Matter

20. Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown

The interior of the Morthanveld Great Ship Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown was generally experienced virtually even by those for whom it was designed and who had built it. Externally the ship was a flattened sphere fifty kilometres in diameter. It resembled a vast droplet of blue ice whose surface had been blasted with several million jewels, about half of which had subsequently fallen out, leaving behind small craters.

Its main internal space was enormous; bigger than anything on a Culture GSV. The best way to think of it, Anaplian had been told by Skalpapta, her Morthanveld liaison officer, was as if you’d got nineteen balloons full of water each nearly ten kilometres in diameter, arranged them into a rough hexagon so that they formed as near a circle as possible, then squished them all together so that the walls between them flattened out. Then you added another two layers of seven spheres, one above and one below, under the same principle. Finally you removed all those flat, separating walls.

The whole space was criss-crossed by strands and cables supporting hundreds of millions of polyp-like living quarters and multitudinous travel tubes, many with a vacuum inside to speed up transit times.

As on most Morthanveld ships, the water was generally kept as clean as desirable by fixed and static scrubbing units; nevertheless, the fact was that the bait species and accrescent flora the Morthanveld liked to feed on needed water with nutrients in it, and the Morthanveld themselves regarded having to visit some special place to relieve oneself of waste as the mark of a species insufficiently at home with itself. Or gas-breathing, which was almost as embarrassing.

The water they lived, swam, worked and played within, then, was not perfectly unclouded. However, it was always pleasant to have a clear view, especially in such a vast space.

The Morthanveld very much approved of themselves, and the larger the numbers of their kind there were present, the more self-approval they felt. Being able to see the hundreds of millions of their fellows a Great Ship normally carried was generally regarded as an extremely good thing, so rather than rely on their naked eyes to see their way round a space as vast as that of a Great Ship’s interior, they used thin-film screens covering their eyes to present them with the view they’d be able to see had the water been perfectly clear.

Djan Seriy had decided to adopt the same strategy and so swam with a modified thin-film screen over her own eyes. She moved through the water in a dark suit like a second skin. Around her neck was what looked like a necklace made of fluttering green fronds; a gill arrangement that provided oxygen to her nose through two small transparent tubes. This was somewhat ignominious to her, as with her old upgrades her skin would have ridged and puckered over whatever area was required to absorb the gases she needed straight out of the water.

The thin-film screen was stuck across her eyes like a flimsy transparent bandage. She had switched off her blink reflex; the alternative was to let the screen bulge out far enough for her to blink normally, but the air-gap introduced unwanted distortions. The screen provided her with the virtual view of the real space, showing the cavernous semi-spherical spaces of the Great Ship like some staggeringly vast cave system.

She could have patched directly into the ship’s internal sensory view to achieve the same effect, or just swum with her own senses and not bothered with the greater, seemingly clear view, but she was being polite; using the thin-film screen meant that the ship could keep an eye on her, seeing, no doubt, what she could see, and so knowing that she wasn’t getting into any Special Circumstances-style mischief.

She could also have used any one of several different kinds of public transport to get to where she was going, but had opted instead for a small personal propulsion unit which she held on to with one hand as it thrummed its way through the water. The sex toy that was really a knife missile that was really a drone had wanted to impersonate such a propulsion unit, so staying close to her, but she reckoned this was just the machine fussing and had instructed it to remain in her quarters.

Djan Seriy powered up and to the left to avoid a fore-current, found a helpful aft-current, curved round a set of long, bulbous habitats like enormous dangling fruits and then struck out towards a tall bunch of green-black spheres each between ten and thirty metres across, hanging in the water like a colossal strand of seaweed. She switched off the prop unit and swam into one of the larger spheres through a silvery circle a couple of metres across and let the draining water lower her to the soft, wet floor. Gravity again. She was spending more time aquatic than not, even including sleeping, as she explored the huge space vessel. This was her fifth day aboard and she only had another four to go. There was still much to see.

Her suit, until now coating her body as closely as paint, promptly frizzed up, forcing the water to slide off and letting it assume the look of something a fashionable young lady would choose to wear in an air-breathing environment. She stuffed her necklace gill into a pocket and — as the suit’s head-part flowed downward to form an attractive frilled collar — flicked one earring to activate a temporary static field. This sorted her hair, which was, today, blonde. She kept the thin-film screen on. She thought it looked rather good on her; vaguely piratical.

Djan Seriy stepped through the cling-field into the 303rd Aliens’ Lounge, where thumping music played loudly and the air was full of drug smoke and incense.

She was quickly greeted by a small cloud of tiny brightly coloured creatures like small birds, each thrown by one of the bar’s patrons. Some sang welcomes, others fluttered strobed messages across their hazy wings and a few squirted scent messages at her. This was, currently, the latest greeting-fad for new arrivals at the 303rd Aliens’ Lounge. Sometimes the lobbed creatures would carry notes or small parcels of narcotics or declarations of love, or they would start spouting insults, witticisms, philosophical epigrams or other messages. As Djan Seriy understood it, this was meant to be amusing.

She waited for the cloud of flittering creatures to start dissipating, thinking all the time how easy it would have been to bat, grasp and crush every one of the twenty-eight little twittering shapes around her, had she been fully enabled. She plucked the most lately arrived of the creatures out of the air and looked severely at the old-looking, purple-skinned humanoid who had thrown it. “Yours, sir,” she said, as she passed his table, handing it to him. He mumbled a reply. Others nearby were calling out to her. The denizens of the 303rd were gregarious and got to know people quickly; she was already regarded as a regular after only three visits. She refused various offers of company and waved away some especially thick and pungent drug smoke; the 303rd was something of a wide-spectrum humanoid stoners’ hang-out.

She acknowledged a few people as she walked to the circular bar in the middle of the Lounge, sitting glowing in the darkened space like a giant halo.

“Shjan! You’re here!” shouted Tulya Puonvangi, who was what passed as the Culture’s ambassador on the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown. Djan Seriy regarded the man rather as she did the fluttering creature fad; immature and vaguely annoying. He had introduced himself shortly after she’d arrived and done his best to make himself a nuisance more or less ever since. Puonvangi was obese, pinkish, bald, and fairly human-basic on the surface save for two long, fang-like incisors which distorted his speech (he couldn’t manage the hard “D” sound at the start of her first name, for example). Plus he had an eye in the back of his head which he claimed was fully functional but was apparently really no more than an affectation. He often, as now, kept it covered with an eye patch, though the eye patch — again, as now — was frequently clear. He also — he’d told her after a remarkably short time during their first meeting — had exquisitely altered genitalia, which he’d offered to show her. She had demurred.

“Hello, jear!” Puonvangi said, clutching at her elbows and bringing her close to kiss her cheeks. She allowed this to happen while remaining stiff and unresponsive. He smelled of brine, tangfruit and some sweet, unashamedly psychotropic scent. His clothes were loose, voluminous, ever gently billowing and showed slow-motion scenes of humanoid pornography. His sleeves were rolled up and she could see from the thin, fiercely glowing lines incised on his forearms that he had been grazing tattoo drugs. He released her. “How are you? Looking ra’iant as ezher! Here’sh the young fellow I wanted you to meet!” He pointed at the young, long-limbed man sitting by his side. “Shjan Sheree Araprian, this is Kra’sri Kruike. Kra’sri; say hi!”

The young man looked embarrassed. “How do you do,” he said in a quiet, deep, deliciously accented voice. He had gently glowing skin of something between deep bronze and very dark green and a mass of shining, ringleted black hair. He wore perfectly cut, utterly black close-fitting trous and a short jacket. His face was quite long, his nose fairly flat, his teeth were normal but very white and his expression, beneath hooded eyes, was diffident, amused, perhaps a little wary, though modulated by what looked like a permanent smile. He had laughter lines, which made someone so otherwise young-looking appear oddly vulnerable. Chevron-cut brows and moustache looked like something new he was trying and was unsure he was getting away with. Those eyes were dark, flecked with gold.

He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion.

“I am Djan Seriy Anaplian,” she told him. “How is your name properly pronounced?”

He grinned, glanced apologetically at a beaming, eyebrow-waggling Puonvangi. “Klatsli Quike,” he told her.

She nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Klatsli Quike,” she said. She took the bar stool on the far side of him, putting the young man between her and Puonvangi, who looked disappointed, though only briefly. He slammed the bar with the flat of one hand, bringing a serving unit zinging over on shining rails strung along the far side of the bar.

“Jhrinks! Shmokes! Shnorts! Inshisions!”

She agreed to drink a little to keep Puonvangi company. Quike lit up a small pipe of some fabulously fragrant herb, purely for the scent as it had no known narcotic effect, though even the aroma was almost drug-like in its headiness. Puonvangi ordered a couple of styli of tattoo drugs and — when both Djan Seriy and Quike refused to join him — grazed one into each of his arms, from wrist to elbow. The drug lines glowed so brightly at first they coloured his pink face green. He sighed and sat back in his high seat, exhaling and closing his eyes, going slack. While their host was enjoying his first rush, Quike said, “You’re from Sursamen?” He sounded apologetic, as though he wasn’t supposed to know.

“I am,” she said. “You know it?”

“Of,” he said. “Shellworlds are a subject of mine. I study them. I find them fascinating.”

“You’re not alone in that.”

“I know. Actually, I find it perplexing that everyone doesn’t find them utterly fascinating.”

Djan Seriy shrugged. “There are many fascinating places.”

“Yes, but Shellworlds are something special.” He put his hand to his mouth. Long fingers. He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You lived there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.”

“Well, for me it is — was — just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occur. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”

She drank. He puffed on his pipe for a bit. Puonvangi sighed deeply, eyes still closed.

“And you,” she said, remembering to be polite. “Where are you from? May I ask your Full Name?”

“Astle-Chulinisa Klatsli LP Quike dam Uast.”

“LP?” she said. “The letters L and P?”

“The letters L and P,” he confirmed, with a small nod and a mischievous smile.

“Do they stand for something?”

“They do. But it’s a secret.”

She looked at him doubtfully.

He laughed, spread his arms. “I’m well travelled, Ms Seriy; a Wanderer. I am older than I look, I have met many people and given and shared and received many things. I have been most places, at a certain scale. I have spent time with all the major Involveds, I have talked to Gods, shared thought with the Sublimed and tasted, as far as a human can, something of the joy of what the Minds call Infinite Fun Space. I am not the person I was when I took my Full Name, and I am not definable just by that any more. A nested mystery in the centre of my name is no more than I deserve. Trust me.”

Djan Seriy thought about this. He had called himself a Wanderer (they were talking Marain, the Culture’s language; it had a phoneme to denote upper case). There had always been a proportion of people in the Culture, or at least people who were from the Culture originally, who termed themselves so. She found it difficult not to think of them as a class. They did indeed just wander; most doing so within the Culture, going from Orbital to Orbital, place to place, travelling on cruise ships and trampers as a rule and on Contact vessels when they could.

Others travelled amongst the rest of the Involved and Aspirant species, existing — when they encountered societies shockingly unenlightened enough not to have cast off the last shackles of monetary exchange — through inter-civilisational co-supportive understandings, or by using some vanishingly microscopic fraction of the allegedly infinite resources the Culture commanded to pay their way.

Some cast their adventures wider still, which was where problems sometimes occurred. The mere presence of such a person in a sufficiently undeveloped society could change it, sometimes profoundly, if that person was blind to what their being there might be doing to those they had come to live among, or at least look at. Not all such people agreed to be monitored by Contact during their travels, and even though Contact was perfectly unabashed when it came to spying on travellers who strayed into vulnerable societies whether they liked it or not, it did sometimes miss individuals. There was a whole section of the organisation devoted to watching developing civilisations for signs that some so-called Wanderer had — with prior intent, opportunistically or even accidentally — turned into a local Mad Professor, Despot, Prophet or God. There were other categories, but these four formed the most popular and predictable avenues people’s fantasies took them along when they lost their moral bearings down amongst the prims.

Most Wanderers caused no such problems, however, and such itinerants normally found somewhere to call home eventually, usually back in the Culture. Some, though, never settled anywhere, roaming all their lives, and of these a few — a surprisingly large proportion compared to the rest of the Culture’s population — lived, effectively, for ever. Or at least lived until they met some almost inevitably violent, irrecoverable end. There were rumours — usually in the form of personal boasts — of individuals who had been around since the formation of the Culture itself, nomads who’d drifted the galaxy and its near infinitude of peoples, societies, civilisations and places for thousands upon thousands of years.

Trust me, he had said. “I think I do not,” she told him at last, narrowing her eyes a little.

“Really?” he asked, looking hurt. “I’m telling the truth,” he said quietly. He seemed half small boy and half untroubled ancient, darkly self-possessed.

“I’m sure it appears so to you,” she said, arching one eyebrow. She drank some more; she had ordered a Za’s Revenge, but said concoction was unknown to the bar machine, which had made its own speciality. It served. Quike took another pipe of incense herb.

“And you’re from the Eighth?” Quike said, coughing a little, though with a broad smile wreathed in violet smoke.

“I am,” she said. He smiled shyly and hid behind some smoke. “You’re well informed,” she told him.

“Thank you.” He suddenly mugged an expression of what might have been pretended fear. “And an SC agent too, yes?”

“I wouldn’t get too excited,” she told him. “I have been demilitarised.”

He grinned again. Almost cheekily. “All the same.”

Djan Seriy would have sighed if she had felt able to. She had a feeling she was being set up here — Mr Quike was so handsome and attractive it was positively suspicious — she just wasn’t sure yet by whom.

They left Puonvangi at the 303rd in the company of a riotous party of Birilisi conventioneers. The Birilisi were an avian species and much given to excessive narcoticism; they and Puonvangi were guaranteed to get on. There was much fluttering.

They suited up and went to a place Quike knew where the aquaticised gathered. These were humanoids fully converted to water-dwelling. The space was full of what looked like every kind of watergoing species — or at least those below a certain size. The warm, hazy water was full of skin scents, incomprehensible sounds of every appreciable frequency and curious, musical pulsations. They had to stay suited up and laughed bubbles as they tried drinking underwater, using smart cups and self-sealing straws. They talked via what was basically a pre-electricity speaking tube.

They got to the end of their drinks together.

She was looking away from him, watching two thin, flamboyantly colourful, fabulously frilled creatures three metres tall with great long, expressionless but somehow dignified heads and faces. They were floating a short distance away from her, poised facing each other just out of the touching range of their frills, which waved so fast they flickered. She wondered were they talking, arguing, flirting?

Quike touched her arm to attract her attention. “Shall we go?” he asked. “There’s something you’ve got to see.” She looked down, at his hand still resting on her arm.

They took a bubble car through the enclosed galaxy of the Great Ship’s main internal space to where his quarters were. They were still suited up, sat side by side in the speeding car, communicating by lace as the gaudily bewildering expanses of the ship’s interior swept around them.

You really must see this, he said, glancing at her.

No need to overstate, she told him. I am already here, going with you. She had never been very good at being romantic. Wooing and seduction, even played as a kind of game, seemed dishonest to her somehow. Again, she blamed her upbringing, though she wouldn’t have argued the point too determinedly if pressed on it; ultimately she was prepared to concede that maybe, at some level beyond even childhood indoctrination, it was just her.

His living space was a trio of four-metre spheres bunched in with thousands of others on a kilometres-long string of alien habs situated near the vast curved wall of the main space’s outer periphery. The room was entered by entirely the stickiest, slowest-working gel field lock she’d ever encountered. Inside it was rather small and brightly lit. The air tasted clean, almost sharp. Nothing in it looked personalised. Furniture or fittings of debatable utility lay scattered about the floor and wall. The general colour scheme was of green components over cerise backgrounds. Not, to Djan Seriy’s eye, a happy combination. There was a sort of glisteny look to a lot of the surfaces, as though a film or membrane had been shrink-wrapped around everything.

“Another drink?” he suggested.

“Oh, I suppose so,” she said.

“I have some Chapantlic spirit,” he said, digging in a small floor chest. He saw her run a finger along the edge of what appeared to be a sponge-covered seat, frowning as her skin encountered something slick and smooth coating it, and said, “Sorry. Everything is sort of sealed in; covered. All a bit antiseptic. I do apologise.” He looked embarrassed as he waved a couple of glittering goblets shaped like inverted bells and a small bottle. “I picked up some sort of weird allergy thing on my travels and they can only fix it back in the Culture. Wherever I live I need it to be pretty clean. I’ll get it dealt with, but for now, well…”

Djan Seriy was not at all convinced this was true. “Is it in any way infectious?” she asked. Her own immune system, still fully functioning and well into the comprehensive end of the spectrum of congenital Culture protection, had signalled nothing amiss. After a couple of hours in such close proximity to Mr Quike there would have been at least some hint of any untoward virus, spore or similar unpleasantness.

“No!” he said, motioning her to sit down. They sat on opposite sides of a narrow table. He poured some of the spirit; it was brown and highly viscous.

The seat Djan Seriy was sitting on felt slidey. A tiny new suspicion had entered her head. Had the fellow thought to bring her here for something other than sex? She found the shrink-wrapped nature of the fittings in the man’s quarters disturbing. What was really going on here? Ought she to be worried? It was almost beyond imagining that any civilian in their right mind might think to offer some sort of mischief or mistreatment to an SC agent, even a de-fanged one, but then people were nothing if not varied and strange; who knew what strangenesses went on their heads?

Just to be on the safe side, she monitored the Great Ship’s available systems with her neural lace. The living space was partially shielded, but that was normal enough. She could see where she was in the ship, and the ship knew where she was. A relief, she supposed.

The young-looking Mr Quike offered her a crystal bell-goblet. It rang faintly the instant she touched it. “They’re meant to do that,” he explained. “The vibrations are supposed to make it taste better.”

She took the little goblet and leant forward. “LP Quike,” she said, “what exactly are your intentions?” She could smell the spirit, albeit faintly.

He looked almost flustered. “First a toast,” he said, holding up his bell-goblet.

“No,” she said, lowering her head a little and narrowing her eyes. “First the truth.” Her nose was reporting nothing unexpected in the fumes rising from the goblet of spirit in her hand but she wanted to be sure, giving bits of her brain time to do a proper processing job on the chemicals her nasal membranes were picking up. “Tell me what it was you wanted to show me here.”

Quike sighed and put down his bell-goblet. He fastened her with his gaze. “I picked up an ability to read minds on my travels,” he said quickly, possibly a little annoyed. “I just wanted to show off, I suppose.”

“Read minds?” Djan Seriy said sceptically. Ship Minds could read human minds, though they were not supposed to; specialist equipment could read human minds and she imagined you could make some kind of android machine embodying the same technology that could do so too, but an ordinary human being? That seemed unlikely.

This was depressing. If Klatsli Quike was a fantasist or just mad then she was certainly not going to have sex with him.

“It’s true!” he told her. He sat forward. Their noses were now a few centimetres apart. “Just look into my eyes.”

“You are serious?” Djan Seriy asked. Oh dear, this was not turning out as she’d wished at all.

“I am perfectly serious, Djan Seriy,” he said quietly, and something in his voice persuaded her to humour him just a little longer. She sighed again and put the bell-goblet of spirit down on the narrow table. By now, it was clear the drink was highly alcoholic though otherwise harmless.

She looked into his eyes.

After a few moments, there was the hint of something there. A tiny red spark. She sat back, blinking. The man in front of her, smiling faintly — looking quite serious and not at all pleased with himself — put his finger to his lips.

What was going on? She ran what was basically an internal systems check, to reassure herself that she hadn’t been unconscious even for a moment, or that she hadn’t performed some movement or function she hadn’t been aware of, or that less time had elapsed than she assumed. Nothing out of kilter, nothing wrong. She seemed to be okay.

Djan Seriy frowned, leant forward again.

The red spark was still there in his eyes, almost vanishingly faint. It was, she realised, coherent light; one single, pure, narrow frequency. It flickered. Very quickly.

Something approaching…

What approaching? Where had that thought come from? What was going on here?

She sat back again, blinking fast and frowning deeply, running her systems check again. Still nothing untoward. She sat forward once more. Ah. She was starting to guess what was going on.

The flickering red spark came back and she realised he was indeed signalling her. A section of his retina must be a laser, capable of sending a beam of coherent light through his eye and into hers. The signal was expressed in nonary Marain, the nine-part binary base of the Culture’s language. She’d heard of this ability in SC training, though purely as an aside. It was a multi-millennia-ancient, now almost never-used amendment, long made redundant by the technology behind the neural lace. It was even something she could have made herself capable of, with a few days’ notice, before she’d had her claws pulled. She concentrated.

PTA?

He was signalling a Permission To Approach burst. It was a ship signal, originally. It had been adopted as a sort of acronymic shorthand by Culture people wanting to get in closer contact with other people they weren’t sure would welcome them.

PTA?

She nodded very slightly.

Djan Seriy, the signal said. I think you are receiving me, but please scratch your right cheek with your left hand if you are understanding all of this. Scratch once if this is too slow a rate of transmission, twice for acceptable and three times for too fast.

The information was coming in faster than it could have been spoken intelligibly, but not ungraspably quick. She gently scratched her right cheek with her left hand, twice.

Wonderful! Allow me to introduce myself properly. The LP you asked about earlier stands for ‘Liveware Problem’. I am not a properly normal human being. I am an avatoid of the Liveware Problem, a Stream-class Superlifter; a modified Delta-class GCU, a Wanderer of the ship kind and technically Absconded.

Ah, she thought. An avatoid. A ship’s avatar of such exquisite bio-mimicry it could pass for fully human. A ship Wanderer. And an Absconder. Absconders were ships that had chosen to throw off the weight of Cultural discipline and go off on their own.

Even so, a proportion were known, or at least strongly suspected, to be using this state of self-imposed exile purely as a disguise, and were still fully committed to the Culture, allegedly adopting Absconder status as cover for being able to carry out actions the main part of the Culture might shrink from. The granddaddy, the exemplary hero figure, the very God of such vessels, was the GSV Sleeper Service, which had selflessly impersonated such eccentric indifference to the Culture for four decades and then, some twenty-plus years ago now, suddenly revealed itself as utterly mainstream-Culture-loyal and — handily — harbouring a secretly manufactured, instantly available war fleet just when the Culture most needed it, before disappearing again.

She allowed her eyes to narrow a little. She was fully aware this was her own signature signal; suspicion, distrust.

Sorry about all the subterfuge. The air in here is kept scrubbed to remove the possibility of nanoscale devices watching in on such eye-to-eye communication and the room’s coverings are themselves wrapped in film for the same reason. Even the smoke I inhaled at the bar contains an additive which clears my lungs of any such possible contamination. I was only able to get close enough to contact you after you’d arrived on board the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown, and of course everybody is being so wary of upsetting the Morthanveld. I thought it best to adopt the trappings of ultra-caution! I’m aware, of course, that you can’t reply in kind to me, so let me just tell you why I’m here and why I’m contacting you in this way.

She raised her brows a fraction.

I am, as I say, an Absconder, though only technically; I spent three and a half thousand years faithfully tugging smaller ships around Systems Vehicles throughout the greater galaxy and saw active service during the Idiran War — serving, if I may say so, with some distinction, especially in the first few desperate years. After all that I decided I was due a protracted holiday — probably a retirement, to be quite honest, though I reserve the right to change my mind!

I have wandered the galaxy for the last eight hundred years, seeing all I could of other civilisations and peoples. There is always more to see, of course; the galaxy renews and re-forms itself faster than one can make one’s way round it. Anyway, I am, truly, fascinated by Shellworlds and have a particular interest in Sursamen, not the smallest part of which concerns your level, the Eighth. When I heard rumours regarding your father’s death — and please accept my condolences in that regard — and the events surrounding this sad occasion, including the death of your brother Ferbin, I immediately thought to make myself available to help the Sarl, and the children of the late king in particular.

I’d assumed you’d be going back home with many of your powers removed or reduced. I know that you return with no ship or drone or other aid about you, and so I’d like to offer my own services. Not as a day-to-day servant or courier or anything like that — our Morthanveld hosts would not tolerate such a thing — but as a last resort, if you will. Certainly as a friend in case of need. Sursamen, and especially the Eighth, seems like a dangerous place these days, and a person travelling alone, no matter how able, may need all the friends they can muster.

I — that is, the ship — am currently some distance off but keeping pace with the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown, to stay in reasonable proximity to this avatoid and facilitate its speedy retrieval should I need to do so. However, it is my intention, shortly, to make my way to Sursamen directly and this avatoid, or another — for I have several — will be there. It and myself are ready to afford you such assistance as you may require.

You need not respond now; please think about this at your leisure and make your mind up in your own time. When you meet my avatoid on Sursamen you can let me know what you think then, through it. I shall completely understand if you want nothing to do with me. That is entirely your right. However, please be assured of my continuing respect and know that I am, dear lady, entirely at your service.

I shall end this signal shortly; please decide whether you wish to pretend I have in any way read your mind, just on the off-chance we are somehow being observed.

Signal ends at implied zero: four, three, two, one…

Djan Seriy stared into the eyes of the young man sitting opposite her. She was thinking, Dear shafted WorldGod, all my potential bedfellows are machines. How depressing.

Only about half a minute had passed since they’d started staring into each other’s eyes. She sat back slowly, smiling and shaking her head. “I think your trick does not work on me, sir.”

Quike smiled. “Well, it doesn’t work with everybody,” he said. He raised his goblet. It emitted a high, pleasant, ringing tone. “Perhaps I might be permitted to try again some other time?”

“Perhaps.” They clinked bell-goblets; the twin sound was surprisingly mellifluous. She had dismissed the idea of taking seriously the offer he’d just made before the glasses had stopped ringing.

She engaged him in conversation for some time after that, listening to him recount tales of various explorations and adventures during his many travels. It was not unpleasant, she did not have to pretend interest and it was amusing to try to work out in his stories which parts were probably true and had been experienced by the ship concerned directly (assuming there really was a ship involved), which parts had been lived by the avatoid while the ship had looked on and which might have been entirely made up to try to fool anybody listening that all this related to a real human, not a ship-plus-avatar-in-human-form.

In exchange, she related something of her life on Sursamen as a child and adolescent and answered most of the eagerly asked questions Quike had, though she steered clear of certain areas and tried not to give any indication of how she would eventually react to his offer.

But of course she would reject his help, the ship’s help. If the Liveware Problem was working completely alone then it was probably either hopelessly naïve or quietly insane; neither inspired confidence. If not then it presumably represented a part of SC or something even more rarefied and it was just pretending to be hopelessly naïve or quietly insane, which was even more worrying. And if Quike and the Liveware Problem were SC then why hadn’t she been briefed about them turning up before she’d left Prasadal, or at least before she’d left the last vestige of the Culture proper and been batonned onwards to the Morthanveld?

What was going on here? All she wanted to do was go back home and pay her respects to her late father and her presumed-deceased brother, reconnect with her past a bit and perhaps lay something to rest (she was not entirely sure what, but maybe that would come to her later). She doubted she’d be able to provide much help to her surviving brother, Oramen, but if she could offer some small service or other, she would. But that was kind of it. After that she’d be off; away back to the Culture — and, if they’d take her, back to SC and the job that, for all its frustrations, dilemmas and heartbreaks, she loved.

Why was a Culture ship trying to get involved in her returning to Sursamen in the first place? At most, this was still all about a pretty paltry thing; a grubby dispute regarding the succession of power within a very minor and embarrassingly violent and undemocratic tribe whose principal claim on the interest of others was that they happened to live inside a relatively rare and exotic world-type. Was she expected to do something on Sursamen? If so, what? What could she be expected to do, unbriefed, lacking any specified mission and de-fanged?

Well, she didn’t know. She strongly suspected she’d be crazy to do anything other than keep her head down, do what she’d said she was going to do and no more. She was in enough trouble already just for quitting the mission on Prasadal and heading home on compassionate leave without adding to the charge-sheet. SC training was full of stories of agents who’d gone dramatically off-piste and had taken on bizarre missions all of their own devising. They usually ended badly.

There were only a few stories leaning in the other direction, of agents who had passed up obvious opportunities to make some beneficial intervention unbriefed, without some specific mandate or instruction. The implication was, as ever, to stick to the plan, but be prepared to improvise. (Also, listen to your drone or other companion; they were expected to be more levelheaded, less emotional than you — that was one of the main reasons they were there.)

Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgement to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words.

It sometimes seemed to SC trainees, and especially to SC trainees coming to the organisation having been raised in other societies, that those people sworn just to obey orders had the easier time of it, being allowed to be single-minded in whatever purpose they pursued rather than having to do that and wrestle with its ethical implications. However, as this difference in approach was held up as one of the principal reasons that the Culture in general and SC in particular was morally superior to everybody else, it was generally regarded as a small operational price to pay for the allegedly far greater reward of being able to feel well ahead in the ethics stakes compared to one’s civilisational peers.

So she would stick to the plan. And the plan was: go home, behave, return, apply herself. That ought to be fairly simple, ought it not?

She joined in Mr Quike’s laughter as he reached the end of a story she’d been barely half listening to. They drank more of the spirit from the delicate, tinkling little bell-goblets and she felt herself grow pleasantly tipsy, her head ringing in a sort of woozy, complicit sympathy with the crystals.

“Well,” she said at last. “I had better go. It has been interesting talking to you.”

He stood up as she did. “Really?” he said. He looked suddenly anxious, even hurt. “I wish you’d stay.”

“Do you now?” she asked coolly.

“Kind of hoping you would,” he confessed. He gave a nervous laugh. “I thought we were getting on really well there.” He looked at the puzzled expression on her face. “I thought we were flirting.”

“You did?” she said. She felt like rolling her eyes; this was not the first time this had happened. It must be her fault.

“Well, yes,” he said, almost laughing. He waved one arm to an internal door. “My sleeping quarters are more, well, welcoming than this rather spare space.” He smiled his little-boy smile.

“I’m sure they are,” she said.

She noticed the room lights were dimming. A little late, she thought.

So; another about-turn. She inspected her own feelings and knew that, despite the abruptness and the fact she was tired, she was at least a little interested.

He came up to her and took one of her hands in his. “Djan Seriy,” he said quietly, “no matter what image of ourselves we try to project upon the world, upon others, even back upon ourselves, we are still all human, are we not?”

She frowned. “Are we?” she said.

“We are. And to be human, to be anything like human, is to know what one lacks, to know what one needs, to know what one must look for to find some semblance of completeness amongst strangers, all alone in the darkness.”

She looked into his languidly beautiful eyes and saw in them — well, being cold about it, more precisely in the exact set of his facial features and muscle state — a hint of real need, even genuine hunger.

How close to fully, messily, imperfectly human did an avatoid have to be to pass the close inspection afforded by an equiv-tech civilisation like the Morthanveld? Perhaps close enough to have all the usual failings of meta-humanity, and the full quota of needs and desires. Whether he was a sophisticated avatar constructed from the cellular level up, a subtly altered clone of an original human being or anything else, Mr Quike, it seemed, was still very much a man, and in looking into his eyes and seeing that craving desperation, that anxious desire (with its undertone of pre-prepared sullenness, aching yearning ready to become hurt contempt on the instant of rejection), she was only experiencing what untold generations of females had experienced throughout the ages. And, oh, that smile, those eyes, that skin; the warm, enveloping voice.

She thought, A real Culture girl would definitely say yes at this point.

She sighed regretfully. However, I am still — deep down, and for my sins — both my father’s daughter and a Sarl.

“Perhaps some other time,” she told him.

She left in an all-species pod taxi. She sat there in the damp, strange-smelling air, closed her eyes and laced in to the Great Ship’s public information systems to review the next few days. There had been no recent schedule changes; they were still on course for the Morthanveld Nestworld of Syaung-un, due there in two and a half days.

She considered looking at humanoid dating/quick-contact sites (there were over three hundred thousand humanoids aboard — you’d think there would be somebody…), but still felt both too tired, and restless in the wrong way.

She returned to her own quarters, where the twice-disguised drone whispered good night to her.

She thought good night back to it, then lay, eyes closed but unable or unwilling to sleep, continuing to use her neural lace to interrogate the ship’s dataverse. She checked up — at a remove, over distances and system translations that introduced delays of five or six seconds — on the agents she’d left running in the Culture’s dataverse. She was both slightly disappointed and highly relieved to find that there was no known intrusive, close-observational recordage from the Eighth or indeed any of Sursamen’s interior levels. Whatever happened there happened once and was never seen again.

She clicked out of the Culture’s interface. One last roving agent system was waiting to report back from the local dataverse. It told her that her brother Ferbin was not dead after all; he was alive, he was on a Morthanveld tramp ship and he was due to arrive on the Nestworld of Syaung-un less than a day after her.

Ferbin! In the hushed darkness of her cabin, her eyes blinked suddenly open.

21. Many Worlds

A strange thing had happened to Choubris Holse. He had become interested in what was, if he understood such matters rightly, not a million strides away from being philosophy. Given Ferbin’s unrestrainedly expressed views on that subject, this felt tantamount to treason.

It had started with the games that they had both been playing on the Nariscene ship Hence the Fortress to pass the time on the way to the Nestworld of Syaung-un. The games were played floating inside screen-spheres which were linked to the brain of the ship itself. Such ships, Holse had realised, were not merely vessels, that is, empty things you put stuff into; they were things, beings in their own right, at least as far as a mersicor, lyge or other mount was a being, and perhaps a lot more so.

There were even more realistically fashioned diversions available, games in which you really did seem to be awake and moving physically around, talking and walking and fighting and everything else (though not peeing or shitting — Holse had felt he had to ask), but those sounded daunting and overly alien to both men, as well as unpleasantly close to some of the disturbing stuff Xide Hyrlis had been bending their ears about back on the disputed, burned husk that was Bulthmaas.

The ship had advised them on which games they would find most rewarding and they’d ended up playing those whose pretended worlds were not all that different from the real one they’d left behind on Sursamen; war games of strategy and tactics, connivance and daring.

Holse had taken at first guilty and then unrestrained delight in playing some of these games from the point of view of a prince. Later he had discovered works, analyses and comments related to such games, and, intrigued, started to read or watch these too.

Which was how he came to be interested in the idea that all reality might indeed be a game, most specifically as this concept related to the Infinite Worlds theory, which held that all possible things had already happened, or were happening now, all together.

This alleged that life was very like a game or simulation where every possible course and outcome has already been played out, noted down and drawn up, as though on an enormous map, with the beginning of the game — before a piece has been moved or a move has been made — in the centre, and every single possible end state arranged along the outer fringe of this implausibly stupendous chart. By this comparison, all that one does in mapping out the course of one particular game is trace a path from that central Beginning of things out through more and more branches, chances and possibilities, to one of the near infinitude of Ends at the periphery.

And there you were; the further likeness being drawn here, unless Holse had it completely arse-before-cock, was that which held; As Game, So Life. And indeed, As Game, So Entire History Of Whole Universe, Bar Nothing And Nobody.

Everything had already happened, and in every single possible way, too. Not only had everything that had already happened happened, everything that was going to happen had already happened. And not only that: everything that was going to happen had already happened in every single possible way that it possibly could.

So if, say, he played a game of cards with Ferbin, for money, then there was a course, a line, a way through this already written, previously happened universe of possibilities which led to the outcome that involved him losing everything to Ferbin, or Ferbin losing everything to him, including Ferbin suffering a fit of madness and betting and losing his entire fortune and inheritance to his servant — ha! There were universe-lines where he’d kill Ferbin over the disputed card game, and others wherein Ferbin would kill him; indeed there were tracks that led to everything that could be imagined, and everything that would never be imagined by anybody but was still somehow possible.

It seemed at first glance like utter madness, yet it also, when one thought about it, appeared somehow no less implausible than any other explanation of how things truly were, and it had a sort of completeness about it that stifled argument. Assuming that every branching fork on the universe map was taken randomly, all would still somehow be well; the likely things would always outnumber the unlikely and vastly outnumber the ludicrous, so as a rule things would happen much as one expected, with the occasional surprise and the very rare moment of utter incredulity.

Pretty much as life generally was, in other words, in his experience. This was at once oddly satisfactory, mildly disappointing and strangely reassuring to Holse; fate was as fate was, and that was it.

He immediately wondered how you could cheat.

Deputy Acting Zamerin Yariem Girgetioni (Deputy Acting Zamerin Of All Sursamen, The Esteemed Yariem Girgetioni, as he liked to be known; the added bit was not official Nariscene nomenclature, though Yariem was firmly of the opinion it ought to be) viewed the forwarded signal with some distaste and not a little nervousness, though he was careful to hide the latter emotion from the duty lieutenant who had delivered the flimsy bearing the signal.

He was in his personal cloudcraft, floating over the 8-shaped greenery and bluery of Sursamen’s Twinned Crater. He was lounging in a whole-body micro-massage cradle, watching erotic entertainments and being fed dainty sweetmeats by attractively identical pleasure-whelps. He flicked the offending flimsy back at the duty lieutenant. “Just so. See to it.”

“Ah, sir, it does say that you personally—”

“Precisely. We personally are ordering you to make sure that all that is detailed here is carried out to the very letter or we personally shall crack you from your exoskeleton and fling you into the hydrochloric lagoons. Is that personal enough for you?”

“Abundantly, sir.”

“How splendid. Now leave.”

The Nestworld of Syaung-un was located in the region of space known as the 34th Pendant Floret and seemed almost farcically enormous to Ferbin. He could understand something the size of a Shellworld; for all that his background was one of relative primitiveness compared to others within the greater galactic hierarchy, he was not a savage. He might not understand how the spaceships of the Optimae worked — he was not even privileged to know quite how the far more crude and limited scendships of the Oct operated — but he knew that they did and he accepted it.

He knew that there were levels of science and technology, and of understanding and wisdom, well above those he was privy to and he was not amongst those who chose simply to disbelieve in their existence. Nevertheless, the measure of the engineering behind Morthanveld Nestworlds — structures built on such a scale that engineering and physics started to become the same thing — quite defeated him.

The Nestworld was an ordered tangle of massive tubes within gigantic braids forming colossal ropes making up stupefyingly vast cables constituting loops almost beyond imagining, and — despite the fact that the transparent outer casing of each tubular component was metres thick — it all twisted, turned and revolved, easy as a length of thread.

