The Revolutions (48 page)

The top of the tower came closer. Faint daylight crept through the rafters overhead. They clambered up onto another ledge. There was another window, and another heap of dust—which, on closer inspection, appeared to contain bones.

They approached the bone-heap with trepidation, shoulder to shoulder, practically hand in hand.

“After you,” Vaz said.

Arthur gave the heap a poke with his foot. A tangle of bones, held together by scraps of some ancient fabric—or, God forbid, skin—slid from the dust. The bones were plainly inhuman: long and tapering, light, paper-yellow. Whatever they were, there was no visible clue to the manner or cause of death. Vaz crossed himself.

They flung the kettle up over the next beam and pulled themselves up again.

*   *   *

After three more turns of the spiral—past three more windows, and more heaps of dust and bone, which they did not inspect too closely—Arthur stopped, overcome by a nagging sensation that there was something he’d overlooked. He put a hand on Vaz’s shoulder and stopped him from throwing the kettle again.

“The windows,” he said.

“The windows?”

“Yes—yes, Vaz. Or, rather, the view. Come, here, look.”

At some point in their climb, the shape of the windows had changed. Lower down, the windows were tall narrow slits, but farther up they were round, and hardly more than a foot in diameter—too small for anyone to enter; even, one would imagine, a Martian. The view through them had changed, too, some three or four revolutions ago, but Arthur hadn’t fully noticed the change until now. He had to examine it closely to be sure he wasn’t imagining it.

Though the window was empty, looking through it was somewhat like looking through a finely crafted lens. It commanded a view across vast plains and into the mountains; and yet it seemed somehow
focused
on one particular point in the distance, in the foothills of a mountain range, such that when one looked at that region—and only at that region—one could see it as if it were only a few yards away. The effect was tremendously disorientating. There was nothing to
see
in that distant region, nothing but rocks and hills and dust and shadow; and yet the fact that one could see it at all was extraordinary.

They lowered themselves back to the previous ledge. That window, naturally, faced in a different direction, and the point on which it was focused was different. It was almost equally nondescript, although this time, in addition to rocks and dunes, the zone of magnification contained a squat and empty-looking stone ruin.

“Lord Atwood will want to know about these,” Vaz said. “Perhaps we can use them to plan our course.”

“How do you suppose they work? Some sort of—some sort of ray, perhaps? Or something in the air, a gas or a … Yes. Atwood should know. Are there more? How do you suppose one controls them?”

They kept climbing. They passed by more bone-heaps without further curiosity. Next they found a window focused on a distant mountain, and then one that was focused on a region of cloudy sky. Perhaps, Vaz guessed, if they waited until nightfall it would illuminate a distant star, or one of the moons.

By the next window they had revolved half-way around the tower, and now they looked out west. The tower stood in a sort of shallow depression, they observed; the ground sloped up slowly into a great plain, under low-hanging clouds. In the far distance was an impossibly tall and tapering mountain. The window’s zone of magnification lay at the mountain’s foot. A storm was brewing there, great whirling winds rushing down off the mountain into valleys of dust and sweeping up enormous black clouds. Thrilling to watch, but terrifying; Arthur was very glad for the countless miles that lay between him and the storm.

After a while, Vaz scratched his head and asked if it was just his imagination, or wasn’t the storm, miles wide, moving in their direction, and rather rapidly?

“Good Lord,” Arthur said. “Good Lord. I believe you’re right.”

“I’ve seen enough, Mr Shaw. Let us return to Lord Atwood and make our report.”

