Mnemo's Memory Read online

  The next wave hit. Brega was ready for it. She crouched, jammed her fingers into a fissure in the rock and leaned in to meet the wave. She felt her shoulder wrench as the wave hit the oblivious Ministry man but she kept her grip and he somehow kept to his feet.

  "Move!"

  They retreated along the ledge back toward the lighthouse. The lantern was gone, submerged too deep to see. Brega remembered tunnels that weren't so dark as this. Fixing their bearings with the passage of the lighthouse beam every thirty seconds, they followed the rope line, dashing between waves like a battalion advancing under fire. At some point a drenching assault brought Assent back to reality. Their flight to safety smoothed with his active cooperation.

  Finally she pushed him up the embankment and dragged herself up beside the bolted ring. The waves lapped just below their feet. They were both drenched and Brega shivered with exhaustion and cold.

  "You," she gasped, spitting up salt and gulping lungsful of air. "You idiot! What were you doing out there? One more minute and you'd have drowned."

  "The storm is cutting away the cliff face. I had to see it for myself before nightfall."

  "Why?"

  "Because every night, the sailors rebury the bones."

  Assent rolled the boulder over in his hands, holding it by his fingertips. He held it up as the lighthouse beam passed overhead, washing them with its pale green luminescence.

  He held an enormous skull. It glowed with the phosphorescent memory of the light beam. Three eye sockets, packed with rock and soil from the cliff face, stared back at her.

  Assent stared at his prize with naked ardency. "Titan," he breathed.

  #

  "Do you know what the Ministry would do to me if you drowned under my care?"

  Assent reverently place the skull at the end of the trestle, on which he had assembled every bone he'd recovered to date. Brega conceded she had misjudged his anatomical knowledge; he'd set most of the pieces in their rightful position. She'd underestimated his diligence as well. Three-quarters of a complete skeleton lay before her. The remains amounted to a creature almost half the height of the lighthouse itself.

  "Am I under your care, Keeper?" His eyes shone as he fidgeted with bone fragments.

  "I am duty-bound to protect people from these dangerous waters, Professor Assent. I would not care to discuss the finer points of your suicidal recklessness before a board of inquiry."

  Assent raised flaring nostrils, seeming ready to mount a counter-argument. Then he sniffed and nodded, looking away quickly. "Rest assured it will not happen again, Keeper. I have my prize."

  "What exactly do you have?"

  "You know as well as I do what this creature was," said Assent.

  Brega poured eight years of military pragmatism into a disdainful snort. "Titans are a story for minstrels who don't know any dirty songs."

  "Granted. Go on, please."

  Brega rolled her eyes. "The Titans ruled the world. They kept humans as slaves, but humans cast them down by inventing the curse of war. "

  "What do you think of that?"

  Brega answered with exaggerated care, "I think the Ministry has forbidden observation of all irrational belief systems."

  "Spoken like a patriot, Keeper. But as you can clearly see, these bones are anything but an irrational belief." Assent waved his hands over the bones like he was warming himself at a fireside. His mouth was a thin line of satisfaction. "I'd almost given up hope of ever finding one. But, aha, that's the irrational thing, isn't it? To give up just because the likelihood of success is low? You were a soldier, I'm sure you understand."

  Brega retreated toward the stairs. She was soaked, she was tired of bones and the lamp had gone unattended long enough. "I was a revolutionary, Professor," she said. "I understand reckless obsession well enough."

  #

  The storm blew itself out but the poor light continued. Brega eventually set the lamp to look after itself and crumpled into her bunk. When she awoke, the night was half over. She ate warm gruel to pump some heat into her body and ascended to the lamp room without bothering to check on Assent.

  The sailors were back, digging in the sand. They had replaced their usual plodding with a vital urgency. One, the man with the feathered hat was waving his arms at the others and striking at their legs with a whip or a cane. The others were digging lustily into the sand, cutting dark trenches into the beach's unblemished skin.

  A pang rose in Brega as she watched their tireless labour. How many nights had she spent, knee-deep in grasping mud, her spade taking meagre bites from the baked clay trench walls? She might have wished for the ghosts' implacable strength as sergeants barked orders, as shells whistled overhead, as her stomach emptied over and again in sympathy with her screaming muscles.

