Then, as his head began floating away as rapidly as his silly flapping ears and sputtering spine could carry him, the three Fox Maiden heads, long red hair streaming like comets tails, began to circle and nip and harass him, tearing away bits of flesh from his cheeks and nose, or yanking on his hair with their sharp, white teeth. And he screamed silently as he fled through the air, shouting out defensive mudras which the Foxes ignored.
In that same moment, an internal inside Vigil noticed that the reaction time of the fourth attacker, the immaterial node in the sewer line, was too small for the node to be remotely controlled. This meant, unlike the other three, this assassin was not a Nomad too poor to afford to buy soul-rental space in the Noösphere and too proud to accept one as charity, and was not a would-be Swan too detached from human society to desire one. No: the fourth man was actually in the Noösphere, a ghost, a disembodied spirit, and merely operating through a node. Ghosts were not immune to vendetta.
Vigil drew up the wand, sending chips of the cobblestones flying, and pointed at the ground, and uttered a Word of Retaliation. There was something like a silent thunderclap on all the near-system channels, and the fourth man flickered and vanished.
Dead? Perhaps so, but Vigil blinked his eyes and found his sight again, pouring in from a thousand points of view, so he assumed the wand inflicted a more poetic judgment than simple capital punishment and edited the physical world, all of reality outside the infosphere, out of the mind and sensorium of the fourth man forever.
Vigil flourished the wand like a quarterstaff, and turned to the Rokurokubi. “There is neither honor nor accomplishment in slaying a woman,” he said. “Flee, and no more will be said.”
The long-necked creature chuckled, and the laugh bubbled and echoed many times as it passed up the length of her throat. “There is, however, great honor in slaying a Stranger, who came to our world so long after us. Die, arrogant Stranger, and no more will be said.”
Only then did he see that the control lines leading from the sewer were active. Some command must have been uttered by the fourth man before he fell. Vigil looked around wildly, wondering from what quarter the weapon would strike, and seeing nothing. There was no giant weapon taller than a man here in the alley. Everything looked normal.
Then the cart fell apart and stood up.
2. The Juggernaut
On one of the higher bands in his eyesight from points of view in the alley walls behind the cart, Vigil saw a burst of radioactivity and heat. Inside the cart, a fusion cell was heating water to steam.
As the cart stood, it formed a traditional shape called a juggernaut, a type of armored car used by Myrmidons to crush Firstling men.
Instead of the guns and cannons of the ancient form of juggernaut, called a tank, this juggernaut followed the traditional form from the sad period of the Long Twilight, after the Golden Afternoon had passed, and the wars of man grew distorted under the pressures of the Absolute Rules imposed by Tau Ceti, creating such bizarre anachronisms. The Absolute Rules forbade automatons and firearms to be used in combat and electromotive amplification, but not steam-powered prosthetics. Atomics could not be used in weaponry, but could be used to heat water. The limbs were jointed, and the muscles were hydraulic cylinders powered by branching copper veins of steam.
With a great rattle, the juggernaut brought her many hidden arms into view, each carrying a weapon or emblem permitted under the Absolute Rules.
In the right hands of the juggernaut were a naked sword, a burning lamp, a mace, a spear, a bifork, an arrow, a goad, and a lotus; and in the left hands were a shield, a bowl, an octagonal discus, a noose, a longbow, a conch shell, a serpent, and a severed human head. Blood poured from the decollated head into the bowl made from the top of the skull held in a lower hand below it.
Up she reared, huge, a body of metal throwing aside the disguise of wood in a spray of splinters. The hard metal hemispheres of her bosom were decorated with a necklace of skulls. Beneath, the wheelless body of the cart now stood on saw-toothed treads made of jointed metal slabs.
The cart was wheelless because the sly-eyed wheels of the cart flew into the air like so many helicopters, the cruel, dead-center eyes steady in screaming circles of spinning blades.
The face of the three-eyed juggernaut lifted up, throwing aside splinters and dust from the serpents of her hair. Her face was blue, and her lolling tongue coated with blood, and her teeth were like the teeth of a lioness.
Worst of all, there was a fourth eye inside her mouth, indicating absolute control over all appetites, total self-command which no Swan, no Fox, and certainly no Firstling human being, could match.
The four eyes at the wheel hubs grew bright, as did the four eyes of her face, her forehead, and on her tongue. Too late, Vigil realized what he was facing. This was no Nomad, no Firstling in masquerade.
This was a Megalodon in truth, a Third Human, a space-borne form of life that had descended to Earth to occupy the ancient Myrmidon war-car shape of his ancestors.
Then the four living wheels spat from their spokes a glittering spiral cloud, a swarm of thousands of jewels fine as dust specks.
The Megalodon was a master guru, as skilled as Vigil in the art of nerve indication, or more skilled: for this bright cloud her flying wheels wove solidified into a canopy, burning with gems, behind and above the head of the juggernaut. And the burning canopy displayed a mandala of uttermost terror.
It was a sixty-four-fold mandala made of eightfold mandalas, as complex as the bloom of a rose, showing patterns within patterns of eye-dazzling neural signifiers. It was louder than a silent explosion and brighter than unseen lightning.
One of Vigil’s internal creatures sacrificed itself to prevent his conscious mind from seeing the sixty-four-sided mandala. All his memories and reflexes running through that internal felt numb, and the shocking pain of its dying agony echoed in Vigil’s nerves.
The vendetta wand, that irreplaceable antique, was not so fortunate. It had no internal buffers prepared for self-sacrifice. Instead, it uttered a high-pitched whistle, calling for restorative software which had been extinct an eon before the planet Torment was born, and it died in Vigil’s hand. Little gems and logic crystals flaked away from beneath Vigil’s fingers and dropped to the cobblestones, tinkling.
Vigil was now unarmed. Even his giant strength was nothing compared to this steam-powered behemoth. He could perhaps dodge the blows from sword and spear and mace and bifork, and he could hope the bow and arrow would miss, but he could not outrun the deadly sound of the conch shell, or the deadly light from the burning lamp. Worst of all, he could not make himself unfrightened by the sight of the severed head, nor could he close the vulnerable nerve-channels deep into the racial subconsciousness that primal fear opened. The scent of the lotus leaf had no doubt, by now, exploited those open channels to insert all fashions of false reflexes and fatal thoughts into his lower nervous system, because smells did not pass through the midbrain complex as sights and sounds did before leaving their imprints.
Were there any vulnerable points? Vigil flung out a mudra called shuni, touching his thumb to his middle finger, a calming gesture indicating a shutdown of the fusion cell, but the mudra echoed back at him and benumbed his arm from fingers to elbow, not just rejecting the command with contempt but also punishing him for issuing it. The authority level was beyond that of the Lords of Stability, beyond the range of any member of the First Human Race.