“I’m pretty surprised they were understanding once,” Çrom admitted.
“And on a selfish note, short of going back into stasis, I doubt I’d live long enough to see it all through,” Greyblade added. “In fact, I doubt even stasis would be survivable for such a long period.”
“I could wear your armour,” Çrom offered. “Secure your legend, sort of thing,” he glanced back at Greyblade’s visor. “I’m kidding,” he said. “We’re not doing Naskiraqad.”
“Where does this leave us?” Greyblade said.
“What do you mean?”
“I came out here on the urgings of a prophecy, and in the company of a guide straight out of the tall tales section of the history books. Nine sisters – ten, actually, if it turns out it was never Godfangs we were supposed to be looking for and the Destarion doesn’t count. Ten … things … capable of doing battle with a God, and relocating a world.”
Çrom didn’t make any further arguments about not wanting to know Greyblade’s mission. As Greyblade had already reflected, they were past that. “Sounds like a lot of power,” he said. “I mean, obviously if you go out looking for Rosedian’s Daughters, you’re after something pretty powerful, so I can’t say I’m shocked…”
“Maybe we can recruit some Demigods from The Falling Damned?”
“Sure. Just drop me off here,” Çrom laughed a little hysterically, then turned again, this time looking at Greyblade straight and seriously. “For real,” he said, “two years and I still can’t tell when you’re being serious behind that thing.”
“That’s it,” Greyblade said.
“No,” Çrom replied, “no, that’s not it, we can’t recruit–”
“No,” Greyblade agreed with a wave of his hand. “Not that. Drop me off here, you said. What’s here? The Godfangs are broken, but there are still pieces. We homed in on this field by following a Bharriom power spike. That means something down there has survived intact enough to have power.”
“You want to repair them?” Çrom asked doubtfully.
“Probably not possible,” Greyblade replied, “but we can at least go down and see what there is. Salvage, but more importantly information.”
“Oh,” Çrom said, “right, that’s, sure. You want to go down into the Godfang graveyard and poke around. I can’t wait, because you know what? The one intact Godfang we know about is so nice.”
“I think we’ve come far enough to take ‘turning back’ off our list of options,” Greyblade pointed out.
Çrom nodded. “No, you’re right. Of course you’re right. Let’s get centred over the signal, and I’ll set us down.”
The Highwayman circled, triangulating the exact location of the energy spike and finding a secure landing spot, for a few seconds. Greyblade looked out at the strange fractal landscape and the dreary plain of shattered teeth tucked in the palm of its vast clawed hand.
“Stable landing area found,” Dora said, and marked a region on the viewers. It appeared to be a segment of intact hull, a smooth slightly-curved surface two and a half kilometres by one, although its edges were as jagged and debris-surrounded as the rest of the plain. The Highwayman descended towards it.
“Hey,” Çrom said, “that harmony fluctuation we picked up after the Hellpath seems to have vanished at last. So that’s something, I guess.”
“Good,” Greyblade said absently. He was running analyses of the hull fragments and debris, and attempting to combine them into intact hundred-kilometre vessels. Were all twenty-six accounted for in the volume of wreckage? It was difficult to be sure, because the wrecks were lying on top of one another as well as spread across the frozen ground, and could be any number of layers deep.
“Something wrong?” Çrom asked. “Aside from the obvious.”
“No,” Greyblade replied. “Just the obvious, really.”
“Oh.”
“I was just thinking about something else you said when we were in Axis Mundi.”
“Hey now, I said a lot of things when we were in Axis Mundi,” Çrom protested. “I wanted to impress you. And now I come to think about it, I was drunk when we were in Axis Mundi. I remember screwing the Kedlams over, that was great,” he smiled wistfully out of the window for a moment, then blinked and turned back to Greyblade. “What did I say when we were in Axis Mundi?”
“‘Once I get us close, I have a bit of a nose for lost treasures’,” Greyblade recited. “‘If anyone can find Rosedian’s Daughters for you, I can’.”
