“Fate, I tell you, if not the hand of the WorldGod itself . . . or whatever manipulatory appendage WorldGods possess. Anyway, the hand, metaphorically, of the WorldGod. Possibly.”
“I think you underguess the workings of blind chance, sir.”
“Blind chance that took me to that dreadful place?”
“Unarguably, sir: your startled mount ran cross-country until it found a track; naturally it then took the levelled road rather than the coarse ground and of course it took the easier, downhill route. Then that old mill appeared, on the first place where the road widens and levels out. Natural place for it to stop.”
Ferbin looked across at the prone form of his servant, lying on the ground a couple of strides away across the leaf-littered ground with a large blue leaf poised over his head. Choubris Holse looked calmly back.
They had flown straight out from the Scholastery until hidden from it by a line of low hills, then set down on a sloped heath above the limit of cultivated land.
“I think I’ve heard of the D’nengoal Tower,” Ferbin said, while they inspected the two grumbling, huffing caude, “but I’m damned if I know which way it is.”
“Same here, sir,” said Holse. He opened up one of the saddle bags on his beast. “Though with any luck there’ll be a map in here. Let me just have a quick furtle.” He dug his hand elbow-deep into the bag.
The saddle bags yielded maps, some food, a little water, a telescope, a heliograph, two hefty pocket chronometers, one barometer/altimeter, some rifle and pistol ammunition but no weapons, four small bomblets like smooth hand grenades with cruciform flights, padded jackets, gauntlets, one small blanket each and the usual paraphernalia of tack associated with caude, including a good supply of the krisk nuts they found so stimulating. Holse popped one in the mouth of each animal; they mewed and whinnied appreciatively. “Ever tried these things, sir?” Holse asked, holding up the bag of krisk.
“No,” Ferbin lied. “Of course not.”
“Bloody horrible. Bitter as a scold’s piss.” He put the bag away, fastened the saddle bags and adjusted his saddle. “And these bastard knights that came to the Scholastery must be ascetics or something, for there’s no sign of any of the little niceties that make life bearable for the common man, sir. Like wine, or unge, or crile. Bloody fliers.” Holse shook his head at such lack of consideration.
“No goggles or masks either,” Ferbin pointed out.
“Must have carried them with them.”
Holse was checking one of the pistol rounds they’d discovered in the saddle bags against one from his own gun. “Let’s have a quick look, and then be off, eh, sir?” he said, then shook his head and dumped all the ammunition on the heath.
They consulted the maps, one of which was of sufficient scale to show the land for nearly ten days’ flying around Pourl, depicting hundreds upon hundreds of the great Towers as well as the shade limits and periods of the various Rollstars.
“There it is,” Ferbin said, tapping on the map.
“What would you say, sir? Four short-days’ flying?”
“More like three,” Ferbin said, glad to have found a practical subject he knew so much more of than his servant. “Five Towers along and one down, four times over, then three and one. Away from Pourl, which is to the good.” He glanced up at Obor. Its red-tinged bulk was still barely above the horizon as it rose upon its slow and settled course. “It’s a long-day today. We shall have to let the beasts day-sleep, but we should achieve the tower before dusk.”
“Could do with a snooze myself,” Holse yawned. He looked disparagingly at his mount, which had tucked its long neck under its massive body to lick its genitals. “Rather hoped I’d seen the last of these things this close, I do confess, sir.” Holse’s caude removed its head from between its legs, though only long enough for it to fart long and loud, as though to confirm its new rider’s poor opinion.
“You are not enamoured of the beasts of the air, Holse?”
“Indeed not, sir. If the gods had meant us to fly they’d have given us the wings and the caude the pox.”
“If they hadn’t meant us to fly, gravity would be stronger,” Ferbin replied.
“I wasn’t aware it was adjustable, sir.”
Ferbin smiled tolerantly. He realised that his servant might not be versed in the kind of alien lore that would insist that what he and Holse had known all their lives as normal gravity was about half Standard, whatever that really meant.
