*
“Whatever we are, machine or flesh,
programs or instincts,
we are
bound by heaven and hell.”
*
The void shadowed darker, and Lod was again in his plasma torso, wincing as the spiders worked their tiny violence inside him.
The Rust Age
With the extermination of the zōtl in Chalco-Doror, neo-sapiens serve no further function for the Rimstalker. Now we are ignored by the Mother of Worlds, left to do as we please in the remaining two millennia before we are returned to the oblivion from which we have been briefly retrieved. So what are we doing? We sing songs and we fall in love as though we should live forever.
—Bill Jones, from Diary of a Second Life, 1989 Doror
Sword’s Wanderings in Chalco
The tips of sequoia floated in brightness above a dark forest on Q’re. Sword leaned on his weapon and stared up at amber jellies of twilight. Behind him, in the pocket of a valley, a hamlet, whose windows faced away from the forest of giant trees, prepared for the night and its horrors. A tractor bumbled along the circuit road, laying coils of razor-wire. Lux flares ignited on the toll bridge that crossed the stream into the hamlet. The vesper bell tolled, calling the last straggly farmers, shepherds, and pilgrims in from the pastures before the night watch barricaded the one road into town.
Despite these precautions, the hamlet had lost numerous residents in the last few years and had almost become a ghost town. Fear had driven many families away. A band of rawfaces, seeking easy prey, had come down from highland forests and raided the hamlet almost every night. Led by a distort with a cunning unknown before in rawfaces, they had recently burrowed under the hamlet and come up in the houses, finding families huddled in their bedrooms quaking with terror at the eerie ululations of the monsters without. Many died that night. After that, only the poorest of the families remained, those who had worked as serfs in the fields of landowners before the owners fled and left them the land. If they fled, they would lose all they could hope to own in this life. So, they had blocked the tunnels with boulders and razor-wire and had sent for Sword.
Since the collapse of the Emirate, 320 years earlier, each world had shaped its own government—or tried to, for the countless factions that thrived in the absence of the zōtl’s predation constantly feuded. The besieged hamlet on Q’re had no one to appeal to for help but a legendary figure called Sword, reputed to wander the wild worlds seeking evil distorts to slay. Many in the hamlet doubted he even existed. The few who did ignored the taunts of the others and broadcasted their distress messages each week. Their signal went out faithfully whenever Q’re came in line with the ancient Viking battlestation in the Abyss that had been converted to a radio relayer by the government on Cendre.
At the peak of the horror, when the rawfaces’ craving for human flesh had inspired them to lay broken boughs over razor-wire coils and scale the hamlet gate with stone-weighted ladders made from forest tendrils, using the carcasses of their fallen brood to shield them from projectiles, Sword arrived. He landed in the hamlet’s cobbled square in an antique ramstat flyer, battered, hissing coolant-vapors, and dripping oil.
Those who believed in Sword had expected to meet a warrior with the stature of Wulf Bane. The short, wiry man, who unbuckled from the flight sling and slid feet-first from the nose hatch, inspired disappointment in everyone but the youngest children; they had no notion of what a hero should look like, other than that he should have a weapon. And Sword had a weapon.
The small man wore strapped to his back by an intricately knotted thong his namesake, a long, narrow sword, nearly as tall as he, sheathed in a red scabbard studded with gruesome fangs. Despite his sleek black armor, weatherworn to gray, and plasteel-tipped boots fitted on the insides of his calves with bone-handled knives, he presented a slight and unimposing figure. His face, too, hardly inspired confidence. With his large nose, slender chin, and large eyes behind sturdy metal-framed eyeglasses, he looked more like a schoolteacher than a slayer of monsters.
The hamlet did not want this man to die for them, and they tried to convince him to leave Q’re and return with a dozen strong warriors, preferably armed with laser guns. He smiled with quiet understanding and asked to see the hamlet’s defenses. The elders shrugged and showed him the log ramparts, the sturdy wood portcullis, and the stack of coiled razor-wire that the hamlet’s one tractor laid in place each night.
“This is fine for wolves and saberclaws,” Sword appraised. “But rawfaces are too crafty in their hunger, even without a sapient distort to lead them. I am really surprised you have survived this long. Haven’t they dug tunnels into your houses yet?”
