House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  The interior door closed on him. Through the glass partition I watched his gold skin darken to ash as he adjusted his coloration. I had never imagined him capable of such an effortless change, but there was now nothing about Hesperus that would have surprised me. The ash became a dark, hyphenated blur as he left the chamber at the speed of a bullet. Then the outer door closed and I was alone in the white ark, with only my fears for company.

  That was when it dawned on me that I was the only living thing on my ship.

  PART SEVEN

  Relictus had been confined to our deepest dungeon for six years, but not in the conditions to which most of our prisoners were accustomed. He had been allotted two rooms, one to sleep in, another in which to eat and continue his studies. He was given a fire to warm himself, candles, paper, quills and ink, a small library of his own choosing. He was allowed wine and the kind of food normally served to the highest-ranking soldiers. Occasionally he was even allowed a visit from a courtesan. The only thing not permitted him was the ability to conjure. When he did not need to eat or drink, he wore a heavy mask that muffled his voice beyond the range required for spell-casting. When it was necessary to remove the mask so that he could be fed, his hands were bound together. Guards spooned food into his mouth and washed it down with wine, treating him with the servile respect they had been ordered to show. At all times another guard observed him from a few paces away, alert to the slightest trick. That guard carried a knife, ready to slit Relictus’s throat.

  I visited him in the dungeon, for it was considered too hazardous to move him without good purpose. For my visit he was both masked and bound, facing me in a black chair that was itself bolted to the floor. A guard stood behind him, pressing a knife against his throat. I could see only his eyes, moving behind round holes in the leather and metal covering his face. They were the eyes of a young man, almost a boy.

  ‘I have a difficulty, Relictus. I believe I have shown you kindness. It is true that you were never exactly a prisoner, but when the nature of your talents became known to us, I was advised that the safest thing would be to cut out your tongue, sever your hands and burn out your eyes. I did none of these things, because I am a woman of kindness. I had no choice but to confine you, but I strove to do all that I could to ease the burden of your incarceration. I could not allow you to work magic, but I have allowed you luxuries forbidden to any other prisoner. I do not think you can argue that you have been treated unfairly, given the alternatives.’

  Relictus nodded. I did not know whether that meant yes, he could well argue against my point, or whether he accepted the truth of what I had said.

  ‘As I mentioned, a difficulty has arisen. It will not have escaped your knowledge that Calidris - your former master - is now a prisoner of Count Mordax. To my regret, but not my surprise, he has turned against us. He has used magic to create an army of Ghost Soldiers, an army that grows in number by the day, while ours is steadily depleted and weakened.’

  He nodded again, then turned his mask towards the paper and ink on his desk. This was the signal that he wished to write. One hand was unbound. The knife was pressed even tighter against the skin of his throat where it showed under the mask.

  He wrote: Tell me of these soldiers.

  ‘They are suits of armour, but empty. They travel on horses that are either dead or near death, but which move with astonishing speed and stealth.’

  Have you captured one?

  ‘Only the armour, broken and in pieces. It seems that whatever spirit or phantasm is animating these shells escapes when the armour is pierced or pulled apart. Witnesses have spoken of red smoke issuing from the gaps.’

  Bring me one that is still intact.

  ‘I do not know if that is possible.’

  Divert all resources until it is accomplished. Nothing matters more.

  ‘Will you help us, Relictus?’

  A grating noise came from the mask. I think it was laughter.

  That night, or perhaps the night after, I was taken from my bed by infiltrators dressed in green. It was a measure of our loosening control that Count Mordax’s agents were able to get into the Palace of Clouds unchallenged, and to find their way to my quarters.

  The infiltrators took me from the Palace to a bright white room where I was molested and questioned. They pushed needles into me and peered into my eyes with shining contraptions. They called me ‘Abigail’ and kept telling me I had been lost, wandering in a kind of green labyrinth that they called Palatial, but that I had been rescued just in time.

  Fortunately I escaped from the infiltrators. I wandered bright hallways until - by some artifice of magic or deception - I found myself back in my quarters in the Palace of Clouds.

