A Quantum Mythology (35 page)

‘It doesn’t matter. Do you want me?’ Bress asked.

‘Yes,’ she admitted weakly.

‘I’ll give you what you want. Only lie with me if you want.’

‘I said yes.’

‘You sound as if you wish it otherwise.’

She turned on him, angry again. ‘Do you want to remind me of all the reasons I should hate you?’ she demanded.

‘I will remind you of that every time you look at me. There is no point pretending that I have not done what I have done.’

‘I want you to suffer and die,’ she said, in a small voice that Bress did not think sounded like her. ‘And I want you as my lover.’

Bress nodded. ‘Fachtna’s here, isn’t he?’

This time it was Britha who looked away. ‘Fachtna’s dead. I put a sword through him, his own. He killed a
dryw
, he had to die.’ Britha knew that Bress had probably killed or enslaved or sacrificed many
dryw
, as they would have attempted to negotiate with him when the black
curraghs
raided. She hoped he would not tell her this now.

‘Then we should go to his body. He has something we want. If he has it, then we can try to get your child.’

She nodded.

‘But if you want power, you will have to come with me to Oeth first.’

‘The Place of Bones?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘If you want power, that is where it will be found.’

As they rode away from the camp, the
curraghs
were sinking into the fast-moving water of the
Tros Hynt
. She had stopped questioning the magics of the Otherworld.

About twenty of the Lochlannach joined them on horseback. Bress left the rest of the Lochlannach at the camp.

They headed north and east. The powerful horses covered the ground far swifter than the ponies Britha was used to. She was a skilled horsewoman, but she mostly found herself merely holding on.

Every village and settlement they passed had been destroyed and carrion-eaters fed on the corpses of the livestock. After they rode by the first, Britha glanced over at Bress. He didn’t appear to have noticed the village, though it was clear the Lochlannach had been there before.

The terrain became progressively higher as they made their way through long river valleys. The landscape was dominated by tall, rounded hills, many with rocky escarpments. Woodland and scattered farmland eventually gave way to heather-covered moorland. They spotted burial mounds and a stone circle as they travelled, proof that this land had been inhabited for a long time, and interfered with by the gods. It was at the stone circle she saw the only bodies, but they were long dead. They had been left for the ravens to slowly take to the Underworld, morsel by morsel.

After a night’s rest, wrapped in Bress’s cloak and in his arms, they continued onwards. The light had just started to fade when they entered the long valley. At the west end Britha could make out a roughly dome-shaped hill surrounded by a number of smaller mounds. Even from this distance she could see the hill fort. Some of it was built on platforms suspended out over the sheer drop of the cliff. It was only when they got closer, however, that she saw the bodies hanging from the ramparts, and the reddish brown smears on the rock. She glanced over at Bress. Again he said nothing.

‘You kill everything,’ she said quietly, though she knew Bress would hear her.

Just before they reached the rounded hill at the end of the valley they turned south, where the horses carried them up a steep slope towards a large, gaping, dark hole in the cliffside. Britha began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Like most people she feared caves. Leaving aside the fact that bears, wolf packs and the most desperate and degenerate of people – those who had been cast out from their tribes – often lived in them, they were also gateways to the Underworld.

She tried to mask her fear as she spurred her mount on and followed Bress and the rest of the Lochlannach into the dark cave-mouth.

They were already dismounting when Britha finally rode into the cave. She climbed off her own horse, watching Bress as she did so. He remained silent, and then stalked into the darkness. As Britha watched him go, her eyes adjusted to the darkness, though colour was sucked from her vision. He turned around to look at her and she took an involuntary step back. His eyes glowed. The fear felt like a fast-rising tide inside her. She was standing still but wanted to bolt. The other Lochlannach were following Bress, and she would lose him soon if she did not do the same. She forced her feet to move. She forced herself to remember who and what she was. That dealing with the Underworld was as much her responsibility as dealing with the Otherworld.
No
, she reminded herself,
protecting your people from the Underworld and the Otherworld was your responsibility.

She was no longer in mortal lands. They had waded through water under what looked like a naturally made gate, and her vision was caught in the half-light of permanent dusk. She knew this must be the Underworld. She was travelling into the land of the dead. Even though she could see Bress and the other Lochlannach ahead, she felt very alone.

They climbed down through small waterfalls and rocks into one cavern, and then down again into another that was half-flooded. They moved through it slowly, half-wading, half-swimming, despite the weapons they carried and the armour they wore.

