Mother laughed. ‘Cranwyl was right. But he didn’t teach you that, darling. You’re a Thonn. That’s just the way we are.’
Drayn nodded. They sat together in silence, the figures from Drayn’s memory, while the real girl and her companion from the Old Place drank in the scene before them. It faded, starting around the edges, until they were immersed in blackness.
The light slowly returned. They had now come to Drayn’s bedroom.
The girl was wrapped up tightly under the blankets. Her window was uncovered, and moonlight streamed in upon her. Her eyes were open, and she stared up at the ceiling.
There came a knock at the door, and the memory Drayn sat up in bed.
‘Come in.’
Dad entered. He was still drunk – he stank of wine – but he was more composed than before. He found a stool, and took a seat at his daughter’s side.
‘Sorry about earlier,’ he said. ‘I wanted to come, and say sorry about earlier.’ He put a finger to his mouth. ‘But don’t tell Mother. You know, she’s a bit annoyed about how I was. I’m sorry about that. About earlier.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘It’s not all right.’ He shook his head and sighed, a deep and raggedy sound that came from somewhere deep inside. ‘Sometimes, I wish the hands would just take me, so I could be Unchosen and be done with it.’
‘Don’t say that. Things will work out. We’ve just got to keep on with it.’ Mother’s words. Mother’s voice.
Dad smiled. ‘I’m not a Thonn. Not really. I suppose I thought I was, because I married into the family. But I’m not. You are, and it is my greatest mistake.’
‘I’m a mistake?’
He drunkenly shook his head. ‘No, of course not, by the Autocrat’s fingers. But I should never have let her make you into one of them, never, never. When I saw you put that noose around Simeon’s neck … Ah! Maybe I could have taken you away, hmm? It’s too late now though. The Thonns run the Habitation, them and the other Houses. No one cares about what they do.’ Something flashed across his eyes. ‘The Autocrat mustn’t know about what she’s done. He mustn’t know. Otherwise, he would’ve stopped it, wouldn’t he? The Autocrat is the only good thing in the world. He wouldn’t let them do what they do, if he knew.’
Dad leaned forward, over his daughter, staring into her eyes.
‘We should go and tell him, Drayn! It’s not too late!’
‘What are you doing?’ asked a new voice.
Dad leapt to his feet and spun around, almost toppling over. Mother stood in the doorway. Dad looked at her for a moment, and without saying a word, left the room, brushing gently past her as he went.
Mother smiled at Drayn. ‘Get some sleep.’
**
But Drayn did not sleep.
She stayed awake all night, listening to her father and Mother arguing. She left her room and descended the stairs, and stood outside the door of the Great Hall. She never knew why her parents had gone to that room. Perhaps the memory of Simeon dragged them there.
Alexander and the real Drayn stood alongside the memory girl, outside the door to the hall.
‘Well, this is all very interesting,’ Alexander said.
The sounds of an argument came from behind the door.
‘… the Autocrat doesn’t know? Doesn’t know what’s happening on his own island? The Autocrat knows everything, Teron …’
‘How can he know? I’m going to tell him, Lyna. He’ll clear out the Houses for good, then. The Houses have stopped the right person being Chosen—’
‘Nonsense. You’re drunk, Teron. As usual.’
There was a thud of footsteps and the door swung open. Teron stormed past, without noticing his daughter.
Mother did not seem surprised to find Drayn at the door.
‘I’ll have a servant watch him tonight,’ she whispered. ‘He won’t go anywhere. We’ll let him sleep it off. In the morning, if he still wants to go and make fools of the House of Thonn, well, we can deal with it then. Now go to bed.’
The Drayn in the memory nodded. She knew what her Mother meant, and she knew what would happen next. The scene faded, and another day dawned in the memory world of the Old Place.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Timmon Canning awoke to a different world.
It was strange; he could not remember falling asleep. But fall asleep he surely had, for he was now lying on a wide, soft bed. He sat up, stretching his arms and examining his surroundings. He was in a large, airy room. It was uncluttered, the only furniture being the bed and a chest of drawers. The floor and walls were formed of a creamy stone. A window lay open, allowing a gentle breeze to play across the thin, transparent curtains.
He yawned. What happened? He had no idea how he had come to be in this strange place. He was now wearing a pair of silver pyjamas, which he could not remember putting on, meaning some poor soul must have undressed him before putting him to bed. Still, he was not anxious, which was unusual for him. On the contrary, he felt rested and relaxed, perhaps more so than he had ever been since before his days as a Tactician.
The bed was soft and yielding, and for a brief moment he considered throwing himself back into the arms of sleep. But he felt too good for that. And curious, too: another odd emotion for him. Where am I, by the Machinery?
He rolled out of the bed and walked to the window to examine his surroundings. He appeared to be in a coastal town of some sort. His building seemed to be at the top of a hill. Below, white houses stretched to the edge of a sparkling blue sea, and dustless paths snaked their way through clusters of bleached dwellings. People walked by, all of them wearing hooded white gowns. Canning breathed in the salty air, and it cheered him. I’ll live in this place forever. I don’t care if they try and kick me out; I’ll find my way back in.
