The woman coughed again. Her titanium-grey eyes were bright and joyful, even as she struggled for breath. There was something idiotic about her, Scorpio realised.
The armoured body started convulsing. Clavain kept hold of her head, his other hand still across her mouth.
‘Let her breathe,’ Khouri said.
He released the pressure across her mouth for an instant. The woman kept smiling, her eyes wide, unblinking. Something black squeezed between Clavain’s fingers, forcing its way through the gaps like some manifestation of demonic foulness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.
‘Live machinery,’ Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.
From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.
Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.
‘They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.’
Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.
‘I’ll try to lever it off,’ Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.
Clavain opened his eyes. ‘It won’t work.’
With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.
It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.
Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.
‘Scorp, pick it up.’
He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.
‘No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be careful: she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.’
‘I can’t do this, Nevil.’
‘You have to. It’s killing me.’
The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.
He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.
‘Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.’
‘I’ll kill you.’
‘No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.’ Clavain paused. ‘I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it. Now. Before I change my mind, or that stuff finds a short cut to my head.’
Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.
Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to the fabric of the sleeve.
He looked into Clavain’s face. ‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Scorp. Now. As a friend. Do it.’
Scorpio pushed the knife down. He felt no resistance as it ghosted through fabric, flesh and bone.
Half a second later the work was done. The severed hand - Scorpio had cut it off just above the wrist - dropped to the ice with a solid whack. With a moan Clavain slumped back against the wall, losing whatever strength he had mustered until then. He’d told Scorpio that he had blocked all pain signals, but some residual message must have reached his brain: either that or what Scorpio heard was a moan of desperate relief.
Jaccottet knelt down by Clavain, unhitching a medical kit from his belt. Clavain had been right: there was very little in the way of blood loss from the wound. He held the truncated forearm against his belly, pressing it tight, while Jaccottet prepared a dressing.
There was a rustle of movement from the hand. The black machines were detaching themselves, breaking free of the remaining flesh. They moved hesitantly, as if sapped of the energy they had drawn from the warmth of living bodies. The mass of cubes oozed away from the hand, slowed and then halted, becoming just another part of the dormant growth that filled the ship. The hand lay there, the flesh a contused landscape of recent bruises and older age spots, yet still largely intact save for the eroded stubs of the fingertips, which had been consumed down to the first joint.
Scorpio made the knife stop shivering and put it on the ground. ‘I’m sorry, Nevil.’
‘I’ve lost it once already,’ Clavain said. ‘It really doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m grateful that you did what you had to do.’ Then he leant back against the wall and closed his eyes for another few seconds. His breathing was sharply audible and irregular. It sounded like someone making inexpert saw cuts.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ Scorpio asked Clavain, eyeing the severed hand.
Clavain did not respond.
‘I don’t know enough about Conjoiners to say how much shock he can take,’ Jaccottet said, keeping his voice low, ‘but I know this man needs rest and a lot of it. He’s old, for a start, and no one’s been around to fine-tune all those machines in his blood. It might be hitting him a lot worse than we think.’
‘We have to move on,’ Khouri said.
‘She’s right,’ Clavain said, stirring again. ‘Here, someone help me to my feet. Losing a hand didn’t stop me last time; it won’t now.’
‘Wait a moment,’ Jaccottet said, finishing off the emergency dressing.
‘You need to stay here, Nevil,’ Scorpio said.
‘If I stay here, Scorp, I will die.’ Clavain groaned with the effort of trying to stand up on his own. ‘Help me, God damn you. Help me!’
Scorpio eased him to his feet. He stood unsteadily, still holding the bandaged stump against his belly.
‘I still think you’d be better off waiting here,’ Scorpio said.
‘Scorp, we’re all staring hypothermia in the face. If I can feel it, so can you. Right now the only thing that’s holding it off is adrenalin and movement. So I suggest we keep moving.’ Then Clavain reached down and picked up the knife from where Scorpio had put it down. He slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Glad I brought it with me now,’ he said.
Scorpio glanced down at the ground. ‘What about the hand?’ ‘Leave it. They can grow me a new one.’
They followed the draught of cold toward
s the front portion of Skade’s wrecked ship.
‘Is it me,’ Khouri said, ‘or has the music just changed?’
