Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  It didn’t talk at all, which was a relief but somewhat suspicious. It regarded them both silently for a few moments, its palps moving slowly but not in any meaningful communication. Greyblade finished his drink with a thick burbling sound, and Çrom somehow managed to look at him with his exo helmet as though he’d just wiped his arse with the Barthanq consortium charter.

  The Dûlian turned heavily and clattered away, and Çrom slid his suit sideways to take up the spot it had vacated. There was nothing left behind that Greyblade could detect, but when Çrom once again turned his helmet towards Greyblade, he realised something had changed. A sub-language had unlocked for them both … but it wasn’t so much a language as it was a series of phrases. Codenames, he suspected.

  Çrom inclined his exo helmet.

  “Fash floof plaah,” he said, then collected himself with an effort that was visible even through the reinforced metal. “You may have to carry,” he said, then lapsed into silence for a time.

  “Çrom?”

  The exo lurched. “Me back to the ship,” Skelliglyph concluded.

  Greyblade sighed, turned and flipped the Molranoid suit over across his own back with a loud clank, and headed back to the Highwayman.

  ÇROM’S SHORTCUT (I)

  It was a punishing seventeen weeks in soft-space and along the Highroads from Dûl to The Falling Damned, which was enough time for Çrom to first sleep and groan for about three days, then sober up, and finally begin to explain the situation a little more clearly.

  “The Falling Damned is … sort of a planet,” he started, “but it’s really more exactly what it sounds like. We’re talking about a standard near-vacuum Dimension with thin atmosphere and downward-oriented gravity. Source unknown. Either an ambient condition or a central plane down there somewhere.”

  Greyblade settled back in the couch. He was a guest in Çrom’s stateroom – not a rare occurrence, but not quite routine. Çrom was lounging on one couch enjoying a breakfast of rations garnished with fried meat provided by the Barthanq consortium. It smelled nice, despite the fact that the meat slices were dark silver in colour and looked like burned filtration discs. Greyblade was running basic repair and maintenance updates to his systems one after another, and sipping on a glass of chilled mozo juice from Çrom’s stores.

  “I assume this planet we’re headed for is falling down through the Dimension,” Greyblade said. Çrom nodded, and Greyblade shrugged to himself. It wasn’t all that unusual. In fact, most spatial gulfs had some physical law or so-called starting condition33 that drove objects into motion. Describing it as a downward pull was just the simplest way to conceptualise it from an outside perspective. Still, it was unusual for a Dimension Beyond the Walls to have even this measure of respect for the laws of physics. “Are there many planets in motion there?”

  “I’m not sure you’re getting it,” Çrom responded, “but that’s because I’m just getting started,” he scooped up a mouthful of breakfast and chewed reflectively for a few seconds. “There aren’t any other planets,” he said eventually, “at least not as far as I know. There might be other clusters like The Falling Damned, but … well look, not to get all dramatic on you, but The Falling Damned is people.”

  “That is dramatic. And you’re right, I’m not getting it.”

  “It’s a big cluster of people,” Çrom elaborated with a little shiver, “and … other life-forms. And, just … things. Monsters. Demigods. Weirder shit. Alive, dead. Neither. Both. I don’t know where it all came from originally, but once upon a time it dropped out of the Hellpath in dribs and drabs and just started falling through the void. Bit by bit, year after year, the ones that were alive clustered together, gathered up the dead ones for resources and materials. The ones further down made a bit of wind resistance, slowed their descent so more could land on the mass. Over millions of years, it collected into a sort of a planet. And that’s what it is. A falling sort-of-a-planet made of things.”

  “Okay,” Greyblade said.

  Çrom lowered his fork and looked at him in frank astonishment. “Really?”

  “Of course not really,” Greyblade snapped. “But seventeen weeks is a lot of psych-up time. So tell me everything. Starting with what a Hellpath is.”

  “A Hellpath is – well actually as far as I know there’s only the one of them,” Çrom said. “The Portal that The Falling Damned dropped out of is corrupted. They call it the Mangle.”

