The Gunsmith, legendary figure of human ingenuity and horror, had designed the technology that allowed human souls to be used as power sources for unspeakable weapons. And now, apparently, Greyblade was looking at him. The Gunsmith was actually rosy-cheeked and crinkle-eyed Galatine Gazmouth.
Greyblade’s immediate instinct was to draw his sword, decapitate the monstrous human, and be done with it. It might actually constitute ending his career – perhaps even his life, if Fat Tuesday decided to take umbrage – on a high. No killing of Karl the Bloody-Handed required.
But, he concluded after a split-second’s reflection, that wouldn’t really solve anything – and if Galatine was here, and hadn’t been stomped by Gabriel or the Ogres yet, he had clearly had a change of heart and had quite literally joined the side of the Angels.
It was hard to imagine anyone witnessing the work of the guns, Greyblade reflected, and not having a change of heart. One way or another.
And if he was here, he would hopefully be able to help fix the mess his appalling weapons had made.
“I will understand if you do not want to shake my hand,” the Gunsmith said stiffly.
Greyblade shook his head and extended his gauntlet. Galatine looked surprised, but quickly switched the bulky metal case he was carrying to his left hand and shook with the Burning Knight.
“I’ve recently learned the folly of punishing allies for things they may have been forced to do in the past,” Greyblade said, “at the expense of what they can offer now. And besides,” he went on as Galatine smiled cautiously, “one world-killer to another, I can hardly point fingers.”
He watched Gazmouth’s smile curdle on his face, and decided the man had potential.
“Alright,” Gabriel said, sounding relieved and frankly stunned that nobody had died in the past thirty seconds, “that all went about as nicely as can be reasonably expected. How about coffee?”
Greyblade stepped aside to let Galatine descend the last couple of steps. Gazmouth was just as crisp and tidy in his TrollCage overall as the other two, and only Greyblade’s more high-grain scans revealed any sign that he’d been woken up by Tuesday’s hammering.
“Coffee sounds good,” Galatine said, and raised the case. “But first…”
“Does it work?” Ludi asked.
Galatine nodded. “Not perfectly,” he said, “but I think we’re almost ready to go into full retrofit production. And apparently not a moment too soon,” he added, giving Greyblade another guarded look as he passed. They crossed not to the next door in the rear of the warehouse, but the end of a nearby aisle where stacks of crates formed a benchtop of sorts.
Rather than ask what the Gunsmith had created, Greyblade joined the little group as they gathered around. Galatine set the case on top of the crate, snapped it open, and lifted the lid to reveal a dully gleaming object in the same pale bronze metal as the guns and the great Exorcist block. Greyblade screwed his self-control tighter, and waited.
The device even looked a little like a gun, with a squat round barrel and a flared muzzle. Its body was blunt and heavy, and instead of a handgrip it had a pair of plain metal handles bolted to it. Galatine pulled it out of the case – Greyblade read insulating and deadening agents in the padding – held it muzzle-out by the handles, and stepped into the aisle, jerking his head to encourage the audience to make room. None of them needed to be told once, let alone twice.
The Gunsmith raised the device, grimaced in anticipation, and put the rounded back of it to his chest.
Greyblade saw nothing, although his sensors outlined an emission of unknown energy-adjacent provenance they could do nothing with, so simply marked its shape as being present. Whatever it was, it was like Galatine was firing it out of his own chest. And from the Gunsmith’s rictus of pain, it hurt.
The outline of unidentified output flared straight out from the muzzle of the device, widening and fading slightly like a spotlight beam towards the ceiling where it painted a circle of mildly agitated particles on the metal sheeting – a vibration, barely detectable and lost in the general background thrum of the world – before beaming off into the sky. It was utterly harmless as far as any measurements Greyblade’s systems were capable of detecting.
There was nothing in the visible spectrum, and yet Magna and Ludi stepped back and gaped up at the property-outline and its exit point. Evidently there was something they could see.
It only lasted a moment, and then Galatine was lowering the device. The beam winked out as silently and immediately as it had appeared.
