He moved around to the front of the cathedral, into the shadow of the black window. The chips of glass were invisible; all he could see were the ghostly arcs and pillars of the supporting masonry. The design in that window had undoubtedly changed since the last time he had seen it.
He moved back across to the right-hand side and proceeded along half the length of the cathedral until he arrived at the base of the Clocktower.
‘Can’t put it off any longer,’ Grelier said to himself.
Back in her quarters on the caravan, Rashmika opened the letter, breaking the already weakened seal. The paper sprung wide. It was good-quality stuff: creamy and thick, better than anything she had handled in the badlands. Printed inside, in neat but naïve handwriting, was a short message.
She recognised the handwriting.
Dear Rashmika,
I am very sorry not to have been in touch for so long. I heard your name on the broadcasts from the Vigrid region, saying you had run away from home. I had a feeling that you would be coming after me, trying to find out what had happened to me since my last letter. When I found out that there was a caravan coming towards the Way, one that you might have been able to reach with help, I felt certain you would be on it. I made an enquiry and found out the names of the passengers and now I am writing this letter to you.
I know you will think it strange that I have not written to you or any of the family for so long. But things are different now, and it would not have been right. Everything that you said was true. They did not tell the truth to start with, and they gave me the dean’s blood as soon as I arrived at the Way. I am sure you could tell this from the letters I sent to begin with. I was angry at first, but now I know that it was all for the best. What’s done is done, and if they had been honest it wouldn’t have happened this way. They had to tell a lie for the greater good. I am happy now, happier than I have ever been. I have found a duty in life, something bigger than myself. I feel the dean’s love and the love of the Creator beyond the dean. I don’t expect you to understand or like any of this, Rashmika. That’s why I stopped writing home. I didn’t want to lie, and yet I also didn’t want to hurt anyone. It was better to say nothing.
It is kind and brave of you to come after me. It means more than you can imagine. But you must go home now, before I bring you any more hurt. Do this for me: go home, back to the badlands, and tell everyone that I am happy and that I love them all. I miss them terribly, but I do not regret what I have done. Please. Do that for me, will you? And take my love as well. Remember me as I was, as your brother, not as what I have become. Then it will all be for the best.
With love,
Your brother, Harbin Els.
Rashmika read it one more time, scrutinising it for hidden meaning, and then put it down. She closed it, but the seal would no longer hold the edges tight.
Grelier liked the view, if little else. Two hundred metres above the surface of Hela, Quaiche’s room was a windowed garret at the very top of the Clocktower. From this vantage point one could see nearly twenty kilometres of the Way in either direction, with the cathedrals strung along it like artfully placed ornaments. There were only a few of them ahead, but to the rear they stretched back far over the horizon. The tops of distant spires sparkled with the unnatural clarity of things in vacuum, tricking the eye into the illusion that they were much nearer than they actually were. Grelier reminded himself that some of those spires were nearly forty kilometres behind. It would take them thirty hours or more to reach the spot now immediately beneath the Lady Morwenna, the better part of a Hela day. There were some cathedrals so far behind that even their spires were not visible.
The garret was hexagonal in plan, with high armoured windows on all six sides. The slats of metal jalousies were ready to tilt into position at a command from Quaiche, blocking light in any direction. For now the room was fully illuminated, with stripes of light and shade falling on every object and person within it. There were many mirrors in the room, arranged on pedestals, sight-lines and angles of reflection carefully chosen. When Grelier entered, he saw his own shattered reflection arriving from a thousand directions.
He placed the cane into a wooden rack by the door.
Aside from Grelier, the room contained two people. Quaiche, as usual, reclined in the baroque enclosure of his medical support couch. He was a shrivelled, spectral thing, seemingly less substantial in the full glare of daylight than in the half-shuttered darkness that prevailed in the garret. He wore oversized black sunglasses that accentuated the morbid pallor and thinness of his face. The couch ruminated to itself with thoughtful hums and clicks and gurgles, occasionally delivering a dose of medicine into its client. Most of the distasteful medical business was tucked away under the scarlet blanket that covered his recumbent form to the ribcage, but now and then something pulsed along one of the feedlines running into his forearms or the base of his skull: something chemical-green or electric-blue, something that could never be mistaken for blood. He did not look a well man. Appearances, in this case, were not deceptive.
But, Grelier reminded himself, this was how Quaiche had looked for decades. He was a very old man, pushing the envelope of available life-prolongation therapies, testing them to their limit. But the limit was always slightly out of reach. Dying seemed to be a threshold that he lacked the energy to cross.
They had both, Grelier reflected, been more or less the same physiological age when they had served under Jasmina aboard the Gnostic Ascension. Now Quaiche was by far the older man, having lived through all of the last hundred and twelve years of planetary time. Grelier, by contrast, had experienced only thirty of those years. The arrangement had been simple enough, with generous benefits where Grelier was concerned.
‘I don’t really like you,’ Quaiche had told him, back aboard the Gnostic Ascension. ‘If that wasn’t already obvious.’
‘I think I got the message,’ Grelier said.
‘But I need you. You’re useful to me. I don’t want to die here. Not just now.’