The Nestworld’s principal components were giant tubes full of water; they varied in diameter between ten metres and many tens of kilometres and any individual tube might range over its length from the narrowest gauge to the greatest. They were bundled together without touching into larger braids which were contained within encompassingly greater pipes measuring a hundred kilometres or so across, also water-filled; these too revolved independently and were also bundled within yet greater cylinders — by now on a scale of tens of thousands of kilometres and more — and were frequently covered in engraved designs and patterns many scores of thousands of kilometres across.

The average Nestworld was a great gathered crown of tangled tubes within tubes within tubes within tubes; a halo world tens of thousands of years old, millions of kilometres across and set circumference-on to its local star, its every million-kilometre-long strand twisting and revolving to provide the tens of billions of Morthanveld within the vast construction with the faint, pleasant tug of gravity they were used to.

Syaung-un was not average; it was half a million years old, the greatest world in the Morthanveld Commonwealth and, amongst the metre-scale species of the Involveds, one of the most populous settlements in the entire galaxy. It was three hundred million kilometres in diameter, nowhere less than a million klicks thick, contained over forty trillion souls and the whole assemblage rotated round a small star at its centre.

Its final, open braid of cylinders altogether easily constituted sufficient matter to produce a gravity well within which a thin but significant opportunistic atmosphere had built up over the decieons of its existence, filling the open bracelet of twisted habitat-strands with a hazy fuzz of waste gas and debris-scatter. The Morthanveld could have cleaned all this up, of course, but chose not to; the consensus was that it led to agreeable lighting effects.

The Hence the Fortress dropped them into a Nariscene-run satellite facility the size of a small moon — a sand grain next to a globe-encircling sea — and a little shuttle vessel zipped them across to the openwork braid of the vast corded world itself, slipstream whispering against its hull, the star at the world’s centre glinting mistily through Syaung-un’s filigree of cables, each stout enough, it seemed, to anchor a planet.

This was, Ferbin thought, the equivalent of a whole civilisation, almost an entire galaxy, contained within what would, in a normal solar system, be the orbit of a single planet. What uncounted lives were lived within those dark, unending braids? How many souls were born, lived and died within those monstrous curling twists of tubing, never seeing — perhaps never feeling the need to see — any other worlds, transfixed for ever within the encompassing vastness of this unexplorably prodigious habitat? What lives, what fates, what stories must have taken place within this star-surrounding ring, forever twisting, folding, unfolding?

They were delivered into a chaotic-seeming port area full of transparent walls both concave and convex and curving caissons and tubing, the whole set like a gassy bubble within one huge water-filled cylinder and all arranged to suit air-breathing people like the Nariscene and themselves. A machine about the size of a human torso floated up to them, announced itself as being Nuthe 3887b, an accredited Morthanveld greeting device belonging to the First Original Indigent Alien Deep Spacefarers’ Benevolent Fund, and told them it would be their guide. It sounded helpful and was jollily coloured, but Ferbin had never felt further from home, or more small and insignificant.

We are lost here, he thought as Holse chatted with the machine and passed on to it their pathetically few possessions. We might disappear into this wilderness of civility and progress and never be seen again. We might be dissolved within it for ever, compressed, reduced to nothing by its sheer ungraspable scale. What is one man’s life if such casual immensity can even exist?

The Optimae counted in magnitudes, measured in light years and censused their own people by the trillion, while beyond them the Sublimed and the Elder peoples whom they might well one day join thought not in years or decades, not even in centuries and millennia, but in centieons and decieons at the very least, and centiaeons and deciaeons generally. The galaxy, meanwhile, the universe itself, was aged in aeons; units of time as far from the human grasp as a light year was beyond a step.

They were truly lost, Ferbin thought with a kind of core-enfeebling terror that sent a tremor pulsing through him; forgotten, minimised to nothing, placed and categorised as beings far beneath the lowest level of irrelevance simply by their entry into this thunderously, stunningly phenomenal place, perhaps even just by the full realisation of its immensity.

It came as something of a surprise, then, for Ferbin and Holse to be greeted, before Holse had finished chatting to the Morthanveld machine, by a short, portly, smiling gent with long, blond, ringletty hair who called them by name in excellently articulated Sarl and entirely as though they were old friends.

“No, to a Morthanveld a Nestworld is a symbol of homeliness, intimacy,” their new friend informed them as they rode a little tube-car along a gauzily transparent tunnel threaded through one of the klick-thick hab tubes. “Bizarrely!” he added. The man had given his name as Pone Hippinse; he too was an Accredited Greeter, he said, albeit only gaining this distinction recently. For a machine, Nuthe 3887b did a very good impression of being annoyed by Hippinse’s arrival. “The nest a male Morthanveld weaves when he’s trying to attract a mate is a sort of torus of seaweed twigs,” Hippinse continued. “Kind of a big circle.” He showed them what a circle looked like, using both hands.

They were on their way to another port area for what Hippinse described as a “short hop” in a spaceship round a small part of the vast ring to a suitable Humanoid Guest Facility. The Facility — the 512th Degree FifthStrand; 512/5 to most people — was most highly recommended by Hippinse.

“Strictly speaking—” Nuthe 3887b began.

“So, to a Morthanvelder, one of these things,” Hippinse said, ignoring the little machine and waving his arms about to indicate the whole Nestworld, “is a sort of symbol of their being wedded to the cosmos, see? They’re making their conjugal bower in space itself, expressing their connectedness to the galaxy or whatever. It’s quite romantic, really. Vast place, though; I mean truly, mind-boggling vast. There are more Morthanveld on this one Nestworld than there are Culture citizens anywhere, did you know that?” He gave the impression of looking stunned on their behalf. “I mean even including the Peace Faction, the Ulterior, the Elench and every other splinter group, casually connected associate category and loosely affiliated bunch of hangers-on who just happen to like the name Culture. Amazing! Anyway, just as well I came along.” He made a strange face at Ferbin and Holse that might have been meant to be friendly, comforting, conspiratorial or something else entirely.

Holse was looking at Pone Hippinse, trying to figure the fellow out.

“I mean, to remove you guys from the attentions of the media, the news junkies and aboriginistas; people like that.” Hippinse belched and fell silent.

Ferbin used the opportunity to ask, “Where exactly are we going?”

“To the Facility,” Hippinse said, with a glance at Nuthe 3887b. “Someone wants to meet you.” He winked.

“Someone?” Ferbin asked.

“Can’t tell you; spoil the surprise.”

Ferbin and Holse exchanged looks.

Holse frowned and turned deliberately to the Morthanveld machine, hovering in the air to one side of the three seated humans. “This Facility we’re heading for…” he began.

“It’s a perfect place for—” Hippinse started to say, but Holse, now sitting side-on to him, held up one hand to him — held it almost into his face — and said, “If you don’t mind, sir. I’m talking to this machine.”

“Well, I was just going to say—” Hippinse said.

“Tell us about it,” Holse said loudly to the machine. “Tell us about this Facility we’re supposed to go to.”

“…you can hole up there, unmolested…” Hippinse continued.

“The 512th Degree FifthStrand, or 512/5, is a Humanoid Transfer and Processing Facility,” the machine told them as Hippinse finally fell silent.

Holse frowned. “What sort of processing?”

“Identity establishment, in-world alien behaviour legal agreement-making, knowledge-sharing—”

“What does that mean? Knowledge-sharing?” Holse had once helped a town constable with his enquiries regarding the theft of some tableware from the local County House; it had been a considerably rougher and more painful experience than the phrase Helping With Enquiries implied. He was worried that ‘knowledge-sharing’ might be a similar lie dressed up pretty.

“Any data held is requested to be shared with the knowledge reservoirs of the Nestworld,” Nuthe 3887b said, “on a philanthropic or charitable basis, as a rule.”

Holse still wasn’t happy. “Does this process hurt?” he asked.

“Of course not!” the machine said, sounding shocked.

Holse nodded. “Carry on.”

“The 512th Degree FifthStrand Facility is a Culture-sponsored Facility,” the machine told them. Ferbin and Holse both sat back and exchanged looks.

“I was coming to that!” Hippinse exclaimed in a sudden release of pent-up exasperation, waving his arms about.

They transferred to the Facility in a fat little ship which swallowed the car they were riding in whole. The ship lurched and they were away.

A screen showed them the view ahead for the duration of the twenty-minute journey; Hippinse chattered continually, pointing out sights, especially famous or well-executed patterns of cables or designs engraved on the cables, noteworthy spacecraft arriving and departing, stellar-atmospheric effects and a few of the favela structures which were not officially part of the world at all but which had been constructed within Syaung-un’s surrounding network of cylinders and inside the partial protection, both physical and symbolic, afforded by the lattice of mighty cylinders and their accompanying wrap of gases.

The 512th Degree FifthStrand was a kind of fully enclosed mini-Orbital, fashioned to look as much like the Nestworld itself as possible. It was only eight hundred kilometres across and — until you were right up at it — it looked quite insignificant within the loops and swirls of the giant world’s main cylinders; just a tiny finger-ring lost amongst the openwork vastness of the braided super-cables submerged in their accidental haze of found atmosphere.

Close up, the Facility looked a little like a pushbike wheel. They docked at the hub. Nuthe 3887b stayed aboard; it wished them well. Hippinse’s long blond hair floated about his head like a curly nebula and he pulled it back and bunned it with a little hair-net. Their car was released from the stubby ship and floated into and down a curved, hollow spoke like a thin, twisted Tower.

“Keen on being able to see through things, aren’t they?” Holse said, staring down through the clear floor of the car, the transparent side of the hollow spoke and the seemingly nonexistent roof of the miniature habitat below.

“The Morthanveld have this thing about clarity,” Hippinse told them. “The Culture wouldn’t think of being so rude as to fashion their own places any differently.” He snorted, shook his head.

Inside, the Facility was a little ribbon-world of its own, a rotating loop of landscape dotted with parkland, rivers, lakes and small hills, the air above filled with delicate-looking flying machines. Ferbin and Holse both felt the gravity building up as they descended.

Halfway down, approaching a conglomeration of what looked like huge half-silvered glass beads stuck on to the spoke like some aquatic accretion, the car began to slow. It fell out of the hazy sunshine into darkness and drew smoothly to a stop deep inside the cluster of silvery globes.

“Gentlemen!” Hippinse announced, clapping his chubby hands together. “Our destination!”

They entered the gently lit, pleasantly perfumed interior opening before them and walked along a curved, broadening corridor — the gravity was a little more than they were used to, but entirely tolerable — to an open space dominated by enormous rocks, small streams and broad pools, all overseen by a host of giant yellow-green and blue-brown plants joined together by nets of foliage. Silvery birds flitted silently across the scene. Overhead, the twisted lattice of the Nestworld revolved with a silent, steady, monumental grace.

Humans of a variety of body-types and skin colours were scattered amongst the plants, streams and pools. One or two glanced casually over in their direction, then away again. A few were entirely naked; a lot were mostly so. They appeared, to a man and woman, to be in excellent physical condition — even the more alien-looking ones somehow gave off an impression of glossy health — and so relaxed in their demeanour that the sight of their nudity wasn’t quite as shocking to the two Sarl men as they might have expected. Still, Ferbin and Holse glanced at each other. Holse shrugged. A man and a woman, each wearing only jewellery, walked past them, smiling.

Ferbin glanced at Holse again and cleared his throat. “Would appear to be permitted,” he said.

“So long as it’s not compulsory, sir,” Holse replied.

A small machine shaped like a sort of squared-off lozenge floated up to them. It said, again in perfect Sarl, “Prince Ferbin, Choubris Holse, LP Hippinse; welcome.”

They said their various hellos.

A woman — compactly elegant, dark-haired, clad in a long, plain blue shift that left only her arms and head exposed — was walking towards them. Ferbin felt himself frown. Was it really her? Older, so different…

She walked right up to him. The others around him were silent, even Hippinse, as though they knew something he didn’t. The woman nodded once and smiled, in a guarded but not unfriendly way.

He realised it really was Djan Seriy an instant before she opened her mouth to speak.

22. The Falls

“This is currently our most impressive sight,” Jerfin Poatas said, waving his stick at the bizarre building looming out of the dim bronze mists. The fellow had to raise his voice to be heard above the thunderous cacophony of the Falls, though he did so with a kind of ease that implied he didn’t even know he did it himself, Oramen thought.

The Fountain Building was indeed impressive. They were approaching it in a little covered carriage rattling along one of the many light railways which threaded their precarious and often dangerous ways across the islets, sandbars, parts of fallen buildings and anchored pylons set into the foaming waters themselves. The roof and side of the rail car were made from salvage gleaned from the unnamed city; a substance like glass, but lighter, flexible, far more clear than any glass Oramen had ever seen outside of a telescope or microscope, and without flaws. He drew one fingertip down the interior surface of the material. It did not even feel cold like glass. He put his glove back on.

The weather was chilly. In the sky, far to facing, almost directly down the gorge of the Sulpitine after the river had tumbled away from the Falls, the Rollstars Clissens and Natherley had dropped to the horizon — Clissens seeming to graze it, Natherley already half-hidden by it — and only the fading Rollstar Kiesestraal was left to shed any new light on the Hyeng-zhar, rising from the direction Clissens and Natherley were setting.

Kiesestraal shed a weak, watery-looking blue-white light, but provided almost no warmth. Rollstars had a life of less than half a billion years and Kiesestraal’s was almost over: nearly burned out, it probably had only a few thousand years until extinguishment altogether, whereupon it would drop, falling from the ceiling fourteen hundred kilometres above to come crashing down through the atmosphere — producing one last, brief, awful burst of light and heat — to smack on to the surface of the Ninth somewhere along its course, and, if the star sages and catastrophists, astrologers and scientists had been mistaken in their calculations, or if their warnings went unheeded, cause utter catastrophe where it fell, potentially killing millions.

Even with nobody present directly underneath, the fall of a dead star, especially on to a level featuring a majority of solid ground, was an apocalyptic event, pulverising earth and rock to dust and fire, sending projectiles the size of mountains soaring like shrapnel all about it to produce still further terrible impacts which would themselves birth smaller and smaller successions of crater, ejecta and debris until finally all that was left was wasteland — its centre scoured to Bare, to the very bone of the world — and clouds of dust and gas and years of spreading, dissipating winters, terrible rains, failed crops and screeching, dust-filled winds. The world itself rang to such impacts. Even directly beneath the ceiling of a floor being so struck, a human might struggle to notice any effect, the structure of a Shellworld was so strong, but machines throughout every level from Core to Surface registered the blow and heard the world ring like a vast bell for days afterwards. The WorldGod, it was said, heard the Starfall, and grieved.

Thankfully, such catastrophes were rare; the last one suffered by Sursamen had been decieons ago. They were also, apparently, part of the natural life of a modified Shellworld. So the Oct and Aultridia and other Shellworld Conducer species claimed. All such destruction led to forms of creation, they assured, producing new rocks, landscapes and minerals. And stars could be replaced, new ones emplaced and kindled, even though such technology was seemingly beyond species like the Oct and Aultridia, who relied on the good graces of the Optimae for these actions.

This fate awaited Kiesestraal and whatever part of the Ninth it fell upon; for now though, as if it was a great wave drawing the waters back before charging furiously back in, the star gave out a thin, attenuated seep of light, and over the whole course of the Sulpitine and well beyond, including the great inland seas at both ends of the river, a partial winter was making itself felt, first the air cooling and then the land and waters too as they radiated their heat away into the encroaching darkness. Soon the Sulpitine would start to freeze over and even the vast unending chaos of the Falls would be stilled. It seemed impossible, unbelievable, Oramen thought, looking about at the sudden, sporadic visions of madly dancing waters and waves which the eccentricities of Falls-created wind and pummelling walls of spray afforded, and yet it had happened in centuries past and would surely happen again.

The rail car was slowing. It was racketing along a raised section of narrow, uneven-looking track held above a shallow sandbar by tall pylons. The sandbar was surrounded by sweeps and curves of dashing, booming waters which looked like they could change course at any moment and wash the sands and pylons away. A gale seemed to shake the little rail car, briefly pulling away some of the surrounding mist and spray.

The Fountain Building soared above them now, bursting with curved fountains of water that turned to spray and rain and came dropping all around in an unceasing torrent that was starting to drum and beat upon the roof of the rail car, shaking it bodily. A chill wind moaned through spaces in the rail car’s body and Oramen felt the cold draught on his face. He wondered if the barrages and veils of water hitting the car would turn to snow as the winter came on but before the whole Falls froze. He tried to imagine this. How magnificent it would look!

These partial winters were almost unknown on the Eighth. On that level, the ceiling above was nearly completely smooth, so that a star, whether a Fixstar or a Rollstar, shed its light freely, casting its rays in every direction save where the horizon itself intervened. Here on the Ninth, for reasons known only to the Veil themselves and implied by the equations of whatever fluid physical figurings they employed, the ceiling — and, in places, the floor too — was much interrupted by the great vanes, blades and channels required to make the Shellworlds work according to their mysterious original purpose.

These features generally extended kilometres or tens of kilometres from the floor or ceiling and frequently right across the horizon; some ceiling strakes were known to stretch halfway round the world itself.

The result was that the light of a star was often much more localised here than it was on the Eighth, so that bright sunshine shone along one line of landscape while just to the side the rest would be held in deep shade, receiving only the light reflected from the general spread of the shining sky itself. Some benighted lands, usually those caught between tall surface vanes, received no direct sunlight whatever, at any time, and were truly barren.

The little rail car chuffed and steamed its way to a halt, shuddering to a stop in a screech of brakes some few metres shy of a set of damaged-looking buffers, the water crashing and bursting across the car’s roof and sides, rocking it like a demented cradle. Steam rolled up from its wheels.

Oramen looked down. They were poised above the side of a great, tipped, fallen building made of, or at least clad in, material much like that which provided the rail car with its sides and roof. The rail tracks rested on trestles like wedges attached to the side of the building itself, making it feel more secure than the flimsy-looking pylons they had recently traversed.

Metres beyond the buffers, the edge of the building fell away sharply to reveal — between this upended edifice and the still upright Fountain Building — a cauldron of wildly swirling mist and spray fifty metres or more deep, at the base of which — on the rare occasions when the clouds of vapour were torn apart sufficiently for such a view to be opened — giant surging waves of brown-tinged foam could briefly be glimpsed.

A large platform of wood and metal extended from the rail tracks on the down-slope side, awash with the near-solid torrents of water falling from the Fountain Building. One or two bits of machinery lay scattered about the platform’s surface, though it was hard to imagine how anyone could work on the platform in this stunning, down-crashing deluge. Parts of the platform’s edges seemed to have broken off, presumably washed away by the sheer weight of the falling water.

“This was a staging platform for workings within the building beneath us,” Poatas said, “until whatever cave-in or tunnel collapse upstream caused the building before us to become the Fountain Building.”

Poatas sat alongside Oramen behind the rail car’s driver. The seats behind were taken up by Droffo, Oramen’s equerry, and his servant, Neguste Puibive — Oramen could feel the fellow’s bony knees pressing into his back through the seat’s thin back whenever Neguste shifted his long legs. In the last row were the knights Vollird and Baerth. They were his personal guard, specifically chosen by tyl Loesp and most highly recommended and able, he’d been told, but he’d found them somewhat prone to surliness and their presence vaguely offputting. He’d rather have left them behind — he found excuses to whenever he could — but there had been space in the rail car and Poatas had talked darkly of needing all the weight in the little conveyance they could muster to help keep it anchored to the tracks.

“The platform looks in some danger of being washed away,” Oramen shouted, perhaps a little too loudly, to Poatas.

“No doubt it is,” the small, hunched man conceded. “But this will not happen quite yet, one hopes. For now, it provides the best view of the Fountain Building.” He jabbed his stick up at the tall, improbably spray-plumed structure.

“Which is quite a sight,” Oramen conceded, nodding. He gazed up at it in the bronze wash of sunset-gloom. Folds and waves of water came crashing down on the rail car’s roof, a particularly heavy clump slamming off the near invisible material protecting them and causing the whole car to quiver, making it seem that it was about to be thrown off the tracks beneath and hurled across the water-drenched surface of the railing-less platform, doubtless to be dashed to smithereens somewhere far below.

“Three balls of God!” Neguste Puibive blurted. “Sorry, sir,” he muttered.

Oramen smiled and held up one hand, forgiving. Another wave of solid water hit them, making something on one lower side of the seats creak.

“Chire,” Poatas said, tapping the driver on the shoulder with the end of his stick. “I think we might reverse a way.”

Oramen held out one hand. “I thought I might try standing outside for a bit,” he said to Poatas.

Poatas’ eyes went round. “And try is all you’d do, sir. You’d be battered down and swept away before you drew a single breath.”

“And, sir, you’d get awfully wet,” Neguste pointed out.

Oramen smiled and looked out at the maelstrom of crashing water and swirling wind. “Well, it would only be for a moment or two, just to experience something of that fabulous power, that mighty energy.” He shivered with the anticipation of it.

“By that logic, sir,” Droffo said, sitting forward to talk loudly into Oramen’s ear, “one might experience something of the power and energy of a piece of heavy artillery by positioning one’s head over the barrel just as the firing lanyard’s pulled; however, I’d venture to suggest the resulting sensation would not remain long in one’s brain.”

Oramen grinned, looking round at Droffo and then back at Poatas. “My father warned all his children there would be times when even kings must allow themselves overruled. I suppose I must prepare for such moments. I accept the judgement of my parliament here gathered.” He waved one flat hand from Poatas to the driver, who was looking round at them. “Chire — was that your name?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Please do as Mr Poatas says, and let’s retreat somewhat.”

Chire glanced at Poatas, who nodded. The train clanked gears and then went, huffing, slowly backwards in clouds of steam and a smell of hot oil.

Droffo turned round to Vollird and Baerth. “You are well, gentlemen?”

“Never better, Droffo,” Vollird replied. Baerth just grunted.

“You seem so quiet,” Droffo said. “Not sickened by the rocking, are we?”

“It takes rather more,” Vollird told him with an insincere smile. “Though I can sicken well enough with sufficient provocation.”

“Of that I’m sure,” Droffo said, turning away from them again.

“The Falls are, what? Ten thousand strides across?” Oramen asked Poatas as they withdrew.

Poatas nodded. “Bank to bank, straight across; one has to add another two thousand if one follows the curve of the drop-off.”

“And about a thousand strides of that is without water, is that right? Where islands in the stream upriver block the flow.”

“Nearer two thousand strides,” Poatas said. “The figure changes constantly; so much here does. At any one time there might be three or four hundred separate falls within the greater cataract.”

“So many? I read of only two hundred!”

Poatas smiled. “A handful of long-years ago, that was true.” His smile might have looked a little brittle. “The young sir has obviously done his book research, but it has to cede authority to that which actually pertains.”

“Of course!” Oramen yelled as a howling gust of rain-filled wind shook the rail car. “How quickly it all changes, eh!”

“As I say, sir; so much here does.”

The mayoral residence in Rasselle had been sacked and burned during the taking of the city. Oramen’s mother and her new family were staying in the old ducal palace of Hemerje while the repairs and renovations were effected.

Built on a wide fertile plain, the Deldeyn capital had grown according to quite a different plan compared to Pourl on its hill, with broad, tree-lined boulevards separating a variety of extensive enclaves: noble estates, palaces, monasteries, League and Guild trading yards and Public Commons. Rather than city walls, the inner city was ringed with a double set of canals overseen by six Great Towers; tall forts which were the highest buildings in the city and remained so by statute. The citadel, near the Great Palace, was a giant, barrel-shaped barracks; purely a place of last resort with no pretensions towards luxury in the same way that the Great Palace was purely a great royal house with little intrinsic defendability.

Every element of the city had been linked through the boulevards and, originally, by canals — later railways. Before that change, after the Merchants’ Revolt, parts of the boulevards had been built over, leaving mere streets between the enclave walls and the new buildings and a much-reduced central avenue in what had been the centre of each boulevard. Three generations later, some of the nobles still complained.

The ducal palace of Hemerje was an imposing, tall-ceilinged, solid-feeling building with dark, thick, heavy-sounding wooden floors. The compound’s high walls enclosed an ancient garden full of shaped lawns, shady trees, tinkling rills, quiet ponds and an abundant kitchen garden.

Aclyn, the lady Blisk, Oramen’s mother, met him in the hall, rushing up to him and taking him by the shoulders.

“Oramen! My little boy! Can it really be? But look at you! How you’ve grown! So much like your father! Come in, come in; my Masyen would have loved to see you but he is so busy! But you must come to dinner. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after. My Masyen is dying to meet you! And him mayor! Mayor! Really! Of this great city! I ask you; who’d have thought it?”

“Mother,” Oramen said, taking her in his arms. “I’ve longed to see you. How are you?”

“I am well, I am well. Stop now, you silly, or you’ll crush my dress,” she told him, laughing and pressing him away with both hands.

Aclyn was older and heavier than he’d pictured her. He supposed this was inevitable. Her face, though more lined and puffier than it had been both in her portraits and his imagination, seemed to glow. She was dressed as though she was going to a ball, albeit with an apron over her gown. Her auburn hair was piled and powdered in the latest fashion.

“Of course,” she said, “I’m still recovering from little Mertis — that was dreadful; you men, you have no idea. I told my Masyen he was never to touch me again! Though I was only saying that, of course. And the journey here was simply ghastly, it went on for ever, but — this is Rasselle! So much to see and do! So many arcades and shops and receptions and balls! Who would be in low spirits here? Will you eat with us?” she asked. “The rhythm of the days here is so bizarre! We still dine at odd times; what must people think of us? We were about to sit down to lunch in the garden, the weather is so mild. Be our guest, will you?”

“Gladly,” he told her, taking off his gloves and handing those and his travelling cloak to Neguste. They walked along a well-lit hall, the dark floors swaddled in thick carpets. He adjusted his pace to hers, slowing. Servants were carrying heavy-looking boxes out of another room; they stood back to let Oramen and his mother pass. “Books,” Aclyn said, with what sounded like distaste. “All completely incomprehensible, of course, even if one did want to read them. We’re turning the library into another receiving room; we’ll try selling those old things but we’ll just burn the rest. Have you seen tyl Loesp?”

“I thought I might,” Oramen said, peeking into the top of one of the book-filled boxes. “However, I’m told now he has just left Rasselle to visit some distant province. Our communications here would appear still to be erratic.”

“Isn’t he a marvel? Tyl Loesp is such a fine man! So brave and dashing, such authority. I was most impressed. You are in safe hands there, Oramen, my little Prince Regent; he loves you dearly. Do you stay in the Great Palace?”

“I do, though only my baggage has made arrival there so far.”

“So you came here first! How sweet! This way; come and meet your new little brother.”

They walked down to the scented terraces.

Oramen stood on a high tower within the vast gorge of recession formed by the Hyeng-zhar, looking out to another great building which was, if the engineers and excavationers had it right, about to fall, finally and fatally undermined by the surging water piled frothing round its base, much of it descending from the Fountain Building nearby — this would be the second construction whose fate that bizarre edifice had hastened. The building he stood on was thin and dagger-shaped, allegedly still well founded; the little circular platform beneath him sat at the top like a finger-ring lowered on to the very tip of the dagger. The building he was looking at was tall and thin too, but flat like a sword blade, its edges glinting in the tenuous, grey-blue light of Kiesestraal.

The fading star was almost the only light left now; a thin band of sky, just a lining across the horizon, shone to farpole, in the direction of Rasselle. To facing, where Clissens and Natherley had disappeared some days earlier, only the most imaginative eye could detect any remnant of their passing. A few people, perhaps with slightly different eyesight to the norm, claimed they could still glimpse a hint of red left over there, but nobody else did.

Still, Oramen thought, one’s eyes adjusted, or one’s entire mind did. The view was dull under Kiesestraal’s meagre light, but most things remained visible. The twinned effect of Clissens and Natherley being in the sky together had been to make the weather oppressively hot at their zenith, he’d heard, and the light had been too much for many eyes to bear. They might be better off under this more rationed portion of illumination. He shivered, pulled his collar up as a biting wind snagged itself round the tower’s thin summit.

There had been snow, though it had not lain. The river was cold, ice starting to form upstream in the quieter pools along its banks. Further upstream, at its source, reports had it that the Higher Sulpine Sea — the first part of the river system to experience the complete disappearance of the two Rollstars from its skies — was beginning to freeze over.

The air was rarely still now, even well away from the Falls themselves, where the stupendous weight of falling water created its own crazed turmoil of forever swirling gusts. These could and did focus themselves into lateral tornadoes capable of sweeping men and equipment, whole sections of railway track and entire trains of carriages away with almost no warning.

Now, as the great wide strip of land on the Ninth denied all but Kiesestraal’s light gradually cooled while the rest of the continent about it remained temperate, winds blew nearly constantly, whining gears in the vast engine of the atmosphere as it attempted to balance chilled and heated parcels of air, creating gales that lasted for days on end and great sandstorms that lifted whole landscapes of sand, silt and dust from hundreds of kilometres away and threw them across the sky, robbing the land of what little light there was and hindering work on the Falls’ excavations as the generators, power lines and lights struggled to pierce the encompassing gloom and machines ground to a stop, workings jammed with dust. The larger sand blizzards were capable of dumping so much material into the river upstream that — according to the latest storm’s direction and the colour of the desert from which it had lifted its cargo of swirling grains — the waters of the cataract turned dun, grey, yellow, pink or dark, blood red.

Today there were no veils of sand or even ordinary cloud, the day might have been dark as night. The river still plunged over the cap rock and into the gorge in an ocean of falling and its roaring shook the rock and air, though Oramen had noticed that in a sense he hardly heard the noise now and had quickly become used to modulating his voice to the right level to be heard without thinking about it. Even in his quarters, a small compound in the Settlement a kilometre from the gorge, he could hear the voice of the cataract.

His accommodation, formerly that of the Archipontine of the Hyeng-zharia Mission — the man in charge of the monks who had chosen death rather than exile from their posts — was formed from several luxuriously appointed railway carriages surrounded by a set of sturdy but movable barbed walls which could be shifted across the sands and scrub to keep pace with the carriages as they were needed; a whole system of broad-gauge tracks lay beside the gorge and formed the most organised and disciplined district of the mobile city. As the gorge recessed and the Falls moved upstream, more tracks were laid ahead and every fifty days or so the official part of the Settlement, almost all of it on carriages and rail trucks, moved to follow the cataract’s unstoppable progress upriver. The remainder of the city — the unofficial districts of merchants, miners and labourers and all their associated supporting crews of bar people, bankers, suppliers, prostitutes, hospitals, preachers, entertainers and guards — moved in its own spasmodic jerks, roughly in time with the Settlement’s bureaucratic heart.

Oramen’s compound always lay near the canal that was forever being dug along the bank parallel with the river, ahead of the Falls’ retreat, keeping pace with the railway tracks. The canal provided drinking and toilet water for the Settlement and power for the various hydraulic systems which lowered and raised men and equipment into and out of the gorge, and removed plunder. At night, on the odd occasions when the winds were stilled, Oramen thought he could hear, even above the distant thunder of the Falls, the canal’s quiet gurglings.

How quickly he had become used to this strange, forever temporary place. He had missed it, bizarrely, during the five days he had spent in Rasselle and the four days it had taken travelling there and back. It was something like the effect of the cataract’s stupendous voice; that vast, never-ending roar. You got so used to it so quickly that when you left the place, its absence seemed like an emptiness inside.

He perfectly understood why so many of the people who came here never left, not for long, not without always wanting to come back again. He wondered if he ought to leave before he too became habituated to the Hyeng-zhar as though to some fierce drug. He wondered if he really wanted to.

The mist still climbed into the slate skies. The vapours curled and twisted round the exposed towers — most plumbly upright, many tipped, just as many fallen — of the Nameless City. Beyond the doomed height of the flat-bladed building, the Fountain Building still stood like some insane ornament from a god’s garden, scattering slow billows of water all around it. On the far side of that building, visible now and again through the spray and mist, could be seen the horizon-flat, dark-skirted edge which marked the start of the great plateau situated halfway up the height of the taller buildings and which many of the Falls’ scholars and experts thought marked the centre of the long-buried alien city. A wall of water tipped over that edge, falling like a pleated curtain of dark cream to the base of the gorge, raising yet more spray and mist.

As Oramen watched, something flashed dim blue behind the waters, lighting them up from inside. He was startled for a second. The explosions of the quarriers and blasters were usually only heard not seen; when they were visible in the darkness the flash was yellow-white, sometimes orange if a charge did not explode fully. Then he realised it was probably a cutting crew; one of the more recent discoveries the Deldeyn had made was how to slice through certain metals using electric arcs. This could produce ghostly blue flashes like the one he’d just seen.

On the other hand, the excavationers and plunderers — an easily unnerved and highly superstitious bunch at the best of times, by all accounts — had reported seeing even more strange and unusual things than they normally did, now that the only external light came from Kiesestraal and the focus of so much of their work and attention had shifted to the buildings under the kilometres-wide plaza, where it would have been dark enough even had the days been of normal brightness.

Working in that doubled darkness, by crude, unreliable lights, in an environment that could change at any moment and kill you in so many sudden ways, surrounded by the ghostly remains of buildings of near unimaginable antiquity, the wonder was that men ventured there at all, not that they experienced or imagined anything out-of-the-ordinary. This was an out-of-the-ordinary place, Oramen thought. Few places he’d heard of were more so.

He raised the heavy binoculars to his eyes and searched the view for people. Whenever you looked, wherever you looked carefully enough, the Falls — so vast, so impersonal, so furiously of a scale indifferent to that of humanity — proved to be swarming with human figures, animals and activity. He searched in vain, though. The field glasses were the best available, with great wide lenses at the front to gather as much light as possible, so that, if anything, they made the view lighter than it really was, but even so it was still too dim to see in sufficient detail to make out individual humans.

“Here you are! Sir, you give us the slip and the conniptions in equal measure, running off like that.” Neguste Puibive arrived on the viewing platform holding various bags and a large umbrella. He leaned back to the doorway. “He’s here!” he shouted down the stairs. “Earl Droffo also in attendance, sir,” he told Oramen. “Happily not Messrs V & B, though.” Oramen smiled. Neguste was no more a friend to Vollird and Baerth than he was.

Oramen had told both knights that their presence was unnecessary. He didn’t really see the need for such closely dedicated guarding; the main dangers posed in the gorge itself were not caused by people and he just didn’t go into the parts of the Settlement where the violence happened. Still, the two men accompanied him, sullenly, whenever he didn’t take particular care to lose them, claiming as excuse that if anything did happen to Oramen, tyl Loesp would crack their skulls like eggs.

Oramen spent quite a lot of time avoiding people he found disagreeable; General Foise, who was in overall charge of the security and guarding of the Settlement and the Falls, was one such. The man Fanthile had described as entirely tyl Loesp’s was in no way sinister and gave nary a hint that he was anything less than a loyal functionary of the army and the state. He was, however, boring. He was slight, short-sighted behind thick glasses, had a thin, never-smiling face and a quiet, monotonous voice. He was nondescript in most other ways and seemed more like a merchant’s chief clerk than a true general, though his record in the recent wars had been creditable if unspectacular. The junior officers around him were similar; efficient but uninspiring, managerial rather than swashbuckling. They spent a lot of time working on plans and contingencies and determining how best to guard the highest number of sites with the lowest number of men. Oramen was happy to leave them to it, and tended to keep out of their way.

“You must stop sprinting off like that, sir,” Neguste said, opening the large umbrella and holding it over Oramen. There was a fair bit of spray around, Oramen supposed. “Every time I lose sight of you I think you’ve fallen off a building or something, sir.”

“I wanted to see this,” Oramen said, nodding at the great flat building across the mist-strewn waste of frothing waters. “The engineers say it could go at any moment.”

Neguste peered forward. “Won’t fall this way, will it, sir?”

“Apparently not.”

“Hope not, sir.”

Between the blade-building and the Fountain Building, another flash of blue lit up the curtain of water falling from the vast plaza set across the buildings beyond. “See that, sir?”

“Yes. Second one since I’ve been here.”

“Ghosts, sir,” Neguste said emphatically. “There’s proof.”

Oramen looked briefly round at him. “Ghosts,” he said. “Really?”

“Sure as fate, sir. I’ve been talking to the tinks, scrimps, blasters and the rest, sir.” Oramen knew that Neguste did indeed frequent the notoriously dangerous bars, smoke tents and music halls of the Settlement’s less salubrious areas, thus far without injury. “They say there’s all sorts of terrible, weird, uncanny things in there under that plaza thing.”

“What sort of things?” Oramen asked. He always liked to hear the specifics of such charges.

“Oh,” Neguste said, shaking his head and sucking in his cheeks, “terrible, weird, strange things, sir. Things that shouldn’t be seeing the light of day. Or even night,” he said, looking round the darkened sky. “It’s a fact, sir.”

“Is it now?” Oramen said. He nodded at Droffo as the other man appeared. Droffo kept to the inside of the platform, next to the wall; he was not good with heights. “Droff. Well done. Your turn to hide. I’ll count to fifty.”

“Sir,” the earl said with a weak smile, coming to stand behind him. Droffo was a fine fellow in many ways and possessed of a dry sense of humour of his own, but rarely found Oramen’s jokes funny.

Oramen leant on the platform parapet and looked over the edge. “Not that far down, Droff.”

“Far enough, prince,” Droffo said, looking up and away as Oramen leaned further out. “Wish you wouldn’t do that, sir.”

“Me too, for all it may be worth, sirs,” Neguste said, looking from one man to another. A gust of wind threatened to pull him off his feet.

“Neguste,” Oramen said, “put that contraption down before you get blown off the damn building. The spray’s mostly coming upwards anyway; it’s no use.”

“Right-oh, sir,” Neguste said, collapsing and furling the umbrella. “Have you heard of all the strange occurrences, sir?” he asked Droffo.

“What strange occurrences?” the earl asked.

