Holly’s body wants to groan and retch, but I keep it in a state of deathlike stillness while I work out … What? I don’t have enough voltage left for a single psychoprojectile. Try to save my soul? Egress Holly, try to cloak myself, and hover nearby as she is slain or decanted, until the Blind Cathar notices the frightened little piggy, hiding in the corner? I almost envy Esther. At least she died in the false belief she had won Horology its ultimate victory.
The surviving Anchorites take stock. Pfenninger’s still standing at the center of the rhombus nave. Constantin, D’Arnoq, Hugo Lamb, Rivas-Godoy, Du Nord, and O’Dowd remain. One or two of the other fallen may wake in a while, or may not. The Anchorites will be knocked back, but they’ll have lists of possible Carnivores, and in a decade or two they’ll be operating, and abducting, at full strength. The Chapel of the Dusk is unscratched. Beyond the upended table and benches, and a lesser icon hanging at the wrong angle, there is no sign of the battle that raged here only a minute ago. I don’t know what to do, so I just stay inside Holly’s head, paralyzed by indecision.
Elijah D’Arnoq asks, “What was that light?”
“A Last Act,” says Pfenninger. “A powerful one. The question is, who invoked it?”
“Esther Little,” says Constantin, “in incorporeal form. The Counterscript never acknowledged her death, as you know. I sensed her. She attacked the Chapel’s doubt-line, in hopes of splitting it open and making the sky fall in. Who else but her could have engineered this attack? We’re lucky her last big bang wasn’t quite as explosive as she hoped.”
“So we’ve won the War?” asks Rivas-Godoy.
Pfenninger looks at Constantin. As one, they announce, “Yes.”
“Oh,” admits Pfenninger, “there’ll be a few mopping-up operations. We have a few wounds to lick, but Horology is dead. My one regret? That Marinus didn’t live long enough to learn how utterly, how miserably, she had failed. The Blind Cathar must have slain her at some point between killing Фshima and Arkady.”
“Let’s tip the Sykes woman after Sadaqat,” says Constantin, stepping over towards us. She asks D’Arnoq, “Why didMarinus bring her along? I don’t … Wait a minute.” She peers at me with not-quite-human eyes. “Mr. Pfenninger. I do believe we have an afterdinner mint.” Constantin takes a few cautious steps closer. She smiles. “My my my, Holly Sykes is—what’s the term?—playing possum. How—”
A ROARING, PERCUSSIVE KA– BOOOOOOOOOMMM … fills the Chapel. Constantin falls to the floor, as do the others. I-in-Holly stare up at the crack, terror transmuting into hope, then a savage joy as an uprooting, tearing, steel-hull-on-a-reef noise howls louder, and the hairline crack becomes a black line zigzagging down the north roof to the back of the icon. Slowly, the sickening sound dies away, but it leaves behind a heavily pregnant threat of more … From where I-in-Holly am crouching I see the halo-shaped gnostic serpent swing, then drop. It smashes like a thousand dinner plates, fragments dashing and smattering across the stone floor, like ten thousand little living fleeing beings. A chunk as big as a cricket ball just misses Holly’s head. I hear Baptiste Pfenninger declaim a histrionic “Shit! Did you see that, Ms. Constantin?” It occurs to me to test Holly’s own psychovoltage, and I find a deeper reserve than I expected.
“That’s the least of our problems,” snaps Constantin. “Can’t you see the crack?” Silently, I invoke an Act of Cloaking. If a psychosoteric looks at me directly they’ll see a faded outline, but it’s better than nothing, and the seven Anchorites are now worried about the Chapel’s fabric. As well they should be. Moving along the wall towards the west window, we hear the creak of stressed stone.
Elijah D’Arnoq notices first. “The Sykes woman!”
O’Dowd, the Eleventh Anchorite, asks, “Where did she go?”
“The bitch is hosting,” booms Du Nord. “Someone’s cloaked her!”
