Lower now, the light bright and the air still burning his lungs, at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot crevasse whose ice walls were made of countless strands of what Daeman began more and more to think were some sort of living tissue, he saw a second crevasse-tunnel crossing his on the diagonal and he recognized it at once. Avenue Daumesnil. He knew this area well—he’d played here as a child, seduced girls here as a teenager, taken his mother for countless walks here as an adult.
If he followed the other crevasse to his right, the southeast, it would take him away from the crater and the city center, out toward the forest called Bois de Vincennes. But he didn’t want to head away from the center of Paris Crater—he’d seen the Hole appear to the northwest, very near his mother’s domi tower right on the Crater. To go that way, he would have to head up the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse toward the bamboo-three marketplace called the Oprabastel just opposite an ancient heap of overgrown rubble called the Bastille. He’d had rock fights there as a boy, with the few children from his domi tower flinging rocks and clods at those boys from the west, kids that his neighborhood group had always insultingly called the “radioactive bastillites” for some reason known to no one, adults or children.
The blue ice seemed thicker and more ominous in the direction of the Oprabastel, but Daeman realized he had no choice. He’d caught that first glimpse of Setebos in that direction, back toward the Crater.
The trench he was in angled around to the east again before intersecting Avenue Daumesnil. This larger crevasse was too deep to enter directly, so Daeman crossed it on an ice bridge. Looking down, he saw the bamboo-three and everplas-sealed ruins of the street and avenue he’d known his whole life, but the trench continued lower than that, revealing layers of ruins of some old steel-and-masonry city beneath the Paris Crater he was familiar with. He had the horrible image of the gray-and-pink brain Setebos scrabbling in the earth with its many hands, uncovering the bones of the city under the city. What was he hunting for? And then an even more horrible thought occurred to Daeman. What could he be burying?
The ropes and stalagmites of blue on regular street level were too thick to allow him to proceed northwest up Avenue Daumesnil itself, but, amazingly, there was a stretch of green pathway down there paralleling the avenue. He rigged a bent quarrel driven into the blue ice to secure his thirty-foot descent, looping a rope over it and lowering himself carefully, knowing that a broken leg now would probably mean his death. There was an icy overhang near the bottom and he had to swing free, then slide down the rope the last ten feet to the absurdly grassy floor of the trench.
There were a dozen voynix waiting in the darkness under the overhang.
Daeman was so surprised that he let go of the rope at the same instant he started fumbling for the crossbow strung across his back. He fell four feet, lost his footing on the grass, and tumbled backward without extricating the heavy crossbow. He half lay there on his back, hands empty, looking at the raised steel arms, sharp killing blades, and emerging carapaces of the mob of voynix frozen in the act of leaping at him from only eight feet away.
Frozen. All twelve of the creatures were mostly entombed in the blue ice with only bits of blade or arm or leg or shell protruding. None of their peds were fully on the ground and it was obvious that the ice had caught them in the act of running and leaping. Voynix were fast on their peds. How could this blue ice form quickly enough to catch them thus?
Daeman had no answer, only thankfulness that it had. He got to his feet, felt his back and ribs ache where he’d fallen on the crossbow and lumpy pack, and pulled the rope down. He could have left it fixed in place—he had more than a hundred feet more and he might need to ascend that ice cliff quickly on his return rather than laboriously chipping footholds with his ice hammers—but he might need all the rope before this day was done. Heading northwest now, parallel to the Avenue Daumesnil on what he still thought of as the Promenade Plantee—the familiar bamboo-three elevated walkway frozen in ice sixty feet above him now—Daeman freed the crossbow, made sure again that the heavy weapon was cocked and ready, and followed the impossible path of green grass toward the heart of Paris Crater.
Promenade Plantee, everyone in Paris Crater had called the walkway above. It was one of those rare old names, in words that seemed to predate the world’s common language, and no one Daeman knew had ever asked its meaning. He wondered now as he followed the green strip down the darkening and ever-deeper canyon through blue ice and excavated ruins if the walkway he’d known had been named after this older, forgotten path, buried until Setebos had seen fit to dig it up with his many hands.
Daeman advanced cautiously and with a growing sense of anxiety. He didn’t know what he thought he’d find here—his main goal had been to get one clear look at Setebos, if Setebos it was, and perhaps be able to report to everyone at Ardis Hall on just what this blue-ice city was like after its invasion—but as he saw other things frozen in the organic blue ice on either side of the Promenade, half a dozen more voynix, stacks of human skulls, more ruins that had not seen the light of day for centuries, his palms grew more moist even as his mouth dried up.
He wished he’d taken one of the flechette pistols or rifles that Petyr had brought back from the Bridge. Daeman clearly remembered Savi firing a full cloud of flechettes into Caliban’s chest at almost zero range up there in the subterranean grotto on Prospero’s orbital isle. It hadn’t killed the monster; Caliban had howled and bled, but had also lifted Savi in his long arms and bitten through her neck with one horribly audible snap of his jaws. Then the creature had hauled her body away, diving into the swamp and carrying her corpse off through the system of sewage pipes and flooded tunnels.
I came to find Caliban, thought Daeman, clearly acknowledging that as fact for the first time. Caliban was his enemy—his nemesis. Daeman had learned the word only the previous month and knew at once that in his life, the term “nemesis” applied only to Caliban. And—after his trying to kill the creature up there on Prospero’s isle, then leaving it to die there after maneuvering the orbiting black-hole machine into the island—it was all too possible that Caliban considered Daeman his nemesis.
Daeman hoped so, though the thought of fighting the creature again made his mouth drier and his palms wetter. But then Daeman would remember holding his mother’s skull, remember the taunting insult of that pyramid of skulls—an insult that could have come only from Caliban, Sycorax’s child, Prospero’s creature, worshiper of that god of arbitrary violence, Setebos—and he kept on walking, his crossbow with its two inadequate but sharpened and barbed bolts cocked and ready.
He was in the deep shadow of another larger overhang when he saw the forms emerging from the blue ice. These weren’t frozen voynix; they appeared to be humans, giants, heavily muscled and contorted, with blue-gray flesh and vacant, upturned eyes.
Daeman had his crossbow leveled and was frozen in his tracks for thirty seconds before he understood what he was looking at.
Statues. He’d first learned the real meaning of the word from Hannah—stone or some other material shaped into human form. There had been no “statues” in the Paris Crater and faxworld of his youth and the first time he’d actually seen one had been at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu just ten months or so before. That place, or at least the green habitation globes clinging to it like ivy, was a museum more than a bridge, but it had taken Hannah—always interested in making and pouring molten metal into shapes—to explain that the human forms they were looking at there were “statues,” works of art—also an alien idea. Evidently these statues had no other reason for existence than to please the eye. Daeman had to smile even now at one memory from the Bridge—they’d thought that Odysseus, Noman now, had been one of those museum statues until he’d moved and spoken to them.