Ruin's Wake Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dr Song’s Journal

  Groan

  i. Karume

  Endeldam

  Dr Song’s Journal

  Alec IV

  ii. Quincentennial

  The Field

  iii. Stakes

  Wreckers

  Dr Song’s Journal

  Hollow

  iv. Underworld

  Debrayn

  Dr Song’s Journal

  v. Hush

  Sanatorium

  Dr Song’s Journal

  vi. Overlooked

  Fleet Coast

  vii. Complication

  A Parting

  Dr Song’s Journal

  viii. Knife

  Cypher

  Flight

  Buried

  Unification

  Illumination

  Revolution

  By Blood

  Renewal

  Dr Song’s Journal

  Heartfelt thanks go to

  About the Author

  Ruin’s Wake

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785658792

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658808

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: March 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2019 Patrick Edwards

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For Al,

  who made it all happen

  Bask 2 – 498

  I had to rid myself of Melthum. The man was insufferable, and worse, unreliable. His bumbling efforts to manage my appointments and correspondence reflected poorly on me, and that I will not tolerate.

  So much of position is dependent on keeping face here at the vaunted Karume Elucidon – I am measured not merely on the papers I write, but how well my department is organised, though I – like all of my faculty colleagues – couldn’t care less about the right forms going in the right bins, student assessment, inter-departmental statistics. The face of it – the conceit – is that efficiency is as vital as discovery, though in truth the former trumps the latter in this glorious Hegemony of the Seeker.

  Melthum had been my assistant and occasional bed-warmer for so long I barely noticed him, no more than I would the pen I use to sign or the chair I pull up to my desk. I certainly noticed him when he tried to plead his case, bleating in that dreadful provincial accent of his. When he persisted, I slammed the door in his face and advised him to try the fucking military (which he never shut up about anyway). Maybe getting shot at in some border action would give him some vim – though I doubt, for all of his admiration and exaltation of the soldiery, he really has any intention of putting himself in harm’s way. Doubtless he’ll scratch at someone else’s door for his grant money, and there is enough vanity among the faculty that he’ll likely get it. Just not in my department.

  Department – it sounds so grand. The name conjures images of shuffled papers and sage nodding in all-night pushes; rooms full of desks, the ceilings chattering with rapid keystrokes as serious boys and girls process important data and compile heavy archival volumes for posterity.

  As it is, the Department of pre-Ruin Cryptoarchaeology comprises only myself, Professor Sulara Song, and two underachieving postgrads who couldn’t do any better (academically, as well as with each other) and, until recently, the assistant and administrator Melthum. Now my truncated ‘team’ of two is, I’m sure, as much looking forward to taking their directives from me as I am to addressing them directly.

  On to the paperwork, in which the idiot barely made a dent despite ours being the smallest department in the Elucidon. I’ve requested a replacement, although, given how most of my formal requests die alone in a darkened corner of the Dean’s office, I’ll square my shoulders against a long haul of tedium.

  Despite the drudgery, I can at least look forward to not seeing that rodent-like face peering around the door and the awkward silences when he assumed a few throwaway rolls in bed permitted him to see me as anything other than his superior.

  Bask 9 – 498

  I am packing up the department for the move to the Makuo glacier. Paperwork, endless reams of the stuff, dogs me at every turn. I would draft in the other two to help if I didn’t think their heads would implode from the need to consider more than one thing at a time.

  So much to do, so much equipment to be requisitioned, so many permits to be filed. Moving house is hard enough in this city, let alone shifting a team of people three hundred klicks into the frozen north.

  …but of course, I forget. With all that has gone on I neglected to keep this log updated. To wit:

  The oaf Fermin marched into my office three days ago and stood in front of my desk looking mightily pleased with himself. Someone – presumably heralding imminent senility – decided the greasy shit was fit for an assistant professorship and now he struts about as if he owns the place. Come to think of it, he’s looked that way ever since the Elucidon overruled me in giving him a fail for his undergraduate Heritage module. In his eyes, that was quite the victory, I’m sure.

  Anyway, I made sure Assistant Professor Fermin had a good wait before I raised my eyes to acknowledge him, and when I did so I just stared at him in silence. This had always made his upper lip sweat when he was a student, and it seemed nothing had changed. He fussed with his nails, shuffling from foot to foot, then blurted out what had obviously been meant as a triumphant, pre-prepared speech.

  The survey I’d commissioned with his (ha!) department – Geology – had turned up some results. Again, I waited in silence. In fact, I began to drum my fingernails on the desk because I know how wickedly unnerving he finds it. The oaf spat it out – in the north, they’d found something that might be pre-Ruin. After a pause, I gave him some cold formal words of thanks and indicated he should leave the sheaf of papers on my desk. He dropped them and made for the door, and only at the last minute did he seem to regain some of his forced humour. His face took on a look halfway between elation and satisfaction – triumphant, you might call it. Despite myself I snapped at him, asking what was so wonderful that he felt the need to take up more of my time.

