Celestine looked at the only one of us still wearing one of the original suits. ‘They worked on Hirz.’
‘Must have been luck. But yes, you’re right. She couldn’t see as far as you, though, even with the modifiers.’
Celestine tapped the shunt in her wrist, still faintly visible beneath the tight-fitting fabric of her suit. ‘I took a spike of the modifiers as well.’
‘I doubt that it gave you much of an edge over what you already had.’
‘Maybe not.’ She paused. ‘Is there a point to this conversation, Richard?’
‘Not really,’ I said, stung by her response. ‘I just…’
‘Wanted to talk, yes.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘You can hardly blame me if I don’t, can you? This isn’t exactly the place for small talk, let alone with someone who chose to have me erased from his memory.’
‘Would it make any difference if I said I was sorry about that?’
I could tell from the tone of her response that my answer had not been quite the one she was expecting. ‘It’s easy to say you’re sorry, now… now that it suits you to say as much. That’s not how you felt at the time, is it?’
I fumbled for an answer which was not too distant from the truth. ‘Would you believe me if I said I’d had you suppressed because I still loved you, and not for any other reason?’
‘That’s just a little too convenient, isn’t it?’
‘But not necessarily a lie. And can you blame me for it? We were in love, Celestine. You can’t deny that. Just because things happened between us…’ A question I had been meaning to ask her forced itself to the front of my mind. ‘Why didn’t you contact me again, after you were told you couldn’t go to Resurgam?’
‘Our relationship was over, Richard.’
‘But we’d parted on reasonably amicable terms. If the Resurgam expedition hadn’t come up, we might not have parted at all.’
Celestine sighed; one of exasperation. ‘Well, since you asked, I did try and contact you.’
‘You did?’
‘But by the time I’d made my mind up, I learned about the way you’d had me suppressed. How do you imagine that made me feel, Richard? Like a small, disposable part of your past — something to be wadded up and flicked away when it offended you?’
‘It wasn’t like that at all. I never thought I’d see you again.’
She snorted. ‘And maybe you wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for dear old Roland Childe.’
I kept my voice level. ‘He asked me along because we both used to test each other with challenges like this. I presume he needed someone with your kind of Juggler transform. Childe wouldn’t have cared about our past.’
Her eyes flashed behind the visor of her helmet. ‘And you don’t care either, do you?’
‘About Childe’s motives? No. They’re neither my concern nor my interest. All that bothers me now is this.’
I patted the Spire’s thrumming floor.
‘There’s more here than meets the eye, Richard.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Haven’t you noticed how—’ She looked at me for several seconds, as if on the verge of revealing something, then shook her head. ‘Never mind.’
‘What, for pity’s sake?’
‘Doesn’t it strike you that Childe has been just a little too well prepared?’
‘I wouldn’t say there’s any such thing as being too well prepared for a thing like Blood Spire, Celestine.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’ She fingered the fabric of her skintight. ‘These suits, for instance. How did he know we wouldn’t be able to go all the way with the larger ones?’
I shrugged, a gesture that was now perfectly visible. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he learned a few things from Argyle, before he died.’
‘Then what about Doctor Trintignant? That ghoul isn’t remotely interested in solving the Spire. He hasn’t contributed to a single problem yet. And yet he’s already proved his value, hasn’t he?’
‘I don’t follow.’
Celestine rubbed her shunt. ‘These things. And the neural modifiers — Trintignant supervised their installation. And I haven’t even mentioned Forqueray’s arm, or the medical equipment aboard the shuttle.’
‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘I don’t know what leverage Childe’s used to get his co-operation — it’s got to be more than bribery or avarice — but I have a very, very nasty idea. And all of it points to something even more disturbing.’
I was wearying of this. With the challenge of the next door ahead of us, the last thing I needed was paranoiac theory-mongering.
‘Which is?’
‘Childe knows too much about this place.’
Another room, another wrong answer, another punishment.
It made the last look like a minor reprimand. I remembered a swift metallic flicker of machines emerging from hatches which opened in the seamless walls: not javelins now, but jointed, articulated pincers and viciously curved scissors. I remembered high-pressure jets of vivid arterial blood spraying the room like pink banners, the shards of shattered bone hammering against the walls like shrapnel. I remembered an unwanted and brutal lesson in the anatomy of the human body; the elegance with which muscle, bone and sinew were anchored to each other and the horrid ease with which they could be flensed apart — filleted — by surgically sharp metallic instruments.
I remembered screams.
I remembered indescribable pain, before the analgesics kicked in.
Afterwards, when we had time to think about what had happened, I do not think any of us thought of blaming Celestine for making another mistake. Childe’s modifiers had given us a healthy respect for the difficulty of what she was doing, and — as before — her second choice had been the correct one; the one that opened a route back to the Spire’s exit.
And besides…
Celestine had suffered as well.
It was Forqueray who had caught the worst of it, though. Perhaps the Spire, having tasted his blood once, had decided it wanted much more of it — more than could be provided by the sacrifice of a mere limb. It had quartered him: two quick opposed snips with the nightmarish scissors; a bisection followed an instant later by a hideous transection.
Four pieces of Forqueray had thudded to the Spire’s floor; his interior organs were laid open like a wax model in a medical school. Various machines nestled neatly amongst his innards, sliced along the same planes. What remained of him spasmed once or twice, then — with the exception of his replacement arm, which continued to twitch — he was mercifully still. A moment or two passed, and then — with whiplash speed — jointed arms seized his pieces and pulled him into the wall, leaving slick red skid-marks.
Forqueray’s death would have been bad enough, but by then the Spire was already inflicting further punishment.
I saw Celestine drop to the ground, one arm pressed around the stump of another, blood spraying from the wound despite the pressure she was applying. Through her visor her face turned ghostly.
Childe’s right hand was missing all the fingers. He pressed the ruined hand against his chest, grimacing, but managed to stay on his feet.
Trintignant had lost a leg. But there was no blood gushing from the wound; no evidence of severed muscle and bone. I saw only damaged mechanisms; twisted and snapped steel and plastic armatures; buzzing cables and stuttering optic fibres; interrupted feedlines oozing sickly green fluids.
Trintignant, nonetheless, fell to the floor.
I also felt myself falling, looking down to see that my right leg ended just below the knee; realising that my
