The Red Queen (70 page)

Dameon was still sitting beside me, his eyes closed, but I could feel him calming me. Realising I was probably exhausting him, I unfastened my seat binding and got resolutely to my feet. I noticed Dragon eyeing me anxiously and forced a smile for her as I made my careful way, one willed step at a time, to the back of the vessel. I saw Rasial and Gavyn pressed into a narrow space between two cabinets. The boy was sitting up, yawning and knuckling his eyes as if he had just woken. Then, he reached into his forage pouch and scooped out a small, bedraggled owl. It was Fey, whom I had last seen in the mountains; I recognised the colours of her plumage, though she was full grown now. No wonder he had been distressed when the door snagged his pouch!

Gavyn began to stroke her feathers and croon a little tuneless song and I wondered if he had any sense he had saved our lives as well, not to mention bringing me the stone sword. I could not for the life of me remember what I had done with it, but I must have set it down when I had gone to Sendari. I made my way back along the side of the glide towards the front, thinking I would go around and then down to the hold to check on the horses. I glanced at Dameon as I passed him, and wondered if he was thinking of Balboa. The profound sadness I had seen in him from time to time since leaving Habitat was in his face again.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

He opened his eyes and smiled, saying composedly, ‘Do not trouble yourself about me. I am in good company.’ He rested his big hand on Maruman who flattened out under it, but he did not make the mistake of stroking him when he was awake. No one ever did that more than once. ‘I am glad to feel that you are becoming more comfortable.’

‘Not truly,’ I said ruefully. ‘But it is better when I don’t think about what we are doing and where we are. It is strangely humiliating to discover that the rest of you are sanguine about flying while I am awash with terror.’

‘Look!’ Dragon cried. Reluctantly, I joined her and Swallow at the window, and saw a great halo of radiance rising up in the darkness that had come over the land, now the sun had set. I was glad of night, veiling the world far below.

‘It must be the Whelmer Dam,’ Swallow murmured.

‘That’s where Kelver Rhonin went!’ Dragon cried excitedly.

‘It is where we think he was going,’ I said. ‘We do not know if he got there.’

‘He must have done, if the lights are shining,’ Swallow said. ‘Unless they have been shining since the Beforetimers left.’

‘I wonder what damned water is anyway?’ Dragon asked.

The glide changed direction and we began moving directly towards the light. In a little, we were passing over what seemed to me a long, wide chasm filled with water. I saw, too, that the brightness was coming not from lights but from an immense body of water! This was obviously what had protected the beasts from the light-sensitive
rhenlings
. The light was very yellow, and I drew in a breath at the thought that it might be full of the little taint-devouring insects called
dryka
. It would take many millions of the tiny creatures to give off such a potent glow, but perhaps they had found their way into the water long ago, for this much water must be flowing up from some deep subterranean source. Yet surely I had been told there was no natural watercourse near Northport.

The chasm narrowed and the glide turned to follow its northward course, which ran on for some distance, and I marvelled at seeing so much water in such arid terrain. At last we came to the abrupt end of water, for an immense stone wall crossed the chasm, constraining and trapping the water. As we passed over it, there was enough light from the water on the other side of it to let me see several great, thick pipes jutting out and curving down into the ground, then there was only a deep dark chasm.

‘That was a very odd body of water,’ Swallow said. ‘But I did not see any sign of a glide on the ground.’

I had not even looked, for my attention had been concentrated on the water itself. I was about to say that I thought the water was full of taint-devouring insects when Ana called out that Hendon had made a light go on, and the ground was now visible.

‘Do you want to go up the front?’ Dragon asked us eagerly.

Swallow nodded, but I had no desire to go any closer to the enormous window at the front of the glide. ‘I’ll check on the horses,’ I muttered, making my way through the rows of seats to the steps and descending with some relief into the blind dimness of the hold. The horses were still standing in their net harnesses, and I was relieved to see that I had left the stone sword inside a net.

Gahltha beastspoke me as I approached him.

‘I/Gahltha do not like this, ElspethInnle. How long will this
najulkit/
journey take?’

‘I do not know,’ I said, absurdly gratified to find I was not the only one aboard who hated this means of travel. Nevertheless, I said, ‘But you bore the journeys we took by sea so I am sure we will both manage to endure this.’ I tried to sound more confident than I felt.

‘It is true that since the oldOnes made me Daywatcher, ElspethInnle, I have made many unpleasant journeys,’ the black horse agreed with weary resignation.

I promised him that I would come to groom him as soon as I had found a brush. The mere thought of doing such an ordinary thing soothed me. I spoke to the other horses for a little, then I went back up to the main chamber, though I wished I might curl up in the dark hold and coerce myself to sleep until the vessel came to land.

