The Beauty of Destruction (24 page)

During the height of the hostilities, roughly a quarter of the planet’s volatiles had suddenly disappeared, and more than three quarters of the crossroad ziggurats had suddenly emitted beams of superheated plasma powerful enough to cut through star ships and make their hulls burn in space. Suddenly Cyst’s orbit had been full of wreckage.

The hostilities ceased. The belligerents were less worried about the destruction of property and personnel, and more worried that the utilisation of the planet’s resources in such a way would significantly hasten its destruction. Without a way to use the tech for their own gain, the Consortium, the Monarchist systems, and (in theory) the Church, lost interest.

It had proved cheaper to leave many of the combatants and other support personnel behind on the Cage after the conflict. It was assumed that they would die out when their supplies ran out, or that whatever had attacked the ships would deal with them. Instead the ziggurats started to assemble food and other supplies, though the Cage itself had seemed to be implicitly encouraging competition for the resources through scarcity.

Things went feral quickly. Roaming gangs were formed. They fought for territory and resources high above the depleted gas clouds. Heretical cults sprang up. Many of them talked about the Dark Mother. Those that died were harvested for
DNA
, and new inhabitant/combatants were born from exo-wombs in the smart matter of the ziggurats.

The population had remained reasonably stable, in part because of the constant warring. Newborns very quickly gained physical maturity and were often ‘rewarded’ with grafted weapons and used as hunting/fighting animals until they had proven themselves enough to become something that looked more like an uplift.

Scab had been born into this. Apparently he had been part of an already-existing bloodline. He had started his own street sect, dedicated to himself. His mixture of cunning, psychosis, grasp of strategy, and his fervent followers who offered a choice of convert or be tortured to death in a society that had been conditioned to respect strength, soon had him close to dominating the world. A situation that the Consortium, backed by the Church, could not allow.

The war was fought on the walkways, in the ziggurats, and among the still-dripping structures of fused and hardened bone and skin Scab had made from his victims. Church militia and Consortium military contractors had fought side by side, but it had been the Legions, the Consortium’s penal forces, who had borne the brunt of the fighting. Poorly armed and equipped, they had been thrown at the hordes of cultists.

Eventually a Legion special ops team, aided by one of the Church’s monks, had captured Scab. Vic was pretty sure it hadn’t been Talia’s older sister. What he didn’t understand was why the Consortium didn’t have one of the Elite deal with Scab, and why capture him? After his capture he’d had brain surgery, apparently to curb his excesses, and had been placed into one of the Legions. There he had worked his way up until he had been offered Elitehood.

Both the Consortium and the Church had maintained a presence above Cyst. A number of the Legions’ special operations units were made up entirely of recruits from Cyst. The Church’s presence was to monitor the L-tech artefact, in theory.

But this
was where it all started,
Vic had thought as he looked at the planet through the
Basilisk II
’s sensor feed, which was ’face linked direct to his neunonics. From this distance it looked like wisps of gas encased in a glass sphere, which was in turn in bondage. They were relying on the Church-upgraded stealth systems to keep them hidden from the Consortium military contractor fleets now stationed above the planet.

Part of the lounge’s wall became transparent and the Monk got up from the sofa she’d been sitting on, concentrating, since they’d emerged from Red Space. Talia had been pacing and fidgeting. It seemed obvious to Vic, since he had cross-referenced her behaviour with the information he had on human psychology, that the pre-Loss girl was struggling to deal with what had happened at the Cathedral, and the amount of violence she had to face in general. Currently she was trying to cope by self-medicating with vodka and
THC
. Vic had already sent a request to the
Basilisk II
’s AI for virtual counselling for the girl, as she couldn’t control her psyche in a healthy way with drugs and machinery like the rest of them could.

Part of the
Basilisk II
’s hull also became transparent and magnified the view of distant Cyst. The Monk, hands clasped behind her back, stood just in front of the image. Scab extruded himself through the ceiling, making Talia squeal with fright, and dropped into the lounge in a way that reminded Vic of the humans’ simian ancestry.

‘I’ve sent a heavily occulted tight-beam signal to Church assets in the system,’ the Monk said. ‘Nothing.’

‘They’re dead,’ Scab said. They had picked up the information from news transmitted between the beacons in Red Space. The Consortium had moved unilaterally on the Church, a board-level decree, no exceptions. Military contractors, company security forces, and the Legions had attacked every ship, Church and facility they could find. Any Church members who resisted were killed outright, many others had killed themselves for one reason or another, those that could had run, the rest were being held in the ship or facility they had been captured in.

