At that moment, the choir and the organ swelled in unison. Grelier’s hand was tight on the head of his cane. He squinted, knowing exactly what was coming.
‘Behold God’s Fire,’ Quaiche intoned.
The black window flared with wonderful light. Through each chip and facet of glass rammed a tangible shaft of colour, each shaft so intense and pure that it slammed Grelier back to a nursery world of bright shapes and colours. He felt the chemical seepage of joy into his brain, struggling to resist it even as he felt his resolve crumbling.
Before the window, Quaiche stood silhouetted on the pulpit. His arms were raised, spindly as branches. Grelier narrowed his eyes even more, trying to make out the pattern revealed in the black window. He was just beginning to tease it out when the shockwave hit, making the whole cathedral shake. Candles fluttered and died, the suspended chandeliers swaying.
The window faded to black. An afterimage remained, however: a rendering of Quaiche himself, kneeling before the iron monstrosity of the scrimshaw suit. The suit was hinged open along the once-welded seam. Quaiche’s hands were cupped before him, lathered in a cloying red mass that extended tendrils and ropes back into the cavity of the scrimshaw suit. It was as if he had reached into the suit and drawn out that sticky red mess. Quaiche’s face was turned to heaven, to the banded globe of Haldora.
But it wasn’t Haldora as Grelier had ever seen it portrayed.
The afterimage was fading. Grelier began to wonder if he would have to wait until the next blockage to see the window again, but another demolition burst followed the first, again revealing the design. Worked into the face of Haldora, conspiring to look as if it was shining through the atmospheric bands of the gas giant, was a geometric pattern. It was very complicated, like the intricate wax seal of an emperor: a three-dimensional lattice of silver beams. At the heart of the lattice, radiating beams of light, was a single human eye.
Another shockwave came through, rocking the Lady Morwenna. One final detonation followed and then the show was over. The black window was again black, its facets too opaque to be illuminated by anything other than the nuclear brilliance of God’s own Fire.
The organ and the choir subsided.
‘The Way may now be cleared,’ Quaiche said. ‘It will not be easy, but we will now be able to proceed at normal Way speeds for several days. There may even have to be more demolition charges, but the bulk of the obstacle no longer exists. For this we thank God. But the time we have lost cannot be easily recovered.’
Grelier’s hand was again tight on the cane.
‘Let the other cathedrals attempt to make up lost time,’ Quaiche said. ‘They will struggle. Yes, the Jarnsaxa Flats lie before us, and the race there will be to the swift. The Lady Morwenna is not the fastest cathedral on the Way, nor has it ever sought that worthless accolade. But what is the point of trying to make up lost ground on the Flats when the Devil’s Staircase lies just beyond it? Normally we would be trying to have time in hand at this point, pulling ahead of Haldora in preparation for the slow and difficult navigation of the Staircase. This time we do not have that luxury. We have lost critical days when we can least afford to lose them.’
He waited a moment, knowing that he had the congregation’s terrified attention. ‘But there is another way,’ Quaiche said, leaning forwards in the pulpit, almost threatening to topple out of the support couch. ‘One that will require daring, and faith. We do not have to take the Devil’s Staircase at all. There is another route across Ginnungagap Rift. You all know, of course, of what I speak.’
All around the cathedral, transmitted through its armoured fabric, Grelier heard the rattling as the external shutters were drawn up. The ordinary stained-glass windows were being reopened, light flooding through them in sequenced order. Ordinarily he would have been duly impressed, but the memory of the black window was still there, its afterimage still ghosting his vision. When you had seen nuclear fire through welding glass, all else was as pale as watercolour.
‘God gave us a bridge,’ Quaiche said. ‘I believe it is time we used it.’
Rashmika found herself drawn to the roof of the caravan again, crossing between the vehicles until she reached the tilted rack of the Observers. The identical smooth mirrors of their faces, neatly spaced and ranked, had taken on a peculiar abstract quality. They made her think of the bottoms of stacked bottles in a cellar, or the arrayed facets of one of the gamma-ray monitoring stations out near the edge of the badlands. She did not know whether she found this more or less comforting than the realisation that each was a distinct human being — or had been, at least, until their compulsion to gaze at Haldora had scoured the last stubborn trace of personality from their minds.
The caravan rocked and rolled, negotiating a stretch of road that had only recently been reclaimed from icefalls. Now and then — more often, it seemed, than a day or so before — they swerved to steer past a group of pilgrims making the journey on foot. The pilgrims looked tiny and stupid, so far below. The fortunate ones had closed-cycle vacuum suits that permitted long journeys across the surface of a planet. Some of the suits even tended to ailments, healing minor wounds or soothing arthritic joints. Certainly those were the lucky ones. The rest had to make do with suits that had never been designed for travelling more than a few kilometres unassisted. They trudged beneath the weight of bulky home-made backpacks, like peasants carrying all their possessions. Some of them had ended up with such grotesque contraptions that they had no choice but to haul their belongings and their makeshift life-support systems behind them, on skis or treads. The suits, helmets, backpacks and towed contraptions were all augmented with religious totems, often of a cumbersome nature. There were golden statues, crosses, pagodas, demons, snakes, swords, armoured knights, dragons, sea monsters, arks and a hundred other things Rashmika did not trouble herself to recognise. Everything was done by muscle power, without the succour of mechanical assistance. Even in Hela’s moderate gravity the pilgrims were bent double with the effort, every sliding footstep a study in exhaustion.
Something drew her eye, far to what she judged to be the south. She looked sharply in that direction, but caught only a fading nimbus: a blue-violet glow retreating behind the nearest line of hills.
A moment later, she saw another flash in the same direction. It was as sharp and quick as an eye-blink, but it left the same dying aura.
A third. Then nothing.
She had no definite idea of what the flashes had been, but she guessed that the direction she was looking in could not be far from the position on the Permanent Way currently occupied by the cathedrals. Perhaps she had witnessed part of the clearing operation of which the quaestor had spoken.
Now something else was happening, but this time much nearer. The rack on which the Observers were mounted was tilting, lowering itself down towards the horizontal. At an angle of about thirty degrees it halted, and with one eerily smooth movement the Observers all sat up, their shackles unlocked. The suddenness of the motion quite startled Rashmika. It was like the co-ordinated rising of an army of somnambulists.
Something brushed past her — not forcefully, but not exactly gently either. Then another something.
She was being passed by a procession of the same hooded pilgrims. She looked back and saw that there was a long line of them approaching the rack. They were emerging from a trapdoor in the roof of the caravan, one she had not noticed earlier. At the same time, the ones that had been on the rack were filing off it one row at a time, stepping down the gentle slope with synchronised movements. As they reached the roof of the caravan they made their own line, winding back around the rack and vanishing down another trapdoor. Even before the rack was fully vacated, the new batch of Observers were taking their positions: lying flat on their backs, buckling in. The entire shift change took perhaps two minutes, and was executed with such a degree of manic calm that it was difficult to see how it could have been completed any more quickly. Rashmika had the impression that blood had been spilled over every second of that shift change, for here was a hiatus during which Haldora remained unobserved. This was not quite true, she realised then, for she saw no sign of similar activity anywhere else along the caravan: the other racks were still tilted at their usual observation angles. Doubtless the shift changes were staggered so that at least one group of Observers would be sure to witness a Haldora vanishing.