Cage of souls, p.42
Cage of Souls, page 42
I had one visitor and I made one visit. The visitor first, because he led to so many maddening speculations. One evening, the jailer suddenly stopped talking and moved away from me, and I heard footsteps down the corridor. There were two Angels, better turned out than the average, and there was an older man.
There was an undefinable aura of command about him. I felt he was so used to having his words taken as truth that he never even thought of it any more. He breezed through the cells of the Government District as easily as he might the gatherings of the rich or the halls of the Authority. He had a pleasant, paternal face belied by a distant, analytical expression. His hair was silver and he was surely far older than he looked. His back was hunched in elegant cosmetic deformity.
“This is the man?” he enquired of one of the Angels, and was told that yes, I was indeed.
He flicked an eyebrow in the bored surprise of a man to whom all things are, in the end, equal. “I suppose revolutionaries come in all sizes.”
“Please, sir, I’m no subversive,” I started straight up. “I’m innocent, I—”
He made a sharp little warning gesture at me, and it shut me up straight away.
He came into the cell, all poise and control. The two Angels seemed momentarily thrown. If I was such a dangerous man, then my distinguished visitor should not be allowed so close. On the other hand, they had no power to stop him.
The old man came close, and looked me in the eyes.
“Where is she?” he said, and I knew who he meant.
“I do not know,” I replied honestly. “Gone free.”
The old man stared into my eyes and divined that I was telling the truth. I saw a corner of his mouth clench up, and an unhappiness surface in his eyes that must always have been there behind the mask of his power. Then he left, and I never saw him again.
I think that he was Faith’s maker or commisioner, and the architect of that murderous building where the silver-lightning creature lived. Or maybe he was simply a man of vast wealth who had seen her, once, and been as covetous as we all were. Either way, I read in that iron face that he would move earth and moon and stars to find her, and not care who he trampled on the way.
A few days later I was brought out to an office smaller than my cell where a man who had been in the year below me at the Academy, and whose name I could not recall, took my details and informed me that I had been sentenced.
“Sentenced?” I demanded. “How?”
“Standard procedure,” the clerk informed me. “The sentence of exile to the Island has been judged appropriate for your crimes. Have you anything to say?”
I barely heard what I had actually been sentenced to. I was more interested in the furtherance of my plan. “I need to speak to the Lord Justiciar,” I said. “I have vital information that will clear my name.”
“The Lord Justiciar is very busy,” the clerk informed me. “I will relay your request to him, however. I am sure that he will be able to find the time. Vital information, you say?”
“Extremely vital.”
“Well then, how could he refuse?” the clerk said smoothly.
I was returned to my cell in high spirits, and spent the next hour telling the sympathetic jailer that I would surely be out by the end of the week.
I was not out by the end of the week but, the middle of the week after, I was told that the boat had arrived.
“Boat? What boat?” I asked.
“The prison boat,” the jailer told me. “What do you think we’ve been waiting for?”
“But I need to see the Lord Justiciar!”
“I’m sorry. He’s very busy. Now would you mind putting these on?”
It was my first sight of the prison greys that were to become such a feature of my life.
My only consolation is that, unlike Lucian, I knew then that I was condemned. By the time I reached the Island all my illusions had been stripped from me.
PART THE FIFTH
IN WHICH I LEAVE THE ISLAND
35
The Battle for Underworld
There was Arves, like a heap of sticks that someone had bundled into prison greys. He was leathered and creased by the cruel sun, worn to the very rounded nub of his endurance. He looked older than Trethowan ever would.
“What’s the point of him?” Hermione grumbled. “He won’t last.”
Lucian disagreed, with his customary vacuous cheer. Why Lucian had seen people nine-tenths into death’s kingdom rally and pull through. Perhaps a little food would do him good. Maybe some exercise. In Lucian’s bubble-bright world, there was everything to hope for.
I thought Hermione had the right of it, and cut through Lucian’s amiable chatter with, “He’s a friend of mine from back home.”
Hermione grunted, unimpressed, and sat down in one corner. Gaki’s face appeared beside hers through the bars. The madman was unusually subdued, biding his time for something only he could name. Hermione began to speak to him, his soft replies quite lost in her blurred bass rumble.
I knelt beside Arves, wondering if he were dead already. He looked dead for some time. Even now, in the sanctuary of the Island’s gloom, he was hanging by the frailest thread.
I said gently, “Arves? It’s me. Stefan.”
His eyes opened, the irises were sepia and the whites had gone yellow. He could not see me.
“Arves, what happened to you?” I asked him. How long had it been since he and I, Giulia and Sergei, last drank together? A year, but that year had so ruined him that nothing of the outward man was left.
“Stefan…” His voice was a croak, strengthening as he forced the sounds out. “How did you come here? Did they get you as well? No, you were gone long before. Is this where you went? You can’t know, then. You can’t know what happened to us. They declared war on the Underworld!”
“They did… War?” I stared into that blind face. “Who? The Meat Packers?”
“The surface. Shadrapar. The Authority. War, Stefan. All gone to war. God save me, it’s all gone.”
