“If you like. What do these carvings say about how to get home?”
“Home?” Atwood said. “What about Josephine?”
Arthur blinked. For a moment, he was confused. He hadn’t thought about Josephine in—how long? Not since Sun’s death, at least. Since then he’d had no time to think of anything but the march, hunger and fear, the flight from the Martians.
“She’s gone, isn’t she, Atwood?”
“Gone? Pull yourself together, Shaw—now is no time for a nervous collapse.”
“She’s gone, Atwood. She’s gone. It was madness to ever think otherwise. I let you trick me here—I did terrible things to help you—and she was always gone, wasn’t she? I let you—I played a trick on myself, Atwood—as if I’d … like the sort of poor fool who lets some crooked medium play nasty tricks on him. I’m a fool. A fool.”
“We have travelled across the void, and survived the surface of Mars. Now is no time for despair. But I need your help.”
“If you mention her name again, Atwood, I shan’t be responsible for what I might do.”
“Hmm.” Atwood edged a hand towards his revolver. Then he shrugged.
“To business, then.”
“That would be best, Atwood. What did you want?”
Atwood stood. His legs nearly went out from under him.
Arthur jumped up.
“Sorry, Shaw. Bit stiff. Thank you.”
As Atwood stumbled past, Arthur noticed his rash—an awful purple mottling on his neck. He’d torn his nails bloody scraping at the carvings. The man was falling apart. Well, weren’t they all?
“The trial that remains is one of the will, Shaw, not the body. There are ghosts here—did you know that? Echoes, one might say. Sometimes we speak of a writer putting his soul into his words, don’t we? This was a great centre of learning and they were great magicians. More to learn here than in Athens and all of Egypt and every library in London. I wish I had a hundred years.”
Arthur stepped over Atwood’s papers and crouched to examine the tablets stacked in the corner. Scraped clean, the tablets displayed clear evidence of writing—far clearer than the faint scratches in the tower. Perhaps the eroding winds were less severe in the lee of the mountain. They were covered in swooping vectors, odd geometries, and inscrutable hieroglyphs that were somehow uncomfortably dense, in a way that suggested that they might move if you took your eyes off them; or that they were already slowly moving.
“They didn’t quite see the stars the way we do,” Atwood said. “Their language, their way of thinking, was very different from ours. A matter of translation, that’s all. Mathematics. Should have brought Jupiter after all. Ah, well.”
“The stars.”
“Yes. Before—before the disaster that destroyed them, they were engaged in a study not so very different from ours. I told you, didn’t I? They were attempting to explore the spheres. To move up.”
“Up? You mean to Earth.”
“Yes! Earth. The Blue Sphere. But it’s hard to go up. Much easier to go down. This very room—this very room once contained a creature that they brought up from below—a thing from the Black Sphere, Shaw. Saturn. Can you imagine it?”
“No.”
Arthur picked up a page of Atwood’s sketches. The same hieroglyphs, over and over, with notes in Atwood’s erratic handwriting.
“Listen. I’ve seen these before. In the Liber Ad Astra. On the floor of your library. When I first saw them I thought a madman or a drunk had painted them. Yet here they are on Mars.”
“But that was down,” Atwood said, as if he hadn’t heard. “Into the dark. They never rose up—or else certainly history would have recorded it. They never solved the puzzle, Shaw.”
“Then what good are they to us? We’re stuck here—is that what you’re saying?”
“No.” Atwood snatched his papers back. “Leave that alone, Shaw. Listen. In this place they summoned up creatures from the lower heavens; and they peered into the higher heavens and prayed. They could not unlock the gates above them, but perhaps we can.”
He sat down against the wall and pulled his journal from his pocket. “Our calculations. The stars from our sphere. What they didn’t know. And so we can close the circle. We must think like them, Shaw—we must become them. And then become greater than them.”
“Who were they? What were they?”
“Scholars. Magicians. The greatest of their kind. They left these carvings for us—they knew we would come. Someone would come. Do you think they knew it would be me?”
