‘Steady on, now.’
He held up his hands placatingly, then took out a carton of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered her one, took one himself and lit both with an ornate gold-plated lighter decorated with a dragon.
‘What I am saying, Rachel, is that maybe you should wait this one out. I know Liddell and Vivian respect you. They might go to Sir Stewart. I would put good money on this backfiring on Jasper.’
‘Liddell and Vivian need a scapegoat for this mess just as much as Jasper does.’
Rachel took a hasty drag from the cigarette.
‘Well, I may be in a position to do more for you, in a little while,’ Roger said.
She stared at him.
‘They say it does not hurt too much, especially with barbiturates. Trying to memorise the Ticket gives me headaches, though. I think they put extra twists and turns for the Court especially.’
‘That is splendid, Roger. I am happy for you,’ Rachel said, her voice flat.
‘I am not ungrateful,’ he said quietly. ‘I owe it all to you, Rachel. Just lay low and I will spread the word that it was all Jasper’s fault. People will believe that. A few months with Miss Scaplehorn, what is that? You can handle it. Do some busywork and relax with Joe in the meantime.’
‘The stakes are too high! I may have issues with Harker, but what if the Summer Court is compromised? If there is the faintest chance that the source was telling the truth, I have to do something.’
‘But we do not know that. We do not know who the mole is, or what they have access to. It’s not as bad as you think. You are overreacting because this brute hurt you, I can see how shaken you are. Think—think rationally for a minute—’
‘Oh, is that it? Jasper just finished telling me that my natural limitations make me unsuitable for this work. You think I am upset because the big, bad Russian hurt me? Thank you very much, Roger. I am so very glad that you explained it to me.’
‘For God’s sake, Rachel, I know you have nerves of steel. I just do not think you understand the Winter Court at all.’
‘I have been here half my life. I think I understand it well enough.’
‘With all due respect, perhaps you don’t allow yourself to understand. You don’t want to believe that incompetents like Harker get all the glory while we do all the work. But they are also petty and fight amongst themselves. That is something we can use to beat them in their own game.’
‘Sounds like it worked out for you, at least.’
What was wrong with her? She should have been pleased for Roger, but when she opened her mouth, only bitter words came out.
Roger sighed. ‘It’s all because you trusted me, once, Rachel. I am just trying to return the favour and protect you.’
‘I don’t need to be protected.’
‘Only from yourself. Do you remember what we talked about, after that tennis game?’
Rachel’s cigarette was a flaking cylinder of ash. She dropped it into the wastepaper basket. She felt numb and tired and empty and said nothing.
‘You asked me about Hong Kong, what it was like in a different country with a different language. I told you it was hard, how even after a long time you could never tell what people really thought, there was always this invisible wall of glass between you and them. That it was lonely. I think you have to decide which country you want to live in, Rachel. I’ll be here if you need me.’
His cough echoed hollowly down the corridor as he went.
* * *
Rachel sat alone for a while, looking at the faded pencil lines on the wall she used as an impromptu blackboard. Roger was right, she knew. Keep your head down, seek allies, cash in favours, bide your time. That was how it worked. And that was exactly what Bloom was exploiting.
Kulagin’s face rose up in her mind again, and behind it, another being loomed like a malevolent planet, a broad forehead, a neatly trimmed, sharp-tipped spade of a beard, larger than life, made of darkness and the souls of the dying. She thought of the agents lost in Spain. She thought of her mother in Summerland and her memory garden, her voice on the ectophone. The Empire had conquered what was once the most terrifying frontier of all, and the SIS were the Empire’s guardians. When she joined the Service during the Great War, all those years ago, everyone had understood that. They were so young, so alive. No one minded that a Registry clerk like her had stepped up and started analysing radio transcripts when they were a man short.
If you had something more solid, Roger said. And then Harker’s voice: We know his people.
Who knew Peter Bloom’s people? Who had vetted him?
