Into Everywhere (35 page)

‘Have you forgotten what the Reds did to your home?’ she said. ‘This is no time for subtlety; this is a desperate and dangerous business. Quit bitching and get on with it. Or do I have to ask my boys to persuade you?’

Bane kept watch under the archway while Bob led Tony out into the rainy courtyard. The big man sprayed something around the edges of the door of Adam Apostu’s house, told Tony to step back. A moment of silence, raindrops sizzling off the hoods and skirts of their rain capes. Then with a sharp crack and a blue flash the door fell flat on the wet flagstones, and Bob grabbed Tony’s arm and hauled him across the threshold.

A single room occupied the ground floor, dark and unquiet. Little rustlings and squeaks. Flutterings. Bob floated a sparklight that revealed furniture piled everywhere, with only a narrow passage to the staircase on the far side. Shadows skittered under upturned chairs and tables, cat-sized and quick. Eidolons.

Tony could feel their attention prickling in his head, stepped back with electric shock when one reared up in front of him. It was pale and bone-thin, and had too many eyes studded around the dish of its face. He felt its attention push towards him, and then it recoiled and whirled away like a rag blown on a gust of wind.

‘Up,’ Bob said. ‘Quick.’

Another dark room at the top of the stairs, bare floorboards and red curtains stretched from wall to wall. The sparklight cast Tony’s and Bob’s shadows across the curtains’ heavy folds; the shadows rippled as something stirred and parted them.

A man stepped through, dressed in a long black gown whose hood covered most of his head. His face was mild and milk-white; his eyes were masked by glasses with round black mirrors for lenses. He pulled a wheeled pole with him as he took two tentative steps into the room. His free hand, white-gloved, groped the air and he asked in a high quavering voice, ‘Who are you? Why have you disturbed me?’

Tony realised that the man, Adam Apostu, was blind and ill. A transparent sac hung from the top of his pole, and a line looped from it to a slit in the waist of his gown.

‘We come for answers, not questions,’ Bob said.

Tony pushed back the hood of his rain cape and said, ‘I want to discuss stromatolites and Ghajar algorithms.’

‘You are early for your appointment. And there was no need to enter by force. As you can see, I am a harmless old man, not at all like the monster they told you about.’

Adam Apostu’s lips scarcely moved when he spoke. His skin was caked with white powder and seemed to be as stiff as leather. Tony wondered if it was a symptom of his illness.

‘I was told that you never leave this house,’ Tony said. ‘Yet you know that we were asking about you.’

‘I don’t go out because I prefer people to come to me. And I have no need of food, as this drip sustains my body. But I have my mice, and my mice have ears,’ Adam Apostu said. ‘They go everywhere in the city, and most people don’t notice them. They travel the paths of the dead. Speaking of the dead, how is the guest in your head?’

Tony was too surprised to deny it. ‘Who told you about that?’

Before the scholar could reply, Bob said, ‘We don’t care about your mice, or about dead people either. We want to know what you know about Ada Morange and the Red Brigade.’

Tony said, ‘Ada Morange is a laminated brain owned by my family. She also goes by the name of Aunty Jael. Do you know her?’

‘Of course,’ Adam Apostu said.

Tony was surprised by the man’s candour. He said, ‘Have you spoken to her? Did she tell you about the slime planet?’

If he kept Adam Apostu talking, there would be no need for Bob’s tickling.

‘I learned about it in records that no one else had bothered to access for fifty years. People commonly say that much knowledge was lost in the various wars when the two empires rose and fell. But it’s more accurate to say that most of it was misplaced. You just have to know how to look for it.’

‘Did you share your find with Ada Morange? Did she suggest that you offer it to Raqle Thornhilde?’

‘I sold the details of the slime planet to Raqle Thornhilde. And also suggested that she hire you.’

Tony looked at Bob. ‘Is this true?’

‘He lies,’ Bob said, and shucked off his rain cape and drew a knife with a long thin blade. ‘This is my tickler, old man. I use it to tickle the truth out of people. First I’ll cut your food line. Then I’ll start cutting you.’

Tony said quickly, ‘He won’t hurt you if you tell the truth.’

‘But I am telling the truth.’ The scholar seemed to be amused.

Tony said, ‘Why use a third party? Why not tell my family directly?’

