Champion of Mars (35 page)

The candles flickered as Moden entered. The man stopped writing. His hair was dressed in the latest fashion, his robes stiffened into elaborate folds as was the custom of the fourteen houses of the Man-dar-see. This was a rich man, a powerful man. “Ah,” he said. “Moden Pic.” He spoke as if they had an appointment, and Moden had arrived in good time. Perhaps he believed that; most of the aristocracy were full believers in eleutheremic fate. Moden was not. He had seen too much in this life and his others to buy into that. For starters, if everything was fated, how come the spirits were absolutely shitting their ephemeral selves during the war? Ask them and you got the usual evasive horseshit.

The man held an open hand out to a stool in front of his desk. He went back to his writing. Moden supposed he was supposed to sit down.

The man could suppose the fuck off. Moden remained where he was.

The man looked up and sighed. He laid aside his pen, scattered red sand across what he had written and blew gently upon the paper, then tipped the sand away, put the paper into a tray and dusted his hands off . The putto fell silent. “I understood it would be like this, but I am still irked by it.” The man tried an honest expression. He had a merchant’s face, generously blanketed in fat, lips creased by the constant pursing that seemed to accompany bazaar dickering. The expression did not suit him; there was a ruthlessness underlying his skin. “I am fool to myself.” A chuckle followed to the same effect, a plaster mask of a laugh, fragile and fake. “Please sit down. I have a proposal I wish to discuss with you. I have gone to a great deal of time and trouble to find you.” His tongue periodically strayed from his lips, fat and pink as the rest of him, to touch the corners of his mouth or the base of his philtrum.

Moden peered out of the tentflap. “I am flattered,” he murmured. The light was harsh after the dim tent interior. Still the same sense of peril. “If I run, I die, right? That’s the way these things usually work.”

The man tilted his hands and put out a fleshy lip. “I have to have some leverage.”

“No Second World up here any more, so no assassin spirits. And those brassnecks you got there won’t stop me.”

“Oh, I very much doubt they would. You’re what, a five-times-reinvested veteran of the last war? And how many times have you lived in total, Moden Pic? Hundreds? You’re quite the legend back in Kemyonset, I have no doubt you could take my men apart like soft cheese. But you are wrong about the Second World, as wrong about that as you are about the lack of assassin spirits.” He wagged a pudgy finger. “I have a variety of
exceptionally
final means at my disposal here. But, assuming I did not, and assuming you considered declining my invitation on the mountain, it begs the question, if your martial prowess is so great, then why did you come here at all? And to that I know the answer...” He smiled. His teeth were small. “I think you know what I have.” The man pulled open a drawer, the wood creaking. “Or should I say,
who.”

From within the drawer he produced a spirit core, which he held up between his fat forefinger and thumb. The light it cast – pale violet with threads of silver, Kaibeli’s colour – made of his face a demoniacal leer. “I am sure you know who this is. We’re here on a reclamation mission, you see. The Second World is growing again. The Grand Court and Conclave of Spirits has been re-established, the Great Library functions again, although alas without the Great Librarian. Five of the greatest spirits have come to the fore and are rebuilding Mars. True, we may still be isolated from the rest of the galaxy, but there’s no reason we have to go the same way as Erth. It’s a new world out there!” He snatched the spirit core into his palm, enfolding it within flesh and hiding its glow. His face returned to that of the avuncular cheat. “Of course, you wouldn’t know that, hiding yourself up here and drinking yourself stupid. It was a coincidence, really, that we came across her so soon. And that, my friend, gave me an idea. I wonder, would you care to do me a small service in return for your lover?”

Moden’s throat was suddenly dry. “Prove it is her, and maybe we can talk.”

Again that smile, again the tongue following to taste it. The man tossed the core across the tent. “Prove it yourself. You have the equipment.” He heaved himself out from behind his desk with not a little difficulty, for he was grossly fat, as many men of the aristocracy tended to be.

Moden caught it and withdrew the fork from his belt. As he brought the core close, the fork sang the song he had wanted to hear these last twenty years, humming the notes that made up her name. “Kaibeli, Kaibeli, Kaibeli.” He fitted the core into the fork’s tines, and it sang the louder.

