Grelier collected his cane, stuffed it into the crook of his arm and made his way back down the series of ramps and ladders. At the foot of the reactor he retrieved his medical kit and unlocked the access door. By the time he reached Vaustad, half a dozen of Glaur’s workers had gathered around the body. He considered shooing them away, then decided against it. Let them watch. Let them see what Bloodwork entailed.
He knelt down by Vaustad and opened the medical kit. It gasped cold. It was divided into two compartments. In the upper tray were the red-filled syringes of top-up doses, fresh from Bloodwork. They were labelled for serotype and viral strain. One of them had been intended for Vaustad and would now have to go to new home.
He peeled back Vaustad’s sleeve. Was there still a faint pulse? That would make life easier. It was never a simple business, drawing blood from the dead. Even the recently deceased.
He reached into the second compartment, the one that held the empty syringes. He held one up to the light, symbolically.
“The Lord giveth,” Grelier said, slipping the syringe into one of Vaustad’s veins and starting to draw blood. “And sometimes, unfortunately, the Lord taketh away.”
He filled three syringes before he was done.
Grelier latched the gate to the spiral staircase behind him. It was good, on reflection, to escape the aggressive stillness of the traction hall. Sometimes it seemed to him that the place was a cathedral within a cathedral, with its own unwritten rules. He could control people, but down there—amid machines—he was out of his element. He had tried to make the most of the business with Vaustad, but everyone knew that he had not come to take blood, but to give it.
Before ascending further he stopped at one of the speaking points, calling a team down from Bloodwork to deal with the body. There would be questions to answer, later, but nothing that would cost him any sleep.
Grelier moved through the main hall, on his way to the Clocktower. He was taking the long way around, in no particular hurry to see Quaiche after the Vaustad debacle. Besides, it was his usual custom to make at least one circumnavigation of the hall before going up or down. It was the largest open space in the cathedral, and the only one—save for the traction hall—where he could free himself from the mild claustrophobia that he felt in every other part of the moving structure.
The hall had been remade and expanded many times, as the cathedral itself grew to its present size. Little of that history was evident to the casual eye now, but having lived through most of the changes, Grelier saw what others might have missed. He observed the faint scars where interior walls had been removed and relocated. He saw the tidemark where the original, much lower ceiling had been. Thirty or forty years had passed since the new one had been put in—it had been a mammoth exercise in the airless environment of Hela, especially since the old space had remained occupied throughout the whole process and the cathedral had, of course, kept moving the entire time. Yet the choir had not missed a note during the entire remodelling, and the number of deaths amongst the construction workers had remained tolerably low.
Grelier paused awhile at one of the stained-glass windows on the right-hand side of the cathedral. The coloured edifice towered dozens of metres above him. It was framed by a series of divided stone arches, with a rose window at the very top. The cathedral’s architectural skeleton, traction mechanisms and external cladding were necessarily composed largely of metal, but much of the interior was faced with a thin layer of cosmetic masonry. Some of it had been processed from indigenous Hela minerals, but the rest of it—the subtle biscuit-hued stones and the luscious white-and-rose marbles—had been imported by the Ultras. Some of the stones, it was said, had even come from cathedrals on Earth. Grelier took that with a large pinch of salt: more than likely they’d come from the nearest suitable asteroid. It was the same with the holy relics he encountered during his tour, tucked away in candlelit niches. It was anyone’s guess how old they really were, whether they’d been hand-crafted by medieval artisans or knocked together in manufactory nano-forges.
But regardless of the provenance of the stonework that framed it, the stained-glass window was a thing of beauty. When the light was right, it not only shone with a glory of its own but transmitted that glory to everything and everyone within the hall. The details of the window hardly mattered—it would still have been beautiful if the chips of coloured, vacuum-tight glass had been arranged in random kaleidoscopic patterns—but Grelier took particular note of the imagery. It changed from time to time, following dictates from Quaiche himself. When Grelier sometimes had difficulty reading the man directly (and that was increasingly the case) the windows offered a parallel insight into Quaiche’s state of mind.
Take now, for instance: when he had last paid attention to this window, it had focused on Haldora, showing a stylised view of the gas giant rendered in swirling chips of ochre and fawn. The planet had been set within a blue backdrop speckled with the yellow chips of surrounding stars. In the foreground there had been a rocky landscape evoked in contrasting shards of white and black, with the gold form of Quaiche’s crashed ship parked amid boulders. Quaiche himself was depicted outside the ship, robed and bearded, kneeling on the ground and raising an imploring hand to the heavens. Before that, Grelier recalled, the window had shown the cathedral itself, pictured descending the zigzagging ramp of the Devil’s Staircase, looking for all the world like a tiny storm-tossed sailing ship, all the other cathedrals lagging behind, and with a slightly smaller rendition of Haldora in the sky.
Before that, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might have been a more modest variation on the theme of the crashed ship.
The images that the window showed now were clear enough, but their significance to Quaiche was much more difficult to judge. At the top, worked into the rose window itself, was the familiar banded face of Haldora. Below that were a couple of metres of starlit sky, shaded from deep blue to gold by some artifice of glass tinting. Then, taking up most of the height of the window, was a toweringly impressive cathedral, a teetering assemblage of pennanted spires and buttresses, lines of converging perspective making it clear that the cathedral sat immediately below Haldora. So far so good: the whole point of a cathedral was for it to remain precisely below the gas giant, just as depicted. But the cathedral in the window was obviously larger than any to be found on the Permanent Way; it was practically a citadel in its own right. And—unless Grelier was mistaken—it was clearly portrayed as being an outgrowth of the rocky foreground landscape, as if it had foundations rather than traction mechanisms. There was no sign of the Permanent Way at all.
The window puzzled him. Quaiche chose the content of the windows, and he was usually very literal-minded in his selections. The scenes might be exaggerated, might even have the taint of unreality (Quaiche outside his ship without a vacuum suit, for instance) but they usually bore at least some glancing relationship to actual events. But the present content of the window appeared to be worryingly metaphorical. That was all Grelier needed, Quaiche going all metaphorical on him. But what else was he to make of the vast, grounded cathedral? Perhaps it symbolised the fixed, immobile nature of Quaiche’s faith. Fine, Grelier told himself: you think you can read him now, but what if the messages start getting even foggier?
He shook his head and continued his journey. He traversed the entire left-hand wall of the cathedral, not seeing any further oddities amongst the windows. That was a relief, at least. Perhaps the new design would turn out to be a temporary aberration, and life would continue as normal.