The Thousand Emperors

FIFTEEN

Luc.

He opened his eyes to see Winchell Antonov, one hand clasped to his injured shoulder, leaning over him. Antonov’s breath came in short, sharp gasps, blood pooling at his feet.

He was back on the bridge of the starship, tied to a chair.

Luc glared dully up at the other man. I could get really sick of this.

Antonov laughed. That’s the spirit! His expression suddenly changed and he grunted with pain, his face shiny and pale. Tell me, how are you sleeping these days, Luc?

Badly. If the lattice winds up killing me, then you die too – or didn’t you think of that?

But not before you finish what needs finishing. If it wasn’t for Zelia, you’d be in Cripps’ hands by now, and almost certainly dead. But there are things you need to do that even she can’t help you with.

I can’t see one reason, Luc spat, for me to believe one damn word that comes out of your treacherous mouth.

Really? Antonov’s expression was cynical. And just how grateful have the Temur Council been to you, for all your service in their name? All those years you spent squirrelled away inside Archives, doing everything you could to try and figure where I was or what I might do next – just how much have they rewarded you for all that effort?

I’m not interested in your fucking propaganda. Just . . . let me wake up, and get the fuck out of my head.

No. You’ve seen enough of the Council to have an idea of who and what some of them really are, but you’re still struggling to accept the truth. They’re monsters, even Zelia – and she’s one of the better ones.

And you think you were better?

Antonov hacked out a cough before answering, flecks of blood on his lips. You’re closer than almost anyone else ever has been, to finding out things Cheng would rather keep hidden from view forever. Neither he nor his cronies can be sure just what I might have done to you while you were wandering around inside Aeschere. And because of that, every last one of them – particularly those damn Eighty-Fivers – would rather see you dead than take a chance you might know something you shouldn’t. If not for Zelia, they probably would have killed you anyway, on the pretext that you might – just might – have been working for me all along.

You botched up, Luc said wearily. You told me to speak to Ambassador Sachs, but he didn’t seem interested in helping anyone, least of all me.

You need to gain his trust, Antonov replied. He saw me lurking inside you, but can’t be sure yet of your motives, or who you might decide to report to if he tells you too much.

Luc shook his head in disbelief. Gain his trust? Do you even know where I am just now? Or what’s happened to me?

You’re exactly where I wanted you to be.

Waiting to die in the snow?

You’re not dead, Luc. In fact, you’ve already been rescued. Haven’t you worked out yet that I’m the reason you came here in the first place?

Bullshit, Luc snapped. I came out here looking for the Ambassador after he—

Think back, said Antonov, to when you were studying that map of Vanaheim.

Luc recalled the globe Zelia had projected into the air. He had looked towards the range of mountains, and felt a twinge of pain behind his eyes . . .

Luc’s fists tightened under his restraints. Something had drawn him towards those mountains, and to Maxwell’s prison.

You did that to me? he demanded.

I needed you to come here, Antonov replied.

But why?

Because you need to hear the truth about Vasili, and about me – and Cheng, too.

You told me there’d be some terrible calamity without the Ambassador’s help. Are you talking about war with the Coalition?

Antonov was growing visibly weaker. Believe me, he said, there are far, far worse things out there than the Coalition.

The cobalt blues and dark metallic greys surrounding them were beginning to lose definition, as if Luc’s eyes were blurring. He sensed their encounter was coming to an end.

You need to tell me more, he insisted. I know you’re holding something back.

But sometimes there’s so much I can’t remember myself, Antonov replied, his voice weak and pitiful. The air between them seemed to ripple. There’s only a fragment of me inside you, and it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

The starship bridge faded, and was replaced by a different scene. Luc saw the streets of a biome on some airless world, unwinking stars fixed into the firmament beyond its precious pocket of atmosphere. Men and women, their flesh riddled with terrible pustules, lay scattered around. Other figures in contamination suits, their faces just visible behind wraparound visors, moved from body to body. They were taking measurements of some kind.

He found his attention drawn to one suited figure in particular, and after a moment he recognized the face behind the visor. Zelia.

Luc came awake with a start, to find himself in a room filled with books.

He had been laid out on a couch at the centre of a large hexagonal room, high walls of dark granite supporting recessed shelves crammed with hundreds of bound volumes much like those he had seen in Vasili’s residence. The floor was tiled with dark slate, while soft, pearlescent light shone through translucent ceiling tiles. A single door led out of the room, while his cold-weather gear had been dumped in a pile in one corner.

