He lay on his back for a time, cradling the barrel in both arms, breath coming in ragged sobs and leaking so much sweat it formed a small pool around him. Feeling the way his heart lurched in his chest, like a trapped animal attempting a frantic escape, he wondered if he might have pushed too hard. It wasn’t unheard of, over-eager Blood-blessed forcing their bodies past tolerable limits whilst lost in the throes of product. After what seemed an age, though, the pounding beast in his chest finally began to slow its labours and clarity returned to his fatigue-dimmed eyes.
He got slowly to his feet, finding he had come to a halt on a broad plaza extending in a semicircle for about a quarter of the radius of this re-formed mountain. There were no statues or fountains here, just bare stone tile surrounding a building. This structure was unique in that, unlike all the other buildings he had seen so far, this one was free-standing. A plain, windowless rectangle of impressive size, bare of the walkways and bridges that interlinked the rest of the city.
Clay drank all the water remaining in his canteen. It provided only a few mouthfuls and proved barely enough to assuage his dreadful thirst before he tossed it aside and started towards the building. He stumbled several times and soon found he had to swallow a drop of Green to keep upright, though the burn of it brought on a now-familiar nausea. When this is done, he told himself, I ain’t touching a drop of product again for at least a year.
He took time to survey the free-standing building, finding it featureless but for a single symbol inscribed above what appeared to be its only entrance: a circle residing between two lateral curves that put him in mind of an eye. A watch-tower? he wondered as he came closer, thinking it unlikely. Home to whatever they called their Protectorate, maybe? He was tempted to bypass it and make for the summit, but something made him pause, a conviction that the singularity of its construction must hold some meaning. Also, if he thought it a place of importance, Scriberson might have formed a similar conclusion.
Clay drew the Stinger and stood with his back to the wall beside the door before jerking his head inside for a quick look. To his surprise the place was less gloomy than expected, being roofless and lit by the reflected glow from the stone far above. A large, perfectly square opening lay in the centre of the floor and a stairwell descended into its depths. He went inside, eyes roving the shadows but finding nothing more of interest. He approached the opening and looked down, following the track of the stairs as they hugged the wall of the shaft to descend for at least a hundred feet. The sight of the shaft and the absent roof put him in mind of the temple where once Blacks had come to be worshipped. This shaft was certainly wide enough to accommodate a full-grown Black, or something twice the size.
His eyes soon registered another glow in the depths of the shaft, a blue-white luminescence jarring with the orange light that played on every surface of this place. But what gave birth to it was lost from view. He swayed a little as the last drop of Green faded, resisted the urge to drink more, then started down.
—
The air grew cooler as he descended, so cool in fact that he started to shiver a little as heat leached from the sweat clamming his skin. After a long climb down lasting more than a quarter hour the walls of the shaft disappeared revealing a huge circular chamber, the first curved structure he had set eyes on in this city. His footsteps birthed a long echo as he came to a halt, taking a good while to fade thanks to the hardly believable size of this space. His attention immediately fixed on the dome in the centre of the chamber, a perfect circle with a roof formed of arcing, interlocked stone slats standing at least two hundred feet in diameter. It was surrounded by four more domes of identical construction but about half its size. Each dome had a small opening in the top, all but one emitting a different-coloured light, red from the one on the right, the next green, then blue. But the large dome in the centre glowed brighter than all the others, providing enough light to illuminate the entire chamber, and it shone white.
Red, Green, Blue . . . and White, he thought, eyes flicking from one dome to another before coming to rest on the only dome not to emit any light. And Black.
He stood still for a time, frowning as he sensed something, not a noise exactly, more a sensation. Like a long-forgotten tune humming in his head, the melody at once both familiar and unknown. He staggered at a sudden, painful flare in his mind, flashing a glimpse of something; the shadow sweeping across Nelphia’s surface in the trance. He grunted, shaking his head as the vision faded. Heart thumping faster at the knowledge of what he had just experienced: The trance. I was in the trance without benefit of Blue.
