The Oracle had said it was going to collapse on this side, Tymon remembered numbly. She had meant the whole South Canopy of the Tree. And he was right under it.
He staggered on in panic, splashing into the unquiet lake, his mouth and nostrils caked with the falling dust. Coughing and choking, he waded as fast as he could through the rising waves and away from the collapsing trunk, in the direction of the ruined city. If this were his final hour, he thought, and he was about to join the Oracle in death, he would like to see Samiha’s body one last time. He would like to live just long enough to return to the building where she was held. But he was still some distance from the ruins, two miles perhaps, when a large section of branch and leaves plummeted through the clouds about a mile to his right, falling with a thunderous crash into the waters.
The shallow lake became suddenly riotous, and a single massive wave slammed into Tymon, sending him sprawling. When he picked himself up again, dripping and terrified, something else hard and about the size of a child’s fist hit his head with a stinging thump. It was followed by several similar missiles. The rain of bark was becoming a lethal hail; the South Canopy was disintegrating about his ears. He broke into a run with his arms curled over his head and one thought in mind. He must fend off death for just a little while, delaying the end until he reached Samiha.
The race to the ruins was an obstacle course. Once Tymon entered the environs of the ancient city, he was able to take some cover from the rain of bark beneath its overhanging towers. He knew that even the ancient hall would not stand up beneath the weight of a whole limb of the Tree, were one to fall on top of it. He slipped, dripping wet and half-blinded by dust, from the shelter of one ruined wall to the next, leaving the boiling lake behind him. Between the periodic showers of bark and twig particles, he glimpsed the demise of two more huge supporting branches, one far to the west and the other worryingly close to the east, the vast forms detaching themselves from the clouds and falling into the lake with a slow, grinding roar. The ground heaved and trembled when they hit, but the real danger came from above.
He was exhausted by the time he reached the region of the city where he knew the hall should be. For a few anguished moments, he feared it had been crushed already, for a massive section of bark the size of the building itself had flattened one of the ancient towers in front of it, blocking his view. The earth beneath the ruins was already thick with splintered twig-shafts, shards of bark and torn leaves, and Tymon waded through a pile of debris almost as deep as the lake itself, passing under the tipped-up slab of bark to reach what he hoped would be the hall stairs. They were still there, he saw with relief, the building intact by a hair’s breadth. He hastened up to the double doors, and slipped into the gloomy hall as the South Canopy continued to rain down in ruin on the World Below. The fall of bark pounded against the roof of the building, echoing through the central nave like an endless drum roll.
He did not immediately notice the movement in the rear chamber, hurrying between the rows of columns. The green light still welled out of the door to the room where Samiha’s body was kept, and the rain of shattered bark overhead drowned out all other sounds. But just as he stepped over the threshold, a shadow flitted across his vision. Then he caught sight of the ominous flash of a flying stick, and heard a Collector’s telltale hum. An instant later, a pale and grim-faced figure staggered into his line of sight, wielding one of the dormant flying machines like a weapon.
‘Jedda?’ cried Tymon, in utter astonishment.
Jedda swung the grey broom-handle up above her head and brought it down hard, with a grunt of effort, on top of something close to Tymon’s right-hand side. One of the Ancients’ addled machines had been sliding towards him, he realised as he stumbled back. The Collector gave a despairing sputter and dropped out of the air, tumbling to the floor of the chamber. It tried to grow legs and scuttle away, but Jedda lurched towards it, smashing it with her weapon until it was still. Then, there was only the thunderous clatter of falling bark above them, and a choked sound as Jedda began to sob.
Tymon caught her in his arms as she collapsed. She was shaking all over, the tears spilling. ‘Jedda, Jedda!’ he murmured in wonder. ‘How did you get here? I thought you were dead on that beach. I wouldn’t have left you if I’d known you were alive!’
‘I was dead,’ Jedda panted, gazing at him through eyes that were ringed with blue shadow. She looked little better than dead now, he thought: her complexion was almost the same ghastly shade as the frost on the walls. ‘Suffice to say, I was sent back. I have to tell you what happened — another time. What about you? And Ama?’ she finished, without much hope.
