War in Heaven (28 page)

"And do you suppose he would respect the inviolateness of my property when he threatens to mutilate my body?"

"How could I know?" Ede responded, answering Danlo's question with a question as he had learned to do. "But I'm afraid that if you died, Hanuman will confiscate me as
his
property and try to take me down."

"I will not die," Danlo said.

"Can you truly know that, Pilot?"

"Hanuman will not want to kill me. I ... know."

"That may be true," Ede said. "But you, after all, are only flesh — can you foresee how this delicate flesh will react if burned in hot oil? Your skin might cook away or blacken with gangrene. You might take an infection and die."

"I ... will not die."

"Or what if the warrior-poets crush your limbs between stones? If the flesh and bones are severely compressed, liquid fat is forced out of the fat cells into the body's other tissues. The fat globules can cause embolisms in the blood vessels of the lungs, kidneys and brain. You might suffer a stroke and be paralysed, if not die outright."

"Thank you for providing me with such enlightening information," Danlo said as he began a pawn storm of Ede's badly protected god. "How is it that you, who have forgotten the Dragon Opening or the God's Defence, know about such things?"

"Well, if I ever do recover my body, I shall need to know everything about the human body, don't you think?"

"I do not know what to think," Danlo said. And then, "But I believe I know why Hanuman returned you to me."

"Why, Pilot?"

"To torture me with your knowledge, yes?" Danlo advanced a pawn towards Ede's god, and he smiled in grim amusement. "Now perhaps we could finish our game without discussing the vulnerabilities of
my
body."

Four times during this period of waiting, Lord Bede demanded to be taken from the academy to the cathedral in order to visit Danlo. He was appalled that his fellow ambassador should be imprisoned in a tiny cell and held incommunicado. Because he still knew many of the Order's lords and could be most persuasive, he quickly rallied support in the halls of the academy for Danlo's freedom to meet with others, if not his release. But Hanuman deafened himself to such protests. He knew where his power lay; he controlled Lord Pall and the most prominent of the Order's lords as he did the fingers on his hand. Other peoples and problems within the city worried him much more. In truth, even at the height of his ascendancy, Hanuman never managed to elevate himself as Lord of Neverness, as some have claimed. Although he might have striven for the total power of an autarch, there were always those who opposed him. The harijan sect, in their colourful rags and arrogance, were wont to riot and set themselves aflame at every act of Hanuman's that they didn't like. The astriers, too, most of whom were Architects of the Reformed Cybernetic Churches, shunned all Ringists or contact with Ringism; they shut their children inside their big stone houses and refused to allow any of Hanuman's godlings to skate down the streets where they lived. An entire section of the Farsider's Quarter — the Ashtoreth District — fell into open rebellion against Ringism and the Order. It was said that the astriers there had begun manufacturing lasers and other forbidden weapons, but no one really knew. Similarly, all the alien races regarded Ringism as a plague upon the galaxy. Many aliens had already fled Neverness in protest, but many more set about organizing the entire Zoo from Far North Beach to the City Wild as a separate city closed not only to Ringists, but to all human beings. For the Elidi, with their elfin faces and golden wings, to act in concert with the Scutari seneschals was almost unthinkable, but so it happened. It was a time of strange alliances and clandestine meetings, cabals and assassinations and plots. Not all the resistance to Hanuman and the Way of Ringess occurred in these outlying districts of Neverness. Perhaps the most vexing of the problems that Hanuman faced (other than the war itself) was the secret dissent within the apartments near the cathedral, even within the very ranks of Ringism. This harked back to the very beginning of Bardo's church. To accommodate the Lords of the Order and gain new converts, Bardo had banned the drinking of kalla, the remembrancers' sacred drug. Kalla had been a way for some — for a few such as Danlo and himself — to remembrance the Elder Eddas. But it was a difficult and dangerous way, and so Bardo had enlisted Hanuman's help to devise a new remembrancing ceremony. This Hanuman had done. He had copied his own memory of the Elder Eddas into a computer — along with those of such luminaries as Bardo, Thomas Rane, and the diva, Nirvelli. Henceforth, Ringists were supposed to satisfy themselves with pulling a silver heaume over their heads and sitting quietly while other people's memories played through their minds like a cartoonist's dramas. Danlo, from the beginning, had called this watered-down ceremony a counterfeit of the true experience of the Elder Eddas. And so had others. Even as long ago as Hanuman's Fire Sermon, Jonathan and Benjamin Hur and other Ringists had formed a cult within a cult dedicated to the drinking of kalla. They called themselves, simply, the Kalla Fellowship, and they refused to abandon their sacred drug, even when Hanuman li Tosh began excommunicating them from the church for the crime of drinking it. As they of the Kalla Fellowship saw it,
they
were the true Ringists who practised the true Way of Ringess. And so the brothers Hur had long held secret kalla ceremonies, first in the rooms of Bardo's house and later in Jonathan's apartment or in the rooms of his friends throughout the Old City. A few members of the Kalla Fellowship, in defiance of Hanuman, had even managed to smuggle tubes of kalla into the cathedral itself; while Hanuman had conducted the usual, false remembrancing ceremony with his computers before the altar, they had held a private joyance in one of the meeting rooms off the nave. Jonathan Hur, of course, was not one these secret celebrants, for Hanuman had long since denounced him as the chief of the Wayless. But each evening many of Jonathan's friends found their way into the cathedral, undiscovered as the kalla drinkers they really were. In truth, Hanuman never quite determined how many of his Ringists secretly drank kalla. To Surya Surata Lai, he confided his fear that there might have been as many as a thousand of them. These thousand, however, he said, posed a threat to Ringism wholly out of proportion to their numbers. They were like worms in his belly, he said; they were like viruses in firestones that could fract even the finest of such jewelled, living computers. If he'd had the time and the means, he would have driven them from his church and from their apartments nearby; he would have banished them from Neverness as wayless rebels who had betrayed the truths of Ringism.

