‘Any more details from the Plain?’ Gadfium asked him.
‘None, ma’am.’ Rasfline paused, making it obvious he was communicating, then shook his head. ‘As before; the observatory there has reported something unusual and the Palace has granted their request that you attend.’
‘Plain of Sliding Stones?’ Goscil said, opening her eyes suddenly. She blew hair away from the side of her face, glancing at Rasfline. ‘I heard some gossip on the science channel about the stones doing something weird.’
‘Really,’ Rasfline said drily.
‘And how did this weirdness manifest itself?’ Gadfium asked.
Goscil shrugged. ‘Didn’t say; there’s just a filed report from some junior timed about dawn that the stones were moving and something strange was happening. Nothing since.’ She glanced at Rasfline again. ‘Probably been clamped down.’
Gadfium nodded. ‘Has there been much wind and precipitation up there lately?’
Both Rasfline and Goscil went still for a moment. Goscil answered first: ‘Yes. Enough melt for them to move, and some wind. But . . .’
‘Yes?’ Gadfium said.
Goscil shrugged. ‘The way that junior reported; said there was a ... may I repeat it verbatim?’
Gadfium nodded. ‘Go on.’
Goscil closed her eyes. Rasfline looked away again. ‘Umm,’ Goscil said, ‘. . . Usual identifiers; Plain of Stones Observatory, etc., then, quote:’ - her voice changed here to something like a chant - ‘something odd going on. Something very odd. Oh shit. Let’s see, right, general data first: wind blowing; north-west, force four, precip; three mill yesterday, plain friction factor; six. Oh, look at them! Look at that. They can’t do that! They’ve never done that, have they? Wait till - (unintelligible) - I’m calling the chief observer . . . filing this as is. Signing off.’
Goscil opened her eyes. ‘Unquote. After that, nothing. People have been trying to get in touch with the observatory since, but there’s no reply.’
‘When was the report timed?’
‘Six-thirteen.’
Gadfium looked at Rasfline, who was smiling thinly. ‘Has the Palace been in touch with the observatory since?’
‘I cannot say, Chief Scientist,’ the aide replied, then, as though seeking to be helpful nevertheless, added: ‘The message I received requesting your presence was timed at ten forty-five.’
‘Hmm,’ Gadfium said. ‘Kindly request that the Palace furnish us with more details, and allow us to speak directly with the observatory.’
‘Ma’am,’ Rasfline said, and took on the glassy-eyed look of someone making it politely obvious they were communicating.
Gadfium’s status decreed that she was above the need for an implanted direct status link, being one of those valued souls whose mind must be left free from the distractions of constant inter-communication to concentrate on undiluted thought, unless they chose to access the data corpus by some external means. She knew she must accept this, but even so oscillated between a guilty pride in her privileged position and an intermittent frustration that she so often had to rely on others to furnish her with so many of the details her work required.
‘We’re to take a clifter up the East Face,’ Goscil announced after a moment’s pause. ‘The King’s own machine, just for us,’ she told the chief scientist. ‘They must want us there very quickly.’
3
The caisson-train lumbered across the broken landscape of the collapsed Southern Volcano Room; a line of huge, cylindrically rotund, multi-wheeled heavy carriers interspersed with smaller vehicles and chimerics. Some of the larger chimerics, all of them of the incarnosaur genus, carried troops; most of the other make-beasts were considered at least semi-sentient, and were themselves soldiers, variously armoured, impedimented and armed.
The other ground vehicles were all-drive holster-buggies, armoured scree-cars, one- or two-gun landromonds and the huge multi-turreted tanks known as bassinals. The struggling convoy accounted for a good sixth of the King’s military transport, and represented either a brilliant flanking manoeuvre to supply the beleaguered garrison of troops guarding the workings in the fifth-floor south-western solar, or a desperate and probably forlorn gamble to win a war that was not only unwinnable but anyway pointless; Sessine had still to decide which.
