Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  But only for a nanosecond.

  With unreality sealed behind Him by the Angelic Prison, all Karl could do was extend His divine essence into the deadly containment network Galatine Gazmouth had woven out of the Earth’s great, rusty old machinery. The power web took Him in, and the fountains blasted into life like seventy thousand wood chippers.

  And the moment that happened, Karl the Bloody-Handed died. It just took Him a while to realise it.

  Which, when you think about it, is kind of what it means to be mortal.

  EPILOGUE

  - - - I - - -

  - - - II - - -

  - - - III - - -

  I

  (SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE DETROIT)

  The Ghorennes family nest had been abandoned since the war, and even before that had been a difficult place to get to. That was part of the reason it had been a last refuge on Darling’s Day.

  Long before the war, the nest – and the nearby city of Detroit – had been devastated by a nuclear weapon strike. The helpful and highly advanced Heaven-folk, Molren, Gróbs and other aliens who flocked to Earth in the aftermath of the unFlutter and the occupation had repaired the damage and somehow even cleansed the fallout from the area, but there was still something about the caves that encouraged trespassers to move along.

  Still, for the Ghorennes Dragon clan, it had been home since before the Earth was exiled. And it was where the Drake’s egg had been laid, even if she’d hatched thousands of kilometres away in Old Meganesia. That made it her home.

  And it was to the old nest that she returned, slowly and painfully, through the chasms and chambers of the Overhell and the forgotten cracks and passages that Lucifer had helped her to find, and finally through tunnels she dug herself with flame and claw. Carrying her hoard painstakingly with her, piece by piece and chamber by chamber, burying it and sealing it and uncovering it as she went so that it was never completely exposed to potential discovery. It was a combination of meticulous compulsion and pure inborn Dragon hoarding instinct.

  It took a long time. Occasionally she stopped, and fed raw materials into the battered old HarvCorp beef-printer, fired it up using the power cells she’d brought to keep her trove operational, and ate. More often than not she went hungry, to conserve her supplies. By the time she reached the nest, the disaster above had run its course and things were beginning to stabilise.

  She remained unaware, and uncaring, about what had happened for some time. She knew the world had been relocated, because the gravity shattered sickeningly and the air thinned in the Overhell. While it didn’t entirely give way to vacuum, she was forced to dig and climb closer to the surface. She was also aware, in another Dragon-instinct way, that something had happened to the stone through which she was pulling herself. The taste of soul-pollution, already familiar to her, seemed to lessen – and at the same time change, and become more oppressive. And there were shakings and subsidences, as if some massive seismic event was reverberating across the disc of the world. Still, she dug on.

  At the same time, she realised later, Galatine’s nolovirus had its way with the humans’ information networks. Osrai, she assumed in a vague way, would be able to protect itself … but everything else seemed to be afflicted. It was fortunate that her own network, packed up and in-transit as it was, was a closed system when the semi-sentient program swept over the world. She wondered if perhaps the nolovirus worked more efficiently than Galatine had expected. By the time she finally got settled and began to send out careful feelers, she found to her surprise that almost the entirety of electronically stored human knowledge had been wiped out. And all of the devices it had been stored on; technology had collapsed, and although it hadn’t thrust humanity all the way back to pre-industrial levels it had necessitated a great deal of rebuilding and rethinking the whole concept of data and communications, and in the meantime the general populace was left at very low levels of tech availability. And regretting, she suspected, the day they’d decided abandoning hard copy for so much of their data was a good idea.

  They were calling it the Bucolic Plague.

  The Drake paid the world outside her nest little attention. She’d intended to call on Galatine, and hold him to his promise, but he was too far away and too much had happened. He may have even been dead, she realised – either slain in the disasters caused by his great final work, or taken by old age and infirmity in the years and decades that had followed, while she painstakingly burrowed and carried her possessions from cave to cave. And besides, she found she didn’t want to involve the humans in this. She didn’t want to involve anyone. Not yet. Maybe, in time, she would call on the Gunsmith if he still lived. And if her need became great.

  After making sure she had all the energy she needed – a relatively simple matter, when one could dig into magma pockets and hook up conduits to forgotten subterranean power network channels – and collected a stockpile of carbon and other materials for her printer, she sealed herself off securely. She re-established her information network, reawakened her trove, and made at least nodding contact with Osrai. The spirit in the machine was shaken by what had happened, and was not capable of communicating in specific terms, but it was willing and able to shield her from the lingering effects of the nolovirus.

  The Drake didn’t really care what had befallen Osrai. The only thing from the outside world that interested her was the Ark Project.

  She’d always suspected that something of the project had survived her fiery escape from Warakurna Mine, if only because Fagin had survived. After returning to her Sprawling Adelbairn nest and sealing herself up safely, she’d set about recovering as much of the data as she could find. It hadn’t been much – Fagin was old and wily, and had moved his research operation regularly and discreetly – but it had been a start. Upon reaching the Ghorennes nest she was able to seek out and find a little more in pockets left behind by the Bucolic Plague, and of course she had access to the most vital of the source material – her own flesh and blood.

