Tenblen pulled on a harness and hitched himself to the roof struts. An officer came up to him and told him to return to his quarters, but the song in his head told him this wasn’t a real officer; it was a ghost and to be ignored.
Tenblen found a pair of boots that didn’t look too badly scarred and started down the steps to the mine surface. A chimeric oxephant hauling a vat of acid loomed out of the mist, making him pause. He found himself automatically checking its harness and restrainer straps; they all seemed to be in place, the harness tight and the straps disappearing up into the steam clouds towards the grid of struts barely visible against the dark roof above (and some part of him looked at that darkness above thinking, But – … but then the song swelled, drowning out the sound of his recalcitrant thoughts).
He walked towards the eastern part of the floor. He glanced down as he walked. The surface. The song in his head welled up again, telling him to rejoice at the task they had undertaken, at its daring, its technological sophistication, at its audacity and its uniqueness. It was a wonderful and beautiful thing they were doing; they were reclaiming the structure, the whole castle, not just for their cause and the King but for all people. They were no longer at its mercy, it was at theirs.
A beautiful woman appeared out of the mists, her skin black, her clothes whiter and wispier than the mists, her body full and firm and voluptuous. Tenblen knew she was a ghost but he stood and stared for a while as she walked round him with a half-coy, half-welcoming smile. Then the song rose again, racketing in his head and setting his teeth on edge. It was still pleasant, like being tickled, but he could not take it for very long. He hurried on, away from the woman.
He came to the latest workings. Acid fumed, arc-light sparkled, power tools hammered. Men dressed in full protective suits stumbled round. Chimerics pawed the ground, pulled with harness hooks and bellowed.
Tenblen tried to breathe easily and shallowly through his mouth, ignoring the rasp of fumes in his throat as he walked amongst the men and beasts, checking their harness connections and restraining straps. Under his feet, the surface of the workings was smoking and peeling and blistering, constantly sprayed by the rusting agent and then further attacked with scab-hooks, welding arcs, lasers and a selection of acids, mostly sulphuric and hydrochloric. The surface was constantly attempting to repair itself, flowing back to fill holes and rearranging the large-scale fibres and scales which it was composed of. You could never be certain which sections would be susceptible to which removing agent; there was no alternative but to try everything and see what worked at that point at that time.
He stood for a moment, ignoring the ghost of a small baby at his feet, writhing and screaming on the ground amongst the acid pools. The surface here looked thin somehow. Perhaps they’d do it here (the baby looked up at him, eyes huge, while smoke curled up around its blistering skin. The song sang high and sweet while Tenblen’s eyes filled with tears. He gently put his boot out, through the apparition of the baby, then when it moved out of his way, suddenly screamed in frustration and brought his boot down on it as though trying to crush the infant. It disappeared. His boot heel met the surface and the shock resounded through him, then the ground too seemed to disappear and he was looking –
– down. The circular hole started at his feet and was almost instantly ten metres wide around him.
He dropped through, screaming, in a haze of acid spray. The city was a sparkling jewel two kilometres below him. His harness tightened around him like a bony fist and the restraining straps bounced him up and down like some child in a walking yoke. The song burned in his head, exultant. He kept on screaming despite the song, and soiled himself.
On a warm marble table in the Palace baths, the King opened his eyes and looked up as the masseuse kneaded his back. He smiled broadly and said, ‘Yes!’
He winked at the masseuse and lowered his head again, within range of the receptor devices buried in the marble table.
He skipped back into Uris Tenblen’s head just in time to watch with him as the edges of the hole above him wobbled liquidly like grey-black circular lips, then snapped back closed with a whiplash crack, rebounding a little so that a metre-diameter hole existed for a moment before that too irised shut like an eye blinking.
The first closure had instantly severed the straps on Tenblen’s harness.
He plummeted – gesticulating frantically, screaming hoarsely – towards the glittering spires of the city two thousand metres below.
The link sizzled and cut out.
Adijine raised his head. ‘Shhhit,’ he said softly.
* * *
3
‘Very well, Alan, who is trying to kill me?’ Sessine asked, smiling a little at the image of his earlier self.
The younger Sessine looked around. The engine’s thrashing heart was all fury and noise; pipes roaring, connecting rods flashing to and fro. He took up the portable chess board and put it down the bib front of his engineer’s overalls, then stood.
Sessine did not get up, but sat on the little stool, still smiling up at the construct of his younger self, who laughed.
‘Please, Count; come with me.’
Sessine stood slowly, and nodded.
They were standing in a clearing within the high forest at the foot of the fastness walls. Sessine looked up through the sighing tops of the trees to the curtain-wall towering above. A tower a few kilometres away rose still higher, but the rest of the structure was hidden by the walls, a rosy cliff fifteen hundred metres high and festooned with variegated babilia. The wind soughed briefly in the trees, then died away.
‘Here,’ Alan said. Sessine turned, and the younger man took his hand.
/They stood in a vast circular space with a floor of gleaming gold, a velvet-black ceiling and what appeared to be a single all-round window looking out onto a whitely shining surface and a purple-black sky where stars shone steadily. Above them, suspended as though on nothing, hung a massive orrery; a model of the solar system with a brilliant yellow-white ball of light in the middle and the various planets shown as glassy globes of the appropriate appearance all fixed by slender poles and shafts to thin hoops of blackly shining metal like wet jet.
Under the representation of the sun, there was a brightly lit circular construction like a half-built room. They walked there across the glistening floor.
‘This is a memory, of course,’ his younger self said, waving one hand. ‘We don’t know what the upper sections of the fast-tower look like now. When Serehfa was still called Acsets, this was part of the control apparatus.’
They entered the circular area in the centre of the room; a collection of couches, seats, desks and ornately decorated wood and precious-metal consoles and dark screens of crystal.
They sat on facing seats. Alan looked up at the glaring image of the sun, his face shining. ‘We’re safe here,’ he told Sessine. ‘I’ve spent subjective millennia exploring, mapping and studying the structure of the Cryptosphere and this is as secure as it gets.’
Sessine glanced around. ‘Very impressive. Now.’ He sat forward. ‘Answer my question.’
‘The King. He ordered your death.’
Sessine sat very still for a moment. Then I am lost, he thought. He said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Entirely.’
‘And the Consistory?’
‘They approved it.’
‘Well,’ Sessine said, running a hand round the back of his neck, ‘that would appear to be that.’
‘That depends on what you want to do,’ the construct said.
‘All I wanted was to find out why I was killed.’
‘Because you have doubts about the conduct of the war, but most especially because you were starting to doubt the motives of the King and the Consistory and their dedication to the cause of saving people from the Encroachment.’
‘I think others feel that way.’
Alan smiled. ‘Most of the Consistory doubt the wisdom of the war, and many people think the King and his pals seem less concerned than they ought to be about the Encroachment – a lot of people suspect they have their own space-ship, though they don’t. Most people can’t do anything about their suspicions; you can – or could have. You have the honour of being the most highly placed and popular potential dissident, the one they felt they might benefit most from making an example of. They were still uncertain whether actually to do it – Adijine himself spoke for letting you live – but you made their minds up for them; you pulled strings to go on that supply convoy to the bomb-workings. Adijine had left strict instructions only somebody with implants could command it.’