Of course the day that Ingray and Garal had to walk the nine kilometers from the city transport terminal to the Aughskold house would be gray and rainy. A mild, steady rain, but within an hour of starting out Ingray’s jacket and skirts had been soaked through, her hair plastered to her head and back, her bag dripping. Garal looked similarly soaked but did not complain, did not say anything, just walked, shoulders hunched, staring down at the ground, as though e meant to disappear into the rain. They passed several mechs stepping through the wet streets on unguessable errands, but not many people, not once they’d started out on the pedestrian courses and left the transport hub behind. Everyone else had sense enough to stay inside today, or take the city trams if they had to go out. Even the black-paved plaza in front of the Arsamol District Planetary Safety Headquarters, usually full of people passing, was silent and empty but for the pattering of rain, and a boxy gray-green mech stepping stiffly along the cracks between the paving stones looking for any sign of incipient weeds. Here and there a doorway would open on light and dry warmth as someone would dash from indoors to a groundcar. By the time Ingray and Garal approached Netano’s house Ingray had lost any convincing memory of being dry.
The front of the house, like the other houses on the street, was high and broad, and the entrance opened right onto the public walkway. Unlike its neighbors, it was built of the ruin glass that the first human settlers had found scattered all over the planet, one-and two-and even three-meter carefully placed, irregularly shaped chunks of it, blue and green and one streak of intense red slashing down, not quite in the center of the wall. Each block was shot through with twisting, convoluted shadows, some sort of inclusion maybe, but on the rare occasions someone had managed to break a block or (more frequently but still difficult) grind it down, there had been nothing but glass. At night the lights inside would shine through the wall, making the front of the house glow. Even in daylight the colors seemed luminous, particularly on gray, rainy days like this one.
Seeing the bright house-front, Ingray felt its utter familiarity, and a yearning to be finally inside and at home. At the same time she had a disconcerting sense of strangeness, as though the house she’d grown up in had become something foreign to her. Or something she was foreign to. Was the house different, the colors faded, the twisting shadows, perhaps, changed in shape, as Ingray and her siblings had believed they did, when they were small? Or was it that it seemed forbidding to her now, returning as she was with no money at all and only the most forlorn hope of making anything of herself, of being able to remain an Aughskold much longer? She was too wet and tired to ponder for very long. The door swung open at her touch, and they stepped into the entrance hall.
Silence, except for the sound of the rain outside and the intermittent patter of water dripping onto the amber-tiled floor. Netano kept many of her most important vestiges here, a practice that older names like Ethiat Budrakim considered showy and vulgar. There was no question, though, that visitors knew whose house they were in from the moment they entered. If they had to wait, there was a bench by the stairs from which they could contemplate the wall, bordered with red, blue, and green triangles near the ceiling but otherwise plain white, the better to show off the vestiges that hung there: entrance tickets from Assembly sessions and receptions decades and centuries in the past, all of them elaborate black script on stiff, brown-bordered paper; a scattering of invitation sheets in blue and yellow and pink and pale purple, bearing the names and dates of previous Netanos, or their illustrious friends and relations; a small grouping of black linen rectangles, with names painted in white, each one from the hand of the person named, flowing script or awkward dabbing, depending on the ability or inclination of the writer.
“Well, well,” murmured Garal, beside her. “My own work in the Aughskold lareum. That’s an achievement.”
“What?” Ingray turned to em, startled. Frowned at em. “Your own … is it one of the black linen ones?” That had been a very popular sort of vestige about two hundred years ago, very distinctive, and it was an easy way to make an entertainment set during that time look authentic. It would be quite easy to forge if you had the right materials and knew what names and styles of writing to use. She would never have thought of that, if she hadn’t met Garal.
“No, not those. Though some of those may be fakes, too. I’d have to look closer to be sure.”
“Then which …” She stopped. They shouldn’t be having this conversation in the foyer. And besides, it didn’t matter. They should both go straight upstairs to her room. There was a bath there, and dry clothes. Ingray was only about average height, and thickly built, so none of her clothes would fit tall, thin Garal particularly well, but it would be better than nothing. They would leave a long, wet trail across the foyer, up the stairs, and down the hallway to Ingray’s room. A mech would clean it up—one came stepping stiffly into the hall as Ingray thought of it, small and gray and moving straight toward the growing puddle they stood in—but Ingray didn’t like even the fact of it, the evidence of their long, miserable walk from the transport hub being laid out on the floor for anyone to read. Of course the door opening would have alerted the staff to her arrival, and any moment now …
A servant came into the hall. Cast an outwardly impassive eye on the puddle where Ingray and Garal stood, the mech stepping toward it. “Miss Ingray. Your mother is in the front reception room.”
Damn. That was not a neutral piece of information. It was very possibly a direct order from Netano herself. She suppressed a sigh. “Thank you.” She turned to look at Garal, silent, slouching, staring floorward. She had not anticipated having to show Garal to Netano, not just yet. But if she sent em to her room, or had em stand out in the hallway while she went in, that would probably attract even more attention, and curiosity. “We need to speak to Mama. Hopefully it won’t take long.” She wished she could say, out loud, Be careful, be inconspicuous. Because if Netano noticed Garal and started asking questions, well, that would be the end of everything.
Garal said nothing, didn’t make even the smallest gesture in response, but e followed when she moved toward the reception room door.
The front wall of the reception room was blue and green ruin glass, but the wall opposite the door where Ingray and Garal came in was all broad windows, plain and clear, looking out onto the rain-washed garden, moss-lined stones and silver-wet willows, three stone benches, swaths of flowers bent by the rain, their colors faded-looking in the gray light. The other walls were hung with slubbed silk, rough-woven in waving bands of red and yellow and green. Netano Aughskold, nearly as tall as Garal and imposingly solid, sat on a low-backed cushioned bench, her hair—thick and dark, the sort of hair that hairpins didn’t fall out of, that would stay once it was twisted or braided—was pulled back with a bright yellow headband, to fan out behind her head. If Ingray ever wished she’d been Netano’s biological child, it was because of that hair.
Netano was talking to two visitors Ingray had never seen before, a man and a woman in perfectly ordinary loose trousers and tunics but whose pale skin, blunt features, and accent—and gaunt height—said they came from Omkem, two gates away. Ingray thought of the man in the Tyr Siilas Incomers Office—but beyond looking like Omkem these two didn’t really look like him once Ingray thought about it. The woman sat on a bench, the man on a cushion on the floor.