“What of the other things? When my father hurt his arm, he said you tied an eel around his arm.”
Her words made the widow smile. “I probably did. I could just as well have smeared pigeon dung on it instead, or made him wear a necklace of worms, for all the difference it would have made. Your father’s arm would have mended itself on its own, Kathrin. The cut was deep, but clean. It did not need the bracelet to heal, and your father was neither stupid nor feverish. But he did have the loose tongue of all small boys. He would have seen the bracelet, and spoken of it.”
“Then you did nothing.”
“Your father believed that I did something. That was enough to ease the pain in his arm and perhaps allow it to heal faster than it would otherwise have done.”
“But you turn people away.”
“If they are seriously ill, but neither feverish nor unconscious, I cannot let them see the bracelet. There is no other way, Kathrin. Some must die, so that the bracelet’s secret is protected.”
“This is the burden?” Kathrin asked doubtfully.
“No, this is the reward for carrying the burden. The burden is knowledge.”
Again, Kathrin said, “Tell me.”
“This is what the flier told me. The Great Winter fell across our world because the sun itself grew colder and paler. There was a reason for that. The armies of the celestial war were mining its fire, using the furnace of the sun itself to dig and shore up those seams in the sky. How they did this is beyond my comprehension, and perhaps even that of the flier himself. But he did make one thing clear. So long as the Great Winter held, the celestial war must still be raging. And that would mean that the jangling men had not yet won.”
“But the Thaw…” Kathrin began.
“Yes, you see it now. The snow melts from the land. Rivers flow, crops grow again. The people rejoice, they grow stronger and happier, skins darken, the Frost Fairs fade into memory. But they do not understand what it really means.”
Kathrin hardly dared ask. “Which side is winning, or has already won?”
“I don’t know; that’s the terrible part of it. But when the flier spoke to me, I sensed an awful hopelessness, as if he knew things were not going to go the way of his people.”
“I’m frightened now.”
“You should be. But someone needs to know, Kathrin, and the bracelet is losing its power to keep me out of the grave. Not because there is anything wrong with it, I think—it heals as well as it has ever done—but because it has decided that my time has grown sufficient, just as it will eventually decide the same thing with you.”
Kathrin touched the other object, the thing that looked like a sword’s handle.
“What is this?”
“The flier’s weapon. His hand was holding it from inside the wing. It poked through the outside of the wing like the claw of a bat. The flier showed me how to remove it. It is yours as well.”
She had touched it already, but this time Kathrin felt a sudden tingle as her fingers wrapped around the hilt. She let go suddenly, gasping as if she had reached for a stick and picked up an adder, squirming and slippery and venomous.
“Yes, you feel its power,” Widow Grayling said admiringly. “It works for no one unless they carry the bracelet.”
“I can’t take it.”
“Better you have it, than let that power go to waste. If the jangling men come, then at least someone will have a means to hurt them. Until then, there are other uses for it.”
Without touching the hilt, Kathrin slipped the weapon into her pocket where it lay as heavy and solid as a pebble.
“Did you ever use it?”
“Once.”
“What did you do?”
She caught a secretive smile on Widow Grayling’s face. “I took something precious from William the Questioner. Banished him to the ground like the rest of us. I meant to kill him, but he was not riding in the machine when I brought it down.”
Kathrin laughed. Had she not felt the power of the weapon, she might have dismissed the widow’s story as the ramblings of an old woman. But she had no reason in the world to doubt her companion.
“You could have killed the sheriff later, when he came to inspect the killing poles.”
“I nearly did. But something always stayed my hand. Then the sheriff was replaced by another man, and he in turn by another. Sheriffs came and went. Some were evil men, but not all of them. Some were only as hard and cruel as their office demanded. I never used the weapon again, Kathrin. I sensed that its power was not limitless, that it must be used sparingly, against the time when it became really necessary. But to use it in defence, against a smaller target…that would be a different matter, I think.”
Kathrin thought she understood.
“I need to be getting back home,” she said, trying to sound as if they had discussed nothing except the matter of the widow’s next delivery of provisions. “I am sorry about the other head.”
“There is no need to apologise. It was not your doing.”
“What will happen to you now, Widow?”
“I’ll fade, slowly and gracefully. Perhaps I will see things through to the next winter. But I don’t expect to see another thaw.”
“Please. Take the bracelet back.”
“Kathrin, listen. It will make no difference to me now, whether you take it or not.”
“I’m not old enough for this. I’m only a girl from the Shield, a sledge-maker’s daughter.”
“What do you think I was, when I found the flier? We were the same. I’ve seen your strength and courage.”
“I wasn’t strong today.”
“Yet you took the bridge, when you knew Garret would be on it. I have no doubt, Kathrin.”
She stood. “If I had not lost the other head…if Garret had not caught me…would you have given me these things?”
“I was minded to do it. If not today, it would have happened next time. But let us give Garret due credit. He helped me make up my mind.”
