Neal Asher - Cowl

However, down below lay the remains of other less natural structures, which Tack would not have recognized without Pedagogue’s teaching. For here lay the remains of the entire research facility that Cowl had taken back through time, and across space, from Callisto. Witnessing this ruination, Tack recalled the gutted spaceships that lay decaying by Pig City. Clearly they were vessels from the Umbrathane fleet which Cowl had also dragged back through time.

The plain eventually narrowed into a peninsula projecting out into a golden sea, its water reflecting the lemon sky. To one side of this peninsula rested Tack’s true destination—not those ruins below him, for Cowl had built anew in the three centuries since his flight.

Supported above the sea on a forest of pillars, the citadel bore the shape of an open water lily. The structure was as beautiful as it was huge. Though still ten kilometres away from it, he estimated that the tops of its petals, glowing with lights, must pierce cloud. So that was where Cowl lived—and where Tack intended him to die.

The structure squatted on a slab of basalt poised at the top of a slope leading down to the wide but shallow river they were currently crossing. It was dome-shaped, closely arched all around, so that only narrow points of exterior wall between these arches actually reached the ground. Through most of the arches glinted windows, though Polly could just see that one of them opened directly into the interior. Too tired to keep turning her head round to look at it, she gave up and faced back down the way they had come. Realizing that they were now travelling in bright moonlight, Polly tried to remember some of the journey that had brought them here, but she had been fading in and out of consciousness so often that it remained a blur.

‘What’s your name?’ she finally managed to croak to her travelling companion.

‘Before I was born, my mother named me Amanita because I poisoned her in the womb and had to be removed, completing my early growth in an amniotic tank. As soon as I could, I renamed myself Aconite.’

‘Why that?’

‘Because it seemed appropriate.’

Polly found she had run out of the energy to pursue this line of questioning, so bowed her head and lost it for a second. Coming to, she saw that they had now reached the other side of the river and were about to climb the slope towards what seemed likely to be some kind of house.

Aconite is an interesting word.

Nandru, who was walking alongside the robot, gazed across it with a twisted expression at the strange woman.

‘How so?’ Polly asked out loud.

It is an alternative name for the poisonous plant also called wolfsbane or monkshood.

‘And that’s interesting why?’

I see you don’t get it. You must try harder; since you’re now so closely linked into Muse’s reference library, the information is available to you.

‘I still don’t understand…’ Then Polly did get it. ‘I didn’t know what Cowl meant before. I see… cowl is the name for a monk’s hood.’

Abruptly she realized her robot transport had stopped moving. She glanced the other way and saw that Aconite was standing watching her. Turning back revealed that the illusory Nandru had disappeared.

‘I realize now that your words are not entirely the result of delirium.’ The troll woman stepped forward and reached down beside Polly into the back of the robot. Removing a square palm console, Aconite held it in her heavy three-fingered hand while running the nimbler fingers of her other hand over the machine’s display. After a moment she looked up, reached over and pulled aside the filthy collar of Polly’s blouse. She touched first the muse device briefly, before reaching up to flick Polly’s earring.

To Polly she said, ‘Speak to your hidden companion.’

Oh-oh, looks like I’ve been rumbled.

‘That is enough,’ said Aconite before Polly could say anything to Nandru. ‘Now, are you Al?’

Polly tried to overcome her confusion, but her brain was washing around inside her head like dirty water.

Nandru’s voice issued from the palm console. ‘Well, that’s a moot point,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s what I am now, but I wasn’t always like this. You’ve caught me on a bad day.’

‘You are a cerebral download,’ Aconite said, disapproval in her voice. ‘Yes, I see. A military log-tac computer with secure com-link, and the facility set for partial download of tactical information in the event of death. It would seem the level of redundancy was excessive and that you took advantage of that. So dead soldier, what is your name?’

‘Nandru. And I resent being addressed that way, that’s… thanatist.’

With a snort, Aconite switched off the console and dropped it back into the compartment beside Polly. Turning away, she snapped her fingers, and the robot began to follow her again.

I think she likes me.

Mounting the slope, the robot did not tilt in the least. With its back legs stretching down at full extension, its front legs bent double like a spider’s, it maintained Polly perfectly level as it climbed the incline. Soon they reached the basalt slab and, as Polly twisted to look round, they began heading for the arched entrance. Close up, Polly saw that the building was huge.

Then through the entrance and crossing a wide room, with arched windows all around, containing the chaotic glinting of metal and glass—insectile sculptures or esoteric machines, Polly could not tell. A whoomph as the entrance closed behind them, then a breeze stirring up Polly’s hair. The mask coming away from her face with a sucking sound. Also unmasked, Aconite picked her up from the robot’s container and briefly Polly glimpsed golden eyes amid lopsided but not unattractive features. Then bright aseptic light and a soft table underneath her, clothing cut away, something cold against her chest—then a stabbing pain and a sense of movement inside her chest. Abrupt unconsciousness followed.

On waking, after long oblivion, to find some flesh miraculously back on her bones, Nandru told her, He’s her brother.

And only later did she learn that she was the first of Cowl’s samples to survive.

The cold and piercingly bright light of the full moon precluded sleep, as did the itching underneath his dead tor. Sitting in the tent, Tack picked at the edges of the thing as if it was a huge scab, and just like a scab it began to peel away from his flesh, but was frangible and snapped like charcoal. Revealed underneath it was pink scar tissue—forming so fast because of the Heliothane boosting of his body. He continued snapping away pieces of the tor and, bit by bit, broke the thing off. His arm looked grotesque and felt as if it had been burnt, so he quickly applied a wound dressing taken from his pack. His arm ached as well as itched and he realized he had very little chance of sleep now.

Once masked and outside again, Tack collapsed his shelter and stowed it away. Taking up his pack once more, he rounded the boulder and headed off. Cowl’s citadel now glowed both with internal light and reflected moonlight, looking even more beautiful. Tack observed it in awe for a while, wondering why he had expected something ugly. Then he negotiated the steep slope down to the plain.

Within an hour he was back on level ground, then walking fast down a watercourse that wound in the general direction of the peninsula. He chose this route as a precaution against there being motion detectors aimed out across the plain above him. He suspected, though, that Cowl, if he entertained at all the possibility of the Heliothane getting through to him, would expect from them a massive assault, not a lone assassin.