Greyblade Read online

  “I choose to take that as a compliment.”

  “You should,” Greyblade chuckled. “After the Burning Knights pulled out of Snowhome, after I retired, I went with them to the Thalaar Institute and I did a bit of research. Maybe I was worried about the pox. Maybe I was just trying out this whole ‘research’ malarkey to see if it would keep me occupied until my armour finally seized up.”

  “Since it apparently launched you right back into a semi-secret mission of some sort, I’m going to guess it did not keep you occupied,” Gabriel remarked.

  Greyblade spread his hands. “Some people can retire. Others have to go out at the top of their game. And when your game has included some of the spectacular bullshit I’ve done in my life, perhaps you can appreciate just how challenging it’s going to be to go out at the top of it,” they both laughed, then Greyblade went on more sombrely. “At the Institute, I was able to isolate certain … signals, certain telltales that showed when someone was messing with veil theory. Symptoms, if you’ll excuse the overburdened metaphor, of Stormburg’s pox.”

  “It’s just overburdened enough to work for something that’s vague by definition,” Gabriel allowed.

  “Either way, I’m afraid I can’t explain it any better without boring you,” Greyblade admitted. “Power Plant feed levels, things like that. All the Pinian realms have logs, data collection satellites that feed into the central administration, and that gets shared with places like the Institute.

  “I didn’t find out if anyone was messing around with weaponising any sort of virus, and what I did find out was enough to convince me that was a dead end anyway … but I figured out how to tell if someone was messing around with Stormburg’s real ideas.”

  “And you picked up some of these telltales coming from Earth?” Gabriel frowned.

  “I picked up all of those telltales coming from Earth.”

  “Can you isolate them more than world-level?”

  “No,” Greyblade admitted. “I can’t even say for sure what sort of ‘messing around’ we’re talking about here. That’s sort of the problem.”

  “Why would humans be studying the veil?” Gabriel asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Greyblade replied in surprise.

  Gabriel favoured him with another patient look. “Pretend it isn’t.”

  “Well, look at the whole Snowhome thing. The Human Territory Interdict. This Dumblertown of theirs. Ever since the end of the Last War of Independence, humans have been isolating themselves more and more thoroughly. An increasing majority of them don’t even believe non-human sentients ever existed. Shit, Gabriel, they have a cult up on the stairs that believe this whole thing is a conspiracy and they still live in the Milky Way galaxy on the surface of a ballworld.”

  “Are you telling me,” Gabriel grated, “that after all this, humans are planning on putting the veil back and vanishing again? For good this time?”

  “You tell me,” Greyblade said. “You’ve been here a long time. Is there anything humans like sticking their heads up more than their own arseholes?”

  “Beginning to wish you hadn’t darkened my doorstep, Kisser.”

  “Believe me, I wish I hadn’t too,” Greyblade said, “because it gets worse,” he didn’t wait for Gabriel to ask, and the Archangel seemed disinclined to speak at that point anyway. “It wasn’t just the veil that made the exile work. If the humans aren’t able to also turn Earth and the seared realms back into a bunch of ballworlds and make a stellar-scale hydrogen power source for them to orbit and provide all the perfectly-balanced differentials they had the first time around…”

  “Jalah,” Gabriel murmured softly.

  “Just making their world disappear – and maybe Hell and Cursèd again too – won’t do a damn thing to help humanity on anything approaching a permanent basis,” Greyblade confirmed. “They’ll starve, suffocate, and choke to death on their own effluence like they damn near did last time.”

  THE DRAKE

  Gabriel sat for a while and contemplated this new information. Except Greyblade was fairly sure that it wasn’t new information for the Archangel, not really – and that was what the shaggy old immortal was contemplating.

  “Alright,” Gabriel said eventually, taking a long, unsteady breath. “So. You’ve found out that humans are still tinkering with the veil, which was put in place last time by the Infinites Themselves, and that they may be working on some way of recreating the exile. Or at least the veil part of the exile, and without the sustainability equations there’s a significant risk of absolute bloody disaster.”

