Terminal World (59 page)

‘We’ll have to come back,’ Ricasso said. ‘Do it properly. Maybe even send someone down there.’

‘How far down do you think it goes?’

‘Below the surface of the Earth, I’m pretty sure. If the ships were only meant to travel down to the base, wouldn’t we have seen somewhere for the passengers to disembark?’

‘It’s been a long time. Maybe the ground’s covered up the entrances and exits.’

‘That’s possible. And of course, Spearpoint’s riddled with tunnels through the walls, so we can presume this one is as well. I wonder, though ... You said it yourself, Doctor - there wouldn’t be much point building all this just to come the last few leagues. So what if the ships were meant to go further than that? Deeper, I mean?’

‘Into the Earth?’

‘That’s what I’m getting at. How far below, I wouldn’t care to speculate. But - presumably - many leagues at the very least. Otherwise - why bother with all this?’

‘Why bother going into the Earth, is another question,’ Quillon observed.

‘Yes,’ Ricasso said. ‘That it is. And of course, none of this gets us anywhere near the really big one.’

‘Which is?’

‘What is the Mire? Or, more generally speaking, what are the zones? And why do they originate in Spearpoint?’

Quillon was about to answer when he glimpsed the plunging, spiralledged wall on the other side of Spearpoint, and felt his heart skip a beat.

‘Look,’ he said.

Ricasso did, and for an instant Quillon saw the same reaction he had just experienced. Recognition, followed by a wrenching sense of wrongness.

Cut into the black face of Spearpoint 2, between two rising turns of the spiral ledge, was a baubled star. It was mirror-bright even now, the reflected horizon-line cutting through it, tawny brown below, pastel blue above.

The sign of the tectomancer.

‘Now that,’ Ricasso said, ‘does put rather an interesting complexion on things.’

 

They came down in a series of giddy, bucking descents as Ricasso worked the firesap burner and the balloon tangled with the twisting winds around Spearpoint 2’s base. Any hope of landing back on
Painted Lady
was utterly forlorn, Quillon now saw. Perhaps with the balloon in more expert hands, and with more predictable winds, it could have been accomplished. But not today, with Ricasso at the controls.

Ancient structures, similar in style to those that lapped against the encircling wall, pressed around Spearpoint 2’s base and crawled partway up the ledge. It was the start of something like Horsetown, but for one reason or another, it had risen no higher. Whatever the function of the ledge, it now seemed probable to Quillon that it had never been intended as a place for people to build on. Perhaps it had something to do with the winds, deflecting them up, rather than around, the soaring structure. Or perhaps the ledge had been installed to allow gargantuan machines to toil up and down the outside, repairing and modifying where necessary.

‘There she is,’ Ricasso said.

‘What?’

‘Painted Lady
. She’s shadowing us. That’s good. I was a little worried she might lose us in all this sky.’

‘You didn’t mention that before,’ Quillon said.

‘I didn’t think it would be helpful.’

‘Probably not. And this may be premature, but do you have the vaguest idea how that thing we just saw - that symbol - relates to Nimcha, and all the other tectomancers?’

‘Honestly? No. But here’s a thought - that mark on her head ... those powers she has ... they didn’t just arise by magic. Will you indulge me?’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Let us suppose - and I stress that this is merely a supposition - that the tectomancers once served some specific and useful purpose in society. You have guilds in Spearpoint, do you not? And we have traditions of generational ownership in Swarm, parents passing airships to their children, and so on. It’s not that unusual for humans to keep it in the family, so to speak.’

‘You think the tectomancers were a guild of some kind?’

‘The term will suffice, for now. But a more complex guild than anything we have experience of. Let us again suppose that those marks and powers arose through the direct manipulation of inherited factors, in much the same way that angels were shaped from orthodox humans. Whatever work they did, whatever purpose their guild served, it required of them an inordinate degree of alteration. And it would have been hereditary, so that each generation passed the powers down to the next. That mark on Nimcha’s head is merely the external signifier of far more profound differences inside her skull.’

‘Then there would have been many of them, once.’

