Sea Of Ghosts

CHAPTER 16
PERTICA

Violent juddering woke Granger. He sat up abruptly, momentarily disorientated, then remembered where he was. Green light filtered through the windows of the deadship cabin, bathing the shelves of trove and Unmer experiments in a queer underwater luminance. Granger got up, wincing as his dry flesh cracked, and took a moment to work the numbness out of his arms and legs. It was freezing in here. His breath misted in the air before him. He wrapped a blanket around himself and shuffled over to the window.

Green ice floated upon a green sea. Outside the window stretched a frozen expanse of the Mare Verdant, the brine littered with broken slabs of ice and great nebulous snow-dusted masses with facets as deep and dark as bottle glass. From the bow of the ironclad came a dull pounding sound as the ship smashed its way through more of the ice field. Granger took out a fur-lined jacket from the captain’s dressing room and forced his heavy joints into it as he stomped up the steps that led above deck.

It must have rained during the night. Fronds of clear ice crystals had formed on the metal tower in the centre of the deck and on the torn remnants of the spinnaker attached to it. The wind had blown them into crazy shapes. A sugaring of white snow crunched under Granger’s boots. He scooped some up and ate it as he paced the deck. Vast ice-fields lay ahead of the deadship, a glittering expanse of emerald and white. In her wake stretched a channel of dark green water where she had punched through the surface ice. Granger walked to the bow of the ship and scanned the horizon. Basalt cliffs rose out of the sea a league to the north, their storm-cracked aspects mortared with snow. Upon the edge of this landmass perched a single building, a drab and windowless cube supporting a vast steel tower on its roof.

A sense of dread seemed to roll down from that structure and creep into Granger’s bones. That building was the source of the deadship’s power and could only be its ultimate destination. The force that had steered the icebreaker towards his own wooden lifeboat, and then brought him inexorably north, must emanate from there. In order to gain control of this ship, he must disable that interference. He gazed up at the building for a long time, watching for signs of life, but saw only white flurries of snow blowing across the black and green.

Constant snapping and pounding noises came from the prow as the deadship smashed a channel through the ice. The air remained as cold and sharp as a knife edge. Granger rubbed his hands and stamped his boots upon the deck, trying to coax some feeling into his body. He spotted an old wharf, partially hidden behind the headland of a sheltered natural harbour. The ice was thinner here and bereft of snow, its surface etched where the frozen brine had cracked and reformed. The ironclad slowed as it drew near, until the whining from the ship’s tower suddenly stopped.

The ship coasted the final few yards and then bumped against the wharf. Silence fell over the deck, broken only by the hiss of the wind through frozen metal.

Trying to ignore the uneasy feeling in his guts, Granger hitched a canvas bag over his shoulder and, after weeks at sea, finally stepped onto dry land.

A stairway zigzagged from the wharf up into a deep cut in the cliff. Twisted iron railings bordered the steps in places, but many had sheared away and now lay at the bottom of the gully among tumbles of ice-fused rock. Granger edged his way upwards with one shoulder against the wall of the defile, testing each step before trusting his weight to it. Icicles overhung the trail in places, forming glassy passages. The wind keened like a grief-stricken child.

At the summit he paused to catch his breath. The air hurt his lungs. No other living thing was breathing this, and perhaps never had. Down below, the ironclad waited in that smashed green bay, as dark and empty as a coffin. To the north stretched a howling landscape of emerald and white, the snowfields sculpted by constant gales into scalloped ridges and dream-like shapes with razor-blade edges. From here Granger could see the transmitting station tower rising above a snowy bluff to the east. Perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, it was far larger than the one aboard the deadship, supporting a torus three times the size of its smaller twin. A faint whining sound came from its summit.

Granger’s boots sank into deep powder as he struggled up the bluff. At the summit he was rewarded with a clear view of the Unmer station. A square grey block with a huge round metal door, it occupied more than an acre of ground. Snow drifts engulfed its windward side, partially burying the whole structure. As Granger studied the landscape, he perceived other objects partly buried in the surrounding snow. Dragon armour and bones. Conquillas’s Revolution, it seemed, had reached even this distant place.

And yet this station continued to transmit power. The attackers had failed to shut it down.

The hinges had frozen solid, and it took considerable effort to pull that massive door open. Granger chipped away at the ice with his knife until, finally, it gave way. With a metal groan, the door swung open a few feet before lodging itself in snow. A dark tunnel lay behind, wide enough to drive a horse and carriage down. Granger took out his gem lantern and held it high. There were signs of violence. Black stains spattered the curved floor. The concrete had been scorched by dragonfire and heavily scarred by impacts from blades. A single thigh bone lay in a frozen puddle, and yet, strangely, he couldn’t see any other human remains.

Close fighting in here, several opponents.

Twenty paces further along, the passageway swelled into a spherical chamber lined by coils of copper wire. The humming sound was more intense here, the air noticeably warmer. Melt water had leaked in through the apex and collected in a shallow green pool in the hollow below. Granger stepped carefully around it. Several objects lay under the water – metal brackets or machine parts, all furred with verdigris. Two further openings led deeper into the station. He listened at each for a while, then lifted his gem lantern again and took the first passage.

