Icarus Descending (39 page)

“Not just war.” Cadence looked over her shoulder while she steered the caravan with her one hand. “Jihad.”

Jane frowned. “Jihad?” Suniata nodded, and Cadence smiled triumphantly.

“
Holy
war,” she said. “To avenge them, and redeem ourselves.”

“Redeem
who
?” Jane asked suspiciously.

“Us. All of humanity.” Cadence’s voice took on the same ringing tone I had heard in Miss Scarlet’s when she played one of the more ardent roles in her repertoire, Saint Joan or Clytemnestra or Maw-ree Zilus. The van veered dangerously close to a stack of bricks as she went on. “This is a war of redemption—yours, ours, all of humanity’s! We sought to enslave the world, and like all slaves the world has finally rebelled. It is up to
us,
for those humans who have joined the Alliance, to redeem our race. The Earth will be cleansed of humanity. We will free those beings we created, end their centuries of servitude, so that at last they can take their places beside us in a
new
world—”

She paused to look over at Suniata, and her eyes shone with a radiance that transcended anything I had ever seen before in a man or woman. Not simple love, certainly not lust; but an intensity of expression that I can only describe as beatific. It was a gaze that scorched; I could imagine myself flinching if she was to turn it upon me. I thought then of her father and the enhancer he had worn over his damaged face, and wondered if his eyes had withered away from such incandescent ardor.

And then I felt the cool, slightly moist touch of Suniata’s hand upon mine, and a simple thought like a jolt of adrenaline, coursing from his fingers to my brain—

But of course! Didn’t you know?

I drew away sharply, staring into that bloated fishlike face as though into a warped mirror. Suniata only nodded and turned back to Cadence. Jane put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me to her.

“Wendy? What is it?” I shook her away, suddenly frightened.

Because all this time I had thought of the cacodemon merely as an odd accessory to this journey; a creature whose function was to serve as some kind of silent adjunct to Cadence, perhaps to cow Jane and me by his presence.

But now, with Cadence gazing at him with that wonder and reverence and, yes,
fear,
igniting her blue eyes, I saw the truth of it.

The cacodemon was not her servant. She was
his.
In some misguided effort to reverse the wrongs of hundreds of years of genetic engineering and biological warfare, the human members of the Asterine Alliance had offered themselves as infantry and handsel to the geneslaves.

“No, not
beside
us in that new work!—above us,” Cadence continued. Her hood had slipped from her head, so that all I saw was a halo of brilliant white above the blue folds of her uniform. “This world has become unlivable. The sun is poisoned, and the water, so that nothing from our past can safely live upon it.

“But these others—”

She raised the stump of her left hand triumphantly. “The new creatures, the ones
we
created—they
can
survive in this world we have made! To them the poisons are like cool water, and darkness is daylight. They can live among the stars without falling prey to madness, and when they breed—and they will!—they will have only a single offspring, so that the subtle balance of our new world will not be overthrown. We gave birth to them in darkness, but that darkness has welcomed them, even as it has swallowed us.”

I felt as though someone had run an icy finger across my throat. “Are you—do you mean to make slaves of
us,
then? Your own kind?”

Cadence shook her head. “No,” she said softly, her voice nearly drowned by the droning engines. “You will see—we are not devoured by self-hatred, seeing these new creatures. They would never have come to be, were it not for us; were it not for their father, the man who gave birth to all of them. We honor them, that is all. We honor him.

“But you’ll see, Wendy. And Jane. Icarus is coming. And when he comes, a new world will come with him, even as this one falls away.”

She crouched back over the steering wheel, the wind whipping her hair into silver froth. For another moment Suniata looked at me, his gaze flat and inscrutable as a viper’s.

Icarus. Into my mind rose the image that had been printed on Giles’s packets of cigarettes, and on the wine and brandy we’d drunk at Seven Chimneys.

Iχαpυσ

Icarus: that was what the strange characters spelled. Whomever—or whatever—the Asterine Alliance had taken as their emblem, was a thing called
Icarus.

For the first time Suniata spoke aloud, the tendrils around his mouth rising as though to taste the name.

“Icarus,” he whispered, and nodded at me. Then he turned to stare outside.

“Icarus,” I thought, and even though the name was meaningless to me, I felt it like a palpable weight upon my heart.

In her seat Cadence peered through the front window, occasionally glancing at Suniata and nodding as though to some unspoken question. From the manner in which the cacodemon touched her—his long flattened fingers brushing now her neck, now her elbow or the wrinkled stump of her arm—I imagined they must be engaged in conversation, a new and subtle means of speech that stupid folk like Jane or me would never understand. Twice Suniata pointed, and Cadence craned her neck to see what he had indicated: improvements, I gathered, that had been made since their departure the day before.

Beyond the edge of the road were endless heaps of crates and heavy canvas sacks, some of them ripped open to spill their burden of ammunition and armored clothing beneath the tossing limbs of birches and young oaks. Behind the trees hundreds of vehicles were thrown together, nosing each other like bastard pups searching for their mother: caravans and jitneys and trucks and trylons, Ascendant aviettes with their wings folded up like a pterosaur’s and blunt-nosed Harkers from the Commonwealth. In the distance I glimpsed the wreckage of a fouga. Its outer skin had burned away so that only its steel infrastructure remained, like the shattered ribs and vertebrae of a whale gnawed to bone by some unimaginably vast predator. Two cacodemons emerged slowly from its blackened hulk, dragging corpses and what looked like the body of a huge worm. Others of their kind huddled together over the ruins of the dirigible’s gondola, shaking their heads solemnly and staring at a flickering image that might have been a holofile of the warship’s flight plan.

