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  ‘Subadwan of Gaya,’ came the smart response. ‘Caught out without ID.’

  ‘I’ll take her in.’

  The pyuton, producing a two-foot revolver from a holster slung over her back, gestured Subadwan into the building. This being the latest of many infractions, Subadwan knew what to do: walk along the stuffy, black-carpeted, so-silent corridor to the door at the end marked ZF1 and then wait – standing, not seated, for if you sat somebody would poke your arm and make you rise.

  At the door a pyuter voice said, ‘Enter.’ Subadwan opened the door to room ZF1 then walked inside.

  Silvery light greeted her, a light that emanated from the walls and the roof. As ever, the small pyuton with the matted ginger fuzzlocks, the steel tooth brace and the calm, round face that looked as if it had never known a feeling sat at the room’s only desk, sheets of plastic in front of her. ‘Subadwan,’ she said, her voice harsh.

  Know your rights, Gaya’s knowledge taught.

  Subadwan knew her rights. ‘Call Rhannan,’ she told the triader official. ‘Call her now and she’ll speak for me.’

  ‘You think Gaya’s lone Triad member will help you?’ came the reply. The pyuton pressed grey pads, inlaid as an arc in the desk melamine. ‘The only representative of Gaya on the Triad?’ she continued.

  Sensing that the pyuton did not want her here, Subadwan suppressed her own irritation. Maybe it would be best simply to accept this incident and swallow her pride.

  ‘Show me your identification fishtail,’ the pyuton demanded.

  ‘I can’t. I accidentally forgot to put it in my pocket.’

  ‘That is a transgression. Archivists of Gaya must carry a fishtail at all times.’ The pyuton looked at her desk, a portion of which was flickering with information; lines and diagrams of blue and black within the white. ‘I see this is the thirteenth time you have stepped across the Triad’s boundary.’

  ‘Might be, yes.’

  ‘It is logged. We shall decide what to do with you within seven days. You had better depart.’

  Subadwan left the room, returning to the front of Enforcer House, where she was expelled. A group of jeering enforcers demanded back the earmuffs.

  What would happen now? Of course, she did not know: and that was the point. Sometimes there were penalties, other times there were not, but every time, as the Triad knew, the miscreant suffered by not knowing what was in store. Subadwan however, despite her youth, had developed a method of avoiding this subtle mental torture, and that was to follow tenets of personal indifference to the Triad. She did not care. Lord Archivist Rhannan and Archivist Aswaque, Gaya love them, were her only superiors, and so short of assassination she was safe even from Cray’s Reeve, repugnant Umia of the Archive of Noct. She did not care.

  Subadwan’s home was a cool house made of bronze and copper in the Rusty Quarter, where Cray’s most ancient metals had been forged into dwellings, courtyards and cloisters. But just walking the streets had stained her clothes black, and her skin, she knew from experience, would be as grimy as any street outer’s. It was late, almost midnight in fact, but the Baths never closed.

  She hurried across to Lac Street, followed the road leading around the Swamps – that putrid black heart of Cray – then made south for Peppermint Street. Glass shards crunched under her boots, making her slip and slide. Crossing the bridge into Eastcity she noticed that even this far downstream the river remained a sooty gel, thick enough for a pair of scribes of the Archive of Vein Extraction to walk along it on gridiron shoes. Hastening into the Plastic Quarter, she soon found herself at the Baths. Far above, in the discordant sky, sheet lightning flashed between hovering aeromorphs.

  But here stood Cray’s most beautiful building: and it was soundproofed. The clamour of aerial vehicles, plastic buildings, heat exchangers, groaning architecture, electronic devices and speakers, cables and pipes choking every street – the ceaseless noise of Cray – all this was here reduced by means of felt padding and pyuter-controlled anti-sound. Here, at last, Subadwan could remove her head-band and not risk damaging her hearing.

  Here also she would find one of her closest friends, Liguilifrey the blind masseuse, who with Calminthan the Laverwoman ran the Baths. Liguilifrey was a little older than Subadwan and beholden to the Archive of Perfume, but these differences had done little to weaken their decade of friendship.