“However,” Holse said. “Let’s get moving, eh?” They both went to saddle up.
“Best put these jackets on,” Ferbin said. “It’ll be cold up there.” He gestured upwards. “Clouds are clearing so we’ll be able to go high.”
Holse sighed. “If we must, sir.”
“I’ll work the clock, shall I?” Ferbin held up the chronometer.
“That necessary, sir?”
Ferbin, who had got lost while flying too many times, mistakenly thinking that you could never miscount things as big as Towers – or fall asleep in the saddle, for that matter – said, “I think it advisable.”
They had flown without incident at the altitude best for caude cruising stamina. They had seen other fliers far in the distance, but had not been approached. The landscape moved slowly beneath them, changing from tiny fields to stretches of waste and heath that were low hills, then back to fields, small towns, and great glaring areas of bright green that marked the roasoaril plantations whose fruits went to feed the refineries which produced the fuel to power the steam engines of the modern age.
Slowly over the horizon appeared a handful of long fingers of shining water that were the Quoluk Lakes. Ferbin recognised the island that held the Hausk family estate of Moiliou. The river Quoline gathered water from all the lakes and then wound away towards the distant equator, vanishing in the haze. Canals blinked, reflecting sunlight like thin threads of silver, spearing straight over level areas and describing curving contours about raised ground.
Even in the jacket, Ferbin shivered. His knees, covered only in hose and trous, were especially cold. Not having goggles or a mask meant his eyes were watering all the time. He’d wrapped his collar scarf round his lower face, but it was all still most uncomfortable. He kept an eye on the chronometer clipped to the tall front edge of his saddle and used a waterproof pad and wax crayon also attached to the saddle to mark down the passing of each great Tower as it loomed and then slid slowly past to their right.
The Towers, as ever, were a source of a kind of odd comfort. From this height more of them were visible than one saw from the ground and one was able to form a proper impression of their numbers and regular spacing. Only from this sort of altitude, Ferbin thought, did one fully appreciate that one lived within a greater world, a world of levels, of regularly spaced floors and ceilings, with the Towers holding one above the other. They rose like vast spars of pale luminescence, masts of a celestial ship of infinite grace and absolute, inconceivable power. High above, just visible, the laciness of Filigree showed where the Towers’ splayed summits – still fourteen hundred kilometres over his and Holse’s heads, for all their chilly altitude – fluted out like an impossibly fine network of branches from a succession of vast trees.
A million Towers held the world up. The collapse of just one might destroy everything, not just on this level, their own dear Eighth, but on and in all the others too; the WorldGod itself might not be beyond harm. But then it was said that the Towers were near invulnerable, and Sursamen had been here for a thousand times a million years. Whether this meant their own short-years or long-years or so-called Standard years, he didn’t know – with such a number it hardly mattered.
Ferbin wiped his eyes free of tears and looked carefully around, taking time to let his gaze rest on a succession of distant points the better to catch any movement. He wondered how long it would take for word to get back to Pourl of what had happened at the Scholastery. Riding there would take five days or so, but – using the heliograph – perhaps anoth
er patrol would be attracted, and in reality the knights who’d lost their mounts only needed to get to the nearest telegraph station. Plus, the patrol would be missed when it didn’t return; search parties would be sent out and would no doubt be signalled from the Scholastery. Seltis would surely be questioned; would they stoop to torture? What if he told them about the documents and the D’nengoal Tower?
Well, he and Holse had little choice. They would make the best time they could. The rest was up to luck and the WorldGod.
Their beasts started to show signs of fatigue. Ferbin checked the chronometer. They had been in the air nearly ten hours and must have flown over six hundred thousand strides – six hundred kilometres. They had passed twelve Towers to their right, and flown left by one tower every five. Obor, a slow, orange Rollstar, was just approaching its noon. They were about halfway.