“Shield the Umber Arch!” Constantin orders Rivas-Godoy. “It’s Marinus! Don’t let her out! I’ll evoke an Act of Exposure and—”
An ogre groans overhead and stones rain from the crack, which now widens into a jagged gash. I understand. Esther’s Last Act worked, and only the Blind Cathar has kept the Chapel intact. But now even his ancient strength is failing.
“Pfenninger, MOVE!” shouts Constantin.
But the First Anchorite, whose survival instinct has perhaps been dulled by two centuries’ Black Wine, health, and wealth, looks up to where Constantin is staring before, not after, he dives to safety. A slab of Chapel roof the size of a family car is the final thing that Baptiste Pfenninger sees before it smashes him, like a sledgehammer striking an egg. More masonry explodes off the floor. I revoke my cloak and invoke a body-shield. Du Nord, a French captain who followed the Shaded Way from 1830 to the present day, is too slow to protect himself from a volley of shrapnel, and although it doesn’t kill Du Nord, yet, his current wife wouldn’t recognize him. Three or four body-shielded figures are running for the Umber Arch but, like an ice sheet calving icebergs, the south roof slides down and blocks the exit. Our tomb, then, is sealed.
Through the crumbling gaps in the roof, a roiling, grainy, smoky tentacle of Dusk spills, gropes, and uncoils into the Chapel. It hums, not quite like bees, and mutters, not quite like a crowd, and susurrates, not quite like sand. A tendril of the stuff uncurls behind Elijah D’Arnoq as he shifts backwards to avoid a falling slab of rock. Unimpeded by his body-shield, the Dusk brushes D’Arnoq’s neck, and he is turned into a man-shaped cloud of Dusk, whose form lasts only a moment.
“Marinus, is this you in here?” asks Holly.
Sorry, I suasioned you without permission.
“We beat them, didn’t we? Aoife’s safe.”
Everyone’s family is safe from the Anchorites, now.
We look across the rubble and body-strewn Chapel. Only three of the ember-red shielded figures are visible. I recognize those of Constantin, Rivas-Godoy, and Hugo Lamb. In its corner, the icon of the Blind Cathar is peeling and decaying, as if spattered by acid. The place is growing darker by the second. The arms of the Dusk fill a quarter of the Chapel now, at least.
“That Dusk stuff,” says Holly. “It doesn’t look so painful.”
Sorry I let you get tangled up in this.
“It’s all right. It wasn’t you, it was the War.”
It’ll only be a few moments now.
A SPLITTING NOISE from the northern corner turns into the discordant jangle of a bell. Where the icon hung, an ellipse has opened up, emitting a pale moonlight. “That noise,” says Holly, “sounded like the time-bell at the Captain Marlow. What is it, Marinus?”
A few feet away, the psychosedated body of Imhoff is licked into nonexistence by a tongue of Dusk.
I have no idea,I subadmit. Hope?
Certainly the three surviving Anchorites reach a similar conclusion and make for the north corner. I-in-Holly follow, or try to, but a long plume of Dusk sweeps in through the now-unshielded east window. I slip in a puddle of what used to be Baptiste Pfenninger, and dodge into a safe pocket of clear air that drifts up the nave, before a column of the swarming gray forces me over to the west wall. The Chapel is now more than half Dusk, and the thirty paces to the ellipse are a shifting airborne minefield. I stumble over my old body, lying at an undignified angle, but in mere seconds Dr. Fenby will cease to be. Miraculously, our luck holds, and we arrive at the ellipse. Constantin and her two companions are nowhere in sight. Some sort of emergency chute? It doesn’t feel like a design feature of the Blind Cathar. The oval glow brightens as the Chapel darkens. It’s a membrane across which clouds appear to stream, like speeded-up sky. I take one last look at the Chapel, now Dusk-filled. The eastern roof slides in. “What do we have to lose?” asks Holly.