He looked around, feeling wildly disoriented. From staggering through endless snowy wastes . . . to this.

Sitting up, he winced with pain. The muscles of both legs throbbed, and he massaged his calves with both hands until the cramp lessened. He stood carefully, stretching his legs before reaching out to pull a random volume down from a shelf close at hand.

The book turned out to be filled with what appeared to be proofs of mathematical equations. Before being summoned to Vasili’s residence, Luc – in common with most citizens of the Tian Di – had only rarely encountered actual, physical volumes such as this. They were like the relic of a past and better age. The pages felt cool to the touch, even slightly metallic, indeed much like the one he had pulled out from under Vasili’s half-burned corpse . . .

He froze, remembering what had happened when his fingers had brushed against the pages of that particular volume, and closed the book carefully before placing it back where it had come from.

Taking a step back, he regarded the shelves around him with new eyes. That other book – the one in Vasili’s library, that had transported him into the mind of a dead man – might not officially exist, but if he was, as seemed likely, somewhere inside the prison that had held Javier Maxwell for all these centuries, then maybe that first book had originated from here.

If that was the case, then it might be best not to touch any of the books. That first experience had been traumatic enough.

He tried again to contact de Almeida, but had no more luck than before. It looked like he was still on his own.

The only thing left was to explore, so he pulled open the one door leading out of the room – and felt the breath catch in his throat at what he beheld.

The room he had been left to wake in proved to be little more than an antechamber to a vast, cathedral-like space. He saw an arched ceiling at least twenty metres overhead, from which hung chandeliers supported by heavy steel chains. And all around, rising up the walls and accessible by a multitude of narrow metal stairways and walkways, were tens of thousands more books. More physical, tactile volumes than he might ever have believed existed anywhere within the Tian Di, let alone Vanaheim.

If this really was Maxwell’s prison, it was a hell of a luxurious one.

Luc turned to look down the other end of the hall and saw an elderly man regarding him from a few metres away. The old man’s narrow skull was topped with a fringe of white hair. A long robe hung loose on his bony shoulders, while a faint nimbus of light around his head and upper shoulders indicated he was a data-ghost.

‘You must be . . .’

‘Javier Maxwell,’ said the data-ghost in a reedy voice, the eyes bright blue and full of intelligence. ‘You were close to dying out there in the snow, did you know that?’

‘Thanks,’ said Luc, ‘for saving me.’

Maxwell cast his gaze up towards the ceiling and back down. ‘You know where you are?’

‘This is where they keep you locked up.’

‘I fear you already know more about me than I know about you, Mr . . . ?’

‘Archivist Luc Gabion.’

Maxwell nodded as if coming to a conclusion. ‘You’re clearly not a member of the Temur Council, are you?’

‘I’m not, no.’

‘An assassin, then?’

‘No. I’m not here to kill you, or anyone else.’

‘Really? I certainly hope that’s not the case. I’ve had reason to become quite concerned about such things lately.’

Luc heard a slight hum as two mechants dropped down from the ceiling, taking station on either side of him. The mirror-smooth skin of one of the mechants parted, revealing intricate and deadly-looking weaponry mounted on tiny gimballed joints.

Glancing at the other mechant, Luc saw it had done the same, its weapons swivelling until they were directed at his skull.

‘Now,’ said Maxwell, ‘I’ll give you, hmm . . . let’s say five seconds, to tell me why you’re here, before I order them to kill you as a purely precautionary measure. And please,’ he added, stepping slightly closer, ‘be aware that I’ve been around for long enough to be able to tell when someone is lying to me.’

‘I’m investigating Sevgeny Vasili’s death,’ Luc blurted, as the hum emanating from the mechants rapidly increased in pitch.

Maxwell stared at him with narrowed eyes for a period of time that felt much longer than five seconds. Then, just as the hum was about to reach a crescendo, Maxwell raised a hand, and the hum fell away into silence.

‘I heard about Sevgeny,’ said Maxwell, his voice grave. ‘Joseph told me all about it on his last visit. A very unfortunate thing indeed, and something that has inspired me to greater than usual levels of paranoia. On whose authority, Mr Gabion, are you carrying out this investigation?’