The Kalla Fellowship might have formed a truly potent opposition to Hanuman if they themselves hadn't been divided in their purpose. Only a year before Danlo's return to Neverness, as Hanuman's control of Lord Pall became ever more obvious and intolerable, the brothers Hur had fallen into argument with each other. Jonathan Hur, with his bright eyes and lovely face, believed that they who drank the kalla should concern themselves only with the exploration of the Elder Eddas and the realization of the One Memory in each human being. They were pilots of mind and soul, he said, and their path lay among shimmering lights inside each man and woman and not in disputing Hanuman's false doctrines on the icy streets surrounding the cathedral. Benjamin Hur, however, who was as free-spirited and fierce as his brother was soulful, argued that such divine realizations would be meaningless if not brought back into the real world of stone cathedrals and lightships and murderous men. Quite simply, he wanted to fight Hanuman in any way that he could. It was his purpose to restore Ringism to the force for humanity's evolution that he believed it could be. If this struggle meant infiltrating Hanuman's church and trying to win the godlings back to Ringism's original vision, Benjamin Hur was glad to organize the cells and secret networks of kalla drinkers who might undermine Hanuman's authority. And if fate should demand of him more drastic actions, he was willing to lead a secret war of terror and assassination that would make Hanuman tremble.

Unknown to Danlo, it was Benjamin Hur and his kalla drinkers who distracted Hanuman's energies during Danlo's time of waiting. Once, Benjamin and Danlo had been friends and fellow explorers of the Elder Eddas. Although Danlo had renounced drinking kalla for himself, Benjamin Hur (and his brother) still regarded him as one of their own. But where Jonathan felt content merely to lament the imprisonment of a great soul such as Danlo, Benjamin's protest took a more active form. On the day that Hanuman served Danlo a meal of kurmash and pastries, one of Hanuman's closest godlings, a former horologe named Galeno Astarei, was found dead in the deserted aisle off the nave of the cathedral. And the following morning, two ronin warrior-poets loyal to Hanuman were murdered as they skated down one of the orange slidderies leading from the Old City Glissade. The murder of one warrior-poet, of course, is an extraordinary event. But for two such killing machines themselves to be surprised and killed in the clear light of day spoke of plots and prowess almost beyond what was considered possible When these murders were accompanied by Benjamin's demand for Danlo's release, it truly made Hanuman tremble. He spent most of the next few days in reaction to this loss: doubling the guard around the altar and other strategic points within the cathedral; setting his remaining four warrior-poets to hunting the assassins who had hunted their friends; questioning Ringists of doubtful loyalty and threatening to use his akashics to lay bare their minds. In his frenzy to discover traitors, he might have begun a purge of his entire church if time hadn't been rolling towards him like death clouds across the open sea. But the Order's fleet awaited his command to strike out among the stars, and fate itself awaited the completion of his Universal Computer. And alone in his cell, his deepest friend, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, waited in silent darkness counting the beats of his heart.