At the top of the steps I drew a deep, steadying breath before emerging into the main chamber again. I forced myself to walk to the front of the glide. Swallow now stood alongside Ana, and Dragon had actually gone around the other side of the bench and was standing on the edge of the window gazing, rapt, at the ground rushing below us. Instead of looking down, I looked up into the star-dappled darkness.

It occurred to me suddenly that this blank wall of fear was exactly what Gahltha had faced when I had first tried to bring him aboard the raft in the White Valley years before, after our escape from Henry Druid’s encampment. Fear had won on that occasion, but it had not defeated him again, and I took courage from the fact. Dragon had feared water, too. That fear had been so extreme that she had gone mad even when Kella tried to make her bathe. Miryum had been crippled by fear, too, not of water but of height, when she had been forced to walk a high pole during the Battlegames in Sador. I suddenly understood her outrage at finding that courage and will were not enough to subdue fear.

I looked at Hendon, knowing that man-shaped though he was, he was not a man. Then I grinned despite myself, noticing belatedly that I had done what the others kept doing, and had thought of him as ‘he’. Maybe that was why they could trust it – him – knowing the androne was controlling the glide and therefore had all of our lives in his hands. It struck me suddenly that in my past-dreams, when I had seen Cassy in a Beforetime flying vessel, there had always been a shadowy human sitting in a little compartment at the front of the flier. Perhaps it had been an androne.

Belatedly, I noticed what must be the complex workings of the glide atop the bench in front of the androne, but he had not moved, and I saw now that his hands were both flat to the bench, several of his fingers curled into small openings. A glowing panel was set into the bench amidst the levers and knobs, showing the same vision as the large screen but with numbers and letter flashing and changing atop it; the greenish light from the letters and numbers played over the androne’s shining carapace, making its eyes glitter strangely.

I shook my head, unable to think of it as human, even if I did think of it as ‘he’ from time to time. I wondered what would happen if it withdrew itself from the glide or simply lost power. Would we drop from the sky like a stone? The thought brought me out in a clammy sweat and I cursed myself for letting my imagination get the better of me.

Then the glide tilted slightly. I closed my eyes again, taking deep breaths.

‘Are you all right, Elspeth? You look truly awful.’ It was Dragon, come to stand beside me.

I forced a smile for her. ‘Well, I am as fine as anyone could be soaring over the dark strange world without wings,’ I said.

She took my words at face value and her expression brightened. ‘Isn’t it wondrous? Never did I imagine I would travel so far and see such sights as this when I lived in the ruins on the West Coast.’

It came to me then, in the way odd thoughts sometimes do come randomly, that she must have had a name in that lost childhood in the Red Land. Not Dragon – the name we had given her, almost jokingly to begin with, because of the horrible grotesque visions of monsters she had been able to coerce people into seeing – but a true name given to her by her mother. It occurred to me that this might be a good moment to tell her that I wanted to see if I could enter her mind when she slept, but then Swallow spoke.

‘I am beginning to be ravenous,’ Swallow said, but we were all too preoccupied to answer.

The glide flew on and on into an inky darkness, in which, after a time, not a single star shone, for we had flown into a bleared pall that even the blinding glide light could not penetrate. Finally, Ana bade Hendon stop it shining. I preferred the darkness, though it was daunting to be flying into nothing. But Ana assured me that the glide had devices that could read the shape of the land whether or not we could see it. She had tended everyone’s wounds, lamenting her box of herbs, though she admitted she had enough for the nonce.

‘I think Dragon and I ought to prepare a meal if we can manage it, and we ought to get some rest,’ Swallow said.

Ana asked the androne if it was safe for us to make a meal. It had not occurred to me that anything we would do within the glide might distract the androne, since it was somehow commanding the vessel and all of its devices.

‘It is safe to prepare sustenance in the galley at this time, Technician Ana. However, in the event of a turbulence warning siren, all passengers must resume seats and harnesses immediately.’

The androne spoke these slightly alarming words in the same blandly monotonous voice I remembered from my waking in the resurrection chamber and I remembered with momentary wry amusement how furious I had been at its apparent indifference to my plight and pleas.

Swallow went off with Dragon to investigate the galley, which I remembered was the same name a kitchen was given aboard a shipboat, and I trailed after them, willing to help though marvelling that they could think of food at all when we were flying high above unknown ground to an unknown destination in a Beforetime machine.

The glide galley turned out to be the area between the bench and the wall, where I had seen the cooking box. The wall where it was fixed and surrounded by cupboards turned out to be able to be slid ingeniously around to connect to the end of the bench, revealing a small hidden eating chamber containing a table and two long benches. After a little experimentation based on what she had learned in Kelver Rhonin’s residence, Dragon managed to produce a simple meal using the Beforetimer pouches of pebbles and dust. She had shooed Swallow away to see that the beasts had water and fodder, wondering a little that a glide intended to carry so many people would have such a tiny kitchen.

‘I don’t suppose it would have been much needed on the flights between the settlements of the Pellmar Quadrants,’ Dameon said, having come to sit on the other side of the bench with me on stools that Swallow had discovered swung out from niches within it. ‘They would not have taken more than an hour or so in this.’

He was right, and given this, I doubted the little galley would have been used at all, save maybe by the few people who would have crewed it, in between flights.

‘How much food do we have?’ I asked Dragon.

‘Ana will know better than me, but I would say, if we are careful, a few days at most for the beasts, and a good bit more for us if we count the dust and pebble packages. I suppose the wolves and dogs and Maruman can eat our food, but I doubt the horses will stomach it. We had some good pressed cakes of fodder for them, but that was one of the bundles left behind in the rush to leave.’

‘It is a wonder we got as much aboard as we did,’ I said firmly.

When Swallow returned and the food was prepared, we all sat down to eat in the little eating niche, even Ana, who seemed to have decided her duty was to remain constantly with Hendon. Dragon apologised for the oddness of one dish as she served it, saying some of the pouches contained sweet food and others salty, and there was no way of knowing which was which save by preparing and tasting them.

‘I prefer unusual to bland,’ Dameon said.

‘We had plenty of both in Habitat,’ I said, grimacing at the memory.

Swallow gave Ana a teasing look. ‘After the tongue-lashing you gave God I think the Speci will no longer be eating bland foods.’

Somewhat dreamily, Dameon said, ‘God will probably have noted every single thing you and Tash cooked and everything Ahmedri is now cooking and that is what the Speci will find themselves cooking and eating in future. I wonder how they will find Ahmedri’s spices.’

Dragon looked downcast at the mention of Tash and we talked for a little about the sort of life she might live now. We then turned to speculate as to whether Miryum would ultimately choose to be put back into a cryopod or to live and endure the death that would come to her as she succumbed to the final stages of the Endrax virus.

‘If only we had got to Whelmer,’ Ana said. ‘The fact that it was all lit up really makes me think Kelver Rhonin found a computermachine there.’

‘Even if he did, it can’t have had a connection to God, or he would have gone back to Northport to finish what he started,’ Swallow said. ‘Besides, it was not the buildings that were lit up at Whelmer, but the water itself.’

Ana frowned. ‘Well someone must have made the lights under the water come on. I suppose it had something to do with whatever work was being done there in the Beforetime. God said it was considered to be very important by the Pellmar people.’

‘I don’t think it was lights at all,’ I said, startled to realise they had not immediately come to the same conclusion as I had, that the brightness in the water was the result of little taint-devouring insects. But what Ana had said prompted a strange thought.

‘What then?’ Swallow asked, when I sat silent and somewhat stunned.

‘I believe the water was full of taint-devouring insects,’ I said. ‘It was the yellow colour that made me think of it, and I simply supposed that the water must come from some subterranean source containing them. But I was told that Subio, Midland and Westside were all located near subterranean springs, which could be tapped, but not Northport. And when we passed over the very end of the long lake, there was some sort of stone wall, holding the water back, and immense pipes that look like the ones we saw in the mountains.’

‘I thought of the
graag
,’ Swallow said, frowning.

‘There was water and there were shining insects in the
graag
,’ Dragon said.

‘Exactly,’ I said, every one of their observations making me more certain I was right in my fantastic theory. ‘And seeing the shining water in the
graag
, I thought the water infected with the insects must have got in through the cracks. But what if the water was in the pipes, with the insects, before it cracked.’

‘In the Beforetime . . .’ Dameon murmured.

‘Ye gods, that water that was in the bottle in the
graag
when it collapsed, I got that from the pipe in the mountains,’ Swallow said. ‘But what can it mean?’

‘It means that was what they were doing at Whelmer,’ Ana said, eyes shining. ‘They were breeding the insects in the water, and those pipes coming out of the stone retaining wall were probably connected to the ones in the mountains and the
graag
.’

‘It was another way of preparing for what they all seemed to have been so certain was coming,’ I said. ‘They somehow created insects that could devour taint. That was why Jak found them so willing to be adapted. Ye gods, how strange that he had the same idea as the Beforetimers.’ I had no doubt that we were right; it made sense of so many things.

‘You know, it occurs to me that the reason Kelver Rhonin went to Whelmer might have been to release the shining waters,’ Dameon said.

‘I bet if he did, the computermachine told him it couldn’t release the water unless the govamen approved it,’ Swallow said.

We stared at one another incredulously, not one of us doubting it. Then Dameon chuckled. ‘Whether or not the govamen permitted it, the shining insects
did
get out, and they are doing what they were made to do, even if not as swiftly as they would have done if the shining waters were released. And Jak is helping them.’

