by Various
‘Look at it again, Merelock. Please, ma’am. Is it what you think it is? Look at me, do you see your cousin? I think I almost have what it is that’s happening to us, ma’am, almost in my mind, but will you help me to try and understand it?’ She could hear herself cracking and begging, near tears, but she seemed to have broken the trail of Merelock’s delusion. Hope bloomed warm in her. She met the other woman’s gaze, held it. Let her be jarred by the pain, Jann thought. Let her think! Let her see it in my
(but it isn’t even my)
face.
For a long moment there was no sound, and then Merelock began making a low noise in her throat. Jann leaned in, listening for words, but there was just a soft moan of breath. Jann kept her eyes on Merelock’s, trying to ignore what her senses were telling her about the woman’s features, trying to pull insight out of the air by simple concentration.
‘Jann?’ The doubling of Merelock’s voice was gone. It was a simple voice now, the voice Jann was familiar with, but it was faint and confused. ‘Jann, is that you? I can’t recognise you. What happened to us? What happened? I hurt, Jann. I hurt. I can hear the forge engines. Where’s Tokuin? Jann?’
‘We’re going up from the forge,’ Jann told her. ‘Up to the top level, where that thing is. I know we… weren’t always like this. I dream how we were before we found it. I think if we all go and find it we might understand about those people in my dreams.’
‘Up,’ said Merelock, still in that small, childlike voice. ‘We’ll go up.’ She tried to hold out her broken arm but it wouldn’t quite extend. ‘You and I. Together.’ Merelock wouldn’t release her grip on her spear, so Jann held her as best she could under the broken arm and tried to help her along. ‘We’ll walk together. You and I. Together in the dark.’ Grunting, Jann got Merelock to the end of the aisle and into a broader space where they could more comfortably walk abreast. ‘You and I, walking in the dark,’ Merelock said, ‘and not our first such journey, no,’ with an almost-chuckle that chilled Jann’s blood. The sound seemed to be picked up and echoed in the gloom around them. Jann thought she heard soft, rapid footsteps counterpointing the echoes, but who could tell any more what was happening around her and what was the ghost-pantomime in her own head?
(‘Gallardi, Klaide, fetch a pair of piston-grips,’ Merelock said. Her voice, never very powerful, was fighting against the stiff wind on the tower roof but there was still enough snap in it to cut through the arguments. ‘Tokuin knows we’ve had a find, but he has some sort of ministration to attend to below before he’ll come up and look at this thing. We’ll make a start ourselves.’
‘Ma’am, Jann thinks there’s definitely tech in there,’ said Crussman, ‘and I agree with her. Look, that long curve has the line of an engine cowl, and if you look under it you’ll see, well, I’m sure it’s machinery.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Merelock said as Klaide, Gallardi and Heng came past pushing the big piston-grip pedestals on their rumbling wheels. ‘But the tech is the only thing I’m having him look at. If that stuff you think is machinery is part of the Mechanicus mysteries then we’re best served by keeping them sweet from the start, but whatever there is here that’s not machinery is legal salvage of the Filiate Guilds. There’s no lack of piety in doing things by the letter and sorting out what’s ours.’
That was what Crussman had wanted to hear, and he and Sabila had actually clapped as the pedestals halted next to this thing they had found, the thing like a long iridescent arrowhead that looked so heavy and lifted so light, with its strange controls and its riding-rails. None of them had openly discussed the bright gemlike crystals embedded in its sleek curves: most of the deep-desert pipeline crews held the same half-formed superstitions about gloating over salvage before the bonus warrants had been signed. But Jann had found herself studying them, counting them, and wondering about the shapes she was sure now were cargo panniers. As Klaide shooed the others away and started working the controls, the arms extended with a piston-hiss and the three-fingered grips slowly positioned themselves over the pannier lids…)
Jann didn’t want to think about it any more. Didn’t want to dream, didn’t want to remember. Wasn’t it her dream that had begun all this strife? She had dreamed of uprising (although that didn’t fit), she had dreamed of war between them all (but was that really what had happened?), she had dreamed of a bloodshed that the telling of her dreams had brought to pass, prophecy and fulfilment in one closed and shining circle like the edge of a full white moon. But she had never told anyone. She hadn’t even been the one to see the thing wedged in under the pipeline by the winds. Who had seen it first? They had been out checking that the new fixtures at pylon 171 had survived the hypervelocity sandblasting of the previous day and Tokuin’s drone had spotted something his image catalogues couldn’t quite identify. They had gone to hunt it out. But Merelock hadn’t gone with them. And wasn’t Merelock the one who hunted?
