Cage of Souls, page 39
I showed her somewhere to sleep, pilfered some sheets for her, and she curled up on them, knees to her forehead, arms about her legs. Save for the fact that she was clothed, she was just as I had found her.
*
She slept for two whole days. In all that time, whether I was officiating at the Temple or idling in Greygori’s chambers, I was aware of her. I would have known, I think, had she awoken at any time.
The night of that first full day, Greygori came to play chess. Arves, who was happy to play with me, always stole away to his books when “the Master” wanted a game. Either he felt it would complicate the master–servant relationship he had dreamed up (surely it was none of Greygori’s doing) or the transformations of the Transforming Man (of which he had seen more than I) were getting too much for him.
The chess we played was the complicated sort, with nineteen different pieces and a host of odd rules. We sat across from each other at the long table in the library, and Greygori marched his pieces about automatically as I tried to keep up with him.
After the game had started, Arves made a reappearance to sit in the corner with some new manuscript. His rustling of paper and scratching of notes made a constant foray into the silence between our moves.
Greygori had been quiet as we settled into a protracted mid-game, but eventually his narrow mouth got out the words, “What is she, Stefan?”
“I have no idea,” I told him quietly, conscious that Faith might wake and hear at any moment. “She was just there, in the Temple. No memory, no explanations.”
He grunted moodily, more humanity surfacing. “Just appeared,” he murmured. “From the depths, Stefan, perhaps.”
The thought had not occurred to me. The idea that Faith might have been a prisoner of some buried installation, released only now into a world centuries older than her own, was plausible, but I shied away from it. She was a creature of light and life, not the cold, dead depths of the earth.
“Who made her, do you think?” the Transforming Man mused, as one hand clicked a piece forward in another stage of his invisible master strategy. “She is a startling piece of work, is she not?”
I agreed that she certainly was. Arves let out a sniff of amusement that Greygori did not seem to hear. Some normally-silenced part of Greygori’s mind was taking control of his voice. The names and anchors he usually relied on were falling away.
He said, “She reminds me of the sky,” which threw me. He was not a poetical man, as though what poetry he had been born with had been the first thing under the knife.
Behind the panes of darkened glass and the fragments of murdered expression there was nothing to be read, but he went on, “The daylight sky. She reminds me of the sun.”
I wondered how long it had been since Greygori Sanguival had seen the sun.
His warped fingers, over-jointed, with rough ridges about the knuckles, twitched another piece into position.
“I am not ready to face the sun just yet,” he told me. His hand contracted savagely, knocking the piece over, and we both stared at it.
“If… If you want me to find somewhere else for her…” I started slowly.
Greygori’s hand, of its own volition, replaced the fallen piece precisely in the centre of its square.
“No need,” he said. “Keep her out of my way but… keep her, Stefan. She may, Stefan, be of use.”
I did not like the sound of that, but the Transforming Man’s thoughts were not for me to pry into.
*
When she awoke, I thought that our previous days had gone the way of all her memories. She did not recognise me. She was terrified of me. Then something passed over her face and my name came to her lips.
“I was dreaming,” she said. “I was somewhere else…” but she could remember nothing save for that. “It’s not important,” she told my questioning look, though I could see it was.
When she ate, she ate sparingly. She and Arves avoided each other. To Arves she was still the sun that had condemned him to his subterranean existence. Greygori was keeping to his experiments and we saw nothing of him. Faith asked me questions about what he was doing, what his laboratory was like. I think she half-expected to find the shining place of her vanished dreams behind the door. She never asked about Greygori’s physical appearance. That, of all the things around her, she just accepted.
*
She came with me to the Temple while my period in office paced itself out. Whilst never fond of crowds, she gradually became bolder, pushing the boundaries of her fear until it had retreated to the horizon. It never wholly disappeared.
I would be talking through some commercial point between Rodin’s Garden and the Exceptionals (another team of thieves), and I would look up to see her talking in halting tones to a young woman of the Garden faction, or to a new Ward of the Temple. There was even a Bazaar when I lost her completely amongst the stalls and shopfronts, only to find her listening to a Fisherman telling some great tale of cave-diving adventure. He had been speaking to a crowd of the impressionable young, but by the end of his story he was speaking only for Faith. He was an old man, grey hair cut to a stubble and face lashed by two long scars that were a Stabber’s work, but there was a yearning, young man’s look in his eyes as he looked to Faith for some sign of approval or favour.
“You have been to many places,” she said, and he nodded sagely.
“Above and below, desert and jungle. Few many places I’ve not been, in my time.” It was as though he were stating his credentials for a job.
“Do you know of a place of gold, of lights? Where everything is cared for, and there are…” I could see her breaking down inside as she tried to externalise those wisps of memory. “There are friends.” A tear splintered in the corner of her eye.
The old Fisherman shook his head slowly. “Nothing like that,” he said sadly, “or I’d not be back here.”
