In the Mouth of the Whale (13 page)

In one instant it stood before us. The next, before we could recover from the shock, it was on us. We tried to establish a perimeter, and we failed. Loops of raw processing power flicked out all around; flagstones exploded to dust everywhere they grounded, and the dust whirled in complex reiterated figures. We barely managed to counter the first attack; the second overwhelmed us. Van went first, and his kholop tried to run and was caught too. Both of them frozen shadows in swirls of burning dust, blinking out as their links to the translation frames were cut, but too late, too late. The Horse and I looked at each other, and knew that there was no time to throw up any kind of shield. The demon was too quick, too powerful. We ran, and Arden and her kholop chased after us and were caught by dust and consumed. In that brief interval, the Horse and I were able to break into a blockhouse and safely disconnect while the demon raved beyond the slabs of dumb and stubbornly inert data.

All this in a little less than a millisecond.

Van and his kholop died almost at once. The demon had traced the links back to their translation frames, punching through firewalls, overwhelming counterstrikes, getting inside their skulls and overloading the electrical activity of their brains. They suffered a series of massive seizures before they could be extracted from the translation frames, and although they were placed on life-support their brain activity was permanently flatlined. Arden and her kholop lived a little longer, driven insane by malignant subroutines. The Horse and I were quarantined, and, after the alienists were satisfied that we had not been infected, I was interviewed by the Redactor Miriam and then brought up before the full council of the Library and tried and sentenced.

I was sweating hard when I had finished telling Lathi Singleton all this, yet felt cold to the marrow of my bones. She pressed a small glass into my hand and told me to drink, and I obediently swallowed the measure of white liquid. Bitter fire hollowed my mouth and its warmth bloomed in my chest, and gradually I stopped shivering, and was able to answer Lathi Singleton’s questions about my work as an itinerant exorcist. I told her about the last hell that the Horse and I had harrowed, just as I’ve told you, and she said that she was pleased by my honesty and the courage.

‘Let me match your candour with my own,’ she said. ‘First, I’ll tell you something of my family history. It’s a sorry story, mostly involving untimely deaths. My father and mother are dead, both of them killed in the war. My mother was a warlord, my father a senior member of her staff. Their ship was crippled when the Ghosts pushed forward unexpectedly, and my mother blew it up rather than be captured. Two of my father’s brothers and one of his sisters were likewise killed in battle. My mother’s eldest brother died after his ship lost power, approaching Dis. One of her sisters died in a hunting accident; the other died of an autoimmune disease. A good number of their children died, too – I won’t bore you with the list. And my partner died, in the war, and so did our daughter. She insisted on volunteering against all my advice, and she was killed on some nameless rock when a horde of child-things infiltrated the forward supply station she commanded.

‘In short,’ Lathi Singleton said, looking directly at me with no particular expression on her face, ‘I am one of the few survivors of a tragic chapter in our clan’s history. All I have is this little square of dirt, and my son, Yakob. What were you told about him?’

‘That he was working for the Office of Public Safety, Majistra. And that he found a hell and afterwards disappeared, while the data miner who helped him killed herself.’

‘An accurate but cruelly abrupt summary,’ Lathi Singleton said. ‘Let me tell you about my son. I want you to know what he was like because I believe it may help you to find out why he disappeared. And I want you to see him as a person, too.

‘I believed that he could play a large part in restoring the honour and esteem of my family, and for that reason I wanted him to enter politics. For several years he worked as assistant for one of my cousins, an ancient and distinguished representative in Our Thing. But he rebelled against this apprenticeship and in spite of my express wishes and commands he joined the Office of Public Safety – and not as an officer, but an ordinary trooper. I was not happy about this, as you may imagine. The Office of Public Safety protects us from outlaws, criminals, and wreckers, but it is in no way a route to political influence. The only consolation was that Yakob had been something of a dissolute in my cousin’s service, but during his training he buckled down and aced every test, and on graduation started out walking a beat like any ordinary trooper. And this wasn’t some comfortable assignment in a calm and comfortable neighbourhood reserved for cadres and entrepreneurs. No, it was in one of the industrial worldlets, a trashed wasteland littered with manufactories dedicated to organosynthesis, element refining and heavy fabrication, inhabited by convicts, former convicts, and internal exiles.

‘Yakob soon distinguished himself by his quick and fearless action in disturbances large and small, by securing the arrest of a gang of corrupt officials, by his patient work in tracking down the criminals who had made and distributed a batch of jeniver that left more than a hundred people blind and brain-damaged, and his help in arresting a serial killer who sold on the black market the meat of Quicks he had murdered and dismembered. His success almost reconciled me to his rebellion. The arrest and execution of the serial killer led to promotion and a move to Thule, where Yakob quickly uncovered a minor case of preferment in an obscure office of the Ministry of Defence that led to the reopening of an old unsolved homicide case and eventually brought down one of Our Thing’s senior advisers. After that, he was involved in a string of less spectacular but equally knotty cases, and won promotion again. And then he discovered the hell, and he disappeared.’

Lathi Singleton had told me her son’s story very calmly, but her strong hands were twisted together in her lap.

‘My clan is powerful, but I have lost almost everything,’ she said. ‘This platform was once a happy hunting ground for my immediate family. Now I rent most of it out as a place of execution, where wreckers and other traitors are hazed by their peers or put to death by wild animals. I have no influence amongst those who could help, and they have no inclination to help me. If his colleagues know anything, they have not shared it with me. That is why I have turned to your clan for help. In the small hope that something in the hell will give a clue as to his intentions.

