Abaddon

Abaddon
by
Dominic Green

[Author's note - Many thanks to M. J. and P. J. A.
Croft for extensively correcting my Latin. I
also apologize to the ghost of Karl Edward
Wagner for nicking his idea. He will know
which one I mean.]

Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein

- Friedrich Nietzsche

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

- St. John the Divine

But now, in this valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him: his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again, that he had no armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts; therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground: for, thought he, had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, it would be the best way to stand.

So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold: he was clothed with scales like a fish, and they are his pride; he had wings like a dragon, and feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion.

- John Bunyan, *The Pilgrim’s Progress*

Part One

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 10 2010

Here at last. Small for an ex-Imperial Capital. Buildings, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Greek, Byzantine, Romanesque, Romanov, Roman - piled up in no particular order. For all the Gzel Czaer Matias Corvinus is a ‘majestic palimpsest of three thousand years of European history’ (quote from ‘Let’s Go Vzeng Na’ 2008) it is a very small one.

Looking east across the square - Gzel is the word for square, no idea how pronounced - can see the palace of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, a token of that monarch’s unhealthy fascination with this area. During WW2, the palace was both an SS and KGB headquarters, and an SS General had the unfortunate distinction of being tortured there in his own torturing cellars. Now, it is a museum, the Musé Sissi. To the north of it is the old Polish town hall, originally a mediaeval guildhall, for many years the Soviet Commissary. Now it seems to be the Hilton Matias Corvinus. Polish, Austro-Hungarian and Russian eagles alike sit around its eaves (you can tell the Austro-Hungarian and Russian ones easily - they have two heads). Some of the eagles nursing bulletholes.

Behind where the Zil taxi dropped me off is the Orthodox cathedral, notable for having a Catholic campanile. Easy to see where the Orthodox saints have been excised from the campanile and replaced with Catholic ones. The same process seems to have happened in reverse on the cathedral façade. The city has been swapped back and forth between Cath. and Orth. for the last thousand years, not forgetting a short sojourn under the Mongols. The saints on the upper stages of the façade famously only survived the Mongol conquest because Ogedei Khan was unable to find a stepladder. Guidebook says façade originally covered in gold leaf before Vzeng Na’s glorious forty years under Communism, but cathedral still an imposing building.

Opposite the cathedral, with minarets deliberately built to be a cubit taller, is the Ottoman mosque, abutting a northerly section of the Bey’s wall. To be honest, mosque is mostly minaret. Ottomans did not have much time to build it in before the Hungarian reconquista, but wanted to make their point. Hungarians wanted to make their point too - tops of minarets are flat where the roofs have been remodelled to make them shorter than the cathedral again.

To the left, looking from the cathedral, an archway inlaid with cut and painted tile leads through the Beglerbeg’s wall into the Garden Citadel. Archway v. ornate, but has stone gateposts big and squat and ugly enough to support vault doors of Federal Reserve Bank, not to mention ominous holes in the arabesques overhead that evil head-destroying substances might be poured through.

Air is an enticing reek of strange foods, peculiar and ill-advised automobile fuels, and exotically poorly maintained sewers. Cars are nearly all Czaer 2000’s, products of Vzeng Na’s one and only car factory, bizarre copies of Isetta bubblecars. Driving one a point of national pride, it seems. Only a very few of the most important businessmen, pimps and gunrunners seem to drive Lexi and Mercedes, and there seems to be little middle ground.

Across the Gzel, in what was once a Soviet Museum of the Patriotic War, new American imperialists have set their mark, a branch of Starbuck’s. Notice ‘Starbucks’ spelt out in Roman and Cyrillic characters. In one of the comfy armchairs near the window sits Ivan. Recognized Ivan as only man in caff wearing red carnation in buttonhole (actually only man in caff with buttonhole, but digress). Ivan’s suit, like most suits round here, not a perfect fit, but a reasonable one, and what it’s fitting is quite pleasant too. This police inspector does not live on donuts alone. There is a gymnasium somewhere in Na for certain.

Ran down steps and waved. Heel fell off shoe on period cobbles, went arse over tit into fire hydrant, which still has pointy Communist stars on it just where it kisses the forehead.

Ow.

Saw pointy Communist stars for some minutes.

Ivan a nuclear-powered dreamboat. Shows me a picture of his wife, who is of course gorgeous, the cow. He carries a gun, a dinky little Russian thing which he says is better than James Bond’s Walther PPK. He says the bullets from it go through steel plate.

As day was warm, suggested we sit outside on pavement. He objected as only pimps sit on pavement, with their bitches apparently. Quite excited at thought of being his bitch, so insisted. Smiled at old gentlemen passing by. They all smiled back, but their wives reined them in and scowled at me. Man with a big smart jacket and two girlfriends wandered past and said something obviously rude to Ivan. Ivan in hysterics by the time the sun set. Getting along fine, it seems, and always a good idea to know the local police chief, biblically even.

Na, says Ivan, is and always has been arranged totally around its central tourist attraction. In the very earliest days the Greeks, and maybe even the Persians, built temples here to gods of their respective underworlds. Here, he says, is the site of the world’s only recorded temple to Angra Mainyu. Not sure who Angra Mainyu is, but smile and nod politely. The Romans, says Ivan, were also obsessed with the site, the Emperor Heliogabalus making a pilgrimage here, and the Emperor Trajan conquering all the land between here and the mountains just so he could dedicate a temple. The site was as important to the Greeks as Delphi. At Delphi the single priestess, known as the Pythia, sat on a chair balanced over a fissure in the earth. The fissure was supposed to contain the body of the monster serpent Python, guardian of the Centre of the Earth. Python had been slain by Apollo for some reason or other, and from the corruption of its body foul miasmas rose into the priestess's nostrils, allowing her to foretell the future, possibly insofar as the future was 'sitting on top of this fissure is going to get really old really quickly'. But, says Ivan, Delphi was widely known by everyone who was ayone in the Ancient World to be just a pale imitation of the far older, greater and more terrible Oracle in the cold lands to the north at Na. (Have been to Delphi; have looked down the priestess's fissure. Agree that Na's is the only one of the two that looks as if it really could go all the way down).

There is even reputed to be an old proto-Celtic stone circle round the place. It wasn't just the religious and artistic life of the area, Ivan says, that was dictated by what was revered here, but also the local economy, from the very earliest times - in Roman days, it was considered a prime source of fertilizer from the thousands of bats which used to live inside the entrance, and the locals were known as ‘vespertiliani’ or ‘bat people’, as many of them lived down in the dark among the chiroptera, in little crazy wood-and-raffia villages clinging to the rock. Tacitus complains that ‘these people seem to think Caesar cannot tax them, as they live not on the Earth, but in it’. Since time immemorial, all the sewers of all the surrounding districts have fed into the mouth, and it should, Ivan admits, smell appalling, but it swallows the stench, just as it swallows light, and sound. (Knew this from the guidebook - if you yell into it, you get no echo back, apparently.) (Just checked another, scarier guidebook, which says you sometimes do get an echo, but not in your own voice, because it’s Satan mimicking you from the Pits of Tartarus and trying to draw you down to Hell, etc., etc. Prefer first old wive’s tale, less scary). The town grew in the nineteenth century purely because of this incredible ability to absorb sewage; other cities on the plains around it had to construct huge and elaborate systems for poo disposal. Na, says Ivan, still has, even today, not one single sewage farm. ‘If the devil’s down there’, Ivan grins, ‘we’re all crapping on his head daily’.

Ivan knows about the group of Americans in town who believe it goes right down to the Mohovoric Discontinuity. He says the Soviets believed that in the 1950’s, and had their own Mohole project here. He says their equipment is still visible down there if you squint through binoculars. The Russians, he says, were not successful (looks v. satisfied when he says this).

A street kid tried to tap me up for dollars. Wouldn’t take local currency, cheeky little SOB. At the same time as he was tapping me, another kid was trying to sidle past and grab my wallet. Ivan just looked at him. The kid took one look back and scarpered. Ivan laughed. He says kids like that are a constant problem. They’re the kids of Smoke addicts, he says. The word he uses is Дым, which means Smoke in English. I’ve never heard of it, and he’s quite surprised I haven’t. Oracle Smoke, he says, is the drug of choice hereabouts. I ask him what sort of drug it is, and he waves his hands about vaguely and says ‘probably an opiate’. It certainly sounds like crack or heroin, addicts lose all interest in reality, not even sending their kids out to whore and steal like decent junkies should. The kids do the whoring and stealing off their own bats, as they starve to death if they don’t.

“Where does Oracle Smoke come from?” I say.

He shrugs. “They make it somewhere, I imagine.”

“You mean you’ve never seen it?”

He nods. “I have. It is carried into Smoke houses in glass bottles, wrapped around with cooking foil. Coke bottles, so I hear, are especially favoured. The bottle is heated, inside the foil to stop it cracking, and the family gathers round. As the flame gets hotter the Smoke rises from the bottle and fills the room. It is more addictive, I imagine, than heroin, sex or chocolate. Our narcotics officers have orders to wear respirators. I have lost more than one man to the Smoke who did not.”

“Was that boy on Oracle Smoke?” I ask. Ivan shakes his head. Oracle Smoke, he says, sucks the life out of a user almost overnight. “There is no soul any longer”, he says. “The skin tightens, because the addict fails to eat. The eyes steal back into the head. Besides”, he adds, “Smoke users don’t speak that intelligibly. They talk in strings of gibberish. Some believe what they say predicts the future.”

“And does it?”

“It predicts their own future. They die within a month, invariably.”

Ivan says he’ll show me the Museum tomorrow. I asked him if it worried him, living on the edge of what the Greeks and Romans thought was the entrance to Hell. He laughs and says he spent the first ten years of his life in Hell. He explains - until he was eleven, rock and roll music was forbidden in Vzeng Na, with the exception, it seems, of Pat Boone, as the local party chairman had all the Boonester’s records. Ivan launched into an impromptu solo of Ain’t That A Shame, and his fellow customers in the café responded by throwing litter and good-natured abuse at him.

“You see”, he says with a wink, “the police chief is the only man who can get away with Pat Boone karaoke in this town.”

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 11, 2010

Morning. Hotel room was cold. Modern 'duvet' technology has not yet penetrated this far east. Bed was made up with a gazillion blankets, each as thin as tissue paper and each wound round the mattress so tight I could scarcely breathe when I first got in.

Breakfast a thing they called ‘compôte’, and I called ‘a bunch of very old pears swimming in some very horrid syrup’. There were also boiled sweets, a bit like Pez or Lovehearts. There was something described as coffee. The boiled sweets, being virtually raw sugar, weren’t bad. I found they dissolved in ‘coffee’. Maybe they were supposed to.

Went for an early morning stroll around the metropolis. Doesn’t smell quite so bad in the early morning when nobody’s been for a shit yet. Eveywhere government restoration teams are prising up poor-quality Soviet tarmac to reveal gorgeous mediaeval cobblestones beneath. Govt. seems acutely conscious of the fact that tourism is the only reliable way to draw investment into Na.

(In the cold, the sewers actually steam. You can tell which buildings people have taken a dump in. Maybe getting obsessive on this point.)

Walked into Victory Square (Gzel Lziofang), enormous impressive poor quality Soviet tarmac thing with triumphal statues holding aloft hammers and sickles and submachineguns. Statues covered in anticommunist graffiti. At least one of the statues has a gigantic aluminium phallus, welded on to it by freshman art students, according to the Guide. Victory Square created to commemorate glorious Soviet victory against evil Nazi legions. The Guide goes on to admit the evil Nazi legions included at least one Leibstandarte Dacia, a sort of Vzeng Na Freikorps recruited from local fascist sympathizers. Victory Square a monument to the heroic struggle of the workers against capitalist etc., etc., and was created by bulldozing an acre of tenement housing.

At one end of Victory Square, the Bey’s Wall crumbles - most likely someone in the seventeenth century scored a direct hit with a cannon - and the Beglerbeg’s Wall is visible behind it. On the other side of that wall, signs warn in several languages, is ‘a drop’. Not ‘a ten foot drop’; not ‘a thirty foot drop’. Not ‘a thousand’. Possibly the greatest understatement I have ever seen on public signage. It’s at this end that the Americans from the University of Prague, Michigan are setting up their equipment. Their equipment is big and impressive. It has UNIVERSITY OF PRAGUE, MICHIGAN printed all over it.

Ran into one of the Americans. He’s a big black man called Wilson. He says Wilson is a common name back where his people from. I ask him where his people come from. He grins and says “Africa”.

He explains that the machine is really little more than a giant crane. “The hole’s been dug already”, he says, “we just need brave men to fill it.” He slams his fist to his chest to indicate he’s a brave man. Either that or a Klingon warrior.

I ask Wilson if he’s going to be filling the hole himself - he says “not unless the A team gets sick”. He points out the A Team, a white man working on what looks like it’s going to end up at the end of the Americans’ crane. It looks like a cross between a cable car and a wrecking ball, and I say this to the A team. The A team isn’t nearly so friendly. He’s far too interested in doing important boy stuff to talk to a girl. He seems to be checking the cable connection to the wrecking ball. Fair enough. if I was going down in the wrecking ball, I’d check the cable too.

I ask the A team what he’s going to wreck with his wrecking ball. I don’t even get a smile then. He just grunts 'If I’m Unlucky, Myself', and carries on with his checking. I shrug and stand back and take photos. The whole thing looks more like a naval cable-layer than a crane - after all, it is supposed to dangle things down, not lift them up. All the lifting it has to do is the two yards over the Beglerbeg’s Wall. After that, it’s downhill all the way. I notice that the wrecking ball looks to be made mostly of carbon fibre. I ask Wilson if it was expensive. He says it was paid for by a Japanese corporation, Komatsu. He says Komatsu make cranes. Their publicity department will be along later to get their pound of flesh taking pictures, apparently.

Ask Wilson if his giant crane has a name. He scratches his head, and says its name depends on whether you're asking the official Komatsu supercrane concept development team, or the team who are actually going to be using it. The official marketing name of the K2005 supercrane is, he says, "Vortox", because Vortox sounds impressive and means nothing in any language. I ask him what the team who are using the crane call it. "Mr. Lifty", he replies.

I ask him where Prague is in Michigan, and mispronounce ‘Prague’. Apparently you say it ‘Praig’. It rhymes with the name of Wilson’s unfriendly colleague, which is apparently Craig.

Say goodbye to Wilson, but am forced to promise him a candlelit dinner for two with caviar and champagne before he’ll give me my hand back. Ho hum. Wilson claims to be African stallion but his belly like an old cart horse.

I get to the Museum of the Pit an hour early, wanting to poke around on my own before getting steered around by Ivan. He looks like a steerer. The Museum is entered via the arch in the Beglerbeg’s Wall, and is, even today, the only way for ordinary members of the public to get through to see the sights. The Beglerbeg probably put the wall up himself for that express purpose, and charged admission. Even in 1500, Early Renaissance peasants would have paid to stand and boggle. The Beglerbeg wasn’t daft.

The Museum of the Pit was bombed by both the Russians and the Germans in WW2, and half of it’s been rebuilt all postmodern. It looks horrid, like a handsome face with some really bad corrective burn surgery. The old half of it was once a public bath, perched right there on the edge where all the stinky water could easily be gotten rid of. Supposedly, it’s also built on the site of a genuine old Roman balnea. “In a building on this spot” (says the all-knowing Let’s Go Guide) “Heliogabalus himself might have stewed in his own juices whilst gazing out into a majestic mile of nothingness”.

At a loss to imagine how a mile of nothingness can look majestic, but walked in and paid the entrance fee to a minge-faced old babushkye. The rooms inside are yellow with years of fag smoke, and there are star shapes in the smoke where old Communist insignia have been removed. In the anteroom, there are models of what stood on this site in 200 BC, 200 AD, 1200, 1500, 1700, 1945, and 1962, all crafted with elaborate care and as much love as went into the saints’ faces on the cathedral. There are no English translations on the cases - unthinkable! - and I’m forced to fall back on an English guidebook which is an entertainment in itself, as it appears to have been translated from Maem Na or Russian into Mongol, Swahili and finally English using some sort of online crapulence engine. In the 200 Before Jesus, we are told, there was already being one church to Hades on this locality, and a Soothsayer like the Soothsayer on Delphi. Apparently peoples very important like kings and tsars swarmed to the Soothsayer to learn the future. In 200 AD, the Romanesque Empire conquered the neighbourhood, and builded a Romanesque church. Then followed the Dark Periods and the Barbaric Invasions, and the churches were destroyed. When Christianism came to the Barbaric peoples, they builded more churches, but this time to Jesus. Momentaneously, the Turkic peoples attacked and made this land a colony, but they got defeated by Christianists in the 15th Century, and the Austrian-Hungarians ruled this country then until the 20th Century, when the Big War freeed the peoples of Na. (I particularly liked the ‘freeed’). Unluckily (said the guide), after the Republic of Vzeng Na had been freeed, it then had the misfortune to be liberated by the Nazis and emancipated by the Russians.

The 1945 diorama of the Museum shows much the same drab grey streets I’ve already been out in, Nazi banners hanging from some of the buildings being torn down by victorious Soviet soldiers triumphantly raising the hammer-and-sickle on top of the catholic campanile. Defeated Nazis, still fighting a desperate rearguard, are exiting to stage left behind a huge tank half the size of the Museum building itself. Asked an old buffer standing by the door in a commissionaire’s outfit whether the tank was out of scale, and he said no, the Germans had had very big tanks, he had seen them as a child. One of the very big ones, he said, was still rusting in a square very near where it appeared on the diorama. It had weighed over 200 tonnes, and been called a ‘Mouse’. He finds this outrageously funny and laughs like he has a punctured lung. “I have a punctured lung”, he explains proudly, “although I am seventy-five.”

The 1965 exhibit, meanwhile, shows an enormous structure, pillarbox-red all over, occupying exactly the same place in Victory Square as the American crane is now. The structure is a crane, arching out over the drop, and unlike any normal crane, spans it totally; a gantry crane, I think it would be called. A rather pretty-looking old building on the other side of the drop from the square has been blown up to make room for one of the crane’s feet. It has three feet - a third foot is blocking the entrance to a street one hundred and twenty degrees around from the second. The impression is of a great red spider sitting brooding over the city. Or squatting over a potty.

“They tried to go down”, says the old man in weirdly accented Russian, “to the Discontinuity.”

“The Mohovoric Discontinuity”, I nodded.

“Exactly that discontinuity, yes.”

“What did they think they would find there?”

“What did the Americans think they would find”, said the old man, “when they went to the Moon?” He makes a sign on his chest. Not sure whether it is a cross or not. “A bad thing, a bad thing, to go down there.” He points at the Soviet stars on the model machine. “After they went down there, their empire fell. Heliogabalus”, he says, indicating the Roman exhibit, “his empire fell. Alexander”, he says, jabbing a finger at the Greek exhibit, “his empire fell.”

“Alexander’s empire”, says I, “was founded after he came here. The Soviet empire fell twenty years after they came here. And Heliogabalus’s empire fell two hundred years after he came here. Surely the lesson here is that empires fall.”

“Their empire fell”, warns the old man, still wagging his finger in my face.

“It’s a beautiful display”, I say. “It must have taken many people a very long time.”

“I built it”, says the old man, swelling so much with pride I think he’ll bust his buttons. “I built it all, myself.”

I was amazed. (Am not easily amazed). “How long did it take?”

He shrugged. “I am a very old man”, he said.

The old man’s name, as far as I can make it out, is Gviong - native Vaemna, short build, axeblade face, eyes like knifewounds in pork fat, the works. Says his family gave themselves all German names during the Great Patriotic War - his German name was Georg - but as soon as the wars were over, they went back to the names they were baptised with. (As if any self-respecting Gestapo officer wouldn’t have known a Vaemna at a hundred yards). The Vaemna were put into slave labour in the war, on the Germans’ pet projects. If the war hadn’t ended when it had, they’d probably have been exterminated along with the Jews and gypsies.

He shows me his arms proudly; no tattoos. He’s inviting me to be impressed by this. “I finished the war as a water carrier for the Leibstandarte”, he says. “I was too clever to go into the camps.” This says just about all you need to know about the Vaemna. They are survivors, not moralists. Surrounded by Germany, Hungary, Russia, Greece, Rome, Poland, the Cossacks, the Mongols and the Ottomans, after two and a half thousand years of recorded pig-in-the-middle, they are still alive.

“One year later”, he grins, “I was running errands for Zhukov.”

Beyond the anteroom, the Museum is full of glass cabinets containing stuff that has been excavated. Some of these are the actual stuff, some replicas, as the Soviets and Nazis took most of the originals, and they are only now beginning to be tracked down. Circa 50% of the exhibits are votive tablets (most broken). Chucked into the deep over the millennia, they are chipped into expensive marble in Classical Latin, scratched into half-baked clay in dog-Latin, glazed into Samian terra cotta in aristocratic Greek. The very oldest are scratched into aurochs scapulae in scripts philologists are still trying to decipher. Some of the earliest look like they should be in our own alphabet, but this is deceptive, as they’re some of the first surviving examples of the Phoenician character set. People have been writing prayers to their gods, things they wuld like to happen, letters to Santa or Satan, and lobbing them down into the dark here since before the time of Jesus. Archaeologists have only been hauling them back up, by comparison, since the time of Schliemann.

The newer tablets in the collection are made of porcelain, tourist trinkets from the nineteenth century, saying things like ‘God bless this house and all the little children’ in Romanian. The really modern ones are plastic or titanium, designed to survive the journey all the way down to, uh, whatever is at the bottom. Some of the titanium exhibits are written in Japanese, Hindi or Arabic.

Besides the tablets, there are more valuable items of swag. Scythian gold tinkets from a thousand years before the birth of Christ, sesterces, denarii, drachmas, minissimi, Byzantine necklaces made of amber that found its way to Byzantium on Viking boats picking their way cautiously down the Dnieper. The occasional Turkish dinar. A thing the plaque on its cabinet says is a paiza, a word that doesn’t exist in my Russian dictionary. For the record, a paiza looks like a big wooden coin and was apparently “only entrusted to the most loyal messsengers of the Tartar Khans” for some doubtless very good Tartar Khan reason. Soviet Patriotic War medals. An Iron Cross on which someone has scratched the words ‘Es sterbe Adolf Hitler’. A Rolex watch. A stone age Venus figurine with buttocks even more ample than my own. A Persian cylinder seal.

Persians? I do a double-take on this one. We are, after all, a long way from Persia. But in the days of Xenophon, Demosthenes and Alexander, the Persian Empire stretched to the Hellespont and, from time to time, beyond; and the fact that an entrance to Hell existed in a cold land beyond their borders interested the Great King enough, it seems, to merit a substantial Achaemenid presence here.

As for the replica exhibits, a highly imaginative and doubtless totally fanciful set of shelves details every single pagan idol that existed in the kingdom of the Danubian Ostrogoths, idols “sent down to join the Devil in the dark” when the Ostrogoth king converted. “The largest of these”, the plaque on the Pagan Idols cabinet proclaims, “was over two men high, sat on three legs, and possessed two heads which looked both back to the past and forward to the future, and a fire that burned eternally in its belly.” A likeness of the Ostrogoth idol has been produced for the museum by what looks like Vzeng Na Mixed Infants, who have tried to depict its barbarous splendour in bacofoil and papier maché. Looked like large-headed pig with big willy. (Willy, on closer examination, was third leg.) “This dreadful graven image”, said the cabinet plaque grandly, “has never been recovered.”

In the 1500’s, meanwhile, when the Turks took the town, all the golden crucifixes in its churches were melted down and cast into verses from the Quran in a faience lattice, which were then thrown into the pit “to send the word of God even down to Eblis”. When the Christians recovered the city a century later, the newly-appointed Bishop fired consecrated silver arrows down into the deep to wound the Devil, who the Christians of the town were convinced had been coaxed closer to the surface by Islamic evangelism.

But one thing the Christians, Moslems and Zoroastrians all seem to have been convinced of is this - the Devil is down there, somewhere. The Big D’s face jokingly rendered in the bathhouse murals all round the Museum walls - a grinning Satan, an imperious Eblis, a dark and terrible Hades carrying off a not entirely unhappy-looking Proserpina. The whole room recognizably a bathhouse - marble shelves round the walls used to be seats, a large depression in the floor where most of the larger cabinets stand is decorated with a delapidated mosaic of mermaids and tritons and obviously used to be the bath itself. (The mosaic is bomb-damaged at one end & has been repaired with what I found when I prised one loose with my toe to be little cubes of plastic not even the same colour as the original ceramic).

And at the other end of the room is the Picture Window.

The Window stretches from floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall. Its lintel is spanned by an RSJ thick enough to hold up a viaduct, just so bathers and museumgoers alike can have an uninterrupted oggle at what lies beyond.

The bathhouse walls must project over the edge. View goes straight, straight down. How far? Nobody knows. Radar does not return from down there. They say this could be because of scatter from the walls, or radar-absorbent muck (or magma!) at pit bottom. But the locals all know better. They know it goes down forever. Things dropped down it make no sound. Explosive shells fired down it do explode, but at wildly differing depths, implying that they are detonating on the abyss walls rather than on its bottom. Certainly the vent twists and turns as it descends, and spelunkers have so far explored only the first mile. The walls are difficult to climb, overhanging and slimy with bat guano. Aid climbing is necessary, and you have to make your own holes to put protection in; there are hardly any cracks in which to shove a nut or piton. The rock is metamorphic, volcanic rock that was tough to start with and has since been squeezed and fused in the Earth’s guts until it is hard as iron, smooth as glass.

There have been scientific attempts to explain the pit. Thales of Miletus, an Ancient Greek flat earth philosopher, believed it had originally been one of the entrances by which the sun rose each day from the underworld, and that it had simply dried up like an old channel of the river Euphrates when the Sun changed its course and began rising in the East. Nazi scientists believed it to be a possible entrance to the alien kingdoms they knew existed inside the hollow Earth (or, since their leaders cherished an idea that the Earth was hollow but that we were living on the inside, outside it). Soviet and German scientists alike theorized that, if not to the actual inside of the Earth, it might reach at least to the Mohovoric Discontinuity, the boundary layer between the Earth’s crust and its mantle. US scientists wasted millions trying to bore a hole down to the Discontinuity in the States in the 60’s. Here it seems Soviet scientists hoped they might be lucky enough to have found a ready-bored hole in their own back yard. Ufologists believe, in fact, that the pit is an abandoned alien Mohole project built by aliens for whatever purposes aliens build Mohole projects.

Christian ‘scientists’ all around the world still believe, of course, that this is the hole made by Satan when he fell through the Earth from Heaven into Hell.

Certainly, it looks like you’d be motoring some before you hit pit bottom. Birds’ nests and bat colonies streak the walls with guano as far down as the eye can see, and undoubtedly further. Green grass tufts and the occasional tree cling to rocky prominences nearer to the sunlight. As you look further down, the grass grows yellow and eventually peters out altogether, replaced by deep-reaching tree roots, dead white ivy and and shelf fungus feeding off the walls. Some of the streaks round the rim, as most of the city’s sewage and waste water still drains into this one sink, must be human guano. It doesn’t smell from this side of the window, but am not sure it doesn’t stink beyond it, whatever Ivan says.

The official geologist’s term for the rock is abyssite. It is described by my Guide as a ‘schist rich in cryptocrystalline quartz’, which tells me little apart from the fact that I like the sound of the phrase ‘cryptocrystalline quartz’. Although identifiably a schist, it appears nowhere else on Earth in this precise chemical composition; hence it has its own name. One single slender column of abyssite strikes up from somewhere far beneath like a Stone Age spearhead. On top of this uncertain foundation, someone, many years ago, has chosen to build a church; how, I’m not sure. We’re talking about mediaeval engineering here, after all. The church is dedicated, controversially, to Abaddon, the creature mentioned in Revelation as the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Detractors of the church point to the fact that only four angels, Raphael, Michael, Gabriel and Uriel, are officially mentioned in the O.T., and that this angel from Revelation might be a fallen one resident in Hell.

Then: “Don’t look into the abyss”, comes a voice from behind me, “or the abyss will look back into you.”

“You didn’t make that up”, I laugh. “That was Nietzsche.”

“Everyone in this city knows that quote”, says Ivan. “They say Nietzsche was holidaying in Na when he came up with it.” He is in uniform, and what a lot of silver buttons his uniform has on it too. Makes you just want to unbutton them all. He’s wearing a military-style beret - not on his head, but clipped to his shoulder epaulette. The cap badge is stylized enough to look like a heraldic bird, but I realize it isn’t. The wings are more like the wings of an insect, there are four legs, and the head of the creature looks human. He notices I’m looking at it.

“And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men”, explains Ivan.

“And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit”, I say back.

He taps the cap badge. “This has been the symbol of our city for over a thousand years”, he says. “Possibly even longer. Maybe over two thousand.”

I find this hard to believe. “Ivan, the Book of Revelation was written around 100 AD.”

He frowns. “Yes, and that’s the funny thing, you see. This shape, this image, appears on commemorative medals and votive tablets struck here well before the birth of Plato.” Then he grins. “Maybe it wasn’t our artists who took their inspiration from John, eh? Maybe John just wrote down a description of the devil based on the testimony of one of our own people who had seen him.”

“The Angel of the Bottomless Pit isn’t the Devil, Ivan.”

Ivan shrugs. “Lucifer was an angel, once.”

He steered me round the museum as expected. Gviong, the old commissionaire, winked at me as he did so. It transpires the paternal side of Ivan’s family are Russian, not Vaemna, as I might have guessed from the name. His mother’s family, meanwhile, are ethnic Poles, as are many of the shopkeepers and petit bourgeoisie of Na. “The Vaemna don’t breed with outsiders”, he says, and he’s looking at Gviong as he says it. I get the feeling this may be a sore point. Maybe Ivan has attempted to breed with a Vaemna in the past.

For Ivan, whose father was a KGB officer, the story behind the cabinets is different. The Russian troops in the dioramas are defending the motherland against Nazi aggression. When the Soviet era ended, he says, Russia withdrew voluntarily from Vzeng Na, if only because it would have been stupid for one tiny ASSR to remain a Russian island on the other side of Belarus. Russia’s efforts to unlock the earth’s Mohovoric secrets had brought prosperity and employment to the area in the 1960’s, as had the many Russian Army and Air Force bases. “But it is good now”, he says, “that the Russians are no longer here, I think. We must be free to make our own destiny.”

“Does ‘we’ include the Vaemna?” I say, and he replies that over fifty percent of Vzeng Na’s population are now ethnic slavs - Poles, Russians, Byelorussians, Kashubians, Ukrainians, and so forth - which strictly is not an answer, but which, in another equally important sense, is. The Pan-Slavist Party has been in power in Vzeng Na since 1996, apparently. So it seems the Vaemna are, even now they have their independence, not in charge of their destiny.

Then Ivan steers me politely to the mysterious-looking cage at one corner of the room, which looks as if it might contain a dangerous animal. This is a new addition to the Museum; it cuts across the lines of mosaic on the floor. The cage is the only thing allowed to break the line of the big picture window as it crosses the room. A commissionaire dressed like Gviong is standing by it, almost like a sentry. This cage is evidently important. It is made of wrought iron, formed into fantastical art deco designs, and it’s a good few seconds before I realize it’s an elevator cage. The machinery for the elevator vanishes up into the roof. This was doubtless the lift assembly for some swank Na apartment before it was appropriated en bloc; above the lintel of the cage door is a quotation in what appears to be Italian.

“’Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’”, translates Ivan before I ask, and sweeps the steel louvres open before the commissionaire has time to. I am acutely, almost uncomfortably aware that Ivan is the local police chief. The museum staff may be terrified with dignity, but they are clearly terrified of him.

The elevator is very small. It has cagework sides through which little fingers can easily protrude and get chopped away. There is nothing to hold on to inside it.

Ivan slams the louvres shut and presses one of only two buttons on the control panel - a big red one marked, in Russian, BOTTOM. The lift jolts and grinds alarmingly, and sprocket teeth whirr above me in the darkness, finger-hungry. Then the cage begins a sedate and altogether quite pleasant descent into the floor, where I see not dark but daylight rising round my ankles.

“The Museum is built out from the edge”, says Ivan. “On iron girders. Look.”

Massive riveted nineteenth century buttresses project out from the cliff. It appears they are holding up the floor I had been standing on. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have walked so close to the window. Underneath them is twenty or thirty metres of fresh air. Underneath that, a narrow shelf projecting from the abyssal wall, looking knifeblade-thin next to the vast gulfs of nothing crowding in on it on either side. Remember thinking - if the cable snaps and we fall, will we hit it? Or will we fall further?

Like the webbing of a finger, the shelf connects the thin shard of abyssite that the Church of the Angel is perched on with the chasm walls. At this shallow depth, there is grass, manky and yellow, growing on it; even a tree, to which someone has fixed a portable ultraviolet light to help it grow bigger. The shelf is actually quite broad as we come closer - wide enough, even, for people to stand up on and move about. There are tents, quite large ones, women with no make-up, men with beards. One of them is grumpily sweeping away a clutter of plastic votive tablets, turning them over the edge of the cliff with a broom.

“Archaeologists”, explains Ivan. “They cannot understand that this place is a work in progress. They think only of unearthing yesterday, and complain when today rains down on them constantly.”

I notice the archaeologists were all wearing hard hats. I ask whether people still threw votive tablets down here. Ivan nods.

“I found a tablet asking both God and the Devil to kill me once”, he says. He shrugs and smiles, but this time his heart isn’t in it.

We are at the level of the grass, now, and still descending. Here, in the middle of all these archaeologists, someone has dug a small square pit exactly the size of our elevator, into which we disappear like a coffin being decorously lowered into an open grave. The inside of the grave has steep spade-cut sides and electric light.

“The Pit has formed here over centuries”, says Ivan. “All around the Abyss, people throw things in, but in places like this, where there are ledges near the top, the things collected. Sometimes the braver, poorer people who feared divine retribution less than hunger would wait until dark and climb in after them. People who did such things were considered anathema, like grave robbers or Indian untouchables. Even Vaemna”, he said, as if this was the crowning insult, “do not talk to such people.” I notices he says do not talk instead of did not.

“And so we have the Museum of the Pit. Archaeologists are obsessed with this location. Western archaeologists in particular pay big money to be allowed down here. But nothing ever leaves the site. Things either remain here or stay in the Museum, and only replicas tour exhibitions abroad. Nothing that enters the Pit leaves it”, he said, “apart from archaeologists, geologists and tourists.”

Archaeologists must obtain state permits, it seems. The Pit referred to in the Museum’s title is not the yawning chasm we are standing on the edges of, but this tiny excavation, only perhaps four metres deep.

The surface level, under the grass, is immediately gruesome. A skeletal head stares out at us from under a hairline of turf. There are femurs, jawbones, ribcages. One of the ribcages, in what I am sure is a piece of pure theatre on the part of the Museum staff, is wearing an Iron Cross.

“It is believed this layer of topsoil was added in the 1940’s after the Soviets slaughtered three hundred SS prisoners here”, says Ivan. I express my revulsion. He reminds me that the next level down consists of Russian and Polish bones, executed with Nazi bullets.

“The Nazis were trying to get to the centre of the world”, I say. Ivan laughs. “To meet up with their master, Satan”, he says. (Dante’s Inferno, I am reminded, is a popular school textbook in Na, along with Virgil’s Aeneid, Goethe’s Faust and Beckford’s Vathek. Their children must sleep really well at night).

Beneath the Nazi and Soviet skulls is a layer of shattered porcelain - “votive tablets”, says Ivan dismissively - and then a clearly visible layer of black soot containing three perfectly formed cannonballs. “The Magyars take the town from the Turks”, he says. “A lot of the town was burned.” Underneath the cannonballs and ashes, a layer of fine ash. “The poorer Turks scatter the ashes of their dead into the Pit”, says Ivan. Then still more soot and cannonballs. “The Turks”, announces Ivan, “take the town from the Magyars.”

The Turks and Magyars both seem to have taken the town twice, though in the deeper layers they don’t fire cannonballs any more. There follows several feet of porcelain of decidedly poorer quality. “Mediaeval”, says Ivan. Finally, more bones, some of them with clearly human teethmarks in them. Ivan sucks in his breath seriously. “The Mongol Khan Ogedei”, he says, “conquers Poland and Russia. He drives the inhabitants of the town of Na, who refused to capitulate when he first rode up to their walls, into the Abyss. Some of them, cushioned from the fall by the dead bodies of their former neighbours, survive the fall and live for many days, taunted by the Tartars far above, living on the abundance of rotting human flesh.” He pauses theatrically a monent, then adds in a whisper:

“Some says their descendants live down here still.”

Still further down, past pottery-shard gravel of steadily decreasing quality, shading from porcelain into actual earthenware, the omnipresent cross motifs on coins, plaques or rotting bits of fabric become ‘T’ shapes. “Worshippers of Thor and Pyerun”, says Ivan. “Back this far, the area is still not entirely Christian.” The quality of the earthenware begins to improve. Crosses reappear, though they are probably better described as swastikas. “The Roman period”, Ivan explains. Down here the quality of the goods thrown into the Pit is better than at virtually any time since. Gold and silver glitter among the litter, among gladii and spathae, denarii and oboli. There is an abundance of statues of Isis, Egyptian goddess of the underworld, popular with the Romans with their mix-n’-match approach to worship. And then, suddenly, the Isis statues become Proserpina - I can’t tell the difference, but Ivan convinces me one of them is holding a pomegranate - and the votive tablets are suddenly addressed rather than Dis Pater. And then, once the alphabets become confused, like the destruction of Babel happening in reverse, they break out into a mish-mash of Ancient Persian, Phoenician, Hittite, and Linear B. And even here, there are trinkets and articles of fabulous value to bronze age chieftains who doubtless inhabited the most palatial mud huts in their neighbourhoods.

We have reached pit bottom.

“Does it stop here?” I say.

Ivan shrugs. “Excavations continue”, he says.

He presses the green button for the lift to rise.

After the Museum, Ivan suggested food, but apologized for not being able to deliver it until the evening due to “work commitments”. Asked “if it would be acceptable to dine at the Hilton”. Have driven past the Hilton on the way in from the airport. Very big, built on the edge of town beyond the tangle of ancient architecture in the city centre. Lots of glass and steel, very swish. Wondered naïvely how it was that a policeman could afford to eat at that sort of place. Wondered even more naïvely and not a little hypocritically whether Ivan’s beautiful wife had been informed he was dining with another rather less beautiful woman.

Of course, said yes.

Spent the rest of the day queueing in the Interior Ministry, trying to get permission to leave the elevator cage in the Museum of the Pit and wander around taking photos actually inside the mouth of the Abyss. National Geographic have done this successfully in the past, though I find out from talking to a backpacker in the queue next to me that this was only via smuggling one of their cameramen into an archaeological team. Get shunted round three separate ‘departments’ (this involving queueing in front of various different windows in the same office, often to see the same people) and am given three tickets of different colours. Get the colour of my ticket wrong at least once and stand in the parking fines queue, much to everyone else’s annoyance. Queueing is even more of a way of life with these people than it is in Britain, it seems. Am resoundingly unsuccessful in obtaining permit, despite my government connections. Am treated almost as if I’d wandered into the cathedral and asked for a permit to piss in the font.

Spend the rest of my afternoon shopping for clothes. Haven’t got much good stuff with me that Ivan’s not seen me in already. Shameless.

Ivan has a policeman pick me up from the hotel at nine, in a police car. Very nice, but cannot help feeling like a prostitute being pulled in off the street. Policeman says nothing to me all the the way there, doesn’t open the door for me like a taxi driver or a chauffeur, but smiles and waves at me as he pulls away, and is good enough not to leer. The Hilton is swank, as is only to be expected; full of smart suits conversing in German, English and Russian, tucking into fillet steaks and Caesar salads. There appears to be not a single Eastern European dish on the menu.

I have the monkfish (how far does the nearest monkfish have to travel to get here?). I also insist on paying for it myself (all right, insist on expensing it). Ivan pays for it anyway while I’m in the toilet. He knows the waitresses by name, though he doesn’t flirt with them. He listens attentively whilst I talk about myself - Roedean, degree in Modern languages, early desire to be a spy, hence the reason for learning Russian, never recruited at Oxford, hence the reason for currently being a journalist. Not married, no children, one cat fed most of the time by my neighbour, who he must be convinced by now is his actual owner.

Whilst Ivan laughs at my jokes, he doesn’t laugh uproariously, which is good, because I know they’re not that funny.

His own life story is Dr. Zhivago stuff. Grandaddy was a KGB lieutenant who slept with a local Polish shop girl to produce Daddy. As Grandaddy was already married to the daughter of his local party chief back home in Russia proper, Daddy couldn’t be publicly acknowledged, and instead had to be supported by ‘Uncle Ivan’, who paid for his upbringing and made sure he followed his uncle into the Service. He also made sure Daddy had a good Russian name, Mikhail - “though”, Ivan adds, smiling bitterly, “no Ivanovich”. Daddy, meanwhile, prudently made sure Ivan got both a Russian name and a Vaemna one. Ivan’s Vaemna name is Vaereng, which he says means ‘prosperous’. I tell him mine means ‘spinner’.

Ivan, unlike his father, was savvy enough to become an officer in the local police; thus, when the Russians left and the KGB became a dwindling memory, he still kept his job. “My father works as a security guard in a bank”, he adds cheerily. “But I make sure he gets a big package of vodka and salmon once a month”, he cackles, as if to prove he is not, after all, a monster. (I note, however, that Ivan sends his father fish, rather than teaching him how to; he is the sort of man who likes to keep others dependent on him).

Ivan insists on driving me back to the centre of town in his big police car. It is a Zil. “When I was a boy, I always wanted to drive one of these cars”, he says. “Now my junior lieutenants make fun of me for not driving a BMW.” I laugh. We both laugh. We are drunk. He is perhaps too drunk to drive. What, I wonder in my naïveté, if he gets arrested?

He drops me off just outside the the hotel, nice as pie, but as luck would have it, what do you know, he just happens to have the keys to a flat in town, a safe house, used by the police to observe drug traffickers. He is going there to sleep off the booze. He does not want to drive the twenty kilometres home in his condition. I laugh. He laughs. He suggests we go up there together and have a coffee, maybe a little nightcap, who knows?

End up sleeping with Ivan. He is a considerate lover, not half as drunk, surprise surprise, as he appeared to be. He also does not wait till I’m pretending to be asleep and then pretend not to know I’m pretending and slip quietly out of bed into his uniform and leave to drive home to his family. When he leaves, he leaves at daybreak, plants a kiss in the middle of my forehead, and orders a bouquet of flowers sent to my hotel to be there when I arrive.

Walk up the stairs to my room feeling dirty. Shower several times. Cry.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 12, 2010

Slept in till twelve. Spent the rest of the day in the company of the Information Minister, Yaebing Dudayev. This man is Ivan’s diametric opposite, a man who, I am reliably informed, changed his name from Yuri after the Russians moved out. Before being Information Minister, he was a fishmonger. He is a greasy little man with huge windowpanes of glasses and eyes like sushi behind them. He spends an afternoon droning about the highly specialized nature of Vzeng Na’s import/export trades from behind a moustache you could mop floors with. He has many graphs to show me. I suspect that he is showing them to me only in order to proudly demonstrate the fact that he has learned to use his new Western-designed spreadsheet program.

I ask him about Vzeng Na’s illegal export trades. This throws him. He shrugs his shoulders and admits that, yes, incredible as it may seem, people do break the law in Vzeng Na. Under Communism, of course, if was almost obligatory to use illegal channels in order to trade at all. He shifts about nervously in his chair as he says this, and spends a great deal of time inspecting his fingers. I am left under no illusion that Mr. Dudayev is anything other than a born-again black marketeer.

Then, just for fun, I ask him about Oracle Smoke. His eyes swell like poaching eggs. He asks me why I’m interested in such things. I tell him that if Oracle Smoke is an export, it surely falls under his remit, legal or illegal. He says Oracle Smoke is not exported. I say I don’t believe him. He says it cannot be exported. “It is not that sort of product”, he says. He reminds me that if I were a decent human being and a serious journalist I would not be interested in such things. He draws my attention back to his graph of projected bat guano exports against electronics imports, 2011-12.

Yes, you heard me right. Bat guano. They still run two or three big mechanical scoops down into the dark at what he describes as ‘decent and sustainable intervals’, which I take to mean infrequently enough for the bats to cover the abyss walls with crap in the intervening period. In the old days, it seems, people only used to harvest the bird guano from higher up in the Abyss, but the old lodes are now exhausted, and the advent of modern technology now means that the deeper, more mammalian deposits can be worked. It is, says the Minister, illegal to harm a bat in Na, through centuries-old legislation. Ever the investigative journo, I ask if this means the population of Na are at significantly higher risk of catching rabies. He denies this vehemently. Rabies is caught, he insists, by either (a) being bitten by bats, which the people of Na are less likely to have happen to them as they are, as previously discussed, prohibited from bat-molestation, or (b) inhalation of bat faeces. He pounds the table with his tiny fist. “And do I look like I breathe bat shit to you? Well do I? Do I?”

Took my leave of the Information Minister and made my way back to the hotel. Whilst walking back across the square, a street urchin taps me up for money. Specifically, American dollars.

“But I’m not American”, I say. “I’m British.”

“British dollars”, he says, grinning. His face is very thin. He has probably not eaten for some time. But his clothes are bright and new, Nike and Adidas and Le Coq Sportif. He seems able to afford clothes, if not food.

Then I turn around and find the other kid who is attempting, while the first kid distracts me, to rob my purse from my handbag. I grab him by the nose with thumb and forefinger. He makes an amusing noise like an elephant trying to vomit through a gasmask. When I let him go, he runs.

I turn back to the first boy. He grins again, as if it is unthinkable he might have done wrong.

“You’re the boy I saw the day before yesterday”, I realize out loud. “Outside Starbucks.”

He stops suddenly at the word ‘Starbucks’, as if he realizes who he is talking to - and, unquestionably, what I am to him now is ‘the lady who was sitting next to the police chief’.

He frowns, bends, and actually tugs his forelock, and apologizes furiously in Russian. And scuttles away, across the big bright square, like a spider caught in the middle of a room when the lights go on.

Back at the hotel I spent half an hour trying to explain to the desk clerk what I meant by ‘fax machine’ and ‘internet’. Eventually located an internet café, Ezhu Happy Netsurfing-Ngaëar, and managed to plug my laptop into the wall and upload several days’ worth of story.

Went to bed early and watched what passes for local TV, an appalling Vaemna-language sitcom about three old men all trying to sexually harass the same young dolly bird living in their apartment block. Tonight, it seems, Bimaen the Butcher - distinguished from the other two male characters by the fact that he always, always, always wears a butcher’s apron, even in the bath - was able to cop a feel of her left tit, but got his penis caught in a revolving door for his trouble. Expect to see it on Sky One soon.

Went to sleep with the window open, perhaps a perilous thing to do this close to Transylvania. There were flowers in my room from Ivan when I got back, of course, and an invitation to dinner the next night. No intimations that I should wear something sexy, or prepare for a big night with Captain Sexy Trousers, and that only seems to make it worse.

Dreamed I was falling into a deep, deep pit.

Above me, the moon stares down the pit, illuminating the walls, which are too far away for me to touch. I have no idea how quickly I’m falling.

I hit the bed and wake up with a jolt.

Almost as if it’s with the voice of another person, I hear myself scream. The wind is blowing in through the open window, making the curtains dance about like creepy scooby doo ghosts. Outside, the town is a huddle of silent roofs, a jumble of schist and slate.

And I can still hear it, out there. Not my voice, but another human one. Screaming.

Probably a domestic or a schizophrenic or an alcoholic, I imagine to myself. But I get to my feet and go to the window anyway. I could drag a few lines of copy out of it, after all. Crappy Eastern European republic fails to care for its loonies shock.

But the voice is not shouting “You bastard what time do you call this”, or “I’ll fight the fuggin lot o’yer”, or even “I am Napoleon, do you hear me? First Emperor of France!”

No, what it’s shouting - in, I presume, Russian and Vaemna, though I can’t understand the Vaemna - is “Help me, for the love of God.” It is, I realize, as I lean out of the window, shouting very loud, loud enough to wake me, and I can sleep my way through a transatlantic flight in Economy class. And yet no lights are going on, no police sirens are sounding, no-one is coming to the poor bastard’s aid. If I squint down into the dark against the streetlights, I can see a trio of figures dragging one, smaller figure across a constellation of cobbles. He is yelling and shouting and his captors are not even trying to silence him. But nobody is doing anything, though all the world must hear.

They are dragging him down the Aeveny Gabyzaï, which is a dead end street, connecting only with the Museum and the expanse of empty wall at the east end of Victory Square, which connects only with...

No. They wouldn’t.

It transpires they would. As they walk, I notice one of the three is not helping with the manhandling and the dragging, but is instead trundling along a sort of little handcart, almost like a wheelbarrow with a solid platform on top of it. This on its own is making a noise like a steamroller on the cobblestones. Its wheels must be solid wood. I wonder what purpose this little geegaw might serve, and then they come to a stop in the square, and I realize.

I think of shouting out, but this man - this boy, I realize, from the high pitch of his yelling - has been shouting out there for the last ten minutes, and no-one has so much as twitched a net curtain. The only thing quick enough to stop what is going to happen would be a rifle bullet, and I have no such thing.

The three silent figures push their barrow to a halt right next to the wall. They are all wearing hats, for some peculiar reason, and some sort of smart jacket - almost as if they dress for this sort of occasion. Their captive continues to scream. They drag him onto the top of the barrow, yelling at him in Russian and Vaemna. The Russian is too fast and guttural for me to understand.

Two of them have to jump up onto the barrow in order to get him to stand upright, whilst the third holds it firmly by the handles, stopping all three of them from getting dumped down into the street. There is a little bit more struggling, and then a final bout of screaming high pitched enough to surely test even prepubescent vocal cords, and as they hoist him over the capstones so his head is hanging over absolutely nothing, the moon catches his face like a searchlight and I realize why his screams are so familiar.

It’s the boy from outside Starbuck’s. The boy from Victory Square.

Then they grunt and give one final heave, and the moonlight shows him fluttering down into the dark like a ghost.

Their task finished, the three figures dust themselves down, straighten their clothing, crack their knuckles (audibly, even at this distance), and trundle their cart away unconcernedly across the square, brilliantly picked out in bright moonshine.

I close the curtain and sit back on the bed. I still don’t shut the window. After that, vampires are nothing.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 14, 2010

Back from Belarus. Belarus appalling. These are people whose great grandfathers fought with guns to keep them from being ruled by Moscow, and they’re falling over themselves to kowtow to their new suited and booted czars. The Russian state automobile, the Mercedes, is everywhere, whilst ordinary White Russians queue out of the shop and down the street for bread. Russian fascist graffiti everywhere. Russian communist graffiti everywhere else. White Russian local politics boring (in fact nonexistent - Lukashenko’s grinning fizzog everywhere. He’s one of those democratically elected leaders who, gosh, just keep on getting democratically elected again, and again, and again...).

Was in Belarus as a token Russian speaker to support what were described to me as real reporters from head office in London. This was, of course, not necessary - everyone in Russia, White or otherwise, speaks English nowadays. And White Russian dialect is so impenetrable, might as well not have been there. Ended up shrugging shoulders and grinning gamely half the time. Real reporters glared at me disapprovingly.

In any case, now back to my ongoing project for the Thursday travel pullout. Made the mistake of returning directly to Na from Belarus. Man on customs went over my British passport with a fine toothcomb, examined and re-examined my visa, asked me suspiciously why I spoke Russian. Would not believe that I’d learned it in school. Asked me questions about the current make-up of the Man United squad, and became still more hostile when I professed no knowledge. Eventually escaped from customs man’s clutches after two hours of continuous questioning. Make mental note to go back via Warsaw next time.

Travel piece is now turning into investigative journalism. One of the local papers, Gaziëta Gabyzaï, which translates as The Abysmal Gazette, is printed in both Russian and Vaemna-language editions. Picked up the Russian edition, read it cover to cover, and found no record of any murder having been committed in the last two days. Two days ago, I saw the boy being thrown into the pit from my hotel window. Attempted to ring Ivan on his mobile, but received no reply. Remonstrated with myself for having failed to report a murder I’d seen happen with my own eyes. Why didn’t I report it? Apart from the fact I wasn’t sure, in the morning, whether or not I’d been dreaming, I have no idea.

Decided to report the murder now. Or, at the very least, to walk out to the break in the Beglerbeg’s Wall and assure myself I hadn’t been dreaming. Crossed the main square in front of the cathedral, walked in front of Starbuck’s, and saw Ivan sitting there on the turd-brown sofa with a blonde bit who certainly wasn’t his wife. They were talking in English, she with an American accent. Had no idea Ivan even spoke English. She had a dictaphone out on the table and was scribbling away notes absent-mindedly in shorthand whilst hanging adoringly on his every word.

A pimp passed Ivan on the pavement, flanked by bitches. He said something rapid to Ivan in Vaemna. Ivan laughed manfully. The pimp smirked and moved off. My Vaemna must be getting better. I think I had a pretty good idea what they had been saying to each other. I turned, unseen by any of them, and found myself looking at my own reflection in Starbuck’s shop front.

I hurried on. The American deep-down-dangling machine was growing steadily, and had moved closer to the Beglerbeg’s Wall. It had KOMATSU written ostentatiously all over it. Like two Komatsu executives buggering each other, it now rested on four sturdy yellow legs.

There was nothing by the wall. What, after all, would there have been? Blood? A signed confession written by the three who dumped the boy over?

Maybe it had all been a dream.

Halfway along the wall, though, I saw something passing strange. A man with a completely unnecessary torch strapped to a hardly more necessary construction helmet strapped to his head, dressed dapperly in a plastic sack saying FISONS with armholes cut out for his head and arms, was standing arguing with a city policeman. I couldn’t help noticing that the man appeared to be tied to a lamp post.

“Why not?” said the man in English. I felt the familiar sinking in my stomach all English people feel on realizing an idiot encountered abroad is also English. The Englander had a partner in crime who was dressed as quietly as he was, and whose grasp of haute couture even ran to air cylinders and flippers.

“Is danger”, explained the policeman. “Very big danger.” He held his hands out wide to illustrate how big the danger was. For the record, it was about three feet wide.

The man turned and pointed at the big fuck-off American crane. “You see that? Why are they allowed to go down there?”

The policeman shrugged. “They have permission.”

“And I haven’t got permission.”

“I know if you have permission or you not have permission. You not have permission.”

“Look, one of our friends may be hurt down there. Maybe even dead.”

At this point, Air Cylinder Man tugs his associate’s shoulder. “Look, Pete, maybe this isn’t the time.” It certainly isn’t. The police monkey’s hand is crawling over his left buttock behind him towards his gun, which is one of the little Russian ones that can punch a hole through steel. And the policeman can’t understand a word they’re saying now. They’ve lost it and started talking far too fast. He is also a small man – most Vaemna are – and both of them are much, much, bigger than he is. He is scared.

I interpose myself.

“Excuse me, officer”, I say, in perfect Russian. “These are two colleagues of mine. They are concerned a friend of theirs might be lost and hurt in the abyss.”

Captain Head Torch is hurt at being interrupted. “Barisef –”, he says, in Russian so dreadful it really shouldn’t be spoken by a human being.

“Shut up”, I say, in perfect English. “He will shoot you. You are not in North Yorkshire now, grobag boy.” This stops him. I switch back to the policeman. “I apologize for any inconvenience my coworker here may have caused. He fears his friend may have suffered a fatal accident.”

The inspector’s hand eases on his left buttock, and comes round in front of him again. He looks me up and down slowly.

“You have White Russian accent”, he accuses. I cringe. I hadn’t realized it was starting to rub off.

“I was born and bred in Minsk”, I lie.

He nods slowly. Then, he holds up a finger, to indicate he is about to say something important.

“Where people go when they die”, he says, “they stay, whether that place is a good place or a bad. It is not the job of your friend to bring people back.” He makes that little religious sign in the air, the one I’ve seen Gviong make, the one that may be the sign of the cross, and then again might not.

“You may go about your business”, he says. “Legal business”, he clarifies darkly, and departs.

***

“You can untie yourself from that lamp post now”, I say. To do him credit, Captain Head Torch finds this amusing.

“It’s a belay point”, he says.

“It’s a lamp post”, I say.

“We weren’t lying about our friend”, says Air Cylinder Man. “He disappeared down the Abyss yesterday.”

“Entering the Abyss without a permit”, I say, “is illegal. And what was he doing in there on his own, anyway?”

Pete shrugs. “He’s that sort of guy.”

“A tosser”, clarifies Air Cylinder Man.

“We’ve come here all this way from England, he’d promised us we were going to do the whole first mile down together, by the book, and then he takes off from the hotel while we’re asleep with half our gear.”

“Can’t do anything in our company”, says Air Cylinder Man.

“He’s an experienced caver”, says Pete. “Happier underneath Yorkshire than on top of it. If he comes up and tries to walk back to the minibus across the moors he gets lost.”

“The caves in North Yorkshire”, I say, “aren’t over a mile deep.”

“He’s been a mile down before and come back up”, says Pete. “We’ve been down Sarawak Chamber in Borneo before. That goes down about a mile.”

“Course”, adds Air Cylinder Man, “you have to climb a mile up a mountain before you get to down the mile. So you might as well have just stayed put, really, for all the buggering about.”

“This guy who went down the Abyss”, I say, “is over five feet in height and weighs more than seven stone, I take it.”

Pete nods. “Try six foot six and fifteen stone.”

“In that case, I haven’t seen him.”

***

Take Pete and Air Cylinder Man under my wing and off the street. Passers-by point and laugh and giggle and find them amusing, but obviously know they’re cavers rather than some sort of new wave of gay fashion. Cavers are common animals around here. Caving is illegal - the city authorities protect the sanctity of the Pit with an almost superstitious reverence - but it’s usually only possible for the police to arrest spelunkers after they’ve penetrated the hallowed chasm and are on the way back up, and even then all they can really do is fine them. Cavers gather round the Abyss like jackals round a carcass, waiting for the beat coppers to be otherwise occupied giving directions to tourists, before wrapping a rope round the nearest streetlight, cycle stand or traffic bollard, hopping over the Beglerbeg’s Wall and abseiling down into the void. It’s more usual for them to do their dirty in the hours of darkness, though. These guys must be genuinely worried.

Take them into the Xotel-Restavran Vugromaen in Victory Parade. ‘Vugromaen’ means ‘The Three Romes’, an old slavic church expression meaning Rome, Byzantium and Moscow. Russocentric toadying of the worst sort, but an interesting name for a gin palace. I buy them Russian coffees, on expenses - it’s a cold day, and they’re too northern to be lying about their friend.

It transpires Pete is a Business Process Reengineering Consultant, whatever that may be, and his friend Vernon (Air Cylinder Man) is a lecturer in mathematics. I knew they had to work hard to be able to afford all those shiny nuts and karabiners.

It is obvious Pete and Vern - and their missing friend, Sean - have been dreaming of this trip since they dug their first hole at the seaside with a bucket and spade and sat in it. “Course, you realize, it’s the challenge”, says Pete between quaffing.

“This thing must be twice as deep, shit, maybe three, four times as deep, as anything I’ve ever done”, he says. “Counting Wilhelmina Tranter at St. Paul’s Secondary”, he adds, in some personal surprise.

“And in the caves in Sarawak”, interjects Vern, “the water’s warm.” He sounds disgusted, as if caving in warm water has something vaguely homosexual about it.

“And the guano”, says Pete with relish, “the guano adds a challenge.”

“It changes to bat guano a few hundred metres down”, says Vern, obviously excited.

“Gosh”, I say, hoping I sound adequately impressed.

Pete and Vern seem to pay the sort of attention to inanimate chasms in the ground that most men do to women. Under the current circumstances, I find their total lack of attention to me refreshing, and buy them more drinks. They buy me more drinks. I learn a great deal about clints and grikes. You should always, it seems, take air cylinders of the more modern round-ended type down caves, as the older square-ended ones can catch in a cave roof and drown you. You should always climb rope ladders sideways-on.

Leave the Xotel-Restavran Vugromaen drunk and singing rude songs about swallow holes. Glad to have run into idiots from my home country. Pass a pimp in the street (probably the same pimp, still sporting a moll on each shoulder). Offer him fifteen hundred Minim for his bookends in heavily Belarus-accented Russian. He does not understand.

The Troglodytes are still going down the pit. They say the edges of the pit are quite well-patrolled, even after dark, and the top ten or twenty metres are crumbly with a thin coating of earth (and also, in place, human sewage) so it would be difficult, not to mention dangerous, to take that route. They say they have found another. I’ve already asked them if they’re going down the town sewer system. They say they aren’t.

It is still daylight. I still have time for a shower and a few minutes’ scribbling; the feature isn’t finished, maybe I can add a subsection on how to cave effectively in Na. I’m halfway back to the hotel when I remember my original reason for being out here.

The police station is on the other side of the square. It’s a big, squat, solid building that seems to have taken the last few hundred years of cowboys and Indians and Commies and Aryans in its stride. It has a line of shiny POLISIC cars parked up outside it. These cars are the very fastest Eastern Europe has to offer, Skoda Superbs, Czech on the front of the bonnet, German underneath it. Slow as fuck. It’s well known a savvy joyrider in a stolen Clio can outrun virtually any police car on the road here.

And the car at the end of the line is even slower. The big Zil. The police commissioner is in. Maybe the woman at Starbuck’s had more self-respect than some people I could mention.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn.

“Very poor, pretty lady”, says someone from the level of my shoulder. “Need dollars. Dollars will go up against Sterling Yen and Euro by close of play today.”

I look down. A face stares up at me. It looks like an ordinary face that has had the head sucked out of it. The skin is stretched taut over a cage of bone. The skin is also that of a seventy-year-old man, and this is odd, because I’m almost certainly looking at a thirteen-year-old boy.

I stare. I stare shamelessly. I stare not just because this is the first Oracle Smoke victim I’ve seen. I stare because I saw this boy fall a mile (two miles, three miles, four?) to his death only a few days ago.

“I’m sorry”, I say. “I’m English.”

The boy shrugs. “English dollars. And to him shall be given a sword, and he shall go forth conquering, and to conquer.”

I feel something pull at my other arm. I turn and notice I no longer have a handbag. Instead, I have a leather strap looped redundantly round my arm, and a boy even shorter than the one at my right elbow is absconding with the bag. Far too late, I move to yell. Realizing yelling will do nothing - they are already away and running - I move to run after them, and run into a stationary police officer, a kindly old gent of 50 or 60, watching them go with a look of unconcern. He holds up a hand to stop me.

“No further, if you value your neck”, he says, pointing at the inch-long sliver of sharpened steel the younger boy is carrying. “That went through your handbag strap with very little trouble, I believe. They are only very small, but they will kill you.” He pulls out a whistle and blows it. The boys continue running. “See? They are unafraid even of my whistle.”

Suddenly I’m not quite so sure I want police assistance. “I don’t want to cause trouble for them. They’re only stealing for food.”

He grins and shakes his head all-knowingly. “They don’t steal for food or shelter. They steal only for the Smoke, and they will steal for it until they starve.” He spits out the whistle and pulls out a gun. “This is my little boy gun”, he assures me. “7.62 millimetres only. It will hardly hurt a sparrow.”

He fires a warning shot to one side of the boys. It zings off distant cobblestones. They continue running. He fires again. One of them drops to the ground, blood jetting from his leg. But the other, the boy who went down the pit, is still running free. He even stops to grab my bag off his downed friend's body.

And it is the body. The dead body. A terrific amount of blood has come out of it for so short a time and so small a frame. The boy probably died of shock.

“Alas”, says the policeman, “God sees every sparrow that falls.” He makes that peculiar Vaemna religious symbol, and tucks his gun away. He jerks a thumb across the square to where a big black Merc has suddenly moved off from the kerb, its motorized mirrored windows closing.

“The mafia, they make a living robbing Smoke couriers. Once they break the chain of supply, the addicts must steal money to pay to get their Smoke bottles back. Otherwise the addicts would have no interest in you. You do not come in a bottle, and are not wrapped in aluminium foil.”

This puzzles me. “You mean the mafia don’t produce the Smoke.”

He shakes his head.

“Then who does?”

He smiles, and shrugs. Then, he walks off, ambling slowly along the cobbles at policeman speed, smiling at the beautiful morning.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 15, 2010

Luckily, I didn’t have my passport in my wallet, or any credit cards. I have been travelling in Eastern Europe for a long time, and know the value of the hotel safe. The handbag, mind you, was a valuable one, a limited edition.

I did not visit the police station to report the death. Several passing tourists took snapshots of the body. I exchanged addresses with one of them and offered him money for negatives. A journalist must do these things.

Got back to the hotel again to find more flowers in reception. Suspect Ivan has definitely been blown out by his American floozie. Cannot criticize however as am personally below even floozie status.

Birds preen after getting a shock. I read magazines. Strolled out to the foreign language bookstall and scored several out-of-date copies of Cosmo, Bella (The Magazine For Today’s Independent Woman), and Vogue. Did not escape even then; discovered seven new ways to please my man. (Also bought FHM, as it was in English - discovered seven new ways to Make My Woman Want It). Penned an extensive piece on the evils of living in a corrupt police state. Drank too much.

During the afternoon, visited the state of Na’s second most imposing tourist attraction, the Paerca Episcopa Maercus Andréëvici, a former gravel pit on the outskirts of town where trees have been planted and it is possible to hire bicycles and ride them for up to several kilometres without passing the same tree twice. The Vzeng Na Ministry of Tourism are obscenely proud of it. It is named after one of Na’s great national heroes, Bishop Maercus Andréëvici, who is historically lauded for having the common sense to retreat in good order from the Tartars at the Battle of Mohi, abandoning his feudal overlord Bela (King of Hungary, not the Magazine for Today’s Independent Woman) to his fate. This allowed him to ally himself, later, with the Ottoman armies of Beyazid I and free the lands of the Gzaere Valley for Islam. The main thing being, of course, that the land was under the Tartars no longer. As I have said, the Vaemna are nothing if not pragmatic.

Returned to the hotel having put down many, many pages of pure evil grossly misrepresenting the Vzeng Na Ministry of Tourism as Cthulhu-worshipping paedophiles in the back of my taxi. Picked up a message from the Troglodytes in reception. It appears I strategically forgot a promise to have dinner with them in the Zum Abgrund, a German-themed jolly beer-drinking thigh-slapping panzer-driving venue across the Cathedral Square. They had, if the date on the message was to be believed, already been there an hour.

Went there. What the hell. Was glad to see them. Got drunker. Sang more rude songs about limestone formations. Tights come down, apparently. They were sitting in an unobtrusive corner attracting rude stares from tourists and resigned sighs from locals, surrounded by coils of rope, nuts, karabiners, pitons and descenders. They confided to me in whispers that they were planning a caving expedition that very night.

“Really?” I said, flickering my eyelashes, wide-eyed.

They still will not divulge their secret route down into the Abyss, though, even when I accuse them point blank of planning to use the government’s deep bat guano shovel. They seem not to know of any such shovel, and its existence makes them pause for thought.

But in the end, they don’t like the idea. “We’d have seen it parked up on the pit edge”, says Pete. “It would only get parked up there when they were going to trawl for guano, yes? So while they’re still in this intermediate period where they wait for the bats to poop enough for it to be worth their scraping it off the walls, the shovel’ll be in storage in town somewhere. No way down there.”

“So which way are you going down?”

Pete taps his nose with great care, as if he might miss it if he doesn’t. “None of your beeswax.”

“It is my beeswax. Because I’m going with you.”

This startled the pair of them.

“Um. We work alone”, says Pete.

“Alone apart from each other”, clarifies Vern.

“I’ve been climbing before”, I say. “Climbing can’t be too different from caving. And I, which is to say, my employer’s expenses department, will pay you handsomely for the privilege.”

“Aha”, says Pete. “Money, huh.”

“Not sex, then”, says Vern hopefully.

“Sex is where I draw the line”, I say firmly (with you, at least, I add to myself, glancing at the muscle definition on the insides of Pete’s thighs).

“Rats”, says Vern.

“This isn’t like ordinary caving”, says Pete. “It’s a lot longer and a lot more treacherous. It’s like doing El Capitan underground.”

“I’ve been up the Old Man of Hoy”, I lie. This appears to impress them. They butt heads together and whisper at length, then break apart for further information.

“Aided or unaided?” says Pete.

“What’d’you take me for, some sort of shandy-diluting fairy?”

They huddle again.

“All right”, says Pete. “Pending successful financial negotiations, you’re in.”

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 16, 2010

Ten minutes before closing time, we’re inside the Museum of the Pit again. I have paid good money to goggle at Hellenic Imperial Votive Tablet Number 59,993, once again.

The place is full of backpackers, much more so than normal. Why is it full of them? Because Pete and Vernon have been hanging around outside it for the past hour offering vacillating hippies wads of worthless Vzeng Na currency to pay their way into the exhibition, claiming they no longer need the money as they’re leaving town and can’t change it. The backpackers are lumbering around like moonmen among glass cases filled with delicate exhibits, and the museum commissionaires, unused to such volumes of visitors - particularly visitors who insist on wearing hundred-pound Bergens at all times - scurry around anxiously, trying to discreetly stand behind the bigger and more dangerous-looking individuals.

Meanwhile, we - who have quite small rucksacks, by comparison - have finally entered the Museum ourselves, and are skulking unobtrusively behind the Vzeng Na Mixed Infants’ bacofoil recreation of the pagan idol.

“D’you think they’ve recognized us?” says Pete to me furtively.

“Almost certainly”, I say. “But I think they think they’ve other things to worry about.” Gviong, for one, has already thrown me a flummoxed stare of recognition, even in this woolly hat and outsize Gore-Tex parka I’m inhabiting as a temporary disguise. I find the fact that he recognized me so quickly both sweet and flattering.

“Is it behind us yet?”

Pete throws a nervous glance back over his shoulder. “Just about.”

“And you’re sure it’s unlocked.”

He ums and ahs. “Er, you might need to push it a bit.”

This isn’t encouraging, but in the event it (it is, in fact, a cleaning cupboard) opens with only the merest of shoulder barges, and as I barge, some pimply Oxbridge twot on the other side of the room just happens to loudly inform his travelling companions that “Nietzsche is only Schopenhauer reinvented, yah?”, masking the noise.

Inside, it is dark and there are cleaning materials. Luckily, far too many cleaning materials - huge numbers of cardboard boxes which we promptly hide behind. It smells very unclean for a cleaning cupboard. Our rucksacks are unpacked rapidly to reveal caving and burgling equipment. No air cylinders, though. Vern has been pressured into leaving them behind.

“There is”, asserts Pete, “a dead rat in here somewhere.”

“Dead rats”, I say, “are not what I’m bothered about. I can live in here with a dead rat till closing time.”

“Well”, says Vern ominously, “what do we do to pass the time?”

“If one green bottle”, says Pete, “falls, however accidentally, off one wall, you are for it, Vernon Hollingsworth.”

In the event we pass the time by being bored stiff in a cupboard, though this is alleviated by the thrill of being bored stiff in a cupboard we’re not supposed to be in. For many hours, there is the sound of shuffling feet and voices saying “Doch Nietzche ist nur Schopenhauer in neuen Kleidern, das weißt jeder.”

Then, finally, there is silence. The Museum has finally closed for the day.

“What if the cleaners come round?” whispers Vern.

“This is a former communist country”, I reply. “If the cleaners are in evidence first thing in the morning, which they are, they will not come round again in the evening. By the smell of things, we were lucky they came round in the morning.” And as neither Pete nor Vern seems willing to do so, I sneak out from behind the pile of pine fresh windowcleaner, push open the cupboard door a fraction, and poke my nose out into the bathhouse.

Leaf litter of fallen Wrigleys wrappers. A collage of Nike prints. Rows and rows and rows of silent votive tablets lying in state in cases, saying things like MAKE ME RICH and KILL MY ENEMY.

“Why are you so interested in going down there anyway?” hisses Vern.

“Put it this way - if you saw someone fall a mile to certain death, and then ran into them to talk to only a day later, wouldn’t you be curious?”

This is no answer, of course, but it shuts him up. The room is empty. The door to the elevator cage in the corner is unlocked (actually has no lock).

“The elevator shaft is open once it leaves the Museum”, I tell Pete. “Girderwork. A thin man could climb through it.”

He nods, opens the outer and inner elevator doors, and examines their locking mechanisms.

“I think the door on the elevator itself locks solid once the car is moving”, he says. He turns his attention to the louvre door. “And this has to be locked shut before the car will move.” He pulls a wad of chewing gum out of his cheek and squishes it into the door lock. “Now it thinks it has a bolt inside it.” He reaches through the lift cage and pushes the BOTTOM button, having to snatch his hand back quickly as the lift jolts into motion and begins to motor downward. “Et voilà.”

And even he, a man I supposed ought to be comfortable dangling at dizzy heights, took a good long look into the gulf beneath his feet, and took a good deep breath to steady himself.

Then, he swung himself into space above the drop, clambered down among the cantilevers as if walking downstairs, unlooped a coil of rope from round his shoulder, and began securing it around a handy girder. Vern followed him down like a big Helly Hansen’d spider.

This part of the descent was not so bad - began to think the whole thing might be a cinch, like going down a big climbing frame. After all, people who go to, say, Stanage, go there with intent to deliberately target the most difficult parts of the face. These guys just wanted to get to the bottom.

Erm. Didn’t they?

We were soon standing at the base of the cagework, on the actual face of the saddle at the foot of the actual pinnacle that had the actual Church of the Angel on its summit. Above us I could see the actual single-arch stone footbridge built by yer actual Matthias Corvinus after two unsuccessful tries which both fell into the void during construction. He finally used an unnamed English cathedral mason who constructed a marble arch so close to being flat that a marble placed anywhere on it took over ten seconds to roll off. But roll it did, from any point on the surface, the whole bridge being as precisely cut and planned as any of the onyx statues of saints that flanked it on both sides of the gulf, nailing down the weight. Even the Mongols were impressed by the bridge, and let it stand while churches galore burned around it. Today the bridge is helped to stand by lengths of steel cable pinned through its masonry, which is cheating in my view.

But we were standing a good twenty or thirty metres beneath it . Looking up at it. From underneath.

Nearby, tents full of archaeologists dozed in the dark. From one of the nearer tents, a ratbag voice said: “Those fucking museum faggots are using the fucking elevator after hours.”

“Fuckers”, came a voice back.

We made our way to the edge of the gulf, difficult in the dark, and Pete began casting about for places to put his nuts with a head torch. There were cries of “TURN THAT FUCKIN TORCH OFF” and “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, MAN, CAN’T YOU PEE STRAIGHT WITHOUT A LIGHT?” Eventually, Pete and Vern belayed the line to the base of the elevator shaft, which bent and whined alarmingly, but held. The rock was not good for climbing, but slimy and covered in patches of crumbling earth - not even one solid piece of cliff in places, but collections of frost-split gravel held together only by grass and soil. And the light was bad (for ‘bad’, read ‘nonexistent’). If I looked up and stared into the dark a little while, I could just about make out a pool of stars far above. Basically, Pete led the climb, Vern removed our protection all good-neighbourly behind us, and I scrabbled down between them making maximum use of the rope. I slipped two or three times; luckily, Pete’s nuts and bolts held. I tried to cover up my lack of experience by swearing at the slime and dark, and on this occasion at least they seemed to buy it. No idea whether they’ll buy it next time.

And so eventually, after what must be hour upon hour of scrambling, we finally arrive at the bottom of something.

It is not the bottom of the pit - that it cannot be. We’ve probably only gone around a hundred metres, an incredible distance for a novice climber like me who’s never been up anything more challenging than thirty feet of V Diff. But compared to the massive wound in the earth beneath us, it's a papercut. It is a shelf we're standing on, though, solid flattish ground, temporary respite whole handspans across. Room to stretch legs, maybe even lie flat to sleep. Pete says that we don’t need to sleep yet, but that we’ll do well to remember spots like this.

It also stinks to high heaven.

“Switch off your torches a minute”, says Pete. “And don’t put your weight on owt you haven’t felt out first. And what’s that FUCKING SMELL?”

As our eyes became accustomed to the gloom - it can take this long for the cones in the human eye to reach maximum sensitivity, as any astronomer lying on his back on a hillside squinting through a cardboard tube will tell you - the outlines of the underworld became more visible. Long black and white streaks of human and avian waste striped the rocks, some fresh enough to raise trails of steam. They streak down, down, down, converging, coalescing, until they sink into what is unmistakeably -

“A lake of shit”, says Vern; and he’s not wrong.

“It’s not marked on any maps”, complains Pete. He stares out into the dark. “Maybe it’s an optical illusion.”

“None of the maps are official anyway”, scoffs Vern.

“It must be yards across...”

“Tens of yards.” Vern seems to be trying to poke around it with what looks like a tentpole, which he must have taken from his rucksack. “It’s huge...”

“It has to be”, I say. “It contains all the accumulated bum waste of the entire city of Na. Must be an outflow somewhere, though.” I search the blackness for said outflow, but can’t see it.

“It can’t be a natural formation”, says Pete.

“It isn’t. It’s had two thousand years to form, like a pothole forms at the base of a waterfall.” I pause for dramatic effect. “A waterfall of poo.”

“I name this lake”, says Pete, “Lake Vladimir Pootin, on the grounds that it contains almost as much shit as he does. And I claim it”, he adds, “for Britain.”

Vern salutes. They perform an impromptu duet of Rule Britannia.

“Is there a way round it?” I say. And as I say it, I’m looking up at the arc of darkness obscuring the stars and thinking, what part of the city is above us right now?

“Think so”, says Vern from somewhere out there. I can see his headtorch bobbing. “Not bivouacking here, that’s for certain.”

Ah. So it was a tent pole.

“Do you often bivouac in caves?” I say.

“Frequently, in some of the really deep ones”, says Pete. “It can take days to get in and out.”

I look up again. “This is directly under the part of the edge that backs on to Victory Square.”

He grins. “Someone should tell the Americans. They’re going to be dipping their balls in the shit.”

I look down. “How deep do you think this pool is?”

He shrugs. “Can’t tell. Might be able to guess in daylight. Waterfall plunge pools are usually a metre or three at least. Why?”

“Do you think it could cushion the fall of someone dropping right from the top up there?”

He stares at the steaming cwm of ordure.

“I don’t know”, he says, shrugging. “Why? Did somebody?”

I name our new body of ‘water’ Lake Avernus. But I don’t tell either of them that. It is indeed, by Abyssal standards, enormous - maybe twenty metres across, perhaps ten or fifteen wide, a substantial bite out of the footprint of the pit. The Abyss wall behind it is set back in what, from here, looks to be a classic waterfall erosion pattern. It’s a wonder no-one has ever recorded that the pool existed.

“Maybe they were embarrassed”, says Vern as we finally rejoin him. “Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know they had a lake of cack down here.”

And at one end of the lake, there is a waterfall, though I’m loath to go up close and feel the spray on my face. It looks more like a sort of anaemic mudslide, and must ooze from the mouths of Lord alone knows how many civic sewage outlets far above. At the inward end of the lake, there is another waterfall, going down into depths which we prudently decide not to abseil down.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to stay here longer than strictly necessary”, says Pete, and I agree. I’ve no desire to step on a discarded AIDS-infected heroin syringe or jagged fragment of Oracle Smoke bottle.