“What was that?” Greyblade asked, looking at Gabriel.
The Archangel shrugged. “A passable prop improv of Captain Ahab taking down the white whale?”
“You didn’t see anything,” Greyblade concluded. Gabriel shook his head, and Greyblade turned back to the Gunsmith. “What is it, Gazmouth?” he asked. “A new weapon prototype?”
“It’s an amalgamation of old energy condenser and new living gun technology,” Galatine said, putting the object back into its insulation and closing the case. He was weakened, Greyblade noted, hands shaking, wearier now than he had appeared on the stairs. “I call it a fountain. It seemed like a nicer name than anything with ‘scream’ in it.”
“Galatine – we want to fit these throughout the power network, retrofitting the old Plant condensers,” Magna said. “But on this sort of scale…”
“We’d need thousands of them,” Galatine said heavily. “Tens of thousands.”
“And we don’t have manufacturing capacity,” Ludi said. “We can scavenge, we can convert, but we can’t go into full production. This isn’t like the Drake’s old HarvCorp steak machine. We don’t have anywhere that … Synfoss … can’t see us.”
“If you’re leaving Earth again, you could … manufacture them off-world,” Magna suggested. Galatine looked at Greyblade hopefully.
Greyblade managed not to laugh, but shook his head. “Not only is this kind of research and development completely prohibited outside the Interdict, there’s no way I could bring fifty thousand … chest cannons back down here with me. They were weird enough about my sword.”
“They’re not chest cannons,” Galatine said with a weary smile. “I was just using myself as a source.”
“But you were firing some sort of energy out of your soul?”
“Clean, screamless energy,” Galatine said. “Even calling it ‘energy’ is misleading. It’s more like an intermediate-process-less state-shift. A null-signal placeholder for energy. You couldn’t light a glowbulb with it, but scaled up sufficiently it could safely vent off every living gun the way the Exorcist does.”
“Disarming humanity,” Gabriel said grimly.
Galatine shook his head. “Saving humanity’s soul,” he said simply.
THE LIVING GUNS
“You’d better explain,” Greyblade said, “if it’s even possible. This fountain – what did it just do to you?”
“It siphoned off soul energy,” Galatine explained, “without the need for the soul to be trapped in torment. With a living soul, the result is a harmless spray of essence that the insighted like Ludi and Magna can see. They probably wouldn’t want to touch it, and it doesn’t feel great for the body involved, but essentially it’s harmless. This is … forgive me, Sir Greyblade, but this is impossibly complex.”
“Okay,” Greyblade nodded, “but the upshot is that with a big enough fountain – or enough of them – you could drain off the souls trapped here?”
“Yes. It’s different for a trapped dead soul than it is for a living soul,” Galatine sighed. “It would extinguish them, closing the conduits to unreality. In a single more-or-less harmless burst of clean essence, they would be gone. A final sigh, to replace the screams.”
“I suspect there are a lot of wrinkles to iron out yet.”
“Yes,” the Gunsmith admitted. “Connecting the fountains to the power network in such a way as to enable the release … it needs to feed back through the system that is currently
sluicing power from the guns, and every other soul power-source, and feeding the pollution into the sinkholes. And that’s just the first obstacle.”
“The next being that as soon as the authorities find themselves with a bunch of dud technology, they’re going to build new cells, new guns, and harvest new souls to power it all with,” Greyblade guessed.
“Starting with the poor revolutionary schmucks who sabotaged the system in the first place,” Gabriel added.
Galatine smiled again. “That’s a fair assessment,” he said. “Depressing, but fair.”
Nevertheless, Greyblade stored the information away. “But it hurts,” he gestured. “Pouring your soul out like that?”
“Pouring one’s soul out is supposed to hurt,” Galatine told him.
Greyblade chuckled dryly. “I’ll let you have that one, Gazmouth.”
“In all seriousness, I wasn’t expecting you to care,” Galatine said.
