Champion of Mars (37 page)

I burst through a final stack and come to a sudden stop. There, before me, is a single book. It glows with faint welcome, and raises itself up off the shelf. Its pages flicker open, and its contents enter my mind.

I cannot help but feel that this book has been waiting for me.

It is a book of history. The history of Mars. It pours into my mind entire, and I see the whole of Man’s story on the red planet. Nowhere else is this information to be found. Much of it is forgotten, much of it I have forgotten.

I see myself and Yoechakenon in many guises in it. Sometimes lifetime follows hard after lifetime, sometimes our partnership is broken by gaps of hundreds of years.

I see myself in a cavern, in a body of mechanical design so ancient it staggers me that I once wore the like.

I see Yoechakenon. His first face. It is a face that I have not been able to bring to mind for many lifetimes. The sight of it twists my heart.

I see myself, my body trapped beneath the stone.

I make my promise.

The book moves through the transformation of Mars, through the twenty-thousand-year Hegemony of Man, thence to the Stone Wars, how the Stone Kin descended to our level of reality to make it their own, how they were beaten back. How the Second Stone War culminated with the transformation of Jupiter into the Stone Sun and trapped the Stone Kin in the system of Suul, cutting our world off from the rest of humanity in the process; how the Third Stone War brought ruin to Mars when the Kin subverted the Stone Sun and used it to pull themselves through once more to our level of existence.

That was the last time the Stone Sun approached the inner reaches of Suul’s system. Now it comes again and they come with it.

The history ends with the end of that War. How it came to be in a city destroyed and isolated by that very conflict is a mystery, and only reinforces my opinion that I was fated to find this book.

At the end, it talks of a gate, of a Golden Man, and of its guardian.

I know where the Librarian of Mars is. We must find this Golden Man, and then we will find the Librarian.

My elation is broken short. The Spirefather is nearly upon me. There is a crashing roar, and mountains of books and shelving collapse outwards, dust billowing everywhere.

I see it.

Huge, bloated, a hundred spans long at least. A mass of writhing memories plays endlessly over its maggot-like body. Three heads as big as boulders, sweaty-faced, framed by a fuzz of wiry hair, wave upon long necks. A fourth face, smaller, is embedded at the necks’ root. It mouths pleas, its eyes rolling as if it searches for release.

A thousand eyes wink, a thousand mouths gibber, a frill of grasping hands flail around its necks. It stinks of corruption, its being riddled with the influence of the Stone Lands. Yet still it lives.

“The song, the song. At last it has stopped. Sweet, sweet silence. Where is it? The will? Where is it?” Voices a shrill chorus, unified in insanity. Noses snuffle at the air, slack mouths work round yellow teeth. Its heads dart from side to side, then all converge upon me. “Pretty. Pretty,” it says. “You have it! It must not get out!” Mucus pours from its principal mouths and nostrils. I feel a stream of Stone-corrupted data hit me as the thing tries a direct link. It slides off my mind like liquid shit. It shakes itself like a gargantuan dog and appraises me with beady eyes. “Let us dine together.” It lunges, striking like a snake with each head in turn. I throw myself to one side, clutching the book. My stomach turns in disgust at the gobbets of slime running down my body. The thing snarls, its heads juddering with the broken movement of the Stone Kin. Long necks pull back. “Preeeeeety! Be good!” one head admonishes, and the other two titter. I am terrified; its will has stripped me of volition, pinning me to the spot.

There is a blur of black, and a powerful shape smashes one of the Spirefather’s heads aside. Long ebon claws dig into rheumy eyes, and the head roars in pain as the other two bite and snatch at the armour. “Mistress companion,” says the armour, “I advise you to flee.”

I run. The Spirefather is distracted, and I am able to move us. The Library fades, and we are beside the river again. The combat comes with me. The struggle is vicious. The armour is a powerful spirit of war, bred for one thing and one thing alone, but it fights a Spirefather on its own ground.

As I move away from the spirits, the Spirefather’s influence lessens. I take to the air and streak for the door. I reach out my hand to it, but hesitate. The armour and the Spirefather are flying across the landscape, or the landscape moves under them. Waves of fury batter my back.