*
I took her to meet other friends. Giulia showed her maps but the golden place was on none of them. Pelgraine fell in love with her, an exercise doomed to failure. He scared her and she would not go near him. Eventually I even took her to Sergei’s Collective. Like Greygori, she did not find Sergei strange to look upon. She feared him less than she feared the normal run of men and women. He told her of the place where he was born, the myths he made up about himself. She heard the whole improbable fable and believed it. It was no stranger to her than the truths I gave of Shadrapar and Underworld.
“Where did you get her, Stefan?” he asked later. “What the hell is she?”
I explained my theory that she was a Rengen and had escaped or been liberated from some private clinic. “She is looking for some place… some place she belonged,” I said.
“But you think she has escaped,” he pointed out. “If she escapes, she will not want to be returned. Or, if she tries to return, then there was no escape. She fell, merely.”
“She fell…” I considered.
“From grace,” Sergei finished. “She does not fit, so she seeks some place she will.”
I nodded helplessly.
“And you help her?”
“I don’t know why. I feel responsible. I want to find this place for her, but… How?”
“She is like a hook, I think, and you are on it.”
I tried to defend myself, but I knew that it was true. I was a victim of Faith just as everyone else was, who looked upon her. It was how they had made her.
Sergei fell for her too, in his way. “I also shall help,” he decided. “We two shall seek out this place of hers.”
*
We lived a strange kind of life over the next months. When Greygori did not want me, and when the Collective could spare him, Sergei and I took on the profession of burglars. We contacted groups like the Friendly Society, the Exceptionals, even the Ascendants whose larceny was grounded in their bizarre religious beliefs. At one time or another, Sergei had done good for just about everyone. We would go to a Friendlies factor or the like and Sergei would say, “We wish to look at some laboratories.”
The factor would nod and a message would reach us a week later, that this or that team of entrepreneurs would be raiding a rich man’s factory or a pharmaceuticals husbandry, and Sergei and I would sign up for the job.
I learned a lot in those months. By my third sortie I could climb up and down a rope without falling off and I could sneak across a roof without waking the sleepers below. I was taught the rudiments of how to fool a clever lock and how to pick a simple one. I cannot claim to have been a quick student, but I was driven by Faith.
You may think we were mad, to venture so far on her vague imaginings, without her ever asking us. You would be right. Blameless though she was, this was how she was made. Nobody under the effects of Faith was entirely rational.
*
For example, we would hook up with three of the Exceptionals an hour after dark and steal from the Underworld into the Steel Town district. By routes that they had discovered through careful experimentation we would ascend to the rooftops and make our way by a system of lines, jumps and rope-bridges (unsuspected by those below) until we reached the building in question. Below us, through skylights, we could see the heedless night shift preparing their toxins. As nimbly and silently as web-children we would find the loose panel or open hatch or sabotaged lock that would let us in. While the sleepy labourers worked around us we would grab the chemical goods and creep away as though we had never been there.
Sergei and I would describe these places to Faith in the hope of prompting some return of her lost soul. She would listen with infinite attention, sifting each word for something of familiarity. There was nothing. Each time she would lower her head a little, and thank us mechanically for what we had done. Each time we were both more determined than ever to break the lock that sealed away her mind. It became a challenge in its own right. The universe was mocking us with our impotence, and we were not putting up with it. Word got around, soon enough, that Sergei and Stefan were interested in ever more exotic targets. At the time I felt assured of her eventual gratitude and some nebulous reward arising from it. This is the dangerous fiction we spin for ourselves, is it not, that so readily turns sour. Looking back I can only think that I tired and frightened her, yet kept her beholden on me because she had nowhere else to go.
Our new hobby was not only to our benefit. The thieves could make good use of us. Sergei was an all-round cracksman: good with machines, a climber and sneaker, skilled in a fight. We had not needed to fight in our three forays, but the thieves were no soldiers and they grew nervous without some kind of backup. As for me, I was none of those things but I discovered that my education was a commodity. It had won me no friends when I was a Ward of the Temple, but now I was a known quantity and my word was trusted. The market for liberated books and papers was as lively as that for drugs and elixirs, and I found that I was a good man to rifle a bookshelf or case a library. When I went with them I could be counted on to find some piece of ancient literature that I knew would have a buyer amongst the literati. The Overworld rich asked no questions when prizes were proffered. Between my criminal ventures, the thieves began to bring their finds to me for valuing. When Greygori was deeply engrossed in his experiments I held court with Arves, the two of us talking over the value of stolen scrolls and pilfered poetry.
The Ascendants took us on their expedition into the private de Howza museum, where a gallery of horrors showed stuffed and mounted monsters from the jungles, looming and leering from the shadows. Many of them had been collected by Trethowan’s own expeditions, and I located for the thieves an untouched first edition set of his bestiaries that I knew would be the pride and joy of some rich collector.
There was a factory line of ancient machines, only a few with any obvious purpose, and the Ascendants took one, which they believed had been constructed by their prophet. It triggered some alarm, so that a device at the end of the row tried to kill us with beams of cold light that froze the walls where they touched. Sergei took a wrench to it and broke off the nozzle of its weapon. It continued to glare at us with its evil little lights and lenses but we absconded with its brother and the tale of our daring.
