After thirteen, the flow showed signs of attenuation, breaking up into sub-elements which flocked off in different directions, and by the time a day had passed there was no clear sign of it. Only so much reassurance could be drawn from this, though. The sensor network was patchy, with significant blind spots. What the wolves were doing or planning in the shadows was open to conjecture.
But we would never have any better guarantees.
Scythe was the first ship to leave orbit. Glass took it out alone, exercising extreme caution and running all her stealthing measures. She nosed her way through the ruins of the Rust Belt, and then down into the inter-orbital space between the lowest-flying debris belts and the sickly coloured atmosphere of Yellowstone. Her last signal, tight-beamed back to the stronghold, was confirmation that Scythe had not detected any lone wolf elements, nor seen any sign of larger groupings within its limited sensor horizon.
Then Scythe dropped into the atmosphere, and we lost contact.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Before leaving, Glass had made all the necessary arrangements with Probably Rose. Partially dressed for the mission, but with additional armour and breathing devices still to be fitted, Pinky and I laid ourselves down on adjoining medical couches. Straps were then fastened across our bodies, which did nothing for my confidence. My forearm was left exposed, so that a transfusion catheter could be inserted without difficulty. With Pinky, it was easier to go in through the inner thigh. This part was unpleasant enough, since the catheter had to be large enough to handle a large blood volume. Since there was worse to come, though, it had been agreed that any sort of anaesthetic was pointless.
Then it began. Probably Rose wheeled a trolley into the space between our couches. The trolley had an upright rack, dangling with chilled blood bags, clear and full. Litre by litre our blood was extracted and stored in the waiting bags, ready to be put back in us if we ever made it back from Chasm City. With each litre that was removed, another litre of an oxygen-bearing buffering agent was substituted. This was a medically safe blood substitute, proven for use in field surgery, and would produce no more than mild discomfort and nausea while it was inside us. It was intended to keep a person alive, and no more than that.
The buffering agent was just an intermediate step. Once it was circulating, and we were deemed to have accepted it well, the real process began. Litre by litre – but more slowly this time – the buffering agent itself was replaced by the haemoclast, injected from a pair of upright metal reservoirs.
I had been right about the name. The haemoclast was weaponised blood. It was the right colour and a similar viscosity, and it could keep its recipient alive for an extended period. But there all biological similarities ceased. This blood was a moving fluid made up of quickmatter: tiny machines in a plasma-like suspension medium. Because it was distributed throughout our bodies, and had density and ferromagnetic properties comparable with biological blood, it would pass all but the closest inspection. There would be nothing to show up on an X-ray, resonance, or ultrasound scan. It could manage oxygen transfer, although not as efficiently as normal blood. Inside our bodies, the haemoclast was a functioning, if imperfect, life-support system. Outside of them, it was an adaptive, self-governing killing machine.
But the cost to bear it was torment. It built slowly, litre by litre. To begin with, I thought I might be able to tolerate it quite well, something I could almost push to the back of my mind. By the third litre, I understood how wrong I was. The blood felt like a stream of lava circulating in me, burning me from inside. My heart laboured, sending out sharp protests of its own. My lungs were like two bellows being filled with heavy, molten metal.
Pinky and I tested our restraints. My body writhed and strained, my limbs tensing and untensing so violently that I felt they might rip themselves from their sockets. Within a few seconds, I felt that every already aching muscle had been shredded, every ligament severed. I would have screamed, except that Probably Rose had given me something to bite down on. But even she seemed surprised by the ferocity of the reaction. On the couch next to mine, Pinky tried to swallow back a groan. He had forsworn the biting aid. Now I wondered if he regretted it.
‘Glass says this might help,’ Lady Arek said, as Probably Rose pushed in the last litre of our torment. ‘The pain is a false signal, your body confused by the new circulatory medium. Merely knowing that may allow you to compartmentalise the discomfort.’
‘Tell Glass . . .’ Pinky began.
I wrenched open my jaws and allowed the biting aid to loll away from my lips, trailing drool. Probably Rose had finished replacing our blood and was extracting our catheters.
‘. . . to shove it,’ I finished for Pinky.
By some miracle it did not worsen, and after a few minutes of doing nothing but breathing and thinking, I saw that there might be a point somewhere in my future where the pain could be endured. Just to be able to move and talk and think about something else for one clean second. Could I do that? The answer, when it presented itself, was simplicity itself. I had no choice. I was committed to this operation, and therefore I had to function. Even if there was no room inside me for anything but the pain, I had to lie to myself that it was otherwise, and in the narrow space of that lie, make myself useful.
‘It’s bad,’ I said aloud, testing the timbre and steadiness of my voice, and surprising myself by how resolute I sounded. ‘But I think I can live. Glass is right: it’s better when you remember the blood isn’t doing as much damage to us as it feels like.’
Snowdrop came around, looking down at me. ‘Does it hurt, Clavain?’
‘Yes.’
‘Keep this pain in mind. It’ll be a tenth of what I’ll do to you if Pinky doesn’t come back.’
