Briana closed her eyes for a moment. ‘A supply,’ she said.
‘Did you just ask your associates?’
‘All three thousand of them,’ Briana replied. ‘The great benefit of telepathy is that one is able to obtain information whenever one wishes. A psychic is never surprised.’ She reached the glass doors, opened them and stepped out onto the terrace. There she stopped dead. ‘Where did you get all this stuff?’
Maskelyne joined her. A small collection of Unmer trove lay spread across the flagstones, most of it located amongst potted plants and flower troughs, although he had set out many of the more useful pieces for disassembly on the stone breakfast table. ‘After so many months at sea,’ he said, ‘I find it refreshing to work outdoors.’
‘Work? Where did this trove come from?’
‘The palace storerooms.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘The Unmer won’t miss objects you’ve already confiscated. Most of it is simply junk, but there are a few pieces that may prove vital to my research.’
Briana simply stared at him.
‘The Unmer are able to manipulate Space and Time,’ Maskelyne explained. ‘To transfer energies across vast gulfs. I have been trying to determine how they accomplish this.’
‘You were supposed to remain locked in this suite,’ Briana said.
Maskelyne waved his hand irritably. ‘Yes, yes. My point is this: What we perceive as sorcery is merely a method of juggling entropy. The Unmer transmit energy and matter from one place to another, most likely from one universe to another, through some sort of aspacial conduit. The Unmer’s strength lies in their ability to plunder what I have chosen to call cosmic remnants.’
‘How did you get past the guards?’
Maskelyne sighed. ‘You’re not listening. Our present universe is merely the latest configuration of energy and matter formed within a never-ending cycle of cosmic inflation. Like the ripples formed beneath a dripping tap – as the outer circles fade they are replaced by new ones. If my—’
‘Did you bribe someone to bring all this equipment here?’
‘If my theory is correct, then . . .’ He paused and frowned at her. ‘Of course I bribed someone. When dealing with the Haurstaf, it is practically immoral not to bribe someone.’ He smiled thinly. ‘If my theory is correct, it means that certain aspects of Unmer sorcery are not only detrimental to our universe, but completely impossible without assistance from beyond our universe.’
She just looked at him.
‘Imagine a bathtub full of water,’ he said.
She continued to stare at him.
‘Now imagine there are two plugs in the bath, one at either end,’ he went on. ‘When we pull out both plugs, the water begins to drain through both openings at once. If the holes represent vast clusters of matter and the water represents the space between those clusters, then the flow of water represents the force of gravity.’ He glanced around the terrace, looking for something he could draw a diagram with, but there was nothing to hand. ‘In this analogy, the bathwater would flow out, leaving no space between the holes, no cosmos. But what is space? Is it tangible, like matter? Or does it merely represent a sea in which the potential for material interactions exists? What if, as the bath drained, the volume of water it contained did not diminish? What if the area of space between the holes actually stretches? If the holes remain unchanged, the distance between them must increase.’ He nodded. ‘So the universe expands.’
‘I really wish I hadn’t come here,’ Briana said.
Maskelyne walked over to the terrace balustrade and sat down. ‘Have you ever wondered how the Unmer came to possess the ability to remove matter, to turn flesh and stone into vacuum? This talent requires no device, no sorcerous ring or pendant.’ He shook his head. ‘It is inherent, and therefore like nothing else we have ever seen.’
‘It’s just a gift,’ Briana said. ‘Like telepathy.’
Maskelyne threw his hands up. ‘It is nothing like telepathy,’ he said. ‘Telepathy does not add or subtract anything from the universe. Look.’ He walked over to the table and picked up a partially disassembled gem lantern from among the clutter of machine parts and tools. ‘These burn for, say, a thousand years,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea how much energy that requires? It’s enough to blow a battleship to pieces, and it has to come from somewhere.’ Next he untied a burlap sack from the leg of the table and opened it. Three small concrete spheres floated up out of the bag and rose gently towards the sky. Maskelyne scooped them back into the bag before they drifted too high. ‘Air stones,’ he said, ‘or chariot ballast, or whatever name you want to give them. The repulsive force comes from somewhere.’ Next he snatched up a stoppered ichusae. ‘You recognize this, of course?’ He set the bottle down again when he saw fear light Briana’s eyes. ‘Ichusae introduce poisonous matter to our world, matter brought from somewhere else. You see? Most of what the Unmer create sucks matter or energy from somewhere and dumps it into our world.’
‘Void flies—’ Briana began.
‘Void flies are not created,’ Maskelyne cried. ‘Void flies are creatures which possess the same inherent ability the Unmer do. And that’s the key. Where did they suddenly appear from? What becomes of the matter they remove from our universe? Where does it go? There’s a balance in all of this. A trade.’
Briana frowned.
Maskelyne’s gaze travelled across the objects on the table. ‘The universe expands in all directions,’ he muttered. ‘Elemental particles of matter cool and cease to fluctuate. But space cannot exist between identical particles. As variance decreases, more and more particles must find themselves occupying the same point in the universe, regardless of how far apart they are. Vast swathes of the cosmos begin to gather in one place, a single, tiny place that exists almost everywhere at the same time. Unimaginable pressure builds, and builds, and builds, until eventually . . .’ He looked at her expectantly.
