‘No,’ the Jurtina said.
Mezereon began to pull the handle towards the left, slowly this time. The prisoner began to speed up from our perspective, twitching and fidgeting increasingly quickly.
Something exploded inside me.
‘Wait!’ I shouted, before she had tugged it all the way across. ‘There’s got to be a better way than this.’
Mezereon looked at me with icy disdain. ‘Something to contribute, Campion? You’ve been spectacularly silent until now.’
‘Dial down,’ I said, conscious of the whirling hand on my chronometer. ‘We can discuss this in realtime.’
‘I’m happy discussing it now.’
Aconite stood and turned towards me, hands raised placatingly. ‘Leave this to us, old man. We’ve got it under control.’
‘No, you haven’t. Mezereon’s burning her way through prisoners like she’s tossing coals on a fire. There are two left. We can’t afford to lose another one.’
‘I only need one to talk,’ Mezereon said, and began to tug the handle towards its limit.
I dialled myself down. I was alone in a room full of superhumanly accurate wax effigies. I dashed from the audience, through the electric tingle of the screen that had blocked the audience from view, onto Mezereon’s plinth. She was still looking at where I had been seated, but her expression was beginning to shift - it was like watching the beginning of a very slow landslide. Her head started to track, following the blur of motion that I must have made from her perspective. I forced her stiff fingers from the Jurtina’s handle and pushed it back up to a high stasis level. Behind me there was a sudden commotion as other shatterlings emerged from Synchromesh. Mezereon’s right hand started to inch towards her own chronometer.
Someone grabbed me. I was slammed around by Aconite, his face a mask of uncomprehending disappointment. ‘You shouldn’t have done this, old man. We owe you everything, but there have to be limits.’
He was holding me against the side of the Jurtina’s cabinet. I might have been able to break free of Aconite, but Valerian took my other arm, gently but firmly.
‘She’s out of control,’ I said.
Mezereon emerged into realtime. ‘Get out of here,’ she told me.
‘You’re letting hatred get the better of you.’
‘They hate us. Why shouldn’t we turn a little of that back on them?’
‘Because we’re Gentian. Because six million years of good works say we’re better than that.’
‘In your world. Not in mine.’ She nodded at Aconite and Valerian. ‘He means well, but he can’t be allowed to disrupt the proceedings. Have him taken outside. Betony can decide what to do with him later.’
Betony, who had said nothing until then, stood from the audience. ‘I’m sorry, Campion, but we simply can’t tolerate this kind of disruption. See yourself out, or we’ll have you removed. I wouldn’t want to do that, but if you will insist on bringing this kind of attention upon yourself ...’ He waved his hand in a gesture of surrender, as if my actions were a bewildering puzzle.
‘Maybe there’s something in what the Jurtina said,’ I replied. ‘If there is a traitor here, he’d like nothing better than for the prisoners to die. Then there wouldn’t be any danger of one of them revealing his identity.’
‘Go,’ Betony said. ‘Before you say anything else you may have cause to regret. I’m disappointed in you, Campion. I thought you’d have the common grace to rise above Purslane’s censure and not make it an issue between you and the rest of us. I was evidently mistaken.’
‘We suffered an appalling attack,’ I said. ‘It was brutal and came without warning. We’re right to seek justice, right to go after those who wronged us. But that doesn’t mean we get to throw away every moral principle we’ve ever abided by.’
‘Times are different now,’ Mezereon said. ‘They made it this way, not us.’
At that moment, the door to the interrogation chamber was flung open, revealing the pink sky of an Ymirian sunset. Disconcerted, I realised that we had already been inside the whole day. A shatterling, Burdock - one of those who had been on patrol duty until now - stood with one of the masked and winged locals.
‘We’re in session here,’ Betony said.
‘It’ll have to wait,’ Burdock answered. ‘The Ymirians found me as soon as I came down from my ship.’ He stepped into the room, accompanied by the Ymirian, and closed the door behind him. ‘It’s about Cyphel,’ he said.