Suddenly, we hear Vern’s voice call from near the exit waterfall.

“What is it?”

“Footprints!” he yells back. “I’ve found fucking footprints!”

***

There is someone down here who isn’t us.

To detract from the general drama, it seems they also have a penchant for Reebok trainers.

There is more than one set of footprints, and they, or their feet at any rate, are all human. They come down to the lake, then leave it. Sometimes they are dragging heavy objects as they do so.

“Scavengers”, says Pete. “Like the people who live on Smoky Mountain in Manila, or the muck-rakers in old London. People who make a living out of other people’s shit.”

“They must know a way back up to the surface”, says Vern, then seems to think about this a minute and goes very quiet. Somehow the thought of human beings who live down here all the time seems far, far worse than the idea of people who just commute here daily.

Some of the footprints have shoes; some are barefoot. Some appear to be wearing odd shoes, one manufacturer’s logo on the left foot, another on the right. There is at least one odd pairing that appears on two separate pairs of feet so that if the owners of these feet pooled their shoes, they’d have two matching pairs between them.

“Why do they come here?” says Vern.

Pete shrugs. “Everything that gets chucked down the sewers ends up here. It’s a shit-shark’s Aladdin’s Cave.”

Pete and Vern begin following the footprints off into the dark to see where they end up. I am growing uneasy about this.

“I just don’t want to come up against these guys after dark”, I say.

Pete shrugs. But he doesn’t argue, which basically means he feels the same way as I do, but doesn’t want to admit it, because he’s a big strong tough hairy man.

The footprints, we discover, lead away from the lake and along a broad ledge, joining many other prints, leading not up but down. A small car could be driven down the path they walk along, were it not for Vern’s next discovery.

“Steps!” he yells incredulously. “The damn thing’s cut into steps!”

A Devil’s Staircase, spiralling round and round the Abyssal wall into the depths. The steps are there, all right. And what’s more, they’re worn with the pressure of many, many feet.

“The opposite of Jacob’s Ladder”, says Pete.

Vern doesn’t think it’s the Devil’s Staircase.

“Satan’s Escalator”, he says. “Have you ever noticed how the shops on the High Street always have escalators to take you in, but only stairs to take you out?”

Not far along the Devil’s Escalator, there’s a small waterfall which I call Nightingale Falls, where a whole gaggle of tiny night-birds are washing themselves in the water, twittering like fuck. Since the birds seem to think it’s OK, we risk it, and it seems clean enough. It’s amazing how much human ordure can creep onto your clothing in the pitch dark. After ten minutes or so, we’re cold and soaking wet, but clean. I am aghast at the fact that Pete and Dave just peel off every inch of their caving gear and stand there unashamedly probing their every bodily crevice, but after a few moments’ indecision, I join them. We can hardly see each other in the dark anyway. (But if they try probing any of my bodily crevices, they’re for it...)

At this point Vern suddenly supports himself with one hand on the waterfall wall and goes into a coughing fit so bad I expect to see bits of lung coming up. Pete v. concerned. Vern says he thinks it’s just hay fever. Makes a joke that there couldn’t be much pollen down here. Pete says it’s no joke, as there isn’t pollen but there are zillions upon squillions of bats, and the amount of airborne batshit in some caves can be v. high. This is normally fine, but can be v. dangerous if bats are infected e.g. with rabies. Vern goes white as a bleached sheet and stops coughing forthwith, bless him. Have a feeling he is now trying to breathe as little as humanly possible.

Who cut the steps? We have no idea. We’re certainly not about to try and find out till we’ve had a good night’s sleep. So we roll out big comfy waterproof sleeping bags and get on with the snoring and the lying recumbent. I thought this sort of thing only happened when pimply little adolescents played Dungeons and Dragons, but we actually do post watches and I really, really do see the necessity for them.

I can’t sleep during my allotted sleeping time for excitement, so I doze off during my watch. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night. Out there in the dark, something is screaming. Maybe it’s an owl. I tell myself it’s an owl.

I’ve roped myself to the cliff so I don’t roll over in my sleep and fail to wake up from a falling dream. Penned these notes while I was on watch. Took my helmet off and put it down on a rock nearby so I could write by its light. Remember hearing from a friend who was in the army that a torch held in front of your body is the only point a sniper can see to shoot at in the dark. That may be why the police hold torches high up and reversed in the hand.

Hopefully, we will all wake up in the morning.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 17, 2005

We all woke up in the morning. It is raining, and it seems we’ve made our base camp (summit camp?) at precisely the wrong part of the face. For most of its length, the Devil’s Escalator is shielded from above by a more or less continuous overhang. In the dark, we chose the only part of it that wasn’t covered. When we woke up, nesting birds were looking back at us on either side, perfectly dry, with puzzled expressions on their beaks.

The overhang is evidently the reason why the Escalator is invisible from ground level - why Lake Avernus isn’t is more of a question. The canyon walls around it might conceivably hide it from view. In daylight - or what passes for daylight here, a sort of porridge-grey gloom which nevertheless seems brilliant after the oily blackness of last night - there is indeed a waterfall draining out of it, as well as into. Well, mostly water. It plops rather than plunges over the edge, sending a brown torrent of water, not-quite-water, used nappies and tampons (which, tut tut, should never be flushed) and a whole raft of other unlikely flotsam down unthinkable distances into the depths.

I walk up to the lake, and am impressed, though unamazed, at the extent to which it steams. Maybe that also masks it from overhead view.

The sides of the lake are very slippery, and I can only marvel at the lucky escape we had last night in not ending up in it. In consistency, it is like brown Ready-Brek, or the sort of sucking quicksand I’ve seen in far too many bad 50’s movies. Anyone falling in would certainly not come out again, I tell myself.

And then, a peculiar thing happens. I see a particularly big piece of garbage drop into the soup from above, an entire electric oven, a thing that would not normally float. I’ve heard bored kids sometimes sneak over the Beglerbeg’s Wall and chunk things down into the dark - fluorescent tubes and gas cannisters, mainly - just to watch them explode. It doesn’t explode - it’s an oven - but it does burst apart like an egg hit by a jackhammer, and sinks beneath the surface.

Then, incredibly, it comes back up again - even the big metal parts that shouldn’t float. It bobs, mostly, back up to the surface and drifts serenely back towards the shore, in bits.

Then I notice the bubbles rising and popping in the centre of the lake, unleashing great choking sulphurous farty clouds when they burst and shower poo around themselves like some sort of purulent hand grenade. This is not a lake of water, but a lake of poo, and decomposition is taking place down there underneath the surface, and decomposition means heat. The temperature down there in the centre might be that of bathwater, maybe even hotter. Maybe boiling hot. Perhaps the old bathhouse far above is not so weirdly situated. Maybe the bathhouse owners somehow managed to pump hot water up from here into its boilers. And sure enough, in one corner of the lake, I find a set of muck-encrusted pipes. Municipal sewage outflow, or private Victorian hot water inlet? No way to know.

So whatever solid objects fall into the lake, the lake gives up. Good news for scavengers hunting the shore for useful discarded items. Maybe even for human beings falling into the pool from far above, if they don’t get smashed by the impact or boiled alive by the lake waters...

The boy could have fallen down this far and survived. And been nudged gently ashore, even unconscious, by the current.

So, following that undeniable logic, if we carry on following the Devil’s Escalator down, we are about to run into the people he next ran into.

The Escalator, though cut directly from the stone of the cliff, has steps of rock of a completely different colour. Possibly, suggests Pete, this is because it was the Devil’s own job to shape the native stuff. The path is also shored up with this material where it needs to be. And whilst I’m taking the steps two at a time, I suddenly realize where I’ve seen it.

“This was mined outside town”, I say. “There’s an old set of quarries. Turned into a country park now. It’s the same stone, I’d swear it.”

“Must have been cut a long time ago, then”, says Vern, drawing my attention to a graffito on one of the squat rock pillars that support the overhang at points where the road has had to be physically battered through the abyssite. On top of the marks of a thousand chisels, there is something scratched into the stone in the Roman alphabet. I write down the lettering exactly.

HIC IACET M AEMILIVS GAIVS XXII LEGIONIS CENTVRIO PROPTER IMPIETATEM SVVM LAPIDIBVS LAPSIS INTERFECTVS DITIS IRAM CAVE

“It says ‘Cave’”, says Vern.

“Maybe it’s the same word in English and Vaemna”, shrugs Pete.

“It’s Latin”, I say. “There’s a man buried under this pillar. Quite an important man, a Centurion, I think. And ‘Cave’, I add, means ‘Beware’.”

Pete refuses to believe this. “You aren’t telling me Romans built this thing.”

“No”, says I, “I’m telling you Romans repaired it.”

“But it’s still in use.”

“So is the A2. Romans built that too.”

“What’s the rest of it mean?”

“No idea.”

We also, it has to be said, pass parts of the path which have been repaired with more modern materials - poured concrete, iron girders, metal brackets - although the Romans had concrete, they seldom put steel reinforcement in it. “This stuff looks more recent”, says Vern. Duh.

And then, directly underneath us in the dark, Pete catches sight of more of the same.

“Uh - what the hell is that?”

It’s only because he’s enough of an idiot to stroll along unconcernedly right next to the edge that he sees it first. When we do look down - I have to crouch down to get that close to the drop - it’s absolutely impossible to miss. After all, it spans the Abyss from side to side.

It’s a mass of rust, obviously, after so many years. But its original night-black paintjob is still obstinately refusing to reflect light - presumably the original builders painted it that colour to blend it in with the black hole of the abyss beneath it, probably to fend off air attacks. At its centre, I can still see the attachment points for the cable windings. Lord alone knows how they got it into place. It resembles a single span of the Forth Bridge, both in size and appearance. Every single one of the metal triangles that honeycomb its surface must be large enough for a man to fall through them. There are control cabins, inspection walkways, ladders, housings for giant motors. It must weigh as much as an ocean liner, contain enough steel to make a hundred Maus tanks.

So why, in a time of severe tank shortage, did they build it?

“I know what it is”, I say, not without a touch of smugness.

“A Greco-Roman centrifuge”, says Vern.

“An ancient Mongol planetarium”, counters Pete.

“A big old Nazi gantry crane”, I say. “Built to explore the Abyss. It must be capable of hauling a hundred tonnes or more.”

“What”, says Pete, “like the one the Americans have got in the square upstairs?”

“And like the model of the one the Soviets built in the Museum.” This, of course, explains where the Soviets got the idea, and the motivation - if superior German researchers wanted to build a thing so badly, the Russians would have to build one of their own just to see what the Nazis had been up to. “They copied what the Krauts had done before them. Probably even used German scientists to build it.”

“German crane scientists”, smans Pete.

“A crane to dangle stuff down a mile or more”, I say, “is a difficult thing to build. I don’t even know that anyone ever has built one. Not as difficult to build as an atom bomb or rocket, maybe, but hardly easy. And they just left it down here to rust.”

Pete shrugs. “If you believe the Museum dioramas, they left in a bit of a rush.”

“But why didn’t they blow it up? If Hitler and Goebbels and so on were crazy enough to think this was so all-fired important, why did they leave it for the Russians to find?”

“Maybe they got to the inner world”, grins Vern. “Maybe they found out there’s nothing there.”

“Or maybe”, says Pete, “they found something down there so bad, they wanted the Russians to find it after them.”

This is most unlike him. I tell him so.

“Just a thought”, he says.

“Er”, says Vern. “There’s something moving down there.”

I squint. There is indeed movement, down there in the thicket of metal triangles. Whether it’s human, I can’t tell. But something was moving, and has now hastily withdrawn into the scaffolding, which means only one thing: We’ve been seen.

Pete nods. “Well, we always suspected that, didn’t we?” He points across the gulf at the opposite cliff. I squint to follow his finger.

“Looks like someone else saw the thing before we did, too.”

It’s a rope, attached to the cliff by bolts and pitons, bright red nylon against the grey rock.

“Sean's rope”, he says. “Worked his way right down that face to put it there.”

I ask why we didn’t see any ropes on the way down to the Escalator.

“Probably climbed that bit freestyle”, says Pete. “Nutter.” But when he says ‘Nutter’, he says it in the same way as anyone normal might say, ‘What a guy!’

So it’s settled, then. We’re going down to take a look at the Nazi gantry crane, no matter how many drug-addled lunatics might be hiding in it.

It doesn’t take long to make our way down to the crane, though at one point we have to detour round a rusting Nazi half-track abandoned on the path, its machine gun still pointed up towards the pit head at maximum elevation. There is no ammunition left in the machine gun. Possibly this is the reason why it’s still attached to the vehicle. But what was it doing down here in the first place? What can have been down here that required the use of armoured vehicles for protection?

I sit down on a rock a long way away to get a stone out of my boot while Pete and Vern walk down to one of the concrete piers that support the gantry. I warn Vern and Pete that the hopheaded nutjobs, whoever they are, might have guns or knives or pit bull terriers and such. Pete nods, but states confidently that the accurate range of a pistol is only about forty or fifty yards. He reckons we’ll know a junkie is about to shoot at us before we get that close to him.

Pete, it transpires, hasn’t met that many junkies.

He walks out onto the broad flat walkway where the crane joins the cliff. His boots crunch on the muck. The structure is deserted. At one end, a rusted iron manhole lies on the concrete like a bad penny. The hole it covers lies open, and the wind is making a noise on it like the blowing of a flute.

He edges closer to the gantry. Nothing moves.

“Whoever was here”, he says, “I think they’ve gone now.”

The note blown by the wind on the manhole changes, drops suddenly.

“PETE!” I yell.

They’re in the manhole.

A single smacked-up opium fiend pops out, and, with a “THIS DAY SHALL YOU BE WITH ME IN PARADISE!”, hits Pete with an accurate burst from what looks remarkably like a submachinegun. All three slugs hit him dead in the chest. He topples back, off the edge to which he was walking so close like a twat, and falls on the back of his head onto the rusted iron crap of the gantry. There is a sound like a heavyweight boxer punching a melon.

Then he slides off the gantry and down, leaving a red trail like a slug, and is gone. So easy. Live human, dead human.

Vern is suddenly nowhere to be seen.

Having looked for Vern in vain, the controlled substance user in the manhole turns around, preparing to do me too. “I am not going to hurt you”, he says unconvincingly, whilst continuing to point the gun right at the middle of my head. However, when he pulls the trigger, there’s only an unimpressive CHING sound. He appears to have some difficulty figuring out how to clear the jam from the breech, and while he’s holding the gun upside down and squinting up its barrel I hit him square in the eye with the only weapon I have, a nasty sharp shard of abyssite I’ve just prised out of my boot heel. It hits so hard that I see blood. He should scream like a baby. Instead, he shuts one eye, works the jam loose, waves the gun in my general direction, and fires (inaccurately, as he’s firing with only one eye). Rock chips spray me from all sides as his near misses carve up the cliff.

And then, he’s stopped firing, and is rolling on the ground struggling with something much bigger and heftier than he is. Vern, who had dropped down behind the concrete pier out of sight, suspended over the abyss by his fingertips, has squirmed back up over the edge and taken him from behind. The junkie fights like an anaemic demon, but is so pale and wasted that Vern can simply lift him up, turn him round till he’s hanging over the edge, and drop him. He doesn’t even scream or paw the walls as he falls, but instead makes a “WOOOO!” noise, like a kid on a roller coaster.

Vern stares down into the abyss for a long, long time.

“He’s still going down”, he says.

I rush over suddenly to the manhole cover and kick it back over the hole, several times before it settles. Then I sit on it. Hoping it’s bulletproof.

“What do we now?” I say.

Vern has no answer. He seems as stunned as I am. To cap it all, the Oracle Smoker - I presume he was an Oracle Smoker - meanly kept hold of the submachinegun when he fell over the cliff.

“There may be more of them about”, I say; and as if on cue, the cliff to my right suddenly stars as something zings into it at high speed.

“How did they get up there?” says Vern.

They are shooting at us with a pistol - about three or four people and one pistol, from much higher up the Abyss. Direly aimed bullets PING and PAZANG off the rock and concrete all around us. Occasionally they miss the gantry structure altogether. But they’re coming down the Escalator, and if their one peashooter doesn’t explode in the face of the man who’s firing it by the time they get to point blank range, we’re goulash.

“Must be an easier way down the cliff”, I say. “We must have missed it in the dark.”

“Yes”, says Vern. “We must have.”

“We can’t go up any more”, I say, frighteningly rational.

“We’ll have to go down”, deduces Vern (in whom the instinct to go down, after all, is strong).

I look at the rusty iron ladders disappearing into the gantry framework.

“We can go sideways”, I say.

“We’ll be trapped in there”, protests Vern. “Besides, we don’t know how many of them might be in there. That might be where they live.”

They’ve stopped shooting at us from above now, clear evidence that even a mind crazed by Oracle Smoke can still figure out how many bullets there are left in a magazine. But they’re still on their way down. And they don’t just have a gun with them. More ironmongery is flickering in the dim light. Knives. Bigger things than knives. Axes, maybe, or shovels, or meat cleavers.

“What are they shooting at us for?” says Vern, now they’ve stopped shooting. “We haven’t done anything to them.”

This, I have to admit, is a good point. Then I remember what the old policeman said about Oracle Smokers - that they don’t have any interest in anything but Oracle Smoke.

“Oh my god”, I say. “It’s down here, isn’t it. This is where it comes from.”

“We’d better get inside”, says Vern pragmatically, hurrying over to one of the rusted ladders. “Don’t hold on to it too hard, unless you want hepatitis. And only put your feet on the edges of the rungs.”

There’s nobody down inside the gantry, which is a big dark tunnel of rust dappled with triangular patches of light. Within it are walkways running the length of the structure, platforms, engine mountings, a telephone handset bolted to a girder. As I climb down, I can’t see a single junked-up cokehead down here.

What I can do, however, is smell them. The whole of the inside of the gantry stinks like an unwashed lavatory. In fact, when I take my hand off the wet sticky rung of the ladder and smell it, I realize that it is an unwashed lavatory. Not only has someone gone to the toilet down here, they’ve also gone to the trouble of smearing their shit around the walls, floors, rungs, everything.

My feet crunch on something as I step off the ladder. Vern switches on his head torch, shines it down. Glass glints back at us from the dark. Glass, and silver foil. “It was glass that was crunching underfoot up top”, I observe. “These are the remains of Smoke bottles.” I explain about Smoke bottles. Vern appears to be trying to get an international number on the bakelite telephone attached to one of the gantry supports.

“No electric”, he says.

“No kidding”, I say.

We move out of the gantry and into the concrete pier, where fingermarks are clearly visible by head-torch-light in the shitsmears on the wall. Smears of shit, and of blood. The entire floor, it seems, is just one big potty to these people. Stepping through the room is like stepping through a faecal minefield. Vaughan coughs hard on entering the room, what with the dust and all, then realizes he’s coughing and shuts up. Up above us, up a length of ladder, is the manhole cover to the top, with a sturdy (rusted) iron bar in its inner surface. Right behind us is the steel door to the gantry, which looks thick enough to give gunfire a serious run for its money. It’s the work of seconds to whip out a climbing rope and tie the handle of the one to the bar of the other, tighter than a drunk Scots virgin. Now no-one can open either. Whilst the dragon-chasing lotus-eaters outside learn this and start to hammer on the metal, we move on into the structure. We find us a dead Nazi.

Our dead Nazi is sitting in a little office inside the pier, where, from the position of his body, he appears to have blown the top of his own head off with a gun he is no longer holding (possibly the one the hopheads are now using on us?). We have to push and kick our way into the little side room he’s sitting in, as it seems to have been deliberately blocked off, the door nailed to the frame. A makeshift sign on the door says DANGER - HAZARD TO HEALTH in Russian, but we only notice this after we kick our way in. It has too much bum juice smeared all over it to be properly legible.

“He’s SS”, says Vern. “Important SS. A Captain. “See the pips on the left hand side of his collar? And on the right hand side of his collar - normally, there’d be some sort of unit designation here. SS runes, a death’s head, some other Nazi shit. But instead, there’s this.” He holds the disintegrating cloth up for inspection. The symbol on it looks like a swastika drawn with two sets of lines, as if drawn by a bad kid writing with two pens in the same hand to get his lines done quicker.

“That’s a way of disguising his unit”, says Vern. “Of confusing anyone looking for the officer who gave him his orders. It also means that he was a concentration camp attendant.”

“So they did use forced labour here.”

“Looks like it.”

There is not much meat on him by now; rats seem to have gnawed his clothes apart to get the meat off the skeleton. Thankfully, I can’t see any teethmarks in the bone that look human. The bullet has not only passed through his head, but zinged and ricocheted back and forth off the concrete all around the chamber, smashing a picture of the Führer on one wall, and putting a hole clean through Mein Kampf, Goethe’s Faust, and the Bible, all of which are sitting back to back on a bookshelf, flanked by a pair of rather natty Nazi bookends in the shape of Indomitable Eagles Of Destiny. A gas mask lies on the floor next to him. Why he’s committed suicide, I have no idea. Since he shot himself, the room also appears to have been vandalized by Soviets. A lurid red five-pointed star has been splashed across one wall, and RED ARMY TROOPS SHALL NEVER DIE over the opposite one.

In the next chamber on is a dead Red Army soldier. He’s also sitting at an escritoire, in uniform, a pile of papers neatly stacked in front of him. On his desktop he even has a steam-powered Soviet computer of some antiquity, with a screen the size of a postage stamp. He, too, has been shot in the head. There’s a little round hole in one side of his skull, and a big ugly hole in the other. He has actually been shot through one eye of his gasmask, which he is still wearing. There is glass inside his skull. It rattles when I touch it. His gun is also missing.

“Maybe someone else shot him”, hopes Vern.

“I get the feeling”, I say, “that he shot himself.”

The gasmask he is wearing is also useless. It seems to have been cut through at the front, where the rubber tube leaves the mask on its way to the filter cannister on his back. There is no sign of the knife that did this either.

Apart from him, the room is an ordinary, if very smelly, office, with a rank of filing cabinets lining one wall; I pull one out, and it’s still full of folders. Stars, hammers and sickles are stamped on every page, using even more unnecessary red ink than my old maths teacher.

“What does it say?” says Vern.

“Not sure...just tons of graphs...this block graph’s labelled ‘Potential Productive Output’...x/y plots of production versus time, production against workforce....uh, workforce goes down over time. Seems to peak in 1945, stays high through the early 1950’s, goes downhill sharply after 1953...which, er, will be about the time of the end of the gulag system.”

“They were making something down here”, says Vern. “Something that killed the people who made it. Something only prison labour was fit to make.”

Behind us, from close outside the metal door, a voice is saying, “In the year 2011 and seven months, from the sky shall come the Great King of Terror.”

“Before and afterwards, war reigns happily” echoes another voice from up above the manhole.

I rummage further through the drawers. “Some of these are in German. Look like production figures too, for the manufacture of something they just call Omega-Stoff.”

“You speak German as well as Russian?”

“I figured it’d be useful in business if I couldn’t get to be a spy.” He finds this funny, which is odd, because it’s true. Hey, we all have our dreams.

“What’s Omega-Stoff mean?”

“Erm. ‘Omega Stuff’.”

“Maybe it was some sort of fuel or explosive. All this was built by a Nazi army, after all.”

Behind us, voices outside the fragile-seeming metal doors are, and I am not kidding, informing us that the weather will be fine tomorrow until lunchtime, when a light drizzle will blow in from the direction of the Pripyet Marshes. It will, they say, be cold.

“I think we’d better go in further, Pen.” Vern is watching the violently vibrating doors with an expression of deep disquiet. “Maybe there’ll be something back there we can fight them with.”

I pull out a fistful of folders. “OK.”

We bar the next door on the inside. It disturbs me that, down here, someone felt the need to put a bar on it. The door is also huge, the size of a bank vault, inches thick. The other side of the wall it’s set in, in the light of my head torch, is plastered with signs in Russian which appear to make no sense. WARNING. AIRTIGHT SEAL. YOU ARE LEAVING THE SECURE AREA. RESPIRATORS MUST BE WORN. Beyond the Airtight Seal - which I assume is the door - the walls are still concrete, though we must be inside the cliff by now. But the chamber beyond is huge. The ceiling rests on steel pillars bolted together with pins a man’s wrist thick, and I-beams that reach from wall to wall. The air in here is like soup, full of airborne shit. I have to cough, but quietly, so hard that my brains nearly explode out of my ears.

The room is also filled with machinery, arranged neatly in lines, still arranged neatly in lines despite the fact that it’s covered with muck and human excrement, probably because the machinery is too heavy to be disarranged. It’s quite obvious what sort of machinery it is. There are hoists for lifting heavy objects and lowering them onto the lines, bins for storing continuously consumed components, conveyor belts that span the length of the room.

“It’s a production line”, said Vern. “An underground factory. They were building them all over Germany towards the end of the War, to protect against Allied bombing. Germany and other places too, like Czechoslovakia. But what were they making?”

The factory lines seem to have been making more than one thing, in fact - huge, fluted metal tubes big enough around for a tall midget to stand up inside them, flat-riveted metal sheets that look like they belong on aircraft, man-high things like drainpipes with crosshairs and triggers, and a number of things whose purpose is totally unmistakable.

The hulls of these things alone are the height of a man, and the turret above adds almost that again. The turret runs almost the entire length of the hull. Their tracks are thick as building bricks. Their guns - those that have guns - seem big enough to fire truck axles out of. But despite all this sheer brutal size, they’re an inch wider than they really should be on all sides with a thick rind of rust. Down here, entombed in concrete, they have become useless. (They must be. Otherwise a junkie would be firing one of them at us).

“What the hell are those?” says Vern, hugely impressed.

“Mice”, I giggle. “The rest, I have no idea.”

Vern does. “Desperation weapons”, he says. “Those small tubes, they were called ‘Panzerfaust’” - he pronounces it ‘Pansyforced’, which has got to be Freudian in some way - “cheap anti-tank weapons. And those aviation parts over there look like bits of a Bochem Natter. Cheap piloted rocket so dangerous they really should have gone the whole hog and just called it a kamikaze. Weapons they produced towards the end of the war, when they were beginning to realize they were beaten. The big tanks, too.” He hangs his head guiltily. “My Dad had all nine million editions of The World At War, plus the handsome binders.”

“German weapons, then”, I say.

He discreetly points out the fact that I’m standing in front of a six foot Teutonic cross printed onto a rocket wing.

“Looks like the Russians left this part alone”, he says. “Almost as if they weren’t really interested.”

There are also offices, canteens, storage bays, and what look like air conditioning facilities. A red line wide enough for two men to walk it abreast has been painted on the floor, along with exhortatory expressions like STAY RIGHT!, STAY LEFT!, and OFF THE LINE MEANS DEATH!

We stay on the line.

There is also glass and silver foil everywhere, and a smell of burnt petrol.

“They’re in here”, I say. “With us.”

We pass a cabinet of gasmasks, staring eyelessly at us like racks of Killing Fields skulls.

“If there’s something so dangerous down here”, I say, “maybe we ought to take advantage of these.”

Vern looks at them distrustfully. “If they’re old fire respirators, they might have asbestos in the filters. Give yourself lung cancer, breathing through them.”

Despite this, I run my hand along the masks until I find one, at the very end of the bottom row, that I reckon might fit my face. The masks are helpfully sorted into sizes. They are of German manufacture, though someone has also stencilled instructions on each one in Russian, and the GRÖßE categories on the mask cabinet in German script are accompanied by equivalent ones in Cyrillic. They do not look quite like normal gas masks - the bit round the nose, and the filter cannister at the belt, both seem longer and more complicated.

My mask seems a fairly good fit, though I give myself a coughing fit from the dust (hopefully not the asbestos dust) when I put it on, and imagine all sorts of unseen terrors homing in on the ruckus I’m making as I do so. Some of the SS troopers must have had small heads, no doubt to house those tiny Nazi minds they were out of. I hang my mask around my neck, and buckle the filter round my waist. Immediately, I feel safer. Not.

The Soviets, it seems, planted a skeleton staff down here (literally in at least one case, haha). One of the canteens has a red border round it, and bunk beds at the far end. A Portakabin, which at a guess contained the office staff, sits next to the canteen. As usual, there are no guns.

But by far the most interesting thing we find is at the very end of the chamber, recessed into the wall and big enough to drive a tank into. We know this because someone already has done.

“It’s an elevator”, says Vern.

“An elevator that can lift two hundred tonnes?” I step, gingerly, onto the platform. It sways giddily under my weight, but not too much - after all, the pressure of my foot is not going to push a heavy tank sitting on a metal plate big enough to hold up a heavy tank very far. Far, far up above me, steel cables which must be strong enough to bind Satan himself sigh wistfully. If they snap....

“It’s not going to break”, says Vern. “It hasn’t broken under two hundred tonnes in sixty years, it’s not going to break under two hundred and one.”

Chagrined that he’s implying I weigh a tonne, I step out onto the platform.

“A lift shaft”, I confirm. “Going up.”

Vern, meanwhile, can’t resist poking his head torch over the edges of the platform and peering into the depths. “And down”, he says. He looks up again. “We could climb this.”

“Yes, and we could also find the bloody stairs.”

We find the bloody stairs, as I suspected, at the end of one of the ever-present red lines. But there’s an olfactory warning as to how safe they are - they stink of shit.

“They come this way too.”

Vern nods. “Maybe the lift shaft might be safer.”

These words are made even truer by a sudden clanging from the stairwell above.

“They’re up above us.” Vern dives out incautiously into the stairwell, squinting upward. “Two or three. At least.”

“Might have realized they can’t get in the front entrance”, I say. “Might be the same lot.” But at the same time, in my heart of hearts, I know this is all a lie, and that we are being outflanked, and are already outgunned and outnumbered. How many weed-loaded junkheads can one clandestine underground facility support?

But they don’t need to be supported. They don’t need to eat or sleep, and breathing and shitting are just things their body can’t kick the habit of doing. They don’t come down here to live. They come down here to die.

Just at that moment, we hear the sound of our carefully constructed blockade breaking far behind us.

“We could hide”, says Vern. “Somewhere off the red line, in the dormitories or in among the machinery.”

“These people know this place. We don’t. And I don’t think they care a great deal about sticking to the red lines.” I ponder this a minute. “I hate to say it, but there’s one direction they won’t be expecting us to go in.” I nod at the stairwell, going down.

Vern looks doubtful. I sweeten the deal. “We’d only need to go down a little, then wait until they come past. They’re bound to go into the factory room looking for us. Then we’d come back up and run up to the surface.”

He considers it, then nods. “Switch off your helmet light.”

I know it needs to be done - the head torches make us stand out like a priapism patient in a nudist colony - but it’s still scary. When the light dies, the dark is awful, all-enveloping.

“THEY’VE SWITCHED OFF THEIR TORCHES”, hisses a voice above us, much closer than I thought.

It’s only after a few seconds that I realize the enemy have their own lights as well, smaller, crapper torches, spiralling down the stairwell from above. Much, much more than two or three. But in the dim light, I tell myself, we will be able to see them coming and slink about invisible in the dark.

As soon as I move to go lower on the staircase, I bang my knee on the steel balustrade, and it hurts like hell, and I can’t yell out to relieve it. My feet crunch and squelch softly on the shitsmeared steps, and no matter how slowly and carefully I move, I can’t stop it sounding like I’ve got double-sided sellotape on my soles. But the enemy are even noisier, and we manage to move relatively silently against the relative cacophany they’re making. And when they come to the entrance to the machine hall, they move on into the room just like they were supposed to. But what they weren’t supposed to do was leave a man behind to guard the stairwell. A man with a gun.

The gun looks like a hunting rifle, a tiny little one, hardly designed to kill people. But I’m fairly sure it would smart some if it shot me. And therein lies the crux of the problem we non-junkies have in dealing with junkies - junkies may be being ridden by the heroin hag, but they’re not (necessarily) stupid. Instead, whatever intelligence they had prior to getting junked up is sharpened, bent solely to the purpose of getting hold of junk. Or, of course, of protecting what supply of junk they already possess.

“What the hell do we do now?” hisses Vern. He hisses too loudly. The hophead hears. He pricks up his ears. He takes a couple of steps further down the stairwell. We, on the other hand, can’t move. He’ll surely hear us if we do.

Then someone falls over a big clangorous pile of something in the big room upstairs, and we scuttle down a few steps, maybe just a little too loudly, as our junkie stiffens and listens again on the stairwell before taking another two steps closer. Someone else makes a racket in the big room, and we edge down a little further. Again, our junkie hears us and edges lower.

We are now coming close to the doorway on the next storey down. And through the doorway, we can see light.

The door is another of the massive steel ones, designed to be airtight, hanging open on a set of hinges big enough to be bridge supports. It is actually swinging open in the breeze - there is a breeze - though it must weigh at least a tonne. To leave such a massive object free to travel is surely to invite disaster. But to the people who live down here, the only conceivable disaster is a failure to get their next hit of Smoke. Having their arms, legs or head crunched off in a one-tonne door is, it seems, nothing by comparison.

There is the usual crop of warnings round the door - DO NOT GO FURTHER THAN THIS POINT, BREATHING EQUIPMENT IS MANDATORY, DANGER OF HELL AND DEATH, etc. Beyond the door, as I said earlier, we can see firelight.

It is surely beyond the end of foolhardy to light campfires underground. These people haven’t just lit one, but a hundred. The chamber on this level, I notice as we creep lower, is just as large, just as chock full of widgetry.

But the widgetry is different, somehow. Line upon line of cylindrical metal tanks, each the length of a petrol tanker. Each one bolted to the floor. Each fed by a complex mystery of pipes and valves, snaking out along the floor, rising to form metal arbours over the walkways between the tanks.

On the walkways, people are living. Not clustered around the campfires, huddled close to the heat, but laid out as good as dead on the cold metal, staring raptly at nothing, at things no-one without a head full of Smoke can see. The fires, I realize with a cold shudder, are not to warm people, but to warm Smoke bottles. Makeshift wire tripods are propped up over the flames with an ingenuity born of complete and utter devotion to purpose. Bottles of every size, colour and configuration are arranged neatly round the floor, even the empty ones positioned with the same reverence as religious icons.

Wait a minute.

Empty ones?

I shut my eyes, reopen them, and see the empty bottles still there, each one lovingly pre-wrapped in silver foil pressed around its outline like a tailormade dress around a bride. And the full bottles, too, though I’ve never technically seen either an empty bottle or a full before. But I can tell these are full, because they are as black as asps and gleam like venom.

There are so many full bottles that they stretch up the steps that lead up to our door out of the chamber. Some of them are close enough to touch. Between the empty bottles and the full on the floor downstairs, meanwhile, there is a tap, almost as if Oracle Smoke were a thing that came out of the walls like water or electricity. And that tap is coming right out of the end of the nearest and biggest of the tanks. The tanks that have skulls and crossbones on them. Skulls and crossbones, the Roman characters SAMAROBRIN, the Cyrillic characters Самаробрын, the Greek letter Omega.

“Oracle Smoke”, I realize, too late, out loud, “isn’t a drug. It’s a weapon.”

Vern nods. “Imagine what you could do to your enemies if you shelled one of their cities with the stuff.” He thinks a moment. “I’ll bet the shells those heavy tanks upstairs are built to fire are hollow.”

We’ve been sitting gawping into the sub-basement too long. The junkie at the top of the stairs has clumped down another couple of steps before we hear him coming.

“You are going to kill me”, he says, and shoots Vern. Vern crumples, but then, as the boy - he can only be around thirteen or fourteen - jerks the bolt back to load a new round from the magazine, shoots out a desperate hand and grabs the kid’s arm with a hand I know to be capable of hauling a fifteen stone man six feet up a rock face by its fingertips. I swear I hear bones crack. Then Vern sweeps the kid sideways over the balustrade as if he were a doll (which he virtually is; the Smoke has left him no musculature except what he needs to stand up straight and wander from bottle to bottle).

The kid falls. The gun clatters to the floor on our side of the bars. Ha! Luckily, though its barrel is pointing straight at me as it clangs down on its butt on the steps, it does not go off.

The single shot it did fire, however, has been heard. In the firelit blackness below us, bodies that looked dead are stirring. On the stairs above us, feet are clanging downwards. Vern, meanwhile, has collapsed against the balustrade, leaking red stuff. Decidedly useless and immobile.

“Samarobrin shall spread the breadth of the Northern Pole”, murmurs a voice from below.

“The well-dressed executive will be wearing tweed this winter”, assures another. I hear a knifeblade click out of a handle and lock.

“Is that what they call it?” says Vern. “Samarobrin?”

“It’s Nostradamus”, I say back. “From his prediction of the end of the world. They talk in shitty prophecies, remember. He probably read it in a book.”

“He said it in English, Pen.” And it’s only then that I realize he’s right.

Now that really does put the frighteners on. And now that they’ve identified a threat to their nest, the Smokers are swarming up towards us with a vengeance, like a nest of big sick-looking termites, some of them collecting shards of spent bottle held like knives, oblivious to the fact that what will slash our throats will also sever their fingers. Oblivious to all things but the need to protect their precious Smoke.

And suddenly, I see our way out of this. Quickly, I reach forward and snatch up a bottle of the black junk.

I nearly drop it - what I’m not expecting is for it to feel so cold, as if something more frigid than a politician’s heart is rolling around inside it. And when I look into it, into the glass, the smoke or dust or gas inside it really does seem to coil and roil like some sort of infernal eel.

It’s also letting loose tiny puffs of black smoke from out of its stopper, round the carefully-made wax seal at its neck. Puffs of smoke that seem to go out of their way to seek out the bare flesh on my arms. I quickly develop second thoughts about having picked up the thing.

But it has the desired effect.

They all, to a junkie, go silent. An indeterminate number of angels could be heard tapdancing on a dropping pinhead. It is as if I’m the villain in the scene in the bad movie where the bad guy threatens to shoot the baby/child/dog/cat/girlfriend if the hero doesn’t drop his gun.

As I have said before, these are not stupid people. These are perfectly intelligent and rational people whose rationality has been entirely perverted to the aim of acquiring Oracle Smoke. And I’m holding a bottle of the stuff which I could break at any time.

The goons on the stairs are equally impressed with the gravity of the situation. They stand down, holding (it transpires) a motley collection of firearms ranging from fowling pieces that look like they were made for Czar Nicholas to full-on military hardware. We pass them on the stairs at kissing distance as I dangle the bottle over the bannisters. I have to support Vern with my other arm. We don’t attempt to bring the rifle. It wouldn’t be much use in any case. Half the artillery these people have looks set to blow up in the face of anyone fool enough to fire it.

We make it up to the machinery level, but they’re still following near enough behind us to twang my knicker elastic. It’s at this point that Vern refuses to be lugged any further. He’s breathing like a fat Yankee nudist climbing Everest. And Vern, I know, enjoys a spot of fell running when he’s not caving. He probably has twice the number of red blood cells of any normal man.

“Come on!” I yell, nearly dropping my bottle in the process, which would surely kill us both. But he ain’t budging.

“Go on without me”, he says; and of course, I can’t. I look up and the number of flights above seems interminable. If I stay down here with him, I am going to die. Unless I stay down here with him, on the other hand, he is going to die.

That makes both of us dead, then.

Then, suddenly, with more energy than I’d thought he still had in him, he snaps out, grabs the bottle from my hands, twists round, and dashes it on the stairwell behind him.

He turns back, and his face is spattered with some substance like black living mercury. As I watch, one of the droplets slithers uphill against gravity into his nostril.

“RUN!” he yells.

An almost living cloud of glass and gas and dust and droplets fills the air. A religious moan of lamentation comes from the crowd behind us. The front rank of stoners drops to the steps, searching on hands and knees, trying to literally lick up the spilled junk.

“Only one thousand shall be saved”, intones one.

“We foresee the development of high-bandwidth Eastern European optical infrastructures progressing at an ever faster pace following deregulation of markets in fledgeling EU member states”, mumbles another.

I cast a look back at Vern. He is, surely, already dead, and worse than dead. I run.

Nobody runs after me. A continuous stream of jabbering prophecy chatters excited out of the dark behind me, and I swear that after a while, at least one of the voices, yelling “ENGLAND WILL NEVER FALL WHILE RAVENS REMAIN IN THE TOWER”, is screaming in Northern English.

But up above, far up above, beyond stairway after stairway after stairway, is a glint of daylight.

It might be the false daylight of a fluorescent tube, but it’s something to aim for. I can force myself to push for it despite the fact that my lungs are searing and my leg muscles are tying themselves into crochet and my pulse is hammering like a steam locomotive in my brain.

And it is daylight. Genuine live daylight, coming in through a grille in the concrete ceiling scarcely larger than a microchip. Fading, bluing daylight creeping towards dusk, and distinguishable as such from any cheap fluorescent imitation. And if I could leap up ten feet in the air and bite through steel with my teeth, I’d be through it in half a jiffy. But as it is, caked in my own sweat at the top of the final staircase, up here in the twilight with real rain dripping through that tiny matrix of fading evening sky above me, and the smell of the outside air and freedom soft and cool on my face and certain death closing on me from below, I think this looks very much like the End Of The Line.

The top of the stairwell is blocked off. It obviously once opened into somewhere - there are doorways, many doorways, which someone has painstakingly bricked up. This is why there was no glass and shit on the upper storeys. No-one ever comes up here. This way doesn’t go anywhere any more. When the Russians abandoned their underground venom-manufacture complex, they bricked it up and concreted it over, and probably ploughed the ground with salt for good measure. Whoever lives or works up top probably doesn’t even know what lies beneath them.

I can hear the enemy gasping and wheezing as they lope up the stairs towards me, out of condition due to their Smoke habit. But however unfit they might be, they can and will cut me to pieces. It’s only a matter of seconds now.

Then I realize suddenly that the distance from me to the grille in the roof does not have to be ten feet. Not if I stand on the balustrade before I jump.

The drawback to this is that both grille and balustrade are positioned above perhaps one hundred metres of vertical space. Right in the middle of the stairwell, in the case of the grille. If I miss it, I fall; and if I fall, I die.

But any danger of death is better than death as an absolute certainty. I hop up onto the rail and waddle out towards the grille like an overstuffed budgerigar. I sit there for a second or two, testing my weight distribution, plucking up courage. And jump.

My hands hit the grille. My small and puny fingers pass through it and hold on; the bars are heavy enough to hold my weight. But what do I do now? I’m dangling forty storeys above pit bottom. And the grille is an iron manhole cover set into concrete. And it opens, if it opens at all, upward. I can feel rain on my face now. I could cry.

But I am not giving up. I will die before I give up.

After all, the difference between the two options is only measured in seconds right now. There’ll be time enough for me to make my peace with God on the way down.

I jerk my entire body, punching it upwards against the grille. Beautifully, miraculously, the grille moves, lifting out of the concrete slightly. I jerk harder. This time it comes out completely. I jerk again, and this time, twist as I do so. Nearly, but not quite. The grille drops back into its hole, back to where it started.

I hold on again for another couple of seconds, summoning up everything I have, and spasm upwards, and yell like a karateka.

And the grille catches on the edge of the hole. And holds. And I see four thin slivers of daylight round its edges.

I twist further, making the slivers bigger, big enough to writhe a finger through. Then I cautiously unstick the fingers of one hand, and slap them onto the concrete up above. Then I follow them with the other hand, and finally I’m hauling myself up out of the manhole onto a tiny square of rain-sodden cement at the bottom of a brick shaft lined with drainpipes and sash windows. Steam hisses from drain covers all around me. Somewhere, I hear a toilet flushing. I’m in a light well sunk into some big old building. A building with flush toilets. Smoke houses, I imagine, do not usually have functioning flush toilets. Smoke users are not the sort to go in for domestic plumbing.

I can still hear them down below, issuing threats and dire predictions in the dark. But they cannot come up here. They can’t go where I can. The drug has destroyed their bodies too efficiently.

Idly, I push the metal cover back over the abyss, and get to my feet, just as a lady in an unconvincing blonde wig pulls down one of the nearest windows and asks me what I think I’m doing in the British Consulate in very poor Russian indeed.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 20, 2010

“It is simply not possible that such a weapon could have remained undiscovered by our security forces”, says the head of the security forces. Ivan (for it is he) looks thoroughly ill at ease sitting in a huge floral print armchair with a cup of bone china tea on his lap and a slobbery labrador at his left elbow. Ivan being treated with the utmost hospitality, but a sort of hospitality thoroughly un-Russian, making him look like a vodyanoi out of water.

In his best dress uniform, with every silver button, star and eagle polished, Ivan is also heavily overdressed. Her Majesty’s consul to the Republic of Vzeng Na, Sir Reginald Washburton, OBE, is in his carpet slippers, slyly feeding scraps of breakfast bacon to his dogs beneath the eyes of Mrs. Washburton.

“Well”, announces Sir Reginald, “we do have a problem there, I’m afraid.” He goes on to say that he fully appreciates how much of Vzeng Na’s GNP is dependent on tourism, people flying in to look at the big hole in the ground and so forth. Her Majesty’s government, he says, have no wish to inflict damage on the Vzeng Na economy by issuing, for example, an official advice against travelling to Na. But the safety of British citizens also has to be considered. As Her Majesty’s representative in Na, not only has he to receive assurances that no danger of weapons of mass unpleasantness exist under his and Ivan’s feet, but his own staff have to see that it does not.

Ivan fidgets with his cap badge and replies that he cannot prove that a thing does not exist. At this point, I posit loudly that Ivan has just conclusively proved his own brain doesn’t to my full satisfaction. Ivan shoots me a look of crocodilian coldness, then claims not to have understood my Russian.

There are five of us in the room, the best room in the British Consulate, a place my social-climbing grandmother would have called a drawing room, and which Sir Reginald slummingly refers to as ‘the back parlour’. The floral curtains match the chintz on the armchairs. Despite this, everything manages in some bizarre impossible manner to clash with everything else. The flowers on the chintz curtains are red, green and orange. The wallpaper is blue and pink. The carpeting can only be described as Battenburg.

Seated round the fire - a roaring log fire, very jolly, technically illegal inside Na city limits - are Sir Reginald, Ivan, and myself, having a cosy fireside chat, along with a young man who remains standing behind Ivan and who has been introduced only as “Mr. Keogh, our technical advisor”, and Lady Washburton, without whom the presence of Sir Reginald would be inconceivable. I am recovering well from my terrible ordeal (in actual fact, the worst physical damage I’ve sustained is skinned knees and blisters). Sir Reg., though, is of the opinion that I’ve also suffered untold invisible trauma to my psyche, and has been trying to convince me to undergo counselling ever since. Said counselling, however, seems to involve being flown back to England at government expense whenever he suggests it. This would mean letting go of the sort of story any decent journalist needs to be prised away from with tyre levers and blowtorches. It’s the “at government expense” part that makes me particularly suspicious. Normally anyone who, say, accidentally cuts off their own head in foreign parts can whistle for any government assistance whatsoever for the price of a sticking plaster, no matter how much invisible trauma they may have undergone.

No, Sir Reginald does not want me in his back parlour, so to speak, and for this reason I am determined to stay lodged in there like a bad piece of sweetcorn.

Sir Reginald asks if it would be possible for an armed police detachment to be sent down into the caves or catacombs or whatever they might be to ensure no risk to human life remains. And whether it would be possible for this detachment to be accompanied by Embassy staff. Ivan clearly does not like this one little bit, and points out that all that is known so far of these so-called drug caverns is derived from the story of one excitable, possibly sex-maniac woman with an overactive imagination, who might in any case have inhaled drugs whilst on an illegal visit to the Abyss. Ivan claims never to have heard of Oracle Smoke. He denies ever having discussed it with me.

Sir Reginald looks at Ivan for a very long time.

Then, still in his carpet slippers, he gets up out of his floral armchair, and walks over to a small window in one corner of the room. The window is covered by a curtain. Sir Reginald opens the curtain, then opens the window, then climbs out of the window and beckons for Ivan to do the same.

Sir Reginald is standing in the centre of a light well sunk into the Consulate building. In the centre of that light well is a metal grating, and on top of that grating is what looks like the engine block of a Czaer 2000.

Patiently, and with some difficulty, Sir Reginald shuffles the engine block aside into a corner. Then, standing on the opposite side of the grating from Ivan, and looking him straight in the eye, he lifts the lid and flourishes a hallmarked silver teaspoon, which he must have palmed before he went out the window. Then, still looking Ivan dead in the eye, he drops the spoon carefully down into the dark, and theatrically cups his hand to his ear to listen for any impact.

There is no impact...

...until there is an almighty BANG. Ivan, myself, and even Sir Reginald himself, jump.

“Spoons being fairly aerodynamic”, muses Sir Reginald, “I imagine that to have been the sound of a spoon hitting the bottom of something over five hundred metres deep at an appreciable percentage of the speed of sound.” He peers into the darkness worriedly. “I shouldn’t really have done that. It might play havoc with the foundations.”

He replaces the grating, and looks up at Ivan again.

“Sewers”, he says, “and cesspits, and wine cellars, even subways, don’t tend to be five hundred metres deep.”

“Perhaps”, says Ivan stolidly, “it is a mineshaft.”

“Perhaps”, says Sir Reginald. “But mining what?”

Somehow, this shuts Ivan up.

“We will supply members of our Embassy staff”, says Sir Reginald, “as observers.” He nods across the room at Mr. Keogh, who I already know speaks execrable Russian, and whose only talent seems to be possession of (a) buttocks fit to crack walnuts, and (b) if the bulge in his breast pocket isn’t the world’s biggest mobile phone, a gun. “If, as Miss Simpson claims, this Oracle Smoke is any sort of military hardware”, continues Sir Reg., “Mr. Keogh is well qualified to recognize it. Her Majesty’s government can recommend his services. He has many years’ experience of working with the IAEA in Iraq, South Africa and the Ukraine. We are fortunate he happened to be here.”

“You are very interested in old Soviet military hardware”, notes Ivan. “I remember that it was the British who first discovered the German nerve gases sarin and soman, yes? And that you later developed them further to produce newer and still more exciting substances.”

Sir Reginald nods. “V-agents”, he says.

“VX”, says Ivan.

“VX was one of ours, I believe, yes.”

Ivan nods back. “You are the world’s experts in poison gases, I believe. Is Mr. Keogh one of your poison gas experts, I wonder?”

Sir Reginald shakes his head and sips his tea. “Well, I certainly wish, Captain Gushin, that we were as expert as everyone seems to think. If Miss Simpson’s story is to be believed, it would seem that there were people sixty years ago who could knock our poison-making skills into a cocked hat. And if those people existed here once, we can only assume a second, third and fourth generation of them might exist today, in Russia or the United States of America, because certainly, to my knowledge, no such expertise exists in Britain. Which means, Captain, that it is our duty to find out as much as possible about these people, because one day, we might have to defend ourselves against them.”

“Just like you defended yourself against Iraq”, says Ivan.

Sir Reginald nods, smiles, and sips his tea. “Quite right. Britain has a terrible history of inventing things, you see, only to see them put to actual practical use by foreigners.” He looks across to me. “Obviously, I’m not expecting you to go back down there with the investigating officers, Miss Simpson; that would be far too traumatic.”

“But I’ve got to go down”, I say.

He blinks like a startled toad. “Why ever would you want to do that?”

“Because if I don’t, you’ll discover some sort of new nerve poison down there, come to an agreement with the Vzeng Na government to keep quiet about it, and synthesize it yourselves; and no-one will breathe a word, and the world will never know until you actually use it.”

Sir Reginald blinks again; more this time, I think, like one of those big carnivorous toads that squirts blood at its enemies out of its eyeballs. It is a look of blood he gives me. I reckon I’ve hit the toad on the head.

Then he becomes the kindly old vicar again, rather than the shifty serial non-executive director with share options in fifteen Eastern European oil, nuclear and defence companies that I know him to be.

“Well, really, this is most untrusting”, he says. “All I can do is assure you Her Majesty’s Government really aren’t like that any more. What would the editor of your paper say? I went to school with him, you know.”

“I’ve already mailed my story to five newspapers”, I say. “The enclosure I’ve mailed is encrypted. Only I have the key. Whoever bids highest gets the key.”

He nods sagely. “As I say, I went to school with him. Frightful little tick. We all thought he was homosexual.”

“He is homosexual. He lives quite openly with a gay restauranteur called Jeremy.”

This nonplusses Sir Reginald badly enough for him to pour scalding hot tea into his lap. He screeches in pain and yells for water. Servants (did I mention the servants? They’re always there in the background, but one doesn’t notice them, dahling) scurry in and scuttle for taps and buckets. Lady Washburton actually titters behind her hand and winks at me. Even Ivan’s glacial composure breaks for a moment, and he grins daftly for a split second before realizing he has a reputation to maintain as the sinister secret police captain.

Sir Reginald’s groin is eventually mopped down with cold water by a nice young Vaemna maid. He seems to enjoy the mopping process rather too much for Lady Washburton’s liking, and she sends the girl back out to disinfect her dishcloth. Sir Reginald’s groin bacteria are going nowhere near Lady Washburton’s best silver, oh no. After all, the silver gets put in her mouth.

Sir Reginald agrees to allow me, even in my traumatized condition, on a “fact-finding expedition” into the abyss depths, to which Ivan also agrees to contribute two police officers. Ivan also agrees, warily, to the inclusion of Mr. Keogh the International Atomic Energy Agency Expert, who has MoD written all over him more clearly than a quadropheniac’s knuckles. Keogh makes me nervous. He is as perfectly formed as an Action Man. I wonder if he has a completely smooth, hairless plastic crotch.

I ask if the police officers will be armed. Ivan reminds me that all Vzeng Na police officers are armed. I ask if they’ll be armed with military weapons. Ivan replies that a few heroin addicts and the odd spelunker who has lost his way (and possibly mind) are hardly likely to present a military threat. He asks me whether we located the missing caver, the man called Sean, on our visit. I reply that we didn’t. Ivan nods sagely and announces that this is obviously the explanation. Mad from hunger, possibly even dosed with illegal opiate painkillers self-administered to kill the pain of an injury sustained in a fall, this man failed to recognize his companions in the dark and attacked them, perhaps with a sharp climbing piton or a heavy rock. We, meanwhile, bewildered by the sheer ferocity of the attack, and possibly tired and confused in our turn, mistook the repeated and determined assaults of this one man for an entire horde of narcotic addicts.

Then he sits back in his chair, hands clasped round his knee, evidently hugely pleased with himself. I suggest to him that he do the worst thing I can possibly think of in Russian.

“Hardly”, he says. “My mother was a very ugly lady.”

He smiles.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 21, 2010

I am now resident in the British Consulate. Sir Reginald has sent minions out to obtain my things and check me out of the Novotel. This means they probably found the Pauline Réage bondage novel hidden in the back of my suitcase, but they probably don’t read English in any case. Half of them might not even read the Roman alphabet - Na’s Russian population are as cosmopolitan as they are educated.

My room in the Consulate is obviously the emergency Tourist Who Cut Off His Head By Accident room. It seems not to have been redecorated since the 1930’s, and has a carpet which is worn right down to the matting next to the shaving mirror. Also, the bed has a protruding spring, sharp as a bacon slicer and just as pleasant to sit on.

Worst of all, it looks out on the light well at the bottom of which is the Nazi Abyss.

Luckily, the Czaer 2000 engine has been replaced over the grating with a larger 1 litre model. In fact, the grating itself looks newer, as if Sir Reg. has had a new cover put in. One which locks. But it’s still there. And there’s still that horrid giddy feeling that my bed, being close by the window which is close by the grating, is still sitting vertically above five hundred metres of twisty turny staircase lightly frosted with glass and blood and human excrement.

Five hundred metres. That means, potentially, another hundred storeys underneath the ones we know about, containing what? Ordnance factories full of weapons no Allied historian ever heard of, storage facilities full of enough Oracle Smoke to drown a city in, never mind poison it? Why did they need to dig down that deep? Surely that deep down, you’re not digging through rock, but magma.

The room has a TV, communist-era, which doubles as a heating radiator when it’s turned on. A polite note in English and Russian on the wall behind it enjoins guests not to put anything flammable, or indeed meltable, on top of it. The wallpaper is the colour of dirty marzipan. It was probably a recognizable shade of something once, but is now a uniform nicotine.

It is nine p.m. in Na. Seven p.m. in Britain. Right about now the sun is just setting over the Houses of Parliament. Here, it’s black as pitch and the night life is well underway. The sounds of drunks singing, gypsy violinists annoying diners, and police sirens blaring penetrate faintly through the night even to the bottom of my own little abyss in the light well. I stretch out on the bed and discover that it is slightly shorter than even I am tall. Maybe the couple of pouffes lurking underneath the bureau are supposed to be appended to the bed in some way to make it a more normal length. They have zip fasteners on their sides...

The police siren is blaring around, and around, and around, almost as if it’s circling the building. Maybe the coppers are chasing someone who has his steering lock stuck full on. Although deafening, it’s hypnotic. It could send a body to sleep -

I’m falling down a rabbit hole. There are bits of furniture, heroin syringes, tinkly broken glassware and an entire suit of cards flying with me. Some of the cards are animated, with tiny arms and legs and arms, yelling at me that this is all my fault, shaking their little pink fists.

Then I open my eyes with a start and see a Czaer 2000 engine block flying up past my window.

The building shudders. I must have been woken by a loud bang, but I can hardly remember it.

I sit up in bed and see the same Czaer 2000 lump flying downwards. I wait for a very, very long time. Then there is a second almighty bang, as of a Czaer 2000 engine lump hitting the bottom of a five hundred metre deep shaft at an appreciable portion of the speed of sound.

That will definitely not be good for the foundations.

I open the windowsash and lean out. The concrete bottom of the light well has disappeared. I am looking five hundred metres down a vertical shaft. Down in the dark, deep beneath, I can see tiny neon wasps of what might be tracer fire.

Three metres directly beneath me, on the other hand, gawping out of the back parlour window, I can see Sir Reginald’s bald head. He appears to be wearing purple floral pyjamas. He looks up, and sees me. He is furious.

“Little sod’s trying to sweep it all under the carpet before we get down there”, he says indignantly. He brings his right arm into view. He’s holding a pistol and slotting a magazine into the handle. Then he disappears.

What I think at this point is: I’m not missing this. Besides, Vern might still be down there.

I grab my notebook from under my pillow and struggle into my day clothes.

***

Sir Reginald is dressed to kill - or at least, has a gun. I know nothing about guns, but it is a big, nasty-looking gun that looks like it would make big nasty holes in people. The rest of his ensemble is less deadly - sturdy hiking boots, socks rolled over his corduroys, and the inevitable Barbour. Tom Keogh, meanwhile, seems to have produced an automatic weapon - a Kalashnikov, complete with folding stock and nightsight.

I ask if he smuggled the gun in in a diplomatic bag. He shakes his head and says, no, he just bought it off the black market once he got here, it’s easier and cheaper. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t seem to find the irony of the situation amusing.

We are in what I suppose Sir Reginald would refer to as the embassy’s Front Parlour. The police siren is still circling the building. It does not appear to be chasing anything. Possibly it was only there in the first place to distract us from a gunbattle happening five hundred yards beneath us. Sir Reg. is on the phone - his mobile phone, as our land line has predictably and inexplicably malfunctioned - to both his masters in the UK and Ivan’s masters in Vzeng Na by turns.

Tom Keogh also just happens to have an impressive collection of caving and mountaineering gear, which he’s laying out on the front parlour floor and securing to the wall next to the street - i.e., the wall in the house furthest from the Abyss - with an industrial bolt gun. He also has helmets, head torches, and climbing boots, but I have my own helmet, boots, etc. in any case. Right now he’s telling me there’s no way he can let me go down into the Little Abyss, as it seems to be a combat zone right now. I tell him he can either give me a harness and a descender, or I’ll try to swarm down the rope by hand. He looks at me critically for a very long time, then nods, shrugs, and chucks me a harness and descender.

I ask him what the plan is. He says it’s “to go down and assess the situation.” He lowers his voice and says Sir Reginald thinks he’s coming too. This, he says, is unlikely. Sir Reginald’s mission function, he says, is to stay on the other end of the phone up here and keep us alive by making sure whoever is remotely friendly down there doesn’t think we’re unfriendly and attempt to neutralize our threat. He explains that, by neutralize our threat, he means shoot us. I ask him what he thinks is going on down there. He says he thinks the local police have probably attempted to “pre-empt the situation. They were probably going to plug the shaft a hundred yards down with concrete and prevent further access”, he says. “Looks like the junkies are a little more resistant to non-military weapons than the police chief thinks.”

I think it sounds like rifle and submachinegun fire coming from the well, and tell him so. He agrees, with one addendum; he thinks it’s two sets of rifle and submachinegun fire. Right now, both the junkies and Ivan’s policemen have got out the heavy iron. “Very heavy iron”, he clarifies. “I think what blew the top off the stairwell was probably an RPG launcher. The bad guys used it, probably. Anyone using a weapon like that in a confined space has to be assisting their normal mental processes with chemistry.”

I ask him how it is that junkies can be using military weapons. He ignores me. Instead, he looks up and nods at four armed men who have just entered the room, also carrying Kalashnikovs, though ones not quite nice as his. Their suppliers don’t seem to have been able to run to folding stocks. They appear to be dressed for some sort of fetish party. Respirators are hanging from around their necks on straps, and they are wearing a great deal of black plastic.

“More friends from the International Atomic Energy Agency?” I ask. Tom Keogh doesn’t reply. Instead, he looks me up and down concernedly. “I’m afraid that no matter how much you stamp your tiny feet, we just don’t have an NBC suit in your size. Or indeed any spare NBC suits.”

“It’s all right. I have my own gasmask.” He stares at me oddly. “And mine”, I add, “is designed to stop Oracle Smoke, unlike yours.”

He absorbs this.

“Okay”, he says finally. “You can go first, then.”

In the event, he goes first, which is very nice of him.

I had thought we were going to abseil down like James Bond ninjas into the middle of a big scary explody firefight. Thankfully, Mr. Keogh doesn’t seem to be insane. He waits for a very, very long time indeed before thinking about dangling any part of himself down into the deep.

The first thing he and the others do, in fact, is remove the carpet from one of the upstairs rooms, and drape it over the entrance to the Abyss, closing off any holes with duct tape and rags, blanking out any light from above. “Be like running in banging a big gong yelling ‘DINNERTIME’ otherwise”, he observes.

Every few minutes afterwards, Mr. Keogh ropes himself up with a climbing helmet on and creeps and crawls all mousy-quiet up to the edge of the abyss and peers down carefully through night vision goggles into the dark.

A long, long time after all sound of gunfire has stopped way below us, he crawls back out from under the carpet and gives a thumbs-up to his team. He seems to think something over a minute, then turns to me and asks - in a whisper, as if he’s expecting someone to be listening - “Did you see any NBC suits down there?”

I shake my head.

“Thank Christ for that. Out of the fucking monkey suits, guys. We’ll only be needing the masks.”

There is a general chorus of relief.

“Keep those chemical sniffers turned on, though.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Stay very, very close to me. Hold on to my shoulder strap, put your hands and feet where I say, and don’t move if I don’t tell you to.”

“I’m not hanging on to you like some sort of blind woman.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to be doing. We don’t have any spare night vision goggles.”

***

Going down a rope you can’t see the end of, in the dark, five hundred metres above a very hard landing, in a confined space where people have been firing guns, is scarier than scary. I slow them down to an appalling extent. Tom Keogh has to keep reaching up and grabbing my ankle to get me to go down further. He has to have been hanging on one hand for most of the way down. And then, after we’ve abseiled down what seems like half the way to the Earth’s core and finally alighted on a merciful thin sliver of steel and concrete sturdy enough to stand on and I get to stand rigidly in the same position and ‘rest’ for a handful of seconds to get my breath back, they clip in another length of rope and start the same process all over again.

Whenever we find a place to stand, I freeze like a mannequin - that is to say, I freeze after the first time, when I assumed I was standing all safe and cosy on the stairwell that used to be down here, and Tom Keogh hissed at me Not To Move, You Stupid Bitch, and then unclipped his own night vision goggles and clipped them on to me for a moment. The world was green inside them, as if seen through the bottom of a beer bottle, squaddie vision. There is no staircase down here any longer. The force of the RPG explosion, and possibly also of Sir Reginald’s experiments with teaspoons, has torn the fragile structure clean out of the walls all around us, leaving only twisted stumps of steel and concrete joists, like blackened, rotten teeth. The metal of the staircase was probably rusted to hell anyway - the grenade only gave it that little extra push.

Keogh’s men are very, very quiet. They are not IAEA men, and they have done this sort of thing many, many times before. I, on the other hand, have done it a grand total of once, and cannot see the surface I am jumping down like a moonman, paying the rope through my descender as I do so. I feel like a traction engine acting as the pace car to a starting line of Ferraris. My descender feels cold in my fingers as I go down. As I stand cramped on the second ledge down next to Tom Keogh, I brush against his descender for a second, and it’s so hot I have to snatch my hand away.

We have to go through this whole ghastly process four times before we get to anything solid enough to risk standing on for more than a matter of seconds.

For the first time in a long time, I can see a dim, almost imperceptible light below, the right height and width to be a doorway. The light is yellow and low-powered, like the ambient glow from a torch not pointed in our direction.

I hear a few soft THUMPs in the dark, like a cat coughing furballs. I hear a soft shuffling, as of a lady in a long skirt flouncing down a hallway. The light in the doorway crazes as if the torch that casts it has been knocked off balance.

“It should be safe for us to go down now.” A hand feeds a rope into my descender.

“What about the Smokers? There might be Smokers.”

“There were seven.”

There were actually more than seven, it transpires; more cat-coughing from the dark, and a series of THUDs which I am sickeningly certain are bodies hitting the floor. Tom Keogh’s hand tugs at my ankle. Gingerly, I set off down the rope. Nobody shoots me as I descend. Eventually, I feel my feet touch terra firma. Concrete. Solid concrete.

I slump down against the wall, exhausted, relishing the chance to bend my legs.

“Hang on”, says Keogh from somewhere out in the dark. “This one isn’t a Smoker.”

“How do you know?” says another low voice.

“I’ll lay a bet Smokers don’t often wear police uniforms.”

“Shit.”

I’ve got a horrible, awful feeling about this.

“Does it smell like it’s gone for a shit in its pants?” I say.

There is a pause for sniffing, and then someone answers, “Er - yeah. Very much so, actually.”

“Then it’s a Smoker and a policeman. Probably inhaled Smoke fumes. Oracle Smoke addicts you that fast.”

“Jesus, so that’s why there were two sources of tracer fire”, says a disbelieving voice, and then: “GET THOSE BLOODY GASMASKS ON NOW.”

There is a sound of muffled fumbling and tugging, and not a little discreet swearing. The modest hubbub dies down slowly. There is the sound of someone shooting a Smoker somewhere out in the dark.

Then a shot rings out around all four walls of the chamber. I see it as well as hear it, careering around the room like a light sabre. A tracer round.

“WHO GOES THERE?” yells someone. Unfortunately, he yells it in Russian, so nobody can hear that he’s coherent.

“Kill him”, says Keogh, his voice hissing through his respirator.

“He’s not a Smoker”, I say. “Smokers don’t ask you Who Goes There, they tell you Elvis, Saddam Hussein and Lord God Almighty will be going there tomorrow.”

“You want me to kill him, Cap?” hisses a voice back.

I pounce victoriously. “Aha, so you’re a Captain, are you?”

“Nice one, Corporal. Can you see him?”

“Up the end, Cap, on his own. Sat behind a big pile of metal sheeting. Probably thinks he can’t be seen. He’s putting a gasmask back over his mouth.”

“Kill him”, says Keogh. “He may be friendly, but if he keeps firing the mob downstairs’ll know we’re coming.”

This is too much. I stand up.

“SIT DOWN!” rasps Keogh.

“МЙСТЕР ПОЛИЦЕЙСКИЙ!” I yell out. “WE’RE FRIENDLY! COME OUT AND PUT YOUR GUN DOWN!”

There is an ominous pause.

“He’s getting up, Cap”, comes Jimmy’s voice.

“Good”, says Keogh - and then: “Kill him.”

“For FUCK’S SAKE -“

A cat coughs twice in the dark.

“Sit DOWN.”

“I will NOT sit down. That encryption key I was talking about is also in the keeping of a friend of mine, and she will be emailing it to every single one of the papers who have the story if (a) I do not come back from this trip alive, or (b) you do not stop shooting our friends and allies. And I can see that laser dot you’ve just moved on to my chest, thank you so very much.”

Keogh absorbs this.

“All right”, he says. “We won’t shoot anyone else wearing a mask unless they shoot first. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

I still can’t see shit (though I can smell it right enough, all over every smearable surface). I find a torch on the floor and switch it on.

I am surrounded by bodies.

All of them have been shot. Some of them have also been finished off with a knife around the throat. I don’t recall having heard any ricochets.

“SWITCH that BLOODY TORCH off -“

“There was a torch on up here before. That means the ones downstairs will still be expecting a torch up here now.”

“Er...yes. Yes, good point.”

There appears to have been a firefight between policemen still wearing their anti-Smoke masks and policemen happily breathing Smoke. There is more glass glistering around the bodies here than I remember...

“They used Smoke bottles as bombs”, I say. “Lobbed them into the middle of Ivan’s police. A few of them were too daft to be wearing their masks, perhaps, or too slow to put them on in time. They turned on the others.”

I search the dead men’s faces with my torch. None of them is Ivan. But then again, I never expected them to be. Ivan would send someone else down here to do his dirty work.

Keogh’s team are working their way through the machinery chamber. There seems to be nobody else in here, or at least, nobody we can see.

“If they can use this stuff like a hand grenade”, says Keogh, who is poking through shards of bottle with his boot, “I’m surprised they don’t break out and use it to take over the town.”

“I don’t think you appreciate how difficult wasting Smoke in that way would be for them. I think it would have been like throwing your own children at the enemy. Take your foot out of that. You might touch your boot later.”

He’s incredulous. “It isn’t that poisonous, is it?”

The outer offices have been stormed through by Ivan’s men, but are empty - in the case of the filing cabinets, even more empty than before. All the files and papers have vanished, leaving only the bodies and the graffiti.

And then there’s only a manhole and a steel door between us and the outside world. One of Keogh’s men sticks his head up through the manhole and pronounces it safe up top. Cautiously, watching each other’s backs, they emerge and spread out.

“Seems OK.”

“All clean this way.”

But a third voice, sounding puzzled, says instead:

“Is this a Smoke bottle?”

“DON’T TOUCH IT”. I actually yell this. When I get myself back together, I go on to say: “And don’t go anywhere near it either.”

Then I move up to the manhole, stand directly underneath it, and yell:

“OKAY, GUSHIN. YOU CAN COME OUT NOW. UNLESS YOU HAVE A THING ABOUT WATCHING OTHER MEN.”

There is a long, long pause. Then there’s a distant answering yell, echoing round the Abyss:

“BUT THEY LOOK SO ADORABLE IN THEIR NBC GEAR.”

Luckily for Ivan’s health, this exchange is taking place in Russian. But Keogh, at least, seems to be understanding some of it.

I keep Ivan talking. “THAT NBC GEAR’S KEPT THEM ALL ALIVE SO FAR. THOSE SHITE SOVIET-ISSUE MASKS YOUR MEN ARE WEARING KILLED HALF OF THEM STONE DEAD. OR RATHER, FORCED YOU TO KILL HALF OF THEM STONE DEAD.”

"SADLY I AM FORCED TO ADMIT THIS. THEY WERE GOOD MEN, PENELOPE."

I poke my head up, cautiously, from the manhole, and take a look around. Nothing but stone, steel and concrete in all directions.

"WELL, NOW THEY'RE GOOD CORPSES. ARE YOU COMING OUT WHERE WE CAN SEE YOU OR NOT?"

In answer, a number of figures detach themselves from the rock walls uphill and downhill of us.

"Good work", says Keogh. "That won't be all of them, of course."

I hadn't even thought of that. But of course that would be how Ivan would think, and fight. Dirty. I climb out of the hole and squat on the concrete. A kaleidoscope of stars stares down a hundred-metre-deep rock tube at me.

One of the figures cups its hand to its mouth and yells downhill at us in Ivan's voice. "DON'T GO NEAR THE SMOKE BOTTLE."

"WHY NOT?" yells Keogh.

"IT'S GOT A SOVIET ARMY ANTIPERSONNEL MINE BURIED UNDERNEATH IT."

"I KNOW", I yell. "I KNEW IT HAD TO BE YOU, GUSHIN. SMOKERS DON'T USE A BOTTLE OF JUNK AS BAIT, NOR DO THEY LEAVE THEM LYING AROUND."

"AND NO REAL HUMAN WOULD GO ANYWHERE NEAR ONE. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE PROVED BRITISH PEOPLE ARE REAL HUMANS."

He comes down the slope towards us, holding an AKM as if he's used one all his life. He probably has. All this stuff about Daddy being the only ex-KGB man in the family was probably all lies. Ivan was probably the last beardless youth saluting the Soviets through the border crossing when they left for Moscow in '91.

"Ought to shoot him now", says Keogh, "if I didn't know he still had a few men up there in the rocks that I can't see, I would do." I’d applaud Keogh’s willingness to shoot Ivan if I didn’t know he’d been drawing a bead on me too just now.

The men that we can see number seven, but they're policemen - too young, too old, too fat, or too skinny to cause Mr. Keogh's men any trouble. Keogh's men look like they only recently evolved into men. They could probably deal with Ivan's tired old coppers without even needing to fire a shot, if they got close enough.

But those tired old coppers were also clever enough to set a trap that would have taken half of Keogh's men out if I hadn't warned them. I'm not so sure.

"I take it you were going to tell us about the mine", I say in Russian.

"Of course", says Ivan in English, grinning. "At first, we could not easily see who you were, you understand. You came down the stairwell underneath the Consulate, yes?"

I nod. Ivan calls his men around and gets to talking soldier and policeman stuff with Tom Keogh. Luckily neither speaks the other's language perfectly, so I catch all of the conversation as a lot of it needs to go through me. Ivan's men came down during daylight, secured the bridge - 'Мост' is the Russian word he uses for the German gantry crane, and this means bridge - and then moved on into the tank and rocket factory. All that went well, until they went down to the lower levels, "where", Ivan admits, "there appears to have unfortunately been a contamination of my personnel by some variety of toxin.”

Keogh interrupts at this point.

"So", he says, "she was telling the truth, then."

Ivan's face squirms into several expressions at once.

"It would seem so", he says. "I apologize", he says to me with the briefest of nods.

Keogh and Ivan agree to "have another stab" (Keogh's words) at the tanker chamber. I realize with sudden clarity that this is a jolly-hockey-sticks way of saying they are going to go downstairs and kill everybody. I should feel appalled at this, but I really can't work myself up to it.

They leave seven men - mostly Ivan's - on the Bridge upstairs, and send the others back into the factory chambers. I am told to stay put on the Bridge pier together with one of Keogh's troopers, and for once I don't feel like disobeying. If Vern's still alive down there, thin as a rake, eating nothing and scooping up piss from the deck whenever he needs to drink, I've no desire to watch one of Keogh's australopithecines disembowel him. The real Vern saved my life, and is as dead as he is dignified.

I'm actually really tired. I stretch out on the concrete and try to sleep, but it's too damn cold and wet. Down here, even in the big Abyss proper, there's always water dripping down onto your head from somewhere.

I resign myself to getting no sleep, and work on the very notes you are now reading for a while by the light of a card torch - a Christmas present, it fits into a wallet and provides enough light to ruin your eyes by. My australopithecine tells me it'll get seen by Oracle Smokers. I shrug and recommend that he shoot me. Luckily he doesn't.

After a while, I become aware that things are happening around me. The disposition of our troops on the Bridge pier is changing subtly. Two of them are still on guard uphill and down - the downhill road from the Bridge pier looks just as untechnological as its uphill counterpart, and winds around overhangs and spurs until it vanishes from sight in the blue dark far beneath. Two of them are making holes in the top of the pier with an Hilti gun, almost as if they intend to begin rappelling downwards. A fifth man, meanwhile, appears to have found a welding kit from somewhere, and is hard at work on the steel door at the head of the Bridge pier, fusing it strongly shut. A sixth man is cleaning a long hunting knife on the Bridge girders, dangling his feet over the drop. A seventh is communicating with somebody or other on a field radio. An eighth -

An eighth?

At that moment I suddenly also realize that the eight (or nine, or ten) or so troopers I can currently see are all Ivan's men. What has happened to Keogh's man?

The last time I saw him, he was sitting inside the Bridge girders, sheltering from the drizzle. Clouds had come over the sun, just before sunrise. The sky up above is still just a dim blue circle, but my dark-accustomed eyes are beginning to be able to take in my surroundings without torchlight.

I cross to the edge of the Bridge pier, trying not to appear too urgent. I look down. The body of Keogh's man is lying down there on top of the girders, a dark, sharp line ringing his throat from jawjoint to jawjoint. A dark liquid seems to have leaked out of him onto the iron.

I look up and see Ivan's man, still cleaning a dark liquid off his knife - with a handkerchief now, he's wiped off most of the thick stuff on the Bridge steel. He nods at me and smiles. He's wearing a hat, a peaked cap, the sort of big daft dinnerplate hat Eastern European military officers tend to favour. He's also now wearing Keogh's man's night vision goggles, and looks very much the gay fashion icon.

And then I remember I've seen hats like that before, not only during the day stalking around menacingly looking for opportunities to get bribed, not only during rush hour directing traffic, but also in a dark square in the wee small hours, on the heads of men dragging something screaming across the cobbles, towards a wall...

"You", I say - in English, forgetting myself. "It was you who threw that kid down the cliff." And I call him a rude name in Russian.

He shakes his head and tells me his anus is open only to outgoing traffic.

I suddenly realize what it is the two men with the bolt gun are fixing into the concrete over by the manhole cover. There are three of these things, and they are roughly oblong, mounted on four sturdy steel legs. From above, their shapes curve inwards like a canteen. On the inward-curving face is stencilled, in the Roman alphabet:

M18A1 CLAYMORE
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

Why these guys are using American rather than Russian hardware, I have no idea - maybe American hardware actually works. I may be a mere sweet slip of a girl who seldom if ever reads Commando War Picture Library, but I've been an assistant understudy to a war correspondent, and I know what a Claymore mine is. It works in one direction only, against people rather than armoured targets, like a giant shotgun shell. And the faces of fall three of these Claymores are pointing inward, towards the pier - towards, in fact, the manhole cover, which now that the downstairs door is being welded shut is the only remaining exit from the Bridge.

I take a step down onto the Bridge girders, next to the knife cleaner. Next to the body of Keogh's man. After they've set the Claymores in place, they set about covering them with greatcoats and uniform tunics, disguising them from whoever might emerge from the manhole, and then retire a few steps back up and down the Devil's Escalator, trailing detonator wires behind them, before concealing themselves behind rock outcrops sturdy enough to take blast damage.

I walk backwards, gingerly, on the rusted surface. It feels as safe as a giant engineering project made of gingerbread. The knife-cleaning guy looks up at me, leers again, and runs the blade of his knife over his tongue, as if stropping it on a leather to sharpen it rather than cleaning it. His tongue begins to bleed, and must be bleeding heavily for me to see it in the dark. He grins at me round a mouthful of blood.

