The area immediately around the hall had been cleared of debris, swept clean of the rubble that littered the rest of the city. There must be more Collectors about, Tymon thought, with a twinge of anxiety; he hesitated a long moment before following Samiha out of the shadow of the ruins. When no sound or movement broke the pervasive silence, he hurried across the open space towards the hall, pursuing her blue form up the front steps. His breath seemed loud and harsh in the echoing space of the portico. As he stepped up to the doors, he realised they could not be made of ordinary hardwood, their polished surface glinting coldly in the light of noon. Even the handles were oversized, two tawny discs the size of Tymon’s chest. There was neither lock nor keyhole.
‘Orah?’ he muttered doubtfully to Samiha. He touched his fingers to the burnished material of the doors: it was cool.
‘They’re made of metal,’ Samiha answered, using another word he was unfamiliar with. ‘The Ancients extracted this stuff from rocks, and used it for building. Orah doesn’t come from this world at all. Go on, try the door, I don’t think it’s locked.’
Tymon reached up with both hands to take hold of one of the discs, feeling like a tiny child faced with its gigantic proportions, but hesitated at the last minute. ‘Why not?’ he whispered to Samiha. ‘Why would they leave your body in an unlocked building? Wouldn’t it be a trap?’
‘I don’t know.’ She seemed anxious and unsure again, glancing over her shoulder at the silent ruins. Her voice was pleading. ‘We haven’t any choice. We have to go in and find out.’
It seemed to him that she was right. Anything was worth the risk, if they could recover her body. Resigned to the danger, he leaned his weight against the handle.
He had expected the door to be stuck with age, or at least heavy, requiring all his strength to budge, but to his surprise it swung open with hardly a push, perfectly balanced on silent hinges. Beyond it yawned a cavernous space. But just as he was about to step over the threshold, he heard a sound that brought him up short — a dim, thrumming echo, somewhere behind and high overhead. He turned and frowned at the rolling grey of the Storm; the sound reminded him incongruously of an air-chariot’s propellers.
‘Don’t wait!’ hissed Samiha urgently, at his side. ‘Quick, before the Collectors find us again!’
The wind changed and the thrumming faded. After one last wary glance at the sky, Tymon slipped through the doors into the gloom. He did not see the blue flash that arced above the portico just at that moment, a buzzing tongue of energy that leapt straight up from the roof of the hall.
Inside, cold air washed over him in a tingling wave. The main chamber of the hall was as frigid as an icebox, a shadowy central nave with columns marching down each side. There were no windows in the walls but, as Tymon’s eyes adjusted, he saw a small amount of daylight filtering down through hidden openings in the roof. There was also a greenish glow, clearly artificial, welling out of a small, enclosed chamber at the far end of the hall. Just as he noticed this, the main door swung shut behind him with a soft click, causing him to jump.
‘Come on.’ Samiha’s whisper was eager, her blue silhouette already gliding down the central nave. ‘My body’s in the back room, I can feel it.’
Tymon followed her as quietly and cautiously as he could, unable to quell the anxiety that had taken hold of him at the sound of the closing door. This was all too easy. He did not believe for a minute that the Envoy’s servants would have left their prisoner unguarded, not even locking up the building where her body was kept. And had he heard an air-chariot, after all? He peered at the flickering green light ahead, then over his shoulder, into the dim recesses between the columns, expecting at any moment to see a figure outlined there.
Even so, he could not help noticing the austere beauty of the hall as he continued down the nave. The main chamber was empty of furniture or other items, offering no clue as to what the function of the building might once have been. But there were intricate friezes on the walls, better preserved than their counterparts outside. Scenes melted in and out of the darkness above Tymon’s head as he walked, fine relief-work adorning the columns. One of the first he passed on his right depicted the stars and constellations, some of which he vaguely remembered from his studies at the seminary. But here, the heavenly bodies were not shown dangling like fruit in the upper branches of the World Tree, as was traditionally the case on seminary maps. The stars seemed to move purely in relation to each other, conducting a stately procession across the column, and there were a great many of them. Stranger still, tiny figures floated incongruously between the constellations, as if a group of people had flown up to dance among the stars.
