‘That’s a big one,’ said Roger. ‘Near to budding.’

He meant generating a sub-organism, a daughter herd.

‘How can you tell?’ Dad touched his shoulder. ‘You belong here, son, in a way I never will.’

A tight claw of tension squeezed Roger’s torso.

Then why don’t you let me leave?

Because there were other places he could venture, far beyond Lucis City, beyond the world of Fulgor, even beyond the universe. But this was a hired aircab, and for all of Dad’s capabilities, the stakes were too high to discuss confidential matters here. If he’d wanted to raise the subject, he should have done so at home.

That was what he thought. But what Dad did next surprised him.

‘Let’s talk openly.’

‘But—’

‘This aircab is, well, special. We’re protected here.’

Beneath them, a valley was filled with striped fog, a moving tiger-skin configuration of purple and green, forming a Turing pattern: emergent properties from simple chemistry.

‘How protected?’

‘This much.’ Dad reached up and dabbed at his eyes, removing his smartlenses. ‘See?’

Freed of disguise, his natural eyes were obsidian, without surrounding whites. Black upon black, dark as space.

‘You can’t be serious.’ Roger reached up to his own smartlenses, then stopped. ‘I can’t.’

‘That’s a good inhibition to have, son.’

‘While I’m among ordinary humans, you mean.’

‘Yes. You do belong here, Roger. I meant that.’

‘And Labyrinth? Isn’t that where I was born?’

Dad looked away as if checking the sky, but if they weren’t shielded from SatScan then they wouldn’t be speaking like this.

‘Maybe I’ve been wrong.’

Roger tried to work out the right words to say, some persuasive rhetoric that would change Dad’s mind all the way. Nothing occurred to him.

‘You’ve had to live with secrets your whole life,’ said Dad. ‘We even wore smartlenses around you at home when you were a baby.’

‘I know.’ Meaning, he’d heard the stories before. ‘I don’t remember that, or the time in nursery that you had to mindwipe the teacher.’

‘It was a very selective amnesia,’ said Dad. ‘And you only betrayed yourself once.’

‘Betrayed you, you mean.’

There was a tightness in Roger’s voice that he hadn’t intended, a roughness of accusation.

‘It’s important, what we do here. But there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you, son.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The most important things in my life are you and your mother.’

Such simple words. There was a directness in those jet-black eyes that Roger could not withstand. Then he rubbed his face and made himself smile.

‘What about your other lover?’

‘My-? Ah. Well. Her.’

‘She’ll take you any place you like, any time. Doesn’t it make you want to fly away from Fulgor, away from everything?’

Dad’s answer was filled with surprising vulnerability.

‘You’ll never know how much.’

Neither said anything as Dad replaced his smartlenses and his normal expression, settled back in the seat, and closed his eyes, pretending to work.

They alighted on the edge of a piazza, in the shadow of an aqueduct. Dad paid the aircab, the fare a simple four-dimensional money matrix in the two-hundred-dimensional phase space of Fulgidi finance. Occasionally Mum or Dad complained about the complexity of buying or selling, especially if any Luculenti were involved; but Roger had never known anything different.

The cab ascended into the green sky, looped behind a grandiose quickglass tower, and was gone. This week’s architectural fashion favoured trompe-l’oeil illusions, and many of the two dozen towers in sight looked translucent or oddly shaped, including several that were formed from ‘impossible’ polygons, or appeared to be. Skywalks hung among the towers like necklaces, sparkling where the sunlight struck.

‘You’re mediating some kind of deal?’ Roger said.

‘Uh-huh. The more sophisticated Fulgidi merchants become, the more resourcefully they find ways to disagree with each other.’

‘I never thought of that.’

‘So often they fail to negotiate because their plans are just so twisty and complex.’

There was something different in Dad’s tone, as if talking to an equal. Or perhaps that was some kind of wishful thinking.

‘You’ve got to go straight away?’

‘I’m afraid so. I want to catch some of them before the meeting starts. How long have you got to wait?’

‘Another forty-seven minutes.’ Roger knew the answer automatically. ‘I thought I might buy myself some jantrasta, maybe some chocolate.’

‘Chocolate.’

‘Some new thing from Earth.’

‘Wasn’t that the name of an old programming language? Anyway, have a good first day.’

They hugged.

‘Thanks, Dad.’

As Dad walked away, he reformatted his clothes so that a pale-grey cloak hung from his shoulders. He walked towards a sheer ceramic pillar, support for an aqueduct, then brushed past a steel buttress. Only Roger saw what happened next.

Dad’s hand disappeared inside the solid-looking steel, came out in a fist, then tucked inside his cloak. Out in the open like this, SatScan would normally notice such a manoeuvre - but an attenuated tingling in his nerves told Roger that Dad had deployed a smartmiasma to make subtle optical shifts in light travelling upward.

It was called a dead-letter drop, and his parents had taught him the basics and the variations years ago; while the technique itself was centuries old. Tried and true, was how Dad described it.

For even espionage has its traditions.

TWO

EARTH, 777 AD

Ice covered the upper slopes, reflecting cold orange dawn. Above, circled two black ravens. On a wide irregular ledge, Ulfr crouched, spear in one hand, his other fist inside Brandr’s leather collar, tight against the war-hound’s bunched and trembling muscles.

Their prey, so magnificent, so handsome, paused beneath their ledge, perhaps hearing the beating of hunters’ hearts, or sensing their breath upon the air. Antlers raised as nostrils flared, chestnut eyes widening, searching for the source of unease.

Ulfr’s thumb rubbed the true-aim rune that Eira had inscribed upon his spear-shaft. The gesture brought back the memory of chanting, and the altered perceptions that came with the ritual. Now, the stag seemed to grow huge in his vision while the landscape faded. Life-blood beat in the long artery in the neck: Ulfr could see the pulse.

Soon it would be time.

But a raven cawed overhead, causing the stag to jerk upward and catch sight of Ulfr, the whites of its eyes showing as it jumped back; and there was nothing Ulfr could do but fling everything into the moment. He slammed the spear downward in a throw of power, not finesse. Then he was launching himself, springing from rock to rock, while Brandr flowed past him, cutting off the route to the forest.

Clenching and unclenching the big buttock muscles, dark hooves arcing, fastened spear bobbing from its side, the stag ran, clattering across stony ground, swishing through gorse and heather, fleeing the hunters, Ulfr and Brandr, sprinting in its wake.

The stag kicked out but Brandr dodged.

‘To me,’ called Ulfr.

Brandr loped back, then trotted alongside Ulfr as he dropped the pace. Ahead was a desolate, beautiful stretch of heathland and ice, and the stag might continue for hours yet, perhaps until the day’s end. The hunt was about to become a test of endurance, more suited to a youthful warrior than to his hound; and Ulfr would have to make sure that he kept track of Brandr’s fitness. Many times he had run with Brandr across his shoulders.

They immersed themselves in running.

Eira sometimes said the Norns weave fate at varying speeds, and the present slowed into a single, elongated moment as the pale sun rose to its midday height. All was movement, breath from the working of torso and arms, warmth in the legs’ big muscles, the feeling that he could run forever; while Brandr kept pace.