The locals themselves were almost staggeringly diverse. No two seemed alike to Greyblade’s senses, ranging from a little skittering rodent / crustacean analogue the size of his gauntlet, to a towering, wheezing thing that resembled a building and actually seemed to be being used as one. And while none of the ultrafauna of The Falling Damned’s northern hemisphere were really visible from the ground at this latitude, of course, Greyblade had seen an overwhelming variety of them on approach as well.
He saw what he thought might be another couple of building-creatures in the strange neighbourhood beyond the spaceport, but then he began to pick out anatomical functions of sorts, and shortly after that realised that the thing was an interconnected organism somewhere between bloji nest and fungus colony. The whole thing had a radius of almost two kilometres, and that didn’t preclude the possibility that it extended farther in other directions.
The area they headed into was … well, most of the place was difficult to classify because it fell so far outside the normality cluster, but it seemed like a sort of slum for the underprivileged. The creatures – and the structures made out of creatures – here were still impossibly divergent in size and form, but there was a certain uniformity to their attitudes. They were bent, weighed down, and many of them seemed damaged or lame. They cringed.
“Seems some Falling Damned are a little more damned than others,” Greyblade remarked quietly to Çrom.
“And fell a little harder,” Çrom agreed. “Have you seen the abreal yet?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Greyblade said. There hadn’t been a lexicon or background information dump when they’d landed.
“The legitimate mortal life-forms,” Çrom explained. “The functional breeding organisms. They’re called the abreal. It’s sort of a rough translation of my own, I combined it out of abnormal and real. On The Falling Damned, the real denizens are somewhat sturdier than mortals, even if they’re not exactly immortal or Divine. They’re some no-rules version of life that is allowed to exist out here, and that’s how they’ve managed to survive on this world. Biologicals as we understand them … don’t do so well.”
Greyblade looked around again. “You’re not talking about the general Fallen on the street,” he said. His sensors, even if they couldn’t really make sense of what they were seeing, had been routinely identifying the locals as functions of higher physics, metaphysics, and even unphysics since their arrival. He looked again.
There were other creatures, more readily identifiable as members of a species of organism rather than a collection of wildly dissimilar individuals. They shared certain characteristics, and his sensors could recognise them as biological even if that was about as deep as it went. They’d been hard to spot at first, since they were very few in number and were hiding in nooks and crannies so cleverly as to pass for general vegetative or rotting biomass, of which there was an abundance. But as they continued into the slum, the abreal increased in number and the ‘real’ Fallen decreased. At the same time, the habitats and other structures became bleached and dusty, clearly made out of inferior carcasses and other pieces of scavenged debris.
There were two distinct breeds, maybe three. Vaguely mammalian, they crouched on long rear feet and watched the intruders with large, inky eyes. Few of them came higher than Greyblade’s chest in height, but there were a lot of them.
“The abreal don’t count as living things here,” Çrom reiterated. “They’re used as beasts of burden, hunted and mutilated and experimented on for sport, bred for food by those few denizens who actually need or enjoy it. In fact, their ability to reproduce biologically is one of their only prized capabilities, since the overwhelming majority of The Falling Damned are singular entities incapable of replicating themselves or converting biomass into energy in any way you might understand.”
“I’ve seen populations like this before,” Greyblade said calmly.
Çrom nodded. “Their sentience is … extant – encouraged, even, to make their little uprisings more amusing,” he continued, “but not legally recognised. While we’re here, our primary objective is to not be categorised as abreal.”
“Duly noted.”
“You’re probably wondering why we’re wading into a shantytown full of them,” Çrom added.
Greyblade looked around. “I just assumed they were the only ones who knew how to make alcohol out of ground-up Demigod bones.”
Çrom laughed. “Okay, fine,” he said, “but there’s another reason. Come on.”
JANK
Çrom led the way through the abreal slum, the fleshly mortals around them increasing in number until their presence went past ‘creepy’ and became ‘scenery’.