What about her?’
‘She’s dead.’ Burdock paused—he was having trouble getting the words out. ‘She must have fallen from one of the high balconies. They found her on the slope of the Benevolence structure, under the lowest level of Ymir.’
The flier was hovering at the nearest landing stage, its wings thumping the darkening air. Betony was the first to step aboard, followed by Burdock, Aconite and Melilot. Galingale and Charlock boarded next, then Lucerne and me. Almost as soon as my foot had left the deck, the flier was moving. An appalling drop opened up under me as I eased into the plush cabin. I shuddered to think what it must have been like for Cyphel, to be falling and knowing that no force in the universe was going to stop her. I had stood on the edges of ten-kilometre-high cliffs, far from the assistance of any guardian machine, knowing that it would only take a twitch of my muscles to send me over the edge. But until my encounter with the Spirit, I had never fallen; I had never been pushed. Even then, I had been quickly snatched from danger, unlike Cyphel. The fact of knowing that your own death was not only imminent, but mathematically certain, carried with it a special horror. I hoped and prayed that Cyphel had been dead or unconscious before she fell, but I had a feeling we might never know for sure.
‘If she’d fallen from a different tower, or one of the bridges, she might have dropped right through the fingers,’ Charlock said. ‘She’d have stood a chance if she’d hit the sand, wouldn’t she?’
Limax, the Ymirian, looked back. ‘I’m afraid not. If the impact didn’t kill her instantly, she would probably have triggered an avalanche and suffocated under the sand, if she didn’t bury herself in it immediately, her bones smashed. That would not have been a pleasant way to die, I assure you.’
‘That doesn’t mean she was lucky,’ I said.
Limax looked grave. ‘No, shatterling. It doesn’t. But I am saying it could have been worse.’
I realised, with a lurch of comprehension, how bad this was going to be for the Ymirians. We had lost another of our number to attrition, which would have been bad enough when there were a thousand of us, but was immeasurably worse now that we were down to a twentieth of our former strength. But the process had begun with the ambush; whatever the details of Cyphel’s fall turned out to be, her death was simply part of the playing out of that long, murderous process. To the Ymirians, on the other hand, we were guests, travellers who had surrendered ourselves to their care. They had allowed us to live in their city, to have complete freedom of movement between Ymir and the other settlements, and in return we had agreed to be bound by their policies. Purslane and I could have visited the Spirit of the Air without the magistrate’s permission, or the grudging cooperation of Mister Jynx, but we had shown the Ymirians that we were willing to take no for an answer; that we would not bully our way into getting what we wanted. We had left our ships in space, along with our robot servants and weapons, and come to the surface with only the basic amenities. Had this been one of our reunion venues, the entire structure, the entire city, would have been a machine for keeping us from harm. No one could have fallen to their death. It would have taken determination just to graze an elbow.
The lowest inhabited level of the tower was a hundred metres above us; the foundations by which it was anchored to the sloping finger of the High Benevolence structure were windowless and weatherworn, like the ramparts of a castle. Cyphel’s body lay about fifty metres downslope from the foundations, caught in the shallow ledge formed by the markings engraved into the structure’s ebony skin. She had e
ither bounced after an initial impact, or had been pushed sideways during her fall.
The Ymirian flier came to a halt another ten metres downslope from where Cyphel lay. We got out cautiously, stooping against the dust-laden wind and taking meticulous care with every footfall. We were a safe distance from the edge, but I did not think much of my chances of surviving a slide if I were to lose my footing on the sloping, marble-smooth ground. Like a team of ants ascending the angled trunk of a fallen tree, we crept up to the ruined body of our fellow shatterling.
