The Abyss Beyond Dreams Read online

  ‘They’re not traitors, they did what they had to so they could keep the institute going. They’re fighting the Fallers, just like us.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he conceded. ‘But I can’t get it out of my head.’

  ‘Is that why you argued with Javier?’

  ‘Oh crud!’ He ground his teeth together. ‘I don’t know. One second we were so pleased that we’d both survived, that we were in Congress together, that we were right all along, and that we could finally help people; the next thing it’s like I’m looking down on these two madmen screaming at each other. I knew I had to stop, but he just wouldn’t see reason. It’s crazy.’

  ‘Giu, the pair of you!’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry. I was tired, that’s all. And still upset over Ingmar, Giu, the shock of that was unreal. I let it get out of hand. It won’t happen again. I promise you that. You do believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re to sit down with him and talk this through like rational people.’

  ‘But . . . the mods, they belong to the Fallers!’

  Her whole body stiffened. ‘I know that. But you will have to find a way to make the rest of Bienvenido accept the revolution’s authority. Once you have accomplished that, then you can sort out the mods and neuts.’ Her fingers gripped his chin again, and her stare was very intent. ‘You do understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said as the tiredness came back in an almighty wave that made everything seem irrelevant. ‘I know. But I will not rest until this world is free of them.’

  ‘One step at a time, my love.’ She kissed him.

  ‘Thank you. I was worried.’

  ‘Me too, when this happened. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘You always do,’ he said. ‘That’s why I love you.’

  ‘Not this time. But I have some strange news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Goleford bridge has been blown up. About half an hour ago. An express only just got over it. They were lucky.’

  ‘Where’s Goleford?’

  ‘Uracus, you are tired. It’s the bridge on the Southern City Line.’

  ‘What? Where in Giu’s name have they been?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m trying to get our agents to find out what’s going on, but it’s difficult to get messages over the Colbal right now. Every boat is full of refugees.’

  ‘We’re not tyrants,’ he snapped in annoyance. ‘We’re the opposite. Nobody needs to run away from us.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You have to get in touch with the sabotage team. We don’t want any more bridges blown up. As Javier said, we need to start building the economy back up.’

  ‘Oh, a sensible comment. I’ll put that down in my diary.’

  ‘Hey, I’m trying, okay?’

  ‘I know.’ She didn’t shift from his lap.

  Slvasta’s ex-sight caught Yannrith entering the ante-room. ‘Come on in,’ he ’pathed.

  ‘Captain,’ Yannrith said. Anxiety was leaking through his shell.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Slvasta asked wearily. He wasn’t sure he could take much more bad news right now.

  ‘I can’t find Coulan anywhere.’

  ‘He’ll be with Javier,’ Slvasta said.

  ‘He’s not.’

  Bethaneve stood up. ‘I’ll find him. I’ll put the word out with my people.’

  ‘I’ve just come back from the Captain’s Palace,’ Yannrith said. ‘There’s something really strange been going on. Coulan’s militia, the ones guarding it, they’re all acting odd.’

  ‘What do you mean, odd?’

  Yannrith shrugged. ‘As if they’re drunk, or something. It’s difficult to get them to say anything.’

  ‘They’re loyal to Coulan.’

  ‘No, it’s more than that. And something’s been taken. I had to ask hard, but I found that much out eventually.’

  ‘Taken?’

  ‘From the palace cellars. Uracus, Slvasta, there are some really bizarre things down there. Ancient things that I’ve never seen before, things from Captain Cornelius’s ship itself.’

  Slvasta stared at him, trying to make sense of what was being said. ‘Coulan’s taken something from Cornelius’s ship?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But look, captain, you remember your last sweep with the regiment?’

  ‘I can hardly forget. What about it?’

  ‘We met those peculiar people we thought were narnik barons. The girl, the redhead, I forget her name, Nigel’s so-called wife. She’s here. I saw her riding one of the wagons on Walton Boulevard. They were all heading down the hill.’

  ‘What wagons?’ Bethaneve blurted.

  ‘The wagons that took something from the palace.’