This conduit took him to another wire-walled sphere where the passage branched again. Again, Granger chose the opening from which the humming noise seemed louder. He passed through four more of these junctions before he began to perceive a tremor running through the floor. It was accompanied by an uncomfortable tingling sensation in his fingertips. His gem lantern seemed brighter, too. In places he found round metal plaques set into the curving walls, each inset with a small clear lens. He passed four or five, before something about them began to bother him. When he found yet another, he stopped to inspect it more closely. As he lowered his eye to the lens at its centre, he glimpsed another eye withdrawing abruptly from the other side.

Granger shuddered and moved on.

Eventually, the concrete maze opened out into an enormous cylindrical space like the inside of a tower. Scores of other conduits led away from its base. The humming sound he had been following reached a fierce resonance here; he could feel it reverberating in his teeth and bones. Great mounds of trove covered the floor, some twenty or thirty feet high in places. Pistols and cannons and suits of armour lay among piles of wrecked war machines: arbalists and turtles and drop-forged rams. His gem lantern shone so brightly it illuminated the whole vast space from wall to wall. There were ballistic weapons and energy weapons, and countless burned and twisted metal pieces of indeterminable purpose – a bonfire of scrap and used weapons, of flanged tripods and serrated fins, with bursts of wire, glass shields, goggles, gauntlets and cannon barrels protruding like giant steel fingers. Upon a nearby mound lay an ancient sky chariot, heavily dented and fire-blackened, but seemingly intact. Granger’s gaze travelled up the walls, and higher still, to the ceiling far above, where similar mounds of wreckage had floated up and gathered there in sorcerous defiance of gravity.

He frowned. Had he been descending underground all this time? From the outside the building hadn’t seemed tall enough to contain a space this large.

Amidst all this trove, one area in the centre of the chamber had been left clear. Here a single stone pedestal supported a crystal as large as a man’s head. It was glowing brightly, radiating shafts of ever-moving light, like a lighthouse lantern. The humming noise seemed to emanate from its facets. Granger let his kitbag slide down from his shoulder to the floor, then tucked his seeing knife into his belt.

He wandered over to the nearest heap of trove and reached in to pull out a sword. But the instant his hand closed on the grip, something remarkable happened.

One moment he was alone, the next he was surrounded. Out of thin air they appeared – six men dressed in bulky Unmer furs, brutally thin, with howling red eyes and brine-scorched skin. And every one of them was pulling a sword from the surrounding scrap.

Sorcery.

Granger swung his stolen blade up at the nearest figure, but his opponent parried instantly. The two blades clashed. Granger sensed movement all around him. He leaped back, and his opponent did likewise. And then Granger recognized him.

His opponent was the very image of himself, identical in every way, from the fur jacket he had taken from the deadship down to the sword he carried. Granger turned his head to examine the other five, and as he did so these five turned their heads in unison. Every one of them was him, and every one continued to mimic his every move. He lifted his sword, and the others lifted their swords. He lowered the sword again, watching as the simulacrums copied him. On their faces he saw six mirror images of his own startled expression. He dropped the sword…

… and the men vanished.

He picked up the sword again, and they reappeared.

A cheerful voice called out, ‘You found my Replicating Sword.’

Granger, and his six replicas, turned to see an old man standing in the corner of the chamber. He was short, stooped and grey of face, and he wore an old suit of mail several sizes too large for him. A simple tin crown sat low upon his brow, balanced above his prodigious nose and ears. Tufts of yellow hair clung to his head the way dead weeds remain clinging to a mountainside. If a man’s attitude to life leaves its mark in his face then this crooked figure had found much to smile about over the years. And he was smiling now, a huge smile that reached all the way from his lips to his honey-coloured eyes.

‘It’s designed to allow a warrior to fight multiple enemies at once,’ he said. ‘But controlling them is tricky. You have to think of multiple manoeuvres at the same time or the simulacrums just mimic you. I could never completely master it myself.’ He chuckled. ‘And I’ve got the scars to prove it.’

The man looked vaguely Unmer, but he spoke Anean like a Losotan. His crown rested low on his brow, and Granger thought he knew why. If this man had fought during the Uprising, it would be covering another scar.

‘Some of the other inventions are even harder to wield,’ the old man said. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t pick up any of the Sniggering Blades. A sword like that will trick you into cracking open your own bones and sucking out the marrow if you give it half a chance. Even Brutalists are frightened of them.’ He nodded amicably. ‘And then there are the Phasing Shields and Void Blades, of course. To call them terrifying doesn’t even begin to do them justice.’

‘Who are you?’ Granger said. He was startled to hear his own voice coming out of six mouths at once, but not startled enough to drop the weapon.

‘The name’s Herian,’ the old man replied. ‘I’m the operator here.’

‘I didn’t think there were any free Unmer left,’ Granger said, ‘except Conquillas.’

Herian’s smile withered. ‘Conquillas will be judged by powers greater than us,’ he said, strolling forward. ‘He gave up the right to call himself Unmer a long time ago.’

Granger noted that the old man’s crown only partially covered a red welt above his left eyebrow. Not exactly free, then. Herian had been leucotomized by the Haurstaf. But if he’d been captured and deliberately crippled at Awl, then how did he find his way out here?

