“It matters not. But if you care to know, Varah’s policy is an entrenched, ruthlessly defended anti-interventionism, his ambitions as diminutive as his stature,” the words spat. “Freed from such dilettante posturing we would be able manipulate the war, engineer victory for whoever we choose to support. Free of Varah’s timidity we can assume real power.”
Sicarius conjures an image of the lumbering tripedal war machines involved in the continent-wide War of Holy Liberation five thousand K’s away. “You need offer no justification. My contracts are not dependent on moral considerations.”
Sicarius disconnects attention from the argument, their words igniting unbidden memories that are irritatingly incomplete. The wall is old. But there had been a time before it had been constructed when the plain from which it grows had been crossed only by the drifting dirigibles of mercantile trade en route for the New Soviets of the West or the Hives of the South, or the caravanserai of missionaries bearing the claims of one transient messiah or another. A plain where vast dust clouds ebb in meteorological turbulences, eroding surreal formations of granite into the contours of fractured skulls and frozen limbs, a place inhabited by a few world-evading aesthetes squatting in cave complexes beside watering holes. The wall had come later.
West or the Hives of the South, or the caravanserai of missionaries bearing the claims of one transient messiah or another. A plain where vast dust clouds ebb in meteorological turbulences, eroding surreal formations of granite into the contours of fractured skulls and frozen limbs, a place inhabited by a few world-evading aesthetes squatting in cave complexes beside watering holes. The wall had come later.
“Vhed Varah shelters behind the wall?” he says suddenly.
“No. Inside the wall. Never emerges. He’s impossible to reach.”
“I can reach him.” The assassin signifies the end of the transaction by standing and approaching an induction register. Once a room has been reserved for him he finalizes price and ‘identification procedures’ with his new employers, and retreats to the upper floors of the Cathouse. The establishment’s androgynous whores are individually structured through genetic implantation to suit diverse tastes.
As she services him he considers symmetries. Whore and assassin. The impulse to life and the impulse to destroy life. The passage of millennia changes little, the two professions inextricably linked.
The room is small. A gable window opens out onto the lichen-pitted roofscape. As the whore sleeps, he dresses, then prizes open the window and climbs easily onto the precarious slates.
Wind howls around him, a subliminal susurration constant since the eruption of the wall, a monument to protect what lies beneath its vast foundations. The city is silent. He slithers down to the roof lip, bare metres from the obsidian blackness of the wall, its surface melted into a smooth glaze sucking all into it and giving back nothing. It had been fused by the intense heat of the holocaust wars which, two thousand years before, had left the plain a wasteland, and had simultaneously uncovered the secret the wall had been constructed to keep, leading to the first discovery of the substance named for Pluto sunk deep into the substratum of the Earth. It was then that the prospectors had clustered like ants, their footprints widening into broad highways of creaking laden wagons feeding new military technologies five thousand K’s away. Creating this city of hideous genetic mutations.
But the wall is not solid. Washed by the incandescent heat of nuclear suns its skin had rippled, boiling like liquid, developing capillaries and smooth interconnecting bubble chambers that solidified gradually into an igneous network covering large areas of the monolithic barrier. A maze mapped and colonized as the most impregnable of fortresses, access points concealed and jealously guarded. The assassin allows himself a week to prepare his assault, piecing together and comparing fragments of information, checking over the equipment of his ancient trade, exercising physically and spiritually for die oncoming ordeal.
About a fifth of the way from the base of the wall to its crest is a small aperture, a chimney of rock set into featureless glaze. As the sun sets Adsiduo Sicarius begins to scale the wall, sheltered by the shrouding darkness of the Cathouse. From beyond the plain, from a technology over two thousand years dead, he’d brought a small laser transducer with which he laboriously cuts a series of small ascending recesses. Once the epidermis glaze is thus penetrated it is possible to sink stressed steel pegs into the less dense material beneath, connecting the pitons with thick hawsers, then retrieving both pegs and rope as he climbs.
The method is slow and backbreaking but Sicarius moves methodically through the long night, with exactly spaced rest periods during which he secures himself firmly to the face, and self-induces a hypnotically relaxing trance. By sunrise he’s reached a sufficiently lofty elevation that his presence passes unnoticed in the bustling city below him. Then, with the last of the fading light, it is possible to obtain a visual fix on the aperture, and work more swiftly towards his objective, shrugging off the deliberately low-key dogmatism he’d assumed to make the climb tolerable, to dampen fear, assuage die pain and vertigo.
Then he was reeling in the hawser for the last time, reaching the lip of the chimney, and hauling himself into its waiting darkness. The capillary slants steeply upwards, but is narrow enough for the assassin to brace himself across its restriction and gradually work upwards. There is artificial light beyond, and he slows, crawling forward as die chimney narrows. A grille separates him from an elaborately decorated corridor, the tunnel obviously serving as a ventilation duct or sluice for the disposal of waste materials.
The grille could be wired. Nothing visible. But he coats it with a blast blister, neutralizing any potential active fields within. Then, using the laser, Sicarius severs his way through the grille, angling his cuts in such a manner that he’s able to lift the center section, hang for a moment, then swing precisely up, dropping gently to the fused-ceramic tiles inside. He crouches, watching, breathing, listening, sensing. Cameras, tripping-traps, sneak-beams, bug-rays? No. A gallery. Long and shadowy. He turns to replace the grille, leaving little detectable trace of interference.
Further. Little more than several paces and he’s brought up sharp. Something indefinable. A sensor-grid. Little more than a haze of particles. A faint ionization of the air, invisible to most. But he detects it. He traces its limits. They’ve been lax There’s at least a metre of clear space between its highest point and the upper arch of the ceiling. More than enough. He retrieves the pitons and hawser from the ventilation duct. For a moment, once on the far side of the grid, he relaxes his tensed muscles, allowing the seep of feelings to scream back beneath his self-discipline, allowing random sensations to flood him, the staleness of richly perfumed air, the dazzling color of wall frescoes covered with opulent tapestries to disguise their ‘volcanic’ origins, the nauseous backwash of vertigo. Such direct tactile impressions can be useful if correctly utilized and logically filtered.
At last he re-applies mental control, and lopes soundlessly towards the interior, attempting to superimpose the remembered map-fragments onto what he sees around him. At seemingly irregular points the ducts converge into spacious galleries, smooth, featureless chambers and long white ceramic galleries that lie at the center of new radiations of corridors. Whispers of sound come closer. Whispers magnified by tricks of acoustics. He hears a disembodied wash of voices, and stiffens, but the voices fade, and he resumes. Then he waits, pressing himself into the wall ornamentation as two women pass along the concourse.
They are deep in intimate conversation, talking animatedly in some gutturally obscure Asiatic dialect. Yet he recognizes their language. They are discussing a missing child, and they continue to do so until they are out of his hearing. Security is almost boringly lax. It will be concentrated lower, at the more obvious ground level access points. Or in the upper levels, in case of aerial assault. But here, deep within the wall, they are complacent in their supposed invulnerability.