He shook his head sadly. ‘I was too late. By the time I fought off the Masters and took back my body, Gowron had got to her. I failed absolutely, Jedda.’
He saw his own grief reflected in Jedda’s face, and wondered if he should tell her about the Key, and the Oracle’s true form. But the memory of the ancient Being in the roots of the Tree was still too raw. He could not speak.
Jedda gave a final shudder and pulled herself together. ‘This is the end, then,’ she said. ‘When someone of that power goes … well. You can hear it, outside.’
‘The South Canopy is falling down.’ Even as Tymon uttered the words, another crash echoed overhead.
‘A third of what lies above …’ Jedda murmured the old prophecy, considering the crushed machine at her feet. ‘And here’s what lies below, or some of it. I must have been brought here by some of these bizarre creatures. There’s no way else it could have happened. I think they saved me, in spite of themselves, though I doubt they had that objective in mind. I woke up on one of those hard beds, with them trying to attach their cursed tubes to me, like they’ve done to that poor fellow over there.’
She pointed to a frost-encoated orah-couch on the far left of the chamber, on the opposite side to Samiha’s alcove. To his joy, Tymon glimpsed a familiar, red-headed figure stretched out on the table. ‘Zero!’ he exclaimed, hastening to his friend’s side, filled with anxious recognition and relief combined. ‘But what have they done to him?’
The Marak boy was still alive, but deeply asleep, his body festooned with transparent tubes and other, nameless Collector paraphernalia. His breath was the faintest curl of white on the cold air. Jedda joined Tymon, peering curiously down at Zero.
‘The creatures must have ambushed him,’ she said. ‘I think they put people to sleep with poisoned darts. There’s another around here somewhere, and it’s been trying to stick me for about an hour. It’s hiding, waiting for me to let down my guard.’
‘Asleep, but not in the Veil,’ muttered Tymon, inspecting Zero’s pale features. It was clear that his friend was not held in a trance: the orah disc behind his table was undisturbed, still wearing its coat of frost. Instead, the Collector tubes snaked off in a long winding mass towards a bank of machinery on the far wall, similar to one other Tymon had seen in the building.
‘Just like Samiha,’ he said, glancing up with alarm, in the direction of the alcove. He had been overcome by a sudden fear that the Collectors had moved the Kion’s tank, or somehow tampered with it.
‘Samiha?’ echoed Jedda, pursuing him as he set off abruptly across the chamber. ‘Is she here, too? What is this place, Tymon? You act like you’ve seen it before.’
‘This is where it all happened,’ he answered, reluctant to go into detail. ‘This is where the Masters stole my body, and threw me into the Veil.’
‘But how would they do that?’ Jedda was hard-pressed to keep up with him as he hurried towards the alcove, panting in her exhaustion. ‘With the tubes?’
‘The couches are made of orah,’ he explained briefly. ‘The mechanism forces people into a trance. But our flying friends haven’t done that to Samiha, or to Zero. Or perhaps they don’t know how …’
‘Careful,’ Jedda said, as they stepped over the threshold, into the shadows of the alcove. ‘Remember, there’s another one of those things, somewhere.’ Sh
e handed Tymon the grey stick. ‘You’d better take this.’
To his great relief, the tank was still there, along with its slumbering occupant, the green light pulsing in the machinery behind. Jedda hastened with him to the side of the tank, gazing up in awe at the floating form of the Kion.
‘I should have known!’ she breathed. ‘She said she’d come back, for a while.’
‘Come back?’ asked Tymon in confusion. ‘She spoke to you?’
‘In my head. After I died.’ Jedda’s eyes slid away from his, as if the admission embarrassed her. ‘She told me a few things I ought to know, before I was granted my life again … about the choices I’ve made, and how they’ve affected people … Not quite in the way I thought, actually, but still. Consequences …’
Her voice trailed off awkwardly. Tymon could not help feeling a pang of envy; Samiha had not spoken to him at all, in any state, not even about his own very questionable choices.