‘Hundreds, thousands, who knows? Enough to do whatever great work this society required of them. And they would only ever have bred with other tectomancers, of course. The guild would have been insular and self-perpetuating. Perhaps they would have introduced outsiders occasionally, to maintain the diversity of the population. But it would have been strictly controlled.’

‘I understand. But I don’t see how we get from there to here, with tectomancers so rare as to be almost mythical.’

‘Something happened, clearly. Might it be too outrageous a leap of speculation to suggest that it was the intrusion of the Mire, the breaking through of the Eye of God, the coming of the zones? Perhaps I’ve gone too far; it’s a weakness of mine. But consider this: if civilisation fell, then what became of the guild? Did its members hide themselves away, or were they forced out into the wider world, to survive amongst ordinary humans as best they could? Did they marry into the wider population, diluting their inheritance factors?’

‘Diluted,’ Quillon said, picking up on Ricasso’s line of reasoning, ‘but still present, still capable of producing a tectomancer if the right combination of factors came together again. But after five thousand years, or however long it’s been, that would be very unlikely indeed.’

‘Agreed - it must be unlikely or we’d be swimming in tectomancers. As it is, they only arise very rarely indeed - a statistical fluke. And for every genuine, functioning tectomancer - for every Nimcha - there must be another that has almost the right set of inheritance factors, but not all of them. A child with the powers, but not the mark. A child with the mark, but no ability to move zones. They exist, Doctor. There may not be very many of them, but given Nimcha’s existence, we can be sure that she’s not alone.’

‘You truly believe there are others out there?’

‘Not in huge numbers, certainly. And some will be older than Nimcha, some younger. Some may not even realise what they are. But I doubt very much that she’s alone.’

‘But something’s different now, isn’t it? The storm that hit Spearpoint had been building for years - such things don’t happen more than once every century, and maybe not as often as that.’

‘Nimcha may be special, even amongst tectomancers. Or it may be that something in the Mire has changed, something that makes it more responsive, more willing to obey them.’

Quillon thought about that for a moment. ‘If Nimcha is exceptional, then it’s even more of a coincidence that we ran into her when we did.’

‘You’d prefer to think you weren’t the victim of cosmic happenstance?’

‘If Nimcha is a tectomancer, but merely one of many ... however “many” might be ... then it’s easier for me to accept that we might have crossed paths. It also makes me wonder if Kalis was entirely right about her daughter.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Kalis believes Nimcha brought the big storm. It’s clear that Nimcha’s powers are genuine, so I don’t blame her mother for making that assumption. But what if she’s wrong about the rest of it? If there are other tectomancers out there, all of them feeling the pull of the Mire, all of them capable of reacting to it and shifting the zones, would Kalis be able to single out the influence of her daughter?’

‘You don’t think Nimcha is as strong as Kalis believes.’

‘Alone, no. But collectively - acting in concert with the others - she might very well be. Or else we’ve got it all wrong, and there’s just one of them, and Nimcha is exactly as powerful as Kalis imagines.’

‘We don’t have enough evidence to decide either way,’ Ricasso said, ‘so for now we may as well keep open minds. But let’s be clear about one thing. It’s Spearpoint calling Nimcha home, not the Mire. The Mire may be the very thing it needs the tectomancers to put right. To heal the wound in the face of the world where the Eye of God burned through.’

‘What would happen then?’

‘Something we haven’t had a lot of in the last five thousand years,’ Ricasso said. ‘History.’

The balloon had continued to shed altitude as they spoke. Ahead, at an intersection of several pale, weather-scoured roads, lay a cluster of white buildings around a dome-shaped central structure. The off-white dome was marbled by black fractures. Judging by the scale of the windows in the surrounding buildings, it must have been fifteen or twenty storeys in height at its apex. Under other circumstances, it would have been impressive, but today it just looked like an act of pathetic underachievement.

‘Try to avoid landing on that,’ Quillon said.

