Absolution Gap (55 page)

At that moment, the choir and the organ swelled in unison. Grelier’s hand was tight on the head of his cane. He squinted, knowing exactly what was coming.

“Behold God’s Fire,” Quaiche intoned.

The black window flared with wonderful light. Through each chip and facet of glass rammed a tangible shaft of colour, each shaft so intense and pure that it slammed Grelier back to a nursery world of bright shapes and colours. He felt the chemical seepage of joy into his brain, struggling to resist it even as he felt his resolve crumbling.

Before the window, Quaiche stood silhouetted on the pulpit. His arms were raised, spindly as branches. Grelier narrowed his eyes even more, trying to make out the pattern revealed in the black window. He was just beginning to tease it out when the shockwave hit, making the whole cathedral shake. Candles fluttered and died, the suspended chandeliers swaying.

The window faded to black. An afterimage remained, however: a rendering of Quaiche himself, kneeling before the iron monstrosity of the scrimshaw suit. The suit was hinged open along the once-welded seam. Quaiche’s hands were cupped before him, lathered in a cloying red mass that extended tendrils and ropes back into the cavity of the scrimshaw suit. It was as if he had reached into the suit and drawn out that sticky red mess. Quaiche’s face was turned to heaven, to the banded globe of Haldora.

But it wasn’t Haldora as Grelier had ever seen it portrayed.

The afterimage was fading. Grelier began to wonder if he would have to wait until the next blockage to see the window again, but another demolition burst followed the first, again revealing the design. Worked into the face of Haldora, conspiring to look as if it was shining through the atmospheric bands of the gas giant, was a geometric pattern. It was very complicated, like the intricate wax seal of an emperor: a three-dimensional lattice of silver beams. At the heart of the lattice, radiating beams of light, was a single human eye.

Another shockwave came through, rocking the Lady Morwenna. One final detonation followed and then the show was over. The black window was again black, its facets too opaque to be illuminated by anything other than the nuclear brilliance of God’s own Fire.

The organ and the choir subsided.

“The Way may now be cleared,” Quaiche said. “It will not be easy, but we will now be able to proceed at normal Way speeds for several days. There may even have to be more demolition charges, but the bulk of the obstacle no longer exists. For this we thank God. But the time we have lost cannot be easily recovered.”

Grelier’s hand was again tight on the cane.

“Let the other cathedrals attempt to make up lost time,” Quaiche said. “They will struggle. Yes, the Jarnsaxa Flats lie before us, and the race there will be to the swift. The Lady Morwenna is not the fastest cathedral on the Way, nor has it ever sought that worthless accolade. But what is the point of trying to make up lost ground on the Flats when the Devil’s Staircase lies just beyond it? Normally we would be trying to have time in hand at this point, pulling ahead of Haldora in preparation for the slow and difficult navigation of the Staircase. This time we do not have that luxury. We have lost critical days when we can least afford to lose them.”

He waited a moment, knowing that he had the congregation’s terrified attention. “But there is another way,” Quaiche said, leaning forwards in the pulpit, almost threatening to topple out of the support couch. “One that will require daring, and faith. We do not have to take the Devil’s Staircase at all. There is another route across Ginnungagap Rift. You all know, of course, of what I speak.”

All around the cathedral, transmitted through its armoured fabric, Grelier heard the rattling as the external shutters were drawn up. The ordinary stained-glass windows were being reopened, light flooding through them in sequenced order. Ordinarily he would have been duly impressed, but the memory of the black window was still there, its afterimage still ghosting his vision. When you had seen nuclear fire through welding glass, all else was as pale as watercolour.

“God gave us a bridge,” Quaiche said. “I believe it is time we used it.”

 

Rashmika found herself drawn to the roof of the caravan again, crossing between the vehicles until she reached the tilted rack of the Observers. The identical smooth mirrors of their faces, neatly spaced and ranked, had taken on a peculiar abstract quality. They made her think of the bottoms of stacked bottles in a cellar, or the arrayed facets of one of the gamma-ray monitoring stations out near the edge of the badlands. She did not know whether she found this more or less comforting than the realisation that each was a distinct human being—or had been, at least, until their compulsion to gaze at Haldora had scoured the last stubborn trace of personality from their minds.

