Steel Sky (54 page)

The Deathsman lays him down gently. He sighs. “It doesn’t matter, Edward,” he says at last. “I’ll be your voice. I will say what has to be said. You’ll be the redeemer whether you like it or not.”

He stands, still shaking with adrenaline, his clothes covered with dust and blood. The crowd has gathered all around him now, ringing the shattered concrete. A clop is standing in front of them in his black rubber armor and the dark respirators the clops wear. He eyes the Deathsman warily from behind his crimson visor. “What was that you were saying to him?” he asks. “I couldn’t hear.”

The Deathsman shakes his head. “You’ll hear soon enough. Everyone will hear.”

“Step aside,” the clop grunts, unsatisfied. “I want to take his mask off.”

The Deathsman does not move. “The mask stays on.”

The clop glowers at him. He touches his palm to the handle of his shockstick. “Let me pass,” he says. “He may still be alive.”

“He’s dead,” the Deathsman says. “I know.”

“Then your job’s done. Why are you still here?”

“I’m his caretaker,” the Deathsman replies. He looks down at Edward. “I’ll be staying with him until the knackers come for his body. And the mask stays on.”

MANUAL OVERRIDE

Finally, far in the back of the staging area, where the walls are rough-hewn rock, behind all the rusted machines and rotting, empty crates, Orel finds what can only be the emergency exit.

A metal tube, wider than a man, emerges vertically from the rock over his head. At the end of it is a round, convex hatch with a hand wheel.

On the wall near the hatch, among flecks of red and yellow paint, is a small metal cage, with a long-dead light bulb inside. Orel drops the backpack, and wedges his glowstick into the metal cage, so his hands will be free. By its slowly fading light, Orel drags a stack of hard plastic pallets underneath the hatch, and climbs on top. He grabs the crossbars of the wheel with both hands and tries to turn it. His hands slide along the slick, cold metal; the wheel doesn’t move a millimeter. He tries again, wedging both hands in one of the corners where the crossbar meets the wheel, putting his whole body behind the effort, groaning with the strain, eyes bulging from his head.

Still nothing.

Orel jumps off the pallets, and pulls a fresh glowstick from the backpack. Activating it with a twist, Orel stalks through the old machinery until he finds a short length of metal pipe. He leaps back onto the pallets. Holding the pipe in both hands, he slams it against the hatch, which resonates with an ear-splitting ring. He strikes it again and again, sparks flying, little bits of rock and metal falling around him, until the staging area reverberates with a thousand echoes of metal on metal.

He pauses for only a moment, breathing heavily, as the echoes slowly fade away. Shimmering lights dart around the periphery of his vision, and blood runs down his chin from his lip where he has bitten through. He wedges the pipe into the wheel and pushes at it with all his remaining strength. The pallets creak and shift beneath him, threatening to collapse. Finally, with a sharp crack and a loud groan, the wheel turns. Orel turns it half a revolution, and suddenly the hatch falls open, nearly crushing him against the wall.

He stares stupidly at it for a moment. He had half expected to see something come through the hatch: a beam of blinding light, perhaps, or a friendly hand, welcoming him to a new world. But it is empty.

Orel crawls forward and looks up into the dark tube. The glowstick only illuminates it for about a meter. Rungs are welded to the curved surface. The cold air smells of corrosion.

With the pipe sticking out of his backpack and the glowstick in his teeth, Orel hauls himself into the tube and resumes climbing. It almost feels comforting, to again lose himself in the rhythm: hand up, leg up, hand up, leg up . . . hand up, leg up, hand up, leg up . . .

Before long, the light of the glowstick catches a glint of something at the end of the tube. It is another hatch, identical to the one below, except that this one curves outward because this time he is looking at it from the inside.

This is it, he is sure. This is the final way out.

Just below the hatch, the tube widens so Orel can rest on the lip, looking up at the hand wheel. His heart is pounding and he is drenched in sweat despite the cold. He takes quick, shallow breaths, trying to determine if the air is thinner here or if it is just a case of nerves. From his life in the Hypogeum, Orel is used to confined spaces, but still he feels trapped, acutely aware that he has nowhere to go if he cannot open this hatch.

And he is not entirely sure that he should.
They were fleeing from something
, he thinks.
That much we know. The Founders were fleeing some sort of disaster when they created the Hypogeum.

Is it wise to try to open the hatch? What if whatever the Founders feared is still out there?

It could be death to go out.

He sits staring at the hatch for a long time, until he comes to the realization that he is only wasting time. His decision is already made.

He slams the pipe against the wheel, turning his head from the cloud of rust particles that explode from the impact. Again and again he strikes it, until his ears go numb from the din. Finally, when he feels that the hatch has been sufficiently loosened, he wedges the pipe into the hand wheel, and pushes.

With a deep groan, the wheel begins to turn.

DESCENT

Fortunately, it does not take long for the knackers to arrive. They gather around Edward, two to a side, and hoist him onto the gurney. The Deathsman escorts them away. For a moment he worries that the onlookers will try to stop him, but the clop stands back as he approaches, and the crowd parts to let him pass.

Their fear of his kind helps
, the Deathsman thinks, surveying their faces, but that does not explain why they so reverently step aside.

It is love.
The Winnower is loved, as the Deathsmen are not.

A few people follow them into the prep room behind the giant screens, but no one tries to enter the elevator with them. The Deathsman exhales with relief as the car descends. The worst is not yet over, but a threshold has been crossed.

At the bottom of the shaft, the doors open and the gurney rattles down the dark stone corridors until they reach the main receiving station. A small crowd of hunched men and women are waiting under the bare bulbs, uncharacteristically absent from their posts. Blood and lymph drip from knives left carelessly at their tables. Acetylene torches hiss and sputter unattended. The air stinks of decay and hot metal.

