Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  “Very well.”

  Greyblade opened the door to Çrom’s stateroom and was pleasantly surprised at how fresh – clinically sterile, but fresh – it was. Çrom lay on his bed with a tasteful array of medical equipment around and connected to him, but he was smiling faintly and his breathing was slow and strong. He looked like he was enjoying a perfect afternoon nap.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured to the smiling human. “My God, I’m so sorry. I thought I knew, but I didn’t. Not really.”

  He returned to his post, sat back down, and reactivated his fugue protocols.

  ENTER NONSENSE

  As happy and crisp as he’d looked when Greyblade had checked in on him Çrom was tousle-haired, puffy-faced and barely lucid when he finally woke up. He may even have still been nursing the hangover he’d taken under with him, which Greyblade considered to be a cosmically unfair length of time for a hangover to wait around.

  Greyblade had come out of fugue some hours previously to find the ship floating at rest in the white vault of the Liminal. Dora reported that they had transited through the previously-mentioned Nonsense Portal and were now in extra-Dimensional space where they could finish their recovery in peace. Everything, Dora and the logs agreed, had gone smoothly and they were officially back at week ninety-six of their journey.

  Çrom, however, had still been deep under the influence of the sleeper drug and required a bit of flushing-out and stimulant-encouragement.

  “Did you wake up early and crap in my mouth?” the human demanded in a croak.

  “In my defence, I really needed to go and wasn’t sure I’d ever get as perfect an opportunity again.”

  “I knew it,” Çrom sat up, and groaned. “I need–” Greyblade put a cup in his hand. “I was going to say alc–” Çrom smelled the steam rising from the heavily-spiked coffee, and raised it to his mouth as fast as possible without spilling a drop. “Good man,” he gasped, after downing half the cup.

  “Shortcut achieved,” Greyblade told him. He stepped back from the bed and lowered himself into a nearby chair. “According to the navigation system, we’re less than four weeks from our final destination.”

  “There, you see?” Çrom took another long draught. “Pretty good shortcut, right?”

  “Impressive,” Greyblade conceded. “Very impressive.”

  Çrom fixed him with a far more wakeful look than Greyblade would have expected. “Did you…” he started, then shivered and shook his head and drained his cup. “Nothing, never mind. You got more of this?”

  “The Shedders woke me up to say hello,” Greyblade said. Çrom flinched, but they weren’t immediately unravelled from the tapestry of time and space. Greyblade felt certain, somehow, that it was safe to speak about it – within reason.

  “Oh yeah?” Çrom asked indifferently. “What did they have to say, aside from hello?”

  “‘Hello’ was about the first and last thing I understood,” Greyblade admitted.

  Çrom chuckled. “Shedders.”

  “So,” Greyblade went on, “we’re apparently in ‘Nonsense’ now. And nothing at all is preventing you from talking about it.”

  “Oh – yeah, well I guess it’s more accurate to say we’re on the inner edge of Nonsense, but sure,” Çrom tilted his cup against his lips and looked disappointed to find it empty. He put the cup down on the muscle-stimulant generator beside the bed. “It’s like this. You know how, when you’re a kid – okay, immediately I can tell this explanation is going wrong.”

  Greyblade grinned behind his visor. “Carry on though.”

  “You know how when you’re learning about the Corporation and elementary Dimensional theory and the urverse,” Çrom went on, “how there’s an infinite number of different universes. And the first question you ask is like ‘so where’s the Dimension filled with candy?’ or whatever.”

  “Right…” Greyblade said doubtfully.

  “Well, obviously the answer to that is that there isn’t a Dimension filled with candy in the ten million Corporate Dimensions,” Çrom said, “although there are a few Dimensions where there’s – you know – quite a lot of candy.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then again every Dimension is infinite so there’s statistically a pretty good chance that there’s a ton of candy in all of them somewhere or other, but that’s kind of wandering off-point.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And then of course outside the Corporation, there might be Dimensions filled with candy but it’s Beyond the Walls,” Çrom said. “So it’d be disappointing candy.”

