Abaddon - Chapter 12

Penny Simpson's notes, January 12, 2011

Knew it would be an anticlimax.

Progress down into the Abyss has been swift and, sad to relate, merciless.

These things, these people, do show up on infrared, and are vulnerable to gunfire. A great deal of gunfire. The poor things - I shouldn't say poor things, as they were attempting to climb around the face upwards and downwards of us and get behind us for an attack - showed up on the soldiers' scopes before they had chance to get within glass needling distance. The soldiers opened up without issuing any sort of warning. We didn't recover any bodies - everything fell into the Abyss. What we did see was roughly human-shaped. But they must have been terrific climbers to be able to move up a face silently at that sort of speed. Even Sean is impressed. He says he's sorry now he didn't bring a weapon, and I agree with him.

The Americans are very good at killing things. They keep an area around us bathed with floodlights at all times, and shoot dead anything coming even remotely close to us. We have all been told to stay in the vehicles for our own safety, and I can see why. Anything manshaped and moving that pops up in our escorts' sights stops a bullet. We complained at first, then saw the folly of complaining and simply hunkered down in the wagons with our eyes shut and our hands over our ears, singing la-la-la-I'm-not-listening to our consciences. The leader of our convoy, a wet-behind-the-ears Hitlerjung named, I kid you not, Nelson Nilsson, says we'll "interact more productively with the local fauna if we can first demonstrate a position of strength."

Every now and again, Nilsson's caravan of carnage stops in order for the "scientist guys" to get out to collect mineral samples and take photos of interesting minerals. Nobody seems to have told Nilsson that Sean and myself aren't Scientific Types - grunts keep handing us eyeglasses, UV torches and rock hammers, and asking us if we're going to need the spectrometer or the microtome. Sean, however, has enough local underground knowledge to have already pointed out to Craig and Wilson that the rock they were examining was fluorite rather than benitoite, a statement immediately concurred with by Wayne and Jeanette.

The road is still patchy and, in places, nonexistent. The vehicles we've been loaned, however, include one which trundles along at the front and has been brought along solely to span gaps with a variety of folding, extending and interlocking bridge sections concealed in its innards. Unfortunately, because we only have one of the vehicles, Captain Nilsson is faced with the decision of whether to continue without requesting extra scaffolding from further uproad to ensure a safe escape route. He decides to press on regardless, leaving gaps in the road behind us which, if we lose the bridging vehicle, we'll be unable to return over.

A while ago, while Nilsson’s engineers were still struggling across one of the voids in the road, Craig called me over to a spot on the wall where his scientific team had been conducting an experiment. They have some sort of weird Dyno-Rod device plugged into the rock; it looks like they’re drilling into it. Or rather, they’re not right now, because they’re busy taking their own equipment apart and examining it in microscopic detail.

“Take a look at this”, says Craig. He hands me a chart. The chart shows a wiggly line labelled t climbing from a flat plane to a spiky peak. I don’t even attempt to feign understanding.

“That”, says Craig, pointing at the long flexible metal cylinder his men are currently picking to pieces, “was designed to measure the passage of time at various depths of a drill hole sunk into the Abyss wall. There’s a separate atom decay clock built into an IC every inch along the bit, and a master clock in the drill’s power train.”

“Did it work?” I say.

“I don’t know”, he says. “I hope not.”

“t represents the change in the rate time elapses as measured locally. The left side of the chart is the powertrain, effectively zero centimetres into the face. The right hand side goes up to one metre deep.”

The chart appears to show that time is moving logarithmically faster the further the drill travels into the Abyss wall, except for one particular - the one metre measurement is missing.

I draw Craig’s attention to it.

“The drill bit shattered at one metre”, he says. “Puffed into dust. When we pulled it out, it just wasn’t there any more.”

“If you extrapolate the line...” says Wilson, taking hold of the chart thoughtfully

"And if you believe the bullshit", reproves Wayne Dougal.

“And if you believe the bullshit, at that point it would have been recording time elapsing at one hundred thousand times normal speed. Particularly considering that the powertrain end of the drill was still moving at normal speed, it's hardly surprising it broke.”

Craig stares at the chart in open dismay. “They've tested this equipment operationally. I've seen the QA assessments. Limestone, granite, chalk, you name it.”

“Kryptonite?” says Sean innocently.

Craig throws him a dirty look.

We shoot only two of the night creatures in the next hour; they seem to be getting more cautious, approaching only to the limits of our outriders' nightsights. One of the grunts who bags one swears blind that it stared at him out of the dark with "big eyes, like a cat's." One of the things actually screams, quite an eerie scream, a man's scream but too high for a man, like an operatic castrato: "EHEU! EHEU! ADIUVA ME!"

