Absolution Gap (76 page)

“It’s the oldest cathedral on the Way,” she said. “I think it’d be a little strange
not
to want to see it, don’t you?”

“All we want is work, love. Doesn’t matter which one doles it out. It’s still the same fucking
ice
you have to shovel out the way.”

“Well, I’m still interested,” she said.

“It isn’t any of those cathedrals,” another voice said, bored but not unreasonable. She saw a man at the back of the gathering, lying down on a couch with a cigarette in one hand and the other tucked deep into his trousers, where it rummaged and scratched. “But you can see it.”

“Where?”

“Over here, little girl.”

She stepped towards the man.

“Watch him,” another voice said. “He’ll be on you like a rash.”

She hesitated. The man waved her over with his cigarette. He pulled his hand free from his trousers. It ended in a crude-looking metal claw. He transferred the cigarette to it and beckoned her over with his undamaged hand. “It’s all right. I stink a bit, but I don’t bite. Just want to show you the Lady Mor, that’s all.”

“I know,” she said. She stepped through the jumble of other bodies.

The man pointed to a small scuffed window behind him. He wiped it clean with his sleeve. “Look through there. You can still see the top of her spire.”

She looked. All she saw was landscape. “I’m not . . .”

“There.” The man nudged her chin until she was looking in exactly the right direction. He smelled like vinegar. “Between those bluffs, do you see something sticking up?”

“There’s something sticking up all right,” someone else said.

“Shut up,” Rashmika snapped. There must have been something in the tone of her voice because it had exactly the desired effect.

“See it now?” the man asked.

“Yes. What’s it doing all the way out there? It can’t be on the Permanent Way at all.”

“It is,” the man said. “Just not on the part we usually follow.”

“Doesn’t she know?” said another voice.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking,” Rashmika replied tartly.

“The Way branches near here,” the man said, explaining it to her the way you would explain something to a child. She decided that she did not really like him after all. He was helping her, but the manner in which he was helping mattered, too. Sometimes refusal was better than grudging assistance. “Splits in two,” he said. “One route is the one the cathedrals normally follow. Takes them all the way down to the Devil’s Staircase.”

“I know about that,” she said. “Zigzag ramps cut into the side of the Rift. The cathedrals follow them down to the bottom of the Rift, then up the other side again after they’ve crossed it.”

“Right. Care to have a guess where the other route takes them?”

“I’m assuming it crosses the bridge.”

“You’re a clever little girl.”

She pulled away from the window. “If there’s a branch of the Way from the bridge to here, why didn’t we follow it?”

“Because for a caravan it isn’t the quickest route. Caravans can cut corners, go up slopes and around tight bends. Cathedrals can’t. They have to take the long way around anything they can’t blast through. Anyway, the route to the bridge doesn’t see much maintenance. You might not have noticed it was a part of the Way even if you were on it.”

“Then the Lady Morwenna will pull further and further away from the main gathering of cathedrals,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean Haldora won’t be overhead any more?”

“Not exactly, no,” he said. He scratched at the side of his face with his claw, metal rasping against stubble. “But the Devil’s Staircase isn’t bang on the equator, either. They had to dig it where they could dig it, not where it should have gone. Another thing, too: you go down the Devil’s Staircase, you’ve got overhanging ice to contend with. Not good for Observers: blocks their view of the planet. And the Staircase is where cathedrals stand the best chance of pulling ahead of each other. But if one of them ever managed to cross the bridge, it’d be so far ahead of the pack it’d have to stop to let the others catch up with it. After that, nothing would ever get ahead of them. They could build themselves as wide as they liked. Never mind the glory in having crossed the bridge. They’d rule the Way.”

“But no cathedral has ever crossed the bridge.” She remembered the cratered ruins she had seen from the roof of the caravan. “I know that one did try it once, but . . .”

“No one said it wasn’t madness, love, but that’s old pop-eyed Dean Quaiche for you. You should be glad you’re ending up on the Iron Katy. They say the rats have already started leaving the Lady Mor.”