‘I’m here on Zelia de Almeida’s authority,’ Luc admitted.

Maxwell’s brows furrowed together, and he sighed in consternation, pulling his robe tight around his shoulders.

‘Zelia,’ the old man muttered half to himself, then let out a soft laugh with a shake of the head. ‘Now there’s someone I haven’t heard from in a long time. She didn’t feel like paying me a visit in person?’

‘She said she wasn’t allowed to come here.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Of course, of course. Try, if you will, to see things from my point of view; I’ve so rarely encountered anyone outside of the Eighty-Five in such a very long time that I don’t particularly care to recall just how long it’s been.’ His eyebrows, as white as the hair on his head, rose fractionally. ‘And now I find an unexpected visitor struggling to reach my library and nearly dying in the attempt. And from what scant information I’ve been able to glean regarding what transpires in the outside world, I gather Zelia herself is a potential suspect in Sevgeny’s murder. By all rights, I should inform my gaolers of your presence. I can imagine they’d take a degree of pleasure in extracting considerably more information from you than you’ve provided me with so far.’

‘You mean the Sandoz don’t already know I’m here?’

‘The Sandoz?’ Maxwell chuckled under his breath. ‘They know there’s no way I could cross a thousand miles of ice and snow on my own. What need is there to watch me closely, given that knowledge? But perhaps I should let them know about you. What do you think?’

‘I really don’t think you want to do that.’

‘Why not?’ Maxwell demanded, his voice rising, and echoing from the high walls around them.

‘Because then you might have to explain to them why the hell the Coalition Ambassador just paid you a visit.’

Maxwell gazed at him with an expression of utter stupefaction.

Luc waited, his hands clammy, all too aware of the gentle hum of the mechants on either side of him. His stomach growled audibly in the otherwise still silence of the library, and he realized it had been a good long while since he’d had anything to eat.

‘May I say, this is turning out to be quite the novel day,’ said Maxwell suddenly, as if coming unfrozen. ‘You’re hungry?’

‘Yeah, very,’ Luc admitted.

‘My dining room is on the lowest level of the library,’ Maxwell told him, gesturing towards the mechants. ‘I’ll see you there in a minute or two.’

Maxwell’s data-ghost vanished, and Luc followed one of the mechants to an elevator platform that carried him swiftly downwards. He gazed along the length of the library in the moment before it disappeared out of sight, and wondered what it must be like to live in such a place, buried inside a mountain with no eyes to the outside world beyond the lenses of mechants.

The platform came to a halt, and he followed the mechant down a long gallery to another room lined with yet more books. A third mechant was busy placing serving dishes and bowls on a table, at one end of which sat the flesh-and-blood Javier Maxwell.

‘Don’t look so nervous,’ said Maxwell, indicating an empty seat across the table from him. ‘Take a seat. Please. It’s nice to have the opportunity to eat with someone who isn’t also my gaoler, even if he is intent on blackmailing me.’

Luc remained standing. The mechant that had guided him here floated up to hover in one corner of the ceiling. ‘You still haven’t told me why Ambassador Sachs was here. Or has he not departed yet?’

‘No, the Ambassador is gone. He left just before one of my mechants found you. You know, I was just about to eat when you woke, and I don’t know about you, but I hate long conversations on an empty stomach.’

‘I need to get in touch with Zelia—’

His stomach rumbled again.

‘Dear God,’ said Maxwell, picking up a fork and stabbing it towards the empty chair. ‘Sit down and eat first. Then we talk.’

Maxwell lifted the lid from a serving dish and the sweet, aromatic scent of grilled fish rose up. Luc sat and watched as Maxwell, pointedly ignoring him, focused all his attention on filling his plate.

Despite himself, and the terrible urgency that continued to dominate his every thought and action, Luc ate.

The food and wine helped chase some of his nerves away. He had the sense the meal was as much a delaying tactic for Maxwell as anything else, an opportunity for the imprisoned Councillor to try and work out what Luc’s presence here meant. The mechants worked efficiently at clearing empty dishes away and replacing them with new ones.

He tried again to engage Maxwell in conversation, but the old man’s only response was to tap the edge of a dish with a fork and shake his head.

When he was finished, Maxwell took a last sip of wine, regarding Luc from across the table. ‘One of my mechants was observing you,’ he said, ‘when you woke up. I watched you picking through the books in that room I left you in.’

