Matter c-8

by Iain M. Banks

  He had moved his departure from Rasselle forward only a day or so to avoid meeting the Prince Regent. Certainly it let the fellow know who was boss and this was how he’d justified it to himself originally, but he knew that his real motive had been more complicated. He had developed a distaste for the youth (young man; whatever you wanted to call him). He simply did not want to see him. He found himself bizarrely awkward in his company, experienced a strange difficulty in meeting his gaze. He had first noticed this on the day of his triumph in Pourl, when nothing should have been able to cloud his mood, and yet this odd phenomenon somehow had.

  This could not possibly be a guilty conscience or an inability to dissemble; he was confident he had done the right thing — did not his ability to travel round this newly conquered level, as its king in all but name, not attest to that? — and he had lied fluently to Hausk for twenty years, telling him how much he admired him and respected him and revered him and would be forever in his debt and be the sword in his right hand, etc. etc. etc., so it must simply be that he had come to despise the Prince Regent. There was no other reasonable explanation.

  It was all most unpleasant and could not go on. It was partly for this reason he had arranged for matters to be brought to a conclusion at the Hyeng-zhar while he was away.

  So he was here, some rather more than respectable distance from any unpleasantness, and he had seen their damned Boiling Sea for himself and he had indeed seen some other spectacular and enchanting sights.

  He was still not entirely sure why he had done this. Again, it could not be simply because he wished to avoid the Prince Regent.

  Besides, it did no harm anyway for a new ruler to inspect his recently conquered possessions. It was a way of imposing himself upon his new domain and letting his subjects see him, now that he was confident the capital was secure and functioning smoothly (he’d got the strong impression the Deldeyn civil service was genuinely indifferent to who ruled; all they cared about was that somebody did and they be allowed to manage the business of the realm in that person’s name).

  He had visited various other cities, too, of course, and been — though he had taken some care not to show it — impressed by what he had seen. The Deldeyn cities were generally bigger, better organised and cleaner than those of the Sarl and their factories seemed more efficiently organised too. In fact, the Deldeyn were the Sarl’s superiors in dismayingly many areas, save the vital ones of military might and martial prowess. The wonder was that they had prevailed over them at all.

  Again though, the people of the Ninth — or at least the ones that he met at ducal house receptions, city chambers lunches and Guildhall dinners — seemed rather pathetically keen to show that they were glad the war was over and thankful that order had been restored. To think that he had once thought to lay waste to so much of this, to have the skies filled with flames and weeping and the gutters and rivers with blood! And all in the cause of besmirching Hausk’s name — how limited, how immature that desire seemed now.

  These people barely knew or cared who Hausk had been. They had been at war and now they were at peace. Tyl Loesp had the disquieting yet also perversely encouraging impression that the Deldeyn would adapt better to the state of peace as the defeated than the Sarl would as victors.

  He had started to dress like the Deldeyn, reckoning that this would endear him to them. The loose, almost effeminate clothes — billowy trous and frock coat — felt odd at first, but he had quickly grown used to them. He had been presented with a fine, many-jewelled watch by the Timepiece Makers’ Guild of Rasselle, and had taken to wearing that, too, in the pocket cut into his coat specifically for such instruments. In this land of railways and timetables, it was a sensible accoutrement, even for one who could command trains and steamers to run or not as his whim dictated.

  His temporary palace was in the ducal house of Dillser on the shores of the Sea. The pleasure steamer — paddles slapping at the water, funnel pulsing smoke and steam — was heading for the much beflagged dock now, beating through waters that were merely warm and gently misted beneath a wind-cleared sky. Far mountains ringed the horizon, a few of their round, rolling summits snow-topped. The slender towers and narrow spires of the city rose beyond the ducal house and the various marquees and pavilions now covering its lawns.

  Tyl Loesp drank in the cool, clear air and tried not to think of Oramen (would it be today? Had it already happened? How surprised ought he to act when the news came through? How would it actually be done?), turning his thoughts instead to dinner that evening and the choice of girl for the night.

