Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

by Henry Gee

  Chapter 21. Priest

   

  Gascony, France, Earth, March, 2032

   

  It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion.

  H. P. Lovecraft—The Rats in the Walls

   

  It had been six months of frenetic activity into which Jadis had poured her heart and soul. And finally, here they all were—Balthazar, Primrose, Faye, Eric, Mathilde, Domingo, Jack and herself—standing on what remained of the sward outside the cave at Souris Saint-Michel (or ‘SSM’ as it was now universally known among the field crew). The rock drillers were on station at the back wall, and about to make first contact. Jadis had painted a neat red cross on the precise place where, she thought, the sealing wall was at its thinnest.

  Much had changed. The immediate landscape around the cave mouth now gave the impression of cramped and coiling industry rather than bucolic calm. The car park on the lakeshore was, more often than not, busy with jeeps and trucks. The forest track had been widened and graded, allowing motor vehicles access to the site. Even so, what with the still-lingering snow and ever-present mud, a helicopter had to be used to bring in some of the bulkier items, such as the twenty-six-foot mobile home that Jack and Jadis would use as a site office and temporary quarters if needed.

  The compressor and generator for the rock drill stood close by on the back of a pickup, together with separate generator to drive a water pump, pulling water up from the lake to lay the dust created by the drilling; and a third generator to bring in power for tools, and for the racks of lights that would be needed to illuminate any voids beyond. A trailer bearing eight large cylindrical tanks of LPG supplied fuel for all of them. Cables and pipes snaked in and out of the cave through a tough polythene membrane that had been fixed over the entire entrance. Balthazar’s reaction at the transformation spoke for everyone. “If this is a mouse,” he said, “it will be a mouse that roars!”

  Not that there had been much doubt that there would be something to find. As soon as the dig at Saint-Rogatien had officially closed in September, Jadis had applied to the Institute for a small exploration grant to sound out the back wall. With the paper she was about to publish in Nature on de Bonnard’s lost artifacts (“Remillardian artifacts from the Souris Saint-Michel rock shelter, France,” by John A. Corstorphine, Balthazar Y. Desplaines, Domingo G. V. S. Sanchopanza and Jadis L. Markham), a grant was soon forthcoming, and by mid-November she’d established that the inside surface of the other side of the wall was more or less parabolic in shape, the apex—marking the thinnest part of the wall—about a meter above ground level on the hither side. The signals had been clear. Twenty centimeters beyond the red cross she’d marked, give or take a couple of centimeters, was thin air.

  And not a moment too soon. The day after the first sounding results came in, all work had to be suspended—literally, lashed to the decks—before an Atlantic gale of demonic ferocity. They had been used to the vagaries of the Gascon weather, but this storm was the sternest they’d yet faced, and indeed worse than anyone could remember. While still in full force, the wind veered to the northeast, and with it came a blizzard that cut off remoter villages for many days, burying livestock and stranding motorists.

  After a week of quite infernal battering, in which the dig crew had barricaded themselves inside the shuttered farmhouse, enduring power outages that lasted days at a stretch, the gale suddenly dropped, leaving a panorama of icy blue and white. Jadis remembered the day when they’d finally been brave enough to open the kitchen door, and how Fairbanks had bounded out to frolic in the snow, bulldozing the drifts with his nose and coming up with tiny white pyramids on its end. Nobody had seen Horrible, the cat, at all for the entire duration of the storm, until, a day after it ended, she was seen picking her way across the snowbound yard, shaking each paw in evident disapproval at the uncomfortable wet whiteness that had landed without leave on her territory, stirring her from her accustomed winter state of inept repose—and dragging the mangled corpse of something or another along in her jaws, spotting the clear, smooth snow with drops of red-black blood.

  The storm left human casualties in its wake, too, including the priest at Saint-Rogatien, who had been returning to the church after pastoral visits when a loose slate from above, lifted by the gale-force wind, scythed downwards and sliced open his jugular vein. Even this was not the first casualty in the commune: new graves sprang up under the yews on the edge of the cliff as elderly people succumbed to falls, or simply to the severe cold.

