Thousandth Night (11 page)

The
meteor shower was over, I noticed.

“The
screen,” Fescue said.

I
gave the necessary commands, lowering the screen. “Thank you,” I said, breathless
and distraught. “That was . . .  quick thinking, Fescue.”

“It
must have been a false alarm after all,” he said, his unmasked eyes piercing
mine. “Or a mistake.”

“I
thought my ship was going to blow up.”

“Of
course you did. Why else would you have told us?” He made a growl-like sound.
“You were about to announce the winner, Campion. Perhaps you ought to
continue.”

There
was a murmur of approval. If I’d had the sympathy of the crowd five minutes
ago, I had lost it completely now. My throat was dry. I saw Purslane, the fox
mask tugged down, and something like horror on her face.

“Campion,”
Fescue pushed. “The winner . . .  if it isn’t too much trouble.”

But
I didn’t know the winner. The system wasn’t due to inform me for another hour.
I had delayed my receipt of the announcement, not wishing to be distracted from
the main business.

“I.
. . the winner. Yes. The winner of the strand . . .  the best strand winner . .
.  is . . .  the winner. And the winner is . . . ” I fell silent for ten or
twenty seconds, frozen in the gaze of nearly a thousand mortified onlookers.
Then my thoughts suddenly quietened, as if I’d found an epicentre of mental
calm. I seemed to stand outside myself.

“There
is no winner,” I said softly. “Not yet.”

“Perhaps
you ought to stand down,” Fescue said. “You’ve arranged a fine reunion; we all
agree on that. It would be a shame to ruin it now.”

Fescue
took a step toward me, presumably intending to help me from the plinth.

“Wait,”
I said, with all the dignity I could muster. “Wait and hear me out. All of
you.”

“You
have an explanation for this travesty?” Fescue asked.

“Yes,”
I said. “I do.”

He
stopped in his tracks and folded his arms. “Then let’s hear it. Part of me
would love to think that this is all part of your Thousandth Night plans,
Campion.”

“Something
awful has happened,” I said. “There has been a conspiracy . . .  a murder. One
of us has been killed.”

Fescue
cocked his head. “One of us?”

I
scanned the crowd and pointed to Burdock’s duplicate. “That’s not Burdock,” I
said. “That’s an impostor. The real Burdock is dead.”

The
duplicate Burdock pulled a startled face. He looked at the people surrounding
him, and then back at me, aghast. He said something and the onlookers laughed.

“The
real Burdock is dead?” Fescue asked. “Are you quite sure of this, Campion?”

“Yes.
I know because I’ve seen his body. When we broke into his ship . ..”

“When
‘we’ broke into his ship,” Fescue repeated, silencing me. “You mean there was
someone else involved?”

Purslane’s
voice rang out clear and true. “It was me. Campion and I broke into the ship.
Everything he’s told you is the truth. Burdock was murdered by proponents of
the Great Work, because Burdock knew what they had done.”

Fescue
looked intrigued. “Which was?”

“They
destroyed an entire culture . . .  Grisha’s people . . .  a culture that had
uncovered Prior data damaging to the Great Work. Wiped them out with Homunculus
weapons. Burdock tried to cover up his discovery, for fear of what the
Advocates would do to him. There was a discrepancy in Burdock’s dreams . . .  an
error.” Purslane’s control began to falter. “He said he’d been somewhere he
hadn’t. . . somewhere Campion had been.”

“So
it was Burdock’s word against Campion?” Fescue turned to the impostor. “Does
this make the slightest sense to you?”

The
impostor shrugged and looked at me with something between pity and spite.

“Hear
us out,” Purslane insisted. “All Campion was hoping to do was provoke the
raising of anticollision shields. The ship that destroyed Grisha’s people . . .
 we had data on its field resonance, but we needed to see our own fields before
we could establish a match.” Purslane swallowed and regained some measure of
calm. “I’m broadcasting the resonance data to all ships. See it for yourselves.
See what those bastards did to Grisha’s people.”

There
was a moment, a lull, while the crowd assessed the data Purslane had just made
public. She had taken a frightful risk in revealing the information, for now
our enemies had every incentive to move against us, even if that meant killing
everyone else on the island. But I agreed with what she had done. We were out
of options.

