There was a muffled curse from inside the helm, and the guard moved closer to the door. "Merys?"
Another guard appeared. "Sir?"
"Fetch some clothing. Our new guest is feeling chilly."
"Aye, sir." Merys vanished. Harrow heard the banging of wooden doors and then footsteps. After a minute or two, the guard, or one of his identically-dressed fellows, reappeared.
The man was holding a garment, a shapeless mass of grey weave. "Put this on, stranger."
Harrow took it gratefully, and slipped it on over his head. It dropped down around his knees, something like a monk's habit. There was even a hood.
The cloth was itchy, but it beat standing about in a freezing chamber bare-chested. "Thank you."
He received no reply. The guard turned and walked away without a word, leaving Harrow with the first soldier and Verney, still in the corner.
The woman was wringing her hands. They were thin, and very white. It was by looking at them that Harrow first determined that his companion was female. He still hadn't seen her face, and she seemed disinclined to show it to him.
He moved a little closer to her, slowly, so as not to frighten her any further. The woman was obviously in great distress.
"Hello, Verney," he said quietly.
There was no reply, and no cessation of the hand-wringing. Harrow tried again, taking another step closer to the woman. "Please, come out of the corner. I mean you no harm."
"Don't speak to me," she hissed, suddenly. "You're death to me, stranger."
"I don't understand."
"Do you not? If you're that stupid, what good are you to Makeblise?" Her head tipped up, giving him another flash of pale skin, and a huge, dark eye. She was wearing a habit-like garment rather like his own, although she had added several swathes of torn white linen around her head and shoulders. One was wrapped partly around her face, like the scarves he had seen the peasants wear outside in the city, to protect their lungs from the frigid air.
"Verney, I'm here against my will. I've agreed to help Makeblise with these machines, but I've no intention of causing you trouble."
"He doesn't need your help, offworlder!" she snarled. "I don't need your help - why don't you leave here, and let me work in peace?"
He spread his hands. "If I could, don't you think I'd be gone by now?" He took another couple of steps towards her. She backed up, as though his closeness terrified her, but she was already too far into the corner, and there was nowhere for her to go.
"Listen to me," he breathed. At this range, the guard wouldn't be able to hear him. "I'm no threat to whatever life you have here, and I don't intend to remain long. Now you can stay in this corner and wring your snecking hands all nightwinter for all I care, you'll just prolong my visit if you do. Neither of us wants that, do we?"
Her mouth worked for a moment, under the scarf and then she shook her head.
"That's good," Harrow told her. Then, even more quietly he said: "Help me, Verney, and I'll help you. I promise."
"He'll kill me," she whispered. "He'll keep you, and kill me. He's wanted me dead for-"
"Hoy, you two!" The guard was striding over. "You'll talk so that I can hear you, or you'll not talk at all!"
Harrow spun on his heel. "Go back to the doorway."
"Are you giving me orders, boy?" The armoured man flipped his sword up, so that the point danced under Harrow's chin. "You're not be the first that Makeblise has brought down here, and you won't be the first I've dragged out by the heels, either!"
"Really? Is that so?" Harrow blinked at him and then brought his left arm up and around, startlingly fast. It was a blocking move he'd learned many years ago, and it would turn the silver blade of an Iconoclast shocktrooper. The Endura guard, well-trained but overconfident, stood no chance.
Harrow swiped the sword away, ducked forward and slammed the heel of his other hand into the base of the guard's helm. The man's head went back, hard, but before he even started to fall, Harrow had spun him around, sweeping the legs from under him, grabbing his arm and his neck. In a second, the man was immobile, face-down on the map-table with his sword spinning on the flagstones.
"Cry out," said Harrow, "and I'll shear your spine."
There was a whimper from behind him, but he ignored it. Instead, he placed a little pressure on the back of the guard's shoulder. Not enough to dislocate the arm, but almost.
