Absolution Gap

FORTY-THREE

Rashmika had a premonitory sense that something was about to trespass into her head. In the moments before the shadows spoke to her, she had learned to identify a specific sensation: a faint tingle of neural intrusion, like the feeling that somewhere in a huge and rambling old house a door had just opened.

She steeled herself: aware of the proximity of the scrimshaw suit, conscious of the ease with which the shadows were able to slip in and out of her skull.

But the voice was different this time.

[Rashmika. Listen to me. Don’t react. Don’t pay any more attention to me than you would to a stranger.]

Rashmika shaped an answer, without speaking. It was as if she had been born to it, as if the skill had always been there. Who are you?

[I’m the only other woman in this room.]

Despite herself, Rashmika glanced towards Khouri. The woman’s face was impassive: not hostile, not even unkind, but utterly blank of any kind of expression. It was as if she were looking at a wall, rather than Rashmika.

You?

[Me, Rashmika. Yes.]

Why are you here?

[To help you. How much do you remember? All of it, or only some of it? Do you remember anything at all?]

Aloud, Vasko said, “Propulsion, Dean? Are you saying you want our ship to take you somewhere?”

“Not exactly, no,” Quaiche replied.

Rashmika tried not to look at the woman, keeping her attention focused on the men instead. I don’t remember much, only that I don’t belong here. The shadows already found me out. Do you know about the shadows, Khouri?

[A little. Not as much as you.]

Can you answer any of my questions? Who sent me here? What was I supposed to do?

[We sent you here.] In her peripheral vision Rashmika saw the woman’s head nod by the slightest of degrees: silent, discreet affirmation that it was really her voice Rashmika was hearing. [But it was your decision. Nine years ago, Rashmika, you told us we had to put you on Hela, in the care of another family.]

Why?

[To learn things, to find out as much as you could about Hela and the scuttlers, from the inside. To reach the dean.]

Why?

[Because the dean was the only way of reaching Haldora. We thought Haldora was the key: the only route to the shadows. We didn’t know he’d already used it. You told us that, Rashmika. You found the short cut.]

The suit?

[That’s what we came for. And you, of course.]

Whatever your plan was, it’s going wrong. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?

[You’re safe, Rashmika. He doesn’t know you have anything to do with us.]

If he finds out?

[We’ll protect you. I’ll protect you, no matter what happens. You have my word on that.]

She looked into the woman’s face, daring Quaiche to notice. Why would you care about me?

[Because I’m your mother.]

Look into my eyes. Say it again.

Khouri did. And though Rashmika watched her face intently for the slightest indication of a lie, there was none. She supposed that meant Khouri was telling the truth.

There was shock, a stinging sense of denial, but it was not nearly as great as Rashmika might have expected. She had, by then, already begun to doubt much of what passed for her assumed history. The shadows—and, of course, Surgeon-General Grelier—had already convinced her that she had not been born on Hela, and that the people in the Vigrid badlands could not be her real parents. So what remained was a void waiting to be filled with facts, rather than one truth waiting to be displaced by another.

So here it was. There was still much she needed to remember for herself, but the essence was this: she was an agent of Ultras— these Ultras, specifically—and she had been put on Hela on an intelligence-gathering mission. Her actual memories had been suppressed, and in their place she had a series of vague, generic snapshots of early life on Hela. They were like a theatrical backdrop: convincing enough to pass muster provided they were not the object of attention themselves. But when the shadows had told her about her false past, she had seen the early memories for what they were.

The woman said she was Rashmika’s mother. She had no reason to doubt her—her face had conveyed no indication of a lie, and Rashmika already knew that her supposed mother in the badlands was only a foster parent. She felt sadness, a sense of loss, but no sense of betrayal.

She shaped a thought. I think you must be my mother.

[Do you remember me?]

I don’t know. A little. I remember someone like you, I think.

[What was I doing?]

You were standing in a palace of ice. You were crying.

