Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  “Alright.”

  “That’s why, if we get the approach wrong, or any of the time we spend in Naskiraqad, we have to just give up those years as a loss,” Çrom warned. “There’s no circling around for another try. If we get out alive, we thank every lucky star in the urverse and we keep on going and we don’t look back.”

  “They’re really that bad,” Greyblade said, uncharacteristically nervous. “Aren’t they?”

  Çrom just shook his head. “We go straight in,” he said, “and we park, and we give the Shedders the years we took and not a second longer, and then we fly out of there. And then we breathe.”

  “Alright,” Greyblade raised his hands in surrender, “I get it,” he finished his drink and closed his visor. “Out of curiosity–”

  Çrom groaned. “Yes?”

  “Couldn’t we have been non-contact ever since leaving Axis Mundi?” Greyblade asked. “Automated a lot of the jumps, even the stopovers … taken the longer, safer route and stayed at relative speed the whole way…”

  Çrom was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, even if we could have come all this way by a different route, which would have taken ages, or if we could have done either route without interaction with various vectors … no. There’s a … a sort of a region that the Shedders watch. Not just the Belt, but around the Belt and all the Portal-routes in. All the ways potential intruders come by. That’s why the Hellpath was so cautious even though it’s way outside the risk area. As long as we cross Shedder territory on their terms, and only take back the time we spend in the Belt, they’ll let us pass.”

  “And let us use this Portal of theirs.”

  “Yep.”

  “And we can’t bring the Godfangs back this way?”

  “No,” Çrom shuddered. “God, no. The Shedders would take the Godfangs – if we were lucky. If we weren’t … the Godfangs might become Shedders. It just doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “In, park, and out,” Greyblade concluded.

  “Right.”

  “No need to negotiate, talk with them, explain … ?” Çrom was shuddering again. “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “Right.”

  “But before the Belt, Gateway,” Greyblade went on. Çrom nodded. “Twenty-one weeks by Highroad.”

  “Exactly.”

  Greyblade paused, running through more scenarios and questions. He still had far more problems with the plan than he had answers, but as long as they got to Rosedian’s fleet, he didn’t care. He had a not-really-a-prophecy to fulfil.

  “Blind Beggar?” he offered.

  GATEWAY

  Çrom actually had enough of the Lonesome Ice sleeper drug to put them both under, and for considerably more than seven years. He hadn’t been certain, he explained, whether Greyblade would need the medication – or how much would be required to overwhelm his constitution if he did.

  “It’s probably for the best that you’ve got your own system,” he confessed to Greyblade while the Burning Knight studied one of the precious canisters dubiously. It was heavy, matte metal like a flechette cartridge, with a little clear window along its length. Inside, the contents were thick and silver as mercury.

  “Yes…” Greyblade agreed. “I’m delighted not to have to put this shit in myself and I’m frankly amazed you’re considering it.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Çrom said. “Heavy-duty hallucinations and flashbacks, like I said … but that might just be because I have so many calcified layers of memories to peel back.”

  “Is that why you’re glad I have my own method?” Greyblade asked. “Want to save one of these for recreational purposes?”

  Çrom spread his hands. “Tell me the ten years immediately following your return to Earth won’t be ten excellent years to sleep through.”

  “You may have a point there.”

  “But actually, I was thinking you can wake me up in case I miscalculate,” Çrom went on. “Dora might have trouble. Keeping me alive is one thing, and she’ll be able to take us through the Nonsense Portal right at zero-second, but the wake-up needs a bit of finesse.”

  They were finally approaching Gateway. There was only the computer’s assurance on this, however, because the Highroads were rolling by underneath the ship at their usual breakneck speed and not even Çrom’s famous lungs could discern their proximity to whichever Naskiraqad-battered Dimension Gateway was in.

  “Are we worried about Dora being conscious through this?” Greyblade decided not to ask about the ‘Nonsense Portal’ just yet. “Interacting with the urverse?”

  “Dora’s technically not conscious,” Çrom said. “She’s not sentient. Don’t ask me why but that makes a difference.”