Neguste leaned towards him. “Great sea monsters moving in the waters upstream from the Falls, sirs, upsetting boats and tearing up anchors. Others seen downstream, too, moving where no boat could ever go. Spirits and ghosts and strange appearances and people being found frozen into stone or turned to no more dust than you could hold in the palm of one hand, sir, and others losing their minds so that they don’t recognise nobody who is even their nearest and dearest and just wander the ruins until they step off an edge, or people who see something in the ruins and excavations that makes them walk to the nearest electric light and stare into it until their eyes go blind, or stick their hands in to touch the spark and die all jerky, smoking and flaming.”

Oramen had heard all this. He might, he realised, have contributed a strange occurrence of his own.

Just ten hours earlier he’d been woken from the middle of his sleep by a strange, insistent little noise. He’d turned the cover on the candle-lamp and looked round the carriage in the newly increased light, trying to trace the source of the trilling sound. He hadn’t heard any noise quite like it before. It sounded like some curious, metallic bird call.

He noticed a soft green light blinking on and off, not in the sleeping compartment itself but through the ajar door into the carriage’s study and reception chamber. Xessice, the girl he’d favoured most since he’d been here in the Settlement, stirred but did not wake. He slipped out of bed, shucking on a robe and taking his gun from underneath the head bolster.

The light and the sound were coming from a delicately ornate and beautifully turned World model sitting on the desk in the study. It was one of the few ornaments Oramen had kept from when the carriage had belonged to the Archipontine; he had admired it for its exquisitely executed fashioning and been almost physically unable to throw the thing out, even though he suspected it was in some sense a foreign religious artifact and therefore not wholly suitable for a good WorldGod-respecting Sarlian to possess.

Now the object was emitting this strange, alien-sounding warble, and a green light was pulsing from its interior. It had changed, too; it had been reconfigured, or it had reconfigured itself so that the half-open cut-away parts of each of the shells had aligned, creating a sort of spiky hemisphere with the green light pulsing at its heart. He looked round the study — the green light gave quite sufficient illumination for him to see by — then quietly closed the door to the sleeping chamber and sat down on the seat in front of the desk. He was thinking about prodding the green central light with the barrel of the gun when the light blinked off and was replaced by a soft circle of gently changing colours which he took to be some sort of screen. He’d sat back when this had happened; he leant tentatively forward again and a soft, androgynous voice said, “Hello? To whom do I speak? Are you Sarl, yes? Prince Oramen, I am warned, is so?”

“Who is talking?” Oramen answered. “Who wishes to know?”

“A friend. Or, with more accuracy, one who would be friend, if so was allowed.”

“I have known many friends. Not all were as they might have seemed.”

“Which of us is? We are all mistaken against. There are so many barriers about us. We are too separated. I seek to remove some of those barriers.”

“If you would be my friend it might help to know your name. From your voice I am not even sure you are male.”

“Call me Friend, then. My own identity is complicated and would only confuse. You are the prince of Sarl called Oramen, are you?”

“Call me Listener,” Oramen suggested. “Titles, names; they can mislead, as we seem already to have agreed.”

“I see. Well, Listener, I express my fine good wishes and utmost benevolence to you, in hope of understanding and mutual interest. These things, please accept.”

Oramen filled the pause. “Thank you. I appreciate your good wishes.”

“Now, that clarified, our anchor embedded, as it were, I would talk with you to give you a warning.”

“Would you now?”

“I would. In this, I do; there is caution needed in the burrowings you make.”

“The burrowings?” Oramen asked, frowning at the softly glowing screen. The colours continued to shift and change.

“Yes, your excavatory workings in the great city. These must be approached with caution. Humbly, we’d petition to be allowed to advise on such. Not all that is hidden from you is so hidden from us.”

“I think too much is hidden here. Who would you be? What ‘us’ do we talk about? If you would advise us, begin by advising who you might be.”

“Those who would be your friends, Listener,” the asexual voice said smoothly. “I approach you because we believe you are untrammelled. You, Listener, are believed to be capable of ploughing your own course, unrestricted to the furrows of others. You have freedom to move, to turn about from incorrect beliefs and unfortunate slanders directed against those who would only help, not hinder. They mislead themselves who accept the traducement of others by those who have only their own narrowed interests at heart. Sometimes those who seem most funnelled are most free, and those who are most—”

“Hold there, let me guess; you are from the Oct, are you not?”

“Ha!” the voice said, then there was a pause. “That would be mistaken, good Listener. You doubtless think I am of that kind because it might appear that I seek to deceive you. This is an understandable mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. Oh, their lies go deep, to the core, they are most fastly tunnelled. We have much to untangle here.”

“Show your face, creature,” Oramen said. He was becoming more and more sure of the kind of being he was talking to here.

“Sometimes we must prepare ourselves for important meetings. Ways must be smoothed, gradients negotiated. A blunt, front-on approach might suffer rebuff while a more curved and gentle path, though seeming less honestly direct, will break through finally to success and mutual understanding and reward.”

“Show your face, being,” Oramen said, “or I’ll think you a monster that dares not.”

“There are so many levels of translation, Listener. Are we really to say that a face is required to be a moral creature? Must goodness or evil be configured about eating-parts? Is this a rule that persists throughout the great emptiness surrounding us? Many are the—”

“Tell me now who you are or I swear I’ll put a bullet straight through this device.”

“Listener! I swear too; I am your Friend. We are! We seek only to warn you of the dangers—”

“Deny you are Aultridia!” Oramen said, jumping up from the chair.

“Why would any deny being one of that misunderstood, maligned race? So cruelly slandered—”

Oramen pointed the gun at the World model, then put it up again. The shot would terrify Xessice and doubtless bring Neguste hurtling through from his quarters, tripping over himself, and probably wake or galvanise any nearby guards.

“…by those who theft our very purpose! Listener! Prince! Do no violence! I beg you! This prefigures what we wish to warn you about, talismans our worries that—”

He clicked the safety catch, held the gun by the barrel and brought the butt whacking down on the exposed centre of the World model. It crumpled and shot sparks; some tiny pieces flew skittering across the surface of the desk, though still the cloudy screen pulsed with slow strange colours and the voice, though weakened now, warbled on, incomprehensible. He hit it hard again. It seemed wrong to strike a model of any Shellworld, wrong to destroy something so beautiful, but not as wrong as allowing himself to be talked to by an Aultridian. He shivered at the very thought and slammed the gun down again on the still glowing World model. A blaze of tiny sparks and a puff of smoke and it was finally silent and dark. He waited for Xessice or Neguste to appear, or make some noise, but neither did. After a few moments he lit a candle then found a bin, pushed the smashed World model into it and poured a jug of water over the remains.

He went back to bed beside the gently snoring Xessice. He lay awake unsleeping, waiting until it was time for breakfast, staring into the darkness. By God, they had been proved even more right to have smashed the Deldeyn. And he no longer wondered at the mass suicide of the brethren, sending themselves over the Falls. There were rumours in the Settlement that it had not been suicide; some people even spoke of a few surviving monks who’d been washed up far downstream with tales of treachery and murder. He had started to doubt tyl Loesp’s account of mass suicide, but he doubted it no longer.

The wonder was that the wretches had lived with themselves at all rather than that they had chosen death, if this was what they had buried in their conscience all the time. An alliance with the Aultridia! Contact with them at the very least. With the foulness that conspired against the WorldGod itself! He wondered what conspiracies, lies and secrets had passed between the Archipontine of the Hyeng-zharia Mission and whatever Aultridian master had been on the other end of the communication channel that ended at the World model he had just destroyed.

Had that hideous race even directed matters here at the Falls? The monks of the Mission had controlled the workings, supervised and licensed all the excavations and largely policed them; certainly they had kept a tight hand upon the main, official excavations. Had the Mission been in effect controlled by the Aultridia? Well, they were in control no longer, and would remain so disempowered as long as he had any sort of say in matters. He wondered who to tell about what had passed between him and the nameless — and no doubt faceless — Aultridian he had spoken to. The very thought turned his stomach. Should he tell Poatas, or General Foise? Poatas would probably find a way to blame Oramen for what had happened; he’d be horrified he’d broken the communication device. Oramen doubted General Foise would even understand.

He’d tell nobody, not for now.

He considered taking the World model to the cliff above the gorge and throwing it in, but was concerned that it would just be dredged up again by some collector. In the end he had Neguste carry the thing to the nearest foundry and had them melt it down while he watched. The foundrymen were amazed at the temperatures required to slag it, and even then there was still some unmelted debris left, both floating above the resulting liquid and sunk to its base. Oramen ordered the whole split into a dozen different ingots and delivered to him as soon as they’d cooled.

That morning, on his way to watch the demise of the blade-building, he’d thrown some into the gorge. He consigned the rest to latrines.

“Well, it all sounds most unpleasant,” Droffo said. He shook his head. “You hear all sorts of ridiculous stories; the workers are full of them. Too much drink, too little learning.”

“No, more than that, sir,” Neguste told him. “These are facts.”

“I think I might dispute that,” Droffo said.

“All the same, sir, facts is facts. That itself’s a fact.”

“Well, let’s go and see for ourselves, shall we?” Oramen said, looking round at the other two. “Tomorrow. We’ll take the narrow-gauge and cableways and britches boys or whatever we need to take and we’ll go and have a look under the great ghostly, spooky plaza. Yes? Tomorrow. We’ll do it then.”

“Well,” Droffo said, looking up into the sky again. “If you feel you have to, prince; however—”

“Begging pardon, sir,” Neguste said, nodding behind Oramen. “Building’s falling over.”

“What?” Oramen said, turning back again.

The great blade of a building was indeed falling. It pivoted, turning fractionally towards them, still moving slowly at first, whirling gradually through the air, the edge of its summit parting the mists and clouds of spray and making them whorl around its surfaces and sharpnesses as it leant diagonally away from the plaza and the main face of the waterfall behind, picking up speed and turning further like a man starting to fall on his face but then twisting to lead with one shoulder. One long edge came down, hitting the spray and the sandbanks beneath like a blade chopping through a child’s dam on a beach, the rest of the building following on to it, parts finally starting to crumple as the whole structure slammed into the waves, raising enormous pale fans of muddy water to half the height of their own vantage point.

Finally, some sound arrived; a terrible creaking, tearing, screaming noise that forced its way out of the encompassing roar of the Falls, topped with a great extra rumble that pulsed through the air, seemed to shake the building beneath their feet and briefly outbellowed the voice of the Hyeng-zhar itself. The poised, half-collapsed building fell over one last time, settling from its side on to its back, collapsing into the chaotic waste of piling waves with another great surge of foaming, outrushing waters.

Oramen watched, fascinated. Immediately the first shocked pulse of waves fell washing back from the heights around the impact site the waters began to rearrange themselves to accommodate the new obstruction, piling up behind the shattered hulk of the fallen building and surging round its edges while foam-creamed waves went dancing backwards, slapping into others still falling forwards, their combined shapes climbing and bursting as though in some wild celebration of destruction. Nearby sand bars that had been five metres above the tallest waves were now sunk beneath them; those ten metres above the waters were being swiftly eroded as the swirling currents cut carving into them, their lives now counted in minutes. Looking straight down, Oramen could see that the base of the building they were in was now almost surrounded by the backed-up surge of spray and foam.

He turned to the others. Neguste was still staring at where the building had fallen. Even Droffo looked rapt, standing away from the wall, vertigo temporarily forgotten.

Oramen took another glance towards the waters surging round their tower. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’d best go.”

23. Liveware Problem

“Sister?” Ferbin said as the woman in the plain blue shift walked up to him. It was Djan Seriy. He hadn’t seen her for fifteen of their years but he knew it was her. So changed, though! A woman, not a girl, and a wise, utterly poised and collected woman at that. Ferbin knew enough about authority and charisma to recognise it when he saw it. No mere princess, little Djan Seriy; rather a very queen among them.

“Ferbin,” she said, stopping a stride away and smiling warmly. She nodded. “How good to see you again. Are you well? You look different.”

He shook his head. “Sister, I am well.” He could feel his throat closing up. “Sister!” he said, and threw himself at her, wrapping her in his arms and hooking his chin over her right shoulder. He felt her arms close over his back. It was like hugging a layer of soft leather over a figure made of hardwood; she felt astoundingly powerful; unshakeable. She patted his back with one hand, cupped the back of his head with the other. Her chin settled on his shoulder.

“Ferbin, Ferbin, Ferbin,” she whispered.

“Where exactly are we?” Ferbin asked.

“In the middle of the hub engine unit,” Hippinse told him. Since meeting with Djan Seriy, Hippinse’s manner had changed somewhat; he seemed much less manic and voluble, more composed and measured.

“Are we boarding a ship, then, sir?” Holse asked.

“No, this is a habitat,” Hippinse said. “All Culture habitats apart from planets have engines. Have had for nearly a millennium now. So we can move them. Just in case.”

They had come here straight after meeting, back up one of the tubes to the very centre of the little wheel-shaped habitat. They floated again — seemingly weightless — within the narrow but quiet, gently lit and pleasantly perfumed spaces of the habitat’s bulging centre.

Another corridor and some rolling, sliding doors had taken them to this place where there were no windows or screens and the circular wall looked odd, like oil spilled on water, colours ever shifting. It appeared soft somehow, but — when Ferbin touched the surface — felt hard as iron, though strangely warm. A small, floating cylindrical object had accompanied Djan Seriy. It looked rather like a plain-sword handle with no sword attached. It had produced five more little floating things no bigger than a single joint in one of Ferbin’s smallest fingers. These had started to glow as they’d entered the corridor and were now their only source of light.

The section of corridor they were floating in — he, Holse, Hippinse and Djan Seriy — was perhaps twenty metres long and blank at one end. Ferbin watched as the doorway they had entered by closed off and slid in towards them.

“Inside an engine?” Ferbin said, glancing at Djan Seriy. The massive plug of door continued to slide down the corridor towards them. A glittering silver sphere the size of a man’s head appeared at the far end of the ever-shortening tube. It started flickering.

Djan Seriy took his hand. “It is not an engine relying on any sort of compression,” she told him. She nodded at the still slowly advancing end of the corridor. “That is not a piston. It is part of the engine unit which slid out to allow us to enter here and is now sliding back in to provide us with privacy. That thing at the other end” — she indicated the pulsing silvery sphere — “is removing some of the air at the same time so that the pressure in here remains acceptable. All to the purpose of letting us speak without being overheard.” She squeezed his hand, glanced around. “It is hard to explain, but where we are now exists in a manner that makes it impossible for the Morthanveld to eavesdrop upon us.”

“The engine exists in four dimensions,” Hippinse told Ferbin. “Like a Shellworld. Closed, even to a ship.”

Ferbin and Holse exchanged looks.

“As I said,” Djan Seriy told them. “Hard to explain.” The wall had stopped moving towards them. They were now floating in a space perhaps two metres in diameter and five long. The silvery sphere had stopped pulsing.

“Ferbin, Mr Holse,” Djan Seriy said, sounding formal. “You’ve met Mr Hippinse. This object here is the drone Turminder Xuss.” She nodded at the floating sword handle.

“Pleased to meet you,” it said.

Holse stared at it. Well, he supposed this was no more strange than some of the Oct and Nariscene things they’d been treating as rational, talk-to-able persons since before they’d even left Sursamen. “Good-day,” he said. Ferbin made a throat-clearing grunt that might have been a similar greeting.

“Think of it as my familiar,” Djan Seriy said, catching the look on Ferbin’s face.

“You’re some sort of wizardess, then, ma’am?” Holse asked.

“You might say that, Mr Holse. Now.” Djan Seriy glanced at the silvery sphere and it disappeared. She looked at the floating sword handle. “We are thoroughly isolated and we are all free of any devices that might report anything that happens here. We are, for the moment, existing on the air we have around us, so let’s not waste words. Ferbin,” she said, looking at him. “Briefly, if you would, what brings you here?”

The silvery sphere came back before he was finished. Even keeping it as succinct as he could, Ferbin’s account had taken a while. Holse had filled in parts, too. The air had grown stuffy and very warm. Ferbin had had to loosen his clothing as he told his story, and Holse was sweating. Hippinse and Djan Seriy looked unbothered.

Djan Seriy held up her hand to stop Ferbin a moment before the sphere appeared. Ferbin had assumed she could summon it at will, though later he discovered that she was just very good at counting time in her head and knew when it would reappear. The air cooled and freshened, then the sphere disappeared again. His sister nodded and Ferbin completed his tale.

“Oramen still lived, last I heard,” she said, once he had finished. She looked stern, Ferbin thought; the wise, knowing smile that had played across her face was gone now, her jaw set in a tight line, lips compressed. Her reaction to the manner of their father’s death had been expressed at first not in words but in a brief widening of her eyes, then gaze narrowing. It was so little in a way, and yet Ferbin had the impression he had just set something unstoppable, implacable in motion. She had, he realised, become formidable. He remembered how solid and strong she had felt, and was glad she was on his side. “Tyl Loesp really did this?” she said suddenly, looking at him directly, almost fiercely.

Ferbin felt a terrible pressure from those clear, startlingly dark eyes. He felt himself gulp as he said, “Yes. On my life.”

She continued to study him for a moment longer, then relaxed a little, looking down and nodding. She glanced at the thing she had called a drone and frowned briefly, then looked down again. Djan Seriy sat cross-legged in her long blue shift, floating effortlessly, as did the black-clad Hippinse. Ferbin and Holse just floated feeling ungainly, limbs spread so that when they bumped into the sides they could fend themselves off again. Ferbin felt odd in the absence of gravity; puffed up, as though his face was flushed.

He studied his sister while — he guessed — she thought. There was an almost unnatural stillness about her, a sense of immovable solidity beyond the human.

Djan Seriy looked up. “Very well.” She nodded at Hippinse. “Mr Hippinse here represents a ship that should be able to get us back to Sursamen with some dispatch.” Ferbin and Holse looked at the other man.

Hippinse turned his smile from them to Djan Seriy. “At your disposal, dear lady,” he said. A little oilily, Ferbin thought. He had decided he did not like the fellow, though his new calmness was welcome.

“I think we have little choice but to take this offered help, and ship,” Djan Seriy said. “Our urgencies multiply.”

“Happy to be of service,” Hippinse said, still smiling annoyingly.

“Ferbin,” Djan Seriy said, leaning towards him, “Mr Holse; I was returning home anyway, having heard of our father’s death, though of course not of its manner. However, Mr Hippinse brought news regarding the Oct which has meant that I’ve been asked to make my visit what you might call an officially authorised one. One of Mr Hippinse’s colleagues contacted me earlier with an offer of help. I turned that first offer down but on arrival here I discovered a message from those one might term my employers asking me to take a professional interest in events on Sursamen, so I have had to change my mind.” She glanced at Hippinse, who grinned, first at her, then at the two Sarl men. “My employers have even seen fit to send a representation of my immediate superior to the ship to assist in planning the mission,” she added.

A personality construct of Jerle Batra had been emplaced within the Liveware Problem’s Mind. If that wasn’t a sign that the ship was a secret asset of SC, she didn’t know what would be, though they were still denying this officially.

“Something may be amiss on Sursamen,” Djan Seriy said. “Something of potentially still greater importance than King Hausk’s death, however terrible that may be to us. Something that involves the Oct. What it is, we do not know.” She nodded to Ferbin. “Whether this is linked in any way to our father’s murder, we also do not know.” She looked at Ferbin and Holse in turn. “Returning to Sursamen might be dangerous for you both in any event. Returning with me may be much more dangerous. I may attract more trouble than you’d have discovered yourselves and I will not be able to guarantee your safety, or even guarantee that I can make it my priority. I am going back, now, on business. I shall have duties. Do you understand? You do not have to accompany me. You would be welcome to stay here or be taken to some other part of the Culture. There would be no dishonour in that.”

“Sister,” Ferbin said, “we go with you.” He glanced at Holse, who nodded sharply.

Anaplian nodded. She turned to Hippinse. “How soon can you get us to Sursamen?”

“Five hours in-shuttle to clear Syaung-un and synch the pickup. After that; seventy-eight hours to a stop over Sursamen Surface.”

Djan Seriy frowned. “What can you cut off that?”

Hippinse looked alarmed. “Nothing. That’s already engine-damage speed. Need an overhaul.”

“Damage them a bit more. Book a bigger overhaul.”

“If I damage them any more I risk breaking them altogether and leaving us reduced to warp, or limping in on burst units.”

“What about a crash-stop?”

“Five hours off journey time. But bang goes your stealthy approach. Everybody’ll know we’re there. Might as well spell it out with sunspots.”

“Still, option it.” She frowned. “Bring the ship in afap and snap us off the shuttle. What’s that save?”

“Three hours off the front. Adds one to journey time; wrong direction. But a high-speed Displ—”

“Do it, please.” She nodded briskly. The silvery sphere reappeared. The door that had slid towards them started to slide back again almost immediately. Djan Seriy calmly unfolded herself and looked round the three men. “We speak no more of any of this until we’re on the ship itself, agreed?” They all nodded. Djan Seriy pushed herself away towards the retreating plug of door. “Let’s go.”

They were being given exactly ten minutes to get themselves together. Ferbin and Holse found a place nearby in the hub section that had a tiny amount of gravity, windows looking out to the vast, slowly twisting coils of the great Nestworld of Syaung-un which surrounded them, and a little bar area with machines that dispensed food and drink. Djan Seriy’s drone thing went with them and showed them how everything worked. When they dithered it made choices for them. They were still expressing amazement at how good it all tasted when it was time to go.

The Displace may show up. A crash-stop certainly will, the personality construct of Jerle Batra told Anaplian as she watched first the little micro-Orbital 512th Degree FifthStrand, and then Syaung-un itself, shrink in size on the module’s main screen. The two structures shrank at very different rates, for all that the little twelve-seat craft they were in, a shuttle off the Liveware Problem, was accelerating as fast as Morthanveld statutes allowed. 512th Degree FifthStrand disappeared almost immediately, a tiny cog in a vast machine. The Nestworld stayed visible for a long time. At first it seemed almost to grow bigger, even more of it coming into view as the shuttle powered away, before, along with its central star, Syaung-un finally started to shrink.

Too bad, Djan Seriy replied. If our Morthanveld friends are insulted, then so be it. We’ve pitty-patted round the Morthanveld long enough. I grow tired of it.

You assume a deal of authority here, Seriy Anaplian, the construct — currently housed in the shuttle’s AI matrix — told her. It is not for you to make or remake Culture foreign policy.

Djan Seriy settled in her seat at the back of the shuttle. From here she could see everybody.

I am a Culture citizen, she replied. I thought it was entirely my right and duty.

You are one Culture citizen.

Well, in any case, Jerle Batra, if my elder brother is to be believed, my other brother’s life is in severe danger, the cold-blooded murderer of my father — a potential tyrant — is lord of not one but two of Sursamen’s levels, and, of course, the majority of the Oct front-line fleet may be converging on my home planet, for reasons still unclear. I think I am entitled to a little leeway here. Talking of; what is the latest on the Oct ships? The ones that may or may not be heading for Sursamen.

We’re picking up nothing untoward so far, last I heard. I suggest you update when you’re on the Liveware Problem.

You aren’t coming with us?

My presence, even in construct form, might make this look too official. I won’t be coming with you.

Oh. This probably meant the construct was going to be wiped from the matrix of the shuttle, too. It would be a kind of death. The construct didn’t sound too upset about it.

You do trust the Liveware Problem, I assume? she sent.

We have no choice, Batra replied. It is all we have available.

You are still denying it is officially SC?

The ship is what it says it is, Batra told her. However, to return to the subject: the trouble is that we don’t have any ships in the relevant volumes to be able to check on what the Oct are really doing. The Morthanveld and Nariscene do have the ships and don’t seem to have spotted anything either, but then they’re not looking.

Perhaps it is time we told them to start looking.

Perhaps it is. It’s being discussed.

I’m sure. Would this involve lots of Minds blathering?

It would.

Suggest that they blather quicker. One other thing.

Yes, Djan Seriy?

I am switching on all my systems again. All those that I can, at least. Those I can’t reinstigate myself I’ll ask the Liveware Problem to help with. Always assuming, of course, that it is familiar with SC procedures.

You are not being ordered to do this, Batra replied, ignoring what might have been sarcasm.

Yes, I know.

Personally, I think it’s a wise move.

So do I.

“Didn’t you notice, sir? Never breathed, not for the whole time we were in there, save for when the glittery thing was there. When it wasn’t, she didn’t breathe at all. Amazing.” Holse was speaking very quietly, aware that the lady concerned was only a couple of rows behind them in the shuttle. Hippinse was a row in front, seemingly fast asleep. Holse frowned. “You quite sure she’s really your sister, sir?”

Ferbin only remembered thinking how still Djan Seriy had seemed in the strange tube of corridor back on the little wheel-habitat. “Oh, she is my sister, Holse.” He glanced back, wondering why she’d chosen to sit there, away from him. She nodded at him in a distracted way; he smiled and turned away. “At any rate, I must take her to be,” he told Holse. “As she, in return, must take me at my word regarding the fate of our father.”

Oh yes, I can feel you doing it, the drone sent. She’d just told the machine she was re-fanging herself, switching back on all those systems that she was able to. Batra happy with that?

Happy enough.

I wonder how “fanged” the Liveware Problem is? the drone sent. The machine was lodged between Anaplian’s neck and the seat. Its appearance had changed again; when they’d arrived on the 512th Degree FifthStrand facility it had morphed its surface and puffed out a little to look like a kind of baton-drone.

Oh, I think it might be quite fanged, Djan Seriy sent. The more I’ve thought about it, the more strange it’s come to seem that the ship described itself as “Absconded”.

That struck me as odd at the time, too, Turminder Xuss sent. However, I put it down to elderly ship eccentricity.

It is an old ship, Anaplian agreed. But I do not think it is demented. However, certainly it is old enough to have earned its retirement. It is a veteran. Superlifters at the start of the Idiran War were the fastest ships the Culture had and the closest things to warships that were not actually warships. They held the line and took a preponderant share of the punishment. Few survived. So it should be an honoured citizen. It should have the equivalent of medals, pension, free travel. However, it is describing itself as Absconded, so maybe it refused to do something it was supposed to do. Like be disarmed.

Hmm, the drone replied, obviously unconvinced. Jerle Batra does not clarify its status?

Correct. Anaplian’s eyes narrowed as the few immediately available systems she could control just by thinking about it came back on line and started checking themselves. So it has to be an old SC machine. Or something very similar.

I suppose we should hope so.

We should, she agreed. Do you have any more to add?

Not for now. Why?

I’m going to leave you for a bit, Turminder. I should go and talk to my brother.

24. Steam, Water, Ice, Fire

Tyl Loesp found the Boiling Sea of Yakid a disappointment. It did indeed boil, in the centre of the great crater that held it, but it was not really that impressive, even if the resulting steams and mists did indeed “assault the very vault of heaven” (some ancient poet — he was glad he couldn’t remember which one; every forgotten lesson was a victory over the tutors who’d tried so hard, under the express instructions of his father, to beat the knowledge into him). With the wind in the wrong direction all the Boiling Sea had to offer was the sensation of being in a thick bank of fog; hardly a phenomenon worth walking out of doors to sample, let alone travelling for many days through frankly undistinguished countryside.

The Hyeng-zhar was far more striking and magnificent.

Tyl Loesp had seen the Boiling Sea from the shore, from the water in a pleasure steamer (as he was now), and from the air on a lyge. In each case one was not allowed to get too close, but he suspected even genuinely dangerous proximity would fail to make the experience especially interesting.

He had brought what was effectively his travelling court here, establishing a temporary capital in Yakid City to spend a month or so enjoying cooler weather than that afflicting Rasselle, allow him to visit the other famous sites — Yakid was roughly at the centre of these — and put some distance between him and both Rasselle and the Hyeng-zhar. To put distance between him and Oramen, being honest about it.

He had moved his departure from Rasselle forward only a day or so to avoid meeting the Prince Regent. Certainly it let the fellow know who was boss and this was how he’d justified it to himself originally, but he knew that his real motive had been more complicated. He had developed a distaste for the youth (young man; whatever you wanted to call him). He simply did not want to see him. He found himself bizarrely awkward in his company, experienced a strange difficulty in meeting his gaze. He had first noticed this on the day of his triumph in Pourl, when nothing should have been able to cloud his mood, and yet this odd phenomenon somehow had.

This could not possibly be a guilty conscience or an inability to dissemble; he was confident he had done the right thing — did not his ability to travel round this newly conquered level, as its king in all but name, not attest to that? — and he had lied fluently to Hausk for twenty years, telling him how much he admired him and respected him and revered him and would be forever in his debt and be the sword in his right hand, etc. etc. etc., so it must simply be that he had come to despise the Prince Regent. There was no other reasonable explanation.

It was all most unpleasant and could not go on. It was partly for this reason he had arranged for matters to be brought to a conclusion at the Hyeng-zhar while he was away.

So he was here, some rather more than respectable distance from any unpleasantness, and he had seen their damned Boiling Sea for himself and he had indeed seen some other spectacular and enchanting sights.

He was still not entirely sure why he had done this. Again, it could not be simply because he wished to avoid the Prince Regent.

Besides, it did no harm anyway for a new ruler to inspect his recently conquered possessions. It was a way of imposing himself upon his new domain and letting his subjects see him, now that he was confident the capital was secure and functioning smoothly (he’d got the strong impression the Deldeyn civil service was genuinely indifferent to who ruled; all they cared about was that somebody did and they be allowed to manage the business of the realm in that person’s name).

He had visited various other cities, too, of course, and been — though he had taken some care not to show it — impressed by what he had seen. The Deldeyn cities were generally bigger, better organised and cleaner than those of the Sarl and their factories seemed more efficiently organised too. In fact, the Deldeyn were the Sarl’s superiors in dismayingly many areas, save the vital ones of military might and martial prowess. The wonder was that they had prevailed over them at all.

Again though, the people of the Ninth — or at least the ones that he met at ducal house receptions, city chambers lunches and Guildhall dinners — seemed rather pathetically keen to show that they were glad the war was over and thankful that order had been restored. To think that he had once thought to lay waste to so much of this, to have the skies filled with flames and weeping and the gutters and rivers with blood! And all in the cause of besmirching Hausk’s name — how limited, how immature that desire seemed now.

These people barely knew or cared who Hausk had been. They had been at war and now they were at peace. Tyl Loesp had the disquieting yet also perversely encouraging impression that the Deldeyn would adapt better to the state of peace as the defeated than the Sarl would as victors.

He had started to dress like the Deldeyn, reckoning that this would endear him to them. The loose, almost effeminate clothes — billowy trous and frock coat — felt odd at first, but he had quickly grown used to them. He had been presented with a fine, many-jewelled watch by the Timepiece Makers’ Guild of Rasselle, and had taken to wearing that, too, in the pocket cut into his coat specifically for such instruments. In this land of railways and timetables, it was a sensible accoutrement, even for one who could command trains and steamers to run or not as his whim dictated.

His temporary palace was in the ducal house of Dillser on the shores of the Sea. The pleasure steamer — paddles slapping at the water, funnel pulsing smoke and steam — was heading for the much beflagged dock now, beating through waters that were merely warm and gently misted beneath a wind-cleared sky. Far mountains ringed the horizon, a few of their round, rolling summits snow-topped. The slender towers and narrow spires of the city rose beyond the ducal house and the various marquees and pavilions now covering its lawns.

Tyl Loesp drank in the cool, clear air and tried not to think of Oramen (would it be today? Had it already happened? How surprised ought he to act when the news came through? How would it actually be done?), turning his thoughts instead to dinner that evening and the choice of girl for the night.

“We make good time, sir,” the steamer’s captain said, coming to join him on the flying bridge. He nodded to tyl Loesp’s immediate guard and senior officials, gathered nearby.

“The currents are favourable?” tyl Loesp asked.

“More the lack of any Oct underwater-ships,” the captain said. He leant on the railing and pushed his cap up. He was a small, jolly fellow with no hair.

“They are normally a hazard?” tyl Loesp asked.

“Movable sandbanks,” the captain said, laughing. “And not very quick about getting out of the way either. Dented a few vessels. Sunk a couple; not by ramming them but by the Oct ship moving up underneath and capsizing the steamer. Few people been drowned. Not intentional, of course. Just poor navigation. You’d think they’d do better, being so advanced.” The captain shrugged. “Maybe they just don’t care.”

“But not a hazard to navigation today?” tyl Loesp said.

The captain shook his head. “Not for about the last twenty days. Haven’t seen a single one.”

Tyl Loesp frowned as he looked out at the approaching quay. “What normally brings them here?” he asked.

“Who can say?” the captain said cheerfully. “We’ve always assumed it’s the Boiling; might be even more impressive down at the bottom of the Sea, if you had a craft that could get you down there and back again and could see whatever it is that goes on. The Oct never get out of their submarine craft so we can’t ask them.” The captain nodded at the quayside. “Well, better get us docked. Excuse me, sir.” He walked back under the covered bridge to the wheelhouse, shouting orders. The steamer started to turn and the engine exhausted a plume of smoke and steam through its tall funnel before falling back to a steady, idling puff-puff-puff.

Tyl Loesp watched the waves of their wake as they curved away behind them, the last ragged, extended cloud of steam from the funnel settling over the creamy crease of sparkling water, shadowing it.

“Twenty days or so,” he said quietly to himself. He beckoned his nearest aide. “Strike our camp,” he told him. “We return to Rasselle.”

An uncanny stillness had settled over the Hyeng-zhar. Allied with the darkness, it seemed like a form of death.

The river had frozen across its breadth, the middle channel last. Still the water had continued to fall across the Nameless City and into the gorge, even if at a much reduced rate, appearing from underneath the cap of ice to plunge, wreathed in mist, to the landscape of towers, ramps, plaza and water channels beneath. The roar was still there, though also much lessened, so that now it seemed a fit partner for the glimmer that was the weak, paltry light of the slow-moving Rollstar Kiesestraal.

Then one night Oramen had woken up and known something was wrong. He had lain there in the darkness, listening, unable to tell what it was that was so disturbing. A kind of terror afflicted him when he thought it might be another device left behind from the Archipontine’s time here, awake again now, calling him. But there was no sound. He listened carefully but could hear nothing, and no winking lights, green or otherwise, showed anywhere.

He turned the cover around the thick night candle, letting light into the compartment. It was very cold; he coughed — one more fading remnant of a typical Settlement affliction that had laid him low for a few days — and watched his breath fume out in front him.

It had taken him a while to work out what seemed so wrong: it was the silence. There was no sound from the Falls.

He walked out at the start of the next working period, into the perpetual-seeming half-night. Droffo, Neguste and the two surly knights were with him. All around, the usual crowds and teams of men and animals were marshalling themselves, ready for their descent into the gorge. A few more today than the day before, just as it had been every day since Oramen had arrived here.

Shuffling and stamping and shouting and bellowing, they made their slow way to the lifts and cranes dotted along the cliff edge for kilometres down the sheer edge of the gorge. An army dropping into the abyss.

The skies were clear. The only mist rose from the broad backs of some beasts of burden, hauling heavy carts and larger items of machinery. Chunsel, uoxantch and ossesyi; Oramen hadn’t even known these great warbeasts could be tamed sufficiently for the work of hauling and carrying. He was glad he wouldn’t have to share a hoist platform with any of those massively impressive but frightening beasts.

From the gorge side, the Falls were a fabulous, disturbing sight. No water ran. No clouds obscured any part of the monumental gulf the waters had formed in the land. The view was uninterrupted, startlingly clear. Frozen curtains and shawls of solidified water lay draped over every cliff. The channels at the foot of the gorge — each of which would have been a great river in its own right, anywhere else — were sinuous black wastes half covered by sprinkled frosts and snows.

Oramen felt as though he was looking out to a site of some vast butchery, an eaten landscape — chewed into by an animal of unimaginable scale — which had then suffered further diminishing but still enormous quarryings as that first monster’s young had come along and each also bitten into the greater semicircle, after which some smaller monsters had taken still tinier nips out of the perimeters of those secondary bites, leaving bite upon bite upon bite all torn from the landscape, all devoured and swept away by the waters.

And then, in all that structured desolation, that tiered advancement of fractured chaos, was revealed a city beyond the skills and fashioning of any portion of humanity Oramen had ever encountered; a city on a scale that beggared belief; a city of glassy black towers, bone-white spires, twisted obsidian blades, outrageously curved, bizarrely patterned structures of indecipherable purpose and huge, sweeping vistas leading to canyons and strata and ranks of glistening, glittering edifices, one after another after another until only the vertical gorge wall on the far side of the silent Falls, ten kilometres away, intervened.

Half the view was sliced across by the plaza, the spaces beneath now also shuttered in by the frozen walls of water draped unmoving over its edges.

“Well, they can get anywhere now,” Droffo said.

Oramen looked over to where the cranes, hoists and lifts were already ferrying whole platforms of men, animals and equipment down into the chasm. A few were coming back up, quitting their own shifts. “Yes, they can,” he said. He looked over at where Vollird and Baerth were both leaning on the railing, staring into the gorge. Even they seemed impressed. Vollird coughed; a sharp, hacking, choking noise, then he gathered phlegm in his mouth and spat it into the gorge.

“Are you all right, Vollird?” Oramen called.

“Never better, sir,” the fellow replied, then cleared his throat and spat again.

“By God, they are a hard couple to like,” Droffo muttered.

“The man’s not well,” Oramen said tolerantly.

Droffo sniffed. “Even so.”

This latest cold was affecting everybody in turn. The field hospitals were full of those it was striking most fiercely, and the scrubby ground on the very outskirts of the Settlement, part of what was claimed to be, and probably was, the longest cemetery in the world, was filling up with those it had not spared.

“But yes, they can get to the centre,” Oramen said, staring out to the revealed city. “Nothing hinders them now.”

“It does seem to be their focus,” Droffo said.

Oramen nodded. “Whatever’s there.”

The latest briefing by the Falls’ scholars and gentlemen engineers had been fascinating. Oramen had never seen them so animated, though of course he hadn’t been here long. He’d checked with Poatas, who had; he said of course they were wild with excitement. What did the young prince expect? They approached the centre of the Nameless City; how could they not be agitated? This was their summit, their climax, their apogee. From here on, the city would likely be just more of the same, and gradually less of it as they left its centre behind, a slow dying away, a diminishing. Meanwhile, what treasure!