The subsequent friezes had more recognisable settings, showing the loam slopes and waters of the World Below, though again, no Tree. A column about a third of the way down the hall on Tymon’s left depicted a bustling city with tall buildings, and what must have been airships of a variety that used neither ether sacks nor propellers. But as the scenes went on, the character of the friezes changed dramatically. Instead of simple records of human activity, they all appeared to deal with a single, defining historical event. Halfway along the nave, Tymon came across an image of people gathered about what must have been a judge or other representative of justice, for the feminine figure was shown blindfolded and holding a pair of scales, a symbol still used to denote impartiality in Argos. The people held up petitions to the presiding figure, their expressions angry or woeful, clamouring for retribution.
The Ancients could not have been too different from their descendants today, Tymon thought, struck by how unhappy the faces on the later friezes looked. This was no idyllic history of the Born and their creations. He shivered as the columns marched relentlessly on, and he passed scene after scene of conflict and misery, growing more violent as he approached the rear of the building. All-out war was depicted on the final columns and, to Tymon’s distress, heaps of dead bodies. The city was now a gutted ruin surmounted by a rain of fire, clearly a reference to the Born war. The air was growing steadily colder towards the back of the hall, too; he noticed that his breath was smoking and that his footsteps left dark patches on the coating of frost on the floor. He took some comfort from the fact that there were no visible marks in front of him, indicating that no one had passed there recently. He almost tripped, slithering to a stop on the icy flags, when he looked up at the last column on his right, and saw the woman in the tree.
The frieze depicted a female head and torso emerging seamlessly from a stylised tangle of trunk and branches. Leafy fronds sprouted from her hair and limbs. The design reminded Tymon, with a shock of recognition, of Samiha, as she had been when he found her mysteriously intertwined with the Tree of Being. He had almost forgotten that experience, obsessed with the newer, glimmering vision from the mine. The woman on the column was pointing upwards, indicating something to the people gathered about her.
‘What’s taking you so long?’
The peevish note was back in the Kion’s voice. As Tymon glanced towards the current version of his love, standing in the greenish light that spilled out of the small chamber at the back of the main hall, he felt a sense of aching loss. Samiha had changed so much since the execution, he thought. She had lost her depth of humanity and compassion, the capacity he had noticed in her long ago of queenliness, of seeing to the needs of others before herself. She was a mere shadow of her former self, as impatient as a child, her arms folded over her chest as she waited for him by the half-open door.
‘Do hurry up,’ she said.
But as he approached she smiled again, winsome as ever. ‘Come, my love,’ she said. ‘We’re almost there. It’ll all be better soon, the way it was before.’
He nodded wordlessly, following her into the smaller chamber lit with its green glow. This room was equipped with a series of nine rectangular blocks set against the back wall of the hall, each one surmounted by a decorative, arched frieze at the head. They would have reminded Tymon incongruously of nine emp
ty beds, had they not been hugely oversized and made of what he assumed was more of the hard, burnished metal. The cold was intense in this part of the building and all the surfaces were covered in a thick layer of white frost. A quick glance about the room showed Tymon that it was empty of intruders, the white blanket on the floor unbroken. It crunched under his feet as he followed Samiha towards the source of the green glow, an alcove on the right-hand side of the room. The silence was now filled with a barely perceptible, continuous hum.
Tymon almost cried aloud when he saw the clear-walled tank at the rear of the alcove, about the height of a man and filled with a viscous-looking liquid. Within it, floating upright and festooned with tubes like tangled vines, was Samiha’s body. He ran up to the tank, pressing his palms against the coldly transparent sides; they were made of another unfamiliar material, like hardened Treesap but more sheer. He stared through that window, devouring Samiha with his eyes, torn between relief at finding her and pity for her state. The mass of tubes snaked about her naked body, plugging her nostrils and her mouth, wrapped about her belly and inserted into the skin of her arms; he could not guess the utility of them, unless they were somehow keeping her alive in the liquid. For he saw her chest rise and fall, a faint indication of breath beneath all the paraphernalia.
