The machine knocked him sideways with the blunt circular muzzle of its Gatling gun. Bone cracked; Clock crashed against the wall and was immediately still. He looked dead, but then again there had never been a time when he had looked particularly alive. The stink of his burned skin still filled the cabin. It was not something Antoinette was going to forget in a hurry.
She looked at Xavier again. Clock had been on his way to do something for him. He had been “dead” for perhaps half a minute already. Unlike Clock, unlike any spider, Xavier did not have an ensemble of fancy machines in his head to arrest the processes of brain damage that accompanied loss of circulation. He did not have much more than another minute . . .
“Mr. Pink . . .” she pleaded.
The pig said, “Sorry, but it isn’t my problem. I’m dead anyway.”
Her head still hurt. The bones were bruised, she was sure of it. The proxy had nearly shattered her skull. Well, they were dead anyway. Mr. Pink was right. So what did it matter if she got hurt some more? She couldn’t let Xavier stay like that, without doing something.
She was out of her seat.
“Stop,” the proxy said. “You are interfering with a crime scene. Interference with a designated crime scene is a category . . .”
She carried on moving anyway, springing from handhold to handhold until she was next to Xavier. The machine advanced on her—she heard the crackle of the taser intensify. Xavier had been dead for a minute. He was not breathing. She felt his wrist, trying to locate a pulse. Was that the right way to do it, she wondered frantically? Or was it the side of the neck . . .
The proxy heaved her aside as easily as if she were a bundle of sticks. She went at it again, angrier than she had ever been in her life, angry and terrified at the same time. Xavier was going to die—was, in fact, already dead. She, it seemed, would soon be following him. Holy shit . . . half an hour ago all she had been worried about had been bankruptcy.
“Beast!” she cried out. “Beast, if you can do something . . . now might not be a bad time.”
“Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but one is unable to do anything that would not inconvenience you more than it would inconvenience the proxy.” Beast paused and added, “I am really, really sorry.”
Antoinette glanced at the walls, and a moment of perfect stillness enclosed her, an eye in the storm. Beast had never sounded like that before. It was as if the subpersona had spontaneously clicked into a different identity program. When had it ever called itself “I” before?
“Beast . . .” she said calmly. “Beast . . . ?”
But then the proxy was on her, the diamond-hard, scimitar-sharp alloy of its limbs scissoring around her, Antoinette thrashing and screaming as the machine pried her away from Xavier. She could not help cutting herself against the proxy’s limbs. Her blood welled out from each wound in long beadlike processions, tracing ruby-red arcs through the air. She began to feel faint, consciousness lapping away.
The pig moved. Mr. Pink was on the machine. The pig was small but immensely strong for his size and the proxy’s servitors whined and hummed in protest as the pig fought the bladed limbs. The whips and whorls of his own shed blood mingled with Antoinette’s. The air hazed scarlet as the beads broke down into smaller and smaller droplets. She watched the machine inflict savage gashes in Mr. Pink. He bled curtains of blood, rippling out of him like aurorae. Mr. Pink roared in pain and anger, and yet he kept fighting. The taser arced a stuttering blue curve through the air. The muzzle of the Gatling gun began to rotate even more rapidly, as if the proxy were preparing to spray the cabin.
Antoinette crawled her way back to Xavier. Her palms were crisscrossed with cuts. She touched Xavier’s forehead. She could have saved him a few minutes ago, she thought, but it was pointless trying now. Mr. Pink was fighting a brave battle, but he was, inexorably, losing. The machine would win, and it would pick her off Xavier again; and then, perhaps, it would kill her too.
It was over. And all she should have done, she thought, was follow her father’s advice. He had told her never to get involved with spiders, and although he could not have guessed the circumstances that would entangle her with them, time had proved him right.
Sorry, Dad, Antoinette thought. You were right, and I thought I knew better. Next time I promise I’ll be a good girl . . .
The proxy stopped moving, its servo motors falling instantly silent. The Gatling gun spun down to a low rumble and then stopped. The taser buzzed, sparked and then died. The centrifuge wound down until Antoinette could no longer hear it. Even the humming had ended. The machine was simply frozen there, immobile, a vile blood-lathered black spider spanning the cabin from wall to wall.
