“Keep safe,” Child’a’grace said, kissing the old woman the three-fold kiss of farewell; forehead, wrist, wrist. “You’ve got a photograph…”
“A grandmother does not have a photograph of her granddaughter?”
“Of course. Well, let us know…”
“Immediately.”
Ten minutes later, a figure a little more black than the Muchanga night climbed slowly down the passenger steps to the ground. The air smelled of sage and cold, stone-chilled water. The stars were sharp and threatening as an arrow storm. The moonring seemed suspended in flight, an arch of frost. Grandmother Taal took two nostrilfuls of the big night. She took three steps away from the track. This was the furthest she had been from Catherine of Tharsis in a half-decade. The novelty was worth that brief a consideration, no more. She found a place of concealment among the trackside equipment. Ladies of her venerability did not hide. Skittering night things fled from her. Good. There were almost certainly things out there that she would flee from. The big train swigged its fill of fossil water. The feeder arms swung loose. Voices called up and down the track. Steam vented from valves. The big horns sang once, twice, thrice. The pistons thrashed, the wheels spun. Freighted with lights and lives, Catherine of Tharsis glided slowly past her.
Grandmother Taal watched the red taillights curve out of sight around the bend in the track. She stepped out of concealment. By the light of the moonring, she took a reading from her pocket vade-mecum. The timetable function told her the 22:50 Triskander-Grand Valley Limited Night Service would be on the upline in eighty minutes. Time enough. She began to walk. She laid the first detonator on the upline switchover. Vertebrae protested as she straightened up. The night was working into her marrow. She found a pair of fingerless gloves and pulled them on. Warm hands fool a cold body. She laid the second detonator a twenty-minute walk upline by the vade-mecum clock. The service lights of Muchanga Water Station had receded into the great dark, a dirty, low constellation. She thought a bit about the flee-worthy things in the dark. Onward.
She heard an explosion behind her. She turned. Too soon, too close…Grandmother Taal fumbled in her infinity bag. Keys, sweets, small ladylike weapons, items of food, coins, charms, vials of scented waters, comfits, hair pins and old-fashioned jewellery, hard edges of very large machines. Where was it? Damn infundibular folding dimensions.
The second detonator went off. She saw its brief sharp flare close to the ground, eclipsed by wheels. She began to walk very quickly, counting one thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand…There. Her fingers curled around the shaft of the thermite flare. Fifteen thousand sixteen thousand…So dark, so damned dark, no light from all those stupid, wasted stars, and so cold; one frosty sleeper, one unseated trackbed, one loose tie, she could fall, and that would be…Twenty-two thousand twenty-three thousand twenty-four thousand…Boom.
The last detonator. He was coming fast, too fast. There must have been delays down the line in Margaret Land, he was making up time on the empty Oxus section.
She turned, held the flare at arm’s length, pulled the ripcord. The metal cap flipped off. The thermite mixture coughed, spat sparks. A low flare guttered, teetered on the edge of extinction in the wind, then caught. A blade of searing white flame leaped from the casing. Grandmother Taal faced down the night train to Grand Valley with a sword of light. She could see the headlamp, cutting a curve through the night. The wheels beat, the horns declared their impatience with all that might impede them. Grandmother Taal held her sword firm before her face. See it. They must see it. But she could not hear brakes. She could not hear the chunter of an Engineer throwing the drive into reverse, the shriek of the emergency steam release. She tried to remember how much fire there was in the standard Bethlehem Ares Railroads signal flare. The light expanded before, swallowing her like the hypnotising eyes of a speedsnake bewitching a Syrtis hare. The world around her was white, the horns bellowed, “This is the Triskander-Grand Valley Limited, out of my way.” He wasn’t stopping. He wasn’t stopping. Brakes. She heard brakes. Sparks cascaded from the agonised steel. Geysers of steam jetted from the piston valves. The horns yelled at her, then fell silent. The engine stood motionless before her. She could have reached out and touched the cow-catcher.
The flame guttered out in dismal sparks. Grandmother Taal flung the empty casing away from her. She looked defiantly up into the great white light.
“I am Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th, of Catherine of Tharsis!” she declared. “In the name of all Engineers, I claim Uncle Billy!”
A distant voice shouted down.
“How about you, Cousin Taal Engineer! Welcome to Five Great Stones. Come aboard.”
Dark figures were already weaving through the seething white spotlight to her assistance.
14
Acolytes in plum opened the filigree gates of the hand-cranked elevator and demurely ushered Sweetness and Serpio into a short corridor. More acolytes waited by a tall pair of arched double doors worked with a pattern of twining tree branches and roots. The acolytes were young, pudding-bowl cropped, puppyish. Their plum pants were too short around the ankles and their plum tops too tall around the collar.
“Hiya,” Sweetness said as they swung open the double doors. They smiled.
The audience chamber of Devastation Harx occupied the uppermost chord of the flying cathedral. It was a glassine dome, transparent to heaven. Little webs of sand clung to the corners of the ribbing, souvenirs from when the machine—or was it a building, Sweetness wondered, accustomed to dual-purpose artifacts—had lain buried under the great sand. What was not transparent was wood. Wooden floor, clicky under Sweetness’s desert boots. Wooden furniture—a horseshoe-shaped table and thirteen chairs, all alike and elegantly unostentatious. Wooden cressets, bearing double-handfuls of bioluminescence. Wooden buttresses arching overhead, spreading finger-twigs in a complex interwoven vaulting. Sweetness imagined herself standing in a forest under a winter sky. The audience chamber smelled of wax polish.
If you wandered close to the wooden perimeter handrail you could see the flanks of the lift canopy spreading out around you like old women’s skirts. You could also see that you were several hundred metres above the ground. To a railway girl who had only ever flown in her dreams, it was hypnotically disconcerting. The cathedral was moving over an expanse of old chaotic terrain that had escaped the manforming. The raw stuff of the earth lay heaped and unsorted like effects at a Deuteronomy funeral. Red rock clawed for Sweetness; any and every part of this sharp-edged land could pierce and flay this flying circus like a carnival balloon on a barbed-wire fence. The play of sun and shadow over the long, knife-blade valleys striped the land like an Argyre hunting cat. The ground rippled like sand in a shallow river. Sweetness felt herself dragged to the rail, to contemplate the long slide down the side of the airship, the terminal plummet to end shredded by stone knives. It was a nastily delicious fantasy.
“You know, if men could fly like birds, I don’t think we would really bother doing anything else.” The voice was low and soft and almost accentless. It used the words slowly, as if it weighing and parcelling each. “Everyone, at some time, wonders what it would be like to jump.” Devastation Harx was one of those people who are not what you expect but, when you see them, they so utterly refute your mental image that you can no longer recall what it was you had expected. The face perfectly fitted the voice: late twenties, grey-haired, refined, a hint of epicene to take the edge off crude handsome; lips a little full, as if this face had once belonged to a cruel teen-something who had latterly found a better way. Not over tall, nor over small. Medium framed, no obvious body fat but not gaunt. He had bearing. Poise. A trained stance. He carried his hands as if he knew what to do with them. His left held a black swagger-cane, capped each end with silver. It looked as if it might contain a sword. But best, Sweetness observed, he wore a very killer suit. Soft, light-swallowing black. The frock coat was frogged with silver. His white shirt was clasped with a silver collar brooch. Exactly the same amount of cuff peeped from the coat sleeves. It was not a thing Sweetness had consciously considered until then, but it was now obvious that people who call themselves names like Devastation Harx—he could be no other—need good tailors.