Finally, he stopped at a slumped shack of petrified bone that seemed to be held together by a dozen of the scrawny, hopeless little creatures. The shack’s sole opening gaped dark and seemed to angle steeply into the ground. Unpleasant warmth and a thin, ammoniac vapour pulsed from the depths like … well, like what it probably was, Greyblade thought. Some enormous thing, or part of a thing, breathing away eternity when it had no right to even exist.
One of the abreal rose to its full height and then still further onto the splayed toes of its hind legs, its dark eyes not quite level with the humanoids’ shoulders.
“Hey jabu, what-where-why you going with that makk-makk?” the creature demanded of Çrom, pointing at Greyblade.
The existing lexicons Greyblade had collected seemed to be adequate – this wasn’t exactly one of the languages of Lonesome Ice, but it was close enough and simplified enough for estimation. Greyblade didn’t have the time or the inclination to formulate theories about the existence of a common language across such a huge stretch of non-Corporate and barely-connected Dimensions. The distance, if such a term was even applicable, between Lonesome Ice and The Falling Damned was something like three Corporation-breadths, and only the dazzling speed of the Highwayman made the journey practical. That an understandable language even existed out here was almost as shocking as hearing it from this sorry excuse for a life-form.
He did, however, make a note to ask Çrom what a makk-makk was. It didn’t sound complimentary.
“Here to see Jank,” Çrom said. “Want to come with us, jaka?”
The abreal – Greyblade was fairly sure jaka was another insult and not the thing’s name – hooted with laughter and lowered itself back onto the flats of its long feet. “Jank be dead, jabu,” it said. “Jank be so dead.”
Çrom half-turned to glance at Greyblade, and a slow grin appeared behind his breather before he turned back to the abreal. It wasn’t a nice grin, and was not improved by the mask’s pallid translucency. “Didn’t say we were here to talk to her, jaka,” he said.
The abreal hooted again, but raised an arm and snagged the top of the doorframe in its tough fingers. It swung itself up out of the way, and Çrom nodded to Greyblade. They started into the moist darkness.
“Watch your steppin’s, makk-makk,” the abreal said in a low, feverish voice as Greyblade passed it. Greyblade ignored it and followed Çrom down.
The stairway, or stair-carved tunnel, or tiered oesophagus, or whatever it was, spiralled down into the ground for a few turns until the light was gone and Greyblade was operating on ambients. He wasn’t entirely sure what Çrom was using, aside from irritating amounts of luck and confidence. They levelled out into a large chamber that didn’t seem any more alive or organic than the bony structure through which they’d entered, but that shifting clammy exhalation was coming from somewhere.
“Jank?” Çrom said, then raised his voice. “Jank!”
“Çrom–” Greyblade started.
“Çrom Skelliglyph,” a voice whispered from the far side of the chamber, where Greyblade’s quick examination revealed a stacked cluster of lumps like a small cave-in that had been overlaid with sediment. When the voice continued, Greyblade was surprised to find it speaking Xidh. “Come closer, child. Do these old eyes some good.”
Çrom turned
again to look at Greyblade – or at least in his direction, since it was clear the human was practically blind down here – then shuffled across the cavern towards the pile of detritus. “How about a bit of light, Janky?” he said.
Obligingly, but with a sort of brain-hurting stuttering effect, blue-white light filled the chamber from a collection of hanging tendrils in the ceiling. The lumps towards which Çrom was shuffling resolved themselves into pale pieces of gleaming matter like giant knuckle bones, but he got the impression this wasn’t Jank – not exactly.
At the same moment the lights had appeared in the ceiling, another light had appeared above the pile of knuckles. This one was a twisting, flickering thing like a flame, picked out in red and black. Despite the fact that he hadn’t picked it up on his sensors, Greyblade was certain it had been there even when the room had been dark. Its visibility now was a function of contrast, although it was still delivering strange readings through Greyblade’s visor.
The light was swirling above a smaller rounded-off piece of knuckle that may have been its source – or may have just happened to be lying underneath it. What old eyes was she talking about, Greyblade wondered randomly.
“Who’s your shiny friend?” the voice said from the little flame.
“Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk,” Çrom said. “Burning Knight of Brutan the Warrior, military agent of the Firstmade Pinian Brotherhood, on a quest to find–”
“Skelliglyph,” Greyblade interrupted.
“Relax,” Çrom told him. “Jank’s dead. Didn’t you hear?”
“Yes,” Greyblade said, “but I also heard you tell the abreal up top that we weren’t here to talk.”
“Yeah, well,” Çrom shrugged. “The abreal don’t really get Jank.”
“And I don’t care about your quest, Sir Greyblade,” Jank added. “All these stories that Çrom tells about the Quin Cities and the Four Realms and the Firstmades and the Ghååla … it is all so much enjoyable nonsense. It is amusing to see one such story in the flesh – and to hear you confirm at least part of his nonsense as truth, with your adorable urgency to not give away your secrets.”
“Alright,” Greyblade gathered his frayed nerves. “Jank. It’s a pleasure to meet you too. Çrom has told me absolutely nothing about you,” he turned his visor towards Çrom. “And we’ve had quite a long time to exchange stories,” he added.
“Jank is … the closest I think we’re going to get is that she’s a disembodied soul,” Çrom said. “Dead, but still connected to her body. Hence the spooky voice from the little chunk of rock.”
Greyblade realised that Çrom couldn’t see the squirming light, and subjected it to another scan. It seemed to be occurring in the visible spectrum, but at a tepid / gelid layer not quite available to the human eye. Çrom really was just hearing a ghostly voice from a stone.
“I assume you both met here before,” he said.
“Yep,” Çrom replied, which Greyblade once again took to mean not quite, there’s a lot more to it, but let’s just keep it simple. “In fact, Janky’s the mastermind – mistressmind? – Jank is the one who came up with the Dûl code to help us through the Hellpath. Back when she was alive, obviously. And with the Dûlians’ help.”
“Then we’re in your debt,” Greyblade said politely.
“A debt we’re settling right now,” Çrom said sternly, and very quickly. “Not a whole separate debt, Jank,” he turned to Greyblade. “This will square things with Jank, and leave the real powers of The Falling Damned happy with us,” he went on. “Which means they’ll let us go without any additional fuckery.”
“By all means,” Greyblade raised his hands. “What’s involved in this settlement?”
“Pretty simple, really,” Çrom said, and stepped forward to pick up the smooth block of Jank. The flame bobbed and flailed above his hand, then settled unnoticed on his shoulder as Çrom stuck the stone in his coat pocket, making it bulge and sag a little on one side. “We’re going to drop her remains into the Mangle before we fly through.”
Çrom explained briefly as they ascended back to the surface and made their way back to the spaceport.
The Falling Damned were committed, or perhaps resigned, to their interminable plummet through near-vacuum emptiness. There was no return, by strange cultural agreement, to the Hellpath or whatever place they had all originally been uprooted from. However, there were exceptions. In Jank’s case, her combination of weird un-life and subversive attitudes made her an embarrassment, which was why she’d been ‘killed as much as possible’ – Çrom’s own words – and buried under abreal-town. However, if an outsider were to remove her from the world altogether, and fling her back into the Mangle …
“What will the Hellpath think of it?” Greyblade asked.
“It won’t care,” Çrom replied. “It’ll chew her up and swallow her and never bat an eyelid. If you’re worried about it interfering with our transit, you needn’t be – Jank’s intrusion and ours will be two entirely different things. They won’t even be taking place in the same sphere of existence, since we’ll be at relative speed.”
The Falling Damned, Çrom further explained, officially had to disapprove of such seditious notions as returning to the Mangle through which they’d all dropped so many aeons before. However, since they were quietly in favour of getting rid of Jank, their disapproval would be demonstrative but non-physical – and would in fact come with an undertone of The Falling Damned’s version of goodwill, which Çrom admitted wouldn’t actually do them any good anywhere else … but if they ran into trouble on the Hellpath and had to return to The Falling Damned on a more permanent basis, it would make things slightly more comfortable.