  But all wars end eventually, one way or another. Those poor wretches would dig their holes and bury their miserable hordes every night until the world became cold. It was ill-fortuned, going to your grave with unfinished business in life. Brega counted herself among the lucky exceptions.

  The lighthouse shuddered as if in response to the chill. Brega's feet knew every creak and groan of the building. Something was wrong. She cast a worried glance at a pressure gauge set below the lamp. Pipes, pumps and reaction chambers all showed normal.

  Brega released her breath, calmly running a checklist through her head. If she set aside the likelihood of a catastrophic pressure build up, nothing short of an earthquake posed a serious threat to the lighthouse. Was Cape Defeat prone to boneshakers?

  "Keeper."

  Brega jumped. She hadn't heard Assent climbing the stairs. His face was drained of colour, except for scarlet cheeks. "What's the matter with you? When did you last sleep?"

  "I think I've made a terrible mistake."

  He led her down to the workroom. Its disarray was worse than ever. One of the trestle tables was upside down, the other was in splinters. The instrument of its destruction, the axe Brega used to split her firewood, lay amid the rubble. Her landscape paintings had not escaped the mayhem; some canvases bore no more than a few puncture marks, but most of the frames were good for nothing but kindling. Long lateral gouges in the walls and on the ceiling were new.

  The mule, free of its stable, chewed on a canvas and stamped its hooves. It brayed in hot accusation at the sight of Brega.

  "What happened to my – Wait, where are all the bones?" When Assent did not answer at once, Brega snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. "Professor, what did you do with the bones?"

  Assent pointed at the wide workshop doors without a word. One was off its rollers, slightly ajar and held in place only by its weight. Cursing, Brega snatched up the axe and dragged the other door open.

  The captain of the sailors stood there, his feathered hat drawn low across a face indistinct even at these close quarters. By contrast, she could see every detail of his shirt, from the frayed lacework along the cuffs and fore-sleeves of his stained linen shirt, the scuffs on his cracked leather kidney belt and the droplets of tar on his canvas deck shoes. The brilliant plumage adorning his hat was plucked from the tail of a bird that had been hunted to extinction back when His Late Majesty's grandfather was a boy.

  The old sailor spoke with a voice as sharp as breaking timbers. "The last king of men is dead. The curse of war is broken."

  Brega had seen enough ghosts in her time not to share Assent's terror. "Don't be stupid. War's no more a curse than spring sniffles."

  "War is salvation and damnation both. Sometimes more one than the other."

  Brega had no taste for riddles. Ghosts had a way of focusing on useless details. "What did you do with the bones?"

  The ghost shook his head. "Nothing. Our efforts were thwarted."

  Assent let out a tortured moan and sank to his knees. Brega rounded on him. "What does he mean?"

  "Some within the Ministry believe we made a terrible mistake at the end of the revolution. I was sent here to find out if they were right."

  "Wha
t mistake?"

  "We executed the king."

  "No!" Brega slapped the table with the axe handle. It sounded like the crack of a rifle. The mule's ears shot up and it backed through the door to its stable. "The king was a butcher and a thief. He stole my lands, he killed my husbands and he put everyone I knew on a chain gang. I joined the revolution to put that bastard and his cronies on the executioner's block. I hunted his taxmen. I collapsed his mines and burned his wheat fields. I fought his dogs through mud and rain and disease for seven horrible years, Professor. While you sat in your precious academy with your books and your fierce intellectual debates, I saw damned close to every man and woman I served with shot or burned or beheaded. Don't you dare tell me that monster didn't deserve his death."

  The ghost captain interrupted with sepulchral reluctance, looking at his feet. The feathers of his hat drooped across its brim like a surrendered banner. "When I was alive," he said, "I was called Reyes Cerradi. I commanded the fourth fleet of the Republic of Merrijo."

  Throwing Assent a withering glare, Brega said "You died centuries ago?" Most ghosts lasted a few decades, no more.

  "We thought our lives a fair price to overthrow Queen Yerai's rule."

