Sparrow settled his mount at the edge of a plain so flat that an optical illusion made it seem to rise in the far distance. The setting sun cast long shadows.
For as far as the eye could see, the ground was covered with warriors battling.
Duration meant nothing to immortals like Miyoko and her brother. They might choose to walk or might slip through the Matrix to their destination in a nerve-freezing flash; it was all the same to the gods.
Sparrow was a man. He rode to North's battleplain to find Saburo.
The vehicle was one the smith had built himself. It was a dragonfly in general form, capable of travel between the planes of the Matrix as well as flying at speeds high enough that its forcefield glowed with the collisions with air molecules. Sparrow had modified the vehicle so that the pressure of his knees and bootheels controlled speed and direction in-plane, as he would control a pony.
Sparrow could use dials and rocker switches, just as he was comfortable with either a crossbow or a battlesuit. He had chosen a unique design for his dragonfly because he was the greatest smith in the eight planes of Northworld.
To the gods, creation was a thought or a fingersnap; but they did not understand the process by which they controlled event waves. Sparrow entered the Matrix in a trance; found the pattern of his desire; and reformed piles of ore and rubble into smooth crystalline machines in which atoms were spaced and arranged just as they were in the ideal he dreamed.
Other smiths built battlesuits. Sparrow built anything he chose. He was the master of all patterns within the Matrix, and the Matrix was the pattern of all existence on Northworld.
Saburo stood alone, a silent figure in layers of peach-colored silk. Before him, battle clashed into the observable distance.
The combatants could be identified by the colors and flashings which each warrior had worn when he died. Now, however, their battlesuits were uniformly of the highest quality: armor that only Sparrow or a handful of other smiths could have duplicated, and that with great effort. The air between the two opposing lines glowed as arc weapons shorted against one another.
Sparrow watched with critical interest for a moment. Though the battlesuits were all ideal, there were variations among the warriors. Neither side had been able to advance since combat began at dawn, but suits lay dead and blackened all along the line of conflict.
Turtle-backed machines slid across the plain, gathering limbs and helmets to the torsos from which they had been sheared. When the machines moved on, the armor they left behind was perfect again, though it lacked the sheen that indicated its systems were alive.
"Good evening, lord," Sparrow said.
Saburo spun around. At once a bubble of silence surrounded the two men, isolating them from the arcs' continuous snarl and an occasional crash as a forcefield was loaded to the point of failure.
"Ah," said Saburo. "Master Sparrow. I—didn't expect to see you here."
His tone might have been one of disapproval, if Sparrow has chosen to take it that way.
Sparrow smiled. Saburo could blast him into atoms—but he could not control this servant by subtleties of intonation. "One wouldn't expect to find you here, either, milord," he said bluntly. "It's Lord North's domain, one would say."
He glanced past his master toward the continuing battle. "Or Lord Hansen's, perhaps."
"Commissioner Hansen never visits the battleplain," Saburo remarked. He turned to view the fighting again himself.
Saburo was a slight man with delicate features, though Sparrow had never made the mistake of thinking that his master was soft. They were very different in personality; but Sparrow would never have taken service with someone he did not respect.
"They're quite splendid in their way, aren't they?" Saburo said. "There's a poetry of sorts in their motion. It's all a matter of understanding the idiom."
Sparrow snorted, though he could see that his master's observation had a certain validity—
For someone who had never worn a battlesuit. Who hadn't chafed his limbs in long hours of practice, straining against the delay before the suit's servos translated the wearer's motion into the swing of an armored leg. Who hadn't felt the heat build up during battle, until the interior of the suit was an oven which burned the wearers lungs and boiled the juices from his cramping limbs.
Who hadn't seen his vision displays break up into multicolored snow which meant the battlesuit was about to explode in coruscating flames, carbonizing all portions of the wearer near the point of failure.
The warriors still on their feet at evening on the battleplain were the best of the best. Their movements of attack and defense were so skillful that they might have been dancers.
But every one of them had died in battle in the Open Lands, or they would not be fighting again here.
"No one could stand against them, don't you think?" Saburo said. Despite his phrasing, the slight man was speaking to himself rather than his servant. "One could lead a group of them on a raid into another of the planes and—whisk off a slave very easily. If one wished."
"And tear a hole in the fabric of the Matrix," Sparrow said. "And start the Final Day, when the armies of the other planes come through the hole you've torn."
Saburo turned. "It might not do that," he said sharply. "If perhaps only a few of the—of the warriors crossed. There needn't be a serious disruption of the Matrix."
"Which plane?" said Sparrow.
"This is purely an intellectual problem of the sort your crude—"
"Which plane, milord?" Sparrow repeated. He did not bother to raise his voice, but no one who knew the smith could doubt that he would continue pressing until he had an answer—or Saburo gave him his death for asking.
"Say—as an intellectual exercise," Saburo said. "Say Plane Three. The androids would be easily surprised. In and out. And no repercussions. There very likely wouldn't be any repercussions."
"The androids," the smith said, "aren't defenseless, milord . . . but that wouldn't really matter. Seeings that the holds on Plane Three are all within the swamps, the androids wouldn't need to defend themselves. That lot—"
Sparrow jerked his bushy, cinnamon beard to indicate the warriors struggling in the last moments of full daylight.
"—would sink out of sight on the first piece of soft ground, which they'd find the first step they took out of the Matrix."
He fixed Saburo with eyes as frosty as metal burned in the casting crucible. "What is it that you really want, milord?" Sparrow asked.
Saburo tented his hands. "You can't help me," he said to his fingertips.
"I can't help you until you tell me what you want," the smith replied.
The sun dipped below the horizon, though refracted light continued to brighten the sky: lemon yellow in the west, a rich and saturated blue on the opposite horizon. The warriors still on their feet froze in position. Their arc weapons vanished like the visual aftershocks of a myriad lightning bolts, and the luster of the battlesuits dulled.
"All right," said Saburo with a calm that belied the struggle before he permitted himself to speak. "I'll show you, Master Sparrow."
He waved a hand. Master and servant vanished together from the battleplain as though they had never been.
The turtle-backed repair vehicles continued to crawl among the casualties as yet unrepaired.
The severed limbs were hollow. The battlesuits fought without anyone inside them.