He could not see the weapon. He only sensed the volume of data used for control and command processes, so he knew it was large, weighing about a ton. It was physical rather than informational, something that would bash his skull or lacerate his flesh rather than meddle with thought or perception.
From the information contour, the weapon was not chemical and not nanotechnological, and so it was technically inside what the Patricians permitted for automated death instruments. But what was it? He could not tell from seeing the thought-streams controlling it, because it did not fit any of the patterns he, or the Archangel of Bloodroot (whom he queried), recognized. It was an old command pattern. But from what nation of what world in what era long forgotten even Vigil the antiquarian could not say. The number of colonies planted was higher than the number of colonies that survived, and the history of off-world man reached back over sixty-eight thousand years.
And where was the weapon? Somewhere near, he knew. But there was no time and no information budget for a deeper scan of the area.
Vigil drew a breath, crossed himself, said a prayer, set his battle priorities, set his internal creatures to start selecting targets, spun the vendetta wand overhead, and ran toward the ambush with a shout on his lips.
The first and obvious choice was the scattered man. Vigil ran toward the medical slops can tucked in the weed-grown corner of the cobblestone alley, between a rain pipe leading down and an extraction pipe leading up, and almost before the ambushers knew their prey had found them, Vigil made the sign of Threatening Mudra, the tarjana, using an unusual left-handed stance, a fist with the index finger raised; next he tossed the wand from his right hand to his left, freeing his right hand to indicate harina, the Lion Gesture, thumb touching his second and third fingers, pinkie and index raised and crooked.
The result was immediate and startling: the scattered man, instead of abandoning the several parts of his body when their communication channels were jammed, pulled his limbs and organs from the various hiding places under eaves and springbird nests and streetlamps and ego slots together in one ugly mass of flesh. It looked like a shoal of fish, ruby red with blood, trying to form itself into a man’s shape.
The smell was vile; the sight was grotesque and mysterious. Vigil could not see how the body parts were moving through the air.
At the same time, the cart horse reared up, broke his traces, and fell forward onto the pavement, dead. The pack of dogs scattered, some howling insanely, fleeing and puking blood. Some ran a dozen steps and collapsed; others continued running and escaped. The teamster himself toppled headlong from the driver’s bench. His skull exploded outward as if from inner pressure.
Vigil was startled. He was expecting the scattered man to fall and the horse to charge, because the scattered man looked like a decentralized formation and the horse looked like savantry, a matter of brain download. Instead, the horse had been delocalized in the ether, and the man, one organism. The scattered man was something he had not seen before; a man with independent body parts, one part each given to one internal creature. He was like something from the legends of undead volcanoscapes and elfin sand dunes in nameless, nonconformist parishes beyond the Southeast, where lawless fauna thrived, programmed to survive any environment, no matter how dry, or to endure the plutonian winter.
The invisible figure was visible to his eyes, of course, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and ankle-length cloak, sand goggles and moisture veil of a Nomad from the small-crater prairie region of the Southeast, beyond the reach of the last canal. From the slight stature, the breathing pattern, and the set of the shoulders, Vigil could see it was a Nomadess, a woman of the Nomad race. In her hands was a breaching tool called a Halligan bar, with a fork at one end and an adze at the other. Not legally considered a weapon, it was ignored by most security protocols. The Nomadess had added an extender bar between two mating points, making the thing practically a pike.
She sublimated her goggles and veil so they disappeared into long streaks of light to the left and right. Beneath she was a Fox Maiden, or rather she wore a living mask that closely mimicked Fox Maiden features. This was a trick from a peddler’s tale, which should not have worked in real life, but Vigil felt the neural channels in his head leading to specific strikes and blows and battle reflexes jar themselves into stillness, as if paralyzed by the ancient instinctual rule preventing lesser races from harming foxes.
But no—he blinked, and in the afterimages, he saw that the goggles and veil, during the moment when they evaporated, had ignited to form a sketchy but legitimate mandala in midair—little more than a circle within a square—indicating Samadhi, or mental stability. That was what had actually frozen his impulses—that, and his unwillingness to strike an unmodified woman. It was a clever two-leveled deception.
