Storm Thief (25 page)

“Hold them back! Hold them
back
!” cried the commander to Bane's right.

A volley of aether cannon fire was turned on to the creatures that were once their own men. The Revenants had possessed the husks of the soldiers, and those who had escaped that fate were now forced to mow them down. The Taken fell silently, and from their bodies rose ghosts of energy that were obliterated by the soldiers' weapons before they could attack. But there were always more.

The Protectorate forces that had penetrated the Fulcrum had splintered into a disorganized mess. The panic induced by the skull-spheres had driven men in all different directions, through the many exits from the vast chamber where they had first been attacked. Bane had managed to keep his head better than most, due to the training that all Secret Police received to strengthen their minds against torture. He and his men had fled the chamber to the tunnels, which were more defensible. Once out of there and free of the skull-spheres' influence, they had organized and gathered what pieces of the Protectorate army they had come across. Though the situation was still desperate, they at least had a fighting chance now.

There had been talk of escape at first, but Bane had quashed that. There would be no escape. He held up the Fade-Science device that he had brought with him, the black stone full of tiny lights. It would guide them to the Chaos Engine. They were not leaving until the Engine was destroyed.

He was angry at Vago for deserting him. Part of the reason he had brought the golem was because he was the most effective weapon they had against the Revenants. But he had run off on some crazed vendetta of his own. Vago himself had warned Bane: he hadn't been properly conditioned yet. He had been taught to hate the ghetto folk but not to control that hate. The golem was entirely unstable.

He hadn't lost Finch, however. The thief-boy was still at his side. Bane was surprised that he hadn't tried to flee, even with the threat of the Persuader hanging over him. He may not have been much to look at, but his sheer ruthlessness and his devious nature evoked a kind of admiration in Bane. When they got through this, he would see that the boy was schooled in the ways of the Secret Police. It was unusual to take in ghetto folk, but not unheard of. It seemed a waste to squander talent like Finch's.

Finch hadn't been given a glimmer visor, but he was resourceful enough to have stolen one from somewhere. Since then, he had been sticking close to Bane. He had no weapon that was effective against Revenants, whereas Bane was a dead shot with an aether cannon.

They had made their way deeper and deeper into the Fulcrum, keeping to the narrower tunnels where they could put up an effective response to any Revenants that came their way. Casualties were steadily mounting, but Bane didn't care. If it got them to their target, then every sacrifice would be worth it.

Their route had taken them up stairs and ramps. The path was lit by recessed lights or hanging globes that floated along with them. At each level they encountered new resistance, but the soldiers were growing in confidence now, and the Revenants couldn't stop them.

“It's close,” Bane murmured. “It has to be close.”

“Revenants to the rear!” came the cry, and there was a great surge as a horde of possessed soldiers and energy ghosts swarmed around the corner. The back end of the Protectorate group retreated up the tunnel, firing. Someone bumped Finch and he tripped, crashing into Bane and knocking him over. The two of them scrambled together comically before Bane pulled himself free and got up. He glared at the thief-boy.

“Clumsy idiot!” he snarled.

Finch grinned at him. “Sorry, Chief,” he said, clearly not meaning it.

A salvo of aether shrieked down the tunnel, obliterating a dozen Revenants. Bane took a glance to be sure that the battle was under control and then pushed through the compressed mass of soldiers towards the front, where the vanguard was clearing tunnels ahead of them.

One of the commanders noticed him coming. “Something up ahead,” he said. Bane looked. There was a massive, narrow arch, and through it he could see a soft glow of shifting colours.

“Secure that arch,” he said. He checked his device, and felt a twinge of excitement as he saw that all the lights in its black depths were rushing towards that glow. The soldiers raced up the tunnel, taking position on either side, and Bane walked behind them until he could see what was beyond. He stared for a time, speechless; then he went slowly through, drawn in by amazement.

It was the Chaos Engine.

