The Encoded Heart Read online

  After that, Durham Red's recovery seemed to accelerate. Knowing that she needed blood to survive, Losen fed her sylphs, sending them in at carefully regulated intervals. They were the only people she met, during those first few days, although many others saw her through the various visula feeds dotted around the villa. Losen, in particular, spent a long time keeping watch on her.

  The mutant never turned into the savage monster Compasso had feared, once she had regained her senses. She often became angry - the silence of the sylphs Losen sent in tended to infuriate her. Every time one came into the villa Red would follow the same pattern; she would try to engage it in conversation, fail, grow angry, and bite the unfortunate servant on the neck. She hadn't actually drained one yet, and seemed able to survive on quite a small amount of blood each day, leaving the sylphs dazed but alive. She was also happy to indulge in the other dishes Losen had laid out for her while she slept.

  She seemed particularly fond of anything flavoured with quantities of garlic. Losen, despite himself, found that quite endearing: it so effectively belied all the old vampire stories he had been told.

  Naturally, imprisonment did not suit Red well. Her escape attempts broke a little furniture, but nothing that couldn't be replaced. Her ranting at those watching her - for she seemed to have an instinctive awareness that she was under surveillance - was a revelation in terms of her vast and florid vocabulary of cursewords, and her willingness to use them in the most amazing combinations. However, she was still weak and such outbursts tended to be few.

  Through most of the nine days Losen held her alone in the villa, she did little but sleep.

  Finally, on the tenth day, Losen decided that it was time he and the vampire spoke face to face.

  She was asleep when he entered, but he was careful to wear a suit of bio-carapace armour under his robes. Losen was no coward, but neither was he suicidal.

  He took the mask with him too, just for insurance.

  Once inside the villa he sat down on a chair in her bedchamber, content to watch her sleep for a time. She was stretched out on the bed with her back to him, lying on her side, half-covered by a silken sheet. Her hair, a vivid scarlet striped with jet black, lay tousled on the pillow, and the sheet did nothing to conceal the curves of her slender body. She was, Losen admitted to herself, quite attractive in an alien, feral way.

  For a time he just sat, watching, until she spoke. "You the snecker who's been spying on me?"

  She hadn't moved, hadn't changed position in the slightest. Losen wondered if she had been asleep at all.

  "One of them," he admitted.

  She rolled over. Her eyes, which he had seen on numerous visula screens, were a clear, calm blue. When she became angry they seemed to reflect the light oddly, shining vivid scarlet.

  They were red.

  "You spoke," she said quietly.

  "It's a habit of mine."

  "The others didn't share it."

  "The others were sylphs. A servant class. They don't speak."

  "Which puts you in charge." Without warning she sprang up from the bed, flipping the sheet away, grabbing Losen by the throat as she barrelled into him. He crashed backwards out of the chair and she rode him all the way down, slamming him into the carpet.

  It wasn't the first time Saleph Losen had been on his back with a naked woman atop him, but seldom had the experience been less pleasant.

  The armour was protecting him from being strangled, but only just. "So," she said, her face very close to his. "This is where you start answering some questions. Like what the sneck is going on!"

  If Losen had wanted to, he could have brushed Durham Red with the needle projecting from his signet ring. She would have been unconscious before she hit the floor. But he realised he was in no real danger. The woman wanted answers more than she wanted blood.

  "I'll tell you anything you wish to know, my lady. That's why I came in. If you like, I can tell you from down here on the carpet, or we can do this in a more upright stance." He let his gaze flick down, purely for effect. "After all, if anyone were watching us now, they might get the wrong idea."

  Losen seriousely doubted that his comment would embarrass Red. She had few inhibitions about her nude form, and the clothes she had been wearing in the library were not exactly modest or demure. It was the scars she still bore from that place that seemed to bother her more.

  Red got up, and allowed Losen to do the same. While he was retrieving the chair from the floor, she fetched the sheet and draped it over her shoulders.

