Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  “Possibly the Demons are at the centre of it,” the Drake said, “although I do find it hard to credit.”

  “Me too,” Gabriel said. “They’re old and clever – at least Mercy was, and even he hasn’t been seen in a long time – but subtle they’re not. The way they melted off as the veil lifted … maybe they set something in motion, but…”

  “The I-Spy would probably find evidence of Demonic activity on Earth, if there was any,” the Drake reiterated. “The agents of the Adversary are very much one of her strengths.”

  Several of the displays, Greyblade noticed, melted into images of sacred sites and buildings across Earth. Churches, mosques, temples, daja’i, even the occasional esoteric outlier, like a circle of stones or a shrine to a specific Disciple. While all holy properties were essentially dedicated to Jalah and the Brotherhood, there were as many facets to the Pinian faith as there were to the indefinable so-very-very-fuckedness of the world they affectionately called Snowhome.

  “You know,” Gabriel pointed out, “it’s not just the I-Spy. If there were Demons moving around on Earth again, they’d be soiling the holy ground and the Angels and I would have noticed that.”

  “So what can drive a Demon into hiding?” the Drake mused.

  “You mean aside from God turning up, the forces of the Brotherhood and the forces of darkness doing battle over the world, and then the humans blasting anyone left with the souls of their own dead until everyone runs for cover?” Gabriel asked.

  “Aside from that,” the Drake replied calmly. “Yes.”

  “I suppose that would depend on whether Mercy went into hiding when the veil was lifted,” Greyblade said, “or was just destroyed like the others. And whether he stayed hidden ever since. And why.”

  “That all sounds very difficult to establish,” the Drake remarked, turning gleaming blue eyes on Gabriel. “Perhaps that is the facet the Archangel is focussing on,” she said. “He did mention that we were all looking at different issues, and he has been the enemy of Demons for many years.”

  “My facet just came front-and-centre when our tin-plated friend here mentioned Earth had been abandoned by the Brotherhood,” Gabriel said. “An abandoned world would be a Demon’s amusement park.”

  “Tin-plated?” Greyblade objected.

  “Before he told us about the Brotherhood’s decision,” Gabriel went on, “I’d sort of been ignoring the whole thing and hoping it would go away.”

  “Explain,” Greyblade urged, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. This was why he’d come to Earth, though. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

  “You brushed on it earlier,” Gabriel said, “when you told me about the border guard cussing you out using Damorak swearwords.”

  “Damoraks?” the Drake said, recoiling slightly.

  So what can drive a Demon into hiding?

  The question finally tripped a switch in Greyblade’s head. His mental scenario-tapestries completed themselves with a flourish. He turned to the Drake’s screens.

  “Show me Damorak activity,” he said.

  DAMORAK

  “Damoraks?” the Drake repeated. “Here on Earth?”

  “Not for fifteen years,” Gabriel said, glaring at Greyblade. “I told you.”

  “You also told me the last one was here on a diplomatic docket,” Greyblade said, “and that you didn’t know whether they’d stopped coming, or whether they’d just stopped coming here.”

  “And that’s true,” Gabriel said, “we don’t know that.”

  “But you think they did stop coming altogether,” Greyblade said.

  “Pretty sure,” Gabriel said. “For one thing, if any more Damoraks had started dropping in, the Destarion would have descended on this place like the proverbial wrath of God. It was enough of an effort just to keep her from killing the ones that came here as diplomats.”

  “Shame anyone went to that effort,” Greyblade noted.

  “That’s what I said, Sir Knight,” the Drake told him. “Mind you, I was a hatchling of ten the last time a Damorak graced our humble world, but since then … I have always been surprised at the willingness the human governments showed to hear the Damorak point of view. Surely there comes a point where respect for alternate worldviews must end.”

  “You would think,” Greyblade said.

  “Fine,” Gabriel said, “show us Damoraks. You realise, don’t you, that if the network had ever spotted black robes, glowing eyes, burning plasma hands it would have alerted us by now?”

