In the Mouth of the Whale (15 page)

After helping Father Caetano at Mass, the Child went straight to her mother, who was already seeing the first of her patients in the tent of the field clinic while a queue of women with babies cradled in their arms and small children clinging to their skirts waited outside in the hot sunlight. The Child said that Vidal Francisca wanted to explore the ruins, asked if she could go with him.

‘I want to show him the mural we discovered.’

‘As long as you don’t go any further. And wear your hat,’ her mother said – but the Child was already running off to find Vidal.

He was at the edge of the old dock where the skiff was tied up, watching one of the drones he’d unpacked from his aluminium case skim out across channels of water that ran between sandbars. He’d bought the drones to supplement his house’s security, and had once allowed the Child to fly one. It was shaped like a flying saucer, light and quick as a hummingbird, driven by a pair of bladeless fans. She’d quickly mastered the simple controls, sending it swooping noiselessly over the darkening lawn, now high, now low, now looping around the big pepper tree, darting in and out of the branches, until Vidal had grown nervous, and told her she had done very well but it wasn’t a toy, she should please bring it back. And she had, flying it straight at him, watching his face grow bigger on the little screen of the control tablet, laughing as he swore and ducked when the drone flashed past, a fast curve that ended in a crash stop above the illuminated amoeba of the swimming pool. He’d snatched the tablet from her, a moment of anger getting the better of his self-control, and had sworn again when he’d mishandled the controls and nearly dropped the drone in the water.

Now the Child was on her best behaviour, telling Vidal that her mother had given her permission to botanise along the edge of the ruins: would he like to come with her? Saying, when he expressed doubt, that she and her mother had walked there last time, she was sure it was perfectly safe.

‘My mother said that I should ask one of the soldiers to go with me,’ she said. ‘But I would rather you did.’

It was as easy as that.

See the man and the Child walking through the long grass beyond the square. A little drone drifting along about a dozen metres overhead, almost invisible against the hot white sky. Vidal Francisca cupping the control tablet in one hand, flicking back and forth between views from the drone above his head and the drones stationed above the square and the field clinic, at the jetty down by the river. His eyes masked with mirrored sunglasses, a bush hat shading his face, his stupid little ponytail sticking out behind.

The Child walked beside him, keeping up a stream of chatter. When they reached the margin of the ruins, Vidal stopped and looked all around; the drone rose up, turning on its axis, surveying the overgrown apartment blocks and the mounds of rubble beyond. It was very hot, very quiet. The air glassy with heat, rippling above solitary stretches of wall standing here and there, scrub wasteland humped with overgrown heaps of rubble settling into earth. The Child pointed to a vivid slash of green in the middle distance, told Vidal that was where she and her mother had gone last time.

The man took off his sunglasses and mopped sweat from his face with one end of the red handkerchief knotted around his neck, and put his sunglasses on again. ‘It looks a long way,’ he said.

‘It’s really not far. And it’s shady there. Full of flowers and butterflies.’

The Child, after studying satellite images of the ruins of Santo João do Rio Negro and comparing them with old maps, had determined that the green line was a deep channel that had once been part of the town’s flood-control system. When they reached the edge of its steep slope, Vidal made a show of surveying the trees and bushes that grew along its floor amongst tangles of broken concrete and splintered tree trunks, and declared that it would be too dangerous to explore further.

‘We’ll take a break before we head back. You can look around up here, but keep in sight.’

He sat down and took off his hat and fanned himself, unbuckled his water bottle and offered it to the Child, who refused with a shake of her head. The drone’s white disc hung above the trees, glinting as it turned this way and that. Nothing else moved around them. In the mid-distance, a tree growing in the channel was in flower, a blaze of ardent red amongst variegated greens.

Vidal said, ‘You are like one of the Indians. You walk like them, quick and quiet. And you see everything around you.’

The Child shrugged off this compliment. She’d become interested in intelligence-boosting drugs recently, and after extensive research and experimentation had managed to manufacture small amounts of a neural booster by methylation of a proprietary pain killer. She’d taken fifty milligrams of this home-brewed stimulant before they’d set off, and it was kicking in nicely now. Everything around her stood out with pin-sharp particularity. She could feel every drop of sweat that crawled down the back of her neck as she showed Vidal the little collecting bottles in her satchel and said that she was going to look for beetles – she was certain she would find some new and interesting species of beetle under the stones.

‘Be careful. There will be snakes, I’m sure. Also scorpions and centipedes. The big ones that sting.’

The Child nodded dutifully, and made a show of using a stick to tip up stones one by one. Taking her time, moving away from Vidal and the solitary star of the drone. When she was certain that he had lost interest in her, she took out the phone she’d hacked, checked once again that it had locked on to the drone’s signal, and touched the icon shimmering above its screen, a triangle with a stylised eye in it. The icon flashed from red to green, and the Child ran straight down the slope of tilted cracked concrete slabs that lined the wall of channel, into the deep shadows under the trees. Dancing and leaping and twisting over sprawling roots and stubs of broken concrete, ducking under loops of vine and coming out of the far side of the trees into the avalanche of hot sunlight, slick with sweat, her heart going like anything.

Off in the distance, a plaintive voice called her name.

The Child felt a surge of glee and excitement. Her plan had been very simple, like all the best plans, and it had worked perfectly. She’d downloaded the hack from a site on one of the darknets that Roberto had once showed her. It was an old design that cut into the feeds of security cameras and transmitted the visual equivalent of white noise. She had tested it on the security system of the hospital, used it to lock on to the feeds from Vidal Francesca’s drones during the open-air Mass.

Now they were down, and she was free. All she had to do was stay hidden for a couple of hours, then walk back to the dock and claim she’d been kidnapped by wildsiders but had managed to escape. After that, after he’d put her in danger and failed to do anything useful, Vidal Francisca would be blamed and disgraced. Her mother would never talk to him again.

