"Oh, snecking hell," Red groaned. She spat, purging the taste of voltage from her mouth. "A robot."
"You make it sound so mundane," sighed D'Isis. His head was calm, despite the convulsions of his body, the eyes swivelling to look at her.
Red got to her feet. "I didn't think they made these any more."
"They don't. It's an antique. A duplicate, from when I still had an empire. I used to have hundreds, but this was the only one that survived."
"So all this time I've been talking to a bloody droid?" She walked over to the table and picked up the needle gun.
"Don't be hasty. You've been speaking to me through the robot." The eyelids dropped closed over roving eyes. One of them came up, but the other was frozen. "Things have changed around here, Durham Red. I have a little power now, more than I've ever had. The systems failures have let me take control of a few machines, but I'm still a prisoner. I need you."
"You're doing that riddle thing again."
"It's a hard habit to break." The voice was fading, attenuating. She drew closer to hear it. "I'd tell you everything right now, if I could. You deserve it. But we're out of time. You have to come and find me."
"So where are you?" She hefted the gun. It was small and heavy, fully loaded. Not a weapon she was familiar with, but she could soon learn. "And why the sneck shouldn't I just walk out of here right now?"
"Because you'll never leave Magadan unless I tell you how." The eyes weren't moving at all. "Come down and find me, Durham Red. I'll guide you. Find the real me, and I'll tell you everything. Every..."
The head stilled. Red nudged it with the toe of her boot, but it gave no reply.
"Shit."
There was one more thing to do before she left, a promise to keep. When she first resolved to kill Saleph Losen if she ever saw him again it had been in the form of a threat. But in the space of a few hours, it had passed from a threat to a duty.
She took the needle gun, went over to the mewling thing that had been Sire Losen, and fired a single toxin dart into the back of his neck. Then, as he fell silent, she did the same, carefully and systematically, to every other guest at the table.
All but one. Lise was still sitting in place. Her face was blank, her body motionless, but her eyes followed Red everywhere, flickeriing plaintively between her face and the gun.
Red perched on the edge of her table. "I don't know how to help you," she said simply. "I wish I could."
The sylph gazed up at her for a long moment, and in that haunted look was all the answer Red needed. Even if it wasn't the one she wanted to hear.
"I understand," she said.
Slowly, Lise closed her eyes.
18. NO PLACE LIKE HOME
There was no sign of Sorrelier on the way out. He was obviously long gone from the court. The only signs of his passing were a couple of bloodied footprints near the door, where he'd trodden in seepings from one of the dinner guests, and a puddle of greasy bile in the next hallway along. Red saw that and felt nothing. Her own guts were in turmoil from what the Gothking's servilants had wrought in the dining hall.
She was glad that Sorrelier had gone, in more ways than one. The man was a menace, a conspirator and a fool. He'd kidnapped her, and set Ketta upon her, and Red had the uneasy suspicion that he'd done worse to her in another life. She still couldn't shake the conviction that she knew him.
Not only that, but if she saw him again she might have to tell him about Lise.
D'Isis had only given her one clue as to his location, before the damage Red had done to his robot duplicate had taken its toll. She knew that she had to go further down into the Keep, though she didn't know how far or how she might arrive there.
Red ran until she reached the elevator, through the five halls, across the mirrored floor. The elevator doors were closed. Sorrelier must have rode the elevator back up to the stratum of fountains. Red pressed the call control, expecting a wait, but the doors opened for her immediately.
She stepped through them, impatient to be away, and found her foot dangling in empty space.
Red cried out, just about managing to scramble back before she lost her balance completely. The elevator was gone, as she had suspected, but the doors had opened anyway.
"Snecking system failures," she said out loud, feeling a little breathless. She was going to have to watch her step; whatever dissolution was affecting the Grand Keep, it was becoming lethal.
If the elevator was above her, she couldn't see it. The shaft was dark, only the light spilling in from the open doors partially illuminating its interior, which seemed to go on forever, upwards and downwards. Red stared into it for a few moments, then stepped away. "D'Isis?"
There was no answer, save the echo of her own voice. She tried again, more loudly this time. "Hey, Simon. You said you'd guide me. Now would be a good time to start!"
Nothing. Either the Gothking had been lying, or he couldn't reach her yet. In either case, she would need to find her own way.
She leaned back into the shaft. After a few moments her night vision came into play, enhancing the meagre light coming in through the open doors.
There were dozens of pipes and ducts hugging the walls, some of which might provide enough of a grip to enable a short climb. A narrow ledge ringed the shaft at floor height. Red scanned these features quickly, and dismissed them with similar speed. She didn't want to be spidering around the inside of the shaft if the elevator decided to reappear. No, there had to be another way.
And there it was, over to her right. Above the ledge, a small hatchway.
Red stepped into the shaft, gripping the walls wherever she could find purchase, inching her way above the dizzying drop. By the time she reached the hatch her fingers were aching, and the oily smell was starting to get to her. She was glad she'd not been stupid enough to try climbing the pipework.
The hatch, thankfully, was not locked, and slid easily aside on hidden runners. Behind it was a cage just about big enough for an engineer - or one very tired and hungry mutant in uncomfortable boots - to stand up in. A service elevator.
