by Neal Asher
It was a demented plan; which was to be expected, since my father Lexas was of course insane. But he was also powerful. Twenty-six great battles had already been fought; and Lexas had won them all. Not by weight of arms; nor by superior strategy. Simply by challenging the chieftain of each tribe to single combat. None can refuse such a challenge according to the honour-code of my people; and none of my father’s opponents had survived these bloody and furious bouts.
Thus, twenty-six chieftains had perished in single combat; and my father now near ruled our world. All this had occurred in the last five years of the hundred that I had been away.
So when I returned to Madagorian, I was confronted with dark truths about my world and about my family. I spoke to my mother Giona, whose spirit was broken and who seemed to me as nervous and ineptly shy as a Philosopher’s teenage child - this, the warrior-born who was once one of the most fearless cathary racers in our tribe, in the glorious days of her youth!
My sister Wareel told me dire tales of my father’s violence to my mother; once, he staked her in the desert, so the sun beat down on her body, and left her there for days. It was a degradation indeed for one so noble and so true; and yet she whimpered not once.
Andro too had incurred my father’s wrath; and now was barred from his tent, and condemned as a creature-so-vile-no-warrior-should-ever-again-be-his-friend. This is a dark naming for our kind; it meant, irrevocably, that Andro had no friends and no status within our tribe. He had to sleep in the desert or with the catharys, for no tent would offer him welcome. He stole all his food, for none would serve him meat. And when I spoke to him, Andro would not honour my eyes with his eyes, for fear of bringing shame upon me too.
I begged Wareel to speak to Andro; but she would not. She was the kindest of sisters, but she felt herself bound by the code of our kind. Even I – a warrior fresh from battle – risked banishment for speaking to my brother without permission of my Chieftain. And in truth, I did not speak to him for very long; or with any trace of our former affection.
All this was unendurable and wrong. So I sought my father out.
I found him in his tent, drunk, eyes glittering. He welcomed me coldly. I sat before him and a pretty galoit served me a glass of wine. I drained it. She poured another glass; I drained it, and smiled at her pleasantly, to honour her service. She smiled in return, but there was fear in her eyes. Her face was black and bruised; I guessed my father had beaten her as punishment for some offence, and must have done so often, for such bruises would normally heal before discolouring.
And there I sat, honouring my father, who sat before me with legs double-curled and grinning with evil unallayed; and he joined me in my drink.
Before long the tales began.
Lexas told me the familiar, sweet and comical story of how he first met my mother. She was a champion cathary racer, as I have said, and she had defeated him in a race. His beast was the fastest on the planet; but her creature was inspired by her touch and her spirit, and she rode it like the wind driving a cloud.
The best part of the story was when, halfway through the race, Lexas had out of frustration beaten his own beast on the haunch with his whip, and it had roared and bucked and thrown him. (At this point in the tale my father mimed falling, and bashing his nose, and roaring with rage; and I laughed uproariously at his clowning.) However, rather than continuing on to victory, Giona had stopped her beast, and waited patiently as he remounted. And then she allowed him to gallop past. And – to the astonishment of all - paused a further fifteen minutes as he urged his cathary to the finish line.
Then she nudged her own beast with the gentlest of touches and the animal ran faster than any cathary in living memory; and Lexas was rocked by the breeze as they raced past him. Thus was he defeated with ease.
Later, he told me, at the celebration feast, he had toasted her prowess with words most eloquent and flattering; including eleven new words he had created which conveyed the depth of his admiration for her beauty and her skill.
Later still, she seduced him in the sands, by the light of our moons. The sands were warm, as they often are at night, and the wind was chill. And as they fornicated, with passion most extraordinary, her cathary – no, perhaps that part of the story does not bear recounting. It involves – ha! It is very funny, in fact, but only if you have ever seen a cathary piss. For the creature nuzzled up to them and then - they saw what was about to happen, and they had to flee – stark naked – to avoid the tidal wave of…
No, it’s longer funny. Not after all this time.
