“Penalty for desertion is death! But this is your lucky day, because you’ve just received amnesty! As long as you turn around and follow me right now!” His words probably weren’t as motivating as the scores of cavalry riding in behind him; those horsemen left the would-be deserters with little choice then to turn around and get back into the fight. Leosthenes spurred his horse through the other pair of gates and into the Circle’s courtyard. To his surprise, the siege-tower was reversing away from the western wall.
And then he understood why.
“It’s coming back,” yelled Diocles.
“Of course it is,” shouted Agathocles.
Xanthippus said nothing. He just watched as though hypnotized while the gigantic Helepolis ceased reversing and switched its engines into full-throttle again, plowing toward the Circle’s wall. That wall had already withstood one impact, and it was highly doubtful it would withstand another. The first such blow had nearly knocked them all off—had sent cracks spiderwebbing through stone, pieces of rock falling into the courtyard below. Missiles of every description were raining down from the tower upon the hapless defenders on the battlements. As the Helepolis thundered in toward the wall, Agathocles suddenly seemed to snap out of it. He reached down to his dead spear-bearer, grabbed a bunch of spears, slung them on his back and—
“Follow me,” he said as he started sprinting away toward the nearest tower. To Diocles’ astonishment, Xanthippus just seized his lover’s hand and followed the Syracusan outlaw. Maybe Xanthippus no longer believed in honor. Then again, maybe honor meant living for a few more minutes. Diocles wasn’t about to argue. They reached the tower—it was one of those that had housed one of the steam-guns, so there wasn’t much left of its upper levels. But amidst the rubble they could clearly see the flight of stairs going downward. Agathocles took them them two at a time, Xanthippus and Diocles doing their best to keep up. Agathocles was shouting something but he couldn’t be heard over the steadily increasing rumbling that felt like it was going to shake all of them apart. The stairway was vibrating so badly they were practically falling down it. They tumbled to the bottom, picked themselves up, raced out of the tower and along a culvert that bordered the western wall.
Just as that wall exploded inward.
One moment it was there, the next it just…wasn’t. Dust was everywhere, so thick Diocles was coughing and choking and almost blinded. But Xanthippus was still holding his hand, still leading him onward as the world crumbled around them. Diocles could hear the insanely loud clanking of the siege-engine towering above them; he couldn’t see it, but he expected to get run over at any moment. But then Xanthippus led him down a flight of stairs and into one of the underground passages beneath the Circle. Only then did Agathocles glance back to see the two soldiers were still behind them. Above them there was a noise like the ocean itself crashing down.
“This way,” said Agathocles. Diocles didn’t ask him how he knew the layout of the Athenian fortress; keeping tabs on the Athenian defenses seemed to be a specialty for the man. He led the other two quickly along the corridor, turned left, then right, then up another set of stairs, through a door and into—
“Thank fuck,” said Xanthippus. They were outside the Circle—which was crumbling into pieces before their eyes. Dead men and horses were everywhere. The impossibly huge outline of the Helepolis was dimly visible amidst all the dust and falling masonry. A man stood right in front of them trying to pull another man free of wreckage. He turned as they reached him.
It was Leosthenes.
“Viceroy,” said Agathocles, “what a pleasant surprise—”
“Shut up and help me get this rock off Memnon,” snapped Leosthenes. Diocles wasn’t sure who Memnon was, but Xanthippus didn’t hesitate; he leaned forward and helped Leosthenes push the rock off. But the old man who lay beneath was obviously dead, half his body crushed. Leosthenes blinked like someone who was seizing control of his emotions; he leaned down, closed the old man’s eyes, then looked back up at the three of them. In the background, the Helepolis was reversing one more time, undoubtedly so it could steamroll straight through the rubble and into the city that lay beyond. Beyond that, the Macedonian phalanx could be seen in the distance, cheering as they advanced triumphantly toward the gaping hole in the western wall. Leosthenes stared up at the Helepolis.
