Greyblade Read online

  Machine followed machine, enhancement followed enhancement. Command had been bred into him, but further levels were built on top, and so it was with all of the Knights. Training and programming and iterative construction testing blended together through what in normal beings would be called a childhood. The cocktails of drugs and hormones and genetic manipulants they were fed sent the Burning Knights’ organic components into overdrive, their regeneration and recovery systems – systems to rival those of the Ogres in many ways – turning them into feverish, misshapen things of sinew and excess extruded appendages and great gasping rings of perpetually-growing serrated Áea teeth.

  At a certain point in his development he was stabilised, his remaining growth nodes and glands were docked, and he was integrated and encased in the etched golden armour and black-spined helmet that would be his adult form – and the form in which he would remain, until death on the battlefield.

  He may have had the base physiology of a Lowland Elf – may even have had the teeth and the inner fire of a Lowland Elf – but he wasn’t one. The crest of black spines that decorated his helmet were a symbol of his heritage, but his peeled-bare, implant-dotted head had never grown spines of its own the way an adult Áea’s head did. His people were the Burning Knights of Brutan the Warrior. Greyblade was what he was, and he was nothing, if not a soldier.

  Nothing.

  When he was eleven years old, he was Knighted and mobilised. There was no more training, no trial runs, no ramp-up. He was placed immediately into command of a legion of Burning Knights and a Category 8 Convoy Defence Platform, a brutal and utilitarian carrier-warship named the Ladyhawk. And they went immediately onto active duty. Into battle. Wherever the revered Firstmades pointed them, they went. Whatever the revered Firstmades wanted dead, they killed.

  And when the revered Firstmades stopped caring, stopped giving orders, stopped doing anything much, the Burning Knights followed the orders of the Archangelic court.

  And when they were ordered to stand down, place themselves and their ship into storage in the caverns of Hell, and wait there until they were called upon to mobilise once more, the Burning Knights did that. Through the millennia of the exile, they slept in stasis. Until the Pinian Disciples returned, awakened them, pointed them at a new enemy, and set them back to work.

  The Burning Knights worked. And when they were finally forced out of their lives’ calling by politics and culture as relentless as it was unfathomable, they were left with less than nothing. Because for all his talk, Greyblade’s people didn’t retire. Not really. The concept had no meaning for them. They returned to the womb of their race, back to Barnalk Low, to oversee the growth of new Knights. Or, like Greyblade, they …

  They what?

  They looked for a final war. One that would actually finish the job of killing them. Because that was the only way the Burning Knights’ rules of grammar would allow their sentences to end.

  It surprised anyone who knew much about the process of creating a Burning Knight, that they had personalities at all. And rather irreverent ones, for the elite fighting force in a theocratic army. But the truth was simple, and it had been Brutan the Warrior, Pinian Second Disciple of bygone days, who had first put it to words. Not about the Knights, for Brutan predated them by a considerable span. But it was a philosophy they exemplified. It was why they took his name as their sigil.

  A mindless machine can hold perfect discipline in the palm of its metal hand, he’d said, adjusting for hundreds of millions of years of linguistic drift, and be routed by an army with wit and independent thought.

  But not too much.

  It was that spark of cynicism, that questioning nature, that put the Burning Knights a cut above other cyborg races like the Halarak, and a cut above pure machines like the Argothmod or the Char-bots. Not that the Char-bots, with their artificial minds and infinitely complex personality networks, were by any stretch unthinking machines. The lines between all living things were thoroughly blurred.

  This was, Greyblade had always considered, one of the main reasons he’d always gotten on so well with the Char-bots. A Char-bot was like a Burning Knight in which the problem of organic necessity had been solved, and its last scrap of flesh replaced with cool, efficient machinery. They did not hold perfect discipline in the palms of their hands. The palms of their hands were as likely to be filled with compression grenades or some other dirty trick. They were wily, and droll, and creative … and deadly.

  It was also why the thought of the weapons the humans had made, at the end of the Last War of Independence, so horrified him. Because humans were the wisdom of Brutan the Warrior’s adage, taken to its farthest-flung extreme. They were the final expression of the spectrum, of the army with wit and independent thought. And then they had distilled that expression into weapons as merciless and nightmarish as the Gods Themselves.

  Wit, and independent thought, and too much of both.

  Too much.

  STORMBURG’S POX

  “So what happens next?” Greyblade looked around. The media gear didn’t look like it had ever been used. There was a window, but it faced out into an unexciting street and an equally drab building opposite. “Sit here and complain about how back in our day, children respected their elders?”

  “Back in my day, children were smarmy sociopathic little cunts,” Gabriel opined. “But what happens next depends on you. Why are you here, Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk?” he frowned. “And where is the Ladyhawk, since you say she got out of here in one piece?”

  “She got out in one piece,” Greyblade said unwillingly, “but not a very healthy piece. And even if I’d been allowed to crew her and take her out, she wouldn’t have been allowed into the Human Territory Interdict.”

  “The Human Territory Interdict,” Gabriel snorted. “The folks here in Dumblertown call it Snowhome. Earth, that is. You know the story of Haffil Mograthea?”