"Your repertoire is stale and unoriginal", I say. But I say it in English, as I don't want him to kill me just yet.

But he's in no hurry to kill me - after all, he knows I'm backing away towards a blank rock wall set into a solid concrete pier with no internal rooms or chambers, no doorways and no hidey holes.

He is so confident of his ability to deal with me, in fact, that he puts down his gun, very carefully, and draws his nice clean knife, seeming quite prepared to get it dirty all over again.

But I know a thing he does not know.

Keeping my eye on the nice gent with the knife, I move to the side of the Bridge, and begin working my way, as careful as if climbing through a house of cards, hand over hand over foot down the metal, being careful to keep at least seven points of contact between me and my climbing surface at all times. The man upstairs seems to find this hugely amusing, standing staring down at me with knife in hand, knowing I have to come up some time. All he has to do is wait. But he also knows that if he doesn't want to wait, he'll have to brachiate down all this rusted crapulence after me.

The metal is a nightmare to hold on to - huge chunks of it just come away in my hand, and I take to giving each rung a good tug and twist, hard enough to give me hepatitis, to take off the swarf before I put my weight on it. My hands are bleeding before long.

But I can see it now. The thing that he doesn't know is down here, though he must be blind if he can't see it, or at least infer its existence from what he can see from where he is. I reach a hand out to touch it, and am safe. Or at least safer.

I give it a tug. It holds. I ease my weight down onto it, very gradually. It continues to hold.

I work my way down it, into the dark. I have no idea where it leads to. All of a sudden, the man up top realizes what is happening, and panics. He begins yelling to his companions in Vaemna, then in Russian (presumably becoming aware that half of them can't understand him in Vaemna). He's telling them to shoot, shoot, shoot the British bitch. But they can't shoot me, because half of them have the body of the bridge between me and them, and the other half can't see me in any case. I can't see me, for Christ's sake. But I don't know how far down Sean's climbing rope will let me go before it peters out - just about to where Sean stopped climbing and started falling, I imagine. I will probably feel the end of the line before I see it, and if I'm hanging in space next to a sheer rock wall without any handholds, what then?

Shots begin raining down out of the dark - luckily, wildly inaccurate ones. I can see just how inaccurate because they're obliging enough to use tracer bullets. The worst that could happen seems to be that the sound of the shots might cause some sort of freak rockslide. The one man who can see where I am perfectly - i.e., who is wearing a pair of stolen night vision goggles - is standing on the other side of a thousand-tonne climbing frame, and therefore irrelevant.

After a little while, the rope bends over what must be an overhang, nearly trapping my fingers against the face. Only a little further down, I find a ledge beneath my feet. I’m safe. I realize I’ve just climbed a terrifying distance - gosh, maybe as much as twenty whole metres - down a sheer rock face without a safety harness. My granny would disapprove.

Shortly after this, they cut the rope and send it down after me. But I expected that, of course. What I didn’t expect is that they’d tie a filing cabinet to the upstairs end of it. I hear nuts and bolts ripping out of the cliff below me, and if I’d still had hold of the rope, I’d have gone down with them. I hear something big, heavy and metallic bouncing down interminable depths beneath. But I hear no enormous BOOM as it hits bottom. No matter how long I wait.

Maybe there’s a lake down there. Or some big pool of volcanic mud. Maybe the pit’s not bottomless after all. There has to be a rational explanation, right?

But down there on my own in the dark, I know that all of that is just wishful thinking, just as I was certain that the trees rattling around in the wind and the dark outside my parents’ house when I was a kid were a vampire’s long sharp fingernails tapping against my window.

It’s still blacker than Hell’s own coal-hole down here. But maybe once the sun rises a bit higher I’ll be able to see a way to climb down. Down because I’m hoping the Devil's Escalator might continue downhill from the Bridge – might, I try to convince myself, be only a ten-foot pitch away.

Or maybe I’m sitting on the only three- by two-foot ledge in an expanse of sheer cliff the height of Half Dome, Wyoming. But right now, nothing, not even the thought of falling forever, is going to stop the accumulated weight of late nights from hitting me like a sledgehammer in the back of the skull.

...And while my mind is still working through the late nights, I have a dream....

I dream I am a drowned woman, feet tangled in the anchor chain of some enormous filing cabinet-shaped ship that sank while I was trying to swim away from the wreck, and I have been pulled down into a dark crevice between continents, an Abyss, a subduction zone where one landmass is being sucked under, rocks and fossils and all, into the dark and the murk and the globigerina. And then, all of a sudden, something new enters my universe. Something brash and noisy. A bright bauble dangling on a length of silvery cable snaking down from far, far above. There are floats spaced out along this cable like parasites feeding on a larger life form, and the larger life form is a big steely ball with glowing glaring eyes brighter than the lures of deep-sea anglers, staring out white light into the dark, not the soft blue dusk of the Abyss that I'm used to.

And trapped inside the thing's glassy eyeballs is a man, another parasite, imprisoned in its pupils like one of the marine crustaceans that feed on a Greenland shark's corneas, peering out at the alien world around him. He doesn't see me, of course. How can he? I'm dead, after all. On the outside of his big glittery ball, some other man has painted a US flag and the words KOMATSU EUROPE.

Weird. My dreams are not normally this spaced out.

It's a bathysphere, of course, not any sort of sea creature. I know better than to be fooled so easily.

When the sun rises up so high it stabs down into the Abyss and allows folk down here to see, I nearly laugh myself off the ledge.

Climbing ropes are built to hold the weight of a falling person, after all; and the Nazi filing cabinet is still hanging on the end of Sean’s rope, held securely by a climbing anchor that is doing its job and then some. It’s no more than twenty feet below me. And underneath it is a man with a beard and a hard hat, looking up. He must be attached to the cliff by either glue or telekinesis, because he’s certainly standing on nothing.

He stares at the filing cabinet. Then he stares at me.

“I prefer you to your mate”, he says.

“Stop looking up her drawers”, I answer. “What’s the matter, you never seen a girl take her filing system climbing with her before?”

“I’m not even going to ask”, he says. He’s carrying on a conversation with me without apparent concern that he’s holding on to a sheer rock wall by his fingertips.

“You’ll be Sean, I take it.”

This fazes him even more than the filing cabinet. “You have the advantage over me.”

“You’re very famous in subterranean circles. My name’s Penny Simpson. I came down with Vern and Pete. Looking for you.”

He nods. “I saw bits of Pete over by the lich gate.”

“Lich gate.”

He nods. “That’s what I call it. Ain’t that what you call the gate to a cemetery?”

“I’m sorry. You said ‘lich gate’. And then you said ‘cemetery’.”

He’s up to the filing cabinet now – climbs like a gecko. Right now, he’s holding on to the abyssite with one hand whilst trying to undo the policemen’s knots with the other.

“Waste my bloody climbing rope”, I hear him mutter.

He looks up as the cabinet begins to shift in its bonds. “Vern?” he says.

I shake my head. “Dead. The Oracle Smokers got him.”

“The Oracle Smokers those really thin scratters with guns up by that big iron cantilever?” I nod. He nods back. “They took a pot shot at me.” He frowns. “I clipped a krab on to the girders up there, and I reckon I abseiled down faster than poor old Pete fell. I nearly had me a drysuit that wasn’t quite so dry in the arse region. Ah, there we go –“ He loosens the last knot, and, leaving the rope still in his hand, the cabinet lurches and plunges to its doom. I hear it progressing from rock to rock down the Abyss, on its way to the world’s core.

“I’m not sure I can get down from here”, I say.

He nods, detaching and re-attaching nuts from and to cracks on the face as he does so. “That’s a descender on your belt, innit? Clip it onto this.” He hands me the uphill end of the filing cabinet tether. “There’s a ledge you can play five-a-side football on only a couple of seconds’ drop down from here.”

“I’d prefer to abseil rather than drop if you don’t mind.”

“You’d only a break a few legs if you did drop. It’s a cissy distance.”

Then, having made sure of his aids, he disappears down the rock again with the downhill end of the rope – and I do mean disappears. There must be an overhang immediately below. What is most worrying is the fact that he hasn’t bothered to clip himself on to the rope.

“COME ON”, yells a voice I can’t see. “I’VE BELAYED THE ROPE TO SOMETHING FAR TOO HEAVY FOR ITS OWN GOOD.”

“WHICH IS?”

“ME.”

Like a skinny kid forced into a swimming pool on a cold day by a cruel scoutmistress, I lower myself from the ledge by inches, taking my weight on both hands; then I shift to one hand and try my weight on the first nut. It doesn’t budge. I put my weight on the rope and start to work my way downwards.

The ledge down below is huge by Abyss standards – it must be the size of a squash court. Its full extent is only dimly visible in the light coming down from above.

“You can switch on your head torch”, says Sean. “There’s no line of sight down here from the cantilever. The scrotes tried dropping rocks on me from time to time, but they just bounce off the overhang. The ledge’s just about protected from falling crap. See how the votive garbage only collects round the sides of it? I don’t ever sit in those bits.”

I switch on my head torch. It is true. This is probably the only reason why the ledge still exists – otherwise, chunks of Na garbage motoring down from above at man-killing speed would have chiselled it flush to the face centuries ago.

“Careful how you tread”, he says. “The floor’s almost all bat guano.”

There are little tiny button mushrooms everywhere. Even down here, where the sun never comes, there is life, though probably not life Beatrix Potter would care to illustrate wearing trousers and a waistcoat. There is also a buzz of insects, and heat like that of an oven. The smell is diabolical. The rock walls all around us resemble sea cliffs hung with mussels, and I only realize after a few seconds that they are actually crawling with bats.

“Don’t handle them”, says Sean, which he of course really needed to say, as otherwise I’d have been all over them. “Rabies.”

Despite Pete’s and Ivan’s earlier conversations on this subject, I hadn’t thought of rabies. Vampires, yes. Rabies, no.

But the most remarkable fact about the ledge is the ornamental wrought iron railing going all the way around it.

“They brought it down from somewhere else, of course”, says Sean. “These, though, they made with local materials.” He strides into the middle of what he’s talking about, and taps one with a thumb.

These are gravestones. Many gravestones, arranged in rows – rows of modern ones hung with iron crosses and Soviet army helmets, and rows of older ones, undecorated. Maybe they were decorated once. Maybe some grave robber stole what hung on them.

The older gravestones are stones, crudely hacked-up lumps of abyssite into which inscriptions have been scored in dog Latin. The Soviet stones, as befits a worker state, are pieces of construction iron that have been welded – curiously enough, welded into the shapes of crosses. Comrade Stalin would never have approved. Whatever Sean says, the Nazi stones, at least, look like they weren’t made here – they’re marble, nothing but the best for the Waffen SS. The First Reich came here, then the Third. The Second seems to have missed out.

“They can’t be buried very deep”, I say.

He shrugs. “Might be. Lot of bats have been shitting here for a lot of time. Not nice to know you’re buried in shit.”

I look down into the shit, and frown at what I see.

“Yeah”, says Sean. “Footprints.”

“They come down this far?”

“No. They don’t.” He nods his head torch at the end of the ledge furthest out in the Abyss. It illuminates something unpleasant.

Being very careful on the slick surface, I walk out amid the graves to the end of the yard. There, planted in the earth like a new crop, like a subterranean John Barleycorn, someone has left a man.

At least, I think it’s a man. Oracle Smokers are so thin it’s hard to tell the difference. His-or-her body is splayed out on two long shafts thrust into the dirt – shafts made out of smaller lengths of something roped together. At their upper ends, the shafts terminate in crude rusty iron spearpoints. At their bases, they are set into heavy square lumps of lead, presumably to balance the spears and make them fly better. The frame made by the two makeshift spears is flimsy and insubstantial, and someone’s had a very tough job driving in the nails to crucify him.

They didn’t just stop at crucifying him, though - someone also seems to have removed his arms and legs. Whether he died before or after crucifixion is unclear - he’s not so much been made into an amputee as a Boneless Man, his legs and arms filleted neatly of humerus, tibia, fibia, femur, radius and ulna. He’s been attached to the cross by pegs driven through the mummified flaps of skin and muscle that are all that remain of his extremities. His hands and forearms are wrapped sardonically round his neck like fox furs, in case he catches a chill.

But the spears holding him up there aren’t made of wood. I wonder what they are made of, thinking at first it must be carbon fibre or plastic. Then I mentally subtract forty or fifty years of immersion in an atmosphere of sewer urine, fungal spores, and bat guano, and finally I realize what I’m looking at. I realize now just why the man had to be de-boned like a chicken. He’s been crucified on a frame made from the long bones of his own arms and legs.

“Why’d’you reckon anyone would want to do that?” says Sean clinically.

“Wood is really scarce down here”, I shrug back. I notice that, as a final marvellous conceit, the man’s fingerbones have been used as the pegs that fix him to the cross. They’ve had to actually sew his flesh to the frame in places before hammering the nails in. The nails evidently wouldn’t take the weight.

“I know it’s weird to say this, but I think these are someone’s attempt to make a Roman legionnaire’s javelin out of bone.”

Nod. “I think so too. The lead weights.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. Why would Oracle Smokers want to do this to one of their own people?”

“You ain’t got the point. They didn’t. This wasn’t done by them.”

And then it does make sense. The Smokers stay in the manufacturing facility up above, even when attacked, when they could just as easily retreat to the lower levels. Why do they do this? Because there’s something down here that’s worse. There’s more than one lost tribe of humankind down here, and we’ve just crossed a line into someone else’s territory.

“The footprints”, I say. “None of them wear shoes.”

“Think you better count the toes on those footprints”, he says.

I count. I don’t believe. I recount, and get the same result.

“These little piggies”, he says, “are never going to go wee-wee-wee-wee all the way home.”

There are several different sets of prints, all of different sizes. Each one is deficient in the piggy department.

The gravestones are carefully tended. Each one has been painstakingly kept clean from the constant rain of guano. In front of each stone is a dull grey pile of pebbles, like a cairn. Each pebble looks polished, as if by a gemcutter. I don’t disturb the pebbles. Neither has Sean. I think we've both come to the independent conclusion that this would be a bad idea.

“Been waiting around for a couple of days,”, he says. “Imagined Pete and Vern might have showed up by now. Did wonder why. Now I know. Suspected it, obviously - someone took a shot at me, so I thought they might have got shot at too. I reckoned if I waited around down here for long enough, whoever it was who had the guns and the bad attitude would get bored and go home. Besides, it’s interesting down here.”

“What have you been living on?”

He jerks his head torch at a lightweight pack clipped to the rock above me. “I have an inexhaustible supply of Mars bars.”

“How many is inexhaustible?”

“At least three. I had one about a day ago by my watch.” He shows me his watch proudly. It’s luminous.

“It’s a genuine radium watch”, he says. “Little match girls used to get radiation sickness painting the figures onto these suckers. They used to lick their brushes to stiffen them and hey presto, oral cancer. That’s why I never, ever put the watch in my mouth.”

I try hard to change the subject. “What have you been waiting around down here for?”

He pokes a toe at the footprints. “Been waiting for them to turn up. Wanted to know what they looked like.”

“Well, pardon me for not sharing your enthusiasm.” I nod at the crucifix. “You want to spend Easter like that?”

He shakes his head. “I set all my ropes up so you need to climb up to get to them, so only I can use them. There’s a pathway people seem to use around this place, probably cut by the Romans. But it goes down in a spiral, and I can get from level to level of it faster than any enemy can chase me, up or down.”

“What if the enemy can climb as fast as you can?”

“Ain’t no cave man can climb faster than me.”

“Sean, these people, these things, live here. If they can’t climb, they die at an early age. And they’ve been dying at an early age for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could run up walls like spiders by now.”

This does make him look up at the walls above his head a trifle nervously; but it doesn’t bother him overmuch. He frowns and claps me on the shoulder. “You ain’t seen the best yet. You’re in for a real treat.”

***

When he says there’s a path carved into the Abyss even this far down, his definition of the word ‘path’ leaves a lot to be desired. This isn’t the three-abreast thoroughfare cut, shored and blasted into the rock high up above. This is what the Romans’ engineering projects look like when the Germans don’t lovingly repair them.

Parts of the Roman road still survive – the occasional forlorn mason-cut step or archway, hanging in air, connecting with nothing. These islands of classical civilization are connected by paths worn deep into the rock by heaven knows how many years of feet (and Lord alone knows how many toes per foot), meandering up over great stone blocks and under overhangs, taking detours up and down twenty or thirty feet, necessitating climbs and scrambles that would stop anyone having undesensitized fear centres in their five-toed tracks. But of course, for me, by now, it’s a doddle. Somehow, I even seem to like it down here now, as if I’m becoming part of the environment. I feel almost like singing a happy Climbing Down Into Hell song.

And then we come upon Sean’s idea of the Best Thing. If anything, it proves that he doesn’t get out much.

It’s a pipe – an indisputably Twentieth-Century one, rooted in undeniable Twentieth-Century concrete. It's too rusty to be a Twenty-First Century pipe, but made of steel, and serviceable. It’s also, when I rap on its outside, full. And thrumming softly as something passes through it. Up or down, I’ve no idea, but I’d guess at up. People don’t normally pump stuff down into the ground...

“What’s in it, you think?” says Sean. “Geothermal energy? Oil? Natural gas?”

(...except in California, where I’ve heard they pump water into the ground sometimes to ease the stresses on the San Andreas fault. Or maybe, if someone had something really really bad that they’d created and had realized that they shouldn’t have, maybe they might sink a really long, deep pipe into some very hard old rock and try to squirt the stuff as far underground as they could get it...something like radioactive waste, maybe...or nerve gas...)

This is a very old pipe. As I turn my head and headtorch upwards, I can see an emergency valve some way up it. There are letters on the valve. Something-Or-Other-SGEFAHR. The ‘SGEFAHR means ‘Danger of Something-Or-Other’. I get the feeling the Something-Or-Other isn’t likely to be pleasant.

And the pipe is still in operation. A tribute to Nazi engineering.

Maybe, though, I think to myself, I got the direction of flow right the first time.

“There was once supposed to be another temple in Na”, I say, "which no archaeologist has ever found. An old Greek temple, or rather, a temple known to the Greeks, where priestesses – Oracles – were said to foretell the future. Do you know how ancient Greek oracles were supposed to work?”

He shakes his head torch. The beam dances about wildly.

“Well, the Oracle at Delphi, for one, is now thought to have worked like this. The temple’s sanctus sanctorum was constructed over some sort of volcanic vent which seeped poison gas – not nerve-gas poisonous, but enough to have an intoxicating effect on the brain. The priestesses, and for all I know the worshippers too, breathed in this gas, and it gave them visions of the future all right, all the way to showing them their own deaths in some cases, I shouldn’t wonder. Of course, all this is pure speculation, based on fanciful interpretation of ancient sources. But what if those sources were one hundred per cent accurate? And what if the Greek poison gas oracles we can’t find any reliable evidence for were just copies of one original?”

Sean frowns under his helmet. “But you said no-one ever found the temple.”

I nod. “And what if the reason why the archaeologists never found the temple is because they didn’t go deep enough? What if the temple is down here?”

“Gosh”, he says.

Then we hear three explosions loud enough to send rock splinters tumbling off the walls far above.

I look up. There is a cloud of smoke and dust billowing around what looks to me like the factory limb of the Bridge. It’s as clearly visible as things ever get down here, between me and the morning sun.

“Claymores”, I say.

“Pardon?” says Sean.

“Someone just died up there.”

“Good guys or bad guys?”

“Bit of both.”

I look at the pathway leading upwards. Well, parts of it lead upwards.

“Does this still go all the way to the Bridge?”

He shrugs. “Far as I know.”

“Then I’m going up it. You may want to stay down here forever, I don’t.”

He looks doubtful. “Have to turn off your torch. They’ll shoot at the light.”

“Well, it’s a choice between climbing up that in the dark – “ I wave a hand up at the Abyss wall – “or walking up this. And I know which one I’m doing. Until I get close to the Bridge, at least. Then maybe I can try climbing past it.” Though I know, of course, that I can’t. The walls are sheer, and Sean is right, I’ll have to do it in the dark, because Ivan will leave a man on guard, who will shoot me. If he sees me.

No, I’m hoping I can shame Sean into coming with me and leading the climb – but I don’t hold too much hope out for this, as by the look of his hairdo, he has very little shame.

He shakes his head. “You won’t have to walk up the path all the way to the Bridge. There’s another set of openings further down. Saw them about a day ago. It was all lit up, there were tracer bullets flying around up there like fireflies. Happened a few hours back too.”

“Why haven’t you tried to get out that way, then?”

He repeats himself, slowly. “There were tracer bullets flying around up there.”

“Will you come up that way with me if I threaten to ridicule your masculinity?”

He looks at his feet, illuminating them as he does so with his head torch, and makes noises of disgruntlement, but I know I have him trapped.

***

It takes some time to get up to the place where Sean says there are openings in the rock. Since the Bridge is vertically above us, the openings (if they’re actually there) do indeed look promisingly like the sub-basement levels of the Nazi factory complex.

And there are people here. Mostly dead people. In places, also, people who are mostly dead, who’d probably benefit from a coup de grace which neither I nor Sean are prepared to give them.

“National Autoroute Number One into Na”, whispers a voice from the dark mournfully, “will be blocked from 0800 hours onwards during the months of September and October due to essential road widening.”

“In the year 2087”, sighs another voice, “Nhamo Pongo will be the first Zimbabwean to set foot on Uranus.”

Occasionally, sniper fire – sometimes tracer, sometimes not – stabs down from the dark, but always a long, long way away from us. What the people upstairs think they’re shooting at, I have no idea. Maybe they’re just trying to chip the rocks into interesting shapes. Like a camera flash going off at random intervals in a darkened room, the gunfire gives a tantalizing outline of gigantic iron doors set in concrete, with rivets that look the size of beachballs. With Soviet armies rolling ever closer up at the mouth of the Abyss, fortified gateways should surely be expected at the upper end of the SS stronghold, not the lower. But these gates are clearly not designed to throw off attacks from above.

Despite this, however, someone has left them open. A last malicious act by the departing Russians, maybe.

The corpses on the ground are ninety per cent Oracle Smoker, looking not much deader than they did in life. However, one man, lying full length on the path, is one of Keogh’s. Based on the fact that he no longer has most of his face, he would seem to have been shot in the back of the head.

And close up ahead, I can hear movement (or it may be way, way ahead, or even right round the Abyss behind us. The rock walls bend sound like a whispering gallery). A series of scrapes and shuffles, and then a clearly identifiable KLIKKLIK.

“Someone moving”, says Sean, very softly. “Someone with a gun.”

“I think I know who that is”, I mutter.

This someone is moving around very noisily; he’s having great difficulty negotiating rocks and obstacles he can’t see, and he also hasn’t spent a week squatting down here in the dark living on Mars bars and magic mushrooms. Sean, on the other hand, has. By now, he can probably see things in the dark that other men can only dream of.

“There’s two of them”, he says. “One up high, big guy, uniform with lots of shiny buttons, on the rocks above the doors. Carrying some sort of AK. And one down below, pressed close in against the wall. Also carrying an AK, but one with a folding stock, and he’s wearing boots and a climbing harness. Both got gasmasks just like you. Neither of them actually wearing them, though.”

“Ivan and Keogh”, I say.

I explain, very quietly, that the municipal authorities of Na do not, for some reason, approve of foreigners exploring their big hole in the ground, quite possibly because it's full of homicidal addicts to a substance worse than PCP-cut heroin. And possibly because those same municipal authorities keep the civic peace by chucking in kids who misbehave. I explain that there might well be, as well as said homicidal opium fiends, armed and unfriendly policemen out there in the dark. I explain how the British consulate has also expressed a purely scientific interest in the toxic substance emanating from the Abyss tunnels, and that they have sent a group of armed MoD monkeys to locate and bring back samples. I theorize that the MoD monkeys are now in battle with the Na police.

Sean absorbs this, then nods sagely.

"Figured it had to be summat like that."

“Are either of them wearing sort of big heavy goggles?”

“Nah.”

But I knew they had no night vision specs already. If they could see to shoot in the dark, Ivan would have given me fresh holes to bleed through by now, and Keogh would probably have shot Sean as a troublesome threat to his mission objectives.

“Can we get through the gateway without going past them?”

Sean shrugs nonchalantly. I take this as a yes.

“Let’s go.” They can kill each other to their heart’s content.

The gateway is littered with bodies. It is also very dark. As Keogh and Ivan have probably just come through here, though, I imagine (no, hope and pray) that there aren’t any Oracle Smokers left inside. There are footprints coming in and out aplenty, however, dotted across the spoor of a number of tracked vehicles that came this way a long time ago, leaving marks like big bold brushstrokes laid on by a lunatic in a work of art that is purposely meaningless.

About ten yards in, we turn on our hats, and I satisfy myself that what I’d thought I’d find is here.

Just as I thought.

A forest of gigantic pipes, disappearing into floor and ceiling like steel sequoias. Thrumming gently from some weird subterranean power source still operating after all these years. Pumping something upward from the depths, many storeys upward. At first, it all looks like a colonnaded hall from the depths of Tolkien’s Moria or Piranesi’s Carceri; the only source of light, apart from the pathetic candles of our headgear, are Smoker bonfires, some of them nothing but lit puddles of meths and petrol made up in water potholes, giving the pipes the appearance of classical columns, the rust of rock. The whole of Hell.

There’s no-one alive in here. No-one I can see. I pick up an Avtomat Kalashnikova off another of Keogh’s men I find in the hallway (shot, again, in the back). I pull off the dead man’s NBC mask and hand it to Sean. He shakes his head.

“You misunderstand me”, I say. “You wear it, or I shoot you. You don’t know this stuff like I do.”

He shrugs and puts it on, and I put mine on, and we walk into the place like deep sea divers, seeing the world through two tiny circles of glass. Through the circles, the world looks like an oil refinery piled on top of a chemical works. Half the machinery is clearly both disused and unusable. Despite the fact that the pumps seem to be operating, there is no power in the light fittings, as a moment’s flicking back and forth with a thumb reveals. Anything burnable has long since gone into one of the myriad bonfires dotted round the floor and stairwells. The walls are covered with thick streaks of black soot in which bizarre hieroglyphics announcing the end of the world in a variety of cruel and unusual ways abound. My nostrils tell me this is Smoker territory.

Part of the wall at the far end seems to have collapsed, and people are protruding from the rubble. I shine my head around, and there is molten aluminium smeared all over the pipework. This, I suspect, is the work of Sir Reginald’s Kzaer 2000. We must be at pit bottom here, after all, though I doubt it would be possible to reach the stairwell now. The entrance must be blocked by a thousand tonnes of garbage. My memory informs me that there’s still a lift shaft, though, even if there isn’t a stairwell any longer. And when we check it out, there are – joy of joys – climbing ropes already bolted to its walls. Keogh’s men must have come down this way. And nobody shoots at me even when I stick my illuminated head into the shaft.

“It’s safe”, I say.

“Huh”, disagrees Sean.

Without bothering with the rope, he locates a few slight indents in the wall with his fingertips, chins and chews himself free of his gasmask, and starts climbing.

“Hey! Your mask! Your BASTARD MASK!”

“OK SO FAR”, he yells happily, ignoring me.

“DON’T YELL”, I yell. But I already know Ivan’s policemen have welded the doors shut upstairs, and Keogh and Ivan seem to have gone down through the whole complex shooting everything that moves, so there really is unlikely to be anyone in here who can hear us. Isn’t there?

I take a last look back at the pump room. The firelight behind a hundred vertically rising pipes tigerstripes the wall with creeping shadows. I take hold of the rope, and go up it.

Sean is already a long way ahead, pronouncing each level safe with a cheery thumbs-up back to me as he goes. But only three levels after we start climbing, all I can make out above, instead of the blank black oblongs of lift entrances, is bare raw concrete stretching as far as Sean’s light will carry.

I should have expected this. For the Nazis to have completely honeycombed the rock with factory halls and pumping stations to a depth of over one hundred metres, the complex would have needed to have been as big as the Empire State. Ergo, most of it isn’t honeycombed. It’s solid rock. They only tunnelled out new levels where they needed them. The factory complex was built just deep enough to escape the blast from any Russian bomb (and maybe even the rather bigger bombs they must have suspected the Americans were developing), whilst still allowing supplies to move easily back and forth between it and the surface. The pumping station we’ve just left was built deep enough to keep the pipes sunk into the rock undamaged and properly maintained, and ensure a constant supply of whatever it is they were bringing up here from the dark.

“You’re going to get tired”, says Sean. “Must be ten storeys of sheer concrete up there at least. It’s roped and bolted, but there’s not much room to stop and rest as you’re going.”

I look up. “I can make it.”

He looks dubious. “If you fall –“

“It’ll be quick.”

***

My arms ache. My legs, which I’ve been working harder to take the pain from my arms, also ache. I have rope burn over every soft and tender surface on my body.

I switched my headtorch off half an hour ago. I’ve grown so used to the shape of the space I’m shinning my way up through that I can find my way by feel. Besides, my mystic third eye bobbing up and down in the dark made an ideal target for a sniper, and silly me, I haven’t yet been able to shake my paranoid fear that there might still be people who don’t like me left alive in the dark above.

At first I think I’ll be able to rest my legs by perching on the steel reinforcing bands that lap the shaft every ten yards or so. But I find out very quickly that I have to hold on to something to steady myself, and that something can’t be the climbing rope, which stretches and pulls out from the vertical, leaving me dangling in space, having to hold on even harder. The best I can manage to get a minute’s rest is to hook the insides of my wrists around the counterweight cables, which are nests of frayed wire and leave impressions of themselves in my flesh. It has to be the wrists I hold on with. I can’t risk injuring the insides of my palms. I wouldn’t be able to grip the rope and climb.

Sean helps as much as he can, of course – he says he’s already reached the next level up, which seems unimaginably distant, and keeps on disappearing into the darkness up above to check that everything’s still safe ahead. But he always comes back down, clambering down balance weights and cables, sometimes lending me an arm to steady myself.

It seems like we’ve been climbing for hours. I say so.

“About an hour” he agrees, sotto voce. “You’re just too slow.” He pats me on the head and disappears up the wall again. By this time, even he is having to take breaks. “Not too far now.” He first said not too far now a long, long time ago.

Then, suddenly, I hear him say disbelievingly:

“Shit. It really is not too far now.”

I can hardly believe the effrontery. “BASTARD! YOU NEVER DID GET TO THE TOP!”

“No, it really is not too far away now. I can actually see it.”

Bastard. Mind you, if he hadn’t been lying to me comprehensively since we started climbing, I wouldn’t have made it this far.

“How long have we really been climbing?”

“About three hours.”

Bastard.

And then, almost immediately (bastard!) he’s reached the top and installed himself there, and is crowing down to me.

“Not too far. You can do it easily. If you don’t fall or anything.”

But then I hear a discreet whispering from above Sean, and think twice about the wisdom of having yelled BASTARD at him at the top of my voice. It’s conversation I can hear rather than prognostication, so I’ve a fair idea who it is doing the whispering. After all, I’ve counted two of Keogh’s men dead on the ground, and seen another man wiping his knife clean of the blood of a third. And the claymore mine up above must have dealt with the fourth.

Then I hear a noise I can’t quite put my finger on. A noise like a violin being bowed by a madman on cattle tranquilizers, accompanied by tinny tinkles like the high strings on a piano snapping.

Sawing.

Someone’s sawing through the cable that holds the lift platform up above my head. The platform that’s big enough to lift a two hundred tonne tank. That already has a two hundred tonne tank on it.

“Penelope -!”

“I know.” I start hauling myself upward on muscles I thought I couldn’t force anything more out of, but which now seem oddly cooperative. Blisters sear my fingers, but it still seems I’m only inching up the rope. The rope is now jerking about like the alarm line that leads from a spider’s web to a spider. If this rope goes all the way up the shaft to the top, whoever’s doing the sawing will certainly know I’m here if they didn’t already, and redouble their efforts on the basis of that information.

So it doesn’t matter if I yell now. “HOW – MUCH – FURTHER – “

“Not - far -” The rope suddenly goes taut in my fists, and I’m climbing up it as it travels up the shaft of its own accord. It’s difficult to stay on it at first. It’s moving up in short, rapid jerks, as if being pulled first through one hand, then the other, of someone stronger than any man has a right to be. Up above I can only hear Sean gasping for breath, not shouting encouragement any longer. I can also hear the sound of something very, very large shifting in the shaft above, as a single silvery cable snaps and hurtles downwards frighteningly close to my left ear, whiplash-fast.

There is light way up there now. Someone has switched a torch on. The outline of the lift platform, an oblong of silvery luminescence the size of a postage stamp, is visible – and underneath it, my rope, feeding up over the lip of a black aperture in the shaft, over the boot of someone standing in that aperture. Someone who is heaving at the line like Saint Andrew bringing in his catch.

Only another few metres now –

Then the platform lurches and starts to move.

I suppose it’s too much to ask that the lift have some sort of functioning safety brake.

It drops down like a steel press, which I suppose is exactly what it is. I shut my eyes, and my neck nearly snaps with the acceleration as someone yanks me upwards and sideways with a last heroic effort, and I’m suddenly rolling on a glass-and-faeces-covered surface as the fastest tank in the world hurtles past me at a hundred miles an hour.

It is a good two or three seconds before I can remember to breathe again.

While I’m still trying out my first breath, I’m stopped in mid-gasp by a bolt of fire shooting up the elevator. The walls shake so hard that cracks shudder up them as if they were windscreen glass. A sheet of flame shoots across the roof, then vanishes as if it were a tablecloth whipped away by a magician, to be replaced by a puff of soot that rains down on us like wedding confetti.

Almost immediately, there’s a second, not quite so loud bang from the top of the elevator shaft. This is more alarming, as it isn’t expected. There is screaming, and a man plummets past the elevator entrance, trailing smoke.

“D’you think the tank had live ammunition in it?”

Sean looks at me patiently. “The tank weighed two hundred tons and was travelling at a couple of hundred miles an hour on top of a platform that weighed at least as much as it did. It didn’t need to have live ammunition in it.”

I roll over and stick my head incautiously into the lift shaft, looking upwards. “Why did the top of the shaft explode?”

Sean squints up the shaft after me. “When they were sawing the cables, they forgot that every elevator everywhere in the world has a set of balance weights attached. Big job like that’ll have more than one set of weights, I reckon. They probably sawed through most of the counterweight cables but overlooked one attached to something light and fluffy that only weighed ten tonnes or so. When the big weight goes down, the small weight attached to it goes up, at the same speed...”

“Ten tonnes, travelling as fast as a tank falling down a lift shaft. No wonder he screamed.”

“Yeah. Bound to have stung a bit.” He pulls himself to his feet. “Let’s have a look round. They might have Mars bars.”

“They built this place sixty years ago, and they were Nazis.”

He nods confidently. “Nazi mars bars. Made with dead Jews. Bite through the creamy Jewy caramel into thick thick chocolate.” He casts his head to right and left. “Looks like a ruddy school bursar’s office.”

It is an office all right, though a very old one. There is also living accommodation of a cramped sort at one end - people were expected to eat and sleep down here, as well as working. There are Olympia and Mercedes typewriters, Kaweco fountain pens, and bottles that once contained Pelican ink, and now only contain dry cakes of purple dust. Only a few bodies, most of them in Leibstandarte Dacia uniform, two of them without backs to their skulls, and teeth blacked with carbon on the insides. Suicide wounds, though someone has taken away the guns they used to do it. In a room which has three separate mortice locks on its door and contains seven telephones, we also discover things that look like a cross between big typewriters and GPO operators' switchboards.

“What are they?” says Sean.

“They're Enigma machines; a whole bank of them. I saw one at Bletchley Park once. I had a boyfriend who was a mathematician. I remember unwisely asking him to tell me how they worked in mathematical terms. A bloody Enigma switchboard.”

This was a communications centre. A secure communications centre. But why here, a hundred metres underground?

The telephone lines in this room have names, not numbers. One of them is labelled KIEL; there is also a ROM, a PRAG, a PARIS, a KIEV, and one - an especially impressive one the size of a church lectern, smothered in bakelite eagles and lightning bolts - is labelled BERLIN.

Despite the fact that this telephone room seems to be a secure area, one wall of it is glass. Very thick glass, with a manufacturer's hallmark on one corner. Possibly bulletproof. Beyond the glass is a small, cube-shaped room only just big enough to contain one metal chair with leather cuff restraints attached to its legs and arms. I half expect to see steel wok-like headgear suspended over the head of the seat with wires trailing from it, but this isn't an electric chair. The chair also has a large microphone sprouting from the floor in front of it. And behind the chair, also projecting from the floor, is a steel tube terminating in what looks like an oversized showerhead. It's not just the wall I'm looking through that's glass - all four sides of the cube are. One of the offices I'm looking into through those other glass sides is full of recording equipment - banks of ancient tape drives with spools the size of dinnerplates.

"The bastards. The sick bastards."

Sean raps on the glass. "Thick glass. Soundproof, probably. Looks like a radio broadcast booth. For sending messages out to the troops, probably."

"Soundproof I can understand." I draw a fingernail down the edge of the windowpane. "Airtight I can't. It's an execution chamber. They put people in there, and something came out of that big power shower over there. And I'm pretty sure I know what that something was."

He frowns and ransacks his imagination. "Cyanide?"

"No. Put yourself in the position of the Reich. They've been pushed back from Stalingrad. They know the Allies are crawling up Italy - their own propaganda posters say so." I point to one on the wall of the radio office, its colours as bright as the day they were printed in the total absence of UV underground. Though covered in mildew; the poster depicts a rather fetching Allied snail with British and American eyestalks oozing its way north from Naples. The poster says - in English, which I'm quite impressed by - IT'S A LONG WAY TO ROME. But the snail is moving, gaining ground if only ever so slowly, and the poster admits it. "They also know that their Japanese allies are losing the war in the Pacific, and that the Allies are preparing for the Second Front across the Channel. They are getting desperate. And if you were getting that desperate, wouldn't it be really valuable to you to know the date of, say, D-Day in advance?"

He still hasn't got it. He carries on staring blankly.

"Oracle Smoke causes the Smoker to babble predictions of the future", I say. "Whether they were accurate or not, no SS commander would have cared by that stage. The Germans were clutching at straws. Giant two hundred ton tanks that sank into whatever ground they drove over. Suicide rockets."

I stare into the cubicle. There are scratches all around the wrist cuffs on the chair, like the scratches found on the coffin lids of people buried alive. "They used prisoners, I imagine. Jews. Vaemna. Russian POW's. Or gypsies."

I turn round and see Sean has left the comms room and is pacing the length of the wall in the main office. When he reaches the end of it, he starts working his way left from room to room at a right angle to the main wall, shoving furniture aside as if searching for something.

"What are you looking for?"

"Windows", he says.

"We're underground", I say gently, suspecting he might be going cage happy. "There are no windows."

He raps on the plaster hard with his knuckles. "Thirty paces. This wall should back on to the Abyss."

"Maybe there aren't any windows. What use would windows be to us anyway?"

"You were on the face downhill from the gantry yesterday. You must've seen it."

"Seen what?"

"The Americans' crane. They've been dangling it down into the Abyss for two days now. Didn't go very far down, I thought. Maybe they're doing some sort of speed trial."

And I suddenly remember my dream of last night. The bathysphere stamped with the American flag. The man inside it, looking out in wonder at an underwater world. I kick myself.

"I did see it", I say. "But I thought I was asleep at the time."

Sean has discovered a toilet door. He has to kick it open and dislodge a bad-smelling Nazi occupant who's blown out his brains with his trousers down, but the all-important thing is that the toilet has a window. Or at least a fanlight, which Sean proceeds to smash into a window large enough to squirm through using a snapped-off table leg.

I notice that the corpse on the carpet is exceedingly well-dressed, sporting official SS underwear. Sean wriggles through the hole in the wall, and I'm now holding a conversation with his arse. It makes just about as much sense as his head.

"Anything out there?"

"Hmph", says Sean's arse expressively. "There's no crane capsule. But I think there's light up at the Abyss mouth, and from where the crane comes down too."

"And that means?"

"They're still up there. Your municipal authorities haven't shut them down."

That doesn't sound like Ivan, and I say so.

"Ivan's still downstairs playing Murder In The Dark with your Mr. Keogh. He's not himself right now. Besides", Sean adds, "the crane's on live TV. National Geographic. Worldwide coverage."

I begin to see Sean's plan. "They wouldn't dare shoot at the Americans' balls while those balls are dangling from a crane and sending back live footage."

He leans further into the Abyss. "Precisely." He's fumbling with the straps on his climbing helmet. "Help me get this bastard off."

"What for?"

He doesn't answer, but rips off the head torch and begins flicking it on and off slowly, pointing it up toward the Abyss mouth. Someone shoots at him. A rifle bullet ricochets off the rock a comfortable number of yards away. He carries on flashing the torch, but retreats back into the window, leaving only hand and torch outside in the dark.

Someone carries on shooting at him. After a while they get frustrated with the lack of progress from the single shots and switch to automatic fire. Flinty splinters occasionally bounce in through the window, but nothing nits Sean. After several minutes of pebble-dashing the cliff with wildly inaccurate fire, the sniper runs out either of ammunition or of motivation, and the gun falls silent. Sean carries on flashing, whilst making sure all his vital areas are still well inside the window.

"Get back over to the elevator", he says. "See if you can find any other ways up or down. If you can, see if you can find a way to block them. Now I'm doing this, I'm signalling our position to the bad guys as well as the good ones. And we'll need rope. Rope and something curvy and solid." He points back into the office, where there's a wooden hatstand. "That'll do."

I'm not really sure why he needs to hang his coat up at this juncture. But I show willing.

***

The stairwell is too full of mangled stairs at this depth for anyone to actually be able to climb up it. The grenade explosion in the upper storeys brought down what looks like a hundred or so flights of steel steps, and they all ended up down here. The way up is a mess of mangled iron and powdered plaster, with hardly a passage through big enough for a mouse, or at the very most a medium-sized badger. I am larger than a badger.

The elevator, meanwhile, has been swept weirdly clean of ropes, cables, balance weights, everything - it's now nothing more than a long concrete box leading upward. Nobody, I reckon, is coming at us up or down via either of those routes.

But there must, I reason, be a smaller elevator. Nobody is going to use a lift platform which might itself weigh a hundred tonnes to shift an office desk. And sure enough, I find a desk-sized elevator, tucked away behind a wooden door in the main office. I can lever open the safety doors inside with a paperknife, and there's a shaft beyond which I suspect to have a lift in it up above me somewhere - it must be up above me as, at the moment, I can only see counterweight cables. I ponder how to block it. I wonder whether to block it; I’m not entirely certain whether Sean’s cunning plan is going to work, principally because I don’t yet know what it is. And if the plan doesn’t work, we’re trapped on this storey.

Or rather, I am. Sean’s almost as happy climbing up a cliff face as he is walking along a floor.

As I’m leaning into the dark pondering my options, a voice calls out from below:

“Is that you, Penelope?”

I don’t see any point in lying, so I reply:

“Yup.”

“The others in your party are all dead. You may as well give up.”

“Hmm, give myself up and die, not give myself up and not die. You’ve a tenuous grasp of logic on you, Ivan.”

There is a pause. And then he says:

“If you give yourself up to me now, I can promise it’ll be quick. But I can’t answer for my men up higher if you try to climb up past them. Some of them are...unpleasant.”

I think about this a second, and follow it to its logical conclusion. “You’d really like me to drop you down a rope, wouldn’t you, Ivan.”

A much longer pause this time. “I can get up any time I like.”

“There’s a break in the Roman road between there and here, isn’t there? Sometime in the last two thousand years, there was a landslip or a rockfall and the road fell away from the cliff. Or is Tom Keogh still alive out there? Did you not manage to finish him off? Are you scared to go back out the gates?”

This time the pause is very, very long.

“I am going to kill you, Miss Simpson. I will take great pleasure in it.”

“Come up here and say that. How long have you people been hiding your guilty little secret? Two thousand years? Three thousand? Longer?”

“If it were your children who were affected by the Smoke, perhaps you would feel differently.”

“How did it start? Was it the bat people who got it first, in the time of the Greeks and Romans, and started affecting others?”

“The Abyss”, says Ivan, “was once a patch of water meadow in a field, a part of a Vaemna’s land he could not use. This is what our earliest stories tell us. That part of the field was low, and water would always collect there, yet it always seemed to drain away, even after the heaviest rain, and even while nearby rivers were still flooded. The Vaemna, wisely, left the meadow alone, and told his wife and family to do likewise. But then, one day, the earth shook, and the water level in that corner of the field rose. Black water was bubbling from the ground.

“The Vaemna told his wife and sons not to drink from it. But the next day, while he was out in the forest hunting with his sons, his wife, realizing it was further to a nearby spring than to the black water in the field, and having a good deal of washing to do, thought: “It’s only washing water. It will not matter.” And she brought in several buckets of the black water, which smoked foully, and set to washing her husband’s clothes in it.

“When the Vaemna and his sons came home from the hunt, they found nothing left of the woman but a washing bucket, and a trail of suds leading from their croft to the water’s edge, where her clothes and shoes were floating in the mire.

“The Vaemna put up a fence around the mire. A month passed, and then there was another night when the earth shook, and the fences collapsed inward into a great hole in the ground. The Vaemna, not to be outdone, built another fence. But the earth shook again, devouring the second fence, and by now the hole in the earth filled half the Vaemna’s homestead, and he could not see the bottom of it.

“The Vaemna, in desperation, sold his land for cattle and moved. The man who bought the land from him was a greedy Slav, and rubbed his hands in glee to think that he had made profit from a neighbour who’d had no other option but to sell. Several nights passed, and then the earth shook again. The new owner of the land stayed indoors all night, fearing to set foot outside his door, fearing that the monsters and devils Slavs believe in were fighting round his house.

“When he finally opened his door, he found out all the land around him had collapsed, and his hut was marooned on the pillar of rock where the Church of the Angel now stands. None of his fellow Slavs would help him to cross the Abyss to escape; they were afraid his bad fortune would transfer to them. He survived another year and a day, living off chunks of food thrown across the chasm by his neighbours. When he finally began to die, he began to babble predictions, yelling out how the world was going to end, sometimes in strange languages no-one in the area knew. Travellers who went near the place were often similarly affected, and many of the farmers living nearby talked of selling their own land and moving. But the chasm grew no larger, and somehow they could never work up the courage to leave the district. Even the original farmer, the man who sold his land for cattle, was later seen running, blind mad, towards the edge of the precipice, yelling prophecies as he hurled himself into the depths. He’d bought land seven days’ ride away from the Abyss, but still it drew him back.

“We Vaemna have been unable to move away since then. We are, as the Germans said, a weak, inferior race. We have stayed here, no matter how low our status, no matter how miniscule our gene pool becomes, like a child holding to its mother’s skirts. But we have been the same people for over two thousand years, and like the Israelites, we remember. We have a language and a spoken history stretching back since before the Romans. We remember when Celts were on our western border.

“The Abyss calls us. It draws in our children, our mothers, our fathers, and once it has one of our loved ones, our concept of civilization demands that we cannot leave them to die down in the dark alone. We keep them safe down in the tunnels, and we send them food - often we need to put food into their mouths, and massage their jaws and throats to make them chew and swallow. And we tolerate the monstrosities they perpetrate when they occasionally find their way back up into the world above. Do you know there is not one single heroin or cocaine addict in Na? The needle holds no fascination for us. We already live with it every day.”

“I’m still not going to lower you a rope, Ivan.”

“The Abyss has you too. You know it. Have you not noticed how you keep on returning to it, despite the fact that it has almost killed you several times? We prevent people from going down into it for a reason.”

“What about the Americans? You’re letting the Americans into it.”

“We made them satisfy us that their crane capsule was airtight. We cited firedamp to them, and volcanic gases. We did not want to be responsible for their deaths. Our civic leaders, and our real leaders, talked the matter over at great length. But we imagine the Smoke to be a toxin, and no matter how potent any toxin might be, surely it cannot penetrate an airtight vehicle. We may behave like creatures of the Dark Ages, but we do have twenty-first century educations. And we are as interested in the contents of the Pit as any man. Possibly more.”

“Your real leaders? Who might they be?”

“I”, says Ivan, not without a twinge of solemn pride, “am the one hundred and fifty-first priest of the Outer Temple. Priest, pontifex, magus, call it what you will. For fifteen hundred years, we walled the Abyss round and made money out of kings and emperors wanting glimpses of the future. Recently, we have been forced to curtail such activities due to a creeping Christian morality. But Russian mafiosi, businessmen and politicians alike still pay high prices on the sly to listen to the babblings of our tame maniacs.”

“The Outer Temple? Would that be the Greek, the Roman, or the Persian?”

“They are all the Outer Temple. The entire city is the Outer Temple.”

“So...that really means you run the city, doesn’t it.”

“Yes. It really means I run the city.”

“Can’t run a city from the bottom of a lift shaft, though.”

“That is why it is vitally important that I return to the surface with immediacy.”

“What’s the matter, Ivan? Worried you might start to breathe in some of the stuff yourself? I saw you earlier on in the lower levels. You weren’t wearing your gasmask.”

I pause a moment to think.

“Where’s the Inner Temple?”

He also pauses before answering.

“I think you know where the Inner Temple is.”

And it's just about then, when I'm about to learn the location of Ivan's inner sanctum, when someone stuffs a submachinegun into the lift shaft next to my ear and unloads it downward. Ricochets swarm back up the shaft at me like neon wasps, and I have to jerk back into the office to avoid getting new holes made in my skull to let the demons out. I have to jerk back Sean too, and his submachinegun, which is still going off as he falls backward. A line of bullets punctuates both the carpet and the ceiling. For several scary seconds, mobile lead is everywhere. Light fittings shatter.

Sean finally manages to release his trigger finger. He sits up on the carpet, looking hugely hurt.

"Whaddyou do that for?"

I look at him in disbelief.

"He was lining you up for a shot", he says. "Didn't you figure that out?"

"There's only him down there, Sean."

"He'll have a radio. Only has to walk outside and call up his friends upstairs. Then they ball up a block of Semtex round a climbing rope, stick a time fuse in it, and dangle it down the precise number of storeys their leader tells them." He scrawms up to the edge of the shaft and stares down into total blackness. Ivan has wisely turned off his torch. "We don't do any more talking", he announces. "Particularly talking with torches strapped to our heads", he adds darkly.

"As long as you don't do any more shooting at concrete ceilings at arm's length with a gun you can't aim properly."

He looks sheepish, and lays the gun down gingerly on a desktop, like a drunk putting down a beer glass very, very carefully for fear of spilling it.

"I came to tell you", he says. "They're flashing back."

***

It's still pitch black upstairs - it's five a.m. up there by my watch. But then again, I can't remember resetting my watch from Greenwich Mean to Eastern European Time. The watch is my only remaining link with the world on the surface, and even it isn't reliable. As far as everything down here is concerned, it might as well be 1945. As far as everyone down here is concerned, it might still be the Dark Ages.

...But it's true. Up there, close on half a mile above us, a bright white light is winking on and off. On-on-on...on...on...on...on-on-on...on-on-on....

"They obviously haven't much grasp of Morse Code", I say. "They're just flashing our own SOS back at us."

Sean looks on the bright side. "Maybe they're in trouble too."

I find a secluded office and scribble down more notes by torchlight in very tiny shorthand. There is plenty of paper available, though much of it has more swastikas, lightning flashes and helmeted tarts riding wingèd steeds than I'd ideally prefer.

Sean, meanwhile, continues leaning out of the window and flashing his implement. Occasionally someone takes a shot at him. Once, someone actually chucks down a hand grenade, though they don't seem too well up on working out distances and accelerations. I hear a big bang and a squillion little impacts pebbledashing the Abyss walls, then Sean asking if That's The Best They Can Do at the top of his voice, and going on to inquire if they Call Themselves Men. These people's willingness to chuck explosives down a pit they're sitting halfway up the sides of seems to know no bounds.

Eventually, Sean rushes in, smacking the walls around him to feel his way.

"THEY'RE COMING DOWN!" he yells. "GET READY!"

I've already seen the Americans' bathysphere, although the last time I saw it I was under the impression I was dreaming. It's still hard to believe it's not being lowered from the stern of some ship moored a thousand feet above us, and that I can't just push myself out of the window and swim to it.

Sean still has his own torch switched on, and is flashing it in a regular on-on-on...on...on...on pattern, trying to make final adjustments to his length of line and bit of hatstand as he does so. He's wound rope around the wood, making the whole thing stronger-looking, less brittle. It now resembles some obscure part of the rigging on an old sailing ship, but it's quite obvious what he intends to use it for. It's a grappling hook, with which he's going to try to lassoo the American crane capsule. He pays out a few metres of rope and tries to swing it, but there isn't room to swing the premature foetus of a kitten. It's looking like he'll have to simply chuck the hook and hope it hits home.

I really don't know how he's made himself so sure that the Americans are coming down to rescue us. All I can see are lights. Bright white lights, carbon arcs or halogens, not the nicotine yellow of some tired old tungsten filament. Something is bearing down on us from above, and it is lit up like an angel at the Annunciation. At least five or six dazzlingly bright beams, each one moving independently like the eyes of a chameleon, stab out into the dark in all directions. As the machine descends closer, I can see that each searchlight has its own individual TV camera, filming directly down its beam.

The bathysphere - I'll have to stop calling it that, we're not underwater - is big, the size of a camper van, connected to its main cable by a bizarre macramé of levers, stays and shock absorbers. One end of it is all window, two huge bug eyes goggling out into the gloom. Around the windows, a battery of television cameras and other, weirder devices assist the naked eye in figuring out what's down here, looking like barbels on a deep sea fish (we are not underwater). The sphere has skids so that it can be entered and exited via a single hatch on the port side, where there's a small railed platform dotted with what are almost certainly anchor points for attaching caving and climbing gear. A rack of pressurised cylinders is stored along its dorsal surface - oxygen, maybe? - and there are further tanks and pods and equipment cages ringing the sphere's upper surface.

But one thing is certain. It has a big Yankee flag sprayed down one side of it, underneath which someone has added CENTER OF THE EARTH OR BUST.

Besides being so big, the machine is also smaller than I'd like, as it is a very long way away. Sean is going to have his work cut out hurling his makeshift grappling hook that far.

Luckily, he doesn't have to. There is already a man standing on the platform by the capsule's hatch. He is manning something big, squat and powerful that looks remarkably like a cross between a demi-culverin and a whaling harpoon, the muzzle of which is swinging round to point directly at our makeshift window. He appears to be aiming his culverin-harpoon at us.

"Sean - he's going to -"

But Sean's already down under the level of the window as the gun booms and something flicks out between capsule and cliff like a striking snake, punching into the abyssite with a shock I can feel through the concrete I'm now pressed flat against.

"Christ", says Sean from his new position hunched up under the windowledge. "Big one, that."

"D'you think the city cops have got to the Americans?"

"Dunno. Maybe. Maybe they're just as interested in narcotics that foretell the future as the Nazis were."

I sit up next to him in the dark. "What do we do now?"

"Er. Did you block the other elevator?"

"Thankfully not. Even though someone told me to."

I hear a sound like a ruler twanging on a desktop - the sound of something being pulled taut. Then, I hear grunting, swearing and the unmistakable noise of karabiners being clipped onto lines and harnesses.

"They're tooling up to cross over to the window", I say.

"Time for a discouraging sweeping burst through the window", says Sean. "I had a gun." He goes to get it, crawling across the carpet.

"You can't shoot for toffee", I point out. "They probably can. And you'll be blinded by their lights. They won't. And they'll be using night vision goggles."

"AHOY THERE", calls a voice from outside. Light plays across the toilet door through the jagged hole of the window. "PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD?"

"It's a trick", I say.

"We're not at sea", agrees Sean. "Just trying to disorientate us."

"ANYONE IN THERE, FOLKS?" says the voice again. It doesn't sound like a voice trained for military command at West Point. It sounds more like a voice trained for geology at the University of Praig, Michigan.

And besides, I know the voice.

I sit up straight. Light shines in my face, blinding me.

Wilson the friendly American, wearing a caving suit made of enough aluminium insulation to equip a Gemini astronaut, is hanging around outside our window, hooked up to a line slung between the capsule and the cliff. His line is attached, at our end, to a rocket propelled grappling iron I can only assume he has just fired into the cliff from the capsule.

"Er - hello", I say. "We, er, thought you might be someone else."

"You were maybe waiting to be rescued by someone more classically handsome? I can always go, if you prefer."

"Ah, no, my mistake, we were expecting you, no-one else, definitely. Can we come aboard? Now would be good."

Sean, meanwhile, has already swarmed past both me and John onto the wire, and is halfway to the capsule already. Noticing the fact that he still has a submachinegun slung over his shoulder, Wilson leans over to me and says, sotto voce: "I'm the same. Every time I go underground, I always make sure I pack my dry suit, my head torch, a few Hershey bars, and adequate firepower."

"Did anyone, erm, shoot at you on the way down, while we're on the subject?"

He scratches his head. Well, actually..."No - though the Na branch of the Man's been trying to shut us down for close on two days now. Making all kinds of threats. Even sent out traffic cops to tell us the crane jib was illegally parked. You know there's been a rain of car parts in the cathedral district?"

I nod. "Czaer 2000, at a guess?"

He eyes me with deep suspicion. "You know your rains of car parts. Over the rope to the capsule, don't move around too sudden, she's only rated to carry two."

I make my way hand-over-hand down the line to the crane capsule. By now, climbing is almost as second nature to me as it is to Sean, though I'm holding on with a fireman's grip to ease my aching hands. In the sterile white light on the capsule platform, I can see my palms are leopard-spotted with blood blisters.

I suddenly realize I've just brachiated maybe a hundred feet out over a bottomless chasm without even thinking about being frightened.

What for want of a better word I call the capsule pilot, Craig, the unfriendly American, scowls at us in greeting. He's sitting at a control console, trying to appear busy, although how hard can it be to control a hunk of junk dangling on the end of a crane cable? He seems to be doing stuff with the capsule's various TV cameras, whose footage is displayed on a bank of VDUs above him.

"Another body", he says to Wilson, pointing at one of his screens.

I lean in close without being invited. "Yes, I think that one's name was Jim. Headshot from behind, by the look of it."

He looks up at me, mortified.

"I think we'd better be leaving now", I say. "Don't you?"

"Afraid we can't do that", says Wilson. "Got one more passenger to pick up." He moves across the capsule, very carefully, and points down into the dark. Way below, almost vertically beneath us, a single white light is blinking on-on-on...on...on...on....

“Uh”, I say, and then “Erm.”

“It would not be a good idea to pick that man up”, says Sean, with an uncharacteristic verbosity born of self-preservation. I nod my head in agreement.

“We picked you up”, says Wilson accusingly.

Yes, I want to say. But we’re nice.

But we’re already downward bound; Craig the Unpleasant American has operated the controls (which appear to consist of a switch marked DOWN in one direction and UP in the other). The light is coming closer.

“Is this thing bulletproof?” I ask Wilson.

“He hasn’t got a gun”, says Craig. He taps the image on one of his TV sets. And it’s Ivan. Standing without mask or officer’s hat, waving a flaming bundle of rags in the air for all he’s worth. The rags are wrapped round something long, white and knobbly that isn’t burning.

“He doesn’t have a gun right now”, I concede. “But he does seem to have a human thighbone.”

This fazes them, particularly as it’s plain to see, now that they’re looking for it, that it’s true.

“Plenty of bones lying around loose down there”, comments Sean.

"There's a shelf of rock just about underneath us", says Craig. "Might be able to manoeuvre over to it."

It transpires there's actually more than one control for the crane - there are also two big dials marked TRACK and ROTATE, which Craig is now juggling with. Nothing seems to be happening despite his juggling, but I remind myself that the motors that move the crane are way above us, on the end of close on a kilometre of cable.

Eventually, there is a gentle sensation of motion, as of a giant hand swinging us inexorably around in the direction of the cliff.

"PULL BACK! YOU'VE OVERCOOKED IT!" Craig pulls back. The cliff recedes, to be replaced by another cliff in the other window. Craig twiddles his dials frantically. The capsule begins to rock violently from side to side.

"H-have we h-hit something?"

Craig shakes his head. "I've screwed up and put an oscillation in the cable. Hang on." He flicks a switch marked DAMPER. The rocking subsides. He flicks the DAMPER off again. "Puts a counter-oscillation in to flatten the wave", he explains impenetrably.

I suddenly realize with horrible certainty that I am becoming seasick underground.

Ivan is now clearly visible underneath us, still waving his flaming bone, still sans gasmask. Wilson clips himself onto the cabin walls and eases himself out of the hatch. I notice that the National Geographic team have already broken their promise to the Na government to carry out all their exploration from inside an airtight capsule.

Ivan, however, doesn't look Smoked, despite having breathed the atmosphere down here. If anything, he looks cheerful, particularly when he catches sight of me. He's standing on another concrete ledge at the base of the massive doors that give entry to the Nazi citadel. As the capsule's front skids hit the concrete, he runs over to a pile of rags by the doors, extracts his officer's cap and AKM, and scurries back to our vehicle. He even winks at me as he clambers over the rail. I have to stop Sean from pulling the cocking lever back on the submachinegun he doesn't know how to use. A missed shot would almost certainly kill us all in here with all these oxygen cylinders, and Ivan's AKM is still slung safely over his shoulder.

"And when I think that I tried to stop your first test yesterday", he grins to Craig and Wilson. "I am grateful and sorry at the same time."

"Where's Tom Keogh?" I ask.

"I have not seen him for some time", he says - probably truthfully, as this encompasses Ivan having shot Keogh and dumped his body into the deep.

"I am looking forward to getting back behind my desk", says Ivan, with a meaningful stare at me.

And there's nothing I can do. I can't shoot him, unless I shoot both the Americans too, and dump their bodies; I'd be tried for murder. Ivan isn't going to shoot us with his gun on the way up out of the Abyss - why should he? As police chief he can have us shot any time he likes. He's only carrying that AKM to remind us of the fact that he doesn't need to use it. The irritating Cheshire Cat grin on his face says all of that. I haven't time to explain to Craig and Wilson exactly how many ways Ivan is a low-down cocksucking dog on our way up, because I'd need space to draw diagrams, and possibly also an overhead projector. And they wouldn't believe me anyway.

And the whole way up, the little rat is smiling at me in a way that damn near forces me to grab Sean's gun, shoot him and swing for it anyway.

"It was your clever idea of signalling SOS that gave me the idea, Penelope", he says. "I thought, if someone will come to pick up her, they will pick me up as well." And we're rising up fast now as the cable shortens and the winch has less weight to reel in, and daylight is greying the abyssite around us. After two days underground, the dimness is blinding.

"I don't suppose anyone would care to tell us what's been going on down below before we surface?" says Craig nonchalantly.

"I intend to make a full report as soon as I get back to my department", assures Ivan. "Until then, I must point out to you", he says to Sean, as proximity to the world above builds his confidence, "that carrying automatic weapons is illegal in Vzeng Na."

"That so", says Sean. And I'm still amazed he doesn't shoot him.

Instead, there is a sudden jolt, as of someone tripping the safety circuit in a lift between floors. I look down, and see Craig's hand on the UP/DOWN switch.

"Anyone shooting anyone is not going anywhere", says Craig prissily. " If a gun goes off in here it could snap a cable, break that airtight seal you're so fond of, Captain, or cause an explosion. You will please both hand over your weapons to my colleague." He taps a box bolted to the ceiling behind his head. "I may also remind you that you're both on live television."

"I will be only too glad to do so", says Ivan, theatrically handing his AKM to Wilson butt-first, after removing the magazine. Sourly, Sean also surrenders his SMG.

Craig flicks the UP/DOWN switch to UP again (and surely both Ivan and Sean knew they could have done that without his help?).

And then there's a sound so loud I think the cable must be breaking.

All around the top of the Abyss, the edge is lined with people, Vaemna and foreigners alike, pressed dangerously close to balcony rails, windows, the low wall round the Gzel Lziofang, and even, in places, the edge of the gulf itself. Cheering as if we were a Soviet army arriving in triumph in 1945, or a Soviet army leaving in disgrace in 1992.

The tourists, I reckon, are cheering because they've been told, and believe, that a bunch of stranded cavers have been rescued by the philanthropic Americans. Craig and Wilson are beaming like returning astronauts, evidently sure of the same thing. But I know why the Vaemna are cheering, and there are far more Vaemna in that crowd than there are foreigners. Every time Ivan shows his face at the windows, the crowd roars louder. Ivan wasn't getting delusional down in the tunnels. He is their High Priest, their hierarch, maybe even their pharaoh. And he has been cast down into the awful Pit, and has returned alive.

But surely he can’t have us shot here and now, in front of so many people.

And then I see the number of Na police uniforms clustered round the crane jib, and begin to doubt very much whether we’ll leave Victory Square alive.

The crane capsule swings round like a morningstar as the jib tracks left, returning us back over the Beglerbeg’s Wall out of harm’s way. Craig flicks the switch to DOWN and the crane begins to unwind that final ten feet down onto the cobbles, which we hit with an inevitable CLANG.

Wilson throws the capsule open. The crowds close in. The Polisic are plastered across the front of them, appearing to be holding them back, protecting us. But every single one of those officers is armed, some of them to levels that go far beyond crowd control.

Wilson steps down into the square, standing at the bottom of the ladder ready to help me down like a perfect gentleman. Making sure I’m the first down into the line of fire. For a moment, I wonder whether Wilson is actually in league with the Vaemna. Then Sean comes down the ladder, and then Ivan. As Ivan steps out of the capsule, the crowd shrieks fit to bust eardrums, and still Craig and Wilson have their fists in the air like champion boxers, thinking that all this is for them.

Ivan walks out into the middle of the crowd, and there are people in it holding out flowers and begging him in Russian to kiss their children, for Christ’s sake, and the line of policemen is having difficulty holding them back.

Then one of the policemen, in perhaps a slightly shabbier and more bloodstained uniform than the others, walks forward, raises his gun, and shoots Ivan in the head. The crowd noise drops like the tide before a tsunami, then flows back with a vengeance, this time in the form of women screaming. Men screaming.

The policeman stands there, watching Ivan crumple, and I notice his policeman’s uniform has a neat and perfectly circular little hole just over where his heart should be. The hole is blackened, as if by powder burns. Underneath the hole, however, I can see his nipple. I notice that the nails of the policeman’s hands are snapped to the quick, as if he’s just clawed his way out of an early grave.

“That”, says the policeman in Tom Keogh’s voice, “is for my men.”

He turns the pistol round towards his own head.

“This”, he says, “is for your men.”

And then he adds, with immense satisfaction:

“All your men.”

It is debatable whether or not he shoots himself before Ivan’s police cronies do. Certainly, he has more than one bullet in him before he hits the ground, his body moving this way and that, failing to fall in a neat and predictable manner as the slugs rip into it. One of the policemen near him also collapses, hit by poorly aimed fire. Everyone around Keogh and Ivan takes a cautious step backward, including me.

Then the police holster and shoulder their weapons, and run in towards Ivan as if sufficient speed and diligence will cure the hole in his head. They fall around him like beneficent vultures, protecting the corpse with their lives. I don’t know. Maybe it needs to be saved for burial in some weird Vaemna manner.

I lean over to Craig and whisper in his ear:

“Now would be a good time to leave for the nearest American embassy.”

He thinks about this for a microsecond, then nods; and we begin to edge our way out cautiously through the crowd.

Part Two

Penny Simpson’s notes, November 20, 2010

The room is bright and well-lit. Facing the speaker in the auditorium are the cameras of around fifteen international TV networks, as many as could be convinced to attend. The more cameras there are, the more chance there is that one of them will be filming the speaker’s killer if someone tries to assassinate him.

“The, ah, vent is certainly deep, deeper than was originally imagined”, says the speaker, pointing with a British MoD laser gunsight - a souvenir of several journeys into the Abyss - at an enormous Powerpoint display projected on a whiteboard the size of a galleon’s mainsail. What he means by ‘deeper than was originally imagined’, of course, is deeper than he originally imagined. “Its total depth still remains to be ascertained. However, it is certainly more than a kilometre - indeed, at this depth, the vent has still scarcely narrowed.”

The speaker is Craig Van Vreden, the Unfriendly American, pointedly wearing his very best suit without a tie, the modern power dresser's way of indicating the very highest status, of saying Look, see, I can get away with this. He is visibly annoyed as he delivers his presentation to a packed lecture theatre full of the world’s scientific press; annoyed because, however astounding the discoveries dredged up from the deep have been, they have still proved his own preconceptions to be wrong. Scientists are such arseholes.

“It was originally thought (I originally thought) the Na Abyss was a former lava tube, formerly filled with superheated gas”, says Craig. “As the lava dried, it left a hollow vent of considerable depth.” He gazes at his obviously meticulously-prepared lava tube slide wistfully. “Unfortunately, this is not so. Expeditions down to up to eight hundred metres in the vent have been unable to confirm a wall composition that would corroborate the lava tube hypothesis.” ( the slide changes to the same beautifully labelled lava tube diagram, this time with a big crude red cross drawn through it, and the single word NO.)

“Either the Abyss, then, is a feature formed in the abyssite by some sort of erosion, or it has always been here, and is not a feature of erosion at all.” ( a mediaeval woodcut of the sun rising up through the ground in the vicinity of Na, observed by happy smiling peasants.) “The greater part of the man-made structures in what we have come to call the Totalitarian Layer -“ ( a capsule’s-eye view of the Nazi and Soviet crane and Smoke facilities, taken from around half a kilometre down) “- have been explored extensively in several well-documented expeditions. However, there are further structures, in particular a set of ramps and galleries cut into the Abyss walls, going even further down than the German and Russian work. These appear to be, both from the way in which they were made and from graffiti cut into the rocks around them, Roman. Timber boards which seem to have been used to form moulds for some of the gallery pillars have been found by the lower entrance to the Totalitarian Complex here. The pillars, unusually, are made of concrete. Samples of the timbers used to shape them have been carbon-dated to around 200 AD. Only Roman architects were known to use concrete to make buildings at any time before the nineteenth century. Vertical samples of the floor surface inside the galleries indicate large, square-cut surface stones laid on a bed of finer gravel - exactly the pattern used by Roman road builders. There are even purpose-built wheel ruts for short-axled cart traffic, and stepping stones for pedestrians to cross the thoroughfare. The gallery arches are semicircular in section, a Roman development, and -“ here his voice drops as he records another major Roman development - “bodies discovered in a gulley seven hundred metres down seem to be those of dead Roman slaves. DNA samples taken from all the bodies present indicate that most of them were of Slavic extraction, with ten per cent Vaemna, five per cent German, and four per cent Finno-Ugrian and Turkic, just about the proportions to be expected from Roman slave populations of the time and area. The slaves were, uh, probably worked to death, then had their bodies thrown into the gulley when they were of no more use. The gulley also seems to have been used as a latrine.

“As vernacular Greek graffiti has also been discovered in this area, we have christened it the Classical Layer. Someone went to great lengths to build a road down here, much of which has disintegrated over the centuries, and we have not actually yet reached the end of that road. This is the reason for our fifth trip down into the Abyss, which we’ll be undertaking today.”

He takes his glasses off to massage his temples as he takes questions from the floor. I realize with some surprise that he has lost a good deal of his hair. I myself have been picking grey hairs out of my comb for some weeks now. Big frown lines are starting to spread out from the headwaters of my eyes like river deltas. I’m certain I didn’t have them six months back. We have all been living in the same cheap hotel, in the same four adjoining rooms in the same cheap hotel, since May. Three major British and American newspapers have been hiring cheap Russian mafia bodyguards to stand meaningfully in the hotel hallways to prevent incensed Vaemna from lynching us. All our food is flown in in hampers from Fortnum & Mason’s. (And the bodyguards have to be Russian, or at least Byelorussian; the local mob can’t be trusted. One of our earlier guards has already been shot.)

We really shouldn’t be staying here. The head has been cut off Ivan’s security apparatus, but I suspect two more heads will spring up to replace every one that’s pollarded. The Vaemna have lost their pharaoh, and they will surely be revenged. But try as I might, I can’t make it through the departure gate at the airport. Somehow I have to know what it is that’s at the end of the Romans’ road, why an entire legion and scores of slaves were employed (and, er, murdered) to build it.

Question from the floor (young pimply gentleman in a very smart suit, probably hasn’t been working for his rag for long, anxious to make a good impression):

“Is it true that the British government sent Special Forces troops to Vzeng Na to acquire samples of a German nerve gas found in the Totalitarian Complex?”

Craig locks gazes with me before replying. “Uh, we certainly didn’t see any British Special Forces when we were down there. If you’re talking about Captain Thomas Keogh, then, yes, I believe it’s a known fact that he was a member of the British SAS, but he’s now believed to have been acting alone - he was a keen caver, by all accounts, and he was on leave from his unit, his regiment, at the time. The gun he shot Captain Gushin with was the personal sidearm of a Na policeman who Captain Keogh seems to have earlier murdered. He certainly seems to have had some British military equipment on him, night vision goggles and such, but he could quite easily have just borrowed it from his barracks without permission.”

They always ask that question, and that is the stock paragraph we have for it. Next question, from an older, crustier journo (you can tell the older ones, they grow larger on hotel food and the colours of their suits grow drabber. And they always say isn’t it true, not is it.):

“Isn’t it true that Na police troops were involved in massacring homeless people in the tunnels that join the Abyss to the city?”

Craig frowns. “We saw no evidence of any massacre, which is understandable, as we didn’t actually enter the tunnels. We do, however, understand the Na police to have been involved in operations against heroin addicts and sex traffickers who were holed up down there. We don’t believe Captain Keogh has been linked with this. It is our opinion that whatever could have incited Captain Keogh to shoot Captain Gushin must have been a tragic misunderstanding. Possibly Captain Keogh had been participating in an illegal caving expedition - all caving expeditions into the Abyss that don’t have the Na government’s permission are illegal - and was mistaken for a heroin trafficker by the Na police. Maybe one or more of his friends was shot, and Captain Keogh was exacting his idea of revenge. But I’d like to stress that this is just speculation on our part.”

This second journalist isn’t stopping there, however. “Is it, in your opinion, a coincidence that four other British Special Forces servicemen died in the same week? Two missing presumed drowned in a training accident in Weymouth, and two trapped in a cave-in during an Army spelunking weekend in the Mendips. No bodies were recovered in either of these cases. Could these men have, in your opinion, actually been somewhere near the Na Abyss in the company of Captain Keogh when they died?”

"I can certainly tell you it's possible. I can tell you Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are possible too. But if you want to know whether it's definitely true, I think you really need to be talking to someone from the British government."

The journo doesn't even flinch. "Like, for example, Sir Reginald Washburton, in whose consulate Miss Simpson over there spent at least one night just before Mr. Keogh murdered Captain Gushin?"

Craig doesn't even flinch back. This paragraph is pre-prepared too. "Miss Simpson had been attacked by drug addicts while on a caving expedition. The two men she was accompanying had also been attacked, shot, and killed. She went to the Consulate because she was afraid she might be also be killed." All, in fact, perfectly true, apart from an entire infernal horde of devils and details.

The face of the old journo, who I realize with distaste works for a rival rag to my own, collapses into a mass of scowl wrinkles like a sea anemone poked with a stick. Then some science pundit in a brown suit sticks up a hand and, finally, we get asked where we're going.

"Down", smiles Craig, to general chuckles. The ice finally gets broken. "We intend to use Mr. Lifty to the full extent of its operating envelope of two kilometres. If the hole goes down that deep, the mere fact that it does will be interesting enough."

"What if the road goes down further?" says Mr. Lary Journo.

"We will set down a team to explore further on foot equipped with protective clothing and breathing apparatus if conditions allow."

"Surely", pipes up one audience member, "the Ancient Romans couldn't have built a road into a cave system they were unable to breathe in." Aha, bright lad. But you didn't know what we need the protective gear to protect ourselves against. It ain't firedamp, that's for certain. And Craig doesn't answer that one, despite how well prepared he is.

"How many people will go down in the foot party?"

"Six", says Craig. "Wilson here, Miss Simpson, Mr. Bogdanovich -" he indicates Sean, who's sitting slumped in a chair as if he'd rather die than stay above ground a moment longer - "and three veterans of scientific caving expeditions in the Bahamas, Borneo and Russia. May I introduce Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Dougal, and Mr. Oleg Bilibin."

There are grinning bows and patters of polite applause. I push open the fire exit and wander out into the first floor of the lobby, staring through reconstituted marble balustrades at a knot of people cluttering up the chequerboard pattern of the Hilton's lobby tiling. This is the other press conference. Down there I recognize Tom Keogh's widow, Vernon Hallam's daughter, an earnest young gentleman from Greenpeace, a trio of sinister-looking Scientologists in matching grey suits, and the Lost Subterranean Fastness of Shambhala Correspondent of the National Inquirer. I also recognize two gentlemen sitting nonchalantly drinking lemonade at the bar, wearing well-made lounge suits, carrying on a conversation that I am sure involves the prostitutes in Kabul. Both of them notice me and wave. I retreat back behind the balustrade. I'm not quite ready for that level of confrontation yet.

***

"We have no interest in the Abyss. We have been down there already."

Lounge Suit Number 1 has a Russian accent and a silk handkerchief tucked into his top pocket. Rather carelessly for a spy's hanky, it has his initials on it in Cyrillic.

"We haven't been down into the Abyss, but we believe our Russian allies when they say we do not need to go down there." Lounge Suit Number 2 has a Massachussetts drawl and a tartan handkerchief in green and orange. Hides the bogeys, I imagine.

"You're prepared to take the Russians' word on this", says Craig in disbelief. This may not be a good move. After all, the Russians are just about all that has been keeping us, including Craig, alive till now.

We are in the cellar of a Romanian restaurant popular with tourists for the fact that it is called DRACULAS and features waitresses with uplift bras and fake plastic vampire fangs. The wine is actually Bulgarian, not Romanian, and most of what's on the menu is Hungarian, as few people have heard of sarmale, but everyone has heard of goulash, even when spelt with a 'gh'. As the restaurant is popular with tourists, it is not popular with Vaemna, which is no doubt the reason for us being here. However, I notice that a lot of diners at the tables all around us are behaving themselves to what, for tourists, seems an unnatural degree. At least one of them is wearing an earpiece. I also do not recall having seen this restaurant in the past; and in the street where it is, I should remember having walked past it several times before.

"We have seen a good deal of intelligence material passed to us by our Russian allies", says Lounge Suit Number 2. "It has convinced us we do not want to go into the Abyss. We would like you not to go into the Abyss too."

"Why?" says Wilson. "With respect", he adds, probably having noted the man he's talking to is wearing a gun inside his jacket.

Lounge Suit Number 2 sniffs, looks up at Number 1, and nods. Number 1 gets to his feet, walks across the room, and (entirely unremarked by the waiters, which surprises me not at all) lifts two carriage clocks from either side of a big stone fireplace.

He sets the two clocks down on the table in front of us, reaches round the back of them, and winds them both to the same time. He's certainly not winding them up, as they both have QUARTZ MOVEMENT written on the back of their casings in very tiny letters.

"How good is your eyesight?" he says to me.

"Pretty good", I answer.

He nods, gets up with one clock, and walks it off to the other end of the room, setting it down on the table facing me.

