Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  Ludi managed the day to day running of the warehouse, such as it was, while the weeks ticked away and the world seemed to grow steadily more stifling. Magna couldn’t shake the feeling that Earth was rotting, a feverish disease that was advancing faster and faster every hour, every minute. It had felt like she was helping, back when her visions had returned and her insights had set Greyblade on his path. But now it seemed like her job was done, her message delivered, her usefulness exhausted.

  And she wasn’t even sure how useful it had been.

  The more time went past, the more she went obsessively back over her prophecy, second-guessing and re-interpreting at every turn. The more she scrutinised and criticised, the more it all seemed like so much preposterous nonsense.

  That’s it? Don’t take this the wrong way, but … that’s the full prophecy?

  And for this, they had sent Sir Greyblade of the Burning Knights out into the deadly nothingness Beyond the Walls.

  And that’s the non-floofy version?

  There didn’t seem to be much she could do about any of it, and so Magna did what she could to keep things together the way she thought Gabriel would want. And she waited for something to happen. A vision, a breakthrough, a Demon attack. Anything.

  The hours, the days, the weeks and months continued to pass, and Cara-Magna Áqui’s persistent feeling of desperation became a vision in its own right. A vision of a new and different sort, and one that required no interpretation.

  In her vision, the world and all its people were parts of a great mechanical assembly, a timepiece of unthinkable complexity and ancient, abiding beauty. Every construct, every institution, every law, formed structures within structures like a fractal clockwork going inwards and downwards forever. And with every passing second, that clockwork was running … not down, but towards something. Long before the last tension wore out of its last spring, it would hit some critical overlap and a switch would be tripped. Pendulums would swing, tumblers would fall, and a bell would toll for the final doleful time.

  Everything they did – Magna and her daydreams, Galatine and his gadgets, Greyblade on his hopeless quest, Ludi, the Angels, even the Ogres – only served to hasten the great machine’s heartbeat and bring the day of that last bell striding closer. And Magna hated it, because she couldn’t make it come sooner.

  ANGEL MUNICIPAL REPRESENTATIVE

  THIRD GRADE KOZURA AGIN

  Aganéa was a pleasant land. It had been fortunate, in a way, to have been one of several Earthly landmasses that had been rolled up onto another of the planets of the solar system during the Flutter. So, while it had been completely depopulated and scoured bare by the hostile environments that had emerged on the Fluttered planets, it had also not been stuck on planet Earth for those centuries.

  The continents and islands that had remained as part of Earth had enjoyed a near-total collapse of human civilisation and a few hundred years of relative peace and tranquillity at the onset of the exile … followed by a ferocious resurgence of the irrepressible primates. The humans had started again from scratch, destroying forests and wiping out species after species as they clawed their way back towards industrialisation.

  Stopping only to take the occasional shit in the ocean and breed a new generation to carry on their good work, they bounced back with all the perverse, vindictive force of a crotch-bound football. Within two thousand years, they’d essentially consumed everything and were fighting over the stuff they’d made out of it.

  Stable land ran out. Fuel ran out. Food ran out. And the humans fought over all of it, with weapons that got nonsensically more and more filthy and destructive, traditions of war and foreign relations58 that grew ever more vile and savage. The assorted nations of the rearranged Earth fought over their new reality like cats in a sack, and very nearly drowned like them. A fortunate rekindling of the connection with the Destarion’s power supplies, and an accompanying brutal mass-murder of the most troublesome human mega-wealthy by the grumpy Godfang, had been enough to see Earth limp over the finish line.

  Aganéa, at that time, had rematerialised as empty but surprisingly fertile land for the taking, and after a few false starts and a couple of blessedly short and polite wars the humans had taken it. Even now, after a couple of centuries and a devastating war of secession, Aganéa was a sparsely-populated temperate nation largely given over to farming and grazing.

  It wouldn’t, Gabriel thought to himself, have looked out of place on Earth in 250 AD. Except of course for the silhouette of the reticulation and inoculant machinery against the sunset, which would have sent the locals running for their torches and pitchforks. And the animals out on the hillside were larger, sleeker, and lacked the rangy agility of natural creatures that occasionally needed to fend for themselves. These were slabs of meat, bags of dairy, bales of wool and leather, left outside to get ripe. They were leaving animal behind and ambling placidly towards mushroom.

  Gabriel sighed and rested his elbows on the glassless windowsill. The daja was long-abandoned, and for Aganéan architecture it was veritably ancient. The new Aganéan settlers, in their freshly-rediscovered enthusiasm for the forgotten Pinian religious rituals, had rebuilt the daja to its original specifications, and had even spent a few decades at worship here. Daja’i were old Pinian – even by Gabriel’s standards. And he doubted many Gróbs had been to this one, even before the war.

  These days, it was mostly used to store replacement parts for the farm maintenance machinery. Still, it was pleasant. It was nice to be out in the daylight, even if it was framed by grey stone arches and monoliths.

  The sun sank below the hilltops, and dusk gathered swiftly. The big, chunky animals continued to waddle around aimlessly, and the big metal mantis of the reticulation machine stood sentinel. Gabriel waited, as he had for so many, many days, for the final flush of light as the sun swooped under the edge of the Earth and sank into the sky of Hell. Darkness descended.

