In Heaven and Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

gleaming silver armour riding up and down on
metallic horses.
    How bizarre.
    Nonetheless, Reuben’s
next move was obvious. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the
screen, into Vairya’s dream.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
    IT DIDN’T feel like a
dream. The grass was crisp beneath his feet, and he could feel a
cool wind gusting past his cheeks. Behind him, the door to a large
tent flapped and billowed.
    The silver knights had
all turned to line up before him in perfect rows. They all wore
visored helmets and metalled gauntlets, with not a hint of skin
showing.
    “ Nanites,”
Reuben said, and they all saluted, hands clanging off their
helmets.
    There was something
disturbing about the way they had no faces, and Reuben wished that
Vairya’s imagination had pushed them into a different shape. They
were supposed to be mindless and functional. The hint of humanity
this shape gave them just emphasised how inhuman they really
were.
    “ Cease the
attack,” he told them. “Take a flag of parley to the
walls.”
    Three of them immediately
wheeled and rode off, the banner they carried changing colour as
they moved. Another swung down from its saddle and offered Reuben
its horse.
    He didn’t know how to
ride, but since the horse was metal and the whole scenario subject
to his imagination, he dragged himself up the horse’s side and into
the saddle, jerking the reins in the direction of the
castle.
    With a soft whirr of
cogs, the horse carried him in that direction.
    It was only a few minutes
before he arrived at the gates of the city, but it gave him time to
survey the landscape around him. It was an odd place. For the most
part, it looked like something from an ancient picture: castle,
blue sky, ploughed fields rising in gentle curves, cobbled road
placed at an aesthetically pleasing angle across the
fields.
    All across the fields,
however, thin stakes of glass rose towards the sky, glittering in
the sunlight and confusing the eye. They struck Reuben as ominous,
for all they should have been fragile, and he was glad none stuck
out of the road. All the same, he directed his iron horse to the
middle of the road to avoid them, and shuddered when a wind shifted
through them, making them hum and moan in a way that set his teeth
on edge.
    He was glad to reach the
gatehouse of the citadel, where his nanoknights were waiting for
him, their white flag streaming in the wind.
    On the wall over the
gate, a lone man in a white surcoat was standing, his blue cloak
flaring in the breeze. Reuben shaded his eyes with his hand and
looked up at him.
    Vairya looked back at
him.
    In the infirmary, he had
been a body and a medical puzzle. Now, staring down at Reuben with
the wind stinging colour into his cheeks and tousling his fair
curls, he looked like a man, and a damned pretty one at
that.
    “ Hello,” Reuben
called to him. “I’ve been looking for you.”
    Vairya didn’t seem to
have heard that. Instead, he stood straight, a cold expression
settling on his face. “Sir Knight, I am Vairya, lord of this
castle. Wherefore do you besiege us with such strength of
arms?”
    What the fuck? Sighing,
Reuben reassessed the situation. They were in Vairya’s mind, after
all, which combined a dose of amnesia with memories of all of human
history. If he had to operate within the bounds of the scenario to
win Vairya’s trust, so be it. He had seen enough silly vids set in
the ancient era.
    “ Lord Vairya, I
greet you in the name of the Sirius Protectorate, whom we both
serve. I am Sir Reuben, late of Rigel, Knight-Chirugeon. As a
penance for my sins, this geas has been laid upon me: I may not
pass by any man who suffers a wound or sickness without offering
him my service until he is healed once more.”
    “ Oh, well
played,” Vairya said, his eyes bright and his mouth tilting into a
grin, “but that’s really not what a geas meant. You’re muddling
your myth cycles.”
    Reuben crossed his arms
and glowered.