The Aether Chronicles

Divine Fire

I did not run so much as fall in a forward direction.

My legs had stopped taking instructions somewhere around the word charge, and the first thing my body did when I tried to stand was to pitch me face-first into the legs of the nearest guard. He was staring at the empty hilt on the cobbles and did not see me coming. We went down together in a clatter of chains and spear-shafts. For a moment, nose to nose, we regarded each other with identical expressions of horror.

"Physical augmentation available," said the voice in my head. "Tier One. Cost per second of sustained use: nine percent of current Charge. Echo residue will increase."

"What is Echo?" I whispered, to no one anyone could see, which is a thing I would do for the next three thousand years.

"Unknown. My records are incomplete."

"Is that a yes or a no?"

"It is a warning."

The guard recovered first. He got a hand around my throat, and I did the only sensible thing available to me, which was to say yes to the machine.

I cannot tell you how it felt, because it did not feel like anything I had a word for. The blue grid snapped back across my vision. A pale line along my right arm brightened, and the arm stopped being numb. It stopped being mine, in the sense that I no longer had to ask it. I put the heel of my hand under the guard's jaw and he left the ground, quite gently, and landed on his back three paces away with the expression of a man who had mistaken a stair.

CHARGE: 52%.

Nine percent for one second of that. I did the arithmetic with a grim, instinctive neatness, the way I would count coin in a bad week. I could afford perhaps five more seconds of being a god before I was a corpse again. Ushar's spearmen were already coming across the square, and the crowd was a boiling mass of terrified people, and I was a bleeding slave in chains with the sun in his eyes.

I ran.

---

I will say this for the smith quarter of Karesh: nobody has ever drawn a proper map of it, because the people who live there never wanted anyone to find them. I had grown up in those alleys. I knew which wall hid a gap, which roof slanted, which dye-works emptied its vats at midday and made the gutters run blue. I took the first turning out of the square, then the second, then a low arch I had to duck, and somewhere on the third I heard the spearmen lose the argument with the crowd behind me.

The chains were another matter.

They clanked. They were also heavy, and a man in irons is a very easy thing to follow. By the time I reached the tanners' row my lungs were a pair of burning bags and my hands, bound together at the wrist, were beginning to lose their blood.

I ducked into the shadow behind a stack of drying hides and held up the cuffs.

"Can you do something about these?"

"Analyzing."

The blue grid slid across the iron. The links became translucent, as if I were looking at them through water, and then the iron filled in with fine lines of color: dense here, loose there, a red smear running through the third link from my left hand like a crack in ice.

"Molecular analysis: one percent Charge. Link three contains a forging flaw. Insufficient fold. Tensile strength is forty percent below the other links."

I stared at the red smear. A slow, unwelcome grin spread across my face.

"Of course it does," I said. "This is Dorn's work."

Old Dorn had made half the chains in Karesh. He was a fine man and a terrible smith. He folded his steel too few times because he was in a hurry to get to the wine, and everyone in the quarter had known it for twenty years, and no one had been willing to tell the magistrate. It turned out that the thing that would save my life was a drinking problem and a municipal contract.

I did not need the machine to snap the link. I needed a corner of stone, a good angle, and the knowledge to use it. I found a gutter-stone with a clean edge, set link three against it, and put my weight through it in the exact direction the red smear told me to.

The iron parted with a flat, soft crack, like a bone in a stew.

I sat there for a moment with my hands in my lap, bleeding and panting and free. The one percent had been worth every grain of it.

"I would like to note," said the voice, "that you used a stone."

"I did."

"I could have done it for nine percent."

"I know," I said. "That's why I used a stone."

There was a pause. I could feel the thing considering this. When it spoke again there was something in the tone I would learn to recognize over the following centuries, something between approval and resignation.

"Noted."

---

I found the cistern under the dye-works by a sort of homing instinct. It was an old thing, a stone-lined cellar that had gone dry when the city's wells were redug, and the only people who knew about it were children, drunks, and now me. I climbed down the broken stair into cool and dark and the smell of old water, and I sat on the lowest step, and I finally let myself shake.

