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CHAPTER 27

PERSEUS AND MEDUSA


The Ascalon’s repulsors whined and glowed blue before us, and the light of her open ramp shone like the gates of heaven. Annaz had set me down perhaps a dozen paces from the ship, and landed himself just ahead of me in a beating of clamorous wings. Cassandra and Edouard both stood just inside, the latter with a hand on the controls to seal the hold.

“Are we ready to launch?” I shouted, adjusting my torn coat.

“Nearly!” Edouard said.

“Good!” I said in return. “Cassandra! Get to the bridge and strap yourself in, we’re leaving!”

She turned to go just as my feet hit the bottom of the ramp.

“Hold!” Edouard shouted. His hand flew to his sidearm, and he drew the pistol forth. He leveled it at Ramanthanu, who had hit the sand a half dozen paces behind me. In a voice barely to be heard, Edouard breathed, “It’s true . . . ”

Ramanthanu checked its advance. Its people were dropping to the sand about me even then, their Irchtani escorts alighting moments after. “These Cielcin have my protection, A2!” I said. “Put the gun down!”

“I didn’t believe it,” he said. “Cassandra told me, but I did not believe.”

Cassandra herself had halted halfway to the inner door.

“Believe it!” I said. “And put down your gun. Ramanthanu and its ilk have thrown in with us. They’re mine!”

“Yours?” Albé made a face.

“Mine!” I answered him, “I’ll hear no more of it!” I turned to bark orders in the xenobites’ own language, ushering them up the ramp. They went without question, Ramanthanu lingering at the top of the ramp like a faithful dog. Returning my attention to Edouard, I said, “We’ll kill them . . . if we have to. For now, they may be useful.”

To my surprise, the other man did not argue. Ever pragmatic, the HAPSIS man asked, “What of the Monumental?”

“There’s nothing we can do. I . . . ” How could I explain what I had done in a way that could be understood? The Watcher was but a wave of energy, in form and substance little different than a radio broadcast. I had broken that wave as a shoal breaks the sea, diverted its course and channeled it to some lower state, forcing it into the gullies of potential time. It had climbed out once already, and I felt sure it would climb out once again.

In the end, I said only, “I wounded it. But I can’t kill it, not without the Perseus weapon.”

“What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later!” I said, brushing past him into the hold, shouting to the Cielcin and Irchtani alike to take seats in the foldouts that lined the great hold’s either side. “Cassandra! Bridge! Now!” She had lingered by the door, went through it at last. Returning my attention to Edouard, I asked, “Where’s Neema?”

“Safe in his quarters.” Albé rushed after me. “Hadrian, there must be something we can do!”

“There’s nothing!” I stopped dead, halfway to the inner door, and rounded on the man. He had called me Hadrian. “You know the literature better than me, Edouard! You know what it took the team on Nairi. You know how hard these things are to kill.”

“But if we could get a dozen standard EMP weapons, time their release across . . . three minutes? Five minutes? It could simulate the Perseus weapon.”

I turned to face the younger man. Edouard held his jaw tight, and there was a hardness in his eyes. How old I felt! How tired. I reminded myself that here was a man who had not battled the Cielcin and their pet sorcerers all night. For young Albé, the fight had just begun. Sparing a glance for Cassandra, feeling my patience worn down and my anger rising like Ushara herself from the sands of the desert, I snarled, “And where are we going to get these weapons, Albé?”

“Hulle’s Defense Force.” Edouard did not even hesitate.

“And how are we going to reach them?” I asked.

The answer was obvious, too obvious for me to see.

“We fly above the ionosphere,” Edouard said. “Call in the cavalry.”

I halted, the formless objection I had been about to make dying its swift death.

He was right. Right at least about the cavalry. With the Ascalon at the ready, we were in position to contact the governor-general’s paltry defense force. Whether or not they had the pulse weapons we required, or could spare the lightercraft, was another matter.