  Two weeks before Christmas, things had eased sufficiently for Jack to get away on a much-delayed trip to the Institute in Cambridge, to finalize plans for the upcoming field season. Jadis was overjoyed to hear him, while they were washing up after supper one evening, declare that this would be his last trip away for the foreseeable future. “SSM should produce enough to keep us both busy for a while,” he’d said. “So I am yours to command.”

  “I can think of… ooh… all sorts of things you can do for me,” she’d laughed, flicking him smartly on the backside with the wet tea towel, after which they’d chased each other round and round the kitchen table, suds flying, Fairbanks leaping and barking to join in this entertaining new game.

  The wintry landscape inspired Jadis to do something special for Christmas, so with Jack away, she decided, the last Saturday afternoon before Christmas, to go to the bird market at Seissan in search of a goose. Domingo volunteered to come along for the ride. He had been looking pensive: he clearly had something to tell her.

  Jadis was fascinated by the Gascon devotion to poultry, and in particular to its organized dismemberment. The market hall, a large covered square about thirty meters on a side, was crammed with rows and rows of stalls, all devoted to poultry, the position of each row giving a clue to the state of butchery of the products to be found therein. The first row, as you walked in, had live poultry—baskets of chickens, ducks and geese, and cheeping day-old chicks.

  The second row had much the same poultry, only dead.

  The third and subsequent rows exhibited birds progressively plucked, beheaded, dressed, quartered, filleted and preserved, so that the stalls in the very last row showed only the last stages in the process, the final apotheosis and zenith of Gascon cuisine—jars of pâté, confits and foie gras. Jadis knew that some of it was cruel, but she was always lost in admiration at the industry of it, and relished the smells, noise and bustle of French market life. She realized how much she loved it, and hoped that none of it would ever change.

  Domingo helped her choose a couple of jars of confits de canard, but to their surprise, one could not simply buy a table goose in the bird market, most geese having been bred especially for their livers, rather than for their corpses in general. However, a tour of butchers nearby produced a simply enormous goose—plucked, beheaded and ready to roast. Domingo carried it to the jeep. As they loaded it into the trunk, Jadis looked at him, noting his expression of distracted, brooding concern. She went up to him, put a hand on his immense barrel chest (clothed, as ever, and incongruously given the weather, in a Hawai’ian shirt of lysergic vividness).

  “Domingo, what is it?”

  “Might I treat you to a coffee?” he replied, “and I shall reveal all.”

  They sat a very small table in a sports bar opposite the market (not that any table looked large when Domingo sat next to it), their hands warming round steaming grand-crèmes. The bar was full of people and pre-Christmas chatter, the windows fogged with the heat of the customers and the steam rising from their meals and drinks.

  Most of the attention seemed focused on the TV monitor above the bar. This was switched to English Premiership football where the hitherto unassailable might of Brighton and Hove Albion was being pummeled into the dust by underdogs Chelsea. There were many close-ups of the hopeless anguish that creased the handsome face of Albion’s manager, Sir David Beck
ham, each time another goal thundered into the Albion net. The author of most of these was Honoré N’Dour, Chelsea’s recent star signing from Toulouse—explaining the local interest and the frequent cheers from the bar, interpolated with calls of “vive Honoré!,” “à bas Becks!” and (which made Domingo smile) “Albion perfide!”

  “What is David wearing?” asked Jadis, incredulously. Domingo peered at the screen.

  “It looks like a designer frock,” he said, “and so, very soon, shall I be.” He gave Jadis his best expression of unfathomable knowingness, the bright glints in his eyes betraying it, as ever, with the promise of puckish mischief. Jadis was even more incredulous.

  “No, dear Jadis—I’m not going to run away to the Stade de France, nor venture on to the catwalk”—the mental image of Domingo modeling designer dresses made Jadis laugh—“but I do have to go. I have, at last, received my calling. I very much regret that I shall have to leave our happy band, at least as a full-time participant.”

