Light scythed across the ruined exterior, harsh and blue. Crouching into the flood so that my chest was fully submerged and the stench almost unbearable, I waited for the searchlight to complete its business. I could hear voices now, raised like a pack of jackals in musk. Man-shaped patches of utter blackness flitted between the closest buildings, beckoning each other, arms laden with those instruments of murder permitted by the Game.
A few desultory shots rained against the building, dislodging shards of calcified masonry into the flood. Another patch of light began sweeping the side, grazing only inches above my head. My breathing, laboured as it was by the pressure of the filthy water, was like a barking weapon itself.
I sucked in air and lowered myself into the flood.
I could see nothing, of course, but that was hardly a handicap. Relying on touch, I skirted my fingers against the building’s side until I found a place where the wall curved abruptly in. I heard more shots, transmitted through the water, and more splashes. I wanted to vomit. But then I remembered the smile of the man who had arranged for my capture and realised I wanted him to die first; Fischetti and then Sybilline. Then I’d kill Waverly while I was at it, and piece by piece I’d dismantle the entire apparatus of the Game.
In that same moment I realised that I hated them more than I hated Reivich.
But he’d get his, too.
Still kneeling beneath the waterline, I closed my fists around the edges of the aperture and thrust myself into the building’s interior. I could not have been beneath water for more than a few seconds, but I slammed upward with so much anger and relief that I almost screamed as air rushed into my mouth. But apart from gasping, I made as little noise as possible.
I found a relatively dry ledge and hauled myself from the murk. And there, for long moments, I just lay, until my breathing settled down and enough oxygen reached my brain for it to resume the business of thinking, rather than simply keeping me alive.
I heard voices and shots outside, louder now. And sporadically, blue light stabbed through rents in the building, making my eyes sting.
When the darkness resumed, I looked up and saw something.
It was faint—fainter, in fact, than I had imagined any visible object could possibly be. I had read that the human retina was in principle capable of detecting only two or three photons at at time, if conditions of sufficient sensitivity were reached. I had also heard—and met—soldiers who claimed extraordinary night vision; soldiers who spent every hour in darkness, for fear of losing their acclimatisation.
I’d never been one of them.
What I was looking at was a staircase, or the ruined skeleton of what had once been a staircase. A spiral thing, ribbed by cross-members, which reached a landing and then climbed higher towards an irregular gash of pale light, against which it was silhouetted.
“He’s inside. Thermal trace in the water.”
That was Sybilline’s voice, or someone who sounded very much like her, with the same tone of arrogant surety. Now a man spoke, knowingly, “That’s unusual for a Mulch. They don’t like the insides, usually. Too many ghost stories.”
“It isn’t just ghost stories. There are pigs down here. We should be careful, too.”
“How are we going to get in? I’m not going in that water, no matter what the bloodmoney is.”
“I have structural maps of this one. There’s another route on the other side. Better hurry, though. Skamelson’s team are only a block down-trace, and they’ve got better sniffers.”
I heaved myself from the ledge and moved towards the lower end of the ruined staircase. I hit it too soon, judging the distance poorly. But it was growing clearer all the time. I could see that it climbed ten or fifteen metres above me before vanishing through a sagging, doughlike ceiling which more resembled a stomach diaphragm than anything architectural.
What I could not tell, for all my visual acuity, was how near my chasers were, or how structurally sound the staircase was going to be. If it collapsed while I was climbing, I would fall into the flood, but the water would be too shallow for the drop to be endured without some kind of injury.
Still, I climbed, using the ghostly banister where it existed, heaving myself across gaps in the treads, or where there were no treads at all. The staircase creaked, but I just kept on—even when the tread on which I’d just placed my weight shattered and dropped into the water.
Below me, light filled the chamber, and then black-clad figures emerged through a hole in one wall, trudging through the water. I could see them quite clearly: Fischetti and Sybilline, both masked and carrying enough firepower for a small war. I paused on the landing I’d reached. There was darkness on either side of me, but even as I looked at it details began to emerge from the blackness like solidifying phantoms. I thought about going left or right rather than higher, knowing that I’d have to make the decision quickly and that I didn’t want to get trapped in a dead-end.