“What happened to them? This is a ruin—this is a wasteland.”
“An excellent question. I don’t know.”
“But you knew about this all along. Even back in London, you meant to come here.”
“Yes. I didn’t remember it all, of course. Some of it I only remembered in the tower—thank you, Shaw, for finding those telescopes—and some of it I remembered only when I listened to the wind. But I have always known. Ever since…” He closed his eyes.
“I am the greatest magician who has ever lived. That’s plain fact, not a boast—who else could have brought us here? What’s time to a magician? Nothing but another circle, Shaw.”
“What other secrets have you kept from us?”
“What right do you have to all my secrets? How have you earned them? Will you help me or not?”
“I should break your neck.”
“Then what chance would Josephine have?”
“I told you not to say her name, Atwood.”
“Only I could bring us here; only I can bring us back. By my will, Shaw.” Atwood showed an unpleasant smile. Bloody gums, loose teeth.
Arthur looked around Atwood’s cell again. It was defensible; that was why Atwood had chosen it, of course. Atwood was dug in. If the Martians overran them, this room would be the last to fall.
“Ghosts,” Arthur said. “You say ghosts speak to you here. I don’t hear them.”
“Pray that you never do. You wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
From the gallery above them came the sound of Vaz shouting in alarm, a rifle-shot, then the whirring of wings.
Atwood called up the chute. “Report, please, Payne.”
Payne shouted down to confirm it: they’d spotted a Martian, hovering just above their window. No one was hurt. They’d winged the thing but not killed it, and it had fled. Stalemate was preserved.
“Looked like a female,” Payne opined.
Arthur called up. “How can you tell?”
“I don’t know, Shaw. Maybe I’m going native.”
“They’re moving,” Atwood said. “We have no time to waste.”
* * *
All through the night Payne kept a look-out from the gallery, while Atwood beavered away in his cell, and Arthur and Vaz went clambering through the rafters and narrow corridors in search of carvings. Every corridor looked alike; they got lost. There were windows that had the odd telescopic power of the windows of the lowlands tower, but since their walls had collapsed they faced onto the ground, or towards other walls or windows, and they were exceedingly confusing to look through. If there had ever been any rhyme or reason that a human mind could comprehend in the locations of the carvings, it had long since been lost, as successive centuries of erosion and subsidence and collapse had rearranged the chambers. It rather reminded Arthur of Gracewell’s Engine in Deptford, after the fire. He began to suspect that the castle had once been taller, and possibly beautiful; that it had collapsed in on itself to make this squat claustrophobic maze.
Sometimes the carvings could be prized out of the wall, with ice-axe or shovel, and carried back to Atwood’s cell. Sometimes they were wedged too tight to move. Arthur spent half an hour balancing with one foot on a rafter, the other on a wall, a sheet of paper pressed with one hand against the ceiling while he sketched hieroglyphs in charcoal with the other. Later he squeezed into a crack in the wall, feeling entombed, to take notes. Once Vaz cried out for help, and Arthur came running, sliding down fallen
pillars and climbing up broken walls, axe in hand. He found Vaz standing with a heap of spilled Martian bones at his feet, cursing colourfully.
“Rather a surprise,” Vaz conceded. “I apologise. One would think we were far past the point of being frightened by skeletons.”
“Far past all points, Vaz. Far past all. God! Is this what it’s come to, after all Atwood’s talk. This—this tomb? Looting the bloody thing?”
Vaz shrugged, as if to say that it came as no great surprise to him.
Together they dug a broken stele from beneath the bones and brought it back to Atwood, who had by that time covered the floor of his cell in papers and tablets, arranged in a sort of complex spiralling pattern of unclear significance.
* * *
Some time in the course of the night, bad weather blew in. The usual dry Martian weather—whirling dust-clouds that shrieked and scraped across the rooftops and blew in through the windows to sting the eyes and choke the throat. When morning came, the clouds obscured the sun.