“Oh boy, I said that?” Çrom said. “I mean, well, sure,” he added as the Highwayman touched down. “And here we are. Doesn’t get much closer than ‘landed on top of them’, right? Another Çrom Skelliglyph promise fulfilled.”
“Hm,” Greyblade said.
“That was an underwhelming response.”
“This is an underwhelming fleet,” Greyblade said. “But where there’s a power signature, there’s a slim chance of something useful still being intact.”
“Big improvement,” Çrom congratulated him, and raised a finger. “But still not inspiring.”
They stood and moved towards the access ramp.
“Thermal wear and a breather recommended,” Dora said.
“When you say ‘recommended’…” Çrom started.
“The atmosphere is thin but breathable,” Greyblade said, “even if its actual composition is still a mystery. You’ll probably get light-headed. Take a breather.”
“And consider reading the atmospheric data I compile for you,” Dora added.
“Fine, fine,” Çrom grumbled. “If mum and dad both say so…”
“Actually, the reason I asked about your ability to find the fleet once we get close is, this might not be all of them,” Greyblade said. “And if it isn’t, we’re going to need all our senses and talents to find the ones that are left.”
“Ah,” Çrom nodded, and pulled a thermal from a compartment. “Right. Well, say no more. If there are more Godfangs out there, I’m the guy to find them for you.”
“I’d be a lot more reassured by your confidence if you hadn’t just confessed to being drunk last time we had this conversation.”
“But I’m not drunk now.”
“I see.”
“Not very, anyway.”
“Hm.”
“It was nine, right? You need nine Godfangs?”
Greyblade ignored the human’s grin, and – leaving Çrom struggling into his thermal – stepped down the ramp into the biting cold.
THE GHOST IN THE BHARRIOM
They strolled out onto the wide white expanse of hull and stood under the inky sky, looking around.
From this viewpoint, the plain of broken Godfangs was like a new layer of the fractal geography of the world. The slivers of white machinery, the ridges of ice, the mountains beyond, and the absurd over-arching spires of tortured landscape above them, all formed a strangely harmonious continuity. The thin air moaned through the distant shards and across the kilometres of white enamel. It sounded less like wind moving through rock formations, and more like … well, there was no real way to avoid the conclusion. Ghosts. It sounded like an army of ghosts, both distant and horribly intimate.
The illumination seemed to come from the hull-segment beneath them, as well as from the great blue-green formations of ice and stone. Considering the blue-black heavens and the lack of astral bodies to light up the area, it should have been completely dark aside from the Highwayman’s lanterns. Greyblade was accustomed to Beyond the Walls pulling this sort of nonsense, however.
He crouched to examine the surface while Çrom finished fussing with his thermal and setting up his breather mask. He wasn’t very familiar with the Category 9s and their hull specifications, but there was something slightly off about the material. Not, alas, sufficiently off to conclude they weren’t standing in the middle of Rosedian’s demolished fleet, but off nevertheless. The surface was smooth and slightly textured, like slicked-together river pebbles. Its white flawlessness was marbled, shini
ng listlessly in pearly veins that made it look almost translucent.
Greyblade didn’t think the Destarion had that kind of lustre. Over long years of use and even longer years of standby slumber, her hull was bleached and cracked like dried hardpan. The fragment under Greyblade’s and Çrom’s feet was paradoxically more alive than the shell of the operational Godfang, because it had been ripped apart when it was in the full bloom of life and youth.
“The Bharriom spike is that way,” Çrom said, pointing with the handheld scanner he’d brought with him.
Greyblade, who had the same sensor system built into his helmet, nodded. They started across the expanse of dead hull towards the dark zigzag of its edge.
It was almost a kilometre from their landing spot, but the two didn’t really talk in the ten minutes or so it took them to half-jog to the junction. Like tectonic plates in miniature, the overlapping wreckage was subsumed at this point and there was a sharply-sloping hollow large enough for them both to slide into. They descended, picked their way along the broken floor of the little chasm, then descended into another gap. Just when Greyblade was beginning to wonder if they’d need to excavate, they reached a vertical crack and squeezed through into a chilly, sloping chamber. Çrom promptly lost his footing and slid, cursing, to the lowermost corner of the space some thirty metres away.