  "There are clothes," he said. "In the wardrobes."

  "I know, I saw." She took a slightly shivery breath. "I don't like them."

  "I'll have some made for you, something more to your taste. In the meantime..." He smiled, took the mask from his robes and tossed it across to her.

  She snapped it out of the air, insect-quick despite her weakness. "Christ," she breathed.

  It was the mask he had been wearing when he had taken her from the renegade agent's daggership.

  "It was you," she muttered, turning the mask over in her hands. "I thought I recognised your voice, but I wasn't sure..."

  "You were rather distracted at the time." He favoured her with a slight bow. "Saleph Losen, at your service."

  "You got me away from Ketta, brought me..." She made a vague gesture. "Here. Wherever here is."

  "We call our world Magadan."

  "Never heard of it."

  "That's rather the point. We've been extremely careful to make sure no one has."

  Without warning, Red flipped the mask back to him. "So, what's the catch?"

  "Catch?" He snatched the mask out of the air. "There is no catch, not this time. The Magister has a personal interest in meeting you, but his motives are quite benign. When it became known to us that you were walking into a trap, a rescue mission was dispatched."

  "I don't buy it. Benign reasons? Trust me, pal, no one does a bloody thing for benign reasons, not in this universe. As far as I know I've never been to anywhere called Magadan and I've not met any Magisters. So why is someone I don't even snecking know going to go to all that trouble and expense to pull my fat out of the fire?"

  Losen couldn't help but smile. "My lady," he began gently. "The chair I am sitting on is hand-carved from ebony-crossed burwood, and inlaid with about two kilos of solid gold. The sheet you are wearing is prime-grade silk woven with gold thread, as are the pillows, the bedspread, the curtains and the hangings. The carpet is hand-tufted, the walls inlaid with platinum and lapis lazuli, the surfaces marble. In short, this room alone is worth more in monetary terms than most Accord citizens earn in a lifetime.

  "There are nine room in this villa and a hundred villas on this stratum. There are fifty strata in this citadel and five citadels in the Grand Keep, and the Magister owns all of it. All of it."

  He stood. "Now tell me, my lady, how could he possibly consider your rescue and treatment expensive?"

  After Losen left the villa, making sure that the door was firmly locked behind him, a sylph approached. She was a neutral, dressed in the soft linens of the Concourse and she carried a message tube.

  Losen accepted the tube with courtesy and good grace, but behind his outward calm he would far rather have been handed a live snake.

  He took the tube to a café in the nearby piazza, and sat at one of the tables to open it. As was customary, he slipped on a pair of gloves before doing so. It would have been extremely bad protocol to poison the scroll within, or modify the seal; as far as Losen knew, no one had done such a thing in his lifetime. Trust, though, was not something he was familiar with, or even particularly approved of. Besides, the tube was marked with the seal of Cados and the Cadosi could be a strange crew.

  The message was written by hand on fine parchment. Its content was deceptively simple.

  Losen had climbed a long way up the ladder of the Magadani hierarchy, all the way through servitude, observance, and onward to the giddy heights of domination. But the hig
her one climbed, the wider the gaps between rungs, and the more painful the fall should one misstep. Saleph Losen liked the altitude, and he had no intention of risking a tumble just yet.

  He took the tube back to his own villa, on the outskirts of the eighth stratum, and sent a request for audience through the visula. In a few minutes the little screen brightened, and the patterns on it resolved into the features of Sire Brakkeri, a third dominus and Losen's direct patron-superior.

  Losen bowed low before the visula's circular screen. "Sire."

  "Hello, Saleph." Brakkeri smiled thinly. "A visula call in the middle of the afternoon? You must be keeping busy."

  "Forgive me, sire. Ordinarily I would not have intruded, and certainly not in such an impolite manner. But this is a matter of importance, and I urgently need your advice."

  "Hmm." The old dominus leaned closer to the screen. "Does it concern our guest?"

  "It does."

