A whir and a flash of wings crossed the window. Payne cursed and s.n.a.t.c.hed up his rifle. Arthur felt the now-familiar sensation of telepathic a.s.sault-a wave of emotions so confusing that he nearly dropped to his knees-and he defended himself again, the way Atwood and Miss Didot had taught him. The sensation pa.s.sed.
"Missed," Payne said. "Where"d it go? Do you see it?"
"Shaw!" Atwood called up from the depths below. His voice was a faint ghostly echo, m.u.f.fled by countless tons of stone and dirt and by the thin Martian air. "Shaw! I need you. Come here."
Atwood was holed up in an odd little windowless room on a recessed mezzanine floor beneath the South Gallery-to get to it Arthur had to clamber down a narrow slippery-sided chute. He suspected it had once been used for disposing of waste, or feeding something.
The room was roughly pentagonal in shape. Atwood had been working there for hours by the light of a hurricane lamp and the place reeked of soot and oil. Atwood"s eyes were bloodshot and his fingers were ink-stained. His condition-both physical and mental-had degraded rapidly since entering the castle. He resembled a feverish monk in his cell, or a mad prisoner. All around him on the floor were his papers: sketches he"d made of the carvings on the castle"s walls.
The castle was almost empty. Wind and dust had long since eroded most traces of ornament or furnishing or daily life, with the exception of a series of heavy ceramic tablets, which they"d found scattered haphazardly throughout the corridors. Almost a dozen of the things so far, and no doubt there were more. Some were mounted in recesses in the walls. Others were mounted on the sides of obelisks. Some were high out of reach; others were buried in drifts of dust. A few had shattered. Atwood"s first instruction that morning, as soon as a comfortable stalemate with the enemy had been achieved, had been to collect half a dozen specimens and bring them to his cell. He"d spent the afternoon sc.r.a.ping dirt from them with a pen-knife to reveal the carvings beneath.
"I need your help," Atwood said. "Sit, sit."
Arthur cleared papers to make a s.p.a.ce.
"No! Don"t-it"s a map, Shaw, it"s a map! For G.o.d"s sake, be careful. Sit there. Give me that and sit there."
Atwood"s pistol occupied an empty spot on the floor. Arthur handed it to Atwood and sat down.
"That was our first encounter since sundown," Arthur said. "Payne thinks they fear the rifle. I don"t know-they seem a little different from the last lot."
"Hmm? Oh-yes. Perhaps. There used to be many nations on Mars, Shaw. You see, their science is jumbled together with their history. I"m not sure that they made quite the same distinctions as we do."
"You"ve been reading their carvings, then."
"Yes. They were many nations, and not all were so wise or so civilised as the builders of this observatory-that"s what it is, Shaw, or you might say a library or a tomb. The builders were plagued by barbarian tribes. Let"s suppose that the creatures that have plagued us are descendants of those barbarians of Old Mars-devolved further, into a truly primitive state."
"If you like. What do these carvings say about how to get home?"
"Home?" Atwood said. "What about Josephine?"
Arthur blinked. For a moment, he was confused. He hadn"t thought about Josephine in-how long? Not since Sun"s death, at least. Since then he"d had no time to think of anything but the march, hunger and fear, the flight from the Martians.
"She"s gone, isn"t she, Atwood?"
"Gone? Pull yourself together, Shaw-now is no time for a nervous collapse."
"She"s gone, Atwood. She"s gone. It was madness to ever think otherwise. I let you trick me here-I did terrible things to help you-and she was always gone, wasn"t she? I let you-I played a trick on myself, Atwood-as if I"d ... like the sort of poor fool who lets some crooked medium play nasty tricks on him. I"m a fool. A fool."
"We have travelled across the void, and survived the surface of Mars. Now is no time for despair. But I need your help."
"If you mention her name again, Atwood, I shan"t be responsible for what I might do."
"Hmm." Atwood edged a hand towards his revolver. Then he shrugged.
"To business, then."
"That would be best, Atwood. What did you want?"
Atwood stood. His legs nearly went out from under him.
Arthur jumped up.
"Sorry, Shaw. Bit stiff. Thank you."
As Atwood stumbled past, Arthur noticed his rash-an awful purple mottling on his neck. He"d torn his nails b.l.o.o.d.y sc.r.a.ping at the carvings. The man was falling apart. Well, weren"t they all?
"The trial that remains is one of the will, Shaw, not the body. There are ghosts here-did you know that? Echoes, one might say. Sometimes we speak of a writer putting his soul into his words, don"t we? This was a great centre of learning and they were great magicians. More to learn here than in Athens and all of Egypt and every library in London. I wish I had a hundred years."
