Transition. Part 5

... What? Why, why, and why? I would have had no idea if I had not been told, and even once I was told frankly I still didn't care. (I am mildly surprised I recall any of the reasons given below at all.) So: Yerge would have started a political party to rid the USA of non-Aryans, bringing chaos and apocalyptic bloodshed. Max would have given all his hundreds of millions in royalties to an extremist Green movement who taking an arguably rather drastic approach to harmonising the planet's natural carrying capacity with the size of its human population would have used the windfall to design, manufacture, weaponise and distribute a virus that would kill ninety per cent of humanity. And Marit would have used his vast communications network to... I can't remember; broadcast p.o.r.nography to Andromeda or something. As I say, it didn't really matter. I had by then entirely stopped enquiring why I might be committing such terminally grievous acts. All I cared about was the artistry and elegance involved in the doing, the carrying out, the commission.

The execution.

The Philosopher.

Screams. Too many screams. They have kept me awake at night, woken me from dreams and nightmares.

I do not enjoy what I do, though I am not ashamed of it, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am proud of it. It is something that has to be done, and somebody has to do it. It is because I do not enjoy it that I am good at it. I have seen the work of those who do enjoy our mutual calling, and they do not produce the best results. They get carried away, they indulge themselves rather than stick to the task in hand, which is to produce the results which are desired and to recognise them when they are produced. Instead, they try too hard, and fail.

I torture people. I am a torturer. But I do no more than I am told to do and I would rather that the people I torture told the truth, or revealed the information that they carry and which we need to know, as quickly as possible, both to spare themselves and to spare me the unpleasantness of the task because, as I say, I take no pleasure in what I have to do. Nevertheless, I do all that I am asked to do, and will always work long hours and take on extra duties if required. This is conscientiousness, and a sort of mercy because at least when I do it only the minimum is done. I have had colleagues the ones mentioned above who enjoy what we do who have been impatient to cause the maximum amount of pain and damage. They are, in the end, inefficient.

The clever ones pretend not to be psychotic and only indulge themselves rarely, opting for routine efficiency for the majority of the time. They're the dangerous ones.

My favoured techniques are electricity, repeated near-suffocation and, hard though this may be to believe, simply talking. The electricity is the crudest, in a sense. We use a variable step resistor attached to the mains and a variety of common-or-garden car jump leads. Sometimes some water or conducting gel. The crocodile clips on the end of the jump leads hurt quite a bit without any current flowing through them. The ears are good sites, and fingers and toes. The genitals, obviously. The nose or tongue with the other terminal inserted into the a.n.u.s is a favourite with some of my colleagues, though I dislike the resultant messiness.

Repeated near-suffocation involves gaffer-taping the subject's mouth and then using a second small piece of tape to close the nostrils, removing it just before or just after the onset of unconsciousness. This is a useful technique for low-level subjects and for those who must be returned to some other department or security agency, or even to normal life, without any signs of injury.

Talking involves telling the subject what will happen to them if they do not cooperate. It is best done in a perfectly dark room, talking quietly and matter-of-factly from somewhere behind the chair they are secured to. First I describe what will happen to them anyway, even if they tell us everything, because there is a certain minimum, a kind of call-out fee level of torment that we have to inflict once people have been referred to us. This is to maintain our reputation and the sense of dread that must be a.s.sociated with us. Fear of being tortured can be a highly effective technique for maintaining law and order in a society and I believe that we would be in dereliction of our duty if we did not do our bit.

Then I describe what I might do to them: the voltages used, the symptoms of suffocation and so on. I have studied the relevant physiology in some depth and am able to elucidate with the use of copious medical terminology. Then I describe some of the other techniques used by some of my colleagues. I mention the man whose code name is Doctor Citrus. He restricts his torture instruments to a sheet of A4 paper and a fresh lemon, using numerous usually several dozen to start with paper cuts distributed all over the subject's naked body which then have a drop or two of lemon juice squeezed into them. Or salt, sometimes. Like repeated near-suffocation, this does not sound so terrible to most people, but, statistically, it is one of the most effective torture techniques that we employ. Of course our friend Doctor Citrus does not use just one sheet of paper, as any single sheet will grow moist with sweat and small amounts of blood, over time. He always has a box of paper to hand.