“Go!” howls the armour. “Do not concern yourself for me! I am bred to conflict, this corrupt thing cannot defeat me!”

I touch the glass, and the world whirls in upon itself. I feel myself sucked through.

I am back in the armour’s true shape. The sensation of being a woman clutching a book to her chest vanishes. I am unreal once again, a spirit in a hostile body in an alien place. The armour’s spirit joins me. It is aroused. I smell its pleasure, like rank meat. I feel its hostility. Its snarls at me and leaps, trapping my soul. Its touch burns. It snaps its jaws in my face, and I think it will kill me.

It holds me there, grinning, as it interfaces itself with its outer being again, and I am thankful. Armour spirits are of monolithic character, choirless single entities. They are destined to remain forever solitary, outside of the symbiosis they share with their master. Its being cannot join with mine and subsume me.

And then, as my mind meshes with the senses of the armour’s true shape, I realise with horror that in order to save me, it had come to find me.

In doing so it has disobeyed a direct order. My hold on it is gone. I can never be alone with it again.

The armour opens its senses to the First World, and we are plunged into yet more violence.

Y
OECHAKENON IS NAKED
, bleeding from a number of shallow cuts and one graver wound to his arm. About his feet are the corpses of a score of the small troglodytic beings. Two dozen more circle him, wary eyes fixed on the blades of the glaive, gnashing their teeth. Their glaucous eyes glint in the light cast by the Library nexus. Their childish speech and fox-like barking is a horrible counterpoint to the screech of the glaive’s blades. They have reached an impasse. They are too many for Yoechakenon to fight at once, but he has already proved his skill, and they are loath to attack again.

The armour pulls itself into the crude shape of a man, charged liquid half-metals running together to create jointless limbs and a faceless head. Unsteadily it stands. “Master!” it calls, metallically.

The creatures holler alarms, waving their lumpen weapons in the armour’s direction. Half of them turn to face the armour. They back away, frightened, yet one brute, festooned in dangling charms, squeals and gesticulates at them until they gather their courage and interpose themselves between the true man and his companions.

A creature makes a feint for Yoechakenon. His glaive sheers off the end of its seax, sending it spinning through the air to clatter against the wall. “Kaibeli!” he calls. “Step back! Let the armour have its head!”

He does not know that it holds me back, not the other way round. The armour’s spirit twitches atop mine. It is hot and strange to the touch.

Yoechakenon swings his glaive up and round over his head, sweeping it in a wide circle. The blade nearest him stops instinctively, the edge going dull as it passes close to him, resuming its humming once clear. The creatures jump back, and one trips over a body. The child-thing scrabbles around in the crimson guts of its fallen comrade, and the glaive takes its head. Another makes a run for the door, but the leader cuffs it back into position.

“It is sworn to protect me. Let it run free!”

“Yoechakenon...”

Something is wrong. The energy patterns of the node are fluctuating in an impossible way. I pray the armour senses it too.

“Now, Kaibeli, now!” The creatures have recovered their nerve and are closing in on the armour, for it has no glaive.

Reluctantly, I submit to the armour’s mind. It gurgles in triumph. I fight to stop myself being overcome, to keep my dimmed senses fixed on the rumbling node. I begin to choke.

For a moment, I see the armour not as a beast, but another woman, a spirit like myself. She laughs in my face and the monster returns.

The armour has made its point and releases me. It takes full control of the suit’s faculties and explodes into action. It springs forward, spreading out in the air to a thin sheet of living metal. As it hits the line of squealing child-things, it wraps itself round the heads of three of them and draws its folds in. The creatures hammer at it in panic, powerless to damage its flexible skin as it squeezes tighter.

Yoechakenon takes his chance as the creatures stare at their struggling friends. He leaps high into the air over their heads and comes down hard, smashing the face of one into a bloody crater with his heel. With a broad sweep of his shrieking weapon, he decapitates two more. They are in a panic now, caught between the armour and the glaive. Some run, bursting past their chief; another throws itself at Yoechakenon, rancid breath whistling through fangs. The champion steps aside, flicks the glaive to open the thing’s stomach from neck to crotch. Its viscera unspool upon the floor, and it falls dead.

“Armour, armour, to me!” shouts Yoechakenon.