"What sort of language is that?" says a soldier in the comforting dark of our APC.

"It isn't Russian", says Bilibin.

"Vaemna, maybe", says Craig.

There certainly should be corpses this time; both bodies fell onto the road. We heard the thumps. But by the time we get there, there is no body to be found.

What we do find, however, is perhaps even more interesting.

When we get to the location, I find a lone US sentry standing covering ten inanimate objects.

"What are they?" he says. And it's actually Nilsson, behind me, who says, "I think I can answer that."

I look at the objects. They look like a field of washing blown onto some fenceposts. I take a guess from the rust of the iron some are made of that they are very, very old, but that is the limit of my knowledge. "You can?"

"Aquilae", says Nilsson. "Aigles Impériales. We're made to study ancient warfare in cadet school. I made it a specialist subject. It was the reason why I was included on this project, actually. Those, ma'am, are, left to right - an ancient Roman aquila - literally, 'an eagle', a sort of battle flag. Flanking it you can see two legionary standards, not quite the same as aquilae, though sometimes people assume they are. See those letters S P Q R? They stand for senatus populusque romanus, 'The Senate and People of Rome'. Next to it is a standard from the later - probably the eastern - empire, called a labarum. Look at the chi-rho design at the head of it - a design from a Greek-speaking people who worshipped Christ. Next to that is something I don't recognize...nor the next one, but I'm certain the lettering is Arabic...next to that is what looks like a battle flag of the Austrian Habsburgs, with the double eagle...and next to that we come full circle. An eagle standard of Napoleon's army, intended to mimic a Roman aquila, and another from the Nazis...that one has both the eagle and the swastika, same as the Roman one."

"Some people have no imagination."

"It's quite rare to see a German SS standard captured. Normally they were kept safe well behind the lines of battle. This would probably be worth quite a lot of money to, ah -"

"Very sick people?"

"I'm sure you're right", says Nilsson diplomatically. He walks forward and rubs a layer of dirt off the thing. A plaque underneath the eagly-swastiky stuff says DACIA.

"It's local", I say. "Dacia was the name of the local SS detachment."

The metal of the Nazi standard is still shiny and bright. Next to it, the metal pole of a Soviet hammer-and-sickle banner is lizard-skinned with rust.

"And it's hardly been corroded", says Nilsson, almost reverently. Why does this worry me? "As new as the day it was cast", he adds.

"That's because it's made of aluminium", points out Sean, "whereas the Russian one is made of steel."

"But what are they doing down here?" says Bilibin.

"Trophies", I say. "Skulls mounted on sticks. The sort of things primitive tribesmen put up to say STAY AWAY."

"Some trophies!" says Nilsson. "A Roman legion numbered between five and six thousand soldiers. A Napoleonic regiment was even larger."

"Nevertheless", I say, "they got their hands on these somehow." Though I suspect the local SS detachment probably slaughtered their own officers as soon as the Russians got close to the walls, then chucked their battle standard in the Abyss. It's the way the Vaemna do things.

We take our leave of the standards, though Nilsson orders them photographed and organizes a team to excavate them for removal back up to the surface. The Museum of the Pit will shortly have ten new exhibits.

Towering around us on all sides, the Abyss is all terrifying sublimity. Giant spires of abyssite tower priapically out of the dark, geologically inexplicable; where necessary, the road detours around them, and occasionally burrows through them. If anything, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the diameter of the vent is getting wider rather than constricting, and Wilson confirms this with a measuring laser.

After another hour, Sean suddenly stands stock-still in the way of an oncoming APC, almost causing it to lose control and go over the edge. He's oblivious, staring up at something far above.

I look up from where I am on the next APC - I can't see anything.

"OKAY - I GIVE IN. WHAT IS IT?"

"Sunset", says Sean, pointing. And it is indeed a beautiful sunset, what little I can see of it - a rosy red dot in the roof shining down like a sniper scope laser.

"YOU NEARLY PUT ONE OF MY VEHICLES OVER A CLIFF BECAUSE YOU STOPPED TO LOOK AT A SUNSET?" yells a sergeant.

Sean looks up, straight into the man's eyes, and holds up his left wrist and the watch fastened to it.

"It's been sunset for three hours."

***

"I don't know, I think the light from above is being bent and reddened in some way." This is Craig.

"A relativistic effect?" This is Bilibin. Mister Logical.

"It's too soon to say right now. But telescope observation of the sky above the shaft certainly seems to show a pronounced shift towards the red end of the spectrum, compared with observation of the walls around it."