“Sorry,” he called.
“Are you alright?” Greyblade asked.
“Yeah. My pride broke my fall,” Çrom called back. “Could have been worse. Could’ve been my dignity, not much padding left on that these days…”
“You could have impaled yourself on the jagged edge of hull sticking through the wall about a metre to your left,” Greyblade remarked.
“There’s a jagged edge? I can’t see a damn thing on account of it being as dark as the inside of an Ogre’s head,” Çrom looked around. “Except without the two little pinpricks of light from the earholes.”
“Oh, right,” Greyblade muttered in embarrassment, and dropped a dollop of phosphorescent epoxy from his gauntlet. It mixed and adhered to the sloping floor, lighting up the chamber for non-echo-ambient-possessing human visual range in what Greyblade had to admit wasn’t really an improvement. Çrom stood and dusted himself off. “The Bharriom signature is coming from through there,” Greyblade pointed at an arched opening in an adjacent wall. “Can you climb up?”
“Yeah,” Çrom scrambled in that direction, and Greyblade angled himself out onto the slope. He crossed the floor and let himself slide to the doorway’s edge, then crouched and pulled Çrom up. “You got more of that goo?”
“Plenty,” Greyblade said, “but we shouldn’t need it,” he helped Çrom into the next room, which was actually long and narrow and turned out to be a tunnel. At the end, which was collapsed in another jagged mass of shattered hull fragments, light was shining feebly from a gap in the side of the blockage.
Greyblade stepped up to the shards and pulled them aside to make room for Çrom, and they clambered through into another half-collapsed chamber that was dimly-lit by a guttering purple light.
“Wow,” Çrom breathed.
Along the lower side of the chamber, where slanting floor met badly-buckled wall, blocks of pale enamel machinery had been tumbled open. The whole chamber was stained and bubbled with what looked like rays of intense heat that had long since faded. In the centre of the machinery, bared like a heart amidst shattered ribs, were four arm-length bars of Bharriom.
Three of the four great dusty rods were cracked and missing chunks, and were as dead and cold as the rest of the room. The fourth was still alight, but only very faintly – and only in a tiny scattering of spots, a faint lattice of sparks interconnected by even fainter purple mist deep inside the bar. Greyblade stopped at the wreckage they’d just climbed through, and subjected the scene to intense multi-sensor scrutiny.
“Alright…” he said steadily
“Look,” Çrom pointed.
“I’m looking,” Greyblade said.
A humanoid shape, picked out in a similar blue-purple mist to the stuff lighting the Bharriom, had swum into Greyblade’s visual range and then into Çrom’s, right in front of the broken machinery. It brightened and solidified, until Greyblade could see the somewhat sheepish expression on its face.
“Can you see the figure?” Çrom whispered. “It looks just like me,” he frowned a little. “A bit too much like me, actually.”
“I see it,” Greyblade said, eyes narrowing behind his visor. “First of all, the cultured Bharriom used in the Godfangs was really just a specially reconstructed three-dimensional mosaic of tiny, tiny Bharriom flecks, filled out with some other kind of power lattice. They weren’t actual single Bharriom crystals – not even the Pinian Brotherhood of the pre-Worm era could find so many Bharriom crystals that size.”
“But–”
“And because they weren’t actual crystals, they didn’t manifest the so-called Bharriom phantoms,” Greyblade went on. “And second, Bharriom phantoms don’t manifest as copies of people. They really just appear as sort of vague ghost-like humanoids or Molranoids, or whatever species they happen to be manifesting to. It’s an expression of the Bharriom’s consciousness, projected fairly clumsily into the consciousness of a sentient onlooker. It’s clumsy because Bharriom doesn’t really understand non-Bharriom minds. This is an illusion cast by someone who understands non-Bharriom minds, but has no idea how Bharriom works even though she’s using its energy to cast the illusion.”
