~ The way was hard. Only the strongest survived. And some were lost. Some drifted. Some fell to the red moon. Isn't that how it is? We are blown here and there. I am old enough to know. Why did you come to me, of all people? I could ask, but why not?

~ And what happened to them on the red moon?

He shrugged. ~ A hard world. Harder even than ours. It moves too quickly, and it drives them mad. They have no good leaders and they have forgotten how to live. And so they steal from us. Whenever the red moon comes close enough to cross.

~ To cross?

~ They have ways. Perhaps they remember some things we have forgotten. When the moons are close it's almost as if we are one again. And then there are currents, and they can cross.

He stood at the window and looked up.

The moon was huge in the sky, occluding the face of Mars. The air throbbed with its presence.

On the red surface of the moon, a scattering of black dust-a faint shadow, like soot on a lamp-grew slowly at first, and then faster, becoming a curl of smoke. Then, moments later, a flock of distant black dots, which next became cross-shaped, a thousand tiny letter X's-as big as flies, as big as bats, as big as birds; wings like a fleet of sails along a red river. Black sails swept along by lunar currents. An armada, sailing on a river of red light.

They were hateful; they were the enemy. It was a strong, clear, joyful hate, a good hate. It was no sin to hate, not here.

The city rippled its wings, tensed its muscles.

The enemy's final descent was so fast, so sudden, that Josephine didn't realise they were there, in amongst the people of the city, indistinguishable from them, until she heard fighting. The snap and crack and slash of sharp wings. Falling and running and hissing. The noise came from above and from below. Something sliced through a tendril overhead and it fell like a cut washing-line. Flowers scattered, some drifting in through the window.

In the next moment, one of the enemy landed in the window. Josephine leapt back. Piccadilly was too slow. A wing lashed out and struck open his throat.

Chapter Thirty-one.

The killer leapt across Piccadilly's body and into the room. It crouched, reaching for the spilled decanter, which leapt from the floor into its harpy-claw hand. The killer lapped at the red dregs, then dashed the decanter against the wall. It glared at Josephine and hissed.

She realised with horror that it was trying to speak. To threaten, gloat, mock. The people of the red moon Abyss spoke with their voices. That struck her as barbaric, disgusting, an animal behaviour. They could hardly communicate very much that way-hooting and hissing. No wonder they'd descended into barbarism.

The killer's outstretched wings blocked her view of Piccadilly's body, but not his blood: red, thinner and paler than the blood of an Englishman, and an extraordinary amount of it. In the instant he'd died, his wings had stiffened, snapping beneath him when he fell. Somehow that was more gruesome by far than the blood.

Josephine noted sorrow, and anger, and fear, as if they were outside of her, filling the room.

She retreated to the wall. The killer's eyes shot to the door and back again. It tensed, ready to jump, and she tensed to meet it.

To meet her. The killer was a woman. Little more than a child-tiny and half-starved. Wings dull, mottled, and mute; bony chest so thickly scarred that she looked scaled. She wore a belt around her wasp-thin waist, braided from something bright. It resembled snakeskin. A Fury, dripping with blood, wild-eyed.

There was no possibility of communication, and nothing to say. Josephine, who'd never in her life lifted a hand in anger against anyone, was as eager for confrontation as the killer was.

The belt, she realised, was made of the bright fibres of severed wings.

The killer's own wings shifted. Veins darkened and lightened again as muscles tensed and blood pulsed. Their sharp, fern-like edges rippled. Dull meaningless patterns formed and unformed.

The killer was playing with her, feinting. She felt it probing at her mind-a nasty vicious whispering, looking for weakness-trying to confuse and distract her, to panic her.

Jo looked away, and down at her feet.

The killer leapt, and Josephine leapt a half-second later. They met somewhere near the ceiling, slashing and clawing at each other. Their wings sc.r.a.ped together with a terrible screech.

