Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  “About time,” Skelliglyph said, rising to his feet and approaching the bars. “I guess Gabe’s indisposed until sundown?”

  Magna nodded. “Çrom,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again. It would have been nice to know you were back. We have … many questions.”

  “It would have been nice to tell you I was back,” Çrom grimaced. “It’s been a nightmare. Have they told you about their so-called ‘bail’ arrangement?” he didn’t wait for Ed to stop stammering. “They’ll let me out of here if I give them my ship. A Fhaste original worth more than this entire staircase. Can you imagine it?”

  Magna glanced at Ed, who rallied admirably.

  “The bail price is set at a high level due to the severity of the crime,” he said, “and the vessel was the only collateral he could offer. My understanding is that even that took some legal juggling, because the ship was used in the crime itself.”

  “I assume the crime you refer to is breaching the Interdict,” Magna said, and turned from Ed to Çrom. “Why did you try to fly in here? I thought you were supposed to send word from Axis Mundi.”

  “Axis Mundi turned out to be a little too hot for my liking,” Çrom replied, “owing to the manner of my departure with our … mutual friend.”

  “Where is our mutual friend?” Magna asked. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Çrom ignored her loftily. “I still didn’t mean to wind up here – I’m actually meant to be waiting in the Playground to meet back up with him,” he said, “but there was a complication. I lost attitude control and wound up coming through the Interdict – well more sort of just brushing it, really – around this step’s level. Except out near the edge of the worlds, of course, where the Interdict is … but did you know the jurisdiction of each step extends in a disc-shaped volume encompassing its plane of altitude? I didn’t, and I was frankly bored to find out. Bit of a stroke of luck, though. That you all happened to be up here doing … whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “Trying to talk our Milky Way movement friends into evacuating the Eden Road before it becomes unstable,” Magna said. There was little harm in saying so in front of Ed, since local law enforcement had been involved in their earnest attempts to reach the inhabitants of this step. “Can we maybe get some sort of time-frame on that now? When, and for that matter why, were you supposed to be meeting back up with our friend?”

  “I’d love to discuss all that,” Çrom said, “but not from behind bars, I’m afraid.”

  “So they caught you, locked you up on charges of crimes against sovereignty, and you refused to give them your ship as bail,” Magna summarised.

  “Look, maybe if they were going to execute me I’d consider the Highwayman a reasonable trade–”

  “Execution isn’t technically off the table, inmate,” Ed said severely.

  Çrom snorted.

  “I don’t understand,” Magna admitted. “I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t bail a sort of deposit to make sure you don’t run off? I mean, it would be hard to do that from here anyway, especially without a ship, but–”

  “What they like to gloss over is that yes, the bail value might be handed back to me after the trial,” Çrom said, “except I definitely did breach the Interdict and it’s anyone’s guess what these jack-booted thugs would do with me and my possessions after a guilty verdict–”

  “These are uggs,” Ed protested, looking down at his woolly, albeit sturdy and obviously steel-capped, boots.

  “Yeah, but ugg-booted thugs are a bit too sympathetic for my liking.”

  “I’m pretty sure they’d give your ship back,” Magna said. “The standard penalty for breach of Interdict is censure from the Hathal Moga’threta Advisory Council, and a lifetime banishment from Earth.”

  “A hundred-year banishment, but we quibble,” Çrom waved a hand. “The thing is, they’re obligated to give me back the value, and that’s dependent on finding a legitimate valuer. Best case scenario, they thank me for my cooperation and I leave here with a pocket full of cash and they keep my ship. Not happening.”

  “I’d have to look into the legality of that,” Magna said, looking at Ed. Ed looked back at her blankly. Either this was a bit of police corruption taking place at a level so far above him it might as well be on the next step, or he was a bluffing master.