"It couldn't be a normal sunset that's just lasting a long time." This is Nilsson, sounding worried. We're talking sotto voce half in and half out of the back of an APC, but sound carries in the deep like a whisper in a cathedral gallery, and Nilsson's men are hanging around as close as is humanly practicable without him being able to accuse them of blatant earwigging. After all, the convoy's been stopped for hours now just so Craig can spend time looking up at the sky.

Craig shakes his head. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because the sun's gone down and come up three times upstairs since I started observing. And the light colour up there doesn't seem to change despite that."

Nilsson's eyes pop out of his head. "In eight hours? That's impossible."

Following Sean's revelation on the sunset, we've made camp. The camp has been officially dubbed Fort Sunset by some wag who's scribbled it on the big map in the command APC. The camp is long and thin, strung out along the cliff to minimize the pressure on the road surface of too many APC's at once. Tents have been erected, and they are as well made as all things American. We have sleeping bags which are actually warm, and groundsheets which are actually waterproof. Right now, we're in the command tent, a rather grand word for a canvas roof erected over Nilsson's vehicle.

"Nevertheless", says Craig, "that seems to be the case."

Wilson interrupts. "Maye it isn't night and day up there", he says. "Maybe there's just something going on up there that's producing light sources as, um, bright even as the sun, erm, itself." His sentence tails off into a mumble which is nevertheless clearly audible as everyone else falls silent.

"Such as what?" says Nilsson. "What sort of event?"

"I think we all know", says Bilibin, "exactly what sort of event Mr. Jones is talking about."

"Brighter than the sun itself", repeats Jeanette Dougal.

"And the dust scooped up into the stratosphere from a nuclear explosion would create the most spectacular sunsets", says Bilibin. "They might last for days, maybe even years."

"It couldn't be a nuclear explosion", says Nilsson. "Not that many, not all at once, around the same city."

"Why not?" says Craig. "Most missiles these days have MIRV warheads - multiple payloads detonating all round the target, each one a few hundred kilotons or so. All you need is for a few of them to fall to the ground and fail to detonate, then maybe get tripped by bomb disposal teams and BANG, you get your apocalypse spaced out at intervals."

There is much discussion on this point, all of it pointless as we have no way of observing what is actually going on way up above us, but in the end, Nilsson’s less alarmist argument wins the day and we continue on our way down. The Dougals wanted to send a couple of troopers back to check on current events on the surface, but Nilsson overrules them. Not sure whether I disagree with him or not. Jeanette Dougal is that most common Australian thing, an Aussie who can beat the poms hollow at a game they invented, in this case whingeing.

A little while later, Sean sidles up to me as I’m picking my way across scree.

“Been checking the sunrise again”, he says. “Sun’s not set for an hour.”

“That’s encouraging”, I say. “Let’s hope it goes for the full twenty-four.”

“Or even the full forty-eight”, he says, almost under his breath. “The sky’s been red all this time. The sun’s been setting for over an hour. First time speeds up, then it slows down. Weird shit.” He throws a conspiratorial glance over at the other expedition members. “Of course, they know too. They’ve been looking up just like I have. They just won’t admit it.”

They do, indeed, look worried. Bilibin is glancing upwards so often he’s nearly lost his footing and tumbled into the Pit at least once.

“Why, then,” I say, “are we whispering?”

“I have no idea. Of course, you realize all this means some clever clever person is going to have to rewrite the laws of physics.”

“Or it could just mean the sky is red because there’s a city on fire up there.”

“So it could”, he admits in a whisper, sighs out a long breath, and sidles away.

And only an hour after that, we come on the Black Smoker.

It blocks the road, belching out smog like a perpetual oil fire; as we approach unwisely to within billowing distance of it, it feels like a fire, a cold one, more a pillar of flame than a pillar of smoke. I tell this to Bilibin, and he replies that a Moslem man once told him that Allah made dzhin from a black smokeless fire, after the making of angels and before the creation of people. I presume that by dzhin, he means genies. I don't know. Maybe he means gin, though what Allah would be doing moonshining, I have no idea.

What the Black Smoker is putting out may look like smoke, may look like fire, but is in fact pure Oracle Smoke, writhing and suppurating out of a crack in the rock that resembles nothing so much as a human wound. Fascinated, I climb out of the APC in my NBC gear and walk closer to it than I would ever have believed I would.

"It's coming straight out of the rock", says Craig in disbelief.. "It's not a made thing at all. It comes out of the ground."

One of the few Russian soldiers mutters something which I do not translate to Craig. What he says is "out of Hell." Again, I'm not sure whether I disagree with him or not.

