Context (112 page)

The
holding pen was a dank, black stone alcove: a far cry from the nacre and marble
halls where the Collegium’s Magisters had once socialized and deliberated. Tom
sat on cold stone, hunched inside his voluminous prisoner’s tunic, nursing the
bruise to his lower ribs. The two soldiers had not damaged him significantly,
but a final strike with a rifle butt had been irresistible.

Floating dust sparked, outlining
the horizontal alarm beams’ bands. It was the simplest security-tech
imaginable, and for a starved prisoner barely able to stand, it would have been
sufficient to hold him immobile.

But, after Tom was sure the
soldiers had departed and the corridor outside was deserted, he rose slowly,
and shrugged off his outer clothes. Underneath, he was wearing a skintight
black bodysuit with integral friction-slippers, which had come from Elva’s
wardrobe.

He wadded up the discarded
clothes—he would need them later—and tossed them over the top barrier beam.
They flopped onto the flagstones outside.

The stone was rough, with hand-
and footholds which would have been child’s play had it been dry, and Tom
spider-climbed up to the ceiling, then slowly, slowly, climbed belly up over
the waiting alarm beam, hauled himself—
careful!—
up to the outer corridor’s
ceiling, then dropped lightly to the floor.

Wait in the holding cell,
Elva had told him,
until I
come for you.

But she was going to be a while,
and when else would he have the chance to infiltrate the Collegium Perpetuum
Delphinorum, cradle of the Oracles’ power?

Solo infiltration is dangerous;
but Tom was very good at this.

There
was one tense moment when chatting officers were coming towards him and the
only way to move had been upwards, to hang suspended between a Doric column’s
apex and the nearest wall, applying counterpressure against smooth polished
pink-tinged marble while the officers passed underneath, oblivious. And then he
slid down, carefully, to continue his exploration.

Took a turn at random.

And felt a strange change upon
the air.

A
sense of dread.

Once, in training at the Academy,
Tom had been overtaken by a revulsion-driven need to kill a man: a small,
odd-looking trooper with a crooked stance. The man had done nothing to attract
Tom’s attention, but at first glance Tom was seized with the impulse to stamp
him out of existence like a toxin-laden insect, or to beat an immediate
retreat.

He did neither of these things,
but watched instead as a sergeant gave the trooper punishment duty, a long
arduous run with heavy kit followed by acid-burning the latrines.

‘Court-martial found him not
guilty,’ the sergeant muttered later. ‘But if he gets accused of rape again, I’ll
shoot the little bastard in the head myself.’

It was a chemical change, someone
had theorized: a pheromone excretion which caused ordinary decent humans to
react instinctively in the presence of a psychopath.

And, in a totally empty corridor,
that was the kind of sensation—though many times more powerful—which washed
over Tom’s skin, and perversely drew him forwards.

He
looked over a sill, into a round hall cupped like a giant hand: an
amphitheatre, filled with row upon curved row of seated figures.

So many people.

They were clad in pale grey, and
their breath filled the atmosphere, an incessant hum though no-one spoke, for there
were ten thousand individuals down there and, as Tom watched, it seemed their
breathing was in total synchrony: ten thousand chests rising and falling to the
same rhythm.

Then, in the amphitheatre’s
centre, a strange blackness flickered: a negation of light, an inverse of
warming flame.

Chaos. ..

It was something primal; it was
something very dark and strong: powerful beyond resistance, implacable as
death. A force was manifesting itself, here, below him.

Go back. Now.

But he could not retreat, could
only stare down at the shape-which-was-not-a-shape twisting in an outgrowth of
nothingness, a growing void in the centre of their regard, of the ten thousand
watchers ...

Stench of ozone.

No...

Suddenly it seemed that stars
were rippling in the dark flames, and Tom wanted to take a step backwards but
fear prevented it.

It cannot be.

And then, in unison, ten thousand
faces turned upwards, towards the balcony where he crouched, and focused their
myriad gaze on Tom.

~ * ~

62

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

Those
eyes ...

Tom sprinted, but with a
prickling across his back, upon his entire body, as though ten thousand pairs
of eyes were still trained upon him; and he knew with an absolute inner
certainty that something—some
thing—
was fully aware of him.

Then a sense of relief, as though
some dark deity had blinked, forgetting the human insect which had momentarily
caught that near-omniscient regard.

Trembling, he found his cached
prisoner’s tunic and baggy trews, and pulled them on. Then he stumbled onwards,
slowing to a bent-backed shuffle as a patrol—six troopers summoned by the
gathering Blight: he was sure of it—hurried to block the corridor before him.

‘Commander Hilsdottir,’ he
mumbled. ‘Orders. Must find Commander Hilsdottir.’

The patrol leader’s lips moved,
as he silently reported Tom’s capture.

Tom’s skin prickled again, just
for a second, before the sensation faded to nothingness.

He swallowed in relief, not even
minding the blow which thudded against his head and knocked him to the ground.

‘The commander’s in her office; I
saw her earlier. Take the thing to her.’

Boots against his ribs, not hard,
and Tom forced himself to react slowly, pulling himself upright as though it
took all his mortal strength merely to stand.

He moved at a stumbling pace, off
balance, for there was a fine line: if he slowed too much, they would merely
kill him and bring another prisoner, a replacement unit, to carry Elva’s
satchel for her.

Walls of lustrous
mother-of-pearl, here a deep swirling blue, and big curved pillars of the same
hue which bellied outwards, fat and richly decorated. Thick azure carpet
beneath their feet. From somewhere, soft Aeolian music—

And a yell, cut short by the
liquid spit of graser fire.

Elva!

He knew, with dread certainty,
that they had caught her in the act of theft.