Arthur stepped over Atwood"s papers and crouched to examine the tablets stacked in the corner. Sc.r.a.ped clean, the tablets displayed clear evidence of writing-far clearer than the faint scratches in the tower. Perhaps the eroding winds were less severe in the lee of the mountain. They were covered in swooping vectors, odd geometries, and inscrutable hieroglyphs that were somehow uncomfortably dense, in a way that suggested that they might move if you took your eyes off them; or that they were already slowly moving.
"They didn"t quite see the stars the way we do," Atwood said. "Their language, their way of thinking, was very different from ours. A matter of translation, that"s all. Mathematics. Should have brought Jupiter after all. Ah, well."
"The stars."
"Yes. Before-before the disaster that destroyed them, they were engaged in a study not so very different from ours. I told you, didn"t I? They were attempting to explore the spheres. To move up."
"Up? You mean to Earth."
"Yes! Earth. The Blue Sphere. But it"s hard to go up. Much easier to go down. This very room-this very room once contained a creature that they brought up from below-a thing from the Black Sphere, Shaw. Saturn. Can you imagine it?"
"No."
Arthur picked up a page of Atwood"s sketches. The same hieroglyphs, over and over, with notes in Atwood"s erratic handwriting.
"Listen. I"ve seen these before. In the Liber Ad Astra. On the floor of your library. When I first saw them I thought a madman or a drunk had painted them. Yet here they are on Mars."
"But that was down," Atwood said, as if he hadn"t heard. "Into the dark. They never rose up-or else certainly history would have recorded it. They never solved the puzzle, Shaw."
"Then what good are they to us? We"re stuck here-is that what you"re saying?"
"No." Atwood s.n.a.t.c.hed his papers back. "Leave that alone, Shaw. Listen. In this place they summoned up creatures from the lower heavens; and they peered into the higher heavens and prayed. They could not unlock the gates above them, but perhaps we can."
He sat down against the wall and pulled his journal from his pocket. "Our calculations. The stars from our sphere. What they didn"t know. And so we can close the circle. We must think like them, Shaw-we must become them. And then become greater than them."
"Who were they? What were they?"
"Scholars. Magicians. The greatest of their kind. They left these carvings for us-they knew we would come. Someone would come. Do you think they knew it would be me?"
"What happened to them? This is a ruin-this is a wasteland."
"An excellent question. I don"t know."
"But you knew about this all along. Even back in London, you meant to come here."
"Yes. I didn"t remember it all, of course. Some of it I only remembered in the tower-thank you, Shaw, for finding those telescopes-and some of it I remembered only when I listened to the wind. But I have always known. Ever since..." He closed his eyes.
"I am the greatest magician who has ever lived. That"s plain fact, not a boast-who else could have brought us here? What"s time to a magician? Nothing but another circle, Shaw."
"What other secrets have you kept from us?"
"What right do you have to all my secrets? How have you earned them? Will you help me or not?"
"I should break your neck."
"Then what chance would Josephine have?"
"I told you not to say her name, Atwood."
"Only I could bring us here; only I can bring us back. By my will, Shaw." Atwood showed an unpleasant smile. b.l.o.o.d.y gums, loose teeth.
Arthur looked around Atwood"s cell again. It was defensible; that was why Atwood had chosen it, of course. Atwood was dug in. If the Martians overran them, this room would be the last to fall.
"Ghosts," Arthur said. "You say ghosts speak to you here. I don"t hear them."
"Pray that you never do. You wouldn"t be able to bear it."
From the gallery above them came the sound of Vaz shouting in alarm, a rifle-shot, then the whirring of wings.
Atwood called up the chute. "Report, please, Payne."
Payne shouted down to confirm it: they"d spotted a Martian, hovering just above their window. No one was hurt. They"d winged the thing but not killed it, and it had fled. Stalemate was preserved.
"Looked like a female," Payne opined.
Arthur called up. "How can you tell?"
"I don"t know, Shaw. Maybe I"m going native."
"They"re moving," Atwood said. "We have no time to waste."
All through the night Payne kept a look-out from the gallery, while Atwood beavered away in his cell, and Arthur and Vaz went clambering through the rafters and narrow corridors in search of carvings. Every corridor looked alike; they got lost. There were windows that had the odd telescopic power of the windows of the lowlands tower, but since their walls had collapsed they faced onto the ground, or towards other walls or windows, and they were exceedingly confusing to look through. If there had ever been any rhyme or reason that a human mind could comprehend in the locations of the carvings, it had long since been lost, as successive centuries of erosion and subsidence and collapse had rearranged the chambers. It rather reminded Arthur of Gracewell"s Engine in Deptford, after the fire. He began to suspect that the castle had once been taller, and possibly beautiful; that it had collapsed in on itself to make this squat claustrophobic maze.
Sometimes the carvings could be prized out of the wall, with ice-axe or shovel, and carried back to Atwood"s cell. Sometimes they were wedged too tight to move. Arthur spent half an hour balancing with one foot on a rafter, the other on a wall, a sheet of paper pressed with one hand against the ceiling while he sketched hieroglyphs in charcoal with the other. Later he squeezed into a crack in the wall, feeling entombed, to take notes. Once Vaz cried out for help, and Arthur came running, sliding down fallen pillars and climbing up broken walls, axe in hand. He found Vaz standing with a heap of spilled Martian bones at his feet, cursing colourfully.
"Rather a surprise," Vaz conceded. "I apologise. One would think we were far past the point of being frightened by skeletons."
"Far past all points, Vaz. Far past all. G.o.d! Is this what it"s come to, after all Atwood"s talk. This-this tomb? Looting the b.l.o.o.d.y thing?"
Vaz shrugged, as if to say that it came as no great surprise to him.
Together they dug a broken stele from beneath the bones and brought it back to Atwood, who had by that time covered the floor of his cell in papers and tablets, arranged in a sort of complex spiralling pattern of unclear significance.
Some time in the course of the night, bad weather blew in. The usual dry Martian weather-whirling dust-clouds that shrieked and sc.r.a.ped across the rooftops and blew in through the windows to sting the eyes and choke the throat. When morning came, the clouds obscured the sun.
Around what was probably mid-morning, Atwood emerged from his cell.
"Payne," he said. "Shaw. Vaz. Listen. It"s not enough. That"s why they"re here, of course. I should have seen it. The Martians, I mean. They"re here to stop me."
"Slow down, Atwood."
"From escaping, Mr Shaw. From returning home, with all that I"ve learned. I was wrong, you see. There is one more trial. And what else should I have expected? This is Mars, after all."
"You are not well," Vaz said. "Mr Shaw and I have been talking and we think-"
"Oh, have you? Have you? And what have you determined? No-listen. It"s very simple. A very simple, practical problem, of the sort that you gentlemen are eminently suited to solve-that"s why I brought you here! We have only half the carvings. And half are in the territory that the enemy occupies. What we need, gentlemen, is a plan of attack."
Chapter Forty.
Josephine scouted out the southern half of the complex-the Earthmen"s territory.
Arthur was with them. She first caught a glimpse of him early that morning, through a crack in one of the walls. A bony, and bearded, and sickly looking apparition, but unquestionably Arthur. He had come for her after all. She felt such a rush of relief and excitement, love and hope and fear, that her wings trembled. For a moment she thought she might fall.
How could she possibly explain her wings to him?
When she saw him, he was busy heaving a stone tablet down from the wall. That would be at Atwood"s instructions, no doubt. She didn"t know where Atwood was. She hadn"t set eyes on him since he entered the castle. She supposed he was hidden somewhere safe, while Arthur and the strangers did all the work, faced all the danger. That would be just like Atwood. Just like Arthur, too. What were Atwood"s plans, and what did Arthur know of them? Did he have any notion how much danger he might be in?
She tried to call out to him, but her throat and her tongue weren"t suited to the task. Arthur came out as a croak and a shriek. She attempted to call to him telepathically, but his mind was locked tightly against intrusion-they were all wary of telepathic a.s.sault. She called out her love and her joy to him and he took it as an attack. It was intensely frustrating.
She scouted, and made reports to Orpheus. Names, numbers, movements. One or possibly two rifles. They didn"t seem to be very good shots. Arthur and the two ragged strangers lay in wait overlooking the courtyard; Atwood was hidden.
In the evening she grew over-confident, flew too close, and one of the strangers shot her in her wing. A sudden stinging-more shock than pain. She fell to the ground, scrambled in the dust, ran across the courtyard and leapt for the safety of the northern complex, through a window and into the chamber where Orpheus, Exalted, Poet and Far-Traveller waited.
The room was empty. It was high-ceilinged and many-windowed. A pillar in the middle of the room had once held a carved tablet, but Orpheus and Exalted had tossed it from the window. The carvings unnerved them. Everything about the place unnerved them. They were far more afraid of the ghosts of the Eye than of the Earthmen or their rifles. They said that they were planning. She suspected that their courage had run out at last; they were afraid to leave the room.
~ They hurt me, she said. There was no word for shot.
Orpheus examined her wound. He poked its neat round edges with his finger.
~ Harmless, he signed. Is there pain?
~ No worse than the Great Flight. That was a popular idiom in the lunar city, which she"d picked up somewhere along the way. It meant worse things happen at sea.
~ Look, Orpheus said. A perfect little circle. In and out. What a strange weapon. But I think perhaps you were lucky.
~ I need to talk to him.