Greyblade Read online

  Greyblade

  Andrew Hindle

  Copyright © 2019 Andrew Hindle

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1717398847

  ISBN-13: 978-1717398840

  For Lillo

  1928 – 2018

  PART ONE: DUMBLERWORLD

  - - - Snowhome - - -

  - - - Drake - - -

  - - - Nay, not a word at all - - -

  PROLOGUE

  And then, on the last day of the war, the humans weaponised stupidity.

  - Sabine Aptidocles

  The transport ship descended straight through Heaven without stopping. Much like the previous time, and as he’d suspected, it didn’t seem like anyone up there was particularly interested in anyone headed down there. Earth had long since surpassed Hell and Cursèd as the least popular destination in the region.

  The people down there, on the other hand, were perversely interested in anyone coming from up there, or indeed from anywhere. Specifically, they were interested in squinting at them suspiciously until they began to ask themselves why they were even bothering. If this resulted in most of them giving up in disgust and going home, apparently this meant the system was working.

  “Name?”

  All the stops were the same as before. All the checks, with minor variations and an occasional added bit of creative indignity, were the same. The transport ship, a clunky old thing named the Jango B, had a broken initialiser that made a hilarious whaaa? sound when she started her landing rampdown, which she had done an irritating five times since he’d come aboard. It sounded like a young child, indignant at having to stop again just as they’d reached cruising speed.

  “Name?”

  It wasn’t as if they couldn’t have jumped directly from the Four Realms Portal to Earth in about ten minutes, including a nine-minute security scan and a bit of small talk. Greyblade knew this, because he’d done it … ooh, at least three thousand times. But direct jumps into Snowhome1 just didn’t happen anymore. Instead there was a cumbersome bound from the Portal into near-stellar regions of the Void Dimension, a couple of security and quarantine screenings, then a descent straight through Heaven, a bunch of irrelevant stops on the Eden Road at Axis Mundi, Petrovane and Fade, respectively, and then this.

  Last stop. Not the last checkpoint, because there were more of those … but last stop for the Jango B. There was no flying transport of even her grade from here on down. The only flying vessels allowed in Snowhome were strictly domestic.

  From here, you walked. Metaphorically speaking.

  “Yo, Lancelot. Name?”

  Greyblade turned his visor towards the inspector at the gangway. He hadn’t realised a new checkpoint had been added to the process of getting off the ship. “Hmm?”

  “Oh boy,” the human sitting in the shielded booth rolled her eyes. “What’s your name, you tin-plated old geezer?”

  “I think I heard someone say it was … Lancelot … ?” Greyblade said, exaggerating the querulous puzzlement in his voice.

  “Oh for Jalah’s … just put your permit on the sensor, muggo.”

  This was, Greyblade had to admit, almost a record number of mildly-insulting epithets in a five-second exchange, although he’d heard worse. That could be safely discounted as a statistical anomaly rather than any sign of improvement, however – things had definitely gone downhill here since his last visit.

  But he’d been expecting that. He obediently brought up his permit dataset onto the armoured surface of his palm, and pressed it to the sensor. “There you go.”

  “Greyblade, Gary,” the clerk read boredly off the display in front of her. Then she double-took. “‘Gary’?”

  “It’s my first name,” Greyblade confided. “Not many people know that. Well, to be entirely accurate, quite a lot of people know now because there have been so many checkpoints–”

  She squinted at him. “Are you causing trouble here, Gary?”

  “Pretty sure that’s up to you to decide,” Greyblade looked at the clerk’s name-pad, “Zagar.”

  “Nobody like a smartarse first thing in the morning.”

  “My apologies, officer,” Greyblade said. “I’m still operating on … Ninadhi time,” it took him a worrying moment to remember the name of his last port of call, at least on his official data. “The Ninadhites love a smartarse in the…” he paused again, “I want to say, late afternoon … ?”

  “I find that hard to believe,” the clerk said, but bleeped him through. “Butcher’s Cascade is where you head down from here, there’s a magnetic shuttle.”

  “Yes,” Greyblade said politely, “I’ve been here before.”

  This seemed to annoy the clerk more. “Yeah, I know, that’s marked here – along with a note about your cooperation in an investigation last time as a condition for your departure and your permits for a return trip.”

  “I was very cooperative.”

  “What you may not know, Gary, is that you need to be check-marked here, then counter-marked when you board your shuttle. Otherwise, there’s no way through the checkpoints.”

  “Oh,” Greyblade said. “You’re right, officer – I’m not in possession of all the facts. The last time I visited, there were no stops along the staircase.”

  “Mm,” the clerk was mollified by his deference. “Yeah, the Milkies have really lost numbers. They conceded a lot of staircase territory, so now we have a proper screening infrastructure in place.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Greyblade said, sincerely. He was a little concerned about what a proper screening infrastructure might look like if the last system had been inadequate for human needs, but was prepared to tolerate it if it meant the Milkies were in decline.

  But then, if they were, why did the general feel of the place still seem to have deteriorated? Had the evacuations really been successful, or had the Milkies been replaced with something worse?

  Greyblade nodded to the clerk as courteously as he could bring himself to, and moved on through into the echoing space of the transfer hall.

