Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  Barl was sitting in a transparent bubble that hung from a curl of Nest super-structure listening to Guild Professor Vilow speak to the ranks of Trainees ranged on transparent benches all the way up to the back surface of the bubble. It had been Vilow who had met Barl and Summer when the escape capsule had materialised on an Aether Stage outside the Nest. It was Vilow who’d told Barl he’d passed a test that he didn’t know he’d been taking. No one, however, not even Professor Vilow had explained to Barl what exactly had attacked them in the capsule. That thing hadn’t been mentioned once.

  Professor Vilow was a green-skinned tripod with three claws and a face as craggy as an ancient tree. His reedy voice whispered like the wind rustling through ancient leaves in some half-remember forest. Barl liked the sound of the voice but wasn’t entirely happy with what he heard.

  “History is not our concern today. Today you begin your Guild training in earnest. You will be measured soon for your exoskeletal battle-armour, and then begin your rotations through the various armouries to train at the hands of the battlemasters. They will teach you the vital skills needed to wield a thousand weapons. This truly is the first day of the rest of your deaths.”

  Vilow paused, hoping for a laugh. It wasn’t as funny as he’d hoped, though it earned a polite ripple of unsure laughter. Sighing he ploughed on.

  “Being a Guild Assassin is the most honourable vocation within the known universe. It is your mission to bring down, without mercy, the beasts who would subjugate and enslave us all. Your autonomy is sacrosanct. Your mission holy. Where beasts rise, the Guild have pledged to take them down with whatever means necessary. Go forth! Learn to kill!”

  The class stood up in their pressure-cages as one, cheering and clapping.

  Barl didn’t share their enthusiasm. He intended to learn the skills he needed to escape, his only objective to return to God’s Heart. But he had to fit in. He stood and cheered Professor Vilow with the best of them. The Professor bowed to the trainees and tripped out of the bubble with tripodal precision.

  What Barl had initially thought to be a livid purple sky when he had been pulled from the escape capsule had not been sky at all.

  Well not the sky of Pantonyle at least.

  It was in actuality a massive planet. The surface of Hanshavo Prime was thinly banded with every possible shade of purple. It roiled with storms and constant flashing sparkles of lighting. Pantonyle orbited Hanshavo Prime every six days but kept one face towards its huge parent at all times. So, the massive gaseous monster was a constant fixture in the sky, day and night. Many of the planet’s one hundred moons described arcs between Pantonyle. Some even came close enough to the Nest’s host atmosphere to make out details on their rocky surfaces.

  It was an astoundingly strange, yet beautiful vista, under which to live.

  Barl couldn’t help being thrilled by the sight—it couldn’t have been more different from the sky above his home but left him just as awestruck.

  The trainees began to move out of the bubble. They streamed onto the limbs that made up the million branches and filigrees of the Nest itself. There were no rooms as such, the Nest was a riot of branches; thin and fat, flexible and static that ran for miles upon miles. Barl was forced to place his feet carefully and concentrate on his balance as he negotiated several, though others were wide enough to accommodate a hundred Trainees running shoulder to shoulder in a wild charge. Transparent bubbles hung from limbs across the nest. Thousands of them. Some bubbles served as dormitories, some living quarters, some mess halls; others were places of worship, council or parliament. Approaching the centre of the Nest, the bubbles became less numerous but considerably larger. These were used for Guild Business and Aether Stages for Guild Missions. Some bubbles, he saw, were stuffed with incredible technologies he could only guess the purpose of. These were served day and night by Guild Technicians who might just as well have been priests.

  The Nest was a vast, disorientating, awe-inspiring collection of wonder and mystery. Dark and stark, its branches etched blackly against the enraged purple face of Hanshavo.

  “Tell me you haven’t thought it too?”

  Barl was looking up, marvelling at the structures around him. His face must have given away immediately the wonderment he was feeling. Gharlin floated beside Barl in his own transparent pressure-cage, his words coming through a complicated grille at the front.