Luc hesitated, then carefully put down his knife and fork. ‘What about it?’

Maxwell pushed his chair back and stood, then crossed over to a nearby shelf, trailing his fingers along a line of volumes before selecting one in particular and pulling it out.

‘Perhaps you’d indulge me in a little experiment,’ he said, bringing the book around the table and placing it next to Luc.

Luc cleared his throat nervously. ‘What kind of experiment?’

Maxwell flipped the book open, then slid it closer to Luc’s right hand. ‘I want you to place your hand flat on these pages.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then my mechants will find a way to make you, Mr Gabion.’

‘What is the book, exactly?’

‘An account of the fall of Earth, by a man named Saul Dumont. Ever heard of him?’

Saul Dumont. ‘Of course I have. He was the last man on Earth.’

‘The last man to escape Earth, would be a more precise way of putting it.’

Luc shook his head. ‘There’s no such book. If there was, I’d have heard of it – we’d all have.’

Maxwell regarded him with an expression of tolerant pity. ‘The book is called Final Days. He wrote it during his decades on Novaya Zvezda, back when it was still called Galileo. It’s an eye-opener, let me tell you – it most certainly does not correlate with the sanctioned histories of the Tian Di, and is all the more fascinating because of that. Now,’ Maxwell continued, ‘do as I say: press your hand and fingers flat and firmly on the pages.’

Luc hesitated, and one of the mechants drifted towards him, weapons slithering from out of its belly.

‘Just a minute,’ said Luc, sweating now. ‘How could this book possibly exist—’

‘Unless it had been deliberately redacted on the orders of Cheng and his faithful Eighty-Five?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘I could say much the same for many of the books I keep here. If this prison had a name, Mr Gabion, it would be called the Library of the Damned.’

Luc reached out hesitantly, his hand hovering over the pages. Maxwell made an impatient sound and pushed Luc’s hand flat against the smooth, metallic paper.

He stood at the entrance to a room as small and undecorated as a monk’s cell, the scent of ocean water mixed with the stink of rotting seaweed.

He stepped inside and past a heavy iron door to see a man seated by a desk, its surface bright with icons floating above it. Words formed in the air as the man murmured quietly to himself. The desk was an antique, manufactured on Earth prior to the Abandonment.

The man – Saul Dumont – had dark chocolate skin and close-cropped hair, and wore a heavy coat over a zipped-up jerkin to keep out the cold. He had undergone his second instantiation within the last several years, and so looked young despite being well into his second century.

Dumont glanced over his shoulder at him, favouring him with a weary smile.

‘What took you so long, Javier?’ he asked.

Javier glanced to the side as a woman in late middle-age entered the room beside him. She was similar enough in appearance to Dumont that one might easily assume them to be mother and son.

‘Dad?’ Her voice quavered slightly as she spoke to Dumont. ‘We need to get going. Johnson’s got the boat ready. We need to evacuate. Now.’

Dumont gripped the edge of the desk with one hand, then pushed so that his chair slid back from it.

‘There’s still time,’ said Dumont, addressing his daughter. ‘We can still negotiate with Hsiu-Chuan—’

‘Cheng,’ she replied. ‘Please remember, Dad.’

Dumont waved a hand in irritation. ‘Whatever the hell he calls himself these days, Hsiu-Chuan’s no fool. He must know we’d blow the rigs before we’d let the Tian Di Hui install their puppet government here. We—’

‘Warships set out from Ocean Harbour more than a day ago. Please,’ she said, stepping closer to him. ‘We know how hard you fought for autonomy. We all do, but you have to accept that the fight is over.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Dumont’s voice rose, and he slammed a fist against the desk, making the icons ripple. ‘Ettrick and Litewski still have some say on Franklin,’ he continued, a plaintive edge creeping into his voice. ‘We can run our own damn affairs.’

‘Ettrick and Litewski have already agreed to the transfer of power,’ his daughter replied. ‘They didn’t have any choice. They’ve already arrived back through the transfer gate.’

Dumont stared back at her in horror.

‘She’s right,’ said Javier. ‘We need to retreat and regroup.’

‘For God’s sake, Javier,’ said Dumont, ‘I know Hsiu-Chuan – he’s a monster. Whatever he’s got in mind for us, he can’t possibly—’

Luc gasped as his fingers slipped from the page. Maxwell stared down at him, tight-lipped.

