The menu had been projected, she saw, and Burzmali already was scanning it.
“I will order for you,” he said.
Burzmali’s way of saying he did not want her to make a mistake by ordering something a woman of the Hormu might avoid.
It galled her to feel dependent. She was a Reverend Mother! She was trained to take command in any situation, mistress of her own destiny. How tiring all of this was. She gestured at the dirty window on her left where people could be seen passing on the narrow street.
“I am losing business while we dally, Skar.”
There! That was in character.
Burzmali almost sighed. At last! he thought. She had begun to function once more as a Reverend Mother. He could not understand her abstracted attitude, the way she looked at the city and its people.
Two milky drinks slid from the slot onto the table. Burzmali drank his in one swallow. Lucilla tested her drink on the tip of her tongue, sorting the contents. An imitation caffiate diluted with a nut-flavored juice.
Burzmali gestured upward with his chin for her to drink it quickly. She obeyed, concealing a grimace at the chemical flavors. Burzmali’s attention was on something over her right shoulder but she dared not turn. That would be out of character.
“Come.” He placed a coin on the table and hurried her out into the street. He smiled the smile of an eager customer but there was wariness in his eyes.
The tempo of the streets had changed. There were fewer people. The shadowy doors conveyed a deeper sense of menace. Lucilla reminded herself that she was supposed to represent a powerful guild whose members were immune to the common violence of the gutter. The few people on the street did make way for her, eyeing the dragons of her robe with every appearance of awe.
Burzmali stopped at a doorway.
It was like the others along this street, set back slightly from the walkway, so tall that it appeared narrower than it actually was. An old-fashioned security beam guarded the entrance. None of the newer systems had penetrated to the slum, apparently. The streets themselves were testimony to that: designed for groundcars. She doubted that there was a roofpad in the entire area. No sign of flitters or ,’thopters could be heard or seen. There was music, though — a faint susurration reminiscent of semuta. Something new in semuta addiction? This would certainly be an area where addicts would go to ground.
Lucilla looked up at the face of the building as Burzmali moved ahead of her and made their presence known by breaking the doorway beam.
There were no windows in the building’s face. Only the faint glitterings of surface ‘eyes here and there in the dull sheen of ancient plasteel. They were old-fashioned comeyes, she noted, much bigger than modern ones.
A door deep in the shadows swung inward on silent hinges.
“This way.” Burzmali reached back and urged her forward with a hand on her elbow.
They entered a dimly lighted hallway that smelled of exotic foods and bitter essences. She was a moment identifying some of the things that assailed her nostrils. Melange. She caught the unmistakable cinnamon ripeness. And yes, semuta. She identified burned rice, higet salts. Someone was masking another kind of cooking. There were explosives being made here. She thought of warning Burzmali but reconsidered. It was not necessary for him to know and there might be ears in this confined space to hear whatever she said.
Burzmali led the way up a shadowy flight of stairs with a dim glowstrip along the slanting baseboard. At the top he found a hidden switch concealed behind a patch in the patched and repatched wall. There was no sound when he pushed the switch but Lucilla felt a change in the movement all around them. Silence. It was a new kind of silence in her experience, a crouching preparation for flight or violence.
It was cold in the stairwell and she shivered, but not from the chill. Footsteps sounded beyond the doorway beside the patch-masked switch.
A gray-haired hag in a yellow smock opened the door and peered up at them past her straggling eyebrows.