  “We make good time, sir,” the steamer’s captain said, coming to join him on the flying bridge. He nodded to tyl Loesp’s immediate guard and senior officials, gathered nearby.

  “The currents are favourable?” tyl Loesp asked.

  “More the lack of any Oct underwater-ships,” the captain said. He leant on the railing and pushed his cap up. He was a small, jolly fellow with no hair.

  “They are normally a hazard?” tyl Loesp asked.

  “Movable sandbanks,” the captain said, laughing. “And not very quick about getting out of the way either. Dented a few vessels. Sunk a couple; not by ramming them but by the Oct ship moving up underneath and capsizing the steamer. Few people been drowned. Not intentional, of course. Just poor navigation. You’d think they’d do better, being so advanced.” The captain shrugged. “Maybe they just don’t care.”

  “But not a hazard to navigation today?” tyl Loesp said.

  The captain shook his head. “Not for about the last twenty days. Haven’t seen a single one.”

  Tyl Loesp frowned as he looked out at the approaching quay. “What normally brings them here?” he asked.

  “Who can say?” the captain said cheerfully. “We’ve always assumed it’s the Boiling; might be even more impressive down at the bottom of the Sea, if you had a craft that could get you down there and back again and could see whatever it is that goes on. The Oct never get out of their submarine craft so we can’t ask them.” The captain nodded at the quayside. “Well, better get us docked. Excuse me, sir.” He walked back under the covered bridge to the wheelhouse, shouting orders. The steamer started to turn and the engine exhausted a plume of smoke and steam through its tall funnel before falling back to a steady, idling puff-puff-puff.

  Tyl Loesp watched the waves of their wake as they curved away behind them, the last ragged, extended cloud of steam from the funnel settling over the creamy crease of sparkling water, shadowing it.

  “Twenty days or so,” he said quietly to himself. He beckoned his nearest aide. “Strike our camp,” he told him. “We return to Rasselle.”

  * * *

  An uncanny stillness had settled over the Hyeng-zhar. Allied with the darkness, it seemed like a form of death.

  The river had frozen across its breadth, the middle channel last. Still the water had continued to fall across the Nameless City and into the gorge, even if at a much reduced rate, appearing from underneath the cap of ice to plunge, wreathed in mist, to the landscape of towers, ramps, plaza and water channels beneath. The roar was still there, though also much lessened, so that now it seemed a fit partner for the glimmer that was the weak, paltry light of the slow-moving Rollstar Kiesestraal.

  Then one night Oramen had woken up and known something was wrong. He had lain there in the darkness, listening, unable to tell what it was that was so disturbing. A kind of terror afflicted him when he thought it might be another device left behind from the Archipontine’s time here, awake again now, calling him. But there was no sound. He listened carefully but could hear nothing, and no winking lights, green or otherwise, showed anywhere.

  He turned the cover around the thick night candle, letting light into the compartment. It was very cold; he coughed — one more fading remnant of a typical Settlement affliction that had laid him low for a few days — and watched his breath fume out in front him.

  It had taken him a while to work out what seemed so wrong: i
t was the silence. There was no sound from the Falls.

  He walked out at the start of the next working period, into the perpetual-seeming half-night. Droffo, Neguste and the two surly knights were with him. All around, the usual crowds and teams of men and animals were marshalling themselves, ready for their descent into the gorge. A few more today than the day before, just as it had been every day since Oramen had arrived here.

  Shuffling and stamping and shouting and bellowing, they made their slow way to the lifts and cranes dotted along the cliff edge for kilometres down the sheer edge of the gorge. An army dropping into the abyss.

  The skies were clear. The only mist rose from the broad backs of some beasts of burden, hauling heavy carts and larger items of machinery. Chunsel, uoxantch and ossesyi; Oramen hadn’t even known these great warbeasts could be tamed sufficiently for the work of hauling and carrying. He was glad he wouldn’t have to share a hoist platform with any of those massively impressive but frightening beasts.

