The Revolutions (54 page)

~
I need to talk to him.

~
You should be more careful. Not your life to throw away, like a gift you don’t want.

She bridled at that.
~
Who are you to tell me where I should go! I was sent here to talk to them. I was sent here to save them.

~
It’s too late to save them. It was too late when they came here. Do you think they came here for you? To this place?

Wind howled across the rooftops. Dust swirled in the window. Orpheus went to the window and looked out.

~
I hear a storm coming
, he said.

Far-Traveller sat awkwardly against the wall and stared at the bullet wound in her leg.

~
This is the place
, she said.
Is it? Isn’t it? Hestia would know. This is where they crossed. It is. It must be. I wish Hestia were here with us. I feel them, I feel them whispering, don’t you? Their ghosts. When they crossed they left part of themselves behind. Their shadows—I feel them.

~
No
, Orpheus said.
I feel them too. But it’s not the ones who crossed. It’s the ones who made this place.

Poet rushed to the window in a sudden frenzy, as if he meant to hurl himself from it.

~
The men from the Blue Sphere are waking them,
Orpheus said.

~
They don’t know
, Josephine said.
They don’t know what they’re doing.

Orpheus made his hands into fists. That meant,
enough.
He turned and began to talk with the others.

She couldn’t follow what he was saying. He was talking the curt, crude language of tactics and war, and she’d never learned it.

*   *   *

Night fell. A dust-storm blew in and quickly surrounded the ruin in darkness. It howled and scraped and shook the walls. Little whirlwinds spun pillars of dust in the courtyard. The clouds made a roof overhead, hiding the mountain from sight. It wasn’t safe to fly. They were trapped.

They talked war. They planned to charge—to assault the southern complex. They could not be dissuaded from their plan. Nor did they seem able to put it into effect. Poet stood by the window and Far-Traveller moaned on the floor and Orpheus paced around and around the room in endless circles, talking to himself, arguing with shadows.

She left them to it.

*   *   *

She went exploring. She drifted through narrow corridors and up and down deep circular shafts until they opened onto the vault below the great dome. Through the crack she could see storm-clouds, an indigo storm-light.

She leapt up and spread her wings. A slight ache, no more. A clean wound, just as Orpheus had said. Lucky. She was owed some luck. She rose up and settled on the rafters.

There were carvings set into the ceiling, all around the underside of the dome. She’d seen them before, when they entered the castle, but she hadn’t had time to look closely at them. Now the memory of them nagged at her.

She counted a dozen carvings. Others had fallen from their settings and were no doubt buried in the dust below. They must once have covered all of the ceiling, like the frescoes of a cathedral—a map of the heavens, perhaps.

She ran her fingers along the carved symbols. Somehow it was easier to make them out by touch than by sight. To the eye, they appeared to move, to shift in an untrustworthy way. A terrible heaviness to them. They were in no earthly language, and no language known to the refugees of the white moon.

She’d seen them before, painted on the floor of Atwood’s library.

Orpheus was right. This was what Atwood had come for—this knowledge. He’d lied to her, or told her half-truths at best. He’d known what waited on Mars, before he’d ever come.

Something on the surface of dead Mars had reached out to him across the void, before he’d ever left London, and had told him what lay here beneath the dust. Something—the ghosts that whispered here—had tempted him with knowledge, had taught him enough to make this voyage. What had Atwood offered them in return? What could these ghosts, trapped and starving on a dead world, want? What else could he have promised them but a way back to Earth?

An image of Atwood’s smile came into her mind, and for the first time she truly hated him. He’d lied to her. He’d lied to her, and used her, and discarded her, and now he’d done the same to Arthur.

Beneath her the shadows of the vault seemed to shift and thicken.

She fled out through an archway and across the courtyard, wings tightly folded as the winds battered at her. If anyone shot at her, she didn’t hear it over the storm.

Chapter Forty-one

Atwood’s genius apparently did not extend to military matters, and Payne had always been an indifferent soldier at best. They didn’t know where the enemy were located, their numbers, their goals, or their capabilities. After hours of planning they had come up with little more than variations on the theme of:
charge.
They had a bottle of whisky left: Payne proposed sharing it four ways, for courage.

“And if we beat them?” Vaz said. “What then?”

“If, Vaz?” Atwood scowled. “If? There’s no
if
—we prevail or we perish here.”

Arthur picked up his axe and a candle and walked away.

“Shaw—where do you think you’re going?”

“The call of nature, Atwood.”

*   *   *

He seemed to have lost the habit of urination. Instead he just paced through the corridors, wishing that there were still cigarettes. One could call it deserting, he supposed. So be it. Hadn’t he given Atwood enough already?

At the end of the corridor, there was a flash of blue and a sound of scrabbling.

He hefted the ice-axe.

After a minute’s thought, he decided to investigate.

The end of the corridor opened out into a honeycomb of passages. The shadows were thick. In the dust at his feet, someone appeared to have written the letter
A.

A cryptic message.
A
might mean
Arthur
or
Atwood
or God knows what. Who could have left it? Vaz might once have enjoyed playing that sort of game, but his sense of humour had been notably diminished by his time on Mars. And so far as Arthur knew, no other human being had ever walked those corridors.

Hadn’t Atwood said there were ghosts here? And hadn’t he said that there were difficulties of translation, that their way of thinking was strange?

He waited and listened for further messages.

There was another flash of blue at an arched window overhead. He jumped up and clambered over a steep-angled stone beam to find that someone had drawn an arrow in the dust on the window-sill. It pointed across a small yard.

