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possesses power, that she is, to these people, a splinter of their own
dreaming. ...
She turns back to Order of Eternity, straightens her spine, looks down at the
smaller woman. "I am an imago," she says. "An imago stands before you to
tell you these things, and the plasm that forms these imagoes would not lie to
you. I tell you this: The Death must die! The Architect must be saved! The
war must not come to pass! I come from your own dreams to tell you this!
Order of Eternity stares at her, eyes wide, a touch of fear crossing her
young, freckled face. She sighs, turns away, takes Aiah's arm, leads her to
the alcove.
"Come sit in my place," she says. "And explain these things to us. We do not
know you, not really, and we don't know these other people whose images lie in
our dreams, and for the first time, perhaps, in ages we would hear of the
world outside.
"First," Aiah says, "tell me about The Mage.
"The Mage is a powerful imago," says Order of Eternity. "The Mage is he who
reorders nature in accordance with his will, who demands obedience from
reality itself. But he is heedless as to consequence his actions proceed from
his own will alone, without regard for what follows. His actions can lead to
tragedy as well as glory. His force of will makes him nearly invincible, but
he is a dangerous figure to know, and often fatal to those around him.
Rohder? she thinks. Dangerous? The world-bending will sounds much more like
Constantine than the mild-mannered Rohder.
Well, she thinks, the imagoes can't be right all the time.
Aiah sits in the alcove and gazes out at her audience, two dozen or so women
in gray shifts, all looking at her with solemn, youthful faces, the one
exception the twisted Avian with the fierce eyes and the brown, barred wings
tented over her shoulders. "Please sit down," she tells them, and as they do
Aiah smiles at this reflection of the classroom, with herself the teacher and
these ageless, youthful-seeming women in their gray uniforms the students.
She remembers herself, seated before a speaker on Career Day, drowsing through
a lecture on the joys of being a marketing executive for Colorsafe Soap.
The Dreaming Sisters know nothing of the world outside, and Aiah has to
explain who the players are. A few of the younger sisters have heard of
Constantine; none have heard of Sorya or Rohder or the PED. She finds it
easier, in the end, to speak of the Architect, the Shadow, and the Mage.
She is aware, as she speaks, that the interpretation she is feeding them may
not be true it may not be Rohder's techniques that are making the plasm sing
in the sisters' minds; it may not be Taikoen that is threatening the peace of
their dreaming every word she speaks might be a lie, a piece of pure
manipulation.
But so might the sisters be manipulating her: stealing plasm to create the
huge displays that lured her here, diverting her from an investigation by
putting her face on the imagoes, all for some subterranean purpose of their
own.
Users and the used: who is the passu, who the pascol? It doesn't matter.
She needs their cooperation, and she must do what she can to get it.
In the end, the Dreaming Sisters agree to do as she asks.
Death will die.
TWENTY-FIVE
Aiah returns from her visit to the Dreaming Sisters and finds Alfeg waiting in
the corridor near her apartment, standing uneasily beneath a carving of
apricots and carnations. He holds a file in his hand, and his eyes are grave.
Aiah signs him not to speak until she opens her door and leaves the
surveillance zone outside her apartment. The scent of massed flowers strikes
her as she presses the light switch and she sees the surprising floral blaze,
flowers everywhere, on every table, chair, or horizontal surface, their
combined aromas heavy in the room.
Alfeg gives a tight smile. "It would seem that someone loves you," he says.
Aiah wanders to a towering spray of gladiolas, yellow and azure with splashes
of red, and touches the attached note, inscribed in Constantine's bold hand.
"Possibly," she concedes. She does not want to cope with Constantine right
now, and turns to Alfeg. "Something happened last shift, didn't it?
He nods. "It's Refiq." He hesitates, then adds, "What was that thing? What
happened to him? It was terrifying.
Aiah looks at him. "Tell me what you saw." She had never seen Taikoen in the
act of capturing a human.
Alfeg hesitates. "I was telepresent, had my sensorium across the canal from
Refiq's apartment, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. I had
configured my sensorium with farvision, to bring his apartment up close. I
couldn't have got into his apartment anyway, because he'd screened it very
thoroughly, but I could peek through the windows. At 14:42 precisely I saw a
plasm tether descend from the sky and pause outside the apartment as if it
contained a sensorium that was doing some surveilling of its own. Whoever it
was, he wasn't trying to be subtle I had the impression of haste, if
anything.
That would be Constantine, Aiah thinks, trying to locate Taikoen's next victim
while his government waited outside his office.
"And then something moved behind the kitchen window, something ..." Alfeg
swallows. "Something very disturbing. I only caught a glimpse of it, but it
was menacing, as if someone had constructed an anima for a fright party. And
then the window just blew out into the street, like an explosion, and the
plasm tether shot in." He licks his lips. "I wondered what to do. If I
should try to break the plasm tether, or follow it to its point of origin, but
in the end I decided just to keep watching.
Taikoen, who could pass through plasm screens, had entered the apartment and
opened the screen for Constantine to enter. Then, presumably, Constantine had
subdued Refiq and performed whatever unholy midwifery was necessary.
"The plasm tether remained in the apartment for twenty minutes or so, and then
it dissolved, as if the mage on the other end had simply broken the
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