“What’s up?” he asked.
“You’ve never been Beyond the Walls before,” Çrom said over his shoulder. “This is your first Alien realm. Come on.”
“We don’t have time for sightseeing.”
“Do you see any sights out there? This will take five minutes. We’ve got time for a five-minute stopover, in a trip that’s going to take a couple of decades.”
“It really is going to take a couple of decades if we stop for five minutes every–”
“It’s too late, we’re down.”
Greyblade sighed, but didn’t make an issue of it. Skelliglyph really was a low-effort companion and was handling the journey well so far. And they could afford to stop for five minutes and check out Motab Gunderbront. He had to confess, he was curious.
The Highwayman’s nose opened with a hiss and a puff of chilly air – chilly, but not freezing – and Çrom stood and gestured for Greyblade to precede him down the ramp.
Motab Gunderbront was a hard, flat plain featureless but for the occasional broken slab of greyish-white stone separated from the bedrock. The whole place was pallid, worn-out, wan. Dead. No, not dead – had never been alive in the first place.
Entropy had not drained the last scrap of energy and dissolved the final nuclear bond from these stones, this dull vault of sky. It had never even begun to occur, because there was nothing for it to occur to.
And yet …
There was some sort of atmosphere, some warmth to the air even if it was faint. This much he could tell because Çrom was breathing, and not visibly suffering from cold, and Greyblade’s own environmental readings were all settled on the thin-and-chilly side of green. There was something … but it was more like the null-environment you got if you went EVA in the Liminal between Dimensions. That wouldn’t kill you, although if you wound up stuck out there it inevitably would, and it still wasn’t particularly fun either way. There was nothing resembling Centre-normal atmosphere or physics in the Liminal, but there was no absence of those things, either. It was as if the utter nothingness, the anti-somethingness, of it simply went along with whatever the intruding lumps of matter seemed to need. In the absurdly total absence of anything, the senses simply convinced themselves there was something. There had to be, they insisted – because if there wasn’t, the matter that made up your body would have dissipated by now. Right?
This was similar to that, but … not.
Motab Gunderbront was like … was like … it was as though a great big volume of interstellar vault, and a planet or flatworld or just a huge random block of some kind of solid matter, had been dropped into the Liminal at the beginning of time. And lacking any alternative, or any experience, or any physical precedent, the intruding reality had just adopted some characteristics that seemed right. Never mind that a huge lump of matter didn’t have a consciousness or senses with which to make that determination. It had simply existed, until more information came along.
And then billions and billions of years had gone by, over in the blazing churning cluster of universes right next door that even had a concept of time, and … no more information had come along.
Some people had come along, probably starting with the inestimable Motab Gunderbront. But regardless of what they all thought about the place, it had continued as it had before. Because there was no trace of the energy that would be required to turn this pallid neverborn excuse for a world into anything those visitors could categorise.
Greyblade crouched, letting his sensors go to work.
There was matter, even if it was like a hard, bleached expression of post-transpersion shooey. There was gravity, except his sensors couldn’t confidently confirm anything except that he didn’t seem to be floating off the surface. There didn’t appear to be mass. He picked up a piece of broken rock, and it told him nothing. Its structure, its properties, were all blank spaces in his analysis readouts. His sensors, which had done their best to catalogue the Archangel Gabriel, simply sat back and shrugged.
Any attributes Motab Gunderbront might have seemed to have, in fact, could have been the result of the ship’s lights, Greyblade’s own sensors, or his observing consciousness itself. It was like an intensified and prolonged bout of what they’d called targ misan’a, armour dysphoria, when he was young.
Once you realised that everything was entering your consciousness through the suit’s electronics, that any of it could be doctored, it didn’t even matter if you raised your visor. Organic senses could be hacked and fooled just as easily – more easily. Targ misan’a left you frozen and unable to trust that anything you were seeing or feeling was actually there, that it bore any resemblance to what anyone else was seeing or feeling. It left you unable to trust that anyone else even existed.
But if they don’t, Greyblade remembered his crusty old recovery and orientation program saying, then who the fuck is messing with your sensors?
He let the rock drop, and it didn’t even have the decency to fall right. It went from his gauntlet to the hard, pitted surface, but it just seemed to go there, listlessly, because there wasn’t any other place for it to be.
He stood up. “Is all of Beyond the Walls like this?”
“Statistically speaking,” Çrom said behind him, “yeah. All of it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“There are plenty of places out here that have managed to impose some sort of vitality,” Çrom replied. “We’re going to do our best to stop at them, since there’s really not much point in stopping anywhere else. Obviously, we’re also going to do our best to avoid a lot of them too, because they’re really, really dangerous…”
“It’s weathered, though,” Greyblade insisted in a sort of outrage. He gestured at the plain extending before him. “The surface is pitted, striated. There’s these broken-off slabs … how did any of that happen? Or was it just made this way?”
“Don’t ask me,” Çrom said. “That’s not what you really need to see, though.”
“Hmm?”
“Turn around.”
Greyblade turned around.
“Wow,” he said.
