Within those five days everything began to go wrong. My first warning was a conversation late one night, which was to say, around midday above ground.
I was having trouble sleeping. Perhaps it was worry over Faith accompanying us on our next jaunt; perhaps it was just prolonged exposure to Faith. I was drawn out of an extended sequence of disturbing images by the sound of voices from the library. It was two rooms away, but in the dead silence I heard every sound as though I was right there.
I heard Greygori say, “Stefan tells me you are searching.” Perhaps it was my own name that awoke me. I had told him nothing of the sort but he still knew.
I assumed, in those bleary moments, that Greygori was just muttering to himself. I only came fully awake when I heard Faith say, “Stefan is searching.”
“For you, though, Faith. On your behalf. In accord with your purposes, Faith. Is that not the case?”
No audible answer came, but I could imagine the shrug, that little movement of her shoulders with her face turned away.
“You are a grand experiment,” Greygori wheezed at her, an odd tremor in his voice. “You are a most exacting piece of work, Faith. Really, you are a detailed creation.”
I heard the oversized nails of his bare feet ticking on the stone as he advanced across the library floor. Greygori had more to say, and there was something familiar about the way he said it.
“I have not seen, Faith, such artifice beyond my own work,” he murmured. I imagined him standing beside and around her, just short of touching her, whilst she kept her head carefully tilted away from him. “Faith, you are the project of a master.”
“I don’t want to be that,” from Faith.
“You should embrace it,” Greygori pressed. “You are the pinnacle of the art, Faith. You should not pretend to be one of the dying masses, Faith. You should rejoice in your nature, that you have been made into what you are. You are a special construction, Faith.”
I realised that the faintly familiar tone of Greygori’s voice was one I had heard in my more innocent days often enough. I recalled sitting in some fashionable dispensary or other and hearing a young student shower the object of his affections with a welter of compliments. No lover would have been won by the compliments Greygori had found, but then what pleased Greygori was manifestly not that which pleased any other.
I heard Faith say, “Don’t talk about me like that, as though I am some thing.”
“You would rather be a natural person, Faith?” Greygori wanted to know. “Have you not seen them, Faith, enough of them? Their pointless, brief and flawed lives? They’re vermin, Faith. Useless, out-evolved, Faith. Doomed, Faith, they’re all doomed.” I heard Faith give out a little sound of fright and I deduced that he had laid one of those mutated hands on her.
I could not get up. You may have wondered why I just lay there, listening. The whole drama held a terrible fascination for me, as I listened to Greygori’s long-denied human side rise up to put him through the paces of a wooer.
“And what are you?” Faith demanded faintly.
“Observe,” Greygori told her, and there was a sound of flapping cloth, and I did not know whether to be horrified or to laugh. In my mind’s eye – and perhaps in reality – he had exposed himself to her like any dirty old man. God, though – what abomination would be exposed when Greygori lifted his shroud? Faith was never distressed by the grotesque, though. Often she found it comforting, as she found the familiar frightening and strange.
“What think you of the fruits of my labours, Faith?” Greygori asked of her.
She said, cool and unworried, “I think nothing of them.”
I heard more cloth sounds, and then the clicking of his nails again as Greygori prowled with halting gait around the perimeters of the library. I imagined his fused fingers trailing the spines of Arves’ books.
“You come from a shining place, is that right, Faith?” Greygori said, and the staccato sound of his footsteps stopped.
“A shining place,” she confirmed, with that same wistful air that always attended her blank nostalgia.
“I am going to a shining place,” Greygori told her. “I am working my way to it, one gene at a time. Would you like to come with me?”
I was silently praying that she would say no, trying to send my mind out to warn her. My mind never reached her, for she said, “Maybe… Perhaps…” and I heard Greygori rustle and scrape his way close to her.
