Cage of souls, p.54
Cage of Souls, page 54
I did not dare wake the others. A single sound would bring the silence down on me in an annihilating wave. I knew it when it entered the square; I recognised the clues left by all the absences of sight and sound. As I crouched in abject terror by the fire, the silence, the Silence, slithered from a side-street like a great eyeless serpent.
I tried to stay as still as possible but it had heard the blood hammering through my arteries. It knew that I was close. The great unseen jaws gaped, a tongue of air tasting air. It towered upwards on its coils, vast and deathly and utterly a product of my brain. When only one man perceives a scene, who is to say what it real?
I knew, with a complete certainty, that it would strike and kill me the moment it found me. I could not fight it. How can one fight a silence? Even Peter would think twice. Without ever taking my eyes from its invisible form I crept backwards, painstakingly slow. Above me, around me, the Silence swayed.
I moved back and further back, and sometimes it heard me and slid a yard closer and sometimes I made five or six paces without alerting it. I knew only one place where it could not follow me. The silence was vast, far greater than any serpent of flesh and blood. It needed the lonely sky to form it. I would go underground.
Yes, I was abandoning my friends to the mercies of Macathars, Vermin and Gaki. I should not have done it. I had no choice. In those painful dragging moments, I believed it.
My foot touched the edge of the hole where the weapon once was, with the slightest scraping of metal. Abruptly the Silence focused its attentions on me and threw all the looping coils of its insubstantial body into motion. I looked down frantically and, as I had somehow known, there were metal rungs descending into that abyss. Even the Weapon was only a machine, that had been built and maintained once. Now that it had taken itself away, all the mundane details of its construction were revealed
The Silence was rushing on towards me with its jaws agape, and I fell into the Weapon’s setting, grasped the rungs and clambered down hand over hand.
45
The Underworld Desolato
The big house I grew up in could have been tipped down that hole and not have touched the sides on the way down. The Weapon’s roots had been vast.
I climbed hand over hand for an unmeasured time. Looking back I can see the changes the Island had wrought in me. The man who could not descend a rope could now march on, rung after rung, without slowing or tiring. The madness drove me. I could still sense the Silence at the hole’s mouth. Around me as I descended, the shaft narrowed and narrowed.
After a while the black metal that lined the shaft gave out, and I was left climbing down rungs of an unidentifiable material hammered into the rock. They were luminous, and lit the shaft interior with a queasy, greenish-yellow light. I was slowing by then, more aware of my surroundings. I was climbing through history.
Across the shaft from me, almost close enough to touch, there was a cave mouth, the entrance to some suite of caverns that Giulia’s maps had never suspected. Whatever enormous drill had bored this shaft had sheared straight into those pre-existing caverns without a thought, destroying most that was in there, sealing off the rest as the Weapon was fit into place. Now I was the first man in a thousand thousand years to look into that opened space. I saw bodies. There were three of them and the conditions of their deaths had mummified them perfectly. Within another month they would be eaten away by the damp, but they were there for me: a man, a woman and a child, still cased in paper-brittle hides they had been wearing when they died. I saw no cause of death. There was a litter of small bones on the cave floor, scraps of desiccated tissue and stone tools. I wonder, now, what nadir of civilisation they represented, which of the many dark ages. How long had it been since that cave had last seen light and air?
Whatever catastrophe had forced them back to the very dawn of man, man had survived it. We had rebuilt, over and over. I could not see us building again.
I pressed on, because to be alone with the dead is never preferable to simply being alone.
Then I ran out of hole. Abruptly the metal ladder which had replaced the strange rungs came to a sheared close, and there was simply a dimly-lit space beneath me through a gap no more than six foot across. I saw a floor, and it did not seem too far. At the time I did not recognise it.
I looked up and could not tell if the pinpoints of light were stars, or fabrications of my brain. I found myself hanging at arm’s length from the bottom-most rung of the ladder, about to drop.
It occurred to me that this was not a good idea, but by then I had let go.
In the fraction of a second after I dropped I was struck by a savage jolt of energy and lost consciousness. My mind came back to me as I struck the floor and I think it was the looseness of my limbs that prevented any permanent harm. I injured my ankle painfully, and it was that pain that dispelled the madness and let me realise where I was.
The hole in the centre of the ceiling was now a great void in the midst of an ever-moving starfield. The jolt that had run through me was a crackling dance of energy passing from one edge of the starscape to the other. Beside me on the floor I saw the unmoving dead-spider form of the Caretaker, lying where it had fallen. The other bodies had been removed.
I was in the Temple. The Temple had been directly below the Weapon.
I got to my feet and winced with the pain of it. The Temple lights were dim, as though in mourning, but they were still on. There was power yet.
The Temple’s computer was still there. It had gained some bullet holes since I had last seen it, and the mirror in which one had read the records of antiquity was cracked beyond repair. I looked up, with that peculiar reverence the sight demanded, and I cried out.
Above the computer was an empty oval niche in the wall, from which a clear eggshell lid had been hinged back.
The Coming Man had been and gone. Too late to save the Underworld, too late to save the city, the imprisoned giant had woken, turned his back and walked away.