The Highwayman, and Çrom Skelliglyph himself, were quite simply ablaze with energy and life. They shone, as though they had been cut out and grafted onto the landscape by a bad editing program. And yet, to his sensors, nothing was really out of the ordinary. Ship and human – and, when he glanced down and took a moment to pay attention, his own gleaming armour – were simply contrasting with the abnormally null readings he was getting from everywhere else.
Çrom spoiled the moment slightly by spreading his arms and intoning “Aaaaaa-aaaaaah,” in a reedy, choral tone. “Cool, huh?”
“We’re really going to attract attention, aren’t we?” Greyblade said hopelessly.
“Nah,” Çrom lowered his arms. “I mean, yeah, probably … but not because of our healthy Corporate glow. That’ll fade in a few minutes. Let’s go.”
“That’s it?”
“Unless you want to scratch your name onto the rock,” Çrom pointed away vaguely to their left and behind. “I think there’s a big patch of markings around the Portal…”
“I like to think I’ve left enough of a mark on the Corporation without scrawling my initials on Beyond the Walls as well,” Greyblade replied, and headed back towards the ramp.
“Your choice.”
They boarded, lifted off, and ascended into the strangely creepy dead black of Motab Gunderbront’s sky.
BEYOND THE WALLS
They accelerated for a time, even after reaching minimum safe distance for relative speed. Çrom tapped and swiped histrionically at the computer interface.
“I’m setting our first leg,” he said. “Nice easy nine-week jaunt, and there’s even a couple of places we can stop in between if we need to. Somewhat Corporate-friendly, if not exactly homely. But after that, we’re on our own,” he reached over into his bag and produced a translucent greenish-yellow spine the length of his hand. “Music?” he offered, twiddling t
he spine.
Greyblade shrugged. “Sure. What is it?”
“The new epic from Dark Glory Fallen,” Çrom replied happily, sliding the spine into the malleable media interface. The music started immediately, a gentle and melodic warble strengthening into a stirring heavy march. “They’re a big deal in the Four Realms, although Earth and even Axis Mundi were apparently a bit behind.”
“Not exactly surprising, from what I saw of Earth,” Greyblade noted.
“Fair enough,” Çrom allowed. “I picked it up at the Fortress, though. It’s funny to think the Boundary Dimensions got Dhavorine before the Void did.”
“It’s vigorous,” Greyblade said approvingly.
“Yeah, I figured they’d be a good soundtrack for a joyride,” Çrom agreed. “Should keep us occupied for a week or so, and then there’s all the variations and counterstrikes.”
They sat and listened for another minute or so, and when Dora murmured that the relative field variables were aligned, Çrom waved his hand and the drab grey of soft-space smothered the screens.
“You’ve got some information on stopovers and settlements,” Greyblade noted casually, “that’s at least somewhat recent?”
“I’ve collected some bits and pieces,” Çrom evaded. “I wouldn’t call myself an expert guide, seeing as how I only ever came out here once, on foot, a whole ton of years ago.”
“I can’t help but wonder how you managed to walk from Portal to Portal,” Greyblade remarked. He kept circling back to this point, but he felt it was excusable on the grounds that his mission was really quite important and the only help he’d been sent by the Archangel Gabriel was questionable at best. God was only allowed to move in mysterious ways when it came to civilian matters. In military situations, transparency was paramount. “Especially the Portals out in space or in the Liminal. Or whichever one we’re flying towards now.”
“Obviously I didn’t walk to them.”
“Even so, if there’s a route that can be walked in – what was it you said, a few million years? – then surely that route would be considerably faster at several billion times the speed of light.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Çrom said, his voice turning abruptly testy. “And how many times did you say you could afford to die on this trip? It was zero, wasn’t it? Zero times?”
“Why don’t you just admit that you’ve been out here since your famous walk?” Greyblade asked. “It doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it’s a good thing if you actually know where you’re going. We don’t need to play the Sorry Çrom game.”
“Maybe there are some things I don’t feel you need to know,” Çrom said, his tone stiffening still further. “Especially since you’re not exactly telling me everything either.”
“Hold on,” Greyblade protested. He knew that the best move to keep the peace at this point was to simply back off and not engage the human. Let him keep his air of mystery if he wanted, as long as he could actually do his job as a guide. Even so, he felt this was an unfair rationalisation for Skelliglyph’s secrecy. “You specifically said you didn’t want to be told about the mission.”
“I don’t,” Çrom said. “But I’ve made a point of not getting too close to the Firstmades, let alone the Ghååla. Some things burn too brightly for us to bear. And if I’m going to help you with this crusade of yours, and you’re not going to tell anybody the complete truth about it, then I’m going to maintain a little buffer-zone of my own. Maybe, by the time we get to where we’re going, we’ll both agree there’s no need for any of this secrecy and then we’ll pour out our souls to one another and have a good hug and a cry. But until then, I’ll just pretend to be your trusty all-knowing guide, and you can pretend to be a retired Burning Knight performing one final off-the-books hurrah for old times’ sake, and we’ll get along fine. We can save the world, and you can go back to getting older and dying, and I can go back to – to not doing that,” Çrom faltered, then rallied a passable glare over his shoulder. “Sound good?”
