by Heide Goody
“We should starting killing civilians at once,” said Major Sanders with grim conviction.
Vaughn pushed himself forward, grunting as he stretched across the table with his free hand.
“What are you doing, Mr Sitterson?” said Rod.
With a victorious gasp, Vaughn snagged the edge of the box of Tranquill suicide tablets and dragged it across the table. He tore it open with his one free hand and brought his face down to devour the contents.
Rod grabbed his shoulder to pull him back. In the scrappy struggle over suicide pills, the box was shredded.
Vaughn paused, staring in despair. “Lois!” he yelled. “You brought an empty one!”
Rod gathered the scraps, to be sure there really was no poison.
“Wise of her not to bring an actual box of them in here,” said Morag.
“Most of the boxes are empty,” said Vaughn, wearily.
“Huh?”
He tidied his scattered papers. “A lot of countries signed up to the Tranquill programme,” he muttered.
“Agreed to dish out suicide pills to their citizens?” said Councillor Rahman, appalled.
“But it turns out there were a limited number of companies who could be trusted to mass produce potassium cyanide capsules. There’s the tendering process, plus the matter of secrecy.”
“You didn’t make enough pills,” said Rod.
“Some countries unfairly stockpiled what they’d manufactured.” Vaughn turned and grabbed Rod’s lapel. “You’ve got a gun! You could kill me!”
Rod pushed his clawing hand away. “You’ve got a job to do, sir. We all have.”
“I’ll pay you. A pay rise.”
Rod gave him a patient look.
“Or whatever else it is you want,” added Vaughn. “Even now, I—” He faltered at the pronoun. Vaughn had always been a man who took exception to his own existence. He tittered madly. “I can grease any number of wheels for you.”
“Are you going to drink your tea there, Mr Sitterson?”
“Who gives a fig about tea at a time like this?” Vaughn spat the words with quiet, miserable fury.
Rod took the man’s hand and, meeting ineffectual resistance all the way, once more tied it to the arm of the chair.
“So, this team of volunteers handing out door to door suicide pills is going to run out of boxes very soon,” said Nina.
“Shame,” said Chad. “It’s a lovely design.”
Major Sanders put his hands on the table in a solemn and significant gesture. “If we can’t provide a … an easier death for the population, and I can’t get through to my commanding officer― If the nuclear warheads aren’t yet in the air to put us all out of our misery, then I should order my troops to begin killing people on sight.”
He looked from person to person for some form of confirmation. Rod gave him a firm nod of agreement.
“But if we have time…” said Councillor Rahman.
“This Yoth-Bilau character…” said the CEO.
“If we have time, then we can negotiate an end to hostilities,” said Chad brightly.
“You can’t win them over,” said Nina.
“You have not seen my PowerPoint skills,” said Chad. “I can be quite persuasive. And we have one of the Venislarn here.”
Rod looked wildly about as though expecting Yo-Morgantus or Zildrohar-Cqulu to be lurking in the shadows, before realising Chad was referring to Pupfish. Morag too had started to look around, on the floor behind her and under the table.
“Mr Pupfish,” said Chad. “Perhaps you can tell us what you, the Venislarn, want.”
“Me?” said the samakha, wide-eyed with the sudden attention on him (although, being a fish-headed creature made him generally wide-eyed all the time). “Uh, well – ggh! – me, I’ve always wanted a bit of respect.”
“Respect,” said Chad, as though that was the most profound thing ever. He clicked his fingers at Maurice. “You. You rustle us up a flipchart or whiteboard from somewhere. What else, Pupfish? What do the Venislarn want?”
“My girl, Allana – she’s human – I always wanted to treat her right.”
“Want to treat her right.” Chad nodded. “Flipchart, now,” he said to Maurice who hadn’t moved anywhere.
Morag was looking under the table. “Prudence!” She stood up.
“What?” said Chad.
Morag glanced at Rod. “She’s gone missing.”
01:11am
The tiled floor was cool under Prudence’s bare feet. She made no noise as she walked but could feel the slight, sticky tension between her soles and the white tiles. Steve’s land squid made a rhythmic slurp-slap slurp-slap as he rode beside her.
This place was very different to the level below. Prudence had been born into a world of rough concrete and harsh lighting. Here the lighting was no friendlier, but the walls and floor were a smooth white. The shiny white floor tiles were squares; Prudence tried to walk without putting her feet on any of the cracks.
She looked at the shelves they passed. Cups, crowns, bones, plants, books. There were lots of books. There was a different smell in here as well. This place smelled of old things rather than people.
“I suppose you think you’re a big deal, morsel?” said Steve.
“Am I?” said Prudence, taking a mask from a shelf to look at it closer. It had a very long oblong face, painted with a few blood red lines. The eyeballs in its wooden sockets swivelled to fix Prudence with its gaze. The voice of the Shus’vinah mask (which was no voice at all and rose from a place as deep as centuries) told her that she must wear it and join in the dance of ecstatic slaughter.
“No, thank you,” she told it, showed it Mr Angry Shell and put it back on the shelf.
“I’m a big deal,” said Steve.
“Are you?”
