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1
She was a closed codex within a vast dark library whose floor was a valley, whose walls were cliffs, whose alcoves were hanging valleys; she was an ancient book, rich of smell, gravid with collected knowledge, huge and heavy with ink-thick illuminated pages and a cover of embossed leather, chased with metal and fitted with a lock for which only she possessed the key.
She was a virgin wise too long now on her wedding night, wined, dined, coddled, sozzled, wished well by family and friends still revelling in distant loudness in the halls below, swept up by her handsome new husband and left to change from wedding gown to nightgown and slip into the huge wide warmed welcoming bed.
She was the only speaker in a tribe of the dumb, walking amongst them, tall and silent while they touched her and beseeched her with their sad eyes and their deferent, hesitant hands and their flowing, pleading signs to talk for them, sing for them, be their voice.
She was the captain of a ship sunk by enemy action, alone still conscious in the lifeboat while her crew died slowly around her, moaning quietly through salt-crusted lips or raving as they twitched and spasmed in the bilges. She saw another ship and knew she could signal it, but it was an enemy vessel and only her pride made her hesitate.
She was a mother watching her child suffering and dying because she was of a faith inimical to medicine. Doctors, nurses and friends all pleaded with her to allow her child to live by merely saying a word or making a gesture, the syringe there ready in the surgeon’s hand.
She was a protester who’d had proved to her that her fellow dissidents had betrayed her, deserted her, lied to her. It was known beyond doubt that she was guilty; all that was required was that she acknowledge her guilt; no names were needed, nobody else had to be implicated; she merely had to accept her responsibility. She had been foolish and she owed society that. Regretfully, they showed her the instruments of torture within the place of torment.
/She allowed the book to be opened, its every word translated into a language only she knew. When it was slammed shut again, she smiled to herself.
/She fed her new husband yet more wine as she slowly undressed him, and when he had to relieve himself locked him in the latrine, donned his clothes and escaped the room on a rope made from the bed sheets, spilled wine like a proud deflowerer’s trophy stain, flourished to the night.
/She sang to the tribe with her dance and her own gestures, more beautiful than speech or song, so silencing their signs.
/She signalled the ship and when she saw it turn set the lifeboat towards it, slipping into the water to swim away while her comrades were rescued.
/She would still say nothing, but took the syringe herself, went to apply it to the child’s arm, looked into its blank and empty eyes, then squirted the fluid over its skin before quickly sucking air into the instrument and turning and plunging it into the horrified surgeon’s chest.
/By the rack within the gory chamber she broke down and wept, squatting on her haunches, hiding her face and sobbing. When the torturer bent pityingly to hold her, she looked up with a tear-streaked face and bit his throat out.
‘Fuck! Fuck! I can’t let go! I can’t get out! I can’t let go!’ the man screamed, his voice hoarse. ‘She won’t let me go!’
He sat up in the couch and pulled at his collar, his face reddening as he struggled with something at his throat that nobody else could see. The nurse tapped at her keyboard and a tiny light flickered on the head-net the man wore like a thin hat over his shaved scalp. He swayed from the waist, his hands fell from his throat, his eyelids drooped and he lay back again.
The woman waved one hand and the window into the room blanked out. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered to the nurse. She turned to the tall, broad-shouldered man at her side and motioned with her head. They stepped into the corridor outside.
‘Do you realise what she did?’ she asked him. ‘She put a mimetic virus into his head. Could be months before we get him back. If we get him back.’
‘Evolution,’ Lunce said, shrugging.
‘Don’t give me that shit, the guy was one of our best.’
‘Well, he wasn’t best enough, was he?’
‘Oh, well put. But the point is, word’s got out now and nobody else will touch her.’
‘I’d touch her,’ Lunce told her, and made a show of cracking his fingers.
‘Yeah, I bet you would.’
He shrugged again. ‘I mean it. Wake her up and really torture her.’
The woman sighed and shook her head. ‘You really have no idea, do you?’
‘So you keep telling me. I just think we’re all missing something really obvious here. Maybe a bit of real physical… pressure might actually produce some results.’
‘Lunce, we have the Consistory member with special responsibility for Security Oncaterius breathing down our necks on this; if you’re tired of your work, why don’t you suggest that to him? But if you do, just remember it’s nothing to do with me.’ She looked him up and down. ‘In fact, as I haven’t particularly enjoyed working with you, maybe it’s not such a bad idea.’
‘We haven’t tried what I’m suggesting,’ he pointed out. ‘We have tried what you suggested and it’s failed.’
The woman dismissed this with a wave of her hand. ‘Well, we’ll keep her in solitary for now and see if that gets any results.’
Lunce just took a deep breath and snorted.
‘Come on,’ the woman said. ‘Let’s get something to eat. I have to think what we’re going to tell Oncaterius.’
Asura was left in a cell. She thought of it as a mirror cell because when she lay down on the bed and put her head on the thin pillow there was a cell in there too; that was the only place they would let her go to in her sleep.
So she was in two cells. It was a little like being in the tower in the first of the dreams she could remember, but less interesting. There was a tap for water and another tap which dispensed a sort of soup. Between the two taps was a cup chained to the wall. Also in the cell was a toilet and a bed platform and a chair platform, all parts of the wall. There was no window and no view, though there was a locked, tight-fitting door.
She slept a great deal ignoring the pretend, dead-end cell they offered her. Instead, when she dreamt, she recalled what had happened to her so far.
She remembered the view of the great castle, the journey on the airship, the train and car journey before that, the dream in the night at the big house, the things that Pieter Velteseri had asked her about, her walk through the garden from the vault and the strange dreams she had had before she’d awoken.
And it was as though there was something beyond those dreams too, something she knew was there but knew nothing else about save that it existed. The knowledge tickled her mind when she thought back to the time – instant or aeon – in the Velteseri family vault. There was something there, she knew there was, but like a dim light just sensed with the corner of the eye which disappeared when looked at directly, she could not inspect it more closely; the very act of attempting to do so had the effect of extinguishing it completely for as long as she tried.
She reviewed all that had happened to her in the short life she could remember. She wondered if there had been a degree of choice in the fact she had awoken in the Velteseri vault; most of the clan had been away and Pieter might have been chosen as somebody likely to help. She thought she had been right to trust him, and thought that the dreams she had had during the night she had spent at the house had been genuine dreams; something that had put her here had contacted her and told her what her purpose was.
She supposed she had been kidnapped by somebody who was not really Cousin Ucubulaire. These people must have recognised her name, or found out about her in some other way, and not wanted her to do whatever it was she was supposed to do here (assuming she actually had been taken to the big castle she had seen). Perhaps travelling under the name Asura had been a mistake.
And yet as soon as she’d heard Pieter Velteseri utter the word she’d known that was her name. There had been no feeling of warning, no niggling sensation that she might be doing something dangerous; instead she had recognised her true title and claimed it.