Context

by John Meaney

  It was a broken wreck, which some power had mostly destroyed and left here, propped up—immobile, statue-like—to suffer slowly, to wait out the years until its internal power plant finally gave up the ghost, and whatever passed for human in its core patterns finally dissipated into oblivion.

  ‘I... hunted... you.’

  That brought the fear back. Jacks had searched for the Pilot’s mu-space crystal, when Tom was fourteen SY old; years later, Jacks were part of the manhunt for Gérard d’Ovraison’s murderer. Was that what it meant?

  But the poor ravaged thing did not have the energy for prolonged conversation: Tom could see the agonized effort those few words had cost it.

  ‘I’m looking for a woman. Held captive by the Blight.’

  Trying to enlist its sympathy, by naming the Blight as his enemy. For whatever had done this to a Jack was itself no human being. Such power: the rained Jack’s abdominal area, blackened, was melded into the chapel wall, part of the extended charcoal burn pattern which sprayed across half the chamber.

  Slowly, it raised its shattered face.

  And sniffed.

  Tom’s skin crawled in remembrance of childhood tales: those senses which could detect individual airborne molecules, the implanted weaponry which might destroy half a demesne in seconds.

  ‘That...way.’ A minute nod indicated direction. ‘Not long ...Hurry.’

  But Tom did not move.

  ‘What can I—?’

  ‘You... know.’

  Tom had no weapon with which to end it. And a creature which could survive all that had happened ... With his bare hand Tom could make it suffer, but he was not sure he could kill it.

  Instead, he gave his deepest bow.

  ‘I’ll return, honoured Jack. You have my word.’

  ‘Hurry...’

  ~ * ~

  65

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  It was vast: a wide circular arena, bathed in a pool of white ghostly light, shining from above. All around rose banked tiers of seats, filled with people: perhaps ten thousand, clad in grey, staring up into a searing glare too powerful for normal eyes.

  Crouched in the shadowed entranceway, Tom held up his hand—a poor shield against that blinding white—and squinted, barely managing to see the shaft’s walls rising vertically upwards, some two kilometres to the surface, and the great crystal stadium which blazed above.

  And on those walls, all the way up, stood row upon circular row of people: a crush of entwined bodies, a seething mass like some vast communal hive. A quarter of a million people lined the shaft like jostling, crawling insects, waiting for... what?

  But down here on the arena floor, at its centre, was a small figure ringed by armed human guards—not drones—whose attention was on her instead of the titanic presence growing overhead. One of them bore the bulky black satchel, proof of Elva’s guilt.

  The white light glowed stronger, nova-bright. Tom looked down and away, fluorescence crowding his vision, helpless as a crawling ant at ground zero.

  At that moment one of Elva’s guards saw Tom.

  In unison, they turned in his direction. Simultaneously, every person on the lowest tier of seats stood up in perfect synchrony. Two hundred pairs of eyes stared at Tom.

  ‘Elva,’ he called out.

  ‘Fate, Tom! No!’

  Only the guards looked armed, but it was irrelevant: no-one could survive the weight of such a huge crowd advancing. If he fled right now—he was in the exit-way, could save himself—but no. A strange calm descended on him.

  Flight was impossible, without Elva.

  And if death was inevitable, then he chose to face it here, with her—not by himself in some lonely future, whether hours or decades from now. He stepped out into the white light, onto the arena floor.

  ‘Elva... I’m not leaving you again.’

  Hopeless love moistened her grey eyes.

  Overhead, the blaze grew even brighter, though Tom had not thought it possible. It was huge, and its energy was growing: it was a manifestation of a great being, a vast power whose drives knew nothing of the two human specks who stood below it. And in that moment, flooded with a sense of his worthless insignificance beneath the Blight’s overwhelming presence, Tom realized how much he and others had misinterpreted its nature, and underestimated its power.

  For the Blight was not an extension or a limb of that distant Anomaly, but something more like a seed—or had been. For now it was mature, coming into its own as it gathered humans throughout the world into itself, almost becoming the planet: a true sentience beyond pitiful human understanding, which perhaps was evolution’s goal as individuals were subsumed within the whole. While Tom and Elva were about to die, burned from existence in a flare of energy, like dust particles which drifted into incandescent flames, sparked briefly and were gone.

  So this is death.

  He tried to meet Elva’s gaze.

  Then a vast percussive clap slammed the air, and Tom fell down.

  They swarmed inside.

  Crimson arachnasprites with black-clad riders hurtled into the arena, up onto the walls, speeding sideways to the ground as their grasers spat ravening energy. Half of Elva’s guards perished in that moment. Within seconds, as some of the riders caromed off the walls, causing their mounts to leap in a blur of tendrils over Elva, the other guards were down: two flattened by flailing’ sprite tendrils, the others drilled through with precision graser fire.

  One of the riders stopped, flung back her helmet: Thylara, of the Clades Tau, with that familiar mocking grin and mass of flame-red hair. She held out her gauntlet-covered hand to Elva, who took a step towards the crouched arachnasprite.

  But then Elva wheeled away, muttering, and crouched over one of the fallen guards, tugging at the black satchel which was caught in the corpse’s grasp.

  ‘Come on, Strelsthorm!’

  While overhead, something new was taking place.

  A great shadow fell across the arena.

  Glimmers of white still shone around the shaft’s edges—in the crystal stadium two klicks above, light still blazed—but immediately overhead a blackness was gathering. It roiled, it flexed: a twisting in space, a massive vibration of power so great that light could not escape its presence. It was the true Dark Fire, the Blight itself, coalescing into being above Tom. Waves of dread washed down upon him.

  The scarlet ‘sprites sprang into action, firing at the massed humans in their tiers upon the shaft walls, but suddenly their coruscating fire was having no effect, as energy which could blast through stone spattered and burst from the Absorbed targets, fell away from those once-human beings as harmlessly as gentle water, leaving them unwounded.

  Then darkness reached out, and half of the TauRiders and their ‘sprites winked out of existence like snuffed holo images.

  ‘Get out!’ Tom waved urgently to Thylara, who had helped Elva to mount the saddle behind her, clutching the black satchel which surely could not matter now.

  Her arachnasprite sprang forward, but even in that moment human figures came from nowhere, a mass of them, jamming the exit from the arena, blocking the TauRiders’ way. Tom heard Thylara’s curse as she spun her mount sideways on and stopped.

  The other riders, not wishing to present stationary targets, were moving, but such manoeuvres could have no meaning for the being coalescing above them, capable of reaching through spacetime itself, so powerful that it could not be termed anything other than a god.

  But it did not strike.

  For a moment Tom wondered why it held back, whether there was some awful torture it might have in mind for these tiny beings which had come to its notice, perhaps caused it a momentary annoyance; but then something strange happened which caused him to re-evaluate the wisdom of Elva’s actions.

  The satchel which she clutched so tightly twitched.

  At that instant, in a circle around the arena’s floor, black flames rippled in the air, and then there were nine scarlet figures standing there. Alm
ost immediately, they began to walk towards Elva, and Thylara caused her ‘sprite to crouch lower, ready to spring: sensing, like Tom, that these beings could perhaps be avoided but surely not defeated.

  And the satchel twitched once more.

  What the Chaos is it?

  ‘Elva!’ Tom made up his mind instantly. ‘Throw it to me!’

  Startled, Elva stared at him—grey eyes wide with love—then tossed the satchel towards him.

  Nine scarlet figures turned their attention to Tom as he snatched it from the air.

  Overhead, the massive presence of the Blight stirred, but did not strike; that was more horrifying than if it had killed everyone outright.

  Two TauRiders moved to flank Tom, guarding him, but the air clenched like a black fist and squeezed them from existence, and they were gone.

  Why didn‘t you kill me ?

  Down on one knee, working quickly as the nine scarlet-clad Absorbed drew closer, Tom opened the satchel, drew out a spherical grey bag—spilling crystals: they were not the cause of the Blight’s hesitation—and opened the bag.

  He grabbed the wet, glistening contents by its long thin locks of sparse, blood-soaked hair, and stood up straight with the thing dangling from his hand.

  The nine Absorbed stopped dead.

  For in Tom’s hand was a flayed human head, its blood-red muscles flensed and glistening, its sinews hanging intact, with prominent lidless eyeballs: white spheres in startling contrast to the bloody, stripped muscles. Its teeth looked long, for lips, like skin, had been cut away. The head ended at the severed, dripping neck: not neatly, but with a tangle of arteries and sinews, roughly hacked away from the long-dead body.

  And then, as it hung from Tom’s hand, the thing’s mouth moved, forming silent words, and those dead eyeballs swivelled to focus upon Tom.

  He was too stunned even to drop it.

  ‘It’s Eemur’s Head.’ Elva’s voice echoed oddly in the stillness. ‘She was a Seer, killed long ago, and they guard it like a treasure.’

  A Seer?

  And even as he watched, two teardrops grew in that poor thing’s butchered face: one drop swelling slowly at the corner of each eye.

  But these were no ordinary tears, for they sparked with electric blue fire, glowed like sapphires in startling contrast to the black malevolence roiling overhead.

  In silence, the blackness waited. The air chilled, as if solidifying, while the huge hive of Blight-absorbed humanity held its collective breath. Then the nine Absorbed continued their advance towards him—as though Tom had missed something, as though he could have struck back but failed—and he knew that mere seconds remained before he and Elva and Thylara and the other TauRiders were ripped from existence or, worse, invaded by the questing darkness with a sickening intimacy which could not be denied, as it inserted itself into body and soul, taking what it wanted, making human meat a part of its distributed self.