Ribbons of grey-blue smoke twisted in the corridor, writhing with the shifts of air pressure. Fluid sluiced from weeping wounds in the walls and ceiling, raining down in muddy curtains. From some nearby part of the ship, Captain Seyfarth heard shouts and the rattle of automatic slug-guns, punctuated by the occasional bark of an energy weapon. He stepped through an obstacle course of bodies, his booted feet squashing limbs and heads into the ankle-deep muck that seemed to flood every level of the ship. One gauntleted hand gripped the rough handle of a throwing knife formed from the armour he had been wearing upon his arrival. The knife was already bloodied—by Seyfarth’s estimate he had killed three Ultras so far, and left another two with serious injuries—but he was still looking for something better. As he passed each body he kicked it over, checking the hands and belt for something promising. All he needed was a slug-gun.

Seyfarth was alone, the rest of his group either dead or cut off, wandering some other part of the ship. He had anticipated nothing less. Of the twenty units of the first infiltration team, Seyfarth would have been surprised if more than half a dozen survived to see the taking of the ship. Of course, he counted himself amongst the likely survivors, but based on past experience that was only to be expected. It was not, never had been, a suicide mission: just an operation with a low survival probability for most of those involved. The infiltration squad wasn’t required to survive, just to signal the fitness of the ship for the full takeover effort, using the massed ships of the Cathedral Guard. If the infiltrators were able to disrupt the defensive activities aboard the ship, creating pockets of internal confusion, then all the better. But once that signal had been sent to the surface, the survival or otherwise of Seyfarth’s unit had no bearing on subsequent events.

Given that, he thought, things were actually going tolerably well. There had been reports—fragmented, not entirely trustworthy—that the massed assault had met more resistance than expected. Certainly, the Cathedral Guard had appeared to suffer greater losses than Seyfarth had ever planned. But the massed assault had been overwhelming in scale for precisely the reason that it needed to be able to absorb huge losses and still succeed. It was shock and awe: no one needed to lecture Seyfarth on that particular doctrine. And the reports of weapons fire from elsewhere in the ship confirmed that elements of the second wave had indeed reached the Nostalgia for Infinity, together with the slug-guns they could never have smuggled past the pig.

His foot touched something.

Seyfarth knelt down, grimacing at the smell. He pushed the body over, bringing a sodden hip out of the brown muck in which it lay. He spied the tarnished gleam of a slug-gun.

Seyfarth pulled the weapon from the belt of the dead Cathedral Guardsman, shaking loose most of the muck. He checked the clip: fully loaded. The slug-gun was crudely made, mass-produced from cheap metal, but there were no electronic components in it, nothing that would have suffered from being immersed in the shipboard filth. Seyfarth tested it anyway, releasing a single slug into the nearest wall. The ship groaned as the slug went in. Now that he paid attention to it, it occurred to Seyfarth that the ship had been groaning rather a lot lately—more than he would have expected if the groans were merely structural noises. For a moment this troubled him.

Only for a moment, though.

He threw the knife away, grateful for the weighty heft of the slug-gun. It had taken nerve to come aboard the ship with only knives and a few concealed gadgets, but he had always known that if he made it this far—to the point where he had a real gun in his hand—he would make it all the way through.

It was like the end of a bad dream.

“Going somewhere?”

The voice had come from behind him. But that simply wasn’t possible: he had been checking his rearguard constantly, and there had been no one coming along the corridor behind him when he knelt down to recover the slug-gun. Seyfarth was a good soldier: he never left his back uncovered for more than a few seconds.

But the voice sounded very near. Very familiar, too.

The safety catch was still off. He turned around slowly, olding the slug-gun at waist level. “I thought I took care of ou,” he said.

“I need a lot of taking care of,” the pig replied. He stood there, unarmed, not even a slug-gun to his name. Looming behind him, like an adult above an infant, stood the hollow shell of a spacesuit. Seyfarth’s lip twisted in a sneer of incomprehension. The pig, just possibly, could have hidden in the darkness, or even pretended to be a body. But the hulking spacesuit? There was no conceivable way he had walked past that without noticing it. And it didn’t seem very likely that the suit could have sprinted from the far end of the corridor in the few seconds during which he’d had his back turned.

