The Pillars of Hercules (54 page)

And right now he had more pressing priorities to deal with anyway—like following Kalyana as he reached the end of one of the platforms, climbed up a set of stairs to the very ceiling of the celestial firmament itself—and slid back a trapdoor. Eumenes flinched involuntarily, half-expecting to see fire pouring from the opening thus revealed. Having just climbed in here through that tube he knew that the rafters of this place was one big furnace. But instead of flames he saw something far stranger.

Six of them, in fact.

“Those look like
carts,
” said Ptolemy.

“They are,” said Kalyana. “Now we must all get in.”

It took only a few minutes to do so, and yet all that time Eumenes was conscious that Barsine and her motley crew were moving ever further away—getting ever closer to the place they were all trying to get to. It was still far below them, but their lead was increasing with every second. But the contraptions on the ceiling were simple enough to work. One got in, strapped oneself in—that was important, because you’d be upside down for most of the time. You used one handle to set the thing in motion, another handle to stop it. As for steering—

“The whole ceiling is cris-crossed with rails,” said Kalyana.

“And you knew this how?” said Ptolemy.

“Our texts speak of servants moving across the sacred ceiling of the gods. And—how should I put it?—seeing a stairway to nowhere raised my suspicions.”

Eumenes shrugged. He didn’t really care how Kalyana knew it, just as long as it worked. Kalyana pulled himself up into the first of the carts, strapped himself in while Eumenes and Ptolemy did the same. Hanno and his two slingers climbed into a second cart; the six soldiers took two more of the vehicles.

“Here we go,” said Kalyana—he pulled on one of the levers and next moment the cart began to move upside down along the ceiling, over the platform—slowly at first, the other three carts following. Eumenes looked down past that platform, was relieved to see that Kronos’s long orbit had barely taken it an eighth of the distance around the sphere. But then he noticed that the orb below it—that of the largest planet, Zeus—had stopped and was
reversing
toward Kronos, the gap between them closing with every passing second….

“They’re controlling them,” he breathed.

Kalyana nodded. “Those two planets, they cannot intersect, but they are going to try a jump from one to the other. I wonder if…”

But Eumenes was no longer listening. He’d just noticed something else—something far closer. And way more disturbing.

“Speed up,” he hissed to Kalyana.

“What?”

“That’s a fucking bomb.”

Eumenes had to give the sage credit: he didn’t ask any questions, didn’t even glance at the black-powder device that had started hissing and spluttering above the end of the platform, attached to the underside of the firmament itself—instead he just pushed the lever onto maximum and the car shot away, along the side of the firmament. Following its lead, the other three cars sped up too.

And then the bomb detonated.

Even from the vantage point of Kronos, it was quite a sight: a quick flaring as the device that Eurydice had planted blew—and then, before the detonation reached their ears, an enormous gout of fire sprayed out from the ceiling, huge chunks of that firmament falling away, along with pieces of that platform.

As well as one of those railcars. It fell in toward the four who clung to the top of Kronos, tumbled past them close enough so they could see the the three screaming Macedonian soldiers inside before it hit one of the gear-shafts lower down. The car stuck there. The bodies kept falling.

“That’s gotta hurt,” said Matthias.

“They met the fate their actions brought them,” said the voice of Barsine. “They trespassed on the roof of heaven.”

“How exactly is it that
they’re
trepassing and
we’re
not?” said Eurydice sardonically.

“Because I am the seed of those who ruled here,” said Barsine. “My mother is a daughter of Persia, my father a son of Macedonia.”

“So I’m
really
supposed to go along with this?” said Eurydice. “You
really
want me to believe that I’m talking to the unborn child of the woman who calls herself Barsine?”

“You are a scientist, are you not?”—it was Barsine’s voice, but it just
wasn’t
. “How else do you explain my command over this machine we find ourselves in? How else could I deploy its ramps and gears with the power of my presence?” She pointed at the Earth-disc, still far below, but close enough so they could make out the continents amidst the encompassing World-Ocean. A languid hand gestured at different areas on those continents in turn, her voice as hollow as the space they were speeding through.