“I’m working my way up to care,” Greyblade said. “Right now I’m concerned that testing your toys on yourself is going to damage and ultimately kill you, robbing us of a critical intellectual resource.”
“I’ll let you have that one,” Galatine echoed quietly, then fell silent once more. Just as Greyblade was about to ask something else, the Gunsmith continued. “Compared to the damage done to my soul thirty years ago, the fountain does nothing,” he said. “I could hold it to my body centre-mass for a year and not die. I saw the footage, Sir Greyblade. I saw them burning out the nests in the Sundered Commonwealth on Darling’s Day. I saw the Ogres die where they squatted, and I convinced myself they couldn’t be that ancient. That it wasn’t the same as destroying some prehistoric relics of the Pinian faith. I saw the Dragons–” he turned away, blinking tears. “They were so beautiful.”
“Galatine,” Ludi said, “you don’t have to–”
“But that’s not the worst of it,” Gazmouth went on, turning his red-rimmed eyes back on Greyblade. “I was there for the tests. Most of them were tests I’d devised. I know that willing, deluded believers don’t make better sources than snarling death row inmates or desperate test subject volunteers. They’re exactly the same. No – monsters are better. There just aren’t enough of them. And the believers were easier. No scandals, no protests, no outrage. They lined up. They signed away their rights. They signed away their everything.
“And I remember the other tests. The ones that didn’t get recorded, even in the most heavily-encrypted files. I know Vampire soul makes excellent gun stock,” he laughed bitterly. “I know Imago makes even better,” he turned his broken smile on Gabriel. “I know Angel makes best.”
Greyblade listened, taking it all in. Filing it, cross-referencing it. Letting the Gunsmith say the things he needed to say.
The living guns hadn’t been fuelled by the religious in general. That had been an oversimplification, a headline. Many of the organised-religious of Earth were quite canny – particularly those higher up the ranks – and that was no good. But for every intelligent, thoughtful, devious person of faith, it seemed, there was a bloody-minded petty little imbecile willing to send his or her life savings to a billionaire Intervangelist in the belief it would multiply by divine magic and make him or her rich.
And those – particularly in the wake of the unFlutter and the Dark Realms occupation and all the rest – were just perfect for the job. And the Gunsmith and his teams had been there, every blood-squelching jackbooted step of the way.
“What else is running on soul power?” Greyblade asked once it seemed as though Gazmouth was beginning to run out of steam. “Aside from the guns?”
“Everything,” Galatine replied. “We – Earth has disconnected almost completely from the Power Plant, although technically we’re still on the grid…”
Greyblade looked at Gabriel, then at Ludi and Magna. Then, so as not to leave anyone out, he looked at Fat Tuesday. Fat Tuesday appeared to be trying to pick his nose without taking either gauntlet or helmet off.
“One set of devices to trap a soul,” Greyblade said thoughtfully, “and now another to vent it away safely into nothingness.”
“While we’re scaling up,” Gabriel agreed, “why not vent Karl away safely into nothingness?”
“Excuse me?” Galatine blinked.
“Karl?” Magna blinked, and turned to Ludi. “The Drake failed to mention Karl.”
“They sprung that on me too,” Ludi said.
Magna shook her head and stepped forward. “Coffee,” she announced.
THE PROPHECY OF SIR GREYBLADE
“I see ten sisters.
“Six of them do battle with a God, and die.
“Three of them stand between Heaven and Hell, and hold aloft the tattered dominion of the Eternals.
“One is abandoned, and weeps as her sisters turn their backs on her again.
“And Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk, burning champion of the lonely and the lost, will come to Earth in the final days. First shall he come but fleetingly, that his wrath may be ignited and that his allies may stand. Then shall he leave, that he may find the sisters. Then shall he return after many a long and a strange road, and his coming shall be the doom of mortal and Divine.”
Magna lowered her interface and picked up her half-finished coffee. They’d relocated to the second spacious room built into the back of the warehouse where the TrollCage employees had a modest kitchen and dining setup. This included an old coffee machine so massive and antique Greyblade half-expected it to have a HarvCorp logo on it, and which seemed to serve as the TrollCagers’ sole source of nutrition.
