The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  6.

  INTERLUDE: ENEMY TERRITORY

  Agent First of Spies and Liars dances along the shadow roads that lead through the timeless void of the eternal now.

  In her gloved right hand she holds a mace of power; with her left she swings a thurible of burning incense, its chain fastened to her bare wrist by an iron manacle. The velvet choker she wears around her throat is fastened with a clasp bearing gems of memory and a rare, precious oracle stone to help her distinguish destiny from lies. On her fingers she wears rings of power. Her target is a shadow world, one of a myriad of alternate realities that can be molded to the will of the People. It is a penumbral land of ghosts, bereft of law and lore alike, its primitive denizens defenseless before the Host’s invading might. Her orders bind her to steal their names and faces and, eventually, their truths: she is required to ensnare them in a cunning harness of lies and present them to her father the All-Highest, that he might tie them to his will.

  It does not occur to Agent First that the denizens of this shadow world might defy her father’s geasa, much less that they might do so successfully. It has never happened before. In all the shadow worlds, her kind have never encountered a subspecies of People who can defy the Host. Not only is it unthinkable, a considerable body of philosophical/religious thought holds that it is impossible, a nonsensical proposition. The People are the pinnacle of primate evolution, for if it were otherwise they would already have been discovered and subjugated (or exterminated) by a more aggressive, dominant subspecies. That they have not been brought low already demonstrates that such an outcome is impossible: obviously no such alien conquerors exist. The People are the master race, the Autarchate of the Morningstar Empire is their greatest creation, and the Host of Air and Darkness is the highest and last surviving expression of their martial prowess. Failure, it follows, is not only not an option, it would be indistinguishable from treason. Or so she has been raised to believe.

  At least her assignment to this mission removes her from the baleful purview of her father’s consort. Out of sight means out of mind. Or so she can hope.

  The road Agent First travels spirals through a higher-dimensional space, to which she has been granted access by the Host’s magi. There is a vestibule in one of the subsurface caverns, its floor paved with artificial coral shot through with veins of semiprecious crystals, grown in situ in the form of a grid to channel the magi’s power into a gate to the shadows cast by spacetime itself. The road before her has the semblance of a glowing pathway stretching across a stark plane of darkness. An infinite distance above her, a ghostly manifold of points of light glitter coldly. These are not stars but singularities opening off the edge of the alien fractal that gives access to the universes compatible with the Host’s physical laws. Each pinprick of light is a gate leading to another shadow land. (The darkness between them contains an infinity of points representing entrances to members of the set of worlds with physical laws incompatible with existence. This is the dark anthropic zone, universes within which life cannot survive.) As she dances, the stylized moves carry her along the road in strange bursts of motion, the landscape shifting and reconfiguring around her. You do not travel the ghost roads by walking, unless you are willing to die of old age. Here, geometry is an expression of power: the ritual dance of the shadows manipulates distance.

  Agent First follows a seldom-traveled route, abandoned these past thousand years. It leads to a shadow inhabited by round-eared brutes, ignorant and easily domesticated. Long ago Agent First’s predecessors sent reconnaissance teams hither, hoping to find lands fit for conquest. The place they found was indeed inhabitable, but so dismally bereft of anything worth taking that nobody in their right mind would consider it a fitting home. The natives fled in terror, or fought wildly and viciously with crude iron weapons. Some few were captured, bound, and transported to the empire for interrogation (and to provide cruel but short-lived entertainment for their captors). When the Duke of the Western Lowlands subsequently terminated the exploration program, some of the surviving prisoners were expelled back to the world of their birth, as living testimony to the unwisdom of meddling with the People: hopefully they instilled a healthy fear of their betters among their fellows before dying.

  It is Agent First’s privilege to be the first of the People to set foot in this shadow realm in a thousand years and spy out the lay of the land for the invasion to come. As likely as not, this will be her only such opportunity. She goes first, as befits her rank. When she sends for her command (what remains of it) the rest of the Spies and Liars will follow her. Far behind, her father’s magi continue to chant, pumping mana into the road, stabilizing and broadening it. Once their preparations are complete, the Host will emerge in all its glory.

