Free Inversions by Iain M. Banks Page A

result of such a fall, but unlike the Doctor I cannot swim. Eventually I found myself being forced by a tall stone wall which started sheer on a wind-whipped quay and extended off into the distance to walk back uphill into the maze of tenements.
    The children had beaten me to it. I arrived back at the accursed building, ignored the frightful threats of the foul-smelling harridan at the door, dragged myself up the steps past the smells and through the cacophony of sounds, following a trail of dark water spots to the top floor, where the ice had been delivered and the girl packed in it, still covered in the Doctor’s cloak and now again surrounded by her siblings and friends.
    The ice arrived too late. We had arrived too late, perhaps by a day or so. The Doctor struggled through into the night, trying everything she could think of, but the girl slipped away from her in a blazing fever the ice could not alleviate, and sometime around when the storm started to abate, in the midnight of Xamis, while Seigen still struggled to pierce the tattering dark shrouds of the storm clouds and the voices of the singers were carried away and lost on the quickness of the wind, the child died.
     

Culture 6 - Inversions
    4. THE BODYGUARD
    ‘ Let me search him, General.’
    ‘We can’t search him, DeWar, he’s an ambassador.’
    ‘ZeSpiole is right, DeWar. We can’t treat him as though he’s some peasant supplicant.’
    ‘Of course not, DeWar,’ said BiLeth, who was the Protector’s advisor on most matters foreign. He was a tall, thin, imperious man with long, scant hair and a short, considerable temper. He did his best to look down his very thin nose at the taller DeWar. ‘What sort of ruffians do you want us to appear?’
    ‘The ambassador certainly comes with all the usual diplomatic accoutrements,’ UrLeyn said, striding onwards along the terrace.
    ‘From one of the Sea Companies, sir,’ DeWar protested. ‘They’re hardly an Imperial delegation of old. They have the clothes and the jewels and the chains of office, but do any of them match?’
    ‘Match?’ UrLeyn said, mystified.
    ‘I think,’ ZeSpiole said, ‘the chief bodyguard means that all their finery is stolen.’
    ‘Ha!’ BiLeth said, with a shake of his head.
    ‘Aye, and recently, too,’ DeWar said.
    ‘Nevertheless,’ UrLeyn said. ‘In fact, all the more so because of that.’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘All the more so ?’
    BiLeth looked confused for a moment, then nodded wisely.
    General UrLeyn came to a sudden stop on the white and black tiles of the terrace. DeWar seemed to stop in the same instant, ZeSpiole and BiLeth a moment later. Those following them along the terrace between the private quarters and the formal court chambers generals, aides, scribes and clerks, the usual attenders bumped into each scribes other with a muffled clattering of armour, swords and writing boards as they drew to a stop behind.
    ‘The Sea Companies may be all the more important now that the old Empire is in tatters, my friends,’ General UrLeyn said, turning in the sunlight to address the tall, balding figure of BiLeth, the still taller and shadow-dark bodyguard and the smaller, older man in the uniform of the palace guard. ZeSpiole a thin, wizened man with deeply lined eyes had been DeWar’s predecessor as chief bodyguard. Now instead of being charged with the immediate protection of UrLeyn’s person he was in command of the palace guard and therefore with the security of the whole palace. ‘The Sea Companies’ knowledge,’ UrLeyn said, ‘their skills, their ships, their cannons . . . they have all become more important. The collapse of the Empire has brought us a surfeit of those who call themselves Emperors . . .’
    ‘At least three, brother!’ RuLeuin called.
    ‘Precisely,’ UrLeyn said, smiling. ‘Three Emperors, a lot of happy Kings, or at least Kings who are happier than they were under the old Empire, and indeed a few more people calling themselves Kings who