  Greyblade chuckled. “The snowflake in Hell. Yes, that joke’s about thirty seconds younger than the designation of the Hathal Moga’threta, and that was long before they ever tried to enforce it. Still,” he gestured towards the window. “What good would the bitch have been here? Fly her in, start making impassioned speeches about unity and diversity from her upper deck?”

  “Again,” Gabriel replied, “that really depends on what you’re here for.”

  “Okay. Let me see if I can figure out some logical way to explain.”

  “Hey, you can be as illogical as you like,” Gabriel invited. “I’ve long since relinquished any right to straightforward answers in the face of my many failures to provide them myself. And logic moved out of this place centuries ago.”

  This place. Greyblade looked around the apartment again. “You live here during the day – some days, at least?” he asked. Gabriel nodded, eyes slightly narrowed. “So this property is sanctified,” he went on, “but it’s not a church.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Give up on churches?”

  “Is this getting us any closer to why you’re here?” Gabriel asked.

  “Maybe. You know I’ve worked with Higher Management more closely than any Angel in the Four Realms. Your adventures with the Pinians while they were lost on Earth notwithstanding.”

  “I’d hardly call them adventures,” Gabriel demurred. “Most of the time I had no idea who they were, let alone where. And when I did know, I was flapping around trying to bring them back out of their human disguises, and they really didn’t seem to want to come … it was a shambles.”

  “But you managed it,” Greyblade said, “sort of.”

  “Sort of,” Gabriel stressed.

  “With help from Stormburg of the Áea,” Greyblade insisted. “His theories formed the basis of veil physics as we know it, and allowed people out in real space to establish a connection with you, on Earth in the veiled sphere.”

  “Don’t even think about trying to get me to explain any of that,” Gabriel said with a hint of desperation. “Veil physics a
s we know it is the most rarefied load of psychomysticism since the Gospel of Purvis. Stormburg was a certifiable mad genius with one foot in Limbo and both hands stuck up to the elbow in the most unbelievable bullplop…”

  “I know,” Greyblade said. “And it’s all completely unverifiable anyway, since the veil was taken away and Earth and the seared realms were returned to their rightful places. The conditions required for any sort of study or testing of that layer of reality, or the boundary between this one and that one, or veil physics itself … well, they’re gone.”

  “And now, what Moskin Stormburg is mostly remembered for is an embarrassing illness that afflicts Áea-folk children,” Gabriel said.

  “Stormburg’s pox,” Greyblade nodded. “Funny you should mention that.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Well, it was sort of my starting point,” Greyblade said. “Tell me – what do you know about Stormburg’s pox?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Well, it’s a bit of a bogeyman, isn’t it? We got a lot of them during the war. Something about a virus that can take out Áea-folk?”

  “Sounds about right. What started out as a story about something that can affect Áea-folk children quickly got blown out of all proportion. It fed on the panic after the Slumsville Wind ate a significant portion of The Centre,” Greyblade took note of Gabriel’s sceptical frown. “Let me ask you this,” he went on. “You’ve been down here long enough. When you heard about Stormburg’s pox, what was the first thing that occurred to you?”

  “Weapon,” Gabriel said immediately.

  “Precisely. Something that could bring the Áea-folk down, just in case the war didn’t go the way they planned, or the Lowland Elves decided fuck the humans and their super-weapons, we’re going to take them on anyway. That whole idea ignored the fundamental truth of the connection between the Áea-folk and the Second Disciple, but since when did anybody care about that? It’s beyond the understanding of normal people, so of course all they saw was a potentially hostile force that might try to undermine human sovereignty regardless of the Pinians’ wishes.”

  “They say that when the Slumsville Wind swept The Centre, it was Áea-folk who survived it longest,” Gabriel said.

  “It’s true,” Greyblade confirmed, “although they still fell to it. They provided a lot of the medical starting points, though, for fighting the wind to a standstill.”

  “Is that what Stormburg’s pox is?” Gabriel asked. “Some sort of variant of the wind … ?”

  “No. It may be difficult to accept, since everybody’s still so jumpy about viral weapons like that, but this goes beyond humans just looking for a germ that might kill an alien species that already surrendered and left this world forever – an alien species, more to the point, which most humans don’t even believe exists anymore.”

  “Okay…” Gabriel said, in a tone that said he was waiting to be wowed.

  “Well, look,” Greyblade attempted. “These days, Stormburg and … and the other main players in the exile and veil physics … they’re a big deal, especially on Barnalk Low. Even you.”

  “Understandable,” Gabriel conceded. “I have a certain hairy charisma.”

  “But about the only reference to an ailment that Stormburg theorised about,” Greyblade insisted, “was a sort of psychological affliction that might affect practitioners of magic, or other people dependent on higher physics and wider urversal systems that the veil would cut off. In a sense, the Disciples came down with Stormburg’s pox when they went into human guise and forgot they were Disciples. Shit, you might say the Earth and the seared realms almost died of the pox, when they were cut off from the Power Plant. It was a malaise. Practically speaking, there was never a virus.”

