Alastiar Reynolds

‘I had to know. But I couldn’t know what

was going to happen.’Khouri rubbed circulation back into her hands where they had grown numb. It was good to be out of the restraint webbing that Thorn had put her in. He apologised for that, without very much in the way of conviction. She had to admit that she would never have confessed to the truth without such extreme coercion.
‘What did happen, by the way?’ Thorn added.
I don’t know. Not all of it anyway. We provoked a response, and I’m pretty sure we were about to die, or at least to be swallowed up by that machinery.‘
‘I know. I had that feeling as well.’
They looked at each other, conscious that the period of union in the Inhibitor data-gathering network had permitted them a level of intimacy neither had expected. They had shared very little other than fear, but Thorn at least had been shown that her fear was every bit as intense as his own, and that the Inhibitor attack had not been something she had arranged for his benefit. But there had been something more than fear, hadn’t there? There had been concern for each other’s welfare. And when the third mind had arrived, there had also been something very close to remorse.
‘Thorn… did you feel the other mind?’ Khouri asked.
I felt something. Something other than you, and something other than the machinery.‘
I know who it was,‘ she said, knowing that it was far too late for lies and evasion now, and that Thorn needed to be told as much of the truth as she understood. ’At least, I think I recognised him. The mind was Sylveste’s.‘
‘Dan Sylveste?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I knew him, Thorn. Not well, and not for long, but enough to recognise him again. And I know what happened to him.’
‘Start at the beginning, Ana.’
She rubbed the grit from the edge of her eye, hoping that the machinery was truly inert and not simply sleeping. Thorn was right. Her admission had been the first crack in an otherwise perfect facade. But the crack could not be unmade. It would spread, extending fracturing fingers. All she could offer now was damage limitation.
‘Everything you think you know about the Triumvir is wrong. She isn’t the maniacal tyrant that the populace thinks. The government built up her image. It needed a demon, a hate figure. If the people hadn’t had the Triumvir to hate, they would have directed their anger, their sense of frustration, at the government itself. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.’
‘She murdered a whole settlement.’
‘No…’ She was suddenly weary. ‘No. It didn’t happen like that. She just made it seem that way, don’t you understand? Nobody actually died.’
‘And you can be sure of that, can you?’
‘I was there.’
The hull creaked and reconfigured itself again. Shortly they would be outside the electromagnetic influence of the gas giant. The Inhibitor processes continued unabated: the slow laying of the sub-atmospheric tubes, the building of the great orbital arc. What had just happened within Roc had made no difference to that grander scheme.
‘Tell me about it, Ana. Is that really your name, or is it another layer of untruth that I need to peel back?’
‘It is my name,’ she said. ‘But Vuilleumier isn’t. That was a cover. It was a colonist name. We created a history for me, the necessary past that enabled me to infiltrate the government. My true name is Khouri. And yes, I was part of the Triumvir’s crew. I came here aboard Nostalgia for Infinity . We came to find Sylveste.’
Thorn folded his arms. ‘Well, now we’re finally getting somewhere.’
‘The crew wanted Sylveste, that’s all. They had no grudge against the colony. They used misinformation to make you think that they were more willing to use force than was really the case. But Sylveste double-crossed us. He needed a way to explore the neutron star and the thing in orbit around it, the Cerberus/Hades pair. He persuaded the Ultras to help him with their ship.’
‘And afterwards? What happened then? Why did the two of you come back to Resurgam if you had a starship to yourselves?’
‘There was trouble on the ship, as you guessed. Serious fucking trouble.’
‘A mutiny?’
Khouri bit her lip and nodded. ‘Three of us, I suppose, turned against the rest. Ilia and myself, and Sylveste’s wife, Pascale. We didn’t want Sylveste to explore the Hades pair.’
‘Pascale? As in Pascale Girardieau, you mean?’
Khouri remembered that Sylveste’s wife had been the daughter of one of the most powerful colonial politicians; the man whose regime had taken power after Sylveste was deposed for his beliefs.
‘I didn’t know her that well. She’s dead now. Well, sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘This isn’t going to be easy, Thorn. You’ll just have to accept what I say, understand? No matter how insane or unlikely it sounds. Although given what’s just happened, I have a feeling you’ll be more receptive than before.’
He touched a finger to his lip. ‘Try me.’
‘Sylveste and his wife entered Hades.’
‘You mean the other object, surely? Cerberus?’
‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘I mean Hades. They entered the neutron star, although it turned out that it’s a lot more than just a neutron star. It’s not really a neutron star at all, actually; more a kind of giant computer, left behind by aliens.’
He shrugged. ‘Like you say, it’s not as if I haven’t seen some strange things today. And? What happened next?’
‘Sylveste and his wife are inside the computer, running like programs. Like alpha-levels, I guess.’ She raised a finger, anticipating his point. I know this, Thorn, because I took a stroll inside it myself. I encountered Sylveste, after he’d been mapped into Hades. Pascale too. As a matter of fact, there’s probably a copy of me in there as well. But I — this me — didn’t stay. I came back out here into the real universe, and I haven’t been back since. Matter of fact, I’m not planning on ever going back. There’s no easy way into Hades, not unless you count dying by being ripped apart by gravitational tidal stresses.‘
‘But you think the mind we met was Sylveste’s?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sighing. ‘Sylveste’s been inside Hades for subjective centuries, Thorn — subjective aeons, probably. What happened to us all sixty years ago must just be a dim, distant memory from the dawn of time for him. He’s had time to evolve beyond anything our imaginations can deal with. And he’s immortal, since nothing within Hades has to die. I can’t guess how he’d act now, whether we’d even recognise his mind. But it sure as hell felt like Sylveste to me. Maybe he was able to recreate himself the way he used to be, just so I’d know what it was that saved us.’
‘He’d take an interest in us?’
‘He’s never shown any sign of it before. But then again, nothing very much has happened in the outside world since he was mapped into Hades. But now, all of a sudden, the Inhibitors have arrived and they’ve started ripping the place up. Information must still be reaching him inside Hades, even if it’s only on an emergency basis. But think about it, Thorn. There is some serious shit going down here. It might even affect Sylveste. We can’t know that, but we can’t say for sure it isn’t true either.’
‘So what was that thing?’
‘An envoy, I suppose. A chunk of Hades, sent out to gather information. And Sylveste sent a copy of himself along with it. The envoy learned what it could, buzzed around the machinery, shadowed us, and then headed back to Hades. Presumably when it gets there it’ll merge back into the matrix. Maybe it was never totally disconnected — there could have been a filament of nuclear matter a single quark wide stretching all the way from the marble back to the edge of the system, and we’d never have known it.’
‘Go back a bit. What happened after you left Hades? Did Ilia come with you?’
‘No. She was never mapped into the matrix. But she survived and we met up again in orbit around Hades, inside Nostalgia for Infinity . The logical thing to have done would have been to get away from this system, a long way away, but it wasn’t happening. The ship was, well, not exactly damaged, but changed. It had suffered a kind of psychotic episode. It didn’t want to have any further dealings with the external universe. It was all we could do to get it back to the inner system, within an AU of Resurgam.’
‘Hm.’ Thorn had his chin propped on his knuckle. ‘This gets better, it really does. The odd thing is, I actually think you might be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you’d at least come up with something that made sense.’
‘It does make sense, you’ll see.’

She told him the rest of it, Thorn listening quietly and patiently, nodding occasionally and asking her to clarify certain aspects of her story. She told him that everything they had already told him about the Inhibitors was the truth in so far as they knew it, and that the threat was as real as they had claimed.

‘That much I think you’ve convinced me of,’ Thorn said.
‘Sylveste brought them down, unless they were already on their way here. That’s why he might still feel some obligation to protect us, or at least take a passing interest in the external universe. The thing around Hades was a kind of trigger, we think. Sylveste knew there was risk in what he did, but he didn’t care.’ Khouri scowled, feeling a surge of anger. ‘Fucking arrogant scientist. I was supposed to kill him, you know. That’s why I was on that ship in the first place.’
‘Another delicious complication.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘Who sent you?’
‘A woman from Chasm City. Called herself the Mademoiselle. She and Sylveste went years back. She knew what he was up to, and that he had to be stopped. That was my job. Trouble was, I fucked up.’
‘You don’t look like the sort to commit cold-blooded murder.’
‘You don’t know me, Thorn. Not at all.’
