Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  “You’re way off,” Çrom said cheerfully, “but if you like Nonsense Portals I can pretty much guarantee you’re going to love dying. If we can ever make it stick.”

  “Are you entering coordinates by memory now?” Greyblade asked, unable to keep a certain accusing tone from his voice.

  Çrom’s smile curdled a little. “Sort of,” he said. “But more like … letting the Network remind me. You’ll understand – in a while,” he waved his hand over the console grandly. “Off we go then.”

  They flicked forward and entered the Portal.

  At some point, much later, Greyblade thought they went to relative speed. They were never more than a few seconds between Portals in any case – Çrom had been right, the Network seemed to have been drilled intentionally outwards into the physical gibberish at the edge of the rational urverse, with as little space between Portals as possible and as much distance covered in each jump as could be traversed intact, or so it felt. Still, skipping to the grey rather than real space between Portals seemed to soften the jolt. Both were formless and unreal in their own way, and after a while soft-space and Portal-space seemed to merge.

  They flew on, plunging into discorporated nothingness and then being slapped back together at the far end of each unnaturally extended Portal-bound. They must have stopped, to allow Çrom to eat if nothing else, but Greyblade couldn’t recall it happening. Maybe Çrom just moved around the ship, moving a few centimetres in each fleeting moment between Portals, and gradually took care of himself.

  A week, then two, then four passed in a strange tangled dream. A dream, like Greyblade imagined full organics having. It was unpleasant and uncontrolled. He forgot where they were, was jolted into fearful unfamiliarity when the ship coalesced around him between hour-long Portal plunges, didn’t have time to remember by the time they dissolved again. Another week passed.

  Greyblade became aware of a sound inside the Nonsense Portals, even though there was no air or movement and he had no auditory system to pick it up. It was like a howl, a low, thin wind that was blowing through the empty shells of these, the urverse’s outermost yet still endless Dimensions. Whistling, lonesome, across the mouths of the Portals that pierced them. It was the sound of Nonsense, the great wind into which all ordered physics must inevitably dissolve. Must.

  And as Greyblade drifted through the everythingness, listening to the growing howl of the wind at the end of all worlds, he realised that he did understand what Çrom had meant. Once you’d been in a place where the wind roared, you would be able to hear it whispering in the quiet places of your heart. Forever.

  Çrom hadn’t remembered, and it was no wonder the Highwayman’s computer had failed to do so. The eternal human had simply let the wind lead him.

  “There is no coming back from this,” he said, and suddenly realised he was talking. His wicked snarl of teeth, his half-integrated jaw, felt thick and wet and shiny and ludicrous. He looked around, the elegant consoles slowly swimming back into familiarity. The threatening shapes didn’t change, only his perception of them.

  “Did you say something?” Çrom asked. The human was massaging his face.

  “No going back,” Greyblade said. He looked out of the viewscreen and saw the comforting grey of soft-space. They were pounding through Dimensions in more or less normal fashion again, the occasional shudder of an ordinary Portal and even more occasional flash of white-and-blue Highroads breaking the monotony. “I can hear it. The wind.”

  “It goes away,” Çrom said complacently. “It’s mostly when you’re near the ragged edge that you hear it. I like to think it’s the urverse telling you there’s nothing to see, you might as well go back and check out the actual urverse. It’s the voice of DaRah saying ‘Have I Not Made Enough Universes For You To Enjoy?’,” he chuckled.

  “And Aliens call the Corporation ‘the Tornado’,” Greyblade mumbled.

  “I also like to think that when Judgement Day comes, the wind will tighten in on this tiny little patch of Dimensions in the middle,” Çrom went on, “and the ten million Corporate Dimensions that make a pinprick in the middle of that … and the whole lot will just fly apart in a roaring gale of oblivion, carrying everything away to whatever comes next.”

  “And you’ll be there,” Greyblade said, feeling a stab of cold horror.

  “That’s why I hope ‘next’ will turn out to be ‘nothing’,” Çrom said. “Real, proper nothing. You still with us, Jank?”

  “Yes,” Jank replied. Greyblade had already seen her little red-black flame dancing over the Bharriom sparks. “Did we make it to the replica Dimension?”

  “Let’s find out,” Çrom said.