The elders shared unhappy looks and showed him the tunnels.
“These boulders and razor-wire barriers are too easily dislodged,” he noted and went on to teach the villagers how to plant barbed shafts of fire-hardened wood in the dirt walls of the tunnels. “You will hear their screams and be prepared when they come through here next. But already it is too late for that. They know you are vulnerable. They will sacrifice their own to get you.”
The youngest of the children, who had been secretly listening, cried out at that. Sword knelt before her and wiped away her tears with a silk cloth he wore about his neck to prevent chafing. He met the fright in the child’s loud eyes and held the fear firmly with his lemur-like stare. “You must not be afraid anymore,” he admonished in a voice too soft to inspire courage in anyone but a child. “You are safe now. I am here. And I will kill all the bad things. They will never again come into this village. I promise.”
The child hugged him, and the elders shook their heads ruefully.
Alone, Sword walked out of the hamlet and into the forest, the elders shouting at him from the gate to reconsider. He waved with friendly reassurance and continued. Once in the shadow of the great trees, he unsheathed his weapon, stabbed it into the earth, leaned on it, and gazed up at the world’s slow dream. This beauty touched him more deeply, because those who had once loved him would never see it. Distorts had slaughtered his family on Elphame when he was a child.
He had been only six-years-old, small enough to crawl into a rock crevice and hide while a pack of shagjaws devoured alive his parents and older brothers and sisters. Their screams echoed in his bones, forever chilling his marrow. He never stopped hearing them. Or feeling their pain.
After the terror of his loss, an ancient renegade Viking family adopted him, inspired by his eagerness to endure any suffering. They taught him how to fight. He became a genius of destruction, powered by the screams in his bones and devoted his life to actively seeking out the worlds’ terrors and destroying them.
Whenever beauty appeared in the midst of these cruelties, he took pains to enjoy it, for the sake of his loved ones. They had seen too little of beauty on the croft where they had birthed him and his siblings, where they had struggled with the molting land to win a meager living, and then been murdered. He breathed in the leaf mulch, gaze lost among peach-tinted clouds.
A ghostly wail burned his hearing like acid—and a cold smile touched Sword’s lips. He had found his way back home.
Sword stretched till his shoulders popped, then flexed his hands and did several agile knee-bends, one leg extended at a time, limbering himself for the worshipful dance to come. Banshee cries slithered closer. He adjusted the knobs at the steel temples of his eyeglasses, shifting the lenses to infrared. Finally, he pulled his black cowl over his balding head, fit the earguards in place, tightened the straps of his armor at wrists and throat, and waited.
Sunset went brown as wine, and the galaxy rose as a crystal mist beyond the sullen clouds—when the first eyeglints jerked in the darkness between the trees. By then, the eerily curving howls had become a din, and Sword blessed again his earguards. He stood, legs wide apart, hands clasped atop the hilt of his weapon, still stuck in the ground.
Rawfaces came through the trees in a wave of raving jaws and talons. Bi
pedal beasts, some of them three meters tall, their chitinous black flesh gleamed with light from the planetesimals and starstreams. Loathsome jaws gnashed in slimy visages, fangs clacking a blur of rabid motion. Their ferocious faces looked like hacked meat beneath long, plated skulls crested with spikes, flame-cored eyes fixed on their prey with maniacal intensity.
Sword remained utterly motionless until the rawfaces lunged into striking distance. With a gut-cramping scream unheard among the feeding cries of rawfaces, he swung his sword in a hissing arc. The blade, directed with fatal precision, slashed through the eye-bubbles of several rawfaces before cracking into the chitin-plate of a skull. A twist of the hilt, and the blade discharged a writhing blue bolt of electricity that knotted about the head of the rawface and threw it dead against the onrushing horde.
The throng of rawfaces roared louder, infuriated by the sudden stink of their own blood and the smell of thunder. Sword leaped with feral abandon among them, swinging his weapon in swollen pirouettes that jagged into barbs of bluehot lightning with each impact. His face a furious rictus, he hacked his way in a wide circle of leaps and stamping charges, a rage of postures among the trees and the fallen bodies.