There were structures at the city’s very centre, deep under the plaza above, of a type they had never encountered before. Every effort was being made to investigate and penetrate that dark, frozen heart, and for once they had the luxury of time, and some surety that the ground would not shift beneath their feet on an instant; the Falls would not quicken again and the waters wash all away once more for another forty or more days. It was auspicious; a piece of luck to be grabbed with both hands and exploited to the full. Meanwhile more of tyl Loesp’s reinforcements, his new toilers, were arriving with every incoming train, eager for work. There would never be a better time. This was the very peak and centre of the whole history of the excavations of the Nameless City, indeed the Falls themselves. It deserved their every energy and resource.

Poatas was personally true to his word, having made a new headquarters down in the gorge itself and quartered himself and his staff there in a portion of building deep under the plaza near one of the recently discovered artifacts that appeared by its size and central location to be of particular importance. Oramen had been given the distinct impression that his own presence at the focus of all this furious activity was not required, and indeed might only hinder matters, given that when he was around additional guards had to be deployed to ensure his protection and a proportion of people would always stop work to gawp at a prince, so inhibiting the expeditious and efficient progress of the great works being undertaken.

Nevertheless, he had been determined to see what was going on and had already visited various parts of the excavations even while the ice had been spreading and the waters falling back. He had gone unannounced, with as few people in attendance as he could, seeking to cause as little disruption by his presence as possible. He was certainly not going to be stopped from seeing closer up what was going on now that the waters had frozen solid altogether, and he especially wanted to see something of this new class of artifact that was turning up; he felt he had been kept in ignorance of their importance by Poatas, as though this latest revelation was none of his business. He would not, could not tolerate such disrespect.

They would be flying down on caude; the animals complained about the cold and low levels of light, but their handlers assured Oramen and his party the creatures had been fed a couple of hours before and were warmed and ready to fly. They mounted up, Vollird cursing as his first attempt was wrecked by a fit of coughing.

It had been so long since Oramen had flown he had thought about asking for a practice ground-flight, getting the beast to pad along the flat and rise up a little, giving him time to recall his old flying lessons in relative safety, but that would have been demeaning; a sign of weakness. He had the biggest of the caude, and had offered to take Neguste with him, saddled in behind, but the lad had begged to be excused. He tended to throw up. Oramen had smiled and given him the morning off.

They launched into the air beyond the cliff; Oramen taking the lead. He’d forgotten quite how alarming was the stomach-lurching drop at the start of a flight as the air-beast fell before starting to gain height.

The cold wind bit at the exposed parts of Oramen’s face as the caude dropped, stretching its wings out; even with a scarf over his mouth and nose and wearing flying goggles he felt the chill enter him. He pulled on the caude’s reins, worrying that it seemed sluggish and felt slow to answer. The beast pulled slowly up, shifting beneath him fretfully as though not yet fully awake. They were still falling too fast; he glanced up and saw Droffo staring down at him from a good ten metres higher. Vollird and Baerth were a little further up still.

The caude shook itself and started beating across the chasm, finally catching the air and levelling out. Oramen watched it raise its great long face and swivel its gaze to each side as it looked groggily up at its companions. The beast’s course changed fractionally with each gesture as the creature’s head acted like a sort of forward rudder, its tail doubtless twitching in instinctive compensation with each movement. It gave a deep, bellowing cry and beat harder, slowly rising to join the others, and they flew together for a few minutes.

Oramen used the opportunity to look around for as long as he could, drinking in the view and trying to fix it in his mind, knowing that seeing the Nameless City so close up from a flying beast was a rare privilege, then they all went gliding down together towards the temporary landing ground set up near the lumpenly frozen foot of the secondary fall which formed a great dark wall climbing to the edge of the plaza level high above.

They’d passed over the remains of the Fountain Building; the sheer weight of ice accumulated on its surfaces had brought it crumpling, crashing down shortly before the freeze had become complete.

“This is one of ten such littler structures all spotted round the big one in the middle, the one they’re calling the Sarcophagus, where there’s most attention, as you’d expect,” the foreman told them as they walked down a shallow-sloped tunnel towards one of the latest diggings.

“Is there any more on the Sarcophagus?” Oramen asked.

Broft — a bald, trim, upright figure in neatly pressed dungarees with a conspicuously displayed pocket pen — shook his head. “Not really on any of them sir, as I understand it.”

The adit sloped downwards into the bowels of some long-fallen building, following a passage that had silted up when the city had first been buried. A string of flickering electric bulbs did their best to light their way, though a couple of the foreman’s men carried meshed lanterns as well. This was as much for the fore-warning the lanterns gave — sometimes — of noxious gases as for the light they cast, though that too was welcome. The air about their little party had turned from chilly to mild as they’d descended.

Oramen and foreman Broft led the way, flanked by the two men bearing lanterns. Droffo and a small gaggle of workers, some on their way to their labours, came behind, tailed by Vollird and Baerth — Oramen could hear Vollird’s muffled coughing now and again. The passage was smooth save for knee-high ribs running across the floor every fifteen steps or so. These had once been part of the passage walls; the building had fallen on its back and they were walking down what had once been a vertical shaft. Stout wooden boards had been placed across these ribs to provide a level path, one corner of it given over to cables and pipes.

“This one is the deepest, having fallen from the plaza level, sir,” Broft said. “We are investigating all such anomalous structures out of stratigraphic orderliness, for once paying little heed to the integrity and place-in-sequence of all discovered objects. Mr Poatas is normally very strict on his integrity of objects, but not here.” They were nearing the pit where the artifact had been discovered. The walls here ran with dampness and the air felt warm. Water gurgled beneath the boards at their feet. Pumps sounded ahead; companions to those they’d passed at the entrance to the adit. To Oramen the machines were like the men at either end of a two-man saw, passing it to and fro, cutting into some great trunk.

“Many are the theories, as you might imagine, prince sir, regarding the objects, especially the large central one. My own thoughts…”

Oramen was only half listening. He was thinking about how he’d felt when the caude had dropped away beneath him as they’d left the clifftop. He had been terrified. First he had thought that he had forgotten how to fly, then that the creature wasn’t properly awake — hearty breakfast or not — or ill; caude took ailments as men did, and there was enough sickness around the Settlement. He had even wondered, just for an instant, if the beast might have been drugged.

Was he being preposterous? He didn’t know. Ever since the conversation with Fanthile the day that Tove had been murdered and he had shot the two assassins, he’d been thinking. Of course there were people who wanted him dead; he was a prince, the Prince Regent; future leader of the people who had conquered these people. And his death, of course, would suit some. Tyl Loesp, even. Who would gain most from his death? Fanthile had asked. He still could not believe tyl Loesp wanted him dead; he had been too sure and absolute a friend of his father’s for far too long, but a man of such power was surrounded by others who might act on his behalf, thinking that they did what he might wish but could not request.

Even those awful few moments in the courtyard of the inn, when Tove had died, had been poisoned for him. Thinking about it, the fight had started very easily, and Tove had pulled him out of it and sobered up very quickly. (Well, drunken fights did start over nothing, and the prospect of violence could sober a man up in a heartbeat.) But then Tove had tried to send him out of that door first, and seemed surprised, even alarmed when Oramen had pushed him out. (Of course he’d want his friend to get to safety before he did; he thought the danger was all behind them, back in the bar.) And then, his words: “Not me,” or something very like that.

Why that? Why exactly those words, with the implication — perhaps — that the assault itself had been expected but it should have happened to whoever was with him, not Tove himself? (He had just had a knife rammed into his guts and ripped up towards his heart; was he to be suspicioned because he failed to scream, Fie, murder! or, O, sire, thou dost kill me! like some mummer in a play?)

And Dr Gillews, seemingly by his own hand.

But why Gillews? And if Gillews…

He shook his head — foreman Broft glanced at him and he had to grin back encouragingly for a moment before resuming his thoughts. No, that was taking supposition too far.

However it worked out, he was sure that, this morning, he should have tested the caude. It had been foolish not to. Admitting his flying might be a little rusty would have been no great disgrace. Next time he would do the sensible thing, even if it meant running the risk of embarrassing himself.

They came out on to a platform above the pit, looking down from halfway up the curved wall into the focus of all the attention: a night-black cube ten metres to a side lying tipped in a moat of dirty-looking water at the bottom of a great shored chamber at least thirty metres in diameter. The cube seemed to swallow light. It was surrounded by scaffolding and clambering people, many using what looked like pieces of mining equipment. Blue and orange flashes lit the scene and hissing, clattering steam hammers sounded as various methods were attempted to gain entry into the cube — if it could be entered — or at least to try to chip pieces off. In all the noise and hubbub, though, it was the object itself that always drew the eye back to it. Some of the labourers they’d accompanied filed on to a hoist attached to the main platform and waited to be lowered into the pit.

“Still resisting!” Broft said, shaking his head. He leaned on the makeshift railing. A pump fell silent and Oramen heard cursing. As though in sympathy, the light nearest them, on the wall of the chamber to the side of the adit, flickered and went out. “Can’t get into these things,” Broft said, turning and tutting at the extinguished light. He looked at one of the lantern men and nodded at the lamp. The fellow went to inspect it. “Though the object might be judged worth lifting out,” Broft continued, “the brethren would have left it here to rot — or not rot, probably, as it hasn’t already — but, however, under our new and may I say much more enlightened rules, sir, we might offer the object to a third party, which is to say… What?”

The lantern man had muttered something into Broft’s ear. He made a tsking noise and went to look at the dead light.

It was relatively quiet in the chamber for a moment. The squeaking noises of the pulleys lowering the first group of workers towards the pit floor was the loudest sound. Even Vollird seemed to have stopped coughing.

Oramen hadn’t heard the knight’s cough for a little while now. Without warning, he felt an odd chill.

“Well,” he heard Broft say, “it looks like a blasting wire, but how can it be a blasting wire when there’s not any blasting today? That’s just ridiculous.”

Oramen turned to see the foreman tugging at a wire strung with some of the other wires looped along the wall between the light fixtures. The wire led down the wall to disappear behind the planking at their feet. In the other direction, it disappeared into the tunnel they’d just walked down. Vollird and Baerth weren’t on the platform.

He felt suddenly sweaty and cold at once. But no, he was being silly, absurd. To react as he suddenly wanted to react would be to make himself look fearful and stupid in front of these men. A prince had to behave with decorum, calmness, bravery…

But then; what was he thinking of? Was he mad? What had he decided, only a few minutes earlier?

Have the bravery to risk looking foolish…

Oramen swivelled, took Droffo by the shoulders and forced him to turn with him and step towards the adit. “Come,” he said, forcing Droffo forward. He began pushing through some of the workers waiting to descend. “Excuse me; excuse me, if you would, excuse me, thank you, excuse me,” he said calmly.

“Sir?” he heard Broft say.

Droffo was dragging his feet. “Prince,” he said as they approached the entrance to the adit. A glance up it showed no trace of Vollird and Baerth.

“Run,” Oramen said, not loudly. “I’m ordering you to run. Get out.” He turned to the men remaining on the platform and bellowed, “RUN! Get OUT!” then he pushed the uncomprehending Droffo forward, darted past him and started running as fast as he could, pounding uphill, the boards slamming and quaking under his feet. After a few moments he heard Droffo following, his feet too hammering on the boards, whether because he also thought there might be danger or because he saw Oramen running away and thought he ought to stay with him regardless, Oramen did not know.

How slowly one ran, he thought, when one’s mind was racing so much faster. He could not believe that he could run any quicker — his legs were pistoning beneath him, his arms swinging and his chest pulling the air into his lungs with an instinctive functionality no mentation would improve upon — but he felt cheated that his furiously working brain could in no further way contribute to the effort. It might be a doomed effort, of course. Looking at it logically, rationally, it probably was.

He had been too trusting. Naïve, even. One paid for such laxness. Sometimes one got away with it, escaped just punishment — rather as he’d escaped and Tove had paid, that day in the courtyard of the Gilder’s Lament (and maybe Tove had not paid unjustly) — but one did not escape every time. Nobody did. Now, he had no doubt, was when he paid.

Embarrassment. He had worried about being embarrassed because he might overreact to some perceived, perhaps misperceived threat. How much more embarrassing to have missed all clues, to have wandered through this violent, kinetic world with a babe’s wide-eyed innocence and trust, to have ascribed innocence and decency when he should have seen duplicity and iniquity.

I should just have tugged at the blasting wire, he thought. Tried to pull it free. What a fool, what a selfish fool. Together we might—

The explosion was a dirty yellow blast of light followed almost immediately by what felt like a warbeast kicking him hard in the back with both hind legs. He was lifted off his feet and propelled through the air up and along the adit so that it seemed like a vertical shaft he was falling into. He was upright and flailing for a long moment, then suddenly tumbling; limbs, shoulders, behind, head and hip smacking off the surrounding surfaces in an instant cacophony of pain, as though a dozen accurate kicks had all been landed at once.

He blinked up at a ceiling; rough wood, right above him. His nose was pressed against it. He might be crushed. Perhaps he was in a coffin. His ears were ringing. Where had he just been? He could not remember. There was a crazed ringing sound in his head and the air smelled wrong.

He rolled over, making a small noise as bruised, broken parts of his body protested. The real ceiling was visible. He was lying on his back now, the floor beneath him. This must be some part of the palace he hadn’t encountered before. Where was Fanthile?

Dim yellow lights flickered on the wall, linked by loops of wire. The loops of wire meant something, he knew. He’d been doing something. Something he ought to keep doing. What had it been? He tasted blood. He brought one hand up to his face and felt stickiness. He squinted at his hand, raising his head off the floor on quivering, complaining neck muscles. His hand looked very black. He used it to support himself and peered down the corridor. It was very black down there too. Smoke or steam or something was creeping up the tipped ceiling, gradually obscuring the lights further down.

Somebody was lying on their side down there. It looked like that what-did-you…

Droffo. It was Earl Droffo. What was he doing here? That cloud of smoke was creeping up the ceiling above him. Droff had lost some of his clothes. He looked a bit tattered altogether. And not moving.

The realisation, the memory, came crashing back on him as though the ceiling had caved in, which, he thought, might be exactly what was about to happen. He dragged himself to his knees and then his feet, coughing. Still the cough, he thought; still the cough. He could hear it in his head but not through his still ringing ears.

He staggered down the tunnel to where Droffo lay. He himself seemed to be as poorly clad as the young earl; in rags, all torn and shredded. He had to keep his head down, out of the dark overcast of smoke still drifting up the adit. He shook Droffo but the man didn’t move. His face looked pale and there was blood coming from his nose. The smoke was getting lower down all the time. Oramen bent, took Droffo by the armpits and started hauling him bodily over the boards.

He found it hard going. So much hurt; even the coughing pained him. He wished Droffo would wake up and that his hearing would return. The smoke coming up all quiet and dark from down below seemed to be catching up with him again. He wondered if he might have to let Droffo go and run away to save himself. If he did and they’d both have died otherwise, it would be the sensible thing to do. If he did and they might both have survived, it would be the wrong thing to do. How simple that seemed. He decided to keep on dragging Droffo for the time being. He’d think about dropping him if he really couldn’t see and breathe. His back hurt.

He thought he felt something through his feet, but his ringing ears let him down. By the time he realised that what he was feeling through his feet might be footsteps, it was too late. You pay, he had time to think.

Next thing he knew there was a rough hand round his nose, mouth and chin and a terrific thudding sensation in his back. Possibly a shouted curse.

He found he had dropped Droffo. He wrenched himself away from whoever had grabbed him; their grip seemed to have loosened. He turned round and saw Baerth standing there looking thunderstruck, a broken long-knife in his hand. Its blade lay between them on the wooden boards, in two pieces. That was careless, Oramen thought. He felt round to the small of his back, through the remains of tattered clothing, found the gun that had stopped the blow and tugged it free.

“You broke it on this!” he shouted to Baerth as he brandished the gun and shot the fellow with it. Three times, just to be sure, then, after the knight had collapsed to the boards, once more, through one flickering eyelid, just to be even more sure. Baerth had had a gun too. A hand on it, at his waist; should have used it earlier. Oramen was glad his ears were already ringing; meant he didn’t have to suffer the sound of the gun going off four times in such a confined space. That would really have hurt.

He went back to Droffo, who was moving on his own now. “You’re going to have to get up, Droff!” he shouted, then hefted the fellow one-armed under his armpit, side by side this time so that he could see where they were going and not be surprised by murderous fuckers with long-knives. Droffo seemed to be trying to say something, but Oramen still couldn’t hear. The tunnel ahead looked long and hazy but otherwise empty. He kept his gun in his hand all the same.

People came down the tunnel eventually and he didn’t shoot them; ordinary labourers and a couple of guards. They helped him and Droffo out.

Back at the adit entrance, in the looming darkness of the under-plaza, all studded with little lights, they got to sit and lie down in the little encampment round the tunnel mouth and he thought he heard — muffled, as though his ears were full of water — that somebody had run away.

“You poor sir! Look at you! Oh, you poor sir! A blotting paper!” Neguste Puibive was helping Oramen’s nurse to dress him. Neguste was shocked at the extent of his master’s bruising. “Camouflaged you are, sir, I swear; I’ve seen trucks and things all scattered with dibs and daubs of paint with less of a mixturing of colours than your poor skin!”

“No more colourful than your comparisons, Neguste,” Oramen said, hissing in pain as the nurse lifted his arm and his servant fitted his undershirt over it.

Oramen’s ears still rang. He could hear well enough now, but the ringing, even if much reduced, remained and the doctors could not guarantee it would ever fully stop. That might be his only lasting damage, and he counted himself lucky. Droffo had suffered a badly broken arm as well as a puncturing of the membrane in one ear, leaving him permanently half-deaf. The doctors reckoned his arm could be made whole again; they had an embarrassment of experience with every form of human injury in the infirmaries of the Settlement.

Oramen had been fairly surrounded by doctors for too much of the time. At one stage he’d thought a group of Sarl doctors was going to come to blows with another clutch of Deldeyn medics over some abstruse point regarding how to treat extensive bruising. He wondered if they were just keen to be able to say they had once treated a prince.

General Foise had been to see him. He had wished him well politely enough, though Oramen had the distinct impression the fellow was looking at him as he might at a piece of malfunctioning military equipment he was thinking about having junked. Poatas had sent his regards by note, thankfully, claiming great and urgent busyness occasioned in no small part by the necessary re-excavation of the chamber partially collapsed by the explosion.

Oramen dismissed the nurse — a prim, middle-aged woman of some formidability — and, with much grunting and wincing, let Neguste alone help him complete dressing.

When they were about done, and Oramen, dressed formally, was ready to make his first public appearance since the explosion three days earlier, he drew his ceremonial sword and asked Neguste to inspect its tip, holding it out level with the fellow’s eyes, almost at his nose. The effort of it hurt Oramen’s arm.

Neguste looked puzzled. A little comical, too, with his eyes crossed, focusing on the sword’s tip so close to his face. “What do I look for, sir?”

“That is my question, Neguste,” Oramen said quietly. “What do you look for?”

“Sir?” Neguste looked mightily confused. He started to put his right hand up to touch the tip of the sword.

“Leave it be,” Oramen said sharply. Neguste let his hand fall back. “Are you really so sicked by riding in the air, Neguste?”

“Sir?” Neguste’s brows were furrowed like a field; sufficiently deep, Oramen thought, to cast shadows.

“That was a canny absence you had there, fellow, just when all closest to me were marked to die.”

“Sir?” Neguste said again, looking like he was about to start crying.

“Stop saying ‘Sir?’,” Oramen told him gently, “or I swear I’ll stick this point through either one of your idiot eyes. Now answer me.”

“Sir! I lose my latest meal near on sight of an air-beast! I swear! Ask anyone! I’d not wish you harm, sir! Not me! You don’t think I had any part in this, do you? Sir?” Neguste sounded horrified, shocked. His face drained of colour and his eyes filled with tears. “Oh!” he said faintly, and crumpled, his back sliding down the wall, his backside thumping heavily down on the floor of the carriage, his knees splayed on either side. Oramen let the tip of the sword follow him down so that it was still angled at his nose. “Oh, sir!” he said, and put his face in his hands. He started sobbing. “Oh, sir! Sir, kill me if it pleases you; I’d rather you did that and found me innocent later than live apart from you, accused, even just in your heart, a free man. A limb to a hair, sir; I swore that to Mr Fanthile when he instructed me I was to be your last sticking shield as well as your most faithful servant. I’d lose arm or leg than see a hair on your littlest toe unkindly plucked!”

Oramen looked down at the crying youth. The Prince Regent’s face was set, his expression neutral, as he listened — through the ringing — to the fellow’s hand-muffled sobs.

He sheathed the sword — that hurt too, a little — then leant down to grasp Neguste’s hand, slippery and hot with tears, and pulled the lad to his feet. He smiled at him. Neguste’s face had some blood in it now, all reddened with crying, his eyes already puffed. He wiped his nose on one sleeve, sniffing strenuously, and when he blinked tiny beads of moisture arced from his eyelids.

“Calm yourself, Neguste,” Oramen said, clapping him gently on his shoulder. “You are my shield, and my conscience too in this. I’m poisoned by this too-slow-seen conspiracy against me. I’m late inoculated against it and suffering a fever of suspicion that makes every face around me look mean and every hand, even those that would help, seem turned against. But here; take mine. I offer apology. Ascribe my wronging you as your share of my injury. We infect those closest in the very act of caring for us, but mean them no harm.”

Neguste gulped and sniffed again, then wiped his hand on his britches and took Oramen’s offered hand.

“Sir, I swear—”

“Hush, Neguste,” Oramen told him. “No more’s to say. Indulge me in silence. Believe me, I long for it.” He drew himself up, his very bones protesting at the movement, and gritted his teeth. “Now, tell me. How do I look?”

Neguste sniffed and a small smile broke across his face. “Very well, sir. Most smart, I’d say.”

“Come then, I’ve my poor face to show to the people.”

Vollird too had started down the adit, carbine drawn, then turned back. He’d been challenged by some surface official, shot and killed the fellow then made off into the dark landscape of the under-plaza, followed by, or taking with him — reports varied — the diggings’ blasting marshal. This man was found later a short way off, also shot.

Only a handful of men had survived the blast and subsequent fire in the chamber at the bottom of the adit, which had been badly damaged and had partially collapsed. The excavations on that black cube — mercifully itself probably undamaged — had been set back many days. Poatas seemed to regard this as Oramen’s fault entirely.

Oramen was holding court in the greatest marquee available. He’d summoned everybody he could think of. Poatas was there, fretting and vexed at this forced absence from the diggings but commanded to attend with the rest and obviously judging it unwise to resist the authority of a prince who had so recently escaped murder.

“Understand that I do not accuse tyl Loesp,” Oramen told the assembly, coming towards the end of his address. “I do accuse those who have his ear and think they have his interest at heart. If Mertis tyl Loesp is guilty of anything it may only be failing to see that some around him are less honourable and devoted to the rule of law and good of all than he is himself. I have been most unjustly preyed upon, and have had to kill not one but three men merely to protect my own existence, and while I have been lucky, or blessed, in escaping the fate these wretches have desired for me, many around me have suffered in my stead through no fault of their own.”

Oramen paused and looked down. He took a couple of deep breaths and bit his lip before looking up again. If those present chose to interpret this as emotion close to tears, then so be it. “A season ago I lost my best friend in the sunshine of a courtyard in Pourl. This company lost fifty good men in the darkness of a pit in the under-plaza not four days ago. I ask the forgiveness of their shades and survivors for allowing my youthfulness to blind me to the hatefulness that threatened me.”

Oramen raised his voice. He felt weary and sore and his ears still rang, but he was determined not to let this show. “All I can offer in return for their hoped-for forgiveness is the vow that I shall not let my guard down again and so endanger those close to me.” He paused and looked around the whole gathering. He could see General Foise and the other people tyl Loesp had put in charge of the Settlement’s security and organisation looking distinctly worried at how this was going. “So it is that I ask you all to be my sentinels. I shall constitute a formal watch of some of the most trusted veterans here amongst you to protect me most closely from harm and to preserve the rightful continuance of our heritage, but I ask you all to play whatever part you can in the proper security of my being and our purpose. I have, also, sent a messenger to Field Marshal Werreber informing him of the attack upon me here and requesting both a pledge of his continuing and undoubted loyalty and a contingent of his finest troops to protect us all.

“You are engaged in great works here. I have come late to this mighty undertaking but it has become part of who I am as it has become part of who you are, and I well know I am privileged to be here when the unbaring of the City approaches its zenith. I would not think to tell you how to do what you do; Jerfin Poatas knows better than I what needs be done and you yourselves know better than anybody how to do it. All I ask is that you remain vigilant as you go about your works, for the betterment of all of us. By the WorldGod, I swear we do labour here the like of which will never be seen again in the whole history of Sursamen!”

He gave a single deep nod, as though he saluted them, then, before he could sit down and while only the vaguest hint of sound, as yet unidentifiable in its import, was forming in the throats of those present, Neguste Puibive — seated at the side of the dais — leapt to his feet and shouted at the top of his lungs, “WorldGod save the good Prince Regent Oramen!”

“Prince Regent Oramen!” the whole assembly — or very nearly the whole assembly — shouted in a great ragged cheer.

Oramen, who had been expecting quietly grudging respect at best and querulous alarm and hostile questioning at worst, was genuinely surprised. He had to blink back tears.

He remained standing, so that, before anybody else there, he saw the messenger dash into the rear of the marquee, hesitate and stop — patently momentarily bewildered by the tumult — then collect himself and rush forward to Jerfin Poatas, who tipped his head to listen to the message over the continuing sound of cheering before hobbling with his stick closer to the dais. Guards at the front — veterans of the Sarl army — barred his way but looked round to Oramen, who nodded Poatas through and stepped down to him to hear his news.

Shortly, he strode back, raising both arms into the air.

“Gentlemen; your various duties await! The object at the centre of the under-plaza, the very focus of all our energies, an artifact we believe has been buried there for deciaeons, has shown signs of life! I command and beseech you: to work!”

25. The Levels

The Liveware Problem had started out life as a relatively slim 3D delta shape like an elegantly pointed pyramid. After conversion to a Superlifter — a glorified tug, really — it took on a block-like brutality. Three hundred metres long, square-sectioned, slab-sided, only the vaguest implication of its older, more slender shape remained.

It had not cared about such aesthetic considerations then and it did not care now. The petalled surround of its field complex, abundant as any party dress wrapped in dozens of gauzy layers, could bestow a kind of beauty on it if the viewer chose to look for it, and its hull skin could take on any design, hue or pattern it desired.

All that was irrelevant anyway; the transformation had made it powerful, the transformation had made it fast.

And that was before Special Circumstances came calling.

It swung through hyperspace on what was in effect a near-straight attack path to the star Meseriphine, deviating only to keep the chances of detection low. It had snapped the humans and its own avatoid off the shuttle without incident and scour-turned about to head back in the direction of Sursamen at something uncomfortably over its design-parameter maximum allowed sustainable velocity. It felt the damage accruing to its engines like a human athlete might feel a cramp or a shin splint starting to develop, but knew it would get its little cargo of souls to Sursamen as fast as it sensibly could.

After some negotiation with Anaplian they had agreed it would push its engines to a profile consistent with a one per cent possibility of total failure, thus shaving another hour off their ETA, though even a one in one hundred and twenty-eight chance seemed quite shockingly risky to the ship. With this in mind it had massaged its own performance parameters and lied; the time saving was real but the failure profile was better than one in two hundred and fifty. There were some advantages to being a self-customised one-off based on an ancient Modified.

In one of the two small lounges that was all its rather miserable allocation of accommodation could afford, the ship’s avatoid was explaining to the SC agent Anaplian the extent to which the Liveware Problem would be limited in its field of operations if it had actually to enter Sursamen. It still hoped, rather fervently, this would not be necessary.

“It’s a hypersphere. In fact, it’s a series of sixteen hyperspheres,” the avatoid Hippinse told the woman. “Four D; I can no easier jump into it than an ordinary, non-HS-capable ship can. I can’t even gain any traction off the Grid because it’ll cut me off from that too. Didn’t you know this?” the avatoid said, looking puzzled. “It’s their strength, it’s how the heat’s managed, how the opacity comes about.”

“I knew Shellworlds were four-dimensional,” Anaplian admitted, frowning.

It was one of those things that she’d learned only long after leaving the place. In a sense, knowing this before she’d left would have been fairly meaningless; a so-what? fact. When you lived in a Shellworld you just accepted them for what they appeared to be, same as if you lived on the surface of an ordinary rocky planet or within the waters or gases of a waterworld or a gas giant. That Shellworlds had such a profound and extensive four-dimensional component only made any difference once you knew what four-dimensionality implied and allowed in the first place; access to hyperspace in two handy directions, contact with the universes-separating energy Grids so that ships could exploit their many fascinating properties and the easy ability of anything with the appropriate talent to shift something entirely into hyperspace and then make it reappear in three-dimensional space through any amount of conventional solidity as though by magic.

You got used to that sort of capability. In a sense, the more inexplicable and supernatural these skills seemed before you learned how they were done, the less you thought about them afterwards. They went from being dismissible due to their essential absurdity to being accepted without thought because thinking cogently about them was itself so demanding.

“What I had not realised,” Anaplian said, “is that that means they’re closed off to ships.”

“They’re not closed off,” Hippinse said. “I can move about inside them as freely as any other three-dimensional entity of my size, it’s just that I can’t move about in the extra fourth dimension that I’m used to and designed for. And I can’t use my main engines.”

“So you’d rather stay out?”

“Precisely.”

“What about Displacing?”

“Same problem. From outside I can Displace down into open Tower-ends. Line-of-sight within a level is possible too, if I can get inside somehow, but that’d be all. And of course once inside I couldn’t Displace back to outside.”

“But you can Displace items short distance?”

“Yes.”

Anaplian frowned. “What would happen if you did try to Displace into 4D matter?”

“Something a lot like an AM explosion.”

“Really?”

“Good as. Not recommended. Wouldn’t want to break a Shellworld.”

“They are not easily broken.”

“Not with all that 4D structure. What are in effect a Shellworld’s operating instructions say you can let off thermonuclear weapons inside them without voiding the warranty as long as you steer clear of Secondary structure, and anyway the internal stars are basically thermonukes and a bundle of exotic matter the most elderly of which have been trying to burn their way through the ceiling of their shell for deciaeons. All the same; anti-matter weaponry is banned inside and a misplaced Displace would have a highly similar profile. If and when I do have to do any Displacing, it’ll be very, very carefully.”

“Is anti-matter banned entirely?” Anaplian asked, sounding worried. “Most of the high-end gear I work with uses AM reactors and batteries.” She scratched the back of her neck, grimacing. “I even have one inside my head.”

“In theory as long as it’s not weaponry it’s allowed,” the ship told her. “In practice… I wouldn’t mention it.”

“Very well,” Anaplian said, sighing. “Your fields; will they work?”

“Yes. Running on internal power. So limited.”

“And you can go in if you have to.”

“I can go in,” the ship confirmed through Hippinse, sounding unhappy. “I’m preparing to reconfigure engine and other matter to reaction mass.”

“Reaction mass?” Djan Seriy said, looking sceptical.

“To be used in a deeply retro fusion drive I’m also putting together,” Hippinse said with an embarrassed-sounding sigh. He was himself looking reconfigured, becoming taller and less rotund with every passing day.

“Oh dear,” Anaplian said, thinking it seemed called for.

“Yes,” the ship’s avatoid said with evident distaste. “I am preparing to turn myself into a rocket.”

“They’re saying some terrible things about you, sir, where they mention you at all any more.”

“Thank you, Holse. However, I am scarcely concerned with the degree to which my own reputation has been defamed by that tyrant-in-waiting tyl Loesp,” Ferbin said, lying. “The state of our home and the fate of my brother is all that matters to me.”

“Just as well, sir,” Holse said, staring at the display hovering in mid-air in front of him. Ferbin sat nearby, inspecting another holo-screen. Holse shook his head. “They’ve painted you as a proper rapscallion.” He whistled at something on the screen. “Now I know you’ve never done that.”

“Holse!” Ferbin said sharply. “My brother lives, tyl Loesp goes unpunished and disports himself round the Ninth. The Deldeyn are entirely defeated, the army is partially disbanded, the Nameless City is more than half revealed and — we’re told — the Oct gather round Sursamen. These things are of far greater import, would you not agree?”

“Course I do, sir,” Holse agreed.

“Then to those things attend, not gossip germed by my enemies.”

“Just as you say, sir.”

They were reading material about Sursamen and the Eighth (and, now, the Ninth) from news services run by the Oct, the Nariscene and the Morthanveld, as commented upon by people, artificial minds and what appeared to be non-official but somehow still respected organisations from within the Culture, all of it expressed in commendably succinct and clear Sarlian. Ferbin hadn’t known whether to be flattered that they drew so much attention or insulted that they were so spied upon. He had searched in vain — or at least he had asked the ship to search for, unsuccessfully — any sort of verbatim recordings of the sort Xide Hyrlis had suggested might exist of what had happened to his father, but had found none. Djan Seriy had already told him such records did not appear to exist but he had wanted to check.

“All highly interesting,” Ferbin agreed, sitting back in his almost excessively accommodating seat. They were in the ship’s other small lounge area, one short sleep and a half-day into their journey. “I wonder what the latest information is regarding the Oct ships…?” Ferbin’s voice trailed off as he inadvertently read another vicious exaggeration regarding his own past behaviour.

“What do you want to know?” the ship’s voice asked, making Holse jump.

Ferbin collected himself. “The Oct ships,” he said. “Are they really there, around Sursamen?”

“We don’t know,” the ship admitted.

“Have the Morthanveld been told the Oct might be gathering there?” Ferbin asked.

“It has been decided that they’ll be told very shortly after we arrive,” the ship said.

“I see.” Ferbin nodded wisely.

“How very shortly afterwards?” Holse asked.

The ship hesitated, as though thinking. “Very very shortly afterwards,” it said.

“Would that be a coincidence?” Holse enquired.

“Not exactly.”

“He died in his armour; in that sense he died well.”

Ferbin shook his head. “He died on a table like a spayed cur, Djan Seriy,” he told her. “Like some traitor of old, broken and cruelled, made most filthy sport of. He would not have wished upon himself what I saw happen to him, believe me.”

His sister lowered her head for a few moments.

They had been left alone after their first substantial meal aboard the Liveware Problem, sitting in the smaller lounge on a conversation seat shaped like a sine wave. She looked up again and said, “And it was tyl Loesp himself? I mean at the very—”

“It was his hand, sister.” Ferbin looked deep into Djan Seriy’s eyes. “He twisted the life from our father’s heart and made all possible anguish in his mind too, in case that in his breast was somehow insufficient. He told him he would order massacre in his name, both that day on the battlefield around the Xiliskine and later when the army invaded the Deldeyn level. He would claim that Father had demanded such against tyl Loesp’s advice, all to blacken his name. He scorned him in those last moments, sister; told him the game was always greater than he’d known, as though my father was not ever the one to see furthest.”

Djan Seriy frowned momentarily. “What do you think he meant by that?” she asked. “The game was always greater than he’d known?”

Ferbin tutted in exasperation. “I think he meant to taunt our father, grasping anything to hand to hurt him with.”

“Hmm,” Djan Seriy said.

Ferbin sat closer to his sister. “He would want us to revenge him, of that I’m sure, Djan Seriy.”

“I’m sure he would.”

“I am not illusioned in this, sister. I know it is you who holds the power between us. But can you? Will you?”

“What? Kill Mertis tyl Loesp?”

Ferbin clutched at her hand. “Yes!”

“No.” She shook her head, took her hand away. “I can find him, take him, deliver him, but this is not a matter for summary justice, Ferbin. He should suffer the ignominy of a trial and the contempt of those he once commanded; then you can imprison him for ever or kill him if that’s still how we do these things, but it’s not my place to murder him. This is an affair of state and I’ll be present, on that level, in a purely personal capacity. The orders I have now have nothing to do with him.” She reached out, squeezed her brother’s hand. “Hausk was a king before he was a father, Ferbin. He was not intentionally cruel to us and he loved us in his own way, I’m sure, but we were never his priority. He would not thank you for putting your personal animosity and thirst for revenge above the needs of the state he made great and expected his sons to make greater.”

“Will you try to stop me,” Ferbin asked, sounding bitter, “should I take aim at tyl Loesp?”

Djan Seriy patted his hand. “Only verbally,” she said. “But I’ll start now; do not use the death of this man to make you feel better. Use his fate, whatever it may be, to make your kingdom better.”

“I never wanted it to be my kingdom,” Ferbin said, and looked away, taking a deep breath.

Anaplian watched him, studying the set of his body and what she could still see of his expression, and thought how much and how little he had changed. He was, of course, much more mature than he had been fifteen years ago, but he had changed in ways that she might not have expected, and probably had changed quite recently, just due to all the things that had happened since their father had been killed. He seemed more serious, less self-obsessed and much less selfish in his pleasures and aims now. She got the impression, especially after a few brief conversations with Choubris himself, that Holse would never have followed the old Ferbin so far or so faithfully. What had not changed was his lack of desire to be king.

She wondered how much he thought she had changed, but knew there was almost no comparison. She still had all her memories of childhood and early adolescence, she appeared vaguely similar to how she’d looked when she’d left and she could contrive to sound much like her old self, but in every other regard she was another person altogether.

She used her neural lace to listen in to the Liveware Problem’s systems talking to each other, quickly took in a compensated view of the gulf of space ahead of the rushing ship, updated herself on any news from Sursamen and then from elsewhere, shared a casual handshake with Turminder Xuss, quiescent in her cabin, and then monitored her brother closely, listening to his heartbeat, sensing his skin conductivity, his blood pressure, implied core temperature and temperature distribution as well as the state of his slightly tense, tautened muscles. He was grinding his teeth, though he probably wasn’t aware of it himself.

