Splintered Suns

by Michael Cobley

  She shook her head even as she produced the dark golden vial from within her hacketon. “You think that the statues of the Eternal Four are somehow magical? That they can destroy this?”

  Pazzyk nodded but it was the mechanical bird that spoke from its perch on the upraised hand of one of the statues. “We do not think so, we know so.”

  “I have been up here many times over the years,” said Delara. “There are neither rumours nor lore concerning any mysterious properties.”

  “Would we have come this far,” said Pazzyk, “if it wasn’t worth all that skagging trouble? Humour me. Try tilting back the Granavian statue—it’s loose at its base so it’ll be easy to stick the vial under it.”

  He was clearly dying, so she decided there was no harm. “Very well.”

  She climbed up on the plinth, found herself face-to-face with the smiling statue of Thelya, the personification of Granah and the Granavian people. Weighing the vial in her hand, Delara crouched down and saw how the flat base had indeed come loose from the mortared surface of the plinth. All she had to do was push Thelya’s midriff, tilting her back enough to …

  The moment her bare hand touched the cold cast bronze of the statue there was a bright, engulfing moment, as if the sky had broken open and a special kind of sunlight flooded straight into her mind. A dazzling river of knowledge and memory and thought, an exhilarating swirl that surged in to fill up gaps, holes, absences she never knew she had. The unveiled essence of being—Dervla breathed it all in and became herself. She let out a burst of laughter …

  Then Delara’s own memories leaped to the forefront of Dervla’s focus—Pyke!

  Quickly, she scrambled back down to where he lay against the plinth, babbling apologies. How could she not—she had been Delara, she recalled how the commander had treated him, remembered her short-sighted distrust … and now here he was bleeding to death.

  “Damn you, Brannan Pyke, don’t you dare die on me!”

  “Not planning to, ould girl—just nip back up there and finish the job, would you kindly?”

  “You mean the vial really does have to be …”

  “Destroyed, yes …” He coughed agonisingly. “All this around us is a story, a simulation, and the destruction of that vial winds it all up—then slots us, fresh and undamaged, into a new one … Dammit, T’Moy and Vrass are retreating from the western steps. Quick, Derv, finish the job, smash that thing to bits!”

  Trusting Pyke’s orders, she clambered back onto the plinth and wedged the vial right under the statue’s metal base. Then she stood and tilted the bronze statue back as far as she dared—and swung it down with all her strength.

  There seemed to be a fraction of a second where the vial resisted the impact, then with a crunching and a cracking it shattered, disintegrating into a spray of tiny splinters and flecks.

  Dervla felt the change in the air, as if it were suddenly charged and intense. There was a rumbling that rolled all around the ominously darkening sky. Pyke’s allies—a Shylan, a Barlig and a Gadromi, going by Delara’s memories—were retreating to the pavilion with axe-wielding Shylan guards in pursuit. But as Dervla watched the Shield guards suddenly froze in mid-dash and faded away to nothing, as did Delara’s last two surviving Nightblades cadets. From above came another low rumble and dark spots began to appear across the tiled rooftop.

  Here comes the rain, Dervla thought.

  “Right, this is the tricky part,” said the mechanical bird.

  Dervla stared at the speaking contraption. “Who or what is that?”

  “That’s RK1, residual sub-drone left behind by our old buddy Rensik,” said Pyke. “Look, time’s about to run out—this simulation is going to be replaced by a new one and this time Arky there is going to try and keep you, me and my amigos”—he paused to wave at the other three who were now sitting on the benches outside the pavilion, enjoying the light shower that was falling—“from having our personalities shrink-wrapped with storytale roles again, which, quite frankly, sucks big time …”

  “Transition is about to start,” said the bird. “Prepare yourselves!”

  “Derv, remember ‘Whisky In The Jar’?”

  “The song?” she said. “Why?”

  Pyke smiled. “If we’re separated, listen out for it, okay?”

  “We need to talk,” she said, suddenly anxious. “Bran, I need to know, you need to tell me … am I dead?”

