by Ian McDonald
“I knew I could smell something,” Pharaoh said, sniffing.
Sweetness stopped at another circular door halfway down the corridor.
“In here.”
“What's in here?”
“The way up's in here. Child'a'grace, do you have to make a question out of everything? I got the genes, you don't, that's evolution. In here.” She slapped the door release with the heel of her hand. It flew up. Sweetness found herself looking in a darkness that glittered with a thousand mirrors.
“Maybe not this one.”
There was a man reflected in those mirrors, a man of distinguished silver and good personal grooming, of fine taste in tailoring with a black cane in one hand. A man who, as she watched, turned as if scenting her, all his mirror images turning as one with him. A man who was now aiming something that looked inarguably like a gun at her.
“Run!” Sweetness yelled and dived past the door, Pharaoh a step behind her, as a tremendous explosion and shattering of glass shook the corridor.
“You!”
The word hung in the electric air of the mirror maze. Eyes met in the mirror; green, grey. Then Harx reached inside his immaculate jacket, pulled out a hand-held field impeller, spun and with a terrible raven cry fired at the source of the image. A boom of exploding glass: a million minute shards rained down on Devastation Harx. In the same instant the corner of his eye saw the figure, that trainbrat, that dreadful persistent, rude little girl who would not accept her severe limitations, who would insist on trying her betters, who would absolutely not go away or take no for an answer or know when she was mastered, roll and duck for cover. He readied his gun, panting.
The gas. It's getting to you. You can't allow yourself to act this way, not over an uncouth trainbrat. But she irritated him so much. He wanted her gone, gone for good, so much. He spun, reading his mirrors for unauthorised reflections.
There.
“Yah!”
Harx spun, fired six fast, flat shots at the six standing figures that had swung into view as the mirrors revolved on their tireless waltz. The mirror maze rang to multiple detonations. Still she mocked him, now a dozen reflections away. No matter. Two-fisted, Harx aimed the field-impeller, blew the dreadful girl to hell and silica and so she would have no hiding place, each of the intervening mirrors as well. A slow snow of powdered silvering dusted Devastation Harx's shoulders.
A serene place beyond the paranoia of the combat gasses said, She's not moving. She's not even there. You're just shooting at reflections of reflections of reflections.
Selah. It was good to shoot. Good to cast off the constraints of holiness and spirituality and responsibility and guruship and blaze away with a very big gun at something that annoys you very much.
“Waaaaaah!”
Spinning like a Swavyn, impeller set on constant output, he cut a scything swathe of flying glass through his revolving mirrors.
“Come out come out come out!”
A movement. He turned. In one beautiful, oil-smooth movement, he levelled and aimed the gun at the figure in the glass. Too late he saw that it was not his Nemesis. Harx II, his otherversal counterpart, gaped at the gun, threw up his hands in supplication, denial, hope. Far far too late. The eager finger had closed the contact. A ram of gravitomagnetic force sent him raving up in a spray of subquantal shards.
Devastation Harx staggered. What man would not, who has already killed his brother, and just shot his own self? His field-impeller fell like a shriven sin to the ground. He gave a little creaking moan. He clutched at his heart. Something was torn out of him. Somewhere, he had felt himself die. In a pique of confusion and paranoia, he had killed himself.
No. That itself was paranoia. That was the combat gas, as much as that image of that taunting, grinning female, which he now knew to have been one brief glance, amplified by the vinculum circuitry of his shattered maze. The man had been a Harx, but not Harx. He had been a mirrorman, a reflection, a thing from a universe not his own. A dog soldier. And dog soldiers die.
He was glad. It had long angered him, being given orders by such a sloven.
Disgusted by his lapse of control, Devastation Harx stormed from his sanctum. There was a war to be fought, and won, and it would not be won by ecstatic, slashing violence. Control. Application. Determination. He found the corridor awash with purple: acolytes rushing hither and yon. Beyond the tumult of panicked voices, was that gunfire he heard? He seized a passing faithful, a runty, trembling boy with a pudding-bowl crop.
“Just what the hell is going on?” he thundered.
