The Broken God (44 page)

Kana oil is the smell of death, he suddenly remembered. The warrior-poets wear kana oil perfumes.

With this dreadful thought, he cast aside all rules and etiquette, and he pulled the door open. Now the smell of kana oil was thick and intense. It rushed like electricity into his brain, and his throat clutched up, and he gasped for breath. In the auricle room, there was another smell, too, rich and quick and running with life. As a child, he had smelled this thrilling smell many times before. It was the smell of blood – the smell of death. On a small white futon at the rear of the auricle room, Master Baran Smith sat politely with his hands folded across his lap. Danlo had almost expected to see him floating in a pool of water, but then he remembered that the master librarians do not need such aids in order to interface the tutelary computers. Master Smith, he saw, was fairly floating in a pool of blood. The floor of the cell glistened with blood, and the futon was no longer white but now almost pure red. There were drops of bright blood sprayed against the auricle room's neurologics, and blood dripping down the curves of Master Smith's shiny bald head. It had been four years since Danlo had seen so much blood, when Haidar had speared a shag-shay ewe against the clean new snow and used his knife to cut her throat. Danlo stepped closer to Master Smith, the better to see more clearly. Master Smith was not really sitting at all, but rather slumped back against the wall neurologics. His eyes were open and his face was twisted in surprise as if someone had caught him in deep interface unable to see or hear or move. Someone must have opened the door unbidden, even as Danlo had; he must have rushed upon Master Smith and cut open his throat.

Murder upon murder upon murder.

Although it seemed that room's redness and the reek of kana oil would go on and on forever, all this seeing and smelling and remembering of Danlo's lasted only a moment. When he saw that Master Smith was dead beyond hope, he turned and ran from the room.

Warrior-poets murder because they love to murder.

Toward the door of Hanuman's cell he ran, and he moved so quickly that his wet queue of hair whipped about violently, flinging drops of water into the air. He wanted to tell Hanuman that the ontogenesis of man into god was dangerous beyond belief and fraught with shaida. He wanted to tell Hanuman other things, too, and he was very afraid that there would never again be time for such telling. There was a warrior-poet loose in the library – of this he was sure. He was sure, too, that the warrior-poet had killed the librarian only as a preliminary and that his masters had really sent him to murder Hanuman.

How do I prepare for death? Learn how to live. How do I learn to live? Prepare for death.

– saying of the warrior-poets

When Danlo entered Hanuman's cell, he found it empty. Much water had been splashed out of the cell's tank; this water had overflowed into the cell's gowning room and now lay gathered in shallow puddles across the uneven floor tiles. Hanuman's clothes – his kamelaika, undersilks and furs – still hung from the wall hooks. His boots were neatly stowed on the rack beneath them. Danlo quickly looked about for blood-sign, but he saw nothing to indicate that Hanuman was dead or dying. Only the strong and terrible smell of kana oil pointed toward the warrior-poet as the cause of the cell's emptiness.

The warrior-poets are like spiders – they like to take and bind victims before killing them.

In truth, the warrior-poets liked to torture their victims, and Danlo thought about this as he tore from the cell and turned into the corridor. He might have gone for help then. He might have turned toward the right and passed back through the corridor the way that he had come, into the soft lights and safeness of the library's main hallway. He might have scrambled frantically to find a librarian or anyone else, to give the alarm and cry out that Master Smith had been murdered by a warrior-poet. He might have given way to panic (or prudence) but he began remembering many things about the warrior-poets, and so when he stepped out into the corridor, he turned toward his left. Me turned into the darkness of the long corridor. He rushed deeper into the library, and the smell of kana oil grew denser and sickening, like that of wolverine musk sprayed into the air. The corridor was empty, nothing but moist wall stones and the numbered doors of the novices' cells. As he ran further into the corridor, the numbers grew higher. There were many doors and many novices enwombed safely within their cells, lying blindly and deafly as bodies in a prayer ship. They would not know that a warrior-poet had recently passed their way; they would never suspect that one of their fellow novices was soon to be murdered.

Hanu, Hanu.

