“The virus will also take out the suppressor fields on the Interdict ships,” Ludi added. “Allowing us to jump.”
Greyblade nodded slowly, then tilted his helmet again. “Not to harp on about it, but the sun will be coming up before long,” he remarked.
“No it won’t,” Gabriel smiled, and rummaged in his pocket for the communicator he’d been using to speak with Lucifer. “But it’s time.”
“Alright,” Galatine said, and gave Gabriel a nod. “Tell her to initiate the fountain placements.”
Gabriel tapped on the communicator, and got a curt flicker of acknowledgement from Lucifer’s staging outpost in the Overhell. “They’re away.”
“Okay,” Galatine said, “no turning back now, I guess,” he leaned over the table and picked Jank up. “We’ll do this with the Exorcist,” he explained, leading them back out of the kitchen. “If I’ve estimated the load requirements correctly, this will use all the different parts of the system – my system, that is,” he added, “not the parts connected to the Godfangs and Greyblade’s sword. So a reasonable practice run, even if it’s not exactly perfect.”
“And is Jank close enough to a paper God that you can use an adapter, or whatever the metaphor was you were using last time we talked about this?” Gabriel asked.
“You mean using a system specially constructed for one God to dispose of another?” Galatine asked. “No offence, Jank.”
“I have been disposed of before,” Jank replied blandly.
“Yes, it should be fine,” Galatine smiled, but Gabriel didn’t need any extraordinary senses to tell him the man was terrified. “Jank’s divine essence will be drawn out into the power network, blocked in by the seals, and then vented through the fountains. She’s only a God in such a technical way, She really couldn’t be better suited to our purposes.”
“What an urverse we live in,” Greyblade said. “You might almost be forgiven for thinking the Ghååla have a sense of humour.”
“Almost,” Galatine echoed. Gabriel cleared his throat and looked pointedly down at his hairy timepiece-lacking wrist. “It’s a much cleaner and smaller-scale test than the final run, anyway, so it may not even use all the fountains,” the human continued quickly, and gave them an apologetic look as he placed the glowing white bar of Bharriom on top of the huge bronze block of the Exorcist. “To be honest, I don’t know exactly how this will go – just that if we can’t kill Jank, we might as well quit right now.”
“Except it’s too late to,” Gabriel wiggled the communicator before dropping it back in his pocket.
“Right,” Galatine said queasily.
They all turned to look at the white crystal.
“Are you sure about this, Jank?” Greyblade asked.
“I was part of the Falling Damned for years beyond measure,” Jank replied. “I did terrible things. Were they worse than the things done to me, to make me what I am today? Perhaps. That seems unimportant now. Let this be an end. It is the end I wish. I hope it is of use to you. That is all anyone can hope, of their deaths. Is it not?”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Greyblade said, put his hand on the gaudy extended hilt of his sword, and bowed his head. “Goodbye, Jank. The Pinian Brotherhood thanks you.”
“Good,” Jank replied. Galatine went over to the wall and made some adjustments to the fittings, then pulled out his pocket interface and looked a bit sheepish. It was perhaps the least impressive Godslayer in the history of deicide, Gabriel reflected. “Will it hurt?” Jank added, a trace of apprehension entering Her voice.
“No,” Galatine said, and Gabriel could tell he was once again simply ad-libbing a response to a question he’d been trying to avoid asking himself. “Good luck, Jank.”
There was a chorus of farewells from the humans, and Frogsalt, and the bemused Ogres in the doorway. Galatine tapped a command.
“Ah, it hurts!” Jank suddenly shrieked discordantly. Then chuckled. “I was jo–”
The Bharriom flickered white, purple, white … and then went completely inert, matte grey as the concrete of the floor. Galatine released a long, shaky breath, and resumed tapping away on his interface.
“It worked,” he said.
“I didn’t feel anything,” Frogsalt said.
“Hm?” Galatine looked up. “Oh, well I don’t suppose … Jank wasn’t exactly … I was sort of expecting Her to not really make a splash in the system. Or I was hoping She wouldn’t. Like I said, if She’d caused the network problems, we’d really be in trouble.”