  “So what about the kiddies?” Gabriel asked.

  “I don’t really know when that started or where it came from, since kids were never what you’d call my area, but whenever a child comes down with something that doesn’t fit a familiar profile, and maybe struggles to throw it within a day or two, parents cluck and call it Stormburg’s pox,” Greyblade said. “It’s not negative – it’s actually a form of affectionate celebration in Áea culture, glorifying the manic afflictions Stormburg was said to have had in his genius.”

  “That does sound typically Áea-folk,” Gabriel noted. “Clucking about an illness that would knock one of their children on his backside. Which most likely would mean it was fatal to a Molran, and probably be capable of wiping out a whole nation of humans – if it was a virus, and if it was cross-species communicable.”

  Greyblade nodded. Every alien species hardier than humans – and that was most of them, really – had maladies and afflictions of their own. That was nature. It was also nature that meant those maladies rarely posed any danger to other species … but it took logic to accept that. And logic had moved out of this place.

  “Well the point is,” he said, “Stormburg’s pox isn’t really what everyone thinks, and it’s absolutely not communicable, or even really classifiable – but it was a point to start.”

  “And does it have anything to do with why you’re here?” Gabriel squinted at Greyblade. “And I should warn you, if you say ‘yes and no’…”

  “It is at least somewhat relevant,” Greyblade said carefully. “Stormburg had a ton of theories about the formation and properties of the veil that hid Earth and the seared realms.”

  “Yes. I was inside it while he was working them all out,” Gabriel said patiently.

  “Yes, well, so was I,” Greyblade reminded him. “Except I and my legion were in storage, buried in a cave under Hell, or whatever it was called when it was spinning around in exile as a solar system ballworld.”

  “Lots of things spinning around in there,” Gabriel said, “some more deeply asleep than others. Some more helpful in keeping the prisoners alive than others, too,” he grimaced. “That came out more critical than I meant it to.”

  Greyblade waved this off. He was well aware of Gabriel’s experiences and the justifiable chip they had left on his shoulder. “The thing about Stormburg’s theories,” he tried again, “is that a lot of the things he predicted could only happen inside a field like the veil, and a lot of them were only applicable to Áea-folk. This was mostly because he was Áea-folk, so he had no other frame of reference for his thought experiments and attempted psychotropic explorations. Since there were no Áea-folk on Earth, Hell or Cursèd, it wasn’t really testable. This is as simple as I can make it,” he apologised. “There was a lot more detail about the deep-seated connections he was exploring, that would bring this side of the veil and that side into a more practical conjunction.”

  “But there were Elves in there,” Gabriel said. “You were just telling me. The Knights.”

  “Right,” Greyblade agreed, “we’re sort of Elves. Sort of. And that connection – and the possibility that there might be some sort of viral weapon in development that the humans might still be enraged enough to come after us with – was what set me to studying Stormburg’s work in the first place. This was on Barnalk, where most of us went to the Thalaar Institute, like I was saying. After our mobilisation to the Four Realms was ended and we went into retirement.”

  “Thalaar was Stormburg’s partner,” Gabriel said, “wasn’t she?”

  “Partner, friend, fellow theorist,” Greyblade nodded. “She returned to Barnalk Low after a while living on the Eden Road. She, or her family, founded the Institute and began work on continuing the Burning Knights, in some form or other.”

  “The Burning Knights speak to a romantic part of the Áea psyche,” Gabriel said. “I guess I can see how the idea of a weaponised Stormburg’s pox would have concerned them.”

  “Funnily enough, I learned pretty quickly that Stormburg’s pox wasn’t really an issue outside Snowhome,” Greyblade said. “It wasn’t that humans were researching how to wipe the Áea-folk out, although for all I know they could be, and if they are I’d certainly like to find out about it while I’m here and stop them if I possibly
can. But no,” he went on, “it wasn’t that. It was what else the humans were researching that brought me back. Humans, famously, go on testing and tweaking and experimenting and fooling around long after any sane species would stop.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Gabriel grunted.

  “I’ll try,” Greyblade replied seriously. “For example, did you know they went on studying the veil – after it was removed?” Gabriel frowned. “They’d collected data,” Greyblade went on. “I know they’d gathered some of their own, and you saw to it that most of that was destroyed long before the veil came down, but they kept picking at it. They might have accessed information from elsewhere, over the years. It had been going on for a long time, during and after the exile. I don’t know who’s responsible, but that’s another part of why I’m here. Whatever the humans are experimenting with, it goes beyond the weapons they made that ended the war. That wasn’t enough for them.”

  “Nothing’s ever enough for them,” Gabriel looked thoughtful. “What do you know?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to,” Greyblade admitted. “I’m not the visionary – or the madman – that Moskin Stormburg was. But when he first began to look into the veil, he used his innate species-connection to the Pinian Second Disciple. It was his way in, whether it was just a psychological crutch or not.”

  “And you have the same gift,” Gabriel remarked.

  “Hardly. I’m a Lowland Elf the way you’re a human.”