  “Been through a few damaged Portals in my time,” Greyblade noted. “It’s never pleasant. And the Highwayman, while well-built, isn’t quite as sturdy as the Ladyhawk.”

  “This is a slightly different sort of damaged Portal,” Çrom told him.

  “It’s called the Mangle, though.”

  “That’s because the people who named it all came through without a spaceship,” Çrom replied. “We’ll get through it, don’t worry about that. That’s not the problem.”

  “Fine.”

  “The Mangle leads to a Dimension, or a segment of the Highroads, that caused the Mangle to collapse in the first place. And probably spat out all the things that make up The Falling Damned, for that matter.”

  “The Hellpath.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the Hellpath is … on a scale of one to as-dangerous-as-it-sounds…”

  “Seeing as how you’ve probably actually carried out missions in assorted Hells … let’s adjust for that and say nine,” Çrom picked up his fork again and resumed shovelling down breakfast.

  “And this is a vital shortcut.”

  “Cruf’le,” Çrom slurred, swallowed, then repeated, “crucial. It’s basically the first leg of our main shortcut, and if we don’t take it…”

  “Hello next-quickest route,” Greyblade concluded glumly. He’d tried to wheedle information from Çrom on numerous occasions regarding his intended route, and specifically the shortcut he had planned. But apparently even talking about it was too risky.

  “Exactly,” Çrom said again, “except worse, because we’ve already drifted a fair way off that route to get here. We’d have to backtrack to, like, Barthanq to take our first alternate.”

  “So what sort of conditions are we talking about?” Greyblade asked. “Is it like the Dark Paths?”34

  “Nah, not that bad,” Çrom said. Too fast, too easily. Greyblade waited. “There’s something inside it.”

  “Something,” Greyblade echoed. “Something like the monsters and Demigods that got pushed out through the Mangle and made into The Falling Damned, only bad enough to stick in the Hellpath?”

  “Probably more like something that did the pushing in the first place,” Çrom replied. “It might get a bit rough if we drop out of relative speed – and we might need to, there are pockets that sort of act like field suppressors – but we’ll be at relative speed for most of it. Hopefully all of it. Shortcut achieved.”

  “So what are the actual risks?”

  “The Hellpath doesn’t like spaceships,” Çrom admitted. “It doesn’t like them whizzing around at relative speed in there, and it certainly doesn’t like them slowing down and making a mess in subluminal space. But that’s why we have the token – the code. It’s not just to get us in and out of The Falling Damned in one piece. We go into the Hellpath shouting that code, going just as fast as we can, and it’ll let us through. The code will basically … well … okay,” Çrom took another deep breath and frowned for a moment in concentration. Greyblade had learned that when Çrom did this, it meant he was unlikely to enjoy the forthcoming explanation. “What our little magic bullet from Dûl does for us is convinces the Hellpath that we’re on our way somewhere and … it’s really not going to want to interfere with our journey there. Because any messing around with the next leg of our trip, and the consequences are going to be severe.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” Greyblade declared.

  “What I mean is, the code is basically telling the Hellpath where we’re headed next,” Çrom said. “Not exactly directly afte
r we get through the Hellpath, but a couple of stops after that, we hit the main part of our shortcut. And I know, you’ve been asking about this and making snide remarks about it for weeks and weeks, but the fact is, the Hellpath basically knows what I do. The shortcut we’re heading for … it’s not really a threat to the Hellpath, but it won’t want to take the risk. It’s difficult to expl–”

  “So help me God, Skelliglyph…”

  “We’ll be allowed through the Hellpath, basically, because the Hellpath won’t want to be the thing responsible for interfering with our upcoming shortcut,” Çrom explained. “It will minimise its interaction with us as much as possible, and in practice that means we’ll get a nice clear shot.”

  “This shortcut you have planned is so dangerous, something called a Hellpath isn’t even going to want to stop us from taking it,” Greyblade summarised.