  It was still another couple of hours before he brought them out of relative speed, however. They sat, three mismatched treasure hunters, in silence for the most part.

  “How did the prophecy know the others were all destroyed?” Greyblade mused.

  “Hmm?” Çrom looked back.

  “The ten sisters,” Greyblade said. “It presupposes we wouldn’t find all twenty-six intact. That wasn’t subconscious information I already had, or any sort of data Cara-Magna could pick up. Nobody knew there were only nine left.”

  “Maybe if they’d all been at the first site, only nine would have agreed to come with you,” Skelliglyph suggested. “Or maybe you would have been so blinded by this so-called prophecy of yours, you only would have let nine come back. Or all twenty-six would have started out, but your subconscious insistence that there only be nine would have led to a bunch of awful tactical blunders and all but nine of them would have been destroyed.”

  “I get the idea.”

  “Or maybe only nine of them need to do anything,” Çrom went on blithely. “Did the prophecy happen to mention ‘and yea, verily, also there were seventeen other Godfangs just floating nearby, doing naught’?”

  “It didn’t say,” Greyblade chuckled.

  “Let’s hope there’s at least nine here, then,” Çrom said. He tapped and swept his hands at the console. “Or I’m in for a long walk.”

  They dropped out of soft-space into a blue-black and not-exactly-star-speckled sky, hanging over a frozen landscape dotted with thousand-kilometre spires and arches of glowing blue ice. As the Highwayman descended, the tortured plain expanded and flattened, and mountains and chasms emerged from the plains between the massive formations.

  And there they were.

  Rearing far above the mountain peaks, small only in comparison to the twisted spire of crystal at the base of which they stood, they didn’t look at all out of place in the ruined landscape. The ghostly wind, that Greyblade could only assume was the same here as it was in the original Dimension, had laid a scattering of ice around the bases of the great white pillars where they stood, melding them even more naturally into the scenery. Even so, their hulls were smooth and lustrous after all these years.

  They were all there. Nine of them, arrayed in an arc across the broken land like watchtowers. Rosedian’s lost fleet, lost no more.

  SISTERS

  “I have a question,” Jank spoke up while they hovered, watching the Godfangs and trying to decide on the best way to approach them.

  “Go ahead,” Greyblade invited.

  “Why do you need these platforms? I understand that they are mighty, and that your need is great,” Jank said. “But why not continue through the Nonsense Network until you found a Dimension where five hundred Godfangs waited for you? Or five million? Why not travel to a Dimension that just happens to contain the precise weapon or tool to complete your quest single-handedly?”

  Çrom sucked in a long, careful breath. “Well,” he said, “okay. That is a good question. There are two reasons. First, we couldn’t be sure the Nonsense Network would take us to the right Dimension. This was nicely on the route, but there’s no saying how far into the wind we’d have to go, or that there’d be a Nonsense Network connection. We could fetch up needing to fly along normal routes for billions of years to get to the right Di
mension – or spend decades in the Nonsense Network, which would be worse. Much longer immersed in the Nonsense Portals, and we’d lose our way and never come back. That’s not how I want to spend eternity.”

  “And even if we could get back out of the ragged edge with exactly what we needed, I don’t imagine we’d be allowed to bring it back into the Corporation,” Greyblade said with sudden realisation.

  Çrom nodded. “That’s the second reason,” he said. “We can bring back a fleet of defence platforms that Arbus Rosedian built in The Centre and then flew out here. We can’t go out into reiterative space and bring back five million Godfangs or a God-slaying thunder hammer or whatever, that only exist because an infinite number of universes will eventually throw pretty much anything up. The Relth, or Limbo Himself, would meet us at the Boundary and turn us away.”

  “A God-slaying thunder hammer would be pretty amazing though,” Greyblade remarked.

  “Oh, I’m not arguing it wouldn’t be amazing,” Çrom agreed. “Limbo just wouldn’t let us keep it.”

  “Ah yes,” Jank said, “your Ghååla of the infinite power. I suppose if I suggested you fly far enough into Nonsense to find a weapon capable of defying the Relth or this Limbo character, you’d default to the first reason for not doing so.”