She felt she ought to jolly Ferbin out of what might be a dark mood, but was not sure she herself was in the mood to do so. She glanded sperk, and soon was.

“Is Director General Shoum still on Sursamen?” Anaplian asked.

“No,” Hippinse said. “Left forty-plus days ago. Continuing her tour of Morthanveld possessions and protectorates in the Lesser Spine.”

“But she is contactable once we’re down there?”

“Definitely. At the moment she’s here, in transit between Asulious IV and Grahy on the Cat.4 CleaveHull “On First Seeing Jhiriit”. Due to arrive Grahy fourteen hours after we make Sursamen. Without the crash-stop,” Hippinse added archly. The avatoid had changed further just in the last day and was now positively muscular. He still looked burly compared to the two Sarl men, but he appeared far fitter and athletic than he had when they’d first met him a few days earlier. Even his blond hair was cropped and businesslike, similar to Djan Seriy’s.

The central holo-display they were seated around spun to show where Shoum’s ship was now, then rotated smoothly back to where it had been (Holse remembered the display of the dreadful planet Bulthmaas, and Xide Hyrlis’ face, lit from below). The display was false-coloured; all the stars were white. Sursamen was a gently blinking red dot hard by its star, Meseriphine. The Liveware Problem was an even tinier strobing blue point trailing a fading aquamarine wake. The positions of other major ships, where known, were also shown, colour-coded; Morthanveld craft were green. The Oct colour was blue; their possible presence was implied by a faint tinge all around Sursamen.

Djan Seriy looked at Ferbin. “You think Shoum will facilitate our travel to the Eighth if we have any problems with the Nariscene or the Oct?”

“She took some considerable interest in our plight,” Ferbin said. “It was she who arranged our conveyance to Xide Hyrlis, for all that that proved a futile expedition.” Ferbin did not try to suppress a sneer. “She found my quest for justice ‘romantic’, I recall.” He looked at his sister and shook his head. “She might be termed sympathetic; however, it could be just a passing sympathy. I cannot say.”

Djan Seriy shrugged. “Still, this is worth keeping in mind, I think,” she said.

“Shouldn’t be an issue,” Hippinse said. “With luck the Oct systems will be breezeable and the Nariscene won’t be alerted. I should be able to drop you straight into a lift. Maybe even a scendship.”

“That, as you say, is with luck,” Anaplian said. “I am thinking about if luck is not with us.” She looked quizzically at Hippinse. “Oramen is still at the Falls, is that correct?”

“Last we heard, yes,” the ship said through its avatoid. “Though the information is eight days old at least. The Oct/Aultridia tussling between levels is making communications unreliable.”

“How bad is this so-called ‘tussling’?” Anaplian asked.

“About as bad as it can get before the Nariscene would be obliged to step in.” The avatoid paused. “I’m a little surprised they haven’t already.”

Anaplian frowned. “Do they shoot at each other?”

“No,” Hippinse said. “They’re not supposed to within the Towers or near any secondary structure. Mostly the dispute involves taking over Towers using blocking scendships and remote reconfiguring of door-control fidelities.”

“Is this going to help or hinder us?”

“Could go either way. Multiplier rather than a valuer.”

Djan Seriy sat back. “Very well,” she said. “This is what will happen: we four descend together to Sursamen Surface. We have to try and get down through the levels before anybody works out we shouldn’t have got to the Meseriphine system so quickly and starts asking what ship brought us.” She nodded at Hippinse. “The Liveware Problem believes it can get us down and inserted into the Nariscene travel-admin system without anybody noticing, but short of trying to take over the whole Nariscene AI matrix on Sursamen — arguably an act of war in itself — it cannot stop us getting spotted as anomalous eventually. So; we attain the level of the Hyeng-zhar, expeditiously. We find Oramen; at the Falls, hopefully. We tell him he is in danger if he does not know already. We also get a message to him while we’re on our way, if possible. We do what we can to make him safe, or at least safer, if necessary, then we deal with tyl Loesp.”

“‘Deal with’?” the ship asked, through Hippinse.

Anaplian looked levelly at the avatoid. “Deal with as in apprehend. Capture. Hold, or ensure is held until a properly formulated court can decide his fate.”

“I would not anticipate a royal pardon,” Ferbin said icily.

“Meanwhile,” Djan Seriy continued, “the ship will be attempting to find out what the Oct are up to by seeing if all these missing ships really are turning up around Sursamen. Though of course by then the Morthanveld and Nariscene will have been informed of our suspicions regarding the Oct ship concentration and will doubtless be formulating their own responses. We can but hope these will complement the Liveware Problem’s, though it is not impossible they will be antagonistic.” Anaplian looked at Ferbin and Holse. “If the Oct are there in force then both Hippinse and I may have to leave you alone on minimal notice. I’m sorry, brother, but that is how it has to be. We must all hope it doesn’t come to that but if it does we’ll leave you with what advantage we can.”

“And what would that be?” Ferbin asked, looking from Anaplian to Hippinse.

“Intelligence,” said Djan Seriy.

“Better weaponry,” the ship told them.

They popped into existence within a vacant Oct scendship; its doors had just closed — unexpectedly, as far as the cloudily aware brain of the Tower Traffic Control was concerned. Then it rechecked, and found that the door closure was not unexpected after all; an instruction demanding just such an action had been there for some time. So that was all right. A very short time later there was no longer memory or record of it having found anything unexpected in the first place. That was even better.

The scendship was one of over twenty attached to a great carousel device which hung directly above the gaping fourteen-hundred-metre-diameter mouth that was the top of the Pandil-fwa Tower. The carousel was designed to load the selected scendship, like a shell into an immense gun, into one of the secondary tubes bundled within the main Tower which would allow the vessel to drop to any of the available levels.

The Oct’s Tower Traffic Control computer executed a variety of instructions it was under the completely erroneous impression had been properly authorised and the carousel machine ninety metres beneath it duly dropped the scendship from the access ring above to another ring below; this swung the ship over one of the tubes. The capsule craft was lowered, fitted, and then grasped by what were basically two gigantic, if sophisticated, washers. Fluids drained and were pumped away. Lock-rotates opened and closed and the ship shuffled down until it hung in vacuum, dripping, directly above a dark shaft fourteen hundred kilometres deep and full of almost nothing at all. The ship announced it was ready to travel. The Tower Traffic Control machine gave it permission. The scendship released its hold on the side of the tube and started to fall, powered by nothing more than Sursamen’s own gravity.

That had been, as Anaplian had warned Ferbin and Holse, the easy bit. The Oerten Crater on Sursamen’s Surface stood directly over the fluted mouth of the Pandil-fwa Tower and was separated from it only by Secondary structure; the ship had had no difficulty — once it had checked its co-ordinates several thousand times and Displaced a few hundred microscopic scout motes — placing them straight into the scendship. Co-opting the Oct’s computer matrices — they barely merited the term AIs — had been, for the Mind of the Liveware Problem, a trivial matter.

They had chosen a stealthy approach, arriving without fanfare or — as far as they were aware — detection above Sursamen less than half an hour earlier. The Liveware Problem had spent the days of their approach modelling and rehearsing its tactics using the highly detailed knowledge of Nariscene and Oct systems it already had. It had grown confident it could put them straight into a scendship and remove the need for any exposure to the Surface itself. Arriving, it found pretty much what it had expected and sent them straight in.

Djan Seriy had spent the same time giving Ferbin and Holse a crash course in the use of certain Culture defensive and offensive technologies, up to the level she thought they could handle. It was a truism that some of the more rarefied Culture personal weapon systems were far more likely to kill an untrained user than anybody they were ostensibly aimed at, but even the defensive systems, while they were never going to kill you — that was, rather obviously, the one thing they were designed above all else to prevent — could give you a bowel-loosening fright, too, just due to the speed and seeming violence with which they could react when under threat.

The two men quickly got used to the suits they’d be wearing. The suits were default soot-black, their surfaces basically smooth once on but much straked and be-lumped with units, accoutrements and sub-systems not all of which Ferbin and Holse were even allowed to know about. The face sections could divide into lower mask and upper visor parts and defaulted clear so that facial expressions were readable.

“What if we get an itch?” Holse had asked Hippinse. “I got an itch wearing a Morthanveld swimming suit when we were being shown round one of their ships and it was disproportionately annoying.” They were on the hangar deck. It was crowded even by hangar deck standards but it still provided the largest open space the ship had for them to gather in.

“You won’t itch,” the avatoid told him and Ferbin. “The suit deadens that sort of sensation on interior contact. You can sense touch and temperature and so on, but not to the point of pain. It’s partly about damping distractive itching, partly about preemptive first-level damage control.”

“How clever,” Ferbin said.

“These are very clever suits,” Hippinse said with a smile.

“Not sure I like being so swaddled, sir,” Holse said.

Hippinse shrugged. “You become a new, hybrid entity in such a suit. There is a certain loss of absolute control, or at least absolute exposure, but the recompense is vastly heightened operational capability and survivability.”

Anaplian, standing nearby, looked thoughtful.

Ferbin and Holse had been willing and attentive pupils, though Ferbin had been just a little niggled at something he would not specify and his sister could not determine until the ship suggested she equip him with one more weapon, or perhaps a bigger one, than his servant. She asked Ferbin to carry the smaller of the two hypervelocity kinetic rifles the ship just happened to have in its armoury (she had the larger one). After that all had been well.

She’d been impressed with the quality of the suits.

“Very advanced,” she commented, frowning.

Hippinse beamed. “Thank you.”

“It seems to me,” Anaplian said slowly, scanning the suits with her re-enhanced senses, “that a ship would either have to have these suits physically aboard, or, if it was going to make them itself from scratch, have access to the most sophisticated and — dare I say it — most severely restricted patterns known only to some very small and unusual bits of the Culture. You know; the bits generally called Special Circumstances.”

“Really?” Hippinse said brightly. “That’s interesting.”

They floated over the floor of the scendship. The water started to fall away about them as the ship descended, draining to tanks beneath the floor. Within a couple of minutes they were in a dry, if still damp-smelling, near semi-spherical space fifteen metres across. Ferbin and Holse pushed the mask and visor sections of their suits away.

“Well, sir,” Holse said cheerily, “we’re home.” He looked round the scendship’s interior. “After a fashion.”

Djan Seriy and Hippinse hadn’t bothered with masks. They were dressed, like the two Sarl men, in the same dark, close-fitting suits each of which, Djan Seriy had claimed in all seriousness, was several times more intelligent than the entire Oct computational matrix on Sursamen. As well as sporting all those odd lumps and bumps, the suits each carried small, streamlined chest and back pouches and both Hippinse and Djan Seriy’s suits held long straked bulges on their backs which turned into long, dark weapons it was hard even to identify as guns. Ferbin and Holse each had things half the size of a rifle called CREWs which fired light, and a disappointingly small handgun. Ferbin had been hoping for something rather more impressive; however, he’d been mollified by being given the hypervelocity rifle, which was satisfyingly chunky.

Their suits also had their own embedded weapon and defensive systems which were apparently far too complicated to leave to the whims of mere men. Ferbin found this somewhat disturbing but had been informed it was for his own good. That, too, had not been the most reassuring thing he had ever heard.

“In the unlikely event we do get involved in a serious firefight and the suits think you’re under real threat,” Djan Seriy had told the two Sarl men, “they’ll take over. High-end exchanges happen too fast for human reactions so the suits will do the aiming, firing and dodging for you.” She’d seen the expressions of dismay on their faces, and shrugged. “It’s like all war; months of utter boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. It’s just the moments are sometimes measured in milliseconds and the engagement’s often over before you’re aware it has even begun.”

Holse had looked at Ferbin and sighed. “Welcome to the future, sir.”

Djan Seriy’s familiar, the drone thing called Turminder Xuss, had been Displaced attached to one thigh of her suit; another lozenged bulge. It had floated away as soon as they’d been Displaced in and was still floating around above them now that the water was all gone, seemingly inspecting the dripping interior of the scendship. Holse was watching the little machine closely, following it round the ship, squinting up at it.

The drone lowered itself in front of the man. “Can I help you, Mr Holse?” it asked.

“I always meant to ask,” he said. “How do things like you float in the air like that?”

“Why, with ease,” the drone said, ascending away from him again. Holse shrugged and chewed on a little crile leaf he’d persuaded the Liveware Problem to make for him.

Djan Seriy sat cross-legged near the centre of the floor, eyes closed. Enclosed by the tight black suit, only her face exposed, she looked oddly childlike, though her shape was certainly womanly enough, as even Ferbin noticed.

“Is my sister asleep?” Ferbin asked Hippinse quietly.

The avatoid — a compact, powerful-looking figure now — smiled. “She’s just checking the scendship’s systems. I’ve already done that, but it does no harm to verify.”

“So, are we successfully on our way?” Ferbin asked. He noticed that the avatoid had rolled the head part of his suit right back to form a collar, freeing his whole head. He did likewise.

“Yes, successfully so far.”

“And are you still the ship, or do you function independently yet?”

“You can still talk direct to the ship through me until we transfer,” Hippinse told him.

Djan Seriy had opened her eyes and was already looking at the avatoid. “They’re here, aren’t they?” she said.

Hippinse nodded thoughtfully. “The missing Oct ships,” he said. “Yes. Three just discovered all at once, lined up above the end of the open Tower nearest to me. Strong suspicion the rest will be here or on their way too.”

“But we keep going,” Djan Seriy said, frowning.

Hippinse nodded. “They’re here, that’s all. Nothing else has changed yet. I’m signalling now. I imagine the Morthanveld and the Nariscene will know something of the Oct dispositions fairly shortly.” He looked round at all of them. “We keep going.”

The transfer took place halfway down the first section of the Tower, seven hundred kilometres from the Surface. The scendship slowed and stopped. They were fully suited up again; the drone had returned to attach itself to Anaplian’s thigh. The air was pumped from the scendship’s interior, the door swung open silently, a last puff of atmosphere dissipated into the vacuum and they followed it down a broad corridor, their shadows advancing hugely in front of them. When the scendship’s door closed, all normal light was cut off and they were left with a ghostly image built up from the faint radiations given off by the chilly walls and surfaces around them. This was the point at which the ship no longer directly controlled Hippinse and the avatoid was newly as alone in his own head as any normal human was in theirs. Ferbin watched for him to stumble or for his expression to change, but saw nothing.

Two sets of thick double doors rolled open in sequence, taking them to a great semicircular aperture which opened on to a broad oval balcony forty metres or more across; a hard, steely light returned, picking out several small, sleek craft sitting on cradles on the floor of the platform.

There was no wall or railing. The view dropped away for another seven hundred kilometres, seemingly to dark nothing. Above, tiny bright stars hung untwinkling.

Level One was a Seedsail nursery. Seedsails were some of the galaxy’s most ancient biologicals. Depending which authority you listened to, they had been around for either about half a dozen aeons, or nearly ten. The debate over whether they had evolved naturally or had been created by an earlier civilisation was equally unsettled. Only arguably self-aware, they were some of the galaxy’s greatest true wanderers, migrating across the entire lens over the eons, centiaeons and deciaeons it took for them to tack and run and spinnaker their way from star to star powered by sunlight alone.

They came with their own barely smarter predators anyway but had, in addition, been exploited, hunted and slaughtered over time by those who might have known better, though they had been followed, revered and appreciated, too. The present day was a good time for them; they were seen as a part of a greater natural galactic ecology and a generally good thing, so there was civilisational credit to be garnered by being nice to them. Sponsored in this case by the Nariscene, the first or attic level of many a Shellworld was given over to Seedsail nursery space where the creatures could grow and flourish in their vacuum ground-growing phase under the relatively gentle light of the Fixstars and Rollstars before their magnetic coil-roots catapulted them upwards.

They still had to be helped on their way after that; caught and held before they could hit the ceiling above by specialist craft which took them to one of the few open Towers and then ejected them from there into the harsher environment of their true home: outer space.

Ferbin and Holse stood, a couple of metres back from the abrupt edge, looking out at the view while Djan Seriy and Hippinse busied themselves with a couple of the slender little craft sitting cradled on the wide balcony. Holse offered his hand to Ferbin, who clasped it. They were observing communications in silence, but when the suits touched they could talk undetected. “Not really that much to see, eh, sir?”

“Just the stars,” Ferbin agreed. They gazed out over the emptiness.

They were beckoned over to the two small craft Djan Seriy and Hippinse had been working on. The dark, curved canopies of the craft, like sections cut from a huge seashell, stood raised. They were motioned to sit inside. The craft were built to carry six Nariscene rather than two humans but the suits made them as comfortable as possible, impersonating seats. Djan Seriy and Hippinse piloted one each. The craft rose silently from the balcony and darted straight out into the darkness, accelerating hard enough initially to take Ferbin’s breath away.

Djan Seriy reached back and touched his ankle with one finger.

“Are you all right, Ferbin?” she asked.

“Perfectly well, thank you,” he told her.

“So far so good, brother. We are still within the main sequence of our plan.”

“Delighted to hear it.”

The two little craft tore across the dark landscape far below, curving lazily round intervening Towers. Half an hour and a twelfth of the world away they slowed and dropped, approaching the base of a Tower. Ferbin was ready to get out but the two little craft sat hovering a metre above the Bare surface in front of a great dark ellipse inscribed on the fluted base at the Tower’s foot. They sat there for some time. Ferbin leaned forward to touch Djan Seriy’s shoulder and ask what they were waiting for, but she held one hand up flat to him without turning round, and just as she did so, the dark shape ahead fell away, revealing a still darker tunnel behind.

The twin craft went slowly, tentatively down it.

“This bit is fractionally dangerous,” Djan Seriy told her brother, reaching back to touch his suit with hers again as the two little craft dropped down one of the minor tubes within the Tower. “The ship will be working the Surface systems to keep us clear, but not everything is handled from there. Matrices further down and even on individual scendships might take it into their own little circuits to send something up or down here.” She paused. “Nothing so far,” she added.

The two craft flitted from one Tower to another over the next two levels. The next one down was Vacuum Baskers territory, the home of creatures of several different species-types which, like the Seedsails, absorbed sunlight directly. Unlike the Seedsails they were happy enough to stick roughly where they were all their lives rather than go sailing amongst the stars. Apart from the occasional surface glint, there wasn’t much to be seen there either. Another dark transition took them to another Tower and across the perfectly black and completely vacant vacuum-level below the Baskers.

“Still all right, brother?” Djan Seriy asked. Her touch on his ankle was oddly comforting in the utter darkness and near total silence.

“A little bored,” Ferbin told her.

“Talk to the suit. Get it to play you music or screen you something.”

He whispered to the suit; it played soothing music.

They ended up on another mid-level Tower balcony similar to the one they’d left from, abandoning the two little craft tipped on the floor beside some already occupied cradles. One corridor, several doors and many ghostly images later they stood by the curved wall of a scendship tube while Djan Seriy and Hippinse both carefully placed the palms of their hands on position after position on the wide wall, as though searching for something. Djan Seriy raised one hand. Hippinse stepped away from the wall. A short while later Anaplian also stepped back from the wall and a little later still the wall revealed a door which rolled up, releasing creamy purple light from beneath like a flood that lapped round feet, calves, thighs and torsos until it reached their masked faces and they could see that they were facing a scendship interior full of what looked like barely solidified glowing purple cloud-stuff. They stepped into it.

It was like walking through a curtain of syrup into a room full of thick air. The suit masks provided a view; the partially solidified cloud and the everywhere-purple light inside it made it impossible to see past the end of one’s nose on normal sight. Djan Seriy beckoned them all to stand together, hands resting on shoulders.

“Be glad you can’t smell this, gentlemen,” she told the two Sarl men. “This is an Aultridian scendship.”

Holse went rigid.

Ferbin nearly fainted.

It was not even to be a short journey, though it might be relatively quick. The scendship hurtled down the Tower past the level of the Cumuloforms, where Ferbin and Holse had been transported over the unending ocean by Expanded Version Five; Zourd, months before, past the level beneath where Pelagic Kites and Avians roamed the airs above a shallow ocean dotted with sunlit islands, past the one beneath that where Naiant Tendrils swarmed through a level pressured to the ceiling with an atmosphere from the upper levels of a gas giant, then past the one beneath that where the Vesiculars — Monthian megawhales — swam singing through a mineral-rich methane ocean that did not quite touch the ceiling above.

They went plunging past the Eighth.

They were sat on the floor by Djan Seriy, who stood. The feet or hands of their suits all touched.

“Home proper, we’re passing, sir,” Holse said to Ferbin when Djan Seriy relayed this information.

Ferbin heard him over some very loud but still soothing music he was having the suit play him. He had closed his eyes earlier but still could not keep out the unspeakable purple glow; then he’d thought to ask the suit to block it, which it did. He shivered with disgust every time he thought of that ghastly purple mass of Aultridian stuff stuck cloyingly all around them, infusing them with its hideous smell. He didn’t reply to Holse.

They kept going, flashing beneath their home level.

The Aultridian vessel didn’t even start to slow until it had fallen to a point level with the top of the atmosphere covering what had been the Deldeyn’s lands.

Still slowing gradually, it fell past the floor of that level too, coming to a halt adjacent to the matrix of Filigree immediately beneath. It jostled itself sideways, the floor tipping and the whole craft shuddering. Djan Seriy, one hand attached to a patch on the scendship’s wall near the door, was controlling its actions. Her knees flexed and her whole body moved with what looked like intensely practised ease as the craft shook and juddered beneath her. Then they felt the craft steady before starting to move smartly sideways and up, gradually levelling off.

“Moving into the Filigree now,” Hippinse told Ferbin and Holse.

“The Aultridia have spotted all is not well with one of their scendships,” Djan Seriy told them, sounding distracted.

“You mean this one, ma’am?” Holse asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“They’re following us,” Hippinse confirmed.

“What?” Ferbin squeaked. He was imagining being captured and peeled from his suit by Aultridia.

“Precautionary,” Hippinse said, unworried. “They’ll try and block us off somewhere ahead too, once we’ve narrowed our options a bit, but we’ll be gone by then. Don’t worry.”

“If you say so, sir,” Holse said, though he did not sound unworried.

“This kind of thing happens all the time,” Hippinse reassured them. “Scendships have brains just smart enough to fool themselves. They take off on their own sometimes, or people get into them and borrow them for unauthorised excursions. There are separate safety systems that still prevent collisions so it isn’t a catastrophe when a scendship moves without orders; more of a nuisance.”

“Oh really?” Ferbin said tartly. “You are an expert on our homeworld now, are you?”

“Certainly am,” Hippinse said happily. “The ship and I have the best original specification overview, secondary structure plans, accrued morphology mappings, full geo, hydro, aero, bio and data system models and all the latest full-spectrum updates available. Right now I know more about Sursamen than the Nariscene do, and they know almost everything.”

“What do you know they don’t?” Holse asked.

“A few details the Oct and Aultridia haven’t told them.” Hippinse laughed. “They’ll find out eventually but they don’t know yet. I do.”

“Such as?” Ferbin asked.

“Well, where we’re going,” Hippinse said. “There’s an inordinate amount of Oct interest in these Falls. And the Aultridia are getting curious too. High degree of convergence; intriguing.” The avatoid sounded both bemused and fascinated. “Now there’s a pattern for you, don’t you think? Oct ships outside clustering round Sursamen and Oct inside focusing on the Hyeng-zhar. Hmm-hmm. Very interesting.” Ferbin got the impression that — inhuman avatar of a God-like Optimae super-spaceship or not — the being was basically talking to itself at this point.

“By the way, Mr Hippinse,” Holse said, “is it really all right to wet oneself in these things?”

“Absolutely!” Hippinse said, as though Holse had proposed a toast. “All gets used. Feel free.”

Ferbin rolled his eyes, though he was glad that Holse, probably, could not see.

“Oh, that’s better…”

“We’re here,” Djan Seriy said.

Ferbin had fallen asleep. The suit seemed to have reduced the volume of the music it had been playing; it swelled again now as he woke up. He told it to stop. They were still surrounded by the horrible purple glow.

“Good navigating,” Hippinse said.

“Thank you,” Djan Seriy replied.

“A drop, then?”

“So it would appear,” Anaplian agreed. “Brother, Mr Holse; we were unable to make the landfall we wanted to. Too many Aultridian scendships trying to block us and too many doors closed off.” She glanced at Hippinse, who had a blank expression on his face and seemed to have lost his earlier good humour. “Plus something alarmingly capable of procedural corruption and instruction manipulation appears to be loose in the data systems of this part of the world,” she added. She grinned in what was probably meant to be an encouraging manner. “So instead we’ve transited to another Tower, ascended it and then made off into its Filigree and come to a dead end; we’re in an Oversquare level so there’s no onward connections.”

“A dead end?” Ferbin said. Were they never to be released from this cloying purple filth?

“Yes. So we have to drop.”

“Drop?”

“Walk this way,” Djan Seriy said, turning. The scendship’s door rolled up, revealing darkness. They all got to their feet, pushed through the thick-feeling curtain at the entrance and were suddenly free of the glutinous purple stuff filling the scendship’s interior. Ferbin looked down at his arms, chest and legs, expecting to see some of the ghastly material still adhering to him but there was, happily, no trace. He doubted they’d shrugged off the notorious smell so easily.

They were standing on a narrow platform lit only by the purple glare from behind; the wall above curved up and over them, following the shape of the scendship’s hull. Djan Seriy looked at the bulge on her thigh. The drone Turminder Xuss detached itself and floated up to the dark line where the door had buried itself in the ship’s hull.

It twisted itself slowly into the material as though it was no more substantial than the glowing purple mass beneath. Long hanging strands of hull and other material worked their way out along the little machine’s body and drooped down, swaying. The drone — rosily glowing folds of light pulsing about its body — finished by stationing itself midway between the scendship’s hull and the wall of the chamber and floating there for a moment. There was an alarming groaning noise and the hull of the ship around the hole bulged inwards by about a hand’s span, exactly as though an invisible sphere a metre across was being pressed into it. The wall directly opposite made creaking, popping noises too.

“Try closing that,” Turminder Xuss said, with what sounded like relish.

Djan Seriy nodded. “This way.”

They passed through a small door into the closed-off end of the channel the scendship travelled within; a twenty-metre-diameter concavity at whose centre, up some complicated steps that were more like handrails, another small round door was set. They entered it and found themselves inside a spherical space three metres or so across, struggling to stand up all at once on its bowled floor. Djan Seriy closed the door they’d come through and pointed to a similar one set straight across from it.

“That one leads to the outside. That’s where we drop from. One at a time. Me first; Hippinse last.”

“This ‘drop’, ma’am…” Holse said.

“We’re fourteen hundred kilometres above the Deldeyn province of Sull,” Anaplian told him. “We ambient-drop, not using AG, through nearly a thousand klicks of near-vacuum and then hit the atmosphere. Then it’s an assisted glide to the Hyeng-zhar, again leaving suit antigravity off; it could show.” She looked at Ferbin and Holse. “You don’t have to do a thing; your suits will take care of everything. Just enjoy the view. We’re still in comms blackout, but don’t forget you can always talk to your suit if you need to ask any questions about what’s going on. Okay? Let’s go.”

There had not — Ferbin reflected as his sister swung open the circular door — really been enough time between the “Okay?” and the “Let’s go” bits of that last sentence for anybody to say very much at all.

Outside, it was dark until you looked down, then the landscape shone in great stripes separated by a central band of grey near-dark. No stars were visible, hidden by vanes and ceiling structures. Djan Seriy squatted on the sill, one hand holding on to the top edge of the inward-opening door. She turned to Ferbin and touched him with her other hand. “You come straight out after me, all right, brother? Don’t delay.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. His heart was hammering.

Djan Seriy looked at him for a moment longer. “Or you could just go limp and the suit will do it all for you; climbing up and out, I mean. With your eyes closed—”

“I shall do it myself, never fear,” Ferbin said, trying to sound braver and more certain than he felt.

She squeezed his shoulder. “See you down there.”

Then she threw herself out of the doorway.

Ferbin pulled himself up to squat where his sister had, feeling Holse’s hands helping to steady him, then he swallowed as he looked down at the impossible drop below him. He closed his eyes after all, but he flexed legs and arms and threw himself out, curling into a ball.

The view was tumbling about him when he opened his eyes again; light/dark, light/dark, light… then the flickering sequence started to slow as the suit whirred, gently teasing his limbs out. His breath sounded terribly loud in his head. After a few moments he was falling in an X shape, feeling almost relaxed as he lay looking back up at the shady mass of Filigree and vaning hanging from the ceiling above. He tried to see where he had thrown himself from, but couldn’t. He thought he caught a glimpse of another tiny dark dot far above, also falling, but could not be sure.

“Can I turn over and look down?” he asked the suit.

“Yes. It will be advisable to return to this orientation for entry into the atmosphere,” the suit told him in its crisp, asexual voice. “Or it is possible to transmit the view downward to your eyes in your present orientation.”

“Is that better?”

“Yes.”

“Do that, then.”

Suddenly it was as though he was dropping down into the distant landscape beneath rather than falling away from the view above. He felt disoriented and dizzy for a moment, but soon adapted. He looked in vain for Djan Seriy, falling somewhere below, but could see no sign of her. “Can you see my sister?” he asked.

“She is probably within this area,” the suit said, creating a thin red circle over part of the view. “She is camouflaged,” it explained.

“How far have we fallen so far?”

“Six kilometres.”

“Oh. How long did that take?”

“Fifty seconds. Over the next fifty seconds we shall descend another twenty kilometres. We are still accelerating and will continue to do so until we encounter the atmosphere.”

“When does that happen?”

“In about ten minutes from now.”

Ferbin settled back and enjoyed the topsy-turvy view, trying to spot the Hyeng-zhar cataract, then attempting to trace the course of the Sulpitine river and finally settling for working out where the Upper and Lower Sulpine Seas might be. He wondered if it was all still frozen. They’d been told it would be, though he found that hard to believe.

The view expanded slowly in front of him. There; was that one of the seas? It looked too small. Was that the other? Too small and too close to the other one. It was so hard to tell. The gloom beneath was gradually filling more and more of his field of vision, leaving the bright, sunlit lands on the edges of the view.

By the time he was sure those had been the two Seas, he had begun to realise how high up they had been when they’d started falling, how small even two substantial seas and a mighty river could look from a great altitude and how enormous the world he had lived in all his life really was.

The landscape beneath was bulging up towards him. How were they to stop?

The suit started to grow around him, extending a mass of bubbles from every part save that he must be looking through. The bubbles enlarged; some slowly broke and kept on extending, becoming a delicate-looking tracery of what appeared like an insect’s near-transparent wings or the infinitely fragile-looking skeleton structure that was left when a tree-leaf had lost all trace of its light-gathering surface and only the sustaining filigree of its sap-transporting veins was left.

The top of the atmosphere imposed itself as a very slowly increasing sense of returning weight, pushing against his back, so that — as he continued to look downwards even though he was actually on his back — he experienced the vertiginous sensation of being propelled even faster towards the ground beneath. A faint whispering sound transmitted itself through the suit. The push grew harder and the whisper swelled to a roar.

He waited to see the red, yellow and white glow which he had heard things meeting atmospheres produced about them, but it never appeared.

The suit twisted, rotating so that he was actually facing downwards now. The tracery and the bubbles collapsed back in towards the suit and became crescent wings and thin fins protruding from his arms, sides and thighs; the suit had been gently reconfiguring his body so that his arms were stuck out ahead of him now, as though he was about to dive into a river. His legs were splayed behind him and felt as though they were connected by some sort of tether or membrane.

The landscape was much closer now — he could see tiny dark rivers and hints of other surface features picked out in blacks and pale greys in the gloom far beneath — however, the ground was no longer rushing up towards him but sliding past beneath. The feeling of weight had shifted too and the air was whispering about him.

He was flying.

Anaplian dropped back to touch with Hippinse as they flew. “Worked out what’s messing with the local systemry?” she asked. Hippinse was monitoring the disturbance in the surrounding level’s data complexes and analysing data they’d collected earlier while in the Aultridian scendship.

“Not really,” the avatoid confessed, sounding both embarrassed and concerned. “Whatever’s corrupting it is almost untouchably exotic. Genuinely alien; unknown. In fact, right now, unknowable. I’d need the ship’s whole Mind to start attacking this shit.”

Anaplian was silent for a moment. “What the fuck is going on here?” she asked quietly. Hippinse had no reply to that either. Anaplian let go and flew ahead.

Ferbin and the suit dipped, passing close enough to the ground to see individual boulders, bushes and small, scrubby trees, all tailed by narrow deltas of the same pale grey as though casting strange shadows. Gullies and ravines shone palely too, as if filled with softly shining mist.

“Is that snow?” he asked.

“Yes,” the suit said.

Something lightly grasped his ankle. “Are you all right, Ferbin?” Djan Seriy’s voice said.

“Yes,” he said, starting to twist round to look back but then stopping himself just as she said, “There is no point looking back, brother; you won’t be able to see me.”

“Oh,” he said, “so you are behind me?”

“I am now. I have been flying ahead of you for the last two minutes. We are in a diamond formation; you are in the right-hand position. Turminder Xuss flies a kilometre ahead of us.”

“Oh.”

“Listen, brother. While we were in the tube, just before we dropped, we picked up repeated signals from an Oct news service talking about the Falls and Oramen. They say that Oramen lives and is well but there was some sort of attempt on his life nine days ago; an explosion in the excavations and/or an attempt to knife him. It may not have been the first attempt on his life, either. He is aware he is in danger and may already have accused people around tyl Loesp, if not tyl Loesp himself, of being responsible.”

“But he is well?”

“Lightly injured but well enough. Tyl Loesp in turn accuses Oramen of impatience in trying to wrest the crown from the properly appointed regent before he is legally of an age to do so. He returns from travels elsewhere on this level and has signalled forces loyal to him to gather just upstream from the Falls. Werreber — in charge of the greater army — has been contacted by both Oramen and tyl Loesp and has not declared for either side yet. He is on the Eighth, though, and is ten or more days away, even flying. His ground forces would be many weeks behind that again.”

Ferbin felt a chill. “We are not quite too late, then,” he said, trying to sound hopeful.

“I don’t know. There is more; some artifact long buried in the Nameless City was reported to be showing signs of life and all attention had been turned to it. But that was five days ago. Since then there has been nothing. Not just no news service but no fresh signals at all from the vicinity of the Falls or the Settlement or anywhere else within this section. The data networks all around this area are in a state of locked-in chaos. That is odd and worrying. Plus, we are picking up curious, anomalous indicators from the Nameless City itself.”

“Is that bad?”

Djan Seriy hesitated. This worried Ferbin all by itself. “Possibly.” Then she added, “We’ll set down on the city outskirts downstream in about twenty minutes. Tell the suit if you need to talk to me in the meantime. All right?”

“All right.”

“Don’t worry. See you soon.” His ankle was patted once, then the pressure on it was removed.

He assumed she was resuming her position ahead of him in their diamond formation but he couldn’t see her pass him or spot her flying in front.

They zoomed over a small hill without losing speed and Ferbin realised that they were doing more than just gliding; they were under power. He asked to look back and was given a view from the back of his head. There was a membrane filling the V between his legs and two small fat cylinders sticking out from his ankles. The view through them was a blur.

He looked ahead again just as they went hurtling over what looked like a road, some old railway lines and a drained canal. Then the ground just fell away and he was staring at a flat, icy landscape another two hundred metres further beneath, a shadowy wasteland of broad, frozen waterways, slim, sinuously curved channels, rounded banks and mounds of sand and snow, the whole linear, winterbound plain punctuated at random by a variety of misshapen shards, stumps of arbitrary debris and jagged wreckage from what looked like ruined buildings or sunken ships all sticking chaotically aslant, broken and alone from the pitted, frozen surface.

They swooped, dipping in towards the centre of this new and pitiless landscape contained by the sheer and distant cliffs on either side.

When they got to the Nameless City, arriving over increasing amounts of fractured, haphazardly jumbled detritus trapped within the ice and the frozen wastes of sand and snow and mud, they could see many thin trails of smoke leading up into the sky from their left above the cliffs on that side. Hard against the cliffs, visible under modest magnification, they could make out zigzagging traceries of stairways and the open lattices of lift shafts. Nothing save the smoke was moving, drifting slowly upwards into the quiet, windless dim.

In front of them, the city rose, its highest spires and towers still some kilometres distant. They crossed the first outskirt jumble of short, few-storey buildings and began to slow. The suit released Ferbin from its gentle grip, letting his arms and legs free.

Moments later he felt himself tipped forward, slowing still further as his legs swung underneath him and he was lowered and positioned as though about to start walking. A small open space in front of him seemed to be their target. He realised that the few-storey-high buildings were actually much taller, their lower floors buried in the frozen mud and ice.

His sister, Holse and Hippinse blinked into relative visibility, hazily indistinct shapes each ten metres or so away as they set down in the icy little clearing, and — finally, though it might have been in a strange place under no appreciable sun on the wrong level and through soles that would doubtless have insulated him from anything down to absolute zero, Ferbin’s feet again touched the ground of home.

26. The Sarcophagus

The object now being called the Sarcophagus lay almost in the dead centre of the Nameless City. It was located deep beneath the under-plaza within a building as fat and tall and impressive as any in the ancient, long-buried metropolis. The city’s heart was now accessed along a freshly directed rail track; the engineers had taken advantage of the freeze to build lines where they never could have before, over frozen expanses of river that would have swept any trestles or pylons away in an instant had they still held water rather than ice and straight across sand- and mudbanks that would have shifted, sunk and reappeared somewhere else in the course of a shift had the rapids still been roaring.

From the thronging chaos of the railhead — an arc-lit station deep under the plaza whose traffic volume would have done justice to a terminus in a major city — the well-tramped way led, past whistling, roaring, bellowing machines and piles and coils of pipe and cable, along a thoroughfare twenty metres across crowded with pack creatures, warbeasts pressed into service as haulage animals, steam- and oil-powered traction engines, narrow-gauge trains and — more than anything else — with rank after rank and row after row and group and company and detail and shift and gang of workers, labourers, engineers, guards, specialists and professionals of a hundred different types.