  From the gorge side, the Falls were a fabulous, disturbing sight. No water ran. No clouds obscured any part of the monumental gulf the waters had formed in the land. The view was uninterrupted, startlingly clear. Frozen curtains and shawls of solidified water lay draped over every cliff. The channels at the foot of the gorge — each of which would have been a great river in its own right, anywhere else — were sinuous black wastes half covered by sprinkled frosts and snows.

  Oramen felt as though he was looking out to a site of some vast butchery, an eaten landscape — chewed into by an animal of unimaginable scale — which had then suffered further diminishing but still enormous quarryings as that first monster’s young had come along and each also bitten into the greater semicircle, after which some smaller monsters had taken still tinier nips out of the perimeters of those secondary bites, leaving bite upon bite upon bite all torn from the landscape, all devoured and swept away by the waters.

  And then, in all that structured desolation, that tiered advancement of fractured chaos, was revealed a city beyond the skills and fashioning of any portion of humanity Oramen had ever encountered; a city on a scale that beggared belief; a city of glassy black towers, bone-white spires, twisted obsidian blades, outrageously curved, bizarrely patterned structures of indecipherable purpose and huge, sweeping vistas leading to canyons and strata and ranks of glistening, glittering edifices, one after another after another until only the vertical gorge wall on the far side of the silent Falls, ten kilometres away, intervened.

  Half the view was sliced across by the plaza, the spaces beneath now also shuttered in by the frozen walls of water draped unmoving over its edges.

  “Well, they can get anywhere now,” Droffo said.

  Oramen looked over to where the cranes, hoists and lifts were already ferrying whole platforms of men, animals and equipment down into the chasm. A few were coming back up, quitting their own shifts. “Yes, they can,” he said. He looked over at where Vollird and Baerth were both leaning on the railing, staring into the gorge. Even they seemed impressed. Vollird coughed; a sharp, hacking, choking noise, then he gathered phlegm in his mouth and spat it into the gorge.

  “Are you all right, Vollird?” Oramen called.

  “Never better, sir,” the fellow replied, then cleared his throat and spat again.

  “By God, they are a hard couple to like,” Droffo muttered.

  “The man’s not well,” Oramen said tolerantly.

  Droffo sniffed. “Even so.”

  This latest cold was affecting everybody in turn. The field hospitals were full of those it was striking most fiercely, and the scrubby ground on the very outskirts of the Settlement, part of what was claimed to be, and probably was, the longest cemetery in the world, was filling up with those it had not spared.

  “But yes, they can get to the centre,” Oramen said, staring out to the revealed city. “Nothing hinders them now.”

  “It does seem to be their focus,” Droffo said.

  Oramen nodded. “Whatever’s there.”

  The latest briefing by the Falls’ scholars and gentlemen engineers had been fascinating. Oramen had never seen them so animated, though of course he hadn’t been here long. He’d checked with Poatas, who had; he said of course they were wild with excitement. What did the young prince expect? They approached the centre of the Nameless City; how could they not be agitated? This was their summit, their climax, their apogee. From here on, the city would likely be just more of the same, and gradually less of it as they left its centre behind, a slow dying away, a diminishing. Meanwhile, what treasure!

  There were structures at the city’s very centre, deep under the plaza above, of a type they had never encountered before. Every effort was being made to investigate and penetrate that dark, frozen heart, and for once they had the luxury of time, and some surety that the ground would not shift beneath their feet on an instant; the Falls would not quicken again and the waters wash all away once more for another forty or more days. It was auspicious; a piece of luck to be grabbed with both hands and exploited to the full. Meanwhile more of tyl Loesp’s reinforcements, his new toilers, were arriving with every incoming train, eager for work. There would never be a better time. This was the very peak and centre of the whole history of the excavations of the Nameless City, indeed the Falls themselves. It deserved their every energy and resource.

