manifestation of demonic foulness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.
‘Live machinery,’ Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.
From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.
Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.
‘They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.’
Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.
‘I’ll try to lever it off,’ Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.
Clavain opened his eyes. ‘It won’t work.’
With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.
It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.
Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.
‘Scorp, pick it up.’
He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.
‘No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be careful: she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.’
‘I can’t do this, Nevil.’
‘You have to. It’s killing me.’
The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.
He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.
‘Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.’
‘I’ll kill you.’
‘No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.’ Clavain paused. ‘I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it.
Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.
Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to the fabric of the sleeve.
He looked into Clavain’s face. ‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Scorp. Now. As a friend.
Scorpio pushed the knife down. He felt no resistance as it ghosted through fabric, flesh and bone.
Half a second later the work was done. The severed hand — Scorpio had cut it off just above the wrist — dropped to the ice with a solid whack. With a moan Clavain slumped back against the wall, losing whatever strength he had mustered until then. He’d told Scorpio that he had blocked all pain signals, but some residual message must have reached his brain: either that or what Scorpio heard was a moan of desperate relief.
Jaccottet knelt down by Clavain, unhitching a medical kit from his belt. Clavain had been right: there was very little in the way of blood loss from the wound. He held the truncated forearm against his belly, pressing it tight, while Jaccottet prepared a dressing.
There was a rustle of movement from the hand. The black machines were detaching themselves, breaking free of the remaining flesh. They moved hesitantly, as if sapped of the energy they had drawn from the warmth of living bodies. The mass of cubes oozed away from the hand, slowed and then halted, becoming just another part of the dormant growth that filled the ship. The hand lay there, the flesh a contused landscape of recent bruises and older age spots, yet still largely intact save for the eroded stubs of the fingertips, which had been consumed down to the first joint.
Scorpio made the knife stop shivering and put it on the ground. ‘I’m sorry, Nevil.’
‘I’ve lost it once already,’ Clavain said. ‘It really doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m grateful that you did what you had to do.’ Then he leant back against the wall and closed his eyes for another few seconds. His breathing was sharply audible and irregular. It sounded like someone making inexpert saw cuts.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ Scorpio asked Clavain, eyeing the severed hand.
Clavain did not respond.
‘I don’t know enough about Conjoiners to say how much shock he can take,’ Jaccottet said, keeping his voice low, ‘but I know this man needs rest and a lot of it. He’s old, for a start, and no one’s been around to fine-tune all those machines in his blood. It might be hitting him a lot worse than we think.’
‘We have to move on,’ Khouri said.
‘She’s right,’ Clavain said, stirring again. ‘Here, someone help me to my feet. Losing a hand didn’t stop me last time; it won’t now.’
‘Wait a moment,’ Jaccottet said, finishing off the emergency dressing.
‘You need to stay here, Nevil,’ Scorpio said.
‘If I stay here, Scorp, I
Scorpio eased him to his feet. He stood unsteadily, still holding the bandaged stump against his belly.
‘I still think you’d be better off waiting here,’ Scorpio said.
‘Scorp, we’re all staring hypothermia in the face. If I can feel it, so can you. Right now the only thing that’s holding it off is adrenalin and movement. So I suggest we
Scorpio glanced down at the ground. ‘What about the hand?’ ‘Leave it. They can grow me a new one.’
They followed the draught of cold towards the front portion of Skade’s wrecked ship.
‘Is it me,’ Khouri said, ‘or has the music just changed?’
‘It’s changed,’ Clavain said. ‘But it’s still Bach.’
TWENTY
Rashmika watched the icejammer being winched down to the rolling ribbon of road. There was a scuff of ice as the skis touched the surface. On the icejammer’s roof, the two suited men unhitched the hooks and rode them