There are colleagues who prefer to use the tried and trusted tools of torture: thumbscrews, pincers, pliers, hammers, certain acids and, of course, fire; flame or just heat, supplied by gas burners, blowtorches, soldering irons, steam or boiling water. These are sometimes the techniques of last resort when others have failed. The subject will usually be scarred for life should they survive, and the survival rate, even if full cooperation is achieved, is not high.

Another of our colleagues likes to use c.o.c.ktail sticks: hundreds of wooden c.o.c.ktail sticks inserted into the soft tissues of the body. He talks too, softening the subject up psychologically by sitting in front of them and using a small penknife to slit the c.o.c.ktail sticks, producing little barbs and curls of wood which will increase the pain caused both when they are inserted and when and if they are removed. He sits there for an hour or more with a big pile of sticks, using the tiny knife on these hundreds of little wooden slivers and detailing to the subject precisely where they will be placed. He too has some medical training and describes to the subject the thinking behind his technique as being in some ways the opposite of acupuncture, where the needles are inserted with the aim of causing little or no pain on entry and alleviating pain thereafter.

This preparatory dialogue can in itself be sufficient to produce full cooperation from the subject, though, as I say, there is a minimum level of pain which has to be inflicted in any event, just to be sure that full cooperation really has been achieved and to ensure that we, as an agency, are taken seriously.

My own talking technique is in some ways my personal favourite. I like the economy of it. I have found it is especially useful on artistic people or those of an intellectual persuasion as they tend to have their own very active imaginations and thus this technique lets these imaginations do my work for me. Over the years, some of them have even mentioned said phenomenon themselves, though this recognition would appear to make the process no less effective.

I do not like to question females. The rather obvious reason would be that their screams remind me of those of my mother when my father raped her on that never-to-be-forgotten night following her return home after the birth of my sister. However, I would prefer to think that it is simply good old-fashioned manners. A gentleman simply does not wish to subject a female to anything unpleasant. This does not stop me torturing women; it is still something that has to be done, and I am a professional, and conscientious, but I enjoy the process even less than I do when working with a male subject and I am not ashamed to admit that I have on occasion begged literally begged a female subject to exhibit full co-operation as quickly as possible, and I am also not ashamed to reveal that I have felt tears come to my eyes when I have had to work especially hard with a female subject.

The use of tape across the mouth, regardless of what other technique is being employed, is good for cutting down the sound of screams, which must then all exit the subject via the nasal pa.s.sages more than somewhat reduced in volume, I am relieved to be able to report.

I do draw the line at children. Some of my colleagues will happily oblige when a child must be tortured to force a parent to talk, but I think this is both morally objectionable and suspect in principle. A child ought not to have to suffer for the follies or beliefs of his or her parents, and to the extent that the techniques we employ on the subjects are in themselves a kind of punishment for subversion, treachery and lawbreaking, they ought to be applied to the guilty party, not visited upon their family or dependants. Everyone talks eventually. Everyone. Using a child to shorten the process is, in my opinion, sloppy, lazy and simply bad technique.

Largely due to this scruple and perhaps also because I find it interesting and illuminating to discuss or at least attempt to discuss with my colleagues subjects such as those enumerated above, my code name within the department is The Philosopher.

The Transitionary.

I live in a Switzerland. The indefinite article is germane.

The particular Switzerland I live in is not even called Switzerland, but it is a recognised type, a place whose function and demeanour will be familiar to all those we number amongst the Aware. "Aware" means being au fait with the realities of the realities. "Aware" is a term applied to those who understand that we live not in one world singular, settled and linear but within a mult.i.tude of worlds, forever exponentially and explosively multiplying through time. More to the point, it applies to those who know how easy it is to travel between these disparate, ever-branching and unfolding and developing realities.

My home is an old lodge in the pines, on a ridge looking out over the small but sophisticated spa town of Flesse. Beyond the town, to the west, is high rolling ground, clothed with trees. To the east, behind my lodge, the hills rise in craggy increments, culminating in a serrated ma.s.sif of mountains high enough to hold snow all the year. Sufficiently compact for one to take all of it in with a single glance from my terrace, Flesse nevertheless boasts an opera house, a railway station and junction, a medley of fascinating and eccentric shops, two superior hotels and a casino. When I am not on my travels, working for Madame d'Ortolan or some other member of l'Expedience the Concern I am here: reading in my library during wet weather, walking in the hills on the finer days and, in the evening, frequenting the hotels and the casino.

