Nulapeiron, the fifteenth world, was different.

Eight centuries after Fulgor fell, the Anomaly manifested in one realm of Nulapeiron after another, taking control of rulers and soldiers, absorbing key humans into its gestalt, but not every human, not yet. Perhaps it was the logotropes in the Lords’ and Ladies’ brains that made absorption so challenging; or the differences in cognition throughout the populace that arose due to logosophical training; or perhaps it was the greater scale and environment of that population, with billions living in subterranean demesnes, not a few million (or less) on the surface or in the skies.

The final possibility – perhaps with the greater likelihood – was that the far greater distance from Fulgor made the difference. Perhaps it was true that there was only a single Anomaly, increasingly extended each time a new hellworld was born.

Because of the Oracles, well established as tools of the ruling Lords and Ladies, ‘Fate’ and ‘Chaos’ had become curse words; yet the undenied truth of every Oracular report had failed to help against the Anomalous invasion. Worse: the lack of reports from further in the future formed a de facto prediction of defeat.

For all of those past eight centuries Kenna had been living here: the last seven hundred years in her crystalline form, whose capabilities continued to grow and yet were nowhere near their final development. If she were right in her estimates, every century that passed was like a single day in a human life. She would be entering full maturity – approximately equivalent to a human’s thirtieth birthday – a million years from now.

Such a long time in which to keep herself unharmed.

For nearly a century now, in her deep stronghold beneath a subterranean sea, she had been alternately priestess – the word volva came from hidden memory – and chieftain to some of the Kobolds who lived in this unofficial realm. They were not the only line of once humans merged cyborg-like with one or other variant of technology; as a crystalline being herself, Kenna had been instrumental in these blue skinned part quickstone beings creating a culture of their own.

The Kobolds had long been allied with the Grey Shadow movement, whose antecedents stretched all the way back to the dissidents first organised by the undercover Pilot, Linda Gunnarsson. Long dedicated to quiet subversion of the status quo, they now – for the first time – began to regard their Crystal Lady as a war ruler. And when they took a special prisoner whose name had featured heavily in the revolutionary movement before such things became irrelevant, it was to Kenna that they brought the man.

He was a commoner turned Lord (for the first time in a century in the region controlled by the Congressio-Interstata Beth-Gamma) who had turned his back on both the incumbent system and the rebels’ self serving alternative; but he was remembered as a figurehead in the revolution.

To many, he was simply Lord One-Arm.

His name was Tom Corcorigan.

Kenna waited in the great hall that was kept cool despite the magma that surrounded it, and watched as they brought him in: a one-armed man in his mid-thirties, with the ascetic look of an endurance athlete. There were fragments of holo footage within the revolutionary movement that showed Corcorigan fighting hand-to-hand, and the significance to Kenna was this: Lord One-Arm was fully human, but he fought like a Pilot.

Clearly there was much to be discovered beyond his reputation. Like most people entering her presence, he stood as if hypnotised, in awe. It would be easy to explore his mind.

The question was, how much should she assist the man?

Around Nulapeiron, armies were fighting back against invading forces which in many cases were almost entirely human, but under the control of Anomaly-absorbed officers. The defenders included fully armed battalions led by General Lord Ygran, a fierce and experienced strategist. His forces boasted fully armoured arachnargoi – near-living vehicles able to carry sometimes hundreds of troops, their forms like huge spiders with strong tendrils, perfectly adapted to both the natural deep caverns of Nulapeiron and the halls and tunnels of human demesnes.

And there were the fringe tribes: wild-riding nomads who practically lived in the saddles of their speeding arachnasprites. Their hard, fierce existence made them cunning, pitiless guerrilla fighters. But however hard the various defenders fought, it could only be a delaying action.

It was not as if the Anomaly cared about any of its components dying.

What Nulapeiron’s defence required was something different, and every possibility needed to be investigated, including the one-armed man before her now.

—You are most welcome in this place, Thomas Corcorigan.

He continued to look awestruck.

‘I don’t deserve to be here.’

In her presence, he meant. She tried to form her response in an idiom natural to one whose first language was Nov’glin, the contemporary descendant of Novanglin.

—Your form belongs in this place. Then: Tell me of yourself, my fighting Lord. So he told her of his life.

There was much to tell, and as he related what he remembered, Kenna thought back to another time when she, or rather Rhianna Chiang, allowed one Roger Blackstone’s deep subconscious mind to unburden itself of secrets that his consciousness could not be allowed to share; except that in this case, Tom Corcorigan knew exactly what had happened to him, and consciously nursed the stubbornness growing inside him, enabling him to fight back.

The highlights were: aged fourteen standard, he had witnessed an undercover Pilot being hunted down and killed, but not before she had bequeathed him a crystal that told him of Pilot history; then an Oracle called Gérard d’Ovraison predicted the death of Tom’s father – who subsequently wasted away for no good medical reason – after d’Ovraison carried away Tom’s mother; later, the amputation of Tom’s arm as punishment for theft he had been caught up in, not instigated; then servitude and the driven discipline to better himself, to become a Lord in his own right; and the need to kill an Oracle, up close with a blade, even though the Oracle foresaw his own long and peaceful life, lasting well into undisturbed old age.

But Tom Corcorigan, once a boy who had dreamt of being a poet, sometime Lord One-Arm and revolutionary icon, had accomplished his vengeance, and more.

Kenna mulled over this while Corcorigan waited, standing in peaceful trance. There were two pieces of information she could give him, to remain perhaps within his subconscious yet available to his intuition. The first was a logical thing to share.

—The Grey Shadows have Pilot agents among them.

Corcorigan’s long involvement with the revolutionary movement, now part of the increasingly scattered resistance, meant that he had contacts among the disparate, loosely allied organisations that comprised the Grey Shadows. The point was that Nulapeiron’s resistance was doomed unless someone managed to get external allies, powerful allies, involved. In the past, Pilotkind’s response to nascent Anomalous incursion had been to get clear at the first sign of trouble, and quarantine the planet.

But the situation here was different, the timescale longer, and the continuing presence of undercover Pilots, however sparse their numbers, gave Kenna some hope.

The second piece of information, though . . . That was a wild thought, half rational. The Pilot history that Corcorigan had immersed himself in, the crystal that he still carried inside a stallion-shaped talisman around his neck, had focused on the McNamara clan, and was in fact a copy of a tale that Rhianna Chiang had owned as a girl in Labyrinth. It meant that Lord One-Arm knew almost as much Pilot history as Kenna did, and so this would make sense to him: