EXCERPT: THE COBALT KNIGHT

  Night on the Fifth was dark and long. Zhou lit a cigarette, watched the cherry glow ochre against the pitch of the city air; inhaled, exhaled, followed the smoke trail with her eyes all the way to the starless sky-rim.

  There was no real sky here, of course. You had to go up to Seventh to even glimpse light coming down the wells of the spokes that tethered each of the great rings to one another. Ninth, perhaps, was a dream in aurora colors burnt off the edges of the spinning wheel. Zhou would not see it in her lifetime.

  She was a night-guard for the Yellow Tiger: born in a shack above it, raised by the din of plinko and mag-driven roulette wheels, of men and constructs alike shouting and squalling and moaning and singing; oft as not there was the stink of rice wine and the shimmer of Starlight—not the real stuff they had after sunset on Ninth, of course, but what you’d slip into a vein to feel like you were there instead. (Zhou had been plied many times and refused all of them. She knew she’d be inevitably disappointed.)

  Sunset wasn’t even a concept here. Nor was sunrise. The closest you had was the circadian glow of the city; and that, Zhou had to admit, was real damn pretty nights like these, all kaleidoscopic and wreathed in argent fog—though she was sure it would still pale next to a real night on the cosmos, up top.

  As it was, the day-lights were extinguished for the next eight hours. On her eyescreen the clock read 19:03. She took another drag, held it, savored the taste of smoke and synth-cloves.

  Behind her, through the door, muffled sounds of a struggle. Someone yelled. One, two, three—the unmistakable sound of a glass shattering, close, probably just on the other side of the wall. Then silence.

  Zhou let out a breath—the smoke clouded around her—and looked at the citrine tiger statue that kept silent watch, as ever, by the big round door. Alright, thought Zhou, if I hear one more glass break, I’m going in. You’ll have to hold the door alone for me, buddy.

  Nothing. The tiger seemed to wink back with electric eyes, as if to say: You’re joking. They posted you on door guard tonight.

  Zhou shrugged, lifted the cig again, and all hell broke loose.

  First: The door shattered outward, wholesale. This was particularly improbable because the door was made of a solid half-meter of starsteel, smuggled in at high cost from Ninth, not the sort of thing you usually saw on crude gambling establishments, and certainly not the sort of thing that shattered, like matchsticks in a child’s fist.

  Second: The night split in half with a crack. Momentarily everything was spinning. When it settled again, Zhou found herself staring up at the distant, dark ceiling, where flyers glimmered like the stars she couldn’t see.

  Third: The ground shook. Zhou, on her back, willed herself to move and found she could not. Once, twice, then a third time—and into her vision swam two glowing coals of eyes, and then a steaming maw, and below that a wide golden collar, and a great dark fist closed fast around an axe—blazing with hard light and big enough, she thought, to set the heavens afire.

  The figure took another step toward her and revealed, behind it, the remaining half of the tiger statue gently smoking, its wired internals sparking into the night.

  Oh, thought Zhou. I’m so fucked.

  The maw opened, and the thing spoke:

  “Where,” it rumbled in a voice like the steel earth itself, “the FUCK is my money, you little cunt?”

  I don’t have your money! Zhou tried to say. I don’t even know who you are! I’m just the door guard! She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Desperately she willed her body to move; it did not answer. Her left arm was twisted before her face at a funny angle, and the total lack of feeling in it made her blood run cold.

  The smoke was clearing now. Around the thing’s head it haloed two great and twisting ebon horns. These swung toward her; so did the ember-eyes; for a moment Zhou felt very, very small. Then the face swung back, and up, and she realized it was not looking at her at all.

  Behind her a voice said, “I don’t have your money—and even if I did, you need to let it go. You played it away, fair and square.”

  It wasn’t any voice Zhou knew. In vain she tried to turn her head; then a foot came down over her, right onto her left hand, and then from the foot followed a leg, and another, and she found herself staring up a rather shapely backside to a face she could hardly half-see—but enough to know it was handsome, probably a woman’s.

  “Lies!” Bull-Head’s roar rattled dust from the ruined ceiling. “Lies and insults. You are far too ugly to deal in either, bitch.”

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  The bitch in question said, “That isn’t very nice.” The foot left Zhou’s hand. “Besides, it’s only a fifty-hand of credits. Come on now, Shri Agni, let’s talk about this.”

  “Only? ONLY?” The rest of the citrine tiger went flying, followed by a distant thudding impact. Bull-Head was moving again: the ground shivered once, twice, thrice, and then the whole of Zhou’s vision was filled with the aurora fire of the axe’s edge, perhaps a foot from her face. Her asshole went tight.

  Bull-Head said, “That fifty-hand was all my family had. And my name isn’t Agni.”

  The bitch—the woman—said, “Maybe don’t gamble with your family’s wealth next time?”

  The axe went up; Zhou followed it with her eyes and saw that his own were blazing now, no longer embers but twin stars. “There will be no next time, Nightingale, daughter of no stars,” said Bull-Head, in a voice like prophecy, like gravity itself. “Tonight you die.”