What we all do agree on, however, is that the Black Smoker is a thing we can do without having in our lungs, air intakes, rifle magazines, and sandwiches, and Nilsson decides to send the vehicles through it one at a time, though he has the two rear cars reverse to a point where they can see, by dint of the curvature of the Abyss wall, what's on the other side of the Smoke plume and warn us of an ambush. The preparations we go through to make each vehicle safe and airtight are baroque; I can't help feeling any self-respecting VX molecule would have already snuck into our respirators by the time the last hatch is dogged and the overpressure dial cranked up to the max.

But all the same, inside that vanguard vehicle as it trundles through the murk, there is still an indefinable sense of something black and wrong and horrible whispering over our hull, probing, searching for a way in through all that steel and plastic.

And then we're through. I can tell we're through, because the hull sounds normal, feels warmer, feels one constant temperature against my back rather than a writhing succession of temperature gradients that feels as if I'm being explored by an octopus. Still, we sit for a very long time and wait while the crew squint through various viewports and peiriscopes and examine instruments. Eventually, they, and the crews of the other vehicles positioned further round the Abyss, pronounce the top hatch safe to open. Even so, it's opened by a man in NBC gear, and with the rest of us huddled at the other end of the compartment in gasmasks.

Eventually, after they've doused the outside of our hull with some Russian attachment designed for cleaning down chemical weapons trucks, they announce that we can, gingerly and in great fear, remove our gasmasks. Jeanette Dougal doesn't remove hers even then, but waits until everyone else has removed theirs and not displayed any ill effects for several minutes.

"The Black Smoke won't kill us just yet." To do him credit, Nilsson has accompanied us in the guinea pig car, and now we're through and clean, he waves the others through likewise.

"I'll grow old down here", agrees Sean.

"I already have grown old down here", I mutter.

My watch says it should be sundown; our little dot of sky seems to think it's midnight.

We seem to have come to a place where faulting has shunted the entire Abyss sideways, leaving overhangs deep enough for a squillion bats to hang in perfect dryness, though there are no bats; we are too deep for bats. There are also wide, flat ledges large enough to march a Napoleonic regiment down in open formation. The overhangs either have luminous bacteria or, more worryingly, luminous rocks on their undersides, glowing like the mouths of some bizarre bioluminescent sea creature. Of course, the light the organisms and/or radioactive compounds give out is not nearly enough to see by; only enough to find disturbing.

Speaking of Napoleonic regiments, it is here we find the hats. French shakos, Roman casca, Herman Gelmets. Rusty spiky Turkish headgear made to be rammed into your adversary of choice. This would provide a fascinating fashion parade of military modes through the ages suitable for all ages, were it not for the fact that each hat still contains the head of the original wearer.

"These will prove", says Craig, "to be the skulls of those who failed to take this place." This seems an odd thing to say, although I am not quite sure why.

"This one", says Nilsson, tapping a Napoleonic bearskin, "will be the pride of the Pit Museum."

Then Bilibin gets in on the fact and points across the Abyss towards a patch of glowing blackness on the opposing wall. "This will prove to be bioluminescence, very rare in terrestrial organisms, but exactly the same wavelength as is seen in many marine fauna. We will find it is the same chemical."

This is beginning to disturb me. "Oh, will we."

The second APC is now coming on through the Smoker. The ground underfoot is sandy, but greasy - not thick sand, probably carried down by a number of small waterfalls that punctuate the cliff. Our APC's tracks can cope with it easily. Our boots find it more difficult. Wilson slips once and is helped to his feet, embarrassingly, by a soldier, with one hand. It is tempting to think the soil underfoot is filled with the blood and viscera of a thousand victims ambushed down here by the troglodytes, but this is surely not the case. The last soldier to poke a bayonet down here ran back out screaming in the 1960's. Everything would have rotted to mulch by now, surely.

But there is a smell...an undefinable odour...what is that?

"Phew! I'll remember that stink as long as I live", I remark to Sean.

"You'll live a long life", replies Sean mournfully, "and bear many children."

Shit. Even I'm starting to do it now.

"Someone will please make a statement that isn't phrased as a future prediction", I say, through gritted teeth.

"Pardon?" says Jeanette Dougal.

"You'll find what you just said is a future prediction in itself", says Sean, exhaling wearily and sitting down in the sand, his back to a comfy rock, his rifle at his feet, as if giving in And I know full well why. All the masks and hatches, all the carefully made precautions and diligently followed procedures, were not enough. Finally, the poison has found a way through rubber, steel, plastic and skin into our brains. If it wasn't there already.

And the only reason why I know exactly what it is that's making the sand greasy underfoot is that I already know exactly what it's going to do to us. I try to force myself to make statements rather than prophecies, but it is difficult.

"Byzantium", I say. "These people live off the accumulated military wisdom of every culture that has attacked them. People crucified on Roman pila...fortified structures reinforced with iron on modern principles..."

