'Ah well,' he said. He closed her hands over the small wallet and patted them. 'You ought not to need it, but if anybody asks you what clan you're from, just show them this.'
She nodded. 'Phremylagists and Incliometricists.'
'Not one of the more active clans, I'll grant you, but ancient, and honourable. I hope we have been of some service.'
She smiled. 'You have made me welcome, and brought me here. Thank you.'
Pieter nodded to a wooden bench behind them. 'Let's sit, shall we?'
They sat, and for a while simply contemplated the castle.
She jumped when the airship sounded its horn. Pieter looked at his watch again. 'Well, I must go. Cousin Ucubulaire ought to arrive presently. Will you be all right waiting here?'
'Yes, thank you.' She stood with him, and he took her hand and kissed it. She returned the gesture and he laughed gently.
'I don't know what your business is here, my dear, or what lies in store for you, but I do hope you will come and visit us again, when you know what all this has been about.' Pieter hesitated and a troubled expression crossed his face for a moment, then he shook his head. 'I'm sure it will all sort itself out happily. But do come back and see us.'
'I shall.'
'I'm very glad to hear it. Goodbye, Asura.'
'Goodbye, Pieter Velteseri.'
He returned to the airship. A little later he appeared on the observation deck. He waved and she waved back, flourishing the wallet he'd given her before placing it carefully in a pocket. The airship's engines hummed into life; it lifted, turned across the breeze and started back east across the hills of Xtremadur.
She watched the vessel grow slowly smaller in the sky, then turned back to feast her sight upon the castle.
'Ah, Asura?' the woman said.
She looked up. There was a tall lady standing by the bench. She wore cool blue clothes the same colour as her eyes. Her skin was pale.
'Yes, I am Asura. Are you Ucubulaire?'
'Yes.' The woman put her hand out. 'Yes, I am.' Her grip was scratchy; her hands were covered with thin net gloves made from some fine but hard filaments. 'Pleased to meet you.' She indicated a tall, square-set, powerful looking man with deep-set eyes standing a little way off. 'This is a friend; Lunce.'
The man nodded. Asura smiled. He smiled, briefly.
'Shall we go?' the woman said.
'To there, to the fastness, yes?'
The woman smiled thinly. 'Oh yes.'
She stood up and went with them.
2
Consistory member Quolier Oncaterius VI sat in the single ice-scull, pulling hard on the oars while the seat slid under him, the breath whistled out of his lungs and the claw-blades bit and chipped into the smoothly glistening surface on either side. The scull was an A-shaped tracery of carbon tubing a child could lift with one hand; it skittered across the ice on its three hair-thin blades with a nervous, rumbling, hissing noise.
The chill blast of air slid round his body-suit and licked up over the seat harness towards his face.
He pulled, slid, pulled, slid, pulled, slid, settling into a steady rhythm of heart, lung and muscle, flicking the oars back and hauling them forward, the hooked claws at the shafts' ends embedding in the ice and providing the leverage to snap himself forward on each explosive haul.
The trick with ice-rowing was to judge precisely the weight and angle of attack of the stramazon — or downward cut — of the claws, while balancing the vertical and horizontal components of the stroke, thus ensuring both that one always had a sufficiently embedded grip on the ice's skin to provide purchase while wasting as little effort as possible lifting the claw-tips out of the ice again, and that one was always just on the edge of lifting oneself and the scull partially off the ice, but never quite doing so. It was a delicate double-balance to maintain and required both finely tuned judgment and great concentration. There were many aspects of a politician's — indeed a ruler's — life which demanded exactly such equipoise.
Oncaterius was proud of the skill he had developed at the sport.
He stroked on, oblivious to the space around him save for the fuzzy black mark of the lane centre-line printed under the ice. Around him stretched kilometres of ice, lightly populated by people on skates, ice boards and ice yachts. The thin air of the level-five Great Flying Room sounded to the zizz of blades inscribing the floor-lake's frozen surface and the propeller blades of the microlights describing lazy arcs about its lofted spaces.
Something clicked in Oncaterius' mind and a display superimposed itself in his vision, giving him his time for the kilometre course.
He shipped oars and sat back, breathing hard, the scull still skidding quickly across the ice. He gazed up at the microlights circling round the ornate, suspended architecture of the central stalactite at the crux of the room's groin-vaulted ceiling.
Soon, he thought, in perhaps as little as a century, all this would be gone. The Great Flying Room, Serehfa, Earth itself. Even the sun would never again be the same.
It was a thought that filled Oncaterius with a sort of delicious gloom; a melancholic ecstasy which made the appreciation of this current life all the sweeter. To treasure each moment, to savour every experience, to evaluate individually one's multitudinous feelings and sensations with the knowledge lodged within that events were hurrying to a close, that there was no longer a seeming infinitude of time stretching ahead of one; that was truly to live.
All that they and their ancestors had known throughout the monotonous millennia of the past since the Diaspora had been a kind of elegant death, an automaton's graceful impersonation of life; the surface without the substance. Well, it was going now. The arc of humanity's purpose — that is, real humanity, the part that had chosen to stay true to the past and what it meant — was finally drawing itself back into the shade after whole long troubled ages spent in the vexatious light of day.
Fruition. Consummation. Termination… Closure.
Oncaterius savoured the thoughts and correlations such words evoked, drawing their meanings and associations into his mind as he drew the cool, sharp air into his lungs; arid — even sterile — and yet invigorating. Especially when one knew that one would not necessarily have to share the fate of one's fellows, or one's surroundings.
The scull skated on across the water-filmed ice, gradually slowing.
Oncaterius leant back against the seat's spindly head-rest, letting it cup his neck and scalp. He crypted for a moment, reviewing the current security condition.
They still sought Sessine, who remained loose after all this time. Probably in hiding.
Security's quasi-official leak/rumour that any asuras would actually be agents of the crypt's chaotic levels sent with the purpose of infecting the properly functioning Cryptosphere seemed to be meeting with a mixed reception; however, enough people/entities appeared to believe it for an atmosphere of satisfyingly useful paranoia to have settled over at least some sections of the data corpus.
His Majesty himself had first reported the loss of a soldier at the bomb-workings; it remained to be seen to what extent this had jeopardised the project. There had been no reaction yet from the Chapel ambassadorial mission, though they had to assume that the Engineer emissaries had been informed through their secure channel to the Palace.
Concern remained over unusual patterns within the lower crypt; some obscure species of chimeric bird appeared to have developed behaviour above its station and so was under suspicion of being an agent for the chaos; the birds would be sought out and apprehended as soon as was practical. Linked with that, perhaps, was a
