At the same time, the scattered man had mostly regathered and had one working leg and arm, and his head (which had the sharp features and high cheekbones of a Southeastern Nomad) was connected to his neck by a dozen pulsing red strands. Vigil recognized this order: the man was a Nukekubi, a colony creature with a detachable head. It was one of the racial absurdities left over from the Second Sweep, when the Myrmidons wanted to save on lift mass on starships and did not ship the colonist’s bodies with them, but insisted they be grown of native materials on arrival. The Fox Maidens by tossing their heads aloft had been trying subtly to warn him of this attack.

The man drew the broom handle, and it opened like an old-fashioned sword cane—one more thing from a peddler’s tale—and he feinted and lunged.

Vigil had sheathed his heart and lungs in layers of deflective tissue when he had first entered the alleyway, moved some organs into unexpected locations, and switched most of his body from biological to mechanical systems just before the blow from the girl’s Halligan bar struck home. (It was a technique from a race called the Hormagaunts, who dated from the brief and largely forgotten period between prehistory and posthumanity, between the invention of picture writing and the invention of ghost endorcism.) Vigil could move his limbs freely despite the horrific wound running through his chest cavity.

As the Nukekubi man lunged with his sword, he also threw his head from his body, bearing itself aloft with tiny pulses emitted from his dripping spinal column, and opened his mouth and screamed a verbal indication. The scream petrified Vigil’s nervous system, since it was a mudra, not a real scream (for the head while aloft had no lungs), and the head swooped to bite at Vigil’s neck with suddenly elongating teeth.

The perceptive internal which had been so subtly influenced by the Fox Maiden now saved Vigil, as it (for some reason) was not affected by the scream. That internal triggered Vigil’s battle internals, and his fighting reflexes took over.

Without knowing what he was doing or being able to stop it, Vigil drove the elbow of his right arm into the eye socket of the oncoming head, and with the same motion, he elongated the vendetta wand in his right hand to parry the sword blow from the scattered man’s still-fighting body. The nanotechnologically active dust flew from the blade like pollen, but pulses from the large red metal amulet on Vigil’s wrist neutralized the dust in a spray of sparks.

The vendetta wand struck the man’s blade on the unsharpened side, throwing the blade aside and driving the infinitely sharp cutting side into and through the haft of the Halligan bar, severing it. The woman gasped in shock. She had evidently not been told that Vigil Starmanson was as strong as a giant. He grasped the free end of the severed bar, and, before she could react, drove it into her midriff, making her double over. He tore the bar from her hands and threw it over the rooftop behind him.

Vigil would have driven the bar through her stomach and broken her spine, but he used a mesmeric breathing technique to block the reflex pattern dominating him. Vigil once again could not hurt her. Even though the mandala had been no more than an afterimage, it still dominated his nervous system and could not be exorcised by a simple breath-cue, mostly because he hated using his strength against women. Beating women was nothing to boast of.

He flexed his chest muscles and had his internals push and spit the head of the adze out of his chest. Blood poured from the sucking wound, and he halted his lung action, sending oxygen directly from a spare breathing lozenge into his bloodstream. The antique uniform of the Hermeticists was ruined, torn in the breast and back, circuits severed, capillaries leaking fluids.

Vigil now turned toward the swordsman, who was naked and confused, his head hanging ten feet above his body and to the left, with his spinal jets cracking and sputtering comically. Even more comically, his ears had expanded into wings and flapped like something out of a children’s story.

Vigil drove the vendetta wand into the cobblestones as if they had been soft mud, cracking them, so that the wand stood next to him, vibrating. Then he used both hands to indicate the gesture called Fist of Knowledge, where his right fingers hid both his right thumb and the forefinger of his left hand. The sword blade shattered into three pieces.

Vigil snorted. For assassins who got all their tactics from peddlers’ stories, they did not seem to recognize the oldest mudra effect in the old myths. Nanomachines were absurdly dangerous, but, due to their size, their information density was always high and their memory was low, which means they could easily be made to fight each other, and destroy the weapons or launching systems they rode. That was the main reason why men of old fought with wooden swords and clubs and spears invisible to the Noösphere. Had it not been for that, all warfare, all street fights, would merely be dust hacks and mote cleanings.

The two stood gawping in shock. Vigil made his voice issue from the wand. “I am a Lord of Stability and control the privilege of Vengeance, which even the Principality will recognize! Any violence will be retaliated in the infosphere, where wounds are more permanent. All future downloads of your souls will bear eternal scars. A nonlethal blow of this wand will be imprinted permanently on any future patterns of flesh you inhabit. One mortal blow of this wand, and you will be deleted!”

The woman raised her head. And it kept rising and rising. For a moment, Vigil thought she was like the man, a Nukekubi. But no, she was a related order, nondecentralized, called Rokurokubi. The two were often mistaken for each other. Her head swayed upward on a long snakelike neck, until it hung nine feet above her. The Fox Maiden mask was still in place, giving an unnatural, overwhelming beauty to her features, but the jawline hung and rattled limply against the real woman’s skull underneath.

She spoke, and the words echoed oddly in her long, long throat. “We have no counterparts in the Noösphere. This is the only life we have.”

Vigil now was the one in shock. This meant that he had killed whoever was occupying the horse and the dogs. He had not simply disincarnated him, but killed him entirely, the real him.

“How can you have no souls?” he demanded.

The Nukekubi man said, “We are Cygnanthropes.”

Vigil would have vowed that the sect of man who followed the moral code of the Swans had vanished ages ago, when the Long Golden Afternoon of man passed away. These were laicists and antinomians. Despite that they were men, they neither married nor were given in marriage and formed no social bonds. Now he understood their look and garb. Among the loose confederations of the Nomads, a band of anarchists could pass unremarked.

And he knew the Nomads rejected the lore of Delta Pavonis, which demanded terraforming, and followed instead the practice of Promixa and Epsilon Eridani, and allowed for radical pantropy. The long necks and floating heads were grim necessity for traveling through the tall grasses and taller banks of low-hanging poisoned pollen of summer and autumn in the Far Southeastern pampas.

“Why do you oppose me?” asked Vigil. “A Swan sent me on this mission!”

“You will shatter our world,” said the Rokurokubi woman. The lips of her mask did not move as she spoke. “We are loyal to Torment!”

The Nukekubi man said, “Only here, in this world of ghosts and shadows, where nothing is forgotten, does our ancient order still exist. Only here can we live and practice the old ways.”

“Your old ways are not so old,” Vigil remarked wryly. “They only date back to the time of the Sculptured Lifeways in the Twenty-Fourth Millennium. And you yourselves are much younger, being only impersonators and epigones of long-dead ancient lore. You are not Cygnanthropes, you are merely enemies of Sacerdotes and seek some easy excuse to escape from the chastity and chores and lore of living as children of civilization. You have all your ideas from tales and yarns. Why do you fear the starfall of the Emancipation? Why would the new colonials meddle with the Nomads in their deserts and grasslands?”