She knew where they were now: on the surface of Vellern, below the City. But there was nothing down here. Why had Salik brought her to this place?
As they neared the column she saw that it was not black after all, it just appeared so in contrast to the glow of the distant forcedome beyond. It was made of the same dark-grey material as the City above, save for a narrow red band running round it a few metres up. When they were thirty or forty metres from it Scarrion held up a hand. At the same time, he slid the gun off his shoulder. The ease with which he managed both manoeuvres simultaneously sent a flash of alarm through Elarn. Lost in the rhythm of their footsteps and the strangeness of their surroundings she had almost forgotten that she was travelling with a killer.
He addressed Salik. ‘Sirrah, company. About fifty metres up and to the left of the spine.’
Elarn looked up. Flying towards them was what looked for all the world like a great black bird.
Three people? Taro was sure he had seen three figures climb down from the taxi and disappear among the rocks. Who was the third one?
Solo had managed to find her rhythm. Her breathing was steadier now, her wing-beats longer and stronger. Taro shifted into a more comfortable position.
‘
Skkrreeeee!
’ Solo screeched and lurched to the side, sending Taro sliding across her back. He barely managed to keep his hold round her neck. His head was filled with an agonised screech, a noise both heard and felt.
The alien’s wings were at the end of their down-stroke and though her left wing came up her right one stayed down. She lurched to the right. Taro slipped again; now he was hanging near-vertical.
Solo’s wings started heaving and fluttering, not flying so much as trying to break their fall. Taro was tossed around like a doll; his already damaged shoulders felt like they were being wrenched out of their sockets. Below, he glimpsed the ground, coming up fast. He stubbed his bandaged finger on something small and hard at Solo’s throat, which took his mind off his other problems for a moment.
With the ground so close that Taro could see individual rocks, Solo managed to get some sort of rhythm back into her flight, though she was still keening to herself. Taro pulled himself up onto her back. The muscles beneath him bucked and twitched.
Something near his right ear tore with a sound like wet cloth being ripped. Solo shrieked again and they dropped from the sky.
Taro let go. A second later his feet hit rock, then, before the pain of the impact could register, slipped off again. He flexed and rolled, landing sprawled and breathless with his head a few centimetres away from a torso-sized rock. Red dust puffed up around him.
More bruises to add to his collection, but nothing actually broken. He rolled over, blinked the dust out of his eyes and sat up. Solo had come down a few metres away on a flat-topped rock - at least, he assumed that pile of fur and skin was Solo. He pulled himself to his feet and went over to her, started to reach out, then drew back his hand and said, ‘Are you all right?’ Stupid question! One wing was all but shredded and though he didn’t know what angle was right for her limbs, he was sure the leg nearest him shouldn’t be bent like that.
Just as he had resigned himself to the fact that the alien was dead, she raised her head. Her golden eyes focused on him but he heard only a faint thrumming sigh, like the wind in a water-trap rope. He must’ve knocked off her voice-box when they fell.
‘I know you can’t speak, in fact, don’t try to, but—Oh!’ A gentle warmth filled his mind. Solo didn’t need the voice-box to communicate after all. Her presence in his head was less insistent, more subtle than Nual’s. Wordlessly she reassured him that she would survive and reminded him of the urgent need to carry on and not waste any more time.
‘I understand.’ He reached up to hug her. She pressed her cheek against his briefly before pulling back.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered, then turned and started to run towards the spine.
Smell returned first, the smell of blood and dust. The blood, Nual knew, was hers; unconscious healing processes would have already blocked the pain and slowed the flow from her wounds. The dust was from the quake. She was still in the infobroker’s office. No other active minds were here, though she felt an unconscious presence behind her. The infobroker? Had to be, though she was too exhausted to probe further.
Scarrion must have left her for dead, which she probably would have been, had she been human. From the sting of toxins in her system, she assumed that Ando Meraint had shot her with a dart-gun loaded with lethal ammo, accidentally, no doubt. He would have been trying to help her, acting under the desperate and unsubtle compulsion she had laid on him before taking her foolish journey into poor Elarn’s head.
She had been an idiot to think she could just slip into Elarn’s mind. The Sidhe would have left nothing to chance. They knew that Elarn wasn’t capable of murder, and that the love the two women had once shared was likely to lead Nual to help her, rather than killing her. And Nual had fallen into their trap, reverting to the frightened child who had run from them seven years ago. In some ways she had never grown up, for she had been too afraid to develop and explore her natural power for fear of giving herself away, or hurting those around her again. She would be dead now if someone - presumably Ando Meraint - had not intervened and broken the mental link.
She opened her eyes and sat up carefully, one hand across her abdomen. That huddled form in the alcove would be the luckless infobroker. She shuffled over to him and lifted his eyelids. The whites of his eyes were red with burst blood vessels. The Screamer must have used his implant on him. She briefly considered bringing him round, but she needed to conserve her energy and she doubted he would be able to tell her much.
She pulled open cupboards until she found a first-aid kit, and sprayed synth-skin over the worst of her wounds, covering clothes, flesh and, she noticed with a grimace, open guts. No time for niceties, she just needed to survive for long enough to get to the Heart of the City.
If she wasn’t already too late.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The spine towered over him, a solid column of unbroken grey. There had to be a way in somewhere. He worked his way round, keeping Nual’s cloak pulled tight for camouflage, until he came on the door suddenly, caught out by the curve of the spine. Beside it he spotted the charred remains of some sort of instrument panel.
