‘I’ve tried that; most of the military don’t know.’
‘Perhaps the shade of Count Sessine could answer the question,’ Gadfium suggested.
Xemetrio looked sceptical. ‘I doubt it. And what if he remains loyal to the King? Quite possibly he is part of their big bad conspiracy and would report our little one to Security.’
‘A way might be found to talk to him without giving too much away.’
‘I suppose so,’ Xemetrio said, looking uncomfortable, ‘but I’m not doing it.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Gadfium told him.
Uris Tenblen raised his face to the cold, thin wind cutting across the frozen plain, blinked red-rimmed eyes, cocked his grey-skinned shaven head to one side and listened to the song in his skull.
It was different again today. It was different every day, if he remembered correctly. He wasn’t at all sure that he did remember everything correctly. He wasn’t sure he remembered anything correctly. But the song in his heart said that it didn’t matter.
The wind blew in through the vast windows two kilometres away across the plain. The windows were floor-to-ceiling, and broad; sometimes it seemed to Tenblen that it was better to think of three skinny pillars holding up that side of the next storey, not four broad windows in a wall. Above here there was only a broad piazza, open to the skies. Tenblen turned round and looked towards the other wall, where four similar apertures, also two kilometres away, let the wind straight back out again. Both sets of windows looked out onto a sea of white cloud.
He turned back; the wind brought hard powdery snow with it, probably not fresh but dislodged from part of the castle above here. The wind-blown granules stung the exposed skin of his face, neck, wrists and hands. He forced the visor and helmet over his head, fumbling raw-fingered with the straps. Chill weather, he told himself, but the song in his head kept him warm, or told him it did, which was just as good.
His dorm was at the edge of the camp; it was a shining aluminium box almost identical to the forty or so others which ringed the workings. This close, the workings themselves were just a huge sloped wall of rubble; from further away across the frozen marshes and low hills of the plain they appeared as a small, steep-sided crater.
From above they would just look like a hole; a dark pit, usually filled with yellow-grey mists, like a giant weeping wound.
Tenblen trudged through the rimed puddles on the rutted path leading towards the workings, fastening his tunic. His boots crunched through brittle white surfaces of ice into the hard brown hollows of the puddles.
The song in his head rose to a sweet crescendo just then and he gave a thin, grim smile, then made a small, involuntary ducking motion and looked nervously up at the ceiling a thousand metres above him.
He passed the bomb caissons, great closed iron cylinders coated with snow, their wheels sunk a little way into the cracked surface of frozen mud. Thus far, they had only two caissons, six small bombs and one large one. A new convoy was on its way, bringing fresh materiel. He saluted an officer who passed him on the path. He knew he ought to know the officer’s name, but he could not remember it. That didn’t matter; if he needed to talk to the officer or take him some message or order, the song in his head would remind him of his name. The officer nodded as he walked past, his gaze fastened straight ahead and his expression fixed in a broad and somehow desperate grin.
Tenblen climbed the steps by the side of the inclined plain. He ascended them in time to the song, and as he climbed he imagined that the King was looking through his eyes.
(Adijine, who was doing exactly that, experienced only very mild surprise at this point, and almost immediately felt oddly cheated that he hadn’t sustained some profound sense of alienation or momentary loss-of-identity.)
The King would look through his eyes and hear the song in his head; the song of loyalty, of obedience, of joy to have this part to play, and know that he was glad to be loyal, glad to be obedient and glad to be joyful. He could think of nothing more pleasant than to be transparent in exactly that manner, and to be seen to be the King’s loyal soldier. He got to the top of the crater-wall of rubble and started down the other side, towards the pit.
The fumes were already quite bad. The steam came drifting up the brecciated slope from the hole, wrapping itself around the scattered cisterns, pipes, valveheads, winches and gantries littering the incline. Sometimes the smell of the gases came with the steam, and you thought the cloud enveloping you would be pure fume and you almost panicked with only the song in your head telling you it was all right; other times the steam was far away when you picked up the stink and your eyes watered and your nose and the back of your throat felt rasped and burned.
He stopped at the quartermaster’s office. There was a ghost outside.
The ghost was dressed as some ancient judge or holy man. He tried to get in Tenblen’s way and shout something at him, but Uris just put his hand through the ghost and made as though to wave it out of the way as he stepped through it. The song in his head drowned out the ghost’s voice.
‘Bit nippy today,’ he shouted to the quartermaster. It helped to shout, over the noise of the song. The quartermaster was a large, red-faced man. He nodded as he issued Tenblen with his gloves, mask and respirator.
‘Wind’s shifted,’ he said loudly, coughing. ‘I’ve asked them to move me further up the slope but of course they haven’t done anything yet.’
‘Perhaps you should be right at the top.’
‘Perhaps I should. Or even on the far slope.’
‘You might be better off at the bottom of the slope on the other side.’
‘Yes, I might.’
‘Well, see you later.’
‘Goodbye.’
Tenblen put his mask and respirator on before he left the quartermaster’s office. He felt hoarse and his throat was sore already. He could remember being able to talk without talking; being able to think something and somebody else understanding what it was you had thought; he could remember a long time ago when the song had started, thinking how odd it felt having to physically talk any time you wanted to tell somebody something. Promotion, people had joked at the time, at first.
The song had been young then and they had all been charmed by it. He could remember even longer ago when he’d not been a soldier and had been able to talk to anybody. He felt sad about that, sometimes. The song lifted his spirits, though. It could turn the sadness to joy. After all, you cried when you were happy sometimes, too.
He stepped outside into the slow whorls of drifting, rising steam, and continued down into the workings. His own breath sounded loud within the mask and he could hear valves clicking and hissing. He could feel the fumes on his neck, already chafing against his collar. A little of the fume-smell leaked in round the edges of the mask, and he tried to clamp the mask down harder. He tramped deeper into the steam, down a concrete path lit by tall poles tipped with small lamps and strung with a hand-rope at hip level.
The song sang majestically as he descended into the darkness…
(The song the song the song while he seemed to pass venting pipes and arrive at a platform in a broad tunnel where a small train waited full of coughing men but the song said no no no stuck in a breath-holding loop that said time is not passing this is not happening and sang higher sweeter fuller as the train ground and screeched its way over points and into a narrow tunnel and accelerated in utter darkness the wind in his face journeying for a time then passing through a dimly lit hole where guards with fixed stares stood then another tunnel and then the fume smell again and the steam and he started to relax as though he’d been holding his breath all that time and then out of the train with the others and down the steps relieved and even glad to be here while the song sang resuming.)
… The workings surface was a chaotic ballet from some primitive’s hell; it was filled with a loud, fume-laden darkness pierced sporadically by flashes of intense, scarifying light, and permeated with a furious hissing sound punctuated by sudden screams and explosions. Through this havoc drifted a population of terrifying beasts, monstrously deformed human shapes wielding strange instruments designed to puncture, flay and burn, and the wailing, beseeching figures of ghosts.