‘Impossible,’ Maxwell muttered under his breath.

‘How does it work?’ Luc managed to croak. ‘It’s like I was actually there, out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Saul Dumont was there—’ He stared at Maxwell in shock. ‘You were there. I was seeing everything through your eyes.’

‘The memories are encrypted,’ said Maxwell, shaking his head. ‘How could you possibly access them without an encryption key? In fact, how could you even have a lattice? No one outside of the Council or Sandoz has one, except . . .’

He stopped abruptly, his mouth trembling slightly.

Luc nodded at the shelves around them. ‘Can all of these books do the same?’

Maxwell shrugged, looking defeated. ‘A few, but not all.’

‘And what I saw and heard . . . That was all real?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Quite real. You just experienced my own memories, from about a century after the Abandonment.’

‘You were on Novaya Zvezda, with Dumont?’

Maxwell sighed as he sat back down. ‘I grew up there, long ago enough that I can remember when the first transfer gate was destroyed, years before the Abandonment even took place. I remember the clamour when Dumont was first brought down from orbit.’

‘What happened to Dumont? Didn’t he disappear?’

‘No, he simply decided he preferred life in the Coalition to the rule of the Council, some time before the Schism. If he’s still alive, he’s to be found there now.’

Luc recalled his history. Before escaping on board a starship carrying a new transfer gate to Galileo, Dumont had shut down the entire wormhole network to ensure the survival of the colonies. By the time the ship arrived at Galileo, the Earth had been sterilized by some unknown, alien force.

‘Dumont said something about Cheng – that it wasn’t always his name.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘His name back in those days was Shih Hsiu-Chuan.’

‘So why the change of identity?’

‘Because he’s a man with many secrets,’ Maxwell muttered, taking his seat at the table once more and pouring himself a new glass of wine. ‘Assuming a new identity makes it easier to ensure that those secrets stay secret; he picked Cheng because it’s a common name, as is Joe.’ He made a circle with one hand. ‘A man of the people, you see. Father Cheng, because a father always takes care of his children.’

‘But . . . why would Cheng allow you to keep those memories stored here, in this prison? Surely they’d be dangerous to him, if they were found out?’

Maxwell didn’t reply, and Luc glanced at the book where it still lay on the floor, its pages half-folded.

He came to a realization. ‘Cheng doesn’t know these recordings exist, does he? Does anyone else know about them?’

Maxwell regarded him balefully. ‘You know, I could still order these mechants to kill you. It might save me a lot of unnecessary bother.’

Luc glanced towards the mechants and saw that they had still not retracted their weapons. ‘You could,’ he replied slowly, ‘but I think if you were going to, you already would have.’

‘Please don’t make the mistake of making too many assumptions about me,’ Maxwell snapped. ‘For all Zelia knows, you’re lying dead out there in the snow. She might never know you were here.’

‘Then why the hell did you even bother to rescue me at all?’

‘I looked you up while the mechant was escorting you here,’ Maxwell replied. ‘You’re the one who killed Winchell Antonov, my former colleague and, dare I say it, brother-in-arms.’

‘So it’s revenge you want?’

Maxwell laughed. ‘I have no intention of harming you, Mr Gabion. Revenge is for the young, and killing you wouldn’t bring Winchell back. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s simple curiosity.’

‘You said that apart from me, no one outside of the Council or Sandoz has a lattice,’ said Luc, ‘but then you said except. Except who?’

Maxwell didn’t answer.

‘You were going to say Ambassador Sachs, weren’t you?’ Luc hazarded. ‘He’s the only other one outside of either of them with an instantiation lattice.’

Maxwell sighed and took another sip of wine. ‘Nobody should be able to access those memories without my permission,’ he agreed. ‘Not you, not Sachs, not anyone without the appropriate encryption key. And yet the Ambassador’s lattice somehow unlocked the memories automatically, and without effort – as did yours.’

‘Who else has a copy of that key?’

‘Only me,’ Maxwell replied.

Luc glanced around the ranks of books surrounding them, thinking about all those people, Cheng and the members of the Eighty-Five, coming here and browsing their pages, entirely unaware of the sophisticated circuitry contained within them. Surely they must handle these books all the time . . .