“This is a trick,” Seyfarth said, “isn’t it?”

“I’d put down that gun if I were you,” the pig said.

Seyfarth’s finger squeezed the trigger. Part of him wanted to blow the snout-faced abortion away. Another part wanted to know why the pig thought he had the right to speak to him in that kind of tone.

Didn’t the pig know his place?

“I hung you out to dry,” Seyfarth said. He wasn’t mistaken: this was the same pig. He could even see the wounds from where he had pinned him to the wall.

“Listen to me,” the pig said. “Put down the gun and we’ll talk. There are things I want you to tell me. Like what the hell Quaiche wants with my ship.”

Seyfarth touched one finger to his helmeted head, as if scratching an itch. “Which one of lis is holding the gun, pig?”

“You are”

“Right. Just felt that needed clearing up. Now step away from the suit and kneel in the shit, where you belong.”

The pig looked at him, the sly white of an eye catching the light. “Or what?”

“Or we’ll be looking at pork.”

The pig made a move towards him. It was only a flinch, but it was enough for Seyfarth. There were questions he’d have liked answered, but they would all have to wait for now. Once they had taken the ship, there would be all the time in the world for a few forensic investigations. It would actually give him something to do.

He made to squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Furious, imagining that the slug-gun had jammed after all, Seyfarth glanced down at the weapon.

It wasn’t the weapon that was the problem. The problem was his arm. Two spikes had appeared through it: they had shot out from one wall, speared his forearm and emerged on the other side, their sharp tips a damp ruby-red.

Seyfarth felt the pain arrive, felt the spikes grinding against bone and tendon. He bit down on the agony, sneering at the pig. “Nice…” he tried to say.

The spikes slid out of his arm, making a slick, slithery sound as they retracted. Seyfarth watched, fascinated and appalled, as they vanished back into the smooth wall.

“Drop the gun,” the pig said.

Seyfarth’s arm quivered. He raised the barrel towards the pig and the suit, made one last effort to squeeze the trigger. But there was something badly amiss with the anatomy of his arm. His forefinger merely spasmed, tapping pathetically against the trigger like a worm wriggling on a hook.

“I did warn you,” the pig said.

All around Seyfarth, walls, floor and ceiling erupted spikes. He felt them slide into him, freezing him in place. The gun fell from his hand, clattering to the ground through the labyrinth of interlaced metal rods.

“That’s for Orca,” the pig said.

It went quickly after that. The Captain’s control over his own local transformations seemed to grow in confidence and dexterity with each kill. It was, at times, quite sickening to watch. How much more terrible it must have been for the Adventists, to suddenly have the ship itself come alive and turn against them. How shocking, when the supposedly fixed surfaces of walls and floors and ceilings became mobile, crushing and pinning, maiming and suffocating. How distressing, when the fluids that ran throughout the ship—the fluids that the bilge pumps strove to contain—suddenly became the liquid instruments of murder, gushing out at high pressure, drowning hapless Adventists caught in the Captain’s hastily arranged traps. Growing up on Hela, drowning probably hadn’t been amongst the ways they expected to die. But that, Scorpio reflected, was life: full of nasty little surprises.

The tide had been turning against the Adventists, but now it was in full ebb. Scorpio felt his strength redouble, tapping into some last, unexpected reserve. He knew he was going to pay for it later, but for now it felt good to be pushing the enemy back, doing—as the Captain had promised—some actual damage. The slug-gun wasn’t designed for a pig, but that didn’t stop him finding a way to fire it. Sooner or later he was able to trade up for a shipboard boser pistol, pig-issue. Then, as he had always liked to say in Chasm City, he was really cooking.

“Do what you have to do,” the Captain told him. “I can take a little pain, for now.”