“After the War, with the mutual destruction of the Olympians and the Chthonics, each side put in motion plans to use the ape-children of the Earth to some day re-awaken themselves and their machinery. This was done through the seeding of royal bloodlines—the code of the
genetikos
. There were several royal houses. The Egyptians were once the foremost—they built Pyramids and other works that might have allowed them to rule all the Earth—but they grew decadent and crumbled before the weight of foreign invaders. The Phoenicians scattered to the seas. The Achaemenids of Persia dominated central Asia until they were undone by the Argeads of Macedonia, who—centuries before—had fled Argos after civil war. They are thus both Greek and Macedonian, and today they are almost certainly the most powerful, even if hate has always existed between their line’s fathers and sons. Further to the East were the Vedic princes, who destroyed each other amidst internecine feuding—and had Alexander been so bold as to press on into northern India, he might have discovered even more than he and his henchmen did. And on the far east of Asia are the Han people, who even now rule a territory as large as Alexander, though they are divided into several warring states. If any of them have plans to insert themselves into this contest, I know not. Same with the remaining two houses.” She gestured across the eastern edge of ocean, at another long chunk of land, running north to south. Lugorix narrowed his eyes, realized that a slender isthmus at the top of Asia was a land-bridge to still another continent at the very eastern edge of the disc. The entity behind Barsine’s eyes saw his puzzlement, smiled.

“The fourth continent—Furthest Asia—contains two more peoples, the Toltecs in the north and the Nazcas in the south. Both possess powerful magicks but I regret to say I know very little of their activities. They may already be far ahead of us.”

“Who’s
us
?” muttered Eurydice. She was clearly trying to keep up with everything around her. She’d already admitted during the descent to Kronos that she’d made a very small such device once—a replicator of the heavens that she’d called an
Antikythera,
as that was the island in the Aegean she’d been working on at the time. But that had been only a few finger-spans across, rather than scores of miles. So now she was listening to Barsine while she stared at the fire erupting from the ceiling of heaven—and at the three surviving railcars as they raced further down the firmament, keeping pace with Kronos as it clanked along its orbit. But lower down was the orb of Zeus, rumbling in toward them…

“Isn’t it obvious?” said the voice of Barsine. “The whole name of the game right now is to get off the disc of the world—
the real one,
the one that’s far above us—and into the
actual
machinery that controls the cosmos. And I daresay we have made much progress. After all, here we are in the center of the Underworld, moving toward the heart of the ancillary computer.”

Eurydice looked like she’d been slapped in the face. “There’s another? One more vital than this?”

“Of course.”

“Fuck’s sake:
where?”

“In the real celestial sphere. Far overhead.”

“Then—”

“I don’t know how to get there. But rest assured I intend to find out—”

“But you don’t even know how to use
this
computer to manipulate the world above.”

“Because it’s latent,” said Barsine. “It’s turned off.”

“Looks pretty active to me.”

“Mostly
latent, then.”

“Now you’re splitting hairs. Alexander seems to have already attained at least some control over it. Those storms—”

“I’m not sure
how
he’s doing that. A telepathic”—Lugorix didn’t understand the word, but he recognized it as a compound of the Greek terms for
distant
and
experience
—“link with one or both of the computers, maybe—but it’s partial, and it’s only over certain elements.”

Eurydice looked like she wanted to throw Barsine straight off the orb of Kronos. “But
how does controlling this machinery control the universe in the first place?
Why should a machine—”

“What the hell do you think the universe is?”
demanded Barsine.

Throughout this exchange, Matthias’ gaze kept flicking back and forth from woman to woman, his mouth open, his brain left far behind. But Lugorix was concerned with more practical matters. Like the cracks that continued to grow along the ceiling far above. More fire kept on licking through, spreading along the roof of the dome. The Macedonians who had fallen into the gear-shaft seemed to have jammed that apparatus completely; as Lugorix watched, it disintegrated altogether, pieces of it flying into still more gear-shafts that in turn broke or splintered—a chain reaction that kept gathering pace, until suddenly Lugorix noticed the rail on which Zeus was rising toward them start to
bend
out of alignment, under ever greater pressure. He cleared his throat.