The killer was surprised. Her dead eyes lit up for a moment. The killer flicked her wings, rolled upside down, and leapt off the ceiling-an elegant motion that Josephine couldn't possibly mimic, so instead she fell, clumsily, which was perhaps for the best: her clumsiness confused the killer, made her unpredictable. The killer lashed out with the long edge of her wing, but missed wildly. Josephine circled and struck; they clashed, then pa.s.sed each other. Cuts bled on Josephine's face and leg. The killer was unwounded. The killer hissed; Josephine was silent. A claw reached for Josephine's eye-she swung her head away. She parried, sharp teeth sc.r.a.ping her wing. It was an extraordinary, agonizing sensation. She stepped back and the killer followed. Wings struck against wings, cutting and parrying, a flurry of violent colour and light and motion. She parried by instinct. Then, suddenly, her wings and the killer's wings were enmeshed, interlocked, and they were struggling together, both trying to pull free. The muscles of her back screamed and nearly tore with the effort. Then Josephine's wings were free and for a moment she was airborne, her wings brushing against the ceiling, while beneath her the killer took an unsteady step forward, screamed, and stumbled. Jo wasn't sure why at first; then she saw that the killer had cut open her foot on the broken decanter. She struck quickly before the killer could stand again.

The anger went elsewhere, but the sorrow was still there in the room with Josephine, choking her.

There was nothing she could do for Piccadilly. She didn't know what they did with their dead. She hardly knew who she was or where she was. She felt drunk.

She crouched in the window, knees drawn up to her chin. Wherever she looked, she could see fighting. The raiders of the red moon had infested the whole city, it seemed. There was no clear plan to the violence. They killed, they looted. Packs of the white city's defenders fought the pirates in the street below; flocks circled each other in the sky, wings lit by red moonlight. She could tell the raiders of the red moon and the city's people apart by her anger; it was like a sixth sense, or possibly a seventh or an eighth. Her wings were trembling with sensation, and her mind was full of shouting and screaming.

Josephine leapt from the window and into the air, cutting at the back of one of the pirates, who fell from the sky behind her as she sailed on, landing in another window, on a distant tower. She collected herself, looked about, and leapt again.

This time she was in mid-air when something slammed into her, knocking the breath from her lungs and buckling her wings. She fell.

She caught herself half-way to the ground-a treetop's distance from the stones of the white city, had there been trees, or the height of two or three lamp-posts, had there been lamp-posts. Wings outstretched, muscles aching, she sailed slowly down. She crouched with her hands and feet and forehead touching cool stone. She didn't know where she was. Two short flights had brought her to an unfamiliar part of the city, a wide avenue between white honeycomb towers, cluttered with stone arches and b.u.t.tresses, and cut through with channels that once-in the days of the city's long-lost makers-might have held water, but were now merely obstacles, complex terrain to be fought over.

Something had knocked her from the sky, but no one had touched her. It had been a blow of pure force, pure anger.

They fought not just with their bodies but with their minds, with what an English occultist might call telekinesis and telepathy. Here the mind was a weapon, an ordinary technology of war just like gunpowder or cavalry on the Blue Sphere.

She remembered those empty bodies in the vault Clotho had led her to: withered husks, hollowed out by the enemy's weapons ...

Two of the pirates came charging up, half-running and half-flying, moving from a dog-like crouch to an eagle's swoop and back again so fast that she could hardly make sense of what she was seeing. She tried reaching out with her mind, as if stretching beyond the edges of her wings, and struck one of them-the one that was at that moment in flight-so that it spun through the air and broke its wings against one of the stone arches.

The other pounced on her, slashing with its wings. Someone parried. A stranger's bright wing. A comrade, a fellow warrior of the white moon-a male, dark and handsome, one-eyed, who cut, parried, spun and ducked, then leapt high and struck down at the pirate, splitting open the pirate's thin skull with a kick of his heel. Before she could thank him, he was off again, crouched low and wings high, running back into the melee.

The scene before her was incomprehensible: the jumbled angles and arches and smooth channels of the street, the constant blur of motion and violence, screaming and clashing, bodies thrown this way and that. And at the edge of her awareness, the enemy's minds, prowling and looking for weakness ...

She showed none. She leapt, lifted herself to the top of a white stone arch, and leapt again, sailing down into a deep channel, its sides slick with blood, where three of the pirates wrestled with two of the city's defenders. They turned to face her and she struck at them ...

The red moon was so close she could feel its pull. The air tugged her unpredictably this way and that, and sometimes she hardly knew which way was up and which was down. The architecture of the city ceased to make sense. She moved where she was pulled. A strange mood took hold of her. There was anger in it, and a wild joy, and something else: a sense of the smallness of her own life, blown here and there between those two vast whirling giants ... but also a sense of its preciousness. It was worth spending, but not cheaply.