"There are two ways I can move," he smiled. "One tears your brainstem from the back of your skull, so that the last sound you hear is your own heart stopping. The other will just slide your arm from its socket, and that would be worse, wouldn't it? Imagine what Lord Makeblise will do to you when he finds out how easily you've been bested?"
There was a groan from the guard, but no words. "I'm sure you understand me. Now understand this: when I let you up, you'll go back to the door and stand guard there. You'll say nothing, and you'll do nothing except the task you were given by Lord Makeblise. If you disturb me in my duties again, you'll find out what we offworlders can do."
He dragged the man up, and shoved him away. "Guard the door. If you have need of your sword, I'll give it to you."
The guard started to back up, around the edge of the map table and towards the door. "Devil," he spat.
Harrow nodded. "Truer words were never spoken."
It had been a risk, calling the guard's bluff like that, but it had turned out for the best. Harrow had gambled on his value to Lord Makeblise, and on the guard knowing it. The man he had attacked could quite easily have called for help, or drawn a dagger as soon as Harrow had let him up. He had, however, simply returned to the doorway nursing a bruised shoulder and some severely wounded pride.
Harrow wasn't foolish enough to put his back to the man, however.
The altercation also served to bring Verney a little further out of her shell. The woman was still terrified, he could see that, but that seemed to be more of a baseline fear, something she experienced every day. Harrow wondered just what kind of a life this woman led.
He couldn't allow such things to concern him overly, though. The sanctum was a conundrum that would take time to solve, and he wasn't sure exactly how much time he had. Makeblise could return at any time, and demand results. The guard might decide to take exception at Harrow's assault and, most worryingly of all, Durham Red might find herself captured. If that occurred, life would take a very different turn, he was sure.
In any case, there could be no delay. He had to find out what was going on here, so far underground, and he had to do it quickly.
That, inevitably, brought him back to Verney.
After his fight with the guard, the woman had edged back into the chamber by degrees, while Harrow was making a detailed survey of the sanctum's equipment. He had started on the far left of the chamber, in the other corner, and had begun to go from bench to bench, peering at the machines that either hummed and chattered, or stood silent and broken.
His first real point of interest was the battery array. He had quickly discarded the idea that it could be used to recharge Omega Fury's cores, realising after a cursory examination that the entire rack, a wooden construction that stood taller than he did, was only giving out a few tens of volts. The current it provided was microscopic too, as he discovered when investigating the upper level of wiring. As he prodded one of the terminals, the insulating material covering it had simply disintegrated under his touch, and discharged a row of batteries through his fingers.
It tingled, and one of the flatscreens dimmed. That, and a horrified yelp from Verney, was its sole effect.
Harrow snatched his hand away, and shook it to ease the tingling while he watched Verney dart over to the dimmed screen. She hunched in front of it for a few seconds, her pale fingertips resting on the sides of its wooden frame, muttered something under her breath and turned away. Harrow saw her walk quickly around the map-table and disappear out of the door.
The guard turned slightly to watch her go. "Well done, stranger. You've bro
ken one of the infernal things already."
"It isn't broken," Harrow muttered. He was still studying the battery array, and making some swift mental calculations. "It's ust a minor power drain."
"Tell that to Makeblise when he comes back. I'll enjoy hauling you back to the cutting room."
Harrow glanced up at him. "I might be a spy," he said levelly, "sent down here by Lord Makeblise to check up on how his guards go about their duties when he's not here. Think on that."
He turned his attention back to the batteries. There were a hundred of them in the rack, corroded cylinders as thick as his wrist, some still bearing scraps of yellow and black paint from long-faded warning messages. Even the best of them, though, could only have been providing the most pitiful amount of power.
Connecting the rack to Fury would be like trying to fill a reservoir with a ladle. The ship needed enough raw energy not only to initiate a fusion reaction in the primary core, but also to power the magnetic fields that would hold the reaction in check. This array of cells, with their dripping seals and hand-cranked generator, could do little more than light a few screens and boot up a portable data-engine. No wonder Fury's scans hadn't detected the sanctum from orbit.
