City on Fire

Aiah pushes away her cooling noodles, stands, approaches Constantine from behind. She puts her arms around him, presses her cheek to his shoulder. “It wasn’t all your fault,” she says. “You had to fight gangsters and your own family and Cheloki’s neighbors. Even so you did well. You lasted for years against all of them, and you inspired millions.” Her tone softens. “You inspired me.”

“You weren’t there,” he grudges, but his tone is softer.

Constantine’s warmth steals into her frame. She can feel his anger soften. “Much better to be a mere government minister,” he says. “I will be responsible only for my own department, and even if I have my way in larger issues, success or failure will be up to someone else.”

For all that he finds this thought comforting, Aiah cannot quite believe that Constantine will find himself this detached when anything important is at stake.

“Everything must be in place as soon as possible,” Constantine says. His voice is low, thoughtful, and perhaps he is talking as much to himself as to Aiah. “We have a new government, and many more actions are possible under martial law than otherwise… but they must be the right actions, not abuses or pointless pursuit of revenge, and martial law must soon enough be lifted, and by then, we must all be ready.”

He turns, puts his arms around her waist, and looks at her levelly. “You must have your department prepared by then. I can guarantee you independence as long as I am minister; but no appointment lasts forever, and after I’m gone—well, you must be in place, with an independent, efficient, and incorruptible force. Once you have that, once you have proved your worth, they will have a much harder time dislodging you.”

Aiah’s head swims. “I understand.”

“Do you need anything right now? Anything at all?”

“I need to see as much of the apparatus as possible. Control stations, broadcast antennae, receivers, connections, capacitors.”

“I will arrange to give you a tour.”

“Of course.”

He kisses her—a moment’s softness brushing her lips—and then Constantine is already in motion, his body moving toward the door, mind focused on another item of his agenda. He reaches the door and turns.

“I will send you an engineer, Miss Aiah. Within the hour.” He reaches for the door, then hesitates and breaks into a smile. “Apologies for my haste,” he says. “By all means finish your luncheon, and order as many desserts as you like.”

“Thank you,” Aiah says, his taste still tingling on her lips, and then he is gone.

She returns to her meal, and wonders how dangerous it is that, after all this, she is still so very hungry.

TRAM SCANDAL REVEALED! KEREMATHS RAKED IN MILLIONS! CONTRACTOR HELD FOR QUESTIONING

Constantine sends a Captain Delruss, who is plainly annoyed at having been drawn away from his other duty. Delruss is stocky and gray-haired, a native of the Timocracy of Garshab, where the military profession is an honored and highly profitable tradition among its fierce mountaineers. He is a military engineer with a specialty in plasm control systems—and probably a mage of sorts—and though he has had only a few days to acquaint himself with the systems of the Aerial Palace, he has learned them well indeed. If Delruss performs his new assignment grudgingly he performs it efficiently enough, and becomes visibly happier when he finds out that Aiah knows her business.

The tour starts in the heart of the Palace, deep underwater in the largest of the giant barges that support the extravagant structure overhead. This is clearly the center of Caraqui’s power: the concrete pontoon is armored with slabs of steel, segmented into watertight compartments, laced with a defensive bronze web intended to absorb plasm attack.

There is one compartment after another filled with giant plasm accumulators and capacitors—each four times Aiah’s height, layers of gleaming black ceramic and polished brass and copper that tower into the darkness overhead. Above them are the huge contact arms poised to drop and connect the accumulators to Caraqui’s plasm network, the all-embracing web that can draw all the power of the city into this one place.

The control room is as vast as everything else, one bank after another of controls, levers, switches, glowing dials. In one corner is an icon to Tangid, the two-faced god of power, with a few candles burning in front of it, and in another corner is another icon to a figure Aiah doesn’t recognize, with no candles at all. Looming overhead, video monitors show unblinking views of the outside of the building, of the entrance areas, of Government Harbor several radii away, and of other points deemed important to Caraqui’s security.

Mages, some civilian and some not, sit before consoles, eyes closed, bodies swaying as power pours through them. Captain Delruss’s comrades, the uniformed personnel operating the system, seem dwarfed by the enormity of it all.

“During the fighting all this could have given us a lot of trouble,” Delruss says, “but afterward we discovered there were very few calls for plasm made during the coup.”

“Why was that?” Aiah asks, gazing up at glowing monitor screens. She can’t imagine anyone forgetting to use the colossal power of this place.

“There was sabotage of the communications system and of the plasm delivery network,” Delruss says. “But nothing that couldn’t have been overcome by competent people in the control room. What really won the coup for our side was that the enemy leadership was completely decapitated. There was no one left alive with the authority to make big plasm calls.”

Aiah’s mouth goes dry as she remembers the splashes of red-brown on her bedroom walls. “Do you know how our side managed it?” she asks.

Delruss has clearly been giving this issue a lot of thought. “Very good intelligence, for one thing. It looked as if we knew where almost every last one of the enemy leaders were, and were able to target them. And there were probably holes in the security screen here that our side had discovered, so mages could slip an attack through…” Delruss frowns, shakes his head. “But what sort of attack was used, miss, I can’t say. There are a large number of possibilities. But it was done very well, however it was done.”

Aiah remembers a moment of choking terror in a deep underground tunnel, the appearance of a thing that seemed made of purest black and silver, the chill waves of ice that flooded her nerves…

Ice man. Hanged man. The damned … an evil thing, whatever label you chose to give it. Its personal name was Taikoen, for that wasits name when it was a man—a hero, Taikoen the Great, the leader who saved Atavir from the Slaver Mages. Now debased, beyond humanity, a creature that Constantine could summon out of the depths of the plasm well, a thing deadly to everything that lived……

The enemy leadership was completely decapitated. Perhaps literally. And Aiah has the feeling she knows how it was done. A large part of it, anyway.

From the deep underwater plasma fortress, Delruss takes Aiah to the highest point of the Aerial Palace, where the huge bronze transmission horns are set in clusters like the outgrowths of a strange, intricate forest of gleaming metal. The horns are ornamented with ornate baroque swirls and scallops and, at each end, the sculptured figure of a hawk about to take flight. A cold wind buffets Aiah as she gazes out at the city—pontoons, buildings, roof gardens, long gray-green canals packed with ship and barge traffic—an endless procession stretching all the way to the distant volcanoes of the Metropolis of Barchab. Several of the aerial tramcars are visible in the distance, dancing on invisible wires. The volcanoes, Aiah realizes, are the only object in sight that, on account of altitude and danger of eruption, were not inhabited by the swarms of humanity that otherwise covered the globe.

She looks in the other direction, toward the North Pole only three or four hundred radii away. She sees giant buildings looming up out of the sea, one group twenty or so radii away and another dimly visible in the distance behind a cluster of spires. The Shield glows on their gleaming windows and burnished metal. Jagged transmission horns top almost every building.

“Lorkhin Island, and Little Lorkhin,” Delruss says. “Extinct volcanoes. They build tall here, when they can find bedrock.” He peers out into the distance. “The whole metropolis is ringed by tall buildings where the sea turns