City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) Read Free Page A

want.
    “Mr. Martinus,” she says.
    "Miss Aiah.”
    He is a huge man, one of Constantine’s bodyguards, not only trained for war but bred for it. His genes are twisted to produce a massive, muscled body and catlike reflexes. His face looks like a helmet, eyes sunk beneath protective plates of bone. Heavy slabs of callus ridge his knuckles.
    “Welcome to Caraqui,” he says.
    “Thank you, sir.”
    Martinus escorts Aiah into the elevator and presses the lever. There is a smell of burning that lodges in the back of Aiah’s throat, a souvenir of the fighting. The elevator doesn’t go straight up, but swoops as it rises to match the building’s architecture: the Aerial Palace, for all its extravagance, is a generator of plasm, built to distill the essence of mage-power. Its alloy structure is a maze of careful, intricate alignments, intended to take advantage of geomantic relationships that increase plasm generation.
    The elevator doors open. The deep wine-red carpet is plush and the walls are paneled with dark wood— genuine wood!— broken with diagonal stripes of brightly patterned tile and solid gold wall fixtures in the shape of birds in flight. A percentage of the latter seem to have been torn from the walls by looters.
    The corridor is blocked at regular intervals by sliding glass doors set into polished bronze frames. The doors open automatically on approach, though Aiah sees that they can be locked if necessary. Crosshatched bronze wire winks from inside the glass. It is part of the building’s defense system: the huge Palace is divided into sealed compartments to prevent a single attacking mage from raging through the whole building.
    Martinus opens a paneled door and ushers her in.
    “Wait here, please.”
    Aiah steps into the room. "How long will I have to wait?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Martinus closes the door. Aiah looks about her. More wood paneling, gold-framed mirrors, two huge oval windows miraculously undamaged by war. The room is intended for meetings: there’s a huge kidney-shaped table— more wood!— and metal-and-leather chairs, gold frames with luxurious brown calfskin cushions. Even the ashtrays, laid out two-by-two down the length of the table, are solid gold.
    The burning scent is here as well, like embers smoldering in the back of the throat, and it won’t go away.
    Outside, a peregrine dives past the windows, a swift dark streak against the opalescence of the Shield. Aiah steps to one of the windows and looks out, hoping to find the falcon against the backdrop of the city. She doesn’t see it— perhaps it’s already sitting on a ledge somewhere, eating the pigeon it’s just caught.
    The room projects out from the Palace and gives Aiah an exemplary view of the world-city, the buildings and towers and water-lanes that go on forever, unbroken to the flat ocean horizon. One of the green aerial tramcars floats in midair between two distant towers. I am on the water , she thinks, having to remind herself of the fact ...
    The sky blossoms with a giant plasm-image, the stern face of the actor Kherzaki hovering over the Caraqui, his expression commanding. An advertisement for the chromoplay Lords of the New City, based on Constantine’s early life and career. Fire-petals unfold beside the image, become words burning in air.
    See it now.. ., the sky commands.
    An advert, Aiah wonders, or a command from the ruling triumvirate? Should it be See it now... or else? The door opens behind her, and she gives a start and spins, a brief giddy disorientation eddying through her inner ear . . . and as the whirling stops the false, burning mage in the sky is replaced with the real Constantine, a far more dangerous commodity. He looks almost respectable in modest white lace, black pipestem pants, and a black velvet jacket, and Aiah knows right away that her having come here is a mistake. Her heart sinks.
    He doesn’t love her. They had been lovers, yes, but that was an accident, the chance result of a