War in Heaven (20 page)

"I was in the Timekeeper's Tower when the bomb exploded," Demothi told Danlo above the wind whipping through the open sled. "I saw the mushroom cloud rise over this part of the city. And after, the utter ruin of streets that I had skated as a child. Every tower of the Fields broken, blown down. Almost every building. And look at it now! There's no sign of the war, is there?"

Danlo looked out at the shopfronts and the many people coming and going from the various apartments giving out on to the street. Many of these buildings, with their pink granite and sweeping garlands of icevine flowers, reminded him of similar architecture he had seen throughout the Old City. All kinds of people thronged the sliddery itself, making travel slow. He saw wormrunners, courtesans, astriers, harijan, hibakusha and of course many Ordermen skating in the lanes to the side of them. The Academy Sliddery, as this street had been called for three thousand years, was one of the oldest in the city and usually one of the busiest. And now, on this 98th day of false winter in the year 2959 since the founding of Neverness, it seemed much as it always had at this time of day in this fairest of seasons. The air had fallen warm enough to melt the sliddery's orange ice, and a sheen of water slickened its smooth surface. Songbirds warbled from their roosts in the elaborate stonework of the buildings while fritillaries swarmed the icevine flowers or the snow dahlia bursting from the planters in front of many restaurants. These were
real
fritillaries, insects with their lovely violet wings, not the organisms of the Golden Ring named for them. They added to the brightness and gaiety of the street; looking at them fluttering about in their thousands, it was almost impossible not to feel a certain peace.

And yet beneath the surface serenity of a typical false winter day, Danlo saw signs of war.
Not
the Pilots' War that had befallen Neverness when he was still a child, but the coming war, the one he must stop even if it cost him his life. To begin with, too many people were wearing gold. Wormrunners and astriers and even harijan in their billowing pantaloons — many of them wore at least one garment that had been dyed a golden hue. All the courtesans, he saw, in their two- or three-piece silken pyjamas, were dressed wholly in gold, a clear sign that their Society had wholly converted to Ringism. And all the Ordermen wore bands of gold, often sewn into the very fabric of their robes. Five times he saw Ordermen actually wearing golden robes, and these were not grammarians as their colour once would have shown, but rather a horologe, a librarian, a cantor, a notationist and a holist.
These
five women and men wore armbands coloured red, brown, grey, maroon and cobalt to distinguish their respective professions. The most devoted of the Order's Ringists, who called themselves godlings, prided themselves on beginning a trend which they hoped would spread throughout the halls of the academy; soon, it was said, even the Lord of the Order himself, Audric Pall, would take off his cetic's orange robe and don one of purest gold.

Even the bustle of the street heralded the opposite of peace. Danlo saw too many sleds laden with furs or food-stuffs or other goods that people might hoard if the times grew violent. With the sliddery so crowded, it was the slowest journey he ever remembered making between the Fields and the academy. At the intersection of the great East-West Sliddery, the second longest street in the city, a sled had run out of hydrogen and stood blocking traffic. There was a snarl of stalled sleds and frustrated skaters backed up along both slidderies; many people were shouting and pushing their way through the manswarms as if they had forgotten every social grace. A fight broke out between two wormrunners. One of these, a large, black-bearded man bedecked in black sable furs and diamonds, whipped out a laser from a hidden holster and fairly shoved it in the other wormrunner's face. He threatened to burn through his eyes and boil his brains. And then, realizing that the penalty for the crime of keeping a laser would be banishment from the city, he put away this vicious weapon and quickly skulked off into the crowd. That wormrunners might now carry lasers instead of their usual knives alarmed Danlo; that no one tried to chastise the wormrunner or seemed to regard his open display of outlawed technology as unusual alarmed him even more.

But they traversed the remaining seven long blocks to the academy without further incident. And then they came to the scorched steel doors of the Wounded Wall, which surrounded the academy to the south, west and north. The gates to this high granite barrier stood open awaiting their arrival. Danlo remembered that when he had been a journeyman, they always closed at night, making it necessary for him and Hanuman li Tosh and other friends to climb its rough stone blocks in their forbidden forays into the Farsider's Quarter. Now, Yemon Astoret said, the gates were often closed during the day — for the first time since the Dark Year when the Order's schools on eight hundred worlds had been burned in the Architect religious riots and the Great Plague had come to Neverness. Now, Yemon said, as if addressing two novices, the Lords of the Order feared that the astrier and harijan sects might riot under intense pressure to convert to Ringism. Or warrior-poets might try to storm through the gates on a mission of assassination. There were too many warrior-poets in the city; over the last year, these bringers of death in their rainbow robes had flocked to Neverness like goshawks gathering for a killing frenzy.

