Starquest: Scourge of the Spaceways, page 23
She was walking from outer dreams to outer space, no more solid than a ghost, drawn by memory and longing toward the bright planet Ksora.
From five light years away, she saw the double star, burning like a lamp in the night, a bright hue of yellow-gold. At this distance, it should have been too far to see the tiny crescents of the gas giants of the outer system, winking merrily, and the larger, dimmer companion should have been blended with her smaller, brighter sister to form one candle of light. But Lyra walked half in dream, and not wholly in space, making time and distance strange; therefore she could see both the twin suns and worlds like horned moons agleam distinctly.
She heard the screams when the two stars winked out, and, as she rushed forward, she smelled the hideous perfume of burning metal and burning flesh, as men in desperation set fire to their cities, hoping to stave off, if only for an hour, the deadly chill of the liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen descending as the black and unlit atmosphere coagulated, congealed, and froze. Had she been in the real and solid dimensions of outer space, neither sound nor smell would have been possible.
Nor would she have seen the throned archangels of darkness, crowned in black flame, with malignant eyes hate-burning on the plumes of their multiple wings, smile their grim and unholy smiles. These august shapes loomed in the gloom between the constellations, immeasurable in stature. A shadow-shape like a wheel within a wheel, embossed within and without with living eyes, larger than the archangels and darker, was carried with solemn procession by the Nightmare Lords.
As the wheel moved, it cast down and crushed two bright angels, each garbed in the light of the glory of one of the suns of Ksora. From the two broken corpses the turning wheel lifted up what were now two dark angels, their cloaks now black.
Like dead things, yet still possessed with motion, the star nobles turned from the light, and raised sword or trumpet toward the interstellar void, vowing fealty to the Dark Will, calling upon one whose name Lyra dearly wished not to hear.
The horror of it dazed her.
Long, long ago, the Ancient-of-Days, the founder of the Golden Order, was betrayed by his first and most beloved student. This student took the mocking name Ancient-of-Night, lured four evil disciples to follow him, and fled to the hidden world of Styx.
There he and his disciples erected the Dark Fane of Forbidden Lore and vowed blasphemous vows to the dead suns circling the twin supermassive black holes at the galactic core. The dread spirits of these dead suns instructed the disciples in the worship and occult arts of the Dark Will, and gave them crowns.
And the four dark princes of Styx founded a Nocturnal Order in envy and opposition to the Golden Order named the Stygian Order of the Followers of the Dark Will of the Stars.
Eons passed. In the Third Age, the Stygian Order vanished, and was thought destroyed. More eons passed, but the Stygian Order re-emerged in the Ninth Age.
In that Age, Coron the Steadfast created a military order of knights to guard the Third Temple of the Golden Order on Septentrion, called the Templars. In mockery, Mandricard of Draco created an order of dark knights to guard the Dark Fane of the Nocturnal Order on Styx, called the Draconians.
The Draconians were Dark Knights, the miliary arm and protectors of the devil-worshippers, occultists, and witches of the Stygian Order. The Draconians, too, followed the Dark Will and were gifted with dark powers.
The Stygians vanished again when the Empire fell, and again were thought destroyed.
Lyra knew better. Again revived the Followers of the Dark Will. Again their dark chants, strange fires, and venomous incense rose toward the endless night between worlds and beyond galaxies.
So it came to pass that mortals for many generations bowed to and adored the same darkness and chaos that the dead suns themselves worshipped and served. The dead suns hated the primordial light of creation of the Big Bang, and yearned for the dark and insane ultra-spacewarped singularity which proceeded it.
These were they. Lyra beheld the archons and authorities of the Dark Will, princedoms and dominations, archangels of darkness, and ghosts of perished stars and suns: immortal creatures, larger than worlds, exiled from light, consumed with hate, who had assumed the shapes of death.
In dreams, time is odd, and a moment can be an eternity. Lyra hid herself, using a technique she knew. Her anger summoned a red fire from her eyes and fingers, and she wove this as a cloak to smother herself. The dreadful eyes of dead stars perhaps still rested on her, but no serpent-shapes of the dark horde reached for her with ever-lengthening fingers.