When I am, as it were, away, flitting between other worlds and other bodies, I still have a life here; a version of me remains, living on, inhabiting my house and my body and going through all the appropriate motions concomitant with existence, though by all accounts I am, in the shape of this residual self, quite astoundingly boring. According to my housekeeper and a few other people who have encountered me in this state, I never leave the house, I sleep a great deal, I will eat but not cook food for myself, I am reluctant to get dressed properly and I show no interest in music or conversation. Sometimes I try to read a book but sit staring at the same page for hours, either not really reading it or reading it over and over again. Art books, paintings and ill.u.s.trations appear to pique my interest as much as anything, which is to say not very much at all, as will a television programme, though only if it is visually arresting. My conversation becomes monosyllabic. I seem happiest just sitting in the loggia or staring out of a window at the view.

I'm told that I appear drugged, or sedated, or as though I have had a stroke or been lobotomised. I maintain that I have met several allegedly normal persons and not a few students who exhibit a lesser degree of day-to-day animation I exaggerate only slightly. However, I have no cause to complain. I don't get into trouble while I'm away from myself (well, I don't get into trouble here here) and my appet.i.te is not sufficient to cause me to gain weight. Perish the thought that I might go for a walk in the hills and fall off a cliff, or head for the casino and incur vast debts, or start an ill-advised affair while my back is turned on myself.

The rest of the time, though, I am entirely here, living fully, attention undivided, in this world, this reality, on the seemingly singular version of the Earth that calls itself Calbefraques. My name in what is for me at least this base or root reality is nothing like the ones I usually end up with when transitioning. Here I am called Temudjin Oh, a name of Eastern Asian origin. The Earth I came from is one of the many where the influence of the Mongolian Empires, especially in Europe, was more profound than the one in which you are reading these words.

I live an orderly, even quiet life, as entirely befits somebody who spends potentially highly disorienting amounts of time flitting between one world and the next, too often for the unfortunate purpose of killing people. Murder is not all that I do, however. Sometimes I will be a positive angel, a good fairy, an imp of the benign, showering some unfortunate who is down on their luck with money or granting them a commission or pointing them in the direction of somebody who might be able to help them. On occasion I do something almost unbearably ba.n.a.l, like trip somebody up in the street, or buy them a drink in a bar or once fall down in front of them while apparently suffering a fit.

That was one of the few times when I glimpsed what I might really have been doing. The young doctor hurrying to an appointment but who nevertheless stopped to tend to me was thereby prevented from entering a building that promptly collapsed in a great burst of dust and mortar and smashed wooden beams. Lying there in the gutter, seeing this, just a few dozen strides down the street, I feigned a partial recovery, thanked him and insisted that he hurry to treat the many wailing unfortunates injured by the tenement's collapse. "No, thank you you, sir," he muttered, face grey, not just with dust. "I believe your fit saved my life." He disappeared into the growing crowd while I sat there, trying not to get fallen over by those rushing to help or gawp.

I have no idea what that young fellow then went on to do or achieve. Something good, I trust.

Sometimes I simply introduce one person to another, or leave a particular book or pamphlet lying around for them to discover. Sometimes I just talk to them, generally encouraging them or mentioning a particular idea. I relish such roles, but they are not the ones I remember. They are certainly not the ones that keep me awake at night. Perhaps this is simply because geniality is conventionally a little insipid. Havoc rocks.

Most of my colleagues and superiors choose to live in cities. It is where we are most at home and where one can most easily make the transition from one reality to another. I do not pretend entirely to understand either the theories or the mechanics spiritual mechanics, if you will, but still mechanics behind such profoundly disconnected travellings, but I know a little regarding how these things work, some of it gleaned from others and some of it the result of simply working matters out for myself, practically, rather as I was able to work out what the true purpose of my appearing to faint in front of that young doctor was when the building he had been about to enter fell down.

Flitting from here to there to any-old-where requires a deep sense of place, and some sort of minimum level of societal complexity, it would seem. It is as a result of this that cities are by far the easiest places in which to slip between realities.

Aircraft work too, though, if one has the skill. Something about the concentration of people, I suppose. I sip my gin and tonic and look down at the clouds. The peaks of some of the higher mountains in the Norwegian coastal range protrude like jagged ice cubes floating in milk. I am taking a direct Great Circle route from London to Tokyo, cosseted within a giant aircraft coasting high above the weather where the sky is a deep, dark blue.