“We need to stop that bastard,” he said.
“Any ideas as to how?” said Agathocles.
“I’m down to exactly one,” said the viceroy.
A single swipe with the axe was all it took. Suddenly unbroken mirror had become shards of glass flying through the air, revealing an opening within—black tinged with a fiery light. Lugorix was about to peer inside when Matthias landed a few yards from him. Eurydice wasn’t so precise—she landed toward the edge of the sphere, began to slide. Matthias reached out and grabbed her, helped her up.
“Thanks,” she said—and then, to Lugorix: “What’s up with Barsine?”
“She’s possessed by her own baby,” said Lugorix.
“Got it,” said Eurydice. “So…. either she’s gone crazy or you have?”
“Where is Barsine anyway?” asked Matthias.
There was only one answer to that. Lugorix whirled, realizing that she’d gone through the opening while the other two were hitting the surface. He bent down, stuck his head in.
“What do you see?” asked Eurydice impatiently.
It was impossible to describe. Rungs led down through what seemed to be a tunnel surrounded by fire. But he could feel no burning—could sense no heat. And he could hear the Macks shouting above them. Either they’d reached the platform or they were about to. Lugorix grabbed those rungs and started climbing down through the tube, doing his best to ignore the flames seemed to be raging right in front of his face. Were they real? Was he looking at more of those moving pictures? Or was there really fire mere inches away from him his face? It was like descending into a volcano. He finally started to accept that he really was in Hell.
But then suddenly he was out of it: through a trapdoor and onto another platform. Barsine was standing there. Ten seconds later, Matthias and Eurydice were too.
And during those ten seconds, all Lugorix had done was stare at what lay all around him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The platform was suspended just below a concave ceiling that curved away in all directions. They were inside the enormous sphere they’d just been on the exterior of. That much made sense.
That was basically all that did.
It was mostly empty space—mostly dark, too—and yet it was clearly some vast machine, several miles across, a webwork of gears and clanking steam-pipes, all of it in motion. Rungs and ramps were dimly illuminated by glowing orbs that shone through the black, rattling along metal rails that curved down toward something a long way below, a faraway disc that was a combination of green and blue and brown. It seemed oddly familiar to Lugorix—it took him a moment to place it—but Matthias beat him to it.
“It’s like that map,” he said. “From Demosthenes’ study. That’s what it’s like. It’s meant to be—Fates protect us, it’s meant to be the…”
“Earth,” Lugorix finished for him. Fuck, maybe it was the Earth, maybe they’d somehow been transported to far, far above it. After everything that had gone down, it seemed anything was possible. And as Lugorix took in the rumbling network of gears that powered those orbs—“planets,” whispered an awestruck Eurydice—he realized that the blackness of the ceiling was actually nothing of the kind—that it was shot through with a myriad pinpricks of light. The fact that he knew they were lit by the vast furnace built into the attic of that ceiling in no way detracted from his wonder at what were very obviously intended to be stars. In some faraway portion of himself, he became aware that Barsine—or whatever was inside her—had begun to speak.
“This is a mechanical universe,” she said, her words flat, without emotion. “A faithful replica of the real one, fueled by the furnace in i
ts ceiling and driven by steam and fire. Like the real universe, it contains interlocking sets of spheres. That of the stars. Those of the planets. And the interior consists of the Earth, the Moon”—she pointed at a grey gleaming orb near the disc—“and the Sun. Which you can’t see right now, because it’s intended to be night.”
“Very pretty,” said Matthias, “but what’s the point?”
“The point is it’s a fucking computer,” said Eurydice. She used a word that Lugorix had never heard before. “A calculator-of-worlds,” she added. “Right?”
“More than that,” said Barsine. “A controller of them.”
Before anyone had time to react to that, they heard the thud of Macedonian boots landing on the roof of the structure above them.