The deeper they went, the further from the light they travelled, the more her fear grew, but she forced herself to keep going. She could feel her heart in her chest, pounding like a blacksmith beating metal into shape.

Finally they found themselves standing over a chasm where she looked down into darkness. She wanted to tell Bress that she couldn’t go on, but remained quiet.

The Lochlannach leaned their spears and shields against the rock alongside other spears and shields already laid there, all of them identical. Britha added her spear to the collection.

One by one, the Lochlannach started climbing down the chasm wall. Frightened though she was, Britha had the presence of mind to watch where they moved and noticed that they all went exactly the same way. Finally only Bress was left with her. He lay down and all but slithered over the edge into the chasm.

Would you be frightened if you were doing this climb back under the sky?
she admonished herself.
But I’m not. I am in the land of the dead.
She pulled off her boots. It took her a long time to force herself over the edge, even though she could recall perfectly from her observations where the hand- and footholds were. By the time she began the descent, Bress and the Lochlannach had long since been swallowed by the blackness below her. She descended alone into the darkness.

Clinging on with fingers and toes, Britha looked down and saw water just below her. She pushed out from the rock face and glanced all around, but all she could see was water. She had climbed down into a massive cavern, the roof of which was covered with sharp, pointed rocks that looked like teeth. The whole place made her think of the mouth of some gigantic beast. The water was utterly still; she could not even hear it lapping against the rock.

Britha lowered herself into the freezing water. For a brief moment she wondered how the Lochlannach had not drowned in their mail. Then all her thoughts were on the coldness of the water. From the first moment, she knew she was not feeling it as she should, for it was nowhere near as debilitating as it should have been.

Where she entered the underground loch, it was deep enough that her feet did not touch the rock of the cavern floor. Treading water, she looked for some clue as to where the others had gone. It took her a while, peering through the murky darkness, but finally she thought she saw something. She started to swim towards what looked like an island, little more than a mound that broke the surface of the water.

Either that or I am lost in the Underworld
, she thought.

It was an obscenity. The broch that rose from the muddy island looked as if it had sprouted from the rock, but it had in fact been grown from bones. She had swum through the rotted, boneless remains of hundreds of people in the water surrounding the island.

Everywhere she looked in the Underworld’s strange half-light she was sure she saw things moving in the shadows, as if there were many Crom Dhubhs, but when she focused there was nothing.

The Lochlannach stood around the broch, gazing up at it. Smaller figures moved between them, playing with odd, strangely regular rootlike growths which ran from the tower into the water. It was with a dawning horror that she recognised the hunched over, twisted shapes. They were like the malformed children Ettin had used as hunting dogs, except these were blind and had webs between their fingers and toes.

There was a glow coming from the other side of the small island. Britha was close to hysteria now. She wasn’t sure why she went to look, but she did, forcing herself to take one step after another. There were no boneless bodies floating in the water on this side of the island. She could not work out where the light was coming from, but in the still, clear water she saw a circle of stones, like the cairns in the north and the many others she had passed on her travels. She was about to turn away when she caught sight of something else. At the edge of the light she could make out what might be a structure of some kind, in the water, but she could see too little of it to be sure.

Her skin crawled, and she jumped as she felt something cold and clammy touch her hand. She looked down at the small childlike creature. Its mouth was smeared with a dark fluid and it was still chewing something. It pulled her gently towards the broch of bone that reached up to the toothed roof of the cavern like a skeletal finger. He/she/it gestured for Britha to go inside.

Britha wasn’t sure how or why she was still moving. She felt bone against her bare feet and looked down at the geometric arrangements of bones on the floor. A helical staircase rose against the inner wall and she started to climb.

At the top of the broch, she looked out over the dark underground loch. On one side she could see the floating collection of split and boned corpses, and on the other the glow of the stones. The cavern walls were lost in the darkness.

There was a hearthstone in the centre of the roof, firewood stacked on top of it. As she moved closer the firewood burst into flames, illuminating the cavern with a red glow.

Bress was on the other side of the fire. Britha looked down at the bones on which she stood, then again at the floating corpses and the things that fed on them.

‘You all need to die, don’t you?’ she said quietly, feeling the ache in her chest as she did so.

‘Reach into the flames,’ he told her.

Britha stared at him as she shrugged off her wet robe. Then, with only a moment’s hesitation, she thrust her arm into the flame. Her cries echoed out across the cavern.

