‘Which I’ll reveal in due course,’ Childe said. ‘Just bear with me, will you? You two aren’t the only ones I’ve gathered together.’
Presently we arrived somewhere.
It was a cave in the form of a near-perfect hemisphere, the great domed roof arching a clear three hundred metres from the floor. We were obviously well below Yellowstone’s surface now. It was even possible that we had passed beyond the city’s crater wall, so that above us lay only poisonous skies.
But the domed chamber was inhabited.
The roof was studded with an enormous number of lamps, flooding the interior with synthetic daylight. An island stood in the middle of the chamber, moated by a ring of uninviting water. A single bone-white bridge connected the mainland to the island, shaped like a great curved femur. The island was dominated by a thicket of slender, dark poplars partly concealing a pale structure situated near its middle.
Childe brought the volantor to a rest near the edge of the water and invited us to disembark.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, once I had stepped down.
‘Query the city and find out for yourself,’ Trintignant said.
The result was not what I was expecting. For a moment there was a shocking absence inside my head, the neural equivalent of a sudden, unexpected amputation.
The Doctor’s chuckle was an arpeggio played on a pipe organ. ‘We have been out of range of city services from the moment we entered his conveyance.’
‘You needn’t worry,’ Childe said. ‘You are beyond city services, but only because I value the secrecy of this place. If I imagined it’d have come as a shock to you, I’d have told you already.’
‘I’d have at least appreciated a warning, Roland,’ I said.
‘Would it have changed your mind about coming here?’
‘Conceivably.’
The echo of his laughter betrayed the chamber’s peculiar acoustics. ‘Then are you at all surprised that I didn’t tell you?’
I turned to Trintignant. ‘What about you?’
‘I confess my use of city services has been as limited as your own, but for rather different reasons.’
‘The good Doctor needed to lie low,’ Childe said. ‘That meant he couldn’t participate very actively in city affairs. Not if he didn’t want to be tracked down and assassinated.’
I stamped my feet, beginning to feel cold. ‘Good. What now?’
‘It’s only a short ride to the house,’ Childe said, glancing towards the island.
Now a noise came steadily nearer. It was an antiquated, rumbling sound, accompanied by a odd, rhythmic sort of drumming, quite unlike any machine I had experienced. I looked towards the femoral bridge, suspecting as I did that it was exactly what it looked like: a giant, bio-engineered bone, carved with a flat roadbed. And something was approaching us over the span: a dark, complicated and unfamiliar contraption, which at first glance resembled an iron tarantula.
I felt the back of my neck prickle.
The thing reached the end of the bridge and swerved towards us. Two mechanical black horses provided the motive power. They were emaciated black machines with sinewy, piston-driven limbs, venting steam and snorting from intakes. Malignant red laser-eyes swept over us. The horses were harnessed to a four-wheeled carriage slightly larger than the volantor, above which was perched a headless humanoid robot. Skeletal hands gripped iron control cables which plunged into the backs of the horses’ steel necks.
‘Meant to inspire confidence, is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s an old family heirloom,’ Childe said, swinging open a black door in the side of the carriage. ‘My uncle Giles made automata. Unfortunately — for reasons we’ll come to — he was a bit of a miserable bastard. But don’t let it put you off.’
He helped us aboard, then climbed inside himself, sealed the door and knocked on the roof. I heard the mechanical horses snort; alloy hooves hammered the ground impatiently. Then we were moving, curving around and ascending the gentle arc of the bridge of bone.
‘Have you been here during the entire period of your absence, Mister Childe?’ Trintignant asked.
He nodded. ‘Ever since that family business came up, I’ve allowed myself the occasional visit back to the city — just like I did today — but I’ve tried to keep such excursions to a minimum.’
‘Didn’t you have horns the last time we met?’ I said.
He rubbed the smooth skin of his scalp where the horns had been. ‘Had to have them removed. I couldn’t very well disguise myself otherwise.’
We crossed the bridge and navigated a path between the tall trees which sheltered the island’s structure. Childe’s carriage pulled up to a smart stop in front of the building and I was afforded my first unobstructed view of our destination. It was not one to induce great cheer. The house’s architecture was haphazard: whatever basic symmetry it might once have had was lost under a profusion of additions and modifications. The roof was a jumbled collision of angles and spires, jutting turrets and sinister oubliettes. Not all of the embellishments had been arranged at strict right angles to their neighbours, and the style and apparent age of the house varied jarringly from place to place. Since our arrival in the cave the overhead lights had dimmed, simulating the onset of dusk, but only a few windows were illuminated, clustered together in the left-hand wing. The rest of the house had a forbidding aspect, the paleness of its stone, the irregularity of its construction and the darkness of its many windows suggesting a pile of skulls.
Almost before we had disembarked from the carriage, a reception party emerged from the house. It was a troupe of servitors — humanoid household robots, of the kind anyone would have felt comfortable with in the city proper — but they had been reworked to resemble skeletal ghouls or headless knights. Their mechanisms had been sabotaged so that they limped and creaked, and they had all had their voiceboxes disabled.
‘Had a lot of time on his hands, your uncle,’ I said.
‘You’d have loved Giles, Richard. He was a scream.’
‘I’ll take your word for it, I think.’
The servitors escorted us into the central part of the house, then took us through a maze of chill, dark corridors.
Finally we reached a large room walled in plush red velvet. A holoclavier sat in one corner, with a book of sheet music spread open above the projected keyboard. There was a malachite escritoire, a number of well-stocked bookcases, a single chandelier, three smaller candelabra and two fireplaces of distinctly Gothic appearance, in one of which roared an actual fire. But the room’s central feature was a mahogany table, around which three additional guests were gathered.
‘Sorry to keep everyone waiting,’ Childe said, closing a pair of sturdy wooden doors behind us. ‘Now. Introductions.’
The others looked at us with no more than mild interest.
The only man amongst them wore an elaborately ornamented exoskeleton: a baroque support structure of struts, hinged plates, cables and servo-mechanisms. His face was a skull papered with deathly white skin, shading to black under his bladelike cheekbones. His eyes were concealed behind goggles, his hair a spray of stiff black dreadlocks.
Periodically he inhaled from a glass pipe, connected to a miniature refinery of bubbling apparatus placed before him on the table.
‘Allow me to introduce Captain Forqueray,’ Childe said. ‘Captain — this is Richard Swift and… um, Doctor Trintignant.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, leaning across the table to shake Forqueray’s hand. His grip felt like the cold clasp of a squid.
‘The Captain is an Ultra; the master of the lighthugger Apollyon, currently in orbit around Yellowstone,’ Childe added.
Trintignant refrained from approaching him.
‘Shy, Doctor?’ Forqueray said, his voice simultaneously deep and flawed, like a cracked bell.
‘No, merely cautious. It is a matter of common knowledge that I have enemies amongst the Ultras.’