"When the second hand on your clock reaches the number twelve again, take a look at my clock."

I nod, and watch the hand obediently. When it passes the minute, I look up. The second hand on the other clock is still at 59.

"So?"

"So this clock loses one second every minute. Not so good for a clock I bought in town this morning, yes?"

"So what? It's only a second." I realize this is moronic as soon as I say it. One second a minute is one hour every three days. Is six days every year.

"Bad Vaemna workmanship", says Craig dismissively.

Lounge Suit Number 1 gets up, walks back up the room, sets the clock back down next to the first one, winds both to the same time again.

"Now watch", he says.

I watch. The two second hands keep pace right round to the moment they cross the minute marker.

"And that means?"

Lounge Suit 1 casts a glance up the room. "It means there is something different about that end of the room."

Craig snorts derisively. "It means you've got yourself a magnet and some sleight of hand."

Lounge Suit 1 looks hugely offended. Lounge Suit 2, on the other hand, nods. "Yes, it would be possible for us to fool you. Given the resources at our disposal, it would even be easy. But now I've placed the seed in your mind, being scientists, you will make little experiments of your own, and I'm convinced you will convince yourself. Unless, of course, you're capable of fooling yourself, and I've met a few of those in my time, of course."

Craig stares at the clocks. "What are you suggesting? That one end of this room is travelling close to the speed of light, and the other isn't?"

"I'm suggesting nothing", says Suit Number 1, "apart from the fact that that end of the room is closer to the Abyss."

"How pronounced is the effect at the Abyss edge?" says Wilson, who already appears to be sold on the idea.

"Not much larger. About three seconds per minute. That also seems to be the case right down to two point two kilometres in, which is the lowest point for which reliable readings exist."

"No-one's ever gone down deeper than two kilometres", says Craig quickly.

"No-one that you know about", says Suit Number 1.

Wilson, and everyone else at the table - me, Sean, Craig, Bilibin, and the two Australians, Dougal and Dougal - stares in disbelief. Disbelief, and indignation - this is like someone tapping Neil Armstrong on the shoulder before he gets into Apollo 11 and saying, 'Ah, by the way, Armstrong, it's like this - the CIA have been on the Moon secretly since 1862."

"How deep did you go?" says Wilson.

Suit Number 1 clears his throat embarrassedly. "Ah, this is not entirely certain, as the debriefing was of necessity somewhat haphazard. Let us say three kilometres."

"Three kilometres?"

"That's impossible! What was the temperature down there?"

"Was the atmosphere breathable?"

"You do know there are one thousand metres in a kilometre, don't you?"

Suit 2 waves away the torrent of questions exasperatedly. "Enough please! We have a transcript of the debriefing. It will answer every question that can be answered. More complex answers we do not have."

Wilson settles back in his seat. "Show us."

Lounge Suit 1 reaches down under the table, and I hear briefcase-unclipping noises. He slides out a sheaf of papers, very gently, as if removing the innards of a bomb.

"These papers", he says, "will not leave this room. I am authorized to allow you to read them, one person at a time, one page at a time. I am also authorized, if you attempt to take any of them away from me, to shoot you."

"Read them to us", says Wilson. "Out loud."

Lounge Suit 1 looks narrowly at Wilson, as if imagining sights lining up between his eyes. Then, he reaches up and clicks his fingers in impatience, once only. The entire room clears. Diners, waiters, and for all I know, public health inspectors, simply get to their feet and, without casting so much as a glance in our direction, walk out in a manner so orderly it cannot be anything other than military. The contrast between the laughing, joking restaurantgoers of only a few seconds earlier could not be more marked.

"Thought so", said Wilson. "How long has this restaurant been here?"

"The restaurant is an international fixture", says Suit Number 1. "It can be packed into trucks and moved from country to country at a moment's notice. It is often essential to be able to provide a meeting location that is both credible and completely safe."

I blink and stare at the departing diners. "You move the whole building?"

Suit Number 1 smiles indulgently. "No. Just the interior décor and staff."

"The papers", presses Wilson. "Read them to us, please."

He does have good reason for needing them read to him as, of course, they're in Russian. Suit Number 1 clears his throat. "Ah, first of all it is important to realize the circumstances. This is the transcript of a conversation with a dying man. He was the only surviving member of an eight-man team sent down into the Abyss from what we call the Devil's Distillery, what I suppose you would call the lower gate of the Totalitarian Complex."

I nod. "We saw APC tracks in the Hall of Pipes. Would that have been them?"

"It may well have been. No-one has been down there since that time. Our team travelled in a specially made light reconnaissance vehicle adapted from a BTR-60 military APC, hand welded out of aluminium, made airtight, and powered by an ingenious and highly dangerous self-contained peroxide motor. Even its engine, you see, was designed not to need air to breathe. The vehicle was armed with a single turret-mounted twelve point seven millimetre machine gun. The crew were young, fit men, and three of them, the officers, possessed academicians' degrees in technical subjects. Two had fought in Prague and Cuba."

"I think you mean 'gunned down demonstrators in Prague' and 'stood at the back telling black guys how to fight in Cuba'", mutters Craig. Suit Number 1 continues as if no utterance has occurred. "The mission appeared to be proceeding well enough in its early stages, though it was necessary for it to begin communicating with base via coded light flashes after radio became impractical. For whatever reason, beyond a certain depth the Abyss seems to deaden radio signals. Messages received back were, beyond two point three kilometres, necessarily curt due to the nature of communication. A message from two point five kilometres reports back, UNABLE TO USE BRIDGING TOOLS TO CROSS GULF IN ROAD. PROCEEDING FURTHER ON FOOT USING BREATHING APPARATUS. LEAVING CORPORAL GERASIMOV AS OFFICER-IN-CHARGE, 'BASE CAMP'. Further down, they seem to encounter additional obstacles, and cross them with ropes in messages nine, ten and eleven.

"Then we see this - 'HAVE ENCOUNTERED MAN MADE OBSTACLE EXTENDS 10 METRES UP, 20 DOWN; INVESTIGATING.' An engineer at Tupolev later designed a camera mounted on a small balloon which was used to take photographs of this 'obstacle'. Many of them came out quite well." He produces a matt blow-up of a fuzzy obstacle, looking like a cross between a cathedral buttress and a caddis-fly larva, slicing down across the road.

“It can’t be man-made. There can't be people living down that deep", says the Australian woman, Jeanette Dougal. Luckily, Jeanette has not discovered either fashion or hairstyling, or she'd be better looking than me. "There's simply not enough food to supply them."

"There is if there's a constant supply of cavers", says Sean, without any apparent sarcasm, which only makes it worse.

"Mrs. Dougal is correct", says Oleg Bilibin, a painfully thin, middle-aged academic who seems to sustain himself purely on the weight of his own crapulence, as I haven't yet seen him eat or drink. "There is insufficient biomass at that depth. No energy source. No sunlight."

"I know Mrs. Dougal is correct", says Craig. "And six months ago, I would have agreed with her. But the fact is that, as well as being correct, she's wrong, because there are people down there, because we have the holes they left in other people to prove it."

"At least, they were down there in 1962", corrects Wilson. "They might all be gone by now."

Bilibin thinks about this and nods, trapped by logic.

"In any case”, continues Suit 1, “whoever built the obstacle, they knew enough about the engineering of iron to allow them use metal pieces to hold a wall together. If it were only built out of stone compressing stone like a Classical temple or basilica, I am told that a structure like this would fall apart immediately. Of course, iron reinforced structures would rust away in time too. We believe in fact that they already rusted on several previous occasions. I am referring here to the 'gulfs' the team passed in messages nine, ten and eleven."

"Previous...obstacles", says Wilson. "That rusted and fell into the deep."

"Precisely. The fact that the makers of this obstacle had a source of iron, and knew how to reinforce structures with it, is after all certain. Look at the number of sharp iron or steel blades that stick out of it. Iron, steel, and, by the reflections from the camera flash, glass. Anyone attempting to climb around the obstacle using only their hands would be losing fingers very quickly."

"So how'd'they get round it?" says Sean.

Lounge Suit 1 returns his attention to the document. "The, ah, next message is as follows. 'OBSTACLE POSSIBLY DESIGNED TO DEFEND AGAINST ARMED AGGRESSION. DISCOVERED NUMBER OF MP44 CARTRIDGE CASES, LOOSELY SCATTERED IN A CIRCLE. GATE IN OBSTACLE NOT LOCKED! HAVE DECIDED TO FOLLOW DOCTRINE OF BRITISH AFRICAN EXPLORER MARY KINGSLEY - LARGE ARMED PARTIES SUCH AS LIVINGSTONE'S / STANLEY'S ONLY PROVOKE NATIVE AGGRESSION. DECIDED TO GO THROUGH GATE WITH LT. PONOMARENKO, UNARMED, HANDS SPREAD WIDE TO INDICATE OUR PEACEFUL INTENT."

"Uh-huh", nods Wilson. "Peaceful intent."

"Last seen with his hands spread wide in peaceful intent with his own fingerbones hammered through them, was he?" says Sean.

"Ah, the next message reads 'DANILOV AND PONOMARENKO OVERDUE 3 HOURS NOW. HAVE DECIDED TO FOLLOW WITH NON-PEACEFUL INTENT.' That is Lieutenant Yezhov, one of the three men left behind by Captain Danilov."

"Smart man", says Sean. "What's next?"

"Then there are no messages for the next five hours. Gerasimov, the single man left on guard with the APC above them, reports in message fifteen that he has seen phosphor flares going off in the deep below him, almost all the flares that Danilov's party carried."

"The MP44 cartridges were left by someone spinning round in a circle firing blind", says Sean.

"Someone too scared and heavily surrounded to aim", I add.

Suit Number 1 clears his throat and continues. But he's visibly sweating, and breathing with some difficulty.

"The next message was very short, and the light used to flash it very dim. It says only, 'THEY FEAR THE LIGHT. THEY ARE NOT MEN ANY LONGER. THEY HAVE LIVED DOWN HERE A LONG TIME. THE GATE THROUGH THE BASTION WAS LOCKED WHEN WE RETURNED' -"

("Surprise surprise", says Sean under his breath.)

"- WE ARE TRYING TO FORCE IT. HAVE NO GRENADES LEFT. AM ONLY FLASHING MESSAGE AS THE LIGHT KEEPS THEM AWAY. DO NOT THINK ANY ONE WILL SEE IT. THEY FEAR THE LIGHT. TELL MY WIFE', and there it ends."

"So Gerasimov was the only man who survived", says Craig.

Suit Number 1 shakes his head. "Gerasimov died when person or persons unknown to us fired or stabbed or projected this into his neck." He opens the sheaf of papers to another blow-up of a grainy black and white photo of what looks like a slender icicle.

"It is hollow", says Suit Number 1. "At its centre, we believe it to have contained around ten milligrams of Samarobrin emulsion - Oracle Smoke. I suspect Corporal Gerasimov died very quickly."

"What is Samarobrin - uh, Oracle Smoke?" I ask.

Suit Number 1 shrugs his shoulders. "We have no idea. Being neither truly solid, nor liquid, nor a gas, but an emulsion, it defies most attempts to study it in situ, and it is not portable; it breaks down into carbon dioxide, water, methane, and complex organic compounds such as mercaptans if it is carried away from its natural environment. Even if carried in a sealed container."

"Alkanes and mercaptans", grins Craig. "Fart gas. Almost as if someone has a sense of humour."

But one of us, at least, has not lost track of one final detail.

"So, who was the guy who survived?" says Wilson.

"Gerasimov was found dead by the APC by a rescue team several hours later. His sidearm was still in his hand, and all around him was a little ragged circle of nine millimetre Stetchkin bullets." Suit Number 1 cannot deny himself a grim Russian smile. "However, forty-five minutes later, a single trooper, attracted by the lights of the rescuers, was also recovered. Sergeant Portnoy was missing all but two of his fingers and one of his thumbs. He had had to climb around the bastion. His battledress was full of the little glass vessels that had punctured Corporal Gerasimov, which luckily for him had not penetrated his skin. He had lost his signalling light, his backpack, his helmet, and a lot of blood. Debriefing him was difficult, requiring great effort both from him and from his interrogators, and may have hastened his death."

"What did he die of?" says Wilson.

"Inattention on our part, I fear. Whilst he was being driven from the debriefing to the military hospital here in Na, he kicked the doors of the ambulance open, ran three streets to the Beglerbeg's Wall, scrambled over it, and hurled himself into the gulf. In his debriefing", Suit Number 1 licks his lips, "he speaks of 'The City' and 'The Temple' and 'Men Who Are Not Men'. And - and he repeats this phrase a number of times - 'the dark, it has as many eyes as a peacock'."

I read down the page where Suit Number 1's finger is resting. "'I have been in their City. I have seen their - " I find the next phrase difficult only because it is so unexpected - "aquamarine idols. I have seen my comrades crucified, still alive...I shot one through the head, to kill him, to put him out of his misery. They hate the light. They hate the light and fear it, because it is good, and they are only evil. They live down there amid stinking pools and bubbling geysers of that foul poison...they speak no language known to man. They are not Russians, they are not Romans, they are not Germans. They are not human any longer.'"

“Still want to go down?” says Suit Number 2.

“Hang on”, says Wilson. “This is the Evil Empire we’re talking about. They wouldn’t be scared of a handful of whackjobs with good night vision and glass spears. They would have sent down helicopters, spetsnaz and poison gas.”

Suit Number 1 nods sadly. “But you are not remembering that as well as helicopters and spetsnaz, the USSR also had political infighting and very bad bureaucratic incompetence. The officer in charge of the operation was a General Anatoly Vlasov, and he did in fact send down a helicopter. It was a Soviet-maintained helicopter, and it crashed. It is possible, I imagine, that something in the pit might have attacked and damaged it, but it was a military gunship, a Mil-2, fully armed and prepared for fighting. It had a very experienced pilot who had been on many combat missions in Africa and Latin America. It is far more likely, I think, that one of the helicopter’s turbines was disabled by a piece of bat shit.

“General Vlasov was a Christian, and had enemies in the Politburo, and such a fiasco had to be blamed on someone. However, if anyone suggested that the General had failed due to incompetence, that person could be challenged to do the General’s job any better. And nobody, of course, knew for sure whether the job Vlasov had failed at could actually be done. So instead, the General’s enemies claimed that he had been foolishly chasing subterranean enemies that did not exist, that there was nothing in the Abyss but stupid Christian and Jewish superstition, things not right for good Communists to concern themselves with. General Vlasov was stripped of his rank, and no Soviet expedition ever went down into the pit again.”

"So you're suggesting we should turn tail and run from a sad race of underground mutants whose main weakness we already know", concludes Craig.

This appears to nonplus the suits. Suit 2 looks at Suit 1. Suit 1 shrugs and nods.

"Well - yes", says Suit 2.

"No fear", Craig says. "Their weakness is light, right? So we take a big old box of road flares with us, maybe a portable generator, a bunch of halogen floodlights...oh, and guns. Lots and lots of guns. Guns with infrared sights."

"What if they don't show up on infrared?" says Sean.

"You've been watching too many movies", says Craig. "Everyone shows up on infrared."

Sean counts on his fingers. "Count Dracula, the Id Monster, H R Giger's Alien, Star Vampires from unknown Kadath - that's four, do I need to go on?"

"Sean, none of those people exist."

"There is no smoke without fire."

"So", says Suit Number 2 to Craig, twiddling his thumbs, looking intently at the floor. "We cannot dissuade you. You are fixed in this course of action."

"Absolutely", says Craig.

"Categorically", says Wilson.

"It is not entirely unexpected", says Suit Number 1 with unconcealed distaste. "Previous survivors of expeditions into the Abyss have become disturbed if removed from it. It is a form of mental illness."

"I'll say", says Sean, sticking two empty bottles of Pilsner up his nose.

"Well", says Suit 2, licking his lips, mountainously embarrassed, "since you're dead set on going...would you mind taking some recording gear down there for us?"

Both suits seem genuinely surprised when the whole room erupts in laughter.

Penny Simpson's notes, January 11, 2011

"So that's the 'Obstacle'."

It has taken five whole days to get this far down. Sean is almost literally hopping with frustration. We have been using arrays of scaffolding winched down over two kilometres to cross gaps he could have scampered over in seconds. The US and Russian militaries, it would seem, will not be happy until it is possible to propel themselves to the bottom of the Abyss on motorized wheelchairs. Up behind us, pioneer teams are manning each scaffold over the gulf, each silvery bridge having its own non-air-breathing generator and a total of eight quartz halogen searchlights to make the dark down here as bright as a midsummer day in southern California. You could tan by these lights.

And now that all this gear, all this materiel, is down here, that tiny little hole in a tiny little wall doesn't seem so menacing at all, more of an anticlimax. More pathetic. In fact, I'm beginning to feel sorry for the poor things, however murderous they might be, that lie beyond it.

Ahem.

Well, actually, it's quite a big wall. Far too high to climb. And impossible to dynamite - the suits were right. It's built a long, long way out from the face, almost certainly held together by iron pinning. To blow it would be to send the whole construction tumbling down into the deep, obstacle, path and all, necessitating another day of waiting as more scaffolding is brought down from above.

So it's a good thing the gate, a solid mass of rust, is hanging open on its hinges. There is what looks like a key mechanism, but the key it would take would surely outweigh a man. Whoever these people are, they believe in engineering in a prodigious safety margin.

We have a proper manned base camp behind and above us, with generators and enough fuel to keep the floodlights blazing into the dark till Christmas - and it's only January now. We have not just one, but a caravan of dinky little tracked vehicles with US ARMY badly painted over on their sides, plus a whole A-Team of enthusiastic young military drones in flak jackets and respirators (mostly American, with two or three token Russian observers). I've no idea how the Americans managed to swing getting a group of US troops into a former Soviet satellite nation on the White Russian border. Most likely the Russians were asked to provide the manpower and couldn't afford it.

Sean, sitting on a rock, eyes the men in masks with an unsettled expression.

"Kilo for your thoughts", I say. The Kilo is the Na currency, an oddity in European history which is actually not that odd. After all, Britain's own currency is the pound, which is also a measurement of weight - originally, a weight of silver - and the French currency, similarly, used to be the Livre, and the Italian the Lira. The Kilo became the Na currency back in the days of post-revolutionary fervour when Na was briefly the easternmost outpost of the Napoleonic empire. The Vaemna, as they invariably do, assiduously adopted all the trappings of their new conquerors, including weights and measures, and immediately and patriotically minted a new silver coin to be called a Kilo. Of course, it didn't weigh a kilo, just as a pound doesn't weigh a pound.

"I don't want to be around when one of those guys gets a whiff of Oracle Smoke and opens up on the others", says Sean.

"I know what you mean. After all, they're likely to be better shots than the Na police."

Craig and Wilson, possibly out of some deep-seated American thing in their psyche, have taken a big-eyed trip round Uncle Sam's military sweetshop with Suit 1 and Suit 2, and are solemnly standing over by the nearest scaffolding bridge discussing muzzle velocities and cavitation with one of the gasmasked troopers. Both Craig and Wilson are toting what I am sure have proper names like AR-15 and M16 and M2HB, but can also be perfectly adequately described by the catch-all term Fucking Great Guns. Not content with the industry standard Fucking Great Gun product, however, they have also attached a prodigious number of accessories to their pieces - night sights, flash hiders, and for all I know, extra ergonomic triggers for that squeezy feeling. Whatever part they can bolt a bit to has had a bit bolted to it. I shudder to think how much the weapons must now weigh. They seem not to have noticed that the army guy they're talking to is hefting a rifle considerably smaller than Craig's pistol.

Craig is, officially, our Leader. Being the official head of the Komatsu Vortox project, and being, more importantly, an American, he has been put in charge of the expedition. However, we've been issued copious documentation by the Americans regarding who is in charge of what, and Craig's actual remit seems to fall into the 'Jack Shit' category. American (and token Russian) military personnel will be responsible for getting us into the Abyss and back, defending us against 'external aggression' (I note that internal aggression seems to be OK), planning our route, feeding, clothing and watering us, etc., etc., etc. Craig has authority to decide which pretty rocks to look at under a microscope every time the military machine says we can stop and break out the scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The Dougals, Wayne and Jeanette, and the Russian, Bilibin, are fussing with their backpacks. Jeanette Dougal has refused the offer of a weapon from the military, whilst Wayne has refused to accept anything but the smallest calibre handgun possible, probably due to nagging from his wife. Bilibin has refused all offers of American hardware, plumping instead for a Russian-made AKM, which will probably still be working when all the Armalites everyone else is carrying jam into useless lumps of gunmetal. Bilibin was one of a team who explored the Nadir cave, the deepest karst cavern in the Pamirs - as no-one has ever been to the bottom of the Na Abyss, the Nadir is technically the deepest cave in the world. Yes. We all believe that, don't we.

Apart from the AKM, Bilibin seems to be filling the rest of his rucksack with meticulously-packed bars of Russian chocolate (a good choice, Novgorod dark, made by a mysterious company whose not typically Russian name transliterates from the Cyrillic as Kadbery). It seems he does need food to live after all, and not the blood of Wirgins.

Almost everyone coughing heavily since our arrival; many feeling under the weather, despite the fact that down here, there is no weather. Air quality v. bad, maybe due to the bats. Many people wearing the precautionary SARS masks issued by the paramedics. This seems to stop the coughing.

Wayne and Jeanette, amusingly, are unused to caving in the cold, and are already shivering, but are stoically refusing to complain. Maybe they think they’ll somehow grow accustomed to the cold and become like us Northern Hemispheric folk. They seem not to have realized that us Northern Hemispheric folk have all packed thermal underwear. It must also help that, unlike the tanned and muscular Greg and Jeanette, I have a solid supply of painstakingly built-up body fat. Sean, to be fair, does actually seem to thrive on cold. He seems to have evolved to live underground. I feel that if we actually get to meet any light-shunning denizens of the netherworld, Sean will be able to play a vital part in communicating with them. It is quite possible they may make him their king.

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.

Part Three

27 February, 2016

“Who is he?”

“I dunno. Some old weird guy, actually lives down there. Quite a few cavers report him, now the Abyss is more open to tourists. He lives down beyond the Wire Curtain and the DANGER NO CAVING BEYOND THIS POINT signs.”

“Does everyone take notice of those?”

Hugh Waldrop shrugged. “I’ve no way of knowing. Sometimes you meet a spelunker in one of the cafés round the Gzel Matias Corvinus and he tells you he’s going to make a dash down through the Curtain to the deep caves, and you never hear of him again. The Abyss has a...reputation. It’s said the Soviets and Nazis sent caving expeditions into it, soldiers and geologists, which never came back. And there was that joint US-Russian expedition ten years ago. The one they said was probably wiped out by a rockfall. They sent four more expeditions in there since to recover bodies, you know. Some of them found nothing, some of them didn’t come back at all, and from one of them they only got back the team leader, Christensen, who was babbling like a crazy guy and had the blood type of three of his team geologists all over him and an empty magazine in his gun.”

“Gun???” The young man almost dropped his coffee cup.

“Well”, said Waldrop, spreading his hands expansively, “it was an American expedition.”

Outside the streets were bloated with the biotech boom. Gigantic limousines built on the Pacific Rim growled past, along with the ubiquitous plastic Africars, products of the burgeoning Lion Economies of the Dark Continent. The Africar was a copy of the Kzaer 2000, revamped to use more plastic in the bodywork and aluminium in the chassis. The Kzaer car company had bought up a Kenyan motor works in 2015, then, after discovering it could make cars in Nairobi for half the price they cost to build in Na, had promptly moved its entire factory operation south. For five or six years, the cars had been made in Kenya and put together in Na, thereby maintaining the illusion that they were a home-grown product; then the Kzaer board had been bought out by African interests, and now all Na’s subcompact car traffic was manufactured in Kinshasa. Nairobi had become too expensive. There had been terrible demonstrations by laid-off Kenyan auto workers.

Boys and girls were walking past the windows in GENE GENIE sweatshirts, each one with their own genome laserprinted on it in miniature. The gene pairings were so small no biological eye could possibly read them, but the shirts were all the rage.

Seeing the young man’s attention focussed on the street, Waldrop mistakenly assumed it was fixed on the contents of the sweaters rather than the garments themselves. “They may look big”, he said, “but it’s all silicone. Actually not silicone these days , but a sort of plastic a Ukrainian company invented - you know, the sort of plastic that retains a memory of the last shape it had before moulding? Only this stuff can have up to about ten memory levels - double A, double B, double C, double D, you get the idea. The pimps and porno directors love it. Tit size to order. Mammary Plastic, they call it.”

The young man was appalled. “They’re all whores? They look barely older than schoolgirls!”

“They are schoolgirls. Welcome to the Carpathians.”

The other man returned his expression to his espresso. “The Abyss. Why do they have a wire fence down there? What are they trying to stop?”

Waldrop frowned. “Well, they actually call it a Suicide Fence, but for it to stop any determined suicide the jumper would have to start his journey no more than ten metres or so above the wire. Any higher and the fence itself would cut him to ribbons. That or he’d just tear a hole in it. Black Cavers do just that - get hold of a couple of leather briefcases filled with bricks, link them with a security chain wrapped round the handle, and drop them down like grapeshot. Bites a damn great hole in the fence, and then the caver climbs down.”

“Why do they call them Black Cavers?”

“Because if you go more than a kilometre down, it’s illegal. Because, they say, it’d be well nigh impossible for the cave rescue teams to fish you out.”

“And you think this man, this Stylite, might be able to tell me where I need to go?”

“Stylite isn’t his name. And it's nothing to do with his effect on the In Crowd either. It's from the Greek word stylos."

“I know”, said the young man with smile that was almost pained, as if he were apologizing for his knowledge. “Stylos means column. Stylite is an old Christian word for one of the more extreme forms of hermit. They were called Stylites because they lived on the top of columns and did the whole locust and honey thing.”

“An extreme hermit.”

“A sort of snowboarding hermit, yes”, smiled the young man.

“Well, it would seem this guy’s some sort of extreme hermit to the max. He lives somewhere out on a flat stretch of cliff called the Glass Waterfall about half a mile down from ground. And he really does live in one of those old hermits’ cells cut into the rock. It seems the Abyss was once quite a popular place for hermits to settle in the Dark and Middle Ages, before the Turks and Mongols cleared the area of holy men with big beards. It was thought that since the Abyss was plainly the area of the Earth that Satan fell through into Hell, a devout man could show just how devout he was by living down the Abyss as close to Satan as he could.”

“A sort of holy test-your-strength machine.”

“It was considered the deeper you lived while keeping your vows, the more full of the love of God you were. The Stylite’s cell is actually one thought to have once been occupied by an Orthodox saint, Vladimir Nyctophagus. The name means ‘Bat Eater’. Vladimir was a wily old Russian hermit who lived down the pit at the time of the Ottoman invasion. He refused to leave the pit despite entreaties from the Turks to come up and convert to Mohammedanism. The Turks sent men down to capture him, but couldn’t catch him, and many of their men died, killed by what was described as “black genies with great eyes of flame”, which the Christian church dutifully explained away as angels. Eventually the Bey proclaimed him an official Moslem holy man, and Vlad wasn’t around up top to object. He therefore holds the uncommon honour of being a saddhu in both the Moslem and Christian religions.”

“But our Stylite isn’t a holy man.”

Waldrop shrugged. “Not as far as we know, but he does claim to be able to foretell the future. Told a climber last year exactly when and where he was going to fall. The guy was able to warn Na Cave Rescue, who took this, weirdly enough, extremely seriously and, when he didn’t check in the next day, went straight to the spot he got injured in and picked him up. Some climbers leave messages on the rock now in french chalk, and the Stylite answers them. Rarely speaks face to face.” He tapped the blurry still photograph on the table. “But I think he’ll speak to you.”

The young man frowned. “Why?”

"Because you're his reason for being on his column."

"Down his hole, surely, rather than on his column. He's a sort of stylite-in-reverse."

Waldrop ignored this and dished out another photograph from his wallet. “This is the face of one Sean Bogdanovich - not an extreme hermit, but an extreme caver. Our Sean vanished down the Na Abyss five years back as a member of the Nilsson expedition we were just discussing, the one that was wiped out by a rockfall. It was thought no-one from the expedition survived. But here’s the thing; take a look at these two photos side by side.” He put them side by side. One was of a wild, long-haired man with madly staring eyes, looking up at the camera from a position hanging on to a cliff by his fingernails, and the other was of a hermit.

“Have you ever spelunked before?” said Waldrop.

“That’s a bit of a personal question.”

Waldrop looked at the young man sourly.

“Erm, yes, I’ve been down caves. I was given the opportunity to do it in the army.”

“Well, these caves are different. They’re big enough for it to be more properly called mountaineering. Ever done any of that?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Good. We began to suspect that this man, this Stylite, might have been Sean Bogdanovich some time ago. As I said, you’re possibly the only man with any chance of telling us what might have happened to his expedition, largely due to the postscript to that letter you’ve been given. It’s just possible, if you show him the letter, that it might shock him out of his state of mind, make him realize who and where he is.”

The young man’s puzzlement mounted. He stirred his spoon in the dregs of his coffee. “Why exactly are Intelligence taking such an interest in what happened to a foreign civilian caving expedition?”

Waldrop looked into the young man’s eyes with an expression of perfect ironclad honesty. “Because we’re British. And because British Intelligence takes an interest in the fall of every Cockney Sparrow.”

The young man refused to meet Waldrop’s earnest gaze, and instead examined the grounds in his coffee cup minutely and disconsolately. Waldrop hoped he wasn’t seeing the future in them.

A car blared past, pulling a float which bore an animatronic fibreglass likeness of the Socialist candidate for the Presidency of the Russian Federation, beating the Nationalist candidate to death with a hammer and sickle in one hand and the Nationalist’s own blue-and-white cross in the other. The diorama was artfully constructed to recycle the Nationalist candidate's blood in the manner of a garden water feature. The young man watched without apparent comprehension.

"First election Na's had since readmitting themselves to the Evil Empire", said Waldrop. "It's a toss-up whether the Trotskyite or the Czarist revival guy will win."

The young man shuddered. "Things like this make me glad the cold war's over", he said.

"Ah, you're one of those naïve fools, are you? You know how many nuclear missiles the Russians have nowadays? Remember, Gorbachev offered Bush the chance to buy Russia's entire nuclear stockpile back in the Nineties, and got the cold shoulder. Yeltsin tried the same thing a few years later with the same result. Give up? The answer is 'Not far shy of the number they had in 1980.' And you know what? Because of all the wide open borders and investment freedom and interpenetration of ideas in a glorious multicultural mosaic that's been going on since 1980, these days all their missiles will work.

The young man frowned. "But nobody's stopping us sitting here talking. And people cross the borders freely to visit the West. There's no collectivization. There's no KGB."

Waldrop stirred his latte with a biscotto finger. "Well hoop-de-doop and dickory dock, bend over and take my big fat cock. They've taken away all the things about their empire that made it incapable of defeating us. And we helped them do it. I honestly have difficulty believing we could ever have been so stupid."

The biscotto broke. Waldrop swore in Russian. "Same thing in China", he said, whilst trying to coax the broken pieces out in a napkin. "We've fallen over ourselves to get contracts in their programme to put a yellow man on the Moon, which coincidentally just happens to involve developing big fuck-off ballistic missiles that can also put a yellow warhead on Reigate from Hainan. There's going to be a war soon. There has to be, mark my words. People don't build weapons without using them. Especially American people. You know the majority of American handgun deaths are accidents that happen in the home? Americans account for most of the world's handguns. They also account for most of the world's nuclear weapons. What happens if Little Jimmy finds out where Papa keeps his Polaris? It doesn't bear thinking about, I'm telling you."

"I believe", said the young man, "that human beings are better than that."

Waldrop stared out of the window through the backwards STARBUCKS sign.

"You know", he said, "I think you're wrong; but I hope you're right. I really do."

28 February 2016

The rope was taut, so much so that it was singing in the wind like a harpstring. The young man glanced up at the belay point nervously. Taut ropes frayed on the rock if they draped over it. He knew little about mountaineering, but he knew that much. But he didn't appear to have snagged the cliff with the line at any point above him. This was good. He'd have to place his next anchor carefully. It would change the geometry of the rope.

At least he had the bolting drill at his belt. On this rock surface, there were no cracks to insert a nut or piton into. A man had to make his own holes before he could fill them.

"You're doing fine. Al you have to do is carry on in the same vein for another hundred metres."

All very well for you to say, Waldrop, but I've only done ten so far.

The Glass Waterfall was a smear of polished metamorphic rock that lay between two laps of the Devil's Staircase, smooth as mercury, hard enough to turn a tungsten carbide drillbit. Virtually unclimbable.

And yet, somehow, someone without access to any climbing aids at all lives in the centre of it. How?

Feeling like a Victorian deep sea diver descending into the realm of the merpeople, the young man descended to the next taped interval on the rope, then carefully drilled another hole into the face - even hanging on the drillbit with all his weight, the drill only went in slowly - placed and tightened a bolt with exquisite care, clipped a karabiner onto the bolt, clipped the karabiner onto the line.

"You're passing over the edge now - there's a bit of a swell in the face, you look like a drowning man going into a wave trough, haha, only kidding about the drowning. Don't be surprised if you lose communication, this area of the face is a bit of a radio dead spot -"

And Waldrop's voice cut out. Looking up, he was now entirely certain that he'd placed the bolt wrong. The line was now snagging the cliff. He should have bolted the overhang at its apex. He was relying on the rope alone, after all, not even trying to climb the cliff, which was impossible. The rope was under a constant stress of seventy-odd kilograms, and it went without saying that he couldn't afford for it to break.

Still, it couldn't be helped now. He'd dug his grave and he had to lie in it -

"Hey, you! Stop making holes in my cliff!"

He nearly lost his grip on the rope and fell off the face. His descender would have held him, but it might have tested his bolts to destruction.

He looked sideways. Somehow, almost within touching distance of him, a long, thin sliver of human being was clinging to ripples in the rock, covered by a mop of shaggy black hair. Neither rope nor Batman climbing suckers appeared to be in evidence.

"Don't worry", it said, winking. "You don't fall."

The young man could think of nothing to say. It briefly ran through his mind that, although the Browning was still in his backpack, the bolting gun at his belt might make a serviceable weapon.

"Easy enough for you to say, Oh, Mercy Me, I'm Just Making A Few Holes In The Rock To Plant Me Climbing Aids, Guvnor, So As I Don't Fall And All", continued the bearded spiderman, "but what you've got to remember is, this is only the first time. What happens next time, and next time, and the time after that? Pretty soon the whole of this originally pristine natural face starts looking like a bed of nails. Bolt pollution!" He wagged an admonitory finger, which almost caused him to lose his grip on the face. "Whoops!" He scrabbled at the rock, appearing to lose his grip again. "Whoops!" he said again, grinning winningly at the young man, and then suddenly frowned, clinging to the face like a human slug, and said, "At this point you stop thinking it's funny."

"I never thought it was funny", said the young man.

"It's all right", said the climber, though the young man hadn't asked whether it was. "I don't fall - at least, not till the first time ever, but that's not for years yet." He cast a glance over his shoulder and mock-winced. "Hooooeee, that's a long way down."

"You'll be the Stylite, I take it."

"There are some as calls me by that name, young master."

Like many climbers, the supposed Stylite was an outstanding physical specimen in some respects, a sorry wreck of a man in others. The strength he was using to adhere himself to the face was almost superhuman, but his skin was a mass of scrapes, sores and infections, and grin though he might, he had a smile like a Roman mosaic, pearly white but with many pieces missing. He was wearing a pair of faded lycra climbing bottoms that had once been striped like a tiger, and what the young man couldn 't rationalize as anything other than a World War 2 SS tunic with the sleeves ripped off and a HAVE A NICE DAY badge stuck over the death's heads and/or swastikas at the collar. Also, the source of the smell the young man had been wondering about for some minutes had now been definitely cleared up.

"I have a message -" began the young man.

"I know you have a message."

The young man was exasperated. "It's not a message for you, but I've been told you might be able to explain it."

"Might be, might be. Depends on how much truth you can take, don't it?" The Stylite suddenly, somehow, turned himself diametrically upside-down on the face and scuttled away downward like a lycra spider. "Come into my parlour." He looked back up over his shoulder. "The look on your face! You can only do that on this bit here, the cliff slopes outward, any other place and no man alive'd be able to hold on. I'm giving away trade secrets here, I hope you understand." He turned right-side-up again and raised himself up off the face indignantly like a sunning crocodile. "What's the matter, slowcoach? Ahhh, you'd better put yourself one or two more of them cissy pegs in and shimmy on down your rope. What difference will it make? I've seen the future, and it's bolted. Twenty years from now, this cliff looks like a Meccano model of itself, I'm telling you." He scrawmed on down the face like a lizard running down a paving slab. "There's three more overhangs to go, over the third one and slightly to the left, you can't miss it. I'll put the kettle on."

***

"Yes", said the Stylite. "I know her."

The cell was remarkably roomy. It seemed St. Vladimir, a former cathedral mason, had chiselled it out himself using tools begged and stolen from former colleagues on the surface far above, while dangling in a leather harness suspended from a wooden crane the vespertiliani had used to mine bat poo. It had taken over two years for the hermit to chip out his cell.

The Stylite was full of such information. Certainly, the walls around the young man seemed to bear the marks of chisels. The ledge in the rock was wide enough for one man to lie full length - "more luxurious than many hotel beds", the Stylite had quipped. It also sloped, thoughtfully, from side to side to prevent a hermit sent evil dreams by Satan from tossing himself out of bed to his death. There was just enough room in the alcove for two men to squat abreast in extreme discomfort. The young man's knees were hurting. Outside the alcove, the world was all vertical. There were cavities for storing minor personal possessions, filled with all manner of unmentionable junk - Nazi desk ornaments, Soviet soldiers' Great Patriotic War memorabilia, a massive Seventies digital watch, its red wire numerals dead and dark. And most importantly, a single large alcove, apparently chiselled in some haste after the main chamber had been made, in front of which two knee-holes had been worn into the sleeping shelf.

"Don't know what he kept in there", said the Stylite, stirring what were definitely teabags, Tetley's teabags, in a Trangia pan of boiling water, "but I use it for keeping tea in. It was important to him, whatever it was."

"Not the altar cross of St. Justinian's, by any chance?" fished Percival. "The largest and most valuable piece of ecclesiastical jewellery in Na, which the Turks searched for for seven days without success, putting over a hundred monks to the torture to find? It was always suspected Vladimir took it into the Abyss with him. Big heavy gold thing set with five rubies that were popularly held to be sparks from the Star of Bethlehem, you can't miss it."

The Stylite looked shifty. "Religious iconography. Probably a whole bunch of pictures of geezers being nailed to stuff by other geezers. Whatever it was, it's gone now. He must have took it with him."

"I thought Vladimir died down there."

"I never said that", said the Stylite. He tapped a tin disc sitting on a store shelf. It had red stars on it, sickles, hammers, and a great deal of writing in Soviet. He flipped it open. "My watch", he said proudly. "A Russian watch. A medal from World War 2. It doesn't work, of course. It's Russian. Mind you, it wouldn't work anyway, not even if it was Swiss."

"Your point being?"

"There's less time down here", said the Stylite, seeming to wonder at his own words. "The deeper you go, the less there is. If you go deep down enough, well, there might not be any time at all."

The young man looked doubtful. "Where do you get the tea?" he said, changing the subject.

"Oh", said the Stylite, removing the brewed bags with a pair of silver tongs that sported swastikas on the sides, "people bring me things."

"Who brought you these things?"

"A man who wanted to know if he would die if he attempted the overhang below the Totalitarian Complex. I told him he would. And he did, of course."

"How did he die?"

"Ah, a hero's death. He didn't place any bolts, and his nuts came loose. Terrible thing when your nuts come loose."

"So it's not so bad a thing to place bolts after all."

"No, placing bolts makes you a terrible bad man. More likely to live to a ripe old age, but it's quality of life we care about, not quantity. After all, it's what you say when you take your cat to the vet's to avoid having to carry on paying all those bills to keep the poor old bugger alive." He stopped in mid-flow to deliver a great cough like a Kzaer 2000 starting. A massive gobbet of phlegm filled the palm of his hand, and he looked at it like a surgeon performing a diagnosis before gobbling it back down again without apparent concern.

“You should get someone to look at that cough”, said Percival.

“No need”, said the Stylite. “Everyone coughs down here.”

"You're English", observed the young man. "Is your name Sean Bogdanovich?"

The Stylite nodded. "Yes, you do ask me that., don't you. It was, once. Names mean less down here. Down here your value is measured by what you can supply. Down here I'm the man who can tell you if you're going to survive tomorrow's caving trip or not."

"You can tell the future?"

"Does it matter if I can or can't?" He passed a mug of steaming brown stuff, which smelled surprisingly good, to the young man. "Most people come back from most trips anyway. You think this place is dangerous? You should try cave diving. Back when cave diving started, the death rate was one per three cavers, per trip."

"What's the death rate in the Abyss below the three-kilometre line?" said the young man.

The Stylite shrugged and grinned stupidly. "Aha, I'm afraid you have me there. It's been holding steady at about forty-eight per fifty cavers per trip for the last five years."

"Implying two survivors?" said the young man. "If you're one, Sean, who's the other?"

"You and I both know the answer to that one, I imagine", said the Stylite. "She sent you a message, I think. I already know what's in the message, but if you don't read it out I won't be able to remember it, so..." he shrugged. "You may as well read it."

"So if I don't read it", said the young man perspicaciously, "you'll not be able to remember it, and I'll have changed the future."

"Ah", grinned the Stylite, "but you are going to read it."

"I might....and I might not."

"You're going to", said the Stylite. "You know you are."

With a hurt look at the hermit, the young man tugged a sky-blue rectangle of Basildon Bond out of a side pocket of his rucksack, unfolded it and began to read. The Stylite settled back against the wall of his habitat, sighing luxuriantly, clasping his arms behind his head.

"From: Penelope Simpson", the young man began, "To: Sir Reginald Washburton, OBE. It's in memo format, you see."

"Ah, yes, very meticulous", said the Stylite. "That's our Pen."

"It then gives a date of last month, and continues "Dear Sir Reginald; we apologize for this somewhat baroque means of communication. We urgently require that you recruit an army chaplain by the name of Percival. Percival is his last name. We do not know his first. We know that he is an Army Chaplain currently attached to the Grenadier Guards. He will come here because he must, and he must come here because he will. We have seen it and you cannot prevent it. You must send him down the Abyss to us. We are unable to descend further, but he will go where we cannot.

"Please inform our family that we are dead. This is the kindest explanation. Certainly we will not be returning either to them, or to you. In contrast to the Russians' and Americans' recent unprovoked aggression of our people, Lieutenant Percival will proceed unarmed and, we promise, unharmed. He is absolutely necessary to our further purpose. Without him, everything fails.

"I trust you are all well, and we wish you a Merry Christmas, though I regret this letter will not reach you before Easter, Yours sincerely, HM Penny Simpson, Queen of the Nether Regions 2006-2031."

The Stylite let out a brief guffaw. "Queen of the Nether Regions. I do like that. Well, I suppose she is now."

"There were also many rather densely-written pages of notes", said the young man, "which I can read to you if you want to hear them. The notes suggested that you survived the expedition of 2011. It took a little while for us to link them with you, of course, but ..."

"I haven't advertised my continued existence", said the Stylite. "I don't need to, you see. I don't return home, I die down here. I bear no grudges."

"The whole message was transmitted by hot air balloon", said the young man. "A Montgolfier balloon of the simplest sort, a skin bag held over an open fire. The letter was attached to it. It landed in the Gzel gzaraeye Tanku near Victory Square - you know, the one with the old Russian tank in."

"German", corrected the Stylite severely. "It's a German tank."

"Mea culpa. And the streetsweeper who found it recognized the address - it was addressed in Russian - and took it to the British Consulate. Who forwarded a request to my unit that I be dispatched to Na immediately. The, ah, balloon", he said, wrinkling his nose up with distaste, "was made of human skin. The skin of one Jeanette Dougal, in fact. A member of the 2011 US-Russian expedition. Believed to have been taken from beneath the left buttock. It had a small and readily authenticated tattoo of His Holiness the Pope."

Bogdanovich nodded. "With the legend 'YOU NO WANTA CONTRACEPZIONE, I SIT ON YOU FACE.' I remember." He sighed wearily. "And that one I really do remember from the past. She'd show it to anyone once she was drunk. And you", he said, indicating the young man, "are Lieutenant Percival."

"That's not difficult to guess", said the young man defensively.

"She sounds very certain that it's you she needs. Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope. What makes you think you'll survive ten yards into monster territory when only one woman has so far?"

"She knows my name", said the young man. "She seems to know a great deal about me. I was curious."

"She may even know how delicious your left buttock is going to taste fried in batshit", pointed out the Stylite. "She is not a majorly sane lady."

"Have you seen her?" said the young man anxiously.

"No", said the Stylite. "But I send her messages." He pulled back a curtain made of the Flag of the Na Republic to reveal a number of aluminium cylinders. "Waterproof luminous spray paint. Cavers bring me it. I usually use it to mark spots where men have died before them. Like roadsigns on a dangerous bend."

"Only where men have died before them?" said Percival.

The Stylite shrugged guiltily. "Okay, and where they will die after. Sometimes even where they're going to die themselves. But I don't tell them that unless they ask straight out."

"The man who died the other day", said Percival. "He asked straight out, and you told him, and he went anyway, and died."

"Who knows why?" shrugged the Stylite. "Maybe he figured he couldn't change fate. Maybe he didn't really believe me. Maybe he was happy to go out on a roll doing what he enjoyed doing best, rather than of some minor pneumonic infection on a piss-stinking bed in a geriatric ward fifty years from now."

Percival stared out of the cell into the cylindrical deep below him.

"Yeah", he said finally. "Maybe there's some truth in that."

"So you've been given this letter that tells you your presence has been urgently requested four kilometres below the earth's surface by a homicidal maniac, and your CO has suggested you might go, so here you are", said the Stylite eventually.

"I was given a choice", said Percival. "I could have refused."

"Do you know what this lady's people do to", the Stylite chose his words carefully, "anybody?"

Percival nodded. "I've seen photos."

"Don't show those photos to the public, I'll bet, do they?"

Percival shook his head. "I had no idea the military were even involved down here. That there were actually things down here that could stop an armoured convoy."

The Stylite did not reply with his usual sarcasm. "The Road is the first thing to beware of", he said. "It was constructed, I believe, for this reason. Those who decorate this place ensure that, however vilely unpleasant it may be, those who enter it come to acquire a false impression that it is like home." His accent went West. "Shucks, there's a road down here, we can drive right on down." It came back East again, as far as Moscow. "Thyese are clyearly Styone Yage syavages who have not even discyovered collyectivization, no myatch for styeel and byullets." The accent fell back to the outskirts of Berlin. "Zese Oracle Smowke poisonss are almost certainly nerve agents similar in structure to zowse currently being defeloped for fengeance on ze enemies of our glorious German Reich. There's something down here that makes sure all this happens, padre. It's not all happenstance. It's been going on for over two thousand years."

Percival absorbed this. He sipped his tea - black, sweet, and contained in half a Coca-Cola tin shaped round with window putty - gratefully.

"So, if you think there's something bigger than the both of us down there, why haven't you gone looking for it?"

The Stylite shrugged. "I can't. This place has hold of me, padre. Maybe men who've been living down here too long can't penetrate further into it. Maybe the Black Smoke is its...immune system. You know about the Black Smoke?"

Percival nodded as the hermit pinned out the teabags he had just used on a pulley-driven clothes line to dry. Percival saw no evidence of actual clothes drying on the line, or indeed of any clothes in the cell whatsoever other than those the Stylite was currently wearing.

"The Black Smoke", said Percival, "is the main reason why the Americans, British and Russians fear this place. It does not submit to analysis. They tried to set up a secure facility to study it in the Totalitarian Complex, with the highest levels of sterility our biological people use...the place was five or six levels deep, with only one door in each level -"

"I know", said Bogdanovich. "I saw them build it. I knew what they were up to. Don't forget, they were only trying to do what the Soviets and the Nazis did before them."

"And like the Soviets and Nazis, they failed", said Percival, shuddering. "The test samples...escaped. The research staff went mad. Washington and Moscow were within an ace of ordering a tactical nuclear strike on Na. It was only the scientists' advice that Oracle Smoke breaks down into ordinary household chemicals if removed from the Abyss that stopped them." He looked up again at athe Stylite. "But the thing you have to understand is, when I say the test samples escaped, I don't mean 'permeated through normal filters', or 'burned a hole in the test tube', or even 'were evolved after a laboratory accident'. Mr. Bogdanovich, Oracle Smoke will crawl up a bottle under acceleration in a centrifuge of its own accord. If put in containment structures that worked last week, it seems to analyze those structures and work out their weaknesses this week. Since the scientists stopped trying to figure out its chemical composition and contain it in laboratory glassware and started trying to study its behaviour in busting out of the same, they've had a far more interesting time of it, and they're all of the same opinion - it's alive."

The Stylite nodded. "I could have told you that. I've seen it change direction to attack a victim."

"Well, in any case, they've invented a new level of sterility to deal with it. All laboratory activities are now automated, total telemetric control. The scientists work from a bunker just outside Na city limits that communicates with the lab via shortwave radio. The military are terrified by their own lab experiments. Fascinated too, but definitely terrified. And they've sewn the press up tight."

The Stylite nodded. Lice were crawling visibly in his beard. "But they don't need to sew the caving community up tight, because if anyone goes down below two kilometres, believe me, they don't come back alive." He sighed and settled back against the cell wall. "Actually, that's not totally true; and I suppose saying none of them come back alive only serves to attract more idiots. And I was an idiot once", he said, patting his chest in disbelief, as if the thought he might once have been an idiot simply didn't bear contemplation nowadays.

Then, he looked back up at Percival again.

"So they offered you a choice, then. Very decent of them."

"It was very strange", said the young man, blinking. "My wife had just died, you see, quite unpleasantly, in a car crash. I had to watch her die, very painfully, over the course of about eight hours. I had my hand bones crushed by her holding my hand without having the accompanying pleasure of watching her give birth like most men have. We'd only been married a year. I was having, ah, some difficulty reconciling it with my profession, imagining how God could allow such things to happen and so forth, and then this...It was like a new door opening just as another one shut."

"Or like an ugly girl appearing on the rebound when you'd split with a good-looking one", warned the Stylite darkly. "A very, very ugly girl", he added.

Percival frowned. "She's actually quite pretty in her pictures, I think."

"Not her. Not Penelope. The Abyss, I mean. That fish-stinking cuntal crack in the flesh of Mother Earth that goes straight down to Hell. You know, the further a man goes down, the holier he has to be? How holy do you think you are, Percival?"

The young man examined his fingernails. He needed to. The Abyss had already splintered several of them.

"Not holier-than-thou, at any rate", he said, and smiled.

Day One

So you're going anyway? Despite all you know about the mortality rate down there?

Percival adjusted the straps of the rucksack on his shoulders. He'd picked up a sunburn in Basra only the week before, and it was rubbing. In Basra, of course, he'd been a 'Morale Officer'. He had not been permitted to be a chaplain.

Good show, that man. I wish I had balls that big, I really do.

A piece of the Stylite's handiwork gleamed like a galaxy on a wicked tangle of overhangs above him. There must be a depth, he imagined, beyond which luminous paint would cease to work, as all it did was store and redistribute daylight.

We're sending you down on your own, only the one man this time. We believe we have a transceiver now that can lock on to you down to three kilometres depth, we've been working on it for some time. And further down than that you have those dinky little diskettes, just dictate into the machine, pop out the diskette and, well, you know what to do with them -

On the other hand, maybe the Stylite's paint was the old, evil radium-type paint that caused cancer of the mouth. It had probably been bought in the Former Soviet Union, after all, where spivs sidled up to anyone vaguely wild-eyed and Middle Eastern at street corners and offered to sell them Red Mercury. The road surface, rough-cut blocks pointing out of the road in all directions, crunched under his feet, more like a natural growth of crystals than a highway suffering from two thousand years of neglect.

We'll be tracking you as far down as we can do, don't have any fears on that score. What's important to remember is that you're the first person who's actually been invited down...and that may make a difference. Sorry, must make a difference.

He stopped, realizing he was standing at the one-kilometre post, which glowed with an evil radium light that would last a thousand years. None of the Enemy in the pit beneath had yet seen fit to disturb it. On all four faces of the post it said clearly, in English, Russian and Vaemna, that the post marked the one-kilometre line and that progress beyond it was both highly dangerous and illegal. On the rock behind it, someone had already sprayed HOOZE AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WULF in what looked like English, Russian and Vaemna.

Percival stopped just short of the pillar.

"I, Gavin Percival", he muttered, "am afraid of the Big Bad Wulf."

Then, slowly and deliberately, he took a step on down the Roman road.

"Good luck", hissed a voice from the rocks above him. "I don't know how this ends, for you."

Percival looked up. "Thanks." But he didn't take another step yet.

"Bogdanovich?"

"Yup?"

"How come the other people in Penny Simpson's notes became violent, aggressive, and murderous, and you didn't?"

The dark above his head appeared to consider. "I dunno. Perhaps because it took longer to affect me. Maybe my mind had time to adjust. But consider this - I may be putting you through the same process as if I'd banged your brains out with a boulder on first seeing you. It's just a question of timescale - because in my opinion, I am certainly sending you to your death."

Percival did not find this altogether reassuring. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. And please remember, Percival...may I call you Percy?"

"You may not."

"The Black Queen is murderous, Percy. She is aggressive, she is violent. Do not ever foolishly consider her to be anything other than what she is."

The dark fell silent. The radio communicator buzzed in Percival's top pocket. He tore it out, without seeming to think about it, and threw it sideways into the pit. The gravel growled softly beneath his boots, and hordes of bats watched from beneath the overhangs like rows of upside-down operagoers. A long, long way above, a tiny pie of sky glowed an impossible, brilliant blue. Occasionally, a spraypainted graffito in English and what Percival imagined might be broken Russian lit the blackness - "TWO DEATHS HERE!", "CAREFUL, CRUMBLING ROCK!", or sometimes just a very large "!".

After a little while, he came to an area where even the Stylite's messages fell silent. There was not supposed to be any torchlight down here - her people don't need artificial light, the Stylite had said - but there were two yellow flames guttering ahead and below in the blackness. A welcome, maybe - or a lure? Continuing to pick out his own way with a hand torch, Percival pushed ahead, negotiating drops and rises in the route with care, but not taking excessive notice of the blackness to either side of him. "The Enemy", the Stylite had said, "will be out there in the dark at all times, waiting for any command, any excuse to close in and feast upon your pasty white flesh. There is absolutely nothing you can do about this. Live with it."

He came up, abruptly, to the two yellow flames, which were flickering on top of two crude candles. The candles, in turn, were fastened to the heads of stakes made of some material he thought it better not to scrutinize further. The candles stank like the inside of an oven after a Sunday roast, and were burning a smoky, livid yellow. Between them, on the grime and gravel, a carpet had been laid out - a beautiful, purple carpet of a quality surely intended to be hung rather than stood on. The carpet stretched out further than his light.

"It's a welcome", said the dark above him.

"Are you still there?" said Percival, amazed that the hermit seemed to have been able to climb silently in the pitch dark as rapidly as he could walk.

"Evidently", hissed the dark.

"I'd expect red", said Percival, "for a welcome."

"Well, this is purple", said the Stylite. "For a royal welcome." The carpet was, on a second examination, not exactly purple, but a deep mottled maroon that brought to mind dried blood. Tyrian purple, maybe, that hugely expensive dye of the ancient world, each litre of which was squeezed from the sepia of a million molluscs.

Or actual dried blood, obviously.

"In Euripides' Agamemnon", said Percival, "it's treading on a purple carpet which is Agamemnon's downfall. The ancient Greek gods punish him for his wicked pride. The people down here might be descended from Greeks. Maybe it's a test."

"It's a Persian carpet", said the hermit. "Not a Greek one. The language you can see along its borders is Persian. That name by your left foot, I am reliably informed, is 'Rustem', a great Persian hero. He's the guy below you to the right, fighting the big ugly white dude. I've seen the carpet before, being beaten out in their city square. Old war loot from many years ago, no more. Persian armies passed this way before, before the Greeks and Romans. And other armies passed before the Persians did -"

"You've been down as far as the City?"

"Once or twice. It's not an experience I care to repeat. I was lucky to pass through their scouts without being taken. I discussed the carpet at great length in correspondence with Her Infernal Majesty. It relates the exploits of the line of Zal. I'm not sure whether Zal really existed, or whether the Persians simply invented him. Certainly he was helped to power by a big white bird, which sounds highly dodgy from a standpoint of historical accuracy."

"Surely it would have faded by now, if it was that old."

"To get faded, it would have to see sunlight. And it's not seen the sun for a very, very long time."

"But the pictures -" Percival swept the feeble torch beam over bearded giants, flame-feathered birds, turbanned swordsmen - "this can’t be a carpet from a Moslem country, it's full of...idols."

"This is a carpet", said the cliff, "from what was shortly to become a Moslem country. And now I really must go, as the troglos are on their way. You're on your own now."

They're on their way.

Not wanting to tread on a two thousand year old heirloom, but not wanting to appear impolite, Percival gingerly edged out onto the weave and walked as softly as any kung fu master on any rice paper to its end. The gravel hardly whispered. He resumed his downward journey.

***

The Stylite had been right. Everyone did cough down here. Percival felt his eyes streaming and his mucous membranes wanting to turn themselves inside out.

At times, Simpson's journal had warned, there would be gaps in the rock, and he had been supplied with enough aid climbing gear to rappel down the walls of Hell to deal with this. The first of these he came to, however, had been helpfully bridged by driving three posts, made of what looked like steel leaf suspension springs, into the road surface on either side. Around these had been looped lengths of what (for want of more accurate descriptions that didn't disturb him deeply) he chose to call rope. This stretched three meagre strands of stuff across the void; one to tread on, two to hold on to on either side.

Not entirely trusting the bridge, he debated using the Bosch drill at his belt to punch a bolt into the wall and clamber across the gap, bypassing the bridge entirely. He decided against it. After all, if the means to cross had been provided, common courtesy dictated he should use them.

He wobbled out onto the first bridge, clinging on to the side ropes for dear life - and toppled over sideways immediately like a felled tree.

The strain of staying on the line nearly ripped his right arm from its socket. Items of minor importance - a St. Christopher's medal his mother had given him, a penknife, a pencil - slid from his pack's side pockets and fell into the dark, and he heard them rustling off cliffs beneath...far, far beneath. His right arm was tiring on the side rope. It was only a matter of time before he joined his possessions, and no matter how hard he hauled on the lines, they refused to let him back up to an upright position. The pack, unbelievably heavy, was bending his spine sideways like a bow.

Could the bridge be a booby trap? Would the troglodytes send a message halfway across the world to a man just to assassinate him for their own amusement?

No. There had to be a proper way to do this. He was just doing it wrong.

Gripping the standing rope using his feet as both sides of a pincer, he shifted his weight back onto it, bending his knees deeply, arriving back where he'd come from in a squat, the ropes coming back to the centre obediently.

So the side wires were just for guidance. The centre rope was where the weight went and had to stay. Carefully, treading on ricepaper for the second time that day, he eased himself inch by inch across the bridge, and arrived, soaking wet with with sweat and gasping, at the other side. Luckily, he'd been able to keep hold of the torch, which he had stupidly held in his hand when he’d started out across the chasm. He secured it to his pack with a length of bungee cord and infinite care, and continued.

There were three more bridges like this. By the time he'd negotiated them all, the common courtesy of his hosts in leaving him ways to cross the gaps in the road had left him with his heart pounding in his chest and his inner clothes soaked in perspiration; and then he came to the Black Smoker, in the place where Simpson's journal had said it would be, boiling evil from the rock. As he approached it, it seemed to boil towards him; he took several hasty steps backwards. The bulk of it was tumbling over the cliff, as if it was heavier than air; the Stylite had told him not to trust this. Sometimes it falls, sometimes it rises.

Watching the way the Smoke was blowing with obsessive-compulsive caution, he selected a part of the cliff that seemed easily climbable and set to it. Before long, he was fifteen feet up above the road surface, still warily watching the direction of the Smoke. As luck would have it, there was a crack vertically above the Smoke vent (but not a crack, as far as he could see, that was itself venting Smoke).

As cautiously as if milking venom from a serpent, he reached across to feel the crack for size, select a nut of the right shape, slide the nut into the crack, clip a karabiner onto the nut, slide a rope through the karabiner....

He looked down, and was both appalled and astonished. The Smoke cloud had bubbled out onto the road surface where he had begun his climb only seconds earlier, almost as if it were casting about for his scent, covering the flagstones like a murky black carpet.

Grimly, he smiled to himself, tested the anchor he'd placed with first one hand and then two, then swung out clean over the top of the vent, letting go of the rope and hurtling down the fifteen feet on the other side, rolling as he hit the gravel, congratulating himself on his cleverness half a second before braining himself on an armoured personnel carrier he hadn’t expected to be there and knocking his own lights out.

***

When he woke up, he had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. The Black Smoke was still bubbling out of the cliff, and seemed to have made no attempt to approach closer. But of course, if it had already approached him while he was under...but he reassured himself that he felt no different.

He upbraided himself for not having remembered the APC would be there from Penny Simpson's journal. True to the journal, the broad, open ledge up from which he was now heaving himself was indeed considerably wider than the normal road surface. It was also set about with more than just the one APC, and with spaces where other APC's had been before being rolled or driven away into the dark. The APC's all seemed to be variants of M113's, American-made, designed for maximum survivability on a nuclear battlefield. They were burnt out. Of their crews there was no sign.

The torch, contrary to any reasonable expectation, was still working. He felt a momentary surge of pride that it had been made in Britain, and resolved to get one of his own as soon as he returned back to the surface.

Unfortunately, the downside of the torch working was that it allowed him to see things.

All around him in a wide, ragged circle, the eyes of the inhabitants of the underworld shone like a million moons - apart, of course, from the fact that moons did not normally come in pairs. A million Martian moons, maybe. They were on the surface of the ledge around him, peering over the edge of the cliff beneath it, crawling in phalanx down the cliff above it. As they scuttled closer, the forms behind the eyes became dimly visible - alarmingly smaller than expected, the heads almost entirely occupied by eye. The eyes came no closer than the edge of the dim circle of torchlight, and now that they were closer, rather than being wide full moons, they were closed crescent slits.

Suddenly realizing that the torch was causing them pain, he lowered it, and immediately regretted his kindness. They came on in a surge of crackling gravel, moving several loping steps closer.

They're not monstrosities, said his good side. They're people just like you are, equally beloved of God.

But his pragmatic side added, No, they really are monstrosities. And just because God loves them doesn't mean you have to agree with him.

They closed in around him, but did not attack. The impression was not one of a raiding party, but an escort - although he could see that, at the back of the crowd, many of them were carrying what were surely weapons. They had been suspecting he might bring weapons of his own, and indeed, Waldrop had insisted that he bring the HP-35, though he'd slung it surreptitiously over the cliff fifteen minutes ago. How could thirteen bullets defend him against an onrush of a hundred of the creatures, when Armalites and hand grenades hadn't protected forty men five years before?

He walked with them down the path, keeping the beam of his torch low to the ground. The monstrosities followed, their faces illuminated from underneath by his torchlight, like children's faces telling Hallowe'en stories.

***

The city was immense, all the more so because it was so unexpected. He had, of course, known it existed - Simpson's notes had described it, and the Dornier drone had photographed it in detail six months ago, and Pentagon tacticians had gone over its weak points exhaustively - but nothing could prepare a man for finding a city where no city should be.

It had been constructed by a people who knew space was at a premium. Like the inhabitants of cities in similar environments - Venice, Manhattan, Tokyo - they had built upwards. The only freely available building material here, abyssite, had been piled up in abundance - the walls were high, buttressed, crenellated, machicolated, proof against siege, earthquake and, for all he knew, Godzilla. Towers jutted from them, with fantastical siege engines mounted on each on turntables that swivelled to cover Percival and his party as they approached the walls. Within the walls, the houses were towers higher than the walls themselves, connected by bridges on squat, businesslike romanesque arches. The bridges and buildings were almost as heavily fortified as the outer walls, though there were no windows - it only seemed possible to enter each roughly rectangular tower via a staircase winding round it to a single child-sized doorway. The child would have to bend down as it entered.

And the Infernal City stank like hell, a fact politely omitted in Penelope Simpson's tour guide. Above all, it stank of human excrement. Although the more obvious uses of human bodily waste, such as fertilizing fields, were irrelevant down here, Percival had no doubt that the fastidious people mentioned in Simpson's memoirs were finding other uses for it all around him. It certainly smelled as if they didn't just throw it away, and the place was a mass of flies, a solid carpet of them swarming around the bases of many of the buildings as he and his escort crossed the clanging steel drawbridge into the city. As he walked further, his guides' physical forms becoming horribly clearer as they passed under the streets' dim candles, he saw some of the inhabitants darting forth with nets of some diaphanous substance and skimming them into apertures at the buildings' bases, withdrawing them full of squirming masses of shit-smeared maggots. Nothing wasted, he told himself. The human animal operating at maximum efficiency. Human beings couldn't turn human shit into protein, but maggots did it with ease. He had little doubt that those maggots would end up on someone's dinner table - hopefully dead, roasted and shit-free.

He realized suddenly that he could see the activity going on in the streets around him. How could this be? The city's lucifuge inhabitants surely didn't need to hang tallow candles like lanterns on every street corner to be able to see. Had this (albeit dim) light show been put on solely for his benefit? And if so, why was every street illuminated?

Certainly, his escort were not allowing him to walk down any street he chose. Rather, he was being guided down a wide avenue, big enough for several people to walk abreast. The avenue was lined with armoured fighting vehicles from the past three millennia - US Army, Red Army, Waffen SS, Achaemenid - and led up to the precipitous steps of what could only be Penelope Simpson's Bathopolis. And in the tiny, V-arched crack at the head of the steps, the only light from the inside of the building was blocked by a golden throne, and a figure was occupying that throne.

The steps were covered by a purple carpet, larger than the first and considerably more splendid. Percival made a point of treading on it on his way up to the Royal Presence, grinding the faces of ancient Persian kings into the abyssite.

She had grown fat; this probably spoke of success, down here. As a young woman, she had been pretty. As an older woman, she had not aged like a fine wine. Rather, she appeared to have grown like a cancer. Her belly was a swollen, pregnant mass, on top of which huge breasts were piled like pillows. Her face was now framed in fat, her arms and legs massive, her hair grown long enough to provide a bed for her where she sat. Her coiffure also looked to be crawling with much the same minute parasites as the Stylite's beard, though all about her Troglodytes fussed and fretted, combing the night crawlers from her fringe, scrubbing blood and afterbirth from the insides of her thighs, tracing out new lines of kohl and henna all over her as if she were a work of performance art in progress. There was no expression visible in the mass of baroque curlicues her maids-in-waiting had made of her face, which was lit from behind in any case. Percival felt that, under the circumstances, shining torchlight in her eyes might be interpreted as an attack. And she still had not yet moved at all. She might be a dead, rotting corpse still being blindly worshipped by the troglodytes for all he knew.

"Your Majesty", he said, thinking this the correct manner of address, and bowed.

A voice issued from the dark where the Queen's voice ought to be. "Regina inferorum placet servum salutare".

"It pleases the Queen of the Underworld to greet her servant", echoed a heavily-accented voice from the left hand side of the throne.

"Latinam loquor", said Percival huffily. "I took Classics at university. But being English, the Queen also understands English. What is the reason for me being here?"

There was a pause while the voice from the left interpreted - entirely unnecessarily, Percival was certain. Then the throne spoke again, creakily, croakily, like a gearbox being pushed into a gear that had not been used for a very long time. It sounded, however, amused.

"I remember English", it said in English. "A language busy with small words, overburdened with ways for describing genitalia, incapable of inflection and bereft of a proper subjunctive. A simplified dialect of German."

"And a language now spoken by twenty per cent of the world's population", said Percival. "Whereas Latin is now spoken by Latin teachers, academics, some but not all priests of the Roman Catholic Church, and of course Her Majesty. What is my reason for being here? I do not wish to be rude, but my question has not been answered." Percival felt that this question was better asked in English. If he had asked it in Latin, he was certain, the Queen's loyal subjects would have killed him.

The throne cackled, though it might have been a cough. "You're here because you're here because you're here because you're here, Mr. Percival. You are here because I remember you being here."

Ye gods, not this again. "What is it I do", said Percival, "when I'm here?"

"I can't see everything you do. I can only remember what I will actually see happen." The dark cackled again. "What'd'you think I am, psychic?"

Percival absorbed this. "Okay. Let's put the question another way. What do you want me to do while I'm here?"

"We do, it is true, have an immediate problem worthy of your attention. My people are suffering, Mr. Percival. Move your torch to right and left, and you will see evidence of that fact." The Queen barked commands in bat-Latin. "Move your torch; I have told them not to shy away from the light."

Cautiously, Percival swept the light beam right and left. The creatures caught in it whimpered, shrank from the light, and hid their eyes with massive fingers, but did not run. Some were male, some were, it seemed, female, though the females' breasts were tiny and emaciated. Both sexes' skulls were dominated by their massive eyes, the space between the temples grown wider to accommodate them, the head tilted slightly backwards on the cervical vertebrae to take the sheer weight of the eyes. The body was actually not slight and childlike as Percival's first impressions had suggested, but squat and massive. The forearms, in particular, were hard with muscle, and the fingertips of the hands square and flat, with fingernails thick as penknife blades. The toes were also long, thick and flat at the tips, and exhibited a marked separation between the big toe and the next.

But the most marked feature of the things' bodies was the fact that they were injured - in many cases, horribly, fatally so. These were not subtle wounds produced by Greek Fire or some black poison, but limbs hacked off, bones shattered and protruding from the arm, ragged wounds that had failed to heal and were going an ominous, dingy grey. Percival became suddenly aware that much of the smell he had imputed to the sewage systems at the bases of the city's towers might in fact have been the stink of gangrene emanating from his own escort. Somewhere out beyond the city's walls, recently - but not within the last twenty-four hours, by the advanced stench of those infections - a battle had taken place.

"The Enemy is one we know of old", said the Queen. "They are not as subtle as we are, but possess one great advantage - somehow, they are able to see in the great, deep, complete dark over four thousand metres down, where even ambient light never reaches even at midday. My people can see in near darkness, but not total. For this reason, we avoid the deep dark and tolerate the fact that some of our number are occasionally caught and eaten in the lower reaches of our range."

"Eaten", repeated Percival.

"Often with the bare minimum of culinary preparation", said the Queen with some distaste. "However, recently, the Enemy's depredations have been bolder. We suspect that either his numbers are growing due to, perhaps, a freak number of exceptionally fertile breeding years, or that some other power or predator beneath him is forcing him to move upwards out of his traditional territories. Perhaps there is a sort of malthusian effect in progress, we representing the food source, they representing the predator, and they are simply multiplying naturally to consume all available food supplies in their area after which they will starve and die down again. I have no idea. But the situation is growing desperate. We have recently found it necessary to post guards even in the environs of this City itself, and more recently still one of these guard duties was itself attacked, losing half its number and suffering casualties to many of the remainder."

"How can these creatures see in total darkness?" said Percival. "Do they use some sort of infra-red?"

"They would appear to use their eyes to see", said the Queen, still appearing to find her story mildly amusing, "as captured prisoners were unable to find their way around their cages once these organs were removed. If the ears were removed, however, no such loss of perception was experienced, though the prisoners ceased to respond to sound."

"So it's something in their eyes. Rattlesnakes", said Percival, "have an infra-red sense organ located in pits in the head. They use it to sense mice in the dark. But", he added hastily, "the pits aren't located in the eyes."

"I suspected the Enemy's senses might be based on infra-red", said the Queen, nodding, "and sent my own patrols out with candles, and even torches, in the hope that a bright heat source might blind them. As you can see, the streets of our City are currently lit up as if it is Christmas. However, it has been reported that this tactic has not been a major success. I must pronounced myself baffled. We still have one live prisoner, however, intact with all appendages, should you wish to inspect it. Loquax, my royal translator here" - a hand drifted idly from her side to indicate the English-speaking creature at the right hand of her throne - "will show you to it. We preserved it for that reason. I am certain it will...interest you. A man of your profession will, I am certain, have been expecting to see such a creature all his life. You of all people will understand fully why beings of its stamp need to be exterminated from the under earth. The prisoner has witnessed the experiments on its fellow prisoners and is most docile."

"So you expect me to prosecute a war for you?" said Percival. "Miss Simpson, I hate to point this out to you, but although I am an Army officer, I am also still a chaplain."

"That does not have to be a problem. I myself have a function which is at the same time both religious and military. But this is a minor errand, not the main reason why we have requested your presence here. You, Mr. Percival, are the man who will go down into the deep and explain to us all why we are here. You will explain the nature of the Abyss. You will find the Temple. You will look down into the dark and see what none of us can see."

Percival's hands hung loosely at his sides. He stared into space.

"That's a...tall order."

"You have already delivered on that tall order. I have already foreseen your triumphant return."

"How did I do it?"

The voice was mocking. "You didn't bother to communicate such trifling details to me."

Not knowing exactly how seriously to take the Queen's statement, Percival eased the rucksack off his shoulders onto the steps. As always on taking off a pack, he felt like a moonman, bouncing with every step. His shoulders creaked into a normal human position. He massaged them gently, wishing Waldrop hadn't insisted he bring quite so much spare ammunition, and wishing he'd had the sense to throw away the ammunition after he'd thrown away the HP-35.

"I suppose you'd better show me your prisoner, then", he muttered. "Will my gear be safe here?"

"This is Hades", came the answer, "not Haringey."

***

The prisoner was intact. That was all that could be said for its state of health, though it had obviously also been allowed water and oxygen. It had been wounded during capture, though the wounds appeared to be confined to heavy bruising. The cell in which it was confined was only barely larger than a wardrobe, and was indeed more or less the same shape as a wardrobe tipped onto its thin side, with a metal grille on top. It was set into a row of other, similar wardrobe-holes in the stone floor of a large wardrobe-hole-containment building. Percival remembered Coalition propaganda that had claimed Saddam Hussein operated a prison with a similar cell system in Iraq. Percival, who had been in Iraq, had not seen it.

The prisoner cringed at the bottom of its cell, with good reason - bone spears with points sharp enough to put an eye out were currently holding it at bay. Small localized bruises all over the prisoner's body suggested it had already suffered a vigorous poking, though it was difficult to gauge the full extent of its injuries.

In terms of physical dimensions and body plan, there was no marked anatomical difference between the prisoner and the troglodytes poking it back into the cell. And yet the creature's jailers seemed to fear it, as if it were not a flesh and blood being, but something supernatural - something that, unless they kept a careful eye on it, might turn into a puff of smoke and drift through the bars and away, to prey on their children another day.

"Diabolus est", spat a voice in their barely recognizable argot of Latin. It is a devil.

"Homo qui non adest est", whispered another voice in a sentence that sounded like an echo. What did that mean? 'It is a man who isn't there'?

But the creature appeared just as fearsome to Percival as to its tormentors, and the first reason why this was so was also the reason why it was so difficult to see where (or even whether) it was bleeding; its skin was a bright, vivid, bloody devil red. And the second reason why it was terrifying, even in captivity, was that its eyes, eyes of the same hypnotic size as those of the creatures that had incarcerated it, glowed like flickering coals. Satan himself might have had such coals for eyes, to burn the insides of his eyesockets. This was no reflection, as in the eyes of a dog or cat or shark - the light actually seemed to be generated within the very eyes themselves.

Percival requested that the cell be closed, and that moves be made to transfer the prisoner to a larger cage. The creature which had spoken as the translator for the throne appeared to understand, and to Percival's surprise obeyed the order without question.

Heavy hands pressed food on Percival, on makeshift plates which he dimly recognized as titanium votive tablets - waterproof, rustproof, light, heat-resistant, and probably highly valuable tableware down here. The food was probably an expensive meal, too; large, hard-to-come-by gobbets of good red meat, boiled until dull grey and rubbery. Percival, suspecting he knew exactly where the meat had come from, declined it. There were, after all, limits to courtesy. The creatures kept attempting to press it on him. He kept declining it. Eventually, exasperated, he took a great handful of the grey muck and threw it into the cell occupied by the prisoner, who fell on it greedily. The natives around him gaped in horror. Uncaring, he looked into the eyes of the the creature through the bars as it munched ravenously on what was probably the remains of its former comrades.

"You are going to die horribly", he said, "which is probably no more than you deserve. But until I know for sure you really are a devil in league with Satan, I will keep you alive as long as I can."

Wearily, he trudged back to the steps of the Bathopolis, extracted a packet of raisins from a side pocket of his pack, and began to feed.

***

In one of the windowless stone towers, Percival was given a place to sleep. The entrance to his living quarters was so tiny that he had to drop onto all fours and squirm rather than crawl; a native holding a steel sabre-blade sharpened to molecular thickness, more a butcher's cleaver than a sword, stood over the entrance on the inside. Percival was certain his head would have left his shoulders had he tried to wriggle into the building unannounced, or with his eyes glowing.

Inside, the building was a wide flat space with a ceiling too low to stand beneath, even for the natives. They slept on hair mattresses - Percival had no illusions as to where the hair came from, though at least hair could be removed without ill effects from a living body - and blankets probably woven from the same materials. Families were snoring in here, piled on top of one another in gigantic, sussurating heaps. And despite the fact that the citizens hated it and shied away from it and held their hands in front of their faces to shield their eyes from it, each room was filled with light. The brilliance was surely unnecessary for the dinnerplate-eyed natives; candles sent a dim flickering light into every corner, like the bedroom of a small child who fears that monsters lurk in the merest shadow.

"Lux haud bonus est", explained Loquax, sensing Percival's curiosity. The light is not good. "Sed requiritur, quod mirabiliter hostes nostros haud videre possumus." But it is needed, on account of our enemies' weird invisibility.

"Et vidit deus lucem", said Percival, "quod haud bona esset." Loquax laughed a mouthful of daggers. He was familiar with the Bible. Judging by the amount of Christian attention this place had received over the centuries, this was perhaps hardly surprising.

Stephanie, what am I come to? See what happens when you're not here to tell me going for a jaunt down the road to Hell might not be a good idea? Could you not have had the decency to keep breathing after all those A & E doctors and nurses put all that work and all those tubes into you, into keeping you alive? People who get as far as A & E are supposed to survive and undergo a tearful reunion with their loved ones. TV hospital dramas say it, it must be true.

This is a test. All life is a test, like a big school examination. There are right answers, and there are wrong answers. Is Hell real, and is this the way to it? Am I down here just because I want to test my theological strength by holding my hand in hellfire without getting burned? And did I, today, really come face to face with a devil?