My point, however, is that my father spoke of my mother, in the telling of this long and enchanting story, with love and deep respect; as was appropriate for a Chieftain speaking of his bride.
But then his tone darkened. He told me that I was a fool, for helping to wage a war that did not serve the interests of my own tribe. And that my mother was a fool too. A fucker-of-animals. A slut-who-should-be-caged-in-a-dungeon-without-light. And many other words. Hurtful words. Our people love invective; it is an art form for us. I cannot paint, nor can I sing, but I can call you a cunt in four thousand different ways; and of this I am proud.
But even so there are limits, strictly defined, which all should observe. And it is a point of deep principle that no Maxolun male should ever talk of his wife as my father spoke, that day, of my mother.
And no son should ever hear such words, such daggers-of-contempt, for the female who gave him life.
I should explain that for my kind fathers are – what can I say? I’m sorry – my usual flow-of-story is becoming – I’m aware you see that for some of you, love between a father and a child is not a special bond. But for us, it assuredly is. More intimate than - well, than anything.
When he was alive, my father and I were as one. He was a part of me. And every time I fought, my father’s soul possessed me. I can say it no more clearly than that.
I did not love him. Love is too small a word. Fathers of my kind can love children of course – as I loved mine. But the feeling of a child towards a father – awe is perhaps a better word. My father was my god.
And so, it was hard for me to do what I did. Hard beyond all measure. But I did not falter in my resolve; nor did my courage fail me.
We drained our final flask, we shook hands, and we blessed our ancestors. Though my father did so with a sneer in his tone, as if he did not accept that previous generations knew more than ours. And then my father instructed me to take over the leadership of the mounted regiments of his defeated enemies. I was, he conceded, a warrior tested and proven and he would have use of me now.
However, to his utter amazement, I declined. And then, with customary Maxolun invective, using a formal phrase of such obscenity I dare not repeat it here, I spat upon the floor; and challenged my father to a single combat to the death.
It was, of course, an utterly foolhardy thing to do. For a whelp such as myself to defeat the oldest and hence the strongest warrior on Madagorian in such a combat would be a feat that staggered credulity. Many older warriors had failed before me; and it seemed most likely that I would fail too.
Yet my honour demanded that I should try.
And I had a deeper motive than revenge for the way my father Lexas had treated my family. For I knew there were at that time certain impetuous fools, my brother Andro among them, who were plotting rebellion. They talked of challenging my father’s right to claim victory after defeating a tribe’s chieftain in single combat, without testing his strength against the other warriors in that tribe.
And, as I knew, the rebels had won much support for their view among the warriors of all the defeated tribes. Andro himself had argued that if they were all to gather and defy their new chieftain, they would be an unstoppable force. My father’s army of loyal tribe-warriors would be easily defeated by the hordes of the other twenty-six tribes!
However, the law of single combat was a hallowed and a precious tradition. To repeal it would, in my view, be to mock and to disgrace
everything that was of value to me and my fellow warriors.
That way lay anarchy. Patricide, I truly believed, was preferable.
And so the day of our combat was assigned. My father had choice of weapon; he chose the eight-blade. A pole with four blades at each end, and a spike between the blades, like a carois in a flower. A hard weapon to use but, handled right, it could both stab and slice, and was prized for the ease with which it decapitated. I had never held one before. My father however was the master of the eight-blade; indeed, some say he invented it.
In preparation we stood naked, daubed in mud, all the long night, at the very centre of our village of tents. And we slept for much of that time, whilst standing, to preserve our strength.
In the morn we dressed in our battlewear. Armour for the loins, and boots that would not slip and slide in blood. That was all. My father’s body was half again the size of mine; since our kind never cease to grow. His body was scarred, for old skin loses its ability to heal scars so well. But his arms and legs and chest were dense with muscle; and his hair was black; and his eyes glittered with evil clarity.
I felt like a child; I had to stare up to see my father’s eyes.
