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April 7

INEZ DRIVES. She’s wearing dark glasses to hide the effects of a sleepless abysmal night. The wipers squelch every few seconds. We don’t say much and there’s not a lot to say. Unalaq sits up front, and Ōshima, Holly, Arkady, and I are squashed into the back. Ōshima’s hosting Esther today. New York is damp, in a hurry, and indifferent to the fact that we Horologists plus Holly are risking our metalives and life for total strangers, their psychovoltaic children, and for the unborn whose parents have not yet met. I notice details I ordinarily overlook. Faces, textures, materials, signs, flows. There are days when New York strikes me as a conjuring trick. All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know. I’ve seen it with my eyes. Today, however, New York’s here-ness is incontestable, as if time is subject to it, not it subject to time. What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks, and more bricks than there are stars? Who could ever have predicted these vertical upthrusts and squally canyons in Klara Koskov’s lifetime, when I first traveled here with Xi Lo and Holokai—my friends the Davydovs? Yet all this was already there, packed into that magpie entrepôt like an oak tree packed into an acorn or the Chrysler Building folded up small enough to fit inside the brain of William Van Alen. If consciousness exists beyond the Last Sea and I go there today, I’ll miss New York as much as anywhere.

Inez turns off Third Avenue into our street. For the last time? These thoughts don’t help. Will I die without ever reading Ulysses to the end? Think of the case files I’m leaving back in Toronto, the paperwork, the emails, the emotions that my colleagues, friends, neighbors, and patients will pass through as I change from being “the AWOL Dr. Fenby” to “the Missing Dr. Fenby” to “Dr. Fenby, presumed dead.” No, don’t think. We pull up to 119A. If Horology has a home, it’s this place, with its oxtail-soup red bricks and darkframed windows of differing shapes. Inez tells the car, “Park,” and the hazards lights flick on.

“Be careful,” Inez says to Unalaq. Unalaq nods.

“Bring her back,” Inez says to me.

“I’ll do my best,” I say. My voice sounds thin.

119A RECOGNIZES HOROLOGISTS and lets us in. Sadaqat greets us behind the inner shield on the first floor. Our faithful warden is dressed like a parody survivalist, with army fatigues and a dozen pockets, a compass around his neck. “Welcome home, Doctor.” He takes my coat. “Mr. L’Ohkna’s in the office. Mr. Arkady, Miss Unalaq, Mr. Ōshima. And Ms. Sykes.” Sadaqat’s face drops. “I only hope you have recovered from the vicious and cowardly attack by the enemy. Mr. Arkady told me what happened.”

Holly: “I’ve been well taken care of. Thank you.”

“The Anchorites are abominable. They are vermin.”

“Their attack persuaded me to help Horology,” says Holly.

“Good,” says Sadaqat. “Absolutely. It is black and white.”



“Holly is joining our Second Mission,” I tell our warden.

Sadaqat shows surprise, and a gram of confusion. “Oh? I was not aware that Ms. Sykes had studied Deep Stream methodology.”

“She hasn’t,” says Arkady, hanging up his coat. “But we all have a role to play in the hours ahead, don’t we, Sadaqat?”

“True, my friend.” Sadaqat insists on collecting everyone else’s coat for the closet. “So true. And are there any other last minute … modifications to the Mission?”

Sadaqat’s been well prepared, but he can’t quite keep the hunger out of his voice.

“None,” I say. “None. We will act with acute caution, but we will take Elijah D’Arnoq at face value—unless he betrays us.”

“And Horology has its secret weapon.” Sadaqat glows. “Myself. But it is not yet ten o’clock, and Mr. D’Arnoq is not due to appear until eleven, so I made some muffins. You can smell them, I think?” Sadaqat smiles like a buxom chocolatier tempting a group of dieters who know they want to. “Banana and morello cherries. An army cannot march on an empty stomach, my friends.”

“I’m sorry, Sadaqat,” I step in, “but we shouldn’t eat. The Way of Stones can induce nausea. An empty stomach is in fact best.”

“But surely, Doctor, just a tiny mouthful can’t hurt? They are fresher than fresh. I put white chocolate chips in the mix, too.”

“They’ll be just as awesome on our return,” says Arkady.

Sadaqat doesn’t push it. “Later, then. To celebrate.”

He smiles, showing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of American dental care, paid for by Horology, of course. Sadaqat owns very little not earned from or given by Horology. How could he? He spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital outside Reading, England. A freelance Carnivore had got herself employed as a secretary in the hospital, and had groomed a psychovoltaic patient who had shared confidences with Sadaqat before the poor woman’s soul was decanted. I disposed of the Carnivore after quite a strenuous duel in her sunken garden, but rather than redact what Sadaqat had learned about the Atemporal world, I set about isolating the section of his brain harboring his schizophrenia and severing its neural pathways to the unimpaired regions. This cured him, after a fashion, and when he declared his undying gratitude I brought him over to New York to be the warden of 119A. That was five years ago. One year ago our faithful retainer was turned during a series of incorporeal encounters and rendezvous in Central Park, where Sadaqat exercises daily, whatever the weather. Ōshima, who first noticed the Anchorites’ fingerprints on our warden, was all for redacting the last six years from Sadaqat’s memory and suasioning him aboard a container ship to the Russian Far East. A mixture of sentimentality and a reluctant intuition that we could deploy the Anchorites’ mole against his new masters persuaded me to stay Ōshima’s hand. It has been a perilous twelve months of second- and third-guessing our enemy’s intentions, and L’Ohkna had to recalibrate 119A’s sensors to detect toxins in case Sadaqat was ordered to poison us, but it all comes to an end this very morning, for good or for ill.

How I loathe this war.

“Come,” Ōshima tells Sadaqat. “Let’s check the circuitry in our box of tricks one last time …”

They go upstairs to ensure the hardware needs no last-minute adjustments. Arkady goes up to the garden to do Tai Chi in the halfhearted drizzle. Unalaq retreats to the common room to send instructions to her Kenyan network. I go to the office to transfer the Horology protocols to L’Ohkna. The task is soon done. The young Horologist shakes my hand and tells me he hopes we’ll meet again, and I tell him, “Not as much I do.” Then he departs 119A through the secret exit. Thirty minutes remain before D’Arnoq’s appearance. Poetry? Music? A game of pool.

I go down to the basement, where I find Holly setting up. “I hope it was okay to help myself. Everyone sort of vanished, so I just …”

“Of course. May I join you?”

She’s surprised. “You play?”

“When not battling with the devil over a chessboard, nothing calms the nerves like the click of cue tip on phenolic resin.”

Holly lines up the pack of balls and removes the triangle. “Can I ask another question about Atemporals?” I give her a fire-away face. “Do you have families?”

“We’re often resurrected into families. A Sojourner’s host usually has blood relatives around like Jacko did. We form attachments, like Unalaq and Inez. Until the twentieth century, traveling alone as an unmarried woman was problematic.”

“So you’ve been married yourself?”

“Fifteen times, though not since the 1870s. More than Liz Taylor and Henry the Eighth combined. You’re curious to know if we can conceive children, however.” I make a gesture to brush her awkwardness away. “No. We cannot. Terms and conditions.”