Only when, what might have been years later, the dark thrones and powers and dominations were far away or deep in slumber, did she dare draw near.
Eternity passed. On she flew, down from the stars to the dead world.
Coming closer, she heard sobbing. As the final lightyear was crossed, in one moment of timeless time, she heard the sad sounds of days and weeks and months of endless woe.
Some men had gathered wives and children into grounded spaceships, military bases, or other places where life support could maintain heat and oxygen against the plutonian cold. Women and children were buried alive as increasing tons of gasses turned to ice and gathered atop their sealed chambers. Some were crushed. Others lasted until the air cycling failed. One small room lasted many days, over a month.
The sobbing was silent after that.
Finally, Lyra landed on the world. It was a flat expanse of frozen nitrogen, a world-glacier gleaming in the glint of distant stars, each bright with the diamond-brightness of hard vacuum.
For a time, she stood on the frozen face of the dead globe.
Overhead were stars of the constellations she had known in her youth. She recognized them. She used to watch them every night, looking back toward Centaurus. This was Ksora. There was no mistake.
Underneath, she saw, or dreamed she saw, the empty eyesockets of the unburied who had fallen, died, been showered with liquid nitrogen, and entombed in nitrogen ice.
Memories had been laid down here also, whose hints and echoes Lyra could feel crawling ever nearer. Whatever happy memories the purple-skinned people of Ksora once knew were buried beneath a layer of the loss, sorrow, and bitterness of slave-life, sprinkled and spangled with fever-torches of the triumph and pride of their conquerors: for the souls of the servants of the Empire had left an indelible imprint as well.
The few souls who had lingered after the death of their sun, buried alive, were more recent: a thin veneer of wailing anguish above a lake of suffering and deep despair.
Lyra rose. She walked along the ice from place to place. Whether continent or sea was underfoot meant nothing now. How long she walked, how many times on foot she circled the globe, the odd logic of dream made meaningless. At first, she did not weep.
Twice, she had a dream of the ghost of a child not realizing he was dead, or crying for his mother, and afraid of the dark. Both times, Lyra brought out her hyssop, and purged the young shade, spoke words of forgiveness and release, as she had been taught. She called upon the Prince of the Host by his secret name, Who-Is-Like-Unto-Him, raised her shrinebow, and drove away the starved and silent dark-cloaked beings who stood blocking the way to whatever lay beyond. In her dream, she saw the shadow children follow the light from the arrow as it fled. Those arrowheads she never recovered.
Eventually, all the ghosts of the dead world were laid to rest.
Even then, it was not perfectly silent. A snarling and mumbling voice, shivering with hate, wandered across the dead world. But this voice did not come from a living thing, nor from anything that had ever been alive. In the crooked, guttural words of a forgotten tongue, the voice chanted praises to the Dark Will.
Lyra saw nothing to shoot with her bow. Had she known a psalm to sing to challenge the voice of the black chanter, she would have: but her own grief and anger drove all fair words out of mind. Mounting into her own memories as if into a chariot, she let the rush of her sorrow carry her away.
Beneath her slipper, the globe became an ice-pebble and was gone.
2. The Kid Gang
Galactic Year 12812, Ksora
An old memory came to her, clear and cold as a knife blade.
"Run, Lightfoot! Run!" Jinx called as she raced toward an alley fence. The fence was ten feet of rough brick with a line of iron spearpoints crowning it.
Jinx's brown hair whirled like a wild tail behind her head, brushing Lyra's face as the other girl passed her. Lyra always shaved her hair close to her scalp, so no one could grab her from behind.
Jinx was a year or two older than Lyra, twelve or thirteen, and, like her, slender from undereating, with limbs as thin and elastic as a young colt.
As Jinx crested the fence, she slithered between the bars, and paused, beckoning.
She and Lyra were fleeing from the bouncer of the jewelry shop, who was dressed in a fancy coat and wig like a doorman, but muscled like an ox.
The fine smells of the Perfumier's Square was around them, for they had strayed far from the stench of Tannery Lane. The buildings here were taller, with fewer broken or boarded-up windows, and the alleyways between narrower.