After a long while he turned away from the window. He walked to the door of the room and peered outside, half-expecting the scene to be a terrible trick of Shirkra. But she was not there. An empty corridor greeted him, stretching off to his right: his room must have been at the very end. For a moment, he thought of turning back, and staring out of the window until someone came to get him. But something urged him on. He went out into the corridor, and began to walk.
He eventually came to a hall. It was a large space, rivalling the Map Room of the Overland in the Fortress of Expansion, but different in every other way. Where the Fortress was all shadows and flickering candles, this place was open and filled with sunlight. The hall was made of that same white stone. It put him in mind of the Arboretum in Memory Hall. It had that same light and airy feel, with trees and colourful plants lining the walls and scattered around the centre of the floor. The ceiling was shaped into a great dome, formed of what appeared to be crystal, or perhaps a kind of glass: the sun streamed through in a thousand colours, creating a kaleidoscopic effect.
There were only two people in the hall, as far as Canning could make out: a man and a woman, sitting on black chairs in the centre. They were so alike that Canning thought they must have been twins. For a heartbeat he wondered if they were those twins, the ones that Raxx had wounded, in a different manifestation. But surely not: those creatures were far away, and these two were very old, with white hair falling in rings to their shoulders. Their skin was pale, lighter than anything Canning had seen on the Plateau, even among the far northerners. They wore the same white gowns that everyone in this place seemed to favour; from a distance they looked like strange puffs of air, or clouds that had descended to the earth.
He felt calm as he approached them. His time in bed had been good for him, and he was strangely confident.
It was only as he closed in on the old couple that he noticed how still they were. He wondered if they could be statues, crafted by a master whose skills outshone anything they had on the Plateau. He looked around the hall once more, to see if anyone else was there. But it was just the three of them.
He leaned towards the woman. Her narrow face was a patchwork of lines, and h
er skin seemed thin and frail. Her unblinking eyes were a pale blue, and they were creased with pleasure.
Canning turned to the man. He was almost identical to the woman, but he seemed somehow stronger, more vital.
These people can’t be real, can they? He took a last glance around the hall, then reached out his hand, inching it closer to the man’s face.
‘Oh, hello.’
Canning leapt back with such violence that he fell onto the ground.
The man stood and shook himself, before turning to the woman and tapping her shoulder. She sparked into life, took a deep breath, and got to her feet. She reached out to the man and took him by the hand.
‘How long were we under?’ she asked.
The man shrugged. ‘Not long. Too long. Who knows? But we’re free now.’ He turned to Canning. ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’
Canning stood, and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, at the corridor.
‘Back there. I just woke up. I’ve no idea how long I was asleep.’
‘Back there?’ asked the woman. She moved forward without appearing to walk. ‘There’s nothing back there.’
‘What?’ Canning turned around. The room before him was falling away, becoming a haze of spectral white.
He turned back to the old man and woman, who regarded him with a blend of sympathy and contempt.
‘Where am I?’ he asked. His sense of contentment had evaporated, replaced with a more familiar wave of fear.
The woman was directly before him. She no longer seemed frail.
‘Do you really not know where you are, and what you are doing here?’
He shook his head.
‘You have been betrayed,’ said the man. ‘This happens all the time when they want to test someone. They put you in a memory, with us, or one of our relations, depending on who they’ve caught. Just to see how you get along.’
‘It rarely works out well,’ said the woman.
‘No, it very rarely works out well at all,’ the man echoed. ‘We may not be the Duet, but we are quite strong. Stronger than you, at any rate.’
Canning looked around again in desperation. The walls at his side had now faded into the whiteness, which was creeping around the room, eating it up, until the three of them were floating in a void.
‘He is particularly weak,’ said the man.
‘I feel sorry for him,’ said the woman.
‘I do, too, my love. He has been thrown here, with us, without anyone to protect him.’
‘But we should not feel guilty, I think. They have used us, too. We did not ask for this.’
‘No, we did not ask for it, my love, you are quite correct.’
‘It would be rude to turn it up. He is standing before us with his beautiful memories.’
‘Yes, his sad and beautiful memories.’
‘Yes, we should take them for ourselves, these memories; we can drink them and rejoice in them. They have a kind of melancholic power. Perhaps they would give us strength. Perhaps we could use them to free ourselves.’
‘Yes, yes …’
The white void crept up on the old man and woman, and began to crawl along their skin. It became one with them, seeping into them, tearing them apart, until nothing was left but void, and Canning was utterly alone in the nothingness.
‘Come,’ said a voice. He could not tell if it was the man or the woman or someone else that spoke. ‘Allow yourself to float away, and you will not suffer. All you have to do is float away.’
The void wrapped itself around his body, pinning him to the spot. It probed him, tugging at his thoughts, playing with his memories. It would drain him, if he allowed it.
‘You are Operators,’ he said. ‘This is an Operator trick.’
‘This is no trick,’ the old man said from nowhere and everywhere. ‘We want your memories. We could do such things with them.’
‘We will leave the husk behind,’ said the woman.