“The hell!” the little acolyte exclaimed and fled shrieking. Harx pushed his way through the milling crowd to the elevator. As the doors opened the airship lurched, sending him reeling inside. He slid the doors shut and ordered “Presence chamber” into the gosport. The elevator stayed obdurately motionless. He called again, a third time, a fourth time. The elevator crew had evidently abandoned their posts for the mass hysteria raging through the corridors.
“Must I do everything myself?” he declared to the universe in general, and began to crank the windlass.
At the perigee of the dive, at the uttermost straining limit of the bungee, Skerry hit the snap release, went into a forward roll and came up poised and feisty on the balls of her feet as the elastic cords snapped back up through the hole she had made with the isokinetic punch. A moment to fit nasal plugs in case of any lingering pockets of Mishcondereya's trip-gas, another to fix her bearing on the wrist tracker, a quick tweak of the string of her leotard out of her crack, and she was ready for action.
“Okay I'm in,” she said into the throat-bindi mike. Still without a notion where she was going, what she was looking for. But in and intact. “There's a lot of noise.” There certainly was, down beneath her feet, like a party going badly wrong in a neighbour's house. She crept forward on her toes; the din neither waxed nor waned. “I guess they must be really digging your light show, Bladnoch.”
Director Seskinore came on the line.
“My dear, we have a suggestion from the head doctors in Wisdom. They suggest you go up rather than down. Some head-shrinkie theory about people and valuables.”
“Too right I'm going up. I'm not going down there for a boob job.”
She checked her wrist tracker. Its hypersonic bat-squeaks penetrated every level of this creaky, shambling edifice and sketched up a rudimentary map. On the toe-tips of her grip-sole shoes, Skerry moved out. At every turn, she chose the inward route. At every flight of steps, she chose the upward course. Sound travelled well along these curving corridors; plenty of warning of approaching feet to slip into cover: a wall closet, a low-level airco shaft, a false-ceiling panel. What is it about young people today, she thought as the purple-clad faithful rushed beneath her, that fun and dancing and drinking and sex aren't enough for them? Why do they want to be going and joining religions and dressing up all the same and getting dreadful dreadful haircuts? Each generation rejects the mores of the one preceding. You should know that better than most, daughter of Ghalgorm's draughty halls.
Better to avoid people altogether. The ceiling duct in which she had taken cover let into a crawlway. After a dozen metres on her belly, it branched. Her tracker advised her that the left fork led to the cathedral's service core. Skerry had always been a fan of service cores. She kicked the panel that capped the tunnel free. It fell an impressive distance between the bloated gas cells before it hit a tension net and bounced. With a grin, Skerry swung herself out on to the honeycomb mainframe beams and began to climb. Upward. But still no idea what she was looking for. The nave-like space of the service core amplified sounds, reflected and focused noises in strange ways. The din from the panicked in the corridors washed back and forth, up and down, unnerving hellish. Skerry flinched at the sudden tattoo of gunfire, though sense told her not even a teen acolyte would be so idiotic as to fire a slug-thrower in an LTA.
“Mish?”
“What's up?”
“I heard shooting.”<
br />
“Oh, that. They're spraying bullets at anything that moves. Sooner or later they'll run out. What's with you?”
“I'm on a gantry directly under the apex of the ship. There's a solid roof above me, which the tracker says is the floor of the dome room. I'm going to try there first, once I get out of here.”
The tracker also a contained a clever little bollixer (in Weill's gaudy and expressive phrase) with enough electronic nous to jemmy the hatch from the gantry on to the corridor. The two halves of the door slid open to reveal a young, dark-haired woman dressed in improbably ramshackle battle gear pulling at the handles of an inlaid double door. Skerry froze. The girl froze. Behind her a similarly piratical youth also froze, but it was the girl that transfixed Skerry. In an instant of epiphany, she knew who that girl must be, what she was looking for behind that door, how she recognised it.
“Hey! You!”