Fear gripped him then, the kind of all-consuming, inescapable terror he had thought lost in childhood the day the Black got free. His shivering doubled as he stared at the domes below, knowing with absolute certainty that he wanted no part of whatever they contained. What lurked here was so far beyond him he found himself voicing a shrill laugh at his own arrogance. As if some Blinds-born gutter rat has any business even being here, a treacherous voice told him, a voice he knew was born as much from rationality as fear. Go back. Could be another way out. If not, use the barrel to blast a way out. Then get to the Hadlock and find a ship, any ship. Just get far away from here . . .
Silverpin.
The name didn’t quite banish every vestige of terror but it was enough to steady him, quelling his shivers as he stood there panting. She’s down there, he knew, and forced himself to take another step, then another, his pace increasing so that he was running by the time he reached the chamber floor. He made directly for the largest dome, scanning its sloping sides for a way in and increasing his pace, worried any pause might summon the fear once more. He had gone perhaps a dozen feet when another vision hit him.
The pain was enough to send him sprawling, though some fortunate instinct enabled him to keep hold of the barrel. The images invaded his mind with brutal ease; the shadow sweeping across Nelphia’s surface, fear blossoming once more as it came ever closer . . . then a shift in the image, the mindscape misting then re-forming into a face, one he knew. Miss Lethridge, regarding him with grave concern, her lips forming urgent words he couldn’t hear. Another flash, another spasm of pain and she was gone, leaving him gasping on the floor.
His gaze went to the dome with the blue light, seeing how the beam it emitted was pulsing now, flaring and fading in a steady rhythm that seemed to echo his own heart-beat. It’s calling to me, he knew, rising and taking a short tentative step towards the dome before forcing himself to a halt. The White, he told himself, wondering why his own thoughts sounded so faint. You came for the White.
The blue beam’s pulse intensified, now accompanied by a definite thrum whenever it flared, an insistent note that birthed a certainty in his heart. I came for Silverpin too, he answered himself. And she’s in there.
He moved towards the dome in a shuffling stumble, dimly aware that he had left the barrel behind when he got to his feet. It didn’t seem to matter. Now he had but one goal. The blue dome’s surface remained sealed until he stumbled to within a dozen feet, whereupon a section of stone receded and slid aside, revealing an interior of vague shapes occluded by the glow. He continued inside without pause, blinking until the shapes resolved into something he could recognise.
People.
They were arranged in a large circle, all standing and staring at something in the centre of the dome’s floor. He thought there could be sixty or more of them but couldn’t be sure, there being little room in his head for numbers now. He managed to take in some details as he moved towards them, miners’ helmets and dusters, one man in a well-cut suit with the look of a manager. The Briteshore folk, he decided, the thought slowly coalescing in his mind. They didn’t leave . . . They all came here.
They all stood rigid as statues, the fact of their continued survival betrayed only by the most shallow of breaths. But their eyes were empty and unblinking. Peering at their faces he saw something that should have se
nt him recoiling in shock, but now only made him blink in ponderous bafflement. They were changed, the skin of their faces scaled, ridges growing from foreheads and chins, puckered by nascent spines.
“Not . . . changed,” he realised aloud in a slow slur. “Spoiled . . .”
He groaned and turned to look upon whatever it was that fascinated these people so. It stood in the centre of their circle, pulsing a blue light that filled the dome and seeped through the opening in the roof. It was a crystal of some kind, formed of jagged spines so that it resembled a star, a deep blue star. He had a sense that its pulsing deepened as he drew closer, the rhythm more insistent, the light flaring brighter.
He reached out a hand towards it, gaze lost in the all-consuming light it cast forth. Doubt and fear were gone now, and there was only the light . . .
