Greyblade

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Greyblade Page 40

by Andrew Hindle


  Çrom looked relieved. “But we’re almost there now,” he said. “They’re waiting for us, I know it.”

  Greyblade nodded. “Then let’s go and find them.”

  LIGHTS OUT

  Greyblade sat at his place at the secondary tactical console after settling Çrom in his resting place and double-checking the nutrient and waste feeds.

  You should tell him, he berated himself. The voice in his head, as it so often was in these circumstances, was the warm and too-soulful voice of Ildar, Pinian Second Disciple. Her burning eyes regarded him calmly in the depths of his mind, where memory met programming in the chaotic biomech foam.

  That would be a sentiment-based lapse in tactical judgement, he replied to himself. This time it was the voice of his recovery and orientation program.

  Do you think that vicious old robot knows more about tactics than I do? Ildar asked pointedly.

  I think you taught that vicious old robot everything it knows, Greyblade thought. But I also know you’re not Ildar. And the other voice isn’t my orientation program. You’re both me, arguing with myself, which means that ultimately, the choice is mine.

  Maybe you’re not quite as unburdened by illusions of free will as you thought, black-crest, the voice of his recovery and orientation program remarked threateningly.

  The illusion of free will is what tells you you’re not a machine like your tactical protocols, Ildar told him. And it may seem counter-intuitive, but sentiment-based lapses in tactical judgement do make you a better soldier.

  He sighed quietly to himself. If he was going to unburden his soul, the time to do it had probably been when Çrom was confessing to his Janknapping caper. Certainly now that the human was deep in a near-death state of suspension it was a bit late to worry about it.

  Pouring one’s soul out is supposed to hurt, he remembered Gazmouth saying.

  Galatine Gazmouth. The Gunsmith. It never ceased to amaze him, the kinds of alliances that formed when you were knee-deep in it. Sentiment-based lapses in tactical judgement, indeed.

  Greyblade tapped at the console, triple-checked the ship’s flight path and security settings, then set his own fugue protocols to activate.

  “Gunsmiff,” he toasted ponderously as his systems locked down and the preservatives burned coldly through his flesh. “Sorry about anything that happens in the next three years and eight months. If it’s any consolation, it won’t actually happen,” his synapses threw a final spark of insight and accompanying black humour up in front of his eyes, and he laughed sluggishly. “Until we actually wake up again and find the Godfangs and then take another ten years getting home,” he added in a drunken slur. “So, sorry about making it happen twice, I guess.”

  Darkness fell behind his visor.

  THE RETRIBUTION OF AN INFINITE

  He couldn’t have said what happened after that. He could only assume that, in accordance with their mission and her programming, Dora took the Highwayman out onto the Highroads and cruised at optimal relative register for three years and eight months into the deadly wake of the Naasskiraqad Dimension. And that, again in accordance with the flight plan, the computer had taken them into Naskiraqad, begun the meticulous reverse countdown, and landed them.

  Somewhere.

  He didn’t know how long the ship sat there, with her cargo of mostly-dead human and Burning Knight. But when he rose back up out of fugue and saw neither grey nor Highroads through the main viewscreens, he knew something had gone wrong. Still, the knowledge had no accompanying sense of urgency, probably because a lot of the physiological elements that controlled his responses were still in shut-down. It was somewhere between a drugged haze and a lucid dream. He wondered if this might be at all similar to the hallucinations Çrom was enjoying.

  Greyblade studied the view through the screens. It was at a casual glance similar to the white of the Liminal or the Highroads, but there were streaks and texture to it that made him think that it might be high, thin cloud blown by strong winds. He couldn’t see the ground, if there was any, from where he was sitting.

  “Run a fugue system diagnostic,” he subvocalised, as though he hadn’t run a half-dozen diagnostics and test-runs in the weeks they’d spent flying to Gateway. Sure enough, the check came back clean. There was nothing wrong with his storage protocols. They’d just deactivated.

