The Pillars of Eternity

At the top, he received a surprise.

The hatch lock was already blown.

He signed the others to be cautious, then eased the hatch open and stepped through, placing his feet with cat-like quietness. He was on a between-decks gallery. A ship robot lay on the floor, limbs awry. It had a blast hole through its chest.

The others followed him in. ‘Someone’s been here before us,’ he murmured. ‘They could still be on board.’

‘Probably common robbers.’

‘Then they can go with the rest of it. Come on.’

Their main job was to make sure they blew both the transmitter and the processors. But this was a custom-built ship; it had not been possible to obtain a design print. He went through a door at the end of the gallery and found himself on a deck that was, he guessed, over the hold.

His eyes quickly adjusted to the dim light. The deck had a crammed appearance. It seemed to be made up of corridors whose walls were dull-coloured casings that whirred and clicked. On each casing was a dully glowing green check screen, so that the whole deck was filled with the eerie luminescence – the only light there was, apparently.

At the end of the first corridor two men, clad in black cat-suits, knelt by a flat box shape. Part of a casing had been cut away, and the innards connected to the box by adp-fibres. The nearby green screen was oscillating wildly.

‘Police,’ the Rectification Branch man announced in a cold voice. ‘On your feet, keep your hands in sight.’

The two jumped up, eyes flicking from the pale, indistinguishable faces of the Branch men to the guns they held. ‘We are on official business,’ said one.

‘Whose?’

There was no answer. Though incurious as to the truth of the claim, the Branch man was slightly mollified. ‘Get out fast,’ he said. ‘This ship is to be destroyed.’

The other’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘No! It’s ours! It has to be preserved—’

There came a noise from behind the casing. Another cat-suited figure came around the bend of the corridor. This one was armed with a force gun.

The Branch men did not wait. Two of them opened fire. The unarmed victims before them cried out in panic and cringed, flinging out their arms in a useless, self-defensive reflex. WHO DARES WINS glared briefly on the palms of their hands, before they fell.

The third Branch man did not see the stigmata. He was crouched down between two casings and was opening his box of thermal grenades.

Mace was anointing his body with oil when Boaz first began to feel prodromic flashes of discomfort.

His bone settings were high, so high it was as if he were transported to another world. Yet it was a world in which Mace was present with him, into which they had entered together. In that world she had said to him: this is the future for mankind. We are like a new species, we bone people. Others cannot understand it. Hebron, Ebarak, they do not have bones. You can tell it. Everything about them is dull.

And, yes, it was true. It was true that new powers glowed within one, that the world was transfigured. That those without bones were to be pitied.

He moved a foot or two away from her, trying to identify the new source of physical unease.

Then unseen fire suddenly enveloped him, moving in a flash from the soles of his feet to the crown of this head. His ship screamed to him, one last cataclysmic message.

COLLAPSE

He knew in an instant that nothing could save him. He had failed to evade the Rectification Branch. His ship was being destroyed. All the work of the bonemakers, whose skill and resource had made of him again a functioning human entity, was being undone piece by piece as the regulating departments of the ship went out one by one. He took a step forward, and seemed, howling, to move as through a crystal lattice of pain. Too late, he realized he had unthinkingly keyed in all his bone functions, including – just as on that far-off day on the edge of the alchemists’ firepit – the preservation function. Too late, he realized he no longer had the power to switch any of them off.

The difference was that this time all the functions were on setting eight. The agony mounted and mounted, and mounted and mounted, fed by the super-senses silicon bones insisted, still, on giving him. He was back there. He was back with what he feared most, back in the pit, and Boaz howled his rage, howled his fear, screamed and screeched with his efforts to escape, to evade, to over-come, in any way at all to come to terms with torment as his bleak, twisted soul knew again its aloneness and its damnation. For the bones took the pain, took it, delighted in it, presented it to him enhanced to the ultimate. He journeyed a million years through winding labyrinths of exquisite, ecstatic agony. He dwelt in palaces of pain, he inhabited cities and civilizations based on the technology of torture.