‘Well,’ resumed Jedda, taking a deep breath. ‘How shall we get her out of there? Do you think she’d wake up if we unplugged her?’
‘It’s worth a try,’ said Tymon, inspecting the back of the tank, where another tangle of large tubes connected Samiha to the green-lit machine. ‘For her and for Zero. I’m beginning to understand now, Jedda. The Collectors — those flying things — they keep people alive, or half-alive. That’s all they know how to do. They’re just complicated machines, built to tend unconscious bodies.’
‘So that the Masters can use them?’ Jedda shuddered.
‘I don’t think so.’ Tymon made a full circuit and emerged from the other side of the tank, his face pensive as he pieced the possibilities together. ‘The Masters can’t take over just any sleeping body. They needed to use the orah-couches. And the Collectors haven’t sent Zero or Samiha to the Veil. They’ve just drugged them and stuck them full of tubes.’
‘That’s bad enough,’ muttered Jedda, rubbing her arms in the chill of the hall and glancing nervously up as the rain of bark on the roof grew louder, a drumming roar.
But Tymon had been carried away by his ideas. ‘You know, I think this was a prison in the old days,’ he said to Jedda. ‘The criminals’ minds were locked in the Veil while their bodies were kept alive by the Collectors. Think of it, it’s the perfect sentence.’ He turned excitedly to the Nurian girl, standing shivering beside him. ‘Maybe the Masters were even the ones imprisoned here, all those centuries ago. The bodies on the couches must have disintegrated, leaving nothing for the Collectors to tend or guard. The machines didn’t stop wanting to do their jobs, though, in a broken sort of way. They scavenged for bodies under the Tree, collecting corpses as far as Argos city. The Masters would have known they would collect Samiha, too. They couldn’t force her spirit into the Veil, and this was the next best thing. They wanted her helpless, unconscious, but not dead!’
He stopped talking then, because Jedda’s expression was aghast, as if he had spoken a blasphemy. A split second later, he realised she was looking over his shoulder. He spun around to see the familiar humped silhouette of the missing Collector rising up in a shadowy corner of the alcove, its thin arm poised to hurl a dart.
‘Look out!’ he cried, leaping forward and pulling Jedda bodily down to the floor.
It was not a moment too soon. The whir of the dart clipped Tymon’s right ear even as he tumbled on top of Jedda. The Nurian girl was cursing roundly but not at him, as they scrambled up to face their floating nemesis together. The remaining Collector did not survive another encounter with both of them. Tymon gave it a resounding whack with his stick, sending it reeling into the nearest wall with a crash. Jedda grasped one of its hanging legs, and dragged it back as it sought to slip away from them, out of the door. After that, Tymon bashed the contraption to the floor, and continued to deal it blows until it gave a final coughing whirr and lay silent. In the pause that followed, the bark rain thundered loudly on the roof.
‘Let’s do it,’ said Tymon, hurrying towards the tubes that linked Samiha to the green-lit machine. ‘Let’s wake her up. All we need to do is disconnect her —’
He never finished his phrase, for at that instant something huge fell on the hall roof with a deafening crash, and the green lights in the alcove went out.
The World Tree shook and groaned as the spark of life at its heart ebbed away. The tremors in the Oracle’s cavern extended for miles, the vibrations shuddering up the network of roots and causing the flanks of the Tree to quake. The South Canopy, already weakened by old age, decay, constant mining of its corewood and finally the Saint’s blast-cannons, could not take the strain; one by one, the massive branches that had held up the Lantrian leaf-table for so many centuries succumbed to the stress. The great southern sisters to the mining limb of Chal began to show small fractures, then wider cracks. Gaping fissures opened at their bases, and one by one they tipped, toppled and finally crashed down on the watery plain. The Tree was too vast for the southern disaster to cause significant damage outside a radius of about a hundred miles, but the vibrations of the dying canopy were felt everywhere, echoing dimly through the human world above.