  Gabriel counted to ten. Then ten again. How far from here to Tao-Javel …

  With a high tearing sound and a thud of air, Kozura Agin appeared at the edge of the daja with wings spread. He folded them, dropped lightly to the grass, and strode forward. Fastidiously twitching his robes back into place as he came.

  Twat, Gabriel thought to himself, not without a certain grudging affection. Kozura was a pedantic fusspot, but Gabriel liked him. And he knew that this baffled a lot of people on every point of the political spectrum, and frankly that just added to his affinity for the Angel. Keep them guessing, that was the trick.

  At least he came to Earth. Gabriel couldn’t exactly fault him for not wanting to stay in Dumblertown.

  Kozura wasted no time on greetings or small talk. It was another of the reasons Gabriel liked him, actually.

  “The Hathal Moga’threta Advisory Council is convening in two days in Whistkavelier City,” he said. “I intend to be there, and it is a long way between holy ground in the farmlands.”

  “You’re telling me,” Gabriel said. “Why do you think I’m waiting in this daja for you?”

  “Because you like daja’i,” Kozura, neat and stern and not much taller than Gabriel himself, stopped before him and inclined his head. The absolute minimum concession to rank, while acknowledging their opposing sides. The Angels that were really on his side didn’t even bother with that much. “You like to stand in the sun and pretend you’re living on a clean and sanctified world. That’s why you sneak around in Vanning.”

  That was yet another reason he liked Kozura, Gabriel reflected. Kozura knew him, and didn’t do anything with this gift except answer every last one of Gabriel’s rhetorical questions.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “What’s the Advisory Council meeting about this time?”

  “Council business,” Kozura replied. “Although I can assure you, if I delivered you to the address floor, they would be very interested in hearing what you had to say.”

  “I bet.”

  “Did you acquire the necessary permissions t
o leave the alien quarter and travel to Aganéa?” Kozura asked.

  “I’m sure I must have at some point,” Gabriel mused. “I’m not as young as I once was.”

  “Did you have anything to do with the … I won’t dignify it by calling it an infiltration … the demolition of a red-file storage and research site in Warakurna a few months ago?”

  “No,” Gabriel growled, honestly, “and I wasn’t particularly pleased to hear it had happened, although it was certainly for a good cause. What’s a Municipal Representative Fourth Grade like you know about it?”

  “Third Grade,” Kozura corrected him.

  “You got a promotion?” Gabriel said. “Or is that a demotion? Damned if I remember which direction they count these things in.”

  “Promotion,” Kozura said. “I’m the lead Angel on the Mercy taskforce. That’s my interest in Warakurna. The Demon had a controlling stake in the site, even though it was legally quarantined,” he paused. “Is the Drake alright?”

  Gabriel hissed. “You knew?”

  “Only after the fact,” Kozura gave no sign that the Archangel’s anger affected him in any way, neither hurrying to explain himself nor showing any contrition. “I don’t know what they were doing, because the site had been turned into a plug of impure glass out in the desert, it took almost a week to be cool enough for humans to go near it–”

  “You try to lock up a Dragon, don’t complain when you get burned.”

  “–and someone had taken apart the virtual shadow,” Kozura said. “Someone who knows far more about computers than you do.”

  “That’s a pretty low bar.”

  Kozura’s lips tightened – not annoyance, so much as resolve. “I have also heard rumours that someone is bringing Angels into the Hathal Moga’threta,” he said. “In violation of the Treaty of Mumbai. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

  “Who have you been hearing these things from?” Gabriel asked. Kozura gave no sign that he was going to answer. “You know how eager Philip is to make you happy, he’s probably–”

  “Transcendus Excelsius Macabre is a dutiful Angel who doesn’t deserve an influence like you crouching between his wings,” Kozura said. “Those with authority can least afford to be above the law. You told me that.”

  “I’m not sneaking Angels down into the Interdict,” Gabriel said wearily.

  Kozura gave him a look of withering disappointment. “It’s not down into the Interdict I’m worried about.”

  “Come to Vanning with me,” Gabriel said. “Put your worries to rest.”

  Kozura sighed. “We have had this conversation before.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gabriel said. “We probably won’t have it again.”

  “I wish I could believe you.”

  “Tell you what,” Gabriel said. “If I come with you to Whistkavelier City and answer all the Council’s questions, and then help out with anything you might need for your Mercy taskforce … will you come to the Sacred City with me?”

  “You realise that even implying that your base of operations is in Vanning, rather than the Adelbairn alien quarter, is a confession of guilt and enough evidence for the Archangelic court to launch an inquiry that would obligate the Hathal Moga’threta Advisory Council to take steps…” Kozura began.

  “Yes, I know it would lead to serious inter-departmental fucking around for years,” Gabriel rolled his eyes. “I’ll start filling out the required forms for pissing myself, shall I?”

  “You also realise that I’m perfectly aware that you have just magnanimously offered to insert yourself into a number of ongoing investigations and organisations from which you have been intentionally excluded, in return for my allowing you to recruit me,” Kozura continued.