“Right.” Holly chalks her cue. “It’d be tough, I s’pose, to …”

“To live, knowing your kids died of old age decades ago. Or that they didn’t die, but won’t see this loon on the doorstep who insists he’s Mom or Dad, reincarnated. Or discover you’ve impregnated your great-great-grandchild. Sometimes we adopt, and often it works well. There’s never a shortage of children needing homes. So I’ve never borne or fathered a child, but what you feel for Aoife, that unhesitating willingness to rush into a burning building, I’ve felt that too. I’ve gone into burning buildings, as well. And one sizable advantage of infertility was to spare my female selves getting banged up as breeding stock all their lives, as was the fate of most women between the Stone Age and the Suffragettes.” I gesture at the table. “Shall we?”

“Sure. Ed always said I’ve got this nosy streak. Which was brassnecked of Mr. Journalist, mind you.” She takes a coin from her purse. “Heads or tails?”

“Throw me a heads.”

She flips the coin. “Tails. Once I’d’ve known that.” Holly lines up her shot and breaks. The cue grazes the pack, bounces off the bottom cushion, and floats back up to the top.

“I’m guessing that wasn’t beginner’s luck.”

“Brendan, Jacko, and me played at the Captain Marlow, on Sundays when the pub was shut. Guess who usually won?”

I copy Holly’s shot, but play it less well. “He’d been playing since the 1750s, remember. More recently, too. Xi Lo and I played daily on this very table, for most of 1969.”

“Seriously? On this very table?”

“It’s been reupholstered twice since, but yes.”

Holly runs her thumb along the cushion. “What did Xi Lo look like?”

“Shortish, early fifties in 1969, bearded, Jewish, as it happened. He set up comparative anthropology at NYU. There are photos in the archives, if you’d like to see him.”

She considers the offer. “Another time, when we’re not off on a suicide mission. Xi Lo was male back then, too?”

“Yes. Sojourners often have a gender they’re most at home in. Esther prefers being female. We Returnees alternate gender from one resurrection to the next, whether we like it or not.”

“That doesn’t screw your head up?”

“It’s odd for the first few lives, but you get used it.”

Holly hits the cue ball off the side and bottom cushions, and into the loosened pack. “You say things like that as if it’s so … normal.”

“Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted. To your ancestor in 1024, your life in 2024 would seem equally improbable, mystifying, full of marvels.”

“Yeah, but … it’s not quite the same. For that ancestor and me, when we die, we die. For you … What’s it like, Marinus?”

“Atemporality?” I rub blue chalk dust onto the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb. “We’re old, even when young. We’re usually leaving, or being left behind. We’re wary of ties. Until 1821, when Xi Lo and Holokai found me, my loneliness was indescribable yet had to be endured. Even now, what I’d call the ‘ennui of eternity,’ if you will, can be debilitating. But being a doctor, and an horologist, gives my metalife a purpose.”

Holly readjusts her moss-green head-wrap, half removing it, to reveal a scalp of trimmed tufty down. She hasn’t done this in my presence before, and I’m touched. “Last question: Why do Atemporals exist? I mean, did Returnees and Sojourners evolve this way, like the great apes or whales? Or were you … ‘made’? Was it something that happened to you, in your first life?”

“Not even Xi Lo has an answer to that. Not even Esther knows.” I hit the orange 5 ball into the bottom left. “I’m spots, you’re stripes.”

AT TEN-FIFTY, HOLLY pots the black to beat me by a single ball. “I’ll give you a rematch later,” she says, picking up her daypack. We walk upstairs to the gallery, where the others are assembled. Ōshima lowers the blinds. Holly goes into the kitchen for a glass of tap water—Only tap water, I subcall after her. Don’t touch the bottled water. It could have been tampered with, I subwarn her—and she returns a minute later, strapping on a small daypack, as if we’re going for a short hike in the woods. I lack the heart to ask her what she’s packed—a flask of tea, a cardigan, a bar of Kendal mint cake for energy? This just isn’t that sort of expedition. We look at the paintings. What’s left to say? We discussed strategy to the saturation point in Unalaq’s library; sharing our fears at this point is unhelpful, and we don’t want to fill the last moments with small talk. Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time calls me over. Xi Lo told me he regretted never switching it for the copy in London, but he couldn’t face all the Acts of Suasion, skulduggery, and subterfuge needed to right the wrong. Fifty years later I stand there with the same regret. For Atemporals, our tomorrows feel like a limitless resource. Now I’ve none left.

“The Aperture,” Unalaq says. “I feel it.”

Six of us look around for the unzipping line …

“There,” says Arkady, “by the Georgia O’Keeffe.”

A vertical black slit draws itself in front of the horizontal yellows and pinks of the New Mexico dawn. A hand appears, the line widens to a slash, and Elijah D’Arnoq emerges. Softly, Holly mangles a swear word and says, “Where did he come from?” and Arkady mutters, “Where we’re going.”

Elijah D’Arnoq needs a shave and his wiry hair looks unkempt. Yes, the strain of being a traitor ought to show. “You’re punctual.”

“Horologists have no excuse for being late,” replies Arkady.

D’Arnoq recognizes Holly. “Ms. Sykes. I’m glad you were rescued the other day. Constantin regards you as unfinished business.”

Holly can’t yet speak to the man who steps out of thin air.

“Ms. Sykes will join our demolition party,” I tell D’Arnoq. “Unalaq will channel her psychosoteric voltage into the cloaking operation.”

Elijah D’Arnoq looks dubious, and I wonder if this might jeopardize the Second Mission. “I can’t guarantee her safety.”

“I thought you’d covered all angles?” says Arkady.

“War has no guarantees. You all know that.”

“And Mr. Dastaani here,” I indicate Sadaqat, “will also be joining us. I presume you are familiar with our warden at 119A?”

“Everybody spies,” says D’Arnoq. “What’s Mr. Dastaani’s role?”

“To park his ass,” says Ōshima, “halfway up the Way of Stones and unleash a force-ten psychoferno if anyone wanders up after us. Temporal, Atemporal—anyone in the conduit will be ash.”

D’Arnoq frowns. “Is a psychoferno a Deep Stream invocation?”

“No,” says Ōshima. “It’s my word for what happens if the bomb made of N9D—the famous Israeli-made nano-explosive—currently in Mr. Dastaani’s backpack goes off inside the Way of Stones.”

“It’s insurance against an attack from the rear,” I say, “while we’re taking apart the Chapel.”

“A smart precaution,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, looking impressed. “Though I pray to God you don’t have to use it.”

“How do you feel?” Ōshima asks D’Arnoq. “Defection’s a big step.”

The 128-year-old Carnivore regards the eight-centuries-old Ōshima with defiance. “I’ve been party to decades of indiscriminate evil, Mr. Ōshima. But today I’ll also be party to stopping it.”

“But without your Black Wine,” Ōshima reminds him, “you’ll age, you’ll fade away, you’ll die in a care home.”

“Not if Pfenninger or Constantin stop us before we’ve smashed the Chapel of the Dusk, I won’t. And so. With no further ado?”

ONE BY ONE, we slip through the dark Aperture onto the round floor of rock ten paces across. The unflickering, paper-white Candle of the Dial stands as tall as a child. I’d forgotten the dual claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the smell of locked spaces, and the thin air. Residual color and light from the gallery filters in through the Aperture, held open like a drape by D’Arnoq now for Holly, now for Sadaqat, with his explosive backpack. Sadaqat’s face is a study of nervous awe, while Ōshima, the last to enter, is a study of sulky nonchalance. “This isn’t the Chapel, is it?” Holly mutters. “And why’s my voice so quiet?”

