War in Heaven (41 page)

No, no, no, no!

Danlo gently lowered the dying ringkeeper to the street. And then, in yet another moment of time, he hesitated — but not out of terror. He had vowed to try to stop Tobias and the other ringkeepers from killing anyone, but how could he do this? If he grabbed Tobias' knife arm, he would only help the warrior-poet to kill Tobias, as with the stricken ringkeeper that he held in his arms. But if he moved to fend off the warrior-poet's deadly knife — if by some miracle he actually caught the knife in his body or hand — he would only make it easier for the ringkeepers to do their bloody work. As the sunlight poured down like gold across the ringkeeper's lifeless eyes, Danlo saw that all that he had done that day had only hastened the dead towards their fate. And nothing that he could do now would prevent more killing; the coming bloodstorm was as inevitable as the rising sun.

"Skate, Danlo, skate!" Tobias cried as he slashed his knife towards the warrior-poet.

And so Danlo skated. He whipped off his encumbering furs and fairly exploded off the ice. He did not want to see this battle between the ringkeepers and the warrior-poet. And yet, in the moment before he turned to concentrate on the icy street before him, he beheld an astonishing thing: the lone warrior-poet with his killing knife charging five similarly armed men. It was terribly unequal odds. But fate favoured the warrior-poet, for he had trained his whole life with this weapon for such a moment, and he exulted in the exercise of his dread art. Almost instantly he fell into that electric state of being in which external time slowed down even as the firing of his brain and the nerve impulses singing through his limbs accelerated. He was no longer a man, but rather a fury of pure movement. He whirled and slashed and ducked and parried; his knife was a striking serpent's fang, a blur, a flash of lightning. His golden furs swirled about him like flames, and his golden, armoured kamelaika turned Tobias Urit's and Kantu Mamod's blades. The three other ringkeepers, in their terror and confusion, seemed only to get in each other's way. Danlo saw one of them cry out and fall clasping the bright white coils of intestines that spilled from his opened belly. And then he saw no more — no more than the purple ice powdered with white snow, the spaces between the screaming people in their brown and ochre furs, and the deep blue sky beyond. He skated as fast as he could; in only moments, he left the violence of the street behind him.

No, no, no, no ...

For a while, the only sounds that Danlo could hear were the click-clack of his steel skate blades beating against the ice and the screams of the hurrying people all about him. And then came other sounds: the whooshing wind, birds singing and the distant roar of rockets. He heard his heart beating in quick, explosive pulses like a bomb detonating over and over inside his chest. He had always been the fastest of skaters, and with the warrior-poet making a butchery of the ringkeepers, he had need of great speed. He skated and skated, and the hardness of the ice beneath his blades sent shock waves of pain shooting up through the bones of his legs. He skated with a rare wildness and grace of motion and, as he skated, he prayed that he would leave the warrior-poet far behind him.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Although he hated leaving the ringkeepers behind this way, he decided that he could best honour their lives — and their deaths — by fleeing. That they would die beneath the warrior-poet's flashing knife, he felt certain. There came a moment when he could almost feel the booming of their separate hearts; he sensed their lifefire as cries in the wind, as vibrations in the ice, as a pain deep within his own wild heart. And then in another moment four of their hearts suddenly stopped.

Doom, doom, doom, doom.

Once, near the intersection with the Street of Friends, he turned to look for the warrior-poet. All he could see behind him, with his eyes, was a great stream of people flowing down the gliddery, their colourful furs shimmering in the sun. But with a deeper sense of vision, he became aware of the warrior-poet pursuing him. This knowledge came to him in different ways. As if scanning the manifold for a lightship, he read the tells of the street, the ripples of fear running from man to woman to man. He felt this fear himself as an acid burning in his belly. From far away, like the ringing of a distant star, he picked out the individual clack-click-clack of the warrior-poet's skates. He saw him, then. In the deeps of his mind, lightning flashed, and this afterimage blazed like fire: the warrior-poet skating in a hellish fury of accelerated motion. His golden cape billowed behind him; his glittering knife dripped blood as he flung aside the screaming people who blocked his way down the purple ice.