But there's no point any more in warning anybody, when they know full well what is going to happen to us. To almost all of us. Sean is already nodding knowingly.

Nilsson turns to me, blinking heavily as if drunk.

"I will", he says, "shortly know what the hell you are talking about."

We were fools to think we could avoid the stuff simply by driving through it in a steel shell. It's more subtle than that, and more tenacious. It must be in the air like airborne batshit, in the greasy sand like corpse-rot, in the water like blotter LSD, burning through our every defence like -

I see the match, a primitive firelighter as long as a man's arm - I'll later find it to be made of dried bat-wings, phosphor, and human fat - strike a hundred yards away...

"Greek Fire", I say softly.

The entire shelf under our feet surges like a living carpet of fire. It's moving towards us through the muck, sending up a shower of sand like a cruising sea beast coursing just below the surface towards a swimmer.

One of the troopers turns towards me, indolently.

"Don't bother running", I say. "You die anyway."

He nods, and the flame takes him down like a crash test dummy. He doesn't even bother to unsling his rifle.

I, on the other hand, am up and running. I have a future. Sean has a future, but it is different from mine. He sits with his back to his rock, and the fire divides around him, and he sits watching the soldiers, those soldiers from the second APC who haven't yet been affected by the Smoke, screaming, dying, and burning, trying frantically to fan out the flames, which I already know is pointless, as the flames contain their own oxygen supply. Jeanette Dougal is running too, as far as the first APC, which she dives inside and dogs the hatch of. Her husband, who also appears not to have been affected by the Smoke as, if he had been, he'd have known this to be pointless, follows shortly after and hammers on the hatch, which she doesn't open, and the flames take him. Nilsson shrugs, eats his service revolver, and decorates the Abyss wall with his grey matter.

Craig just stands and burns, looking at his combusting hands sadly.

The soldiers who have come through on the second APC have panicked, of course, firing in all directions at the enemy, bits of the landscape that look like the enemy, and maybe even just plain bits of the landscape. Since they’re shooting inside a set of solid stone walls surrounding them on all sides, they seem to be losing some men to ricochets of their own gunfire.

And of course, the enemy open up with firearms of their own. How daft were we to think they'd just thrown away all those lovely Stetchkins and Schmeissers from 1943 and 1962, thinking they were the white man's magic. No, they kept all of them, and learned to use them with admirable effectiveness. Bizarrely, I see rows of crackling gunbarrels standing in line facing our men on the APC's. Weapons at shoulder height, the other side's heavy artillery fire till their magazines are exhausted; then - I am certain, even though I can only see the muzzle flashes alone, that this is what is happening - they kneel down and reload as their second rank rise, walk forward and fire. Give a submachinegun to a man who last fired a Napoleonic musket, and this is the use he'll make of it.

The thing is, it actually works. Whether these men can aim their pieces straight or not, there's no escaping the sheer volume of fire a line of troops twenty guns wide can put out. Lead is splashing through our lines like rainwater, and like rainwater, it finds every nook and cranny, going between flak jackets and helmets, through viewports, past lucky beltbuckles and Bibles.

In point of fact, I can’t see any actual enemy bodies out there beyond the flames, though that’s no guarantee there aren’t any. The fire is blinding my eyes to everything that isn’t it, both when I’m using my own unassisted peepers and when I pull down my night vision goggles. I know this to be the case before I pull down the goggles, but I pull them down anyway and take a peek just for the sake of causality.

The enemy knew the fire would blind us in the infra-red, of course; and night vision is our only main advantage over them. They have eyes that can see dimly in almost total darkness, it is true, but our heat-sensitive eyes were able to read writing in a lead box buried underground. Now they can see nothing. And at the edges of the fire, now I’m safe from being burned alive, I can see those enemy eyes, like dinnerplates, suggestive of creatures of massive size behind them, though I know full well the bodies we’ve accounted for were hardly taller than children. Eyes that reflect the firelight like those of a dog or cat or shark. Behind those eyes, I know, will prove to be heads whose brains have struggled to keep pace with the cuckoo growth of their sight organs, have lost advanced capacity for speech, abstract reasoning, and moral philosophy, in the mad rush to cram in more visual cortex.

As they’re going to catch me - where am I going to run to? - I allow myself to be caught. As they also know I’m going to be caught, the whole affair is fairly amicable on both sides, and they simply assign me a token troglodyte guard, a tiny man only as high as my shoulder, who I nevertheless know, even though I can’t yet see him, to have muscles capable of smashing a man’s femur with a single blow. I know this because I’ve seen him do it, in the future, to scoop out the delicious marrowbone. I am almost perversely pleased to hear him coughing heartily. Evidently he isn’t any more immune to the bad air down here than we hom saps are.