“This is the Dial of the Way of Stones,” I reply. “The first of the many steps that climb up to the Chapel. The edges of the Dial absorb light and sound, so raise your voice a little to compensate.”

“There’s no color,” observes Holly. “Or is it me?”

“The Candle’s monochrome,” I answer. “It’s been burning for eight centuries.” Behind us, Elijah D’Arnoq is sealing the Aperture. I catch a brief glimpse of Bronzino’s Venus, lightly holding her golden apple, before our way back is gone. No dungeon was ever so secure. Only Esther or a follower of the Shaded Way can unseal the Aperture and get us home. I suffer a jabbing flashback to my last time on the Dial, incorporeally, my and Esther’s souls unraveling, Joseph Rhîmes hard on her heels and gaining. Esther, nestled and hidden in Ōshima’s head, is no doubt remembering too.

“There are letters cut into the stone,” Holly remarks.

“The Cathar alphabet,” I tell her. “No one can read it now, not even heresiologists. The alphabet is descended from Oc, a language older even than Basque.”

“Pfenninger told me,” says D’Arnoq, “the letters are a prayer to God, requesting His help to rebuild Jacob’s Ladder. That’s what the Blind Cathar believed he was building, apparently. Don’t touch the walls. Whatever it’s made of, it and atomic matter”—he produces a coin from his pocket—“do not get on.” He tosses the coin out of the Dial’s perimeter. It vanishes in a blink of phosphorescence. “Don’t lose your footing on the Way of Stones.”

“Which is where?” asks Ōshima.

“It’s cloaked,” D’Arnoq shuts his eyes and opens his chakra-eye, “and moving, to keep out the riffraff. One moment.” He takes short, slow steps to the edge of the Dial, symboling in the staccato manner of the Shaded Way and mumbling an Act of Reveal. Keeping his back to the Candle, he shuffles sideways around the perimeter. “Got it.” Off the edge of the Dial and about one foot higher, a stone slab appears, as long and wide as a table. A second slab leads up from the first, and a third, and a fourth, higher into the blackness.

“Marinus,” Holly asks in my ear, “is this technology? Or …”

I know the missing word. “If you’d cured Henry the Seventh’s TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour’s access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you’re not yet used to.”

If the professor of semantics wouldn’t object,” says Ōshima, “perhaps she’d finish her seminar later?”

ELIJAH D’ARNOQ GOES first, I follow, then Holly, Arkady, Unalaq, and Sadaqat, with ten kilos of N9D in his bag, and last Ōshima as our rear guard. On the fifth or sixth stone I look back over my companions’ heads, but the Dial is already out of view. Even the Way of Stones’ irregularity is irregular. There are stretches where the steps twist upward, sharp and steep, a stairway in a spire. There are stretches where long slabs of stone form a gently climbing road. There are even places where the climber must jump across from slab to slab, like stepping stones in a river. Better to ignore thoughts of slipping. Soon I work up a sweat. Visibility is poor, akin to climbing a narrow mountain track at night, in grainy fog. The stones glow with a pale light, like that of the Candle of the Dial, but only as we approach, creating an illusion that the Way is building itself as we make our ascent. The darkness all around is oppressive, and seems to conjure up voices from my metalife. I hear my birth father, explaining in vernacular late Latin how to feed a dormouse to a kestrel. Now it’s Sholeetsa, an herbalist of the Duwamish tribe, scolding me for overboiling a root. Now the corvine cackle of Arie Grote, a warehouseman on Dejima. Their bodies were compost long ago, their souls passed to the Last Sea. We Horologists agreed not to subspeak, for fear of being overheard, but I wonder if the others also hear voices from their past lives. I don’t ask in case I distract them from where they’re putting their feet. Who falls off the Way of Stones falls into nothing.

• • •

 

WE ARRIVE AT the only triangular slab on the whole climb. It is concave in its center and large enough for all six of us to stand on. “Welcome to the Halfway Station,” says D’Arnoq, and I recall Immaculée Constantin naming it in the same way to Jacko on the First Mission. “I think we’ve found our lookout point for you, Sadaqat,” says Ōshima. “The line of sight looking down is as good it gets. Lie in this hollow, here in the middle, and you’ll see any visitors before they see you.” Sadaqat nods, looks at me and I nod back. “Very good, Mr. Ōshima.” With due diligence, Sadaqat sits down and takes from his backpack a heavily adapted iCube and a thin metallic cylinder. He places the iCube towards the “downhill” corner of the slab.

“Is that the firebomb?” D’Arnoq asks with professional curiosity.

“It’s a Deep Stream cloak generator,” Sadaqat flips open the cuboid’s air-screen and scrolls through options, “and a soul alarm. This noise sounds”—a wild-goose signal honks repeatedly—“when it detects an unidentified soul, such as yours, Mr. D’Arnoq …” Sadaqat’s fingers sidescroll and the air-screen throbs as D’Arnoq’s brain signature is stored. “Now it will know friend from foe.”

“A wise gadget,” says D’Arnoq, “and a clever one.”

“The generator prevents a psychosoteric from using an Act of Suasion to make me deactivate the N9D.” Sadaqat unscrews the top of the metallic cylinder. “And the detector alerts me to the fact that someone has tried—and that it is time to detonate the firebomb, which, of course, is this.” Tripod legs shoot out from the lower end of the cylinder and Sadaqat stands it up. “Ten kilos of N9D have been compressed into this tube—sufficient to turn the Way of Stones into a conduit of flame at five hundred degrees Celsius. If the goose goes ‘honk,’ ” Sadaqat looks at D’Arnoq, “psychoferno.”

“Stay alert,” says Ōshima. “We’re depending on you.”

“I have made my oaths, Mr. Ōshima. This is what I am for.”

“You have a loyal lieutenant,” D’Arnoq tells me. “Ready to make a … the ultimate sacrifice.”

“I know how lucky we are,” I say to Sadaqat.

“Don’t look so grim, Doctor!” Sadaqat stands and shakes hands with us all. “We’ll see each other soon, my friends. I am sure it is Scripted.” When he reaches me he slaps his heart. “Here!”

WE KEEP CLIMBING, stone after stone after stone, but it’s difficult to track how high or how far we’ve come since the Dial of the Way, or how many minutes have gone by since we left Sadaqat on sentry duty at the Halfway Station. We left our devices and watches at 119A. Time exists here but it isn’t easily measured, even in an Horologist’s mind. My resolve to count the steps has been sidelined by the voices of the long-dead. So I just follow Elijah D’Arnoq’s back, staying as alert as I can until at last we come to a second circular slab of stone, identical in most features to the Dial at the base of the climb. “The Summit, we call this one,” says D’Arnoq, visibly nervous. “We’re here.”

“Isn’t this where we came in?” asks Holly. “The candle, the circle, the stone circle, the engravings …”

“The stone inscription differs,” I say. “Mr. D’Arnoq?”

“Never studied it,” admits the defector. “Pfenninger is big into philology, and Joseph Rhîmes used to be as well, but for most of us, the Chapel’s a … sentient machine that we have a deal with.”

“ ‘Don’t blame me, I’m only the little guy’?” says Arkady.

D’Arnoq looks worn thin. “Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe that is what we tell ourselves.” He rubs imaginary dust from his eye. “Okay, now I’ll unseal the Umber Arch—the way in—but first a warning: The Blind Cathar should be safely in stasis, in his icon, in the north corner. You’ll sense him. He shouldn’t sense us. So—”

“ ‘Shouldn’t’?” queries Ōshima. “What’s this ‘shouldn’t’?”

“Deicide has its risks,” D’Arnoq scowls, “or it wouldn’t be deicide. If you’re afraid, Ōshima, go and join Sadaqat down below. But here are three don’ts to reduce the risk: Be wary of looking into the Blind Cathar’s face on the icon; don’t make any loud noises or sudden movements; don’t perform any acts of Deep Stream psychosoterica, not even subspeech. I can invoke Shaded Way acts without disturbing the Chapel, but the Cathar’ll detect psychosoterica from the far side of the Schism. Your 119A is fitted with alarms, shields, and cloaks; so is our sanctum, and if the Blind Cathar is aware of Horologists in the house before the walls come tumbling down, the day will end badly for all of us. Understood?”

“Understood,” says Arkady. “Dracula can be safely awoken only when the stake’s already in his heart.”

D’Arnoq barely hears as he evokes an Act of Reveal. A modest, trefoiled, man-high portal shimmers into being at the edge of the Summit Stone. The Umber Arch. Through it we see the Chapel, and inwardly I recoil, even as I follow Elijah D’Arnoq forwards. “In we go,” somebody says.

THE CHAPEL OF the Dusk of the Blind Cathar is the body of a living being. One senses it, immediately. Taking the Umber Arch as south, the rhombus-shaped nave of the Chapel is maybe sixty paces along its north-south axis, thirty paces from east to west, and loftier than it is long. Every plane points to, refers to, or mirrors the icon of the Blind Cathar, hanging in the narrow “northern” corner, so one must concentrate hard on not gazing at the icon. Walls, floor, and pyramidal ceiling are all crafted from same milky, flint-gray stone. The Chapel’s sole furnishings are a long oaken table placed along the north-south axis, two benches on either side, and one large picture on each wall. Immaculée Constantin explained the gnostic paintings to Jacko last time: the Blue Apples of Eden at Noon on the Eighth Day of Creation; the Demon Asmodeus, tricked by Solomon into building the King’s Temple; the true Virgin, suckling a pair of infant Christs; and Saint Thomas standing in a rhombus-shaped chamber identical to the Chapel of the Dusk. Floating below the roof’s apex is a writhing snake wrought in chatoyant stone, in the circular act of consuming its own tail. The Chapel’s blockwork is flawless and fused and creates the illusion that the chamber was hewn from inside a mountain, or that it was crystallized into being. The air here is not fresh or stale or warm or cool, though it carries the tang of bad memories. Holokai died here, and despite what we’ve allowed Holly to hope, I have no proof that Xi Lo didn’t.

“Give me a minute,” murmurs D’Arnoq. “I need to revoke my Act of Immunity, so we can merge our psychovoltage.” He closes his eyes. I walk over to the oblique-angled west corner, where a window offers a view over one mile or a hundred miles of Dunes, up to the High Ridge and the Light of Day. Holly follows me. “See up there?” I tell her. “That’s where we’re from.”

“Then all those little pale lights,” whispers Holly, “crossing the sand, they’re souls?”

“Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time.” We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of Dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. “And that’s where they’re bound.” We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one.

Holly asks, “Is the Last Sea really a sea?”

“I doubt it. It’s just the name we use.”

“What happens to the souls when they get there?”

“You’ll find out, Holly. Maybe I will, one day.” Today?

We return to the center, where D’Arnoq is still inside himself. Ōshima points up to the apex of the Chapel, and traces an invisible line down to the north corner where the icon appears to be watching us. I shut my eyes, open my chakra-eye, and scan the ceiling for the crack mentioned by Esther …

It takes a moment, but I find it. There, starting at the apex and curving down to the shadows in the north corner.

Yes, it’s there, but it’s a terribly thin crack on which to gamble five Atemporal metalives and one Temporal life.

“Is it me,” Holly is asking, and I close my chakra-eye and open up my physical eyes, “or does that picture … sort of … reel you in?”

“It’s not you,” replies Elijah D’Arnoq, who is now back with us. We look at the icon. The hermit wears a white cloak, his hood draped about his shoulders to expose his head and a face with blanks instead of eyes. “But don’t stare at him,” D’Arnoq reminds us. On the Way of Stones, sound was muffled so you had to speak twice as loudly. Here in the Chapel, whispers, footsteps, and even the swish of our clothing sound amplified, as if collected by hidden microphones. “Look away, Ms. Sykes. He may be dreaming at present, but he’s a light sleeper.”

Holly forces herself to look to one side. “It’s those empty eye sockets. They drag your eyeballs into them.”

“This place has a sick mind,” remarks Arkady.

“Then let us put it out of our misery,” says D’Arnoq. “The Act of Anesthesia is done. As per the plan, then: Marinus and Unalaq, you hiatus the icon to ensure he won’t wake while Arkady, Ōshima, and I psychoflame the icon with every volt we’ve got.”

We approach the northern corner, where the eyeless figure gleams pale as a shark’s underbelly. “So all you have to do to bring down this place,” Holly asks me, “is trash that painting?”

“Only now, at this point in the cycle,” D’Arnoq answers on my behalf, “while the Blind Cathar’s soul is housed inside the icon. At other times he resides in the fabric of the chapel, and then he would have sensed our intent and melted us like plastic figurines in the flame of a blowtorch. Marinus: Begin.”

If Elijah D’Arnoq is betraying us, he’s keeping up a convincing act until the last minute. “You take the left,” I tell Unalaq, “I’ll take the right.” We stand in front of the Blind Cathar and shut our eyes. Our hands intone in synchronicity. Xi Lo taught Klara Marinus Koskov the Act of Hiatus in Saint Petersburg, and as my Indian self, I taught Unalaq. To strengthen and deepen the act, our lips recite it, silently, from memory, like a pianist’s eye navigating a complex but familiar musical score. I sense the Blind Cathar’s consciousness rise to the icon’s surface, like a swarm of bees. We push it back. We succeed. Partly. I think. “Quickly,” I tell Elijah D’Arnoq. “It’s more a local anesthetic than a deep coma.”

Unalaq and I step aside. D’Arnoq stands before his ex-master, or his current master, I do not know, and holds out his hands at his sides, palms up. To his left and his right, Arkady and Ōshima press their palm-chakras against D’Arnoq’s. “Don’t even think about getting off on this,” mumbles Ōshima.

Pallid and sweaty, D’Arnoq shuts his eyes, opens his chakra-eye, and channels the ember-red light of the Shaded Way at the throat of the Holy of Holies.

The Blind Cathar is no longer dreaming. He knows he’s being attacked. Like a drugged giant, like my house in Kleinburg in the grip of an Arctic gale, the Chapel strains and struggles. I stagger, I think I blink, and the Blind Cathar’s mouth is twisted into aggression. His chakra begins to dilate, a black spot appearing on his forehead, growing like an ink stain. If it opens fully, we’re in severe trouble. An earthquake is trapped in the Chapel walls, and Elijah D’Arnoq is making a high, inhuman sound. Channeling so much psychovoltage is killing him. His defection must be genuine; this will kill him. I think I blink again and the icon is firelit and smoking and the depicted monk is roaring with agony, as two-dimensional flames burn him alive, his chakra-eye flickering here and not-here, here and not-here, here and …

GONE. SILENCE. THE Blind Cathar’s icon is a charcoal square and Elijah D’Arnoq is heaving, bent over double. “We’ve done it,” he gasps. “We’ve bloody well done it.”