The old man picked his way across piles of trove. ‘A lot of these flowspaces were used for storage during the war. Dragons don’t much like to venture inside them. Not against a gradient of this magnitude.’ He stubbed his foot on something and let out a curse, then picked up the offending object and flung it away. It was a skeletal box of some sort. ‘It’s all clutter to me now,’ he said. ‘I swear there’s more of it every time I come in here.’ He approached the crystal and examined it carefully, allowing curtains of shimmering light to bathe his face. For a moment he seemed to forget himself, but then he said, ‘Have you looked at this closely, yet?’

‘How do I get out of here?’ Granger said.

Herian didn’t answer.

‘How do I gain control of the ironclad?’

The old man continued to gaze into the crystal.

‘The icebreaker,’ Granger insisted. ‘Tell me how to steer it.’

‘You don’t steer it,’ Herian said. ‘Only the captain can do that.’

‘The captain is dead.’

Herian smiled again. ‘That didn’t stop him from delivering his package and then bringing you here, did it?’ His gaze returned to the jewel, which was now shining even more brightly than moments before. The colour and texture of its light had altered, too. A scattering of pink and orange rays swept across the old man’s mail suit, his weathered face and his tin crown. ‘Don’t you find it mesmerizing?’ he said. ‘The light, I mean…’ Radiance flooded over the mounds of trove behind him. As the rays touched the Unmer devices, many of them activated. Deep within the heap it seemed that embers began to glow. Energy weapons hummed and crackled. To Granger’s astonishment, additional copies of himself began to appear. He moved towards Herian, and his simulacrums moved too.

‘Draws you in, doesn’t it?’ Herian said.

Granger stopped.

‘Time’s horizon,’ the old man went on. ‘Entropaths use it to control the gradient, the rate of aspacial flow. You can’t see it, but it’s all around us now. If this device let it all through at once, our universe would collapse like that.’ He glanced up at Granger and snapped his fingers. ‘Bang. Crushed in a blink.’

The radiance from the crystal now filled the entire chamber. Through its facets Granger spied an image of a black plain under a burning sky. Curtains of red and pink light tore across the horizon. Lightning flickered. He took another step forward and then stopped himself. Had he meant to approach? His instincts screamed at him not to get any closer. The sky within that jewel continued to pulse and writhe. All around him, his simulacrums began to walk forward. And Granger found himself following them.

He halted beside Herian, without having made the decision to approach. And now he saw that the plain within the jewel was not land at all, but a great black sea, empty but for a single cone of rock rising above the tarry waters. Upon this solitary island stood a cylindrical metal tower as tall and broad as the interior of this chamber. ‘What is that place?’ he said.

‘It’s this place,’ Herian said, ‘and yet it’s not. It’s a fortress, a refuge, a doorway, the last bastion of thought in a dying universe.’

‘The source of brine?’

Herian chuckled. ‘Do you even know what brine is?’

Granger hesitated.

Herian grinned even more fiercely. ‘What happens when the seas rise?’

‘We drown.’

‘That’s the sort of limited answer I’d expect from a human,’ Herian said. ‘The seas rise, the land shrinks, and woe to all mankind.’ He laughed. ‘Brine never stops flowing. Not in a hundred years, nor in a million; not when our air thins and boils away and this bloated planet pulls the moon and the sun down from the sky. It will fill the vacuum between the stars long after my race has departed this world and yours has perished. It isn’t a weapon, it’s a catalyst – the broth from which a new cosmos will be manufactured.’

‘Who sent it here?’

Herian shrugged. ‘We made a deal.’

‘With whom?’

At that moment the whole chamber gave a sudden shudder. Light burst from the trove all around, as though those dull embers within the mountains of scrap had suddenly been fanned into flames. Herian cocked his head to one side and grinned. ‘You’re about to see for yourself,’ he said. ‘They’ve sensed you and activated the conduits.’ He gestured towards the nearest wall, where a dim green glow now pulsed within the passageway openings. ‘They don’t like trespassers.’

Granger grabbed the old man’s mail shirt. ‘Who are they?’

Herian beamed. ‘Your race would call them gods,’ he said. ‘Mine think of them as masters of entropy. They have stalled the end of their own universe.’ His eyes sparkled with awe. ‘Can you comprehend the sheer magnitude of that achievement? To actually resist the formation of a singularity… even for a moment?’

Granger shook him. ‘You invited them here?’

‘Not me,’ Herian said. ‘I’m just an operator.’

At the old man’s words, someone seized Granger from behind. A strong arm gripped his neck, dragging him backwards. Granger reacted at once, driving his elbow into the unseen opponent’s ribs.

Something struck him hard in the gut, punching the air from him. The blow had come from nowhere. Granger hadn’t even seen whatever had hit him, but he felt his opponent’s grip slacken. He wrestled free, spun round…

… and found himself facing one of the simulacrums.

This copy was no longer mimicking him. It was bent over, clutching its ribs. And, to Granger’s astonishment, so were all the others. At least a dozen copies stood around him, every one of them doubled over in pain.

