‘Oh, I expect it’s part of the blast-poison affair,’ he told the Saint dismissively. ‘They’ll be messengers of some kind, pawns of Rede’s, perhaps. In any case, the network is dead now that its head has been cut off. We needn’t worry about the Jays.’
‘Good,’ said Fallow, satisfied as usual with the explanation that required the minimum effort. ‘I was beginning to dread a colonial production of “The Seeker of Saman”, with a Nurry slut singing soprano.’
He rolled his eyes as the Envoy gazed at him in blank incomprehension. ‘The story you mentioned in the archives, remember?’ he prompted.
Lace still did not react.
‘Juno and Lyla. It’s been made into an operetta, didn’t you know?’ resumed Fallow, exasperated. ‘You really should get out more, my friend. It’s all work, work, work with you, Lace: enjoy yourself a little!’
After receiving that piece of hackneyed advice, the Envoy took a rather stiff leave of Fallow, pleading fatigue, and fled the company of the All-Father. Lace may have been pulling the strings on his puppet Saint, but he occasionally balked at the hollow company he was obliged to keep. He stalked back along the corridors of the seminary to his own modest sleeping quarters, an acolyte’s garret equipped with nothing but a single bed, and locked the door behind him, breathing a sigh of relief in the narrow peacefulness of his chamber.
It was just then, of course, that the leash from the Veil yanked tight once more, calling him home.
There was hardly a moment of the day or night that Lace did not feel the link to his Masters, the twining connection that pulled like a chain about his neck. He was tied to them, and they could call him imperiously into the prison world whenever they willed. They would be wanting to hear his plans for the Nurian Grafters, he knew, as well as news of the expedition below the Storm. They did not really need him to return to the Veil right now, but obliged him to make his reports in person, in order to press home a point. They were waiting for him to grovel to them, as usual. They loved to bring him to heel. Well, he thought, he might have to play the part of the cringing cur, but he stole meat from his Masters’ table, when they had their backs turned.
He quelled his irritation and lay down on the bed, allowing his construct-body to fall into a stupor. This physical simulacrum he had put together with Wick’s help lacked permanence, but was simpler to use than a human body. Once he ceased to hold himself to it, the headless Beast-that-was-Lace stepped out of his physical casing as easily as from a garment. Despite the Masters’ yanking chain, Eblas stopped to bend a moment over the construct, snuffling at it with invisible nostrils.
Prisoners from the Veil could not normally access the material realm, and it had taken the combined power of the Masters to send the Envoy into the world, even as a half-real wraith. The scraps of physicality he possessed were unstable and had to be continually shored up, replacements scavenged from elsewhere. The current construct was growing frayed, decaying at the edges, and would have to be renewed before the acolytes left for the World Below. With that thought in mind, Eblas raised a barbed claw and rent open a passage to the Veil above the body, leaping through the fissure onto the icy surface of the prison world. He wished to be done with his report as quickly as possible, and return to complete his preparations. Behind him, the gaping tear between the dimensions slowly meshed shut.
The bird-kings were waiting for him. They sat in a hulking ring on the ice, almost as he had left them, vast winged shapes blotting out the stars. But although their invisible leash on him tightened, the Masters gave no immediate sign of noticing their servant’s presence. Eblas wondered a moment, incredulously, whether they had fallen asleep on the spot after their last encounter, for their shapes seemed to have solidified, settling into black ice, their heavy-lidded eyes no more than gleaming slits in their heads. Then he realised they were preoccupied, not asleep, engaged in the unseen battle against Matrya from which he had been summarily excluded. They had probably trapped the Oracle’s trance-form in a folding corner of the Veil dimension, a prison within the prison, assailing her spirit with their combined forces.
Such tactics could not keep a Being such as she confined forever, of course: the attack would only distract her long enough for the acolytes to reach her body. And that, Eblas swore, would be his victory alone. Although he needed them to fight their common enemy, the Masters would be required to loosen his leash when he retrieved the World Key. He crouched quiescent, a black lump on the floor of the Veil, outlined in faint starlight. It was a long, chilly wait before one of the bird-shapes stirred and blinked to life, shaking off glittering crystals of ice.