  “I don’t know if even infinite iterations could throw up something that could defeat an Infinite,” Çrom said. “That sounds like a philosophical conundrum to me,” he glanced at Greyblade. “If anyone’s got a file on how to kill a Ghåålus, though, it’d be this guy,” he added, a sad look of hopeless curiosity on his face.

  “Nothing on file,” Greyblade reported. “Taking an Infinite off the board is a bit exotic even for me. They’re all responsible for some pretty basic laws of existence – at least in our little cluster of Dimensions. Killing one might unravel everything that works in the Corporation.”

  “Not that Beyond the Walls doesn’t have its own rugged, inscrutable charm,” Çrom added loyally.

  “I have heard stories,” Jank said. “Great empires built – and conquered – at the hands of terrible things unleashed by the Imp of the Seven Hells, and other great enemies. Things like the Worm, and worse. There are no Ghååla out here to stop the things from Nonsense and turn them back. The only Ghåålus who rules outside the Corporation is–”

  “We know,” Çrom said darkly. “We know who rules Beyond the Walls. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Imp used discoveries from the depths of Nonsense, things snatched from the teeth of the gale, to solidify His dominion. It’s one of many, many reasons I’m glad we didn’t have to go anywhere near the Seven Hells on this jaunt. But if that shit happens, it’s only allowed to fly out here. And the Imp has resources that would make navigating the Nonsense Network easier.”

  “I don’t think the Worm came from the Nonsense Network,” Greyblade pointed out. “Limbo and the Vultures didn’t stop the Cult from invading the Corporation.”

  “But they were ultimately pushed back out,” Çrom said. “Limbo likes Himself a good self-correcting problem. I doubt that would extend to letting us be smart alecks and lug back a Godkiller or a couple of million Category 9s that have only the most dubious technicality-based right to exist.”

  “Even if we could go that far out into … reiterative space,” Greyblade said.

  “Right. If we even knew where to begin looking. But hey, like we’ve talked about before, I’m sure there’s plenty of nasty stuff we could recruit to our cause in the trillions upon quintillions of normal Beyond the Walls Dimensions between the Boundary and the ragged edge. Limbo wouldn’t stop us – probably. But let’s keep in mind that Corporate powers attempting to make common cause with Aliens doesn’t generally end well.”

  “I’m an Alien,” Jank remarked.

  “You’re almost-dead,” Çrom replied. “I think that makes it okay,” he tapped at his console. “Are you getting Bharriom signatures from down there, Dora?” he asked.

  “Like you would not believe,” Dora replied.

  Çrom looked back at Greyblade again. “Should we just land, then?”

  Greyblade sat and looked out at the massive pale spikes, like curved stakes plunged into the frozen ground. He was reminded, unsettlingly, of the Monster of Barthanq. It seemed like centuries ago – and had in fact been upwards of a decade, subjectively speaking, even if a lot of it had passed in fugue and half of that had occurred backwards. The big curved translucent teeth sticking out of the plain … these looked similar, only they were fifty times bigger.

  “Let’s land,” he said, and entered a suggested landing pattern. “Take us down to the closest point to those three, and we’ll walk from there. Send the recognition message.”

  He’d prepared a greeting and acknowledgement for the Godfangs, comprising a summary of his position in the Pinian Brotherhood and his corresponding ally-status with the defence platforms. It also included a series of data packages on the history of the Pinian faith since the Godfangs’ departure, detailing some of the changes that had taken place and the series of events that had led the Highwayman here, asking for help.

  “Message away,” Çrom reported, and waved a hand. “Taking us down. If we’re about to get swatted, it was nice knowing you. I’ll relay your apologies and regrets to whoever’s still alive by the time I finally–”

  “Greyblade-dei af the Ladyhawk,” a voice suddenly spoke over the communicator, neither the husky murmur of Dora’s voice or the soft whisper of Jank. The language was archaic and littered with Ancient Pinian influence. The tone was stern, vaguely maternal. It may just have been the coldest voice Greyblade had ever heard. “En Sorré Çrom Skelliglyph af the brokyn stōn. I’aér Catygry 9 Deféns af Convoye Platfyrm Medolokai.”

  Greyblade and Çrom sat in silence for a moment, then Çrom leaned over his console.

