Bane handed her the artefact. She put it on, and it swirled into life.
“I don’t. . .” she began. I don’t know if this will work, she meant to say, but she realized it was pointless. Words would not change anything. Bane pretended not to have heard her.
She put her hand again to the mirror, this time with the artefact resting in her palm.
Nothing happened.
Moa swallowed. Bane looked sidelong at her.
Still nothing happened.
And then the colours shifted, flowing from her arm and across the wall. Moa let out a sigh of relief, but her relief didn’t last long. The colours were not forming a doorway. Instead, they kept on spreading, becoming thicker and brighter as they crept over the mirrored blade that she touched, and beyond. Waves of gauzy purples and reds flooded from her palm and across the Fulcrum. Alarmed, she was about to draw her hand away when Bane grabbed her wrist and held it there. She met his gaze with fear in her eyes.
“It’s not supposed to do this!” she said.
“Let’s see what happens,” Bane replied. He wasn’t afraid. He could think of no price that he wouldn’t pay to get inside this place.
And now the colours faded, draining from Moa’s arm, sucked out of her. The artefact had no more to give. The veils that drifted across the surface of the Fulcrum had become absorbed into the mirrors, as if the building was drinking the energy greedily. All went quiet.
Finally, Bane released her, and she stepped back. She looked at the amber disc in her hand. There was no light there; it had lost the strange quality which had made it seem deep. She knew, without any way of being certain, that the artefact was only an ornament now. Its power had been leached. It was dead.
If the artefact was dead, then Bane had no more use for her. She closed her hand around the disc. She couldn’t let him know.
She and Bane stepped back. The Fulcrum was just as it had been. It was as if it had never been touched. And yet they were both waiting for something.
All at once, the Fulcrum turned red. As if it were a mirror that had turned towards a crimson sunset, every one of its reflective facets went the colour of rich, dark blood. No longer a tornado of ice, it was a frozen rose, jagged and deformed and threatening. The gasp from the assembled spectators was audible across the plaza, and some people shrieked and began to cry.
Then it began to unfold.
The shrieking of the spectators became panic. The troops looked at each other nervously and shuffled in the ranks. Their commanders ordered them to move back to a safe distance. Bane took Moa by the arm and marched her to where Rail and Finch and Vago were, and they watched.
The Fulcrum was unwrapping, its uppermost parts peeling back like the petals of a flower. It was utterly silent: there was no grinding of gears or squeal of tortured metal as it bent. Bane was impressed. Incredible that a building could move like this. More evidence of how ignorant they were compared to the civilizations that lived before the Fade ever took place.
They stood mesmerized as it uncurled and shifted, like a nest of snakes slowly writhing. The mirrors on its flanks were angling this way and that, making it seem as if the whole surface was in motion. And then it abruptly stopped, its top crowned with dozens of slanted tendrils of glass that had locked into place. It seemed bigger than before, like a pinecone that had opened up.
There was a breathless hush, deeper even than the silence that had attended its movement.
“We’re in,” said Bane quietly, and pointed.
He was right. At the base of the Fulcrum, the panels that had armoured it lay flat, offering a hundred entrances. All the way up the structure, the bladed mirrors had peeled back, opening the interior to the air.
“We’re in!” Bane cried again, fierce excitement in his voice. And he set off towards the Fulcrum, his troops in tow, and Rail and Moa went with him at gunpoint.
The temperature dropped the instant they set foot inside the Fulcrum, as if they had stepped through a curtain of cold air. Bane insisted on being the first in, and with him went Rail, Moa, Vago and Finch with a small retinue of Secret Police. The soldiers followed warily after, their eyes hidden by glimmer visors and aether cannons held ready.
The openings fed into high tunnels with arched roofs that dipped in the middle. They were ribbed along the way, and carved of some smooth substance that could have been either marbly stone or metal. There wasn’t a join or seam to be seen; the construction was uncannily perfect. Wafts of cool air that tasted flat and lifeless drifted from the interior. Rail had the unpleasant sensation of walking down the throat of some great beast towards its stomach.
