From the inside.
She clutched at the dying willow, shaking. She drew the river's power—her power—to heal this body that she wore, to build it afresh and renew flesh and bone, but that only brought forth a thicker flow of the black oil; the black oil was part of her, part of the river, part of her power, and it ate Pallas Raithe's flesh as fast as she could heal. The river howled her pain in a voice of human screams and bird cries, of cat snarls and the shrieks of wounded rabbits, and only a tiny fraction of this pain was physical.
I might pray for help—but to whom? Whom does the goddess ask for help? What am I supposed to do?
—you can fight
The remembered voice was Hari's, of course; what other advice did he ever offer? Fighting was his whole life.
—quit whining get off your ass and fucking FIGHT
She could never make him understand. Some things cannot be fought; some things just are. Day and night. The turn of seasons. Life. Death.
Horseshit, she remembered him saying. What the fuck is a house, then? It's how you fight the seasons. What's a campfire? It's how you fight the night. What's medicine? It's how you fight death. That's what love is, too. Just because you're not gonna win is no fucking reason to give up.
All right, she exhaustedly told that remembered voice, surrendering. All right. But you have to help me. Hari, I need your help.
I AM helping you, goddammit
Which was so like him that it made her smile while the river's oil-fouled current washed away her tears.
She pulled herself up from the water, carrying Kosall, climbing one-handed the branches of the dying willow. Muscles shivered with oncoming shock; blister-scarred palms blistered anew, swelling into solid boils of blackened corruption. She turned back to the half-formed body she had built in the cradle of the Great Chambaygen's clay. As she feverishly willed that body into existence, building it of clay and stone and river water, the blind god entered her more fully, more roughly, thrusting itself into her with the overpowering force of billions of desperate lives. It would let her rebuild herself.
It wanted her to.
Already she could feel, with the half-formed nerves of the Pallas Ril body in the clay beside her, the searing poison of the black oil up and down the river. The more life she summoned, the more death it produced. The more one they became.
She could see, now, through the eyes of the Kollberg and Tan'elKoth bodies in the techbooth in San Francisco: could feel the avid lust with which they watched her on the POV monitors: could feel the anticipation of victory building like an orgasm, as they breathlessly watched her create a woman's body from the earth. She looked down at the half-shaped clay, at its swell of breast and curve of hip, and then she turned away.
She could not do this to her river.
She could focus her power upon the sword itself, one swift twist of will destroying it and herself together—but that would release her pattern from the blade into the river. Destroying the sword would flood her river with her consciousness, and the blind god would ride that flood forever.
The blind god had her in Chinese handcuffs: every move she made tightened its hold upon her.
She had to retreat: to throw herself into the lack, become nothing in that sea of nonexistence. Unmake herself. Using the partial nervous system she had created in the riverbank, she began to restructure Raithe's nervous system to its original resonance.
The blind god hummed its satisfaction, like a chess player who has caught his opponent in a particularly gratifying fork. Through the two sets of eyes in the Studio's ISP booth, she saw the swing of Actors' POVs and understood the blind god's new pleasure. Actors closed in upon her, crept closer and closer, their breath going short, penises stiffening and labia moistening with the blind god's lust. These Actors were tools of the blind god already; once she was again nothing more than a pattern bound in the magick of the sword, she could not stop any new hand upon its hilt from calling her forth but she would not come forth the same.
A different hand upon Kosall would bring a different goddess: one bent already to the blind god's will.
The ring of Actors closed around her. She could feel them with the blind god's perception: she knew precisely where each one was, knew his name, her history, the whole of every one of them. She gathered power in the river: she could destroy them with a gesture—and the blind god laughed. Let her kill them.
It had many, many Actors.
And even this shrug of power had quickened the venom that poured through her. Already the river stank of death for a mile downstream; already trees upstream sweated pinpricks of black oil, pocking their trunks with growing lesions of dead bark.
Please, she begged herself. A little inspiration, that's all I ask. She dived deeper into the Song, begging the river itself for any clue it might offer. Even just a hint.
And a small, timid voice with the querulousness of nervous exhaustion whispered from the far side of Faith's tears: Well, if all you're worried about is Aktiri, I think I may be able to help you.
12
The shade of Hannto the Scythe wasted no time trying to form thoughts and words and explanations: he knew They would come for him, and he knew Their billions were an ocean in which he would drown. Instead, he took his understanding of a technique of Ma'elKoth's and passed it through the link. It was a slight—even minuscule—alteration of local physics, a tiny shift in the resonance of reality itself that could be made self-sustaining.
He felt her puzzlement as though it were a question in reply, but They were closing in, sucking him down, and he had time to offer her only a fading memory of the Colhari Palace, and a reminder that Ma'elKoth had once suffered an Aktir problem, too.
And then the sea of lives dragged him under, and swallowed him.
13
Holding her nerves of clay in mindview, Pallas built the image at the forefront of her mind: a spherical lattice of shimmering violet, as the shade had shown her. It was an elegant variant of a simple Shield, retuned to near-ultraviolet from its usual warm gold. As she channeled the river's power into it, it vanished from her mindview: it had reached frequencies she could no longer perceive.
Its centerpoint hovered an inch behind the forehead of the Pallas Ril of clay that grew upon the riverbank, an inch above the midpoint between her eyes. She sang its melody into the Song, and it expanded like a slow-motion shock wave, enclosing all that it touched: the dockside, the warehouses, the caverns below, Old Town behind her, the Warrens, Alientown, and even the South Bank across the river: a million, two million, ten million times the volume of the field Ma'elKoth had set about the Colhari Palace, and more.
The clay Pallas shifted and bubbled, and smoke rose from its eyes. The unfinished nerves within that body of clay were less than ideally efficient, and to overpower any circuit beyond its efficiency causes energy to be lost as waste heat.
She stripped herself from Raithe's body, and his nerves spasmed with shock and agony. In so doing, she rewrote herself within the sword, overlaid her pattern there with the memories she shared with Raithe; should a mind ever draw her back to consciousness again, she would remember all they had learned.
She could not return him to himself entirely; she could heal neither the burns of his body nor the memories she had scorched into his brain, but what she could do, she did. And she left within him the answer he would require, should he choose to fight on in this war against the blind god: the hiding place of her weapon. It was the only way she could thank him for saving her.
She knit one final command into his brain, hardwired it like an instinct
Defend the sword.
—then she poured what was left of her will into the clay.
The final burst of power that made her elegant invisible Shield self-sustaining detonated the clay half-body of Pallas Ril in an explosion that left a smoking crater on the dockside and blew Raithe spinning backward through the air all the way across the river.
The sword fell from his hands, splashed in
to the oil-fouled waters of the Great Chambaygen, and vanished into their oil-sealed murk; Raithe crashed into one of the enormous limestone blocks that formed the base of the Old Town wall, then he, too, fell into the river. He floated facedown, limp as the wilted leaves of the trees that rotted around him.
And the black oil that leaked from those trees burned like gasoline.
14
A hundred yards downstream, a man called J'Than—or Francis Rossi, depending on which world he walked—crouched behind the gunwale of a boat canted half-over in the branches of a dying willow. In the narrow brick right-of-way between the Palnar Drygoods warehouse and the steel-works, a likewise dual-named woman—Cholet or Tina Welch—pressed herself against a wall, gasping. On the roof of that same warehouse, a pair of experienced thieves from out of town—from way, way out of town—suddenly paused in the act of belaying a rope they had planned to use to rappel down to the dockside.
Each of these—and seven more like them—had been creeping toward the man on the river, had been watching intently the shimmering sword in his hand, had come closer and closer while the eldritch jungle sprang to life unheeded around them, had slid untouched past the weeping black oil to approach their goal.
And all of them had felt a prickling, tingling wave pass over and through them, an instant before the riverside erupted in a gout of power that spread flames over the oil—flames that sped outward, reaching hungrily toward them and the black oil that dripped from the jungle on all sides. Each of them felt as though he or she now awakened from a bad dream, a dream that had carried them toward this moment without volition. Each of them said to himself or herself, with minor variations ac-cording to their individual usages, What the fuck was I THINKING?
And all of them, finding their wills now their own, ran like hell.
15
In the techbooth of the Interlocking Serial Program, the blind god talked to itself.
It had two mouths here. The voice from one was deep and round and mellow as honey; the voice from the other was a harsh cindery rasp. Which voice spoke mattered not at all, because it was only talking to itself.
"A setback," one murmured, as the POV screen that had shown a view of Ankhana's decaying-jungle dockside in flames flickered to white static. "Only a setback."
"Not even serious," one replied, as another screen that showed the black oil burning on the surface of the river went white, and another.
The booth became brighter and brighter as the POV screens exchanged views of Ankhana in flames for rectangles of featureless electronic snow. The blind god understood what Pallas had done as completely as Pallas had comprehended the blind god, and it was not in the least dismayed. The link to the river shut down only an instant after the last of the screens blanked, and Faith Michaelson sobbed in some remote corner of the blind god's mind.
The city was now sealed against the Winston Transfer.
"Do we need Actors to get the sword?"
"I should say not. We have troops. Combat troops. Social Police. Armed men. We can take the city, if we want."
"We want"
"Yes. We need a story. We need a story to keep the people behind us. To keep everyone on board."
"Nothing could be simpler. We can tell them we have to invade."
"The city's in flames."
"We don't have any choice."
"Of course we don't have any choice."
"It's the only way to save Caine."
"That's true. It's the only way to save Caine."
The hiss of electronic snow from the techbooth speakers was joined by a wash of rusty, breathless cackles—innumerable MIDI files of canned laughter culled from netshows around the globe—which was the blind god snickering at its own joke.
