We did not know, and we could never know, just what events had led to which hand triggering those ancient mechanisms. The Weapon had stood longer than records, longer than Shadrapar perhaps. It had been known forever as the ineffable, definitive protection that Shadrapar had against its enemies. What enemies? Other cities, in the dim recesses of the past; more recently the deserts and the jungles.
Who could have known that Shadrapar would be its own worst enemy? Who would have thought that we would turn in upon ourselves?
“There was a coup,” Kiera suggested. “There was a revolt against the Authority. Or perhaps the Authority fell into two factions. Each side had its supporters. It might just have been a shifting of power across the Authority table, people moving from one faction to another, until whoever was in charge could see they wouldn’t be by dawn.”
“You think it was Harweg,” I said.
“I think it was someone who would rather do something unthinkable than let themselves be ousted. Perhaps they did not know what the Weapon would do. Perhaps they thought their opponents were the fabled enemies of Shadrapar the Weapon was supposed to guard against. Perhaps it was all in good faith. But rather than go quietly, they did it.”
And my head crawled with pieces of a puzzle I would never quite solve: the Anteims, the Angels, Kiera’s fall from grace. Faith.
*
We stood in that deserted street for a long time as the sun crawled up the inside of the sky and looked down at the city it had outlived. I felt as though the whole insides of me had been scraped out, nothing left but a hollow space. I felt as though I should just fall down and die. It was no place for living people.
The silence was so very absolute that it had ceased to be silence. It became for me the cavernous and unending echo of the sound that the Weapon must have made. A sound that no man could hear, I am sure, rushing through the city in all directions to vanish away, instantly and impersonally, every Shadrapan there was. That sound had rushed out to the very boundaries of the city, catching even poor vagrants camping out in the docks, leaving only the eternal ringing echo of its absence to preside over all of the other absences that now made up Shadrapar.
Peter’s face was blank. What possible expression could a man be equipped with, to cope with such a concept. No great rescue for Peter. No triumphant return at the head of an army of convicts and guards. Perhaps he was thinking that, had his plan played out, his revolution might have precipitated just this. In contrast, Shon’s face was afraid for the first time. He had lost his friends and his contacts and his criminal networks. Shadrapar had finally been cleared of crime. No more vice, no more laws, no more duels, no more deals. Shon’s eyes glittered in the sun. He was the only one, perhaps, to love our mutual birthplace enough to shed a tear for it.
Kiera muttered, almost under her breath: an appeal to divinity, or maybe just something profane and prosaic. She had family, I recalled. They were gone. Gone too, the great game of politics and society she had trained for. Gone, her way of life, the point of her and the reason for all her skills. As a social historian I was the same. Social history had closed its final chapter.
Peter lurched forwards, Ropa blade in one hand as though he could do battle with the emptiness, slay it and cut open its corpse to let out all the sound and life that it had consumed. We all followed him through the vacated streets.
I do not think that Peter had any particular destination in mind. Every place in Shadrapar, after all, had been voided of significance. We just drifted with the dust through the alien streets we had all once known. We glanced at the emptied clothes we came across, trying to piece together the stories of their owners. Had they been running in terror? Had they been out for a stroll? Had they any warning of the catastrophe before the unimaginable force had taken them away? There were men and women, large and small, rich and poor, adults and children, all witnessed for only by what they had chosen to wear that morning. Had the wisest, the most powerful, the most beautiful man or woman gone naked into the streets in that fatal moment then they would have nothing to speak for them at all. It would be as though they had never been.
We saw a flat semicircle of clothing cast off around a metal crate on which another suit was laid in state. Some demagogue on the very moment of conjuring the mob; some prophet imparting his revelations of the end of the world? What satisfaction to the latter to discover, in one apocalyptic second, that he was right?
We saw one street clogged with uniforms. Ranks of Outrider leathers, knives in their sheathes, muskets fallen like straws. Their crisp-cut military styles opposed a great mass of coarse cloth, the hard-wearing garb of factory workers that I remembered so well. Many of the clothes were holed by musket balls, the blood without gone to the same oblivion as the blood within. There had been a riot here, in the same instant that the agitator had been orating, in the same moment that the family by the docks had sat down to their last meal.
Then Shon cried out, for he had spotted something moving at the far end of the street, and abruptly we were running. His mirage was gone before we reached it, leaving no trace of its reality or unreality, but Shon swore that he had seen someone: a living person; a survivor.
