In the Mouth of the Whale (46 page)

The Redactor Svern gestured; the lumpy mote in the window shrank to a bright dot as the view widened and tilted to show that the dot was slanting in above the plane of the dust ring. It was not heading towards Cthuga, as I had supposed, but towards Fomalhaut. In fact, it had already passed the inner edge of the dust ring and Cthuga’s orbit.

‘According to my clan’s philosophers, it will swing close in around Fomalhaut,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘A manoeuvre that will exchange a great deal of its delta vee with the rotational energy of our star, and also bring it into the plane of the system. Then it will deploy a braking sail. It is an ancient, reliable technique that was used by our seedship and by the seedship of the Quick. Both sent a package ahead of themselves which took root in an asteroid and manufactured a solar-powered laser array. If the starship has done the same thing, then we must find out where its laser array is sited, and take control of it.’

‘And here is the crux, Isak,’ the Redactor Svern said. ‘You claim that certain cultists have opened back doors into the Library. Back doors that lead to information about the ship. It’s a serious claim, and we are taking it seriously, as you can see.’

‘Our two clans have joined in common cause,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘We are working together to capture the starship, deprive the enemy of a valuable resource, and begin a final battle to eliminate them from the Fomalhaut system.’

I looked across the glowing plane at the two revenants, light and dizzy with relief and elation. I was certain that Prem was chasing the same thing as me, but only I had the means to track down the information she needed. I could hand my clan a great victory, and reclaim my place amongst my peers.

‘You failed to find what you were looking for in my security not because it is hidden, but because it isn’t there,’ I said. ‘It isn’t in the security of my assistant, either. I removed all trace of it. But if you want to know about the back doors, and where they lead to, and what they have to do with the ship, I’ll lead you to them. I ask only that my kholop and I be returned to our former position.’

‘Oh, I think that we can do better than that,’ the Redactor Svern said.

And so I returned to the Library of the Homesun. Not as a lone and penitent exile who had succeeded in the small task given to him, but at the head of a small army of officers and troopers. We were met at the entrance hall by the living Redactors, and the journeymen and women I had asked to volunteer to help me, and their kholops. The Redactor Miriam stepped forward to meet the splendidly caparisoned myrmidon who was the chief of the delegation from the Singleton clan. He bowed so low that the crest of tall plumes on top of his helmet almost brushed the floor, and then straightened and held up his hand, and shot the formal request to the Redactor Miriam’s security. She accepted it without comment, and turned to me and looked me up and down with cold contempt.

‘Don’t think this will absolve you,’ she said. ‘In fact, you’re doubly damned now.’

I met her gaze and said, ‘You always wanted me to join the army. And so I have, and so has everyone who serves the Library.’

She slapped my face, spat on the ground between us, and turned and stalked away. The other Redactors and the journeymen and women and their assistants, all clad in the plain black of our clan, parted to let her through. There was a long moment of silence. Everyone was looking at me. I felt the blood beat in my cheek.

‘Let’s get to work,’ I said.

Within three kiloseconds, I was standing on an elevated highway that swept between the glass and steel towers of the Brutal Quarter. The sky was the blank white of a dead slate, shedding an even and directionless light. Dry weeds grew here and there in cracks between the concrete blocks that paved the roadway, and around the concrete posts of the railings on either side. There were no shadows, and everything stood out with stark particularity, vivid as anything in reality, far more real than the low-resolution simulacrum of Yakob Singleton’s data miner.

The Horse stood beside me, wearing a sealed recording algorithm that manifested in the viron as mirrored goggles strapped around his head and fastened at the back with a padlock. The eight volunteers, selected because they’d all had experience in shutting down powerful demons, rode skycycles of an antique design, hovering in pairs at the cardinal points around the blocks of the Brutal Quarter. If anything manifested, they would engage it as best they could, without scrupling to save either the Horse or me.

‘Even if we survive this,’ the Horse said, as we walked along the centre of the elevated highway, ‘what makes you think that they’ll let us live after we return with what they want?’