Pushing through the ship, following the Captain’s lead, he soon met up with surviving members of the Security Arm. They were shell-shocked, confused and disorganised, but on seeing him they rallied, realising that the ship had not yet fallen to the Adventists. And when word began to spread that the Captain was assisting in the effort, they fought like devils. The nature of the battle changed from minute to minute. Now it was no longer a question of securing control of their ship, but of mopping up the few outstanding pockets of Adventist resistance holed-up in volumes of the ship where the Captain had only limited control.

“I could kill them now,” he told Scorpio. “I can’t reshape thoseparts of me, but I can depressurise them, or flood them. It will just take a little longer than usual. I could even turn the hy-pometric weapon against them.”

“Inside yourself?” Scorpio asked, remembering the last time that had happened, during the calibration exercise.

“I wouldn’t do it lightly.”

Scorpio tightened his grip on the boser pistol. His heart was hammering in his chest, his eyesight and hearing no better than when he had been revived.

None of that mattered.

“I’ll deal with them,” he said. “You’ve done your bit for the day, Captain.”

“I’ll leave things to you, then,” the suit said, stepping back into a perfectly formed aperture that had just appeared in the wall. The wall resealed itself. It was as if the Captain had never been with him.

Beyond the Nostalgia for Infinity, the Captain’s manifold attention was at least partly occupied by the progress of the cache weapon. Even as the battle raged within him, even as the ship was brought slowly back under orthodox control, he was mindful of the weapon, anxious that it should not be wasted. For years he had carried the forty hell-class weapons within him, treasuring them against the predations of theft and damage. His degree of transformation had been much less than it was now, but he still felt an intense bond of care towards the weapons that had played such a central role in his recent history. Besides, the weapons themselves had been the beloved playthings of the old Triumvir, Ilia Volyova. He still had fond thoughts for the Triumvir, despite what she had done to him. As long as he remembered Ilia—who had always found time to speak to the Captain, even when he had been at his least communicative—he was not going to let her down by misusing the last of those dark toys.

Telemetry from the cache weapon reached him through multiply secure channels. The Captain had already sown tiny spysat cameras around himself during the fiercest phase of the Cathedral Guard assault. Now that same swarm of eyes permitted continuous communication with the weapon, even as the Nostalgia for Infinity swung around the far side of Hela.

Haldora, from the cache weapon’s perspective, now swallowed half the sky. The gas giant was a striped behemoth of primal cold oozing exotic chemistries, its bands of colour so wide that you could drown a rocky world in them. It looked very real: every sensor on the cache weapon’s harness reported exactly what would have been expected this close to a gas giant. It sniffed the cruel strength of its magnetic field, felt the hard sleet of charged particles entrained by that field. Even at extreme magnification, the whorls and flurries of the atmosphere looked absolutely convincing.

The Captain had listened to the conversations of the humans in his care, to their speculations concerning the nature of the Haldora enigma. He knew what they expected to find behind this mask of a world: a mechanism for signalling between adjacent realities, entire universes fluttering there like ribbons, adjacent braneworlds in the higher dimensional reality of the bulk: a kind of radio, capable of tuning into the whisper of gravitons. The details, as yet, didn’t matter. What they needed, now, was to make contact with the entities on the other side as quickly as possible. The suit in the Lady Morwenna was one possible means—perhaps the easiest, since it was already open—but it couldn’t be relied upon. If Quaiche destroyed it, then they would need to find another way to contact the shadows. Quaiche had waited until a vanishing occurred before sending his probe into the planet. They didn’t have time for that.

They needed to provoke a vanishing, to-expose the machinery for themselves.

The weapon began to slow, taking up its firing posture. Within it, grave preparations were being made. Arcane physical processes began to occur: sequences of reactions, tiny at first, but growing towards an irreversible cascade. The commanding sentience of the device had settled into a state of calm acceptance. After so many years of inaction, it was now going to do the thing for which it had been created. The fact that it would die in the process did not alarm it in the slightest. It felt only a microscopic glimmer of regret that it was the last of its kind, and that no other cache weapons would be around to witness its furious proclamation.

