A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  As she watched, the Brigante turned as one and leaped from the palisade. Bladud wasn’t wearing his robe now. He was wearing iron mail and a bearskin cloak like the rest of his warriors. The skull of a bear that he had killed himself was set onto his helmet. His cloak caught fire as he leaped. Bladud landed and tore it off, stabbing at the cloak as the green fire imbued it with deformed life.

  ‘Hold here!’ Bladud cried. The wall across the entire front of the fort was torn down. The monstrosities crawled, ran, slithered and flew into the fort. Behind her the children screamed. In front of her, some of the warriors and landsfolk screamed as well, fleeing the line.

  Tangwen pushed her feet deeper into the mud. There was a smile on her face. She could feel the demons in her blood fighting against the magics of Andraste that filled the air. Ahead of her, in the line of warriors and landsfolk, she could see flesh and armour start to warp. There were things growing out of them, bursting through skin, changing them. Some lost control and started stabbing at new mouths, eyes, entire heads. Others stood and held even as they were being transformed.

  Goibniu resembled Bress again, which made him easier to look at, in some ways. The blood was still drying on Britha’s cheek. Her head still ached.

  ‘Who is Germelqart speaking with?’ Britha asked.

  ‘Ninegal,’ Goibniu told her.

  ‘Who is Ninegal?’

  ‘Me.’

  Britha shook her head. None of this was making much sense. ‘You are aware? You know what is happening outside?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘It has driven its own children mad,’ he said.

  Britha stared at him for a moment but had no time to go into it. ‘Will you help us?’

  ‘What would you have of me?’

  ‘Can you …’ Germelqart had spoken of this but she could not see how it might be done. The land would not fit in the Red Chalice. ‘Can you return the land to what it was?’

  ‘Yes,’ Goibniu said simply.

  Britha stared at him. ‘That’s it? No bargain? No price?’ All dealings with the Otherworld had a price.

  ‘I am a tool, nothing more.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and cursed her weakness as the relief surged through her and tears sprang to her eyes again. ‘Can you return me, and my friend?’ she asked.

  He nodded. Then: ‘Britha?’ he asked. She looked up at him. ‘I am alone. All my people are gone.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ she told him, but then she remembered the little girl.

  Tangwen rammed her knife into something’s head and there was an audible crack as the point of the blade pierced the skull. The mouth growing from Tangwen’s own neck and shoulder was cackling insanely. She put both hands on her spear and rammed it into one of the beaked walking-tree monstrosities, running at it, pushing the spear in as deep as she could. The spear howled through her blood, into her skull. The spearhead branched out through the tree-thing’s body, hungry for the slaughter, searching for a way to kill it.

  A one-legged monstrosity landed in front of her. It clawed at her with thick, ragged nails on its single hand, tearing deep rents in her face. Tangwen barely felt the pain. She spat her own flesh into its eye, yanked her hatchet from her belt and used it to open the thing’s head, splashing herself with its gory contents. She grabbed her knife from the dead thing’s head and jammed it into neck of another. Iron branches exploded through the bark-like skin of the tree-thing and it fell to the ground, crushing spawn and human alike. Tangwen bit the nose off whatever it was she had just stabbed in the neck and spat it away from her. She embedded her hatchet in the head of something slithering towards her with a thousand tiny legs and a human face. Then she grabbed for her spear, tearing it out of the tree-thing.

  A flailing tendril hit her hard, sending her spinning through the air. She landed close to where Britha and Germelqart lay. She could see their flesh starting to transform now. Britha’s arm was slowly turning into a tentacle. Feathers and eyes were growing from Germelqart’s head.

  The Brigante and the gwyllion were fighting next to her, trying to keep Britha and Germelqart safe for as long as they could. Many of them were just being stomped into the ground by things too large for them to fight. The rest of the warriors were in a ragged line across the fort, trying to keep the creatures away from the children, though many had run. Tangwen wondered if those who stayed had done so because they were damned or driven mad with battle lust by the cursed weapons they carried, or were just the bravest people she had ever met.

