Or you found someone else to blame. Like Valentine’s daughter.
Sathya said, “You will pay for what you did. But first, perhaps, you can help to make amends.” She took a gun from her desk and gestured to a small door on the far side of her office. Hester walked towards it, not really caring where she went, or whether Sathya was going to shoot her. Valentine’s daughter, she kept thinking. Valentine’s daughter goes through a doorway. Valentine’s daughter goes down some iron steps. Valentine’s daughter. No wonder she had such a temper. No wonder she had been able to sell a city full of good people to Arkangel with barely a squeak from her conscience. She was Valentine’s daughter, and she took after Daddy.
The steps led to a tunnel, then a sort of antechamber. Two guards watched Hester coldly through the tinted glastic visors of their crab-shell helmets. A third man stood waiting beside a heavy steel door; a twitchy little pink-eyed rabbit of a man, gnawing nervously at his fingernails. The argon-lamps on the walls bounced bright reflections off his bald scalp. Between his eyebrows was a red wheel.
“He’s an Engineer!” said Hester. “A London Engineer! I thought they were all dead…”
“A few survived,” said Sathya. “After London exploded I was put in charge of the squadron sent out to round up survivors escaping from the wreck. Most were sent to slave-labour camps deep in League territory, but when I interrogated Dr Popjoy, and learned what his work had been, I realized he might be able to help us.”
“Help you with what? I thought the League hated Old-Tech?”
“There have always been some in the League who believed that to defeat the cities we should use their own infernal devices against them,” said Sathya. “After what you and your father did at Batmunkh Gompa their voices began to be heard more loudly. A secret society of young officers was formed; the Green Storm. When I told them about Popjoy they saw his potential at once, and agreed to let me set up this facility.”
The Engineer bared big yellow teeth in a nervous grin and said, “So this is Hester Shaw is it? She may be helpful. Yes, yes. Someone who was ‘in at the kill’, so to speak. Her presence in the Mnemonic Environment may provide just the trigger we’ve been seeking.”
“Get on with it,” snapped Sathya, and Hester saw that she, too, was extremely nervous.
Popjoy pulled a series of levers on the door, and the massive electro-magnetic locks released with hollow thuds and clangs, like docking clamps disengaging. The guards tensed, wraiths of steam scrolling from the funnels of their bulky machine-guns as they flipped the safety catches off. All this security wasn’t designed to keep people out, Hester realized. It was meant to keep something in.
The door swung open.
Later Hester would learn that the Memory Chamber was a decommissioned fuel-tank: one of dozens of steel globes clumped in the corries of Rogues’ Roost, but at first sight it seemed just an insanely huge room, with rusty walls curving up to form a dome above her and down to make a bowl below. All over the walls big pictures had been fixed; grainy blow-ups of people’s faces, photographs of London and Arkangel and Marseilles, a silk-painting of Batmunkh Gompa in an ebony frame. Loops of scratchy film repeated endlessly on whitewashed panels: a little golden girl with pigtails laughing in a meadow; a young woman drawing on a long-stemmed pipe and blowing smoke at the camera.
Hester felt suddenly sick with fear, and did not know why.
A walkway ran around the edge of this spherical vault, and a narrow footbridge stretched from it to a platform in the centre, where a monk-like figure stood robed in grey. Hester tried to hang back as Sathya and Popjoy started along the bridge, but one of the guards was behind her, pushing her firmly forward. Ahead, Sathya reached the central platform and touched the arm of the one who waited there. She was crying silently, her face shining with tears in the dim light. “I’ve brought you a present, dearest,” she said softly. “A visitor. Someone you’re sure to remember!”
And the robed figure turned, the grey cowl fell aside, and Hester saw that it was — no, that it had once been — Anna Fang.
20
Dr Popjoy had done good work for his new masters. Of course, he and his fellow Engineers had spent many years studying Stalker technology. They had learned much from Shrike, the mechanized bounty-killer who had once adopted Hester. They had even made Stalkers of their own; Hester had seen squads of the Resurrected Men marching through the streets of London on the night MEDUSA went off. But comparing those lurching, mindless creatures to the thing that stood before her now was like comparing a tatty old cargo balloon to a brand new Serapis Cloud Yacht.
It was slender and almost graceful, and not very much taller than Miss Fang had been in life. Its face was hidden by a bronze death-mask of the aviatrix and the ducts and flexes which sprouted from its skull-piece were gathered neatly behind its head. The faint, curious twitchings of its head and its hands as it peered at Hester seemed so human that for a moment she almost imagined the Engineer had succeeded in bringing Anna back.
Sathya started talking, quick and brittle. “She doesn’t remember yet, but she will. This place acts as her memory, until her own memories come back to her. We’ve collected photographs of everyone she ever knew, everywhere she went, the cities she fought against, her lovers and her enemies. It will all come back to her. She’s only been resurrected for a few months, and…”
She stopped suddenly, as if understanding that her stream of hopeful chatter was only making the horror of what she had done more horrible. Echoes of her words went whispering off around the inside of the old fuel-tank: “And, and, and, and, and…”
“Oh, Gods and Goddesses,” said Hester. “Why couldn’t you let her rest in peace?”
“Because we need her!” yelled Sathya. “The League has lost its way! We need new leaders. Anna was the best of us. She will show us the path to victory!”
The Stalker flexed its clever hands, and a slender blade slid from each fingertip, snick, snick, snick.
“This isn’t Anna,” Hester said. “Nobody comes back from the Sunless Country. Your tame Engineer may have managed to get her corpse up and about, but it isn’t her. I knew a Stalker once: they don’t remember who they were in life; they aren’t the same person; that person’s dead, and when you stick one of those Old-Tech machines in their head you make a new person, like a new tenant moving into an empty house…”
Popjoy began to chuckle.
“I hadn’t realized that you were an expert, Miss Shaw. Of course, you would be referring to the old Shrike model; a very inferior piece of work. Before I installed the Stalker machinery in Miss Fang’s brain I programmed it to seek out her memory-centres. I have every confidence that we will be able to re-ignite the memories which lie buried there. That’s what this chamber is for; to stimulate the subject with constant reminders of her former life. It’s all a question of finding the right mnemonic trigger — a smell, an object, a face. That’s where you come in.”
Sathya shoved Hester forward until she was standing only a few inches from the new Stalker. “Look, dear!” she said brightly. “Look! This is Hester Shaw! Valentine’s daughter! You remember how you found her in the Out-Country and brought her to Batmunkh Gompa? She was there when you died!”
The Stalker leaned close. In the shadows behind its bronze mask a dead black tongue licked withered lips. Its voice was a dry whisper, a night-wind blowing through valleys of stone. “I do not know this girl.”
“You do, Anna!” urged Sathya, with awful patience. “You must! Try and remember!”
The Stalker glanced up, scanning the hundreds of portraits on the walls and floor and ceiling of its spherical prison. Anna Fang’s parents were there, and Stilton Kael, who had been Anna’s master when she was a slave in the salvage-yards of Arkangel. Valentine was there, and Captain Khora, and Pandora Rae, but there was no picture of Hester’s disfigured face. It focused its mechanical eyes on her again, and its long claws twitched. “I do not know this girl. I am not Anna Fang. You are wasting my time, little once-born. I wish to leave this place.”