“Telokopolis was a city,” said Elpida. “The city where I was born, where I lived my whole life, and where I died, for a cause I did not fully understand at the time, but which I see now with perfect clarity.”
The Commander paused.
The roar and rumble of rain-static rushed back into the echoing vault; the whip and wave of divine wind washed the silence clean. God-storm raged on, beyond the sepulchral darkness.
Shilu stared out from behind the wall of her bone-pale mask, floating in the oily black of the tomb chamber. Her face was tainted red by Pheiri’s tomb-light glow, matching the crimson dye of Elpida’s long white hair. She was like a single rose petal in a basin of pitch, on a stem of black iron studded with razor thorns.
Atyle watched that bleached visage with great interest.
This so-called ‘Necromancer’ — this raiser-of-the-dead — she was more passive than any self-claimed wizard or magician Atyle had known in life. Atyle had known far too many of those, littering the hallways and colonnades of the palace; she had known them all to be frauds, no different to herself, before her death and rebirth beneath the truth of real gods.
Shilu said, “That tells me very little.”
The Commander smiled, knowing and wry, yet unaware she had already won.
Atyle was not going to divulge her secret knowledge — that the conversion of this enemy was already complete. This conversation may be mere formality, but Atyle knew that formality and ritual were essential to power. The Commander must wield power, be seen to wield power, and have that power acknowledged. To interrupt would be to deny this opportunity.
“Yeah,” Elpida said. “That’s the short answer, and it tells you nothing useful. Shilu, I’m going to have to demand an explanation first. You’ve seen Telokopolis, you’ve seen the city? What do you mean by that?”
Shilu said, “Right now that claim of prior knowledge and information is my only leverage. I will withhold it until I have heard your full answer, and your ‘promise’.”
Elpida’s smile widened. “Keeping me honest?”
“Exactly.”
Elpida nodded, allowing that she was impressed. Victoria puffed out one of her big sighs, the ones she gave breath to when she felt out of her depth. Atyle just watched.
“So,” Elpida said. “I’m going to have to give you a very long answer. Are you prepared?”
“We have nothing but time,” said Shilu.
The Commander’s smile brightened. “We have so much more than time. That’s what I’m promising.”
Victoria cleared her throat. “Elpida, Commander, um. Not to throw a wrench into the works here, but … are we absolutely sure that we can trust her with sensitive information? We’re not giving away intel here, are we? No offence or anything, Shilu, but you are a Necromancer. This is kind of fucked up.”
An interruption crackled in Atyle’s left ear — voices floating across the void of space, speaking through the headset. Kagami hissed over the radio: “My question exactly. Thank you, Victoria. I am glad to see that somebody still has a brain between their ears.”
Shilu said, “I take no offence. I would be more worried if you didn’t show caution.”
Elpida raised her head and raised her eyebrows. “Atyle, your assessment again, please?”
Wizards, magicians, mages, diabolists, shamans, soothsayers, from the native shores of the great river or from dusty foreign hills, they were all the same in Atyle’s experience. They all fancied themselves masters in their secret hearts. That was why they ended up at the palace, for any chance at the ear of the Emperor.
But Shilu was no master; this slave-puppet had no dreams. Atyle could see that with her mortal eye, plain as mud.
God-sight showed her the truth of Shilu’s isolation.
Atyle said it out loud. “She is a puppet and a slave, but with her strings cut and her chains broken. No master’s hand lies on the collar. No steps are woven for her to dance. Lykke was the dog of meagre gods. She dripped with umbilical cords and cancerous growths, all joining her to the greater whole. But this one? No. She is alone.”
Kagami hissed over the radio, “Technical details would be preferred over shitty poetry, thank you very much. But I concur.”
Elpida nodded. “Thank you, Atyle. Well, there you go. Shilu’s cut off from network access. So either we make the decision to trust her, or we don’t.”
Victoria and Elpida exchanged additional formalities about trust. Kagami’s voice crackled over the radio, joined briefly by Ilyusha, likely leaning over the Princess’ shoulder.