The Count Alandre Sessine VII, commander-in-chief of the second expeditionary force, looked up and away from the slow-moving convoy of beasts and machines in his charge to gaze at the gaping shell of ruined walls around them, and the revealed topography of mega-architecture and cloud beyond.
Standing waist-high in the turret of the command scree-car, shaken this way and that by the rough, trackless ground the convoy traversed, his body armour clunking dully against the inside rim of the hatch, it took an effort to focus on the vast and sullen grandeur of one’s surroundings, and a further effort to dismiss the apparent irrelevance of such scale to the more immediate task at hand (or rather at foot, and paw, and wheel and track).
All the same, it pleased him to do so every now and again when the steam and smoke-clouds cleared sufficiently, and he judged it no extravagance upon his supposedly valuable attention; keener eyes and more extrapolated senses than his would mind the progress of the convoy over such increments of time as he chose to allow the wider view, and - after all - what was his silent, self-solitary mind left so for (by the King’s good grace) if not to attend to the greater world beyond the vulgar intimacy of the immediate?
The collapsed Southern Volcano Room was really many rooms, and several levels of them, too; the walls still standing formed a huge extra curtain of cliff in the shape of a C between ten and thirteen kilometres in diameter and one and six kilometres in height. The crumpled ground the convoy moved across with such exquisite slowness was the wreckage of five or six floors, compressed by the cataclysm that had befallen this section of the fastness to a height of less than two great storeys, and was still shaken every year or so by smaller earthquakes. Steam and smoke drifted from a hundred different cracks and fissures across the crazily tilted geography of the room, and when dispersing winds did not whip whorling through the vast cauldron, the air was filled with the smell of sulphur.
It was a moderately calm day now, and the clouds of yellow-tinged smoke and brightly white steam that drifted over this tortured legacy of landscape provided cover for the convoy’s painstaking progress, even if they also sporadically prevented one from witnessing the full majesty of the great castle beyond.
Sessine looked behind him, through the high hanging valley that was the breach in the fortress structure created by the buried volcano. The curtain walls made a wavy line on the landscape, blue with distance beyond the hazily glimpsed forests, lakes and parkland of the outer bailey. Beyond was only the vaguest hint of the hills and plains of the provinces that made up Xtremadur.
It looked warm down there, Sessine thought, imagining the smells of summer pasture and woodland, and the feel of pool-water on his skin. Here, though the snow-line was still a good kilometre above, the air was chill when not heated with the rotten smell of the semi-dormant volcano beneath the convoy. Sessine felt himself shiver, for all his armour and furs.
He smiled as he looked around. For the privilege of being here in this gelid hell risking his last life on a mission the point of which even he did not entirely understand, he had indulged in the sort of prolonged and strenuous string-pulling he normally quite thoroughly disapproved of. Perhaps after all I am a masochist at heart, he thought. Maybe it had merely lain latent (he glanced at the pitched upheaval of ground they were crossing) - dormant - these last seven lives. The idea amused. He continued his sweep of the panorama briefly available through the shifting clouds.
At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a single great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rumpled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge o
f fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation.
Above, trees grew on the summit of the serrated ridge, which grew haphazardly, jaggedly, as it swept around the huge bowl of the Volcano Room, gradually lifting above the tree-line until directly in front of them it merged with the intact structure of the fastness Serehfa, where the walls - some pierced by enormous windows and clerestories, some plain, some shining sheer and some roughened sufficiently to be coated with snow or the blue-green strain of high-altitude babilia - climbed through the clouds and into the sky.
Sessine was looking almost straight up now, trying to glimpse the summit of the fast-tower itself, the mightiest of Serehfa’s mighty towers, standing glittering in its solitude above all but the most vestigial traces of atmosphere, fully twenty-five kilometres above the surface of the Earth and almost in space itself.
Clouds hid the mysterious summit of the castle, and Sessine smiled ruefully to himself as another veil of steam and foul-smelling smoke drifted across the view, obscuring. The Count held the image of those enormous distant walls for a moment and wrinkled his nose as the vapours and gases wrapped themselves round the slowly moving car. He lifted a pair of all-band field glasses from a hook inside the hatch and scanned his surroundings again, but the effect, and particularly the sense of scale, was not the same.