Except
one.

“Very
impressive,” Fescue admitted. “But we’ve no evidence that you didn’t forge this
data.”

“The
authentication stamp ties it to Burdock,” Purslane said.

Fescue
looked regretful. “Authentication can always be faked, with sufficient
ingenuity. You’ve already admitted that you broke into his ship, after all.
Disavow your involvement in this, Purslane, before it’s too late.”

“No,”
she said. “I won’t.”

Fescue
nodded at a number of the people around him, including a handful of senior
Advocates.

“Restrain
the two of them,” he said.

I
fingered the metal shape under my flame-coloured costume. My hand closed on the
haft and removed Grisha’s particle gun. The crowd silenced as the evil little
thing glinted in the lantern light. Earlier, unwitnessed, I had primed the weapon
onto Burdock. I squeezed a jewelled button and the gun moved as if in an
invisible grip, nearly dragging itself from my fist. It swivelled onto Burdock
and locked steady as a snake. Even if I released my hold on the gun, it would
keep tracking its designated target.

“Stand
aside, please,” I said.

“Don’t
do anything silly,” Fescue said, even as the crowd parted around Burdock’s
impostor.

The
moment closed around me like a vice. I had seen the real, dying Burdock aboard
his ship—at least, I believed I had. When I squeezed the trigger, I would be
killing a mindless automaton, a bio-mechanical construct programmed to
duplicate Burdock’s responses with a high degree of accuracy . . . but not a
living thing. Nothing with a sense of self.

But
what if the dying figure on the ship was the impostor, and this was still the
real Burdock? What if the whole story about Grisha and the assassination agent
had been the lie, and the real Burdock was standing in front of me? I had no
idea why such an elaborate charade might have been staged . . .  but I couldn’t
rule it out, either. And there was one possibility that sprang to mind. What if
Burdock had enemies among the line, and they wanted him dead, with someone else
to pin the blame on? Suddenly I felt dizzy, lost in mazelike permutations of
bluff and double bluff. I had to make a simple choice. I had to trust my
intuitive sense of what was true and what was false.

“If
this is a mistake,” I said, “forgive me.”

I
squeezed the trigger. The particle beam sliced its way across space, piercing
the figure in the chest.

Burdock’s
impostor touched a hand to the smoking wound, opened its mouth as it speak, and
fell lifeless to the floor. The crowd screamed their horror, revolted at the
idea that a member of the Gentian Line had murdered another.

My
work done, I let go of the particle gun. It remained floating before me, as if
inviting me to take another shot. Burdock’s impostor lay on its side, with one
dry hand open to the sky. He had touched the wound and there had been no blood.
I allowed myself a moment of relief. The others would see that the thing I had
killed was not a man, but a bloodless construct. But even as these thoughts
formed, the body retched and coughed a mouthful of dark blood onto the perfect
white marble of the terrace. Its face was a mask of fear and incomprehension.
Then it was still.

The
crowd surged. They were on me in seconds, swatting aside the gun. They pulled
me from the plinth and smothered me to the ground. The breath was knocked out
of me. They began to pull at my clothing with animal fury. I heard shouts as
some of the revellers tried to pull the others off me, but the collective
anger—the collective repulsion—was too great to be resisted. I felt something
crack in my chest, tasted my own blood as someone smashed a fist into my jaw. I
thrashed out, survival instincts kicking in, but there were too many of them.
Most of them were still wearing carnival masks.

Then
something happened. Just before I was about to go under, the attack calmed.
Someone landed a final punch in my chest, sending a bolt of pain up my spine,
and then pulled away. I received a desultory kick, and then they left me there,
sprawled on the ground, my mouth wet, my body bruised. I knew they hadn’t
finished with me. They were just leaving me alone while something else
attracted their attention.

In
their hundreds, they were pressing against the low railing that encircled the
balcony. They were looking out to sea, drawn by something going on beyond the
island. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled to the slumped form of
Purslane. They had not hurt her as badly as me, but there was still a cut on
her lip where someone had slapped her.