Somehow her fingers clasped around cold metal and she yanked the chalice of red gold from the fire. Agony coursed through her body. She forced the chalice to her mouth but could not scream this time as the molten metal filled her mouth. She did not so much drink it as feel tendrils of the burning, liquid red gold claw and crawl their way down her throat. She collapsed to the bone floor. Her body convulsed violently, her throat and then her stomach glowing from within, and then the light began to branch throughout her body.

‘This pleases me,’ Crom Dhubh whispered to Bress. Bress squeezed his eyes shut as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

‘I think you should leave this place whilst you can,’ Fachtna said. The dead that followed him, those that still moved, stood in the open area of the hill fort, swaying gently in an unfelt wind. The fort offered a commanding view over the surrounding, transformed terrain. Its gates hung off their posts. The dead, those that no longer moved, lay around them, fused with the earth itself, strange flowers growing from their wounds and through their skulls. ‘Please, before it’s too late.’ He wanted to help them, but he was torn. It was all so beautiful.

25

Close to the Oceanic Pole of

Inaccessibility, 5 Weeks Ago

I’ve only been here a week
, Lodup thought. Given the extraordinary nature of his environment, he felt that there should be more to the job than the constant sense of unease, which frequently spilled over into outright fear. He had dreams he couldn’t remember, that he didn’t want to remember. He had been told that without neurosurgery, his mind simply wouldn’t have coped with the geometry of the architecture alone, never mind anything else. He didn’t like that he was ‘okay’ with the fact that someone had operated on his brain and radically changed his body so he could work down here. His acceptance of this place wasn’t natural, but he didn’t leave, and it wasn’t just the neurosurgery that kept him there. At some level he was aware of how incredible what they were doing was. Though even that excitement was dulled by the strong antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that were turning everything into a kind of fugue state.

He wasn’t the only one behaving strangely. There were people working on
Kanamwayso
that he’d known for years – mostly acquaintances, a few he considered actual friends. They were quiet and unresponsive when he spoke to them and got out of the conversation as quickly as possible. He would have been offended if he hadn’t felt so numb himself.

Hideo swung between periods of almost invasive, enthusiastic companionship, and periods of withdrawn despondency. After a few days, Lodup had found his way into Sal’s bed. It was more for comfort than anything else. It hadn’t taken him long to see through her up-for-it, can-do attitude. Underneath, this place was eating away at her just like everyone else.

There’d been two more suicides and a murder since he arrived. One of the divers had taken his knife to his lover. Siraja alerted Yaroslav’s security team immediately and one of them killed the murderer. Lodup had known the killer, though not well. His name was Antonio something-or-other, a diver in the Italian Navy. They’d worked a job together in the Mediterranean. Lodup’s memory of him was as a competent diver who was good enough company, particularly as they’d spent long periods of time together in decompression chambers.

The small cult groups continued to fascinate Lodup. They used salvaged pieces of the city’s ‘statuary’ as altars and spoke in tongues. Lodup was beginning to wonder if the cultists might actually be the most well-balanced people down here. He wondered if their faith was what was required to stay without killing yourself or someone else. At the back of his mind he couldn’t help but wonder if they genuinely knew something, had some insight that was lost to the rest of them. Maybe they’ve just made peace with the city, Lodup thought, not for the first time.

Only the immortals, as Lodup found himself thinking of them, appeared immune to the effects of the alien city. The only constants were Deane, Siska, Yaroslav and Siraja.

Eight hours of cold a day didn’t help, either, and the feeling of water being flushed through his chest, the false sensation of drowning and vomiting at the same time, only added to the feeling of numbness. It half-helped to convince his mind that it was already dead. That he was just going through the motions.

The fusion torch made the water bubble around what Lodup was still trying to think of as a statue. It was fused to one of the tomblike buildings. It had a biomechanical look to it, reminding Lodup of a cross between some kind of bottom-feeding fish, perhaps even a ray, and some enormous seed-pod. He’d seen another statue similar to this one in a different part of the city, and the tethered wet workshops contained more that looked just like it.

They were working in the shadow of one of the reengineered ‘Archies’, or giant squid, which stood over the statue like an enormous crane, its segmented, armoured tentacles reaching down and curling under the ‘seed-pod’. Powerful lights running along the underside of the Archie illuminated the area with a cold, steel-blue light.