“He’s still out there,” Kathrin said.
“But he will know you will not be taking the bridge to get back home, even though that would save you paying the toll at Jarrow Ferry. He will content himself to wait until you cross his path again.”
Kathrin collected her one remaining bag and moved to the door.
“Yes.”
“I will see you again, in a month. Give my regards to your father.”
“I will.”
Widow Grayling opened the door. The sky was darkening to the east, in the direction of Jarrow Ferry. The dusk stars would appear shortly, and it would be dark within the hour. The crows were still wheeling, but more languidly now, preparing to roost. Though the Great Winter was easing, the evenings seemed as cold as ever, as if night was the final stronghold, the place where the winter had retreated when the inevitability of its defeat became apparent. Kathrin knew that she would be shivering long before she reached the tollgate at the crossing, miles down the river. She tugged down her hat in readiness for the journey and stepped onto the broken road in front of the widow’s cottage.
“You will take care now, Kathrin. Watch out for the janglies.”
“I will, Widow Grayling.”
The door closed behind her. She heard a bolt slide into place.
She was alone.
Kathrin set off, following the path she had used to climb up from the river. If it was arduous in daylight, it was steep and treacherous at dusk. As she descended she could see Twenty Arch Bridge from above, a thread of light across the shadowed ribbon of the river. Candles were being lit in the inns and houses that lined the bridge, tallow torches burning along the parapets. There was still light at the north end, where the sagging arch was being repaired. The obstruction caused by the dray had been cleared, and traffic was moving normally from bank to bank. She heard the calls of men and women, the barked orders of foremen, the braying of drunkards and slatterns, the regular creak and splash of the mill wheels turning under the arches.
But now she reached a hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around the flier’s weapon. The shiver of contact was less shocking this time. The object already felt a part of her, as if she had carried it for years.
She drew it out. It gleamed in twilight, shining where it had appeared dull before. Even if the widow had not told her of its nature, there would have been no doubt now. The object spoke its nature through her skin and bones, whispering to her on a level beneath language. It told her what it could do and how she could make it obey her. It told her to be careful of the power she now carried in her hand. She must scruple to use it wisely, for nothing like it now existed in the world. It was the power to smash walls. Power to smash bridges and towers and flying machines. Power to smash jangling men.
Power to smash ordinary men, if that was what she desired.
She had to know.
The last handful of crows gyred overhead. She raised the weapon to them and felt a sudden dizzying apprehension of their number and distance and position, each crow feeling distinct from its brethren, as if she could almost name them.
She selected one laggard bird. All the others faded from her attention, like players removing themselves from a stage. She came to know that last bird intimately. She could feel its wingbeats cutting the cold air. She could feel the soft thatch of its feathers, and the lacelike scaffolding of bone underneath. Within the cage of its chest she felt the tiny strong pulse of its heart, and she knew that she could make that heart freeze just by willing it.
The weapon seemed to urge her to do it. She came close. She came frighteningly close.
But the bird had done nothing to wrong her, and she spared it. She had no need to take a life to test this new gift, at least not an innocent one. The crow rejoined its brethren, something skittish and hurried in its flight, as if it had felt that coldness closing around its heart.
Kathrin returned the weapon to her pocket. She looked at the bridge again, measuring it once more with clinical eyes, eyes that were older and sadder this time, because she knew something that the people on the bridge could never know.
“I’m ready,” she said, aloud, into the night, for whoever might be listening.
Then resumed her descent.
DIAMOND DOGS
ONE
I MET CHILDE in the Monument to the Eighty.
It was one of those days when I had the place largely to myself, able to walk from aisle to aisle without seeing another visitor; only my footsteps disturbed the air of funereal silence and stillness.
I was visiting my parents’ shrine. It was a modest affair: a smooth wedge of obsidian shaped like a metronome, undecorated save for two cameo portraits set in elliptical borders. The sole moving part was a black blade which was attached near the base of the shrine, ticking back and forth with magisterial slowness. Mechanisms buried inside the shrine ensured that it was winding down, destined to count out days and then years with each tick. Eventually it would require careful measurement to detect its movement.
I was watching the blade when a voice disturbed me.
“Visiting the dead again, Richard?”
“Who’s there?” I said, looking around, faintly recognising the speaker but not immediately able to place him.
“Just another ghost.”
Various possibilities flashed through my mind as I listened to the man’s deep and taunting voice—a kidnapping, an assassination—before I stopped flattering myself that I was worthy of such attention.
Then the man emerged from between two shrines a little way down from the metronome.
“My God,” I said.
“Now do you recognise me?”
He smiled and stepped closer: as tall and imposing as I remembered. He had lost the devil’s horns since our last meeting—they had only ever been a bio-engineered affectation—but there was still something satanic about his appearance, an effect not lessened by the small and slightly pointed goatee he had cultivated in the meantime.
Dust swirled around him as he walked towards me, suggesting that he was not a projection.
“I thought you were dead, Roland.”
“No, Richard,” he said, stepping close enough to shake my hand. “But that was most certainly the effect I desired to achieve.”
“Why?” I said.
“Long story.”
“Start at the beginning, then.”
Roland Childe placed a hand on the smooth side of my parents’ shrine. “Not quite your style, I’d have thought?”
“It was all I could do to argue against something even more ostentatious and morbid. But don’t change the subject. What happened to you?”
He removed his hand, leaving a faint damp imprint. “I faked my own death. The Eighty was the perfect cover. The fact that it all went so horrendously wrong was even better. I couldn’t have planned it like that if I’d tried.”
No arguing with that, I thought. It had gone horrendously wrong.
More than a century and a half ago, a clique of researchers led by Calvin Sylveste had resurrected the old idea of copying the essence of a living human being into a computer-generated simulation. The procedure—then in its infancy—had the slight drawback that it killed the subject. But there had still been volunteers, and my parents had been amongst the first to sign up and support Calvin’s work. They had offered him political protection when the powerful Mixmaster lobby opposed the project, and they had been amongst the first to be scanned.
Less than fourteen months later, their simulations had also been amongst the first to crash.
None could ever be restarted. Most of the remaining Eighty had succumbed, and now only a handful remained unaffected.
“You must hate Calvin for what he did,” Childe said, still with that taunting quality in his voice.
“Would it surprise you if I said I didn’t?”
“Then why did you set yourself so vocally against his family after the tragedy?”
“Because I felt justice still needed to be served.” I turned from the shrine and started walking away, curious as to whether Childe would follow me.
“Fair enough,” he said. “But that opposition cost you dearly, didn’t it?”
I bridled, halting next to what appeared a highly realistic sculpture but was almost certainly an embalmed corpse.
“Meaning what?”
“The Resurgam expedition, of course, which just happened to be bankrolled by House Sylveste. By rights, you should have been on it. You were Richard Swift, for heaven’s sake. You’d spent the better part of your life thinking about possible modes of alien sentience. There should have been a place for you on that ship, and you damned well knew it.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” I said, resuming my walk. “There were a limited number of slots available and they needed practical types first—biologists, geologists, that kind of thing. By the time they’d filled the most essential slots, there simply wasn’t any room for abstract dreamers like myself.”
“And the fact that you’d pissed off House Sylveste had nothing whatsoever to do with it? Come off it, Richard.”
We descended a series of steps down into the lower level of the Monument. The atrium’s ceiling was a cloudy mass of jagged sculptures: interlocked metal birds. A party of visitors was arriving, attended by servitors and a swarm of bright, marble-sized float-cams. Childe breezed through the group, drawing annoyed frowns but no actual recognition, although one or two of the people in the party were vague acquaintances of mine.
“What is this about?” I asked, once we were outside.
“Concern for an old friend. I’ve had my tabs on you, and it was pretty obvious that not being selected for that exp
edition was a crushing disappointment. You’d thrown your life into contemplation of the alien. One marriage down the drain because of your self-absorption. What was her name again?”
I’d had her memory buried so deeply that it took a real effort of will to recall any exact details about my marriage.
“Celestine. I think.”
“Since then you’ve had a few relationships, but nothing lasting more than a decade. A decade’s a mere fling in this town, Richard.”
“My private life’s my own business,” I responded sullenly. “Hey. Where’s my volantor? I parked it here.”
“I sent it away. We’ll take mine instead.”
Where my volantor had been was a larger, blood-red model. It was as baroquely ornamented as a funeral barge. At a gesture from Childe it clammed open, revealing a plush gold interior with four seats, one of which was occupied by a dark, slouched figure.
“What’s going on, Roland?”
“I’ve found something. Something astonishing that I want you to be a part of; a challenge that makes every game you and I ever played in our youth pale in comparison.”
“A challenge?”
“The ultimate one, I think.”
He had pricked my curiosity, but I hoped it was not too obvious. “The city’s vigilant. It’ll be a matter of public record that I came to the Monument, and we’ll have been recorded together by those float-cams.”
“Exactly,” Childe said, nodding enthusiastically. “So you risk nothing by getting in the volantor.”
“And should I at any point weary of your company?”
“You have my word that I’ll let you leave.”
I decided to play along with him for the time being. Childe and I took the volantor’s front pair of seats. Once ensconced, I turned around to acquaint myself with the other passenger, and then flinched as I saw him properly.
He wore a high-necked leather coat which concealed much of the lower half of his face. The upper part was shadowed under the generous rim of a Homburg, tipped down to shade his brow. Yet what remained visible was sufficient to shock me. There was only a blandly handsome silver mask; sculpted into an expression of quiet serenity. The eyes were blank silver surfaces, what I could see of his mouth a thin, slightly smiling slot.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 36