Eumenes hated it when there was only one way to enter a place. Too easy for anyone inside to defend. His soldiers smashed away at the mirrors for a few minutes, but all they found beneath them was iron. Finally he bowed to the inevitable and sent his men inside, down the ladder, through the tunnel of fire, and onto the platform.
Which blew everybody’s minds, of course.
Even having some idea of what to expect, Eumenes was still struggling to hold onto his sanity. Kalyana and he had talked about the various possibilities, but talk was one thing and seeing was quite another. There wasn’t time to gawk either: Barsine’s group had a head-start, and they were making the most of it. Eumenes could see them, ant-like, far below, riding the outermost orb, the orb that was intended to represent the planet known as….“Kronos,” muttered Kalyana, as it swung away into abyss. How they’d reached it so quickly baffled him for a moment, until he saw an almost-impossibly long ramp folding back into the bottom of the platform on which he stood, the other half of that ramp retracting into the Kronos-orb below.
“They must have just slid along it,” he muttered. “Perfect timing—”
“Can we control those ramps?” said Ptolemy.
Kalyana looked around, studying the ceiling. “There might be something better,” he said—and cautiously led the way along the network of platforms, followed by the others. Eumenes and Ptolemy were right behind them, with the six remaining Macedonian soldiers keeping a wary eye on Hanno and his two slingers. One of those slingers stepped to the platform’s edge, whirled his sling so rapidly it was impossible to even see the moment when the stone spun away, whipping after the receding simulacrum of Kronos… which was technically way out of range, but then again gravity seemed to be in full effect within this place, all of it pulling toward that earth-disc far below. The slinger watched as the stone shot off into the dark—stared after it, then shook his head in disappointment. He’d missed, but Eumenes was damned if he could see by how far.
And right now he had more pressing priorities to deal with anyway—like following Kalyana as he reached the end of one of the platforms, climbed up a set of stairs to the very ceiling of the celestial firmament itself—and slid back a trapdoor. Eumenes flinched involuntarily, half-expecting to see fire pouring from the opening thus revealed. Having just climbed in here through that tube he knew that the rafters of this place was one big furnace. But instead of flames he saw something far stranger.
Six of them, in fact.
“Those look like carts,” said Ptolemy.
“They are,” said Kalyana. “Now we must all get in.”
It took only a few minutes to do so, and yet all that time Eumenes was conscious that Barsine and her motley crew were moving ever further away—getting ever closer to the place they were all trying to get to. It was still far below them, but their lead was increasing with every second. But the contraptions on the ceiling were simple enough to work. One got in, strapped oneself in—that was important, because you’d be upside down for most of the time. You used one handle to set the thing in motion, another handle to stop it. As for steering—
“The whole ceiling is cris-crossed with rails,” said Kalyana.
“And you knew this how?” said Ptolemy.
“Our texts speak of servants moving across the sacred ceiling of the gods. And—how should I put it?—seeing a stairway to nowhere raised my suspicions.”
Eumenes shrugged. He didn’t really care how Kalyana knew it, just as long as it worked. Kalyana pulled himself up into the first of the carts, strapped himself in while Eumenes and Ptolemy did the same. Hanno and his two slingers climbed into a second cart; the six soldiers took two more of the vehicles.
“Here we go,” said Kalyana—he pulled on one of the levers and next moment the cart began to move upside down along the ceiling, over the platform—slowly at first, the other three carts following. Eumenes looked down past that platform, was relieved to see that Kronos’s long orbit had barely taken it an eighth of the distance around the sphere. But then he noticed that the orb below it—that of the largest planet, Zeus—had stopped and was reversing toward Kronos, the gap between them closing with every passing second….
“They’re controlling them,” he breathed.
Kalyana nodded. “Those two planets, they cannot intersect, but they are going to try a jump from one to the other. I wonder if…”
But Eumenes was no longer listening. He’d just noticed something else—something far closer. And way more disturbing.
“Speed up,” he hissed to Kalyana.
“What?”
“That’s a fucking bomb.”