“Gaki,” Peter said.
“Needn’t be,” Shon countered him. “I mean, who’s to say everyone’s dead? How many people were there in Shadrapar? They can’t all be gone. They can’t.”
“If it was Gaki, he would let us know it was him,” I said slowly. “Or we would never see him until it was too late.”
“Do we call out?” Kiera suggested.
“No,” Peter said firmly. “Not until we’re sure.”
Kiera clutched at my arm suddenly. “There!” she said, and we all saw it then: someone dashing from shadow to shadow and away from us, round a corner and out of sight. We gave chase instantly. The thought that our frenzied pursuit would not reassure anyone did not occur to us. The lure of human company was too great. Shon was fastest, in the lead from the first step. Kiera was next, and then Peter hauling the Ropa blade in his wake. I was never a good runner and had the rearguard, toiling over cobbles and clothes, over the memories of Shadrapar’s last second, trying to keep up.
*
I tried to remember my streets and knew that we were on the Fenney Way that led from the docklands into a nasty area of decrepit housing near where Helman had rented once. Markaf Square was ahead, and the thought came to me that it would be an ideal ambush point. Even as I opened my mouth to urge caution, though, Shon had stopped so suddenly that I thought he had been shot.
We caught up with him, halted by an inexplicably horrible sight. It was just a pile of clothes, a huge pile about man-high, in the centre of the square. There was nothing innately hideous about it. There was no happy way to account for it, though, knowing what those clothes represented. They were mostly of the poorer wardrobes, as the area would suggest, but there was some bright and expensive cloth tucked in between the drab and the cheap. There was the tough canvas of Outriders and even the sombre half-cape of an Academy Master. My skin crawled. In the mind’s eye was conjured the image of a mass of people clambering in mindless terror over each other, crushing each other down, climbing up into an obscene human pyramid to reach some unthinkable salvation. I felt ill at the sight of it.
Peter advanced cautiously, sword in hand. He was the only one of us that could move. He was no more than halfway to the mound when something else entered the square. For a moment we thought it was a child.
It was less than three feet tall, hunched and covered with matted dark hair. Eyes glittered above a long, whiskered snout, and a bristle-covered tail snaked out behind it. Its forelegs ended in clawed almost-hands and it was holding some vanished Shadrapan’s clothes with the obvious intention of adding them to the pile. Vermin.
Something broke in me that had been under too much strain from the moment we made our discovery. From my starting position of static horror, I found myself in screaming, murderous descent on the creature with no obvious transition. I sped past Peter, drawing my knife and shouting curses and threats at the paralysed rodent. In my mind, it was responsible for everything. The Vermin had killed Shadrapar and now they were doing something unspeakable with what was left.
It fell over backwards and then was scurrying away on all fours, but I had a good start and flung myself on it, catching it by the tail. I, Stefan Advani, Academy graduate and man of peace, crouched over a cowering animal with my blade raised and nothing but hate in my mind.
You must understand that everyone knew to despise the Vermin. They were disease-ridden parasites, worthless animals. They stole children. They stole valuables. The Outriders did everyone a service trying to wipe them out. They bred so fast that they would infest Shadrapar within weeks if they were not continually culled. They did not have any culture. They made tools and dwellings by bestial instinct and nothing more. We all knew this. We all had been taught this.
Peter grabbed my knife hand and dragged me back before I struck, which I am glad of in retrospect. I was shouting all manner of accusations but I will not recount them here; they would add nothing.
There were others, I saw. They had been brought by my cries, perhaps a dozen little hairy shapes. Some of them had young clutched to them; some held jagged-ended shafts of metal and plastic, but they were far too frightened of us to use them. One in the centre, grey more than black, held a plastic rod that was aflame at one end, giving off a plume of noxious smoke.
I tried to understand what it was they were about. Defiance of the master race that would no longer hunt and trap them? Respect for the dead? I could put no interpretation on it that would not force me to revise the way I saw them and so, in the end, I did not interpret it at all, just backed off from the fallen Vermin and stared. The wretched beast I had assaulted bolted away into the shadows and was lost.
I came to my senses and remembered who I was, and what I was, and that I was not that sort of man. I felt unstable. Wherever all that violence had come from, I was not sure that it had gone away.