  He called the relevant information about the new screening system onto his helmet display as he clanked through the port. It beat looking at his surroundings in detail. He paid just enough attention to confirm that the place was still a dump, that there were even more safety and surveillance systems scattered about, that that goddamn ‘Char-bot statue’ was still up there on its pedestal in the middle of the concourse, and that he wasn’t about to fall afoul of pedestrians or officials or additional security measures. Otherwise, he turned his senses inwards.

  Greyblade was a Burning Knight. That meant he was technically humanoid although his physiology was Áea-folk-based rather than human – Áeaoid, then, even more technically – and he was comprehensively cybernetically enhanced. The antique-styled suit of armour that encased him was not defence, or clothing, although it served as both. It was his body and skin.

  Gauntlets provided tactile and interface data. Helmet and visor provided audio-visual and communications, as well as any number of other tactical requirements. Inside his tough casing, there wasn’t a lot left of his organic self at all – and hadn’t been since he’d taken his holy vows and become a Knight in the first place. Certainly nothing anyone would particularly enjoy looking at, he’d be the first to admit. He took solace in the Burning Knights’ informal motto: Nisplodetha Kantoi. Beautiful on the outside.

  The suit’s intricately-etched golden surface, tapering visor and thick plume of black quills were mere decorations on a formidably advanced war machine. Or so it had been, once. These days, he was not only retired. He was outmoded.

  Well, he thought, sometimes even an old soldier can strike a decisive blow. Sometimes it takes an old soldier. One who doesn’t have anything left to lose.

  Yes
, he’d been a Burning Knight, once. Now he was just an antique, a relic. A monster of the ancient world, wrapped in a golden suit.

  His data-trawl didn’t reveal anything particularly surprising about the remainder of the journey. Once he was cleared and departed from this step, the shuttle would stop regularly through the descent and the passengers would be scanned and verified and authenticated and maybe even searched. Some of the step-nations, most notably the near-vacuum ones in the central region of the gulf, didn’t have checkpoints … but these were balanced out by the ones that had two or even three. He’d likely be travelling for another day or so. All for a journey that could be made in seconds.

  He stopped at the edge of the concourse and turned back and forth slowly, considering the exits. Most of his head and body movement was superfluous, since his helmet accorded him 365° vision, but his physiological mannerisms were baked in. He saw a direct access to the shuttle bay, a more circuitous route through a series of shops and services he didn’t need, and a tourist route that apparently extended around the exterior wall to offer ‘spectacular views’ and ‘unforgettable memories’.

  He wondered, idly, what a forgettable memory might be like. One that had failed the basic prerequisite for being a memory, surely. Just a synapse firing randomly against the inside of the skull, and not even leaving a scorch mark.

  All of these routes terminated at the counter-marking checkpoint the clerk had mentioned, so Greyblade took the tourists’ path. It was scenery, after all, that he might not get another chance to see.

  It might not exist much longer.

  The ‘spectacular view’ he clanked quietly alongside for several blessedly solitary minutes consisted mostly of thin, whipping mist that his helmet faithfully informed him was known as basodiscal substrative suspension – basically the cloud you got on the higher stairs of the Eden Road and the underside of Heaven’s atmoplanic envelope. Aside from that gloomy cloak, there was nothing but the yawning gulf of Earth’s uppermost stratoplane. The flatworld below was invisible except as a milky shadow, making the abyss seem paradoxically vaster by providing the false perspective of a floor.

  Heaven was visible in the light of the late evening sun, but since the sun was somewhere beneath and behind the Eden Road, most of what he could see was obscured by shadow. The occasional vessel skimmed by along Heaven’s soft-cragged underside, a microscopic pilot fish flitting beneath a deep-sea leviathan.

  The tourist path was fully sealed, of course – it had to be, because the air was too thin for humans to breathe – and cleverly cantilevered to overhang empty space. The Eden Road, a great helix of mountain-range-sized stone slabs forming a staircase from Heaven to Earth, Earth to Hell, Hell to Cursèd, and Cursèd to the Rooftop of Castle Void, was visible if you looked almost straight down. At least the arc of steps one turn down could be made out. The rest were obscured by distance, the aforementioned steps, and more of that basodiscal substrative suspension.

  Still, it was a long way. A lot of checkpoints, Greyblade reflected glumly.

  He looked out.

  That way, looking eastwards into the gap between Heaven and Earth, was almost a nice view. It would be nicer a turn or two down, where the atmoplane was still thinner and the perpetual clouds and condensation didn’t obscure everything. Still, you could see the corkscrew shadow of the Eden Road attenuating slowly along the underside of Heaven as the sun sank towards the edge of Earth. You could see the misty ‘floor’ that was Earth extending in the same direction, almost seeming to curve upwards like a chalice to meet the overhanging mass of the realm above. And you could see – if you were fortunate enough to have machine-enhanced vision – the strip of deeper indigo beyond the edges of both worlds, where the darkness of Castle space below met the darkness of the stellar gulf above.