  Gateway, when they finally arrived, revealed itself to be an innocuous enough place in classic Beyond the Walls mystery-solid and frigid, inexplicably breathable mystery-air. It swam out of the darkness to the Highwayman’s sensors and appeared to be a system of flatworlds, but completely shapeless and twisted, great curving sheets and winding ribbons and floating discs in a tangle the size of a solar system. It looked like a massive collection of nackfruit peel that had been sheared off the fruit and left to float in space.

  Gravity, like on the nodes and spars of Tomberland, apparently varied from place to place but there was little to justify it: the rolled-flat and carelessly-scattered world was composed of material a few hundred metres thick, and the length and breadth of the segments didn’t seem to have any bearing on their gravitational pull.

  It was also, as far as the sensors could establish, uninhabited. Most of the broader expanses of the furled world were covered in large fungal formations that registered as life-forms, and it was on the outskirts of one of these that the Highwayman landed, but there didn’t seem to be any sentients. No buildings, no movement, no artificial structures.

  Of course, as far as Greyblade knew the fungus was a thriving technological civilisation that just looked like giant mushrooms to him. Or was moving too slowly for him to see. Or was disguised as mushrooms. Or was mushrooms from one direction but a bunch of singing and dancing isopods in stupid hats from another. There just wasn’t any way to know. Either way, they seemed to be the first ship to have visited in a while.

  “So this is Gateway,” Greyblade said as they stood together on the ramp.

  “Nice, huh?” Çrom breathed in deeply, and coughed. “Shouldn’t have done that,” he muttered. “Smells like a mouldy cellar,” he rubbed his arms. “A freezing mouldy cellar.”

  “And you want to spend twenty-four hours here?” Greyblade asked. They’d gone over this enough times on the flight from Tomberland Mighty, but now he was actually seeing the place he was having doubts. Nevertheless, Çrom nodded determinedly and patted his bag. The cartridges of Lonesome Ice sleeper-drug were back in the ship, but he’d stuffed his bag with thermal gear, food, and more than a little alcohol. “Okay,” Greyblade shrugged. “Meet you back here when you’re ready to take off.”

  “I don’t know how your fugue mode works, but I’m going to need to run around, roll in the mushrooms, yell a bit,” Çrom explained. “The drug – it’s not just to avoid the boredom and cabin fever on a seven-year jag, you know. It’s vital.”

  “I know,” Greyblade said. “It’s to shut down your senses as much as possible. Minimise your interaction with the urverse, right down to the smallest level. The less you do, the safer this will be for both of us.”

  “Right,” Çrom said.

  “So get all the interaction out of your system.”

  “Right.”

  “As much interaction as you can have with a bunch of mushrooms. And the less I know about that, the better.”

  “Right.”

  “For the sake of the space-time continuum.”

  Çrom chuckled. “Right.”

  Still, they stood for a while and looked out at the frigid fungus-scape illuminated by the Highwayman’s lights.

  “None of this makes sense,” Greyblade protested. “It’s a
ll very well for us to minimise our impact on whatever we fly through for the next few years, but we’re still going to be absent from Earth for those years. Things will progress there. The Drake will still be imprisoned. The world will still degenerate. Our absence will affect things as much as our interference would.”

  Çrom groaned. “You’re going to get us in trouble, aren’t you?”

  Greyblade raised his hands. “I’m just saying, those years will happen, and whatever happens in them, to the entire urverse, will happen whether we’re flying along the Highroads of the Naskiraqad Belt, or tearing arse back towards the Boundary shooting every Alien we meet along the way right in the face.”

  “But–”

  “And then, when we go into Naskiraqad, we go backwards,” Greyblade said. “Okay. Fine. So all that time just … what, rolls back? Everything undone, the entire urverse except for Naskiraqad itself, which is rolling back in the opposite direction? We, by our very presence there, simply undo years of linear time?”