‘Oh, he’ll come back,’ I said, grunting as I twisted around to look at him. ‘How would I . . . manage . . . without his sparkling company?’ Then I pushed out a hand. ‘Help me, Snowdrop. He can look beaten-up: it fits the narrative. But I have to look strong, at least until Lady Arek cuts me loose.’
Snowdrop took my hand and yanked me into a sitting position. I breathed. The slight increase in oxygen demand made itself known in my chest, but compared to the fire threading every vein and artery inside me, that was no more than a dull ache.
‘Thank you,’ I huffed.
‘I mean what I said.’
‘I don’t doubt it. I’d far sooner have you on my side than against me.’
‘First intelligent thing you’ve said since we met,’ Pinky growled.
‘Then we’re finding common ground.’ I braced for pain and swung my legs off the medical couch. ‘I mean it too, Snowdrop. I saw the job you’ve done wringing some useful intelligence out of that sensor network. We struggled with the same problems on Michaelmas. The difference was we had hundreds more people and ten times the technical resources you’ve managed with here. We could have used you.’
Snowdrop made a noncommittal sound, not dismissing my words but unwilling to show that she was moved by them. I understood well enough.
‘Bring those stones back to us, and maybe some of this won’t have been for nothing.’
Probably Rose came back with a couple of tablets palmed in her hand.
‘Take one of these, yes. Glass said they’ll dull the symptoms for a little while, and verily.’
The pills looked alike, so I selected one at random and swallowed it whole. It scraped down my throat, dry and tasteless as a pebble. ‘Why didn’t you give us the pills before injecting the blood?’
Probably Rose looked at me as if I had asked a deliberately vacuous question.
‘Because you needed to know what it’ll be like when they wear off.’
‘How soon?’
‘Two, three hours. Yes, and yes. I’ll be in the shuttle, along with Omori, if something goes wrong. Once you’re outside, though, you’re on your own.’
‘And if something did go wrong, I don’t imagine there’d be much you could do about it? Am I right?’
&nb
sp; Probably Rose looked torn between candour and reassurance. Clearly there was little of the latter she could offer.
‘And verily.’
‘Well, luck’s been on my side so far. Why would it desert me now?’
‘I don’t know you very well, Clavain. I think you are a tissue of lies walking around in the shape of a man. I think you may have done many bad deeds.’
‘Very probably.’
‘But this is a good thing that you do now. Yes.’
‘Thank you,’ I breathed.
Whether it was that crumb of kindness from Probably Rose, or the effect of the pill, I felt an easing in me, a simmering down of the fire. It was still there, nothing that I would call pleasant, but momentarily bearable. I looked at Pinky, who had also taken a pill, and hoped that he was feeling a similar respite. Snowdrop was leaning down to him, whispering some promise in his ear, and I looked away just as they kissed, feeling that I was intruding on their privacy.
I’ll bring him back, I vowed to myself. It was as much as I could do.
Chasm City was nowhere beneath us, and then it was everywhere. We had come through the last layer of cloud, above a plain of ruins. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to what I was seeing; a few more for my brain to accept the scale of destruction and the toll of murder that it implied. I knew what had happened here; I knew the punishment that had been dealt against us for having the hubris to turn our eyes to the stars. But no intellectual understanding could have prepared me for the visible evidence of our downfall, graven in the ruins of our greatest metropolis. The worst thing was that it was still possible to tell that this had been a city. A blackened carpet of ash, a glass-fused crater, a scoured blank absence, would have been easier to process than the half-incinerated remains beneath us. Ruins told a story.
Kilometre upon kilometre they stretched: the black or ashen remnants of what had once been buildings as big as mountains, now reduced to hunched, crouching, mangled forms like pitiable slouching figures under cowls and cloaks of sackcloth. They were hollow-eyed, hollow-skulled, blown right through. Some of them had fallen over, or taken one or more with them in the same collapse. Pieces of buildings lay among the ruins, jammed upright like jagged tombstones. Draped over everything, yet mostly so diaphanous that we saw right through it, was the collapsed shroudwork of the city’s domes. Nowhere was there a trace of movement, nowhere a light or a flash of living matter. I had accepted that there were pockets of survivors down in Chasm City without question, but now it seemed preposterous that any organism, much less any group of people, could have found a way to live there.
The city slid under us, monotonous and terrible, until in the grey haze of distance we could make out the chasm itself, the belching maw at the city’s heart. Lady Arek slowed us further as we neared the in-curving lip, the ruined buildings crowding near the edge in tightening spirals, like processions of ships about to tumble into a whirlpool. Turbulence increased. Thick, unhealthy-coloured clouds were still rising from the chasm, hiding anything more than the upper fraction of its depth. The shuttle stopped altogether and began a cautious, queasy descent.
‘Are you all right?’ Probably Rose asked both of us.
‘No worse,’ I said. ‘Pinky?’
‘No worse,’ he echoed. And I thought that if we could agree on that much, even in our discomfort, there might yet be hope we’d come through this together.
