“You’re looking tired, my lord." She used the formal term, without any mockery, when reproaching him. “There’s gray under your eyes. You’ve been spending all your time in the world of false power. You will have to let go of that or you will suffer."

She handed him a glass of sparkling iced liquid, cloudy apple juice settling in pure spring water, wonderfully cold and refreshing. He took a deep draught and relaxed back against the pile of cushions. Skita moved slightly, too, stretching out his front legs, licking the side of one paw to wash his ears. The animal seemed to especially enjoy cleaning himself when Geraint was wearing a dark suit, all the better a carpet to deposit white belly hairs. The cat purred with a deeper tone, but then seemed to think better of rolling over to have his belly rubbed. Skita preferred to hold on to his dignity until he was fully relaxed.

"It’s just that time of year, Serena. Lots of corps are finalizing the third-quarter turnovers and announcements, and it’s been busy in the House. But then you’d know that." More than a few elven nobles counted Serena as a good friend, and it was probably their influence that allowed her to operate beyond the rigid legal constraints of the Lord Protector’s Office. She didn’t always need to fill out the quadruplicate paperwork or obtain the full array of permits most registered talismongers needed in Britain’s highly regulated society.

Serena waved away his words with a tiny, bird-like shake of her head. “You can always find a rationalization, Geraint. There is always the pressure of work, if you choose that. But I see you are not at ease. There is a blockage in your aura. Your left side”-she touched her left temple with her index finger-"has been flaring. You won’t accept it, or you don’t want to face it, and you tell yourself that you are too busy, perhaps. You have a block there, and your energies do not flow properly. You’re creating tension within yourself, and you have been trying to calm it with poisons.”

Her expression was almost stem, almost like one his mother had mastered to perfection. If he’d been allowed, he would have lit a cigarette to calm his irritation and to give his restless fingers something to do now that Skita was clearly not to be disturbed in the acme of his relaxation. Serena would not allow tobacco to even enter her premises, let alone be smoked here.

“Serena, I came for business. It’s fortunate that I asked for the mask when I did, for there’s an important business meeting this weekend and I’m sure there’ll be the usual gaggle of corporate mages and opportunistic freelancers trying to probe a mind or two here and there.”

The comment doubled as a warning to her not to probe his any further. Geraint reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew the credstick with the monogrammed silver top. It was a little joke between them, an ostentation that went beyond the bounds of his normal vanity, but one that pleased and amused her. He held it out to her, opening the palm of his free hand to receive the quartz focus in exchange. She took the stick and pushed the focus toward him, but would not relinquish the line of query.

"And they will know, as I do, that you are an adept. You would be a better one if you had not defiled your spirit.” Serena disapproved strongly of the little cyberware Geraint had implanted: his datajack, the headware memory, the cannula implant just above the first vertebra for swift administration of psychoactives. Poisons, she called them, and she would not budge on that interpretation. “It is not a common gift, yours, to see the future.”

This, at least, gave him the opportunity to attempt to divert the direction the conversation was going. “It’s not true precognition, my mother would say. Predicting the future is only extrapolating the present. It is merely clairvoyance and some intuitive guesswork that works out from time to time.” He took an almost perverse pleasure in denigrating his talent, a carefully imposed “merely” making it seem more domesticated, less an intrusion into a well-ordered life.

“Call it what you will, Geraint. It isn’t something you can stop, or control, or subdue. If you will not accept it, then it will break through in ways that will haunt and disturb you.” She was silent for a moment, then turned to put the credstick away. "Well, that’s done,” she said. "Will you have your cards read?"

“No. Thank you.” The first word was too swift, the second following a pause just too long. His response had been almost panicky, and they both knew it. Geraint hid his embarrassment by lifting up a complaining Skita and depositing the cat on the warm cushion he was vacating, then brushing the cat’s fur off his lap with exaggerated motions. As he was leaving, Serena had a final word for him, as always.

“Then, they have been speaking to you themselves. Listen, Geraint. Listen! If you do not, they will force you to hear. Take care.”

For some inexplicable reason, Geraint managed to knock a small trinket off the counter on the way out of the shop, diluting the impact of her words somehow. He hurriedly picked up the bracelet and replaced it in its wicker container on the polished glass counter. Serena stood with arms crossed, watching him half-seriously, half-amused.

"Acquaintance of yours was in the other day,” she said.

“Hmm? One of the elven nobles? Haven’t been seeing-”

“No, an elf from across the waters. Serrin Shamandar. I would not tell you what he was seeking, of course, but it was an interesting little coincidence." They both knew that neither of them believed in coincidence. Geraint shrugged, smiled away her raised eyebrows, and then headed into the flow of the faceless on Frith Street.

His bags were already packed as he held the focus within his hands. It would take a couple of hours for the bonding, to draw the magic of the thing into himself. He had handled and meditated upon the crystal and metal during its making, of course, and now he needed just a little time with the finished item. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and within four hours he would be back in Cambridge, five or ten minutes from his old college, shaking hands with the rich, the fat, and the titled. He laughed, his good spirits returning, and sat down with the focus.

Within minutes, he was oblivious to the world, and he did not even register Francesca’s call on the telecom. Besides, she was only calling to wish him a prosperous weekend.

Serrin frowned as he parked the hired bike in the hotel’s underground garage. It didn’t help his mood to have baleful sodium-molybdenum lighting winking at him from the walls, with their flaking white-painted arrows pointing toward the elevator.

The morning had been tedious, as usual. Down in Grantchester, a couple of miles to the south, his watchers at the Renraku labs had chattered their reports to him. The barrier created by the hermetic mages inside was as thick as a troll samurai’s skin, but that was to be expected. The Corp’s watchers were observing his without undue concern. The little buggers probably leg it as soon as I’ve gone, doing whatever they do to amuse themselves, he thought.

It had been the usual routine: concentrating on his magical masking and camouflage, perceiving astrally from a safe distance, prowling around the seamless magical barriers, testing gently for any unusual responses or activities. But nothing unusual ever turned up. No combat mages returning the astral surveillance, no body-armored goons roaring forth in APVs. But then, this was England, nothing like what Serrin was used to back home.

Just for the hell of it, he decided to break the speed limit on the flat, straight road back to the heart of the sprawl. Roaring along the riverbank, he seriously startled some students poling flat-bottomed punts along the River Cam, but none actually fell into the stinking water. Serrin had read in his guidebook that ingesting a mouthful of the river water gave you a flat 10 percent chance of death by chemistry, while sometimes a puntful of students got swallowed by one of the paranimals that wandered downstream from the Stinkfens to the east. But the students still went on punting, as if the simple tradition of it all could defy the realities of a ravaged earth. People just went on: punting on rivers of filth, buying demitech that’d kill them more times than it’d work, going to butchers to get questionable cyberware implanted in street clinics, believing in another green guru with a smile on his face and a corporate credstick stuck up his ass.