The Monarchists had, of course, offered sanctuary to all Church personnel, and were on the cusp of war with the Consortium for the first time in centuries, and were one Elite down.

‘She spoke to me once,’ Scab said. Everyone turned to look at him.

‘Who?’ the Monk asked.

Vic found that he had no patience for Scab’s strange little utterings, regardless of how calm his erstwhile partner seemed.

‘The Dark Mother.’

The Monk started laughing. ‘Bullshit,’ she told him.

Vic sighed and slumped as Scab’s face tightened and he turned to stare at her. ‘Leave him with something,’ Vic ’faced privately to the Monk. ‘Or all we’ll end up doing is fighting until he kills us, or we kill him.’

Scab clearly saw something in the Monk’s face, however, and he turned to look at Vic.

‘What are you going to do when we get down there?’ Vic asked.

‘If we get down there,’ the Monk mused.

‘I don’t know,’ Scab said. He seemed strangely thoughtful. He turned to look at the magnified image of the hell he had grown up on.

‘We can bridge into planetary space,’ Vic said.

‘The contractors will be scanning the planet, they’ll target us from orbit,’ the Monk pointed out.

‘You think they’ll risk it?’ Vic asked.

‘Kind of solipsistic to assume that the only other time that Cyst comes to life is for us,’ the Monk said.

‘Okay, “solipsistic”?’ a more than a little drunk Talia said from the sofa. The Monk ignored her.

‘What are we going to do when we get down there?’ Vic asked. He was aware there was a whiny tone in his voice. ‘Go sightseeing?’

The Monk concentrated, frowned and then turned on Scab. ‘What did you just do?’

‘Sent a transmission,’ Scab told her.

‘It’s his ship,’ Talia pointed out, earning herself a glare from her big sister. ‘Oops.’

‘For Christ’s sake, we’re trying to hide!’ the Monk shouted at him. He turned to look at her.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said quietly.

‘But we—’

‘Please, send a tight-beam signal to these coordinates,’ the
Basilisk II
’s AI said as his hologram sprang into life.

‘What do you want the message to say?’ the Monk asked.

‘So it’s alright for us to send a transmission?’ Talia asked.

‘Maybe you should stop drinking,’ the Monk suggested.

‘Not a chance!’

‘A simple hail, but use a Church encryption,’ the AI said.

Scab was suddenly more interested in the hologram.

‘Which one?’ the Monk asked, anger creeping into her tone.

‘Any,’ the AI said.

‘Any!’ the Monk snapped. Vic wasn’t sure why but suddenly the Monk seemed very angry. The ’sect knew that she had worked black ops for the Church. It was starting to sound like she hadn’t been let in on all of Churchman’s secrets.

‘If being angry with me helps then by all means please go ahead but I am not him,’ the AI told her. ‘I just look like him.’

‘In which case I am going to call you Basil,’ Talia said. Even Vic thought she was being a little insensitive.

In Red Space the most real thing about Cyst was the Cage, though the network of walkways and ziggurats looked, well, spikier, Vic thought. Against the red, gaseous background they looked like something from one of the highly stylised, more artistic immersions that he hated. Talia had described it as looking like a dark fairy tale. He’d heard the Monk use the word expressionist. He’d had to search his neunonics for the definition.

Beneath them the gas clouds were black, serpentine forms roiling around each other.

‘I’m sure there’s something down there,’ Talia said again. The Monk just glanced at her irritably.

The return transmission had the same encryption as the initial hail and had simply contained a set of coordinates in Cyst’s planetary space. It was obvious that the Monk was not overjoyed by any of this. Vic wasn’t entirely pleased himself.

‘I believe this is what Churchman wished us to do,’ the ’sect had told the sceptical Monk.

The Monk was flying the
Basilisk II
at the moment. For some reason Scab had become passive and less of a control freak than normal. This was making Vic very suspicious. Very slowly the ship sank past the walkways and moved under one of the ‘expressionist’ ziggurats. The Monk was making more and more of the hull transparent at the same time. Red light, the colour of blood, flooded the large, open space lounge/C&C.

‘Well, this could be over quickly,’ the Monk muttered. Blue light cut a jagged gash in Red Space, and the
Basilisk
juddered as red vacuum and a weak helium/hydrogen atmosphere briefly interacted. With a thought, the Monk brought the extensively modified yacht up through the bridge and into Cyst’s atmosphere just underneath one of the ziggurats. Vic was pleasantly surprised that the blockading military contractors didn’t immediately destroy them with an orbital bombardment.

‘I was born here,’ Scab said quietly.

‘They’re all identical,’ the Monk said scornfully. ‘At an atomic level.’

Scab just shook his head.

‘Is that supposed to be happening?’ Talia asked. They looked up. A covered stairwell was growing out of the bottom of the ziggurat towards the top of their ship. The Monk was staring at it, eyes wide. Vic was aware of Scab moving the top airlock through the smart matter to meet the stairwell. Vic had to step to one side as an extruded stairwell grew out of the carpet to reach the airlock that the ceiling was peeling back to reveal.

He gestured for Talia and the Monk to go ahead of him.

‘Maybe Talia—’ Vic started, but shut up when she turned and glared at him. He followed Scab and the others up the stairs. He was surprised and a little uncomfortable that they weren’t taking heavier armour and weapons.

The stairs led them into a large, sealed, black, inverted-step chamber, illuminated by subdued lighting emanating from parts of the ancient smart matter itself. Vic, still more than a little nervous, half expected the chamber of the stairwell to close behind them.

His nano-screen made him aware of it first, the sensitive sensors on his antennae a moment later. He turned as Scab and the Monk did. Talia was the slowest to react. Her hand came up to her mouth and she took several steps back.

The figure was formed of the same material as the smart matter itself, black, like oil. She looked like a tall, statuesque human woman: long hair, angular features, wearing a black leather corset, an ankle-length skirt, slashed at both sides for her long legs, which were clad in thigh-high, spike-heeled boots. Even made from the black, oil-like material, the woman’s beauty was apparent. Her arms were held out towards them, a slight smile on her features.

‘She looks like Kali,’ Talia said in a voice full of awe.

‘Mother,’ Scab said.

‘Alexia?’ the Monk asked.

16

Ancient Britain

Of course nobody wished to leave the camp. They might have had ample food, ample firewood, but it was difficult to get past how cold it was, and they were living in shelters of branch and hide that the wisest among them had added mud to, to keep in the warmth. They daren’t use the village because it was too close to the entrance to Annwn and the fort on the Mother Hill.

With Bladud gone the divisions between the tribes, and even within some of the tribes, was becoming more apparent. Anharad was capable, and doing the best she could, aided by the warriors of the Trinovantes and some of the less truculent Brigante, but the other warriors, the newcomers, had not heard stories of her in the way they had Bladud. In part this was because she had not been as generous to wandering bards as her husband had.

Challenges were a daily occurrence now. A number of them had resulted in either crippling or death. Members of the Cait
teulu
had fought more than their fair share of the challenges. Partly due to their belligerence and partly due to them being the most prominent outsiders.

It seemed moon-touched to Tangwen. Too long had warrior society clung to the idea that the challenges weeded out the weak and made the tribe stronger. All she saw were dead and crippled warriors that they would sorely need when they attacked the Lochlannach. She could have enforced discipline herself, she supposed, but she had no stomach for it, particularly after her humiliation at the hands of Madawg, which of course meant she was respected less among the other warriors. Instead she tried to avoid arguments, particularly discussions about the Red Chalice, and in general avoid Anharad and others of rank who might try and get her involved in these things.

Part of the problem was that the newcomers had no real idea what they were facing. Too many of them were here for glory rather than revenge. All they had were stories from those who had fought the Lochlannach or, more accurately, had been raided by them. Proud warriors scoffed at the stories, assuming they were exaggerations to justify defeat. Then a challenge was made, and ever on. She had considered the idea of taking some of the newcomers out to look for Lochlannach, but they didn’t even have weapons that could harm them at the moment, and she was loath to start using the Red Chalice unless she had to. She might have been its guardian but Germelqart carried it most of the time. The chalice had saved them but it also caused a lot of trouble.

Among the warband there were still those who carried the cursed weapons they had used to fight Andraste’s Brood. The smartest of them wrapped the weapons up and put them away until they were needed. Others carried them. They looked half moonstruck, and were quick to feed their weapons blood and bone. So more challenges were fought, and occasionally the sword or spear had a new owner that it whispered to.

Even if she could put together a group of newcomers with the right weapons, and Anharad allowed them to hunt the Lochlannach, and she could get warriors of various tribes to cooperate long enough, the Lochlannach were staying close to the fort and the cave. She did wonder where their food was coming from. Anharad and a number of the ranking warriors thought they were waiting for something. Tangwen was of the opinion that Crom Dhubh just didn’t care about the warband camped outside his lair, and why should he when his sword destroyed utterly with a touch?