  Greyblade shook his head. “How much off-world traffic comes into Earth through channels other than the Eden Road?” he asked. “How much just comes and goes from the sides of the flatworld? How many ships jump in at relative speed?”

  “None,” the Drake said with grim positivity. “It is an Interdict, Sir Knight. Even official travel takes place through the Eden Road checkpoints set in place by the Treaty of Mumbai. There is a relative suppression field surrounding the flatworld and limiting all relative speed access to the atmoplane between here and Heaven. And even if ships could jump in here through the suppressor, where would they go? They could come out of soft-space close to a world this size, but they would need to fly back out to a safe distance, through the Interdict, to go to relative speed again. Otherwise, we would be collecting ships down here. And we hardly seem to have any.”

  “Not even official government sanctioned top secret vessels for reasons of state?” Greyblade demanded. He looked at Gabriel. “Not even warships?”

  “You know the Treaty prohibits any relative-capable space fleet,” Gabriel said. “Local only. That was just fine with everybody. There are Interdict cruisers and drift-sats out there in the envelope, and the field generator-ships of course, but they don’t come and go. They’re part of the wall. If there are secret comings and goings by shadowy government agencies, they’re too shadowy for the Drake’s network to detect – and I find that hard to believe. Not saying we can’t be wrong, of course,” he added reasonably, and the Drake nodded. “I just tend to doubt it.”

  “What about the Destarion?” Greyblade changed tack. “Why didn’t she kill the Damorak … diplomats?” he was still unable to say the word without an edge of disbelief.

  “The Elevator People persuaded her to stand down,” Gabriel said, “on the request of a bunch world leaders and – again – in accordance with the Treaty of Mumbai. When the last one to visit inevitably turned out to be … well, a Damorak, they basically told the Elevator People to let the Godfang off her leash. There have been no Master Races Alliance ships in the Void Dimension since then – not on this side of Castle space, anyway.”

  “They did not consider this place worth starting a war over,” the Drake commented.

  “Didn’t they,” Greyblade murmured.

  “As interested as I’d be to see a war between the Destarion and the Damorak Empire,” Gabriel said, “I don’t think a single Category 9 would be able to take on an entire Elder Race. But it would be close,” he grinned widely. “And a heck of a thing to see.”

  Greyblade shrugged. The Elevator hadn’t taken part in the fighting after the veil lifted, but that had been due to rather unique extenuating circumstances. And she hadn’t been mobilised during the Last War of Independence, either. Whether that had been because humanity hadn’t needed her help, or because despite her oddball crew complement they considered her to be an alien intruder they just couldn’t get rid of, that was impossible to say for sure. But he had to concede that if Damoraks had come to Earth uninvited, the Godfang would have ended them. Regardless of whether it led to a war that would finally conclude her long, terrifyingly mottled career.

  “In fact,” the Drake said, returning to her controls, “we can be fairly certain that Damoraks stopped coming here. Damoraks, Time Destroyers, Deathmites, the Dark Realmers, all the Master Races Alliance species and representatives. They all left Earth long before the Last War of Independence. They were defeated here. And yes, some individuals still vis
ited, even after the Interdict. They came as diplomats, but very strictly controlled and very closely supervised. Since the war’s end, they were limited to the alien quarter,” she pointed. “If they had appeared anywhere else in the Interdict, my systems would have found them even if the Elevator was encouraged to look the other way.”

  “Maybe,” Gabriel said in an obvious attempt to satisfy both Knight and Dragon points of view so he could get to his steak. He raised his hands as the Drake turned to look at him. “Not to cast aspersions on your system, but isn’t it possible that they’re hidden – underground, like you are?”

  “I am quite visible to my surveillance system,” the Drake said, sounding more amused than offended, “as are the secret places of the humans. I, however, have not become visible to their eyes. So tell me, who has the better eyes?”

  Gabriel made a hopeless gesture with his hands.

  “What sorts of secret places do the humans have?” Greyblade asked.