The Child pressed on through the strip of forest, moving away from the sound of Vidal’s voice. She’d check out the flowering tree, she thought. See what kinds of insects it attracted, pass the time there until everyone was absolutely frantic with worry, and then she’d stroll back and tell her little story.

She was about halfway there when she saw a shadow detach from the trunk of a big thorn tree, thought for a horrible moment that Vidal had caught up with her. But the figure was too small, a boy about her age, a slim bare-chested boy in ragged cotton trousers stepping towards her, a rifle slung at his shoulder.

He was wearing a mask, the Child thought. But then he smiled at her, a smile that was so very wide it seemed to split his face in half, showing his pink tongue lolling amongst a narrow barricade of white fangs. And she realised with a thrilled shock that his mask was not a mask. He was a boy with the small sleek head of a jaguar.

For a long moment the Child and the boy stared at each other. The Child’s skin was suddenly cold all over. Her mouth was dry. She started to ask the boy what he was, who had made him, and he shook his head and put a finger to his narrow mouth. An incongruously human gesture that made him seen even stranger, even more alien and frightening.

In the distance, beyond the trees, Vidal Francisca called the Child’s name. The boy cocked his head, the shells of his mobile upright ears flicking forward; then in a swift smooth motion he raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired off two shots at a scrap of sky caught amongst leafy branches. The Child clapped her hands over her ears in shock as small green birds exploded from a nearby tree, whistling each to each as they fled. The boy stared straight at the Child for a moment. Something soft in his lambent gaze. Something like pity, or like love. And then he stepped backwards and by degrees melted away into the shadows under the trees.

Vidal Francisca called again, close now. She could hear him smashing through the undergrowth, coming towards her. And she had nowhere to run.

11

Watched narrowly by Lathi Singleton, I scanned Prem Singleton and showed her how to put on and adjust the gear. I told her that the training programme was just like a saga or any other viron, explained that the gear paralysed voluntary control of her musculature and channelled it to an avatar, that it managed the transition from one reality to another, and so on, and so forth.

Prem Singleton endured my instruction with a kind of dutiful impatience. ‘I’ve fought all kinds of monsters in my time,’ she said, when I’d finished. ‘But I never thought I’d be fighting dream demons. Bring it on, Isak. Do your worst.’

‘I’m going to show you what the Library of the Homesun looks like, Majistra, and demonstrate a few common traps. As for fighting demons, that takes a certain amount of instruction and practice. It isn’t possible to replicate that experience in the little time we have.’

I had no intention of allowing her to follow the Horse and me into the hell that Yakob Singleton had discovered, of course, and was already thinking of various strategies I could use to make sure she didn’t.

Prem laughed and said, ‘Is that a fancy way of saying that you don’t want to share your secrets, demon-slayer?’

‘Forget about heroics and do as he asks,’ Lathi Singleton said. ‘This is a serious business.’

Prem said to me, ‘Is it going to be anything like this so-called hell?’

‘If the hell is modelled on the Library, yes. But hells take many forms.’

‘Remind me how many you’ve harrowed,’ Prem said.

‘Thirteen, Majistra.’

‘Does that include the demon you ran away from?’

‘It was exorcised by others more experienced than me.’

‘I’ve made you angry. I apologise. I didn’t mean to question your qualifications.’

She didn’t seem apologetic; she seemed pleased and amused. And I was angry, yes, but I was also exhilarated. She wanted to challenge me, and I wanted to meet and best her challenge.

‘If you two are going to spar,’ Lathi Singleton said, ‘it might be more useful if you did it in this training programme.’

We went through together, Prem Singleton and I, into the garden so familiar to me from countless training sessions and exercises. As always, it was winter. Snow dusted the flagstone paths and the clipped box that edged the formal flower beds, where brown sticks stuck up from frosted earth. Long shadows stretched everywhere. The square stone tower at the far end of the garden reared against a sky bloodied by perpetual sunset.

Prem touched her face, then stamped a foot, raising a brief muffled echo. ‘I thought I’d feel different.’

‘The nervous impulses that reach your brain on the other side are mirrored here.’

She looked all around, alive and eager. ‘This doesn’t look like much,’ she said. ‘Where are these traps you talked about?’

I took her up through the tower, engaging various traps and minor entities. At first, Prem was amused by the exercises required to negotiate the lower levels, but she quickly grew bored and didn’t bother to hide it.

‘We dress up certain rooms in our hold every Candlemass,’ she told me. ‘The windows are darkened and the rooms draped with tall black cloths that form a maze. You can walk through some parts; in others you have to crawl through low tunnels, as if you are being reborn. Which is part of the reason why we celebrate Candlemass, of course. It marks the death of your childhood, and your rebirth as an adult, with adult rights and responsibilities.’

‘It sounds like a charming custom.’

Prem looked at me with a mix of scorn and pity. ‘It’s a test of fitness. Some of the children who enter the maze don’t reappear. Not many, these days. But always one or two. When people say they are scared to death, they’re really talking about moments when they’re most alive. And that’s what it’s like. There are flickering lights and odd breezes, projections that give glimpses of strange and terrible creatures. Draperies of cobwebs. Blood dripping from one part of a ceiling. Bodies mutilated in horrible ways. Screams from a place always in front of you, or behind you. Whispered threats and lewd invitations that come from the air next to your ear. There are actors, too, and Quicks modified in various monstrous ways. They jump out at you, or stage mock fights. You could be one of the actors, Isak. In that costume of yours, you would fit right in with the other players.’

‘The horrors you’ve seen here might seem tame and tawdry, but we are at a low level in the suites. If we go higher, you’ll get a better idea of the real horrors you might encounter out in the Library.’