The dust in the air obscured clear vision all the more so when trying to view the scene at ground level, but Shaa had the impression that at the very least the Bones of the Empire had been thrown to the dirt themselves. If the thing now considering its footing, its head even in its half-kneeling position at a level with the higher tiers, actually had mass, though, Shaa had a pretty good idea just where that mass had been drawn from. Mass, after all, could be neither created nor destroyed, although a clever practitioner could slip some from place to place behind his back, so to speak, but this amount of mass was something for which no mere prestidigitation could fully account. If the Corpus did have mass, the most prodigious transfer-rate ever recorded would be insufficient to add up by several orders of magnitude. No, if the Corpus had mass it had come from the bodies of its constituents. And if that were the case... well, the Emperor-now-no-longer-designate, for all of his misguided vexations, had shown no signs of wanting to grind his staff and adherents into corn mash. Which lead one inexorably to the suspicion that if the Corpus did have mass...
...then the Emperor might not be the one in control.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” shouted Leen.
What she was referring to was scarcely in doubt. The looming face of the Corpus beyond the glare of its searchlight eye-beams had experienced a transformation that was more than a matter of a fresh expression. The features were clearly not those of the Emperor. They were those of the Scapula.
The tower was whipsawing back-and-forth violently enough for its survival to be in imminent doubt. Most all of its occupants were sprawled on the floor hanging on with breakneck grips to anything solid, and trying to stay out of the way of the cascading chairs and the wreckage of the buffet tables. Only the Emperor, at the highest point of the spire, had managed to retain his feet, and that by dint of a lean-rod behind him to which he was clutching with both hands.
Max could see the sweat pouring from the Emperor’s face. Even Max, in his black plate armor, was starting to feel like a boiled lobster, and if those light rays the Corpus was giving off were intense enough to do that to him, a good twenty feet off their focus point, the Emperor had to be pretty much melting. Serves him right, Max thought.
A toppled chair moved aside just ahead of Max and Leen, and Phlinn Arol, having entirely shed his aura of golden radiance, crawled through the opening. “I’ve shut down and disconnected whatever I can,” he said. “I believe I am free of contamination.”
“Arznaak’s after bigger fish,” Max stated, “but then we always knew that. Now -”
The floor rebounded again. The tower leaned far over to the right. They heard a crash, a hubbub of extensive breakage, and then a chorus of human wails, declining in volume as though the makers of these sounds were disappearing down a shaft. The angle of the incoming light beams steepened. The Corpus was on its feet.
Max took the risk of looking up. Its shoulders topped the level of the highest stadium tiers, waving banners and all. Its feet had sunk into the thick earth of the parade ground deeply enough so that the midpoints of its ankles were even with the grass. It was wearing a toga-like garment that looped over one shoulder and left the other bare, and a fiery diadem around its brow. Its hands had been planted on its hips; now, they were being raised into the air, where they would no doubt disrupt migration patterns for birds.
“HEAR, O MY SUBJECTS!” said the colossus.
“What the hell kind of jury-rig cockeyed disaster did you put together here?” I demanded.
“Now just a damn minute,” began Favored-of-the-Gods, about to spin himself out into another aggrieved tirade, “where do you come off sneaking in from the street, claiming to be resurrected or some kind of idiot story no one with half a brain would -”
“Favored,” said Haddo, also for not nearly the first time, “up shut!”
“Fine!” yelled Favored, “fine! Be that way! Here I am working for the good of the world and -”
“Put a lid on it,” I told him, “or I’ll have to blast you or something.” Of course, blasting folks was the last thing I wanted to start doing again. I’d had quite enough of that with Iskendarian, thank you. Now that I was Byron again, more or less, I thought it was past time to try fixing things for a change.
Which wasn’t to say I was back to normal - as if anybody could say at this point what might be “normal” where I was concerned. It did seem that I’d freed myself of the self-inflicted though inadvertent wound that was Iskendarian, and I now knew who I’d been before that, and some things that had happened in the recent past now made a lot more sense, but that didn’t mean all my memories had come back in an overwhelming flood or that I was even the same person I’d been when I’d been Byron before. I didn’t have the same body as the original Byron, that was for certain, or to be more precise I probably did have the same body - I hadn’t been regrown from a cell sample or had my brain transplanted or something drastic like that - but a crew of nanoremodelers or nanosurgeons or whatever they were calling them these days had been loose sometime in my Iskendarian-past. Most likely this had happened when the personality virus had gone after me; that would have made the most sense. I didn’t remember enough details to remember if I’d included a shape-change module in with the virus - as I said, my memory was still coming back in spots and chunks - but it would have made sense. I was pretty sure that was the way my mind operated.
I’d been working on this personality virus idea, like I’d said, as one of several projects aimed in the long run at getting the world out of the situation I’d played a key role in getting it into. My clean-room technique must have gone sour on me, though, or perhaps I’d been the victim of sabotage - I hadn’t exactly been a figure of great veneration by that time - but the bottom line was that my test system had gotten a jump and infected me.
I hadn’t been left with no recourse, however. I’d been building in certain safeguards - that much was only standard good practice - and if they hadn’t been enough to totally eradicate the pest that was Iskendarian and restore me to full knowledge and function, they had still managed eventually to tone him down and put him to sleep. The battle hadn’t been one-sided, however. Iskendarian had left me with a violent antipathy for magic, designed I suppose to keep me away from techniques that might have healed things up once and for all. He had also managed somehow to redeploy some of his own code in the form of the Spell of Namelessness. So there I’d been, first comatose for who knew how long, being kept in fighting shape by the tight-leash nanodocs that were godhood’s greatest perk, then awake enough to wander the world but not quite at the level of consciousness to realize I had no memory of a past and no identity but the stream of day-to-day. I didn’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t finally crossed paths with Gashanatantra.
Of course, Gash hadn’t merely started to wake up me, Byron, but me, Iskendarian, too. There was a lot going on inside us that Iskendarian couldn’t explain. In the manner of disoriented personalities everywhere, he’d started filling in back-details to try to make things make sense. That story he’d told me about deliberately imposing the Spell of Namelessness on himself to lie low until the fruition of some unspecified mysterious plan, for example, was cockeyed on its face. Since I now knew Iskendarian had been much more unstable in this instantiation than he’d been the first time around, I might have been able to reduce him to gibbering insensibility merely by forcing him face to face with mutually inconsistent facts... but I hadn’t known that then, and in any case it hadn’t been necessary. Byron-instincts filtering up through the Iskendarian-haze might have tipped me to that tactic, as they had apparently guided me to so much else, but now the problem was the Scapula’s.