TWENTY-FOUR
The sun set, leaving us to climb up to the fort in the day’s afterglow. We beat the rising mists up the slopes, and glancing back I could see nothing of the burned village, just a white sea, all a-swirl, flowing into the woods, coiling around each trunk before reaching up to drown the trees.
In the west the sky glowed red; in the east darkness threatened, and somewhere a screech-owl lifted its voice to greet the night. Just great.
*beep* “We could wait until morning, you know.” *beep* I wrapped the box in my cloak, trying to muffle it. The thing had been annoying from the start, and the irritation increased with the increasing tempo of the beeps. “Or I could stay here with the box—we don’t want it to give us away.”
“We need the box to find Taproot,” Snorri said. “And I never saw your Red Queen as the sort to leave survivors. Certainly not armed and dangerous ones.”
Large chunks of masonry littered the upper slope, some pieces so big we had to track around them. Hennan leapt from one to another, clearly oblivious to the growing sense of dread that any reasonable person should feel in such circumstances. Just above us the breach in the walls yawned wide, still jagged with the violence of the event that had obliterated the gatehouse.
“Is that . . . smoke?” I pointed to a white cloud hanging across the breach.
“The memory of smoke.” Kara reached up to snatch something from the air. Opening her palm she revealed a small seed hanging below a scrap of downy fluff. “Fireweed. Always the first green among the black.”
And as we gained more height I could see she was right. Among the tumbled and blackened walls the stuff grew knee-high, the seeds floating away in white profusion. Even so, something seemed wrong.
“Doesn’t it look odd to you?” I asked.
Ahead of me Snorri stopped and looked back. “What?”
“It’s too still,” Hennan said, coming up behind me.
That hadn’t been what I was thinking, but he was right. The seeds had been drifting around us lower down the slope, but above the fireweed they hung in a great motionless cloud as if the air were wholly without motion.
“Grandmother came through here . . . what, two weeks ago at the very most?”
Snorri shrugged. “You tell me. You saw her leave—I was in . . . another place.”
Kara frowned. “Two weeks isn’t long enough for fireweed to grow and go to seed. Not even if it sprang up the moment the fire went out.” She kept her gaze on the false and unmoving smoke. “Perhaps your grandmother didn’t do this.”
“It was her.” I walked past them, angling toward the far side of the breach where the only weed that grew still lay close to the ground without sign of flower or seed. At the back of my mind another of the Red Queen’s blood-dreams replayed itself, not of Taproot in the palace forty years before I was born, but of Ameroth keep . . . another fortress that had exploded and where time had run in strange patterns.
Many people must have been killed but we saw no bodies as we crossed the courtyard, clambering over rubble. One could read that as good news—Grandmother having ordered their cremation, meaning that the Dead King would have no handy corpses to set chasing me for the key, or as very bad news, taking it to say that the Dead King had already gathered them into a single force, perhaps hidden amid the shattered walls of the stables, just waiting to pour forth . . .
“Jal!” Snorri’s voice startled me from my imaginings. I jumped away, spinning, sword half-drawn.
“What?” Anger and fear mixed in my voice. Shadows filled the interior of the fort wall to wall. I could make out the northerners but the rest lay in a jumble of soft grey shapes.
“The beeping. It’s slowing down. Was faster back there.” He jabbed a blunt finger toward a group of outbuildings.
I nodded and started back. In truth I’d already tuned out the box’s noise, too focused on my fears to hear it, only noticing it now that Snorri drew my attention to it. There are probably half a dozen lessons in that for a wise man.
As I approached the nearest of the outbuildings the box’s beeps grew so rapid as to join together into a single tone which then, thankfully, ended. “Perhaps he died,” I said. “We should go back to the horses now.”
“We don’t need a lantern, Jal.”
I hadn’t been planning to go back for a lantern—I wasn’t planning on returning. But we did need light if we were intending to venture into the structure in front of us, and Snorri was right, we didn’t need a lantern for that. “Fine.” I pulled the orichalcum cone from my pocket and tipped it from its leather bag into Snorri’s outstretched hand. The cold light that sprang forth as orichalcum touched skin revealed that the mist had caught us up again, faint tendrils of it curling about our ankles. What I’d taken for gravel underfoot turned out to be grain, the building before us a granary. Snorri stepped up to the shattered doorway and raised his hand. The light also showed a profusion of sacks, wreckage, and that whoever had gathered up the corpses—Grandmother’s troops or the Dead King— hadn’t been particularly thorough. The body of a stout, middle-aged woman lay trapped under one of the fallen roof beams. The sickly-sweet stink reaching out of the room suggested she had been lying there long enough to give birth to several generations of flies. I tried not to look too closely where her flesh lay exposed, not wanting to see it crawling.
