Abaddon - Chapter 26

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?"