He moved around to the front of the cathedral, into the shadow of the black window. The chips of glass were invisible; all he could see were the ghostly arcs and pillars of the supporting masonry. The design in that window had undoubtedly changed since the last time he had seen it.
He moved back across to the right-hand side and proceeded along half the length of the cathedral until he arrived at the base of the Clocktower.
“Can’t put it off any longer,” Grelier said to himself.
Back in her quarters on the caravan, Rashmika opened the letter, breaking the already weakened seal. The paper sprung wide. It was good-quality stuff: creamy and thick, better than anything she had handled in the badlands. Printed inside, in neat but naive handwriting, was a short message.
She recognised the handwriting.
Dear Rashmika,
I am very sorry not to have been in touch for so long. I heard your name on the broadcasts from the Vigrid region, saying you had run away from home. I had a feeling that you would be coming after me, trying to find out what had happened to me since my last letter. When I found out that there was a caravan coming towards the Way, one that you might have been able to reach with help, I felt certain you would be on it. I made an enquiry and found out the names of the passengers and now I am writing this letter to you.
I know you will think it strange that I have not written to you or any of the family for so long. But things are different now, and it would not have been right. Everything that you said was true. They did not tell the truth to start with, and they gave me the dean’s blood as soon as I arrived at the Way. I am sure you could tell this from the letters I sent to begin with. I was angry at first, but now I know that it was all for the best. What’s done is done, and if they had been honest it wouldn’t have happened this way. They had to tell a lie for the greater good. I am happy now, happier than I have ever been. I have found a duty in life, something bigger than myself I feel the dean’s love and the love of the Creator beyond the dean. I don’t expect you to understand or like any of this, Rashmika. That’s why I stopped writing home. I didn’t want to lie, and yet I also didn’t want to hurt anyone. It was better to say nothing.
It is kind and brave of you to come after me. It means more than you can imagine. But you must go home now, before I bring you any more hurt. Do this for me: go home, back to the badlands, and tell everyone that I am happy and that I love them all. I miss them terribly, but I do not regret what I have done. Please. Do that for me, will you? And take my love as well. Remember me as I was, as your brother, not as what I have become. Then it will all be for the best.
With love,
Rashmika read it one more time, scrutinising it for hidden meaning, and then put it down. She closed it, but the seal would no longer hold the edges tight.
Grelier liked the view, if little else. Two hundred metres above the surface of Hela, Quaiche’s room was a windowed garret at the very top of the Clocktower. From this vantage point one could see nearly twenty kilometres of the Way in either direction, with the cathedrals strung along it like artfully placed ornaments. There were only a few of them ahead, but to the rear they stretched back far over the horizon. The tops of distant spires sparkled with the unnatural clarity of things in vacuum, tricking the eye into the illusion that they were much nearer than they actually were. Grelier reminded himself that some of those spires were nearly forty kilometres behind. It would take them thirty hours or more to reach the spot now immediately beneath the Lady Morwenna, the better part of a Hela day. There were some cathedrals so far behind that even their spires were not visible.
The garret was hexagonal in plan, with high armoured windows on all six sides. The slats of metal jalousies were ready to tilt into position at a command from Quaiche, blocking light in any direction. For now the room was fully illuminated, with stripes of light and shade falling on every object and person within it. There were many mirrors in the room, arranged on pedestals, sight-lines and angles of reflection carefully chosen. When Grelier entered, he saw his own shattered reflection arriving from a thousand directions.
He placed the cane into a wooden rack by the door.
Aside from Grelier, the room contained two people. Quaiche, as usual, reclined in the baroque enclosure of his medical support couch. He was a shrivelled, spectral thing, seemingly less substantial in the full glare of daylight than in the half-shuttered darkness that prevailed in the garret. He wore oversized black sunglasses that accentuated the morbid pallor and thinness of his face. The couch ruminated to itself with thoughtful hums and clicks and gurgles, occasionally delivering a dose of medicine into its client. Most of the distasteful medical business was tucked away under the scarlet blanket that covered his recumbent form to the ribcage, but now and then something pulsed along one of the feedlines running into his forearms or the base of his skulclass="underline" something chemical-green or electric-blue, something that could never be mistaken for blood. He did not look a well man. Appearances, in this case, were not deceptive.
But, Grelier reminded himself, this was how Quaiche had looked for decades. He was a very old man, pushing the envelope of available life-prolongation therapies, testing them to their limit. But the limit was always slightly out of reach. Dying seemed to be a threshold that he lacked the energy to cross.
They had both, Grelier reflected, been more or less the same physiological age when they had served under Jasmina aboard the Gnostic Ascension. Now Quaiche was by far the older man, having lived through all of the last hundred and twelve years of planetary time. Grelier, by contrast, had experienced only thirty of those years. The arrangement had been simple enough, with generous benefits where Grelier was concerned.
“I don’t really like you,” Quaiche had told him, back aboard the Gnostic Ascension. “If that wasn’t already obvious.”
“I think I got the message,” Grelier said.
“But I need you. You’re useful to me. I don’t want to die here. Not just now.”
“What about Jasmina?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something. She relies on you for her clones, after all.”
It had been shortly after Quaiche’s rescue from the bridge on Hela. As soon as she received data on the structure, Jasmina had turned the Gnostic Ascension around and brought it into the 107 Piscium system, swinging into orbit around Hela. There had been no more booby traps on the surface: later investigation showed that Quaiche had triggered the only three sentries on the entire moon, and that they had been placed there and forgotten at least a century before by an earlier and now unremembered discoverer of the bridge.
Except that was almost but not quite true. There was another sentry, but only Quaiche knew about it.
Fixated by what he had seen, and stunned by what had happened to him—the miraculous nature of his rescue combined inseparably and punishingly with the horror of losing Morwenna—Quaiche had gone mad. That was Grelier’s view, at least, and nothing in the last hundred and twelve years had done anything to reverse his opinion. Given what had happened, and given the perception-altering presence of the virus in Quaiche’s blood, he thought Quaiche had got off lightly with only a mild kind of insanity. He still had some kind of grip on reality, still understood—with a manipulative brilliance—all that was going on around him. It was just that he saw the world through a gauze of piety. He had sanctified himself.