Atyle ignored the empty words. She stared at Shilu’s body.
The inside of that black metal shell was very beautiful. Beneath her thorns and barbs and hard exterior, Shilu’s muscles glowed like divine meat, little hives of activity of the tiny machines of the gods. Shilu’s viscera did not look like that of any other revenant — multiple heart-muscles, stacks of bacteria, no true stomach. Her brain was like a little star, more machine than flesh.
And all without a master to show her the way.
Would she place the end of her broken chain in the Commander’s hand?
Atyle had no doubt of Shilu’s new-found allegiance, for she knew Shilu had seen the Crowned Girl — the secret, furtive, hidden god of Atyle’s death-dreams.
Atyle had glimpsed the exchange through the god-sight of her right eye, but she had only caught the briefest flicker, as if it had all happened too quickly. The Crowned Girl had stepped through Atyle, crouched in front of Shilu, and touched her face.
Atyle had dearly wished for another visitation from the Crowned Girl; she had not seen the little red-and-white god since the birth of the Newborn Thirteen Arcadia. She harboured no real jealousy toward Shilu for this favour, for she suspected that the Crowned Girl was the one responsible for cutting Shilu’s strings in the first place, and the masterless slave was now at the Commander’s disposal, as she should be.
This fight was already won. All else was formality.
But Atyle liked to listen to the Commander speak. Oration was also a gift from the gods. It was good that the Commander had found her missing faith, the clarity and truth she had misplaced during the long weeks which had followed the cannibal feast on the flesh of Eseld and her friends. The Commander’s eyes were bright now. Atyle wished to hear that faith flower once again.
The debate ended. Elpida focused on Shilu.
“I am to be trusted?” Shilu asked.
“This much, for now,” Elpida said. “Telokopolis, then.”
“Telokopolis.”
The Commander continued.
“When I was alive, during my era of human history, Telokopolis was the only city — the last city, the last redoubt of humankind. She sheltered and cradled a population of approximately nine hundred million, though I believe that number may have been larger in the ages before my own birth. By the Post-Founding calendar I was born in the year seventy thirteen. That’s meant to be the number of years since the city was built, but in truth I suspect she was much older than that. Our records of earlier ages were spotty and confused at best, myth and legend at worst. I don’t know exactly how long she stood before the year of my birth, but certain academics claimed that more people had lived and died within her arms than in all prior ages of humankind.”
Shilu interrupted. “May I ask a question?”
“Of course. Go ahead.”
“Do you truly believe that final statement?”
Elpida smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but perhaps not for the literal reason.”
Shilu fell silent, apparently satisfied. Elpida continued.
“Telokopolis was situated on a plateau — ‘the plateau’, we called it, because it was the only exposed plateau we knew of. Telokopolis and the plateau were surrounded by a forest, a kind of jungle, which we called the green. As far as we could tell, the green covered the entire remainder of the earth’s surface.”
Elpida descended briefly into technical details. She told Shilu about the green and the Silico, about how deadly it was to unprotected humans, about how it grew so rapidly it had to be burned back, lest it find victory in creeping vines and flesh-eating moss. She told Shilu about the many forms of Silico life, about how they flowed up and out of the endless jungle as if disgorged on purpose by some greater mind, bred in alien depths. She told Shilu about those depths also, and the strangeness Elpida and her cadre-sisters had witnessed down there in the dark beneath the world.
Shilu listened in silence, a mask floating in oil. She held her body of black metal thorns perfectly still. No chatter came across the radio. The god-veil storm raged on beyond the tomb, but Atyle fancied even the great hurricane hushed itself before the Commander’s words.
Eventually, Shilu said: “A nanomachine plague.”