With dreadful inevitability, the winds made every effort to ensure that was exactly what happened. Ricasso tried to lose height more rapidly, but thermals keep buoying them up. The pod had already sunk below the top of the dome and was now scooting along at about the same height as the tallest buildings. When a collision looked inevitable, Ricasso abandoned his efforts to lose more height and instead dropped ballast, firing up the burner again. Ponderously, the balloon and its cargo began to rise upwards. They cleared the roofs of the outermost buildings, clanged against a wall, and bobbed higher. The buildings climbed up in steps, getting taller the closer they were to the rim of the dome.

‘When I said
avoid
landing on that—’

‘I know,’ Ricasso said. ‘You meant “avoid” in the more commonly accepted usage.’

They weren’t going to clear the dome, that much was apparent. What was the worst that could happen, though? Quillon wondered. They were still aloft, still airworthy. Even if they crashed into the side of the dome, the winds could do no more than drag them to the zenith, and then they would be free again.

‘I think we’ll be all right,’ Quillon said. ‘If we can just avoid hitting one of those—’

‘Cracks,’ Ricasso finished for him. ‘Like the one we appear to be headed directly towards?’

The crack in question ran down from near the apex of the dome to the point where it met the tallest of the surrounding buildings. It was wider at the base than the top. Just about wide enough, Quillon reckoned, for the pod to pass right through. But not, he felt fairly confident, for the balloon the pod was hanging from.

They passed between the dome’s ripped sides, the pod still moving as quickly as ever. Then it slowed, far more violently than was generally appropriate for balloons, and came to a halt. The pod creaked and swayed in the gloomy half-light of the dome’s interior. The angled windows prevented Quillon from looking up, but he didn’t need his eyes to tell him that the balloon had snagged itself in the gap.

The pod jerked down and stopped. Both men caught their breath. They were still far above the floor of the dome, which they were presuming lay at the same level as the surrounding land. The pod might conceivably survive such a drop; it was questionable whether Ricasso and Quillon would.

‘Curtana’ll get here quickly,’ Ricasso said, undermining the reassuring thrust of his statement with a desperate, confirmation-seeking grin. ‘One imagines.’

The pod jerked down again. The balloon, which was open at the bottom, would have completely deflated by now. They were just hanging by snagged fabric, a dozen or so storeys up.

‘At least we solved the mystery of Spearpoint,’ Quillon said. Something ripped. The pod dropped. Quillon gripped his chair in reflex and closed his eyes.

The pod landed. It crunched down onto something reassuringly solid, then tipped slightly to one side. The entire drop must have taken no more than half a second.

‘As I was saying ...’ Quillon let go of his seat arms, coming to the surprised conclusion that he was not only alive, but not necessarily facing imminent death. ‘Where do you think we are?’

‘Let’s get out and see,’ Ricasso said.

He equalised pressure before working the door mechanism. The door swung open and banged into rubble. Quillon and Ricasso climbed out, blinking against dust. It hovered in the air, pinned there by slanting sunbeams ramming through the dome’s many cracks. The pod had come to rest on a rubble slope, perhaps the crumbled remains of the part of the dome that had collapsed to form the crack where the balloon had jammed. It formed a steep but traversable ramp all the way down to the floor, covering about a third of it.

‘Will Curtana see us?’

‘She’ll have seen where we were headed,’ Ricasso said, ‘and part of the balloon’s still sticking out of the crack. She’ll find us, don’t you worry about that.’

They set off down the ramp, picking their way with great care, stumbling occasionally, helping each other down the steepest and loosest parts. All the while Quillon’s attention kept drifting to the thing down on the floor. It was a dome in its own right, a glass hemisphere partly covered on one side by the rubble. Dust had coated it almost to the point of opacity, but - like Ricasso, who was no less fixated - he could see things inside the glass.

‘There’s something I meant to ask you,’ Quillon said, ‘before I was distracted by the star symbol, and all that talk of tectomancers and guilds and history.’

Ricasso lost his footing, recovered it by windmilling his arms. ‘Ask away, Doctor.’

‘I was thinking back to what Gambeson said to me, about the cellular grid - which seemed to have something to do with the zones - and how we were going to talk about that game board of yours, the one with the black pieces. When you mentioned the Mire, and how we didn’t understand it—’