‘Not yet, perhaps.’ He looked at her long and hard until, with some reluctance, she turned away from his gaze. He was a man she felt attracted to and she knew that he was a man who believed in something. He was strong and brave — she had seen that for herself, in Inquisition House. And it was true, even if she did not necessarily want to admit it, that she had engineered this situation with some inkling of how it might play out, from the moment she had insisted that they bring Thorn aboard. But there was no escaping the single painful truth that continued to define her life, even after so much had happened. She was a married woman.
Thorn added, ‘But there’s always time, as they say.’
‘Thorn
‘Keep talking, Ana. Keep talking.’ Thorn’s voice was very soft. ‘I want to hear it all.’

Later, when they had put a light-minute between themselves and the gas giant, the console signalled an incoming tight-beam transmission relayed from Nostalgia for Infinity

. Ilia must have tracked Khouri’s ship with deep-look sensors, waiting until there was sufficient angular separation between it and the Inhibitor machines. Even with the relay drones she was deeply anxious not to compromise her position.‘I see you are on your way home,’ she said, intense displeasure etched into every word. ‘I see also that you went much closer to the heart of their activity than we agreed. That is not good. Not good at all.’
‘She doesn’t sound happy,’ Thorn whispered.
‘What you did was exceptionally dangerous. I just hope you learned something for your efforts. I demand that you make all haste back to the starship. We mustn’t detain Thorn from his urgent work on Resurgam… nor the Inquisitor from her duties in Cuvier. I will have more to say on this matter when you return.’ She paused before adding, ‘Irina out.’
‘She still doesn’t know that I know,’ Thorn said.
‘I’d better tell her.’
‘That doesn’t sound terribly wise to me, Ana.’
She looked at him. ‘No?’
‘Not just yet. We don’t know how she’d take it. Probably better that we act as if I still think… et cetera.’ He made a spiralling gesture with his forefinger. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘I kept something from Ilia once before. It was a serious mistake.’
‘This time you’ll have me on your side. We can break it to her gently once we’re safe and sound aboard the ship.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
Thorn narrowed his eyes playfully. ‘It will work out in the end, I promise you that. All you have to do is trust me. That isn’t so hard, is it? After all, it’s no more than you asked of me.’
‘The trouble was we were lying.’
He touched her arm, a contact that might have seemed accidental had he not prolonged it for several artful seconds. ‘We’ll just have to put that behind us, won’t we?’
She reached over and delicately removed his hand, which closed gently around her own, and for a moment they were frozen like that. Khouri was conscious of her own breathing. She looked at Thorn, knowing full well what she wanted and knowing that he wanted it too.
‘I can’t do this, Thorn.’
‘Why not?’ He spoke as if there were no valid objection she could possibly raise.
‘Because…’ She slipped her hand from his. ‘Because of what I still am. Because of a promise I made to someone.’
‘Who?’ Thorn asked.
‘My husband.’
‘I’m sorry. I never thought for a moment that you might be married.’ He sat back in his seat, putting a sudden distance between them. ‘I don’t mean that in an insulting way. It’s just one minute you’re the Inquisitor, the next you’re an Ultra. Neither exactly fitted my preconceptions of a married woman.’
She raised a hand. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Who is he, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘It isn’t that simple, Thorn. I honestly wish it was.’
‘Tell me. Please. I do want to know.’ He paused, perhaps reading something in her expression. ‘Is your husband dead, Ana?’
‘It isn’t that simple, either. My husband was a soldier. I used to be one as well. We were both soldiers on Sky’s Edge, in the Peninsula wars. I’m sure you’ve heard of our quaint little civil dispute.’ She did not wait for his answer. ‘We were fighting together. We were wounded and shipped into orbit unconscious. But something went wrong. I was misidentified, mis-tagged, put on the wrong hospital ship. I still don’t know all the details. I ended up being loaded aboard a bigger ship heading out-system. A lighthugger. By the time the error was discovered I was around Epsilon Eridani, Yellowstone.’
‘And your husband?’
‘I still don’t know. At the time I was led to think that he’d been left behind around Sky’s Edge. Thirty, forty years, Thorn — that’s how long he’d have had to wait, even if I’d managed to get on a ship making the immediate return trip.’
‘What kind of longevity therapies did you have on Sky’s Edge?’
‘None at all.’
‘So there would have been a good chance of your husband being dead by the time you got back?’
‘He was a soldier. Life expectancy in a freeze/thaw battalion was already pretty damned short. And anyway, there wasn’t any ship headed straight back.’ She rubbed her eyes and sighed. ‘That was what I was told had happened to him. But I still don’t know for sure. He might have come with me on the same ship; everything else might have been a lie.’Thorn nodded. ‘So your husband might still be alive, but in the Yellowstone system?’
