‘A bargaining ploy?’
I shifted, uncomfortable with my ignorance. ‘Something like that.’
‘Glass knows a lot about these Nestbuilders. A strange amount, considering how sparse our own knowledge base was at the time of my demise. Almost everything . . . apart from that location.’
‘Glass only tells me what she needs to, and then only under duress. Will you help us?’
Nevil deliberated. I wondered how much of that was real, and how much was for no other reason than to torment me. This had never occurred to me: that I might reach him, but not make a persuasive enough case.
‘How did you take to Scorp?’
I sifted through the possible answers I might offer, finally settling on the truth. ‘Not well, to begin with.’
‘An aversion to pigs?’
‘An aversion to his having an aversion to me. He didn’t believe any part of the story he was presented with. Certainly didn’t believe I could ever be half the man you’d been. He made no secret of the fact he considered me unworthy of his friendship.’
‘Yet by some means, you’ve turned him around.’
‘I put my life on the line. He was ready to put himself forward for a slow, painful death. I wouldn’t let him face that alone, or without an escape plan. We made it out and obtained the technology that Scythe needed to reach the Nestbuilder vessel.’
‘You think that made him your friend?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I wouldn’t be so callow as to imagine his opinion could be altered by a single deed. But it was the start of something. I know I’ll never be your equal, in his eyes. But I think he’s accepted that I’m not an impostor.’
‘I should have liked to have spoken to Scorp again. To have thanked him for being there, at the end. To have wished him well, and listened to his voice again. He was a better man than any of us.’
‘Let me be the one to pass on that message.’
‘Do you think you’d be up to it?’
‘I wronged you very badly, in ways that can’t ever be undone. But I can start to become the better human being I always believed I was on Michaelmas. Let me carry your friendship back to Pinky.’
‘There’s a small problem with that.’ He began to rise, pushing himself up by his knees. ‘I made you a promise, Warren. I said that if you ever came back here, I’d kill you. Now, if a man breaks his word . . .’
I rose as well, the cold seeping into my spine. I had allowed myself to believe I was getting somewhere with him, that there might be a way to convince him. ‘Nevil. Put aside what’s happened between us. Humanity matters more than a couple of feuding brothers. Give me the information. Once we have the Incantor, I’ll return here. You can do as you will with me. But allow me this stay of execution. And if that isn’t acceptable to you, find a way to pass the information directly to Glass.’
‘I still don’t know that you really came with Scorp. Why should I trust your word? The Inhibitors got into others. They could have got into you, or Glass, or anyone. You might want that information so you can finally destroy any chance of the Incantor falling into human hands.’
‘It’s not that!’ I pleaded.
‘Then prove it! The last thing I said. Out of those that survived that day, only Scorp was there. Only he knew. He’d remember. And if he meant me to trust you, he’d have told you that word.’
A quiet anger rose in me. I was wearying of these brotherly games. ‘You may have become the better man, Nevil, but you were always a monster to me. Nothing’s changed.’
‘So you don’t know.’
I shook my head, sneering. ‘These sands? That sea? That grey, dreary sky? I always knew where we were, you stupid fool. This is Scotland. Where we were born, where we grew up. The word is Scotland.’
Two figures appeared from the mist behind us. They were indistinct; grey silhouettes. But I thought that one was an older woman and one a younger, and the two of them gestured for Nevil Clavain to turn from the iron sea.
‘Scotland,’ I repeated, more softly.
Nevil nodded. Without seeming to change – some trick of perception being worked on the deep architecture of my brain – the boy became a man, and the man became very old. His eyes were infinitely cold, infinitely patient and infinitely sorrowful. He had seen and endured more than any soul should.
‘You’ll remember what needs to be remembered,’ he said, and turned to rejoin Galiana and Felka.
I came up for air and gasped the first sweet, life-giving breath into my lungs. I was alive; I had been spared. And although I could not momentarily bring it to mind, I knew that there was a piece of knowledge inside me which had not been there before, and which I would soon be able to express.
I wiped green scum from my eyes and trod water, breathing heavily, pleased not to be dead but not sure that I had the strength to keep myself from drowning. I looked around through stinging, watery eyes, squinting into the trembling light. The lagoon’s green walls had passed away. I could see nothing of the node, and nothing of the weather system. With no other reference points, it was impossible to say which of us had moved. I could not allow myself to die out here, but my limbs felt heavy and my muscles nearly empty of strength. How absurd it would be to have succeeded in my mission with Nevil, then to perish before ever communicating the information to my allies. But that was exactly the kind of sick joke the universe had no qualms about playing on its inhabitants.
No, I vowed. Not here, not now. I was going to live. While I had the energy to hold a conscious thought, I had the energy to swim. Or at least keep myself afloat.
Something glinted at the edge of my vision. It came and went, bobbing on the waves, snatched in and out of view. The boat. If I could see it at all it had to be near, but in that moment nothing had ever seemed so distant. A wave slapped me and I took in a mouthful of water. I coughed it out, spluttering, but not quickly enough to stop some of going down my windpipe. A velvety darkness lapped at the edge of my thoughts. The boat was gone and I wondered if I had imagined it. Then it was back again. I fixed its position against a pattern of clouds, hoping neither the boat nor the clouds would move against each other too swiftly, and struck out in that direction. My swimming was so feeble that any current would have negated it completely, but the boat did not seem to be moving, so I hoped that any movement of the waters would act us on equally.