It was worse than I had been expecting, though Burdock had warned me that I would not find it pleasant. The fall had smashed her body and disarticulated her limbs. One leg was bent double, forced back under her spine, the other thrust out at an unnatural angle. Her arms were broken in several places; the skin where her clothes had been ripped was bloodied and gashed, and bone jutted from an elbow and thigh - she must have bounced, I realised, either against the side of the building, or against the floor of the Benevolence structure. Of her head, there was little left to recognise. Her face was a red pulp, almost too abstract to elicit revulsion. But her hair was still recognisable, where the wind had not pushed it into the bloodied mess of skin and bone. I could not help reaching out and stroking a lock of it, white and pure as moonlight against my skin. That it was Cyphel, and not someone else with similar hair, was confirmed by the multitude of rings on her hand. The hand was still intact, the fingers open and inviting, as if all she needed was someone to comfort her.
‘Cyphel,’ I said, as the full reality of what had happened to her began to hit home. I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.
Galingale, who was stooping next to me, placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Whoever did this,’ he said, quietly enough that only I would have heard, ‘we’ll find them. We won’t let Cyphel down - we’ll avenge her loss.’
Charlock had squeezed aspic-of-machines onto his hand, forming a black tattoo. Grimacing with concentration and the effort of kneeling against the wind, he held his hand palm down and open above what remained of Cyphel’s head. ‘I’m not picking up anything,’ he said, after several moments. ‘I knew it would probably be futile, but if I hadn’t looked—’
‘You were right to try,’ Lucerne said.
Betony said, ‘We’ll have to examine her brain for coarse structure - memories she hasn’t yet committed to trove, thoughts frozen at the moment of shutdown. We may get something.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ I said. Extracting patterns from a mind was difficult enough when the person had just died, let alone after they had suffered a violent, damaging death several hours ago. All of a sudden it hit home to me how profoundly, pathetically ineffectual we really were. We could move worlds, wrap rings around stars, skip ourselves across time and space like pebbles on water. None of that would make any difference to Cyphel, though. There had been a human soul in that skull only a few hours earlier, and now no authority in the universe could bring her back. We were like monkeys sitting around a fire that had just extinguished, wondering why the warmth and light had gone away.
‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions,’ Betony said as I stood back, a few strands of Cyphel’s hair still between my fingers. ‘She could have fallen by accident, without anyone pushing her.’
‘Do you honestly believe that?’ Aconite asked.
‘I find it no harder to believe than that one of us killed her.’
‘Then start dealing with it,’ I said. ‘Gentian involvement was always suspected, from the moment we were ambushed. This just confirms it.’
‘She was one of us. Could you kill me, knowing what you do? About who I am, what I’ve seen and done, how long I’ve been alive?’ Betony was looking at me with an expression that forbade an affirmative answer. ‘We’re people who’ve lived through almost everything that matters. The few thousand years of recorded history that came before us was just a prologue, nothing more. The real story started when Abigail took her first breath.’
‘We’re bookworms who’ve tunnelled through the pages of history,’ I said, recalling how the Vigilance curator had described me. ‘It’s not quite the same thing.’
‘But we know what we are. We know how precious we are. I couldn’t kill you, Campion. I may not approve of the things you’ve done, the way you’ve flouted the traditions of the Line, but I still couldn’t touch a hair on your head. It would be like destroying a monument, poisoning a fragile ecology ... an act of vandalism, not just murder. I can’t help but think you feel the same way about me.’
‘Of course I do,’ I said angrily. ‘But that’s because I’m not the murderer. Nor are you, if you really feel like that. But someone obviously doesn’t. Someone saw Cyphel as an obstacle they could remove as easily as you or I would toss something into a disposal slot.’
‘Then they’re not one of us. No matter what they look like, they’re not Gentian at heart.’
‘I wish I shared your conviction.’
Betony looked over his shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw a Gentian flier—the same open-topped kind that had taken Purslane and me to the Spirit - lowering down to us. ‘We’ll move her,’ Betony said. ‘Take her back into orbit. I can scan her aboard Adonis Blue.’
‘She’s gone,’ I said.
