Angel Stations (4 page)

Ursu himself had been handed over to the Masters at the very young age typical of most acolytes. Nubala had strict laws on this: if you had produced three children who survived into adulthood, then any further offspring had to be offered up for consideration by the Masters. Ursu had been the fourth in his family. Though an elder brother had died of the recurrent blackface plague some years into his adulthood, by then Ursu had been too far advanced into his training for the priesthood.

Being selected for service by the city’s god was not a rare occurrence, but neither was it an everyday event. It usually meant celebrations for the other denizens of the House, even a day or two of holiday. It had been four, maybe five years since the last acolyte – a female named Ewenden, Ursu recalled – had been called to serve Nubala’s god. Ursu himself had been a lot younger then, barely sentient a year, so Ewenden was only the vaguest memory. Her name was remembered, though, as being the one who had died so tragically, drowning in the well immediately beyond the House. Being called meant you were destined for better things than most, to join the elite of the Masters who guided all religious life in the city and, perhaps, if you played your cards right, destined to become part of the ruling Council itself.

And so it was that as Ursu picked his way through the great entrance hall of the House, yawning and scratching at the tangled fur beneath his robes, he noticed that the normal indifference with which he was treated had been replaced with respectful gazes. Some pre-sentients – canthres – dashed past him on all fours, having somehow found their way inside the temple, their eyes glinting happily and devoid of adult intelligence.

He exchanged some casual greetings with other acolytes, their tongues touching and tasting each other’s fur. Uftheyan, behind him, allowed his claws to briefly unsheathe, and the other acolytes scattered out of their way.

Being an acolyte required no special calling: you were there to fulfil the menial or degrading tasks the Masters regarded as below them.

But now things were different; he had been called. He would be permitted into the awesome presence of Shecumpeh. And if you were called, you became a Master-in-Waiting. You were housed in better quarters; you were even assigned an acolyte to run around for you. Uftheyan’s hand occasionally touched his shoulder as if to guide him, but Ursu could have found his way down these steep stone steps leading deep into the ground with his eyes blindfolded.

Ursu stepped on down into a familiar darkness, where the scent of sticks of burning sweetgrass filled the air like perfume. This was supposed to be a solemn occasion, but Ursu could hear the sound of muffled yawns and low muttering from the dozen or so Masters who waited in the chamber below, somewhat spoiling the ritual atmosphere. It seemed likely they hadn’t been up for long themselves. Ursu’s long-toed feet sought out the edge of each step carefully, not wanting to witness the reaction of the Masters if he managed to trip and make a fool of himself.

The morning chill seemed to fade as Ursu heard the great wooden door that separated the Lower Chambers from the Main Hall above squeak shut. There was little light, but as his eyes adjusted to the dim candlelight flickering over walls laden with mosaics so ancient that many of them had almost merged into the surrounding stone, he saw the Masters he had served almost all his young life waiting there – for him.

It occurred to Ursu that his bladder was uncomfortably full.

Uftheyan was gone, merged with the shadows, and Ursu stood alone in the centre of a circle of watchers. He felt a nervousness tinged with excitement, and the delight of a new life now awaiting him.

And there, straight ahead of Ursu, sat Shecumpeh itself, the beating heart of Nubala, on its throne of brass and gold.

The god of the City was represented by a clay figure moulded loosely in the form of Ursu’s own people, with spiralling incisions to indicate fur, a long tongue sliding downwards over the torso and a broadly grinning tooth-filled snout that might be interpreted by some as menacing. Shecumpeh was as old as the city itself – was in fact indistinguishable from the city. By an ancient Plains tradition, each of the Great Cities maintained its own god, and when it chose to, the god spoke to its citizens. Ursu had been taught how, at times, these gods would speak of things beyond nature, beyond understanding.

And suddenly the spirit of Shecumpeh was within Ursu. The attentive Masters could feel it too: an accompanying sensation, not quite taste nor smell, like the way the air feels the morning after a thunderstorm. Something clean, and sharp and bright.

