The Thousand Emperors (25 page)

Dry-mouthed, Luc forced himself closer to the table. He now saw that the man lying there was being operated on. His skull had been cut open, black pits gaped where his eyes had once been, and
much of his lower jaw had been removed. One of the mechants was engaged in manoeuvring a chunk of grey-blue machinery into place where his jawbone had been.

Luc staggered away and threw up in a corner.

He coughed, wiped his mouth, then pressed his forehead against the cool damp stone, breathing harshly. In that moment he heard a sudden, brief burst of static coming from behind him.

He turned to hear a second burst of static issuing from the machinery-clogged throat of the needle-fingered creature. After another moment it appeared to lose interest in him, turning its
attention back to its comatose patient. Luc wondered if it had been trying to say something, assuming any kind of human consciousness was still trapped behind that savagely disfigured face.

Luc became aware of a slow, dragging shuffle, echoing from some way further down the corridor. Peering ahead, he saw the very creature he’d come looking for disappear into a shadowed
alcove, not far from where the corridor came to an end.

Part of him wanted to turn back, to the world of daylight and air that didn’t smell of mould and disinfectant and death. His heart thundered inside his chest at the thought of going any
farther. Worse, he had no idea how de Almeida might react if she discovered he had come down here.

But he had to know.

Making his way quickly to the same alcove into which the stooped figure had disappeared, Luc found himself at the entrance to a wide, low-ceilinged room. Instantly he was bathed in a blast of
heat emanating from an open furnace at the opposite end of the room from him, the air shimmering violently from the heat. Rubbish was piled up on either side of the furnace door, while several more
of de Almeida’s eyeless monstrosities worked steadily at shovelling it all into the flames.

He saw the stooped creature he had followed, outlined by the flames dancing in the heart of the furnace. At first he thought it would pick up a shovel and join its companions, but instead, to
his unending horror, it climbed in through the open furnace door, burning like a torch as the flames caught at its ragged clothes. Apparently impervious to pain, it continued to move deeper into
the furnace before slowly pitching forward.

The roar of the furnace grew incrementally louder for a second or two.

Luc heard a sound like the cry of an animal caught in a trap, then realized it had come from his own throat.

He took several steps backwards and stumbled against the wall of the passageway. His lungs felt like they had turned to ice despite the intensity of the heat.

The next thing he knew, he was back upstairs and halfway through the greenhouse attached to de Almeida’s laboratory. He kept going until he was outside, then collapsed against a low wall
bordering a garden before again throwing up over some artfully arranged flowers.

As de Almeida had promised, a flier stood waiting for him, a blunt-nosed affair with a more utilitarian appearance than most, meaning it was probably used primarily as a goods vehicle. He
staggered towards it as if drunk, climbing on board and barely noticing when it lifted up into clear blue skies.

He closed his eyes, but all he could see was that same stooped figure pitching forward into an inferno.

And maybe one day de Almeida will get tired of trying to help you, and turn you into another one of her monsters
.

As he hugged himself, and the flier boosted high into the atmosphere, it came to him that he was going to have to try and save himself, although
how
he might do that remained beyond him.
De Almeida was quite possibly psychotic, and the rest of the Council – those same people he’d given a lifetime of service to – were, judging by what he’d seen and heard,
even worse.

But that didn’t mean he had any choice but to play along for the moment. He thought again of those terrible bright flames, and felt as if strips of gauze had been lifted from his eyes. The
world seemed different now, had taken on a new and sinister edge.

Between that – and the long, painful quest to find out what purpose might lie behind Antonov’s surgery on him – all he could do was wait.

A couple of hours after rescuing Jacob, Jonathan Kulic guided his horse and cart into a small settlement on the edge of the forest, just as the sky began to redden towards
dusk.

Jacob watched the landscape pass by from under the carpet Kulic had thrown over him in the rear of the cart. He kept the case he had recovered from his ship clutched tight against his chest. The
settlement that Kulic called home was, to Jacob’s eyes, astoundingly primitive. Smoke spiralled upwards from thatched-roof dwellings, while candles and lanterns flickered from inside windows
formed from heavy, puddled glass. There were farm animals in pens, and a stable with horses. It was a stark contrast to the spires of one of Darwin’s cities, glittering on the far
horizon.