Taro ducked inside, alert for possible ambushes. A short passage stretched ahead. The walls and floor were the same featureless grey material as the City, though where the vanes of the Undertow often had a slight warmth to them, here the walls radiated cold.
The passage ended in a spiral staircase carved into the rock. A faint hum, felt in guts and jaw rather than heard, began to seep through him as he started down. After one twist of the stairs the light from outside faded, leaving him in darkness. He felt his way forward with toes and fingertips, pausing after each step, listening for any sign that he was not alone. After the open space of the planet’s surface, the inside of the spine felt like a trap, but its very closeness made it a bad place for an ambush.
Taro wondered how much Vidoran and Scarrion knew about this place. The Sidhe would’ve told them all they knew, but from what the Minister said that wouldn’t be much as they’d never got a spy this far. It was possible that no one had set foot here in more than a thousand years. Not that the Minister had said that. Taro guessed he’d told him only what he needed to know to get the job done. He’d hoped Taro would stop Vidoran before he got this far. Taro paused, one foot in mid-air; he had to stop thinking of that man as the Minister. He -
it
- was just a tool, or an organ, like a hand or an eye.
And now Taro was heading into the City’s heart.
As he reached the final twist of the staircase a dim red light oozed up from below. A topsider would be left blinking in the semi-darkness, but Taro’s eyes were adapted to the Undertow; his night-vision allowed him to make out the view clearly.
The staircase opened out onto the strangest place he had ever seen. The Minister had explained what a cavern was, and Taro had thought he’d understood, but he hadn’t been sure what the Minister had meant by ‘honeycomb’. He’d seen something like this before, though: when Scarrion had first picked him up on Soft Street - it seemed like a lifetime ago now - he had ordered him to wash. He’d run Taro a bath - a prime waste of water - and had him scrub himself with a pale squishy thing riddled with holes. This, the Screamer had explained with amused patience, was called a sponge.
And now Taro had come out in the centre of a giant sponge carved into the rock of Vellern itself. Some of the gaps between the rock pillars were filled with shimmering curtains of red, the only light in the place. The way the light flickered reminded Taro of the forcedome. When Federin had spoken of the spirits of the dead feeding the City, this must be what he meant. The Minister’s brief description hadn’t mentioned the curtains of light, but Taro suspected it would be a bad idea to get too close. As he watched, one directly ahead flickered off. After half a dozen frantic heartbeats, a new one appeared in the distance, off to his right. Oh shit, they moved.
The air felt warm and thick and damp. Breathing took effort, and every breath stung his nose. The smell of decay, of wrongness, was stronger than ever. As he stepped down from the bottom step onto the bare earth, the pull on his legs increased. This was something the Minister
had
warned him about: the gravity here varied, not only in strength but in direction.
He needed to get to the centre of the maze. The only advice the Minister’d had time to give him was to spiral left and down. The Minister had also told him not to touch anything down here, but looking into the red-lit tunnels Taro decided that warning was unnecessary.
He checked the possible ways out from the open area around the steps. There were exits on every side, including several sloping down, some steeply enough to be called holes.
He glimpsed a flash of white light off to the left. That had to be Scarrion and Vidoran.
The light was a long way off; he was too far behind. He started to run, taking large uneven steps into the passage leading towards the intruders. Almost at once the passage started to slope down at a scary angle, but just as Taro’s sense of balance was about to trip him up, the gravity shifted to match. Looked like down was the new up. The passage twisted back on itself, but he ignored the side turnings and whenever it forked he chose the left path. Soon after the third fork a curtain flickered out just as he passed it and freezing air whooshed across the passage, making him stumble.
He slowed down a bit and turned the next corner. At first he thought he’d reached a dead end, but as he drew closer he realised it was a T-junction, with paths going off at steep angles to the left and right. Left would be the default choice, but he could see the leftmost passage doglegged back to the right again a few steps along. He paused at the junction, trying to work out which path to take . . .
He heard a crack like the sting of a stun-baton, felt a blast of heat on his back and threw himself forward with a yelp. When he looked behind him, he saw that he had only one choice now; a flame curtain had sprung up across the left passage, half a step behind the spot where he’d stopped to check his options.
Right, this way.
Elarn caught herself chewing the inside of her lip and forced herself to stop. This was hell. It had to be: the red-lit cavern, the heat, the vile, thick air. Salik, whom she had trusted, whom she loved, had brought her to hell.
He had spoken to the Screamer when they’d reached the spine, while Elarn stared up at the looming bulk of the City hanging over them and wondered how she could have been stupid enough to let herself be brought here. The Screamer had used the gun again, shooting out a near-invisible panel and triggering an opening to appear from what had looked like a blank wall. Then he’d slung it over his shoulder and drawn a nasty-looking curved knife from his boot. Elarn remembered that knife now. She remembered how Scarrion had slit the throat of the air-car driver. She flinched away. Salik turned to her and smiled what he must have hoped was a reassuring smile, but the drug-induced haze was already receding and Elarn saw how the smile did not reach his eyes, how it was as much an act as everything else he had ever said to her and done with her.
She had descended the spiral staircase between Salik and his bodyguard. At the bottom Salik took hold of her hand; the gesture that had once been reassuring was now threatening. He did not look at her or speak to her as they set off into the labyrinth, Scarrion picking out their path with the aid of a small flashlight.