This was no sweet vision of the past. Samiha’s physical reality was the battered one he had witnessed in Argos city, her hair hacked short and her face drawn with pain, even while unconscious. But there was no mistaking the identity of the woman in the tank. This was the Samiha who had stood in the prisoner’s dock during the trial, who had spoken to him briefly in the bell tower, then fallen into blank emptiness from the air-harbour quays. And she was here, really here, separated from him only by a sheet of what looked like clear ice.
‘How do we wake you up?’ he breathed to the apparition, though his eyes were still fixed on the floating body in the tank. ‘Do we turn off this machine?’
For that was what he assumed the tangle of pipes and humming boxes behind the tank must be. They produced the steady mechanical humming; the green glow that filled the alcove emanated from two lamp-like protuberances on the topmost box. The whole contraption reminded him uneasily of the Collectors. Galliano would have found it fascinating, he thought — and then wondered, with a pang, why he had not remembered his old friend before. He was living the scientist’s dream, after all, walking in the World Below.
‘No,’ answered the Sending, from behind him. ‘You have to do it from here.’
Tymon turned to see the vision of his love, half-reclining on the nearest long block by the door of the alcove. Except that she did not recline, but hovered, her shimmering form only mimicking contact with the hard surface, whitened by frost. She beckoned to him.
‘Come,’ she said with a teasing smile. ‘Lie with me.’
When he gazed at her in confusion, wondering if she could really be offering him her strange, incorporeal love right now, in these circumstances, she laughed. ‘I can help you launch the Grafter’s trance,’ she explained. ‘You have to go in and bring me back: I can’t wake up on my own.’
There was something jarring about her laugh, a slight edge of mockery to her smile. He took her outstretched fingers, allowing her tingling touch to draw him closer to the block, but gazed searchingly into her eyes, desperate to find a glimmer of the person she had been before. The reality of Samiha’s body, so clearly marked by her trials and suffering, only underscored the change that had come over her as a Sending. It was not just the externals: such things would mean little in the world of the Sap, he knew. It was her behaviour. The Samiha of before had been high-minded in all her dealings. She had loved him, but never manipulated him with the promise of pleasure. In fact, she had been independent of him to a degree that was almost vexing. The vision, by contrast, alternated between neediness and domination, seductive and scolding by turns. She was intent on achieving her personal goals, and intolerant of anyone, like Zero, who stood in her way. She had become, Tymon thought in dismay, a profoundly ordinary person.
He winced as he lay down on the icy block, shivering when the frost seeped through the back of his tunic, melting with his body’s heat. ‘I can launch the trance myself,’ he sighed. ‘I don’t need your help.’
‘This way is quicker,’ she told him. ‘And we need to hurry.’
Though he half-raised his head, protesting when she climbed astride him, she did not pay him the slightest heed. ‘Relax,’ she said.
Before he could object, she ran her prickling blue fingers down his chest. The effect of her touch was overpoweringly strong, sending a jolt of intense sensation through him. He almost fainted from the shock, his vision reeling. It was not right, he thought, shaking his head groggily in an attempt to recover his senses. What she was doing to him was not right: she should not be ignoring his wishes so completely.
‘Samiha,’ he began again, as soon as he could, ‘I don’t want this —’
‘Will you ever be quiet?’ she interrupted, peremptory.
And suddenly she slapped him, with the flat of her hand, even as he had struck Zero. The force of her half-real blow on his cheek was a trembling, biting rush, both pleasant and painful. He stared at her, deeply shaken, but she only laughed as if it were all a joke.
‘I’ve had enough,’ he muttered, trying to rise from the hard couch.
But he could not. The strength had fled from his limbs, and he lay sprawled and helpless on the block. The act of touching it seemed to have drained his vitality, and he was reminded again, alarmingly, of the Doctor’s chair. A terrible suspicion gripped him; he raised his sluggish hand to rub away the frost on the right side of the slab, craning to see the surface beneath. Why was Samiha behaving so strangely?
