Beyond that was a door through which Church could hear a faint whimpering. It would have been wiser to ignore it, but some quality to the sound drew him inside. A central aisle stretched for as far as the eye could see. On either side were cells containing people sitting on marble benches. There were no bars, and any of them could have walked out at any time, but they had a beatific, slightly dazed appearance that suggested sedation. As far as Church could see, all of the inmates were humans and from their clothes appeared to have been brought from many different periods. Church saw a woad-painted Celt, a wild-bearded Viking, a monk in brown robes, a Victorian woman in an extravagant dress who looked as though she had been plucked straight from a ball. There were scabby-kneed guttersnipes and other children in smart school uniforms, and Church was disturbed to see a number of babies sleeping peacefully in cribs.
Church stopped at one cell in which a man in his twenties wearing the rough clothes of a Tudor peasant hummed gently to himself.
‘Are you all right?’ Church asked.
The man smiled and nodded.
‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Robert, the miller’s son.’
‘How did you get here, Robert?’
‘I fell asleep in the fields one night,’ he said dreamily, ‘and I awoke to the most beautiful music I had ever heard. The Fair Folk were dancing around their mound to a fiddle and pipe tune. I tried to hide, but they saw me. And the girls … the beautiful girls … asked me if I wanted to dance with them. How could I refuse? We whirled around and around beneath the light of the moon, and then afterwards they invited me back to partake of their … food and drink … beneath the hills …’ His voice trailed away to be replaced by a satisfied smile. His out-of-focus eyes replayed the scene of wonder over and over in his mind.
Church asked several others, but the story was always some variation on the same theme: of people enticed from their homes and villages by the Fair Folk with promises of wonders beyond measure. And the babies? Undoubtedly stolen from their cribs, as the old stories always said, with a changeling or a corn dolly left in their place.
Church looked up and down the aisle. Hundreds of cells, perhaps thousands, lined up like the pens at an animal-research lab. Church vowed to himself that he would find some way to return to free them.
Filled with mounting dread, Church continued towards the thrumming sound, which grew louder by the minute. What he encountered next dwarfed all his feelings about the horrors of the court.
He passed through a door that was larger than all the rest, set in a wall at least nine feet thick. There was a sense that he had also passed into an area of greater importance. Though everywhere was still white, an oppressive gloom lay heavily on the rooms and corridors. The tiles were dirtier, the grouting thick with black grease. This was an area of industrial labour, not philosophic thought. The machine sounds were now loud and resonant, like enormous hearts beating just behind the walls. Church found himself holding his breath.
More of the Tuatha De Danann moved around this section, their scarlet robes like pools of blood in the gloom, their masks depersonalising them until they became machine-like sentries. Church slipped stealthily through doors and behind vats or cupboards, or strange, lathe-like machines of indiscernible purpose.
Eventually he came to rows of windows that looked onto a large area of interconnecting rooms. The first thing he noticed were the numerous drainage channels crisscrossing the floor, all of them running with blood. Here the machine-noises were so loud they almost drowned out all other sound, but gradually his ears became attuned to what lay beneath: screaming, hundreds of voices rising up, mingling, different pitches, different timbres, an orchestration of agony.
There was movement in each of the rooms. As his eyes grew accustomed to the subdued lighting he saw teams of red-garbed figures busy over tables on which lay humans. At least, Church presumed they were human, for they were all in various stages of dissection, and all of them were conscious. The surgeons did not use scalpels or saws. To Church, it appeared as though they passed their hands through flesh and bone, peeling open faces, delving into organs, investigating to the very atomic structure of their subjects. Here and there, where some procedure became particularly difficult, a Caraprix would be introduced to the operation, changing its shape as it delved deeper into the bodies.
On some tables the people were being put back together, but not always the way they had started out. Some lay shaking, on the surface quite normal, but Church had seen objects introduced into brains and hearts and lungs and eyes. Others woke to find themselves with scales or wings or fiery breath. Many died in the process and their bodies were quickly removed. Others suffered terribly. On one table a pile of component parts made a sickening mewling sound.
In that moment Church understood why Tom was the way he was, and what Jerzy had also suffered. And that vista over atrocity told Church what the gods thought of humans and why his role was so important: it was a battle for survival, species against species. But it also fanned into life the first black spark of despair, small but growing, for how could he or any other human combat a race that was capable of such things, that was not even the true Enemy but which simply considered humans so far beneath them that they were accorded the same degree of concern that an abattoir worker showed to the cattle trooping past his work-station?
Sickened and reeling, Church moved away from the windows, desperate to complete his task and escape. The further he moved into the heart of the complex, the stranger and more puzzling the experiments became. Here there were no operations on humans, for which he was thankful, but what he did see troubled him on a different level.
On a crystal as big as he was, every facet revealed a different view of reality — in his own world, in the Far Lands, and in other places he did not recognise. An orb contained within it a tiny boiling galaxy. A machine cut a door shape in the air, and then opened the door a minute fraction before it slammed shut. Then the process would begin all over again. There were arcs of coruscating energy, and shimmering beams of light, and whirring blades. A system of mirrors filled Church with a devastating dread when he glanced into it, but he blacked out before his mind would reveal what it had seen. When he came around, he moved quickly away, no longer sure whether he could complete his mission.
But then he came to a long corridor with windows on either side and the mood became profoundly different. The queasy sense of dread diminished and he felt oddly uplifted, almost heady. When he glanced out of the window, he realised why: it was like looking into starless space, with crackling bursts of Blue Fire illuminating holes darker than the surrounding space. And from these holes Fabulous Beasts appeared to be birthing. Their sinuous forms rolled and turned joyously as they soared on their leathery wings, their scales glimmering like miniature suns. At times they appeared to be made entirely of the blue energy.
Church watched them for a while, mesmerised. For those moments he felt an abiding peace that he had not experienced since childhood. It was with great reluctance that he continued to the door at the end of the corridor.
This new room was dark, and unlike the rest of the court had walls of studded iron. In the centre hovered a globe formed from interconnecting blue lines, which shifted every now and then so that the globe took on new dimensions and warped perspectives. After Church had studied it for a while, he decided it was a representation of how the Blue Fire ran through reality.