Red stepped gratefully inside. "Shirts and haberdashery," she muttered. "Going down."
The elevator, according to its indicator panel, could take Red six strata below the inner court. She still had no idea how far down the Gothking might be, but she pressed the lowest button anyway. She could work her way up from there if she needed to.
The journey wasn't as swift as in the larger elevators, but it was far more interesting. The service elevator had no solid walls; it was basically a cylinder of steel mesh on grav-lifters, and many parts of its surrounding shaft were laid wide open. Red saw more of the workings of the Keep in this one short trip than she had done on her entire journey with Sorrelier.
First was the space below the inner court, a cavernous level that seemed to stretch away into infinity. There were no walls, and it was no higher than a couple of storeys, but it was a maze of systemry; forests and cabling and pipework, endless ducts and thousands upon thousands of support braces. This, she realised, was merely the court's underfloor area, the structure between strata. There was probably one of these under every inhabited level.
Huge machines hummed, glowing with power. Gravity nullifiers, giant companions to the service elevator's own system of motion, had been set into the space. Red felt the heat of their radiators and marvelled. This was how the Keep extended so high, she realised. Each floor negated the mass of the one above it.
Suddenly, the idea of power failures within the Keep became even more terrifying.
Further levels brought further wonders. She passed down through a stratum that was clearly one enormous flight harbour, many times the size of those she had seen before. A ring of starships, ranging in size from yachts to caravels, was arranged around the perimeter. From the ceiling extended a series of oddly shaped towers. Decks and gantries surrounded the ships, which were attended by cranes and mobile grabs. Cargo and fuel were being loaded, and the hangar seethed with
people running in every direction. They seemed to be in a state of high agitation. One man, close to the shaft, looked in as Red went past. His face was a mask of terror.
It looked as though the whole statum was preparing for an exodus, although no exit was visible. If a ship lifted off from one of those inward-facing berths, Red wondered, how would it leave the Keep?
She headed further down, through more braces and support levels, more ducts and tunnels, to the bottom of the shaft.
The elevator sighed to a halt and opened. Red slid the hatch aside and stepped out of it, glad to be free of its confines. Her boots came down on steel mesh.
It was hot. Steam came up through the floor, and disappeared through a ceiling made of the same material. The mesh deck had four, maybe five, similar levels both above and below it. Light came from tubular lumes bolted to the ceiling at intermittent points, issuing simultaneously from up and down, but a greater source of illumination could be glimpsed glowing at some distance ahead.
There were machines everywhere, pumping and hissing, complex assemblies of black metal and chrome. Pipes hung from them, dangling like jungle vines, and cables snaked across the floor. The service elevator had taken her right into the guts of this place, whatever it was, into the heat of its bowels. There was nothing appealing or pretty here.
No workers, either. The place must have been largely automatised, or else the engineers and their sylphs must have been scattered by the same panic gripping the hangar decks above.
"What the sneck," she breathed, "is all this?"
"You're in my domain, Durham Red."
She whirled. His voice was everywhere, coming down from concealed sounders. "Where are you?"
"I'm close. You'll have to come and find me, Red. I'm not as fit as I was. You've weathered the years far better than I."
"Thirteen hundred years of hibernation is great beauty treatment." She started forwards, deeper into the maze of machines. "So it really is you."
There was a long, soft, synthetic-sounding sigh. "In a manner of speaking."
"Quite a coincidence. Of all the planets, in all the systems-"
"Please don't continue with that awful paraphrase, my dear. You're far smarter than that. And trust me, there is no coincidence at all. I looked long and hard for you, and it took some considerable effort to bring you to Magadan."
Red was still pacing forwards, heading for the light. After a time the rows of devices gave way to a railed walkway between them, curving slightly away to left and right. Like most places in the Keep, the Magister's domain must have been laid out in a vast circle. "So you could do to me what you did to those poor bastards upstairs?"
There was an exasperated noise from the sounders. "Don't waste your sympathies on those monsters, girl. If you want to grieve for someone, take a look at the inside surface of one of the sarcophagi you've been passing by."
Red paused. The rows of blank devices had given no clue as to their purpose. It wasn't until she turned around and studied one up close that she saw the machine was faced with a window, a curving glass panel taller than she was. Red wiped steam from it so she could see what was inside.
It was a man. He was very young. His skin was pale and slicked with sweat, criss-crossed with the straps that held him in place. His arms were outstretched, his legs held straight and his feet together, crucified on a gantry of gleaming surgical steel. He was naked, apart from the straps and a device that covered his groin; pipes led from that device into the floor. More pipes came in from the sides of the machine, terminating in bright steel plugs bolted directly into his skin between each pair of ribs, into his armpits, the insides of his elbows, the backs of his knees. His body was a forest of shaking, pumping cables.
His head sprouted slender tubes connected to what appeared to Red to be a skullcap. Then she wiped away a little more steam, and saw that the man wore nothing on his head - not even bone. The entire top of his skull had been sliced away, exposing the grey mass of his brain.