“So, we’re going in, then?” I asked as Snorri stepped through, Hennan and Kara crowding behind him.
“This floor is Builder stone.” Kara knelt to set her hand to it, brushing away grain from split sacks.
“It will be below us,” Snorri said. “The things that time wants to keep, it buries.”
“Time might be playing different games around here,” I said. The fireweed had shown a month’s growth in less than two weeks, then become frozen in a single moment. Whatever had happened here broke something important and time itself that invisible fire in which we burn, had become fractured.
“I think there’s a trapdoor over here.” Kara called us from beside a pile of debris and fallen beams. “Bring the light.”
“How on earth can you say there’s a trapdoor?” I squinted through a gap in the crossed roof beams. Even with Snorri holding the light up I could see nothing but dust, wheat grain, and broken roof tiles. “I can barely even see the floor.”
Kara looked around to meet my question, her eyes with that unfocused, “witchy” look to them.
“Oh,” I said.
Hennan took hold of a beam and started to heave. An ant would have more luck trying to drag a tree. Snorri bent to help him.
“Is this a good idea?” By which I meant of course that it was a terrible idea. “Apart from whatever bad thing might be lurking down there, this place looks ready to finish falling down any moment.” From what I could see several dozen sacks of grain formed the main structural support in lieu of the stone and timber now piled on the floor. Apparently Grandmother’s men had agreed with me and decided to leave the sacks in place. “I said,” I repeated myself more loudly. “The whole place could collapse any moment.”
“All the more reason to work quickly and keep our voices down then.” Snorri flashed me a look. He bent and, gritting his teeth, wrapped his enormous arms around a fallen roof beam, straining to move it. For a moment the thing held as Snorri passed from red through several shades of scarlet. Veins pulsed along the bulging muscles of his arms—I later described it to a young woman who seemed overly interested in the Northman as being like ugly worms mating—his legs trembled and straightened, and in a cloud of dust the beam gave up the fight.
I tried to retain a logistical role, explaining that such dangerous labour required coordination and oversight, but in the end the ignorant savages had me put my back into the effort. I set the ghost-box down in a corner and rolled up both sleeves. It took forever, possibly an hour, but eventually I stood sweaty, dirty, with my hands aching and torn, staring at six square yards of blank floor.
“There’s no trapdoor.” It had to be said. It’s not my fault if I took a certain pleasure in saying it.
Kara knelt in the cleared space and started to tap the floor with a piece of broken tile. She moved methodically, checking the whole area, then returned to a patch to the left. “There, do you hear it?”
“I hear you making a racket,” I said.
“It sounds hollow here.”
“It sounds the same as the other two hundred places you whacked.”
She shook her head. “It’s here . . . but I can’t see the trapdoor.”
“There?” Snorri asked.
Kara nodded. The Viking handed her the orichalcum and stepped out over the splintered door into the night.
Hennan watched him go. “Where’s he—”
Snorri came back almost immediately, a chunk of rock in his hands that clearly weighed considerably more than me. It looked as though it might have been blasted from the main walls. I recalled some debris up against the side of the granary.
Kara needed no warning to get out of the way. Snorri approached the spot, making the slow and deliberate steps of a man near the limits of his strength. With a grunt he hefted the rock up to nearly chest height, and dropped it. It hit the floor and kept on going. When the dust cleared I could see a dark and perfectly round hole where Kara had been knocking with her tile.
“I hope Dr. Taproot wasn’t standing underneath that trapdoor waiting to be rescued . . .” I gestured for Kara to take a look.
“It goes down a long way.” She knelt to take a closer look. “There are handholds built into the wall of the shaft.” Without further discussion she swung her legs into the hole and started to climb down.
Snorri followed, then Hennan, shooting a glance back at me. He probably couldn’t see much since our only light was vanishing down the shaft.