  The Baths were twinned domes of blue-veined marble. Passing through the only entrance, a double door of finest polythene, Subadwan walked along claustrophobic corridors until she reached a set of changing rooms not unlike the cells of a hive in their cylindrical form. She undressed and, following ancient tradition, folded her clothes inside a niche in the polished wall, knowing they would be washed by Bath pyutons then replaced.

  At this late hour the Baths would be almost empty. She heard only a few voices echoing. Entering the bathing chamber, two linked circular pools of steaming water with great domes for their roofs, she made for the nearest pyuton. ‘What is the temperature?’ she asked.

  The pyuton was sitting on the crumbly stone edge of the pool, its amputated legs in the water. ‘Two ninety-four,’ it replied. Subadwan glanced at the other thirty pyutons, sitting around the pool, gazing into the water. Cables linked their spine vertebrae to the Baths’ power source. Tradition required them to sit here for years at a time, the biomechanical transducers hanging from their ruined legs heating the water.

  Subadwan walked into the water by way of limestone steps. Happily naked, in her favourite place, she relaxed, lying against the side to let her muscles loosen. Some people liked massage, but she preferred the anonymous touch of water. Few sensations surpassed water.

  ‘’Dwan?’

  The voice reverberated above gurgling water. Subadwan, dozing, turned around to see a figure she knew, dim against the gleam of discharging glow-beans.

  ‘Aquaitra. What are you doing here?’

  Aquaitra entered the pool and, after hugging Subadwan, lay back until her head was above water. Her skin was dark, her black curly hair damp around her scalp, and she wore as much bakelite jewellery as all three of her superiors put together.

  ‘I was searching for you,’ Aquaitra replied. ‘I looked all around the Archive–’

  ‘I’ve not been there since this afternoon.’

  ‘–then I went up to your house, then down to my house to see if you had passed by, then I went all the way down to the Water Purification House, because I knew you had business there today.’

  ‘Only some independents in need of shriving.’

  ‘Then I thought of coming here.’

  Subadwan nodded, causing ripples to spread out. They were almost alone, just two men and a sleepy old woman at the far end. ‘What’s so important that you needed to do all that?’

  ‘There was a pyuton to see you.’

  Subadwan looked into her friend’s eyes. ‘What pyuton?’

  ‘She said she needed to converse with you. I said you might be here, or possibly at the Damp Courtyard.’

  ‘I was at the Damp Courtyard. Well, I expect it’s some Triader pyuton come to annoy me. I got arrested today.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘A couple of enforcers dragged me down to Deciduo Street.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Subadwan splashed her feet at the water’s surface, as if to mask the slight shame she still felt. ‘On a seven-day notice. They’ll probably leave me be. I’ll tell Rhannan, she might put in a word for me.’

  ‘Was it genuine?’

  Subadwan laughed. ‘They were waiting for me, the morons. They knew where I was, who I was. Happened I’d forgotten my fishtail.’

  ‘But you’re all right now?’

  ‘Yes, thank Gaya.’

  A voice said, ‘That is good!’

  They both turned to see a tall pyuton wrapped in a brown shawl that offered little to disguise a voluptuous figure. The pyuton had a pale oval face and spiky black hair, her eyes menacing violet, almost fierce under thick ey
ebrows; but despite the pyuton’s position towering above them at the side of the pool, Subadwan was not going to be threatened. ‘What do you want?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘You are Subadwan of the Archive of Gaya?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish to speak with you.’ The pyuton turned to Aquaitra and added, ‘In confidence.’

  Aquaitra splashed about as she tried to stand up. ‘I’ll go–’

  ‘No,’ Subadwan said, trying to grab her friend’s arm.

  ‘I have to, ’Dwan. I have an early morning tomorrow. We can meet after breakfast.’

  Aquaitra walked off but turned to glance back and sign, I’ll stay to listen. I’ll lipread.

  ‘Let us make for the other pool,’ the pyuton said. ‘It is empty.’

  ‘I’ll swim there,’ Subadwan replied.

  Menacingly, the pyuton walked at her side as Subadwan swam without haste through the narrow channel joining the twin pools. The bare plastic feet, she noticed, were clean. The pyuton must have worn boots, must have taken them off before entering the water chambers. So she was following Crayan tradition – this was not official harassment. Most likely the pyuton did not want to cause a disturbance. Interesting.

