Greyblade waited, not allowing his nervousness a foothold, until he heard the Ogre’s happy boom of “Turkeyman!” Then, the smile behind his visor broad even for an Áea, he started down the steps.
It was cooler in the basement, but still would have been on the uncomfortable side of hot for the Ogres. He spotted the four big cluster-iron refrigeration suits lined up facing one wall14 at the same time as he saw the Ogres themselves, standing around a huge dented block that was presumably what an industrial air hockey table looked like.
The Ogres, each one head and shoulders taller than a Molran – which made them head, shoulders and chest taller than Greyblade and most humans – and so wide as to appear practically cubic, were just as he remembered them. Not even geology was as unchanging as an Ogre. Their immense bodies were covered in long, shaggy grey-white hair, their short rear legs ended in heavy horned feet almost like hooves, and their huge arms terminated in gnarled, clawed grey fists that rested on the floor. Their big heavy-jawed heads were like – and often acted as – battering rams on their upper torsos. Small eyes squinted from between shoulders and thick, curved horns. Their tusks were like rows of aged ivory spires ringing the low-domed tops of their heads.
They were elemental, brutal, beautiful.
They were evidently comfortable enough in the above-freezing room, but the distinctive smell of slightly-thawed Ogre introduced itself robustly to Greyblade’s sensors as he entered their domain. It grew stronger as the largest of the four knuckled forwards at a ponderous but shockingly fast lope. Greyblade stopped at the base of the stairs and stood very, very still. There was nothing in the turning urverse, he’d found after a long life of experiences, quite like the sight of an Ogre bearing down on you to remind you of your mortality.
Big Thundering Bjørn stopped and sniffed the air in his general direction. Greyblade stood and waited, hands loosely spread and visor angled down and slightly to one side.
“Greyblade,” the shaggy monster eventually concluded, sounding pleased.
“Biggie,” Greyblade slowly stretched out his hand, palm-up. Bjørn ran a thick, chipped-obsidian claw gently down the centre of it, then swung away and thumped back to the table. “Tuesday. Pete. Hungry,” Greyblade went on.
Fat Tuesday, Colossal Colossal Pete and Brute Hungry, taking their leader’s cue, shuffled around and sniffed amenably at Greyblade as he moved slowly and carefully towards them.
“Tin Can Man,” Fat Tuesday rumbled happily, raising a huge paw to pat him on the spiny black plumes.
“Brute Hungry a cheaty fuck,” Bjørn growled, picking up a heavy disc-shaped object that Greyblade assumed was an instrument of air hockey.
“Am not,” Hungry retorted.
“Am,” Bjørn declared conclusively. Ogres being Ogres, this did actually seem to settle it because Brute Hungry didn’t appear to have any available comeback.
“Galatine must be a heavy sleeper,” Greyblade remarked, “to not wake up through the sound of these boys playing…” he hesitated only briefly, then pointed at the table where another battered metal disc was sliding slowly sideways on what seemed to be a customised magnetic impeller, “…air hockey two floors down?”
“The TrollCagers have lived with the Ogres for years,” Gabriel said. “They’re all pretty sound sleepers.”
There wasn’t much small-talk to indulge in with a group of Ogres, so once Greyblade had let them all have a good sniff and reestablish his presence in the line-drawings of their conceptual landscapes, he gave Colossal Colossal Pete a pat on the arm and followed Gabriel back up the stairs. Tuesday loped over to the row of slumped refrigerator suits and began shuffling into one, and by the time Greyblade and the Archangel were approaching the door Ludi had left ajar, the Ogre was clanking loudly up the stairs after them, club over his shoulder.
The Exorcist wasn’t a machine as Greyblade typically understood the term. The room was dominated by a massive elongated block of dully-gleaming pale-bronze metal, with a slight curve in its length discernible only by Greyblade’s sensors. The top of the block was at around visor-height, and it was about three times as long as it was tall and deep. It was, he realised after a moment’s calculation, a segment of one of the big soul-pollution grounding rings he’d seen on the Drake’s monitors.