I may flit from here, within the plane. I may not. It is not an easy thing to do many of us have wasted our drug by trying to effect transitions from remote places or especially moving start points. The way it appears to work is that if a successful flit cannot be made then nothing at all happens and one remains where one is. There are rumours, however, that people who have tried such manoeuvres have indeed ended up in another reality, but without the benefit of whatever mode of transport they left behind in the source reality being there to greet them in the target one. One pops into existence over open water if one flitted from a liner, splashing into an empty ocean to drown or be eaten by sharks, or if the attempted transition is from an aircraft like this one materialises in mid-air twelve thousand metres up with no air to breathe, a temperature of sixty below and a long way to fall. I have had successes flitting from aircraft, and failures; obviously failures where nothing happened.

I take the little ormolu case from my shirt pocket and turn it over and over on my fold-down table. To flit or not to flit. If I do vacate the aircraft then I will cover my tracks more completely than if I wait until my arrival. However, I could waste a pill. And I just might discover the hard way that the rumours are true, and find myself blast-frozen and gasping my way to unconsciousness as I start the long fall to the sea or the land. There is also the well-doc.u.mented complication that sometimes one ends up in an aircraft going somewhere quite different to the destination of that one started from.

Usually there is a reliable commonality between a roughly aligned group of worlds regarding the placement of continents, major geographical features such as mountain ranges and rivers and hence big cities and therefore the air routes between them, so that leaving one aircraft results in a transition to a similar craft on a parallel course, but not always. There appear to be limits to the maximum displacement in s.p.a.ce and time that people have made in such circ.u.mstances a few kilometres up or down, a few dozen laterally, and some hours later or earlier and it is as if some aspect of one's will or visualisation is guiding one to the nearest approximation it's possible to find, but sometimes the influence of this ghostly presence goes quite awry, or just accepts something that it hopes will do, but which will not.

Once, flitting while flying over the Alps bound for Napoli from Dublin, I ended up on a flight from Madrid to Kiev. That's practically a right-angle! It took me a day and a half to repair the damage to my itinerary, and I missed one appointment. I had and have no idea why this happened. When I mentioned this little adventure to someone from the Transitionary Office the primary body of l'Expedience, which at least in theory oversees all the actions of those like myself and Madame d'Ortolan the bureaucrat concerned just blinked behind his rimless gla.s.ses and said how interesting this was and hastened to record a note! I mean, really.

The drug we take to effect our travels is called septus. Some take theirs in liquid form, from tiny vials like medical ampoules. Others prefer to snort their travellers' medicine, or inject it. Some like it to be in the form of a suppository or pessary. Madame d'Ortolan was always said to have favoured the latter option.

I tap the little ormolu case gently on one corner, rotate it a quarter turn, tap it again, and repeat. Most of us take septus in pill form; it is simply less of a bother. I regard most of the other methods as being rather like showing off.

A clear patch of sea gleams up at me. A ship, made tiny by the vertical kilometres between us, slides slowly north across the ruffled grey surface, drawing a feathery white wake after it. I imagine somebody on that ship looking up and seeing this aircraft, a bright white dot leaving its own thin trail inscribed across the blue.

Perhaps some of those who are said to have disappeared are gone to other Earths entirely, where Pangaea still holds, Man never evolved and sapient otters or insectile hive-minds rule in our place who can say?

When we flit we go to where we imagine, and if distracted, disoriented we imagine something too far away from what we know and where we wish to go to, we may end up somewhere it is somehow impossible to imagine one's way back from. I don't know how that could be what saves people like myself, sometimes, is how intensely we long for our home but you never know.

I have quizzed the theorists, technicians and general functionaries of the Transitionary Office regarding just how all of this works and have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. I am not supposed to know because I have no need to know. Still, I would like to know. My being sent to save that young doctor from being crushed in that collapsing building in Savoie, for example: does that not imply foresight? Must we I mean the Concern not have some ability to look ahead in time, or be able to use realities otherwise similar to another but separated only by being slightly displaced in time so that having observed what has happened in the leading one one is able to affect events in the trailing one? This would amount to the same thing.

Of course, maybe it was complete happenstance that the tenement collapsed, pure chance. I find this unlikely, however. Chance is rarely pure.