  Bladud was fighting like a demon, moving with speed and ferocity, cutting down anything that got close to him. All the more impressive when Tangwen remembered he had not drunk of Britha’s blood. His sword arm, his entire body, must ache, he must have been gasping for breath, soaked in sweat. He cut at something that looked like a twisted man with antlers, driving it into the ground and then striking down, again and again, with his red iron blade until the thing stopped moving and started to come apart. Bladud had another face growing out of the back of his bald head. He tore his shield off his arm as it grew teeth and bit at him.

  She saw one of the lynx-headed Iceni land on the back of one of the man/horse things and stab at it in a frenzy, shrieking as she rode it to the mud. Then a tree-thing stomped on her.

  Duach and Sel dragged a one-legged hopping creature to the ground. Twrch beat its head in with a hammer.

  Guidgen was being cagey, waiting for his moment to dart out from among his naked warriors and strike with his scythe. He watched for those in trouble and stepped in to help whilst the rest of the Gwyllion fought around him in a frenzy.

  Tangwen stood up. A hoof caught her in the head as another rearing man/horse thing came down on her. The force of the blow drove her into the ground and everything went dark for a moment. She heard screaming. The mouth in her neck was trying to eat the mud she was lying on. Her face didn’t feel as if it was on straight. She was nauseous. She heard someone shouting her name.

  She managed to look up. Mabon was hanging from the creature’s neck, stabbing at it again and again. He must have leaped at it over the thing’s weapons. He must have charged it from where he had been guarding the other children. Anharad was next to her. The terrified Trinovantes woman had Britha’s spear in her hand. She pushed it into the monstrosity’s flanks. The thing reared and then toppled sideways.

  Tangwen searched around for a weapon. Any weapon. The dragon with a horse’s skull and a crow’s wings reared up over them. Tangwen saw a longspear with a red iron head lying in the mud. Warriors went flying as they were swept out of the way by the deformed walking trees. As the horse-skulled dragon opened its mouth, Tangwen pushed herself to her feet, grabbed the spear and ran. She used the corpse of the horse/man creature to launch herself high into the air, towards the dragon.

  Germelqart and Britha opened their eyes. Germelqart looked down at the Red Chalice.

  The alien artificial intelligence that lived in the immersion environment inside the L-tech device set the process in motion. It pulled matter through the bottom of the ancient but powerful assembler, converting the base carbon molecules into a functioning nano-swarm and spraying them into the air.

  The L-tech nanites met the biological nanites, which were the product of the Seeders’ malfunctioning and corrupted terraforming process. It began to reprogram the biological S-tech nanites, transforming them at a molecular level, returning them to their constituent parts where it could, or into base carbon where it couldn’t. It spread quickly among the corrupted terraformed life. Part-spore, part-disease. Flesh, bark, blood, sap, plant fibre, wood, mineral and chitin began to separate, collapsing, slewing to the earth in clouds of ash-like carbon dust as the artificial intelligence took Britha at her word. All the while it fed on matter from the earth.

  ‘Run!’ Germelqart shouted as he got to his feet.

  Britha tried to push herself up but found her arm had p
artially transformed into a tentacle. It was agony as the demons in her blood sought to reverse the transformation. Panic took her as she thought of the child in her stomach.

  Tangwen, unarmed, covered in blood and ichor, deep wounds in her face, was suddenly standing over her. She leaned down and grabbed Britha, dragging her to her feet. Tangwen reached for the Red Chalice.

  ‘No, leave it!’ Britha cried, and then it was her dragging the reluctant Tangwen back. All around them the ground was collapsing, as if the earth beneath it had been sucked away. The Red Chalice was quickly sinking into an ever-expanding crater. The walls of the fort started to fall into the crater.

  ‘Break!’ Bladud shouted. The line of warriors turned and ran, heading for the back of the fort. A door had already been opened in the wall and the children were streaming out of it. The running warriors were struck down as they fled, often sent flying into or over the walls, their bodies broken as they bounced off trees. Beyond the walls, the line of spawn stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. But they were slowing. Starting to rot, melt or simply fall apart. All the while the Red Chalice fed on the earth.

  Britha saw the child from Ardestie standing by the rear wall, crying, hugging herself. Britha scooped the child up with her good arm and carried her from the Gwyllion’s fort, away from the monsters.