‘Yes — supposing he ever got there, and supposing he didn’t ship back on the next outbound ship. But even then he’d be old. I spent a long time frozen in Chasm City before I came here. And I’ve spent even more time frozen since then, while Ilia and I waited for the wolves.’
Thorn was silent for a minute. ‘So you’re married to a man you still love, but who you probably won’t ever see again?’
‘Now you understand why it isn’t easy for me,’ she said.
‘I do,’ Thorn said quietly, with something close to reverence in his voice. ‘1 do, and I’m sorry.’ Then he touched her hand again. ‘But maybe it’s still time to let go of the past, Ana. We all have to one day.’

It took much less time to reach Yellowstone than Clavain had expected. He wondered if Zebra had drugged him, or whether the thin cold air in the cabin had caused him to slip into unconsciousness… but there appeared to be no gap in the sequence of his thoughts. The time had simply passed very rapidly. Three or four times Manoukhian and Zebra had spoken quietly and urgently between themselves, and shortly thereafter Clavain had felt the ship change its vector, presumably to avoid another tangle with the Convention. But there had never been any tangible sense of panic.

He had the impression that Zebra and Manoukhian regarded another conflict as something to be avoided out of a sense of decorum or neatness, rather than a pragmatic matter of survival. Whatever else they were, they were professionals.
The ship looped above the Rust Belt, avoiding it by many thousands of kilometres, and then made a spiralling approach towards Yellowstone’s cloud layers. The planet swelled, filling every window within Clavain’s field of view. A skin of neon-pink ionisation gases surrounded the ship as she cleaved into atmosphere. Clavain felt his gravity return after hours of weightlessness. It was, he reminded himself, the first actual gravity that he had felt in years.
‘Have you visited Chasm City before, Mr Clavain?’ Zebra asked him, when the black ship had completed its atmospheric insertion.
‘Once or twice,’ he said. ‘Not lately. I take it that’s where we’re going?’
‘Yes, but I can’t say where exactly. You’ll have to find out for yourself. Manoukhian, can you hold her steady for the next minute or so?’
‘Take your time, Zeb.’
She unbuckled from her acceleration couch and stood over Clavain. It appeared that the stripes were zones of distinct pigmentation rather than tattoos or skin paint. Zebra flipped open a locker and slid out a metallic-blue box the size of a medical kit. She opened it and dithered her finger over the contents, like someone puzzling over a box of chocolates. She pulled out a hypodermic device.
i’m going to put you under, Mr Clavain. While you’re unconscious I’ll run some neurological tests, just to verify that you really are a Conjoiner. I won’t wake you until we’ve arrived at our destination.‘
‘There’s no need to do that.’
‘Ah, but there is. My boss is very protective of his secrets. He’ll want to decide for himself what you get to know.’ Zebra leaned over him. ‘I can get this into your neck, I think, without getting you out of that suit.’
Clavain saw that there was no point in arguing. He closed his eyes and felt the cold tip of the hypodermic prick his skin. Zebra was good, no doubt about that. He felt a second flush of cold as the drug hit his bloodstream.
‘What does your boss want with me?’ he asked.
I don’t think he really knows yet,‘ Zebra said. ’He’s just curious. You can’t blame him for that, can you?‘
Clavain had already willed his implants to neutralise whatever agent Zebra had injected into him. There might be a slight loss of clarity as the medichines filtered his blood — he might even lapse into brief unconsciousness — but it would not last. Conjoiner medichines were good against any…

He was sitting upright in an elegant chair fashioned from scrolls of rough black iron. The chair was anchored to something tremendously solid and ancient. He was on planetary ground, no longer in Zebra’s ship. The blue-grey marble beneath the chair was fabulously veined, streaked and whorled like the gas flows in some impossibly gaudy interstellar nebula.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Clavain. How are you feeling now?’
It was not Zebra’s voice this time. Footsteps padded across the marble without haste. Clavain looked up, taking in more of his surroundings.
