In the Mouth of the Whale (42 page)

There was a crevice under an overhang, where half a dozen lichen hunters and their horses waited in the freezing mist. Akoni conferred with them, and told us that there had been no sign of any activity.

‘Are you sure they’re still in there?’ Prem said. ‘They could have found another way through the caves.’

‘The watchers on the rim have seen no sign of any movement,’ Akoni said, and shook out a sheet of paper that showed a pict of a tower standing up from the flooded floor of a deep and steep-sided shaft. Lights showed in the tower’s narrow windows, reflected in the dark water all around it.

Prem had already explained how Akoni and his brothers had discovered where her cousin and Bree Sixsmith had gone to ground. It had not been difficult. The lichen hunters knew of three places where fragments of the Library were lodged on Ull. They were wary of the old machines, but knew that they were curated by several house servants who were almost certainly members of the cult, and also knew that those servants had killed themselves some one point eight megaseconds ago (when Prem had told us this, the Horse had given me a knowing look). Prem, or her friends, had reached out to the lichen hunters when Yakob Singleton and Bree Sixsmith had been tracked to Ull; the lichen hunters had checked each location, and found activity only in this one.

Prem studied the pict, spinning the view all the way around the tower, and said, ‘Has anyone gone down there?’

‘A few of the young ones wanted to prove their courage,’ Akoni said. ‘But none have broken discipline. I am certain your targets do not suspect they are being watched.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Prem said. ‘That’s why we’ll take the back route.’

I took her aside as the lichen hunters struck their little camp, and told her that I knew who her friends were, and why she was doing this.

‘You do, do you?’

‘You asked me whether I was a hardliner. I am not. But that doesn’t mean I agree with what you want. You and your friends.’

‘Say what you need to say, Isak. Don’t dance around it. There isn’t time, and I don’t have the patience. What exactly don’t you agree with?’

‘Overthrowing centuries of consensus about the Quick. Restoring their freedom. Taking control of Our Thing to achieve that. Directly opposing hardliners who want an end to the Quick. In short, revolution.’

‘You worked all this out yourself.’

‘I may be naive, Majistra. But I am not stupid. My clan has a deep and abiding respect for Quick achievements because of our work. We look after our kholops and the other servants as best we can. We do not abuse them. Sometimes some form of correction is necessary, but it is never excessive. We’re often criticised for this by outsiders, but it is an ethos we cherish. But we have never tried to impose it on others. Nor will we. But I know that there are many young scions who want to impose their ideas on everyone else. Young scions like yourself, Majistra, who have served and fought alongside Quicks in the war.’

Prem stared at me with a mixture of contempt and exasperation. Her eye sockets were bruised from lack of sleep and her wet hair straggled across her forehead. ‘That’s an astonishingly simplistic view.’

‘Yet you do not deny it.’

‘All I ever expected from you was to harrow any hells I uncovered while looking for Yakob. No more, no less. What I do after that is my business. And you have your own reason for helping me, don’t you? Those back doors you’re so scared of, and the forgiveness of your clan you hope to win by locating them. When this is over, you can go your way and I’ll go mine. Why don’t we leave it that?’

I was as tired, and as unreasonably angry as Prem. And scared, too. Of what we were about to face. Of what might happen if we failed, and the consequences if we succeeded. I said, ‘We agreed to be equal partners, but you have not held your end of the bargain. You have never told me the whole truth. Perhaps you didn’t trust me. Perhaps because you thought I would not follow or help you if I knew your real intentions. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been led into something deep and dark and dangerous. And that means my clan is implicated too.’

‘If you don’t like this, you should go,’ Prem said.

She turned from me and walked to the edge of the steep drop down to the lake. A small, defiant figure, half-lost in blowing scarves of mist. When I came up behind her, she did not turn.

‘You should have trusted me,’ I said.

‘This isn’t about your wounded dignity.’

‘When you lack power or wealth, dignity is important. Not just because it is hard-won, but because you have little else by which to measure your status.’