Around what was probably mid-morning, Atwood emerged from his cell.
“Payne,” he said. “Shaw. Vaz. Listen. It’s not enough. That’s why they’re here, of course. I should have seen it. The Martians, I mean. They’re here to stop me.”
“Slow down, Atwood.”
“From escaping, Mr Shaw. From returning home, with all that I’ve learned. I was wrong, you see. There is one more trial. And what else should I have expected? This is Mars, after all.”
“You are not well,” Vaz said. “Mr Shaw and I have been talking and we think—”
“Oh, have you? Have you? And what have you determined? No—listen. It’s very simple. A very simple, practical problem, of the sort that you gentlemen are eminently suited to solve—that’s why I brought you here! We have only half the carvings. And half are in the territory that the enemy occupies. What we need, gentlemen, is a plan of attack.”
Chapter Forty
Josephine scouted out the southern half of the complex—the Earthmen’s territory.
Arthur was with them. She first caught a glimpse of him early that morning, through a crack in one of the walls. A bony, and bearded, and sickly looking apparition, but unquestionably Arthur. He had come for her after all. She felt such a rush of relief and excitement, love and hope and fear, that her wings trembled. For a moment she thought she might fall.
How could she possibly explain her wings to him?
When she saw him, he was busy heaving a stone tablet down from the wall. That would be at Atwood’s instructions, no doubt. She didn’t know where Atwood was. She hadn’t set eyes on him since he entered the castle. She supposed he was hidden somewhere safe, while Arthur and the strangers did all the work, faced all the danger. That would be just like Atwood. Just like Arthur, too. What were Atwood’s plans, and what did Arthur know of them? Did he have any notion how much danger he might be in?
She tried to call out to him, but her throat and her tongue weren’t suited to the task. Arthur came out as a croak and a shriek. She attempted to call to him telepathically, but his mind was locked tightly against intrusion—they were all wary of telepathic assault. She called out her love and her joy to him and he took it as an attack. It was intensely frustrating.
She scouted, and made reports to Orpheus. Names, numbers, movements. One or possibly two rifles. They didn’t seem to be very good shots. Arthur and the two ragged strangers lay in wait overlooking the courtyard; Atwood was hidden.
In the evening she grew over-confident, flew too close, and one of the strangers shot her in her wing. A sudden stinging—more shock than pain. She fell to the ground, scrambled in the dust, ran across the courtyard and leapt for the safety of the northern complex, through a window and into the chamber where Orpheus, Exalted, Poet and Far-Traveller waited.
The room was empty. It was high-ceilinged and many-windowed. A pillar in the middle of the room had once held a carved tablet, but Orpheus and Exalted had tossed it from the window. The carvings unnerved them. Everything about the place unnerved them. They were far more afraid of the ghosts of the Eye than of the Earthmen or their rifles. They said that they were planning. She suspected that their courage had run out at last; they were afraid to leave the room.
~ They hurt me, she said. There was no word for shot.
Orpheus examined her wound. He poked its neat round edges with his finger.
~ Harmless, he signed. Is there pain?
~ No worse than the Great Flight. That was a popular idiom in the lunar city, which she’d picked up somewhere along the way. It meant worse things happen at sea.
~ Look, Orpheus said. A perfect little circle. In and out. What a strange weapon. But I think perhaps you were lucky.
~ I need to talk to him.
~ You should be more careful. Not your life to throw away, like a gift you don’t want.
She bridled at that. ~ Who are you to tell me where I should go! I was sent here to talk to them. I was sent here to save them.
~ It’s too late to save them. It was too late when they came here. Do you think they came here for you? To this place?
Wind howled across the rooftops. Dust swirled in the window. Orpheus went to the window and looked out.
~ I hear a storm coming, he said.
Far-Traveller sat awkwardly against the wall and stared at the bullet wound in her leg.
~ This is the place, she said. Is it? Isn’t it? Hestia would know. This is where they crossed. It is. It must be. I wish Hestia were here with us. I feel them, I feel them whispering, don’t you? Their ghosts. When they crossed they left part of themselves behind. Their shadows—I feel them.