They descended, found an island at the edge of a vast Bowlsea with a rich crop of fat bald-head fruit, and landed in a small clearing. The caude swallowed fruit until they looked fit to burst. They started farting again, then promptly fell asleep in the nearest shade, still expelling gas. Ferbin and Holse tethered the beasts, also had something to eat, then found another patch of deep shade and cut down a giant leaf each to shield their eyes still further from the light while they slept. This was where Ferbin chose to share his thoughts with his servant on the course of events recently, and why ideas like predestination, destiny and fate had been much on his mind during the long, cold and painful hours in the saddle.
“Oh. I see,” Ferbin said. “You are familiar with the disposition of that ancient manufactury?”
“All I’m saying, sir, is that it was about the only intact building for half a day’s ride around. Even the old hunting lodge, which was, as it were, the cause of every other building in the area having as useful a roof as that stupidity I found you in—”
“Folly.”
“ – that folly I found you in, was smashed to buggery. It had been artilleried. But anyway, sir, your mount getting you there was no great surprise.”
“Very well,” Ferbin said, determined to show his reasonableness by making a concession. “My arriving might not have been due to the hand of fate. The traitors taking my father there – that was. Destiny was taking a hand. Perhaps even the WorldGod. My father’s fate was sealed, it would seem, and he could not be saved, but at least his son might be allowed to witness the despicable crime and set vengeance in train.”
“I’m sure it seemed and seems so to you, sir. However, with no buildings about the place, in the heat of a battle, and a dirt-rain starting, taking a wounded man to a place with a roof only makes sense. If dirt-rain gets into a wound, it turns cut-rot and infection from a bad risk to a perfect certainty.”
Ferbin had to think back. He recalled that when he’d crawled out of the burning building into the damp, cloying leaves and branches it had, indeed, been a dirty rain that had been falling. That was why it had all felt so sticky and grainy and horrible. “But they wanted him dead!” he protested.
“And where would you rather do that, sir? In full view of who-knows-who, in the open, or under a roof, between walls?”
Ferbin frowned, pulled his big blue leaf down over his face and from underneath said grumpily, “Still, for all your cynicism, Holse, it was fate.”
“As you say, sir,” Holse said, sighing, and pulled his own leaf over his face. “Good sleep, sir.”
He was answered with a snore.
When they awoke it was to colder, darker, windier conditions. The Obor-lit long-day was still in its early afternoon, but the weather had changed. Small grey clouds sailed raggedly across the sky beneath a high overcast and the air smelled damp. The caude were slow to wake and spent much of the next half-hour defecating noisily and voluminously. Ferbin and Holse took their small breakfast some distance upwind.
“That wind’s against us,” Ferbin said, looking out from the edge of the plantation across the quick-chopping waves of the Bowlsea. A dark horizon in the direction they would be heading looked ominous.
“As well we made good distance yesterday,” Holse said, chewing on some air-dried meat.
They secured their few belongings, checked the map, took a few of the bald-head fruit with them – for the caude; the fruit was indigestible to humans – then took off into a freshening breeze. The wind added to the sensation of cold, even though they were flying much lower than earlier due to the great banks and drifts of dark grey cloud striating the sky. They skirted the bigger clouds and flew through only the smallest. Caude were reluctant to fly through thick cloud anyway, though they would do so if they were forced. Once inside cloud the animals were as bad as humans at gauging whether they were upright and flying straight and level, or describing a banked circle and about to crash into some nearby Tower. Caude were the rowels of the air, reliable work beasts rather than thoroughbred racing creatures like lyge, and so only flew at about fifty or sixty kilometres per hour. Even so, hitting a Tower at that speed was usually enough to kill both beast and rider, and if not, then the subsequent fall to the ground tended to do the trick.
Ferbin was still keeping an eye on the chronometer and marking the passage of the Towers to their right – they were flying closer to them now, only a few kilometres off each one, so they didn’t miss any, something Ferbin knew from experience it was all too easy to do – however, he found himself thinking back to a dream he’d had the night before and – via that – to his one journey to the Surface, back when he’d been a youth.
That, too, was like a dream to him now.
