Another thing Fringe hadn’t known. But of course, if he’d inherited from Grandma it would have opened up whole new worlds for him! She sighed.
“Both Pa and Grandma Gregoria were very clear about my being crude. And Trashy. Which is no doubt why I was deposed in your favor. I didn’t find that out until he died, did you know that?”
Tears ran down Yilland’s face. “I never asked him to. I never even knew you didn’t know. He didn’t tell us you were still around, anywhere. I thought you were gone away, that you didn’t need anything….”
“And if I had needed anything?” Fringe asked curiously. “Would you or your mama have helped me out?”
Yilland flushed again, face quivering, and Fringe felt guilty, as though she’d slapped a child.
“If he inherited from Grandma, what happened to it all?”
Yilland gestured helplessly. Gone, her waving fingers seemed to say. Evaporated. Vanished. Well, that was typical.
“Oh, go on home, Yilland,” Fringe said impatiently. “Don’t worry about the claim. I’ll take care of it, because I’m curious, and because you ask me, and for the fee. No, no, you needn’t pay me now. Later will do. When you get yourself married to some classly Professional.”
Yilland turned a floral red from her neck to her forehead. “I have no right to ask. Mother and I … we thought you had betrayed Char,” she whispered, unable not to confess her true feelings. “Well, he said you had. Betrayed his Professional status by becoming what you are….”
Fringe felt first a blinding fury, then a surge of laughter coupled with something almost like pity.
“You have no idea what I am,” she whispered.
Yilland paled and stepped back.
“You have no idea,” said Fringe again. “You and your classly mother, and all the self-satisfied people of Enarae. All the folk of Elsewhere! They live because of me and people like me! Char Dorwalk lived on the blood of people like me. It is we who keep you all situated in your familiar worlds, we who keep you comfortable. If it were not for me and those like me keeping things together, those you despise so readily would rise up and eat you! Or the Hobbs Land Gods would swallow you up and perhaps that would be best for you all!”
It was what Enforcers said about themselves. Even Fringe didn’t believe it all. But at the moment, it felt exactly the right and final thing to say.
Night in Tolerance, with nine tenths of the population asleep, the corridors still, and only the night shift on monitor duty. These are the vacant hours, the time for inexplicable happenings. Corridor doors deep below ground swing open of themselves. Distant sounds filter through from ancient armories. People waken from dreams sweating, their hearts pounding. Night workers think they see things at the corners of their eyes. There has been more of this lately, a great deal more. The med-techs are concerned, wondering if there is some kind of epidemic brewing.
If so, Boarmus is a sufferer, wakening at midnight, lungs heaving, as from a dream of torture and despair. The room flickers around him, as though thronged with transparent creatures. He believes he sees faces, hands, arms writhing like tentacles. He knows he hears voices. Dead men. That’s what Boarmus calls them. Dead men. They never used to come here like this, but lately—lately they seem to wander around to suit themselves.
Boarmus heaves himself out of bed and goes out just as he is, in his rumpled nightshirt, uncorseted and bleary-eyed. The corridors are vacant except for the flickering, wavering shapes he sees along the walls, except for the pairs of dim white orbs following him down the narrow back hall to the secret tubeway, which opens at the sound of his voice and drops him a thousand feet down and horizontally, clanking through voice-code activated security locks before opening into a small metal-walled cube with blank walls.
Before the former Provost, Chadra Hume, had retired to Heaven, he had brought Boarmus here once. There had been no marks on the walls to guide Chadra Hume then; there are none to guide Boarmus now. He simply has to remember where the touch plates are. Three paces left of the lift door at shoulder height (where he thinks he sees two spectral faces howling into his own). One. Six paces the other side, waist high (where he puts his hands through the guts of a wraith). Two. Straight across from the lift door, eye level (under that clutter of ghostly hands). Three. If he’s done it right, there’ll be a click. If he hasn’t done it right, he must go up, come back down, and try again.
The click is slow in coming, muffled and reluctant. One of the metal walls moves to the right, leaving a floor-to-ceiling slit at the corner. Boarmus shambles into the opening before the wall stops moving, and it closes behind him as he shuffles down soft-floored twisting corridors flushed with effulgent light. Like being sucked down a glow worm’s guts, he had thought more than once. The corridors are lined with rows of cabinets, all of them stuffed with sensory recordings and official transcripts—a millennium’s worth of records of God knows what by God knows whom!
The door at the bottom opens into darkness. Only when the door has locked itself behind him do the lights come on, showing the console, the speaker, the transparent plate set into the lower wall and floor through which he can observe the crystalline structures below. This is the Core, the first thing built upon Elsewhere. Before the armory, before the Great Rotunda, before all the ramifications of Tolerance, this was built, an enormous, complicated device extending in repeated spirals down to the limit of vision, deep as a mine, wide as a chasm. Spirits cluster thickly upon the spirals, like rotted grapes upon a dangling vine. Boarmus can’t see them. Not really. But he believes they’re there.
“Boarmus,” says a dead man in a toneless voice.
“Here,” he