Still, there was a little added safety in the mists. He wondered - as he always did at some point in one of these recreational panoramas - whether his inspection had been in any way reciprocated.
He knew the King had his own spyers, dispatched to towers and high walls to watch the open areas beneath them and report to Army Intelligence, and he had never entirely believed that the Engineers seemed never to have thought of the same idea. He put the field glasses back. The volcanic mists did not appear to be dispersing; if anything they were growing thicker and more noxious.
There was a crackle of noise from inside the car, then someone spoke. It sounded like a signal-burst had been received. The convoy had to observe complete communicative silence, though the Army could still contact them through broadcasts. It meant that all the men were alone in their own heads, or at least in their own vehicles. To join the Army was to lose the ability to have unrestrained access to the data corpus; everything had to go through the Army’s own network.
Being unable to contact distant loved ones was bad enough for troops unused to war and brought up from childhood with the ability to reach anybody they wanted through the corpus, but at least in most of the rest of the Army they could talk so to each other. For the duration of this mission they were forbidden even that, lest they betray their positions, and only encapsulated within their closed transports could they use their implants.
Sessine glanced back at the bulbous snout of the provisions caisson immediately aft - it was all there was to be seen behind, just as all he could see in front was the rear of a weapon-laden chimeric - then ducked back inside the scree-car, closing the hatch cover after him.
The scree-car’s interior was warm and smelled of oil and plastic; in the two days since they had quit the newly built hydrovator at the breach lip opposite the bastion-tower he had come to regard its humming, machine-scented interior almost with affection. Perhaps there was something womb-like about its hermetic, humming redness.
Sessine settled into the commander’s seat and took his gloves off. ‘Hatch down,’ he said.
‘Hatch down, sir,’ the car’s captain called out, calling back over her shoulder. The driver at her side twisted the scree-car’s wheel, his eyes fixed on the clear image of the ground ahead produced by the all-band display.
‘Communication?’ Sessine asked the comms operator. The young lieutenant nodded, trembling. He looked frightened, his skin grey. Sessine wondered what the news was, and felt his guts start to knot.
‘We got it too, sir,’ the captain called, still watching the screen. ‘Gistics update code: routine.’
‘Routine?’ Sessine asked, staring at the lieutenant’s stricken-looking expression. What was happening?
‘I - I heard some—’ the comms operator began, then swallowed. ‘I heard something more, sir, over the machine’s hard channel, from Intelligence,’ he stammered. He licked his lips and rested one shaking hand on the comms console.
The captain twisted round in her seat, frowning. ‘What?’
The lieutenant glanced at her, then told Sessine, ‘They have a spyer on the north rim-wall, sir; he reports . . . a . . .’ the young man hesitated, then blurted, ‘an air attack.’
‘What?’ yelled the captain, twisting in her seat and punching at the car’s sensor controls, then sitting back, one hand to her ear, eyes closed.
‘A ... an air attack, sir,’ the lieutenant repeated, tears in his eyes, glancing up at the hatch.
The captain muttered something. The driver started to whistle. Sessine could think of nothing to say. He jumped up onto the observation platform and threw the hatch open again, remembering to shout, ‘Hatch open!’ as he rose into the steams and smokes above. He lifted the field glasses.
As he put them to his eyes, he heard two shots from beneath him, inside the car, followed quickly by two more. The car lurched and swung right.
Sessine dropped through the hatch, and as he did so realised that he might have made a terrible mistake.
His hand went to his own gun; he registered the sick-sweet smell of burnt flesh, and found himself looking into the tear-streaked face of the comms operator, pointing his gun straight at him.
The two bodies in the front of the scree-car jiggled slackly as the car thumped over some obstruction. The lieutenant braced himself against the car’s ceiling with his free hand and sniffed hard. Sessine held his hand out to him, leaving his other hand on the butt of his gun. ‘Now—’
‘I’m sorry, sir!’
