The man looked intently at Skade before continuing. [There’s another rumour, Skade, concerning something called Exordium. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that that was the codeword Galiana gave to her final series of experiments on Mars — the ones she swore she would never repeat.]
Remontoire might have been imagining it, but he thought he saw a visible change of colour sweep through Skade’s crest at the mere mention of the word. What about Exordium? he asked.
The man turned to Remontoire. [I don’t know, but I can guess. Galiana never wanted the experiments to be repeated; the results were useful, incredibly useful, but they were also too disturbing. But once Galiana was away from the Mother Nest, off on her interstellar expedition, what was to stop the Inner Sanctum from re-running Exordium? She need never have found out about it.]
The codeword meant something to Remontoire; he had definitely heard it before. But if it referred to experiments Galiana had performed on Mars, it was something that had happened more than four hundred years earlier. It would require delicate mnemonic archaeology to dig through the strata of overlying memories, especially if the subject itself was shrouded in secrecy.
It seemed simpler to ask. What was Exordium?
‘I’ll tell you what it was, Remontoire.’
The sound of a real human voice cutting through the chamber’s silence was as shocking as a scream.
Remontoire followed the sound until he saw the speaker, sitting on her own near one of the entry points. It was Felka; she must have arrived since the session had commenced.
Skade slammed a furious thought into his head. [Who invited her?]
‘I did,’ Remontoire said mildly, speaking aloud for Felka’s benefit, ‘on the assumption that you didn’t seem very likely to, and since the matter under discussion happened to be Clavain… it seemed the right thing to do.’
‘It was,’ Felka said. Remontoire saw something move in her hand and realised that she had brought a mouse into the privy chamber. ‘Wasn’t it, Skade?’
Skade sneered. [There’s no need to talk aloud. It takes too long. She can hear our thoughts as well as any of us.]
‘But if you were to hear my thoughts, you’d probably all go mad,’ Felka said. The way she smiled was all the more chilling, Remontoire thought, because what she said was probably true. ‘So rather than risk that…’ She looked down, the mouse chasing its tail around her hand.
[You have no right to be here.]
‘But I do, Skade. If I wasn’t recognised as a Closed Council member, the privy chamber wouldn’t have admitted me. And if I wasn’t a Closed Council member, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about Exordium, would I?’
The man who had first mentioned the codeword spoke aloud, his voice high and trembling. ‘So my guess was correct, was it, Skade?’
[Ignore anything she says. She knows nothing about the programme.]
‘Then I can say what I like, can’t I, and none of it will matter. Exordium was an experiment, Remontoire, an attempt to achieve unification between consciousness and quantum superposition. It happened on Mars; you can verify that much for yourself. But Galiana got far more than she bargained for. She curtailed the experiments, frightened at what she had invoked. And that should have been the end of it.’ Felka looked directly at Skade, tauntingly. ‘But it wasn’t, was it? The experiments were begun again, about a century ago. It was an Exordium message that made us stop making ships.’
‘A message?’ Remontoire said, perplexed.
‘From the future,’ Felka said, as if this should have been obvious from the start.
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m perfectly serious, Remontoire. I should know — I took part in one of the experiments.’
Skade’s thoughts scythed across the room. [We’re here to discuss Clavain, not this.]
Felka continued to speak calmly. She was, Remontoire thought, the only one in the room who was unfazed by Skade, including himself. Felka’s head already held worse horrors than Skade could imagine. ‘But we can’t discuss one without discussing the other, Skade. The experiments have continued, haven’t they? And they have something to do with what’s happening now. The Inner Sanctum’s learned something, and they’d rather the rest of us didn’t know anything about it.’
Skade clenched her jaw again. [The Inner Sanctum has identified a coming crisis.]
‘What kind of crisis?’ asked Felka.
[A bad one.]
Felka nodded sagely and pushed a strand of lank black hair from her eyes. ‘And Clavain’s role in all this — where does he come in?’
Skade’s pain was almost tangible. Her thoughts arrived in clipped packets, as if, between her utterances, she was waiting for a silent speaker to offer her guidance. [We need Clavain to help us. The crisis can be… lessened… with Clavain’s assistance.]
‘What kind of assistance did you have in mind, exactly?’ Felka persisted.
A tiny vein twitched in Skade’s brow. Jarring colour waves chased each other along her crest, like the patterns in a dragonfly’s wing. [A long time ago, we lost some objects of value. Now we know exactly where they are. We want Clavain to help us get them back.]
‘And these “objects”,’ Felka said. ‘They wouldn’t by any chance be weapons, would they?’
The Inquisitor said farewell to the driver who had brought her to Solnhofen. She had slept for five or six hours clean through on the drive, offering the driver ample opportunity to rifle her belongings or strand her in the middle of nowhere. But everything was intact, including her gun. The driver had even left her with the newspaper clipping, the one about Thorn.
Solnhofen itself was every bit as miserable and squalid as she had suspected it would be. She only had to wander around the centre for a few minutes before she found what passed for the settlement’s heart: an apron of ground surrounded by two slovenly-looking hostels, a couple of drab administrative structures and a motley assortment of drinking establishments. Looming beyond the centre were the hulking repair sheds that were Solnhofen’s reason for existence. Far to the north, vast terraforming machines worked to speed the conversion of Resurgam’s atmosphere into a fully human-breathable form. These atmospheric refineries had functioned perfectly for a few decades, but now they were becoming old and unreliable. Keeping them working was a major drain on the planet’s centrally managed economy. Communities like Solnhofen made a precarious living from servicing and crewing the terraforming rigs, but the work was hard and unforgiving, and required — demanded — a certain breed of worker.
The Inquisitor remembered that as she stepped into the hostel. She had expected it to be quiet at this time of day, but when she shoved open the door it was like stepping into a party that had only just passed its peak. There was music and shouting and laughter, hard, boisterous laughter that reminded her of barracks rooms on Sky’s Edge. A few drinkers had already passed out, huddled over their mugs like pupils guarding homework. The air was clotted with chemicals that made her eyes sting. She clenched her teeth against the noise and swore softly. Trust Four to pick a dump like this. She remembered the first time they had met. It had been in a bar in a carousel orbiting Yellowstone, probably the worst dive she had ever been in. Four had many talents, but selecting salubrious meeting places was not one of them.
Fortunately no one had noticed the Inquisitor’s arrival. She pushed past some semi-comatose bodies to what passed for the bar: a hole punched through one wall, ragged brickwork at the edges. A surly woman pushed drinks through like prison rations, snatching back money and spent glasses with almost indecent haste.