The pirates were everywhere. Soon her wings were ragged and she was bleeding from a dozen places on her face, her chest, her arms and legs. She'd hurled a half-dozen pirates from the air, sending them crashing to the stones below. She'd pinned a hissing and shrieking male, a big one, one-eyed, against a white wall, under red light, while two women of Angel cut at him-cut him to ribbons. She saw the pirates at the window of a school, pulling children out by their spindly legs. She saw them lifting fistfuls of beads, useless trophies, the words destroyed for ever as soon as the pirates touched them.

The pirates fought like wild things. The city's defenders were organised, well-prepared. There were signals and alarms all over the city. The shadows of signalmen standing with their wings outspread on high places, urging the city's warriors this way or that. Flocks formed, aerial formations, loose waves and tight phalanxes. There was a curt language of war, quite different from the city's usual elegant mode of communication-a language of jabbing, slicing, orders, alarms. Josephine knew none of it, but on some deep level the body itself remembered, and obeyed. She fell into line; and the line swept across the city, growing wider and deeper, until somewhere it left her behind and she was alone. Then, before too much time pa.s.sed, another great bright wing of warriors came from above and behind and between the towers and swept her up again.

There was organization among the pirates, too, but looser, wilder, and always in flux. They were skirmishers, raiders, looters-they avoided resistance, fled from open battle, and looked for weak or solitary victims, unguarded treasures, opportunities for ambush. It was impossible even to guess at their number.

They had leaders, of a sort. Big brutes, who drove their warriors before them by force and with an awful piercing whistle; and wiry little ragged-winged old women whose eyes were bright with malign telepathic power; and desperate creatures who looked to Josephine like devils. They broke, fled, sacrificed their warriors to escape, evaded capture again and again.

There'd been one big brute in particular, who Josephine saw at the quarry, and again beneath the spike in Piccadilly Circus, and again on the mushroom-domed roof of a great tower at the bend of the river, and finally leading the retreat. He was a giant of his kind. He was thin, as they all were, with wiry arms and a narrow waist, but extraordinarily tall and long-limbed. His left hand was a stump, his chest deeply scarred, and one of his eyes blind; but his wings were pristine, unwounded, as wide and bright and beautiful and complex as a cathedral's stained-gla.s.s window. Otherwise, he was ugly; fierce, a wrecker and a looter, a cleaver of skulls and a ripper of wings. The second time she saw him, she tried to get close to him. He saw her, gliding down. His good eye was cunning. She reached out with her mind, knocked the brute's hand from his victim-and then he was gone, leaping up from window to window and out of sight, his mob following behind him. After that she kept a look-out for him.

When she saw him again, she charged. At that moment, she was alone; unwise. The brute retreated and three of his men moved smoothly to her side, cutting her off from her allies, and she was instantly alone and afraid. This was up on the huge dome-like roof of a top-heavy tower overlooking the river. She moved left, right, as the three pirates lunged at her, and fled for the edge of the dome. They shrieked and whistled at her. She stumbled and went down to her knees. She felt them scratching at the edge of her mind.

One of them was strong. He forced his way into her mind. It was like when Piccadilly had tried to speak to her, months ago, except that, where Piccadilly had been gentle and nervous, this creature was savage.

The pirate's a.s.sault on her mind was wordless, but it filled her mind with visions of blood and violence, and of the horrors of the red moon Abyss. She saw a world of constant hunger. It hurtled through the void at such terrible speeds that its inhabitants were driven mad. There was hardly air to breathe. She felt her throat close. For months at a time there was no light, no flight. She saw the weak starving, choking, left to die. Darkness towered, threatened to overwhelm her. She shrank before it, small as a candle flame. She flared.

The pirate tumbled from her mind. He stumbled, suddenly weak-kneed, his wings trembling, and fell from the edge of the dome.

She fled.

She crossed paths with another pack of raiders, down by the river, as they retreated. They looked at her first with loathing, and then with fear, and then launched themselves upwards, leaping from window to window, clambering up the sides of the towers and the tendrils and vines that hung between them, and then up onto the tops of the towers. Overhead, the red moon was in retreat, rushing on past its twin, receding into the night; and all over the city the enemy were in retreat. She hurried up to the tower-tops. Everywhere she looked, the raiders were rising up into the air, first up to the heights of the city and then, with great leaps, into the sky, throwing themselves recklessly into the red light as it faded. Their arms were laden with their spoils: fistfuls of beads, bottles, torn-off wings, sc.r.a.ps of b.l.o.o.d.y gore, pathetic handfuls of fern or flower or food, frantically struggling infants, some stones, some plant matter. A few meaningless sc.r.a.ps.

Not all of them made it. Gravity overcame some of them before they were half a hundred feet above the tower-tops, and they fell back into the city, where they were quickly dispatched. Most of them kept going, up and up, so many of them that they were a dark cloud obscuring the moon.

An hour or two, perhaps three-it was hard to say how long it had lasted. The red moon was already perceptibly smaller; soon it would be smaller still. Soon it would be too late to cross.

She gave chase-opening her wings wide to sail on the light of the red moon. The retreating pirates were slowed by their spoils, and she caught up to them. As she swooped in on a straggler, she was already so far above the city that the buildings below looked like sandcastles, mushrooms, bright empty sh.e.l.ls. She cut at the straggler's back, broke his wings, and as he fell she took an infant from his arms. It struggled and clutched at her.

The straggler's comrades kept going, most of them, ignoring his shrieks as he fell. A few of them stopped, turned: five-no, six-of them, out of thousands, torn between their eagerness to return to their departing world and their hunger for spoils, their hate. They circled her.

She was alone. She looked down to see that none of the city's defenders but her had given chase.

Distant blue specks watched her from the tower-tops below. She was alone in the sky, except for the raiders.

She saw the rules of the game now: the fighting ceased when the raiders fled. The city's defenders let them go. Poised between the rose moon and the red she saw, as if in a vision, the whole thousand-year cycle of their shared existence: the moons endlessly circling each other; the struggle becoming an observance as natural as the seasons.

The moons were drifting apart and the rage of the city's defenders (which had been quite as savage and wild as that of its enemies) was subsiding now. The pressure of the storm was draining from the air.

She had misunderstood yet again, committed an error. This might be her last.

The raiders circled her, wary, angry, waiting to see what she would do. There were two of them above her and two below-if she fell back to the ground, they would cut at her as she pa.s.sed, and the infant was a terrible weight in her arms, and a strain on her wings, its fingers digging in a panic into her neck.

A sharp wing struck out at her. She parried, spun, and fell twice her own height, then moved sharply sideways as another wing struck at her, and a hand reached for her leg. She kicked and struck bone. She fell again, turned again. They circled her, shifting their places, some of them behind, some above, some below. One of them held two red fistfuls of ferns in his hands, and he had a deep bleeding slash above his mouth. It hardly seemed worth it.

They closed in. The infant's clutching fingers were a wordless scream. She couldn't think clearly. She turned and turned, not daring to let her guard down for a moment.

Then she glanced down and saw a bright blue mist rising from the city below. A scattering of blue and green petals on the wind; dabs of colour-a dozen, twenty, thirty, men and women of Angel on the wing. Among them-not the first, but rising up at the rear-she saw the explorer Orpheus. She recognised him by his wings.

They were there in seconds. Sharp wings cut down the raiders. Strong hands took the infant from her so that she could answer their questions. Yes, she was unharmed. Yes, the infant was unharmed, she thought, probably. No, she didn't know what she'd done, or why. Why not? She'd hardly known she was s.n.a.t.c.hing an infant, she confessed, she might just as easily have taken a handful of beads or a sc.r.a.p of clothing; only the chase had mattered. Yes, yes, she was the Earthwoman ...

She looked around for Orpheus. She saw him circling, watching her. His face was impa.s.sive. His wings-those extraordinary, beautiful wings-suggested curiosity, perhaps even amus.e.m.e.nt. Then he turned and swooped down towards the city.

Far above them, the retreating pirates were a distant fading shadow. They dwindled, swallowed by the light of the red moon, and then they were gone from sight. The red moon was pa.s.sing on its way. At some moment in the course of their flight they'd go from rising up to falling down. It made her dizzy just to imagine it. She was so tired she could hardly think, or speak; so tired it was all she could do to gently drift down like a falling leaf. She looked around for Orpheus, but he was gone.