“She?” Çrom’s eyes were uncomprehending above his breather mask.
“Yes. Which brings me to my third point,” he fixed the little twisting flame above the Bharriom bar with an unseen look, “that,” he said, pointing, “is your old dead friend Jank.”
“Jank?” Çrom blinked. The softly-glowing Çrom-copy flickered and blurred. “But we dropped her into the Mangle.”
“We dropped the stone she appeared to be connected to into the Mangle,” Greyblade said, “but the rest…” he gestured at the Bharriom bar, “is right there. She’s got some sort of energy-layer component that doesn’t seem to be visible to you.”
“Jank?” Çrom said again. His voice was unusually nervous. “What’s the deal here, Janky?” he glanced at Greyblade. “Maybe it’s just something that looks like the thing you saw when we–”
The voice that came from the Bharriom matrix laid any doubts to rest.
“I did not mean to be here, Çrom,” Jank said. “You came through, into the Hellpath, and your shadow touched mine. I was swept into your wake, and then drawn in.”
“I thought that was impossible,” Greyblade said, “while we were at relative speed and she was subluminal,” he turned his disapproving visor towards Çrom, who spread his hands and looked honestly flabbergasted behind his mask.
“It is impossible,” Çrom squeaked. “You know the laws of superluminal flight and the Highroads better than I do! I have no idea how she got back on the ship.”
“Such a pretty ship,” Jank said warmly. “I hid in the container you flushed me from.”
“The waste hatch?” Çrom ventured.
“I clung to the material of your ship, to the power sources. The little figurines in the engine. They were strange, and had an unpleasant taste, and I felt myself fading. When Greyblade came to search for me, he did not even see me – so faded had I become.”
“The harmony fluctuations when we were crash-stopped by those pirates after Blackleaf – that was you?” Greyblade said. “And all the times it occurred after that? You all along?”
“Yes. I tried to–”
“Wait – you came through Naskiraqad with us?” Çrom asked, his voice growing even shriller.
“Yes,” Jank repeated. “It was very dull. But I did nothing to interfere. That was what I was supposed to do, yes? Not interfere?”
“And then?” Greyblade asked.
“Well, then we arrived here, and I felt this strange stone call to me. Such power! I was drawn here by a force I co
uld not resist, uprooting me from the ship, the engines.”
“That’s when the harmony fluctuations stopped,” Greyblade shook his head. It made sense – as much sense as anything did – that Jank would be drawn by power sources in the Highwayman, and even more so by the power source that was the wrecked Godfang’s Bharriom core. A power source like Bharriom would be practically unheard-of Beyond the Walls.
In fact, it would be so rare, Greyblade was having an increasingly hard time believing nobody had come after it until now. Even though it was essentially useless in its current form, it clearly had some impact on the outside world and the Aliens therein.
“And now you’re integrated into that Bharriom bar?” Çrom asked.
“Is that bad?” Jank asked.
Çrom looked at Greyblade.
Greyblade shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “The bars of artificial Bharriom in a Godfang’s power plant are unable to be integrated into any other machine. Each set – each bar – is unique. I wouldn’t have thought Jank could use it for anything, but we certainly can’t. If Jank can’t dislodge herself and return to the Highwayman, there’s nothing much we can do.”
“Can we take the bar out and take it – and Jank – with us?” Çrom asked. “I mean, when we go. If the worst comes to the worst, we could go back the way we came and try dropping her into the Hellpath again. It might stick better if she has a bit of an anchor.”
“I’m not quite ready to give up on the mission just yet,” Greyblade said distractedly. “I suppose we can take it with us … it has no real value except as a relic, though. Like I say, these bars can’t be used to power anything the way natural Bharriom crystals can,” he glanced at Jank. The glowing false phantom had completely faded by now. “At least I didn’t think they could,” he added. “If Jank’s existence even counts as utilising the energy in the bar.”
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