Therefore, he stood stupidly, motionless, when she flourished the Halligan bar and it telescoped open at the speed of sound, making a crack like a whip, slamming into and through Vigil’s chest. The adze, covered in blood, emerged four inches from his back.
At the same time, the scattered man had mostly regathered and had one working leg and arm, and his head (which had the sharp features and high cheekbones of a Southeastern Nomad) was connected to his neck by a dozen pulsing red strands. Vigil recognized this order: the man was a Nukekubi, a colony creature with a detachable head. It was one of the racial absurdities left over from the Second Sweep, when the Myrmidons wanted to save on lift mass on starships and did not ship the colonist’s bodies with them, but insisted they be grown of native materials on arrival. The Fox Maidens by tossing their heads aloft had been trying subtly to warn him of this attack.
The man drew the broom handle, and it opened like an old-fashioned sword cane—one more thing from a peddler’s tale—and he feinted and lunged.
Vigil had sheathed his heart and lungs in layers of deflective tissue when he had first entered the alleyway, moved some organs into unexpected locations, and switched most of his body from biological to mechanical systems just before the blow from the girl’s Halligan bar struck home. (It was a technique from a race called the Hormagaunts, who dated from the brief and largely forgotten period between prehistory and posthumanity, between the invention of picture writing and the invention of ghost endorcism.) Vigil could move his limbs freely despite the horrific wound running through his chest cavity.
As the Nukekubi man lunged with his sword, he also threw his head from his body, bearing itself aloft with tiny pulses emitted from his dripping spinal column, and opened his mouth and screamed a verbal indication. The scream petrified Vigil’s nervous system, since it was a mudra, not a real scream (for the head while aloft had no lungs), and the head swooped to bite at Vigil’s neck with suddenly elongating teeth.
The perceptive internal which had been so subtly influenced by the Fox Maiden now saved Vigil, as it (for some reason) was not affected by the scream. That internal triggered Vigil’s battle internals, and his fighting reflexes took over.
Without knowing what he was doing or being able to stop it, Vigil drove the elbow of his right arm into the eye socket of the oncoming head, and with the same motion, he elongated the vendetta wand in his right hand to parry the sword blow from the scattered man’s still-fighting body. The nanotechnologically active dust flew from the blade like pollen, but pulses from the large red metal amulet on Vigil’s wrist neutralized the dust in a spray of sparks.
The vendetta wand struck the man’s blade on the unsharpened side, throwing the blade aside and driving the infinitely sharp cutting side into and through the haft of the Halligan bar, severing it. The woman gasped in shock. She had evidently not been told that Vigil Starmanson was as strong as a giant. He grasped the free end of the severed bar, and, before she could react, drove it into her midriff, making her double over. He tore the bar from her hands and threw it over the rooftop behind him.
Vigil would have driven the bar through her stomach and broken her spine, but he used a mesmeric breathing technique to block the refl
ex pattern dominating him. Vigil once again could not hurt her. Even though the mandala had been no more than an afterimage, it still dominated his nervous system and could not be exorcised by a simple breath-cue, mostly because he hated using his strength against women. Beating women was nothing to boast of.
He flexed his chest muscles and had his internals push and spit the head of the adze out of his chest. Blood poured from the sucking wound, and he halted his lung action, sending oxygen directly from a spare breathing lozenge into his bloodstream. The antique uniform of the Hermeticists was ruined, torn in the breast and back, circuits severed, capillaries leaking fluids.
Vigil now turned toward the swordsman, who was naked and confused, his head hanging ten feet above his body and to the left, with his spinal jets cracking and sputtering comically. Even more comically, his ears had expanded into wings and flapped like something out of a children’s story.
