Holly can’t yet speak to the man who steps out of thin air.
“Ms. Sykes will join our demolition party,” I tell D’Arnoq. “Unalaq will channel her psychosoteric voltage into the cloaking operation.”
Elijah D’Arnoq looks dubious, and I wonder if this might jeopardize the Second Mission. “I can’t guarantee her safety.”
“I thought you’d covered all angles?” says Arkady.
“War has no guarantees. You all know that.”
“And Mr. Dastaani here,” I indicate Sadaqat, “will also be joining us. I presume you are familiar with our warden at 119A?”
“Everybody spies,” says D’Arnoq. “What’s Mr. Dastaani’s role?”
“To park his ass,” says Фshima, “halfway up the Way of Stones and unleash a force-ten psychoferno if anyone wanders up after us. Temporal, Atemporal—anyone in the conduit will be ash.”
D’Arnoq frowns. “Is a psychoferno a Deep Stream invocation?”
“No,” says Фshima. “It’s my word for what happens if the bomb made of N9D—the famous Israeli-made nano-explosive—currently in Mr. Dastaani’s backpack goes off inside the Way of Stones.”
“It’s insurance against an attack from the rear,” I say, “while we’re taking apart the Chapel.”
“A smart precaution,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, looking impressed. “Though I pray to God you don’t have to use it.”
“How do you feel?” Фshima asks D’Arnoq. “Defection’s a big step.”
The 128-year-old Carnivore regards the eight-centuries-old Фshima with defiance. “I’ve been party to decades of indiscriminate evil, Mr. Фshima. But today I’ll also be party to stopping it.”
“But without your Black Wine,” Фshima reminds him, “you’ll age, you’ll fade away, you’ll die in a care home.”
“Not if Pfenninger or Constantin stop us before we’ve smashed the Chapel of the Dusk, I won’t. And so. With no further ado?”
ONE BY ONE, we slip through the dark Aperture onto the round floor of rock ten paces across. The unflickering, paper-white Candle of the Dial stands as tall as a child. I’d forgotten the dual claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the smell of locked spaces, and the thin air. Residual color and light from the gallery filters in through the Aperture, held open like a drape by D’Arnoq now for Holly, now for Sadaqat, with his explosive backpack. Sadaqat’s face is a study of nervous awe, while Фshima, the last to enter, is a study of sulky nonchalance. “This isn’t the Chapel, is it?” Holly mutters. “And why’s my voice so quiet?”
“This is the Dial of the Way of Stones,” I reply. “The first of the many steps that climb up to the Chapel. The edges of the Dial absorb light and sound, so raise your voice a little to compensate.”
“There’s no color,” observes Holly. “Or is it me?”
“The Candle’s monochrome,” I answer. “It’s been burning for eight centuries.” Behind us, Elijah D’Arnoq is sealing the Aperture. I catch a brief glimpse of Bronzino’s Venus, lightly holding her golden apple, before our way back is gone. No dungeon was ever so secure. Only Esther or a follower of the Shaded Way can unseal the Aperture and get us home. I suffer a jabbing flashback to my last time on the Dial, incorporeally, my and Esther’s souls unraveling, Joseph Rhоmes hard on her heels and gaining. Esther, nestled and hidden in Фshima’s head, is no doubt remembering too.
“There are letters cut into the stone,” Holly remarks.
“The Cathar alphabet,” I tell her. “No one can read it now, not even heresiologists. The alphabet is descended from Oc, a language older even than Basque.”
“Pfenninger told me,” says D’Arnoq, “the letters are a prayer to God, requesting His help to rebuild Jacob’s Ladder. That’s what the Blind Cathar believed he was building, apparently. Don’t touch the walls. Whatever it’s made of, it and atomic matter”—he produces a coin from his pocket—“do not get on.” He tosses the coin out of the Dial’s perimeter. It vanishes in a blink of phosphorescence. “Don’t lose your footing on the Way of Stones.”
“Which is where?” asks Фshima.
