Storm Thief (23 page)

“One condition,” Moa said. “Rail comes with me.”

“Agreed,” said Bane.

Moa studied him a moment longer. Enemies they might be, but they all wanted the same thing. If she could get to the heart of the Fulcrum, maybe there would be a way to deactivate the Skimmers. Not only would Kittiwake and the people of Kilatas be saved, but the doors of their prison would have been blown off. They could escape.
Anyone
could escape.

“Deal,” she said.

Bane nodded at the guards, and Rail and Moa were led away, back to their cells. When they were alone, Vago spoke at last.

“Even if this works, Bane, you don't really intend to let those ghetto scum from Kilatas be the first people to reach the sea, do you?” he growled. “Think of the publicity. A fleet of junk ships beats the Protectorate Navy to the prize.”

Bane sat back at his desk and began looking through his papers again. “Of course I don't. Perhaps they are sailing to nowhere, perhaps not. But I'm not going to let some ragged group of outcasts become the inspiration for a generation of rebels. Our forces in the western Territories are assembling already. By tomorrow evening, Kilatas will be just an unpleasant memory.” He turned in his chair and considered the golem, fingers steepled under his chin. “You will come with us into the Fulcrum tomorrow. I need to field-test your capabilities. It will be as good a time as any.”

“I still have several days of conditioning left to undergo,” the golem reminded him. “I would not want to be a liability to the Protectorate.”

Bane smiled to himself. “I trust you won't be,” he said. In fact, the golem had responded unusually well to the conditioning. Between the revelations about his ugly past and the truth of the present, his spirit had been broken even before the machine got to work on him. And besides, conditioning him properly was something of a waste of time: once they had fully tested his capabilities, they would have to dissect him to get out all the prototype parts they had put into his body.

But there was another reason. The Fulcrum was home to the Chaos Engine, and the Chaos Engine was home to the Revenants. Vago was their ultimate weapon against the energy ghosts. He had to be there.

“I will do my best to live up to your trust,” Vago said. He left Bane soon after, and Bane sat at his desk and dreamed of perfection. After a time, he began to plan.

Tomorrow they would go to the Fulcrum. Tomorrow they would change the world. There were preparations to be made.

She stood at the foot of the Fulcrum, her heart pounding. Before her and above her, the forbidden citadel of the Faded blocked out the sky. It was a bladed cyclone of metal and glass, glinting maddeningly in the midday sun. Hiding within were the secrets of a lost age, if rumours were to be believed. Nobody since the Fade had managed to penetrate it. It had no doors, no windows, and its surface, though glass-like, was made of something utterly indestructible by any technology that the people of Orokos knew.

Moa waited at the head of three hundred Protectorate soldiers and Secret Police, in the great paved plaza that surrounded the foot of the Fulcrum. More guards prowled around the edges of the plaza, fending off curious spectators. Bane let them watch. They would see, for the first time in history, the defences of the Fulcrum breached. Or so he believed. Moa wasn't so sure.

There had been brief tests yesterday to ensure that the artefact worked in Moa's hands. It performed superbly.

So they needed her. That was the reason she and Rail were still here. And Bane certainly didn't waste any time. He had obtained the approval of the Patrician and assembled the forces he needed in less than a day. Moa wasn't sure what had provoked such haste. Maybe it was simply that planning made no difference when they hadn't the least idea what awaited them inside. And maybe it was just that he couldn't wait. She saw, behind his rigid composure, a burning passion for order. She knew that the chance to strike at the Chaos Engine was what he had waited for all his life. That was why he was leading them personally into the Fulcrum.

But Moa could only think of what would come next if she laid her hand on the flank of the Fulcrum and nothing happened. What if the artefact couldn't penetrate the skin of this place? Bane had invested too much in this; it was too public. The humiliation would be terrible for him if this didn't work. The last thing she would hear would be the sound of an aether cannon as it blew her soul apart.