The third girl in the kid gang was Gypsy, a year older than Jinx. She had bloomed into premature womanhood, just enough to pass, in a rich dress and a poor light, when padded and painted, for older. She had gone into the goldsmith's as if to inspect the wedding rings to buy. Gypsy looked just old enough for this to be feasible, barely, because the law allowed a sixteen-year-old to wed if she were pregnant.
Gypsy had daubed her fingernails (glaring red like a grown woman's) with an adhesive, and palmed two rings while pretending to inspect another, passing both quickly to Lyra and Jinx.
The plan had been for these two girls to flee in opposite directions. Whichever one the bouncer pursued would throw her stolen ring on the ground, hoping he must stop to recover it, allowing her to fade into the crowd, or flee into the twisting maze of back alleys. Meanwhile the other, unpursued, would escape with a gold ring to turn over to Sam the Lizard.
But the plan did not go right. The bouncer had chased Lyra and overlooked or ignored the ring she dropped to slow him. Trying to fade from her pursuer, Lyra ran into a night-crowd who came pouring out of the burlesque theater in a sudden flood of roughnecks in leather caps and trollops in miniskirts. But the bouncer raised the hue and cry, and some drunks in the crowd tried to join the game of grabbing or tripping her. She escaped the mob by scaling a lightpole and leaping from awning to ground again, then ducking around a corner. It was not for nothing she was called Lightfoot. But now she was turned around, and did not recognize which street she was on. But the bouncer must have known the neighborhood, because he came out from a passageway, grunting, feet pounding.
Jinx, for some reason, had doubled back to find her, yanking her hand, to lead her to the side-alley they had previously picked out as an escape route. The bouncer was right behind.
Jinx, atop the fence, instead of fleeing, paused, turned, and lowered her hand to give Lyra help up. Lyra, as if weightless, passed swiftly up the rough bricks of the wall. But the bouncer pursuing her reached out and grabbed her naked foot by the ankle.
For a moment, the bouncer and Jinx played tug of war, while Lyra kicked the smiling bouncer in the face.
Then Jinx spat out the golden ring she had been clutching in her teeth. She held the shining prize under the bouncer's nose for a moment, and flung it tinkling down the alley.
This time, the trick worked. He released Lyra to go seek the ring. Lyra sailed over the fence without even touching the iron spearpoints. On they ran.
Years later, Lyra always remembered the knot of hunger and anger in her belly during that last mile back to the chop shop. Jinx was ahead of her, skipping and grinning. Lyra donned her sunglasses, despite that it was night, to hide the flicker of red sparks she felt crawling in her eyes.
"Jinx! You should have ditched me, and nipped the swag! It was worth a Yellow Boy!" This was cant for a guinea-piece.
Jinx flung her pony-tail nonchalantly. "That cull had you nicked by the gam! You'd be One-foot, not Light-foot, had I not fawney-rigged him!" The fawney rig was to drop a finger-ring of gilded brass before the eyes of a chump to gull him into purchasing it for half its seeming worth, many times its real worth.
"It's not a rig if you throw real gelt away!" snapped Lyra. "We'll get naught this night to grub but the rough side of Sam's lash."
Whichever member of the kid gang gave Sam the best prize of that night's work would get first go at the slops pail, and perhaps capture the one piece of meat Sam sometimes threw into the stew. Whoever gave him the worst prize, or none, got the switch instead.
Jinx said, "Don't huff! Sam always called me bad luck — but not if I can trip others in it." Jinx was not her real name, of course, any more than Lightfoot or Princess was Lyra's. Her real name was Camilla.
Like Lyra, she was an off-worlder, with hair and hue common elsewhere, but an oddity here in a world of purple people. Lyra later would remember staring at the long brown ponytail Jinx was so fond of flinging this way and that as she tossed her head, and wishing she could grow her hair as long as that, or longer. I will find a world where they will never chase me, and no one, not Sam nor no one else, will grab me by the hair.
It was not a vow, but it was a promise.