That was the one thing their human masters had never grasped: cache weapons were intensely vain.

Scorpio sat at the conference table, scowling. He was alone except for a handful of seniors. Valensin was tending to his wounds: there was a small museum’s worth of antiquated medical equipment spread out on a bloodstained sheet before the pig, including bandages, scalpels, scissors, needles and various bottled ointments and sterilising agents. The doctor had already cut away part of his tunic, exposing the twin wounds where the Adventist’s throwing knives had pinned him to the wall.

“You’re lucky,” Valensin said, when he had cleaned away most of the blood and began sealing the entrance and exit wounds with an adhesive salve. “He knew what he was doing. You probably weren’t meant to die.”

“And that makes me lucky? It wasn’t remotely unlucky to end up impaled on a wall in the first place? Just a thought.”

“All I’m saying is, it could have been worse. It looks to me as if they were under orders to minimalise casualties, as far as possible.”

“Tell that to Orca.”

“Yes, the nerve gas was unfortunate. At some point, obviously, they were prepared to kill, but in general it appears that they considered themselves to be on holy business, like crusaders. The sword was to be used only as an instrument of last resort. But they must have known some blood would be shed.”

Urton leant across the table. Her arm was in a sling and there was a vivid purple bruise across her right cheek, but she was otherwise unhurt. “The question is, what now? We can’t just sit here and not react, Scorp. We have to take this back to Quaiche.”

The pig winced as Valensin tugged two folds of skin together, drawing a slug of adhesive across them. “That thought’s crossed my mind, believe me.”

“And?” Jaccottet asked.

“I’d like nothing more than to target all our hull defences on that cathedral and turn the fucker into a smouldering pile of rubble. But that‘ isn’t an option, not while we’ve got people aboard it.”

“If we could get a message to Vasko and Khouri,” Urton said, “they could start doing some damage themselves. At the very least, they could find their way to safety.”

Scorpio sighed. Of all of them, why did it fall to him—the one who had the least-developed capacity for forward thinking—to point out the problems?

“This isn’t about revenge,” he said. “Believe me, I’m big on revenge. I wrote the book on retribution.” He paused, catching his breath while Valensin started fussing around with another wound, snipping away at leather and scabbed blood. “But we came here for a reason. I don’t know what Quaiche wanted with our ship, and it doesn’t look as if any of the surviving Adventists have much of an idea either. My guess is we just got caught up in some local power game, something that probably has damn all to do with the shadows. As tempting as it might be to take revenge now, it’d be the worst thing we could do in terms of our mission objective. We still have to make contact with the shadows, and our quickest route to them is inside a metal spacesuit inside the Lady Morwenna. That, people, is what we need to focus on, not on giving Quaiche the kicking he so richly deserves because he betrayed us. We can do that later, once we’ve established contact with the shadows. Believe me, I’ll be the first in line. And I won’t be operating on a minimum-casualties basis, either.”

No one said anything for a moment. There was a hiatus, a stillness in the room. It reminded him of something, but it took a while to remember what it was. When he did, he almost flinched away from the memory: Clavain. There had been a similar pause whenever the old man had finished one of his rabble-rousing monologues.

“We could still storm the cathedral,” Urton said, her voice low. “There’s time. We’ve taken losses, but we have operational shuttles. How about it, Scorp: a precision raid on the Lady Morwenna, in and out, snatch the suit and our people?”

“It’d be dangerous,” said another of the Security Arm people. “We don’t just have Khouri and Malinin to worry about. There’s Aura. What if Quaiche suspects she’s one of us?”

“He won’t,” Urton said. “There’s no reason for him to do that.”

Scorpio wrestled away from Valensin long enough to lift up his sleeve and inspect the plastic and metal ruin of his communicator. He did not remember when he had damaged it, just as he did not recall where all the additional bruises and cuts had come from.

“Someone get me a line to the cathedral,” he said. “I want to talk to the man in charge.”