He was right, and I felt suddenly immensely moved and cheered by the thought that for all the Beforetimers had tried to control and contain the world in their time and even beyond it, they had failed. And once I had dealt with Sentinel, they would have failed again. Then, once and for all, we would be free of them.

It was the first time I had thought of the Beforetimers in that way.

‘Incredible,’ Swallow muttered, shaking his head. ‘I cannot get over the fact that they had the ability to build a ship that can sail through the air, and cities beneath the earth, and they went to such astonishing lengths to prepare for the damage they knew their weapons would cause, including creating Sentinel to punish anyone for using those weapons, but they could not conceive of
not
creating the weapons in the first place.’

‘Perhaps the creation of Sentinel was the beginning of trying to deal differently with the world and one another,’ Dameon said.

‘I think the trouble was that they were not all good or all bad,’ I said. ‘Just as there are the Gadfians and Herders and the Council, as well as healers and rebels like Dardelan, there would have been Beforetimers who did not care what they did to get what they wanted, who did not think of the future at all, but only of what power they could amass and how they might use it to benefit themselves.’

‘How could they not think of the future?’ Dameon said. ‘Did they not have children?’

‘Perhaps they formed a group mind,’ Dameon said. ‘You always say a group mind is a good deal stupider than the mind of a single person.’

It was an interesting thought and I pondered it a bit as Ana went back to Hendon and I helped Swallow to clear away the little mess we had made.

‘I sometimes wonder, when I think of all these projects preparing for disaster, and especially seeing the Pellmar Quadrants, if someone may have actually known the end was coming,’ the gypsy said.

‘Maybe someone was determined . . .’ I said darkly. ‘Just lately I have wondered if Sentinel was never meant to work to stop the end from coming, but rather was meant to orchestrate it. Only that went horribly wrong.’

He stared at me. ‘You think someone set Sentinel up to fail?’

‘I don’t think anyone would have wanted the Great White to happen, but all those supposed accidents that led to the five powers wanting to set up Sentinel – you have to wonder who was behind them, and how they would have felt about Sentinel. Maybe someone had the bright idea of worming their way into the Sentinel project and sabotaging it, or rigging it to provoke yet another accident,’ I said.

‘Ye gods, that is an ugly idea,’ Swallow said soberly. ‘But if someone feared that, or got wind of it, you can imagine it giving rise to the Pellmar Quadrants.’

‘The govamen, at least some of them, were intimately connected to the weaponmakers of the Beforetime, and they were behind Sentinel,’ I said. ‘That is enough of a paradox to make anyone nervous.’

Dragon had turned to look out the small window in the eating chamber, and now she said, ‘It is so very dark. I wonder if the blackness is mist of some kind.’

‘Hendon says it is smoke,’ Swallow said. ‘Ana asked him but he said it was something called anthracite, on fire under the earth. Apparently it is some natural stone that can only be lit by an unnaturally hot burst of fire. The sort that would be caused by the explosion of a Beforetime weaponmachine.

‘But it can’t
still
be burning . . .’ I began.

‘Ana said that to Hendon and he said that even in the Beforetime accidental fires had been lit that had burned for hundreds of years. Hendon said if there was enough anthracite, a fire could burn for a thousand years.’

That was so astonishing that we were all silenced.

Finally Swallow got up and stretched and said he would go and see to the beasts’ chambers, for they would need some cleaning. Dragon said she would go and take some food to Gavyn, and try to entice him out of his niche between the cupboards.

I went to sit by Maruman, who was sound asleep on one of the rows of chairs fixed to the floor. I stroked the old cat’s fur while I had the chance, for the comfort it gave me, and told myself firmly that riding in a vessel that could guide itself was not truly much different from being pulled in a wagon drawn by horses who knew where to go. But a snide little voice pointed out that horses were live creatures who might be supposed not to want to die, while a machine did not experience any emotion.

Yet in truth, I was becoming accustomed to the idea of flying as well as to the motion, and it struck me that humans were even more adaptable than the little taint-devouring insects. Then the glide tilted slightly and I swallowed hard and hoped I had not made a mistake in eating.

‘Hannah would never have let you use a glide if she had not foreseen that you would be safe,’ Dameon said gently.

He had been lying on the floor again, but now he was sitting up. Sighing, I apologised glumly for burdening him with my fears. I wondered belatedly if our talk of Habitat over the meal had reminded him of Balboa. He had been very silent during that part of our conversations. I never had spoken to him of the Speci girl, despite all my good intentions, and even now, a cowardly part of me insisted that there was no use in raising the matter since there was now no possibility of the Speci woman accompanying us. Yet I must mention her sooner or later if only to give him the chance to speak of her and ease his mind.