Wordlessly, we Horologists consult with one another …

… and Unalaq confirms it. “He’s still there.” Her words are our death sentence. The Blind Cathar has merely left the icon and fled to the floors, walls, and ceiling. We have been participants in a charade to allow the Anchorites time to stream up the Way of Stones. Their arrival is imminent. D’Arnoq’s defection was indeed a trap, and the Second Mission has become a kamikaze attack. I’d subsend an apology to Inez and Aoife if I could, but their world is out of range. “Holly? Stand behind us, please.”

“Did it work? Is—is—is Jacko going to … appear?”

I’d like to hiatus her now so she won’t die hating me. The Script has failed us. At Blithewood Cemetery I should have turned around, called Wendy Hanger, explained there’d been a mix-up, and gone back to Poughkeepsie station. “I don’t know,” I tell Holly the mother, sister, daughter, widow, writer, friend. “But stand behind us.”

Message from Esther, subreports Ōshima. She’s started the Last Act. She’ll need up to a quarter hour.

“We had to try,” Unalaq says. “While there was hope.”

Elijah D’Arnoq is still pretending: “What are you talking about?” He even smiles. “We’ve won! The Blind Cathar’s dead. Without him to maintain the Chapel fabric, where we’re standing will all be Dunes and Dusk within six hours.”

I look at what, in spy-novel terms, is an old-fashioned double agent. I don’t even need scansion to be sure. Elijah D’Arnoq isn’t as skillful a liar as he believes. For part one of the deception, at my house outside Toronto, he had indeed been “turned” into a genuine penitento, but at some point in the last few days, Pfenninger or Constantin turned him back to the Shaded Way.

“May I, Marinus?” asks Ōshima. “Please?”

“As if my permission ever mattered to you. But yes. Hard.”

Ōshima fakes a sneeze and suckerkinetics D’Arnoq along the table, clean off the end. He comes to a halt only at the Umber Arch.

Xi Lo did the same to Constantin, I subremark, though he only managed to bowl her about halfway down the table.

“D’Arnoq’s more of a lightweight,” says Ōshima. “It’s an obvious play: long, smooth, table; annoying person. Who could resist?”

“I … guess this means he’s not one of us,” says Holly.

“You,” Elijah D’Arnoq picks himself up and is shouting from the far end of the Chapel, “you,” he points, “will smoulder and shrivel in the heat!” Nine men and a woman melt from the air around him.

“GUESTS, GUESTS, GUESTS!” Baptiste Pfenninger claps his hands and smiles. The First Anchorite is a tall man, utterly at ease in his well-toned, well-dressed body. He sports a fastidiously trimmed, silver-tinged beard. “How the old place loves guests, and so many!” I’d forgotten his bass, actorly voice. “One per quarter is the usual quota, so today’s a very special occasion. Our second very special occasion.” All the men are wearing dinner jackets of various cuts and fashions. Pfenninger’s looks Edwardian. “Marinus, Marinus, welcome. Our only repeat visitor in the Chapel of the Dusk’s history, though, of course, last time you’d left your body back on earth. Ōshima, you’re looking old, burned, tired, and in need of a resurrection. It won’t occur. Thank you for killing Brzycki, by the by; he was showing signs of vegetarianism. Who else? ‘Unalaq’—do I pronounce it correctly? It sounds awfully like a brand of superglue, however one says it. Arkady, Arkady, you’ve got taller since I last sawed your feet off. Remember the rats? Dictators really were dictators in the days of Salazar’s Lisbon. Seventy-two hours you took to die. I’ll see if I can’t beat it with Inez, eh?” Pfenninger clicks his tongue. “A pity L’Ohkna and Roho can’t be here, but Mr. D’Arnoq,” the First Anchorite turns to his double agent, “netted the fattest fish. Good boy. Oh! Last and least, Holly Sykes, mystic lady author turned Irish egg farmer. We’ve never met. I’m Baptiste Pfenninger, interlocutor of this miraculous”—he gestures at the walls and dome—“engine, and, oh, titles, titles, they drag behind one like Marley’s chains, Jacob’s not Bob’s. Two of our number are even more thrilled than I to see you here at last, Holly …”

Dressed in a black velvet gown and gratuitous webs of diamonds, Immaculée Constantin steps forwards. “My singular young lady is all grown-up … menopausal, cancerous, and fallen in with quite the wrong sort. So. Do I match my voice?”

Holly looks at this faceless girlhood figure, speechless.

Constantin’s smile fades, though it was never sincere. “Jacko could carry a dialogue. Only he wasn’t really Jacko by then, was he? Tell me, Holly, did you believe Marinus when she claimed your brother just happened to die of natural causes while Xi Lo was hovering nearby, mmm?”

Seconds pass. Holly’s voice is dry. “What are you saying?”

“Oh, my.” Constantin’s smile fades into pity. “You did believe them? Forget everything I said, I beg you. Gossip is the devil’s radio, and I shan’t be a broadcaster, but … try to put two and two together before you die. I’ll take care of Aoife, too. Just so, you know, she won’t miss you. In fact, why not go the whole hog and kill Sharon and Brendan and collect the full Sykes family set? As it were.”

Esther’s had about three minutes. The Sadaqat denouement should take five, if Pfenninger’s feeling voluble. I calculate our chances for when the psychoduel begins. The newest three Anchorites shouldn’t cause us too much trouble, but the Chapel is devoid of projectiles to kinetic and eleven against four is still eleven against four. We’ll need to buy Esther about seven minutes. Can we hold them off that long?

“You will regret threatening my family,” Holly’s saying. “I swear. I swear to God.”

“Oh, you swear, do you? To God, no less?” Immaculée Constantin looks concerned. “But God’s dead. Why don’t we check if I’ll regret my promises with our friends the Radio People, shall we?” She cups her diamonded ear and pretends to listen. “No, Holly, no. You’re misinformed. I’ll regret nothing; you, however, are going to writhe with remorse that you deserted your secret friend Miss Constantin when you were sweet, seven, and psychic. Think about it. Only one Sykes would have died, instead of five Sykeses plus a Brubeck. You’ll positively scream with regret! Well, Mr. Anyder? Was this brittle-boned widow a screamer in her pliable, pheromonal days?”

Hugo Lamb steps into view. Cleft-chinned, his body preserved at twenty-five years of age, and scornful-eyed. “She was the silent type. Hello, Holly. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. “What did they do to you?”

Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. “They”—he looks about the Chapel—“cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug … a veined, scrawny, dribbling … bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.”

“ ‘Betrays’?” Pfenninger steps up. “A segue, Marinus. Did you know we have a supergrass among your Inner Circle?”

I resist the temptation to say, “Yes, we’ve known for a year now.”

“Not Mr. D’Arnoq,” Pfenninger continues. “He only duped you for seven days. Someone who’s been making a monstrous bloody tit of you for a whole year.”

I’ve been dreading this scene. “Don’t, Pfenninger.”

“Yes, it hurts, but veritas vos liberabit—and remember, amusing me is your only means of squeezing out a few extra minutes …”

True. I think of incorporeal Esther, invoking a real psychoferno inside Ōshima’s head. Every second matters. “Amaze and dismay me.”