It had been a smudge of tin-coloured metal, identifiable as the boat only because no other artificial thing could be anywhere near me. Now at last I could discern more of its details. I was hoping to see Pinky, perhaps not yet aware of me, but waiting.
The boat was on its back. No wonder it had been so hard to see, as it moved up and down on the swell. I stared at it in shock, unable to accept what I was seeing. Not after all this. Not this.
‘Scorp . . .’ I mouthed, before spitting out water.
In that moment I hated everything about this world. I hated the sea, the Jugglers, the minds within them. The capricious and unforgiving tyrant that was my brother, and the uncaring will that had allowed this to happen. But since the boat was still my only point of sanctuary, and I retained enough of my own will not to want to drown, I kept swimming. Perhaps, as a mirage within a mirage, the boat would invert itself as I got nearer, and I would see my friend the pig beckoning me to close the distance.
I swam, and swam. The boat became more constant in its presence, but nothing about it changed. Like some demonstration of Zeno’s paradox, my energy halved with each halving of the distance yet to swim. I was going to have to shatter some infinities to make it to that doubtful objective.
How long it took me, I have no idea. In all likelihood the entire interval between my coming up for air and touching the boat was no more than minutes in extent. But there was room in my struggle and despair for endless days.
I stayed in the water for a long while, holding onto the boat but without the strength to do more than that. Intuition told me that I had no hope of turning the hull around again, but when I
regained some tiny measure of strength in my limbs I still tried it. The hull was much too heavy for a lone swimmer to tip over. Then I gathered a deep breath and poked my head under the water and up into the inverted hull, where there was still a pocket of air. I had very little hope of finding Pinky there, and he was absent. So was all of our equipment. No matter how carefully we thought it had been stowed, it had not survived the capsizing.
The water was starting to feel cold. I could not survive immersion for very much longer. With one last exertion I ducked out again, heaved myself up onto the boat’s belly, hooking an ankle around the keel and stretching as far as I could until my fingers found one of the mounts for the oars. I dragged myself onto that baking metal, sprawled face down against it, content that if I had to die then at least I would not give myself to the ocean. Then I lay in a fog of half consciousness, broken and exhausted, and with too many impressions storming the edges of my thoughts for any one of them to gain precedence over the others. Somewhere in them was the realisation that when my fingers scratched against the boat’s side they had been tipped with black.
But there was not enough left of me to think deeply about that.
There was sun and light, cold and sea spray. Straddling the boat, face down on the bobbing swell, living by the merest thread, I grew weaker rather than stronger. By the time they came I had nothing to offer by way of resistance. They emerged from the waters, pressing webbed hands to the boat’s flanks, studying me with those inscrutable proud-whiskered faces that were half human, half seal. I think I screamed, or at least mouthed some failing protestation. But one of them pressed a finger to my lips as if silencing a child against the night’s terrors, and by some strange persuasion I was moved to submission.
Then they swept me into the darkening waters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I had feverish dreams of stars.
Victorine was standing on the kitchen chair, precariously balanced, paintbox in one hand, brush in the other. She was dabbing stars onto the ceiling: speckly smears of blue or gold or red, like little painted flowers. They glowed where she left them, as if in her meagre assortment of improvised materials were marvellous luminous pigments that she had never discovered until now. Or perhaps never deemed worthy of use until she came to make this starscape.
The stars floated in a dizzying trickery of depth. Rather than being fixed to the ceiling’s plane, each had its own distance, its own implied luminosity. It was as if the ceiling had soared away to an infinite elevation, with the stars suspended by threads. Looking up at her patient work, my head swam with vertigo. My feet loosened from the floor, as if I were about to fall into that aching vastness.
‘I made you some stars,’ Victorine said, looking down from her perch. ‘They’ll help you get to where you need to go.’
‘I made you a machine,’ I answered, as if that were the only possible response.
Later I would learn that three full days passed between my entering the lagoon and my return to proper, lasting consciousness. I had no reason to doubt the accuracy of that, but if I had been told it had been three hours, or three eternities, I do not think I would have quibbled. I had been stripped down to the components of sentience by the Pattern Jugglers, dismantled and remade like a broken toy, and somewhere in that process all continuities of time had been severed.
Beyond the immediate fact of not being dead, or in the process of drowning, or being slowly mummified on the back of the boat, I arrived at some qualified observations. I was in a room or chamber of some kind. There were walls around me and a ceiling above and the air was cool but not so cold as to be uncomfortable. Something of the room’s pale textures and curving contours (revealed by a high-placed window, elaborately and pleasingly fretted, and set with chips of coloured glass) brought to mind the conch structures we had surveyed, and begun to prepare for our own use, at First Camp. But I did not think I was in any part of First Camp. There had been nothing like this room, and none of its furnishings bore the stamp of the modular components and materials I had authorised Scythe to manufacture. There was a bed, on which I rested, and near the bed two long, sinuous, chair-like forms made up of vertebrae, pelvic girdles, ribs and flukes. There was a thing like a low table, crouched on a quartet of mottled crab’s legs, and a sort of dresser or cabinet pressed into the wall’s concavity, and seemingly made of a whale’s baleen screens. Adhering to the wall at random intervals were lacy accretions of bone or coral, forming winding, branching chains.
