manicurist, and cosmetician. She finds herself fretting over the work she’s missing.
“It’s your
With the increased media exposure comes increased exposure to danger. She is given security briefings, cameras are set up outside her apartment, and she is forbidden to travel outside the Palace without bodyguards. The guards come from a pool available to all government employees above a certain grade—she has no regular guards, as Constantine does—but now she has to become accustomed to looking at the world through a screen of broad, besuited male backs.
Aiah checks out a boat from the vehicle pool, and after the guards declare it safe from bomb or hidden assassin, she ducks down into the cabin and lets the helmsman take the boat out of the immediate vicinity of the Palace, at which point her guards allow her to come out into the air.
It is best, Aiah has been told, to assume that all traffic entering or leaving the Palace is being monitored by someone hostile to the government. Aside from the likelihood that there are observation posts in the tall buildings surrounding the Palace, Aiah knows from personal experience that mages working surveillance can be very unobtrusive indeed.
But any enemy surveillance is limited. Anyone watching will grow tired and bored and soon be overwhelmed by the task. Hundreds of wheeled vehicles and watercraft enter or leave the Palace every day. If nothing intriguing is seen in the boat in the first few moments of its journey, it is unlikely that any observer will maintain interest, and will instead go look at something else.
After the boat has traveled a radius from the Palace, Aiah is allowed out of the shielded cabin. As hydrogen turbines whine, the boat speeds over bright green water through a residential district of elegant flats. The buildings, about three hundred years old, have sinuous fronts, silver-bright metal alternating with long rows of window glass, and each building is topped with a crystal-roofed arboretum; and Aiah’s heart gives a leap as she realizes she’s out of the Palace again, in a speeding boat, on a bright Shieldlit day, on an errand all her own and none that belongs to the war.
Elections slogans are everywhere.
Then she notices other graffiti unconnected with the elections, painted on the slab sides of the pontoons that support the apartment buildings—could gangs be marking their turf even here?; but as she looks closely she sees that the graffiti consists of repetitions of geomantic foci, particularly the White Horse and the Quadromark, one believed to be a warding sign and the other a sign to attract good luck.
The people here are trying to keep the war away.
It’s all nonsense, of course, popular magic without foundation in the real world of plasm science. The marks are a sign of how superstition can swarm into the world in times of uncertainty.
But it’s happening even in well-off neighborhoods like this one, a sign of how far the war has penetrated.
Suddenly the day seems less bright.
The boat slows and turns into a side canal. The long shining buildings fall behind, and here brown-brick apartments and warehouses crowd up close to the water, overhanging the canal and bridging it in places. The old, rusting bridges are encumbered with structures—shops and even small houses—that hang off them like barnacles. In these narrow watery corridors the turbines rumble loudly. Laundry floats overhead like faded artificial clouds, and swarms of noisy gulls circle. The White Horse and the Quadromark are displayed here as well, on pontoons crowded with other graffiti of a purely local interest.
Aiah sees two groups of Dalavan Militia, neither of them doing anything in particular, just drinking beer and strolling in packs along the quays. Each Militia member, Aiah sees, carries a staggering amount of firepower. An assault rifle over one shoulder, often with a sawtooth bayonet glinting in Shieldlight; a submachine gun under one arm; two or three pistols stuck into waistbands or holsters; knives big as short swords stuck into boots or jammed into cartridge belts.
Aiah can see her guards exchange looks of contempt. No serious soldier, she thinks, needs so many weapons, and no real policeman does either. All the weaponry is just to impress the neighbors, and each other.
Put these people up against the Provisional army and they’d fade into the mist.
The boat passes a stockyard and its adjacent slaughterhouse, pens packed with miniature beeves and sheep with wool the color of industrial grime. The smell is ghastly, but the swarms of gulls are thriving. Animal smells drench the air—wet wool, dung, blood, steam, offal, and a pungent chemical stench that probably has to do with how hides and wool are processed.
Aiah feels her gorge rise and turns away from the sight.
The Society of the Simple is nearby, still within smelling distance. It sits amid the grim old buildings on an ancient rust-streaked pontoon. The squat building is gray granite, with a leaded roof and a central bell-shaped dome of gleaming copper. The granite is overlaid with thousands of carvings woven together into an endless, complex knot that covers the whole building: vine leaves that turn into serpents, faces of pop-eyed demons and monsters leering out of the centers of flower blossoms… thorny brambles, ferns, trees with interwoven branches and bearing a dozen different kinds of fruit. Comic, grotesque figures hang out of carved buildings, waving papers or bottles or pigeon legs. Other buildings are ablaze, and little humans leap from the flames to their deaths. Half-hidden by the complex tracings, guns and armored vehicles can be seen. Dead women and babies hang on the bayonets of grinning soldiers, while tall, robed humans with faces of angelic serenity watch unmoved.
Everyone and everything woven together, unable to escape the vines, the brambles, the knots. It’s like one of their plasm displays carved into stone.
Aiah examines the exterior carefully as the boat approaches, but sees no figures that resemble those she has seen beyond the Shield.
A pier floats in the water on empty metal drums, and above it a rusting metal stair rises to the Dreaming Sisters’ home. A pair of Aiah’s guards bound up the stairs to check for sign of ambush, and find none. Aiah follows at a more sedate pace, still studying an intricate pattern of carved quincunxes…
The door, twice Aiah’s height, is of thick timbers with a trompe l’oeil relief of polished cast bronze stapled onto it, a relief in the shape of a door, and a young woman, seen from the rear, stepping through it. Superficially, tall and thin and with long hair in ringlets, the woman could be Aiah, or any of ten million other women. Above the relief are graven words,
There seems no doorbell or knocker, so Aiah finds a piece of the design—a border pattern of oak leaves—that curves conveniently in the form of a handhold, and gives the door a firm tug.
Although the door is heavy, it opens smoothly. Inside there is a bare room a half-dozen paces square—gray flags, gray stone walls, a groined arch overhead with a globular electric lamp dangling on an iron chain. Two simple arched doorways on either side lead to corridors. In an arched alcove in the back of the room a young woman lies on a mattress. She wears a simple gray knee-length shift and watches without expression as Aiah’s party enters.
Aiah’s nerves prickle as she realizes that the woman is wired to a plasm well. Even though there are no visible signs that the dreaming sister is working any magic here, she’s broadcasting signals of power perfectly recognizable to anyone who spends her days working with plasm.
Aiah’s guards are trained to recognize the signs as well, and fan into the room in case there’s any threat of violent sorcery. The three-man inspection team, suspecting nothing, follows Aiah through the door. Aiah approaches the woman, who—reluctantly, it seems—sits up to receive her. A wire trails out of her mouth, her connection to the plasm well. The woman—nun? postulant? Simple Person?—is copper-skinned and black-haired, with the hair kept severely short in a bowl-shaped bob. She’s thin and waiflike and looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare, and her leg and armpit hair are unshaven.
The dreaming sister removes the plasm connection from her mouth and holds it in her hand. The wire ends in a simple curved piece of copper metal, with a gleaming little copper ball on the end, an appliance like some people use for cleaning their tongues.
“May I help you?” the woman asks.