“Go on.” I waved him forward. “I’ll bring up the rear. Just don’t want any of you lot falling on me.”
I planned to find a comfortable grain sack and sit this one out. The thing about the stink of rotting corpse though is that you can never truly acclimatize to it. I’d blocked out the box’s beeping almost immediately but drawing in a deep sigh of relief as Hennan vanished into the hole was all it took to remind me that I wasn’t quite as alone as I might have hoped. The scuttling noise was almost certainly a rat: the place must be full of them. Corpse and grain—a rat feast! Even so, the possibility that it might be a dead hand suddenly twitching into action proved enough to make me a man of my word and six seconds later I was clambering down after the boy.
The descent put me in mind of our visit to Kelem in his mines, another ill-advised climb down into the dark unknown. The handholds in the poured-stone wall seemed to have been made when the shaft was lined, being moulded into the stone rather than hacked out, and proved considerably more trustworthy than Kelem’s rickety ladders. And thankfully the bottom took less time to reach. I estimated we’d descended thirty yards, certainly not more than fifty.
I joined the others in a square chamber of poured stone. Dim red light pulsed fitfully from a circular plate in the ceiling, making our shadows grow and shrink. It put me in mind of Hell.
“Lovely.” I drew my sword.
In the wall opposite a circular door of silver-steel a good six inches thick stood ajar on heavy, gleaming hinges. If ever a smith found a fire hot enough to melt the stuff there would be the wealth of a nation right there, just waiting to be forged into the best swords that money could just about afford to buy.
Corridors led off to the right and left, the left one blocked by an ancient collapse, the right by a more recent one, burn marks patterning the stone. I moved to peer past Snorri and over Hennan’s head through the gap where the vault door opened. A single small room lay beyond it, also lit by a pulsing red light in the ceiling. It held four cubicles of glass, two against one wall, two others opposite. Four silver-steel domes were set in the ceiling, one above each cubicle. You could imagine each a great sphere of silver-steel, nine-tenths of which lay hidden in the rock above with just a fraction showing. The nearest cubicle on the right and the farthest on the left lay dark, the glass fractured in strange patterns. A dead man stood in the cubicle closest on the left, illuminated by some unseen light source, his flesh all the colours of rot, some peeling from his bones, some having dropped off and yet hanging unsupported partway to a floor spattered with decay. A kind of harness secured him to the wall. The last cubicle held Dr. Taproot, as motionless as the corpse, worry crowding the narrowness of his face, his hands locked together, long fingers entwined mid-wrestle. He looked much as he had when I last saw him in the flesh, dust marks on the blackness of his circus-master’s coat, a white shirt across his thin chest, the buttons mother-of-pearl.
“What’s wrong with him?” Snorri asked.
“He’s stuck in time,” I said. “Glued into one moment.”
“And this one?” Hennan screwed up his face at the rotting body.
“I guess either he wasn’t stuck so firmly and time is slipping by for him, just very slowly, or the machine was turned on and caught him like that.”
“Machine?” Kara asked.
I nodded up at the silver domes. “Those, I guess.”
Snorri walked over to Taproot’s cubicle and opened the door, pausing to marvel at so large and flat and clear a piece of glass. He reached toward Taproot and I was glad to see some hesitancy in the move. I found it easier to like Snorri when he showed at least some sign of nerves. He frowned as his fingers met some resistance. He pushed and his hand seemed to slide around some second sheet of glass, this one curved and reflecting no light.
“I can’t touch him.”
“Can you break the glass?” I asked.
Snorri frowned. “I’m not sure there’s any glass here . . . it doesn’t feel like . . . anything. I just can’t touch him.”
Kara moved to stand with Snorri, looking tiny beside him—as most people do. “If he’s locked in time, and where we are time is flowing . . . then there must be a divide between those two regions, a barrier through which nothing can pass because there is no time for it to do so. It would be pointless to try and break such a wall—there wouldn’t be a meaning to the word ‘break’.” She furrowed her brow, lips pressed into a thin line. “Even the light from him shouldn’t reach us . . . perhaps the machine projects the last image of him for the benefit of those outside.”
“Well, we’re here to rescue him aren’t we? So we should get on and do it, or leave.” I didn’t much like the Builder hole with its pulsing red light, frozen corpse, and singular, easily blocked exit. In fact after my experi-ences in the Crptipa mines I was quite happy never to venture below ground again until my time came to be lowered in my coffin. “Hit it with your axe, Snorri. The way of the North!”