The forward APC, of course, was still the bridging car, and thanks to Nilsson’s enlightened decision to also use it as the guinea pig wagon, the troops on the other side of the Smoker now can’t drive back in retreat. They’ll panic, of course - those of them who don’t succumb to the Smoke and start turning on their comrades - in the next few hours, and try to rig up some way of getting back up to the upper levels using climbing gear, true grit, and Providence. Those of them who don’t try this will wait in vain for their comrades to return with reinforcements before their power supplies dwindle to nothing and their ammunition is exhausted and the subterranean race close in for the coup de grace. Those who go up the cliff, meanwhile, will be picked off by scampering clambering natives who know the rock far better than the soldiers and fear headtorches far less than they do halogen searchlights. Those few who actually do win through to the Base Camp far above will then be confronted by the uncomfortable fact that both the skilled operators of the Vortox crane are now missing presumed dead in the dark below. I have no idea how many other qualified operators exist in the Mr. Lifty project, but Craig and Wilson had enough trouble coaxing the damn thing to haul loads of up to ten tonnes up and down the Abyss on the end of a thousand-metre cable, and they were the best Vortox jockeys the project had; their understudies will not be able to extract every survivor out of danger before they succumb to either Oracle Smoke, troglo attack or a tragic supercrane accident.

And before long, the flames are dying and the air smells both acrid as a tannery and delicious as a carvery. There are a few sporadic bursts of gunfire still going on at the upstairs end of the shelf, but down where we are there are only live bodies standing quiet and dead ones steaming gently. The meat harvesters among the troglodytes are already scampering forth to recycle the corpses. Everything will be used. Hair will be woven into rope, skin cured into fabric and parchment, the long bones in the arms and legs drained of marrow, then snapped and wound round with catgut to make compound bows capable of hurling a glass or bone arrow a hundred yards. The catgut will not come from cats.

Various different body parts are of use in medicine - the pineal gland, for exampe, is extracted and mashed for feeding to boys who will become labourers or warriors. It will make them big and strong. If the prisoner is still clinging to life, they will be inverted and their throat slit in proper halal fashion to drain them of blood, which will then be stirred for several days to prevent it coagulating, after which it can then be cut into solid cubes of a highly lean black pudding.

The edible body organs, like the pudding, will be dried and smoked. Subcutaneous fat is carefully harvested and used for many purposes; as tallow, as axle grease, as cubes of fat which make yummy treats for children. Teeth are one of the hardest parts of the body, and are fashioned into hand tools when iron is not available. Urine and bile are carefully collected and passed to the simple-makers, who use them to concoct medicines and explosives. The simple-makers also pride themselves on being able to tan a man's hide with his own urine. Hair and fingernails are important sources of ammonia.

How do I know all this? I have seen it all happen in the future, just as I know where they are taking me. They will also bring Jeanette Dougal, kicking and screaming and hogtied, once they light a fire under her APC and smoke her out by making the metal intolerably hot. This is a method they developed many years ago for use on Nazi armoured cars; they have rolled these incredibly heavy items (albeit downhill all the way) right down the long road that snakes its tortuous way through fortification after fortification under the great overhang that protects the City. Armoured cars, APC's, and Roman siege engines stand in rusting rows in a great main square that is barely the size of a basketball court but, down here, seems big as a Roman forum.

The City is square in section, with a castellated fortress tower at each corner, and a single gate made, on closer inspection, of the shells of two Volkswagen field cars hammered flat and hung on hinges Around its walls, which are only partly there to protect against surface dwellers, are a ditch and dyke, the dyke-top bristling with antipersonnel devices of splintered human bone.. The ditch has been cut, single-mindedly, into rock, rather than dug in earth. This far into the earth, there is no earth. A modicum of rotten human flesh - it has to be human, as human bacteria will not fester on batflesh - is kept aside for the use of castellans to daub on the bone splinters, which are cut with tiny grooves to trap meat particles. Anyone stumbling on the splinters in the dark and receiving a minor wound will be nursing a gangrenous one before the unseen sun next comes around far above.

The walls are twice the height of those on a Roman citadel, and there are no windows in them. Within the city, a redoubt with walls twice the height of the exterior ones provides refuge to the entire city's population in times of unpleasantness. Lights of human tallow burn permanently on its inside walls; these terrible people live in terrible fear, and I sympathize with that fear, as I know what its object is.