‘Eblas,’ whispered the imprisoned Born, in acknowledgment of him.
The Beast-that-was-Lace bowed, throwing itself down on its belly to make its obeisance. There would be time enough to work out personal plans of ascendency. For now, Eblas needed the Masters’ help to combat Matrya, and he needed them strong.
Two days later, after an emergency court hearing in the temple Hall, Father Rede was pronounced guilty of treason and sentenced to hang by the neck on the city docks, as an example to all. Wick found himself on the crowded quays again, witnessing his second public execution in less than a month — his third, if he counted the sentence carried out on Pallas, in secret, in the seminary dungeons.
The thought of that dark tryst caused him to shiver with a combination of remembered ecstasy and self-disgust, and he wrapped his cloak tighter about him as he stood with the rest of the townsfolk in the chill morning fog. But it was not the cold that made him pull the seminary’s green cloth protectively tight. He was, perhaps, a little too ready to see another man die, a little too hot and eager beneath the folds of his cloak. The Explorer mask kept him well hidden, veiling his conflicted emotions as well as his scars. The people on each side of him were oblivious to both his shame and excitement, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the tiny figure on the execution quay.
Wick eyed his companions with contempt. They had no idea, he thought. They were unaware of what he could do, how intensely he could feel, the heights he could reach. For he was one of the elite who had learned the real secret of existence. He knew, despite the last rites delivered publicly to the condemned prisoner before the rope was placed about his neck, that there was no chastisement in another life, no Hell awaiting sinners after death. Heaven was right here, right now, in the sliver of orah about his neck.
And so was Hell. For he sensed he had grown dependent on that borrowed power, yearning day by day to revel in it again. But Lace would not allow it. He was not ready for a second dose of the Sap, his master had told him, rather coldly, following the debacle on the night before the Kion’s execution. He had permitted himself to be carried away then, it was true, forgetting to shut down the connection to Pallas. The Nurian lad had lingered on in a reduced state for hours; Wick could not think of the transgression without a flush of embarrassment. He had let himself go — he had made a fool of himself. But he knew better now, and would never waste that precious rush again. Perhaps he was being sent away on this long and arduous trek beneath the Storm as punishment, he thought gloomily. He was not allowed to taste the Sap again until he had carried out his task. He was, moreover, to answer to Gowron on the journey, for Lace had placed that lowborn murderer in charge of their mission, a decision that enraged Wick. His master, he reflected bitterly, did nothing but hold him back.
The acolyte shuddered slightly as he watched the tiny figure of Rede twisting round and round on the rope beneath the execution quay. The condemned man had stopped kicking some time ago; there was only an involuntary jerk of his left heel visible now and then, to indicate the proximity of death. Wick wondered, in passing, why the Saint had not chosen this far more efficient method for the Kion’s execution. Why had she been thrown alive into the Void, like the saints from the old stories, instead of being dispatched before the eyes of the crowd? But no one thought to consult Wick about such things. Neither the priests at the seminary, nor his own fami
ly, nor the Envoy had ever truly valued his judgment, he thought bitterly. His master stymied him at every turn.
He longed for a chance to make his mark, to answer to no one but himself. One day, he would show them all what he could do, he reflected. One day, through the power of the orah, he would come into his own. He dreamed of the Sap flowing through his limbs as he watched the demise of his half-remembered professor, caring nothing for the life that ended there beneath the quays. He could never have imagined the last image flickering through the mind of the dying man as he swayed in the breeze, never guessed at the remembered conversation with the heretic in the prison cell.
Rede died thinking of tiny blue flowers in the courtyard of an eastern city, far away.
