by Dan Abnett
‘Patience?’ I called softly. There was no answer. I clicked my micro-bead, but the link was dead. I walked towards the arch.
Beyond it, a long tiled hallway flanked with sleek charcoal pillars. If this was the City of Dust, then it was not what I expected. It seemed clean to the point of sterility.
The air was warm. Strong sunlight shone in through the pillared arches, casting long, hard shadows of the columns across the floor, like italicised numerals on the face of a clock. The quality of the light was strange. It was so pure and fierce, and so directional.
The hallway, like the chamber with the mirror, was tiled in amber. They held a rich inner warmth, glowing where the sunlight touched them. I looked at the tiles on the wall beside me: again, so perfectly fitted. Close to, I realised there was a mark upon them, a tiny pattern repeated in delicate rows across the surface of every single tile. It was the numeral ‘8’, over and over again, each one no bigger than the tip of a pencil. But the numerals were aligned on their sides, forming bands or chains. They were not eights at all. They were the lemniscate, the geometric symbol for infinity. They were the limitless apeiron, the tail-biting double-circle of ouroboros.
I stepped back.
I could hear nothing, but there was a sensation of music, or at least a harmonic vibration just at the edge of hearing. The air smelled of perfume, but then I realised it was me. It was the splashes of Kara’s fragrances that had spotted my clothes when Kys tossed aside the bottles in the nameless house. A faint trace, but it smelled so strong because the place smelled of absolutely nothing.
Place. Palace. The scale was great. I sensed I was in a small part of something vast. I started to walk, then paused. I realised there was a word in my head that had not been there before. It was a word of forbidden Enuncia that I had forgotten the instant I spoke it. I had only remembered it when I passed into the extimate space at Feverfugue. To remember it again, suddenly, here… It seemed to prove that this was extimate space too.
I walked. Through the open archways, I could see a city below. The wonder of it stopped me dead. A great city, of towers and domes, all gleaming grey and white, steel and corundum, some topped with crests and spires of glinting auramite and orichalcum. Beyond the city, concentric rings of walls, built strong for defence, like cliffs, and as majestic as the towers. The sky above was the deepest black, in stark contrast to the brilliantly lit city. I leaned out a little beside a charcoal pillar, and looked up. I glimpsed the sun, the source of the blazing light. But it was not the sun – it was a supermassive star, not of the same system. Set in the blackness, it glowed numinous white. Around its haloed glare, other stars twinkled, an infinite scape of unfamiliar patterns and strange constellations that I was sure Freddy Dance would recognise at once. Closer, like phantoms in the perpetual dark, I saw the rims and crescents of primordial exoplanets, some very large, timeless and inscrutable in the King’s private heavens.
I steadied my breathing. How big was this palace, this city? A hundred leagues across? A thousand? The mighty walls seemed so far away, yet I could see them sharply, just like the innumerable stars, for the air was so clear and there was no light pollution.
And there was no one there.
The emptiness was eerie. I wandered the amber halls for a while, and found a staircase, wide and of burnished marble, and followed it upwards. I reached a much higher level, emerging into the unforgiving starlight and onto a great platform of white stone, lined with huge statues, each one a giant winged man of noble aspect hewn from alabaster.
The likeness of every one of them, crafted by a master sculptor, was that of Comus Nocturnus.
I thought I was high up in the palace, but the platform I had reached, larger than any grand plaza in Queen Mab, was merely the foot of greater towers that soared above me, strong-lit against the blackness, their white ethercite radiant. Just looking up and trying to comprehend their height made me giddy.
I looked away, back at the city below. I had a greater vantage now. I could see the plan of it, the perfect plan. It wove in spirals and graceful curves obeying, in both macro and micro scheme, the universal harmony of the Golden or Divine Ratio. The streets seemed wound like the coiled cells of a sectioned nautilus. What place was this, what mind could have conceived it?
From this height, I could see beyond the distant walls. I could see a bone-white shoreline, a beach perhaps a kilometre deep and as wide as the horizon. Beyond that, an ocean, boundless and black beneath the starred black sky, lapping endlessly against the bone-shore. Despite the space of distance, I could hear its rolling surge. I thought I could even hear the clack and tinkle of the shells and pebbles on the tidal edge.
It was the ocean sound I had heard in the Below. This, I felt with great certainty, was the other side of that same sea, the far shore of the vista I had glimpsed through the King Door. It could not be crossed or navigated, and even if it could, one would then only face the insurmountable walls of the city. Ravenor was wrong, Eisenhorn too. The King Door could be no mortal access to this place. They had not even begun to imagine the scale of the other side.
For it wasn’t a sea at all. The city was a great, shining island, and the sea was the immaterium, calmed and majestic, but as infinite and absolute as the apeiron pattern on the amber tiles. I had no idea why the great empyrean wasn’t washing me away, me and the place I stood in.