She found some strength. “Mr. Pink . . . what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Mr. Pink said. And then the pig nodded at Xavier. “I’d concentrate on him, if I were you.”
“Help me. Please. I’m not strong enough to do this myself.”
“Help yourself.”
Mr. Pink, she saw, was quite seriously injured himself. But though he was losing blood, he appeared not to have suffered anything beyond cuts and gashes; he did not seem to have lost any digits or received any broken bones.
“I’m begging you. Help me massage his chest.”
“I said I’d never help a human, Antoinette.”
She began to work Xavier’s chest anyway, but each depression sapped more strength from her, strength that she did not have to spare.
“Please, Mr. Pink . . .”
“I’m sorry, Antoinette. It’s nothing personal, but . . .”
She stopped what she was doing. Her own anger was supreme now. “But what?”
“I’m afraid humans just aren’t my favourite species.”
“Well, Mr. Pink, here’s a message from the human species. Fuck you and your attitude.”
She went back to Xavier, mustering the strength for one last attempt.
TWENTY-THREE
Clavain and H rode the rattling iron elevator back up from the Château’s basement levels. On the way up, Clavain ruminated on what his host had shown and told him. Under any other circumstances, the story about Sukhoi and Mercier would have strained his credulity. But H’s apparent sincerity and the dread atmosphere of the empty room had made the whole thing difficult to dismiss. It was much more comforting to think that H had simply told him the story to play with his mind, and for that reason Clavain chose, provisionally, to opt for the less comforting possibility, just as H had done when he had investigated Sukhoi’s claims.
In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.
Little was said on the ascent. Clavain was still convinced that he had to escape from H and continue his defection. Equally, however, what H had revealed to him so far had forced him to accept that his own understanding of the whole affair was far from complete.
Skade was not just working for her own ends, or even for the ends of a cabal of faceless Conjoiners. She was in all likelihood working for the Mademoiselle, who had always desired influence within the Mother Nest. And the Mademoiselle herself was an unknown, a figure entirely outside Clavain’s experience. And yet, like H, she had evidently had some profound interest in the alien grub and his technology, enough that she had brought the creature to the Château and learned how to communicate with him. She was dead, it was true, but perhaps Skade had become such a willing agent of hers that one might as well think of Skade and the Mademoiselle as inseparable now.
Whatever Clavain had imagined he was dealing with, it was bigger—and it went back further—than he had ever imagined.
But it changes nothing, he thought. The crucial matter was still the acquisition of the hell-class weapons. Whoever was running Skade wanted those weapons more than anything.
And so I have to get them instead.
The elevator rattled to a halt. H opened the trelliswork door and led Clavain through another series of marbled corridors until they reached what appeared to be an absurdly spacious hotel room. A low, ornately plaster-moulded ceiling receded into middle distance, and various items of furniture and ornamentation were stationed here and there, much like items in a sculptural installation: the tilted black wedge of a grand piano; a grandfather clock in the middle of the room, as if caught in the act of gliding from wall to wall; a number of black pillars supporting obscure alabaster busts; a pair of lion-footed settees in dark scarlet velvet; and three golden armchairs as large as thrones.
Two of the three armchairs were occupied. In one sat a pig dressed like H in a simple black gown and trousers. Clavain frowned, realising—though he could not be absolutely certain—that the pig was Scorpio, the prisoner he had last seen in the Mother Nest. In the other sat Xavier, the young mechanic Clavain had met in Carousel New Copenhagen. The odd juxtaposition made Clavain’s head ache as he tried to construct some plausible scenario for how the two came to be together, here.
“Are introductions necessary?” H asked. “I don’t think so, but just to be on the safe side—Mr. Clavain, meet Scorpio and Xavier Liu.” He nodded first at Xavier. “How are you feeling now?”
“I’m all right,” Xavier said.
“Mr. Liu suffered heart failure. He was attacked with a taser weapon aboard Antoinette Bax’s spacecraft Storm Bird. The voltage setting would have dropped a hamadryad, let alone a human.”
“Attacked?” Clavain said, feeling it was polite to say something.
“By an agent of the Ferrisville Convention. Oh, don’t worry, the individual involved won’t be doing that again. Or much else, as it happens.”
“Have you killed him?” Xavier asked.