‘It’s changed,’ Clavain said. ‘But it’s still Bach.’
TWENTY
Hela, 2727
Rashmika watched the icejammer being winched down to the rolling ribbon of road. There was a scuff of ice as the skis touched the surface. On the icejammer’s roof, the two suited men unhitched the hooks and rode them up to the top of the winches, before being swung back on to the top of the caravan vehicle. Crozet’s tiny-looking vehicle bobbed and yawed alongside the caravan for several hundred metres, then allowed itself to be slowly overtaken by the rumbling procession. Rashmika watched until it was lost to view behind the grinding wheels of one of the machines.
She stepped back from the inclined viewing window. That was it, then: all her bridges burned. But her resolve to continue remained as strong as ever. She was going onwards, no matter what it took.
‘I see you’ve made your mind up, then.’
Rashmika turned from the window. The sound of Quaestor Jones’s voice shocked her: she had imagined herself alone.
The quaestor’s green pet cleaned its face with its one good forelimb, its tail wrapped tight as a tourniquet around his upper arm.
‘My mind didn’t need making up,’ she said.
‘I had hoped that the letter from your brother would knock some sense into your head. But it didn’t, and here you are. At least now we have a small treat for you.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Rashmika asked.
‘There’s been a slight change in our itinerary,’ he said. ‘We’ll be taking a little longer to make our rendezvous with the cathedrals than planned.’
‘Nothing serious has happened, I hope.’
‘We’ve already incurred delays that we can’t make up by following our usual route south. We had intended to traverse the Ginnungagap Rift near Gudbrand Crossing, then move south down the Hyrrokkin Trail until we reached the Way, where we’d meet the cathedrals. But that simply isn’t possible now, and in any case, there’s been a major icefall somewhere along the Hyrrokkin Pass. We don’t have the gear to shift it, not quickly, and the nearest caravan with ice-clearing equipment is stuck at Glum Junction, pinned down by a flash glacier. So we’ll have to take a short cut, if we aren’t to be even later.’
‘A short cut, Quaestor?’
‘We’re approaching the Ginnungagap Rift.’ He paused. ‘You know about the rift, of course. Everything has to cross it at some point.’
Rashmika visualised the laceration of the Rift, a deep sheer-sided ice canyon slicing diagonally across the equator. It was the largest geological feature on the planet, the first thing Quaiche had named on his approach.
‘I thought there was only one safe crossing,’ she said.
‘For the cathedrals, yes,’ he allowed. ‘The Way deviates a little to the north, where the walls of the Rift have been tiered in a zigzag fashion to allow the cathedrals to descend to the floor. It’s a laborious process, costs them days, and then they have to repeat the process climbing up the far side. They need a good head start on Haldora if they aren’t to slip behind. They call that route the Devil’s Staircase, and every cathedral master secretly dreads it. The descent is narrow and collapses aren’t uncommon. But we don’t have to take the Staircase: there’s another way across the Rift, you see. A cathedral can’t make it, but a caravan doesn’t weigh anywhere near as much as a cathedral.’
‘You’re talking about the bridge,’ Rashmika said, with a shiver of fear and anticipation.
‘You’ve seen it, then.’
‘Only in photos.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I think it looks beautiful,’ she said, ‘beautiful and delicate, like something blown from glass. Much too delicate for machines.’
‘We’ve crossed it before.’
‘But no one knows how much it can take.’
‘I think we can trust the scuttlers in that regard, wouldn’t you say? The experts say it’s been there for millions of years.’
‘They say a lot of things,’ Rashmika replied, ‘but we don’t know for sure how old it is, or who built it. It doesn’t look much like anything else the scuttlers left behind, does it? And we certainly don’t know that it was ever meant to be crossed.’
‘You seem unnaturally worried about what is - in all honesty - a technically simple manoeuvre, one that will save us many precious days. Might I ask why?’
‘Because I know what they call that crossing,’ she said. ‘Ginnungagap Rift is what Quaiche named the canyon, but they have another name for it, don’t they? Especially those who decide to cross the bridge. They call it Absolution Gap. They say you’d better be free from sin before you begin the crossing.’
‘But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?’
‘I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,’ Rashmika replied.
‘Well, you needn’t worry yourself about that. All you have to do is enjoy the view, just like the other pilgrims.’
