one of those periods when he began to build up immunity to his own blood viruses. He began to question the entire edifice of the religion he’d built around himself, which was painful for him, because without this religion the death of his beloved Morwenna becomes just another meaningless cosmic event.’
‘Be careful what you say,’ Quaiche said.
She ignored him. ‘During this crisis, he felt compelled to test the nature of a vanishing, using the tools of scientific enquiry normally banned by the church. He arranged for a probe to be fired into the face of Haldora during a vanishing.’
‘Must have called for some careful preparations,’ Grelier said. ‘A vanishing’s so brief—’
‘Not this one,’ Rashmika said. ‘The probe had an effect: it prolonged the vanishing by more than a second. Haldora is an illusion, nothing more: a piece of camouflage to hide a signalling mechanism. The camouflage has been failing, lately — that’s why the vanishings have been happening in the first place. The dean’s probe added additional stress, prolonging the vanishing. It was enough, wasn’t it, Dean?’
‘I have no…’
Grelier pulled out another vial — a smoky shade of green, this time — and held it over his master, pinched tight between thumb and forefinger. ‘Let’s stop mucking about, shall we? I’m convinced that she knows more than you’d like the rest of us to know, so will you please stop denying it?’
‘Tell him,’ Rashmika said.
Quaiche licked his lips: they were as pale and dry as bone. ‘She’s right,’ he said. ‘Why deny it now? The shadows are just a distraction.’ He tilted his head towards Vasko and Khouri. ‘I have your ship. Do you think I give a damn about anything else?’
The skin of Grelier’s fingers whitened around the vial. ‘Tell us,’ he hissed.
‘I sent a probe into Haldora,’ Quaiche said. ‘It prolonged the vanishing. In that extended glimpse I saw…
Rashmika turned and pointed towards the suit. ‘He keeps it in that.’
Grelier’s eyes narrowed. ‘The scrimshaw suit?’
‘Morwenna died in it,’ Quaiche said, picking his way through his words like someone crossing a minefield. ‘She was crushed in it when our ship made an emergency sprint to Hela, to rescue me. The ship didn’t know that Morwenna couldn’t tolerate that kind of acceleration. It pulped her, turned her into red jelly, red jelly with bone and metal in it.
‘I’m sorry about what happened to her,’ Rashmika said.
‘I wasn’t like this before it happened,’ Quaiche said.
‘No one could have blamed you for her death.’
Grelier sneered. ‘Don’t let him fool you. He wasn’t exactly an angel before that happened.’
‘I was just a man with something bad in his blood,’ Quaiche said defensively, ‘just a man trying to make his way.’
Quietly, Rashmika said, ‘I believe you.’
‘You can read my face?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I just believe you. I don’t think you were a bad man, Dean.’
‘And now, after all that I’ve made happen? After what happened to your brother?’ There was, she heard, an audible crack of hope in his voice. This late in the day, this close to the crossing, he still craved absolution.
‘I said that I believed you, not that I was in a forgiving mood,’ she said.
‘The shadows,’ Grelier said. ‘You still haven’t told me what they are, or what they have to do with the suit.’
‘The suit is a holy relic,’ Rashmika said, ‘his one tangible link with Morwenna. In testing Haldora, he was also validating the sacrifice she’d made for him. That was why he put the receiving apparatus inside the suit: so that when the answer came, when he discovered whether or not Haldora was a miracle, it would be Morwenna who told him.’
‘And the shadows?’ Grelier asked.
‘Demons,’ Quaiche said.
‘Entities,’ Rashmika corrected. ‘Sentient beings trapped in a different universe, adjacent to this one.’
Grelier smiled. ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’
‘Listen to the rest,’ Vasko said. ‘She’s not lying. They’re real, and we need their help very badly.’
‘Their help?’ Grelier repeated.
‘They’re more advanced than us,’ Vasko said, ‘more advanced than any other culture in this galaxy. They’re the only things that are going to make a difference against the Inhibitors.’
‘And in return for this help, what do
‘They want to be let out,’ Rashmika said. ‘They want to be able to cross over into this universe. The thing in the suit — it’s not really the shadows, just a negotiating agent, like a piece of software — it knows what we have to do to let the rest of them through. It knows the commands we need to send to the Haldora machinery.’
‘The Haldora machinery?’ the surgeon-general asked.
‘Take a look for yourself,’ the dean said. The arrangement of mirrors had locked on to him again, beaming a shaft of focused light into his one good eye. ‘The vanishings have ended, Grelier. After all this time, I can see the holy machinery.’
FORTY-SIX
Glaur was alone, the only member of the technical staff left in the vaulted hall of Motive Power. The cathedral had recovered from the earlier disturbance; the klaxon had silenced, the emergency lights on the reactor had dimmed, and the motion of the rods and spars above his head had fallen back into their usual hypnotic rhythm. The floor swayed from side to side, but only Glaur had the hard-won acuity of balance to detect that. The motion was within normal limits, and to someone unfamiliar with the Lady Morwenna the floor would have felt rock steady, as if anchored to Hela.
Breathing heavily, he made his way around one of the catwalks that encircled the central core of turbines and generators. He felt the breeze as the whisking spars moved just above his head, but years of familiarity with the place meant that he no longer ducked unnecessarily.
He reached an anonymous, unremarkable-looking access panel. Glaur flipped the toggles that held the panel shut, then hinged it open above his head. Inside were the gleaming silver-blue controls of the lockout system: two enormous levers, with a single keyhole beneath each. The procedure had been simple enough: well rehearsed in many exercises using the dummy panel on the other side of the machine.
Glaur had inserted a key into one lock. Seyfarth had inserted his key into the corresponding hole. The keys had been engaged simultaneously, and then the two of them had pulled the levers as far as they would travel, in one smooth, synchronised movement. Things had clunked and whirred. All around the chamber there had been the chatter of relays as the normal control inputs were disconnected. Behind this one panel, Glaur knew, was an armoured clock ticking down the seconds from the moment the levers had been pulled. The levers had now moved through half of their travel: there were another twelve or thirteen hours before the relays would chatter again, restoring manual control.
Too long. In thirteen hours, there probably wouldn’t be a Lady Morwenna.
Glaur braced himself against the catwalk handrail, then positioned both gloved hands on the left-side handle. He squeezed down, applying as much force as he could muster. The handle didn’t budge: it felt as solid as if it had been welded into place, at exactly that angle. He tried the other, and then tried to pull both of them down at the same time. It was absurd: his own knowledge of the lockout system told him that it was engineered to resist a lot more interference than this. It was built to withstand a rioting gang, let alone one man. But he had to try, no matter how unlikely the chances of success.
Sweating, his breathing even more laboured, Glaur returned to the floor of Motive Power and gathered some