  He took Jadis’ slim hands in his own vast paws. She felt a mixture of emotions: joy at his news, and sorrow that this wonderful man, who had become almost indispensable, would have to leave for pastures new, just as they were on the verge of new discoveries.

  “Don’t be sad,” he said. “I won’t be too far away. What with the somewhat… er… abrupt gathering-in of my brother priest at Saint-Rogatien, and with the season of Advent well advanced, I took my chance. The authorities have agreed that I can take over at Saint-Rogatien straight away. And as for designer frocks, I now have vestments—I had to have a special fitting!” He grinned, but his face turned serious again: “I now have much to prepare for the community, much to organize. I shall, of course, be moving from my digs at the farmhouse, which you’ve so generously provided these few years past, as there is a small house that goes with the position. This implies that I won’t be able to come to SSM very often, but I shall certainly be there as often as my duties allow—if you’ll have me.”

  “Oh, Domingo—of course! You’ll always be welcome. Always! You’re—well, you’re part of the family.”

  Jadis would never be able to articulate how Domingo, with his steadfastness, reliability and ready wit, had been part of her own recovery, even had she wanted to tell him.

  As for Domingo, he was happier at this news than he thought he ever could be. Up until his arrival at Saint-Rogatien, his life had been dark and troubled, and yet all inquiries as to his history had been met with nothing more than the enigmatic toothy smile and a change of subject. Nobody was even sure how old he was (he was, in fact, the same age as Jack). But only he and the Merciful Father knew what he had endured.

  As it was, Le Dig had been a haven, a retreat, and Jack and Jadis had become almost as foster parents to him. Jadis would have been surprised to learn (and probably a little embarrassed) that she, especially, had always been in his prayers, and had assumed in his private pantheon a place close to that of the Holy Mother herself.

  He experienced a sense of unutterable happiness and gratitude that Jack, Jadis and all the crew came to help him celebrate his first Midnight Mass at Saint-Rogatien, on Christmas Eve—and to invite him home for their reveillon.

  And here he was now, with the rest of them, wearing his most migraine-inducing shirt, standing bare-armed and open-necked in the drizzle of a raw March morning. A shout came from inside the cave, and a few people made their way out through the slit in the heavy door membrane.

  The drilling was about to start.

  When it began, the noise was fearful, only slightly dulled by the polythene sheeting. What the men inside must be enduring, Jadis could hardly imagine. Even with face masks and ear defenders, the yammer and thud of a rock drill in a confined space as it made its way through twenty centimeters of limestone was incredible. But in five minutes, it was all over. The crew emerged, covered in dust and filthy water, looking for all the world like South African diamond miners emerging from a twelve-hour shift.

  “We’re through,” the foreman said. “Come and see!”

  It was mid-afternoon by the time the drill crew had packed up and gone, and the contractors had returned for the water pump. Peace reigned once more. Jadis’ first sight of the cave after the breach was a damp, reddish puddle in the cave entrance, just beyond the membrane, the floor climbing up towards the back wall. This looked quite different from the surface that Jadis had first seen, nine months earlier. It was milky white, its normally dirty pinkish-grey colour bleached by the harsh glare from the racks of powerful halogen lamps mounted on stands. The hole in the wall made a sharp contrast with the general whiteness, a ragged circle of blackness about forty centimeters across, the size of a small trapdoor, and a meter off the ground.

  “Nobody’s looked through yet, Jadis,” said Primrose: “Director’s prerogative!”

  Jadis smiled, took a torch, and peered through the breach. Quite suddenly, she was seized with panic. What lurked behind the wall? A monster from Tartarus that would bite her head off? At first she could not quite work out what her beam illuminated, but it soon became clear that it was a smooth, backward continuation of the cave, narrowing after three or four meters into a tunnel. The tunnel was not the irregular fissure one might have expected in a natural cave, nor even a rough passage, but a more or less symmetrical structure, tubular, with a diameter of two meters or so, and with a flattened floor. It looked like the kind of tunnel that two people could walk down in comfort, as far from an awkward, sinuous pothole as might be imagined. As far as she could tell it went directly into the side of the hill for as far as her beam could penetrate.

  In later life she was often called on—by journalists, especially—to recapture this moment. But she could not. She had been stupefied. With surprise? With anticlimax? She could not tell. Of course, she’d expected something—after all, they knew that the false wall in the cave had been artificial, so the tunnel behind it was likely to have been modified, too, presumably by the same people. Her earnest hope was to find some sign of the makers of the Remillardian artefacts, and with them, the builders of the hill of Saint-Rogatien, and a dozen other, similar structures Jack had since found all over Gascony and Languedoc. But the tunnel, as it was, was bare and featureless.

  All she knew at this point was that the tunnel had to have been bored at least forty-five thousand years ago, for that was the best date for the emplacement of the flowstone in the wall. No doubts, this time, about the age: accelerator mass-spectrometry dates on tiny flecks of charcoal buried in the wall, and uranium-thorium dates of small samples of rock material drilled from the wall itself, had confirmed this beyond all doubt.

  She pulled her head out. “Well, we’re in,” she said, exhaling. Until then, she hadn’t realized that she’d been holding her breath. “Let’s make a bigger hole tomorrow, so we can explore. Let’s meet here at—say—ten a.m.?”

  The team drove away in the farmhouse jeeps: except for Domingo, shoehorned into his newly acquired second-hand pink-and-purple-Paisley Citroën 2CV which, he said, he didn’t so much as drive, as wear. (“Think of it as a motorized aloha shirt,” he’d said.) Jack and Jadis were to stay on site, in the mobile home, at least for the first few nights, just to keep watch. Primrose and Faye were to take on the next shift, next week.

  After they’d waved the crew down the track, Jack made tea in the tiny kitchenette while, not a meter away in the sitting area, Jadis made a play of reviewing a sheaf of official site documents: permits, contracts and so on. But when Jack found her, sitting quite still in a pool of light, she was clearly miles away. He chose not to disturb her.

  Jadis flung open the mobile home’s flimsy door on a bright, fine morning, the close drizzle of the previous day quite gone, the weather having lifted to reveal bright Spring sunshine and birdsong. By the time the rest of the crew arrived, she and Jack had had coffee on the go, and invited them all in to discuss strategy. Domingo had sent his apologies (“duties on a higher plane,” he’d explained) but promised to vis
it the farmhouse later and walk Fairbanks, who, with the rest of the crew increasingly preoccupied with SSM, was coming to enjoy accompanying Father Domingo on his parochial rounds.

  That left Primrose, Faye, Eric and Mathilde, and it suddenly occurred to Jadis that they’d paired up into two couples.

  She’d known about Eric and Mathilde from the way Mathilde flushed as red as a traffic signal every time Eric turned up at Le Dig. She’d been doing this for ages, except that Eric hadn’t seemed to pay any attention. But now, as they walked up to the caravan, they were trying very hard not to hold hands, or even look at each other, and patently not succeeding.

  Primrose and Faye, on the other hand, did nothing to avoid each others’ gaze, and couldn’t help bursting into fits of giggles any time they made eye contact, as if they were a pair of twelve-year-olds at the back of the class sharing secrets about boys. But they’d had more serious moments when, each seemingly lost in her own thoughts, held hands, subconsciously reaching out to the other, oblivious to anyone who might notice.

  Jadis was almost sure Jack hadn’t grasped any of these undercurrents, but she thought it touching—and mused on the things people got up to in and around the farmhouse when she and Jack were away. She had no reason to complain, or even mention it, but it did make her feel rather old. Responsible. Like a parent.