  “Mm hm.”

  “Basically, after enough Dimensions, every single thing that a Dimension can have in it, in every single permutation or amount, every possible number and configuration of aactur on upwards, has been done,” Çrom said. “And there are still infinite Dimensions out from that. That’s what Nonsense is.”

  “We’re so far out into Beyond the Walls that every combination of matter-elements in reality has been expressed,” Greyblade said, “and the Dimensions from here on outwards are … ?”

  “A jumbled mess, mostly,” Çrom said. “And also endless re-permutations of all the shit that’s already permutated. Reiterative space. Like I say, the Nonsense Portal out of Naskiraqad is a big one. It’s actually pretty rough to fly through it, which is another reason it was a good idea to sleep that little bit longer. It’s not over in a half-second, like most other Portals. I have a few theories. But of course I don’t actually want to know.”

  “Of course,” Greyblade’s grin had faded, and now he frowned. “But if there’s just the one Portal this far out, and we can’t take the Godfangs back to Naskiraqad…”

  “Aha,” Çrom said, and swivelled his legs off the edge of the bed. “Well, the short answer to that is, there’s more than one Nonsense Portal. But don’t worry, the Godfangs aren’t out here. Our four-week jag to Wyrm will take us back in from the edge of Nonsense, using a series of Portals that are also abnormally far-reaching and a bit unpleasant to fly through. This is another set of Portals, incidentally, that I think were made or at least altered by some–”

  “Back how far?” Greyblade asked suspiciously.

  “Bit of a meaningless question,” Çrom said, “but I guess you could say pretty close to where we left off. Only complication being that … well, as the old joke goes, you can’t get there from here. I mean, the other route to Wyrm, we’re talking about our next fastest route out here. Which we’re going to have to use on our way back because it’s not safe to take the Godfangs the way we just came. So – next fastest. Whole different route, starting from Barthanq or so. But conceptualising it is a bit much to expect of me in my current state.”

  “So we went all the way to the edge of the statistical expressibility of the urverse and risked being erased from history … for a shortcut,” Greyblade summarised.

  “Sure. Just because it’s a shortcut doesn’t mean it’s actually a smaller distance. Just that it takes less time. Right?” Çrom stood up. “Where are my pants?”

  WYRM

  The next four weeks were much like their long march from the Boundary to Gateway, another long and uneventful sequence of Highroads and soft-space as they flitted from Dimension to Dimension and through the unfathomable spaces in between. The only notable dissimilarity was in five particular Portal-dives along the way. The dives through the inner edge of what Çrom called ‘the Nonsense Network’.

  The human hadn’t been joking. While a normal transition from one terminus of a Portal to the other was a split-second rearrangement of the molecules whether you walked through or flew at a hundred billion times the speed of light, these Portals took several minutes to pass through. The overall effect was like being somehow loose in the grey and featureless void of soft-space, except Greyblade found he had no discernible body and was diffused into a sort of slow-drifting awareness. And while he had no body, he still felt his physical matter being churned and flipped and poked and prodded, as though some vast
consciousness inside Portal-space was trying to figure out how to get him put back together at the far end so he matched with the Burning Knight that had entered the Portal in the first place. And didn’t have bits of Fhaste and trace elements of immortal human mixed in.

  It was dramatically unpleasant, and Greyblade was heartily pleased when Dora announced that they had passed the final Nonsense Network Portal and were proceeding to their destination.

  “I guess this is it,” Çrom said as their final leg wound down. “End of the line. Or halfway there – I don’t know how you think about mission stuff.”

  “Halfway,” Greyblade agreed, “not including the time it’s likely to take to establish contact with the Godfangs, and get them back to flight-readiness. If they’re not already. Tell me about this ‘Wyrm’ place. It’s not the actual Enclave?”

  Çrom shook his head. “Like I told you right at the start,” he said, “the best I can offer, with a few pointers from the Drake’s I-Spy, is that we know they were heading for the Enclave, but we know they didn’t quite make it there.”

