Glorious Angels Read online

  GLORIOUS

  ANGELS

  JUSTINA ROBSON

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Postscript

  Also by Justina Robson

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  WHY THE WAR IN THE SOUTH MUST END

  By Tralane Huntingore, Professor of Engineering,

  Glimshard Academy of Sciences.

  The war in the south has already consumed our soldiers, our money and our interest in its outcome. Daily it costs us more tax revenues than the entire Sun City District. The news reports regarding it have slowed to a trickle of inaccurate supposition and death tolls or lurid recollections.

  Mercenaries gather at our gates, eager for the high wages paid to career warmen, including fighters from groups historically and politically opposed to the Empire and sympathetic to the indigenous tribeswomen of the south whose lands we have invaded, willingly or not, in our march to claim the Southern Fragment. Those tribes fight a righteous war against an unsympathetic occupier.

  Refugees fleeing the front have collided with related blood families along the Karoo forest and drawn them into the conflict so that now what began as a simple crossing of territory has become an attempt to hold an impossible line, hundreds of miles long.

  Counteragents and sympathisers have come to the Imperial diaspora and burned crops, looted homes and murdered villagers in shifting bands that are almost impossible to hunt down. They have allied with our ever-present agitators on the Steppelands and cannot be pursued even this close to home due to lack of manpower.

  If this were not enough those countries bordering the Empire who have long envied our wealth and prosperity now see a chink in our armour as we lose guard patrols, civilian militia organisations and our attentions to our lands in order to fuel the conflict far beyond our natural reach. It has also lately been attested in several vivid journals, published lately by Hollow Victory Presses, that use of powerful mage weapons in battle has roused the Karoo of the southern forest and drawn them into the conflict. They are a combatant we cannot win against in our current depleted state.

  With the greatest personal regrets I must advise the immediate closure of the Southern Fragment Expedition and propose extensive peacemaking diplomacy be carried out before we lose not only our dear sons and daughters but our beloved city and Empire as well. Is any scientific discovery, no matter how potentially significant, worth the price we are paying?

  CHAPTER ONE

  ZHARAZIN

  Against a gunmetal grey sky a small plane was flying. Barely bigger than a hang glider, its two wings tilted and juddered in the force of the winds that tossed it this way and that. So violent and erratic was the progress that, seen from afar, it could easily have been mistaken for a leaf. But then a streak of light caught the edge of one of its propellers and flashed a regular code of brilliant motes that betrayed its mechanical nature.

  Zharazin Mazhd, frozen almost into insensibility on his precarious perch, felt his heart catch at the sight. The slight increase of motion made him wobble and he felt the leather harness holding him against the icy stone slip a little as it took his weight. The pain of being forced to maintain one position for hours was outstanding and the cold had numbed his hands and feet in spite of their fireweave wraps.

  As the plane battled closer, a figure could be seen sitting inside the light framework of the craft’s delicate body, arms and legs working hard at various controls. The head was covered in a black leather helmet. Its full glass faceplate reflected the stormclouds. Beneath this an air tube curled down like a slender black trunk to the tanks behind the single seat. Wrestling hard with levers, one leg thrusting forwards, the other braced, the pilot struggled and cajoled the tiny craft in steady corrections towards the overgrown deck below Zharazin’s ruined tower. The bees of the engine became a furious tiger and the underside of the wings lit with a burst of arcane energy in pale purple as the pilot applied maximum power in an attempt to stall their excessive speed. Success brought a sudden new series of terrifying angles of descent and the plane zigged, yawed and pitched as it dropped from the sky.

  Zharazin put down the glasses for a moment and quickly wiped their lenses again, to be sure he would not miss the essential moment. Their heavy brass frames were cold and rigid against the bone of his eye sockets as he replaced them and the shaking of his hands made him bang them clumsily so that pain shot through one cheekbone but he found the airplane easily again, huge and out of focus in his vision. He spun the dials as it flitted closer to the platform where its landing circle was marked in weeds bursting through the stones, their lines vivid green against the yellowed streaks where the rest had been sprayed dead.

  A gust of wind almost knocked him off his perch and he clutched and gasped with a moment of sudden terror. The glasses fell heavily against the strap on his neck. He swore, swore, swore, fumbling with his gloved, dead fingers until he had them back in place. For a second, the view wavered crazily and he lost sight of his quarry, but then he found the small shape, the violet glows already dying back until it was barely more than a silhouette against an ever-darkening sky.

  There was a moment when the tiny craft was suspended in the air above the deck, so still that it might have hung there for ever, propeller whirring, insectlike, fragile. Then, with the sudden relenting of the wind, it dropped like a stone to the burst pavement of the runway and landed heavily with a thud that Zharazin felt as well as heard. He found his heart in his mouth. He’d thought the pilot was surely going to die, the plane smashed into matches, although identifying an unprotesting corpse might be easier than the lengths this had forced him to.