‘The Redactor Svern gave his word.’

‘You always were a hopeless romantic.’

‘And you an unredeemable cynic.’

The Horse looked up at me, the blank sky blankly reflected in the round lenses of his goggles. ‘At least one of us knows how the world works.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘This is just another exorcism. Nothing we haven’t done a hundred times before.’

‘I remember the last time we encountered a demon in the Library,’ the Horse said. ‘First we screamed. Then we ran.’

‘There may not be any demon. There’s no reason why the cultists would have protected their back doors. They hid them well.’

‘You know who has been here,’ the Horse said. ‘And you must remember what we found when we last visited one of the places where she got ahead of us.’

The highway passed between two towers of identical height, one faced with mirror glass and the other with glass as black as obsidian, and we followed the curve of an off-ramp down an empty eight-lane street, crossed an empty plaza. Our securities sent enquiries darting away in every direction, returning reports of nothing more than the normal low-level cycling activity required to maintain the texture and physics of the viron. Every hundred seconds the journeymen and women in the perimeter reported that they had nothing to report.

‘If it wasn’t bad luck to say it’s too quiet, I’d say it’s too quiet,’ the Horse said.

We passed a flock of metal tables and chairs. We skirted the edge of a square planted with a waist-high labyrinth of neatly trimmed thorn bushes. We passed a row of empty storefronts that lined the ground floor of one of the towers. We passed a giant bronze sculpture with three fat lobes, like an internal organ extracted from some alien behemoth. We passed the dry basin of a fountain, where a disarticulated human skeleton lay, its skull grinning at the white sky.

‘Oh-ho,’ the Horse said, with a grim smile.

‘We’ve seen skeletons elsewhere. They didn’t signify.’

‘In the Chapel of Skulls and in the Catacomb Gardens, as part of the viron design. Does this look like it’s part of any design?’

We entered a wide plaza, that stretched away, punctuated only by a gigantic fretted globe balanced on a plinth, towards a tower with narrow windows set in a honeycomb of white concrete. I told the Horse that it wasn’t far to the gate now; a few moments later, he held up a hand and looked all around, turning in a complete circle.

I felt it too, a granulation in the fabric of reality, and unzipped my kit a picosecond before a hundred little mouths opened in the air around us and disgorged a hundred flapping things that flew at us in stuttering stop-start trajectories like trash blown on errant winds. The nearest recoiled from the perimeter of our securities and we loosed algorithms that chased them down and devoured them on the spot, dissipating their little loads of computational energy in bright fizzes of random calculations.

‘That was easy,’ the Horse said.

He was still turning in slow clockwise circles. I turned widdershins, and on my second revolution spotted and zeroed in on motion at the far end of the plaza, low down inside the tall building. It had a double-height lobby, empty but for a pair of tall stairways hooked at either end like integral signs. Their stepped treads were rising and falling past each other, and someone rode the descending staircase. It was Prem, walking across the lobby, through glass doors that slid apart in front of her.

‘It isn’t really her,’ the Horse said.

‘I know.’

But it looked so very much like her. She walked out across the plaza, slender and strong, her dark eyes steady and serious under the straight-cut fringe of her helmet of black hair. Part of me wanted to run towards her, but the impulse was overshadowed by my fear. As she skirted the plinth of the big, fretted globe, she began to grow and lose definition, fading into shadow that grew darker as she expanded. Already taller than the globe, growing taller still with every step, her footfalls thundering across the plaza and echoing from the tall buildings on every side, slabs of stone cracking under her weight and turning black as if charred as she sucked energy from them, their husks splintering away into little whirlwinds of ash.

The demon was ten storeys high, twenty. Sucking all light from the plaza, stooping over us, reaching out towards our perimeter. Energy moves from a hotter to a cooler place, yet the demon was so cold that it seemed to radiate a chthonic chill as if its absolutely black shape was a gateway on to some place colder than absolute zero: a region of negative energy where atoms had not merely stopped moving, but had lost all integrity and shrivelled into the strings that composed their basic particles, and the strings themselves had frozen and ceased singing.

