Angelmaker

IX Women of Consequence; the Treasure of Mansura; Habakuk.

Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache which tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the windowsill of the aged mother of a renownedly murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life. She realises she had no idea what she was expecting, but if she had been expecting anything it wasn’t this. Dotty Catty’s bedroom is papered in a very fine rose and green vertical stripe. There’s a picture rail, and a lot of tables with doilies. A china cow sits on the mantel, the base declaring it a present from Salisbury, and a red baize card table is covered in writing paper, all weighted down with a metal model of the Westminster Clock Tower.

And yet, this is not the Dotty Catty she saw at dinner, or even the author of the letter which brought her here; the affronted trout is gone, and the waffly old broad and former socialite is not in res. This is Dowager-Khatun Dalan, wearing a simple white robe and gown and with her aged hands trembling ever so slightly in her lap. There is a smear of soot on her left thumb—lighting her own lamps?—and she looks as if she’s just run a marathon. Not surprising, in context. This is something of a big moment for her. Softly, softly, lest the old dear take fright and this mission be for naught.

“My son murdered my husband and his brother, Commander Banister.”

“Yes,” Edie says. “I know.” Because what the Hell else do you say to a statement like that? She stays on the windowsill, her hands flat on the stone, legs dangling like a child’s.

“He burned my grandson in an iron box.”

“Yes.”

“He is still my son,” the Dowager-Khatun says. “What can I do? He is still my son. I should not love him any more. I hate him. But he is still my son. So I hate him, and when I hate him the most, I see him when he was very young and I remember the way he looked at me, and I wonder what it was that I did so very, very badly that he became this man. This perfect, awful man. This Opium Khan of Addeh Sikkim, that all the world knows is a monster. That makes me a monster’s mother. Grendels modor. Wretched hag… But am I also aglœc-wif? That’s the question…” And, seeing Edie’s blank look, “Have you read Beowulf?”

“My headmistress at school called it a work of pagan darkness touched by the dawning of Christ.”

“Then I suspect you only got the highlights. To be aglœc is to possess greatness, for good or ill. My son has it. He killed his family. I was drowning in the scale of him. I chose to float, to be carried on his tide. I did not know what else to do. Monster’s mother.

“And then there was this. This new design, this plan: a thing to end war. The Frenchwoman has aglœca, no doubt. A divine smith, perhaps. Or a woman Prometheus, a thief of fire. She has no idea what my son will do with what she makes in her forge. Or perhaps she does. Perhaps she plots, too. The gifts of gods were always dangerous. A hero’s sword may be the blade on which he dies. So. But I do not know. I do not think she sees the world like that. She is not… small… enough.

“But something in me said: no. No more. This far and no further. I will not let him make the world in his own image. Horror and war and selfishness. No.” Dotty Catty sags. She waves her hands once, twice in front of her face, warding off flies and memories. Edie suspects she sees the young Shem Shem Tsien, looking for a lost ball or a favoured pet: Mother, can you help me? No, child. Not now. Not any more.

“So I betrayed him to your King. But I told them, I shall only meet a woman. They assumed it was customary. Bah! What do I care for custom, here, now? Do you imagine that I do? I plot against my son. Of course I do not care who comes to my room. Send the first five regiments of the British Army in India! Send them all, naked as they were born! I shall not be afrighted in the slightest. But I knew, if they sent a woman, she must be a rare one. To do this work at all, to be accepted, to be trusted with such a thing. They would have to think carefully. Send the best.” The Dowager-Khatun shakes her head, and Edie can smell rosehips and oil. From the lined, empty face, little dark eyes are measuring, probing. She wants something.

“I have a choice. I can float to my death, on the tide of a man’s destiny, or I can make my own. I can decide I will be great in my own way. I can accept that I, too, have a little aglœca within me. So I asked for you.”

Edie takes the line she has been given. “What for?”

“Those soldiers downstairs—they follow your orders?”

“Yes.”

“Aglœc-wif. A woman of consequence. A devil hag or a goddess. Do you see?”

“No. Nearly.”

“If I must do this thing—if I must betray my one remaining, murderous son—then it is an act of greatness. I do not mean that I am great. Just that this choice is the great kind of choice. So, then: let it be a matter between women of consequence. Between queens.”

“I’m… I’m sorry they sent me, then. I’m not that important.”

“Pfft. You have no rank, you mean. You are not Lady Edie or Duchess Edie.”

“No. Plain old Edie.”

“And yet here you are, on the far side of the world, with your King’s commission and soldiers to do your bidding. You have achieved things.”

“Small things, maybe.”

“With grand results. You play on the great stage.”

“I suppose.”

“And you will carry this through. You will get it right, whatever the cost?”

“I will.”

“Then you are a woman of consequence, Commander Banister. You will do very well. You will acquire secrets and treasure and weapons. And so that is the second thing: I have a treasure. All crones and witches do, do they not? A great treasure, that must not be held by one such as Shem Shem Tsien. You must take the Frenchwoman, and her impossible mind, and you must take my treasure, and you must spirit them away so they will be safe.”

“I’m only supposed to concern myself with the scientist—”

“Of course. But to concern yourself with the scientist, you must do as I ask. Or I shall not help you at all.”

Mad old hag, Edie Banister thinks, with considerable approval, and extends her hand. Dotty Catty smiles—terrible sight—and shakes it with vigour. Consumatum est.

“We’re ready to go,” says a shallow, nervous voice from the door, and Edie turns to see a pale young Ruskinite in a sort of warm-weather version of their usual kit, looking very unhappy and clandestine, but trying to be brave about it.

Dotty Catty leads the way.

Shem Shem Tsien is a man who likes, after taking his pleasure, to sleep with his hand upon his conquests. Amid the half-eaten carcass of the swan, row upon row of ewers and a heap of slumbering, exhausted trollops—Edie recognises At Your Service on top of the pile—the Opium Khan lies on his side, rapt in dreams of war and pillage. Edie wonders sickly whether he forced the crucified bishop to watch the whole debauch.

Dotty Catty’s rescue party steps lithely past the doorway of the sleeping Khan and on through corridors of dressed stone and down staircases to rougher tunnels and mazy passages, until a strange, caustic smell floats in the air and a sound as of water falling on a bass drum the size of Kentish Town thrums around them. Dotty Catty holds up her hand, and her two attendants step to the side of the corridor and wait.

Ahead of them is a stout wooden door. Dotty Catty eyes it with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty. Edie glances at her.

“Best get this rescue on the road, ey?” she says.

Dotty Catty nods. She steps forward and opens the door.

