The Cathedral of Known Things

by Edward Cox

  How Old Man Sam had managed to conceal his true identity for all these years was a mystery. If it wasn’t for the stack of fulfilled bounty contracts and dead bodies the old bounty hunter had left behind him, Ennis would have begun to doubt he ever existed at all. He was like a phantom. The only useful information Ennis had uncovered came from the police reports. Old Man Sam had a hideout, a secret apartment hidden in the middle of other apartments in the central district. Ennis had gone there, and found it empty, a sad and dingy home, shot up by some bounty hunters who had tried to fulfil the contract on Old Man Sam’s head. Bounty hunters who were never seen again.

  With first Van Bam and now Old Man Sam leading Ennis to a dead end, only one member of the Relic Guild remained on his list. And the search to discover more about her had brought the police sergeant to the Lazy House.

  Ennis reached the second floor and entered a dimly lit hallway. The growl of the nightclub became a faint hum rising through the thick carpet beneath his feet. Closed doors to private chambers flanked him, dampening the guttural exclamations of sex. The spicy tang of narcotic smoke laced the air. Ennis found the room he wanted. He didn’t knock; he didn’t need to.

  The young woman in the room was sitting on a stool by a vanity table. She was dressed for work. Her hair was long, twisted into fat locks that sprang from her head like a nest of spider legs. Heavy, concealing makeup decorated her face. Her legs were crossed, one thigh displayed. The front of her silk dressing gown formed a low V between her breasts.

  ‘You must be Willow,’ Ennis said, closing the door behind him.

  She answered with a professional smile. ‘I don’t recognise your face,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Is this your first visit to the Lazy House?’

  Ennis returned her smile, but didn’t answer.

  Willow’s room seemed spiritless – clean but without character, as if she had strategically removed her personality from view, hidden it in the vanity table, the wardrobe, under the freshly made bed, beneath her makeup.

  Secrets …

  ‘Are you shy?’ Willow said, looking Ennis up and down. ‘Do you need me to come and take that … token from you?’

  Ennis looked at the wooden coin in his hand. With a casual flip, he sent it spinning across the room. Willow caught it in a clap, and a touch of steel came to her eyes.

  ‘More confident than you look,’ she said.

  Ennis shrugged. ‘I just want to talk.’

  The smile returned to Willow’s face far too easily. ‘I’ve known a few talkers in my time’ – Her time? Ennis wondered. She looked shy of twenty ‘– but you don’t look like one of those to me.’

  ‘Then how do I look?’

  ‘Like you’re not supposed to be noticed,’ Willow said. ‘Like people only know you’re there if you let them see you.’

  Clever …

  ‘I want to talk to you about your friend,’ Ennis said.

  ‘My friend?’ Willow narrowed her eyes. ‘You mean one I like, or one who pays me?’

  ‘Your work colleague. Peppercorn Clara. I’m told the two of you were close.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Willow’s expression didn’t alter. ‘Funny – I never would’ve pegged you as a policeman.’ She looked at the wooden token in her hands. ‘Are you here to arrest me? Lead me at gunpoint to the nearest station? Or the Nightshade?’

  Unconcerned …

  Ennis said, ‘I’m not going to arrest you, and I’m not armed. I just have questions about Peppercorn.’

  ‘I’ve already told the police everything I know.’

  ‘But you haven’t told me. Don’t worry, this is off the record. No one will know I’ve been to see you.’

  ‘Well then …’ Willow opened a drawer in the vanity table, and placed the token inside it. ‘You want to talk about Clara.’

  Dangerous …

  By the time Ennis recognised the sudden whining noise of a power stone being primed, Willow had already removed her hand from the drawer holding a snub-nosed pistol. She aimed it directly at him.

  ‘Get on your knees, please.’ Her voice and expression remained exactly as they had been before.

  ‘Wait,’ Ennis said, raising his hands. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I told you to get on your knees.’ Willow’s hand was steady. ‘I won’t ask you again, Sergeant Ennis.’

  ‘All right,’ Ennis said calmly, and he did as Willow ordered. ‘Who told you I was coming?’

  ‘Shut up and put your hands on your head.’ Once Ennis had complied, Willow called out, ‘It’s him. You can come in now.’