The building's many storeys were all like this, with successive floors and ceilings made of vaulted stone - vaults of such artful flatness that they seemed made of reinforced concrete rather than masonry. On each level, staircases twined upward - the staircases on the inside were larger and easier to force himself through - until finally, he and his guides arrived on a flat platform on the very roof of the building, caressed by a gentle breeze from underground. Here, in defiance of all logic, and surely with some considerable engineering difficulty, a gigantic four poster bed had been erected, complete with feather mattress, lacy quilted pillows, a gauzy canopy allowing curtains to be drawn around the bed on all three open sides, and sheets that, although mouldy, had once been silk. To complete his feeling of disorientation, the carvings that crawled around the posts and headboard swarmed with eagles and swastikas. This was a Nazi bed, removed from the Totalitarian Complex sixty years ago. Thoughtfully, someone had constructed a protective Alpine-chalet roof over the top of the bed, sewing together titanium votive tablets over a roof of wood or bone to protect against the constant drip-drop of water and the less constant but more life-threatening BLAM of falling abyssite.

Suddenly realizing exactly how many of the structural members of the City were bone - all those that weren't stone or steel - Percival understood why the Citizens had shown no compunction in desecrating the graveyard of Nazi and Soviet soldiers high above. No citizen of the City would ever be buried in a grave. To them, the human body was a treasure-house of reusable materials. Children turned mother's milk into strong bones that could be used to support a roof, once the surrounding child was cut away. Percival reflected that he would not be surprised if the City farmed children for precisely that purpose. Young bones, after all, were less brittle, and more flexible.

He eyed the bed like a hermit in the desert trying not to look at a beautiful young woman he knew to be a succubus. Someone had even placed an oil portrait of Adolf Hitler next to the headboard, to make him feel more at home.

Loquax was squatting nervously by the exit to the stairs, shifting his weight from heel to heel, as if ready to flee if Percival signalled his displeasure.

Such trouble, thought Percival. They have gone to such trouble.

He smiled down at the Queen's translator. "Loquax", he announced, "amicus meus est, in saeculo saeculorum, amen."

The little troglodyte glowed with pleasure and embarrassment. Percival reached for his pack, which he had dragged with some difficulty up every step and through every doorway, and extracted a sleeping bag, which he unrolled and stared at. He stared at the bag, then at the bed. Then he sat down on the bed with a thump, undid his boots, telling himself he would take off his dry suit trousers, proper trousers, thermal undertrousers, and amusing comedy WEAPON OF MASS ERECTION Saddam Hussein jockey briefs later, and fell asleep as if a switch had been thrown in his brain.

***

Several nights later, they sent the Dornier down to look for him.

He awoke from a bad dream. Wandering the streets because his wife had been hit by a car, he had crawled off the street into a spin dryer in a launderette for warmth. But the walls of the dryer were red hot, and the air was choking his lungs, and the dryer was full only of field-grey Waffen SS socks with stitched-on portraits of Adolf Hitler. The spin dryer had DORNIER written on the inside of the drum. He remembered thinking this was stupid - what was the point of writing the name of the the manufacturer on the inside of the machine? Yet suddenly the air in the spin dryer was blowing freezing cold, and a voice was shouting that it was George Waldrop and was concerned for his welfare. And the name DORNIER kept whirling around, and around, and around -

He woke up, and the bedclothes were all but coming off. It was also, uncharacteristically for underground, blowing a gale. The curtains were straining at their moorings, and Adolf Hitler’s portrait was in danger of sailing away forever.

The source of the wind sat spinning in the air only yards away from him, supported by three silvery whirling rotors. Its single black TV camera eye was fixed firmly on Percival. Percival noted with disquiet that it now had what looked like a gunbarrel mounted underneath its chassis, which was orange and white and the shape and size of the drum of an industrial spin dryer, and labelled DORNIER in large black letters.

Previously, the Dornier had not been armed. Percival hoped against hope that the thing was only a shotgun microphone. It had speakers, too. The speakers said: “LIEUTENANT PERCIVAL! THIS IS GEORGE WALDROP. ARE YOU OKAY? DO YOU NEED ASSISTANCE?”

By this time, however, native militiamen had swarmed out of the stairwell leading to the roof, rushed to the edge of the building, and showered the device with bone spears. The spears splintered into vertebrae on the drone’s rotors, and it turned its gunbarrel round towards them threateningly as arrows pinged off its lower surfaces from below.

“WE ARE CONCERNED FOR YOUR WELFARE”, droned the drone. “PLEASE COMMUNICATE VIA WHATEVER MEANS. THIS IS GEORGE WALDROP. WE HAVE LOST RADIO CONTACT WITH YOU. PLEASE COMMUNICATE -“

Then the drone rose on a keening engine note, easily outclimbing the ragged parabolas of stone age weaponry sent up after it from the ground, and disappeared into the dark; and the night was quiet once more.

***

At the beginning of his next day in the City, Percival searched his belongings for the emergency communications capsules supplied him by Waldrop. These were admirably compact, looked as if they’d been homemade to order in a workshop, and to date had made excellent paperweights. Each came with its own RECORD button and a tiny internal audio CD drive. The CD’s, he had been told, wrote once only. He had even been shown one; they were the size of plumbing washers.

Eventually, he found a capsule and took it to the top storey of one of the City’s many towers. Placing it on the low point of a merlon, he shooed away all nearby natives, stepped back, cleared his throat, and pressed the RECORD button.

“This is Gavin Percival”, he said. “I apologize for not having been in touch sooner. I am well and have successfully made contact with the inhabitants of the City. Assistance of the Stylite has been invaluable and recommend continuing good relationship be cultivated in this area. Please send him some clean socks. Will communicate further when further developments develop.” He clicked the RECORD button off and pressed LAUNCH. As specified in its design, a tiny pressure bottle inside the capsule slowly hissed out helium into a small orange bag extruded by the capsule, which became a large orange bag, which became a balloon, which caused the capsule to bounce gently off the ledge into the air, and then to rise, first slowly, then at a rapidly increasing rate. He watched the balloon dwindle slowly in the tiny white dinnerplate of daylight high above him, spiralling upward, a tiny orange dot.

He made another recording for good measure. It would never do to have Waldrop and the sort of people Waldrop represented coming down here to rescue him when he had been received with the finest hospitality Hell had to offer.

Day Four

"It was only after I began experimenting with your own people as well as your enemy prisoner that I realized", said Percival. "Observe."

The open area at the end of the square that approached the Bathopolis had been cleared. In place of the usual press of people - Percival determined to call them 'people' - were the following experimental materials: three jagged-brimmed stoneware pots (made, he suspected, out of the remains of shattered classical amphorae); a creaking, swaying cage containing a wary red-eyed experimental subject making brooding crawling circuits of his cell; a control troglodyte; a large, recently opened bag of bonbons from Percival's pack; and Percival himself.

"This is a repetition of an experiment we have already successfully executed several times. The prisoner and Loquax here” - he indicated the control troglodyte, the Queen's English-speaking translator - "have both been introduced to the delights of Cadbury's Chocolate Eclairs, and are aware of their advantages over bat sourprise. They are both eager to locate and ingest as many Chocolate Eclairs as possible." Loquax grinned widely and nodded his head vigorously. His teeth, Percival noted, had been filed into points.

"The two test subjects", said Percival, "will now be blindfolded." He issued a set of commands in pseudo-Latin, and well-drilled laboratory assistants scurried forth with strips of ragged cloth, which were tied around the temples of Loquax and - as it became suddenly, amazingly docile in its cell - the prisoner.

And I know why you're docile, you poor bastard, thought Percival. You know you're about to be sent out to hunt for chocolate eclairs again. For one peculiar instant, although he knew the prisoner had been deprived of freedom, food, safety, and almost certainly any prospect of future survival, it was the fact that this might be the last time it ever tasted Chocolate Eclairs that seemed most tragic to Percival. Every creature, he thought to himself, deserves life, liberty and the pursuit of Chocolate Eclairs.

"We now take flagstone A", said Percival, "which has, as have flagstones B and C, been painted black. It should be very easy, one would think, to locate a bright object of any colour seen against such a background. Firstly", he continued, "we will take an ordinary Chocolate Eclair - wrapped, of course, to preserve the flavour - and dip it in a pot of bright blue dye prepared by your majesty's simple-makers. It becomes blue; I place it somewhere on the flagstone. We release Citizen Loquax, and remove his blindfold -"

The Queen clapped her hands in glee at the conceit. Loquax grinned like an alligator, rushed forward to the flagstone, scooped up the sweet immediately, unwrapped it with a practised flick of his fingers, and devoured it.

"Bravo, Loquax!" The Queen squealed like a little girl. "More, your reverence! More!"

"Now we prepare another sweet, place it on the same stone, and release our prisoner." The prisoner, pathetically cooperative, loped out of its opened cage, making no attempt to attack or escape, scooped up the sweet, and ate it.

"So what have we established?" recouped Percival. "Only that both species - and I do consider the prisoner to represent an entirely separate species of homo sapiens - can easily distinguish blue objects against a black background.

"Now, however, we will change the experiment. On flagstone B, we place another sweet, this time coloured a bright yellow by Her Majesty's inestimable simple-makers, who I believe made highly imaginative use of human bile to do so. We blindfold Mr. Loquax as we place the sweet - we spin him around, thus - we release him." Loquax wandered forward, paused at the edge of the flagstone, stared down at it like a surface person staring at a Magic Eye picture. Eventually, he squatted down, squinted across the flagstone with only one eye open, located the sweet, scooped it up greedily and chugged it.

"Mr. Loquax, as we can see, had more difficulty this time. Let us see how our prisoner fares."

The prisoner, his leash released, scampered up to the flagstone, his eyes flickering like flames. He squatted in front of the stone, examining it from edge to edge. He bobbed his head up and down, and weaved his body from side to side. Eventually, he fell onto all fours and began to actually sniff the air, before finally appearing to locate the sweet purely by accident and greedily snuffling it down, not even attempting to remove the wrapper.

Percival cleared his throat.

“Both subjects exhibit a marked lack of ability to identify a yellow-dyed object against a black background. This is interesting enough in itself; but let’s see what happens when we move to flagstone C.”

Both test subjects were re-blindfolded and spun round, Loquax with ease, the prisoner with some difficulty.

“Now we will put down an Eclair”, said Percival, “which has been dyed bright red.”

Loquax was released, and loped up to the flagstone. Despite the fact that the sweet was clearly visible, he stared at the stone in great perplexity. Eventually, completely stumped, he fanned his hand across the surface of the stone until he found the sweet purely by touch and gobbled it.

“That was cheating, Loquax”, reproved the Queen. “Was that cheating, Reverend Percival?”

“I suspect so, Your Majesty”, said Percival. “But it matters little. Now let us see how our prisoner deals with the same situation.” He clicked his fingers.

The prisoner, with a contemptuous glance at Loquax, swaggered forward arrogantly, scooped up his own sweet instantly, and ate it.

“The prisoner”, said Percival, “appears to have no difficulty whatsoever seeing light from the red end of the spectrum.”

The Queen was unamused. “We have already established, Mr. Percival, that these creatures do not see light in the infra-red.”

“Quite so, Majesty. All I am suggesting is that they see light in the red.”

“What is so fantastic about that?”

“To us, as normal homo sapiens sapiens, nothing, Your Majesty. But to your subjects, who clearly are incapable of distinguishing the colour red, it means a great deal.”

The Queen kept her counsel, absorbing this information. Percival continued. “The Abyss at this depth, like seawater below a depth of only a few metres, like the Earth’s atmosphere after sunset, seems to filter out all colours but blue. The rocks, to us, if we snuff out all man-made fires, torches and candles, seem blue. Blue is the last colour lost before total blackness. Your subjects, Majesty, have accordingly developed, it would seem, an extraordinary acuity for sight in the blue end of the spectrum. On my first day down here, I passed a plastered wall which, it seemed to me, somebody had simply painted a flat uninteresting blue. It was only later, when I saw one of your citizens painting something on that wall very carefully in blue, that I realized that their eyesight differed from my own not just in that they were capable of seeing in dimmer light - they were also capable of seeing two colours where I can only distinguish one. To them, there is no one colour ‘blue’ - light of this wavelength, to them, represents the whole of their visual spectrum, and is split into ‘colours’ of its own. Their eyes have evolved to deal to maximum efficiency with light of the only colour that can naturally penetrate down here.

“But what happens even further down? How does a human being adapt when there is no light at all?

“The citizens of your state, Majesty, have evolved methods of seeing in a dark environment which I believe to be analagous to those exhibited by fish in the twilight layers of the deep oceans. Fish living at these depths are adapted to see multiple shades of blue in much the same manner, and have large eyes in the same manner as your own people. Further down in the ocean, however, certain fish have developed other ways of seeing in darkness.

“The game of prey against predator is like a battle between soldiers, and the classic soldier’s goal, as far as reconnaissance is concerned, is the ability to ‘see without being seen’. Many fish in the deep oceans can produce bioluminescent light, but this is a light anyone can see. It advertises the fish that produces it as a potential meal just as much as it allows that fish to see where it is going. But what if the fish were able to produce a kind of light no other fish could see? The light would project out into the dark ahead like a radar beam, invisible to those not equipped to see it, but highly useful to the fish that made it. And for this reason, some fish of the deep seas have redeveloped the ability to see red light. The reason why they’ve done this is that the light-producing organs on their bodies only produce light of that colour.”

Percival gestured to the prisoner as it crouched on the flagstones, head bowed low in case it received a smack on it with the lead weight of a spear. Its eyes were still burning like Mars and Antares in the gloom. “What you see here as just ‘eyes’ are in fact organs of far greater sophistication. I imagine that, if a skilled anatomist were to dissect this fellow’s eyes, he’d find a massive number of photophores, light-producing organs, mixed in among the rods and cones in the retinas. His eyes, you’ll notice, don’t burn with a steady red light; instead, they seem to flicker, much like the picture on an old TV set. This, I believe, is because photophores at the back of his eyes are strobing many hundreds of times a second, switching on and off extremely rapidly. Why do they do this? For the simple reason that, if the photophores were switched on at the same moment the rods and cones were absorbing light, they’d burn out his retinas as surely as if someone had shone a laser beam into his eye. Bats switch their hearing off for just the same reason while they’re issuing their outgoing sonar shriek; if they didn’t, they’d deafen themselves. The pupil of the eye can pass light out just as easily as it can let it in; hence the eye of this man is both a light-producing and a light-receiving organ.”

The Queen was confused. "And does this mean we now have a military advantage, Mr. Percival?"

"I'm afraid it does, ma'am."

"You're afraid?"

"I am a soldier of the British Army, ma'am. I'm allowed to bless the bullets for a just war. Is this a just war?"

"My people have been attacked, Mr. Percival. Attacked and eaten. I am almost certain that eating enemy prisoners is against the Geneva Convention."

"And what will your people now do in retaliation? And would they not have done it already, if the enemy had not had the advantage?"

"Mr. Percival, you are considering these creatures to be human. Do you have proof they are of the same species as humanity? What is the definition of a species? A group of creatures that can interbreed with each other? There has never been an instance of an Enemy creature interbreeding with a person of the City. However, I am living proof that the people of the City can still, by the skins of their teeth, interbreed with humans. This is, therefore, not warfare - it is pest control. Humans versus animals. In your Big Book Of God, was dominion over all the animal kingdom not given to Adam?"

"I think you'll find that Adam was only given the opportunity to name the animal kingdom", said Percival. "Must have been a big job, I imagine. All the way down to the protozoa."

"Will you help us develop ways of combatting these creatures?"

"I will help you develop ways of protecting yourselves."

"The best means of defence is attack, Mr. Percival."

Stephanie, what do I say?

"I will help you to see your enemies", said Percival stuffily. "As far as attack is concerned, I must refer you to my military superiors."

What the hell. Of course, What The Hell, down here, might not just be idiomatic. My hand is in Satan's fiery arse up to the elbow, and it hurts.

Day Eight

Loquax loped across the square and squatted obediently at Percival's right hand. It was about time. Percival had been without his shadow for too long. He nodded to acknowledge Loquax's presence, and resumed the careful folding that had occupied him for the last two hours.

The folding resulted in a paper dart. It had ended up being a paper dart all day. Or, he reflected, with a glance up at the twilight disc of sky far, far above, all night. Or all week. Days seemed to pass more quickly here.

He unravelled it, and carefully refolded it to a subtly different specification. It ended up being a paper dart again. Furiously, he tore it into a paper snowstorm and swept it onto a pile of similar paper flakes now mounting beside him. He picked up another sheet of paper from the ream at his other elbow. The paper was headed with swastikas and eagles, and had been specially obtained in a raid on the Totalitarian Complex at his order. It was brittle with age, and had to be folded delicately, often with the aid of a straight edge.

His next attempt resulted in what could only be described as a bizarrely mutated bookmark. He held it up and sighed. If only, he reflected, he had been brought up in Japan.

At his right hand, Loquax coughed.

“Yes?” said Percival.

Loquax respectfully informed him that Her Majesty had instructed him to tell him not to lose heart, as he would succeed at the task eventually.

Percival regarded the translator with deep suspicion.

“How much longer?” he said.

Frowning as if being asked to deliver state secrets into the hands of the enemy, Loquax said that it would take another day.

Percival stared at the paper in frustration. Then, a sly expression creeping over his face, he said:

“How do you measure days, Loquax?”

Loquax replied that the people of the City measured days by observing when the circle of sky above grew dark and light, as did all other peoples. Percival nodded, and pointed upward.

“That sky up there has grown dark and light twelve times in what my watch tells me is the last twenty-four hours”, he said. “I reckon a day to be about two hours.” Seeing the look of confusion on the little creature’s face, he added: “Your people, I suspect, measure hours by dividing the hours of daylight into twelve. Mine don’t.” That, he remembered, had been the ancient Roman practice; he was gratified when Loquax appeared to understand.

He folded another paper. It came out as a waterbomb with a tail.

“Nearly right”, he said. “Look, can’t you just tell me the way I eventually get it right? And then we can spend the next two hours, erm...”

He attempted to think of a fun leisure activity Loquax’s people indulged in.

“...erm, forget it. Let’s just soldier on another two hours.”

Loquax sat in the same squat, not moving a muscle, as the sky overhead reddened, blued, and blackened. Eventually, with infinite care, Percival made the final fold to his latest sheet of A4, sat back on his haunches, and looked at it.

“I believe”, he said, “that that is finally it.”

Loquax peered at Percival’s creation, inspecting it professionally. He announced his belief that it was, indeed, it.

“I believe you are correct in your assertion of my correctness”, said Percival. “Let’s go find ourselves a few cc’s of something blue and vivid and try it out.”

Day Ten

The battleground was decided on well in advance. Percival had reckoned a wide, flat shelf would provide the most room for any attempt at tactics, but had been informed there were no broad ledges or pediments in the immediate vicinity of the City. In fact, the closest one, he was told, was ten thousand paces in a downward direction, well into the territory of the diaboli, the homines qui non adsunt. Percival accordingly advised the Queen to instruct her generals to march an army down to this depth and confront the enemy. The Queen's reply had been simple. Tu imperator meus es. You are my general. The message had been delivered by a child with half a face. One eye and one ear were missing; the left had side of the cheek was also absent, exposing the teeth which attempted to grin winningly. The child, so the Queen's message went on to say, had been attacked by a diabolus that had crept straight past guards right into the City. Guards had been alerted by the child's screams as it attempted to gnaw off the more succulent parts of her face. It had taken ten men to bring the diabolus down. It had killed three of them in the process.

Percival sent a message back to the queen agreeing to take on the position of vermin exterminator general.

From broken conversations with Loquax, Percival gathered that war between the City and the underdwellers usually took the form of raids, which the terrain necessitated. From this, he extrapolated that a large frontal assault simply would not be expected. Confident of this, he requisitioned the production of large quantities of expensive materials by the simple-makers, and requested the presence of one hundred soldiers in the civic square for battle training.

The enemy were suspected to have a force of at least five hundred adult males in the field; the Queen suspected the quantity of forces Percival had requested to be inadequate, and said as much. Percival, however, was adamant about the number, but insisted that the hundred warriors chosen be the very best, the fittest, the most skilful, and above all the largest available.

It proved easy to train the City natives; they had, after all, been well used to learning and counteracting the constantly changing tactics of successive waves of invaders from the surface for the past two thousand years. They were accustomed to adaptation. They were also obedient, and it was a simple matter to get them to stand and fight in a line, jabbing a forest of bone spears forward between shields.

There was only one area of the City - apart from the Bathopolis, which as the residence of the Queen was guarded day and night - which Percival was not allowed to visit during the time he trained the army. At what his Silva compass told him was the extreme south-eastern corner of town, a massive, square-built tower stood on the very edge of the cliff, staring out of the most exposed quarter of the walls. Although built sturdily to Roman military standards to begin with, the tower appeared to have been recently extended; several storeys seemed to have been added, and the whole structure had been built backward into the City.

It had also, however, been built outwards. Out of that side of the tower that faced the Abyss, a framework of wood and metal protruded into the gulf like a parasitic growth, particularly noteworthy in a city where nothing else was built in anything but stone. Wood and metal were difficult to find down here, and certainly not available in anything like standardized lengths; it was perhaps for this reason that the structure looked more nest than building. Something long, slender, and regularly-shaped was concealed inside it, visible only dimly through a patchwork of boards and panels. Yet his questions to Loquax and the Queen regarding the structure had been rebuffed; he was informed it was not necessary for him to know what the tower contained. Nor was he allowed to walk down the only narrow route that led to it, an alleyway surrounded by recently-constructed blocks that towered above it on all sides like the outside walls of a fortress. That alleyway was guarded by City militiamen at all times, and the fact that Percival was their general and had carefully learned the names of each and every one of them did not prevent them from preventing him from walking down it.

The glass sliver arrows that had proven so effective against so many surface armies, Loquax informed him, would be ineffective against the red men. They, like the City's inhabitants themselves, had been living and breathing in an environment that seethed with Oracle Smoke since birth, and were immune to its more destructive effects. The Stylite, it seemed, had been correct on this point; the citizens' minds had had time to adjust to the toxin, though not to the extent that they didn't still talk in a stream of future predictions. The slogan being whispered around Percival's army was 'nunc vincemus', 'now we will conquer', and his troops seemed so confident on this point that he wondered if they really did already know the battle's outcome.

He decided on using sharpened bone and steel arrows, and ordered training to accustom troops to these heavier projectiles. The creatures of his army, well used to hauling themselves up sheer faces with one arm, were capable of bending bows which, to Percival, would have been more suitable for use as truck springs. A small detachment of troops were also made available to carry the collection of M16's and Kalashnikovs possessed by the City. However, the troops who carried these weapons, it soon became clear, had often not fired a shot in anger with them. Only a few magazines had ever been captured, from the US-Russian expedition in 2011 and the Soviet one in 1962, and little ammunition was available to practice with. From conversations in broken Latin with Loquax, Percival gathered that the weapons' mere presence on the battlefield was often considered enough to overawe the more primitive dark-dwellers.

A reconnaissance detachment was also recruited from among the most stealthy and resourceful of Loquax's soldiery, and trained in what Percival could remember of sniper tactics, as it would probably be necessary not only for them to approach the enemy and count their numbers, but also to provoke them into action by attacking. This reconnaissance team were trained in accompanying the main force, flanking and preceding it; this involved descending cliff faces ahead of the main troop column, allowing them to drop down onto the next level of the road and identify ambushes before their comrades arrived. They were lightly armed with short bone spears and bows. These bowmen's quivers, however, were full of arrows tipped not with heavy man-killing heads, but with carefully-prepared hollow darts of parchment, painstakingly folded by the City's womenfolk on Percival's instruction. The darts were larger than arrowheads, and the arrows containing them could be persuaded to fly a substantial fraction of the distance a war arrow could. They fitted onto the bowstrings on specially-made boards which held between ten and twelve darts, and which, when the string was released, would send all the darts anywhere within a five metre radius of a target thirty metres distant. The City's general public watched the scouts practising with these peculiar weapons with the greatest disquiet Percival had ever seen them exhibit. Still, this only showed itself as an occasional blank stare of disbelief in the odd onlooker. The remainder of the crowd were still whispering 'vincemus'. Oddly, it was the vincemus-whisperers that bothered him more.

He still felt, however, that a final dress rehearsal was called for. And the only available ground for it was on the great ledge upstairs where the Queen's forces had defeated the Americans and Russians; an immense, broad shelf where twenty men might stand shield to shield. However, this would mean marching his own men way, way up towards the sunlight, leaving Queen and City defended only by the raw, untrained forces that had proved so ineffective against the Enemy so far.

"This is a bad decision", said the Queen; but she acquiesced to it without question despite the fact that her courtiers threw him glances of pure odium as they scuttled to do his bidding. As he stood on the Bathopolis steps, he saw them moving out among the crowd, uttering what seemed almost to be prayers in their own argot of Latin, placing their hands on the heads of citizens as they passed. If their hands lighted on a child's head, the mother sobbed and clutched her child to her. If they lighted on a woman's, the child would wail in turn. Sometimes the courtiers would place a hand upon a man, who would not sob, but stand quiet and still, occasionally turning an accusatory glance on Percival.

"What are they doing?" said Percival.

"Marking out the dead", said the Queen. "After you leave to carry out your Dress Rehearsal, the Enemy will mount a raid on our City, entering via the south-west tower. Once within the walls they will run riot. Most of our citizens, even the militias, will scuttle into their houses in terror and close the doors. The Enemy, finding themselves possessed of the City, will first sack it, then set light to it in an attempt to force citizens from their homes to be hacked apart. This strategy will indeed work most admirably. But the fire will be a poor move in another sense, as it will embolden our soldiery, who, seeing that the invisible enemy are now beautifully illuminated, will rally and gallantly counterattack, and throw back the enemy, who will realize their peril and flee. We will, however, lose perhaps a quarter of our manpower, casualties we can ill afford to sustain, although many of those will be children and drone females."

A large, frontal assault simply will not be expected. The Enemy, it seemed, was capable of strategy and tactics too.

Percival could not believe the Queen was discussing this so calmly. "And you know all this is going to happen?"

"Of course. Your next question, of course, is, 'Why don't you do anything about it?'".

Percival stared hard at the Queen, willing himself not to ask the question. In the end, he gave up.

"Well, okay then, why? Why don't you try to change the future, if you think you can see it so well?"

"The future is the future. To be able to change it would be to violate causality, which as you know is impossible."

"Like seeing the future, which is also impossible?"

"Not so. Any number of experiments with quantum entanglement will prove that it is possible for information to travel faster than light, and hence by definition to travel in time. It is possible to see the future. What is not possible is altering the future."

"Miss Simpson, you are a Modern Languages graduate, not a quantum physicist. How do you know all this?"

She smiled. "You tell it to me. Ten years from now."

He spread his arms out wide, exasperated. "But I have no idea what you're talking about!"

"You will. Someone will tell you."

"Who?"

"Whoever you find down there at the foot of the Abyss. Whoever built this place."

"Have you ever considered that this might just be a natural chasm in the rock that vents an organic poison that gives people the delusion that they're psychics?" He fought for an explanation desperately. "Déja vu, I hear, has a medical explanation. Human beings have two eyes. The one eye normally receives a signal at the exact same time as the other. However, if the two eyes are out of sync for whatever reason, the signal from the right eye might arrive after the signal from the left. An object would literally be seen twice. You would think you had seen the future. What if your brains are bottling up the images from your left eye, say, and only releasing them a week or a year later? You'd think you'd foreseen them, but your brains would be fooling you."

This was the first moment Percival genuinely unsettled the Queen. The effect, however, lasted only for an instant.

"No", she said. "No, the effect is different." She thought a second, and then said:

"Insects with compound eyes must be really confused."

Day Eleven

"Quam diu hortatus es", said Percival to the dark, forgetting to talk to it in English.

"You are getting more difficult to sneak up on", said the dark back.

"I have more outlying reconnaissance nowadays", said Percival, craning his neck up at the acres of overhang above him. Somewhere in that overhang hung a man. "You got the message."

"I could hardly miss it. The letters must be five feet across. Everyone else can see it too, even the cavers. The Man's had to kick 'em out saying an urban gas main's been ruptured and vented gas into the Abyss. Smart move writing it in English, by the way. There must be, oh, only about one-hundred-odd English, American and Australian cavers up here."

"I wanted you down here, not Waldrop and his goons, and I didn't think you'd understand Ecclesiastical Latin or New Testament Greek. So what's the answer? Can you get what I want? I had to march an army three yards up a garden to get an excuse to be up here."

Around Percival, the outriders of his army squatted combat-ready, hands curled around the shafts of their pila, every one gazing unerringly upwards at the same pitch-black point in the dark. I'm glad someone knows where he is, at any rate, thought Percival.

"Oh, I can get it all right. Your message to Waldrop made them anxious to cooperate with me. I have recently received gifts of socks. And a month's supply of chocolate, a lovely new sleeping bag, a PornoSoft 128-bit Masturbation Station, and a portaledge to hang outside the Hermitage on bolts as a veranda."

"On bolts? You're turning into some sort of big soft aid-climbing homosexual."

"It's carefully colour-coordinated to match with the abyssite", said the Stylite huffily.

"So what about the goods? Can you deliver?"

The dark was dubious. "The hundred litres, yes. The Russians' black marketeers sourced plenty of it stored in a warehouse just outside Na International; the owner was trying to negotiate sale to a third world country where this sort of shit's still legal. They discovered he was the source of my own supplies as well. He'd been selling dribs and drabs of it to cavers on the cheap."

"What about the other stuff?"

"The second item on your list was easier to come by, though expensive. Have you any idea how much one of these things costs? Once all the nitrogen cylinders, flatline barrels, collapsible stocks and Cyclone Feed Systems are factored in? An Armalite is cheaper, and I need hardly add has considerably more killing power. "

"Ah, but in order to shoot your enemy, you need to see him. Armalites would have been nice nonetheless."

"They were very firm on that point, I'm afraid. No automatic rifles, no hand grenades, no running with scissors. I managed to haggle them round on ammunition, though. 5.56 mm NATO, 7.62 mm long and 9 mill parabellum, a thousand rounds of each."

"Haggle? You haggled with the Intelligence Services of the free world?"

"I knew they were going to say yes anyway, so I kept on at them till they did."

Percival grinned. "Never argue with a man who can see the future. They probably think they got the good end of the deal anyway. NATO see any quantity of ammunition of a thousand rounds or less as chickenfeed. When are they likely to be delivering it?"

"They already have. It's been left five hundred metres up the road, just on the other side of the gate in the wall. They, uh, didn't want to send their troops too far into your territory."

"My territory? Am I a card-carrying troglodyte now?"

"They have their doubts as to your loyalties. They view anyone who spends too long in the Abyss without dying as suspect."

"How's it stored?"

"One-thousand-round crates for the 5.56 millimetre, 7.62, and Parabellum alike. And ten thousand-round crates for the, uh, other stuff."

"We'll not be needing the crates. If I send one of our men over one of the rope bridges with an ammo crate on his back I'll lose the whole load and the man as well. Probably the bridge as well. The ten thousand-round crates - are they exactly what I asked for? I provided a colour sample."

"I told you already, that part of the order has been delivered in full, though they're mystified as to why you want it."

"I have a heavy-duty painting project that is well overdue."

"Are you going through a Blue Period?"

"I fear", grinned Percival, "I might be about to enter a Bloody Red Period. No pun intended."

"You're making something big with this."

"Pale blue Weapons of Mass Destruction."

“Hmph. As you wish. I always knew you weren’t going to tell me.”

“I believe you.”

“As regards item number one on the list, as I said before, a hundred litres of it are stored with the crates, under a canvas sheet."

"I'm warning you, if these are booby-trapped in any way, nothing will be gained. I'm sending two men up there at a time, no more. And we haven't taken any of their sentries for days."

"They've noticed. They think you must have snipers with infrared sights."

"We took the sights they brought down with them last time."

The overhang chuckled and echoed. "Some of their madder military analysts suspected you had a fully equipped ancient Atlantean electronics workshop down there with you. They also suspect you're mining iron and copper."

"All we do is take what people keep chucking down the chute at us. Weaponry, votive inscriptions to the devil and sewage, mainly. Sewage is an abundant source of saltpetre, of course. In any case, I must go now. My people need me. And I can't keep them from killing and skinning you for your beautiful hairy pelt forever."

"I thank them for their kind restraint."

***

With that, the man in the dark was gone. The natives' massive eyes followed his invisible progress up the overhang above.

Percival rose to his feet, rubbing the back of his spine - no matter how much good posture he adopted, it always seemed to manage to hurt by the end of the day - and paced over to the edge of the Abyss. The edge had been marked out with candles by Loquax and his auxiliaries, purely in order to stop Percival from putting a foot wrong and plunging to his doom.

Deep beneath, a ruby red glow showed that the City was burning. He could even catch a whiff of it on the wind, whenever the breeze chose to blow his way. Not far away, securely chained to no less than four firmly bolted anchor points, the prisoner brooded darkly. Occasionally, it muttered to itself in imp-latin.

He, Percival reminded himself. It's a he.

The day's exercise had been a success, with no actually fatal casualties, which was an improvement on the day before. The inhabitants of the City responded well to tactical instruction. Their ancestors had been drilled by Macedonian hoplites, Thracian peltasts, Persian Immortals, Roman centurions, Turkish janissaries. And now one British Tommy. Though I've only ever watched soldiers drilling. I've never done it myself. I wonder if they know that?

He turned to look at Loquax standing beside him.

"Today, we are being defeated", he said. "Tomorrow, we will conquer."

***

The home fires were still burning as Percival's army approached the walls. He had been expecting jeering and catcalls. Instead, there was an eerie silence, the inhabitants watching with blackened faces from the battlements. When the army column rounded the city walls to approach the main gate, Percival felt his stomach turn to ice.

The south-west tower had completely vanished. The south-west corner of the the city, in fact, had vanished, leaving a vast and rotten wound in the ledge the city stood upon, filled with a stink of shit and corpses.

At once, he realized what had happened. Burn the buildings from the ground up. One of the City's rudimentary sewers had exploded. The force of the blast had shattered the walls outwards.

The mysterious south-eastern tower had not been damaged during the fighting - this was hardly likely, after all, as it lay in that part of the City furthest from any possible incursion across the walls. Beneath the walls of the south-east tower, there was nothing but air and sheer rock going all the way down to - whatever.

A native militiaman ran out of the main gate up to Loquax and fell in the gravel, chattering uncontrollably. Before Loquax could translate, Percival spoke up.

"Don't bother. What he's saying is that a small enemy scouting force came over the wall, probably anywhere but the south-west tower. They captured one of the buildings in the south-west quarter, and our soldiers, following my instructions to the letter, set light to it. And blew out the entire south-west quarter of the city. Destroying the walls and allowing the enemy, a whole enemy army, to pour in from that direction and slaughter one quarter of our citizens. Am I right?"

Loquax hesitated a moment, then nodded stiffly.

The carnage, looking on what could be construed as a bright side, had been double-edged. Many of the Enemy had died in various random blasts as cesspit after cesspit had exploded when the City's defenders put Percival's disastrous 'scorched sewer' policy into practice. And what the Queen had said was true; once the Enemy had been made visible in the streets by the brilliant light of burning buildings, they had been porcupined with pila and bone shard darts. He noted, also, that the forest of newly sharpened, newly poisoned stakes he he'd ordered erected by the south-west tower now lay trampled, broken and encouragingly bloodstained across a wide area. Many stake fragments still lay inside the rapidly cooling bodies of Enemy dead and wounded. Children were running from body to body, smashing helpless skulls with rocks without any apparent compunction whatsoever. Percival was reminded of British children gleefully smashing limpets in seaside rockpools.

But as the army column entered the town, there were no impassioned tirades of recrimination, no hisses, no thrown stones. The worst the people did was to look up at him in reproach as they loaded their dead and dying onto handcarts for transport to the simple-makers. The logic, he supposed, was probably that the dying would be dead by the time they got there. The handcart wheels were made of human femurs. This was, after all, Bone City.

Somehow, the looks of mild reproach seemed worse to Percival than any actual attempt on his life would have.

The main square was also littered with bodies, friendly and Enemy. He examined the friendly bodies critically. It appeared the Enemy had their archers too. Percival picked an Enemy arrow out of the back of a dead man, snapping the shaft, and looked at the flights quizzically. It was feathered. The feathers were huge.

He stroked the flights and looked up at a soldier questioningly.

"Simurga", said the soldier fearfully. “Avis est.” He said nothing more.

What sort of birds could live down here? thought Percival. The City's archers fledged their arrows with paper and steel, and the word simurga was not one he was familiar with.

Simple-makers were arranging dismemberment of the dead on an assembly-line basis. Friendly citizens with, for example, a gangrene of the leg, were having their legs amputated. Percival doubted, in the brutal society of the City, that this was being done to save them pain. He mentioned this to Loquax, who confirmed his suspicions. "If the poison rot travels throughout the body, it will consume valuable meat", replied the little troglodyte. "These people will be well fed, if the rot stops at the amputation and they survive. Then, when they are fat, their remaining limbs will be harvested, while they are unconscious if at all possible. Eventually, of course, they will die, but they will do so knowing that they have been of service to the polity even to the moment of their passing -"

Percival couldn't stand it any longer and lurched to the nearest noissome sewer entrance, where he leaned on a wall alive with maggots and heaved into the evil-smelling dark. For the first time ever, he was glad of the stink and crawling parasites, as they helped it all to come out.

He raised himself upright again and turned to face a semicircle of respectfully cringing citizens. He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, then clapped Loquax on the shoulder with one hand. "Better not show too much weakness, eh, old chap? Or you might decide I'm more use as an hors d'oeuvre than a general." Loquax did not react. "Of course, I forgot - it doesn't matter how much I try to shock you. You've heard it all before."

"You love your children", said Loquax suddenly.

Fuck me, talking bacon. Percival, taken aback by what sounded like an actual question from the little translator, considered it.

"Had I ever had the opportunity to have children", he said, "I would have loved them."

"We", said Loquax, "also love our children." He turned away and moved toward the Bathopolis. The Queen was not enthroned at the entrance. Instead, a pair of massive doors had closed across the only way in. The doors, to Percival's amazement, seemed to be made of solid blocks of stone. On his previous visit, they had been open. Rather than doors, he had taken them to be architecture.

"They move on rollers", volunteered Loquax. "Stone rollers", he added. "Steel rusts. Stone endures."

"What do the rollers rotate around?" said Percival suspiciously.

"Steel", admitted Loquax miserably. "She is still inside", he added. "She is too valuable to be risked."

"But you must have known she would survive the battle", said Percival.

Loquax shrugged. "To protect her is the proper thing to do." He nodded upwards at the Bathopolis battlements. "They are flying signal flags."

"The signal flags", said Percival, "are all blue."

Loquax grinned a smile full of stalactites. "The Queen regrets being unable to venture outside to greet her gallant general and champion", he translated. "She wishes him well on his journey into the nether dark, and awaits his first victorious return."

"Jolly dee", said Percival. "Makes you feel all warm and tingly."

As they walked away from the Bathopolis, Percival saw the enemy prisoner, now standing in the centre of a circle of jabbering angry Citizens who were baiting it with spears. It had not been seriously injured, however - if Percival's troops had intended to kill it, it would have been dead already. But it was screeching with rage and pain. One of the Citizens had pulled a pair of ironworking tongs from the ruins of one of the buildings, and using the tongs, thrust a steel stiletto into the flames of another. With the red-hot dagger at arm's length, he was now burning little cruciform dagger marks into the flesh of the prisoner; the metal was so hot that the flesh crisped and bubbled as it was touched.

"Let it go", said Percival.

Loquax looked up at Percival, shrugged tight-lippedly, and motioned to the Citizens around the creature to stop tormenting it.

"Let it go completely", said Percival. "If I have to politely pretend that you can see the future, I'm damned if I'm going to repeat myself. And no-one is to attack it once it gets outside the walls, either, not until it's crossed back into its own territory."

Loquax resignedly waved a hand, and a disbelieving troglodyte jailer scuttled forward to unlock the creature's chains, with the usual mild frown of reproach at Percival.

"We do not kill helpless creatures", said Percival. "That is what the Enemy does. If we do the same thing, we become the Enemy, and the Enemy has won."

"It will only return with more of its kind and kill more of our own", said Loquax.

"I know", said Percival. "But what additional harm can one more enemy soldier do?"

Loquax sighed, hung his head with an expression of immense sadness, and said nothing.

Day Twelve

The Enemy did not allow Percival to march into his territory quite as easily as Percival had allowed the Enemy into his. He had hoped it might be possible to tramp down to his chosen battleground unmolested, but the City's army was forced to fight for every step it took. This was unnerving, but, Percival told himself, would only wear the Enemy's forces down slowly as they threw themselves fruitlessly against his well-prepared defences. It would, after all, hardly be possible for the whole five-hundred-man mass of the Enemy to deploy itself against him in a series of raids launched up and down a vertical cliff.

Reality brought him down to earth, and several kilometres lower. Percival's strategy had been based on the fact that his army would advance slowly, like a brittle star feeling its way along the sea floor, surrounded by a screen of scouts. These outlying infantrymen, chosen for keen sight and an ability to climb like demons, had been trained to fire on any incoming motion by firing on it frantically, doing a backscuttle, and screaming like stuck pigs to sound the alarm. The racks of paper darts loaded on their bowstrings, or the newer, more effective weapons Percival had obtained for his scouts from the upper world, might miss their targets - indeed, were almost guaranteed to. But they would still deliver their payloads to the rock around an incoming Enemy, and those payloads would, in theory, still be deadly even then.

However, a scout, almost by definition, would be used up every time the Enemy made an attack - the first attack would probably always be deadly, the red devils out in the dark invisible until they moved to strike. And the Enemy knew the tactics of stealth worked, and would have no intention of deviating from them. In reality, it would be Percival's troops who would be worn down.

The first encounter took place on the first day of the march, with the column still well inside City territory. The column was moving at a snail's pace, in rigid military formation, followed and preceded by scouts sweating on the dark rock faces above and below, the unseen nine-tenths of the army's iceberg. Woman and child camp followers held up, not sputtering brands of tar-wrapped rags, but battery-powered torches and halogen lanterns stabbing out fierce white light into the dark. Percival was convinced he had been correct in his assessment of the relative worths of a crate of Armalites and a crate of Ever-Readies; down here, it was the ability to project light, not lead, that won battles.

However, with every man around him holding a spear or bow or Armalite and training it on the dark facing outwards, Percival felt thoroughly ridiculous. To any observer, the entire column of march must resemble a giant, hairy caterpillar.

He had insisted the column assume and hold battle formation as soon as it left the City gates. This, he knew, might tire his troops; but recent events had shown that the Enemy would attack right up to the walls and beyond. Besides, the army's discipline was strong, and the formation holding.

Then one man screamed, and all was confusion.

The man who screamed must have been a scout - what was screamed were the words, "MULT'OSTES!", from somewhere ahead and below, followed by the WHOOSH of a volley of paper darts and the almost silent spitting of the scouts' new weapons. Many, many weapons being discharged, by the sound of it - had the entire front line of scouts let go their bowstrings at once? Were there that many Enemy out there in the black?

Immediately, the entire army turned and loosed its bowstrings in the direction of the infantryman's yell. Percival heard a gasp of disbelief, and then a flurry of leathery wings rustled overhead, making volley-of-paper-dart noises with every wingbeat.

He had not known bats could live so deep down. They were small, but with surprisingly impressive wingspans, and were covered with fine fur that glowed like gold in the magnesium light of the torches. Comically, every other bat was spotted a bright royal blue. The scout had hit his target.

"False alarm", suggested Percival. Loquax leaned forward to peer over the edge, and nodded. Of the scout who had fired the volley, there was no sign. Percival suspected more of the main column's missiles had hit him than had touched any other living thing.

If we kill one of our own scouts every time one farts or coughs or stumbles, we'll be running out of troops fast.

He told Loquax to issue orders to the troops to be more careful.

***

The next encounter wasn’t a false alarm.

The Enemy’s tactics of ambush were unbeatable against Citizens; but the City had two secret weapons, and they were fixed in Percival’s eyesockets. It was actually laughably easy for Percival to spy out the Enemy scouts. Several of them were lurking on the high rock up above the column, evidently intending to hurl rocks down upon their victims. The Enemy were clearly visible by the burning red orbs of their eyes, which, as Percival had predicted, no Citizen in the column appeared to be able to see.

Percival ordered the front of his column to advance to just outside rock-hurling range - but within Armalite and Kalashnikov range - and halt. Meanwhile, the rear of his column was to separate and march back up the spiral of the Roman road until they were positioned upward and forward of the lights of the main unit. His scouts, meanwhile, were to climb the cliff to a position, again, just out of range of the Enemy ambushers, and prepare to advance on a signal from below.

Percival could not bring himself to hope the trap might work perfectly - he could see the little group of would-be bushwhackers so easily, it seemed unthinkable that they might not be able to see him. But they remained in place, evidently secure in the smug knowledge that they possessed an evolutionary advantage, as unable to see Percival as a man holding a torch is to see a man standing in the dark a mile away. They remained unperturbed even when the rear half of the column shuffled into position vertically above them, outflanking them entirely.

Hardly believing that the Enemy had cheerfully watched him put their testicles in the vice, Percival cranked down hard on the lever. The order to advance was given. Word whispered up the cliff like an autumn breeze sweeping leaves off trees underground; the Enemy must surely hear it. And indeed, at that point the eyes did shift about slightly on their ledge, as if agitated. But still they did not move.

Percival’s line of scouts was surely advancing now, although he could not see them. The troops around him, however, by the bright light of the halogen torches, could; the intense, focussed expressions they held bore witness to the fact...

- And then a chorus of Jew’s-harp TWANGs from far above, followed by a rustle like an army rushing forward through autumn leaves, signalled that combat had begun. The front rank of scouts had loosed their weapons at the Enemy. A spatter of pale blue water-soluble rainfall fell across his cheek, the cluster of eyes up above moved frantically, and a luckless scout who had seen the Enemy a fraction of a second too late became the first casualty of the battle by sailing down the cliff to a horrid impact on the road surface up ahead.

But up above, Percival’s armed forces were already exacting payback. Automatic weapons fired in both of Percival’s ears, deafening him instantly, and tiny flashes of sparks bounced off the cliffs above in the dark. Bowstrings loosed like a flock of twittering birds, and clattered off rock like fat ladies rolling on bubble wrap. But enemy bodies came down off the rock along with broken arrows. The sheer volume of fire could hardly have failed to hit a target.

There were no enemy eyes remaining on the cliff above, but still both columns continued to rain down and fire up missiles onto what was in all likelihood now bare rock. Percival yelled loudly enough at Loquax for him to shout and signal frantically and call a stop to the waste. The Army ceased fire, though it had not relaxed; Percival could feel troopers next to him in the press of bodies, trembling with excitement like dogs held back from a kill.

He walked forward, keeping his eyes on the gloom above in case an unnoticed pair of eyes suddenly blinked into existence. The single Citizen scout casualty lay thoroughly and irreparably dead on the road surface. As Percival had instructed, the front of the scout’s body had been smeared a bright yellow with stage greasepaint. The back of his body, meanwhile, had been painted a vivid azure blue. To his fellow troops in the ranks behind, he would be perfectly visible; to an enemy up ahead, he would be as black as the abyssite around him. Percival had experimented with red torchlight and multitudinous shades of yellow.

The Enemy troops around the scout, meanwhile, were spotted with Percival’s secret weapon. The paper missiles - combination darts and waterbombs - had contained nothing more deadly than a mixture of Royal Blue enamel and luminous radium paint, which, whenever it had hit an enemy trooper, had spotted him with bright reflective points of light that Percival’s own troops could easily see, and even when falling on the abyssite behind the Enemy, had provided a brightly-spotted backdrop against which a moving Enemy, however dark, could easily be distinguished. Percival’s scouts had operated like Special Forces teams laser-painting targets in preparation for air attack. The front rank of the scouts, chosen men, were carrying the new weapon from upper Earth - compressed air paintball carbines of the very latest type, electronically triggered, capable of accurately loosing off fifteen rounds per second in flat, accurate trajectories.

The grand troglodyte army had won its first engagement.

The same pattern, with only minor differences, was followed in the next few encounters between the City’s army and the Enemy. Just as the English had had the tables turned on them after Agincourt, so the former effectiveness of the Enemy's tactics now worked to their disadvantage. The English had persisted with the same longbow-and-yeomanry strategy that had reliably defeated the French for a century, despite the fact that the French had by then acquired cannon and were now defeating them. The Enemy, meanwhile, were persisting in the stubborn belief that Percival's army would continue to blithely walk into their ambushes, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. They pursued a monotonous strategy of lying in wait high above the roadway, sometimes in small numbers, often in large. Percival was amazed that no-one in the City's army had even noticed this habit, but such was the blind, unreasoning panic an assault by invisible monsters engendered that no-one seemed to have bothered to give any thought to analyzing the enemy's tactics.

Now, however, the monsters could be seen; and now that it no longer had to take to its heels, Percival's army was beginning to think on its feet. Percival issued no orders allowing any quarter to the Enemy wounded. Instead, he specified that any wounded were to be killed immediately. This, he knew, would prevent them from being killed slowly. Was that a good enough excuse for his willing participation in their slaughter? Would Stephanie have approved?

The battlefield was approaching now, the broad, flat ledge where two armies could conceivably field a large number of troops against each other at once. Percival, who had been beginning to hope the Enemy might never give battle with anything approaching his entire force, was mildly surprised to see an opposing army already lined up in battle array on the shelf below - or so he surmised from the neon array of eyes, clustered together like red blood cells in an aneurism. The Enemy, he was pleased to see, did not line up his troops in good order. Percival's own troops could have passed an inspection carried out on their formation made with a protractor and tape measure - and with every victory they won, they were growing stronger.

But the Enemy evidently had at least one strategist worth his her or its salt; that strategist had realized that the tactics of ambush were not working and had failed to slow down the City’s juggernaut, which therefore needed to be stopped some other way. The way which was now being attempted probably wouldn't work either, but it displayed a disturbing tendency towards organized thought.

The Enemy had arranged his troops so as to completely cover the ledge. In particular, the tapering entrance to it was defended so that Percival's men trying to gain the ledge would have to fight four men to a row against a rank of five or six of the Enemy. However, the Enemy had also totally crammed the ledge with his men, who were completely visible to Percival from above. Not wishing to waste an opportunity, Percival ordered the column to halt directly above the ledge, and to pick up whatever rocks and roadstones presented themselves and sling them down over the precipice.

It wasn't possible for Percival's troops to aim - they were unable to see the Enemy - but with the opposing force so tightly packed together, aiming wasn't necessary. Red Enemy eyes were rapidly interspersed with showers of white sparks as rocks hurled from a great height literally exploded in their midst. The mass of eyes swirled like liquid, even more like erythrocytes than ever, as the crowd below surged in panic. Some were actually being swept over the cliff by their own comrades, and many, to Percival's gratification, began to haemorrhage back down the long narrow track towards their own city.

"Is the Enemy's city like your own?" he asked Loquax.

"Olim sic erat. Urbs similis urbis nostris erat.", said Loquax. Once it was. It was a city like our own.

"What happened?" said Percival.

"Hostes", said Loquax acidly. The Enemy.

"It was a city of people like yourselves, as old as yours, and the Enemy attacked and killed them all?"

"Senior quam noster. Omnes interfecerunt hostes." Older than ours. The Enemy killed them all. "Quamquam non Romani, sed Persae, erant", Loquax added, as if this in some way excused the Enemy’s activities.

"Persians?" said Percival.

"Custodes templi", said Loquax. Guardians of the Temple.

Percival ordered the column to proceed downward with appropriate caution, a row of scouts at the front, two rows of riflemen behind them. If he had to fight his way onto the ledge, he reasoned, he would give the Enemy a taste of the worst he had to offer straight away - no sense in encouraging the foe to stand around and fight.

The Battle of the Ledge was over in a matter of minutes; the Citizens' army did not lose a single scout to enemy action. Percival's front rank danced in, released a flurry of paint, and scampered away through the second rank, who opened up on the joyous Enemy charge triggered by the retreat of the scouts. Ten or eleven of the Enemy fell before the charge faltered, the remainder being saved partly by the sheer mass of bodies left by their fallen comrades. Sensing defensive terrain, Percival ordered his front rank up to exploit the line of bodies as a natural breastwork. He noticed that he had lost two of his riflemen due to barrel explosions, the inevitable result of holding the trigger down on full automatic on a very old weapon. It was an AK47 and an MP44 that had exploded; among the oldest weapons in his arsenal. Other troops armed with more reliable (though less deadly) compound bows moved up to take their places. The compound bows, Percival reflected, might even terrify the enemy more, simply because the rifles were not made out of parts of the Enemy's dead relatives.

The battle was a rout, delayed only by the fact that the Enemy troops simply could not evacuate the ledge quickly enough. Percival reflected sadly (sadly?) that, if he hadn't been so successful in thinning out the numbers of the Enemy by dropping rocks on them earlier, the crush of Enemy troops on the ledge would have been far greater, and annihilation close to total.

As it was, the bulk of the Enemy army fled, and Percival gave no order to pursue. He doubted anyone would have obeyed one even if it had been issued. His army, by now, was used to advancing one step at a time in good formation; above all, it understood the dangers of pelting forward headlong into a dark that might contain an invisible enemy.

Inside perhaps ten minutes, the ledge was Percival's. He gave the order for a temporary camp and a few moments of rest; long enough to boil water, cook meat, perhaps even grab a second or two of sleep. But Percival, having seen what he himself had already done to an Enemy army that had lingered on the ledge, did not want his troops to stay here. Instead, to a chorus of complaints in rat-Latin, the column was ordered to pack up and proceed almost as soon as it had sat down. For the next ledge, Loquax had told Percival, was the ledge where the Enemy had his city.

There were no further attempts to ambush the column - this disturbed Percival, as it was further proof that the Enemy was revisiting his tactics. And when he set eyes on the lie of the city itself, Percival's heart sank.

The Enemy city was dimly lit by bioluminescent algae that suggested, rather than overtly describing, the alien outlines of its buildings. Unlike the Roman city upcliff of it, it was a city of domes, but not yet of minarets, as it had been built well before Islam. The Romans, true to their national character, had built an unadorned utilitarian city, well suited to the hardships of an existence a mile below ground. The Persians had sealed their own fate in attempting to build a city that was beautiful.

The massive, overarching domes were hopelessly impractical in an environment where your enemy could rain down rocks upon your roof at any moment, and hardly allowed for the placement of adequate numbers of archers and acroballistae. The curtain wall - what remained of the curtain wall - was only half the height of the one that surrounded the City.

But the Persians, like the Romans, had known well enough to build their city underneath a very large, completely unclimbable overhang, slimy as a snail's foot. And the curtain wall was manned - Percival could see red eyes slinking furtive round the battlements. The Enemy's military strategists had decided right this time. Stone walls were a potent defence against gunfire. Massed projectile weapons had been Percival's main advantage so far, but right now they looked set to become one of his weaknesses too. If the Enemy had even a few short-range, inaccurate slings, javelins, crossbows, whatever, then from behind those walls, they would be able to pick off Percival's infantry at their leisure whilst his scouts struggled to send darts over the walls. Until the scouts were able to paint the Enemy, the Enemy would remain invisible and terrifying to men who were watching their comrades keel over hit by shots coming out of nowhere.

Would it be possible to lay siege to the place? Percival mused that he did not have a reliable food source. He kicked himself immediately, however, when he remembered the City's army had just created itself a reliable food source by killing some fifty enemy combatants in the Battle of the Ledge. All that was needed was for a detachment to trundle back up the Roman road - was it still a Roman road this deep down, or a Persian one? - harvest the bodies, maybe lay their meaty bits in pickle or smoke them. He was astounded at the ease with which he now contemplated cannibalism.

The Enemy, on the other hand, did not have a reliable food source. The Enemy were expanding into City territory because food was scarce in their area. Percival had by now seen too many City corpses with teethmarks in the bone to doubt this. The Enemy had no reliable food source, because Percival's army were their food source.

Correction - had been their food source. Would be no longer.

As well as dispatching part of the army up-cliff to convert Enemy corpses into long pork, Percival detailed a small group of scouts and soldiers to locate a water source. This far down in the world's bowels, truly clean water would be hard to find, but his people had strong stomachs. The trick, Loquax had informed him in a long and difficult discussion, was to find places where water had filtered through the rock, not drained directly down from the surface sewers far above. This, with an impervious rock like abyssite, was difficult. Once he had located a source that was unlikely to dry up, Percival allowed the search for water to continue, with the difference that every new water source located was now to be poisoned.

The Enemy launched no attacks on the City's forces throughout all this; nor did Percival's food column uphill face any trouble. They were, however, still irritatingly alive; the red eyes continued to gleam out of the dark behind the battlements. Percival knew all too well that he had neglected to bring, or even to design, any effective siege weaponry.

Mining the walls would be impossible; down here there was no soft soil, only impenetrable rock. Greek Fire the Citizens had in abundance; what they lacked was an effective projector that would take it over walls to burn buildings. The walls did not look in themselves to be combustible.

And then he began to realize how the Enemy citadel needed to be assaulted. They were Persians, after all, not Greeks. It ought to work.

He consulted with the Queen's lieutenants, a volatile bunch prone to chattering excitedly in mole-Latin at speeds he was guaranteed not to understand. One of the human-femur handcarts the Army had brought with it for logistics and supply was commandeered. A number of man-hide infantry shields were located and sewn together. A number of soldiers were assembled, soldiers - this was the most painful part - who Percival felt he could afford to lose.

The Enemy were being given a gift, but it was essential they not suspect they were being given it. They had to be made, in some way, to think they had won the gift without assistance. For instance, Percival suspected the Enemy would never believe he would be so hard-hearted as to allow his own men to die. Any poisoned pill Percival handed out would best be sweetened by ordering good City soldiers to prevent the enemy from taking it, by laying down their lives if necessary. By reverse psychology, what you appeared to be trying to prevent your enemy from doing, he inevitably did. The more men died, the better. The better troops, the better. The harder they fought, the longer they took to die while the rest of Percival's army stood and watched and did nothing to help them, the better and more convincing.

This was a moral dilemma.

Why am I even bothering to think about this? If Her Infernal Majesty's to be believed, whatever I do, whatever I say, I'm still coming back in triumph. She didn't even entertain the possibility of failure. The sin is already as good as committed, and there is no choice between good and evil, hence no salvation and no God. I am merely a mechanical assembly of flesh finding the path of least resistance through life.

Mind you, she didn't entertain the possibility of me not getting my arms and legs hacked off either. I can still be triumphant if I'm being carried in on a litter. And what she says is only what she knows. She doesn't know I did a good job. She wasn't here. I was. I am. And I want to come out of this knowing that I did my damnedest.

He resolved to sacrifice as many guns, and as few men, as possible.

***

He had to admit the penthouse looked the part.

It wasn't a penthouse in the Ritz Hotel sense of the word. It was a sappers’ shelter, an armoured roof in the shape of a deep inverted V, designed to keep out, not rain, but slings and arrows and Greek (or Persian) Fire. Its only purpose was to protect its occupants while they attacked the walls, though it only had loopholes enough in its own walls for two or three riflemen or archers to defend it. It did, however, have space for five or six men to stand or crouch inside it. The only conclusion that could be drawn from its appearance on the battlefield was that whatever attack on the walls was intended would be coming in from underground.

The penthouse moved on eight hurriedly improvised bone wheels, which, due to the jury-rigged nature of the design, were incapable of being steered; Percival hoped no-one on the other side of the walls would notice. The assembly could only be pushed across the ledge where it had been assembled in a straight line up to the massive gates of the Persians' city.

The gates were the city's main weakness, insofar as there were none. They had originally been made of wood - plated, Loquax said, with lead - and some fibrous scraps of these gates hung off rotted hinges at the one and only hole in this side of the city wall. The Romans, making use of the large quantities of freely available metals coming down from the newly industrialized world above, had replaced their gates with steel. The Persians - and after them, the Enemy - had had no such luxury.

The penthouse was, in fact, totally undefended right now, though Percival thought it best not to advertise the fact too obviously. The payload inside the machine was heavier than the lead that had been poured to tile its roof, and every man inside the machine was required to down weaponry and put his shoulder to a strut to heave the contraption inch by inch toward the walls. Half the wheels, inadequately designed, had stuck fast and were being dragged rather than pushed. Percival hoped fervently that the Enemy did not use fire arrows.

The penthouse rolled forward, like a predatory tortoise sneaking up on an unsuspecting lettuce, towards the walls. As a siege weapon, it was hopelessly inadequate. The wheels were creaking under its weight; it could not move fast enough to prevent the Enemy from sallying from the walls and capturing it. As the protection to a sappers' minehead, it might have been adequate if there had been any rock hereabouts that wouldn't blunt the bit on a pneumatic drill in the first ten minutes. The Nazis had had to blast out their chambers using dynamite.

Arrows clattered from the wall, at first like the few spots of rain that fall before the storm, and then like the storm itself. Percival saw several of them go straight through the lead tiling. Shortly afterwards, a crewman's body was gradually made visible by the excruciating creeping progress of the siege machine's carapace. There was little blood; an Enemy arrow appeared to have pierced his heart.

Before long, the penthouse was a mass of arrows. Its progress was considerably slower than before; Percival crossed his fingers and hoped that it would be able to crawl close enough to the Enemy for the plan to be accomplished. The soldiers within it had been instructed to move their payload up to the Enemy gates, and then to defend the Engine at all costs. Percival had promised them the support of the Army. Behind them, the first rank of the Army's scouts and archers stood obediently idle, watching the engine move further and further into the open jaws of what the Enemy probably thought was his own trap, but which was in reality Percival's. Percival had had the rear of the penthouse nailed opaque with thin skin sheeting, to make sure his sacrificial victims didn't see their comrades standing still thirty yards behind them. They must remain under the illusion they were being supported by the main line, he had reasoned. Nothing must slow that inexorable forward crawl. And in order for them to carry out their task, they must also die without ever once knowing their Army had stood by and watched them die. Percival knew how the Citizens' peculiar brand of precognition worked. There must be no possibility of a man seeing his future and attempting to shirk it.

Then the jaws of the trap snapped shut. Enemy men erupted from the walls, hurtling forward at the flimsy structure, piling every ounce of strength they had into the spear-points they flung home into the wood. The walls were not armoured with lead sheet like the roof, and Percival saw blood spray from underneath a wheel like red steam from a car radiator hose. Then the Enemy were all over the penthouse, ripping tiles from the roof with grips that could twist a man's face loose from his skull, stabbing spears into the wood like harpoons into a dying whale, screaming in whatever bizarre language they used. Screams of dying men were sounding from the penthouse; good men who had only done what Percival had asked. And still, Percival's army stood and leaned on their shields and did nothing.

Percival became uncomfortably aware that the attention of his entire line of troops was fixed on him.

"We can't advance", he said to Loquax desperately. "That's not the plan. If we approach those walls our troops won't be able to see to shoot. If we take back the penthouse the Enemy won't be able to take the bait. You know that." Gunfire - Stetchkin and Kalashnikov gunfire, the cheapest he could afford to give away - was coming from the ports on the siege engine, which were purposely ill-designed, difficult to shove a gun up behind and shoot accurately out of. The shots were hitting nothing. Everything was going perfectly to plan.

Nevertheless, Loquax stared at him severely.

"What? What is it? If you're expecting me to pull some great tactical coup out of my bumcrack, why don't you just save us both some time and TELL ME WHAT IT FUCKING IS?"

Loquax lowered his gaze and looked back to the walls, where Enemy troops were now dragging some of Percival's soldiers out of the engine. He heard the sounds of bone spears going into flesh.

Everything was going to plan - and everything, he decided suddenly, was wrong.

"Right", said Percival. "Right. It doesn't matter what I do, right?" He motioned to the soldier next to him. "Quinte - da mihi telum tuum." As he cradled the soldier's M16, he realized, with a sudden cold prickling on his skin, that there had been one trooper in his army all along who could see to shoot the Enemy.

"MECUM portas OPPUGNATE!"

His first few shots blew the Enemy soldiers off the City troopers they had been molesting. Percival, after all, had used an M16 before, even if only on a shooting range for recreation, and the City's artillery had fired perhaps five or six shots with a rifle in their lives. His next few shots, delivered from the hip as he ran forward into No Man's Land, scattered the Enemy's archers from the walls. His next few held back a tide of Enemy troopers swarming through the gates to attack this one presumptuous warrior of the City's. His next shot was not a shot, as the firing pin bit down on air.

He reversed the gun and slammed the butt into the face of an Enemy trooper attacking him with a spear. He heard teeth splinter, but still the man fought on. Luckily, as the trooper was lining up for a second thrust that would probably have spitted Percival, he was killed by one of his own side's arrows fired from the walls.

And then Percival's army arrived.

Snatching up a Stetchkin dropped by a dead trooper, Percival picked it up and hosed the battlements on the other side with bullets. The Stetchkin had a drum magazine and was still partly full. Such was the fear the Enemy had of gunfire, particularly gunfire that seemed uncannily likely to hit them, that they remained huddled behind their merlons. Percival was almost entirely sure he had hit nothing at all.

Further up and down the walls, Enemy archers were letting fly at City soldiers, but the entire army was surging inward to the gates like sand into the neck of an hourglass. A mass of troops formed up behind the penthouse like bubbles behind a cork; the penthouse shifted forward at a breakneck crawl, skidding on broken wheels, and Percival heard the screams of the men he had intended to save being crushed beneath it. Had they been fated to die after all?

The Stetchkin jammed, and Percival threw it away. Instead, he fell to directing the soldiery to shoulder the siege engine through the gate and up the main street between the crumbling colonnades and verandas of the Persian city. Percival dimly remembered the inner part of Dante's Hell being ringed by the parapets of a city named Dis, named after its ruler. Every colonnade in this version of Dis hid a spearman, every rooftop an archer, every veranda a harem of Enemy females pelting the City's army with bits of building. They seemed willing to dismantle their own metropolis for ammunition to throw at Percival. Gunfire, from one or two men who had actually managed to struggle free of the penthouse, and arrows from the remainder of the army, were eating away at these creatures; Percival's scouts had painted the town blue with airgun pellets, and the enemy were very far from being invisible now. But the City's forces were taking losses. He yelled to the nearer of the Queen's lieutenants, and to Loquax, to sound a withdrawal.

He had expected the commanders to gawp at him in disbelief; to his amazement, they simply nodded at their sergeants, who proceeded to scream their heads off at the rank and file, who proceeded to obey without question.

The Army was still taking heavy losses as it withdrew; Percival could hear the screams of the wounded, but could not see them, because by this time he had dipped under the tiling in the penthouse and was groping about in the dark as the incomprehensible mutterings of Enemy troopers surrounded the engine.

At length, he found what he was looking for, and began looking for something, anything, with which to set light to it. Matches had been made for this purpose, and several of them were still secured to the inside of the penthouse carapace.

He hesitated, knowing that the act of striking the match would alert the Enemy to his presence.

It doesn't matter what I do.

He struck the match. It flared like a firework, bigger and faster-burning than surface-dweller safety matches. He heard Enemy yells from outside the carapace as he touched the match to the fuse.

It doesn't matter what I do. But how do I get out of this?

The light of the match showed him how. He snatched up what he'd found tucked in an angle of the structure; it was reassuringly heavy, full of other people's trouble. Enemy feet gathered round the penthouse; three spears stabbed through the tiling to his left. He cocked the weapon as loudly as he could. The feet scattered backwards. At least two of the feet fell over in their haste to get further away from Percival.

It doesn't matter what I do it doesn't matter what I do it doesn't matter what I do -

He came out from under the carapace and shot people a lot whilst running at full pelt towards the City gates, screaming to the City's soldiers to lie flat and cover their ears. Spears shivered past him. And then the world behind him went hot and bright and red and he realized he had forgotten to cover his own ears and someone turned the world sideways-on and smacked him around the face with it.

When he rose to his feet, his ears were singing and spears were still rushing past him, but were in the hands of his own soldiery running inwards through the gates. He had difficulty staying on his feet. Men were screaming and dying and bashing each other with awful force, and one half of the visible universe was on fire, but all this violence was happening in perfect, serene silence. A man died to his left, quietly, decently and without fuss. Screaming. An Enemy soldier was spitted wriggling under five or six spears ripping into him like carving forks.

Citizens were used to winning victories by setting fire to the battlefield; it was a tactic they had used against the Russians and Americans, and which they had employed to the extent of setting their own city alight only days before. They were accustomed to fire. The Enemy was not, and ran shrieking from it. And naked flame and the streets of the Persian city, filled with refuse, got along like a thousand houses on fire. The detonation of a hundred gallons of Greek fire spread out like a brilliant orange weed in a poorly tended garden. The only danger was that the sheer heat of the flames might burn so fiercely as to deny access to the city to Percival's reserves still leaning on their shields outside; but there were, he told himself, plenty of other holes in the walls. And the Enemy were now plainly outlined against the fire, and Percival's archers were having a field day. Bizarrely, the creatures seemed to have little concept of ducking behind cover against bowshot. Why should they have learned to, after all? Were they not invisible? The City's coordinated, disciplined way of making war was paying off, particularly against opponents who seemed to possess no reactions in between racing slavering to berserk attack and scattering in panic. Percival did not blame them. After all, he reasoned, if these creatures were anything like Citizens, they must know the outcome of the battle. They knew who was going to win, and who to lose.

This must be the way wars were always fought down here. One side smug with the knowledge of its inevitable victory, the other one totally demoralized and fleeing almost before combat had even begun.

He wandered nonchalantly over a gap in the wall, occasionally raising the gun and shooting somebody. Most of the combat now taking place on the streets was now hand-to-hand, less because the troops had run out of room or ammunition to shoot than because both sides were blinded by the brilliance of the blaze. The combat had become one of impact and contact, of sensing the enemy's position by touch once spears, swords or riflebutts were locked. Both armies appeared to be fighting with their eyes tight shut. But Percival's forces were pushing the Enemy slowly backward through the streets, every column of march in every street being led by a lieutenant or a sergeant, a tribunus or a decurio, shields locked together like the smooth fascia of a patent stabbing and mangling machine.

They were nearing the further edge of the city now, the splendid conflagration of the metropolis lighting up the entire Abyss. For the first time, Percival could see that the Persians had build their town on a rock promontory that walked out into the drop, terminating in a skycraper-sized abyssite column which soared up into the dark overhead to become the overhang which protected the city; a natural bridge whose arch was maybe a hundred yards across and just as high. What process of erosion or deposition could have created it, Percival had no idea.

The city crowded around the rock column on both sides, narrow streets and buildings clinging to the cliffs as if painted on by optimistic artists. At least one ugly scar of rubble showed where, Percival imagined, a building had given up clinging and crumbled into the gulf. The fighting around the column was fiercer; scouts and archers were needed again, as the streets were too narrow for lines of locked shields to be an advantage. Loquax led the assault around one side of the column, and Percival and Penelope Simpson's lieutenants around the other. As usual, the Enemy were easy to spot, providing ready-made targets whenever they opened their eyes. Percival's men, meanwhile, advancing under the cover of gigantic magnolia shields, seemed all but impossible to find with an arrow. Squadrons of great taupe bats flapped overhead, making a noise like pennants rippling in the wind.

Then, finally, Percival's half of the army came out onto a flat platform of rock where no building existed. A level pavement had been built, but had been left bare, an act of rare reverence in an area where horizontal surfaces were at a premium. This promenade was punctuated only by a number of bronze or copper rings fixed directly into the pavement. Possibly those who had built the pavement had acquired the knowledge of how to make concrete from the Romans upstairs, and had planted the rings in the wet cement. The rings were thick, perhaps the thickness of a man’s thumb, and, when Percival weighed one in his palm, heavy. They would have worked well as tethering points for draught animals, maybe, or livestock waiting to be sold at market.

But there was only one form of livestock down here. And the fastening points, he noticed, were spaced out in such a way that a human being could be made to lie outstretched between them, all four limbs lashed down to the flags. The promenade was a place of execution, not a public square.

Yet it was not the promenade that most interested him, because beyond it, lit up suddenly by the collapse of a burning building way behind him in the city, was a thing Penelope Simpson’s diaries made cryptic mention of, which Ivan Gushin had said existed, which Ministry archaeologists had uncovered references to in sources dating back beyond the Dark Ages.

The Inner Temple. The Oracle. Iste Locus in Alto - “That Place Below”. In Herodotus, , “Hades’ Audience Hall.” In Ivan Gushin's final conversations with Penelope Simpson, the Captain had of course been speaking in metaphor when he'd referred to the entire city of Na as 'The Outer Temple'. By 'The Inner Temple', therefore, Gushin had been referring poetically to the entire Abyss, and not to any actual building as such. Such was the opinion of the very best experts the MoD had consulted.

Percival now knew that he was looking at that building.

The structure was a Graeco-Persian fusion like the Tomb of Mausolus, a massive pile of stone crammed onto a precarious spire of foundation, presenting aspects of both Persian and Hellenic art. Percival remembered that the Mausoleum had been a Wonder of the World. Carved above the entrance was a Farohar, a winged bearded man symbolizing God. This temple, he reflected, had been built at a time when the prophet Haggai was threatening his fellow Judaeans with dire divine retribution if they failed to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. The walls of the temple were crammed with bas-reliefs depicting the Sun, the Moon, and winged lions with human heads and beards that would put the most enthusiastic Mormon to shame.

“And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle”, recited Percival out loud, “and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men...And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.”

Loquax looked at him oddly.

“And they had a king over them”, continued Percival, “which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

The sightless eyes of twenty or thirty winged, gold-crowned quadrupeds stared out of the stone at Percival. No-one seemed to have attempted to pry the gilt away from them; down here, steel, gunpowder and human flesh were all more valuable than gold. But steel rusted and flesh rotted, which was why they were sold at a premium; gold did not corrode, and the temple gleamed with it.

It was built on a separate spire of rock which had originally been a mere extension of the archway that protected the city. This, the one and only approach to the temple, had been carved painstakingly into an ornately-fretted causeway, decorated with bas reliefs of Lord Mithra carrying out the tauroctony, the act of sacrificing a bull in which he was always, unfailingly, depicted, and whose meaning no archaeologist had ever satisfactorily explained. The causeway was not only ornamental, however; it was also defensive. It was only a thin man wide, and the gaps between its paving stones big enough to make sure it would be more than just bears who got anyone who walked on the cracks in the pavement. Effectively, it was a set of stepping stones thirty feet in height, each stone separated from the next by three feet of absolutely nothing. Percival had no doubt that at least a dozen Enemy bows would be trained on any man attempting to hop, skip and jump his way into the temple.

However, before getting to the causeway, they would need to cross the promenade. Percival's army stayed stopped, almost comically obedient, waiting for further commands, crowded into the alleys between the smattering of buildings round the precipice.

Percival bent to the flagstones and picked up a single long, black feather, lying among others in a coating of moist grey garbage that overlay the flags like soil. The feather was alarmingly large; surely it had to come from a bird of eagle size or larger. Further feathers poked out of the dirt a few slabs further on. The larger ones were flight feathers; there were smaller ones that looked like the down on a young chick. Many birds had once not only lived here, but had almost certainly roosted too.

There was only one type of flying bird that grew to such a size, and it was no eagle. Even down here, buried under tons of rock, a vertical mile from any flying bird, in a place where every exposed surface dripped with moisture, the Zoroastrians had built a Tower of Silence, giving their dead back to the world without sullying earth, air or water. Even down here, they had tried to be true to their God. And this, of course, was why they had died out.

Beneath Percival's feet, the stuff on the flags squashed like rich loam. Parts of it crunched. The occasional rib or pelvis poked up through the marl. This was what human flesh became if enough people were left to rot for long enough. Vultures couldn't finish everything.

He held the feather up to the cold white light of the lanterns. Despite the noissome greyness covering most of it, one edge of it - the leading edge, the edge lying poking through the litter - was a brilliant, unclotted crimson. Percival clamped a hand down on the shoulder of one of his men, who was beginning to steal out across the flagstones with intent to attack the Enemy.

Cautiously, he took a halogen lantern from the hands of its bearer and swept it right at left across the pavement. The pavingstones gleamed scarlet as a sunset in Hell.

"Blood", he said, to no-one. "Sanguis", he repeated, for the soldiers' benefit. "Sanguis multus", he elaborated.

"Hecatombe hoc accidit", opined a lieutenant behind him.

Percival shook his head. "Hoc nec sacrificium neque proelium erat." Whoever had spilt this blood had covered the ground as finely as any interior decorator. Whoever had bled this blood had been neither a sacrificial offering nor a soldier wounded in battle.

Should he advance, or should he cower here in the rosy glow of the city he had set alight, just because he had encountered Enemy behaviour for which he had no explanation?

All of a sudden, a clatter of steel, bone and anything heavy enough to hit with sounded from the other side of the promenade. Loquax's forces had arrived. Their last few poor remnants of Enemy opposition backed into the square, piebald with Royal Blue marker paint and bright red blood, tempting targets for Percival's archers. Many of the Enemy broke and ran as soon as they burst into the square, ensuring that their remaining comrades were outflanked, surrounded and slaughtered. Loquax was visible at the head of his cohort, yelling what Percival knew, even before the words issued from his lips, was an order to charge.

It was logical behaviour - taking advantage of the enemy's disarray. But Percival knew suddenly - and surely Loquax must also know - that it was suicide.

"NOLI OPPUGNARE!" yelled Percival. "TERRA PARATA!"

- yet even as the shout died in his throat he knew that there was not, nor could be, any Latin translation of the words 'prepared ground'.

The Enemy general, whoever he was, was not an unreasoning beast, but a man, and an exceptional man at that. He had noticed that the Roman barbarians from uphill had been fighting using unfair tactics, colouring their skins and shields to make themselves invisible. He must have had prisoners of war of his own, and had experimented with the dye colours most readily available to him. And now, Loquax was charging full tilt over a field of the colour that most readily identified him to the enemy.

Loquax, at the head of his charge like a latter-day Alexander, was a latter-day St. Sebastian within seconds. Trailing blood like a spiral galaxy as he tumbled end-over-end, he tripped the troops that followed him and slowed their progress as they, in turn, became targets.

How had the Enemy realized the advantages of light and colour so quickly? Did they, perhaps, have an instinctive understanding of it, because of their peculiar biology? But surely that could not be the case. Their colour perception, like that of the Citizens, was narrower, if anything, than that of surface-dwelling humans.

The bowshot was deadly accurate, coming from dark voids in the bas-reliefs that crawled across the face of the Temple. He should have realized that, down here, even art would have a purpose.

Only a hundred yards away, his army was being reduced as methodically as meat being fed into a grinder, and he was standing watching, doing nothing to help. With every new wound the arrows made, his soldiers bled out fresh red blood that made them even easier targets.

There had to be a solution to this. There had to be a way through.

He realized almost instantly that the solution was, in fact, simple. It just wasn't pleasant.

He motioned to his lieutenants to give the order for a general withdrawal.

***

The Enemy continued to shoot up those already wounded; even those already dead. Many screamed and whimpered and moaned for help, but Percival, knowing the Enemy were only attempting to lure his remaining men back into the killing ground, did nothing. He attempted to push to the back of his mind, without success, the fact that one of those bleeding to death, scared and in pain, out there might be Loquax. But if Percival had sent his entire army into the killing field, the result would have been a subterranean Agincourt.

He ordered the army to set up camp in the slime, and brew up as best they could. No sense in attacking on an empty stomach.

Behind him in the dark, the screaming and the pleading continued.

***

Eventually, he stuck a thumb down into the muck and pulled it up to the light for scrutiny. It was black.

He looked up at the circle of squatting lieutenants, and nodded.