“There’s got to be some way of releasing him . . .” Kara started to walk around the sides of the cubicle as if the glass would yield more information on closer inspection.
I left her to it and glanced over at the time-locked corpse to make sure it hadn’t moved. I walked over to the doorway. If something the völva touched set the great metal disc swinging in on its hinges I would be the first to tumble out before the gap sealed. I stood beside the wall, had a yawn, scratched my nethers, and glanced at the corpse again. Still in the same position . . .
Kara had resorted to incantations, run out of those, and was swearing softly in Old Norse by the time I spotted the little silver buttons on the inner surface of the vault door, a grid of nine of them near the middle. I waited a while. She set her palms to the invisible surface that surrounded Taproot, closed her eyes, and began to concentrate, eyes screwed tight. After two minutes I could see the sweat on her forehead, like beads of blood in the pulsing red light. Another minute and she was trembling with the effort.
“Hruga uskit’r!” Kara threw up her hands. “Give me the damn axe.” She reached for Hel, and Snorri moved it out of her reach.
“Or we could just push these buttons,” I said. And reached to jab three at once.
“No!” Kara’s shout to start with, Snorri’s rising over her.
Too late to stop me, though. The lights went out, leaving us in total darkness. A moment later a noise that could only be the door swinging closed sounded just next to me, a dull and heavy clunk with as much finality as any judge’s death sentence ever held.
“Ohgodwe’reallgoingtodiedownhere!” The words escaped me in a breath.
“Jal!” A sharp reprimand from Kara, protective of her young charge.
“You don’t have the key?” Snorri asked in an even voice. “Without the key I’ll agree, we might well all die down here.”
“The key!” I reached for Loki’s black little blessing, feeling over my chest for the lump of it beneath my jerkin. My moment of relief proved short-lived. Nothing! “It’s somewhere. I put it somewhere!” Fear-blunted fingers began a wild search.
“Just wait!” Kara snapped. “I have the orichalcum. Let me get it out and we can see—”
“Got it!” I found the key. It had slid around on its thong and hung almost under my armpit. I pulled it out, lifted the thong over my head, and got a good grip on the key’s glassy surface. As my hand tightened about it a distant laughter, perhaps imagined, seemed to mock me from the dark. “Hurry up with that light!” I held the key before me like a weapon, ready to ward off any unseen horrors, and stepped forward, swinging it. Somehow I’d managed to lose my bearings and the twenty-ton door was proving elusive.
Something ahead of me made a soft thump on the floor. I froze. Silence, save for Kara’s muttered cursing in Old Norse again as she hunted her skirts for the orichalcum.
“What’s that stink?” Snorri sniffed. “It smells like the hold of a longship in high summer.”
I could smell it too. I had to pat myself to make sure it wasn’t something those moments of blind terror had squeezed out of me—but this was something even less pleasant than sewage. It put me in mind of the rear dungeons at the debtor prison in Umbertide. The stink of death.
“Ah!” Light blossomed from Kara’s hand, revealing the chamber once more.
The gleaming door stood behind me. Directly before me lay the remains of the rotting Builder corpse, now in a loose heap on the floor. I gagged and took a sharp step back.
“How did . . .”
“You unlocked him!” Hennan pointed at the key in my hand.
“Try it on Taproot.” Snorri nodded toward the doctor still frozen in his own moment.
I glanced back at the door, wanting to secure our exit first, but Snorri waved me on. I shrugged and advanced on Taproot. Kara and Hennan stepped aside to give me access. “Do what you did over there,” she said.
I jabbed the key at Taproot, expecting to hit something but feeling just empty air. “Well, it worked with the dead one . . .”
Kara frowned and reached out toward the motionless man in front of us. Her eyebrows lifted as her hand encountered no barrier. “I don’t understand.”
“He blinked!” A shout from Hennan at my side. “I saw him.”
Kara stepped forward, extending her reach and set her fingers to Taproot’s arm.
“Dear lady!” Taproot pulled his arm back and swept into a bow that she narrowly avoided by means of a quick retreat. “Delighted to meet you. Prince Jalan Kendeth! Snorri ver Snagason! An unexpected pleasure. And who is this young man? A likely-looking fellow to be sure.” He stepped smartly into the space vacated by Kara and out of the booth. “Now that is an interesting key, Prince Jalan!”
