Outside, the rise and fall sound of the alert siren wove the air into an urgent chill. Torada’s guard, Jago, was waiting for her, his black face above the leather mask that covered his jaw and throat set in an expression grim enough to turn her to stone. He didn’t ask questions, but hefted her bag and lifted her on to the champing horse he’d brought. They rode together through the empty streets at a clattering canter broken by thumping as they moved on to the grassed tracks where they could. From windows an assortment of faces peered out at them as they took one turn after another down the hill to the stem elevation station where they stopped and she slid down before she could be moved. Jago came after her, weapons drawn.
The doors into the machine room swung open silently on their hinges and closed after them. Now the alert was replaced by a resonant hum of power moving through metal and crystal filaments. Isabeau moved forward to lead the way along the corridors that led to the control stations for the elevators. At the first station, she entered to find three men garbed in the dark blue and silver of the engineering guild arguing ferociously among themselves, one of them brandishing a book, another gesticulating at the panels. They didn’t notice her entry but they turned as one when Jago passed through the door, having to turn slightly sideways to do so, his shoulders and spears both briefly a liability.
‘Gentlemen,’ Isabeau said into the moment of silence that hung around them, the suspense of it nearly a physical pressure on her head. ‘Are the cars at their base positions, cargo offloaded, passengers clear?’ She could see from their faces that they had been arguing about her – their expressions varied from outraged to resentful and points in between.
The one with the greyest hair, set in something like a cross between a bush and a bonnet, was the only one to speak, though she felt he summed up their feeling adequately. ‘But she’s so young. This is ridiculous. Being ordered around by a child!’
Isabeau turned to Jago, towering behind her right shoulder, the sudden sweat smell of him in the confined space almost alarming. ‘Can we cut their heads off for treason?’
The huge man gave her a glance over the top of his mask, which, now she noticed it, did make him look as if he had been muzzled. He shoved past her as delicately as possible in the circumstances and punched the only one without spectacles. As he straightened up the other two were already moving hastily towards their stations, leaving a free spot between them which Isabeau took herself with a small, ‘Thank you,’ as she stepped over the unconscious form of the unlucky good-sighted engineer.
‘Cars are stowed,’ she said with satisfaction after a further few minutes of busy silent industry had passed. ‘Lockout track power below.’
‘Track power decoupled!’ came the reply from the speaker in her desk. The tension in the voice was enough to let her know that nobody down there had an inkling of what was about to happen next. In theory, they did. In practice nobody had moved this machinery for hundreds of years and several million tons was about to descend on their heads. She was about to make the magical flower stem of Glimshard shrink down to nothing.
A man who had not criticised her looked across to her, whispering shakily, ‘Do you know what will happen when the raft reaches the floor and the power isn’t required any more?’
‘No,’ Isabeau said. Power engineering on this scale was nothing that Glimshard engineers knew. As far as she was aware nobody knew the true physics of it, it was simply something that had been used time out of mind and mostly this seemed adequate though the worry here was not without precedence. Large-scale power operations had been known to go wrong in the past. Entire districts of some cities had been blown to smithereens. To her understanding, the flow of particles in the tides that made up the aether should simply stop without a problem once the conduit transmission was closed but why this should be was something for theoreticians to work out. She felt, in her bones, they were good, and that was enough for her. If they blew up she would simply consider it an early explosion of the many more about to arrive with the ballistas from the approaching army, supposing she survived it. She pushed the notion aside and followed the sequences she had memorised from the book. ‘Initiating descent of the viewing deck. Maintain monitoring of gravitation tolerances and disc balance.’ She wondered what gravitation tolerance was, but there was a symbol for it and readouts, and for the time being that was all that she needed.
