War in Heaven (31 page)

Pain.

"This is useless," Radomil said. He looked at the display of Danlo's brain, all lit up with a brilliant red fire. Then he looked at Danlo, who sat with his eyes closed, all the while relaxing his chest and shoulders as if opening his heart to all the pain in the world.

Jaroslav Bulba cut loose yet another fingernail, then stood in front of Danlo with his dripping, red knife. To Hanuman, he said, "This
is
useless. If I didn't know that it was impossible, I'd think that he drank an antidote to the ekkana earlier tonight."

But no antidote for the ekkana poison existed, and Hanuman said, "No, he'll feel its fire all his life."

"And how long must that be?" Jaroslav asked, looking back and forth between Danlo and Hanuman.

"I don't know," Hanuman said with a terrible sadness in his voice. "How could I know?"

"Let me take his eyes, now," Jaroslav said.

Hanuman leaned closer to Danlo, then, and he gently pressed his fingers against Danlo's closed eyelids.

"Let me take his life," Jaroslav said with surprising compassion. "He's earned this freedom — no man more."

Hanuman stepped over behind Danlo's chair. He pressed his fingertips against the great artery along Danlo's throat, and said, "How strongly his heart still beats."

"We could wait a few more days," Radomil said in his wheezy old voice. "After the effects of the ekkana have quieted, there are other drugs we might give him. And then, with most of his brain clear from the pain, I might read — "

"Can anyone read this man?" Hanuman asked softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself. "Have
I
ever been able to read him?"

"Let me take his life," Jaroslav repeated. "If he's reached his moment of the possible and gone on, then there's nothing else to do."

And Arrio Kell added, "If it's his fate to be the Eleventh, he'll have gone beyond all pain and you'll never read him."

Pain beyond pain. Fire beyond fire. Light beyond light inside light light light ...

While the two warrior-poets stood arguing Danlo's fate with Radomil and Hanuman, something strange began to happen to Danlo. Inside himself, in that space of all fire and pain between his lungs, it seemed that he could feel heartbeats other than his own. He thought perhaps that they might be Hanuman's; he had always felt connected with him soul to soul as if they were twins joined at the chest and floating in their mother's womb. And then the beats seemed to come closer to him, as with a man walking towards him beating a drum. He could
see
this man: a young godling with a jook-pocked face hurrying into the cathedral and making his way through the corridors into the chapter house. His golden cloak flapped behind him like a mallow's wings. Danlo waited a few moments, and then he could hear the man, too, not only with this mysterious sense for which he had no name, but with his ears. And then Hanuman and the warrior-poets heard him as well. There came the distant whoosh of a door being opened, the slap of hard boots against stone. These sounds abruptly stopped outside Danlo's cell. Danlo's heart beat once more, and then someone's knuckles beat against the great steel door. "My Lord Hanuman," a voice called out, "I must speak with you immediately."

Hanuman motioned for Jaroslav to open the door. This he did, and a fervent-looking man wearing a golden robe hurried into the room. Jook pocks scarred his face, which was still red from his journey through the cold streets. His name, as Danlo remembered, was Ivar Zayit, and next to Surya Surata Lai or Jaroslav Bulba, he was the most trusted of Hanuman's godlings.

"Come closer, then," Hanuman said as he stepped over to the farthest corner of the cell. "Please, catch your breath and calm yourself."

This Ivar did, and then he cupped his hands over Hanuman's ear and began whispering. After a few moments, Hanuman pulled away with a jerk as if he couldn't bear such an intimate touch by another human being.

"You may free the pilot," Hanuman said to Jaroslav. "There's nothing of help that he could tell us now."

"What news has Ivar brought, then?"

"
This
news," Hanuman said softly. "This news that will soon be all over the city. Near Mara's Star, by purest chance, a cadre of twenty lightships discovered part of the Fellowship's fleet. And the fleet discovered them. There was a small battle. You should know, two of our pilots survived to return to Neverness. There will be no surprising the Sonderval now. He'll wait for us there, around that damned star — or one close by such as Orino Luz."

"He may wait, but would it be wise for Salmalin to lead the Order's fleet against him?" This question came from Radomil Morven, who considered himself a natural strategist in all matters concerning war — as many men who know nothing about war are wont to do.

"Would this be wise?" Hanuman mused. His eyes paled for a moment like blue ice obscured by clouds. The neurologics twisting through the clearface on his head lit up in a million strands of purple wire. Then he said, "Ivar Zayit has just come from the academy, where the entire College of Lords is meeting to determine whether such a course of action would be wise."