Verney hurried back in, holding what looked like a plank of wood under one arm. She went straight over to the screen that had suffered the power loss and placed the plank carefully down in front of it. As Harrow came over to see what she was doing, he noticed that the wood was set with dozens of home-made keys, a matrix of bent metal contacts and polished nails, with cloth-wrapped cables fanning out from it.
He marvelled. Crude though the construction was, it was a device of considerable ingenuity, and must have taken an age to build. "Did you make this?"
She didn't answer, just carried on setting up the keyboard. The cables terminated in a complex plug that seemed to be a fusion of ancient plastic and something that looked like pitch. Verney used a piece of her wrappings to brush dust from its contacts and then brought it down to a socket below the screen, and pushed it home.
The screen blinked, and a fizzing bar of static crawled down it. Verney made an exasperated noise, and began pushing keys in sequence.
Text began to appear at the top of the screen, faintly. Harrow leaned closer, drawing a look from the woman.
"Ah," he said.
"What do you mean, 'Ah'?"
Her voice was sharp, and quick. Harrow blinked, remembering that he was intruding into a world she might have been alone in for some time. "I'm sorry, Verney but part of this makes sense to me, that's all."
"It does?" she asked warily.
"In a way. Some of the command strings aren't much different from what we use." He raised himself on his toes to peer behind the screen, and saw a mess of glowing components and crude wiring. "What does it do?"
"You tell me, stranger."
He sighed. "Verney, I'm not here to replace you, far from it, but if you're willing, we can help each other here."
"I don't need your help, I told you."
"Really? Because this device has gone into a power-saving mode, and all you're doing is typing system interrogate commands. You'll be doing that for a long time, I'm afraid."
There was a long silence, broken only by the faint chattering of relays from behind the screen. Finally, Verney seemed to slump forwards. "Show me," she whispered.
Harrow took the board from her and, squinting to see the letters hand-written onto the metal key-contacts, typed in an activation chain.
The screen blinked into life. "There."
Verney put a hand to her face. "It took me six years to learn those codes, stranger. Scraps of parchment, hidden away in vaults, pieces of text so old all I could do was try to copy the light parts where the ink had once been... Now you're here, and it's all for nothing."
"That's not true. I don't even know what this system does."
"But you will, won't you? You'll learn all this, and Makeblise will finally be rid of me. He'll have someone else to hunt for Daedalus."
Harrow frowned and then leaned in to the keyboard again. The screen was showing a complex series of graphs and gauges but there was a frame on the lower section for new commands.
He began to type, slowly. +++WE MUST TALK AWAY FROM GUARD+++
She read the message and shook her head. "No, that's not right. You're using a different syntax."
For a moment Harrow was confused, until he saw her delete the line and begin to type some words of her own. +++WHY+++
"I think I see," he replied. +++MAKE-BLEES WILL KILL ME TOO+++WE CAN BE ALLIES+++
"Still wrong, stranger." +++MAKEBLISE+++I CANT TRUST YOU+++
+++WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE+++
+++LIFE+++
"Hmm." Harrow stood back, watching Verney erase the text again. "I think you'll have to decide what that means, Verney. It looks like a contradictory syntax to me, but you seem to be a lot more used to it than I am."
From beneath her hood, she looked up at him with that dark eye. "It's the only one I know."
"Maybe we could change it."
She looked away. "Maybe," she whispered.
"Will you let me try?"
"I don't know." She moved back from the bench, straightening up. "Stranger, there are medicines I need to take. Usually I ask a physician to mix them for me, but perhaps it would save time if you helped me?"
Harrow spread his hands. "I'll do anything I can."
"Very well. Follow me." She turned away, and headed for the door. "Guard, I'm going to my quarters. The stranger is coming with me, to help me mix potions."