The caravan rocked and rolled, negotiating a stretch of road that had only recently been reclaimed from icefalls. Now and then—more often, it seemed, than a day or so before—they swerved to steer past a group of pilgrims making the journey on foot. The pilgrims looked tiny and stupid, so far below. The fortunate ones had closed-cycle vacuum suits that permitted long journeys across the surface of a planet. Some of the suits even tended to ailments, healing minor wounds or soothing arthritic joints. Certainly those were the lucky ones. The rest had to make do with suits that had never been designed for travelling more than a few kilometres unassisted. They trudged beneath the weight of bulky home-made backpacks, like peasants carrying all their possessions. Some of them had ended up with such grotesque contraptions that they had no choice but to haul their belongings and their makeshift life-support systems behind them, on skis or treads. The suits, helmets, backpacks and towed contraptions were all augmented with religious totems, often of a cumbersome nature. There were golden statues, crosses, pagodas, demons, snakes, swords, armoured knights, dragons, sea monsters, arks and a hundred other things Rashmika did not trouble herself to recognise. Everything was done by muscle power, without the succour of mechanical assistance. Even in Hela’s moderate gravity the pilgrims were bent double with the effort, every sliding footstep a study in exhaustion.

Something drew her eye, far to what she judged to be the south. She looked sharply in that direction, but caught only a fading nimbus: a blue-violet glow retreating behind the nearest line of hills.

A moment later, she saw another flash in the same direction. It was as sharp and quick as an eye-blink, but it left the same dying aura.

A third. Then nothing.

She had no definite idea of what the flashes had been, but she guessed that the direction she was looking in could not be far from the position on the Permanent Way currently occupied by the cathedrals. Perhaps she had witnessed part of the clearing operation of which the quaestor had spoken.

Now something else was happening, but this time much nearer. The rack on which the Observers were mounted was tilting, lowering itself down towards the horizontal. At an angle of about thirty degrees it halted, and with one eerily smooth movement the Observers all sat up, their shackles unlocked. The suddenness of the motion quite startled Rashmika. It was like the co-ordinated rising of an army of somnambulists.

Something brushed past her—not forcefully, but not exactly gently either. Then another something.

She was being passed by a procession of the same hooded pilgrims. She looked back and saw that there was a long line of them approaching the rack. They were emerging from a trapdoor in the roof of the caravan, one she had not noticed earlier. At the same time, the ones that had been on the rack were filing off it one row at a time, stepping down the gentle slope with synchronised movements. As they reached the roof of the caravan they made their own line, winding back around the rack and vanishing down another trapdoor. Even before the rack was fully vacated, the new batch of Observers were taking their positions: lying flat on their backs, buckling in. The entire shift change took perhaps two minutes, and was executed with such a degree of manic calm that it was difficult to see how it could have been completed any more quickly. Rashmika had the impression that blood had been spilled over every second of that shift change, for here was a hiatus during which Haldora remained unobserved. This was not quite true, she realised then, for she saw no sign of similar activity anywhere else along the caravan: the other racks were still tilted at their usual observation angles. Doubtless the shift changes were staggered so that at least one group of Observers would be sure to witness a Haldora vanishing.

Until now, it had not occurred to her that the Observers would spend any time off the rack. But here they were, filing obediently back into the caravan. She wondered if this was because there were too many Observers to go around, or whether they needed to be taken off the rack now and then for their own health.

Doubtless the sequence of distant flashes had been a coincidence, but it had served to underscore the shift change in a way that Rashmika found faintly unsettling. The last time she had been up here she had felt as if she was spying on a sacred ceremony. Now she felt as if she had been caught in the middle of it, and had in some way marred the sanctity of the ritual.

The last of the new batch of Observers had assumed their positions on the rack. Though they had bustled past her, there was no obvious sign that she had spoiled their timing. Now the rack itself was tilting back to the same slope as the others along the line of the caravan, angling to face Haldora.

