They watched the city come near from their perch on the hood of a great grain-hauling automotive trundling along on six metal legs — looking more like a beetle than those insects themselves. None of them had fully appreciated the concept of Helleron as the Lowlands’ epicentre of industry. They had envisaged something like Collegium but with a few more factories and without the elegant white buildings of the College.
But Helleron was vast, extending half again Collegium’s size, the greatest single city in all the Lowlands. It sprawled and it was dirty: whether its buildings had been raised of dark stone or not, they had been overlaid, day after day, with the grime of the city’s foundries and workshops. There was a pall in the very air, as though the visitors were gazing on the place through smoked glass. A hundred hundred chimneys gouted it out continually, their narrow windows aglare with forge-fire.
It was built on two scales, the city. The factories were huge grubs, extended and extended, comprising mazes of workrooms, storerooms and vehicle yards. Up on the western hills, where the air was clearer, there were mansions built as grandiose statements in stone, telling about their owners’ profits and losses. Between these hulks, however, swarmed the masses. The buildings that housed the workers of Helleron were crammed together, squeezed tight, beside and under and over, as though jostling for position beside the mighty flanks of their masters. The whole complexity was shot through with silver: the rails that were Helleron’s breath and blood, shuttling men and machines, crew and commodities, across the breadth of the city, north to the mines or south part-way to the Ant city of Tark. It seemed at first glance that the rails’ silver lacework was the only passage through the city. The walls of the buildings seemed so crammed together that surely not even the smallest insect could have crept between them.
They watched the sheer enormity of it grow and approach them across the distance. Even Totho, that champion of industry, was humbled.
‘Are we even going to be able to find this Benevolence Square?’ he asked.
‘Uncle Sten said it was near the airfield — which is over there.’ Across a cleared area of land the pale blister of the Sky Without was clearly visible. Che shaded her eyes, thinking for a moment that she might be able to discern some details, some dabs of black and gold, but she had forgotten the Sky’s great bulk. It was still further away than she realized.
Closer still, and they at last saw that there was indeed breathing space, even open space, in Helleron, but none of it had been left alone. There were squares, but they were roofed by the canvas of countless traders’ stalls, or else thronging with swarms of citizens. There were alleys and roads, but half of them were concealed under overarching buildings, the opposite sides of streets leaning in to turn a thoroughfare into a tunnel for the sake of a few extra square yards of living space in their upper storey. And where there were gaps between the buildings, these gaps were filled with people.
‘No outer walls,’ Salma said quietly. They turned to look at him in puzzlement and he gestured. It was plain to see, when you looked out for it. Helleron’s very commerce apparently made it proof against invasion — or so went the theory writ large in its streets. Helleron free was of greater use to all the rest of the world than Helleron chained would be to anyone.
Tynisa recalled the ill-fated Captain Halrad’s manner, his possessive attitude. If all Wasps thought that way then they would seek to pluck Helleron and hold it close, crush it in their grasping hands until it was good for nothing and nobody. The Wasp Empire, by Halrad’s own words, was no respecter of mutual benefit. The Wasp Empire saw only property to be possessed and enemies to vanquish.
The four of them had dressed themselves up as local peasantry, and Salma and Tynisa had hoods up to shade their faces. If the mysterious Thalric was waiting for them in Helleron, as seemed almost certain, then they were determined to make it harder for him. The city’s daunting size would become their unexpected ally.
Helleron finally fell across them like a shadow. The buildings rose abruptly high on both sides, the air thickening with smoke and the stench of people. Here on the outskirts were those seeking to mimic the commerce of the inner city: little amateur markets selling goods of dubious provenance for small change, itinerant entertainers and charlatans, beggars everywhere. A squad of Ant soldiers drilled in an open space before the city, their masters or employers no doubt tending their business within. Stake-fenced pens advertised the wares of slavers: even though Beetles kept no slaves and allowed none within their towns, more lives were bought and sold in Helleron every day than anywhere else in the Lowlands.
‘Where do you stop?’ Che inquired of the driver of their automotive. He was sitting one level down from them, exposed to the open air just like any real beetle driver.
‘Chancery Street Station,’ he rasped back. ‘Got a big depot there, they have.’
‘Excuse me, but do you happen to know Benevolence Square?’ she continued. It seemed the easiest way, although she was sure an experienced agent would have had a more subtle way of doing it.
He did indeed, and although the way was long, they had only to follow one of the outer circula, as he called Helleron’s ringroads, in order to come to it.
‘You can’t miss it,’ their driver assured them. ‘The old Benevolence place has got two great big skeletons all over it.’
That sounded unlikely, but they disembarked as instructed, having no directions to trust save his. The tide of busy humanity that was Helleron immediately engulfed them, and in the first moments Che was nearly ripped away from her companions and hauled off down the street by the simple crush of people, each one a slave to his destination. The four of them huddled together, feeling cowed by such a press. Great vehicles, beasts and wagons crawled past them to one side, the walls leered down to the other. A succession of short-tempered people buffeted them as they stood in the way, a stone in the course of the human stream.
Tynisa signalled that they should move on, and they found their way into the flow, bustled along at an undignified pace. The people around them seemed mostly workers and small traders. They looked close mouthed and sullen, minding their own business and never looking at each other. Passing on, the wall to one side gave way to a succession of small workshops: a cobbler, a piece-maker, a sharpener, a leatherworker, men and women hard at work with solid, uncomplaining, joyless faces.
Salma’s face, too, was wrinkled up. ‘I can’t understand how they live with the smell of themselves,’ he complained. ‘The smell of the air. . it’s like it’s been burned and then sweated out.’
‘Let me guess, they don’t have. . factories or anything like that, where you come from,’ Totho said.
‘And how thankful I am for it,’ said Salma. ‘We may have our vices but this mayhem isn’t one of them. I don’t even know if there’s a name for what vice this is.’
‘Helleron,’ Tynisa suggested. ‘There’s your name.’
Totho shrugged, as best he could in the crush. ‘Well, I think it’s. . it’s got promise. I’d like to work here. Everything ever manufactured is made here. What do you think, Che?’
She felt rather guilty in the face of his enthusiasm, but she replied, ‘Collegium for me, every time.’
‘And that must be the Benevolence,’ Salma said suddenly. Ahead of them, past a line of near-identical inns and stables, lay a square. The largest building fronting it was facing them as well. The driver had been wrong, however: there was only one skeleton patterned in pale bricks amongst the darker stone. The other figure depicted a woman, austerely offering her hand to the same cadaver. The ‘old Benevolence place’ had been an almshouse once, offering succour to the needy, the destitute, the sick and the mad. Now it was a workhouse, where any succour was bought with a hard day’s labour. There was little enough going free in Helleron.