~ No, Orpheus said. I feel them too. But it’s not the ones who crossed. It’s the ones who made this place.
Poet rushed to the window in a sudden frenzy, as if he meant to hurl himself from it.
~ The men from the Blue Sphere are waking them, Orpheus said.
~ They don’t know, Josephine said. They don’t know what they’re doing.
Orpheus made his hands into fists. That meant, enough. He turned and began to talk with the others.
She couldn’t follow what he was saying. He was talking the curt, crude language of tactics and war, and she’d never learned it.
* * *
Night fell. A dust-storm blew in and quickly surrounded the ruin in darkness. It howled and scraped and shook the walls. Little whirlwinds spun pillars of dust in the courtyard. The clouds made a roof overhead, hiding the mountain from sight. It wasn’t safe to fly. They were trapped.
They talked war. They planned to charge—to assault the southern complex. They could not be dissuaded from their plan. Nor did they seem able to put it into effect. Poet stood by the window and Far-Traveller moaned on the floor and Orpheus paced around and around the room in endless circles, talking to himself, arguing with shadows.
She left them to it.
* * *
She went exploring. She drifted through narrow corridors and up and down deep circular shafts until they opened onto the vault below the great dome. Through the crack she could see storm-clouds, an indigo storm-light.
She leapt up and spread her wings. A slight ache, no more. A clean wound, just as Orpheus had said. Lucky. She was owed some luck. She rose up and settled on the rafters.
There were carvings set into the ceiling, all around the underside of the dome. She’d seen them before, when they entered the castle, but she hadn’t had time to look closely at them. Now the memory of them nagged at her.
She counted a dozen carvings. Others had fallen from their settings and were no doubt buried in the dust below. They must once have covered all of the ceiling, like the frescoes of a cathedral—a map of the heavens, perhaps.
She ran her fingers along the carved symbols. Somehow it was easier to make them out by touch than by sight. To the eye, they appeared to move, to shift in an untrustworthy way. A terrible heaviness to them. They were in no earthly language, and no language known to the refugees of
the white moon.
She’d seen them before, painted on the floor of Atwood’s library.
Orpheus was right. This was what Atwood had come for—this knowledge. He’d lied to her, or told her half-truths at best. He’d known what waited on Mars, before he’d ever come.
Something on the surface of dead Mars had reached out to him across the void, before he’d ever left London, and had told him what lay here beneath the dust. Something—the ghosts that whispered here—had tempted him with knowledge, had taught him enough to make this voyage. What had Atwood offered them in return? What could these ghosts, trapped and starving on a dead world, want? What else could he have promised them but a way back to Earth?
An image of Atwood’s smile came into her mind, and for the first time she truly hated him. He’d lied to her. He’d lied to her, and used her, and discarded her, and now he’d done the same to Arthur.
Beneath her the shadows of the vault seemed to shift and thicken.
She fled out through an archway and across the courtyard, wings tightly folded as the winds battered at her. If anyone shot at her, she didn’t hear it over the storm.
Chapter Forty-one
Atwood’s genius apparently did not extend to military matters, and Payne had always been an indifferent soldier at best. They didn’t know where the enemy were located, their numbers, their goals, or their capabilities. After hours of planning they had come up with little more than variations on the theme of: charge. They had a bottle of whisky left: Payne proposed sharing it four ways, for courage.
“And if we beat them?” Vaz said. “What then?”
“If, Vaz?” Atwood scowled. “If? There’s no if—we prevail or we perish here.”
Arthur picked up his axe and a candle and walked away.
“Shaw—where do you think you’re going?”
“The call of nature, Atwood.”
* * *
He seemed to have lost the habit of urination. Instead he just paced through the corridors, wishing that there were still cigarettes. One could call it deserting, he supposed. So be it. Hadn’t he given Atwood enough already?
The Revolutions Page 40
