City on Fire

no other job.” She smiles. “And because he needed a hobby.”

“Would he come to work for us, do you think?”

“I will call him, if you like.”

“An interview first. At his convenience. I will send an aerocar for him.”

“He has almost three hundred years’ seniority at the Authority. It’s a lot to give up.”

“Well.” Constantine shrugs. “We will see how badly he needs a hobby.”

Aiah smiles. “I will make the call.”

There is a knock on the doorframe, and Sorya walks in. She wears a silk dress the color of apricots and a belt of linked gold geomantic foci low on her hips, and carries a file folder.

Aiah’s nerves cry an alarm, but Sorya ignores her. She walks past Aiah’s chair with her languid panther stride, drops the folder on Constantine’s desk, then pulls out a chair and sits uninvited.

“The interrogations have gone well,” she says. “I have uncovered a few dozen foreign accounts where these Keremath men, these little losers, have been keeping their millions.”

Constantine gazes at Sorya with a hooded expression, lips turned up in a smile. A cruel little predatory glimmer dwells in his eyes, a twin to the gleam Aiah can see in Sorya’s glance.

“The question is how to retrieve this money,” Sorya says, and draws her legs up into the chair, coiling herself in the soft leather as if it were Constantine’s lap. “We can go through the courts, and, on convincing them that these Kere-math men are guilty of theft, and that the money was corruptly gained, we may in the end retrieve it, or…” She smiles. “Or we may mount an operation. I have their chops. An agent with the right passwords and the right chop can gain the money in a half-shift’s work.” “I will review the files.”

“In my judgment a few of these sums are worth the risk. I have already had my people in the banks here in Caraqui, torn out deposit boxes with crowbars, and found bonds and jewels enough to run the Force of the Interior for a week.”

“Ah.” He deliberately examines a dangling jewel about her neck. Rubies and brilliants, glittering amid a nested serpent design, wink Shieldlight back at him.

“That is very fine,” Constantine remarks, “and new, I believe.”

Sorya gives her lilting laugh. “A souvenir only,” she says. “I will return it to the state when I tire of it. But I think I will wear it to Justice Gathmark’s reception this sleep shift, and let him wonder where he has seen it before, and around whose pretty neck, and wonder as well what has happened to that old crony of his, for whom he did so many favors.”

They laugh at this conceit. A leaden weight sits on Aiah’s heart as she watches these companions at their clever play.

She pushes her chair back and stands.

“I’ll leave you to your work, Minister,” she says.

Sorya laughs again and looks at Aiah from beneath a soft wave of her blonde-streaked hair. “I was sorry to miss the tour last shift,” she says. “I hear good things of your department.”

And I hear nothing good of yours. Aiah burns to say it, but instead says “Thank you,” and makes her way out.

She hears Sorya’s laugh again as she closes the door behind her, and she remembers Constantine’s words: A personal power base in your department may not be a bad thing.

Indeed, she concludes, not a bad thing at all.

WHY LIVE WITH BLEMISHED SKIN… WHEN YOU CAN BE PERFECT?

REASONABLE RATES—INQUIRE NOW!

Another plasm house confirmed.

Another tip from the half-worlds proven accurate.

Aiah throws the switch and feels the transphysical world fade, sees the smaller of the two operations rooms come back into focus. The room is a shambles, gear piled everywhere and cables taped to the floor, with only a few plasm stations operational. Even though it’s early first shift, every station is being used by mages on surveillance. Aiah’s own shift ended at 24:00, but she stayed for another hour in order to make notes on a conversation the Handmen were having concerning a hijacking they’d pulled off in Barchab. The Barchabi police would probably be interested to know the names of the Barchabi accomplices.

It takes half an hour for Aiah to write her notes into a form suitable for transcription, next shift, by one of the department’s clerical aides; and then she tucks the file under her arm and makes her way out of the room.

The secure room is down a short hall. She’ll put the file there till work shift, then head to her apartment to take a shower and get some sleep. If, that is, the blazing plasm she’s been feeding into her nerves over the last hours will permit her even to close her eyes…

Aiah nods to the guard and says hello to the clerk, a little goggle-eyed embryo woman, who’s on duty and bent over her desk, keeping the index up to date. Aiah gives her the file number so that she can log it in. Then she steps to the door of the secure room itself, puts her hand on the cool bronze bar, and prepares to punch the day’s code into the twelve-key pad. No, the next day’s code, because it’s after change of shift…

She looks up and feels her heart turn over. Constantine is in the secure room, sitting at a metal desk, head bent as he copies something from a file. There is a cold light in his lowered eyes, and his upper lip is curled, as if in distaste for the task he has set himself.

Constantine, normally so aware of his surroundings, hasn’t even glanced up at her approach.

She steps silently back from the barred door and puts the file on the desk of the clerk. “I don’t want to disturb the minister,” she says. “Could you file this for me after he leaves?”

The big eyes lift to hers. “Certainly.”

Aiah walks away. / don’t want to know when it happens, she had told Constantine. / don’t want to know who, or when, or why it is being done.

He is choosing Taikoen’s victims, Aiah knows. Going through the files to find the most deserving of the Handmen. She probably won’t know which.

Until Taikoen is done with each, when Aiah will tell the clerk to retire his file.

GOVERNMENT DECIDES TO SELL ARMS COMPANY

QERWAN EMPLOYEES PROTEST DECISION

Aiah, telepresent, watches the old man snore. He lives in a fashionable district, in an expensive apartment building that presents to its canal a long, sinuous, reflective ribbon of black glass. The ownership of the building seems obscure, and is being looked into. The man himself seems untroubled by the ambiguity. From the corner, an icon of the prophet Dalavos regards this domestic scene with approval. A little glittering jewel of drool hangs in the corner of his mouth as he sleeps, next to his third wife, beneath an expensive Sycar comforter.

It is 02:00, early first shift, and the amnesty on plasm thieves expired two hours earlier, at 24:00. The opalescent Shield is bright overhead, undimmed by cloud, but most of the world is in bed, and few see the purposeful powerboats or the shrouded military convoys leaving the Palace district. The old man has polarized his windows, and his room is dark.

The man in the bed is Great-Uncle Rathmen, the head of Caraqui’s Silver Hand, and he is 111 years old, a thin, precise man fond of handmade boots and sentimental tokaph music. Like Costantine, he has kept aging at bay with regular plasm-rejuvenation treatments. Except that his are illegal, performed with bootleg plasm; one of Aiah’s observers even saw one of the procedures being performed out of an illegal plasm tap in the man’s apartment. The tap appeared to have been in place for a long time, and may have been designed into the building when it was built.

To live longer than a century is unusual in a Handman. It speaks less of his skill than of how comfortably the Silver Hand lives in Caraqui, that none of his underlings has seen any profit in removing him.

He has taken precautions, however: there is a crosshatch-ing of bronze mesh in the glass windows, and other bronze grids in the wall paneling, beneath the floor tile, and hidden behind the ceiling. But he’s remodeled since he moved in, and some of the bronze mesh wasn’t properly reinstalled: one of Aiah’s surveillance teams found