And as enticing as immortality sounds to mortal creatures – not dying, after all, might accurately be called the ultimate biological imperative – it was something one fell afoul of. There were as many unpleasant forms of immortality as there were Gods and Ghååla to inflict them on mortals who irritated Them. And, sooner or later, those forced to linger came to regret whatever they’d done to earn the unhappy distinction.
Whether it was continuing to age and wither, rot and crumble as the centuries went by; or to live invincible and untouchable but never again feeling an emotion; or to awake every morning with a new face and no memory – or, worse, with a memory of one’s own but everybody else’s memories purged … the Gods were nothing if not creative. It was another thing They had in common with humans.
Eternity in the flesh was a punishment, just as surely as eternity in damnation as a disembodied soul. A punishment that sounded to foolish people like a reward. The Gods loved that kind of lesson.
Take Sorry Çrom.
“Are you awake in there, or did you doze off? It’s just that I know I’d find it really tempting to snooze.”
Greyblade shifted from his generalised reflection and studied the man, rather puzzled by how lightheaded he felt. He’d fought side by side with Firstmades, who made the most ancient of human immortals seem like babbling children. And yet … here he sat, in a gloomy but pleasant bar on the great nation-stair of Axis Mundi, underhanging Heaven, with Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph sitting next to him. Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph, casually gulping down the glass of Skeg’s Courage he’d lifted out of Greyblade’s hand, and claiming it tasted of krudley mints. Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph, trying to get the bartender’s attention and muttering about how he hadn’t known the capital chitty he’d previously been using to buy drinks had been a fake, and the bartender was probably just prejudiced against humans.
Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph, who’d been punished for defying the dread Ghåålus Nnal Himself, and sentenced to immortality of a particularly dreadful kind.
“My offer is rescinded if you shoot me just to see if I come back from the dead,” the human said quickly, perhaps worried that he’d given offence with his comment. Although the idea that Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph was constrained by any kind of self-preservation was laughable. “Or cut my head off for the same reason,” he added, glancing down at the sword at Greyblade’s hip.
“How else am I supposed to make sure you’re really who you say you are?” Greyblade asked innocently.
“I have an ID card,” the man said in a pained voice. “As for the whole tragic and preposterous legend, why don’t we just say ‘every man is immortal right up until the moment he dies’, and you can feel all let down and betrayed when I actually crap out on you.”
“It might be a slightly more urgent situation when you crap out on me,” Greyblade pointed out. “I need to know I can depend on you in more than a bar-room context.”
“I like to think my dependability in a bar-room context more than makes up for my deficiencies in literally hundreds of other areas,” Skelliglyph said. “Didn’t my brother vouch for me?”
“Your brother didn’t say a damned thing about this,” Greyblade said. “What’s the big deal? If you do come back from the dead–”
“Have you ever died?”
“No.”
“Then shut your dillweed mouth about it.”
“Fair enough,” Greyblade chuckled. “I thought you’d been made into a comic character anyway,” he raised a hand and nodded to the bartender over Skelliglyph’s shoulder. He indicated the human – include his drinks on my account – and then turned his visor fully in Skelliglyph’s direction. “Sorry Çrom, from an illustrated ballad in which the protagonist dies on every page. I thought, if you were still alive and aware and suffering, it was in some storybook pocket-reality that Nnal had created. That the rest of us just looked at.”
“Could be,” Çrom said easily. “It was a long time ago, and it might just be a made-up story anyway. And even if it’s not for keeps, dying tends to warp you if you do it enough times. Look at the Firstmades. Tell me they’re well-adjusted. And they’re meant to be able to handle it. No, I recommend just dying the once – if you can.”
“Alright. But the Archangel Gabriel’s brother?” Greyblade continued. “What’s that about?”
“A while back we figured out that we were two of the first human immortals,” Çrom shrugged, “with origins in around the same historical era. I look like a modern human, most likely, because I change a little bit each time I die and come back – or each hundredth time I die and come back, shifting along with evolution.”
“‘Most likely’?”