Elpida nodded. “In retrospect, probably yes. In fact, I have reason to believe that our conflict with the green is the root of everything we see here today, this nanomachine plague, this afterlife, us.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons. I’ll get to that later. But for now I’ll tell you that we’ve seen images of the edge of this supercontinent, and the ‘ocean’ beyond. Some of the green seems to persist, locked in a process of destruction and creation, against some kind of viscous black goo.”
Shilu blinked. “You’ve seen the shores?”
Elpida smiled. “We have. You haven’t?”
“No. How?”
“We’ll tell you all about it, when you’ve earned a bit more trust.”
Kagami hissed over the radio: “Good choice, Commander. Right answer. Don’t trust her act.”
Shilu paused, totally still, then nodded. “Very well.”
Elpida continuned once again. “So, Telokopolis was under siege, for centuries or perhaps millennia before I was born. But that doesn’t tell you anything about what she really was. Telokopolis, the city herself, she was built in the shape of a spire. There were wonders in the ages before my own, I know that now, things we in Telokopolis did not have access to — space-flight, nanomachine-guided body modification, virtual realities, and more — but Telokopolis herself was taller than any human-crafted object on the face of the earth, at least before her. She was, I believe, the single greatest engineering and architectural marvel in human history. And yes, that includes whatever is going on now, it includes Central’s ‘physical assets’, or whatever else has been built out there — the towers, the orbital ring, all of it. I don’t care what marvels are claimed by the nanomachine ecosystem — Telokopolis was, is, and will be greater than them all.”
Kagami hissed frustration across the radio, complaining about the Commander giving up intel, letting the enemy know what we know. But Atyle merely smiled. The Commander was flexing her muscles, showing Shilu the range of her power.
Shilu didn’t react outwardly to the mention of the towers and the ring or the physical assets, but Atyle’s god-sight saw the tensing of tiny muscles behind her mask, and the flicker of an electrical soul inside the meat of her brain.
Elpida went on: “Images of the city abounded in our culture, but very few people ever got to see her from a distance, with their own eyes, apart from Legionaries patrolling the plateau. But even at the plateau’s edge, one would have to crane their neck to look up, and up, and up, and one could not take in the full beauty of the spire from so close. Most of the distant images we had of her were taken in prior ages, when powered flight still worked.”
Elpida paused. Atyle saw the Commander overcome with emotion, then control herself with an iron fist.
“Telokopolis was beautiful beyond comparison. The Skirts, her lowest levels, rising up in armoured layers, like the foothills of a mountain, or the frills of a real skirt. The monochalkum layer, her outer bones, they would catch the sunlight in glimmering waves of white and silver, as if soaking up the light and transforming it into something else, solid and gleaming.” Elpida raised both hands and gestured as if cupping a pair of hips, encircling a slender waist with her fingers; her voice pushed back the rain and wind of the god-storm with molten passion. “The Skirts gathered together as they rose, narrowing into the thick curves of the middle Spire. Her body climbed toward the heavens, relentlessly. Have you ever seen something like that, Shilu? Something which just keeps going up, and up, and up, and it never seems to end? Because I don’t think you have. I’ve seen these ‘skyscrapers’ out in the corpse-city, and they aren’t worth the name.”
Shilu said nothing.
Elpida took a deep breath; for a moment the winds beyond the tomb seemed to inhale with her.
“But there is an end, eventually. She comes to a point, sharper than a blade. The upper spire ends in the needle-point, aimed at the sky. The needle amid the green. And when you’re out there, lost in the green, you can see her from so far away. She is the unifying point. A mother, calling all humanity home.”
Elpida stopped at the obvious conclusion.
Shilu said: “Very stirring.”
Atyle bristled; the sarcasm in Shilu’s voice was an insult and a question. How could she still doubt, after being visited by the Crowned Girl?
But the Commander merely smiled, more than a little sardonic herself. “I know what you’re thinking, Shilu. You’re thinking I’m a … ” She gestured to Victoria. “Vicky would call it ‘nationalist’, as if I’m extolling the virtues and natural superiority of my ‘country’.”
“Are you not?” Shilu asked.