For a moment, Canning came close to relenting. But then a memory sparked in his mind. He cast himself back to his time as a prisoner, suffering under Shirkra.
He remembered how he had felt when she played with his memories.
He remembered how he used the power of memory to escape.
For once in his life, he had fought back.
Why could he not fight again?
Acting on some strange instinct, he closed his eyes, and turned his thoughts away from the void. He allowed his mind to drift away, though not towards the Operators: to another place, a place within himself. He could hear them speaking, whispering to him of his failures. They told him he would fail again. They said he could not hope to defeat them. But as they spoke, a new tone entered their voices. Panic.
They could not control him.
He opened his eyes. He was standing on solid ground, though it was not the white stone of the domed room. The old man and woman were before him, gazing at him in shock. The void was falling away, and a real place was emerging, a hard place of dark colours. But he did not look at it; he knew he had to remain focused.
‘No,’ said the man. ‘How did you do that?’
Canning glanced at his hands, and saw that they were trembling. He clenched his fists together, and the remaining void drifted towards him. He saw things in it, faces from the past, so many millions of people, flickering into nothing. He gathered it around his arm, like a rope, and threw it at the Operators. It moved slowly, like it was floating through treacle, but there was nothing they could do to escape.
They watched as it encircled them, and they fell backwards.
Suddenly Canning felt capable of anything. He felt himself within the void, entangled with the Operators. He felt himself holding them down. He could reach inside them, if he wished, and drink down their thoughts, all the memories they had collected over long centuries. He felt himself capable of controlling them …
The man and woman were screaming, now, but he barely noticed. He was their master; they had tried to exploit him, and he had turned the tables on them. He felt a sense of real power, stronger even than his experience in the Bowels of the See House. He wanted them to suffer for what they had tried to do. All the rage of his lifetime swirled within him, gathering like a storm. He brought it before his mind’s eye. He aimed it at the old man and woman. How long had they walked the world? How long had they tormented others? Their day was done. He was here, Timmon Canning, the vengeance of humanity—
‘Enough.’
The void vanished from his grip. The old man and woman lay before him.
Canning gasped, and stumbled backwards. His gaze flickered across the room. This space was just as cavernous as that white, domed room, but it was black, metallic, and monotonous: it reminded him of the foundries of the Fortress, but without the flame and the noise. Even his clothing had changed, the pyjamas replaced with a dark green vest, black trousers and hard boots.
A platform ran across the room, connecting two levels high above his head. Manipulator Raxx was standing there with a group of men and women that Canning did not recognise. They all wore the same white robes as Raxx. Some of them held their hands in the air, their eyes bone white; they whispered some words, and the old man and woman became still as statues once again.
‘You see,’ whispered Raxx. ‘I told you there was something about him.’
**
‘What was that all about, by the Machinery?’
Raxx had taken him away from the dark room, after gathering up the two Operators and sending them to the Machinery knew where. They were now in what he supposed was her study. It was a miniature version of the room they had come from, a space of dark metal. The monotony was somewhat relieved by a painting on the wall, depicting a young boy in white robes, with curly black hair and light brown skin. He was standing on a cliff on the edge of a crashing sea, his arms aloft, his eyes burning with that familiar white intensity.
‘You’re annoyed with me, Canning.’ Raxx took a white chair, and gestured to Canning to sit on an
other.
‘You’re very perceptive. Why shouldn’t I be annoyed? You tried to kill me.’
‘I certainly did not. I would have intervened, if you needed me to.’
‘I did need you to.’
‘You did? You overpowered two immortals, alone. No one’s ever done that in their first go. Not that I remember, anyway.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe it wasn’t your first go. Have you battled one of them before?’
Canning ignored the question. ‘I don’t understand.’ He leaned forward, and placed his head in his hands. He felt suddenly exhausted. ‘When I woke up … I was in such a nice place, like I’d never seen before. Was that all just a lie? How did you fool me, like that? Are you an Operator, too?’
Raxx’s eyes widened. ‘What a lot of questions to answer!’ She laughed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it was a lie – or a memory, which is often the same thing. This city does lie on a harbour, but it is not so pretty as that.’ She gestured to a window.
Canning stood and walked to it. Below, there stretched a black and ruined shore. The only buildings he could see were hovels. It was daylight, but even the sun here was pale and insipid, peeking out occasionally from a boiling black mess of clouds. The few people he saw wore dark shawls, and hurried from building to building.
‘To answer your second question, I did not trick you. You tricked yourself.’ Raxx was at his side, looking out of the window. She seemed far older, then, than the teenager he had taken her for. ‘You awoke in a memory, but you could have seen it for what it was, if you had tried. We built a space, in which you and those immortals could test one another, but where we could control them, if we needed to.’
She guided him back to the chairs.
‘What is this place?’ he asked.
‘The Remnants,’ she replied. ‘All that remains of a broken Empire.’
‘What Empire?’
Raxx sighed. ‘A place of legend, now, to us, in our misery. A place of dreams. Once, it covered all of our continent, including your Plateau.’
‘Impossible. How big could it have been?’
The Strategist Page 20