He stopped to hack and then leaped and stopped to hack again, picking his way with murderous cunning through the crowd of distorts. At last, when dozens lay dead and dying in spasms on the forest floor, they shrunk like vapors before him. As if shorn of gravity, muscles pumped with screams from his dead family, he pursued the retreating rawfaces. They circled back on him, trying to trip him from behind trees, diving from boughs. But Sword, snug in his poise and smallness, ducked and feinted nimble as a mouse, thunderbolts shattering skulls and torsos, splintering trees.
With an overhead blow, he split a rawface head almost in half, leapfrogged its sprawling body, and burst into a clearing, where planetlight illuminated a giant almost hidden in the traumas of shadow. His infrared lenses revealed the cruel awareness of swivel eyes. He caught a smudge of movement to his side and jumped backward. The handful of remaining rawfaces came at him with thick boughs in their talons—and Sword realized that the giant was telepathically directing them.
He smashed the first to attack him, a lash of lightning blasting its club before piercing its face. But two of the other monstrosities hit him even as he struck the first. With a crack that almost severed his arm, the armor from his left shoulder broke away. He sprawled face-down, sword knocked from his grip. Immediately, he defied his impulse to scramble for his weapon and rolled to his side in the opposite direction. The clubs crashed into the space where he would have gone.
A fume of shrill hissing that must have been rawface laughter seared from the giant rawface as the others converged on Sword. With both hands, he drew the two knives from his boots, pointed the blades at the monsters, and squeezed the handles. The blades shot from the hilts and struck one rawface in its widening maw, another on its chestplate. In a bramble of twisting electrical voltage, the knife blades exploded, dropping the two beasts. But the remaining three lurched at him, and he escaped only by squirting backward and diving under a root coil.
Swiftly, Sword ripped off what remained of his armor even as he squirmed under another root-arch. The rawfaces clawing at him were too large to follow and had to mount root buttress to get at him. He propped the armor vest with its cowl against the base of the immense tree, unlatched the grenade he kept taped to the small of his back, primed and dropped it. He dove beneath another rootloop and slithered around the base of the tree.
The rawfaces jumped upon the silhouette of the armor and had only a moment to realize their error before the grenade detonated. The concussion heaved Sword to his feet. Pushing his body to its richest extreme, he sprinted back into the clearing, where the intelligent rawface crouched over Sword’s weapon.
The blast of the grenade had jerked the giant rawface’s head upright. Sword ran directly toward the abomination, taking advantage of its momentary distraction to dive in a self-consuming leap for his long blade.
The rawface seized him even as his fingertips brushed the hilt of the sword—and hoisted him toward its crushing jaws. With a desperate kick, he struck the hilt of his sword with his boot-tip as he pulled away. The sword flipped, and Sword grabbed its tip. With vigilant composure, he drew the hilt to his free hand and rammed the long blade into the saliva-threading fangs of the rawface. The rawface’s talons clenched to crush the life out of him as he twisted the hilt and sent an intense blue lash of lightning into the beast’s face.
From the rooftops of the hamlet, the people watched the forest flashing with lightning beneath the crystal light of the galaxy and heard the wails of mortally wounded rawfaces. A dozen of the bravest villagers, inspired by the carnage, gathered their own swords, pikes, hatchets, and pitchforks and marched out to join the fight. They dispatched the wounded rawfaces that they found among heaped bodies of the dead. In the clearing at the end of the trail of mangled distorts, they came upon the queen rawface with its loathsome face split open, massive limbs twitching with the last sparks of life, and they killed it.
They found Sword lying nearby, armor missing, weapon still firmly gripped, unconscious but alive. They carried him back to the hamlet. He regained consciousness within the hour, and the celebration of his victory began at once and would have reveled for days had he not insisted on leaving the next morning. He adamantly turned aside all rewards and recompense—and it was he who thanked the villagers for the opportunity they had given him to touch again through vengeance those whose love he had lost to life’s voracity.
NIGHT OF TIME
To go on is to go through.
At last, even the seer is cremated.
Each seed loves the dark for the light it promises.
Mama is maw.