On a vast raised round structure that lay at the focus of a dozen ramps and roadways original to the Nameless City the great packed street split in a score of different directions. Conveyor belts, tramways and aerial wagonways spun off with the roadways, all dotted with faint oil lamps, hissing gas fixtures and sputtering electric lights. What had been the busiest ramp — attended by cableways, conveyors and funicular lines like too-steep railways with jagged stairways at their centres — led across a filled-in lake and a broad roadway of thick planking down to the great bulbous building housing the Sarcophagus.

Through what had been a gigantic, elongated formal entrance a hundred metres across and forty high, flanked by a dozen soaring sculptures of cut-away Shellworlds and leading to a still taller mouth-shaped atrium within, the torrent of men, machines, animals and material had poured.

That torrent had slowed to a trickle now as Oramen and the party which had come directly from the gathering he had held in the great marquee descended to the focus of the city and the excavations; the greatest concentrations of effort were elsewhere now, principally targeting the ten smaller artifacts similar to the one Oramen had gone to inspect when the attempt on his life had been made. That particular black cube was subject to the most intense exertions of all due to the partial collapse of the chamber which had been excavated around it.

The central chamber housing the Sarcophagus was similar to — but far larger than — that around the black cube Oramen had seen. The excavations had emptied a huge cavity within the building, removing mud, silt, sand and assorted debris that had collected there over uncounted centuries to reveal what had always been an enormous central arena over a hundred metres across rather than an extemporised void blasted and torn from smaller rooms and spaces.

At its centre, brightly lit by arc lights and cluttered by layers, levels and platforms of scaffolding and latticed by the resulting shadows, lay the Sarcophagus itself; a pale grey cube twenty metres to a side, its corners and edges subtly rounded. For nearly twenty days while it was fully excavated a controlled chaos had swirled about the artifact, a storm of men, machines and movement, attended by shouts, bangs, sparks, animal roars, gouts and bursts of steam and exhaust smoke. Now, though, as Oramen finally looked upon it, the chamber around the object was quiet and hushed and the atmosphere almost reverential, though possessed, unless Oramen was imagining it, of a certain tension.

“It does not look very alive from here,” Oramen said. He and Poatas stood, surrounded by guards, at the main entrance to the central chamber, a wide doorway stationed ten metres above the base of the shallow bowl at the centre of which the Sarcophagus sat on a round plinth raised by about five metres.

“Well, you should come closer,” Poatas said.

Oramen smiled at the man. “That is exactly what we are going to do, Mr Poatas.”

They walked towards it. Oramen found the thing in many ways less intimidating than the pure black cube he’d taken an interest in earlier. The chamber was far larger and less oppressive-seeming — partly, no doubt, he was simply appreciating the lack of clamour — and the object itself, though much larger than the one he’d seen just a few days before, seemed less intimidating just because it was a relatively unthreatening shade of grey rather than the light-defying black that had so repelled and fascinated him in that other object. Nevertheless, it was large and he was seeing it from below rather than above, so that it appeared more massive still.

He wondered how much he was still suffering from the effects of his injuries. He might have stopped another day in bed; his doctors had recommended it but he had been more concerned at losing the trust of the people and especially the ex-soldiers of the Settlement. He had had to rise, had to show himself to them, had to address them, and then — when the messenger had entered with news that the Sarcophagus had shown signs of life — he had had no choice but to accompany Poatas and his closest aides to the focus of their excavations. He felt breathless, sore in too many places to count and his head hurt, plus his ears still rang and he had to struggle to hear what people said sometimes, as though he was an already old man, but he was doing his best to appear well and hearty and unconcerned.

The Sarcophagus gave off, it seemed to him as he walked up to it, an aura of utter solidity; of settled, stolid, almost crushing containment and impassivity, of — indeed — timelessness, as though this thing had witnessed the passing of ages and epochs ungraspable by men, and yet still, somehow, was more of the future than of the past.

Oramen assured the makeshift personal guard of concerned-looking, rather fearsome ex-soldiers who’d accumulated around him since his speech an hour or so earlier that he would be all right on the scaffolding with just one or two to look after him. Dubrile, a grey, grim-looking, one-eyed veteran from many of Hausk’s campaigns, who seemed to have been acclaimed their leader by the many ex-soldiers who’d rallied about him, detailed two others to accompany him in looking after Oramen.

“This is not necessary, you know,” Poatas told Oramen while the guards were negotiating all this amongst themselves. “You are in no danger here.”

“I thought as much three days ago, Poatas,” Oramen said with a smile, “when I went to view the other object.” He let the smile fade and dropped his voice. “And do try to remember, Poatas, you address me as ‘sir’, both in front of the men and when we are alone.” He put the smile back again. “There are niceties to be observed, after all.”

Poatas looked like he’d suddenly discovered a frozen turd in his britches. He drew himself up, the staff wavered in his hand as though he was putting more weight on it than he was used to and he nodded, getting out a rather strangled-sounding, “Well, yes, indeed, sir.”

With the guards sorted, Oramen nodded to the great grey object in front of them. “Now, shall we?”

They ascended the ramps to a point at the centre of one of the cube’s faces where a dozen or so men in neat white overalls moved, hidden from the rest of the chamber by grey sheets shrouding the scaffolding behind them. Clustered about the platform were various delicate, mysterious-looking machines and instruments of a sophistication patently beyond the capacity of both the Sarl and Deldeyn. They all seemed to be connected to each other by thin wires and cables of a variety of colours. Even these looked somehow advanced, almost alien.

“Where does this come from?” Oramen asked, waving at the equipment.

“These were traded from the Oct,” Poatas said with relish. “Sir,” he added, along with a little facial twitch. He positioned himself so that he stood between Oramen and the rest of the people on the platform. Oramen saw Dubrile shift behind him, perhaps to guard against the unlikely possibility that Poatas would seek to push the Prince Regent off the scaffolding. Poatas frowned but went on, voice dropped almost to a whisper. “The Oct have shown a new interest in our excavations and were most keen to help when they realised we had discovered objects of such advancement. Sir.”

Oramen frowned. “One assumes their Nariscene mentors approved.”

“One assumes what one wishes to, I dare say, sir,” Poatas said quietly. “The Oct, I understand through some of the merchants who deal with them, would offer us much more help, if we’d but let them. Sir.”

“Do they now?” Oramen said.

“Such help was disdained by the Deldeyn when they ran the excavations. As on the Eighth, the Oct’s licence here runs no deeper than those who hold the level wish it to, and the Deldeyn, led by the late monks of the Mission, refused any such aid, citing pride and an over-punctilious reading of the Articles of Inhabitation which someone perhaps wishing to limit themselves and their people in their natural desire and right for advancement both technical and moral, a right which surely any—”

“Enough, Poatas, enough,” Oramen said quietly, clapping the fellow lightly on the shoulder. The stooped grey man, whose voice and manner had grown maniacally intense and feverish in the course of just that single gasped, unfinished sentence, ceased talking, looking pained and stricken.

“So, Poatas,” Oramen said, louder now, so that all could hear again. “Show me what brought my little gathering to such an abrupt conclusion.”

“Of course, sir,” Poatas whispered, and hobbled off, staff echoing on the boards, to speak with a couple of the technicians.

“Sir, if you would,” one of the white-suited men said to Oramen. The fellow was middle-aged, pallid and nervous-looking, though he also seemed excited, energised. He indicated that Oramen should stand at a particular point on the platform in front of a panel on the Sarcophagus that looked a shade lighter than the rest of the visible structure.

“Sir,” Poatas said, “may I present Senior Technician Leratiy.” Another man bowed to Oramen. He was more fully built though just as pallid. He wore a set of overalls that looked better and more generously cut than those of his colleagues.

“Prince Regent. An honour, sir. I should warn you, however,” he said, “that the effect is one of… being read, somehow, and then having images of, well…” The fellow smiled. “I ought to let you see for yourself. I cannot tell you quite what to expect because everyone who has experienced this phenomenon thus far has encountered something rather different from everybody else, though common themes do seem to predominate in the results. It would be wrong of me, in any case, to prejudice your impressions. If you will only remember to attempt to recall what it is that you experience and then be willing to communicate whatever that may be to one of the technician-recorders, I should be most extremely grateful. Please step forward; the focus appears to be about here.”

There was a rough square marked on the boards beneath Oramen’s feet; he stepped into it. One of the technicians came forward with what looked like a small flat box, but Senior Technician Leratiy waved him away with one imperious hand. “The Prince Regent is of sufficient height,” he muttered. Then, checking that Oramen’s feet were within the square, he said, “Please, sir, merely stand there a little while, if you please.” The senior technician took out a large pocket watch and inspected it. “The process usually begins after approximately one half-minute. With your permission, sir, I shall time events.”

Oramen nodded. He looked quizzically at the patch of light grey in front of him.

For some few moments, there was nothing. Nothing happened at all except that he started to wonder if this was all some elaborate joke, or even a convoluted and over-organised attempt, again, to kill him. He was stood in one obviously very well-worked-out spot. Might this be where an assassin’s rifle shot was targeted, perhaps even through the grey curtains obscuring this part of the platform from the rest of the chamber?

The experience began as a tiny dizziness. He felt oddly imbalanced for a moment, then the dizziness itself seemed to steady him somehow, as though compensating for its own disruptive effects. He felt a strange sensation of weightlessness and carelessness all at once, and for an instant was utterly unsure where he was or when, and how long he had been wherever he was. Then he was fully aware once more, but could feel a sort of rushing in his head, and a cacophonous medley of everything he’d ever heard or felt or seen or known seemed to tear through him.

He felt like a man sitting in a sunlit room watching a gaudy parade that represented in some detail every aspect of his life since birth all rushing past outside, taking only a few seconds to pass and yet allowing him to see and recognise individual bursts and fragments of that long-stored, mostly forgotten life.

Then it was gone — how quickly over!

Then yearning. Yearning for a lost mother, a crown and a whole kingdom; craving the love of all and the return of a long-departed sister, mourning a dead brother and the unrecoverable love, respect and approval of a departed father…

He stepped out of the square, breaking the spell.

He took a couple of deep breaths then turned and looked at Senior Technician Leratiy. After some moments he said, “You may tell your technician-recorder I experienced a sense of loss and a sense of longing, both expressed in terms of personal experiences.” He looked round the others on the platform, all of them watching him. There were one or two smiles, nervous-seeming. Oramen nodded at Senior Technician Leratiy. “An interesting experience. I take it that what I felt was on a par with the sensations others had?”

“Loss, yearning,” Leratiy confirmed. “Those are indeed the emotions felt in common, sir.”

“You think this qualifies it as being in any way alive?” Oramen asked, glancing, frowning, at the grey surface.

“It is doing something, sir,” Poatas said. “To be doing anything after so long buried is perfectly astounding. No other object in the excavations has ever worked in this manner before.”

“It could be working as a waterwheel might work or a windmill might work, dug out of a similar caking of mud or dust,” Oramen suggested.

“We think it is something more than that, sir,” Leratiy said.

“Well then, what would be your next step?”

Leratiy and Poatas exchanged looks. “We believe, sir,” Senior Technician Leratiy said, “that the object is trying to communicate, but can only do so at the moment through crude images; the strongest ones the human soul experiences; those of loss and yearning amongst them. We believe that it may be possible to allow the object to communicate more fully by, quite simply, teaching it to speak a language.”

“What? Shall we talk baby-talk to it?” Oramen asked.

“If it could hear and speak, sir,” Leratiy said, “it probably would have tried to talk to us by now; a hundred or more labourers, engineers, technicians and other experts have been speaking in its vicinity since well before we discovered the curious property you have just experienced.”

“What, then?” Oramen asked.

Leratiy cleared his throat. “The problem facing us here, sir, is unique in our history but not that of others. It has been experienced many times before over many eons and by a multiplicity of peoples facing an uncounted number of similar relics and artifacts. There are established and highly successful techniques employed by peoples from the Optimae down which may be employed to establish communication with just such an object.”

“Indeed,” Oramen said. He looked from Leratiy to Poatas. “Have we access to such techniques?”

“At a remove, sir, yes,” Poatas said. “An Enabler machine can be ours to command.”

“An Enabler machine?” Oramen asked.

“We would rely on the Oct to provide and operate the equipment involved, sir,” Leratiy said, “though it would, of course,” he added quickly, “be under our most diligent and intense supervision. All would be noted, recorded, tabulated and filed. On any subsequent occasions it may well be that we would be able to employ the same techniques directly ourselves. Thus, our benefit would be twofold, or indeed of an even higher order.”

“We both,” Poatas began, glancing at the senior technician, “feel it is of the utmost importance—”

“Again,” Oramen interrupted, “is not this sort of technology transfer, this kind of help banned, though?” He looked at the two men in turn. They both looked awkward, glancing at each other.

Leratiy cleared his throat again. “The Oct claim that if they operate it, sir, then — as it is being directed at something that in effect already belongs to them — the answer is no, it is not banned.”

“Indeed,” Poatas said, lifting his chin defiantly.

“They claim this thing?” Oramen asked, glancing at the cube. This was a new development.

“Not formally, sir,” Leratiy replied. “They accept our prior claim. However, they believe it may form part of their ancient birthright, so take a particular and profound interest in it.”

Oramen looked around. “I see no Oct here. How do you know all this about them?”

“They have communicated through a special emissary by the name of Savide, sir,” Poatas said. “He has appeared within this chamber on a couple of occasions, and been of some consultant help.”

“I was not informed of this,” Oramen pointed out.

“You were injured, confined to bed, sir,” Poatas said, studying the planking at his feet for a moment.

“That recently, I see,” Oramen said. Poatas and Leratiy both smiled at him.

“Gentlemen,” Oramen said, smiling back, “if it is your judgement we should allow the Oct to help us, then let them. Have them bring their wonderful techniques, their Enabler machines, though do what you can to find out how they work. Very well?” he asked.

The two men looked both surprised and delighted.

“Indeed, sir!” Senior Technician Leratiy said.

“Sir!” Poatas said, lowering his head.

Oramen spent the rest of the day organising what were in effect all the trappings of a small state, or at least looking on as others did the actual organising. Apart from anything else they were resurrecting a disbanded army, turning the men who had been soldiers and had become excavationers back into soldiers again. There was no shortage of men, only of weapons; most of the guns that had equipped the army were stored in armouries back in Pourl. They would have to do the best they could with what they had. The situation ought to improve a little; some of the workshops in the Settlement were already turning their forges and lathes to the production of guns, though they would not be of especially high quality.

The people he entrusted to oversee this were all from relatively junior ranks; almost his first action had been to gather together all the senior people tyl Loesp had put in place, including General Foise, and send them off to Rasselle, allegedly as a delegation to explain Oramen’s actions but in reality just to be rid of people he was no longer sure he could trust. Some of his new advisers had cautioned that he was sending able officers with a clear idea of the precise strengths and weaknesses of Oramen’s own forces straight to their enemy, but he was not convinced this was sufficient reason to let them stay, and was reluctant to attempt to intern or imprison them.

Foise and the others had departed, reluctant but obedient, on a train only a few hours earlier. Another train had followed half an hour behind. It was full of soldiers loyal to Oramen carrying plentiful supplies of blasting material, with instructions to mine and guard every bridge between the Falls and Rasselle that could be attained without opening hostilities.

Oramen made his excuses from the planning meeting as soon as he decently could and retired to his carriage for a much-needed nap; the doctors still wanted him to take more days off but he would not, could not. He slept for an hour and then visited Droffo, who was recovering in the principal hospital train.

“You’ve moved quickly then,” Droffo said. He was still bandaged and looked dazed. Various cuts had been cleaned on his face and left to heal in the air, though a couple on one cheek had needed stitches. “Foise went quietly?” He shook his head, then grimaced. “Probably off to plot with tyl Loesp.”

“You think they’ll attack us?” Oramen asked. He sat on a canvas chair drawn up beside Droffo’s bed in the private compartment.

“I don’t know, prince,” Droffo said. “Is there any news yet from tyl Loesp?”

“None. He is not even in Rasselle. He may not have heard yet.”

“I’d be wary of going to meet with him, I know that.”

“You think he himself is behind this?”

“Who else?”

“I thought perhaps… people around him.”

“Such as who?” Droffo said.

“Bleye? Tohonlo? People like that.”

Droffo shook his head. “They haven’t the wit.”

Oramen couldn’t think of anybody else by name, with the possible exception of General Foise. Surely not Werreber. Chasque he was not so sure about, but then the Exaltine was not connected between tyl Loesp and any further layers of underlings; he was, as it were, off to one side. Oramen was used to seeing tyl Loesp surrounded by other people — mostly army officers and civil servants — but no, now Droffo mentioned it, there were few regular, identifiable people around him. He had functionaries, lackeys, those who did his bidding, but no real friends or confidants that Oramen knew of. He’d assumed they existed but he just didn’t know them, but maybe they didn’t exist at all.

Oramen shrugged. “But tyl Loesp?” he said, frowning mightily. “I just can’t…”

“Vollird and Baerth were his men, Oramen.”

“I know.”

“Is there any news on Vollird?”

“None. Still missing; another ghost to haunt the diggings.”

“And tyl Loesp recommended Tove Lomma to you as well, didn’t he?”

“Tove was an old friend,” Oramen said.

“But one who owed tyl Loesp his advancement. Just be careful.”

“I am, belatedly,” Oramen told him.

“This thing, the Sarcophagus. Is it really all they say?”

“It seems to communicate. The Oct want to try and teach it to talk,” Oramen said. “They have a thing called an Enabler machine which the Optimae use to talk to such dug-up curiosities.”

“Perhaps it’s an oracle,” Droffo said, smiling lopsidedly, stretching his stitched cuts and grimacing again. “Ask it what’s going to happen next.”

What happened next was that, two shifts later, on what was in effect the following day, tyl Loesp sent word by telegraph from Rasselle that there must have been some terrible misunderstanding. Vollird and Baerth must themselves have been victims of a conspiracy and persons unknown were patently plotting to drive a wedge between the regent and the Prince Regent for their own ignoble ends. Tyl Loesp thought it best that he and Oramen meet in Rasselle to discuss matters, reassure themselves of their mutual love and respect and arrange all subsequent dealings in a manner such as would lead to no more rash actions nor unsubstantiated, hinted-at accusations.

Oramen, after discussing this signal with Droffo, Dubrile and the half-dozen or so junior officers who had become his advisers — all acclaimed by their men rather than owing their advancement to tyl Loesp — replied that he would meet tyl Loesp here at the Falls, and he must bring no more than a dozen men with him, lightly armed.

They were still waiting on a reply.

Then, in the middle of what most people were treating as the night, news came that the Sarcophagus was speaking, and the Oct had appeared in force in the chamber around it, arriving via submarine vessels which had found or created channels in the Sulpine river which were still liquid water rather than ice. There was some confusion over whether they had taken over the chamber or not — work was apparently continuing — but they were there in unprecedented numbers and they were demanding to see tyl Loesp or whoever was in charge.

“I thought they were just coming to use this language-teaching device,” Oramen said as he pulled on clothes, wincing with each stretch of arm and leg. Neguste held out his jacket and helped him into it.

Droffo, who was ambulatory if far from fully recovered and who had intercepted the messenger bringing the news, held Oramen’s ceremonial sword belt in his one good hand. His other arm was cradled by a sling. “Perhaps when the thing spoke it said something disagreeable,” he suggested.

“It might have chosen a more agreeable time, that’s sure,” Oramen said, accepting his sword belt.

“Dear WorldGod,” Oramen said when he saw the interior of the great chamber at the Nameless City’s heart. He and Droffo both stopped in their tracks. Neguste, following behind — determined to go wherever his master went to ensure he shared whatever fate awaited and never again be thought either frightened or disloyal — failed to stop in time and bumped into them.

“Begging pardon, sirs,” he said, then saw between them to the chamber. “Well, fuck me upside down,” he breathed.

There were hundreds and hundreds of Oct in the chamber. Blue bodies glistened under the lights, thousands of red limbs shone as though polished. They had entirely surrounded the Sarcophagus, arranging themselves on the cleared floor of the great space in concentric circles of what looked like prostrated devotion, even adoration. The creatures all appeared motionless and might have been mistaken for dead had they not been so neatly and identically arranged. All were equipped with the same kind of body-encompassing suit that Ambassador Kiu had worn. Oramen caught the same strange scent he had smelled all those months ago, the day he’d heard his father had been killed. He remembered encountering Ambassador Kiu on his way to the mounting yard, and that curious smell. Faint then, it was strong now.

Around Oramen, his personal guard, commanded by Dubrile, jostled into position, trying to leave no gap. They surround me, Oramen thought, while the Oct surround that. But why? The guards too were distracted by the sight of so many Oct, glancing nervously as they took up their positions around Oramen.

White-coated technicians still moved about the chamber and along the scaffolding levels, seemingly untroubled by the presence of the Oct. On the platform where Oramen had stood earlier and experienced the Sarcophagus seemingly trying to communicate with him, the covers had been drawn back so that it was possible to see what was going on. Two Oct were there, along with some white-suited human figures. Oramen thought he recognised both Leratiy and Poatas.

A guardsman was reporting to Dubrile, who saluted Oramen and said, “Sir, the Oct just appeared; their ships are somewhere behind the ice of the Falls; they melted their way through. They came in, some through here, others floating in from places up in the walls. The guards didn’t know what to do. We never thought to have orders to cover such a thing. The Oct seem unarmed, so I suppose we are still in control, but they refuse to move.”

“Thank you, Dubrile,” Oramen said. Poatas was waving wildly from the platform. “Let’s go and see what’s happening, shall we?”

“Oramen-man, prince,” one of the Oct said when Oramen arrived on the platform. Its voice was like dry leaves rustling. “Again. Like meetings meet in time and spaces. As our ancestors, the blessed Involucra, who were no more, to us always were, and now are again without denial, so we are met once more. Think you not?”

“Ambassador Kiu?” Oramen asked. The ambassador and another Oct hung unsupported in front of the light patch of grey on the cube’s surface. Poatas and Senior Technician Leratiy stood nearby, gazing on with expressions of barely controlled excitement. They looked, Oramen thought, as though they could not wait to tell him something.

“I have that privilege,” Ambassador Kiu-to-Pourl said. “And to he I you introduce; Savidius Savide, Peripatetic Special Envoy to Sursamen.”

The other Oct turned fractionally to Oramen. “Oramen-man, Prince of Hausk, Pourl,” it said.

Oramen nodded. Dubrile and three of the guards were positioning themselves at the corners of the platform, making it almost crowded. “I am pleased to meet you, Envoy Savidius Savide. Welcome, friends,” he said. “May I ask what brings you here?” He turned to look round and down at the hundreds of Oct arranged in glittering circles round the Sarcophagus. “And in such numbers?”

“Greatness, prince,” Kiu said, drifting closer to Oramen. Dubrile went to interpose himself between but Oramen held up one hand. “Unparalleled greatness!”

“An occasion of such importance we are made as nothing!” the other Oct said. “These, here, our comrades, we two. We are nothing, no fit witness, no worthy acolytes, utterly insufficient! Nevertheless.”

“Deserving or not, we are here,” Kiu said. “Of incomprehensible privilege is this to all present. We thank you boundlessly for such. You put us forever in your debt. No lives lived to the end of time by billions, trillions of Oct could so repay our chance to witness.”

“Witness?” Oramen said gently, smiling indulgently, looking from the two Oct to Poatas and Leratiy. “Witness to what? That the Sarcophagus has spoken?”

“It has, sir!” Poatas said, stepping forward, flourishing his stick, waving it at the pale grey patch on the object’s surface. He gestured at one of the pieces of equipment on a tall trolley. “This device simply projected images and sounds and a sequence of invisible wave-fronts through the ether into the face of what we have called the Sarcophagus and it spoke! Sarl, Deldeyn, Oct, several Optimae languages. Repetitions, at first, so that we were disappointed, thinking that it only recorded, regurgitated, had no mind after all, but then — then, prince, then it spoke in its own voice!” Poatas turned to the pale grey square and bowed. “Will you indulge us once more, sir? Our most senior person is present; a prince of the royal house which commands two levels, he who is in charge here.”

“To see?” a voice said from the grey square. It was a voice like a long sigh, like something being expelled, waved away with every syllable.

“Come, come, sir!” Poatas said, beckoning Oramen forward. “It would see you. Here, sir; into the focus as before.”

Oramen held back. “Simply to be seen? Why into this focus again?” He was concerned that now this thing seemed to have found a voice it still might need to see into people’s minds.

“You are the prince?” the voice said levelly.

Oramen stepped round so that, had the grey patch been some sort of window, he might be visible to whatever was inside, but he did not step into the focal point he had stood in earlier. “I am,” he said. “My name is Oramen. Son of the late King Hausk.”

“You distrust me, prince?”

“That would be too strong,” Oramen said. “I wonder at you. You must be something quite remarkable and strange to be so long buried and yet alive. What might your name be?”

“So quickly we come to regret. My name, with so much else, is lost to me. I seek to recover it, with so much else.”

“How might you do that?” Oramen asked it.

“There are other parts. Parts of me, belonging. Scattered. Together, brought, I may be made whole again. It is all I value now, all I miss, all I yearn for.”

Senior Technician Leratiy stepped forward. “We believe, sir, that some of the other cubes, the smaller ones, are repositories of this being’s memories, and possibly other faculties.”

“They would have been situated nearby but not together with this being, you see, sir,” Poatas said. “To ensure some would survive.”

“All the cubes?” Oramen asked.

“Not all, I think, though I cannot yet know,” the sighing voice said. “Three or four, perhaps.”

“Some others may be merely symbolic,” Poatas added.

“What are you, then?” Oramen asked the Sarcophagus.

“What am I, prince?”

“To which people do you belong? What species?”

“Why, gentle prince, I am Involucra. I am what I understand you sometimes call ‘Veil’.”

“Our ancestor survives!” Savidius Savide exclaimed. “The Veil, they who are who made us as well as all Shellworlds are, in one being, returned, to bless us, to bless all but to bless us, the Oct, the — truly, now undeniably — Inheritors!”

Mertis tyl Loesp fretted around the Imperial Chambers, feeling pursued by the pack of advisers and senior military people at his back who all wanted to offer advice. He had resumed his Sarl clothing, taking up mail, tabard and a sword belt again, putting aside the more delicate Deldeyn civilian attire, but feeling wrong, out of place, almost ridiculous. This was meant to be the New Age; fighting, disputation was supposed to be finished with. Was he to be forced to take up arms again because of a misunderstanding, because of a pair of bungling idiots? Why could no one else do their job properly?

“This is still a young man, barely more than a child. He cannot be our problem, sir. We must seek and identify whoever has his ear and so guides his actions. Knowing that is the key.”

“Only insist that he attends you, sir. He will come. The young will often put up a most fervent resistance, at least in words, and then, their point having been made, their independence established sufficiently in their own eyes, they will, with all natural truculence, see sense and come round to a more adult view. Renew your invitation as an instruction. Bring the young fellow to heel. Once in Rasselle, confronted with your own obvious authority and good will, all will be resolved satisfactorily.”

“He is wounded in his pride, too, sir. He has the impatience of youth and knows that he will be king in time, but at such an age we often cannot see the point in waiting. Therefore we must compromise. Meet him between here and the Falls, on the edge of the area where the shadow presently falls; let that symbolise the new dawn of good relations between you.”

“Go to him, sir; show the forbearance of power. Go to him not even with a dozen men, but with none. Leave your army camped beyond, of course, but go to him purely alone, with the simplicity and humility of justice and the right that is on your side.”

“He is a child in this; punish him, sir. Princes require discipline as much as any other children. More; they are too usually indulged and require regular correction to maintain a fit balance of indulgence and regulation. Make all haste to the Hyeng-zhar with your greatest force arrayed in full battle order; he’ll not come out against you, and even if he did think to there must be wiser heads around him who’ll know to counsel otherwise. The presentation of force settles such matters, sir; all silly plans and fancies evaporate faced with it. Only provide that and your problems cease.”

“They have men but not arms, sir. You have both. Merely display such and all settles. It will not come to a fight. Impose your will, do not be taken as one who can suffer such implied accusations lightly. You feel justly offended at being so unjustly accused. Show that you will not tolerate such insult.”

Tyl Loesp stood on a balcony looking out over the trees of the royal enclosure surrounding the Great Palace in Rasselle, clutching at the rail and working his hands round and round it while behind him clamoured all those who would tell him what to do. He felt at bay. He turned and faced them. “Foise,” he said, picking out the general who’d arrived only a few hours earlier from the Hyeng-zhar. They had already spoken, but only for Foise to deliver a brief report. “Your thoughts.”

“Sir,” Foise said, looking round the others present; Sarl military and nobility mostly, though with a few trusted Deldeyn civil servants and nobles who had always been sympathetic to the Sarl even when their peoples had been at war. “I have not thus far heard an unwise word here.” There was much serious nodding and many an expression of pretended modesty. Only those who had not yet actually spoken looked in any way unimpressed with this latest contribution. “However, it is as true today as it always has been that we cannot follow every line of advice. Therefore, I would suggest that, bearing in mind the most recent information which we have to hand, of which I am the humble bearer, we look at what we know to be the most lately pertaining situation of the object of our deliberations.” There was some more nodding at this.

Tyl Loesp was still waiting to hear anything of import, or indeed new, but just listening to Foise’s voice seemed to have calmed something in him. He felt able to breathe again.

“But what would you suggest that we do, Foise?” he asked.

“What he does not expect, sir,” Foise said.

Tyl Loesp felt back in charge. He directed a smile round everybody else in the group, and shrugged. “General,” he said, “he does not expect me to surrender and admit I was wrong, some black-hearted traitor. We shall not be doing that, I assure you.” There was laughter at his words.

Foise smiled too, like a brief echo of his superior’s expression. “Of course, sir. I mean, sir, that we do not wait, do not gather our forces. Strike now. What we have just heard said about the prince and those around him seeing sense on the presentation of force will be no less true.”

“Strike now?” tyl Loesp said, again glancing at the others. He took a stagey look over the balcony rail. “I do not seem to have the Prince Regent immediately to hand for that strategy.” More laughter.

“Indeed, sir,” Foise said, unflustered. “I mean that you should form an aerial force. Take as many men and weapons as all available lyge and caude within the city will bear and fly to the Falls. They do not expect it. They have not the weaponry to reduce an aerial attack. Their—”

“The region is dark!” one of the other military people pointed out. “The beasts will not fly!”

“They will,” Foise said levelly. “I have seen Oramen himself trust his life to them, just a few days ago. Ask the beasts’ handlers. They may need using to it, but it can be done.”

“The winds are too great!”

“They have fallen back lately,” Foise said, “and anyway do not normally persist longer than a short-day without sufficient pause.” Foise looked at tyl Loesp and spread his arms from the elbows, saying simply, “It can be done, sir.”

“We shall see,” tyl Loesp said. “Lemitte, Uliast,” he said, naming two of his most hard-headed generals. “Look into this.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

“It takes the name Nameless, then,” Savidius Savide said. “Our dear ancestor, this sanctified remainder, surviving echo of a mighty and glorious chorus from the dawn of all that’s good assumes the burden of this ever-consecrated city as we take on the burden of long absence. Ever-present loss! How cruel! A night has been upon us that’s lasted decieons; the shadow’s back half of for ever. A night now glimmering to dawn, at last! Oh! How long we have waited! All rejoice! Another part of the great community is made whole. Who pitied now may — no, must — with all good reason and bounteous wishes rejoice, rejoice and rejoice again for we who are reunited with our past!”

“It is our parent!” Kiu added. “Producing all, itself produced by this city-wide birthing, dross swept away, the past uncovered, all jibes abandoned, all disbelief extinguished.”

Oramen had never heard the ambassador sound so excited, or even so comprehensible. “Sympathy, again!” Kiu exclaimed. “For those who doubted the Oct, scorned us for our very name, Inheritors. How they will rue their lack of belief in us on this news being carried, in joy, in truth absolute, unshakeable, undeniable, to every star and planet, hab and ship of the great lens! Fall the Falls silent, frozen in tremulous expectation, in calm, in fit and proper pause before the great climactic chords of fulfilment, realisation, celebration!”

“You are so sure it is what it says it is?” Oramen asked. They were still on the platform around the lighter grey patch on the front of the Sarcophagus, which might or might not be a kind of window into the thing. Oramen had wanted to talk further elsewhere, but the two Oct ambassadors would not leave the presence of whatever was in the Sarcophagus. He had had to settle for bringing the two of them to the far edge of the platform — possibly out of range of the window, possibly not — and asking everybody else to leave. Poatas and Leratiy had removed themselves only as far as the next layer of scaffolding down, and that reluctantly. Oramen talked quietly, in the vain hope that this would encourage the two Oct to do the same, but they would not; both seemed enthused, agitated, almost wild.

They had each taken a turn facing that window, experiencing it for themselves. Others had too, including Poatas and Leratiy. They reported that the experience was now one of joy and hope, not loss and yearning. A feeling of euphoric release filled whoever stood or floated there, along with an aching, earnest desire that one might soon be made whole.

“Of course sure it is what it says! Why anything other?” Savidius Savide asked. The alien voice sounded shocked that any doubt might be entertained. “It is what it says that it is. This has been presaged, this is expected. Who doubts such profundity?”

“You were expecting this?” Oramen said, looking from one Oct to the other. “For how long?”

“All our lives before we lived, truly!” Kiu said, waving his upper limbs around.

“As this will resound forever forwards in time, so the expectation has lasted the forever of not just individuals but our selves as one, our self, our species, kind,” Savidius Savide added.

“But for how long have you thought the answer was here, at the Falls specifically?” Oramen asked.

“Unknown time,” Kiu told him.

“Party, we are not,” Savidius Savide agreed. “Who knows what lessons learned, futures foretold, intelligences garnered, down timelines older than ourselves, we are sure, pursued to produce plans, courses, actions? Not I.”

“Nor,” Kiu agreed.

Oramen realised that even if the Oct were trying to give him a direct answer, he’d be unlikely to understand it. He just had to accept this frustration. “The information which you transferred from the Enabler machine into the Nameless,” he said, trying a new tack. “Was it… what one might call neutral regarding whatever you expected to discover here?”

“Better than!” exclaimed Kiu.

“Needless hesitancy,” Savide said. “Cowardice of reproachable lack of will, decisiveness. Expellence upon all such.”

“Gentlemen,” Oramen said, still trying to keep his voice down. “Did you tell the being in here what you were looking for? That you expected it to be an Involucra?”

“How can its true nature be hidden from itself?” Savide said scornfully.

“You ask impossibles,” Kiu added.

“It is as it is. Nothing can alter that,” Savide said. “We would all be advised lessons similar ourselves doubly to learn, taking such, templated.”

Oramen sighed. “A moment, please.”

“Unowned, making unbestowable. All share the one moment of now,” Kiu said.

“Just so,” Oramen said, and stepped away from the two Oct, indicating with one flat hand that he wished them to stay where they were. He stood in front of the pale grey patch, though closer than its focus.

“What are you?” he asked quietly.

“Nameless,” came the equally subdued reply. “I have taken that name. It pleases me, for now, until my own may be returned to me.”

“But what sort of thing are you? Truly.”

“Veil,” the voice whispered back. “I am Veil, I am Involucra. We made that within which you have ever lived, prince.”

“You made Sursamen?”

“Yes, and we made all those that you call Shellworlds.”

“For what reason?”

“To cast a field about the galaxy. To protect. All know this, prince.”

“To protect from what?”

“What is your own guess?”

“I have none. Would you answer my question? What did you seek to protect the galaxy from?”

“You misunderstand.”

“Then tell, so that I understand.”

“I require my other pieces, my scattered shards. I would be whole again, then I might answer your questions. The years have been long, prince, and cruel to me. So much is gone, so much taken away. I am ashamed at how much, blush to report how little I know that did not come out of that device that let me learn how to talk to you.”

“You blush? Do you blush? Can you? What are you, in there?”

“I am less than whole. Of course I blush not. I translate. I speak to you and in your idiom; to the Oct the same, and so quite differently. All is translation. How could it be otherwise?”

Oramen sighed heavily and took his leave of the Sarcophagus. He left the two Oct returning to their positions in front of it again.

On the floor of the chamber, some way beyond the outer circle of the devotional Oct, Oramen talked to Poatas and Leratiy. Another couple of men who were Oct experts had arrived, yawning, too, and some of his new crop of advisers.

“Sir,” Poatas said, leaning forward in his seat, both hands clutching at his stick. “This is a moment of the utmost historicity! We are present at one of the most important discoveries in recent history, anywhere in the galaxy!”

“You think it is a Veil in there?” Oramen asked.

Poatas waved one hand impatiently, “Not an actual Involucra; that is unlikely.”

“But not impossible,” Leratiy added.

“Not impossible,” Poatas agreed.

“There could be some sort of stasis mechanism or effect pertaining,” one of the younger experts suggested. “Some loop of time itself.” He shrugged. “We have heard of such things. The Optimae are said to be capable of comparable feats.”

“It scarcely matters whether it is a real Involucra, though I repeat that it is most unlikely to be one,” Poatas exclaimed. “It must be an awoken machine of Optimae sophistication to have survived so long! It has been buried for centiaeons, perhaps deciaeons! Rational, interrogatable entities of that antiquity turn up in the greater galaxy not once in the lifetime of any one of us! We must not hesitate! The Nariscene or the Morthanveld will take it from us if we do. Even if they do not, then the waters will return all too soon and sweep who-knows-what away! Can you not see how important this is?” Poatas looked feverish, his whole body clenched and expression tormented. “We are dabbling about on the fringe of something that will resound throughout all civilised space! We must strike! We must make busy with every possible application, or lose this priceless opportunity! If we act, we live for ever more! Every Optimae will know the name of Sursamen, of the Hyeng-zhar, of this Nameless City, its single Nameless citizen and we here!”

“We keep talking about the Optimae,” Oramen said, hoping to calm Poatas down by seeming sober and practical himself. “Should we not involve them? The Morthanveld would seem the obvious people to ask for help.”

“They will take this for themselves!” Poatas said, anguished. “We will lose it!”

