‘I suppose.’
‘So why aren’t there any?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think the answer, quite literally, is staring us in the face. The void-crosser’s here because it had something to do with Spearpoint Two. The one is intimately related to the other.’
‘So why aren’t there any fallen void-crossers lying near our - my - Spearpoint?’ Quillon asked.
‘Because, Doctor, your Spearpoint isn’t broken.’
The balloon’s course was straight and true, the winds clement. Quillon’s ears popped slightly on the ascent - cabin pressure was obviously lower than aboard Painted Lady - but in all other respects he felt clear-headed and alert, and he saw nothing in Ricasso’s boyish demeanour to indicate that the other man was suffering any ill effects.
‘Look,’ Ricasso said at one point, gesturing excitedly through one of the windows. ‘There’s Swarm! I’ve never seen it from so high up before.’
Quillon turned to follow Ricasso’s down-pointing finger. It took him a few moments to identify Swarm against the confusion of background scenery. Far from the city-sized agglomeration of ships he had grown accustomed to, Swarm now appeared to be little more than a hectic concentration of slightly elongated dots, darkening near the middle where the larger ships were gathered. He could cover all of it with one hand. Even the sharp curvature of the Earth failed to diminish the sense of the landscape being vast and permanent compared to Swarm’s fragility.
‘Not much, is it?’ Ricasso said, reading Quillon’s thoughts as if they were written on his face. ‘But it’s all we’ve got, most of us.’
Quillon recalled looking back at Spearpoint, the night the storm turned out the lights.
‘Home is where the heart lies,’ he said quietly.
They kept rising. The cabin creaked and clanged with the rising pressure differential. The sky overhead was a deeper blue than even the view from the Celestial Levels, shading almost to black at the zenith. Quillon wondered whether a healthy, fully formed angel could have endured at this altitude. He didn’t know for sure, but he was certain that his own chances for survival were not much better than Ricasso’s. He stood between two worlds, without a confident foothold in either.
Before very long they were level with the summit and still rising. Ricasso adjusted the firesap burner to level their flight. If Spearpoint 2 resembled a wine glass with the cup snapped off, they were now at approximately the point in the narrowing stem where the break had occurred. It was close to half a league across, Quillon estimated. The edges were jagged, like the serrated wall of a circular crater. He had felt nothing resembling vertigo until this point, but as the balloon sped towards the summit, the feeling began to reassert itself. He was able to look all the way down the rising structure, to the point where it emerged from the ground. He was tiny and it was huge, and the balloon wouldn’t leave so much as a scratch if the winds changed and dashed them against that imperturbable black wall.
And then, suddenly, they were above the summit. Quillon wasn’t quite sure what he had been expecting until that moment. It had never occurred to him that Spearpoint might be hollow, but if this broken twin was any indication it was, and the thickness of the walls was no more than a twentieth of the diameter of the broken stem. The sun could not have reached more than a league or so down the shaft, but from what they could see, it was both perfectly smooth and of perfectly constant diameter. He had the ominous sense of looking down a rifle-barrel.
‘That void-crosser we saw,’ Ricasso said, ‘would easily have fitted inside that shaft, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose.’
Ricasso was busy working the cable-release for the underbelly camera.
‘Spearpoint’s diameter decreases from the base, but - and you’ll have to take my word on this - it’s never less than one-eighth of a league across. From the Celestial Levels upwards, it doesn’t get much narrower. A ship could travel all the way up, until it reached vacuum. Actually, it wouldn’t necessarily be a question of reaching vacuum; if the shaft pushed sufficiently far above the atmosphere, it could hold vacuum all the way down to the surface of the Earth. That ship was probably never meant to travel in air at all. It was a ship of space, a creature of the true void.’
‘Why?’ Quillon asked.
‘Why what?’
‘If it’s so much trouble, why bring a ship like that down to the ground at all? It seems a lot of effort, building something like Spearpoint - or Spearpoint Two, for that matter - just to bring a ship the last few leagues.’