—sayings from the Glyph Astra
The torso of Fire throbbed like molten iron in the tremulous dark of Perdur. Cowled figures drifted aimlessly across mirrorgloss floors, pilgrims and priests awed by the suspended shape. These new devotees of Saor, who had replaced those the zōtl had taken for their mounts, swung fuming censers; others chanted and danced.
In the crapulous shadows, where the onyx of the serpentcoil columns soaked up all light, a small figure hugged the wall. The stones at his back, damp with the nutrient oozings savored by the nongyls, soaked his jacket through with slime. From a lux cone set high on the wall to illumine a resinous conglomerate of torn limbs and twisted faces, a straw of light struck the small figure. Twin lenses flashed, and the blue edge of a blade split radiant hairs.
Sword pushed off from the wall and slunk among helical pillars toward the fireglow shape saddled by darkness. He had come to free Lod. As soon as he had learned from an Ordo Valan sojourner of Fire’s capture by Night, he had volunteered to liberate the stricken power. What good exterminating evil distorts if spiders owned the sun itself?
Limber as smoke, Sword trespassed the neon shine from the hanged entity and flitted between pilasters. When Saor-priests appeared, he curled among the arabesque creases of the carved pillars, his blade propped in the dark. No one saw him. And no nongyl smelled him, for his broth-soaked jacket masked his scent. The Ordo Valan who had informed him of Lod’s plight had taught him that trick. She had shown him the natural lynk that led to Perdur after she had revealed her shrewd plan to free Lod from the magnetic column. A simple handful of iron shavings and the hero’s famous weapon were all the implements Sword needed once he emerged from the lynk.
Sword had come out in a fissure of the citadel’s baserock and had slowly earned his way up the lightless stiles and shafts to this gargantuan hall of serpentcoil pillars. Now all that remained was to sheath his blade and stroll into the sparse crowd of pilgrims, a pilgrim himself. He would meander his way to where Lod’s torso hung brightly before the Cave of Riddles, then release the pouch of iron filings. The magnetic column would draw them up with its flux into the webwork of zōtl machinery. The iron cloud would jam the works and drop Lod to where Sword could se
ver the phanes. The elegant simplicity of the plan required bravery and adeptness under pressure—Sword’s hard-proven traits.
When the Saor-priests had passed and no one but the abomination of smashed faces plastered among the broken limbs of the glisteny wall watched, Sword unfolded from where he hid, silently slid his long blade into its scabbard, and strode into the clear expanse lit by the bound body of Fire. Hood drawn over his head, he glided with ceremonial serenity over the slick floor, through tendrils of incense smoke, past a knot of chanting pilgrims, into the flameshadows.
A scream—or was it a wild laugh?—winced from out of the dark beyond the pillars. One of the victims that had been smashed into a crevice of the wet well, a demented soul obeying some pain-induced zōtl program, recognized Sword’s presence as an intrusion and had shouted an alarm. The chanting stopped abruptly. Sword glanced sidewise from under his hood and noticed that the scattering of pilgrims and priests had stopped their meditative strolls and were staring at him. His heart thrashed. From behind, the screaming laugh came again.
In a fireflash, Sword’s weapon was out. He whirled with epic poise, then dashed for the pentagonal stone over which Lod hung. He had gone no more than three swift steps, when a red laserbolt from the webwork above struck him full in the chest. The low-frequency bolt knocked him off his feet and kicked back his hood, leaving him dazed and sitting open-mouthed, sucking for air in the rubescent sheen of the luminous torso.
Velvety whirrs and clicks flurried from above, where it was dark, where clasped forebrains spangled with songthoughts, where elemental greeds rippled villi along needlesharp feedertubes.
Sword caught his breath in time to raise his weapon. The blade, plucked from his stunned grasp, flew away in a blur of black shapes that vapored into the high, dark vaults. Away his long sword flew. He rose to one knee, groping for the pouch of iron filings. A cloud of vibrant blackness hummed over him, hooked his shoulderpads, and hoisted him off the floor. In his hand, the pouch of iron shavings dangled uselessly, trailing a thin gray fume as he rose into the air, gripped by a horde of jubilantly thrumming zōtl.
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