I have no explanation for this. It is a small thing amongst all the other unexplained events, but I still wonder.
Now that I had my mind again I thought of the fastest way back to my friends. There were no quick exits into the shadow of the Weapon, though. To leave the Underworld was to enter some little-used or derelict part of Shadrapar Above.
The fear that had been so great beneath the sky was gone now. The Temple was my place, after all. The surface had grown to be as strange and hostile as the desert. Down here there was only the restfulness that always presides after terrible deeds have been rubbed smooth by time. In this very room there had been a massacre. Only the broken metal spider and a few bullet holes testified to it.
The idea that had been nudging at my mind with the lazy curiosity of a predatory fish suddenly seized me. The Vermin, who had made the Underworld their home as much as anyone, how had they survived the lash of the Weapon?
Obviously – so obviously that I was kicking myself for not having thought of it before – they had been underground. Certainly there were Vermin in the desert, the jungles and everywhere, but the quantities we had seen suggested a boiling-up out of holes and dens and cellars. The energies of the Weapon had not reached underground.
The community of Underworld had been destroyed, but surely some others had found these tunnels before the end. There had only been a month of so, but a city can throw up a lot of rogues and malcontents in that time.
I left the Temple and my feet took me towards home automatically. Not Greygori’s cheerless chambers but the rooms of Sergei’s Collective, where I had spent my last month. Arves had not pronounced the death of Sergei. He might still be living out a troglodytic existence, tinkering with his machine and trying to return to that place and time that only he believed in. As I made my way, my own belief in Sergei swelled larger and larger. It was another face of the madness, I suppose. I was desperate to walk into the Collective’s rooms and find him there, larger than life. I broke into a run without intending to.
The way into the Collective’s quarters was lined with broken barricades. Sergei’s people had put up a furious fight in defence of their home. Arves had said that Sergei had been fighting with the Fishermen down in the mycoculture caverns. Had he evaded pursuit and retreated into the deeper caverns, or had he come back here to die with his people?
I stepped over the shattered wood, the twisted metals and plastics of their last stand. The walls were scarred by musket shot and other weapons, so much so that I almost heard the echo of it.
Then I realised that there was a sound, and that it was not my overstretched imagination working on me once again. A faint, low hum: a machine sound.
The little fruit garden the Collective had tended had run wild, still bathed in its shaft of sunlight like a prisoner Below. Beyond that illumination I saw a faint phosphorescence from Sergei’s workshop. Wordlessly I tiptoed onwards. Part of me still expected the man himself; part of me was looking for his body.
I found his creation instead. When I had last seen it, it had been a bizarre cluster of rods and gears and wiring. Now it had grown to fill the room, a veritable forest of interconnecting spines and pistons and hollow bars. It was the source of the sound, and I felt that each individual part had its own tone, blended into a harmony by the whole.
I stepped into the room, ducking beneath the nearest projections. It was like some mad plumber’s nightmare, and a clockwright’s as well. The air was charged with the energy of it. To go further was to step into the heart of the machine.
He had left a plaque there. A roughly-tooled plate of metal proclaimed:
IT WAS FROM HERE THAT CAPTAIN SERGEI ANDREIOVITCH MAZHIENSKY SET FORTH ON THE SEAS OF TIME ONCE MORE, IN SEARCH OF HIS COUNTRY.
A second inscription might have said the same, but it was in an ancient script I could not read.
I stood a long time looking at that, and it seemed to me that, knowing Sergei, it might have been his joke. He was quite capable of that.
Then I looked at his machine, still buzzing with power, and I wondered. After the Underworld fell, after the Outriders departed, he must have come back here. He must have worked, all alone, extending and building upon his machine. Had this tortuous monster resembled the thing he had seen in his head?
Had it worked for him? Was he even now adrift on the seas of time, or simply scattered into atoms like everyone else.
I stepped in. You would have done the same.
You would have been disappointed, too. It would not work for me. Perhaps there had been power only for a single step into time. Certainly the residue that thrummed in every lever and pipe did nothing.
Sergei was gone, then: into the past of his own belief, or just gone. I had the Underworld to myself, or so I assumed.
It was on leaving the Collective’s rooms that I saw her. I knew even then that she could only have been a hallucination. How else could it be that I should see Faith at the very edge of the light, just a lit face in the gloom?
I saw her face turned towards me, out there in the dark beneath the earth. Or I convinced myself that I did. I have seen prey in the jungles freeze suddenly before bolting from a predator. It seemed to me that Faith sprang away into the darkness just like those prey animals. And like the predator, I pursued.
They made her irresistable, and they made her too well. They had coveted her, and they had fought over her, and they had lost her.
It was just possible that they had fired the Weapon because of her.
And she was alive, and everything else was dead, dead, dead.
I did not see her again. I ran with all my speed but she must have been faster. She was a hallucination, after all, I realised. They can go as fast as they like.
I realised I had lost track of where I was just before I was snagged. Something like a bony hook tore into my prison greys and yanked me backwards, and only later did I realise it was supposed to be a hand.
