She paused to look over at Suniata, and her eyes shone with a radiance that transcended anything I had ever seen before in a man or woman. Not simple love, certainly not lust; but an intensity of expression that I can only describe as beatific. It was a gaze that scorched; I could imagine myself flinching if she was to turn it upon me. I thought then of her father and the enhancer he had worn over his damaged face, and wondered if his eyes had withered away from such incandescent ardor.
And then I felt the cool, slightly moist touch of Suniata’s hand upon mine, and a simple thought like a jolt of adrenaline, coursing from his fingers to my brain—
But of course! Didn’t you know?
I drew away sharply, staring into that bloated fishlike face as though into a warped mirror. Suniata only nodded and turned back to Cadence. Jane put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me to her.
“Wendy? What is it?” I shook her away, suddenly frightened.
Because all this time I had thought of the cacodemon merely as an odd accessory to this journey; a creature whose function was to serve as some kind of silent adjunct to Cadence, perhaps to cow Jane and me by his presence.
But now, with Cadence gazing at him with that wonder and reverence and, yes, fear, igniting her blue eyes, I saw the truth of it.
The cacodemon was not her servant. She was his. In some misguided effort to reverse the wrongs of hundreds of years of genetic engineering and biological warfare, the human members of the Asterine Alliance had offered themselves as infantry and handsel to the geneslaves.
“No, not beside us in that new work!—above us,” Cadence continued. Her hood had slipped from her head, so that all I saw was a halo of brilliant white above the blue folds of her uniform. “This world has become unlivable. The sun is poisoned, and the water, so that nothing from our past can safely live upon it.
“But these others—”
She raised the stump of her left hand triumphantly. “The new creatures, the ones we created—they can survive in this world we have made! To them the poisons are like cool water, and darkness is daylight. They can live among the stars without falling prey to madness, and when they breed—and they will!—they will have only a single offspring, so that the subtle balance of our new world will not be overthrown. We gave birth to them in darkness, but that darkness has welcomed them, even as it has swallowed us.”
I felt as though someone had run an icy finger across my throat. “Are you—do you mean to make slaves of us, then? Your own kind?”
Cadence shook her head. “No,” she said softly, her voice nearly drowned by the droning engines. “You will see—we are not devoured by self-hatred, seeing these new creatures. They would never have come to be, were it not for us; were it not for their father, the man who gave birth to all of them. We honor them, that is all. We honor him.
“But you’ll see, Wendy. And Jane. Icarus is coming. And when he comes, a new world will come with him, even as this one falls away.”
She crouched back over the steering wheel, the wind whipping her hair into silver froth. For another moment Suniata looked at me, his gaze flat and inscrutable as a viper’s.
Icarus. Into my mind rose the image that had been printed on Giles’s packets of cigarettes, and on the wine and brandy we’d drunk at Seven Chimneys.
Iχαpυσ
Icarus: that was what the strange characters spelled. Whomever—or whatever—the Asterine Alliance had taken as their emblem, was a thing called Icarus.
For the first time Suniata spoke aloud, the tendrils around his mouth rising as though to taste the name.
“Icarus,” he whispered, and nodded at me. Then he turned to stare outside.
“Icarus,” I thought, and even though the name was meaningless to me, I felt it like a palpable weight upon my heart.
In her seat Cadence peered through the front window, occasionally glancing at Suniata and nodding as though to some unspoken question. From the manner in which the cacodemon touched her—his long flattened fingers brushing now her neck, now her elbow or the wrinkled stump of her arm—I imagined they must be engaged in conversation, a new and subtle means of speech that stupid folk like Jane or me would never understand. Twice Suniata pointed, and Cadence craned her neck to see what he had indicated: improvements, I gathered, that had been made since their departure the day before.
Beyond the edge of the road were endless heaps of crates and heavy canvas sacks, some of them ripped open to spill their burden of ammunition and armored clothing beneath the tossing limbs of birches and young oaks. Behind the trees hundreds of vehicles were thrown together, nosing each other like bastard pups searching for their mother: caravans and jitneys and trucks and trylons, Ascendant aviettes with their wings folded up like a pterosaur’s and blunt-nosed Harkers from the Commonwealth. In the distance I glimpsed the wreckage of a fouga. Its outer skin had burned away so that only its steel infrastructure remained, like the shattered ribs and vertebrae of a whale gnawed to bone by some unimaginably vast predator. Two cacodemons emerged slowly from its blackened hulk, dragging corpses and what looked like the body of a huge worm. Others of their kind huddled together over the ruins of the dirigible’s gondola, shaking their heads solemnly and staring at a flickering image that might have been a holofile of the warship’s flight plan.
“Look at all this,” Jane murmured, shaking her head. “They must have gone to war against the entire world, to get all this….”
“Oh, but we have,” said Cadence, and Jane fell silent.
The caravan drove out from under the canopy of oaks, to a sunlit place where the road widened. To either side grass and flowering vines grew over the remains of ancient buildings long since given over to the earth. Here the mountains were so close that I could smell them, their secrets trickling from dark places like water, the wind rushing down gray cuffs in a cold torrent. Through a stand of live oaks, their trunks blackened and burled with age, I could glimpse the very foot of the mountain, a gray-and-green rampart rising thousands of feet above us until it vanished in blue haze. Scattered about its base were broken chunks of granite and boulders like chunks of dirty ice. From the center of all this rose an immense pair of polished metal doors, buttressed with steel beams and smooth slabs of rock that must have been torn from the mountain itself. Trees grew above the doors, spindly, gnarled trees whose roots clutched at the loose soil trapped between stones that had been loosed by avalanche or storm. For all the sunlight and warmth spilling from the unclouded sky, it was a grim place. I could imagine black eagles nesting there, or vultures, but not wrens or larkspurs or the darting wild finches: nothing that might give voice to song.
“Well, Wendy,” Jane said, hugging herself and staring at the mountain with a face as cold and unyielding as its own. “Looks like the end of the world, all right.”
All up and down the mountainside innumerable solar disks rose on crooked stiltlike legs, like great black beetles that had crawled from a giant’s corpse. Lines of rebels marched between them, snaking down to the road in an unbroken file. They would have been invisible save for their sky-colored uniforms and the weapons they carried, double-bladed yataghans and flame-shooting culverins glinting in the sun, and a billowing standard bearing the now-familiar image of mountains and star and the name Icarus spelled in archaic script. A dull thunder echoed from somewhere far above us. The lines of troops halted and turned to stare up the mountainside. A moment later a cloud of black smoke appeared in the sky. A faint rain of leaves and shattered stone pattered against the caravan and sent the rebels scuttling down their path.