Had Granger struck himself, along with all the others? He raised the sword, but none of the simulacrums copied his gesture. Many of them had already recovered. They were edging closer from all directions at once. For a moment, Granger stood there, uncertain. Then he dropped the sword.

The simulacrums vanished.

Herian laughed. ‘If you don’t make decisions for your own swordsmen,’ he said, ‘then there are always others who’ll do it for you.’ He indicated the scrap pile. ‘Please, help yourself to something else. Plenty more weapons to choose from.’

Granger stooped to grab a different sword but hesitated. He glanced at Herian.

Herian shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be my choice.’

Granger walked up to him and punched him in the face.

The old man fell back into a pile of metal. His crown fell off, revealing the leucotomy scar on his forehead. He spat blood, then gave Granger a red grin. ‘A hundred years ago I’d have made you suffer for that,’ he said. ‘Old age has mellowed me.’ He reached over into a heap of trove and grabbed a heavy flintlock pistol with a barrel big enough to ram a fist inside. He swung it round to bear on Granger.

Granger forced his boot down on Herian’s arm, pinning the weapon. He crouched over the old man and slugged him again, breaking his jaw. Herian howled. He managed to squeeze the trigger and the pistol gave a soft hiss, like an exhalation. A haze passed through the air, scattering the trove beyond the weapon’s barrel in all directions. The flying scrap turned to dust even as Granger watched. He slammed Herian’s wrist down, again and again, until the old man dropped the pistol. Then he kicked the damn thing away. He punched Herian’s face a second time, and then a third.

Herian sputtered and coughed, but then he grinned once more. ‘Beating me doesn’t even scratch the cosmos, you know?’ he said. ‘The wings of a fly make as much damage. Look around you, man.’

The crystal was blazing now, filling the whole room with the radiance of that alien sky trapped inside. And something equally strange was happening within the mouths of the conduits. Green light flickered within each of those portals, accompanied by a furious crackling sound and a deeper, more regular mechanical shunting. Was this whole tower a machine? A piece of trove itself? Many of the surrounding weapons began to glow and shiver, as weird fires danced across their metal surfaces. Granger could feel the energy crawling across his skin.

A bolt of lightning shot from one of the conduit doorways and struck the crystal, followed a heartbeat later by dozens more in rapid succession. The air fizzed with power. Herian shrieked with laughter, his bruised and swollen face contorted into a rictus of joy. His tongue lolled in his mouth; his eyes stared madly at the lightning. Granger released him and searched around frantically for something, anything with which to protect himself. He hauled out a heavy glass shield and raised it before him. Looking through it was like looking through an old, warped window, and yet the landscape he saw through that shield bore no resemblance to the chamber around him. Instead, he perceived a winter forest, the trees like charcoal dashes on a white page.

Herian growled, ‘Beware of wolves.’

Granger spied movement in that world beyond the shield – grey shapes loping through the snow. Something flashed by to his immediate left, and he spun the shield around to follow the movement. Through the woozy glass he saw a wolf pounce at him, its red eyes agleam, its fangs bared. The beast slammed against the shield, knocking Granger backwards. And suddenly he felt its weight on top of him, pinning him down as it slavered and snapped at the other side of the glass.

Herian laughed. ‘How does it feel to hold something that’s in two places at once?’

Granger heaved the shield aside and the weight abruptly disappeared. The wolves and their bleak forest remained inside the glass.

Electrical fluids were now streaming between the crystal and the mouths of the conduits, forming a blazing net that filled the centre of the chamber. The air smelled of storms. As Granger watched, the energy began to coalesce in front of the crystal, forming a discernible shape. It seemed to him that he could see the outline of a female figure in that chaos – white and luminous with lightning for hair.

‘She’s reversing entropy,’ Herian said. ‘Recreating herself in this place.’ He scrambled to his feet and laughed again. ‘You needn’t bother arming yourself – flesh, steel, bullets, it’s all just matter to her.’

The woman amidst the lightning was becoming more solid with each passing moment as energy hardened and took the shape of flesh and bone and armour. Her mirrored plate had been crafted to resemble the facets of a crystal and shone with the brilliance of a thousand gem lanterns. She wore a glass shield strapped to her back, and carried a whip that sparkled with energy. Her long hair blazed and snapped, the electric fluids arcing in every direction. As the energy dissipated around her, Granger saw that her face was old and grey and haggard. For an instant he thought that she was weeping, but then he realized the truth. Those weren’t tears he saw, but brine leaking from the corners of her eyes and trickling out of her open mouth. She looked and smelled like one of the Drowned.

‘Those tears will burn,’ Herian said. ‘But I see you’ve had some experience of that already.’ He was sitting on a nearby mound of trove with his chin resting on his fist. ‘You look like a man who’s already had a taste of the world to come.’

Granger tore his eyes from the woman. Frantically, he eyed the trove around him. Swords, shields, pistols, armour. He didn’t know what any of it did. He reached for another sword, but then stopped when Herian began to snigger. This was Unmer weaponry. Most of it would be beyond him. He spied the kitbag he’d brought from the deadship. He’d packed it with tools he’d found aboard. But they were Unmer too. He snatched it up anyway and threw it at the entropath in wild desperation.