The thin tubes ended in needles, and these were pushed into the man's brain tissue. Fluids inched up out of them, slowly, constantly. He was being fed by the pipes below, and drained by the tubes above.
Red backed away, horrified. From where she stood she could see hundreds of similar machines; row after row, rank after rank, thousands ringing the stratum, hot and rattling, a man or woman trapped in every one of them.
"You see?" said the Gothking, his voice thick. "They built this, those creatures you felt such sympathy for. Generation after generation of Arch-Domini have added to it, sacrificing their own people." He gave a derisive snort. "And you thought I was evil."
"Why?" Red stepped back from the encased man, and saw his eyes follow her. "What's this all for?"
"For me," the Gothking said. Then suddenly his tone switched, adding a sense of urgency. "Durham Red, there's someone down here."
Red tensed. "Who? Guards?"
"No, they're gone." There was a heartbeat of silence. "He's on this stratum, close at hand. I have some eyes and ears down here, Red, but I'm not omnipotent. Far from it. You'd better keep moving."
"Where to?"
"Follow the light."
For once, Red did as she was told. She aimed herself at the greatest source of light and ran.
She passed ten rows of machines, ten great rings of human captives, crucified and drained by the Board's sarcophagi. The same number, maybe even greater, occupied the levels above and below. The total count was something Red couldn't let herself think about.
She ran through an open area, only stopping when she reached the huge windows that lay beyond.
There was a kind of observation gallery here, the windows tilted inward at the top, so tall that they stretched past her level and into those above and below. The gallery was circular, surrounding a space as big as the Masque stadium. Red put her hands to the nearest pane and looked down onto a sea of glowing machinery.
These weren't the coffin factories that had surrounded her, but something else entirely. Tubes of glass and steel, spire-topped, gave off a fitful blue light. There was a forest of them, a sea of them, so closely packed that she couldn't have walked between them, each one bigger than a starship set on end.
Above them was a cruciform walkway, four bridges of narrow mesh meeting at the centre of the space, where they joined a stepped disc. And there, on the circular top step, was a house-sized cylinder of black metal. Pipes, thick as tree trunks, hung down from above the gallery to join the top of the cylinder.
"I can see you," Red whispered. The Gothking was hiding in that drum of black steel. She knew it as certainly as she knew her own heartbeat. Here, at the very centre of the Keep, was the real Simon D'Isis.
Now all she had to do was find a way down.
"And I can see you," D'Isis replied. "Be careful, Red. I can't imagine that this fellow means you well."
"I don't see him."
"No, I think that's the way he wants it. But I can't help you from here. If you need an ally, you'll have to bring him closer."
She glanced about wildly, peering through the heat-haze. As she did so, a pale form stepped out from behind one of the machines, three or four rows away and part-hidden by steam.
Red almost laughed with relief. "It's okay, D'Isis. That's a friend. It's Godolkin."
Even half-hidden by vapour, and lit only by the fitful shafts of light from above, there was no mistaking that colourless skin, even from a distance, or the powerful muscles that rippled beneath the charm-tattoos covering his naked torso. He wore his black uniform trousers and heavy boots, but his battle harness was gone. Maybe he had stripped it off in the heat.
She raised a hand to wave, and saw the figure move towards her. He started to run.
"I've seen Godolkin before," the Gothking said forebodingly. "And I don't think that's him."
"What do you mean, you've seen him? When did you - oh, sneck!"
It wasn't Godolkin. His hair was too short, his charm-tattoos too sparse. His eyes we
re covered with round-lensed goggles.
It was Hermas, the man whose blood had almost eviscerated her on Biblos.
He was pounding towards her now, his boots hammering the mesh. Red hauled the needle gun up, squeezing the trigger to send a burst of toxin barbs lancing out at the Iconoclast, but if they struck him he didn't seem to notice. A moment later he was upon her.
There was no subtlety to his attack. He just ran into her, shoulder first, crushing her against the window.
He was fast, and brutally strong. The blow slammed her with incredible force back into the glass. She felt it crack behind her as her skull smashed back into it, felt one of her ribs give way with an a creaking snap. Pain flooded her, and she cried out.
Hermas yanked her away from the window, and shoved her back into it again. "That's the spirit, bitch-saint! Scream for me!"
"Yeah," snarled Red. "I bet you love it when they do that."
His face twisted in rage, and he reached for her, but she had the measure of him now. She ducked away, letting his momentum carry him past, and powered her elbow into the back of his head. This time it was his skull that collided with the glass, face-first. Cracks spiderwebbed across the window.
There was something sticking out of his back, a metal cylinder as thick as two fingers. A staking pin, crusted with dried blood. A memory of pain sparked in Red's mind. She knew what that felt like.
Hermas span around to face her. She darted back, sweeping her foot around at head-level, the steel toe of her boot cracking his jaw. He roared and caught the boot, twisting Red over, but she wrenched herself away and leapt at him.
They went through the window together.
It was a long way down. Red could see the sea of blue-lit machines spiralling up at her, the slender spires atop each one, sharp as a blade. She twisted, trying to get Hermas beneath her, but he was too strong. When they hit, she was mostly underneath the Iconoclast.
The Encoded Heart Page 20