"Sagitarii primi", he cautioned. "Atque lux nulla." The lieutenants clapped fists to their chests, bowed, and scuttled away. In the dark, preparations for combat began quietly. Palms were dusted with a suspiciously bone-white powder to make sure of a steady grip on swords and spears. Blades were notched and dipped into the erstwhile human gunk that covered the ground, to ensure that wounds would be ragged and become infected. The liquid crunch of soldiers trampling charnel grime under unshod feet filled what was shortly to become the battlefield.

Almost immediately, eyes flicked open like dim lanterns behind the bas-reliefs. Percival climbed noiselessly up from his command post in the dirt at the edge of the promenade and onto a handy piece of statuary - an abyssite pedestal depicting, on its sides, men with beards smiting other men with beards - which he had earlier earmarked for this moment. Lying full length in a comfortable shooting position above the unseen heads of his own troops, one hundred yards from the Temple, he clicked the M16 into semi-automatic mode, sighted down the barrel, and began sending shots into the architecture.

He was not the best of shots. Occasionally he missed. When he missed, constellations of sparks cascaded down the faces of ancient prophets, and many works archaeologists would have killed to see were ruined. Most of the time, however, he hit, and the lanterns he was aiming at went out.

Volleys of arrows nevertheless continued to fly out of the dark, bowstrings twanging with a sound like progressive jazz guitar. This time, however, the archers' aim was relatively random. The single and simple drawback of using human captives to paint your battlefield blood red was that, in under an hour, the thickest coat you could apply would dry to jet black. Percival's insistence that his troops advance across the bloody blackness spaced out crouched behind Enemyskin scuta was also paying dividends. He heard as many wet SPLATs of arrows belly-flopping into the formerly human muck as he did dull THUMPs of arrows thudding into the hide shields. The occasional exasperated gasp as a head bit into flesh was so uncommon as to be negligible (except, he conceded, if you were the one being bitten).

Before long, Percival's troops were ensconced on the city side of the causeway into the temple, crouched behind a double wall of shields, virtually invulnerable, pelting the near side of the building with target painting darts and a good deal of heavier calibre ammunition. Every time Percival saw a pair of eyes, he shot what was between them; but the Enemy were by now learning to pop up, attack and drop down before a bead could be drawn on them.

On the plus side, they now showed signs of running low on ammunition, only sending the occasional shot out through the temple walls. Of course, this might only be a ruse; their commander might be hoping Percival would throw his remaining men into a mad dash over that last few tempting metres of causeway that could not possibly be long enough to be dangerous.

Making the rifle safe, he eased himself down off the low roof, narrowly avoiding skidding in the bony leftovers underfoot, and padded as silently as possible in the direction of the noise.

Moans and groans were still sounding all around him. He groped low about himself in the dark, trying not to disturb arrows well entrenched in wounds. There had been no time yet to deal with the fallen.

"Loquax!" he hissed. "Quo es?"

"Hoc", hissed a voice far to his right. He had to clamber over several corpses and not-quite corpses before finding one that was still breathing, though a hedgehog's hide of arrows that was moving up and down in it with every breath it took.

"Moriturus", wheezed the corpse, "te saluto."

"Haud moriturus es", lied Percival. "Why did you attack?"

"Hodie mortuus fuisses", gasped Loquax, "nisi pro te mortuus fuissem. Gravissimus es." You would have died, if I had not died instead. You are very important.

"I'm not that important, Loquax", said Percival.

The little creature shook his head, wincing as this caused the arrows to catch in his side. "Non comprehendes gravitatem tuam. Homo gravissimus mundi es." You do not realize your own importance. You are the most important man in the world.

"You knew you were going to die", said Percival.

"Scimus omnes se morituri iri. In hoc sunt omnes Sibyllae." We all know we are going to die. In this one matter, all men are prophets.

He fulfilled his prophecy. His eyes were so large and luminous that the sudden lack of life behind them seemed impossible. Percival considered slapping Loquax in the face and telling him faking wasn't funny. Yet the little Citizen seemed to be holding his breath for an awfully long time.

The Battle of the Temple still raged, though the Enemy were now getting the worst of it. However, it remained to be seen how the gulf between city and temple could be crossed; the stepping-stone causeway was intelligently defended, flanked by gorgeous relief carvings of bizarre metaphysical activities - men with crowns on their shoulders kneeling before a man crowned with rays of sunlight or lightning, a bearded magus prostrating himself before a gigantic winged figure holding a staff the height of the temple wall. There were plenty of dark spaces in those carvings, and Percival felt sure the Enemy had archers and ammunition in reserve to occupy those spaces.

He let the body of the diminutive translator down gently, and carefully opened the flap on his breast pocket, which contained the one final surprise he had hoped would be unnecessary.

Slowly, methodically, he popped the top off the auto touch-up spray and, being careful to protect the temperamental mechanism of the M16 with his off-hand, applied the spray liberally and democratically to his entire body surface as if it were anti-perspirant. First of all, his whole left arm was made yellow, as if by spreading jaundice; then the left side of his torso bloomed magnolia, then his leg turned canary-coloured. Then he switched the can to his left hand and infected his right side with the same livid cast as his left. Finally, he shut his eyes and applied the paint to his head. It felt cold on his skin. He didn’t open his eyes for several seconds, letting the coat take hold. It would, he knew, be murder to get it out of his beard.

He waved the spray up and down his rifle; then, remembering that the rifle might not be so useful in close quarters, reached down to Loquax's body for the Tokarev the translator always carried, fumbled in the little creature's bandolier pouches for the pistol's associated paraphernalia, slotted a fresh magazine into it, practised using the unfamiliar cocking and safety action, and painted it, too, yellow. Then he dropped the empty paint can in the dirt and stood dripping cadmium yellow onto the pavement. He did not feel invisible.

He had kept the palms of his hands clenched throughout. Now, he opened them and scooped a hand into another of his pockets, which contained a fine white powder. He rubbed his palms together, letting the stuff crumble between them. There was no chalk available down here; powdered human bone would just have to do.

He moved away from the sound of bowshot and gunfire, feeling his way with his feet through the human slurry to a point where the flagstones ended. He felt his way over the lip of the edge; there was masonry beneath, big coarse slabs that offered easy purchase to his boots.

Can't fall in any case. I could dive into the Abyss and return triumphant if I wanted. I am the World's Most Important Man. I can't fall. God, who Nietzsche foolishly believes is dead, will not let me -

The masonry ended in rock. His feet crunched on what he at first thought were eggshells from hundreds of years of birds' nests, but when another falling and fulminating building in the city behind him lit up the ledge, turned out to be row upon row upon row of tiny birds' skulls.

The rock offered foot- and handholds. It was, so far, relatively easy to traverse. But he had to go down as well as across.

Now the hard part started. Away from the glare of the burning city, round the end of the promontory and into the moat between temple and town.

Luckily, the Persians had not been able to help their artistic urges. Even down here, the rock was carved, into big, helpful shapes of birds and men and demons, as easy to climb on as a ladder. He could feel his way across the face, moving easily from prophet to prophet, feeling the big square outlines of the stepping stones, slightly broader at their bases than their heads; they afforded him a surprising amount of cover as he edged in towards the front of the Temple. There were no Enemy troops down here; the Enemy had learned by now to put all his men behind good strong walls, in case some unseen force should strike them dead between the eyes from an impossible distance.

However, a man behind strong walls could still easily pour down boiling oil on a man trying to climb them. And Her Majesty's prophecies don't preclude me returning triumphant with horrific facial burns.

For this reason, Percival worked his way around the front of the Temple to its (hopefully) relatively undefended side. Here, around the lion-pawed feet of a stone Abaddon - he had started to call the winged, crowned Persian man-beasts by that name - the wall became less alive with carvings, more difficult to climb, but almost certainly also less well defended. The carvings here were sparse and shallow, without the elaboration of those on the front of the building, which had almost certainly been made so to conceal arrowslits. At first, he was afraid he would not be able to scale the wall in such an absence of iconography, but, with a determination that would have terrified him only weeks earlier, he managed a chimney between two carved patriarchs and came up underneath a tiny window, too small for anything but an arrow or a bullet to travel through.

One foot on the two thousand-year-old head of one magus, one foot on the head of another, Percival precariously drew the Tokarev from his belt, made it unsafe, and pulled out a long silencer from a battledress pocket, which he screwed into the muzzle of the gun with exquisite care.

Then, one-handed, he reached up, curled his fingers round the lip of the arrowslit, and walked himself up the surface of the wall, four fingers between himself and a fall into infinity. He came up, was confronted by a pair of huge red glowing eyes, and made a third, less luminous red eye between them with the pistol. He waited patiently, but no more eyes showed themselves. He now had to face the dilemma of whether to put the pistol away. He could not climb further upwards without doing so; nor could he enter the building via the window. Also, his hand was getting tired.

He put the gun away, rendering himself defenceless, and rested his left hand by shifting his weight to his right. Then, he reached up into space above himself. There had been a Farohar up above the window on the wall, he was sure of it. Sure enough, his fingers found a hold, probably a wing or a crown or a bit of beard, impossibly high above him at the full extent of their reach. Holding his weight on that tenuous strip of stone, he removed his other hand and reached it, too, upwards.

If I fall now -

But I can't fall.

He pulled himself up with strength he had not been aware he possessed, powered on by the knowledge that he not only could do it, but would. Downward lay only death; upward was the only place to go.

He found himself on roofing tiles. There had once been far more tiles on the roof, which was roughly pyramidal in shape. The roof's original tiling seemed to have been imported from somewhere sunnier up above; over the years, it had been replaced with stratified, fragile abyssite of a variety Percival had never seen before. Over still more years, even these tiles had been lost, probably more by the action of water or falling rock than by wind. After dealing with the tiles, the groundwater had wrought heavy damage on the interior. There were massive, rotten holes that appeared to go deep into the lower storeys. Only the sheer solidity of the building's construction - the walls were as thick as those of a mediaeval fortress - seemed to have saved it from collapse.

He had originally assumed the building was on fire; a pyre of thick black smoke was rising from it, after all. Now, however, from closer in, he knew that the smoke was not what it contrived to seem. Outlying plumes and puffs of it were issuing from gaps and cracks in the tiling where the roof had caved in, it was true, but the majority of it was rising from a thick, squat structure in the shape of four daevas at the roof's apex, each daeva leering evilly at a separate quarter of the world. The smoke was coming out of a chimney; it was supposed to be there. But it wasn't strictly smoke. Percival was certain that, as he approached it across the plane of the roof, parts of it cast about idly in his direction, as if blown by a subterranean wind that wasn't there. He retreated hurriedly. The smoke returned to billowing upwards as smoke should.

There were no red eyes visible in the depths inside the building. Percival eased himself down, unable even to see his feet, let alone where to put them. At first, he could not find a foothold, and he was forced to dangle in the dark, legs flailing, hips swinging, until he had a place to stand. All around him now, he could see glimmering eyes rushing back and forth through openings in the structure - doorways, stairwells, wall collapses?

He swung down onto a solid stone floor, taking out the pistol. A pair of red eyes bustled towards him out of the dark, eyes which might have been behind a bow that had shot at Loquax, and he shot at them. He rose and felt his way along the corridor, past a dying man. To his right, a doorway, regular-sided, opened up - inside the doorway, more pairs of eyes were milling about, chattering excitedly. The owners of those eyes might have been directing the volleys that had taken down Loquax's charge. He raised the gun, hand shaking, and shot all of them - he thought he remembered firing three times - before they even knew they were under attack. He was now in a cramped, low-ceilinged space with a single narrow window that he could only identify as such by wiggling his hand through it; it admitted no light. The space was now half full of bleeding humanoids; he stood on some accidentally as he passed, but they only gurgled feebly. His aim had been good.

There were many more red eyes in a larger chamber further on; a huge one, by Abyss standards, the size of a suburban living room, extending both ahead of him and below. One end of it was a jewel mosaic of brilliant, irregular shapes of light; the sort of light that came from automatic gunfire and burning cities. He tried to turn some of the shapes of light around in his head, recognized the wide open eyes of an angel, the gaping jaws of a daeva, the dark shadow beneath a simurg's wings.

He was looking at one of the two wings of the temple front, the ones out of which enemy archers had targetted his men. Had targetted Loquax.

He began picking off the red eyes from behind.

The Enemy troopers in here were not buck naked like their more deceased companions outside, but groaning under the weight of heavy leather aprons sewn with flat steel ingots that he instantly recognized as votive tablets, the common currency of the underworld - another surprise. He had never suspected, nor been told, that the Enemy had such heavy armour; it would certainly have stopped any number of bone arrows that hit on its plates. Unhappily for the plates' wearers, pistol bullets went through them like birds through air.

At first, his success was almost comical, as the Enemy assumed the gunfire was still coming from outside, and took cover and returned fire by frantic turns as he continued to drop them one by one. Then, one of them clearly spotted him; a pair of eyes swung round to fasten directly on his position, there was a yell in the troglodyte gabble, and a silhouette on the end of the line of eyes leapt to its feet and jabbed a finger at him.

Percival edged into the chamber and opened up with the M16.

***

The slaughter had been ferocious, interrupted only by brief pauses to slap in fresh magazines. The rifle barrel was warm to the touch, even through the polypropylene sheath. Percival's trigger finger was beginning to get cramp.

Lord, what have I done? Have I not admitted to myself that these are men like me? Men who can plot and counterplot, develop strategies, respond to a change in tactics with one of their own? These are not animals, and this is not extermination. This is war. And I am a Field Chaplain caught red-handed by the Almighty with a weapon in my hand.

With only one fully manned shooting gallery now remaining behind the temple statues, the City's troops were able to rush across the stepping-stone causeway in testudo formation, crouched behind shields heavy with arrows. As soon as Percival had stepped out into the galleries at the front of the temple, as soon as muzzle flashes had been seen inside the building, the army had known at least one of its own was inside. The remainder of the battle was a foregone conclusion. He could hear them now, raging through the rooms behind him, taking their revenge on the Enemy who had caused them to cower behind their own city walls for so long.

Percival was now standing in what he imagined must be a Holy of Holies; a circular, colonnaded chamber, at least partly collapsed, with Aryan script picked out on its walls in gold. The walls themselves were marble, punctuated by abyssite carvings - farohars, but turned over so that the bearded head in the symbol was not looking upwards towards Heaven, but falling downwards into Hell. Percival was now absolutely sure that he was standing in a temple, not to Ahura Mazda, but to Angra Mainyu, to Darkness, to the Lie. Daevas stood round the walls - not capering in gay abandon, as on the walls of some Hell Fire Club where rich sybarites played at worshipping Satan, but standing stiffly to attention, stylized in stone, like soldiers. The armies of a Hell that meant business.

It made sense. Zoroaster may have swayed the Achaemenid kings into worshipping his One God, but the mindset of the ancient world was to hedge one's bets as far as divinities were concerned, and surely worshipping the One God didn't preclude also dabbling in a little veneration of Marduk, Ra, Astarte or, what was that other chappie, the one who was the One God's opposite?

The inscriptions curled around the walls in all the alphabets of the Achaemenids - Aryan Cuneiform, Demotic, Phoenician, Sanskrit - even Greek. Percival, a clergyman (albeit a heavily armed clergyman) could read Greek.

"I, Ariaramnes, who am king in this region, have built this place to pay homage to the Lie."

Ariaramnes. He had heard that name before, in an Ancient History class. Surely this king could not be the King Ariaramnes? But Ariaramnes was his name, and he described himself as a king.

Cyrus the Great, the first Achaemenid King of Persia, had been succeeded first by his son, Cambyses, then by Smerdis the Pretender, then by Darius. However, this put historians in a quandary, as, although Darius admitted he was no blood relation of Cyrus, he nevertheless described himself as the ninth in a line of kings leading back to Achaemenus, who hence gave his name to the Achaemenid Dynasty. Darius also named another of his nine kingly ancestors as a King Ariaramnes who was described (by himself) in a golden tablet found at Ecbatana as 'The Great King, King of Kings', a title which properly was only ever accorded to monarchs of the Persian Empire. But if Cyrus and Cambyses had preceded Darius, and been monarchs of the Empire, what could Darius's ancestors have been kings of?

The answer appeared to be: Hell.

The Persians had considered this place to be important. Even though it lay outside the borders of their world, they had conquered it and built their temples here. They, like the Nazis and the Greeks and Romans after them, had been fascinated by the fact that a substance existed here which made men babble the future, but which appeared at the same time to corrupt them into beasts. The Persian kings must have realized the implications for long-term strategy, and attempted to harness the power of the Abyss for help in running their Empire. But how to do so, when they had just agreed to a compact with Zoroaster which demanded high morality, the worship of light and fire and all that lay above the earth? They could hardly be seen to be stealing away furtively into burrows in the ground to consult with what could only be emissaries of the Lie.

So they sent their own emissaries here, men who willingly damned themselves in the eyes of the Zoroastrian faith, men who were instructed to enter into the service of Angra Mainyu and pipe back any truly useful lies the Lord of the Dark might have. Such as, for example, detailed lies on the current disposition of the armies of the mainland Greeks. However damned they might be, those men would become important to the Empire, trusted advisors at the right hand of royalty. Might they even have become important enough for the Achaemenids to have handed over their kingdom to such a man?

Darius had been, by all accounts, a good king. He built roads. He built new capitals at Persepolis and Susa. He organized the empire into satrapies. He allowed the Jews to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. He expanded the empire (though temporary setbacks were inflicted on him by rebellious Greeks). Percival had lost count of the number of Latin texts he had translated at school which had begun ‘Darius, rex Persarum...’

The roof above his head, a double dome, was held up by an outer and an inner circle of columns, heavy, squat, businesslike; no graceful fluted Doric or soaring Gothic here. These were pillars built with a hefty safety margin, far, far thicker than they absolutely needed to be, and engineered, not in sandstone, slate or even marble, but in the midnight blue flecked with tiny starlight glimmers that could only be lapis lazuli. In the Greco-Roman world, lapis had been the preserve of the Persians, and a rarity even to them, coming only from recently conquered Afghanistan. In the Middle Ages, miniscule quantities of it, ground into a powder, had fetched astronomical prices as perhaps the only artist's pigment more valuable than gold. The sheer value of the pigment had been the reason why the Virgin Mary's robe was always depicted as a rich, deep blue. And here Percival was, standing in the middle of a room made of it. The columns couldn't be solid lapis - could they?

What was inside the inner row of columns would remain a mystery; Percival had no doubt, though, that what was in there was intended to constitute the temple's Holy of Unholies. He based this assumption on the fact that the spaces between the columns were solid curtains of Oracle Smoke, so dense that it was cold on the eyes to look upon. Percival had at first been skeptical about reports of the Black Smoke being 'burning cold' and 'like liquid ice'; but a single glance in the direction of the smoke curtain sliced into his eyes like a winter wind. Pulling his lighter from his breast pocket, he flicked up a flame, which stood up straight and tall; there was no breeze in the chamber. The smoke appeared to issue from somewhere in the floor between the columns, and travelled straight up into the ceiling, where he imagined it must vanish into some series of purpose-built vents. He had no doubt, though, that the moment he approached the Smoke, it would stop rising quite so vertically and come out to meet and greet him.

It was, in fact, some moments before he noticed the most interesting fact about the room, which was that there was a human figure standing quietly next to the Smoke curtain, watching him.

How did he get in here? I've been all the way round the room. There's only one way in.

Isn't there?

It was not standing in a combat-ready crouch, frightened, agitated, ready to fight or flee. It was sullenly erect and relaxed, staring him down like an equal. It wore no armour, and appeared to carry no weapon, unlike any Enemy footsoldier Percival had so far seen.

"Necandum est. Interficendum est."

But by far the most disturbing thing about the creature was the pattern of little cruciform weals leopard-spotting it from the buttocks to the shoulders; so regular as to be almost like ritual scarring. Certainly, these had been deliberately inflicted. Unfortunately, Percival was also almost certain he knew who had done the inflicting.

"Non dolere potest." These words were spat out by lips he had thought capable only of babbling like an ape. Had the early European explorers thought the same of the Australian aborigines?

"Non humanus est."

Sweet holy Jesus, he's their leader.

The City captured their bastard general and I set him free. After showing him all our most secret military schemes in gorgeous lavish detail. Allowing him to formulate counter-strategies. To arrange the slaughter of prisoners, the sprinkling of the promenade with their good red blood. A field of red the size of a baseball field, in which the Enemy leader knew from personal experience he could easily locate a single chocolate eclair which Loquax and his arrow-riddled comrades might miss. Percival remembered how the red dye used by his simple-makers had been the easiest of the three to produce; the Citizens had used the same method to make it as the Enemy had, and it had come from the same source. He remembered particularly uncomfortably how his soldiers had revelled in holding struggling prisoners over the mixing buckets and slitting their throats whilst Percival's own pet Enemy was made to watch and learn. As learn he evidently had.

The creature grinned a row of huge teeth at Percival. Percival smiled back. Neither smile was friendly.

"Quam diu hortatus es", mimicked the prisoner. "Homo qui non adest est."

"Moriturum", said Percival, "te saluto."

But somehow, he knew what would happen when he raised the pistol to his eye, lined up on all the ironmongery in the centre of the thing's chest, and pulled the trigger. The action chinked like a pocketful of loose change, and the object of Percival's affections was still obnoxiously alive. Its smile grew wider. Percival shrugged, unloaded the M16 from over his shoulder, cocked it, and began to raise it to a shooting stance.

The creature smiled again, and stepped back into the Smoke curtain, as easily as a crocodile slithering into water.

Evidently this was how the Enemy general had managed to sneak in here unnoticed. But how could he live in the stuff? Even the Citizens avoided it. If I stepped in there, I'd come out a cannibal, a homicide, a drug addict and a Daily Mail reader. Condemned to live out my life like a jaded actor playing out a script he already knows by heart.

Somehow it was this last possibility that frightened him most. Lose your freedom to choose, and lose your soul.

What do I do now? I can’t see to shoot.

As if mocking him, a grey sliver of bone quivered past his ear and shattered on the cuneiform carved into the lapis, flung with enough force to erase an entire sentence. Percival’s opponent had a good spatial memory.

So did Percival. He took aim at the point where the sliver had been flung out of the Smoke and fired. He saw movement to his left, spun and fired again, just in time to see a human head duck back into the murk. His shot erased a whole paragraph on the other side of the room. Prudently, he took several steps backward. A bone shard flew past his eyes again, editing the lapis. Splinters of semi-precious stone stung his forehead.

“Diabolus est”, spat the dark.

A head ducked back into the Smoke at another location; he spun and fired again, this time remembering to aim not at the head, but at what was behind it. Unfortunately his opponent had remembered this time to shield his body with a pillar. Percival’s shots ate into the pillar, but almost certainly killed nothing.

“Homo qui non adest est”, echoed the voice from the Smoke in glee.

Percival took two steps to the side this time, still keeping a discreet distance between himself and the Smoke curtain. A further bone splinter flew out of the black at him; this time he was forced to dodge it, losing his balance in the process. A head popped out of the Smoke arrogantly, right in front of him, grinned when it saw his rifle was not up and ready, and disappeared back into the interface.

I don’t get this. I keep moving. How can he tell where I am so easily?

Hang on. Every time he flings another dart, his head pops up just afterward.

He’s prescient. He’s an Oracle Smoke addict, and he’s using the side-effects of the drug on me. Bastard! I thought they weren’t allowed to do that. A bone javelin flickered past his ear; he took no action, but waited for the head to pop up, then shot at it, just too late.

“That was cheating, Loquax”, said the voice from the Smoke reproachfully.

But he isn’t cheating. He’s missing me, every time. Just missing me doesn’t break the laws of causality...

...okay, maybe it bends them a little. He’s not going to kill me, even though he knows exactly where I am, because he knows he doesn’t kill me. But he isn’t above grazing my cheek with a dart to let me know he could kill me if it weren’t for all these pesky laws of physics.

But if he knows he doesn’t kill me....

Eventually, I do take him down. All I have to do is keep my nerve, and STOP SHOOTING ON BURST-FIRE. I wonder how much ammunition I've wasted already? A good soldier is supposed to keep a shot count in the back of his head.

The face peek-a-booed out of the Smoke again. This time he was ready. The firing pin, however, bit down on air.

Ah. I've wasted that much ammunition.

"Bravo, Loquax!" said the creature in a plummy Home Counties accent. "Well done!"

Percival felt his teeth grind together.

I know what you're trying to do - trying to draw me closer in. Make me one of you, just as crazy as you and the Citizens and Lady Penelope.

I'll come close enough to kill you, and no further.

Reaching into a battledress pocket, he slid out the KCB-70, and clicked it into position on his gun muzzle. He had to duck in the process of doing so, as another trio of darts was flung at him with the precision of a circus knife thrower. He ducked with the agility of a knife thrower’s Beautiful Assistant. Keeping to the script.

Now, let's see whether you've ever seen a bayonet before.

A face popped out of the Smoke. Percival jabbed with the bayonet and lopped the bridge of its nose off. It yowled, despite the fact that it had almost certainly known it was going to lose a nose in advance.

The Smoke swirled; the face resurfaced at a different location. Percival whirled the gun round and caught it in the remnants of its face with the butt.

This is getting easier. I'm reacting to its pattern, is what I'm doing. Uh, whatever pattern that is, that is. Must be doing it subconsciously. Oh yes, I'm far more clever than I think.

The face twined round a pillar. Percival nearly took its eye out with the bayonet, laying its cheek open. It was difficult to see how heavily it was bleeding. It might be just pretending to bleed.

I have the better of it now. I am going to kill it. I am going to crucify it.

Then the entire Enemy stepped out of the Smoke directly in front of him, so slowly that he did not even bother to jab it with the bayonet as it could not possibly present a threat, arms crossed like an entombed Egyptian pharaoh, holding two bone javelins. And grinning, through the blood that was now running down it, blood the same colour as its own flesh, like a melting wax candle. On the creature's cheek was a big, welling droplet trembling to break free of its face and fall, and Percival knew exactly where it would fall on the flagstoned floor, as if the tiles were Cartesian coordinates.

Oh dear.

"You are going to attempt to hit me in the right shoulder", said Percival. "But your javelin shaft will break on the pillar behind me. In attempting to ward the blow off, I will fail signally to do so, but will catch you on the way back and sever a major artery in your left arm. Then you will attempt to ward off a stab to your right side. You will lose your balance, possibly weakened by sudden loss of blood, and fall over, though my blow will miss in the dark in any case. However, I will then strike in a third time - and, I am afraid to say, a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh time - which will kill you."

The creature grinned at Percival like a cathedral gargoyle.

"But there is something missing. Something I can't see. Can you help me out? It's hazy."

The thing put up both of its javelins - pathetic weapons against a razor-edged bayonet - and stepped back smiling into the Smoke.

"Thank you", said Percival.

"This one, in case there is any doubt", said the creature, "is for Loquax."

"This one, in case there is any doubt", said Percival, "is for Loquax."

He stepped forward into the black. It was like jumping into cold water, without the resistance cold water would offer. It moved and swirled about him like water would, but his limbs moved as swiftly as they would have done in air. He breathed easily, despite knowing in his heart of hearts that what he was breathing was no longer entirely oxygen/nitrogen. The cold seemed to worm its way into every crease and wrinkle on him - into his nostrils and his ears, caressing every hair on his head, threading its way up his urethra like mercury rising in a thermometer, numbing his flesh exactly like novocaine spreading from a dental injection, even down to the euphoria that novocaine would bring.

He played the part. He felt the bone splinter, felt the bayonet bite down into flesh. He stabbed hard, several times, killing the Enemy quickly rather than leaving it to bleed to death slowly full of puncture wounds as he might have done had it been a friend. His final thrust pushed the creature back out of the other side of the Smoke and the ring of columns, and he collapsed onto one arm, one side of his body warm with someone else's blood, the other cold with Smoke condensing black on his battledress in living droplets.

"Gratias te ago", said the creature, and died.

Day Thirteen

The Smoke has me now. It has probably had me for a long time.

He backed up against a passage from the Avesta, annotating a paragraph in red. But now, I see it all. Now it's all painted on my brain in glorious technicolour.

He staggered out of the chamber, into galleries through which his own troops were rampaging, oblivious to the carnage going on around him. His troops had discovered the Enemy women and children, and were busy ensuring the children would never become adults and breed with the women. They were quite inventive in their means of ensuring this.

I can't stop them, because I don't. I walk out of here, and stumble to the edge of the drop, and look down.

And the drop looks back.

And I know who it is, what it is that is way down there, hiding from mankind in the darkness but known to everyone in their nightmares. I know the purpose of the walls around me. I know where a bat will fall to if it flits out of Hell and flies seven days downwards. I know what is at the bottom of all things, because I've been there. And that thought terrifies me, because the fact that I know I've been there means that I'll have to go there.

Ah well. A journey of nine worlds starts with but a single step.

He took his single step, realizing only as he did so that he was actually standing on the carved pavement outside the Temple, looking down into at least a mile of air. It had not been a dream or memory, but real. And only the three pairs of Citizen arms that snaked about his waist, neck and shoulders stopped him travelling downwards to his doom.

But I knew they stopped me. You hear me? I knew it all along! I, who have discovered the Secret of Life Itself? YOU CALL ME MAD?

They were dragging him back now, away from the precipice, businesslike as mental nurses, having probably seen the effects of immersion in Oracle Smoke a thousand times before. He felt them walk his legs across the stepping stones at the entrance to the Temple, moving him as far away from the edge as possible.

But I can still see it. I can still hear it. I still know what it meant, what they meant, when they made this place.

"ALL OF YOU!" he yelled. "ALL OF YOU, YOU ARE ALL SHEEP STARING ACROSS A CATTLE GRID AT THE GREEN PASTURE!"

They were pushing him towards a wagon now, a wagon equipped with restraining straps for the wrists and ankles. Of course, it would make sense that they would have a wagon ready.

Above him, the world burned. He had no idea whether it was really burning now, or whether it would only be burning in the future. The laser speck of sky at the Abyss’s mouth still glowed as if someone had set fire to the earth. Someone had to sooner or later, obviously. All those bombers and rockets and submarines all dressed up with nowhere to nuke -

Either way, now or later, it would happen. The bombs would fall, the rockets would rise, the world would burn. He saw Vzeng Na’s poor filing down into the dark, taking cover before they heard the two minute warning. He saw vehicles, buildings, people swept into the Abyss like kitchen waste, an entire metropolis falling together in the dark. He saw Citizens wiped from the cliffs by falling rubble that impacted with the force of meteors. He saw nights a week, a year, a thousand years hence, where the mouth of the Abyss on high glowed like a green galaxy with tiny patches of breathable death that outglistered the stars.

If the pit really went down forever, an enterprising faller ought to be able to die a natural death in free fall, living a happy and fulfilled life in a constantly accelerating environment, maybe crossing occasionally to the next falling building to forage for a tumbling tin of beans, or to kill and eat his plummeting neighbour. He might, mind you, get careless and become trapped in the air between the buildings, unable either to cross or to get back, dying of hunger and thirst within ten feet of safety.

But all this was the merest fancy, of course. Any falling thing would be bound to hit the side of the shaft eventually, with a detonation fit to be heard from Heaven.

The cart was going upward now, out of the gates of the Enemy city, as his mental nurses fastened the leather straps tight on his wrists and ankles. His head lolled over the drop, and the cartwheels bounced and wobbled, but it was all right, because he knew he did not fall.

Up above, the City also burned, with candles, torches and halogen lanterns that had been missing from his army’s inventory. It was still dimmer than a town blacked out for aerial bombardment on the dark side of Pluto, but by Abysmal standards, it was a veritable Piccadilly Circus. Her Infernal Majesty was welcoming her heroes home.

And now, inevitably, the barriers along South East Street no longer existed. Access to the great southeastern tower was open to all, and everyone who was anyone was going there. Women, children and warriors thronged the streets, making passage difficult for Percival's triumphal tumbril, as it was impossible for onlookers to hang out of overlooking windows in the City, and everyone had to be on either the streets or the rooftops. Seeming to find no contradiction in the fact that their general and saviour was tied raving to a wagon, Citizens rushed out of the crowd to touch Percival like lepers round a saint. Coloured streamers had been made for the occasion. They were all blue. Percival found this last detail so amusing that he began laughing with the crowd, and did not stop laughing till the tumbril drew him up alongside the tower that perched on the southeasternmost corner of all that was not vertical. The boards had been stripped from the second tower that grew out of the side of the first, revealing what had been hidden within it. But Percival did not need to look; he knew already. He was still cackling to himself as they cut the bonds and dragged him from the wagon, up steps to a romanesque arch at the tower's entrance, where She was waiting.

She had changed her coiffure specially for the occasion. Her hair hung above her, wound onto wood and steel laths like candyfloss. Underneath it, her face hung as if decapitated and suspended, stark white with lead foundation against a jet black neck and body which Percival suspected was painted rather than dressed. In one hand she held a bundle of sticks wound around an axe too rusty to be used for anything other than spreading hepatitis. In the other, she held something that glittered and gleamed and sparkled, inset with other things that also glittered and gleamed and sparkled. Five huge rubies were hammered into the gold at all four points of it, and also into the left hand side of the shaft, signifying the five wounds of Christ. Smaller rubies wept from the larger ones like drops of Christ's blood leaking from His heart, sapphires trickled down the shaft like His tears, and tiny pearls were inset into the base of it like His divine toe-jam.

After six hundred years, the altar cross of St. Justinian's Cathedral in Na still shone bright down in the dark. And he knew how it had come to be here, in the Queen's keeping, how it had fallen, how it had risen,

"Kane gave you that", said Percival. "As a bribe for safe passage. And Vladimir gave it to Kane."

Her Majesty nodded. "General Percival, you are going on a little journey."

"It's a beauty", he giggled, ignoring the gilded cross and looking up at what was inside the tower. "Where did you find it?"

"The Totalitarian Complex upstairs. They were making many of them. We originally had several. We lost some in tests and accidents."

Percival nodded. "You knew the tests would fail, but you had to run them anyway, just for the look of the thing."

She nodded. "We nearly burned down the City several times. You have no idea how dangerous the propellant is. Luckily the payloads were kept separate at the factory."

He looked the structure inside the tower up and down curiously. "You've added a cockpit."

"We did the best we could. The original warhead weighed a thousand kilos, so there was ample room for a human being, however fat and unwell, once it was removed."

"Where did you get the cockpit?"

"From a Bochem Natter. A German last-ditch weapon, essentially a rocket with a whole load of other rockets nailed to it and a very frightened German somewhere in the middle. The seat faces downwards, I'm afraid. You'll be hanging in your harness all the way. We thought it discourteous not to show you where you were going."

They were bundling him up toward the cockpit now, allowing him a chance to look inside. "Aha, there aren't any controls inside, I see."

"There don't need to be. The guidance systems were designed to operate on radar reflections from the walls. As soon as you drift up close to a cliff, the fins tilt and pull you back. Most ingenious. The radar is from a Messerschmitt night fighter. It doesn't have to be too powerful - it only needs to see for a few yards. We had a gaggle of captured German scientists working on these things for quite a while. It's amazing what feats of ingenuity the human mind is capable of once it's been shown its teammates being eaten alive."

The gantry - the wooden gantry - around the thing was decked with azure streamers. Onlookers were clustered around the thing, many so close that they were almost certain to be burnt up in the blast. Didn't they know that? Maybe they thought it a glorious death.

Not bothering to fight back, not sure he still possessed a soul to save, Percival allowed himself to be carried along the gantry toward the black and white elongated ogive of a V-2 rocket, most powerful of Hitler's Vergeltungswaffen. He had thought all such things had been stored in Germany and occupied Holland, and captured by the Allies after the opening of the Second Front. But evidently some had been constructed in the East as well. With a range of nearly two hundred miles and a typical trajectory that took it almost to the edge of space, the V-2 had carried enough amatol explosive to level an entire tenement block wherever it came down again. You never hear the one that hits you, his great-grandparents had said. That was even truer of V-2's than it was of bullets, as although both were supersonic, you had an even chance of surviving being shot with a rifle. But a V-2 would kill you, and the man in the house next to you, and the man in the street behind him.

But this V-2 was slightly different to the average Vengeance Weapon. First of all, it possessed a tiny, rudimentary cockpit just behind the nose. And secondly, that nose was not pointing in the direction of the Edge of Space, but straight down, further into the Abyss.

Snickering and guffawing, he was manhandled into the cockpit chair, two pairs of hands holding him up while another buckled a leather harness round his chest and stomach, tightening it until he was suspended in space, face down, bum up, like a bondage victim. Dials in front of his face said 'METER', 'STUNDENKILOMETER', and 'VOLT'. He wondered whether they would register anything in flight. There was even an artificial horizon, which spun hopelessly confused in its housing.

“You are going to fire a manned rocket straight down into the ground”, said Percival with glee.

“Not the ground”, corrected Her Majesty, her retinue crowding around her, supporting her hair and clothing. She bent over the gantry edge, looking down into the black. “It goes down a long, long way - some say forever. We think, however, just a long, long way. The ancient Greeks experimented with homing pigeons, did I ever tell you that? They weighted the birds with ice, so that they were forced to fly downward, but would be able to return home once their payloads had melted. Some birds took as long as a week to return.”

“’He stayed yet another seven days’”, parroted Percival, “’and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark”.

“I hardly think they returned with olive branches in their beaks”, said Her Majesty. “Many had lost feathers. Some were injured. But none of them had feathers that had been singed by boiling lava. A pigeon, dear General, is a very swift-flying bird, capable of covering hundreds of miles in a day. Any bird flying even one day down from here should have reached the edge of the Earth’s mantle by that time. If the Abyss truly does go down all the way, from here, even we should be able to see the rocks of the Earth’s core glowing.”

“The deduction from which is obvious.”

The Queen nodded. “This deep down in the Abyss, we are not on Earth any longer.” She stroked his hair gently. “And you know why, because I have sent you to the bottom of the Abyss and back; but you are not going to tell me.”

“I am never going to tell you”, said Percival, his face freezing in mid-laugh into a stare, “because you have sent me to the bottom of the Abyss. Are about to, rather.”

“But I knew you would survive.”

“You also knew the test subjects you sent down in previous rockets wouldn’t.”

“So did they. We constructed the rocket to take you to pit bottom, because we knew that would be the method that eventually succeeded. Many others have tried to explore the Abyss by flight, and failed. The Turkish beys sent captive Na Christians down the pit on leather wings as birdmen, though I think this may have been more entertainment rather than serious scientific research. Napoléon even sent down a military volunteer in a Montgolfière. Just be so good as to tell me one thing, Percival - was it worth sending you? Will it be worth all this time, and all these lives?”

Percival thought about this briefly, and nodded.

The Queen nodded back and withdrew back down the gantry, nodding to the naked ground crew swarming all over the V-2 frame to commence ignition.

Percival craned his neck to look up at the vast bulk of the rocket above him. Barefoot electricians were connecting ancient manual chargers to the rocketship’s electrical systems. Children were dashing round the upward-pointed tail, waving lighted torches round the engines.

“Burning off unignited fuel”, explained Her Majesty proudly.

He heard a voice beginning a quiet countdown in Latin. Up above, workers were scuttling from the gantry.

“Novem - octo - septem -“

Some workers evidently had to remain, however, sitting silent at their posts, hefting massive, square -bladed cleavers made from steel votive tablets shaved thin as paper. Without being told, he guessed what their purpose was. This launch wasn’t a nice convenient lift upward against gravity. Someone would need to stand on the gantry and sever the leather straps that held the V-2 suspended in its frame. Someone who was prepared to be burnt to death in an instant when the rocket motor fired.

“Quattuor - tres - duo - unus -“

The frame of the cockpit began to shake. Percival forgot the fate of his ground crew, however horrible it might be, and stared fixedly downward. Then the rocket tore free of its moorings and punched into the earth like a piledriver.

***

He had hoped he might black out. No such luck.

The push of the wholly inadequate seat in his back was like being hit by a leather-upholstered rhinoceros. His neck whipped backward and attempted to squirm free of his shoulders. Only after several seconds of keeping his eyes tight shut to stop the eyeballs from escaping could he struggle his gaze back forwards.

The Abyss thundered towards him. So quickly that he had only as much time to note the details on its walls as a bullet has to examine the rifling on the gunbarrel it’s fired out of. Rock walls with which the lightest brush would kill hurtle past, dimly illuminated by the flare of his own engines, a moving, blurred grey halo of abyssite.

But there were details in the blurring - tantalizing details, suggestive of shape and form, yet gone in an instant. For the first two or three seconds, he was surrounded by ruby rings of staring, binary eyes - evidence that a mass migration upwards into the country of the weaker City people truly was in progress. Whatever unseen force or creature was pushing the devil-people upwards, however, it was not giving out enough light to be seen.

Sometimes, he sailed past other lights both dim and brilliant, which might have been the photophores of some bioluminescent deep-earth organism, or might have been the cities of some proud subterranean civilization, spanning more land than a man could climb in a lifetime, and passed in the blink of an eye. Sometimes the rocketship shuddered through great darknesses, bubbles in the earth, where no cavern wall came close enough for the naked eye to see it. Most of the time, however, the tunnel walls were visible by the brief bright flare of his own exhaust, an onrushing ring of instantly vanishing terrain which provided no clue whatsoever as to what flat wall of granite his rocket might be speeding towards, pock-marked with the cratered remains of previous rockets -

Then he noticed that the cockpit was beginning to steam around him.

This was not an altogether unexpected phenomenon, as he must already be travelling faster than the speed of sound. Didn’t the outer shells of American rocketplanes glow red hot when they flew at top speed? And they were made of advanced things like carbon fibre and titanium - and this was, for all its technical sophistication, only a very old aluminium-hulled ballistic missile, designed without thought for carrying human cargo. It would break apart in flight, or cook him like human stew in a long thin cauldron. Or possibly even, being aluminium, melt around him.

It went suddenly, horribly dark. Not only were the exhaust lights on all sides of him no longer shining off the Abyss walls, the instrument lights were also dead. The only light now came from the fizzing and sparking of ancient electrical connectors shorting out inside the cabin. Something that sounded ominously like glass crazing under pressure travelled across the dark, out of his left ear into his right.

Then the glass did more than craze, and the slipstream hammered in after it like a piledriver, and he heard inch-thick steel struts around him squeal like spitted piglets, and the dark was full of, and lit by, red hot iron tumbling past a dimly-seen Abyss wall moving too quickly for him to be capable of worrying about it, like a television screen refresh, or a rotor blade. He briefly wondered whether, miraculously, the supersonic mechanics of the slipstream, travelling at the speed it was, would push a pressure wave before it and prevent him from hitting the walls until he slowed to a relatively dawdling two hundred miles an hour, which he seemed to recall was the terminal velocity of the human body. Then he might have been able to risk opening a parachute. If he’d had one.

Then the V-2’s own compression wave hit him from behind like a subway train. Since breaking the sound barrier on its way down, the rocket must have been trailing a membrane of slightly subsonic compressed air in its wake. Now, however, the fragments of V-2 had slowed down, while the wave front had not. It rolled him in a surf of red hot metal fragments, like a boogie boarder tumbled in a pipeline and thrown onto a gravel beach. As if he had fallen underwater, he felt all sound drain out of the world. He also felt his own skin burning.

The last thing he remembered was falling towards a wall of water big enough to drown mankind.

Part Four

1: Beachcombing

He was cold and wet, and somebody was tugging off his clothes. Also, he was inhaling water.

Spluttering, he pulled himself upright. He was sitting down, legs outstretched, waist-deep in ice water.

“Totis inferis, we got ourselves a live one.”

The voice was speaking Latin, but a more inflected, cultured Latin than the worm-Latin of the City. Since the shadowy figure at his left elbow had said we, he turned and saw another, larger figure to his right. He could see nothing else but a vast, spangled emptiness arching high above, which surely could not be a sky.

He was on a shoreline. A shoreline of smooth, roughly oval rocks big as Australian stromatolites, curiously regular in size, almost as big as a man’s head -

“Didn’t you see the change come on him? It was as bright as lightning -“

“I was rubbing my eyes. You let me try and tug the trews off someone who was marked to live? Are you trying to kill me, Kane?”

“No-one’d be happier than you if I could, and you know it, Ahasuere.”

“They’re coming for us. You know they are. He said they are. They’ll set us free. Free to die. Free to live, like men.”

Percival’s hands tried to push him upright, but found only slime, as if he were becalmed in the mouth of some great cold fish. His left hand found what appeared to be a firm purchase, and came out of the water as a femur.

A human femur.

“He makes ‘em”, said the one who had been called Kane. “Well, probably not makes ‘em - just makes sure everything else as falls in Cocytus gets broke down, excepting bones. He likes bones. No idea why. Don’t think he’s got none hisself, maybe.”

Percival stared hard into the dark. The rocks on the shoreline stared back at him, out of hollow cavities where eyes had once been. Almost as big as a man’s head.

He started and began struggling to his feet.

“Heh! Heh!” commented Kane. “Always the way with new bugs, the jumpy screamy thing, once they realize what they’re lounging around on. Though you scream less than most, I must say. Odd old jalopy you came down in. They really do go for making machines out of the shiny stuff up top nowadays, eh? We’ve seen one or two like it, but you’re the first one he’s marked out to live.”

“That’s the he who said they were coming?” said Percival.

“No”, said the one called Ahasuerus, shifting about nervously. “That was a different he.”

Then Percival turned around, looked up again, and stood still as if he had been impaled to the spot.

"Been waiting for you to do that", said Kane appreciatively.

"They always does", said Ahasuerus.

"It's..." said Percival.

"Big", finished Ahasuerus.

"Though I think the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus is bigger", said Kane critically.

"Not any more", said Percival.

It was...it was big. Unthinkably so, as much because nothing that shape and that size had ever presented itself to him as for any other reason.

And it certainly should not have been hanging right over his head.

It looked more like a marine organism than a made thing. Three great illuminated arms spread out from its main body, merging like graceful flying cathedral buttresses (or starfish feet, or cephalopod tentacles) with the Abyss walls. A single majestic spire soared upward at the junction of the arms, like a minaret or a bishop's mitre or the body of a giant squid; and, like the body of a giant calamary cruising in waters black as night and thick as lead, it was alive with tiny points of light. White light. Blue light. Smokeless, sparkless. Fluorescent, technological light.

Beneath the junction of the arms, a second, smaller spire jutted downward like a squid's beak. Percival could see tiny human figures at the tip of the spire, standing on a flimsy wooden platform, busying themselves with a contraption of wire and fabric. What they were actually doing was anyone's guess. The spire, and the huger spire on top of it, and the buttresses, and the lights and the little human beings were all poised dizzily and directly overhead.

"The Bridge", said Kane. "He lives there."

"He", said Percival, "has an electrical generator. Changing the subject, meanwhile, if I stay in this water any longer, my fingers are going to drop off through frostbite.”

“Ah, they’ll grow back”, said Kane airily. “Mine always do.”

Both of the men, despite the coldness of the water, seemed to be wearing nothing on their feet.

“Helps you grub about for bits on the bottom with your toes”, winked Ahasuerus, seeing Percival’s stunned expression. “Bits of metal feel different to normal bottomy stuff.”

“Found a bit of wing here”, exclaimed Kane. He held up a riveted metal panel, crumpled and ripped as a piece of tissue paper.

“Ah, guidance, I think”, said Percival. “Not strictly a wing as such.”

“Ow!” Kane snatched away his fingers and sucked them. “This end’s still hot.”

“Probably a steel rivet. Different metal, different specific heat capacity.”

“Don’t you worry about him”, chuckled Ahasuerus. “They still hadn’t discovered iron when he was a lad, never mind steel. Bronze was still coming in, wasn’t it, Kane?”

“You watch it.” Kane lurched about in the shallows. “Got the venturi!”

“No idea why”, said Ahasuerus, rooting closer to the shore, “why the thing on the back of the dingus is called a word that means ‘about to arrive’. Surely it should be on the front.”

“Tain’t the venturi”, said Kane, disappointed. “Just another bloody Roman infantry helmet.”

“In your face, old timer! I got a German hand grenade!” It was, indeed, a Second World War Steilhandgranate, so time-worn that it was only a lump of rust mated to a lump of driftwood. Ahasuerus banged it against the side of his head, as if willing it to go off. Percival backed away gingerly, not wishing to offend, but equally unwilling to explode.

“Them Germans nearly stuck the Romans”, reflected Ahasuerus wistfully.

“It was Attila did for em in the end, though”, said Kane. “And though he was a Hun, he weren’t no German.”

“And Fritigern”, said Ahasuerus, stuffing the grenade into a filthy linen sack hairy with mildew. “Lived near here, too, up top, did Fritigern. Met him once. Stuffed the Romans at Adrianople. And he was a German. Well, a Vizzygoth.”

Percival stared into Kane’s face. Eyes glittered in it, dimly reflecting the spangly light above.

“That isn’t a sky up there, is it?” said Percival.

Kane laughed. It sounded like someone playing a church organ full of custard. “No, it ain’t no sky, young un. It’s the stony outer casing of your new universe. You ain’t going nowhere.” Having laughed, he coughed violently. This reassured Percival that he was talking to a human being. Demons and devils were not on record as being prone to allergic reactions, unless the air in Hell were full of holy water draining from a million upstairs fonts.

“He marked him out for life”, cautioned Ahasuerus.

“He marked me out for life”, harrumphed Kane. “And you. And ain’t life been a breeze ever since.”

“I was only making a point, is all”, complained Ahasuerus. His face was older than Kane’s; both looked Middle Eastern, even Semitic. Kane’s face, though, was handsome, square-jawed, with an impressive array of gleaming teeth, while Ahasuerus’s was that of an old man, as worn and pitted as a limestone pavement.

“You want an ass’s jawbone in the kisser, oldster?” said Kane, picking up a dripping bone - actually a sacrum, therefore technically an ass-bone - threateningly. “That’d be ironic, that would, though technically Samson rather than me.”

“Ha! You kill me dead and I’ll be impressed. And it’s you who’s the old man, you fraud. I wish I’d thought to kill my brother while I was still a good looker.”

“I didn’t kill my brother. That’s a legend.”

“Heh! Heh! Heh! And I didn’t kill Christ..."

"You bloody did. Take that back."

"...mind you, that isn’t strictly in my legend." Ahasuerus turned to Percival to explained further. "Helped hold his arms while the legionaries pounded in them nails, then hammered the nails over flat to the wood at the back to hold ‘em firm...Come on then, kill me, you always do, you big bully.”

“I’ll tap you just hard enough to make you take a hundred days to die. A few days’ screaming’ll oil your whining muscles.”

Ahasuerus growled like an animal and leapt on Kane. The two wrestled, falling over and over in the surf that lapped at the beach of skulls. Brittle old crania crackled underneath them like a carpet of eggshells. Percival, disregarded, disregarded them back, rose to shaky feet and picked his way up the shoreline with care.

There were lights down here as well - lights too white and bright to be made by burning tallow, a line of flickering white motes, spaced out at regular intervals along the strand. As he approached, he could see they were streetlamps, Victorian wrought-iron lanterns, set into the bony gravel on concrete pillars. But the light inside them was not made by burning gas. Neither was there any bulb or filament that might suggest an electrical power source.

Instead, in the centre of an octagonal glass lantern, a single, clearly defined, clearly identifiable fairy, complete with silken wings, gossamer mini-skirt and a fairy wand topped with a five-pointed star, burned with a white fire. Burned, but was not consumed, her dear little lips twisted in an ultrasonic fairy scream. Batting up against the glass like a moth against an insectocutor, or a fly trying to butt its way through a windowpane.

Have I died, and am I in Hell?

“It’s an illusion, lad”, said Kane, coming up behind him unexpectedly and looking at the imp in the glass with a pitying expression. “Leastways, I hope it is. He makes ‘em. It amuses him.”

Ahasuerus, sopping wet, trailed after Kane, who was equally wet, but also slightly bruised. Ahasuerus, meanwhile, was entirely unmarked, and Percival could swear an ugly scab that had formerly dominated his forehead was now no longer present. Even the age lines in his face seemed to have softened.

“Bastard, you killed me once too often. He will hear of this.”

“He knows already, or you wouldn’t be up and walking again. Shut your noise.”

They were walking along the line of lanterns, towards a set of buildings which could have come from any place or time. Big important buildings, Percival reflected, could afford to be distinctive, to be Ionic temples or Toltec step-pyramids or Gothic cathedrals. But for the past Lord alone knew how many thousand years, there had only been so many ways to build a hovel.

Yet even here, there had been pathetic attempts to make each house stand out from its neighbours. The walls, particularly around the doors and windows, were decorated with tattered fragments of civilization - rotted cloth, twisted metal, and even, on occasion, shiny pieces of plastic, which seemed to be accorded positions of special prominence. Possibly, Percival reasoned, if this was just the Abyss at some unimaginable depth, plastic might still be quite a rarity here. One house was tiled entirely in small rectangular tablets of an iridescent metal, lovingly heat-treated to throw back rainbow colours at the burning fairy lanterns.

Titanium votive tablets.

Dear God, I’m still in the Abyss. I’m not in Hell yet.

Unless this is where Hell is.

No. Hell has been proven by multiple independent scientific studies to be in Slough.

At one point the street widened slightly into what could loosely be called a square, though no Saxon cross, village green or war memorial filled its centre. At one end of it, the gravel surged up around the wooden supports of what could not possibly be, but to all intents and purposes was, a gigantic cuckoo clock contained in a half-timbered penthouse. The gingerbread around the penthouse eaves would not have looked out of place in Oberammergau, were it not for the fact that what was carved into it belonged in Tenochtitlan. Bizarrely inappropriate flayed gods, damaged bodies, and grotesque demonesses depicted in the act of giving birth surrounded the structure. As Percival watched, the clock struck the hour. The trapdoor above the clockface opened, and a glittering skull slid out on runners, gnashed its teeth twice, and slid back in.

"He", said Kane with feeling, "built it. If he hadn't we wouldn't know the time of day down here. It's clockwork. It's the job of one of us every day to wind it. Some days the guy on the winding rota forgets to wind it, and we have no time."

“Where are we?” said Percival.

“On the Mole”, said Kane.

“Mole”, said Percival. “As in subterranean burrowing device.”

“No”, said Kane. “Mole as in big fuck-off dam. A mole should be a breakwater, of course, not a dam, but we prefer Mole on account of Mole being more undergroundy, as you rightly pointed out. And this big wet thing you just crawled out of should be called the River Styx, on account of it being what you get cast up on the shores of once you die, but it’s more of a lake, more of a reservoir, so we calls it Cocytus.”

“The water is held in place by a dam”, said Percival.

Kane nodded. “You’re standing on it. Must be all of a hundred yards high, all told. You were lucky you didn’t drop in close to the sluices, or you’d have been sucked under and diced by the wires in the outlets.”

The windows of the town - hardly a town, only two or three long rows of tiny houses - glowed with a soft purple radiance. It was a second or two before Percival realized where he had seen light of that type before.

“UV”, he said. “UV lamps.”

“They’re proving quite popular”, said Kane. “Interesting toys you upworlders keep inventing. A Russian fellow who came down in the 1970’s made the first ones, and they sold like thirteen-year-old virgins. Folks use ‘em to grow plants, real plants, from seeds that flow downhill to us, erm, in human shit, mainly. Tomatoes are a big favourite. You folks sure do seem to shit tomato seed a lot.”

“It’s called pizza”, said Percival absently.

“I have heard of your strange Earth ‘pizza’”, said Kane. “It is a circular bread furnished with olives and tomatoes. One day we hope to create one with our primitive pre-pizza-age technology.” He bent to a window and let his face be bathed in a violet radiance. “Some folks claim it keeps ‘em healthy just to stare into the glow.”

“Ess Ay Dee”, said Percival, without thinking.

Kane was confused. “Esse deus? To be a god?”

“No, SAD. ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’, in my own language. It’s a, ahm, a German language. SAD is a sort of melancholy caused by lack of sunlight. Common in, ah, polar regions where the winter nights are long. People in a place like - ah, wherever this is - would contract it; no sky, and hence no daylight. Doctors have only just started treating it with UV.” He thought a moment. “Staring into a UV light for a long time could cause cancer, mind you.”

"Cancer!", spat Kane, pushing open a door apparently entirely made of welded votive tablets. "Cancer is the least of our worries here."

The door concealed a short flight of steps leading down to a room dimly lit in ultraviolet. UV lamps were the centrepieces to several irregular tables where shadowy figures lounged creakily on bone furniture, nursing thumbnail-sized glasses of what could only be, in glasses that size, pure alcohol.

There was some interest as Kane, Ahasuerus and Percival entered. A man stabbing holes in a table around the template of his fingers with a knife that was clearly only a sharpened shard of votive tablet, looked up abruptly, continuing to stab as he did so, continuing to stare challengingly at Percival.

thunk - thunk - thunk -

Dominating the scene was a huge stone fireplace almost as big as the room was. A coal scuttle made of riveted votive tablets stood on the hearth, and was full of almost every conceivable combustible substance saving coal. Every now and again a grizzled lunatic would get up, caper across the room to the scuttle, and pull out a chunk of thin, twisted metal dripping with an amber liquid, which flared into stinking brilliant life when chucked onto the flames.

Percival sniffed in horror. The smell was one with which he had recently become only too familiar.

"Aluminium and kerosene. He's burning rocket fuel."

Kane nodded. "And part of a rocket."

"The other V-2's. He's burning part of another V-2."

"If you say so. The, the engine in that one, it stopped before it started to break up", said Kane. "And the fuel tanks survived intact."

"Played havoc with my poor old back pulling 'em out of the muck", complained Ahasuerus. "It was the death of me. Twice."

- THUNKthunk. THUNKthunk. THUNKthunk -

"Curious", said Kane, "a metal that burns."

"Does he know", said Percival, "how dangerous that is?"

- thunk THUNK - thunk THUNK - thunk THUNK - thunk THUNK -

"This is our place", said Kane, frowning. "Here we'll be as dangerous as we please. And here", he said, gesturing at the tabletops, "we eat and drink only the fruits of our own labours. Not what he has cooked up for us."

The food on the metal plates on the tables (hammered out from votive tablets) certainly looked man-made, at least insofar as no woman Percival could think of would have admitted to having made it. Percival suspected that dead bat, lichen, and blind cave animals would figure heavily in its ingredients. Its prominent colour, under the UV lights, was grey and purple.

- THUNK thunkthunk THUNK thunk - THUNK thunkthunk THUNK thunk - THUNK thunkthunk THUNK thunk -

Not content merely with endangering the physical integrity of his fingers, the knifeman was now attempting to incorporate a 3-2 rhythm into his stabbing.

"Who's he?" said Percival, settling gingerly into a rickety chair made (as he had suspected) of human long bones, and finding the tabletop to be made of a suspiciously fine tan hide. By he, he did not mean the man with the knife.

"You know who he is", said Kane, grinning as he sat down opposite with Ahasuerus.

Percival looked up at the winged crowned figure which formed the entire lintel and mantlepiece of the fireplace. Its tail was as the tails of scorpions.

"Abaddon", he said.

The name, used in such a cavalier fashion, appeared to arouse the interest of a number of the regulars. Glances were cast in Percival's direction.

"Don't kid yourself you're anyone special", said Kane. "He only saved you like he saved the rest of us. We were all supposed to be special. All supposed to be the next best thing since sliced bread. Weren't we, Ahaz, old buddy?"

"Not speaking to you", muttered Ahasuerus. "Killed me again."

"And he sent us all downstairs, to see how special we all were", said Kane. "Some of us even came back. The others, well, no-one's ever found out where the others went. There is, you see, a downstairs. You are not at the bottom."

"I figured that out for myself, thanks", said Percival. "If there's a mole, a breakwater, a dam, then there's a further down the water would fall to if that dam didn't exist. What is down?"

Kane leaned over and patted Percival on the knee. "Well, if you happen to find out, be sure to come back and tell us, old buddy."

thunk SHICK. thunk SHICK. thunk SHICK SHICK SHICK.

Percival looked across the room. Expertly, with his tongue jammed into the corner of his mouth, the knifeman was stabbing his fingers off. The makeshift blade he was using was not suited to completely severing digits, so a good deal of twisting and chiselling was called for. Finger pieces flew here and there as his right hand moved in a savage blur. Eventually, having reduced not just his fingers but the carpal bones of his hand to a bloody mess, he impaled the blade down through the back of his hand into the tabletop, which was made of a thick, round piece of wood with a central metal boss. Percival wondered if it had once been a Greek hoplite’s shield.

Finally, the knifeman ground his teeth hard together, and it was only after Percival had watched his jaw work back and forth in intense concentration for several seconds, blood seeping from his lips, that he realized the man still had his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth. At length, with a final herculean effort, the man managed to bite off his own tongue, gobble it up in mid-air after it dropped from his mouth, and swallow it, gulping it down with gusto. He winked at Percival in a matey fashion, then turned his attention back to the remains of his hand.

On the table, his hand was glowing.

It was a soft radiance, like torchlight shining through the hand of a child, though it seemed to be coming from inside the flesh. A lesser, gentler aura seemed to hang in the air around it. The glow was brightest around the multiple wounds the knifeman had inflicted. Percival swallowed, feeling his mouth dry. His eyes also itched, and he felt warm all over, and giddy, as if the blood was rushing to his head. Something was happening here that was affecting not just the man’s stricken hand, but everything in the room around it.

Then he noticed that the glow was moving over the hand. Moving towards the fingertips. Where the fingertips should have been -

“A, a, a, a”, said the tongueless knifeman, as if willing the glow on. A second glow was making silhouettes of his teeth inside his mouth.

The hand was intact again. Still nailed to the table. But then, horribly, uncannily, the wedge of steel jammed through the hand into the wound began to rock gently backwards and forwards.

“A, a, a, a, a”, said the knifeman.

The knife began to wiggle in the wound. Then, suddenly, it shot up out of the man’s hand, did a graceful somersault, and buried itself point-first in the ceiling.

The man held up his hand. It was as good as new.

“La, la, la, la, la”, said the knifeman, the glow fading from his mouth. “TralalaLAAAA!”

The knife shivered slowly out of the roof, and dropped. There was a soft
as it was caught by the knifeman again. Its owner did not look up at Percival, or at any other occupant of the taberna. Instead, he turned the knife in his hand, as if considering it. Then, he drew it across his throat in one swift movement, rocked out of control in his chair as blood vomited out of a second mouth in his larynx, then sat up straight again as a line of fire drew across the wound, closing it, leaving nothing but pale, malnourished skin. He drew the knife over his throat again, slumped in his seat again, sat back up again as the wound healed. He drew the knife across a third time, and this time the reaction was so fast that his throat zipped itself up almost as quickly as he was able to unseam it.

He pulled the knife up in front of his face and stared at the blood sadly.

"Yes", said Kane. "We can't even kill ourselves."

"Can't even wound ourselves", said Ahasuerus reproachfully, as if this was a great source of discomfort to him.

Percival stared at the blade of the knife. It appeared sharp and solid. There could have been no trickery.

Then he clicked his fingers and pointed across the room to an elderly man, his face hidden by a beard that had not seen a razor in a century, who was sitting staring glumly at a table full of tiny glasses. "Him. He's been hugging his stomach in pain for the last ten minutes."

Kane shrugged. "That's just Fisher. A Roman legionary serving in Dacia Inferior, I believe; fell into the Abyss after running wounded from a battle. Fisher, you see, was already injured before the change came on him. If I was to walk across the room now and stab Fisher up, the wound would heal. But here's the thing", he continued, his eyes shining with grisly delight, "if I was to walk across the room and stitch up Fisher's wound, the wound would unstitch itself. The wound gives old Fisher no end of pain. He has to drink like, well, a fish. Me and Ahaz here, we was luckier." He put a comradely arm around Ahasuerus, whom Percival was now almost certain he had recently killed.

"Some", muttered Ahasuerus darkly, "Are luckier than others. Some was daft enough to fall down here when they was young enough to spot the edge coming."

Kane laughed, kissed Ahasuerus on the cheek like a beloved uncle, and snapped his fingers at what appeared to be a bartender.

"This is Hell, then", said Percival.

Kane guffawed. "Will you lighten up! Hell, boy, is a thing you folks invented way after my time. Useful thing, I'll grant you, a place of burning torment you go to if you don't do what the king and the rabbi tell you." He spread his arms out wide, as if scaring children. "Wooooo!"

"So, where is this?" said Percival. "Did we base our ideas of Hell on this?"

Kane considered this. "Maybe. Maybe you based your ideas on tales some of us have told. Sometimes he lets us back out on the top floor, as it were, to let off steam. Time off for good behaviour. Still can't kill ourselves, though. His old magic goes with us wherever we are. You may have heard of some of us."

Percival cast a cautious glance around him. "I think I know who I'm supposed to think you are...though I'm not sure I believe it. Fisher, for example. We do have legends of a man called the Fisher King, a man with a wound that would neither heal nor kill." He nodded across the room at the bearded gentleman, who was now snoring flatulently, blowing little flecks of vomit out of his beard.

Kane's eyes bulged. "Fisher, in legends? You're kidding me. Whose legends?"

"Christian ones. In the stories of King Arthur, the Fisher King is the lord of the Grail Castle. Though some people", said Percival, "ah, think that the legend comes from, uh, Mithraism." His voice tailed off.

"You saw the Parsee temple on the way down, then", said Kane. "Beautiful statuary. I've passed it many a time."

"You're telling me", said Percival, "that you can get up to the surface."

"It is not easy. ‘The Gates of Hell are open night and day, smooth the descent and easy is the way...’”

“’...But to return and view the cheerful skies, in this the task and mighty labour lies’, returned Percival. “So you’re telling me it’s more difficult than coming down.”

“Coming down’s easy as falling off a log”, said Kane. “Well...several thousand logs, arranged in series. Going up’s more difficult. The way up is mapped only by the imperfect memories of those who have gone before, and the terrain changes in between attempts at the ascent. You’d think the locals’d leave us alone after all this years, as they’ve figured out over those years they can’t kill us. But they don’t because they’ve also figured out by now that, since we regenerate lost body parts, we’re a constant and infallible source of food. All in all, it takes around a hundred years for a fit man to claw his way back up the rock. And you’ll die a thousand times in the attempt, falling from face to face, being eaten up by hunger, freezing to death or being eaten up over and over again by cannibals. The world you return to will not be the one you came from, either. That pretty girl you wanted to see one last time before you die will be a corpse long rotten in the grave.”

“That’s no problem”, said Percival. “My pretty girl was the one I wanted to see one last time before she died.”

“Well”, said Kane huffily. “That’s as may be. But like as not they won’t even speak your language. God will move among them and confound their speech.” He sighed, and looked deep into his ethyl alcohol. “Happened to me. Again and again and again.”

“What about flying machines? We on the surface can build flying machines now.”

“We know, but he doesn’t like them - not if they fly upwards, at any rate. Reckons they demean the bold striving spirit of pitting yourself against the rock to climb to the surface.”

“So you’ve been back there. More than once.”

“Aye - whenever I simply couldn’t bear cowering down here shivering in the dark any longer. Returned home to the land of my fathers, first of all - everyone does. Was recognized by an old man who’d been a child when I was young, and developed an unfortunate mythology. Came back at intervals, was nailed to crosses, chased across the battlements of Elsinore and rowed across the water to Avalon with depressing frequency.”

“But you kept on coming back.” Percival gestured round the tavern walls. Small mementoes hung around them could only have come from the world above. Cigarette cards, cigarette packets, beer mats, campaign rosettes proclaiming VOTE FOR TAFT IN ’22, photographs of faces almost certainly long since dead. Gold coins from a myriad mints, nailed to the walls like Ahab’s sovereign. Weapons, of great value in so many other places, were here only interesting curios from cinquedeas to Stechkins, loaded automatic firearms hung up to rust like the obligatory farm implements on the walls of pubs in Essex. But as well as firearms, there were flowers - preserved flowers, silk flowers, plastic flowers, covering every wall in a dead dry carpet, with not a single fresh petal among them. Percival saw tulips, roses, Passion flowers, lotus blossoms, and a single colossal sunflower, stapled to the ceiling like an enormous spider.

“Yes. I kept coming back.” It was clear, on seeing Kane’s expression, that this was the hard part. “The Abyss keeps us all on long pieces of elastic. We can never truly leave here. We all find ourselves coming back. He says this is not his fault, that it's all built into the design."

"Is he the one who built this place?"

Kane let out a derisive snort, and stared hard at the corner of the room he always seemed to stare at when mentioning the h word. "He wishes."

Percival thought carefully before saying a thing that might make Kane laugh, then said it anyway. "Then...did God build this place?"

Kane laughed so loud the lights of candles guttered on the wall nearby.

"You", said Percival, pointing at Ahasuerus. "Ahasuerus is one of the names historically given to the Wandering Jew."

Ahasuerus tugged his forelock respectfully. "I thirst for the blood of Christian children, sire."

"And me", said Kane, grinning like a row of stone tablets. "Who do you think I'm supposed to be?"

"I think we both know the answer to that -"

As he spoke, he was cut off by a long, piercing scream.

"I thought", he said, "this wasn't Hell."

"Oh, that's just Prometheus", said Kane. "Pay him no mind."

***

The barman - whom Kane referred to as The Eternal Wandering Barman - brought three miniscule glasses, and filled them with a milky liquid that smelt of chemistry lessons.

"Drink it", said Kane. "We have poor glassware and little control over the distillation process. If you're lucky, it might kill you."

Then came a sound which Percival did not believe possible.

No. I'm going crazy. This really is the last few microseconds of hallucination as my brain is dashed into a gooey pulp on the rock I hit halfway down the Abyss -

Horses? How could a horse get down here?

"I take it from that satisfied smirk", he said to Kane, "that you can hear it too."

"Hear what?" said Kane innocently; and as if by magic, the clip-clopping stopped.

"He's only taking the mick", said Ahasuerus.

"Don't tell me", said Percival. "There's a man out there with two halves of a coconut."

"What's a coconut?" said Ahasuerus.

There was the sound of a door slamming, and a second, more precise , different somehow to the first, though Percival could not quite fathom how.

"A variety of palm", said Percival, "native to the tropics, three tall men in height, growing hairy spherical fruit."

"Don't be daft", grinned Ahasuerus. "How'd one of them get down here?"

The door of the tavern opened, and a crisply-turned-out figure stood at the head of the steps, its every surface neatly ironed and mercilessly starched, presenting a greater contrast to the dispirited grey denizens of the bar than stainless steel did to rust.

"HIS INFERNAL MAJESTY COMMANDS THE PRESENCE OF MR. GAVIN PERCIVAL."

The figure was no taller than a tall man, but Percival knew it was not strictly a man. It stood too stiffly, the brass buttons on its uniform twinkled too brilliantly, and the muck outside seemed hardly to cling to its hooves.

Ah, yes. And it has hooves.

Cloven ones.

There had been no attempt, Percival noted, to put some sort of cloven jackboot on the feet, though the shoes had been shod, with tiny little silver shoes, giving an effect oddly more redolent of Beatrix Potter than the Earl of Hell. The face, if there was a face, was impenetrable inside the shiny silver helmet, though Percival could see his own face reflected in it. His own face looked worried.

He turned to look at Kane and Ahasuerus.

"Do I have a choice?"

Kane shrugged. "He's got ways to make you go, if you try not to."

Percival shrugged and rose to his feet. He felt old.

"Cold getting to you?" said Kane.

He considered pretending otherwise, then nodded.

"Kill yourself", said Kane. "I do it every couple of hours or so. Then his little diabolicules will be forced to rebuild you warm and toasty. Have to drink up enough courage first, mind you." He knocked his drink back and snapped his fist shut around the glass, which splintered. His palm bled briefly, flared with coloured light, and was pristine again. But the glass was still broken. The barman stared at Kane severely.

Percival waved goodbye and walked up the stairs to the outside.

2: An Audience With The Management

The Earl of Hell's coach was black, as befitted his position. It was a four-horse brougham, furnished with the by-now-familiar coat of arms - a winged, crowned thing with the tail of a scorpion rampant - and lanterns held in crystal prisms at each corner. There were no fairy lights this time, the lanterns being, apparently, fuelled by a passable facsimile of oil. He could even smell it burning. The horses pulling the coach were horses. Percival had half expected wolves or prehistoric lizards. He was becoming too cold and tired to be frightened.

There was a road leading up out of the little bone-gravel courtyard outside the tavern - a road that, as soon as it left the grubby environs of the village, ceased to be constructed of splintered skull fragments and started being made of masonry. A huge sweeping shelf of precision-cut blocks carried the road upwards, marching up a cliff that should have been vertical and turning it into a gentle walk. Mining and moving the stone alone would have taken the entire population of Penelope Simpson's city a hundred years. And the colour of the stone, in the white fairy fire lanterns, was not the familiar oiled-engine black, but a rich, granular ochre.

Not Abyssite.

The road spiralled upwards in and out of sight, looping around colossal pillars of stone large enough to support cities, until it travelled up to the foothills of the colossal pile of masonry that made up the Bridge. He could even see a tiny toy carriage very like his own, travelling up through a miniscule guarded archway up into one of the colossal buttresses...

The diabolic footman mounted the front of the coach - with difficulty due to his tail, which was provided for in the cut of his breeches - and instructed the horses to walk on, doubtless in the ancient abhorred Aklo language of sleeping R'lyeh. The coach turned a perfect pirouette in the street outside the Eternal Wandering Inn of the Damned, and set off in an uphill direction. Percival settled into a surprisingly pleasant velvet seat embroidered with winged crowned horrors of the nether pit, and drifted off to sleep.

***

When he awoke, gargoyles were passing grinning over his head, just visible through the side window. The gargoyles were made of stone. Percival watched them warily in case they came to life without warning, but they continued to stare sightless out of the keystones of the arches they were set into.

The arches rose over a paved road which travelled uphill at a steep angle - the coachman was having to urge the horses on with harsh language and the whip.Gates were set into the archways, which were being held open by servants of the same species as the coachman, standing to attention, their heads downcast in respect. Road, archways, and the walls on either side alike were built of the same massive brown blocks, exquisitely cut to Inca standards. Percival could see not a dribble of mortar anywhere.

Above him, the central spire of the Bridge, which could have housed the goldsmiths of the Ponte Vecchio and Rialto and the tanners of old London Bridge combined, soarded like a stone skyrocket, and was replaced by vaulted ceilings as he passed inside it, into a tunnel lit by the electric light he'd suspected from below.

And then the coach swept into a wide, circular courtyard lit impossibly by the perfect blue of a summer sky.

The coach rumbled to a halt. Crickets and cicadas buzzed. There was a smell of summer in the air. The footman opened the door of the coach and stood respectfully waiting for Percival to exit. Not wishing to offend, he did so. His sodden boots squelched on a Classical mosaic floor.

Outside, the walls were masked by an ionic colonnade, with ivy twined round its columns. A fountain tinkled pleasantly. The sky overhead was a pure cadmium blue. A bird fluttered overhead. There was an authentic sound of birdsong. Percival did not for a moment believe the bird was real.

"You are examining my sky in great detail. Is there something wrong with it?"

The voice came from behind him. He turned. The speaker was, apparently, human, a white male of average height and build, dressed as a gentleman should be, had that gentleman been four centuries out of date. There were hose. There was, as far as Percival understood the term, a doublet. There was even the vestige of a ruff. If a man in Elizabeth Tudor's court had been a quiet and businesslike dresser, he would have looked like this.

"There is nothing wrong with your sky", said Percival. "But it's not real."

"What makes you so sure?" said the newcomer. He had a tiny, painstakingly pointed beard, and an equally precise moustache.

"Because I can see the brushstrokes."

The Elizabethan clapped his hands and laughed. "Excellent! Hardly any man notices that detail! And it took an age."

"A curved-screen animation designed to repaint itself not only fast enough to resemble reality", said Percival, "but also literally. A living oil painting. Very impressive."

"Curved-screen animation", parroted the little courtier. "You people really are coming along up there. But why can't you simply accept that it's all done by magic?"

"There is nothing in here", said Percival, "that I can't understand, even if my species' technology can't do it yet."

"Your species? So you don't think I belong to your species?"

Percival cast a sour glance at the courtier. "What species would you have me believe you belong to?"

"Don't I look like a member of your species?"

"Indeed you do." Percival nodded up at the sky. "And that bird up there looks just like a bird."

"An interesting point." The courtier snapped his fingers; as if by magic, girls - very real-seeming, uncomfortably human and post-pubescent girls - ran in through the colonnade dressed in Greek togas, carrying a small table and chair, and food to go on the table. There were grapes. There was bread. There was cheese. None of the food on the table appeared to have once formed part of a bat or a person. The girls were all that girls should be, and Percival gaped openly. Seeing him gaping, they giggled.

"I see you yourself are perfectly human", said the courtier. "Unless the girls aren't human, obviously. They certainly seem human to me, in every particular; I have tried them out in all the ways familiar to humans." He stared after the girls' departing bottoms hungrily.

Percival fell on the food. He did not bother to sit down, but grabbed handfuls and set to devouring them unashamedly. It was only through a supreme effort of Christian willpower that he stopped himself from falling on the girls and devouring them too.

"And the cheese", said the courtier. "Is the cheese real, in your opinion?"

"Never mind real", mumbled Percival through huge mouthfuls of cheese, "perfectly authentic." He swallowed in a huge gulp, and then, remembering the legend of Proserpina, checked himself and said: "I'm certain the girls' dress was authentic too. After all, you've been down here a long time. Pretending."

"Pretending what?"

"Pretending to come from this planet."

The courtier's eyebrows raised. "I assume you have evidence to support these wild allegations?"

"You're capable of things - GULP - no human being is, or will be for at least a hundred years. If you built this place, this, this Abyss, you have control - GULP - over the structure of space-time. Time slows down here. And space here isn't as Euclid would have understood it either. I fell, by my own estimation, for hours in the V-2, travelling at over a thousand kilometres per hour. By the simplest of arithmetic, I should be somewhere near the Earth's core by now. So why aren't my eyebrows burning?"

The courtier shook his head, and frowned sadly. "I am afraid you accord me an honour I haven't earned. I did not construct the Abyss."

Percival talked with his mouth full. "Kane was of the same opinion."

"Kane has believed me to be an enemy of his people's god ever since our first meeting. I do try to oblige him. He believes his god built this place to keep me prisoner. Do you believe him?"

"I have no idea. But the things you're capable of doing...it was you who brought me back to life?"

The bearded Tudor nodded. "It's necessary with most people who stray down this far. The Abyss tends to kill them before they get to us."

"Bringing a dead man back to life is not a thing my people are currently capable of. But it's a thing we can imagine how to do. It's not a thing totally beyond my comprehension."

"Fascinating! How, then, would you do it?"

Percival thought for a moment. "That warm glow that surrounds people who are being rebuilt - that's excess heat being given off by some sort of nanotechnological machine, sorry, machines, billions of them, shouldn't wonder. That's why everyone coughs down here - not airborne batshit, we're breathing in millions of little nanorobots. The Black Smoke, that must be a variety of them. For you people to be able to heal instantly and miraculously anywhere down here - which seems to be the case - you'd have to be walking around constantly surrounded by clouds of them. The hot dry feeling on the skin when someone in the same room is reconstructing - that's your nanomachines obtaining the energy for the process. Nuclear fusion, drinking up all the water in the air for its hydrogen. Giving off free oxygen, which accounts for the light-headed feeling. Giving off excess heat, as no machine is perfectly efficient. Am I right?"

