"Agreed," Rebecca said, giving no clue that the decision had been taken there and then to kill several thousand people.
The old Styx closed his eyes, not because the gathering Topsoil light bothered him, but because he had been struck by a thought that was tiresome.
"That Burrows child…"
Rebecca opened her mouth to speak, but held her tongue as the old Styx continued.
"You and your sister did well to pull in the Jerome woman and neutralize her. Your father was not one for unfinished business, either. Both of you have his instinct," the old Styx said, so softly that it could have been construed as affection.
His tone resumed its usual hardness. "That being as it is, we have scotched the snake, not killed it. Will Burrows is contained for the moment, but he may yet become a false idol, a figurehead, for our enemies. They might seek to use him in their opposition of us and the measures we intend to take. He cannot be allowed to continue to roam unchecked in the Interior. He must be flushed out and stopped." Only then did the old Styx swivel his head slowly toward Rebecca, who continued to gaze down on the scene below. "And the boy might yet piece together what we're doing and sideline our plans. This is to be avoided… at all costs," he stressed.
"It will be dealt with," Rebecca assured him with unerring conviction.
"Make sure of it," the old Styx said and released his hands from behind his back, swinging them in front of him and clapping them together.
Rebecca took her cue from his gesture. "Yes," she said, "we should get under way." Her long black coat billowed open in the breeze as she half turned to the troop of Styx waiting quietly behind her.
"Let me see one," she ordered as she left the roof edge and strode imperiously toward the rank of shadowy men. There were perhaps as many as fifty of them in a perfectly straight line, and from this a single Styx snapped obediently to life, breaking from the formation. He kneeled down to slip his gloved hand under the lid of one of a pair of large wicker baskets that he and every one of the Styx on the rooftop had by their feet. From the basket came the soft sounds of cooing. He plucked out a pure white dove and closed the lid again. As he passed the dove to Rebecca, it tried to flap its wings, but she took it firmly in both hands.
She held the bird on its side to inspect its legs. There was something around both of them, as if the bird had been ringed, but these were more than mere metal bands. Made from an off-white fabric, they sparkled dimly as the light caught them. Each band had tiny spheres embedded in it, which had been designed to degrade upon several hours' exposure to ultraviolet light and shed their load. The sun itself was the timing mechanism, the trigger.
"They are ready?" the old Styx asked as he came alongside Rebecca.
"They are," another Styx confirmed from farther down the line.
"Excellent," the old Styx said as he began to stroll along the rank of men, each one melding with the next in the weak light as they stood shoulder to shoulder, all wearing identical black leather greatcoats and breathing apparatus.
"My brothers," the old Styx addressed them. "We're done with hiding. It's time to take what is rightfully ours." He was silent for a moment, allowing his words to sink in. "Today will be remembered as the first day of a glorious new epoch in our history. It is a day that will mark our eventual return to the surface.
Drawing to a halt, he punched his fist into the palm of his hand. "In the last hundred years we have made the Topsoilers atone for their sins by unleashing the germules they call influenzas. The first was in the summer of nineteen eighteen." He gave a sour laugh. "The poor fools called it the Spanish Flu, and it took millions of them to their graves. Then we gave them further demonstrations of our power in nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen sixty-eight with the Asian and Hong Kong variants."
He punched his palm with even greater force, the slap of his leather gloves resounding around the rooftop.
"But those epidemics amount to nothing more than common colds compared to what is to come. The Topsoilers' souls are rotten to the very core — their morality is that of the insane — and they ruin our promised lands with their excessive consumption and greed."
"Their time is drawing to a close, and the Heathen shall be purged," he growled like a wounded bear, scanning from one end of the rank to the other before he began to walk again, his boot heels clicking on the lead flat of the roof.
"For today we test a reduced strain of Dominion, our holy plague. And through the fruits of our labors, we will confirm that it can be spread throughout this city, throughout this country, and then to the rest of the world." He raised his hand, splaying his fingers at the sky. "Once our birds take flight, the sun will see to it that air currents carry our message to the evil masses, a message that will be written in blood and pus across the face of this earth."
Reaching the last man in the rank, he swung around to return down it again, silent until he neared the midpoint of the line.
"So my comrades, the next time we find ourselves here, our cargo will indeed be deadly. Then our foes, the Topsoilers, will be laid low, just as it is decreed in the Book of Catastrophes. And we, the true heirs to the earth, shall regain what is rightfully ours."
He came to a dramatic halt and addressed the Styx in a lower, more intimate tone. "To work."
There was a flurry of activity as the troop got ready.
Rebecca took over. "On my mark… three… two… one… go!" she commanded, pitching her dove high into the air. The Styx immediately heaved open the baskets by their feet and the birds took to the wing, a white swarm flapping from between the amassed men and lifting from the rooftop.
Rebecca watched her dove for as long as she could, but the hundreds of others caught up with it, and it was soon lost in the flock, which seemed to linger for a second over Nelson's Column before dispersing in all directions, like a cloud of pale smoke fanned by the wind.
"Fly, fly, fly!" Rebecca called out after them, laughing.
Part Three
Drake And Elliott
20
"It's just terrible," Chester kept saying over and over again as the enormity of what had happened sank in. "But there wasn't anything we could do. He didn't have a pulse."
Chester was remonstrating with himself, laden with a mounting sense of guilt. He believed that he was partly to blame for Cal's death. Perhaps, by being so critical of the boy, he had goaded him on, provoking him into being so reckless and entering the cavern by himself.
"We couldn't go back in…" Chester babbled on to himself.
He was rocked to the very core. He'd never seen anybody die, not before his very eyes. It took him back to the time he had been in the car with his father and they'd driven past the aftermath of a bloody motorcycle accident. He didn't know if the twisted body by the roadside was dead — and he'd never found out. But this was different. This was someone he knew, who had died while he'd actually been watching. One minute Cal was there, the next he was just a limp body. A dead body. It was so absolute, and so brutally final; it was as if he'd been talking to someone on the telephone and they'd been cut off, never to speak again. Chester just couldn't come to terms with it.
After a while he lapsed into silence and he and Will walked side by side, their boots scuffling in the dust. Oblivious to his surroundings, Will placed one foot mechanically in front of the other like a sleepwalker, as the canal continued for mile after monotonous mile.