Pfenninger clicks his fingers at the Umber Arch, and in strolls Sadaqat. His demeanor has changed from humble warden to captain of firing squad. “Hello again, dear friends. Here was my choice: twenty more years of housework, laundry, weeding, growing old, catheters, prostate trouble, or eternal life, free training in the Shaded Way, and the deeds to 119A. Mm. Let me think. For about twenty seconds. Well, well, well, the Way of the Butler just wasn’t for me.”

Holly is shocked: “They trusted you! They were your friends!”

“If you’d known Horology for longer than five days, Ms. Sykes,” Sadaqat walks up to the far end of the long table and leans on it as if he owns it, “you would eventually wake up to the fact that Horology is a club for immortals, who prevent others from attaining their own privileges. They are aristocrats. They are very like a white country—so sorry to bring race into this, but the analogy is spot on—a rich, white, imperial, exploitative bastion, which torpedoes the refugee boats coming from the Land of the Huddled Brown Masses. What I have done is to choose survival. Any living being would do the same.”

“Congratulations on the new job, Sadaqat.” Arkady’s sincerity is flawless. “ ‘Soul-harvester.’ Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Sadaqat sneers: “Fancy your servile little Pakistani butler spotting your subtle Arkadian irony.”

Ōshima asks, “What’s your hipster new name going to be, Sadaqat? Major Integrity? Mr. Snitchfink? Judas McJanus?”

“Here’s what my name is not—Mr. Don’t-Worry-About-Sadaqat-He’s-Happy-to-Have-the-Privilege-of-Blowing-Himself-Up-on-the-Stairs-to-Save-Our-Pious-Atemporal-Asses.”

“Sadaqat’s played his part,” I tell Pfenninger. “Let him go.”

Pfenninger flicks his bow tie. “Don’t pretend to know my mind, Marinus. You’d not knowingly nurture a spy.”

“Fine, I had no idea. He followed your orders. Spied on us. Threw away his ten kilos of Blu Tack. Let him go.”

Sadaqat snarls in a way he hasn’t done since I first treated him at Dawkins Hospital in Berkshire, England: “It wasn’t Blu Tack! It was N9D. Hyperexplosives, which you as good as strapped to my chest!”

“Actually, Marinus, he’s half right,” Arkady tells me. “The Blu Tack people make it, but technically its brand-name is White Tack.”

Sadaqat stands on the bench. “Liar! You dragged me along as your human land mine!”

“Three times I tried to persuade you not to join the Second Mission, Sadaqat,” I remind him.

“You could’ve suasioned me, if you cared so much. And Mr. Pfenninger isn’t going to ‘let me go’! I’m the Twelfth Anchorite.”

“Forgive me for raising the specter of race,” Arkady says, “but look at Anchorites One through Eleven. Any ethnic commonalities jump out at you?”

Sadaqat is immune to doubt. “I’ve been recruited to improve the—the—the balance of the Anchorites.”

Arkady’s snorting laugh turns into a cough. “Sorry, a bit of saliva went down the wrong way. And why did the All Whites choose you?”

“My psychovoltage is off the scale, is why!”

“You poor sap.” Ōshima yawns. “I’ve eaten trays of dim sum with more psychosoteric potential than you.”

“I’m curious, Marinus,” says Immaculée Constantin. “Your pet schizophrenic just sold you down the river. Will nothing make you despise a person?”

“Homicide and animacide work just fine. But I blame you for bending Sadaqat’s fear of dying into treachery. I’m sorry, Sadaqat. It’s the War. I had to let them believe you were their ace in the hole. Thank you for the garden, at least. This won’t change that.”

“I am the Twelfth Anchorite. Tell them, Miss Constantin, what you told me. About my potential as a follower of the Shaded Way.”

“You have the potential to whinge people to death, Sadaqat.” When Constantin’s tone turns maternal I know time’s running out. “No. Psychosoterically speaking, you fire blanks. Worse, you’re a traitor. A talentless, chakraless, brown traitor.”

Sadaqat looks round at the tall white Anchorites disbelievingly. I can barely look at his changed expression, but I owe him this. Then, mercifully, he turns his back to us to take a few shaky steps towards the Umber Arch. Two of the rearguard block his way. Sadaqat flees for the exit but Pfenninger psycholassos him, reeling him in with mighty pulls, then kinetics him twenty feet high. I can’t intervene. The Second Mission depends on us preserving every volt for the coming duel. Constantin hand-symbols an Act of Violence, and Sadaqat’s head is twisted through 360 degrees. “There,” purrs Constantin. “We’re not such sadists, are we? Nice and quick. Chickens suffer more when you wring their necks, don’t they, Holly?”

Sadaqat’s broken body drops onto the ground, and a lesser Anchorite kinetics it through the east window, like a trash bag of household waste. His soul, at least, will find its way to the Last Sea, unlike those of other “guests,” who are brought here to be psychodecanted.

They’re about to attack, Unalaq subwarns me.

Feeling like a conductor raising his baton for the Orchestra of All Hell Breaks Loose, I say, “Now.”

UNALAQ INVOKES A shield from wall to wall, closing off the northern quarter of the Chapel. Even at thirty paces, its force shoves Pfenninger, Constantin, Hugo Lamb, and D’Arnoq back a few feet. The shield is rooted in Unalaq’s raised palms, and shimmers, a blue lens of Deep Stream force. Pfenninger and Constantin look on from the outer edge of the shield with condescension. Why? Elijah D’Arnoq makes a megaphone of his hands and shouts at us. His words take a few seconds to penetrate Unalaq’s shield, and arrive fragmented but discernible: “It’s behind you!”

I look behind us. Sickeningly, the charred icon of the Blind Cathar is restoring itself. The monk’s skin is emerging, and the gold halo is starting to shine. Worse, the black dot of the chakra-eye’s returning. Once it’s fully dilated, the Cathar will be able to decant us one by one.

Pfenninger taunts us: “See who you’ve locked yourself in with!”

“This one’s mine,” Ōshima calls out. “Marinus, Arkady, keep the shield up. Goodbye Esther.” Esther’s soul egresses from Ōshima, transversing to one side, pulsing with her evocation of the Last Act. Then the grizzled warrior turns, grips the edges of the icon, and holds his head one foot away from the Blind Cathar’s. He shuts his physical eyes and pours Deep Stream voltage from his own glowing chakra straight at the black pupil on the icon’s forehead. Ōshima cannot win against this incorporeal generator of the Shaded Way, but he might win us a precious extra minute.

Pfenninger sees the stowaway soul, however, and barks an order. The Anchorites advance towards our shield, two rows of five on either side of the table, hands symboling furiously. Constantin’s voice reaches me: “Smash that shield and kill the stowaway first!” Arkady, Unalaq, Holly, and I are knocked back by a barrage of jagged emberfire, laser-whiplash, and sonic bullets. I feel Unalaq’s nervous system scream with every impact. Arkady and I fire back, our Deep Stream projectiles passing from our palm-chakras through Unalaq’s shield. Those that hit their targets will hiatus, sedate, or redact an Anchorite out of the battle, but Shaded Way psychoincendiaries will fry our flesh. The Anchorites have flamethrowers, while we have tranq darts and a riot shield, a riot shield beginning to crack. Through the oscillating blaze I see that Arkady and I have scored a couple of lucky strikes. Cammerer, the Eighth Anchorite, crumples and Osterby, the Sixth, is hiatused off-balance and topples over like a side of pork, but now Du Nord enacts a Shaded Way shield to prevent further losses.