  The crew was as excited as a sports team about to run into the field for the crucial fixture that would win the trophy—or lose it. After coffee and croissants (brought by Faye from the boulangerie in Saint-Rogatien) they strapped on their backpacks, which they’d filled with anything they felt they might need, for all that none of them knew what they might encounter on this, their first scouting trip. Mathilde had raided the farmhouse medical kit, while Faye—a keen mountaineer and sometime spelunker—had brought along several coils of nylon rope, some of which were already festooned with assorted climbing bric-a-brac that none of the rest apart from Primrose could name. All had geological hammers, digital cameras, spare battery packs, waterproofs, sweaters, gloves, a small amount of food and water, and each bore a yellow miner’s helmet adorned with a large headlamp.

  Once inside the cave—the atmosphere foggy with adrenaline and expectation—it had taken only a few blows from Jack’s rock hammer to make the hole left by the rock drill big enough for them to crawl through, one by one, without extravagant discomfort. Once on the other side—a drop of more than a meter, the level on the hither side of the cave having been raised by the backfill from de Bonnard’s last dig—they stood in a small huddle, switching on their headlamps so that they became a small, nervous cloud of nodding fireflies in the gloom.

  It was decided that Faye, who’d had most experience of underground exploration, would be the team leader for the day. “Everyone stick together,” she said. “There are six of us. If you can’t count another five lamps at any time, just stay put, and holler!”

  And so they started, carefully pacing along the tunnel, two by two, like Noah’s animals had in their own epic journey into the unknown, long ago—Faye and Primrose, Eric and Mathilde, with Jack and Jadis bringing up the rear.

  The solemnity of the occasion had blanketed their excited chatter into silence. To Jadis it had seemed almost sacred, given the anticipation, and despite her own indifference to religion she had longed for Domingo to have been there, offering some kind of blessing: permission, almost, to go forth. As they tramped along the passage—smooth, and, the further they got from the entrance, increasingly dry and dust-free—Jadis became conscious of its airlessness. There was air, but it was static, stale, like the air trapped inside a rarely used museum storeroom. It was also very cold, and she was glad of her synthetic fleece and gloves. There was nothing to see apart from the sweeping beams of their own headlights, illuminating near-featureless stretches of wall—white with cool, glistening limestone, but not quite smooth—like the whitewashed roughcast walls of a seaside cottage.

  The passage seemed to continue forever in a dead straight line, although after a kilometer or so it began to dip downwards, at first very gently, but after another few hundred meters it became much steeper, the floor puckering into treacherous ruts and ridges, which, after they had clambered over a few of them, they began to think of as very worn steps—steps for giants.

  By the time they had reached the bottom of the staircase and the passage had resumed its smooth, gently downward grade, they were cold and exhausted, as if they’d just scrambled down a frozen waterfall. Faye called them all into a huddle, and they decided to stop for a snack, and to take stock. Faye looked at her wrist logger.

  “We’ve been down for forty minutes, and have covered three kilometers in a direct line from the cave mouth,” she said. Expressions of shock and disbelief. “I know, I know, seems like we’ve been down here forever.”

  “I wonder how much longer we’ll go before… before…” This from Eric. They sat, eating chocolate and dried apricots, the sound of self-conscious chewing punctuating the atmosphere of silence and thought. They hadn’t brought any sleeping gear—this was strictly a day trip, reconnaissance on the fly, not a full-scale hike. But when would they decide to turn back? And what were they expecting to find? The cave, this long passage, was entirely unlike anything that anyone had seen before, for all that it had (so far) turned up very few surprises.

  “Okay,” continued Faye. It’s now a quarter after eleven. I vote that we carry on until—say—one o’clock, and after that, we turn back—whatever happens. Jadis?”

  “Agreed,” Jadis nodded. It was hard holding a council when you couldn’t see anyone else’s eyes, all lost in the impenetrable shadows cast by the brims beneath their headlights.

  “How much have we dropped?” asked Jack. Faye looked again at her logger.

  “About thirty-five meters from the cave mouth. Of course, most of that was in the staircase behind us. Just a thought—we ought to leave a little extra time for climbing back. Me and Primrose might have to climb up first and lay some guide ropes. That should put our start-back time to, oh, let’s say twelve-thirty, tops. Agreed?” A general chorus of nods, after which they packed up their litter, got stiffly to their feet, and plodded on.