“What the hell are you doing down here, Taproot?” I waved my arm at our surroundings in case he might have missed them.
“Ah.” He frowned and glanced across our number again. “Trapped by a witch. Minding my own business one moment and hexed the next. Happens to the best of us.” Stepping past me with the fluid motion of an eel, Dr. Taproot angled for the door.
“We have a box with your image in it.” Kara interposed herself. “That image directed us here—”
“That’s right!” I raised my voice above hers, strug-gling to regain control of the conversation. “A little talking you. Younger, and speaking a lot of nonsense, but it said you were in danger and told us to come here.”
“Really?” Taproot turned to peer at me as if I might be unwell. “A tiny me? Sounds like more witchcraft. I was trapped though, so you’ve been an enormous help. Now, if we could just get out of here—”
“You were in the Builder box, Taproot?” I made it a question.
“Yes, yes.” Somehow he slipped between me and Kara and reached the door.
“You’re a Builder,” Hennan said. The words managed to stop Taproot where physical obstruction had failed. He froze, one hand halfway to the button pad at the centre of the door.
“Don’t children have the strangest notions?” Taproot spun on a heel and faced us all, a wide smile on his narrow face.
“You were in Gholloth’s court when my grandmother was younger than Hennan, and you’re scarcely changed,” I said.
“I have a common type of face. People are always mistaking me for . . .” Taproot slumped, his animation vanishing mid-sentence. “Well, you caught me. Knowledge is power. What do you plan to do with your power, Prince Jalan?”
I opened my mouth but no words came. I’d thought I was the one asking the difficult questions.
“You sleep years away here?” Kara pointed to the glass-walled cubicle Taproot had emerged from.
“Decades, madam. Once I spent a century in stasis. But I like to get out and about most generations, even if it’s just for a week or two. In more interesting times I’ll spend a few years topside, even take up a job maybe.”
“To what end?” Snorri’s first words since Taproot came back to life.
“Ah, Master Snagason, good question.”
“And why,” I interrupted, “don’t you say ‘watch me’ any more?”
“A less good question, Prince Jalan, but still valid. Watch me!” A grin spasmed across his face. “An affectation. People remember such things long after they forget a face. It helps to adopt some quirk for each of my ventures into main time. If I stumble across some long-lived individual who has met me on a previous emergence they are more easily convinced that any resemblance is coincidental if the quirk has gone, replaced by something different.” Again the grin. “I do worry that I overplay them sometimes. In your great-great-grandfather’s employ I was an ear-puller. Watch me!” His hand came sharply to his ear and made a slow retreat, pulling the lobe between finger and thumb.
“To what end do you visit us?” Snorri repeated.
“Dogged! Dogged he is! Watch me!” Taproot spun to look up at the Northman. “I observe. I guide. I do what little I can to help. I wasn’t chosen for this task—fate’s fickle finger came to rest upon me on the Day of a Thousand Suns and I survived. I do what I can here and there . . .”
“And yet, when disaster threatens, here you are back in your hideyhole,” Kara said. “Did you think to sleep another hundred years and escape the second Ragnarok?”
Taproot’s hands began his reply ahead of his mouth, signing their disagreement into the air between them. “Madam, there will be no hiding to be had if the Wheel turns past omega. Time itself will burn.” He brushed at invisible nothings on the chest of his broad-collared shirt. “I came here to talk to the deepnet. Primitive, I know, but these days the mountain must go to Mohammed. When I tried to leave the upper door was jammed and the exterior sensors were dead. Satellite feed indicated an explosion of some sort. I hadn’t brought any food down with me so I had little choice other than to put out a distress call then go into stasis and wait to see if help came.” He spread his hands. “And here you are!”
“I understood about half of that,” I lied. “But the main thing seems to be: you’re a Builder and you’re going to save the world so I don’t have to go to Osheim. Right?”