“And now the clock is ticking,” Greyblade put in delicately.
“Osrai already sent the nolovirus out,” Galatine nodded. “The Interdict field ships should be going offline and Çrom should be making his move…”
Everyone noticed the shift in the quality of the light, no matter how minor it was in the artificially-lit warehouse with its tiny windows and grubby skylights. The faint glow of pre-dawn outside had suddenly been replaced by full night once again.
The change in the light was noticeable, on a deep but somehow instinctive level. But for Gabriel – and, he saw, Frogsalt – it was monumental. Even if it was to be fleeting, it was nothing short of extraordinary.
The sun, and with it the ever-present crawling feeling that pinned the Angels to holy ground by day, had vanished. Whisked away by an immortal madman flying an antique Fhaste with an outsized and supercharged relative field generator.
“That’s your cue,” Gabriel said, and pulled a pre-programmed light-speed transfer strip from his robe pocket. It was already powered up and had been programmed with the Knight’s unique parameters. “Good luck, Kisser.”
“Goodbye, Gabriel – and good luck to you,” Greyblade said, and turned his head. “Biggie, Tuesday. Look after them. Galatine. Thank you for your service. Ludi, Magna. The Brotherhood should be grateful to have you. Mehapmi–”
“Frogsalt,” Frog blurted.
“Oh, enough,” Gabriel growled, and slapped the strip onto Greyblade’s chest. With his other hand he reached down and clicked his communicator again. “Initiate.”
Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk, Commander of the Burning Knights of Brutan the Warrior, vanished with a little crump of inrushing air.
DEICIDE
Greyblade popped back into solidity, the luminal transfer program reassembling him about ten centimetres above the grass on a gentle slope. He landed, took a single stumbling step, then straightened with a soft groan.
“Ugh,” he muttered, as his compensators did their best to reassure the rest of him that he was all still in one piece and what was a few atoms here or there between friends, anyway. “I hate that.”
Still, he conceded to himself as he looked around, if all went well he wasn’t going to have to feel like shit for very long.
It was dark, but that didn’t really affect his sensors. The gentle hills and fields of the Aganéan farmlands extended around him, and he spared a moment to regret what would have to happen to at least this small pocket in the centre of the continent. With any luck the damage would be minimal, and the population was small here – mostly livestock.
A few seconds later, with almost-simultaneous pop sounds that really didn’t seem appropriate to the situation, two Ogres dropped onto the grass. Brute Hungry gave a low grunt, and Colossal Colossal Pete dropped his club and scrubbed vigorously at his face before picking the huge weapon back up and looking around.
“Alright, boys?” Greyblade asked them.
“Yup,” Pete replied. They didn’t have compensators, but they had something even better. Every cell in their bodies was a compensator, in a sense. Telling them how to hold together. Or, more accurately, just telling them to do it. Explaining how or why to an Ogre was a waste of time, and Greyblade didn’t imagine it was any different at the cellular level.
There was a deep rumble and Greyblade felt the ground shake, maybe even subside a little beneath him. That, although he couldn’t see them from this distance over the hilly terrain, would
be the pair of Imperium hub-rings from the Eden Road above and below Earth, transported to this location by more of the luminal transfer devices. Each ring was a couple of hundred metres tall and a half-dozen kilometres in diameter, they should have rematerialised stacked on top of one another, and Greyblade and the Ogres ought to be right in the centre. And that ought to be the last of Lucifer’s dirty little luminal tricks–
No more than a tenth of a second after the distant landing of the hub segments, Greyblade felt the familiar internal shift of flipping into soft-space. It wasn’t something he’d ever expected to experience while standing in a field. The sky above them paled to a drab grey void he’d seen through the viewscreens of a thousand starships.
He stood and enjoyed the show – not to mention the strange feeling of gratitude that, even at this late stage of his life, the urverse was still capable of putting new oddities in his path.
The Earth was riddled with structures and artefacts and networks from as far back as the earliest days of the flatworld’s construction. Galatine Gazmouth, with help from Osrai and Lucifer, had turned some of it into an engine. Using field specs from the Godfangs and the raw power of human souls damned by their own kind, the Earth generated a bubble around itself and directly between the rapidly-closing gaps left by the luminal-transferred hub rings.