The courtier considered this. "Whether you're right or no, I'm impressed by the scientific levels you people are attaining. You might present some serious competition given another couple of centuries. You speak so glibly of...I have never heard that term before, 'nanorobots'..."

"At present, nanotechnology is more a theoretical field than a practical one with us. With you, it seems to be different."

"So you claim to be able to understand a thing you are not yourself capable of doing."

Percival looked up at the oil-painting sky. "I can understand how a bird can fly, even if I can't do so myself."

"I would imagine you must be an educated man in order to make such leaps of understanding."

"My college degree was in chemistry. I'm a scientist by training."

"That explains your lack of faith. Why can you simply not accept that I am the Lord of Hades, the King of the World, Old Nick, Old Hob, Dis Pater, the Enemy of Mankind? Then I can accept your signature on the dotted line and take your soul for all eternity."

"Because after I did my degree in physics, I took orders in the Church of England. As a chemist, I can tell you gold from iron pyrites. As a chaplain, I can tell the Devil from a man in a mask. If you're going to pretend to be a figment of a Judaeo-Christian religion's perfervid imagination, at least get it right. Firstly, if you've 'tried your girls out in all ways familiar to humans', you're not the Devil. It is well known to the Church that the Devil cannot conduct himself familiarly with a woman through the normal marital channel, which is reserved for Christian lovemaking. Satan is condemned to forever come in via the tradesman's entrance. Secondly, is Kane who Kane seems to be?"

The putative demon nodded. Percival nodded back. "Then if you were the devil, God could not have built Hell to keep you prisoner by the time you first met Kane. You meet Kane in Genesis, and Satan is still God's willing servant in the book of Job. In the New Testament, even, come to that. And thirdly, it's a widely accepted theological point that it is impossible for the devil to take a man's soul simply by getting him to sign on any dotted line, unless he signs in the blood of freshly slaughtered children or some such substance. The act of signing has to itself constitute an irretrievably damning sin. So there."

The courtier's eyes bulged in their sockets. "Most impressive. I shall not lightly cross swords with the Church in future. In any case, we shall speak further on this matter." The Shakespearean clicked his fingers, and the world went black, to be replaced by the barren bone gravel drive outside the tavern, a sky of bioluminescent stars on a firmament of stone, and a cold, cold wind blowing out of Hell. Ahasuerus and Kane were standing in front of him with faces of concern.

"Are you all right, lad?" said Kane.

***

Percival felt himself to check none of his parts had been subtracted, and felt himself sway giddily. "Fine...so he can do things I can't understand. All he has to do is snap his fingers, and I zip from one place to another."

Kane shook his head. "I have never seen him do any such thing. The German thought it had happened too, called it teleportatsion. But it ain't. All that happened was that a couple of his servants brung you here and stood you up while you recovered consciousness." He spun Percival round to see a coach bearing the arms of the Angel of the Pit trundling away up the roadway to the Bridge.

"He put me to sleep", said Percival, rubbing his head to clear it.

"No", said Kane. "He killed you. Then he had your body brung down here. Then he unkilled you. He likes folk to know where they stand on the living and dying issue."

"How did he appear to you?" said Ahasuerus.

Percival thought about this. "He was a man my size, spoke my language. Yes. He spoke English. Not Latin or Greek or Aramaic. Dressed like a sixteenth-century nobleman."

"He was not always like that", said Kane. "When I first met him, he was a big black man wearing furs."

"To me", said Ahasuerus, "one of my own people, an Israelite. He spoke like a man of Jericho."

"But lately he seems to have become happy with the man the Franj calls 'Le Marinier', said Kane. "He has worn that face for the greater part of four hundred years now. I get the feeling it's some sort of private joke."

Percival tried to move his legs, found he could. There was a pins-and-needles feeling, and a numbness, but it was clearing. "The Franj? Who's he?"

"He came down in a device he called a montgolfière", said Kane.

"That would be a balloon", said Percival.

"Un ballon, yes", parroted Kane. "That is the other word he uses. He is a very clever man. He is the only one who ever arrived here alive, by letting air slowly out of his montgolfière."

"He is the cleverest of us all, and the youngest", said Ahasuerus. "In terms of purely temporal age", he clarified. "Apart from yourself and the German", he added.

"The Franj would very much like to talk to you", said Kane. "Both of them would, he and the German. They live not far from here. Will you come?"

Percival felt the cold of the under earth seeping back in to his limbs after the initial warmth of reconstruction. "Do they have a fire?"

"Right now, with all the combustibles that have been raining from up top these last few days, a very good one."

"Then let us go right now", said Percival, "and sit in front of it.”

“YOU ARE GOING NOWHERE.” Percival heard the dull THUNK of the glittering skull sliding out of its housing on oiled runners, snapping its teeth once for the first hour. “THE WORKING DAY HAS JUST BEGUN.”

In between the two coachmen, behind Percival, stood what appeared to be a human being; a man of rather less than average height, dressed in a uniform similar to the footmen who flanked him, only with appreciably more gold and silver thread. The tabard he wore, like that of the footmen, was inscribed with a crest depicting a winged Abaddon.

"Well met", said the figure. Percival noticed that Kane and Ahasuerus seemed to shrink back in his presence like guilty children. "You've had your audience with Milord; that made you feel you are special and valued. Let me now disabuse you of that illusion. I am Milord's executive branch. It is my function to ensure things happen here when they should, and make them not happen when they should not. My name is Orpheus. You may", he said, puffing his chest up slightly, "have heard of me."

The ancient Thessalian hero, mythological serenader of Cerberus, rescuer of Eurydice, stared hard at Percival.

Percival blinked dumbly. "Can't say I have.” He stared up at the clock. “Are we on Roman time, then?”

The little hell-creature nodded. “Yes. The day starts at the first hour. At dawn. And dawn, as you should know by now, happens when Milord says it does.”

Percival exhaled deeply against an overwhelming wave of fatigue. Resurrection was a terrible thing. He appeared to be suffering from something very similar to jetlag. If he had been resurrected with the same serotonin levels in his brain as he had died with, he must now biochemically be a man who had been awake for forty-eight hours longer than he had been alive.

"Look down", said Milord's executive branch.

Percival looked down. He was wearing a tabard exactly like that of Orpheus, only with appreciably less gold and silver thread.

"You are now wearing the Uniform", said the hero. "See that you are worthy of it. Roll call happens at low sand." He gestured across the square to the cuckoo clock. "At prima hora you will be issued your duties for the day, which you will perform to the best of your ability. Any remaining time is yours. Work well, and you will be rewarded, as I have been." He indicated his own finery, in which he looked quite ridiculous. "Work poorly, and you will be punished."

Percival thought about this.

"How?" he said.

The miniature commisar shifted nervously in his uniform. "What do you mean?"

"You can't kill me. Kane says none of us here can die. How are you going to punish me?"

A gloat stole across the baby face of the Greek. "Believe me, there are men in Milord's custody who wish fervently and constantly that they were dead."

"All day every day", said Kane mournfully. "And I'm not even in custody", he added.

"Not yet", warned the baby face.

"Canning it now, sir", said Kane. "Putting a sock in it. Zipping it most securely."

"So", said Percival, "what are my duties for the day?"

"Milord's automatic systems have scoured the lake for debris from the recent conflagrations upstairs. However, a final manual analysis on the ground -"

"- below the ground", corrected Kane.

"- is still in progress. Some of the heavier pieces also require manual retrieval. None of them, before you ask, Kane, are human." Orpheus turned to Percival. "He was so hoping you'd be an attractive young lady, so he could have screwed you and strangled you before bringing you back in."

"And you were hoping he'd be an attractive young man, Greek boy", muttered Kane.

"Right, that's it." Orpheus clicked pudgy fingers, and his satyr footpersons sprang to action, flanking Kane. "Take him upstairs", said Orpheus with venom, "to the Cellars." He swivelled to Percival again while the foot-beings manhandled Kane. "There are other duties - the sluices require constant manning, there is a perpetual need for building maintenance, Milord's stables need tending -"

"The horses are real?" Percival was flabbergasted.

"Of course they are real. Milord does not deal in half measures. And you will also find", said the malignant midget, "that their shit is real." Theatrically, he tossed Percival a shovel. Percival caught it, by the wrong end.

"There is a good deal of horse's ass product on this street already today. Some of it has been left so long it's grown two legs and is walking around emulating people." He cast a coprophobic glance at Ahasuerus, who attempted to cringe into invisibility. "You'll only be working on the legless stuff. Good day."

He turned on his heel in the bone dust and stalked back to his enormous glittering carriage. Demons held velvet curtains open for him as he climbed inside, a satyr footman cracked a whip on real horses' backs, and real rickety wooden wheels wobbled away.

***

"So what do I do now?" said Percival.

"Lose the uniform", said Ahasuerus. "Do you see any of us wearing it? Claim it was stolen by anti-Abaddonist extremists while you were in the shower."

Percival sniffed the air disbelievingly. "You guys shower?"

"No. And Him Upstairs knows we don't. But we don't wear his uniform either."

"Couldn't I just...accidentally scuff it up?"

Ahasuerus stared down at the uniform with venom. "Try it. Go on. Try it."

Percival looked down at his tabard. He picked a likely spot on the pocket where it looked easy to tear apart. And indeed, it was. The threads came apart with the ease of fresh bread. Then they flared emerald, like a fistful of fibre optics, criss-crossing over one another to reform the weave. Within seconds, the pocket was one piece again.

"Made of the same stuff", said Ahasuerus in disgust, "as we are. If you wear the uniform, you're one of his. If you eat his food, you're one of his. If you sleep on his big fancy beds with the big fluffy pillows and the individually pocketed springs", he said, licking his lips, his eyes misting over, "you're one of his. Live down here in righteous misery", he said mournfully, "and you're one of us."

Percival hefted his shovel experimentally. "So you deliberately mortify yourselves, just to show him you're not his servants."

"Occasionally", said Ahasuerus, "I has a moment of weakness, and nips up to the Bridge and becomes his despicable tool for a week or so. Then I has a moment of strength and does something unpardonable, and gets banished forever back down here. Most of us do much the same."

"What sort of duties do you have to do, while you're his despicable tool?"

"Oh, nothing much. Strutting around, giving orders. Wearing uniforms. Beating carpets. Polishing silver. Torturing the occasional miscreant."

"Beating carpets?" Percival stared up at the glittering city of the Bridge, occupying the entire Abyss above him like a giant turbine in a shaft. "Hasn't he ever heard of Electrolux?"

"He believes in the purifying effect of honest manual labour."

"Shit-shovelling", said Percival.

"What does not kill you", said Ahasuerus, "only makes you stronger." He stared down at his hands, which were shaking with age. "My, how strong I must be by now."

"So, where are Milord's stables?"

"Follow the coach. If the coach ain't visible, follow the line of horse shit. There's only one. The horses only ever come down here, turn round and go back. Not room for but one road down here."

***

Milord's stables were recessed into the rock, but dry and electrically lit. The horses were feeding on what appeared to be hay, had enough room to pace around in, and seemed to be in what Percival took to be a healthy condition for horses. The stable entrance was a low yellow-lit opening halfway up the great zig-zagging roadway that reached up the rock to the Bridge buttresses. Such were the constraints of space that the roadway, despite all Milord's advanced technology, only had room for one lane of carriage traffic, though there were occasional passing places. Percival had been forced to jump aside smartly on one occasion when a carriage came thundering down at breakneck speed pulled by lathered and terrified horses, their shoes striking sparks from off the cobbles. Rather than apologizing, the demon driver had attempted to swing a whip at him.

There were other stablehands scurrying about already, carrying tack, mucking out stalls, grooming horses. The horses appeared healthier than their human handlers, standing taller than Percival at the shoulder, mowing their way through their feed with teeth like scytheblades. The master of the stables, meanwhile, was a black silhouette against blinding electrical-filament light, standing hands clasped behind his back, looking in Percival's direction. It was clear that he was wearing a Uniform, on which the light from behind him sparkled. Rows of silver buttons punctuated the front of his tabard, and his beard was neatly trimmed.

"Mr. Percival. We have been expecting you."

Percival's jaw dropped.

"Kane?"

"The very same."

"But they took you upstairs, to the cellars!"

"I arranged a little subterfuge in order to save myself the shame of everyone knowing I was entering Milord's service again. Every few weeks or so a man finds himself hankering for the good life." He breathed on a button on his coat, and buffed it vigorously. "A good bed, good food, female company." He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, "there are women in the Bridge."

"I did wonder at that", said Percival. "I saw no women on the Mole."

"Statistical analysis shows that ninety per cent of people who fall or climb down the Abyss to this depth are men, for whatever reason - possibly that women have more sense than to go falling into holes. Women are at a premium, and Milord retains them for his own uses, which are principally those of keeping us under control."

"So", said Percival, "if there are men and women, are there children?"

"Goodness gracious no. Imagine, in an undying population. Malthus would have a field day." Kane strolled across the floor and scratched a horse behind the ears. It puffed appreciatively like a large bay steam engine.

"The horses - can they die?"

"I believe so. Lucky devils. Occasionally a human coachman goes completely bananas and puts a coach over the side. Invariably, we find him days later, shivering on a ledge half a mile down, covered in splintered wood and horseflesh, pathetically regenerated. Milord reserves special punishments for such people. He understands our enmity towards him, but believes it is not fair to involve the horses. Besides, it takes him a long time to replace them." He looked back at Percival. "Well, Mr. Percival. I believe you have been supplied with a shovel. Employ it."

He walked away, then looked back over his shoulder.

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention my being here to the others."

***

The horses of hell did not resemble any on earth. One of the stablehands, a Latin-speaking Mongol who had been hurled into the Abyss for unofficial looting during the sack of Na, informed Percival that they had been bred continuously down here for as long as horses had been in the upstairs world, and using techniques far more radical than simple selective breeding. Their coats were black as oil, shimmering with moiré patterns. Their eyes were red as coals, possibly the result of some sort of albinism. And they were huge, measuring more hands than existed on an Indian idol - Great Horses, Percherons, Shire Horses, whatever. Horses of this size had carried mediaeval knights into battle, towed mouldboard ploughs along fields a furrow long and a rood wide, and been the earliest four-legged tanks in the world when manned by Persian cataphract cavalry.

They also had very sharp teeth; and any fingers they bit off, they swallowed with every sign of enjoyment. Percival estimated he lost two fingers in the first hour, though they grew back instantaneously before his marvelling eyes.

The horses also produced prodigious quantities of shit. Percival was shown a winding staircase on the outward-facing side of the stables which was bricked up and no longer in use; this was the original shit chute out of the building, which had been overwhelmed by horse manure deposits building up on the cliffs outside over so many thousand years. The secondary shit chute, which was now upstairs, was a noissome hole that stank vilely. His uniform sleeve over his face in order to make sure the only stench he breathed was his own, Percival looked out over a glistering faecal landscape of saltpetre crystals plated hard to the rock like snow. And even at this depth, there were flies - untold billions of them, the slope downhill from the stables one putrid avalanche of maggots. The inside of the stables was oddly fly-free. Percival was tempted to think this was due to some application of high technology, then thought better of it and suspected instead the use of life-threatening quantities of insecticide.

The horses were named by the head groom, a short, thick-set man with a peculiarly elongated skull, which Percival considered might be some form of birth defect. The other grooms whispered that he been a chieftain of sorts among the Huns; after being taken ill whilst bedding a concubine late in life, he been issued with a form of cataleptic drug by his soothsayers and buried alive, and his coffin had been propelled to the edge of the Na Abyss and hurled down into the depths. The coffin, Percival was told by junior grooms who spoke of their superior only in whispers, had been in three caskets made of iron, gold and silver. Percival remembered army packing crates, made to survive drops from helicopters, that had had several layers separated by polystyrene packing. Possibly the soothsayers had had some inkling of what lay at the bottom of the Abyss.

The groom had a large head, a swarthy complexion, and small, deep-set eyes. His nose was Asiatic in its flatness, and his beard in its sparsity; he had a peculiar capability to terrify the junior grooms, who were men no threat of physical damage should have been capable of terrifying. He had made the task of naming the horses easy for himself, Percival was told, by always giving the horses the same names, which were 'Those of the Kings of the World' - Theodosius, Valentianus, Huangdi, Mahomet, Ashoka and Satan. Percival remembered Satan being referred to in Christian mythology as King of the World. There were also two brood mares named Honoria and Ildico, and a couple of foals, Valentinianulus and Little Satan, bright-eyed lumps of fuzz moving about on legs like bundles of sticks. The two biggest and youngest stallions, Mahomet and Satan, were too big to be harnessed to any of the gleaming carriages kept in the stable garage; when Percival asked what they were used for, he was simply told they had been 'bred for other purposes'. The horses were exercised by being galloped daily up and down the long series of zigzags that joined the nearest of the Bridge's buttresses to the ramshackle village on the Mole below. Their horseshoes, as befitted animals being ridden hard over stone, were made of an elastic alloy that compressed and abraded like iron, yet also took a polish like table silver. It was one of Percival's tasks to polish them to a brilliant and unnecessary sheen. He made the mistake of standing behind a horse once as he was doing so, and woke up on the stable floor, looking into the squash-ball-sized eye of Mahomet as he stripped fingers off Percival's left hand like berries from a bush, one of his hooves planted solidly in the centre of Percival's stomach, holding him down like a lion pinning down an antelope. Curiously, possibly because he had expected the pain to be excruciating, Percival felt no pain, even though he was watching his own ribcage heal and re-knit in a glowing tracery of emerald. The other stablehands were watching indolently, knowing he would struggle to his feet eventually, not wanting to incur the wrath of the massive animal themselves.

Eventually, Etzel, the head groom, chased the creature away with a besom, and Percival was left staring at his own reforming fingers, entirely certain that he was in the wrong profession.

***

It was a long trudge down from the stables at the end of the day, which was signalled by the electric lights in the stable roofs dimming to a nocturnal purple. Other stablehands accompanied Percival as he slung his shitshovel over his shoulder and began the journey home. He reflected that actually had no idea where home was, as he had been given no idea where he should sleep, eat, or even defecate, but blind human loyalty propelled him down towards the village on the Mole, rather than up towards the brilliant citadel of the Bridge. He imagined he might be turned away in either place.

About halfway down the slope leading down to the village, a cart rumbled in their direction from stablewards, driven by a lone footman in Abaddonian livery. The cart was not well-appointed - only four long boards formed a rough corral around it to stop passengers falling out as it swayed dangerously back and forth over the precipice. It had some sort of primitive braking system on its wheels, which hissed like asthmatic serpents and produced smoke and steam as it was applied before every corner.

"Up and aboard, human vermin", yelled the driver. "And be thankful for milord's generous heart. He can ill afford to spare transport at the best of times."

Percival climbed up next to the driver, whose voice he was oddly certain he recognized. Leaning close to the other man rudely in the gloom, he examined him in detail.

"Stare any harder and you'll lose an eyeball to my whip", raged the driver unconvincingly.

"Ahasuerus?" said Percival. "Is that you?"

"Sssh!" hissed the hellish horseman. "Not so loud!" Then, his voice becoming wheedling and imploring, he added:

"Don't tell Kane, or I'll never hear the end of it. It's just the beds upstairs, you see. And the steak. I've been promised steak."

The cart rattled self-destructively to a halt. Percival was not sure, after the jarring his skeleton had taken, that walking would not have been preferable.

"Don't worry", he said. "Your secret's safe with me."

"You are a true friend", said Ahasuerus, and handed his reins and whip to a new passenger who had stolen furtively out of the dark to take his place on the buckboard. Ahasuerus then hopped down, and began furiously disrobing. When he had finally divested himself of the alien uniform, he threw it back up to the man who now held the reins, who began struggling into it.

"YAAA!" yelled the new coachman in triumph, and applied his whip to Ashoka and Huangdi, who were in the traces. The cart began to turn with molluscoid velocity out of the village square back up towards the stables.

Percival finally dragged his feet into the main and only street of the village; he was unprepared to be greeted by Kane, dressed in his usual rags.

"So!" said the proto-Hebrew accusingly. "You've entered the service of our great Enemy right from square one, I see. An unprepossessing start, I must say."

Hangers-on hissed in disapproval to right and left of Kane. Ahasuerus nipped into view at Kane's elbow and fixed Percival with a hard stare.

“I really do not care, right now”, said Percival, “about your pathetic inter-species rivalries. All I need, right now, is a nice comfy soiled privy floor on which to sleep.”

“We sleep”, said Kane, “where we fall. I cannot promise you anything as palatial as a privy floor.”

“Show me a coil of barbed wire, and I will sleep on it.”

“I will show you where you may sleep. You need sleep.”

“On that we are agreed.”

“You have much to do. You must redeem yourself. In the morning, or the evening, or whenever you eventually wake, you will come with me to see the Franj and the German.”

3: The Obedient Servants of His Lordship

The house of the Franj and the German was made of heavy blocks of abyssite, tiled on top with votive tablets, with small bright windows. Smoke and electric white sparks issued from the single chimney. A crowd of locals, ragged and disreputable, knowing their bodies would heal any abuse inflicted on them, stood around the house gawping at the firework display.

"WHATSAMATTER", yelled Ahasuerus as he pushed through them, "AINTCHA NEVER SEEN METAL BURN BEFORE?"

The door of the house was made of light fabric stretched over rigid frames, like a traditional Japanese screen door. The windows seemed made of a similar material. Fringes of stiff fibre had been painstakingly tacked round the edges of the windows, presumably as draught excluders. "Glass is dear", explained Ahasuerus. "When things are dear, the Franj and the German find other ways of doing things."

Percival run his finger down the door fabric. "They do indeed. This door has hairs."

Ahasuerus shrugged. "What do you expect? Imperfectly cured, poor workmanship. We are not rich men down here."

"Ahasuere, the door is made of human skin."

"And the man it was taken off was probably got so drunk he didn't feel it, and his wound would have healed immediately. Your point being?"

Percival swallowed uncomfortably. "Nothing. I can see I'm in a different world."

"The only raw materials we have down here", said Kane, "are stone, people's idiotic wants and needs that they write on slivers of stainless steel and bung down the pit at us, and the cast-off bits of our own bodies."

Inside, the place was a junkyard. A collection of twisted, smashed, unwanted metal, both very old and very new, with nothing in between. Only stainless steel and bronze, after all, would survive the thousand-kilometre hurtle down from Planet Earth - Percival was, by now, certain he was no longer on Planet Earth - and the all-pervasive corrosive moisture that seeped out of every surface in the Abyss. Percival saw Ancient Egyptian sickle-swords next to the twisted remains of AK47's. Most of the objects were so battered as to be unrecognizable. At one end of the room, a miscellany of combustible items was crammed into the mouth of what must be at the same time both fireplace and forge. The fire was burning white hot, gurgling happily on a diet of V-2 aluminium. The greater part of the remaining space was taken up by an enormous makeshift still, dripping what Percival hoped against hope were unmethylated spirits into poorly-made earthenware bottles. There were also two hammocks - on reflection, probably the best and only way of keeping a bed dry down here - slung up among the jumble. Other technological devices were dotted here and there - a spinning wheel, a weaver's loom, a bellows feeding air to the forge, an ominous-looking frame for stretching and scraping hides for parchment.

There were books too - small ones, easily portable, and clearly precious, as dog-eared as Anubis, kept carefully on high dry shelves. There was at least one Holy Bible, along with some literature - a Doctor Faustus, a Faust, a Huis Clos, a Jurgen, and the ever-popular Inferno. There were, however, far more works by Euclid, Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. A Mein Kampf sat unashamedly next to a Das Kapital.

Poking the fire was a man in his thirties, or his thirty thousands, naked to the waist and bearded, wearing a cross and rosary. His poker was a cavalry sabre. At the other end of the room, a man sat darning a grey uniform jacket.

"Louis, Werther, we have a new arrival."

The man at the fire did not look round. "I can tell that, Kane. I can recognize new faces. What languages does he speak? What can he do?"

"I speak English, Latin, und ein paar schlechte Wörter Deutsch", said Percival.

The darner gave a start, and looked up in amazement.

"Man spricht noch Deutsch dort oben?"

"Jawohl." Percival grinned. "In Deutschland, meistens."

"Ein deutschsprechender Engländer...war Unternehmen Seelöwe erfolgreich?"

"Nein", said Percival. "Hitler tötete sich in Berlin in 1945. Er hat Rußland nie angriffen sollen."

The darner shrugged, and turned his attention to his darning again. "C'est la guerre."

"And what's your trade?" said the stoker. "You come from a civilization far more technologically advanced than ours. Can you rivet? Can you weld? Can you fettle?"

Percival shrugged. "I can program in Fortran."

The stoker snorted in disgust, and turned his attention back to his stoking. But he carried on talking. "Technology has moved on, on the surface...how many years?"

"It is now the year 2016", said Percival.

"I imagine", said the stoker, and here his eyes gleamed, "that the skies are now filled with enormous montgolfières."

"Hardly anybody has built a zeppelin since the Hindenburg and R101 disasters", said Percival. "Virtually all flight is now carried out in fixed-wing aircraft."

"Impossible! The imbeciles! Such a waste of energy! Who won the Second World War?"

"The Allies. Which is to say, the British, the Russians, the French, and the Americans."

The stoker scowled. "Vaudrait mieux si c'était les allemands", he muttered.

The darner looked up. "We, too, had built no zeppelins since the Hindenburg, Louis." He looked at his darning sorrowfully. "They were no use in war."

"Sit down", said the stoker. "You will be tired and confused. My name is Louis du Mont des Chênes, though many here call me the Franj, as they remember Frenchmen mainly from the Crusades. I am a minor marquis. I was formerly a lieutenant in the Grande Armée. Does this surprise you?"

Percival shook his head. "I am acquainted with the behaviour of the Abyss."

The stoker's eyebrows raised. "Iter? Alors. I was dispatched into the depths by our great leader Bonaparte himself, who had been written many unsolicited letters by me regarding the new invention of the brothers Montgolfier, letters in which I had urged him at great length to consider this revolutionary device for use in military reconnaissance and artillery spotting. Eventually, when our army entered the streets of Na, he acquiesced gracefully and allowed me to commandeer enough ladies' silk underwear to construct a Montgolfière and descend into the depths."

"What did he hope you'd find?"

Du Mont des Chênes smiled ruefully. "I don't think he greatly cared. Certainly his commandeering of ladies' silk underwear greatly improved morale." He indicated the darner. "This is SS-Haupsturmführer Markus Laszlo, an officer in the Leibstandarte Dacia of Adolf Hitler, trained to be a paratrooper. I was already familiar with the principles of parachutism from the works of Leonardo, but it was most surprising to discover that you surface dwellers had actually been so foolhardy as to try it. Kapitän Laszlo volunteered to use his parachuting skills to descend into the Abyssal depths and flash back messages via a heliograph. Unfortunately for him, his parachute failed to open. In civilian life, he was an apprentice engineer, and his assistance has proved invaluable in the construction of many fascinating technological devices. In my own first life, I considered myself a keen student of natural philosophy, though I was not so gauche as to take this to the extent of having a profession...so you, sir, you claim to have no trade but 'programming in Fortran'?"

"That's not my trade. I was a chaplain. Un curé militaire."

"Valde te Deum laudo! You are a student of the science most useful to us! Have you visited our host yet?"

"What do you think?" said the darner. "Is he an angel, or a devil?"

"He is an evil devil", said Kane. "Imprisoned here by a just God who has sent both us and him here for our sins. Hammering men to crosses and so forth." For some reason, he looked hard at Ahasuerus as he said this.

"He is Satan", said Ahasuerus. "He is sent by Yahweh to tempt the righteous, and punish the wicked. This is a testing ground to determine which we are. We should strive to be good."

"God", said the darner, without looking up, "is dead." He bit the end off his thread, which Percival was certain would be made of human hair.

"I am convinced he is a devil", said the stoker. "But what is the purpose of his and our being here? Are we in Hell? And are we damned?" He held up an admonitory finger. "This, I believe, is the crux of the matter. If he is a devil, might he not pretend to have taken us to Hell, so that we mistakenly believe ourselves to be damned? For what does a man who believes himself damned do? Does he not run round committing all the deadly sins he can, for how can he become any more damned? This is an elaborate charade created in order to harvest the souls of the just." He kissed a crucifix hanging at his throat.

"The Devil", said Percival, "has no power over Death. Only God does."

"And yet", continued Du Mont des Chênes, "might not a devil's supreme act of cruelty in Hell be to let sinners somehow retain hope that escape might be possible? To lead us to the false conclusion that we are not in Hell? To torture us with a vain expectation of release?"

"I've never escaped this place", said Kane sadly. "Even when I left it."

"The official Christian position on characters such as yourself", said Percival, "is that, as you were never baptised, you cannot achieve Paradise. However, this is also viewed to be no fault of your own, and as soon as Christ descends into Hell at the Second Coming, He will raise all the Old Testament Prophets up to sit with him in the New Jerusalem."

"Hallelujah", said Kane, with feeling. "Though I always preferred Jericho to Jerusalem. Jerusalem's way too crowded."

"Can it, Judaean", said Ahasuerus.

"And yet", said Du Mont des Chênes, "a benevolent angel might pretend to be a devil, in order to test the souls of the just. Our host has never claimed to be a devil in my hearing. Nor will he answer if he is asked whether he is an angel. This would be necessary if he were an angel, as it is, of course, widely known that angels cannot lie. Of course, if he were a devil, he might gain much from pretending to be an angel. Which do you believe our host to be?"

"He's neither", said Percival.

The Franj stood for a long time staring at Percival with his iron in the fire, for so long that, when he pulled it out again, the tip had bent and softened. He clucked his annoyance and walked over to the anvil to re-straighten it.

"Then is he", said the Franj, "a Middle Spirit? One of the creatures who inhabit the air between heaven and earth? Wizards may conjure such beings, so we are told by sources such as your own Doctor John Dee. And they were once angels, but are not quite devils. They did not rebel against God, but deserted from His armies in the battle against Lucifer, and thus were not condemned to Hell. Instead, they were condemned never again to see Paradise, much as was Adam for his primal sin."

"You watch whose family you're bad-mouthing", warned Kane.

"I have never seen a devil", mused Percival, "that I know of, though I'm not sure about certain third world dictators, traffic wardens and driving examiners. Neither have I ever seen angels, saving my late wife, or middle spirits. Much though I hate, as a clergyman, to be a champion of reason over blind Christian superstition, I think what we're looking at here is none of the above. Looking at the problem scientifically, what are the properties of Abaddon?"

Du Mont des Chênes thought a moment. "The cold does not affect him. I have never seen him eat. And he is very old".

"Older than your devil", said Ahasuerus. "Older, I think, than God."

"He was here before me", said Kane. "And there's folks down here older than me he was here before too."

"We know", said Du Mont des Chênes, "that he did not originate in this place. He came here from elsewhere. And there are others of his kind. He speaks to them on occasion. Our sources in the Bridge confirm this. We imagined these others to be some form of devils-in-chief."

"How does he speak to them? Do they visit him?"

Laszlo shook his head. "There is a room in the Bridge, jealously guarded, where he consults with them. There are no other rooms around it, only a long corridor leading to it, which suggests that the room itself is dangerous in some way, requiring the presence of a large amount of shielding between it and the inhabited parts of the Bridge...I have heard there is now a thing called radiation?"

"Yes. A large amount of solid stone would block radiation."

Du Mont des Chênes nodded. "The voices of those he consults are indistinct and distant. He can only either listen to them, or speak. He cannot do both in the same session. We have no idea why this is...have I said something of interest?"

Percival was smiling like a Cheshire cat.

"Because", said Percival, "they are very, very distant. A message from Abaddon has to cross so much space to reach home that even the radio waves or light beams or whatever it is he uses to send it will take years to get there. We can even find out just how long."

"We can?" Kane pouted, mystified. "How?"

"How long does it take between Abaddon issuing a question to one of his devils-in-chief and him receiving an answer?"

"I don't know", said Du Mont des Chênes. "But we have sources. Those of us who serve in the Bridge can find out."

"So the people in the Bridge are real? Not some sort of illusion or automaton?"

"Good Lord, no, they're just like us. Women and boys, mostly. He prefers women and boys. More compliant. Although he likes to pretend he keeps them up there to feed his rampant appetites, he seems to be quite indifferent to conducting actual sexual acts with them."

"Yes. That would be biologically impossible, I'll bet. Now, listen - the time between Abaddon issuing a question and receiving an answer, measured in years, is the distance in light years between Earth and Abaddon's homeworld, or at least his people's nearest base."

"Distance in light years?" said Kane. "How about a distance in heavy gallons?"

"I have heard of Light Years", said Laszlo. "They are a measure of distance. Astronomers use them. A Light Year is the distance travelled by light in a year."

Percival nodded. "A very great distance. If the time lag is about eight and a half years, Abaddon's homeworld would be near Alpha or Proxima Centauri, for example. But if the time lag is under a year, Abaddon's compatriots are probably inside our own solar system."

"You're saying that Abaddon is an..." the German struggled for a phrase "...an Allmensch?"

"A man from space, yes. Nothing more than a man. Though probably not what you or I would think of as a man. Am I confusing you?"

"Yes", said Kane, glassy-eyed.

"I apologize. But when you were young, there were people your people didn't know about, yes? Tribesmen and barbarians from strange places, who didn't speak your language, didn't look like you, whose skin was the wrong colour, white, black or yellow. Maybe they didn't even seem human. But they were."

Kane nodded. "Apart from the Israelites", he added, darting a glance at Ahasuerus.

"Well, that's what Abaddon is. He is just a man from a very long way away. The difference is that he came from so far away he really and truly isn't human."

"Oh", said Kane. "He's an alien. I've heard of aliens. I've been up top recently, don't you forget. Nineteen fifty nine. I've seen movies. Aliens have green skin, tentacles and heads like balloons, and travel in little silver saucers. Bullets are useless against them, and they Want Our Women."

"Not quite", said Percival.

“Can Your Heart Stand The Shocking Facts About Graverobbers From Outer Space?", quoted Kane from memory.

"Surely aliens have grey skin and abduct people from trailer parks?" said Ahasuerus. "I last went up in the nineteen nineties", he added apologetically.

"Aliens", said Percival with an air of firm authority, "do neither. What you were experiencing were the twentieth-century equivalent of children's nursery rhymes, which we call Hollywood. This is different from serious scientific speculation. For all we know, Abaddon could have any physical form. He might not have a physical form. He doesn't have to be similar to us in any way. Except one. I believe Abaddon is as trapped down here as we are."

"Vlad said you would understand things", said Kane. "It was him as told us you'd be coming."

Percival thought about this. "Vlad short for Vladimir? Beardy guy, about the length of an Stylite's cell, big gold crucifix covered in valuable minerals?"

"That would be him, yes. In the end, before he left, he made me a gift of that crucifix. Though he was convinced I was a devil when he first met me."

"I'm not entirely convinced, said Percival, "that you aren't."

"And he proclaimed me forever damned", said Ahasuerus. "On account of my having killed Christ. Me! I mean, I'd been a good and holy man. I'd never worked on the Sabbath, and I crossed over the road whenever I saw a Samaritan -"

"Vlad believed you'd be the one to make it all the way through", said Kane.

"What'd'you mean, 'make it all the way through'?"

"Well - all the way through the Abyss, of course, past the Parts of Satan."

Percival considered this. "You're talking about the Inferno. Dante made the world a sphere centred around Satan, who was buried in the ice at the centre of the Earth in Caïna, surrounded by all the tiers of Hell. In order to reach Purgatory and escape Hell, Dante had to clamber across Satan's nether regions -" he leaned nonchalantly on a tin outcropping of the forge, and had to pull away hastily when he burned himself.

"We know all about the Inferno", beamed Kane. "We're up to the minute, technologically aware chaps. We're in with all the latest advances in demonology."

"Dante", said Percival, sucking his fingers, "wrote the Inferno in the 13th century AD."

"Well, it's AD", complained Kane. "It's recent."

"For you it might be, old codging geezer", muttered Ahasuerus, rubbing the arthritis out of his hands as he warmed them on the forge.

"You watch it, young timer. In any case, down is the Parts of Satan. And he believes that if you go down far enough, you start going up."

"Which is why he has no problem with launching montgolfières that go down", observed Percival.

"Won't allow burners in them", said the stoker sadly. "Which forces the pilot to go down."

"But he believes that, at some point, gravity will reverse itself, just as if the pilot has travelled right through the centre of the Earth...which means a balloon would end up the wrong way up. Be unable to sink further. It would remain trapped at the centre of gravity."

The balloonaut nodded, stoking the liquefying coals while shielding his eyes. "We believe this may be the reason why his most recent experiments have sanctioned the use of powered flying machines driven by propellers. Although his earliest devices were gliders. And it was in just such a glider that the Blessed Vladimir left us."

"I thought he was a saint."

"He was only blessed back then."

"And he made it all the way through the Abyss."

"Well", shrugged Du Mont des Chênes, "they never found his body."

"And usually they do", said Percival. "Find the body."

"Well...sight the body. He has telescopes, and a fresh body can be seen a long way down. Particularly by the light that comes upon it, each time it revives itself."

Percival felt his face going numb. "You mean they're still not really dead."

"Well, naturally they're not. We can't really die. You ought to know that by now."

"So they lie down there, all smashed and broken, and -"

"Regenerate. The heat of repeated regenerations sometimes wears a hole around them in the rock over time."

"Starving to death, dying of their injuries, dying of thirst, over and over and over again."

Kane nodded. "For thousands on thousands of years. But it is still only the very best of us Abaddon chooses for the journey. Some of us", he said bitterly, "are no longer considered suitable material."

"So why does he still keep you here?"

"Because he's not quite sure in his own mind how to pick the best", said Laszlo. "His requirements change from day to day. Some weeks it's men with a large and perfectly formed amygdala. Other days it's manic depressives and haemophiliacs. To get rid of us would be to discard valuable raw material."

"Raw material for what?" said Percival.

"The grand objective", said Du Mont des Chênes. "Getting through the Abyss. Tunnelling all the way downward into Hell's centre."

"Trying to reach the Centre of Gravity and climb through it out of Dante's Hell."

Du Mont des Chênes tossed a rocket fin fragment into the furnace. "It had crossed our minds that this might be his purpose."

"So isn't the next logical question Why Can't He Go Himself? Why does he have to make us do it?"

Laszlo shrugged. "Because we aren't damned?"

Percival clicked his fingers. "The Stylite! The Stylite suggested the Abyss acted like a filter, excluding bad input. And like a filter, it gets clogged up with all manner of crap. Really bad people, human vermin, get stopped at the hundred metre level. Genocidal lunatics get stopped a few metres lower down, barbarous imperialists a little further still. Only the very best and finest pass through the filter right to the very bottom." He eyed Kane, Ahasuerus, Laszlo, and Du Mont des Chênes with frank disbelief. "Unfortunately, according to that theory, that means you. And, I'm afraid, me."

Du Mont des Chênes grinned, exposing aristocratic incisors. "A very egotistical theory, I fear."

"But certainly, Abaddon is constantly searching for the mental or physical quality that will enable a man to pass all the way to Hell's bottom. Constantly changing tack. What is the current fashion?"

"He currently believes that only a knight pure in heart can pass through the Abyss", said Laszlo.

"That's insane."

"You noticed." Laszlo lost patience with his sock and began darning at such a speed that little red pinpricks of blood polka-dotted his fingers, along with little emerald starbursts of unnatural healing. "He's been down here longer than Kane, remember. Probably was here for something very like forever all by himself. Sometimes he claims he created us. The whole human race. So he'd have some guinea pigs to send through the Abyss. It is an understatement to say his cups are not all correctly located in the cupboard."

"It's not as unusual as it sounds", said Kane, licking his lips. "Back when I was on Abyss-spelunking duty, roped up wriggling down the rock, I saw things on the lower cliffs that weren't what you and I would think about as human. But they were regenerating, just like us. They were once Kane's servants too. Big huge heavy things, with shoulders like horses' quarters. Some things that looked more monkey than man. Some lying there on the rock half dead, half alive, some as didn't look quite so dead, that was lying doggo but watching you sly-like out of the corner of their eye. Not quite so daft as they was monkey-looking, and a fierce set of teeth on them. One of them that healed up green as grass right as I was looking at him, then jumped up and come at me."

"In any case", said Laszlo, "Him upstairs has decided in his putative wisdom that we will henceforth all joust for the privilege of doing battle with the Abyss. Someone foolishly drew his attention to a mediaeval manual on knighthood by Taliesin."

"Oh?" said Percival. "Who was that?"

"Taliesin, I think. He lives over the way. A man with mental issues. Believes he's in the realm of Manannan MacLir, Ahriman, and Satan all at once."

"But who'd joust for the right to be hurled into a pit?"

"Oh, the alternative is always something far worse. I believe you're in the lists for tomorrow."

"But I can't use a lance." Percival's eyes bulged in panic.

"Oh. Him upstairs will be disappointed. You've got the Arthurian name and everything. I suppose now you're going to tell me you can't ride a horse either."

"Just barely."

"Oh dear. And you're up against Bertilak de Hautdesert. Originally, I believe he was a Sassanid mercenary, a knight in armour. In parts of his subsequent existence, he was a knight errant."

"A highwayman."

"A Raubritter, indeed."

"You may have heard of him in your poets' stories of the Green Knight", said Du Mont des Chênes. "He terrorized Dark Ages Britain by hanging around crossroads betting passers-by they couldn't knock off his head in one stroke with an axe. Some of them took up the offer, and then a month later Bertilak would knock on their door grinning and asking for a chance to return the favour."

"How did he end up back down here?"

Du Mont des Chênes grimaced across the room. "Kane dealt with him."

"How?"

Kane appeared almost reluctant to admit to his misdeeds. "I rode to the crossroads, hacked his head from off his body, and buried it under an anthill for a year. I'd dig it up out every now and again and pass it round court to entertain the ladies." His face brightened. "Oh, the contorted and amusing expressions!"

"I was brought up to respect such men", said Laszlo, raising his dark Magyar eyebrows, "to revere them as paragons of the Aryan ideal. I must confess, at times, I find this difficult."

"Because?" said Percival.

"Because Bertilak has difficulty stringing a sentence together and scratching his arse at the same time", said Laszlo. "Though he has no problem scratching his arse per se, it must be said. He can also, I'm afraid, hack an armed opponent in two with a broadsword before the man has even moved his own weapon to defend himself. I'm sorry."

"But I'll regenerate", said Percival. "I'll wake up, won't I?"

"Oh, yes", said Kane. "Oh yes, you will. You'll wake up somewhere truly horrible. I guarantee it. Him upstairs has no patience with failures."

4: In The Lists

The crowd roared, and bayed for Percival's pasty white flesh. He wondered how many of them were actually human.

The jousting lists were a wide, sandy-floored bowl underneath an artificial hemisphere of sky, a close copy of the room in which Percival had first met Abaddon. This sky, however, had been executed by Turner rather than Michaelangelo. Unlike Turner's, of course, these clouds moved, twisting like a grey winding sheet drawn around the entire earth. There were no birds in this sky.

The steps of the amphitheatre came right down to the sand, with no attempt at safety barriers, and were populated by hordes of Abyssals, yelling and screeching their hatred of the man who was failing so pathetically to defend himself, and their love of the man who looked set to be his executioner. Percival had recognized a few faces among them when he'd first shambled in encumbered by his armour; he'd had no time to spot more. Kane was there, and Du Mont des Chênes, and Ahasuerus; their faces were crestfallen. And at one end of the arena, of course, enthroned in a royal box flanked by dazzling Greek and Slavic beauties who may or may not have been real, was Abaddon.

The first time his opponent’s weapon had swung in, it had come in with such force that Percival's own had shattered. He was fighting with half a sword now - not as much of a handicap as might be thought, since he was not getting any opportunity to use it to attack his opponent. All he needed was the foot or so of blade just up from the hilt, to block and parry. His opponent was faster than he was, and stronger, and never seemed to tire. Rather than a single sword which might stab in at him at intervals, he seemed to be facing a razor-edged disc representing any of the points the sword might occupy on a blinding, whirring arc around Bertilak. The disc also seemed to have a ton of weight behind it at all times; Bertilak was a physical giant, and was putting his every gramme of muscle mass behind every swipe. It was unthinkable that Percival could meet such force with anything even remotely equivalent.

The sword came in again; his final foot of blade splintered. This gave him temporary respite, but only temporary. The blade came round again in an almost unbroken circle that was felt rather than seen, before he had time to step back or use his shield. He felt his brain stem break from his spinal column, an odd sensation, and experienced excruciating pain as his severed head crashed to the gravel, rolling and bouncing simultaneously like a rugby ball, the world turning cartwheels all around him, the crowd cheering the half-human behemoth that now stood, sword and shield in hand, elevating its greaves and gauntlets to the heavens, accepting the adulation of all. He felt blood in his mouth. And then there was a blackness that seemed only momentary, and which he knew had lasted far longer, and he woke up again in the spider pit.

***

His newly healed body had already been bitten several times. The pain burst in like a red hot iron held, slowly and deliberately, against his funny bone. Bitten in three, perhaps, four places. By some of the big ones.

The web, he knew, had not been created by the biting spiders. It was a product of a miniscule garden spider he had imported from India, which, despite its tiny size, produced webs of such strength and volume they could hold a man fast. The biters lived within the web, and were not affected by it; Percival suspected Abaddon had done something to enhance their anatomies, maybe grafted genes into them from the webweavers. Spiders of their bulk did not normally weave webs. From their size he reckoned they could be nothing less than fully grown female Theraphosae, the largest spider on earth. Unless, that is, they were some extinct genus Abaddon had somehow resurrected. Many things supposedly extinct in the world above were not quite so down here.

He hoped that, this time at least, none of them would bite him on the face.

A light passed over his eyes, illuminating huge, multilegged shapes resting in the web. Waiting while the poison they had injected into him did its work, dissolving him from the inside. The grand fiction promulgated by Tolkien and other writers, that spider venom only paralysed its victims, was almost laughably untrue. Bilbo Baggins would have stabbed himself to death by now with his own elven dagger. Had he had the opportunity of death.

The spiders, he knew, had privileged status down here. Their venom had been altered. It was capable of inflicting damage on a resident of the Abyss, without that damage immediately healing. Percival wondered if it were possible to thrash around enough for the spiders to bite him enough times to actually kill him permanently. Kane had suggested it.

This was now the one hundred and thirteenth time he had been in the pit.

“WRIGGLE ABOUT A BIT”, came Kane’s voice from above. “GET 'EM EXCITED.”

“Don’t tell him how to kill hisself”, whispered a croakier voice, which Percival was almost certain was Ahasuerus. “He might go ahead and do it , and he’s got to get through to God.”

“If he’s going through to God, he’s going through to God. That’s how prophecies work, dingbat. And if Vlad’s prophecy’s wrong, he’ll be better off dead than alive down here. Gor, I wish it was me down there. I’d wriggle.”

“HAS ANYONE EVER SUCCESSFULLY KILLED THEMSELF DOWN HERE BY WRIGGLING?” yelled Percival. The sound of his voice sent huge hairy shapes dashing down the web towards him.

“NO”, yelled Kane back. “BUT IT CAN’T HURT TO TRY. ERM. WELL, IT WOULD HURT, OBVIOUSLY, BUT -“

“- OW. SORRY, BEING BITTEN. HOW’S MY OPPONENT?”

“RIDING ROUND IN CIRCLES ALL DAY ON HIS BEST CHARGER. HE’S SETTING HIMSELF A TARGET OF LOPPING OFF YOUR HEAD INSIDE TWO SECONDS THIS TIME.”

“HASN’T MIRACULOUSLY DROPPED DEAD IN THE INTERVENING PERIOD, THEN?”

“NO SUCH LUCK. HE’S DEALT WITH TEN MORE MEN SINCE THEN. THEIR REMAINS ARE SITTING IN HEAPS IN THE INFIRMARY, KNITTING THEMSELVES TOGETHER VERY VERY SLOWLY.”

“THE INFIRMARY.”

“LITTLE ROOM OFF THE JOUSTING LISTS. YOU WERE MOULDERING UP THERE A MONTH OR MORE THIS TIME AROUND.”

“MY WORD. HAS IT BEEN THAT LONG? GET OFF ME, YOU EIGHTLEGGED SCUMFREAK! TOUCH THE FACE, AND I’LL BITE YOU!”

“GET ‘EM TO FANG YOU IN THE WINDPIPE”, called Kane. “THEN YOU’LL CROAK FOR SURE, AND HIM UPSTAIRS’LL HAVE TO HAVE YOU OUT OF HERE.”

“WHERE IS IT, THIS PIT?” called Percival. “IS IT IN THE BRIDGE?”

“ON ONE OF THE LOWER LEVELS. POSSIBLY INSIDE ONE OF THE BUTTRESSES. YOU GO DOWN A TON OF STAIRS."

“YOU WALKED ALL THE WAY UP HERE TO SEE ME?”

If it were possible to hear a shrug, Percival would have.

“WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO DO DOWN HERE? THERE’S BEEN PRECIOUS LITTLE DEBRIS FROM UP ABOVE THESE PAST FEW DAYS. NO BEACHCOMBING TO BE DONE. I THINK THE WAR BETWEEN THE ROMANS AND DEMONS IS OVER.”

“I’M TOUCHED BY YOUR TRUE FRIENDSHIP.”

“FRIENDSHIP IT AIN’T. YOU’VE GOT TO IMPROVE YOUR GAME, PERCIVAL. YOU’VE GOT TO WIN ONE, SO AS HIM UPSTAIRS SENDS YOU THROUGH THE ABYSS TO GOD.”

“DOES HE KNOW VLADIMIR SAID I’D DO THAT?”

“ALMOST CERTAINLY. I BELIEVE IT AMUSES HIM. BUT I THINK IT INTERESTS HIM TOO. VLAD WAS A MISTAKE - A FAILURE OF ABADDON’S KNOWHOW. ABADDON TAKES THE ORACLE SMOKE THAT’S IN US AND DOES SUMMAT TO IT TO KEEP US ALIVE. MAKE IT SO WE CAN’T DIE - AND SO WE DON’T TALK IN RIDDLES EITHER. BUT TO DO THAT HE HAS TO LOSE THE BIT OF IT THAT MAKES US ABLE TO SEE THE FUTURE.”

Percival lay back in the web as the spiders fed on his arms and legs.

“AHA. SO THAT’S THE EXPLANATION FOR THAT. I HAD WONDERED WHY I’M NO LONGER ABLE TO SEE STUFF THAT HADN’T HAPPENED YET.”

“VLADIMIR WAS DIFFERENT. THE REJIGGING DIDN’T WORK ON HIM QUITE AS WELL AS IT DID ON YOU AND ME. OR RATHER, IT WORKED TOO WELL. HE STAYED ABLE TO PROPHESIZE. HIM UPSTAIRS HAS TRIED TIME AND AGAIN TO DO IT OVER AGAIN, BUT WITHOUT SUCCESS. HE FIGURED VLADIMIR WAS DIFFERENT TO US IN SOME WAY. SENT HIM DOWN THROUGH THE PARTS OF SATAN BECAUSE HE FIGURED HE’D FOUND HIS FINAL GUINEA PIG. SOMEONE WHO HAD A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ABYSS.”

“IF HE KNEW HE HAD A MAN WHO COULD PREDICT THE FUTURE, HE SHOULD HAVE HUNG ON TO HIM.”

“WELL, VLAD DID TELL HIM HE WAS GOING ALL THE WAY THROUGH. THING WAS, HE DIDN’T TELL HIM HE WASN’T COMING BACK.”

“AN ABSENCE OF A DEAD BODY”, shouted Percival, “DOESN’T MEAN THE PRESENCE OF A LIVE ONE. HOW DID HE GO DOWN?”

“IN A GLIDER HE’D INSTRUCTED ABADDON TO BUILD, A THING OF WOOD AND FABRIC. QUITE SOPHISTICATED CONSIDERING IT FLEW THREE CENTURIES BEFORE LILIENTHAL. IT WAS PAINTED TO RESEMBLE A GREAT BIRD, WITH ST. MARK’S CROSSES ON THE WINGS. PERSONALLY I PREFER PAN AM.”

Percival hung in the web, feeling the poison spread in his veins even as it dissolved them. “MAYBE, IN THAT CASE, IT IS BETTER FOR ME TO BE HERE THAN THERE, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.”

The voice upstairs became urgent, talking out of a rectangle of light that was probably a trapdoor opening into the Pit. “BUT YOU HAVE TO GO THERE.”

“WHY?”

Despite the fact that he couldn’t see the speaker, Percival heard him squirm desperately. “BECAUSE VLADIMIR TOLD US YOU’D BE THE ONE WHO’D BE COMING BACK. THE ONE WHO’D FINALLY FREE US. THE HARROWER OF HELL.”

***

The sword was the same sword. Percival knew it by its heft in his hand. It was occasionally replaced by a stock item, remade from another fight or newly manufactured. Percival could always tell the difference.

This was his sword.

Peculiar, that a man might develop such a close relationship with a mere lump of steel. But this lump of steel was all that stood between him and the spider pit.

The shield had been changed. And some of the armour. As usual, it took all his strength merely to stand up in it. Every time Percival died, he was remade anew, as a pasty, anaemic thirty-year-old without the required musculature for handling swords and shields and armour. But Bertilak did not die. He only ever grew stronger - and even if he had died, he would be remade as the same old mediaeval killing machine he'd always been. Percival was locked into a losing battle.

As the heralds, two prepubescent boys dressed identically in white, led him to the vomitory, the disorganized rumble of the crowd became one single jeer of disapproval. Percival had been killed in the same quick and easy fashion for the past fifty-seven fights. Percival was old hat. Percival was boring.

He always swipes in hard from the right, without feinting. And I always try to get my blade to it. And the blade always breaks. Sometimes I try to put the shield in the way of it. Then either the shield breaks, or I get hammered back like I was a nail in a lump of wood.

But if I slant the shield slightly - tilt the base of it upwards -

The blow swept in, so quickly only the arm that delivered it could be seen to move. Percival's arm jarred backwards, and he felt a terrific impact.

But the shield held. And he was still standing in the same place, and had not been forced backward, and Bertilak was the one staggering.

Gosh. Erm. What do I do now?

The blade reversed and came in again from the opposite direction. He panicked and held his own sword up to block it. The blade shattered. He woke up in the spider pit.

***

Got you, on the wrong foot!

Percival turned his entire body and tried to pour it into the killing edge of the sword. The sword bit down, and glanced off Bertilak's leg armour. Bertilak's blade leapt back towards Percival's throat - he dashed it away, almost without thinking, and launched a fresh attack at Bertilak's sword arm. The huge bulk of Bertilak's shield slammed into him. Try as he might, he could find no way around it - and then suddenly, it was gone, and Bertilak's sword was in its place, swinging its way vertically down towards the top of his head.

He was cut in two from the crown to the hip that time. When Kane and Laszlo came to him in the spider pit, they told him he had been two full months in the Regeneratory. Him Upstairs had feared Percival's brain might not re-knit itself.

***

Bertilak was stronger than Percival, but Percival had had one hundred and seventy two lives' worth of experience at being killed with a sword. If he remembered being killed, then his body also remembered reflexes, even if his muscles remained weak. Bertilak's overhead blow disappeared like a shower of troublesome rain on a perfectly executed sword parry; Bertilak, meanwhile, stumbled, not having expected his blow to meet so little resistance. Percival clanged into him with the targe and forced him to stumble further. While he was stumbling, Percival brought his own sword in and took Bertilak's entire helmet off, along with a substantial layer of his face.

The face seethed immediately with emerald regrowth. Percival swallowed in horror, realizing how difficult it was to permanently incapacitate a man down here, and feeling a new respect for his opponent; getting past the armour was only the beginning. He had never before seen Bertilak's head without the helmet; for this reason, he had imagined some deformed, plague-scabbed abomination out of Chaucer or Boccacio. It was the blond, chiselled face staring back at him with an expression of huge affront that stopped his hand for the vital half second required for Bertilak to chop his legs out from underneath him and then go to work on his arms and neck. This time, Bertilak was angry, and it was not quick.

Percival found himself astounded to realize that Bertilak might have a head inside his helmet. He reflected ruefully that the little time Bertilak spent inside the helmet was the only time Percival ever got to meet him.

***

Bertilak was tricksier now, and more dangerous now the crowd was not necessarily on his side. Percival also suspected he was actually enjoying himself more. But he feared the pit as much as Percival, and was fighting for his right to walk around free in relative comfort, if not actually for his life.

He had stopped hurling in a massive battering assault of furious swipes and cuts, and instead was picking at his victim, advancing and retreating, hiding behind his shield one minute, then opening up for an attack when Percival was worst equipped to deal with it.

Had been worst equipped to deal with it.

The sword blows had begun to flow into one another, to tell Percival where Bertilak's blade was next going to be like a braille map of the future. And not only did he know where the sword was going to be - he could take steps to deal with it being there, without having to keep his eye on it, break into a sweat, or hurry himself. Indeed, every time he had sweated or hurried himself in the past, he had ended up smacking the dirt floor with his face while he watched his own crumpling headless body revolve beneath him.

I am not going back in the spider pit. I will do anything, win anyhow. Anyhow at all.

He was beginning to appreciate, for the first time, exactly how good a swordsman Bertilak was. Maybe the Sassanid was not even as physically strong as he seemed.

But Percival, by now, was better. Because Percival had not ever had the luxury of being strong, and instead had had to learn subtlety.

And is not going back in the pit. Not ever.

Bertilak advanced in a blur of steel which Percival stepped into the centre of, unmoving, and sent a widowmaking cut down on to the crown of his opponent's helmet. Bertilak cringed beneath his shield, and Percival barged forward with his own and pushed the Teuton back into the arena-side crowd. Bertilak fell to one knee against an Old Testament prophet, and hacked desperately backwards to deter Percival from pursuing. A head flew off an early Christian martyr. Any normal crowd would have scattered in both directions - this crowd shuffled aside just enough to allow Percival to step in and hammer Bertilak's sword arm behind the elbow. The German wheezed in pain, and healing fizzed inside his armour. His shield came round to protect against the inevitable follow-through, but that follow-through came in from the wrong direction. Percival had stepped out to the left, taking advantage of Bertilak's temporarily deadened right arm, and brought his own sword clean through the armour jointing at the back of Bertilak's knee.

The crowd breathed in with such simultaneity that the pressure in the room seemed to drop a full half bar. There was absolute silence, broken only by the sound of a fully grown knight in armour collapsing to the sand. Almost comically, Percival poked the lower leg, which had been completely severed, across the floor away from the body with his sword. There was going to be no chance of the knight reviving in the immediate future.

He looked up at the royal box, where Abaddon sat rigid as a statue.

"I claim victory", he said.

Abaddon stared down at him.

"Finish your victory, then", he said.

Percival looked down at the body of Bertilak, which had at first begun to claw its way back toward the remnants of its leg, but had now thought better of it, and sat back staring up at Percival.

NOT going back in the pit -

He let his own sword clatter to the floor.

"Finish it yourself", he said, and walked towards the exit from the arena. Abaddon signalled with a finger, and a man-at-arms ran forward with an ancient Greek kontos.

He woke up in the spider pit.

***

"Percival?" The voice was a hiss, as if it hardly wanted to be heard. Percival looked up, but no light source could be seen.

"Yes?" Percival's own voice was a hiss too, but there were physiological reasons for this. A huge Theraphosa rearranged its legs slightly on the web as it fed on Percival's right arm. The arm had ballooned to the size of a football with the weight of poison inside it.

"It's me. Bertilak."

"Why are you whispering?"

"So that he does not hear me."

Percival laughed. "Rest assured, he can hear you. There are devices I can think of whereby he could spy on all of us simultaneously, and his own technology must be far in advance of mine."

There was a pause while the darkness above Percival absorbed this.

"He has decided you're to be the next to go down through to God. He believes you're the Flower of Knighthood."

Percival snorted, almost dislodging a dinnerplate-sized spider sitting on his stomach, which bit him to quieten him down. The pain made him retch, and it was difficult to turn his head to get rid of the vomit. He hoped that, this time at least, he would not die by choking on the stuff.

"Don't laugh", said the dark, mistaking his puking for laughter. "I think you're the Flower of Knighthood too. You defeated me. I have never been defeated in single combat. All my life, I wanted to be the best knight, the strongest and the bravest, like in all the stories. But I was not good enough."

"But you were the stronger man, Bertilak. I only defeated you once."

"But if we were to meet again, you would defeat me again, now. I know it."

"There is no point in me defeating you, or you defeating me. We are both human, after all. And being human, we should know who our true enemy is."

The dark was quiet a while. Then, as a Theraphosa scuttled up Percival's thigh, and came to rest on his breastbone followed by three or four others, Bertilak spoke again. Percival recognized the pattern of the spiders closing in for the kill.

"I am your man now. Wherever you go, I will go. I will fight with you."

"If the sainted Vladimir is correct", said Percival, "there may be places I can go that you cannot."

"I will not be far behind."

"As one delivery man said to another", said Percival, " If you provide the rearguard, I'll look after the van."

The first spider sank fangs the size of a little finger clean through his breastbone. There were a few moments' scuttling, biting, choking horror, and then he reawoke in the presence of Him Upstairs.

5: The Tower of Air

Him Upstairs was dressed in the same plain black. The throne behind him, meanwhile, was eight feet high, and carved somehow from what appeared from the slightly soapy texture of its surface to be a solid lump of jet. Percival dimly remembered that jet was, essentially, coal. It had only become a popular gemstone in the reign of Queen Victoria, who had worn it to mourn Albert - probably just as Nineveh's inhabitants had put on sackcloth and ashes, because they were black and worthless. A black, worthless substance that had become a precious stone.

The throne was carved into words. Cuneiform at the very base of its pedestal, shading up to hieroglyphs, coptic and Phoenician higher up, then becoming various forms of Roman and Cyrillic. Percival strained to read the words on the very top lines which, though in English, were far too high to read. The very top of the throne was left completely bare, presumably left so for the benefit of whatever future civilizations might come to inhabit the Earth.

There were only two finger's breadths of throne left to write in.

Percival found himself unaccountably able to stand upright and move his limbs. This, after a spell in the pit, was always a pleasure.

But I am not going to show fear.

"Do they all say the same thing?" he said.

"You are familiar with the text", said Abaddon.

"And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit?", guessed Percival.

"I taught it to the first inhabitant of a literate civilization to penetrate this far down", said Abaddon. "The man you know as Kane. He was a promising student."

"But he didn't succeed in what you wanted him to succeed in."

"To date", said Abaddon, "no-one has."

"Do you need to get to the bottom of the Abyss to get out of here?" said Kane.

"I believe I do", said Abaddon. "And believe you do too. So does any creature who the automated defence systems of the Abyss recognize as intelligent."

"The Black Smoke", said Kane. "The Oracle Smoke."

"Nanobots, in your phrasing", said the Renaissance Man. "Forming part of what I believe you call the filtration system. They prevent us from leaving, entice us to crawl further in to the trap. They are the cheese in the mousetrap. Or maybe, because the trap does not necessarily kill, the ultraviolet light that attracts the insect to the entomologist's bottle. You creatures are not being exterminated - anyone possessing the level of technology we see in the Abyss could easily have erased all human life on your world by now. You are, I believe, being studied. The nanobots have the task of fixing you on the slide beneath the microscope. I have - supreme irony! - studied them back, even altered them in attempting to discover how they work. Their technology, at least, is not so many hundred years ahead of my own. I have even been able to reprogram them to preserve my, ah, raw material. Again, your phrasing."

"So the nanobots are used to keep us alive. And you too?"

"I am intrinsically long-lived. Which is to say, my species had learned to alter their genome to prevent ageing long before I arrived here."

"So you're not human."

The bearded lips smiled. "You would hardly believe how far from being human I am. The body you see here is only as much me as a suit of clothes is to you. Conversing with me in my natural form would present, ah, logistical problems."

"Does your suit of clothes", said Percival, "have a separate existence when you're not wearing it?"

"Does yours? It was created from a human being, it is true - but you have yourself worn clothes that were created from living beings on many occasions, I am sure. When you take them off, do they exhibit an existence of their own?"

"You have, uh, changed your clothes, many times. The Abyssals, Kane and the others, say so."

"I am many thousands of years old, and fashions change. Not all of my species are this old, you understand; but a few of us are allowed effective immortality."

"Those who need to travel from star to star."

Abaddon appeared quite surprised. "Yes. Yes, it still takes a long time for us to travel between stars. Depending on the distance, a thousand years or so. The speed of light is still as much a barrier to us as it is to you. For that reason, it was little hardship, once I arrived here, to spend further thousands of years initiating a systematic and scientific system for examining the Abyss."

"So the Abyss was built by someone else."

Abaddon's suit of clothes looked to the heavens and blew its breath out through pursed lips. "I freely admit that neither I, nor any member of my race, has any inkling how to build such a thing as the Abyss."

"Is this Abyss the only one? Or are there others?"

"Far from it. Thousands exist. And always on planets inhabited by intelligent species."

"So there are other intelligent species in the universe."

Abaddon fixed Percival with a camply offended stare. "May I take that to mean that you don't consider my species intelligent?"

"I consider you intelligent. That doesn't mean I consider you warm and fuzzy. I have spent the last few months in a spider pit at your leisure, after all."

The stare hardened. "Yes. Curious. After such a spell in the pit, most of your species scream as soon as they see me."

Percival tried to stop his heart racing, suspecting his interrogator was aware of it. "Why should a man who knows his tissues will grow back fear torture?"

"Agreed." Abaddon smiled angelically. "But many do not share your facility for applying logic to situations where their own eyelids are being peeled away."

"I don't want to go back in the spider pit, believe me."

The creature smiled. "Excellent. Well, on that we are agreed. It will not, I think, be necessary to put you back there. I was not exactly sure of the stuff parfit gentil knights are made of, but I must say, you have opened my eyes. A sterling performance. Defeating an opponent and then sparing him at the cost of your own pain and suffering. Greater love hath no man and so forth. And all my courtiers agree with me. Bertilak agrees with me. I have my ways of hearing of these little personal conversations, you see. I believe you think of me as your enemy?"

Percival felt cold nausea rising in him. He thought carefully before replying. "I can hardly be blamed for it. You have had me killed, many times over, in many ways."

"Quite, quite. But I have not killed you permanently. I have, in actual fact, as you can plainly see, killed very few people permanently. Whereas your own species' scientists care little for the lives of their own laboratory animals, I exhibit a modicum of compassion for my own. And the aim here is progress. The expansion of scientific thought. The pursuit of truth. The exploration of the unknown. How can you not feel a spark within you at that prospect?"

"Why is it necessary, in the pursuit of scientific truth, to have me hacked to pieces in a hundred different ways?"

Abaddon examined his hands. They were, after all, probably alien appendages to him. "It may be. It may not. Frankly, my intellectual creativity is at a low ebb. I have been attempting to devise methods of threading you creatures through this particular needle's eye for the past few thousand years."

Percival realized suddenly that he could feel a cold breeze on his skin. He looked up, and felt dizzy.

There was no artificial sky above his head this time, but a succession of balconies and turrets piled one on top of another seemingly ad infinitum; arches that were gothic, romanesque, corbelled, turkish; gargoyles, guttering, flying buttressing, stone capitals in the shapes of elves and demons, prophets and saints, incubi and succubi. Percival was certain he saw a giant Mickey Mouse executed in marble on one distant pilaster.

He looked down, to see a sea of stone mosaic-work picked out in ocean blue and wavecrest white, depicting sea dragons, merpersons and tritons. At the edges of his vision, nightlights burned dully, illuminating stone balustrades that he was certain separated him from a long drop into infinity.

"Isn't it dangerous", he said, "building here, under the drop?"

"The Abyss drops vertically down only onto Lake Cocytus, which makes a useful trap for debris falling from above - indeed, the lake was constructed precisely for that purpose. Human debris in particular - it is difficult to resurrect a body that is painted across the rocks in a layer thin as toilet paper. Broken backs and shattered skulls we can deal with. Liquefaction we cannot."

"So we're under an overhang", said Percival. "Like the City."

"Better than an overhang. The Abyss, at this point, changes direction entirely, feeding from one shaft into a new one several hundred metres to the west. When I first came here, Cocytus was a great waterfall, a torrent into a which a river of groundwater thousands of kilometres high was draining. I dammed that torrent and pacified it, making a lake of a glissade, and built my city in the space above the second shaft. There is nothing above us but a thousand kilometres of rock, a roof which I make sure is reinforced constantly by processes I am certain you would describe as 'nanotechnological'."

One feature of the balcony, now Percival's eyes were accustoming themselves to the dark, stood out more than any other. There was a Rolls Royce parked on it.

The Rolls was a cabriolet in silver, with a black leather interior. The dash was of some variety of wood, though darker than the standard Rolls walnut, if there could be said to be such a thing as a standard Rolls. Rather than the drab metallic grey soup most car manufacturers described as silver, however, this car truly was silver. Leonardo da Vinci could have written his notes in it. And it was clearly a Rolls. The Spirit of Ecstasy was clearly visible on its bonnet.

"You seem to have a car", said Percival.

"Indeed", nodded Abaddon. "It'll have to go back, though. The speedometer sticks at 100."

Attempting to imagine where, in the Abyss, Abaddon could get a Rolls up to 100, Percival floundered for further conversation. "It's very nice", he said.

"Aside from the speedometer, yes. It's only recently arrived. My agent has been dealing with the manufacturers for quite some time."

"Your agent."

"Just so. I am usually too busy to leave here, so I am forced to deal through intermediaries. Humans normally suffice. I believe that will be one now."

Percival heard the unmistakable sound of an electric bell to his left, glanced in that direction, and saw, above an ornate wrought iron doorway set into the wall, coloured lights counting down in sequence behind the stained glass in the gothic arch that crowned the door.

"It's an elevator", said Percival in amazement.

"The progression of the lights is logarithmic", explained Abaddon. "Otherwise we'd need so many lights, you see."

The wrought iron doors slid and folded aside into the stonework, and a middle-aged man walked out, folding a copy of the New York Times. He was quite the picture of the City gent, wearing a pinstriped, double-breasted three-piece and a silver pocket watch tucked into his inside pocket which he briefly consulted before raising his hat (a red-banded Homburg) and bowing to both Percival and Abaddon.

"Sir's purchases", he explained, "have arrived."

The elevator was filled with boxes of a variety of shapes and sizes, bearing labels ranging from HARROD'S OF KNIGHTSBRIDGE through BLOOMINGDALE'S down to NEUHAUS VAN BELGIE, whose labels adorned a small stack of shoebox-sized packages tied with green and gold ribbon.

"I simply can't do without their butterscotch gianduja", explained Abaddon guiltily. "In this respect, I freely acknowledge human technology to be far superior to that of my own species."

Percival peered through the wrought iron doors. "Is that really an elevator?"

"All you need to know is that it starts here and terminates in the world above." Abaddon snapped his fingers irritably, and his minion surrendered up the New York Times. "I trust all free-standing inserts have been removed?"

"Removed and burned, Milord. I have also paid for several of the inserters to be hunted down by professional assassins."

"Excellent." The demon unfolded the paper with the care of Casanova unpeeling a nun's labia. "Ah, history proceeds apace. I see Fiji has appointed its first woman prime minister."

Percival, meanwhile, was staring fixedly at the headline written in uncustomarily large letters across the Times's cover.

NUCLEAR STANDOFF

Bullets points sat underneath in relatively sedate 18-point bold:

IRANIAN AND PAKISTANI FORCES ON FULL ALERT
IRAN REFUSES TO WITHDRAW FROM HERAT
INDIA THREATENS WAR WITH PAKISTAN - 'WILL NOT RULE OUT NUCLEAR CONFLICT' IF PAKISTANI FIRST USE OF NUKES VS. IRAN
CHINA THREATENS PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR RETALIATION ON INDIA
CHINESE PRESIDENT: CHINA 'HAS FILLED' US-CHINESE ORBITAL COBALT BOMB GAP

At the foot of the page was a small, ominous addendum:

UKRAINE THREATENS WAR WITH JAPAN.

"I imagine", said the suited gentleman, making jolly conversation, "that a radiation suit of some description would be in order for my next visit to the surface."

"Oh, I'm not entirely sure that will be necessary", said Abaddon pleasantly, turning the pages. "I see here a man has decapitated a foetus and called it art in Switzerland."

"Not necessary to wear a radiation suit?" said the gentleman.

"Not necessary to make another visit to the surface", said Abaddon.

He looked up suddenly from the paper and noticed Percival's continued presence.

"Ah, yes. You, of course. You'll be pleased to know you've qualified for participation in our exclusive new Abyssonaut programme. The very highest levels of training and physical fitness will be expected. Report to Du Mont Des Chênes in the Aerial Contraption Bay first thing tomorrow."

He clicked his fingers, and Percival died. He was becoming used to resurrection by this time, and managed to at least maintain the illusion that he had stayed on his feet throughout the whole process.

When he came back to life, he was swaying unsteadily at the base of the stairs in the Eternal Wandering Inn of the Damned. Kane and Ahasuerus were staring at him in concern over their ethyl alcohol. Percival realized he was still goggling in fear, but didn't bother to correct the expression. It was appropriate.

"We haven't much time", he said.

***

The stairs seemed to wind down interminably. Percival knew he was in the lower extents of the Bridge now, as the walls had become, not stone, but steel. Down here, the illusion of being in some feudal lord's demesne vanished as hard technological necessity broke through. These rooms were suspended directly underneath the Bridge, and could not be made of stone. Stone could not be made to bear loads in tension. Steel could.

"I never knew you built Milord's flying machines for him."

Du Mont des Chênes scoffed aristocratically. "Who else would? Does anyone else down here have aeronautical experience, including yourself? Of course not. Of course, the main thrust of my aerial career has been in montgolfières, but the principles are similar -"

"No they're not, they're entirely different. How can a balloon be similar to a fixed-wing aircraft?"

"They are both flying machines suspended by the pressure of air." Du Mont des Chênes finally pushed open an iron-bound door, which creaked with appropriate menace and opened into a room far larger than anything Percival had expected.

He realized immediately that there could be nothing else on this floor. The walls, after all, sloped sharply inwards on all sides. This room had to be right at the very tip of the Bridge's downward taper.

The Flight Deck was floored with steel, and a mesh of support cables twined around its walls like the wire spokes of a 1960's car. Strewn around it were flying machines of unimaginable variety. There were devices built on clearly man-made principles, and vehicles that looked to be propelled by techniques totally unknown to Percival. There were rocketplanes, helicopters, gyrocopters, ornithopters, turbojets, and piston-engined pull-pushes. Bizarrely, one of the fleet was a Westland Lysander, perfect right down to the black-and-white Operation Overlord stripes at its wing roots.

"Milord passed through a phase of favouring terrestrial designers", grumped Du Mont des Chênes. "All of these are prototypes he became bored with. Hundreds more have actually flown, but of course, the ones that fly never return." He walked over to a draughtsman's table and flicked an ON switch on its upper surface. "You'll be flying two weeks from today."

Percival walked along the lines of aerial contraptions, running his hand along struts and flaps and leading edges. "You know what all of this means, don't you?"

Du Mont des Chênes nodded. "Many of these machines can't glide. They'd be too unstable to fly without power. That means, unless Milord intended their pilots to get to the target in a vertical dive, that he thinks the bottom of the Abyss is close. Very close. By my calculations, no more than one hundred kilometres' vertical distance." He activated several controls on the draughtsman's table, which appeared to be computerised, and a stream of algebra, punctuated by very little non-symbolic data, filled the display. Percival was impressed. Despite coming from a supposedly backward century, the little Frenchman possessed far more mathematics than Percival.

"A man could fall that far", said Du Mont des Chênes, "if he did not mind dying on impact." He stared into the coloured display forlornly. "I am amazed that Milord can create even such wonders as this magic box."

Percival scoffed. "We, my people, your people, upstairs in the Real World, could manufacture such a thing."

Du Mont des Chênes' jaw dropped. "Vraiment?"

"Our latest models are rather smaller, I think, and also run better. That big box looks like it's putting out a great deal of heat. Milord probably swiped it from one of our design houses on the surface in the 1990's, and hasn't yet got around to swiping a replacement. These days, our technology moves very fast -"

He stopped dead suddenly.

"Jesus."

Du Mont des Chênes blinked huge, soulful eyes. "I beg your pardon?"

"That's why he's giving up on us. We're becoming too technologically sophisticated. We've reached a level where we've grown too dangerous. He's an explorer, right? An explorer from a not particularly pleasant species, if his species can be judged from his own actions. They wouldn't be going out into the wastes of space to extend the tentacle of friendship. They'd be exploiters, developers, pioneers, and just as with the Old Western pioneers, it'd be curtains for any other races who got in their way."

"I don't follow your meaning."

"Abaddon sees us as lab rats. Lab rats are useful creatures. Feral rats of the same species, meanwhile, are pests. The only thing that separates the two is that lab rats are under control. If humanity becomes too technologically advanced to be easily controlled, Abaddon will destroy us. We will present too great a threat. He has to balance our usefulness as experimental animals against the hazard presented by our species as a whole."

Du Mont des Chênes looked down at the draughtsman's table. "So the fact that we can manufacture such things as this, he regards as...dangerous?"

"I'm sure of it. Though of course he probably still considers that box to be as quaint as he does the horse-drawn carriages he rides around in."

"Rides?" Du Mont des Chênes frowned. "Milord does not ride. He is never seen outside his quarter of the Bridge. Some of the older ones among us think the Bridge is the source of his power. But that is mere superstition, of course."

"Maybe not", said Percival. "To control a body, to take charge of every single nerve ending, that involves a terrific amount of information exchange. Abaddon has already told us he puts the human bodies he uses on and off like a suit of clothes. This implies he has a real body somewhere, and must communicate with the host bodies somehow. And as there are no massive coils of fibre optics sticking out of his backside, that means of communication must be wireless. He might be using nothing more advanced than radio."

"What is radio?" said Du Mont des Chênes, so ingenuously that Percival believed he genuinely did not know.

"Erm - electromagnetic waves of a very low frequency", said Percival. "Used for communication. Greater distance from the sender, or obstacles in between the sender and receiver, would cause breakdowns in the transmission -"

"Oh, that." The little balloonist was almost contemptuous. "I think Milord has advanced beyond that. He uses gravity wave communication, which is unbothered by obstacles or distance."

Percival was surprised, but not knocked off his stride. "But the structure of the Abyss somehow alters time, makes time itself unreliable; we know that. And if time is unreliable, according to Einstein, gravity is too. The distortion effects are particularly pronounced the further one goes into the walls...therefore, that could mean the centre of the Abyss, the drop itself, might be the area least affected. And where has Milord taken great pains to build his castle?"

Du Mont des Chênes stared in alarm. "Directly in the centre of the gulf." He thought a moment. "This might allow him to communicate with others like him, out in space. It fits. It fits. The aircraft, we only ever communicate with the aircraft in this way, and they circle downwards, keeping a constant distance between themselves and the walls. There are no gravitic communications devices in use by Orphée and his henchmen, nor by the grooms and coachmen, nor in the village of Pandaemonium itself -"

Percival chuckled. "Pandaemonium? That's what you call it?"