  As more of his systems came back online, Greyblade was able to push himself to his feet. A change in the air quality, and a small notification on his control panel, told him the Highwayman’s main access hatch was open.

  This is probably bad, he thought, still without any real sense of urgency, and walked around and down to the ramp into the warm aquatic light of the filigree-wrapped guidance lamps.

  The ground on which the ship was standing was flat, faintly scorched by the Highwayman’s positioning jets, and appeared to be paved. Smooth flagstones, the colour of soft-space once one filtered out the blue-green of the ship’s lights, extended in every direction as far as Greyblade could see. Some more of his sensors checked back in and reported that there was no discernible curve to the landscape. It was a plane, a flatworld, or a very large planet. Beyond the Walls classic all the way, in short … except the stone did seem to boast some sort of atomic distinctiveness, rather than just being a solid-state placeholder.

  It was, but what it was, was simply exhausted.

  While most of the matter that made up Skelliglyph’s ‘worlds without zaz’ had never possessed said zaz, in some indefinable way it was clear that this endless grey courtyard once had. And that it had gradually drained away, over the course of aeons, leaving something that could pass for ordinary Beyond the Walls if you weren’t paying attention. It was cold, the streaky white sky above sunless yet harshly bright. There was an occasional mournful hoot of something that might have been wind if there’d been anything for it to play off aside from the ship. The air wasn’t quite still, but its movement was fitful. Simply going from one place to another, to remind itself that it wasn’t stone.

  “Hello, Greyblade.”

  Greyblade turned, unable to muster up much surprise, or any wariness. The voice had spoken its simple greeting in Xidh, its tone the gentle choral of a Molranoid.

  The figures were standing beside the ramp, and one of them was indeed a Molran. Not exactly a flesh and blood Molran, although it was solid more than it was ethereal. It was more like an artist’s impression of a Molran, stylised and streamlined and rendered in strange lines of blue and gold and black, and yet calling to mind a Molran with strangely compelling effectiveness. The second figure was humanoid, and smaller – smaller and more delicate than Çrom, who was by no means a large human. It was constructed – manifested – in the same style.

  Both figures were androgynous, with eyes like pale stones. Their bodies were shrouded in translucent wrappings that seemed to exude from their gleaming golden skin, but did nothing to reduce the solid reality of them.

  No, Greyblade realised. They weren’t just artists’ impressions. They were a Molran and a human, rendered by artists who had seen a Molran and a human once a long time ago, and then done their best to recreate them from memory. Exceptionally good memories, by very good artists, but still somehow … not quite right. He couldn’t have said what gave him this impression, but it was persistent.

  “Hello,” he said. The detached sense of calm that came from his senses being partially disconnected made him certain he was participating in some kind of vision. It was nothing like a dream – his dreams, as he’d told Gabriel all those months ago, were very different. But it was a bit like a dream as he imagined other species might have them. “I didn’t wake up intentionally, but if you’re going to punish anyone for interfering with your time–”

  “We woke you,” the human figure said.

  “You will not be punished for your incursion,” the Molran said. “I am Ortorius.”

  “I am Adeneo,” the human figure said. “We were chosen–”

  “We volunteered–”
Ortorius interjected, not in the manner of a correction so much as a clarification.

  “–to greet you, because we represent familiar forms, representative of familiar species,” Adeneo continued, and gestured to itself. “Molranoid.”

  “And humanoid,” Ortorius added, waving its left hands to indicate itself.

  “Other way around, I think,” Greyblade suggested.

  “Yes,” said Ortorius.

  “We were confident you would know that,” Adeneo told him.

  “‘Just testing’?” Greyblade asked.

  “Always,” Ortorius said.

  “I assume you’re Shedders,” Greyblade said.

  “We are,” Ortorius replied.

  “We have been waiting for you,” Adeneo said.

  “Does everyone to make it into Naskiraqad get a welcoming committee?”

  “No,” Adeneo said.

  “What makes us so special?” Greyblade asked. “Do you know us?”

