House of Suns (43 page)

‘Better his magic be loosed into the world than to watch the Kingdom fall to Count Mordax’s raiding parties.’ Daubenton shrugged wearily. ‘It is a dark bargain, but I see no alternative.’

‘Because there is none,’ I said. ‘We must have Calidris.’

‘To give to Mordax, in return for the lady-in-waiting, and the safety of our villages?’ asked Cirlus. ‘Surely we have other choices? What of Relictus, the failed apprentice? He remains in our custody. Could he not help us now?’

‘Calidris made me promise that I would never turn to Relictus, even in our darkest hour. He never trusted the apprentice. He said that his talents were dark and misshapen.’

‘Calidris could not have foreseen our present needs,’ Cirlus said.

‘It is immaterial. I have no intention of giving Calidris to Mordax. The count would never keep his side of the bargain. I know him better than anyone else. He and I were once to be married, you know.’

‘Milady, the count is your stepbrother,’ Daubenton said tactfully.

Confusion addled my mind for a few heartbeats. I had been certain that the count and I were destined for marriage until shadowy politicking had made that betrothal an impossibility. How could I know his voice and mannerisms, his inability to keep a promise, if I had not moved in his circles with the intimacy of a lover-to-be? ‘He used to come and play,’ I said, trailing off as the absurdity of my statement sank home. ‘I remember his ship, his robots—’

‘Milady must sleep,’ Daubenton said. ‘She has been driving herself to exhaustion with her concern for her people.’

Cirlus just looked at me. I did not know if he had formed a judgement.

‘Calidris must return to us,’ I said, with renewed firmness. ‘Not to be traded for my lady-in-waiting, but to use his powers against Mordax. No advisor in the Palace would trust our enemies in the Black Castle to hold to a bargain.’

‘That is true,’ Daubenton admitted.

‘I feel clear-headed now. Resolute. The time has come.’

‘It must be milady’s decision,’ Cirlus said.

‘It is,’ I answered. ‘Always and for ever.’

I pricked my finger with the blood-bound needle and drew a bauble of the purest scarlet. There was no pain. Somewhere in my Kingdom, Calidris, the strongest of all magicians, felt more than his share.

‘You’re no fool,’ Mezereon said, her voice pitched to reach the audience even though it was the prisoner she was addressing. ‘You’ve been around; seen a few things here and there. You know exactly what I have in mind for you.’

‘So get it over with,’ Grilse said. ‘You’re already boring me to death.’

He had been moved into the open air, onto one of the largest balconies in the tower. He was out of stasis. Mezereon had failed with the Jurtina shatterling, who was now another pile of dust, but her efforts with Grilse had been more successful. As she had anticipated, his cabinet was in a better condition than the other three. He had weathered the transition to realtime without complications, and was now in Gentian hands, literally and metaphorically.

Or at least, he had been for a few moments. Fearful that he might find a way to kill himself, or at least render himself incapable of being usefully interrogated, Mezereon had arranged for Grilse to be manhandled into a restraining box. It was an upright frame of complicated construction, a skeletal outline filled with aspic-of-machines, forming a translucent, gelid rectangle into which Grilse - by now stripped of his clothes - was forcibly immersed. The box allowed him to breathe and communicate, but he was going nowhere. It was presumed that if he had been carrying an implanted suicide mechanism, he would already have triggered it inside the stasis cabinet, during one the intervals when he had been dialled down for questioning.

The sectioning apparatus was centre stage, and the box in which Grilse was trapped formed part of it. Hovering above the box, arranged into an ordered circle, were rectangular panes of a glassy material, each of which was as tall and wide as the framework around the box. Along the top of each pane was a flanged grey bar containing levators and enough intelligence to follow Mezereon’s instructions. All of this had been forged by makers, in accordance with ancient blueprints.

The aspic had forced its way into his lungs, into contact with his nervous system. It was feeding him with air and information, allowing him to breathe, move within certain limits and hear what Mezereon was saying. We could see his chest rising and falling, his eyes following Mezereon as she strode up and down.