  Assent's academic instincts hared ahead of his terror. "Ours was not the first great revolution to depose a tyrant king, Keeper Brega. The same pattern has repeated again and again, the world over. Petty chieftains, tin-pot warlords, imperial pretenders – no matter how mighty or mean, monarchies have been falling one by one for a hundred years."

  "Get to the point."

  "Soon after the fighting ended, the Ministry consulted with me on certain points of mythology. On my advice, they sent delegations to every corner of the globe. Each returned with the same story. The Kings have all fallen. Ours was the last."

  "Well, huzzah to that," said Brega. "What does this have to do with the bones, Professor?"

  The ghost captain set a hand upon Brega's shoulder. She felt no sensation of flesh upon flesh, though a prickling sensation along the underside of her toes eased the moment his hand lifted away. "Come," he said, leading her into the night.

  At first she could not make it one faintly luminous figure from another. As her eyes adjusted away from the chemical glare of the lighthouse lanterns, she saw the sailors engaged in a pitched battle upon the beach. They raised muskets and long-arms, blew puffs of wan yellow smoke that lingered on the stiff breeze. They charged with cutlasses and pikes; one even swung like a dislodged cog, his heavy spade extended like an hour hand running out of control.

  Their opponent was a lumbering figure, huge against the stretch of the beach. It rose on trembling legs, emaciated but no longer fleshless. Strips of striated muscle and ligament cords wrapped pale bones like a forest overtaking a battlefield. A crop of cartilaginous plates were forming across the thick neck and broad shoulders, tapering down a spine now almost completely hidden. As the lighthouse beam passed across it, the creature looked back, directly at Brega or so she imagined, with unblinking eyes reflecting like three full moons lingering like ill luck in the night sky.

  "Titan, said Cerradi.

  The sailors renewed their attacks. Even at this distance, Brega saw it was a losing battle. The creature flung them aside with a sweep of its single arm. Some crashed against rocks and recovered at once to renew their attack. Others were cast into the roiling waters and sank without trace. The Titan clawed at the wet sand, gouging out a furrow that it followed up the beach. It ignored further salvos from the sailors, excavating a trench that took it to a rock formation beyond the high tide line. A pistol-crack reached the lighthouse as the Titan pulled the rock spur in half with one great heave. It followed with a barrage of pummelling blows that dashed the remnants into pebbles.

  "What's it doing?" Brega's chest was too tight for easy breath. Her words sounded hollow and distant, washed out by the roar of her blood. Her grip tightened on the axe haft.

  "Searching for its arm," replied Assent, pointing as the creature pried from the rubble its prize of a spear of broken bone. It jammed the limb fragment into its own empty shoulder socket, raising its face to the skies in an unheard but unmistakable roar of pain.

  "The curse of war ended with the fall of the last King," said the ghost captain, awed. "Where one Titan rises, the rest will follow. We cannot bury them all."

  Brega was horrified. "You were burying Titan bones?"

  "And I dug them up," said Assent. "I have doomed us."

  Brega looked from the dead man whose hope had sustained it long past a spirit's natural span to the living man whose hope lay freshly slaughtered. The lumbering shape beyond flung one last flailing sailor into the ocean.

  "What are you trying to tell me? You think the Titans will retake their world because humanity's will to fight has burned out?"

  The Titan righted itself on feet like longboats wrapped in bloody meat. Its new arm was almost whole to the elbow. It followed a first experimental step with a second, steadier and more confident. It oriented itself on the lighthouse and strode forth.

  Neither man answered Brega. She snarled, "Like hell. I've got war in me until it's ripped from my ribcage."

  She snatched the sailor's pistol from his shoulder bandolier, her fingers instinctively closing around the grip before her brain had time to register that she should not be able to touch it at all. It was an old thing, weathered and salt-pitted, with silvery plates inscribed with filigree style that had not been fashionable for centuries and four chambers fat with ammunition. She thumbed the firing hammer back, noting the smooth action. For all that it was as unreal as its owner, it was well-maintained. It would fire when she pulled the trigger, because she expected nothing else. Would force of will extend to harming the Titan? The other sailors' whips and axes were ineffective.