Kagami’s voice hissed over the trio of headsets: “You do sound a bit like that, Commander. You can’t blame her.”
Vicky tutted, turned aside briefly, and whispered: “Kaga, shut up.”
“It’s fine, Vicky,” Elpida said, without once taking her eyes from Shilu. She reached up and tapped her own headset. “One of my cadre just said that she can’t blame you for that reaction. And she’s right, I can’t blame you for it either, because I don’t comprehend it. In my time we didn’t have such things as countries and nations. I’ve only learned those concepts after death, from people who lived in other times, and they’re still alien to me. It seems no decent way to organise humankind, to divide us against ourselves.”
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Shilu said: “I tend to agree. But that is impossible to avoid.”
Elpida shook her head. “The greatest home-machine ever built by human love and human labour, crystallised into the foundations and returned for eternity, refreshed with each generation of effort, from all, to all, for all. Those aren’t my words, those were words learned by every child in the city. And we — the human beings inside Telokopolis — we did not always live up to that ideal, to her, to the city itself. We were capable of failing her. I’m the first to admit that, because that’s why I died. It’s why all my sisters were murdered.”
Elpida went off on another tangent — she told Shilu about the hated ‘Covenanters’, the civil war inside the city, the disagreement over the green, and the basic outline of her own death. Faith and fury burned behind her purple eyes, holding back the sorrow that Atyle had seen up close.
“But Telokopolis,” Elpida finished. “She never failed us. She never failed a single person. Not even me. She did everything she could to protect me and my sisters, despite the way we ended.”
“You are growing abstract,” said Shilu.
“No, I’m not. You think I am, because you can’t imagine it. But I am being literal, Shilu. I am talking about actual, physical events.”
Shilu narrowed her eyes in silent scepticism.
Elpida said: “Telokopolis was built to house many, many more than nine hundred million people. In my time that was the sum of all humanity, but I’ve since learned that in some prior ages there were billions of people, and I believe every single one of them could have fit comfortably within the walls of Telokopolis — and not merely in a little box, stored away and apartmented out, but truly welcomed within the city. Because that’s what she was for, that’s why she was built. The interior of the city was endless, as long as she was fed fresh nanomachines every century or so. Any person, any human being, could walk up to a wall and request space. Rooms, food, the necessities of life, Telokopolis herself provided, coaxed and cared for by us in turn. She nurtured us and cradled us and gave us space and safety in which to grow. Her veins and arteries ran with power and water and light. Her innards and guts were filled with public spaces and public canteens and all the warrens of human life. Her bones surrounded us, her flesh cushioned us.”
“This is a tiresome metaphor,” Shilu said. “Cities do not do these things by themselves. People do them. Cities are just agglomerations of people and labour.”
“I’m being literal, Shilu. The city did these things herself.”
Shilu frowned.
Victoria spoke up: “She’s being literal, yeah. She’s been over this with each of us before. I know, it’s hard to believe, and she doesn’t do the best job of explaining it, but she’s telling the truth, at least as far as she knows it. Telokopolis was a living city.” Victoria gestured over her shoulder, at the little titan to the rear. “Same technology as Pheiri, just scaled up a billion times. He’s one of her descendants, kind of.”
Shilu’s eyes flickered away from Elpida for the first time in several minutes. She stared at Pheiri, then back at Elpida.
“The city … provided?”
Elpida nodded. “Telokopolis is home, for all humanity. Vicky has explained a concept to me, called ‘homelessness’. This had no place in Telokopolis. It would be like leaving somebody out in the green.” She snorted. “Even the worst elements of our society would never have countenanced that, even the ones who divided us against ourselves and murdered my sisters. It would be like spitting in the face of every human being ever.”
Shilu said, “Is this a joke?”
Vicky sighed. “Nope. She’s being serious.”
Shilu said, “And how was this utopia achieved?”