‘I’ve killed three of your colleagues,’ she said. ‘I was ready to kill you as well, without hesitation, but things are different now. One of us is gone. She was murdered, just when she was getting close to exposing vital information. So I’m not going to kill you - not until I’m certain I’ve bled you dry, and by then maybe I’ll have lost interest. You mean nothing to me beyond the information in your head. And I will find out what you know - piece by piece, if necessary.’

‘You can do what you like. It won’t get you anywhere.’

Mezereon looked to one side. ‘Lower the first pane.’

At her instruction, one of the orbiting panes broke from the group and lowered until it was suspended just above the top of the cabinet. For a moment it hung there, until a nod from Mezereon caused it to lower into the cabinet itself, piercing the invisible glass and parting the aspic in a clean, descending line. It was only just possible to make out the pale edge of the descending pane.

‘You’ll feel it cut its way through you,’ Mezereon told the prisoner. ‘It won’t hurt as much as it should, since the nerve connections are reinstated almost as soon as they are broken. But there’ll still be a tingling background of unpleasantness. It will feel like a sharp-edged cold front pushing through your soul. As it descends, you will know that part of you is on one side of that glass and part of you on the other.’

The pane had begun to divide him at the skull, piercing him so that his face was on one side of the glass, his ears and the rear of his head on the other. It crept downwards at perhaps a centimetre a second, the progress smooth for the most part but with occasional hesitations, as if it was encountering denser or more complex biological structures.

I knew that the pane was only microns thick, yet it was isolating the two halves of him, severing them from each other as completely as if it had been a metal guillotine. What prevented him from dying - what allowed him to keep thinking, even as the pane knifed his brain into two halves - was that the glass was permitting essential biological functions to tunnel through itself as if the divided surfaces were still contiguous. I gathered that very little biological material was actually passing through the glass without being completely disassembled down to atoms or basic molecules, incorporated into the glass’s agile, constantly adapting matrix, and then conveyed and reassembled elsewhere (on one side or the other) in accordance with the circulatory patterns that had been interrupted. The same was true of the electrical and chemical signals associated with synaptic function.

By now the glass had passed through his head and was beginning to divide him at the shoulders and upper torso. The expression on his face had altered subtly, in a way that might easily be mistaken for the effect of the play of light as clouds passed over the piazza. The aspic-of-machines was allowing him to move his facial muscles just enough to register disquiet, and perhaps even horror, at what was being done to him. Even if he wished to talk now, it would make no difference to Mezereon.

I watched, mesmerised and repelled, as the glass completed sectioning the prisoner. When the pane reached the base of the cabinet, it halted. Since we could no longer see the pale edges of the pane, the effect was as if the prisoner had been restored to his former integrity. This was illusory. Mezereon gestured towards the cabinet and it partitioned itself into two halves, each of which contained one portion of the divided man. The two halves folded away from each other, the man opened for inspection like a lavishly illustrated book. The pane must have split itself into two thinner layers, each of which was holding back a wall of tissue, muscle, sinew, bone and pumping fluid, all pinks and whites and reds and livery purples. The visible detail in the two sections was identical, except that one was a precise mirror image of the other. A living mirror, too, for the man was still alive, still breathing. We could see the rise and fall of his chest behind the glass, the outline of his pleural cavity, his heart pumping like the speeded-up opening and contraction of a flower.

Mezereon allowed us to examine him a moment longer, then rotated the front section, the one that contained his face, until it was looking back at the rear section.

‘This is you,’ she said, indicating the living anatomical chart he had become. ‘This is not a projection, but rather your own self, cut down the middle and trapped behind glass. It is necessary that you understand this. Indicate your assent by nodding. The aspic-of-machines will permit you this movement.’