  “Oh well,” said the woman, “I tried.”

  What happened next Zhou could not quite explain. There was a flare of blue light, so intensely, deeply blue that she thought for a moment a bomb had gone off. For a second she desperately blinked back an afterimage of chartreuse sparks. Then it cleared, and she beheld a vision—an improbability—an impossibility: cobalt starsteel in the shape of a woman that swam and shimmered like it was alive, burning with the leftovers of that blue flare.

  A resounding clang: Bull-Head had dropped the axe. No—his hand was still around it. But it ended now in a smoking stump.

  Zhou became dimly aware that someone was screaming. For a moment she thought it was herself—but no, it came from Bull-Head, head thrown back, whistling like a tea kettle, high and shrill and girlish. The vision in blue stood between him and Zhou. She saw now the long straight sword—the same blue as that armor, only brighter—the middle bright as a star, the edge smoking gently, dark blood already staining the pavement beneath.

  An angel, thought Zhou in awe, come to reckon.

  The screaming had resolved itself into words: a name, or a curse, or a prayer, maybe; not in Ringspeak, nothing Zhou knew. The angel, however, seemed to. She stepped forward, back still to Zhou; she looked down at the man, whose screams died down, now, into a whimper, and then nothing at all.

  “Now,” said the angel. “Would you like to talk about this, or—”

  Bull-Head lifted his head, yawned wide his jaws, and from them spewed forth a blinding stream of orange fire, which enveloped the angel wholly till Zhou could not see her at all.

  No! she wanted to scream. But her voice would not come, which was a good thing—for it would have drawn attention to her—but then the heat struck her, and she recoiled out of instinct, and Bull-Head’s eyes jerked toward her, and she knew she was dead.

  Only then the fire stopped—and Zhou thought at first that Bull-Head had simply closed his mouth, but no, his jaws were still wide open. It seemed he was choking on something she could not see. Then she saw a faint glow growing within his throat: not orange like the fire had been, but silver, then white, brighter and brighter till it erupted, too, from his mouth. It was straight and perfectly colorless and not hot at all, and it ended in a point not unlike a blade’s tip.

  It was a blade’s tip. It surged forth out of his mouth, forcing his jaws apart wider and wider, and now Zhou saw the faintest blue at its edges, like the biggest, brightest star on the charts she’d studied as a child.

  Beautiful, she thought, and watched as his head split open around it.

  The skull went first. Dark skin peeled and fell away like burning paper; darker blood-steam hissed up and out from under. The bone plates under that shattered and came apart like ceramic. Then chunks of gray matter were bubbling out of the ruined cavity like tofu pudding overflowing its pot, and wherever they met the blade’s edge they burst into superheated vapor, did not even burn first.

  The bull-headed man sighed. His ember eyes went out.

  And then a shadow that Zhou had taken for more of the darkness itself reached out, into the wreck of his mouth, gripped the end of the blade, and pulled it the rest of the way from his corpse. Blade in hand, the shadow shrugged her shoulders, rolled them backward, and scales of charcoal split in long gleaming cobalt seams along her arms and legs, her hips and wrists, and fell from her in a great cascade.

  The angel looked up from the bull-man’s corpse. If she saw Zhou, she said nothing, which gave her such great relief that she might have released her bladder then and there if not for her lingering numbness. It felt like she was floating, in fact, as if this were all a dream—she still could not believe that the Yellow Tiger was half gone, in smoking ruins, and that she had come very close to dying just now, and was possibly also out of a job, so perhaps dead anyway.

  At least from this close she could make out every mesmerizing detail of the cobalt angel, who stood still, now, very still, almost like a construct—her hands were closed around the blade like gloves; every inch of her glowed with strange blue light; it had to be a suit, surely armor, like a knight’s, but fitted so tightly and so beautifully that it seemed to be part of her. The way color and shape alike roiled impossibly over its gleaming skin—Zhou had seen old images of the surfaces of stars, close up, that she was now reminded of—made her dizzy. And there was not a single scratch on her.

  Someone screamed. The angel turned. Her face at last was visible, and Zhou found it very curious that it did not seem to be covered at all, nor marked, like the rest of her. It was handsome indeed.

  Wait, she wanted to say, tell me your name. But that would have been foolish; she probably really would have died if she’d done that, judging by the cold fire of that blade, and in the angel’s eyes. Fortunately, her tongue did not move in time, like the rest of her; and then she blinked, and the angel was gone.

  In the morning, while agents of the Realm came to talk with the boss about insurance and criminal investigations, Zhou picked her way through the whole neighborhood to ask if they had seen the woman in blue, if they knew where she could find her. She spent the whole day-cycle doing it, even after the gambling house had dismissed her, even when she came back to find herself locked out of the crooked little room above. But the answer, no matter how she begged and pleaded, was always the same: Nobody had any idea what she was talking about.