Elpida smiled. “Telokopolis was alive. Nano-composite bones, machine-meat innards. A body, a mind, even a soul.” She shrugged. “I don’t pretend to understand how it worked, how the city was given life. By my time, we didn’t comprehend her. She was a marvel of engineering beyond us. The Builders, the founders, the ones who constructed the city, they built a miracle. They were smarter than us, in ways I can barely express. They made a home, for all humanity, and rejected nobody.”
Elpida fell silent. Shilu did the same. The darkness of the tomb chamber filled with the static of pounding rain and the distant howl of god-storm’s wind.
Eventually Shilu said: “This is the promise?”
Elpida nodded. “Telokopolis was more than a city. She was an ideal made flesh and bone, gifted with a mind and a soul. Even thrust forward in time, into this nanomachine afterlife, I believe that Telokopolis was and is the most glorious concept and machine human love has ever made. A home for all humanity, no matter the difficulty, no matter the cost. None are left behind, none are rejected — not traitors, not Silico, not Necromancers. The principle is just as applicable now as it was then, as it was always. From all, to all, for all.”
“There have been countless eternal cities,” said Shilu. “Shining cities on their hills. Beacons of civilization. All considered themselves necessary, indispensable, without peer. All are rot and ruin and forgotten now, except in the brains of zombies. What makes yours any different? Telokopolis had civil wars, internal strife, discord and dissolution. It fell, like all the others.”
A grin ripped across Elpida’s face, toothy and triumphant, no longer Elpida.
Howl said, “Because we’re still here, bitch! Telokopolis is forever!”
Shilu blinked.
Elpida lost the grin. “As Howl said, we’re still here. I accept the possibility that the physical bones of Telokopolis may lie cold and abandoned now. But that doesn’t matter, because she is more than that. As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city still stands.”
“One of ‘us’?” Shilu echoed.
“I was a pilot — I had no mother, no father, I was grown in a uterine replicator, as part of a project to develop human beings who could explore the green. My sisters and I were developed with help from the city herself. I don’t think the people who made us understood that they were doing the bidding of Telokopolis, not the Civitas or scientific enquiry or anything else. They were her instruments, however flawed, planting seeds and quickening her daughters. That’s what I am, a daughter of Telokopolis, in blood. I have been resurrected, and she along with me. I am Telokopolis, her avatar, her daughter, her hands, her feet, her voice. And I will continue my mother’s work. From all, to all, for all.”
“A lofty goal. For one person.”
Elpida grinned — and was not Howl this time. “I accept the possibility that Telokopolis, the physical city, may be dead. She may endure as a network presence, or she may not. But I’m still here. Howl is here. Pheiri is here, and he’s a blood child of the city too. More importantly, each and every one of my comrades is within Telokopolis now, and they are also children of the city, even if they never knew her in life. Eseld, who we wronged, can be a child of Telokopolis as well. So, when I say ‘one of us’? I mean all of us. If I fall, Telokopolis does not die with me. My cadre carries it on. That’s why I accepted Eseld into our group, even though we ate her. It’s why I would parley with scavengers, and feed them our own resources. It’s why I’m having this conversation with you, a Necromancer. It’s why I’m doing anything. I see a world in as much need of Telokopolis as the one in which I died. She is necessary, and I will rebuild her. That’s the promise. Even if I die and resurrect a hundred times. Even if I take a thousand years — or a million — to build Telokopolis again, she will be rebuilt, in spirit, in principle. She is already here. You’re looking at her. Telokopolis is forever.”
Vicky echoed those three words. Atyle murmured them too. A whisper came from the trio of headsets, those words murmured in yet more throats.
Shilu said: “Hope never dies?”
Elpida smiled. “Is that something you can imagine yourself fighting for, Shilu?”
“Everything dies,” said Shilu. Then, after a moment’s pause: “Perhaps. It is too abstract for me.”
Atyle was not stirred to faith by the Commander’s words, as most of the others had been. She recognised their basic validity in a different way; the Commander had been chosen by the same occulted god as Atyle, by the hidden kiss of the Crowned Girl, though she knew it not. Atyle was bound to this task, to this monumental quest, by the deal she had made in the underworld between life and death.