  At the far side of the Baths, Subadwan sat in shallow water, ensuring that her face and that of the pyuton, now crouching beside her on the pool’s edge, were visible from Aquaitra’s position. ‘What do you want?’ she asked for a second time.

  ‘I have been instructed to arrange a brief private meeting between you and a pyutonic colleague of mine regarding some work that my colleague would very much like you to do.’

  ‘I’m too busy.’

  ‘This is important. It is not official work–’

  ‘Who is this colleague?’ Subadwan interrupted. ‘What do they do, for Gaya’s sake?’

  ‘The person does nothing for Gaya’s sake. I speak for graceful Tanglanah of the Archive of Safekeeping.’

  Now Subadwan wished Aquaitra were here. Why should that sinister deviant, Lord Archivist though she was, require a secret meeting? ‘With me?’ Subadwan said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to meet Rhannan or Aswaque?’

  ‘The graceful pyuton wishes to speak with you also. You possess certain qualities.’

  Amused at this hammer-blow flattery, Subadwan laughed out loud. ‘What qualities would those be?’

  ‘Being but an adjutant, I have not been informed. Will you meet graceful Tanglanah?’

  ‘What’s the meeting about?’

  ‘I am but an adjutant–’

  Subadwan nodded, saying, ‘All right, I know. I’ll have to think about it. Call me tomorrow at my Archive, a couple of hours after dawn, and I’ll tell you then.’

  The pyuton considered. Her purple eyes seemed to narrow, though her pallid face showed no expression.

  No human expression, at least. Plastic visages animated by plastic emotions, that was what Subadwan had been taught. She did not hate pyutons, but she did hate the regime that allowed every pyuton such elevated status – a status that was owed to beggarly outers and enslaved lessers.

  Eventually the pyuton said, ‘Very well. I shall call tomorrow morning. Farewell until then.’

  She stalked off, and Subadwan swam back to the other pool. Climbing out into chilly air, she reached for a towel off a heated copper rail attached to the marble wall. The towel was green, and Subadwan paused to look at her reflection in the polished marble.

  In superseding Crayan law, Bath law had created a place where even the Triad’s most fervent achloricians could not practise their ancient art.

  A shout broke her reverie: Aquaitra. The pyuton was gone, and Subadwan led the way back to the changing rooms, ducking where the low tunnel ceilings forced her to.

  ‘Do you think this is anything to do with those enforcers harassing you this evening?’ Aquaitra asked as she took her clothes from the wall niche.

  Subadwan had not considered this. ‘I doubt it,’ she replied. She dropped the towel to the floor and, using talc from an alabaster bottle, powdered her body. As Aquaitra handed over ambrosia-scented underwear, then breeches, then waistcoat and jacket, Subadwan dressed, all the time thinking what motive might be behind the appearance of the pyuton. Eventually she said, ‘I’ll have to ask Rhannan about all this. I suppose it can’t do any harm if she and Aswaque are going. But let’s keep it secret for now, eh?’

  ‘I would be careful, ’Dwan.’

  Subadwan nodded. ‘Perhaps they want us to join their Archive.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Me, too. What could be worse than pyutonic safekeeping? But they are planning something.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Gaya’s Archive was set in a yard of bronze. Turquoise verdigris covered many parts, especially the outer sections, but where people had over the centuries walked into the Archive from Lac Street, or from surrounding alleys, there were eroded paths glittering gold, twinkling, reflecting lights above; the lamps of the aeromorphs, of the occasional flying carpet, and of azure aericians with glow-bean nets strung from their wings. The Archive’s conical bulk lay central.

  Subadwan stood in the yard. Through the noon gloom, even with her antique wooden lumod in one hand, she found it hard to make out the faces of people leaving the Archive. There had been a meeting, and hundreds of smiling citizens were departing. Some independents – for no Triader or pyuton paid attention to the memoirs of Gaya – had left their pedicians tied to rusty iron posts, and were now mounting these beasts of burden, sitting uncomfortably behind the knobbly stumps of their shoulders. One man sat upon a woven brass rug and rose into the heavens.