“Help me,” I said, I am not sure who to. It was Kiera who touched my arm, then held me when I started to shake. Shon and Peter had weapons drawn and ready, watching the Vermin. The creatures were clustered together, glaring at us with a mixture of fear and defiance. Poor monsters, to discover that humanity was not as dead as they had been led to believe.
Abruptly Shon fired a pistol into the air and they scattered at the noise. Moments later they were all running like animals, spears and torch forgotten, offspring clinging to the adults’ pelts.
Kiera was asking me if I was all right, but I was waiting for the echo of the shot to die away. It just seemed to go on and on until I realised that I was listening to that same awful reverberating silence again. She had to ask me three times.
“I don’t know,” I said. I could hear a raw edge in my own voice that I did not like. “I think I’m going mad.”
The others were all looking drawn and pale, but none of them seemed as oppressed by it all as I. My mind had been opened up by Helman. I had gained an extra sense that people were not born with. I must have been hearing the echoes of a mass of minds every day since then, a comforting, inaudible background murmur that underscored everything I ever thought or heard or did. Now, save for the fragile minds of my companions, there was nothing. There were no human minds within the boundaries of Shadrapar save for us, and Gaki and Hermione wherever they were. Into that vast absence of mind, that intolerable vacuum that nobody else could feel, my thoughts were slowly bleeding.
Peter was moving off again with Shon following a little behind, a little to the side, keeping an eye out for surprises. Kiera hugged me briefly. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked. “We can stop here if you need it.” She looked frightened, and I realised it was for me. It was enough, in that moment, to draw a little strength from.
I cannot say where Peter was taking us. It did not occur to me to ask. He moved purposefully enough that I believed in him. Looking back, I think he was just moving because it was better for a man of action than staying still.
We were making our way slowly towards the centre of the city, I realised. The great square that expeditions had traditionally set off from would see the return of the last expedition ever re-entering Shadrapar. There we would stand, as people had once said, in the Shadow of the Weapon. All Shadrapar was in the shadow of the Weapon now.
I found myself leaping forward to grab Peter by the belt and drag him down. We were just moving up a broad commercial street lined with wound-up business when something alerted me. Whether I heard a sound the others missed, or whether my flayed-open mind felt some pressure against it, I suddenly had a feeling of fear that I was familiar with, a specific dread. Peter struggled to dislodge my grip, but something in my face stopped him from shouting out. Across the street, Shon had also gone to ground in a doorway, and Kiera was crouching next to us.
It was not as close as I feared. It came from a side-road five-hundred yards down the street. Something white arched its way into view, and then another pale arc to join it, poling forward a squat, ridged body with underwater ease. Even at that distance we could see the great man-wide eyes and ragged sense organs that sprouted from the body’s leading edge.
The Macathar strode through the abandoned works of mankind at last. It was a moot point whether it had come out of the deep desert, or whether the desert had come to Shadrapar.
It did not see or sense us, passing by on some mission of its own devising, meaningless to man. Even at such a distance we were left shattered in its wake.
“God,” Peter got out. “So that’s what one of those damned things looks like.”
“But why is it here?” Kiera demanded.
“In the desert,” I said hollowly, “you will often find them amongst the ruins. I think that they are curious.”
*
We saw one other Macathar, at an even greater distance. It was just a white shadow drifting across the expanse of the Academy grounds. We saw many more Vermin, trekking in little lines through the deserted streets with their makeshift spears and crude sacks of possessions.
“They’re kind of like the web-children,” Peter suggested.
“They are not like the web-children!” I snapped. “Vermin are… animals. Pests. The web-children are people.” As I was saying it I was aware of how unsatisfied Trethowan would have been by the division.
Just before dark we found the great square where the Weapon once stood. It had been a long, halting progress through dead Shadrapar. There was a great hole in the square’s centre that must surely go down into some part of the Underworld. I wondered which lost faction’s ceiling had been violated and I knew that it did not matter and nobody was left to care. It is a great lie of civilisation that the things we invest with our emotions are real and important, but they are not. Take away the people and they vanish into smoke. All those idle dreams: government, money, education, love, revenge. All these things are parasites that cannot survive without the host. A thousand million things had gone out of the world when Shadrapar died, and we were too few to recreate them.
We stopped in that square, in the shadow of the Weapon’s absence, as if whatever driving force had drawn Peter onwards had fallen down that hole and disappeared.
“What are we going to do?” said Peter for the first time, perhaps, in his life.