“The dean must think he has a good chance of making it,” she said.

“Or he’s insane.” The man grinned at her, his yellow teeth like chipped tombstones. “Take your pick.”

“I don’t have to,” she said, then added, “Why did you call him pop-eyed?”

They all laughed at her. One of them made goggles of his fingers around his eyes.

“Girl’s got a lot to learn,” someone said.

 

The Catherine of Iron was one of the smaller cathedrals in the procession, travelling alone several kilometres to the rear of the main pack. There were others further behind it, but these were little more than spires on the horizon. Almost certainly they were struggling to catch up with the others, determined to bring themselves as close as possible to the abstract moving point on the Way that corresponded to Haldora sitting precisely overhead. The ultimate shame, from a cathedral’s point of view, was to fall so far back that even the casual observer became aware that Haldora was not quite at the zenith. Worse than that—unspeakably worse—was the stigma that went beyond shame that was the fate suffered by any cathedral that lost sight of Haldora altogether. That was why the work of the Permanent Way gangs was taken so seriously. A day’s delay here or there was nothing, but many such delays could have a catastrophic effect on a cathedral’s progress.

Rashmika’s vehicle slowed as it approached the Catherine of Iron, then looped around to the rear. The partial circumnavigation afforded her an excellent view of the place that was to be her new home. Small though her assigned cathedral undoubtedly was, it was not an untypical example of their general style.

The flat base of the cathedral was a rectangle thirty metres wide and perhaps one hundred in length. Above this base towered the superstructure; below it—partially hidden by metal skirts—lay the rude business of engines and traction systems. The cathedral inched along the Way by dint of many parallel sets of caterpillar tracks. Currently, on one side, an entire traction unit had been hauled ten or so metres above the ice. Suited workers were lashed to the immobile underside of one of the tread plates, their welding and cutting torches flashing a pretty blue-violet as they effected some repair. Rashmika had never asked herself how the cathedrals dealt with that kind of overhaul, and the sheer bloody-minded
ruthlessness
of the solution—fixing part of the traction machinery while the cathedral was still moving—rather impressed her.

All around the cathedral, now that she noticed it, was more such activity; traceries of scaffolding covered much of the superstructure. Small figures were working everywhere she looked. The way they popped in and out of hatches, high above ground, made her think of clockwork automata.

Above the flat base, the cathedral conformed more or less to the traditional architectural expectations. Seen from above, the cathedral was an approximate cruciform shape, made up of a long nave with two stubbier transepts jutting out on either side and a smaller chapel at the head of the cross. Rising from the intersection of the nave and its transepts was a square-based tower. It rose for one hundred meters—about equal to the length of the cathedral—before tapering into a four-sided spire which was another fifty metres higher. The ridges of the spire were serrated, and at the very top of the spire was an assemblage of communications dishes and semaphoric signalling mirrors. Rising from the traction base and angling inwards to connect with the top part of the nave were a dozen or so flying buttresses formed from skeletal girderwork. One or two were obviously missing or incomplete. Much of the cathedral, in fact, had a haphazard look, with various parts of the architecture sitting in only approximate harmony with each other. There were whole sections that appeared to have been replaced in great haste, or at minimal expense, or some combination of the two. The spire appeared to lean at a small angle away from the true vertical. It was propped up on one side by scaffolding.

She didn’t know whether to be saddened or relieved. At this point, knowing what she now knew about Dean Quaiche’s plans for the Lady Morwenna, she was glad not to have been assigned to it. She could entertain all the fantasies she liked, but there was no chance of rescuing her brother before the Lady Morwenna reached the bridge. She would be lucky to have infiltrated any level of the cathedral’s hierarchy by then.