He heard nothing that might be described as sound, nothing like words spoken. It was as if suddenly revealed memories, images, sensations flooded into him.

Ursu knew the god was asking him for his
true
name.

‘I—’ he said out loud, then remembered himself. He was alone now in the centre of the room.
I am Ursu
, he spoke in his thoughts, and he wondered if the god could hear him.

And that was when the god spoke his
true
name, his private name, the name of his soul.

When Ursu had been five summers old, his adult mind so recently implanted in his canthre body that it still seemed a strange thing to be walking on two legs, he had undergone the same ritual that every other child of the city experienced, receiving his true name in the shape of just one of many hundreds of intricately carved pieces of wood picked at random from a great urn. This was to be his inner name, and he had been solemnly warned how demons would try to steal into his dreams to root it out. The horror was that once they had it, they owned your soul.

The only entities who should know your name – your
true
name – were the gods. And so it was that Shecumpeh spoke to Ursu.

More sensations, sounds and smells overwhelmed him. And this time, Ursu saw the image of a small, weak-looking individual in a robe too big for him, slipping through the streets of Nubala at night. And strapped to his back was . . . was . . .

Ursu stared at the idol of Shecumpeh that sat before him. Surely there could be no doubt about the message the god of the City was giving him? He realized now that he was the one in the god’s vision, struggling through the city, this very same effigy crudely strapped into a bag slung across his back.

Then there he was again, slipping as if invisible between the ranks of the enemy marshalled outside the gates. On to the orchards beyond, and – on again. At first clear and sharp, the images flooding into Ursu’s mind began contradicting themselves, as if several separate visions were being presented to him at once, each slightly different in outcome.

And then on, further into confusion and madness, as Ursu envisaged fire raining down from the heavens, the great city of Nubala burning in invisible light, all its territory being reduced to death and ruins.

As vision after vision assailed him, he became lost to the basement temple around him, his mind stretching out to explore something he could only dimly, distantly comprehend. Yet it seemed to be his own life, evolving along in a seemingly endless multiplicity of paths.

But there was one strand that still shone as brightly as a path of stars through an endless sea of night. That enduring image of Ursu the acolyte, now a Master-in-Waiting, stealing away with the figure of the god, and carrying it – somehow – through the walls of the city, and beyond.

Sam Roy

‘Where’s your father?’

‘In the Citadel. I don’t think he has any idea what’s happening here while he’s been in there. You know how it is.’

Sam did. Time and space ceased to operate as they should, once you were deep inside the Citadel. There were ways to navigate it, to find your way into its hidden depths and uncover the treasures that lay there, but it wasn’t without risk. Matthew was older now, side-parted blond hair flopping across his forehead in an unruly wave. The sun was high overhead.

Sam gently rubbed his arms where they had chafed under the chains that secured him to the great round boulder. He already knew how much time they’d have.
All the time in the world
, he thought. Matthew’s father was discovering what Sam already knew, that the Citadel was a patient mistress, a place where something was always waiting to be discovered.

‘How old are you now, Matthew?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Remind me why you hate your father so much.’

Matthew stared at him. ‘Why I—? You hate him too. Look what he’s done to you. You couldn’t help but hate him!’

‘He’s your father. He’s done nothing to
you
.’

Matthew stared out across the wide mountain plain. Sam followed his gaze, taking in distant peaks wreathed in cloud and, nearer at hand, a village almost like a resort in its picturesqueness, like someplace you might find far up in the Rocky Mountains, with a hotel and a bed for the night. But of course, they were a very long way from the Rockies.

‘My father is insane,’ Matthew explained at last. ‘A girl in my class went crazy, started shouting that my father was evil, that we shouldn’t be here.’ Matthew licked his lips, then turned hollow eyes to Sam. ‘They took her away, and a couple of days later he had her body left in the square so we could all see.’ The boy was trembling now. ‘He wants me to be like him. I could never . . .’ He shook his head, the words trailing off.

