Kenna answered him this way.

—All is as you say, brave Ulfr. Our fellow Council members use different words, and think of realms differently, as you suggest. Mithgarth, the Middle World, stands for more than just that disc where men and women first lived. The five middle realms are those formed of ‘baryonic matter’, but these are just words.

She seemed so implacably sure of herself.

—You see the same realms, then, War Queen? The same as poets and sorcerers and volvas from my time, just with different names?

—Indeed so.

—Then I pass onto you the words of a dead poet. People drop Múspellheim from their schemes.

Kenna’s transparent eyes widened, at the mention of a realm which was known and yet did not fit into the cosmic scheme.

—I don’t . . . know how to think about that.

—And it needs a bridge that is not Bifröst.

She shook her head, no longer looking certain.

—That I understand. The darkness needs its own Trembling Way, along which it will advance, and destroy us if we do not fight.

—Then I have helped you, as you asked.

Kenna reached out, starlight twinkling through her.

—Stay with . . .

But the dream was over, the spirit world fading into nothingness as profound and empty as Ginnungagap, the Great Void, the Abyss of Emptiness.

Nothing.

THIRTY-TWO

NULAPEIRON, 2657-2713 AD

From her distributed surveillance motes throughout Palace Avernon, Kenna watched most of the preparations, while her own hidden programme continued slowly: that work was not to be rushed. The Pilot, Caleb deVries, used a lev-platform several times to return to his ship on the surface, via a giant vertical shaft on the edge of the demesne. The first time, he had taken the crystal spearhead stolen from Avernon’s collection. Had Kenna wanted to blackmail deVries, the opportunity was gone, at least without betraying the undercover Pilot, Linda Gunnarsson, living the life of an epsilon-class servitrix in the lowest level of the Palace.

From a balcony protected by membrane, as well as the sharpest members of his personal guard, Lord Avernon watched a sequence of nine master-drones, each ten metres long, float one by one into the centre of the shaft, and then begin a slow vertical ascent to the surface a hundred metres above, there to gently glide into the cargo hold of deVries’s ship.

Kenna noted that Avernon had not proposed going into space himself. He was content for deVries, or rather the drones that deVries was due to deploy, to carry out the experiments, while he, Avernon, would wait to collect, collate and analyse the subsequent results. Realtime images and readings would be tightbeamed down to a receiver near the shaft opening on the planet’s surface. The chances of a neighbouring Lord eavesdropping on the signals were minimal; to involve oneself in tasks up above, even when others did the hard work, was scarcely thinkable, a blindspot in thinking that in the lower strata was taken to the extreme. Many were inhibited against – not to mention prohibited from – ascending to the next stratum. Such concepts as ground and sky were as little thought of as, say, a mythical hell, and exactly as frightening to someone who seriously imagined it.

Had it not been for the theoretical work performed by Avernon’s grandfather, the current Lord would scarcely have thought of this. But the earlier results were intriguing, with the kaon-antikaon decay rates indicating the potential for reversing time’s arrow.

Finally, deVries flew.

Kenna’s airborne surveillance motes showed her: from barely a metre above the surface, deVries’s bronze ship disappeared in a white flash that Kenna knew to be as risky as it was flamboyant. There was no realtime signal relaying the ship’s reappearance in distant orbit; neither the deployment of the first master-drone, nor the subsequent hops as it deployed the other eight, were tightcast to the ground. It was only when the master-drones themselves completed initialisation procedures that the signals began.

First, readings established that each drone was in clear space, with no hindrances to letting loose the cargo, comprising thousands of fist-sized mini-drones.

The last of the master-drones also sent holovideo footage of deVries’s vessel, until it transited out of realspace, leaving nothing to see. If the experimental programme worked, any or all of the master-drones would commence a slow descent back to the shaft on Nulapeiron’s surface that led down to Demesne Avernon, where the ruling Lord and his logosophical research team would commence work on whatever came back.

Soon clouds of mini-drones were spraying out into space.

I wonder what they’ll find.

Kenna already possessed dangerous knowledge of the future, assuming that everything she had learned as Rhianna Chiang from placing Roger Blackstone into deepest trance so long ago was true, and not a delusion formed during her reconstruction and resurrection as a static cyborg formed of distributed components.

A few mini-drones performed initial checks on kaon-antikaon decay rates, finding them skewed further from previous readings by 0.06 per cent. There were no other unusual phenomena. This was a research programme whose payoff might come in days (as the current Lord Avernon hoped) or decades or never.

While deep inside the Palace walls, where no surveillance system beyond Kenna’s own could see, her own programme of experiments was well under way, although she had to be careful because of one severely limited resource.

The splinter of crystal, removed from the spearhead now in mu-space, was so very, very small. She had to plan hard and ration carefully at every stage: that was obvious from the start.

But the energy spectrum . . .

Whatever Kenna was, she was no longer a Pilot, no longer able to perceive mu-space or to work directly with Labyrinthine technologies; but she remembered things, and the results of her every analysis implied a strange construction pathway – transitions to impossible minima – to produce that splinter of crystal taken originally from the spearhead. It did not match any physical process in mu-space that she could remember or imagine.

Which was strange, because the crystal sure as hell did not originate in realspace either.

It doesn’t matter.

Practicality overrode theory every time.

I only have to work the stuff.

In the event, it took fifty-one more years to achieve a breakthrough.

To the continuing sequence of Lords Avernon, Kenna made herself indispensable, because she could not count on them all ignoring her like Lord Dalgen Avernon. Ironically, he, short-sighted and machiavellian, had commissioned one of the most far-sighted experiments to be carried out by Nulapeiron’s logosophers. But he lost interest during the years that followed, as the tiny anomalous results produced zero payoff.

People got on with the march of their lives, and in due course died, while Kenna remained immobile, her pseudo-face embedded in the wall of a laboratory chamber deep inside Palace Avernon. Her larger components were splayed across that same wall, while many more components, far smaller, were distributed throughout the Palace.

Lord Alvix, who had dropped the Avernon suffix though it remained the legal name of his line, was the fifth Lord chronologically, and the nearest so far to recreating the intellectual daring and humour of the old Duke.

But the demesne he had inherited was not financially stable, and so he was forced consciously to use his brilliance and expertise in areas he would rather have avoided – or so Kenna read the situation, on the basis of both passive observation and their personal chats, when Alvix felt there was no one he could talk to besides his immobile cyborg adviser.