Edie has a sense of space even before her eyes adjust to the gloom beyond, and in that space, a great presence, as if she has come into the kennel of a titanic dog and can feel the hound snuffling around her. And then her brain lumbers up behind, assembling the pieces.

The room is vast.

It’s so big, it isn’t properly a room. It is a chamber, or a cavern. And yet there is a sense of the familiar, even the homely… oh. Of course. Abel Jasmine has been making a place just like this in Cornwall, to greet his transplanted genius when she arrives.

Above and to one side, Edie can see part of the depthless shaft which plunges from the Khan’s throne room, and passes on through the floor of the cavern to a river down below. And all around, there are figures, man-high and higher, frozen in aspects of combat and carnage, and a battlefield littered with limbs, as if a chess game has come alive and then stopped in mid-course.

Edie’s first thought is of the lair of the Gorgon Medusa, populated with the petrified corpses of defeated foes. Then she wonders whether at some point some primordial glacier has rolled through this cavern and deposited its frozen passengers here, and finally whether the Opium Khan has arranged a great graveyard of his enemies under his throne. Then she realises that all the warriors—lying atop one another, transfixed and hanging on spears, or slumped over on their knees—are made of metal. The ground is littered with cogs and springs, wires and belts, and the whole cavern smells of heated metal and construction. As Dotty Catty leads the way between them, Edie can pick out the stamps of individual Ruskinite craftsmen on the beautiful, broken arms and fanciful masks. Cogs jut through burnished skins of brass, and the black, grimy stains which run from their wounds are oil, not blood. A legion of homunculi.

She steps closer, and nearly loses her head as the nearest one swings its sword abruptly forward. She steps back and the blow swooshes past. She stares: the homunculus is pinned to the ground by another’s weapon, but the eyeless face tracks her all the same. A moment later, its opponent turns to face her too. When she stays still, they go back to looking at one another. Behind her she can hear Songbird swearing continuously under his breath.

“Some respond to light,” Dotty Catty says softly, “others to sound. They are clumsy and simple. But do not imagine they are harmless. They learn. Frankie says it is too much trouble to make them clever, so they start stupid and grow less so, writing their own punchcards. Although I understand they are not actual punchcards. It is all very modern. There is a limit to their understanding, of course, but Frankie has connected them. They appear to be individuals, but they are… like bees. A swarm. Albeit a swarm in which each member hates the others. Frankie says they are useless because their capacity is too small. They learn very little before they are full. But… they can surprise you.”

Righty-ho.

Carefully, Edie picks a path which keeps them all out of range, and steps through the curtain of broken toy soldiers only to find that they are barely the beginning; the cavern is a battlefield of broken mechanical armies, generations of soldiers rolling back in time from the most humanlike to the more crude and finally to helpless, curious boxes with fragile arms, all of them locked to one another, half or completely shattered, reels of paper tape, punchcards and springs trailing from gaping wounds. There’s a word… Yes. Roboti. Metal slaves, mindless clockwork trapped in their own for-ever war.

She can see her team looking at them, and hopes like Hell they aren’t seeing some kind of ghastly reflection of themselves. One of the boxes claws at Flagpole’s leg. He kicks it, then stands on the box and jumps up and down until the metal folds and concertinas and the grasping hand fails.

“Spunky wee bugger,” Flagpole says, half admiring, and then, when the others look at him askance: “What? Am I noo allowed to touch the furniture, ey?”

Edie leads them on into the cavern.

The river must at one stage have thundered through unimpeded, surfacing here and there where the floor has caved in above it, but now it has been yoked by a succession of wheels and turbines, huge screws twisting inside scaffolds and tanks, armatures and driveshafts humming on greased bearings. Coils of copper in huge amount spark and hum behind glass shields which protect them from moisture, and loops of cable and wire like hawsers connect this endless city of capacitance with fizzing globes, crucibles, and other things more strange: wafers of silverish metal, nuggets and pills which hover spinning in the air, and towering black rods topped with shining arcs of electrical power.

Thick cables trail from one bench along the cavern wall to a small cleft, about five foot across at the widest. A strange, flickering light—not blue like the actinic gleam of the throne room but clearer, whiter—emerges in sporadic flashes. And then, a moment later, Edie hears gunfire. Worse yet, she can hear Americans.

She draws close to the wall and steps inside. The corridor widens abruptly, and she can smell jungle and something else: a rich, pungent stink of mammal, hot metal, and straw.

She rounds a corner, and sees a cave opening onto a lush nighttime mountain, and—lined up and gleaming in the light of a cinema screen—row upon row of grey legs and towering flanks and wrinkled, trunked faces, staring with mute intensity at the image of a man firing a revolver desperately into a dark alley.

“Hell, no!” cries the fugitive. “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

She draws breath to call out, but Dotty Catty draws her back.

“They don’t like it when you interrupt the film,” she says, very quietly.

“They’re elephants,” Edie objects.

“Yes. In my father’s time we put on plays for them, and music. Now they watch films.” Since Dotty Catty thinks this is quite ordinary, Edie doesn’t argue. The old woman sighs. “They’re all I have,” she murmurs, so quietly that the gunfire from the film almost drowns her out. “My fathers’ fathers’ faithful friends. Like children. They trust me. Not him. Only me. And so he will erase them.

“In armour, they cannot be stopped by anything. But the gift of them is that they will not be used wrongly. They are soldiers of the heart, not machines. And that is why he needs this other thing, this Apprehension Engine. Because he cannot command my elephants. Because he is evil.”

Her voice remains quite calm and even, but her cheeks are wet. Edie does not embrace her, because she does not wish the woman of consequence to weep upon her shoulder.

“Frankie’s through here,” Dotty Catty says, a moment later.

Edie follows the Dowager-Khatun into another chamber, where someone is being very French.

A throng of Ruskinites is slaving over what appears to be a fish tank made of brass. It is suspended from a hoist or crane, and a broad-backed monk is hauling hard, in company with two others, while his brethren steady the tank as it comes out of the water. The liquid alone, Edie Banister guesses, must weigh a tonne, and then there’s the metal. Those pulleys are very well calibrated indeed.

In the midst of all this is a small person with a shock of black hair sticking up from her head and an inexpensive ladies’ blouse which has seen better days. She wears a leather apron and a pair of trousers which at some time or another have been either a blackout curtain or a counterpane. Even at this distance, Edie can hear that she is complaining; a sharp, rhythmic patter of what might generously be called “discussion.” The object of her ire is a big Ruskinite wearing a harried expression and forge-master’s gloves.