  His gaze was a frozen thing of anguish and she knew.

  “I’m here with you,” he said, voice cracking. “Just remember the song …”

  The rumbling grew louder and omnipresent, drowning out all other sounds. The sky began to gyre slowly about them and the city, its walls and buildings, started to fly away while pure light settled down around them like a fine mist, then poured down like a deluge of brightness which dissolved them away.

  She woke up walking, a seamless drift from dream, emerging unhurriedly into dim surroundings, a lamplit alleyway, its air warm and dusty. A quiet thread of thoughts was winding its way through her mind, how important it was to get this basket of pastries to her sister over in Darvanu, how that selfish man of hers was going to bring the wrath of Vondral down on her with his heresies, how she had to be careful not to attract the attention of the patrolling Sanctifiers, how vital it was that she be back in Shalmy District before dusk …

  Dervla stopped in her tracks, suddenly wide-eyed. She inhaled deeply and exhaled through pursed lips as she stumbled over to lean against a tenement wall. What was it that Pyke said about the transition to this place? That the residual was supposed to keep their personalities from being “shrink-wrapped with storytale roles”…?

  What am I? she wondered. Am I real any more? Am I just a model of a human being, some kind of mannequin that thinks it’s a person?

  She recalled what the real-world Pyke had said days ago, how his mind had been trapped inside a simulation while that data-entity, the Legacy, had conspired with Raven to get the Angular Eye. He’d said that the Legacy had captured copies of its hosts’ minds before it disposed of them.

  Dervla raised her hand to her chest as a cluster of memories suddenly bobbed into her mind, seeing again the dagger, her hand on the hilt, the gush of blood.

  She was hit by a wave of dizziness and her breathing grew faster. Damn it, no, she couldn’t afford to get panicky and weak right now! She had to find Pyke so that she could get the full story, find out what this shifting from simulation to simulation was all about. Most of all, she needed to find out if Pyke and his gang had any contact with the outside, with the real world.

  She was still carrying the basket and, as she stepped away from the rough building wall, she caught a whiff of its contents and was suddenly ravenous. She opened the lid, inhaled a cloud of savoury deliciousness and grabbed one of the pastries then started nibbling which led to munching and quickly ended in a swift devouring. These delicacies were for her sister, Ketili (her own story-name was Seshila), but it looked as if they would have to be liberated for a higher cause. After consuming another couple (which left three), Dervla went off in search of an old, old song.

  Pyke had told her which tune to listen out for, but not whereabouts in the city—or were locations uncertain variables in this sneaky infiltration of the Legacy’s elaborate scenarios? But if it was going to be some totally random spot, Pyke would surely have warned me of the possibility! She had to assume that if he’d told her to listen out for “Whiskey In The Jar” when she came to, then she would have to be in roughly the right locale to have any chance of finding it.

  She found that she had access to Seshila’s memories of this part of the city, Shalmy District. As she walked she found out why the light was so gloomy and why lamps illuminated most streets—immense swathes of canvas or some heavy material had been draped over the buildings, huge curves of cloth propped up by heavy wood frames fixed to rooftops all around this area. Looking along the wider roads she could see that in the distance, where Shalmy gave way to the more pros
perous Verusti District, the cloth screens were absent. Something in Seshila’s memories suggested that certain areas of the city considered insufficiently pious or virtuous by the Temple of Vondral were denied the benefits of direct sunlight for as long as the impiety continued. Which indicated that extremist zealots were now calling the shots in the city of Granah—and that was never a good thing.