  "I thought as much. Proceed."

  Losen took a deep breath. "I just received a message scroll from a rival dominus."

  "Did you now?" Brakkeri's bushy eyebrows rose a fraction. "It would hardly have been from a friendly one, would it?"

  The use of message tubes was an old custom, a rare relic from a bygone era. Few but the highest-ranking domini would ever have seen one. Most people used a visula to communicate over distance and would never think of doing anything else. When it became necessary to send more secret messages, the services of a trained word-bearer might be employed - in these troubled times they were seldom out of work. There were even ways to modify a sylph to carry data internally, although the methods of retrieving it were often fatal.

  The most polite method of communication, the one that denoted greatest respect, was simply to travel in order to impart the message. "If something is worth discussing," the maxim went, "it is worth doing so face to face, and preferably over a glass of wine."

  But to write out a message, enclose it in a message tube and then hire a neutral sylph to transport it sent out a signal all of its own. Only an enemy would send off a missive in this manner.

  An enemy with resources. "It's from Vaide Sorrelier," Losen replied.

  "Ah." Brakkeri stroked his chin thoughtfully. "That dog. I knew he'd find out we had her, but not so quickly. Perhaps your security needs to be looked into, Saleph."

  "It will be. Nevertheless, dogs do sniff. And Sorrelier scents a bitch."

  "What does he say?"

  "That he wants to meet me. The guest list for the Masque concerns him, and he wants to make sure there are no omissions."

  Brakkeri chuckled. "Now that's obvious, even for Sorrelier. The loss of his prize must have hit him hard."

  "Twice she's slipped from his fingers," Losen agreed. "He won't rest until she's strung up in his factory with a tap in her spine."

  The older dominus sat back, steepling his fingers. It was a gesture Losen knew well, from years under Brakkeri's patronage, and he braced himself.

  "Sorrelier is slipping," the man said quietly. "He's carrying too much weight, and it's time he fell. Saleph, make sure Cinderella goes to the ball. If she's unwilling, persuade her. I want to see what happens when Sorrelier finds her out in the open."

  Suddenly, it all became clear. "He'll try to take her."

  "He may." Brakkeri made a dismissive gesture. "And be prepared for the wrath of the Magister to fall on you, Saleph, if that should happen. You might even shed a level or two." He must have seen the look on Losen's face just then. He raised his hands slightly. "Be calm, my friend. I'll see to it you're not at the sixth for long. And Sorrelier will summon far more spite down upon his head, believe me. We've known for a long while that he's been planning something impolite. This could be the best way of directing the Magister's attentions to where they are best needed, wouldn't you say?"

  "I..." Out of sight of the visula, Losen had slipped a small ampoule of Dream from a concealed pocket, and pushed the tiny integral needle into the base of his left thumb. In a heartbeat a wave of stillness had risen from his core, flowering behind his eyes like black satin. He smiled. "Of course, sire. It's too valuable an opportunity to miss. How should I reply to Sorrelier?"

  "However you wish." Brakkeri waved the question away. "If at all. He'll be at the Masque in any case."

  "I'll be sure to greet him appropriately. Thank you for your counsel, my sire, and enjoy the afternoon."

  Once the visula screen had returned to its patterns, Losen relaxed back into his chair. His hand went to the message tube, fingertips tapping its cool metal surface, brushing the broken seal. "Sardonic old bastard," he muttered, without much malice.

  He had been used, but it was the lot of the Magadani to be the instruments of those higher up the ladder. Now that he could see the whole of the plan, he was too impressed by it to be angry. In the grand scheme of things, what did it matter if he had been selected for sacrifice, his neck on the block from the moment he had set off to find and rescue Durham Red?

  Perhaps, when the Dream wore off, he would think differently. For now, there was etiquette to consider.

  So he took a piece of the very finest parchment, considerably better than his enemy had used, and composed a reply. He wrote that, while he was far too busy to meet with Sire Sorrelier at this time, he could assure him that the guest list for the Masque was complete. No one who should be there would remain uninvited.

  He rolled the message carefully, placed it back in the tube and sealed it with his signet ring, the tiny heating element it contained re-melting the wax perfectly. Then, the job done, he summoned one of his sylphs to take it down to Concourse.

  "Here's your bone back, dog," he said, as the woman walked away. "Let's see you choke on it."

  7. BELLE OF THE BALL

  As soon as Losen had left the room, Red got up from the bed, padded quickly over to the door and rattled the handle. It was locked.

  "Crap," she snarled.

  She wandered back to the bed and sat down on the edge, nibbling her lower lip. She'd missed an opportunity, her curiosity getting the better of her again. Instead of talking to Losen, trying to get answers out of him, she should have just knocked him aside and gone out to find her own.

  She was still tired, still weak. But now that she was getting stronger, she'd do it right next time.

  Perhaps she'd been overly startled by the sound of his voice. Apart from him, everyone who had visited her had remained completely silent - even when she had bitten them. They had offered their throats to her, these wordless, beautiful men and women, and not emitted even a whimper as she had taken their blood. But when Losen had spoken to her, the possibility of getting some information from him had put all other thoughts aside.

  That was most unlike her. The poisoned blood she'd drunk on Biblos must have done more harm than she'd thought.

  But she was also finding it hard to focus in such surroundings. The rooms were so different to anything she'd ever known, before or after the cryo-tube; so opulent and comfortable, so richly adorned. What had Losen said about the sheets?

  Gingerly, she lifted the corner of one and brought it close enough to see the weave. It glittered in the room's pearly light, impossibly fine. Silk thread and gold.

  She'd never seen anything like it.

  Sneck, she'd bled all over them when they'd first brought her in there! She'd been delirious then, injured and poisoned, but the memories still pricked at her. More than once she'd clawed the dressing away from her perforated shoulder, and the blood had come freely. She remembered the warmth of it on her skin, slick at first and then sticky, coating her, its smell a torment.

  How many times had she done that? Twice? More, perhaps? And each time, people had come running into the room within moments, calming her with soft words and sharp needles, never more than a minute passing between the bandages coming off and the drugs hitting her bloodstream. She had watched them take away the gore-soaked bedding and clean her body while new sheets and pillows were provided, and even i
n the depths of her delirium had known that she was being spied upon as she slept.

  Red groaned and rolled over. She never trusted people who were too nice to her, or people who were too wealthy. Rich people being nice imbued her with a crawling horror. But, for all the warning signals going off in her head, she couldn't deny that without Losen and his mysterious Magister, she would either still be on Ketta's ship or at the mercy of someone worse.

  The thought gave her a chill. Red grabbed a sheet, and drew it over herself.

  Losen was a strange one. At first glance, Red might have taken him for nothing more than an ineffectual dandy, elegant to the point of effeminacy. His voice was soft, his manner cultured and almost impossibly polite, his face powdered and his cheeks rouged. Under the surface, though, was something very different. Just as his silken robes had concealed a suit of protective armour, so his foppish demeanour was a façade; behind it was a cunning intelligence, bright and sharp. Red could feel it poking through his mannerisms like the tip of a hidden blade.

  She didn't have to wait long.

  Towards the end of her conversation with Losen, she had felt the tiredness creeping back again, the sluggish weakness in her limbs. Her body was using every scrap of spare energy to repair itself. Naturally, Red had tried to hide this fact from her benefactor, and had believed she'd done a pretty good job, but maybe she'd underestimated him. Within a few minutes of his leaving, she realised that someone was entering the villa.

  Red curled up on the bed, feigning sleep, the sheet still drawn over her nakedness.

  She kept her eyes closed, but sight was the least of her senses. Outside the bedchamber, soft-shoed feet padded almost silently across the polished floors - almost, but not quite. There were four intruders, Red could hear, two with the measured pace of the sylph.