‘You think too much about what other people think about you, Isak. You worry that they think you insignificant. I can assure you that I don’t.’ She turned then. Droplets of water starred the fur of the collar she’d raised about her face, and clung to her wet hair. ‘I could say that I didn’t tell you the whole truth because I was trying to protect you. But it would be a lie. I did it because I didn’t entirely trust you. Because, I suppose, I underestimated you. Because I need you, Isak, and I was frightened that if I told you the truth you’d quit the search.’

Her small cold hands found mine. ‘You think we’ll fail, my friends and I. You’re worried that you’ll be implicated in that failure. That you’ll be unfairly punished. Don’t worry. This is a very small part of something very much larger. It’s so insignificant, in fact, that I’m pursuing it contrary to all counsel and advice. Most of my friends don’t think it’s very important. The Quick do. They know. They understand. But almost everyone else . . . Well, I won’t deny that I’ll be in trouble if I’m caught, but I promise I’ll do my best to convince everyone that you were a fool I led astray. Someone who had no idea about what I was really chasing. That’s more or less the truth, after all. And think about this. What if we succeed?’

I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t think of returning to the Library in glory, of elevating my clan to a central place in a new order, but I was mostly aware of Prem’s hands in mine, her dark and solemn gaze.

‘You’re free to go back right now,’ she said. ‘But I hope you’ll be true to your promise, and help me finish this. For whatever reason.’

Akoni and two of the other lichen hunters followed us into the crevice; the rest stayed behind to keep watch in case the prefect’s troopers worked out where we were and what we were about. A long gullet of rough rock sloped down and down, a ragged and irregular passage so narrow that we had to go in single file, sometimes climbing over rockfalls, sometimes stooping where the ceiling dipped or the floor rose. A handful of drones moved with us, shedding an envelope of bluish light, and several more flew ahead, searching for traps and sensors. All around lay a lightless universe of rock. Masses balanced precariously, ready to shift and crush us out of existence. We picked our way over and around fallen rocks, squatted and shuffled crabwise through a long low passage and emerged at the top of a slope that ran down to the floor of a cathedral void. Behind us was a bulging wall sheened with wet pink and purple mineral deposits. Water dripped from the ends of stalactites high above and fell into cold pools, like so many clocks ticking away eternity.

We stood bunched together as the drones shone tight beams of light here and there. I felt that I was being watched; felt that I had committed to a very bad idea and now I had reached the irrevocable point where there was only a way forward, into a world of trouble.

Prem told the lichen hunters to move out to the left and right and the Horse and I followed her as she started down the slide of rocks. The drones glided through the air ahead of her, pencils of sharp blue light flickering in every direction, and she was suddenly silhouetted by a flash of red light, and a sharp deafening crack filled the black space and echoed back to us in overlapping percussion.

The lichen hunters called to each other and the Horse and I crouched down, our securities searching the darkness for movement, finding it overhead. Small pale winged things were dropping from perches amongst stalactites that hung down from the roof, passing back and forth overhead, swooping lower and lower.

‘Don’t do anything,’ Prem said calmly. ‘They’re only bats.’

The animals whirled around us, fluttering, darting past, somehow aware of our presence in what to them must have been absolute darkness, spattering us with sharp-smelling dung. Naked bird-things with translucent skin and faces like horrorshow masks, whirling past and gone like smoke sucked up through a flue, the cave absolutely still again. Too still, and too dark: the drones were down.

Prem said, ‘It was an EMP grenade rigged to some kind of flash-bang. No doubt designed to frighten away the natives.’

‘We are not frightened,’ Akoni said.

‘They underestimated you,’ Prem said. ‘Isak, are your algorithms and other tricks still working?’

My mouth was dry and there was grit on my tongue. I had to work up a measure of saliva before I could speak. ‘They are hardened against all kinds of attacks.’

‘Then get up, both of you. We’re not turning back. Not now.’