It was at the casino that I encountered Mrs Mulverhill again, for the first time in a long time or at least so I thought. Not that I realised immediately.

Cities are, as I've said, the best places to flit between realities; nexuses of transportation in our multiple existence just as they are in any given single world. The princ.i.p.al emba.s.sy of l'Expedience in the world I have tended to travel to and within partly though chance and partly through some affinitive predisposition on my part, I dare say is in what is called variously Byzantium, Constantinople, Konstantiniyye, Stamboul or Istanbul, depending. It is an ideal focus for our interests and abilities, straddling continents, linking east and west and evoking the past and its manifold legacies in a way that few other cities do on this meta-Earth I deal with. Ancient, modern, a furious mix of peoples, faiths, histories and att.i.tudes, poised above and threatened by myriad fault lines, it exemplifies both heritage, jeopardy, division and linkage all at once. We have another office in Jerusalem.

There used to be another, in Berlin, but that city has, perversely, become less attractive for our purposes since the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany (one of those distributed, straggling meta-events that resonated through the sheaved realities for all the many worlds like some coordinated sp.a.w.ning phenomenon). So the office was closed. A shame, in a way; I liked the old, divided Berlin, with its wall. The greater city was a vast, open, airy place enfolded with lakes and sprawling tracts of forest on both sides of the divide but still, at its core, there was always a forlorn air about it, as well as a faint feeling of imprisonment, on both sides.

And a slowly spinning plate, if you know what I mean. We look for spinning, wobbling plates; places where it feels that matters could go either way, where another spin, another input of energy might restore stability, but where, equally, just a little more neglect or even a nudge in the right/wrong place could produce catastrophe. There are interesting lessons to be gleaned from the wreckage that results. Sometimes you cannot tell everything about a thing until you've seen it broken.

There ought to be a certain point in one's training for the post of transitionary (our official job t.i.tle clunky, I know; I prefer the sobriquet "flitter" or "transitioner" or "transitioneer," at a pinch) when one realises that one has discovered or acquired an extra sense. It is in a sense the sense of history, of connection, of how long a place has been lived in, a feeling for the heritage of human events attached to a particular piece of landscape or set of streets and stones. We call it fragre.

Part of it is akin to having a sharp nose for the scent of ancient blood. Places of great antiquity, where much has happened over not just centuries but millennia, are often steeped in it. Almost any site of ma.s.sacre or battle will have a whiff, even thousands of years later. I find it at its most pungent when I stand within the Colosseum, in Rome. However, much of it is simply the layered result of multifarious generations of people having lived there; lived and died, certainly, but then as most people live for decades and die just the once, it is the living part that has the greatest influence over the aroma, the feel of a place.

Certainly the entirety of the Americas has a significantly different fragre compared to Europe and Asia; less fusty, or less rich, according to your prejudices.

I'm told that New Zealand and Patagonia appraise as terribly fresh compared with almost everywhere else.

Myself, I love the fragre of Venezia. Not the fragrance at least, not in summer, anyway but very much the fragre.

I prefer to arrive in Venice by train, from Mestre. As I disembark at Santa Lucia station I can, if I declutch my senses and memory, fool myself into thinking that I have arrived at just another big Italian railway station, one more terminus amongst many. One walks between the towering trains, crosses the indifferent commercialism of the rather brutalist concourse and expects to find what one would find anywhere: a busy road or square, another bustling vista of car and truck and bus a pedestrianised piazza and a few taxis, at best.

Instead, spreading beyond the sweep of steps and the scatter of people the Grand Ca.n.a.l! Light green choppy water, the churning wakes of vaporetti, launches, water taxis and work boats, reflected light slicing off the waves to dance along the facades of palazzos and churches; spires, domes and inverted-cone chimneys ranged against a sky of cobalt shine. Or against milky clouds, their mirrored pastel tones softening the restless waters of the ca.n.a.l. Or against dark veils of rain cloud, the ca.n.a.l flattened and subdued under a downpour.

The first time I visited the place was for the carnival in February. I discovered mist and fog and quietness, and a chill in the air that seemed to rise from the water like a promise. My name was Mark Cavan. My languages were Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and French. The Berlin Wall was already history, though still mostly standing.

It was your world.

