> Because you came here, an outsider, thinking they’d let you just walk into their circles and drink their wine and sully their floors with your honest feet. Hah. This is Scintilla. Everyone lies.

>

> ~Lady Iulia Paxton, the Jewel of Sibellus

At the edge of purpose, power. Sibellus was a city. Vast, dark, deep, lit with neon glow and furtive shadow.

It was also a puzzle-box, or a game of xiangqi with a million players, faces hidden in the shade above. An interlocking sequence of pieces moved at cross purposes, or cooperatively, depending on the movement of heaven or earth.

A shadow, more dynamic than most, slipped fluidly through the back alleys in a district of back alleyways. Another zu tile moved by the whims of another simple gamepiece, moved by a gamepiece above. How far up did it go, before you stopped meeting game tiles and started finding the players?

Somewhere above, a voxphone chimed. Razer contemplated this.

He was on the wrong streetlevel.

How irritating. The shadow reversed direction, and made for the nearest hatch.

He pulled his hood down over his face. It was raining.

It always rained, in lower Sibellus.

The chime continued as he made his way through narrow, water-slick streets. Even this time, the night markets would be still open, sallow-faced hivers shouting their wares. Every so often one of them would get lucky and a rich offworld tourist would be drawn in by hanging synthsilks or badly-stitched fans or cheap ceramic teasets.

But this, this was Hua territory. No one smart would be out this time of night. Not here.

The water rolled down Razer’s hood, slid down in beads across his leather jacket.

The rain was not true rain. None of these sallow-faced people saw true rain, or true sun. Mankind’s birthright had been stolen from him through tower and wealth. Instead, this was an artefact of the incredible size of hive stacked above. Great pumps drew water from the sea nearby, drained the lakes, swallowed the clouds to feed the city. It was distributed by treatment-effort. A broken pipe here, a leak there, dripping down, down, until there were always many broken pipes above you. The rain was tiny failures in plumbing on a mass scale.

Stolen story; please report.

And it usually contained almost undetectable quantities of piss.

A few Hua in thick golden chains with facial tattoos flashed knuckle-dusters threateningly at him as he passed, but they knew him and backed away once they saw the silvery knives in his hands. If they did not, they knew the lean lethality he radiated, the type.

Runners came here sometimes. And runners usually worked in teams.

The voxphone chimed again.

Razer checked his wallet. A transfer blip from his side-hustle; two thousand for elimination of Hortensia Hora, for the crime of trying to escape the Peaches.

Not bad. But now for his primary role.

A couple more turns brought him to it. Razer ducked inside, relishing the reprieve from the storm.

“My money?” he told the receiver.

“You have it.” The voice was hazy with interference, high-pitched, almost like the tones of small, silvery bells. Faint Malfian accent.

“I do not,” Razer said patiently.

“Check now.”

He checked his wallet. A transfer blip popped up. “This is not all that was promised,” Razer observed.

“It was what we agreed upon. You did not successfully implant the mole.”

“I eliminated the target,” Razer argued. “Five thousand. As promised.”

“You did not protect the plant. No money.”

“I am a knife.” Razer calmed himself. “I cut who I was bid to cut, as was my duty. I kept your Arabel alive until she turned her tongue on herself. Whatever comes next, is not my duty.”

“That does not sound like my problem.”

Razer took a breath. Tile to tile, but even a soldier can threaten a general. It was all a trick of positioning. He tried to remember what Vio’s slate had said.

He took the chance.

“I know you,” he said slowly. Heart pounding. “Penelope Argos, Arbiter.”

There was a long pause.

“I do not know what you are saying.”

“You know,” he said. “And you know that you will not see me coming.”

There was another pause.

His wallet vibrated. Razer checked. Five thousand Scintillan dollars, as promised. Worth about two or three thousand throne gelt. Satisfactory.

“We will remember this.”

“Do you have the operating budget to?”

The line went dead.