I suppose the man had no choice but to nod, or perhaps he was made to do so by the machine in which he was trapped. As his head bowed, the other half echoed the movement with no detectable delay. The action, as the half-head tilted forward into the plane of the glass, revealed a squirming, ever-changing cross section of skull and brain.

‘This will be the last conscious movement you make,’ Mezereon said. ‘You will continue to breathe, and blood will continue to flow through your body, but you will remain fixed in position. You can, of course, still talk to me - your intention to speak is all I need.’ She looked away from the prisoner towards her audience, playing to the house. ‘The sectioning will continue until you have no physical existence, except as several hundred wafer-thin slices trapped under glass - and rest assured I will go that far. You can halt that process at any time by giving us the information we seek, in a verifiable form.’

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ he answered, his voice unchanged but strange nonetheless, given that it had emerged fully formed from only half a man.

Mezereon nodded as if she had expected his response. ‘I’d have been disappointed if you’d let us stop now,’ she said.

Two more panes lowered from the orbiting flock and came into hovering position above the prisoner’s two halves, aligned in parallel with the first division.

Mezereon sliced her prisoner again. Then she kept going, following a geometric progression.

I turned to leave the piazza, imagining that I would be one of the first to do so, and realised that Purslane must have already departed.

When it had been decreed that nothing more would be learned from Cyphel’s remains, her body was brought out into the open on a hovering platform, the platform tilted slightly forward so that the fact of her death and the evidence of her injuries were obvious to all. Cyphel was much as she had been when found, except that her body had been arranged in a suggestion of repose. Visible in outline beneath a translucent sheet, her arms were at her sides, her legs had been straightened, the bones pushed back under her skin, the blood cleaned from her wounds, and although she did not have much of a face left to look with, the angle of her head suggested that she was looking expectantly upwards, into the evening sky. Four shatterlings accompanied the platform until it came to rest over a table-sized block and lowered slowly into place. The rest of us formed a circle, holding torches in the air, and then advanced slowly until we were gathered in a small crowd around Cyphel. There were fifty of us present rather than fifty-one, for as always one shatterling - it happened to be Medick on this occasion - was away from Neume on patrol duties. But there were fifty-one torches, a flame for every survivor, with the spare one being passed from hand to hand in symbolic recognition of the shatterling who was not present at the funeral.

Our witnesses - the shatterlings from other Lines, our guests and the dignitaries from Ymir and the other cities of Neume - surrounded us at a respectful distance, standing on a circle of raised flooring. They were soberly dressed. Our clothes also befitted the occasion - we all wore black garments, devoid of ostentation save for embroidered black flowers that were all but invisible. Purslane’s hair was combed back from her forehead, secured by a simple flower-shaped clasp. She wore no make-up or jewellery; nor did anyone else. The air was cold, but our clothes had been forbidden from warming us or assisting with the burden of the torches. Mine weighed heavy in my hand, as if the more it burned the heavier it became.

I was not surprised that Betony had chosen to speak for Cyphel, but for once I did not begrudge his putting himself forward. I had known Cyphel as well as anyone present, even if I had not been one of her closest friends. Her closest friends had died in the ambush - at best I only counted as a close acquaintance. I felt a sense of obligation towards her, a conviction that there were aspects of her character I understood better than anyone else, but I had no wish to hurt Purslane by dwelling on my feelings for Cyphel. Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over. Besides, my knowledge of Line traditions was not as exhaustive as it might have been. As we had told the robots, funerals of this kind were exceptionally rare events - there was not usually a body involved, and there was often no conclusive evidence that the shatterling in question was really dead.

Betony kept his speech brief. He said that although Cyphel’s death would cast a long shadow over what remained of the Line, and that the circumstances of her death were still under investigation and might yet lead to unpleasant revelations, that was no reason not to celebrate the life she had lived. She had seen and done glorious things; she had touched countless lives; she had carried a thread of memory across six million years; she had been loved and admired and envied. He spoke of a dozen or so significant milestones in her life, blowing the dust off events that had happened many circuits ago.