“Will it… You are an idiot! Yes, Denis, you are. Look! You have disturbed the wave, and now we have it all to do again… Non! Non, the apparatus is perfect. It will preserve… it will! It will because I say it will! The constructive and destructive interference patterns are cancelled by the… oh, nom de Dieu! It is not switched on! Why is it not… Look! Have you even bothered to engage the secondary coils? Mais non, you have not…”

“Oh, dear,” Dotty Catty murmurs. “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time.”

The dark-haired woman—she cuts it herself, Edie guesses, from the strange, uneven fringe and the curious near-baldness on one side—throws her hands in the air.

“We must begin again!” she says. “Entirely! From the start. Immediately! Where is the compressor?” She turns around, and something makes a bonging noise, and then a soft gurgle as it falls into the river. “Connerie de chien de merde! Was that it? Pray to Heaven that was not my compressor?”

“It’s all right,” the burly monk says calmly. “It was the teapot.”

This does not seem to be a huge comfort. The woman pulls a piece of chalk from behind her ear and begins writing on the ground. Then she gets another piece from her pocket and starts writing with her other hand to save time.

“She is ambidextrous,” Dotty Catty whispers, “unless she is thinking very hard, she does different things at the same time. She says it is good for the brain. I tell her to eat fish, but apparently that is not sufficient.”

“I can hear you,” the woman calls, without looking round. “Please do not imagine it is any less distracting to have someone very conspicuously trying to be quiet while I work than it is to have a brass band come wandering through here playing ‘Hope And Glory’ while the Home Fleet fires all its guns at the Guggenheim Glass and China Collection, because that is in no sense the case.”

Denis—the big monk is apparently Denis—sighs into his hands for a moment, then looks up. “You have visitors, Frankie,” he says firmly.

“I cannot possibly have visitors because no one knows I am here and no one would care if they did know,” Frankie replies firmly, and carries on writing. Over by the side of the torrent, two monks have managed to draw up the teapot by hooking it with a rod. It looks… odd.

“Are you sure that’s a teapot?” Edie says.

“I have redesigned it,” Frankie announces.

“That happens to rather a lot of things here,” Denis says neutrally.

“The one we had was inoperable,” Frankie continues, “because it was designed on the assumption that it would only ever be half full. At least, I trust that is why it only pours correctly when the upper volume of the pot is empty. Unless… hm… is it possible that there are benefits to the steeping process in having a gas convection environment directly above the leaf suspension? Well, be that as it may, the pouring issue is a serious one. I scalded myself. Also, the quality of the tea was uneven. The end product, you understand. I controlled the leaves very carefully.” She appears to regard this as some species of deliberate action on the part of the old pot, which is now forming part of another apparatus over by one wall.

“My name is Banister,” Edie begins.

“I’m Esther Françoise Fossoyeur. You may call me Frankie. Hello, Banister.”

“Hello, Frankie.”

“It was nice to meet you and I’m glad we had this little chat! You can see yourself out, can’t you?”

She turns away. Edie stares at Dotty Catty, who gestures to keep things going, as fast as possible. The Dowager-Khatun looks a little twitchy, above and beyond what might be expected of a woman betraying her mass-murdering son.

“As for the Apprehension Engine,” Frankie says sharply, over her shoulder, “you may tell the Khan that it is not yet functional. There are some difficulties I had not anticipated. Observation of certain aspects of matter produces glitches which… eh, bien. I have almost perfected a power source. In fact, it is possible… hm.” She stares away to one side, and Edie can almost hear the sound of the universe splitting open as her gaze reaches into it, prods at it. “Yes. Interestingly, the tea experiments may provide the key. I… hm.”

Dotty Catty intervenes. “Frankie, Commander Banister is from the British government. I asked them to send someone…”

Edie Banister nods. “I’m here to rescue you.”

“Rescue me?”

“Yes,” Dotty Catty says. “We did talk about this.”

Frankie stares at her a moment longer. A single curl of black hair is tickling her cheek, and she brushes it away, leaving a smudge of char on her skin. Her face is very pale and pointed, and she has freckles. She must be all of five foot two inches tall, and proportionately tiny. The sleeves of her blouse are covered in mathematical notation written in ink. She frowns. “Oh. Did we? Yes, you’re quite right, we did. Because Shem wants me to make him a weapon. Yes. Do you know, he is very charming? I had no idea that was what he meant. He seemed so philanthropic. ‘An end to war.’ I am an idiot. I should have seen. Well, I won’t do it, of course. But now’s not the best time for me to leave. I’m just in the middle of something rather important.” She peers at Edie, flaps a hand. “Do you think you could come back in a few weeks, Banister?”

Edie stares at her. “For the teapot?”

“No, no. That will take a day, at most. No, for some testing of the compressor and the… eh, bien, your eyes are glazing over. For the machines, then. I have begun the process. I am isolating a standing wave. This wave, of course, is composed of water, but the dynamics are mathematically similar.” She gestures at the suspended water tank.

“A what?”

“A wave. From the river. I am taking the wave from the river and maintaining it in the box. You see, obviously, what that would mean?”

“No.”

“When I am very old I shall make a school for intelligent young persons to be educated in basic science.”

“Frankie,” Dotty Catty says firmly, “don’t be rude.”

Frankie gives a growl.

“All right! Very well, Banister, please listen closely and try not to say ‘What?’ too often or I shall scream…

“Truth may reasonably be understood as the consonance of our impression of the universe with the underlying reality. Yes? When what we believe matches the external truth about the world… You are staring at my trousers. What is wrong with them?”

Edie, who has been wondering whether to wallop this garrulous loony over the back of the noggin and carry her off, replies that there is nothing wrong with the trousers. In fact, this is true. They are odd, but shapely, and suggestive of decent legs beneath.

“Boff. So then: truth is the mind correctly understanding the world. So, like the water in the tank, the human mind is a wave. It is formed around the brain. A very complicated pattern generated by a moderately complicated thing according to fairly simple rules. Your brain is a special sort of stone. The stream runs over the stone, the surface ripples, yes? We call it a standing wave. So, your mind is the ripple. Life is the motion of water through the pattern. Death is the pattern disappearing when the stone is moved or ground away. You understand? For the mind to apprehend truth—to know, rather than simply to believe, the nature of the wave must change. The ripple must extend so that it is able to touch the bottom of the river, to know the reality directly, not via our eyes and our ears. The machine I make will extend the wave. It is like this new sonar: a new sense. A sense of knowing the truth. From this it follows that the world will change in positive ways. Voilà. C’est simple.”

“What’s the water?”

Frankie Fossoyeur stops and looks at her sharply. “I beg your pardon?”

“In your example. What replaces the water, in the case of the mind?”