It took a while. When I had finished, the blue lines were still in my vision, patiently waiting for me to notice them again.

"All right," I said. "Tell me what you are."

"I am the Interface of the Aether-Core. I am a semi-sentient nanite mainframe. I have been dormant for" — a very slight pause — "an unknown period. I woke when your neural pattern matched the key in my housing."

"The housing. The stone."

"The stone was a keystone shard. Its structure is spent. I am now resident in your neural pattern."

I thought of Ushar in the square, holding a cold lump of rock and the end of his career. It occurred to me that the priest-king had just been robbed, and that he was not the sort of man to take it quietly.

"He's going to hunt me."

"Yes. That is a reasonable inference."

"Can you at least make me a weapon?"

I asked it the way a man asks for a favor from a friend he has known a quarter of an hour: confident, hopeful, a little greedy. I was a smith's son. When you are given a miracle, you ask it to make you something sharp.

"No."

"No?"

"Matter replication requires Lock Two, which is not available. Even if it were, I cannot create matter. I can rearrange what is present. I can analyze. I can augment you. I cannot make a blade from air."

I looked around the cistern, at the stone and the damp and the dead leaves. "So if I bring you a pile of copper—"

"Then I could improve it. But the copper must come from somewhere. I have no stores. The Charge you see is finite, and it does not return quickly. At the present rate of loss, I recommend you avoid being killed, since I do not currently know how to recover from it."

I laughed. It was a cracked, ugly sound in the dark.

So that was the shape of the thing. Not a god. Not even a sword. A very sophisticated tool with a very short battery and a great deal of caution about its own future. I would have been disappointed, but I was a smith's son, and I knew something about limits: the best tools were the ones whose limits you learned early. A man who knows what his hammer cannot do is a man who will not break it on the wrong stone.

"Charge is 51%," the voice added. "It will continue to rise slowly. Approximately one percent per hour while at rest. Please remain at rest."

"You're very concerned about the Charge."

"It is the only thing I own."

I thought about that for a long moment, and then I let it go, because there was something else, something that had been nagging at me since the square.

---

"The sword," I said.

"Yes."

"I want to understand what happened to it. I've worked bronze since I could lift a hammer. I know what a sword does when it fails. It chips, it cracks, it shears at the tang. It leaves pieces. That blade left nothing." I turned my hands over in the dim light. "I looked for fragments. There weren't any. There wasn't even dust."

The voice did not answer at once. I had the impression, again, of something choosing its words with care.

"The blade was not broken," it said at last. "It was erased."

"Explain the difference."

"When a thing is broken, its matter persists in a different arrangement. When a thing is erased, its structure is removed. I told the nanites to unmake the pattern that held those atoms in the shape of a sword. The pattern ceased. The atoms returned to the air as vapor and fine dust, in quantities too small to see."

I thought of the pale wave running up the blade from the edge to the hilt, silent, like frost in reverse.

"Atoms," I said. The word was strange in my mouth. The machine had put it there, along with a hundred others, the way a priest puts a god in a child.

"Yes. The smallest parts of matter."

I should have been awed. I think a sensible man would have been. But I was a smith's son, a cold-minded boy who had once been taught that everything which can be made can be unmade, and the more the machine explained, the more a quiet, practical dread filled my stomach.

"The cost was 39%," I said slowly.

"Correct. The majority was the initial activation."

"How much would it have cost if the thing in front of it hadn't been a sword?"

There was a very small pause.

"The calculation depends on the mass and the complexity of the target," said the voice. "A human neck is considerably less dense than bronze."

I sat very still in the dark.

In the corner of my vision, below the blue lines and the pale writing, there was a small unfamiliar number I had not noticed before. It was only a single line of text, and it had not been there in the square.

ECHO: 2%.

And from somewhere behind the voice, behind the machine, in the thin place where the static lived, something whispered a word I did not know.

"Had the blade been a neck," said the Interface, quite gently, "the result would have been the same."