Very soon the cathedrals would be visible, their spires clawing above the horizon.
But before she saw the cathedrals she saw other machines. They began as dots in the distance, throwing up pure white ballistic plumes from their rumbling wheels and treads. For many minutes they did not appear to move at all. Rashmika wondered if the caravan was simply catching up with similar processions arriving at the Way from elsewhere on Hela. This seemed reasonable, for many roads had joined up with the one they were on since they had climbed out of the Rift.
But then she realised that the vehicles were actually racing towards them. Even this did not strike her as particularly noteworthy, but then she felt the caravan slow and begin to oscillate from one side of the road to the other, as if uncertain which side it ought to be on. The swerves made her feel nauseous. She had the viewing area largely to herself, but the few caravan personnel that she saw also appeared ill at ease with developments.
The other machines continued to sweep towards them. In a few moments they had swelled to enormous size. They were much larger than any of the caravan’s components. Rashmika saw a blur of treads and wide meshwork road wheels, with a superstructure of vicious ice-and-rock-moving machinery. The machines were painted a dusty yellow, with bee-stripes and rotating warning beacons. Many of the components were half-familiar to her: massively scaled-up counterparts of the heavy excavation equipment her fellow villagers used in the scuttler digs.
She recognised the function, even if the size was daunting. There were toothed claws and gaping lantern-jawed dragline buckets. There were grader blades and mighty percussive hammers. There were angled conveyor belts like the ridged spines of dinosaurs. There were rotating shield drills: huge toothed discs as wide as any one of the caravan’s vehicles. There were fusion torches, lasers, bosers, high-pressure water cutters, steam-borers. There were tiny cabins jacked high on articulated gantries. There were vast ore hoppers and grilled, chimneyed machines she couldn’t even begin to identify. There were generators, equipment carriers and accommodation cabins painted the same dusty yellow.
All of it rolled by, machine after machine, hogging the road while the caravan bounced along in a rut on one side of it.
She sensed grinding humiliation.
Later, when the caravan was on the move again, she tried to find out what had happened. She thought Pietr might know, but he was nowhere to be found. Quaestor Jones, when she tracked him down, dismissed the matter as one of trifling importance. But he still did not tell her what she wanted to know.
“That wasn’t a caravan like ours,” she said.
“Your powers of observation do you credit.”
“So might I ask where it was going?”
“I would have thought that was obvious, especially given your chosen intention to work on the Permanent Way. Very evidently, those machines were part of a major Way taskforce. Doubtless they were on their way to clear a blockage, or to make good a defect in the infrastructure.” Quaestor Rutland Jones folded his arms, as if the matter was settled.
“Then they’d be affiliated to a church, wouldn’t they? I may not know much, but I know that all the gangs are tied to specific churches.”
“Most certainly.” He drummed his fingers on the desk before him.
“In which case, what church was it? I watched every one of those machines go past and I didn’t see a single clerical symbol on any of them.”
The quaestor shrugged, a little too emphatically for Rash-mika’s tastes. “It’s dirty work—as you will soon discover. When the clock is against a team, I doubt that touching-up painted insignia is very high on the list of priorities.”
She recalled that the excavation machines had been dusty and faded. What the quaestor said was undoubtedly true in a general sense, but in Rashmika’s opinion, not one of those machines had ever carried a clerical symbol—not since they were last painted, at least.
“One other thing, Quaestor.”
“Yes,” he said, tiredly.
“We’re heading down towards the Way because we took a short cut across Absolution Gap. We’d come from the north. It seems to me that if those machines really were on their way to clear a blockage, they’d hardly be taking the same route we did, even in reverse.”
“What are you suggesting, Miss Els?”
“It strikes me as much more likely that they were headed somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that has nothing to do with the Way.”
“And that’s your considered opinion, is it? Based on all your many years of experience with matters of the Way and the operational complexities of its maintenance?”
“There’s no call for sarcasm, Quaestor.”
He shook his head and reached for a compad, making an exaggerated show of finding his place in whatever work he had been engaged in before her interruption. “Based on my own limited experience, you will do one of two things, Miss Els. You will either go very far, or you will shortly meet a very unfortunate end in what on the face of it might resemble a regrettable accident out on the ice. One thing I am certain about, however: in the process of reaching either outcome, you will still manage to irritate a great many people.”
“Then at least I’ll have made a difference,” she said, with vastly more bravado than she felt. She turned to go.
“Miss Els.”
“Quaestor?”
“Should you at any point decide to return to the badlands… would you do me a singular favour?”
“What?” she asked.
“Find some other mode of transport to take you back,” the quaestor said, before returning to his duties.
THIRTY-ONE
Scorpio cycled through the airlock as soon as the shuttle had engaged with its docking cradle, latching itself securely into place in the reception bay. The other ship that had accompanied them—it was much smaller and sleeker—was a wedge of darkness parked alongside. All he could see was its silhouette, a flint-shaped splash of ink like one of the random blots sometimes used in a psychological examination. It just sat there, hissing, its smell sharp and antiseptic, like a medicine cabinet. It looked completely two-dimensional, as if stamped from a sheet of thin black metal.
It looked like something you could cut yourself on.
Security Arm militia had already cordoned off both craft. They recognised the shuttle, but they were wary of the other arrival. Scorpio assumed it had received the same invitation, but the guards were still taking no chances. He stood most of them down, keeping only a couple handy just in case the ship really did contain an unpleasant surprise.
He raised his sleeve and spoke into his communicator. “Antoinette? You around?”
“I’m on my way up, Scorp. Be there in a minute or so. Do you have our guest?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
He moved over to the black ship. It was not much larger than the capsule Khouri had come down in. Room in it for one or two people at the very most, he estimated. He rapped a knuckle against the black surface. It was cold to the touch. The hairs on his knuckle tingled with shock.
A dogleg of pink light split the black machine down the middle and a section of the hull slid aside, revealing a dim interior. A man was already extricating himself from the prison of an acceleration couch and fold-around controls. It was Re-montoire, just as Scorpio had suspected. He was a little older than Scorpio remembered, but still fundamentally the same: a very thin, very tall, very bald man, dressed entirely in tight black clothes that served only to emphasise his arachnoid qualities. His skull was a peculiar shape: elongated, like a teardrop.