For Çrom, anyway. Greyblade, the unspoken assumption seemed to be, would probably already be dead by that point.
“Alright,” Greyblade said, shaking his head. “Let’s get on with this.”
“Is that your vessel?” Jank gushed suddenly as the Highwayman came into view. “I thought you were bragging about how lovely she was.”
“Oh, I was bragging,” Çrom said complacently, and peeled off his breather mask even as they were approaching the ship. He grimaced at the taste of the air. “It just happened to be true as well.”
And so, after spending less than three hours breathing the unlovely air of The Falling Damned, without so much as a sample bottle of abreal Demigod hooch and with the un-alive shade of a talking knuckle bone sitting on the Highwayman’s control console, they lifted off and accelerated carefully out of the roiling, thing-filled atmosphere. Çrom turned the ship’s nose upwards, and they flipped back into soft-space for the couple of seconds it took to cover the distance through which The Falling Damned had been dropping for some unthinkable length of time. They re-emerged into reality in a steeply decelerating arc across the top of the Mangle.
HELLPATH
Çrom hadn’t been lying – the Mangle was quite different to ordinary corrupted Portals Greyblade had seen.
It was vast, perhaps two hundred kilometres across, although it was hard to tell how much of that was reactant mass and how much was the actual Portal. It looked like a whirlpool of blood and fire, nothing like the serene grey planar sphere of a healthy Portal or the assortment of bruised greyish clefts and sucking wounds of damaged Portals Greyblade was used to seeing. Great prominences and ribbons of flame swept out and spiralled back into the maelstrom, and occasionally a more solid piece of glowing-wet debris would spit up from the surface before curving and tumbling back under this Dimension’s prevailing gravity. Below, Greyblade imagined, this rain of cooling fragments would probably be following The Falling Damned on its long voyage.
“It looks like the sort of thing the Highwayman might not be built for,” he said.
“Bah, she’s tougher than she looks – and besides, it’s a bit calmer in soft-space,” Çrom replied, and pushed up out of his seat where he’d really only just sat down anyway. He leaned back over and grabbed Jank, who was still twisting and bobbing cheerfully i
n Greyblade’s sensors but to the human’s eyes was very clearly still just a talking rock. “Let’s go and dunk the Jankmeister.”
The Highwayman, aside from the main ramp under the nose which wasn’t exactly an airlock but which could be adapted into one fairly elegantly, had a couple of smaller hull-access hatches and vents for repair and disposal. Çrom and Greyblade stood at one of these and Çrom placed Jank ceremoniously into the receptacle.
“Any last words before we commend you to the fiery death-hole from which you came?” Çrom asked.
“I am … regretful, Çrom,” Jank said after a long moment. “I was unable to fulfil my side of our agreement, and the words to see you safely through the Hellpath must seem paltry recompense. And still you intend to settle a debt that I cannot realistically call due.”
Çrom shrugged. “I’m just grateful you used the word ‘regretful’,” he said, “when you could so easily have used ‘sorry’.”
“Goodbye, Çrom,” Jank said. “Perhaps we shall meet again, before the end.”
“Perhaps.”
“Goodbye, Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk,” she added. “I wish you success in your mission.”
“Thank you, Jank,” Greyblade said. He felt distinctly surplus to requirements, but by this stage of their outward journey it was a familiar feeling. “May you find…” he glanced at Çrom.
“Closure,” Çrom said, and flicked the release. The vent swirled shut and the rock, with its little attendant flame, slid gently out of the ship.
They returned to their seats and watched Jank fall. The rock was too tiny to see against the surging vortex, but Dora picked it out and overlaid a marker on the viewscreens.
“What’s a makk-makk?” Greyblade asked as they waited.
Çrom laughed. “Well, you know how we have biological life-form, artificial life-form, inanimate object, stuff like that?” he asked. “The Falling Damned have categories at least that big, and at least that diverse from one another, and each of them sometimes only contains a single being. A makk-makk is something like a mechanical organism that walks and talks like an abreal, but doesn’t do a very good job at it.”
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