‘I’m no pilgrim,’ she said.
The quaestor smiled and popped something into his pet’s mouth. ‘We’re all either pilgrims or martyrs. In my experience, it’s better to be a pilgrim.’
Ararat, 2675
Antoinette put on the goggles. The view through them was like a smoky counterpart of the real room, with red Canasian numerals tumbling in her right visual field. For a moment nothing else changed. The haphazard skeletal machine - the class-three apparition - continued to stand amid the discarded slurry of junk from which it had been birthed, one limb frozen in the act of tossing her the goggles.
‘Captain . . .’ she began.
But even as she spoke the apparition and its detritus were merging into the background, losing sharpness and contrast against the general clutter of the chamber. The goggles were not working perfectly, and in one square part of her visual field the skeletal machine remained unedited, but elsewhere it was vanishing like buildings into a wall of sea fog.
Antoinette did not like this. The machinery had not threatened her, but it troubled her not to have a good idea of where it was. She was reaching up for the goggles, ready to slip them off, when a voice buzzed in her ear.
‘Don’t. Keep them on. You need them to see me.’
‘Captain?’
‘I promise I won’t hurt you. Look.’
She looked. Something was emerging now, being slowly edited into her visual field. A human figure - utterly real, this time - was forming out of thin air. Antoinette took an involuntary step backwards, catching her torch against an obstruction and dropping it to the floor.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he told her. ‘This is what you came for, isn’t it?’
‘Right now I’m not sure,’ she breathed.
The human figure had stepped out of history. He wore a truly ancient space suit, a baggy, bulging affair of crinkled rust-orange fabric. His boots and thick-fingered gloves were clad in the same tawny material, ripped here and there to reveal a laminated mesh of underlying layers. He wore a dull silver belt festooned with numerous tools of unclear function. A rugged square box hung on the chest region of his suit, studded with chunky plastic-sealed controls large enough to be worked despite the handicap of the gloves. An even larger box sat on his back, rising above his neck. Moulded from bright red plastic, a thick ribbed hose dangled from the backpack over his left shoulder, its open end resting against the upper shelf of the chest-pack. The silver band of the suit’s neck ring was a complexity of locking mechanisms and black rubberised seals. Between the neck ring and the upper part of the suit were many unrecognisable logos and insignia.
He wore no helmet.
The Captain’s face looked too small for the suit. On his scalp - which appeared shaven - he wore a padded black and white cap veined with monitor wires. In the smoky light of the goggles she couldn’t guess at the shade of his skin. It was smooth, stretched tight over his cheekbones,
shadowed with a week’s growth of patchy black beard. He had very fine razor-cut eyebrows, which arched quizzically above wide-set, doglike eyes. She could see the whites of those eyes between the pupil and the lower eyelid. He had the kind of mouth - thin, straight, perfect for a certain superciliousness - that she might find either fascinating or untrustworthy, depending on her mood. He did not look like a man much inclined to small talk. Usually that was all right with Antoinette.
‘I brought this back,’ she said. She stooped down and picked up the helmet.
‘Give it to me.’
She moved to throw it.
‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Give it to me. Walk closer and hand it to me.’
‘I’m not sure I’m ready to do that,’ she said.
‘It’s called a gesture of mutual trust. You either do it or the conversation ends here. I’ve already said I won’t hurt you. Didn’t you believe me?’
She thought of the machinery that the goggles had edited out of her vision. Perhaps if she took them off, so that she saw the apparition as it really was . . .
‘Leave the goggles on. That’s also part of the deal.’
She took a step closer. It was clear that she had no choice.
‘Good. Now give me the helmet.’
Another step. Then one more. The Captain waited with his hands at his sides, his eyes encouraging her forwards.
‘I understand that you’re scared,’ he said. ‘That’s the point. If you weren’t frightened, there’d be no show of trust, would there?’
‘I’m just wondering what you’re getting out of this.’
‘I’m trusting you not to let me down. Now pass me the helmet.’ She held it out in front of her, as far as her arms would stretch, and the Captain reached out to take it from her. The goggles lagged slightly, so that a flicker of machinery was briefly visible as his arms moved. His gloved fingers closed around the helmet. She heard the rasp of metal on metal.
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