“I can take you, Faith, to my shining place,” he wheezed, and the weight of pinned emotion in his voice was hideous. “Faith, you can come with me, but you cannot go like that, Faith. You are not dressed, Faith, for that shining place. You must cease to resemble one of these milling slaves, Faith. You must not want, Faith, to be such a thing as Arves or Stefan or the countless others. You must let me prepare you for that shining place. You must be like me.”
I heard nothing for the count of a long breath. Greygori waited, his offer exposed at last. Then I heard feet, not the claws of the Transforming Man but human feet, as Faith ran past him and out of the library into the nest of rooms she shared with Arves and myself. I saw her shadow dance past the doorway to my chamber, and then she was gone, hidden somewhere beyond.
After a long, long silence, Greygori hauled himself from the library with heavy steps. His breath, wheezy and ragged, infected the air before he closed the door to his laboratory.
I lay awake all that night, because I had heard the crippled remnant of Greygori’s humanity claw its way into the light like one of the infinitely withered corpses from the necropolis. Greygori was his old, cold self again for now, but there would be further eruptions of his repressed innards and he was a man used to getting what he wanted. Sergei and I were suddenly up against a cruel time limit in which to find something for Faith.
*
Over those next few days, Greygori and I played an odd little game. He did not know that I knew, but I did not know for sure that he did not know… and so on. He found every excuse to send me and Arves out of his chambers in order to have time alone with Faith. Conversely, I found every excuse to drag Faith along with me. Whether or not he pressed his suit further on her I cannot say. I heard no more, but I knew the clock was counting down.
*
We met Yarmin at Emil’s print shop with her crew of Friendlies. They were all in high spirits, excited about the coming raid. They were excited about Faith, too. They all viewed the night’s venture as an opportunity to impress her, to fashion a simulacrum of themselves in her mind as she helplessly conjured one of herself in all who encountered her.
We made our way across the usual rooftop paths to that great complex and checked that our previous ingress had not been detected. We were clear, and the alarm systems were still pinned, the panels still loose. Sergei went first, the rest of us lowering him down in utter silence. He hung in a slow spin for half a minute and then signalled for us to let him all the way down to the factory floor. One of the Friendlies secured the rope, and we all crept down it. I had worried about Faith, but she climbed as though she were born to it, or as though her engineers had grafted the skill onto her. She was wearing dark, loose clothes like most of us other burglars.
Within the building it was dark and almost silent, save for the faintest murmur of activity from far away down many corridors. Sergei lit a very dim silver lamp that, from a distance, might have seemed moonlight. We had found our way into a room of fixings, unfinished housings for machines as yet uninstalled. The interior of the building was still being fitted out and the Friendlies planned to take advantage of it. In the confusion many valuable things could go missing without suspicion.
I saw now why Sergei had said the place was a money sink. There were odd works of art, statues and icons and idols, both ancient and the modern replicas that constantly flooded the marketplace. The facings of the doors and the fixings of the furnishings were all gold and brass and other precious metals, elaborately worked and ornamented and set with faceted plastics. One half-built horologium had a pendulum of solid crystal that disappeared into Yarmin’s pack almost immediately.
Faith was staring about in the wan light. Her face was a closed book, but not an unwritten one.
“You know this, don’t you?” I prompted.
“I know something,” she whispered. “I feel the presence of someone I should know. I see his hand in this.” Then she surprised me by adding, “I do not like this place, Stefan.”
“You want to leave?” I asked, and she shook her head irresolutely.
“No. I need this. I need to know… but I do not like this place. There is evil here.”
The word lodged in my mind and worried at it, because Faith was not judgemental. She had looked upon the worst the Underworld had to offer, Greygori included, and passed judgement on none of it. I had thought her devoid of any knowledge of good or evil.
The Friendlies had advanced to take the next room on, and one skipped back to hurry us up. They had found some documents they thought might be valuable, but which turned out to be inventories of rooms somewhere else in the complex. I murmured down the list of fittings and fixtures incredulously. Someone was spending obscene amounts of money to fit this place out: baths of alabaster, plumbing of brass and lead, locks and door furniture of adamant, a bed of costly machine-silk over intricately moulded plastics. Someone was making this building their world within a world.