‘Would you have believed a humble and obscure scholar such as me? I knew you were working out of Dry Salvages, so I contacted one of the brokers there, told her about the slime planet, and pointed her towards you. But I see now that she is dissatisfied with the arrangement.’

‘She thinks you cheated her when the Red Brigade raided my home and took the wizards and the stromatolites.’

‘Not to mention Ada Morange,’ Adam Apostu said.

‘She belongs to my family,’ Tony said. ‘I want her back, and I believe that you may know where she is.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Is she with the Red Brigade?’

‘I suppose you could say that she mostly is.’

‘Is she a prisoner?’

‘No.’

‘She made a deal with them, didn’t she? Her freedom in exchange for the Ghajar eidolon and the archival genetics in the stromatolites.’

‘You seem to know everything,’ Adam Apostu said.

‘I don’t know why the Red Brigade wants the eidolon and the archival genetics. Why are they so important?’

‘The Red Brigade stole them from my mother,’ Bob said. He held up the knife in front of his face and smiled around it. ‘We’ve come to get them back.’

‘What you want isn’t here,’ Adam Apostu said.

‘You know where they are,’ Bob said. ‘And I’m going to tickle it out of you.’

But when he stepped towards the old scholar a storm of eidolons blew up around him, pouring like smoke from gaps in the floorboards. Bob roared with anger and slashed at them with his knife. It was as futile as trying to cut air or shadows. In moments, he was completely obscured in a whirling column of black shapes: somewhere in this old dark house Adam Apostu was running a huge cache of Elder Culture algorithms. Wisps whipped out at Tony, but recoiled before touching him.

‘They know your friend, Master Tony,’ Adam Apostu said, speaking quickly and precisely. ‘If I were you, I’d take this chance to escape. Once Raqle Thornhilde realises you’re no longer of any use, she’ll have her bully-boys dispose of you. That would be unfortunate, because the guest aboard your ship has caught my interest. It has made some very interesting changes.’

‘How do you know about my ship?’

Bob, blinded by the eidolons, lunged wildly with his knife; Adam Apostu deftly parried it with his pole, saying, ‘I talked to it, of course. You should leave now, before Bane comes.’

‘There you are, you old fucker,’ Bob sang, and struck again.

The old man leaned backwards, the knife point missing his face by a scant centimetre, and Bob howled inside his whirlwind of eidolons and slammed into him. They crashed into the curtains; eidolons flared away into every corner of the room. Adam Apostu’s hood had fallen back, revealing a plastic shell that had replaced his scalp. Bob caught his pole in one hand and swung his knife, hacking deep into the scholar’s neck, wrenching it free, hacking again.

Adam Apostu’s head tumbled to the floor. There was no blood. The scholar’s dark glasses were askew, revealing silvery eyes with cruciform pupils that swivelled towards Tony. His black lips parted and he croaked, ‘Run, you fool.’

The headless body had broken free from Bob and was belabouring him with the pole. Swift ruthless blows that drove the clone from one side of the room to the other. Tony understood what Adam Apostu was, then. Not a man at all, but a hand controlled by someone else, from some other location. It swung the pole, hit Bob’s head with a tremendous clang. The clone went down on one knee, tried to push up, and the headless hand swung its pole again and a gout of blood splashed across the wall.

Tony ran for the stairs and in the darkness missed the bottom step and fell full length, smacking the breath from his lungs. The thorny thickets of tables and chairs, legs interlocked in a mad sculpture, were lit only by the faint light that outlined the open doorway. Tony saw a shadow moving there and scrambled sideways on elbows and knees, curling up inside his rain cape under a tangle of chairs a moment before Bane charged through the doorway and ran straight at the stairs, slippers pounding a hand’s breadth from Tony’s hiding place.

As soon as the clone had disappeared up the staircase, Tony pushed to his feet and looked all around. He could have made a run through the doorway, across the courtyard, out into the city, but he knew that Bane and Bob would track him down if he took to the streets, and Adam Apostu had pointed him towards a better hiding place.

The construction coral foundations of the city were honeycombed with kilometres of tunnels and voids. People buried their dead down there, in catacombs that they visited on high days and saints’ days. There were hundreds of entrances, in churches and houses, in cafés and shops: Tony believed that there must be one hidden somewhere under the thickets of furniture, and as he looked all around a wisp of faint luminescence curdled in a far corner.