Sal was working the
ADS
and Hideo was in the flatbed submersible, both of them cutting into the ‘masonry’. Lodup was standing on top of the flatbed making sure the gel dispenser’s hose spooled properly, telemetry playing down his vision. He had been feeling a little odd since the cutting began: on edge, phantom sensations shooting through his body. Hideo stopped cutting, expertly controlling the impellers to rapidly manoeuvre the submersible through the crystal-clear water. He started the fusion torch again, the water bubbling around the cutting flame. Lodup cried out in shock, making no noise at all as his body was flooded with water and other liquids. He felt the suggestion of agony but none of the pain. Then his vision whited out.

He regained consciousness lying on the seabed, a cloud of particulate matter rising around him.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ Siraja asked. Lodup heard the words in his mind. The AI was somehow managing to convey concern despite his draconic features. Lodup knew that the AI wasn’t really standing in the cloud of silt wearing a business suit, but was instead transmitting the image direct to Lodup’s visual-perception centres.

Lodup opened his mouth to speak and then remembered to subvocalize. ‘Yes, I’m fine. I lost my balance for a moment, is all,’ he told the AI. He could see Sal in the ADS falling through the water towards him. Hideo was still using the fusion torch to cut into the basalt-like material above them.

‘We detected some anomalies with you, some kind of ghost signals,’ Siraja said.

‘You all right, hon?’ Sal asked over the shortwave comms.

‘Fine, not really sure what happened,’ Lodup said.

‘Perhaps you should report to sick-bay,’ Siraja suggested.

‘Maybe after the shift,’ Lodup told him.

‘How are your dreams, Mr Satakano?’

Lodup stared at Siraja. ‘I don’t remember my dreams.’

The image of the dragon-headed AI nodded. ‘Let me know if I can be of any further assistance.’

‘I will.’

Siraja bowed slightly and disappeared.

‘Lodup, if you’ve finished, I want to get the gel in place,’ Hideo said over the ultrasound comms. This was proving to be one of the Japanese submersible pilot’s more despondent days. Lodup pushed himself off the seabed in a cloud of silt and finned towards the hovering vehicle. The glowing area where the masonry had been cut was cooling quickly in the sub-zero water kept liquid by the immense pressure.

They hadn’t attempted to cut the entire thing from the tomblike structure. Instead Sal and Hideo had incised a gash around the statue. Sal and Lodup then wrangled the hose connected to a large tank bolted to the submersible’s flatbed and pushed it into the still-hot gash. They moved around the statue using the hose to extrude an unbroken line of dark gel into the cut. Lodup didn’t understand it fully, but something to do with the petrification process rendered the surface of the structure resistant to the gel. They cut into it first to weaken it and, apparently, to bypass some sort of innate defence mechanism that resulted from the molecular bonding.

‘Clear,’ Hideo said over the comms. Sal and Lodup moved back from the statue. ‘Sending the command now.’ With a thought from Hideo, the nanites in the gel started to eat their way through the base of the statue.

‘You going back in?’ Sal asked over a closed link. They had some time before the gel finished its job.

‘Not the mood he’s in,’ Lodup said.

‘At least he’s not filling the comms with bullshit waffle,’ Sal said.

‘What do you think they are?’ Lodup asked, changing the subject. There was no reply from Sal for several moments.

‘I don’t know, and we don’t ask.’

Lodup lapsed into silence, hanging neutrally buoyant in the water, waiting for the nanites in the gel to do their work.

They were joined by a number of security
AUV
s and one of the killer whales – Lodup was pretty sure it was Marvin. In the last week he’d seen the armoured orca on several occasions. Sal – and Hideo when he was in a more cheerful mood – had teased him about the whale stalking him. Lodup wasn’t sure what was so funny about being stalked by a deep-diving armoured predator.

They removed the piscean/seed-pod structure using a combination of the Archie’s armoured tentacles, its winch/crane systems and smart-matter airlifts, which were basically self-inflating, buoyancy-regulating underwater balloons.

Lodup was finning along next to the Archie with its cargo cradled beneath it. Marvin wasn’t far behind. Sal and Hideo were on the other side of the giant squid. They were moving the piscean/seed-pod to one of the tethered wet sheds. Lodup had seen what happened to the statues earlier in the week. They cut into the basalt-like material and implanted what looked like eggs made of a material that resembled mercury. The eggs were then attached to hoses sunk in the seabed. Lodup assumed this would collect raw material for whatever it was they were doing.