He had been brought to what appeared to be an immense conservatory or greenhouse. Between pillars of veined black marble were finely mullioned windows that reached tens of metres high before curving over to intersect above him. Trellised sheets climbed nearly to the apex of the structure, tangled with vivid green vines. Between the trellises were many large pots or banks of earth that held too many kinds of plant for Clavain to identify, beyond a few orange trees and what he thought was some kind of eucalyptus. Something like a willow loomed over his seat, its dangling vegetation forming a fine green curtain that effectively blocked his vision in a number of directions. Ladders and spiral staircases provided access to aerial walkways spanning and encircling the conservatory. Somewhere, out of Clavain’s field of view, water trickled constantly, as if from a miniature fountain. The air was cool and fresh rather than cold and thin.
The man who had spoken stepped softly before him. He was Clavain’s height and dressed in similarly dark clothes — Clavain had been divested of his spacesuit — though there the resemblance ended. The man’s apparent physiological age was two or three decades younger than Clavain’s, his slick backcombed black hair merely feathered by grey. He was muscular, but not to the point where it looked ridiculous. He wore narrow black trousers and a knee-length black gown cinched above his waist. His feet and chest were bare, and he stood before Clavain with his arms folded, looking down on him with an expression somewhere between amusement and mild disappointment.
‘I asked…’ the man began again.
‘You have obviously examined me,’ Clavain said. ‘What more can I tell you that you don’t already know?’
‘You seem displeased.’ The man spoke Canasian, but with a trace of stiffness.
‘I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you have no idea of the damage you have done.’
‘Damage?’ the man asked.
‘I was in the process of defecting to the Demarchists. But of course you know all that, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure how much Zebra told you,’ the man said. ‘It’s true we know something about you, but not as much as we’d like to know. That’s why you’re here now, as our guest.’
‘Guest?’ Clavain snorted.
‘Well, that may be stretching the usual definition of the term, I admit. But I do not want you to consider yourself our prisoner. You are not. Nor are you our hostage. It is entirely possible that we will decide to release you very shortly. What harm will have been done then?’
‘Tell me who you are,’ Clavain said.
‘I will in a moment. But first, why don’t you come with me? I think you will find the view most rewarding. Zebra told me this wasn’t your first visit to Chasm City, but I am not sure you’ll have ever seen it from quite this perspective.’ The man leaned down and offered Clavain his hand. ‘Come, please. I assure you I will answer all of your questions.’
‘All of them?’
‘Most of them.’
Clavain pushed himself from the iron seat with the man’s assistance. He realised that he was still a little weak, now that he had to stand on his own, but he was able to walk without difficulty, his own bare feet cold against the marble. He remembered that he had removed his shoes before getting into the Demarchist spacesuit.
The man led him to one of the spiral staircases. ‘Can you manage this, Mr Clavain? It’s worth it. The windows are a little dusty below.’
Clavain followed the man up the rickety spiral staircase until they reached one of the aerial walkways. It wound its way through panes of trelliswork until Clavain lost all sense of direction. From the vantage point of his seat he had been aware only of indistinct shapes beyond the windows and a pale ochre light that suffused everything with its own melancholic glow, but now he saw the view more clearly. The man ushered him to a balustrade.
‘Behold, Mr Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived.’
‘You’re not from here?’ Clavain asked.
‘No. Like you I have travelled far and wide.’
The city crawled away in all directions, festering into a distant urban haze. There were not more than two dozen buildings taller than the one they were in, although some of those were very much taller, plunging into overlying cloud so that their tops were invisible. Clavain saw the dark, distant line of the encircling rim wall looming over the haze many tens of kilometres away. Chasm City was built inside a caldera which itself contained a gaping hole in Yellowstone’s crust. The city surrounded the great belching chasm, teetering on the edge, thrusting clawlike taplines down into the depths. Structures leaned shoulder to shoulder, intertwined and fused into deliriously strange shapes. The air was infested with aerial traffic, a constant shifting mass that made the eye struggle to stay in focus. It seemed quite impossible that there could be that many journeys to be made at any one time, that many vital errands and deputations. But Chasm City was vast. The aerial traffic represented a microscopic portion of the real human activity taking place beneath the spires and towers, even in wartime.
It had been different, once. The city had seen three approximate phases. The longest had been the Belle Époque , when the Demarchists and their presiding families had held absolute power. Back then the city had sweltered under the eighteen merged domes of the Mosquito Net. All the power and chemistry that the city needed had been drawn from the chasm itself. Within the domes, the Demarchists had pushed their mastery of matter and information to its logical conclusion. Their longevity experiments had given them biological immortality, while the regular downloading of neural patterns into computers had made even violent death no more than a nuisance. Their expertise with what some of them still quaintly termed ‘nanotechnology’ had enabled them to reshape their environments and bodies almost at will. They had become protean, a people for whom stasis of any kind was abhorrent.