It was late, and she still had access to the Registry. She sat down at her desk, excavated her ectoterminal from beneath dusty papers and typed in a query. Half an hour later she was on her way home, a brown Manila folder in her handbag.
5
A DAY AT THE SUMMER COURT, 9TH NOVEMBER 1938
When Peter Bloom awoke the next day, his house in Undermay in the Summer City had forgotten what it was supposed to be.
When he opened his eyes, he lay naked on the floor of a bare, twilit room with rough sandstone walls covered in chalk symbols and dark rusty stains. It looked like a torture chamber. The air smelled of sharp sooty smoke.
Peter swore. He must have fallen asleep, and the house had taken advantage of his slumber to revert to its previous existence.
Like everything permanent in Summerland, the house was made of souls. Each one of its bricks was a luz stone, an adamantine kernel that remained when a soul fully Faded and thought and memory were gone. Millennia ago, the Old Dead—the eschatologists’ name for the lost civilisation preceding the modern era—had gathered them and used them to create the Summer City. Then the ancient builders had disappeared. After the invention of the ectophone opened the afterlife for exploration at the turn of the century, England’s dead had arrived. Aethertects had reshaped the city, including Peter’s house, which had become a Victorian residence fit for a gentleman. But the bricks retained other memories, too, and if you didn’t show them who was the master, they leaked out.
Peter felt hollow and weak. He had been so depleted of vim that he had fallen into a brief torpor, allowing the house to run out of control. But why? With sudden horror, he realised his memories of the previous day were sparse, the first sign of Fading. He knew he had gone to Madrid. But had he learned key information he had already forgotten?
Fortunately, the Fountain was still in its place: a lamp-like stand with a brass nozzle surrounded by dials, connected to the wall by a tube. He turned a dial. Bright vim poured out, expanding into a sphere the size of a candle flame that lit up the room and radiated warmth.
Peter cupped his hands and a tendril of the liquid light flowed out of the bright sphere and into them. He drank it, and his thoughts turned its un-taste into honeyed porridge. As the distilled life essence filled him, his memory gradually returned, like photographs being developed. He ran through the previous day in his mind, and was relieved to find there were no gaps.
Tired from meeting Inez, he had nevertheless forced himself to write his usual two reports, one to his handler George in cipher, and one to C, the Chief, at the Summer Court. Usually, the two documents were identical, but Dzhugashvili’s presence in Spain warranted consulting with George before sending the report to C.
Peter had tried to thought-travel to one of their dead drops—a battery-powered ectophone for recording messages—but had found the beacon inactive. That was not unusual: the ectophone batteries lasted less than a week and had to be manually replaced. However, the beacons for the two fallback phones were dark as well. George had to be out of the country, and his operatives had neglected to maintain the dead drops. Completely drained by the thought-travel attempts, Peter had no choice but to ectomail his report to C uncensored. A reply arrived almost immediately by spirit courier, requesting his presence at 9 a.m. sharp. In death, the old spymaster never slept—unlike Peter, who had been overcome by his exertions.
Ful
ly awake and filled with the luminescent power of the vim, Peter hurled a thought at the rough-hewn walls. The torture chamber wavered as if giving an embarrassed shrug and was replaced by a pleasant room with white wallpaper, a soft tan carpet and a curtained window. It was small and bare, modelled after his old rooms at Cambridge, with little in the way of personal items except for his ledger-sized diary on a writing desk, closed with a soul lock that only his own luz could open.
In a way, he felt sorry for the house, forced to wear a mask. What did it really matter what it looked like, when ultimately all was aether and souls? For decades, physicists had known that even what the living thought of as solid matter was only knotted vortices in the aether. In the four dimensions of Summerland, any knot could be undone, and thus a spirit could reshape reality with a thought—but maintaining any given configuration took energy.
The small aetheric clock on the desk showed 8.10 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. He could still make it to the Summer Court by 9 a.m.