She felt Rail's hand reach into hers, and she clutched his fingers tightly. The pressure helped to calm the fluttering inside her. Her ribs were a cage of panicked birds.

On their right stood Finch. He was no longer wearing his black, close-fitting clothes and cowl. Now he had on a long trenchcoat and jackboots, and his head was bare, his wispy white-blond hair straggling across a naked skull. He was dressed as one of the Secret Police. He bared his rotten fangs in a smile as Moa caught his eye, and she looked away hurriedly. Both he and Vago were Bane's men now.

Vago himself stood next to Bane. He was as silent as ever, but now Moa saw the horror of him. Whereas before she hadn't thought him ugly, he had become suddenly terrifying. Perhaps he had always been that way, only she hadn't seen it. He didn't appear to notice her, but she felt a pang of loss as she looked at him. He had been a companion to her once, even a friend, and friends were in short supply in this world. He had saved her life in Territory West 190. He had adored her. But since meeting Bane, he had become something different, and when he looked at her it was with disdain. She didn't know what Bane had done to him, but it had shrivelled him, and now he was like a hard blackened nut instead of the wide-eyed child she had met many days ago.

Rail had been right. She was too soft-hearted. She was too willing to believe the best of people, when it made more sense to assume everyone was a potential enemy until they proved otherwise. But when she said this to Rail, he surprised her by his response.

“No,” he said softly. “Don't ever think that. That's what
I
think, and I wish I didn't. You have faith in people, Moa; you're willing to give. I can't do that, but being with you when you do it makes my life a little more worth living.”

Her thoughts were brought back to the present as Bane walked over to her. He looked sternly down and said: “It's time.”

Rail gave her hand a final squeeze and released it. She and Bane went ahead of the mass of troops, across the short distance to the base of the Fulcrum. It leaned out over them, for it was narrower at its base than at the top, and she couldn't help a feeling of vertigo. Bane said nothing as they walked up to the sloping side of the building. There was no obvious way in, no doorway or any part that might be better than any other. It was a complete unknown.

She looked at their reflection in the massive leaf-blade of reflective material. They were tiny in the mirror it made. She reached out and touched it. It was freezing, though the day was clear and warm.

Bane handed her the artefact. She put it on, and it swirled into life.

“I don't. . .” she began.
I don't know if this will work
, she meant to say, but she realized it was pointless. Words would not change anything. Bane pretended not to have heard her.

She put her hand again to the mirror, this time with the artefact resting in her palm.

Nothing happened.

Moa swallowed. Bane looked sidelong at her.

Still nothing happened.

And then the colours shifted, flowing from her arm and across the wall. Moa let out a sigh of relief, but her relief didn't last long. The colours were not forming a doorway. Instead, they kept on spreading, becoming thicker and brighter as they crept over the mirrored blade that she touched, and beyond. Waves of gauzy purples and reds flooded from her palm and across the Fulcrum. Alarmed, she was about to draw her hand away when Bane grabbed her wrist and held it there. She met his gaze with fear in her eyes.

“It's not supposed to do this!” she said.

“Let's see what happens,” Bane replied. He wasn't afraid. He could think of no price that he wouldn't pay to get inside this place.

And now the colours faded, draining from Moa's arm, sucked out of her. The artefact had no more to give. The veils that drifted across the surface of the Fulcrum had become absorbed into the mirrors, as if the building was drinking the energy greedily. All went quiet.

Finally, Bane released her, and she stepped back. She looked at the amber disc in her hand. There was no light there; it had lost the strange quality which had made it seem deep. She knew, without any way of being certain, that the artefact was only an ornament now. Its power had been leached. It was dead.

If the artefact was dead, then Bane had no more use for her. She closed her hand around the disc. She couldn't let him know.

She and Bane stepped back. The Fulcrum was just as it had been. It was as if it had never been touched. And yet they were both waiting for something.