Then something else emerged from the darkness. It was crouched, and at first I thought it was a dog. But it was much too large for that, and its flat face looked a lot more like a pig. The thing began to stand up on its legs as far as the low ceiling would allow. It was roughly human in build, but instead of fingers on each hand it had a set of five elongated trotters, both sets of which were gripping a vicious-looking crossbow. It was clothed in what looked like patches of leather and crudely fashioned metal, like mediaeval armour. Its flesh was pale and hairless and its face was somewhere between human and pig, with just enough attributes of each to make the composite deeply disturbing. Its eyes were two small black absences and its mouth was curved in a permanent gluttonous smile. Behind it I could see another couple of pigs approaching in the same four-footed manner. The way their back legs were articulated seemed to make walking awkward at best.
I screamed and kicked out, my foot connecting squarely with the pig’s face. The thing fell backwards with a snort of anger, dropping the crossbow. But the others were armed as well, both holding long curved knives. I grabbed the fallen crossbow and hoped that the thing would work when I fired it.
“Get back. Get the hell away from me.”
The pig I’d kicked started up on its hindquarters again. It moved its jaw as if trying to speak, but all that came out was a series of snuffles. Then it reached out towards me, its trotters clasping the air in front of my face.
I fired the crossbow; the bolt thudded into the pig’s leg.
It squealed and fell back, clutching the end of the bolt where it protruded. I watched blood trickle out, almost lumi nously bright. The other two pigs moved towards me, but I shuffled backwards with the crossbow still in my hands. I pulled a fresh bolt from the cache in the bow’s stock and fumbled it into place, winching back the mechanism. The pigs raised their knives, but hesitated to come closer. Then they snorted angrily and began to drag the wounded one back into the darkness. I froze for an instant, then resumed my ascent, hoping to reach the gap before either the pigs or the hunters got to me.
I almost made it.
Sybilline saw me first, shrieking in either delight or fury. She raised a hand and her little gun appeared in it, springing from the sleeve-holster I had guessed she was wearing. Almost simultaneously, a flash of muzzle-fire whitened the chamber, the pain of its brilliance lancing into my eyes.
Her first shot shattered the staircase below me, the entire structure crashing down like a spiral snowstorm. She had to duck to avoid the debris, and then she got off another shot. I was halfway through the ceiling, halfway into whatever lay beyond, reaching out with my hands for some kind of purchase. Then I felt her shot gnaw into my thigh, soft at first, and then causing pain to blossom like a flower opening at dawn.
I dropped the crossbow. It tumbled down the flight of stairs onto the landing, where I saw a pig snatch it from the darkness with a snort of triumph.
Fischetti raised his own weapon, got off another shot, and that took care of what remained of the staircase. If his aim had been any better—or
if I had been any slower—his shot might also have taken care of my leg.
But instead, holding the agony at bay, I slithered onto the ceiling and lay very still. I had no idea what kind of weapon the woman had used; whether my wound had been caused by a projectile or a pulse of light or plasma, nor could I know how severe was the wound. I was probably bleeding, but my clothes were so sodden, and the surface on which I was lying was so damp, that I couldn’t tell where blood ended and rain began. And for a moment that was unimportant. I’d escaped them, if only for the time it would take them to find a way up to this level of the building. They had blueprints of the structure, so it would not take long, then, if a route existed at all.
“Get up, if you’re able.”
The voice was calm and unfamiliar, and it came not from below, but from a little above me.
“Come now; there isn’t much time. Ah, wait. I don’t expect you can see me. Is this better?”
And suddenly it was all I could do to screw my eyes shut against the sudden glare. A woman stood over me, dressed like the other Canopy players in all the sombre shades of black: dark, extravagantly heeled boots which reached to her thighs, jet-black greatcoat which skirted the ground and rose behind her neck to encircle her head, which was itself en globed in a helmet which was more black openwork than anything solid, like a gauze, with goggles like the faceted eyes of insects covering half her face. What I could see of her face, in all this, was so pale it was literally white, like a sketch that had never been tinted. A diagonal black tattoo traced each cheekbone, tapering towards her lips, which were the darkest red imaginable, like cochineal.