  “Thought what?”

  Gharlin fluttered the dozen colours of amusement.

  “If this is a Nest. Imagine the bird that built it!”

  They carried on down the corridor, laughing.

  Gharlin had visited Barl on his first morning in the Nest.

  Barl was shocked to see his friend alive. He’d assumed the Bantoscree had been smeared along the corridors of the Minular with his compatriots, but no, somehow, some miracle, had saved him. Barl wanted to hug the stuffing out of the young Bantoscree, but the pressure-cage made it impossible.

  He asked the only question that mattered. “I don’t understand…how did you escape?”

  Gharlin flushed violet with excitement, eager to tell of their trickery. “We were never really there. The Bantoscree you saw in the corridors weren’t real. Just mirages.”

  “They smelled real enough.”

  His friend howled with laughter. “Believe me, you think I stink, but you… worse. Much worse. All of those hormones and pheromones. It’s enough to drive a simple Bantoscree out of his mind.”

  Barl was so homesick and depressed by the whole situation this one friendly face—except Gharlin didn’t really have a face as such—made a world of difference.

  Barl hadn’t seen Summer since they’d landed.

  She’d departed with Professor Vilow and hadn’t been in contact since.

  Whatever ambivalence he felt towards Summer for her part in taking him from his home, she was his one anchor in this craziness. And he missed her.

  Gharlin operated the controls of his pressure-cage with flickering tendrils and led Barl out of the dormitory bubble, telling him he’d been asked to help make him feel at home and show him around.

  Barl hadn’t stopped being astonished by the construction of the Nest. It was one third organic, a third constructed from exotic metals, and the rest made from materials and fibres Barl didn’t have the first clue about identifying. Some branches pulsated with warmth underfoot as though they were living things, others felt cold and dead to the touch.

  Seen through gaps and fissures in the Nest, the terrain of Pantonyle was nothing more remarkable than a scrubby desert, dotted with bushes, though he marked a distant range of mountains on the horizon, peaks draped with cloaks of snow. Strange four-winged birds fluttered around the Nest, cawing like doors with rusted hinges as they circled. Nothing on the Liston Nine or the Minular had prepared him for the sheer weirdness of Pantonyle.

  As they progressed through the Nest, Gharlin explained, “You must be a very special trainee indeed for the Guild to go to all the trouble of testing you with a space-battle and your ability to weave hyperspace spells even at this early stage of your life. Remarkable.”

  “I don’t feel that special,” Barl countered.

  Gharlin paused, turned in his pressure-cage, venting off clouds of steam behind the glass. “Perhaps you don’t. But that doesn’t mean you’re not. You’re the talk of the Nest. The last person they gave such an elaborate testing procedure to became one of the greatest assassins in the history of the Guild.”

  “And who was that?”

  “You can’t guess? Who did they send to bring you here?”

  “Summer.”

  Summer didn’t reappear and Barl had no way to contact her.

  So, when he was called to the bubble to listen to Professor Vilow give his introductory lecture, he scanned the limbs and the intersections of the Nest, looking at every face to see if she was there. But she wasn’t. It felt like another loss on top of everything else he had suffered. Everyone he came to care about left him in the
end. Was that the lesson they wanted him to learn? If so, they were bastards.

  The young Bantoscree led Barl into the western depths of the Nest, past the bubble armouries, towards what he called the “Demesnes of the Armoursmiths.”

  Barl had no idea what that meant. Gharlin explained, “Bantoscree, due to our very fragile bodies, zero-gee nature and vulnerability to physical attack, have developed some of the finest and strongest armour there is. It isn’t as though I could go into battle in a pressure-cage…”

  “Bantoscree go into battle?”

  “Constantly. We are a fearsome foe, believe me.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Barl said, trying to imagine the ball of noxious gas fighting any sort of combat.

  “The Guild employ us to make the Assassin’s Exoskeletons.”

