Icarus Descending (25 page)

That was why I could hear them so well. And, if I was lucky, soon I would be able to see them, too.

It took me a few minutes to find a spot where the mortar had left gaps in the wall. The smell of mildew nearly made me sneeze, and once I almost tripped over a tall stack of bricks reclaimed from the cellar, put there by Giles in vain hopes of repairing the masonry some day. But by listening and feeling, I finally located the chimney. I patted it triumphantly, then leaned against the wall opposite and slitted my eyes, trying to gauge where the chinks were in the masonry.

After a few minutes I found them. Pinpricks of light, as though a few grains of glowing sand had been cast upon the brickwork. One hole was nearly large enough to poke a pencil through. I attacked that one, with my fingernails set to scraping away the rotten mortar, trying to make no sound. On the floor I found a nail twisted and caked with rust. After a few minutes I was able to gouge a little tunnel through the mortar, large enough for me to peer into the next room.

At first I could see nothing more than bright blurs. Then gradually my eye picked out the back of Trevor’s chair, with Trevor in it leaning forward as though listening closely. Beyond him on the far side of the room facing me, two figures perched on the divan—uneasily, it seemed to me, as though at any moment they might take flight. One was a woman. She had blond hair cut short around a thin, leonine face. One side of her forehead was gone, replaced with a plasteel plate that conformed to the shape of her skull. On the floor beside her booted feet was the helmeted enhancer that usually covered her face, and the stiff plasteel curves of her body armor. Her hands rested on her knees. She held a long black tube, some kind of protonic weapon—so much for Trevor’s insistence that this visit was a mere formality. Her fingers gripped its barrel tightly while she scanned the room suspiciously. I drew back for an instant, my heart racing, certain that she had seen me.

But even an Aviator can’t see through brick walls; at least not without an enhancer. I took a deep breath and once more pressed my eye to the peephole. The other Aviator was a stocky, grizzled man, also with a gun lying across his knees. Like his partner he wore a heavy jacket and trousers of red leather trimmed with black, clothing much worn and stained—the uniform of the NASNA Aviators. His head was cocked as with great interest, as he listened to someone I couldn’t see. Giles, I assumed. I turned my head so that my ear rested against the cold mortar and listened.

It was disorienting, not being able to watch and listen at the same time. Their voices were muffled, and Giles in particular spoke so softly that sometimes I couldn’t hear him at all; but eventually I was able to put together most of what they were saying.

“…trouble in the west.” That was the woman speaking. Her cool, precise diction made each word seem to hang in the air before melting away. “Trouble everywhere these days.”

“We hadn’t heard.” Trevor’s drawl was exaggerated to a complaining whine. “It’s been a bad winter here—no visitors except yourselves and a few janissaries from the City.”

The next words rang out so loudly that I jumped, as though they had been spoken directly to me.

“Araboth has fallen. There were almost no survivors, and the Orsinas and all their advisers were killed.”

I heard Giles exclaim, and Trevor turned so that I could glimpse his face: taut, as though containing some terrible grief—or joy.

How can they not notice?
I thought.
God, he hates them!

But they didn’t notice; or if they did, they had their own reasons for ignoring it.

Trevor asked a question, and the woman Aviator said something else I couldn’t understand. I placed my eye back at the peephole. She and her companion had lowered their heads and were speaking confidingly to Trevor, still clutching their weapons. Through a doorway hobbled the servant, Mazda. It bent to pick up a small tray of glasses and a decanter, then left. I changed position again so I could listen.

“No, I am not mistaken: Captain Patrocles and I received our orders from him at Cisneros.” It was impossible to tell if the woman’s icy tone held rage or pride. “He has been made Imperator. It would take more than a
tsunami
to destroy Tast’annin.”

Tast’annin?

I clutched at the wall, the mortar crumbling between my fingers. My head reeled; I felt as though a huge mouth gaped at me in the darkness, waiting to swallow me if I moved.

“I thought he was dead!” exclaimed Giles.

For the first time the Aviator named Patrocles spoke. “He was.” His next words were incomprehensible. I finally made out, “…regeneration in Araboth. His investiture was held before the City fell. Colonel Aselma was there.”

Colonel Aselma broke in angrily. “It is an insult to us! He is a
rasa,
a walking corpse. How was it that he escaped when the domes collapsed at Araboth, unless he abandoned his post as Imperator? It was a madness of the Autocracy, to have him regenerated—he betrayed us in the City. He will betray us again.”