Another vision tore into his mind, making him cry out and stagger away from the crystal, head filling with unwanted images and sensation. Nelphia . . . The shadow . . . Miss Lethridge, shouting now, desperate even . . . He could hear her, though only just, the words faint and discordant . . . “. . . killed Keyvine . . . Joya . . . alive. She . . . The Island girl . . .”
It all became a jumble as a fresh wave of agony swept through him, making him writhe and clutch at his head, hearing his own screams as a distant wail. Blackness descended quickly, a vast unknowable void, blessedly welcome in its complete lack of sensation. He had no knowledge of how long he remained in the void but when it finally receded he was on the floor, lips leaking drool and head still throbbing in the aftermath of the vision. Something was different. The insistent thrumming pulse of the crystal had stopped, the light now constant; whatever compulsion had forced him here had vanished.
The sound of boot leather on stone drew his gaze and he looked up to see Scriberson standing over him, face scaled and ridged like the others. The astronomer’s features betrayed no emotion at all as he raised the knife in his hand and brought it down.
CHAPTER 40
Lizanne
As was becoming usual, she woke from the latest trance with a severe headache. Tekela passed her a glass of the milky-pale tonic specially mixed for her by the city’s most respected apothecary, an unpleasantly acidic concoction that nonetheless did the trick of banishing her pain with welcome alacrity. The consequent indigestion, however, was less welcome.
“How long?” she asked Tekela, sitting up on the bunk positioned behind her desk. They had both taken to sleeping in her basement office in recent days, for obvious reasons, choosing to eschew the more luxurious accommodations above ground. There had been no more massed attacks since the Reds’ night assault, but neither had they vanished from the skies. In daylight they would fly over by the dozen, circling but never coming low enough for the guns to find the range. At night it was a different story, lone Reds streaking out of the sky without warning to assail Protectorate patrols or the smaller gun-batteries. Such attacks usually meant death for the Reds who made them, but also inevitably entailed the loss of more defenders, as well as straining the already threadbare nerves of the populace.
“Two hours,” Tekela replied in Eutherian, as she tended to do when angry. Her doll’s face wore a severe expression of disapproval Lizanne chose to ignore. “The Accounts manager is waiting,” the girl added in her improving Mandinorian. “Something about . . .” She fumbled for the right words. “Treasure . . . a stock of treasure.”
“The company vault,” Lizanne said, getting to her feet and moving to the desk. “He’s probably come to moan about having to leave all that lovely money behind.”
Her gaze went to the row of Blue vials lined up on her desk, pillaged from the Ironship reserves and probably worth more than she could have hoped to earn in her lifetime. Three trances of two hours each, and still not a sign of him. She had kept to the same routine since hearing the girl Joya’s story, trancing every five hours with the memory of it bundled into a neat vortex and ready for immediate communication. Each time she hoped Clay would be waiting, and each time she had been disappointed. It all rests on him now. If I can’t warn him . . .
She let the thought dwindle, leading as it did to the prospect of fighting their way clear in their fleet of converted ships. Jermayah’s army of artisans and engineers had worked prodigious feats so far, converting a quarter of the required vessels. The harvesters had been similarly industrious, refining enough of their now-copious stocks of Red to ensure every ship could be fuelled all the way to Feros if or when the time came. More when than if, she thought, grimacing as she drank down the remaining tonic, then winced at a rapid pounding on the door.
“Tell that scrip-pinching dullard to wait,” she snapped at Tekela and sank behind her desk, reaching for the latest stack of reports from the manufactory. However, when Tekela opened the door she was confronted by a Protectorate rifleman rather than the portly accountant.
“Commander Stavemoor’s compliments, miss,” the man said in a rush, Lizanne finding the frantic gleam in his eye decidedly ominous. “There’s been a . . . development.”
—
“Started showing up about an hour ago,” Stavemoor said, handing her his binoculars. “About three thousand so far, I’d say. More arriving by the minute.”