  “So then I heard them whispering about under-no-circumstances-Angels-because-they-don’t-exist-don’t-be-silly-that-would-be-crazy,” Çrom went on, “and got them to contact you. Happy new year, by the way. It’s a shame my dear brother couldn’t make it in person…”

  “If you’re not going to part with your ship, how are you expecting us to bail you out?” Magna asked. She glanced at Ed. “What’s the yachut value we’re talking about here?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand,” Ed replied.

  “You see?” Çrom waved his hands emphatically. “You see? That wouldn’t cover the hourly price of hiring a special guy to lick-clean the Highwayman’s exhaust vents.”

  “What are you expecting us to do?” Magna repeated. “The court doesn’t generally walk around with that sort of cash.”

  “My brother’s good for it,” Çrom said firmly. “He’s old money. And when I say ‘old’, I mean ‘stuffed in a mattress somewhere’.”

  Magna sighed. “I’ll contact Gabriel.”

  Ed led her out of the lockup and showed her to a private compartment where she could use the communicator she’d brought with her.

  “We’ll need to establish a legal family connection,” Ed told her in a worried tone as he ushered her into the compartment.

  “That might be complicated,” Magna said, “but we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Magna,” the Archangel’s gruff voice answered as soon as she’d established a connection.

  “It’s Çrom alright,” Magna said. “Apparently he slipped up in an attempt to avoid landing at Axis Mundi, and brushed the Interdict and had his ship impounded. They’re asking three quarters of a million yachut equivalent in bail for crimes against sovereignty, and Çrom refuses to put his ship up to cover it, which is why they’ve held him for so long.”

  “Filius canis,” Gabriel muttered. “Alright, as much as I hate to say it, he was right to dig in his heels. There’s no way a ship used to breach the Interdict could be used as bail. What were they going to do, give it back to him after sentencing? Or just give him some money and walk away with a priceless vintage spacecraft?”

  “Ed did say it took some legal juggling,” Magna admitted.

  “I bet it did. Alright,” Gabriel said, “these guys are shonky so I don’t see any reason not to follow their example. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re still in talks with the Elevator People but we’ve got authorisation from the Advisory Council to hand out transit permissions – tickets, basically, entitling Interdict residents to … what was it, Koz?” he paused for a moment, listening to Kozura. “To roam and ramble free of care, all ‘round the Four Realms and betwixt. Yeah. It’s an antique bit of legal fluffery, but it holds up. Whether the Milkies use the permissions or not is going to be up to them, but the important thing is they have a nominal cash value. We can pay Çrom’s bail with them, kill two birds with one stone. After the trial, he takes his ship and we leave the permissions as a charitable donation.”

  “There’s a couple of hundred thousand Milkies on the stairs,” Magna said, “and a whole lot of random others. Will the permissions cover that many?”

  “Oh yeah,” Gabriel said, “and then some. We’re talking really nominal yachut value here. I’ll arrange to have one and a half million of the things transferred to the office and we can come and sign him out this evening. Did they give any indication of when the trial would be?”

  “No,” Magna replied, “and they also said they’d need to establish a legal family connection.”

  “That’s not going to be a problem,” Gabriel said dryly.

  “You can legally prove Çrom Skelliglyph is your brother?”
Magna said in surprise. “I thought that whole thing–”

  “No, not that,” Gabriel replied with an incredibly smug chuckle. “As it happens, we’ve got his wife here.”

  THE LAST DEMON

  Mercibald Fagin had no intention of hiding the Earth behind a second veil. Maybe once, years ago, when he’d assembled all the data and figured out that it was possible to recreate the cloaking field, if not the conversion of flatworlds into solar system … maybe then, he would have considered it. But that was a long time ago. The idea seemed almost quaint now.

  If he was being honest, he might also have backed the humans who intended to shut Earth off from the rest of the urverse. Sure, it was a classic example of letting the panicky apes run for a little too long, but he could see the benefits. Lending his support to frightened humans had always paid off for him in the past. And it would get him safely out of reach of the Second Disciple. He’d heard from too many sources that he was still a marked man – something of an honour, he supposed, to be on a Firstmade’s personal hit list … but one he would happily relinquish.