  He stood for a short time, watching the gloom deepen as the sun set. There was nothing else visible out there, although as the darkness encroached he saw more little ships by their winking lights. None of them ventured far from the underbelly of Heaven, because that was what the treaties demanded. There was nothing big. Nothing approaching, not visibly. He was, as agreed, alone for this part of the journey. If the new arrivals appeared and things turned sour – and oh, they most certainly would turn sour, and fast – he didn’t want to be trapped on the stairs. Timing was critical, and he had to be in place when the final stage began.

  From this distance, it was easy to be fooled into thinking everything was peaceful, even beautiful. Well, it was beautiful. But it was easy to believe that it was beautiful all the way down.

  Nisplodetha Kantoi. Beautiful on the outside.

  He turned along the causeway and continued to the shuttle bay.

  When he reached the checkpoint where his counter-marking was to take place, and put his hand on the sensor as curtly instructed, he was rather surprised to find the security guard recognised him.

  “You again,” the human man said with neither pleasure nor rancour. “Couldn’t get enough, eh?”

  Greyblade inclined his visored head politely. “Every decade or so I just get a hankering to have my personal data intrusively searched and my motives and loyalties questioned, and nobody does it quite like humans.”

  This provoked a spark of amused interest, although Greyblade would almost have preferred indignation. Either way, a spark could not hope to survive on such a glassy sea of world-weariness. “That’s funny.”

  “I’m just surprised anyone remembered me,” Greyblade admitted. “I know that my departure last time was meant to be–”

  “Oh, we didn’t remember you,” the guard said, and tapped the computer interface in front of him. “Osrai did.”

  “Ah,” Greyblade leaned in a little. “Hello, Osrai.”

  “No,” the guard said stonily. “Just no.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t get many Knights,” the human went on, “since you ran away from the War. You here for the fortieth reunion this time, or what?” he went on in his original bored tone before Greyblade could retort.

  “No,” Greyblade replied stiffly, “just a coincidence.”

  “Well then, happy coincidence.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Drill hasn’t changed, old timer. Any weapons? You had a sword last time, where’s that?”

  “No sword,” he said. “Too much trouble.”

  The human made an unsatisfied noise and tapped at the console. “Any other weapons you planning on surprising us with?”

  There wasn’t much of a face left un-integrated behind Greyblade’s gleaming golden visor. But what there was, smiled.

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  The transport ship Lacrimæ descended straight through Heaven without stopping. It didn’t seem like anybody had any interest in passengers and freight destined for Earth. In fact, there was a distinct but impersonal feeling of noses being held and eyes being averted as they flew on by.

  For Greyblade – he’d dropped the ‘Sir’ at his first entrance interview, and by the fourth he was giving serious consideration to replacing it altogether, perhaps with something like ‘Gordon’ or ‘Gary’ – the first real sign that he was heading into something unexpected was that the transport was barely quarter-full. And the Lacrimæ was not a large transport. It didn’t look like a lot of people were going to Earth. Not many non-humans were visiting, and not many humans were returning. Which meant that not many humans were leaving in the first place.

  “Hello,” he said, as he strolled off the ship and stopped at the nearest security checkpoint. He gave the officer’s gun a look of revulsion that obviously the man didn’t see because Greyblade’s face was concealed behind his visor. For that matter, his face … well, it probably wouldn’t have done the guard much good if he could see it. Greyblade’s face and skull had long since been adjusted to work more efficiently with the helmet systems, to mould into the metal shell that was his skin. And even without that consideration, his base physiology was Áea. Not a species humans found visually
reassuring, at the best of times.

  The security officer grunted, gave Greyblade a narrow look – knowing what the guns were, Greyblade couldn’t fault the guy for lowering a hand to the fat bronze barrel and cradling it with a strange mixture of deliberation and reassurance – then turned his attention to the data the retired Knight had volunteered to the system.

  “Greyblade,” he read. “Just … Greyblade? What Greyblade? Greyblade who?”

  “It’s just Greyblade,” Greyblade replied patiently. “Single name incorporating identity, rank, status, social–”

  “So, what, you’re the only one?” the guard asked sceptically. “Like Molinée?”

  “I don’t know who that is,” Greyblade said, at the same time as his visor helpfully revealed Molinée to be a bard of some kind. “But I am definitely the only one.”

  “Uh huh,” the guard said, losing interest. “You carrying any weapons?”

  Greyblade avoided another glance at the officer’s gun, a glance the officer still wouldn’t notice but which might affect the way Greyblade was behaving in this situation. “Only my sword,” he said, unclasping the battered, faithful old blade from his thigh sheath and holding it up, slowly and deliberately. It was, he reflected, surprisingly difficult to avoid looking threatening while holding up a sword.

  “Your sword?” the guard said incredulously. “Is it … what sort of ordnance does it have?”

  “Just an edge, a tip, and another edge on the opposite side,” he said, turning it back and forth by way of demonstration. “It’s ceremonial, made from the same material as the hull of the Ladyhawk, my old ship. Star-diamond and triple-point carbon. It’s tough. Otherwise, it’s just a pointy stick.”

  “One pointy stick, check. Run it through the scanner,” the officer said, pointing at the bulky set of analytical machinery. “Other weapons?”