The notion of infiltration chimed in her head. It was as if it had resonated with something intimate and personal, something that ran as deep within her as bone marrow. Why did the idea suddenly have such grave and immediate potency? She supposed that her entire mission had been a form of infiltration, from the moment she left her village and set about joining the caravan. The work of ascending through the cathedral until she located Harbin was only a later, more dangerous aspect of an enterprise upon which she had already embarked. She had taken the first step weeks ago, when she first heard of the caravan passing so close to the badlands.

But it had begun earlier than that, really.

Very much earlier.

Rashmika felt dizzy. She had glimpsed something there, a moment of clarity that had opened and closed in an instant. She herself had jammed it shut, the way one slammed a door on a loud noise or a bright light. She had glimpsed a plan—a scheme of infiltration—which stood outside the one she thought she knew. Outside and beyond, enveloping it in its entirety. A scheme of infiltration so huge, so ambitious, that even this trek across Hela was but one chapter in something much longer.

A scheme in which she was not simply a puppet, but also the puppeteer. One thought shone through with painful clarity:
You brought this on yourself.

She tore her mind away from that line of thinking. With an effort of will she forced it back on to the immediate business of the cathedrals. A lapse now, a moment of inattention, could make all the difference.

A shadow fell on the vehicle. It was under the Catherine of Iron, moving between those great rows of crawler tracks. Wheels and treads moved with an unstoppable, inexorable slowness. Never mind her own lapses: it was the driver she had to trust now.

She moved to the other side of the cabin. Ahead, folding down from the underside of the cathedral, was a ramp, its edges marked with pulsing red lights. The lower end of the ramp scraped against the ground, leaving a smooth trail in its wake. The sub-caravan pushed itself on to the slope, wheels spinning for a moment to gain traction, and then its whole length surmounted the ramp. Rashmika grabbed for a handhold as the vehicle began to climb the steep slope. She could feel the labouring grind of the transmission through the metal framing of the cabin.

Soon they reached the top. The sub-caravan righted itself, emerging in a barely lit reception area. There were a couple of other vehicles parked there, as well as a great amount of unfathomable and elderly-looking equipment. Figures moved around wearing vacuum suits. Three of them were fixing an airlock umbilical to the side of the sub-caravan, puzzling over the interconnectors as if this was something they had never had to do before.

Presently Rashmika heard thumps and hisses, then voices. Her companions began to gather themselves and their possessions, edging towards the airlock. She collected her own bundle of belongings and stood ready to join them. For a while nothing happened. She heard the voices getting louder, as if some dispute was taking place. Standing by the window, she had a better view of what was going on outside. Within the depressurised part of the chamber was a figure, standing, doing nothing. She caught a glimpse of a man’s face through the visor of his rococo helmet: the expression was blank, but the face was not entirely unfamiliar.

Whoever it was stood watching the proceedings, with one hand resting on a cane.

The commotion continued unabated for a few more moments. Finally it died down and Rashmika’s companions began to shuffle out through the airlock, donning the helmets of their vacuum suits as they entered it. They all looked a lot less lively than they had five minutes ago. The actuality of arriving at the Catherine of Iron had brought them to the end of their journey. Judging by their expressions, this dim, grimy-looking enclosure filled with derelict junk and bored-looking workers was not quite what they had imagined when they had set out. She remembered what the quaestor had said, however: that the dean of the Iron Katy was a fair man who treated his workers and pilgrims well. They should all count themselves lucky, in that case. Better a down-at-heel cathedral run by a good man than the doomed madhouse of the Lady Morwenna, even if she did have to get to the Lady Mor eventually.

She had reached the door when a hand touched her chest, preventing her from going any further. She looked into the eyes of a fat-faced Adventist official.

“Rashmika Els?” the man said.

“Yes.”

“There’s been a change of plan,” he said. “You’re to stay on the caravan, I’m afraid.”

 

They took her away from the Catherine of Iron, away from the smooth road of the Permanent Way. She was the only passenger in the sub-caravan apart from the suited man with the cane. He just sat there, his helmet still on, tapping the cane against the heel of his boot. Most of the time she could not see his face.