It's through that immense, tiny square that I'm now being taken, through an avenue of silent, pragmatic warriors holding weapons made from bits of human being, up toward that redoubt which doubles as keep, court and church. Maybe 'acropolis' is the best description, though it isn't truly appropriate - 'bathopolis', maybe. It's an ugly, utilitarian building with nothing of the Classical or Corinthian in it. A precipice of steps leads up to its entrance like the killing stairs on the sides of Mayan pyramids. The entrance is a corbelled arch, too primitive even for the use of keystones, large enough for only one human being to pass abreast. And there is one human being sitting in it, in a chair made of other people. The figure is too small and frail, and too old, for it to be likely to be male, and I already know, in any case, that it isn't. Her hands are wrapped around the cnemial arches on the ends of her chair-arms tightly, tight enough to stop Death pulling her off her throne. Her hands are so pale and thin that the bones her chair is made of seem more colourful; having a minimum size fixed by the dimensions of the carpals and metacarpals inside them, they seem absurdly large on the ends of her sticklike arms, which emerge in turn from a Red Army uniform that was made to house a woman my size.

She is an old girl, and has grown older down here. She does not waste energy by moving a muscle - after all, she doesn't seem to have any. It's a weird conversation. We both know what we're going to say, but we have to remember to say it so it's there to be remembered as having been said.

"Quam diu morata es", she says in Latin. You took your bloody time getting here.

"Me elegisti ex aliis omnibus", I reply, hoping my Latin is correct. I don't ask why she chose me from all the others, because I already know. I've heard her reply. But she has to make it anyway.

She nods, so stiffly that I'm sure her spine must suffer. "Te elegi, quod intellexi te electam iri." I chose you, because I knew you were the one who would be chosen. And how weird is that. The weirdest thing of all is that I understand it perfectly.

" Cum eis qui ultimum impetum fecerunt degressa es." You came down with the last group of attackers.

She nods again. "Servi." I remember 'Servus' being the Roman word for 'Slav'. I also remembe that it's exactly the same as the Roman word for 'slave'. The Russians, then. "Pauci tam longe degrediuntur. Servi ultimi erant; Germani penultimi, ante quos Galli." Not many come down this deep. The Slavs, they were the last, the Germans the last but one. Before them were the Gauls."

"Napoléon."

"Id ducis eorum nomen erat. Dux Germaniorum habebatur alius Antichristus esse ei similis!" That was their leader's name. It was thought the Germans' leader was a second antichrist in his image! The old girl snorts rhythmically like a cat about to cough up furballs, or like a mating hedgehog, but is of course only laughing. "Tam longe errabant." How wrong they were.

"Et ante Napoléon?" And before Napoléon?

" Illyrii, tum Turci, tum Seres, tum iterum Servi, tum Ostrogothi, tum patres patriae nostrae illustrissimae." Illyrians, then Turks, then Chinese, then Slavs again, then Ostrogoths, then the fathers of our illustrious country.

" Num Romani sunt?" Romans? They're Romans?

" In initio." Originally.

" Illine hanc urbem aedificaverunt?" And they built this city?

She smiles. " Urbem meliorem fecerunt." They improved the city. She sighs without appearing to breathe, as if her vocal cords are an Aeolian harp the wind has just passed through.

"Servan' es?" Are you a Slav?

"Eram", she corrects. I was.

And then, opening her mouth and licking her lips as if forcing her tongue to try out an old phrase again: "Krasnaya Armiya." The Red Army.

"Leyitenant? Kapitan?"

She smiles. The smile quivers like a drawn bow. "Serzhant. Nunc tu regina inferorum es." Now you're the Queen of Hell.

The smile collapses. "Eram", says the ancient Russian again, laconically; and then she is no more.

They have taken good care of their ruler; her former uniform is plumped up with rags that are probably all that remains of the battledresses of her comrades, and more particularly of the luckless all-male Nazi adventurers who preceded them. The effect is of military green robes with a field grey lining, though much of the field grey is bloodstained. The stink is terrible. Down here there are evidently few laundries, and fewer bug exterminators.

I turn round to face the crowd. It is a crowd of eyes. At some point in the past, there must have been a mutation among the undergrounders which favoured gigantic, soulful eyes like polished tourmalines. However, adaptive radiation alone could not have accounted for this genotype's complete domination of the city's population in so short a time. I smell selective breeding. Also, speaking of breeding, despite the large population of the city, and despite the fact that I'd guess large numbers of these creatures to be female, I have not seen a single one who's pregnant. But as I fully understand what these people mean when they say 'queen', this does not surprise me. Social insects, and even mammals such as the mole rat (the naked mole rat, I remind myself) follow a similar model, whose prerequisites are for the species to be isolated, have a high individual birth rate, and have limited food resources. Human beings confined down the Abyss fit two of these criteria already, and are only a mutation away from fulfilling the third. One female in a group of hymenoptera, or ants, or termites, or naked mole rats, will give out pheromones that stop the other females breeding (and if this sounds ridiculous, ladies, consider how much breeding you got to do whenever you went round with your good-looking girlfriend as her Fat Mate). The 'queen' female then becomes a brood cow, a gigantic sedentary thing who is little more than a foetus factory. The other females, freed of the necessity to breed, become more effective food gatherers.