The spell shattered. The girl drew something that looked like a cross between a crossbow and soft furnishings. Skerry did not wait for it to demonstrate its potentialities. A back flip took her out of arc behind the door. She scrambled up on to the ceiling, hung spider-fashion, peeked out at the inverted corridor. Empty. The dark-haired girl—the granddaughter, the traingirl, the one who was at the heart and root of all this mad affair, the only one apart from Harx who knew what this divine receptacle looked like—and her boyfriend were gone. But the double doors stood open.
“Let's go!” Skerry said, somersaulting to the ground.
Mishcondereya tacked the sky yacht hard aport and by sheer millimetres missed clipping the pin-feathers of the Winged Edsel. She swore her finest ladies-finishing-school oaths as she fought to control the skittery little machine in the chaotic turbulence cast up as cloud boiled into phantasm and back again.
“I'd like to see what the manufacturer's manual has to say about this,” she hissed as she righted the ship and immediately pulled it into a fan-shredding climb as Cheraph PHARIGOSTER came howling up at her, fiery scourges raised. The things were no more substantial than the mist from which they were constructed but you could hardly fly through them. Necessary illusions must be maintained. “Where's he gone now, the bastard?” Radar lock had been long abandoned. Mishcondereya kept track of the labouring cathedral, sometimes invisible within the thrashing cloud of Saints and Angels, by line of sight, seat of pants, twitch of ovary and luck. She momentarily caught Harx's fortress in her peripheral vision, enveloped in the tentacles of PREMGEE, the World-Devouring Squid.
“Woo hoo!” she whooped and threw the airship into an immediate rolling dive after him. Lift bags boomed, struts complained, spars groaned. Tremendous fun.
“Bearing two oh two oh niner,” she called to Bladnoch, circling discreetly in UA2 on the trailing edge of the maelstrom. “Delta vee, about twenty squared.” She knew he flew the thing on autopilot and liked to intimidate him with technicalese.
“Moving in,” Bladnoch said, calmly. From the high steering turret he watched Mishcondereya plunge into the heart of Gotterdammerung. He wondered what the people on the ground were making of it all and what lies the media were being fed to explain just why the Rider of the Many-Headed Beast had chosen this day and their neighbourhood to duke it out with the Seven Sanctas. Whatever, he felt a glow of proprietorial pride. One of his better efforts. Oh definitely. He could almost feel good about it. Bladnoch tried to work out how he could slip it into his cv, then raised control on the communicator.
“Yuh?” Weill said, delighted by the tag-team wrestling match between the Two Lone Swordsmen and several scaley members of the Circus of Heaven unfolding like a summer squall over Nanerl Canton. Who would have thought the forces of divine order harboured such spectacular anarchy?
“Weill, I have to have more weather.”
“I'm giving you all the weather I can, man.”
“We lose cloud, we lose everything, friend. We're bollock naked.”
“Have you any idea how much this is costing?”
“Since when have you been concerned about the taxpayer's dollar?”
Seskinore took over the line. In addition to his preperformance rituals, he had popped a tab of tephranol filched from Weill's supplies and was now as convinced of his own omnipotence as the Panarch himself. More so. He could order the Panarch about: look, there He goes. Loop-a-da-loop, Ancient of Days.
“Whatever it costs, you will have it,” he said, plummily. There was nothing he could not do now, no benison he could not grant, he held elemental forces in his hands and made them dance and sing. A million people were watching the products of his genius, gobemouche with wonder, and they loved him, they loved him. Even if they did not know who he was, they loved him. A stage! A stage worthy of the great Seskinore at last. He tabbed up Mishcondereya. “My dear, timing! Timing! The very soul of comedy!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you're a little bit late on your shadowing. Skerry has to get back out again.”
“Ses, they've got Gatlings down there and they're not averse to using them,” Mishcondereya said, thinking, pillock, but she took the little ship in close through a phalanx of Spiritual Spearmen. The proximity alarm and Weill's shouted warning blasting her eardrum came simultaneously. By instinct alone, Mishcondereya threw the sky yacht out of the way of the six blinding streaks of light that burned over her head and in the same instant were gone.