What Comus must have done to cross it…
I began to walk across the platform, intending to skirt the base of the vast towers and take in the view on the other side, but I was still underestimating the scale. What looked like a walk of five minutes was so much more, for in five minutes I had barely begun to cross even a part of it. I realised how huge these cyclopean towers were, and thus how impossibly vast those distant walls must be, how titanic the bone-white shore, how truly endless the sea. The sunlight – the starlight – was fierce, for there was no shade. I felt but mild heat, but the skin of my cheek began to burn. There was no shield of atmosphere, no sky, but something kept the air I breathed from escaping into the void above.
I kept walking anyway. My footsteps, the only sound, were as tiny as me. Whenever I stopped, and turned to look at the city, the towers had subtly adjusted themselves, as though turned by a photogravitational influence. I wondered if they were following the slow track of the giant star across the heavens, as flowers follow the sun. I saw birds, twice, far away above the ocean shore, the white dots of seabirds soaring in the black sky.
I knew they were not birds.
I began to feel afraid. The wonder of the place was so great, it teetered on the edge of terror.
At last, after walking for longer than I was able to accurately calculate, except that my legs sorely ached, I began to round the corner of the tower base. I leant to rest against the warm, white ethercite. I saw the sprawl of the city that had been obscured from my view, and I saw what filled the black heavens above it, but had been eclipsed by the high towers.
A baleful scar slit the blackness diagonally. A cosmic manifestation, a puckered whorl of starlight and warp, shot through with crimson, pink and traces of flame. It was bigger than the local star. It was light years across, a galactic wound. It dominated the bowl of space, the entire psychocosm. Skeins of tiny stars, some bright as ice flakes, some raw as cinders, slowly tumbled into its yawning abyss of fluorescent nebula gas and bloodshot light. Their fall was glacial, the supreme progress of Long Time. The scar seemed to gaze down upon the city like a burning, disfigured eye. Then I felt terror, true terror, for that was what it was.
The Ocularis Terribus. The Eye of Terror.
Below its numbing horror, a war was raging, far away. From the distant walls of the city, from towers and fortifications greater than the greatest cathedrals, darts and spears of electrocorporeal light lanced up into the sky, and some were answered by red beams that flickered from the high darkness beneath the Eye’s glare. I saw bright flas
hes quiver and throb below the horizon, coming and going, speaking of colossal destruction and annihilation beyond my range of sight. I could hear nothing, not even a faint roar. These were world-shaking detonations, city-destroying blasts of searing bombardment, and I could hear nothing.
I saw flights of angels, dots far away, like snowy blossom on the wind, lifting from the far battlements in formations a thousand strong, setting out into the blackness. I saw golden barges and burnished warships hanging silently, hanging impossibly, in the darkness above the city, prows facing outwards, ready to embark. One passed overhead as I watched. I do not know where it had come from, but its shadow crossed me and crossed the tower I leant against. I looked up to see its golden form, the detail of its plating, its finials, its gun ports and engines, the slow flutter of its banners, the masts of its forward lances, piping and ducts of its gargantuan keel. All wrought of gold, every part of it. Its passage was completely noiseless, and it seemed to go on forever as it crawled past overhead.
I watched it go. I slid down the wall, my back to it, until I was seated on the ground. I watched it go until it was just one of many on station over the shimmering walls.
What had I expected of this place? A decayed shadow of Queen Mab, perhaps. A ruined relic choked in dust and desert. An arcane lair. A furtive King, lurking in a dismal hall, hidden from the real world while he plotted and schemed.
Not this.
Never this.
We had imagined much, but we had fallen so far short it was laughable. This was beyond anything, a realm that contained itself in utter metaphysical perfection and atomically precise engineering, that constrained and harnessed the very ether as a barrier defence. No wonder that all who heard of this feared it. No wonder that warriors of all fealty, traitor and loyalist alike, and sundry great warlords of other species, gathered feverishly at Sancour. This realm of Orphaeus was a threat to all things, or an answer to all prayers. It had to be stopped, or it had to be joined for fear of being left on the side that opposed it, for that side would surely lose.
I think, at that moment, I may have lost my mind.
When I became aware of things again, I found myself back inside the palace. I presume I must have walked, numb and insensible, all the way back across the platform and descended the stairs into the amber hallway. I did not even know if it was the same hallway I had started from. The tiles all looked the same, for they were. I could still hear the hiss of the distant empyrean ocean washing the faraway shore.
I found myself, sitting on the floor at the base of a pillar, exhausted and dazed. The amber tiles were sun-warmed beneath me. I had been crying. My hands trembled. I had no idea how long I had been there.
‘It will be all right,’ said a voice.
I looked up. A young man was standing over me, a look of concern and comfort on his face. He was wearing an austere white uniform that recalled the ceremonial dress of the Imperial Battlefleet, topped by a rich blue robe edged in auramite thread. Upon his tunic breast, collar and sleeves, the repeated symbol of the lemniscate was embroidered in gold. I could see complex tattoos upon his throat, and across the side and base of his shaved head.
I knew his face.
‘Judika?’
‘No, that’s not my name.’
‘But you have his face.’
He laughed, as if to say of course. He helped me to my feet. I glimpsed a cuff as he raised me. Gold, but otherwise like mine. He was a null.
‘Are you new here?’ Not-Judika asked.
‘Yes.’