“You never used to think much of negotiation,” Urton said. “You said all it ever got you was a world of pain.”

‘Trouble is,“ Scorpio acknowledged ruefully, ”sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.“

“You’re wrong about this,” Urton said. “This isn’t the way to handle things.”

“Like I was wrong about letting those twenty Adventists aboard the ship? That wasn’t my bright idea, the last time I checked.”

“They slipped past your security checks,” Urton said.

“You wouldn’t let me examine them as thoroughly as I’d have liked.”

Urton glanced at her fellows. “Look, we’re grateful for your help in regaining control. Deeply grateful. But now that the situation is stable again, wouldn’t it be better if—”

The ship moaned. Someone else slid a communicator across the polished gloss of the table. Scorpio reached for it, snapped it around his wrist, and called Vasko.

Grelier stepped into the garret and took a moment to adjust to the scene that met his eyes. Superficially, the room was much as he had left it. But now it had extra guests—a man and an older woman—detained by a small detachment of the Cathedral Guard. The guests—they were from the Ultra ship, he realised—looked at him as if expecting an explanation. Grelier merely brushed a hand through the white shock of his hair and placed his cane by the door. There was a lot he wanted to get off his chest, but the one thing he couldn’t do was explain what was happening here.

“I go away for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,” he commented.

“Have a seat,” the dean said.

Grelier ignored the suggestion. He did what he usually did upon his arrival in the garret, which was to attend to the dean’s eyes. He opened the wall cabinet and took out his usual paraphernalia of swabs and ointments.

“Not now, Grelier.”

“Now is as good a time as any,” he said. “Infection won’t stop spreading merely because it is inconvenient to treat it.”

“Where have you been, Grelier?”

“First things first.” The surgeon-general leant over the dean, inspecting the points where the barbs of the eye-opener hooked into the delicate skin of Quaiche’s eyelids. “Might be my imagination, but there seemed to be a wee bit of an atmosphere when I came in here.”

“They’re not too thrilled about my taking the cathedral over the rift.”

“Neither am I,” Grelier said, “but you’re not holding me at gunpoint.”

“It’s rather more complicated than that.”

“I’ll bet it is.” More than ever, he was glad that he had left his shuttle in a state of immediate flight-readiness. “Well, is someone going to explain? Or is this a new parlour game, where I have twenty guesses?”

“He’s taken over our ship,” the man said.

Grelier glanced back at him, continuing to dab at the dean’s eyes. “I’m sorry?”

“The Adventist delegates were a trick,” the ma elaborated. “They were sent up there to seize control of the Nostalgia for Infinity?

“Nostalgia for Infinity,” Greleir said. “Now there’s a name that keeps coming up.”

Now it was the man’s turn to be puzzled. “I’m sorry?”

“Been here before, haven’t you? About nine years ago.”

The two prisoners exchanged glances. They did their best to hide it, but Grelier had been expecting some response.

“You’re ahead of me,” Quaiche said.

“I think we’re all ahead of each other in certain respects.” Grelier said. He scooped his swab under an eyelid, the tip yellow with infection. “Is it true what he said, about the delegates taking over their ship?”

“I don’t think he’d have any reason to lie,” Quaiche said.

“You set that up?”

“I needed their ship,” Quaiche said. He sounded like a child explaining why he had been caught stealing apples.

“We know that much. Why else did you spend all that time looking for the right one? But now that they’ve brought the ship, what’s the problem? You’re better off letting them run it, if protection’s what you want.”

“It was never about protection.”

Grelier froze, the swab still buried under the dean’s eyelid. “It wasn’t?”

“I wanted a ship,” Quaiche said. “Didn’t matter which one, so long as it was in reasonably good condition and the engines worked. It wasn’t as if I was planning on taking it very far.”

“I don’t understand,” Grelier said.

“I know why,” the man said. “At least, I think I have a good idea. It’s about Hela, isn’t it?”

Grelier looked at him. “What about it?”