  The door opened, and an old man walked in. He gave Ennis a hard stare.

  Long Tommy . . .

  Ennis’s mind raced, but before he could protest, Long Tommy had stepped forwards, and broken a small glass ampoule beneath his nose. It released a powerful vapour that filled Ennis’s nostrils, and he gasped it into his lungs. The room span and Ennis fell onto his side. Blinking convulsively, unable to speak, he looked up at his aggressors, his thoughts scattered.

  He saw Tommy offering Willow a fold of money.

  ‘I don’t care what you’re doing,’ Willow said. ‘I just don’t want it coming back at me. Got it?’

  ‘Get out,’ Tommy replied.

  Willow snatched the money and walked away, pausing on the threshold to glance down at Ennis.

  ‘Just so you know,’ she said, ‘Clara always hated that name. Peppercorn. It was a bad joke made up by her clients. She was a good person.’

  The door closed, and Long Tommy bent over Ennis. The expression on his old face was a strange mix of pity and rage. The light around him was fading.

  ‘I hear you’ve been asking about Old Man Sam,’ Tommy said. It was as though he spoke down a tunnel. ‘There’re one or two things I can tell you about that bastard.’

  The old man reached down.

  Ennis couldn’t feel his body and he was rolled over onto his front. His vision was failing, his mind slipping away.

  ‘There’s more to you than meets the eye, Sergeant,’ Tommy added. “I tested that metal for you, and … we really need a good chat.’

  Chapter Twenty One

  The Origins of the Necromancer

  An almighty crack of energy brought Hamir’s mind back to the lush garden in Lady Amilee’s dreamscape.

  The big ball of blue glass slipped from the necromancer’s hands, bumping gently to the grass, and rolling away to stop several feet from him. He stared at the message sphere, its contents brutally fresh in his thoughts: a device called Known Things, a House called the Falls of Dust and Silver, the pain and torment suffered by Lord Wolfe the Wanderer at the hands of the Genii …

  Wrenching, a huge noise like that of a mighty tree splitting in two, pulled Hamir’s attention to the spinning, droning column of energy that rose up from the garden, high into a perfect sky. Amilee’s slipstream was in the process of shedding yet another timeline. A tendril of static energy uncoiled from the column, peeling away to twist and wave in the air like a streamer. Slowly, it lost cohesion, breaking apart into black and white chips that blew away to nothing on the breeze like ash and smoke from a fire. The slipstream shrank, became thinner, and Hamir knew that only two of the Skywatcher’s timelines remained.

  The necromancer looked around Amilee’s garden, the colours of the flowers in bloom, the small grove of apple trees close by; insects buzzed and flew in drunken lines, the green of the grass was verdant, rich, real … Hamir’s mind was alight with what the blue glass sphere had shown him: the beginning of the Genii War, Lord Spiral’s first strike against the Timewatcher. But there was a glaring contradiction in what he had seen, a discrepancy that did not sit well alongside the earlier conversation that he had listened to between Amilee and the avatar.

  However clever Spiral had been in creating Known Things, however complicated storing a pe
rsonal timeline within a device constructed from unused time could be, essentially it was only a records device. Yet Amilee had told the avatar that it contained the means of destroying the Lord of the Genii, a way of killing the most powerful Thaumaturgist who ever stood by the Timewatcher’s side. It didn’t add up.

  Spiral was no fool. The way he had planned his uprising with such intricate detail and infinite patience, such ruthless precision – it was a masterstroke, the work of a genius. He didn’t make mistakes. He would not have been so absentminded, so stupid, as to include among the contents of Known Things the method of his own demise. Unless …

  Unless Spiral had a blind spot. Unless there had been something he missed in his planning. If Baran Wolfe had proved anything, it was that Known Things was not without its flaws.

  And with this thought, Hamir’s mind raced to what he knew about Oldest Place, the realm to which the Timewatcher had incarcerated Spiral.

  The necromancer felt a presence close behind him.

  He wheeled around. Lady Amilee stood on the grass, the blue sphere between her bare feet, the apple trees behind her. Her silver wings folded beneath her purple robes, she stood straight and regal. Her head was smoothly shaved, her skin flawless except for the tattoo of a black diamond on her forehead. Her face was ageless, perfect. But the anger in her tawny eyes was a millennium old.