We’re still outnumbered nine to three, penned in with a malign demigod whom Ōshima surely cannot occupy for much longer. Holly crouches by the wall. I don’t have time to guess what she’s thinking. Unalaq shudders as the enemy’s red shield slams into hers with the force of a freight train and the shriek of an angle-grinder. The Deep Stream blue turns a leprous purple at the point of contact, and Unalaq is shoved back a pace, and another, another, another, reducing our little triangle of territory to a few square meters. I don’t have time to check that Holly has shuffled back with us to stay on Horology’s side of the shield, because two more Anchorites now raise their palm-chakras and, through a rattle of psychobullets, I hear Constantin’s cry: “Crush them like ants!”

Arkady now pours his voltage into Unalaq’s shield, which bolsters it temporarily, but the Anchorites’ cascade of fire doubles, trebles, quadruples in intensity. The psychoduel becomes too magnesium-bright to look at, so it is through my chakra-eye that I see the long table rise ten feet into the air, hang there for a second like a bird of prey, then hurtle straight at Arkady and Unalaq. On reflex, I handsign the fastest countermand of my life, and stop it a fist’s width from Arkady’s clenched face, the two ends of the table on either side of the jammed-together shields. Now begins not a tug-of-war but a push-of-war, in which Pfenninger tries to bludgeon Unalaq or Arkady and so knock out the shield, while I try to stop him. We wrestle for control of the table for a long, slippery moment, but fresh Anchorites join Pfenninger, and suddenly I’m overpowered and the table smashes into the head of Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. Luckily, the table has fallen on our side of the shield so it can no longer be used as a weapon, but my body’s skull is half staved in so I egress before my brain shuts down. Cause of death: flying table. That’s a first and, after I die-die in the Dusk, a last.

Through an ever-redder shade of purple I see Pfenninger, Constantin, and other outlines just a few paces away directing their fire at Unalaq until a puncture rips our shield wide open. Baptiste Pfenninger smiles like a proud father, raises his palm at Unalaq, and a pinprick of brilliant light scorches a line in the air between his hand and Unalaq’s heart. The psychodumdum semi-inverts my colleague’s body, my dead colleague’s ex-body, until it deflates in a withered mess of bones and viscera. Pfenninger and Constantin’s eyes shine with delight. Arkady is trying desperately to repair our pale blue barrier and all the while Ōshima is locked into a losing one-to-one duel with the Blind Cathar’s shining icon.

Seeing my dead body against the wall, the Anchorites reason that no psychosoteric can now attack them, and their red shield flickers out. They’ll pay for this mistake. Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants. It smacks into Imhoff and Westhuizen, the Fifth and Seventh Anchorites, respectively, and down they go. Three against seven. I ingress into Arkady to help him repair the shield, which turns a stronger blue and pushes back the remaining Anchorites. When Arkady glances back at Ōshima, however, I see his fight is lost. His body is evaporating as we look. Go to Holly, suborders Arkady. I obey without even thinking to bid him goodbye, an omission I regret even as I transverse to Holly, ingress, evoke an Act of Total Suasion, and … Now what?

Infuriated by the loss of Imhoff and Westhuizen, the seven remaining Anchorites cannon Arkady with everything they have, and the blue shield dies. Arkady’s spent. He straightens up and gives Baptiste Pfenninger the finger. The Blind Cathar evaporates him from behind with a short, sharp psychobolt. The battle’s over. They’ll kill Holly or try to decant her, perhaps. I can neither see nor communicate with Esther, but in seconds the Blind Cathar will psycholocate her soul, annihilate it, and Horology will have lost its hundred-year War with the Anchorites who—

THE LIGHT FILLS the Chapel, passing through hands pressed over eyes, through the eyelids behind those eyes, through corneas and vitreous humors, through bodies, through souls … The white is so white it’s black. Esther did it. Esther won. I wait for the bonesnapping crack as the Chapel splits down the middle. I wait for the screams of the Anchorites as their immortality machine disintegrates about them.

Seconds unspool … Many seconds.

The black beyond white fades back to white.

The white slips off its layers, back to milky flint-gray.

Vision returns. I open Holly’s eyelids and look up from where her body lies, up at the Chapel roof. It hasn’t fallen in.

I think, Esther’s Last Act wasn’t powerful enough.

I think, The Blind Cathar took countermeasures.

It hardly matters why Esther failed. The Second Mission was the last chance. Horology is now just L’Ohkna, a hacker, and Roho, a bodyguard. Horology lost and the Anchorites won.

Holly’s body wants to groan and retch, but I keep it in a state of deathlike stillness while I work out … What? I don’t have enough voltage left for a single psychoprojectile. Try to save my soul? Egress Holly, try to cloak myself, and hover nearby as she is slain or decanted, until the Blind Cathar notices the frightened little piggy, hiding in the corner? I almost envy Esther. At least she died in the false belief she had won Horology its ultimate victory.

The surviving Anchorites take stock. Pfenninger’s still standing at the center of the rhombus nave. Constantin, D’Arnoq, Hugo Lamb, Rivas-Godoy, Du Nord, and O’Dowd remain. One or two of the other fallen may wake in a while, or may not. The Anchorites will be knocked back, but they’ll have lists of possible Carnivores, and in a decade or two they’ll be operating, and abducting, at full strength. The Chapel of the Dusk is unscratched. Beyond the upended table and benches, and a lesser icon hanging at the wrong angle, there is no sign of the battle that raged here only a minute ago. I don’t know what to do, so I just stay inside Holly’s head, paralyzed by indecision.

Elijah D’Arnoq asks, “What was that light?”

“A Last Act,” says Pfenninger. “A powerful one. The question is, who invoked it?”

“Esther Little,” says Constantin, “in incorporeal form. The Counterscript never acknowledged her death, as you know. I sensed her. She attacked the Chapel’s doubt-line, in hopes of splitting it open and making the sky fall in. Who else but her could have engineered this attack? We’re lucky her last big bang wasn’t quite as explosive as she hoped.”

“So we’ve won the War?” asks Rivas-Godoy.

Pfenninger looks at Constantin. As one, they announce, “Yes.”

“Oh,” admits Pfenninger, “there’ll be a few mopping-up operations. We have a few wounds to lick, but Horology is dead. My one regret? That Marinus didn’t live long enough to learn how utterly, how miserably, she had failed. The Blind Cathar must have slain her at some point between killing Ōshima and Arkady.”

“Let’s tip the Sykes woman after Sadaqat,” says Constantin, stepping over towards us. She asks D’Arnoq, “Why did Marinus bring her along? I don’t … Wait a minute.” She peers at me with not-quite-human eyes. “Mr. Pfenninger. I do believe we have an afterdinner mint.” Constantin takes a few cautious steps closer. She smiles. “My my my, Holly Sykes is—what’s the term?—playing possum. How—”

A ROARING, PERCUSSIVE KA–BOOOOOOOOOMMM … fills the Chapel. Constantin falls to the floor, as do the others. I-in-Holly stare up at the crack, terror transmuting into hope, then a savage joy as an uprooting, tearing, steel-hull-on-a-reef noise howls louder, and the hairline crack becomes a black line zigzagging down the north roof to the back of the icon. Slowly, the sickening sound dies away, but it leaves behind a heavily pregnant threat of more … From where I-in-Holly am crouching I see the halo-shaped gnostic serpent swing, then drop. It smashes like a thousand dinner plates, fragments dashing and smattering across the stone floor, like ten thousand little living fleeing beings. A chunk as big as a cricket ball just misses Holly’s head. I hear Baptiste Pfenninger declaim a histrionic “Shit! Did you see that, Ms. Constantin?” It occurs to me to test Holly’s own psychovoltage, and I find a deeper reserve than I expected.

