by Lavie Tidhar
The Stranger shook his head, warding off bad dreams, and set off again, into the night. It did not take him much longer. The twisting alleyways led him unerringly to his destination. Cats fled in his passing and watched him from a safe distance, a juggler juggled fire under ancient ivy. The Stranger looked at the card the man on the train had given him. He found the gate and entered.
A garden thick with vegetation welcomed him inside. A sort of hothouse. He saw orchids and cacti and Joshua trees. Skunk cabbages and giant hogweed. Corpse flowers and Venus flytraps. Strangler figs and witches’ butter. The air stank with a hundred odours. Behind foliage he could see the signs of alcove stores, all dark yet he could sense them open. dream repairers, said one. the emporium of perpetuum mobile, said another.
mummy dust at attractive prices, said a third. lightning bottled here, said a fourth. herr hahnemann’s electrohomoeopathy clinic was yet another.
But these did not interest the Stranger. He searched, going deeper and deeper into the gardens, which seemed to go on forever, as though they somehow existed in a space in which the city itself did not; or perhaps it was that, by some curious property of alchemy or the Escapement, they bent the dimensions around them so that they seemed bigger on the inside. The Stranger stepped softly, his fingers resting lightly on the butt of his gun, for all that he sensed that it would not serve him here. He was aware of other lives all around him. Not merely the rustle underfoot of tiny beetles, or the hum of bees, but other people, or things like people. But though he several times thought he saw a silhouette, he never came into full view of those traversing the gardens as he was. And it seemed to him that perhaps each came alone into the gardens, and alone they travelled it, each to their own and isolated destination.
He checked the card again and it was then, at last, that he saw it, the sign peeking out from behind an unruly growth of nightshade and hemlock: jefferson & norvell, medici.
The Stranger skirted the poisonous shrubs and made his way to the door. He hesitated on the threshold; as well he should. It was only for a moment, and then he shrugged and pushed the door open and went inside.
The shop was dimly lit with only a few burning candles. With their folds of wax and their halos of flame the candles looked like fat, balding monks. The air smelled cloyingly of candyfloss and sweet cherry tobacco, and the walls were dirty with years of nicotine stains. Only a handful of potted plants decorated the room, but they were all wilted, and nothing hung on the walls but for a faded, cheap-looking print of Baphomet from a pack of Tarocchi cards.
A short counter separated this antechamber from the gloomy depths of the workshop beyond, and on the counter there was an old steel summoning bell. The Stranger, seeing no one, pressed the bell several times. The sound it emitted was not at all a ring, but rather the sort of gasping, eventually despairing sound of a person drowning.
“What? What! What do you want! Is this a delivery? Deliveries go through the back. What is this? Has it started yet? We’re closed. Oh.” He peered at the Stranger. “It’s you.”
The man had a long, thin face and mischievous eyes and spikey black hair and he wore a tweed jacket and a bowtie. He was not the man the Stranger had met on the train.
“Do I know you?” the Stranger said.
“I don’t see why you would.”
“Do you know me?”
“You? You’re a stranger.”
He said that dismissively.
“Is Mr. Norvell here?”
“Norvell? No. He’s not here. Busy. Long time. Gone on a journey. Commercial traveller. What do you need, stranger? Pectoral drops? Anderson’s pills? Sagwa? Catarrh snuff? Radium water? Stanley’s snake oil? I’m Stanley, by the way. But you can call me Mr. Jefferson.”
The Stranger said, “I am looking for the Ur-shanabi.”
Jefferson stared at him. “Ah, it’s you,” he said again. “Yes, yes. By which I mean, no. Sorry. Don’t have it. Never have. Beyond even my powers, etcetera, etcetera. Bugger off.”
“I need,” the Stranger said, and his gun leaped into his hand and the muzzle was pointing very directly at Mr. Jefferson, “to find it.”
“Then find a fucking cartographer!” Mr. Jefferson snapped, not at all concerned with the appearance of the gun. “There’s one next door.”