  “That’s about it,” Greyblade said. There was more, but he had to be cautious. And he wasn’t sure how many more revelations the Archangel could take at this point.

  “And what if the humans are also working on figuring out those sustainability equations?” Gabriel asked.

  “They very well might be,” Greyblade said. “Never underestimate a human. But…” he leaned forward. “Have you ever known all humans to agree on something? For that matter, has anyone talked to you, or any of your Dumblertown pals, about this being in the works? Seems like it would have been nice to give anyone who doesn’t want to be permanently cut off from the rest of the urverse a chance to evacuate before they throw the switch.”

  Gabriel stared back at Greyblade stonily for a long moment. “They might be centuries away from a breakthrough,” he said finally. “Plenty of time to make those sorts of arrangements. Shit, Dumblertown’s population is dwindling by the year as people leave and never bother coming back. In time, the evacuation will take care of itself.”

  Greyblade didn’t say what he wanted to say, which was that humans rarely, if ever, embraced projects that would not yield results within one generation. The idea of doing something for their great-great-great-grandchildren was as alien to them as a Grób or a Molran was. Humans just didn’t seem to like their offspring, for all that they were fiercely devoted to them on a small-scale family basis.

  If they weren’t going to see it end, the humans at work on Earth now would not have even begun. Which meant that whatever devilry they were planning with their ill-gotten veil theory, it was going to play out in the next fifty to seventy-five years, at the outside.

  He didn’t say any of that, though, because – again – he was fairly sure Gabriel was aware of it.

  “Are you going to evacuate, Gabriel?” he asked instead, pointedly. “Or are you going back under with them? Maybe forever? Gabriel’s famous plan for his precious human race, take two?”

  “Damn it all,” Gabriel growled, beginning to sound desperate, “if humans were playing with fire, the Vultures would have come.”

  Greyblade shook his head. “The Vultures don’t spread their wings for this sort of fire. This is the sort of fire that burns your hands down to the stumps, or burns your house down, but doesn’t threaten the neighbourhood.”

  “The Four Realms are the seat of power for a Firstmade religion … that’s the neighbourhood,” Gabriel objected.

  “Not by Relth standards,” Greyblade said grimly. “This is more what you’d call a self-correcting infraction.”

  “So what was your plan?” Gabriel demanded. “Come marching down here, start swinging that sword of yours around until the monkeys start behaving?”

  “I was going to find out more before swinging anything around,” Greyblade said dryly. “See what sort of terrain we had to work with. See if we had any allies,” if I had any allies, he once again left unsaid but very much in the forefront of his silence. “If you don’t know anything about this…”

  Gabriel stood up abruptly with a rustle. “Do you need to rest?”

  “I was on low-output all the way down the stairs and across the world from Amazônia Capital,” Greyblade said, also standing. “I’m ready to climb the damn walls. Why?”

  Gabriel stumped for the door. “Come on.”

  Greyblade followed. “But we just got here,” he complained. “You haven’t even given me the tour.”
>
  “Couch is there, kitchen’s there, crapper’s there,” Gabriel said, waving a hand and concluding by pointing at Greyblade. “Smartarse giant animated jousting trophy’s there. That’s the tour. Let’s go.”

  Greyblade didn’t bother asking where they were headed, figuring he’d find out when they arrived at the absolute latest.

  “Anyway,” he took up as they made their way back outside, this time exiting through the dingy front of the apartment block, “as for swinging my sword around, there hardly seems any point. This isn’t a problem we can solve with weapons. And I’m not used to problems I can’t solve with weapons. That’s sort of why I came empty-handed,” he saw Gabriel’s wry look. “My sword doesn’t count,” he snapped. “I came empty-handed, not naked. My point is, short of blowing up the lab where they’re working on this thing … and there’s no guarantee there even is a lab, or that blowing it up will make them stop any more than it did last time … there’s basically nothing a Category 8 like the Ladyhawk could have added to the equation.”

  “Nothing that’s not balanced by the Category 9 the humans still have at their disposal,” Gabriel agreed grimly. They stopped on the worn front step.