“No man is rich like this without stealing from the people,” Sergei observed. “The greatest thieves are always the wealthy.”
I had never felt moved to defend the Shadrapan political system to Sergei. I agreed wholeheartedly that the entire enterprise was probably paid for by prying bread from babies’ mouths. By that time the Friendlies were already moving on. Faith had not, though. She was shivering, rooted to the spot.
“I must go on,” she whispered to herself.
“What is beyond here?” I asked her.
“Something terrible?”
“A guard? A machine? A trap?” I pressed.
“A man,” she told me.
Her creator, I thought, but I said nothing. I could see the war in her, driven to know and yet what she learned could bring pain, even madness.
Beyond there was a museum or something, a collection without any taste or intent. The exhibits were all remarkable, but there was no other common link. It was a rich man’s museum, a private gathering of rarities without context.
I examined a book, millennia old, copied from a work even older; Yarmin had cracked its glass case open for me. Sergei had found a small clockwork he claimed would capture images of the world. The Friendlies were swarming everywhere, prising locks and breaking fastenings.
The place was beginning to get on my nerves. It was partly Faith’s anxiety, more that the halls had an echo of that underground necropolis. There was the same vast breathing silence over everything. We were surrounded by dead things and abandoned chambers, although in this case it was that they had not been inhabited yet. The murmur of distant activity in other far parts of the building just emphasised how quiet it was around us.
Faith stood in the midst of our activity and swayed a little: I tried to keep an eye on her, but the Friendlies kept bringing me things to value, most of which I could not begin to guess at. Sergei was stepping uneasily about the perimeter of the room, eager to move on; he had good instincts.
Two of the Friendlies were dismantling a square case on one wall, which seemed to contain silvery treasure glittering in our lamplight. I thought, in the moment before they pried it open, that Faith was suddenly energised, raising a hand to stop them, opening her mouth to speak.
Too late. With both of them leaning on the crowbar they forced the case with a loud sound of splitting plastic. Even as Yarmin was crossing to remonstrate they stumbled back as its contents cascaded onto the floor.
I thought it was a liquid at first because it moved like quicksilver, but the texture was wrong. As it piled onto the floor it seemed nothing but endless lengths of gleaming chain coiling upon themselves, like a metal waterfall. There were more reflections in that tumbled, flowing mass than our lamp could ever have struck from it. Whatever lights were shining back from that thing, they did not exist in our room, perhaps not in our time.
It lay piled in a heap at the foot of the pedestal, a mound of something shining, perhaps three feet across. One of the Friendlies stepped in towards it, and then our collective breath caught as it flowed away from him in a fluid mass of metal links, half its bulk climbing the nearest wall.
The Friendly was intrigued and reached out to gather it up. Sergei and I, and others, all shouted at him, but it was too late. He touched it and he died. It was a quick death, a snap and sizzle of electricity and a stink of burning hair and the man was arched rigid on the floor with his hands black as charcoal. Then everything went to hell.
Almost everyone made for cover. I skidded behind an armless, headless statue and looked back to see the flowing thing fire a beam of silver chain at another Friendly, stopping him in his tracks and stone dead in an instant. In that same instant it was gone, for it had somehow fired itself at him, leaping down the length of its own ray or tendril, so that it was now coiling and writhing off the man’s charred body looking for further victims. It moved like the lightning it contained.
Sergei dived across open ground to get to me, risking his life every fraction of a second. The thing was oozing forwards and backwards, searching. A second later it snapped itself out at another Friendly crouching behind a metal machine or sculpture. The machine exploded into pieces and the man behind was killed. The silvery killer flowed easily from within the heart of the destroyed artefact.
“We’ve got to get to the rope,” Sergei whispered. “Look, I will run and distract it. You must go, climb.”
