“Just what the hell is going on?” he thundered.
“The hell!” the little acolyte exclaimed and fled shrieking. Harx pushed his way through the milling crowd to the elevator. As the doors opened the airship lurched, sending him reeling inside. He slid the doors shut and ordered “Presence chamber” into the gosport. The elevator stayed obdurately motionless. He called again, a third time, a fourth time. The elevator crew had evidently abandoned their posts for the mass hysteria raging through the corridors.
“Must I do everything myself?” he declared to the universe in general, and began to crank the windlass.
At the perigee of the dive, at the uttermost straining limit of the bungee, Skerry hit the snap release, went into a forward roll and came up poised and feisty on the balls of her feet as the elastic cords snapped back up through the hole she had made with the isokinetic punch. A moment to fit nasal plugs in case of any lingering pockets of Mishcondereya’s trip-gas, another to fix her bearing on the wrist tracker, a quick tweak of the string of her leotard out of her crack, and she was ready for action.
“Okay I’m in,” she said into the throat-bindi mike. Still without a notion where she was going, what she was looking for. But in and intact. “There’s a lot of noise.” There certainly was, down beneath her feet, like a party going badly wrong in a neighbour’s house. She crept forward on her toes; the din neither waxed nor waned. “I guess they must be really digging your light show, Bladnoch.”
Director Seskinore came on the line.
“My dear, we have a suggestion from the head doctors in Wisdom. They suggest you go up rather than down. Some head-shrinkie theory about people and valuables.”
“Too right I’m going up. I’m not going down there for a boob job.”
She checked her wrist tracker. Its hypersonic bat-squeaks penetrated every level of this creaky, shambling edifice and sketched up a rudimentary map. On the toe-tips of her grip-sole shoes, Skerry moved out. At every turn, she chose the inward route. At every flight of steps, she chose the upward course. Sound travelled well along these curving corridors; plenty of warning of approaching feet to slip into cover: a wall closet, a low-level airco shaft, a false-ceiling panel. What is it about young people today, she thought as the purple-clad faithful rushed beneath her, that fun and dancing and drinking and sex aren’t enough for them? Why do they want to be going and joining religions and dressing up all the same and getting dreadful dreadful haircuts? Each generation rejects the mores of the one preceding. You should know that better than most, daughter of Ghalgorm’s draughty halls.
Better to avoid people altogether. The ceiling duct in which she had taken cover let into a crawlway. After a dozen metres on her belly, it branched. Her tracker advised her that the left fork led to the cathedral’s service core. Skerry had always been a fan of service cores. She kicked the panel that capped the tunnel free. It fell an impressive distance between the bloated gas cells before it hit a tension net and bounced. With a grin, Skerry swung herself out on to the honeycomb mainframe beams and began to climb. Upward. But still no idea what she was looking for. The nave-like space of the service core amplified sounds, reflected and focused noises in strange ways. The din from the panicked in the corridors washed back and forth, up and down, unnerving hellish. Skerry flinched at the sudden tattoo of gunfire, though sense told her not even a teen acolyte would be so idiotic as to fire a slug-thrower in an LTA.
“Mish?”
“What’s up?”
“I heard shooting.”
“Oh, that. They’re spraying bullets at anything that moves. Sooner or later they’ll run out. What’s with you?”
“I’m on a gantry directly under the apex of the ship. There’s a solid roof above me, which the tracker says is the floor of the dome room. I’m going to try there first, once I get out of here.”
The tracker also a contained a clever little bollixer (in Weill’s gaudy and expressive phrase) with enough electronic nous to jemmy the hatch from the gantry on to the corridor. The two halves of the door slid open to reveal a young, dark-haired woman dressed in improbably ramshackle battle gear pulling at the handles of an inlaid double door. Skerry froze. The girl froze. Behind her a similarly piratical youth also froze, but it was the girl that transfixed Skerry. In an instant of epiphany, she knew who that girl must be, what she was looking for behind that door, how she recognised it.
“Hey! You!”
The spell shattered. The girl drew something that looked like a cross between a crossbow and soft furnishings. Skerry did not wait for it to demonstrate its potentialities. A back flip took her out of arc behind the door. She scrambled up on to the ceiling, hung spider-fashion, peeked out at the inverted corridor. Empty. The dark-haired girl—the granddaughter, the traingirl, the one who was at the heart and root of all this mad affair, the only one apart from Harx who knew what this divine receptacle looked like—and her boyfriend were gone. But the double doors stood open.
“Let’s go!” Skerry said, somersaulting to the ground.
Mishcondereya tacked the sky yacht hard aport and by sheer millimetres missed clipping the pin-feathers of the Winged Edsel. She swore her finest ladies-finishing-school oaths as she fought to control the skittery little machine in the chaotic turbulence cast up as cloud boiled into phantasm and back again.
“I’d like to see what the manufacturer’s manual has to say about this,” she hissed as she righted the ship and immediately pulled it into a fan-shredding climb as Cheraph PHARIGOSTER came howling up at her, fiery scourges raised. The things were no more substantial than the mist from which they were constructed but you could hardly fly through them. Necessary illusions must be maintained. “Where’s he gone now, the bastard?” Radar lock had been long abandoned. Mishcondereya kept track of the labouring cathedral, sometimes invisible within the thrashing cloud of Saints and Angels, by line of sight, seat of pants, twitch of ovary and luck. She momentarily caught Harx’s fortress in her peripheral vision, enveloped in the tentacles of PREMGEE, the World-Devouring Squid.
“Woo hoo!” she whooped and threw the airship into an immediate rolling dive after him. Lift bags boomed, struts complained, spars groaned. Tremendous fun.
“Bearing two oh two oh niner,” she called to Bladnoch, circling discreetly in UA2 on the trailing edge of the maelstrom. “Delta vee, about twenty squared.” She knew he flew the thing on autopilot and liked to intimidate him with technicalese.
“Moving in,” Bladnoch said, calmly. From the high steering turret he watched Mishcondereya plunge into the heart of Gotterdammerung. He wondered what the people on the ground were making of it all and what lies the media were being fed to explain just why the Rider of the Many-Headed Beast had chosen this day and their neighbourhood to duke it out with the Seven Sanctas. Whatever, he felt a glow of proprietorial pride. One of his better efforts. Oh definitely. He could almost feel good about it. Bladnoch tried to work out how he could slip it into his cv, then raised control on the communicator.
“Yuh?” Weill said, delighted by the tag-team wrestling match between the Two Lone Swordsmen and several scaley members of the Circus of Heaven unfolding like a summer squall over Nanerl Canton. Who would have thought the forces of divine order harboured such spectacular anarchy?
“Weill, I have to have more weather.”