As the procession of sleds passed through the South Gate and threaded through the academy's narrow red glidderies, Danlo filled with memories as if he were drinking an ocean. He gazed at the beloved Morning Towers of Resa, the Pilots' College where he had spent his early manhood learning the mathematics of the manifold. Almost in the shadow of these twin pillars of the sun were the Rose Womb Cloisters, the buildings housing the salt water tanks where he had floated and practised his arts of hallning, adagio and zazen. He saw many journeyman pilots in their black kamelaikas skating the glidderies leading to the Cloisters or to Resa Commons. He couldn't help but feel a camaraderie and compassion for them; many of them, he supposed, would be pressed into piloting lightships in the coming war before they had quite mastered their art. He wanted to stop his sled, to skate over to a group of these young pilots and tell them that he, too, had been elevated to a full pilotship at a very young age and had taken a lightship into the Vild before he was quite ready. But in their flashing eyes and anxious faces, he saw no welcome. They well knew who he was and why he had returned to Neverness.

One of them, a burly man who was said to be the secret son of Lord Burgos Harsha, actually spat at the ice as Danlo's sled moved past, and in a rather loud, braying voice called out, "The wayless return." Several of his friends, who all wore golden armbands, picked up the cue and cried out the newly popular saying, "Wayless, godless, hopeless."

As they passed beneath the great old yu trees lining the streets and gracing the academy's lawns, other Ordermen — akashics, tinkers, mechanics and imprimaturs — greeted them in a similar manner. Danlo could only imagine what insults might await him in the College of the Lords. He didn't have to wait long. Soon the sleds rounded the gliddery that runs past the Timekeeper's Tower, and in a few more moments glided to a rest outside a square building faced with huge slabs of white granite. The College of the Lords was nestled between the academy's cemetery to the south and the lovely Shih Grove just to the north; to the east, the grounds gave way to the rising slopes of the Hill of Sorrows, still covered with purple and white wildflowers, late in the season though it was. Danlo and Demothi thanked Yemon Astoret and the other journeymen for their accompaniment, but, of course, their little mission was not finished. They insisted on escorting them up the steps and into an anteroom off the College's main council chamber. There, a red-robed horologe named Ivar Luan bowed to them and immediately led them through a pair of sliding wooden doors into a circular chamber where the Lords of the Order had gathered.

Once before Danlo had been invited into this place of history and great moment. With its circular walls of polished white granite and the great clary dome high above, it was a dazzlingly bright room but also draughty and always cold. He remembered how he had once knelt on the cold black floor stones before some of these very men and women. (One of whom had been Demothi Bede.) But now, since he and Demothi were no longer of the Old Order, they were not bidden to kneel on a Fravashi carpet according to tradition, but rather provided chairs on which to sit before the watchful eyes of a hundred and twenty lords. These tense men and women waited at their little crescent tables arrayed in a half-circle around four chairs in the centre of the room. Danlo, who had always hated sitting in chairs, took his seat with great disquiet, and he wondered at the two empty chairs next to him. As before, he smelled jewood polished with lemon oil and the reek of many old people's fear. The greatest lords sat directly across from him at the two centre tables. Danlo knew many of them quite well, especially Kolenya Mor, the Lord Eschatologist, who played with the silken folds of her new golden robe. Kolenya was plump, moon-faced, intelligent and kind — and utterly beguiled by this new religion called Ringism. She was a bold women and also the first lord to trade in her traditional robe for a new one of gold. Also at her table were Jonath Parsons, Rodrigo Diaz, Mahavira Netis and Burgos Harsha with his plain brown robe and glass-pocked face. At the other centre table sat Ian Kutikoff, the Lord Semanticist, and Eva Zarifa in a purple robe displaying not one but two golden armbands. Next to her, old Vishnu Suso shifted about in his chair, all the while staring at Danlo and fingering his armband as if he suddenly found it too tight. He seemed uncomfortable sharing so close a physical space with the other lord at the end of the table, Audric Pall, the Lord of the Order himself. And no wonder, for Danlo had never seen a more horrible human being in all his life. It almost hurt him even to look at Lord Pall, with his pink, albino's eyes and skin as white as bleached bone. This rare genetic deformity was accentuated by his black teeth, revealed whenever he spoke or smiled, which was not often. Lord Pall liked to communicate only by using his hands and fingers, making the little cetic signs which the journeyman cetic sitting by his side like a parratock bird translated into spoken language. He was as silent as a cetic, as the saying goes, and also cynical, subtle and wholly corrupt in his spirit.