  Maddeningly, he nodded at the papers on my desk.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he lisped.

  Skies, I loathe him.

  Ice, you see. Almost 1.5 kilometres of ice between the surface of the glacier and the bedrock, and in between all manner of fissures, faults, melt-lines and geological waste dumps. That was what the idiot was so happy about, because he knows I am obliged to go. It has been years since any undergraduate applied to major in Cryptarchaeology, which has whittled away at our share of the budget, our designation reduced to ‘research-only’ – just one step up from ‘shuttered’. We have scoured the old dig sites over and over, sucking every drop of evidence from them (which would fill a medium-sized beaker, at best). The Elucidon, taking its lead from the wider Hegemony, is touchy about anything to do with the pre-Ruin that is not an out-and-out conde
mnation; they would need little encouragement to allow the already obscure department to dry up and disappear – without me, I’m sure this would already have happened.

  So, Fermin was right in his assumption – I have to go, and it will be hard going on me, a woman of middle age (the mirror tells me, unfailingly), and though I try to keep myself fit and healthy (erstwhile rolling with assistants, for example) I am hardly prepared for an expedition into the harsh ice fields.

  But they have made a miscalculation, a misstep guided by male arrogance, pride and a lack of attention to detail that is particularly heinous, for all that they claim to be scientists. They assume I’m past it, ground down by the years and lacking the vitality necessary to make anything come of this; in truth, I cannot gather my things fast enough. The years are rolling off me as I prepare to do something, finally, after an aeon of mouldering in these rooms with the dregs of the student body to assist me. I’m an undergraduate again on my first field expedition, too full of excitement to know which warm liners to pack or which boots to wear.

  There might be nothing up there more than a cavern or an intrusion of granite that has confounded poorly calibrated sensors; on the other hand, I might reach out and lay my fingers on something from before the world I know was made, and feel its legacy on my skin.

  Bask 10 – 498

  The Dean accepted my research proposal with alarming speed. I’m sure the rest of them are having a jolly good laugh about sending me off to freeze. He won’t be smiling when he sees the size of my equipment requirements. And they’d better give me an able assistant, or I’ll come back and haunt the bastards for ever.

  Groan

  Death had receded, and the flat expanse of the steppe welcomed the return of the pale, waking light. The ground was frozen below the surface but the cap ice had begun the slow melt, releasing its grip on the broken walls and streets of the old mining town. Ras’s burning arc was shallow and cast long shadows over the broken water tower, the old dormitories, the ore processors with their silent conveyors. The strip mine’s pit gaped, the great conical hole in the permafrost presenting its open maw to the milky sky. No one remembered the place’s real name. It was just the Groan. Nobody else came here any more.

  Cale contemplated the white stone block in front of him while he got his breath back. It was taller than him, its rough-hewn sides criss-crossed with straps. The lifter-field unit he’d used to haul it out of the pit had barely held together and the block, even in the anti-grav bubble, had been cumbersome. It stood now, stark against the sky on the gravel apron that brimmed the lip of the pit as he ran a callused hand over it, feeling the roughness on his palm. This one would become his tenth Face, and he knew it would be his best. The pale granite stared back at him, flat, unyielding, devoid of the features that would emerge: jawline, brow, eyes, lips. There was still so much to do, so much preparation, before he could so much as pick up a chisel.

  The Death had been especially long this year and the ice had draped itself over everything, layer on layer, during the cold months. A particularly large build-up had caused a section of the mine’s spiral access track to shear away, leaving the rock beneath exposed and saving him many days of surveying and excavating. The next stage, the cutting and hauling of the block, had been more dangerous due to the sheer rock face; even now, powered down, the lifter unit gave off a smell like burned hair that showed how close it had come to failing on him. The motor housing ticked and creaked as it cooled in the sharp air. Then the wind gusted from the west and the giant pit behind him emitted the deep bass note that gave it its name.

  The Groan’s call filled the tundra and drowned out everything for a few heartbeats, so he didn’t hear the skimmer at first. When the uneven pulsing chug of its engines finally made itself known, the heavy utility vehicle was almost upon him. He could see where it had kicked up a trail on the thawing track which wound its way from the hills to the east. The narrow road took in a half-circuit of the circular rim of the pit before ending near where Cale had set up his tools. The rust-red skimmer was bulky, old and jury-rigged, listing under the weight of its cargo, a haze of compressed air distorting the underside.

  Cale dropped his heavy gauntlets on the workbench and shrugged out of his booster harness. He shifted and stretched in his protective suit. The sweat from the work was still lukewarm between his shoulder blades, though his ears and cheeks were raw from the cold and his breath misted the air. There was a moment of dislocation, until he caught up with himself, remembering that the landslip had saved him those two weeks – normally the first supply run of the year would find him deep in piles of excavated mud. A reminder of last year’s dig lay nearby next to the broken security fence: the engine he’d cobbled together from scavenged parts, when the permafrost had been so hard he’d had to jet-blast it just to be able to break the surface.