  She continued to work, as obsessively as only a Dragon can. When she isolated and refined her own DNA sample, she fed it into the HarvCorp machine and recklessly dialled its parameters backwards and forwards across its already-strained, age-tattered templates.

  And there, in her old family nest, down in the darkness and the silence, the last Dragon began making monsters.

  II

  (AGANÉA)

  When the Earth was exiled to the edge of space, the Orbon State research facility in Aganéa was practically demolished. In fact, Aganéa itself was devastated beyond repair. Beyond belief.

  It would be a grave injustice to say that the intricate, brilliant ten-year plan of Galatine Gazmouth was a failure. On the whole, and considering all the variables, it achieved what he’d set out to achieve with staggering success. The living guns were reduced to so many heavy bronze paperweights. The harvested souls of the dead63 were released from their torment. The pollution caused by the vile practice remained, but it had been greatly lessened and neatly contained for the foreseeable future.

  Most importantly of all, the Earth had been successfully relocated and Karl the Bloody-Handed had been slain.

  But some things could arguably have been double-checked, and maybe improved upon. The nolovirus, for example, was far more effective than either Galatine or Osrai had intended, breeding and reacting and evolving in the arcane systems of Earth’s data maze. It meant that, among other things, the humans’ capacity to deal with their world’s structural and gravitational issues, not to mention the irregularities in its ferocious little sun, was somewhat stunted.

  Still, it wasn’t a complete catastrophe and the Bucolic Plague at least ensured that nobody was thinking about how to reinvent guns – or anything else – powered by human souls.

  One element of the plan that had gone dramatically wrong, however, was Aganéa.

  It could have been a lot worse. If the calculations shared and performed by Galatine and the Category 9s had been even slightly off, and
if the massive Imperium rings hadn’t been dropped right around the epicentre of the event to act as a sort of firebreak or shock absorber, the entire continent could have been carved out of the disc and the rest would simply have shattered and rained back down – eventually – onto the Three Realms and the Rooftop. So yes, it could have been a lot worse.

  Usually, when objects came out of soft-space overlapping one another, they just smashed. Or exploded. Or did whatever their respective physics happened to demand they do. If they intersected perfectly, however – and this was practically unheard-of, barely possible even for the extraordinary creations of Arbus Rosedian – it caused a serious explosion. It caused a phenomenon so nasty, in fact, that it would be misleading to even refer to it as an ‘explosion’. It was a maelstrom, a cataclysm, boiling with exotic unreal radiation straight out of Limbo’s nightmares. And this was not a figure of speech.

  Weapons, as the concept was generally understood, really had nothing on the phenomenon. While the actual devices of war carried by the platforms might have borne more pure destructive power, the results of the Sorontethian overwhelm were in many ways more devastating. The phenomenon just wasn’t particularly useful as a sustainable alternative to ordnance.

  Mutation, environmental collapse, and a fundamental warping of physics took place in the epicentre and in great concentric waves around the Sorontethian overwhelm. Millions perished, and millions – regrettably – did not. Not immediately.

  And the Aganéa event wasn’t merely a perfect intersect. It was also an event in which a dark God had been extracted from Limbo, nailed to the floor of reality, and murdered. Karl the Bloody-Handed might have been dead, but Aganéa was where His body had been left to rot. And this, unfortunately, wasn’t a figure of speech either.

  Over a year after the calamity an independent salvage outfit, sporting heavy protective gear despite the fact that Orbon State was on the very outer edge of the churning nightmare that had replaced the majority of the continent, descended into a sealed section of the wrecked lab and established an airlock and base-camp habitat. They were searching, as so many other groups around the world were searching, for active technology and intact data that had survived the Bucolic Plague and might help humanity get back on its feet.

  When they went into the lab, what they found instead was an incubator. The machine’s exterior was charred and blackened by a fire that the lab’s internal suppressants hadn’t quite managed to kill in time, but it was still functional. The foetus inside was suspended at full term, apparently healthy despite the long months of storage and neglect. They extracted him – a perfect baby boy – stabilised him, and carried him back to base camp. When the salvage operation was complete, and otherwise a total bust, they took him with them back to the more or less intact nation from whence they’d come.

  They named him Orbon, for the ruined town under which they’d found him; and Darko, for the only decipherable part of the incubator’s label.

  III

  (THE SACRED CITY)

  After little more than a generation, the Aganéa event was enshrined in myth. The devastation that consumed the nation became a monster unto itself, and the removal of Earth from between Heaven and Hell and its ejection into the lonesome darkness of space became a new chapter in the sorry tale of the human race.

  They called it the Greater Fall of Man, because instead of Adam and Eve being cast from Eden and into a cruel world outside of God’s grace, the world had been cast from the shadow of Heaven.

  Some people said that when the Destarion, the Elevator, reappeared in the sky far above the Earth, it was because she had been sent there. That she had approached her three sisters where they floated around the newly-reconnected Eden Road between Heaven and Hell, and that they had spurned her. That, weeping, she had returned to the only place she had ever found acceptance. Cast out together, forever.

