Part 39 (1/2)

~ 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 a.s.sault 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft 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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sages. 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed. He ducked in through an archway on the other side.