Ludi was bustling around the block of metal, attaching electrodes to its sides at locations that had been marked with chalk. The electrodes were connected to heavy-duty cables, which in turn were connected to old-fashioned interfaces or just fed directly into the warehouse wall.
“Is there a sinkhole out there missing a piece of its containment collar?” Greyblade asked casually.
Ludi shot him a grin as she attached the last electrode and Greyblade’s sensors informed him that a very mild current began feeding through the block. “We liberated it from a construction plant in the Sydneyside industrial complex, and Galatine set this up for us,” she said, holding her hand out to Gabriel. The Archangel deposited the gun cell in her palm, and she held it up to her eye like a jeweller examining a gemstone.
“It seems hard to believe that there’s a human soul in there,” Greyblade said sombrely. “I did a little research into the Stormburg soul-interception and it was a lot less … compact.”
“Well, it was also centuries ago,” Ludi said, “and cobbled together from equipment not meant for the task. Plus, it’s a lot more complicated than just ‘a human soul trapped in a battery’,” she sighed, crossed to the wall, and pulled a couple of big, antique-looking primer switches. “What’s inside this cell is what Galatine calls the scream. It’s like the raw-energy part of the soul, almost devoid of consciousness.”
“Almost?”
“Almost,” she confirmed grimly. “There’s enough left to warrant us calling it a scream.”
“It’s like a doorstop,” Gabriel explained, “holding open the gate between reality and unreality – but not in quite the same way as other holes in the fabric, like whorls. This just keeps the soul from withdrawing completely into Limbo, and keeps its power flowing into the cell, providing energy until there’s nothing left of the soul at all. As much of the consciousness as possible is siphoned off, just to make the guns as clean as they are.”
“That’s not saying much,” Greyblade pointed out.
“No. It’s that siphoned self that is seeping into the world through the sinkholes,” Gabriel said. “The screams – the guns’ energy cells – aren’t contributing much, but they’re the root cause.”
“The living gun is like a claw, holding the soul in this sphere to slowly die, when it should return to Limbo from whence it came,” Ludi murmured, turning the little grey capsule over and over. “They say that some of them whisper to their owners. The guns. Inside their minds.”
“The soul?” Greyblade said.
“I’ve heard the same story,” Gabriel remarked, “about old veterans who’ve had their guns for decades. Hard to tell where paranormal sensitivity ends and post-traumatic stress disorder begins, sometimes.”
An orange light above the primer switches went out, and a green light went on. Ludi rose up on her toes and put the cell delicately on the top of the metal block, not apparently giving much thought to its exact placement. She stood back. Greyblade’s sensors registered a strange moment of dead nullity from the metal as it went completely inert, similar to the empty sensor-air that marked the gun they’d almost fallen afoul of that morning.
Then the mild current returned, the green light above the switches went out and the orange one re-illuminated.
“That’s it?” Greyblade asked, as Ludi plucked the cell off the block, tossed it to Gabriel, and then began peeling the electrodes back off the Exorcist.
“That’s it,” Ludi replied. Gabriel slipped the empty cell into his pocket. “Another soul saved.”
“Or silenced, anyway,” a new voice said from the doorway.
CARA-MAGNA ÁQUI
OF THE WHISPERED TRUTH
Greyblade had seen the second h
uman slip into the Exorcist’s chamber past the massive shape of Fat Tuesday’s refrigerator suit, but hadn’t had a chance to acknowledge her yet. Now he turned to face her, once again going through the body-language motions.
This, he guessed, must be Magna. The only other name he’d heard mentioned in connection with the TrollCage residents, Galatine, had been referred to as a male. Magna was female, taller than Paraludi and bearing several markers of advanced age in comparison to her colleague. She was also straight-backed, bright-eyed and her TrollCage overall was crisp and clean. Particularly considering it was still around four in the morning.
What was most noteworthy about her, however, was the fact that she’d walked right into Fat Tuesday’s personal space and the notoriously sensitive Ogre-hindquarters blind-spot, and Tuesday had responded by shuffling placidly aside with a scrape of great metal boots on concrete.
Greyblade inclined his head politely. “I hope we didn’t wake you … ?”
“Magna, Sir Greyblade of the Burning Knights of Brutan the Warrior, formerly of the Ladyhawk,” Gabriel introduced them. “Greyblade, Cara-Magna Áqui, formerly of the Whispered Truth.”
“Retired?” Greyblade guessed.
“Much like you,” Magna agreed. “Almost exactly like you, in fact, if what I’ve seen and heard is true.”
“And you didn’t wake her,” Ludi said in amusement, without pausing in her tidying-away. “Magna’s been waiting for you to get here like a kid on Jalahame Eve.”
“You’ve … seen my arrival?” Greyblade asked, before Magna could respond to Ludi’s gentle ribbing.
Magna, however, seemed amused and unbothered by what was probably familiar conversational byplay. “Actually, the Drake just sent us an update,” she said, drawing a small personal interface from her overall pocket and holding it up.
“How are things in Adelbairn?” Gabriel asked.
“Quiet,” Magna replied. “I suspect there’s something going unsaid between the lines of her report, but the Drake seems satisfied it’s all clear.”
“She probably had to drop a few bribes,” Gabriel said. “That always makes Dragons a bit squirmy.”
“I’se never seed a Dragon,” Fat Tuesday remarked.
“You’ve met the Drake several times,” Gabriel told him. “Skinny albino girl, fed you steak until you were practically mooing.”
“Her’s a Dragon?” Tuesday rumbled.
“You’ve seen her in Dragon form too,” the Archangel grated, but there was hopeless amusement in his voice. Gabriel had long experience with Ogres and was all too aware that the price of monolithic physiology was a poor memory for details. It was the reason Greyblade was always so pleased and touched when the boys remembered him.
“The raids on the Adelbairn end were called off and nothing untoward was reported, just like a dozen times in the past year,” Magna went on when Fat Tuesday subsided with another vaguely puzzled rumble of acceptance. “The incursion at this end has so far gone unreported altogether, at least as far as the Drake has been able to ascertain.”
“Operations around the Sacred City are usually hushed up,” Ludi said, “especially if they have embarrassing endings like this one did.”
“Isn’t her network able to dig into the hushed-up reports?” Greyblade asked.
“She can,” Magna said, “but until she knows that the raids are really closed–”
“–She won’t,” Greyblade nodded approvingly. “Makes sense not to risk exposure in the process of trying to find out if you’ve been exposed. I wasn’t sure how discreet her methods were, or how sensitive the human security is.”
“Pretty discreet, and not particularly sensitive,” Magna replied. “But that still leaves an unacceptable margin for bad luck,” Greyblade nodded again, but Magna looked like she still had something to say so he didn’t interrupt. “I was waiting for you before the Drake sent her messages and Ludi went out to meet you, though,” she continued. “I have been seeing you. I’ve been seeing you since you stopped at Ninadhi Skybase.”
“I’m sorry you had to suffer through that,” Greyblade said lightly. “If it helps, I was watching an interesting documentary on my visor feed during that orientation and security briefing. Although to call it a ‘briefing’…”
“I didn’t get to see that,” Magna said, “but I wouldn’t have minded if I had. I was just so happy to…” her voice wobbled, and she stopped for a few seconds. “My visions – my abilities dried up after the end of the War,” she went on when she’d gotten control of herself. “Same as everybody else’s.”
Not those who stayed true, Greyblade thought, remembering Sister Bazinard at the doors of the Drake. But he recognised Magna’s emotional reaction to the events she was relating, and didn’t make things worse for her.
Somehow, though, his silent judgement must have been easy for Ludi to deduce – or for her strange how-things-go insight to identify. It was, he admitted to himself, perhaps an unspoken comment too obvious to be missed by anyone but Fat Tuesday.
“She did what she had to,” Ludi spoke up fiercely. “We all did. We can’t all be specially engineered killing machines with loyalty in our genetic structure.”
Greyblade raised his hands. “It was an ugly time,” he said. “We’re all friends here, now.”
Magna nodded, stepping over to put a reassuring hand on her young friend’s arm. “That was when I retired,” she said. “A lot of others stayed, and faked it. I don’t blame them. I got my letters and became an engineer. You can’t fix a broken freezer unit with harrowing visions from beyond the real,” she gave a short laugh. “Especially not if they’re reduced to split-second pinpricks.”