He had to crawl under and over a pile of chairs to reach it. It stood like a faint, frozen candle flame above a flagstone. As thumping footsteps and oaths sounded overhead, Tony ran his fingers around the edges of the stone, found a depression that slid backwards with a click. The stone hinged up and Tony grabbed the free edge and pulled it upright, revealing a ladder dropping down a square shaft.

The wisp of light darted past and plummeted straight down the shaft. Tony shrugged off his rain cape and followed, using the iron ring set in the underside of the hinged flagstone to pull it shut, climbing down the ladder to a narrow passage lit by small lamps set in the rough construction-coral ceiling.

The light circled him twice and fluttered forward. The passage slanted down, always down, joined or crossed here and there by other passages. The paths of the dead. Here was a skull in a niche carved into the stony wall, mirror fragments jammed in its sockets reflecting the tiny flame that burned in front of it. Here was the body of a woman propped upright in an alcove, wrapped in tattered winding cloth, her face an eyeless leathery mask. Here was a window showing a loop of a child running into sunlit water on a beach of some other world, turning in knee-deep waves and smiling.

Not all of the dead were human. As Tony followed the wisp of light down a passage whose walls were lined with polished construction coral, he saw a tall figure seemingly constructed from sticks totter away from him, vanishing into a crevice in the wall.

The route slanted deeper into the city’s foundations, leaving behind human burials. The walls began to sweat; there was a scent of salt and rot in the air. A handful of scrabs skittered around his feet, hard shells glistening. And then the way ended in a cavern or cistern flooded with still black water. Stairs led down to a walkway. The wisp of light shot out across it and halted above a platform on the far side, where a pale-skinned man stood beside the aquarium tank of the !Cha, Unlikely Worlds.

The trip to First Foot’s wormhole took a little over a day. The ship accelerated continuously until it reached midpoint, and then, after a disorientating fifteen minutes in free fall while it swung around, began to decelerate. There would be heavy traffic on the far side of the wormhole, so it wasn’t a good idea to slam out of it at high velocity. The ship lacked windows and portholes, but Lisa could watch First Foot’s ochre and blue globe dwindle on the big HD screen in the guest lounge, an airy space at the centre of an accommodation module constructed by a Dutch shipbuilding firm that usually designed the interiors of superyachts and inserted into the Ghajar ship’s open-plan interior like a bullet into the chamber of a gun. White carpets, white leather furniture, walls panelled in fine-grained maple, brass handrails. The guest cabins and en-suite bathrooms little marvels of economy.

Lisa, Isabelle and Unlikely Worlds shared this space with the pilot, the half-dozen servants who unobtrusively catered to their needs, and the specialists who been sent from Terminus to deal with artefacts retrieved from Willie’s dig site – Doris Bauer, a formidably brisk Austrian woman about Lisa’s age, and her two handsome young assistants. They documented the tesserae from the wall of the tomb and performed a preliminary assessment of Lisa and her ghost that wasn’t much different from the yearly check-ups in the hospital in Port of Plenty. The same tests, the same meaningless reassurances. The eidolon was active, but there was no indication that it was malign. It wasn’t clear how it had been changed, why Lisa could now see the activity of Elder Culture artefacts, or why some unknown object or location in the sky tugged at her attention (she knew now that it wasn’t the ship because that little tug was still there, somewhere off to port), but according to Doris Bauer everything would be clarified by further tests when they reached Terminus. ‘We have the best people there. The best facilities. You are in good hands.’

Lisa thought that the luxury was amusingly over the top, but Isabelle was in her element. She’d had a manicure and a haircut while Lisa was being tested, and had changed into a white silk trouser suit, and spent most of her time on her q-phone, giving crisp accounts of her adventure in the back country to a management team and a variety of experts, and briefing a crew who were riding towards First Foot on the shuttle. They’d been tasked with exploring and documenting the site after the police quit it, and would also hire local tomb raiders to search the area, concentrating on the places Lisa had spotted from the outlook.

‘There may have been other survivors of the crash,’ Isabelle told Lisa. ‘Or other fragments of the ship scattered across the area. I have also arranged for an expert to be transported to Terminus. He will examine the code in those tesserae.’