All at once, the Fulcrum turned red. As if it were a mirror that had turned towards a crimson sunset, every one of its reflective facets went the colour of rich, dark blood. No longer a tornado of ice, it was a frozen rose, jagged and deformed and threatening. The gasp from the assembled spectators was audible across the plaza, and some people shrieked and began to cry.

Then it began to unfold.

The shrieking of the spectators became panic. The troops looked at each other nervously and shuffled in the ranks. Their commanders ordered them to move back to a safe distance. Bane took Moa by the arm and marched her to where Rail and Finch and Vago were, and they watched.

The Fulcrum was unwrapping, its uppermost parts peeling back like the petals of a flower. It was utterly silent: there was no grinding of gears or squeal of tortured metal as it bent. Bane was impressed. Incredible that a
building
could move like this. More evidence of how ignorant they were compared to the civilizations that lived before the Fade ever took place.

They stood mesmerized as it uncurled and shifted, like a nest of snakes slowly writhing. The mirrors on its flanks were angling this way and that, making it seem as if the whole surface was in motion. And then it abruptly stopped, its top crowned with dozens of slanted tendrils of glass that had locked into place. It seemed bigger than before, like a pinecone that had opened up.

There was a breathless hush, deeper even than the silence that had attended its movement.

“We're in,” said Bane quietly, and pointed.

He was right. At the base of the Fulcrum, the panels that had armoured it lay flat, offering a hundred entrances. All the way up the structure, the bladed mirrors had peeled back, opening the interior to the air.

“
We're in!
”
Bane cried again, fierce excitement in his voice. And he set off towards the Fulcrum, his troops in tow, and Rail and Moa went with him at gunpoint.

The temperature dropped the instant they set foot inside the Fulcrum, as if they had stepped through a curtain of cold air. Bane insisted on being the first in, and with him went Rail, Moa, Vago and Finch with a small retinue of Secret Police. The soldiers followed warily after, their eyes hidden by glimmer visors and aether cannons held ready.

The openings fed into high tunnels with arched roofs that dipped in the middle. They were ribbed along the way, and carved of some smooth substance that could have been either marbly stone or metal. There wasn't a join or seam to be seen; the construction was uncannily perfect. Wafts of cool air that tasted flat and lifeless drifted from the interior. Rail had the unpleasant sensation of walking down the throat of some great beast towards its stomach.

He was thinking only of escape, but escape at this point seemed impossible. Moa, next to him, was awed by the gravity of what was happening to them. They were
inside the Fulcrum
, somewhere that nobody had ever been since the Fade. But Rail felt nothing of the grandeur of the moment. He knew for sure that there was no way the Secret Police would let them live after what they had seen. They were ghetto folk; less than human, and very expendable.

Rail was searching for opportunity. Nobody knew what they would face inside this place. Uncertainty was his advantage. Once, he had wanted to be the greatest thief in Orokos. Now he just wanted to survive, and to get Moa out of here.

Bane – they knew that was his name now, for they had heard the other Secret Police refer to him – had taken the artefact from Moa once she had opened up the Fulcrum. Rail wondered why they were being brought inside along with the troops, but he reasoned that there might be more barriers within, and that Moa might be needed again. She hadn't breathed a word about her fears: that the artefact was a mere trinket now, and that it would not work any more.

The tunnel they were following went inward for some way before it ended. They stepped slowly into the room beyond, and there they gaped in wonder. Even Rail couldn't help but be impressed.

It like a dream made solid. A colossal hall of black and purple, fashioned in several levels that were connected by curving ramps. Everything was made of some glistening material that was hard as stone but had been shaped like wax. Each part of the complex arrangement of balconies, free-standing platforms, bridges and wedding-cake structures was rounded and smoothed. Soft light of an indeterminate colour, somewhere between green and blue, washed over the scene from globes that hung in the air like miniature suns. Trenches filled with a glowing liquid of the same hue traced back and forth across the floor, describing restful patterns.