She cracked her whip. The kitbag fell in two pieces, spilling its contents onto the floor.

Shit.

He glanced back at the conduits leading into the chamber. Green fires now burned deep inside them with such savagery that each opening looked like the mouth to a strange chemical furnace. Streamers of lightning flowed from every one of them, feeding the crystal which fed the manifestation before him. He wheeled round and fixed his gaze upon the Unmer chariot lying at a shallow angle upon a heap of trove. Blue and pink electrical auras fluttered across its egg-shaped hull.

Granger bolted across the room and, chased by the sound of Herian’s laughter, ducked inside the open hatch of the flying machine. The floor sloped sharply down towards the stern. Dozens of switches, dials, rollers and levers occupied a console that swept across the bow of the vessel, each marked by Unmer glyphs and numbers of indeterminable meaning. Several panels beneath the console had been removed, leaving the internal mechanics exposed. Lights of all colours flickered within that mess of wires. Above the console, three glass panels hinged like winged dresser mirrors offered views of the chamber beyond. Through these Granger watched the entropath approach. Brine continued to pour from her mouth and eyes; it trickled from her fingers and through the spaces in her armour.

Granger studied the console. None of the controls made any immediate sense. He placed the heel of his hand against a roller and eased it forward. The chariot bucked suddenly and then shuddered, but did not move from its position. The machinery within the console gave out a painful screech. He began trying each control in turn, flipping switches in sequence, pulling levers and spinning rollers in all directions. The chariot jerked suddenly to port, slamming Granger against the bulkhead. He heard laughter behind him.

Herian was holding onto the hatch. ‘I don’t know what you hope to accomplish,’ he said, smiling. ‘There’s enough energy pouring through the conduits to burn this ship to nothing. My lady will simply absorb the residue.’

Granger located the roller that had sent the craft to port and turned it in the opposite direction. The chariot lurched suddenly to starboard, causing Herian to tumble head over heels in through the open hatch. He landed on the floor, striking his head, as the flying machine burst free of the scrap pile and careened across the chamber. Granger rolled the control wheel back to its central position. That’s lateral control. Carefully, he turned a second wheel, set several inches above the first. The chariot responded by rising quickly through the air. Vertical control. Now, where was thrust? Two large hand-grips caught his attention. He eased them both away from himself, and the craft surged forward, trembling slightly.

Herian groaned. ‘You’re wasting a perfectly good chariot,’ he said.

Granger ignored him. Through the glass panels he watched the entropath diminish below him as the craft rose higher and higher. She had strapped her glass shield to one arm and carried her whip in her free hand. Brine continued to pour from her, forming an expanding pool around her boots. She lifted her gaze to the chariot and then lashed out with the whip.

The flying machine should have been well beyond the range of that weapon. But as Granger watched in horror, the lash extended upwards like a bolt of black lightning.

He spun the lateral control wheel to port, but he wasn’t fast enough. The whip struck the craft, opening a thin crack in the port side of the hull. Light shone through.

Herian began to chuckle again. ‘She’s toying with you,’ he said. ‘That lash could cut the world in half.’

Granger spun the vertical control wheel, and the craft shot upwards at breakneck speed. Through the view screens he watched the floor drop far away. The entropath was drawing back her whip to strike again. Granger waited a heartbeat before halting his ascent. As the woman struck out a second time, he sent the chariot plummeting downwards like a stone.

The force of acceleration almost lifted him from his feet, but he clung to the console. He heard the whip crack somewhere overhead. A yard from the floor, he brought the flying machine to a sudden halt, then sent it barrelling sideways towards the centre of the chamber, towards the entropath herself. If he’d judged his heading correctly. ..

The lower edge of the chariot hatch crashed into the pedestal, shattering it and toppling the crystal balanced upon its summit. As the craft’s momentum carried it onwards, the great jewel flew in through the open hatch, bounced off Herian’s prone body and came to rest against the port side of the hull.

Herian’s expression turned fearful. ‘What are you doing?’

Granger slammed the thrust levers forward. The jewel rolled to the back of the control room and clunked against the rear bulkhead. If the damned thing was acting as a bridge between the entropath’s universe and this one, then he had to hope she wouldn’t risk its destruction. He spun the lateral control again, slewing the chariot in the direction of the nearest conduit.

‘You’ll burn us alive! Herian cried.

And the crystal too.

The lash snapped again, and this time a thin slice disappeared from the starboard side of the hull. The blow had cleaved through the edge of the console itself. The chariot stuttered and yawed suddenly to port. Granger wrestled with the controls to bring it back on course. Ahead through the view screens the conduit mouth loomed like a green inferno. Sparks burst from the console under Granger’s fingers. Engines screamed. The whole ship began to judder madly.

‘Stop,’ Herian cried, trying to rise from the floor.

But by then they had reached the portal.

A storm of energy poured into the chariot through the open hatchway, arcing between the bulkheads. Green flames tore across the console. The view screens blazed like suns. Granger cried out as electrical fluids shot through his body. His muscles began to spasm uncontrollably, and for a heartbeat he was aware of nothing but light and agony and the smell of his own burning flesh.

Abruptly, the light vanished.

