A series of snorts and deep, chest-shaking breaths drew her attention to the fact that the enormous creature in front of her was only one of many, standing in a rough semi-circle around the alcove she had taken shelter in. One of the animals stamped a foot. She felt the ground shake.
Gadfium stared. She waited to faint but it would not happen.
Adijine walked to the window of his private office, shaking his head. 'You mean we might have to give those bastard Engineers in the Chapel what they want?'
'We don't appear to have very much choice,' Oncaterius said, crossing his legs and brushing one careful hand over his knee to free his robe of creases. 'It would seem the war is becoming recognised as unwinnable even by those who were originally most in favour of it.'
Adijine wrinkled his nose at this but did not rise to the bait.
'Time draws on,' Oncaterius said evenly. 'The Encroachment draws closer, and perhaps therefore so should we to our, ah, Engineer cousins in the Chapel. We require the access they claim to have to —'
'Yes, claim,' the King said, staring out of the window and down into the depths of the Great Hall; rivers, roads and rail tracks threaded the landscape below in ascending orders of directness.
'Well, let's say, appear to possess,' Oncaterius continued, unruffled. 'They would appear not to possess our access to the necessary systems within the Cryptosphere, therefore an accommodation would appear to make sense for all concerned.'
'An accommodation in which those bastards get to call far too many fucking shots,' Adijine spat.
'I believe Your Majesty knows my opinions on the wisdom of having antagonised the clan Engineers in the first place.'
'Yes,' the King said, rolling his eyes and then turning round. 'I think you've made them clear on more occasions than I care to remember, except when it might have made a difference, right at the start.'
Adijine stood behind the imposingly heavy and ornate swivel chair on the far side of his even more imposingly heavy and ornate desk.
Oncaterius looked wounded. 'If I may say so, Your Majesty does me a disservice. I'm sure the records will show my voice was one of those raised in —'
'Oh, never mind,' the King said, turning the chair round and sitting heavily in its enveloping frame. 'If we have to compromise we have to. We can thrash it out at the Consistory meeting this evening, assuming the Chapel delegation have come up with their answer by then.' The King smiled ruefully, shaking his head once. 'At least we won't be making any concessions to some cross-clan posse of concerned scientists and mathematicians.'
Oncaterius smiled coldly. 'I accept Your Majesty's thanks on behalf of the Security service.'
Adijine narrowed his eyes. 'Is Gadfium still free?'
Oncaterius sighed. 'For now. She's an old lady scientist who got lucky, not a —'
'Couldn't we have tried to capture her? What was the point of trying to kill her?'
'On the confirmation of the existence of the conspiracy,' Oncaterius said, sounding a little as though he was reciting, 'and having received permission to proceed with its amelioration, it was she who happened to be in the position to do the most immediate damage. Rapid action was called for. Our operative took appropriate steps, considering the urgent nature of the circumstances. And I am sure Your Majesty understands that it is usually considered a great deal more straightforward to kill somebody than it is to capture them.' Oncaterius favoured the King with a thin smile. 'Given that our agent's attempt merely to murder Chief Scientist Gadfium resulted in three deaths it is perhaps just as well we did not endeavour to effect her capture.'
'Given the level of competence your people brought to the operation, I'm sure you're right,' the King said, taking some pleasure in the facial flinch this produced on the other man. 'Now, was there anything else?'
'Your Majesty has been informed of the capture of an asura?'
'Held for questioning,' Adijine said, waving one hand. 'Any progress?'
'We are being gentle. However, I think I may attempt to question her myself,' Oncaterius said smoothly.
'What about the child, the Teller who was under suspicion of crypt-hacking or whatever? Didn't he get away too?'
Oncaterius smiled. 'Dealt with.'
3
Sessine stood on the sloped desert sands, looking towards the tall grey tower at the end of the peninsula, cut off from the sands by a high black wall. Within, gardens formed a green triangle at the tower's base. Beyond and to either side, the sea rolled in, waves like creased bronze where they reflected the light of the network of red-orange burning in the sky. He looked away for a moment, trying to cancel the display in the heavens, but it refused to disappear.
The cliffs behind him were rosy with the same light, the sand beneath his soles strewn with shadows like wavelets. The air smelled of salt.
He felt something he had not felt for a long time, and it took a while before he admitted to himself that it was fear. He shrugged, hoisted his pack over his shoulder and continued on towards the distant tower, leaving a deep, scuffed trail of footprints behind him in the talc-fine sand. A vague, gauzy cloud of accompanying dust hung in the air.
It was the ten thousand, two hundred and seventh day of his time in the crypt. He had been here for almost twenty-eight years. Outside, in the other world, a little more than a day had passed.
The wall was obsidian; pitted in places, still highly polished in others. It met the sands and plunged into them like a black knife a kilometre long and fifty metres high at least. He stood in the silence, staring up at the almost featureless cliff, then trod down to the nearest shore. The wall extended a hundred metres or so out to sea. He turned on his heel and set off for the other end.
It was the same. He squatted by the shore and tested the water as a wave broke and rolled, pushing foam up the slope of sand. It was warm. He'd have to swim. He'd thought he might.
He started to undress.
He had not ever paid very much attention to his geographical position in the crypt, though it did roughly correspond to hardware in the base-level world. He supposed he must have wandered over much of South and North America before he had encountered the tonsured woman with her elaborately coded message; that had been, as nearly as he could make out, in a position which equated to somewhere in the North American Midwest; Iowa or Nebraska, he thought. His path since then had led him through Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Britain, Europe and Asia Minor to Arabia.
The sea crossings had been the most dangerous parts of his journey; whether they were effected by the likeness of a bridge or a tunnel, they represented choke points for travellers, and such a focusing of potential prey had in most cases produced a predatory exaggeration of the level's ecological balance. He had had to use the sword a few times, and — on occasion — opponents had attempted to best him through other levels of the crypt, imagining him into situations within which they thought he could more easily be defeated and absorbed.
He found, however, that he had little difficulty in assuming control in such situations. Much appeared to depend on one's wit; a general flexibility and quickness of mind plus an extensive and catholic knowledge-base — as long as these attributes were combined with a generous dash of ruthlessness — were all that one really needed to operate successfully within such imagined realities.
He had walked over broad bridges and within great tunnels hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres long, travelling within the spaces afforded by the slow sweeps of the writhing data highways, in something like a trance sometimes when the pace was forced and he could not afford to sleep, imagining himself to be a molecule of water trapped within the fold of some Archimedean Screw, a wave carried upon some articulation of light within a subsea cable, a fleck of sand-dust borne on the dark gurglings of a submerged water course veined beneath the baking desert.