The traitor’s demise had ushered in a new epoch in Argos city, or so the Saint claimed in his triumphant speech to those gathered on the air-harbour that day. The court had examined definitive proof of Rede’s involvement with the Lantrians, yes, but also and by the same token established Lantria’s involvement with Nurian rebels. This network of treachery included the Freeholders, who provided raw spice-fuel to the South even as Rede had provided information. All were conspiring together against the Mother Canopy; the enemies of Argos were linked in a foul web that extended from Cherk Harbour to Marak, Farhang and beyond.
It was time, Fallow declared, from his special podium — raised for the occasion of Samiha’s execution and never demolished — to rid the Tree of this spreading disease. There would be an Eastern Crusade, he announced to the madly cheering crowd. An ultimatum had already been sent to the Freeholds: Argos would no longer tolerate such insults to its sovereignty. The Saint offered the people florid promises to ‘cleanse the nests of rebellion and heresy with the fire of Truth’. The Nurians had lost their chance at repentance, he said: now, they would experience God’s righteous wrath. The crowd cheered, and cheered again.
In the hours following this rousing speech, as celebrations occasioned by Fallow’s announcement swept through the streets of Argos city, Gowron and Wick set sail from the air-harbour in a small farmer’s dirigible requiring no crew but themselves. The official reason for their departure was to search for their absent fellow, the mysteriously vanished Jed. The foreign acolyte had disappeared during his retreat, it was said, feared to be lost in a snowstorm. His ostensible rescuers carried limited provisions and were due back in a fortnight if they found no trace of their companion. The guards on the quays watched their departure with idle eyes. While their vessel was still visible from the air-harbour, Gowron took care to steer them westwards, over the Chasm. But once they were hidden by an outcrop in the leaf-forests, he turned the flat-bottomed barge to the south and east again.
The Freeholders’ machine, recently embargoed from Cherk Harbour, had been transported to a military cache an hour’s journey away. It sat draped in tarpaulin in the recesses of a wide Tree-cave, a natural hangar in the trunk five miles south of Argos city and some five hundred feet below, in the lower limits of the inhabitable canopy. There were no roads or terraced farms nearby and the face of the trunk stretched unbroken as far as the eye could see, a blank wall lost in mist. Gowron tethered the farmer’s barge at the entrance to the cave and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the workings of the air-chariot, filling it with the barrels of Treespice for fuel, and starting and stopping the propellers with a thud-thud-thud that tore open the foggy silence periodically. He wasted no words on Wick, who sat with his back against the bark wall of the cavity, watching him glumly.
Far from the theatre of his dreams on the docks that morning, the younger acolyte was in an execrable mood. It irked him to miss the city-wide celebrations of the crusade back in Argos: it would have been the first time he could have actually enjoyed his new face, and mingled in desirable company while wearing the mask. He had not bothered to don the artefact for the purposes of this journey, for there was no point in wasting it on Gowron. Besides, though he did not want to admit it to himself, the mask stung his skin when he wore it too long. He glowered at his fellow traveller through savage, red-rimmed eyes. But the Envoy’s orders had been absolute: there was no time to waste. They were to leave at once to retrieve the machine, and must depart no later than the following morning for the Storm. Their work, Lace had assured them, was more important than the launching of any crusade, though Wick was beginning to have his doubts on that score.
He was even beginning to doubt the Envoy’s curses. When he had dared ask his master in private, before they embarked, whether the promised chastisement of Jedda and Tymon had been carried out, Lace had rounded on him with a snarl. The fulfilment of that promise depended entirely on how he completed this assignment, he had snapped. Kill the Oracle, retrieve any artefacts and bring them directly home, and his enemies would suffer the sweet humiliation he desired. Fail, and that reward would be withdrawn.