  “We know him,” Adeneo said.

  “Çrom,” Ortorius added.

  Greyblade nodded. And things – things that had been puzzling him for some time – began to make sense to his free-associating mind. He saw it.

  He saw.

  He saw Çrom. Lost, broken, driven onwards by a nightmare with an Infinite cracking the whip. Set to walk the trackless wilds of the urverse, living – enduring – for all eternity. Dying again and again for the entertainment of a Being who could do anything, and yet never tired of watching small things perish and suffer. Çrom could never have walked, not even as far as the Boundary of the Corporation, in the brief span of time that was the human species’ entire existence. To walk that distance would have taken him … well, Ages.

  But Sorry Çrom, after walking for … what? Half the duration of the urverse itself? … might have found himself here. Yes, had found himself here. And here he’d stayed, in the stern company of the Shedders, while his long walk was walked back. All of it, undone as if it had never happened, except on the inside of Çrom’s poor eternal skull. Every step un-stepped, until he intersected with the Çrom Skelliglyph just setting out on his dreadful journey, at which point he was cast out of Naskiraqad. Supplanting that earlier, relatively unhaunted version of himself. Could Nnal do that? Yes, of course. And so much more.

  For an Infinite, it would be simplicity itself to render those unmade aeons, that oxbow of time, into a surreal series of fictitious adventures and trials and horrors. Had it even happened? The human’s desperate attempts to retrace his steps, find out whether or not he was delusional, his inability to reconcile what he knew with what the urverse was telling him. His heartbreakingly brave attempts – and failures – to face what had been done to him.

  It was all part of Nnal’s torture.

  The dread Ghåålus of Hatred had set His hapless victim to walk, and walk, and walk. And then … He’d unwound him. And then set him to walk again, through the same aeons from which he’d just erased himself. Only this time he had the illusion of free will. And a pretty spaceship.

  Greyblade shivered inside his armour. The Shedders were watching him. Ortorius nodded briefly. It knew, Greyblade thought. It saw the realisation in his eyes, as easily as if his helmet was made of glass.

  “Did you watch over him?” Greyblade asked. “While he was here?”

  “We did,” Adeneo said.

  “The Shedders watched over him,” Ortorius added.

  “Thank you,” Greyblade said softly, feeling an overpowering sentimental protectiveness for the eccentric human.

  Eccentric, he thought. My God. The very fact that he hasn’t lost his mind altogether might just be the cruellest punishment of all. How much did it cost him to come back here? How did Gabriel make him agree to it? What am I still missing from this dataset?

  “It was not a favour we did him,” Adeneo replied, calm as a neverborn star.

  “It was a punishment,” Ortorius said.

  “Kinder to let him die,” Adeneo agreed.

  “But Nnal wouldn’t allow that,” Greyblade said sadly, “would He?”

  Ortorius tilted its elegant head to one side.

  “Naskiraqad would not allow it,” it said.

  “And he doesn’t remember any of it?” Greyblade asked, suddenly uncomfortable. “Only flashes, things he could have heard about from the ballad, those brutal comics, all the stupid Sorry Çrom stories?”

  “He remembers nothing,” Adeneo said.

  “He remembers everything,” Ortorius added. Again, the words felt more like a clarification.

  “He just does not remember that he remembers,” Adeneo said.

  “For his own sake.”

  “It was all we could do,” Adeneo raised its flat, gleaming eyes to the white-striated heavens.

  “Okay,” Greyblade drew in a long, unsteady breath. “And we’re not going to get into trouble for having this conversation?” he felt the need to reiterate. “It’s just that he was very, very insistent on that.”

  “Naskiraqad will allow it,” Ortorius said.

  “Naskiraqad insisted on it,” Adeneo added.

  “What about the paradox?” Greyblade once again felt the need to press the matter. “We’ve already been gone for … several years, and I assume those years are now rewinding – out there. I take it that if I ask what happened in those years, it’ll get me in trouble?”