‘We have to try, Campion.’ He said this so fiercely that I began to wonder if he was close to breaking down. I remembered how overjoyed he had been when I told him the news of the survivors Purslane and I had rescued. Cyphel’s death was hitting me particularly hard, but it was going to be difficult for all of us, Betony included. Gentian Line was down to fifty-one living shatterlings, and at least one of those survivors might well be trying to kill the rest of us.
The flier touched down. Through narrowed eyes I studied Cyphel and remembered how she had looked at breakfast. Already it felt like a lifetime ago, when the universe had been a simpler place, full of bright primary colours.
The wind intensified, lashing dust against my cheeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Campion was quiet that night. I was sad about what had happened to Cyphel, angry and perplexed in equal measure, but there was still a component to his grief that I felt I could not quite share. I knew he had always liked her - I had caught those sidelong glances of his often enough to be aware when he had his eye on her, rather than me. Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well—it was there in her expression whenever they spoke, that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances, but also a kind of measured, probationary respect as well. It was a look that said, You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me? Well, perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me, if only fleetingly. Not that his advances were anything more than the flirtatious overtures of a game he had no intention of seeing to its conclusion. He liked her a lot, was intrigued by her, but I do not think it ever occurred to him to consummate that fascination by sleeping with her, or even prolonging one of the polite kisses shared between shatterlings. I should still have been jealous, no matter how innocent his intentions. But I could never bring myself to dislike Cyphel. That was the worst part of it.
I was glad now - not that she was dead, but that I had never hated her, never given her short shrift. And I badly wanted to find the person who had murdered her, and I badly wanted to do unspeakable things to them.
Come the morning, I found the robots waiting for me before breakfast.
‘We heard the dreadful news,’ Cadence said.
‘It is most unfortunate,’ Cascade said. ‘After all that you have suffered, to lose another of your Line - words cannot begin to express the depth of our sympathy.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘We understand there is going to be a ceremony of some kind,’ said Cadence.
‘Cyphel’s funeral service - most likely they’l
l schedule it for tomorrow, or the day after. Once they’ve got what they can out of her mind, there’ll be no sense in delaying it.’
‘Will this service be a private matter for the Line?’ asked Cascade.
‘Ordinarily, yes, but I’m not sure that’ll be the case now. Our guests are involved in this, too - we’re all victims of the ambush, and we all knew Cyphel—you included. I’d imagine the ceremony will be open to all-comers, Ymirians as well. It’ll be unusual, you know. Normally there isn’t a body. When we die, it’s usually far from home, thousands of years from another shatterling. They’ll log us as missing at the next reunion, and if we don’t show up at the one after that, then we’ll be presumed dead. There’ll be a ceremony, and then one of us will be tasked with creating the memorial - but because the death will have happened at least a circuit ago, it feels more as if we’re commemorating some historic incident. It’ll be different with Cyphel - it’s going to feel a lot more personal, a lot more immediate.’
‘If there is anything we can do to assist matters, please do not hesitate to ask,’ Cadence said.
‘I’ll let Betony know. I’m sure he’ll already have begun putting the arrangements in place.’
If the robots heard the tartness in my voice, my resentment at Betony making all the key decisions, they had the decorum not to show it.
‘In view of developments, it would probably be better if we delayed our departure,’ Cascade said. ‘We are still anxious to be on our way, but we would also like to give our respects to Cyphel, if the Line allows it.’
‘I’m sure it will. It’s good of you to be flexible.’
‘We have seen the respect you have accorded Hesperus,’ Cadence said. ‘The least we can do is reciprocate.’
I thanked the robots for their kindness.
Breakfast was an ordeal. There were a million things we all wanted to say, but none of us was prepared to break the silence. Even Betony kept his own counsel, saying nothing until the very end. At the back of all our thoughts was the suspicion that Cyphel’s murderer could easily be sitting at the table, looking as downcast as the rest of us.
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