He was thinking only of escape, but escape at this point seemed impossible. Moa, next to him, was awed by the gravity of what was happening to them. They were inside the Fulcrum, somewhere that nobody had ever been since the Fade. But Rail felt nothing of the grandeur of the moment. He knew for sure that there was no way the Secret Police would let them live after what they had seen. They were ghetto folk; less than human, and very expendable.
Rail was searching for opportunity. Nobody knew what they would face inside this place. Uncertainty was his advantage. Once, he had wanted to be the greatest thief in Orokos. Now he just wanted to survive, and to get Moa out of here.
Bane – they knew that was his name now, for they had heard the other Secret Police refer to him – had taken the artefact from Moa once she had opened up the Fulcrum. Rail wondered why they were being brought inside along with the troops, but he reasoned that there might be more barriers within, and that Moa might be needed again. She hadn’t breathed a word about her fears: that the artefact was a mere trinket now, and that it would not work any more.
The tunnel they were following went inward for some way before it ended. They stepped slowly into the room beyond, and there they gaped in wonder. Even Rail couldn’t help but be impressed.
It like a dream made solid. A colossal hall of black and purple, fashioned in several levels that were connected by curving ramps. Everything was made of some glistening material that was hard as stone but had been shaped like wax. Each part of the complex arrangement of balconies, free-standing platforms, bridges and wedding-cake structures was rounded and smoothed. Soft light of an indeterminate colour, somewhere between green and blue, washed over the scene from globes that hung in the air like miniature suns. Trenches filled with a glowing liquid of the same hue traced back and forth across the floor, describing restful patterns.
The troops began filtering this way and that, spreading out to secure positions. They were treating this like the invasion of an enemy base. Bane, however, walked boldly out towards the middle of the chamber. His retinue followed him. Their footfalls made no sound, even though the surface they walked on was hard. The only noise was the whisper of clothes, the tap of weaponry, and the occasional hushed order from one of the soldiers as they directed their men.
Bane stopped and stood like a rock around which the troops broke. It was as if he were an explorer, having triumphantly set foot in his new world, and he was now surveying the land he had claimed.
“Nobody’s home,” said Rail flippantly. Bane turned on him and fixed him with a steady glare. Finch grinned at his insubordination.
“Then we’ve nothing to fear,” Bane replied. He produced a small black device, like a round stone of polished darkness. It pulsed softly as he held it up.
Finch eyed it appraisingly, mentally calculating its value. “What’s that?”
“This is why we know that the rumours about the Chaos Engine are true,” Bane muttered, looking into the stone. There were tiny lights inside it, all rushing in one direction. “This is a piece of Fade-Science we found long ago. We’ve established that its purpose is to detect probability energy. Like a compass, it always points towards the Fulcrum. That means that, somewhere in this place, is the most powerful source of probability energy in Orokos. And that
will be the Chaos Engine. This thing will lead us to it.”
“And what then?” Moa asked.
“You’ll see,” Bane replied. He looked around the hall again, consulted the device in his hand. “It’s this way.”
“Chief!” snapped one of the Secret Police at his side. “Movement!”
The soldiers had gone still, their cannons raised, a hundred weapons trained on the large black sphere that was floating down from the roof of the chamber. It descended unhurriedly towards the centre of the room, near where Bane and the others stood.
Moa clutched Rail’s thin arm. He felt her nails dig in through his jacket.
“Hold fire!” Bane said.
The sphere dropped to a hover ten feet above the ground. Rail could see himself reflected in its surface. It was deadly silent.
“There’s more,” muttered one of Bane’s men, and he looked to see several spheres, identical to the first, gliding downward from the shadows overhead at varying speeds. They came to a halt at different heights, in an apparently random fashion.