Moden removed it and gave a noncommittal grunt. “You can fool the forks.”

The fat man rolled his eyes. “Yes, you can, but I have not. It takes time, effort and a lot of lies in very particular places. Dangerous places. Do you see me doing that up here?” He held up his arms and looked about him, as if appealing to a court of law.

“Let me fit her to a sheath, and then we’ll see.”

“Let you fit her to a sheath and then I’ll die. No thank you. I’m afraid you’ll have to take this on faith, but I will point out that your fork was most insistent.”

Moden weighed the dull grey instrument in his hand. Wasn’t it just?

He looked up from under his hat brim, eyes dark spaces where candle-flame stars danced. “What do you want me to do?”

The man rubbed his hands together. “First, let us deal on level terms. You are Moden Pic, but you do not know who I am. I will tell you, so we may deal fairly. I am Sulman Mahoo, of the third house of Man-dar-see, and I would have you do a simple task.” He chuckled apologetically, acknowledging the lie. “I want you to catch me a Stone Kin.”

I
T APPEARED THAT
Moden was to be the bait.

A party of men, armed with weapons that caused the Kin certain excruciation, walked in wide perimeter around Moden. He, stripped of his weapons, was left at the centre of a large depression in the side of the volcano, close by the Veil of Worlds.

There was a reek to the place, redolent of slaughter, cloves and chipped flint, a chemical tang on the air that scalded the throat and forced Moden to wear a scarf wrapped about his face. The scent was one he knew well, the scent of the Stone Kin.

There were a few places like this left, portals half-open, slowly closing, where phantoms and images from the higher dimensions might intrude. Moden avoided them.

Here, Mahoo had told him, was one of the last places the smaller forms might fully make their way into mundane reality, if only for a short while.

Moden had faced the Stone Kin innumerable times, and he was frightened,
because
rather than in spite of that. The Stone Kin were hard to comprehend, eleven-dimensional beings extruded into base four-dimensional reality. They were not of stone; Moden had no idea why they were called so, but he suspected it was because of their manner of movement. They were fast and uniformly deadly, and yet sometimes one would stop dead, like a picture, as if they were excluded from the normal flow of time. They might remain that way for microseconds or millennia. As a habit, it would have added to their otherworldly menace, if they were not easily slain while in this state.

To see one could be difficult, as unless they forced themselves entirely into the four lower dimensions occupied by men, they moved in their own areas of the universe and merely brushed those familiar to humanity. You would see only this or that aspect of a Stone Kin presented to you as they pressed upon the lower realms. It was like looking at a picture made with a froth of paint: one saw the bubbles as flat, broken diameters, and not as the complex three-dimensional forms they really had. An unmanifested Stone Kin could be a curve of light, a membrane, a slight bulging to the air, but it could kill you only marginally less effectively than in its fully extruded form. Thus, Moden kept a sharp watch, eyes darting around. He would not sit, turning constantly upon the spot, looking for the tell-tale disruptions of reality that might end his life.

The fork warbled discordantly. Then the sound died along with all other noise, the wind dropped away. Moden’s perceptions shifted precipitously, and he felt all of a sudden that he viewed the world at ninety degrees to its normal plane. His head felt tight; light became attenuated and the smell of the place intensified. Moden spun around. There. Ripple light shimmered over a mound of rocks, darted around and through them. His heart hammered. It had been two decades since he’d last seen one, and with one glimmer of light, the memory of a half-dozen deaths burst into his mind.

The first thing he’d learned was to stay calm, and never take your eyes off them.

The light changed, became diffuse, a blue glow that died, clinging to the stone. Reality snapped back like a bowstring.

Shouting. He followed the noise. Movement. Three men were running-sliding down the side of the depression, banners of dust flying from their feet.

A woman ran past them, form hazy yet growing more distinct all the while, a woman with light blue skin.

The world reeled again, and the woman blinked out of existence. The men were still at the top of the hill, scanning the horizon. He felt sick.

A noise behind him.

He turned around and there she was, the blue-skinned girl. She smiled at him. A maddeningly familiar perfume engulfed him: flowers, sparks and dust in the summer rain. His brain rifled madly through the accumulated memories of a hundred lifetimes. Faces he knew had once been his – days from times that time itself had little recollection of – flashed by his mind’s eye. There, perhaps, a rooftop garden, a night so very important then, but devoid of meaning now. A girl with blue skin.