Still, the Commander was a beautiful orator.
Her stories of Telokopolis in life made Atyle think of the cities she had known, of finery and squalor placed alongside each other. The cities of Atyle’s life had been dirty and hypocritical, full of perfumed rot, the palace a jewel ridden with worms, the corridors peopled by lies.
She liked the sound of Telokopolis. She would like to live within a god.
“I have additional questions,” said Shilu. “Before I explain myself.”
“Ask away,” Elpida answered with a little chuckle. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere, not with that storm outdoors.”
Shilu began to ask many questions; Elpida began to answer. The Commander explained much, about many things that she had told the others many times before, from the outlines of the ‘pilot program’ and the ‘combat frames’ — the titans of old — to the details they had gleaned from Thirteen Arcadia and Pheiri’s memories. She told Shilu about the re-flowering period where Telokopolan culture had flowed out over the supercontinent once again, while the city herself had lain chained by human arrogance and lack of faith. The Commander told Shilu about Pheiri, about Thirteen Arcadia, about Melyn and Hafina, the maids to the little titan. She told her about Central’s physical assets, about Ooni and Pira, about the original meeting with Eseld. She spoke of Howl and hidden presences deep in the network. She told Shilu everything.
Atyle’s mind wandered off. Her eyes followed.
To Atyle’s mortal left eye the tomb chamber was a pit choked with sticky black darkness. A coffin filled with rot, tucked beneath the earth. Elpida’s heroic band were reduced to bugs scurrying beneath a damp rock.
But to the blessed god-sight of her right eye the tomb was a warren of potential.
Several hundred revenants were scurrying through the corridors, the soft, wet, pinkish machines of their bodies pumping away with electromagnetic activity, little hives of the machines of the gods. Each group kept clear of all others, afraid of contact, terrified of combat in these rabbit-warren tunnels. Many were paralysed with indecision, or desperately searching for rooms with defensible exits, places to hunker down and wait out the gods at war above their heads. They were ripe for the plucking, all of them, but wait too long and the fruit would fall and burst.
Through several black metal walls to the left, Atyle saw the figures of Puk and Tati, those clever little scavengers who the Commander had used to start an irresistible process. Atyle watched them for a while. Puk led the way along the floor while Tati followed, carrying the donated corpse in loops of tarry flesh, clinging to walls and ceiling as she went.
Atyle stood up, indicating to Elpida that she was merely stretching her limbs; she was perfectly safe beneath the aegis of Pheiri’s guns, after all. Victoria followed her example, rising to her feet and rolling her shoulders, though she clutched her weapon and darted nervous little glances at the dark mouths of the passages which led from the chamber. Atyle looked at Victoria with amusement; the soldier was so heavily armoured she could certainly not run away. Her weapon was most interesting though, little frozen explosions cradled in metal eggs.
Atyle returned her attention to Puk and Tati, while Elpida and Shilu spoke on.
As Atyle watched, the distant pair finally blundered into another group, in a dark tangle of corridor junctions and narrow archways. Squeals split the distant air, heard in the tomb chamber as less than whispers; weapons were raised and brandished, claws slid from sheaths, threats and warnings screamed and shouted above the din of the god-storm.
Victoria stepped close and peered at Atyle face’s, then followed her gaze to the blank wall of the tomb chamber. After a moment she whispered: “Atyle? What are you looking at?”
“Change.”
A stand-off had ensued. Tati repeated the trick she had attempted to pull on Elpida — growing the shadows and shapes and whispered voices of other revenants from the tarry mass of her body, to make it seem that her beloved little Puk had many friends, rather than just one. Shadowy guns menaced, shadowy amour lurked in the darkness, shadowy tricks forestalled a fight.
Tense conversation passed between Puk and Tati and the ones they had surprised. Atyle’s god-sight saw the vibrations of the air, but she was too far away to read the words.
