sight. The cross-hairs in the scope centered on the red numbers on his shirt: 66. It was the client. The man inhaled, holding his breath as his finger bent around the trigger. A distant blunderbuss-boom of musketry brought his head up. (“Ambush?”) His client’s horse reared and went down, smoke rising like puffs of steam from the bushes on either side of the road. A viewscreen close-up showed the client thrown free, huddled against the belly of the dead horse, spots of blood beginning to blossom on the white tunic. Then: a dancing ribbon of flame; the boy had a solar-torch set at full power. The bushes along the roadside caught fire. “What kind of circus is this?” the man wondered.
“Never mind,” said an unfamiliar voice within his head. “Finish him. “
“What about the other ones?” the man was thinking.
“Forget them, just finish the job.”
The man did as he was told.
There was a moment, sprawled in the dust, hurt and confused, when Par Sondak almost forced himself awake enough to push the disconnect sensor on the studio wall. Buick’s instincts took over; surprise and fear cleared his mind of shock, and he crawled for the cover of the horse, his painful wounds only tinder for his incendiary hatred. Sondak shared the boy’s furious energy and he postponed awakening like a man delaying an orgasm, wanting to taste just a little bit more of the thrill.
How satisfying to spray the underbrush with fire. The agonized screams of his enemies brought on a sensation almost like joy. Buick never heard the distant echoing shot that sent clouds of birds wheeling into flight from the sides of the canyon. A 250-grain, hollow-point bullet caught him under his upraised arm with enough force to flip him over backwards. Sondak felt the blow, saw a final rushing moment of blue sky; but when the body hit the ground, mouth and nostrils spewing a bright froth of lung-blood, the recording modal on the Dream Syndicate machines went blank and the Dreamer lay open-mouthed in his studio, his goggling eyes glassy with death.
The burial platform of Buick the Firechief was a banner-decked wagonwheel set on a mast above the uppermost ramparts of the fortress. And when the vultures finished, the bones were brought down and ceremoniously interred by the Holy Brotherhood beneath the pavingstones of the Klaven Chamber. The Grand Dragon was bed-ridden with arthritis and did not attend these rites. Neither did five badly burned guardsmen, secretly hospitalized in an empty granary. The unrecognizably charred corpses of three renegade assassins hung from the crossbeam of the village gate.
Upended cinders, scorned even as carrion, the mortal remains of this doleful trio endured longer than the Grand Dragon or his fortress: a fire started mysteriously, deep within the inner chambers of the central keep, and spread with demonic ferocity, igniting the powder-magazines even as the first alarm gongs were sounding. For months afterwards, mothers pointed the three burned bodies out to their children as clear evidence of prophecy, a sign of unspeakable evil harbored within the massive smoke-blackened walls.
The picture-wall in Omar Tarquille’s office throbbed with the programmed chaotics of Lazalo Kingsolving’s Sidereal Motion Series: Apparition 4. On a pedestal in the center of the room stood one of the prizes of the Syndicate collection: Brancusi’s Bird in Space. It was a large office in a world where status could be measured in square meters: the extent of one’s wall-to-wall privacy. The view through the bubble-window opposite the entrance showed sergeant majors and queen angelfish gliding through a spiky forest of elkhorn coral. In the subsurface City, most of the population lived and worked at depths where, if they were fortunate enough to have an outer room, the only view was a hundred meters of dismal artificially lighted murk. His sunlit vista of the coral reef and the fact that he worked at home were other indications of Omar
“Never mind,” said an unfamiliar voice within his head. “Finish him. “
“What about the other ones?” the man was thinking.
“Forget them, just finish the job.”
The man did as he was told.
There was a moment, sprawled in the dust, hurt and confused, when Par Sondak almost forced himself awake enough to push the disconnect sensor on the studio wall. Buick’s instincts took over; surprise and fear cleared his mind of shock, and he crawled for the cover of the horse, his painful wounds only tinder for his incendiary hatred. Sondak shared the boy’s furious energy and he postponed awakening like a man delaying an orgasm, wanting to taste just a little bit more of the thrill.
How satisfying to spray the underbrush with fire. The agonized screams of his enemies brought on a sensation almost like joy. Buick never heard the distant echoing shot that sent clouds of birds wheeling into flight from the sides of the canyon. A 250-grain, hollow-point bullet caught him under his upraised arm with enough force to flip him over backwards. Sondak felt the blow, saw a final rushing moment of blue sky; but when the body hit the ground, mouth and nostrils spewing a bright froth of lung-blood, the recording modal on the Dream Syndicate machines went blank and the Dreamer lay open-mouthed in his studio, his goggling eyes glassy with death.
The burial platform of Buick the Firechief was a banner-decked wagonwheel set on a mast above the uppermost ramparts of the fortress. And when the vultures finished, the bones were brought down and ceremoniously interred by the Holy Brotherhood beneath the pavingstones of the Klaven Chamber. The Grand Dragon was bed-ridden with arthritis and did not attend these rites. Neither did five badly burned guardsmen, secretly hospitalized in an empty granary. The unrecognizably charred corpses of three renegade assassins hung from the crossbeam of the village gate.
Upended cinders, scorned even as carrion, the mortal remains of this doleful trio endured longer than the Grand Dragon or his fortress: a fire started mysteriously, deep within the inner chambers of the central keep, and spread with demonic ferocity, igniting the powder-magazines even as the first alarm gongs were sounding. For months afterwards, mothers pointed the three burned bodies out to their children as clear evidence of prophecy, a sign of unspeakable evil harbored within the massive smoke-blackened walls.
The picture-wall in Omar Tarquille’s office throbbed with the programmed chaotics of Lazalo Kingsolving’s Sidereal Motion Series: Apparition 4. On a pedestal in the center of the room stood one of the prizes of the Syndicate collection: Brancusi’s Bird in Space. It was a large office in a world where status could be measured in square meters: the extent of one’s wall-to-wall privacy. The view through the bubble-window opposite the entrance showed sergeant majors and queen angelfish gliding through a spiky forest of elkhorn coral. In the subsurface City, most of the population lived and worked at depths where, if they were fortunate enough to have an outer room, the only view was a hundred meters of dismal artificially lighted murk. His sunlit vista of the coral reef and the fact that he worked at home were other indications of Omar
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