“Well, I don’t really know for sure,” Çrom confessed. “It happens too slowly for me to notice it, but … well, it sort of stands to reason. It doesn’t really show until you see a guy like Gabe, who got stuck in a powered-up glorified shell and stayed there, and figure out that we probably started out at about the same point in history. And then one day someone tells us both to put our hands on our knees and I’m the only one who bends over…”
Greyblade nodded slowly. Çrom Skelliglyph had lived, or so the story went, back in the infancy of the human race when the dread Ghåålus Nnal walked free and ruled the Corporation with an iron fist. The humans had just taken their first stumbling steps into sentience, but had already begun to establish themselves as trouble on the interdimensional stage.
Çrom, exemplifying the reputation of his species, had marched into Nnal’s court where the Enslaved Gods were forced to kneel in adulation and terrible ecstasy. He’d insulted the Infinite in a variety of ways, culminating – since in the story Nnal had taken humanoid form, something the Ghååla did not necessarily do – in an earnest attempt to kick the ruler of the urverse right in the gonads.
Nnal was an Infinite, of course, and as the name might suggest had power to dwarf the mightiest Gods. Nnal had known what Çrom Skelliglyph intended even before the series of stimuli and impulses had formed a conscious decision in Çrom’s synapses. Nnal could have stopped Çrom from even wanting to kick Him in the gonads. He could have stopped Çrom Skelliglyph from ever having existed, either before or after the incident.
The only reason Nnal didn’t – and with due acknowledgement of the fact that nobody, mortal or divine, can guess at the motives of the Infinites – was because He wanted it to happen, so that the heroically foolish deed and its horrible consequences could provide an entertaining footnote to His Dominion.
The act of defiance did not inspire the downtrodden masses to rise up. The Enslaved Gods did not revolt. Nnal’s reign did not come to an end. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end, by any historian’s measure. Not that any historians but the braver Firstmade variety made a habit of chronicling those dark times.
Nnal’s Dominion had continued, and the human race had flourished in a collection of protected pockets of the Corporation, and – whether or not he also spent some centuries as an ill-fated illustrated fictional character – Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph had endured.
“We’re not really brothers,” Çrom continued. “It’s just another story that’s gone around about us, so Gabe’s buddies refer to me as his brother. To be honest, I’m not sure whether they do it more to annoy him, or because they feel silly talking about me by name.”
A couple of cryptic half-sentences spoken by the Drake, gruffly interrupted by Gabriel every time, suddenly made sense. Greyblade laughed. “It certainly does seem to irritate him.”
“It’s useful to keep him crabby,” Çrom confided. “Gabe does his best work when he’s crabby. Of course, it helps that he’s always crabby,” he leaned towards Greyblade. “If you do nap in there,” he went on, “does the suit get in fights for you and stuff?”
Greyblade studied the man some more. It was still staggering to think of Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph as a real flesh-and-blood person. Greyblade had been scanning and analysing him since before he’d revealed his identity, but there was absolutely noth
ing to suggest he was not a perfectly normal human being. Since his treacherous sensors were being of absolutely no help, Greyblade simply looked. There was no line between processing, data association and instinct for a Burning Knight, but he put his gut at the control panel.
There seemed to be little to see, no matter which internal organs or mechanisms he looked with. Short of pulling out his sword and cutting Çrom’s head off, there really didn’t seem to be any way for Greyblade to verify what this clearly intoxicated man was telling him.
And yet …
And yet, he’d known about the Godfangs. And if anybody outside Ogrehome knew about them, then there was a devastating leak in their network. And if there was a leak of that magnitude, all of this was over before it even began.
This thought led Greyblade to another, far more unsettling.
“You are nodding off,” Çrom accused. “Aren’t you?” he sighed. “Typical. Right after I make a friend with a bottomless bar-tab…”
“I’m awake,” Greyblade said, not really listening. “When I’m asleep, my plumes droop down over my visor. I’m told it’s simply too precious for words.”
Skelliglyph cackled.