‘You’ve been stealing their memories,’ Luc guessed, regarding Maxwell with new eyes. ‘Every time one of the Eighty-Five picks up one of your books, it sieves information out of their lattices without them ever knowing. Am I right?’

Maxwell’s expression became strangely sad. ‘The circuitry in the books is meant to push extra embedded information the other way – from the pages to the reader’s lattice. It took me a while, but I worked out how to reverse the flow of data and keep it hidden.’

‘Why do it?’

‘Because one day, the people of the Tian Di will need to know the truth about their leaders, and they’ll find all the evidence they need right here in this library. Tell me, just how much contact have you had with the members of the Temur Council, apart from Zelia?’

‘More than enough, for this lifetime.’

‘Dreadful people, aren’t they?’ Maxwell said dryly. ‘If I had the means, I would destroy the Council, and Vanaheim along with them.’

Luc stared at him. ‘Why?’

Maxwell put his glass back down, and Luc tried not to flinch when one of the mechants drifted forward to refill it. ‘Because they’re a travesty of what they once were, long sunk into the introspection of old age, and dark perversions you would scarcely believe.’

‘What kind of perversions?’

Maxwell looked at him in disbelief. ‘You’re Zelia’s puppet. Surely you’ve encountered the “experiments” I’ve been hearing so much about? Or has she grown bored with that now?’

Luc shifted uncomfortably, again seeing a hunched figure immolating itself in his mind’s eye.

‘So you have seen them,’ said Maxwell with an expression of dour amusement. ‘It’s a shame you killed Winchell. He was one of the few men left from the old days still worth a damn.’

‘Even knowing of all the atrocities he was responsible for? The assault on Benares, the Battle of Sunderland—’

‘You’ve been taken in by Cheng’s propaganda. I’m well acquainted with the details of the Benarean assault: Cheng came here on several occasions prior to that campaign, so he could describe to me his plan to discredit Black Lotus. He lied to you. All of them did.’

‘Bullshit.’

Maxwell smiled enigmatically. ‘You’ve already worked out, haven’t you, that Vasili paid me a visit not long before his death?’

Luc stiffened. ‘Why would you assume that?’

‘Why else would you have been so afraid of that book you leafed through downstairs, unless you’d encountered a memory-enabled book before? And I can tell you for a fact that Vasili was the only person in possession of a book taken from here. Now tell me,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘That book I gave to him – do you have it with you?’

Luc licked his lips. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

Maxwell sat back, looking deflated. ‘Then tell me what you learned from it.’

‘That he knew someone was coming to kill him,’ Luc replied. ‘He muttered something about how he’d been wrong, and Antonov had been right. But about what, I don’t know.’

‘It’s such a shame you don’t still have that book,’ said Maxwell. ‘It contained some very valuable information indeed.’

‘What information?’

‘The answer to that question,’ Maxwell replied, ‘lies in part inside another book, in another section of the library.’ He pushed his chair back and stood. ‘I’ll take you there now.’

‘Why not just tell me?’

‘Encoded memories, Mr Gabion, offer more fundamental and easily assimilated truths than speech, which is so very vulnerable to interpretation in a way that direct experience is not. To experience the memories of a man is to know certain unassailable truths about him.’

‘But how exactly does Ambassador Sachs tie into all this?’

‘The Ambassador came here on several occasions in order to privately solicit my advice regarding Reunification,’ Maxwell replied, both mechants trailing in his wake as he stepped towards the exit. ‘But before I tell you anything more,’ he said, pausing by the door, ‘I’d like to ask you something. You couldn’t have known the Ambassador was here unless you had already been watching him closely. Were you?’

‘We were tracking him, yes. We discovered he wasn’t where he’d claimed to be at the time of Vasili’s death.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘So that naturally made him a suspect in Sevgeny’s murder, yes? Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that he was here, with me, when Sevgeny died. In that regard, you can rule the Ambassador out.’

Maxwell exited the room, Luc following behind, the sound of his boots echoing from the marble walls as he tried to absorb everything he had just learned.

‘Just how many books are there in this place?’ asked Luc, as Maxwell led him up a metal stairway in the main hall. The mechants kept pace at a discreet distance.

‘At least half a million, if you mean the physical volumes,’ Maxwell replied with a note of pride. ‘There are many, many times that number in data-storage. A few of the physical volumes are particularly fragile, and have to be kept separate from the rest.’

‘But why the hell do they let you keep them at all?’