  “Well when you say it like that–”

  “Let’s go back to the actual risks,” Greyblade suggested. “Unless you’re finally going to open up a bit more about this.”

  Çrom looked relieved, but he showed absolutely no sign of wanting to open up. “Risk number one is if the code doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “Pretty simple one right there, I think. The Hellpath might have changed its policy on interference or established that stopping us is safer than allowing us to continue … this isn’t very likely, I have to add.”

  “And what will happen in the unlikely event of the token not giving us a nice clear shot through the Hellpath?”

  “Well for a start, we’ll find out before we get to the Hellpath,” Çrom said, “because The Falling Damned will not let us land. In which case I guess we can come back here and tell them their code is no good, and see what other alternatives there are. Or else just cut our losses and say hello next-quickest route.”

  “But if we get into the Hellpath and then the code fails?”

  “That’s even less likely, but … we’ll get snatched out of relative speed and the Highwayman peeled apart from around us and … we’ll wind up going through the Mangle and rejoining The Falling Damned, ultimately,” Çrom replied. “If we’re lucky,” he paused. “In fact if we go through the Mangle, you might not even live long enough to fall all the way. It’s pretty far.”

  “Risk number two?” Greyblade prompted.

  Çrom chewed on a slice of silvery meat for a few moments. “Right. Risk number two. You know those pockets I was talking about?”

  “The relative suppressor pockets?”

  Çrom nodded. “If we drop out of relative speed, we’ll probably be attacked by … the local fauna,” he said. “We’ll probably be able to evade them, maybe even fight them off with your expertise … but it’s also possible that in the course of the attack, depending on what exactly comes at us, our token might be … invalidated.”

  Greyblade had run training simulations and performed regular upkeep on the Highwayman’s weapons, and wasn’t convinced his tactical expertise would be any substitute for a heavy arsenal. They were a fast and relatively covert transport, not a warship. “In case of token invalidation, see risk number one?” he guessed.

  “Pretty much,” Çrom said. “But it’d take a lot of unlucky coincidences for that to happen.”

  “Two,” Greyblade replied, “it would take two. Us hitting a slow-down pocket, and us falling afoul of the wrong ‘local fauna’. That’s what it would take, unless I’ve misunderstood.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Çrom waved his fork. “Or we can go back. And look, there are really only those two risks anyway. Two risks, for a total of three things that can go wrong.”

  “I should have been part of the risk evaluation process,” Greyblade growled.

  “You were. You decided we were in a hurry.”

  The seventeen weeks of Portal-hopping and Highroads-skimming from Dûl to The Falling Damned were uneventful, and provided no more alternatives for adjusting their course. For better or worse, Greyblade resigned himself to the idea that they were locked into Çrom’s shortcut to the Godfangs. A shortcut that included The Falling Damned, a Portal called the Mangle, and a hostile stretch of interdimensional terrain called the Hellpath. And that was just to get them through the first leg of the main shortcut. Greyblade understood more clearly by the day why Çrom got grunkfaced at every opportunity.

  They dropped out of relative speed at a point Dora estimated was three hours from The Falling Damned at maximum subluminal cruise, based on the world’s rate of descent and the distance from their Portal of arrival, measured against whatever respective distances had been in the Highwayman’s navigation system already. And as it happened, it was impressively close. The Falling Damned swam out of the murky black void almost exactly three hours later.

  THE FALLING DAMNED

  It was a planet, Greyblade had to conclude, only because no other category readily fit.

  The Falling Damned was perhaps twenty thousand kilometres in equatorial diameter, its upper hemisphere slightly elongated and decorated with great spurs and prominences of dark material that looked mostly like burned bone. It was one part comet tail, one part giant egg crowned with five-thousand-kilometre antlers.

  Its southern hemisphere was slightly broad of spheroid, and slightly flat-bottomed. The main brunt of the plummeting world’s friction against the thin air of its local Dimension was borne by this lower expanse, which shone ruddily with heat and sent aurora-streamers of flame across the world’s atmosphere and playing around the great twisted spires of its northern hemisphere.