Kulic guided his horse and cart into a barn, then led Jacob into his home through an adjoining door. Kulic’s residence proved to be a single-storey affair of brick and plaster, with wooden
floorboards that creaked with every step.

Jacob’s duty was to hide himself in one of these Left-Behind communities, and take advantage of the Coalition’s incomprehensible willingness to allow them to continue existing. From
his conversation with Kulic throughout their journey from the coast, he had learned that the Left-Behind had become considerably more militant in their beliefs over the decades, having come to
reject nearly every form of technology imaginable, up to and including previously accepted technologies such as the internal-combustion engine and electricity. The electric torch Kulic had used to
aid him in his search through the deep forest was something he was forced to keep secret from his neighbours.

The only source of heat in Kulic’s hovel came from a heavy iron stove, with flames licking behind a narrow grate. Pots and pans hung from steel hooks above a table scattered with the ruins
of chopped vegetables. Jacob stood close by the stove, warming his hands before the grate and trying hard not to breathe too deeply, since everything smelled of mould and animal shit. He wondered
what the Darwinians, living as they did in their shining silver cities, made of it all when they gazed down at these disease-ridden hovels, clustered together in the mud and filth.

‘Once the beacon told me you were here, I spread it about that a cousin might come to visit me from New Jerusalem,’ Kulic explained as he closed the latch on the front door.
‘That settlement’s a long way away from here, a good four or five days’ journey on horseback. I thought it’d make as good a story as anything else.’

‘It’ll do,’ said Jacob, his attention still focused on getting warm. ‘It’s called a transceiver, by the way, not a beacon. Where do you keep it?’

‘Downstairs,’ Kulic replied, ‘in the cellar.’

‘I would like to see it, please,’ said Jacob, looking around. He hadn’t seen any sign of steps or a staircase leading down.

Kulic stepped towards the centre of the room, reaching down to pull a faded, hand-woven rug to one side and revealing a trapdoor with an iron ring set into it. Kulic pulled the trapdoor up with
a grunt, revealing a short ladder leading downwards. A foul miasma rose from below, and Jacob covered his mouth, thinking that even the cave in the woods had been better than this.

Kulic climbed down the steps and out of sight. With a sigh, Jacob wrenched himself away from the stove’s welcoming heat and followed the old man down.

Farming implements hung from hooks all around the walls of the stone-floored cellar. Kulic lit a gas lantern hanging from a hook in the ceiling then, as Jacob watched, stepped over to a barrel
that had been pushed into a corner, a rusted kettle and several dirty-looking rags dumped on top of it.

Kulic brushed all of this junk onto the floor, then lifted the lid from the barrel, which proved to be full of oily-looking water. He took hold of an almost invisibly thin thread hanging over
the side of the barrel and pulled on it with extreme care, soon drawing a package wrapped in heavy oilskins up from the barrel’s depths before depositing it on the floor. Jacob watched as the
old man carefully unwrapped the package to reveal a large wooden box.

‘Here,’ said Kulic, opening the box and lifting out a fist-sized device, passing it to Jacob with an uncertain grin. Something about his expression made Jacob think of a dog
desperate for its master’s approval.

He studied the device by the dim light of the ceiling-mounted lantern. In outward appearance it looked like nothing more than a blunt, copper-plated sphere, but in reality it was a compact mass
of molecular circuitry impervious to any but the most ruthless scan. It sang with information from the moment his fingers touched it, firing a blizzard of condensed data into his lattice that had
the quality of long-held memories.

He looked up at Kulic. ‘I see you’ve been speaking to it, telling it everything that’s been happening?’

Kulic nodded, his expression full of awe. ‘Yes, just as my father asked me to. I . . . wondered if I was being a fool, talking to a piece of metal, as if it had ears.’ He looked at
Jacob with hope. ‘It worked?’

‘Yes.’ Jacob nodded.

‘My father told me it could communicate with other worlds.’