“Let the battle begin,” said Timola, once a great warcraft pilot, who was to be the arbiter of justice in the combat. He had known my father for many years and reverenced him greatly.
How to paint the picture of that scene, to those who do not know my world?
Ours is a desert tribe and our days are fierce hot, so we fought at dawn, before the sun’s beams had the power to burn flesh. On all sides mountainous dunes reached up, encircling the combat arena; and at the base of these mountains of sand sat row upon row of spectators on tiered benches - my family and warriors and home-makers and wise ones of this village of my tribe. No children were allowed. No Philosophers chose to attend. Ten thousand watched, and two warriors on platforms were entrusted with ensuring there were no breaches of etiquette. A before-combat ‘heaven-eyes’ pose had to be assumed by each fighter before every flurry, with eyes uplifted, one arm raised, and the backs of the feet raised off the ground. Punching and biting were allowed but spitting and sneering talk were barred; and only two weapons were allowed, namely the eight-blade and the dagger. Our fingertips were inspected for poison beneath the nails. Our fists and knees were ray-scanned in case either of us had surgically implanted metal in with the bone. Our souls were pronounced pure.
And so we began.
We stood, at first, in heaven-eyes for two entire kals: near naked, each staring up at the heavens where the souls or warriors reside, balanced on our forefeet; and all this while holding the heavy pole of an eight blade in one hand.
Then we commenced. Our long black hair trailing behind us like the wake from a ship, our cold bodies warmed by the dawn sun, as we touched our heels to the ground and began our deadly dance. Our moves were fast and sinuous. Lunge. Side-step. Leap. Shaft clanged against shaft; blades whistled close to flesh.
My father’s parries were astonishingly powerful and several times he near rocked me off my feet. And his thrusts were fast and could not be predicted. But I was of the moment; I was the wind whirling against sand; I was the flurry of sand spattering against the wind.
He came at me fast; I was faster, and my blade lunged at his head; he ducked and scuttled and was behind me. But I leaped up, using air like footholds, and landed and launched a perfect spike-thrust that missed him entirely because he was behind me again, and I stepped to the right just in time to dodge his spike.
Crash! The collision of metal shaft upon metal shaft echoed through the desert; and not a sound was heard from the gathered crowed.
Crash! The collision of shafts once again cracked like thunder.
Crash! – and then I knew something was wrong. For I felt a trembling in the shaft I held, like a tide ebbing away; and an instant later it shattered entirely. I leaped backwards as my weapon turned to shards, then tried but fail to seize the blades upon the floor; but Lexas drove me back mercilessly.
I knew I had been duped, for metal does not shatter so. My eight-blade must have had a shaft made of hardened glass. This successfully mimicked metal for a while; it had endured for fifteen entire minutes of combat; but now it was broke. Fair play had not been done. My father had cheated.
But the presiding warriors on their platforms did not call foul. And Timola, my father’s dearest friend, did not speak out. Even my brother Andro was silent. And then I knew that I had no friends this day.
And so I drew my dagger and attempted to live.
I could not fight my father now; I could only run and dodge and duck and dive, and leap, and roll, and parry his savage eight-blade strikes with my dagger’s short blade. He renewed the attack; I ran faster, and dodged more desperately. The crowd began to boo and to mock me for my cowardice; but I was unperturbed.
Sometimes, you see, a warrior must be a coward.
Then I struck one blade of his eight-blade with my dagger and it ripped off, and I caught the blade in my hand and threw it at my father’s heart. Reflexively he batted the blade away; but by then I had thrown my dagger too; and it embedded in his eye.
A brain-strike; a dagger through the eye; I truly thought I had won!
But despite my confidence, I nonetheless rolled away to a safe distance; and right I was to do so. For my father was halted in his wrath for just two long seconds; and then he renewed his swinging and lunging attack. He spun the eight-blade in complex patterns of whistling metal in the air, hoping to catch me a glancing blow. But I ran and fled and ducked and dived; pursued by a warrior with a dagger embedded in his eye. It felt as if he could see me through the blade and handle of my own weapon.