  After another few hundred meters the passage began to narrow, imperceptibly at first, but it wasn’t long before they found they were marching single file. This allowed Jadis to take a closer look at the walls, which now, more than ever, looked as if they had been artificially chiseled and shaped. The ceiling, rather than being a simple rough arch between two ill-defined walls, now looked as if it had been squared off, making the walls on either side distinct from the ceiling itself, and giving the passage more of a box-section profile.

  It was this, more than anything else, that forced Jadis to realize the implications of what they had found. What with all the years at Le Dig, and Jack’s researches before that, she had become inured to antiquity, taking it for granted. The working currency of all who venture into the depths before history, where the skein of written record breaks and fades altogether, is time, measured in thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. And yet few stop to consider what these intervals of time really mean in terms of the scale of human lives.

  The world at large had been stunned by the implications of Le Dig: that there was a civilization in Europe that was at its height hundreds of thousands of years ago. Jadis, at the epicenter of discovery, was quite used to it, or so she thought, swapping talk of tens or hundreds of millennia with other professionals as casually as if she’d been discussing the price of fish with a market stallholder. In any case, the bulk of her life was less scientific than administrative, filled with the minutiae of directing the dig on a day-to-day basis.

  When Jadis did stop to think about the meaning of it all, and to chat about it with Jack—and, lately, Domingo—she felt nothing so much as frustration. The megalith at Saint-Rogatien was really only a giant midden, a huge pile of backfill. It had been an artificial structure, for sure, but it had re
vealed, ultimately, as much about its makers as a well-rotted garden compost heap might of the dreams and desires of the gardener that made it. The few artifacts she’d described were teasing, only deepening the mystery.

  But when she looked up, at the neatly chiseled cornicing above, it struck her quite suddenly that here was a sign of a maker and a mark, creating a recognizable structure for a purpose. The purpose of the megalith at Saint-Rogatien was unknowable—of the artifacts she’d discovered and described, perhaps hardly less. And yet here in this structure, these tunnel walls, was a sign, speaking through ages too great to imagine, of intelligence, and what’s more, intelligence that could be interpreted. The sign said ‘follow me’. To what end, she could not guess.

  Lost in reverie, and looking upward more than forward, she noticed that although the passage remained the same width, the ceiling was getting higher and higher until it was entirely lost, the beam of her headlight disappearing into shadow. This was more than a little disorienting, and she felt herself becoming light-headed. She began to wonder whether she might soon have to make way for a white rabbit hurrying past, or come across a glass table bearing a small bottle labeled ‘Drink Me’. At that moment she realized that she was at the back of the file, and that the rest of the team, even Jack, had moved on ahead. Snapping back to reality, she was just about to raise her pace when she heard, a little way ahead, a male voice—she thought it must have been Eric—shout “whoa!”

  She scrambled forwards, afraid of what she might encounter, and as she did so the passage widened suddenly, the walls falling away on either side, running into a platform whose width could not be guessed, its edges lost in darkness. Ahead of her were five figures, heads haloed by their lights, standing at what appeared to be the brink of a precipice, the edge of which stretched on either side further than she could see. She joined them, noticing that the air seemed cooler, and looked into the void beyond. What she saw made her feel almost inconceivably small, no more than a mote, prey to the fortunes of the whims and the winds of the world.

  She had sufficient presence of mind to notice that the person standing next to her was Jack. She clasped his hand, like a small child suddenly confronted by a vision of vastness beyond experience or imagining. Hers was met by a grasp that was firm, and yet trembling.

  The view was, initially, an immeasurable and utterly black void. If there were an end to it, or a bottom to the cliff on whose edge they now perched, their headlights were far too weak to illuminate it. But as the beams swayed to and fro, they caught flashes, here and there, of what looked like structures in the void—an edge, a corner, but no more than hints. It was then that Mathilde spoke.

  “Has anybody noticed how the air in here is fresher than in the tunnel?”