After a while, Puk and Tati went on their way. The other group peeled back to let them pass, gun-mouths following them the whole way.
But then those others — a ragged band of five — began to move cautiously and circuitously through the corridors, making for Pheiri’s tomb chamber, following the scent of meat.
Atyle smiled. A rock had been cast. The avalanche was not far off.
She turned her eyes upward and outward next, toward the ceiling of the tomb chamber, toward the dozens of ceilings past that one in turn, into the depths of the grave itself. Atyle did not understand the purpose of the millions of mechanisms moving inside the walls of the tomb, but if she paused and concentrated she could see the beginnings of a pattern, like a mandala or an optical trick woven into a rug. Power and knowledge crackled back and forth across sheets of metal. Gears and wheels and tiny mechanisms turned and joined and counted time. Rods and sparks and plates moved in a dance too fine to follow.
The previous tomb, the one in which she had awoken, had not been performing this dance.
Atyle looked beyond, into the swirling vortex of the god-storm.
Kagami, Foolish Princess, believed she understood the ‘hurricane’. She could measure the speed of the tearing winds and the depths of the shredded raindrops, but she could not comprehend that this storm was the veil of the gods. The gods were at war; this much Atyle had known in the space between life and death, before bodily resurrection. But here, the weight of the storm had hidden and veiled that war, forcing the gods to play other hands and attempt other techniques. Shilu was one such move on the board, her arrival concealed beneath this blanket across heaven.
Atyle looked to the right — to the east — almost as an afterthought, and confirmed the continued presence of one other thing Kagami could not see.
The Leviathan was still standing there, beyond the tomb.
Atyle’s god-sight had been unable to pick out the Leviathan against the backdrop of the storm until it had drawn close. The storm was simply too dense with debris, even for her. The Leviathan had made plenty of noise, roaring as it had approached, but now it had fallen silent. It stood well beyond its own arm’s length from the tomb, enduring the world-breaking wind with many cubits worth of steel-shod skin and bones of something stronger than iron. Its back was hunched against the storm, its legs anchored into the ground with claws of burning pitch and bubbling acid. Something like this could never have drawn so close without the storm to pin the worm-guard beneath the graveworm’s bulk.
And all it did was stare down at the tomb with a hundred eyes.
This Leviathan was yet another hand played in the great game of the gods, though Atyle knew not by who, or for what purpose.
Elpida and Shilu drew to a close. Atyle returned her attention to the conversation, returned her feet to Elpida’s side, and dropped into a squat. Victoria followed, sitting back down after casting one last nervous glance at the edge of the chamber.
Shilu stared, her white mask floating in the darkness, her thorn-studded body washed blood-red by Pheiri’s lights.
Elpida waited until both were seated, then said: “I’ve kept my end of the deal, Shilu.”
Shilu nodded. “I’ve seen the spire of your Telokopolis. I saw it from a great distance. Only once, a very long time ago.”
The Commander’s face could not contain her hunger. She leaned forward. Vicky blew out a big sigh. Whispers of warning crackled from the headsets, but Atyle paid them no mind.
“You’re certain?” Elpida said. “You’ve seen the physical city, you’ve seen Telokopolis?”
Shilu nodded again. “Yes. I believe I did. You told me the truth, and I needed to verify that truth. It stands on a wide plateau, just as you described. It is extraordinarily difficult to access. Graveworms do not venture within five hundred miles. No tomb stands within a thousand miles. The city — not Telokopolis, I mean, but the nanomachine city, the corpse we live within — does not colonise the plateau itself, and struggles to grow within about a hundred miles of the edge. I don’t know why that’s the case, it’s only what I saw with my own eyes. And … you did not exaggerate.”
Elpida’s lips stood parted, her purple eyes gone wide, her breath desperate for this morsel. “Exaggerate what?”
“She is beautiful. It has been a long time, but I remember that.”
Elpida burst into a smile. “I told you.”