  Slvasta’s headache seemed to redouble in potency as he gave Yannrith a shocked look. ‘Wait! Nigel and Kysandra are here? In Varlan?’

  ‘You do know them?’ an equally perturbed Yannrith asked.

  ‘Nigel supplied all our weapons,’ Bethaneve said. ‘But – I don’t understand. What’s he doing here?’

  Through all the pain in Slvasta’s head, the elusive memory that had taunted him for days suddenly crystallized. ‘Grunts!’ he exclaimed.

  Bethaneve and Yannrith frowned at him.

  ‘You said it,’ Slvasta accused her. ‘The night we were arming the cells, you said we can’t give a gun to every grunt on the streets.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I only ever heard that word used like that once before. By Nigel! They’re soldiers or troopers, privates, sergeants, corporals, officers – comrades in our cells are activists. But never grunts.’

  ‘Slvasta—’

  ‘What is going on?’ he demanded hotly. ‘Do you know Nigel?’

  ‘I’ve never met him in my life. You were the one that went to Adeone to meet him. You’re the one that did the deal for weapons. All I know about him is what you’ve told me.’

  ‘Then why did you call our cell members grunts?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ she shouted back at him. ‘It’s a crudding word!’

  ‘It’s his word.’

  ‘Oh for fuc—’

  ‘What was he doing back then, when we found him on the sweep? What did he have on those boats? Is he a narnik baron? Wait! Was he your supplier?’

  She flinched as if he’d struck her. All the emotion drained out of her expression. ‘Slvasta,’ she said in an icily calm voice, ‘you need to stop this. You need to get some sleep.’

  ‘Why is he here? What did he take?’

  ‘I want you to calm down. Lie down on this settee and—’

  ‘No. Something is going on. Javier’s turned against me. Is he collaborating with Nigel, too?’

  ‘Slvasta.’ A tear trickled down her cheek. ‘Please. No.’

  ‘I will find out!’ he roared. ‘By Giu, I will know what game you’re all playing behind my back! You think you can get rid of me? You think you can just waltz right into the Captain’s Palace and rule this world? Do you? Well, you can’t! I’ll stop you. I’ll stop all of you.’ He stormed out of the annex. Tovakar and the five bodyguards he commanded regarded him in alarm. ‘We’re going to the palace,’ he told them. ‘Sergeant, are you with me?’

  Yannrith gave Bethaneve a helpless shrug, and hurried out, leaving her to sink to her knees as she started to weep.

  *

  There still wasn’t any real furniture in the Tarleton Gardens apartment. After Slvasta and Bethaneve had moved out, the empty rooms seemed even larger. There was nowhere to hide in any of them.

  Javier’s ex-sight had been pervading it as soon as he climbed out of the cab in the street outside. Coulan wasn’t inside. Coulan wasn’t anywhere. Not in the palace, not in the hotel where the Captain’s family was detained, not with any of the comrades. Nowhere. Javier went upstairs to their apartment anyway. There was nowhere else for him to go. Afternoon sunlight poured through the big bay windows. He’d always enjoyed the sensation of space he gained from the rooms. Other people’s houses
and flats seemed so cluttered. They valued things; he prized potential.

  ‘It brings out your optimistic streak,’ Coulan had told him one night, snuggled up in his embrace. ‘I like that.’

  Now Javier looked down on the mattress with its wrinkled sheets where they’d spent so many nights together, just talking quietly about their plans and hopes or thrashing round in sexual bliss, and there was no optimism left any more. Like the rooms, he was empty.

  He sat on the mattress, and for all his bulk and strength he couldn’t hold back the exhaustion any more. ‘Where are you?’ he asked the bare walls.

  Coulan wouldn’t abandon him, especially not in this dark desperate hour when he needed him more than ever. They loved each other. They were one. All he could think of was that Slvasta had sent an assassin for Coulan; that one by one he was wiping out anybody who opposed him.

  ‘You idiot,’ he told himself, and rested his eyes for a moment.

  *

  ‘Wake up.’