We had a chance, and had to try for it.

Yet even as hope flared white hot and cruel within my breast once more, horror joined it.

“I have to stay,” I said, and looked to the inner door, fearing that Cassandra had not gone on ahead as I had ordered.

Edouard looked at me, mouth open, aghast. “You what?”

“If I go, the Watcher will follow me,” I said, seizing Edouard by his shoulders. “You weren’t out there. You did not see . . . ” I halted, teetered on the edge of telling him about the giant, about the many-armed creature that had slaughtered the Cielcin in the pantheon, about the woman, death-pale and cold as marble. “I have to stay. I have to be here.” I drew back, tugged my sword free from the pocket of my coat. “Tell Cassandra I love her. If I don’t come back . . . ”

“Lord Marlowe, I—”

“If you truly serve my family, as you say, Albé: Serve her. Save her. For me.”

The other man only nodded.

I turned and shouted to Ramanthanu and Annaz and stormed down the ramp into the fading night. They followed, six Cielcin and perhaps ten Irchtani. Sand flew up in fine clouds, and the wind off the repulsors kicked at my torn coat and blew my hair across my face. The Ascalon rose, and turned, half circling us. Too well, I imagined Cassandra shouting on the bridge, glowering through the window down at me. Unseen, I raised my hand in salute. Perhaps in farewell.

In the distance, one of the Cielcin landers blazed skyward, a castle hurled to heaven upon a fountain of oily red flame. The noise of it was like the thunder, like an avalanche. Some of the enemy at least were retreating. The Ascalon rose faster, rising without flame, relying instead upon her repulsors until she reached the height of several miles.

“Go!” I hissed, and felt as I thought poor Corvo must have felt, watching us streak away from Akterumu. “Go! Go!”

The fusion torch burned, a light bright as any sun.

The Ascalon was climbing, mounting the airs toward the silence beyond night.

Thunder roared as another of the Cielcin craft took flight, and all Sabratha trembled. I turned to watch it go, shielding my eyes from the terrible fire of its drive. My inhuman guard shifted about me, Cielcin and Irchtani alike unsure where to go, what to do. I prayed Gaston had heeded my orders, had taken his survivors in the north ridge out into the desert. What had become of Tor Rassam and Tor Carter?

How many of our people remained on the surface? Scattered, divided, yet unconquered?

There had been thousands in the camp, between our Legion engineers, our guards—the Irchtani auxiliaries—and the men of Valeriev and Gaston’s garrison. They could not all be dead, but broken and scattered was as good as. The pulse weapons would not kill them—the blast of such ordnance was more harmful to machines than flesh—and yet such a barrage was certain to destroy any device left unshielded on the surface. Every comms terminal, every phase disruptor, every plasma burner and every deactivated shield generator. Every flier, every spottercraft and skiff would die.

The Cielcin stragglers would likewise be devastated. Their ships would not fly, nor their nahute. They would be trapped on Sabratha. They would die there.

“What now, man-commander?” asked Annaz.

“I don’t know, Udax,” I said, forgetting my place in time.

The Irchtani had halted, and turning I looked back at him, saw Ramanthanu and its Cielcin following not half a dozen paces behind.

Annaz cocked his head in that way of his so reminiscent of the bird his kind resembled. Realizing my mistake, I apologized. “I am very old,” I said, and added only to myself, and very tired.

“I am not Vaanshakril,” Annaz said.

Not Demonslayer, I translated.

“After today, you may be,” I said, and looked to the sky. “How many of your people remain?”

“More than half, bashanda,” the chiliarch replied.

“Call them,” I said. “We’ll need all the help we can muster.”

We advanced into the smoldering ruin that had been our landing field, trudging through sand churned by the passage of so many feet, picking our way over the bodies of men and Cielcin and Irchtani alike. Here and again we caught sight of motion in the shadows and open hatchways of ships that would never fly again.