Du Mont des Chênes grinned. "From the works of your Mr. Milton, yes." He gestured at the ungainly batwinged, steam-driven contraption now depicted on the draughtsman's display. "This will be your vehicle. It is entirely human-designed, by my own hand, with some borrowing from technologies unknown to scholars of my own time. But if what you say is true, such technologies might also have been shaped by men."

Percival nodded. "And women, in fact, nowadays."

The little Frenchman appeared to consider the possibility that his drawing board might have been made by a woman to be even more disturbing than its being made by aliens. He looked at Percival as if the latter had suggested furniture might talk.

"And of course, this is the device I will be flying when I make my descent into the Abyss", said Percival.

"Indubitably so. It is a cunning adaptation of Ader's Éole, the world's first man-powered flying machine." Du Mont des Chênes could hardly contain his pride. "A Frenchman."

"I take it you've never heard of Orville and Wilbur Wright."

"I have heard of them, and also heard that Clément Ader flew several years before them. Besides", added Du Mont des Chênes, adding the exordium to his argument, "Ader was French."

Percival stared hard at the tiny wings, the impossibly huge, impossibly weak engine, the complete lack of control surfaces. "In the event that it might not prove possible to use this device, is an alternative available?"

Du Mont des Chênes smiled. "I am appalled at your lack of confidence in my handiwork. However, such a thing might easily be created."

"I am thinking along more classical lines. Are you familiar with the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci?"

"Very much so. He was a master."

"I am very much interested in a device he sketched, but never actually produced. As with so many of his concepts, it came true only in the twentieth century. I think you know the one I mean."

Du Mont des Chênes nodded. "We discussed it earlier, I believe. We can build it. Though some of the materials may be difficult to source."

The lines of the Éole drew geometric designs on Percival's expression, making it difficult to read. "Do so. We might need it. You never know."

"Agreed. You never know."

***
Percival was exhausted.

The mediaeval flight simulator dreamed up by Du Mont des Chênes possessed no powered controls, and the machine's stubby wings had made it necessary to heave on the rudimentary set of wheels and levers that controlled them with all of the weight a flying man was supposed not to possess. His muscles ached even harder than they would have if he had been shovelling horse exhaust in Etzel's stables.

But now, the cuckoo skull had declared it to be nightfall underground, and the inhabitants of Hell were wending their way back towards the places where it was currently their habit to sleep. It had been a long journey down from the downward tip of the Bridge, although this time Milord had laid on transport and female companionship for the journey. Percival had been too tired to care about the putative charms of the woman he had ridden with, a Wallachian princess who had hurled herself into the pit in the sixteenth century rather than submit to be an item in a Padishah's harem. At one point, while she had been brightly making conversation (no doubt under instruction to do so), he had actually told her to shut up. You are not my wife. How dare you? I am a married man!

Now, he was on the main street of Pandaemonium again, one member of the infernal multitude. He was hailed by Kane and Ahasuerus, who, for a pair of sworn mortal enemies, were remarkably inseparable.

"Coming for a swift one after work?" said Kane.

"Why not", said Percival. "Not many days now until I spot the rock with my corpse, and the sainted Vladimir is proved horribly wrong."

"Or", said Kane with unaccustomed optimism, "surprisingly right. He was right about many things, was Vlad. Gave me fair warning I was going to be canonized third time around. Made darned sure I died before that happened, I can tell you."

Swinging in the impossible wind above the door - where could any wind come from, underground? - was a sign in no language.

“Just like a pub sign”, said Percival.

Kane shrugged. “This is a pub”, he said, using the Latin word, taberna. Percival seemed to remember from somewhere that pub signs had originally had no written components, as most of the European population had been illiterate. This sign, however, was recent, as it was a single battered slice of aluminium on which someone had once stencilled a Nazi swastika.

"Me and Ahasuerus dredged it up from Cocytus night before last", said Kane proudly. "Part of your ride, I fancy."

“A V2 fin”, said Percival. “As a sign for a pub.”

“A little pub”, said Kane, grinning. “A tabernaculum. Lord, who shall dwell in thy little pub.”

“I would have thought”, said Percival, “that all that stuff was after your time.”

“I wrote a lot of that stuff”, said Kane. “At various intervals. Who do you think that guy they pulled off the cross was?”

“Always”, said Ahasuerus in consternation. “Always he says this. He was taller than you, meshuggineh! And I saw him die, and no change came upon him!”

“I was cataleptic”, complained Kane.

“The centurion thrust a lance through his side as a mercy stroke! He was a professional soldier! He knew where the bloody heart was!”

Percival felt his stomach turning. “As a Christian, I find this”, he said, “an unacceptable subject for conversation.”

“Oh, you do?” said Kane. “I’m the one who couldn’t drink water with his hands for ten minutes afterwards, my lad. How’d’you think I feel?”

“I’m an ordained priest of the Church of England”, said Percival pointedly.

“Look, it all just happened”, said Kane indignantly. “What do you want, an apology?”

“Stop it.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry they nailed me to a board. I’m sorry I made a big deal out of busting back out of the tomb. I’m sorry I yelled ‘SURPRISE!!!’ I was not in the best of sorts at the time. Since then I have tried to be discreet about reincarnating in public - I don’t want any more major monotheistic religions in my name, that’s for certain -“

Kane was cut off in mid-sentence as Percival’s hands locked onto his throat. He recognized the light in Percival’s eyes, and did not struggle. Knocked clean off his feet by a flying leap, he allowed Percival to bang his head against the ground repeatedly in the name of God, yelling obscenities interspersed with well-informed theological argument. There was blood.

“Gertcha! Get in there, you bastard!” yelled Ahasuerus from a safe distance. “Serve you bloody right for killing me, you swine!”

Percival blinked, gasped, stopped strangling Kane and saw Kane’s throat begin to glow with an emerald radiance in his hands. He relaxed his grip and sat back. Kane began to gulp in air. He sat up, breathing heavily, though Percival was breathing even harder. Kane did not bother to rub his throat.

“Lord”, he said. “But that was nasty. What did I ever do to you?”

Percival swallowed hard. “The Crusades, the Great Schism, the Western Schism, Spanish Inquisition, the Persecution of the Christians, the Thirty Years’ War, the Spanish Armada, the Reconquista, smallpox-infected blankets, the Teutonic Knights, and the Jonestown Massacre. Among other things.”

“I rather feel”, said Kane, “that you people did those things to yourselves.” He rose to his feet and dusted himself off. “I didn’t realize you were so touchy on the subject.” He examined his hands as if to check they were still there.

"I apologize", said Percival.

"Good lad, excellent manners. Who taught you to forgive those who trespass against you?"

"You did." Percival sat back with his spine against one of the support pillars of the Skull Clock. "What is anything for any longer?"

"Beats me, lad", said Kane, pulling out a suspiciously multicoloured handkerchief and blowing. "Strikes me that all there is left of what I believed in as a boy is my tribe versus your tribe, my folk against everyone else's. The human race against Milord's."

"Is that what they taught you when you were a boy?"

"That and that eating the foreskin of your enemy made powerful juju." He thought about this a moment. "Of course, the scribes and pharisees have corrupted this original message over time. On the subject of Us Against Them, though, lad, we've someone we'd like you to meet. The most dangerous man in history. Apart from you, I suppose." He rose unsteadily to his feet.

Percival looked up at Kane. "Did you really mean all that you said?"

"What, about being Christ? Most certainly. You get a great view up there on the Rood. That's the only fringe benefit, and you're not in much of a mood to enjoy it -"

"No. I mean all that you said about Blessed Are the Peacemakers, Blessed Are The Meek, and so forth."

Kane thought about this a moment.

"Yes", he said finally. "Yes. At the time, I did."

"Then all of it matters", said Percival. "That's why you're down here, along with the man who killed you. This Abyss isn't any sort of scientific experiment, Kane. It's a doorway. A doorway to places ruled by another species far more advanced than we are. You know what Milord says about there being other Abysses in the universe. That's why Abaddon's people are so frustrated. Everywhere, they can see doors opening outwards, and all the doors are closed to them."

Kane held out a hand to help Percival to his feet. "You're talking stuff, lad. Why would the doors be closed?"

"If you lived in the Serengeti, would you put a crocodile-flap in your door? The people who built this place realize that there are races out there who are users, conquerors, exploiters, attackers. They don't want anything to do with such people. But they do want something to do with races like themselves. Races who are compassionate, merciful, great and good, all the things you wanted the world to be when you stood up and made the Sermon on the Mount, and don't pretend that isn't what you were trying to do."

Kane hung his head shamefacedly.

"The Abyss", said Percival, "is somehow able to sense those qualities in our minds. Abaddon knows he can't force his way through the Abyss - no doubt he knows that wherever his people have tried it, they have failed. That's why he's forced to use us. We're his sheep's clothing. But it's by no means certain that we'll ever break through the barrier of the Abyss ourselves. What we've got to do", said Percival, "is prove to the beings who built this place that we are worth the bother. And somehow do it without allowing Abaddon's infection to break through to the other side with us." He held up his hands, stared at their palms, reversed them, stared at their backs. "No doubt we're all swarming with spy devices. Possibly even self destruct machinery, in case we break through and squeal on Abaddon's people to the big boys."

Kane leaned back against one of the Skull Clock's supports. "But you've neglected a number of important facts." He counted the Important Facts off on his palm. "First, the creators of the Abyss might have a different conception of what is great and good. To a species evolved from a praying mantis, the most beautiful act a human being could perform might be to bite off the head of its partner. Secondly, the Abyss builders might not be around any longer - some other species like Abaddon's might have crawled down one of their Abysses and killed them all. And thirdly", he said, inhaling darkly, "all of this might just be a big trick. Only ever deal with the meek and mild among other species, not those capable of defending themselves."

"I am", said Percival, "capable of defending myself. I only recently started and won a war."

Kane nodded, taking in the argument. "And you fought against Bertilak well enough."

"And you're capable of defending yourself. You're capable of killing, if the Book of Genesis is to be believed. And if you're to be believed, you turned the moneychangers out of the temple."

"There were sound theological and geopolitical reasons for that", said Kane defensively. "Mind you, I was also in the van of our equites when they swept down on the Saes at the Battle of Badon. Speaking of which", he said, "we still have an appointment later this evening with one might help us in our cause."

Percival nodded. "But first, I need to commandeer another vehicle; one with oars rather than wings. We have investigations to conduct, you and I."

Kane extended a hand. Percival took it. If stigmata had ever existed in the palms, they had long since healed.

***

The sweeps were hitting stone now, becoming stubby puntpoles rather than oars. The roar of water in the plunge pool was deafening. To fall in would be certain death, if one were capable of dying. Only the steady pressure of thousands of tonnes of water spreading out around the point of constant impact held the boat away from the surfaceless white maelstrom at the pool's centre, which had an interface between air and water as clearly defined as that between air and albumen in an egg whisk.

But there was rock here, megatons of it - and the rock stayed put. Percival slipped one of Laszlo's makeshift nuts into a crack, and the jerry-forged alloy held. A swift loop around one of the cleats on the gunwale, and the boat was fast.

"YOU'RE INSANE", yelled Kane. "HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT IT'S LIKE TO DROWN IN HERE? I'VE DONE IT. THE ANIMALCULES KEEP TRYING TO REBUILD YOU, BUT YOU'RE STILL UNDERWATER. SO YOU KEEP DROWNING." He scanned the dark around him with trepidation. "THERE COULD BE FOLKS IN HERE HAVE BEEN DROWNING LONGER'N I'VE BEEN LIVING. WATCH YOUR STEP."

"THEY SAY - DROWNING - IS A PLEASURABLE DEATH", said Percival, spreading his arms out wide to span a blank slab of abyssite and haul himself out of the boat.

"DON'T YOU BELIEVE 'EM. IT'S HELL UNDERWATER. I DON'T SEE WHY IT'S SO ALL-FIRED IMPORTANT WE DEAL WITH ABADDON NOW."

"I SAW THE HEADLINES ON HIS COPY OF THE TIMES. THERE'S ONLY THIRTY DAYS TO GO BEFORE INDIA LAUNCHES A NUCLEAR ATTACK ON CHINA. AND THIRTY DAYS", he added, "COULD BE ANY AMOUNT OF TIME DOWN HERE."

"BUT THERE'S BEEN NUCLEAR WARS BEFORE", complained Kane. "THERE WAS THAT ONE BACK IN 1945-AFTER-ME. AND DON'T GO SAYING IT WASN'T A NUCLEAR WAR JUST BECAUSE IT WAS YOUR SIDE THAT WON IT."

"ARE YOU COMING UP HERE OR NOT? YOU'RE QUITE CAPABLE OF CLIMBING UP HERE, AND DON'T PRETEND YOU AREN'T. THERE'S FOLK UPSTAIRS NEED US."

"THE FOLK UPSTAIRS", said Kane, "FORGOT ME FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO."

"THE FOLK UPSTAIRS HAVE SPENT THE LAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS BURNING EACH OTHER AT THE STAKE OVER STUFF YOU MADE UP AS A JOKE, KANE. GET ON THE ROCK."

Shamefacedly, mankind's alleged saviour clambered out of the boat and applied himself to the face.

"ONE THING I NEVER UNDERSTOOD", puffed Percival as he picked his way around the great arch out of which the waterfall poured, "IF ADAM AND EVE GAVE BIRTH TO YOU AND ABEL, AND YOU KILLED ABEL, WHO SLEPT WITH WHO TO PROPAGATE THE HUMAN RACE?"

"STOW IT, CHRISTIAN BOY", grumbled Kane. "I'VE HEARD THAT ONE BEFORE."

"MOTHERFUCKER", grinned Percival gleefully.

"LOOK, THERE WEREN'T TOO MANY FOLK AROUND", said Kane. "WE'D ONLY JUST WALKED OUT OF AFRICA. IT WAS NORMAL IN THOSE DAYS. YOU CAN'T JUST APPLY YOUR JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN MORALITY - WHICH, BY THE WAY, I INVENTED - TO MY OWN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES."

"DID YOU DO IT STRAIGHT AWAY, OR DID IT TAKE A LONG TIME?"

"I TRIED TO AVOID IT. I REALLY DID. I WANDERED AROUND EUROPE SLEEPING WITH NEANDERTHALS. THE PROOF IS THERE IN THE FOSSIL RECORD. BUT EVENTUALLY I HAD TO GO WITH MY OWN KIND, AND MOM WAS THE ONLY ONE AVAILABLE."

"I ALWAYS KNEW HUMANITY OUTSIDE AFRICA WAS THE PRODUCT OF A LIMITED GENE POOL", wheezed Percival, inching along a ledge felt rather than seen. "WATCH YOUR STEP...I'M PUTTING IN A NUT HERE."

The makeshift head torch, cobbled together from V2 parts, lit up virtually nothing. The dark was deafening. The water level could only be felt, but Percival suspected that if he put a foot in the current, it wouldn't touch the bottom before being swept away.

They continued to climb into the dark. The waterfall eventually exited from a ragged alcove one thousand metres above pool level. The distance roof-to-water was almost too slim to slide between, the distance between the walls too great to span with feet and hands. Percival had only a handful of makeshift climbing aids, and if the tunnel went too far back, it wouldn't be enough.

But the roar was altering in volume, deeper, a cacophany of echoes rather than a steady yell. The sound of a thousand watercourses fighting to escape containment.

Percival scrabbled in his pocket for the twist of paper that contained a soft tar-coated fragment that had been cooked up in Du Mont des Chênes' perplexity of pipework at one of the rare times the pipework hadn't been cooking up methanol. It did not look like what Du Mont des Chênes had said it was.

He scuffed it on a wet outcrop. The Frenchman had said it was an alkali metal, that it would react with water. It flared dully in the dark; Percival could hardly see it, though he could feel the heat from it.

Then it flared so bright it stopped him seeing anything else.

The chamber he was in was huge, the size of a cathedral, or at the very least a campanile. On every side, at every elevation, water was gushing from the walls, white as milk on coal. Inches from his eyes, water was swirling around in the base of the chamber, so swiftly that it seemed almost to be a solid floor. The currents underneath that surface would be fearsome.

Kane's head poked out of the waterfall aperture.

"AMAZING", he yelled. "HAVEN'T SEEN CAVE SCENERY LIKE THIS SINCE A WHOLE BUNCH OF KRAPINA CHICKS TOOK ME BACK TO THEIR PLACE. COURSE, WHEN NEANDERTHAL WOMEN WANT A PIECE OF BIBLICAL PATRIARCH, THEY DON'T TAKE 'HNGGK' FOR AN ANSWER, THEY WEIGH OVER A HUNDRED KILOS. THREW ME ABOUT LIKE A SODDEN RAG, THEY DID. I WAS USED FOR MY JUICES...HEY, YOU LISTENING?"

The magnesium flare - it had to be magnesium, could not be anything else - quailed and died. Now Percival was just hanging from a wet wall in the dark.

"DID YOU SEE IT?" yelled Percival.

"PERFECTLY CIRCULAR HOLE IN THE WALL, BIG ENOUGH TO DRIVE A SUBMARINE DOWN? YUP. DIDN'T GET CARVED BY ANY WATER ACTION."

"THEY HAD TO DO THE SAME WHEN THEY BUILT THE HOOVER DAM. COULDN'T VERY WELL BUILD A BIG OLD DAM WHILE THERE WAS A SQUILLION TONS OF WATER RUNNING THROUGH IT. AND ABADDON COULDN'T BUILD HIS MOLE WHILE THERE WAS A CRYPTO-RIVER THE SIZE OF THE MISSISSIPPI DRAINING INTO IT. THEREFORE, HE HAD TO BUILD AN ALTERNATIVE WATERCOURSE. AND WHEN HE FINISHED BUILDING THE MOLE, HE REDIVERTED THE WATER. HE HAD NO NEED OF IT ANY MORE. I KNEW IT HAD TO BE HERE. IT'S BEEN HERE ALL THIS TIME, KEPT HIGH AND DRY, TO KEEP THE WATER TOPPING UP COCYTUS."

Percival clambered up the edge of a waterfall he couldn't see, glad he had no way of knowing how far he had to fall and what he would be falling into. Eventually, his hand fell on a hold so regular it could only be machined, heaved himself up, and sat perfectly dry in an aperture he knew to be circular, which was so large it felt horizontal. Behind him, Kane struggled up the rock in a series of strangled gasps.

"IN HERE, WE'RE IN A HOLE WORN BY WATER INTO THE SKIN OF THE ABYSS ITSELF. MILORD'S COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS WILL NOT PENETRATE THE WALLS, AND NEITHER WILL RADIO. WE COULD BUILD ANYTHING IN HERE. SMELT ANY METAL. BUILD ANY FLYING MACHINE, FORGE ANY WEAPON, SEW TOGETHER ANY MONTGOLFIÈRE. AND MILORD WOULD NEVER KNOW."

Percival stared down into the dark, imagining he could see the waters thundering.

"WE HAVE OUR BASE OF OPERATIONS."

***

"Your Majesty."

"Your Grand Wizardry."

Cold blue eyes flickered round the crumbling walls of the Eternal Wandering Inn Of The Damned. "I see your habitat hasn't improved."

Kane grinned. The grin was false. "We heal. The walls don't. And building materials are hard to come by."

A hand straightened an errant cuff back to knife-sharpness. "Still, it wouldn't hurt to slap some plaster on every thousand years or so."

"We need a favour", said Kane.

"The last favour you did me", said the bloodless lips, "was to give me immortality. Imprisoning me in this tower of air."

"I needed you", said Kane. "I still do. The world needs men of your stripe, and you are too good to be allowed to die. The poison that witch administered to you would have killed you eventually, and I would have lost a trusted lieutenant and friend. It took many months to have you carried to the edge of the Abyss, through a Europe overrun by pagan tribes -"

"Nimue was working for you, Kane", said the man in the smart suit. "No poison takes that long to work. You were trying to fool me into thinking you were doing me a favour. I spent too long helping you maintain your futile little outpost of an alien empire." Percival noticed the suited man was actually carefully sitting on a square of handkerchief, preventing his expensively tailored buttocks from having to come into contact with the chair. "And the Saxons won anyway. The Saxons always will. Move with the times, not against them. Can't you see Abaddon's people are our natural rulers?" He toyed with his buttonhole, a real variegated carnation that had grown under actual sunlight. Denizens of the bar were staring at it hungrily.

"Abaddon's people", interrupted Percival, "are our natural predators. Once we have broken the code to the Abyss for them, they will shoot us like the surface people shot all the horses once motor cars became freely available."

The eyes swivelled round to take in Percival.

"This, I take it, is the creature who is going to save our souls. Milord finds the prophecy quite amusing."

Kane's teeth were actually gritted together. "Milord wants the prophecy to come true so badly he can taste it, and you know it. Now, we have a requirement, and you are the only one who can fill it."

"I know what you're talking about. I also know that I hate hauling the stuff. I take it you want a critical mass of it."

"If one can be provided. You've lugged enough of the material for Milord in your time."

The blue eyes dropped guiltily. "Milord is attempting to accelerate the military development of the human world to a pace inadvisably faster than its social evolution."

"If mankind develops any more weapons that use the stuff", said Percival, "there will be no mankind any longer."

A hand raised the immaculate hat; another hand scratched the skull beneath it, asif in consternation. Then it turned its palm over, showering its contents to Kane, Ahasuerus and Percival. The palm was full of massive flakes of scalp, many with hairs still attached.

"The damage it does doesn't heal, Kane. Not easily. It sends Abaddon's animalcules in my blood crazy. Given time, the beasties repair themselves and me, but time is required, sometimes months of it. I don't like handling the stuff, even though Milord currently has me shipping covert cartloads of it all the way round the Third World. Zimbabwe gets its own bomb on Tuesday, and I'd never even heard of the place until an hour ago."

"It used to be called Rhodesia", said Percival.

"Goodness gracious me! Those white supremacists, with bombs? Lug and Mithra preserve us."

"It is because the radiant metal kills", said Kane carefully, "that we want it. Milord's rejuvenating technology is not capable of dealing with it reliably."

The blue eyes blinked, stunned. "But it could kill all of us!"

"Precisely. It could kill all or any of the folk of Milord's kingdom. It might even kill you."

The man in the sharp suit considered this.

"I see your point", he said. "When do you want it?"

6: Thin Man

"IT'LL NEVER CARRY THE PAYLOAD", yelled Kane, striding in out of the dark. His throat was glowing faintly emerald, and his voice gurgled slightly. He coughed up a gulletful of blood and spat into Du Mont des Chênes' furnace mouth. Emerald glittered unmistakably in the flames as nanoparticles boiled.

"You've cut your throat again, Kane", said Laszlo disapprovingly. With a minute circle of smoked glass screwed into one eye, he was welding the aluminium skin onto Thin Man with an electric arc gun powered by a turbine in the forge chimney. The wires connecting gun to dynamo to turbine were insulated by nothing more than greased sheaths of parchment, and Percival, sitting hunched and shivering by the furnace door, had already seen him electrocute himself several times.

"I was feeling the cold", said Kane. "Been bussing collaborators up to the Bridge and back all day." He winked at Percival. "They're preparing for your great sendoff. There's going to be a party."

Percival shot Kane an acidic glance.

"Don't be like that", said Kane. "The Franj's wind tunnel is the only viable method of testing an aircraft before launch."

"In my experience of wind tunnel testing", shuddered Percival, "which is admittedly limited, it is not considered necessary for the pilot to be in the machine during the test process. So they're going to have a party to celebrate me being spread thinly over the rocks a hundred miles down, are they?"

"There is going to be cake", said Kane, patting the warm, recently welded seams of Thin Man proudly. "And artful sugary confections created by Maxim's of Paris."

"I went to Maxim's for my honeymoon", said Percival sourly. "It is overrated. As are devices such as that. They're just another weapon. There's always a countermeasure to any weapon, no matter what its kilotonnage."

"Tush and hush! You never know who might be listening." Kane looked across the room at the massive wooden frame, inside which two immaculately upholstered leather seats opposed each other around a central spindle. "It'll never fly. Power-to-weight ratio. Leonardo had the same problem."

"We've increased the size of the props", said Laszlo. "And it doesn't need to fly, only autorotate. It's downhill all the way from here, remember."

"What happens when he gets to the midpoint?" said Kane. "He going to get out and walk uphill all the rest of the way?" Inside the furnace, combustible substances bubbled and crackled. The wind underground drew the flame up the chimney, raising it to a man's height for a second and making the turbine whirr crazily, then died down.

"He only has to get there", said Laszlo. "Once there, he's out of Milord's sphere of influence."

"And inside someone else's", said Kane. "What makes you think whoever built this place is any nicer than Milord?"

"Because if they'd wanted to destroy us", said Laszlo, flattening the head on a rivet with a harder piece of steel, "they'd have done so millennia ago." Sparks spat out of the furnace, rolling across a floor covered with aluminium swarf. Some of the swarf, hit by some of the brighter sparks, dissolved into puddles of liquid metal. One of them hit Laszlo's arm, puffing flesh instantly into vapour. He ignored it, and his arm remade itself quietly whilst he worked on the rivet.

"Maybe they haven't got time to deal with every threat. Maybe they want advance warning of it. Maybe they only wipe out peoples who prove themselves technologically sophisticated enough to get through their tunnel system."

"Abaddon", said Laszlo, "is more technologically advanced than we are, and has not yet made it through. Ergo, ability to penetrate the Abyss is not based on technology." He wiped his hand across the smooth surface of the metal. "There."

"You don't need to do take such pains", said Kane. "We're not precision bombing. The target can hardly be missed."

Lazlo breathed on the polished surface of the aluminium, wiped it so he could see a blurry version of his face. "A craftsman must take pride in his work."

***

A week into his selection for the Abyssonaut programme, Percival found himself nursing a glass of red wine and making polite conversation on the subject of Aristotle with a lady. Moreover, he was almost certain the lady was real.

Her name, he gathered, was Zaeyo. She had been hurled into the pit as a sacrificial offering before the Roman Empire, by a people who had heard of neither Christ, Zoroaster, nor Mohammed. She found all three of these figures fascinating, and the concept of one all-powerful unknowable deity seemed to intrigue her in particular. For his part, Percival found himself intrigued by the manner in which her breasts moved under the thin fabric of her evening dress.

"But isn't the fact that the existence of your God can never be proven tantamount to a licence to tell whatever divine lies you please?" she said.

"It would be", said Percival, nodding furiously and realizing with horrible certainty that he was drunk, "if the Church were evil. But the Church is good."

Milord's social function occupied several floors of the Bridge. Gentlemen and gentlewomen of all historical ages had attended, and Milord's hospitality was lavish, extending even to the clothing worn by the participants. Du Mont des Chênes' napoleonic uniform glittered with gold braid. Laszlo was standing rapt in conversation with a tittering group of Greek noblewomen, the SS unit insignia on his dress tunic made nanotechnologically new. Ahasuerus, meanwhile, wearing a dinner jacket with a rather fetching scarlet cummberbund and fez, was talking to a set of Roman legionnaires, clearly drunk, whilst Kane appeared to be sporting some sort of South American generalissimo's outfit.

"Do you think your priests are any less evil than mine were? Mine had me dragged to the edge of a precipice and then thrown in to appease Hades." Zaeyo was speaking Latin out of deference to Percival, though he was certain she would have been happier with Greek, Macedonian Celt, or some language entirely unknown to present-day linguistics.

"Your priests were misguided", he said, fixing Abaddon with his eyes, "but correct about one thing - there are monsters to be appeased in Hell."

Her smile froze, and he knew, instantly, that he had restricted the remainder of the conversation to mindless pleasantry. No matter. At one time my entire existence was devoted to finding ways to worm my way between the thighs of creatures as beautiful as this. But now, here, with Milord controlling all such access quite deliberately in order to keep us poor human males in line, all that seems strangely irrelevant somehow -

(...Though she was as pretty as a spring morning after a long hard winter, and her smile as welcome as rain on the parched throat of a becalmed sailor...)

But you are not my wife.

Kane's head bobbed into view at Percival's shoulder. "Well spoken, lad. Here comes one of Milord's highest-ranking monsters now. Watch the elevator."

Percival realized suddenly that, for the last twenty minutes, he had been standing on the mosaic manhood of an immense naked Lord Neptune. He stepped off it hastily. But all around him, on the floor, people were still mingling amid mosaic nereids and tritons. He had been on this balcony before. And on the wall opposite him, in a fretted cage of wrought iron art nouveau lilies, a set of coloured lights was counting slowly and logarithmically down towards zero. He became aware that the crowd of partygoers around him were counting with it. He felt oddly as if he should be standing in Trafalgar Square at midnight, feeling as if he should be enjoying himself more than he actually was, watching the seconds count down on a cheap digital display towards a meaningless New Millennium.

"THREE - TWO -ONE - BASEMENT!"

The doors whooshed back into their invisible housings, and Milord's man had arrived. Still wearing the same old blue business suit, immaculately pressed, with creases sharp as razors, he raised his hat to the applauding multitude. There was no hair beneath the hat., and scales of scalp adhered to his hat like scales sloughing off a snake. Despite his smile, his eyes were sunk deep into his head, and red as blood.

Behind him, cherubim who were, surely, not real ran out of the elevator, their aerodynamically unfeasible white-plumed wings folded. Tiny glistering smoke rings of haloes ringed their angelically curled heads. Percival wondered how it had been done.

The cherubim were bearing gifts - presents chosen carefully for the crowd. One ran up to Laszlo and deposited a massive glass flagon of cold beer in his hand. Another ran to Du Mont des Chénes with a slim volume whose cover identified it as a work by Otto Von Lilienthal . A third trotted up to Zaeyo and pressed a filigree creation into her hands - a silver-and-gemstone dragonfly with fearsome compound eyes made out of motes of ruby. The thing would have been a diamanté creation even in Hollywood, but in this underworld, Percival was certain, every inch of it would be real corundum, real silver, real diamond. Zaeyo gasped as if in orgasm.

Everyone in the crowd received a gift. Percival saw Etzel, dressed as a Ruritanian generalissimo rather than a South American one, have a cowboy saddle in cordovan leather pressed into his green-gloved hands. Ahasuerus gratefully accepted a bling-encrusted hammer, along with three silver nails. He accepted these in very good grace indeed, and waggled them meaningfully in Kane's direction. Kane looked back coolly, igniting a Havana cigar with a jewelled lighter bearing the royal crest of Logres.

Bertilak's present, however, was the largest. As he stood, clearly identifiable by sheer size alone, a human island in the crowd, two cherubim scampered to him with a long parcel wrapped in fine silk, bowed, and departed. Bertilak looked down, nonplussed, and began slowly to peel the wrapping back from the gift. Metal shone as he did so - not the gaudy sheen of ceremonial silver, but the dull, businesslike glimmer of metal forged for a deadly purpose.

It was half out of its scabbard, tied round with lengths of decorative ribbon. The gigantic Persian tore at the ribbons in irritation, then gently eased the enormous blade, thick as a man's hand, out of its housing. The hilt was neither inlaid with precious stones nor carved from a single piece of ivory, but was made of a dull grey heavy metal wrapped round with steel cable. The sword was intended to be used.

Bertilak drew the full length of the weapon from the sheath, its immense weight causing even his hand to wobble and nearly taking an eye out of a chambermaid. But despite the fact that it was clearly a two-handed weapon, he was holding it in one. His grip spanned the greater part of a hilt clearly made to be held two-handed. The sword was as long as a tall man was high, the handle protected by heavy steel cross-bars. The single piece of ostentation was a silver plate fastened across the shearing-guard, showing an engraved scorpion, and bearing the inscription AND THEIR TORMENT WAS AS THE TORMENT OF A SCORPION, WHEN HE STRIKETH A MAN.

Bertilak turned, and his gaze struck out across the crowd, right into Percival's. He raised the weapon in one hand, above his head, and an expression of malignant triumph spread across his features.

Percival frowned, and inspected his drink in detail. A cherub flickered past him and settled at his feet. The creatures, on closer inspection, were not built like babies, but were as slight as monkeys; Percival wondered whether they might actually be capable of using their miniscule wings.

The cherub held out adorable little baby arms. Percival bent over to inspect what was cupped in the palms.

A St. Christopher's medallion in tasteful solid silver. He turned it over in his own palm and inspected it. On the reverse had been engraved, in microscopically machined letters:

WOULD THAT I COULD AFFORD SUCH LUXURIES AS A GOD; MAY YOURS GO WITH YOU.
A.

Percival gripped the medallion in a closed fist, looked up at Abaddon across a sea of faces, and nodded acknowledgement. Milord nodded back.

***

Warmth and light and noise surrounded him as he drifted away from the press of partygoers. Drunkard breath and garlic and expensive ladies' perfume mingled in a sweet sick cloud. Female faces (well-briefed, well-prepared) looked up and opened into grins filled with expensive teeth on seeing him. He was asked, "Do come over and give us the very latest on the world above", and enjoined, "No, you're ours now, we saw you first." But despite attempts by well-meaning hostesses to drag him back as the guest of honour, he escaped onto an isolated balcony where a lone stone naiad poured water endlessly into the gulf. He noticed a movement in the crowd behind him, where a man a head taller than anyone around him was threading his way through knots of brightly dressed immortals, heading gradually towards Percival's position.

Percival stepped back from the parapet, and made for a staircase winding down between turrets. He glanced back into the crowd; eyes met his, eyes that had urgent murder in them. He clattered down the staircase in new leather shoes; he heard feet behind him on the flagstones, moving faster than his own, taking steps a yard long two at a time. The mosaic at this point was of Athene with an owl perched on her shoulder, defeating a thuggish Ares. Despite its being a mosaic, the figures seemed to flow within it, motion in stone.

The footsteps behind him increased in number, drumming more complex rhythms on the marble. He did not look back again.

Percival quickened his own pace; the feet above him accelerated to catch up. The steps wound down to an outlying balcony held up by buttressing worked into the shape of an upthrust devil's claw, and down here was what he had been hurrying to reach.

Ruined.

The glass fibre rotors, moulded and fashioned with such care, had been hit again and again until they had starred and splintered and been rendered entirely unaerodynamic. The leather seats, carefully cured and triple-stitched by hand out of the skin of the man who had stitched them, had been slashed like the back seat of a bus ridden on by hooligans. The handles had been twisted away from their mounts, leaving only dangerously sharp stubs of splintered wood. The central spindle had been chopped into like a treetrunk by a woodfeller's axe.

Leonardo's helicopter, so carefully prepared under conditions of such extreme secrecy, was not going to fly. Not now, and possibly never.

The same heavy footsteps sounded on marble behind him. He turned to a hiss of escaping steel rather than steam, as two yards of swordblade slithered out of a scabbard and rose to the level of his eyes.

"IT IS TIME FOR A REMATCH, ENGLISHMAN."

Bertilak's right hand was holding the two-handed sword, whose point was quivering less in fatigue than in anger. The scorpion glittered on its shearing guard. The left hand threw a glittering ribbon of steel out to Percival, who caught it, by the blade. Blood congealed slowly round the leading edge of the sabre he had caught, pooling into blood grooves, oozing down towards the hilt.

Other footsteps were clattering out of the dark now, down staircases approaching from several directions. A crowd of partygoers followed a phalanx of Orpheus's bodyguards armed with weapons varying from the Renaissance to the atomic age. Every stairway of escape was quickly filled with a rank of guardsmen, each one levelling a blade or barrel or magnetic accelerator at Percival; then, once the security of the area had been established, a figure of unremarkable height, with no striking physical features, strode through the serried rows of massive men like an Old Testament prophet parting a body of water.

Percival's fingers sparkled emerald, and the sword was physically pushed out of the deep cuts it had made in them by the force of healing nanobots. He took it gingerly by the hilt with his other hand.

"That was not", said Bertilak, "a promising start." He bowed low to Abaddon, scraping the ground with his sword. "My lord."

"Bertilak", acknowledged Milord - and though his figure was slight, his voice carried out across the crowd as if amplified. "We have been informed that Orpheus and yourself have uncovered a plot against us."

Bertilak jabbed out an enormous finger at Percival's chest. "My lord, this man has been conspiring against you since the beginning of his time in inferis. My lord Orpheus has discovered weapons he and his confederates have been building in the Franj's domicile, human weapons capable of destroying an entire city."

Abaddon frowned. "The capability of a human weapon to destroy a human city does not perturb me, Bertilak. I am far better protected than that. However, your loyalty does touch me, though I suspect it might be tinged with hatred for the man who defeated you in combat."

Bertilak's face twisted in anger. "Then believe your own seneschal, Milord, if you will not fully believe me."

A face pushed out of the crowd of bodyguards around Milord. The face was at less than normal human height. Percival's heart contorted like a used toothpaste tube. Orpheus, his face beaming as brightly as if it had been recently polished, swaggered forward.

"It is true, Milord", said the Greek. "We have the conspirators and their device. Kane was among them", he said, reaching back into the crowd and dragging out a sullen Semitic captive bound in chains. "They were attempting to effect a nuclear detonation in your lordship's Bridge. They were intercepted by my agents whilst attempting to smuggle an atomic device up into the Bridge by cart."

Kane glared at Bertilak like a bishop at a heretic.

"Betrayer!" he spat. "Serpent in our womb! This creature only pretends to be a devil! You are a devil pretending to be a man!"

Abaddon stared at Orpheus in wonderment. Then, his face split into a smile, which became a huge laugh that might take in all the world.

"Oh, Kane, Kane, you have surpassed yourself this time! I shall have to forge new torments to requite this transgression, though I doubt that I can match your level of invention. Atomic weapons indeed! Where is this famous device?"

Orpheus bowed decorously and turned, opening a passage through the press of bodyguards with his hand. "We have brought it on a handcart, Milord. It is disarmed."

A sheet was drawn back from a glittering sphere engraved with the letters THIN MAN. Abaddon had hysterics, going to the indecorous extent of throwing his head back and forth and hugging his knees. When his head came back up, there were tears in his eyes that were surprisingly human.

"Kane, you are going to succeed with hilarity where you have failed with force of arms. You are going to kill me with laughter. What did you hope to accomplish with this? Do you not think I am protected against such devices? The Bridge's security systems constantly scan all approaching individuals for weapons. Orpheus's security teams are well informed of all weapons that have ever been produced on Earth, and many that have not." He rapped on the aluminium casing of the device.

"Milord", growled Bertilak, whose eyes had still not moved from Percival, "there remains the matter of the Englishman."

"He was intending to steal away from Milord using this surreptitiously constructed flying machine, smuggled secretly into the Bridge and onto this balcony.", offered Orpheus. "We have known for some time that the Franj was replicating something from the notebooks of Da Vinci."

"Yes, yes, I know, I know", waved Abaddon boredly. "I'm aware. I also use the surveillance systems. I even observed the construction of the contraption in question; it looks ingenious, though highly dangerous. I suspect that by smashing it, arresting its pilot and preventing his crime, you have saved him from any number of horrible and painful deaths."

"But may I kill him now, Milord?" said Bertilak.

"Oh, certainly, if you insist", said Abaddon.

The blade came round, at frightening speed, without warning or hesitation. Percival's own sword collided with it at an oblique angle. The two-handed sword was heavy, and would certainly break Percival's blade if it caught it side-on. But Percival's weapon was quicker, and left a red stripe across Bertilak's ribcage before the big sword could come round again. But Percival had had to step in within the range of the claymore to engage his opponent, and had made the mistake of thinking there was no danger space immediately around Bertilak now that both the German's hands were occupied with swinging a six foot sword. A foot lashed out and punched into his stomach, and he toppled backwards, recovering almost instantaneously, but only just getting his sword to the next colossal overhead swipe, which struck sparks off the mosaic-work and left a gritty gash down the side of a cavorting Nereid.

Percival held his own sword up vertically, and Bertilak swung the heavy blade round at it. There was an ear-punishing shriek like a telegraph cable snapping as Percival's own blade shattered, sending sharp steel fragments into his face, leaving wicked gashes which healed instantly. A sigh rose from the crowd. The public's new darling was losing.

Percival backed away, holding the stub of his sword up in what he knew to be a futile effort to defend himself. The knot of bodyguards that had been standing around Abaddon crowded round to watch the kill. Even Abaddon himself stepped closer -

- and Bertilak's sword swung round behind him like a mowing scythe, lopping the heads off three of Orpheus's guardsmen. The bodies seemed to take a moment or so to realize their heads were no longer present, then toppled slowly onto the mosaic, their neck stumps fizzing with nanotechnological healing.

None of the remaining guardsmen could react in time - the shock of the event had frozen their fingers on their triggers, and they could only stand and watch as Bertilak barged through them, physically picked up Milord in a running bear hug, and ran with him over the edge of the balustrade.

There was no scream. Unregarded, Percival leapt onto the parapet, watching the writhing figures in their long drop downward. Bertilak's sword was clamped across Abaddon's throat; Bertilak was pulling back on both handle and blade, throttling Milord in flight, his own fingers glowing emerald from within as the edge bit into them.

There was a series of sickening impacts as their bodies hit outcrops of the rock; then they passed out of sight. Thin films of flesh they had left on the abyssite glowed greenly in the dark, marking a ragged audit trail down the face.

However, half the crowd did not seem to be watching Milord's descent. Percival turned to see the three guardsmen who Manfred had decapitated, prone and lifeless on the red-stained mosaic. Their necks were still bleeding, pumping out more blood than Percival would have believed could exist in a human body. It was true that, inside the spreading blood, flecks of emerald still sparkled - but men of Hell were not supposed to bleed and continue to bleed. The onlookers around the guardsmen stared in horror at the sight of death actually meaning death.

"What has happened?" said Orpheus, appalled. "What have you done?"

"Radioactivity", said Percival. "You were so sure we'd build a nuclear weapon with our stolen fissionables that you never bothered to check Bertilak's sword, which is forged of an alloy of iron and weapons-grade uranium. The handle had to be of lead so he could hold it without his skin blistering. Radioactivity confuses the nanobots that inhabit the blood of people down here - and, we gambled, Abaddon's as well. He'll begin to get well when he finally comes to a halt, but he won't heal in a hurry. Let's see how he likes dying again and again and again."

"Milord", said Orpheus, shuddering up to his full height with a face of obstinate anger, "will be sore annoyed when he discovers you have killed him."

"He won't be coming back", said Percival. "Not in a hurry. The link between Milord and his host body is, we suspect, maintained by gravity wave transmission. But gravity wave transmission breaks down outside the confines of the Bridge, and", he confided, staring at the snail-trail Bertilak and Abaddon had left down the rock, "you can't get much further out of the confines of the Bridge than that. Right now, Milord's real body, wherever it is and whatever it looks like, is experiencing the Milord equivalent of a network error."

He took several steps sideways, hopped off the parapet, and started running. Several of Orpheus's guards held sword-blades up as a barrier; Percival ran through it, his amputated blade sketching in guards' blood in the air, not pausing for breath even when his own left hand was lopped off. He could feel the tingling sensation of it reforming even as he staggered up the stairs. Clean steel, sweet healing.

Being lighter on one side by a hand made it hard to run. He staggered up and down steps, pursued by feet far faster than his own. Another pair of guardsmen confronted him, stepping out to block a colonnaded gallery. Percival slapped one sword aside, sustaining minor damage to his remaining hand, batted aside another, and continued the zig-zag motion of his shattered sword across both guards' throats. The men went down without even bothering to gurgle a scream, though Percival knew they would heal. He pushed on, able to move more quickly now his hand had regrown. Unfortunately, the stump of his sword had not. He turned and tossed it into the deep. It spiralled away to a spinning silvery dot, end-over-ending in the blackness.

He continued running. Without a weapon, he moved faster. His footsteps, unfortunately, clattered down the side of the Bridge like the percussion section of an orchestra, clearly marking out his path to his pursuers.

A massive stone abutment sloped down into the dark on his right, merging on his left with the stonework of the Bridge; he had reached the nearest buttress. The staircase stopped at a padlocked doorway leading back into the inside of the building; it was not intended for people to leave the building via this route. Only a single one-laned entrance, cobble-paved, broke the gently sloping face of the buttress. Percival knew that there were secret passageways aplenty, but he had only ever entered and left the Bridge via this narrow roadway, which linked with the endlessly zig-zagging road down to Pandaemonium-on-the-Mole below.

Right now, a horse-drawn supply cart, lit at all four corners by glass globes filled with dimly smouldering fairies, was trundling up the trench the entranceway ran along the bottom of. The driver, a short, thick-set man with a peculiarly elongated skull, a swarthy complexion, and small, deep-set eyes, had whipped his horses to a lather, and seemed to be in a tearing hurry.

Percival stood up on the stone balustrade and waved wildly. On the buckboard of the cart, the driver stood up whilst still driving and waved frantically back, then sat down to bring his horses to a panting halt. This done, he hopped into the the back of the cart, pulled out a featureless brown parcel, and leaned precariously over the side of cart and entryway to put the package, ever so gently, on the sloping surface of the buttress.

Percival made a frenetic thumbs-up and began working his way around the stone of the Bridge, too inured to death and resurrection by now to be truly afraid of heights, but taking more care than usual, since to die right now would be to reanimate in a world where Milord was back to life and very, very angry.

The stone used to build the Bridge had been dressed by hands too precise to be human. There was scarcely any room to jam a pinky in between the mortarless blocks. All the time, footsteps were converging on his location like vengeful thunder.

A voice shouted down from above.

"PERCIVAL! GIVE YOURSELF UP TO MILORD'S JUSTICE!"

A thrown stone took the wing off a gargoyle to his left. Heaven be thanked, they hadn't yet brought any proper projectile weapons to bear above. But it was only a matter of time.

"I'VE ALREADY ENJOYED MILORD'S JUSTICE", yelled Percival, scrambling down finally onto the nearly sheer beginning of the buttress, which rapidly changed gradient enough for him to cling on. "IT HAS EIGHT LEGS AND IS EXTREMELY ARBITRARY."

"YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THAT WAY", yelled the voice above uncertainly.

"YOU ARE WRONG", said Percival. "YOU ARE SO WRONG. YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW WRONG YOU ARE."

"SUICIDE", yelled Orpheus, "IS ANATHEMA TO YOUR GOD."

"MY GOD", yelled Percival, "APPEARS TO BE A LYING MOTHERFUCKING SERIAL SUICIDE WHO MURDERED HIS OWN BROTHER." From high above, he heard Kane's answering "GO, LAD, GO!" Percival ran across the slabs of the buttress toward the brown package. A spear shivered off the stone a metre from him. He picked up the package, began hurriedly unfolding it.

"YOU SEE, NOT ONLY DID YOU CONCENTRATE SO HARD ON THE A-BOMB IN MY LEFT HAND THAT YOU MISSED BERTILAK'S SWORD IN MY RIGHT", said Percival, "YOU ALSO SMASHED THE WRONG LEONARDO MACHINE." He struggled into the straps that trailed from the assembly. "IN HIS LIFETIME, LEONARDO DESIGNED A GREAT NUMBER OF FLYING DEVICES -" a bullet, or worse than a bullet, took the whole top off a coping stone next to his left foot - "AND ALSO GLIDING ONES."

He gathered up the lion's share of the package, and stepped into space.

The remnants of the device, luckily, slithered cleanly off the stone surface of the buttress after him. He pushed himself clear of an unforeseen limb of the wall which swung into him with the force of a stone club swung by a giant.

And he was falling.

Very, very slowly, falling.

7: La Chute

The straps took the weight, leather pads transferring the shock gently to his shoulders. He reached up for the control ropes and found that, contrary to his fears, the great pyramidal tent of air that the parcel had billowed out into above him could indeed be steered. Laszlo the Fallschirmjäger and Leonardo the fifteenth-century madman had come through. The parachute, designed and built in the tunnel behind the falls of Cocytus out of reach of Milord's surveillance, was working perfectly. Percival grinned to remember how Laszlo had pricked the darning needle into his own face to illuminate his work whenever the primitive electric torches failed. Hundreds of square feet of human skin, donated by men who filed into Du Mont des Chênes' laboratory to be flayed on an assembly line basis, had been sewn together into a canopy above Percival.

It was a long way down.

It was no longer dark down here. The walls of the shaft burned with a thousand emerald torches. Around him, deep down in the dark, the bodies of those unable to climb back up to the warm world above made the Abyss crawl with resurrection light. The very walls were reforming into strange shapes under the pressure of a thousand eternally reconstituting corpses.

There were deep, smooth-sided fissures in the rock that glowed an evil green. Peering into their glassy-slick depths, he knew, without really wishing to know, that they had been worn by repeatedly dying Abyssonauts over years or even centuries, settling a little lower in the graves their resurrections ate out of the rock around them each time the nanobots extracted raw materials to rebuild their bodies. The fit, Percival imagined, would be snug, so snug that a man might not be able to move his legs or shoulders, so smooth-sided that no man grown so emaciated as to be able to squirm upright would be able to scramble out, not even in a million years. The holes had probably also, thinking logically, filled with water by now, so that as soon as a person resurrected, they would drown and die and resurrect again, and so ad infinitum.

Still, the resurrectees were working their way downward, by slow erosion, towards the Destination. Percival was falling faster, but who could say when that fall might not finish very quickly, very fatally?

Hands groped toward him out of the walls, like marine tubeworms waving blindly from geothermal vents. He steered away from them prudently, not wishing to snag his parachute either on the hands or on the walls they were imprisoned in.

"How can the Abyss stop a man falling to its bottom?", Laszlo had snorted. "There is a thing called gravity."

"We already know the Abyss distorts time", Percival had replied. "And if you distort time, you distort space, gravity, the whole big ugly Standard Model."

"It does stop a man falling", Kane had admonished. "At those depths, gravity, as you say, has very little hold on a man. It is like being underwater; one has very little idea of up or down. One finds oneself...climbing downwards in an upwardly direction."

"But what if you just jump off the rock and let yourself fall?" Percival had said.

"The Abyss at those depths is...fluid", Du Mont des Chênes had contributed with a shudder. "I've flown some of Milord's contraptions down it. As you fly, at times it seems the shaft writhes like the belly of a serpent to wrap its walls, its coils, around you. If your aircraft has an artificial horizon, it fails to function. Up and down are meaningless. At times you are circling down inside a vent, at others flying dead straight through a tube, at some moments climbing at a frightening angle at the extreme limit of your engine's pulling power. When I collided with the Abyss wall, I did it almost in a dream. I imagined I was setting down to land in a flat cylindrical valley. But", he'd added, his face twisting and grimacing, "as soon as my wheels touched stone, gravity took hold in the right direction, and I discovered myself diving vertically down a sheer drop with my landing gear snapped away. Don't bother asking how I survived. I didn't."

And now Percival, too, was lying full-length in the dark, rushing like an arse-about-face Superman down a tunnel the colour of greenscreens, the parachute billowing out behind him like the braking system on a dragster. The direction he was falling in seemed at odds with gravity; he could only maintain his downward drift by staring fixedly at his feet, and adjusting his grip on the steering cords to keep the parachute lined up with the dull cylinder of emerald luminescence. His way to the end of the tunnel lit by the burning bodies of those who had gone before him, he wafted down the Abyss with all the reckless speed of a dandelion clock drifting on the breeze, the cords that joined him to his canopy barely taut. His neck ached. His arms ached. His legs ached from being held out rigidly in front of him like dowsing rods.

After what seemed like a million years and for all he knew might have been, he came on the Flying Machines.

They were drifting like spacecraft in the dark, noses bashed in, wings amputated, fuselages shattered. Huge weightless globs of lubricant and propellant floated round them. Propellers the size of scimitar blades rotated in space like the cutting edges of blenders, and Percival was sailing towards them with virtually no capability to steer.

He managed to kick one freewheeling prop assembly away with the heel of his boot, then was pelted by a hail of free-floating turbine blades, each the size of his palm. But the big metal, turning over and over in the air like the grinding wheels of a bonemeal mill, looked far more frightening; and he was drifting into it attached to his parachute, with as much regard for safety as a man riding a rollercoaster with a noose wrapped around his neck and the rope trailing. He was no longer falling now - it seemed only to be inertia that was carrying him forward, and the heavy iron somersaulting in front of him was probably being turned by nothing more substantial than wind. But a collision at speed with a one-tonne aircraft fuselage was sure to kill him whatever had set him or it moving.

The knife was out of his bayonet sheath before he'd even consciously considered the problem; he was sawing away at the parachute cords. One by one they parted, and he was fallling no faster and no slower towards the moving metal. He collided with it like an animated bearing in a pinball machine, pushing himself off cockpits, fending off tailfins that swiped round at him like giant-sized scythes. A shower of metal fragments and disembodied aviation components was the worst thing, hitting him in the face like shrapnel. Much of the flying swarf was small enough to breathe, and he had to cover his mouth with his tunic. Incoming steel shavings sliced his corneas. He went blind at least once, then rehealed.

The strange thing about the tumbling hulks - though, oddly, one he had expected all along - was that he saw no human beings, alive or dead, inside them, as if some highly selective force had plucked the crews from their vehicles before leaving them here in a wrecked condition. Where were the pilots? The emerald luminescence issuing softly from the walls around him, the glow that had allowed him to see and avoid the black freefalling wrecks to begin with, probably answered this.

But things were no longer black and emerald. There was real light down here, light the colour of daytime, coming from somewhere up ahead. And the walls were widening, moving further apart. The wrecks were now specks, stretching out into a smoky cloud spread wide around him. Abaddon had been pouring aircrews down here for a long, long time.

He was now, inexplicably, in clear air again. There was something up ahead, silhouetted against the light. Something black and angular, moving very fast.

No - he was moving very fast.

Suddenly realizing he had to steer if he was not about to collide with the object, he attempted to spread his arms and legs like a skydiver, and succeeded only in flapping frantically like a decapitated chicken.

The object swung at him like a wrecking ball the size of a world, and bashed him unconscious. The last thing he remembered was that it had a paved surface.

***

He woke up feeling buoyant and refreshed. This usually meant that he had died recently. The floor that he was lying on - the paved surface he was lying on - was coated with what could only be his own blood. Even now that he was effectively immortal, it was still alarming to come across large quantities of the stuff. There also appeared to be teeth in the blood, and what looked like pieces of bone and brain.

He pulled himself up out of the remains of his own death, and clotting blood pulled on the fibres of his dinner jacket. The whole front of his clothing a purple blackening mass, he sat upright on the flagstones, attempting to convince his eyes to focus.

He realized abruptly that he was sitting. And sitting meant gravity. Whatever this little world he was sitting on was, it possessed a gravitational field of its very own far in excess of anything an object of its size deserved. Perhaps, he reasoned, some extraterrestrial engineer had sunk a mote of some incredibly dense material into the centre of it. Certainly either the entire worldlet had been made from scratch or someone had discovered some sort of natural gravitic sink and built on it. The flagstones he had collided with and died on had clearly been made by somebody.

The paved surface was square, maybe the size of a tennis court. His blood covered a quarter of it. He could see nothing else of the worldlet he was on, though he remembered it being much larger, roughly geometrically square, hardly a shape formed by nature. He reasoned that he must be on a high building or mountain on the worldlet's surface.

The paving stones were also decorated with a crude pattern of parallel scratches - groups of four scratches, each group slashed obliquely across with a fifth, arranged in perfect order up and down the flags, as if they had been laid that way. But the slashes were shallow and nowhere near as precise as the cuts that had dressed the stones to begin with, and although Percival could not find a stone that was not covered, the patterns of scratches did differ microscopically from stone to stone. If anything, they looked like very anal graffiti.

Above him, the sky was blue. Dead aircraft were still circling in it - he could clearly make out a number of the larger ones - but it was the colour skies should be. Percival reflected that he had not seen a proper sky for some months - maybe even some years.

This side of his world appeared to be in shadow. He was seeing only by ambient light. He was cold. Almost directly above his head, a square shadow that he at first took for some sort of massive approaching vehicle was swooping across the aircraft hulks. From this, he deduced that whatever source of light and heat this inner world possessed was currently on the other side of the worldlet from himself.

This, more than anything else, decided him to attempt a circumnavigation of his planet.

He rose up gently, staying on all fours in what he realized was still dangerously low gravity. One over-exuberant spring in his step and he might sail clean off this overgrown meteoroid and starve to death in free fall. Luckily, his own dried blood on the soles of his wingtips was holding him fast to the floor.

He moved, like a man in a rubber ring trying to walk across a swimming pool, to the edge of his tennis court of space, and looked down.

Someone had helpfully provided steps for him, all around the edge of the platform, as if on a Mayan pyramid. With every step downwards, his world would grow one step larger. Beyond the end of the pyramid stair, however - about twenty steps down - he could not see any ground, only more sky. Almost certainly that was where a tower wall dropped away to the planetoid's surface proper. He started gingerly down the steps, almost prevented from moving by the deliberate delicacy of his own footwork and the thick coating of his own congealed blood on the soles of his shoes. Eventually, he kicked off the shoes and proceeded in socks. Finding the stone underfoot was wet as well as cold, he took off his socks too and proceeded in bare feet.

The steps were also covered in a carpet of parallel scratches. The pattern was the same, four vertical crossed by one oblique. Each step was half as high as a man, suggesting a structure made by giants. Grumbling, he eased himself down them, certain they had actually been made by dinky little aliens with height complexes.

He was so engrossed in his cursing that he nearly continued on past the last step and sailed on into space. His inertia hadn’t decreased in tune with his weight. He’d have to watch that.

He gaped over the edge. There was nothing underneath the pyramid but sky.

But there was a sun down there. Or something that looked like a sun. A credible imitation, at any rate. He felt warm ultraviolet on his face, and felt the breeze as hot air rushed from the sunny side of his worldlet to the shady.

Experimentally, he eased himself forwards on newly remade forearms, and sneaked a peek over the edge at the Antipodes. Curiously, it was physically easier to do this than he'd imagined, as if some invisible force was supporting his neck and spine. There was a single final layer of foundation stones around the very base of the pyramid. He kept a careful hold of it, both from above and below, in case gravity decided suddenly to reverse itself without warning.

His head rose over the brickwork of another pyramid, the mirror image of the first. This one, however, was sunkissed, positively bleached by sunlight, and playing host to whatever plant life was able to thrive under direct and constant UV. Some enterprising flora had begun to worm out their own cracks in the paving. The plant life was a riot of colours - not just green, but all the colours of silly string, presumably using not just chlorophylls, but also carotenoids and whatever other chemicals would convert sunlight into cellulose. He was certain none of it could have evolved on Earth, until he noticed a single snow-white Edelweiss, heliographing at him out of hiding in a crack.

The paving stones were also covered with a carpet of parallel scratches.

Gravity had, indeed, kicked in without warning, but not in the direction he'd expected. It was trying to force his head back down over the parapet, as if it didn't want him on the forbidden sunny side of its nice clean pyramid.

(Not pyramid. Octahedron. Two Mayan pyramids glued together, one in the light, one in the dark - permanently, from the look of the native vegetation -)

Well, no poncy universal force was going to deny the sunny side of a pyramid to him. Particularly not gravity, the ninety pound weakling of all universal forces. With what he proudly imagined to be a herculean effort, he hauled himself round the vegetation-festooned rim of the pyramid onto the dayside, collapsing finally like a beached seal on some far Patagonian shore.

Much further, he reflected, from home than Patagonia.

This sunside world was warm and dry. Possibly, after a couple of hours or so, it might get too warm and dry. Sunburn, or even sunstroke, were bizarre possibilities - there were no clouds, and he could see the entire sky. Once, he saw a particularly large piece of flight debris drift behind the sun.

He chided himself for thinking rationally about a warm bright sun he had not seen for months as he wondered suddenly how Abaddon had managed to cope with the effects of sunlight deprivation on his subjects. Surely they ought all to suffer from rickets as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder? But whatever damage malnutrition did, he reasoned, would be immediately repaired by helpful nanobots.

But nanobots didn't work under radioactive conditions. What if this imitation sun wasn't an exact match for the Sun of Earth? What if it gave out more ultraviolet, more X rays, or more gamma? What if the builders of this artificial world hadn't also built in artificial Van Allen Belts and a faux Ozone Layer?

At the moment, the deadly artificial sunlight was sinking into his bones like benign phenol. He had to cover his eyes with his elbow; it was directly overhead. But it felt, to his skin, like pepper steak felt on his tongue.

After a little while, a voice yelled down the pyramid steps at him in Latin:

"YOU GOING TO LIE DOWN THERE ALL DAY?"

Taken aback, Percival thought a moment before yelling back:

"PROBABLY. THERE DOESN'T SEEM TO BE MUCH IN THE WAY OF NIGHT DOWN HERE."

The owner of the voice also seemed to consider for a second before replying:

"CORRECT. YOU ARE LIEUTENANT GAVIN PERCIVAL, AND I CLAIM MY ONE SQUILLION SESTERCES." Although speaking Latin, he actually used the word 'squillion'.

Percival heaved himself upright, his head swimming with the effort of it in the hot sun. He clambered unsteadily up the massive blocks of the sunside pyramid, warm as hearthstones beneath his hands and feet.

The top of the dayside was another square platform made of stone blocks. Percival was not entirely sure what sort of stone it was. It was almost as much a treat as seeing sunshine, however, since whatever mineral it was, it wasn't Abyssite.

The platform was occupied by a man - a man in the last stages of death, lying flat on the stone, his skin burnt cherry-red by the sun, blistering and peeling like paint under a blowtorch.

The man looked up at Percival - or rather, in the general direction of Percival - and grinned a mouthful of intermittent teeth.

"You're in my light", he said.

"You", said Percival, "are Saint Vladimir Nyctophagus of Na, and I claim my squillion sesterces back. And I am only guessing."

Vladimir laughed, and coughed, and coughed blood. "Precisely. You are having to anticipate the future, whereas to me it is no more difficult to see than the end of my arm. Like Ginger Rogers to my Fred Astaire, you are doing everything I do, only backwards and in heels."

"You are a mediaeval hermit who spent your life on earth in a hole in the ground. What do you know about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?"

"I foresaw that we would speak about them here today." Vladimir attempted to squirm up onto his elbow, but collapsed, evidently from the sheer pain of movement. "Could you be a dear and kill me? You really aren't going to get much sense out of me in my current state. I feel I may be suffering from sunstroke. I also fear you may be a mere hallucination. I have hallucinated about you many times before. I've been waiting for you for a while, you know."

“I know. I saw your count of days scratched into the rock.”

Vladimir blinked with huge blue truthful eyes. “That’s not days I’m counting. It’s lifetimes.”

Percival shrugged, pulled out his bayonet, and counted down the ribs below the left nipple. Gently, he leaned on the knife, and a gentle trickle of blood seeped out of the other man's chest. He left the bayonet in the wound. The bayonet popped back out of the wound like a cork out of a bottle; Percival, who had been expecting it, caught it by the handle. The Russian's entire body glittered. His wound closed miraculously. He rose to a sitting position and took a huge breath, like a man who has been underwater for a long time.

"Ahhh, that's better. I would kill myself, you know, but I lost my only weapon ages ago. Lost my temper trying to put a scratch in a rock, flung it away, and forgot not to fling it too hard. It's still in orbit up there somewhere, I've no doubt. It'll collide with some poor unfortunate some day." Vladimir rose to his feet and began performing desultory arm-swinging exercises. "These days, I kill myself by staking myself out under the sun. It doesn't hurt too much, once you become unafraid of the damage you're doing. All that's left is the pain, and the pain can be overcome." He stared at his hand and flexed and unflexed it triumphantly.

He looked up at Percival oddly. "You're not a hallucination", he said. "You're still here."

"I'm not stopping", said Percival. "I've got to go on."

Vladimir's face split into exactly the same clamour of decaying teeth as before. "Quite, quite." He reached out and touched Percival, grabbing him by the arms, feeling the muscle. "Well, I must say, you're very convincing as delusions go. Tactile as well as audiovisual." He leaned in to Percival's chest and actually licked his skin. "And the taste of real sweat and blood!" He looked around himself as if afraid of being overheard, and whispered: "And just between the two of us, you stink just like a real saviour too."

He settled himself down into sunbathing position yet again.

"How long will it take for you to die again?" said Percival.

"It feels like about two days", said Vladimir. "Though it might be two weeks, or two months or two years for all I know. It's the sunstroke that finishes me off. It's quicker than starving to death. You'll find there's not enough food to feed a grown man here. I did originally hack off the occasional arm or leg or finger for something to nibble on, but it takes so long to saw through the bone. Far less painful to let the sun do the work for you, and then on the third day you're remade again." He winked, and settled back against the stone.

"Is there any way off this, this place?" said Percival.

"Go have a look around", said Vladimir chirpily, without opening his eyes. "It isn't too big. I looked for secret passages and entrances and doorways for quite a while. Didn't find any."

"Quite a while", said Percival. "How long's quite a while?"

"It felt like about two days", said Vladimir. "Though it might have been longer, hey."

"What about ways out that lead upward, rather than inward?" said Percival. "Do any other, erm, celestial bodies, moonlets, vehicles ever come past here?"

"Nah", said Vladimir. "This rock is in a stable orbit inside the shell formed by orbiting aircraft debris. It orbits around its sun much in the manner of our own solar system."

"Who told you what an orbit is?"

"You explain it to me in about two days' time. Get quite obsessed with it, as I recall. Draw diagrams, write out big complex mathematical formulae, make this whole island in the sky your easel."

Percival turned and looked down at Vladimir. "And do I manage to find a way off it?"

"Oh, you will; the real you, I mean. I've long foreseen it. But you probably won't, as you're in all probability a hallucination. I've seen your sort before, you know." He wagged a finger meaningfully at Percival.

Percival nodded, and looked directly upwards at the sun.

"Oh, just in case you are real", called out the hermit, "when I start screaming and raving at things that aren't there that aren't you, could you be a gem and open my throat again? That part of the dying process has always been a terrible ordeal."

Percival nodded, and strolled off down the pyramid in the direction of the dark antipodes.

***

He searched the stone octohedron for secret doors and passageways. It took him a length of time that might indeed have been two days, as, at about the point when he was beginning to give up, Saint Vladimir began raving and required to be killed and resurrected. After having planted his knife upright in the pavement on the sunside of the world, and after having observed that the knife had virtually no shadow, and that that little shadow he could convince it to have by fixing it into the cracks at a slant did not move a millimetre all the time he watched it, Percival had decided that astronomical observation would be little use in telling the time locally. His world's sun stayed put, and little else seemed to be clearly visible in the sky. For the time being, he resolved to use Vladimir's resurrections to mark out time - after all, this was the method Vladimir himself had settled on, and the man had been living here longer than he had.

There did prove, though, to be more in the sky than just the sun. Some of the larger pieces of debris were visible with the naked eye, although they also moved very quickly. There were also dark patches on the blue that he became more than ever convinced must be the openings of other Abysses, maybe from other worlds, from other times in the Earth's history, from the Abyss builders' homeworld - who could tell? But if they were Abyss openings, and if each one really did represent another world, then Abaddon's people were living in a very crowded sky. There were so many branch lines to other worlds that they were packed in to Percival's firmament like pits on a golf ball. The dark patches in the sky were so numerous, and looked so alike, that it was almost impossible to track them. But he was able to draw out markings on the stone that recorded the motion of the debris pieces. At first, he convinced himself that they orbited in a rough circle about the little sun that was the centre of this universe. Then, faced with evidence that their motion wasn't circular, he managed to remember Kepler, and convinced himself that the debris was orbiting in a rough ellipse with a diameter of perhaps thirty kilometres. He worked this out by parallax, measuring out the length of the sunside platform using a length of his own hair plaited together, which he arbitrarily decided was thirty centimetres long. Then, ripping a square of fabric from his own clothing, he drew straight lines on it with the back of the bayonet blade, and using a pen tied into further lengths of his own hair twined together as a set of compasses, he bisected the straight lines until he had drawn enough angles to make a serviceable protractor. The pen had been supplied him by Du Mont des Chênes, and was essentially a steel stylus which he jabbed into his arm to fill its ink reservoir with its own blood. The reservoir did not last long, and it was necessary to jab repeatedly, but he was his own inexhaustible ink supply. Using the protractor, he was able to take bearings on the constantly circling debris particles from either side of his observation platform and work out their positions. Trigonometrical tables were unavailable to him; he had to create his own by drawing out triangles on the stone and measuring the ratios of their sides. Minute calculations were scratched out on the top of the pyramid, until every single one of Vladimir's death-and-resurrection slashes had Arabic numerals scrawled between it. At intervals, when hunger and thirst attacked him, he walked to the far side of the flying island and killed himself with the bayonet. He only once made the mistake of killing himself on the sunside, and woke up with all of his carefully scratched-out calculations erased from the stones around him by nanorobots who had mined the rock for material to remake him. Vladimir was prohibited on pain of Percival never again killing him from dying whilst lying on top of Percival's trigonometrical tables.

Over time, as the bayonet became blunter, it became more and more difficult to kill himself with it. He began to appreciate the wisdom of Vladimir's submission to death by sunstroke.

"What are you accomplishing, o figment of my imagination?" said Vladimir in a particularly irritating moment, having wandered across from where he had just, apparently, died peacefully in his sleep. "You are merely measuring the dimensions of your prison. How will this help you to leave it?"

"I don't know", said Percival, attempting to retain a six-digit string of figures in his head whilst talking. "But you do. Why don't you tell me?"

"Telling you would upset the principles of causality", said Vladimir. "And whilst I do not personally give a hang for the principles of causality, you explain them to me in intricate detail tomorrow, and it is quite apparent to me that you put great store by them. Therefore, it is only polite for me to let you work the problem out for yourself." With that, he rose to his feet, and strode off towards the nightside, whistling Let's Face the Music and Dance.

Percival glared after Vladimir, making a mental note to make his explanation of the laws of causality both lengthy and extremely tiresome.

His sightings on the debris clouds, it was true, had become something of a way of passing the time rather than a genuine attempt to escape the octohedron. However, even more frustrating than this, as his methods of sighting had steadily become more sophisticated, it had become more and more apparent that the debris clouds were not doing what they were supposed to. They were not, for example, orbiting in ellipses. This was not true simply for one or two of them, but for every single one he had observed, making him quite despair of his skills as an astronomer. No matter how exactly he carried out his sightings and his computations, he could not get any of the particles to sit on a perfect ellipse. Instead, they weaved backwards and forwards like serpents, sometimes ten kilometres closer than they really should be, sometimes ten kilometres further, in a way that was not only wrong but also -

Regular.

He stared at the calculations in consternation. If they were regular, then some force, some aspect of the system he was examining, was making them behave in such a manner. They were not visibly moving closer and further away, however - there were no undulations or inconsistencies in the cloud of circling debris, which appeared perfectly uniform, so -

He stretched himself out full length and crocodile-walked down the pyramid to poke his head over the equator and yell to Vladimir. "I'VE WORKED OUT WHY THE DEBRIS IS MOVING CLOSER AND FURTHER AWAY."

The voice sounded terminally bored. "DO TELL"

"IT'S NOT MOVING. WE ARE. I RECKON THE SURFACE GRAVITY OF THIS WORLDLET TO BE ABOUT EQUIVALENT TO A TEN-KILOMETRE-WIDE ASTEROID, LORD ALONE KNOWS HOW ON A THING ONLY A HUNDRED METRES END TO END, BUT THERE YOU HAVE IT. AND OUR LITTLE ASTEROID SHOULD BY RIGHTS BE ORBITING IN ITS OWN LITTLE ELLIPSE AROUND ITS SUN. EXCEPT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO. WHAT IF ITS SUN ISN'T THE SIZE OF OUR OWN? WHAT IF ITS SUN IS ONLY TEN KILOMETRES OR SO WIDE TOO? OR AT LEAST HAS SOMETHING APPROXIMATING THE SAME MASS. THAT WOULD MEAN NEITHER WE NOR THE SUN ORBIT ROUND EACH OTHER - WE BOTH ORBIT ROUND A POINT ROUGHLY HALFWAY BETWEEN US, CALLED A BARYCENTRE."

"AS ALL ASTRONOMICAL BODIES DO", reminded Vladimir.

"YES, BUT IN THE CASE OF EARTH’S SUN THE SUN IS SO MUCH BIGGER THAN US THAT THE BARYCENTRE IS SOMEWHERE INSIDE THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE SUN ITSELF, AND IN ANY CASE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE KNOWN THAT IF I HADN'T TOLD YOU. ANYWAY, THIS WOULD CAUSE US TO MOVE BACK AND FORTH, CLOSER TO AND FURTHER FROM THE DEBRIS FIELD, WHICH IS RELATIVELY INSUBSTANTIAL IN MASS AND IS ALSO ORBITING AROUND THE BARYCENTRE."

"IF YOU SAY SO."

"PAY ATTENTION. THIS IS INTRIGUING NEWS. IT MEANS THAT OUR LITTLE PLANETOID WEIGHS ROUGHLY AS MUCH AS ITS OWN SUN DOES."

"HOOP DE DOOP AND DICKORY DOCK."

"THIS MEANS THAT WITH A FEW MORE CALCULATIONS, I MIGHT BE ABLE TO WORK OUT THE LOCATION OF THE BARYCENTRE."

"AND THEN WHAT WILL YOU DO?"

Percival frowned. "I'LL GO THERE."

"WHY? WHY GO TO AN EMPTY PATCH OF SPACE?"

"WE ALREADY KNOW THAT THE ABYSS ALTERS TIME, WARPS SPACE, AND SO ON. THIS IS STUFF THAT, AS FAR AS OUR SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING GOES, CAN ONLY BE DONE BY IMMENSE CONCENTRATIONS OF MASS. COLLAPSARS. DARK STARS. BLACK HOLES."

"ABADDON", said Vladimir, "HAS TALKED TO ME OF BLACK HOLES. HE, TOO, MENTIONED THAT THE ABYSS BEHAVED IN SUCH A MANNER."

"AT THE GRAVITATIONAL CENTRE OF A BLACK HOLE", said Percival, "THERE IS A POINT CALLED A SINGULARITY. THE SINGULARITY IS A POINT WHERE LOGIC BREAKS DOWN. WHERE THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN. WHERE WATER FLOWS UPHILL. WHERE TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE. IF OUR ABYSS BUILDERS ARE ANYWHERE", he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt, "THEY WILL BE THERE."

Vladimir did not sound fooled. "YOU'RE ONLY GOING THERE", he shouted, "BECAUSE IT'S THE ONLY DIRECTION YOU CAN STILL GO IN THAT'S DOWN."

"AND BECAUSE", said Percival, "YOU HAVE SAID YOURSELF THAT I'M THE CHOSEN ONE. I'M THE HARROWER OF HELL, THE ONE WHO GOES THROUGH THE ABYSS AND COMES BACK. SO WHATEVER I DO IS THE CORRECT DECISION. THEREFORE, IF I GO TO THE BARYCENTRE, GOING TO THE BARYCENTRE IS THE CORRECT THING TO DO." He pulled back from the brink, and began hauling himself up the stone terraces towards the apex of the sunside.

"YOU ARE NOT", yelled Vladimir, "ANY SORT OF CHOSEN ONE. YOU ARE MERELY LUCKY. I, ON THE OTHER HAND, WAS UNLUCKY. THE INHABITANTS OF ALL THOSE BROKEN THINGS CIRCLING UP THERE", he said, waving a hand in the general direction of the heavens, "WERE ALSO UNLUCKY. AND IF I'M WRONG AND MY PREDICTIONS OF THE FUTURE ARE JUST THE RAVINGS OF A MADMAN, AND IF YOU'RE WRONG", he continued, "AND THE BARYCENTRE IS JUST AN EMPTY POINT IN SPACE, YOU'LL DIE REPEATEDLY OF SUNSTROKE FLOATING IN NOTHINGNESS FOREVER."

"MAYBE THIS IS THE LAST TEST, THEN", said Percival. "A LEAP OF FAITH." He squinted up at the world's little sun through his fingers. Although he believed he had proved it to be only hundreds of metres across at the very most, it seemed no less fiercely hot than the million-mile primary he was used to.

"REMEMBER, YOU CAN'T JUST JUMP UP INTO THE SUN AND HOPE TO GET THERE", said Vladimir. "THERE ARE ORBITAL MECHANICS TO CONSIDER."

Percival stared at his own calculations in the flagstones. They had spilled off the top platform and onto the upper stairs. "I HAVEN'T EXPLAINED ORBITAL MECHANICS TO YOU YET. WHAT ABOUT THE LAWS OF CAUSALITY?"

"OH, FUCK THE LAWS OF CAUSALITY. THE SOONER I GET YOU OUT OF HERE, THE SOONER I GET OUT OF THIS BASTARD PLACE. IF", he added hastily, "YOU'RE REAL. I'VE BEEN FOOLED BY TANGIBLE HALLUCINATIONS BEFORE."

Percival had fixed the point at which he had to stand. The precise bearing was marked out with an especially thick line of blood, drawn heavy in order to be visible from orbit, still bright crimson in the sunshine. He had to jump along that bearing in order to maximise the assistance he'd receive from the tetrahedron's angular momentum. The elevation was marked with the bayonet blade, stuck into a crack in the flags, cemented firm with enough clotted blood to bleed an elephant dry.

"USUALLY HALLUCINATIONS TEND TO TURN INTO NAKED WOMEN OR SPIDER DEMONS AT SOME POINT, THOUGH, YEAH?"

"YOU DO HAVE ME THERE. AS DELUSIONS GO, YOU ARE CONVINCING, AND SO, JUST IN CASE YOU'RE REAL, I HAVE TO WISH YOU LUCK." Vladimir's voice was coming from behind him now. He turned to see a dark figure sitting, legs crossed, lounging backwards on its hands. Vladimir waved.

Escape velocity should be achievable with nothing more than human muscles. He stripped off his remaining clothes; they were excess payload. "I APPRECIATE IT. BUT I DON'T NEED IT."

Vladimir stared at him from under a cupped hand. "IF THERE IS A SINGULARITY, IT'LL JUST BE A TINY POINT. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IT'S THERE? AND EVEN IF YOU DO KNOW IT'S THERE, HOW CAN YOU BE SURE OF HITTING IT DEAD CENTRE?"

Percival grinned. "I'LL SEE IT. IT'S A POINT WHERE SCIENTIFICALLY PERCEIVED REALITY BREAKS DOWN. IT'S GOT TO LOOK LIKE SOMETHING. AND IF I DON'T HIT IT FIRST TIME, I'LL OPEN MY FEMORAL AND USE IT AS A ROCKET MOTOR.”

“ABADDON WOULD GIVE HIS EYE TEETH TO HAVE A VIDEO FEED INSIDE YOU.”

“HE PROBABLY DOES. BASTARD’S REBUILT MY BODY ENOUGH TIMES. THOUGH I DOUBT HE HAS EYE TEETH. EYE TENTACLES, MAYBE.” Percival grinned. “JUST IN CASE YOU’RE WATCHING, BASTARD, I’M COMING BACK. AND THE HUMAN SPECIES WILL BE THE LAST ONE YOU FIND SCIENTIFICALLY INTERESTING.

“BE SEEING YOU.”

He ran bow-legged down the platform, hit the edge, and soared into space, arms and legs trimmed tight together, cutting through the air like a swimmer. The octohedron's gravitational field was so weak he actually felt its pull on him diminish as he rose. The sun was heavy on his back, bright even behind his eyelids.

And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion – take the course I show you!

Soon he would begin to have visions, and his skin would start to blister. His journey would take him very close to the sun, perhaps even dangerously close. But he had no wings of wax to melt. He wasn't flying.

He was falling.

© Dominic Green 2008