  Poatas was personally true to his word, having made a new headquarters down in the gorge itself and quartered himself and his staff there in a portion of building deep under the plaza near one of the recently discovered artifacts that appeared by its size and central location to be of particular importance. Oramen had been given the distinct impression that his own presence at the focus of all this furious activity was not required, and indeed might only hinder matters, given that when he was around additional guards had to be deployed to ensure his protection and a proportion of people would always stop work to gawp at a prince, so inhibiting the expeditious and efficient progress of the great works being undertaken.

  Nevertheless, he had been determined to see what was going on and had already visited various parts of the excavations even while the ice had been spreading and the waters falling back. He had gone unannounced, with as few people in attendance as he could, seeking to cause as little disruption by his presence as possible. He was certainly not going to be stopped from seeing closer up what was going on now that the waters had frozen solid altogether, and he especially wanted to see something of this new class of artifact that was turning up; he felt he had been kept in ignorance of their importance by Poatas, as though this latest revelation was none of his business. He would not, could not tolerate such disrespect.

  * * *

  They would be flying down on caude; the animals complained about the cold and low levels of light, but their handlers assured Oramen and his party the creatures had been fed a couple of hours before and were warmed and ready to fly. They mounted up, Vollird cursing as his first attempt was wrecked by a fit of coughing.

  It had been so long since Oramen had flown he had thought about asking for a practice ground-flight, getting the beast to pad along the flat and rise up a little, giving him time to recall his old flying lessons in relative safety, but that would have been demeaning; a sign of weakness. He had the biggest of the caude, and had offered to take Neguste with him, saddled in behind, but the lad had begged to be excused. He tended to throw up. Oramen had smiled and given him the morning off.

  They launched into the air beyond the cliff; Oramen taking the lead. He’d forgotten quite how alarming was the stomach-lurching drop at the start of a flight as the air-beast fell before starting to gain height.

  The cold wind bit at the exposed parts of Oramen’s face as the caude dropped, stretching its wings out; even with a scarf over his mouth and nose and wearing flying goggles he felt the chill enter him. He pulled on the caude’s reins, worrying that it seemed sluggish and felt slow to answer. The beast pulled slowly up, shifting beneath him fretfully as though
not yet fully awake. They were still falling too fast; he glanced up and saw Droffo staring down at him from a good ten metres higher. Vollird and Baerth were a little further up still.

  The caude shook itself and started beating across the chasm, finally catching the air and levelling out. Oramen watched it raise its great long face and swivel its gaze to each side as it looked groggily up at its companions. The beast’s course changed fractionally with each gesture as the creature’s head acted like a sort of forward rudder, its tail doubtless twitching in instinctive compensation with each movement. It gave a deep, bellowing cry and beat harder, slowly rising to join the others, and they flew together for a few minutes.

  Oramen used the opportunity to look around for as long as he could, drinking in the view and trying to fix it in his mind, knowing that seeing the Nameless City so close up from a flying beast was a rare privilege, then they all went gliding down together towards the temporary landing ground set up near the lumpenly frozen foot of the secondary fall which formed a great dark wall climbing to the edge of the plaza level high above.

  They’d passed over the remains of the Fountain Building; the sheer weight of ice accumulated on its surfaces had brought it crumpling, crashing down shortly before the freeze had become complete.

  * * *

  “This is one of ten such littler structures all spotted round the big one in the middle, the one they’re calling the Sarcophagus, where there’s most attention, as you’d expect,” the foreman told them as they walked down a shallow-sloped tunnel towards one of the latest diggings.

  “Is there any more on the Sarcophagus?” Oramen asked.

  Broft — a bald, trim, upright figure in neatly pressed dungarees with a conspicuously displayed pocket pen — shook his head. “Not really on any of them sir, as I understand it.”