  “Is that how you interpreted this?” Gabriel said in feigned astonishment.

  Kozura’s lips tightened again. This was as close as Gabriel thought the Angel could get to actually laughing.

  “Go on,” Kozura said. “Get out of here before I change my mind,” he half-turned, nose in the air and wings opening slightly, and then he sighed in exasperation as the Archangel stood unmoving. “What are you waiting for?”

  “For you to change your mind,” Gabriel said. “But you’re not going to, are you?”

  “You’re actually willing to come to Whistkavelier City with me?”

  Gabriel spread his wings and waved a long, hairy arm in sweeping invitation. “Lead the way.”

  FRESH EYES

  When the Drake finally made it known that she was ready to receive visitors, it came as a relief on multiple levels. Galatine had been distracting himself with his other projects, if it was even accurate to call it a distraction when they were all just different branches of a huge and vital undertaking … but his ability to ignore the growing threat of a bump in the road had never been particularly well-honed. And this wasn’t so much a bump in the road, as an obelisk.

  And it wasn’t as if the other parts of the mission were shaping up to be any easier. They all had problems of their own that seemed insurmountable. And only a few of them were going to be solved by Sir Greyblade appearing out of nowhere with a fleet of Category 9 Convoy Defence Platforms. There were some problems, as he explained to Big Thundering Bjørn late one night, that you just couldn’t solve by throwing a fleet of Category 9 Convoy Defence Platforms at it. Big Thundering Bjørn had seemed to understand.

  To avoid thinking about the looming obelisk in the road, Galatine threw himself into the question of the fountains.

  The fountains, which up until the Burning Knight’s fateful appearance had been almost ready for use if not mass-production-feasible, now had to be retrofitted to vent an entire God’s divine-planar energy, after they’d also rendered the living guns inert. It was possible Galatine could have repurposed them entirely to this new requirement, but he still felt very strongly that destroying the guns was just as important as draining Karl the Bloody-Handed to death. Added to this, he also had to find a way to use the guns’ power to generate a relative field somewhere on its way from the guns to harmless nothingness.

  Sooner or later they were going to have to connect the fountains up to the power network, or at least place them in strategic locations near power network nodes and beams. And do so without attracting attention. All over the world. And that, of course, was dependent on them finding the raw materials and manufacturing capacity to even mass-produce the things. Once they were properly designed.

  And – just like every piece of technology – that design grew more complex the more functions he tried to fit into the devices.

  He’d probably have to leave something out. In practice, that meant he’d have to leave some of the living guns operational after the venting, because the fountains wouldn’t have the functionality to process all types of souls. The Imago, he thought, were a satisfactory intersection of rare and deserving. He’d never heard of a nice Imago. Not one that had been made into a gun, anyway. And only a handful of them had ever been successfully tapped in the first place.

  There were fewer Angels in gun form – may actually have been none at this point – but risking any of them being left to their fate was out of the question. No, if he was going to skip any gun-venting functionality, it would be the Imago that didn’t make the cut.

  None of which really succeeded in distracting him from the main problem – the problem of Karl the Bloody-Handed Himself, and the data that pointed at His presence on Earth. So it wasn’t just a relief to hear that the Drake had recovered enough to receive visitors. It was a relief to know he was finally going to get to discuss the worldwide information network with someone who understood it even better than he did.

  The tunnel into the Adelbairn nest network had not been repaired, of course, and probably wouldn’t be in the immediate future. Galatine had to travel into the alien quarter, which was a hair-raising prospect even with Osrai fudging the security and recognition protocols to keep his face from setting off every Most Wanted algorithm from Adelbai
rn to Amazônia Capital. He trundled into Dumblertown in Ludi’s old car, passed through the checkpoints and signed himself in with a temporary visitor visa, and parked in an ancient motorstack that ground and shuddered like it was crushing cars instead of storing them.

  He avoided the nightclub, making his way to a secondary access under an old theatre. He had to purchase a ticket to watch the matinee marathon of post-liberation renaissance classics, but the stub was good evidence of his whereabouts for an extended period. Just in case anyone asked, which was unlikely. He descended into the maintenance and storage rooms under the theatre, then into a utilities tunnel, through the back door of a not-exactly-secret doof den, and then down to an unguarded access hatch. It didn’t need to be guarded – it was rigged with enough implosives to bring every structure he’d just descended through right down on top of him, and turn the block into a not-inconsiderable sinkhole at one wrong move. Approaching the Drake’s nest uninvited was first on the wrong-moves list.

  There was a small mechanical tumbler-set under the lip of the hatch, and he entered the correct sequence with sweating fingers. The hatch opened, he pulled it up and scrambled in as quickly as his trembling limbs would carry him. The security measures re-armed behind him.

  The shaft was a long ladder-climb, not particularly fun with sweaty hands and even less so because Galatine had to admit he was out of condition. He did not, in fact, remember ever being in condition, and he was no longer a young man. Still, he made it to the next level and followed a broken old segment of rubble-strewn sewer pipe around and then down, through a crack that opened out into the familiar scorched glass of Dragon-nest.