The kids entered through the junk-hatch above a dumpster, a route none was likely to spot. This hatch led up a ladder to a junkroom. Here Fader met them. He was an icy-faced, blue-eyed youth, and his skin was so pale a purple, it seemed blue, and he looked like a Sphingali.
Fader at, age fourteen, was the captain of the youth gang operating out of the storeroom behind Sam the Lizard's chop shop on Skinner's Row. His name came from his fame at never having been caught: he would fade into alleys and crannies, a shadow among shadows, whenever Watchman or Lawman appeared. Usually, his takings were good, and he was allowed to eat at the same table with Sam, in the nice upper room. The rest of the children were slopped, or switched, in the unlit and unheated junkroom in the back.
Fader said, "Any tally?"
Jinx said, "Why do you always send us out on jobs apart from the boys? You hate girls!"
Fader said, "You mots can't foot it as fast, nor floor the pig, nor clout no cull in the nob."
Jinx said, "That's not it! If we fail, you glut! It's on purpose! To rook us of our dues!" She meant that Fader would have first dibs on the stew pot, and avoid the switch, if he made sure the girls always brought in less.
Fader said, "If you were not wee bints, it would rook you of fiddlesticks end! Why should the boys haul your feak loads? Until you are old enough to tumble a john on the green, what good are you?"
Lyra said, "We're not as strong as you lummoxes, but we've more wit!"
Fader said, "So say you. What's your tally? Show me a rum gem. Show me glitter. Nothing? Then you go hungry. Sam don't share his pot with those what don't put in."
But when the others were gathered, and old Sam, green scales glistening in the lamplight, moving slowly, joints creaking, long tail dragging limply behind, was seated on his big chair, Fader was the one who failed.
Fader started by boasting of the sham match he had arranged that day.
"Clobber and Gobble knuckle-brawled a bit before the drink-house by the Spaceport, where we knew the gobs had poke-bulges, and easy enough to get a round of betting to go. Who'd you bet on?"
Sam chuckled at this, waving his forked tongue in the air in amusement. Gobble was so called because he ate ferociously, for he said being stout was a sign of success, and kept starvation at bay. Meanwhile Clobber was big for his age, and spent hours a day at the public gymnasium, lifting weights and wrestling.
Fader said, "Clobber took a dive for the final match. Paid three to one. We wagered a brass groat, but it was counted for a wedge, and took three." But when he unfolded his handkerchief, there was nothing inside but expired tram tokens.
Jinx brought out three silver coins, saying to Sam, "Here is what the girls earned from bilking the goldsmith."
Fader leaped to his feet. "Throw me over the bridge, will you? That's mine! You filching-morts filched nothing today!"
Jinx said, "Ill luck hounds whoever crosses me! Are we all together, jacks and jills?"
Fingers was a tall boy, older than Lyra, but younger than Fader, he said softly to him, "I've got a good bounty from clouting today, Fader. I'll lend you a nosewiper, so Clam goes without, but don't let these bints undo you." Clouting was stealing pocket-handkerchiefs, which the Ksoranese often contrived of fabrics so rare, that a fine one was worth as much as jewelry.
Clam was the youngest, age ten, so called because no threat or bribe from the police could make him talk, not even to say his own name. He said nothing now, but scowled, because what Fingers brought in pickpocketing outmatched what Clam had gathered that day by painting himself with fake pox and begging at the hospital gate.
But now Gypsy, still dolled up like a grown woman, swished her hips and batted her long fake lashes, "Sam will not have it if we filch from each other. Look! As soon as his disc tells him our words, we are all in for it!"
Fader said, "But Jinx funned me!"
Gypsy smiled and put her arm through Fader's arm. "So she did. But how? Ask Fingers how the snatch was done."
Fingers just shook his head. "She did it right now, right before us. Smooth as silk. I saw nothing."
Sam stood up, interrupting all this talk with a bang of his iron walking stick on the floorboards. "Ss-sharp dealings under my roof! You monkey whelps bes-ss-st not play on each other. Ss-sam won't ss-swallow it!"
The children all cowered. Even an old and weak Iss was stronger than a man, nearly tireless, and no human fist could dent scaly hide so thick and stubborn.