‘We found you by chance. Others have gone for help. Newly arrived, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then no wonder you are in a state,’ he said solemnly. ‘You should have been received. Nothing was scheduled. You should have been greeted. The Palace can be overwhelming to those who have not seen it.’
‘The Palace…’
‘Thaumeizin. The Palace of Thaumeizin.’
‘Is that his name?’ I asked.
‘Is that whose name?’ He frowned. There was a slight but distinctive crackle in the texture of his voice, like the prickle of vox static. ‘You need water, and rest. You are clearly unwell. I know I was when I first arrived, and I was received and cared for. Have you been wandering around alone?’
I nodded.
‘Throne save you!’ he cried. ‘It’s a wonder you’re not mad. There is induction, to acclimate you. Neuroanatomical treatment. You should have been taken to the adytum for initiatic processing.’
‘Thaumeizin…’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Not a name?’
‘Yes, the name of here,’ he said. ‘This is the Mote. It is all things here and all we are. It is bounded by the Sea of Souls. It commands Pandaemonium. You were told this?’
‘No.’
‘No one told you this?’ Not-Judika asked. ‘How were you sent to the Mote without being told this?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Of anything.’
‘This is the Palace of Thaumeizin. Thaumeizin means wonder, for all things begin in wonder. So it is said in the earliest Eleniki philosophy, for it is the wonder at a puzzle that drives us towards knowledge. Have you not been taught any of this?’
‘Knowledge?’ I began. I was very dizzy.
‘Knowledge translates to power…’ he said, slowly but lightly, as though it was a refrain I should know and join in with.
He studied me uneasily, frowning.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. He was looking at my clothes, the dirt on my hands and face, the mud that had dried on my boots.
‘I’m new,’ I said.
‘What’s your name?’ His tone had changed. He had become wary and guarded. He had been steadying me, but he took his hands away.
I tried to think.
‘Violetta,’ I said, striving for an identity.
‘What kind of name is that?’ he asked.
‘Penitent,’ I said quickly.
‘We are all penitents before the King,’ he said.
‘The King?’
‘You’ll have to be brought to him,’ he said. I heard the crackle again. ‘The custodians will examine you first, but you’ll have to be brought before him. You’re… you’re either not right at all, or you are not what you seem.’
‘What do I seem?’ I asked.
He glared at me, suspicious.
‘Like an intruder,’ he said. ‘Like you do not belong here, or are not meant for here. Like you came here by mistake.’
‘I came here on purpose,’ I said.
‘Not like the rest. An interloper.’
I was about to protest, but I heard footsteps. Three people approached along the hallway, three more young people like Not-Judika. Two women and a man, heads shaved. They wore the same white uniforms and gold-edged robes as him. One of the women wore a blue over-robe, like Not-Judika, the other a robe of deep cochineal red, and the man’s was a pale absinthe green.
‘Is she all right?’ one asked. ‘Is she better now?’
‘I don’t know what to make of her,’ Not-Judika replied.
‘Help is coming,’ said the man in the green robe. ‘The custodians have been summoned.’
I looked at him. He wore green, yes, but more distressingly, he also wore the face of Judika Sowl. A different pattern of tattoos covered his throat. Two Not-Judikas stared at me. I stepped back, until the pillar behind me stopped me.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ asked one of the girls. The crackle, sharper, was in her voice too. Her face… Her face was that of Faria who, like Judika, had been a candidate with me at the Maze Undue.
‘Faria?’ I asked.
She frowned at me.
‘Why does she call me that? I think you’re right. I think there’s something wrong with her.’
‘Yes,’ said the Ju
dika in green. ‘Look at her clothes. She’s not meant to be here.’
‘No,’ said the other girl. ‘She is. Look at her face.’
And I looked at her face, the face of the girl wearing cochineal red.
It was mine.
It was as looking in a mirror. Her head was shaved, and inked sigils covered her neck and the back of her head. But her face belonged to me.
‘She’s programme,’ she said. ‘Look at her. Her hair’s too long, and she’s covered in dirt, but look at her. Alizebeth genome. Like me, see?’
‘I thought so,’ said Judika-in-blue. ‘But she is acting strange. She hasn’t passed through initiatic. I don’t like it.’
‘Hush! She’s simply scared,’ the other me said. ‘You’re scared, aren’t you? Don’t be. We are alike.’
‘Too alike,’ I whispered.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘We are Alizebeth genome siblings. Sisters. Made whole from the same dust.’ She smiled. My smile. She reached out to me. I could not bear the thought of her touching me.
‘Please, don’t.’
‘It’s all right,’ she insisted. Her tone was soft and kind, but the crackle was lodged in it.
‘Don’t!’ I snapped, and brushed her hands away.
More people were hurrying down the amber to join us. More young people in white uniforms and coloured robes. More Judikas. Another Faria. Four Corlams.
And at least three more who owned my face.
‘Please,’ I mumbled. ‘Stay away from me. Stay away.’
‘Where are the custodians?’ Judika-in-green called to those just arriving. ‘She must be detained.’
‘I can calm her,’ the other me in cochineal red told him. She was facing me still, smiling still.