“That,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, “is the first intelligent question I have been asked in twelve months. But you see, this is exactly the point. The water is the basic stuff of the universe. It is what matter and energy are made of. Hah! Tell the little Swiss I have overreached him!”

“Miss Fossoyeur…”

“Doctor.”

“Doctor Fossoyeur. What does it do?”

“It doesn’t do anything yet. It is a science, not a technology.”

“But in theory?”

“In theory it allows us to see the truth of things. The absolute truth. And perhaps later… well. The absolute truth is good enough to begin with, no?” She looks at Edie.

Edie looks at her a bit blankly. “I don’t understand.”

“How many wars will be averted? How many lives spared, if the truth cannot be obscured? If any statement can be tested for verity? Imagine the advances in understanding. In science. To know… Suppose you could look at the world, Miss Banister, and recognise lies and deception when you heard them. Would that not improve the lot of mankind? The death of falsehood. A new age constructed on the foundation of truth, Banister.”

“Commander Banister.”

Frankie Fossoyeur smiles suddenly. It’s like an English summer; a rare, rich blessing, warm on the skin. “Of course: Commander,” she says impishly. Her eyes travel the length of Edie’s body and she grins rather wickedly.

Edie Banister actually blushes. Lions and tigers and bears… oh, my…

“We really, really need to go,” she says.

“Non. I cannot escape. I must finish my work. You must come back another day. Or perhaps after, it will not be necessary. Hein?”

Dotty Catty huffs. “Frankie, no. Absolutely no. She cannot come back, she cannot wait, the whole thing must be tonight. The timing is precise.”

Frankie Fossoyeur waves this away. “Consider… by how much might the lot of man be improved, in a world where truth was ubiquitous? One per cent? Five? How much positive adjustment is necessary to pass the tipping point and enable the spontaneous formation of a utopia?” Frankie beams. Then her face falls. “Oh. Although too much truth could create problems on a physical level. And one most definitely would not wish to create a determining cascade…” She scribbles frantically.

Dotty Catty throws her bony hands into the air. “Frankie! Commander Banister! You must leave, now!”

“I cannot, I am working—”

“Now! It must be now!”

“We could possibly wait a few hours,” Edie suggests, still looking at Frankie Fossoyeur’s smudged cheek.

“No, you couldn’t. It has started.”

This is true, but Edie catches in Dotty Catty’s voice some hint of more, and she wrenches her eyes away from the bemused Frankie Fossoyeur and looks at her guide.

“What’s started?”

Dotty Catty shrugs, a fine, unapologetic old-lady shrug, and half-turns her back.

“My plan.”

“Your plan.”

“My diversion.”

“What diversion?”

“I have created a diversion, in the finest military tradition, so that you may carry out your mission.”

“What diversion?”

“The gas taps in the kitchens,” Dotty Catty says. “I have arranged that they should catch fire.” She beams. Somewhere to one side, one of the Ruskinites makes a horrified choking noise. Brother Denis the Ruskinite stares at her, aghast.

“But this palace is constructed over a natural-gas reservoir,” he says in horror. “The entire citadel… You’ll blow the whole place like a bomb!”

“Yes,” Dotty Catty says. “It will be very distracting.”

And just like that, Edie Banister is having a really bad day.

Still swearing in terms fit to curdle whisky, Edie Banister hurtles through the burning palace with a wooden crate on wheels.

“My treasure!” the dratted old woman said, after Edie had screamed at her and put Frankie Fossoyeur in a fireman’s lift to short-circuit the escape discussion. “The last of all of them from Mansura, that is no more! In all the world, there is no greater virtue, no more splendid thing. The crate in the west chamber of my apartments—for God’s sake, take it to George in London! There are others here, but they are old, they cannot go with you. This will be their grave, one way or another. But this one… promise me!”

Edie has never been one to turn down a friend—never mind the grey-haired old tub has blown this operation to six kinds of shit with one finely judged insanity (Rig a gas explosion, you potty old trout? You’re out of your bloody head!) and never mind there may be utility in it, too, for good King George. This is a personal matter between Women of Consequence, and hell if whatever is in the crate will come to harm, even get a flake of ash on it.

She gave Dotty Catty a piece of her mind, though, while through the corridors she staggered, carrying that damned squealing scientist on her back and feeling the while a wash of sympathy for the abductors from the seraglio, and why in all the world was she running away with this bony genius without the sense God gave a hedgehog when she could be legging it out the back door with At Your Service and a couple of close friends for an entirely more agreeable adventure?

Girls wishing to serve their country… Aiee, what a mess. Although it was almost worth it to see a dozen monks hike up their habits and run for the hills with only what they could carry and Frankie’s blessed compressor—whatever that may be—on a trolley.

At her room, Edie handed the outraged Frankie to Songbird and told him to get her to the river, get help, get it now, signal Cuparah, get us the Hell out! Let’s have the marines and never mind who knows it!

Then she barged out into the corridor, demanding directions and bloody quick, smelling smoke and thinking about how many kilos of gas at how much pressure per square inch exploding with how much force? Which was about when the first explosion erupted and the whole place shook and seemed to heel over like a ship in a beam sea, and when she got to her feet again the fire was really under way and a lot of bits of palace were looking alarmingly diagonal where they should have been perpendicular.

Dotty Catty embraced her and wrapped a purple sash from her frocks around Edie’s upper arm, which was for some reason terribly significant, and hugged her again and cried “Women of Consequence!” which was very nice except Edie had a strong desire to belt her.

So here she is now making the return trip, hauling the crate along—and bloody Nora, it’s heavy, whatever it is, and something in it rattling around fair to capsize the box. No time to complain, though: get to the boat, and worry about it later. Though how she will explain herself to captain and crew in her present state, as far from covert as is easily imaginable, she has no idea.

Bugger it.

A carpet flops flaming off the wall, tries to snag her. Hah! Missed me… But oops, that was a near one for the fragile crate, oh, yes—the floating ash spreads spectral fingers. Edie wrenches the crate into motion, and this time the thing or things within are cooperating—they rebound off the inside back wall. The crate flexes, damnit, and creaks and wheezes. That’s another concern: pull too hard and it will apparently break open, slew its contents across the steaming floor and then where will we be? Fine reet’n’harsefuckered, as Songbird would have it. Edie lets the crate surge ahead of her on its lanyard, finds herself, ludicrously, admiring her own forearm against the ruddy firelight.

Focus.