“If you were the Faded,” Rail murmured to Moa, “and you were building these things to provide a reception for visitors, would you make them look like that if they were friendly?”
Moa shook her head. She had a dreadful feeling about this.
“Me neither,” he said, and dropped his voice further so that nobody could hear. “Get ready to run. Something’s going to happen.”
Something did. As one, the spheres changed. Now their surfaces were not merely featureless black, but each displayed an emblem in deep red. It was stylized and flickered like a bad panopticon projection, but it was clear enough what the emblems were. Skulls.
Rail felt his heart plummet to his stomach; and then the great chamber, that he had thought resembled a dream, turned into a nightmare.
The skull-spheres emitted a deafening scream, and a wind blasted through the chamber, blowing Rail’s dreadlocks into a frenzy and almost pulling Moa off her feet. With the wind came an immense sensation of absolute terror that swamped them all, an animal panic that made Rail gag inside his respirator with the raw and suffocating strength of it. He had a moment to think this is not real this is not real there’s nothing to be afraid of but then his thoughts scattered under the maddening fear that the skull-spheres transmitted, and he, like everyone else in the room, lost his mind.
He barely knew where he was, only that it was the most awful place he had ever been and that he had to get out of it. But he couldn’t make his legs move; his muscles had turned to water. Everywhere there were the red skulls, floating in the air, shrieking. He scrambled to get away, pawing over other bodies. When he looked down at them their faces were horrible, distorted, their eyes glaring and black. They were monsters; he was surrounded by monsters. Nothing else mattered but to get out of here.
And yet there was nowhere to go. The monsters were everywhere.
He flailed in one direction, then another, then tripped over something and went crashing to the ground. It was one of the monsters, curled tightly into a ball. Instinctively he was afraid of it, but he seemed to recognize it too. Something inside him prevented him from running. Nearby, someone was firing an aether cannon. He looked and saw some of the monsters had guns and were shooting into the air and at each other. He cringed under the force of the skull-sphere’s din, and fell to his knees next to the whimpering shape.
not real
The sight of the curled-up monster somehow gave him the will to clamp down his fear, enough to grab snatches of sanity from the chaos. He reached down to the thing in front of him, wanting to uncurl it and discover what it was. His hands touched flesh. The cool skin of an arm. Moa. It was Moa.
the fear is not real it’s not real it’s not
He grabbed her and she shrieked, struggling against his grip. But she was too weak, and too afraid to fight hard. He picked her up and the two of them found their feet. She was Rail’s anchor, to stop him sliding into hysteria again.
“Moa!” he cried. “Moa, it’s me!”
But his voice sounded like a horrible clattering noise to her, and she screamed and tried to cover her ears. So he pulled her, dragging her in some direction, any direction. All round him he could hear men shouting, and the squeal of aether cannons. There was a dead soldier on the ground before him
just a man, not a monster after all
and some instinct made him reach down and tear the glimmer visor from the soldier’s face. It was only later that he realized why he had done it. The soldiers were firing into the air, at invisible enemies. That meant only one thing.
Revenants.
He put the visor to his eyes, and saw.
The Protectorate soldiers were in chaos. They were driven mad by the fear that the skull-spheres emitted, and they fought each other and anything else that moved. Some were fleeing down the tunnel towards the outside, some were shooting in all directions, others were huddled in fright. And between them went the sparkling shapes of the Revenants, swooping on manta-ray wings to possess the bodies of their victims. Already two dozen newly-made Taken were running about attacking people. But most of the Revenants were not so interested in the little force that had invaded the Fulcrum: they were headed through the tunnel, towards the open air.
Rail had a momentary vision of what the crowds waiting outside would see. They had opened up the Fulcrum, but the Fulcrum was full of Revenants. Like a wasp’s nest that had been disturbed, the Revenants would swarm. Soon, the screams would begin. The Null Spire would be the first target: Revenants always attacked Protectorate constructions before any other, for some reason that nobody could fathom. After that they would flood the district. The nerve centre of Orokos would be compromised. The consequences would be disastrous.