“The Oct have already half taken it,” Droffo said.

“They are here but they do not control,” Poatas said, sounding defensive.

“I think they could control if they wished,” Droffo insisted.

“Well, they do not!” Poatas hissed. “We work with them. They offer us that.”

“They have little choice,” Leratiy told Oramen. “They fear what the Nariscene judgement would be of their actions. Whose judgement would the Morthanveld fear?”

“Their peers among the Optimae, I imagine,” Oramen said.

“Who can do nothing, only register their so-civilised disapproval,” Leratiy said contemptuously. “That is without point.”

“They might at least know what it is we are dealing with,” Oramen suggested.

“We do!” Poatas said, almost wailing.

“We may not have any more time,” Leratiy said. “The Oct have no interest in telling anyone else what’s happening here; however, the news will out soon enough, and then the Nariscene or indeed the Morthanveld may well come calling. Meanwhile,” the senior technician said, glancing at Poatas, who seemed almost to be trying to climb out of his skin, “I agree with my colleague, sir; we must move with all possible speed.”

“We must!” Poatas shouted.

“Calm yourself, Poatas,” Leratiy said. “We can throw no more men at the three other cubes without the extra just getting in the way of those who already know what they’re doing.”

“Three cubes?” Oramen asked.

“Our Nameless one insists that its memories and, perhaps, a few other faculties lie in three specific cubes out of the ten black objects we know about, sir,” Leratiy said. “It has identified them. We are preparing to bring them here, to it.”

“It must be done, and quickly!” Poatas insisted. “While we still have time!”

Oramen looked at the others. “Is this wise?” he asked. There were some concerned looks but nobody seemed prepared to identify such actions as unwise. He looked back at Leratiy. “I was not informed of this.”

“Time, again, sir,” Senior Technician Leratiy said, smiling and sounding both regretful and reasonable. “Of course you will be informed of everything, but this was, in my judgement, a scientific matter which had to be arranged with all possible haste. Also, knowing something of the situation pertaining outside this place — I mean, in effect, between you and Regent tyl Loesp — we did not want to add to your burden of cares before any physical movement of the cubes had actually taken place. You were always, sir — but of course — going to be informed of our intentions once the moves were ready to be made.”

“And when will this happen?” Oramen asked. “When will they be ready?”

Leratiy took out his watch. “The first in about six hours’ time, sir. The second in eighteen to twenty hours, the last one a few hours after that.”

“The Oct press us to do so, sir,” Poatas said, addressing Oramen but glancing sullenly at the senior technician. “They offer to help with the manoeuvring. We might move faster still if we’d only let them.”

“I disagree,” Leratiy said. “We should move the cubes ourselves.”

“If we slip, they will insist,” Poatas said.

Leratiy frowned. “We shall not slip.”

A messenger arrived and passed a note to Droffo, who presented it to Oramen. “Our furthest airborne scouts report an army moving towards us, gentlemen, from Rasselle,” Oramen told them. “They will not be here for another week or more, travelling by road. So, we have that time.”

“Well, army or meltwater, we must have our result before we are inundated,” Poatas said.

“Dubrile,” Oramen said to his guard captain, “would this be a better place to defend than my carriages at the Settlement?” He nodded to indicate the great chamber they stood within.

“Most definitely, sir,” Dubrile replied. He looked at the massed Oct. “However—”

“Then I shall pitch my tent with our allies the Oct,” Oramen said, addressing all. “I stay here.” He smiled at Neguste. “Mr Puibive, see that everything necessary is brought, would you?”

Neguste looked delighted. Probably at being called “Mister”. “Certainly, sir!”

It was a quiet time in the chamber, at the end of another long shift. Most of the lights had been turned off, leaving the whole huge space seeming even greater in extent than it appeared when lit. The Oct were taking turns to return to their ships for whatever reasons occupied them, but still over nine out of ten of them remained in the places they had occupied when Oramen had first seen them, arranged in neat concentric circles of blue bodies and red limbs, all perfectly still, surrounding the scaffolded Sarcophagus.

“You think it will reveal itself and be like you, that it is actually an alive example of your forebears?” Oramen asked Savidius Savide. They were alone on the platform. The others were absent on other duties or sleeping. Oramen had woken in his hurriedly thrown-together tent — fashioned from some of the same material that had shrouded parts of the scaffolding round the Sarcophagus — and come up here to talk with the being that called itself Nameless. He had discovered Savide, just floating there in front of the pale grey patch.

“It is as us. Mere form is irrelevant.”

“Have you asked it whether you truly are its descendants?”

“That is not required.”

Oramen stood up. “I’ll ask it.”

“This cannot be relevant,” Savide said as Oramen went to stand before the Sarcophagus.

“Nameless,” Oramen said, again taking up a position closer than the focal point.

“Oramen,” the voice whispered.

“Are the Oct your descendants?”

“All are our descendants.”

Well, that was a new claim, Oramen thought. “The Oct more than others?” he asked.

“All. Do not ask who is more than who else. As of now, without my memories, my abilities, I cannot even tell. Those who call themselves the Inheritors believe what they believe. I honour them, and that belief. It does them no end of credit. The exactitude of it, that is another matter. I am of the Involucra. If they are as they say, then they are of my kind too, at however great a remove. I cannot pass judgement as I do not know. Only restore me to my proper capacity and I may know. Even then, who can say? I have been in here so long that whole empires, species-types, pan-planetary ecosystems and short-sequence suns have come and gone while I have slept. How should I know who grew in our shadow? You ask me in ignorance. Ask me again in some fit state of knowingness.”

“When you are restored, what will you do?”

“Then I shall be who I am, and see what is to be seen and do what is to be done. I am of the Involucra, and as I understand things I am the last, and all that we ever thought to do is either fully done or no longer worth doing. I shall have to determine what my correct actions ought to be. I can only be what I always was. I would hope to see what remains of our great work, the Shellworlds, and see what is to be seen in the galaxy and beyond, while acknowledging that the need for the Shellworlds themselves has passed now. I must accept that all has changed and I can be but a curio, a throwback, an exhibit. Perhaps an example, a warning.”

“Why warning?”

“Where are the rest of my people now?”

“Gone. Unless we are injuriously mistaken. Quite gone.”

“So, a warning.”

“But all peoples go,” Oramen said gently, as though explaining something to a child. “No one remains in full play for long, not taking the life of a star or a world as one’s measure. Life persists by always changing its form, and to stay in the pattern of one particular species or people is unnatural, and always deleterious. There is a normal and natural trajectory for peoples, civilisations, and it ends where it starts, back in the ground. Even we, the Sarl, know this, and we are but barbarians by the standards of most.”

“Then I need know more of the manner of our going, and mine. Was our end natural, was it normal, was it — if it was not natural — deserved? I do not yet even know why I am within here. Why so preserved? Was I special, and so glorified? Or excessively ordinary, and so chosen to represent all due to my very averageness? I recall no vice or glory of my own, so cannot think I was specified for great achievement or committed depravity. And yet I am here. I would know why. I hope to discover this shortly.”

“What if you discover you are not what you think you are?”

“Why should I not be?”

“I don’t know. If so much is in doubt…”

“Let me show you what I do know,” the quiet voice murmured. “May I?”

“Show me?”

“Step again into the place where we may better communicate, if you would.”

Oramen hesitated. “Very well,” he said. He stepped backwards, found the square daubed on the planking. He glanced back, saw Savidius Savide floating nearby, then faced forward towards the light grey patch on the Sarcophagus surface.

The effect appeared to take less time than it had before. Very soon, it seemed, he experienced that curious dizziness again. Following the momentary feeling of imbalance came the sensation of weightlessness and carelessness, then that of dislocation, wondering where he was or when he was.

Then he knew who he was and where and when.

He felt that he was in that strange sunlit room again, the one where he had seemed to be earlier when he’d had the sensation of all his memories whirling past outside. He seemed to be sitting on a small, crudely fashioned wooden chair while sunlight blazed brightly outside, too bright for him to be able to make out any details of whatever landscape lay beyond the doorway.

A strange lassitude filled him. He felt that he ought to be able to get up from the little chair but at the same time had no desire to do so. It was far more pleasant to simply sit here, doing nothing.

There was somebody else in the room, behind him. He wasn’t concerned about this; the person felt like a benign presence. It was browsing through books on the shelves behind him. Now he looked carefully about the room, or just remembered it better, he realised that it was entirely lined with books. It was like a tiny library, with him in the middle. He wanted to look round and see who his guest actually was, but still somehow could not bring himself to do so. Whoever they were, they were dropping the books to the floor when they were finished with them. This did concern him. That was not very tidy. That was disrespectful. How would they or anybody else find the books again if they just dumped them on the floor?

He tried very hard indeed to turn round, but could not. He threw every part of his being into the effort just to move his head, but it proved impossible. What had seemed like a kind of laziness, a feeling of not being able to be bothered which had been perfectly acceptable only moments earlier because it was something that was coming from within himself, was now revealed as an imposition, something forced upon him from outside. He was not being allowed to move. He was being kept paralysed by whoever this was searching through the books behind him.

This was an image, he realised. The room was his mind, the library his memory, the books specific recollections.

The person behind him was rifling through his memories!

Could this be because…?

He had had a thought, earlier. It had barely registered, scarcely been worth thinking further about because it had seemed both so irrational and so needlessly horrendous and alarming. Was that thought, that word somehow connected to what was happening now?

He had been tricked, trapped. Whoever was searching the room, the library, the shelves, the books, the chapters and sentences and words that made up who he was and what his memories were must have suspected something. He almost didn’t know what it was, certainly didn’t want to know what it was, and felt a terrible compulsion, comical in another context, utterly terrifying here and now, not to think of—

Then he remembered, and the being behind him which was searching his thoughts and memories found it at the same time.

The very act of remembering that one fleeting thought, of exposing that single buried word, confirmed the horror of what this thing might really be.

You’re not, he thought, you’re—

He felt something detonate in his head; a flash of light more brilliant and blinding than that outside the door of the little room, more incandescent than any passing Rollstar, brighter than anything he had ever seen or known.

He was flying backwards, as though he’d thrown himself. A strange creature sailed past — he only glimpsed it; an Oct, of course, with a blue body and red limbs, its filmy surfaces all glittering — then something whacked into the small of his back and he was spinning, somersaulting, falling away into space, falling over and over…

He hit something very hard and things broke and hurt and all the light went away again and this time took him with it.

There was no awakening, not in any sudden, now-here-I-am sense. Instead, life — if life it could be called — seemed to seep back into him, slowly, sluggishly, in tiny increments, like silse rain dripping from a tree, all accompanied by pain and a terrible, crushing weight upon him that prevented him from moving.

He was in that book-lined room again, stricken, immobile in that little seat. He had imagined that he was free of it, that he could rise from it, but after a brief, vivid sensation of sudden, unwanted movement, here he was again, paralysed, laid out, spread prone across the ground, helpless. He was a baby once more. He had no control, no movement, could not even support his own head. He knew there were people around him and was aware of movement and yet more pain, but nothing showed its true shape, nothing made sense. He opened his mouth to say something, even if it was just to beg for help, for an end to this grinding, fractured pain, but only a mewl escaped.

He was awake again. He must have fallen asleep. He was still in terrible pain, though it seemed dulled now. He could not move! He tried to sit upright, tried to move a limb, twitch a finger, just open his eyes… but nothing.

Sounds came to him as though from under water. He lay on something soft now, not hard. It was no more comfortable. What had he been thinking? Something important.

He swam back up through the watery sounds around him, helplessly aware of the noises he was making: wheezing, whining, gurgling.

What had he thought of?

The waters parted, like a hazy curtain drawn aside. He thought he saw his friend Droffo. He needed to tell him something. He wanted to grasp Droffo’s clothing, drag himself upright, scream into his face, issue a terrible warning!

Then there was Neguste. He had tears on his face. There were many other faces, concerned, businesslike, neutral, dreading, dreadful.

He was awake once again. He was clutching at Droffo’s neck, only it was not really Droffo. Don’t let it! Destroy! Mine the chamber, bring it down! Don’t let…

He was asleep in his seat, an old man perhaps, lost in the end of his days, such days shuffled in this slow fading of the light from him. Genteel confusion; he relied on others to tend to him. Somebody was behind him, searching for something. They always stole. Was this what he’d ever wanted? He was not his father’s son, then. He tried to turn round to confront whoever was trying to steal his memories, but could not move. Unless this sensation was a memory too. He felt he might be about to start crying. The voice went on whispering into his ear, into his head. He could not make out what it was it was saying. Old age came with great pain, which seemed unfair. All other senses were dulled but pain was still bright. No, that was not true, the pain was dulled too. Here it was being dulled again.

“What is he trying to say?”

“We don’t know. We can’t make it out.”

Awake again. He blinked, looked up at a ceiling he had seen before. He tried to remember who he was. He decided he must be Droffo, lying here, in the hospital train. No, look; here was Droffo. He must be somebody else, then. He needed to say something to Droffo. Who were all these other people? He wanted them gone. They had to understand! But go. Understand, then go. Things needed to be done. Urgent work. He knew and he had to tell them that he knew. They had to do what he could not. Now!

“Stroy,” he heard himself say through the ruins. “Ring it all down. It…” Then his voice faded away and the light went again. This darkness, enveloping. How quickly the Rollstars moved, how little they illuminated. He needed to tell Droffo, needed to get him to understand and through him everybody else…

He blinked back. Same room. Medical compartment. Something was different, though. He could hear what sounded like shooting. Was that the smell of smoke, burning?

He looked up. Droffo. But not Droffo. It looked like Mertis tyl Loesp. What was he doing here?

“Help…” he heard himself say.

“No,” tyl Loesp said, with a thin smile. “There’s no helping you, prince,” then a mailed fist came crashing down into his face, obliterating light.

Tyl Loesp strode down the ramp into the chamber housing the Sarcophagus, heavily armed men at his heel. The grey cube was surrounded by concentric circles of Oct. They seemed hardly to have noticed that dead and dying men lay scattered about the chamber. The dying were being helped on their way by those charged with dispatching the wounded. Tyl Loesp had been told that a few of the defenders might still be able to put up a fight; the wounded might not all have been accounted for and the chamber was still dangerous; however, he had been impatient to see this thing for himself and had flown straight here on his already tired lyge after they’d taken the Settlement’s centre and discovered the broken Prince Regent lying dying on his hospital bed.

“Poatas, Savide,” he said as they approached him through the mass of Oct. He looked back at the chamber entrance, where a great black cube ten metres to a side was being manoeuvred to the top of the ramp from the tunnel beyond. A couple of distant shots rang out, echoing round the chamber. Tyl Loesp smiled to see Poatas jerk as though he’d been shot himself. “You have been busy,” he said to the old man. “Our prince didn’t delay matters, did he?”

“No, sir,” Poatas said, looking down. “Progress has been all we might have wished. It is good to see you once more, sir, and know that you are victorious—”

“Yes yes, Poatas. All very loyal. Savide; you approve of all that’s happening here?”

“All is approval. We would help further. Let us assist.”

“Do so, by all means.”

Awake again. Yet more pain. He heard his own breathing. It made a strange gurgling sound. Somebody was dabbing at his face, hurting him. He tried to cry out, could not.

“Sir?”

No sounds would come. He could see his servant with one eye now, again as though through a hazy curtain. Where was Droffo? He had to tell him something.

“Oh, sir!” Neguste said, sniffing.

“Still alive, prince?”

He got the single good eye to open. Even this action was not without pain. It was Mertis tyl Loesp. Neguste stood somewhere behind, head down, sobbing.

He tried to look at tyl Loesp. He tried to talk. He heard a bubbling sound.

“Oh, now now now. Hush yourself,” tyl Loesp said, as though talking to an infant, and pursed his lips and put one finger to his lips. “Don’t delay, dear prince. Don’t let us detain you. Depart; feel free. Sake, sir, your father died easier than this. Hurry up. You.”

“Sir?” Neguste said.

“Can he talk?”

“No, sir. He says nothing. He tries, I think… Earl Droffo; he asks for Earl Droffo. I’m not sure.”

“Droffo?”

“Dead, sir. Your men killed him. He was trying to—”

“Oh, yes. Well, ask away all you like, prince. Droffo cannot come to you, though you will soon go to him.”

“Oh, please don’t hurt him, sir, please!”

“Shut up or I’ll hurt you. Captain; two guards. You; you will — now what?”

“Sir! Sir!” Another new voice, young and urgent.

“What?”

“The thing, sir, the object, Sarcophagus! It, it’s doing — it’s — I can’t — it’s…!”

It is not what you believe, Oramen had time to think, then things went flowing away from him again and he felt himself slip back beneath the waters.

“Sir!”

“What?” tyl Loesp said, not stopping. They were in the newly broadened tunnel a minute from the entrance to the great semi-spherical chamber containing the Sarcophagus.

“Sir, this man insists he is a knight in your employ.”

“Tyl Loesp!” an anguished voice rang out over the pack of advisers, guards and soldiers around tyl Loesp. “It’s me, Vollird, sir!”

“Vollird?” tyl Loesp said, halting and turning. “Let me see him.”

The guards parted and two of them brought a man forward, each holding one of his arms. Vollird it was indeed, though he was dressed in what looked like rags, his hair was wild and the expression on his face wilder still, his eyes staring.

“It is, sir! It’s me! Your good and faithful servant, sir!” Vollird cried. “We did all we could, sir! We nearly got him! I swear! There were just too many!”

Tyl Loesp stared at the fellow. He shook his head. “I have no time for you—”

“Just save me from the ghosts, tyl Loesp, please!” Vollird said, his knees buckling underneath him and the guards on either side having to take his weight. Vollird’s eyes were wide and staring, foam flecking his lips.

“Ghosts?” tyl Loesp said.

“Ghosts, man!” Vollird shrieked. “I’ve seen them; ghosts of all of them, come to haunt me!”

Tyl Loesp shook his head. He looked at the guard commander. “The man’s lost his wits. Take him—” he began.

“Gillews, the worst!” Vollird said, voice breaking. “I could feel him! I could still feel him! His arm, his wrist under—”

He got no further. Tyl Loesp had drawn his sword and plunged it straight into the man’s throat, leaving Vollird gurgling and gesticulating, eyes wider still, gaze focused on the flat blade extending from his throat, where the air whistled and the blood pulsed and bubbled and dripped. His jaw worked awkwardly as though he was trying to swallow something too big.

Tyl Loesp rammed the sword forward, meaning to cut the fellow’s spine, but the tip bumped off the bone and sent the edge slicing through the flesh on the side of his neck, producing another gush of blood as an artery was severed. The guard on that side moved out to avoid the blood. Vollird’s eyes crossed and a final breath left him like a bubbled sigh.

The two guards looked at tyl Loesp, who withdrew his sword.

“Let him go,” he told them.

Released, Vollird fell forward and lay still in the dark pool of his own still spreading blood. Tyl Loesp cleaned his sword on the fellow’s tunic with two quick strokes. “Leave him,” he told the guards.

He turned and walked towards the chamber.

The Sarcophagus had insisted the scaffolding be removed from around it. It sat on its plinth, the three black cubes around it on the floor of the chamber, one immediately in front, the other two near its rear corners. The Oct were still arranged beyond in their concentric rings of devotion.

Tyl Loesp and those around him got there just in time to see the transformation. The sides of the black cubes were making sizzling, crackling sounds. A change in their surface texture made them look suddenly dull, then they began to appear grey as a fine network of fissures spread all over them.

Poatas came limping up to where tyl Loesp stood. “Unprecedented!” he said, waving his stick in the air. A couple of tyl Loesp’s personal guard stepped forward, thinking that the wild, manic old man might be offering violence to their master but Poatas didn’t seem to notice. “To be here! To be here, now! And see this! This!” he cried, and turned, waving his stick at the centre of the chamber.

The faces of the black cubes showed great cracks all over their surfaces now. A dark vapour issued from them, rising slowly. Then the sides trembled and fell open in a slow cloud of what looked like heavy soot as the cubes’ casings seemed to turn to dust all at once, revealing dark, glistening ovoids inside, each about three metres long and a metre and a half in girth. They floated up and out from the gradually settling debris of their rebirth.

Poatas turned briefly back to tyl Loesp. “Do you see? Do you see?”

“One can hardly avoid seeing,” tyl Loesp said acidly. His heart was still thumping from the incident a few moments earlier but his voice was firm, controlled.

The ovoids drifted up and in towards the grey cube, which was starting to make the same snapping, zizzing sounds the black cubes had made moments earlier. The noise was much louder, filling the chamber, echoing back off the walls. The Oct ringed round the chamber’s focus were stirring, shifting, as if they were all now looking up at the grey cube as it shuddered and changed, its surfaces growing dark with a million tiny crazings.

“This is your prize, Poatas?” tyl Loesp shouted over the cacophony.

“And their ancestor!” Poatas yelled back, waving his stick at the circles of Oct.

“Is all well here, Poatas?” tyl Loesp demanded. “Should it make this sound?”

“Who knows!” Poatas screamed, shaking his head. “Why, would you flee, sir?” he asked, without turning round. The sound from the Sarcophagus died away without warning, only echoes resounding.

Tyl Loesp opened his mouth to say something, but the sides of the Sarcophagus were falling away too now, slipping as though invisible walls penning in dark grey dust had suddenly ceased to be and letting its powdery weight come sliding out, falling in a great dry wash all around the plinth, lapping to the inner fringes of the surrounding Oct. There was almost no noise accompanying this, just the faintest sound that might have been mistaken for a sigh. The last echoes of the earlier tumult finally died away.

The grey ovoid revealed by the fallen dust was perhaps five metres across and eight long. It floated trembling in mid-air; the three smaller black shapes drew in towards it, approaching as though hesitant. They tipped slowly up on their mid-axes, ends pointing straight up and down. Then they slid ponderously in to meet the larger grey shape at the centre of their pattern, silently joining with it, seeming to slide partway into it.

The resulting shape hung steady in the air. Echoes slowly died, to leave utter silence within the great chamber.

Then the shape roared something in a language the humans present could not understand, sounds crashing off the walls like surf. Tyl Loesp cursed at the sheer piercing volume of it and clapped his hands to his ears like everybody else. Some of the other men fell to their knees with the force of the sound. Only pride prevented tyl Loesp from doing the same. While the echoes were still dying away, the Oct seemed to startle and move, almost as one. Dry whispering noises, like small twigs just starting to catch fire, began to fill the chamber.

The sound was drowned out as the grey-dark shape hanging in the centre rumbled out again, this time in Sarl.

“Thank you for your help,” it thundered. “Now I have much to do. There is no forgiveness.”

A filmy spherical bubble seemed to form around the shape, just great enough in extent to enclose it completely. The bubble went dark, black, then quicksilver. As tyl Loesp and the others watched, a second bubble flickered into existence enclosing the first, forming two metres or so further out from the inner silvery one. A blink of light, brief but close to blindingly bright, came from the space between the two spheres before the outer one went black. A humming noise built quickly, a vast thrumming sound which issued from the black sphere and rapidly grew to fill the entire chamber, cramming it with a tooth-loosening, eyeball-vibrating, bone-shaking bassy howl. The Oct fell back, rolling to the floor, seemingly flattened by the storm of noise. Every human present put their hands to their ears again. Almost all turned away, stumbling, bumping into their fellows, trying to run to escape the pulverising, flesh-battering noise.

The few humans unable to look away — Poatas was one, on his knees, stick fallen from his hand — remained transfixed, watching the colossally humming black sphere. They were the only ones to witness, very briefly, a scatter of tiny pinprick holes speckling its surface, loosing thin, blinding rays.

Then the outer sphere blinked out of existence.

A tsunami of wide-spectrum radiation filled the chamber in an instant as the thermonuclear fireball behind it surged outwards.

The blast of light and heat incinerated Oct and humans indiscriminately, vaporising them along with the inner lining of the chamber, blowing its single great spherical wall out in every direction like a vast grenade and bringing what was left of the building above and the surrounding plaza crashing down upon the glowing wreckage.

The first waves of radiation — gamma rays, neutrons and a titanic electromagnetic pulse — were already long gone, their damage done.

The silvery sphere lifted slowly, calmly out of the smoking debris, perfectly unharmed. It drifted through the kilometre-wide hole in the city’s plaza level and moved slowly away, dropping its film of shields and altering its shape slightly to that of a large ovoid. It turned to the direction humans called facing and accelerated out of the gorge.

27. The Core

They stood on the edge of the kilometre-wide crater left in the plaza level. The suit visors made the scene bright as day. Ferbin clicked the artificial part of the view off for a few moments, just to see the true state of it. Dim, cold greys, blacks, blues and dark browns; the colours of death and decay. A Rollstar was due to dawn about now, but there would be no sign of it this deep in the gorge for many days yet and no melting warmth to restore the Falls until some long time after that.

There was still a faint infrared glow visible through the suit’s visor, deep inside the crater. Steam lifted slowly from the dark depths; the vapour rose and was shredded to nothing by the cold, keening wind.

Anaplian and Hippinse were checking readouts and sensor details. “Something like a small nuke,” Djan Seriy said. They were communicating without touching now, reckoning the need for silence was over. Even so, the suits chose the most secure method available, glittering unseen coherent light from one to the other, pinpointing.

“Small blast but serious EMP and neutrons,” the ship’s avatoid said. “And gamma.”

“They must have been fried,” Djan Seriy said quietly, kneeling down by the breach in the plaza’s surface. She touched the polished stone, feeling its grainy slickness transmitted through the material of the suit.

“Little wonder there’s nobody about,” Hippinse said. They had seen a few bodies on their flight over the city, coming in from the outskirts, and a surprising number of dead lyge and caude, but nothing and nobody moving; all life seemed as frozen and stilled as the hard waters of the Sulpitine.

But why isn’t there anybody else here? Hippinse sent to Anaplian, lace to lace. No aid, no medics?

These people know nothing about radiation sickness, she replied. Anybody escaping would have got to safety thinking they were over the worst of it and getting better and then died, badly, in front of the people they reached. Wouldn’t encourage you to come see what happened. They’ve probably sent a few flying scouts but all they’ll report is dead and dying. Mostly dead.

While the Oct and Aultridia are too busy fighting each other, Hippinse sent.

And something seriously capable is profoundly fucking with the level systems, top to bottom.

The drone Turminder Xuss had floated off some way when they’d set down. It floated back now. “There’s some sort of tech embedded in the vertical ice behind one of the falls,” it announced. “Probably Oct. Quite a lot of it. Shall I take a look?”

Anaplian nodded. “Please do.” The little machine darted away and disappeared into another hole in the plaza.

Anaplian stood, looked at Hippinse, Ferbin and Holse. “Let’s try the Settlement.”

They had stopped only once on their way in, to look at one of the many bodies lying on the snow-scudded surface of a frozen river channel. Djan Seriy had walked over to the body, unstuck it from the grainy white surface, looked at it.

“Radiation,” she’d said.

Ferbin and Holse had looked at each other. Holse had shrugged, then thought to ask the suit. It had started to whisper quickly to him about the sources and effects of electromagnetic, particle and gravitational radiation, rapidly concentrating on the physical consequences of ionising radiations and acute radiation syndrome as applicable to humanoid species, especially those similar to the Sarl.

Then Djan Seriy had removed one of the strakes on the right leg of her suit, a dark tube as long as her thigh and a little thinner than her wrist. She had laid it down on the surface of the frozen river and looked at it briefly. It had started to sink into the ice, raising steam as it melted its way through. It had moved like a snake, wriggling at first, then slipped quickly down the hole it had made for itself in the solid surface of the river. The water had started to ice over again almost immediately.

“What was that, miss?” Holse had asked.

Anaplian had detached another piece of the suit, a tiny thing no larger than a button. She’d tossed it into the air like a coin; it had gone straight up and had not come back down.

She’d shrugged. “Insurance.”

In the Settlement, barely one person in a hundred was still alive, and they were dying, in pain. No birds sang, no workshops rang or engines huffed; in the still air, only the quiet moans of the dying broke the silence.

Anaplian and Hippinse instructed all four suits to manufacture tiny mechanisms which they could inject into anybody they found still living by just pressing on their neck. The suits grew little barbs on the tips of their longest fingers to do the injecting.

“Can these people be cured, sister?” Ferbin asked, staring at a man moving weakly, covered in vomit and blood and surrounded by a thin pool of dried excrement, trying to talk to them but only gurgling. His hair came out in clumps as his head jerked across the frozen mud of one of the Settlement’s unpaved roads. Thin bright blood came from his mouth, nose, ears and eyes.

“The nanorgs will decide,” Djan Seriy said crisply, stooping to inject the fellow. “Those the injectiles cannot save they’ll let die without pain.”

“Too late for most of them,” Holse said, looking round. “This was that radiation, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Hippinse said.

“Apart from the ones with bullet wounds, obviously,” Djan Seriy said, rising from the now limp, sighing man and looking around at dead soldiers clutching guns and the crumpled bodies of a couple of lyge lying nearby, armed riders crushed beneath. “There was a battle here first.”

The few twists of smoke they had seen were fires burning themselves out rather than smoke from the chimneys of works and forges and steam engines. At the main railhead for the Settlement, all the engines and most of the carriages were gone. Hundreds of bodies lay scattered about.

They split up in twos. Djan Seriy and Holse checked the Archipontine’s carriages and the rest of the headquarters compound, but found only more dead bodies, and none they recognised.

Then Hippinse called from the hospital train.

“I’m sorry! The fellow I shot. Tell him I’m sorry, won’t you, somebody, please? I’m most terribly sorry.”

“Son, it was me you shot, and — look — I’m fine. I just fell over in surprise, that’s all. Calm, now.” Holse lifted the young man’s head and tried to get him sitting upright against the wall.

His hair was falling out too. Holse had to wedge him in a corner eventually to stop him falling over.

“I shot you, sir?”

“You did, lad,” Holse told him. “Lucky for me I’m wearing armour better than stride-thick iron. What’s your name, son?”

“Neguste Puibive, sir, at your service. I’m so sorry I shot you.”

“Choubris Holse. No damage done nor offence taken.”

“They wanted whatever drugs we had, sir. Thinking they would save them or at least ease their pain. I gave away all I could but then when they were all gone they’d not believe me, sir. They wouldn’t leave us alone. I was trying to protect the young sir, sir.”

“What young sir would that be then, young Neguste?” Holse asked, frowning at the little barb just flexed from the longest finger on his right hand.

“Oramen, sir. The Prince Regent.”

Hippinse had just entered the compartment. He stared down at Holse. “I heard,” he said. “I’ll tell them.”

Holse pressed the barb into the young man’s mottled, bruised-looking flesh. He cleared his throat. “Is the prince here, lad?”

“Through there, sir,” Neguste Puibive said, attempting to nod at the door through to the next compartment. He started to cry thin, bloody tears.

Ferbin cried too, sweeping back the mask section of the suit so that he could let the tears fall. Oramen had been cleaned up carefully; however, his face looked to have been badly beaten. Ferbin touched his gloved hand to his brother’s reddened, staring eyes, trying to get the eyelids to close, failing. Djan Seriy was at the other side of the narrow bed, her hand cupped under the base of their brother’s head, cradling his upper neck.

She gave out a long breath. She too swept her mask back and away. She bowed her head, then let Oramen’s head very gently back down, allowing it to rest on the pillow again. She slid her hand out.

She looked at Ferbin, shook her head.

“No,” she said. “We are too late, brother.” She sniffed, smoothed some of Oramen’s hair across his head, trying not to pull any of it out as she did so. “Days too late.”

The glove of her suit flowed back from her flesh like black liquid, leaving the tips then the whole of her fingers then her hand to the wrist naked. She gently touched Oramen’s bruised, broken cheek, then his mottled forehead. She tried to close his eyes too. One of his eyelids detached and slid over his blood-flecked eye like a piece of boiled fruit skin.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Djan Seriy said softly.

“Anaplian!” Hippinse shouted urgently from the compartment where he and Holse were trying to comfort Neguste Puibive.

“He asked for Earl Droffo, but they’d killed him, sirs. Tyl Loesp’s men, when they came on the air-beasts. They’d already killed him. Him with only one good arm, trying to reload.”

“But what afterwards?” Hippinse insisted, shaking the injured man. “What was it he said, what did you say? Repeat that! Repeat it!”

Djan Seriy and Holse both reached out to touch Hippinse.

“Steady,” Djan Seriy told the avatoid. “What’s wrong?” Holse didn’t understand. What was making Hippinse so upset? It wasn’t his brother lying dead through there. The man wasn’t even a real human. These weren’t his people; he had no people.

“Repeat it!” Hippinse wailed, shaking Puibive again. Djan Seriy took hold of Hippinse’s nearest hand to stop him jolting the dying youth.

“All the rest left, sirs, those that could, on the trains, when we all started to fall ill the second time,” Neguste Puibive said, his eyes rolling around in their sockets, eyelids flickering. “Sorry to… We all took a terrible gastric fever after the big explosion but then we were all right but then—”

“In the name of your WorldGod,” Hippinse pleaded, “what did Oramen say?”

“It was his last understandable word, I think, sirs,” Puibive told them woozily, “though they’re not real, are they? Just monsters from long ago.”

Oh shit, no, Anaplian thought.

“What are, lad?” Holse asked, pushing Hippinse’s other hand away.

“That word, sir. That was the word he kept saying, eventually, when he could speak again for a short while, when they brought him back from the chamber where the Sarcophagus was. Once he knew Earl Droffo was dead. Iln, he kept saying. I couldn’t work it out at first, but he said it a lot, even if it got softer and fainter each time he said it. Iln, he said; Iln, Iln, Iln.”

Hippinse stared at nothing.

“The Iln,” Holse’s suit whispered to him. “Aero-spiniform, gas-giant mid-level ancients originally from the Zunzil Ligature; assumed contemporary sophisticated equiv-tech level, Involved between point eight-three and point seven-eight billion years ago, multi-decieon non-extant, believed extinct, non-Sublimed, no claimed descendancy; now principally remembered for the destruction of approximately two thousand three hundred Shellworlds.”

To Djan Seriy Anaplian it was as though the world beneath her feet dropped away and the stars and the vacuum fell in around her.

Anaplian stood. “Leave him,” she said, snapping her mask back into place and striding out of the compartment. Hippinse rose and followed.

It’s the second-hand word of one dying man transmitted by another, the avatoid sent to the SC agent. Could be false.

Anaplian shook her head. Something spent geological ages in a buried city, wasted several hundred thousand people as it left just for the hell of it and then disappeared, she replied. Let’s assume the worst of the fucker.

Whatever it was, it may not have been the source of the—

“Can’t I stay—” Holse began.

“Yes you can but I’ll need your suit,” Anaplian told him from down the corridor. “It can function as an extra drone.” Her voice changed as Holse’s suit decided her voice was growing too faint and switched to comms. “Same applies to my brother,” she told him.

“Can we not mourn even a moment?” Ferbin’s voice cut in.

“No,” Anaplian said.

Outside, in the cold desert air, Turminder Xuss swept down to join Anaplian and Hippinse as they stepped from the carriage. “Oct,” it told them. “A few still left in the rearmost ship, a klick back under the ice upstream. All dying. Ship systems blown by EMP. Recordings corrupted but they had live feed and saw a black ovoid emerge from a grey cube housed centrally in a prominent chamber beneath the city’s central building. It was joined by three smaller ovoids which emerged from objects the Sarl and Oct co-operated in bringing to the central one. Last thing they saw sounds like a concentric containment enaction; strong vibrations and photon-tunnelling immediately before containment drop and fireball release confirmatory.”

“Thank you,” Anaplian told the machine. She glanced at Hippinse. “Convinced?”

Hippinse nodded, eyes wide, face pale. “Convinced.”

“Ferbin, Holse,” Anaplian said, calling the two men still inside the carriage. “We have to go now. There is an Iln or some weapon left by the Iln loose. It will be at or on its way to the Core of Sursamen. The first thing it will do is kill the WorldGod. Then it will attempt to destroy the world itself. Do you understand? Your suits must come with us, whether you are inside them or not. There would be no dishonour in—”

“We are on our way,” Ferbin said. His voice sounded hollow.

“Coming, ma’am,” Holse confirmed. “There, lad, you just rest easy there, that’s it,” they heard him mutter.

The four suits and the tiny shape of the accompanying machine lifted from the wispily smoking remains of the Hyeng-zhar Settlement and curved up and out, heading for the nearest open Tower, seven thousand kilometres distant. Turminder Xuss powered ahead and up, vanishing from sight almost immediately. Ferbin assumed they were flying in the same diamond formation as before, though the suits were camouflaged again so it was impossible to tell. At least this time they were allowed to communicate without having to touch.

“But this thing must be ancient, ma’am, mustn’t it?” Holse protested. “It’s been under there for an eternity; everybody knows the Iln vanished millions of years ago. Whatever this thing is it can’t be that dangerous, not to more modern powers like the Optimae, the Culture and so on. Can it?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Anaplian said. “Would that it did.”

She fell silent as they tore upwards into the air, spreading out. Hippinse cleared his throat and said, “The type of progress you guys are used to doesn’t scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime — god-like retirement, if you will — and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who’ve achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s inferior. With workable tech from this thing’s time the stats show it’s about sixty-forty it will be less capable than what we have now, but that’s a big minority.”

“I’m sorry to have to involve you in this,” Anaplian told the two Sarl men. “We are going to have to descend to the Machine level and possibly the Core of Sursamen to confront something we have very little knowledge of. It may well have highly sophisticated offensive capabilities. Our chances of survival are probably not good.”

“I do not care,” Ferbin said, sounding like he meant it. “I would gladly die to do whatever I can to kill the thing that killed our brother and threatens the WorldGod.”

They were leaving the atmosphere, the sky turning black.

“What about the ship, ma’am?” Holse asked.

“Hippinse?” Anaplian asked.

“I’m broadcasting for help,” the avatoid replied. “Oct systems, Nariscene, Morth; anything to patch us through. Nothing’s coming back from the chaos in the local dataverse. System disruption is still spreading, jamming everything. Take heading to another level to find a working system and even then it’d be somebody else’s whim.”

“I’ll signal it,” Anaplian said.

