‘You pulled the ladder up.’
‘I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘The other ladders?’
The steersman blinked and shook his head.
‘When did this happen?’
‘Some time after the eclipse started.’
Eclipse. That was why it was dark. Not because it was night.
‘How long ago was that?’
‘A while. It’s finally starting to get light again.’
It was. It had turned from dark to grey beyond the slit windows already.
‘They’re going to come back, right?’
The steersman nodded.
‘Wait here,’ said Dalip.
He didn’t crawl. He ran. He ran to the map room, kicked the paper into meaningless drifts and seized the cloth map in both hands, shaking the loose threads off it and on to the floor. The charcoal itself proved remarkably resistant: it smudged, but the outline was still visible. He spat at it and beat it and tore at it, and only stopped when he noticed the robed figure watching him.
He snatched up his machete from where he’d dropped it.
‘You can’t have this,’ he said, holding the cloth behind him. ‘This is not yours.’
‘You believe you know better than us?’
‘I’m not the one who’s just committed mass murder.’
‘You tried to destroy this unit. Getting rid of dangerous pests is not murder, simply eradication.’
Dalip raised his sword. This was the one he’d pushed into the river. It had, apparently, just walked out again, upstream or downstream, and back into the city. Perhaps he just needed to try harder.
It was like chopping at wood. It stood passively while he swung and swung and swung, at the same point on its neck, and it grew clear that he wasn’t damaging it at all.
He dropped his shoulder and charged it. It rocked back on its heels, but without the precipice behind it, it simply put one foot back and steadied itself.
Dalip retreated, panting.
‘Show me the map.’
‘No.’
‘You cannot defeat me,’ it said. ‘You cannot kill what cannot die.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘Show me the map.’
‘No. There is an alternative to fighting you, though.’
‘Surrendering.’
‘Running.’
27
She didn’t know if she was a prisoner or not.
The idea of her having the upper hand over these… things was fleeting. She was simply stretching things out, trying to play the Lords off against the pirates, to give Dalip the time he needed. She was certain that if anyone could make sense of the map, it was him◦– not just because he was smart, but because, despite all his protestations, he seemed to understand Down.
There was nothing to say she couldn’t just get up and leave, not even when she caught a glimpse of Simeon through the open door. He wasn’t being frogmarched as such, but the robed figures guiding him were standing very close.
Despite their agreement to swap truths, those had been few and far between. Yes, they were from her future, in as much as she was as removed from them as she was from the Norman conquest, the Vikings and stuff like that. People from a thousand years hence turned out to be complete shits, rather than enlightened, peaceable and generous. There wasn’t much she could do about it, and she’d seen enough films to know that fucking around with time would end in tears, no matter how earnestly it was meant.
Down was their creation. That wouldn’t surprise Dalip: she guessed he’d already been thinking along those lines. They’d made it because they could, because thirty-first-century Earth was crowded with poor people and the rich deserved something better. When she’d suggested they build rockets and go to other planets, the response had been a long silence. Maybe they’d tried that and it hadn’t worked. Maybe they’d tried that and it had just turned out to be too far, too costly, and impossible to control. Or maybe it was too much like hard work, when the alternative◦– cracking the wall between one reality and another and living it up in Down’s vast and pristine emptiness◦– was easier, and they could keep out riff-raff like her.
And inevitably, it all started to go wrong. Down◦– so named because of some hand-wavy energy level thing, and not the disused Tube station◦– wasn’t what they anticipated. It gave them a world that was superficially the same while being built on a structure that worked to utterly different rules.
Their playground changed. People◦– uninvited people◦– started to turn up. What could only ever be described as magic started to infect both the new arrivals and the existing guests. The gatekeepers had abandoned their city by the sea, and then abandoned Down altogether: but they’d left intelligent machines to watch over everything and record their findings. It was useful, interesting even, to see what would happen.
The maps, and it always came down to the maps, were part of the monitoring process. The maps, the Lords insisted, belonged to them. Down was their experiment. She, and everyone else, were lab rats.
That made her feel just great, and screwed down her resolve to beat them somehow.
In return she told them about the fire, about the portal closing behind them and vanishing into the rock as if it had never existed. They listened intently. They asked questions about who had been in the group, and what had happened to them. They were particularly interested in Grace, but Mary couldn’t tell them much because she’d hardly known the woman.
And all the while, she was using up time, trying to goad them into acting against the pirates, to keep Dalip and the maps together for as long as possible. When they brought Simeon in, she thought she’d done it◦– they weren’t going to go anywhere without their captain, so the longer he was here and not there, the better.
Now she was alone in a room. The robed figures had drifted away, one by one, until the last one had got up and left mid-sentence. No explanation had been offered, because why would the scientist explain anything to his specimen? Where was Simeon? What were they offering him? Or were they threatening him? Why couldn’t they just take what they wanted? They still had servants to do the hard work. They didn’t even need to get their hands dirty.
She stood up from her chair and put her eye to the window slit. Outside, it was gloomy◦– she couldn’t work out why it was so dark when it should have been mid-morning. She squinted hard, making out the outlines of a dusty strip of land enclosed by the ubiquitous high wall. She could probably climb it if she had to, but if she had access to the front door, why bother?
There was nothing in the room apart from the chair she’d sat in. The robed figures had all stood, and one of the things that had been niggling at her expressed itself whole: where were the human comforts? These places were just a series of empty, dusty chambers. Apart from the place where she’d eaten which, she presumed, was part of the White City act, none of these buildings seemed much use at all.
These things weren’t human and had no human needs or wants. They were simply robots that reported back to their controllers. Their controllers who lived, not down, but up.
How were they talking to each other, if not through a two-way portal that was right here, in this valley?
She hadn’t seen one, which meant they were hiding it. It could be anywhere, but the place she’d want to look first was the big round building with no doors or windows. Of course, having no obvious way in presented its own problems, but that had never stopped her before. She’d been in all sorts of places she shouldn’t have.
Mary went to the door and checked the corridor. Two men stood either side of the doorway. Both looked at her.
‘Take me to the captain,’ she said. Not ‘where’s the captain?’ or ‘I’d like to see the captain’. If her status was ambiguous, she was going to make the most of that. The more powerful the decision maker, the more capricious their decisions, so who cared if two of their lab rats were in the same cage or in different cages?