“Suicide!” I hissed at him. “It’s too fast. It’ll fry you and be back for us before we blink.”
“Get the Friends following you,” Sergei continued implacably. “And Faith. I will—”
“Faith?” My stomach lurched. “Where is Faith?”
Sergei stared at me and swore in his made-up language.
I put my head around the statue and saw the malignant entity crawling across the floor like a puddle. It was making its steady, calculating way towards a niche where Yarmin and two of the Friendlies were crouched. One of them leant forwards, preparatory to making a break for it. The thing, machine, creature, whatever it was, licked out a tendril of itself to strike a spittle of molten metal from the nearest case, making the man drop back. It could have followed that tentacle and been on them right then, but it was playing with them. Whatever it was, it thought.
One of the other Friendlies took the bold but pointless move of firing his crossbow at the thing. The bolt just shattered into fragments of burned plastic, but it attracted the thing’s attention. With a final flick towards Yarmin it humped itself off in the direction of the crossbowman who was—
Who was hiding with Faith behind some kind of verdigrised telescope.
I actually got a step towards rushing the thing. I cannot say what I would have done. Sergei grabbed my belt and hauled me back into cover.
The crossbowman was mindlessly slipping another bolt to the string as the alien thing advanced on him. He was almost done by the time that Faith stepped past him. Her eyes were closed and she was standing almost on tiptoe.
I glanced at Sergei and saw him as mystified as me.
I remember Faith then as glowing with her own light. It was surely not like that, but the memory plays tricks. I remember her as though her pale hair and flawless skin gave out the light to complete the chain-creature’s unsourced reflections.
Her lips parted slightly, and I knew she was singing, somehow. I heard nothing, no note, but she was singing. Somewhere deep inside, she had always been singing.
The guardian thing reared up almost to the height of a man, little flickers and loops of chain arcing and dancing about it. There they stayed, she perfectly still and it in constant motion, but linked somehow. I cannot explain it but it saved all of us. Sergei hissed out in the loudest stage-whisper you ever heard for everyone to move to the rope, and Yarmin and her two padded stealthily out of their hiding place, glancing at the creature all the time. The crossbowman edged his terrified way from behind Faith and crept along the outside wall, weapon dangling from his hand.
There was an abrupt shout from a further room, and we saw several shapes, human shapes, appear from a new doorway. All the noise had not gone unnoticed; someone had called the guards. There were a good dozen of them, men in dark uniforms not unlike Wardens’ clothes, each clutching a musket. Yarmin and the Friendlies were frozen for a second and then they were running even as the first guard raised his flintlock to his shoulder, tracking them.
Sergei shot him, pistol out from inside his jacket in a smooth motion, and the shot was a monstrous explosion in the echoing space. I was shouting at Faith to come on, to run while we could. I had the horrible feeling that, if she stayed, I could not have left, either.
The matter was taken from my hands. The other guards were taking aim and one let loose at the crossbowman as he tried to dash for it. The ball skipped within inches of Faith and took the poor thief in the thigh, knocking him to the ground. As he cried out, Faith awoke from her trance; her concentration shattered and I knew she would die.
I see the tableau in my mind’s eye: the felled crossbowman writhing, face twisted in agony; Sergei halfway to dragging him after us; Faith’s wide eyes, staring at the blood; the guardian monster or machine released and crouching down into an ugly lump, poised to lance out.
It struck the first guard as the man was reloading, and his powder magazine blew up even as the creature ricocheted from his scorched chest to the next. Sergei and I were away by then, Faith alongside us and all three of us lumping the wounded man along. We left three blackened Friendlies dead behind us and nobody had much loot to show for it. It was a dismally failed burglary but it could have been so much worse.
As we tied the injured man to the end of the rope we heard the screams and cries of the guards as the monster hunted them down and consumed them. I have no idea what it was: engineered life, some strange chemical compound or a trapped natural force, save that it thought. It was ripe with malice and it, too, loved Faith. It certainly wreaked a vengeance on those who interrupted its conference with her.