"But surely it's upon the Lord of the Order himself to decide whether or not to send out the fleet," Radomil said. Despite his skill at reading men's minds, he still hadn't quite read the subtle play of power connecting Hanuman to Lord Pall.

"Surely that's true," Hanuman said. "But Lord Pall values farsighted counsel. Which is why he has sent for my help in making this decision."

"What will you counsel, then?" Jaroslav asked as he wiped his knife with a blood-spattered cloth.

"First," Hanuman said, "that you cut the pilot free and help him to his bed."

"As you wish," Jaroslav said.

With a blindingly quick motion, he sheathed his killing knife and drew a blade of another sort from a pocket of his cloak. This little tool was not really a weapon at all, but only a heat knife which he used to cut Danlo's bonds. In a moment — in a hiss of scorched acid wire and a sickening smell like burning hair — Jaroslav slid the heat knife down the silvery cocoon imprisoning Danlo. It took Arrio Kell scarcely more time to glue shut the wound on Danlo's face and to fit ten krydda-filled skin tubes over Danlo's wounded fingers. Then the two warrior-poets helped him walk to his bed; and they gently pulled the furs up covering his naked body almost as if they were tucking in a child for the night.

"Secondly," Hanuman said as he looked at Jaroslav with his deadly cold eyes, "I would like you to escort Radomil back to his apartment."

"That really won't be necessary," Radomil said. He, too, looked at the warrior-poet, perhaps remembering
how
easily his knife could find its way into a man's flesh.

Hanuman came up close to Radomil and put his hand on his shoulder as if they were old friends. "I'm sorry but I must insist. The streets are dangerous at night, and we of the Way have many enemies."

"But Lord Hanuman — "

"Please allow me to repay your efforts here tonight. You've seen much that would be hard for others to see." With this, Hanuman turned to Jaroslav and said, "Please return him now. You know the way, don't you?"

Jaroslav stared at Hanuman for a moment, and murderous daggers of understanding passed back and forth between their eyes.

"I know the way," Jaroslav finally said. "It will be my pleasure."

He laid his hand on Radomil's arm and steered him towards the door.

"And now," Hanuman said, "Arrio will escort
me
back to my chambers. Where I shall consider what counsel to give Lord Pall."

Ivar Zayit stood next to the cell's chess table, watching Radomil collect his akashic's heaume and holographic display with his trembling hands. Then he looked at Hanuman and asked, "And how may I serve you, Lord Hanuman?"

"You'll come with me," Hanuman said. "I'll need you to wait outside my chambers, and then convey my counsel to Lord Pall."

Ivar Zayit bowed his head in acquiescence to Hanuman's wishes. And then, almost as if he were executing one of the movements of his killing art, Hanuman pushed out his palms to usher out everyone from Danlo's cell. But before leaving himself, he stepped over to Danlo's bed and checked the pulse along Danlo's throat. And then, moving his lips close to Danlo's ear so that no one else could hear him, he whispered, "I know you're conscious; I know you understand me. And I know your pain, but you made me share it with you, do you understand?
Do
you? Do you really? I'm sorry, but the pain will lessen in a few more hours. Another eternity, I know, but after that you should try to sleep. Sleep, Danlo, and heal yourself of your wounds, and you still might live."

For a moment, Danlo lay shrouded in his furs like a corpse. Then he opened his eyes, and a deep blue fire poured out of him, all the terrible beauty and brilliance of his soul. Hanuman shuddered to see this, as if looking at this sunlike thing inside Danlo would cook his face and eat his own eyes down to the bone. At last, he had to break the connection between them and look away.

"No, I will not sleep now," Danlo whispered. His lips were bleeding, and his tongue — and he could barely form the words in his mouth. "If I sleep, I die ... you said, Hanu. If I sleep, I die."

"Goodbye, then," Hanuman said.

"Hanu, Hanu — goodbye."

Hanuman stood away from the bed and whispered, "I'm sorry, Danlo." Then he backed out of the room and shut the door, leaving Danlo alone.

Only when I am alone am I not alone
, Danlo remembered.
In pain I am never alone.

As Danlo lay back in his cold bed and stared at his cell's long dark door, he opened himself to all the pain inside him. And something inside him opened then. Like a door opening on to all the golden, shimmering pain in the universe, his heart moved and he felt the movements of other hearts far away. In truth, he felt the movement of molecules and planets and stars, lightships and men, and of other things — perhaps everything. All the universe from the centre of his bed to the uttermost galaxies of the Grus Cloud moved with a beautiful but terrible purpose, and it all hurt. Movement itself was the essence of pain, the electrons of hot blue stars and of his own blazing eyes spinning and shimmering and connecting to that golden moment at the beginning of time when all matter and memory were one.