Faith was unimpressed with this.
We joined up with a gang named the Phlegmatics to raid an underground vault maintained by an Authority man for private experiments. The Phlegmatics were a disorganised and rowdy crew operating on rumour and hearsay, and when we had cut our way into the vault from beneath (using a fearful implement that Sergei borrowed from the Fishermen) we discovered that the installation was abandoned. The books of formulae that the Phlegmatics were after were absent. We saw that we were not the first to burrow into that secure place. There was a Vermin tunnel in the far corner and marks to suggest that much of the equipment had been stolen by the creatures. As if we were Outriders, we tooled up with our weaponry and went into their warren after them. Sergei killed one, the Phlegmatics killed another, and the remainder fled before us. We found the gnawed notebooks in a nest they had made in a deeper chamber. The Fishermen went in later, I believe, to explore further. Giulia was ecstatic that her maps could be enlarged.
Faith recognised none of it.
We went with the Friendly Society on their first scouting of a big laboratory and leisure complex owned by several very powerful men, most of whom were, or had been, Authority members. I am fairly sure that Harweg had a large stake in it. We were not just slipping in by some established route. The Friendlies were “tapping” the building, seeking ingress, investigating. I had always thought they were a crew of clowns until then, from their flippant manner and general disrespect. My illusions were shattered on this expedition, for they were the soul of organisation. They were led by a square-jawed woman named Yarmin, with short fair hair, wearing most of an old Outrider’s uniform. With Sergei and myself and four Friendlies she tackled the building expertly. By the end of the night we had found a sheet of the roof that could be peeled back, a trigger for an alarm that could be pinned, and we had looked into one of their laboratories. Sergei had been lowered on a rope until he was eight feet from the floor, like some ghastly human spider. As he slowly spun in the gloom he had looked from hall to hall (for the building was vast) seeing dormant equipment, vats of chemicals. His dim lamp had illuminated fittings of brass and bronze, strange statues and ornaments. It was part-laboratory and part-state-room, and perhaps storeroom too, for all the decorative junk that the owners’ townhouses could not accommodate.
When Sergei described all this to Faith she looked troubled.
“Tell me again,” she said.
He went back over the details for her. I had expected her to be delighted, once we found anything that rang a chord in the void of her memory. Instead her worried look increased, as though she was on the verge of some horrible revelation.
“What do you know?” Sergei asked her.
She shook her head, shrugged, huddled into herself. “Nothing. I know nothing.”
Sergei and I exchanged glances. “Probably it is nothing,” he said, voice heavy with disappointment.
“I want to see it,” Faith said flatly. Sergei and I stared at her.
“You… did not seem to like it, when Sergei described it,” I pointed out.
“I have to see it. Your words sound familiar. I cannot visualise it, but still… Do I know it? I have to see it.”
“I really don’t think that you can come with us,” I said dubiously.
She shrugged. “I have to see it,” she repeated.
“We talk to the Friendlies,” Sergei suggested. “They prepare now to make their raid. We see what they say. It is their choice.”
We spoke to Yarmin, who would be leading the burglary as well. She had heard of Faith and was intrigued.
“What good is she?” she demanded.
“She thinks she may have seen the place before,” I explained.
Yarmin pondered this, and I saw she thought Faith could perhaps lead them to treasure within the unexplored building. It had not been my intention to give her the idea but before I could dissuade her she had said, “Fine. We go in five days. Be ready.”
33
Bride of Sanguival
Within those five days everything began to go wrong. My first warning was a conversation late one night, which was to say, around midday above ground.
I was having trouble sleeping. Perhaps it was worry over Faith accompanying us on our next jaunt; perhaps it was just prolonged exposure to Faith. I was drawn out of an extended sequence of disturbing images by the sound of voices from the library. It was two rooms away, but in the dead silence I heard every sound as though I was right there.
I heard Greygori say, “Stefan tells me you are searching.” Perhaps it was my own name that awoke me. I had told him nothing of the sort but he still knew.
I assumed, in those bleary moments, that Greygori was just muttering to himself. I only came fully awake when I heard Faith say, “Stefan is searching.”
“For you, though, Faith. On your behalf. In accord with your purposes, Faith. Is that not the case?”
No audible answer came, but I could imagine the shrug, that little movement of her shoulders with her face turned away.
“You are a grand experiment,” Greygori wheezed at her, an odd tremor in his voice. “You are a most exacting piece of work, Faith. Really, you are a detailed creation.”
I heard the oversized nails of his bare feet ticking on the stone as he advanced across the library floor. Greygori had more to say, and there was something familiar about the way he said it.
“I have not seen, Faith, such artifice beyond my own work,” he murmured. I imagined him standing beside and around her, just short of touching her, whilst she kept her head carefully tilted away from him. “Faith, you are the project of a master.”
“I don’t want to be that,” from Faith.