Prem was standing downslope, pale and slim in the ghostlight of my security’s enhanced vision. Stepping now over stones, moving from one to the next with a smooth and certain gait. She had taken out her pistol, and the Horse and I exchanged glances and started after her, crabbing down the slope, crossing an uneven floor littered with fallen rocks, the lumpy glistening spikes of stalagmites, brimming pools rimmed with slick dripstone. The hunters discovered another explosive device, and another. The Horse destroyed their tiny intelligences with an unnecessarily extravagant gesture, and I stepped close and quietly chided him for showing off.

‘I thought it would be a good idea to display some flair to remind them that we’re an important part of this,’ he said.

‘I have a feeling that we may be too late to do any good,’ I said.

‘But we will do our best, just the same.’

The cavern narrowed at its far end, funnelling into a passage that twisted and turned much like the one by which we’d entered, until at last a star appeared in the darkness, growing into a wedge of pale glow as we approached it. While the Horse and I waited with the other lichen hunters, Prem and Akoni went ahead, returning after some six hundred seconds.

‘No more traps that we can find,’ Prem said. ‘Follow me and keep close.’

We emerged in a cleft where part of the cave system had collapsed, leaving a winding gash caught between steep walls that led to a lake as round as an ancient coin. The tower stood at its centre, light shining from window slits at various heights; a slender bridge made of some translucent halflife polymer arched above the still black water of the lake and descended to kiss a small oval doorway at the base of the tower. It was very cold, and a few flakes of snow drifted down from the circle of gunmetal sky pinched between the high cliffs.

The Horse and I parsed the tower and the bridge and found nothing active.

‘That doesn’t mean there aren’t any more traps,’ I said. ‘They may be too stupid or too sophisticated for us to detect.’

Prem called out Yakob’s name, her clear voice echoing back across the dark water. I thought it incredibly foolish, and braced for some kind of cataclysmic reply, but nothing happened. She called several times, and stood with her arms folded, her head moving up and down as she scanned the tower from bottom to top and back again. At last she told all of us to wait, and walked up the arch of the bridge to the oval doorway, ducking under its low lip.

A moment later her scream cut the air.

I sprinted across the narrow span of the bridge, my security wrapping tight and hard around me, the Horse and the lichen hunters following at my heels. Usually, the old towers left by the ancestral Quick are more or less empty, open chimneys with platforms of different sizes jutting from the inner walls at random heights and linked by a spiralling ramp (the Redactor Svern based the public entrance of the Library on this design, in homage to the creators of the Library’s virons). But when I ducked through the entrance of this tower, I threw up my arm to protect my eyes at once, because it was full of flame. Huge flames beating with white light and heat, and Prem on fire at my feet, writhing as she burned.

Or so it seemed. The entrance had been rigged as a translation frame that opened on to a pocket hell. The flames and heat weren’t real, but Prem’s agony was. My security reached out and enveloped her; as I stooped to pick her up, something coalesced from the flames all around and shot towards me like a runaway star. I threw a string at it and the string shrivelled and flared out like a comet, and then the thing was on me in a furious rush that knocked me over. Something punched at my torso, a sharp point plunging over and again. It didn’t penetrate the armoured corselet that Prem had made me wear, but it knocked the wind out of me, and a moment later hard fingers were clawing at my face, at my eyes.

My attacker was no ordinary demon; it was a demon cloaking a human being, as my security cloaked me. Stabbing and punching at me while the furnace fire raged at my security, burning its way in past layer after layer of futile-cycle algorithms and deadlock traps.

Violent action has a strange effect on memory. Moments are preserved with perfect fidelity, but the connections between them are lost. I remember grasping a sharp blade that stung my palm. I remember a blow that jarred my cheekbone, and my sight going black for a long moment. I remember finding a warm human mouth and wrenching at it, and the shocking pain as teeth clamped on my fingers. I have no idea what I was thinking; most likely I wasn’t thinking at all. And I remember a dark shadow emerging from the furnace light raging all around, and I have a memory that may be true and may be false of a bee flying past my face and shattering into an angry swarm that struck my adversary and hurled him away.