The sheer size of it took his breath away. He stood in the midst of the largest chamber he had ever seen, over which the great machine dominated all. The walls, of honeycombed greenish-black, were rounded and squeezed closer at the top, so that the chamber was shaped like a flower bulb. Sunlight came from overhead in a gauzy beam, cutting down through the layers of many-coloured mists. The mists swirled and rippled with the stirring of the air in the upper part of the chamber, clinging to the tip of the Chaos Engine like it was a pen nib leaking ink into water. They were akin to the colours produced by the probability storms, the same as that created by Moa's artefact. These were the colours of raw probability energy; the colours of change.

He stood on a walkway, one of three that entered the chamber from three identical archways. The walkway led across to a central spike which towered high above them, a needle of metal that bristled with complex technologies. There it joined the other walkways in a ring around the spike. There were control panels of some kind there, recessed in the metal. This was the brain of it, then. This was where the Faded had given it commands.

He went out towards the spike, ignoring the warning cries of the soldiers. Like a moth to a flame. He couldn't resist.

Most of the body of the Chaos Engine was below him, like a miniature city spread out across the whole chamber. It was a mass of tiny spires and unfamiliar shapes, cut through by glowing trenches. Blinking lights and banks of switches nestled close to racks of black spheres that crackled with aether. Gyroscopes rotated silently while darts of light like fireflies flashed between them. He was above it all, only the thin metal of the walkway between him and a dreadful drop.

It was the most complex, beautiful piece of machinery he had ever seen. The crowning glory of a forgotten people, able to affect reality itself. No technology that the Protectorate had could even hope to match this: it was so far beyond them that it was like magic. His heart swelled at the sight, the thought that one day
his
people might be able to invent something so grand. Given time. Given peace, and order.

He turned back to the arch, where the soldiers waited.

“Bring the explosives!” he called.

The elevator door opened with a chime, and Rail and Moa stepped out into the sunlight.

The room was irregularly shaped, with five walls of different lengths. The far wall, which was the longest, was open to the sky. Once, it had been covered by the folding mirrors of the Fulcrum, but now they had unfurled. One side of the room was taken up by a bank of panels covered in what they assumed were controls, but they had no idea what or how they would operate. In the centre was a sculpture of some kind, an arrangement of rods and spheres all in silver that stood on a pedestal.

Moa ignored the sculpture as she walked past, her eyes fixed on the sky, where thin trails of cloud drifted in a clear blue and the sun burned dazzlingly bright. Rail went with her, and together they stood on the edge, and looked out over the city. The door of the elevator slid quietly shut behind them.

They were near the top of the Fulcrum, and the view was unlike anything they had ever experienced. Only those dwellings that clung to the flanks of Orokos' lonely mountains were higher than they were. The whole western side of the city was spread out before them, paled by golden haze in the distance. They could see the glittering path of the West Artery, running straight to the lip of the plateau. They saw how it branched off into a thousand tiny canals on its way, that spread through the Territories like silver blood vessels. From up here, they could trace the walls between the districts that made the city a jigsaw. The great constructions of the Faded reared out of the cluttered mass of newer buildings. From this perspective, it seemed that the city since the Fade was a mould that had grown on the gleaming bones of their ancestors” industry.

But for all that, it was wonderful.

“Did you ever think we'd be seeing this?” Moa whispered, her eyes welling.

Rail put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him unconsciously. He was unable to tear his gaze from the scene before him.

“Never,” he replied, and suddenly he understood her, if only a little. He caught a glimpse of her dreams, the mystical place where joy and awe lived, the invisible land that she visited when she slept. It was this feeling she was after when she talked of the new world over the horizon.

“Greetings,” said a voice from behind them, and they whirled in fright. The room had been empty, and there were no doors from it except the one they had entered by. Yet there was somebody standing there now. He was a short man in late middle age, with a close-cropped brown beard. His clothes were of a fashion so old that they looked ridiculous.

“Who the freck are you?” asked Rail.

“Benejes Frine is my name,” came the reply. He flickered uneasily.

Moa glanced at the device that she had thought was a sculpture, and saw tiny sparks of aether running up and down its complicated length. As realistic as it was, she had seen projections before. “You're not really here,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I died approximately six hundred years ago.”

Rail and Moa looked blank. As a measure of time, years meant nothing to them.