  Captain Cerradi looked at her in frank astonishment. "You must flee. I cannot protect you. You cannot protect yourselves."

  Brega said "Who said anything about protection?" She raised the pistol and sighted along its barrel. She aimed for the Titan's middle eye. Her instincts protested, demanding she account for the wind and the fall of shot. She ignored them. She fired.

  The pistol thundered, as if the storm had doubled back. Assent clapped his hands to his ears and wailed. The Titan slapped a claw to its face and howled.

  Citrus-and-ash smoke residue filled Brega's nostrils, spurring her muscles more sharply than fear. Whether the impossible shot had found its mark, she had the Titan's attention. Its slow lumber became a charge.

  "Move or die, Professor!" She pushed the pistol back into the ghost captain's hands and turned on her heels. Pushing a gaping Assent aside, she crossed the workroom to the stairs to the drive room.

  Like an artillery bombardment ranging in on a foxhole, the Titan reached the long workroom. Old mortar crumbled and bricks cracked overhead. Brega imagined the sweep and weave of its long shadow as it stood at the foot of the lighthouse and rained its good fist down on the workshop roof. Or perhaps by now it had regrown the missing hand. Either way, the workshop would not last long.

  Long enough, though.

  A shriek and a scurry of footfalls told her Assent had come to his senses and followed. He stumbled to his knees at the foot of the steps as Brega raised the fire axe above her head. On a raised inspection dais before her lay the housing for the hydraulic regulator, a riveted copper box fed from either end by thick bundles of pipes. She muttered operational instructions under her breath, trying to recall safety protocols.

  "What are you doing?" gasped Assent, who had done little to familiarise himself with the mechanical operations of the lighthouse.

  "What I was trained for," said Brega, ignoring the airless strain of her own voice. "Killing kings."

  She smashed the regulator box in half, dancing back gingerly as a dark liquid sprayed out and poured like lifeblood across the floor. The pipes encircling the central shaft began to shudder and whine, hammering against the metal brackets that clasped them to the drive's casin
g. Pressure gauges flipped, replacing low numbers with red-rimmed warning symbols. The floor rumbled at the abruptly increased torque of gears that had never been replaced in Brega's lifetime.

  Risking a sudden burst pipe scalding her with caustic chemicals or the shreds of a cog ripping her like shrapnel, Brega put her face close to the main shaft and looked up. High above, phosphorescent mist sprayed from every seam of the great lamp. An ominous cracking noise funnelled down the tower to her.

  She ran to Assent and pulled him to his feet with her free hand. She angled the axe away from them both, avoiding its dripping head. "We have to go," she said.

  "Go? Where?"

  Before she could answer, an avalanche of bricks and timber sprayed down the stairway like storm-wracked surf. Assent's head jerked to one side as a ceiling beam swung down like an executioner's blade and collided with him.

  Long, muscular arms glinting mint-green with sea spray burst through the dust and snatched at the Ministry man. Debris broke away from the ceiling overhead, then a wall collapsed. The grasping fingers leapt back as if burned. Brega caught sight of one heel kicking spasmodically before billowing dust obscured the scene. She sealed her lips against the dust, which stopped her calling out Assent's name and giving away her position. The face and upper torso of the Titan loomed out of the dust cloud. It was wedged in the demolished door frame. It hissed from its shark-toothed maw. Two grey orbs like polished cannonballs blinked in the gritty air; the third in the middle was a ruined, gunshot mess. Canyons deepened in pallid skin at the corners of its eyes and mouth, giving it an ancient, eroded appearance. Stalks of midnight-deep hair bristling along its jaw were muddy with chalky mortar.

  It spoke in a voice like an earthquake. "Where are you, first of the last men?"

  Brega retreated toward the central shaft, axe raised in readiness.

  The Titan dug its clawed fingers into the lower steps. As it pulled itself and twisted, more of the wall around the door frame began to give way. Brickwork folded and collapsed around the Titan's hips. With a triumphant snarl it hauled itself forward, sliding down the cramped stairway like a snake breaking into a rabbit warren. Then its eyes fixed on Brega. It struck out with a clawed hand still damp with rain and the blood of ghosts.