Miles refused to let what was left of his mind be diverted in an attempt to count them, even by a statistically valid sampling-and-multiplication method.
Now, there was a nightmare for him-all those banks of drawers bumping under his fingertips concealing not frozen hope, but warm rotting death. Some abandoned without being cleared? Miles’s ears strained, trying to detect a reassuring hum of refrigeration machinery beyond the blood-surf and the angels’ cries. The tidy blocks of new mausoleums on the city’s western fringe, zoned as the Cryopolis, did not account for all the older facilities scattered around and underneath the town going back as much as a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, some still operational, some cleared and abandoned. The Cryocombs, they called this place, rumored to wind for kilometers beneath the city. That part, unfortunately, was not a hallucination. A hundred corpses to every thirty steps or so, thousands more around each corner, hundreds of thousands in this lost labyrinth. Behind each drawer-face, a frozen corpse: stiff, silent, waiting in mad hope. He began to move forward more slowly, fingers lightly passing over the faint lines and ripples of drawer edges and handle-locks, rank after rank of them, stacked high beyond his reach. Hesitantly, he stretched out again and felt along the corridor wall. Which had to be from the power of suggestion, since he was sweating. He stumbled, and his hand banged against something hollow-sounding-had that bit of wall shifted? He snatched his arms in, wrapping them around himself, trembling. If they were going to glow like that, they might at least illuminate his surroundings for him, like little celestial grav-lights, but no. He scowled at the tumbling angels, peeved. His heart was beating too fast, rushing in his ears like muffled surf, his dry mouth gasping. Or balcony railings, but wouldn’t he feel those, pressing against his chest? Not that he could see anything in this pitch darkness-not even his hands, reaching uncertainly before him. If he could see things that were not there, it was also quite possible for him to not see things that were there, like stairwells, or broken gaps in this corridor floor. Granted the visions seemed more dangerous, in his current addled state. He heard their wavering cries like the whistle of fireworks from far off, the echoes buffeted by hillsides.Īh, terrific.
Miles blinked, trying to resolve the golden streaks sleeting through his vision into mere retinal flashes, but they stubbornly persisted as tiny, distinct figures, faces dismayed, mouths round.
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