“A long time,” Frine clarified. “A long, long time. What you are seeing is a reconstruction of myself, left behind in case anyone such as you should make it past the Fulcrum's defences. In case anyone should come wanting to know what happened here.”

Rail frowned. The name Benejes Frine was familiar to him somehow. Then he remembered: the plaque on the wall of Bane's office.
We will make this world right again
.
Benejes Frine had written those words.

“Are you one of the Faded?” he asked.

“That's what you'd call me,” he replied. “The systems in the Fulcrum have been keeping track of you, updating themselves in line with your progress. For example, though we speak the same language, your dialect has changed so much over six hundred years. You would not understand me if I spoke to you in the way I would have done at the time I died. But the system remains current, and adapts. It is a marvel of what you call Fade-Science.”

Rail couldn't quite believe it. This innocuous man in his strange garments was one of the Faded? He wasn't sure what he had expected, but it hadn't been this. Not someone so . . . normal.

“I expect you are after answers,” said Frine, raising an eyebrow.

“Actually, no,” said Rail. “I just want to get out of here.”

Frine laughed heartily. “Don't you want to know
why
? Why Orokos? Why the probability storms? Why the Revenants and the Skimmers?”

“The Skimmers!” Moa cried. “How do we stop the Skimmers?”

“You can't,” replied Frine. “Unless you destroy the Chaos Engine. They are all part of the system.”

Rail shrugged. “Bane's probably doing just that right now.”

“Yes he is. But he doesn't know what he's doing. It was put here to
protect
you.”

“To protect us from what?”

“From us,” said Frine. “And from yourselves.” He raised his hand. “Let me show you.”

The device in the centre of the room sparkled, and a globe of light expanded from it. On the skin of the globe were pictures, moving pictures that swelled outward and engulfed Rail and Moa. Then they were inside the globe and the pictures were all around them.

It took them a moment to recognize the vista. It was Orokos, but an Orokos that was clean and marvellous and alien. The only buildings were those of the Faded, and the skyline was a magnificence of spirals and coils and towers, arches and bridges and monuments. They could smell and feel the faint sea breeze on their cheeks. It was as if they were actually there, and it took an effort of will to persuade themselves that this was all some sophisticated illusion.

“This is Orokos as it once was, before the Fade,” Frine said. “It was a place of peace. We believed that a society needed law and order, and the stricter the law the greater the order. We liked that.”

“Sounds like the Protectorate to me,” Rail commented.

Frine nodded. “Indeed. You're more right than you know. You see, peace has a price. Prosperity breeds population, and Orokos is not a big place. Not
everyone
could have a job. Not
everyone
could have a family and a home and all the other things that they wanted. And that meant there were people who didn't like the way things were. They were rebellious, and violent, and they brought disorder to our city when order was the most precious thing we had. They were a problem, and we needed a solution.”

“What did you do?” Moa asked.

“First we made them scapegoats. People like scapegoats, you see. It gives a very comforting us-versus-them quality to life. It feels good to be surrounded by people who are on your side.” Frine's tone was faintly sarcastic. “Then we . . . got rid of them. I don't know how. They were just . . . taken away. Nobody really noticed.” His expression showed what he thought of that.

“This is sounding more and more familiar,” Rail said.

“It should. It happened in my time, and now it's happening in yours,” Frine replied. “For hundreds of years, there was peace and order. Our government ruled with an iron fist, crushing dissension, and we were content. We didn't want anything to corrupt our perfect world.”

The scene had changed, to the interior of a dwelling, breathtakingly splendid and strange. A couple lounged there, their expressions dull, eyes flat and vacant.

“But in the end, that was the problem,” Frine continued. “We were so content that we became bored. You see, we're meant to struggle. It's in our blood. We're not supposed to live our lives to a plan. But that's what had happened. We piled law upon law, rule upon rule, until the state told us what we should and shouldn't be doing and none of us really had to think for ourselves at all. We couldn't even be decadent: anything bad for us was outlawed. We had put ourselves in a prison, and even our jailors didn't realize it.”