The city’s second phase had come only a century ago, with the emergence of the Melding Plague. The plague had been very democratic, attacking people as eagerly as it attacked buildings. Belatedly, the Demarchists had realised that their Eden had always held a particularly vicious serpent. Until then the changes had been harnessed, but the plague ripped them from human control. Within a few months the city had been utterly transformed. Only a few hermetic enclaves existed where people could still walk around with machines in their bodies. The buildings contorted into mocking shapes, reminding the Demarchists of what they had lost. Technology had crashed back to an almost pre-industrial state. Predatory factions stalked the city’s lawless depths.
Chasm City’s dark age lasted nearly forty years.
It was a matter of debate whether the city’s third state had already ended or was still continuing under different stewardship. In the immediate aftermath of the plague, the Demarchists had lost most of their former sources of wealth. Ultras took their trade elsewhere. A few high families struggled on, and there were always pockets of financial stability in the Rust Belt, but Chasm City itself was ripe for economic takeover. The Conjoiners, confined until then to a few remote niches throughout the system, had seen their moment.
It was not an invasion in the usual sense. They were too few in number, too militarily weak, and they had no wish to convert the populace to their mode of thinking. Instead they had bought out the city a chunk at a time, rebuilding it into something glittering and new. They tore down the eighteen merged domes. In the chasm they installed a vast item of bioengineered machinery called the Lilly, which vastly increased the efficiency of chemical conversion of the chasm’s native gases. Now the city lived in a pocket of warm breathable air, sustained by the Lilly’s slow exhalations. The Conjoiners had torn down many of the warped structures, replacing them with elegant bladelike towers that reached far above the breathable pocket, turning like yacht’s sails to minimise their wind profile. More resilient forms of nanotechnology were cautiously introduced back into the environment. Conjoiner medicines allowed longevity therapies to be pursued again. Sniffing prosperity, Ultras again made Yellowstone a key stopover on their trade intineraries. Around Yellowstone, resettlement of the Rust Belt proceeded apace.
It should have been a new Golden Age.
But the Demarchists, the city’s former masters, never adjusted to the role of historical has-beens. They chafed at their reduced status. For centuries they had been the Conjoiners’ only allies, but all that was about to end. They would go to war to win back what they had lost.
‘Can you see the chasm, Mr Clavain?’ His host pointed towards a dark elliptical smear almost lost beyond a profusion of spires and towers. They say the Lilly is dying now. The Conjoiners aren’t here to keep it alive, since they were evicted. The air quality is not what it was. There is even speculation that the city will have to be re-domed. But perhaps the Conjoiners will soon be able to reoccupy what was once theirs, eh?‘
‘It would be difficult to draw another conclusion,’ Clavain said.
‘I do not care who wins, I must admit. I was able to make a living before the Conjoiners came, and I have continued to do so in their absence. I did not know the city under the Demarchists, but I don’t doubt that I would have found a way to survive.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Where are we might be a better question. Look down, Mr Clavain.’
Clavain looked down. The building he was in was high, that much was obvious from the elevated view, but he had not quite grasped how very high it really was. It was as if he stood near the summit of an immensely tall and steep mountain, looking down at subsidiary peaks and shoulders many thousands of metres below, secondary summits which themselves towered over the majority of the surrounding buildings. The highest air-traffic corridor was far below; indeed, he saw that some of the traffic flowed through the building itself, diving through immense arches and portals. Below lay other traffic layers, then a gridlike haze of elevated roadways, and below that yet more space, and then a blurred suggestion of tiered parks and lakes, so far below that they resembled faded two-dimensional markings on a map.
The building was black and monumental in its architecture. He could not guess its true shape, but he had the impression that had he viewed it from some other part of Chasm City it would have resembled something black and dead and faintly foreboding, like a solitary tree that had been struck by lightning.
‘All right,’ Clavain said. ‘It’s a very nice view. Where are we?’
‘Chateau des Corbeaux, Mr Clavain. The House of Ravens. I trust you remember the name?’
Clavain nodded. ‘Skade came here.’