Eli los shaida
, Danlo thought.
Shaida eth shaida.

Lord Pall lifted his finger slightly, and the cetic sitting at his side — a handsome young man with the blond hair and ferocious blue eyes of a Thorskaller — spoke in his place: "Have you fallen well, Lord Demothi Bede? Danlo wi Soli Ringess? We wish you well. We accept you as the legitimate ambassadors of the Fellowship of Free Worlds, though you should know that we do not accept the legitimacy of the Fellowship itself."

"Perhaps in time that will change," Demothi said.

"Perhaps," Lord Pall said through his mouthpiece. But his little pink eyes betrayed no sign that he thought this might be possible. "Time is strange, isn't it? We have so little of it. At this moment, the wave-front from the supernova is falling towards us at the speed of light. And perhaps the fleet of your Fellowship approaches even more quickly. And these aren't even the most immediate dangers that we face."

"Of what dangers do you speak, my lord?" Demothi asked.

"That you will soon know," Lord Pall replied. He turned to look at a journeyman horologe standing by the doors to a second anteroom across the chamber. The horologe bowed his head, then drew the laser that he wore in a holster at his hip. He very warily opened the anteroom's doors. Two men were waiting for him there, and, with a wave of his laser, he escorted them into the chamber towards Danlo and Demothi Bede and the two empty chairs.

"No!" Danlo suddenly said, forgetting all restraint. Then, realizing that he had spoken out of place, he held his head as still as a thallow as he locked eyes on these two men whom he knew too well.

"I see that you're acquainted," Lord Pall said. "But allow me to present our guests to the rest of the College: Malaclypse Redring of Qallar, and Bertram Jaspari of Tannahill."

At the saying of this name, a hundred lords gasped as if sharing a single breath. From lost Tannahill, thirty thousand light years across the stars, Bertram Jaspari had come to Neverness even as Danlo had come. With his pointed, bald head and skin discoloured blue from the
mehalis
disease common to Tannahill, he was an ugly man — perhaps the ugliest whom Danlo had ever known. His mouth was as small and puckered as a dried bloodfruit and his eyes cold and dead-grey like rotting seal flesh. His whole face seemed set with a permanent sneer. And all these eyecatching physical features bespoke only the work of his surface self; his true ugliness went much deeper. Danlo knew him to be devious, vain, stingy, cruel and utterly lacking in grace. And worse, he had no care for any human being other than himself, and worse still, he liked using others in his lust to grab power. And perhaps worst of all, he was small in his spirit, small and twisted like a plant deformed by lack of water and sunlight. If he had competed with Lord Pall to see which one of them could best embody pure
shaida
, it would have been hard to judge the winner.

"You are a liar and a murderer," Danlo whispered as Bertram Jaspari let himself down into the chair next to him. "A murderer of a planet and a whole people."

Bertram Jaspari pretended that he hadn't heard these soft yet fierce words of Danlo. He seemed afraid to meet Danlo's blazing blue eyes. He just sat in his jewood chair, adjusting the folds of his kimono, the traditional garment of the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church. Scarcely a year earlier, in the War of Terror which he had inflicted upon Tannahill, he had dyed his kimono a bright red as a sign of his willingness to shed blood. (Though as far as Danlo knew, he had shed only the blood of his fellow Architects and never his own.) All of the fanatical sect called the Iviomils now wore these same ugly kimonos. Somewhere in space, perhaps hiding behind a nearby star, Bertram's fleet of Iviomils would be waiting to shed more blood or to accomplish a much more
shaida
purpose.