“I don’t think so,” Captain Patrocles said. “He is a brilliant man—”

“A
rasa,”
spat Colonel Aselma.

“A brilliant
leader,”
Patrocles went on coolly. “And what ever he is, he has never been a fool. He has his reasons for sending us on this mission….”

His voice trailed off, and I pressed myself even closer to the wall, struggling in vain to make out Trevor’s next words. But the Aviators’ news had so incited everyone that for a few minutes I could hear nothing clearly, just snatches of phrases—“always mad,” “HORUS colonies,” words that sounded like “enemy network.” When I pressed my eye to the hole again, I saw that Trevor had jumped from his chair and was pacing the room, clutching something in one hand and staring at it with furious intensity—a ’file foto, I finally realized. Once he stopped and raised his enhancer, so that the foto seemed aflame with blue light. Whatever the foto showed, it disturbed him greatly. After another minute he turned and shoved it into Giles’s hand. I went back to listening.

“…set up a search for her,” said Patrocles. Giles interrupted him with a question that I couldn’t understand, and the Aviator continued, “Absolutely. It was his last command before he left Cisneros.”

“He’s gone to HORUS,” the woman’s voice rang out. “To Quirinus, I believe. But he will find no one there, no one but energumens—he will be assassinated within the week,” she ended triumphantly.

“All the more reason to carry out his orders,” Captain Patrocles said in a voice like silk. “I’m afraid that’s not a very good image we’ve shown you, but it’s the best we could find—the records library at HEL was in a shambles. We were fortunate to find anything at all.”

At the word
HEL
I began to tremble uncontrollably. I drew away from the wall, nausea and a mounting fear clawing at me, then gazed out once more. Even from where I crouched, I could see that Giles had gone white. I thought the Aviators must be blind not to see his obvious terror as he handed the foto back to Colonel Aselma. I turned to listen again and heard him say, “We’ve seen no one who looks like this.”

“Look again,” urged Colonel Aselma. “It’s not a very good image.”

“Oh, I would remember—” Giles’s voice was stubbornly insistent, but also desperate. “You heard Trevor—it’s been a bad winter, no visitors—”

“Now, Giles,” Trevor said calmly. “They realize that. They’re just following Commander Tast’annin’s orders.”

“
Imperator
Tast’annin,” said Captain Patrocles. “He says she is the last of the original group they had developed at the Human Engineering Laboratory. With proper intervention she can be of great use to us.”

“
If
she is still alive,” Colonel Aselma said with disdain. “With that janissary rabble keeping order in the City, we’ll be lucky to find anything at all.”

“Oh, he’ll find her,” said Captain Patrocles. “By now the entire NASNA corps has received that ’file image, and there’s a bounty on her. She’ll be lucky if some overzealous janissary doesn’t blow her brains out—”

“They’d better not,” Colonel Aselma said darkly. “Her brain is the only part of her the Imperator cares about.”

I drew back from the wall and crouched in the darkness. My shaking hands clutched at my knees.

Tast’annin was alive. Jane’s bullet must not have killed him, or else the Ascendants had found some means to preserve his life—that single word
regenerated
rang in my ears like a warning tocsin.

He was alive, and he was looking for someone.

He was looking for me.

My breath came in such deep bursts, I was afraid the Aviators would hear me through the crumbling bricks. Light headed with fear, I tried to stand, nearly fell, and caught myself against the wall. They
would
hear me if I wasn’t careful; but all I could think of was that monstrous figure in the Cathedral—sacrificing children, using my twin, Raphael, as my own bloody image to lure the hapless Paphians to their deaths.

But I had
seen
Tast’annin die, slumped against the great pit he had dug on Saint Alaban’s Hill.

I stood panting, trying to calm myself so I wouldn’t go careening through the passage and bring the Aviators down on me like a pair of hounds. The fearlessness and strength I had felt just a few minutes ago was gone. Suddenly it seemed that all my actions of the past year had been insanely transparent. I felt as though there had been someone watching me all along, tracking me and just waiting for this moment to seize me. Those months when I had thought I was safe here at Seven Chimneys, safe in the City of Trees: all madness, an illusion brought on by my need to feel myself free and whole for the first time in my life. The Ascendants had for a little time forgotten me, that was all; as they had forgotten the City of Trees. But their attention had been brought back, first by Tast’annin’s defection; now by his command to search for me.