According to the legend in Greyblade’s files – dark and forbidden history-myth written by the Pinians themselves – Nnal had decreed that Skelliglyph would live for all eternity, dying again and again, and that every soul his shadow touched would perish.
Of course, this was eerie enough when he was a character in a comic book. Did the curse just touch the other characters, or did it extend to the readers as well? It had added a forbidden and dangerous spice to the ancient publications of The Ballad of Sorry Çrom.
Now that he knew the man was real, Greyblade found himself more than a little unsettled by the fact that Çrom had been sent to help him on his quest.
BERKENSHAW’S OIL
“Alright,” Greyblade said, when the bartender loped back over to them and served them a matching pair of tarry black drinks Skelliglyph had told him to order, called ‘Berkenshaw’s Oil’. He raised his glass to the human. “To you. Lollipop.”
Skelliglyph grinned. “That’s the spirit,” he approved, and clinked his glass with Greyblade. “Gabe told me your nickname’s Kisser. Is that true? And if so, what’s the story behind it?”
Greyblade shook his head. “Tell me this,” he said, setting his drink down and watching Skelliglyph swallow a mouthful of his own. Skelliglyph grimaced. “How much is your curse going to fuck up this mission?”
“Ah,” Çrom smiled. “You mean the old chestnut about how every soul I touch will turn to salt and ash in the cold wind of the darkest whatever?”
“Yes,” Greyblade said. “I mean, if it’s a simple question of keeping your meathooks off my soul, we can probably lay some ground rules before we start. If mere association with you dooms me to death … well look, isn’t basically everybody you meet doomed to die? That’s mortality.”
Çrom grinned. “You’d be amazed how long it took me to figure that out,” he congratulated Greyblade, and shrugged again. “The way I see it, you’re not doing this to live forever,” he went on. “You’re in it to carry out a final unwritten contract for the Pinian Brotherhood, and it doesn’t really matter if you die – as long as you don’t die before you’re done. In fact, since the mission is a straight-up hit, a bit of extra perishing thrown into the mix is probably going to be of benefit. Sort of using the curse as a weapon.”
“‘A straight-up hit’?” Greyblade objected.
“A straight-up hit with a few special conditions attached,” Çrom conceded, and took another drink. “Gah,” he said. “I think this is actually Synfoss.”
“It’s smoked athlanq sap and spirit distilled from fire oats,” Greyblade said, sparing his glass a brief analysis. “There are also trace elements of disinfectant from the cleaning and storage case the glasses were kept in, and a few stray particulates from the air, but not enough to affect the taste. Unless you’re also cursed with tastebuds a few thousand times more sensitive than the average human.”
“No,” Çrom mourned, “if anything, my senses are a bit duller than most. Maybe food and drink has just gotten blander … aren’t you going to drink–?” Greyblade raised his visor, lifted his glass and poured the thick fluid down his throat. Skelliglyph didn’t stare or avert his eyes, just nodded approvingly at the swift dispatching of a drink, well-executed. “Berkenshaw’s Oil,” he said. “You ever meet Saint Chuck?”
Greyblade lowered his visor. “Once or twice,” he said, “in passing,” Charles Berkenshaw, last scion of the old family firm before the Exposed Earth tore almost all corporate and dynastic ties apart, had played an important role in the occupation and the liberation of the Four Realms. He’d been elevated to Sainthood posthumously by the Disciples, but he’d hardly been the stuff of classic holy figures. “Gabriel knew him better.”
“Nice aftertaste,” Çrom allowed, after they’d sat a moment in contemplation of the fallen. “The drink, I mean. I couldn’t comment on Berkenshaw’s flavour. Never got that high up the Synfoss ladder…”
“How long have you lived in Axis Mundi?” Greyblade asked. “And how did you get here?”
“Few years,” Skelliglyph shrugged. “Got tired of Earth. Tired of humans and their problems. Tired of pulling them out of holes they’d dug for themselves, while they snarled and tried to bite my hands,” he raised a warning finger. “This is the last time. Fool me however-many-times-it’s-been, shame on me.”
“Last time pays for all,” Greyblade agreed.