Everything remembers everything
, he thought.
Everything, everywhere.

In another moment of time — in the nowness of streaming blood and knives of pain spinning through every part of his body — a clear light shone upon events that had recently occurred far away. With open eyes and open heart he remembered the battle of which Ivar Zayit had spoken. He could
see
these blindingly quick movements of lightships and black ships and all the other ships of the Fellowship's Tenth Battle Group, commanded by his friend, Bardo. There were other ships, too. In the deep space around a blazing blue star called Mara's Star (and in the even deeper spaces inside his own mind) he saw a cadre of twenty Ringist lightships surprise the ships of three of Bardo's pilots. That is, the Ringist pilots must have thought they were surprising them, just as they must have supposed that the three ships floated alone and helpless to attack. For they fell against them like wolves surrounding shagshay ewes, but as they did so, the main body of Bardo's battle group fell out of the manifold against
them.
It was a trap well-baited and quickly closed. There came flashes of diamond and light bursts every time a window to the manifold opened. Bardo himself, in his
Sword of Shiva
, sought out the leader of the Ringist pilots. This was Charl Odissan in the
Phoenix Rising
, a lightship famous for the golden and scarlet hues impregnated in its black diamond hull. After a series of furious feints and fenestrations through the manifold's many windows, Bardo managed to map the
Phoenix Rising
into the heart of Mara's Star. He must have seen it vanish from realspace like a piece of ice vaporized by a heat gun. But he certainly couldn't have seen it reappear at the fixed-points that he had chosen deep inside the star. He couldn't have beheld the look of surprise in Chad's brown eyes or heard his final scream. Danlo, however, lying five hundred light years away in a cold bed, did. He watched as the star's terrible fire burned away the diamond skin of Charl's lightship, and then quickly blackened the toffee-coloured skin of Charl's handsome face. He watched and he waited almost for ever, and he felt Charl's final heartbeat as an anguished scarlet burst inside his own chest. He almost screamed, then. In the solitude of his cell and the sudden aloneness of his soul, he opened his mouth and wanted to scream out all the infinite pain inside himself.

No! No, no, no, no
...

But he couldn't look away from this brilliant, blazing reality. He saw and felt and remembered and knew — and he knew that what came into his mind like a fireflower opening in the sun was true.

Ahira, Ahira
, he prayed,
mi alasharia la shantih Charl Odissan, shantih, shantih.

He might have prayed for all the other pilots and peoples caught up in this terrible war, but he couldn't move his lips or find the voice of his deepest self. Suddenly, the pain grew too great. It exploded inside him like a star falling supernova, and all he knew was fire and infinity and a terribly beautiful light beyond light.

Fear not, and be not dismayed at this great multitude; for the battle is not yours but God's.

— from the Chronicles of Israel

Only the dead have seen the end to war.

— Plato

The next ten days were the strangest of Danlo's life. He spent all this time alone in his cell, usually lying in his blood-stained bed, eating the soft foods that one of Hanuman's godlings brought him, and healing. Healing and yet not healing. Although his burns quickly scabbed over and nubs of shiny new nails began to form at the base of each finger's quick, the ekkana drug still seared him as if every tissue of his body had been stung with Scutari venom. He could no more escape his pain than he could sublimate himself into vapour and pass out of the cracks of his cell's steel door. It was the paradox of his existence during this period of nightmare sweats and unheard screams that the worse his pain became the more easily he could bear it. During those terrible moments when his blood and bones seemed to dissolve into a molten lava that burned his insides with its fire, he himself could dissolve into fire, the fire into light. In his wildest agony, he could find a place so hideously hot that it felt as cold as ice, a frenzy of motion so violent that it whirled around a centre of stillness, clarity and peace. Like a white bird taking refuge at the eye of a firestorm, he could rest at this centre beneath a calm blue sky while hellish winds raged all about him. But, inevitably, there came other moments even more terrible where his pain would subside merely to a fevered torment as if each cell of his body had been burned in the sun. Then would become all too aware of his suffering; he would feel himself
as
a separate self trapped in the agony of pure existence. He would feel his blood boiling through his veins and arteries, scalding him deep inside. Often, he covered his face with his pillow and screamed and wept and raged until his voice gave out; he passed into delirium and hellish visions, and then awoke whispering once more his prayer that God would let him die.