“That’s it?” he asked her. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but … that’s the full prophecy?” Magna eyed him coolly over the lip of her cup. “And that’s the non-floofy version?”
“You weren’t expecting a prophecy to actually make sense before its events came to pass,” Gabriel chided him.
“Did you hear that bit about my ‘coming’?” Greyblade leaned over and nudged the Archangel. “Wish I’d known about that when I was trying to come up with a personal motto.”
“You two done?” Magna asked levelly.
“Sorry,” Greyblade replied, straightening. “All prophecy needs to be interpreted, I know.”
“But that’s the good news,” Magna said. “It’s not really prophecy, you see. There’s science – psychology, sociology, chaos and game theory – behind it, more than mysticism. That’s why it’s the subconscious future. This is just a best-probability forecast of what you’re going to do next, with the observation and deduction dialled up so high I can’t see any of the moving parts, just the final answer.”
“I suppose it still needs to be interpreted, though,” Greyblade hazarded. “I mean, there’s not ten literal sisters I’m supposed to recruit and get to fight Karl for me,” he turned consideringly towards where Galatine Gazmouth was cradling his own coffee cup in still-shaking hands. “Maybe we need to build ten big versions of this fountain of yours,” he suggested, “and the prophecy is some reference to where they’re meant to be placed? Like an … an instruction manual of sorts, showing us how we can use Karl as a power source with these things?”
“Of course, like we were talking about with the Drake, the number ten is pretty much a mystic classic,” Gabriel added. “As soon as you have ten of something, it gets all meaningful.”
Magna shook her head. “There’s little interpretation,” she explained, “not as you probably understand it from classical seeing. Interpretation comes in at the wafflier end of the spectrum, but not here. Take your return to Earth,” she leaned in across the table, pushing her cup aside. “Anyone who knows of the Burning Knights knows that there’s not an ounce of quit in them. You were never going to leave Earth at the end we’d chosen for ourselves.”
“So here I am,” Greyblade said lightly, “getting my wrath on.”
“Part of why I was so excited, when I first started having visions again,” Magna said, “was … well, at the start I was just happy I
’d gotten my mojo back, so I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I figured, at the beginning, that your first visit to Earth had already happened. You fought in the sack of Heaven, the liberation. Your wrath was legendary. Your allies stood.”
“Did it occur to you that my next visit after that was during the Last War of Independence?” Greyblade asked, quite deliberately not turning his visor towards the Gunsmith this time although he still saw the man flinch. He picked up his own coffee, into which Ludi had thoughtfully plonked a straw, and sucked down a mouthful. It was actually good. “Didn’t bring much doom with me then.”
“An unforgivable deficit of sisters, too,” Gabriel pointed out.
“I really dropped the ball, didn’t I?”
Magna tolerated the repartee for a while in the interest of lightening the tone for Galatine’s sake, then she shook her head. “It did occur to me, once I got my brain back together,” she said. “The Last War of Independence is what made me realise that this isn’t about your old campaigns. Subconscious future, remember? Not past.”
“It’s right there in the name, Tin Can Man,” Gabriel said mildly.
“Shut up.”
“And that means this is your ‘first’ visit,” Magna said, “where you’ll check in on all our progress over the past thirty years, get righteously pissed, and collect some allies.”
“And then leave on a long strange road to find sisters and doom?”
“You tell me,” Magna replied. “And tell us about Karl while you’re at it. I mean, I assume you’re talking about Karl Karl. I’d be devastated if you came back to Earth to pick a fight with Karl Guldebrandt.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Greyblade said reflexively, as his visor informed him that Karl Guldebrandt was a ‘cheesecake artist’. “And even if I did, I’d never pick a fight with him. The man is clearly a cultural treasure.”
Magna laughed. “It’d also be a great way to get Earth to declare war on the rest of the Corporation,” she said, and nodded towards Fat Tuesday who was sitting with his own enormous cup of chilled coffee. “The boys might even march with us.”
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