‘When we talk, Matthew, I don’t necessarily get any sense of what you want to do, if and when you find a way to defeat him. Remember,
I
tried,’ Sam raised shackled hands, ‘and look what happened to me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Say you’re left in charge of all this,’ Sam said, nodding at the village, ‘what are you going to do?’

Matthew looked defiant. ‘Go home. Leave this place.’

‘This is your home. It’s where you were born.’

Conflicting emotions crossed the boy’s face. ‘There – there’s so much else out there. We shouldn’t even be here!’ The boy actually stamped his foot. Sam raised one eyebrow and waited. ‘We belong out there with the rest of the human race. You knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you did what you did!’

‘I did what I did because your father wants to destroy a world, and I couldn’t permit him to do that. No one sane could allow that.’

‘That’s what I want, too. And the others.’

Sam nodded. It was strange that Matthew’s father had made the decision to have a family and raise a son after so long. He suspected Matthew’s father intended to begin a dynasty.

‘Very well, then. We should make plans. As long as you understand you might die.’

Matthew swallowed. ‘I know that.’ Sam studied the boy carefully until his eyes widened and the blood drained from his face. ‘I will die, won’t I?’ said Matthew, taking a step back.

Sam said nothing, his expression remaining calm.

‘Tell me,’ said Matthew. ‘I have to know. He’ll find us out, won’t he? We should stop.’

‘No, you won’t die.’
But some will
, he thought. He knew who they were, their faces and their names. They came in his visions, such strong, rich visions. He wasn’t going to tell the boy this, though. ‘You’re right to do what you’re doing, Matthew, so maybe you’ll succeed where I didn’t. But there are risks: this is life and death stuff.’

‘He didn’t kill you,’ observed Matthew.

‘He can’t kill me, remember? And I can’t kill him.’ Sam’s smile was more like a grimace. ‘That’s our gift, our sentence – that and the future.’ Sam laid a hand on the boulder he had been chained to for so long. The path upwards waited again and, at the top of the path, food and water. ‘Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, he gets much more of a kick out of torturing me than killing me.’

Kim

It was Fitz again. Fitz, with the bright red shock of hair that seemed to defy gravity in the way it floated in jagged wisps around his head. An emergency light flickered just behind him, and in the intermittent glow it provided, she could only briefly see his features outlined from second to second.

Fitz was saying something. ‘We have to get out of here. Come on—’ And then he said a name, and it was someone else’s name, not hers. ‘We have to get out of here now,’ he repeated, and she could hear despair in his voice.

‘No, wait,’ said a voice sounding suspiciously, unpleasantly like her own. She struggled away from that voice, from the name Fitz had mentioned. Someone else.

‘Fitz, fetch Odell and the others. We can still get this stuff out.’ Great stone slabs surrounded her, their rough surfaces carved with arcane symbols and alien scripts that her practised eye recognized as Middle Period Shipbuilder. She was stepping into a corridor that curved abruptly just ahead. A faint trickle of memory came into her mind about what lay beyond, and then she realized . . .

She was dreaming, and she knew her worst nightmare lay around that curve. The worst thing she could possibly imagine, ever, lay a few feet away, in a building abandoned by the race who had constructed it untold millennia before.

She was dreaming, and with an awful certainty she knew Fitz was dead. She discovered then that no matter how much she wanted to, she could not cry, could not shed tears, because this, after all, was a dream.

Somewhere, on the periphery of her awareness, something significant was happening. She knew it was imperative that she now wake up.

Must wake up.

And suddenly she was back in the Goblin – shockingly so.
Oh dear God
, she thought,
that was bad
. She’d actually forgotten just how bad it could be. She had to find Bill, and fast.

The Goblin was her ship; after the botched expedition to the Citadel, she’d acquired it after finding herself still in the Kasper system with enough money left to purchase a long-range, deep-system hauler and a retrieval contract to go with it. That had been over two years ago, and since then Kim had developed into a rock hermit. Every now and then she’d bring the Goblin back into the Kaspian system’s Angel Station, way far out where the Kaspian sun was just one particularly bright pinprick of stellar light in the deep black of night.