They should never have opened the Fulcrum. They didn’t know what they were meddling with.
But Rail couldn’t think about that now. He had to get himself and Moa to safety. Somehow, he had staggered a fair way across the chamber, and whether it was his imagination or not, the fear seemed to have lessened in him. The glimmer visor filtered out the worst of the hallucinations, and the presence of Moa gave him courage. He had to be strong, to look after her. She needed him.
He remembered how he had almost decided that they should split up, that he would leave her to go with Kittiwake while he made his own way in the city. How ridiculous that seemed now. They couldn’t do without one another. He would let nothing separate them again.
The cry of the skull-spheres was quieting, and Rail saw why. Some of the soldiers had been smart enough to fire at the source of their distress, bringing thumper guns to bear. Several of the spheres had been blown out of the air. The skull-spheres were some mechanism of the Faded to incapacitate their enemies through fear. Each time one fell Rail sensed the pressure of panic easing a little, and he could think more clearly.
The soldiers were organizing against the Revenants now, but Rail was intent only on escape. Moa, frightened out of her mind, was sobbing; but she had stopped resisting him, and they ran together towards a tunnel. Blobs of aether sizzled over their heads and Revenants glided and swooped, but the two ghetto children were not noticed by anyone or anything until they had almost reached the tunnel mouth.
Rail paused there and looked back. As he did, his visored gaze met that of Vago, who had been obliterating Revenants fearlessly. The golem was defending Bane, and several Revenants had already made the mistake of trying to attack him. They had been absorbed on contact. The ridge of his spine sparked with aether energy.
At the sight of Rail, Vago snarled, glowering in hatred. He threw his weapon aside and came pounding across the room on all fours, his metal-frame wings spread above him. Bane called him back, but Vago didn’t hear or didn’t listen.
Rail swore under his breath and pulled Moa into a run, and the golem came after them.
In the depths of Kilata
s, beneath hundreds of feet of dank rock, men and women and children prepared for their departure. Tomorrow they would set out for the promised land. Tomorrow, all they had lived for would come to fruition. Tomorrow, they would run the gauntlet of the Skimmers.
None of them dared to entertain the thought that they would fail. They hurried to make watertight the last of the boats. The shipyards rang with industry. Each extra craft heightened their chances of survival by giving the Skimmers another target to distract themselves with. There was a constant supply of rough food coming in through the secret ways that led down from the city. People were spending the last of their meagre savings on supplies, and those who had remained above to guard Kilatas’ doors were returning to the town.
Kittiwake walked with Ortolan towards her shack. To their right were the shipyards, a mass of scaffolding covered with clambering metalworkers and shipwrights. To their left were the cluttered docks where dozens of ships – rusty tubs, junks, tugs, anything with an engine – jostled at their moorings. They had checked and checked again the explosives wired into the western wall, ready to collapse it and let in the sunlight, to provide a route to the open sea. Except for the scramble to make the last vessels seaworthy, everything was in place. And yet Kittiwake couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong.
Just nerves, she told herself. But she didn’t quite believe it.
Ortolan was a self-taught scholar and a natural genius. It was he who had worked out the complex algorithms that predicted in what numbers the Skimmers would come. It was also he who had calculated the probabilities of survival based on the speed and number of the ships, the speed and number of Skimmers, and the distance across the killing zone (which also fluctuated from day to day, and had to be predicted and taken into account).
There was no appreciable difference in seasons in Orokos, no years or months. Anything longer than a few dozen days was referred to in a vague way, as “ages ago” or likened to another event, such as “back when we had the flood”. So Kittiwake really had no idea how long it had been since she started assembling the people who would build Kilatas, how long it had taken Ortolan to make his calculations, how long they had spent making ships. But it was all to come to this.