  Aside from the blaze of the perpetual heat shield that was its underside, The Falling Damned was lit by what appeared to be little suns orbiting the planet at tropics and equator. Or, if not orbiting, then at least falling alongside it at evenly-spaced points above the surface, shedding little twisted tails of fire of their own and occasionally taking on a brighter blaze from the plumes of the underside.

  The whole thing, Greyblade thought, would have been breathtakingly beautiful … if he hadn’t been told what the world was made of.

  He pointed at one of the antlers.

  “That looks like a tree,” he said. “A dead, petrified one without leaves, but a tree. It’s … actually the first tree I’ve seen since the Kedlams’ estate. I suppose it’s obvious there’d be plants – I just wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Oh yeah, all sorts of things,” Çrom replied, steering them in towards the equatorial level with ever-decreasing speed. “Or very close approximations. That’s really more of a growing stone than a petrified tree, but it’s close. The biggest ones, the antlery things, I have no idea about. Don’t know, don’t want to know. And speaking of don’t want to know … see those two things like giant tentacles twisting up on the other side?”

  Greyblade looked. The formations were fat and glistening grey, tapering to blunt points maybe two-thirds of the stone tree’s three-thousand-kilometre height. One side of each ‘tentacle’ was mottled, the other cratered with what did look very much like suckers. “I see them,” he said unnecessarily.

  “Watch.”

  Greyblade watched. The Falling Damned shifted and swelled in their view as they approached … and then, so deceptively sudden that Greyblade might have dismissed it as a trick of their changing elevation if he hadn’t been able to replay and analyse the footage, the broad tip of one of the tentacles twitched. It curled and then reopened, its suckers puckering unpleasantly.

  “Wow,” Greyblade murmured.

  “It’s a piece of something,” Çrom said. “I always think of it as a severed chunk of Leviathan. You know that the God the Damoraks worship – the Lapgod – is meant to just be a piece as well, only sticking through a Portal from wherever the rest of Its body is, so It’s technically intact? Well, this is a piece that got twisted off in the Mangle.”

  “And still alive,” Greyblade said.

  “Sure,” Çrom replied. “Too nasty to die.”

  Soon they entered the atmosphere, as distinct from the faded air that filled th
e Dimension – a soupy mixture of gases from respiration, exhalation, combustion, and a dozen other processes. The Highwayman’s sensors took stock and Dora announced that it was unhealthy but not immediately hazardous, and recommended that Çrom use a breathing apparatus.

  They landed in what resolved into a strangely utilitarian spaceport facility, a series of scarred stone landing platforms overlooked by a drab grey block of processing buildings that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Amazônia Capital. The structure took on a slightly stranger feel when they disembarked and Greyblade took note of the numerous misshapen bones and other shapes fossilised in the stone. The whole area, furthermore, seemed to be carved out of a single massive deposit of the fossil-filled rock – or else it had been poured in place and the builders had been trapped there, hundreds of thousands of years ago. He didn’t suppose he was ever going to know for sure – and he was okay with that.

  It was somewhat gloomy under the thick atmosphere, but one of The Falling Damned’s strange suns was almost directly overhead – in fact, they’d come in practically alongside it, steering clear of the fierce spikes of radiation it was emitting. It felt odd to be under a light-source, even though Greyblade knew the sun was no more natural than any of the lights that had illuminated buildings they’d been in at any of their earlier stopovers. This light, however, seemed uncharacteristically warm and vital. Çrom, everything below his eyes blurred by a translucent breather mask he’d dug out of a cabinet, tilted his face back and enjoyed the rays as well.

  They passed through the spaceport building unravaged, as the Attempted Molren might say. Their intention to enter the Mangle and take the Hellpath was apparently baked into the set of recognition protocols Çrom had delivered, and the locals had decided they didn’t care. They didn’t even seem to care that Çrom and Greyblade were humanoid.