“
Oh, he’ll find her….
”

He would too; and this time he wouldn’t lose me.

I remembered Trevor Mallory in the cellar—“
I would have done it differently
—
no scars, nothing to show that you had ever been touched….
”—and heard Dr. Harrow’s voice just before she died, warning me of the Ascendants’ plans for the empaths she had nurtured at HEL—

“
And you, Wendy. And Anna, and all the others. Like the geneslaves: toys.
Weapons—
you especially
…”

She had been right. Nothing—not even death, it seemed—would keep the Ascendants from controlling their creations. I had been a fool to think otherwise. They had engineered me as a weapon, my mind altered through chemicals and surgery until they could turn it to their own purposes. But they would not give up a weapon so easily—especially now, when they were threatened by this rebel Alliance. They would reclaim me as they had reclaimed Tast’annin. If he was still alive—if he was
again
alive—he must be an even more maleficent creature than he was before. Somehow they had brought him back into their game; somehow they would do the same with me.

I shuddered. I had been mad to put my trust in Giles and Trevor. Their attempt to hide us suddenly seemed as pathetic as Fossa’s efforts at speech. Those two Aviators would find and capture me as though I were a bewildered feral dog, then give me over to the new team of researchers at HEL and never think of me again. If I tried to fight them, my fate would be Tast’annin’s, killed and regenerated as an Ascendant tool, with no mind or will of my own.

And what then of Jane and Miss Scarlet?

“No,” I whispered. Abruptly I turned and ran down the hallway, stumbling in the darkness and shuddering with fear. When I reached the door, I fled through it, keeping my head down as I ran. It wasn’t until too late that I realized where I was.

“Wendy!”

I gasped, looked up to see Jane silhouetted in a doorway. Her hair was disheveled and her face sunburned. Over her shoulder two hares hung from a loop of leather cord, their legs tied with vines; her pistol was shoved through her belt. Behind her an open door let in the cool night breeze and the sound of the wind. I was in the front hall. I’d come the wrong way.

“Jane,
no—
”

She grinned and let the door slam shut behind her, a sound that echoed through the house like a gunshot. “What is it, Wendy? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I whirled frantically, heading for the steps that led upstairs; but it was too late.

“
Who’s that?
”

The voice of Colonel Aselma rang down the corridor, along with the sound of heavy boots. Behind her I could hear Trevor protesting, “The wind, just the wind—” and Giles adding, “It’s only Jane!”

“Wendy?” Jane turned to me, her eyes wide. “What’s happened? Who’s here—”

“You said there were no other guests—” Captain Patrocles’s angry voice boomed down the corridor. A moment later he strode into the foyer, his weapon dangling from one hand. And saw me.

“
It’s her!—
”

In an instant his gun was trained on me, but before he could fire, Colonel Aselma had shoved him aside.

“
No!
He wants her alive!”

She lunged and I dropped to the floor, rolling until I slammed into the wall. Colonel Aselma was right behind me, reaching for me with one hand while with the other she wrestled something from her belt.

“
You!
”

I glimpsed Trevor and Giles frozen in the entryway, Patrocles shouting as he swung his weapon between them and Jane. Then I felt Colonel Aselma’s fingers closing about my ankle.

“No—” I choked, kicking at her. She swore and I kicked again, harder this time and aiming for her face. I felt the plate covering her forehead crack beneath my blow, and struck again at the other side of her head. Shouting with pain, she dropped back, her hand sliding from me. I staggered to my feet and bolted for the stairs. Behind me I heard Trevor yelling desperately.

“Wendy—for Christ’s sake don’t, wait—Jane,
no
!
”

There was an explosive retort, followed by a scream; then another thunderous roar. For a moment I was blinded. A roiling ball of heat and flame rushed through the room, as though the floor had suddenly opened onto an inferno, and then was gone. I was thrown against the wall with such force that for a moment everything seemed to be frozen around me. Motes of golden light hung in the still air. Jane pointed at the doorway into the hall, her face absolutely devoid of any expression. Colonel Aselma knelt with her hand poised above the gun at her hip. Then like an echo of that first explosion there was another, smaller
boom,
followed by an echoing retort. A pane of glass in one of the foyer windows shattered, and suddenly everything began to move again. I started to race up the steps, then heard a cry that pierced me like a shaft of ice. I stopped and looked back down.