It was as if someone had thrown a switch. The surrounding inferno simply ceased to be, leaving the view screens dark and the craft flying on through gloom. Granger eased back the throttle levers, slowing their forward momentum. Apart from the hum of their engines, the conduit was silent.

Herian groaned from the floor. ‘You’ve no idea what you just risked.’

Granger halted the flying machine. He stepped past the old man and retrieved the jewel from the rear of the cabin. It had ceased to glow, and he could no longer perceive the alien landscape within its facets. It looked like an ordinary crystal. He wedged it behind one of the view screens and gunned the engines again.

‘Let me take it back,’ Herian said.

Granger just grunted. He flew the chariot onwards at a much slower pace, threading his way through the conduits and junction spheres until her reached the transmitting station’s main entrance. All appeared as dark and desolate as it had at first. He brought the craft’s bow gently up against the outer door and then eased the throttles forward. With a shudder and an almighty groan, the door scraped open, and the small vessel moved out into sunlight.

Snowflakes swirled across the view screens and blew in through the open hatch and the gaps in the hull. Granger’s hands danced across the controls as he brought the flying machine up and over the building in a slowly rising spiral. He passed the white, lace-frill skeleton of the transmitting tower and the great torus upon its summit, where he let the chariot come to a halt. The northern ice fields shimmered like emeralds and diamonds, a jewelled coast abutting the bottle-green waters of the Mare Verdant. Awl lay somewhere to the south-west. He might reach it in a few days, but then what?

The Haurstaf had an entire army at their disposal, while Granger had one half-wrecked little chariot. He didn’t know if the craft would even make it that far.

He stood there for a moment, thinking.

‘Let me go,’ Herian said. He sat on the floor, shivering, with his shoulders slumped in an attitude of defeat. Snow was already gathering on his hair and mail shirt. ‘I’m no danger to you. Keep the chariot, let me take the jewel back.’

Granger picked up the jewel and carried it over to the hatch. An icy gale blew around his shoulders. A few yards below him, the toroid gleamed dully under the monochrome sky. Not a single snowflake had adhered to that metal surface.

‘What are you doing?’ Herian said.

Granger pitched the jewel out of the hatch. It landed in the depression in the centre of the toroid with an almighty clang, rolled one way, and then the other, before finally settling.

Herian crawled over, then let out a groan.

‘You’ll get it back,’ Granger said. ‘But I want something in return.’

The old man stared after the jewel.

‘That sword I picked up,’ Granger said. ‘The simulacrums…’

‘What about them?’

‘Show me how to use it properly.’

‘That’s all?’ Herian said. ‘You want to wield a Replicating Sword?’

Granger grunted. ‘That’s just the beginning.’

The room looked like a lecture theatre to Ianthe, with wooden seats rising in curved tiers before her. It was empty apart from a panel of four Haurstaf witches. Subtle changes in their expressions told her they were having a discussion, even if she couldn’t hear them. Briana Marks glanced at Sister Ulla, who gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. The remaining two spinsters simply glared down at Ianthe as if they knew the secrets of her soul. They were older than anyone Ianthe had seen before, balanced there like pinnacles of weathered rock.

‘Really,’ Briana said suddenly. ‘This is beyond tiring. Why not let the girl hear what you have to say? I’m not going to go over this twice for her benefit. If the point of psychic warfare is to inflict pain, suffering and death, then she’s done exceptionally well.’

Sister Ulla snorted. ‘We can’t have lawlessness and anarchy within our own ranks.’

Briana looked at the old woman with an expression of incredulity. ‘Anarchy? Don’t be so dramatic, Ulla. The loss of one brat is not going to make any difference to the world. She was hardly an asset.’

‘The parents!’ Sister Ulla protested.

‘Why on earth would you want to inform them?’

‘They’ll find out eventually-’

Briana batted a hand at the other woman. ‘We have finances set aside to deal with these sorts of problems. Don’t bore us all with your peacock morality. Her parents ought to be glad she was given an opportunity here in the first place.’

Sister Ulla fluffed out her chest, as if she was going to protest, but then she sank back into her chair.

Briana looked at Ianthe. ‘Mara said you turned that girl’s brain to paste.’

Ianthe felt her face turn red. She shuffled from one foot to the other. She wanted to say that she hadn’t meant it, that it wasn’t her fault and if they would let her go home she’d never bother the Haurstaf again. But that wasn’t going to happen now. She lowered her head.

Briana laughed suddenly. ‘You think so, Ulla?’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you do it.’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Sister Ulla growled.

Nobody spoke for several minutes, and it seemed to Ianthe that the witches had fallen back into psychic communication. But then Briana turned to her and said, ‘Sister Ulla is of the opinion that you had help. Did you have help, Ianthe?’

Ianthe said nothing.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Briana went on, ‘we’d like to examine those eyeglasses of yours.’

‘They’re just eyeglasses.’

‘Then you won’t mind-’

‘No!’ Ianthe cried. ‘They don’t belong to you.’ Tears welled in her eyes, blurring her vision through the lenses. These old women had no right to ask her to give up her sight, no right at all. All of them except Briana were glaring furiously at her now.

