He frowned. Had he been descending underground all this time? From the outside the building hadn’t seemed tall enough to contain a space this large.
Amidst all this trove, one area in the centre of the chamber had been left clear. Here a single stone pedestal supported a crystal as large as a man’s head. It was glowing brightly, radiating shafts of ever-moving light, like a lighthouse lantern. The humming noise seemed to emanate from its facets. Granger let his kitbag slide down from his shoulder to the floor, then tucked his seeing knife into his belt.
He wandered over to the nearest heap of trove and reached in to pull out a sword. But the instant his hand closed on the grip, something remarkable happened.
One moment he was alone, the next he was surrounded. Out of thin air they appeared – six men dressed in bulky Unmer furs, brutally thin, with howling red eyes and brine-scorched skin. And every one of them was pulling a sword from the surrounding scrap.
Sorcery.
Granger swung his stolen blade up at the nearest figure, but his opponent parried instantly. The two blades clashed. Granger sensed movement all around him. He leaped back, and his opponent did likewise. And then Granger recognized him.
His opponent was the very image of himself, identical in every way, from the fur jacket he had taken from the deadship down to the sword he carried. Granger turned his head to examine the other five, and as he did so these five turned their heads in unison. Every one of them was him, and every one continued to mimic his every move. He lifted his sword, and the others lifted their swords. He lowered the sword again, watching as the simulacrums copied him. On their faces he saw six mirror images of his own startled expression. He dropped the sword…
… and the men vanished.
He picked up the sword again, and they reappeared.
A cheerful voice called out, ‘You found my Replicating Sword.’
Granger, and his six replicas, turned to see an old man standing in the corner of the chamber. He was short, stooped and grey of face, and he wore an old suit of mail several sizes too large for him. A simple tin crown sat low upon his brow, balanced above his prodigious nose and ears. Tufts of yellow hair clung to his head the way dead weeds remain clinging to a mountainside. If a man’s attitude to life leaves its mark in his face then this crooked figure had found much to smile about over the years. And he was smiling now, a huge smile that reached all the way from his lips to his honey-coloured eyes.
‘It’s designed to allow a warrior to fight multiple enemies at once,’ he said. ‘But controlling them is tricky. You have to think of multiple manoeuvres at the same time or the simulacrums just mimic you. I could never completely master it myself.’ He chuckled. ‘And I’ve got the scars to prove it.’
The man looked vaguely Unmer, but he spoke Anean like a Losotan. His crown rested low on his brow, and Granger thought he knew why. If this man had fought during the Uprising, it would be covering another scar.
‘Some of the other inventions are even harder to wield,’ the old man said. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t pick up any of the Sniggering Blades. A sword like that will trick you into cracking open your own bones and sucking out the marrow if you give it half a chance. Even Brutalists are frightened of them.’ He nodded amicably. ‘And then there are the Phasing Shields and Void Blades, of course. To call them terrifying doesn’t even begin to do them justice.’
‘Who are you?’ Granger said. He was startled to hear his own voice coming out of six mouths at once, but not startled enough to drop the weapon.
‘The name’s Herian,’ the old man replied. ‘I’m the operator here.’
‘I didn’t think there were any free Unmer left,’ Granger said, ‘except Conquillas.’
Herian’s smile withered. ‘Conquillas will be judged by powers greater than us,’ he said, strolling forward. ‘He gave up the right to call himself Unmer a long time ago.’
Granger noted that the old man’s crown only partially covered a red welt above his left eyebrow. Not exactly free, then. Herian had been leucotomized by the Haurstaf. But if he’d been captured and deliberately crippled at Awl, then how did he find his way out here?
The old man picked his way across piles of trove. ‘A lot of these flowspaces were used for storage during the war. Dragons don’t much like to venture inside them. Not against a gradient of this magnitude.’ He stubbed his foot on something and let out a curse, then picked up the offending object and flung it away. It was a skeletal box of some sort. ‘It’s all clutter to me now,’ he said. ‘I swear there’s more of it every time I come in here.’ He approached the crystal and examined it carefully, allowing curtains of shimmering light to bathe his face. For a moment he seemed to forget himself, but then he said, ‘Have you looked at this closely, yet?’
‘How do I get out of here?’ Granger said.
Herian didn’t answer.
‘How do I gain control of the ironclad?’
The old man continued to gaze into the crystal.
‘The icebreaker,’ Granger insisted. ‘Tell me how to steer it.’
‘You don’t steer it,’ Herian said. ‘Only the captain can do that.’
‘The captain is dead.’
Herian smiled again. ‘That didn’t stop him from delivering his package and then bringing you here, did it?’ His gaze returned to the jewel, which was now shining even more brightly than moments before. The colour and texture of its light had altered, too. A scattering of pink and orange rays swept across the old man’s mail suit, his weathered face and his tin crown. ‘Don’t you find it mesmerizing?’ he said. ‘The light, I mean…’ Radiance flooded over the mounds of trove behind him. As the rays touched the Unmer devices, many of them activated. Deep within the heap it seemed that embers began to glow. Energy weapons hummed and crackled. To Granger’s astonishment, additional copies of himself began to appear. He moved towards Herian, and his simulacrums moved too.
‘Draws you in, doesn’t it?’ Herian said.
Granger stopped.
‘Time’s horizon,’ the old man went on. ‘Entropaths use it to control the gradient, the rate of aspacial flow. You can’t see it, but it’s all around us now. If this device let it all through at once, our universe would collapse like that.’ He glanced up at Granger and snapped his fingers. ‘Bang. Crushed in a blink.’
The radiance from the crystal now filled the entire chamber. Through its facets Granger spied an image of a black plain under a burning sky. Curtains of red and pink light tore across the horizon. Lightning flickered. He took another step forward and then stopped himself. Had he meant to approach? His instincts screamed at him not to get any closer. The sky within that jewel continued to pulse and writhe. All around him, his simulacrums began to walk forward. And Granger found himself following them.
He halted beside Herian, without having made the decision to approach. And now he saw that the plain within the jewel was not land at all, but a great black sea, empty but for a single cone of rock rising above the tarry waters. Upon this solitary island stood a cylindrical metal tower as tall and broad as the interior of this chamber. ‘What is that place?’ he said.
‘It’s this place,’ Herian said, ‘and yet it’s not. It’s a fortress, a refuge, a doorway, the last bastion of thought in a dying universe.’
‘The source of brine?’
Herian chuckled. ‘Do you even know what brine is?’
Granger hesitated.
Herian grinned even more fiercely. ‘What happens when the seas rise?’