The Dark Man’s sword was just one of the problems facing them. Assuming the warband didn’t destroy itself, and some were already leaving, then they had a number of things to contend with, apart from the magic of the Lochlannach and Crom Dhubh. Where did they attack? The Dark Man had to be their target and this ended when Crom Dhubh and Bress died, however Britha might feel about the Lochlannach’s second-in-command. If they attacked the cave mouth, then the Lochlannach from the fort would charge down and hit them in the back. The fort was a nightmare to attack, cliffs on two sides, steep approaches on the other two and very heavily fortified. Their best bet was to besiege the fort, try and tempt the Lochlannach out and take a second force against the cave mouth. Which of course meant splitting the warband, and inside the caverns, inside Annwn, the Lochlannach had all the advantages.

The giants. Fachtna had slain one in the grips of the most powerful
riasterthae
frenzy she had ever seen. Though admittedly all the other frenzies she had seen had just looked like warriors who were either really angry, really drunk, or had eaten a lot of the mushrooms that grew on cow dung. She did not think that any among them had the power that Fachtna had, as his magics had come from the Otherworld. She smiled at the memory of them lying together. She had lain with a prince of the fair folk. Admittedly it had been in a muddy ditch.

Then she remembered that he was dead. Twice killed by Bress, the second time with the help of Britha. None of which helped her come up with a way to deal with the giants.

This was one of the reasons she was sitting up on the south ridge, close to a wide ravine, thinking of the idiocy of abandoning your warband to travel to the far west at a time such as this. The other reason was the ‘humiliation’ of her defeat. She didn’t want to be in the camp because it meant putting up with further insults or fighting.

It had stopped snowing. The whiteness of the landscape made it look stark and empty, but still beautiful. Although the presence of Oeth in the Underworld, beneath the earth, made her feel like the land was sick.

She watched a miserable Germelqart struggle through the deep snow towards her. She was also aware of Selbach the Timid trying to sneak through the snow towards her on her right.

Germelqart was spending most of his time in the shelter they had made. He was well treated by those who had fought against Andraste’s Brood, but for many of the others he was too much the foreign magician, and Father had taught her that people feared what they didn’t understand. She had been forced to intervene on more than one occasion, and his biting skull club had torn the face off a spear-carrier who had tried to steal the chalice. Tangwen couldn’t prove it but she was pretty sure that Ysgawyn had something to do with the attempted theft.

Once she had come back early to the shelter they shared, to ask him if the chalice could help them deal with their enemies, perhaps using the same magics that had destroyed Andraste’s Brood. She had found the Carthaginian on his knees holding up a brass bottle stoppered with melted lead. He had been talking to it. Germelqart had explained that he was praying to Dagon, the navigator’s odd fish god. Tangwen had told him that he was very far from the sea. She never liked seeing anyone kneel before anything.

When she had asked about the magics of the chalice, Germelqart had warned her against asking too much of it. The god inside it had been prepared to undo the excesses of another god, Andraste, but too much would attract the powers of others like it, and make more problems. She had half believed him but had thought there was more to it than he was saying. He definitely seemed frightened of something. She did not wish to push the matter, however. Other than Father, her tribe’s own, small god, she was of the opinion that the gods whose work she had witnessed were nothing more than a curse on this island. She would be satisfied if this Ninegal, whom Germelqart said lived in the chalice – though Britha had given him another name – a god of the forge by all accounts, could provide them with weapons that weren’t too ruinous when the time came. They had enough problems with Bladud and Ysgawyn’s visions of all-powerful warriors ruling Ynys Prydain for all time through the gifts the chalice gave.

She thought casually about putting an arrow close to where Selbach was trying to creep up on her but she couldn’t be sure if she would have noticed him before she had drunk of Britha’s blood. Besides, it struck her as the sort of thing the more obnoxious of the warriors down in camp would do. The ones who wished to capitalise on Madawg’s triumph over her. Instead she waited until he revealed himself and showed little surprise, though she had to admit he was good. She suspected his skill in hiding came from the terror of getting caught. She noticed he carried no weapons. Though he had limed himself the colour of the snow and was wearing the similarly limed bearskin again.

He opened his mouth to ask her why she had summoned him. She held up her hand for quiet. She only wanted to have to explain this once. Germelqart had nearly reached them. She saw he had the bag with the chalice in it as she had asked.

‘I mislike this,’ the Carthaginian told her in his own language. Selbach was looking between them. Tangwen didn’t like how she suddenly knew all these tongues; she’d had to work hard for all her other skills, and felt that people should have to work hard for what they had, otherwise they didn’t value it. ‘What if we are killed and the Lochlannach capture it?’

‘Speak in the language of the Pecht,’ Tangwen said in Pecht herself. Germelqart glanced at the Cait scout, who smiled at him uneasily.