‘Perhaps that’s the way they wanted to do things.’ But even as Ricasso spoke, Quillon heard the dissatisfaction with the glibness of his own explanation. ‘No, perhaps not. Wait a moment, Doctor. There’s still something else we can do.’ He leaned over to grab one of the instrument controls. ‘Flare drop. It’s meant for illuminating the ground in darkness, if you’re looking for somewhere to put down.’
They were still over the open mouth of Spearpoint, albeit much nearer to the far edge now.
‘Do it,’ Quillon said.
Ricasso tugged at the lever and a mechanism made a reassuring solid clunk somewhere under their feet. The flare, presumably, had just detached itself from the base of the pod. Quillon couldn’t see it at first, but as they travelled on, and the flare fell further below, it came into view. It was an incandescent blob under a tiny parachute.
They watched it fall into shadow, whereupon it began to illuminate the hitherto unseen part of the shaft. Alas, the wind was pushing the balloon too quickly for them to watch the flare as it travelled all the way down. It had barely reached halfway to the ground when the balloon’s motion took it over the edge, and the shaft was no longer visible.
‘We’ll have to come back,’ Ricasso said. ‘Do it properly. Maybe even send someone down there.’
‘How far down do you think it goes?’
‘Below the surface of the Earth, I’m pretty sure. If the ships were only meant to travel down to the base, wouldn’t we have seen somewhere for the passengers to disembark?’
‘It’s been a long time. Maybe the ground’s covered up the entrances and exits.’
‘That’s possible. And of course, Spearpoint’s riddled with tunnels through the walls, so we can presume this one is as well. I wonder, though ... You said it yourself, Doctor - there wouldn’t be much point building all this just to come the last few leagues. So what if the ships were meant to go further than that? Deeper, I mean?’
‘Into the Earth?’
‘That’s what I’m getting at. How far below, I wouldn’t care to speculate. But - presumably - many leagues at the very least. Otherwise - why bother with all this?’
‘Why bother going into the Earth, is another question,’ Quillon observed.
‘Yes,’ Ricasso said. ‘That it is. And of course, none of this gets us anywhere near the really big one.’
‘Which is?’
‘What is the Mire? Or, more generally speaking, what are the zones? And why do they originate in Spearpoint?’
Quillon was about to answer when he glimpsed the plunging, spiralledged wall on the other side of Spearpoint, and felt his heart skip a beat.
‘Look,’ he said.
Ricasso did, and for an instant Quillon saw the same reaction he had just experienced. Recognition, followed by a wrenching sense of wrongness.
Cut into the black face of Spearpoint 2, between two rising turns of the spiral ledge, was a baubled star. It was mirror-bright even now, the reflected horizon-line cutting through it, tawny brown below, pastel blue above.
The sign of the tectomancer.
‘Now that,’ Ricasso said, ‘does put rather an interesting complexion on things.’
They came down in a series of giddy, bucking descents as Ricasso worked the firesap burner and the balloon tangled with the twisting winds around Spearpoint 2’s base. Any hope of landing back on Painted Lady was utterly forlorn, Quillon now saw. Perhaps with the balloon in more expert
hands, and with more predictable winds, it could have been accomplished. But not today, with Ricasso at the controls.
Ancient structures, similar in style to those that lapped against the encircling wall, pressed around Spearpoint 2’s base and crawled partway up the ledge. It was the start of something like Horsetown, but for one reason or another, it had risen no higher. Whatever the function of the ledge, it now seemed probable to Quillon that it had never been intended as a place for people to build on. Perhaps it had something to do with the winds, deflecting them up, rather than around, the soaring structure. Or perhaps the ledge had been installed to allow gargantuan machines to toil up and down the outside, repairing and modifying where necessary.
‘There she is,’ Ricasso said.
‘What?’
‘Painted Lady. She’s shadowing us. That’s good. I was a little worried she might lose us in all this sky.’
‘You didn’t mention that before,’ Quillon said.
‘I didn’t think it would be helpful.’
‘Probably not. And this may be premature, but do you have the vaguest idea how that thing we just saw - that symbol - relates to Nimcha, and all the other tectomancers?’
‘Honestly? No. But here’s a thought - that mark on her head ... those powers she has ... they didn’t just arise by magic. Will you indulge me?’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Let us suppose - and I stress that this is merely a supposition - that the tectomancers once served some specific and useful purpose in society. You have guilds in Spearpoint, do you not? And we have traditions of generational ownership in Swarm, parents passing airships to their children, and so on. It’s not that unusual for humans to keep it in the family, so to speak.’
‘You think the tectomancers were a guild of some kind?’
‘The term will suffice, for now. But a more complex guild than anything we have experience of. Let us again suppose that those marks and powers arose through the direct manipulation of inherited factors, in much the same way that angels were shaped from orthodox humans. Whatever work they did, whatever purpose their guild served, it required of them an inordinate degree of alteration. And it would have been hereditary, so that each generation passed the powers down to the next. That mark on Nimcha’s head is merely the external signifier of far more profound differences inside her skull.’
‘Then there would have been many of them, once.’
‘Hundreds, thousands, who knows? Enough to do whatever great work this society required of them. And they would only ever have bred with other tectomancers, of course. The guild would have been insular and self-perpetuating. Perhaps they would have introduced outsiders occasionally, to maintain the diversity of the population. But it would have been strictly controlled.’
‘I understand. But I don’t see how we get from there to here, with tectomancers so rare as to be almost mythical.’
‘Something happened, clearly. Might it be too outrageous a leap of speculation to suggest that it was the intrusion of the Mire, the breaking through of the Eye of God, the coming of the zones? Perhaps I’ve gone too far; it’s a weakness of mine. But consider this: if civilisation fell, then what became of the guild? Did its members hide themselves away, or were they forced out into the wider world, to survive amongst ordinary humans as best they could? Did they marry into the wider population, diluting their inheritance factors?’
‘Diluted,’ Quillon said, picking up on Ricasso’s line of reasoning, ‘but still present, still capable of producing a tectomancer if the right combination of factors came together again. But after five thousand years, or however long it’s been, that would be very unlikely indeed.’
‘Agreed - it must be unlikely or we’d be swimming in tectomancers. As it is, they only arise very rarely indeed - a statistical fluke. And for every genuine, functioning tectomancer - for every Nimcha - there must be another that has almost the right set of inheritance factors, but not all of them. A child with the powers, but not the mark. A child with the mark, but no ability to move zones. They exist, Doctor. There may not be very many of them, but given Nimcha’s existence, we can be sure that she’s not alone.’
‘You truly believe there are others out there?’
‘Not in huge numbers, certainly. And some will be older than Nimcha, some younger. Some may not even realise what they are. But I doubt very much that she’s alone.’
‘But something’s different now, isn’t it? The storm that hit Spearpoint had been building for years - such things don’t happen more than once every century, and maybe not as often as that.’
‘Nimcha may be special, even amongst tectomancers. Or it may be that something in the Mire has changed, something that makes it more responsive, more willing to obey them.’
Quillon thought about that for a moment. ‘If Nimcha is exceptional, then it’s even more of a coincidence that we ran into her when we did.’
‘You’d prefer to think you weren’t the victim of cosmic happenstance?’
‘If Nimcha is a tectomancer, but merely one of many ... however “many” might be ... then it’s easier for me to accept that we might have crossed paths. It also makes me wonder if Kalis was entirely right about her daughter.’
‘In what sense?’
‘Kalis believes Nimcha brought the big storm. It’s clear that Nimcha’s powers are genuine, so I don’t blame her mother for making that assumption. But what if she’s wrong about the rest of it? If there are other tectomancers out there, all of them feeling the pull of the Mire, all of them capable of reacting to it and shifting the zones, would Kalis be able to single out the influence of her daughter?’
‘You don’t think Nimcha is as strong as Kalis believes.’
‘Alone, no. But collectively - acting in concert with the others - she might very well be. Or else we’ve got it all wrong, and there’s just one of them, and Nimcha is exactly as powerful as Kalis imagines.’
‘We don’t have enough evidence to decide either way,’ Ricasso said, ‘so for now we may as well keep open minds. But let’s be clear about one thing. It’s Spearpoint calling Nimcha home, not the Mire. The Mire may be the very thing it needs the tectomancers to put right. To heal the wound in the face of the world where the Eye of God burned through.’
‘What would happen then?’
‘Something we haven’t had a lot of in the last five thousand years,’ Ricasso said. ‘History.’
The balloon had continued to shed altitude as they spoke. Ahead, at an intersection of several pale, weather-scoured roads, lay a cluster of white buildings around a dome-shaped central structure. The off-white dome was marbled by black fractures. Judging by the scale of the windows in the surrounding buildings, it must have been fifteen or twenty storeys in height at its apex. Under other circumstances, it would have been impressive, but today it just looked like an act of pathetic underachievement.
‘Try to avoid landing on that,’ Quillon said.
With dreadful inevitability, the winds made every effort to ensure that was exactly what happened. Ricasso tried to lose height more rapidly, but thermals keep buoying them up. The pod had already sunk below the top of the dome and was now scooting along at about the same height as the tallest buildings. When a collision looked inevitable, Ricasso abandoned his efforts to lose more height and instead dropped ballast, firing up the burner again. Ponderously, the balloon and its cargo began to rise upwards. They cleared the roofs of the outermost buildings, clanged against a wall, and bobbed higher. The buildings climbed up in steps, getting taller the closer they were to the rim of the dome.
‘When I said avoid landing on that—’
‘I know,’ Ricasso said. ‘You meant “avoid” in the more commonly accepted usage.’
They weren’t going to clear the dome, that much was apparent. What was the worst that could happen, though? Quillon wondered. They were still aloft, still airworthy. Even if they crashed into the side of the dome, the winds could do no more than drag them to th
e zenith, and then they would be free again.
‘I think we’ll be all right,’ Quillon said. ‘If we can just avoid hitting one of those—’
‘Cracks,’ Ricasso finished for him. ‘Like the one we appear to be headed directly towards?’
The crack in question ran down from near the apex of the dome to the point where it met the tallest of the surrounding buildings. It was wider at the base than the top. Just about wide enough, Quillon reckoned, for the pod to pass right through. But not, he felt fairly confident, for the balloon the pod was hanging from.
They passed between the dome’s ripped sides, the pod still moving as quickly as ever. Then it slowed, far more violently than was generally appropriate for balloons, and came to a halt. The pod creaked and swayed in the gloomy half-light of the dome’s interior. The angled windows prevented Quillon from looking up, but he didn’t need his eyes to tell him that the balloon had snagged itself in the gap.
The pod jerked down and stopped. Both men caught their breath. They were still far above the floor of the dome, which they were presuming lay at the same level as the surrounding land. The pod might conceivably survive such a drop; it was questionable whether Ricasso and Quillon would.
‘Curtana’ll get here quickly,’ Ricasso said, undermining the reassuring thrust of his statement with a desperate, confirmation-seeking grin. ‘One imagines.’
The pod jerked down again. The balloon, which was open at the bottom, would have completely deflated by now. They were just hanging by snagged fabric, a dozen or so storeys up.
‘At least we solved the mystery of Spearpoint,’ Quillon said. Something ripped. The pod dropped. Quillon gripped his chair in reflex and closed his eyes.
The pod landed. It crunched down onto something reassuringly solid, then tipped slightly to one side. The entire drop must have taken no more than half a second.