He glanced at the hypermirror, a tall, silver-framed prism of polished luz that was his only other piece of furniture. A hyperlight reflection provided a three-dimensional image that could be studied from all sides. Inside the prism, there was a serious-looking naked boy of perhaps eleven years old, dark-haired, round-faced, with striking silver-grey eyes.
He stared at the image and concentrated. The boy grew up in an instant and became a young man with a more rounded paunch than he would have liked, a widow’s peak in his dark hair, and a thoughtful expression. Peter shaped himself clothes from the aether, a charcoal pinstriped suit, Oxford shoes, a tie in Trinity colours and a golden watch chain. With a flick of his wrist, he completed his wardrobe with a hat and a raincoat. Satisfied, he headed for the door and stepped on something hard and angular.
Thought-chaff had accumulated on the floor during his sleep. It could be dangerous to dream in Summerland, where the pliable aether might give your nightmares form. This time, the things his subconscious mind had birthed looked harmless enough: an abstract, spiralling ribbon, a few dead white-winged moths and a toy soldier.
On impulse, he picked the soldier up. It was crudely cast tin but lovingly painted in khaki and green. He put it in his pocket. It could sit on his desk at work, until it Faded away.
* * *
Rows of marble facades blushed pink in Summerland’s unchanging twilight glow as Peter walked down Ear Street.
The aethertects had done their jobs well. The Summer City housed millions of New Dead with Tickets in surroundings designed to evoke the best of what the British Empire had to offer, spun from aether and made solid by collective belief. When Peter first moved to Undermay, he could have mistaken the borough for Mayfair, if not for the lack of birdsong and the absence of nights and days.
Yet the longer you lived in Summerland, the stranger things became. Your hypersight grew more acute, and little by little, you developed an awareness of two additional directions that were invisible to the living.
One was the ana direction, or four-up. Towards ana lay the world of the living, in its own thin slice of the aether. It was the direction of the Unseen, the mysterious source of hyperlight and souls. Luz stones fell from ana, lodged themselves in dense aetheric configurations like brains at birth.
Upon death, the luz detached and fell below the plane of the living world in the kata direction—the equivalent of down in the fourth dimension. The soul-stone took the person’s memories with it to Summerland like mud stuck in the roots of an uprooted tree. It was only Fading that shed them away until only the luz remained.
Peter often wondered how most spirits were able to simply ignore the infinite kata beneath them. Even now, as he walked through the small but perfectly groomed Adelphi Park towards the fourtube station at the corner of Fortress Road and Echoes, he felt as if he were crossing a theatre set made of papier mâché, something he could rupture with one sharp poke.
Much like what would happen to his entire existence, if he made a single misstep with C.
It was peak commuting time. The fourtube stop was crowded, mostly affluent New Dead who worked in the ana-higher levels of the city. Some of the besuited men had been deceased long enough to have given up walking, moving instead in a peculiar gliding motion, polished shoes barely touching the cobblestones.
Peter took the steps down to the station and joined the orderly queue on the circular platform encircling the dome-shaped tunnel head. The fourtube car arrived—a large crystal hemisphere that shimmered into existence. Peter filed in with the rest of the commuters, grasped a bar fixed to the ceiling and held on tight as the vessel shot in the ana direction.
Thought-travel would have been faster, but public transport was a good way to conserve vim, and the hypersight views through the crystal gave you a glimpse of the four-dimensional nature of the city. In the fourth direction, buildings were stacked on top of each other like layers in a wedding cake. The attics and purely decorative chimneys merged with the basements of the adjacent ana or kata level, or kissed each other’s walls or roofs in Escher-ian angles. Not for the first time, Peter thought it resembled a honeycomb.
He glanced at the impassive faces of the commuters, who opened their newspapers with the rustle of dead insect wings. What would Inez think of this bourgeois afterlife, where the dead still repeated the routines of life like reanimated worker bees? Perhaps she would realise that her very struggle for something greater than herself was itself a kind of Heaven. As the train climbed ana-wards and the light of the Unseen brightened, Peter found himself fervently wishing that he would not have to take that away from her.