Predictably, the man chuckled behind his mask. "Potions, is it?"
"Aye," Verney motioned Harrow through ahead of her, "and while you're guarding Makeblise's precious devices, why don't you think long and hard about how long it's been since anyone mixed potions for you, hmm?"
Verney's quarters were more like a cell, but with the door closed at least they afforded some privacy.
There was little in the way of furniture. Harrow had been expecting a place of study, somewhere that Verney might pore over her ancient documents, but there was no sign of parchment anywhere. There was only a narrow bed, a small closet and a tiny nightstand, all built out of rough, untreated wood. There was a doorway off to the left, but that was curtained off.
There was a lantern, and couple of lit candles on top of the closet. Verney took one down and opened the door, using the candlelight to peer inside. "They can't hear us, stranger. I've tested that. We have our privacy, if nothing else."
"That's good." Harrow stood away from the door, just in case. "Is the guard going to stay there the whole time?"
"He is. It's not us he's guarding, just the machines." She had taken some small pottery jars from the closet, and placed them next to the lantern. It looked as though she'd not been lying about the potions after all. "Makeblise knows there will be no more. Once these have failed, he'll be reduced to hunting heretics the old-fashioned way."
"How long have you been down here?"
She paused, one jar tipped partially towards another. "I don't know," she said finally. "Ten years, maybe more."
"Has it always been just you?"
"No." There was dry powder in the jars. Verney mixed a measure from one with a smaller part from another and then reached into the closet and took out a jug of water. "I'm the last."
"You were part of Daedalus, weren't you."
The jug came down onto the top of the closet, hard. It had slipped from Verney's fingers. Harrow stepped forwards and steadied it, taking it gently from her and setting it aside. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean--"
"You see much, stranger." Her voice was a thin whisper, dry, like old leaves in the wind. "Too much for your own good, I fear."
"It made sense, that's all."
"Sense?" She straightened slightly and picked up the jug again. Her grip was sure as she topped up her mixed powders with water. "Oh, it all makes sense. It's all very simple. I was part of the movement. In train
ing, of course. I was very young. There were four of us. We'd come in from the wilds with, well, something. I never found out what it was we'd found. The Endura took us just inside Farmers' Gate." She turned away from him as she picked up the mixture, so that she could remove the wrapping from her face without him seeing, and then drank the jar's contents in a single swallow. He saw her shiver as the stuff went down. "I've needed this ever since. Every day, for the pain."
"You were tortured."
"Only for a few days, until I recanted my allegiance to Daedalus. Then he took me down from the frame and gave me to the guards." She wrapped her face again, and began replacing the jars in the closet. "After a couple of weeks, he took me away from them, and I was so grateful that I was happy to tell him everything I knew about my co-conspirators. I heard later that forty Daedalans died on the gibbets, just from what he got out of me."
"Verney-"
"I suppose it served them right. It was a stupid thing to do, recruiting a girl of fifteen."
Harrow rubbed his eyes. "What then?"
"He saw I had an aptitude for the devices, so he put me with the others. There were four of us, back then but every time a machine died, so did one of us." She turned back to him. "And that's the whole of it, stranger. If I'd had any guts at all I'd have chosen death long ago but I saw how the others died. Makeblise can be persuasive."
She smiled, behind the linen. "And here you are, still pretty but we all know what makes you special, offworlder."
"My lady, you have no idea what makes me special." He glanced back towards the door, to make sure it was still closed and then drew a little closer to Verney. "But I'll tell you this. The only reason I'm here is to help my friends, and I need your devices to do that. Once that's done, I'll be away from here. I'm no threat to you."
"You're a threat to us all, stranger. Surely you know that?"
"No, not me. I'll be gone so fast even God won't notice I've left. Before that I'll fix your machines so that I can use them to find what I need. If you want to stay after I'm gone, you'll benefit from that but if you want to leave here with me, then I'll arrange that too."
Black Dawn Page 14
