cabals of officers. Charna had got along perfectly well with the Keremaths.
Northwest is Nesca, a smallish metropolis that rejoices in a functioning parliamentary democracy. Its government seems inexplicably hostile to Caraqui’s new rulers, and has issued a number of statements condemning the violence with which the triumvirate established itself.
West is the horror of Sabaya, which has been dominated for the last seventy-five years by Field Marshal the Serene Lord Dr. Iromaq, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Magical Arts, Savior of the Nation, etc., etc., a man from whom even the Keremaths recoiled. Sabaya’s ghastly regime, inept, cash-poor, and brutal, is a byword for poverty, terror, and oppression. Whatever goes on behind its closed borders goes on largely unobserved, as if within some all-encompassing shroud of darkness.
These are the neighbors among which Caraqui’s new government now stands. Uneasy, hostile, or unstable, friendly for the most part with the Keremaths, none are likely to welcome an unruly set of newcomers like Caraqui’s triumvirate, let alone an ominous foreign presence like Constantine.
And then, below her hovering anima, a miracle blossoms: color expands in midair from a central point like water bursting from a main, like a kaleidoscope gone mad… but soon concrete images begin to form—faces, images, fancies—one turning into another like the products of dream. A man on skates. A tree that blossoms in seconds and produces red fruit, which falls of its own accord into the laps of a circle of smiling children. A tall building, granite and glass, which begins to contort, to shimmy in a kind of dance. Disembodied hands and eyes, a burning egg, a burning key, a wine bottle made of stone…
The Dreaming Sisters are at play in the sky.
Aiah looks for a sourceline for the cloud of images but can’t see one. The vision begins to move westward, toward ominous Sabaya, skipping through the air like a plate skimming the sea. Aiah watches in delight until it vanishes in the distance.
She will have to find out more about the Dreaming Sisters someday.
But now her concerns are more mundane. She orients herself over her target, then drops into a district of cheap flats, warehouses, and illegal factories where the children of Caraqui toil at unforgiving machines for double shifts every day.
The half-world of Aground lies somewhere hereabouts, hidden beneath the streets. On these shallow mudflats, many of the buildings have conventional architecture, with foundations reaching to bedrock; and others, centuries old, are on concrete pontoons that moored themselves in mud long ago.
Aiah is looking for one of the latter. It isn’t hard to find, a sprawling, crumbling warren of brown-brick tenements so ancient that the only thing keeping them upright are the rusting iron braces and props added to the structure. Once there, Aiah has to be more circumspect, on the chance that the people she is looking for might also be on the lookout for her.
She carries her sensorium in an anima, a plasm body that she hasn’t bothered to will into the shape of an actual human body: it’s a diffuse cloud of plasm she has configured to remain sensitive to its environment. Carefully she drops the anima beneath street level, where the huge grounded pontoons loom on either side and the dark brackish sea slops over the mudflats below. There is little light here, but plasm can be configured to see in the dark. Aiah moves between the pontoon walls until she comes to a mark, scored lightly into the crumbling concrete, that she has left earlier.
At this point she reconfigures her anima, confining it to a narrow pipette of plasm that should be difficult to detect, and then rises through the midst of the tenement, through iron beams and brick arches and worn plastic flooring, through uninspiring sights of people cooking or doing laundry or watching video, past children playing or sleeping or fighting with each other, until she reaches the hallway outside the Silver Hand plasm house she has been observing for the last week.
The hallway’s flaking paint is scarred with decades’ worth of graffiti. The crumbling plastic flooring, a cheap imitation of an old Geoform design, has worn clear through in spots, and has been overlaid with ribbed plastic mats—probably not for the convenience or safety of the tenants, but for the benefit of the Silver Hand, who moved truckloads of plasm batteries through this hallway.
Aiah ghosts along at floor height, looking for the mage she’s relieving. She wills her sensorium to become sensitive to plasm, and finds a little flare from a not-quite-concealed sourceline in the hallway, near the baseboard. She ghosts up to the flare, wills a little extrusion of her own plasm to touch the sourceline.
—This is Aiah, she pulses. Anything doing?
She senses a flare of surprise from the other ghost. He is one of Aiah’s new hires, a newly graduated mage from Liri-Domei, a little inexperienced but learning quickly.
—The deliveries went out before midbreak, he broadcasts. The Ferret’s inside filling batteries. The Slug is there with him.
—The Mole?
—Been and gone.
The code names date from an earlier phase of the observation, when Aiah and her unit were ignorant of the names of the Handmen they were observing. But the codes were more descriptive than the Handmen’s actual names, and remain in force.
—I’ll relieve you, then, Aiah sends.
—Nothing much happening. Good luck.
The other mage fades. Aiah slides through the wall and extrudes a minute part of her plasm-body to the other side.
The Silver Hand is very confident here. A plasm house should be sheathed in bronze or at least bronze mesh, like Lamarath’s office in Aground, to prevent anyone like Aiah from peering inside. But the Silver Hand isn’t worried about the forces of the law, or apparently anyone else. They operate openly. Thousands of people must know about this place.
The Silver Hand will learn caution in time. But Aiah intends to gather as much information as possible while they are still careless, and then strike. If she had more time, and more people, she could fashion a single powerful attack that would prove lethal to all of them; but as it is, with the knowledge she possesses and the weapons she has been given, she will do her best to make the blow a heavy one.
Aiah opens her plasm-senses, sees the two Silver Hand men inside their place of business. Each is of a type. Gangsters, Aiah suspects, are the same everywhere. The young are exuberant and dress in exaggerations of fashionable styles—the Ferret wears yards of lace and a plush velvet jacket, purple with brass studs in decorative patterns. His hair is permed and dressed in shining ringlets. He wears a heavy Stoka watch on one wrist, and suede boots with heels.
Older Handmen carry themselves with a different style.
The Slug’s suit is more conservative, his face masklike, his ruthlessness complete. In the younger ones you can still see traces of humanity; in the older ones, never, nothing but the inhuman glimmer in their calculating eyes. Back in Jaspeer they all had military ranks: captains, colonels, generals. Here they have a family structure and call themselves cousins, brothers, and uncles. All the same.
The Ferret wrestles heavy plasm batteries to and from his illegal tap. It’s a struggle for him because he’s a slender man, and sweat drips from his forehead to splash on the scarred soft rubber flooring installed to muffle the thuds of the heavy work.
The other, the Slug, is obese and in authority. He is in charge of the cash, which is kept in a drawer of his desk. He has his feet propped atop the desk while he watches the younger man work, and gestures largely with both hands as he talks on a telephone headset.
The Ferret wrestles the last battery into place, puts the tap on it, and stops to light a cigaret. The Slug, talking to a girlfriend, drones on without cease.
Plasm stolen by the Silver Hand is usually not consumed by the gangsters themselves. They sell it, at inflated prices, to customers who have no choice but to pay their extortionate fees. But a certain percentage of the plasm is used within their own operation: to locate cargoes worth hijacking, to intimidate and murder, to provide life- extension treatments for their leaders. If necessary, to kill each other, though there hasn’t been a war among the Silver Hand in twenty years, and being a Handman is as safe as—probably safer than—banking.
Aiah watches the pair for two hours. Junior Handmen or independent affiliates—“brothers” or “nephews” in Hand-man jargon—turn up every so often to drop off empty plasm batteries and bags of cash and pick up newly charged batteries. Sometimes they stay around and gossip for a while before leaving. It’s all routine.