  Agent First is equipped as befits the leader of a forward reconnaissance team. Her choker is encrusted with memory jewels, containing a full transcript of her predecessors’ experiences of the target realm, and empty gems waiting to receive her own reports. At the front she wears a splendidly mounted fire opal, a thief’s stone. The rings on her fingers and thumbs are of purified rare earths, packed tight with wards, crammed with invocations ready to release—so energized that her metacarpals hum. Around her back and upper arms runs an intimate, intricate tattoo of power that binds a glamour to her skin. It will blind anyone looking at her to her true nature: unless they have strong occult protection, they’ll see only a pretty young female of their own kind, pleasing to the eye, harmless and instantly forgettable. Later, when she finds a suitable victim, she will use most of her mana—stored power—to steal a true name by force and assume the owner’s identity, memories, and personality (meanwhile sending the victim back to her father’s redoubt as a slave bound by her geas). But for now, she is anonymous. By the standards of the People her attire is inconspicuous and dowdy, if of a richness and quality that would be taken for signs of royalty by the awestruck captives retrieved on one of the earlier raids. They are the garments of her caste: boots, a robe and trews of dark green velvet edged with lace, black gloves and hose spun from the silk of false widow spiders and shot through with charms. Over it all she wears a black hooded cloak, fuliginous and dull as death.

  The meta-space through which the shadow roads lead lies beyond time and space but not beyond fatigue. Agent First is flagging, her reserves dwindling. There is sweat in her axillae, a slow burn in muscles and tendons, and her joints ache as she dances on. The pungent astringency of the incense in her thurible helps somewhat, keeping her focussed and active. It also lays a tenuous smoke-trail that will linger, allowing those who eventually follow her to sense the correct road. She follows in the footsteps of Messenger Seventh of Polaris Ascendant, the last courier to come this way. His memory diamond is clenched between her teeth, a bitterness goading her on as her body jerks and pirouettes, replaying the exact moves of his ritual dance. Even her breaths and pauses are perfect echoes of his motions. To deviate would be a disaster, until she has reopened the closed portal at the other end of the path and anchored it in place. Once that task is done any member of the Host who has been granted the Keyword will be able to follow her back and forth without effort. But for now she is performing the dance of the opening of the way, and if she falters or stumbles she will be lost forever among an infinity of worlds.

  Agent First dances ever onwards until eventually she glimpses the end of her path in the distance. At first it is little more than a vanishing point. It slowly brightens, glowing like a pale blue dot hovering in the infinite depths of the space above the plane the path traverses. Finally it seems to descend, approaching the level of the horizon. There is a humming sense of power beneath her feet, the barely leashed strength of a ley line resonating with the similar conduit buried beneath the evaporated sea on her own world where the Host have made their final stand. Now the ghostly blue radiance grows brighter, and from the semblance of a vanishing point the end swells into a circle.

  Agent First pushes hersel
f onwards, chest tight and muscles burning. The circle swells before her until she sees it as a silvery arch that rises above the path, engraved with symbolic bindings. Its glow is a brilliant flare of ghost-light, the radiative emission of photons slowing abruptly as they cross the membrane separating this not-space from the shadow universe beyond.

  Up until this point, Agent First has painstakingly kept her mind clear, empty of verbalizations and any thought that might contaminate or undermine her determination to see this path through to the end. But now she can barely contain a flash of fierce triumph: Mine! she thinks, embracing with her will the world beyond the gate. There is an undernote of fear, of course—notably the fear that her new stepmother will have contrived to corrupt her path. But that would require subtlety: and the mistress of dragons is not noted for her discreet approach to disposing of obstacles.

  Agent First lowers her thurible to the not-ground beneath her feet, unlocking the bracelet that chains it to her wrist. She licks her parched lips, and coughs, and then she speaks (or more accurately croaks) the Keyword, pronouncing the phrase of binding that will lock the thurible to the gate. She raises her mace of power and lightly thrusts it into the center of the blue-glowing void.