  His right lens was misting up again but he daren’t clean it now. Now was the moment to which all his painful effort and machination had led. The pilot taxied forwards to the green circle’s centre, stopped the plane, stopped the engines. They undid their harness and turned in place to operate a crank that wound in the singing wires of the crystallograph which sat behind them on the fuselage, mounted in an iron box and protected with an alder wood frame. That done they slithered to a position on the edge of the cockpit itself, reaching for the crystallograph again.

  One, two, three, four – into the grey anonymity of a mail satchel went the crystals from the ’graph box. They looked like nothings now, shards of coloured rock, clouded with salty faultlines but he knew these to be the final components for Minister Alide’s Chaos Gun, the weapon which would disintegrate anything that came within the range of its entropy beam. But they still looked like nothing, the crystals. As he watched they were covered in cotton wadding, strapped up tight and then their manager, the pilot, with minimum care, hoisted their bag free. With a movement more redolent of joy
than fear they kicked their legs up over the side of the craft and jumped down to the ground.

  Without their weight the wind buffeted the fragile plane and made it move. It slid a few feet. The pilot put one hand out onto the wing, avoided the still-lethal whirl of the propeller with ease and gave the mailbag a hefty underarm swing before letting it go. It sailed across the deck and into a bush. The pilot gave a nod of satisfaction that said clearly they were glad to be rid of it, however temporarily. It was heavy, so there was no chance it would be blown over the edge… Zharazin could not think about the edge. If he did he became aware of what was at his back and that was not worth contemplating. All the tower’s safety mechanisms were long since dismantled or weathered away. It was a direct drop of six hundred feet to the city streets, and if the wind caused him to miss them it was a thousand more to the humble roads and fields of the farmlands.

  He made himself not blink. His eyelashes bent against the glass.

  The pilot was doing things to their craft Zharazin didn’t understand but after a moment or two he watched in surprised admiration for the ingenuity of the machine as the wings were folded up and rolled in, the tail pushed up, and then, with a good shove, the entire thing was wheeled across to the one remaining whole hangar, gently eased through the door and locked in. If he hadn’t seen it happen he would never have noticed the hangar itself – little more than one rotting workshop among many – nor believed something like that would fit in what was essentially a toolshed with a large door. The gale rattled the doors as the pilot heaved them to and sealed their mouldering green with a heavy bar. Then – yes! – they walked forwards to the bush and the bag with a strong, swinging stride, clearly high on the early evening’s dangerous activity.

  Zharazin had only seconds left before they would be gone. He tried not to get his hopes up. After all, he’d been here more than fifteen days in a row, and on none of those days had the pilot taken off their faceplate within viewing distance. The Infomancy demanded to know for certain who it was, and so he had no choice. There were not many candidates but guesswork was not something his mistress engaged with. He wondered if his own hopes had anything to do with the race of his heart.

  The wind sucked at his boots, caught his scarf and tried to use it as a sail to pry him off his cliff.

  And then it happened. The hands went up, the clasps were flicked free, the headcover pulled off and aside in one smooth gesture as the pilot, inexplicably, ignored the bag to turn and face the coming storm. A stream of black hair flagged out suddenly, long and thick, as they hung the mask on their belt and then pulled off their gauntlets too and flung out their arms to the sky in a lover’s embrace.

  ‘Turn, turn, turn,’ Zharazin repeated under his breath, starting to curse the gods he’d been praying to a second before. It seemed the devils preferred him. His thundering heart stood still, waiting.

  The pilot ran their hands through their hair and shook it out. Fresh spots of rain, cold, heavy and ominous began to land. They spattered the grey stone black in front of Zharazin and dashed themselves to death on the left lens of his glasses. One big breath… Then, finally! At last the exhilarated pilot turned and Zharazin got a clear look at their face for a single, perfectly lit moment.

  Zharazin dropped the binoculars. They hit the rail before him and cracked a lens with a sharp retort, which made him start. There was a brief, awful moment in which he knew he was dead and his feet briefly paddled air. He grabbed for the balustrade’s remains in front of him as he felt himself tip sideways. On his waist his rope harness creaked and the binoculars suddenly dragged on the back of his neck as they fell to the length of their strap – if not death by a fall then a hanging. For a few moments he was a scrabbling, panicking animal until his hands became sure the stone in front was not leaning, but strong, and his feet found the pitons he’d taken such pains to drill into position. He pressed his cheek to the cold rock, eyes closed, and saw behind the lids that revelatory moment once again; the triumphant tearing away of the headpiece, the self-satisfied shake of the head releasing all that coiling black hair, the utterly unexpected but hoped-for familiarity of that face.

  Tralane Huntingore. Heiress of an ancient but defunct line of mages. Eccentric, erratic, renowned as a scientist, in the prime of her beauty at thirty-eight, mother of two daughters, the one slight, fair and scholarly the other dark, fierce and curved like a violin. Tralane Huntingore, a woman he had seen once in the street and never forgotten because seeing her had made him walk into a wall.