In one hand she held a huge rifle, its scorched energy-discharge muzzle pointed at my head. But it did not appear that she was aiming the rifle at me.
Her other hand, gloved in black, was reaching out to me.
“I said you’d better move, Mirabel. Unless you’re planning to die here.”
She knew the building, or at least this part of it. We didn’t have far to go. That was good, because locomotion was no longer my strong point. I could just about move along if I allowed one wall to take most of my weight, freeing the injured leg, but it was neither rapid nor elegant, and I knew I would not be able to sustain it for more than a few dozen metres before blood loss or shock or fatigue took their debt.
She took me up one flight—intact, this time—and then we emerged into the night air. It was a measure of how squalid the last few minutes had been that the air hit my lungs as something cooling and fresh and clean. But I felt myself on the verge of unconsciousness, and still had no real idea what was happening. Even when she showed me a small cable-car, parked in a kind of rubble-strewn cave in the building’s side, I could not quite adjust my perceptions to accept that I was being rescued.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“Because the Game stinks,” she said, pausing to mouth a subvocal command at the vehicle, causing it to jerk to life and slink towards us, retracted grapples finding purchase points amongst the dangling debris which covered the cave’s ceiling. “The Gamers think they have the tacit support of the entire Canopy, but they don’t. Maybe once, when it wasn’t quite so barbaric—but not now.”
I fell into the vehicle’s interior, sprawling across the rear seat. Now I could see that my Mendicant trousers were covered in blood, like rust. But the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and while I felt light-headed, it hadn’t got any worse in the last few minutes.
While she lowered herself into the pilot’s seat and brought the controls on line, I said, “There was a time when this wasn’t barbaric?”
“Once, yes—immediately after the plague.” Her gloved hands took hold of a pair of matched brass joysticks and pushed them forward and I felt the cablecar glide out of the cave with rapid whisking sounds of its arms. “The victims used to be criminals; Mulch they caught invading the Canopy or committing crimes against their own sort; murderers or rapists or looters.”
“That makes it all right, then.”
“I’m not condoning it. Not at all. But at least there was some kind of moral equilibrium. These people were scum. And they were chased by scum.”
“And now?”
“You’re talkative, Mirabel. Most people who’ve taken a shot like that don’t want to do anything except scream.” As she spoke, we left the cave, and for a moment I felt sickening free-fall as the cable-car dropped, before finding a nearby cable and correcting its descent. Then we were rising. “In answer to your question,” she said, “there started to be a problem finding suitable victims. So the organisers began to get a little less—how shall I put it? Discriminatory?”
“I understand,” I said. “I understand, because all I did was wander into the wrong part of the Mulch by mistake. Who are you, by the way? And where are you taking me?”
She reached up one hand and removed the gauzy helmet and faceted goggles, so that, when she turned around to face me, I could see her properly. “I’m Taryn,” she said. “But my friends in the sabotage movement call me Zebra.”
I realised I’d seen her earlier that night, amongst the clientèle at the stalk. She had seemed beautiful and exotic then, but she was even more so now. Perhaps it helped that I was lying down in pain having just been shot, fevered with the adrenalin which came from unexpected survival. Beautiful and very strange—and, in the right light, perhaps barely human at all. Her skin was either chalk-white or hard-edged black. The stripes covered her forehead and cheekbones, and from what I remembered seeing in the stalk, a large fraction of the rest of her. Black stripes curved from the edges of her eyes, like flamboyant mascara applied with maniacal precision. Her hair was a stiff black crest which probably ran all the way down her back.
“I don’t think I’ve met anyone like you before, Zebra.”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Some of my friends think I’m rather conservative; rather unadventurous. You’re not Mulch, are you, Mister Mirabel?”