  “Every instant in history is happening right now somewhere,” Çrom said, then frowned. “That sounded profound when I first heard it, but apparently I don’t have what it takes to pull off statements like that. Anyway, my point is, even standing here, there’s a possible point ten or a hundred years in the future where we didn’t come back. Where the ship broke down and couldn’t get off Gateway.”

  “I am in perfect working order,” Dora reported from inside the access hatch.

  Çrom ignored the computer. “That point in the future has happened,” he said, “just not yet. And it won’t, if we take off in twenty-four hours’ time and take this shortcut and get back to Earth.”

  “We still essentially become time travellers,” Greyblade insisted. “We enter Naskiraqad three years or so from now, by which time who-knows-what has happened everywhere in creation. But then we emerge from the Naskiraqad Portal at basically the same moment we ascended to safe altitude above Gateway and flipped into soft-space, twenty-four hours from now. We double back on ourselves and restart a whole series of events that already will have occurred a different way. By coming out of Naskiraqad at the same time as we entered, instead of spending all those years the normal linear way, we’re doubling back and – and making a little oxbow lake in the river of time. We–”

  “That’s such a great metaphor,” Çrom said, and jogged down the ramp. “I’d hate for you to spoil it by continuing to talk. See you in twenty-four hours,” he called over his shoulder, already disappearing into the gloom beyond the ship’s lights.

  BEDTIME STORIES

  It was a subdued and unsurprisingly hungover Çrom Skelliglyph who walked back up the ramp not quite eighteen hours later.

  “Got sleepy,” he said, “figured I might as well come back.”

  “Naskiraqad sequence ready,” Dora reported.

  “Want to get started early?” Greyblade asked.

  Çrom shrugged, and managed a wan smile. “Sure,” he said. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’re done, right?”

  “Now you’re just trying to confuse me.”

  After a brief detour to pick up the canister of sleep-drug from the command console where he’d left it, they walked together to Çrom’s stateroom. They’d set up his resting-place for the next almost-seven years in the relative comfort of his cabin, not that Greyblade supposed it made much difference. Dora could see to Çrom’s nutritional, physiological and hygiene needs through the collection of medical devices they’d put in place.

  “How long have you done in fugue-mode?” the human asked. “What’s your record?”

  “Seriously?” Greyblade said. “Well, we got put into storage for about twenty-five centuries. That was a long one.”

  “Oh right. And you … did alright?”

  Greyblade struck a little pose. “Ta da.”

  Çrom awarded this with another strangely sad smile, and turned towards his open doorway. Then he stopped, and turned back. “You said the world was degenerating,” he remarked.

  “What?”

  “Before I ran off to whoop it up amidst the mushrooms,” Çrom said. “You said that while we were heading into Naskiraqad, in that stretch of time that we’re going to unwind anyway, the world would still degenerate.”

  “Oh,” Greyblade said, “yes. I suppose I did.”

  “Like, literally? I know it’s popular to moan about how the world is going to pot, but…”

  “Yes,” Greyblade said. “Literally.”

  “And you’re going to stop it?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know about the mission.”

  Çrom stood in the doorway for a few seconds, swaying slightly and looking greyer than a phobe.

  “I was worried,” he said eventually.

  “Worried?”

  “About you telling me too much of your mission,” Çrom said. “About me maybe having to tell you too much of my past. I don’t like … making connections with people,” he looked up at Greyblade, and the Burning Knight saw tears in the human’s bloodshot eyes. “People die,” he said. “And it hurts.”

  Greyblade was absurdly touched. “Well,” he said, “I know it’s easy for me to say, but I assure you I’m only going to die once. And not for a long while.”

  “A long while for you,” Çrom said. “Tomorrow for me,” he stood in indecisive silence again for a while. “I suppose it’s always been pretty obvious why I’m so familiar with Beyond the Walls,” he went on.

  “Because you’ve been out here more times than you wanted to let on,” Greyblade said. Çrom nodded. “Looking for a way out?”