Then the world lit up, and a terrible blow struck Sessine’s lower face. He fell, knowing he was dying, falling surrounded by smoke to hit the floor, beyond pain with a noise past sound in his ears, no breath left in him and no way of breathing, and lay there for some terrible suspended moment before he sensed the young lieutenant over him and felt the gun at the back of his head and had time to think, Why?, and he died.
4
Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.
I fot Id bettir clear it wif thi relevint oforities furst & hens avoyd any truble (like happind thi lastime) so I went 2 c mentor Scalopin.
Certinly yung Bascule, he sez, i do beleave this is a day ov relativly lite dooties 4 u u may take it off. ½ u made yoor mattins calls?
O yes, I sed, which woznt stricktly tru, in fact which woz pretti strikly untru, trufe btold, but I cude always do them while we woz travelin.
Wots in that thare box yoor holdin? he asks.
Itz a ant, I sez, waven thi box @ his face.
O this is yoor litil frend, is it? i herd u had a pet. May i see him?
Iss not a pet, iss a frend; u woz rite thi furst time, & iss not a im iss a she. Luke.
O yes very pretti, he sez, which is a pretti strainge thing 2 say about a ant if u ask me but thare u go.
Duz it - duz she ½ a naim? he asks.
Yes, I sez, sheez calld Ergates.
Ergateez, he sez, thatz a nyce name whot maid u call her that?
Nuffink, I sez; itz her reel name.
A I see, he sez, & givs me 1 ov thoze lukes.
& she can tok 2, I tel him, tho I doan xpect yule b able 2 here hir.
(Shh, Bascule! goze Ergates, & I
go a bit red.)
Duz she, duz she now? mentor Scalopin sez wif wunna them tolerint smylez. Very wel then he sez, pattin me on thi hed (which I doan much like, frangly, but sumtimes u jus ½ 2 poot up wif these things. N-way whare wer we? O yes he woz pattin me on thi hed & sayin), off yugo (he sez) but b bak by supper.
Ritey-ho, I sez, all breezy like, nevir thinkin.
Swing doun past thi kitchins 2 see mistriz Blyke 2 flash my big solefool Is & giv hir thi soppi smile all shy & bashfool & skrownj sum provishins. She pats me on thi noddil 2 - what is it wif peeple?
Leev thi monstery about ½ 9 & lift 2 thi top; thi sun iz shinin in fru thi big winders acros thi grate hol strait in2 ma Iz. Dam shure it dozen luke like itz gettin dimmer 2 me but evrybody sez it is so I spose it muss b.
Grab a ride on a waggin heddin 4 thi souf-west hydrovater along thi clif roade, hangin on 2 thi bak ov thi truk abuv thi x-ost; bit steemy when thi truk stops @ junkshins, but beets havvin 2 ride in thi cab & tok 2 thi dryver & probly get pattid on thi bonce aggen like as knot.
I like thi cliff rode cos u can luke ovir thi edge & c rite doun 2 thi flore ov thi hol & evin c thi big rownd bobbly bits what wood b thi handils ov thi drawerz ov thi bureau if this woz a propir size place instead ov being BIG like it is. Mr Zoliparia sez ov coarse ther wernt nevir no jiants & I bileev him but sumtymes u can luke owt ovir thi hall wif its mountins like cuboardz & mountins like seets & sofas set agenst thi wall & thi tabils & poofs & so on skaterd about thi playce & u fink, Whenz them big bags cummin bak then? (Bags is my own koinin & am qwite proud ov it - meenz Boys & GirlS. Ergates sez its called a nacronim. N-way whare woz we? O yes hangin on 2 thi bak ov thi truk rolin along thi clif rode.)
Ergates thi ant iz in hir box in thi left brest pokit ov my jakt-wif-lotza-pokits, all saifly butinned down. U alrite Ergates? I whispir as we bownse along thi rode.