There is a sense in which the matrix of stories that we call history is itself a living thing. There is a structure to it, a shape, that we call its body; it has certain habitual progressions that we call its movement. We say history advances, or retreats, that it recalls this and forgets that; we look to it as a teacher, as a parent, as an oracle.
We say and do these things, and somehow we still delude ourselves that we are speaking metaphorically.
History is not only alive, it is aware.
It meets every test of consciousness. History anticipates. History intends. History wills.
Its anticipation, intention, and will are the sums of ours; it vectors our hopes and fears and dreams with the stern logic of the inanimate. And there are times when history lifts the hammer, and times when it bends the bow, and there are times when it draws a long, long breath.
NINETEEN
Within its smothering blanket of sudden jungle, Ankhana writhed.
This was an instant holiday, a festival, a Carnevale: a suspension of the ordinary rules of life and society. How could one go to work or to the market, when the streets were choked with trees? Grain bins had burst across the city as mills vomited sprouts, and shoots sprang from drying seeds. Door planks shot forth branches that burgeoned with leaves; dungheaps transformed instantly into high-mounded gardens.
For some it was a time of joy and release and childlike play, to dance among the waves of new-sprung life; for others, it was a time of profound contemplation, a time to wonder at the irreducible strangeness of the universe. For most, it was a time of terror.
Most people cannot face a world without rules.
Those rules of life and society—rules that are so often railed against as stifling and degrading—serve a profound purpose: they provide patterns of behavior that allow one the comfort of believing one understands the rules of the game. Without rules, there is no game. There is only the jungle.
This particular jungle swarms with tigers.
Humanity is the only species that is its own natural enemy. The virus that had eaten its way into so many brains had digested already most of the inhibitions and repressions that make civilization possible. The instant jungle dissolved the final trace of even the most elemental animal caution, which had been the last restraint.
Now was the time to hunt and feed.
Two types of people best dealt with the sudden jungle. The first were the sort for whom rules never change. To a bishop of the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma'elKoth, for example, the laws of his god transcended any temporal consideration, even such a shattering transformation as this; to the soldiers finally charged with the arrest of Duke Toa-M'Jest, orders were orders, whether issued in a garrison, a tent, or the branches of an oak that had sprung from bare earth ten minutes before.
The second were the type of people for whom there never had been any rules: the ones who had always lived in the jungle.
The last few Cainists still at liberty banded together to defend their families at a warehouse in the Industrial Park, waiting grimly with spear and sword and bow, dispatching each human tiger who hunted too near; His Grace the Honorable Toa-M'Jest, Duke of Public Order—who had once been His Majesty the King of Cant, and before that had been Jest, a young pickpocket, petty thief, and aspiring thug—scented the approach of pack hunters with instinctive animal wariness.
He, like the others of the second type, actually felt safer now than he had before, when he'd still had to pretend to be following the rules. For the rest of Ankhana, there was only the jungle.
2
When he first glimpsed the line of infantry picking their way through the rubble-choked streets of Alientown toward his improvised stockade, Toa-M'Jest realized that he'd held on too long.
The stockade wall on which he stood rose from the ruins of what once had been a dry goods store at the corner of Moriandar Street and Linnadalinn Alley. It was overspread by a broad canopy of antisprite netting, now burdened with a new growth of spreading hemp leaves sticky with resin; Toa-M'Jest parted the jungle of dangling weighted ropes and squinted at the advancing troops.
In their vanguard strode an officer in the formal dress-blues of the Eyes of God.
Toa-M'Jest clenched his teeth to keep a string of curse
s behind them. He knew exactly what was going on, and it was bad. Their orders must have come from the Patriarch himself, and he had a pretty damned good idea what those orders were.
The crazy old bastard had fucked him.
The Duke turned to the Grey Cat alpha at his side. The alpha, like the pride he commanded, wore the latest in experimental antimagick combat technology: a full bodysuit of overlapping jointed steel plates, painted with protective runes of silver. It made the usually lithe and nimble Cats lumber like overweight bears, but in the close-quarters combat of the war in the caverns below the city, mobility counted for less than did protection.
"This is what I've been worried about," Toa-M'Jest said grimly. "Looks like the elves have taken control of those officers."
"Your Grace?" the alpha said blankly, his voice muffled within his steel helm.
"Nobody gets in here, you understand? We can't trust anyone but ourselves. Those poor bastards out there probably think we called for reinforcements. They might even think they're acting at the order of the Patriarch himself. But no matter what they say, we can't let them inside the stockade."
"But, Your Grace," the alpha said dubiously, "what if their orders do come from the Patriarch?"
"We can sort all that out in a day or two, after things calm down." Toa-M'Jest waved a hand at the jungle that choked the ruined city. "You've seen what the damned elves have done to us. We will take no more chances. No one enters. That's an order."
He turned away and clambered down the ladder before the alpha could reply. He had three more alphas—the commanders at each wall—who needed the same order, and pretty fucking soon, too.
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