  “You may regret your curiosity,” the Drake warned. “Primates are…”

  “I know,” Greyblade said, “and I’m not asking about their private entertainment, however nasty. We haven’t really got time to sit here and watch every sex dungeon and slave auction and lonely man who thinks he knows how to sing.”

  “Nice to see you haven’t lost your knack for wildly inappropriate equivalences,” Gabriel remarked.

  “The higher-level stuff, volume-wise,” Greyblade said. “The governments. The corporations. The private institutions and the unsanctioned experiments they perform. You said the weapons research was sealed to you. How much else might be?”

  “Damoraks,” the Drake said again, her strange mouth twisting. “There is no sign. Only the scars they left after the occupation. There are only three ways they would make an impact on this world any longer. One is technologically, and there is no sign of Damorak technology here. The second is culturally, and aside from some unpleasant curses and a general isolationist, superior attitude that may be entirely human in origin, there is no sign.”

  “And the third?” Greyblade asked.

  The Drake smiled without humour, although this may simply have been because her face lacked the capacity. “By destroying this world entirely,” she said, “and eradicating the species in accordance with Damorak ideology. This has not happened either.”

  “Damoraks don’t like humans,” Greyblade conceded, wondering whether Damoraks would – or could – drive Demons away from the Earth. “I mean, not many species do like humans, and Damoraks don’t like any species except for Damoraks–”

  “And even that is debatable,” Gabriel said. “But okay, they have a particular dislike. They might use humans for their purposes, and they would probably enjoy having an outpost right in the heart of Pinian territory, but it wouldn’t be worth the effort. The Brotherhood went to war against the Damoraks before and won. But … well, let’s put it this way,” the Archangel nodded at the screens. “Not even Damoraks would use soul-powered weapons. Not made from human souls, and certainly not from Damoraks ones.”

  “Mortal Damoraks wouldn’t use soul-powered weapons,” Greyblade said quietly.

  “Hold on,” Gabriel said, “I think this got away from me.”

  “No,” Greyblade said. “I think I just found the big picture.”

  “Help us out,” Gabriel said, looking at the Drake. The Drake shook her head and toyed with the surveillance systems.

  “If you are expecting a big picture in data format, Archangel,” she said. “Sir Greyblade will have to give me more information.”

  “It’s like Gabriel was saying,” Greyblade said, “and it got me thinking. When the Firstmades turned their backs on Earth, opportunists snuck in. It’s happened before. It’s been happening since God built these worlds. The last time it happened on a big scale here – the last time the Pinians looked away – it was the other side of the Brotherhood that moved in. The Darking Disciples, and the Adversary, gained a foothold.”

  Gabriel nodded, his face bleak. He remembered, Greyblade reflected. For all Greyblade knew, the Archangel had been there.

  It had not gone well. The entire continent on which the foothold situation had occurred had been plunged into the sea and now it was nothing but a myth. Of course, that had been the Pinians starting to pay attention again, and acting to protect their sovereign realms. And it had only been one relatively small landmass. With Earth as it was now – whatever was going on down here – it was hard to say whether things would be worse if left alone, or if Jalah turned up and began dunking continents.

  And that was why he was here, wasn’t it?

  “Atlantis was a cautionary tale,” the Drake allowed respectfully, turning back to her monitors. “The Darkings are unlikely to make another move like that. Certainly not overtly. Not while the humans are walking around with their living guns. I remain uncertain what to look for.”

  “Here,” Greyblade lifted a ready-packaged block from his own integrated storage, and fed it across to the trove with a wave of his gauntlet. “Cultural and sociological database on Damorak religion, from Ulto Gomia to the Purifying Fire and back again with all the hymns played in reverse. Including a few innovations you might have missed in the past thirty years.”

  “You just carry this sort of thing around with you, do you?” Gabriel asked.

  “Well, I was thinking that if I’d left it out, I might have had room for a compatibility synchroniser that would have allowed me to play Fall or Fly with some fellow passengers on the way down here,” Greyblade said. “But then I remembered I was a commanding officer in a theocratic army, not a mobile entertainment system.”