Over the rest of the long lunar night, and through the following day, there were countless feasts, and celebrations, and speeches and debates, and rituals she was hard-pressed to understand, both solemn and wild. The city was drunk on red wine, on survival, on stories and boasting and honour, Martians danced, wrestled, argued, swarmed, laughed, made love openly in the skies overhead. Josephine was questioned, flattered, embraced, propositioned. She was drunk too; she couldn't stop herself talking. She told the story of how she'd given chase to the retreating pirates perhaps a hundred times. Her feat was considered daring, mad, hilarious, absurd. This unexpected motion-this deviation from the settled course-was rich in philosophical and artistic implications. It was either a stroke of genius or such a remarkable and prodigious idiocy that it was worth talking about anyway. There was a school of thought that what she'd done was cruel and depraved, a sign that the Blue Sphere was a place of uncivilised monsters. She was both feted and condemned. The Martians debated her act as if it held the key to a total understanding of the Blue Sphere and its inhabitants. They argued, as disputatious and quarrelsome as dons or priests or poets or spiritualists. Before the next night fell-a month of days and nights might have pa.s.sed in London-half a dozen different schools of thought had emerged regarding the significance (spiritual, military, or artistic) of her feat. She was called on to speak, to write, to defend herself. Soon she found herself drawn into the quarrels and politics and life of the lunar city so thoroughly and so pleasantly that there were times when she could almost forget about London.

The red moon dwindled rapidly. The feasts came to an end. She went looking for Orpheus.

THE.

EIGHTH.

DEGREE.

{Vast Countenance}

Chapter Thirty-two.

The sun rose. A sharp little disc of blue, unthinkably remote. The angle of its motion was peculiar, and somewhat vertiginous. There was something chemical about its faint light, as if the sun had been subjected to some hitherto unknown industrial process, burned out, and then discarded. Behind it, the sky was a dome of rust. Beneath it there was gloom. Vast dust-clouds ma.s.sed on the horizon.

Now that there was sun, they had orientation, of a sort. The expedition left camp and set off north-by-north-west. A mountain range visible on the horizon rose higher and higher as the hours went by, and then became clouds, which became a mere haze in the air. The expedition pressed on through.

Atwood led the way. He'd started the march with a dip into his supply of cocaine and was full of energy. The men followed, labouring under packs that would have crushed them under the conditions of Earth. To the eye of any observer (and they both longed for and dreaded encountering any such observer) they might have resembled a procession of ants carrying leaves. Dimmick pulled one of the sleds. Vaz and Payne and Arthur took turns pulling the other. The things made an awful unearthly racket, the steel runners sc.r.a.ping over stony ground and striking sparks; and from time to time a sled got turned over or suddenly hit a rock and jerked to a halt, causing Vaz and Payne and Dimmick to swear, and tins of ox-tongue to go rolling all over the surface of Mars, or get punctured on sharp rocks. There were sharp rocks everywhere. Hard to spot them in the gloom; impossible not to think of them as wilfully malevolent.

The sun achieved its zenith. The cold persisted regardless. It had been twilight on Mars for ten thousand years, it seemed, and the sun was too distant to have much say in how Mars did things. Frank lit one of the lanterns, as much for comfort as for light. He tried to start a sing-along, something from his military days, but n.o.body had much heart for it. It was b.l.o.o.d.y hard work to make a noise that could travel in the thin cold air of Mars; and then there was the awful sense that nothing was listening, anywhere, in all that vast unfriendly sky-or, worse, that something might be.

Something in the atmosphere irritated the throat. It smelled faintly metallic. Sometimes there was a sound rather like the noise on a telephone line when no one was speaking. Occasional gusts of wind rushed past them, carrying odd whispering-or, not quite whispering, because it was soundless: a mere ghost of sound, a motion in the air ...

They marched across stony ground, up and down occasional rills or ripples or dunes of dirt; they manhandled the sleds across cracks and ditches. They encountered no trace of life; not so much as a scattering of moss or lichen; not a trickle of water. Nothing to look at but that strange violet light, glimmering from behind dust-clouds as vast as oceans, slowly streaming and shifting. A haze hung in the air, obscuring vision. G.o.d knows what might come lumbering out of it. Impossible to judge distances, or to distinguish shadow from shape. No wonder poor Ashton had started to hallucinate.

Discipline. That was the thing. The same techniques that disciplined the mind for the rigours of Gracewell's Engine would work for the surface of Mars. It was the same problem, when you got down to basics. Things that the human mind was not meant to think. Things that the human eye was not meant to see.

Atwood marched blithely on ahead, and the rest of them followed.

Shortly after noon, one of the sleds turned over for the third time and bounced into a ditch. Payne cried out as the rope skinned his hands. Vaz stumbled and fell on his back. Then he rolled over and scrabbled after the sled on hands and knees, muttering excitedly. He reached down into the ditch and picked up a rock.

"Look." He got to his feet.

"b.l.o.o.d.y thing turned the sled over," Payne said.