Somewhere in this almost endless corridor, beneath one of the flame globes that had burned out years ago, he came across a black cloak flung against the floorstones. He picked it up and smelled it; the coarse wool reeked of kana oil. Sewn to the inside of this noxious garment were rows of little leather pockets. In each pocket, there was a feathered dart no bigger than his finger. At random, he slipped one of these darts free of its pocket. He held the dart up to the faint light diffusing down the corridor. The tip of the dart was a steel needle enamelled with some dark, hard substance as red as dried blood. He pulled other darts free. Each dart was tipped with a different coloured poison, chocolate or puce or violet. The warrior-poets, it was said, carried many drugs and poisons to play tunes of agony upon the human body as a musician does a gosharp.

Oh, Hanu, Hanu.

Almost without thinking, Danlo grabbed up a handful of darts and continued his wild dash down the corridor. Soon he saw a faint light ahead of him where the corridor ended and a little-used stairwell led to the library's other floors. He drew closer to the stairwell, his boots pounded against the floorstones and he gasped at quick lungfuls of air. There were two people in the stairwell, as he could now plainly see. One of them, bound fast to the stair's heavy railing, was Hanuman li Tosh. And the other was a warrior-poet wearing a beautiful rainbow kamelaika. He had the beautiful and dangerous look of a tiger, and he held a long, killing knife against Hanuman's pale throat.

'Please don't come any closer,' the warrior-poet said, and his voice spilled out like honey into the corridor.

Something in this marvellous voice compelled Danlo to obey and so, some twenty yards from the stairwell, he stopped. He stood frozen with indecision, trying to get back his breath.

'No, Danlo – the drug, the pain, you mustn't!' This came from Hanuman who was pulling and thrashing against his bonds. Many circles of glittering kasja fibre wound over his arms and chest and looped around two balustrades of the iron railing behind him. Each movement must have caused him considerable pain, for the kasja fibres cut at his skin, which was raw and bloody below his shoulders and along the curve of his lower ribs. The warrior-poets, Danlo remembered, sometimes refer to the kasja fibres as acid wire because the touch of these protein filaments against the flesh is like acid opening up a wound.

'No, Danlo – no!'

Beneath the acid wire imprisoning him, Hanuman was naked. The warrior-poet must have pulled him from his tank and forced him at knife point to walk through the corridor. And Hanuman must have fought fiercely with all the skill of his killing art: the warrior-poet's neck was scratched and bleeding as if Hanuman had tried to claw open the arteries of his throat. Clearly, he had succeeded in yanking off the warrior-poet's cloak, but this had hardly impeded the poet, for he must have caught Hanuman in a headlock or some other hold and dragged him into the stairwell. And Hanuman was still fighting, only now he warred against himself, against his urge to scream and whimper and plead for Danlo to somehow help him.

'No, Danlo, please!'

Even though the light in the empty stairwell was quite strong, it was hard for Danlo to tell if the moisture beading up on Hanuman's face was water remaining from his cell's tank or sweat. In truth, Hanuman's face glistened, and it shone with light, and with fear, with hatred and with other deep emotions impossible to guess at. His eyes were wide open as he stared up at the warrior-poet; his eyes never left the warrior-poet's eyes, except once, when he peered out into the corridor to look at Danlo.

'Please, go away! Run, Danlo, run!'

'Yes,' the warrior-poet said, 'please run away. Go and fetch the librarians or their robots. By the time you do, I'll be done with Hanuman.'

'Danlo, please, no!'

Still standing close to Hanuman, the warrior-poet smiled politely and bowed. He pointed his knife at Danlo, saying, 'You must be Danlo wi Soli Ringess. The son of the Ringess whom everyone is talking about. I had thought you would remain in your cell a little longer, but meeting you is an honour, under any circumstances. I'm Marek of Qallar. I've come to Neverness to meet you and your friend.'

Danlo looked into the stairwell, at the long flight of worn basalt steps that led to the higher floors above Hanuman and the warrior-poet. A part of him hoped that a group of librarians or perhaps journeymen pilots might at any moment appear upon these stairs and swarm the warrior-poet. Another part of him, however, whispered that no number of men or women or robots would be quick enough to save Hanuman before the warrior-poet plunged the knife into his throat. Most likely nothing could save Hanuman now, and therefore Danlo should flee back down the corridor lest the warrior-poet take his life, too.