  “You forgot retired,” the Archangel said dryly.

  “No,” Greyblade said. Slowly at first, then faster, the monitors began to light up with case after case, datapoint after datapoint, correlation after correlation. Corporate policies, legislative changes, social norms, shifts in language. Faster than he’d expected, then fast enough to make him worried the others might suspect some kind of ploy … and then fast enough to legitimately concern him.

  “Jalah save us,” the Drake whispered.

  There was an old question that made up half of a proverb: How do you defeat hatred? And the old answer, and second half of the proverb, was: Daily.

  The Damoraks never stopped. They were, as a species, as an Elder Race, as close to the personification of hatred as it was biologically possible to get. Once they had a foothold, yes, you could cast them out, but they left seeds behind. Perhaps not literally, but their figurative roots went deep, and they were roots that tapped into dark reservoirs of which the humans had unspeakable plenty.

  And how did you defeat an enemy like that? How did it defeat you?

  Daily.

  “No, old friend,” Greyblade said to Gabriel. “Retirement forgot me.”

  A DINNER SLIGHTLY MARRED BY CIRCUMSTANCE

  “How did we miss this?” the Drake asked of nobody in particular, in a pale yet marvelling tone.

  The data was mostly raw-form, statistics and text blocks showing significant overlaps with Greyblade’s suite of warning markers. There were some interesting visuals in fashion and entertainment, but most of them constituted fairly dubious connections. There were no, in Gabriel’s words, black robes or glowing eyes or fingers of clutching plasma lightning.

  One of the most serious cases, although it was only to be expected, was a deeply-buried economic trail connecting several of the biggest human corporations to survive the Exposed Earth with Merdokk Industries, a Capital Mind-based business entity with strong but deniable ties to the Master Races Alliance, the Dark Realms, and all the big Corporate nasties. The trail had gone cold, of course, long before the Interdict – but it was there, if you were lucky enough to have had deep-data mining and correlation software constructed into your brain.

  “It’s not such a mystery,” Greyblade did his best to reassure the clearly upset Dragon and her associates. “You’ve been here watching it every
day, changing too slowly to see. It’s not like they made monumental changes in law and custom. It’s not like they converted the Pinian Mass into a Damorak ritual in a single decree. They’re not displaying icons of Saint Kharda jul Jidri in the Orthodox Cathedral.”

  “And it’s not like the Damoraks had to work very hard,” Gabriel added roughly. “Humans have always shared some pretty upsetting similarities with Damoraks. Some of them, much as I hate to say it, are what make humans so brilliant.”

  “Right,” Greyblade agreed. “Until one day I come down for a visit and I find myself telling the Archangel Gabriel that a human called me a char’flet, and his idle response is did you kick his arse? Disapproval, but acceptance. Resignation. ‘It was always thus’.”

  “Steady on,” Gabriel said.

  “And for the Drake, well,” Greyblade shrugged. “It’s been her life, hasn’t it?”

  There didn’t seem to be much anyone could say about that, or anything to be gained in further staring at the trove’s interfaces. They headed back up the rickety elevator to one of the side-rooms, which revealed itself to be a private dining room. Greyblade was a little surprised when the Drake accompanied them, but the Dragon didn’t seem concerned upon penning herself into the warren of human-sized levels and passages. Greyblade supposed their host was unlikely to want or need to assume her natural form here.

  Their food arrived practically as they were seating themselves at the table, a pair of well-dressed Molren entering and setting out plates and cutlery and dishes of vegetables that Greyblade’s sensors told him were mostly resequenced proteins and vat-grown genetic hybrids. It seemed appropriate to the main dish. The Molren set everything up in silence, and with the swift efficiency of four-handed creatures that Greyblade had always rather envied.

  Finally, one of the Molren laid a plate of still-sizzling steaks in the centre of the table, whereupon both attendants bowed slightly and departed. The door closed with a polite finality that reassured Greyblade that the only way they were seeing service again would be if they used the call-chime, and so he loaded up his plate and poured himself a glass of wine.