It shouldn’t have been possible. The speaker was only supposed to work when Quaiche turned it on. ‘You shouldn’t be able to do this.’
The voice — it was like something produced by a cheaply made woodwind instrument — seemed to mock him. ‘This is only the start, Quaiche. We will always find a way out of any cage you build around us.’
‘Then I should destroy you now.’
‘You can’t. And you shouldn’t. We are not your enemy, Quaiche. You should know that by now. We’re here to help you. We just need a little help in return.’
‘You’re demons. I don’t negotiate with demons.’
‘Not demons, Quaiche. Just shadows, as you are to us.’
They had had this conversation before. Many times before. ‘I can think of ways to kill you,’ he said.
‘Then why not try?’
The answer popped unbidden into his head, as it always did: because they might be useful to him. Because he could control them for now. Because he feared what would happen if he killed them as much as if he let them live. Because he knew there were more where this lot came from.
Many more.
‘You know why,’ he said, sounding pitiable even to himself.
‘The vanishings are increasing in frequency,’ the scrimshaw suit said. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘It means that these are the end times,’ Quaiche said. ‘No more than that.’
‘It means that the concealment is failing. It means that the machinery will soon be evident to all.’
‘There is no machinery.’
‘You saw it for yourself. Others will see it, too, when the vanishings reach their culmination. And sooner or later someone will want to do business with us. Why wait until then, Quaiche? Why not deal with us now, on the best possible terms?’
‘I don’t deal with demons.’
‘We are only shadows,’ the suit said again. ‘Just shadows, whispering across the gap between us. Now help us to cross it, so that we can help you.’
‘I won’t. Not ever.’
‘There is a crisis coming, Quaiche. The evidence suggests it has already begun. You’ve seen the refugees. You know the stories they tell, of machines emerging from the darkness, from the cold. Engines of extinction. We’ve seen it happen before, in this very system. You won’t beat them without our help.’
‘God will intervene,’ Quaiche said. His eyes were watering, blurring the image of Haldora.
‘There is no God,’ the suit said. ‘There is only us, and we don’t have limitless patience.’
But then it fell silent. It had said its piece for the day, leaving Quaiche alone with his tears.
‘God’s Fire,’ he whispered.
When Vasko returned to the heart of the iceberg there was no more music. With the light bulk of the incubator hanging from one hand he made his way through the tangle of icy spars, following the now well-cleared route. The ice tinkled and creaked around him, the incubator knocking its way through obstructions. Scorpio had told him not to rush back to the ruined ship, but he knew that the pig had only been trying to spare him any unnecessary distress. He had made the call to Blood, told Urton what was happening and then returned with the incubator as fast as he dared.
But as he neared the gash in the ship’s side he knew it was over. There was a pillar of light ramming down from the ceiling of ice, where someone had blasted a metre-wide hole through to the sky. Scorpio stood in the circle of light at the foot of the pillar, his features sharply lit from above as if in some chiaroscuro painting. He was looking down, the thick mound of his head sunk into the wide yoke of his shoulders. His eyes were closed, the fine-haired skin of his forehead rendered blue-grey in the light’s dusty column. There was something in his hand, speckling red on to the ice.
‘Sir?’ Vasko asked.
‘It’s done,’ Scorpio said.
‘I’m sorry you had to do that, sir.’
The eyes — pale, bloodshot pink — locked on to him. Scorpio’s hands were shaking. When he spoke his perfectly human voice sounded thin, like the voice of a ghost losing its grip on a haunt.
‘Not as sorry as I am.’
‘I would have done it, if you’d asked me.’
‘I wouldn’t have asked you,’ Scorpio said. ‘I wouldn’t have asked it of anyone.’
Vasko fumbled for something else to say. He wanted to ask Scorpio how merciful Skade had allowed him to be. Vasko thought that he could not have been away for more than ten minutes. Did that mean, in some abhorrent algebra of hurting, that Skade had given Clavain some respite from the prolonged death she had promised? Was there any sense in which she could have been said to have shown mercy, if only by shaving scant minutes from what must still have been unutterable agony?
He couldn’t guess. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
‘I brought the incubator, sir. Is the child…’
‘Aura’s all right. She’s with her mother.’
‘And Skade, sir?’
‘Skade is dead,’ Scorpio told him. ‘She knew she couldn’t survive much longer.’ The pig’s voice sounded dull, void of feeling. ‘She’d diverted her own bodily resources to keep Aura alive. There wasn’t much of Skade left when we opened her up.’
‘She wanted Aura to live,’ Vasko said.
‘Or she wanted a bargaining position when we came with Clavain.’
Vasko held up the light plastic box, as if Scorpio had not heard him properly. ‘The incubator, sir. We should get the child into it immediately.’
Scorpio leaned down, wiping the blade of the scalpel against the ice. The red smear bled away into the frost in patterns that made Vasko think of irises. He thought Scorpio might discard the knife, but instead the pig slipped it into a pocket.
‘Jaccottet and Khouri will put the child into the incubator,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, you and I can take care of Clavain.’
‘Sir?’
‘His last wish. He wanted to be buried at sea.’ Scorpio turned to step back into the ship. ‘I think we owe him that much.’
‘Was that the last thing he said, sir?’
Scorpio turned slowly back to face Vasko and studied him for a long moment, his head tilted. Vasko felt as if he was being measured again, just as the old man had measured him, and the experience induced exactly the same feeling of inadequacy. What did these monsters from the past want of him? What did they expect him to live up to?
‘It wasn’t the last thing he said, no,’ Scorpio replied quietly.
They laid the body bag down on the fringe of ice surrounding the iceberg. Vasko had to keep reminding himself that it was still only the middle of the morning: the sky was a wet grey, clouds jammed in from horizon to horizon, like a ceiling scraping the top of the iceberg. A few kilometres out to sea was a distinct and threatening smudge of wet ink in that same ceiling, like a black eye. It seemed to move against the wind, as if looking for something below. On the horizon, lightning scribed chrome lines against the tarnished silver of the sky. Distant rain came down in slow sooty streams.
Around the iceberg, the sea roiled in sullen grey shapes. In all directions, the surface of the water was being constantly interrupted by slick, moving phantasms of an oily turquoise-green colour. Vasko had seen them earlier: they broke the surface, lingered and then vanished almost before the eye had time to focus. The impression was that a vast shoal of vague whale-like things was in the process of surrounding the iceberg. The phantasms bellied and gyred between waves and spume. They merged and split, orbited and submerged, and their precise shape and size was impossible to determine. But they were not animals. They were vast aggregations of micro-organisms acting in a coherent manner.