A brain-strike, and decapitation, are the only sure ways to kill a Maxolun warrior enraged. And yet I had failed to kill my father, though he had my dagger through his eye; such was his strength, and his resolve!
He lunged again and his spike went through my heart; I spat blood and tried to punch him, but he pulled the spike free, and lopped off my left hand with a downwards strike. And this time I did succeed in punching him, with my other – or rather only – hand. Then a blade ripped open my stomach and blood welled and gushed; though fortunately my guts did not entirely spill out of my body.
He stabbed my second heart while I was dazed. And I staggered around in pain, feeling my two hearts dying inside my body, as blood gouted ferociously from my stomach. But this time I grabbed the shaft of his eight-blade with my one remaining hand and held it tight; and struck it with my left forearm and broke the shaft. My father laughed and held the two halves of the eight-blade aloft; one weapon had now been made into two, and the humour of it appealed to him!
But as he laughed, I punched him again, in the face; and this time the punch rocked his skull, and shifted the dagger blade embedded therein. And suddenly, the light went out of his one remaining eye.
He fell. I guessed he was dead or dying, and I do not recollect what happened next.
I was, so I am told, three weeks asleep, recovering from my dire wounds. And when I woke I had a tube down my throat to help me breathe, and a machine to pump my blood; and the stump at my left wrist was covered in a growth-bag. My mother, Giona, was standing over the bedside. She had been standing there, I was later advised, for the entire month; not moving, not eating, not speaking. She saw me wake, and she stared at me.
I was her youngest child, and her most beloved, or so I had always believed. And she knew that I had good cause for doing what I did. I had slain an evil tyrant; the deranged Maxolun who had treated her and all our peoples so very ill. And thus, I had saved the soul of the Maxolu.
And yet, for all his sins, Lexas had been her husband; and she had loved him deep and dear.
I could not speak; but I implored her with my eyes for pity, and for her forgiveness.
A long moment lived between us. I could feel her regrets, and her pain. Tears dampened her cheeks; and her eyes were bright red with grief.
> Then she spat upon me; thick white spit that spattered my face and left puddles. Hate for me was in her soul; and I felt it like a blow. Then she turned and left, without speaking a word.
On that day, so all the chroniclers of my kind agree, on that fateful day when I slew my father and liberated my people from his terrible tyranny, was the legend of Sharrock born. And since then I have lived my life with honour, as a warrior should.
And yet, because of that day, I lost a father; and I never saw my mother again, nor my brother Andro, nor my sister Wareel.
I miss them so.
The Cuisinart Effect
Neal Asher
The ruined city sat incongruously surrounded by thick forest and tangled jungle, open on its east side to the plains. On top of a crumbling skyscraper an eerie light appeared and strange gravitic effects tossed about rubble amidst a tangle of girders to the rear of a floor once inside the building. Out of this light appeared a mantisal: a spherical, vaguely geodesic structure formed of glassy struts ranging in thickness from that of a human finger to a man’s leg. Within the substance of this thing veins and capillaries pulsed, and the thicker areas were occupied by half-seen complex structures that sometimes looked like living organs and sometimes tangled masses of circuitry. From the outer structure, curving members grew inwards to intersect below two smaller spheres that were only a little larger than human heads. They appeared to be huge multifaceted eyes positioned above fused-together glassy feeding mandibles, a spread-thin thorax, and the beginning of legs that blended into the curving outer members, and thence into the surrounding sphere. It looked like some insane glassmaker’s representation of a giant praying mantis turned inside out.
The mantisal settled on the floor and Kyril, a Heliothane man, removed his hands from the control spheres of the two mantisal eyes, then reached down to haul up his pack. His three companions, the man Thrax and the two women, Jelada and Coney, also took up their equipment, which included a large selection of weapons.
