The vendetta wand struck the man’s blade on the unsharpened side, throwing the blade aside and driving the infinitely sharp cutting side into and through the haft of the Halligan bar, severing it. The woman gasped in shock. She had evidently not been told that Vigil Starmanson was as strong as a giant. He grasped the free end of the severed bar, and, before she could react, drove it into her midriff, making her double over. He tore the bar from her hands and threw it over the rooftop behind him.
Vigil would have driven the bar through her stomach and broken her spine, but he used a mesmeric breathing technique to block the reflex pattern dominating him. Vigil once again could not hurt her. Even though the mandala had been no more than an afterimage, it still dominated his nervous system and could not be exorcised by a simple breath-cue, mostly because he hated using his strength against women. Beating women was nothing to boast of.
He flexed his chest muscles and had his internals push and spit the head of the adze out of his chest. Blood poured from the sucking wound, and he halted his lung action, sending oxygen directly from a spare breathing lozenge into his bloodstream. The antique uniform of the Hermeticists was ruined, torn in the breast and back, circuits severed, capillaries leaking fluids.
Vigil now turned toward the swordsman, who was naked and confused, his head hanging ten feet above his body and to the left, with his spinal jets cracking and sputtering comically. Even more comically, his ears had expanded into wings and flapped like something out of a children’s story.
Vigil drove the vendetta wand into the cobblestones as if they had been soft mud, cracking them, so that the wand stood next to him, vibrating. Then he used both hands to indicate the gesture called Fist of Knowledge, where his right fingers hid both his right thumb and the forefinger of his left hand. The sword blade shattered into three pieces.
Vigil snorted. For assassins who got all their tactics from peddlers’ stories, they did not seem to recognize the oldest mudra effect in the old myths. Nanomachines were absurdly dangerous, but, due to their size, their information density was always high and their memory was low, which means they could easily be made to fight each other, and destroy the weapons or launching systems they rode. That was the main reason why men of old fought with wooden swords and clubs and spears invisible to the Noösphere. Had it not been for that, all warfare, all street fights, would merely be dust hacks and mote cleanings.
The two stood gawping in shock. Vigil made his voice issue from the wand. “I am a Lord of Stability and control the privilege of Vengeance, which even the Principality will recognize! Any violence will be retaliated in the infosphere, where wounds are more permanent. All future downloads of your souls will bear eternal scars. A nonlethal blow of this wand will be imprinted permanently on any future patterns of flesh you inhabit. One mortal blow of this wand, and you will be deleted!”
The woman raised her head. And it kept rising and rising. For a moment, Vigil thought she was like the man, a Nukekubi. But no, she was a related order, nondecentralized, called Rokurokubi. The two were often mistaken for each other. Her head swayed upward on a long snakelike neck, until it hung nine feet above her. The Fox Maiden mask was still in place, giving an unnatural, overwhelming beauty to her features, but the jawline hung and rattled limply against the real woman’s skull underneath.
She spoke, and the words echoed oddly in her long, long throat. “We have no counterparts in the Noösphere. This is the only life we have.”
Vigil now was the one in shock. This meant that he had killed whoever was occupying the horse and the dogs. He had not simply disincarnated him, but killed him entirely, the real him.
“How can you have no souls?” he demanded.
The Nukekubi man said, “We are Cygnanthropes.”
Vigil would have vowed that the sect of man who followed the moral code of the Swans had vanished ages ago, when the Long Golden Afternoon of man passed away. These were laicists and antinomians. Despite that they were men, they neither married nor were given in marriage and formed no social bonds. Now he understood their look and garb. Among the loose confederations of the Nomads, a band of anarchists could pass unremarked.
And he knew the Nomads rejected the lore of Delta Pavonis, which demanded terraforming, and followed instead the practice of Promixa and Epsilon Eridani, and allowed for radical pantropy. The long necks and floating heads were grim necessity for traveling through the tall grasses and taller banks of low-hanging poisoned pollen of summer and autumn in the Far Southeastern pampas.
“Why do you oppose me?” asked Vigil. “A Swan sent me on this mission!”
“You will shatter our world,” said the Rokurokubi woman. The lips of her mask did not move as she spoke. “We are loyal to Torment!”
The Nukekubi man said, “Only here, in this world of ghosts and shadows, where nothing is forgotten, does our ancient order still exist. Only here can we live and practice the old ways.”
“Your old ways are not so old,” Vigil remarked wryly. “They only date back to the time of the Sculptured Lifeways in the Twenty-Fourth Millennium. And you yourselves are much younger, being only impersonators and epigones of long-dead ancient lore. You are not Cygnanthropes, you are merely enemies of Sacerdotes and seek some easy excuse to escape from the chastity and chores and lore of living as children of civilization. You have all your ideas from tales and yarns. Why do you fear the starfall of the Emancipation? Why would the new colonials meddle with the Nomads in their deserts and grasslands?”
The woman twisted her head on its long, long neck. “The fool does not know who is aboard. Call upon the elder brother.”
The man’s head fell neatly onto the neck stump and attached itself, and then the no-longer-headless body of the Nukekubi knelt on the cobblestones and pounded on the iron lid covering the sewer entrance. It rang like a gong.
At that moment, a roar of song and joy rockets passed over the area, making further speech impossible. The fourth ambusher, the node underground, now uttered a silent shout—a mudra technique using negative shapes of silence against a noisy background to trigger a nerve reaction—and Vigil was blinded for a moment as an internal energy surge blocked the visual centers of his brain. The mudra was not affecting his eyes alone but his ability to process images so that he could switch to no points of view from any houses or dust motes nearby.
Blind, Vigil stamped his foot and silently commanded the stones near him to draw a mandala at his feet. The stones were sleeping but came awake for a Lord of Stability and erupted in sudden lines, circles within squares within circles, of intricate patterns of sand, glowing like a coal fire. It was a figure system meant to include the aspect called Immeasurably Magnificent Palace, used for focusing power to the body and accentuate the senses, especially the hearing.
It was fortunate that he did so. The woman and the man rushed him from opposite sides. Despite the roar of music and candle-snaps, his discriminating hearing could distinguish their footfalls from the background roar of the celebration.
The woman stopped at the edge of the design on the ground, unable to step forward, her motor nerves jammed.
The man had a more flexible neural pattern, no doubt based on his decentralized nerve network of his detachable limbs and organs, and was able, not without pain, to pass over. Vigil surrendered to the cruel battle reflexes he carried and acted without thought.
First, Vigil’s blind body drove his fingers knife-edged into the man’s midriff, doubling him over so that his falling chin met Vigil’s kneecap. Vigil then twisted the man’s head clean off. Because it had clamps and sutures rather than connecting tissues of muscle, spinal column, and throat, the head came off easily. Vigil threw it into the air with all his considerable strength.
In the blackness of his blindness, suddenly he could see three pink shapes of redheads. They were literally redheads—that is, just the head and not the bodies. It was the Fox Maidens who had toyed with him earlier, floating their heads among the balloons. When his blind eyes turned upon them, some indication being shed from unseen symbols surrounding them restored at least his ability to see them, even though the rest of the world was still a dark blur. The severed heads of the three Fox girls looked archly, smiling red smiles, as the Nukekubi man’s head flew up.