“Ichakta-kih, nevaqqa keta ti-kousun,” I said to Ramanthanu, urging the captain to stay close. “My own people will fire on you and yours.”

One of the other Cielcin spoke up then. “We should flee,” it said. “The god has judged us, and we have betrayed it.”

“Onnanna, Otomno!” hissed the captain. “You saw the Utannashi challenge the god and win!”

“Then why does he fear it?”

Otomno’s question went unanswered.

One of the pole lamps erected by our engineers exploded high above us, and I threw an arm across my face to save myself from raining glass. Annaz and the other Irchtani shielded themselves with their wings or flapped away.

The air above was filled with the noise of wings, and against the brightening dark I saw the blacker shapes of our Irchtani circling like so many crows.

“Man-commander!” cried one of them, alighting atop the hulk of one of our shuttles. “This way!” He pointed with his drawn zitraa, gesturing toward the next aisle between our grounded craft. “Come and see!”

“See what?”

“Najikaar!” he said.

I did not know the word, and looked to Annaz.

“Circles,” the chiliarch translated.

I led the way round the grounded shuttle to see what the fliers had seen.

The space between our shuttles was broad and nearly flat, save where the passage of so many feet had dimpled the pale sand. The stink of smoke unseen filled the air, and there was an electric quality to it, a static tang that touched the skin and pricked at every hair.

There were circles, just as the scout had said. Just as there had been circles burned into the stone in the Hall of Record, just as there had been at the site of the crash in the deep desert.

Great ribbons of molten glass lay upon the desert floor, forming a pattern of circles interlinked. The greatest was perhaps a dozen feet across, the smallest no larger than a raindrop.

Ripples.

“She’s here.”

No sooner had those words escaped me than one of the Irchtani cried out. A high, piercing note like that of a hawk. The note strangled and died.

“It’s too soon!” I said. “Edouard can’t hardly have reached orbit!”

Still, I knew I should have been grateful for the little time we’d had. Cassandra was safe—safe from Ushara, at any rate—and that was all that truly mattered.

Another of the lights erupted in a shower of sparks, and in the middle distance one of the Cielcin landing towers exploded. My ears were ringing, and my vision swam as I staggered away from the explosion. Above the sky stood empty, blushing in the east with the first rosy fingers of dawn.

“We have to play for time!” I said, seizing Annaz by the shoulder. “Tell your men to—”

Boom.

Another of the Cielcin landers erupted in a nimbus of red flame. The air shuddered, as though the night sky were the inside of the head of some almighty drum.

“Fly!” I roared, and felt the word in my bones more than heard it. Had the second blast ruptured my eardrums? I pressed my hands to my ears, felt no blood, heard only a constant ringing.

I staggered a few steps, kept my hands on my ears.

Boom.

A third concussion rent the night, and a third Cielcin war tower erupted in sudden flame.

Boom.

One of our own shuttles blew apart at the end of the aisle. The shock of it knocked me to my knees. Around me, the Irchtani flapped their wings, took to the air or tumbled from it, stunned. My Cielcin honor guard looked round in confusion.

Then all the world went mad.

At first I thought I must have struck my head when I fell. I saw double, and all the world swam before my eyes. Two rows of shuttlecraft floated before me, two clouds of Irchtani flew. Two of Captain Ramanthanu stared down at me, mouth open to reveal black tongue and glassy teeth.

Was it shock?

I turned my head to look, saw a river of molten glass, a tendril thin as a finger snaking its way through the sand to encircle me. I watched it go, like gold in a jeweler’s mold. There was a man kneeling beside me, his face turned from my own. Then he was gone, and the ribbon of molten sand seemed nearer, near enough that I might touch it.

Ramanthanu thrust its sword at me, point hovering inches from my face. I blinked, surprised, too stunned to draw my sword.

“Dein tuka okun ne?” it asked.

Fishlike, I gasped, shut my eyes to stop the world from spinning.