“You doubt me?” he sneered. “I was an outrider of the entourage of Prein, an emissary of—”
“What’s an outrider?” asked Prudence.
“Someone who rides out, foolish child. An emissary of the shattered realms—”
“And what’s one of them?”
“Must you always interrupt? Do you know what I do to prattling mortals who interrupt me?”
“No, what?”
The land squid paused in its slurp-slapping and Steve turned in his seat to waggle a pencil spear at Prudence. He didn’t seem sure what to do next. “An emissary is a very important person sent with messages to other important people,” he told her.
“Oh,” said Prudence and walked on. “Sort of like a postman?”
Steve made a grumbling noise. “What is this post man?”
“I think it’s someone who rides out and delivers messages to people.”
“And does the post man impale people on this post of his?”
“Perhaps,” said Prudence.
“Then I was a post man of Prein.”
“That is a big deal,” she said seriously.
“A very important individual,” Steve agreed. “I am the hero of Hath-No. My actions secured the throne for Sha Datsei and my unparalleled impression of a tito fruit saved the day.”
“What is this place?” asked Prudence, pointing at the shelves.
“The people here call it the Vault. It is where they store all the objects that frighten them, or which their pathetic human minds cannot comprehend. This body of mine came from here. Apart from my legs, which were replacements stitched for me by human servants. Note well the explosions of red blood. Note them well.”
If he had stood on the floor, Steve would have not quite reached Prudence’s knees. His head, upper body and arms were made from two pieces of scratchy beige cloth, one for front and one for back. If not for his stitched-on face, it would not be possible to distinguish front from back. His legs were made of finer cloth and covered with a pattern she would have mistaken for pretty flowers if Steve hadn’t told her otherwise.
“What happened to your legs?” she asked.
“I lost them in battle against
a giant kobashi,” he said.
“Did you lose the battle?”
He laughed derisively. “Steve never loses battles.”
“You beat it even though you had lost your legs?”
“Ha! You have no imagination, snotling! Steve could beat any enemy without his legs! Or his arms! Or his head! Probably.”
“And why were you here?” she asked, idly picking up a mirror with a black twisted frame. A silver hand reached from within the mirror, long talon fingers groping for her eyes. Prudence slapped the silly hand away and put the mirror back.
“I was summoned here by your mother, Morag Murray, through a powerful puzzle box,” said Steve. He stood up in his seat and made a show of scouting his surroundings. “I suppose it must still be here somewhere. In a big impressive display case to show how important it is.”
There was a slow repetitive thumping sound which grew louder. A vaguely head-shaped blob appeared above the shelves to one side, then the whole creature moved into view. It was taller than any adult and made from concrete like the walls and floors of the level below. However, it moved in a very un-concretey, fluid manner. Prudence suspected it was meant to be a horse (even though she had never actually seen one) although it only had two paddle-like legs, one forward, one back, and a head that was more fist than face. It moved in a back-arching motion, stretching its front leg out then pulling the back one behind it.
“Hello,” said Prudence.
The concrete horse twisted its long neck and bent its head to hers. Prudence patted its face. There was a tingling sensation, a million tiny pinpricks as it tried to drink her blood through her skin.
“No, don’t do that,” she told it and gently pushed its head away. The concrete horse turned slowly and moved on ahead of them.
At a large chamber-like box, Steve swung himself up by the metal struts on its outer door and looked through the round window. “Ah ha!” he declared victoriously.
Prudence peered over his head.
Inside the chamber, on a square pedestal, was a large book. It looked old to Prudence’s eyes. Its pages were a light mottled brown, the edges of its heavy covers frayed and battered. Its pages were covered in tightly packed but neat writing. Prudence tried to read them. She’d never read anything before but thought it was worth a try.
“What is it?” she asked when the meaning of the words weren’t forthcoming.
“It’s the Bloody Big Book,” said Steve. “Don’t you know anything?”
Prudence decided he was being rude so she stuck Mr Angry Shell on Steve’s head. Steve squealed in alarm, lost his footing and fell to the floor where he flapped and rolled about.
On the ceiling, a camera lens had turned to watch them. Not much further along, a big red light had started to flash alarmingly.
“My mum told me about the Bloody Big Book,” said Prudence. “When I was smaller and inside her.”
“Pah,” said Steve, rolling free of the angry shell and leaping hurriedly to his feet as though nothing had happened at all. “I saw it being written.”
“All of it?” said Prudence.
“Of course not all of it. I saw the three-limbed fury Mrs Grey start to write it.” He picked up his pencil spear and proceeded to jab at Mr Angry Shell with it. The silvery shell creature fought back with its snapping mouth.
“My mum told me about Mrs Grey,” said Prudence. She watched Steve try to stab Mr Angry Shell. He wasn’t having much success. “Where is she now?”
“In hell,” grunted Steve as he fought.
“Where’s that?”
“Look around you, fleshing!” he said.
Hell
The many pens of Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas swirled across the page.
* * *
Morag Murray tried to explain it to Cattress, attempting to hold back her utter disdain for the man from the Foreign Office.