‘In what’s meant to be a prison?’ Maxwell queried over his shoulder. ‘As a punishment. I have always been a firm opponent of censorship in any form, unlike dear Joe. Everything I keep here should be available to everyone, and not just those few Councillors foolish enough to think they have superior moral stamina to the common public. So even though Cheng allows me to keep these books, and read them if I choose, I can no more share their contents with anyone outside of his inner circle than I could walk out of here alive. Such things,’ he said, waving to the vast ranks and rows of books, ‘were meant for all of us, along with all the other privileges Cheng has only shared with the Temur Council.’

They arrived at a lounge-area that felt and looked different from anywhere else Luc had seen, and he guessed they were now in Maxwell’s private quarters. He watched as the Tian Di’s second most famous renegade stepped over to a shelf and pulled out yet another book.

‘Tell me,’ asked Maxwell, ‘is Ambassador Sachs the one who installed your lattice?’

‘No. Antonov did, when he captured me on Aeschere.’

Maxwell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So it wasn’t voluntary?’

Luc described the worm-like mechant Antonov had sent scurrying inside his nostril.

‘I had no idea such a thing was even possible,’ said Maxwell with a shake of the head. ‘But why on Earth would he have done that to you?’

‘To save himself,’ said Luc. ‘He’d already uploaded a partial copy of his own mind to the lattice before he inflicted it on me, and now his memories are invading my own thoughts. Zelia told me it would probably kill me unless she could find some way to stop the lattice’s growth. But now, for all I know, she’s abandoned me altogether . . .’

He thought about how alone he was here on Vanaheim without her help, and how vulnerable, and fought back a black tide of despair.

‘Please, continue,’ said Maxwell, not without a hint of sympathy.

‘Antonov told me to seek out Ambassador Sachs and ask for his help, but when I did talk to the Ambassador, he wasn’t willing to do anything of the kind.’

‘Then you told Sachs you had a lattice like his?’

‘I didn’t need to. He somehow knew as soon as he set eyes on me.’

‘And your lattice already had Winchell’s personality and memories encoded into it when he placed it inside your skull?’ Maxwell nodded, half to himself. ‘A desperate gamble on Winchell’s part, certainly.’

‘What’s in the book that you wanted to show me?’ asked Luc, nodding at the volume still gripped in the old man’s hand.

Maxwell glanced down at it. ‘If you’re ever going to find out who killed Vasili, you need to better understand him, and what drove him in the last days of his life. On his last visit here – the same day I gave him that other book you unfortunately neglected to bring back to me – I persuaded him to let me capture some of his more recent memories for posterity.’

‘Did he talk much about his suspicions over Ariadna Placet’s death?’

‘It would be unlike Sevgeny not to talk about it,’ said Maxwell, settling into a chair across from Luc. He turned the book this way and that in his hands. ‘Tell me, have you ever been to Thorne, where she died?’

‘Only briefly,’ Luc replied.

Maxwell nodded. ‘I believe Zelia took over as Director of Policy after her death. The official verdict recorded that something went wrong with the navigational systems of Ariadna’s flier while she was travelling between biomes. Vasili was heartbroken, hardly surprising given they’d been together longer than anyone else in the Council – literally centuries. He was never the same afterwards, always trying to have the circumstances around her death rein-vestigated.’ Maxwell smiled thinly. ‘And, so I understand, making a terrible nuisance of himself in the process.’

During that one visit to Thorne, Luc had never once stepped outside of a biome. The tiny world orbited just far out enough from its star that temperatures at the equator rarely rose above freezing. There had been some plan to seed Thorne’s wisp-thin atmosphere with CO2-generating bacteria, to create a controlled greenhouse effect that might bump the global mean temperature up in another few decades.

‘Did you ever suspect she had been murdered?’ asked Luc.

‘Look around you,’ said Maxwell. ‘There’s a thousand times more information in just the physical books here than I could assimilate in a dozen lifetimes. I hate to think how many secrets might be hidden all around us, but that I’ll never know about because I don’t know to look for them.’ He shook his head. ‘No, Mr Gabion, I had no reason to have any such suspicion – but someone else did, someone who knew that the trail of evidence leading to the proof Vasili so desperately needed started right here, in this library.’

Winchell, Vasili had said. I was wrong, so very wrong.