  Greyblade glanced skyward, even though he knew Sprawling Adelbairn was well out of her line of sight. “Is she still … ?”

  Gabriel grunted and ruffled his wings. “She’s out there,” he said. “Still carrying people up and down and occasionally eating the odd community just to keep everyone on their toes. You hear stories, after the…” he curtailed his statement, and went on. “She hasn’t actually enforced any government policies that I know of in recent memory. Just being up there is enough, I guess, even for the pathologically short of attention-span. Captain Marietta Bianchi casts exactly nineteen thousand, eight hundred and fifty-six absentee votes in Hathal Moga’threta Advisory Council elections, the closest we get to Earthwide policy. The absentee votes rarely prove decisive. And that’s about it.”

  “She wasn’t involved in the war,” Greyblade said.

  Gabriel shook his head. “By mutual treaty,” he confirmed, “and the Pinians aren’t giving her any orders. They don’t want to go near her, if you ask me. And that’s probably the best we can hope for. At least she’s not hovering over Dumblertown with her World-Eaters powered up.”

  “But there are still Elevator People on board?”

  “Of course,” Gabriel snorted. “Nineteen thousand, eight hundred and fifty-six of them, if I had to guess. Of voting age, anyway. Occasionally they send delegates, but they’d probably be burned at the stake if they tried to live down here with us dirt crawlers.”

  Greyblade glanced at Gabriel’s quite literally ruffled feathers, and got the strong impression that he should change the subject. The Destarion had protected Earth for a long time, but there was something unhealthy about her solicitude. Something poisonous, parasitic. And he couldn’t have said which side was the host, and which the parasite. The Destarion, the Godfang, was deeply broken. Forcing an ethical dilemma like the Last War of Independence on her would have been a terrible idea.

  “Oh,” Greyblade settled on, “and I’m clearly a melee trophy, not a jousting trophy.”

  “You had a horse,” Gabriel said in amusement. They strolled out into the deserted street and Greyblade followed the Archangel’s lead, turning onto the dusty pavement and heading along the edge of the road under queasy greenish phosphorescent lampposts. The buildings opposite were darkened storefronts, while on their side was a rank of the same depressing flats as the one they’d just exited.

  It occurred to him that the air outside was as warm and stale as the air in Gabriel’s apartment had been, artificial preservatives and cleansers overlying mould, mildew, hopelessness. A world that had been used relentlessly until it was almost wrung dry, then watered with blood as its inhabitants fought over the remains, then masked with bad perfume as the carcass slowly rotted away under the floorboards.

  This world was a neglected apartment.

  “Earth to Greyblade.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What was the name of that horse of yours?” Gabriel said, clearly repeating himself. “I remember you riding it, during the liberation when the Pinians brought you back to the battle lines.”

  “Plogo,” Greyblade said in fond reminiscence.

  “Plogo, that’s right,” Gabriel chortled. “Means Crap in Ancient Pinian, doesn’t it?”

  “More or less,” Greyblade replied. They reached an intersection, and again he followed the Archangel as he swung left and continued down a functionally identical street. Halfway along the block, on the opposite side of the road, a diner of some kind seemed to be doing very little business. A Molran behind the counter, and a second Molran with lurid green stripes on her face sitting at a table, watched them walk by. Greyblade had to admit that he and Gabriel were probably among the more interesting couples you might see on the street in this area. “But it wasn’t really a horse,” he went on. “It was a recursion-jet weapons system that just happened to have a saddle. Sort of a one-man fighter aircraft.”

  “You still jousted with the thing.”

  “I never jousted.”

  Gabriel laughed.

  At the next intersection they swung back right and continued along another street devoid of vehicles. They passed a pair of enormous brown-on-brown Gróbs drifting above the pavement in the opposite direction on silently glowing grav-pads. The huge creatures slowed as the two groups approached one another, eyes widening when they saw the figures heading their way. Both Gróbs coiled their lateral tentacles respectfully and murmured Archangel to Gabriel, and thank you for your service to Greyblade, their Xidh slightly old-fashioned and consequently more familiar to the Burning Knight. Knight and Archangel nodded back in greeting.