“But they came back,” Greyblade pressed.
“A week or so ago,” she nodded, “when you were on Ninadhi.”
“Magna sees the subconscious future,” Ludi explained as Magna busied herself with her interface device. “All the Sisters of the Whispered Truth do.”
“Did,” Magna corrected vaguely.
“What does that actually mean?” Greyblade asked, trying to sound interested rather than cautious. You had to be careful, with seers. “The subconscious future?”
Magna looked up. “In very simple terms,” she said, “it means the future you already know you are walking towards, but do not recognise it on a conscious level. It’s abstract, layered in metaphor. It takes a lot of interpretation, which … isn’t ideal, when you’re trying to help a sceptical population.”
“Yeah,” Ludi said. “It’s not quite spooky prophecy speak, but it’s the closest we get here at Ogrehome.”
“The corporations headhunt the more talented insighted,” Gabriel said, “the ones who still manage to see anything through the smog. Sometimes they headhunt them literally, sometimes for jobs. We help them slip the net, hide their abilities.”
“Here it is,” Magna said, raising her device. “You want to hear the Prophecy of Sir Greyblade, edited for metadata?”
“You put it on your interface?” Greyblade asked, amused. “And did you say ‘metadata’?”
“What were you expecting?” Magna retorted. “A graven stone tablet? A crystal ball filled with swirling mists and a disembodied voice? I recorded it all here, and then made a file where I cut away the incidental info that always floats around in the mix. I call it metadata, but it’s mostly stuff like cats turning into swans and flying seven times around a tree, a lamb devouring its own body, a lot of confusing lead-in and postscript about the Ages of the Turning Urverse … none of it really means anything but you’re welcome to look at the unabridged version if you want. I am a professional, though. I’ve been editing prophecy for content half my life.”
“Alright, let’s hear the abridged version,” Greyblade said. “Although at this point I’ll take all the information I can get, so if you have the full prophecy…”
“Okay,” Magna said, and pointed out past Fat Tuesday. “But let’s do it over coffee. I haven’t been sleeping well, and I’m not going to re
cite a bunch of spooky prophecy speak without some caffeine in me,” she rapped on the Ogre’s upper arm with her knuckles. “And go and wake up Galatine,” she said. “We may not have time to go over all this twice.”
Fat Tuesday swung away and crashed over to the loft staircase.
“Gunsmiff!” the Ogre roared.
Greyblade turned to Gabriel. “‘Gunsmiff’?”
“If you had a judgey little twitch about Cara-Magna Áqui,” Gabriel said, while Fat Tuesday hammered cheerfully and deafeningly on the metal stairs with his great dark cluster-iron gauntlet and massive studded club, ringing the warehouse like a bell, “you may want to strap in before you meet Galatine.”
GUNSMIFF
Galatine Gazmouth was a short, pudgy, round-and-ruddy-faced human who Greyblade thought looked innocuous and pleasant by almost any humanoid standard. Even as an Elf, he would be considered stunted and deformed – many humans would – but it was a jolly stunted and deformed.
He was also, if what a knowing Gabriel and a nervous Ludi and Magna were saying was true, one of the greatest monsters of the Pinian dominion. Perhaps one of the most dangerous minds since Arbus Rosedian.
He only had the TrollCagers’ word for it, and the Archangel’s confirmation, because his files were practically empty on the topic of the living guns. Greyblade knew every large-scale deployment and the basics of their operation, and of course the date of their first use was infamous. It had been the last day of the war.
As for the rest, he was writing the files as he went. Starting with the Exorcist and the scream-cells.
There were no names on the official record of the living guns development project. There were only a few names on the soul-power dossier at all, corporate-owned and operated as it was. The teams had codenames. The members had codenames. The codenames had codenames. And the Gunsmith, chief researcher and head of development, was one of the key players. He or she was wanted outside the Interdict for crimes against the Corporation – was technically a Class Four criminal, a lofty and awful achievement for a mere human being.
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