She trained the optics on the tree-line, finding the focus after a few seconds. At first it seemed like a ragged band of Contractors straggling out of the jungle after some disastrous expedition, but then she saw their faces. “Spoiled,” she whispered, tracking the glasses along the row of deformed figures. They varied greatly in height and clothing. Some wore hardly anything at all, their scaly skin bared to the sun. Others were clad in armour of hardened leather or full-length garments fashioned from rough-made cloth. But they were all Spoiled, and all armed. Spears, bows, clubs, even a few fire-arms pilfered from the Corvantine dead. Though from the way the Spoiled held them she deduced they had little notion of how they worked. However, Lizanne found their demeanour more worrying than their numbers or armaments. They all stood in unmoving, silent ranks, those continuing to materialise out of the jungle simply taking their place and standing in unspeaking expectation.
“Fought my share of Spoiled over the years, miss,” Captain Flaxknot said. “I count at least six different tribes, and all from far-flung regions. They’ve come a very long way, probably been marching for weeks.”
The same number of weeks since the Longrifles set off, I’d wager, Lizanne thought, handing the binoculars back to Stavemoor. “Recommendations?”
“If they keep arriving at this rate there’ll be more than ten thousand by nightfall,” he said. “I think we can assume they aren’t just going to keep on standing out there. If so, we’ll need reinforcement if we’re going to hold. More Growlers and Thumpers too.”
“The latest batch will be here by this evening,” she promised. “And I’ll order another four batteries onto the surrounding roof-tops.”
“Won’t be enough,” Flaxknot said. “It’s plain we’ll soon have every Spoiled bastard in the northern climes at our door. And you can bet they’ll have a horde of Greens and Reds to help when they decide to charge. We’re just too thin.”
Lizanne was about to offer some rousing words, cast a few empty platitudes at the captain and her comrades to bolster their spirits. But they all died in the face of her undeniable judgement. They could shift every gun in the city to the walls and it still wouldn’t be enough. Lizanne turned away from the sight of the growing mass of Spoiled, eyes tracking over the damaged but still-defiant city until she found the docks. Is it time? she thought. Cram every child we can into the converted ships and send them on their way whilst we fight to our heroic last? She suppressed an angry grunt, hating the sense of helplessness and the responsibility. Would Madame have known what to do? she wondered, but doubted it. What comes for us can’t be bribed, or lied to.
She began to turn away then stopped as her gaze alighted on Colonial Town; the recently abandoned ti
nder-box of ancient wooden houses. She stared at it for a long time, wheels turning in her head until Stavemoor gave a polite cough. “Gather all your officers,” she said and paused to favour Flaxknot with a smile, “and Contractor captains. We have a great deal of planning to do.”
—
“Edgerhand,” the man in the long and multiply patched coat introduced himself before nodding at his two companions. “This is Red Allice and Burgrave Crovik. Mr. Cralmoor told us to send his regards.”
“You are very welcome,” Lizanne told him with a smile before glancing at his fellow unregistered Blood-blessed: a dark-haired young woman wearing a pair of tinted spectacles despite the lateness of the hour, and a surprisingly well-dressed but squat fellow with a drake-bone cane. “Though I must confess I had hoped there would be more of you.”
“There were.” Edgerhand’s lips gave a slight twitch that might have been a smile. He was at least ten years her senior judging by the grey hair at his temples and the lines on his thin-featured face that nevertheless retained a lean handsomeness. “Things got very interesting in the Blinds after the king’s demise. Surprised the harbour waters didn’t rise more, what with all the fresh bodies tipped into it over the past few weeks.”
“Well, quite.” She turned and offered a hand to the young woman, who stared at it impassively from behind the black discs of her glasses.
“Please forgive my colleague her ill manners, miss,” the squat man said, raising his cane to his forehead as he lowered his portly frame in a bow. “Such niceties are beyond her.” He straightened and offered what she assumed he thought of as a charming smile, but instead resembled the grimace of a dyspeptic toad. “Burgrave Ellustice Crovik, at your service.”