The face that was presented to my own was fishbelly white and round and hairless, with the skin and flesh hanging at odd angles, as though no longer pinned properly to the skull. The mouth was a pinched wound. With nobody to hide from, he had lost his smoked-glass lenses. His eyes were too large to be covered anyway: great round grey-black discs that I had seen before. The smooth white brow was dotted with livid boils which were other sensory organs just beginning to emerge.
“Stefan Advani,” came out of that mouth like rust speaking. “It is not safe, Stefan, to be walking in these places all alone, Stefan Advani. The Vermin, Stefan, are become uncommonly bold. Or you might meet Mazen, Stefan, or something worse.”
He held me out at arm’s length with no discernable effort, despite the six-foot spindliness of his arm. He had forgone the robe, I saw. The rest was abomination. His hunched shoulders were set off at an impossible angle from an exploded ribcage where all the struts had grown in different directions, stretching the skin to its limits. That was not so bad. There were all manner of tubes and pipes below, as convoluted as Sergei’s machine. Some of them were atrophied and others bloated out, and the skin over these had parted long ago. That was also not so bad.
The bad part was where his spine and organs merged into a chalky, ridgy pelvis from which four legs sprouted, to arc as high as his shoulders before stabbing down at the ground. At the base of that tangle of intestines a bundle of strange projections, feelers and lifeless eyes dangled obscenely.
Greygori Sanguival’s regime of self-improvement had progressed apace. He was now more than half-Macathar. That was the dream he had been chasing: a form to survive the Earth. His bright place, that he had tempted Faith with, was no more or less than the desert’s white sand.
“Stefan Advani.” He tasted the words again. It had been a long time since he had spoken to a living soul.
“Hello… Greygori,” I managed weakly.
“It is you, Stefan Advani…” That scratchy, unused voice seemed querulous. “How is it that you come to be here, Stefan, for they told me you had died on the Island?” There was nothing to admit that he had sent me there himself. There was no indication of incipient violence either, or of anything human at all.
“I came back,” I said inanely.
“Did you?” Greygori whispered. “Stefan… Stefan Advani… I have tried to forget your name, Stefan. On some days I think I have succeeded, but it sticks in me as few others do. Why is that, Stefan?” He was still holding me high above the ground, and now to my horror his legs clicked into cumbersome motion, just as much of a staggering lurch as always. There was nothing of the otherworldly grace of the Macathar to him.
“Why?” came that lost, sad voice. “Why won’t you leave me alone, Stefan?”
“Put me down and I’ll go,” I whispered. I reached one hand up to clutch at the barbed claw, but it dug its way into my shoulder, drawing blood.
“Are you come back to accuse me?” There was no anger in those plate-like eyes, which was why, when he swung me into the wall, I was not ready for it. I recognised a damaged rib instantly and then I was tumbling down to the floor. The world went black for a second and then the nightmare was advancing on me. Those many-jointed arms whipped about his head of their own accord. His exposed organs pulsed. Words forced themselves from his mouth like bullets.
“I have no guilt. I have cut it from me. Why must I always see you, Advani? Why must I see Arves? Did I abandon Arves? Did he die in the fight? I have cut the memory from me, and yet I see you always. And her, I see her. What is it, Stefan, that I must do to rid myself of you all?” At last the thin voice broke into something like emotion: no emotion I could name, but it was there.
I tried to scrabble out of the way, but a hook tore into my ankle and my shoe, and I was hoisted upside down to look into those soulless eyes.
“I have done everything,” Greygori said. A rivulet of blackish blood sprang suddenly from one of his larger eyes.
I pushed calm through myself like a wave. “Talk to me. What is wrong?” Something twitched aggressively under his skin and I added, “We were not always enemies.”
“Look at me, Stefan.” I thought that he was lucid then, although there were precious few clues. “I am not perfect.”
I had no words.
“I have done everything right, Stefan Advani. I have cut it all out, severed everything that holds me back. I wielded the knife myself. Why can I not let it go? Why am I still tied to these memories?”
He dropped me abruptly. Pain tore through my side and I collapsed in a heap.
“Is it really you, Stefan?” he asked softly.
I stared at him.
“I have seen you so many times. You, Arves and the girl. Why can I not cut deep enough to be rid of you?” One of the eyes at his groin twitched sluggishly and turned its blind gaze upon me. “Humanity, Stefan, is such an easy thing to be rid of,” he said, as though he was an Academy Master lecturing me. “Many that wear human shape are yet bereft of it. It should be an easy enough thing to sever those ties that make us men, to pave the way for something greater. To become the new, one must cut, Stefan. One must take the scalpel and cut away the cords that bind our minds. A human mind is human forever. Look at me, Stefan. I am trapped in my human mind. Pity me, Stefan.”
I could not find it in my heart.
Without changing tone he added, “It is your fault. That is why I cannot rid me of you. Arves, who betrayed me to you. You, that took her from me. Faith. Faith. How I wish you had never brought her, Stefan. Not guilt, Stefan, but a lust for revenge, that keeps you with me. Revenge, the most paltry of human things.”
He was very still now, looking at me.
“I cannot forget her,” he whispered. “I see her everywhere.”
“I saw her too!” I burst out, and he recoiled.