  Javier opened his eyes. Bethaneve was staring down at him. There were dark fatigue circles round her eyes, and her cheeks were blotchy from crying. Hair hung lankly round her face.

  ‘You look terrible,’ he said, smiling to ease the slur. He could only have been asleep minutes, for he was still absurdly tired. But somehow the sun was now low in the sky.

  ‘It’s Slvasta,’ she said in a fragile voice.

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. We were both stupid. Uracus, I hadn’t slept for days – I still haven’t. I was so tense, so angry. There were fights, terrible fights against the sheriffs and Marines, and . . . The streets were bad places to be for a while. But I had to be out there, had to lead our comrades. I’d like to talk to him.’

  Bethaneve shook her head, struggling against fresh tears. ‘He’s got worse. He’s . . . He doesn’t trust anyone any more. He thinks there are conspiracies everywhere.’

  ‘You as well?’

  She nodded miserably.

  ‘Giu! What did you do?’

  ‘He thinks I’m scheming with Nigel.’

  ‘Nigel? Nigel that supplied us with all the weapons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he’s the only one of us who knows Nigel.’ He studied Bethaneve’s dead expression, sensed the seething emotions so thinly obscured by her shell. ‘All right. We have to put a stop to this. I need to find Coulan. He’ll know what to do.’

  ‘I know where he is.’

  ‘Where?’ It came out a lot more urgently than he intended.

  ‘The National Council building. Javier, he’s meeting with senior comrades, making deals, organizing them. I think he might be putting his own faction together.’

  He thought it was the cold that made his muscles so difficult to move, but in the end he had to admit it was shock. ‘No. No, you’re wrong.’

  ‘I hope so. I do, really. But my informants aren’t close enough to be included in the deals. I don’t know what he’s actually arranging.’

  ‘Coulan would never betray us. We planned this with him for years; I know exactly what he thinks on any subject. He wants social justice just like we do.’

  ‘I know.’ She gave her feet a sheepish glance. ‘I remember, too. He saved me. He was going to save everyone.’

  ‘Then we must believe in him. We can’t allow Slvasta’s paranoia to contaminate us. That’s one of the principles we were going to install, remember? Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.’

  ‘He came up with that.’

  ‘Yeah. Then, until we find out what’s going on, we follow that principle.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’ll do that.’

  Javier lumbered to his feet. It was an effort, and for a moment he felt dizzy. ‘I should have been helping our comrades with the railway nationalization this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you even know how to nationalize a railway company?’

  ‘Sort of like taking it into new management, like I did with Coughlin’s stall at the Wellfield market.’

  ‘You need to scale up your thinking.’ She paused, allowing her troubled thoughts to show through her shell. ‘I meant what I said about not knowing what to do next. Do you think that’s strange?’

  ‘Listen, we’re both tired like nothing we’ve experienced before. Of course we’re going to make mistakes and forget things. Go easy on yourself. Look at the screw-up I’ve made of today.’

  ‘No. It’s more than that. We could always think of something before. How to organize the cells, political objectives, how to achieve our goals, strategies to manipulate public opinion. We sat down together and these ideas just kept coming. Fabulous ideas. Ideas that worked. Now we’ve won, and there’s nothing. We can’t figure out how to capitalize on what we’ve got. The city’s falling apart; there’s precious little food, the markets are closed, the water’s still not running in half the boroughs, people are fleeing. We broke it, cleverly and carefully. Why don’t we know how to put it all back together? We wanted this to be a decent fair society, so how come we had nothing ready to implement? Why no strategy to rebuild the rail bridges? Why not issue guarantees about life and liberty to reassure the professional classes that do the actual work?’

  ‘The People’s Interim Congress—’

  ‘Is a farce.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’ He squirmed under her gaze. ‘Okay, they’re a bunch of idiots. But some of them are useful idiots. They mean well.’

  ‘That’s a magnificent epitaph. If we’re not careful, we’ll be singing it all the way to Giu.’

  ‘What do you want, Bethaneve?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just saying it’s strange. Strange that it didn’t bother me before, either. It’s as if we’ve suddenly used up every idea. Why?’

