Then there was no more time for speech, nothing clever to do. Vigil (his right arm flapping uselessly) ran from the juggernaut. The juggernaut on treads that roared like ten thunders rolled after him, fast as a locomotive. And the Rokurokubi threw her head back two yards or more and laughed her crazed and long-throated laugh.
There was no escape. The Rokurokubi was between him and the alley mouth, holding a brass mirror in her hands, trying to catch and maze his vision in the reflected sight from behind him of the mandala the juggernaut displayed like a parachute.
Vigil knelt, and, even as the juggernaut emitted a steam whistle of triumph and made to roll over him, he slapped the cobblestones, using his authority as a Lord of Stability to command the cobblestones to disintegrate, to part beneath the juggernaut’s treads, and drop the metal monster into a pit of sand.
But it was no use. The cobblestones were overwhelmed by the mandala of the juggernaut and shrieked on the emergency channels and were petrified with fear. The frightened stones were as still as stones.
Vigil tried to leap or roll or scurry to one side before the monster rolled over him, but the juggernaut shifted her fingers so that, without dropping any of her many weapons or emblems, she indicated the mudras of the Ten Primal Forms of Fear, and Vigil’s muscles would not respond to his nerve commands nor his hardwire commands. He forgot how to breathe, as that knowledge was wiped from his cell memory, lung muscles, and hindbrain. And the great treads rolling filled his vision, and he saw all the weapons rise up, flourish themselves, and fall.
And they all fell to one side or the other. The mace head smashed the cobblestones, sending chips of shrapnel to cut his skin, and the sword blade rang to the stones, missing him; and the head of the goad and the two blades of the bifork smashed and cut the stones to his left-hand side; the cutting octagon of the sharpened discus, and the arrowhead and spearhead and the venomous teeth of the serpent scarred the stones to his right-hand side. The deadly light of the burning lamp fell on him, but his flesh was not consumed; the horror of the conch shell sounded in his ears, but as if distant and dull, and he was not driven mad.
A mudra of immense power, a power beyond what any First Men commanded, a power that operated below the molecular information level, was protecting Vigil like an unseen bubble.
Vigil looked behind him with his many viewpoints to see who had saved him.
3. The Last of the Third Men
In the mouth of the alley stood a tall shape in a hooded cloak that fell to the elbows and a cape that fell to the ankles. In the narrow opening of the hood, his face was a skull-like mask of metal, iron-eyed and impassive. In one gauntlet was a two-edged sword, made of transparent gold.
His other gauntlet, this new figure held before him, palm up. At his mudra-gesture, the juggernaut, as if caught in a giant unseen hand following the man’s hand, was pulled upward so that the treads failed to crush and grind Vigil into paste. The man flicked his wrist, and an unseen force threw the immense machine on her back, which smashed her head and half of her arms.
The transparent, amber sword he pointed at the Rokurokubi and said, “I usurp all your other commands, including the self-preservation imperative. Destroy yourself.”
Being disconnected from the Noösphere did not save the long-necked woman. She opened her mouth to protest the command, but liquid formed from her own disintegrating internal organs gushed out instead. The vomit-mass fell across her upper body and clung like glue, and it ignited, burning hot like alcohol. Her snake neck whipped back and forth in frenzy, and she raised her hands as if to tear her burning garments from her, but her fingers did not obey her commands and instead wrung her neck, snapping the many collapsible vertebrae.
It was raining a brightly colored rain of gemstones. This was the remnant of the shattered canopy containing the sixty-four-sided mandala. The four sly-eyed wheels dived at the cloaked figure, but then swirled to the left and right as if blind and smashed into walls and street, spokes bent, sly eyes dead. With them, little gems, small as dust motes, also fell, twinkling brightly. The cobblestones were carpeted in a layer of rainbow grit, a scattering of sand without a pattern.
The blind push broom sighed, and straightened itself, and began slowly to gather the scattered gem dust into heaps.
Vigil slowly regained control of his muscles and, as luck would have it, found a backup containing the muscle instructions on how to breathe in one of the memento files his mother had made of his birth, including the moment when he switched over from taking oxygenated blood through his navel to switching to an air-breathing regimen. Silently, he blessed his mother.
But he did not rise to his feet. Those memories of birth and the nearness of his death, the shocks to his nervous system caused by the several mudra and mandalas erupting into his personal infosphere, all left him curled in a ball, the foetal position.
A series of spasms racked him as his nerve-muscle balances reestablished themselves, and he coughed and shrieked in pain as his breathing cycle restarted. The numbness in his arm was replaced by a painful sensation, as if lines of ants made of fire were crawling up and down the veins and arteries in his arm.
At last, he climbed to his hands and knees.
With the eyes in his head, he saw the legs and feet of the figure who had saved him. Vigil looked up. The downwash of the dying wheels as they swooped had flung the hood aside and the thrown long cloak open, revealing what was beneath. The creature looked like a naked man made of semitransparent gold, and the black iron of his bones shone through his skin.
The organism was more complex, and more horrible, than at first it seemed.
A central creature occupied the chest cavity. It looked something like an unborn babe, with a vast naked head pulsing with blue viens and tiny malformed body dangling beneath. Bundles of filaments issued from the empty eye sockets in the skull, and tubes into the mouth and nose-holes. The infantile body was held in a metallic frame of rib bones, swimming in gold fluid. Service jacks ran down the bent baby’s spine and wired him to the exoskeleton’s spine.
The skeleton stood on two jointed metallic legs and had two skeletal hands. Power nodes coated the metal bones like beads.
The whole of the exoskeleton was coated with a semifluid gold substance that gleamed like metal where it was still and rippled like oil at the joints when the figure moved. Armored plates, translucent as amber, clung to the surface of the golden, metallic fluid, but seemed to be a solid state of the same substance.
Vigil knew from his historical lore that this transparent gold substance was Aurum Potable, the Philosopher’s Stone. It was both cognitive matter and a mass of nanomechanical tools.
This gold outer flesh was naked except for a sword belt running from shoulder to hip, and a mask. The mask was angular metal, one of those children’s puppets whose face-elements could move to form simple expressions, raise or lower the metal eyebrows in a frown, twist the metal lips to form a smile or scowl. At the moment, the expression was cold and pitiless.
Receptors shaped like eyes pinned the hood in place at the shoulders, and other input sensors ran from eye to eye like a chain of office. Here also was a step-down transformer to allow the gold creature to communicate with the Firstling-inhabited formats of the Noösphere without overwhelming their channels.
Vigil, through the many points of view motes in the air fed into his brain, saw that the juggernaut behind him did not rise nor speak. Of course. Neither human nor Swan could give lawful commands to a juggernaut. Patricians could, but they would not, for they never interfered with human life, not even to save it, unless invited.
What was he? This man might be a Fox Maiden in disguise, but, then again, anyone might be a Fox Maiden in disguise. But an intuition from the Fox laughter which still echoed in his nervous system told him clearly that this was no Kitsune.