Vasko spoke into his communicator. He asked for Scorpio, but it was another senior who answered.
“Request that the ship fire its engines,” Vasko said.
But even before he had finished his sentence they saw the engines light. Twin spikes of purple-edged white lanced from the Conjoiner drives, their brilliance overloading the camera. The ship crept forwards in the harness, like a last, weakened effort at escape by a captured sea creature. But the holding machines flexed, absorbing the shock of drive activation, and the ship gradually returned to its earlier position. The engines burned clean and steady.
“Look,” Grelier said, pointing to one of the garret’s windows. “We can see it.”
The exhaust beams were two scratches of fading white, probing over the horizon like searchlights.
A moment later, they felt a tremble run through the Lady Morwenna.
Quaiche summoned Grelier, gestured at his eyes. “Take this monstrosity off my face. I don’t need it any more.”
“The eye-opener?”
“Remove it. Gently.”
Grelier did as he was told, carefully levering the metal frame away from its subject.
“Your eyelids will take a while to settle back,” Grelier told him. “In the meantime, I’d keep the glasses on.”
Quaiche held the shades to his face, like a child playing with an adult’s spectacles. Without the eye7opener, they were much too large to stay in place.
“Now we can leave,” he said.
Scorpio loped back to the squat pebble of his ship, climbed in through the open doorframe and took the little craft away from the remains of the bridge. The gashed landscape wheeled below him, myriad sharp black shadows stretching across it like individual ink-spills. One wall of the Rift was now as dark as night, while the other was illuminated only near its top. Some part of him wanted the bridge to still be there; wanted his last act to have been revoked so that he could have more time to consider its consequences. He had always felt that way after he hurt someone or something. He always regretted his impulsiveness, but the one thing about the regret was that it never lasted.
The experts had been wrong about the bridge, he now knew. It was a human artefact, not something made by the scuttlers at all. It had certainly been here for more than a century, but it might not have been very much older than that. But until it was shattered, broken open, its origin—its very nature—had remained unknown. It was a thing of advanced science, but it was the advanced science of the Demarchist era rather than the vanished aliens.“ He thought of the man who had appeared on the ice, his sense of anguish that his beautiful, pointless creation had been destroyed. But it was a recording, not a live transmission. It must have been made when the bridge was made, designed to activate when the structure was damaged or destroyed. It meant that the man had always considered this possibility; had even perhaps anticipated it. To Scorpio he had sounded very much like someone being vindicated.
The ship pulled away from the side of the Rift. He was over solid ground now, with the roughly defined track of the Way visible below him. There, no more than three or four kilometres away, was the Lady Morwenna, throwing its own shadow far back along the route it had travelled, dragging it like a great black wedding train. He pushed the bridge and its maker from his mind. Everything he wanted, everything that mattered now, was in that cathedral. And he had to find a way to get inside it.
He took his ship closer, until he could make out the slow, inching crawl of the great walking machine. There was something hypnotic and calming about the sequenced movements of the flying buttresses. It was not his imagination, then: the Lady Morwenna was still moving, seemingly oblivious to the nonexistence of any safe crossing ahead of it.
He hadn’t expected that.
Perhaps it would start slowing any moment now, as forward sensors detected the interruption in its route. Or perhaps it was simply going to keep walking towards the edge, exactly as if the bridge still existed. A thought occurred to him for the first time: what if stopping really wasn’t an option, and not just bluster on Quaiche’s part?
He slid the ship to within five hundred metres of the cathedral, approximately level with the top of its main tower. All he needed was a landing stage, or something he could improvise as one, and some means of accessing the interior of the cathedral from there. The main landing pad was too crowded; he couldn’t put his ship down on it without risking a collision with one of the other two craft already occupying it. One of them was an unfamiliar red cockleshell; the other was the shuttle Vasko and Khouri had brought from the Nostalgia for Infinity. The shuttle was the only ship capable of getting all of them—including Aura and the suit—back into orbit, so he was anxious not to damage it or push it from the landing stage.
But there were other possibilities, and a landing on the designated pad would have lacked the element of surprise. He circled the cathedral, tapping the thruster stud to hold his altitude steady, watching the stuttering glare flicker against the Lady Morwenna like midsummer lightning. The shadows and highlights moved with him, making the architectural features appear to slide and ooze against each other, as if the cathedral were yawning, waking from some tremendous sleep of stone and metal. Even the gargoyles joined in the illusion of movement, their gape-jawed heads seeming to track him with the smooth, oiled malevolence of weapons turrets.
It wasn’t an illusion.
He saw a flash of fire from one of the gargoyles, and then felt his ship shudder and lurch. In his helmet, alarms rang. The console lit up with emergency icons. He saw the cathedral and the landscape tilt alarmingly and felt the ship begin a sharp, barely controlled descent. The thrusters fired urgently, doing their best to stabilise the falling craft, but there was no hope of getting away from the Lady Morwenna, let alone of reaching orbit. Scorpio pulled hard on the controls, trying to steer the damaged ship away from the gargoyle defence systems. His chest hurt as he applied maximum pressure to the steering stick, making him groan and bite his bottom lip. He tasted his own blood. Another head vomited red fire towards him. The ship lurched and fell even more swiftly. He braced for the impact; it came an instant later. He stayed conscious as the ship slammed into the ice, but cried out with the pain—a pure meaningless roar of rage and indignation. The ship rolled, finally coming to rest on its side. The open door was above him, neatly framing the revealed heart of Haldora.
He waited for at least a minute before moving.
FORTY-SEVEN
The detachment of Cathedral Guard kept watch over their prisoners while Grelier left the garret with whispered orders from Quaiche buzzing in his ear. When he returned he brought with him a suit of approximately the right size for Rashmika: a blood-red Adventist model rather than the One she had worn during her journey aboard the caravan.
Grelier dropped the pieces of the suit into her lap. “Put it on,” he said. “And don’t take an eternity doing it. I want to get off this thing as much as you do.”
“I’m not leaving without the scrimshaw suit,” she said, before glancing at her mother. “Or my friends. They’re coming with me, both of them.”
“No,” Quaiche said. “They’re staying here, at least until you and I reach the safety of the ship.”
“Which ship?” Vasko asked.
“Your ship, of course,” Quaiche said, as if this should have been obvious. “The Nostalgia for Infinity. There’s still rather a lot I don’t know about it. The ship even appears to have something of a mind of its own. Mysteries, mysteries: doubtless we’ll get to the bottom of them all in good time. What I do know is this: I don’t trust that ship not to do something stupid like making itself blow up.”