“Arves, you are going to have to slow down,” I told him, because my head was so filled with horrible speculations I could not keep up with him. “Tell me what happened.”
“Tell us all,” Gaki’s voice cut in. “I know the Underworld. Tell us all what has gone on there.”
There were prisoners crowding in from the adjacent cells, and above and below as well, though Arves did not see them. I was the only thing in his life at that moment, aside from the story tearing him apart to get out.
I will not give his words verbatim. The story was so strong, and he was too frail to control it, and so it told itself in a great torrent through him. I will give you my reconstruction, then, of the war that came beneath Shadrapar, with assumptions, extrapolations and bridged gaps. There is no other account. You will have to be satisfied with mine.
*
It began with a death. News came down to the factions that some great man had died. None felt like mourning, and many prepared to celebrate, for the great and good of Shadrapar Above were ever the enemies of the Underworld. So it was that the factions speculated as to whom the death might belong to. A few were hoping that the President himself had died, and far more were praying for the demise of the Lord Justiciar, a most hated figure. Wagers were placed. The details trickled through the Underworld and brought a current of surprise. It was no member of the current Authority who had met his end, but a private individual of such wealth and power that it had been assumed he was invulnerable. I speak of none other than Jon Anteim the Elder. More, he had not passed quietly in his sleep but had been bloodily murdered in his private chambers.
This seems very clear to me. Someone in power, some rival of Anteim’s, had reached the far horizon of their patience, and had taken the ultimate sanction. Perhaps it was even Haelen Anteim, doting daughter, who had so coolly arranged the death of her brother and was surely impatient to claim her inheritance. Back when I was still a citizen of Shadrapar the idea would have been unthinkable. The rich did not have each other assassinated. It was not done. Perhaps it was just that I was lost in scholarly innocence and did not see the way the world turned, but I think there was more. Even on the Island I had seen signs of political upheaval, the first of which (unrecognised at the time) was finding ex-Lord Financier Valentin Miljus in my very cell.
So Jon Anteim the Elder was dead, and to the Underworlders this seemed as good a reason to rejoice as any. There were enough who had suffered from him or his corrupt family. There was further news on the way, though: a public announcement by the President himself; a eulogy for the fallen statesman in which he swore to take action against Old Jon’s killers. He swore that he would forever rid Shadrapar of the murderous scum of the Underworld who had dared to strike the old man down. It was the best-fitting cloak for the truth, whether Harweg was in on it or not. The Underworld was a vague terror to surface Shadrapar. Every citizen peopled it (with some justification) with thieves and killers and mad scientists’ mistakes. It was easy for the Authority to blame any kind of evil on it. That was nothing new.
The mood in the Underworld when this broke was of careless bravado. Many there would love to accept responsibility for the deed.
*
Then a couple of Exceptionals who were on their way out for a little freelance thieving found that others were already coming in. One of the two got back and barrelled into the Temple shouting out some mad story of invasion. “Outriders!” he declared. “Outriders are coming.”
Someone asked him what he meant. How many? A dozen? A score?
“All of them!” the frantic Exceptional cried. “All the Outriders there are!”
And he was right. He had seen tens of Outriders forming up in that cavern, more dropping in through the open hatch, all in full canvas and metal armour with two muskets and a long killing knife apiece. His companion had been less quick to run, and the musketry of the Outriders had got him, leaving only one to tell the tale. If the Underworld ever had a chance, that Exceptional was it. Had he not raised the alarm so soon, there is no telling how far the enemy might have got undetected.
A summons went out to every would-be general, strategist and mercenary commander beneath the earth. Actions move faster than words, though, and by the time those picked few were assembled in the Temple, gunfire could already be heard distantly through the tunnels as Underworlders put up an improvised defence.
*
It turned out that the entry point the Outriders had picked gave them three ways forward, two that led direct into the heart of the Underworld and one that led down. It was in these former two that the first organised opposition found them.
Down one tortuous tunnel, Sergei and a band of Fishermen set an ambush behind what cover they could find, and there followed a bloody and savage exchange of fire between the Outriders’ muskets and the Fishermen’s crossbows. The Fishermen were more used to the dark and knew the ground, but their opponents were well trained and outnumbered them heavily. The first Fishermen volley caught them unprepared and some seven or eight were cut down at once, but then the Outriders scattered to cover and began to return the favour. The skirmish was brutal with no quarter given. The Outriders were desperate to force their way forwards, for the passage widened beyond the ambush point and their greater numbers there would carry the day. Two or three at a time were constantly making a dash for the next niche in the tunnel wall under cover of their fellows’ fire. If even a few could get into close combat with their wicked knives then their comrades would be able to follow up. The Fishermen were forced to expose themselves to the musket-fire to pick off each moving man. They could not afford to miss any of them. More and more were getting closer, from cover to cover. Over half Sergei’s little force was dead, and the tunnel before them was strewn with fallen and dying Outriders. Another trio broke for the very rubble the Fishermen were crouching behind, the lead shot skipping and dancing from the walls. The defenders were moments away from being overwhelmed.