“That’s the least of our problems,” snaps Constantin. “Can’t you see the crack?” Silently, I invoke an Act of Cloaking. If a psychosoteric looks at me directly they’ll see a faded outline, but it’s better than nothing, and the seven Anchorites are now worried about the Chapel’s fabric. As well they should be. Moving along the wall towards the west window, we hear the creak of stressed stone.

Elijah D’Arnoq notices first. “The Sykes woman!”

O’Dowd, the Eleventh Anchorite, asks, “Where did she go?”

“The bitch is hosting,” booms Du Nord. “Someone’s cloaked her!”

“Shield the Umber Arch!” Constantin orders Rivas-Godoy. “It’s Marinus! Don’t let her out! I’ll evoke an Act of Exposure and—”

An ogre groans overhead and stones rain from the crack, which now widens into a jagged gash. I understand. Esther’s Last Act worked, and only the Blind Cathar has kept the Chapel intact. But now even his ancient strength is failing.

“Pfenninger, MOVE!” shouts Constantin.

But the First Anchorite, whose survival instinct has perhaps been dulled by two centuries’ Black Wine, health, and wealth, looks up to where Constantin is staring before, not after, he dives to safety. A slab of Chapel roof the size of a family car is the final thing that Baptiste Pfenninger sees before it smashes him, like a sledgehammer striking an egg. More masonry explodes off the floor. I revoke my cloak and invoke a body-shield. Du Nord, a French captain who followed the Shaded Way from 1830 to the present day, is too slow to protect himself from a volley of shrapnel, and although it doesn’t kill Du Nord, yet, his current wife wouldn’t recognize him. Three or four body-shielded figures are running for the Umber Arch but, like an ice sheet calving icebergs, the south roof slides down and blocks the exit. Our tomb, then, is sealed.

Through the crumbling gaps in the roof, a roiling, grainy, smoky tentacle of Dusk spills, gropes, and uncoils into the Chapel. It hums, not quite like bees, and mutters, not quite like a crowd, and susurrates, not quite like sand. A tendril of the stuff uncurls behind Elijah D’Arnoq as he shifts backwards to avoid a falling slab of rock. Unimpeded by his body-shield, the Dusk brushes D’Arnoq’s neck, and he is turned into a man-shaped cloud of Dusk, whose form lasts only a moment.

“Marinus, is this you in here?” asks Holly.

Sorry, I suasioned you without permission.

“We beat them, didn’t we? Aoife’s safe.”

Everyone’s family is safe from the Anchorites, now.

We look across the rubble and body-strewn Chapel. Only three of the ember-red shielded figures are visible. I recognize those of Constantin, Rivas-Godoy, and Hugo Lamb. In its corner, the icon of the Blind Cathar is peeling and decaying, as if spattered by acid. The place is growing darker by the second. The arms of the Dusk fill a quarter of the Chapel now, at least.

“That Dusk stuff,” says Holly. “It doesn’t look so painful.”

Sorry I let you get tangled up in this.

“It’s all right. It wasn’t you, it was the War.”

It’ll only be a few moments now.

A SPLITTING NOISE from the northern corner turns into the discordant jangle of a bell. Where the icon hung, an ellipse has opened up, emitting a pale moonlight. “That noise,” says Holly, “sounded like the time-bell at the Captain Marlow. What is it, Marinus?”

A few feet away, the psychosedated body of Imhoff is licked into nonexistence by a tongue of Dusk.

I have no idea, I subadmit. Hope?

Certainly the three surviving Anchorites reach a similar conclusion and make for the north corner. I-in-Holly follow, or try to, but a long plume of Dusk sweeps in through the now-unshielded east window. I slip in a puddle of what used to be Baptiste Pfenninger, and dodge into a safe pocket of clear air that drifts up the nave, before a column of the swarming gray forces me over to the west wall. The Chapel is now more than half Dusk, and the thirty paces to the ellipse are a shifting airborne minefield. I stumble over my old body, lying at an undignified angle, but in mere seconds Dr. Fenby will cease to be. Miraculously, our luck holds, and we arrive at the ellipse. Constantin and her two companions are nowhere in sight. Some sort of emergency chute? It doesn’t feel like a design feature of the Blind Cathar. The oval glow brightens as the Chapel darkens. It’s a membrane across which clouds appear to stream, like speeded-up sky. I take one last look at the Chapel, now Dusk-filled. The eastern roof slides in. “What do we have to lose?” asks Holly.

I fill my host’s lungs with a deep breath, and step in …

… and out into a passageway, little wider than a person, little taller, lit by the Chapel’s dying light and the surface through which we just passed, apparently harmlessly. The bellow of the disintegrating Chapel is still audible, but it sounds a good mile behind us, not a few meters. The passageway slopes down ten paces before reaching a wall, then branches off to the left and right. It’s warmer here. I touch the wall. It’s skin temperature, and has the Mars-red hue and texture of adobe. If sound, light, and flesh can travel through the membrane, however, then I’m afraid the Dusk will soon be following us. A body-shield would be wise, especially with three Anchorites up ahead, but Holly’s psychovoltage is low and mine is virtually spent, so I walk down the passage to the end. Both the left-hand and right-hand corridors curve away into darkness. It feels like necropolis, I subsay to Holly, but …

“The Blind Cathar doesn’t bother with bodies, right?”

No. Like Sadaqat’s corpse, the psychodecanted are just ejected.

I look up the corridor behind us. The ellipse is fading as the Chapel dies. I subask Holly, What do you think? Left or right?

“Marinus, I think I just saw letters, on the wall, at waist height.”

I peer down and find, inscribed like a sculptor’s mark:

“JS?” says Holly. “Jacko? Marinus, that’s how he used to sign his—” A noise like a bell struck under water interrupts her, and we can tell by a change of the air that the Dusk is following us in. “Left, Marinus,” Holly orders. “Go left.”

There’s no time to ask if, or why, she’s so sure. I obey, hurrying us along the narrow, curving, claustrophobic, and graphite-black passageway. Holly’s fifty-six-year-old heart is pounding hard and I think I sprained her ankle in our last dash across the Chapel. She’s a decade older than Iris, I need to remember. “Trail my fingers along the wall,” she tells me, in little more than a whisper.

If you’re up to driving, I’ll hand you back the controls.

“Yes. Do it.” She steadies herself against the wall for a moment until her vestibular sense rights itself. “Christ, that was weird.”

I could light a psycholamp, but it might attract company.

“If my wild guess is right, I won’t need light. If I’m wrong, a light won’t help. I’ll know one way or the other fairly soon. This passage is still following a curve, wouldn’t you say?”

Yes. It’s an arc, for sure. About a hundred paces so far.

Holly stops. We hear her ragged breath, her thumping heart, and the murmuring of the Dusk. She looks behind us, and a monochromatic gleam blooms in the darkness. Holly holds up her hand and we see its black outline, and even the faint sheen of her wedding ring. The Dusk has its own phosphorescence, I report. It’s flooding the passage behind us, at walking pace. Keep moving.

“Diabolical,” says Holly. She sets off again, and although I’m tempted to scansion her present tense to


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 870


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