The man nodded. ‘So I gather.’
‘Then you had something to do with what happened to her, is that it?’
‘No, Mr Clavain, I did not. But my predecessor, the person who last inhabited this building, most certainly did.’ The man turned around and offered Clavain his right hand. ‘My name is H, Mr Clavain. At least, that is the name under which I currently choose to do business. Shall we do business?’
Before Clavain could respond, H had taken his hand and squeezed it. Clavain withdrew his hand, taken aback. He noticed that there was a tiny spot of red on his palm, like blood.

H took Clavain downstairs, back to the marbled floor. They walked past the fountain Clavain had heard earlier — it consisted of an eyeless golden snake belching a constant stream of water — and then took another long flight of marbled steps down to the floor immediately below.

‘What do you know about Skade?’ Clavain asked. He did not trust H, but saw no harm in asking a few questions.
‘Not as much as I would like,’ H said. ‘But I will tell you what I have learned, within certain limits. Skade was sent to Chasm City on an espionage operation for the Conjoiners, one that concerned this building. That’s correct, isn’t it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Come now, Mr Clavain. As you will discover, we have very much more in common than you might imagine. There’s no need to be defensive.’
Clavain wanted to laugh. ‘I doubt that you and I have much in common at all, H.’
‘No?’
‘I am a four-hundred-year-old man who has probably seen more wars than you’ve seen sunsets.’
H’s eyes wrinkled in amusement. ‘Really?’
‘My perspective on things is bound to be just a tiny bit different from yours.’
‘I don’t doubt it. Would you follow me, Mr Clavain? I’d like to show you the former tenant.’
H led him along high-ceilinged black corridors lit only by the narrowest of windows. Clavain observed that H walked with the tiniest of limps, caused by a slight imbalance in length between one leg and the other that he managed to overcome most of the time. He seemed to have the whole immense building to himself, or at least this mansion-sized district of it, but perhaps that was an illusion fostered by the building’s sheer immensity. Clavain had already sensed that H controlled an organisation of some influence.
‘Start at the beginning,’ Clavain said. ‘How did you get mixed up in Skade’s business?’
‘Through a mutual interest, I suppose you’d say. I’ve been here on Yellowstone for a century, Mr Clavain. In that time I have cultivated certain interests — obsessions, you might almost call them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Redemption is one of them. I have what you might charitably refer to as a chequered past. I have done some very bad things in my time. But then again, who hasn’t?’ They halted at an arched doorway set into black marble. H made the door open and ushered Clavain into a windowless room that had the still, spectral atmosphere of a crypt.
‘Why would you be interested in redemption?’
To absolve myself, of course. To make some recompense. In the current era, even allowing for the present difficulties, one can live an inordinately long life. In past times a heinous crime marked one for life, or at least for the biblical three score years and ten. But we may live for centuries now. Should such a long life be sullied by a single unmeritorious act?‘
‘You said you’d done more than one bad thing.’
‘As indeed I have. I have signed my name to many nefarious deeds.’ H walked over to a roughly welded upright metal box in the middle of the room. ‘But the point is this: I do not see why my present self should be locked into patterns of behaviour merely because of something my much younger self did. I doubt that there is a single atom of my body shared by both of us, after all, and very few memories.’
‘A criminal past doesn’t give you a unique moral perspective.’
‘No, it doesn’t. But there is such a thing as free will. There is no need for us to be puppets of our past.’ H paused and touched the box. It had, Clavain realised, the general dimensions and proportions of a palanquin, the kind of travelling machine that the hermetics still used.
H drew in a deep breath before speaking again. ‘A century ago I came to terms with what I had done, Mr Clavain. But there was a price to be paid for that reconciliation. I vowed to put right certain wrongs, many of which directly concerned Chasm City. They were difficult vows, and I am not one to take such things lightly. Unfortunately, I failed in the most important one of all.’
‘Which was?’
‘In a moment, Mr Clavain. First I want you to see what has become of her.’
‘Her?’
‘The Mademoiselle. She was the woman who lived here before I did, the woman who occupied this building at the time of Skade’s mission.’ H slid aside a black panel at head-height, revealing a tiny dark window set into the side of the box.
‘What was her real name?’ Clavain asked.
‘I don’t actually know,’ H told him. ‘Manoukhian may know a little more about her, I think — he used to be in her service, before he swapped allegiances. But I’ve never extracted the truth from him, and he’s much too useful, not to say fragile, to risk under a trawl.’