And just like that, it was whisked out of the Four Realms and tossed into near-space at the upper edge of the Face of the Deep.
The relative field only held for about twelve seconds. That was all it needed. The sky flickered – black-grey-black-grey-black-grey-blue – for a nauseating half-second as the generator gasped its last and the field collapsed. Added to Greyblade’s existing queasiness it was particularly unwelcome, and he was sure it had been less pleasant still for the humans, but he didn’t suppose he had any right to expect a world cobbled together into a starship to have been cobbled together into a good starship.
The Earth dropped back into reality, the souls trapped inside the living guns were swept into Limbo, the gravity bounced to near-nominal for a moment before arcing back up, and the sun appeared in the sky with shocking suddenness.
It wasn’t perfectly executed. Aside from the stuttering field collapse, the gravity wasn’t quite Centre-normal. It was close, but it wasn’t exact … and it had a strange thready quality that suggested null pockets and eventual breakdown would likely occur unless a bit of work was put into it. But that was far in the future, and the humans could probably count themselves lucky if they or their world lasted that long. Greyblade also calculated that they’d lost perhaps eight hours, at least if you asked a sundial. The sun was now directly overhead.
He hoped someone added to the story of Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph one day, and told the tale of how he’d stolen the sun. Çrom deserved a better legend than the one he had.
He hoped–
The air in front of Greyblade and the Ogres split in a snarling shadow that registered on the outer limits of his sensor range as an expression of high-level unphysics. God-space uncurled and ejected Karl the Bloody-Handed onto the grass, right on cue.
Karl was a Damorak death-God, and He looked it. Whether the worshippers had evolved towards the form of their most celebrated deity; or whether the worship of trillions upon trillions of Damoraks and sub-Damoraks had altered the God’s own projected morphology; or even whether the myths and propaganda were true and Karl had been a Damorak before being elevated by Leviathan, chief Lapgod of Nnal … it didn’t really matter. The point was, Karl the Bloody-Handed was a Damorak from the swirling hem of His robe to the tattered top of His hood, from the pit of darkness within the cowl lit by two blazing blue eyes to the spitting, blinding plasma-lightning of His long, fire-dripping fingers.
He was also in excess of twelve feet tall, looming above Greyblade and even the Ogres and looking down on them in disdain that was unmistakable despite His unseen face.
“Sir Greyblade of the–” Karl had time to say in a voice like the vengeful progenitor of fire itself, before both Brute Hungry and Colossal Colossal Pete bellowed and charged down the hill towards Him.
Greyblade was a little surprised at the degree of their enthusiasm, although on reflection he realised he oughtn’t have been. He’d seen Ogres fight before. Furthermore, Ogres were made to fight Damoraks, and size was apparently considered a minor issue. For the past decade, the TrollCagers had been referring to Karl the Bloody-Handed as ‘the cheesecake’ simply to stop the Ogres from going berserk right there in the warehouse.
Even so, when Pete took his club in a two-handed grip and swung it at Karl’s cloak-swathed knees with enough force to demolish a building, and Hungry actually launched himself into the air with all four limbs and took the Damorak God at head-height with his tusk-lined maw gaping wide, even Greyblade was a little taken aback.
Karl didn’t stop talking because He was in any way prevented from doing so, of course. He simply paused, a sigh visible if not audible in His bearing, and let the Ogres batter at Him.
“Really now,” He eventually said, “this is undignified.”
Greyblade shrugged, using the gesture to loosen his shoulders, and drew his sword.
“Damn-rax!” Hungry roared in what sounded a lot like joy. He circled tightly to get another run at the towering deity, looking like nothing so much as a giant excited puppy for a second, and hurled a clod of soil and grass into Karl’s hood before leaping a second time.
“I heard,” Karl said, His voice becoming effortlessly audible over the bellowing and thumping of the Ogres, “that you had brought Arbus Rosedian back from the dead, along with his lost fleet of Godfangs. And that you were going to tap into the threads of power and influence I had apparently planted in this world, and use Me to cut the Earth from the Four Realms like a cancerous organ.”