They came for him late at night on the 4th of winter. As Danlo lay sleepless in his bed, he heard the sound of three pairs of boots striking the stones of the corridor outside his cell. He listened to the wind outside the cathedral and to the muffled drumbeat inside his chest, but little other sensa touched his nerves. The window above his bed, he saw, remained as black as obsidian. And then, with the creaking open of the great steel door, a faint light leaked into his cell. He smelled the terrible, sharp essence of kana oil and saw two warrior-poets limned in the hellish glow of the doorway. One was Jaroslav Bulba. He ordered Danlo to sit in the chair by the chess table, while the other one lit the cell's flame globes. The sudden light, in colours of copper, puce and iron red, hurt Danlo's eyes. For a moment, he marvelled at the dual nature of light, the way that it could either illuminate in joy or fall like fire into the unadjusted openings of his eyes. And then, as he pulled off the warm furs covering him and stood away from his bed, he saw Hanuman enter the room. It was Hanuman who silently pushed the door closed. And it was Hanuman, with his silent cetic's face, who looked at Danlo's naked limbs and said, "Don't bother dressing, Danlo. You won't need your clothes tonight."

With that, as they had done in Hanuman's tower, the warrior-poets bound Danlo to the chair with circles of glittering acid wire. They told him not to move, lest the faintest touch of the wire cut his ivory skin. This time, Danlo did not struggle. He sat naked in his silvery cocoon of acid wire, feeling the icy coldness of the chair pounding like a stone hammer against the backs of his legs and spine. He began shivering, then. As Hanuman looked down at him with his pale, icy eyes, he began sweating and shivering at the sudden shock of cold.

"It's you who make me do this," Hanuman said. "You and your damned wilfulness."

In response to this oft-repeated lament of Hanuman's, Danlo only looked at him strangely and smiled.

"I demand that you tell me what the Sonderval's pathway will be."

"I will tell you," Danlo said, "only when all the stars have fallen from the sky."

"I demand that you tell me now."

"I ... would rather die."

"Oh, no," Hanuman said, "we won't allow that. In a few more moments, you'll only wish that you could. But I've come here tonight to bring you two gifts close to my soul. The first, of course, is pain."

"And the second?" Danlo asked, almost knowing what Hanuman would say.

"Eternity, Danlo. Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which this universe is made."

He nodded at Jaroslav Bulba, then, and hardened his face. Quickly, with the speed of a striking cobra, Jaroslav reached out with a glittering needle held between his fingers and stuck it in Danlo's neck. It took only a moment, this injection of the warrior-poets' ekkana drug. The pain of the tiny needle was almost nothing. Danlo sat waiting, sweating and waiting to feel something more than this little fly-bite of his flesh. He counted heartbeats, one, two, three, four of them. And then like a sudden blast of rocket fire in the cold night air, the drug exploded through his nervous system. The fifth beat of his heart felt like a great stone dropped on to his chest. He gasped at the sudden pain of it. In waves, as his heart's quick spasm pushed the blood through his arteries, he felt the pain pulsing out through his arms, legs and torso, and up through his neck into his brain. Quickly now, as his heart beat faster, shocks of pain filled every part of him with the rhythmic beating of his blood. The head pain was the worst; like a red-hot iron being pounded with a hammer through his eye. But other pains took him as well: the fiery coldness of stone against his back; acid wire scorching open the skin of his chest; the burning ache of toes once frozen with frostbite. In truth, the whole of his body shrieked with pain, his muscles and skin and nerves and blood and bones all the way down to the deep screaming of his cells.

"You may scream if you wish," Hanuman said. "The only one who might hear you is Malaclypse Redring, who waits in
his
cell. And to a warrior-poet, you should know, the screams of another are the most heavenly music."