  “No,” Çrom replied, then frowned. “Yes. Yeah, I suppose so. I…” he sighed. “The truth is, I have come out here a few more times since my walk. First, it was just to see if I dared,” Greyblade nodded. “Then, I was trying to figure out how much of it had been real. See if I could actually retrace my steps, see if I was insane or if I’d really walked that far. And after that I realised…”

  “Realised what?”

  “Why I was doing it,” Çrom said. “I don’t know if I was driven out here the first time, the long walk of Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph, all part of the story. But I probably would have come out here anyway, eventually. Doing it on foot … I may never know if that really happened.”

  “Understandable,” Greyblade said, because it seemed expected of him.

  “I came out here looking for a way to die, like I was telling you a while back,” Çrom said. “I mean, of course I did, right? What’s the first thing everyone knows about Beyond the Walls? That the Ghååla don’t rule here the way They regulate the Corporation. If there was anywhere I could break a curse placed on me by Nnal, it would be Beyond the Walls.”

  “Right,” Greyblade said. “Like you told me before. No rules, maybe a way for you to break the curse.”

  Çrom nodded. “Only one problem with all that.”

  “The second thing everyone knows about Beyond the Walls,” Greyblade said.

  Çrom laughed bitterly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Beyond the Walls is Nnal’s true dominion. He cuts up rough in the Corporation once an Age or so, spends some time in the drunk tank … but when He comes home, He comes home here.”

  “But you kept coming out.”

  “Oh yeah. Have to check every box. Try everything. And after all, I can’t say I didn’t find ways to die out here,” he said, fingering the canister of sleeper-medication. “Lots of ways. And these routes I found, this route we’ve taken, it only ever criss-crossed my path vaguely. It was never the classic route.”

  “But you did it,” Greyblade said. “You faced it. You found the Attempted Molren, The Falling Damned. All of it.”

  “Yes I did,” Çrom smiled, and wiped his eyes. “We’ve travelled the Highroads, the Highwayman and I. And we’ll get you there, Greyblade. We’ll get you there.”

  “Past Naskiraqad,” Greyblade said, “past this Nonsense Portal of yours.”

  Çrom’s smile widened into a grin. “That’
s right,” he said. “Through the Nonsense Portal and straight on ‘til sunrise.”

  “Okay,” Greyblade said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “Alright. Greyblade,” Çrom had already turned to shuffle into his cabin, but swung back. “I’ve got a confession to make. Just in case this doesn’t go well.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “We weren’t supposed to smuggle Jank off The Falling Damned,” Çrom said. “She helped us with the Dûl code, and I promised to get her into the Mangle by any means necessary, but the denizens didn’t know about it.”

  “I thought we told them about it and they officially disapproved and unofficially wanted her taken care of,” Greyblade said.

  “Oh no,” Çrom smiled. “No, they had no idea we were taking her out and if they’d caught us with her we would have been in…” he shivered, then grinned. “Ooh, so much trouble.”

  “We can’t go back that way,” Greyblade said. “Can we?”

  “Nope. Burned that bridge,” Çrom said happily. “Sorry about not telling you.”

  Greyblade shook his head. “I’m impressed,” he said. “You were very convincing. Your heart-rate and other telltales hardly shifted while you were strolling out of there with Jank in your pocket. You were chatting with her. I had no idea we were defying the government of The Falling Damned.”

  “It was a bit murkier than that, but … well, for a start I couldn’t mention it at the time, because of what you might do or how it might make me act,” Çrom said. “The abreal don’t exactly like the denizens, but if we’d freaked out in any way or if they’d realised I had Jank with me, they would have gone into a frenzy. After that, I didn’t want to lose my trustworthiness-cred with you until we were ready to do Naskiraqad. That’s why I waited. I am sorry though.”

  “It’s alright,” Greyblade told him. “I’d be lying if I said I was thrilled about you making secret decisions that affected the mission, but obviously a lot of those have been necessary so far. And you’ve gotten us here, even if ‘here’ being the right place is purely still a matter of faith at this point, You have the … trustworthiness-cred. Undiminished.”