To die, to die, to die, to die.

Danlo wondered then, if the time had come to stop and wait for the warrior-poet — simply to stand and die. But if he opened himself to the killing knife, the sacrifice of Tobias Urit and the others would have been in vain. And, in truth, he did not want to die but to live. And so he skated. He didn't fear that the warrior-poet would shoot at him with a laser or bullet-gun; his kind disdained the use of such weapons. He skated very quickly and, moment by moment, his only concern was that he didn't collide with any of the other skaters who got in his way. He darted and bobbed and shifted and weaved; he flashed down the gliddery like a streak of light. The wind tore at his black kamelaika, and the strong sun stung his eyes. As time closed in like the clouds of a winter storm, his whole universe narrowed to the shimmering purple corridor of ice that lay before him. The ringing of a thousand pairs of skates vibrated up through the street and touched the rhythms in his blood. Steel glinted and silk swished, and he seemed to sense with perfect accuracy when the skaters in front of him would suddenly move and an opening appear. He fairly flew through these gaps in the manswarm like a lightship falling through an endless series of windows into the manifold. He skated and skated with an almost perfect freedom of motion; so intense was the wild joy surging within him that he felt like a thallow soaring through the sky.

To fly, to fly, to fly — it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

In his mind, he saw the warrior-poet skating like a whirlwind, closing the gap between them. And yet, he knew that if he kept his courage, he could outdistance him, for the warrior-poet could not maintain his frenzy of accelerated motion very long before completely burning out. The problem was with pain. Danlo felt it building like a firestorm within him. With every stroke and glide, with every heartbeat and breath, tendrils of pure flame twisted along his tortured nerves, nearly paralysing him. Only his will kept him from collapsing into a weeping, shuddering wreck of a man. But even the most adamantine will can be broken, and he knew that soon his will to move would dissolve beneath the ekkana poison like diamonds dropped into mirax acid.

It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

As he gasped at the burning sword of pain stuck beneath his ribs, the streets quickly flew by: the Street of Aphasics, the Street of Heaven, the Street of Neurosingers. And still the warrior-poet pushed closer through the living stream of furs and silks that separated them. He sensed that this Nigel of Qallar tracked him by the tells of the men and women crowding the streets; the warrior-poets were almost as adept at the art of reading faces as the cetics. If he could find a deserted street before the warrior-poet sighted him, he thought, then he might duck into a building and hide. But in this district of tenements, free restaurants and shops, there were no deserted streets. No deserted
legal
streets, that is. As with all of Neverness' segregated districts, the dwellers of the Bell had built various illegal streets connecting its webwork of glidderies to those of surrounding districts. Some were no more than narrow alleys giving out into tunnels beneath the district barriers. Few knew of all of these streets, and still fewer used them for fear of being caught and fined or trapped alone in some dark underpass by a slel necker. Over time, as the city officials discovered them, they were destroyed street by street, but new ones were always springing up like worms from a corpse.

Oh, God, it hurts, oh, God, oh, God!

Once, on a dark night of burning flesh and betrayal, Danlo had followed Hanuman li Tosh down one of these twisting streets. He remembered it well; he wondered if it was still there, connecting with a little gliddery just off the Street of Cartoonists. As he gasped for breath and darted around a fat astrier wearing an illegal snow tiger fur, he
saw
this street in his mind: every dip, every turn, every rill and divot in the old white ice. Only, he was seeing it not from memory, but as he had seen the stellar windows and the flashing lightships around Mara's Star. It existed in the now-moment just beyond the purple glidderies ahead of him. He felt as certain of its reality as the arteries and veins that connected the burning tissues of his body. He could escape down this little tube of ice, he knew. If he were willing to trust that the vision he saw in his mind was true, he could escape the murderous warrior-poet into freedom in the district beyond.

Oh, God; oh, God; oh, God; oh, God!