The Stranger still did not lower his gun. “You,” he said. “You’re a mask, aren’t you. Not a . . . person.”
“Great Harlequin,” Mr. Jefferson said in exasperation. “Does it matter?”
The Stranger holstered his gun.
“No,” he conceded. “I suppose not.”
“Only we’re very busy back here, on account of the . . .” He stopped talking and waved his hand airily. “Things, you know? Everyone’s a little tense right now.”
“The doom and—?”
“And so on. So you understand . . .”
“Next door?”
“Mercator’s Conventional Signs. Can’t miss it. Now piss off? Please? We’re closed.”
“All right,” the Stranger said. He touched his trigger finger to the rim of his hat. “Adios.”
“Just go.”
The Stranger smiled, though there was nothing warm in it. Then he stepped outside, where tendrils of mist curled lazily around the planted cacti.
He did find the cartographer. And he did obtain a map. But what price he paid for it, no one could tell you, though it was a steep one, it was bound to be. For one does not make bargains easily with one of the Major Arcana, for all that they knew the Stranger and the Stranger knew them.
On the bed the child shivered, and the machine ping-ping-pinged wildly, and the man, distressed, cried, Nurse! and he held the child in his arms, and put his coat around him as though he could in this way keep him safe and warm. Then came running feet, and hands pushed him aside, and the boy’s bed was wheeled outside. The man stared at the clock on the wall, and at the second hand crawling on its face.
Then it was done. And with that the Stranger left the cartographer’s shop, but he did not go back the way he came. For there were grooves in the world and in such grooves a man must follow. And so he snuck round the back of the witchy shops, heedless of the poison ivy and stinging nettles, and a long way it seemed to him until he reached the back. He forced open a side door, kicking it with his boot, the wood splintering, and then he slid inside with his gun in his hand until he made it to the back room of Jefferson and Norvell’s, and there he stopped, at the sight of something familiar.
The Kid was just headed to a bar called the Bull Tub when he spotted the Conjurer as though the man had stepped out of nowhere. He stopped in his tracks but the Conjurer hadn’t seen him, and even if he had, he would have had no reason to suspect the young man was any kind of threat to him. The Conjurer merged into the shadows, but the Kid had taught himself the black art which magicians use, and he could follow.
And so he did.
Far beyond the city, trains thundered along old and newly-laid tracks, coming and going across the Thickening. On the Chagrin, the wrecked remnants of what had once been an island shuddered and for a moment the broken rocks in the water seemed to resemble a face. Beyond, still, in the Doinklands, silent clowns streamed across the land on top of painted ponies, their white expressionless faces staring up in wonder at the sky. Over the town of Kellysburg a symbol storm was brewing, ankhs flashing and octagons and dittos, and the town’s residents locked up their doors and closed the blinds, and a bad wind blew in from the Doldrums.
The same storm that those prospectors in Kellysburg could sense was building over the Big Rock Candy Mountains. In the Désert de Soleil, dry wind picked up sand and tossed it this way and that until it built into a full simoom, and the ancient máquinas de sueños, disturbed from slumber, rang uneasily with the sound of wind chimes.
Beyond Jericho, forces were awakening that had been dormant for centuries, and they a
ssembled now with something like anticipation, and something like glee. They came from the east, the north, the south and west, for all that directions meant nothing to them. And a child peering out of a moving train saw something impossible, a Colossus rising in the dark, and behind it another, and another, faces in the stone unmoving, austere, cruel. But when she looked again, the figures were no longer there.
The Conjurer saw the little Pierrot slip into a deliveries yard for what must have been a row of shops, and he followed him in, and threw open a door that had been left just so slightly ajar.
Behind him, softly, came the Kid, and he snuck behind the Conjurer and lifted up his gun, but he never took the shot.
“Kid?” the Stranger said, on the other side of the room.
“What are you doing here?” the Kid said.
The Conjurer looked at them both, first at one, and then at the other, but he made no comment. Then he looked back at the centre of the room, and at the thing that lay there.