  One more non-plussed look from Barl brought a rush of colours from Gharlin, which Barl could not decipher.

  “A suit of actuated intelligent armour to protect your body in environments from hard-vacuum to being dropped into a volcano.”

  Barl still didn’t understand what actuated intelligent armour might be. Oh for a few seconds of piggybacking information from Summer.

  Chapter 23

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Shryke felt her hand clawing his shoulders.

  Her nails dug into his skin. She yanked at his hair. He could have ignored the girl if he wanted to. All he’d need to do was concentrate on the icy dagger of agony twisting in the side of his neck and Galdar’s fingernails would seem like a lover’s caress.

  Shryke threw down the razor-sharp triangle of pointed flint and relaxed his grip on Carlow’s neck.

  He took his knees off the little bastard’s arms and burrowed his eyes into those of the half-dead curate.

  “If you move, if you speak, if you breathe out of turn, I will finish the job the Raider’s started with the nearest rock. Do we understand each other?”

  Carlow, terrified, glared his assent.

  Galdar let go of Shryke’s shoulder and fell back. Her sobbing hadn’t stopped, it had simply been interrupted by Shryke sudden explosive burst of movement as he leapt up from the stinking Raider blanket, threw a hammer-blow punch into Carlow’s gut, and fell on top of him. In the silence between one heartbeat and the next the assassin had a rock in his hand, poised to smash Carlow’s treacherous brains out.

  Shryke was hazy on details, but he knew Carlow was, if not the enemy, then allied to them in some, making him a betrayer. He had moved without thought, intending to end the cur, but Galdar had just lost her entire people.

  And Shryke knew too well what that felt like.

  He stayed his hand.

  He surveyed the dead Raiders. He didn’t recall killing them, but the savagery and violence looked like the work of a berserker, so perhaps it was a mercy these memories were lost to him?

  Shryke picked at the scab on his neck, feeling the seepage from the wound over his fingers.

  He looked closely at the exudate and sniffed it gingerly.

  This wasn’t an honourable wound received in battle which had gone bad with infection.

  This was something else.

  It had the taint of codemagic on it, and the flavour of corruption.

  He would need to have it dealt with by someone who knew what they were doing.

  Shryke still couldn’t risk drawing on his codespells to heal himself. Not that he knew the correct magic to use. If the dark magic within the wound had been cast by a Guild Assassin, it may well have its own defences built in and messing with it would only serve to make it worse. He’d seen wounds before, on other unfortunates, that had grown teeth and bitten away the fingertips of the surgeons trying to stitch them closed, and others which dumped lethal acidic poisons into the bloodstream at the first sign of the victim taking a curative potion.

  Magical wounds rotted in appalling ways.

  Which meant Shryke’s days were numbered without the aid of a magician skilled in the darkest codespells and most potent healing ones.

  He held out his hand to Galdar.

  However urgent his need for assistance, there was something they needed to do first. Galdar took his hand and Shryke pulled her up to her feet.

  “Come. We have burials to perform.”

  Shryke and Carlow dug pits while Galdar performed last rites on the Congregation’s dead. Occasionally Shryke heard her soft sobbing as he dug into the earth. Beside him, Carlow dug forcefully, too. Driven by guilt and regret? More likely he imagined every sod cleaved by his spade was Shryke’s face. No matter. The pits were excavated and the blisters on the heels of Carlow’s hands gave Shryke some satisfaction.

  They dug in silence, only the rasp of their breath on the air as the Loop fell towards Quarternight.

  When it was full dark, Shryke continued pulling the bodies Galdar had finished with into the pits and covered them as reverently as he could manage with ferns. When each pit was full, they moved the earth back to fill the graves.

  Carlow lit a fire. He and Galdar cooked vegetable stew. Shryke heard them whispering occasionally and saw them look across the fire pit at him as he covered more bodies. He couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  As well as being concerned about the wound in his neck and the cold, rough lump beneath the skin, he was worried he was losing more of his memories and that he couldn’t remember much of the last few days. That last thing he could recall was Yane making the offer to him to become the Congregation’s protector, beyond that there was nothing.

