by Angels
The initial wave of agony receded a bit; I grew more fully aware of my surroundings. Close by, a tiny voice was wailing. “Oh please, kind sir, spare me. Oh please, sir, get me back to the water. Let me live, oh let me live.”
Somehow I got to my feet; somehow I managed to run toward my uncle’s house. Those memories are lost to me now; though this was the defining moment of my life, I cannot recall it. There are only shreds left, and they might be the work of imagination. I remember the mineral taste of the village apothecary’s draught that sent me to sleep after he had seen to my envenomed hand; and after that I remember waking up, and the days that followed; but by that time I was no longer the same person.
I had heard of war and wars before; I may have been only ten, but I knew, dimly, what a war was. I believed I knew about weapons, but I thought only in terms of objects: clubs, swords, guns, and wands, as if death-dealing were a card game. There are living weapons, things less than men and more than beasts, or perhaps less even than beasts, for they lack free will, being as patterned as insects. Long ago, so long ago that their name is almost all that is left of their memory, the Doriands crafted the mermaids as a weapon in their unending war with the Cremonts, from whom everyone on this continent draws his ancestry. The ones my Uncle Bernard and I had found were juveniles, no more than a few weeks old. At that age, their poison glands are barely developed. Adults grow to seven or eight feet in length, and one scratch from their prongs will kill a man instantly. They are, or were, very rare—of late they have been sighted with increasing frequency. Though they are not truly intelligent, they are to some degree adaptable; and either they have found a way to overcome whatever deep-sea predators held them in check, or else this too is part of their patterning, this rise and fall in their numbers, so that their victims will have time to forget about their threat. Life is perverse enough that all too often the most twisted explanation is the right one.
My slowfall activated an instant after I’d left the aerostat. By then we were over the outskirts of Quinzach. I fell down from the sky as if flying, spinning slowly along my body’s axis to avoid being surprised by an attack from overhead—I still feared being attacked by a gargoyle. The lights of the city below me were a spangling of gold. Though I knew for a fact that it was nearly impossible to distinguish something so small as a man against the backdrop of the night sky, I felt exposed and wished I could have fallen into utter darkness instead of this glare. Half a minute later, I got my wish, as the lights throughout the city trembled and winked out. After long seconds a dull roar reverberated all around me, an echo of the destruction of a central part of the electrical network.
The darkness did not remain absolute for long: soon flickers of orange and blue spread about, as the inhabitants lit candles or evoked spell-glows, but the streetlights were dead for good and I was able to swoop down into a darkened street like an owl, unseen by anyone. My heart was pounding: the time for action had come. Already other detachments had been at work in Quinzach; the failure of the lights was proof. Now I must link up with the rest of my unit and we would wreak havoc throughout the city, taking its dwellers by surprise, overpowering its weak defences, striking a glorious blow for Melgrion.
What happened instead is that I spent hours crouched in hiding, emerging at times to run through the dark streets without ever managing to link up with my fellow mercenaries. A huge damping field overlay the city, making enspelled communication impossible: our main way of coordinating was inoperable. I had a seeker-spell in reserve for emergencies; after an hour, I decided to use it, but it proved just as impotent as my far-talker. Finding the general area where the others must have dropped was not hard; but once I had reached it, I realized to my dismay that it was in fact crawling with Carhellian patrols: the city was much better defended than our intelligence had said. We were not going to prevail; in fact, if my gut feeling was correct, we were going to be slaughtered. My aerostat had crashed down into the city not long after I’d landed; by then there was so little lifting gas in its bladders that its detonation was almost a murmur. I had hoped it would make for a diversion, but rather it brought the enemy to the pitch of alertness.
After my third narrow escape from a patrol I gave up on any plans to rejoin my unit. If they were still alive, they had fled or were in hiding, and I could not expect to locate them. I just had to make my way out of Quinzach and disappear into the countryside.
