The road bed appeared only slightly wider than the caravan. They were moving down the middle of it, only occasionally veering to one side or the other to avoid a patch of thickened ice or some other obstruction. There were rocks on the frozen surface of the road, deposited there from volcanic plumes else-where on Hela. Some of them were half as high as the caravan’s wheels. The fact that they had managed to smash on to the road without shattering the bridge gave her a tiny flicker of reassurance. And if the road bed was just wide enough to accommodate the two rows of vehicles that made up the caravan, then it was clearly absurd to think of a cathedral making the same journey.
That was when she noticed something down in the floor of the Rift. It was a huge smear of rubble, kilometres across. It was dark and star-shaped, and as far as she could tell the epicentre of the smear lay almost directly beneath the bridge. Near the centre of the star were vague suggestions of ruined structures. Rashmika saw what she thought might be the uppermost part of a spire, leaning to one side. She made out sketchy hints of smashed machinery, smothered in dust and debris.
So someone had tried to cross the bridge with a cathedral.
She moved between the vehicles, focusing dead ahead as she made her own personal crossing. The Observers were still on their racks, tilted towards the swollen sphere of Haldora. Their mirrored faceplates made her think of dozens of neatly packed titanium eggs.
Then she saw another suited figure waiting on the next vehicle along, resting against a railing on one side of the roof. It became aware of her presence at about the same time that she noticed it, for the figure turned to her and beckoned her onwards.
She moved past the Observers, then crossed another swaying connection. The caravan swerved alarmingly to negotiate the chicane between two rockfalls, then bounced and crunched its way over a series of smaller obstructions.
The other figure wore a vacuum suit of unremarkable design. She had no idea whether it was the same kind that the Observers wore, since she had never seen beneath their habits. The mirrored silver visor gave nothing away.
“Pietr?” she asked, on the general channel.
There was no response, but the figure still urged her on with increased urgency.
What if this was a trap of some kind? The quaestor had known about her conversation with the young man. It was quite likely that he also knew about her earlier assignation on the roof. Rashmika had little doubt that she would be making enemies during the course of her investigations, but she did not think she had made any yet, unless one counted the quaestor. But since he had now arranged work for her in the clearance gang, she imagined that he had a vested interest in seeing her safely delivered to the Permanent Way.
Rashmika approached the figure, weighing possibilities all the while. The figure’s suit was a hard-shelled model, closely fitting the anatomy of its wearer. The helmet and limb parts were olive green, the accordion joints gleaming silver. Unlike the suits she had seen being worn by the walking pilgrims, it was completely lacking in any ornamentation or religious frippery.
The faceplate turned to her. She saw highlights glance off a face behind the glass, the hard shadow beneath well-defined cheekbones.
Pietr extended an arm and with the other hand folded back a flap on the wrist of the outstretched arm. He unspooled a thin optical fibre and offered the other end to Rashmika.
Of course. Secure communication. She took the fibre and plugged it into the corresponding socket on her own suit. Such fibres were designed to allow suit-to-suit communications in the event of a radio or general network failure. They were also ideal for privacy.
“I’m glad you made it,” Pietr said.
“I wish I understood the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“Better safe than sorry. I shouldn’t really have talked to you about the vanishings at all, at least not down in the caravan. Do you think anyone overheard us?”
“The quaestor came and had a quiet word with me when you had gone.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Pietr said. “He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.”
“You were hardly calling for the abolition of the churches,” Rashmika replied. “From what I remember, all we discussed was the vanishings.”
“Well, that’s dangerous enough, in some people’s views. Talking of which—views, I mean—isn’t this something else?” Pietr pivoted around on his heels, illustrating his point with an expansive sweep of his free hand.
Rashmika smiled at his enthusiasm. “I’m not sure. I’m not really one for heights.”
“Oh, c’mon. Forget all that stuff about the vanishings, forget your enquiry—whatever it is—just for now. Admire the view. Millions of people will never, ever see what you’re seeing now.”
“It feels as if we’re trespassing,” Rashmika said, “as if the scuttlers built this bridge to be admired, but never used.”
“I don’t know much about them. I’d say we haven’t a clue what they thought, if they even built this thing. But the bridge is here, isn’t it? It seems an awful shame not to make some use of it, even if it’s only once in a while.”
Rashmika looked down at the star-shaped smear. “Is it true what the quaestor told me? Did someone once try to take a cathedral across this thing?”
“So they say. Not that you’ll find any evidence of it in any ecumenical records.”
She grasped the railing tighter, still beguiled by the remoteness of the ground so far below. “But it did happen, all the same?”
“It was a splinter sect,” Pietr said. “A one-off church, with a small cathedral. They called themselves the Numericists. They weren’t affiliated to any of the ecumenical organisations, and they had very limited trading agreements with the other churches. Their belief system was… odd. It wasn’t just a question of being in doctrinal conflict with any of the other churches. They were polytheists, for a start. Most of the churches are strictly monotheistic, with strong ties to the old Abrahamic religions. Hellfire and brimstone churches, I call them. One God, one Heaven, one Hell. But the ones who made that mess down there… they were a lot stranger. They weren’t the only polytheists, but their entire world view—their entire cosmology—was so hopelessly unorthodox that there was no possibility of interecumenical dialogue. The Numericists were devout mathematicians. They viewed the study of numbers as the highest possible calling, the only valid way to approach the numinous. They believed there was one God for every class of number: a God of integers, a God of real numbers, a God of zero. They had subsidiary gods: a lesser god of irrational numbers, a lesser god of the Diophantine primes. The other churches couldn’t stomach that kind of weirdness. So the Numericists were frozen out, and in due course they became insular and paranoid.”
“Not surprising, under the circumstances.”
“But there’s something else. They were interested in a statistical interpretation of the vanishings, using some pretty arcane probability theories. It was tricky. There hadn’t been so many vanishings at that time, so the data was sparser—but their methods, they said, were robust enough to be able to cope. And what they came up with was devastating.”