  The skimmer – grav-trailer bobbing along behind like a leashed larg – pulled up at the edge of the apron. There was a mechanical sigh, followed by the grateful ticking of cooling metal as the skimmer powered down and the cab door popped open. The old man from the village jumped down, the vehicle barely shifting on its air cushion. He wriggled his shoulders inside the big oilskin jacket. He wore a thick cap with flaps that hung down over his stubbled, hollow cheeks. He caught Cale’s eye, a mitten rising in greeting. Cale returned the gesture and went to meet him.

  They rode the short distance back to the hangars in the skimmer. Once there, Aulk was all business. Cale could see the Groan’s shadow in the fisherman’s hesitant step and furtive glances over his shoulder. The place had a reputation amongst the locals, and because of it he had to pay well over the odds for these supply drops; only cash and the occasional bottle of rakk kept the old man to his word, making the seasonal journey from the village over the hills. Aulk was not unfriendly but always eager to be gone from this eerie place and him, the strange foreigner who lived with the ghosts.

  Cale had been alone for so long he found he’d lost the knack for conversation, so the talk was minimal as they worked.

  ‘Lift that, on three.’

  ‘Pass that down.’

  ‘Careful there.’

  For the first time in a while he was conscious of how he must look: his hair and beard unkempt and matted after the months of dark isolation, and now mussed with sweat. The mad hermit and his rocks. Just another reason to stay away.

  The unloading took longer than usual and he could see Aulk checking Ras’s position in the sky every so often. The first drop after the dark months was always the biggest – power cells had run low; fish, meat and vegetables were distant memories. For the last month he’d been on reclaimed military field rations that all tasted identical – fine as long as you didn’t look too closely. He was heartily sick of them.

  Another, second lifter-field unit, the twin of the one he’d used that morning, helped shift the heaviest crates into the open hangar, then Aulk let him haul the rest. Cale towered over the village man and his thick arms could carry twice the load. He noticed Aulk’s limp had got worse during the Death, and he was even less help than usual. The old man shuffled about, offering the odd grunt of encouragement, occasionally holding out a steadying hand. Cale found himself sweating again and a tired old voice at the back of his mind told him he should start exercising. As usual, he ignored it.

  By the tail end of the afternoon all the crates were piled up in the hangar he used for storage. The unladen skimmer floated a half-metre higher off the ground; Aulk had powered down the trailer and stowed it away. Cale leaned on some crates to catch his breath, feeling the wetness that had spread from his lower back. Neither man spoke for several minutes. Aulk cleared his throat as if to start talking but hesitated; Cale saw him looking over at the Faces, all nine of them lined up on the empty concrete square, their frozen expressions facing north.

  He wondered if there was some significance to it, some unthinking reason why he’d arranged them that way. The carved blocks of granite charted his time here, one for e
very year. With each one he’d got better as he’d learned: how to visualise the shape inside the block, how to chip and wedge and scrub and polish until it emerged. Always the same subject, a woman’s rounded face with shoulder-length hair and a half-smile playing over her lips. Every year, he got a little closer to her.

  Aulk shuffled and Cale knew he was about to ask about the Faces, but a gust of wind came barrelling over the plain, passing over the open mouth of the Groan and making it sing like the top of an enormous bottle. The low, mournful note vibrated through the ground and the air all at once, pounding eardrums and shaking bones. Aulk’s eyes widened, his jaw slack. He took a step towards the skimmer as though something invisible had pushed him, gripped the cab’s handle, but did not open it, standing stock-still as the noise died away.

  Cale stood up straight and stretched as if he’d not seen anything. He gestured at the entrance to his home. ‘Come on. Let’s go have a drink.’

  * * *

  The two men sat at Cale’s only table nursing earthenware cups of hot rakk. Aulk looked a little calmer indoors. Cale watched him take regular, rapid slurps, the weathered old face twisting into a grimace of pleasure with each. He brushed the base of his own cup back and forth over the pitted wood, painting it with a tiny spill of liquor, waiting for the right time to break the silence.

  Aulk smacked his lips and caught Cale’s eye. A minute nod of the head, acknowledging the quality of the drink.

  ‘Good?’ Cale asked.

  The fisherman nodded. ‘Good.’ He clasped the cup between his palms to soak up the heat. ‘Now I know how you can stand living in this Sky-forsaken place.’

  ‘I like the quiet,’ said Cale. He put his drink on the table between them and sat back in his chair. ‘The stone is good.’

  Aulk made a sucking noise between his teeth. ‘Stone don’t keep a man warm. Can’t eat or drink stone. I wouldn’t live out here for all the money in the world.’

  ‘I have what I need.’

  Aulk’s brow remained furrowed. ‘Bad place. Can’t be good for a man to be out here this long.’ He looked Cale over with a critical eye, like he was searching for some outward sign of something wrong.