The realization hit Luc like a soft punch to the belly.

‘Winchell Antonov?’ asked Luc.

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell confirmed. ‘When Sevgeny first came to me, he told me how Winchell had approached him in secret and, despite their differences, convinced him he could find the answers he needed here. With my help, of course.’

‘And Vasili admitted to you that he’d been dealing with a renegade like Antonov?’

‘As I’m sure you can imagine, I was somewhat taken aback myself. But Sevgeny was deeply distraught when he came to me; so much so that he was willing to ignore the fact that Winchell was not only his polar opposite politically and philosophically, but also an enemy of the Council.’

‘And you agreed to help Vasili, even though he was one of the people responsible for locking you up here for all these years?’

Maxwell regarded him wearily. ‘That doesn’t mean he wasn’t an honourable man in his way, Mr Gabion. Perhaps you don’t understand just how isolated Sevgeny had become following Ariadna’s death. He had been Cheng’s right-hand man at one time, with considerable influence on Tian Di policies, but he was a cold man, not given to emotions except when it came to Ariadna.’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Outside of her, there was no one in all of the Tian Di, except perhaps Cheng, he could even so much as call a friend. After her death, he demanded access to files and records that, when he was finally given permission to investigate them, proved to have vanished without explanation.’ He gave Luc a crooked smile. ‘Are you surprised to learn this only made him more paranoid? Of course, he came to believe he was the victim of a conspiracy, which led in turn to him being dismissed as a crank by his colleagues in the Eighty-Five.’

‘But he wasn’t a crank, was he? Or paranoid.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘His gradual isolation from the centre of power had made him . . . receptive, you might say, to influences and ideas he never would have entertained before. Even if they came from someone like Antonov.’

‘But how could the evidence he was looking for wind up here in this library,’ asked Luc, ‘without your knowledge?’

‘Over the years, it came to my attention,’ said Maxwell, ‘that certain of the Eighty-Five were using this Library’s databanks as a repository for what might be deemed highly sensitive or damaging information.’

‘Seems careless. Why not just destroy it altogether?’

‘Because knowledge is power, as they say, and such things can prove useful at a later date – perhaps as leverage, should those individuals ever find themselves suddenly out of Cheng’s favour.’ Maxwell favoured him with a thin smile. ‘An insurance policy, of sorts.’

‘So what did Antonov tell Vasili he could find here?’

Maxwell stood and stepped towards Luc, handing him the book. ‘A set of communication protocols which, once I had helped Sevgeny to locate them, proved to allow access to information stored on a derelict orbital station, one of dozens in orbit around Vanaheim.’

‘When I met him, Ambassador Sachs had taken up residence on a station called the Sequoia,’ said Luc. ‘Was it that one?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘No. Vanaheim’s orbital space is littered with debris and abandoned habitats and follies. The station in question is unoccupied and, I suspect, serves as one of the Council’s many secret hiding places for its instantiation backups. When Vasili returned to visit me a few days later, having visited the station in question, he was in a dreadful state, jumping at shadows. He told me he had uncovered something monstrous – something Cheng had kept hidden from us all.’

‘Did he tell you what it was?’

‘I wanted him to,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Whatever he’d discovered clearly terrified him, and I knew he was desperate to talk about it. But he still couldn’t quite bring himself to trust me with the information. He told me he was determined to force a general meeting of the Eighty-Five, so he could present the evidence to all of them. I told him he was being naive at best, at worst suicidal.’ He shook his head. ‘The next thing I heard, he was dead.’

‘And you have no idea just what it was he found?’

‘None.’ Maxwell nodded at the book gripped, unopened, in Luc’s hands. ‘But I did manage to persuade Sevgeny to leave behind some last few memories – in case, I said, something happened to him. Once you’ve experienced what he—’

Maxwell paused mid-sentence, his eyes becoming fixed on some far-off point. Several seconds passed before he focused on Luc once more.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It seems there’s been a failure of some of my perimeter mechants,’ said Maxwell, looking noticeably paler. ‘I’ll have to leave you here for the moment while I go and find out what’s happened.’

‘Are we in danger?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Maxwell. ‘But if we are, it’s even more important you learn everything you can from that book while you have the chance.’

Luc watched as Maxwell headed back the way they’d come, the sound of his slippered feet echoing softly. Then he opened the book on his lap, and placed his fingers against a random page.