All well and good, but whatever happened to the people down here went a step further. Maybe their own 'queen' caste grew soft through the tiny size of their gene pool and lost the ability to become fertile themselves. New blood would have been needed; but only enough new blood to provide one queen at a time. Two queens in one hive cannot be tolerated.

But now, even after the old queen's death, there are still two queens. The women of the tribe can smell it, and there can only be one outcome. The crowd seem expectant, but are really only behaving the way cannibal decorum dictates. They know what is coming just as I do.

They bring her forward in a cage of skin and bone. She is saying the Lord's Prayer to herself over and over and over, still having not been infected with the Smoke, or she'd not feel such apprehension. I feel sorry for her - it might just as easily have been her as I. But electio reginae ultima est, the queen's decision is final.

It was pretty final for the queen, at any rate.

She's probably expecting to see more bug-eyed monster people, and instead sees me. This calms her down, but we all know it's just the calm before the storm.

"Y-you", she says, and it takes her a little while to shape that single word. "You're out there."

I nod. "And you're in there."

It takes her a little while longer to get her head around this. "They didn't kill you. They didn't put you in a cage."

"No", I acknowledge. "They didn't."

"You're one of them!"

"I have always been one of them, and always will be."

"TRAITOR!" She stabs a finger at me, accusing, through the bars. No-one tries to hold her back. They know exactly how far a prisoner in a cage can reach by now. They know she can't hurt anybody.

"I can't be a traitor to my own people."

"But you're one of us", she sobs, collapsing to her knees inside the cage, hugging the bars. "One of us, one of us, one of us -"

Presently she stops feeling sorry for herself and looks up at me.

"What are they going to do with me? Why am I in this cage? Why haven't they killed me like they killed the others?"

"A travelling salesman", I say, "once drove by a farm. The farmer was in his field in front of his farmhouse, leaning on a shovel, a cornstalk in his mouth. Also in the field was a pig, but the darnedest thing about this pig was that it had three wooden legs.

"The salesman couldn't believe his eyes, so much so that he turned around and drove on back for a second look. Sure enough, a pig with legs of the wooden variety, three of. He pulled up next to where the farmer was leaning on his shovel, wound down the window and yelled: 'Hey! Your pig has wooden legs!'..."

And she's backing away into the cage now, shaking her head. Could be she knows the punchline, which will just about plumb spoil everything.

"The farmer pulled the cornstalk out of his mouth and said: "That there pig, mister, when thieves was about to break into my homestead and slaughter my wife and children, set up such a grunting and a wailing and a hollering that I heard the thieves and went for my gun in time."

She's looking me straight in the eye, but still shaking her head like she's willing me to stop. Gathering around her cage as it sits on four solid stakes hammered into the flags of the square are the simple-makers, stirring pots of noissome dark substances that roil and bubble, but do not give off heat, but cold.

"'Couple of years later', said the farmer, 'my house caught fire, and that there pig ran into the house, scampered upstairs and rode out with my youngest son, the apple of my eye, on his back'."

She has sunk down to her knees again inside the cage, eyes full of tears. The simple-makers are close around her now, wafting censers bubbling with the Black Stuff underneath her feet. They are not doing this out of cruelty, rather out of concern that the woman is lacking an important sense that they themselves possess. There is a sense of relaxed certainty about knowing one's future, after all - knowing when one will conceive, give birth, sicken, die.

"And the travelling salesman said to the farmer, 'But how does that explain how the pig has three wooden legs?' And the farmer says to the travelling salesman -'"

She nods, going along with the punchline, but polite enough not to say it out loud.

"' - Well, a pig like that, you don't eat him all at once.'"

And at just that precise moment, the Oracle Smoke takes hold, and she starts to scream. Well, anybody would, after seeing a future like that.

Behind me, the huge-eyed handmaidens of the monarch are stripping off the manky, louse-infested finery of the dead Queen, preparing to transfer it to my own shoulders. And I feel like screaming too, for I will die piece by piece over a timespan far more exquisite than hers.

Alive, I sweep down the stairs I've known all my lifetime, not missing a single step, glad I don't yet have the rheumatoid arthritis, hip displacia, and senile diabetes that I know I'll have in later years. Things are in a state, and there is much to do.

There is not much time before he comes.