Sister Ulla looked as if she was ready to explode with indignation. ‘You’ll hand them over now,’ she said, ‘or I’ll come down there and take them from you myself.’

Ianthe spoke through her teeth. ‘Try it.’

Briana raised her hands. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. She glanced from one sister to another, before returning her attention to Ianthe. Her expression softened. ‘There’s a place for you here, Ianthe, but only if you work with us. I won’t tolerate threats. I expect you to be as civil and honest with us as we’ve been with you.’ She gave her a half-smile. ‘We can’t put you back into the classroom now.’

‘But I didn’t mean to harm-’ Ianthe’s voice broke and she began to cry.

Briana left her seat and walked down the central aisle of the theatre. She wrapped her arms around Ianthe and held her. Ianthe couldn’t stop herself. Her whole body began to convulse with sobs. Tears flowed freely until she could no longer see through her lenses. She clung fiercely to Briana. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

The Haurstaf leader smoothed Ianthe’s hair. ‘Shush,’ she said. ‘You’ve done nothing to be sorry about. All you need is a little guidance.’ She held Ianthe for a long time. Finally she squeezed Ianthe’s shoulders and gently pushed her away. ‘If you can do that to a human,’ she said, smiling, ‘think what you could do to the Unmer.’

Ianthe sniffed and shook her head.

‘This is what we do, Ianthe,’ Briana said. ‘It’s what your classmates have been training towards, what poor Caroline sacrificed her life for.’

‘Constance,’ Ianthe said.

Briana nodded. ‘And when you see what the Unmer are capable of, you’ll understand why the Guild is so vital. Women like us keep the world from falling apart.’ She turned to the other three witches. ‘I think she’s ready to see the dungeons now.’

Sister Ulla shook her head, but her two companions looked at each other for a few moments. ‘There’s no going back if you decide to take that route,’ one of them said. ‘She’ll be bound to us for good or ill.’

Briana made a face. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic, Bethany,’ she said. ‘We can always kill her later.’ She moved her lips close to Ianthe’s ear. ‘I’m joking. But your acceptance into the Guild will have other consequences. Maskelyne will be executed for his crimes.’

Ianthe looked up at her for a long moment. ‘What about his wife? His son?’

Briana looked surprised. ‘You want them dead, too?’

‘No, I mean-’

‘We must protect our family from the Maskelynes of this world,’ the witch said. ‘Family is important, don’t you think?’

Ianthe’s eyes filled with tears again. She nodded.

Briana extended her hand. ‘Then come with me.’

What happened next happened quickly. Ianthe found herself whisked away from that room. Briana Marks led her on through the palace, through glassy black corridors and halls and rooms where women Ianthe did not know looked on in grim silence. They descended one stairwell and then a second and a third and a fourth, until Ianthe lost count and it seemed to her that they must be deep with the earth itself. Finally they came to a nondescript door in a small stone antechamber. Briana turned a key in the lock.

They stepped out onto a balcony set high on one wall of an enormous, brightly lit chamber – one of four platforms connected by a cruciform steel catwalk. Thousands of gem lanterns depended from the vaulted ceiling overhead, filling the entire space with harsh white light. Below the catwalk lay a maze of roofless concrete cells, each about six feet to a side. Hundreds of small openings, barely large enough for a man to squeeze through, connected each cell to one or more of its neighbours in a seemingly haphazard fashion. Ianthe strolled to the edge of the balcony and looked down. A network of pipes suspended beneath the catwalk fed an array of shower heads, one located above each cell. Their purpose was presumably to wash the occupants below.

Hundreds of Unmer filled that grey labyrinth, either alone in a cell or gathered together in small groups. All were naked and painfully thin. They slouched against the bare walls or sat on the floors or lay sleeping. The murmur of conversation gradually ceased as they became aware of their observers in the gallery above.

‘It used to be a mental faculty test,’ Briana said, her voice echoing far across the chamber, ‘but we ended up using the place to store the breeding stock. They’re all leucotomized, of course, so security isn’t much of an issue here. Food can be thrown down, filth washed away, and we use acid to direct test subjects to the gate for removal.’

Ianthe’s throat grew dry. They were all looking up at her.

‘The leucotomy procedure allows them privacy,’ Briana said. ‘We don’t need psychics to monitor them constantly.’

‘They look so miserable.’

‘Misery is the price of freedom,’ Brian replied. ‘We can’t have them walking through walls or vanishing matter at will. They’re happy enough. Come now, I’ll take you to the zoo.’ She set off across the catwalk at a brisk pace.

Ianthe hesitated. ‘The zoo?’

‘That’s where we keep the able-minded ones,’ the witch called back.

Ianthe waited a moment longer, then ran after her. The catwalk rattled under her boots. She kept her gaze level, afraid to look down at the pitiful creatures below. She caught up with Briana just as she reached the opposite balcony. Briana unlocked another door and ushered her into a corridor lit by gem lanterns recessed behind copper mesh. A door at the end of this passage led to yet another stairwell, which descended even further beneath the earth.

By the time they reached the bottom, Ianthe was quite out of breath. They had reached a circular chamber with walls clad in blood-coloured seawood inlaid with curlicues of copper. Recessed lanterns threw cross-hatch patterns across the living rock floor. At least a dozen exits surrounded them, each blocked by a door made from different coloured glass. The air was much cooler here and carried the scent of perfume.

