Wahir leaned forward, rapt with attention. ‘Master? A rocket to the Moon?’
‘It happened before. It’s just an engineering problem. We just didn’t know how far you’d fallen or how far you’d climbed back up, but we decided that you should guide yourselves.’
Ariadne spoke: ‘What Benzamir isn’t saying is that he argued for making contact. He wanted to come back – come home, as he saw it – to breathe the air and swim in the sea. He was broken-hearted when the decision went against him, but he accepted it. Unlike some others. They persuaded a ship to come here. I chased after them. I – I could have stopped them, but they got away. The fault was mine.’
Benzamir gave a tight-lipped smile and continued: ‘It took a long time for everyone to decide that I could follow them. There was no guarantee that this was where they’d end up, but I knew it had to be. All I had to do was find them. But in the end I was too slow. I made a great number of mistakes. I underestimated them and what they’d try to do to take over. I never expected them to kill so many.’
His voice died. He reached for his beer and knocked the glass over. A wave of froth, buoyed up on a golden brown tide, raced across the tabletop, breaking on bowls and plates.
‘Crap,’ he said softly. Alessandra started to use the hem of her dress to soak up the flood, until Benzamir shook his head. ‘Leave it.’
He set his glass upright and poured more beer in.
‘My mission was supposed to finish with taking the rebels back to face those they’ve betrayed. It’s clear that they won’t come quietly. But neither can I just leave them and get help. While I’m away, they could do anything. They’ve shown themselves more than capable of wild cruelty. So I have to stop them, and stop them now.’
‘What do you want us to do?’ asked Alessandra.
‘I don’t want you to do anything. They have worse things than unmakers, and none of you can stand up to them. You will all stay here. I will do what needs to be done. Then I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’
‘What if they kill you too?’ she pressed.
‘Then Ariadne will take you back before she goes to report to those who sent me. I won’t have any of you come to harm.’
Va stirred uneasily. He looked at his scarred hands before momentarily balling them into fists. ‘Where do the User books come in? Why did your people steal them from us?’
‘To tell you the truth, I still don’t know. Every ship holds records of everything we know. They shouldn’t need your books.’
‘So my brothers died for nothing?’ he said. A vein on his shaved head started to pulse.
Benzamir glanced up at the ceiling, to where he always imagined Ariadne to be. He hoped she was right when she said the monk didn’t present a threat to them.
‘I still have a vow I need to honour. The books must be returned to the patriarch.’
‘I’ll get you the books,’ said Benzamir. It was simple enough to say.
‘Va,’ said Elenya, ‘when are you going to admit to yourself that you never made any sort of vow to the patriarch? You sneaked off on your own. This vow is a figment of your imagination, and why should Benzamir help you in any way?’
‘Because he is an honourable man?’
Elenya suddenly smashed the flat of her hand down on the table. Plates and beakers jumped in the air. ‘Damn you, Va! You told me you were going to die. It never happened. Now you have the mighty Benzamir doing your bidding, it never will.’
‘I didn’t promise you anything. I said I might die. I said you could watch.’ Va tried to stay calm, but he screamed out: ‘What I wanted was for you to leave me alone!’
She punched him straight in the nose with her fist. Said was on his feet, climbing over the table, throwing himself between them. Elenya got in two more strikes, one to Va’s stomach, the other into Said’s cheek. Va made no attempt to defend himself. He seemed to welcome the blows. Alessandra joined Said and together they pushed her away.
‘You ungrateful bastard. You wouldn’t have got on that first ship if it hadn’t been for me. You would have got nowhere. Who ended up sweet-talking everyone, who paid for everything, who got us this far? I did everything, and you still don’t want me.’
She tried to get to Va, who sat with blood dripping down his chin. Finally the Arab managed to push her none too gently back into a bulkhead and pin her there. Alessandra stopped her from clawing at his eyes by grabbing her wrists.
Elenya raged for a few moments more, then seemed to fold in on herself. Said risked letting her go, and put his hand to his face. Alessandra was more reluctant to release her grip, but in the end she felt she ought.
Elenya would not meet anyone’s gaze. She found her way to the door, still looking down. It slid aside and closed after she had gone.
Benzamir put his head down on the table, feeling the damp coolness in his forehead.
‘Master?’ asked Wahir. ‘We will not desert you.’
‘You promised you’d leave the magicians to me. I’m going to hold you to that.’
‘I’m not a coward,’ Wahir said. ‘I want to fight with you.’
Said rested his knuckles on the table. ‘I’ll stand with you too. It’s my duty, my right. I will not step back when something so – so important needs completing.’
‘And me. Everything you’ve said just makes it more vital that you have our help.’ Alessandra wiped a line of blood from her arm. ‘I made you no promise, and you are not the only one on this ship.’
Benzamir got up abruptly and swept everything in front of him onto the floor. It fell, it bounced, it broke, it spilled. Into the silence he hissed: ‘I will not allow it! How could I live on knowing that you were dead?’ He limped to the exit. ‘Ari? Call them. Call the rebels. If they answer, we can talk. If they don’t, then I’ll have to dig them out from whichever stone they’re hiding under.’
He left, and he had never felt so wretched in his life.
CHAPTER 39
HE SAT BROODING in the pilot’s chair, waiting for something to happen and going over everything he had said.
‘Where are they?’
‘They don’t answer.’
‘Is it likely that they’ve got the narrowcast?’
‘Yes.’
Benzamir tutted. ‘What of the unmaker’s transponder?’
‘The information was degraded. I couldn’t get anything useful off it.’
‘I thought we could use it. I even took time to get it.’
‘I know,’ said Ariadne. ‘The initial co-ordinates it gave were just wrong. I have to distrust all the tracking data stored thereafter.’
‘Show me.’
‘But—’
‘Humour me, Ari.’
She showed him the metric co-ordinates, based on the usual Tribal conventions. She offered him the image that those co-ordinates represented. There was nothing there but black rock and white ice.
He studied the scene. ‘Why the hell would they land in Antarctica?’
‘I can only surmise that they didn’t, and we have to search the rest of the world.’ Ariadne took away the picture and carried on hunting with her pattern-recognition software for something that resembled a spaceship on the ground.
‘Bring it back up again.’ Benzamir sat forward, then climbed out of his seat and stood on the edge of the display. ‘Zoom in.’
‘You don’t mind if I continue the proper work, do you?’
‘No, no,’ he said absently. ‘Carry on.’
He stared at the holographic image for a long time, examining it from every angle. It was spring in the northern hemisphere. Ice that had formed over the winter was beginning to melt, leaving the continent as a ragged, lake-pocked desert. The only mark on his map was for New Swabia, and the area had been called that for a thousand years.
He looked and looked again, then ducked under the floating picture to study its underneath.