Grelier smiled to himself. No; he could wait. She would be here very shortly, and then he would have his blood.
As much of it as he needed.
At that moment a hush fell on proceedings. He looked around, watching Quaiche slide down the aisle in his moving pulpit. The upright black structure made a faint trundling sound as it approached. Quaiche remained in his life-support couch, titled nearly to vertical and carried atop the pulpit Even as he moved down the aisle, the light from Haldora was still reaching his eyes. An elaborate system of jointed tubes and mirrors conveyed it all the way down from the Clocktower. Robed technicians followed behind the pulpit, adjusting the tubes with long clawed poles. In the dim light, Quaiche’s sunglasses were gone, revealing the painful framework of the eye-opener.
For many of those present—certainly those who had arrived in the Lady Morwenna in the last two or three years—this might well be the first time they had ever seen Quaiche in person. It was very rare for him to descend from the Clock-tower these days. Rumours of his death had been circulating for decades, barely checked by each increasingly infrequent appearance.
The pulpit swung around and moved along the front of the congregation before coming to a halt immediately below the black window. Quaiche had his back to it, facing the audience; In the candlelight he appeared to be a chiselled outgrowth of the pulpit itself, In bas-relief, vacuum-suited saints supported him from below.
“My people,” he said, “let us rejoice. This is a day of wonders, of opportunity in adversity.” His voice was the usual smoky croak, but amplified and enhanced by hidden microphones. From high above, the organ provided a rumbling, almost subsonic counterpoint to Quaiche’s oration.
“For twenty-two days we have been approaching the impasse in the Gullveig canyon, slowing our speed, allowing Hal-dora to slip ahead of us, but never actually stopping. We had hoped that the blockage would be cleared twelve or thirteen days ago. If it had, we would have lost no ground. But the obstruction proved more challenging than we had feared. Conventional clearance measures proved ineffective. Good men died surveying the problem, and yet more lives were lost in planting the demolition charges. I need hardly remind anyone present that this is a delicate business: the Way itself must remain substantially undamaged once the main obstruction is cleared.” He paused, the circular frames around his eyes catching the candlelight and flaring the colour of brass. “But now the dangerous work is done. The charges are in place.”
At that moment, the choir and the organ swelled in unison. Grelier’s hand was tight on the head of his cane. He squinted, knowing exactly what was coming.
“Behold God’s Fire,” Quaiche intoned.
The black window flared with wonderful light. Through each chip and facet of glass rammed a tangible shaft of colour, each shaft so intense and pure that it slammed Grelier back to a nursery world of bright shapes and colours. He felt the chemical seepage of joy into his brain, struggling to resist it even as he felt his resolve crumbling.
Before the window, Quaiche stood silhouetted on the pulpit. His arms were raised, spindly as branches. Grelier narrowed his eyes even more, trying to make out the pattern revealed in the black window.“He was just beginning to tease it out when the Shockwave hit, making the whole cathedral shake. Candles fluttered and died, the suspended chandeliers swaying.
The window faded to black. An afterimage remained, however: a rendering of Quaiche himself, kneeling before the iron monstrosity of the scrimshaw suit. The suit was hinged open along the once-welded seam. Quaiche’s hands were cupped before him, lathered in a cloying red mass that extended tendrils and ropes back into the cavity of the scrimshaw suit. It was as if he had reached into the suit and drawn out that sticky red mess. Quaiche’s face was turned to heaven, to the banded globe of Haldora.
But it wasn’t Haldora as Grelier had ever seen it portrayed.
The afterimage was fading. Grelier began to wonder if he would have to wait until the next blockage to see the window again, but another demolition burst followed the first, again revealing the design. Worked into the face of Haldora, conspiring to look as if it was shining through the atmospheric bands of the gas giant, was a geometric pattern. It was very complicated, like the intricate wax seal of an emperor: a three-dimensional lattice of silver beams. At the heart of the lattice, radiating beams of light, was a single human eye.
Another Shockwave came through, rocking the Lady Morwenna. One final detonation followed and then the show was over. The black window was again black, its facets too opaque to be illuminated by anything other than the nuclear brilliance of God’s own Fire.
The organ and the choir subsided.
“The Way may now be cleared,” Quaiche said. “It will not be easy, but we will now be able to proceed at normal Way speeds for several days. There may even have to be more demolition charges, but the bulk of the obstacle no longer exists. For this we thank God. But the time we have lost cannot be easily recovered.”
Grelier’s hand was again tight on the cane.
“Let the other cathedrals attempt to make up lost time,” Quaiche said. “They will struggle. Yes, the Jarnsaxa Flats lie before us, and the race there will be to the swift. The Lady Morwenna is not the fastest cathedral on the Way, nor has it ever sought that worthless accolade. But what is the point of trying to make up lost ground on the Flats when the Devil’s Staircase lies just beyond it? Normally we would be trying to have time in hand at this point, pulling ahead of Haldora in preparation for the slow and difficult navigation of the Staircase. This time we do not have that luxury. We have lost critical days when we can least afford to lose them.”
He waited a moment, knowing that he had the congregation’s terrified attention. “But there is another way,” Quaiche said, leaning forwards in the pulpit, almost threatening to topple out of the support couch. “One that will require daring, and faith. We do not have to take the Devil’s Staircase at all. There is another route across Ginnungagap Rift. You all know, of course, of what I speak.”
All around the cathedral, transmitted through its armoured fabric, Grelier heard the rattling as the external shutters were drawn up. The ordinary stained-glass windows were being reopened, light flooding through them in sequenced order. Ordinarily he would have been duly impressed, but the memory of the black window was still there, its afterimage still ghosting his vision. When you had seen nuclear fire through welding glass, all else was as pale as watercolour.
“God gave us a bridge,” Quaiche said. “I believe it is time we used it.”
Rashmika found herself drawn to the roof of the caravan again, crossing between the vehicles until she reached the tilted rack of the Observers. The identical smooth mirrors of their faces, neatly spaced and ranked, had taken on a peculiar abstract quality. They made her think of the bottoms of stacked bottles in a cellar, or the arrayed facets of one of the gamma-ray monitoring stations out near the edge of the badlands. She did not know whether she found this more or less comforting than the realisation that each was a distinct human being—or had been, at least, until their compulsion to gaze at Haldora had scoured the last stubborn trace of personality from their minds.
The caravan rocked and rolled, negotiating a stretch of road that had only recently been reclaimed from icefalls. Now and then—more often, it seemed, than a day or so before—they swerved to steer past a group of pilgrims making the journey on foot. The pilgrims looked tiny and stupid, so far below. The fortunate ones had closed-cycle vacuum suits that permitted long journeys across the surface of a planet. Some of the suits even tended to ailments, healing minor wounds or soothing arthritic joints. Certainly those were the lucky ones. The rest had to make do with suits that had never been designed for travelling more than a few kilometres unassisted. They trudged beneath the weight of bulky home-made backpacks, like peasants carrying all their possessions. Some of them had ended up with such grotesque contraptions that they had no choice but to haul their belongings and their makeshift life-support systems behind them, on skis or treads. The suits, helmets, backpacks and towed contraptions were all augmented with religious totems, often of a cumbersome nature. There were golden statues, crosses, pagodas, demons, snakes, swords, armoured knights, dragons, sea monsters, arks and a hundred other things Rashmika did not trouble herself to recognise. Everything was done by muscle power, without the succour of mechanical assistance. Even in Hela’s moderate gravity the pilgrims were bent double with the effort, every sliding footstep a study in exhaustion.