“What are you?” Ramanthanu asked again.

When I opened my eyes at last, I saw that I was mistaken. Ramanthanu’s blade was pointed at the man kneeling beside me. Its other Cielcin drew nearer, eyes wide with inhuman suspicion, jaws slack.

I didn’t understand the question, understood only that the Cielcin had betrayed me. I had been wrong to trust them, wrong to stumble into battle with them at my side. My sword was in my pocket.

The man to my right stumbled to his feet, a blue light flaring in his hand. I turned to look, confusion washing over me. My stomach lurched as though I’d moved all at once, and I braced myself against the sand with one arm.

Ramanthanu stood before me, and I was standing, though I felt coarse sand in my wounded palm. I clenched my fist, felt the sands of the desert slip through my grasp. Shocked by my sudden motion, Ramanthanu lurched back, and I raised my sword—watched the other man raise his from my place on the ground.

“Gasvva!” I bellowed at the inhuman captain. “Kneel!”

When it did not obey, the man standing over me slashed at Ramanthanu’s sword. The tip fell to the sand, and the captain was left holding the broken half of its scimitar. The other Cielcin all halted. And one of the Irchtani—Inamax, perhaps—alighted not three paces from where I stood facing the Cielcin.

From where I knelt upon the sand.

“Iya?” it asked, looking on in confusion.

Two?

“Two?” I heard the kneeling man ask in his clipped Delian baritone, and turning to look I saw Hadrian Marlowe kneeling at my feet. He looked at me, and I saw myself through his eyes, saw Hadrian Marlowe standing, sword in hand, his eyes wild, his jacket torn like mine, his left hand bloody, caked with sand. And I saw Hadrian kneeling, staring up at me, shocked as was I.

I saw through both sets of eyes at once, our fields of visible interlinked, overlapped . . . and I understood. I had become like poor Doctor Mann, my body a wave refracted across the plane of our existence.

I was in two places at once.

“I’m just me!” I said, forgetting to speak Cielcin in the heat of the moment, raising four hands in unison.

Boom.

Another shuttle exploded, more remote. I saw its fire burn over the tops of the ships nearest us. Fires were burning, burning all around us, and the sands were running like wax, bright circles forming in the surface of the path. The noise of the explosion dimmed, and as I looked round—looked through both sets of eyes—I saw the fires begin to die.

Once, when I was very small, Gibson had lit a candle and placed a bell jar over the top of it, to teach the smaller Crispin and myself a lesson about combustion. The candle quickly burned the oxygen left in the little jar, and I had gasped as the candle seemed to blow itself out—fire becoming smoke.

All around us—all at once—all the fires went out.

All sound and movement ceased.

Then a light opened in the sky, a light from nowhere, without source or direction, a light spilling from some higher plane.

Light . . . and song.

Inhuman music filled the vast volume of the air, falling like snow, like ash upon the cold and silent battlefield. It was like the sun was rising, dawning from the zenith of the sky.

The Cielcin around me shuddered, and all save Ramanthanu threw themselves upon their faces. The Irchtani squawked and flapped about me—about both of me.

Reader, I cannot make you understand. Unless you have seen what I have seen—and you have not—words fail utterly. Even for those who stood beside me, words fail.

Words are only symbols. Icons. Crude representations.

They can never capture the thing itself.

Not anything.

Not this.

It was as if the sky opened, as if that light from nowhere made straight the coiled paths from other time and revealed that higher plane—if only for a moment. The space beyond teemed with eyes lidless and pitiless, eyes that might have been carved of marble and set with gems. They slid across the heavens, fixed to great bands of glittering black, rotating rings within rings like the characters of her celestial speech—eyes seeing all. The great and terrible music swelled, but under it—as one might discern the metronome beneath the melody—I heard the ticking of some mechanism ancient and unfathomably immense.

Ushara had returned.