‘What about Jasmina?’
‘I’m sure you’ll think of something. She relies on you for her clones, after all.’
It had been shortly after Quaiche’s rescue from the bridge on Hela. As soon as she received data on the structure, Jasmina had turned the Gnostic Ascension around and brought it into the 107 Piscium system, swinging into orbit around Hela. There had been no more booby traps on the surface: later investigation showed that Quaiche had triggered the only three sentries on the entire moon, and that they had been placed there and forgotten at least a century before by an earlier and now unremembered discoverer of the bridge.
Except that was almost but not quite true. There was another sentry, but only Quaiche knew about it.
Fixated by what he had seen, and stunned by what had happened to him — the miraculous nature of his rescue combined inseparably and punishingly with the horror of losing Morwenna — Quaiche had gone mad. That was Grelier’s view, at least, and nothing in the last hundred and twelve years had done anything to reverse his opinion. Given what had happened, and given the perception-altering presence of the virus in Quaiche’s blood, he thought Quaiche had got off lightly with only a mild kind of insanity. He still had some kind of grip on reality, still understood — with a manipulative brilliance — all that was going on around him. It was just that he saw the world through a gauze of piety. He had sanctified himself.
Rationally, Quaiche knew that his faith had something to do with the virus in his blood. But he also knew that he had been rescued because of a genuinely miraculous event. Telemetry records from the Dominatrix were clear on this: his distress signal had only been intercepted because, for a fraction of a second, Haldora had ceased to exist. Responding to that signal, the Dominatrix had raced to Hela, desperate to save him before his air ran out.
The ship had only been doing its duty by racing at maximum thrust to reach Hela as quickly as possible. The acceleration limits that would have applied had Quaiche been ab
oard were ignored. But the dull intelligence of the ship’s mind had neglected to take Morwenna into consideration.
When Quaiche found his way back aboard, the scrimshaw suit was silent. Later, in desperation — part of him already knowing that Morwenna was dead — he had cut through the thick metal of the suit. He had reached inside, caressing the pulped red atrocity within, weeping even as she flowed through his fingers.
Even the metal parts of her had been mangled.
Quaiche had lived, therefore, but at a terrible cost. His options, at that point, had seemed simple enough. He could find a way to discard his faith, some flushing therapy that would blast all traces of the virus from his blood. He would then have to find a rational, secular explanation for what had happened to him. And he would have to accept that although he had been saved by what appeared to be a miracle, Morwenna — the only woman he had truly loved — was gone for ever, and that she had died so that he might live.
The other choice — the path that he had eventually chosen — was one of acceptance. He would submit himself to faith, acknowledging that a miracle had indeed occurred. The presence of the virus would, in this case, simply be a catalyst. It had pushed him towards faith, made him experience the feelings of Holy presence. But on Hela, with time running out, he had experienced emotions that felt deeper and stronger than any the virus had ever given him. Was it possible that the virus had merely made him more receptive to what was already there? That, as artificial as it had been, it had enabled him to tune in to a real, albeit faint, signal?
If that was the case, then everything had meaning. The bridge meant something. He had witnessed a miracle, had called out for salvation and been granted it. And the death of Morwenna must have had some inexplicable but ultimately benign function in the greater plan of which Quaiche was himself only a tiny, ticking, barely conscious part.
‘I have to stay here,’ he had told Grelier. ‘I have to stay on Hela until I know the answer. Until it is revealed unto me.’
That was what he had said: ‘revealed unto me.’
Grelier had smiled. ‘You can’t stay here.’
‘I’ll find a way.’
‘She won’t let you.’
But Quaiche had made a proposal to Grelier then, one that the surgeon-general had found difficult to dismiss. Queen Jasmina was an unpredictable mistress. Her moods, even after years of service, were largely opaque to him. His relationship with her was characterised by intense fear of disapproval.
‘In the long run, she’ll get you,’ Quaiche had said. ‘She’s an Ultra. You can’t read her, can’t second-guess her. To her, you’re just furniture. You serve a need, but you’ll always be replaceable. But look at me — I’m a baseline human like yourself, an outcast from mainstream society. She said it herself: we have much in common.’
‘Less than you think.’
‘We don’t have to worship each other,’ Quaiche had said. ‘We just have to work together.’
‘What’s in it for me?’ Grelier had asked.
‘Me not telling her your little secret, for one. Oh, I know all about it. It was one of the last things Morwenna found out before Jasmina put her in the suit.’
Grelier had looked at him carefully. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean the body factory,’ Quaiche had said, ‘your little problem with supply and demand. There’s more to it than just meeting Jasmina’s insatiable taste for fresh bodies, isn’t there? You’ve also got a sideline in body usage yourself. You like them small, undeveloped. You take them out of the tanks before they’ve reached adulthood — sometimes even before they’ve reached childhood — and you do things to them. Vile, vile things. Then you put them back in the tanks and say they were never viable.’
‘They have no minds,’ Grelier had said, as if this excused his actions. ‘Anyway, what exactly are you proposing — blackmail?’
