‘A stunning idea,’ Belo said. ‘So simple! Nothing but bags of hot air. But look at that formation. You’ve got to give them credit.’ Belo had a flask of gin in his coat pocket, meant to comfort battlefield wounded. Perhaps he should crack it now, and spend his last moments watching the wondrous spectacle of fighting soldiers and flying machines working in tandem to snuff out his life.
But Tira was almost screaming in his face. ‘Sir! We have to get out of here. Dane has found a way.’
‘Dane?’
Stumbling towards them through the rubble came a trooper, blood-soaked, a small, squat man. Dane’s bayonet had been snapped in two, and he was dragging one leg: both weapon and man damaged, Belo thought bleakly. Grimacing with pain, Dane showed Belo what he had found: a shaft in the ground, no wider than Belo’s own shoulders, covered by a heavy stone slab. ‘I think it’s a well,’ he said.
‘Or a larder,’ Tira said. A place where you could store meat, preserved in the slower time of depth.
‘No,’ Belo said grimly. ‘See the lock on this hatch, broken now? This is a time pit. A place you would throw down thieves and murderers and forget about them.’
‘So where does it come out?’
‘Who knows? But where scarcely matters. It just needs to be deep enough, deep into slow time. A neat way to dispose of your criminals – to hurl them one-way into the future!’
Tira peered into the time pit, her face twisted with fear. ‘It’s this or nothing,’ she said.
Belo said, ‘Do you love your Effigy so much, Tira? Shall we not stand and fight?’
Dane said, ‘Dying like this won’t do any good.’ His accent was coarse; he had been a farm worker before the war. He was wheezing, exhausted. ‘I say we live to fight another day.’
‘Even if that day is far in the future?’
‘Even so,’ Dane said.
Fire-bombs bloomed ever closer. Looking around, Belo saw that the three of them were alone, beyond help.
Belo grinned. ‘Another day.’
‘Another day,’ they mumbled.
Belo lifted his legs into the shaft, raised himself over a tunnel of darkness, and fell into time.
‘I’ll have your boots.’
Belo was reluctant to wake. Even half-asleep he remembered the endless fall down the tight, filthy shaft, as if he was being swallowed into some terrible stomach. And now here was this ugly voice, dragging him back into the world.
‘I said, I’ll have your boots. I know you can hear me, soldier boy.’
Reluctantly he opened his eyes. He was dazzled by a glaring blue sky, by stars that wheeled above his head. And a face loomed over him, a man’s face, broad, dead-eyed, roughly shaven, surrounded by a mass of dirty black hair.
Belo tried to speak. His throat was bone dry. ‘What’s your name?’
‘I am Teeg. And you’re in my world now.’
‘Really?’ Belo had no idea where he was, and he wondered where Dane and Tira were – if they were still alive. All that would have to wait. First he had to deal with this grubby buffoon. ‘You want my boots?’
The face cracked in a grin, showing blackened teeth. ‘That’s right, soldier boy.’
‘Try taking them.’
The grin disappeared. Then Teeg’s face twisted, and he roared and raised two huge scarred hands. Belo aimed a kick at where he guessed the man’s crotch would be, but his legs felt feeble, heavy, as if the muscles had drained of energy. Besides, this Teeg was so massively built, a hulk of muscle and bone dressed in filthy rags, that the kick only enraged him. Teeg got his hands around Belo’s throat, and pressed him back into the dirt. Belo flailed and struggled, but he was like a child battling an adult.
He had been conscious here only a few heartbeats, yet already he had given his life away. Quite a miscalculation, he thought, weakening.
‘Get off him!’ A squat mass came hurtling from Belo’s left side and slammed into Teeg.
Belo, the pressure on his throat gone, coughed for breath. He struggled upright, clinging to consciousness. He was sitting on a dirt plain. Beside him a cliff face rose up into the blue. He was close to a ragged cave, perhaps the chute down which he had tumbled. People huddled a few paces away. Four women, five kids – no men. Scrawny, filthy, dressed in rags, they stared at him fearfully.
He couldn’t see an end to this scrubby plain. Perhaps it was another Shelf – or perhaps he had fallen all the way into the Lowland itself, he thought with a stab of despair.
And beyond the people he glimpsed something moving over the ground – not on it, over it, at about waist height, almost like a Mechanist balloon. It was a rough sphere of some silvery metal that gleamed in the blueshifted light of the sky. Was it a machine? But it was like no machine he had ever seen, no pump or elevator or cannon. And what could possibly support such a mass of metal in the air? He longed to see more, but details were blurred by heat haze—
‘Soldier boy.’
Teeg’s ugly voice snapped him back to the here and now.
Teeg had hold of Dane, by an arm locked around his throat. It was obviously Dane who had knocked Teeg away and saved Belo’s life. Dane wasn’t struggling. His injured leg was twisted back at an impossible angle. But his eyes were locked on his commanding officer, and he made no sound.
‘Let him go,’ Belo said.
Teeg looked mock-puzzled. ‘How did you put it? . . . Try taking him.’
Belo tried to stand. The world greyed.
‘No.’ It was Tira. She was sitting on the ground, the remnants of her blood-stained uniform in disarray. ‘Don’t fight him,’ she said. ‘Not now. He’s too strong. Not yet.’
Belo knew she was right. But still Teeg was squeezing the life out of Dane. ‘Let him go,’ he said again. ‘We didn’t come here to do you harm.’
‘I don’t care why you came here,’ Teeg said. ‘I told you. You’re in my world now. And you will do what I say. You know why? Because of the Weapon.’ He held Dane at arm’s length, with one mighty fist locked on his collar, as if he was holding up a doll. Dane bit his lip, and his leg trailed beneath him, but still he made no sound.
And then Teeg grabbed Dane by neck and belt, and hurled him bodily at the floating machine.
A window clicked opened in the side of the machine. Fire, purple and bright, snaked into Dane’s belly and simply blew him apart, into fragments of flesh and bone amid a mist of blood – all this before the body could hit the ground. Then the window closed, like an eyelid shutting, and the machine continued its serene patrol around the huddling people.
Teeg grinned, cocksure in his ragged robes. He stood over Tira, who was still sprawled on the ground. ‘Now, where were we before soldier boy woke up?’
Despite everything he had seen, Belo stepped forward again. ‘Touch her and I will kill you, I swear.’
Tira said grimly, ‘I already made the same promise.’
Even in this moment of power Teeg looked from one to the other, and something in their determined stare seemed to put him off. ‘You’ll keep. But you,’ he said, stabbing a finger at Belo. ‘Your boots.’
Belo sat down and began to work at his laces.
Teeg walked over to the group of huddled women. ‘You.’ The woman he had selected cowered from him, but he grabbed her by the shoulder, threw her to the ground, and began to fumble at her rags. She lay passively; the children watched empty-eyed.
‘You’re right to give him a victory,’ Tira whispered. ‘There’s nothing to be done as long as he controls that machine. We must play for time. Wait for an opportunity . . .’ She was staring at a charred fragment of Dane’s corpse, and her composure cracked. ‘Oh, Belo, what horror have we fallen into?’
He said grimly, ‘We are soldiers. We have been trained to survive. We will survive this, together.’