  “I was thanked for my service by a human on my way down here,” Greyblade broke the meditative silence as they continued down the street.

  “Oh yeah?” Gabriel grinned, but his tone had been surprised. “Did your helmet pinch when your head swelled?”

  Greyblade snorted. “I also got cussed out by a human who’d apparently picked up a few Damorak curse-words. All is balance.”

  “Oh yeah?” Gabriel repeated, sounding less surprised now. “Did you kick their arse?”

  “I thought I might get court-martialled,” Greyblade joked. “Perhaps the most concerning thing was that the guy thanking me was a nervy-looking passenger, and the guy calling me char’flet was in uniform.”

  “Mm,” Gabriel agreed. “The last Damorak was run out of the alien quarter twelve years ago. Actually more like fifteen. And he was here on a diplomatic docket.”

  “A diplomatic docket,” Greyblade said in disgust.

  “What worries me the most about that,” Gabriel said, “is that we don’t know they stopped coming. We only know they stopped coming here. And if they’re getting sanction to come to other parts of Earth, that means high-level government collaboration.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  “Not really,” Gabriel admitted. “But they’ve clearly planted their nasty little seeds. It’s just a shame there’s so much fertiliser around.”

  They passed another diner, this one almost but not quite achieving ‘restaurant’ and containing about six people of various non-human species. One of them might have been a Molran with thorny augmentations all over his body, or may have been a Molranoid species Greyblade hadn’t encountered before. His helmet feed, still carefully abridged, was no help.

  He glanced back in the general direction from which they’d come. The lank air over Sprawling Adelbairn was noticeably lighter in that direction, not from the some-hours-distant sunrise but from commercial districts and larger entertainment establishments. It was audible, too, to his senses – a steady roaring pulse.

  “We seem to be heading away from the Dumblertown hub,” he remarked. “Assuming that’s still Dumblertown over there.”

  “It is,” Gabriel said placidly. “As for hub, I
guess it depends. If you’re talking about the place where the majority of the general public goes to have good times and fellowship, do their trade and conduct the business of their daily and nightly lives … then yeah. The Denlip Station district, along Normarch Street, is the place to be. If you’re talking about the actual heart of Dumblertown, though…” he gestured. “That’s this way.”

  Greyblade shrugged to himself again. As he’d already been confident, Gabriel knew where he was going and would reveal it to his guest at a time of his own choosing. If it was necessary at all by that stage.

  “How many people need haircuts around here?” he asked as they passed three barber’s shops in rapid succession. “Molren and Gróbs don’t even have hair. Most Heaven-folk don’t either. Are you keeping them all in business singlehandedly?”

  “You’re funny.”

  “I am, aren’t I?” Greyblade admitted. “Most people don’t see past the pretty exterior…”

  “Most of them are just fronts for doof dens,” Gabriel went on. “And other such shady yet completely brazen organisations.”

  “Ah.”

  “The real business that takes place in the alien quarter is quiet,” Gabriel expounded, “and … not secret, as such, because secret would get rooted out and subjected to scrutiny … but it’s kept out of the way. We let the outsiders, and the majority of the residents for that matter, assume that the Denlip Station district is the important part of the zone.”

  “But it’s really here,” Greyblade couldn’t resist concluding, “in the barber’s front and crappy diner district.”

  Gabriel grunted in amusement. “Nothing like getting a haircut from a confused drug dealer to work up an appetite,” he said, “and then where are you going to eat? Somewhere nice?”

  They rounded another corner, and finally encountered something like nightlife. A bar, or possibly some kind of nightclub, was open to the street halfway along the block, and a ragged line of Molren, Gróbs, humans and even a couple of squat, gleaming, copper-cauldron-looking Wudsoie from Aishen Yachar waited outside the main entrance, their backs to the approaching pair. There was music emanating from the establishment, but it was a reedier, more melodic variety to the heavy thump of the distant Denlip Station district’s mass-soundtrack.