He shook his head sadly. “We came to Orokos long ago to escape the disorder of the world, to build ourselves a society that would be perfect in itself. But we became stagnant. We surrounded ourselves with Skimmers, so that nobody could get in or out without state approval. We alienated ourselves entirely from the rest of humanity. We didn't want them to taint us.”

“Wait, wait!” Moa said, holding a hand up. “What do you mean,
the rest of humanity
?”

“If the rest of humanity is even there any more,” Frine said. “It has been a thousand years since we last contacted any of them, or they us.”

Moa's legs went weak. “You mean there's more? More outside Orokos? It's really
true
?”

“Oh yes,” said Frine with an indulgent smile. “So much more.”

While Rail and Moa were trying to digest this, the scene shifted again, and now they stood at the bottom of a colossal bulb-shaped chamber. Bizarre flying automatons glided around above them, building the framework of something massive. The air was cold, and tasted of aether.

“This was our solution to it all,” Frine said. “Some of us, some of the best scientists and military men, we came up with a plan. We began to build a machine. We told them that it was a new weapon, and they loved the idea of that; but what we were really building was the Chaos Engine. We were building something that would unleash havoc on the city. It was our masterpiece. We would paint a canvas of disorder over Orokos, and see what came out of it.”

“Why?” Moa asked. She was still abuzz with a hundred questions, so much so that she didn't know which to ask first.

Frine looked at her, his eyes weary. The projector fizzed and the whole scene flickered and warped for a moment before snapping back into place. “Because we saw what we had become,” he said. “We were empty, hollow things, mindlessly following rules that we had laid down for ourselves. There was no creativity any more, no new thought or art; just people living like clockwork. We had no freedom left. We had given it all away. And anything that threatened our precious contentment, we destroyed. We were monsters. We needed to start again.”

Rail and Moa couldn't believe what they were hearing. “
You
made our world this way?” Rail asked.

Frine nodded solemnly. “Perhaps you think this is Hell. You're wrong. I lived there, and it was worse than this.”

They had never heard of Hell, but they didn't ask. There was already too much to take in.

The picture around them had changed again, and now they saw the Fulcrum from the outside. A terrific probability storm was lashing the city, pounding it with rain and sweeping thick veils through the streets.

“That first probability storm did more than we had ever dreamed it could,” he said. “It changed everything. It shut down the power to all of Orokos, and it was a hundred and twenty-seven years before another storm turned on the old aether generators again. All our knowledge, all our wisdom, was stored in systems that had been inactive for generations. And by the time they had come back on again, everyone had forgotten how to use them. A hundred and twenty-seven years is a very long time. There were riots, starvation, terrible wars. The scientists that still remembered the old ways were lost in the chaos. The Skimmers would not let anything in or out. We started a new Dark Age. But that was the way it had to be. We had to begin again, you see. You call that time the Fade.”

“You set the Revenants on us,” Rail said flatly.

“Yes,” Frine replied. “But that was an accident. We never meant for the Revenants to come. The Chaos Engine did that.” He made a helpless gesture. “Rearranging things wasn't enough. It created an enemy that would match you exactly. There were not many at first, but the harder you tried to wipe them out, the more came. They were intended to be that way. You needed something to stop you getting complacent, you needed chaos to stop yourselves becoming too ordered. To stop you becoming like we were. You see, total chaos and total order are just as bad as each other. There must be a balance. Even if it costs lives.”

“It's cost
millions
of lives!” Rail shouted, swiping a disgusted hand at the apparition. He took a breath, calmed himself a little. “You were right. You
were
monsters.”

“But nothing is different!” Moa cried, seized with a terrible despair at what she had heard. “You broke the world and nothing is different! The Protectorate control everything in Orokos that the Revenants don't; they still send people like us to the ghettoes, or make them disappear. It's just like it was before!”

“Yes,” said Frine sadly. “Yes, it is. We failed. We hoped that things would turn out differently if we wiped the slate clean, but they have turned out the same. It seems that though we can change our environment over and over, we are still trapped by our nature.”

The projection dimmed, and they were back in the room again. The sunlight shone as before, but everything seemed changed now. Frine was pacing the room, his hands behind his back.