Alone, Rashmika rode an elevator back down into the Lady Morwenna, closing her eyes against the stained- glass light, forcing concentration. Thoughts crashed through her head: Quaiche was dead; the surgeon-general was dead. Quaiche had ordered the Cathedral Guard not to let anyone leave until he reached the holdfast, or until thirty minutes before the Lady Morwenna was due to fall over the western limit of the bridge. And the scrimshaw suit was to remain aboard: he had been very specific about that. But the suit was heavy and cumbersome: even if the guards could be persuaded to let them take it, they would need more than thirty minutes to get it off the cathedral. They might even need more time than the handful of hours they had left before the cathedral ceased to exist.
Perhaps, she thought, it was time to make a deal with the shadows, here and now. Even they must see that she had no other choice, no way of saving their envoy. She had done the best she could, hadn’t she? If they had information regarding what Rashmika and her allies needed to do to allow the other shadows to cross over, then they would lose nothing by giving it to her now.
The elevator came to a clanging halt. Gingerly, Rashmika slid aside the trellised gate. She still had to move through the interior of the cathedral, retracing the route along which Grelier and the dean had brought her. Then she would have to find the other elevator that would take her to the high levels of the Clocktower. And she would have to do all this while avoiding any contact with the remaining elements of the Cathedral Guard.
She stepped out of the elevator. Anxious to conserve suit air for when she really needed it, she slid up her visor. The cathedral had never been this quiet before. She could still hear the labouring of the engines, but even that seemed muted now. There was no choir, no voices raised in prayer, no solemn processions of footsteps.
Her heart quickened. The cathedral was already deserted. The Cathedral Guard must have left already, during the commotion on the landing stage. If that was the case, all she had to do was find her mother and Vasko and hope that the scrimshaw suit was still in a communicative frame of mind.
She orientated herself using the designs in the stained-glass windows as a reference, and set off towards the Clocktower. But she had barely taken a step when two officers of the Cathedral Guard emerged from an annexe, pointing weapons at her. They had their helmets on, visors down, pink plumes hanging from their crests.
‘Please,’ Rashmika said, ‘let me through. All I want is to reach my friends.’
‘Stay where you are,’ said one of the guards, training his gun on the flickering indices of her life-support tabard. He nodded to his partner. ‘Secure her.’
His companion shouldered his gun and reached for something on his belt.
‘The dean is dead,’ Rashmika said. ‘The cathedral is about to be smashed to pieces. You should leave, now, while you still can.’
‘We have orders,’ the guard said, while his partner pushed her against a slab of stonework.
‘Don’t you understand?’ she asked. ‘It’s all over now. Everything has changed. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Bind her. And if you can shut her up, do that as well.’
The guard moved to slide her visor down. Rashmika started to protest, wanting to fight but knowing she didn’t have the strength. But even as she struggled, she saw something lurch from the shadows behind the guard holding the gun.
A flicker of a moving blade flashed through her peripheral vision. The guard made a guttural sound, his gun dropping to the floor.
The other one started to react, springing away from Rashmika and making an effort to bring his own weapon around. Rashmika kicked him, her boot catching him in the knee. He stumbled back into the masonry, still fumbling for the gun. The vacuum-suited pig crossed the distance to him, slid the silver gleam of his knife into the man’s abdomen and then dragged it upwards through his sternum in one smooth arc.
Scorpio killed the knife, slipped it back into its sheath. Firmly but gently, he pushed Rashmika into the shadows, where the two of them crouched together.
She pushed her visor up again, surprised at the harshness of her own breathing.
‘Thanks, Scorp.’
‘You know who I am? After all this time?’
‘You left your mark,’ she said, between breaths. She reached and touched his hand with hers. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Had to drop in, didn’t I?’
She waited until her breathing had settled down. ‘Scorp — was that you, with the bridge?’
‘Had my trademark on it, did it?’ He pushed his own visor up and smiled. ‘Yes. How else was I going to get them to stop this thing?’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘It was a good idea, too. Shame about the bridge, but—’
‘But?’
‘The cathedral can’t stop, Scorp. It’s going over.’
He seemed to take this as only a minor adjustment to his world view. ‘Then we’d better get off it as soon as we can. Where are the others?’
‘Up the Clocktower, in the dean’s garret. They’re under guard.’
‘We’ll get them out,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’
‘And the suit, Scorp? The thing I came all this way to find?’
‘We need to have a word about that,’ he said.
FIFTY
They rode the elevator up to the garret, the low sun sliding colours across their faces.
Scorpio reached into his suit pocket. ‘Remontoire gave me this,’ he said.
Rashmika took the piece of conch material, examined it with the cautious, critical eye of someone who has lived amongst fossils and bones and who knows that the slightest scratch can speak volumes — both truthful and false.
‘I don’t recognise it,’ she said.
He told her everything that he had learned from Remontoire, everything that Remontoire had guessed or conjectured.
‘We’re not alone in this,’ Scorpio said. ‘There’s someone else out there. We don’t even have a name for them. We only know them from the wreckage they leave behind.’
‘They left this behind on Ararat?’
‘And around Ararat,’ he said. ‘And elsewhere, you can bet. Whoever they are, they must have been out there a long time. They’re clever, Aura.’ He used her real name deliberately. ‘They’d have to be, to have lived with the Inhibitors for so long.’
‘I don’t understand what they have to do with us.’
‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. ‘Maybe everything. It depends on what happened to the scuttlers. That’s where you come in, I think.’
Her voice was flat as she said, ‘Everyone knows what happened to the scuttlers.’
‘Which is?’
‘They were destroyed by the Inhibitors.’
He watched the colours paint her face. She looked radiant and dangerous, like an avenging angel in an illuminated heretical gospel. ‘And what do you think?’
‘I don’t think the Inhibitors had anything to do with the extinction of the scuttlers. I never have: not since I started paying attention, at least. It didn’t look like an Inhibitor cull to me. Too much was left behind. It was thorough, don’t get me wrong, but not thorough enough.’ She paused, cast her face down as if embarrassed. ‘That was what my book was about: the one I was working on when I lived in the badlands. It was a thesis, proving my hypothesis through the accumulation of data.’
‘No one would have listened to you,’ he said. ‘But if it’s any consolation, I think you’re right. The question is: what did the shadows have to do with any of this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When we came here, we thought it was simple. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: that the scuttlers