We lowered beneath the chasm’s rim, and I saw how the buildings had spilled over the edge and down into the shaft, pushing ever deeper as the real estate above ground became more congested and expensive. The remains of bridges grasped across the chasm without meeting. Lady Arek navigated us around these buckled, sagging hazards, draped with acres of dome that had come raining down. Slowly the walls were rising past us, the sense of confinement and claustrophobia increasing with each kilometre that we descended. Only a poor sort of daylight made it through Yellowstone’s clouds to begin with. There was not much left of it by the time we were five kilometres into the chasm.
Yet as the gloom intensified, and the fluted and striated walls seemed to press in on us like a tightening throat, so I made out the first signs of active habitation. Lights and fires glimmered from a dozen widely spaced points in the wall, like eyes in a night-lit forest. Then a hundred more, as I adjusted to the spectacle. The band of habitation seemed confined within a kilometre or less of the chasm’s height.
‘They do not use those fires for heat or cooking,’ Lady Arek said, noticing my interest. ‘They are territorial markers; lines of division between little dwindling empires. You might as well be looking at a map of planetary systems, slowly being snuffed out by wolves. Already there are fewer signs of life than there were six years ago.’
‘They’re dying off?’
‘One by one. Very little else to do, in the long run. There were no sustainable resources left behind when the city fell. The gangs subsist off scraps, stored commodities, what little they can steal or barter from others.’
‘And if that fails,’ I said quietly, ‘there’s always a bright future in cannibalism.’
‘Not the most sustainable lifestyle choice, if history has been any guide.’
‘You have a gift for understatement, Lady Arek. At times I even think you might have a sense of humour.’
‘I do. But I’ve learned from bitter experience that it’s best kept to myself.’ She nodded into the mist, at a structure emerging from the chasm’s depths. ‘There, Clavain. Our destination: the Swinehouse. Study it well. In a few minutes you are likely to be somewhere inside it, suffering terribly.’
‘Are you a sadist?’ I asked.
‘No, merely a realist.’
‘Well, you’re right: you really should keep that sense of humour to yourself.’
The Swinehouse was built out from the chasm’s side like a faceless wall clock, buttressed from beneath by huge splayed and angled supports which rested on natural ledges a hundred or so metres beneath the underside of the lair. That was about as far down as we could see before thicker layers of mist closed in. Augmenting these supports were numerous tensioned cables, radiating out from fixtures in the lair’s sides and corners and cleated directly into the wall, through whose narrowing gaps we had to pick our way. It would be exceedingly bad manners to clip one of those lines, even though the loss of any one of them would not be sufficient to send the lair tumbling into the chasm.
‘Do you think Glass managed to get all this way without being seen?’
‘We must depend on it.’
‘Not quite the answer I was hoping for.’
‘She will have achieved her initial objective. Scythe’s stealthing systems are far in advance of this shuttle, and besides, we wish to be seen. Hourglass will have come in silently, keeping close to the opposite wall and using the mist and adaptive hull chameleoflage for cover. She will be waiting now, positioned some way beneath the Swinehouse and certainly out of reach of our sensors or any surveillance devices available to the Swine Queen. When we send the signal, she will rise to the base of the structure and commence her infiltration.’
‘Do you think we can rely on her?’
‘We are different in our methods, different in our philosophies. She is the lightning; I am the weather system. But she will not fail in her aspect of the operation.’
‘And it ain’t because she cares about me,’ Pinky said. ‘Or pigs in general.’
‘You may not like me,’ I said. ‘Or respect me. And in your shoes, I probably wouldn’t either. But I have a feeling you are much more valuable than Glass realises. She would be making an error if she treated your life as worth anything less than my own.’
He looked at me sceptically ‘You done, Stink?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’ve spent my whole fucking existence being told I matter. Usually about thirty seconds before I become inconvenient to someone.’
‘Did you matter to Nevil Clavain?’
‘He wasn’t the same.’
‘Then nor am I,’ I said quietly. ‘If you mattered to him, then you matter to me.’
The upper part of the lair was too complicated to be called a rooftop. It was a jumble of different levels and lookouts, criss-crossed with ladders and walkways and bristling with spiked defences and slitted, swivel-mounted turrets. The turrets tracked us as we came in. Perhaps there was nothing in them that could do serious harm to the shuttle, but the message was plain enough. We were only one twitch away from a less than cordial welcome. Now would not be the time to get off on the wrong footing with the Swine Queen.
Hemmed in by spikes and turrets, but nevertheless accessible, was a flattened landing surface marked by a crudely daubed cross and lit with flaming beacons. Lady Arek slipped us between the last of the wires, put out the shuttle’s landing gear, then set gently down on the pad.
‘I think we wait for our hosts before making any moves,’ she said.
There was time for Pinky and me to fix on the breather masks we would need for the handover. We eyed each other, neither having anything to say. Perhaps a certain taciturn distance was the best way of getting into character for the performance ahead, anyway. Glass’s pain-reliever was still doing its work but with every breath I knew that the haemoclast was going to reassert its presence sooner or later, and I needed to be ready for the moment.
Figures came out of a squat building on the edge of the pad. There were six of them, masked and armoured and carrying weapons that resembled long muskets connected by hoses to tanks worn on the figures’ backs. Flame-throwers, I guessed. As if any doubt remained, one of the figures elevated the muzzle of their weapon and squeezed out a tongue of blue-edged fire.
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