He stared.
“A fucking fish?” the Conjurer said.
The three men stood in the room facing each other with guns drawn over the giant flopping mechanical fish. The Stranger had not seen the fish since that single glimpse within the tinkerers’ cart. The thing seemed more alive, somehow. Its glassy eyes stared up and seemed to glow from within, with some yellow, inner light. Its powerful tail thrust against the floor, over and over, and its scales shone wetly, as though it had just risen from a swim.
“What is that thing?” the Conjurer said. “And who the fuck are you?”
The Stranger shrugged. “I’m a stranger here myself,” he said.
“And you, kid?”
The Kid stared at the Conjurer with something like loathing, and something else, ill-defined, something like desperation, or longing.
“Hello, Dad,” he said.
It was quiet in the room. In the silence the only sounds were the men’s breathing and a sound that materialised slowly, on the edge of hearing, but became more and more pronounced as one tuned in to it, until it seemed to dominate the world: the slow, relentless ticking of a mechanical clock. It seemed to come from within the body of the fish.
The two men stared at each other across the room. The Conjurer, for once, looked taken unawares. He stared aghast at the Kid.
“. . . What?” he said.
The kid removed his necklace and showed the silver thumb-tip to the Conjurer.
“Do you recognise this?” he said.
“Vernaculus . . . ,” the Conjurer said.
“Do you remember a town called Bozoburg?” the Kid said. “A small town on the Fratellini plains. I doubt you even remember. There was girl who worked there once, in a bar. Her name was Ethel.” His right hand was very still on the butt of his pistol. “She was my mother.”
The Conjurer stared at the Kid, but for a long moment he didn’t say anything. He remembered a one-clown town and dun-coloured plains that stretched in all directions, somewhere on the edge of the Doinklands. He remembered a young woman who laughed at all his jokes, who had eyes that shone with the light of the sun, he remembered long afternoons stolen out of time, and a sense of completeness. A rare time of peace, and all the more valued for that . . .
“You’re Ethel’s son?”
“Yes. Dad.”
“But I didn’t . . . I can’t . . . How is she?”
“She’s dead, Dad.”
“Stop calling me Dad!” The Conjurer stared at the Kid, and he seemed oblivious to the gun pointed at him. “Wait, dead? How did she die?”
“How do you think she died? She was murdered.”
The Kid remembered again when the Rasmussen Gang, mean and hungry, more wolves then men, with faces painted white and noses painted red, had come riding into town.
We’re looking for the Conjurer, they kept saying. We’re looking for that bastard, he owes us a life, we know he’s been through here, there was a woman, they said.
Then one of the townsfolk, he must have said something to them, and the biggest of the brothers smiled. A terrible dread filled the kid’s heart then, worse than the fear of dying.
They’d strung him up and he swore he’d get them and they laughed. Then they left him to die, but the rotten old beam collapsed under the kid’s weight and he lived, still. But when he ran after them it was too late.
He reached his home only to see it on fire.
He ran inside. . . .
“It was you,” he said now. “They were looking for you.”
“The Rasmussens . . . ,” the Conjurer said. “Ethel’s dead? I never meant . . . When we parted . . . it was only meant to be for a few months, but time flows differently in the Thinning, and when I returned she wasn’t there, the whole town was gone. But that was years ago, and as for a kid, I never . . . she never said . . .”
“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” the Kid said. He aimed the gun very steadily. “I’ve waited for this moment.”
“I didn’t kill your mother!” He stared at the Kid. “And I don’t want to have to kill you. Put down your gun.”
“You think you can take me?” the Kid said, and the Conjurer laughed.
“I know I fucking can,” he said.
The Stranger backed away from them both. His ears were filled with the even ticking sound of a clock. It felt to him that the seconds were speeding up, and that time was running out. A sense of giddy exhalation . . .