  A fine protector I made, Shryke thought with maudlin resignation.

  But why couldn’t he remember what had happened since?

  Another attack on his memory?

  From the same source that had left him empty before he stepped out onto the Thalladon Climbs? Shryke preferred an enemy he could smite, one that bled and wept and begged for its life, not one that hid inside his head.

  Galdar hadn’t told him much.

  She had been steeling herself for the scene that awaited them. So much death. Not one of the Congregation had been spared. They had been opened from neck to navel and laid in rows next to each other. Reading the macabre scene, Yane had been made to watch the massacre, to increase the hurt, Shryke reasoned. Her body lay apart from the others. She hadn’t been cut open. They had hung her with her own robes from a tree and set a fire beneath her.

  Eventually she had fallen in to the flames.

  Shryke had seen this method used by Raiders before. They called it Ripening. It was not an easy way to die.

  Shryke felt waves of exhaustion wash over him as the Loopmoons rose over the surrounding trees.

  With a weary sigh, he went back to the fire to join Galdar and Carlow.

  The stew was thin but nourishing.

  He felt like he hadn’t eaten for a week of Quarternights and demolished three bowls before he felt even a tenth restored from his exertions.

  Carlow ate hungrily with the appetite of a soul without a conscience. Galdar had a bowl in front of her, which had already gone cold by the time Shryke started eating. She just shook her head when he indicated it, then he had to bat Carlow’s hand away as he reached for the untouched food when his own bowl was empty. “Don’t touch it.” Shryke said darkly and Carlow sat back, looking forlornly at the empty pot of stew beside the fire.

  “What happened at the riverbank? I have no memory.”

  Galdar couldn’t speak. Shryke looked to Carlow, who recounted what he had seen.

  “You were unconscious. Galdar took up the battle-mace and fought the Raiders with unearthly ferocity. She met them face-to-face and fought them down, killing every last man in no more than seconds. They were helpless to her wrath. She was vengeance incarnate. At the last, a few tried to save themselves. They ran. But she chased them down and slaughtered them. She came back to where you lay, drenched in blood and gore and seemed as at ease in her blood-soaked rags as she would in fine clothes and perfumes.”

  Shryke took all this
in with rising incredulity.

  The girl had done this?

  Galdar just looked into the fire and said nothing.

  Her slaughter of the Raiders could only have been driven by magic. But Shryke wasn’t the source; if it had been his magic the Assassins would have descended on them while he slept.

  So, whose magic was it at play here?

  Shryke felt darkly uncomfortable at the prospect of unknown forces being involved in his affairs.

  The wound in his neck raged and pulsed.

  He couldn’t shake the sense that the two things were connected.

  It was then that Carlow told him of the woman with the ebony skin. A woman he did not recognise who had used the battle-mace to dispatch the four Assassins who had come to the encampment first…

  “The Assassins you told about me…” Shryke interrupted, feeling the bile of anger rising in his gut.

  Carlow swallowed and nodded, “I didn’t…” He indicated to the bodies and the pits, “…think it would come to this. I thought they would come and take you away…I just wanted you gone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would hurt me,” said Galdar quietly.

  Carlow looked at his crossed legs and fell silent.

  Shryke felt the urge again to kill the fool where he sat. But Galdar had seen more than her fair share of death this day. Much of it at her own hand. Shryke remembered the first time he had killed. How the rush had overtaken him, the rush of guilt and anguish. However much he’d been trained to kill, however deeply he believed the reasons, killing had always been a barrier that took him a long time to overcome.

  Shryke rubbed his eyes.

  “We have to heal the wound on your neck,” said Galdar. “The woman told me it would kill you unless we attended to it.”

  Shryke nodded. “There is devilment in it which will take my life eventually,” he agreed.

  “She also said that we must travel to the Sun-Machine, whatever that is.”