“Well, the Venislarn are not from another galaxy or another dimension,” she said. “They’re from somewhere else entirely. Yes, they’re not actually gods. There are no gods, but it’s the best word we’ve got to describe them. Their power is limitless and their plans utterly unknowable. They are here. They have been here a long time.” She tilted her head. “We think. They’ve certainly inserted themselves into our history, but they’re not restricted by time in the way we are. They might have arrived fifty years ago, ten years ago. Maybe they will come here for the first time next week and then just insinuate themselves back in time to the present day. We don’t know. What we don’t know about them would fill a bloody big book.”
Inspired, she took hold of him and dragged him to the chamber that had been built to house the Bloody Big Book.
“That is the Bloody Big Book,” she said, “AKA the Wittgenstein Volume AKA the Book of Sand. It is a book with an infinite number of pages.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Cattress.
“Isn’t it? But it’s real. It details everything that ever has happened, is happening and will happen. It contains every other book ever written and translations of them all into every language known and unknown.”
* * *
A sound drew her back to the here and now of the scriptorium. It was not the sound of the horns and bells and the general preparations for war that filled all of Hath-No. It was something nearer – speech. Someone had spoken to her.
Ap Shallas turned to the scriptorium entrance. This involved disengaging from her great work and wheeling round her mechanical body. Limbs, extensions and extrusions had accumulated on her like tumours over the ages, and controlling her own body was a feat of effort and memory. Two of her hands continued to write until she physically pulled them away.
Fifteen spiderous zhadan warriors lined the entrance. Before them stood Sha Datsei, Regent of Hath-No, guardian of the scriptorium and patron of ap Shallas’s work. Beside her, crouched in subservient worry, Barry held up his gong.
“I did announce her, mithreth,” he said.
Sha Datsei stalked forward. Today, she wore the body of a combat general, tall, noble and covered in jutting plates of armour. Beneath the milky white skin she had woven for herself, her many-jointed skeleton, her true body, shifted and gave life to the puppet costume she wore.
“The horn sounds a call to arms and you do not come,” she said.
This was fact and ap Shallas saw no need to comment on it.
“I send a personal summons and still you do not come.”
This was also true.
“The pathway to Earth is open and we will take it. Are you not one of my subjects?” asked Sha Datsei.
“We are both subjects of Hath-No,” said ap Shallas.
“Whose will I interpret.”
“Incorrectly.”
Sha Datsei’s battle face twisted in amused surprise. Even though this outer body of hers was a sock puppet she controlled, Sha Datsei was an honest and open individual. She walked round ap Shallas and gazed up at the unquiet shelves.
“Do you remember when you first came here?” she said. “What you were like?”
Ap Shallas struggled. Through the eyes of Hath-No, she had observed all reality, at the microscopic, macroscopic and the cosmic, but it was reality observed through a narrow singularity, a fragment at a time. She was not omniscient, and recalling her own existence, down the uncountable ages, was near to impossible.
“You were a pathetic human being with only one arm.”
“Human…” said ap Shallas, who did not remember and could barely believe. She looked up at the books of human vellum skin around her and wondered why she had always felt a kinship with them.
“Only your will kept you going,” said Sha Datsei. “I rebuilt you. I replaced the missing limb. I gave you others. There is barely a single part of you that I did not construct.”
With difficulty Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas sought out her flesh and blood hand, the odd appendage among the greater and finer limbs that had been grafted onto her.
“What I have given you, I can easily take away,”
said Sha Datsei.
At a flick of a claw, the zhadan warriors came for ap Shallas. Her body might have been a loose confederacy of parts, but the threat galvanised them into unified action. Ap Shallas lifted herself up on legs new and old that she had almost forgotten were there. As the lead warrior came chittering at her, she met it with the menscuzo wordblade. She dissected the creature before it could even bring its weapon to bear. The warriors fanned around her, but she had a limb for each of them. A thorax crushing grip for that one. A pen nib plunged into the compound eye of another.
Sha Datsei roared and, drawing wordblades of her own, joined the attack.
Ap Shallas also responded with a cry, a call to arms of her own.
Books leapt from the shelves. Tomes, pamphlets, scrolls and loose sheets. Human beings who had long been butchered, mangled and transformed into something entirely other, yet who had not been granted the clemency of death. An army of a thousand tortured humans flew to ap Shallas’s defence. They wrapped themselves in suffocating numbers around warriors’ heads. They battered them with sharp spines and heavy volumes.
Sha Datsei batted away a vellum swarm that could not die. The more she slashed them into confetti, the more numerous they became. “Enough! Enough!” she yelled.
The fight stuttered to a halt in an instant. A band of airborne sheets fluttered up into the heights to roost.
There was a deep tear in the face piece Sha Datsei wore. She regarded ap Shallas with wonky, malevolent eyes. “What makes you think you can resist me?” she said in cold disbelief.
“I have written this scene already,” said ap Shallas simply. “I have written this one and I know I shall write them all.”
Sha Datsei shook her head. As the mask fell apart further, she ripped it from her naked face entirely. “We are nearly upon the Earth. You will fight. With me or against me. You will fight.”
Ap Shallas watched Sha Datsei and her remaining warriors leave the scriptorium chamber. She regarded the floor, strewn with bits of zhadan warrior and fragments of paper.