As I headed for the outskirts of the city I heard the sharp rattle of small-arms fire from up ahead, and then a low moan that resonated in my bones: the cry of an Aspect let loose. I thought to recognize it as one of ours, and hurried forward, priming my gun with a whispered command.
Fifteen or twenty Carhellians had flushed out one of our squads who’d been hiding in a cellar. The mercenaries had unleashed an Aspect to clear the way as they erupted from the cellar, hoping to lose themselves before the Carhellians could overcome the Aspect. I found myself arriving in the middle of things: the Aspect towered over the Carhellians and roared in fury, reaching out its many limbs toward its enemies. Unfortunately, they had a capable mage with them: he scribed a single symbol in the air that paralysed the Aspect, and then invoked something of his own, a ravening gyre which he sent out after our forces.
I make it all sound clear and neat, everything thus and so; but I lie. I reconstructed events afterwards, for in those few seconds I could understand nothing, only see: the boiling darkness of the Aspect, the huddled forms of men to my left and the madly running ones to my right; the loops of silver fire forming the symbol, and then the blazing mouth of the gyre, which doubled and redoubled itself as it fissioned and sent out copies of itself in all directions, including the one that flew straight at me. At the last moment, I threw myself down; I don’t know if it was training or the instinctive expenditure of my combat-luck. The gyre missed me by a hair; still I felt its power wash through my body, a surge of light and heat searing my nerves and charring my mind like a twig in a fire.
Perhaps combat is different for generals and high officers, who command from afar and send ten thousand nameless men to be slain for the sake of a hill. To them, I could believe, is granted a clarity of vision that the individual soldier forever lacks. War College certainly taught us this, so deviously that even the cynics amongst us could not but accept it as a fact. Yet I have seen enough engagements to know that battle is at its heart chaos incarnate, a matter of terrified men running blindly about, trying to kill before they are killed. I’ve fought with no weapons but my own hands; I’ve fought with a bolt-sword, wearing enspelled armour; I’ve fought with a rifle and a single eternity disc over my heart, and I know: the instruments may change, but the music remains the same.
By the time I regained consciousness, the battle was long over, and only the dead remained. If anyone on either side had noticed me, they must have assumed I was one of the corpses. I myself wasn’t too sure I was alive. I got my arms under me and pushed; my head swivelled upward and side to side. All around me was the night; noises came from far away. I crawled in the other direction, too stupid to know what I was doing. After what felt like ages I reached a house and was able to lever myself upward, clinging to its wall. All my wards had been burned away; my jacket was thin and glassy-slick in patches, and my pants below the knees had melded themselves to my skin. I had been lucky beyond belief: my face, my arms were untouched; in fact my whole upper body was intact, I was in no pain whatsoever, but my limbs felt brittle as eggshell, and my head both empty and huge, a vast echoing hall. I began walking down the street; I may have fallen several times, or only feared I would. This time also has been almost lost to me; but I can be sure that nothing happened in those minutes or hours that I wandered, dazed, along the darkened alleyways of Quinzach: for if anything had happened I would have been either killed or rescued.
No, I only walked alone in an embattled city; and if any saw me and recognized me as an enemy, they were too craven to come up to me and slay me. I like to thi
nk I wandered half the night; but probably my walk lasted less than five minutes, and I may even have gone in a circle, for when I decided to enter the house I had reached, it was because its façade seemed very familiar.
The door wasn’t locked; I kicked it weakly two or three times before it occurred to me to turn the handle. The door offered no resistance and I almost fell inside.
I found the woman almost immediately; she was crouched in a corner, whimpering the way Xavier had whimpered aboard the aerostat. When I came into the room, she screamed with her hands over her mouth. Though my arm trembled, I pointed my gun straight enough at her. There was a bit of light in the room, from a glowbead floating in a dish of water on the floor. When I saw the woman better, I lowered my weapon.
“It’s okay,” I croaked. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I let myself drop on the narrow bed; its springs creaked under my weight. I was panting suddenly, as if the act of sitting down was what had brought me to the edge of collapse.