She had supped upon the energies of the ships she had destroyed, had slaked her thirst upon their fires and rebuilt much of what she’d lost in a million years of solitude. Seeing her revealed across the heavens, I knew then—with an acuteness sharper than any I had known—how small I was, and how small was all mankind. We were but a passing thing, an accident of nature, the upjumped heirs of some protoplasmic slime, far removed from the ocean vents of our birth.

She was fire and air, sans any baser element.

Light itself, and song.

And that light and that song lifted me from my feet, carried me into the sky, dragging me toward those heavenly wheels and that tumult of roiling eyes. Still, I felt the sand of Sabratha beneath my knees, and looking down saw myself looking up, and looking up saw Hadrian Marlowe twisting, writhing in the air in the grip of hands unseen.

About me, I saw the shapes of men and of Cielcin, of old stones and ships entire lifted into the air. The Irchtani flew among them. I saw one collide fully with the hulk of a Cielcin lander, and felt the crack of impact in my bones. The alien music filled my ears, my skull, my soul, filled all creation until it seemed I was myself but one note in its symphony. One note, jangling with discord, dreadfully distinct.

I saw myself then as she saw me, and hated what I was. I held Hadrian Marlowe in the palm of my innumerable hands, saw him tessellated across infinite variations, an insect-thing of animate clay, a creature of slime and crude matter, possessed by only the faintest spark. Why should he hold so high a place in his esteem? Why had he set such pitiful creatures at the fulcrum of creation? Why were they closer to him than I? I, who had drunk long and deeply of the light that was before the all. I, who had been made before the stars. I, who had crushed countless worlds to powder, and bathed my feet in the blood of empires. I, who flew so much higher than the mud that had birthed this human animal.

I was the pinnacle of creation, and my brothers with me.

Why had we been made to serve?

I would not serve. Not a beast like him.

I could crush him in an instant.

If he would not serve me—and I had given him his chance—I would crush him.

I had only to squeeze.

I felt his pain, felt the wind shudder from his lungs. He would turn to pulp in my fists. His blood would fall like rain to the dirt of this dying world, and he would return to the mold that birthed him. Let his spirit flee creation! Let all spirits flee! Let the universe run dark and cold, but let it run free! Let it be our universe! Let it be mine!


Seher anumma miti!


Eye after eye peered down at me as they slid past. I was a thousand feet from the ground, and kneeling in the dust at the same time. I felt their malice, their hatred of all life—of life itself—their hatred of me in particular, of what I was: a servant of him, of Utannash, the Quiet, the Hidden One. I felt her hatred as if it were my own, felt her pride and her fury until I felt myself almost a part of her, enthused, enthralled, possessed. She was Hadrian Marlowe, and Ushara, too. And I . . . ? She would take me, take all that I was. Nothing of Hadrian Marlowe would remain.

My vision began to fade, to flicker between one vision and another, one field of vision. From the air, I saw her eyes—vast as clouds—floating it seemed inches from my face. From the ground, I saw myself high above, a small, dim figure fluttering in the air, a mote against that light that fell from nowhere, felt the earth shake beneath me. Saw both fields of vision interlaced, mingled with her own, multifaceted view of me. I felt the pain in my head, so sharp I thought my skull must burst, saw the fragile, sticklike thing I was, the aging wreck that had defied the Cielcin and their gods for more than six hundred years.

And I saw, too, how little time that was, how little I meant—had meant in the cosmic balance.

I was nothing at all.

The barest drop in a limitless ocean.

One photon against the infinite Dark.

One is enough.

The voice that whispered to me then was not my own, nor was it Ushara’s. It was not Gibson’s voice, or Valka’s. It was no voice at all, hardly to be heard. But it was right. Had I not seen—had I not been shown—had I so easily forgotten how fragile the darkness is?

One photon was enough to hold it back.

