considers this. “You judge yourself overharshly,” he says. “You have made no promises to this man, none at all. What you have done is make a policy decision—the first of a great many—to the effect that you will concentrate your efforts on one area of your mandate and not another.” His frown changes to a catlike smile. “It is a decision I support fully, by the way. The half-worlds are potentially a great resource. We should not waste them, or their people.”

Relief eases the tension that clings between Aiah’s shoulder blades. “But what about Ethemark? His loyalties are clearly with the half-worlds, and not with us.”

“That will require tactful handling, if and when the difference becomes important. But you need not worry over the loyalties of most of your people—I’ve decided that everyone will require deep plasm scans, to discover where their loyalties really lie.”

Aiah looks at him in surprise. “Who’s going to do the scanning?”

“The Force of the Interior. Sorya’s department. It’s the sort of thing they’re good at.”

Alarm jangles along Aiah’s nerves. “I don’t want Sorya in my brain!” she cries. Involuntarily she lifts a hand protectively to guard her head.

Constantine reaches out, takes her hand in his, gently lowers it to her lap. “Not you,” he says. “Nor Ethemark, nor any other political appointee I am forced to accept. But everyone else, yes. You need an absolutely straight department, even if we have to hire every single one of them from outside Caraqui, and plasm scans are the only way to make certain.”

She clasps Constantine’s big hand in her smaller ones, looks at him. A shiver of memory raises the hairs on her nape. “I saw Taikoen yesterday, Metropolitan.”

He looks startled, then masters himself and nods. “Yes. He is… making use… of an officer of the Specials. A killer, a torturer. He broke hundreds in his dungeons, and murdered many.” His lip curls in disdain. “Such people are best disposed of with the trash. If anyone deserves Taikoen, it is he.”

Aiah finds her lower lip shivering and wills it to stop. “Who knows about him? It.”

Constantine’s eyes gaze somberly into hers. “You. Martinus, my bodyguard. Myself. Sorya may suspect, though I have not told her. And lastly that torturer, who though his body lives is already dead.”

A shudder runs through her. “He recognized me. I was terrified.”

“He will not harm you.” Constantine puts his arms around her, cradles her against his massive chest. “Making use of Taikoen is the worst thing I have ever done. It is the worst thing I can ever conceive.” His hand caresses her jaw-line, turns her face up to his. There is a smouldering anger in his eyes, in the twisting muscles of his jaw. “Taikoen weighs on me,” Constantine says. “He is necessary, but…” There is a flicker in his pensive eyes, echo of a chill thought that passes through his mind. “I hope I judged this aright. The balance of rights and wrongs, the hope of a better outcome.”

Aiah smiles wanly. “It isn’t all as easy as cooking, is it?”

He nods in answer. There is a kind of painful hopelessness in his eyes. “Taikoen is a trap, I know. He is too powerful a weapon to ignore, but the very knowledge of him is… corrupting. I hope that someday I may be strong enough to do without him.” He takes a deep breath. “And he is, sometimes, still the Taikoen who fought the Slaver Mages. Even in his current form he is not without his share of greatness. And he is…” Constantine searches for a word. “He is impaired, and, for all his power, diminished… He has lost his humanity, and he wants it again, and he can’t find it.”

He straightens, visibly summons himself, and gives Aiah a sharp glance. “You know that I worshipped Taikoen once, as part of a…” He licks his lips. “A cult. My cousin Herome was priest.”

“You told me this,” Aiah says.

“It isn’t a part of my life that fills me with pride. I was debased and desperate, and I sought company as debased as I… and there was Herome, in charge of my grandfather’s prisons, feeding prisoners to this thing, and playing at worshipping it. But strangely, it was seeing Taikoen so degraded that brought back my own pride—I had no great opinion of myself, princeling of a bandit regime, but I knew that I was better than this. And when I came to know him, I managed to remind him of his own greatness, and managed to instill in him a memory of his own pride…” An image of that pride broods in Constantine’s eyes, along with bright defiance.

“And that,” he says, “was the end of Herome and his worshippers—Taikoen engulfed them all. It was my first strike against my family, for all they never knew it.” He looks down at Aiah, his glance uneasy. “And Taikoen has followed me ever since. And I have made use of him from time to time, and paid the price.”

She reaches up a hand, touches his cheek. He looks down at her, a kind of need plain on his face. “I hope I may have your understanding in this,” he says. “And better, your compassion.”

Aiah kisses him, driving her lips up into his. The only comfort she can offer, she thinks, is the comfort of her body. For a moment Constantine absorbs the kiss, inhales it as if it’s a consolation, an absolution, and then the kiss awakens in him a tigerish spirit, a fierceness, and his answering kiss is like a kiss of fire.

He carries her bodily to the bedroom, then lays her on the bed and takes off his clothes. She presses the button that polarizes the windows, and in the resulting shadow she looks at the half-light gleaming off his huge shoulders, his massive arms, the powerful muscles of his thighs and buttocks……

Either he is your passu, or you are his. Her grandmother’s voice floats through her mind, and she puts the treacherous thought away.

Aiah welcomes Constantine into the circle of her arms, the circle of her legs. Outside the circle all is dubious, in flux, but the weight of Constantine’s body on hers assures her of her own certainty in the world, of her own consequence, at least until all identity, all thought, is obliterated by climatic fire.

They lie together only a short while before Constantine has to leave. “A meeting,” he sighs, “cocktails. Would you believe it? But he is the Polar League’s ambassador, and we need League funds if we are to accomplish anything at all.”

She touches his shoulder, her fingers following the sheen of light on his black skin. “I wish you would stay.”

He bends over her, kisses her gravely on the forehead. “I cannot treat you as you deserve,” he says. “And for that, as much as anything else, I require your understanding.”

“Sorya—,” she begins, then cuts short at his frown.

“Don’t ask me to choose between you,” he says. “It is not simple. Sorya is what she is, and for a variety of reasons, I need her—her mind and skills more than anything.”

“I was not asking for a choice,” Aiah says. “I was wondering if she would kill me. She and I had… a side- agreement… concerning you. I may have violated it by coming here. And she has already sent me a message.”

All truces are temporary, Sorya said.

Constantine’s brows knit. Aiah can see muscles working on the side of his neck, as if he is chewing the news over before he makes his calm answer.

“If she harms you,” he says (his eyes are stone, cold as the breath of Taikoen), “then it will be the end of her.”

“I hope you will tell her that.”

“I will see that she knows.”

He kisses her forehead again, sealing the promise, then rises and begins to dress.

Aiah lies still for a moment, her nerves humming with the strangeness, the peculiar uncanny intensity, of this life-and-death bargain, and then she remembers she has carried something with her to give to him. She rises from