“Bladnoch, what the hell you playing at?” she yelled as she fought to avoid ramming the Great Pantechnicon amidships.
“Not mine, Mishcon. Those were hundred percent corporeal. Solid.”
“I'll tell you what they were,” Weill said grimly. “Waves five and six. Our Mr. Harx has just upped the ante.”
Sweetness and Pharaoh ran pell-mell up the gently curving corridor that Sweetness's infallible train sense told her led to Devastation Harx's presence chamber. Hell and urine, it was only a few days since she had last been here. Full days admittedly, but how much can you forget? She stood before the double doors, hand resting on the door pad.
“This is the place,” she said.
“Definitely?” Pharaoh asked, faithlessly.
“Hundred percento,” Sweetness said and palmed the door release. “See?”
In those few days since she had last stood in the presence chamber, much had befallen that beautiful room. The wooden cressets had tumbled, the horse-shoe table smashed in the middle by a falling beam, the thirteen chairs scattered and broken-backed. Sweetness walked to the centre across a carpet of glassite shards. She looked up through the shattered dome, shading her eyes against the white glare of the fog.
“What the…?”
Pharaoh was working at the door, wedging the handles with broken chair-backs. He looked up at Sweetness's exclamation.
“What is it?”
“I thought I saw…I don't know, couldn't be, an angel. Looking right in at me.”
“Nothing would surprise me about this place,” Pharaoh said. “Or you. There. That should hold them for a while.”
Sweetness surveyed the grandeur of the devastation of the beautiful room.
“Mother'a'mercy, those boys could chuck dynamite,” she opined. “Where do you start in this mess?”
“Lid like a winged helmet,” Pharaoh said.
“Yuh.”
“It could be over there.”
The wooden altar piece had been added to the furnishings after Sweetness's visit and had been miraculously spared the destruction, as they often are as a sure sign of their divinity. A lot of purple acolyte hours had been put into it, the triptych of St. Catherine on Motherworld, St. Catherine planting the Tree of World's Beginning with pressure-gloved fingers in the regolith of Chryse and St. Catherine the Mortified as a translucent woman in a floaty frock was vigorous if naive. The five radiating arms bore miniatures from the Reality Wars, teen cybersoldiers with mirror shades and wires in their heads, fleets of logic bombers dodging slashing lasers, grim-faced space-marines hacking their way into orbital habitats with power axes
. They were more crudely rendered but had the energy and zeal of the eye of faith guiding the hand of paint. Crucified to the central spine, haloed by festival fairy lights and stick-on fake jewels was the Catherine canister. It could not have been more obvious if it had had a banner hanging over it announcing Catherine of Tharsis, right here, right now.
“You know, I'm having second thoughts about saving you,” Sweetness said as she started to climb the rickety edifice. Her desert boots dislodged self-adhesive cabochons, flaked chips of lovingly applied paint. “You are too damn smart for your own good, son.”
“Then you be spread all over Canton Semb like cashew butter,” Pharaoh said.
“I'd've been all right, I'm a story,” Sweetness said, reaching for the reliquary.
“Yeah? Happy ending or sad ending?”
At which moment, Pharaoh's barricaded door quivered.
Outside, in the curving corridor, Skerry cursed.
“Agh!” She beat her palms against it in frustration. “When will something go right today?” She stepped back, too short a run, put her solid shoulder to it. The double doors bulged. Wood splintered.
Within the presence chamber, the wedge chair creaked, wooden billets cracked. The door slammed again.
“Let's go!” Sweetness said, wrenching the pyx free from the altar. She held it up in her hand like a mace. She expected a glow. She expected an angelic chord. She expected a ray of light to beam through the shattered dome of the sacred place on to her face. She expected a sense of completeness, reunification with her sundered twin, of mission accomplished. What she did feel was Pharaoh's hands plucking urgently at her feet.
“Hey, get off me, I'm coming, I'm coming…”
She looked down at the face behind the insistently clawing hands. It was not Pharaoh's face. They were not Pharaoh's hands. Pharaoh was on his knees on the broken glass, retching from an evident boot in the testicles.