‘No,’ said Vivyen. ‘I’m not, but I know who will.’
‘Oh?’ said the man. ‘Who’s that?’
‘She will,’ said Vivyen, holding out her book and letting him see the picture of the woman and her enormous pistol with the white serpents curling around the barrel.
‘Madame Ghost Snake?’ said the man, reading the name.
‘My mama,’ said Vivyen.
This deep in the ship, the air had a thick, chemical texture, heavy with the scent of unwashed bodies, unclean oils and hot metal. Alivia gagged at the stench but Severian seemed unaffected.
The temperature had been dropping markedly for the last thirty minutes or so.
‘We’re close to ventral hull plating damaged in the void war over Molech,’ said Severian, as though plucking the surface thoughts from her mind. He was a latent, so perhaps he was.
‘A good place to hide,’ said Alivia.
‘Not good enough,’ said Severian.
‘We’re close?’
‘Better than close,’ said Severian, putting a finger to his lips. ‘We’re here.’
He pushed her back against the wall, into an alcove she hadn’t even seen was there, and stood in front of her. Two men approached through the shadows, each with the perforated steel barrel of a stubber held loosely across his chest.
Crude, grubby, solid-slug weapons, but simple and noisy.
As much a means of warning as a weapon. Like the man Severian had killed earlier, their lips were stained purple, and Alivia caught the astringent reek of potent narcotics.
The men drew level. One turned towards the Luna Wolf, looking straight at him, but somehow not seeing him.
‘Right here,’ whispered Severian.
The man’s mouth dropped open in shock.
Severian’s blade pistoned through it. He twisted the blade up and churned his victim’s brain to gruel. With this man hooked like a fish, he stepped from the shadows and wrapped his fingers around the other man’s neck.
A crushing squeeze and a crunch of bone. Head and body parted company. The second man dropped in a gushing heap as Severian used the embedded blade to lift his first kill from the corridor, letting it drop out of sight.
‘Hide that one,’ said Severian, nodding towards the parts of the second man he’d killed.
‘Seriously?’ said Alivia. ‘There’s blood everywhere. I don’t think it much matters whether we hide him or not.’
Severian looked up from cleaning his blade on the dead man’s robes. Arcing blood spray painted the walls of the corridor and dripped from the curved ceiling.
‘Force of habit not to leave easily discovered corpses in my wake,’ he said, standing and sheathing his blade. ‘It won’t matter in a few minutes anyway.’
‘How could he not see you?’ asked Alivia, following Severian along the corridor’s numerous twists and turns. Near the end of their journey, his dead man’s map was growing more precise.
‘Severian?’ she said. ‘How could he not see you?’
He shrugged, and she sensed his unwillingness to elaborate.
‘It’s a talent I have,’ he said, pausing at the foot of an access stairwell partially blocked with debris and twisted steelwork. ‘Probably the only reason Malcador was able to keep Dorn from having me killed.’
‘Dorn? Rogal Dorn?
‘Do you know anyone else named Dorn?’
‘No.’
‘There you go then,’ said Severian, climbing the stairwell with preternatural agility. Warm mist spilled from above, moist and laden with a strange perfume that made Alivia want to gag. Like syrup and honey, but over-sweetened to the point of sickly.
Severian was three times her bulk, yet climbed the web of rebars and broken glass with an ease that utterly eluded Alivia. His oblique answers simply spawned a hundred more questions, but this wasn’t the time to ask them. Instead, she followed the Luna Wolf, trying to step where he stepped, move how he moved. She lifted a hooked length of rebar, testing its weight as a club. Light enough to swing, heavy enough to kill anything she hit.
The stairwell brought them out onto a wide mezzanine walkway filled with broken packing crates and flapping sheets of cloth. From the scale of structural steel overhead, this was clearly a chamber of some size. Hissing pipework threaded giant girders overhead, interleaving like jungle creepers. Warm rain drizzled from every surface, and Alivia spat a mouthful of brackish, iron-flavoured water.
Moisture-sheened columns soared like towering tree trunks, bracing walls that angled inwards to form the underside of a stepped dome. Alivia was no shipwright and had no idea what purpose such a space might serve.
‘It’s a vent chamber for the plasma coolant system,’ said Severian.
‘Stop doing that,’ snapped Alivia.
‘Doing what?’
‘Lifting thoughts from my mind.’
‘It’s hard not to,’ he said.
Alivia took a breath of warm, metallic air, trying to calm herself. Her fear for Vivyen was flaring from her like a beacon. No wonder Severian was hearing her thoughts.
Panels of corrugated sheet metal lashed to the mezzanine railings kept the chamber below from sight. Sibilant voices drifted on the air, a seductive mantra that concealed a corruption offering one of the easiest route to damnation.
‘You were right,’ she whispered. ‘It’s the warp.’
They crawled towards the railings, and Alivia pressed her face to the plates of warm, wet steel. Through a gap in the corrugated metal, she saw a chamber that more than justified the first word that leapt to mind.
Temple.
Several hundred people filled the space below, some in white robes, some naked. Fires burned in wide bowls held aloft on chains and the smoke made serpentine patterns in the air. A raised area opposite the mezzanine had been cleared, and a hexagonal platform of metallic crates that looked too much like an altar for Alivia’s liking was set at its centre.
She swept the crowd, looking for any sign of Vivyen.
‘Do you see her?’ asked Severian.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know if that’s good or not.’
‘Only one way to find out.’
‘Go down there?’
He nodded.
‘There’s hundreds of people down there,’ said Alivia.
‘Nothing I can’t handle.’
‘What about them?’ said Alivia, pointing to the cybernetics lurking at the edge of the chamber. As tall as Severian, each was armed with serious firepower and plated in bonded steel.
‘Thallaxii,’ said Severian. ‘Why did it have to be Thallaxii?’
Alivia switched her gaze from the chanting supplicants and cybernetic killers as she saw movement at the end of the chamber. Alivia’s breath caught in her throat and she stifled a cry as she saw six figures in white emerge from the darkness, each one bearing a struggling child.
‘Vivyen,’ she said.
‘Which one?’
‘The girl at the back.’
‘One of them’s hurt,’ said Severian.
A boy, no more than fourteen, with a soaking bandage tied around his shoulder. Alivia wished she had more bullets. Every man and woman in this chamber deserved to die for what they were doing here.
The children were crying as their captors lifted them onto the crates and secured them with chains around the neck. Vivyen wasn’t struggling, and Alivia saw defiance in her posture, a strength she hadn’t even begun to suspect the girl of possessing.
‘What the hell is that?’ asked Severian, narrowing his eyes as something suspended on a hideous arrangement of wires and chains jerked through the air.
‘Throne!’ hissed the Luna Wolf as the skeletal figure emerged into the light to rapturous awe. Like a famine victim experimented upon by a madman, the naked body twitched like the marionette of a palsied puppet-master. Its suspended body was emaciated and ravaged by toxins, the skull an almost fleshless dome. Unseeing eyes were cataract-blind and its stretched, too-wide grin of a mouth was smeared purple like some nightmarish theatrical clown.