broke apart
and blended together again in a rith dream of astonishing
beauty: a living Mandelbrot set spiraling into itself and out again:
a spray of wildflowers springing fresh and lovely from a shitpile of
ugly, desperate brutality.
For all its terror and savagery, for all its howled agony and
whimpered despair, the flesh that bruised and bled was only shadow:
translucent, incorporeal, more rhythm than reality, a semivisible
expression of energy at play. That energy followed laws of its own
making, in a system as ordered as a galaxy and as random as a throw
of dice, an ever-shifting balance of the elegant with the raw.
For the first time, he understood Hari. He understood his passion for
violence. He could see how Hari could love it so.
It was beautiful.
But it’s his eyes that see that beauty, Deliann thought. Not mine.
Because with the sense of the river, Deliann felt each slash and
smack of bullet and shrapnel into flesh; he saw through the eyes of
men and women who clutched futilely at the spurt of blood from their
own wounds and the wounds of their friends, who tried to stuff
spilled guts back into the gape of ripped-open bellies, who tried to
kiss life back into staring dust-coated eyes; he felt their terror,
and their despair, and he decided that he was going to have to do
something about this.
It was this decision that killed him.
He had six minutes to live.
4
I PULL MYSELF up to the lip of the fountain, and the limestone
shivers with impacts of fragments and slugs and the air is alive with
zips and zings and shrieks of jagged shrapnel and the hand-clap
hypersonic pops of 50-caliber slugs: the open space above the
fountain’s lip is itself a predator and it’s got my
scent. I have looked death in the eye plenty of times, but this is
different: it’s random, unconscious. Unintentional.
Impersonal.
This is not my kind of fight.
Poking my head up to get a peek over the rim is the hardest goddamn
thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Pretty much everybody who can still move has cleared the plaza by
now; a few scarlet-smeared shapes of anonymous flesh drag themselves
inch by shivering inch toward any shadow that might promise cover. At
the far end of Gods’ Way the main cannon of the riot vans ca-rump whistling shells that blast house-sized chunks out of
the row of temples and government buildings lining the Way; the East
Tower of the Colhari Palace overlooks the massacre with a lopsided
face of gaping ragged empty eyes and smoke-drooling idiot’s
mouth before one more shell blasts out the cheek and the whole damn
thing topples sideways and collapses in a mushroom cloud of masonry
dust to the courtyard nine stories below.
The Folk are starting to fight back now, with the kind of heroism
that would be inspiring if it wasn’t so pathetic: firebolts
splash harmlessly off the radically sloped ceramic armor of the riot
vans, and some ogrilloi have figured out how to shoot the soapies’
assault rifles. They’d do more damage with harsh language and a
stern look.
One lone treetopper flutters up into the path of an assault car, and
she and her birdlance get sucked into one of the turbocells. What’s
left of her sprays out the back in a crimson mist, but that birdlance
was steel. The turbocell chews itself into a metal-screaming burst of
junk, and the assault car slews sideways and dips and hits the street
and bounces, skipping up over my head in a thundering meteor-trail of
flame that skips one more time before it slams into the Financial
Block and explodes, which takes out the whole building, and the damn
thing just keeps on exploding as its munitions pop off like a
full-scale fireworks display: rockets and starshells and mortar bombs
and showers of flame.
And fucking Raithe is still sitting where I left him: in seiza right in front of the fountain, calmly picking the locks on his
shackles while he stares at the carnage around us with a dreamy smile
on
and blended together again in a rith dream of astonishing
beauty: a living Mandelbrot set spiraling into itself and out again:
a spray of wildflowers springing fresh and lovely from a shitpile of
ugly, desperate brutality.
For all its terror and savagery, for all its howled agony and
whimpered despair, the flesh that bruised and bled was only shadow:
translucent, incorporeal, more rhythm than reality, a semivisible
expression of energy at play. That energy followed laws of its own
making, in a system as ordered as a galaxy and as random as a throw
of dice, an ever-shifting balance of the elegant with the raw.
For the first time, he understood Hari. He understood his passion for
violence. He could see how Hari could love it so.
It was beautiful.
But it’s his eyes that see that beauty, Deliann thought. Not mine.
Because with the sense of the river, Deliann felt each slash and
smack of bullet and shrapnel into flesh; he saw through the eyes of
men and women who clutched futilely at the spurt of blood from their
own wounds and the wounds of their friends, who tried to stuff
spilled guts back into the gape of ripped-open bellies, who tried to
kiss life back into staring dust-coated eyes; he felt their terror,
and their despair, and he decided that he was going to have to do
something about this.
It was this decision that killed him.
He had six minutes to live.
4
I PULL MYSELF up to the lip of the fountain, and the limestone
shivers with impacts of fragments and slugs and the air is alive with
zips and zings and shrieks of jagged shrapnel and the hand-clap
hypersonic pops of 50-caliber slugs: the open space above the
fountain’s lip is itself a predator and it’s got my
scent. I have looked death in the eye plenty of times, but this is
different: it’s random, unconscious. Unintentional.
Impersonal.
This is not my kind of fight.
Poking my head up to get a peek over the rim is the hardest goddamn
thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Pretty much everybody who can still move has cleared the plaza by
now; a few scarlet-smeared shapes of anonymous flesh drag themselves
inch by shivering inch toward any shadow that might promise cover. At
the far end of Gods’ Way the main cannon of the riot vans ca-rump whistling shells that blast house-sized chunks out of
the row of temples and government buildings lining the Way; the East
Tower of the Colhari Palace overlooks the massacre with a lopsided
face of gaping ragged empty eyes and smoke-drooling idiot’s
mouth before one more shell blasts out the cheek and the whole damn
thing topples sideways and collapses in a mushroom cloud of masonry
dust to the courtyard nine stories below.
The Folk are starting to fight back now, with the kind of heroism
that would be inspiring if it wasn’t so pathetic: firebolts
splash harmlessly off the radically sloped ceramic armor of the riot
vans, and some ogrilloi have figured out how to shoot the soapies’
assault rifles. They’d do more damage with harsh language and a
stern look.
One lone treetopper flutters up into the path of an assault car, and
she and her birdlance get sucked into one of the turbocells. What’s
left of her sprays out the back in a crimson mist, but that birdlance
was steel. The turbocell chews itself into a metal-screaming burst of
junk, and the assault car slews sideways and dips and hits the street
and bounces, skipping up over my head in a thundering meteor-trail of
flame that skips one more time before it slams into the Financial
Block and explodes, which takes out the whole building, and the damn
thing just keeps on exploding as its munitions pop off like a
full-scale fireworks display: rockets and starshells and mortar bombs
and showers of flame.
And fucking Raithe is still sitting where I left him: in seiza right in front of the fountain, calmly picking the locks on his
shackles while he stares at the carnage around us with a dreamy smile
on
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