  Some people said, in the years and centuries following the Greater Fall of Man, that Karl’s Scream had survived intact after His death. It was said that when the six warrior sisters of Cara-Magna Áqui’s prophecy had done battle with the God, they had been able to keep a cell, a tiny eye in the storm, in the centre of the trap that they had made. A tiny pocket that held the shining Tear of the Caretaker. It was said that the sisters had preserved it, so that it could do its dreadful job. And that, one day long after the Fall, two invincible beasts had walked into the heart of Aganéa, and scaled the Imperium walls encircling the malignant heart of the continent, and had carried the Scream out again.

  People said a lot of things in the years that were to come, the years that Sir Greyblade and the Gunsmith and the others had given to the world. Most of the things they said were contradictory, and almost all of them were irretrievable bullplop of the most watery and fibre-deficient order.

  On the day that Galatine Gazmouth moved the world; on the day that Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph stole the sun; on the day that Aganéa burned; on the day that Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk faced Karl the Bloody-Handed with sword drawn and cast Him into His Angelic Prison … on that day, the Archangel Gabriel stood on the outskirts of Vanning and looked up at the bright blue vault of the sky. The soft granularity of Heaven’s ceiling was gone. The sky looked the same as it had when Earth had been under the veil. The Milky Way Cultists would probably have approved.

  Gabriel squinted at the sun, and smiled at the thought of his brother stealing it away, bringing it here to the edge of space, where it could shine down on a free and unburdened Earth once more.

  What a heist. What a caper.

  Gabriel’s smile turned into a grimace as he felt the darkness swell and shift inside him, great cold fingers that extended and dug into every corner of his being.

  Soon, he knew, Çrom would come looking for him. He would come with hand outstretched for the payment Gabriel had promised him, for his crucial aid in the salvation of humanity’s bruised and shrivelled soul.

  The Ferry Man would come for his payment, and Gabriel would give it … and it would be the greatest act of cruelty he had ever performed. So cruel, he could not do it as the Archangel Gabriel. Some things simply could not be borne in a body glorified by God’s grace.

  Pay him nothing even then.

  He clenched his teeth, flexed his gnarled hands slowly … and stepped over the Sacred City limits, onto unsanctified ground.

  Gabriel stepped out of Vanning.

  And Oræl planted his feet in the desert, and looked up at the sun once more, and wept.

  THE END

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  So here we are at the end of another giant tome. I appreciate you going to the effort – it was, as always, a lot of fun for me to write and I can only hope it was fun to read. I will segue from this, with natural grace, to thanking my editors.

  Zachary, Kristiina, Janica – thank you so much for your tireless efforts in reading thoroughly, and then offering constructive comments, for this whole monster. Not to mention the support you provided this demanding and insecure author by finishing the book! And against such challenges as work, home renovation, moving house, and dealing with a pair of kids (and an older, fatter, hairier kid). Share all those responsibilities out amongst yourselves as you see fit, with a huge dose of my personal gratitude to add as gravy. Timo, as well, my thanks for your efforts, and also to Christina for your ongoing and earnest attempts to hack some sort of sense and consistency out of this ever-expanding narrative. So much to do, so little time, I understand completely. And I could not have finished this project without the feedback, the great comments and the excellent questions from each of you. Thank you.

  To my cover artist Gabriel, as always, a huge debt of thanks is in order. He, too, was in the middle of moving – to another country, no less – and he still managed to create a wonderful artist’s impression of Sir Greyblade watching the lost Godfangs mobilise above the strange pinnacles of Wyrm. Or pretty-much-exactly-Wyrm, to be precise.

  I also want to thank my tech savvy fellow indie author, Lucas
Thorn, in advance for helping me put the whole e-book together for Kindle, which seems to be where most of the sales are happening these days. Thank you for wrestling this beast, and its thousand footnotes, into submission. If any of the rest of you want to thank him, look him up on Amazon and check out some of this books. They’re fun to read and one day I’ll finally catch up to him. He’s my literary greyhound bunny and since I have now created a conceptual link between “Lucas Thorn” and “bunny”, I think we’re done here.

  I won’t go on at much length, I hope, on the meta-side of this story. There was a lot going on here for readers of Bad Cow (its preceding volume in the trilogy) and The Final Fall of Man series (the trilogy’s distant, distant chronological sequel) to pick up on and enjoy. My science fiction travelled through a sprawling galaxy, at which point my sci-fi / fantasy stepped back and narrowed to focus on Earth, and has now zoomed out still further to take in the entire turning urverse, from The Centre to the howling winds at the far extremities of reiterative Nonsense space. If you’re not a little bit dizzy, there’s something wrong – probably with both of us.

  While I hate to boast about my obscure references, I also like to mention some of them out of fairness to the original material from which I lifted them. They deserve acknowledgement, I feel, and where but an author’s note can such things really be?

  Fun fact: the computer on board the Charon / Highwayman was nicknamed Dora, not after the Explorer but after a character (and a ship’s computer system) in Robert Heinlein’s novel Time Enough for Love, a novel that just happens to be centred around Lazarus Long, the oldest human in the world. Dora’s commissioned name, Zed, was a considerably less classical reference – Zed was the name of the prison computer in the early ’90s movie Fortress. Fortress was set in 2017, which just adds hilarity value as far as I’m concerned.