just to take a shower and get some food, says Martin Silenus. Perhaps use your comm unit and fatline link to see whos winning the war.
The Consul shakes his head. Not yet. The ship is for an emergency.
Silenus gestures toward the night, the Sphinx, and the rising wind.
You think that this isnt an emergency?
Brawne Lamia realizes that they are talking about the Consul bringing his spacecraft here from the city of Keats. Are you sure that the absence of alcohol isnt the emergency youre referring to? she asks.
Silenus glares at her. Would it hurt to have a drink?
No, says the Consul. He rubs his eyes, and Lamia remembers that he too is addicted to alcohol. But his answer to bringing the ship here had been no. Well wait until we have to.
What about the fatline transmitter? says Kassad.
The Consul nods and removes the antique comlog from his small pack. The instrument had belonged to his grandmother Siri and to her grandparents before her. The Consul touches the diskey. I can broadcast with this, but not receive.
Sol Weintraub has set his sleeping child in the opening of the closest tent. Now he turns toward the fire. And the last time you transmitted a message was when we arrived in the Keep?
Yes.
Martin Silenuss tone is sarcastic. And were supposed to believe that from a confessed traitor?
Yes. The Consuls voice is a distillation of pure weariness.
Kassads thin face floats in the darkness. His body, legs, and arms are discernible only as a blackness against the already dark background.
But it will serve to call the ship if we need it?
Yes.
Father Hoyt hugs his cloak tighter around him to keep it from flapping in the rising wind. Sand scrapes against wool and tent fabric. Arent you afraid that the port authorities or FORCE will move the ship or tamper with it? he asks the Consul.
No. The Consuls head moves only slightly, as if he is too tired to shake it completely. Our clearance pip was from Gladstone herself. Also, the Governor-General is a friend of mine was a friend.
The others had met the recently promoted Hegemony governor shortly after landing; to Brawne Lamia, Theo Lane had seemed a man catapulted into events too large for his talents.
The winds coming up, says Sol Weintraub. He turns his body to protect the baby from flying sand. Still squinting into the gale, the scholar says, I wonder if Het Masteen is out there?
We searched everywhere, says Father Hoyt. His voice is muffled because he has lowered his head into the folds of his cloak.
Martin Silenus laughs. Pardon me, priest, he says, but youre full of shit. The poet stands and walks to the edge of the firelight. The wind ruffles the fur of his coat and rips his words away into the night.
The cliff walls hold a thousand hiding places.
The Crystal Monolith hides its entrance to us but to a Templar? And besides, you saw the stairway to the labyrinth in the deepest room of the Jade Tomb.
Hoyt looks up, squinting against the pinpricks of blowing sand. You think hes there? In the labyrinth?
Silenus laughs and raises his arms. The silk of his loose blouse ripples and billows. How the fuck should I know, Padre? All I know is that Het Masteen could be out there now, watching us, waiting to come back to claim his luggage. The poet gestures toward the Möbius cube in the center of their small pile of gear. Or he could be dead already. Or worse.
Worse? says Hoyt. The priests face has aged in the past few hours.
His eyes are sunken mirrors of pain, his smile a rictus.
Martin Silenus strides back to the dying fire. Worse, he says. He could be twisting on the Shrikes steel tree. Where well be in a few
Brawne Lamia rises suddenly and grasps the poet by his shirtfront.
She lifts him off the ground, shakes him, lowers him until his face is on a level with hers. Once more, she says softly, and Ill do very painful things to you. I wont kill you, but you will wish I had.
The poet shows his satyrs smile. Lamia drops him and turns her back. Kassad says, Were tired. Everyone turn in. Ill stand watch.
My dreams of Lamia are mixed with Lamias dreams. It is not unpleasant to share a womans dreams, a womans thoughts, even those of a woman separated from me by a gulf of time and culture far greater than any imagined gap of gender. In a strange and oddly mirrorlike way, she dreamed of her dead lover, Johnny, of his too-small nose and his too-stubborn jaw, his too-long hair curling over his collar, and his eyesthose too-expressive, too-revealing, eyes that too-freely animated a face which might, except for those eyes, belong to any one of a thousand peasants born within a days ride of London.
The face she dreamed was mine. The voice she heard in that dream was mine. But the lovemaking she dreamed ofremembering nowwas nothing that I had shared. I sought to escape her dream, if only to find my own. If I were to be a voyeur, it might as well be in the tumble of manufactured memories which passed for my own dreams.
But I was not allowed to dream my own dreams. Not yet. I suspect that I was bornand born again from my deathbedsimply to dream those dreams of my dead and distant twin.