“Well,” said Gashanatantra, brushing clods of dirt from his hair and staring down at his fallen colleague, “I suppose that’s that.”
“Will you kill him now?” Svin asked.
“No,” Gashanatantra said thoughtfully. “I think there’s been a bit too much of that lately, don’t you?”
“He seemed ready to kill you!,” Jurtan Mont pointed out.
“Yes, well,” said Gashanatantra, “I think he was only having his fun. I could have most likely talked him out of it.”
There was more to it than that, Shaa knew. From the available evidence the two of them might represent a significant proportion of the gods left alive. Depending on just how much damage Arznaak had caused, every last one of them might need to stand together before too long. Shaa noted Gashanatantra now eyeing him, of all people. Shaa cocked a noncommittal eyebrow, which Gashanatantra answered with an almost imperceptible dip of his head. “Whatever the case,” Shaa reiterated, “might I propose exit from this place, before the option is removed utterly from us?”
“This way?” said Svin, his voice echoing back down the tunnel toward them.
“Is it passable?” Shaa called after him.
“So far,” shouted Svin.
“Yes?” Shaa said, now addressing Jurtan Mont, who had assumed his accustomed posture of attentive listening.
“What? Oh, yeah. The tunnel sounds best.”
“Hm,” mused Shaa. “More evidence for a different modality, unmediated by the standard infrastructure.” Jurtan had said he was hearing a heavy overlay of static, but his music sense all told was remarkably unaffected by the disruption to the magical ether. “Let us go, then,” he continued, “while the going is as good as it is likely to get.”
Gashanatantra hefted Pod Dall over his shoulder in what Shaa deemed a reasonable act of camaraderie and they set off down the tunnel, Svin leading the way from somewhere up ahead and Jurtan Mont monitoring whatever extrasensory channels he was prone to frequent. In the event, the tunnel’s condition was not too terrible, meaning that although earth and rock-fall were frequent there was no obstacle that they could not traverse with reasonable alacrity. Sooner than Shaa had expected they had already entered the region of sludge that implied they were close to the exit. He even allowed himself the momentary fantasy that this might in fact be the ending of the whole long business, that all that might remain would be some cleaning up and sorting out, and perhaps a few days off in the sun somewhere.
These pleasant reveries accompanied him through the sludge and the clamber up onto the field, where they passed quickly and firmly into memory, as Shaa had expected of them. As they surveyed the situation, Jurtan Mont came up beside Shaa, cocking his ear.
Through the static, Jurtan thought he was hearing another familiar theme. He squinted off across the field, beyond the mounds of bodies and the lakes of gore and the writhing injured, to the heap of wreckage atop an apparently fresh hill, and the people making their way down it. “Look!” he said, pointing. “In that dark armor, with his head free. Isn’t that Max?”
“This thing has bit the dust,” I said, sliding my chair back from the workstation console. Favored had managed to bypass the cutouts, and in any case no one had ever anticipated a maneuver such as Arznaak had just pulled; his power pulse had fried everything sensitive that was online to any element of the gods’ infrastructure, a category that was bound to include a fair number of brains as well as the burned-out systems in front of me. If it hadn’t cut out when it had, probably because the modified Iskendarian virus had shut Arznaak down from within, there wouldn’t have been a magic user with any more processing power in their head than a rabbit anywhere closer than five hundred miles.
There was still too much noise and static on the modalities I could access directly to punch through to anything with decent information content, or to retrieve any news that might be out there either. Nevertheless, I had the nasty feeling there could be nasty things sprouting all over the place; you don’t spontaneously supercharge everything in sight and assume they’re all going to sit there saying “Ooh! How interesting!” while they wait for the cows to come home. Potions, for example, especially those produced in bulk plants in industrial quantities, had a tendency toward instability even under everyday conditions. They could be blowing their vats sky-high for all we knew down here, or worse - potentially much worse - they could be reacting and recombining and mutating into stuff that would never consent to seeing the inside of a vat again.
Whether there was any chance of counteracting the situation - or more precisely the thousand different situations that were probably evolving out there even as I sat thinking - was highly questionable. Even if I had the superuser equipment to start tinkering with the overrides and common carrier controls and the general guts of the system, or triggering the waiting oncogenes or retroviruses or other biologicals, I might be able to do nothing but make the general predicament worse.
The system I’d set up all those years ago wasn’t the only possible modality that could influence affairs, either. To meddle directly by rolling up sleeves and plunging arms into the guts would be cruder and rawer and less effective than working through the transformers and facilitator channels, but the world out there wouldn’t wait. Anything that had survived the assault on the infrastructure would already be exploiting any alternatives.
For the first time since the beginning I had begun to think seriously about the autokill self-destruct option. But I’d still need to get to an operational workstation, one that had been off-line during Arznaak’s pulse and that hadn’t had its cutouts tampered with. “Anybody know the fastest way to get to the Archives from here?” I asked.
Tildamire Mont hadn’t been certain Karlini was actually going to wake up, and when he did start to move it was with his eyes rolled back and his arms and legs jerking spasmodically, and when the seizure had stopped and she and the Lion had gotten him turned over so he could finish vomiting without asphyxiation and he opened his eyes for real, blood still running out of his ear, and his face and eyes as red as if he’d been run head-first into a freshly painted wall, well, by then the reason she’d wanted to so urgently get him sensible had advanced far beyond a curiosity into a clearly significant hazard.
She didn’t know if she’d ever been so aware of the movement of air. There was a slight breeze, and it was blowing away from them, which meant that the material that had come foaming up from the ground under the wreckage of the laboratory and was now having its top layers wafted away by the wind in streamers of bubbles was heading in the other direction rather than settling over their own heads. In the glow of the streetlights and the illumination from the Knitting celebration fireworks that were still occasionally going off overhead the stuff had an oily sheen and was a particularly dingy shade of gray as well; it looked overall like the sludge left in the laundry barrel after the clothes were clean. Its scummy appearance was not especially cheerful, but it wasn’t notably ominous either. The menacing character came from what the stuff was doing: it wasn’t merely coating the surfaces of the obstacles it encountered in its path, it seemed to be sinking into them, penetrating, being absorbed. It was unclear what happened to the obstacles next. It was thoroughly clear to Tildamire, however, that she didn’t want that stuff infiltrating her.