For a moment there was silence and they all looked at the instruments and each other, then with a crack and a rumble a tremor went through the ground. Vibrations and echoes of the movement sounded through the hollow tubes of the elevator shafts and caught up resonances from other parts of the plating that the viewing deck was made of – reports of stress that Isabeau listened to with her ears trying desperately to read signs in the sounds. To non-engineers it would have been frightening and to her it was disturbing, though she was loath to admit it. She found her hands on the instrument panel, holding it rather than doing anything. Then there was a sharp crack, several rapid retorts and a much more violent tremor that had them all splay-legged as they made to keep their balance. Rumbling and booming noises built up rapidly into a storm of sound all around them. Thundering crashes from various distances led her to suspect that some of the less stable buildings of the high city had already begun to fail. She stared at the readouts, forcing the numbers to change from meaningless signs to information. Graphs of oscillations skipped around. Warnings of various kinds flashed. Her hands moved and did things she barely understood before doing. Behind her she heard Jago hissing his dislike of the situation. To her left and right both men cursed and hammered at their instruments with panicked fingers. She looked at the clock. Only seconds had passed.
‘Something’s wrong. D-station Ground has not released the dampers,’ the older of the two, the man at her left, muttered, cueing the intercom even before Isabeau had time to look for it. ‘D-station. D-station. What is your status?’
‘Isn’t there an override?’ Isabeau searched, but the system didn’t offer one, it seemed. She couldn’t understand such an oversight.
The intercom hissed silent static.
‘I’m going down,’ Isabeau said, coldly certain there was no time for another choice. ‘This suite is functional. I’m putting it on automatic.’ She did so and turned to the wide, white eyes of the warrior behind her, his balance on his feet impeccable though everything of his visible expression betrayed loathing of the situation and his helplessness. She had to counter that before it turned bad. ‘Jago, you are in charge of my station. Familiarise yourself with the controls. Obey instructions from either of these two. I’m taking the drop chute.’ She was already patting her pockets, checking her tools.
‘If they fix it before you get there you could be crushed,’ the second mate said, tearing his eyes from his own screens for a moment.
‘Keep trying to talk to them,’ she suggested as another and more severe tremor caused a twist that they could all feel attempting to swing them around to the west: failing, it yawed back east and alarms began to sound. Without a pause she smashed the safety glass over the control of a door in the control room’s corner that hadn’t been serviced or opened in living memory and pulled the cord. Air hissed and metal clinked as the seals blew. She set her drop zone as D, since all it offered were letters, and then got into the cage of the single person car that hung below a rail in the roof. It swung and creaked. Banging and shrieking came from the tunnel’s black mouth. She noted that she was more afraid than she had ever been of anything, even in her wildest imagination. She pressed the master key and a glimmer of magelight swept the outer mesh of the cage as the harness around her snapped so tight she thought it was going to cut her in pieces. Then she fell.
Screaming in the circumstances was only pragmatic. The vibrations she made with the sound effectively counteracted around a third of incoming alarming vibrations from other things. Then the screeching of the cage as it swung, fell, swept around and around drowned her out until she wasn’t sure that sh
e was making any noise at all even though her throat felt raw and her lungs full. The terrifying rocking and crashing stopped suddenly, leaving her shaken to bits, aching in shoulders and pelvis where the straps held her to the seat. It was still dark. The harness was still tight. With a sinking feeling she realised she had stalled before reaching her destination. The creaking and groaning of the structure all around her was deafening. She groped in her pocket for a light, found nothing. Both pockets were empty. As if to mock her she heard the tiny skid and tinkle of something small, possibly a screwdriver, slithering past her along the metal chute. She had never figured to close her pockets. They didn’t close. They hadn’t been designed for being flung around like a cork in a storm. With difficulty she recalled the words for conjuration. Everyone knew some.
‘Zirca abbaye,’ she said, concerned her voice would not be enough in the groaning but a faint witchlight ball appeared near her, static arcing briefly off it on to the cage.
With its aid she could see that the cage was jammed at a junction point where two chutes crossed. She tried to throw her own weight backwards and forwards to see if that would jar her loose but she was so tightly strapped in that the force wasn’t enough. She couldn’t see the problem but, as she squinted past the light, she realised she was nearly there anyway. A faint glowing outline of a ‘D’ was visible in the wall about thirty metres away downtube. If she could get out of the cage she could reach the door.