“Stan’ still, Damn-rax,” Pete rumbled menacingly. Greyblade was unable to prevent a wince from crossing his visored face as the Ogre wound up and punched Karl in the robes somewhat south of midriff. Çrom would have been proud, he thought, even though the punch – which would have put a hole in the Ladyhawk’s hull – had no discernible effect on the God.
Greyblade didn’t speak, just took a balanced step towards the fast-moving dance of shaggy, muscular Ogre bodies and the dark, serene figure standing head and shoulders above them.
“Well, you cut the Earth free, right enough,” Karl went on, “and you certainly seem to have brought three Godfangs with you. The only unfortunate thing is – oh now really,” He said in mild irritation, as Brute Hungry grasped His robes in massive fists and either tried to climb Him or head-butt Him. Or possibly both. Karl finally reached down, closed His boiling blue-white claws over the heads of the two Ogres, and closed His fists.
There was a flat electric crack, and Pete and Hungry vanished from the chests up. The remains of their huge bodies fell to the churned grass, blackened and smoking. Pete’s arm, still holding his club, twitched a couple of times and then stilled.
Greyblade took another step.
“The unfortunate thing,” Karl continued, “is that Earth is now all alone, far from home, and your clever attempt to fool your allies into believing you used Me has resulted in this world also being completely unarmed. The wonderful guns that we poked and prodded and hinted and goaded the afrj towards, until finally their own beloved Pinians abandoned them … gone.”
Another step. Still Greyblade said nothing.
“Even more unfortunately,” Karl said, “those Godfangs have stayed behind to keep Heaven from crashing into Hell. Did you really think the famous Convoy Defence Platforms of Arbus Rosedian would help you wage your silly little dead-man’s war, Sir Greyblade? Did you really think their loyalty would lie anywhere but with the Firstmades?”
Greyblade closed the gap between himself and the Damorak God. He didn’t come much higher than Karl’s waist, but he bent his knees and leapt, at the same time pulling back and thrusting his sword in an overhand blow that would have been clumsy if not for his augmen
ted joints and musculature. The sword went into the darkness at the base of Karl’s hood, and sank into the Damorak God’s chest as though Greyblade was stabbing a sandbag.
Again, Karl sighed. “Was that supposed to hurt Me, Sir Greyblade?”
Greyblade didn’t have any dying declaration. He wanted it that way. Let the final words he spoke in this sphere be alright, boys? It was as good an epitaph as any. With one arm, he pulled himself up until he was face-to-face with Karl the Bloody-Handed. With his free hand he reached up and opened his visor. He locked his eyes with the brilliant blue plasma slits of Karl’s derisive stare.
It was easy to bare his teeth. He didn’t have any lips.
The final six Godfangs crash-dropped out of relative speed right on top of them.
It was said, when God drew the Riddlespawn from its Tower, He simply clapped His hands together by the Tower’s walls. It was a tall tale, and like most tall tales it didn’t illustrate much except the fact that Gods could do simply preposterous things.
But then, sometimes, so could mortals.
It was called a Sorontethian overwhelm, and it was caused by the sudden cohabitation of too many highly-charged particles in a single volume of reality. The science of it was just as impossible as the magic of a God clapping His hands, but the result was a momentary imbalance between reality and unreality. It went beyond the simple fission and fusion of atoms in conflict, beyond energy and radiation. When objects merged on the threshold between the real world and Limbo, as occurred at the relative speed boundary … it caused a very special kind of vacuum. It also caused a destructive cancellation event beyond anything reality could effectively generate on its own.
In the nanosecond before the fury of unreality was unleashed, the six Godfangs and the next-generation soul storage structure they’d developed intersected perfectly over Karl the Bloody-Handed, and drew Him out of unreality like a fish from water. And since a God’s manifestation in reality was usually little more than a solid but tiny extrusion of the unreal whole – the tip of an iceberg at best – like a fish drawn from water Karl squirmed and flopped and gasped in the unaccustomed environment.
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