Vigil drove the vendetta wand into the cobblestones as if they had been soft mud, cracking them, so that the wand stood next to him, vibrating. Then he used both hands to indicate the gesture called Fist of Knowledge, where his right fingers hid both his right thumb and the forefinger of his left hand. The sword blade shattered into three pieces.
Vigil snorted. For assassins who got all their tactics from peddlers’ stories, they did not seem to recognize the oldest mudra effect in the old myths. Nanomachines were absurdly dangerous, but, due to their size, their information density was always high and their memory was low, which means they could easily be made to fight each other, and destroy the weapons or launching systems they rode. That was the main reason why men of old fought with wooden swords and clubs and spears invisible to the Noösphere. Had it not been for that, all warfare, all street fights, would merely be dust hacks and mote cleanings.
The two stood gawping in shock. Vigil made his voice issue from the wand. “I am a Lord of Stability and control the privilege of Vengeance, which even the Principality will recognize! Any violence will be retaliated in the infosphere, where wounds are more permanent. All future downloads of your souls will bear eternal scars. A nonlethal blow of this wand will be imprinted permanently on any future patterns of flesh you inhabit. One mortal blow of this wand, and you will be deleted!”
The woman raised her head. And it kept rising and rising. For a moment, Vigil thought she was like the man, a Nukekubi. But no, she was a related order, nondecentralized, called Rokurokubi. The two were often mistaken for each other. Her head swayed upward on a long snakelike neck, until it hung nine feet above her. The Fox Maiden mask was still in place, giving an unnatural, overwhelming beauty to her features, but the jawline hung and rattled limply against the real woman’s skull underneath.
She spoke, and the words echoed oddly in her long, long throat. “We have no counterparts in the Noösphere. This is the only life we have.”
Vigil now was the one in shock. This meant that he had killed whoever was occupying the horse and the dogs. He had not simply disincarnated him, but killed him entirely, the real him.
“How can you have no souls?” he demanded.
The Nukekubi man said, “We are Cygnanthropes.”
Vigil would have vowed that the sect of man who followed the moral code of the Swans had vanished ages ago, when the Long Golden Afternoon of man passed away. These were laicists and antinomians. Despite that they were men, they neither married nor were given in marriage and formed no social bonds. Now he understood their look and garb. Among the loose confederations of the Nomads, a band of anarchists could pass unremarked.
And he knew the Nomads rejected the lore of Delta Pavonis, which demanded terraforming, and followed instead the practice of Promixa and Epsilon Eridani, and allowed for radical pantropy. The long necks and floating heads were grim necessity for traveling through the tall grasses and taller banks of low-hanging poisoned pollen of summer and autumn in the Far Southeastern pampas.
“Why do you oppose me?” asked Vigil. “A Swan sent me on this mission!”
“You will shatter our world,” said the Rokurokubi woman. The lips of her mask did not move as she spoke. “We are loyal to Torment!”
The Nukekubi man said, “Only here, in this world of ghosts and shadows, where nothing is forgotten, does our ancient order still exist. Only here can we live and practice the old ways.”
“Your old ways are not so old,” Vigil remarked wryly. “They only date back to the time of the Sculptured Lifeways in the Twenty-Fourth Millennium. And you yourselves are much younger, being only impersonators and epigones of long-dead ancient lore. You are not Cygnanthropes, you are merely enemies of Sacerdotes and seek some easy excuse to escape from the chastity and chores and lore of living as children of civilization. You have all your ideas from tales and yarns. Why do you fear the starfall of the Emancipation? Why would the new colonials meddle with the Nomads in their deserts and grasslands?”
The woman twisted her head on its long, long neck. “The fool does not know who is aboard. Call upon the elder brother.”
The man’s head fell neatly onto the neck stump and attached itself, and then the no-longer-headless body of the Nukekubi knelt on the cobblestones and pounded on the iron lid covering the sewer entrance. It rang like a gong.