They went for the rope—both hurrying, unable to resist the sensation that the dreadful storm was somehow right at their backs. Arthur stumbled across a heap of bones and dust. There was a sudden agony in his leg, as if a snake had bitten his ankle, or as if he’d received an electric shock. There was a smell of burning in his nostrils, as if his moustache was on fire. Vaz cried out in pain. Arthur felt something clawing at him—clawing in his head, as if fingernails were scraping the inside of his skull. Vaz fell forward and toppled off the ledge into the darkness. Arthur recalled the training in magic that Thérèse Didot had given him—how he’d grumbled at the time!—and summoned into his mind a sigil of warding, of peace, of calm. The thing in his head shrieked wordlessly and battered at his defences. He fell to his knees. Before him, a tall shape—two tall shapes—rose up out of the heap of bones and dust. He looked up at long legs, narrow shoulders, long axe-thin faces, expressions of madness. They opened pale and ragged wings. They were creatures of the same species as the thing in Atwood’s library—Martians. Not dead, these two, not like the others—not mere bones. They’d looked like bones because they were so terribly, excruciatingly thin. Not dead, but sleeping—for how long?—on a dead world. One of them reached for Arthur. He lunged forward between their legs and seized the kettle, which he swung up into the nearest face. That one crumpled. The other one spun, slashing its wing’s ragged edge towards Arthur, and he stumbled back and slipped off the edge of the ledge. He landed on one of the beams, and slid off—bouncing off the next beam down, and falling again. He landed on a ledge, rolled off, and finally came to rest, panting and in agony, God knows how much farther down.

“Vaz!” he called. From somewhere in the darkness above, Vaz answered him. He couldn’t see Vaz, but he could make out motion overhead, glimpses of those horrid pale wings, as the half-skeletal creatures were hopping down from ledge to ledge. From below, he heard Atwood calling up, demanding to know what was happening. Since there was clearly no way he could get up to Vaz at present, and since he didn’t fancy wrestling with those monsters alone, Arthur began lowering himself—carefully, but not carefully enough; he slipped again, bounced again, and before he knew it, he was lying on his back on the sand, looking up at Dimmick’s grinning face. In the next instant, Dimmick heard the buzz and click of the creatures’ wings and the grin disappeared from his face, along with whatever joke he’d been about to make at Arthur’s expense. He grabbed for his rifle as the creatures descended out of the rafters; shot one and it fell. The other kicked out at his head and knocked him sprawling. Arthur tried to get to his feet but seemed to have momentarily lost the use of his legs.

“Stay!” Atwood shouted. He seemed to be speaking more to the monster than to Arthur.

The monster stopped. It hung in the air, watching. Arthur craned his neck. He couldn’t quite see Atwood, who stood behind him—he could see only Atwood’s shadow on the wall, cast by the lantern behind him, as Atwood performed—Good Lord, what was he doing? It began with subtle and occult passes and worked up into jerking inhuman motions of hand and arm—he appeared liable to dislocate his shoulder or break his neck. The creature hovered—an extraordinary motion, not buzzing or beating its wings, but
rippling
them—and then it turned and fled for the nearest window, nearly knocking Sun over as he climbed into the tower.

Atwood stretched out a hand and helped Arthur to his feet. Sun looked out the window for a moment, then apparently decided that the creature was gone.

“Very well done, Lord Atwood,” Sun said. “You must teach me that trick.”

*   *   *

Arthur sat against the wall and caught his breath. No bones appeared to be broken, for which he supposed he had the feeble gravity of Mars to thank. He watched Sun and Atwood and Dimmick go up into the rafters, and he watched Vaz—whose condition was much the same as his—come clambering down.

When Atwood came back down, he was in a near-faint from exertion. Sun helped him to sit against the wall, and called for cocaine.

“Well?” Arthur said.

“A storm is coming,” Sun said. “Perhaps they are common here. In any case, we cannot evade it on foot. And so we will remain here in this tower until it has passed. In the meantime, we will continue our study. Dimmick, please fetch Payne and Frank and bring in what we can of the supplies. And bury the rest.”

Atwood waved. “Go. Good shooting.”

“Sir,” Dimmick said, and went.

“The remaining bones,” Sun said, “are merely bones. As to the two creatures that attacked us, Lord Atwood and I have conferred, and our conclusion is that they were survivors of whatever catastrophe broke the tower, and laid waste to the countryside around. We suppose that Martians, like certain organisms of Earth, may enter in times of drought into a state of suspended animation. We believe they were the builders of this tower. The manner of their attack on you, Mr Shaw, suggests considerable telepathic gifts; the manner of their flight appears at least partially telekinetic. But no doubt they were quite mad, after centuries of hunger and thirst and uneasy dreams. If not for Mr Dimmick’s quick shooting and Lord Atwood’s peerless will, who knows what they might have done.”