Then he told you too much
, thought Jacob, frowning. The device was indeed built to pick up instantaneous transmissions across space, regardless of distance, although the power consumption
required to boost a signal across so many light-years without it dissolving into random noise was quite enormous. Along with news of events back on Temur as well as throughout the Tian Di, Jacob
had in just these last moments received adjustments to his mission plan. Although his primary goal remained the same, there was now an added urgency to his purpose in being here.

‘The device tells me the Left-Behind split into factions, and that the more rigidly conservative faction became dominant.’

Kulic stared at the device nestled in Jacob’s hands with horrified fascination. ‘That little thing – it told you all that?’

The Left-Behind had briefly been a powerful force on the surviving colony worlds following the Abandonment, preaching that the artefacts responsible for turning every living thing on Earth to
dust had been sent there by God, in order to gather the souls of mankind prior to a final judgement. The religion had eventually been outlawed throughout the Tian Di, but here in the Coalition
followers were permitted to exist, so long as they remained far from the provenance of the cities.

‘You told the transceiver that Bruehl had begun to believe he was some kind of messiah, destined to lead the Left-Behind through the Founder Network.’

‘I still remember him from when I was much younger,’ said Kulic, nodding. ‘Before he died, my father told me Bruehl was responsible for setting up safe-houses for other Tian Di
agents. Bruehl was tasked with penetrating the Coalition’s secure military networks, in order to find their weaknesses. But something happened.’

‘What?’

Kulic’s balding pate glistened under the dim light of the lantern. ‘He started telling people God was waiting for us up at the end of time, along with everyone else who’d been
rescued when the angels razed Earth; he said that was why the Founder Network had been created, so that all sentient beings could find their way there. This went against the doctrine of the
Church’s Elders and made them very unhappy.’

‘And your father? How did he feel about this?’

‘At first he thought Bruehl was insane, but I think my father had a great deal of trouble adjusting to life here. He married because it was expected of him, and it was his duty to fit in.
I . . . realize now that I was nothing more than part of his cover, that he had never really wanted a child.’

‘He told you this?’

‘No.’ Kulic shook his head. ‘I worked some of it out for myself, once I knew the truth about him . . .’ His voice trailed off.

‘Go on,’ Jacob prompted.

‘I think my father committed suicide, in a way,’ Kulic finally said. ‘He changed his mind about Bruehl, and began to believe him. I think his new-found religious beliefs were a
way to hide the truth from himself, that he no longer wanted to live.’

‘Bruehl had quite a few followers, I understand. Your father was only one of them.’

‘Yes, Bruehl had a great number of followers after a while. Even I was one. We all followed him when he left for the cities. He said he’d had a vision, that God would guide us
through the Founder Network, and the Coalition wouldn’t be able to stand in our way.’

‘How many of you went with him?’

Kulic shrugged. ‘A thousand, perhaps. At that time I had no idea of my father’s true identity, and the same went for the other agents like Bruehl. When we left, the Elders condemned
us for our actions.’ The old man stopped, gazing wistfully into the distance.

‘And?’

‘And we never even reached the cities. First Bruehl and my father started fighting, and before long the people who’d followed them started to take sides.’ Kulic shook his head.
‘Folks around here don’t like to speak about those days any more, but I was there. A few hundred continued on with Bruehl, while the rest followed my father back home. But not all of us
were allowed back in – old scores were being settled, I suppose.’

‘And what happened to Bruehl?’

‘More people abandoned him and drifted back to their villages over the following days and weeks. As far as I know he managed to lead a few dozen as far as the nearest city, but all I know
about what happened after that is rumour and conjecture. From what I heard,’ said Kulic, with an uncharacteristic touch of sarcasm, ‘they never reached the Founder Network, since God
apparently failed to supply them with the necessary authorization to pass through a single transfer gate.’

As if even the Coalition would have wasted one moment listening to the ravings of madmen straggling in from some self-imposed backwater, branches and leaves clinging to their holy beards
,
thought Jacob. Learning about such things left a sour and unpleasant taste in his belly. He could only imagine that Bruehl and this man’s father must have been suffering from some shared
psychosis they had somehow kept hidden during their mission training – a psychosis that had achieved full flower once they found themselves surrounded by people even crazier than
themselves.