At that moment, a roar of song and joy rockets passed over the area, making further speech impossible. The fourth ambusher, the node underground, now uttered a silent shout—a mudra technique using negative shapes of silence against a noisy background to trigger a nerve reaction—and Vigil was blinded for a moment as an internal energy surge blocked the visual centers of his brain. The mudra was not affecting his eyes alone but his ability to process images so that he could switch to no points of view from any houses or dust motes nearby.
Blind, Vigil stamped his foot and silently commanded the stones near him to draw a mandala at his feet. The stones were sleeping but came awake for a Lord of Stability and erupted in sudden lines, circles within squares within circles, of intricate patterns of sand, glowing like a coal fire. It was a figure system meant to include the aspect called Immeasurably Magnificent Palace, used for focusing power to the body and accentuate the senses, especially the hearing.
It was fortunate that he did so. The woman and the man rushed him from opposite sides. Despite the roar of music and candle-snaps, his discriminating hearing could distinguish their footfalls from the background roar of the celebration.
The woman stopped at the edge of the design on the ground, unable to step forward, her motor nerves jammed.
The man had a more flexible neural pattern, no doubt based on his decentralized nerve network of his detachable limbs and organs, and was able, not without pain, to pass over. Vigil surrendered to the cruel battle reflexes he carried and acted without thought.
First, Vigil’s blind body drove his fingers knife-edged into the man’s midriff, doubling him over so that his falling chin met Vigil’s kneecap. Vigil then twisted the man’s head clean off. Because it had clamps and sutures rather than connecting tissues of muscle, spinal column, and throat, the head came off easily. Vigil threw it into the air with all his considerable strength.
In the blackness of his blindness, suddenly he could see three pink shapes of redheads. They were literally redheads—that is, just the head and not the bodies. It was the Fox Maidens who had toyed with him earlier, floating their heads among the balloons. When his blind eyes turned upon them, some indication being shed from unseen symbols surrounding them restored at least his ability to see them, even though the rest of the world was still a dark blur. The severed heads of the three Fox girls looked archly, smiling red smiles, as the Nukekubi man’s head flew up.
Then, as his head began floating away as rapidly as his silly flapping ears and sputtering spine could carry him, the three Fox Maiden heads, long red hair streaming like comets tails, began to circle and nip and harass him, tearing away bits of flesh from his cheeks and nose, or yanking on his hair with their sharp, white teeth. And he screamed silently as he fled
through the air, shouting out defensive mudras which the Foxes ignored.
In that same moment, an internal inside Vigil noticed that the reaction time of the fourth attacker, the immaterial node in the sewer line, was too small for the node to be remotely controlled. This meant, unlike the other three, this assassin was not a Nomad too poor to afford to buy soul-rental space in the Noösphere and too proud to accept one as charity, and was not a would-be Swan too detached from human society to desire one. No: the fourth man was actually in the Noösphere, a ghost, a disembodied spirit, and merely operating through a node. Ghosts were not immune to vendetta.
Vigil drew up the wand, sending chips of the cobblestones flying, and pointed at the ground, and uttered a Word of Retaliation. There was something like a silent thunderclap on all the near-system channels, and the fourth man flickered and vanished.
Dead? Perhaps so, but Vigil blinked his eyes and found his sight again, pouring in from a thousand points of view, so he assumed the wand inflicted a more poetic judgment than simple capital punishment and edited the physical world, all of reality outside the infosphere, out of the mind and sensorium of the fourth man forever.
Vigil flourished the wand like a quarterstaff, and turned to the Rokurokubi. “There is neither honor nor accomplishment in slaying a woman,” he said. “Flee, and no more will be said.”
The long-necked creature chuckled, and the laugh bubbled and echoed many times as it passed up the length of her throat. “There is, however, great honor in slaying a Stranger, who came to our world so long after us. Die, arrogant Stranger, and no more will be said.”
Only then did he see that the control lines leading from the sewer were active. Some command must have been uttered by the fourth man before he fell. Vigil looked around wildly, wondering from what quarter the weapon would strike, and seeing nothing. There was no giant weapon taller than a man here in the alley. Everything looked normal.
Then the cart fell apart and stood up.