Dimmick stretched out the dead monster on the ground. It was nightmarishly thin, and paler by far than the specimen in Atwood’s library, as if it had been bleached by the centuries. The bullet-wound was nearly bloodless. Sun and Atwood performed a somewhat undermanned version of the Rite of Jupiter, which they’d previously used in London for speaking to the dead. They didn’t wait for any particular hour, on the theory that they had no way of knowing what the appropriate hour of Jupiter was on Mars, and so any hour was as good or as bad as the next. In any event, they got no answers out of the corpse. It remained stubbornly inert, as if it were relieved to at long last be dead.

*   *   *

The storm appeared at sunset. The darkness of evening became solid. The clouds descended from the heavens and swept towards them. The storm seemed to boil at its edges, and the faint light of the sun sparked across it like frozen fire. It was too dreadful to look at for long. The expedition retreated from the windows and hunkered down on the floor of the tower, where they crouched, wrapped up two to a blanket, and waited for the storm to pass.

Everything went dark.

It was soundless at first. Then, all of a sudden, there was a dreadful thundering that seemed to come from all directions at once, and to have always been there. The tower trembled. Dust roared in through the windows. Some of it roared out again; some of it heaped against the wall and began to weigh down on the blankets. Rather a lot of it went directly down Arthur’s throat, it seemed to him, and he began to cough and splutter. The storm thrashed against the tower until the whole structure sounded like a drum being beaten. Several of the stone beams overhead cracked and fell—smashing, they learned later, a lantern, some tins of food, and some of Atwood’s paints. The noise was like great beasts roaring and crashing against the walls.

It went on for an hour, perhaps two. Long enough for Arthur to become convinced, as he huddled in his blanket, pressed up against a shivering Vaz, that the screaming of the storm was a voice, that there were words in it, though none he could understand. Long enough to imagine that he heard Atwood’s voice, answering it. Long enough to convince himself that he was imagining things, and then to change his mind again, and again.

*   *   *

When the storm passed, they crawled out of the tower. The rocks and dunes were much the same as ever. There was a weak light in the sky, and the air felt scraped clean.

The storm had shattered so many of the beams overhead that there was no way of climbing up to the windows again, certainly not by means of rope and tea-kettle.

Atwood announced that it was time to move on. He waved away questions about the markings in the tower as if they’d been merely a childish obsession, one he had long since outgrown. There was a new certainty in his manner as he told them that he had a destination in mind, where they might—if they were lucky—find what they needed to plan their return home.

“A library, of sorts,” Atwood said. “A laboratory, one might say. More to our purpose, an observatory.”

“Excellent news,” Sun said. “And how did you learn of this place?”

“While you have been pacing, Mr Sun, I have been translating the markings of the Martian language. I think you can all see that the Martians are—or were—astronomers of great learning. Consider the windows upstairs. What are they if not telescopes? A marriage of science and magic. Wondrous. But sadly ruined by the passage of time, and useless to us. There are others, and better; and I can find them.”

Arthur said, “Where?”

“Where? Where are we going? High ground, of course.”

Arthur said, “How far?”

Atwood said nothing. He stood at the window and pointed into the distance; westwards, through the violet gloom, into the weird slanting half-light and shadow. On the far horizon, there was a mark that might have been the tapering mountain Arthur had seen through the telescopic window upstairs. It shifted in and out of visibility. First a mountain, then no mountain, then a mountain again.

“Good God, Atwood. You must be joking.”

“You find our predicament funny, Mr Shaw? How odd.”

“What if another storm crosses our path?”

“It won’t. Rest assured.”

“Atwood—”

“Shaw. Have you ever had a dream…” Atwood stared at the mountain and the sunrise and collected his thoughts. “Have you ever had a dream, Shaw, in which—for a moment, for a brief, tremendous moment—it appeared to you that you stood upon a high mountain-top, and that beneath you was laid out all the world, as God must see it, day and night at once? And the sky, Shaw, as if a great black veil had been pulled aside, so that you could see the stars—and hung between them the silver thread of your life, as you have lived it and now live it and will live it, the beginning swallowing the end?”