  And then—

  * * *

  Agent First steps out of the shadow roads, her night vision damaged by the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the portal. As the portal closes behind her darkness descends abruptly. She takes stock, using her other senses. The ground beneath her feet is hard, level, and flat. The air is cold and damp, speaking of rain, but there is a horrible dead taste in the roof of her mouth—there is no vegetation here, it’s like a cold, damp desert—and it is noisy, so noisy, a background roar like a distant waterfall and, approaching, a thunderous growl and bright lights—

  She leaps backwards into darkness, nearly trips over her cloak, and catches her heel on a stony uprising. She tumbles and recovers in a roll, her heart hammering. And so it is that by tripping on a curbstone Agent First narrowly avoids being flung across the road by a BMW whose driver is more interested in his cellphone than in avoiding pedestrians wearing dark clothing at night.

  Hyperventilating on the cusp of a fight/flight reaction, Agent First leaps to her feet and spins round. She searches her immediate vicinity for other threats. She finds herself standing on a narrow path of poured stone slabs that flanks a broader, lower roadway. Thundering wheeled carts with glaring lights and angry faces rumble past in orderly queues, their pasty-faced occupants squinting into the darkness through curved windows. The carts screech and grumble and stink like the smoky oil lamps of a slave barracks, powered by some cryptic force. After a second, shaky glance Agent First realizes they are not a threat to her as long as she stays out of their path. They are confined between the raised strips at either side, guided along the road bed by painted glyphs. Furthermore, the stone buildings to either side bear signs in an inscrutable script, oriented to be visible to the occupants of these carriages. Such are the hallmarks of civilization, regulation, and traffic: they’re not her kind of traffic (and the carts seem to her to be sluggish, smelly, noisome, and potentially dangerous), but it’s a far cry from the wilderness populated by savages that she’d expected to find.

  Clearly the centuries since last a member of the People traveled to this place have brought changes.

  On the side of the footpath opposite the road of carts, Agent First sees a wall of rough-hewn stone bricks held together with mortar. Branches overhang it from behind. Opposite, across the cart track, rows of cramped houses built from baked red clay bricks display locked doors and curtained glass windows to the road. They are all offensively ugly, although the darkness of night—pierced by a sullen amber glow from lights on metal poles—draws a merciful veil across their exteriors. Agent First slows her breathing and tugs her cloak into place around her. There will certainly be changes after the conquest, and for the better: the buildings hereabouts are so grotesque they’re not even fit for a slave barracks. All-Highest will have the architects responsible crucified in due course. In the meantime, Agent First shudders fastidiously and nerves herself to ignore the pervasive crudeness which seems to be a hallmark of this world.

  Some of the buildings close to the footpath display wide glass frontages, illuminated from within as if to deliberately display the contents. These must be public warehouses of some sort, where the serfs can come to collect their rations. Waiting in the shadows she observes as a cart rumbles and slows, amber lights blinking lazily on one side before it turns into a sidestreet and comes to a halt. An occupant climbs out—heavily built compared to one of the People, dressed in well-made but extraordinarily drab clothes, all in shades of gray and black. He walks up to the door of the nearest ration store and goes inside: a bell tinkles. Perhaps two hundred heartbeats pass before he emerges, bearing a nearly flat, square box of cunningly molded wasps’ nest. Do they domesticate insects? she wonders. (That would explain the buzzing and roaring of their carts.) A smell reaches her, the aroma of hot fresh bread and cooked meat. He climbs back into the cart, starts it again, and it moves off into the stream of traffic. I will come back here later and sample the food, Agent First decides, willing her hunger pangs into submission. Like the rest of the Host she has subsisted on time-frozen rations for too long. The smell of hot food, even if only the provender of the cattle-folk, is insidious and seductive. But it will have to wait until she has acquired a face, and memories, and identity—to say nothing of a grasp of the locals’ Low Tongue.

  Agent First walks swiftly along the path beside the main road, nerving herself for the next step. There is a weakness in her character, one that she has successfully concealed from almost everyone—trainers, competitors, superiors, subordinates, and, above all, her father. It is a weakness she shared with her favorite elder sister—or did, until Eldest Sister was condemned as a weakling and paid the penalty. Usually, in most circumstances, Agent First’s weakness is no weakness at all. Indeed, to a Leader of Spies and Liars the ability to empathize with one’s prey is a valuable asset. But it is a vulnerability—a weakness—that is unacceptable among the nobility of the People. And it affects her now, for what Agent First is required to do in order to commence her mission grinds painfully upon it, causing her deep discomfort. She is already shivering with pangs of nausea, the price of an emotion with no name in the High Tongue, but which she will later learn the cattle-folk call guilt.

  It is one thing to steal the face of a serf who has been bound and placed before you in the training pits, their life already forfeit. It’s one thing to do it beneath the unblinking scrutiny of your trainers, knowing that if you display any hesitation at all it will cause them to question your fitness to serve the All-Highest. Eldest Sister’s disgrace has taught Agent First the consequences of revealing weakness, and among the Host empathy is weakness, and weakness means death.

  But it is an awful thing to have to hunt down and steal the soul of an innocent who has done you no harm, merely because this is what is expected of you and you are bound to obey the iron will of a distant power.

  Agent First drifts aimlessly through the stony canyons of the shadow city, waiting to encounter a suitable victim. In the back of her head she is compiling a map, storing it in her memory palace for later transfer to her gems. She’s observing and explicating the mores of this land, inasmuch as she can do so while functionally illiterate and unable to understand the language. The city is very densely constructed by the standards of the People. The buildings are ugly and cramped, the gardens tiny and badly maintained, the costumes of the round-eared natives are drab and uncomfortable-looking. There is little sense of mana here, no sign of constructed conduits for power, no sign of industrial civilization—but there must be something, some eldritch force that causes lights to glow and carts to snarl and rumble through the poorly maintained streets. This is clearly a land that languishes in the grip of a dark parody of civilization, and perhaps if she could get a glimpse
of one of the overseer class she would be able to better understand what she is seeing. But in her frustration and distress she decides that the round-eared cattle-folk of this shadow land truly deserve the name her kind uses for such ugly subhuman slaves-to-be: urük.

  Hours pass as Agent First walks. She passes many people and sees many sights. Her perambulations carry her deep into concrete canyons lined with buildings of a scale that might be described as palaces were they not so utterly bereft of beauty. Some of them are clearly storehouses, possibly clusters of many storehouses gathered together under one roof. Some of them have no obvious purposes, but through unscreened windows she sees many urük in curiously drab, uniform clothes sitting in chairs before tables topped with glowing mirrors. As the night deepens, the lights dim and the many-windowed labor-sheds gradually empty. It comes to Agent First that soon there will be few enough people on the streets that she will have no excuse for foot-dragging. If she shirks her duty, the All-Highest will hold her to account sooner or later. Her heart sinks and she retreats into darkened side streets, passing doors lit by brilliantly colored signs from within which waft peculiar smells. Barking, babbling, ugly cattle-people: Which one of you will I become?

  Her chest feels hollow with a dread that dares not speak its name when she finally sees a likely target. Three young adults have stumbled from the doorway of an establishment that smells of stale beer and buzzes with raucous discourse. It’s clearly a tavern or brothel of some sort. They wobble unsteadily along the street ahead of her. She is still learning to parse the dress code sufficiently well to tell genders apart—beards are male-only, long hair is usually female, females often wear high shoes, and she has yet to see any eunuchs or freemartins at all—but two of them, one man and one woman (or so she thinks) are the worse for wear. They stumble towards one of the curious open-sided glass shelters and huddle beneath a sign, evidently waiting for one of the large carts that sluggishly rumble around the city, picking up serfs and dropping them off elsewhere. Their single companion is less drunk, and Agent First is pretty sure that this one is female—the length of hair and the sway of hips betray her. She says her goodbyes to her friends at the cart-stand then walks on, slowly heading uphill towards a district where many-windowed labor-sheds rub shoulders with more taverns: it seems to be a center of activity among younger adults.