  “Sending our secondary greeting package and confirmation of ally status, and request for reciprocation,” he said neutrally. “Also sharing latest lexicon data, although Xidh is pretty stable and I kind of like the ye olde speech patterns.”

  “‘Çrom Skelliglyph of the broken stone’?” Greyblade said softly while they waited. “What does that mean?”

  “No idea,” Çrom replied, although he was pale. “Not sure I like it, though. It might come from…” he hesitated, and Greyblade saw the same markers he’d seen all too many times when Çrom skirted around the edge of the teetering mountain of cards that were his memories. Nervousness, evasion, a touch of bitter humour, overlying fear. Fear of confronting the things in his past. Fear of himself. Fear of what might be balanced up there in the dark, ready to fall on him if the mountain collapsed.

  “From what?” Greyblade pressed, but not insistently. As familiar as he was with the signals, he was also familiar with how the dance went. He asked, and Çrom would test himself by deciding how much to answer. Whatever Greyblade said next would depend on that decision.

  If he didn’t ask, Çrom would start filling the gap with inane fabrications. The fact that a lot of them were probably true somehow made it worse.

  “The court of the Enslaved Gods,” Çrom said, and then another familiar tone entered his voice. Playful, self-deprecating. Overlying anxiety. Did this really happen? Am I insane? Will I ever find someone who will be able to tell me, or will I have to go on laughing it off forever? “Haven’t you got that story on file?”

  “I don’t think…” Greyblade paused. “Oh.”

  “‘Oh’,” Çrom agreed with a grin. “Right.”

  It was said that, after Nnal’s Dominion ended, the Ghåålus’s infamous court was torn down and burned by the righteous fury of a thousand deities. The stone foundation upon which it had stood, however, was too soaked in the blood and tears and humiliation of Gods to burn, and so it had lain, bare and blackened and cracked, as a monument in the ravaged capital of the urverse. Over the millennia it was broken up, divided and carried away to make a million more monuments, and now Greyblade believed there was only a small block l
eft as the centrepiece of a Dominion museum, and its dark story was just another myth. The broken stone, in a lot of places, was synonymous with the court of the Enslaved Gods, for those still too afraid to speak the institution’s name.

  But it was also said that, when he returned from his long punishment, Sorry Çrom had gone to the site where he had confronted Nnal. Where his eternity had begun. He’d returned to the broken stone, and he’d stepped upon it, and … well, at that point there were several versions of the story.

  “Was it true?” Greyblade asked. “Did you sit on the stone and laugh for a hundred years? Or did you lie down on the stone and sleep for a hundred years?”

  “I’m pretty sure I squatted on the stone and took a very satisfying shit,” Çrom said, “but it was a long time ago. Let’s just pretend I did something cool like that.”

  “Something cool like defecation on a war memorial?”

  “We can say I did it for a hundred years if it sounds more–”

  “So,” the Medolokai’s voice returned, just as cold and stern as before, but in modern Xidh, “you have come a long way seeking us, Burning Knight of Brutan, with your tidings of the challenges faced by the Brotherhood in these perilous times. Of the dangers you face and the kinship you call upon for aid. And now you stand before us bearing the dead and infected heart of the Nathñiata. You bring the shadow of Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph to our door. And you tell us lies, Sir Greyblade, Burning Knight of Brutan. You lie with every word. You lie to our deaths.”

  The communicator fell silent again.

  “Care to explain any of that?” Çrom asked. “Before we really do get swatted?”

  “I imagine she’s referring to Jank’s presence in the Bharriom,” Greyblade said. “Not sure what your shadow has to do with anything, except of course it sounds like the Medolokai’s heard of you. Congratulations.”

  “Really?” Çrom said flatly.

  “My lies, on the other hand,” Greyblade continued, “are between me and the Medolokai. Transmit this,” he patched into the comms system and waited for the tight-lipped human to give him a nod. “Howi, skata’i’Medolokai,” he said in Ancient Pinian, and continued in the same language while Çrom squinted at him. “I would use you as a weapon to protect the Pinian realms and deal a blow to our enemies, as is your purpose and mine. I will hold you to that purpose until there is less left of you than there is of the Nathñiata. If you have evolved beyond that purpose, slay us now and go back to gathering rimefrost on this lonely plain so far from the relevant urverse that you might as well not exist at all.”