Forge of Heaven

They had no actual cash, she and Noble. She’d never handled cash in her life, beyond a few chits for street fairs, and here she and Noble were trying to have their romantic night, which was supposed to be so special, and now she was so upset from arguing with a fool with disgusting cologne about a not-very-good room that she felt like throwing up. Now Noble was mad about the room situation—he was scowling and looking off at the bar, with his hands in his pockets. He was about to sulk and get rude to everybody around him, she saw it coming, and he had no sense when he got mad. He scared her.

Desperate, she left Noble and went back to the front desk to try again. “We’ve just got to have a room,” she said, and burst all the way into tears. Tears sometimes worked. They did with her father.

“Well, I could do something for you,” the man at the desk said, “if you do something for me.”

“What’s that?” she asked, and the man got off his stool and moved over to the office door.

“Come in here,” he said.

She was stu

“Then get out of here,” the man said. “Out!”

She was embarrassed to death to be crying in front of this man. “Come on,” she said to Noble, and he still stood there like a lump with his hands in his pockets. She grabbed his elbow hard and tried to pull him out onto the street. He stood like a piece of the scenery and resisted going anywhere, being an ass.

“So what are we going to do, walk the streets all night?” he asked her.

She was furious. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but I’m not going to sleep with that pig to get us a room!”

Noble took his hands out of his pockets and looked back at the front desk, as if he’d just waked up to the world.

He didn’t, however, offer to go back to the desk and beat hell out of the pig.

“So where are we going to go?” he asked her.

“Well, you don’t blame me, do you?” Her face had gone embarrassingly red, she knew it had, and people were staring at them, watchers all around the shadowy lobby with its imitation plants and its imitation wood. They’d become the show of the evening. People were sniggering. “They don’t take cards, they won’t talk, and when my father hears about this, oh, I promise you, that bastard is going to be looking for a ticket to Orb!” She said the last so the bastard would hear, but when she turned around, dragging Noble toward a dramatic exit, she ran straight into a living shadow, one of the Stylists, it had to be, that she had nearly bumped into. One of the beautiful people. Her embarrassment was complete.

“Well,” this vision of beauty said.

Male voice. Silken voice. The face was red as blood on the left side, black as space on the right, with tendrils wandering actively between. The eyes glowed with red, i

And this person, this Stylist, took her hand and held it, a warm, a wonderful touch. “A genuine damsel in distress.”

“Just a little trouble,” she said shakily, letting go of Noble. She was unwilling to admit to this vision what an embarrassing financial trouble they were in—out of money and out of ideas.

“Do you need a place to stay tonight, lovely?”

“Myself—” She didn’t want to admit to this gorgeous creature that she was attached to the sullen, unstylish teenaged lump sulking behind her with his hands in his pockets, but she had come here with Noble and she found herself standing by that fact. Maybe it was a sense of honor, even if it drove this gorgeous being away. Maybe it was fear. Noble was her safety, her barrier against transactions she didn’t altogether understand. She said shakily: “ Andhim.”

“Oh, well. One, two, no difficulty.” An ink black, fire-shot hand lifted to brush an airy touch across her cheek. “He can come along, too. But who are you, pretty thing?”

“Mignette.” A Stylist thought she was pretty. Her heart raced, fluttered, raced. “I’m Mignette. He’s Noble.”

“Algol,” her vision said, and flourished a gesture toward the outer door.

She walked with him out onto the street. Noble slouched along at their heels.

“An inconvenience, this disturbance up and down the street,” Algol said, “but not to those of us with forethought and co

“It’s shut,” she protested.

“Oh, not to those of us who live there. You’re new to the street, aren’t you?”

She had to admit it. “I just arrived. Noble and I—”

“Oh, well, and the police have to show their authority now and again, darling girl. It’s this Earth visitor that has them buzzing about. But their orders don’t apply upstairs, to private apartments. Dear girl, we who have the keys to the place do as we please. We always have, always will. Such pretty eyes you have.”

The contacts were just commercial, off the rack. She didn’t feel constrained to blurt that out. She looked really good. She hadn’t known how good. Her heart skipped and danced as they walked, together, in beautiful company.

Algol led them not to the front of Michaelangelo’s, but around the side of the frontage to the service nook. She was uncertain that was safe, until she saw a delivery door.

He had a key.

“We’re supposed to find Random and Tink,” Noble objected from the background. She knew it wasn’t Random and Tink that concerned him. Clearly Noble didn’t at all like the way things were going. He would rather strand them back on the street with no place at all, than take help from a source that cast him in the background. But she didn’t pay any attention. They had a personal invitation from a Stylist, and a place to go that had real cachet, and she wanted to go where the beautiful people went. She hadn’t deserted Noble. She’d kept faith with him. So he could be mad for an hour. This was important. A prince of the Trend had swooped down for a rescue, because of her. This was a way into a rarefied society.

She stepped through the door that Algol opened for them, and Noble had no real choice but follow.

A LIZARD WATCHED a gnat, bubble-world confrontation above a rotting flower. Reaux, late-night in his office, watched the lizard, distracting himself as best he could from the quandary he had landed in, trying to have caff and a long-delayed sandwich in peace. Jewel was in one outer conference room, silent the last while, fed and supplied with reading material, concealed from any officials who might come and go.

Since Brazis’s warning, he no longer dared rely on Dortland—nor dared he rely on Brazis, entirely. He had his own heavily paid plainclothes guard sitting watch on Gide.

Gide’s associates on the Southern Crosswere asking hard questions about the attack, and he had had to admit that there was as yet no word on Jeremy Stafford. So he said—while hoping there wouldn’t be.

Dortland’s men were watching Stafford’s parents. He couldn’t pull Dortland’s whole force off the search for Stafford without rousing suspicions and getting thatfact reported to Earth—very directly so, if Dortland was talking to that ship on secret cha

Find my daughter,he’d asked Dortland personally, hours ago, when he’d gotten him on the phone. There’ve been new threats.Never mind the threats were from his wife. I want her back. Now.

Kathy was the best distraction he could offer, and he felt more than guilty doing it—as he felt guilty and frustrated in distrusting Dortland on Brazis’s say-so. He felt ashamed of his current situation, and scared, increasingly isolated in the exercise of the power he did have, wondering even what Ernst thought of the orders that had come out of his office.