They will rid themselves? They? How will they manage that? And mere mortals? Where did that come from?
“Danivon Luze is invaluable to me,” Boarmus blusters.
“No matter about you,” the voice says, chuckling. “We have the power, Boarmus. All the power. We are becoming … more than mere mortals, Boarmus!” The voice chuckles gulpingly.
Boarmus fights to keep his face calm and unresponsive, not to react to this outrageous statement. What do the dead men mean? And how will they kill anyone?
He has to think about this. He has to get away from here and think about this. He licks his lips. “If that’s all,” he says again.
No response. Then, a whisper. “I already killed two of them, Provost. Young ones. Sacrifices. To us.” A long pause. “To me.”
Boarmus swallows, feeling the acid burning in his throat. What have the dead men done?
He looks away for a moment, breathing deeply, gaining control of himself. When he looks back, he sees only the machine with most of its lights out, only a few flickering madly to show the Files are being accessed, the dead men are thinking. He rises from the chair and goes out into the twisting hallway, to the nearest cabinet where he searches frantically among the Files, removing several containers of material he has not bothered with before. No record, no sensory recording, is supposed to leave this place, but Boarmus cannot stay here long enough to look through them. Remaining here has become a physical impossibility.
Thus burdened, he goes back the way he came, distracted only briefly as he approaches his suite by the sight of someone hiding behind a half-opened panel. There is not time to stop and challenge. Once in his own place he vomits and defecates all at once, just as Chadra Hume had said he did, like a sick dog. It has never happened to Boarmus before, and he is sickened at the indecency of it, at the frailty of his own response.
He cleans up after himself, washes himself, rinses out his mouth, and flings himself on his bed to lie there taking deep breaths. “Two young ones,” the dead man said. Sacrifices to themselves, itself. Who would that be? And who had been hiding outside?
He summons Files with an outthrust hand. “Personnel check,” he says. “First item: identity of young person hiding outside my quarters when I returned here moments ago. Second item: Are all Tolerance staff members or guests present or accounted for?”
Files clicks and hums. Monitors throughout the enormous complex are alerted. Recent past-this-point traffic records are recalled and tabulated.
“First item,” says Files. “Named Jacent Sturv. Male kin of Syrilla. Recent arrival from Heaven. Second item: two unaccounted for. Metty and Jum Duschiv, siblings, recent arrivals from Heaven.”
“Find the two missing ones,” says Boarmus from a burning throat.
Files blinks and chatters. Outlying monitors come awake, Frickian guards are roused and directed to patrol unused areas. Boarmus sits on the side of his bed, his jowly face sweating into his hands, waiting.
The news comes at last. Metty Duschiv, found messily dead in the corridors several levels below the Rotunda. On the walls, words written in her blood. “Fool” is written there. And a word that looks like “adore.” Boarmus thinks it isn’t “adore.” Boarmus thinks he knows what it is.
The girl’s brother Jum is nowhere to be found, though a door into the old barracks appears to have been forced.
Have the dead men done this? And if so, how? And for the love of all humanity, why?
• • •
Outside Boarmus’s suite, behind a half-closed panel in a corridor alcove, Jacent stirred uncomfortably and decided that nothing else was likely to happen tonight. He had seen Boarmus go, accompanied by a certain weirdness, not unlike the weirdness in the old barracks. He had seen Boarmus return all alone. He had been close enough to see Boarmus’s face on the return trip, not a face that would encourage Jacent to follow in Boarmus’s footsteps. A terrified, sweaty, sick-looking face. There for a minute, he’d thought Boarmus had seen him too, but evidently not.
And right after that, every monitor had awakened, Frickian patrols had gone bustling past, one of whom had eventually told Jacent about Metty when Jacent asked what was happening.
After hearing that he went to his own place and crawled into bed, his mouth dry, watching his walls for that telltale shift, that shadowy sinuosity, listening for that glottal sound. There was something here in Tolerance he wanted to know about, but he preferred not to get dead finding out, particularly not the way Metty had gotten dead. Something very strange was happening, something interesting. Something Boarmus no doubt knew all about.
Jacent, mouth still dry and limbs jumping nervously, lay on his bed, sickly fascinated by the thought of something—anything!—happening at Tolerance!
On Elsewhere’s technology scale of one to ten, in which category-one places were unsettled wilderness roamed by a few eremites or savages, and category ten were state-of-the-art technological habitat, a category-seven province like Enarae had sufficient technology for comfort while retaining enough nature to provide pleasantly parklike spaces for the inhabitants.
Particularly parklike were the Seldom Isles, reached by swamp-river boat or by the farflung tentacles of Number Three Bridge, lofting upward from the western outskirts of the city and continuing in that direction all the way to the neighboring province of Denial. Fringe Owldark had spent holidays in the Isles and knew they were about as far as possible from the farm town of Fineen, which lay in the flat, sparsely settled agricultural lands across the city to the east. If putative Uncle and maybe-so Aunty came from Fineen, Fringe thought it very strange they’d be staying at Number Three Bridge House. If, on the other hand, they came from the Seldom Isles, as a good many gangers and vagrants did, their place of lodging made perfect sense.
“Probably bogus,” Fringe advised