It was then that Pelgraine turned up on his own, a solitary reinforcement, and let fly with a charge from his light gun. The unbearable white flash of it stopped the Outriders in their tracks, just as it had the Mazen. The surviving Fishermen fell on them and wiped them out.
Then it was quiet and there were no more Outriders there, and Sergei knew something was wrong.
“Too few bodies,” he told Pelgraine. “Scouts only. We find the rest.” He told his men to hold the tunnel against any further comers and then he and Pelgraine made for the Temple.
*
The other approach that the Outriders tried was taken first by the non-combatant novices and scientists of the Alchemical Brethren, who were in no position to weather a serious assault. Some nameless innovator amongst them had brought along an explosive of his own formula which spectacularly collapsed the entire passageway and ensured that no surface-dwellers would be coming that way at all.
*
The bulk of the Outriders were making for the myoculture caves beneath them, Giulia’s maps revealed. Once there they would have access to the myriad tunnels the Fermers used to come and go, and thus they could take Underworld as and when they wanted it. Every able-bodied Underworlder armed and ready to go was sent down to the caverns with Giulia of the Fishermen and a Meat Packer known as the Count at their head. Their advance scouts discovered a fair concentration of Outriders at one end of the cavern with more filing in. Small groups were already crawling up the Fermers’ tunnels into the Underworld proper but the main body was just standing around in some confusion. The most daring of the scouts crept between the burgeoning piles of growing fungus and saw several officer types clustered about a number of charts. It appeared that the Outriders were lost.
The obvious thing to do would be to form a defended firing line at the other end of the cavern and shoot into their ranks, forcing them to take cover. This tactic would allow the Outriders to continue filing through the nearest exits, though, and sooner or later the Underworlders would be flanked and cut off by those that got out. Instead, Giulia and the Count conceived a desperate plan. Their ragged forces, bravoes from a score of different factions, would charge the unsuspecting Outriders, firing as they went, and pin them into as small a section of the cavern as possible. They were armed with a mismatched selection of flintlocks, crossbows and a few of the Waylun Armouries’ special creations, and until they had forced the Outriders back they would be fully exposed to enemy fire. It was a monstrous risk, but if they hung back and sheltered then the whole of the Underworld would be opened up like a shell.
“We are at the end of our time,” the Count told his troops, in words that would reach even Arves eventually. “We have lived, unnatural, between the depths and the sun. Now the jealous surface seeks to strip our heart’s blood from us. We may fall, and we shall fall, but we shall drive them before us like dust. If we fail, live or die, then true darkness shall take the Underworld. If we win, though we die, then we have the freedom at last that was always promised us!”
They stormed out from their tunnels and caves like demons, each one with a war cry or scream on their lips. The front rank discharged their guns and bows into the packed mass of Outriders, and surface men and women doubled up over puncturing bolts or fell back with shafts through limbs, flintlock balls breaking bones and lashing across faces. The fighting Underworlders tore across them and continued to run without pausing to reload.
The Outrider officers fled back to safer ground, and their sense of self-preservation saved countless Underworld lives, for many of their men followed their lead. There were others with enough sense to see the folly of their enemies’ move; a score or so dropped to one knee to steady their muskets, whilst a further score and more stood behind them levelling their own. I cannot say what thoughts must have passed through the minds of those at the fore of the charge. It cannot have been despair for not one of them broke or slowed. They were doomed and it was out of their hands and there is a kind of relief in that.
The volley of shot from the Outriders ripped into them and killed or crippled virtually the entire front of the charge, sending the attackers rolling limply back under the feet of their fellows. Electric Gangsters, Fishermen, Proud Walkers, Meat Packers, People of the Scarlet Sash and members of a dozen other factions, they all died together in a comradeship forged only through adversity. The charge barely faltered, the next wave vaulting and skipping over the dead. Most of the Outriders were forming up at the far wall, unwilling to be driven out of the myoculture caves altogether, but that firing line held fast, each Outrider changing to his second musket, taking aim into the storm and letting fly. The smoke from the first barrage was still in the air but they were shooting straight into the mob and accuracy was moot. The Count died in that second blast, he of the fine words, and two dozen others in the same moment. If twice the number of Outriders had stayed then the charge would have been shattered apart. Instead, the momentum of the attackers’ rush carried them down the very barrels of the muskets to tear into their enemies. They struck with knives and Waylun swords, with the butts of crossbows and pistols and with their bare hands. Some of the Outriders had got their blades out, and gave a bloody accounting of themselves, the others were simply butchered. Then the surviving Underworlders were finding rocks and mounds of fungus to hide behind, reloading their bows and guns or taking the weapons of their dead foes; firing upon the main force which had taken similar cover and was shooting back.
There was a shifting stalemate for the next few minutes. There were more Outriders, but a steady trickle of armed Underworlders came to reinforce the lines. Amongst these were Sergei and Pelgraine, who joined Giulia as she tried to find a way to force the conflict home.
*
The news and the call for recruits was coursing through the arteries of Underworld with the speed of running feet. It even came to Greygori’s door in the person of one of the Organ Donor Boys. This was how Arves became aware that his world was on the point of collapse.