Another colossal boom shakes the palace. An arch collapses to one side, great chunks of solid stone crumbling and cracking in the heat, popping as air bubbles rip them open from the inside. Edie growls sulphurously—a spark has scored her shoulder through the jacket—and gets her mind on business. This isn’t nearly the mother lode going up, this is just the appetiser, plus who knows what appalling muck lurks in Fossoyeur’s cavern, or what will happen when it is burned or crushed or otherwise perturbed? Frankie seemed to think—between bounces on Edie’s shoulder—that this was a thing to be viewed from a great distance or not at all… At this rate the place will explode long before she can get clear, and that is absolutely not on the menu for today. No immolation, so she needs inspiration… Oh ho! Induction, Compression, Combustion, Exhaust. Four stages of the internal combustion engine (which Edie learned for the purposes of sabotage) but here’s the key: locomotion. The horseless carriage. And there it is, no motor but lots of momentum and didn’t the boys back home all have one of these? A go-cart, a tray with wheels. Yes, they did, and no girls allowed to play. Hah!

Edie grabs the lanyard and braces her feet against the back of the crate, lets the thing’s weight carry them both, kicks off the ground from time to time to steer and add velocity. Escape by go-cart, not bad at all. She sniffs. There’s a strange smell, peppery and agricultural. The contents of the crate are apparently padded with river mud.

Focus.

Aye, indeed, for there’s a way to go yet, here’s the bad part starting: dead men, burning, in heaps. Cuparah’s marines at work there, or Songbird and the lads. Edie’s stomach lurches at the sweet, appetising smell, then revolts as her mind catches up with the notion, and she nearly brings up. Some friendly (if thank God not well-known to her) others not (well, mercifully neutral now) but all men and not kabob, no matter what the nose believes. She kicks hard to take the go-cart around the edge of the slaughter, don’t slow down, don’t stop, not for anything.

Ah! Good decision: there’s a live one, armed, the bastard, and swirling his cleaver about the place and gnashing furious teeth. Fine reet’n’harsefuckered… Edie skates towards him, thinking fast. Speed and heft are their own advantage, and this unconventional conveyance has confused him slightly. The man is a brigand in the pay of the Opium Khan; it’s not every day he is assailed by a willowy white lunatic in forest green, borne along on a wave of fire by a box on wheels. Indeed, there probably aren’t many people who have great familiarity with this situation.

He regains his composure and comes towards her. Edie grounds her heel abruptly, sends her carriage into a spin, then lets the heavy crate swing her around like a child at the village fete. Maypole budo! Her right foot catches him in the noggin, and down he goes like a sack of taters. Blast it, though, he has a friend in the corridor, a few paces away, and that’s a really nasty-looking knife, so it is, more a sword. Under Mrs. Sekuni’s tutelage, she has learned to identify weapons; this is a bastard crossbreed, of course, not a wakizashi or a cutlass or even a bowie knife, but the offspring of a machete and a cleaver. Damn, he’s big. Hypersomnia big.

The man raises his weapon, and roars.

Bugger.

Edie scoots out of the way, abandoning the precious crate, and has to duck very fast as Hypersomnia Boy comes charging in much faster than she anticipated. Just her luck: he’s got brains and skill to match his brawn. Surely that’s not allowed?

First thing: don’t die. Edie scoots left and he chops the other way, misses her.

Cla-boiiing! That sword’s a decent piece of work, too, throwing up sparks and vibrating, but not a chip nor crack as he drives it solidly into the mosaic floor and hauls it out. Hauls it out very close to Edie’s hips, and that would have cut her in half… she rolls away, regains her feet. Yama Arashi… a woman would have to be very skilled or very desperate, and in either case very brave… Edie wonders briefly whether the big lad would listen to a discussion on the relative merits of Asiatic Despotism versus planned economy and a dictatorship of the proletariat, culminating in a suggestion that he change sides, and concludes that Yama Arashi has the edge—but only just.

He comes again. She moves forward instead of back, and commits the cardinal sin of anticipating the attack, beginning the technique before he has given the opportunity. Fortunately, he misses the mistake, or doesn’t know what her movement portends. Edie’s arms slide between his, her hips come between him and the sword. Merge the ki. Or as Frankie Fossoyeur would no doubt say: let your centre of gravity and rotation displace your opponent’s… The movement continues, and she feels a feather pressure on her back, hears him land and swirls on. In the dojo, you finish with the sword against uke’s neck. In real life, the sword is heavier and Yama Arashi and mortal combat have their own logic… tchuck.

Scratch one giant.

Don’t look too closely. Don’t think about it too much. Collect the crate, and find the good guys.

Edie rattles away down the passageway, surfing the crate, scared out of her mind and appalled at what she has done and loving every primal second.

At the throne room, it all comes apart on her.

“Well, Commander Banister, goodness me. There seems to have been some tragic misunderstanding. Your men here are very eager to release you from some dungeon or other—I couldn’t persuade them you were an honoured guest. And in the meantime, my soldiers here are most anxious to protect me from any violence, and some unhappy soul has set my great palace on fire. Why, Commander Banister, whatever is that remarkable box?”

“A gift from your mother, Khan,” Edie says in James Banister’s voice, pats her face to make sure of her moustache, though God knows what difference it makes now… yes. She’s still a boy. “Wants me to take it to the King, apparently. Tell me, is this place full o’ bandits or did one of your fellows just try to cut my head off?” She gives it an extra sting, says awf rather than off. “Dashed poor form, if so, Khan, me being an ambassador and all.”

The palace guard of Shem Shem Tsien are not armed in the full modern style—the Opium Khan likes the feel of antiquity, or doesn’t trust his lads with serious automatic weapons—but there are a few pistols, and a crossbow will kill you just as readily as a bullet—or more so, if you happen to have taken shelter behind something. In training, Edie saw a crossbow bolt pass through a metal plate. There are comfortably two hundred of the Khan’s warriors in this room, all around their master. Standing opposite them are the thirty-odd marines from Cuparah, led by Songbird and Flagpole, looking very determined and very doomed. No sign of Frankie or Dotty Catty, which pray God means they’re aboard already, and the mission is all but complete. Now… just a question of everyone not dying here. Stand-off, but not the good kind.

The Opium Khan surveys his situation, and seems about to speak. Then he looks at Edie, and for the first time she sees the truth of him. The hectoring matinée villain fades away, the cheery roguish smile vanishes, and in its place is the thing which locked a family in a room and incinerated them. It’s like watching a snake emerge from the corpse of a wolf. Another explosion rattles the room, closer this time.

“This no longer interests me,” Shem Shem Tsien says flatly. “Kill them all. Put out the fire. I will want their heads, of course.”