She shrugged.
Maskelyne felt deflated. ‘I can see you’re not taking this seriously,’ he said.
‘You weren’t brought here to study the cosmos at our expense, Mr Maskelyne.’
‘At your expense?’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Miss Marks, if my theory is correct, then it is very likely that there are still scraps of former universes adrift out there.’ He jabbed a finger at the sky. ‘Frozen, dying and utterly alien to anything we could imagine. If the Unmer have communicated with the inhabitants of one of these cosmic remnants and, indeed, have actively been shifting matter back and forth between here and there, then we need to consider any consequences that the subsequent enslavement of their race might have had.’
She sighed. ‘Go on.’
‘Our world is drowning,’ he said. ‘Whatever deal the Unmer made with the far side of the cosmos has evidently turned sour.’ He sighed. ‘I’m no merchant, but I know that when one party fails to adhere to a trade agreement, the other party gets angry.’
* * *
CHAPTER 16
PERTICA
Violent juddering woke Granger. He sat up abruptly, momentarily disorientated, then remembered where he was. Green light filtered through the windows of the deadship cabin, bathing the shelves of trove and Unmer experiments in a queer underwater luminance. Granger got up, wincing as his dry flesh cracked, and took a moment to work the numbness out of his arms and legs. It was freezing in here. His breath misted in the air before him. He wrapped a blanket around himself and shuffled over to the window.
Green ice floated upon
a green sea. Outside the window stretched a frozen expanse of the Mare Verdant, the brine littered with broken slabs of ice and great nebulous snow-dusted masses with facets as deep and dark as bottle glass. From the bow of the ironclad came a dull pounding sound as the ship smashed its way through more of the ice field. Granger took out a fur-lined jacket from the captain’s dressing room and forced his heavy joints into it as he stomped up the steps that led above deck.
It must have rained during the night. Fronds of clear ice crystals had formed on the metal tower in the centre of the deck and on the torn remnants of the spinnaker attached to it. The wind had blown them into crazy shapes. A sugaring of white snow crunched under Granger’s boots. He scooped some up and ate it as he paced the deck. Vast ice-fields lay ahead of the deadship, a glittering expanse of emerald and white. In her wake stretched a channel of dark green water where she had punched through the surface ice. Granger walked to the bow of the ship and scanned the horizon. Basalt cliffs rose out of the sea a league to the north, their storm-cracked aspects mortared with snow. Upon the edge of this landmass perched a single building, a drab and windowless cube supporting a vast steel tower on its roof.
A sense of dread seemed to roll down from that structure and creep into Granger’s bones. That building was the source of the deadship’s power and could only be its ultimate destination. The force that had steered the icebreaker towards his own wooden lifeboat, and then brought him inexorably north, must emanate from there. In order to gain control of this ship, he must disable that interference. He gazed up at the building for a long time, watching for signs of life, but saw only white flurries of snow blowing across the black and green.
Constant snapping and pounding noises came from the prow as the deadship smashed a channel through the ice. The air remained as cold and sharp as a knife edge. Granger rubbed his hands and stamped his boots upon the deck, trying to coax some feeling into his body. He spotted an old wharf, partially hidden behind the headland of a sheltered natural harbour. The ice was thinner here and bereft of snow, its surface etched where the frozen brine had cracked and reformed. The ironclad slowed as it drew near, until the whining from the ship’s tower suddenly stopped.
The ship coasted the final few yards and then bumped against the wharf. Silence fell over the deck, broken only by the hiss of the wind through frozen metal.
Trying to ignore the uneasy feeling in his guts, Granger hitched a canvas bag over his shoulder and, after weeks at sea, finally stepped onto dry land.
A stairway zigzagged from the wharf up into a deep cut in the cliff. Twisted iron railings bordered the steps in places, but many had sheared away and now lay at the bottom of the gully among tumbles of ice-fused rock. Granger edged his way upwards with one shoulder against the wall of the defile, testing each step before trusting his weight to it. Icicles overhung the trail in places, forming glassy passages. The wind keened like a grief-stricken child.
At the summit he paused to catch his breath. The air hurt his lungs. No other living thing was breathing this, and perhaps never had. Down below, the ironclad waited in that smashed green bay, as dark and empty as a coffin. To the north stretched a howling landscape of emerald and white, the snowfields sculpted by constant gales into scalloped ridges and dream-like shapes with razor-blade edges. From here Granger could see the transmitting station tower rising above a snowy bluff to the east. Perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, it was far larger than the one aboard the deadship, supporting a torus three times the size of its smaller twin. A faint whining sound came from its summit.
Granger’s boots sank into deep powder as he struggled up the bluff. At the summit he was rewarded with a clear view of the Unmer station. A square grey block with a huge round metal door, it occupied more than an acre of ground. Snow drifts engulfed its windward side, partially burying the whole structure. As Granger studied the landscape, he perceived other objects partly buried in the surrounding snow. Dragon armour and bones. Conquillas’s Revolution, it seemed, had reached even this distant place.