  All this time he had guessed the pilot was a man, just because only a man could be risked on such a mission and Minister Alide, who authorised and banked the gun project, favoured men of the army for all tasks. Instead he had just witnessed the Matriarch of Huntingore complete a daring feat of skill that any Prime would be ecstatic to survive, and all to gather materials for weapons of mass destruction. She’d been jaunty about it too, for an outspoken pacifist who had written and distributed pamphlets against the very war in which the Empire was presently engaged, who harboured known dissenters in her household and who was, if rumour and research be believed, verging on bankruptcy.

  The rock bit his forehead but he let it. He hoped the pain would clear a path in his mind and let him see what to do with this information, which he had fully expected to solve his problems but which had now entirely turned them on their heads and inside out. He didn’t want to reveal her identity, but how could he not? The rock had no ideas, it seemed, because his forehead only hurt. The coming rain splashed on his wrapped hands further numbing them as their magic fought the bitter air and the water and lost. He had to go before it got too slippery and his nerve failed.

  He straightened and looked across the crumpled ruins of the tower deck with naked eyes. Viewed this way the figure of Tralane was toy-sized and indistinct as the clouds reached the city proper and darkened the early evening into a menacing gloom. She grabbed up the mailbag of crystals with careless exuberance, walked across the empty reaches of stone to the black shadows where various stairs and elevators led down into the tower’s guts, and vanished from sight there, the bag swinging from her shoulder and the mask jouncing at her back. A single ray of weak light reflected from her visor, the sky winking at him as if they shared her secret.

  Suddenly cold beyond enduring and fearful of the climb, Zharazin became aware of how far he was from anything resembling safety. It was only with the greatest determination that he was able to unclip his carabiners from the webbing wrapped around the spire and clip them instead to his ropes. He fumbled, but the webbing he had used to make himself an anchor on the fragile spire of rock was thoroughly bedded in place and would not come free. He began to get his penknife out to cut it, tuning the blade to the correct frequency just by experience, but just then a gust of freshening wind and a patter of rain warned him that the clouds were dropping fast. He made the cut but fumbled the knife as he turned the dial again and it fell from his hand. He watched it tumbling over and over until he couldn’t see it at all against the thin mist and the gathering gloom. He heard no result as he prayed briefly that it not kill someone, grateful the mist utterly ruined any kind of view. Try as he might he couldn’t think of it as anything but ominous bad luck. The sky winked. The mist consumed his knife. On the flight deck far below the weeds bent flat, bowing before the storm.

  Moving jerkily with fear of this brewing spell he made himself climb out of the slender notch in the rock. He was stiff from sitting so long without moving and his legs and arms complained all the time about their weeks of climbing but he managed, little by little, thinking of the reputation and reward he would get for his information, and then when that failed of some other kinds of fortune to which he could aspire with his knowledge – many layers and systems of knowledge, not only this sliver – and these fantasies spiralled up around him in a cloud of dissolute protection and allowed him to creep down. He should take all the traces of his work with him, but he was too alarmed. He promised himself he would come b
ack for them when the weather was more clement, knowing it for a lie. After all, nobody had been up here in decades and there was no reason for them to come here again. Zharazin was a good observer and the Array was a derelict artefact of no interest to anyone any longer. He could count the surviving members of the families that had once kept it working on the fingers of one hand and he knew the position of all their files in the Memoriam, including Tralane’s. It was this diligence, observation, patience and a lot of luck which had let him work his way up in the world from thieving guttersnipe out on the hills to a rank within the Infomancy. Even if he hadn’t been attempting to snake his way into the Empress’s elite by hook, crook and bootstrap he might have tried to discover the identity of the crystal recorder’s owner for the professional pride of the thing. Making an identification had seemed an obvious demonstration of his tenacity and determination, and his superiors would be glad to know where the Gleaming’s supply of weapon-grade crystal shards was coming from: a matter that the Minister of Defence had kept from them for some time. But now this grand plan was spoiled. He wouldn’t be selling information, he would be selling Tralane Huntingore. He wasn’t convinced he would ever be ready to do that.

  It amused him to know that this wretched surveillance had in fact mimicked one of his dearest daydreams: all the miserable, terrifying, arduous days and nights since midsummer Zharazin the ambitious spy and the mystery daredevil pilot and crystallomancer, Tralane, had been alone together, far from the eyes of the world. And if the pilot didn’t know he’d been there and he didn’t tell, then there was even less reason to come and rip out the pitons that betrayed his daring path up the face of the tower. But he felt like he ought to. Leaving them felt like leaving a signature behind. Glimshard was a city of mages, one of the Eight, and that was a dangerous place in which to be complacent, on any front. He still felt off balance and a little sick as he finally put foot to flat roof tile at the tower’s base. He couldn’t think what to do or how to turn just yet, so he gathered up his gear instead and carefully made his way home.