his face. The next assault car swoops toward us and strafes a line
of cannonfire that’s gonna go right up his nose, so I reach
over and grab the back of his collar and haul his ass into the
fountain next to me.
He still has that dreamy smile after I dunk us both in the water and
three or four 25-millimeter rounds blow chunks out of the fountain’s
bowl but somehow manage to miss our tender flesh. He lies on his
back, the dirty water swirling bloody mud clouds around him as it
drains out from the fractured bowl. He says something—the roar
of turbines and artillery fire blows it away, but I can read his
lips.
You saved my life.
I give him a shake that bounces his skull off the limestone. “Where’s
Ma’elKoth?â€
TWENTY-FIVE
HE COMES OUT of the clouds, down from a line of thunderheads that
advance from the east: clouds that keep on rolling right into the
teeth of this wind that blows on the back of my neck.
First comes a glossy black-and-chrome meteor—a Mercedes
stretch, bigger than the apartment where I grew up. It comes down
with a rumbling growl like distant turbines, but it’s not
turbines. It’s thunder.
That sonofabitch rolls thunder the way other guys clear their
throats.
The limo settles into place between the two dead riot vans down where
Gods’ and Rogues’ Ways intersect. Then the clouds swell
until they swallow the sky, and a darkness falls upon the ruins; a
single rift parts to admit a golden shaft of autumn sunshine.
Down through that rift, riding that clean light, comes Ma’elKoth,
glowing with power: Superman in an Italian suit.
He trails streamers of black Flow—he is the center of a tangle
of pulsing night-threads that twist into massive cables before they
vanish in a direction my eyes can’t follow.
Some of them I can follow, though. Some of the biggest cables
connect to me.
My own tangle makes a fantastical rats’ nest around me, dense
and interwoven, impenetrably opaque, yet somehow it doesn’t
obstruct my vision, which I guess makes sense because I’m not
seeing it with my eyes.
He touches down like a dancer, light and perfectly balanced, posing
in his sunlight halo. The warm taupe of his Armani suit complements
the tumbled char-blackened blocks of limestone that choke the street.
Huh. He’s let his beard grow.
Yeah, well, so have I.
His eyes find me at this end of Gods’ Way, and his electric
stare surges through me like an amphetamine bloom: waves of tingling
start at the back of my neck and jangle all the way out the ends of
my fingers and toes.
He smiles vividly.
He reaches behind his head and unbinds his hair, shaking it free in
sun-streaked waves. He rotates his shoulders like a wrestler
loosening up, and the clouds part: above him, infinite blue opens
like a flower. The clouds retreat in all directions, flowing out from
the city as they flee the center of all things that are Ma’elKoth.
He’s brought his own kind of spring, drawing life from the
city’s fallow earth: the ruins sprout cardinal-red, maroon and
gold, scarlet-streaked saplings that uncoil toward his solar
presence: Social Police and Household Knights and good old Ankhanan
regular infantry digging themselves out of their burrows of rubble,
helping each other up, even the wounded, even the dying, so that all
can rise in respect, then kneel in reverence, at the arrival of God.
And it’s weird.
Weird is the only word for it.
Not in the debased and degraded sense of the mere peculiar. Weird in
the old sense. The Scottish sense. The Old English root.
Wyrd.
Because somehow I have always been here.
I have always sat in the rubble of the Financial Block, facing down
the length of Gods’ Way over the carnage and ruin of Old Town,
perched on a blast-folded curve of assault-car hull with Kosall’s
cold steel across my lap. The rumpled and torn titanium wreckage
permanently
of cannonfire that’s gonna go right up his nose, so I reach
over and grab the back of his collar and haul his ass into the
fountain next to me.
He still has that dreamy smile after I dunk us both in the water and
three or four 25-millimeter rounds blow chunks out of the fountain’s
bowl but somehow manage to miss our tender flesh. He lies on his
back, the dirty water swirling bloody mud clouds around him as it
drains out from the fractured bowl. He says something—the roar
of turbines and artillery fire blows it away, but I can read his
lips.
You saved my life.
I give him a shake that bounces his skull off the limestone. “Where’s
Ma’elKoth?â€
TWENTY-FIVE
HE COMES OUT of the clouds, down from a line of thunderheads that
advance from the east: clouds that keep on rolling right into the
teeth of this wind that blows on the back of my neck.
First comes a glossy black-and-chrome meteor—a Mercedes
stretch, bigger than the apartment where I grew up. It comes down
with a rumbling growl like distant turbines, but it’s not
turbines. It’s thunder.
That sonofabitch rolls thunder the way other guys clear their
throats.
The limo settles into place between the two dead riot vans down where
Gods’ and Rogues’ Ways intersect. Then the clouds swell
until they swallow the sky, and a darkness falls upon the ruins; a
single rift parts to admit a golden shaft of autumn sunshine.
Down through that rift, riding that clean light, comes Ma’elKoth,
glowing with power: Superman in an Italian suit.
He trails streamers of black Flow—he is the center of a tangle
of pulsing night-threads that twist into massive cables before they
vanish in a direction my eyes can’t follow.
Some of them I can follow, though. Some of the biggest cables
connect to me.
My own tangle makes a fantastical rats’ nest around me, dense
and interwoven, impenetrably opaque, yet somehow it doesn’t
obstruct my vision, which I guess makes sense because I’m not
seeing it with my eyes.
He touches down like a dancer, light and perfectly balanced, posing
in his sunlight halo. The warm taupe of his Armani suit complements
the tumbled char-blackened blocks of limestone that choke the street.
Huh. He’s let his beard grow.
Yeah, well, so have I.
His eyes find me at this end of Gods’ Way, and his electric
stare surges through me like an amphetamine bloom: waves of tingling
start at the back of my neck and jangle all the way out the ends of
my fingers and toes.
He smiles vividly.
He reaches behind his head and unbinds his hair, shaking it free in
sun-streaked waves. He rotates his shoulders like a wrestler
loosening up, and the clouds part: above him, infinite blue opens
like a flower. The clouds retreat in all directions, flowing out from
the city as they flee the center of all things that are Ma’elKoth.
He’s brought his own kind of spring, drawing life from the
city’s fallow earth: the ruins sprout cardinal-red, maroon and
gold, scarlet-streaked saplings that uncoil toward his solar
presence: Social Police and Household Knights and good old Ankhanan
regular infantry digging themselves out of their burrows of rubble,
helping each other up, even the wounded, even the dying, so that all
can rise in respect, then kneel in reverence, at the arrival of God.
And it’s weird.
Weird is the only word for it.
Not in the debased and degraded sense of the mere peculiar. Weird in
the old sense. The Scottish sense. The Old English root.
Wyrd.
Because somehow I have always been here.
I have always sat in the rubble of the Financial Block, facing down
the length of Gods’ Way over the carnage and ruin of Old Town,
perched on a blast-folded curve of assault-car hull with Kosall’s
cold steel across my lap. The rumpled and torn titanium wreckage
permanently
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