That night they were given bunks in a large room where a group called Team B slept and ate, ordered their doings. When they were alone there, setting up the nothing that Tralane had brought with her, she asked him, ‘Do you think there are Karoo still in here?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Males only. They have lairs set up where humans do not yet go.’
‘Are they – what do they want?’
‘They will hunt from there,’ he said. ‘They are territorial so they will also hunt each other.’
‘They hunt us?’
‘Your friend said you already lost five here.’
She paused and brushed back her hair. ‘Can you find them?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
He saw her think about it, the dead bodies behind her gaze, the calculation of missed days, names, who.
‘Do you want me to?’
‘Just guard for now,’ she said. ‘Guard everyone. Can you?’
‘Everyone – maybe.’ He went to scout the place and discover what everyone meant. He found three ‘teams’ living in different areas of the interior and most of that he didn’t understand except as a series of halls and rooms in a building bigger perhaps than the entire city of Glimshard, which was until now by far the biggest civilisation he had seen. Ancient air there spoke of foreign bodies. The vines of the cables and lightlines were the teams’ doing. Sometimes rooms were lit and powered by magic but he had no means of moving this himself and avoided those. A couple of times he came across trails of the other Karoo, one fresh enough to be within the hour. He sat with the scent there a while until he was sure of what he was up against; he wished he had his previous form but instead of his claws he held to the weapons he was given by the humans; spear, swords, daggers, a bow and arrows, a sling though no shot for it. He constantly circled back on himself, patrolling for Tralane, though he rarely revealed his presence to her or any of the others, merely watched their activities as they read, studied, talked and regarded the empty darkness around them with fearful eyes. Thus he did not report the locations of the human remains when he located them. He thought they might try to recover them in a fit of sentiment, and they had been set out in places for ambush.
He came back to her a day later to find her outraged at his long absence. After she had finished shouting at him, growing in confidence as he didn’t respond, he said he could not protect the outlying groups unless they all convened together. She said this was impossible and he agreed to patrol and to do his best, but she must accept anyone straying beyond a small range would do so at their own risks. People came up to ask him how they could detect whether or not they were being hunted at any given moment and he stared blankly at them, until at last he realised they thought it was an on and off state of affairs. It pleased him quietly to see them relax more when he appeared now.
A few days later he found a dead male Karoo gutted and bled out, the body hung and stretched out like a sheet across a route he took often. A sign for him. He left it untouched and when he returned to Tralane that night he moved his bed next to hers. She barely noticed until the last moment, she was so absorbed in thought. He saw the surprise in her face. She saw the flat determination in his. He followed her closely for the next forty-eight hours and when he was done watching her meticulous ways, softly spoken conversations and careful, precise methodology with her magical instruments and her intellect he felt himself encompass her, as though he was a room and she was its tenant. He understood this might mean what humans referred to as love. Of all the things he had seen here this was the only promising information.
So began days of burial that turned into weeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MINNABAR
Minna was taken to the city of Spire on small aircraft with multiple stops in which her guards and the crew were changed. The gave her dry, plain bread she found tasteless and water at two-hourly intervals. At each stop a crew woman took her to wherever the latrines were and gave her two minutes with a turned back in which to do whatever she had to do with her hands chained in front of her. The aircraft were universally cold and she shivered so hard sometimes that her teeth chattered. She slept a few minutes here and there. On the final leg they at last found a seat for her and the bread was supplemented with a piece of cheese. On their arrival at Spire she was taken to a doctor, pronounced fit and well, then stripped, showered and given plain overalls to wear with matching boots and belt. Her hair was cut off to a half inch above her scalp so that she matched every other person she saw. It was the only time she cried, to see the long, coiling brown tresses fall on the rough tiles and be kicked away into a corner. Everything else only made her angry and the anger formed itself up into a cold ball at her frozen core.
They marched her to a small room where a woman and man in white overalls talked to her at length about her life, her mother, her family and Glimshard. They noted all her answers on a recording device that floated in the air like a small disc, a magical thing she’d never seen before. She asked questions about it and they answered with the flat, functional politeness she had learned to expect from them. When she lied they showed no sign of noticing it and she spun a good deal of lies around the few facts she supplied, thinking that they must have some knowledge about her or they wouldn’t have bothered daring a raid of that kind. She stuck to the truth when it came to engineering, but she did not mention the goggles. They asked about weapons and caught her out when she tried to lie about the gun.
‘Don’t lie about your abilities,’ the woman said, as though she really could not care less. ‘I have a talent for detecting the particular strengths and connections of an individual. We already know you are a Sircene of particular skill in devices and artefacts. Your mother’s fortitude is in complex systems. You have a sister, who is off-the-charts talented at analysis and logical spellcasting. We would rather have captured either of them but you will prove very useful to our military applications division. If you have no further stories to spin about your reprehensible upbringing and immoral social acts then we are recommending you for immediate deployment under armed guard. Any escape attempt will be met with lethal opposition. You will now be taken to see the Empress before you are assigned to your post.’