A loud boom came echoing down towards her and then a crackle from the cage’s ancient intercom. She could hear the first engineer’s voice gabbling and then a clearer reply.
‘This is D station. We had a power out. It’s back online. Removing damper arrays.’
‘Negative, I mean No! There’s an engineer in the chute bay! Repeat—’
‘What’s that Control? We can’t hear you, there’s so much interference from the bad links. Array clear.’
Isabeau found herself out of the harness, her fingers turning, slowly turning the wingnuts on the floor pan drop – the only way not blocked by the walls of the chute. She felt a sudden lightness, a rightness in the set of things and the complaints of thousands of tons of material go quiet to be replaced by a mid-toned resonant hum of efficiency. Far above her, but with gathering speed, the clink and slide of telescoping parts, accompanied by the odd crunch of badly aligned plating, began to bang and slam. One nut was off. Another. The noise became a roar and air rushed past her in a sudden wind that whipped her hair around her face, lashing her eyes and nose.
She fell through the hole as the last rusted nut broke free, leaving her coat hanging where it snagged on a raw bolt end. She slowed herself crazily with her boot soles as she shot towards the hatch door only to be blinded with sudden light as it opened. A black half-silhouette looked through. She hit the frame with her foot and arm, was grabbed and hauled inside. The cage shot past a hairsbreadth behind her and struck the buffers with a deafening clang.
She blinked through a haze of dust into the open-mouthed faces of three base station technicians.
‘Descent is steady, halfway, Control. Maintain east pressure. East ten point five. Engineer is down safely.’
Isabeau got to her feet. ‘We couldn’t hear you upstairs,’ she said, coughing, barely able to hear herself even though it was relatively quiet in the room over the machine whir. ‘The chutes need maintenance.’ She couldn’t understand why they were all staring at her when the job was only half done. Belatedly she realised they might not know who she was. After all none of them had met her in person. She was nothing but a name on a set of orders. ‘Isabeau Huntingore,’ she said, holding out her hand and seeing it shake of its own accord. ‘Chief Engineer.’
The deck descended without further incident and settled into position within the main city frame with only minor shudders: it amused to her to consider that as she heard the booming reports of it echoing through the corridors from the outside world. An hour ago such things would have been enough to scare most people to death. Now they were minor shudders. Once eighty per cent plate contact was achieved she ordered deck grips in place and when the reports had confirmed all braces were in position she closed her eyes in a moment of relief. ‘Transfer power to main engine start and plate cohesion array. Ground anchor points, blow anchors when you are ready.’
She watched readouts which spoke to her directly, and felt the explosive shocks as the screwheads disengaged themselves from their barbed grip in the bedrock and began to spiral back into the gate tower armatures. She felt, as much as saw, the fluctuation in the power grid as the displacement engine started. Then everyone held their breath. From the outside and on the surface she knew firsthand that there was no sign that Glimshard was anything but an ordinary city on the plain, topping a small rise in an otherwise flat landscape of waving grasses and fields. Now a line in the ground was being cut rapidly in a series of tiny explosions as minor bolts blew, matched by a rising sense of pressure in her bones as the engine entered its operational mode. Without looking, she knew that the total city power supply was lower than one twentieth of its maximum. Having run so long without recharge it was only decades from closedown, and with this flight, more like single figure years. It was the Empress’ hope that this artefact in the ground held energy supplies that they could use. If it didn’t then its location would be Glimshard’s new and permanent home.
A few minutes passed in which sweat trickled down the face of the man beside her as his fingers stumbled over unfamiliar passes on his controls. Isabeau felt the shift as the last of the restraints catastrophically detached them from their ground site. A change in the vibrations running through the floors told her that they were no longer being damped by contact with the land. She supposed she ought to run a check on the proximity of any people but if they were close outside then they were enemies and she could not spare the time to care about their fate. If they were within five metres of the edges, then they were already gone – reports said what was there vanished. Every landing site carved its own depression, and recarved new edges when it left in lines that spirited things away, no matter what they were.