The thought of her companion dragged Jann’s consciousness back to the moment. Merelock was still muttering to herself.
‘Oh, we ran together when the ghosts sang in the waterfalls, do you remember? And the quarrels, when I had rancour with my black-haired love, and you were always the quiet voice. You called to me when there was burning iron in the… the smoke… and you were the star by which my… my stave, my hunting, my friends…’ That throaty, guttural note was creeping back into Merelock’s voice like a hunting-cat slinking forwards through a thicket, but at the same time she was faltering, reaching for words as though each path of thought had run into darkness. That was wrong twice over. Merelock was the station supervisor, the order-giver, she should be the certain one. Merelock was one with her home, swift like running feet in the wild night, sure like the strike of a hunting spear or the lunge of the falcon. She should be the sure one, no indecision behind the features she wore.
Jann was still trying to work out what that thought meant when she looked up and saw the figure watching them. It held itself in the light from the stairwell up to the living deck, and where that light fell on it it seemed to fray into crisscrossing sparks and threads. The thing moved a dancing half-step towards them and its whole skin cracked, shivered and crawled with glowing colour. For a moment the display calmed, and then it bent an elegant leg, cocked its head just so and somersaulted lazily backwards into the gloom.
Jann stood and gasped, her mind thrumming like a plucked string but empty of thought. Her heart wanted to leap at the sight of the thing, but her bones wanted to chill. On her arm, Merelock was still sagging and murmuring, and up from the forge level came a burst of laughter and an echoing, grinding crash.
Jann moved. She forgot about supporting Merelock along, simply dragged the other woman into a shambling half-run through the twisting, giggling shadows. Merelock stumbled at the foot of the stairs but pushed herself up with her spear and managed to keep pace. Climbing, Jann shot a look over her shoulder to see the supervisor panting hard two steps behind her, leaning forwards to run so she was bent almost double. Merelock’s cap was long gone and her braid had disintegrated, her black curls hanging in her face, and Jann jerked around to face up the stairs again, glad that she hadn’t seen Merelock’s
(I can’t even remember her real)
face in the brighter lights of the stairwell. None of the minds rioting in her head seemed able to predict what they’d see without the merciful blurring of the shadowy lower floors.
The light grew brighter as they rounded the hairpin and clambered up the second flight. The glow-loop over the door to the living deck was defective, Merelock never quite having managed to bully Tokuin into making time to fix it, and so they came into the ransacked dormitory and into flickering light and weeping.
The weeping voice was Klaide’s, and peering past the clinking and winking of the light just above her Jann could make him out. He was slumped across a twisted nest of bedclothes and curtains, torn from the sleeping-booth par
titions and now choking the dormitory aisle. In the middle of it all Klaide knelt tilted against one of the stripped curtain frames with one hand cupped against his face. It was a pose of grief so classic as to look contrived, as though Klaide was the centre of one of the bright-lit tableaux that enactors performed in front of the temples on holy nights.
At that thought Jann’s scattered thoughts seemed to interlock and move in unison. Insight was as brief as a bright moonbeam spearing down through clouds, but as powerful. She shook her arm free from Merelock and ran down the aisle, so fleetfooted she almost seemed to glide over the debris and litter, and knelt at Klaide’s feet.
‘Klaide? It’s me, Klaide,’ although if he had asked her who ‘me’ was she’d have struggled to answer. ‘Klaide, it’s okay. You don’t need to grieve. We’re not… like this. We’re not…’ It had seemed so clear in that brilliant moonlit moment but now she was grasping for the words. ‘We’re not who we are, Klaide. I think I understand. I’ve dreamed us as…’ and her voice choked in her throat because she wanted to say ourselves and she wanted to say others, and both of those and neither were true.