It was all the more irksome to Wick, in the circumstances, to witness how the Envoy lavished favours on Gowron. Lace had gone so far as to entrust the former criminal with a special, secret item to aid them in their endeavours. Gowron refused to reveal the contents of the small leather-bound package he kept with him at all times, in an interior pocket of his jacket. Wick burned with curiosity to know what it contained, but his companion never took off the jacket, not even to sleep. As evening approached and the temperature dropped in the cave, the youth bestirred himself with a martyr’s sigh and began establishing their camp for the night. He pitched a tent at the back of the cavity and gathered a pile of loose bark shards to light a fire. When darkness made further navigational experiments impossible, Gowron returned to squat beside him at the flames, rubbing the palms of his hands together against the cold. He seemed brutishly satisfied with his exertions, so much so that he actually initiated a conversation with Wick.
‘Ready to see Hell in the morning?’ he grinned, with a too-familiar wink.
‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ replied Wick guardedly. He could not understand what the Envoy saw in this mindless thug: servicing a machine was certainly all Gowron would ever be good for.
‘You should be happy,’ remarked the older man. ‘We have the chance of a lifetime here to advance our careers.’
Wick shrugged. ‘If you call advancement to risk our necks,’ he grumbled.
‘What, don’t you want to stick the Nurry Oracle, and see her silenced for good?’ asked Gowron, still leering at Wick with his abominable familiarity.
The youth drew himself up, on his dignity. He was a gentleman’s son, after all; the seminary may have blurred social boundaries, but did not banish them entirely. ‘It’s an assassin’s job,’ he said. ‘I’d rather fight out in the open, like a man, and score a victory against the Nurry Grafters.’
‘Child’s play,’ answered his companion. ‘Nonsense. A diversion.’
‘But that’s what our master is doing,’ protested Wick.
‘Our master would much rather be here with us. Oh yes,’ he continued, as Wick stared at him askance, ‘we’ve got the sweet job, despite appearances. He always said he wanted to be the one to deal with the Oracle. And now he sends us off on our own. Doesn’t it occur to you to ask why?’
‘He said —’ Wick began.
‘Oh yes, I know, I know, busy, he has other things to do!’ sneered Gowron.
He leaned towards the boy, his eyes lit by the crackling flames. ‘I heard them talking, when they thought they were alone last night,’ he whispered huskily. ‘Him and the Saint. There’s something buried in the chamber along with the body. It’s called the World Key. I don’t know what it is, but I know Fallow’s keen on getting it. But the one who’s really desperate is Lace. I could hear it in his voice. I’ve known our Envoy for many years, and very few things make him that desperate, I promise you. If he wants this Key so badly, you can be sure the Masters want it too.’
He fell silent, staring into the fire. Wick did not reply at once. It appeared the brute had some brains after all; the younger acolyte was torn between the desire
to know more and the paranoia instilled by years of life at the seminary, compounded by an all too personal appreciation of Lace’s methods. The Envoy could very well be watching them right now, with the aid of the orah-clock. This might be a test of loyalty.
‘If he wants it so much, why doesn’t he go after it himself?’ he said to Gowron, after a moment.
‘Aha.’ The other gave his unpleasant leer. ‘That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? I think he’s out of favour. He’s been told off. His Masters decided we should be the ones to do this — he didn’t make that decision. They don’t trust him. They want us to bring them this Key. All that nonsense Lace was spouting about not touching the things we find and taking any swag straight back to him … Whatever the Key does, I can assure you it won’t be lethal to humans.’
He said no more, refusing to advance any theory as to what the Key might be. But it seemed obvious enough to Wick that night, bedded down beside his unwanted companion, that if they truly wished to advance their careers, only one course of action remained to them.
The World Key, if they were lucky enough to obtain it, should never be returned to Lace at all. They should go over his head and take their prize to the Masters themselves, entering the Veil. The prospect caused Wick’s heart to beat wildly with fearful anticipation. For his insights did not end there. It was evident that he, Wick, should be the one to personally contact the Masters. He saw no pressing reason, stretched out beside the objectionably snoring Gowron, absolutely no reason at all why he should share credit for the discovery of such a treasure with anyone else. Once they had found the Oracle’s body and fulfilled their mission, he would be far better off on his own. His fellow acolyte, if he were truly intelligent, would have come to a similar conclusion.
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