“And she is dead.”
Elpida’s face wavered.
“I am sorry,” said Shilu. “But you were correct. Whatever the mega-structure is, it lies silent and empty. All I beheld was cold bones. As I said, nothing goes there. It is a dead zone.”
Elpida fell silent. Vicky placed one gauntlet on her back. Whispers came from the trio of headsets — “Commander? Commander?”
Then Elpida wet her lips and composed her face. “I suspected as much. Thank you for your honesty, Shilu.”
“You are taking this very well.”
Elpida smiled. “I won’t lie, confirmation hurts. But perhaps you were mistaken—”
Vicky hissed, “Elpi … ”
A tut and a snapped word came from the radio in Atyle’s ears.
But Elpida carried on, undeterred. “The city may be dormant, or in hibernation, or merely waiting. Or perhaps her body is dead, and she lives on only as some kind of network presence. I don’t know for certain, I can’t know, but as I already explained, it doesn’t matter. As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city still stands. Her physical shell is not redundant, but it is not necessary. And perhaps her body can be resurrected, like ours. Now, Shilu, I need to ask, how did you—”
Shilu interrupted. “You are right to place faith in your Telokopolis.”
Elpida paused. “You agree with me now? You accept the promise?”
Shilu’s eyes seemed harder than before; Atyle watched closely.
“The network is full of ghosts,” Shilu said. “Most of them are below Central’s conscious notice, because Central is not conscious, not in the way we understand it. One such ghost very well may be the memory or imprint or mind of your city. I cannot say for sure. But we have been brought together by some design, you and I. Larger powers than us are at work here.”
Atyle said: “We merely glimpse their passing, do we not?”
Shilu turned her head and made eye contact.
Atyle knew she could not speak of the Crowned Girl, even if she wished so. This was a secret, between her and a furtive god, one who must remain hidden at all costs. That secret was inviolate, sacred, and real. If she dared break faith, her lips would be sealed by fire.
But she could share this silent moment with another agent of the beautiful ghost who had kissed her forehead.
“Are you still a slave and a puppet?” she asked Shilu.
Shilu did not answer.
Vicky sighed, then said, “Larger powers than us, sure. A design, and we’re all just rats in a maze. Love it. Did you just find religion, Shilu?”
Shilu looked at Victoria instead. “No. It’s not so different to being a counter-intelligence agent. I do what greater powers require of me. I always have.”
Vicky’s lips curled with distaste. “Shit. Right.”
“Shilu,” Elpida said. “I need to ask you questions, a lot of questions, about Central, about the trio of towers out there on the supercontinent, about the network, Lykke, Necromancers, everything you know. But first, why did you have a chance to see Telokopolis, and how can we reach the plateau? How—”
“Because I hunted one of you before,” said Shilu.
The rain-static and storm-winds filled a brief silence.
“One of us?” Elpida asked.
“One with your skin colour, your white hair, your purple eyes. A pilot, a ‘Telokopolan’, though she never used that word. That was why I had the rare opportunity to see the city’s corpse. She was a Necromancer, not human-derived, but a post-human feedback loop. She wore the face of the ‘pilot phenotype’, as you call it, among many other faces. But when she went rogue, she went for the city’s bones, as if the Telokopolan face had become real. I was sent to hunt her down. I never learned her real name, but she called herself ‘Hope.’”
Elpida just stared. Vicky muttered ‘fuck me’. Kagami, over the radio, started laughing, low and bitter.
Elpida swallowed. “What happened to her?”
“I caught her on a mountainside, within view of the city. She fought very well, but I won, and I returned her to the network. I don’t know what became of her, either archival or storage or deletion. Central’s subroutines demanded I purge all memory of the sights of the spire. But I did not.”
Elpida stared. “And you’re the one who was sent to assassinate me. The one Necromancer with solid prior proof that Telokopolis still stands.”
“I am sorry,” said Shilu. “That is the short answer, and the long answer, and it tells us both nothing useful.”