Eumenes had to give the sage credit: he didn’t ask any questions, didn’t even glance at the black-powder device that had started hissing and spluttering above the end of the platform, attached to the underside of the firmament itself—instead he just pushed the lever onto maximum and the car shot away, along the side of the firmament. Following its lead, the other three cars sped up too.
And then the bomb detonated.
Even from the vantage point of Kronos, it was quite a sight: a quick flaring as the device that Eurydice had planted blew—and then, before the detonation reached their ears, an enormous gout of fire sprayed out from the ceiling, huge chunks of that firmament falling away, along with pieces of that platform.
As well as one of those railcars. It fell in toward the four who clung to the top of Kronos, tumbled past them close enough so they could see the the three screaming Macedonian soldiers inside before it hit one of the gear-shafts lower down. The car stuck there. The bodies kept falling.
“That’s gotta hurt,” said Matthias.
“They met the fate their actions brought them,” said the voice of Barsine. “They trespassed on the roof of heaven.”
“How exactly is it that they’re trepassing and we’re not?” said Eurydice sardonically.
“Because I am the seed of those who ruled here,” said Barsine. “My mother is a daughter of Persia, my father a son of Macedonia.”
“So I’m really supposed to go along with this?” said Eurydice. “You really want me to believe that I’m talking to the unborn child of the woman who calls herself Barsine?”
“You are a scientist, are you not?”—it was Barsine’s voice, but it just wasn’t. “How else do you explain my command over this machine we find ourselves in? How else could I deploy its ramps and gears with the power of my presence?” She pointed at the Earth-disc, still far below, but close enough so they could make out the continents amidst the encompassing World-Ocean. A languid hand gestured at different areas on those continents in turn, her voice as hollow as the space they were speeding through.
“After the War, with the mutual destruction of the Olympians and the Chthonics, each side put in motion plans to use the ape-children of the Earth to some day re-awaken themselves and their machinery. This was done through the seeding of royal bloodlines—the code of the genetikos. There were several royal houses. The Egyptians were once the foremost—they built Pyramids and other works that might have allowed them to rule all the Earth—but they grew decadent and crumbled before the weight of foreign invaders. The Phoenicians scattered to the seas. The Achaemenids of Persia dominated central Asia unti
l they were undone by the Argeads of Macedonia, who—centuries before—had fled Argos after civil war. They are thus both Greek and Macedonian, and today they are almost certainly the most powerful, even if hate has always existed between their line’s fathers and sons. Further to the East were the Vedic princes, who destroyed each other amidst internecine feuding—and had Alexander been so bold as to press on into northern India, he might have discovered even more than he and his henchmen did. And on the far east of Asia are the Han people, who even now rule a territory as large as Alexander, though they are divided into several warring states. If any of them have plans to insert themselves into this contest, I know not. Same with the remaining two houses.” She gestured across the eastern edge of ocean, at another long chunk of land, running north to south. Lugorix narrowed his eyes, realized that a slender isthmus at the top of Asia was a land-bridge to still another continent at the very eastern edge of the disc. The entity behind Barsine’s eyes saw his puzzlement, smiled.
“The fourth continent—Furthest Asia—contains two more peoples, the Toltecs in the north and the Nazcas in the south. Both possess powerful magicks but I regret to say I know very little of their activities. They may already be far ahead of us.”
“Who’s us?” muttered Eurydice. She was clearly trying to keep up with everything around her. She’d already admitted during the descent to Kronos that she’d made a very small such device once—a replicator of the heavens that she’d called an Antikythera, as that was the island in the Aegean she’d been working on at the time. But that had been only a few finger-spans across, rather than scores of miles. So now she was listening to Barsine while she stared at the fire erupting from the ceiling of heaven—and at the three surviving railcars as they raced further down the firmament, keeping pace with Kronos as it clanked along its orbit. But lower down was the orb of Zeus, rumbling in toward them…
The Pillars of Hercules Page 42