“It’s a looter’s paradise,” Shon said, “if you could do anything with the loot. Still, we could find a lot of useful things, get some power running maybe.”
“And then what? Be lords of the Vermin?” I asked.
“Life is life,” Kiera said, surprising me. I had thought, of all of us, that she had lost the most. I had forgotten that, first and foremost, she had been trained to be adaptable. “I think your first plan is still the best,” she told Peter. “Back to the docks and get a boat. Go liberate the Island.”
“And then what? If we bring them here we’re going to be on the run from the Macathars,” Peter said.
Nobody had any easy answers as to what we would do with several hundred people and no place to put them. The best idea was Shon’s. He suggested that we just take over the Island and live there. It was a poor substitute for Shadrapar, and none of us was eager to return there, but it was civilisation. It was a defiance of encroaching nature. None of us thought it likely that the Macathars would wade up the river after us.
*
We slept in the square, and Peter was concerned enough about the unseen Gaki to set watches. I knew that Gaki could have walked by unseen with us all wide awake, but I said nothing. Between the Weapon and the Macathars, Peter was fed up of things he could not fight. Kiera watched first, Peter second. My turn came after the night had started on the long journey towards dawn, and this is where my problems really began.
Peter woke me to a chill darkness relieved by the tiniest fire (matchwood from the buildings lit with sparks from a flintlock). After he had settled down and instantly fallen asleep, I was left with only that fickle flame and my sleeping comrades, and the utter, utter emptiness of the world.
I held on for about an hour. For just so long did I crouch by the ember of the fire and do my best to fill my mind with thoughts: any thoughts save those of vanished Shadrapar. Thought after thought evaporated away until eventually, in the small and dead hours of the night, I was left with nothing between my naked brain and the truth of it.
I found myself staring at the familiar buildings, populating them with people that I knew. I shuffled through the deck of faces and found myself listing all those who had died here, and the worst thing was, there were so few that I could name. My closest friends had died in the riot, my comrades in adversity had died in Underworld. Who was left? Emil des Schartz, some Academy Masters, some socialites whose faces no longer even conjured up a name. The best of my life had been spent and gone before ever the Weapon fired.
The silence was closing in on me. I could hear it creeping soundlessly through forever-deserted alleyways. It stole like a predator, lured by my heartbeat and my breathing. The dark and vacant city now exhaled it into the shrouded streets and it was coming for me.
I had gone mad. Of that I am sure. Only for a moment, but in that moment I did not know myself and I was privy to an understanding of the universe grotesquely at odds with the norm. I believed without hesitating that the silence was a thing: an unliving but animate thing. I could not see it. Of course I could not hear it. I could feel it, though, with the extraneous senses of a mind gone awry.
I did not dare wake the others. A single sound would bring the silence down on me in an annihilating wave. I knew it when it entered the square; I recognised the clues left by all the absences of sight and sound. As I crouched in abject terror by the fire, the silence, the Silence, slithered from a side-street like a great eyeless serpent.
I tried to stay as still as possible but it had heard the blood hammering through my arteries. It knew that I was close. The great unseen jaws gaped, a tongue of air tasting air. It towered upwards on its coils, vast and deathly and utterly a product of my brain. When only one man perceives a scene, who is to say what it real?
I knew, with a complete certainty, that it would strike and kill me the moment it found me. I could not fight it. How can one fight a silence? Even Peter would think twice. Without ever taking my eyes from its invisible form I crept backwards, painstakingly slow. Above me, around me, the Silence swayed.
I moved back and further back, and sometimes it heard me and slid a yard closer and sometimes I made five or six paces without alerting it. I knew only one place where it could not follow me. The silence was vast, far greater than any serpent of flesh and blood. It needed the lonely sky to form it. I would go underground.
Yes, I was abandoning my friends to the mercies of Macathars, Vermin and Gaki. I should not have done it. I had no choice. In those painful dragging moments, I believed it.
My foot touched the edge of the hole where the weapon once was, with the slightest scraping of metal. Abruptly the Silence focused its attentions on me and threw all the looping coils of its insubstantial body into motion. I looked down frantically and, as I had somehow known, there were metal rungs descending into that abyss. Even the Weapon was only a machine, that had been built and maintained once. Now that it had taken itself away, all the mundane details of its construction were revealed
The Silence was rushing on towards me with its jaws agape, and I fell into the Weapon’s setting, grasped the rungs and clambered down hand over hand.