“Look at all this,” Jane murmured, shaking her head. “They must have gone to war against the entire world, to get all this….”

“Oh, but we have,” said Cadence, and Jane fell silent.

The caravan drove out from under the canopy of oaks, to a sunlit place where the road widened. To either side grass and flowering vines grew over the remains of ancient buildings long since given over to the earth. Here the mountains were so close that I could smell them, their secrets trickling from dark places like water, the wind rushing down gray cuffs in a cold torrent. Through a stand of live oaks, their trunks blackened and burled with age, I could glimpse the very foot of the mountain, a gray-and-green rampart rising thousands of feet above us until it vanished in blue haze. Scattered about its base were broken chunks of granite and boulders like chunks of dirty ice. From the center of all this rose an immense pair of polished metal doors, buttressed with steel beams and smooth slabs of rock that must have been torn from the mountain itself. Trees grew above the doors, spindly, gnarled trees whose roots clutched at the loose soil trapped between stones that had been loosed by avalanche or storm. For all the sunlight and warmth spilling from the unclouded sky, it was a grim place. I could imagine black eagles nesting there, or vultures, but not wrens or larkspurs or the darting wild finches: nothing that might give voice to song.

“Well, Wendy,” Jane said, hugging herself and staring at the mountain with a face as cold and unyielding as its own. “Looks like the end of the world, all right.”

All up and down the mountainside innumerable solar disks rose on crooked stiltlike legs, like great black beetles that had crawled from a giant’s corpse. Lines of rebels marched between them, snaking down to the road in an unbroken file. They would have been invisible save for their sky-colored uniforms and the weapons they carried, double-bladed yataghans and flame-shooting culverins glinting in the sun, and a billowing standard bearing the now-familiar image of mountains and star and the name
Icarus
spelled in archaic script. A dull thunder echoed from somewhere far above us. The lines of troops halted and turned to stare up the mountainside. A moment later a cloud of black smoke appeared in the sky. A faint rain of leaves and shattered stone pattered against the caravan and sent the rebels scuttling down their path.

When she heard the first explosion, Cadence sent the van lurching forward. We racketed past another stand of starved-looking trees and a battered plastic urinal. To the right of the road loomed a metal sign, so old and pitted with rust, it looked like an autumn leaf chewed by locusts.

WELCOME TO CASSANDRA

GATEWAY TO THE BLUE RIDGE

A few yards past it was a smaller sign.

WHEN IN CASSANDRA VISIT WORLD-FAMOUS PARADISE CAVERNS!

On the flaking metal someone had scrawled
Ad astra aspera
in blue paint.

“We mean to cleanse this world and find another,” said Cadence softly. She lifted her head to gaze at the shining gate that loomed before us, then raised her hand as an energumen sentry waved us on. Beside her, the cacodemon turned to regard Jane and me with coldly glittering eyes.

He said, “Your kind have always thought of us as monsters, but it is to us that this great task has fallen.” He spoke in a whisper, as though it hurt him to talk. “If we are truly monsters, perhaps then we are better suited to another world than to this one.”

Cadence nodded, adding fervently, “ ‘I have said to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.’ ” She yanked on a lever in the front of the cab, retracting the solex shields, and the engines died. “ ‘How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?’ ”

I said nothing. Jane drew me close as the caravan shuddered to a halt. With a low moan of greeting Suniata leapt from the van to embrace another of his kind waiting by the doors. In her seat Cadence turned and looked at Jane and me, her blue eyes flashing as she drawled, “Welcome to Paradise.”

Minutes later we stood before the entrance to the caverns, an arched steel gate three times the height of a man and with heavy iron bars so thick, I couldn’t wrap my hands around them. Rusted signs dangled from the bars; others were recessed into the stone itself, and had a slick green patina of moss and algae hiding the letters.

TOURS Begin Hourly and Last 90 Minutes

PARENTS, Please! Carry All Children Under Three Years of Age Caverns Close at Sunset Daily

High above the gate’s arch a sheet of metal had been embedded into the granite, its engraved letters worn but still elegant as they shone in the midday sun.

VELCOME!

TO

PARADISE CAVERNS

As Jane and I stared, several humans in rebel uniforms walked past. They stared at us curiously and, I thought, with sympathy. When they reached the gate, they saluted the energumen sentry and passed inside—all save the last, who hesitated. Looking back at us, he raised his hand and, in a furtive show of solidarity, grimaced. Then he too disappeared into that gaping darkness.

“Come with me, friend,” a soft voice sounded. I started as Suniata’s moist hand closed over mine. “We must go inside now. There is very little time left for our work here. You and Jane will have to meet with Dr. Burdock today.”

“Dr.
Burdock?”
Jane repeated incredulously. Behind us Cadence stood outside her caravan, laughing with a burly man who gestured extravagantly at the cavern entrance. Compared to the cacodemon’s soft tone, their voices sounded as shrill and meaningless as the cry of locusts. “Luther Burdock’s been dead for four hundred years.” The cacodemon said nothing, only folded his hands inside his sleeves and entered the caverns.