  After roughly half an hour of trudging she came to a street of market stalls where every second covered barrow seemed to be overflowing with pies, smoked meats and sweet delicacies of every kind. Her stomach was starting to grumble again and the basket’s remaining contents were exerting a kind of hunger-gravity on her hand. That was the moment when she heard music coming from round the next corner. She accelerated her pace, turned into the side street and found herself approaching a building with a long, seated veranda where locals ate and drank and talked. A pair of musicians strumming odd, long-bodied instruments, were working the customers and the song they were playing had nothing to say about the Cork and Kerry mountains …

  Wearily, she about-turned and padded back towards the intersection. As she crossed the main market street, the strumming duo behind finished their toe-tapping number to a smattering of applause. The sounds of the stall owners’ cries and bartering customers were, for a moment or two, untouched by music and that was when she heard it, someone picking out a motif of notes, faint but unmistakable, a melody she would have recognised anywhere. Dervla hurried along to the next crossing and turned right, following the music with iron resolve. By now someone was singing the first verse and chorus, someone who most certainly was not Brannan Pyke.

  She ignored two shadowy, feebly lit alleys and took the next proper street on the right. The singing and playing was coming from across the street, up high somewhere—there, four doors along, a two-storey house with a wooden shelter on the roof was extended by a yellow canopy. She steeled herself, knocked on the plain door and entered a narrow hallway. A Gomedran sitting near the foot of a cramped stairway looked up from an unfurled scroll.

  “Hi, I’m Vrass,” he said. “He’s waiting upstairs, top floor, trying to get them to pronounce your curious Earth words properly. Tell him still no sign of T’Moy.”

  “Will do, thanks.”

  She smiled and ascended the stairs. The first floor was a single room, murky from the shuttered windows, lit by several candle lamps by which she could discern a brawny Shyntanil sitting in a padded, inclined chair. He wore a bulky dun-coloured robe and was fiddling with a string of beads.

  “Greetings,” he said. “I am Klane. It is good to meet you without arrows flying about our heads.” He pointed up at the ceiling. “The captain awaits yourself and others of our company.”

  She nodded. “I’d better check in, then.”

  She resumed climbing. She could see the yellow canopy flapping lazily as she emerged from the stairway onto a flat roof bounded by a low wall. The singing and playing was still coming from the other side of the wooden shelter she’d seen from down in the street—it took up a third of the space, with its awning angled away from the stairs. It was the yellow canopy which stretched over most of the rest of the roof, rippling in the slow, warm breeze that wafted through. Under the canopy a lantern cast a golden glow over a cluster of chairs and cushions, clearly a gathering place where a low table was graced with a collection of ornate bottles and beakers, and some additional clusters of candles. Beyond the flickering glow, a shadowy figure stirred by the low wall on the other side and came over, arms wide.

  “You made it …”

  Without hesitation she stepped into Pyke’s embrace and hugged him tightly.

  “You,” she said, half muffled by his jacket, “have to tell me, and be straight with me, none of your nonsense … am I dead?”

  Gently, he pulled away from her, enough to look closely into her eyes. “Do I look dead? Do I sound dead? Would a dead guy put himself through all this unbelievably complicated, puzzle-solving, death-defying drek? Not a bit of it, dear heart!—I’m not done with being alive so death can’t have me. Okay, so we’ve been encoded into this very weird virtual-crystal-verse! Well, every part of me, every virtue and every sin and everything in between is in here, making up me! And the same goes for you.” He took her hand, interweaving their fingers. “Not a shred of you got left behind. Forget what was done to you. All of you is here with all of me.”

  Tears were threatening to embarrass her. She sniffed, balled her free hand into a fist and very lightly punched his chest. “Thank you,” she said hoarsely.

  It was bullshit, of course, but it was Pyke’s bullshit, a very special brand engineered from a fine blend of truths, half-truths and gorgeously embroidered optimism. It was just what she needed.

  “There’s a lot to tell,” Pyke said. “About this place …”

  “I’ll bet,” she said. “But first, now that I’m here, can your troubadours quit murdering ‘Whiskey In The Jar’?”

  He laughed. “Ah, but you see, you’re not the only lost ship we need to guide into a safe berth—we’re still waiting for T’Moy to arrive. However, I’ll get them to forego the vocals while we’re exchanging tall tales …”

  “What about that residual drone? The one that looks like a toy bird? I thought it would be here, too.”

