The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [87]
It was after the first volleys from the Revenge fell on Vlytze Square that the unthinkable happened.
The men and sharpsies fighting in Vlytze Square, if they were not deafened by the cannon fire from the Revenge, all stopped as one and listened to an eerie, impossible sound that shrieked in their ears and reached down their throats to wrench at their stomachs. It was a supernormal wail that grew and grew, and imposed a silence over the combatants. The sound ended abruptly with a sudden, echoing crack.
For a long moment, nothing happened; men and trolljrmen and sharpsies all held their breaths in an extended, desperate pause.
Then, there was an explosion. A huge, deep, heart-stopping bone-rattling thunder spread in a wave across the square as a massive column of blinding, blue-white light tore shrieking into the sky. The north half of the square vanished, collapsing into a sinkhole and dragging men and sharpsies with it to be vaporized in the blinding inferno. The rest of the square began to follow it, and, unmindful of their previous enmity, sharpsie, man, and trolljrman began running. A wash of dust, smoke and fire followed after them, claiming the slowest runners and hurling more to the ground. Three-quarters of Vlytze Square disappeared into the dark, and as much an area to the north. The center of Old Bank had become a bloody hole of devastation.
Later, after the dust had settled and someone had time to work out what happened, it would be assumed that the sharpsies were responsible; seeing their intended revolution fail, they’d done the only thing they could think of, and accepted a kind of mass-suicide.
Of course, this hypothesis left a number of disturbing questions unanswered. How did the sharpsies know about it? How did they know where to find it? How did they get in, and know how to use it? Was it really the sharpsies, preferring to kill themselves rather than lose to the humans? Or was it someone from the Committee, fearful that the Revenge might level even more of the city? Or was it someone else, with a purpose more devious?
Someone, deep beneath the house on Corimander Street, had activated the engines of the Excelsior.
Twenty-Eight: The Pilot, the Mastermind
To alien-adapted eyes, Castle Gotheray was a vast inverted labyrinth, a latticework of rooms stacked upon rooms, a strange pattern of outer walls beneath inner walls that could still be seen. Deep beneath the castle, and simultaneously in its center, always at the center, no matter what flowers of past and future bloomed before those eyes, was the beacon, the still glowing white-hot engine of the Montgomery.
The distorted shadow of its limbs, now only fractions of a greater whole, gripped the surface of the ice, and also under and within it, as it made its lurching way up the glacier. The blue-green moonlight was not light, but the shadow of something brighter, something that these new monstrous eyes had come to see. In shadows of the brighter-than-light lurked more and more shadows, strange forms that twisted into and out of space at every moment, and went all unnoticed by human vision. The ice reared up and sank down again, and every step brought it closer to the Castle.
The Castle. The doors were open, but now the thing did not need doors. It moved straight on towards the wall, revolving itself through material space and finding a place on the other side. The lattice-work, the dragonfly-eye collage of visions transformed to a view of a hundred thousand staircases, all leading down, down to the ship beneath the ice. It chose a stair at random; the near ones all led the same way, and most of the future stairs were crumbled and unusable.
Down the stairs and through the ice, to the great white gap in the cold, where only the barest