  My relief was indescribable. I secured my windows and requested that a double detachment of guards be on duty from that point forward. Yet in the morning Daubenton was reluctant to speak of the matter, and I began to doubt whether it had actually happened. In any case, I had no shortage of other affairs to occupy my mind. The Ghost Soldiers were increasing in number, pushing into the Kingdom in silent battalions, their swift, pale horses stinking of decay. They had need of a living captain to guide them, but in every other respect they fought like demons. For every man of ours that fell, Calidris made two for Count Mordax. I cursed the day I had touched the blood-bound needle against my finger, thereby bringing this desolation upon us.

  But I heeded Relictus’s request. Against the wishes of Daubenton and Cirlus, I ordered that men and resources be redirected towards that single goal of capturing a Ghost Soldier with its armour intact. It was, I suppose, a kind of necessary madness. We lost villages and towns as our armies were redeployed from protection duties. Knowing that these orders had originated from me, my name became a curse to those who lost homes, possessions and loved ones. But I remained resolute.

  And then came the day when we caught a Ghost Soldier.

  It had fallen from its horse into a cushion of hay - the armour remaining intact. My men cornered it. It fought for a while, but with diminishing intent, becoming docile the further away its captain rode, until at last it submitted. My men confined it in a sack and brought it on a wagon to the Palace of Clouds. Later it was bound to a wooden rack and taken to Relictus.

  He examined it with great care, over many days. Meanwhile the Ghost Soldiers continued their incursions, steadily eroding the Kingdom’s frontiers. The green men took me from my bedchamber on another occasion, but again I escaped their wicked enchantments and returned to my rooms. More guards were posted. I mentioned nothing to Daubenton, for - with my strange utterances and flashes of memory - I had already given him reason enough to doubt my faculties. Besides, I had begun to suspect that the green infiltrators were men of my own household, their white room a secret chamber somewhere in the Palace of Clouds. How else to explain the ease with which they took me, and the ease with which I returned to my rooms? It was far from clear that Daubenton was innocent in the matter.

  Twelve days after the Ghost Soldier was brought to his dungeon, Relictus called for me. With guards at my side I descended the spiralling stone steps to his rooms.

  The Ghost Soldier was still bound to the rack, but its armoured head moved to follow me as I entered. Relictus was still masked, but his hands were unbound. He wore a white smock, dirty with grease. His hair hung in lank coils over the eyeholes of the mask. He muttered something from behind the mask, thrusting his hands forward to one of the guards.

  ‘Bind him,’ I said. ‘He wishes to speak directly.’

  ‘There is a risk, milady,’ Cirlus warned.

  ‘And I have given an order. Bind him and remove the mask.’

  Relictus’s face was still that of a young man, but it was wild with ambition and power-lust. A guard stood behind him with a knife, the blade pressed against his adam’s apple.

  ‘Progress?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe so, milady.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The magic is unquestionably from Calidr
is’s hand - I would know it anywhere. Inside the armour is a being called a false soul. We often spoke of the spells necessary to conjure such entities and set them abroad in the world. It is subtle, treacherous work - beyond the reach of most adepts. Even for Calidris, the conjuring of a false soul was a painful, protracted exercise. He showed me how to do it once, as a demonstration of his own powers - he placed a false soul in an hourglass, and we watched as it moved sand around. Then he vowed that he would never do such a thing again, and made me swear that I would never even attempt it. A false soul is a kind of living magic that, once set in motion, has an existence independent of its creator. As such, it is more dangerous than a spell that is cast to effect a single outcome, and which then ceases to have currency.’

  ‘But now Calidris is making many false souls. Is that possible?’

  ‘If the Ghost Soldiers are real, then you have your answer. I can only speculate that Calidris has exercised his talents to find a way to make ten false souls, or a hundred, as easily as he made one. He sometimes spoke of the methods by which a single spell might be multiplied, by an arrangement of levers and speaking tubes.’ He looked at the racked figure, which was regarding us both with the pointed metal beak of its visor. The eye slits were glass, I had been told. Examination of the armour of dead Ghost Soldiers had revealed an uncommon artistry in the fashion in which they were jointed and sealed, to keep that red smoke inside. ‘May I release it from the rack?’ Relictus asked. ‘I believe you will find it very interesting. You will come to no harm; it is quite docile.’

  ‘Docile?’ I repeated, for that was not what I had been expecting, given the ferocity with which the Ghost Soldiers were decimating our regiments.

  ‘I guarantee it.’

  I nodded to the guards. Relictus was masked again. Still with the knife to his neck, his hands were freed so that he could untie the armoured figure. As the guards moved to bind him again, Relictus tapped the mask and mumbled something.

  ‘Leave him as he is,’ I said. ‘He wishes to use his hands, but not to speak. The Ghost Soldiers do not respond to spoken orders.’

  Relictus beckoned the figure to step off the rack. Its metal boots clattered on the floor as it took several hesitant paces. Relictus raised his arm. The figure echoed the movement. He gestured a more complicated command, and the figure walked stiffly to the table and picked up his quill. Relictus made it perform a few more simple tasks then commanded it to return to the rack, whereupon it was resecured.

  The guards fastened Relictus’s hands and removed the mask.

  ‘Docile,’ I acknowledged.

  ‘It will do anything you ask of it. Now that it has grown used to me as its master, I could even send it into battle against the other Ghost Soldiers. It would fight them willingly.’

  ‘It would make no difference to us, other than to prove a point. Why is it so easily commanded, Relictus?’

  ‘Such pliability is in the nature of false souls, milady. Calidris could do nothing about that. They are essentially innocent creatures who will do as they are told, provided they are told with sufficient authority. Think of them as very obliging children. They may be excellent warriors, but there is no hatred or evil in them. The evil is in those who would create them, or send them to burn villages.’

  ‘Then you have learned nothing that is useful to me,’ I said, preparing to turn away in disgust. ‘Countless lives were lost to bring you this specimen, Relictus. Villages have burned for the sake of your idle curiosity. I expected you to find a flaw, a literal chink in the armour.’

  ‘I have,’ he said, almost by way of an afterthought. ‘I can kill thousands of them now, if you command it.’

  I asked him how such a thing was possible.

  ‘They must all be copies of the same soul, or copies of a small number of individual souls. That is the only way Calidris can make them in such numbers. I spoke of the method by which a spell might be multiplied.’

  ‘Yes ...’

  ‘Think of an apparatus for duplicating his gestures - the precise movements of his arms, the precise movements of his fingers. A mannequin may be conjured to follow his gestures, or it may be done with wire and pulleys, connected to a kind of armour that Calidris fastens around himself. The mannequin may be enchanted to speak as he speaks, or his own voice may be conveyed to another mouth by a series of tubes. Either way, the result is similar. One spell may be said to have the effect of two. Or three, if the apparatus is more elaborate. Or ten. Practically speaking, there is no limit, especially if magic itself is harnessed.’

  ‘So Calidris gave rise to thousands of false souls with a single spell. I still don’t see—’

  ‘The souls are all the same. They are animated with the same infernal fire. It means that they ...’ Relictus grimaced, lost for words as he strove to communicate the mysteries of his art to a novice such as me. ‘Milady, when you summoned Calidris you did so with the blood-bound needle.’

  ‘My greatest mistake.’

  ‘Nonetheless, it serves to illustrate my point. At that moment your pain was his pain - your blood his. A spell had united you. Something analogous applies to the false souls. Each is united with its sibling because they were forged in the same instant, with the same utterance. That is their strength, because it gives Mordax an army of unlimited size. It is also their weakness, because they are all vulnerable to a single counter-spell.’

  ‘A spell known to you?’

  ‘A spell I am confident I can derive, given a little more time. With every day I learn more of Calidris’s work. In a short while I will know enough to formulate the counter-spell.’