She skitter-jumped back, then sideways, then back again, her limbs moving in stuttered jerks, time writing over itself in confusion.

“I said we would meet again,” she said.

Moden opened his mouth to speak. There was a bang and a wisp of smoke. The woman’s smile froze to her face and she slipped to the floor, as fluid as snow sliding down a mountain. Sulman Mahoo stood behind her, a bulbous weapon in his hand.

“There,” said Sulman Mahoo. “Not too hard, eh?” He pulled a dull cylinder from his belt, and set it beside the woman. He retired a few paces and waved his hand at Moden. “I’d stand back if I were you.”

Moden did. Unable to take his eyes off the woman – unremarkable now, even with her bluish skin, for men had become diverse in appearance – he stumbled on a rock. The cylinder melted like ice in the sun, spreading into silver liquid.

Mahoo directed another instrument at it, and it crept up and over the prone woman. For a moment there was a perfect silver statue upon the sand, and then it collapsed. The metal jerked and strained, pseudopods waving in the air, but Mahoo twiddled something on the device in his hand and it grew quiescent. Moving now as if under direction, the metal flowed back into the shape of a cylinder. Mahoo gestured and one of his men came forward and picked it up. Mahoo took it from him and tucked it into his belt.

“There you are,” he said. “Service rendered. Thank you. Here is your payment.” He walked to Moden and pressed the spirit core into his hand. “It
is
her, you know, and I would have let you have her had this not worked out. I’m not a monster.”

“If this hadn’t worked out, we’d be dead.”

Mahoo made a wry face. “There is that.”

“What is all this for?” He pointed at the cylinder. “What is that?”

“I’m sure you’re thinking ‘why me?’ as well. I cannot say beyond your obvious role as bait. I act under the direction of the new Quinarchy, and they tell little. Just ‘Go here Mahoo, do that Mahoo, find Moden Pic, Mahoo, the Stone Kin are interested in him. It is fated that you will... fated that you will capture one.
Fated
.’ And so I do. Who am I to do otherwise? It is, after all, fated. And they pay well.” He patted his ample belly. “Stay safe, Moden Pic.” One of his men dropped Moden’s weapons at his feet. “I have a feeling the spirits haven’t finished with you yet.”

As much as he hated standing in the dying Stone Intrusion, he waited until Mahoo had gone before he turned and walked out of the interface the other way. He was headed away from the camps at the foot of the mountain, their ranks of empty shacks and bunkers slipping under the sand. That didn’t matter, he wouldn’t be going back there.

He tucked Kaibeli into his pocket, belted his weapons about his waist, shouldered his pack and went away from the mountain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Spirefather of Arn Vashtena

I
AM WITHIN
the world of the city Library fragment, the domain of the machine that once ruled the lives of the men of this spire, and, in council with others of its kind, the lives of all those who once inhabited this city.

I sit upright and open my eyes. Two objects fall from my face; small, brassy coins.

Outside, the armour-sphere ripples and parts to form the shape of a human mouth. Yoechakenon looks to it. “I am within,” the mouth says with my voice. He nods in reply.

I wear a spirit body. Barring our tattoos, when men and spirits meet in the Second World they are indistinguishable. I wear the form I have favoured for the majority of my long life: a woman of the old type, one of the forms of humanity when they first left Earth. When I chose it I do not know, for my memory hazes with distance. It is a landscape that loses itself before the horizon.

I sit on damp sand beside a river. Black water slides past, silver wavelets glimmering. This is not an unusual landscape. All the greater spirits shape their domains to their whim, and many choose rivers or seas as the boundaries to their territories. But the blackness of the water is forbidding. What would usually be alive with light and noise is dark and silent. There is no way in or out of this corner of the Second World. This is a crossroads whose roads lead nowhere.

A stench hangs on the air, coming off the river, and all is rendered in tones of grey. It speaks of a morbid mind, or perhaps it is rendered so drearily to put off unwanted guests. Judging by the smashed corpses at the base of the gravity slide, this is a spirit which does not like company.