Walter Williams - City on Fire

“You, is it, girl-mage? Do you desire death so absolutely? I will oblige, young one…”

He recognizes me, she thinks in sudden terror; // this doesn’t work I’m dead. But the burning plasm in her veins provides an answer, draws Aiah’s lips back in a snarl. “Your death is overdue, creature. And it is the Golden Lady who brings it.”

She doesn’t know whether he hears her or not, whether she is projecting the words to him or just speaking them aloud in the Operations Room, but he acts as if he hears. Taikoen and the plasm-shield make a lunge, straight for Aiah’s anima, and she feels a sudden shock of contact, the touch of the thing’s cold, immortal mind, its dread intention, and knows its goal is to conquer her, nullify her, drive her mind into mad byways and seize her plasm for his own.

And as his mind presses upon hers she catches a glimpse of the way he sees things, the world bent and distorted, plasm the focus of the whole world, all other reality twisted toward it, leaning inward, strangely curved and warped, the colors shimmering in odd spectra, some strangely alive, imbued with a strange purpose… and what purpose could a color have…?

It is fear that saves her, a pure reflex that sends the plasm blasting from her into Taikoen, driving the ice from her in a spray of burning plasm fire. Molten metal sings in her veins. There is a roar of thwarted anger, a kind of snarl, and then the hanged man’s body twists again, a strange little Mobius shiver, and vanishes into the wall, into the building’s plasm conduits.

Aiah pauses—in the Operations Room she is aware of sweat pouring down her neck, of her heart hammering her ribs—and she turns her focus to the Dreaming Sisters, to the outstretched, pointing arms that seem to bridge the world of dreaming and not-dreaming…

The arms sway like compass needles, pointing up and right, and Aiah flies, penetrating the arched ceiling to the story above; and here the sisters’ arms are level, all pointing deeper into the building, and Aiah follows them, flying through walls and ceilings, through alcoves and images, penetrating as if entering a mirror her own image in The Apprentice, Sorya’s scornful gaze in The Shadow, Rohder’s thoughtful Mage. Contact with Taikoen’s mind seems to have deranged her perception in some way: the corridors and images seem warped, twisted, looming toward her as if threatening. She tries to ignore the effect, the distorted and ominous images, and concentrate only on her blazing pursuit.

She realizes as she flies that she is wearing the Golden Lady anima, the featureless icon of blazing gold… She can’t remember willing this, and wonders how long she has borne this form, whether she automatically slipped into it when she began to fly or perhaps took it on when she invoked the Golden Lady’s name, when she shouted at Taikoen in her plasm-pride.

She passes through a wall and finds herself in the dome room, sees Shieldlight passing through the slits in the dome to illuminate the gleaming plasm accumulator, copper and black ceramic behind its carved screen. A dreaming sister lies dead atop a control panel, blood spattering the dials and switches, the sight all the more horrible in Aiah’s distorted perceptions. Taikoen shimmers toward the accumulator, disappears into it before Aiah can launch a plasm blast. Other animas fly into the room, hover about the accumulator like a swarm of angry insects.

It is Taikoen’s last refuge. Plasm was flowing in the mains, and flowing only in one direction, from the accumulator to the sisters’ contacts. Taikoen fled upstream, as it were, to the source of the plasm. Perhaps he’d expected to find a plasm main that would carry him away, allow him to merge with Caraqui’s vast plasm well and vanish; but instead he’d found only a dead end, trapped himself here. He can still run, but if he does he will have to flee into a plasm conduit with less plasm than he has access to now, and he will find himself weaker and still lost, still caught in the sisters’ maze.

The dreaming sister Order of Eternity lies on a couch on the other side of the circular room. She sits upright, opens her eyes.

“Hit him from all sides,” Aiah says. “Destroy the accumulator and he has nowhere to run. Ready… on my command.”

“No.” Order of Eternity raises a hand. Her words are slurred by the plasm contact still in her mouth. “It is our turn. We will end it.”

Aiah hesitates. And then the dome room, the Sisters’ stony refuge, the world itself, seems to undergo a shift, a transformation. Aiah sees everything as through a pulsing wave, and she feels herself uplifted, as if buoyed up by a surge of the sea. There is a moment in which all seems to hang suspended… Aiah thinks wildly of the “slip” in the Barkazil dance, a hesitation between beats.

The world falls into place again, somehow more intense than before, more real. Aiah gazes at the dead sister, and recognizes the woman she knows as Inaction. The dead woman stares at her, a horrified expression that says, / was not expecting this.

The world shivers again to another pulse of… of what? Reality is changing, Aiah thinks, the pace of her thoughts fervid, they are changing the world.

“What is going on?” Khorsa wonders aloud in the breathless moment that follows, like a pause before the clapper strikes the bell.

Another pulse, another endless moment in which the world changes. Aiah feels herself buoyed up by a wave of gentle power. A cry of wonder parts her lips. The figures on the screen seem to move, shift, engage with one another in a solemn dance, the world-dance that Aiah has seen beyond the Shield, the dance of eternity, the dance of the Woman who is the Moon.

The timeless moment ends, and reality falls into place again, stone by slow stone.

“Wahhh, ” Alfeg breathes in awe.

Order of Eternity stands, removes the contact from her mouth, and walks around the screen to where Aiah, the Golden Lady, waits. She seems to move with unnatural lithe movements, and her face is distorted, all eyes and forehead, the mouth and chin tiny. Taikoen’s perceptions have left their imprint on Aiah’s mind.

“The creature is dead,” says the sister. “We have abolished it.”

“How?” The question spills from Aiah’s mind.

“It existed as a modulation in plasm. Once the creature ceased its movement and was contained in one place, and we had the leisure to do so, we modulated the same plasm in a way as to reduce the creature’s modulation to zero—we canceled the creature out, like one wave precisely canceling another and leaving the sea smooth.”

“Ask her if she’s sure.” Aratha’s skeptical voice sounds in Aiah’s ear. “I don’t want to have to go through this again.”

“I didn’t know such a thing could be done,” Aiah tells the sister.

Order of Eternity walks on bare feet to the control panel, reaches out to touch, in a familiar gesture of tenderness, Inaction’s short black hair. “To understand plasm is to control reality,” she says. “Through our understanding, we made the thing unreal.”

And then Aiah feels fingers on her throat and she is torn from the dome room, from the calm gaze of the dreaming sister, and finds herself in the Operations Room, with one of Constantine’s huge hands about her neck. He pulls her from her chair, the t-grip flying from her hand as it reaches the end of its cable. His face is distorted, all anger and teeth. Behind him Aiah sees his guards, Martinus included, yanking t-grip cables from their sockets, disarming Aiah’s team.

“What are you doing?” Constantine cries. “ What is this treason?” He bends her backward over the desk, claw on her windpipe. Aiah seizes his thick wrist in both hands, tries to tear him off her, finds him immovable as iron. Tears come to her eyes as she tries to drag air into her lungs. “ Have you gone mad?” Constantine roars.