  Never one to be intimidated, Hamir addressed her, ‘I have questions for you, my lady. Tell me about Oldest Place. What is Spiral’s relationship with it?’

  Amilee only glared at the necromancer.

  ‘All right – then I’ll tell you what I believe,’ Hamir continued in a cold voice. ‘Primarily, Oldest Place is a prison House. Whether it is filled with the fire and poison and hate that the myths claim is beside the point. What is true is that the Timewatcher created Oldest Place as an eternal prison and that Spiral is its sole prisoner. His punishment is to be tortured by his own actions for . . . ever.’

  The Skywatcher blinked, once, slowly.

  Hamir had spent so many years not being bothered by anything beyond his own interests, but now he felt a slight tightening in his chest, a small icy sensation in his gut.

  Irrespective of the toll such torture might take upon Spiral’s mind, if the Timewatcher wanted her greatest foe to suffer eternally, then she would have to keep him physically safe. She would have made sure Spiral was well protected in Oldest Place. While he remained imprisoned in his own, private House, surely nothing could harm him. And if that was a fact, then what could Known Things do to him?

  While he remained imprisoned …

  ‘Unthinkable,’ Hamir said. He looked at Amilee. ‘Considering the design of Spiral’s prison, one might suspect that the only way to bring harm to the Genii Lord would be to release him from Oldest Place first.’

  Again, Amilee gave no response.

  ‘Please, my lady, feel free to tell me I’m wrong.’ Hamir’s voice had risen in pitch, as the Skywatcher still declined to answer. ‘Tell me that your plan to destroy Spiral does not involve the Genii freeing him from Oldest Place.’

  ‘Your mind clearly hasn’t dulled over the years, Hamir,’ Amilee said finally, her eyes still full of anger. ‘But did you ever learn remorse? Regret? Shame?’

  Hamir looked sharply to the slipstream as it gave another mighty crack, and the column of dancing, droning energy fell apart in a shower of static that dissipated on the wind, disappearing altogether. But what did that mean? Which of the two remaining timelines had been set in motion? Success? Failure? Both?

  Staring into Amilee’s tawny eyes, Hamir felt a flush of desperation. ‘What have you done?’ he demanded.

  ‘I seem to remember that I once asked you the same thing,’ Amilee replied.

  Hamir felt anger rising inside him. ‘There are only two people who know the location of Oldest Place. One is the Timewatcher. The other is a changeling. What will happen when Clara reaches Known Things?’

  Amilee raised her head defiantly. ‘The agents of the Relic Guild have sworn an oath to protect the denizens of Labrys Town above all other things.’

  ‘Evasiveness is as good as an admission of guilt, my lady,’ Hamir growled. ‘How do you live with yourself?’

  ‘Perhaps you are in a better position to answer that than me,’ Amilee said evenly. ‘How did you live with yourself after you created those abominations? How did you sleep at night with your dreams haunted by the screams of the one hundred women who were unfortunate enough to be the test subjects in your experiments?’

  Amilee stepped closer to him. She towered over the necromancer, but he did not shy from her.

  The Skywatcher continued, ‘The Nephilim tell a story about their creator, you know. They have a name for him. They call their father the Progenitor. Does that make you proud, Lord Hamir?’

  ‘Another deflection, my lady?’ Hamir said offhandedly, but he felt a twist inside, a resentment that he had not experienced in centuries, rising within him, forcing his teeth to clench, his blood to boil like molten metal.

  ‘You speak as though I escaped punishment,’ Hamir said, his voice low. ‘Perhaps you need reminding that for my crimes I was dragged to Mother Earth, forced to kneel before the Council of Three. For creating the Nephilim, Iblisha Spiral, Baran Wolfe and you drained the higher magic from my body, leaving me with only the dregs of my former power.’ Hamir jabbed a finger against the scar on his forehead. ‘You burned the mark of thaumaturgy from my skin, claiming that I was no longer fit to carry it. And then you banished me to the Labyrinth to spend my days in the Nightshade serving … lesser minds. You made me a phantom of the Thaumaturgist I once was.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ Amilee countered. ‘If the Trinity had been given its way, your sentence for what you did to those women would have been execution. But the Timewatcher wouldn’t allow it. She ordered us to spare your life, so spare it we did. You remain an embarrassment to higher magic, Hamir. You’re a murderer, as much of a monster as those perversions you created.’

