Scar Night Page 0,106
his lungs with pain. But not now. His blood thundered in his veins, vigorous, fresh. He’d wrenched his life back from the city. But it wasn’t enough. How could it ever be enough? Deepgate owed him more than it could ever repay.
“Whatever foul thing lies in that pit built the Tooth of God to cut the ore from Blackthrone and forge the chains, and then it slunk down into the abyss for three thousand years—to feed. A god?” He sneered. “No, a parasite, like the rest of you.”
Sypes’s eyes narrowed.
“You will tell me exactly what is down there.”
“What do you plan to do?”
Devon smiled thinly. “I’ll get its attention. I’ll cut the chains.”
Sypes spluttered.
“Why not?” Devon said. “Aren’t you all going down there eventually? Isn’t that the point of your lives? Why not send everyone down at once?”
Even the mottled spots on the Presbyter’s scalp seemed to pale. “You would murder everyone in the city?”
“Murder?” Devon cried. “I’m giving them what they want!”
* * * *
The young aeronaut’s gaze had been snared by the shining brass of the aurolethiscope; he did not look at Adjunct Crumb as he spoke. “Thirty heavy-decks have been dispatched after the Birkita under pushed compression. They’ll unravel a flag line back to us as they go.”
“Fascinating,” Adjunct Crumb replied. “And ultimately meaningless. Dill, do you have any idea what this man has just said?”
Dill didn’t, and he admitted so.
The aeronaut glanced at the Adjunct and started again. “The heavy-decks—”
“Heavy-decks?”
“Loaded warships. Lime-gas, incendiaries—”
“I see. Please continue.”
“—are pursuing the Birkita under pushed compression. They’ve twin-lined the engines and upped fuel pressure by—”
“All right, all right, I don’t need to know all the details. So they’ve tinkered with the engines to make the ships go faster. But what was all that nonsense about unravelling flags?”
“Ships will detach at intervals from the main fleet and remain static to form a flag line.”
“A flag line?”
“A communications line.”
“Ah!” The priest looked pleased. “Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Now go, shoo. The angel and I have important matters to discuss.”
When the aeronaut had disentangled his attention from the observatory workings and had left, Adjunct Crumb beckoned Dill closer to the aurolethiscope. “Honestly, these people have the most complicated way of saying the simplest things. It’s a wonder Deepgate’s navy functions at all.” He reached up into the machine and began adjusting things. “Now, if I remember, Sypes did it this way. We need to plug phantom-glass into the prism cupola”—he slotted something in—“…and twist the gloom filters round to prudent obreption.” He twisted something shiny. “That’s it. Now we ought to be able to see them. Would you like to see the dead?”
Dill approached the aurolethiscope warily, conscious of his wings intruding in the tiny observatory, afraid of knocking something over, and also painfully aware of the gloom all around. The darkness seemed to compress around him. He could feel the weight of the temple pressing down, squeezing blood to the pit of his stomach, and he had to struggle to keep his breathing calm.
The observatory desk was buried under wax-sealed scrolls, bone quills, glass pyramids of red, green, black, and blue ink. Further scrolls, in leather tubes, packed the shelves all around. A glass-fronted cabinet held on display, like surgeons’ tools, the elaborate devices for adjusting and calibrating the aurolethiscope. The machine took up so much space that the room itself might have been just a part of it, a hidden space within its workings. The lens column towered to twice his height, and all the surrounding cogs, struts, and foils crowded the dim arched ceiling.
The Adjunct squeezed to one side of the desk, his sleeves at chest level to avoid the candle flame. A cloud of perfume wafted out from him, like sugared summer fruits. “Now, look through here,” he said, “and tell me what you see.”
Dill leaned over the desk and peered into the eyepiece. The lens reflected his grey-white eye as he moved closer until he saw nothing but complete blackness.
“Can you see them?”
Dill looked harder, trying to make out any change in the uniform darkness. “I…It’s hard to tell.”
“Give your eyes a moment to adjust.”
He scanned the void before him. Still nothing. He might have been studying a sheet of black paper. He felt the shadows in the observatory reach closer, felt his pulse quicken. “What do they look like?”
Adjunct Crumb huffed. “Try adjusting the focus. The handle to the left of the eyepiece. That’s it.”
Dill cranked the handle. Above, he heard the brass