Some way down the Grand Ca.n.a.l, on its west bank, sits an imposing near-cubical palazzo. Its walls are a glacial white, the shutters shielding its many windows matt black. This severely formal and symmetrical building is the Palazzo Chirezzia, once the home of a Levantine prince, later that of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, then for a hundred and fifty years an infamous brothel. It belonged, then as now, to Professore Loscelles, a gentleman who knew about and was sympathetic to the Concern. Back then, he simply made himself, his money and connections useful to us, and, equally, gained much through the a.s.sociation. He has since risen to join the ruling Central Council, though on that cold February morning twenty years ago this was still an ambition of his.

I had been invited to the city and the carnival as a reward for my services, which had lately been energetic if not onerous. There were no other transitionaries present, though there was a gaggle of Concern apparatchiks and officials, all of whom were polite to me. Despite the rather generous amount of blood I had on my hands even then, I was still not yet used to the idea that people who knew of my role within l'Expedience might find my presence intimidating, alarming or even frightening.

Professore Loscelles is a modest figure of a man, verging on short, though with a stately bearing which belies this. He is one of those who grow in isolation. Alone, one might swear he is as tall as oneself; in a small group he seems to shrink by comparison and in a crowd he disappears entirely. He was balding then, losing thin brown hair like seaweed dropping back from a rock with a receding tide. He has a splendid hook of a nose, prominent teeth and eyes of a frosty-looking blue. His wife was dramatically taller than him, a statuesque Calabrian blonde with a large, honest-looking face and a ready laugh. It was she, Giacinta, who taught me the dances which would be required at the series of b.a.l.l.s to which we had been invited. Happily I am a quick learner and apparently I move well.

The palace contained a ballroom where one of the great masked b.a.l.l.s of that year's carnival was to be held. This took place the day after I arrived. I was appropriately entranced by the fabulous masks and costumes and by the sumptuous decor of the ballroom itself; a hymn of ancient, polished woods, glossy marble and extravagantly gilt-framed mirrors, all lit entirely with candles, imparting a distinct mellowness to the light and a smoky scent to the air, like incense. It mingled with the odour of perfumes and the smoke from cigarettes and cigars. The men were peac.o.c.ks, the women whirling, dazzling belles in glittering gowns. A small orchestra in antique dress filled the s.p.a.ce with melody. Three enormous chandeliers of red gla.s.s oversaw it all great swirling, abstract shapes looking like vast surges of glistening blood caught in the act of spinning within an unseen whirlpool but were reduced to mere pendulous sculptures reflecting candle flames, their bulbs unnecessary and unlit.

Breathless, gripping a gla.s.s of Tokaj, I stepped out onto a little terrace bounded by fat white marble bal.u.s.trades shaped like tears. A small crowd of partygoers stood quietly watching snow descend against the lights of the few pa.s.sing boats and the light-flecked buildings on the ca.n.a.l's far side. The spiralling chaos of flakes appeared from the darkness overhead as though created by the lanterns of the palazzo and disappeared silently into the oily blackness of the gently moving waters before it.

I went out early the next morning into that cold, encasing whiteness, my breath spreading into the dark narrow s.p.a.ces in front of me, and found some untrodden stretches on the Sestiere Dorsoduro. I strolled the ancient, hidden stones, breathing in the cool, clear salty scent of the place and soaking up the world's fragre. It tasted, of course, of all the things that all the other worlds taste of, but the identifying highlights spoke of a kind of seductive cruelty, an orchidaceous venality, so infinitely sweet it could only be redolent of corruption and decay. Here, in the eternally sinking city, with that odour of glamourous savagery filtering through my mind like mist off the lagoon into a room, it all felt spent here but only paused elsewhere, like something waiting to resume.

The snow lay across the city for the next few days, creating a starkness beneath those sea-wide skies, draining colour from the pa.s.sing clouds, water and buildings and promoting the views of that city of Ca.n.a.letto and fractious colour to a ravishing monochrome.

The final ball was held in the Doge's Palace in a vast and splendid room built half a millennium ago to house two thousand milling princes, merchants, amba.s.sadors, captains and dignitaries. An airstream originating in Africa had pushed up over the heel of Italy and the Adriatic, melting the snow and bringing mists and fog as it collided with and was slowed by contesting winds spilling down from the mountains to the north. The city seemed to submerge beneath the resulting vapours, cloaking itself in veils and shrouds of moisture.

I met my Masked Woman there, then.