“Would it were so, Prince Jalan.” Taproot’s eyes seemed drawn by the key in my hand. “My people didn’t prove themselves particularly adept at saving the world though, did they? The IKOL Project was ill-conceived and its ramifications were not fully understood. The technology required to reach the control room safely is no longer available, and once there decommissioning the project is essentially an impossible task. Even at the time it would not have been just a matter of switching a dial to ‘off’. With the transition so advanced it would require a whole new science to accomplish. The original staff might have succeeded given a decade of research. Maybe not even then. And they were the people who designed it, who understood the theory better than anyone on the planet.” He looked wistful, as if overburdened by memory.
“This could do it?” I held up the key, reclaiming his attention. “A god made it.”
Taproot cocked his head, staring at Loki’s key. He frowned and reached into a pocket for a lens held in a silver hoop. Holding it to his eye, he leaned forward for a close inspection. “The one who made this gave me my first job.” He straightened with a smile. “A remarkable piece of work.” He looked around at us again. “It’s clever. Very clever . . . It’s possible. Not likely. But possible. How are you going to get it there?”
“We walk,” Snorri said.
“Ride,” I said. I’d done enough walking to last a lifetime.
Dr. Taproot’s face fell. The change would have been comical if it didn’t bode so poorly for me. “You’ve no help? No plan?”
“The plan appears to be walking to the Wheel and turning off the engines that drive it,” I said, my voice sour. “Do you think it would be more of a one-man job, Taproot?”
“One, one thousand, it makes little difference.” His hands returned to the wrestling they’d been caught in during his stasis. “Your dreams are what will tear you apart. Every man is the victim of his own imagination: we all carry the seeds of our own destruction.” He tapped a long finger to his forehead. “It feeds on your fears.”
“So we need another plan . . . We need to—”
“There is no other plan.” Snorri cut me off. “Taproot has watched a thousand years go by. His people built Osheim, made this happen. The ancient machines speak their secrets to him. And he hasn’t stopped the slow roll of this world into oblivion.”
“It’s true.” Taproot hugged himself. “Go to Osheim. Perhaps the key . . .” A tremor ran through the chamber. “We should go.”
I was already at the door, Loki’s key pressed to the button pad. “Open!”
The heavy valve slid back without a whisper.
“Well that’s encouraging.” Taproot at my side. “That is no simple lock.”
We stepped aside to let Kara and Hennan through. I would claim chivalry but the truth is she held the light. I took a last glance at the room as shadows reclaimed it. The rotting horror of the dead Builder’s head watched us go.
“I could have sworn . . .” That it had been looking the other way when it first fell. I followed hard on Snorri’s heels, cursing him to hurry. Once through I held the key to the button pad on the outside and commanded the door to close.
Kara and Hennan were already climbing, an island of light above us. “Go on.” I slapped Snorri’s shoulder. “If the kid falls you can catch him.”
I took the opportunity to plead my case alone with Taproot in the gloom at the bottom of the handholds. “Look, I can’t go to Osheim. You said it feeds on fears. Christ, I’m all fear. Fear and bones. That’s all I’ve got. I’m the worst person to send—the absolute worst. You should go with Snorri. Look, I’ll just give you the key and—”
“I have other things to do. The data-echoes in the deepnet—”
“What?”
He drew in a sigh. “There are Builder ghosts in machines beneath the earth. They too will be destroyed if the Wheel turns too far. They can’t stop the Wheel’s engines safely but the engines only turn the Wheel because we use the power it gives us. They can’t stop the engines but they can stop what’s driving those engines on.”
That sounded depressingly familiar. Grandmother had said something similar. “Us?”
“Yes. There is a faction—a faction growing in strength—that wants to use the remaining nuclear arsenal to wipe out humanity. Without people to exercise the . . . to use magic, the Wheel should stop turning.”
“What can you do?” The Kendeth ghost that Garyus had summoned from the box had spoken of this. I had hoped he was lying.
“I can talk to them. Gather evidence. Politic. Delay. And that delay is only useful if someone else acts in it.”
I reached up and found a handhold in the dark. “All I’m saying is that pretty much anyone would be a better choice for this than me.” I started to climb.
“Fear is a necessary metric without which the modelling of risk and consequence would serve no purpose.”
“What?” He’d gone back to talking nonsense.
“No man is without fears, Prince Jalan. The key is designed to unlock things. If it has gathered you four together then perhaps you’re the best chance we have to unlock Osheim.”
That made a kind of sense. I chewed on it as I climbed. By the top I’d lost the thread and was more concerned with the ache in my arms and the business of not falling.