‘Kiss my ass,’ Minna said, staring back with her own stubborn expression.
They ignored her. She was marched out of that room and taken in a car that was pulled by people in a chain before it to a low building that matched in every way the regimented streets and typical structures that made up everything she saw of the city. It was built around principles, she saw that immediately, and loathed them. Her head felt light and cool, but when she stepped out into the air for the first time it was warm and humid, like a soft slap of reproof. They took her indoors and she felt the sudden strange certainty of an Empress’ presence nearby. It was as cool as the air was hot and to her it had a clammy touch in it and a weight she could not adequately describe. She felt herself pressed down as if she was being impersonally ironed out. She resisted it as best she could but with the horrible recognition that this would not last. The indomitable power of the presence would simply wait for her rebellion to exhaust itself and then replace everywhere in her it had lived with grey uniformity, even temper and bland interests. Spire was named by Glimshard as the Temperate Tropic but she renamed it in her head, the Flat Fetor. It was, she realised, exactly like being mired in her anti-nature. Then she wondered how much of that nature was down to Torada, but she couldn’t know and in this minute of confusion she was ushered into the presence itself.
Minna bowed automatically and heard someone snicker. She straightened up and actually looked for the first time, instead of moving on autopilot, and found herself face to face with a well-built middle-aged woman with greying hair cut in the same harsh crop as her own. It bore a severe, intent expression that seemed to be able to bore right into her every thought with disapproval. Spire. For a minute she could not remember the Empress’ name, not that it mattered, as she was not of a status to
use it.
‘We have no hierarchical gestures here, Miss Huntingore.’ The Empress’ voice was surprisingly pleasant, almost warm. It was rich and cultured, with only fine traces of the accent that otherwise blunted every word at both ends.
Minna looked at her stupidly. She didn’t know what ‘Miss’ meant but in the spirit of dislike for the place she took it as an insult. Since it seemed normal to do so she looked where she liked but was unable to avoid being drawn back to the Empress’ face until it was the only face in the world. Grey eyes, like silver discs, with black hearts. A tight pressure inside her skull suddenly made her want to be sick but she made herself stand, closed her jaw and filled her mouth with her tongue so it couldn’t happen. She tried to do the same thing with her mind. The world went dark. She heard someone say in a dispassionate tone, ‘If you stress her too much she might lose her capacities.’
The pressure ceased and her sight returned. The silver eyes stared into her and the Empress said, ‘You work for me now, Engineer.’
Minna nodded, daring nothing more, not even breathing. In the darkness she had felt herself starting to dissolve. The terror of it was only now beginning to hit her but it met the back of her tongue and stayed down.
They sent her to work with the mages and engineers of their military systems unit – a total contrast to her life before. Here she learned that men and women did not exist as she understood it. Their gender was of no significance and any reference to it was erased. Instead they had identities only as drones, or, if they were friends, then they were called ‘mates’ but nobody was mated to each other. Sexual behaviour was outlawed anywhere other than within the home where they lived in ‘caches’ of those who had been determined relatively suitable. This was like a web, but one chosen for you, not one you made yourself. It was like a home, but without families or family ties, and the responsibilities of leadership such as were required passed each month to a new member, so long as they were over the age of wisdom. There was no argument, no dispute, no preference save small things or what biology could not be made to surrender, such as sexuality. Minna learned that everyone believed they had done away with structures of control and she smiled at her workstation, because around her all she could see was the covert, subtle work of the bitterness that this regime pressed out of people. It leaked everywhere. And everything that was pushed under by the presence had only taken on another form, which she came to understand, like a foreign language. It said the same things however. If she flirted by a single look or expressed her feelings with a moment too long here, a quicker response there, her signals were picked up. Superficially, they were disliked. Underneath though – underneath she knew it was all the same and this gave her the confidence to keep face with the Spire world’s apparent peace.
The Spire talented were divided by their affinities into workgroups. Although they were cared for by the state in a similar way to Glimshard’s family-administered systems, they were discouraged absolutely from personal fulfilment outside the group, and from forming relationships other than mateship. Mateship loyalty was, as a result, the only emotional currency worth a damn, Minna found. Group belonged to the state but mates was for you and in spite of whatever silliness was spoken routinely in public about all drones being treasured by the hive or some other metaphor like that she knew it was mere words. Group mattered only where mateship flourished. If they conflicted this was soon arbitrated out of existence with a reshuffle or some other fudge of the rules – they must have learned not to try to live by the letter of the law already.