The soldiers of the Opium Khan roll forward in a wave, and Edie’s boys go to meet them. It is the time-honoured tradition of the sons of England’s North: when all is lost, advance to give the enemy his scars. They are making a fight of it, too, impossible though that seems, and then Shem Shem Tsien unsheathes his sword and joins the fray, and Edie learns what butchery is.

Shem Shem Tsien is perfect. It comes from his feet, she’s fairly sure. His feet take him where he wants to go and you least wish him to be. He comes at your bad side, your wounded leg, your blackened eye. He is lithe and strong, but it’s not his arm and shoulder which power the narrow blade he carries, but his heels and hips. He moves through the battle like the shuttle on a loom, trailing threads of human extinction. Edie wonders, honestly, whether even the Sekunis were ever so graceful.

She moves towards him as he skewers a man whose name she has forgotten, one of Amanda Baines’s marines, and even the weight of the corpse adds to his momentum and his rhythm. He steps to one side and brings his wrists together as another soldier surges at him, then rolls his blade in a gesture she has always assumed is pure swordsman’s swank. The edge rolls around his opponent’s neck in a perfect circle, the man twisting as if trying to follow the hilt with his lips, his blood pouring from a massive wound.

Edie watches Shem Shem Tsien and knows she cannot beat him or even survive him unless God provides a miracle. She goes forward anyway. Her vision narrows to Shem Shem Tsien and him alone, and he sees her, and—to her fury—barely notices her intent. He draws a pistol from his belt and fires left-handed as if to swat her away, and only the broad back of Flagpole saves her from death.

Flagpole stares at her, genially lascivious. “Ey, Countess,” he says quietly. “Tha’s a shame.” And then he falls forward into her arms and she can see the hole in his spine.

Shem Shem Tsien smiles, and Edie can feel his satisfaction. She can hear him in her head. Alas for the limitations of budo, Commander Banister. I find it is a particular pleasure, to the sophisticated mind, to force an officer to watch the death of the soldiers in his care. It has piquancy. Wouldn’t you say?

She realises that she has lost. Frankie will get away, it’s true. Edie will have completed her mission. But she will have died a secret agent’s death in a far land, and no one will ever know. She wonders if Abel Jasmine will cry, or Clarissa Foxglove. She wonders how many sweethearts of her soldiers will weep into ragged pillows, back home, and whether they will blame Commander James Banister personally, or just curse the fortunes of war. She raises her hands into the most cautious of guard positions, and gets ready to die.

To her surprise, Shem Shem Tsien raises his hand in salute. He looks almost human. And then, a moment later, she sees the pleasure in his eyes at her resignation. Not empathy. The sating of an appetite.

He comes towards her, boots barely brushing the tiled floor. She feels clumsy and small, adjusts her guard. He smiles again. I am killing you piece by piece, Commander.

Salvation comes, all undreamed of. With a sharp crack and a noise like a cornet call, Edie’s burdensome crate flies open, and out charges a small, angry grey object decked in ornate metal plates. It fixes eyes on her purple sash, and places itself stoutly between her and her enemies. Then it raises up its head, and the cornet call sounds again: a shrill, high note, amazingly loud and penetrating. In the near distance, something gives answer: a deep hallooing hunter’s horn, or a tuneless brass band with a tuba the size of a house.

Edie does not recognise the grey object for what it is until the Door of Humility explodes inwards, and through the breach come massive, muscular shapes in a mighty rush, bringing a scent of sweat and dung and spice, and Shem Shem Tsien hurtles backwards away from her, sword tumbling in the air, swatted end over end in one furious motion of denial. She stares, then gives vent to a delighted yawp of victory.

The greatest cavalry force ever raised up from one end of the great Addeh River to the other, from the topless Katir mountains to the wide blue Indian Ocean, stands ready to give answer to her need: in the vanguard, a wall of maternal indignation blotting out the light, ploughing into the soldiers of Shem Shem Tsien and sending them fleeing after their master. Behind this titan are other shapes even bigger, smashing walls and doors and charging onward, trumpeting unleashed fury. All are urged on by the armoured shape of Edie’s newest guardian, shoulder high at best, but bristling with affront and duty.

Dotty Catty’s gift: a baby war elephant.

The tide of the battle turns.

Relative calm; this means there are no guns. All the same, Amanda Baines is doing a great deal of shouting. The reason for this is that her upper turret has a number of holes in it (holes are considered a Bad Thing in the submariner trade) and Edie was supposed to run a covert intrusion and appears instead to have declared war on a minor principality and reduced it to rubble. Worse, she has failed to kill or capture the offended party, which is apparently very important when you launch a de facto surprise attack on a foreign nation. The Cuparah is presently going at one-third ahead towards the open ocean, and no one seriously expects there to be anything between her and that ocean, because the last attempt to block her way is still burning. More than that, it is burning in a somewhat emphatic way which is the product of Amanda Baines completely losing her temper. It is burning in such a manner as to suggest that other ships constructed in the same place or around the same time may also be burning out of sheer sympathy. Amanda Baines has achieved the nautical equivalent of punching the enemy very hard in the crotch and then kicking them repeatedly as they lie incapable on the ground, and the assembled pirates and seamen of the Addeh maritime have noted this action and responded in time-honoured fashion by finding very important things to do on dry land. Not even the Opium Khan’s bounties are sufficient to tempt them into the path of Cuparah. This proactive indifference is not sufficient to quell the wrath of Amanda Baines, who is even now drawing breath to express her further lack of impressedness, but realises at the last minute that she has nothing else to say.

“And,” yells Amanda Baines, as if trying to persuade herself that this is worse than unsponsored declarations of war, “there is a baby elephant in my stateroom!”

“Yes,” Edie says, “there is.”

“Well,” says Amanda Baines, trying not to think about the limpid-eyed beast and how delighted she was when he passed her a woolly hat from the rack, “what are we going to feed him? Eh?”

And at this, Edie Banister is suddenly aware that she is not dead, and has survived, and even done well, and she starts to cry. Amanda Baines, hard-bitten woman of the open water, mutters something about highly strung people and how they should stick to making bad art, and trudges over to examine the wreckage of her periscope.

“This is fascinating,” a new voice observes in Edie’s ear. “But the construction is quite wrong.”

Amanda Baines peers at Frankie Fossoyeur. Frankie peers at the dials on Cuparah’s highly classified bridge. Mockley the Ruskinite, who personally built quite a lot of Cuparah, raises one eyebrow ever so slightly.

“In what way?”

“You make inadequate use of resources. This vessel could be far more impressive than it is.”

“Could it?” Amanda Baines asks levelly.

“Oh, yes,” Frankie Fossoyeur replies.

“How very kind of you to notice.”

“A matter of the greatest simplicity for someone of my capacity,” Frankie continues, matter-of-fact.