“Sounds like a workable operations model,” Greyblade said mildly.
“So glad you approve.”
“So what’s our next stop called?” Greyblade asked as the march crashed to an end and the next stanza cautiously began. Survivors of the first engagement, raising their heads to see whether they’re about to be cut off.
“Barthanq,” Çrom said, surly. “Alright?”
“Alright,” Greyblade echoed, then paused for another few moments. “Are we there yet?”
Çrom struggled for a few seconds, then finally spluttered with laughter.
“Dickhead,” he said warmly.
BARTHANQ
Nobody was quite sure what the Monster of Barthanq was, Çrom explained out of nowhere. His enthusiasm had returned within an hour of their near-argument, and the nine weeks following that had gone characteristically smoothly. He had not, however, up to this point revealed that he knew anything about their intended stopover.
“Barthanq, you see, is made of this stuff they call mordite,” he said. “A lot of it. It’s either a really, really big mordite flatworld, or else the whole central plane of the Dimension is made of it, like The Centre and its soil. Barthanq’s actually just the name of the mining settlement near the Portal. There might be other communities out there on the plains – I genuinely don’t know about that.”
Greyblade, in the interests of general amicability, let this pass. “But there’s a monster,” he obliged the storyteller.
“That there is. But first I’ve got to explain about mordite,” Çrom said. “This stuff is … well, it’s just more of the same highly unsatisfying crap that most of Beyond the Walls is made out of, right? Hard, cold, pretty much devoid of zaz.”
“‘Zaz’?”
“Yeah. No energy. No life.”
“Except for the monster.”
“I’m getting to that. Anyway, mordite is this hard greenish translucent stuff a bit like glass. It’s very hard, in fact – practically indestructible. But the settlers at Barthanq found a way to scrape off micron-thin layers. It comes off in curved sheets and they use it for hull plating. Actually, the whole thing started with a little group of … pilgrims, I suppose you could say.”
“Okay.”
“There was this thing, see, sticking out of the mordite. A formation. In billions and billions of square kilometres of dead flat plain, there was this beautiful crystalline shape that twisted up out of it. It extended down into the surface, but it was hard to see how far. Mordite is translucent but not exactly clear.
“First, they worshipped it. Then, later, they started to dig it out. One painstaking micron-thin sheet at a time. The Barthanq slow-mine was formed around the formation, and they’ve been peeling away the mordite around it for … damned if I know how many years. Tens of thousands, at the very least.”
“And the Monster of Barthanq has some sort of connection to the formation?” Greyblade guessed. “Some sort of protective spirit or guardian that they enraged by digging up a sacred relic, I expect. Or else it was the formation itself, and they freed it.”
Çrom leaned back in his seat, turned, and grinned at him. “Good guesses,” he said, “but not quite.”
Çrom chuckled and turned back to the controls.
“Well?” Greyblade prompted after a few seconds.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to tell me about the Monster of Barthanq or just let me find out on my own?”
“That second one,” Çrom said. “We’re almost there.”
They traversed a final couple of Portals and shot for a few seconds along the Highroads once more, before diving through a final Portal and decelerating sharply back into normal space. It was hard to tell for a moment, because the hard grey vault of sky they’d materialised in was very similar to the void of soft-space. Then the Highwayman swivelled downwards and dropped towards the plain below.
Greyblade was somewhat familiar with aerial descent towards Dimensional phenomena like cen
tral planes. It wasn’t exactly like making planetfall or descending into a flatworld’s atmoplane, partially because the landscape simply went on and on forever. In practice, of course, the eye could only see so far and the air rendered anything too distant into a murky haze – but even so, the effect was often optically baffling.
Barthanq was no exception, the dead flat expanse of mordite extending away under the grey sky until both faded together in the distance. Whether hundreds, or thousands of kilometres away, or light years away, depended on the prevailing physical laws – or lack thereof. The deep greenish surface was featureless at this elevation … but they were diving fast.
Soon, the settlement – the so-called slow-mine, Barthanq proper – was unmistakable beneath them. First as a spot, then a ragged discolouration on the mordite plain. The slow-mine was a huge terraced depression in the surface, clusters of buildings ringing each tier of the hole, and the entire thing surrounded by an ellipse of sharp, oddly-shaped peaks that Greyblade assumed to be tailings of some sort from the slow-mining process. Open-cut digs, it seemed, were the same whether you were on Barnalk Low or Beyond the Walls. This one was a little outlandish, which was only to be expected when you were digging up micron-thin sheets of …
He leaned forward, and pointed at the tailings. “What are those?”
Çrom didn’t turn, but self-satisfaction radiated from every pore in his body.
“That,” he said, “is the Monster of Barthanq.”
They descended further. The settlement resolved into a rather large city-state built up around the maw of the slow-mine, in the very centre of which the strange gleaming ‘formation’ could soon be seen. It was no longer a small crystalline extrusion from the mordite but a tall, twisted, glistening spire rising from the deepest part of the hole the Barthanq locals had been digging, apparently for generations.
Greyblade Page 28