Minna noted these things only so far as she needed to in order to function as the best possible group member she could for the days she spent there learning their ways. She had already formed the intention of beating this vile Empress at her own game. Loyalty she could have in spades, it meant nothing to Minna. The Empress’ creating conformity and obedience via the method of hugely lowered impulses caused her visceral horror. She saw how at odds this was with Torada’s regime, and realised well therefore that this was an enemy in truth. Spire could not have been less open to Torada’s ways and could only, in analytical terms, assign her as pernicious, a threat and an unbearable challenge. What a meeting between the Empresses could be like she couldn’t imagine. It seemed an impossibility.
Meantime she was set to work on parts of blueprints and fragments of machinery. She was under close supervision – they watched her every facial twitch – but she decided not to hold back on what she could see with these, filling in the missing information that the mages had attempted and failed to bridge with invention or guesswork. The tasks themselves were fascinating and working on them a pleasure in itself. However, as she went on she began to understand what it was that she saw, even when they interrupted her flow with other less suited tasks developing spells for use with existing failsafe systems.
She woke in the night two days later, her eyes still full of the dream she had been having in which Spire had created a huge airfleet and had gained total command of the skies. The sound of the engines had been so loud, so real. Her bunkmate’s snores slowly gave her a clue as to how that might have come about but as she lay there, unable to go back to sleep, she considered it again and felt sure that these were things she had had her hands on. She could not be sure of course, but the context made sense of what she had examined. Helping them galled her, but she had a faint hope in knowing that so far she had met people who were competent, but none with much vision.
Her hopes on that front were dashed a few days later when she was summoned again to the presence and told she would be sent to the pit site with an elite group of commandos. She was to go on site and recover information for Spire with the team. The only reason to do this was because someone somewhere had domination plans very heavily in mind and whatever she had done lately had been approved of. She was the filler in their gap. That pleased her. It was leverage, though she wasn’t sure how to play it. For now her honesty had bought her position.
Minna knew that her mother and even Isabeau might already be there. This filled her with excitement and hope until the moment of departure when she was fitted with a harness and a device she recognised as an explosive. There was enough to blow open a steel door.
The group leader, a man much older than she was, said to her, ‘If you attempt to communicate with the enemy you will be killed. Every member of the unit has a trigger to this and they will use it. Make no mistake. You’re group because you’re here, but you’re nobody’s mate.’
Minna felt the brief moments of genuine camaraderie from the previous days vanish as if they’d never been. She glanced around faces that had become known to her across workdesks and calculation tables. Most glanced away, unwilling to meet her eye. She tried to detect shame but she wasn’t sure. A couple returned her gaze evenly, with the classic Spire dispassion that said it was nothing personal. She already loathed that look most of all. She returned it with plain contempt. It hurt her to know other engineers could be like this about one of their own. Soldiers, sure, but talentkin? It went against everything she had known in Glimshard. But if it was so, then it was. Mentally she pushed them all off a cliff and out of her consideration. She made a cursory examination of the belt, to be sure that only a deliberate trigger would set it off. Not all explosives were stable or well made. In that at least they had been efficient.
Minna found that the bomb would work. The transmissions spells were ones she had made herself just the day before. She knew they had rigged it so that if she tried to remove it it would explode. She had worked on that too, only at this moment realising what the complex spell had been for with an irony that made her clench her jaw until her teeth hurt. She looked at the others but there was no sign where the triggers might be located. They could be anything from a button to a word. She lifted her head. At least nobody here was trying to sweet talk around the reality. That she could respect and deal with. She was given a water canteen and a food parcel but was manacled for the journey.
They took
a larger craft than she had ever seen before. Because of its size it was located outside the city on its own long, flat runway. A large ground crew attended it. As Minna waited she tried to see what they were doing and how it worked. It was nothing like her mother’s tiny Flit but she thought that the engine worked on a similar principle although it seemed far bigger, turning fans encased in huge cylindrical mounts. Those on their own looked beyond the reach of what she’d seen in the laboratory. They must have found them, she thought, enviously.
The journey was not as long as she thought it should have been. This led her to think that perhaps her trip to Spire had been less than direct. The reason for that she couldn’t understand. The new plane made a terrific roaring sound and was colder than the others. They had put her in heavy overalls, lined and padded, but she was nearly frozen solid by the time the pilot addressed them over the com.
‘Landing site in view. Runway strip appears compromised. Taking a flypast to check it out.’
The group commander undid his harness, got out of his seat and went forwards into the room where the cockpit was located. Minna heard a lot of talking, but the noise meant she couldn’t make out any words. She gathered from the tones that the commander and the pilot were arguing. Then the commander came back and sat down again. He made some order and the soldiers in the group prepared their weapons.
Glorious Angels Page 40