  “You told me right at the start that the I-Spy network had traced their flight path,” Greyblade said, “sort of. Also that it had never shown the Godfangs, as such.”

  “Darn your photographic memory,” Çrom said good-naturedly.

  “Audio playback, but we quibble over terminology.”

  “Anyway, fine,” Çrom said, “I was still getting to know you, easing you into this. By now, you’ll know that what I saw, when I saw it … I still don’t even know if it was real.”

  “Or if it was just another story of your long walk,” Greyblade nodded.

  “But if I’d told you all that right away, you never would have accepted my help,” Çrom smiled.

  “Probably not,” Greyblade conceded. “So this Wyrm place…”

  “It’s connected to the Enclave,” Çrom said, “hence the name, but it’s not directly under Cult control. I think the Godfangs went there to prepare for a final strike on the Cult, but they … didn’t. I don’t know. I mean like you say, we know the Worm Cult wasn’t destroyed by the Godfangs and we know the Godfangs weren’t subverted by the Worm, so you have as much information as I do.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  Çrom smiled crookedly. “Alright, you have as much dependable information as I do,” he amended. “It’s safe. It’s … the Godfangs are there, I’m as confident as I can be. You’ll get what you came here for. And I’m pretty sure the place is uninhabited.”

  “‘Pretty sure’?”

  “I can’t imagine anyone moving in where there’s a bunch of Godfangs in the neighbourhood,” Çrom replied, just a little testily, “but we’re talking about long time-periods … so yeah. Pretty sure.”

  “Alright,” Greyblade soothed. They were counting down the final hours of their outward trip, after all – and whether they called it halfway or end of the line, it was the last stretch under these particular circumstances. There was more benefit in keeping the peace than there was in letting things sour at this stage. And he felt that he had at least a little more understanding of the helpless frustration Çrom must feel at all of his questions now. Maybe the visit from the Shedders had provided some benefit. It was something – a little gift clawed from the cold hands of un-time. “Let’s get there, and see what there is to see.”

  Three hours later, they were both sitting at their usual control stations when the Highwayman flicked through the final Portal from Highroads to soft-space, cruised through the grey for a few seconds, then flipped back into reality.

  A drab, grey-white plain slanted across the windows under an inky blue-black sky. Once again it was either a central plane, or else a flatworld or planet of enormous dimensions. There were a few strange pale sources of light in the sky, something like stars but lacking any real … well, zaz. As if to mirror them, the plain below was also scattered with tiny jagged flecks of illumination, like blue sparks. The overall effect was like hanging between two vast but very dull stellar vaults.

  They swept in closer and the wrinkles of mountains and valleys began to emerge, giving further texture to a dominantly flat landscape that was nevertheless interspersed by chasms and extrusions of absurd, gravity-defying size. Wyrm was a bleak, frozen fractal of a world – and it did indeed appear to be uninhabited. Some of the huge spires and arcs of stone glowed translucent blue from within, explaining the ground-based lights even if the ones in the sky remained a classic Beyond the Walls mystery.

  “Bharriom power spike detected,” Dora reported.

  Greyblade leaned forward in his seat, the familiar thrill of readiness tingling through him.

  “They’re here,” he said.

  The Highwayman descended, cruised along a ragged valley and rounded one of the thousand-kilometre prominences with the cold blue glow shining from its crystalline depths. The landscape beyond was whiter, sharper, as though a frozen lake had shattered and shifted and reformed there. Amidst the shards of ice were smoother shapes, curves like half-submerged albino whales.

  For a moment, Greyblade didn’t recognise what he was looking at. Then the Highwayman slowed to a standstill in the air and Dora said, “Bharriom power spike confirmed.”

  He looked down. The Godfangs were directly underneath the ship.

  As far as the eye could see, in great twisted fragments and hollow curves of hull, the landscape was littered with – no, was composed of – the wreckage of Category 9 Convoy Defence Platforms that had been utterly obliterated.