  ‘I took responsibility for my actions!’ Hamir snarled. ‘Who will take responsibility for yours, my lady? The agents of the Relic Guild?’

  Amilee stepped back as though Hamir’s words had slapped her face. For the first time, her eyes lost their anger, and she could not hold the necromancer’s hostile stare.

  ‘I have done what needed to be done,’ she said in an uncertain voice. ‘The future will now unfold as it has to.’

  ‘Ah, spoken like a true Skywatcher.’

  Amilee’s eyes found his again. ‘Careful, Hamir.’

  He barked a bitter laugh to the sky, and shook his head. ‘The Word, the Warden and the Wanderer – The Trinity of Skywatchers! What a disappointment each of you must have been to our Mother. Tell me, do you feel proud, Yansas Amilee?’

  ‘You have no right to use my true name!’ Amilee bellowed.

  ‘And you no longer have the right to judge me,’ Hamir shouted back.

  Amilee’s perfect face was a sudden mask of fury, as her silver wings sprang from her robes, rising above her like scythes.

  Unafraid, Hamir stepped towards her. ‘A thousand years I served my sentence in the Labyrinth!’ he roared. ‘The Timewatcher and the Thaumaturgists turned their backs on me long before they abandoned the denizens of Labrys Town. And now they have abandoned you!’ Hamir pointed an angry, shaking finger at her. ‘Yansas Amilee, Warden, Skywatcher, Treasured Lady of the Thaumaturgists – you are the embarrassment here!’

  Amilee’s hand flashed out, gripped the necromancer by the jaw, dragged his face within an inch of her own and she screamed, ‘Enough!’ before throwing him to the ground.

  Hamir expected the assault to continue, knowing that he was defenceless against it; but to his surprise the heat and anger evaporated from the Skywatcher as quickly as it had bloomed. She stared down at him. Her wings fell limp, tears came to her eyes, and an
eerie hush fell upon the garden.

  ‘They didn’t abandon me, Hamir,’ she whispered. ‘I walked away from them.’

  Hearing the remorse in her voice, seeing her obvious fatigue, drained Hamir of his own anger. He got to his feet, brushing dirt and grass from his clothes.

  ‘I do not think it is unreasonable of me to expect an explanation at this point, my lady,’ he said stiffly.

  Amilee looked up at the sky of her dreamscape. ‘I tried to tell them that the war was not over, that the threat remained, but none of them would listen to me, including our Mother.’

  Hamir frowned. ‘The Timewatcher wouldn’t listen to you?’

  ‘In the end, she stopped caring, Hamir. I told them all they were fools. I refused to return to Mother Earth, and so they left me behind. They are not coming back.’

  ‘You stayed because you knew the truth,’ Hamir said, almost with respect. ‘You knew that Spiral had planned for losing the war.’

  ‘How different things might have been if I had listened to Lord Wolfe in the beginning,’ Amilee replied, her sense of guilt clear. ‘But I didn’t, and so I have been hiding here since the end of the war, watching, listening, preparing … regretting. I am the discrepancy in Spiral’s plans, Hamir, the anomaly the Genii do not know about.’

  ‘But what of the Relic Guild?’ Hamir pleaded. ‘Tell me what you have done, Yansas.’

  ‘I have ensured the future will arrive on our terms.’ There was concern in Amilee’s eyes, but also defiance. ‘The timeline I have created is in motion, but it is not set. You and I have much to do.’ A fleeting sadness clouded Amilee’s face. She shook her head. ‘Timewatcher spare us all,’ she growled. ‘I hope you are ready to atone, Hamir. Your past atrocities might just be the saving of everyone.’

  Forty Years Earlier

  Home

  The Giant’s Hand.

  Beneath a sky that burned with pink fire, it stood as a lone sentinel in the desert of Mirage, exposed to waves of blistering heat rising from a landscape of searing sand and copper dunes. It rose palm up, its ledge thirty feet above the sands. And the stone sentinel was the custodian of treasure.