“Aah… Yes, and how does madam wish to pay?”
She slapped her credit card on the counter. “Eventually.”
She walked away from the gun shop, the satchel heavy on her shoulder. She bought a newssheet and read it on the open-top deck of the tram she took back to the Artists’ Quarter.
She scanned the flimsy, thumbing through its stored pages on fast-forward and stopping to look closely at something only once.
She’d glanced at the race results from Tile.
One of the runners-up the day before had been Dance of Death.
10 Just A Concept
“Mmm. Hello?”
“Hiya, doll. Oh. ‘Doll’, that wasn’t very… Shit.”
“Get on with it, Zef.”
“Sorry. Meet me at the Crying Statue in an hour; how’s that?”
“Too damn succinct for a lawyer.”
“I’m out of practice.”
“I know the feeling. The Crying Statue, in an hour.”
“See you there, doll… Shit.”
Two women made their way from the Crying Statue in Malishu’s Tourist Quarter across the carved-open arc of Tube Bridge to the University Precincts. Above them, the mid-morning mists were lifting into the air amongst the stalk towers and stay-cables of the Entraxrln, obscuring the distant, under-ocean view of the highest membrane layers.
They walked quickly along pavements still damp from the morning smir. Sharrow, in a long dark dress and jacket and the high-heeled boots she tended to favour when going anywhere with Zefla, strode determinedly with her head up, a severe, slightly forbidding look on her face, discouraging contact. The striking, sternly poised face, dramatic auburn hair and precise, upright carriage almost disguised the fact that every second step was a slight fall, a tiny flaw in the pattern, a misplaced beat in the rhythm of her body.
Zefla strolled-long-stepped in culottes and a light coat-shirt-with an almost disjointed looseness, head moving from side to side, smiling at everyone and no-one, walking with a kind of easy familiarity as though she belonged here, knew these people, made this walk every day.
Heads turned as they crossed the bridge over the trickle-throated bed of the Ishumin rivet and entered the partially walled warren of the university; merchants at stalls lost the thread of their sales pitch, people using phones forgot what they were talking about, passengers at tram stops neglected to press the call-button for the next tram so that it rushed clanking past them; at least two men, looking back over their shoulders, bumped into other people.
Sharrow started to get uneasy as they passed through Apophyge Gate into the dark clutter of the Literature Faculty prefecture. “You sure you weren’t followed?” she asked Zefla.
Zefla looked mildly incredulous. “Of course I was followed,” she said scornfully. “But never by anybody with anything lethal in mind.” She put her arm through Sharrow’s and looked quietly smug. “Quite the opposite, I imagine.”
“I’d forgotten we could be conspicuous,” Sharrow admitted, but seemed to relax a little. She lifted her gaze from the cramped cobble-barks of Metonymy Street to the airy sweep of stay-cables describing elegant arcs above the distant grid of the Mathematics Faculty. She began to whistle.
They walked on, still arm-in-arm. Zefla looked thoughtful for a while, then smiled; a youth crossing the street in front of them with an armful of ancient books, caught unintentionally in the beam of that smile, promptly dropped the tomes. Zefla went, “Whoops,” as she stepped over the crouching student’s head, then gazed at Sharrow.
“Whistling…” Zefla said.
“Hmm?” Sharrow looked at her.
They stopped at a street corner to study a Faculties map. Zefla bent, hands clasped behind her back, inspecting the map.
“Whistling,” she repeated. “Well, it used to mean only one thing.”
Sharrow had an uncharacteristically broad smile on her face when Zefla turned back to her. Sharrow shrugged and cleared her throat as they turned to head up a steep side street towards the History Faculty. “Damn, am I that transparent?”
“You look tired, too.”
Sharrow rubbed under her eyes gently. “Worth every bag and line.”
“Who was the lucky fellow?”
“Musician.”
“Strings? Wind? Keyboard? Composition?” Zefla inquired.
Sharrow grinned at her, brown eyebrows flexing. “Percussion,” she said huskily.
Zefla sniggered, then assumed a serious expression, lifting her head up and enunciating clearly. “Don’t brag, dear; it’s unbecoming.”
“Ah, war is hell,” Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma said, sitting back luxuriantly in the perfumed pillows of the small canal-boat. He lifted the stemmed glass of slushed trax spirit from the boat’s table and sipped at it delicately, watching the gently glowing lanterns as they floated past them. The boat’s own lantern shone softly, creaking on the end of a bowed, spindly branch above them. People in fancy-dress passed on the canal walkway a few metres away, trailing streamers and laughing, their faces hidden by grotesque and fabulous masks. Above, over the dark city, fireworks blazed distantly, their flashes lighting up the layers of Entraxrln membrane and sometimes silhouetting the open weave-work of the composite trunks. The boat whirred quietly on along the raised, open section of canal.
Sharrow-actually, at that moment, Commander Sharrow of the anti-Tax League Irregular Forces Eleventh Clipper Squadron-sat across the little table from him. For the first time since they’d met almost a year ago she was out of uniform and not dressed in ease-fatigues or street sloppies. She wore a rainbow-mirrored half-mask that just covered her eyes and the bridge of her nose. It was topped by a cap of white and green-dyed lake-bird feathers; her dress was bright green, short, low-cut and clinging, and her legs, in the fashion of the day, were sheathed in a transparent covering of polymerised perfume-oil. She had long, perfectly shaped legs and they gleamed, they glistened, they glinted under the suspended lanterns that swung on bowed stalks over the dark canal.
He could hardly keep his eyes off those long, slinkily muscular legs. He knew the dry, slick touch of perfume-oil, the smooth, blissful feel of that slowly evaporating, few-molecules-thick covering; he had experienced it many times on other women and it was no longer quite so freshly erotic an experience as it had been once. But sitting here, alone with her in this little purring, gently bumping boat on the last night of the festival, he wanted to touch her, hold her, stroke and kiss her more than he could remember ever wanting any woman. The urge, the need was as scarifying and intense as he remembered from just before he’d first gotten laid; it burned in him, infested him, ran brilliant and urgent in his blood.
It was suddenly irrelevant to him that she was his Commanding Officer and an aristo-things that had, in some kind of piqued, invertedly snobbish way in the past prevented him from ever thinking of her as a woman (and a beautiful, attractive, intelligent one, at that; the kind he would normally know just from the first glance, the first word, that he would want to bed if he could) rather than his tactically brilliant but curt and scathingly sarcastic CO, or an arrogant over-privileged brat from Golter who had drop-dead looks and knew it.
“A toast,” Sharrow said, uncrossing her gauzily shining legs and sitting forwards. She raised her glass.
“What to?” Miz asked, looking at the colourfully distorted reflection of his face in her rainbow-mirror mask. His own mask lay on his chest, looped round his neck.
“Iphrenil toast,” she said. “The secret toast; we each toast what we choose to.”
“Stupid custom.” He sighed. “Okay.”
They clinked glasses. Masked figures dressed as deep country bandits ran along the canal, whooping and firing pop-guns. He ignored them and looked into her eyes as he drank from his glass. Here’s to getting you into bed, my commander, he thought to himself.