The tremors could be detected as far away as Farhang. In the refugee camp five miles from the Freehold, the young Grafters emerged from their trance to find the bark shivering beneath them. Halas, Gardan and the other evacuees, who had safely reached the camp and were watching and cheering from the twig-thickets as the air-chariots doubled back for yet another assault on the Argosian fleet, fell silent, then and glanced at one another, frowning. Gardan reached up in anxiety to feel a trembling twig-shaft beside her; Galliano, pacing impatiently outside the Focals’ tent, stopped short, then lay down flat on his stomach before the astonished eyes of Adhama Sing, his ear pressed to the bark. And on the admiral’s ship, as the drums of the fleet began to sound the signal for a tactical retreat, Pumble clutched the deck-rail and most particularly his collar, as a sudden and powerful gale from the south threatened to rip away that final shard of dignity.
In Argos city, slightly closer to the epicentre of the disaster, buildings shook and a few of the new sap-panes in the windows of the College burst from their hardwood frames. The Saint, celebrating the recent Lantrian victories with his colleagues in the state banqueting hall, found himself showered with shards of dried Tree-gum even as he raised his goblet in a toast to himself. Nothing further happened in the College, but an uneasy silence fell over the company and the Fathers paused, listening to the echoes of the disaster. From outside the seminary, in the direction of the trunk, came a dim crashing and splintering sound. It was followed by a babble of shocked voices, then wails of dismay. Without a word, Fallow rose from the table and marched out of the hall, pursued by a gaggle of whispering priests. They emerged onto the College quadrangle to join a crowd of seminary students and workers, all staring up at the sheer wall of bark over the city.
It was easy to see the source of their consternation. From the spot where a dark and sacred cleft had once marked the trunk, there now rose a plume of dust and nothing else. The entire Tree-rift had been erased: it had caved in, filled with fallen shards of bark and betrayed by a swift stroke from within. The Divine Mouth had closed.
21
‘Jedda?’ called Tymon, to the dust-filled hall.
He peered shakily over one of the huge grey blocks that had fallen from the roof of the Ancients’ building, crouching close to Samiha’s tank. The block had missed them both by inches as the roof caved in: the hall, it appeared, had finally been caught beneath one of the falling branches of the South Canopy. The central nave was obliterated, replaced by the massive flank of a Tree-limb. Hazy light and thick clouds of dust penetrated the gaping hole in the roof. Outside, the shards of bark continued to fall, a pattering grey rain. Tymon coughed through the dust as he stood up, gazing about him. He could hardly see in the thick air.
‘Jedda —’ he began again.
He was arrested by a tapping noise behind him, and whirled around to find that the figure in
the tank was moving. Samiha’s eyes were open and fixed on him, her hand fluttering urgently against the transparent side of the container. She was drowning, he thought in panic. Whatever the Collectors’ machines had done to keep her alive, they were no longer working, smashed to smithereens by the falling blocks.
‘Samiha!’ he exclaimed, desperately searching the container for a door as she struggled to free herself of the cumbersome tubes.
It was useless. He could see no obvious access to the tank. Faced with Samiha’s increasingly frantic struggles, he climbed on top of one of the nearest fallen blocks and heaved against the container with all his might. Slowly, excruciatingly, it tipped, teetered and finally fell over with a crash on the floor, the transparent material bursting open and spraying its contents in all directions.
And then he was beside Samiha, holding her dripping form entangled in tubes tight against him. He watched anxiously until she coughed and spat up the liquid that clogged her lungs, took a ragged breath, and opened her eyes once more.
‘Hello, my love,’ she said, a choked whisper.
‘Hello,’ he murmured. He could only gaze at her like a fool, drinking her in with his eyes, incapable of saying more or believing as yet in his good fortune.
‘Is this the World Below?’ asked Samiha, peering up at the ruined roof and the continuous rain of dust. The larger pieces of bark had ceased falling, but distant crashes still echoed over the ancient city, proof that the danger was not over.
It did not seem odd to him that she had guessed it. For all he knew, she had indeed walked here long ago, in another form, even as the Masters claimed. They had liberally mixed the truth in with their lies.
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