Palace Read Free Page A

red couches, each flanked by a tray of implements and soft cloths. Along the facing wall ran mirrors. At the back stood an open door leading inward.
    ‘Do you know who I am, now?’ Kata said to the boy.
    ‘With all submission, I need the password.’
    ‘Good for you! Kel amin del Umin.’ No honour with Humans.
    ‘Amin kath voli.’ None except dead ones.
    The youngling raised his head.
    ‘We are honoured to host you. My name is Sar Elen.’
    ‘What? Sar and Elen? Only two names? Do you shun the name of your line?’
    ‘My line has no name until our people have a Standing.’ Kata grinned. He never formed friendships, but he liked this youngling.
    ‘We have a network,’ Elen went on. ‘There are a lot of places you can shelter.’
    ‘Well, that’s very good of you, but I don’t dare. I’ll find my own shelter, youngling. Knowing where I am could kill you. Do you realize that? We’ll never regain our Standing if the faithful get pulled in by the Palace police.’
    ‘True. I take it you’ve come to use the passage?’
    ‘Just that.’
    Elen led him into the shop’s back room, stacked with boxes of cloths and big plastic jugs of oil. He opened what seemed to be a closet, empty except for a bright red robovac on the floor and a rack of brushes and attachments hanging on the back wall. The youngling stepped back and merely waited, but his crest kept raising despite his obvious efforts to keep it down.
    ‘What is it?’ Kata snapped.
    ‘I think you’re in for a surprise, that’s all. About this door.’
    ‘Well, I know it’s hidden. Don’t worry. I know how to unlock it.’
    Elen’s crest quivered from the effort of staying flat.
    Kata opened the shoulder-sack and took out what appeared to be an amber pendant. Whispering the activation name made the yellow-brown transceiver crystal first glow, then send out an electronic pulse - not that Kata could hear it, of course, but the hologram of cleaning equipment disappeared, revealing another door.
    ‘Fare you well, Elen,’ Kata said. ‘And always watch your back.’
    Kata opened the door and stepped through. A sensation like a thousand cold fingers ran over his scales, making him shudder and twitch. For a moment he nearly retched; then the sensation stopped as suddenly as it had started. He staggered a few steps forward and found himself inside a grey room with a black door on the far side. When he spun round, he saw that the door into Sar Elen’s shop had vanished.
    ‘What?’ A trap, was it?
    Yet he remembered things, a casual remark from his contact on Souk, and bits of data he’d learned in school, too, about the old days in the Pinch, before the hypershunts had closed and sealed it off from the rest of civilization. They had marvellous technology in the old days.
    ‘Transport gates.’ He whispered the words aloud. ‘It has to be!’
    He walked back to the wall that once had been a door and ran his hand along it. Not a seam, not a welt, nothing. He must have been delivered inside this room by a technology everyone thought lost forever. He could be anywhere at all on Palace, anywhere! He had the feeling that he’d never know, because he was willing to bet high stakes that the door on the other side would drop him back into the Lep quarter at yet another location. He went still for a moment, listening to something He’d heard - or was it that he felt the sensation around him? A very low throbbing hum or a distant vibration, perhaps heavy machinery? The sound of whatever it was never seemed to vary its rhythm, a big pulse, two small fast pulses, over and over. Turning, he considered the black door. Should he try to open it? His instructions said otherwise: walk through the passage and wait for our leader to join you. Very well. He’d wait. Kata knew this leader only by the code name Riva, an ancient word meaning ‘unblemished scales’. He had to be another Lep, but Kata was only thinking of him as ‘he’ for convenience sake. Was he male,