‘You don’t understand,’ Klaide told her, his voice a travesty: rumbling and chesty as Jann had known it in the years they had been crewmates, not the clear contralto she knew it should really be. ‘He’s gone, he’s…’ and Klaide’s body began to shudder, not with weeping now but with some more profound convulsion. He began shouting, spitting out words in a half-shriek.
‘Dying-dead-he’s-dead-he-will-yet-die-he-dies!’ and while Jann tried to hold the man’s hands down and murmur soft moon-songs to soothe him, still she understood. He had gone away to die. Who had? Jann couldn’t fix on a name, two separate sounds slid into and out of her mind, but she knew he was Klaide’s (champion-child-student-subject-follower), and she knew that whoever he was he had gone to die. He had gone to fight. He was already dead and they mourned. He lay dying, his wound mortal and his blood bright red as a moon whose light waxed upon his death and drenched the green and white moons and drowned their beauty.
He was all these things, all these states, always walking out to his doom, always lying stricken, lying dead. In all these states he was timeless as the tableau they made up now: Klaide grieving, Merelock poised over them with her spear high, Jann kneeling and placating, speaking of dreams. Even as she fought back tears of grief and fear, the form the three of them made felt so right, felt like she was falling into the steps of a dance she had been singled out for while even her own mother was yet waiting to be born.
She thought she heard a soft sigh of recognition from somewhere around them, but could see nobody but the three of them.
She looked at Klaide again. He had wrapped himself in a green curtain-cloth, and torn the front of his tunic so that the edges now echoed the crude garlands of torn fabric Merelock had adorned herself with. He had yanked off his metal collar of rank, and the electoo that ringed his bull-like neck, the badge of a Mechanicus-ordained lay artisan, stood out in the brightness. Its hard geometry made a cruel counterpoint to the tapering lines of Klaide’s own features, elegant even in the depths of grief. It was not Klaide’s own
(any more than this is my real)
face, but finally, finally Jann was coming to understand how that could be.
She found herself talking then, not even sure if Klaide or Merelock had mind enough left behind their
(I can almost remember their)
faces to understand, but letting the words pour out of her like moonlight. She talked about Gallardi taking the machine-shrine from Tokuin because of the steps and the songs that called him to the forge. She talked about her moonlit dreams flowered into prophecies as she spoke them, as her fingers traced the delicate intersecting circles worked into her strange, brittle skin. She talked about the memories she had dreamed and the dreams she couldn’t quite remember, the strange, clumsy creatures they had all once been, with their brutish names (Gallardi, Klaide, Merelock, Jann, surely just the grunts and honks of beasts?) and the reeking, lumpen tower they called home. She talked about the temple tableaux and the passion-plays and the mythic dances, the pageant of Alicia Dominica where the Saint stood before a king with a face like the sun, sometimes to draw her sword on a traitor or sometimes to plead for her doomed children; the Life of Macharius, that her brothers had learned word for word, the general waging war across the heavens, the lay of the ninety-nine swords, the great strife of an aeon past when a murderous hand crushed the martyr-hero and spread his blood, so scarlet-red, the tales of the six magnificent warriors who had walked alive from the end of that great tribulation, ready to hand on the light of their learning.
They were good stories, powerful stories, and they sang in her blood, danced the way she thought she remembered dancing in moonlight to the drum and the cymbal, even as she remembered them all crying and howling and jerkily trying to dance on the roof of the tower when they had found the
(I don’t want to think about the)
faces, broken the locks and found them and…
Now it was Jann sobbing, oblivious to the surprised looks from the other two – this was not her part, these were not her steps. But she staggered to her feet, cast the torque-stave away from her. She had no staff, she had no moonstone necklace, barely had a self. As the stories and the dances solidified in her mind she could feel Jann fragmenting and slipping away. She wanted to tell them, wanted to shout it at them, but the weight of understanding was too great and all she could do was cry for what was happening to them. She struggled to her feet and leapt over Klaide, a broken leap for the broken thing that she had become, and ran for the next stairwell, still sobbing. Behind her, Klaide and Merelock took each other in a clumsy embrace, but Jann didn’t see or care. She understood now. There was no hope.