“It’s all right,” I repeated when she did not change her position. “I don’t fight civilians. Do you understand? You’re safe from me. I just need to rest.”
She looked at me then, and slowly uncoiled from her crouch. I tried smiling. When I asked for water, she brought me some. I carefully explained to her that I would be gone in the morning, that she had nothing to fear from me. I asked her name but she would not tell me, and I was too tired to press.
She brought me water twice more, and food, though I could not make myself eat. She kept darting glances at my legs, where the fabric had intermingled with my skin, then looking away in horror. I tried making a joke about it, but she didn’t laugh. It made me absurdly angry, and I yelled at her, making her cry. Then I apologized, explained how shaken I was.
I must have fallen asleep not long after that. I woke with the dawn—I mustn’t have slept more than two hours. I rose to my feet, feeling weaker than before and yet more solid. I had survived the gyre’s kiss, after all. I noticed that the woman had gone, and told myself that she was in the next room, that I was not in danger. I was just coming out of the room when three Carhellians burst into the house through the front door. My gun was in my hand and I fired in that instant. But the gyre had burned away most of its charge; all that erupted from the muzzle was a thin, ghostly wash of energy.
I had aimed true enough: it hit the woman dead on, as she stood in the threshold, looking in on the scene. The bolt staggered her and she screamed, a full-throated one this time. In the next instant, the Carhellians brought me down with a pulser; as I lay thrashing on the floor, they bound me with elastic straps, then carried me out like a package. The woman was still screaming; in her eyes as I passed I read only loathing and terror. The bolt had burst some blood vessels in her face, giving it a pale crimson, nearly purplish cast. I recalled the mermaid’s little face and its poisoned smile; my left hand burned me like it had on that day so long ago. In that instant I had a revelation of the truth. But I did not want to believe.
I found myself in a prisoners’ camp, along with the last dregs of the Melgrian mercenaries. I spent the next two years a slave, collecting whip-scars as free men collect wages, until the Melgrians conquered Quinzach and the few of us who’d survived were liberated. I was twenty-three years old. I was brought back home; a pomaded general pinned the Silver Claw to my parade uniform, called us all heroes of the war. I spent a few months home, amongst a family that had thought me dead and consequently treated me like a hero of olden days, risen again.
It was a living death. From sitting around idle all day, I gained twenty pounds, all of it fat. Uncle Bernard raised the possibility of my working on the fishing fleet as if it were an honour beyond even the Claw. It was when my marriage to Senemyane was mentioned again that I knew I had to escape.
And so I fled back to the waiting arms of the War College. I resumed training, and after another six months was pronounced fit for duty. Five weeks later I was part of the liberation of Drayaltoll, and then came the Parchen campaign. Yet I knew that my escape was only temporary. Knew that I would have to return one day, because that also was my duty. And after all, I had spent years training to obey.
Now the ceremony is done; I have fulfilled the destiny all men aspire to. Tonight, in the connubial bed, I shall engage with my wife in sexual congress. Her family has wished sons on her, many sons, so that they may be sent out to gather food at risk to their lives, so that they may fight in the wars that countries engage in, these play-wars that distract us from the real conflict at the heart of our race. I am of the moiety that goes outward, that dies senselessly, that learns what honour is, so that it may be better betrayed—by the other half of its own side.
People are dancing now, to stupid peasant music that endlessly repeats the same chords in the same order. Old Cruikshank has put his prostheses back on and is waddling about on the periphery of the dancers on his synthetic legs. I wish I had a synthetic manhood; then I would know for certain I would be able to perform tonight. As it is, such things are hit-and-miss these days; I am an old man in his fourth decade, after all, and I’ve spent far too much of that time in close proximity to energy weapons.