  I looked at the armoured creature, remembering what Relictus had said about it being as innocent as a child. The empty visor was looking back at me, a glimmer of red smoke showing though the glassy slits of its eyes. I sensed a dim curiosity, much like that of a simple animal or slave, but nothing in the way of malice. I should not have cared to have been alone with the Ghost Soldier, but I believed Relictus when he said that it was devoid of guile or hatefulness.

  ‘And then - what will happen?’

  ‘It will die, along with every false soul created by the same spell. That might be a regiment of Ghost Soldiers, or it might be the entire army. Either way, the loss could be decisive.’

  ‘Then you must do it,’ I said, ‘and with the utmost urgency. The future security of the human species depends on you.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ‘She’s turning,’ Betony said, when the fact of it could no longer be disputed.

  Twenty minutes had passed since the first hint that Silver Wings of Morning might be altering her course. At first, we had read nothing into it, assuming only that the robots had made a small, temporary course adjustment in response to the three ships zeroing in on her. The advantage in making such an adjustment was not at all obvious, but - since we could not begin to guess at the robots’ tactical thinking -we had assumed that Purslane’s ship would eventually resume its original heading, having gained some microscopic but quantifiable advantage over its pursuers.

  But she did not stop turning. During the course of those twenty minutes Silver Wings had altered her trajectory by a dozen degrees, and there was no sign of her stopping.

  Machine Space, the spray of exiled stars we called the Monoceros Ring, circumscribed an arc around the main disc of the Milky Way. Provided a ship confined its trajectory to a course parallel to the surface of that disc, it was bound to make Machine Space sooner or later - even if it took a hundred thousand years, rather than ten or twenty. But a ship would only have to steer a little off-parallel to guarantee missing the Monoceros Ring entirely. As Silver Wings continued her course change, her projected destination slowly moved away from Machine Space.

  The course correction continued for another hour, until the ship fell back onto a straight vector. The change had cost the robots a little headway, but they would soon regain that advantage when we performed the same turn, as we were obliged to do if we wished t
o continue the chase.

  ‘Why did they wait until now?’ Betony asked. ‘They must have known which direction they wanted to head in when they left Neume. All this has done is cost them time.’

  ‘Our pursuit must have forced them to revise their plan,’ Henbane said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I replied. ‘I think they always knew exactly where they were going. They wanted us to think that they were returning to Machine Space, so that’s the course they set when they departed orbit. They must have been intending to switch onto a different target as soon as they were out of observational range, when they were a year or two out from Neume. But they weren’t counting on such a fast response from us: we launched the pursuit fleet after them so quickly that they realised there’s no hope of completing that turn without us seeing it. So they’ve executed it now, before they reach high relativistic speed. It’s difficult enough to turn a ship at six-tenths of light, but it’s ten times harder at nine-tenths, or faster.’

  ‘But if they’re not heading back to Machine Space ...’ Sorrel said.

  ‘We have a hard fix on her course now,’ said Charlock, his imago glancing aside at a hovering read-out. ‘Of course, she may still have a few changes up her sleeve. But if we take this as read, we can extrapolate out to a thousand lights with an error of only a few thousand AU at the far end.’

  ‘Show us,’ Betony said, his face still set in a rictus of total concentration.

  A map of the galaxy sprang into existence on Dalliance’s displayer. The map zoomed in on our present position in the Scutum-Crux Spiral Arm, the scale enlarging until there was a visible gap between the bright, constellated smudge of our ships and the silver circle of Neume. We were still technically inside its solar system, but would soon punch through the star’s heliopause into true interstellar space, where only cinder-dark comets swam.

  ‘Here’s where we think she’s heading,’ Charlock said as a red line pushed ahead of Silver Wings of Morning. As the vector touched the edge of the box, the scale changed to encompass a greater volume of space. ‘Nothing after ten years,’ Charlock remarked. ‘Increasing to one hundred. No hits so far - she never comes within two years of a catalogued system.’ The scale lurched again, until the box was a thousand lights across, but still the red line sailed on without touching anything. Now it was thickening as the cumulative error became visible. ‘Close approach to a bachelor sun at nine hundred and thirty years,’ Charlock said, doubtfully. ‘Maybe that’s the target.’