“Hey guys,” he said, “I think we might have a problem.”

Matthias suddenly seemed to snap out of his trance—he pointed up at the fiery hole at the summit of the orb above.

“You’re right about that,” he said. Lugorix abruptly realized that it wasn’t just flames coming through anymore.

It was also scores upon scores of necks.

“That fucking hydra,” breathed Lugorix.

“This is getting tricky,” said Matthias.

All the way to heaven: that’s how high the Helepolis seemed to tower. In truth it was only about four times the height of the Leviathans that Alexander had employed at Athens. But no one on the ground was in the mood to quibble. The siege-tower smashed its way through what was left of the Circle fortress—and then poured on the steam, crunching through the monuments and mansions of Syracuse’s wealthiest districts. It seemed like the whole city beyond that was on fire. Flame and smoke was everywhere. Those who were still stupid enough to be cowering in the buildings and basements came running out like swarms of insects to be crushed or shot. In the windows that lined the Helepolis, the archers were having good sport. Diocles could hear them yelling and joking to each other as they nailed everything in sight. The fact that he was so close to that monster scared him absolutely shitless. But it couldn’t be helped. Leosthenes and Agathocles had a plan. Which was ironic, the two men who ought to have been enemies cooperating in one last desperate attempt to save Syracuse. And Xanthippus, with his accursed sense of duty, was going to die helping them.

Which meant that Diocles would too. The four of them were making their way along the third level of the city’s four-level aqueduct, up to their waists in water and shit and hoping that the Helepolis wasn’t about to change direction any more than it had already done. It was right outside, moving parallel to the aqueduct, which ran down across the heights of the plateau and then down its eastern side and into the city. That was essentially the route the Helepolis intended to follow—and as far as Diocles could see there was absolutely nothing to stop it from steamrollering its way all the way into inner Syracuse, straight up to the Harbor, after which it would undoubtedly find a way to get across to the Ortygia and destroy the final citadel of Athenian resistance. He could see it through the aqueduct’s archways as it rumbled past them—and then that view was obscured by smoke as hails of flame-bolts fired by the defenders of Syracuse struck the front of the Helepolis, lodging there, burning themselves out against the metal-armor. Ahead of him, Leosthenes had stopped and taken a bizarre-looking weapon out of his satchel.

“Where’d you get that?” said Agathocles.

“From Aristotle’s workshop,” said Leosthenes. “Where all the good shit comes from.”

“Too bad you idiots couldn’t hang onto him.”

“Treason’s a dodgy thing,” said the viceroy. The device he was setting up was some kind of large crossbow, except the bolt itself looked for all the world like a grappling hook.

“That one there,” said Agathocles, gesturing through the smoke at the nearest arrow-slit as the enormous machinery clanked past.

“It’s occupied,” said Xanthippus. Agathocles nodded, removed a dart-thrower from his belt—whipped it forward. The dart shot across the space between them and the Helepolis and smacked an archer right in the face. He dropped.

“Not anymore,” said Agathocles. Leosthenes nodded, aimed the grappling hook and fired. It flew straight into that window and stuck fast. The rope hung there, suspended.

“Oh shit,” said Diocles as he realized where this was going.

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” said Ptolemy.

Eumenes couldn’t take his eyes off it. None of them could—save for Kalyana who was too busy driving. With a noise that literally shook the artificial universe, the rails along which Zeus was riding had just snapped—and now the huge planetary orb was sailing into space, straight toward the star-encrusted firmament.

“It’s coming straight for us,”
said Eumenes—and now Kalyana
did
look up and acted immediately, sending the railcar ripping down another rail altogether, desperately veering away from the incoming course of the orb. The cars bearing the Carthaginians and the Macedonian soldiers saw the problem as well—the Carthaginians shot off at an angle, still running parallel with the orb of Kronos. The Macedonians went the other way.