‘The Awakeners did this to me,’ said Condred, raising his head. ‘I remember the man in my bedroom, the fear of him, how it crushed me. And then nothing.’ His eyes narrowed in concentration. ‘He was carrying something. . He held it out towards me. .’ Then he shook his head. The memory was gone.
‘Some thralled object, no doubt,’ said Crake, his voice firmer now they were on safer ground. ‘Perhaps a ring or a bracelet or a band. It contained the daemon that kept you unconscious. He put it on you after you were subdued, and the daemon passed into you.’ His voice became grave. ‘Others have fallen to this sickness. I’ll wager all of them are the sons and daughters of aristocrats who refused to bend the knee to the Awakener cause.’
‘Yes,’ said Condred. ‘I wonder if Father would have received some message eventually. Promising my recovery if he would lend his resources and support.’
Crake thought back on his conversation with his father. ‘Perhaps he already did,’ he said.
There was silence between them at that.
‘They want the rural areas,’ said Condred at last. ‘That’s where they’re strongest. They’ll get the country folk on their side, trap the Coalition in the cities, cut off their supplies.’
Crake was about to agree, but then he heard a faint sound from outside the cellar. A sound that had become familiar to him over these past years. He scrambled to his feet as he heard another, and another and another.
Condred pricked up his ears. ‘What is it?’
‘Gunfire,’ said Crake. ‘It’s gunfire!’
Nineteen
‘Somebody’s coming!’
Jez’s hissed warning sent them scampering back down the corridor and through a side door. Beyond was a small infirmary, shiny and sterile in a way that Malvery’s never was. They crowded inside. Frey left the door open a crack and pressed his eye to it.
Voices were approaching. Two men in conversation.
‘Then what’s the effective range?’
‘Ten kloms.’
‘Theoretically.’
‘Based on the Sammies’ measurements of an identical device.’
‘So, not actually tested at all, then.’
The voices were louder now, and Frey heard footsteps, walking fast and with purpose. He glanced round the room to check on his crew. Ashua was close to the door, listening, with Pinn crowding in to hear as well. Jez waited in that feral stance of hers that meant she was ready to pounce. Pelaru stood there fearlessly, arms folded; he even made a Sentinel’s cassock look good, damn him. Malvery was pilfering suppies from the medicine cabinet.
‘You know what we’re up against,’ said the first voice. ‘They want it kept secret. How are we meant to test its parameters when this place has become a refugee camp for every Awakener in Vardia? We needed more time.’
‘We get one chance at this, that’s all I’m saying. It’s our necks if we’re wrong.’
Frey saw them now, as they passed the door and continued down the corridor. Two middle-aged men, one balding and with spectacles, the other with unkempt hair and an untidy beard. They were wearing the standard issue Awakener cassocks, but unusually their cassocks were brown. Frey didn’t understand the significance of that. He wished Crake were there to shed light on the subject; he didn’t want to ask Pelaru.
‘Effective radius is ten kloms,’ said the balding one. ‘That’s all you need to say. Now tidy yourself up. They’ll hang you if you present yourself to the Lord High Cryptographer like that. Where’s your respect?’
‘Respect? I’m in it for the science. For the chance to work with something no one’s ever seen before. You know I don’t believe that Awakener nonsense.’
‘When you see him, you will,’ said the balding man, and with that they passed out of hearing.
‘Sounds like something we should be investigating, Cap’n,’ Ashua suggested.
‘That it does,’ Frey agreed.
Once the coast was clear, they sallied out and headed in the direction the men had come from. The interior of the building had an industrial feel to it, with steel floors and sterile grey walls. This wasn’t a place meant to impress somebody, it was a place where you got things done. The question was: what?
He covered his ear and listened to the earcuff again, but the signals were frustrating. Occasional garbled voices came in faint snatches, and none of it understandable. He heard Trinica’s voice once in a while, and she sounded relaxed and calm. That made him feel a little better. Probably they were all making nice, the Awakeners buttering up the captains with promises in order to secure their aircraft. But Frey wanted to know for sure; he wanted to know exactly what they were saying. This damned interference, though — he’d never heard anything like it.
Thanks to Jez’s uncanny senses they’d managed to avoid bumping into anyone in the corridors so far, but Frey wasn’t sure how much longer their luck would last. He was beginning to think that this whole idea was a bad one. He should have just taken a chance and trusted Trinica to tell him what she learned. But he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look around the Awakeners’ base. He needed a card in his hand in case the Century Knights tracked him down, or someone stuck a bounty on him. The way events were going, it might be the only thing between him and the noose.
There was a sliding metal door at the end of the corridor, of the kind they used on the Ketty Jay, except considerably cleaner. Jez listened at it, then nodded at Frey. He pulled it aside.
Beyond was a small steel-walled room filled with a bewildering array of gauges, dials and instruments. A ledger lay open on a desk, full of scribbled calculations. Two half-empty coffee mugs stood cold next to it. Frey crossed the room, passing strange scientific devices of brass and glass. He could only guess at the purpose of half of them, and he didn’t care to. Behind the instruments was a window, and he went to that.
‘That’s what we’re looking for,’ he said.
They were standing in an observation room, set high up on the side of a large circular chamber. Around the edges of the chamber were banks of instruments: cabinets that clanked and chattered, bellows that wheezed up and down, gyroscopes tilting this way and that. None of that interested Frey. The prize piece was in the centre, on a pedestal, surrounded by rods and sensors and rot knew what else.
It was a tall cylinder, twice the height of a man, encased in a mass of pipes and protrusions that looked like they’d been carved from yellowed bone. Inside the cylinder, a bruise-coloured gas swirled, and little sparks of lightning flashed and flickered. At its four corners were squat, thick towers of some brass-like material that wasn’t quite brass. Their surfaces were trenched and pitted with what might have been language, or perhaps a form of subtle machinery.
He’d seen its like before. It was Azryx technology.
‘Whoa,’ said Ashua, who’d come up to stand next to him. Its very presence seemed to dent the world around it. ‘Is that what’s messing up your, y’know?’ She flicked his earcuff, which Frey found deeply annoying.
‘Must be,’ said Frey, batting her hand away.
‘It’s not,’ said Jez from behind them. ‘Not that. Something else.’
‘There’s something else in this building weirder than that?’ said Pinn sceptically.
Malvery had crowded in now. ‘That must be what the Sammies sold to the Awakeners,’ he muttered. ‘Whatever these buggers are up to, that’s the key to it down there.’
Frey looked across at Pelaru. His eyes showed nothing as he gazed down at the machine. ‘Any ideas, whispermonger? Any titbits you want to share?’