‘No, just an incentive. Help me dispose of Jasmina, help me with other things, and I’ll make sure no one ever finds out about the factory.’
Quietly, Grelier had said, ‘And what about my needs?’
‘We’ll think of something, if that’s what it takes to keep you working for me.’
‘Why should I prefer you as my master in place of Jasmina? You’re as insane as each other.’
‘Perhaps,’ Quaiche had said. ‘The difference is, I’m not murderous. Think about it.’
Grelier had, and before very long had decided that his short-term best interests lay beyond the Gnostic Ascension. He would co-operate with Quaiche for the immediate future, and then find something better — something less submissive — at the earliest opportunity.
Yet here he was, over a century later. He had underestimated his own weakness to a ludicrous degree. For in the Ultras, with their ships crammed full of ancient, faulty reefersleep caskets, Quaiche had found the perfect means of keeping Grelier in his service.
But Grelier had known nothing of this future in the earliest days of their liaison.
Their first move had been to engineer Jasmina’s downfall. Their plan had consisted of three steps, each of which had to be performed with great caution. The cost of discovery would be huge, but — Grelier was certain now — in all that time she had never once suspected that the two former rivals were plotting against her.
That didn’t mean that things had gone quite according to plan, however.
First, a camp had been established on Hela. There were habitation modules, sensors and surface rovers. Some Ultras had come down, but as usual their instinctive dislike of planetary environments had made them fidgety, anxious to get back to their ship. Grelier and Quaiche, by contrast, had found it the perfect venue in which to further their uneasy alliance. And they had even made a remarkable discovery, one that only aided their cause. It was during their earliest scouting trips away from the base, under the eye of Jasmina, that they had found the very first scuttler relics. Now, at last, they had some idea of who or what had made the bridge.
The second phase of their plan had been to make Jasmina unwell. As master of the body factory, it had been a trivial matter for Grelier. He had tampered with the clones, slowing their development, triggering more abnormalities and defects. Unable to anchor herself to reality with regular doses of self-inflicted pain, Jasmina had grown insular. Her judgement had become impaired, her grasp on events tenuous.
That was when they had attempted the third phase: rebellion. They had meant to engineer a mutiny, taking over the Gnostic Ascension for their own ends. There were Ultras — former friends of Morwenna — who had showed some sympathy to Quaiche. During their initial explorations of Hela, Quaiche and Grelier had located a fourth fully functional sentry of the same type that had downed the Scavenger’s Daughter. The idea had been to exploit Jasmina’s flawed judgement to drag the Gnostic Ascension within range of the remaining sentry weapon. Ordinarily, she would have resisted bringing her ship within light-hours of a place like Hela, but the spectacle of the bridge, and the discovery of the scuttler relics, had overridden her better instincts.
With the expected damage from the sentry — ultimately superficial, but enough to cause panic and confusion amongst her crew — the ship would have been ripe for takeover.
But it hadn’t worked. The sentry had attacked with greater force than Quaiche had anticipated, inflicting fatal, spreading damage on the Gnostic Ascension. He had wanted to cripple the ship and occupy it for his own purposes, but instead the vessel had blown up, waves of explosions stuttering away from the impact points on her hull until the wavefront of destruction had reached the Conjoiner drives. Two bright new suns had flared in Hela’s sky. When the light faded, there had been nothing left of Jasmina, or of the great lighthugger that had brought Quaiche and Grelier to this place.
Quaiche and Grelier had been stranded.
But they were not doomed. They’d had all they needed to survive on Hela for years to come, courtesy of the surface camp already established. They had begun to explore, riding out in the
surface rovers. They had collected scuttler parts, trying to fit the weird alien fossils together into some kind of coherent whole, always failing. To Quaiche it had become an obsessive enterprise. Above him, the puzzle of Haldora. Below, the maddening taxonomic jigsaw of the scuttlers. He had thrown himself into both mysteries, knowing that somehow they were linked, knowing that in finding the answer he would understand why he had been saved and Morwenna sacrificed. He had believed that the puzzles were tests from God. He had also believed that only he was truly capable of solving them.
A year had passed, then another. They circumnavigated Hela, using the rovers to carve out a rough trail. With each circumnavigation, the trail became better defined. They had made excursions to the north and south, veering away from the equator to where the heaviest concentrations of scuttler relics were to be found. Here they had mined and tunnelled, gathering more pieces of the jigsaw. Always, however, they had returned to the equator to mull over what they had found.
And one day, in the second or third year, Quaiche had realised something critical: that he must witness another vanishing.
‘If it happens again, I have to see it,’ he had told Grelier.
‘But if it does happen again — for no particular reason — then you’ll know it isn’t a miracle.’
‘No,’ Quaiche had said, emphatically. ‘If it happens twice, I’ll know that God wanted to show it to me again for a reason, that he wanted to make sure there could be no doubt in my mind that such a thing had already happened.’
Grelier had decided to play along. ‘But you have the telemetry from the Dominatrix. It confirms that Haldora vanished. Isn’t that enough for you?’
Quaiche had dismissed this point with a wave of his hand. ‘Numbers in electronic registers. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. This means something to me.’
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