Ianthe could sense large numbers of people behind each of the doors. Her inner vision fluttered with the lights of their perceptions: a hundred of them, maybe more. And yet she held back in spite of all her nervous excitement – forcing her mind to remain in her own body. She was about to witness the Haurstaf’s greatest secret with her own eyes.

Briana opened the door.

Ianthe’ first impression of the chamber beyond was that it was upside down. Light poured into the room through huge slabs of glass set into the floor. These panes were all of various shapes and sizes: squares and oblongs and long strips. In the centre of the room stood a tall, thin wooden structure, like a small watchtower or an improbably large high-chair. A ladder on the near side gave access to a cushioned seat at its summit. Upon this sat a young witch in plain white robes. She had been peering down into the glass floor below her but now glanced up as Briana and Ianthe entered.

‘Any mischief?’ Briana asked.

The witch on the high-chair did not reply.

‘Verbally,’ Briana said

The other woman cast a curious glance at Ianthe. ‘Not in here,’ she said. ‘But we had an incident in suite seven.’

‘Who was in the chair?’

The younger woman shrugged. ‘Some new girl. She overreacted.’

‘Did the prisoner survive?’

‘Sort of.’

As Briana and Ianthe approached, Ianthe looked down through the glass pane under her feet. Below lay a bedroom, as richly furnished as any other in the palace, with silken sheets and plump pillows on the bed, Evensraum rugs on the floor. Paintings and tapestries adorned the walls, giving the room a rather stately feel. One of the two doors led to a bathroom, with a smaller glass pane for a ceiling. Ianthe walked over it and found herself gazing down at a huge copper bathtub with a matching sink. The other bedroom door opened into an enormous lounge, also roofed with glass. Through this pane, Ianthe could see a young man reclining on a red settee, reading a book. He glanced up at her without expression, before returning his attention to the pages. To the right of the lounge lay a small library containing a writing desk flanked by bookshelves. The witch’s high-chair allowed her to look down into any of the rooms below.

Briana stood directly over the man in the lounge. She tapped her heel against the floor and said, ‘How is the prince today?’

The young man yawned, but didn’t look up.

‘He’s been ignoring me for months now,’ said the witch in the high-chair. ‘Not so much as a glance.’

‘But you must be used to that,’ Briana said. ‘A face like yours. ..’

The witch did not reply.

Ianthe walked across the glass floor. She couldn’t take her eyes off the young man. He couldn’t have been much older than her, and yet he appeared so much more relaxed and confident in his surroundings. A touch of arrogance, even? He was clearly aware of the women in the chamber above him, but chose to dismiss them, casually turning the pages of his book with long white fingers. He had a pale, slightly effeminate face framed by an unruly mop of hay-coloured hair, and he wore a flamboyant smoking jacket of red velvet trimmed with gold.

‘He hasn’t been leucotomized,’ Ianthe said.

Briana looked up. ‘We couldn’t do that to the king’s son. It wouldn’t be civil.’ She glanced down again. ‘Not as long as he behaves himself.’

An Unmer prince? It seemed odd to think of the Unmer having a kingdom of their own.

‘The first emperors tried for years to devise a physical prison to contain the Unmer,’ Briana said. ‘No psychics, no monitoring, just walls. They submerged their prisons under the sea. They used chains and cables to suspend them over pits.’ She paced the glass floor, watching the young man below. ‘Nothing worked.’

‘Wouldn’t they just fall through the ground at the bottom of the pit?’ Ianthe asked.

‘Oh, they can keep that up for a while,’ Briana replied. ‘Fifty feet into solid rock, a hundred feet, maybe more. But there’s a limit to the amount of matter they can destroy before they get tired. Sooner or later, the fall catches up with them.’ She stopped pacing. ‘No, that wasn’t the problem. The problem wasn’t what they destroyed, but what they made when you weren’t watching them.’

‘Trove,’ Ianthe said.

‘They’ll sit for days over a chunk of stone or scrap of metal, running their fingers over it, chanting and muttering to themselves. It’s almost as if they’re praying. And when they’ve finished, the piece of stone or metal isn’t a piece of stone or metal any more.’

‘So you watch them all the time?’

‘For their own protection,’ Briana said. ‘Otherwise we’d have to kill them.’ She tapped her heel against the glass floor again. ‘Isn’t that right, Marquetta?’

The young man continued to ignore her.

Briana’s lips narrowed, and all of a sudden Ianthe sensed something in the air around her – a reverberation like a musical note too low to hear. The young man in the room below cried out suddenly. He dropped his book, clamped both hands against his temples and rolled over in agony.

‘Their minds are like wine glasses,’ Briana said. ‘Easy to crack, easy to shatter.’

‘Stop it!’ Ianthe cried.

Briana exhaled, and the sensation in the air abruptly disappeared. Down below, the young man slumped forward and held his face in his hands. He was breathing heavily, his shoulders trembling slightly.

Briana turned to Ianthe and smiled. ‘Now let’s go find you one to practise on,’ she said.