communicate with the Allsoul.
‘So you’re telling me that there’s a building full of women who haven’t even seen a man in years?’ Frey had demanded to know.
‘What I’m telling you is that your cunning disguise is going to be pretty useless in there, since there shouldn’t be a male Speaker within twenty kloms of that hermitage,’ said Crake. ‘However, it’s interesting that you jumped to the other conclusion first. I never pegged you as a glass-half-full kind of person.’
‘Well, a man must make the best of things,’ Frey replied, already envisioning a pleasant death by sexual exhaustion, after being brutally abused by dozens of rampant adolescent beauties.
So Frey had discarded the uniform. Pinn found it later and had been wearing it ever since, for a joke, pretending to be an Awakener. It was funny for the first few hours, but Pinn, encouraged, had carried the joke far past its natural end and now it was just annoying. Frey wouldn’t be surprised if Malvery had beaten him up and burned the robe by the time he got back. He rather hoped so.
He found two small doors, recessed in alcoves, but the Awakeners who ran the hermitage were sensible enough to keep them locked. He considered breaking a window, but they were set high up in the wall and were very narrow. He wouldn’t want to get stuck in one. Finally he found the entrance to a storm cellar which looked as if it led under the house. Hurricanes were frequent in these parts. A padlock secured a thick chain, locking the doors to the cellar. Both were stout and new. It looked like it would take a lot of sawing and hammering to get through that. An intruder would certainly be caught before they gained access.
Frey drew his cutlass and touched its tip to the lock.
‘Think you can?’ he asked it. He didn’t really believe it could understand him, but as ever, it seemed to know his intention. He felt it begin to vibrate in his hands. A thin, quiet whine came from the metal. Soon it was joined by another note, setting up a weird, off-key harmonic that set Frey’s teeth on edge. The lock began to jitter and shake.
Suddenly, by its own accord, the cutlass swept up and down, smashing into the lock. The shackle broke away from the padlock and the chain slithered free. The blade itself was unmarked by the impact. Frey hadn’t even felt the jolt up his sword arm.
He regarded the daemon-thralled cutlass that Crake had given him as the price of his passage. Best deal he ever made, he reckoned, as he sheathed it again.
He climbed into the storm cellar before anyone came to investigate the noise. Steps led down to a lit room, from which he could hear the growl and rattle of machinery. He slipped inside, shut the cellar door behind him, and crept onward into the hermitage.
Fourteen
Frey stepped warily into the dim electric glow of smoke-grimed bulbs. The room at the bottom of the stairs was the powerhouse of the hermitage, dominated by a huge old generator that whined and screeched and shook. It took Frey a while to persuade himself that the ancient machine wasn’t in imminent danger of detonation, but in the end logic triumphed over instinct. Since it had obviously been running for fifty years or more, the idea that it would explode just as he was passing would be such incredible bad luck that even Frey couldn’t believe it would happen.
Pipes ran from the generator to several water boilers and storage batteries, linking them to the central mass like the legs of some bloated mechanical spider. The air pounded with the unsteady rhythm of the generator and everything stank of prothane fumes. Frey’s head began to swim unpleasantly.
He crept forward, his cutlass held ready. He always preferred blades in close quarters. The powerhouse was shadowy and full of dark corners and aisles from which someone could emerge and surprise him. He hadn’t discounted the possibility that he might run into a mechanic down here, or maybe even a guard, although they’d need lungs like engines to breathe these fumes for long.
The generator banged noisily and he shied away, threatening it with the tip of his cutlass. When nothing calamitous happened, he relaxed