'If you wish to remain,' Marek said to Danlo, 'you've only to wait a moment or so. I've already asked Hanuman his poem.'

The warrior-poets, Danlo recalled, sometimes honoured their victims by reciting part of a poem. If their victims could supply the last lines and complete the poem, they were set free. If they could not, then ...

'Alas, your friend is no student of poetry,' Marek said. 'And so now it's time I gave him the drug.'

So saying, with blinding speed, the warrior-poet removed a silver needle-dart from a pocket of his kamelaika and stabbed it into the side of Hanuman's neck. Instantly, Hanuman screamed out and began writhing inside his cocoon of acid wire. Instantly, too, Danlo began to move toward the stairwell, but the warrior-poet held out his knife and shook his head.

'Please don't move,' Marek said. He kissed the yellow ring that encircled the little finger of his left hand, and then he kissed the violet ring on his right hand. He grasped Hanuman's head between his hands, leaned over, and gently kissed his forehead. 'The drug won't kill him. It will only bring him to the moment of the possible.'

Again, Hanuman screamed, a high, hideous sound like that of a sleekit caught in a snow tiger's claws. Danlo ached to jump forward and help him but he could not move. It was as if he himself had been caught and immobilized by one of the warrior-poet's paralytic drugs. Danlo watched as Hanuman's face twisted in anguish. Then Hanuman bit his tongue, and his muscles jumped beneath his sweat-streaked skin as if touched with an electric current. His eyes were rigid and locked open as he cried out, 'No, the light – no, no!' The warrior-poet, Danlo thought, must have inoculated him with ekkana, a drug that rendered the body responsive to the faintest of sensa. For Hanuman, the photons of the flame globes above him would be like drops of molten gold poured through the dark opening at the centre of the eye. The neurons of his retina would sizzle and hiss at the searing touch of light. The ekkana, in its excitation of the nervous system, was like an acid that dissolved the myelin coating of every nerve, leaving each nerve fibre open to the world's cruel kiss, and to the interior electro-chemical storms and metabolic signals that rage through the body. Soon, in moments, Hanuman's entire universe would be a blazing tapestry of nerves, these endless filaments of fire that branch off and fray into ever tinier fibres, winding like acid wire through every organ and tissue, touching every cell and imprisoning the flesh inside the terrible pain of its own being. And yet, astonishingly, paradoxically, this torture was meant to free Hanuman from himself. The waking brain acts as an eyelid to consciousness; its function is to shut out the blinding shimmer of all things, inside and out, lest one lose sight of the everyday world of needs and dangers and fears. But the ekkana drug – one of the more elegant trans-psychedelics – opens the eyes. It opens the brain to light reflected from all possible surfaces, from rocks and wind-torn leaves and the frozen sea, from broken souls and from nightmares and from corpses spread out upon fields of snow. To stand naked and wide-eyed before this blazing light is to open oneself to all the pain in the universe. Then comes the moment of infinite vulnerability. This is the moment of the possible, when one feels the pain of all things reflected and magnified inside oneself and accepts it utterly, without fear. In this moment before death, beyond death – in the pain beyond pain – there is an utter awakening to the fact that one is infinitely more than one's own body and self. In this one, soaring, marvellous moment, if one is strong enough to drink in the terrible fire of life, all things become possible.

'Danlo, please!'

If one is strong enough to overcome oneself – this is what the warrior-poets believe – then there is a golden moment as eternal as the heaven of the Kristian sects or that ineffable state that the Architects call cybernetic samadhi. But if one is weak or fearful or damaged in the soul, then there is only hell.

'Please – the warrior-poet!'

Again, Hanuman turned his head in Danlo's direction, but it was as if he were looking into a wall of flames. Hanuman shook his head back and forth as if blinded; he ground his teeth and cursed and cried out to Danlo.

And all the while Danlo stood in the gloomy corridor amidst the smells of steam, neurologics, mildew, kana oil and sweat. He looked back and forth between Hanuman and the warrior-poet, and he did not know what to do.

'Let him go!' Danlo finally said. 'No one can bear this kind of pain!'

The warrior-poet brought his killing knife up to his lips and kissed it. 'We shall see,' he said.