* * *
Peter got off at the Albert Park stop on the ana end of Fortress Road, a short walk from his destination.
The Summer Court headquarters was modelled after Blenheim Palace, its counterpart in the living world—a sprawling Baroque-style building with severe towering stone belvederes ornamenting the skyline. It housed thousands of spirits whose tasks ranged from agent-running, logistics and archiving to compiling and analysing signals intelligence, as well as providing secure communications for Her Majesty’s armed forces. Walking briskly towards it, Peter ran through the report in his mind one more time.
A Russian dissident wanting to take over the Spanish Republic. A source close to him. A likely aggressive response from the Soviets to the ectotank deployment. He could not escape the feeling that he had made a mistake, that C suspected something.
Peter ascended the broad stairs of the main entrance, and suddenly the distinctly Summerland character of the Summer Court became clear. It had too many walls and corners at impossible angles, and occasionally the entire building bent and wavered, mirage-like. The Court was a hypercube, with soul-stone walls protecting its secrets from all sides, even in ana and kata.
He signed the entrance book with an imprint of his luz and waited until an attendant spirit arrived to lead him to C’s office on the sixth ana floor. Even a Section head like Peter needed a guide. The building’s aethertecture was constantly changed to eliminate any fixed points that could be used for unauthorised thought-travel, resulting in a warren of corridors, passageways and mezzanines, hypermirrors and blind corners. It was like wandering through an optical illusion.
Peter’s anxiety grew as they approached C’s office. He tried to cling to the fact that none of the security measures were enough to protect the Court from within. But as he ascended the kaleidoscopic flights of stairs that occasionally took one sideways, kata-or ana-wards, his usual sense of superiority eluded him.
* * *
When Peter entered C’s office, at first he saw only the man’s silhouette, dominated by the jutting chin outlined against the blinding light of the Unseen from the window.
‘Bloom. Come in.’
Peter sat in the chair in front of the large desk. It took a few seconds to adjust to the light and he kept his face impassive. The Chief liked to have a moment to assess each visitor.
C turned and bent his round head with i
ts thinning coppery hair over the paperwork on the desk and proceeded to ignore Peter for several minutes. Occasionally, his fine bow of a mouth twitched slightly, but whether in pleasure or displeasure, Peter could not tell. Soul-reading was only possible with the living or newly deceased spirits who had not yet mastered aether-weaving.
Finally, C leaned back in his chair and lifted a horn-rimmed monocle to his right eye, which was then magnified to ridiculous proportions. Yet the cyclopean stare was so piercing that an involuntary laugh died on Peter’s lips.
‘Well?’ C said.
‘Sir?’
C said nothing. Peter cleared his throat.
‘Sir, I thought you asked me here to discuss my report.’
‘No.’ C shook his head sharply and the monocle fell from his eye. Somehow, the pinched stare of his normal-sized eyes was even more intense.
‘No?’
‘No, I asked you here because I am going to need a new head of the Iberian Section.’ C’s mouth twitched again. ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’
Peter’s luz became a cold, dead lump in his chest. In the back of his mind, George’s voice whispered the litany for the moment of being exposed. Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-allegations.
He straightened his back and looked at the Chief.
‘Sir, I am aware that the Section has faced some challenges recently and I take full responsibility. However, I do believe that the recruitment of CARRASCOS–’ the code name Peter had assigned to Inez ‘–was a breakthrough, and—’
‘Yes, I agree.’
‘You agree with what, sir?’
‘That it was a breakthrough. That is why I need your recommendation for a new Section head.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My dear boy, it is very simple. Starting from now, you will be too busy to manage your Section. Your new job is in the recently formed Special Committee for the Iberian Problem. You are going to help me convince the prime minister that we need this Djugashvili chap to take over Spain.’