Diema said nothing.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Kennedy exploded. ‘Just nod!’
Slowly, with a prickle of superstitious dread, Diema forced her head to move — down once, then up again.
‘So I’m guessing he was well within the radius of your border patrols. There’s no way you wouldn’t keep a watch on your own front doorstep. He’s way too close, and way too visible.’
‘Perhaps it pleased his ego to play with us.’
Kennedy drummed the steering wheel with the heels of her thumbs, thinking. ‘Maybe. But is that what he was like, as a Messenger? Did he grandstand or did he get the job done?’
‘Mostly,’ Diema admitted, ‘he got the job done.’
‘Then I think we’re missing something. We’ve got to be. Otherwise—’
Diema’s phone rang, and although the rhaka seemed disposed to carry on talking, she silenced her with a raised hand. That tone meant Kuutma. And if Kuutma was calling her, he had something important to tell her or to ask her.
Rush had got sick of the final prophecy. They’d worried it to pieces and there didn’t seem to be any new insights to be gleaned. So he’d flicked back to the first page and started from scratch.
He was struck all over again by how ludicrous it was to read this crap as though it contained sacred truths. Toller wasn’t just barking, he was barking and boring — so hung up on the minutiae of his own time that he couldn’t talk about the eternal without making six or seven veiled references to the strictly contemporary.
Which, when you thought about it, was strange for one of the Judas People. Getting so caught up in local politics — Adamite politics — seemed like worrying about the weather forecast for the moon.
Something was nagging at Rush. It had been nagging at him when he read the scholarly accounts of Toller and the other Fifth Monarchists on the plane, and when he’d talked it over with Diema. It was the blunt end of an idea, but it wasn’t making enough of an impression to stick. It was just that general sense of wrongness or incongruity, combined with something really tiny and specific that he’d already noticed and wondered about, a discrepancy between the written accounts and the observable here and now.
A second later, as he got into the meat of the prophecies, it fell out of his head altogether, because something else struck him much more forcefully. It was sitting in the book’s opening paragraphs, and the only reason he hadn’t seen it before was because he’d been focusing on the actual text, rather than on the annotations that Kennedy had written in the margins or over the words. That French guy’s sleeve notes.
And so I stand upon the Muses’ Mountain, asking Inspiration of all, though my true Muse be Godde the Higheste. And here He doth deliver, through me unworthy, His final Judgment.
That was Toller. And over the words ‘the Muses’ Mountain’ Kennedy had written in neat black biro a single word.
Parnassus.
The word produced the image: the picture of a mountain on the sign they’d passed as they walked in here. Parnassus Iron and Steel.
Rush got to his feet. The nape of his neck prickled like someone was standing right behind him and breathing on it. Would Ber Lusim — or his Obi Wan, Avra Shekolni — have missed that reference? They’d taken everything else in the book literally as gospel. So it made sense that they would have felt the book had directed them to this place.
Which was empty. There was nobody here, and nowhere for them to be hiding. Kuutma’s Messengers had searched the building and found nothing.
But Rush felt that the silence around him had changed, somehow, and he didn’t feel like sitting down again. It was only a conditional silence, in any case. Just like anywhere in New York, the air carried the roar of traffic from the middle distance. This emptiness was in the heart of a great city. Rush was standing at the still centre of the turning world.
He stepped out of the sunlight and did a slow circuit of the room, with the manuscript rolled up in his hand. He moved quietly, because the echoes of his footsteps sounded disconcertingly loud. Whenever he stopped, he listened. But nothing was moving any closer than the traffic.
When he moved out of the main factory floor into the smaller rooms around it, Rush admitted to himself that this had become a search. He still didn’t know what it was he was looking for, but the uneasiness was eating at him and he wanted to be absolutely sure there was nothing there.
He found himself at last in front of the double doors that led through to the grease pit. He’d seen Kennedy and Tillman looking it over earlier, so he was pretty certain that there wouldn’t be anything to see here, but he went in anyway.
The pit was foul. Probably it had been left that way by the previous owners. The walls and floor of it were thick with industrial residue that might have been oil, tar, paint or most likely all of the above. There were puddles of water with an unhealthy, nacreous sheen to them, and a stink of baking bitumen hung over everything like the breath of a motorway on an August morning.
He looked up at the ceiling. There weren’t any obvious holes in it, but that didn’t mean anything. Water finds its level. The rain could have come in somewhere else and ended up in the pit because the pit was the lowest point.
There was no way of getting down there without ruining your clothes. If you sat down and lowered yourself in, the seat of your pants would get covered in the oily muck. If you jumped, you’d raise a splash.
He walked around the pit instead, feeling like an idiot and yet relieved at the same time that there was nothing to see.
Except that there was. Halfway around the rim, he walked into a shaft of sunlight that came in through a broken skylight high above him and hit one of the pit’s walls. Part of the wall must have been raised a little proud of the area around it, because there was a shadow — perfectly square, and about five feet on a side. It looked like there was a trapdoor in the wall, except that it was only the outline of a door. The colours and textures of that area of wall were exactly the same as the colours and textures to either side of them. It had to be a trick of the light, but it was a disconcerting one, and once he’d seen it he couldn’t trick himself into not seeing it again.
He stood irresolute at the edge of the pit. This was ridiculous. If there was something here, someone else — someone who knew what they were doing — would have found it by now.
The sun went behind a cloud, the ray of light disappeared and the imaginary door went with it. Rush turned away. But at the last moment before he walked out of the room, he remembered Diema’s words back at Dovecote.
Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for.
Bugger it.
Rush launched himself into the pit with an ungainly jump, landing heavily and sending up, just as he’d feared, a shower of variegated filth. He almost lost his footing, but saved himself by holding onto the wall.
One baby step at a time, scared both of what he was treading in and of what he was breathing, he crossed the pit to the wall where the tell-tale shadow had been. There was nothing there. No sign of a hinge or a handle, or of a physical break in the wall where a door might begin or end. But then, the oily residue that had been sluiced over everything made a pretty effective camouflage.
It was pretty fresh, too, and splashed a little thicker, here, than elsewhere on the wall.
Suppressing a shudder, Rush reached out and pushed his fingers into the thick muck. He ran them from right to left and back again, feeling for a break point, a crack in the structure. There was nothing like that.
But there was something else. Around about his chest height, there was a raised spot, rounded and about an inch and a half in diameter. A boss or the head of a rivet, maybe. Rush scooped the oily mess away from it and found a circular plate made of some dull, weathered metal.