Red eyes blinking wetly, the knackers close in, haltingly raising their hands to touch Edward’s armor, but the Deathsman waves them away. He spots their controller, the only one whose coverall is not totally stained with blood and oil. “Take us to the smelting pit,” he says.

The controller bows shallowly and leads them down a ramp, through a series of swinging doors. A handful of the knackers follow them silently. The controller stops at a thick metal door and presses a series of buttons.

As the door recedes into the ceiling the Deathsman is struck by a wave of heat so powerful he fears for a moment his cloak will catch fire. The knackers wheel the gurney to the lip of a wavering pool of molten metal. Heavy chains swing toward them, running on pulleys guided from the control room above their heads. The knackers turn and look at the Deathsman expectantly, their soiled faces orange-lit and wavering like ghosts in the heat.

“Remove the helmet,” he says.

Without hesitation, their calloused fingers crawl over Edward’s head until one of them finds the catches that hold the helmet in place. He unlocks them and carefully pulls the helmet off. If not for the thick streak of bloody froth that has dried across his mouth and jaw, Edward would look almost peaceful.

The Deathsman takes the helmet and tucks it under his arm. The knackers are staring at Edward’s face, trying to decide if they recognize him. He needs to end this quickly. “Drop him in the pit,” he says. The controller stares at him. “But, sir, his body must be reclaimed!”

“Not this one. He is special.”

“But his tissues will contaminate the metal,” the controller says, coughing in his consternation, “weaken its integrity.”

“Do it,” the Deathsman says softly. “And don’t worry. We will not need to scrape and hoard and murder each other just to get by, not for very much longer. That’s what has been accomplished today. At the cost of his life, with the last breath of this mortal body, the Winnower has opened the Sky.”

The controller stares at him helplessly a moment longer, then turns to the others. “Go on. Do as he says.”

The knackers pull down the chains and fasten them with clamps to Edward’s arms and legs. Everything is done methodically, with an almost loving attention to detail. The controller gestures to the men in the control room and the chains tighten, link by link, drawing Edward’s body into the air. When the body is suspended over the pit, the controller looks back one more time, seeking confirmation. The Deathsman nods, and Edward is slowly lowered into the molten metal. In his mind, the Deathsman edits out the unpleasant details: the blackened and bubbling skin, the way the limbs bend as the tendons contract in the heat, the smoking scum of human fat that spreads out across the surface of the pit.

He watches dispassionately as the last bits of the armor submerge into the glowing liquid. He wonders briefly if the knackers who saw Edward’s face will have to die like his brothers — silently, in the night — to protect the new order. Then he realizes, no, the knackers are blameless. As painful as it is to acknowledge, what was done to his brothers was justice.

THE TIPPING OF THE BALANCE

After he is done with her, Second Son stays in the little room, propped up in bed, watching her sleep.

Stupid cow,
he thinks,
what did Edward ever see in her?
She is not particularly intelligent, not sophisticated in the least, not even all that attractive. She does not seem in any way to be a worthy mate for an able foe like the Winnower.

Oh well
, he thinks.
No matter
. He reaches down beside the bed for the flask of musth. He lets a few drops fall into his ear, augmenting and elevating his mood. He sits back, letting his mind spin, enjoying his triumph. To simply kill Edward would have been a fine thing, but so pedestrian. Second Son had truly destroyed him, made him betray his principles, by forcing him to murder an innocent woman, Amarantha, which neatly eliminated another problem. The irony was too sweet. The perfection. It all fit together, like a giant network, just as father had said.

Yes, it was quite a triumph. Taking Edward’s woman as his own was only icing on the cake.

He looks down at the sleeping woman. She is lying on her side, snoring softly, a small spot of drool collecting on her pillow. Should he take her back to the Chandelier with him? he wonders. Make her a concubine?

No,
he thinks,
that would never work. She would never fit in, the slutty quat.

Leave her here then, living down, looking up? Sleeping with every tersh with a spare credit? Second Son considers the idea and finds it distasteful. By virtue of her association with the Winnower, she is a special woman. She should not be allowed to slip back into obscurity.

Perhaps he should just kill her.

As he is thinking, he notices the light change subtly, as if something new has been added to the room, absorbing more of the ambient light. He turns and sees the shadows in the corner shift and twist in a manner that has become much too familiar. For a moment, his heart jumps with fear.
It can’t be the Winnower
, he thinks.
He’s dead! I killed him!

The shadows coalesce into the black-on-black ensemble of a Deathsman. The dark figure stands hunched menacingly in the corner, the top of his head almost brushing the ceiling. He remains utterly motionless, as if waiting for some sort of reaction from Second Son.

Involuntarily, Second Son smiles. He exhales loudly with relief.
It’s not the Winnower,
he thinks.
He’s still dead.

The Deathsman’s hands snake out from beneath his cloak. The silver filigree around them is bright and polished. He flexes his hands slowly. Sinuous power seems to flow through his entire body into his fingers.

Smoke and mirrors bullshit,
Second Son thinks. Still, he has to admire the man’s style.

“What do you want?” he demands.

“Can’t you guess?” the Deathsman replies in his atonal voice.

Second Son glances down at Astrid, who continues slumbering, undisturbed by the intruder. Second Son feels a tug at his heart. He is suddenly touched by her vulnerability. Perhaps he sees a little bit of what attracted Edward to her.

“I’m not quite done with her,” Second Son says. “I’d like to keep her a little while longer. If there’s anything I can do to dissuade you from taking her right now, I’d like to know. I’m a very powerful man.”