The birds had clustered round the man’s face; four of them had snagged the umbrella in their talons and lifted it away; the rest beat and keened in a storm of wings around the man’s face, where something long and red lashed to and fro, beset by pecking, tearing birds.
She sat and watched, horrified, while the birds tore at the man’s face and the long lashing thing; an awful bubbling scream forced its way out through the fury of thrashing wings, then suddenly the man was gone, becoming smoke again for an instant before vanishing utterly.
The birds lifted in the same moment and resumed their arrow-head formation above. No trace was left of the fight, not even a fallen feather. The same number of birds beat rhythmically over the carriage. The great black cats pounded on down the road, having taken not the slightest notice of the struggle.
She shivered despite the heat, looked all around, then settled back in her seat, smoothing her clothes.
Then there was a soft pop! and flying next to her face there was a tiny bat with a livid, skinned-red face.
‘Still think it’s such a good idea, sister?’ it squeaked.
She grabbed at the bat but it flicked easily away from her grasp before side-slipping back towards her. ‘KIP!’ it hooted, giggling. ‘KIP!’
She hissed in exasperation. ‘Serotine!’ she cried – surprising herself – and snatched the bat out of the air.
It had time to look surprised and to go ‘Eek!’ before she twisted its neck and threw it behind her. It thumped twitching onto the road. The last she saw, one of the escort birds had landed beside the body and started pecking at it.
She dusted her hands and looked through narrowed eyes at the vast, vague, unchanged shape of the castle above the distant hills.
The carriage bowled onwards, the thick warm wind whistled past, the birds stroked the air above and the giant cats swept along the dusty red road like a wave of night engulfing sunset.
She felt sleepy.
In the morning they found her dressed and sitting at the breakfast table.
‘Good morning!’ she said brightly to them. ‘Today I have to leave.’
* * *
2
He took the Queen by the shoulders and pushed her back so that she had to sit upon the bed. ‘You go not,’ he told her, ’till I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.’
‘What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?’ she cried. ‘Help, help, ho!’
Then from behind the arras came another voice, that of an old man: ‘What, ho! Help, help, help!’
He spun towards the noise, shouting, ‘How now! A rat?’ He drew his sword, swinging it towards the tapestry. ‘Dead, for a ducat -‘ He swept the arras aside with the tip of the sword, revealing the quivering figure of Polonius. ‘- Or just trapped, and justly?’
‘My lord!’ the old man cried, and sank, stiffly, to one knee.
‘Why then, not a rat, a mouse! What say you, good mouse, or hast the cat your tongue?’- the King paused there.
It was always a moment to savour, in this branching of the improved story; the point where the Prince began to get his act together and behave neither tactically too rashly nor strategically too hesitantly. From now on you just knew he was going to prevail, avenging his father, marrying Ophelia, ruling wisely in a flourishing Denmark and living happily ever after (well, until he died).
The King liked happy endings. You couldn’t blame the ancients for coming up with unhappy conclusions so often – they each spent all their single short life waiting either for oblivion or some absurd after-death torture – but that didn’t mean you had to stick faithfully to their paralysed paradigms and ruin a good story with a depressing denouement.
He sighed happily and got up from the bed, exiting via its foot so as not to disturb the voluptuous forms of the sleeping Luge twins, between whom he’d been lying.
Adijine had woken – still sated but desiring some form of diversion – a little earlier, in what might fairly be termed the middle of the night. His pillow contained a transceptor array similar to the device in his crown which let him access the data corpus; it made a pleasant change to dip into the crypt without that thing on his head. The revised interactive Hamlet was one of his favourites, though it could still be a little long, depending on the choices one made.
He left the Luge twins breathing softly beneath their silk sheet and padded across the warm pelt of the bedroom carpet to the windows. He took some satisfaction in pressing the button that opened the curtains, rather than simply thinking them apart.
Moonlight spilled across the mountains that were the roofs of the fastness; the sky above was cloudless. Stars filled half the vault. The darkness of the other half was absolute.
The King stared up into that inkiness for a while. That was all their dooms, he thought, all their rash mistakes and compensating hesitancies, on the far side of the curtain. He let the drapes sweep back and – stretching, scratching the back of his head – returned to the bed.
The sight of the Encroachment had left him restless. He lay between the sleeping girls and pulled a cover over himself, unsure what to do next.
He glanced into the crypt, first at the paused Hamlet, then at the general security situation, then at the state of the war -still stalemated – and at the progress the bomb-workings were making in the level-five south-western solar – still struggling, still hoping to initiate in a few days, and still tightly controlled by Security – then swung through a few minds, finding various couples coupling and finding his own sexual interest piqued despite his earlier exertions with the almost insatiable Luge twins. He turned away from that for a moment, roaming through the accessible minds still awake in Serehfa, and looked for a moment into that of the Security agent they’d placed with the Chief Scientist Gadfium.
So, they were still up at this hour.
Adijine pondered the significance of the strange and unprecedented circular pattern the stones had formed, and wondered if Gadfium had come up with any explanations. Were the stones also linked into the crypt somehow? His Cryptographers seemed puzzled by some of the corpus’ deeper-level behaviour as well as by some of the upper-level and even physical manifestations of those disturbances. Was the crypt preparing to intervene in the present emergency? If it was, he wanted to know. Gadfium was no more trustworthy than any other Privileged, but she had had a habit of making good guesses in the past, and if anybody was to furnish him with the first warning of the crypt’s interference, it might well be her, one way or the other.
Gadfium. It had annoyed the King throughout his this life-time – and Gadfium’s last two – that she had stuck with the male version of her name; why hadn’t she changed it to Gadfia when he had become a she between incarnations? Wilful type, Gadfium.
He listened in, through the agent.
‘I beg your pardon, Chief Scientist?’ Rasfline said.
‘I said,’ Gadfium replied, sighing, ‘I’d like the data on brand new births displayed related to each clan’s vault, from five years before the new dating system came into use, compensated for clan size.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Rasfline said, obviously embarrassed at seemingly being caught either day-dreaming or dozing. ‘At once.’ The wall screen cleared the previous three-dimensional display and replaced it with the new bar field.
‘Hmm,’ she said, scrutinising the display and realising she could not recall exactly why she had asked for it.
‘I do apologise, ma’am,’ Rasfline said, sounding mortified.
‘That’s quite all right,’ Gadfium told him, still staring at the display. ‘We’re all tired.’
She glanced at Goscil, who was yawning again, though somehow still with a look of concentration on her face as she sat, eyes fixed straight ahead, unseeing, while she reviewed some other aspect of the Sortileger’s files.
The same light tragenter that had taken them to the mobile observatory on the Plain of Sliding Stones had returned them to the elevator, which had dropped them through the thickness of the roof itself and the kilometre-deep space of the room below; a cold, gloomy, barren place where flutes of scree and bahada lay slumped against the walls and thin lancet windows cast mean slivers of light across a dark desert of broken stones where even babilia struggled to grow.
An Army scree-car had jolted them to where a hole let into one wall led to a tunnel and a restricted funicular; they exited to the sixth level on a broad shelf where subsistence farms made the most of the cold and still thin atmosphere and the light came from broad, full-length windows looking out onto a sea of air where little puffy clouds sat like white islands.