  ‘All right. This is how it’s going to go. You and I are going to find Coulan. Then the three of us are going to sit down like we did in the good old days of an entire week and a half ago, and think how to calm Slvasta down and get everything back on track. When we’ve done that, the four of us will brainstorm how to make the city work again; there may even be beer and sitting around in a pub involved. How’s that sound?’

  ‘Sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all day.’

  There was a cab waiting for them outside Tarleton Gardens. Javier smiled as he helped Bethaneve inside. ‘See? You do know how to keep some things working.’

  She was deadly serious when she looked back and said: ‘But this was something we knew we’d need before.’

  Javier gave up.

  The cab set off, moving quickly through the semi-deserted streets.

  ‘He’s moving,’ Bethaneve announced after ten minutes. ‘Leaving the National Congress building. There’s a cab – not one on our list.’

  ‘I’m going to ’path him,’ Javier announced. He focused his mind, reaching over the rooftops towards First Night Square. ‘Coulan. Coulan, my love, talk to me, please. I know you’re there. I need you so much.’

  ‘Uracus,’ Bethaneve grunted. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘He just fuzzed that cab good and hard. My agent’s ex-sight can’t perceive it at all.’

  ‘Why is he doing this?’ Javier couldn’t keep the hurt distress from his voice. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Bethaneve settled back into the cab’s leather bench seat. ‘I’m going to activate all the cells around First Night Square. The comrades are still loyal, at least for now; they’ll watch out for him. Fuzz can defeat ex-sight, but he can’t hide the cab from good old-fashioned eyeball contact.’

  A minute later someone saw the cab turn into Fletton Road. Then Coulan got out and hurried into the Tonsly shopping arcade. ‘Uracus, there are twenty entrances to that place,’ Bethaneve said. ‘I wish we had Andricea’s mod-bird.’

  ‘She’s one of Slvasta’s loyalists.’

  A single eye opened to give him a disapproving stare. ‘That’s wrong-thinking.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He followed the gifting Bethaneve sen
t him. Marvelling at the way she coordinated ’paths from dozens of cell members seemingly simultaneously. Images of streets and arcade halls flashed before him at bewildering speed.

  ‘There!’

  Fleeting glimpse of his beloved’s pale skin and sandy hair disappearing fast down Makins Alley. Short sharp instructions flicked out to cell members. They changed direction, sped up, slowed down, hovered at road junctions.

  Coulan called a cab on Lichester Road. Fuzzed it. A cab from the list turned onto the road behind him, three cell members hopped on.

  There were three more changes of cab. A confusing run on foot through the maze of crooked alleys and tiny dark lanes of Saxby.

  ‘Uracus,’ Javier murmured admiringly as Bethaneve constantly shuffled the cell members about, interpreted images, anticipated moves. ‘You own this city.’

  She smiled, eyes still tight shut.

  Coulan slipped into the Reynolds Hotel, emerging from a side door. A cell member, one of Bethaneve’s elites, was lounging casually at the end of the alley. The last cab dropped him off along Breamer Street, where there were a lot of people milling round at the end, shuffling slowly forwards towards the Colbal. He merged into them.

  ‘Only one reason for him to be there,’ Bethaneve said in satisfaction.

  ‘Cabby,’ Javier called loudly. ‘Quayside, and fast.’

  *

  For seventeen years Philious Brandt had been Captain of Bienvenido; a proud lineage, defending the world, maintaining order, regulating its economy, upholding the law, keeping politicians in line. The world belonged to him. And now it didn’t.

  It had been a day of sheer terror for him and his family. One moment he’d been ’pathing frantically with Trevene and the First Speaker and the captain of the Palace Guard; the next moment gunshots had rippled around the palace. A mob had appeared, and some kind of well-organized and trained military force had stormed the walls and railings. Hidden gunmen had shot the Palace Guard. Staff panicked – some running for freedom, a heartening number rushing to the private apartments to shelter and protect the family.

  Philious had ’pathed and ’pathed for help: the Marines, the sheriffs, the regiment officers stationed in Varlan. But they too were under siege. And one by one their minds vanished from his perception.