Abaddon - Chapter 18

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."