Clearly the sensible course of action would be to report back to the others; and yet his distrust of Atwood was now too deep. It seemed to him that Atwood knew far too much already. If this message was meant for Atwood, he did not want him to have it.

He ran out across the yard. Shadows gathered and whispered; they seemed to stick to him like threads as he passed. He ducked in through an archway on the other side.

At the end of a corridor he came to a tower. It was narrow, and conical; a little light came in through the upper windows.

There was rustling. Dust fell on him. He looked up to see blue light descending through the gloom: faint sunlight through wide, bright stained-glass wings, wings that filled the tower as the creature descended. It must have come in through one of the upper windows. Lean body, silver eyes. Angelic and dreadful. He lifted the axe over his head, but the creature was already on top of him. A sharp-edged wing flashed out and cut the axe in half, leaving a wooden stump in his fist. He stabbed out with the spiked handle, but the creature dodged. He swore. The creature was making a sound that he couldn’t understand. Something like a wind lifted him and threw him against the wall. He slid in the dust and fell on his back.

Muscles moved on the creature’s back and the panes of a bright glass-like wing creaked and shifted and complexly folded back until they were almost invisible. The creature stood over him. He closed his eyes and waited for the death-blow.

Nothing happened. He opened his eyes again.

The creature was long-legged, stiff, and regal in its bearing. A loose blue shift hung around its narrow waist, attached by a chain of blood-red beads and rather battered-looking flowers. Its face was a mask of obscure intensity.

He thought it might be a female.

It reached out a long-fingered hand and touched his face. Its touch was cool, tingling, almost tender. She was producing a noisy high-pitched thrumming, of increasing volume.

He scrabbled in the dust, picked up the stump of the axe again. He held it out in front of him like a dagger.

She crouched down, reached out a finger, and drew his name in the dust.

He lowered his weapon.

“You know my name, then. What do you want? Do you want to make peace?”

The look she gave him was sad.

She drew a
J
in the dust, and then an
O
. Then she pointed at herself. But even before she’d begun drawing the letters he’d known what she was about to say. He knew without question who she was.

Not dead then; alive. But transfigured.

He slid down against the wall to fall in the dust, and she moved to catch him. He observed that her wings appeared to make their own faint light.

He said, “How?”

Perhaps this was simply what happened when one died on Mars. Perhaps this was what happened when anyone died anywhere. Reborn as a Martian; no stranger than Heaven, really. He felt like laughing.

She remained silent. Well, of course! What sort of angel would speak in the tongues of Man, or to such an unsuitable prophet as Arthur Archibald Shaw?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was too late. I came too late.”

Ridiculous. As if he were blaming a late train.

“And it was all my fault in the first place. Better if I’d never walked into Borel’s shop—better if the storm had blown me away. Oh, God, Josephine, but I tried.”

She reached out again and put a hand on his head. She blinked her silver eyes and he saw a parade of visions behind them: spinning moons of fire and rose, cities of ivory, Mr Borel’s stationery shop, a vault of sleeping blue bodies, the scarlet rivers of Mars when it was in full vibrant flower …

*   *   *

She left the way she’d come. He sat against the wall, his mind and his heart racing, his skin still tingling from her touch. He could still hear the thrum of her wings echoing in the empty tower—a faint eerie music. He knew that it would be a long time before he could make sense of what she’d shown him, if he ever did. There’d been too much to communicate, and it was all too strange. He understood only a handful of things, but they were enough.

He understood that dead Mars was an aberration, a flaw in the universal scheme. Elsewhere the universe was alive and beautiful.

Elsewhere, somehow, she was alive.

He stood. He didn’t know how much time had passed. It was still dark out. It felt as if their embrace had lasted for a year; he remembered a long season on the moon. It felt as if it had lasted for no more than an instant.

He took out his ice-axe and carved into the wall:

A A SHAW

MAN OF EARTH

1895

After a little thought he added:

HERE I FOUND JOSEPHINE BRADMAN

That felt inadequate, but it would have to do. There was no time. That was the other thing he’d understood.

She knew something about Atwood. She’d told him. He didn’t quite comprehend it. He had an image of an eye, and a circle, and a black sphere, and princes with the wings of angels and the faces of devils.

He knew where the Engine had come from, and Atwood’s magic, and the secrets of the
Liber Ad Astra
.

Ghosts lingered in this ruin. She’d tried to tell him what they were—that image of an
eye
again. He didn’t understand. It didn’t matter.

They meant ill. Whatever they planned to use Atwood for—or whatever Atwood planned to use them for—it had gone far enough.

I understand
, he’d told her, before she went back to her people. He thought it unlikely that he would see her again.

*   *   *

He went back through the chambers and corridors until he was close enough to the gallery to hear faint echoes of Atwood’s voice. He sat down on the ground against a wall and moved a heavy fallen stone to lean against his leg. Then he called out, “Vaz! Mr Vaz! I’ve bloody well fallen—Mr Vaz, come here, give me a hand!”

Chapter Forty-two

The flapping of his ruined boot came first, then Vaz’s face, candle-lit, appeared from the shadows.

He looked sideways at Arthur’s leg.

“Bloody clumsy of you, Mr Shaw.”

“I’m glad you came, Mr Vaz.”

Vaz crouched on the far side of the chamber, rather pointedly outside of Arthur’s reach.

“I hope you don’t plan to hit me over the head with that stone, Mr Shaw.”

“Not at all.”

“Or with the axe, for that matter, if you have that hidden somewhere about you.”

“As a matter of fact, I lost it.”

“Then if you do not mean to ambush me—and yet you’re lying in wait, as if you distrust me—then it must be that you want to talk. You want to know if I will help you turn against Lord Atwood.”