‘How do we know we can trust him?’ Germelqart continued in the language of Carthage.

‘We don’t know if we can trust him,’ Tangwen answered in Selbach’s language. ‘But I am going to behave as though I can because I’m tiring of all the mistrust among our own people in the face of
that
.’ She pointed towards where she knew the cave mouth was.

Germelqart looked towards it uneasily. After the last time they had travelled to Oeth Tangwen and the others had questioned him on what he had known about Crom Dhubh, asked why the Carthaginian had called the Dark Man Sotik? Whatever Crom Dhubh had done when he stuck the tendrils from the stump of his finger into the navigator’s head had removed all knowledge of the Dark Man. As much as she liked the navigator, she could not claim to know him well. He had seemed changed since then, however. Always one to keep his own counsel, he was now nearly silent, as though he had turned away from people for the company of his god in the brass bottle.

‘I cannot be trusted,’ Selbach said. ‘I am a coward.’ He seemed ashamed of himself.

‘I need a coward today,’ Tangwen said. Germelqart laughed. She didn’t think he’d seen him do so since Kush had died.

‘Then you are twice blessed,’ Germelqart said in the language of the Pecht. ‘What would you have of us?’

‘Where did the giants go?’ Tangwen asked. ‘Selbach, you have hidden close to the fort. Even lying down you would have seen them?’ Selbach nodded. She turned to Germelqart. ‘And we have seen the path to Oeth through the Underworld. If the giants crawled they might get into the first cave, but they could not have got all the way through.’

‘Are they not things of the earth, though?’ Selbach asked. ‘Could they not sink into it, travel through it?’ He may have been cowardly but Tangwen was starting to think that he wasn’t stupid.

Germelqart looked thoughtful. ‘I do not think so. But they may just have gone elsewhere, bigger caves, woods, a body of water we have not found.’

‘Or there could be another way into Oeth?’ Tangwen said. ‘We went the way we went the last time because Britha knew it. This whole land is riddled with caves. It would be strange if there wasn’t another way to get there.’

‘I’m not going to the Underworld!’ Selbach cried.

‘Keep your voice down,’ Tangwen snapped.

‘You wish to go searching caves?’ Germelqart asked sceptically.

‘I wish to track the giants,’ Tangwen said.

‘I know little about tracking, but they passed many days ago and there has been much snow since,’ Germelqart said.

‘But they were heavy, heavier than two aurochs,’ Selbach said. Tangwen nodded. ‘And when they killed Eurneid …’ He was trying to suppress a smile. Tangwen wondered if the horrible old
dryw
had made everyone miserable.

‘They made a deep hole,’ Tangwen supplied. She pointed down into the ravine.

‘You found tracks?’ Germelqart asked. Tangwen nodded. ‘But why am I here? I’m no scout.’

‘It doesn’t matter how quiet and well-hidden Selbach and I are because of Crom’s wards,’ Tangwen told them. Selbach spat and made the sign against evil. She remembered the feel of walking through spider webs when they had first gone to Oeth. From that moment on Crom had known of their presence. ‘I understand that the gods will not fight our wars for us, that we need to prove our strength to them for their aid, but we face gods and their magics.’ Tangwen pointed at the leather bag with the chalice in it. ‘Can this Ninegal help us hide from Crom’s wards?’

Germelqart looked less than happy.

He ran. Bress had finally climbed out of the caverns and into wooded foothills. He ran through the snow-covered woods. It hadn’t taken long to find the wasteland that the spawn of Andraste had left behind them. The snow hadn’t reached that far south yet. The cold and the damp had packed down a lot of the grey dust. It was like running across wet silt, though his footfalls still sent up little clouds. He had seen no one, no animals either.

Poking through the unnatural grey mud were the first signs of regrowth. He knew that the Red Chalice had left the land fecund with life beneath the dust. The winds would blow it away eventually and come spring, when the sun shone and the rains fell, plants would grow again, the animals would start to return, and then, finally, so would the people. Until then it was a near featureless wasteland broken only by grey hills and occasional standing stones. The stones had been left untouched. They were waymarkers of ancient tech buried far beneath the earth.

He ran for days, taking only the occasional break to sleep and eat. He didn’t like to think about where the food came from. It was as tasteless as the land was featureless. It just provided the sustenance he needed to keep going. He tried not to think too much about the boned corpses lying in the water around Oeth.

He came down to the summit of the hill and looked down at the coast. The three islands. Two of them separated from the coast by only thin strips of water, the other one by a much larger channel. Now all three of them were barren, windblown wastelands of grey mulch, though here and there some of the hardier plants were trying to grow through.