Rashmika turned around to watch the last of the old shift vanish back into the machine. There were three left, then two, and then the last one disappeared down into the hole. Where the new shift had emerged the trapdoor was now sealed, but the other one remained open.

Rashmika looked up at the Observers on the rack. They seemed utterly indifferent to her presence now, if indeed they had really noticed her at all. Perhaps they had only registered her as a minor obstacle on the way to their duty.

She began to make her way to the open trapdoor. All the while she kept an eye on the rack, but at its present angle it would have been almost impossible for anyone on it to see her at all, even in peripheral vision, and especially not given the fact that they were wearing helmets and hoods.

She had no intention of going down the trapdoor. At the same time she was hugely curious to see what was below. A glimpse would suffice. She might see nothing, just a laddered tube leading somewhere else, perhaps to an airlock. Or she might see . . . well, her imagination drew a blank. But she could not help but picture rows of Observers, hooked into machines, being refreshed in time for another shift.

The caravan swayed and bumped. She steadied herself on a railing, expecting any moment that the trapdoor would be tugged shut from within. She hesitated to go any nearer. The Observers had appeared docile so far, but how would they react to an invasion of their territory? She knew next to nothing about their sect. Maybe they had an elaborate series of death penalties lined up for those who violated their secrets. A thought crossed her mind: what if Harbin had done exactly what she was about to do? She was a lot like her brother. She could easily imagine Harbin killing time by wandering around the caravan, stumbling into the same shift change, being driven by his natural curiosity to see what was down below. Another thought, even less welcome, chased the first: what if one of the Observers was Harbin?

She pushed forwards until she reached the lip of the trapdoor. It still had not closed. Warm red light spilled up from the depths.

Rashmika steadied herself again, making certain she could not fall over the edge if the caravan made another sharp swerve. She peered into the shaft and saw a simple ladder descending as far as her angle of vision allowed her to see. To look deeper, she would have to lean further out.

Rashmika stretched, letting go of her hand-hold to make the move. She could see a little further into the hole now. The ladder terminated against grilled flooring. There was a hatch or doorway leading further into the caravan—one end of an airlock, perhaps, unless the Observers spent their entire lives in vacuum.

The caravan lurched. Rashmika felt herself tip forwards. She flailed, reaching back for the support railing. Her fingers clasped empty space. She tilted further forwards. The hole yawned bigger, the shaft suddenly appearing much wider and deeper than it had an instant ago. Rashmika started to cry out, certain that she was about to fall in. The ladder was on the wrong side; there was no way she was going to be able to grab it.

But suddenly she was still. Something—someone—held her. The person pulled her gently back from the edge of the trapdoor. Rashmika’s heart was in her throat. She had never understood what people meant when they said that, but now the expression made perfect sense to her.

Looking up into the face of her benefactor, she saw her own mirrored faceplate reflected back at her, and a smaller reflection in that, dwindling all the way to some vague, not too distant vanishing point. Behind the hooded mirror, faintly visible, was a suggestion of a young man’s face. Cheekbones, caught sharply in the light. Slowly, but unmistakably, he shook his head.

Almost as soon as this realisation had dawned, Rashmika was on her own again. The Observer moved around to the side of the shaft where the ladder was and slipped nimbly over the side and then down. Still catching her breath after the shock of nearly falling, Rashmika moved sluggishly to the edge, arriving just in time to see the Observer operate some lever-driven mechanism that brought the trapdoor down. Once snugly in its frame, the door twisted through ninety degrees.

She was on her own again.

Rashmika stood up, shaky on her feet. She felt foolish and irresponsible. How careless she had been to allow herself to be saved by one of the pilgrims. And how unwise to assume that they did not perceive her at all. It was obvious now, crushingly so. They had always been aware of her but had simply chosen to ignore her as best they could. When, finally, she had done something that could not be ignored—something idiotic, it had to be said—they had intervened quickly and sternly, the way adults did around children. She had been put right without reprimand or caution, but the sense of indignity remained. Rashmika had little experience with rebuke, and the sensation was both novel and unpleasant.