Beneath his fingers, under the coating of white on the block, he caught the unmistakable, yellowish glint of orah.
Even as he peered at it in dismay, the slab warmed beneath him, and the energy drained out of him in waves. A spray of cold fell on his face. With a supreme effort, he glanced up at the wall behind his head, to see separate discs of orah spinning in what he had thought was a decorative arch. The block was another of the Old Ones’ machines, its mechanism now whirring to life, shedding its coat of frost. And all the while, Samiha threw back her head and laughed, and laughed again, as if this were the best game in the world. When she looked down again, there was a wild blue light in her eyes, as blue as the flash he had seen above the city.
‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled thickly, staring up at her in anguish. Understanding had dawned. His love had not changed after all. This was simply not Samiha: it never had been.
‘What am I doing?’ echoed the false vision, her expression frankly scornful. ‘I’m taking you for all you’re worth, little man. I’m emptying you. You’re all mine now.’
‘Why?’ he gasped, though he could piece together what had happened to him, berating himself for his own stupidity. He remembered the Oracle’s warning: they can enter this world through our dreams. The Masters, he thought. He had allowed himself to be tricked by the Masters.
‘Why, it asks?’ The Samiha-that-was-not-Samiha burst out laughing again, a harsh, grating sound. Her eyes flashed a venomous blue. ‘Because I can. Because that’s all you’re good for, worm of the Tree.’
Her voice changed on the last phrase, growing raucous and rasping, breaking into several different voices that spoke as one. As Tymon looked on in horror, unable to move, the vision passed through a hideous metamorphosis, the blue haze of the Sending stretching and bulging out. The likeness to Samiha fell away, and a nightmarish creature emerged, squatting over him on the couch — part man, part woman, part ghastly bird. Three monstrous beaked heads sprouted from its shoulders, long-necked as vultures, staring at him sidelong with their mouths agape. The great wings that unfurled from its back were as dark as Storm clouds.
‘Why, why, why,’ jeered the heads, together. ‘Did you expect us to cherish you, worm? Did you expect us to stroke
you, and whisper sweet nothings to you? Heaven knows, it was bad enough doing that on the way down here.’ One of the bird heads took on a vague resemblance to Samiha again. ‘Hold me, my love,’ it mocked in a high falsetto. ‘Oh please, yes, more. Pah, disgusting.’
Then the wavering face of Samiha disappeared and the bird-thing drew itself up, its wings beating, the vulture heads emitting a multiple laugh. ‘The Masters of this universe, love a maggot like yourself?’ they sneered to Tymon. ‘Hardly.’
All at once, the harpy-creature pounced down on him again, plunging its ghostly blue hands into his chest. Tymon howled in pain; the Masters’ disembodied touch was no longer remotely pleasurable. He felt as if his heart were being gouged out.
‘You make us sick,’ rasped his tormentors. ‘Love me, love me. Like a puking infant. You’re all the same. Can’t figure out what their Heavenly Highnesses see in you squealing worms. All you’re good for is eating. Well, if they won’t eat you, we will. Hear that, Matrya? Samaya, do you hear?’
The Masters suddenly let go of Tymon, arching back to shake a fist at the heavens, the three heads emitting a defiant shriek. Tymon let out a shuddering breath, weeping from pain. There was one word his enemies had pronounced that he clung to, one thought that kept their horror from driving him mad.
‘Samaya?’ he whispered. ‘Do you mean Samiha?’
The Masters bent over him again, gloating. ‘She won’t help you now,’ they said.
And with one more pounce, one more tearing, excruciating plunge of their talons, they ripped the very pith out of him, tore up the plant from its casing and cast his consciousness spinning away into a howling vortex.
He imagined, then, that he would die. But the whirlwind that tore him apart and sucked him under was as brief as it was brutal. It did not deliver him to oblivion. After an interval the howling noise and fury drained away, and silence descended on him like a shroud. He found he was still lying on his back, still on a hard cold surface, with his eyes squeezed shut.
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