But trust is one thing, and gambling one's life on a mysterious inner sense quite another. For if he turned down this illegal street only to find it closed, it would almost certainly become a death trap. He would have to retrace his path down the long, walled street — by which time the warrior-poet would have discovered his loophole and moved to backtrack him. If he chose instead to skate straight ahead into the manswarms, he
might
still escape the district via the Long Glissade and thence to the Serpentine which twisted through the heart of the Farsider's Quarter. It was still unknown, he thought, who would give out first, the warrior-poet or himself.

Yes or no, yes or no, yes no yes no ...

In the end there is always a choice. But if one listens to the truth of one's heart, only one way to choose. And so Danlo made a sharp turn down a little gliddery of no name, and he found his street. He skated down it with all the speed and certainty of a falcon diving through the air. At the end of a block lined with apartments and shops, the street itself suddenly ended — or so it seemed. For there, between two crumbling old imprinting shops, was the narrow walkway of ice that he had seen. He followed the walkway where it broadened into a tunnel. This dark tube of ice cut through the embankment of snow separating the Bell from the Diamond District. And all was exactly as he had seen, and suddenly there was light, for the tunnel was blessedly open. And then, after a few more moments of striking steel and gasps of cold air, he was through. He made his way on to a piss-stained alley between two brothels. And then he exited on to Strawberry Street where the air smelled of rare perfumes and burning jambool, and the connecting streets were as red as frozen blood.

The light, the light, the light, the light.

The streets about him were more open than those of the Bell and the buildings newer and more brilliant. He remembered, then, that the Diamond District had been named not just for the trade in firestones and Yarkonan bluestars that occurred there, but for its buildings, many of which were faced with white quartz cut from Mount Attakel. All this lovely crystal caught the sun so that the whole district sparkled like diamonds, from Strawberry Street to the Street of Imprimaturs. As he paused a moment to get his breath, he marvelled at the beauty of it. And then he remembered something else. The Street of Imprimaturs, if he followed it far enough towards the Merripen Green, eventually gave out on to the Street of Smugglers. And on that infamous street, Tobias Urit had said, he would find the apartment of Benjamin Hur.

The dead, the dead, the dead, the dead — mi alasharia la shantih.

After he felt sure that he had lost the warrior-poet, he struck off down Strawberry Street, past all the procurers and wormrunners and silk-clad whores. The intense light of the district dazzled him and hurt his eyes — and this pain was as nothing next to the blazing fire of his heart. Even so, he still skated as quickly as he could. For he had promises to keep, and the faces of all those who had died that day tormented him far worse than any physical pain or poison.

Know, my godlings, the three great truths that we all must live by: that Mallory Ringess became a real god and will one day return to Neverness; that all men and women can become gods; that the path towards godhood is in remembrancing the Elder Eddas and following the Way of Ringess. These are the three pillars that hold up the heavens towards which we all must strive.

— from the
Devotionaries
of Lord Hanuman li Tosh

Danlo found Benjamin Hur's apartment in a neighbourhood of obsidian cloisters, hospices and many fine, three-storey blackstones. There, near Merripen Green, the Street of Smugglers suddenly straightened and became much less seedy and dangerous than it was only half a mile to the east. If one followed it far enough to the west, it emptied into the Serpentine where it curved around the Winter Ring and passed through the safest (and most boring) part of the city: the well-ordered and tree-lined blocks of the Ashtoreth District. But the streets around Benjamin's apartment were safe enough — or had been until war came to the city. Now that Benjamin's ringkeepers had fairly taken over all the nearby buildings, no one wearing the godlings' gold dared to enter this part of the Farsider's Quarter for fear of being killed as an assassin or spy. Even the wormrunners and whores avoided it. As Danlo skated up to the door of a lovely blackstone built between two cafes, he felt the eyes of the street and the surrounding buildings watching him, watching and waiting.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

With the edge of his fist, Danlo knocked on the door. It was an unseemly way to announce himself, drumming on the hard wood as if hammering on a piece of bone. But his knuckles hurt from the cold, and he couldn't bear the pain of knocking in a more civilized manner. Everything about him hurt: his hands, his heart and especially his throbbing, burning head.