He had walked on strange ground beneath no lid or ceiling save that of the atmosphere itself, held contained by a far circle of walls and by nothing else but gravity; a place with no Towers, where the curve of the earth beneath one’s feet just went on, uninterrupted, unbroken, unsupported, unbelievable.
He had watched the stars wheel and, in each of the half-dozen days he had been there, had marvelled at the tiny, blinding dot that was Meseriphine, the Unseen Sun, the distant, connected yet unconnected pivot that great Sursamen itself spun slow about. There was a remorselessness about those Surface days; one sun, one source of light, one regular set of days and nights, always the same, seemingly unchanging, while everything he’d ever known was far below – entire levels that were themselves worlds beneath him, and only nothing above; a dark true-nothingness, sprinkled with a rash of faint points of light that he was told were other suns.
His father had been meant to be there but had had to call off at the last moment. Ferbin had gone with his older brother Elime, who had been there before but had wanted to go again. They were very privileged to be treated so. Their father could command the Oct to take people to other levels including the Surface, as could some other rulers and the Head Scholars of Scholasteries, but any other person travelled at the whim of the Oct, and they granted almost no such wishes.
They had taken a couple of friends and a few old servants. The great Crater they’d stayed within for most of their visit was green with vast meadows and tall trees. The air smelled of unidentifiable perfumes. It was thick and at once fresh and heady; they had felt energised, almost drugged.
They had lived within an underground complex in the face of a tall cliff looking out over a vast network of hexagonal lakes bounded by thin strips of land; this pattern stretched to the horizon. They had met some Nariscene and even one Morthanveld. Ferbin had already seen his first Oct, in the scendship that had taken them up the Tower to the Surface. This had been before the Oct embassy had been opened in the palace at Pourl and Ferbin had the same superstitious dread of the Oct as most people. There were legends, rumours and uncorroborated reports that the Oct issued from their Towers in the dead of night to steal people from their beds. Sometimes whole families or even villages disappeared. The Oct took the captured back to their Towers and experimented upon them, or ate them, or transported them to another level for sport and devilment.
The result was that the common mass of people d
readed both the Oct themselves and the very idea of being taken to and transported within a Tower. Ferbin had long been told these were nonsense tales, but he’d still been nervous. It had been a relief to discover the Oct were so small and delicate-looking.
The Oct in the scendship had been most insistent that they were the true Inheritors and direct descendants of the Involucra, the original builders of the Shellworlds. He had been highly impressed with this, and had felt a vicarious outrage that this fact was not more widely accepted.
He’d been in awe of the Oct’s casual familiarity with and easy control of this vessel that could rise within a Tower, past level after unglimpsed level, to the very outside of all things. It was control of the world, he realised. It seemed more real, more relevant and somehow even more important and impressive than control of the infinitude of ungraspable space beyond the world itself. This, he’d thought, was power.
Then he’d watched how the Oct and the Nariscene treated each other, and realised that the Nariscene were the masters here; they were the superiors, who merely indulged this strange species that to his people, to the Sarl, had near-magical powers. How lowly the Sarl must be, to be mere cargo, simple primitives to the Oct, who were themselves treated like little more than children by their Nariscene mentors!
Seeing, furthermore, how the Nariscene and the Morthanveld interacted was almost dismaying, because the Morthanveld in turn seemed to regard the Nariscene as something like children and treated them with amused indulgence. Another level, and another; all beyond his, above his people’s heads.
In some ways, they were the lowest of the low, he realised. Was this why so few of his people were ever invited here?
Perhaps if everybody saw what he, his brother and their friends were seeing, the Sarl might sink into a state of apathy and depression, for they would know how little their lives really counted within the ever-expanding hierarchies of alien powers beyond them. This had been Elime’s opinion. He also believed that it was a deliberate scheme of their mentors to encourage those who were in power, or who would one day assume power, to witness the wonders that they were now being shown, so that they would never be tempted to get above themselves, so that they would always know that no matter how magnificent they appeared to themselves or those around them and regardless of what they achieved, it was all within the context of this greater, more powerful, sophisticated and ultimately far superior reality.