“You know my name, what else do you know about me?”
“Not as much as I’d like to.” She took her hand from the controls, having set the machine into some kind of auto-pilot mode, allowing it to pick its own trajectory through the interstices of the Canopy.
“Shouldn’t you be driving this thing?”
“It’s safe, Tanner, believe me. The control system of a cable-car is quite intelligent—almost as smart as the machines we had before the plague. But it’s best not to spend too much time down in the Mulch with a machine like this.”
“About my earlier question . . .”
“We know you arrived in the city wearing Ice Mendicant clothes and that someone called Tanner Mirabel is known to the Mendicants.” I was about to ask Zebra how she knew this much, but she was already continuing, “What we don’t know is whether or not this is all a carefully constructed identity to suit some other purpose. Why did you allow yourself to be captured, Tanner?”
“I was curious,” I said, feeling like a repetitious refrain in a third-rate symphony—maybe one of Quirrenbach’s early efforts. “I didn’t know much about the social stratification in Yellowstone. I wanted to reach the Canopy, and I didn’t know how to go about it without threatening anyone.”
“That’s understandable. There isn’t any way.”
“How did you find any of this out?”
“Through Waverly.” She looked at me carefully, squinting deep black eyes, causing the stripes on one side of her face to bunch together. “I don’t know if he introduced himself, but Waverly was the man who shot you with the stun beam.”
“You know him?”
She nodded. “He’s one of ours—or at least, he has sympathies with us, and we have means of ensuring his compliance. He likes to indulge certain tastes.”
“He told me he was a sadist, but I thought it was part of the banter.”
“It wasn’t, believe me.”
I winced as a wave of pain raced up my leg. “How do you know my name?”
“Waverly passed
it to us. Before that, we’d never even heard of Tanner Mirabel. But once we had a name, we could backtrack and confirm your movements. He didn’t get much, though. Either he was lying—which I don’t rule out; it’s not like I particularly trust the one-eyed bastard—or else your memories really are confused.”
“I had revival amnesia. That’s why I spent time with the Mendicants.”
“Waverly seemed to think it went deeper than that. That you might have had something to hide. Is that possible, Tanner? If I’m going to help you, it might help if I trusted you.”
“I’m who you think I am,” I said, which seemed to be all I could manage just then. The odd thing was, I wasn’t quite sure I believed myself.
Something strange happened then: a hard, sharp discontinuity in my thoughts. I was still conscious; still aware of myself sitting in Zebra’s cable-car; still aware that we were moving through Chasm City at night and that she had rescued me from Sybilline’s little hunting party. I was conscious of the pain in my leg—even though it had abated to a dull throb of highly concentrated discomfort by then.
And yet a chunk of Sky Haussmann’s life had just revealed itself to me.
The previous episodes had come during unconsciousness, like orchestrated dreams, but this one had exploded, fully-formed, into my mind. The effect was disturbing and disconcerting, interrupting the normal flow of my thoughts like an EMP burst playing momentary havoc with a computer system.
The episode, mercifully, was not a long one. Sky was still with Balcazar (Christ, I thought—I was even remembering the names of the supporting characters); still ferrying him across space to the meeting—the conclave—aboard the other ship, the Palestine.
What had happened last time? That was it—Balcazar had told Sky about the sixth ship being real; the ghost ship.
The one Norquinco had called the Caleuche.
By the time he had turned the revelation over in his head, examining it from every angle, they were almost there. The Palestine loomed huge, looking very much like the Santiago—all the ships of the Flotilla were built to more or less the same design—but without quite the same degree of discoloration around her rotating hull. She had been much further away from the Islamabad when she went up, the flash of energy weakened by the inverse square law of radiative propagation until it was barely a warm breeze, rather than the killing flux which had burned the shadow of his mother onto the skin of his own ship. They had their problems, of course. There had been viral outbreaks, psychoses, putches, and as many sleepers had died aboard that ship as aboard the Santiago . He thought of her burdened with her own dead; cold corpses strung along her spine like rotten fruit.