Did they tame it again, imprison it beneath glass as a mere exhibit? Or did it evade them, escape the complex, find its own alien life in Shadrapar or beyond? I may yet meet that thing again.
And Faith? Faith would say nothing? The mystery refused to unveil itself. She would talk of none of it, admit none of it.
Was it her shining place? I wanted to believe not, but it was a place from her past. She had known it and it – in the person of the guardian – had known her. If that was the place that she dreamed of going back to then, Sergei suggested, those dreams had been programmed into her in order to coerce a return.
We went on no more burglaries. There seemed to be no point. We had got as close as we would get, and neither of us wanted to hazard the guardian again, or the other horrors the building surely contained.
This left Greygori with the field. The illusion that we had a place to get Faith to, beyond the reach of his long arms, was lost. When I returned that night from the abortive raid he was in the library, leafing through some book with his narrow lips curled into an unnatural smile, though he could not have known.
*
Two days after the raid Faith disappeared for a whole day, and a week later, for a day and a half. It took no stretch of the imagination to guess where she was going. Greygori was taking her into his forbidden laboratory.
I eavesdropped, the once, and heard him expounding something in terms so abstruse that I could not follow him. He was talking about a process, and I realised from context that it was part of his self-engineering. He spoke about his shining place, that he would somehow reach by turning himself into a thing that should only live in darkness. He spoke of her in terms architectural, technical, biomechanical, genetic and mathematical, which for him were terms of love. And she listened.
When I found her between these episodes, her manner was changed. She was anxious and restless, and yet she seemed less and less able to leave our rooms. Greygori had planted some suggestion in her that meant he was always in her head. Either it was his promises of shining places or else he resembled – in temperament, surely not in appearance – some creator-figure lodged in the submerged part of her mind. If Sergei was right and her creators had conditioned her to return to them, perhaps Greygori had co-opted this for his own gain.
Eventually I was able to talk her into leaving Greygori’s domain. I took her somewhere we could talk and I asked her outright. “Do you want what he plans for you?” Before I got her there I had been all full of crusading fury, certain in my righteousness, but perhaps Greygori had his seeds in me, too. I remembered Faith saw the world differently to others. I remembered how meagre were the options I might be able to find for her. I could not assume that some gallant rescue by Stefan Advani would be preferable to Greygori’s attentions.
“I don’t understand what he will do to you. I guess he’ll remake you like he’s doing to himself. I mean, maybe that’s an honour,” I rambled. “But you should have a choice. I’m trying to give you a choice.” And even now I think back on that scene and wonder if I really said those noble sentiments. Or did I just want her for myself. I can’t deny she stirred me, and part of me saw Greygori as a grotesque rival. Perhaps I simply didn’t want anyone else to have her if I could not.
She said nothing, and then she said nothing again. We crouched in the dog-end tunnel I’d found and I listened for the click of Greygori’s nails, the dragging of his ill-fitting robe. Faith’s nothings built up silently around us. She was trying to speak – her throat pulsed and her lips moved – but she could not bring the words out. At last, though, she turned her face away from me. I read rejection in the motion and made to stand, but she lashed out and gripped my wrist like a vice, freezing me in place. Her other hand reached to her ear and peeled it back, and half her scalp. I may have cried out. I may, in fact, have come very close to being very ill.
It all just lifted up, that skin, and underneath I saw something that must have been her skull. The moment would recur strongly to me much later, confronted with the disseminated anatomy of Thelwel’s damaged arm. The not-quite-bone she revealed was lustrous and rainbow-sheened, like the pearls the Organ Donor Boys grew. I saw there the network of recent grooves that had been ground into the surface of that substance, a complex web of channels that were too rough to be part of her design. They were Greygori’s doing. He was laying the foundations for his work on her.
Her expression, when she had replaced her skin, was desperate.