‘Ascending,’ she said, though there was nothing to feel, not like Mom’s elevator in its old cage. The engine thrummed like the hum of distant bees but she could hear the wind outside over it, rattling some loose awnings. ‘Ten metres. Fifteen. Twenty. All halt at twenty-five metres.’ This was the minimum cruise height for the landscape, any less ran the risk of damaging structures underneath, and more was profligate, a waste of energy. ‘Set course, Master Damps. Proceed when ready.’
The transition to forwards motion shook a few loose tiles and sent volleys of settling pigeons back into the air in clouds of applause. Glimshard moved south at a steady five knots, testing itself against the air.
‘W-we should see to your hand, Miss Huntingore, I mean, Chief Engineer,’ the second officer said.
Isabeau looked down and saw that she had unforgivably covered the station control panel in bloody smears from a cut on her left hand, which she had not felt. It ached now that she looked at it.
‘I will be in the control centre,’ she said, nodding and stuffing the hand in her pocket to spare more mess. ‘Keep me informed.’
She made it to the small, stuffy rooms on the second storey before collapsing into a wing chair. Jago was there already, she saw, bossing someone around who brought her drinks. She looked out of the windows and saw the supremely satisfying sight of fields moving at a stately pace, frozen green waves beneath her bow. She let herself have five minutes while Jago gave her cut hand some militarily fierce first aid, and then she got up and recovered her bag from the viewing deck control room, now conveniently located only a few doors away. She took it back to her seat and extracted her notebook and a pen, watching the bodyguard leave, taking her requests back to Torada.
It was time to redesign the Flit to carry a second person.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TRALANE
Tralane rode in a state of
horrified numbness, through which the pain of riding a horse after so long steadily reasserted itself. She was grateful in a way. Without it the pull within her that demanded she turnabout and fly after that craft, find Minna and protect her, was intolerable agony which no amount of rationalising could banish. Managing the horse occupied her much of the time – Tzaban loping at a steady pace until its cantering started to labour and require much kicking from her heels. Then he would slow to a walk. His own breathing was heavier, she noticed, but he didn’t struggle. He also didn’t talk and she wished he would, though every time she was about to speak the banality of everything she could ask stopped her.
Before long they were alone on the roads, every traveller vanished as if into thin air. Across the fields she could see houses still with smoke from lit fires and machineries at work here and there as if nothing was happening. Maybe messages had not got through. Or maybe they didn’t want to leave, no matter what was coming. She couldn’t imagine being stuck out here in this semblance of normality and peace, knowing about the army – though perhaps rumours of the city moving were too odd to be believed, or it didn’t matter as they had no intention of moving themselves. She wanted to run up to the houses and scream at them to do something, to run.
Her thoughts were cut short by the distant bark of sirens. Tzaban stopped, the horse snorting to an uneasy halt just in time to let her look back at the city halfway to the horizon. Her eyes scanned desperately for signs of people outside, terrified that there might be some who had not made the gate in time. The faces of the children they had passed on the way haunted her suddenly as she heard the rise and fall wail of the mechanical sound, so strange and eerie across the damp early evening air. The horse stamped. She found herself looking at Tzaban’s strange face and saw his nostrils flare with dislike, his attention rapt as hers for a moment or two longer. Then his yellow-amber eyes slid to gaze at hers. Despite being mounted she was only a head taller than he was. She saw at once his intent distaste of the sound, and perhaps all it represented, though whether that was the Empire’s culture or its magics and machineries she didn’t know but whatever it was she felt suddenly vulnerable and alone. They were foreign to one another and out here with him she was at a near total disadvantage. She felt the gun holster and knew she could never draw it in time if he chose to do something to her. When he spoke, she started with surprise at recognisable words coming out of him.
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