“Are
you all right?” I said, my mouth thick with blood.

“Better
than you,” she said.

“I
don’t think they’re done with us. There’s a distraction now . . . maybe we
could reach our ships?”

She
shook her head and used her finger to wipe blood from my chin. “We started
this, Campion. Let’s finish it.”

“It’s
Fescue,” I said. “He’s the one.”

We
followed the onlookers to the balcony. No one gave us a second glance, even as
we pushed forward to the front. All round us the revellers were looking at the
sea. Sleek dark forms were surfacing from the midnight waters, black as night
themselves. They lolled and bellied in the waves, pushing great flukes and
flippers into the sky, jetting white spouts of water from blowholes.

Purslane
asked me what was happening.

“I
don’t know,” I said truthfully.

“You
planned this, Campion. This has to be something to do with Thousandth Night.”

“I
know.” I winced at the pain in my chest, certain that the mob had broken a rib.
“But I don’t remember what I planned. I thought the meteor shower was an end to
it.”

They
were everywhere now, surfacing in multitudes. “It’s as if they’re gathering in
readiness for something,” Purslane said. “Like the start of a migration.”

“To
where?”

“You
tell me, Campion.”

But
I didn’t have to tell her. It was soon obvious. In ones and twos they started
leaving the ocean, rising into the air. Curtains of water drained off their
flanks as they parted company with the sea. Ones and twos at first, then whole
schools of them, rising into the sky between the hovering cliffs of our ships,
as if they were born to fly.

“This
is . . . impossible,” I said. “They’re aquatics. They don’t. . . fly.”

“Unless
you made them that way. Unless you always planned this.”

Pink-tinged
aurorae flickered around the rising forms, hinting at the fields that allowed
them to fly, and which would—I presumed— sustain them when the air thinned out,
high above us. Some ghost of a memory now pushed its way into my consciousness.
Had I truly engineered these aquatics for flight, equipping them with implanted
field generators, and enough animal wisdom to use them? The memory beckoned,
and then shrivelled under my attention.

“Maybe,”
I said.

“Good,”
Purslane said. “But now the next question: why?”

But
we didn’t have long to wonder about that. Suddenly the sky was cut in two by a
brighter meteor than any we had seen during the earlier display. It boomed,
reverberating down to the horizon and left a greenish aftertinge.

Another
followed it: brighter now.

As
if the meteor had triggered something, the sea erupted with a vast wave of
departing aquatics. Thousands of them now, packed into huge and ponderous
shoals or flocks, each aggregation moving with its own dim identity. The seas
were emptying of life. Another meteor slashed the sky, bringing a temporary
daylight to the scene. Over the horizon, an ominous false dawn signalled some
terrible impact. Something large had smashed into my world. As more trails of
light split the sky, I sensed that it would not be the last.

The
island shook beneath our feet. That made no sense at all: there surely hadn’t
been enough time for shockwaves to reach us yet, but none of us had imagined
the vibration. I steadied myself on the handrail.

“What.
. .” Purslane began.

The
island shook again. That was a cue for the crowd to renew their interest in me,
tearing their attention away from the departing aquatics. Purslane squeezed
closer to me. I tightened my hold on her, while she redoubled her hold on me.

The
crowd advanced.

“Stop,”
boomed out a voice.

Everyone
halted and turned to look at the speaker. It was Fescue, and he was kneeling by
the figure I had shot. He had a hand in the wound I had bored through the body,
plunged deep to the wrist. Slowly he withdrew his hand, slick to the cuff with
blood, but holding something between his fingers, something that wriggled in
them like a little silver starfish.

“This
wasn’t Burdock,” he said, standing to his feet, while still holding the
obscene, wriggling thing. “It was . . .  a thing. Just like Campion and
Purslane told us.” Fescue turned to look at me, his expression grave and
forgiving. “You told the truth.”

“Yes,”
I said, with all the breath I could muster. I realised that I had been wrong
about Fescue: utterly, utterly wrong.

“Then
it’s true,” he said. “One of us has committed a crime.”

“Burdock’s
body is still on his ship,” I said. “All of this can be proved . . .  if you
allow us.”