  It made him wish he’d invested more time and effort into enjoying himself, back in the last couple of hundred years of the Flutter. It might have been worth the punishment if he had put more thought into the crime. But had he really believed, after so many centuries of Earth under the veil, that those girls had truly been the Pinian Disciples, hiding even from themselves as ordinary human beings?

  No, he hadn’t believed. Not really.

  He put a hand casually in his jacket pocket and fingered the smooth bronze lighter, as he often did when he reflected on his situation with the ostensible landlords of this world. It was wearying. Even when the Pinians had ‘turned their backs’ and ‘left the humans to take care of themselves’, he felt the weight of that vendetta. The proverbial sword hanging above his head cast a darker shadow every day. And he knew that Ildar had an eternity to wait.

  Ash Vandemar is still in here, he remembered the soft words, the baking heat. Oh no, he had no need of Hell. And she still remembers, and she still has a plan for you.

  Mercibald strolled through the plush offices and corridors of the ninety-fifth floor, nodding to the executives hard at work at their calls and meetings and virtual hook-ups and whatever else. Many of them didn’t even recognise him, but those who did made their respect obvious.

  No, he had no intention of returning Earth to its exile, for all that it might suit his immediate self-serving instinct. Whatever his industrious opponents might be planning, he was sure it would work out for him as long as he was prepared. It would be nice to know a bit more about what they were trying to do – the scraps he was getting from the Archangelic court and the Advisory Council were all highly dubious and fragmented – but whatever it was, he was confident that it wouldn’t impact his work.

  And he had powerful protectors, even now. Despite what Ildar might have thought, there were some things against which even she could not stand. Of course, even so, it didn’t hurt to have multiple fall-back positions …

  Mercibald stepped into an elevator. This was an executive elevator that only started on the ninety-fifth floor, and required a series of security clearances to activate. He provided them, the doors closed, and he ascended an unspecified number of floors towards the CEO’s penthouse. There was little of interest to him in the large set of apartments, although on his last visit he had amused himself by temporarily making himself at home up there and reassigning the CEO as a domestic servant – and, afterwards, tasking him with a very unpleasant cleanup job. All terribly juvenile, but it paid to occasionally reassert oneself. It kept you young, and your subjects … informed.

  On this occasion it was the floors in between that were of interest to him.

  He’d been amused to learn that luring the Pinians or even their God to Earth, and trapping them here, had apparently been among his plans. How daring the fictitious Mercibald Fagin was! Ah well, that was part of the price one paid for building a legend around oneself. In truth, the very idea of making more enemies among the eternal, invincible and intractable segment of immortal high society simply exhausted him. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he began to seriously ask himself if the veil research wasn’t the best answer for all concerned.

  He wasn’t completely insane, and he didn’t think he was a fool – although he had certainly made his share of terrible mistakes. Further attempts to pick a fight with the Pinians would offend both sides of the Firstmade Brotherhood, Pinian and Darking. The rulers of Castle Void had made it very clear to him during his post-unFlutter period of hiding that they didn’t like him much more than their opposite numbers did, and that he shouldn’t get ideas above his station. This was fine with Mercibald. Mercibald liked the ideas that were abundant at or even slightly below his station. They were perfectly acceptable ideas.

  You still don’t understand, do you?

  He stepped out into the clean, low-lit laboratory.

  The last remaining data and material from the Ark Project had been gathered here and, using a series of proxy organisations and virtual links, they had continued their development work. Every so often, for security reasons, the whole lot was packed up and moved to a new location, where the work would continue. This was due to happen in a few days, but Mercibald liked to be hands-on. Once it was complete, the work would be nothing short of amazing.

