traitor. I hadn't been sure she was up to it, but she had performed with patience and a finely gauged measure of play-acting. It had been a risk, letting her slip in to see Pontius alone. She had assured me she could do it and she had not been wrong.
The Necroteuch. If Pontius Glaw was telling the truth, our enterprise had even greater urgency now. I had wondered what could be so precious, so important as to galvanise our enemies so, make them risk so much. I had my answer. Legend said the last extant copy of that abominable work had been destroyed millennia before. Except that by some means, in antique ages past, a copy had come into the hands of the
saruthi race. And now they were preparing to trade it back to Glaw's Imperial heretics.
We came down through the clouds and saw the land below, a wide, rolling expanse of dust sweeping down to what seemed to be a sea. Liquid frothed and broke along a curved shoreline a hundred kilometres long. Everything was a shade of pale green, bathed by the radiance that glowed through the wispy clouds. There was a misty softness to it all, a lack of sharp focus. It seemed endless, toneless, slow. There was a calm, ethereal feel that was at once soothing and unnerving. Even the lapping sea seemed languid. It reminded me of the seacoast at Tralito, on Caelun Two, where I had spent a summer recuperating from injuries years before. Endless leagues of mica dunes, the slow sea, the balmy, hazy air.
'How big?' I asked Midas.
'Is what?' he asked.
This… place.'
He pointed to the instruments. 'Can't say. A hundred kilometres, two… three… a thousand.'
'You must have something!'
He looked round at me with a smile that had worry in it. 'Systems say it's endless. Which is, of course, impossible. So I think the instruments are out. I'm not trusting them, anyway.'
Then what are you flying by?'
'My eye – or the seat of my pants. Whichever you find most reassuring.'
We followed the slow curve of the endless bay for about ten minutes. At last, details emerged to break up the uniform anonymity.
A row of arches, octagonal, jutting from the sand a few hundred metres back from the waterline, ran parallel to the water. They were each about fifty metres broad, in everything but scale the twins of the arches Maxilla had guided the
'Set us down.'
We sat the gun-cutter on the soft dusty-sand half a kilometre from the shore, clamped on our helmets and ventured out.
The radiance was greater than I had expected – the cutter's ports had been tinted – and we slid down brown-glass over-visors against the glare.
I hate vacuum suits. The sense of being muffled and constrained, the ponderous movement, the sound of my own breath in my ears, the sporadic click of the intercom. The suit shut out all sounds from outside, except the crunch of my feet on the fine, dry sand.
We shuffled down to the water's edge in a wide file. All of us except Aemos carried weapons.
It looked like a sea. Green water, showing white at the breakers.
'Liquid ammonia/ Aemos said, his voice a low crackle over the vox.
There was something strange about it.
'Do you see it?' he asked me.
What?'
'The waves are moving out from the shore.'
I looked again. It was so obvious, I had missed it. The liquid wasn't rushing in and breaking, it was sucking away from the shore and rolling back into itself.
It was chilling. So simple. So wrong. My confidence withered. I wanted to strip off the claustrophobic suit and cry out. And I would have, except for the stark red warning lights on the atmosphere reader built into my suit's bulky left cuff.
What was it Maxilla had said? The saruthi had tormented the men of the Promethean? I didn't know for a moment if the unnatural behaviour of the sea was their doing – how could it have been? But I understood how insidious, distressing torment might have played upon them.
Fischig and Betancore had approached the first of the arches. I looked across and saw them dwarfed by the unsymmetrical structure. The next in the line was three hundred metres away, and they seemed regularly spaced. Each one, as far as I could see, was irregular in a different way, though the size and proportions were identical.
Bequin was kneeling on the shoreline, brushing the sand aside gently with her gauntlet. She had found what was perhaps the most distressing detail so far.
Under the sand, a few centimetres down, the ground was tiled. Tessellated, irregular octagonal tiles, just like the ones she had found on the floor of the mine working at North Qualm. Once more, they fitted perfectly, impossibly, despite their shape.
The more of them she uncovered, the more she brushed the sand away.
'Stop it/ I said. 'For our sanity, I don't think it's worth trying to discover if they cover the entire beach/
'Can all of this… be artificial?' she asked.
'It can't be/ said Aemos. 'Perhaps the tiles and the arches are part of some old structure, long abandoned, that has since been flooded and covered with the dust… due to… to…'
He didn't sound at all convincing.
I crossed to Fischig and Betancore and stood with them gazing up at the first arch. It was wrought from that odd, unknown metal we had seen on Damask.
What do we do know?' Fischig asked.
'Well, I hate to state the obvious/ said Aemos from down the beach, 'but the last row of these we found formed a deliberate pathway that led the
I stepped forward, through the broad, towering shape of the first arch. 'Come on/1 said.
We walked for what I estimated was perhaps twenty minutes. Estimated. All of our chronometers were dead. After the first few minutes we began to
hear a distant, repetitive boom; a low, almost sub-sonic peal like thunder that rolled out from somewhere far away over the sea. Or seemed to. It came every half minute or so. There were long intervals of silence, and just when we'd thought we'd heard the last, another boom would come. Like the crunch of our own footsteps, we could hear it through the suits, even with our vox circuits switched off.
I voxed to Maxilla. 'Can you hear that?'
There was a crackle, and no immediate reply. Then a sudden burst of transmission. Maxilla's voice:'… as you instruct, Gregor, but it's not going to be easy. Say again… what did you say about Fischig?'
'Maxilla! Repeat!' I began, but his voice continued over the top, incoherent. It wasn't a reply. I was just picking up his voice. I felt my spine go cold.
More static.
Tell Alizebeth, I agree with that! Ha!'
It went dead.
I looked back at the others. Their pale faces gazed out of the tinted brown faceplates like ghosts.
'What… was that?' I murmured.