‘What do you know about her, then?’
‘Only that she was a very powerful influence in Chasm City for many years, without anyone realising it. She was the perfect dictator. Her control was so pervasive that no one noticed they were in her thrall. Her wealth, as estimated by the usual indices, was practically zero. She did not “own” anything in the usual sense. Yet she had webs of coercion that enabled her to achieve whatever she wanted silently, invisibly. When people acted out of what they imagined was pure self-interest, they were often following the Mademoiselle’s hidden script.’
‘You make her sound like a witch.’
‘Oh, I don’t think there was anything supernatural about her influence. It was just that she saw information flows with a clarity most people lack. She could see the precise point where pressure needed to be applied, the point where the butterfly had to flap its wings to cause a storm half a world away. That was her genius, Mr Clavain. An instinctive grasp of chaotic systems as applied to human psychosocial dynamics. Here, take a look.’
Clavain stepped up to the tiny window set into the box.
There was a woman inside. She appeared to have been embalmed, and was sitting in an upright position within the box. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, holding an outspread paper fan of translucent delicacy. She wore a high-necked brocaded gown that Clavain judged to be a century out of date. Her forehead was high and smooth, dark hair raked back from it in severe furrows. From Clavain’s vantage point it was impossible to tell whether her eyes were truly closed or whether she was just looking down at the fan. She rippled, as if she were a mirage.
‘What happened to her?’ Clavain asked.
‘She is dead, in so far as I understand the term. She has been dead for more than thirty years. But she has not changed at all since the moment of her death. There has been no decay, no evidence of the usual morbid processes. And yet there cannot be a vacuum in there, or she could not have breathed.’
I don’t understand. Did she die in this thing?‘
‘It was her palanquin, Mr Clavain. She was in it when I killed her.‘ ‘You killed her?’
H slid the little plate closed, obscuring the window. ‘I used a type of weapon designed by Canopy assassins for the specific purpose of murdering hermetics. They call it a crabber. It attaches a device to the side of the palanquin that bores through the armour while at the same time maintaining perfect hermetic integrity. There can be unpleasant things inside palanquins, you see, especially when the occupants suspect they may be the targets of assassination attempts. Subject-specific nerve gas, that sort of thing.’
‘Go on,’ Clavain said .
‘When the crabber reaches the interior it injects a slug which detonates with sufficient force to kill any organism inside, but not enough to shatter the window or any other weak point. We employed something similar against tank crews on Sky’s Edge, so I had some familiarity with the principles involved.’
‘If the crabber worked,’ he said, ‘there shouldn’t be a body inside.’
‘Quite right, Mr Clavain, there shouldn’t. Believe me, I know — I’ve seen what it looks like when these things do work.’
‘But you did kill her.’
‘I did something to her; what, I’m not quite sure. I could not examine the palanquin until several hours after the crabber had done its work, since we had the Mademoiselle’s allies to deal with as well. When I did look through the window I expected to see nothing except the usual dripping red smear on the other side of the glass. But her body was nearly intact. There were wounds, quite evident wounds which would normally have been fatal in their own right, but over the next few hours I watched them heal. The clothes as well — the damage undid itself. She has been like this ever since. More than thirty years, Mr Clavain.’
‘It isn’t possible.’
‘Did you notice the way you seemed to be viewing her body as if through a layer of shifting water? The way she shimmered and warped? It was no optical illusion. There is something in there with her. I wonder how much of what we can see was ever human.’
‘You’re talking as if she was some kind of alien.’
‘I think there was something alien about her. Beyond that, I would not care to speculate.’
H led him out of the room. Clavain risked one rearward glance at the palanquin, a glance that chilled him. H obviously kept it here because there was nothing else to be done with it. The corpse could not be destroyed, might even be dangerous in other hands. So she remained entombed here, in the building she had once inhabited.
‘I have to ask…’ Clavain began.
‘Yes?’
‘Why did you kill her?’
His host closed the door behind them. There was a palpable feeling of relief. Clavain had the distinct impression that even H did not greatly relish visits to the Mademoiselle.
I killed her, Mr Clavain, for the very simple and obvious reason that she had something I wanted.‘
‘Which was?’
‘I’m not entirely sure. But I think it was the same thing Skade was after.’

CHAPTER 22