  After waiting ten minutes, Subadwan entered her Archive. The outer public chamber – the only entrance for citizens – stood cavernous, its honeycombed aluminium skeleton entirely hidden by flesh, which here and there grew ginger hair, wrinkled up, or even produced deformed nails, tentacles, and unidentifiable orifices. But the deepest mystery was why this flesh was purple and not pink: purple, the skin colour of the invader gnostician creatures who lived outside the city, inhabited the land all around, and indeed flourished across the Earth to its furthest corners.

  Subadwan hastened up the central staircase in the direction of those chambers at the tip of the cone, some three hundred feet above ground. There she hoped to find the Lord Archivist. As she ascended, the flesh of the Archive grew more leathery, became holed in places exposing aluminium, elsewhere shrivelling to dried wisps shining with fat. The upper chambers, where she, Rhannan, Aswaque and other important Archivists had their quarters, were created from plastic, metal, and in one case chewed paper hardened with gum.

  Rhannan was in. Much relieved, Subadwan entered the gold illuminated chamber and touched her superior on both shoulders in the ancient mark of respect. Rhannan seemed flustered, her bobbed blonde hair dirty, her face grimed, the clingfilm robe that sheathed her rotund body street-stained. She had just returned from the city.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as may be,’ Subadwan began. They sat here at the apex of the cone, Subadwan conscious of a dull thump from Cray’s myriad buildings, for at this height much noise rose up from the heat exchangers on every roof. ‘Last night a pyuton asked me to meet–’

  ‘I thought this was about you being arrested?’ Rhannan said in her husky voice. She frowned.

  Subadwan continued, ‘Oh, that was nothing. I wanted to ask you about a meeting with Tanglanah.’

  Rhannan frowned again. ‘She asked you to meet her?’

  Subadwan knew something was awry. The direct Rhannan would not, as she was now, saunter across to a table and pour two tankards of foaming caramel brew. ‘Are you well, Lord Archivist?’ Subadwan asked.

  Rhannan smiled, offering one of the tankards. Subadwan took it, knowing that its nutritional content would last her the rest of the day. ‘I’ve heard bad news, I must admit. But it doesn’t concern you.’ Subadwan received a few seconds of Rhannan’s intense gaze. ‘No doubt you have cleverly spotted my flustered state and surmised…
well, enough of that.’

  ‘This meeting?’ Subadwan prompted.

  ‘Both Aswaque and I have been entreated by graceful Tanglanah’s personal minion, but neither he nor I offered a reply. The memoirs of the Archive of Safekeeping need not bother us, I think, not when the Triad does nothing to save people expelled from their vitrescent homes, nor even lifts a finger to combat the luminophage plague.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  Rhannan nodded. ‘The Triad is a bad regime. It is a cyberocracy – so I have taught since Gaya made me Lord Archivist. It is in fact a Monad, almost a dictatorship, with me the junior member. Reeve Umia and his two Noct cronies make up three of the five. Ridiculous! He controls three votes of five. Querhidwe and I might as well leave Triad politics now.’

  Subadwan shrugged. Her superior was in poor mood. ‘You both being Lord Archivists means you cannot.’

  Rhannan nodded. This fact she knew. ‘You had better go now,’ she told Subadwan, brushing fingers through her hair.

  Subadwan stared. Could that be a wig Rhannan was wearing?

  ‘Are you leaving or not?’ Rhannan enquired.

  Subadwan returned to her home on Dusk Street, but the short walk was marred when she triggered wall-clinging chromium blisters to burst and discharge their tapeworms. With light provided only by her lumod and mote storms passing below her feet, she bound her cut arm with a strip of cloth.

  It was worse elsewhere. Citizens of the Blistered Quarter habitually wore an extra layer of clothes as defence against tiny airborne splinters, while some lanes in the Empty Quarter were so choked Triader gangs swept them daily, collecting shards in sacks and dumping them outside the city walls. Upon these glass hillocks moccasin-shod gnosticians, bent double, swayed and pounced as they collected fragments.

  At home, Subadwan tried to recall the nuances of her conversation with the pyuton, until a call redirected by Archive networks made her pyuter chime. ‘Hello?’

  It was the violet-eyed pyuton. ‘Subadwan, I await your reply.’

  ‘Am I speaking in strictest confidence?’