‘He found it on T. The war worldlet at the outer edge of the archipelago. I know little more than that. Neither his colleagues nor the authorities on T have been helpful. But I do know one thing. It’s the reason why I contacted your clan. Before she killed herself, the data miner who helped Yakob explore the hell said that it contained a back door. One that led to your Library.’

‘With respect, Majistra, I don’t think that is likely. We have not completely mapped the Library, but we do know that the fragments from which it was built did not contain any back doors or other connections.’

‘I am only telling you what I know. Whether or not it is the truth I cannot say. I was told that Jakob found a back door to some part of your Library, and there he found something he believed to be valuable. I don’t know what it was. He hired a data miner to help him, and she is dead. She killed herself. The Quick who told him about the hell is also dead, or has been disappeared. His colleagues are as vague on that point as on all others. All I know is that after Yakob explored the hell he’d found, he went off to search for something, and he has not returned. Perhaps he is somewhere in the Archipelago or on one of the colony worldlets, exploring some lost habitat of the Quick. He could even be here in Thule, going amongst her citizens in deep disguise. More likely he has ventured beyond the known worldlets, out into the vastness of the dust belt. I want to find out where he went, and what happened to him, and the first and best clue lies in that hell. And that is why you are here.’

‘I have been sent to help you, Majistra. And I will do my best.’

‘Your clan will benefit by acquiring a new fragment of the Library, or by closing a back door you knew nothing about. And I will know what happened to my son. I do not expect loyalty to me, little monk, but I expect your clan to honour custom and contract.’

‘As they have, by sending me here.’

‘They have sent someone who has been disgraced and sent into exile. Not the best of their kind, but the least. Why should I not feel insulted?’

I found it hard to meet her cold, searching gaze. I was in her power. She could kill me by her own hand, or have me killed by one of the animals she had recreated. Few in my clan would mourn me; no one of any importance would question my disappearance.

‘I failed once,’ I said. ‘But I have never failed since.’

‘And I will make sure that you do not fail me. Look there,’ Lathi Singleton said, and pointed to the dry grassland beyond the slab of rock where we sat. It had grown darker, but a sliver of light lingered at the far end of the platform, casting long shadows across the reddened landscape. After a few moments, I saw something moving past the solitary flat-topped tree that stood in the middle distance. Someone was jogging towards us out of the dusk’s bloodlight, moving at the apex of a long shadow.

‘There are few people I can trust,’ Lathi Singleton said. ‘My younger brother’s daughter, Prem, is one of them. She and my son were close, as children, and she has sworn to find him alive, or avenge his death. She’ll go with you. Or rather, you will go with her.’

She came scrambling up the rocks, Prem Singleton, stepping from one to the next with a flowing grace, vaulting to the lip of the slab where Lathi Singleton and I stood. She was young and slender, barefoot and bare-legged, dressed in a simple white shirt that fell to her thighs, her bob of glossy black hair highlighted with silvery threads and cut straight across her forehead, just above her eyes. In repose her face would have been merely pretty, but the restless and mischievous intelligence that animated it lent her a striking beauty that reminded me of the eidolon that had led me through the Memory Palace when I had first met Majister Svern. The resemblance wasn’t especially close, but it was enough to undo the laces of my heart.

She stood there, hands on hips, and looked straight at me. Her eyes were large and dark brown, and I could feel her gaze move over my face.

Lathi Singleton introduced us, although I scarcely heard what she said.

‘Well, then,’ Prem Singleton said to me. ‘Why don’t you show me this famous Library?’

9

Commissar Doctor Wilm Pentangel told his new recruits that they had not been selected by him, but by the Mind at the heart of the world.

‘You were all visited by so-called sprites during the recent event, and the experience has imprinted all of you with an indelible signature. As others have been touched in the past, so you have been touched now. The Mind is trying to communicate with us.

We do not yet fully understand what it wants, but you will all help advance that understanding. ‘We are at a tipping point in history. The Ghosts were driven back from Cthuga at the beginning of the war, and now they are reaching out towards Cthuga again. It is clear that they came to Fomalhaut because they wish to communicate with the Mind. We do not know if it wishes to communicate with them, but we do know that it wishes to communicate with us. I have been working long and hard to make full contact. That so many of you stand here today proves that the day when I achieve my aims is close at hand. All of you have been touched. All of you have been selected. Every one of you possesses some quality that attracted the Mind, and now a small part of it resides in your consciousness. Every one of you has the potential to change the war, and so change the course of history. Remember that always.’

The commissar paused, standing tall inside his long white coat and his exoskeleton. His sharp glittering gaze passing over the ranks of Quick. Ori tried not to flinch when he looked at her for a second, and lowered her own gaze and did not look up until he started to speak again.

Saying that they had much work to do and only a little time to do it. ‘You will all be thoroughly tested, and you will all be thoroughly trained. I must remake all of you in a handful of days. Some will fail me. It is inevitable. The rest will have the honour of knowing that they will have contributed to denying the enemy what it desires and ending the war. Now my assistants and kholops will organise you into groups, and tell you what needs to be done. To work!’

They were divided into five groups, and used standard kits to build five commons around the edge of the hangar space. They assembled partitions, divided the central space into training and testing areas, and set up and tested immersion chairs and the other equipment. When the philosopher-soldiers of the commissar’s crew were satisfied that everything was in order, the punishing routines began. Neurological tests of every kind; taking turns in immersion chairs, where they learned how to handle drones in virtual simulations; indoctrination sessions; housekeeping tasks – cleaning and polishing decks and partitions, preparing and serving meals, and routine maintenance of the hangar’s recycling systems – and six hours sleep.

It was intense and exhausting. Ori and the other recruits were forbidden to talk to one another, but it was possible to have brief, whispered conversations while doing scut work, swap stories about their encounters with sprites, speculate about what would happen to them after they finished training.