“It’s cloaked,” D’Arnoq shuts his eyes and opens his chakra-eye, “and moving, to keep out the riffraff. One moment.” He takes short, slow steps to the edge of the Dial, symboling in the staccato manner of the Shaded Way and mumbling an Act of Reveal. Keeping his back to the Candle, he shuffles sideways around the perimeter. “Got it.” Off the edge of the Dial and about one foot higher, a stone slab appears, as long and wide as a table. A second slab leads up from the first, and a third, and a fourth, higher into the blackness.
“Marinus,” Holly asks in my ear, “is this technology? Or …”
I know the missing word. “If you’d cured Henry the Seventh’s TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour’s access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you’re not yet used to.”
“ Ifthe professor of semantics wouldn’t object,” says Фshima, “perhaps she’d finish her seminar later?”
ELIJAH D’ARNOQ GOES first, I follow, then Holly, Arkady, Unalaq, and Sadaqat, with ten kilos of N9D in his bag, and last Фshima as our rear guard. On the fifth or sixth stone I look back over my companions’ heads, but the Dial is already out of view. Even the Way of Stones’ irregularity is irregular. There are stretches where the steps twist upward, sharp and steep, a stairway in a spire. There are stretches where long slabs of stone form a gently climbing road. There are even places where the climber must jump across from slab to slab, like stepping stones in a river. Better to ignore thoughts of slipping. Soon I work up a sweat. Visibility is poor, akin to climbing a narrow mountain track at night, in grainy fog. The stones glow with a pale light, like that of the Candle of the Dial, but only as we approach, creating an illusion that the Way is building itself as we make our ascent. The darkness all around is oppressive, and seems to conjure up voices from my metalife. I hear my birth father, explaining in vernacular late Latin how to feed a dormouse to a kestrel. Now it’s Sholeetsa, an herbalist of the Duwamish tribe, scolding me for overboiling a root. Now the corvine cackle of Arie Grote, a warehouseman on Dejima. Their bodies were compost long ago, their souls passed to the Last Sea. We Horologists agreed not to subspeak, for fear of being overheard, but I wonder if the others also hear voices from their past lives. I don’t ask in case I distract them from where they’re putting their feet. Who falls off the Way of Stones falls into nothing.
· · ·
WE ARRIVE AT the only triangular slab on the whole climb. It is concave in its center and large enough for all six of us to stand on. “Welcome to the Halfway Station,” says D’Arnoq, and I recall Immaculйe Constantin naming it in the same way to Jacko on the First Mission. “I think we’ve found our lookout point for you, Sadaqat,” says Фshima. “The line of sight looking down is as good it gets. Lie in this hollow, here in the middle, and you’ll see any visitors before they see you.” Sadaqat nods, looks at me and I nod back. “Very good, Mr. Фshima.” With due diligence, Sadaqat sits down and takes from his backpack a heavily adapted iCube and a thin metallic cylinder. He places the iCube towards the “downhill” corner of the slab.
“Is that the firebomb?” D’Arnoq asks with professional curiosity.
“It’s a Deep Stream cloak generator,” Sadaqat flips open the cuboid’s air-screen and scrolls through options, “and a soul alarm. This noise sounds”—a wild-goose signal honks repeatedly—“when it detects an unidentified soul, such as yours, Mr. D’Arnoq …” Sadaqat’s fingers sidescroll and the air-screen throbs as D’Arnoq’s brain signature is stored. “Now it will know friend from foe.”
“A wise gadget,” says D’Arnoq, “and a clever one.”
“The generator prevents a psychosoteric from using an Act of Suasion to make me deactivate the N9D.” Sadaqat unscrews the top of the metallic cylinder. “And the detector alerts me to the fact that someone has tried—and that it is time to detonate the firebomb, which, of course, is this.” Tripod legs shoot out from the lower end of the cylinder and Sadaqat stands it up. “Ten kilos of N9D have been compressed into this tube—sufficient to turn the Way of Stones into a conduit of flame at five hundred degrees Celsius. If the goose goes ‘honk,’ ” Sadaqat looks at D’Arnoq, “psychoferno.”