‘I would remember a thing like that.’
Which was quite true. And of course she did remember: he had written those words on the wall in her quarters, in his own blood. The expression meant nothing to her, but that did not mean she was in any sense unfamiliar with it. Towards the unpleasant termination of their professional relationship, Nagorny had spoken of little else. His dreams were thick with Sun Stealer, and — like all paranoiacs — he saw evidence of Sun Stealer’s malignant work in the most humdrum of daily annoyances. When one of the ship’s lights failed unaccountably or a lift directed him to the wrong level, this was Sun Stealer’s doing. It was never a simple malfunction, but always evidence of the deliberate machinations of a behind-the-scenes entity only Nagorny could detect. Volyova had stupidly ignored the signs. She had hoped — in fact come as close to praying as was possible for her — that his phantom would return to the netherworld of his unconscious. But Sun Stealer had stayed with Nagorny; witness the coffin on the floor.
Yes… she would remember a thing like that.
‘I’m sure you would,’ Sajaki said, knowingly. Then he returned his attention to the engravings. ‘I think first we should make a copy of these marks,’ he said. ‘They may help us, but this damned Braille effect isn’t easy to make out with the eye. What do you think these are?’ He moved his palm across a kind of radial pattern. ‘Birds’ wings? Or rays of sunlight shining from above? They look more like birds’ wings to me. Now why would he have bird wings on his mind? And what kind of language is this meant to be?’
Volyova looked, but the crawling complexity of the coffin was too much to take in. It was not that she was uninterested — not at all. But what she wanted was the thing to herself, and Sajaki as far away from it as possible. There was too much evidence here of the canyon depths to which Nagorny’s mind had plummeted.
‘I think it merits more study,’ she said carefully. ‘You said “first”. What do you intend to do after we make a copy of it?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious.’
‘Destroy the damned thing,’ she surmised.
Sajaki smiled. ‘Either that or give it to Sudjic. But personally I’d settle for destroying it. Coffins aren’t good things to have on a ship, you know. Especially home-made ones.’
The stairs went up for ever. After a while — already in the two hundreds — Khouri lost count. But just when her knees felt as if they were going to buckle, the staircase came to an abrupt end, presenting her with a long, long white corridor whose sides were a series of recessed arches. The effect was like standing in a portico under moonlight. She walked along the corridor’s echoey length until she arrived at the double doors which ended it. They were festooned with organic black scrollwork, inset with faintly tinted glass. A lavender light poured through them from the room beyond.
Evidently she had arrived.
It was entirely possible that this was a trap of some kind, and that to enter the room beyond would be a form of suicide. But turning back was not an option either — Manoukhian, for all his charm, had made that abundantly clear. So Khouri grasped the handle and let herself in. Something in the air made her nose tickle pleasantly, a blossomy perfume negating the sterility of the rest of the house. The smell made Khouri feel unwashed, although it was only a few hours since Ng had woken her and told her to go and kill Taraschi. In the meantime she had accumulated a month’s worth of dirt from the Chasm City rain, suffused with her own sweat and fear.
‘I see Manoukhian managed to get you here in one piece,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Me or him?’
‘Both, dear girl,’ the invisible speaker said. ‘Your reputations are equally formidable.’
Behind her the double doors clicked shut. Khouri began to take in her surroundings; difficult in the strange pink light of the room. The enclosure was kettle-shaped, with two eyelike shuttered windows set into one concave wall.
‘Welcome to my place of residence,’ the voice said. ‘Make yourself at home, won’t you.’
Khouri walked to the shuttered windows. To one side of the windows sat a pair of reefersleep caskets, gleaming like chromed silverfish. One of the units was sealed and running, while the other was open; a chrysalis ready to enfold the butterfly.
‘Where am I?’
The shutters whisked open.
‘Where you always were,’ the Mademoiselle said.
She was looking out across Chasm City. But it was from a higher vantage point than she had ever known. She was actually above the Mosquito Net, perhaps fifty metres from its stained surface. The city lay below the Net like a fantastically spiny sea-creature preserved in formaldehyde. She had no idea where she was; except that this had to be one of the tallest buildings; one that she had probably assumed was uninhabited.
The Mademoiselle said: ‘I call this place the Château des Corbeaux; the House of Ravens; by virtue of its blackness. You’ve undoubtedly seen it.’
‘What do you want?’ Khouri said, finally.
‘I want you to do a job for me.’
‘All this for that? I mean, you had to kidnap me at gunpoint just to ask me to do a job? Couldn’t you go through the usual channels?’
‘It isn’t the usual sort of job.’
Khouri nodded towards the open reefersleep unit. ‘Where does that come into it?’
‘Don’t tell me it alarms you. You came to our world in one, after all.’
‘I just asked what it meant.’
‘All in good time. Turn around, will you?’
Khouri heard a slight bustle of machinery behind her, like the sound of a filing cabinet opening.
A hermetic’s palanquin had entered the room. Or had it been here all along, concealed by some artifice? It was as dark and angular as a metronome, lacking ornamentation, and with a roughly welded black exterior. It had no appendages or obvious sensors, and the tiny viewing monocle set into its front was as dark as a shark’s eye.
‘You are doubtless already familiar with my kind,’ said the voice emanating from the palanquin. ‘Do not be disturbed.’
‘I’m not,’ Khouri said.
But she was lying. There was something disturbing about this box; a quality she had never experienced in the presence of Ng or the other hermetics she had known. Perhaps it was the austerity of the palanquin, or the sense — entirely subliminal — that the box was seldom unoccupied. None of this was helped by the smallness of the viewing window, or the feeling that there was something monstrous behind that dark opacity.
‘I can’t answer all your questions now,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘But obviously I didn’t bring you here just to see my predicament. Here. Perhaps this will assist matters.’
A figure grew to solidity next to the palanquin, imaged by the room itself.
It was a woman, of course — young, but paradoxically clothed in the kind of finery which no one had worn on Yellowstone since the plague; enrobed in swirling entoptics. The woman’s black hair was raked back from a noble forehead, held in a clasp inwoven with lights. Her electric-blue gown left her shoulders bare, cut away in a daring décolletage. Where it reached the floor it blurred into nothingness.
‘This is how I was,’ the figure spoke. ‘Before the foulness.’
‘Can’t you still be like that?’
‘The risk of leaving enclosure is too great — even in the hermetic sanctuaries. I distrust their precautions.’
‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘Didn’t Manoukhian explain things fully?’
‘Not exactly, no. Other than explaining how it wouldn’t be good for my health not to go along with him.’
‘How indelicate of him. But not inaccurate, it must be admitted.’ A smile upset the pale composure of the woman’s face. ‘What do you suppose were my reasons for bringing you here?’