The struggles of the three creatures the armour has engulfed grow weak. The living metal convulses. With hideous pops the things’ infantile skulls give in, one after the other, and the armour flows away, leaving bloody pools of matter to gather in the grooves of the floor’s carvings.

My horror at a life, even so lowly a life, so joyously snuffed out draws my attentions from the Library node.

The armour gropes across the floor. It finds Yoechakenon’s foot and embraces it, and the champion cries exultantly as it flows up his limbs. He dispatches two more of the creatures as the armour encases him. He staggers as its pseudopods plug themselves into his spine ports, and one of the dwarfs takes advantage of this faltering, but its clumsy blows bounce from the champion’s metalled skin. Yoechakenon grasps the creature by the throat, the power of the armour surges through him, and he breaks its neck with a quick movement of his wrist. He tosses the body into two of its comrades, knocking them flat, takes up his glaive in both fists and sets to work in earnest.

Without his armour, Yoechakenon is a formidable warrior. For thirteen lifetimes he trained to become a champion, and he has served the role for three, his mind residing in a body engineered at the molecular level for strength, endurance, and agility. He can take half a dozen wounds that would fell most men, withstand the coldest depths of the polar deserts, breathe in the rarefied air atop Mulympiu.

He is pitiless by choice, a man sharpened by unspeakable torment into a living weapon. This is what it is to be a champion of Mars.

In the armour he is unstoppable. His cybernetic systems mesh in perfect synchronisation with the extra-dimensional technologies that make up the suit, his mind blurring into that of the armour’s savage spirit.

Without the armour he is Yoechakenon Val Mora, Mars’ greatest warrior.

In the armour he is the god of war come amongst mortal men.

He leaps effortlessly through the air, jumping from wall to wall, and all the while his long-staffed glaive spins round and round, dealing death to all that falls within its blurred arc. Soon the chamber is empty of all but the creatures’ leader. The walls of the Heart Chamber are dashed a bright crimson by the blood of the child-things, gobbets of flesh hanging from curling decorations.

The leader looks at the silver giant with animal surprise, a giant whose metal skin remains unmarked while his warriors fall dead all about him. For a moment it looks like the leader might run. Instead it screws up its face with rage, shouts a challenge, raises its cleaver and charges. Yoechakenon swings the glaive one-handed, taking it just above the right shoulder, cutting down in a shallow sweep out to its opposing armpit. He brings the weapon back across its face. The chieftain tumbles into three lifeless parts.

No sign can be read upon Yoechakenon’s expressionless, silver face as he surveys the havoc about him, but he is pleased with his work.

Unnatural energy ripples through the air, emanating from the Library node. Its type is violent, unidentifiable. Another burst comes, a bright violet light floods the room, turning scarlet blood black. Disconnected sensations bombard us: weightlessness, music, pain, joy. The air is heavy with the smell of old, mouldering data. When the light dies, the root stretching from the room has grown monstrous, wrapping the chamber from floor to ceiling in writhing rhizomes.

Beneath the undulating mat of rootlets, the bodies of the sub-humans slain by the gladiator boil with activity as they are stripped rapidly of flesh. Dry bones gleam. The taproot palpitates hungrily.

A deafening crack splits the air. “The node!” I shout.

“What by the founders is happening?” shouts Yoechakenon, half-deafened by the rumble of power coming from the node.

Cracks spread over the spire’s Library node, and its fabric twists in on itself, like a ball of paper crumpled in the hand of a giant. The great glass eye cracks as the ball deforms; the sparks in it die and it shatters into dust. The lighting in the chamber goes out. Arcs of energy stab across the room, playing up and down the length of the glaive, illuminating the scene in a strobe of shadow and violent, violet light. There is a roar of frustration, as of a beast trapped behind a door it cannot pass through. The thundering repetition of a song I know only too well.

“Stay away, stay away, stay away!”

Something is emerging from the cracked casing. Tremors shake the spire, debris falls around us.

The sphere collapses into itself in a nova of glaring Stone antilight.

Rising slowly from some paranormal place outside of the spire, one of the heads of the demented Spirefather emerges from the light and dances across the room on its impossible neck, drooling, slot-pupilled eyes narrowing as it searches for something Yoechakenon cannot see.