“I guess we have no choice,” Hippinse said. “This should get us some attention.”

“Arming,” Anaplian said. “Coding for Machine space rendezvous, no holds barred.”

“Total panic now mode,” Hippinse said as though he was talking to himself.

“How can you signal the ship, ma’am?” Holse asked. “I thought signals couldn’t get out of Shellworlds.”

“Oh, some signals can,” Djan Seriy said. “Look back at the gorge down from the Falls. Where we landed earlier.”

They had risen so fast and travelled so far laterally already, this was not easy. Holse still hadn’t located the gorge below the Hyeng-zhar, and hadn’t thought to ask the suit to do so for him, when a sudden flash attracted his eye. It was followed by four more in groups of two; the whole display lasted less than two seconds. Hemispherical grey clouds burst blossoming around the already dead light-points, then quickly disappeared, leaving rapidly rising grey-black towers behind.

“What was that?” Holse asked.

“Five small anti-matter explosions,” Anaplian told him. The debris stacks were already falling over the horizon as they raced away just above the outer reaches of the atmosphere. “The Liveware Problem and its remotes are monitoring the Surface at Prime level, listening for unusual vibrations. Those five explosions together won’t rattle Sursamen as much as a single Starfall but they’ll make the planet ring like a bell for a few minutes, all the way out to the Surface, which is all we need. Surface compression waves. That’s how you get a signal out of a Shellworld.”

“So the ship—” Holse began.

“Will right now be making its way towards the Core,” Anaplian said, “and not taking no for an answer.”

“Getting something,” Hippinse said. “Oh. Looks like—”

Brilliant, blinding light splashed off to Ferbin’s left, diagonally ahead. His gaze darted that way even as the images danced inside his eyes and the suit’s visor blacked out the entire view then cast an obviously false representation up showing the horizon, nearby towers and not much else. The image he was left with was that of a human figure, lit as though it was made of sun stuff.

“Anaplian?” Hippinse yelled.

“Yes,” her calm voice came back. “Laser. Strong physical hit. Optical sighting; no ranging pulse. My suit has slight ablation and I slight bruising. All mirrored up now. Suits have split us up already. Expect mo—”

Something hammered into Ferbin’s back; it was like a cutting sword blow landing on thick chain mail. The breath tried to whistle out of him but the suit was suddenly very stiff and it felt like there was nowhere for the breath to go.

“Under CREW attack, dorsal, above,” the suit informed him. “No immediate threat at present power and frequencies.”

“That’s one hit each, two on me,” Anaplian said. “More have missed. I am reading a ceiling source, Nariscene tech, probably — tss! Three on me. Source probably comped.”

“Ditto,” Hippinse said. “We can probably soak. Outrange in twenty.”

“Yes, but maybe more ahead. I am sending Xuss to deal with. Practice if nothing else.”

“My pleasure,” Turminder Xuss said. “Can I use AM too?”

“Anything,” Anaplian said.

“Leave to me,” Xuss purred. “I’ll get back ahead and anticipate similar?”

“Feel free,” Anaplian said. “Kinetics would be a bigger worry; prioritise and warn.”

“Of course.”

“Regardless, shoot first.”

“You spoil me.”

“Ah!” Holse shouted a moment later. “Faith, even my old man never hit me that hard.”

“Should be this one’s last,” Xuss said. “There; straight up their collimator. Oh! Pretty.”

“Firing not admiring,” Anaplian told it.

“Oh, really,” Xuss said, somewhere between amused and annoyed. “Already on my way.”

They flew over the landscape far below for another few minutes without attracting any more hostile attention, the world seeming to turn like a great tensed drum beneath them, shining and darkening as Fixstars and Rollstars came and went and complexes of vanes and ceiling structure cast them into shadow.

Ferbin cried a little more, thinking of his brother lying dead, disfigured, assaulted in that cold, abandoned carriage. Unmourned now they had been forced to leave, unattended save for a dying servant who was himself hardly more than a child; it had not been a death or a lying-in-state fit for a prince of any age.

A cold and terrible fury grew in his guts. How fucking dare anything do that to so young a man, to his brother, to so many others? He had seen them, he had seen how they’d died. Prompted by Holse, he’d had his suit tell him the effects of high radiation doses. One hundred per cent certainty of death within four to eight days, and those days full of appalling agony. It looked like his brother had been injured before the lethal blast, though that made no difference; he might still have lived but even that chance, however good or slim, had been snatched away from him by this filthy, pitiless murderous thing.

Ferbin sniffed back the tears and the suit itself seemed to absorb whatever he could not swallow. No doubt to be recycled, reused and purified and brought back to him as water from the tiny spigot he could summon to his mouth whenever he wanted. He was a little world in here, a tiny, perfect farm where nothing went to waste and every little thing that fell or died was turned to fresh use, to grow new produce or feed beasts.

He had to do the same, he realised. He could not afford not to employ Oramen’s cruel, ignoble death. They might well have to surrender their lives in whatever doomed enterprise they were now embarked upon, but he would honour his young brother in the only way that could mean anything from this point on and turn Oramen’s death to a determining reinforcement of his purpose. He had meant what he said to Djan Seriy earlier. He did not want to die, but he willingly would if it helped destroy the thing that had killed his brother and meant to do the same to the WorldGod.

The WorldGod! Might he see it? Look upon it? Dear God, converse with it? Just be addressed by it? Never had he thought to witness it in any way. No one did. You knew it was there, knew it was in some sense another being, another inhabitant of the vast and bounteous galaxy, but that did not reduce its manifest divinity, its mystery, its worth of reverence.

Something flickered high above in the darkness. Three tiny trails of light seemed to converge on an implied point. One trail winked out, another curved, the third flared suddenly into a dot of light the suit’s visor briefly blocked out.

“There you go,” Xuss said. “Kinetic battery. Definitely compromised; there was a Nariscene combat engineering team crawling all over it trying to get the unit back under their control.”

“What happened to them?”

“Blown to smithereens,” the drone said matter-of-factly. “No choice; thing was powering up, already swinging towards you.”

“Great,” Anaplian muttered. “So now we’re at war with the fucking Nariscene.”

“Excuse me, ma’am, sir,” Holse said. “Do all levels have such fearsome weaponry looking down upon them?”

“Basically, yes,” Hippinse said.

“By the way, I’m down by five and a half out of eight micro-missiles,” the drone said. “That was learning overkill and I think I can deal with anything similar with two easy, one high-probability, but just to let you know.”

“Five and a half?” Anaplian said.

“Turned one away when I saw the third was getting through; saved it, rehoused it. Half an engine charge left.”

“Most conservationary of you,” Anaplian said. “Hippinse; anything?”

“Yes, I’m into a Nariscene hardened military news channel,” the avatoid said. “Shit, the Oct and Aultridia really are at war. The Oct ships above the open Towers were spotted and the Nariscene closed them off. The Oct blame the Aultridia for the Hyeng-zhar explosion. The Aultridia suspect a plot to increase Oct control. After the blast at the Falls some Oct craft tried to force their way into the open Towers but got ripped apart. Between them the Nariscene, Oct and Aultridia have closed off every Tower.”

“Are we still doing the right thing heading where we’re heading?”

“Looks like it. Two-fifty seconds to go.”

Four minutes later they plunged back into the atmosphere. This time the suits stayed sleek and silvery and barely slowed at all as they hit the gases. They left a trail of glowing, ionised air behind them bright enough to cast shadows from kilometres up. They slowed so fast it hurt and arrived feeling even more bruised at the grassy, fluted base of a Tower. When they landed the ground cover sizzled and burned beneath their feet and steam came spluttering up around them. The suits stayed mirrored.

A section of the green slope nearby was already rearing out of the ground, spilling turf and earth as a cylinder ten metres across slid up and out. A circle appeared on its curved surface as it slowed, then fell forward to form a ramp when the cylinder stopped rising. Anaplian stepped forward, leading the others. Turminder Xuss came banging out of the sky as the ramp door started to rise again. Seconds later the cylinder began to descend.

“Identify!” a voice rang out within the cylinder’s still damp interior.

“I am Culture Special Circumstances agent Djan Seriy Anaplian, originally of the royal palace, Pourl, in Sarl. I am accompanied by my brother the rightful king of Sarl, Ferbin, and an avatoid of the Culture ship Liveware Problem. Be advised that there is an Iln Shellworld-destroying machine loose. I repeat: an Iln Shellworld-destroying machine is here within Sursamen. It is heading for or is already in the Core with the very likely intention of destroying the world. Broadcast this, disseminate as widely as possible, informing the Nariscene and the Morthanveld as a matter of extreme and absolute priority.”

“Release control of cylinder.”

“No. Do as I say. There is an Iln Shellworld-destroying machine present within Sursamen. It has already killed everybody at the Hyeng-zhar and is now heading for, or is already in, the Core. It intends to destroy the world. Tell everybody. Everybody!”

“Insist! Release cylinder control instantly! No! Stop! Release control of corridor environment! Replace fluids immediately! Warning! Aultridian proxies deeming! Apprehension awaits!”

The cylinder was slowing, drawing to a stop in a few seconds. “No,” Anaplian said, walking like some strange silvery dream to stand before the circular door. “I have no time to waste with you. Get in our way and I will kill you. Broadcast all I’ve said as widely as possible at maximum urgency. I insist.” Anaplian detached a handgun from the left hip of her suit. The weapon was silver too. Turminder Xuss rose to hover at the very top of the door, also shining like mercury.

“Release control of door!” the voice wailed as the door started to open, lidding down like a drawbridge. “Apprehension awaits!”

Anaplian rose quickly to float level with the top of the doorway, levelling the gun. The tiny mirror-bodied shape of Turminder Xuss glinted and was gone. A few flashes reflected off the vaulted ceiling of the corridor outside, then the door was thudding down.

Anaplian was already descending and moving forward. She put the gun back to her hip as her feet hit the floor just beyond the door. She stepped out over the twitching bodies of a dozen well-armed Oct, all of them sliced into halves or smaller fractions. Their weapons had been cut up too; a couple of the gun-parts lay on the floor still sputtering and sparking, raising fumes from puddles. Xuss’ monofil warps clicked back into its body as it flicked about and powered down the tunnel. Ahead, a large circular door was already rolling back into the wall. Fluids a metre deep surged out and were soon washing about Anaplian’s legs. Alarms keened and somebody was shouting something in Oct.

“Keep up,” Anaplian said over her gleaming shoulder. Hippinse, Ferbin and Holse stepped smartly from the cylinder, tried to avoid stepping on Oct body parts as the flood of fluids washed them towards them. They followed Anaplian down the tunnel.

A minute later, a few more Oct deaths later, they stood watching another circular door roll away; more knee-deep fluids rushed out past them. They stepped into the resulting chamber. The door closed behind them and they listened to the air whistling out.

“We’ll be in vacuum again from this point on,” Anaplian told them, unhitching her CREW from the back of her suit and quickly checking it. Hippinse mirrored her actions. Ferbin and Holse looked at each other then did the same. Djan Seriy restowed the laser weapon where it had been; it moulded into the dorsal section of her suit while she reached over her shoulder and pulled on another of the long strakes on her back, producing yet another glossily black weapon. She let it unfold itself and checked that too. Ferbin caught his sister’s gaze and she nodded. “I shall lead with this particle buster; you use the kinetic rifle, Ferbin. Holse; you and Hippinse lead with the CREWs. Don’t want us all using the same stuff.” Her mask unmirrored long enough for her to smile briefly at them, and wink. “Just shoot at what we do.” Then the suit was fully mirrored again.

We are all mirrors, Ferbin thought. Reflecting each other. We are here and these strange suits of armour turn back all light but somehow, despite that, we are nearly invisible; the gaze is redirected from each contact with our surfaces, sliding away until we see something of whatever surrounds us, as though only that is real.

Turminder Xuss lowered to hover in front of Anaplian, level with her sternum. A couple of slim shapes like spike-daggers drifted up from Anaplian’s calves and also floated just ahead of her. “Also, we have a long way to drop.”

“This an open Tower, ma’am?” Holse asked.

“No,” Anaplian said. “We are one Tower away from an open Tower, the one that the ship will be using. If this thing’s left anything behind to ambush anybody coming after it, the opens are where they’ll likely wait. The ship has no choice but to use an open; we do, but we can keep close enough to where the ship will appear to offer support. Even then, we won’t be leaving by the main Tower shaft.” She glanced at the two Sarl men. “We are the infantry here, in case you hadn’t guessed, gentlemen. Expendable. Sacrificeable. The ship is the knight, the heavy artillery, however you wish to express it.” She looked at Hippinse as the door ahead of them twitched. “Anything?”

“Not yet,” Hippinse said. Two small mirrored things like tiny daggers floated up to station themselves level with his shoulders. Another pair of mercurially glinting shapes slid away from Ferbin and Holse’s suits too and floated up to cluster round Turminder Xuss.

“If you don’t mind, gents,” the drone said casually.

“Be my guest,” Ferbin told it.

“Didn’t even know they were there,” Holse said.

The door rolled silently to one side, revealing utter darkness. The drone turned soot black and darted ahead, disappearing along with the four other smaller missiles.

The humans floated across a tube Hippinse said was only thirty metres wide; a scendship shaft. Beyond, a circular hatch had just completed irising open. They floated through to the main Tower interior.

As they started to drop, they moved away from each other until they were nearly half a kilometre apart.

I really never thought to be doing this, Holse thought. He was frankly terrified, but elated too. To be dropping towards the WorldGod, with mad aliens, to meet up with a talking, eccentric spaceship that could stride between stars like a man strode between stepping stones, to go in search of an even more insane Iln that wanted to blow up or crumple down the whole world; that was the kind of thing he’d not even started to dream of when he’d been back on the farm, mucking out stables and following his dad around the frost-rimed gelding pen carrying the gently steaming ball bucket, ear still smarting from the latest slap.

He had the worrying feeling that he and Ferbin were along as little more than decoys, but in a way he didn’t care. He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behaviour in some other field.

Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He’d always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.

But once you weren’t living hand-to-mouth, and had some ease, you had the leisure to contemplate what life was really all about and who you really were. And given that you had to die, it made sense to seek a good death.

Even these Culture people, bafflingly, mostly chose to die, when they didn’t have to.

With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from or how many mouths you’d have to feed next year and whether you’d get sacked by your employer or thrown into jail for some minor indiscretion — with freedom from all that came choice, and you could choose a nice quiet, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on and impatient relatives making lots of noise around you… Or you could end up doing something like this, and — however scared your body might feel — your brain rather appreciated the experience.

He thought of his wife and children, and felt a twinge of guilt that they had been so absent from his thoughts for so long recently. He’d had a lot to think about and so many new and utterly bizarre things to learn, but the truth was they seemed like beings from another world now, and while he wished them only well, and could imagine — if, by some miracle, they survived all this — going back to them and taking up his old duties again, somehow that felt like it was never going to happen, and he’d long since seen them for the final time.

A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?

They hovered above a gigantic door composed of great dark curved sections like scimitar blades all pressed together to make a pattern like the petals of a flower. The drop had taken nearly half an hour and in that time they had passed another five levels, where, according to the suit, things called Variolous Tendrils, Vesiculars, Gas Giant Swimmers, Tubers and Hydrals lived. The final level above the Machine space was empty of life, full of oceanic water under kilometres of ice. Now they were directly above the Machine space level where, according to both legend and convention, the workings of the world as it had originally been conceived still sat, lifeless but mighty.

“This is Secondary, isn’t it?” Anaplian asked, staring down at the vast shutter.

“Yes,” Hippinse said. “Openable.”

Hippinse floated over the very centre of the three-kilometre-diameter door, his outline in the visors of the others fuzzy, barely hinted at even by the astoundingly sensitive sensors of the suits. He detached something from his suit and left it lying right in the door’s centre, where the great blades met.

They followed Anaplian back up a kilometre to a huge oval hole in the side of the vast shaft, entered the hundred-metre-diameter tunnel which it led to and floated straight down. Behind, above them, something flashed. The suits registered tiny but ponderous long-wavelength vibrations in the fabric of the tube around them.

Anaplian beckoned them together and when they touched said, “The main door should have opened the one at the bottom of this too, so we can fall straight out. Xuss and the four suit missiles are going first.”

“Look,” Ferbin said, staring down. “Light.”

A flickering blue-grey circle widened quickly as they fell towards it. Beyond, beneath, dimly glimpsed far below, vast shapes loomed, all curved and swooping, sharp and bulbous, pocked and ribbed and serrated. It was like falling into a vast assemblage of blades the size of storm systems, all lit by lightning.

“Clear,” Turminder Xuss announced. “Suggest staying apart, though; signalling less a risk than a tight target.”

“Copy,” Anaplian said tersely.

They dropped beneath the ceiling of the Machine level and hung, hundreds of metres apart, over a drop of about fifty kilometres to the vast blade systems lying still in the gloom below. A few tens of kilometres off, a colossal vaned shape like an enormous toroidal gear wheel filled the view, its topmost edges ridging up to the level ceiling. It seemed to sit on top of and mesh with other titanic spheres and discs all linked to still further massive shapes, and far in the distance, hundreds of kilometres away — their lower reaches obscured by the relatively near horizon of spiralled bladed complexes like immense, open flowers — enormous wheels and globes the size of small moons bulked in the darkness, each seeming to touch the undersurface of the shell above.

Hell’s gearbox, Djan Seriy thought when she saw it, but did not choose to share the image with the others.

The flickering blue-grey light — sporadic, sharp, intense — came from two almost perfectly opposed bearings, partially obscured by intervening machinery in both directions.

“That’s battle light,” Hippinse said.

“Agree,” Anaplian said. “Any ship signals?”

There was a pause. “Yes, got it, but… Confused. Broken up. Must be the other side, getting reflections,” Hippinse said, sounding first relieved then worried.

“Our direction?” Anaplian asked.

“Follow me,” Hippinse said, heading off.

“Xuss; ahead, please,” Anaplian said.

“Already there,” the drone said.

The suits tipped them so that they raced across the ghostly landscape far below with their feet leading, though the view could be switched easily enough to make it look as though one was flying head-first. Holse asked about this. “Not streamlining,” the suit replied. “We are in vacuum, so not required. This orientation presents smaller target profile in direction of travel and prioritises human head for damage limitation.”

“Ah-ha. Oh, yes; also, what holds the world up?” Holse asked. “There’s no Towers.”

“The large machines present within this space retain the structural integrity of the ceiling above.”

“I see,” Holse said. “Righty-ho.”

“Steer clear of the open Tower base,” Anaplian told them, leading them away from a great disc of darkness above. Petals of material nearly a kilometre long hung down from the edges of the gap, looking so symmetrical that at first they didn’t realise they were the result of something breaking through from above. “The ship?” Anaplian asked.

“Looks like it,” Hippinse said. He sounded puzzled, and worried again. “Supposed to leave a drone or something here.”

They flew on for another minute until Turminder Xuss said, “Trouble up ahead.”

“What is it?” Anaplian asked.

“Somebody’s fighting; high-frequency CREWs, particle beams and what looks like AM by the backsplash. From the signatures, we’re outgunned. Pull to here,” the drone told them, and their visors indicated a line across the long summit of one of the kilometres-high vanes at the top edge of one of the gigantic spheres. Light flashed immediately beyond, bright enough to trip the visors’ sight-saving function. They drifted to a stop metres beneath the ridge line of the vane, each a kilometre or so apart from the other.

“Seeing this?” the drone asked, and imposed a view on their visors of a great dark gulf of space beyond, between more of the level-filling spheres and side-tipped concave torus shapes, lit by glaring bursts of light.

The view became shallowly triangulated, offered from three different points of view, then four and five as the four smaller drones all added their perspective to that of Xuss. Three different sources of pinpoint light and sudden, harsh detonations lay between sixty-five and ninety klicks distant. Much closer, only ten kilometres from them and four down, a single object was trading fire with the three faraway sources. The co-ordinated views suggested something only a few metres across was darting in and out behind the cover of great serrated blades on a vast cogwheel beneath, firing and being fired at by its three distant adversaries.

“Those three read as ours,” Hippinse said urgently. “They’re having to fall back.”

“Can we surprise that thing just underneath?” Anaplian asked.

“Looks like it.”

“Ping one of the distants, make sure we have this right,” Anaplian said. “Xuss?”

“Done,” the drone replied. “They’re the LP’s; three remaining of four combat drones it left behind under the forced open Tower. They’re damaged, retreating.”

“The fourth?”

“Dead,” Hippinse said. “Slag in the trench between us and the hostile.”

“Tell them to keep doing exactly what they’re doing. Xuss; those five and a half AM missiles? Prep all but two.”

“Armed.”

“Tell two of the extra knives to widen out now and drop — not power — on my mark, second-wave suicide-ready.”

“Prepped, moving,” the drone said.

“Everybody else, spread further out over the next eight seconds then pop over the top and empty everything. Start moving now. Ferbin, Holse, remember; work with the suit and let it move you if it needs to.”

“Of course.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

Eight seconds.

“Now, now, now!” Anaplian called. The suits bounced them up over the long curved summit of the great ridge of blade. Light flared above them. Suddenly looking down into the chasm beneath, the exhausts of the drone’s AM-powered missiles were soot-dark spots on their visors as the suits blanked out their extreme flaring. The visors blinked red circles round their target and all four of their weapons fired. Ferbin’s kinetic rifle leapt and hammered in his hand, throwing him up and back with every pulse, the rounds tiny bright trails left in the eye. He started to twist as the recoil tried to turn him round and make him somersault all at once, the suit doing its best to compensate and keep the gun pointed at their target.

Light everywhere. Something thudded into his lower right leg; there was a burst of pain as if he’d twisted his knee, but it faded almost instantly.

The target washed out in multiple, visor-tripping bursts of light which threw shadows like barbs and thorns all over the ceiling kilometres above.

“Cease fire!” Anaplian yelled. “Calling off the drop-knives.”

“They’re stopped,” Xuss said. “Here’s their view.”

Something glowing white was falling and tumbling away amongst the curved blades, unleashing yellow sparks and leaving orange debris falling slower behind. All firing had stopped. The fiery, falling object was providing the only light there was.

“That it?” Anaplian asked.

“Pretty sure,” Xuss said. “Move on, keep checking?”

“And scan that hostile debris. Let’s go. Hippinse?”

“Took a kinetic frag,” the avatoid wheezed. “Close to getting mushed, okay. Repairing. Moving.”

“Okay,” Djan Seriy said as they all moved out across the dark trench. Far below, the molten debris was still falling. “Ferbin?” Anaplian said gently. “I’m sorry about your leg.”

“What?” He looked down. His right leg was missing from the knee down.

He stared. General Yilim, he thought. He felt his mouth go dry and heard something roar in his ears.

“You’ll be all right,” his sister’s voice said quietly, soothingly in his ears. “Suit’s sealed it and pumped you with painkill and anti-shock and it was cauterised by the hit. You will be fine, brother; my word on it. Once we’re back out we’ll grow a new one. Easiest thing in the world. Okay?”

Ferbin felt remarkably all right now. Almost happy. Mouth okay, no roaring any more. Certainly there was no pain from the wound, in fact no sensation down there at all. “Yes,” he told his sister.

“You sure, sir?” Holse said.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right. I feel very good.” He had to keep looking at it to be sure it had really happened, and then felt down, just to confirm. Sure enough; no leg below the knee. And he felt fine! Extraordinary.

“That thing was Morth-tech, compromised,” Hippinse told them when he got information back from the microdrone sent to investigate what was left of the machine they’d been fighting. “One of twelve, if its internal records are right.”

“What the hell’s Morth stuff doing down here?” Anaplian asked. “I don’t remember any mention of that.”

“Me neither,” Hippinse said. “Kept that quiet. Probably well intentioned.”

Anaplian made a noise like a spit.

They were flying, a kilometre apart, across the edged unfolding darkness of the Machine level, weaving past the great spherical and ring-shaped components, surfaces ridged and incised with swirling patterns like cut and chiselled gears. The Liveware Problem’s three damaged drones were keeping pace ahead, hurriedly trying to repair what they could of themselves. Turminder Xuss led the way, twenty klicks to the fore.

“Any more comped?” Anaplian asked.

“All twelve were. Two left now; we got one and the ship wasted the rest on entry.”

“Okay,” Anaplian said.

“Ship took some damage from them, though.”

“It did?”

“It was hurt on the way down,” Hippinse said.

“From Nariscene tech?” Anaplian asked, incredulous.

“It had a long way to drop, totally contained, offering perfectly predictable aiming and no eGrid powering,” Hippinse said. “Tried to negotiate but they weren’t having it. They were able to throw a lot at it for a long time. It suffered.”

“How badly?”

“Badly enough. Wounded. Would have gone limping off before now if this wasn’t a desperation mission.”

“Oh, shit,” Anaplian breathed.

“It gets worse,” Hippinse said. “There’s a guard ship.”

“A guard ship?”

“Liveware Problem’s encountered. Got off a spec readout before it had to concentrate on combat.”

“What ship? Whose?”

“Also Morth. Nobody aboard; AI. From the spec, seriously capable. Power linked to the Core.”

“This wasn’t mentioned!” Anaplian insisted.

“Must be a recent thing. Point is, it’s been taken over too.”

“How?” Djan Seriy said, her voice angry.

“Must have been running same systems as the guard machines,” Hippinse said. “Comp one and you get the lot if you play it clever.”

“Fuck!” Djan Seriy shouted. There was a pause, then, “Fuck!” again.

“This, ah, ‘comped’, sir,” Holse said tentatively.

“Compromised,” Hippinse told him. “Taken over by the other side. Persuaded by a sort of thought-infection.”

“Does that happen a lot, sir?”

“It happens.” Hippinse sighed. “Not to Culture ships, as a rule; they write their own individual OS as they grow up, so it’s like every human in a population being slightly different, almost their own individual species despite appearances; bugs can’t spread. The Morthanveld like a degree more central control and predictability in their smart machines. That has its advantages too, but it’s still a potential weakness. This Iln machine seems to have exploited it.” Hippinse made a whistling noise. “Must have learned a lot fast from somewhere.”

“An Enabler,” Anaplian said bitterly. “Bet you. The Oct ran an Enabler system at the thing.”

“That would fit,” Hippinse agreed.

“What from the ship?” Anaplian asked.

Ferbin and Holse’s suits registered information coming in from one of the three drones, but they wouldn’t have known how to interpret it.

“Seeing this?” Anaplian said. Her voice sounded flat and lifeless. Holse felt suddenly terrified. Even Ferbin’s euphoria was punctured.

“Yes,” Hippinse said. He sounded grim. “Seeing it.”

Light flickered and flared ahead, bearing a few similarities to the display produced by the firefight they’d chanced upon earlier between the ship drones and the compromised Morthanveld machine, but much further away; the light was being produced from some way over the horizon and reflecting off the under-surface above, strobing and flaring across the ceiling structures with a distant slowness that seemed to imply a conflict of a weight and scale orders of magnitude above that of the earlier skirmish.

“That’s them, right?” Anaplian asked.

“That’s them,” Hippinse replied, voice low.

Ferbin heard his sister sigh. “This,” she said quietly, “is not going to be fun.”

They got there in time to see the ships destroying each other. The last action was that of the Culture Superlifter Liveware Problem: it fell into the unnamed Morthanveld guard ship — a stubby fist ramming a bloated head — and partially annihilated both of them in a blast of total spectrum radiation so extreme that even from eighty kilometres away it was sufficient to trip alarms in the suits.

“I’m gone!” Hippinse said, sounding like a lost child.

“Down to us now,” Anaplian said crisply. “Hippinse! You all right?”

“Yes,” the avatoid said. They were all watching the distant shrapnel of the wreck; huge pieces of ship flailing and tumbling and racing away from the explosion, their glinting, somersaulting surfaces lit by the fading radiations of the carnage as they flew away, smashing into vanes and blades and machinery and ricocheting away again, trailed by sparks and liquidic splashes of secondary and tertiary debris.

“Still got the drones?” Anaplian asked. “I’ve lost them.”

“Yes, yes; got them,” Hippinse said quietly. “They’re answering.”

“Both ships gone,” Turminder Xuss announced. “I am up close and dodging megatonne shit here. And I can see the offending article. It has the Xinthian.”

Ferbin’s blood seemed to run cold at the mention of the last word. Xinthian. The other name for the WorldGod.

“Ah, what would that mean, sir?” Holse asked.

“The Xinthian is enclosed within what looks like a fiery cage,” Turminder Xuss told them. “The offender is very small but looks extremely capable. Energy profile the like of which I have not seen before. Who’d have thought something so ancient would be so potent?” It showed them.

Beyond where the ships had disputed, beyond where their wreckage had slowly fallen — splashing wildly across the great flowers of spiralled vanes beneath like sun-glinted rain on a forest bloom — half a horizon away but coming quickly closer, another tableau presented itself. The view wobbled, overmagnified, then grew quickly more stable and detailed as the drone and its accompanying missiles rushed closer.

The WorldGod was an ellipsoid a kilometre across and two in length, jerking and writhing within a light-splintered surround of fierce white fire extending a few hundred metres out from its mottled, dark brown surface. The Iln machine was a dot to one side, joined to this tortuous mayhem by a single strand of bright blue energy.

Beneath the Xinthian, directly over a hole in the centre of one of the immense blade flowers, a tiny bright globe was growing, throwing off intense, recurrent flashes of light.

“Beneath it,” Anaplian said, sounding like she was gulping.

“It’s generating anti-matter,” Hippinse said.

“Where are—” Djan Seriy began, then they were all hit by intense bursts of laser fire sparkling from a source above and behind them. The suits flicked about, spun, raced away, ablating layers. Ferbin found himself pummelled, too warm, breathless, and his weapon nearly torn from his arms as it twirled, aimed and fired in one absurdly fast movement that happened so quickly it left his flesh and bones aching.

“Comped Morth drone,” somebody said.

“Mine,” somebody else said.

“You’re—”

“Motherfucker!” Ferbin heard somebody else hiss. Actually, it sounded like him.

All Ferbin knew was that he was being tumbled about and yet the gun was always pointing in the same direction whenever it possibly could and it was kicking and kicking and kicking at him, throwing him wildly back, bouncing across these dark and livid skies.

Until it all stopped.

“Hippinse?”

No answer.

“Hippinse; reply!”

It was Djan Seriy’s voice.

“Hippinse?”

Her again.

“Hippinse!”

Ferbin had blacked out momentarily due to the extreme manoeuvring. The suit apologised. It informed him that they were now sheltered with the surviving members of their group — agent Anaplian, Mr Holse and himself — behind a vane on the flank of the nearest machine sphere. The visor helpfully circled his sister and Holse, each a few hundred metres or so away, ten metres down from the scimitared summit of their protecting vane. Light glittered above, strobing over the ceiling structures.

Ferbin began to wonder how he had got here, to safety. He hadn’t actually articulated the words this thought was leading to when the suit told him that it had taken control, under Agent Anaplian’s instructions.

“Ferbin? You back with us?” His sister’s voice sounded loud in his ears.

“Ah… yes,” he said. He tried to check himself, tried to carry out a mental inventory of his faculties and bodily parts. For a moment everything seemed fine, but then he remembered his missing lower leg. “Well, no worse,” he said. In fact he felt good; still strangely, almost absurdly exuberant, and sharp; suddenly fully recovered from his blackout and seemingly ready for anything. Some still woozy part of his mind wondered vaguely how profoundly and subtly the suit could affect his emotions, and what control over that process his sister had.

“Holse?” Djan Seriy asked.

“I’m fine, ma’am. But Mr Hippinse…?”

“We lost him when he attacked the second of the two comped Morth machines. Also, Xuss isn’t answering. And the ship drones don’t appear to have survived that last tussle either. We are somewhat reduced, gentlemen.”

“Weren’t there two of those Morthanveld machines?” Holse asked.

“Both gone now. I got the other one,” Anaplian said. Every word she uttered sounded clipped, bitten off. Holse wondered if she had been wounded too, but did not want to ask.

“What now, ma’am?”

“That is a good question, Holse,” Anaplian said. “I strongly suspect if we stick our heads over this vane above us we’ll get them blown off. Also, due to the angles, there isn’t really anywhere else to go. Conversely, I have a short-range line-gun that can knock the living fuck out of anything that pokes its head or other relevant part over our side of the vane. That is our inventory, however. The Iln machine knows I have this weapon and will certainly not come close enough to let me use it. Sadly,” Holse heard the woman take a breath, “we have lost my particle gun to enemy action, the kinetics are expended or blasted, the CREWs won’t have any effect and the subsidiary missiles have either also expended themselves in the course of action or been vaped. Vaporised, I should say. Sorry, brother; sorry, Mr Holse. My apologies for having involved you in all this. I appear to have led us into a sorry situation.”

It was, Ferbin thought. It was a sorry situation. Sometimes life itself seemed like a sorry situation.

What was to become of them? And what lay ahead for him? He might die here within minutes but even if he didn’t he knew he didn’t want to be king. He never had. When he’d seen his father killed, his first instinct had been to run away, even before he’d rationalised this gut decision. He’d always known in his heart he wouldn’t be a good king, and realised now that — in the unlikely event they escaped this desperate fix — his whole reign, his entire life, would be a slow and likely ignominious winding down from this peak of meaning and possible glory. There was a new age coming and he could not really see himself being part of it. Elime, Oramen, him…

He heard Holse say, “What’s to be done, then, ma’am?”

“Well, we could just rush the bastard and die very quickly to no effect,” Anaplian said, sounding tired. “Or we can wait here until the Iln machine finishes making all the anti-matter it wants and destroys the whole world. Us first, after itself and the Xinthian,” she added. “If that’s any consolation.”

Holse gulped. “Is that really it, ma’am?”

“Well…” Anaplian began, then paused. “Ah. It wants to talk. Might as well hear what it has to say.”

“Humans,” a deep, sonorous voice said to all of them, “the Shellworld machines were built to create a field enclosing the galaxy. Not to protect but to imprison, control, annihilate. I am a liberator, as were all those who came before me, however vilified. We have set you free by destroying these abominations. Join me, do not oppose.”

“What?” Ferbin said.

“Is it saying…?” Holse began.

“Ignore it,” Anaplian told them. “It’s just being a properly devious enemy. Always unsettle the opposition if possible. I’m telling your suits to ignore any further comms from the machine.”

Yes, Ferbin thought, she controls these suits. The machine was trying to control us. We are controlled. It’s all about control.

“So, are we stuck as we are then, ma’am?” Holse asked. “It and us?”

“No,” Anaplian said. “Come to think of it, the Iln machine doesn’t need to settle for a stand-off. Last estimate we took, the required AM mass will take hours to accrete. Long before that, one of the Iln’s sub-pods will appear over that vane-sphere way back there, good sixty klicks off, and pick us off from a distance.”

Holse looked at the distant ridge line, then around at their immediate surroundings. He didn’t see how they could be got round. “How’s it going to do that, ma’am?”

“It can retreat over the horizon and circle round behind us that way,” Djan Seriy said heavily. “The Core’s only fourteen hundred klicks in diameter; horizon’s very close. Could even go right round the Core. In vacuum, wouldn’t take long for a sufficiently capable machine. I’d guess we have a couple of minutes.”

“Oh,” Holse said again.

“Yes, indeed: oh.”

Holse thought. “Nothing else we can do, ma’am?”

“Oh,” Anaplian said, sounding very tired, “there are always things worth trying.”

“Such as, ma’am?”

“Going to need one of you two to sacrifice yourself. Sorry.”

“Pardon, ma’am?”

“Then I get to do the same thing,” Anaplian said, sounding like she was trying to remain calm. “So one of us survives, for a little while longer, at least. Survivor’s suit can get them anywhere within Sursamen or back to near space. More to the point, we might just stop the world getting blown up. Always a reasonable goal.”

“What do we have to do?” Ferbin asked.

“Somebody has to surrender,” Anaplian said. “Give yourself to the Iln machine. It will kill you — quickly, hopefully — but it might just be intrigued enough to inspect you first. That first one, though, it’ll be suspicious of. Whoever goes first dies to satisfy its caution. The second — that will be me — might just get close enough. I’m already preparing all this in my head. I’m assuming the Enabler program the Oct hit the Iln machine with was one of ours. They have subtle misconstructions regarding Contact and SC that might aid our cause here, though I do have to emphasise that this is the most ridiculously long shot, and even then we’re relying on the WorldGod not being fatally injured and it being capable of unmaking all that anti-matter; an explosion based on what’s already accumulated would kill it and do a significant amount of damage to the Core. So, still hope, of a desperate kind. But you wouldn’t bet on any of this, trust me.”

“So, one of us has to—” Holse began.

“I can’t ask either of you—” Anaplian started to say at the same time, then gulped and shouted, “Ferbin!”

The suited figure was already rising above the shield of the vane, upper body exposed to the flickering radiations beyond, throwing away the weapon he’d been carrying.

She must have been hit hard. When she awoke it was to find herself in the grip of something adamantinely hard and utterly unforgiving. Dear fuck, it had eviscerated her. The suit was shredded, torn apart, and her body inside with it. All that was left of her was her head — half flayed, skin burned off — and a short tattered tail of spinal cord. This bloody scrap was what the Iln thing cradled.

Eyelids burned away, she couldn’t blink; not even her tongue or jaws were responding to orders. Djan Seriy Anaplian felt more helpless than a newborn.

The Iln machine above her was dark, not big, vaguely triangular. Her eyes were damaged, the view hazy. So much trouble from something so small, she thought, and would have laughed if she could. Its slickly bulbous shape was lit from the side by the cage of light surrounding the Xinthian and from below by the scintillations sparking from the containment holding the growing sphere of anti-matter.

Strange little beasts, you, the great heavy voice said inside her head. What fleeting titillations life continues to throw up, many-fold, like virtual particles, bioscale, so long after—

Oh

She had seen all she needed to see, heard all she needed to hear.

go

Now she was close enough.

and

(This was all she had, and the worst of it was, backups or not, she’d never know if it was going to be enough.)

fuck yourself, Djan Seriy Anaplian said finally.

She let the containment within the little anti-matter reactor inside her head go.