I wore the costume of a medieval Orthodox priest, topped with a mirror mask. I had danced some dances, sat at the Loscelles' table and taken part in some slightly stilted conversations with my fellow house guests and the Professore, who was too interested in the details of my a.s.signments for the health of either of us, had I answered him honestly. One of the non-Concern guests of the Loscelles a tall, pretty brunette who was a distant relation of the Professore and whose lissom form had been squeezed most attractively into the garb of a renaissance lady had rather taken my eye that evening. However, she seemed to be equally captivated with a dashing cavaliere and so I had put any thoughts involving her to one side.

I took a break from the eating and drinking and dancing and talking and sought to explore what I could of the palace, strolling through some of the lesser chambers, being shooed out of others and finally ending up back in the Hall of the Great Council while a dance processed like a gaudy vortex in the centre of the vast room. I stood staring up at the frieze of paintings depicting the sequence of Doges, my gaze eventually fastening on one which appeared to be missing, or at least covered by a black veil. I wondered if this was some tradition of the carnival, or just of this particular masked ball.

"His name was Doge Marino Faliero," a female voice announced at my side, in lightly accented English. I looked round to discover that I was being addressed by a pirate captain. Chunkily high-heeled boots brought her almost to my height. Her jacket hung, attached like a hussar's, from one shoulder. The rest of her uniform appeared motley, arranged to look thrown together: baggy breeches, bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned, an extravagantly frilled blouse, a half-undone waistcoat worn like a bodice, a tricolour sash plus beads and various chains and some sort of bra.s.s plate like a half-moon slung around her neck, which looked pale and slender. Her mask was black velvet, misted with what looked like tiny pearls set out in spirals. Beneath the mask her mouth looked roseate, amused. A few locks of black hair escaped a crumpled cap of navy blue surmounted by a c.o.c.ky burst of gaudy feathers.

I glanced back up at the veiled s.p.a.ce in the succession of Doges. "Is it now?"

"He was Doge for a year in the mid thirteen hundreds," my informant told me. Her voice sounded young, melodious, confident. "He's covered up because he's in eternal disgrace. He tried to make a coup to sweep away the republic and have himself declared prince."

"But he was already Doge," I said.

She shrugged. "A prince or a king would have had more power. Doges were elected. For life, but with many restrictions. They were not allowed to open their own mail. It had first to be read by the censor. Too, they were not allowed to conduct discussions with foreign diplomats alone. A committee was required. They had much power but they were also just figureheads." She gestured with one hand (black-gloved, silver rings over leather). Her sword or at least a scabbard for a sword swung at her left hip.

"I thought perhaps he was only veiled for the ball," I said.

She shook her head. "In perpetuity. He was condemned to d.a.m.natio Memoriae. And mutilated, and beheaded, of course."

"Of course." I nodded gravely.

She might have stiffened a little. Was I talking to a local? "The republic took such threats to its existence seriously," she said.

I executed a fraction of a bow, smiling and tipping my head. "You would appear to be an authority, ma'am."

"Hardly. Merely not ignorant."

"I thank you for relieving me of some measure of my own ignorance."

"You are welcome."

I nodded to the swirl of people. "Care to dance?"

She moved her head back a fraction, as though appraising me, then bowed a little further than I had. "Why not?" she said.

And so we danced. She moved with a lithe grace. I sweated beneath my mask and robes, and understood the wisdom of having masked b.a.l.l.s in winter. We talked over the music in the rhythm imposed by the dance.

"May I ask your name?"

"You may." She smiled slightly, fell silent.

"I see. Well, what is your name?"

She shook her head. "It is not always the done thing to ask someone's name at a masked ball."

"Is it not?"

"I feel the spirit of the late Doge looks down upon us and demands due reticence, don't you?"

I shook my head. "Probably not even if I knew what you were talking about."

This appeared to amuse her, as the soft lips parted in a smile before she said, "Alora." For a moment I thought she was telling me her name, but of course it is simply an Italian word, nearly identical to the French "alors." I found her accent impossible to place. "Perhaps we come to names later," she said as we danced around each other. "Otherwise, ask what you will."

"I insist; ladies first."

"Well then, what do you do, sir?"

"I am a traveller. And you?"

"The same."

"Indeed. You travel widely?"

"Very. You?"

"Oh, extraordinarily."

"Do you travel to a purpose?"