Even allowing for his modified metabolism and the efficiency of the monofin, Lodup was reaching the end of his shift and starting to feel very tired. He moved closer to the seed-pod. Most of its surface was smooth and organic-looking, free from any sort of marine growth, but he found a slight protrusion and reached out to grab on to it and allow himself to be pulled along by the Archie, which was half-propelling itself, and half-using its free tentacles to stride across the seabed. He touched the basalt skin of the statue.

Glancing up as he made his way through the crowds, he saw one of the wedge-headed guardian servitors crouched atop the corner of a changing building, looking down at the bustling street. The air was filled with the smell of spices and the stink of so many peoples in close quarters that even the strong breeze blowing in from the azure ocean could not freshen the air.

He jostled one of the snake-headed people in ornate brocade robes that looked too heavy for the warmth of the day. The bad-tempered creature turned and hissed at him. He took a step back but it was on its way in a moment. Most of the other people in the street were humans of one kind or another, though many of them were pale, their skin starting to scale, their eyes becoming black pools. The favoured were taller, stronger, wore little but loincloths, and there was no hair anywhere on their bodies.

A pulsing blue light came from the centre of the city. He felt the power in the air, the strange taste in his mouth, the hairs on his arms standing up. Somehow he knew there would be one less star in the sky tonight. A shadow fell across him and he looked up. With a thrill he saw a massive tentacle, its tip transforming into much smaller tendrils and growing eyes. It reached through the wall of one of the changing buildings.

He heard a voice say something in a language he didn’t quite understand, but which was tantalisingly familiar.

The light looked very bright. It washed out everything else for a while, but then his eyes polarised and things started to come into focus. Personal medical telemetry cascaded down his vision. He was breathing air – or what passed for it in Kanamwayso – and he was as warm as he ever got these days. His stress markers were elevated and he’d been given a sedative – which he could wipe from his system any time he wanted – but other than that he was fine.

Despite the lack of any apparent medical machinery other than the bed he was lying on, there was no mistaking that he was in some kind of sick-bay.

Siraja was kind enough to walk into his perception as if he had entered the room through the door. ‘Hello, Mr Satakano,’ the dragon-headed AI said.

‘What happened?’ Lodup asked.

‘We were hoping you could tell us,’ the AI said. ‘You appeared to black out, and then we registered some interesting brain activity. Tell me, Mr Satakano, did you dream?’

Lodup considered the question. ‘I sort of remember dreaming, but I never remember my dreams,’ he told the AI. He wasn’t sure why he lied. He remembered the dream vividly. He was outside, in the city, but it was above the water under a bright blue, nearly cloudless sky. The architecture was still strange, difficult to look at, but much less ominous. He’d found the sense of wonder he’d been missing.

‘I see,’ Siraja said. It was very difficult to gauge the AI’s draconic expression, though it probably had enough physiological and neural information to realise Lodup was lying. ‘Mr Deane has taken you off the dive rota for a couple of days so that we can monitor you and make sure you’re okay—’

‘I’m not staying in sick-bay.’

‘Understood.’

‘There’s nothing to do here – I may as well dive.’ His day was divided into eight hours of getting wet, eight hours of troubled and not very restful sleep, and then eight hours of leisure time. After he had washed, eaten and performed the few chores that were not done for him, those hours were the most difficult. Those hours left him time to think, to wonder, to try and deal with the environment and the strange behaviour of his co-workers, and Siraja wanted to increase them.

‘Until we’re sure that you are fine and that you don’t pose a risk to yourself, your fellow divers and the project, I’m afraid you will not be diving,’ he said, not unkindly.

‘What is the project, exactly?’ Lodup asked.

‘You are paid very well precisely so we don’t have to answer questions like that,’ Siraja said apologetically.

Lodup got up and looked around for something to wear. He found a pair of his shorts and one of his T-shirts. He started dressing.

‘Let me get some sleep and I’ll be good to go,’ he muttered.

‘That’s Mr Deane’s decision.’

‘Yes, but it will be based on the data you provide for him.’ Lodup stopped dressing and looked over at at Siraja. ‘How do they do it? Siska, Yaroslav, Deane and whoever actually runs this place? Keep calm, I mean. Not lose it like the others. Because I think they’ve been down here a while.’ Siraja didn’t answer. ‘Okay then, tell me this. The dreams, blacking out – am I on my way to losing it? To going thatch? Is this how it starts?’

The dragon-headed AI’s reptilian eyes were unreadable. ‘Sometimes.’

Lodup looked at Siraja for a moment. Then he nodded and finished dressing.