  “So did we,” said Pyke. “Clearly, it succeeded in keeping ourselves from being buried under local-citizen characters, but managing its own transition over to this new simulation was always going to be tough.” He spread his hands. “We just need to be patient and ready. In the meantime, take a seat, make yerself comfy while I have a word with the band.”

  He ducked through a curtained gap in the back of the shelter. The full-on music abruptly ceased. There was some muttering, then it resumed without the singing. Dervla snuggled down into a nest of cushions amid the pool of candlelight before Pyke emerged with a dark bulbous bottle and two tin cups. He settled down beside her, drinks were poured and she decided to go first, knowing that he deserved to know all about her demise.

  It was a challenge but she managed to condense that twisty trail of encounters, fights and deranged locations down to a coherent summary, adding detail and explanation when Pyke asked for it. She told him about the aftermath of the museum heist, the haggling with Van Graes, the decision to fly out into the desert to meet the Sendrukan scientist, Ustril. Then she related their pursuit of Raven Kaligari through the wrecked segments of the ancient and enormous ship, the Mighty Defender, immense decrepit sections scattered across Ong’s vast desert. The bot-swarm, the hazardous approach towards the drive section, Ustril’s betrayal, entering the drive section and struggling through the Steel Forest and all its perils, the portal that led to the forward/bridge section. Then meeting Hokajil, followed by entering the forward section and the sequence of events that led to Ustril’s second, devastating betrayal.

  As she gave this account it dawned on her that this was indeed a different Brannan Pyke, one who had neither met Lieutenant-Doctor Ustril, nor bolted madly through an artificial forest spewing mind-altering vapours. The other Pyke was back there in the really-real world, trying to cope with her death, assuming he and the rest were still alive …

  Dervla came at last to the gory detail of the dagger, planted in her chest by the Legacy during its brief hijacking of her mind and body. All through the long story, Pyke had listened with varying degrees of intent, but now she could see his jaw muscles tense and cold anger light up his eyes. She then finished with the very last thing she could remember, how one hand fell from the dagger while the other released the Legacy’s crystal shard which fell to the floor …

  “And that’s it, pretty much,” she said. “I can dimly recall some of the things that Delara did, but it was all just foggy dreams until I touched the statue.”

  Pyke nodded, his smile sad and weary. “It’s really a hell of a state we’re in, eh? I wish you weren’t here but I can’t help feeling glad that you are! Even if there’s still another me alive out there. And a
fter all that craziness you’ve been through—almost makes our adventures here sound tame.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dervla said, looking about her. “This city, all its inhabitants, their personalities, the sheer depth of realism … this has to be the most detailed, immersive virtuality ever created and it’s all running inside that chunk of crystal. I mean, what kind of power source is driving it—”

  “The Arky drone explained it to me but I couldn’t repeat it,” Pyke said. “But tell me, you’re sure that Raven definitely has the crystal shard?”

  “She’s been working with other Ravens and their allies drawn from the Time-Mosaic …” She smiled, seeing Pyke shake his head. “See? That’s a weird kind of sub-reality, or para-reality, which is just as strange as this one.”

  “Alternate time-facets,” Pyke said, uttering a low whistle. “What about the rest of the crew?”

  “Well, the crew and the other you were taking cover halfway along that balcony, nearly twenty metres from where the Legacy did his little party-trick. Moments after I let go of that crystal, it would have been back in Raven’s hands.”

  “Whole thing sounds like a hellish pantomime.”

  Hellish, she thought. Yes, that sounds about right. “And, of course, for all I know the other Pyke and the crew have been captured and had their minds sent here.”

  But Pyke shook his head. “If the other Pyke was a prisoner and Raven used the crystal on him, I would know, I promise you. My guess is they’re still alive and kicking out there, kicking and scratchin’ and making bloody nuisances of themselves!”

  “Thanks,” she said. “That’s the kind of hopeful defiance I need right now. Okay, c’mon, time for your story—give!”

  “Okay, I guess that the real-world Pyke told you about his experiences on the Isle of Candles before the Legacy failed to kill him …”

  “Before I managed to save his arse with a little prudent forethought, more like …”