Çrom eyed him narrowly, searching for mockery, then nodded and turned back to his drink. “As for how I got here,” he said, “I walked. Famous walker, me. I climbed the Green War memorial switchback on the eastern face of the Amazônia Capital stair, slipped through the border at New Manaus, then…”
“Then?”
“Then I pretended to be a Milky,” Çrom said, “and just kept on walking. I used a breather and a thermal sheath for the middle bits. I bought it – you’ll get a kick out of this – at a shop called Screaming Wilhem’s Breathers and Thermal Sheaths. Then I climbed and walked and walked and climbed. It was painfully boring,” he looked into his almost-empty glass, then at Greyblade’s entirely-empty one. Greyblade gestured to the barkeep, and Çrom gave another approving nod. “You’re not worried about dying, are you?” he asked. “I mean, honour and glory and a magnificent end and all that, but where we’re going, death is pretty likely. Not many soft Corporate members venture Beyond the Walls and return to tell the tale.”
“Is that where we’re going?” Greyblade asked.
“Obviously,” Skelliglyph replied. “I mean, if the Godfangs were parked at the spaceport, we’d be able to see them through the window…”
The bartender placed two more Oils in front of them, and Greyblade opened his visor again.
“Tell me,” he said.
ROSEDIAN
The Category 9 Convoy Defence Platforms were the final dreadful invention of Arbus Rosedian, one of the most spectacularly deadly minds of the first Worm Cult occupation of the Corporation.
A Molran by birth, by his First Prime Rosedian identified himself as a Tenth Elder. This was a philosophical and intellectual position. There were ten Elder Races, of which the Molren were one. Another of the ten, however, did not exist – and had never existed. This was widely agreed to have been the work of the Relth, the Vultures of Limbo. The Tenth Elders had delved too deeply into forbidden secrets, and had been cauterised from history. Their existence, indeed, was purely speculatory – there were ten of every other important thing in the urverse, and only nine known Elder Races.
Utter nonexistence was a fate even more impressive than that of the Kernians, the most famous of the forbidden-secret-fiddling Elder Races. They’d just been struck mad. So the more brilliantly unhinged creative minds of the Corporation claimed kinship with this lost species of master unravellers of the fabric of reality.
Rosedian was con
sidered a dangerous intellect even among those who called themselves Tenth Elders, to whom a maniacal laugh and a pledge to show all the fools who said they were mad was considered a standard and balanced reaction. He’d smuggled himself out of The Centre at a time when the Worm Cult had blockaded the Dimension itself, forcing the populations of ten million universes into Capital Mind and its outlying hinterlands,16 and had planted their vast and inscrutable Riddle Towers like guard posts around the inner city.
He stole out of the occupied Dimension and spent years in the chaotic ruins of the Kernians’ civilisation where not even the Worm had dared to venture. He’d crept around the edges of their abandoned facilities and snuck glimpses at their buried experiments. And he had returned to The Centre, and put what he had learned into practice. He did so with the wealth and influence and workforce of the Pinian Brotherhood behind him, and even in the time of the Worm the Firstmades had practically limitless resources at their disposal.
The Vultures, by Rosedian’s own reckoning, had appeared before him on no fewer than six occasions, and four of these were independently verified … but he never overstepped. Never committed the transgression that would spell his doom.
He called his final creations thokagna. The fangs of God. From the slang word thok, the Molranoid’s elongated eye tooth. The name made sense, since that was what the vessels resembled. But that wasn’t really why he so named them.
The vessels were commissioned at the end of the Worm Cult’s invasion. The Cult had been driven from the Corporation and their masters from Capital Mind, and the displaced multitudes were beginning to make their way home. The Dimensions of the Corporation stood empty. Open and waiting for any refugee civilisation with the will to reach out and take them.
Battles over sovereign territory rights were bitter, and the relocation of entire uprooted cultures – and even biomes – was a huge and ponderous undertaking. A refugee-species in transit was vulnerable, and the worlds on which they used to live very much a matter of debate … if by ‘debate’ one meant ‘firepower’.
Greyblade Page 22