And yet this station continued to transmit power. The attackers had failed to shut it down.
The hinges had frozen solid, and it took considerable effort to pull that massive door open. Granger chipped away at the ice with his knife until, finally, it gave way. With a metal groan, the door swung open a few feet before lodging itself in snow. A dark tunnel lay behind, wide enough to drive a horse and carriage down. Granger took out his gem lantern and held it high. There were signs of violence. Black stains spattered the curved floor. The concrete had been scorched by dragonfire and heavily scarred by impacts from blades. A single thigh bone lay in a frozen puddle, and yet, strangely, he couldn’t see any other human remains.
Close fighting in here, several opponents.
Twenty paces further along, the passageway swelled into a spherical chamber lined by coils of copper wire. The humming sound was more intense here, the air noticeably warmer. Melt water had leaked in through the apex and collected in a shallow green pool in the hollow below. Granger stepped carefully around it. Several objects lay under the water – metal brackets or machine parts, all furred with verdigris. Two further openings led deeper into the station. He listened at each for a while, then lifted his gem lantern again and took the first passage.
This conduit took him to another wire-walled sphere where the passage branched again. Again, Granger chose the opening from which the humming noise seemed louder. He passed through four more of these junctions before he began to perceive a tremor running through the floor. It was accompanied by an uncomfortable tingling sensation in his fingertips. His gem lantern seemed brighter, too. In places he found round metal plaques set into the curving walls, each inset with a small clear lens. He passed four or five, before something about them began to bother him. When he found yet another, he stopped to inspect it more closely. As he lowered his eye to the lens at its centre, he glimpsed another eye withdrawing abruptly from the other side.
Granger shuddered and moved on.
Eventually, the concrete maze opened out into an enormous cylindrical space like the inside of a tower. Scores of other conduits led away from its base. The humming sound he had been following reached a fierce resonance here; he could feel it reverberating in his teeth and bones. Great mounds of trove covered the floor, some twenty or thirty feet high in places. Pistols and cannons and suits of armour lay among piles of wrecked war machines: arbalists and turtles and drop-forged rams. His gem lantern shone so brightly it illuminated the whole vast space from wall to wall. There were ballistic weapons and energy weapons, and countless burned and twisted metal pieces of indeterminable purpose – a bonfire of scrap and used weapons, of flanged tripods and serrated fins, with bursts of wire, glass shields, goggles, gauntlets and cannon barrels protruding like giant steel fingers. Upon a nearby mound lay an ancient sky chariot, heavily dented and fire-blackened, but seemingly intact. Granger’s gaze travelled up the walls, and higher still, to the ceiling far above, where similar mounds of wreckage had floated up and gathered there in sorcerous defiance of gravity.
He frowned. Had he been descending underground all this time? From the outside the building hadn’t seemed tall enough to contain a space this large.
Amidst all this trove, one area in the centre of the chamber had been left clear. Here a single stone pedestal supported a crystal as large as a man’s head. It was glowing brightly, radiating shafts of ever-moving light, like a lighthouse lantern. The humming noise seemed to emanate from its facets. Granger let his kitbag slide down from his shoulder to the floor, then tucked his seeing knife into his belt.
He wandered over to the nearest heap of trove and reached in to pull out a sword. But the instant his hand closed on the grip, something remarkable happened.
One moment he was alone, the next he was surrounded. Out of thin air they appeared – six men dressed in bulky Unmer furs, brutally thin, with howling red eyes and bri
ne-scorched skin. And every one of them was pulling a sword from the surrounding scrap.
Sorcery.
Granger swung his stolen blade up at the nearest figure, but his opponent parried instantly. The two blades clashed. Granger sensed movement all around him. He leaped back, and his opponent did likewise. And then Granger recognized him.
His opponent was the very image of himself, identical in every way, from the fur jacket he had taken from the deadship down to the sword he carried. Granger turned his head to examine the other five, and as he did so these five turned their heads in unison. Every one of them was him, and every one continued to mimic his every move. He lifted his sword, and the others lifted their swords. He lowered the sword again, watching as the simulacrums copied him. On their faces he saw six mirror images of his own startled expression. He dropped the sword . . .
. . . and the men vanished.
He picked up the sword again, and they reappeared.
A cheerful voice called out, ‘You found my Replicating Sword.’
Granger, and his six replicas, turned to see an old man standing in the corner of the chamber. He was short, stooped and grey of face, and he wore an old suit of mail several sizes too large for him. A simple tin crown sat low upon his brow, balanced above his prodigious nose and ears. Tufts of yellow hair clung to his head the way dead weeds remain clinging to a mountainside. If a man’s attitude to life leaves its mark in his face then this crooked figure had found much to smile about over the years. And he was smiling now, a huge smile that reached all the way from his lips to his honey-coloured eyes.
‘It’s designed to allow a warrior to fight multiple enemies at once,’ he said. ‘But controlling them is tricky. You have to think of multiple manoeuvres at the same time or the simulacrums just mimic you. I could never completely master it myself.’ He chuckled. ‘And I’ve got the scars to prove it.’
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