  When a Dragon became human – when a Dragon that actually knew what it was doing became human – it became a perfect human. It was an illusion, of course, a disguise, not followed down to the cellular level in any real sense, let alone the genetic level. But it was something they had been perfecting for a long time, and that skill was encoded somewhere. And in theory, once you had the DNA in stable format … ahh, in theory …

  A human made to those specifications would be flawless. No junk DNA, no mutations, just perfect consistency. Optimised skeletal and muscular structures. Organs, blood, brains … nothing but perfect human, all the way through. Almost – but not quite – glorified, indeed.

  Early days, early days.

  Mercibald opened the sample container. It was constructed like a refrigerator, but the opening door sent a blast of near-furnace heat into his face. One did not refrigerate Dragon matter. He pulled out one of the metal tubes – the heat was just short of searing, on his fingertips as well as the expensive linen of his suit – and smiled at the label.

  It was supposed to read Anthroform Drako, but in his initial haste and admittedly shaken condition after the relocation from Warakurna he’d mistyped the second word. He’d left it that way, and allowed it to become official terminology. The new word created by the error was amusing, and served to remind him of the price to be paid for overconfidence.

  He turned the tube over in his hands, holding it until the pain from the heat plateaued and became white nervous system noise.

  It was entirely possible that he was the last of his kind. Certainly he was the only one left on Earth or the seared realms at the current time, and when – or even if – the higher authorities would see fit to diabolise another human was anyone’s guess. And sooner or later he would succumb to the same thing that eventually consumed all Demons. The darkness through which he’d swum so confidently as a youth would finally reach in and claim him. No amount of transplants, replacements, surgeries or latter-day leechcraft would keep him pure, when the rot began to take hold. Nothing available to the formidable minds and technology of human medicine. If he was going to replace tainted parts of himself, they would have to be as perfect as the diabolised parts he was shedding.

  He smiled, and put the sample back into its storage furnace.

  It would be an awful shame, he reflected, if his own infirmity were to rob Ildar of her long-awaited vengeance.

  A LITTLE BIT GOD

  Almost two months after his capture and less than an hour after his trial, Gabriel met Çrom at the doors of the little habitat-block that doubled as town hall and courthouse. Çrom
wasted no time but pulled his breather into position, marched straight up to Gabriel and punched him square in the face.

  “Ow,” he exclaimed angrily, and wrung his hand. “Stupid thick caveman skull and also you’re an Archangel.”

  “You done?” Gabriel asked.

  “Where is she?”

  “She left,” Gabriel replied, “as soon as she’d signed off on the official paperwork. You’re lucky she was even here. They never would have accepted the brother story.”

  “How long have you known?” Çrom demanded. “That she was alive. How long, Gabriel?”

  “I found out after you’d left,” he said, “and before you got back, and for the record I still wouldn’t have told you about her if she hadn’t volunteered to present her credentials as your spouse.”

  “I feel like I should punch you again.”

  “Go ahead,” Gabriel said, “but maybe it would be a more productive use of your time and mine if we went to the impound to get your ship. You’ve got exactly ten hours to get out of the Interdict and never return.”

  “Tempting.”

  “Try to sneak back in a little more circumspectly next time,” Gabriel advised. “The Archangelic court will take an interest next time the Highwayman shows up in the Four Realms.”

  “The Archangelic court wouldn’t know a circle-jerk from a clusterfuck,” Çrom opined, but followed Gabriel around the side of the sealed hab and down the street. “Where is she, Gabe?” he asked in a more conciliatory tone.

  “She went back down to Earth,” Gabriel said gruffly. “It wasn’t up to you or me to make her stay. When she’s ready to see you, nothing will stop her. In the meantime, we all have jobs to do.”

  “But–”

  “She went her own way before any of this,” Gabriel reminded him. “You know why. I know you blame yourself for you both getting caught on opposite sides of the veil, and–”

  “And all the years after the veil came down, she was – what, just out there?” Çrom asked bitterly. “Avoiding me?”