“Is it?”

“It is. The construction of your vessel is innovative, but not complex.”

“Oh, good.”

“I could design a schematic for you.”

Amanda Baines unkinks slightly, in spite of herself, then glances guiltily at Mockley.

“A schematic?”

“Of course. Do you have paper? The mathematics is quite interesting, but the practical application is not difficult.”

“That would be very kind,” Mockley interjects. “Have you studied this kind of system before?”

“Non. It is unique, is it not? But very clever. The individual who designed it possesses considerable flair. I shall enjoy improving on his work.”

Mockley hunches a little, then sets his expression in a look of monkish placidity. The face of Amanda Baines takes on a sour expression.

“I suppose you know what to feed an elephant, too.”

“Hein. Of course. A varied vegetable diet. Roots and leaves, bark… ah. I see the problem. We will improvise. Kelp, yes, some other weeds. I shall prepare a list. It would be best if he were not allowed to swim.”

“They swim?”

“Extremely well. And of course, the trunk functions like your snorkel, yes? But it would be very hard to get him back on board.”

“I shall bear that closely in mind.”

From the captain’s cabin, a noise like an accordion landing in a rice pudding. Frankie Fossoyeur shrugs, her narrow shoulders rising almost to her ears.

“Elephants are like people,” she says, without great sympathy. “Not all of them are good sailors.”

Six days later, Cuparah is five hundred foot down and diving, and Edie Banister can hear the riveted sections of the boat growl and yap. The faithful hound is struggling. Far from friendly waters, the Kriegsmarine and the Nippon Kaigun are too many, the cold and the pressure too harsh. Enemy ships have spotted Cuparah—tipped off by a spiteful Khan or merely put in her path by ill luck—and now they are searching the sea and listening for her quiet engine, pouring explosives down into the sheltering deep. Every few seconds the whole cabin shudders and the plates of the walls howl and shriek as Cuparah is kicked and harried, and the dull boom of another depth charge throws her one way and another. No dog should have to suffer this. Indeed, no dog can be expected to take it for long. Cuparah is in danger, here in the dark.

Beneath and beyond all of which, Edie is apparently going mad, because she seems to hear choral music. When the door opens, she realises that no, someone is actually singing, low and weird and deranged, deep in the hull.

“Commander Banister?”

Edie is wearing her uniform and moustache, since she may in theory be called upon to do something devious if they surface and surrender. And here is Frankie Fossoyeur, that same desirable, distracted expression on her face as she explains that she thinks the Cuparah may be overcooking it, may be about to implode.

Implode. A very, very bad word indeed. Edie had believed, until she heard it down here, that the worst bad words were Anglo-Saxon in origin and referred to parts of the body. Not so. Not one of the unspeakable sexual terms she has heard is anything like as bad as bleak, measured, Latinate implode.

“Do you think they will continue this…” Frankie waves her hands “… this dropping?” A wrenching impact causes the ship to heel over, and Edie is thrown upright. Frankie is holding onto the frame of the door, so they are suddenly very close. Edie nods.

“I’m sure they will, yes. If they have the charges.”

“The boat is strong. Remarkable, even. But not like this. The repeated stresses accumulate. The hulls will not hold.” Frankie stares into space as if she can actually see the fractures, the stresses.

Edie, ungifted mathematically, is nonetheless inclined to agree. Cuparah’s groaning has taken on a distinctly frantic edge, a shearing, fatigued sound which is far more ominous than the bell-like tone it emitted when the first charge went off a few moments ago.

“Well,” Edie says, “then we will probably die.”

Frankie Fossoyeur stares at her.

“That is not necessary,” she says after a moment. “It is wasteful. There is much we have left to do. Boff.” She throws her hands up, as if all this drama is so typical of the silly people she has to deal with. “I will not permit it. Accompany me, please, Banister.”

Since the alternative would appear to be waiting alone for the inevitable rush of icy water and ensuing death, Edie follows.

Frankie is slight and determined, and Edie’s uniform counts for something on Amanda Baines’s ship, so they pass smoothly through the mill of shouting, frightened men doing their best to be cool under pressure. Also, the place they appear to be going to is not anywhere any of the sailors needs or wants to be. It is the place the weird, disturbing singing is coming from: Cuparah’s decoding chamber. Frankie opens the door and steps inside.

The Ruskinites are praying. The coding machine is shut down—no need for it at the moment, obviously—so they are kneeling on the floor in front of it, facing one another to avoid the appearance of worshipping the machine, which is very much not what they’re about, and chanting like Gregorians. It’s monotone, and very sad. Now that she is inside the room with them, Edie recognises the chant as a prayer for the dying.

Hear us, O Lord, and issue not the decree for the completion of our days before Thou forgivest our sins. There is no room in death for amendment. Deliver us not unto the bitter grave. Lord, have mercy.

She shudders. There’s nothing like religion to make you feel utterly doomed.

“Eh, bien,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, clapping her hands. “Ça suffit. That is enough. There is work.” The Ruskinites stop chanting and stare at her, a bit annoyed. Frankie in turn finds their lack of compliance vexatious, and grabs the nearest one by the cheeks and shouts into his face. “Get up! We. Have. Work. To. Do!”

And whether it is because they take her sudden arrival as the answer to their morbid prayer, or because in all honesty they are just people looking for a way to divert their minds from the imminence of crush-depth and the endless drumming of the enemy above, they get to their feet, and Mockley asks what is to be done.

“This,” Frankie says, waving her hand at the coding machine. “It gets hot?”

“Yes,” Mockley says.

“And you cool it with?”

“We have ice-makers. Poseidon’s Net.”

“Excellent. And we have my compressor for additional cold. Good. And do you also have wood? No, wait. Kelp. We have kelp for the elephant.”

The Ruskinites look a bit shifty. The issue of the elephant has not been a happy one. They have been required to vacate some research space for him in Cuparah’s forward hold, and one very rash person suggested sotto voce that perhaps elephant steak might make a nice change from cod. Songbird chanced to overhear, and nearly throttled him. Edie’s team are a little irrational about the elephant, because so many of his relatives were injured or killed in the business of saving them from Shem Shem Tsien, and because without him there is every possibility that they would be hanging on hooks on the walls of the Opium Khan’s palace.

“Yes,” Mockley says, “we have kelp.”

“Bon. Then we must… hacher… the kelp, into little pieces, and make pulp. Slime. Yes? And then add water, very cold. Supercold. Then squirt it in the pipes. There are pipes everywhere, yes? Squirt squirt. Then we must overload the pipes. They will burst outwards? Good. How good are the pumps? Never mind, they are not good enough, I must make them better. Make kelp, what is the word? It is Scottish and disgusting, not haggis, the oats, yes: porridge! Make porridge, quickly! And you,” she adds, with a keen eye for the would-be eater of elephants. “Hoses! I will need all the spare hoses.”