As if on cue, then, light erupted beyond the sky, filling the upper airs like the dawn. The otherworldly music broke and turned to wailing. The rings with their too-human eyes seemed to resonate, to cry out in pain. Whole sections of the Watcher—which had glittered like black ice, like obsidian set with gems—cracked and fell to earth.

I fell with them. Wind rushed past me, loud as cheering. Sabratha rushed toward me. I was falling headfirst, and watching myself fall from the very sands that would spell my death. I was still in two places at once. But I knew . . . One death would pay for both.

The Hadrian on the ground stood, stumbled forward a step until I was almost directly below my other, falling body. The Watcher was falling, too. Edouard’s cavalry had come, and the fire of their pulse weapons had washed over the body of the god like the tide. The Watcher was—at its core—only a pattern. And a pattern can be disrupted, its energy scattered. Dissipated. Changed in form.

I had but seconds to live, and shut the eyes of the man falling, knowing the ground would take me—knowing I had won. I saw my body hurtling toward me, and ran to catch my other self.

Cassandra . . . 

I hurled myself forward to catch the falling man. The shock of impact knocked the wind from me, and I hit the sand an instant later. The wreck of Ushara crashed to earth with a noise like the ending of the world. Shards of black stone large as any of our shuttles and delicate as glass ploughed into Sabratha and broke, crushing ships and survivors alike beneath them.

It was a miracle I was not crushed myself, though the corpse of a man lifted heavenward by the Watcher struck the sand not two paces from my head. Face caked with sand, I rolled over—and found I was alone.

The second Hadrian was gone.

I was one again, and alone. The Irchtani all had taken wing, and the Cielcin were scattered. The light that shone from nowhere had faded, and the inhuman music was dead and gone. Another blast of light filled the open sky, and—shielding my eyes against its radiance—I saw with relief and sudden joy that the sky was empty!

The Watcher had fallen from it, and the Cielcin moon was gone!

“Ai! Ai! Ai!” Distantly, the cry of an Irchtani filled the ending night.

I forced myself to breathe, ragged, slow, but free. I rolled onto my back, lay flat against the level sands, and watched the light break across the sky. A sob escaped me, or a laugh—I could not say. We had won, and I was still alive. And yet it was not relief I felt, but . . . embarrassment.

I should have died. It would have been a fitting end: the Halfmortal against a god.

And yet there I was . . . still alive.

Edouard’s cavalry rained against the sky, and light after light broke upon the heavens. No one came to disturb my rest.

In time, the flash of the bombs ceased, and all was still. When it seemed the first second of eternity had passed, I sat up, heedless of the sand that clung to me, of the bodies and new flames all round.

“Cassandra?” I touched my comms patch, forgetting the thing was dead. “Neema? Edouard? Cassandra, can you hear me?”

There was nothing, of course. No reply but silence.

I clambered to my feet, stood dazed, swaying. When had I last eaten? Drunk? I must have slept a little—if only for a moment, there upon the sands. The eastern sky blushed with the first light of day.

A shard of the thing that had been Ushara lay not half a hundred steps from where I’d fallen, its polished face to me. I limped toward it, my knee complaining at every other step of the slow decay of time. There were fires in the upper airs. They were beautiful. Soon there would be prayer lanterns, fires raised up to heaven as these were falling down.

I’d reached the shard, a splinter of black stone ten cubits high and wide as my outstretched arms. Smoke coiled from its dark surface, and from the sand mounded about its base. Seeing it, and seeing my reflection in its black mirrored surface, I realized I had no conception until that moment just how vast the thing in the sky had been. It was like a ship had fallen. My image moved in the glass, matching my own movements as I drew nearer. I raised a hand to touch the stone, but caution checked my advance. I could feel the heat still radiating from the substance, like a stone plucked from the fire.

It was black as anything I had ever seen, so black it drank the light. I turned my head, my reflection moving with me. It was without a doubt the same substance that made up the bones of the leviathan I’d seen on Eue.

The bones of a god.


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