The lights were out on the operations deck, and only the glows of the instrument and monitor banks shone back at her. She felt the scraps of her mind twist and reach in two different directions to try and make sense of them, and for a moment she paused in her stumbling run to stare at the clear plastek desk where she had pored over the meteorological charts and dune maps. The edges of memories brushed at her again. Sitting at that table hot-eyed and yawning when Merelock had insisted on having the route for a maintenance round ready by the morning shift. Sitting on the table at Quarter Relief, a cup of rough alcohol in her hand, helpless with laughter as Gallardi and Crussman did one of their little songs mocking the guild controllers. Looking at the weather auguries and telling Merelock that yes, they could head out now, it was safe to move, and plotting a route to where the alerts showed that something had been carried up against the pipeline by the storm.
She couldn’t bear that thought, that any action of hers might have helped along what had happened. Jann slumped against the doorframe, lifting her hands to her eyes to blot out the table and its memories, and when she lowered them it was on the table watching her. The shock of terror rhymed and meshed with the shock of familiarity so that she couldn’t tell them apart. She gulped and found herself stepping forwards, reaching out a placating hand that her fear then made into a fist. The tall thing on the table, fringed and crested in colours that swirled and mixed with the air around it, posed and mocked her movements, and then it went from wearing all colours to no colours, fading from her eyes as it stepped back off the table, leaving her just the ghost of laughter.
It wasn’t a mirage, she thought dully to herself, and it wasn’t a memory. Something really had been in here with her, perhaps was in here still. Something that had– but she found herself pushing that idea away before it had managed to get any traction in her thoughts. They were being watched, nothing more. Nobody had done this to them. They had done it themselves.
(They were hushed as they came in procession down from the roof deck, each carrying one of their strange new trophies. Their chatter had broken off after Crussman’s shout, but now their silence was reverent instead of startl
ed. Jann thought of the weighted silences that came over the throngs watching the grey and white banners unfurl from the sides of the hive spires the day after Tithing Day. Thinking of grey and white and silence, she felt empty eyes watching her from the thing she carried, which she knew was stupid. Crussman’s words – ‘It’s full of faces!’ must have unnerved her more than she’d realised.
And yes, once broken open the panniers had been full of faces. They had been mounted like artworks on the pannier’s inner wall, each one veiled in a cloth of shifting, rippling colours the like of which Jann had never seen before. Some of the cloths had fallen away with the jolting of the craft and the cracking of the panniers, exposing the piece beneath it. Without realising it Jann had taken a pace towards one of them, a mask made to slip tightly over a head longer and slenderer than hers. Its features were odd and stylised, tilted so that the mask’s wearer would always seem to have their face tilted slightly skywards. Stylised silvery-grey curls lined the porcelain-white face, and the alien features still carried a sweet and wise serenity that made Jann want to sigh.
She had caught herself and pulled herself back, and then looked around her and realised they had all reacted similarly.
‘All right then, salvage divides equally,’ said Merelock from behind them, trying to be brisk. ‘We all know the rules.’ And because it was the rules, Merelock took first pick. She reached out and unhooked a dark green mask, stern and masculine, with designs that might have been leaves curling about the cheekbones and the edge flaring with a design that seemed to evoke a tousled mane. Klaide pushed past her as she stepped away. One of these toys would be all right for his brother’s little one, he muttered as though needing an excuse, and paused for a moment before he plucked up a mask that was as pale and delicate a green as Merelock’s was dark, one that dusted to gold around the edges and on which a single deep-blue crystal tear glittered below one eye. Jann, equal in rank to Klaide, had darted in next for the face in white and silver-grey. It didn’t seem to be warming from her hands, and in spite of how light it was she couldn’t force it to bend or flex. Gallardi had picked a mask in a stunning orange-red which seemed to glow with its own light and pulse with yellow sparks when he turned it this way and that. The colour faded to an iron-black around the border, and Gallardi pronounced himself well pleased. ‘I might even wear this back down there,’ he had beamed, ‘and see what Tokuin makes of it.’