Context (117 page)

Slowly, it raised its shattered
face.

And sniffed.

Tom’s skin crawled in remembrance
of childhood tales: those senses which could detect individual airborne
molecules, the implanted weaponry which might destroy half a demesne in
seconds.

‘That...way.’
A minute nod indicated direction.
‘Not long ...Hurry.’

But Tom did not move.

‘What can I—?’

‘You... know.’

Tom had no weapon with which to
end it. And a creature which could survive all that had happened ... With his
bare hand Tom could make it suffer, but he was not sure he could kill it.

Instead, he gave his deepest bow.

‘I’ll return, honoured Jack. You
have my word.’

‘Hurry..
.’

~ * ~

65

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

It
was vast: a wide circular arena, bathed in a pool of white ghostly light,
shining from above. All around rose banked tiers of seats, filled with people:
perhaps ten thousand, clad in grey, staring up into a searing glare too
powerful for normal eyes.

Crouched in the shadowed
entranceway, Tom held up his hand—a poor shield against that blinding white—and
squinted, barely managing to see the shaft’s walls rising vertically upwards,
some two kilometres to the surface, and the great crystal stadium which blazed
above.

And on those walls, all the way
up, stood row upon circular row of people: a crush of entwined bodies, a
seething mass like some vast communal hive. A quarter of a million people lined
the shaft like jostling, crawling insects, waiting for... what?

But down here on the arena floor,
at its centre, was a small figure ringed by armed human guards—not drones—whose
attention was on her instead of the titanic presence growing overhead. One of
them bore the bulky black satchel, proof of Elva’s guilt.

The white light glowed stronger,
nova-bright. Tom looked down and away, fluorescence crowding his vision,
helpless as a crawling ant at ground zero.

At that moment one of Elva’s
guards saw Tom.

In unison, they turned in his
direction. Simultaneously, every person on the lowest tier of seats stood up in
perfect synchrony. Two hundred pairs of eyes stared at Tom.

‘Elva,’
he called out.

‘Fate, Tom! No!’

Only the guards looked armed, but
it was irrelevant: no-one could survive the weight of such a huge crowd
advancing. If he fled right now—he was in the exit-way, could save himself—but no.
A strange calm descended on him.

Flight was impossible, without
Elva.

And if death was inevitable, then
he chose to face it here, with her—not by himself in some lonely future,
whether hours or decades from now. He stepped out into the white light, onto
the arena floor.

‘Elva... I’m not leaving you
again.’

Hopeless love moistened her grey
eyes.

Overhead, the blaze grew even
brighter, though Tom had not thought it possible. It was huge, and its energy
was growing: it was a manifestation of a great being, a vast power whose drives
knew nothing of the two human specks who stood below it. And in that moment,
flooded with a sense of his worthless insignificance beneath the Blight’s
overwhelming presence, Tom realized how much he and others had misinterpreted
its nature, and underestimated its power.

For the Blight was not an
extension or a limb of that distant Anomaly, but something more like a seed—or
had been. For now it was mature, coming into its own as it gathered humans
throughout the world into itself, almost
becoming
the planet: a true
sentience beyond pitiful human understanding, which perhaps was evolution’s
goal as individuals were subsumed within the whole. While Tom and Elva were
about to die, burned from existence in a flare of energy, like dust particles which
drifted into incandescent flames, sparked briefly and were gone.

So this is death.

He tried to meet Elva’s gaze.

Then a vast percussive clap
slammed the air, and Tom fell down.

They
swarmed inside.

Crimson arachnasprites with
black-clad riders hurtled into the arena, up onto the walls, speeding sideways
to the ground as their grasers spat ravening energy. Half of Elva’s guards
perished in that moment. Within seconds, as some of the riders caromed off the
walls, causing their mounts to leap in a blur of tendrils over Elva, the other
guards were down: two flattened by flailing’ sprite tendrils, the others
drilled through with precision graser fire.

One of the riders stopped, flung
back her helmet: Thylara, of the Clades Tau, with that familiar mocking grin
and mass of flame-red hair. She held out her gauntlet-covered hand to Elva, who
took a step towards the crouched arachnasprite.

But then Elva wheeled away,
muttering, and crouched over one of the fallen guards, tugging at the black
satchel which was caught in the corpse’s grasp.

‘Come on, Strelsthorm!’

While overhead, something new was
taking place.

A great shadow fell across the
arena.

Glimmers
of white still shone around the shaft’s edges—in the crystal stadium two klicks
above, light still blazed—but immediately overhead a blackness was gathering.
It roiled, it flexed: a twisting in space, a massive vibration of power so
great that light could not escape its presence. It was the true Dark Fire, the
Blight itself, coalescing into being above Tom. Waves of dread washed down upon
him.

The scarlet ‘sprites sprang into
action, firing at the massed humans in their tiers upon the shaft walls, but
suddenly their coruscating fire was having no effect, as energy which could
blast through stone spattered and burst from the Absorbed targets, fell away
from those once-human beings as harmlessly as gentle water, leaving them
unwounded.

Then darkness reached out, and
half of the TauRiders and their ‘sprites winked out of existence like snuffed
holo images.

‘Get out!’ Tom waved urgently to Thylara,
who had helped Elva to mount the saddle behind her, clutching the black satchel
which surely could not matter now.

Her arachnasprite sprang forward,
but even in that moment human figures came from nowhere, a mass of them,
jamming the exit from the arena, blocking the TauRiders’ way. Tom heard Thylara’s
curse as she spun her mount sideways on and stopped.

The other riders, not wishing to
present stationary targets, were moving, but such manoeuvres could have no
meaning for the being coalescing above them, capable of reaching through
spacetime itself, so powerful that it could not be termed anything other than a
god.

But it did not strike.

For a moment Tom wondered why it
held back, whether there was some awful torture it might have in mind for these
tiny beings which had come to its notice, perhaps caused it a momentary
annoyance; but then something strange happened which caused him to re-evaluate
the wisdom of Elva’s actions.

The satchel which she clutched so
tightly
twitched.

At
that instant, in a circle around the arena’s floor, black flames rippled in the
air, and then there were nine scarlet figures standing there. Almost
immediately, they began to walk towards Elva, and Thylara caused her ‘sprite to
crouch lower, ready to spring: sensing, like Tom, that these beings could
perhaps be avoided but surely not defeated.