The troops began filtering this way and that, spreading out to secure positions. They were treating this like the invasion of an enemy base. Bane, however, walked boldly out towards the middle of the chamber. His retinue followed him. Their footfalls made no sound, even though the surface they walked on was hard. The only noise was the whisper of clothes, the tap of weaponry, and the occasional hushed order from one of the soldiers as they directed their men.

Bane stopped and stood like a rock around which the troops broke. It was as if he were an explorer, having triumphantly set foot in his new world, and he was now surveying the land he had claimed.

“Nobody's home,” said Rail flippantly. Bane turned on him and fixed him with a steady glare. Finch grinned at his insubordination.

“Then we've nothing to fear,” Bane replied. He produced a small black device, like a round stone of polished darkness. It pulsed softly as he held it up.

Finch eyed it appraisingly, mentally calculating its value. “What's that?”

“This is why we know that the rumours about the Chaos Engine are true,” Bane muttered, looking into the stone. There were tiny lights inside it, all rushing in one direction. “This is a piece of Fade-Science we found long ago. We've established that its purpose is to detect probability energy. Like a compass, it always points towards the Fulcrum. That means that, somewhere in this place, is the most powerful source of probability energy in Orokos. And that will be the Chaos Engine. This thing will lead us to it.”

“And what then?” Moa asked.

“You'll see,” Bane replied. He looked around the hall again, consulted the device in his hand. “It's this way.”

“Chief!” snapped one of the Secret Police at his side. “Movement!”

The soldiers had gone still, their cannons raised, a hundred weapons trained on the large black sphere that was floating down from the roof of the chamber. It descended unhurriedly towards the centre of the room, near where Bane and the others stood.

Moa clutched Rail's thin arm. He felt her nails dig in through his jacket.

“Hold fire!” Bane said.

The sphere dropped to a hover ten feet above the ground. Rail could see himself reflected in its surface. It was deadly silent.

“There's more,” muttered one of Bane's men, and he looked to see several spheres, identical to the first, gliding downward from the shadows overhead at varying speeds. They came to a halt at different heights, in an apparently random fashion.

“If you were the Faded,” Rail murmured to Moa, “and you were building these things to provide a reception for visitors, would you make them look like that if they were friendly?”

Moa shook her head. She had a dreadful feeling about this.

“Me neither,” he said, and dropped his voice further so that nobody could hear. “Get ready to run. Something's going to happen.”

Something did. As one, the spheres changed. Now their surfaces were not merely featureless black, but each displayed an emblem in deep red. It was stylized and flickered like a bad panopticon projection, but it was clear enough what the emblems were. Skulls.

Rail felt his heart plummet to his stomach; and then the great chamber, that he had thought resembled a dream, turned into a nightmare.

The skull-spheres emitted a deafening scream, and a wind blasted through the chamber, blowing Rail's dreadlocks into a frenzy and almost pulling Moa off her feet. With the wind came an immense sensation of absolute terror that swamped them all, an animal panic that made Rail gag inside his respirator with the raw and suffocating strength of it. He had a moment to think
this is not real this is not real there's nothing to be afraid of
but then his thoughts scattered under the maddening fear that the skull-spheres transmitted, and he, like everyone else in the room, lost his mind.

He barely knew where he was, only that it was the most awful place he had ever been and that he had to get out of it. But he couldn't make his legs move; his muscles had turned to water. Everywhere there were the red skulls, floating in the air, shrieking. He scrambled to get away, pawing over other bodies. When he looked down at them their faces were horrible, distorted, their eyes glaring and black. They were monsters; he was surrounded by monsters. Nothing else mattered but to get out of here.

And yet there was nowhere to go. The monsters were everywhere.