The volunteers at the perimeter of the Brutal Quarter were asking what they should do. I told them to hold their positions. The demon towered above, filling the plaza with its darkness. It was huge, and it was stupid. It reached towards the Horse and me, and we threw algorithms that meshed in mid-air and grew a net fashioned from Riemann geometry that snapped shut around the demon’s hand and raced up its arm in an exotic frothing lace that fixed parts of it inside deeply folded dimensions. Its other hand reached up to its shoulder and broke off the infected arm and with a tremendous wrenching motion tossed it backwards. It spun out propeller-wise, shedding fragments of its fabric, and smashed into the tower at the end of the plaza and evaporated. The shock exploded a thousand panes of glass from their concrete sockets and glass and concrete rained down and fell apart into ash and less than ash before hitting the ground.

One-armed but still growing, the cold black giant reared back and lifted a gigantic foot. It loomed above our feeble protective perimeter like an enemy battleship. And then algorithms spun out of the air all around it, a tangle of thorns and briars that sank into the giant’s flesh. It staggered backward and roared and threshed, but the briars were strong and doubled and redoubled with each blink of the Library’s checksum clock. They bound the giant on the spot in a thorny casing that began to shrink inwards, narrowing to a cable that hung in the air above the shattered plaza and shrank again, at right angles to reality, and vanished.

The eight journeymen and women hung above us on their skycycles, their kholops clinging behind. One dipped lower. It was Li, the partner of Arden. She had gone in, after the demon had killed him, at the head of the crew that had destroyed it. She stood in the saddle of her skycycle, looking down at the Horse and me with grim amusement, saying, ‘Next time you stand against a demon, bring better mathematics.’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘You are carrying them.’

At the far end of the plaza, there was a tinkling crash as the last of the tall building’s glass fell.

Li turned to look, looked all around. ‘The demon was guarding the gate. Where is it?’

It was just two blocks away. I recognised the originals of the buildings in the data miner’s sketchy simulacrum, and in the basement garage of the mirror-clad tower the Horse and I located the collapsed traces of the back door gateway. In the simulacrum it had been no more than a place marker; here, it still retained certain properties that, by use of a simple root kit, could be read and reconstructed from the matrix in which it had been embedded.

Within minutes, we had the locations of all the back doors in the Library. There were not as many as I had expected, but as Li pointed out, even one back door was one too many. I wasn’t surprised to see that one was located in the undistinguished quarter where the demon had killed Arden and Van and destroyed my reputation; the demon that had ridden the poor data miner at the ruined tower on Avalon had been a low-grade copy of that same demon.

It would have taken several gigaseconds to explore and make safe all of them, and track down the information which those who had used the back doors had been sampling and copying. I chose instead to go to the one that had been used most recently.

It was in the Grey Havens. A quarter of docks and shipyards that stretched either side of a reach of water where waves patched from a simple equation rolled endlessly past every kind of ship at anchor. There was a demon here, too. It came roaring out of a warehouse like a comet set on fire and the Horse and I took it down together, binding its raging decoherence into a cube of pure iron scarcely larger than a crystal of salt.

I had been expecting it, or something like it. If we could track all the back doors using a root kit, so could Bree – or the thing that rode her – and it was inevitable that she would have set guardians at each one. Even so, I was badly shaken.

‘Just like any exorcism,’ the Horse said. He was shaken too. And, like me, smudged with carbon soot.

All around us was a circle of devastation. A wooden trireme on fire from stem to stern on one side; two mangled and half-melted travelling cranes and the smashed ruin of a warehouse on the other. Above us, the riders of the skycycles were scouting the rest of the territory for demon traces, questing in a grid pattern over the roofs of warehouses, amongst the beaks of cranes and the masts and superstructures of ships. Tiny shapes against the vast sunset that bloodied the waves endlessly rolling up the reach of water.