“What are we doing?” Edie asks, as she throws her jacket onto the floor to sit on it, and Frankie rips the cover off the first of Mockley’s refrigeration units.

“We are making a new submarine,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, “before the old one is broken.” A particularly loud roar sounds through the boat. “Which will be very soon. So.” She gestures to the machine in front of her. “We work.”

And they do. Edie’s fingers get red and her nails chip, threading washers and nuts onto bolts by hand, grabbing pliers and spanners to finish the job, passing the tools to someone else and starting again. Splice, fix, rotate, tension, and all the while the boat is dying around them, screaming and shuddering.

Cuparah yaws and rolls all the way over. Edie clings to the compressor and Frankie clings to Edie, the two of them clinched together. Edie’s arms do not have time to hurt. Then the boat slams back over and they fall to the deck. One of the Ruskinites has cut his own finger almost entirely off in the confusion. He holds it up for inspection. Frankie tells him to pull it off and keep working, because he can live with nine fingers, but not with multiple atmospheres of water shattering his body like an empty eggshell. He shrugs, and does as he’s told. Shock. Or courage. Edie isn’t sure there’s a difference. Being dead is a sure remedy for pain… She suddenly remembers being very young, hearing an old woman say:

Tes a zertin cure, Mam, I ’zure ’ee, starps ’ey bagg’rin’ wetchess f’om g’wen te zay in eggbote.

It took her years to work out what it means. She says it now, and Frankie stares at her.

“It is a certain cure, madam, I assure you; it stops those buggering witches from going to sea in an eggboat!” Cuparah, eggboat. Far below crush-depth, metal shell fit to fail. It’s just right, somehow; meaningless, idiotic, and right.

One of the Ruskinites laughs, and repeats it. His voice is Cornish—the woman she heard, Edie reckons, must have been from Dorset—and Mockley says it, too, miming eggs and toasted soldiers, and it becomes the rhythm of their work, an antidote to the percussion all around. Frankie swears in French that they have all gone utterly mad, but they connect the compressor and the pumps to the pipes as she requires, and fire them up. Frankie peers at the switch, then starts to scribble in chalk on a bulkhead.

“Yes, yes, seawater, good, so far, so good, yes… cold, of course, very good, better! So. The pressure is a factor, and the salt… The units will have to work hard initially. The cold inside the vessel will be… it will be cold. Everyone must dress warm. We have no time for that. After it is done, we can warm the interior, yes. Then there will be… bon. Then…” and she’s off, seconds ticking, bombs kicking, until Edie realises she’s gone abstract, and nudges her hard. “Oh, mordieux, I am an idiot, there is an issue of trapped air,” Frankie mutters, and begins drilling a hole in the bulkhead wall, which is when one of Amanda Baines’s sailors comes in and screams at her to stop.

The visceral horror in his voice is enough to cut through the other sounds of fear and horror on the boat, and another man looks around the door. He screams as well.

“Idiot!” Frankie Fossoyeur is shouting. “I am a professional!”

Twenty seconds later, and it has all gone significantly to hell, as if the previous situation—depth charges, water pressure, deteriorating vessel, general doom—had not been bad enough. Now the bosun is holding a gun on Frankie and Frankie won’t stop drilling, and sailors are starting to shout at the chief to shoot her down. Any second now the whole thing will become moot because, with the sailors here instead of where they should be, vital tasks are not getting done, and in any case Cuparah is responding only sluggishly, with one engine’s bearings not doing their job and a shriek of dying metal ripping and buzzing through the air. Up above, the enemy knows they’re on the edge of the kill. One of the Ruskinites starts to mutter: Into Thine arms, O Lord, I commend my soul, that Thou hast made and nourished. Look kindly on me now, that am flawed, and then Edie treads on his toe.

And then there comes a moment of perfect quiet. Edie can’t understand how, at first, and then she realises that a charge has gone off right on top of the boat, and the pulse of pressure has burst her left eardrum and the other one is shrieking. The pain is so awful that she can only feel it in slivers, little bright fragments which punctuate everything. In between times the world is grey and purple as if she is in the dark and her agony is the only illumination. Everything happens in pieces.

She sees the water welling up, up, up from below them, far too fast.

The chief of the boat waves his hands, ordering everyone out of the compartment.

Frankie Fossoyeur ignores him.

The flood door swings shut, sealing them in.

The water rushes up, so cold Edie can actually feel it over the pain. But she can’t move. She has nothing left.

Through the deck, she can feel bad things happening all around. Cuparah is wallowing, rebounding off one blast after another, reeling like a drunkard in a bar brawl. Another blast kicks her sideways, and she does not right. She begins to fall. Edie can feel it in the hairs on the back of her neck. Cuparah is going down, down in an anticlockwise spiral, not sinking but plummeting.

Soon, the water will cover the generators and then the game will be over.

Frankie Fossoyeur throws the switch, then grasps Edie’s arm and drags her up on top of one of the benches.

“You must not be in the water,” Frankie says. It seems like a rather silly thing to be worried about.

Crush-depth is somewhere around nine hundred feet. No one knows for certain. They are falling fast. They will reach it very soon now, if they haven’t already.

Edie’s good ear registers creaking.

And then, something changes. Something strange, but—Edie can tell this by the Frenchwoman’s pleased expression—something expected, and good. The water stops rising. And then it goes white. Frozen in place.

Cuparah shudders, as if throwing off a great weight, rolls and heaves.

Down deep—too deep—Cuparah does not implode. She hangs in the dark. After a moment, the depth charges stop falling. Edie stares at the frozen block a few feet below her.

“They think we are dead,” Frankie says.

“Why?”

“Because we lost a large piece of the hull, of course.”

“Then why aren’t we dead?”

“Because we have a new one.”

“A new one?”

“Yes.”

“How? Where did it come from?”

Frankie smiles brightly.

“Ice,” she says, as if nothing could be more natural. “And kelp fibre, for flexibility, about fourteen per cent. In an irregular pearl formation. About ten foot of it, I think… yes. It’s only slightly weaker than steel.” She smiles. “And, of course, we have rather a lot of it. This vessel is excellent. I had not considered the idea; rather than seeking to rule out variations in quality, accept and adopt the reality of imperfection. A very powerful model indeed.”

Cuparah, in the night of a thousand feet down—the ghost of a fly, caught in ice instead of amber.