The room rocked gently. The light coming through the windows, stained by the coloured facets, wandered up and down the walls and floors on a lulling rhythm.
I had come through something daunting and my reserves of endurance had been tested to their limits. I also knew that I had rested long enough and was ready to move back into the world. I got out of the bed, limbs aching only slightly from the suddenness of my exertions. Keeping a sheet wrapped around myself – there was still a dampness to the air – I shuffled to the wall, until I was just under the lowest part of the window. I stretched to level my eyes with the lowest facet, and through its green tinting I saw waves, clouds, and the edge of another conch-like form, but which did not seem firmly anchored to the one I was inside. Although they had been used and modified in different ways, these were clearly the same kinds of alien structure that had been used in the land-borne settlement.
In the wall behind me, a baleen-fretted door swung open.
Pinky came in. He was dressed as I remembered, and seemed no worse for wear. He appraised me guardedly, then made a gesture back in the direction of the bed.
‘They want you rested. It’s good that you’re up and about, but they have a good idea how long it takes to recover from a Juggler encounter.’
‘They?’ My voice sounded off, so I touched a hand to my throat, as if there were something there that needed to be cleared. ‘You’re alive, Pinky. I can’t tell you how glad I am. When I saw that upturned boat . . .’
‘And knowing my capabilities as a swimmer.’ He nodded, still giving off a wariness. ‘Please humour them, Glass. We don’t want to start coming over as bad guests, not this early in negotiations. They’ve been kinder than we had any right to expect, especially after those little misunderstandings out at sea, but we don’t want to push our luck.’
‘I’m not . . .’ I stopped, already questioning myself.
‘You’re not what?’
‘I was going to say that I’m not Glass. But that would be silly. I am Glass.’ Moving back to the bed, my gaze settled on my fingertips again. ‘I am her. I am Glass.’
‘I’m glad you’re in no doubt.’
‘I also think something odd may have happened.’ Suddenly unsteady on my feet – it was either the room’s movements or the undermining of my own certainties – I lowered back onto the bed. It was only a partial respite, since the bed moved with the room. I felt seasick, unmoored from myself. ‘What happened to Warren?’
‘Stink never came back.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘The storm got worse. All hell broke loose in that lagoon. I cowered down and tried to ride it out, but eventually I got separated from the boat. I thrashed around a bit, tried to keep from drowning. I don’t remember too much of what happened after that, except that when I came around two of the mariners were keeping me afloat. I don’t know how I got to them or what had happened to the node. They spoke, a little. Just enough to stop me thrashing. They weren’t the ones we’d run into earlier. Probably for the best, given what we did to them.’ Pinky lowered himself into the strangely shaped chair. It was no more suited to his frame than mine, and his legs and feet dangled awkwardly to either side of it. ‘They were only ever trying to keep us out of trouble. Turns out they’ve established a rapport with the Jugglers, a sort of diplomatic channel. They know when it’s a good time to swim, and when it’s not such a good time. Guess we ought to have taken a little more notice when we had the chance.’
‘You think we lost Warren?’
‘Only two people came out of that storm alive, Glass. You and I. They were looking for you when you reached the boat. By then, they’d already found his body.’
‘He didn’t die, Pinky. He’s part of me.’
His snout puckered. He cocked his head, eyeing me as if he might be the victim of a particularly tasteless prank. ‘I’m just a pig, and I don’t really know what can and can’t happen when you dance with the Jugglers. But you have to admit that’s going to take a little persuasion.’
‘I met Nevil. I was with him, and I told him the word only you could have known. Could . . . Glass . . . have known any part of that?’
‘There’s no telling what Glass did or didn’t know.’ He pinched at his brow. ‘Wait. Who’s talking now? Who do you think you are?’
‘I think I’m both Glass and Warren,’ I answered carefully, feeling I owed him that much consideration. ‘I have clear memories of swimming in that lagoon, Glass next to me. Then I lost sight of her, and you. But I also remember being Glass before any of this began. I remember floating in space, waiting for him to find me. I remember being trapped by John the Revelator, and thinking I’d die alone in that room, with only a mad captain and his reanimated corpses for company. Hearing that song he sang over and over again, about opening the seventh seal . . .’ I shuddered, as if those threads of memory were clinging around me, dragging me back into that horror. ‘That was me. That was also me. There’s no easy answer to what I’ve become, Scorp, nothing simple and binary.’
He nodded slowly. I think he understood, or at least believed me. There was no earthly reason for me to lie, and no reasonable case in which my dual identity could be put down to post-traumatic confusion.
‘There you go, calling me Scorp again. Dragging me back into a past I’d sooner forget about.’
‘I didn’t even think about it. I’ve known you a long time – long enough for names not to matter.’
Inhibitor Phase Page 46