  This was where Rosedian’s Daughters had died.

  PART THREE: THE GREATER FALL OF MAN

  - - - On the head of a pin - - -

  - - - On the edge of a razor - - -

  - - - From the barrel of a gun - - -

  ANOTHER GREAT DAY

  Ludi clumped down the stairs and shuffled into the kitchen. She stood before the gleaming steel monolith of the coffee machine and tapped its controls until it bent to her will, then sat at the table and stared moodily at her hands while it percolated. The giant old coffee machine usually cheered her up, because it sounded just as unwilling to wake up as she was. But today it did nothing for her mood.

  Show me, she snarled to herself. Show me something. Where is it? How does it go? How does this go? Show me.

  All the months and years of insight, the pointless and distracting certainties as her dumb broken brain told her what was about to happen in a conversation or what was really going on behind a normal-looking set of interactions. Never in a useful way, oh no. Never so she could actually help people or even make a decent living from it, not really. Just enough to make her seem like an insufferable know-it-all. All those infuriating bouts of persistent déjà vu, and for what?

  Just for a moment – a few glorious, glimmering hours – when the Burning Knight had been here, she’d felt as if it was all coming together. That her insight really was a gift. She’d felt as exhilarated as Magna, albeit without the existential relief. Like there really was something behind it all, something pressing buttons on the giant old coffee machine of the urverse.

  It occurred to Ludi that she shouldn’t try to come up with metaphors before breakfast. Either way, the Burning Knight was gone now, and the feeling was gone with it. Now she was getting nothing. Paraludi Aptidocles, the great and gifted teller of the story, was left staring at a blank page just like everybody else.

  The machine gave a final gasping gurgle, and Ludi rose to her feet. At the same time the sounds of an Ogre getting into his fridge-suit and climbing the stairs from the basement culminated in a helmetless Brute Hungry’s appearance in the doorway. Ludi pulled open the freezer door as she went to pick up her cup, and Hungry slouched through and grabbed a huge brown-black block of frozen coffee from the shelf. They usually saved up and froze the remains at the end of each day, so there were several blocks of coffee for the Ogres to enjoy. They didn’t do so very often, since they didn’t care for the taste.40 And a good thing too – a caffeinated Ogre w
as what Galatine referred to as an exposure risk. Perhaps the most misleading phrase in the history of understatement.

  “Hungry,” Ludi said.

  Brute Hungry opened his jaws and crunched the big block of ice and coffee grounds reflectively in his jaws. “Nah,” the massive shaggy creature said. “Had some eats in night.”

  Ludi had never figured out whether this was a joke, or if Brute Hungry didn’t recognise a simple greeting, or if he periodically forgot his own name. He gave pretty much the same reaction every time, except when he said “yup” and ate a block of frozen breakfast, or simply grunted and left again.

  This time, he squatted by the table and went on chewing. The sound of Ogre-tusks grinding up ice was one of the more wince-inducing ones you could hear early in the morning – or indeed any time – but the smell was strangely refreshing. Ludi poured herself a coffee and sat back down a rational distance outside the armour-clad monster’s personal space.

  “Another great day,” she said, “yeah?”

  Hungry chewed, swallowed, and then shrugged shoulders clad in metal plates Ludi doubted she could even move without a pneumatic jack.

  “Guess,” he agreed.

  Ludi had decided, within three days of Sir Greyblade’s deportation, that they were going to break the Drake out of whatever prison the Adelbairn alien quarter regulatory and security department had thrown her in. What she hadn’t decided, after a month of vague and disgruntled planning, was whether she wanted to involve the Ogres. They were a sledgehammer in the guerrilla toolkit – very useful in certain circumstances, but disastrous in many others.

  It didn’t really matter, though. Not until she got more information. Or any information.

  Ludi and Hungry sat for a time in silence. At exactly two minutes past six, Magna strode into the kitchen.

  “Morning,” she said.