Senemyane has been sitting some distance away, talking to a knot of her relatives; she smiles at me when she notices my glance. All the wars in which I have fought have been diversions, minor skirmishes. There is only one true war, which has been going on since the world came into being. They were witches, these ages-gone Doriands who crafted the mermaids; wise women who knew their enemy’s weaknesses and targeted them with care. I cannot, even now, truly hate them, for their weapons taught me more than they intended. The Cremonts who were their enemies are long dead, but still I am the Cremonts’ far-removed son, and I can claim their heritage.
The scar on my hand aches; even after twenty years my flesh still feels the poison. It has taken this long for me to understand the lesson the mermaid was meant to teach me, but then I was always stubborn, and not very quick-witted; ask any of my old teachers.
Senemyane rises from her chair and holds out her arms to me. I incline my head; it feels naked, bereft of its helmet—but though the instruments may change, the music is ever the same. With a smile on my lips and open hands, I go to engage my enemy.
CHILD OF THE SLEEPING WORLDS
BLEUE
The sylphids had tried to discourage him: “Do not go, Prince, do not go! None come back from Hurt. Your soul will be taken, you will not return!” Canarids, Jayls, Sparrels, they spun around him, cheeping their lament: “Do not go, do not go!”
He had closed his eyes to avoid being dizzied by their flight; and he had said softly: “I will go.”
The sylphids had fallen silent, had stopped their whirling flight to land on the boughs of the garden shrubs. The Prince had opened his eyes again. The sylphids were watching him silently, hands and feet clutching at twigs, wings slowly beating; tears at the corners of their eyes like so many dewdrops.
VERTE
First had come the calendar: a green marble cylinder, at one end of which were affixed two brass disks, one pivoting upon the other. In the topmost disk windows had been cut; on both disks were engraved numbers and words in a dead tongue. There was also a picture the Prince saw as a sun, and another one that his mother insisted was a ship—but no such thing could have sailed between the stars.
“Look,” the Fourth Queen, his mother, would say, “if you turn the disk . . . like this . . . you align the month with the year and you can tell which day of the week falls on the first. You see?”
But there were too many months: “That is because the months of Hurt were shorter than ours, they only had thirty-one days. And their seasons were terrible! In the warm season, it was so hot that people had to shelter in the shade to avoid being baked like loaves of bread; and in the cool season, it was so cold that the rain froze and made snow, like the snow you see on the mountaintops, but everywhere!”
The P
rince sometimes looked doubtful; the Fourth Queen would then state, in a tone that brooked no contradiction: “It is written in the Book of Exile.”
The Prince would turn the brass disk backward, as if he could thus have reversed the flow of time. The days and the months and the pale seasons followed their cycles on the Sleeping Worlds, and always an identical future succeeded to the present. Sometimes, the Prince almost convinced himself he had climbed back up the spiral of time; after all, how could he have told the difference for certain?
HURT (IN ORBIT)
The Man from Hurt was incredibly vast: that was the first thought the Prince had had. The breadth of those shoulders, the length of those legs. . . . Then the Prince had been struck by the reddish cast of the skin, the shape of the hands, the smallness of the nose; and even though he knew that many people of home could have had this exact appearance, he had felt in this man all the strangeness of the people of this world, condensed as light was condensed in a prism-lily of Verte.
The Man from Hurt was called Gerard Chun and bore the esoteric title of Grp III Xeno Admin. He could not stand to remain motionless for any length of time; all through their discussion, he would rise from his chair, pace for half a minute, sit down, only to rise again the next instant.
“You cannot comprehend, Highness, the risks that you are running.” He spoke in an ancient, graceless version of Farance. “Outside the polar areas, you will not be easily accepted. We have little contact with other planets anymore, other than through a few thousand Orbitals. I cannot even guarantee the reactions of the polar cities—but the continental religions are almost all violently xenophobic. If you were a non-human, you would immediately be torn to pieces, do you understand?” He was drumming the fingers of his left hand on his right thumb. “But can someone from a planet which has no concept of God understand?”
