The Bone Clocks

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.

I fill my host’s lungs with a deep breath, and step in …

… and out into a passageway, little wider than a person, little taller, lit by the Chapel’s dying light and the surface through which we just passed, apparently harmlessly. The bellow of the disintegrating Chapel is still audible, but it sounds a good mile behind us, not a few meters. The passageway slopes down ten paces before reaching a wall, then branches off to the left and right. It’s warmer here. I touch the wall. It’s skin temperature, and has the Mars-red hue and texture of adobe. If sound, light, and flesh can travel through the membrane, however, then I’m afraid the Dusk will soon be following us. A body-shield would be wise, especially with three Anchorites up ahead, but Holly’s psychovoltage is low and mine is virtually spent, so I walk down the passage to the end. Both the left-hand and right-hand corridors curve away into darkness. It feels like necropolis, I subsay to Holly, but …

“The Blind Cathar doesn’t bother with bodies, right?”

No. Like Sadaqat’s corpse, the psychodecanted are just ejected.

I look up the corridor behind us. The ellipse is fading as the Chapel dies. I subask Holly, What do you think? Left or right?