  He could have run; he could have suicidally attacked.

  Instead, in that moment of total desperation, Tom performed an action he would never be able to explain to himself or others, but which seemed simultaneously the strangest and most natural thing to do at the time.

  Slowly, gently, he raised up that poor, bloody severed head...

  ‘No! Tom—’

  ... and kissed dead Eemur on her bone-white teeth.

  That flensed mouth parted, and for a moment an icy purple swollen tongue touched Tom’s, cold and intimate, and he shivered with fear and another emotion he could not name. And then he kissed her twice more, gently, once at the corner of each eye where the fluorescent sapphire tears were waiting.

  Fate...

  Fear and joy—bittersweet emotion and a strange, acidic taste—accompanied the absorption of those electric, glowing tears into Tom’s lips. He could feel their seeping numbness, then an odd sensation, like an internal itch which could never be scratched, slithering into his nerves, inserting and inveigling its way deep into his body ...

  And was gone, inside him.

  ‘Tom? What’s happening to you?’

  Then, accompanied by angelic music only he could hear, white-hot fire began to sing inside his veins. The scarlet figures were advancing—slowly, slowly as though underwater—but Tom was no longer capable of fearing them.

  For he understood his Destiny.

  And a power was upon him.

  Gently—as though he had forever in which to act—he replaced Eemur’s Head in the grey bag, and sticky-tagged it to his waist.

  Then he waited.

  Patiently.

  There were nine of them, advancing.

  Rip. A protest of sound.

  Reality tore apart, and Tom crouched before his single opponent, aware of the Tom Corcorigan to his left, of the other to his right.

  The blackness roiled overhead and spun, reacting—It knows—and then there were eighty-one scarlet-clad men coming towards him, before reality split asunder and once more each Tom Corcorigan faced one opponent, and the arena was becoming crowded now as the arachnasprites shuffled away, too close for comfort to the lowest tier of the Blight’s other human components.

  For I am become Legion.

  Split again, and exponentially again, and they overlapped, were a multitude—more than should fit inside the arena, partially occupying the same space but without disaster—but Tom was there too and this time he struck.

  And they fell, each of the Absorbed, as he—each Tom—struck once, hard, with killing concentration in the blow.

  ‘Quickly, now!’ one of him called to the others.

  He closed his eyes ...

  Opened them.

  He was by himself, the only Tom Corcorigan, standing at the centre of the arena, while scarlet figures winked out of existence one by one.

  Thylara was the first to react, gunning her arachnasprite towards the exit tunnel. The people who had blocked it were fallen: unconscious or dead. Elva jerked back with the inertia, unable to look away from Tom, mouth open, her eyes sick with fear.

  The other ‘sprites moved to follow.

  One of the riders paused, held out an inviting hand, but Tom waved him on. Above, the massive blackness gathered, yet he felt—he knew—it would not strike while he stood here, protected by the power of Eemur’s tears.

  The ‘sprites left one by one, until only Tom was left, standing beneath the void.

  But the void was darkening. Its capabilities were massive, godlike, as though the universe were gathering itself into one place above him, ready to wipe out Tom Corcorigan with the rest of humanity upon this world. And its human components, the mass of entwined bodies which lined the shaft overhead, sucked in a long collective breath, as though readying itself for one massive strike which would sunder reality and deal with this insect by flicking it into nonexistence.

  Roiling, it waited.

  There was a twitch of crimson motion at the edge of Tom’s vision, then Thylara’s arachnasprite was hurtling across the arena floor towards him.

  ‘Valnek’s got your friend.’ She was panting as the ‘sprite halted. ‘Come on.’

  With a glance upwards at the darkness, Tom swung himself up behind her.

  ‘Can you do that trick again?’ Thylara hesitated. ‘Make copies of yourself?’

  ‘Not unless it attacks in the same way.’

  Tom did not understand how he had tapped into the Blight’s own power; he knew only that he had subverted some kind of flow, blending with its channelling as it replicated its human manifestations.

  I’m scared.

  He had something of value to an entity whose evil and capabilities made it equal to any god of myth or legend. A power which had possibly subsumed entire worlds. And here he was, microscopic before it, frail and defenceless.

  It can flick me from existence.

  Instead, the ground shook with massive vibration, and a gout of dust rose from the exit as it filled with rubble, the tunnel collapsed in ruins.

  Trapped.

  ‘How do w
e...’ Even Thylara’s voice shook as she looked upwards.

  Gently, Tom’s arm enclosed the sticky-tagged bag containing Eemur, cradling the long-dead Seer’s head against him, knowing he could not lose her now. He locked the tension in his arm.

  ‘There’s only one way,’ he said.

  Thylara whooped as the arachnasprite sprang upwards. It leaped to the wall, and they flew vertically up towards the surface, ducking as they sped past blackness.