“I hate to break this touching family reunion,” he said. “But I think we have bigger—”
Two shots were fired at once. The Stranger stared at the others. He could see the bullets. See them emerge from the barrels of the guns. See them cut through the air like slow-moving larvae. See them shed the casing, like pupae emerging, like popping corn. The bullets spread wings. Two butterflies rose into the air. They circled each other, then fled out of the open door into the city beyond.
“—problems,” the Stranger said.
The Conjurer stared down at the giant mechanical fish. It whirred now, from some internal mechanism, and it glowed, light escaping through narrow slits under its scales. The ticking sound grew louder.
“What did you say again this was?” he said.
“I didn’t,” the Stranger said. “But I’ve seen it, once before.”
“The Dumuzi Device . . . ,” the Kid whispered. “Right?” He turned to the Stranger. “Those aerialists on the train, this is what they were looking for?”
“I think so, yes,” the Stranger said.
“Well, what is it?” the Conjurer said.
“I think,” the Stranger said. “I think it’s a chthonic bomb.”
They stared at the fish. Its movements became more rapid, and clinking and hissing sounds began to emerge from it over the ticking of the hidden clock.
“I think,” the Stranger said, meditatively. “I think it might go off.”
“A chthonic bomb?” the Conjurer said. “Great Harlequin, not again!”
“You’ve seen one before?”
“Long ago, and far away, and only the aftermath,” the Conjurer said, grimly. “And that was enough, once was enough. We have to get out of here.”
“Can’t it be disabled?” the Kid said.
“Disabled? It’s a fish.”
“We could, I don’t know, shoot it.”
“You couldn’t even shoot me, kid. And it’s not like you weren’t trying.”
The Kid kicked the fish.
“Ouch!”
A tongue of light had darted out of the fish’s body and wrapped itself around the Kid’s ankle.
“Hey, let go!”
The Stranger looked at the fish, which seemed to grow larger, or to twist the dimensions around itself so that the walls and ceiling of the room seemed to bend down and around it, and he saw that a miniature symbol stor
m had begun to form in the air overhead, and obelisks and pilcrows and crucifixes burst in tiny flashes of light.
“Step away from the fish, kid,” he said.
“I’m trying to!”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” the Conjurer said. He grabbed the Kid in one arm and the Stranger grabbed the other and they pulled. The Kid howled in pain and protested with some profanity, and the tentacle of light tightened around his ankle but then, at last, released him abruptly, and the three men staggered and fell through the open door, and outside.
Inside the room, the ticking of the mechanical clock grew faster and louder in intensity and then, just as abruptly, stopped.
The three men stared at each other in the silence.
“It’s definitely about to go off, isn’t it,” the Conjurer said.
“What do we do?”
“Run?”
“Run where?”
“I know a way,” the Conjurer said. “Come on.” He hesitated, glanced at the Kid. “Son?”
“Don’t call me son!” the Kid said.
But he followed all the same.
The three men moved fast and with deadly purpose, guns drawn, and the burghers and good citizens of Jericho moved swiftly out of their way. The streets were thronged with revellers drunk on moonshine; a fat man on a piano struck “Entrance of the Gladiators,” and a mime troupe locked in an invisible glass cage writhed and floundered as though they were choking on invisible gas. A cat chased a mouse down the street. The Stranger wasn’t sure, but for a moment it seemed to him the mouse wore a bow tie.
The Conjurer led the other two men over a low stone wall and into an unlit courtyard and from there to a twisting stone staircase that rose high up into the upper echelons of the city.
“Hurry, fools!”
They huffed their way up the stairs, going round and round, and the Stranger was absurdly glad they weren’t carrying anything heavy with them, like a piano. They found themselves at last on the roof of the building, and the Conjurer led them in a leap across it, and in this way they traversed the rooftops over Jericho, which were themselves filled with revellers. The Stranger felt the city shifting then. A rumbling just beyond the edge of hearing, a subtle rearrangement of the elements all about him. He stumbled, but the Kid caught and steadied him. Wordlessly, they ran on.
