Empire Dreams by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

“Perellen, the masque at the House Kerrender, this Matinsday, remember.” As the boats pull away from the mooring Dom Perellen remains awhile, head bent, breathing deeply, trying to regain his composure. He is trembling. It had been close. He forces the fear and the guilt down his gullet and draws himself up. It is then that he sees the solitary figure in white running across the empty, fog-shrouded plaza. For an instant the face is turned to him. Behind the funeral mask are eyes he knows.
    “Serenade!” His lunge for shore sets the gondola rocking dangerously. “Serenade!” Far away at the edge of the cloisters the figure turns again for a moment, then hurries on. “Serenade.” Doves explode into the air from the bell-keeps of the Hall of Weeping and the massive buttresses of pale stonework return his cry to him.
    * * * *
    He is to see her again: spied from a high balcony, singular for a moment among the anonymous faces of the street entertainers and mendicants in the Bourse. Again, as a glimpsed figure hurrying up the steps of a water-gate in Harhadden. She turns for an instant at his call but there is no recognition and she does not wait. Again, on a water-taxi sweeping past his gondola on the Canal St. Nimien. Lastly, alone at a far table in a crowded cafe by the Damantine Fountain. By the time he presses his way between the chattering luncheoners she is gone, leaving only a five-pago tip and a musky wisp of perfume prepared from the powdered wings of night moths.
    His discreet inquiries at the House Merreveth prove only that she is gone. Delving into past acquaintances from his rakish days discloses nothing. Her friends know less than he. She has vanished back into the city which raised and nurtured her. Looking out from the music-room window Dom Perellen knows that he can never find the one soul in the city’s thronging millions who does not wish to be found, for what man could explore every laneway and waterway of a city that changes and grows every hour of every day so that it may never cease growing and thus stagnate and die? There is an infinity of canals and channels which reach back into derelict quarters abandoned so long ago by the slow migration to Elder Sea that their names are forgotten and their waterways choked and stagnant, where the funeral grounds of past millennia have, in their turn, become plazas and conventicles, chapteries and arcades, and are now, centuries later, returning to the ancestors who peopled them. The City of Man is upheld by the hands of the dead.
    And she is there somewhere. She will come to him. She must. Otherwise Dom Merreveth’s death is a hollow victory. She will come in time, and time is as plentiful as water in the sea.
    * * * *
    After that time at the Damantine Fountain he does not see her again, not even at the ball in the House Kerrender with every Dom and Infanta in the city in attendance. Though he dances a hundred waltzes and gazes into the eyes behind a hundred masks he does not find the eyes that glow in his memories or the body that quickens the beat of his soul. There are smiling invitations from Infanta and Dom alike but he does not accept them for he had hoped with a sure and certain hope that she would have been drawn here tonight like a moth to a candle. He has not yet found her, but there are still faces to be searched for well-known eyes.
    So he dances too much and drinks too much and flirts too little and by the time his friends ask him to take them home he is obnoxiously drunk and bad-tempered. He is so unpleasant that his friends (considerably more drunk than he, but good-humored) drop him on the Florinthian Steps and sail off in his gondola in search of new diversions. The sounds of laughter and merry music recede into the fog. Dom Perellen breathes in the wet air, suddenly alone and vulnerable. It is so late it is early and there is no traffic abroad on the canals. He must walk. St. Devereux’s Preview will take him to Rerren Square and thence