He flailed in one direction, then another, then tripped over something and went crashing to the ground. It was one of the monsters, curled tightly into a ball. Instinctively he was afraid of it, but he seemed to recognize it too. Something inside him prevented him from running. Nearby, someone was firing an aether cannon. He looked and saw some of the monsters had guns and were shooting into the air and at each other. He cringed under the force of the skull-sphere's din, and fell to his knees next to the whimpering shape.

not real

The sight of the curled-up monster somehow gave him the will to clamp down his fear, enough to grab snatches of sanity from the chaos. He reached down to the thing in front of him, wanting to uncurl it and discover what it was. His hands touched flesh. The cool skin of an arm. Moa. It was Moa.

the fear is not real it's not real it's not

He grabbed her and she shrieked, struggling against his grip. But she was too weak, and too afraid to fight hard. He picked her up and the two of them found their feet. She was Rail's anchor, to stop him sliding into hysteria again.

“Moa!” he cried. “Moa, it's me!”

But his voice sounded like a horrible clattering noise to her, and she screamed and tried to cover her ears. So he pulled her, dragging her in some direction, any direction. All round him he could hear men shouting, and the squeal of aether cannons. There was a dead soldier on the ground before him

just a man, not a monster after all

and some instinct made him reach down and tear the glimmer visor from the soldier's face. It was only later that he realized why he had done it. The soldiers were firing into the air, at invisible enemies. That meant only one thing.

Revenants.

He put the visor to his eyes, and saw.

The Protectorate soldiers were in chaos. They were driven mad by the fear that the skull-spheres emitted, and they fought each other and anything else that moved. Some were fleeing down the tunnel towards the outside, some were shooting in all directions, others were huddled in fright. And between them went the sparkling shapes of the Revenants, swooping on manta-ray wings to possess the bodies of their victims. Already two dozen newly-made Taken were running about attacking people. But most of the Revenants were not so interested in the little force that had invaded the Fulcrum: they were headed through the tunnel, towards the open air.

Rail had a momentary vision of what the crowds waiting outside would see. They had opened up the Fulcrum, but the Fulcrum was full of Revenants. Like a wasp's nest that had been disturbed, the Revenants would swarm. Soon, the screams would begin. The Null Spire would be the first target: Revenants always attacked Protectorate constructions before any other, for some reason that nobody could fathom. After that they would flood the district. The nerve centre of Orokos would be compromised. The consequences would be disastrous.

They should never have opened the Fulcrum. They didn't know what they were meddling with.

But Rail couldn't think about that now. He had to get himself and Moa to safety. Somehow, he had staggered a fair way across the chamber, and whether it was his imagination or not, the fear seemed to have lessened in him. The glimmer visor filtered out the worst of the hallucinations, and the presence of Moa gave him courage. He had to be strong, to look after her. She needed him.

He remembered how he had almost decided that they should split up, that he would leave her to go with Kittiwake while he made his own way in the city. How ridiculous that seemed now. They couldn't do without one another. He would let nothing separate them again.

The cry of the skull-spheres was quieting, and Rail saw why. Some of the soldiers had been smart enough to fire at the source of their distress, bringing thumper guns to bear. Several of the spheres had been blown out of the air. The skull-spheres were some mechanism of the Faded to incapacitate their enemies through fear. Each time one fell Rail sensed the pressure of panic easing a little, and he could think more clearly.

The soldiers were organizing against the Revenants now, but Rail was intent only on escape. Moa, frightened out of her mind, was sobbing; but she had stopped resisting him, and they ran together towards a tunnel. Blobs of aether sizzled over their heads and Revenants glided and swooped, but the two ghetto children were not noticed by anyone or anything until they had almost reached the tunnel mouth.

Rail paused there and looked back. As he did, his visored gaze met that of Vago, who had been obliterating Revenants fearlessly. The golem was defending Bane, and several Revenants had already made the mistake of trying to attack him. They had been absorbed on contact. The ridge of his spine sparked with aether energy.

At the sight of Rail, Vago snarled, glowering in hatred. He threw his weapon aside and came pounding across the room on all fours, his metal-frame wings spread above him. Bane called him back, but Vago didn't hear or didn't listen.

Rail swore under his breath and pulled Moa into a run, and the golem came after them.