  Several agreed. Jadis noticed that despite the volume in which they found themselves, Mathilde’s voice seemed close, intimate—the space was so enormous that voices died before reaching any surface whence they might be reflected. There were no echoes.

  “Yes, there could even be a very slight… breeze,” added Eric. They all stretched upwards, noses in the air, and had anyone been able to see them, they would have looked like nothing so much as a row of meerkats which, having risen from their burrow, stand up to sniff the air. “But where… what…?”

  “I think that there must be ventilation shafts in the roof of the cave, far above, leading to the surface,” said Mathilde. “And if there is air, there might also be light. Very faint, it’s true, but who knows? Perhaps enough to see more than we can with these headlights—and with our cameras, we can always enhance any images we get, even if shot in complete darkness.”

  “Hell, yeah,” said Faye. “We can use ultra-long exposures. It’s not as if we’re trying to shoot anything that’s moving…”

  “Faye, Don’t!” said Primrose, giggling nervously. “This place is spooky enough as it is.”

  Everyone agreed that it was a good idea, and they all took out their cameras. It was harder, however, to persuade everyone to turn out their headlights. They agreed to do it in sequence, along the line. Jadis was last. She did not show it, but felt the first wave of that species of terror, the primal fear of the dark that petrifies small children whose knowledge of the world extends hardly further than their mother’s warmth, and certainly no further than the front door.

  The lights went off along the line—flash, flash, Eric, Mathilde—she saw their afterimages as red glows, dying—flash, flash, there go Faye and Primrose, but as Jack extinguished his light—flash—he held her right hand. She would not be alone in the dark. And so, with one last flash, she twisted the knurled rubber ring round the outside of her headlamp bulb and they were all plunged into heart-stopping blackness. It was like nothing she had ever experienced. As if she’d been switched off like a bulb herself, she instantly lost all sense of space and time.

  What most people call darkness barely deserves the name. The darkness of cities is no darker than a dim, orange glow of street lights far away. Even in isolated, lightless country lanes, there is still some glow from the sky, the stars and the moon. Human beings have grown up with light, and so, to them, darkness is by its very nature inhuman. Only cavers ever experience darkness in its totality, the darkness that existed before humanity, and which was one of the very first casualties of his evolution. And the darkness that now enveloped Jadis was complete, darker even than death that still has the memory of light: as dark as inexistence, a state that memory and light and time and human consciousness have yet to penetrate. Without Jack’s fingers as a lifeline to reality, she wondered if she’d ever be able to climb out of that bottomless pit.

  And yet, as she forced her eyes to stay open (assuming that they were open), and holding on to Jack’s fingers, she began to experience a new sensation. Mathilde had been right: her eyes were slowly accommodating to the darkness, even here, and as she looked out into the void, she became aware of a panorama slowly, very slowly, creeping into view. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, so deprived of light that they had started to create their own pictures to compensate. And yet the image firmed and grew.

  And it was this. Hardly brighter than pitch, and cast in shades of charcoal grey, what she saw before her feet was a city.

  The crew stood on a ledge, unguessably high above the western rim of a bowl that stretched ahead, and to the right and left, further than their straining eyes could see. The bowl was absolutely full of jumbled structures—polyhedra, cubes, cylinders, indeed buildings (they had to be buildings) of all shapes and many different sizes. Although it was very difficult to get any sense of scale, many of the buildings were very large indeed, and would have dwarfed anything since created by Man. Straight ahead of them, and three kilometers away (as they later discovered) stood a pyramid, towering over all, whose apex must have stood as high as they were now. This was a city that had lived and died before the Aurignacians were painting their first pictures, carving their own Venuses, and imagining themselves the victors in a strange, wonderful and conveniently unpopulated new land, in which tales of giants and their works were fit only for old women to burble to infants.

  Well, how wrong they were, thought Jadis—and how foolish we were ever to have believed them. She wondered what Domingo would have made of it.

  She had the strangest feeling that he would not have been at all surprised.