  “It will not get you in trouble,” Adeneo replied.

  “But we cannot answer the question,” Ortorius said. “We are in here. Not out there.”

  Greyblade looked around. Aside from the Highwayman, and the two gleaming Shedders, the endless expanse of flagstones offered very little in the way of scenery.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “Naskiraqad is not a Dimension that is easy to understand by nature,” Ortorius explained. “There are places where the Shedders do their work, and they are inviolate.”

  “This is a place designated specifically for outsiders to wait,” Adeneo told him. “Here, there is nothing to unduly interact with.”

  Greyblade’s mind shuddered back from the idea of spending entire Ages on this bleak and empty plain. He hoped Çrom had been allowed to sleep, as he was now.

  “Those places that are home to life as you would understand it are … very hostile,” Ortorius said. “And ancient, now, beyond your ability to comprehend.”

  “Or even physiologically withstand,” Adeneo put in.

  “Right, because everything in here has been growing older since the end of time,” Greyblade said, “and now is getting close to its own final Ages,” the Shedders nodded. “What happens then? When Naskiraqad gets to the end of the line, the beginning of the urverse, when everything else is new and Naskiraqad is finished?”

  “That,” Ortorius said, “is what we are endeavouring to find out.”

  “Some of us believe that the Shedders will emerge,” Adeneo said.

  “Have emerged,” Ortorius not-corrected.

  “And those that survive the process will walk the Dimensions and the Highroads until the end of time, before returning to newborn Naskiraqad and repeating the journey, until they have done it right.”

  “Rolling back and amputating history, again and again,” Ortorius said, “shaping it like topiary, and carving themselves into new and stranger forms as they go.”

  “And that when there are but nine of us left, like the emergent Riddlespawn from its tower, They will step out of Naskiraqad at the very moment DaRah of the Infinites calls upon Them,” Adeneo said.

  “Not as Shedders,” Ortorius concluded, “but as Ghååla.”

  “Sure, but what about the ambitious Shedders?” Greyblade heard himself ask. That, he was almost certain, had been Çrom speaking through him.

  The elegant lines of Ortorius’s face, already shaped into the perpetual smile of a Molranoid, curved still further into a near-grin. “It is but a theory,” it said.

  “We cannot expect to understand the mechanics of the urverse,” Aden
eo said, “although we live and die in the teeth of its grinding gears.”

  “I … see,” Greyblade said, feeling another distinct sense of dislocation. “So what was this meeting for? Aside from the interesting notes about the life-cycle of the average Shedder, what benefit has it been?”

  “None, perhaps,” Ortorius replied.

  “To you,” Adeneo added.

  “Goodbye,” Ortorius inclined its head.

  “It’s safe to engage with me because I’m going to die on this mission,” Greyblade said, “is that it?”

  “You are mortal,” Adeneo said. “All mortals die.”

  “Almost all,” Ortorius added.

  “Farewell, Greyblade,” Adeneo said. The Shedders turned, and then were no longer there. As was becoming a familiar phenomenon they did not vanish, but simply went from being there to not being there. The difference between this and simple vanishing was subtle but very much extant.

  Greyblade ran his hand back over his crest, accenting the empty grey pavement and the softly-keening white-on-white sky with a lonely rattle of spines. Then he turned and walked back up the ramp into the Highwayman.

  “How much longer, Dora?” he asked. It occurred to him, vaguely, that he should have checked their timetable as soon as he woke up. Perhaps, he thought, on some subconscious level he’d been trying to avoid thinking about any kind of linear time while they were on this preposterous leg of their journey.

  The computer made the same audible warm-up sound it had made on his first interface with it, a charmingly antique affectation that was folded into the ship’s artistry.

  “Three years, six months,” Dora’s ridiculously sultry voice breathed. At the same time, an exact counter – down to the blurred nanosecond – appeared on the tactical console. “Should you be awake?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, patting the console and passing on through the ship. “Just checking up.”

 

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