“He’s going to take our ship and land it on this planet. Somewhere near the equator, I’d guess. He’s probably already constructed something for docking a cradle of some kind.”

“A cradle?” Grelier said blankly.

“A holdfast,” Quaiche said, as if that explained everything. Grelier thought about the diverted Permanent Way resources, the fleet of construction machines Rashmika had described to him. Now he knew exactly what they were for. They must have been on their way to the holdfast—whatever that was—to put the finishing touches to it.

“Just one question,” Grelier said. “Why?”

“He’s going to land the ship sideways,” the man replied. “Lie it down on Hela with the hull aligned east-west, parallel to the equator. Then he’ll lock it in place, so that it can’t move.”

“There’s a point to all this?” Grelier said.

“There will be when I start the engines,” Quaiche said, unable to contain himself. “Then you’ll see. Then everyone will see.”

“He’s going to change the spin rate of Hela,” the man said. “He’s going to use the ship’s engines to lock Hela into synchronous rotation around Haldora. He doesn’t have to change the length of the day by much—twelve minutes will do the trick. Won’t they, Dean?”

“One part in two hundred,” Quaiche said. “Sounds trivial, doesn’t it? But worlds—even small ones like Hela—take a lot of shifting. I always knew I’d need a lighthugger to do it. Think about it: if those engines can push a million tonnes of ship to within a scratch of the speed of light, I think they can change Hela’s day by twelve minutes.”

Grelier retrieved the swab from under Quaiche’s eyelid. “What God failed to put right, you can fix. Is that it?”

“Now don’t go giving me delusions of grandeur,” Quaiche chided.

Vasko’s bracelet chimed. He looked at it, not daring to move.

“Answer it,” Quaiche said eventually. “Then we can all hear how things are going.”

Vasko did as he was told. He listened to the report very carefully, then snapped the bracelet from his wrist and passed it to Grelier. “Listen to it yourself,” he said. “I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

Grelier examined the bracelet, his lips pursed in suspicion. “I’ll take this call, I think,” he said.

“Suits me either way,” Vasko said.

Grelier listened to the voice coming out of the bracelet. He spoke into it carefully, then listened to the answers, nodding occasionally, raising his snowwhite eyebrows in mock astonishment. Then he shrugged and passed it back to Vasko.

“What?” Quaiche said.

“The Cathedral Guard have failed in their attempt to take the ship,” he said. “They’ve been cut to shreds, including the reinforcements. I had a nice chat with the pig in command of ship operations. Seemed a very reasonable fellow, for a pig.”

“No,” Quaiche breathed. “Seyfarth gave me his promise. He told me he had the men to do it. It can’t have failed.”

“It did.”

“What happened? What did they have on that ship that Seyfarth didn’t know about? A whole army?”

“That’s not what the pig says.”

“The pig’s right,” Vasko said. “It was the ship that ruined your plans. It’s not like other ships, not inside. It has ideas of its own. It didn’t take very kindly to your intruders.”

“This wasn’t how it was meant to happen,” Quaiche moaned.

“You’re in a spot of bother, I think,” Grelier said. “The pig mentioned something about taking the cathedral by force.”

“They set me up,” Quaiche said, realisation dawning.

“Oh, don’t think ill of them. They just wanted access to Haldora. It wasn’t their fault they stumbled into your scheme. They’d have left you alone if you hadn’t tried to use them.”

“We’re in trouble,” Quaiche said quietly.

“Actually,” Grelier said, as if remembering something important, “things aren’t quite as bad as you think.” He leant closer to the dean, then looked back at the three people sitting around the table. “We still have a bit of leverage, you see.”

“We do?” Quaiche said.

“Give me the bracelet,” he told Vasko.

Vasko passed it to him. Grelier smiled and spoke into it. “Hello, is that the pig? Nice to speak to you again. Got a bit of news for you. We have the girl. If you want her back in one piece, I suggest you start taking instructions.”

Then he handed the bracelet to the dean. “You’re on,” he said.