Moments later he felt himself tipped forward, slowing still further as his legs swung underneath him and he was lowered and positioned as though about to start walking. A small open space in front of him seemed to be their target. He realised that the few-storey-high buildings were actually much taller, their lower floors buried in the frozen mud and ice.
His sister, Holse and Hippinse blinked into relative visibility, hazily indistinct shapes each ten metres or so away as they set down in the icy little clearing, and — finally, though it might have been in a strange place under no appreciable sun on the wrong level and through soles that would doubtless have insulated him from anything down to absolute zero, Ferbin’s feet again touched the ground of home.
26. The Sarcophagus
The object now being called the Sarcophagus lay almost in the dead centre of the Nameless City. It was located deep beneath the under-plaza within a building as fat and tall and impressive as any in the ancient, long-buried metropolis. The city’s heart was now accessed along a freshly directed rail track; the engineers had taken advantage of the freeze to build lines where they never could have before, over frozen expanses of river that would have swept any trestles or pylons away in an instant had they still held water rather than ice and straight across sand- and mudbanks that would have shifted, sunk and reappeared somewhere else in the course of a shift had the rapids still been roaring.
From the thronging chaos of the railhead — an arc-lit station deep under the plaza whose traffic volume would have done justice to a terminus in a major city — the well-tramped way led, past whistling, roaring, bellowing machines and piles and coils of pipe and cable, along a thoroughfare twenty metres across crowded with pack creatures, warbeasts pressed into service as haulage animals, steam- and oil-powered traction engines, narrow-gauge trains and — more than anything else — with rank after rank and row after row and group and company and detail and shift and gang of workers, labourers, engineers, guards, specialists and professionals of a hundred different types.
On a vast raised round structure that lay at the focus of a dozen ramps and roadways original to the Nameless City the great packed street split in a score of different directions. Conveyor belts, tramways and aerial wagonways spun off with the roadways, all dotted with faint oil lamps, hissing gas fixtures and sputtering electric lights. What had been the busiest ramp — attended by cableways, conveyors and funicular lines like too-steep railways with jagged stairways at their centres — led across a filled-in lake and a broad roadway of thick planking down to the great bulbous building housing the Sarcophagus.
Through what had been a gigantic, elongated formal entrance a hundred metres across and forty high, flanked by a dozen soaring sculptures of cut-away Shellworlds and leading to a still taller mouth-shaped atrium within, the torrent of men, machines, animals and material had poured.
That torrent had slowed to a trickle now as Oramen and the party which had come directly from the gathering he had held in the great marquee descended to the focus of the city and the excavations; the greatest concentrations of effort were elsewhere now, principally targeting the ten smaller artifacts similar to the one Oramen had gone to inspect when the attempt on his life had been made. That particular black cube was subject to the most intense exertions of all due to the partial collapse of the chamber which had been excavated around it.
The central chamber housing the Sarcophagus was similar to — but far larger than — that around the black cube Oramen had seen. The excavations had emptied a huge cavity within the building, removing mud, silt, sand and assorted debris that had collected there over uncounted centuries to reveal what had always been an enormous central arena over a hundred metres across rather than an extemporised void blasted and torn from smaller rooms and spaces.
At its centre, brightly lit by arc lights and cluttered by layers, levels and platforms of scaffolding and latticed by the resulting shadows, lay the Sarcophagus itself; a pale grey cube twenty metres to a side, its corners and edges subtly rounded. For nearly twenty days while it was fully excavated a controlled chaos had swirled about the artifact, a storm of men, machines and movement, attended by shouts, bangs, sparks, animal roars, gouts and bursts of steam and exhaust smoke. Now, though, as Oramen finally looked upon it, the chamber around the object was quiet and hushed and the atmosphere almost reverential, though possessed, unless Oramen was imagining it, of a certain tension.
“It does not look very alive from here,” Oramen said. He and Poatas stood, surrounded by guards, at the main entrance to the central chamber, a wide doorway stationed ten metres above the base of the shallow bowl at the centre of which the Sarcophagus sat on a round plinth raised by about five metres.
“Well, you should come closer,” Poatas said.
Oramen smiled at the man. “That is exactly what we are going to do, Mr Poatas.”
They walked towards it. Oramen found the thing in many ways less intimidating than the pure black cube he’d taken an interest in earlier. The chamber was far larger and less oppressive-seeming — partly, no doubt, he was simply appreciating the lack of clamour — and the object itself, though much larger than the one he’d seen just a few days before, seemed less intimidating just because it was a relatively unthreatening shade of grey rather than the light-defying black that had so repelled and fascinated him in that other object. Nevertheless, it was large and he was seeing it from below rather than above, so that it appeared more massive still.
He wondered how much he was still suffering from the effects of his injuries. He might have stopped another day in bed; his doctors had recommended it but he had been more concerned at losing the trust of the people and especially the ex-soldiers of the Settlement. He had had to rise, had to show himself to them, had to address them, and then — when the messenger had entered with news that the Sarcophagus had shown signs of life — he had had no choice but to accompany Poatas and his closest aides to the focus of their excavations. He felt breathless, sore in too many places to count and his head hurt, plus his ears still rang and he had to struggle to hear what people said sometimes, as though he was an already old man, but he was doing his best to appear well and hearty and unconcerned.
The Sarcophagus gave off, it seemed to him as he walked up to it, an aura of utter solidity; of settled, stolid, almost crushing containment and impassivity, of — indeed — timelessness, as though this thing had witnessed the passing of ages and epochs ungraspable by men, and yet still, somehow, was more of the future than of the past.
Oramen assured the makeshift personal guard of concerned-looking, rather fearsome ex-soldiers who’d accumulated around him since his speech an hour or so earlier that he would be all right on the scaffolding with just one or two to look after him. Dubrile, a grey, grim-looking, one-eyed veteran from many of Hausk’s campaigns, who seemed to have been acclaimed their leader by the many ex-soldiers who’d rallied about him, detailed two others to accompany him in looking after Oramen.
“This is not necessary, you know,” Poatas told Oramen while the guards were negotiating all this amongst themselves. “You are in no danger here.”
“I thought as much three days ago, Poatas,” Oramen said with a smile, “when I went to view the other object.” He let the smile fade and dropped his voice. “And do try to remember, Poatas, you address me as ‘sir’, both in front of the men and when we are alone.” He put the smile back again. “There are niceties to be observed, after all.”