  Epilogue

  The Walker

  Hand-over-hand, he pulled himself up over the rocks past towering, hollow iron fingers reaching for the red sky. On the other side of the vast ridge he could see the glow of the city’s lights now, flickering and surging.

  Stones rained down on him and he heard movement above. Hanging on with one hand, he reached behind him to take the hilt of his sword and loosen the blade in its scabbard.

  A scrabbling noise, bone on scree. The dataghosts watched as the creatures launched themselves at him. Their flesh was sparse and they looked almost skeletal, a biological design for an environment with few resources. Their once-human skulls had grown into a protective shell that covered their backs and was connected to the rest of their bodies by a membrane of skin. They were pitch black in colour, to help absorb any heat.

  They were parasites. Like everything else. He was a vibrant source of heat, energy from calories, raw materials, even devices. It was no surprise that they attacked him. Even though there was little chance of them hurting him. It was no surprise that they gathered so close to the city, either.

  He pulled himself up, landing on a sloping ledge as he drew his sword. He caught the first of them in mid-air. It came apart as the sword flew through it. He kept moving forward, wielding the sword two-handed, their shells cracking, bones breaking. They were soft, brittle mockeries of what had once been but he never dropped his guard, never once took his victory for granted. The dataghosts stood in silent witness, recording everything.

  When they were all dead, he looked through their broken bodies for the most intact of their skull shells. He found four that were good enough. He dribbled into them, exuding a copious amount of translucent saliva. The saliva ate the remaining dry flesh and used the transformed matter to harden the soft, brittle material. Then he tied them together through their eye sockets and continued making his way up the rocky path. He was no less a parasite than anything else, and soon he could use the hardened skull-shells to bargain for the service of screaming demons.

  Soon he would see the city.

  Acknowledgements

  A lot of people helped get this book into shape.

  I would like to think Jamie and Patti Arthur and the rest of the Arthur family and staff at the now sadly closed Village Hotel on Pohnpei for their hospitality and for sending me research material on Nan Madol and the island itself.

  Scottlan Fanning, Jennifer Dupuy, Jake Busby, Chuck Griffin, Candra Malta and Valerie Finney for adopting a wandering Brit in the South Pacific. I also want to thank Chuck for his insights into commercial diving (any ridiculous flights of fancy are my fault not his).

  Thanks to Anthony Jones and Tanya Baldwin for hospitality and suggestions whilst researching Birmingham, and to Matthew Strange and James Adey in their capacity as native guides of the same city.

  Thanks to the following writers for support, advice, in poor Stephen’s case actual collaboration (nothing illegal) and sometimes just staying up late and drinking at conventions: M.D. Lachlan, Chris Wooding, Stephen Deas and particularly to Peter F. Hamilton and my arch-nemesis Hannu Rajaniemi for their comments on Age of Scorpio.

  Thanks to my excellent agent Robert Dinsdale at A.M. Heath for his support.

  Thanks to Simon Spanton, Charlie Panayiotou, Gillian Redfearn and Sophie Calder at Gollancz and to my editor Marcus Gipps for going above and beyond on this and other projects, it’s much appreciated.

  Thanks to Lisa Rogers for all her hard work on the copy edit.

  Thank you for the support and sarcasm from my friends, family, and members of the gaming community, particularly to my mum and dad and to Yvonne for her continuing evil brand of patience.

  Again, and I hope I never forget to say this, I am thankful to everyone who buys a copy (or gets one out of the rapidly shrinking number of libraries) of anything I write and particularly to those who comment or review, good or bad, online. Thank you.

  Finally, during the course of writing this book Iain Banks passed away. I did not know Iain but I have been reading his books for many years and he has been a huge influence on me, and not just my writing. He was taken way too soon and is a huge loss to literature, SF and otherwise.

  Also by Gavin G. Smith from Gollancz

  Veteran

  War in Heaven

  The Age of Scorpio

  Crysis: Escalation

  Co-authored with Stephen Deas, as Gavin Deas

  Elite: Wanted

  Empires: Extraction

  Empires: Infiltration

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Gavin G. Smith 2015

  All rights reserved

  The right of Gavin G. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House,

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2015 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 575 1 2718 0

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.gavingsmith.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk