“Iban,” Phut said.
“And what did they call it? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Gawai Antu,” said Phut. In the details of that ceremony he had glimpsed hints of a forgotten treaty with the corpse-eaters. He had kept the observation, like so many others, to himself. Mustn’t let the mask slip.
“To be honest, I’ve never been one for anthropology,” said Stephens. “Even a Morris dance arouses in me an inexplicable revulsion. As if we’re half-remembering things we rather ought to forget.”
“You lack adventurous spirit, Stephens, and always have.”
“I’ll toast to that.”
A dining partner joined the gunman. Phut tensed. The strap of a shoulder holster made itself barely visible beneath the man’s thin suit jacket, which was at least a size too small for him. Dark hairs jutted from his collar, running all the way up to the hairline. The ears, too, matched the first gunman’s. They might be brothers. Or the spawn of the same nest.
Two adversaries multiplied the complications. One might draw him off, leaving the other to ambush Sir Russell. It might be time to alert him to the danger. But if they were players of the cosmic game, that risked much. Phut had invested too much in the cultivation of his master’s ignorance to let him see the real battle now.
He reached into his jacket’s false lining for a leather pouch. Carefully counting the number of beads sewn onto the pouch’s surface, he confirmed it as the one containing the green lotus powder. Phut hopped down from his chair, replacing its extra cushion, and weaved down the aisle between tables toward the WC. The gunman watched him approach, kicking his companion under the table to alert him. In a show of contemptible amateurism, each let his hand hover near his jacket lapel, ready to thrust in and grab his gun.
Phut maintained his dead expression as he drew alongside their table. He covertly flicked his fingers, now coated with the green powder, to which he had long ago built up an immunity. He continued along to the WC. Once inside, he closed the door, performed his necessaries, and then exited, weaving his hasty way back to Sir Russell’s table. The gunmen were still in place, engaged in a sotto voce argument too quiet for Phut to discern. A bruise-like rash already spread across the first gunman’s wrist.
Phut retook his seat as the serveur asked Stephens and Sir Russell for their pudding orders. He declined the offer of sweets; Stephens chose vanilla ice cream; Sir Russell, a lemon tart. The serveur moved off, allowing Phut a clear view of the gunman’s table. His victim’s skin assumed an ashen tone. The skin below his eyes drooped, revealing red rims. He trembled, heaved, and then was up the aisle, rushing for the WC. Moments after he stepped inside, the unmistakable sound of copious vomiting emanated through the dining car. Serveurs and the chef de brigade gathered in dismay outside the door. They surveyed the discomfited diners, several of whom grew visibly nauseated.
The rest depended on the standard of the service, which Phut knew to be supreme. As expected, the chef de brigade waited for a break in the emesis and tapped firmly on the door. It opened; two serveurs escorted the would-be gunman, a linen napkin held over his mouth, down the aisle and out of the dining car. The gunman’s worried companion followed, snarling at Phut as he passed. Phut hopped down, thinking that there was something not quite right about the interior of the man’s mouth.
As expected, the serveurs ushered the sickened gunman to the WC in the adjoining baggage car, where the sounds of his distress would not further disturb the guests. Phut waited at the threshold between cars. About now an acrid stench would be wafting from the poisoned man’s pores. He peered in—yes, the serveurs and the crewmembers who’d been sleeping in the baggage car’s berth were exiting the car at the other end, to the fourgon beyond. Their exodus left only the second gunman by the WC door, hand over mouth, color draining from his face.
Phut slipped into the car and pressed himself against a luggage rack. The entire length of the car separated him from his enemies. After fishing into his pockets for the weapon he would need, he hauled himself into the lower rack, squeezing his diminutive frame into the foot or so of clearance between its suitcases and the shelf above. He wriggled atop the nearly even row of suitcases, sweating and wincing, crawling by inches toward the foe.
The gunman sniffed the air; his head swiveled to Phut’s location. Phut muttered a curse in the ancient tongue as the man slowly advanced, revolver ready.
How reluctant would he be to fire? Shots fired now would draw opposition. The two of them would be killed or captured before they had the opportunity to complete their assignment. But men with guns in their hands could not be counted on to reason well. The attacker’s darting looks and queasy pallor afforded scant confidence.
Phut let him draw nearer before firing his blowgun. The dart landed true, in his target’s bulging jugular. The gunman clapped at the dart with his free hand, letting his weapon-arm fall to his side. He pulled out the dart, squinted at it, and goggled in panicked recognition. Phut waited; it would take a few seconds for him to collapse.
This the gunman did not do. He stumbled back, dizzy, but did not fall. His partial resistance to the toxin confirmed Phut’s suspicion: not all of him was human.
From the WC behind him, his confederate loosed another awful heave, followed by a rush of splashing.
The attacker lifted his gun-arm, pointing wildly at the upper luggage rack. Phut crawled free of the suitcases and thumped into the aisle. Without stopping to regain his footing, he barreled at his opponent. The gunman was twice Phut’s size. Surprise, and whatever toll the toxin was taking on him, would have to compensate. Drawing a small, curved blade, Phut reached up to slash at his enemy’s weapon hand. The gun hit the floor and bounced. The gunman stared at his slashed wrist, roared, and clouted his adversary with the back of his other hand. Phut slid back, banging his skull on the luggage rack. The gunman kicked at him; Phut ducked below his swinging leg and cut the Achilles tendon. With a groan the man slid to the floor.
Phut leapt on him with the knife; the attacker grabbed his forearm and squeezed. He drew Phut’s arm, still holding the blade, toward his mouth. His protuberant jaws transformed, extending themselves farther, exposing absurdly large, yellow teeth. Phut glimpsed inch-long canines just before they sank into the meat of his forearm. Seizing the knife with his free hand, he punched it down into the gunman’s eye. After a moment of resistance, the blade piercing through bone to enter the brain, he twisted it. The gunman’s jaws relaxed as he shuddered and died. Phut pulled his arm free and reeled over to the pistol, jamming it into his belt with his good hand. He drew a second, matching knife from the lining of his jacket and made his way to the WC.
He tested the door, found it unlatched, and kicked it open. The second attacker lifted his head out of the toilet bowl. Phut first attacked what he could easily reach: in turn, he severed each of the man’s ankle tendons. He dropped the knife, pulled the gun and thrust it into the sickened man’s open, protesting mouth. Like his comrade’s, this, too, was endowed with the massive teeth of a gorilla. Phut pushed the gun deeper into his throat, to best muffle the sound of the coming shot, and pulled the trigger.
He checked the corpse for an exit wound, confirming that his careful angling of the barrel had ensured that there was none. This would aid the clean-up considerably. Only a thick dribble of blood escaped the side of his victim’s jaw. None had sprayed onto the walls, or onto Phut.
His bitten arm throbbing, Phut exited the WC and removed a steamer trunk from the luggage rack. He used it to bar the door to the adjacent fourgon. Then he stumbled down the aisle to do the same at the opposite door. When this was done, he removed his jacket and stripped off his shirt to examine the bite. It consisted of four deep punctures connected by rows of bruises where the front teeth had dented but not pierced the skin. If the bite of an ape-man was anything like that of an ordinary ape, the saliva would carry all manner of deadly infection. From his jacket Phut fished out the pouch containing powder of the red frond and poured it
liberally onto the wounds. It hissed efficaciously. As he let it work, he poked open the lips of his first victim to examine those curious teeth.
Phut remembered now the rumors of a city of white apes. In the Belgian Congo, was it? French Africa? Whichever it was, Sir Russell had been there, and alluded to trouble, trouble so curious Phut’s meager brain was not meant to encompass it. Sir Russell’s account accorded with certain whisperings. These had it that there were men throughout the world who did not know they were not entirely men, that they descended from the residents of the city. As far as Phut had heard, they played no role in the cosmic game. It was not impossible that they were entering the contest now, when it was surely too late. More likely, their designs on Sir Russell arose from a completely separate affair. Revenge for whatever Sir Russell did to them in Africa, decades before Phut had found him.
Perhaps he might spur his master to reminiscence on his past activities in Africa.
Phut teased open the jacket compartment containing his emergency first aid supplies. With needle and thread he puckered the four wounds shut, wrapped a gauze bandage around his forearm, then clipped it shut. Given the potency of the red frond distillate, he anticipated limited seepage.
Straining against the dead weight, he dragged his second victim by the heels into the aisle, to rest atop the first. Working quickly, slashing at the fabric with his knife as needed, he stripped the corpses of clothing, gun-belts, and other possessions. These he rolled up and tossed from the baggage car window. Then he sprinkled them with salts of Leng, taken from another of his pouches. After a few seconds, these azure crystals catalyzed with the tissues of the slain men. Skin blackened and flaked. Muscle bubbled and liquefied. Organs evaporated into a vapor, at first red and later yellow. Bones crumbled into a paste that in turn became a dust. After a few minutes, only tangled orange strings of organic matter remained. These were the nerve networks, which for elusive reasons the salts of Leng could not fully break down. Phut gathered up the strands, rolling them into a gummy ball. It, too, he ejected from the fourgon window.
A banging came at the door. The chef de brigade shouted, first in French, then in English, inquiring after the sickened man. Phut yelled back, in Han Chinese, to confuse him for a while. With a second repair kit—this for tailoring problems—he crudely closed the holes in his jacket sleeve. He put his shirt back on, then the jacket.
The spot where the Leng salts had devoured the remains of the two men was now marked only by a clear, damp stain, as if water had recently been spilled there. Phut went to the door no one was knocking on and removed the steamer trunk blocking it. He then did the same at the far door.
His sudden appearance flustered the chef de brigade. The man asked him what had happened to the two men. Phut pointed to the door. In response to the further, obvious questions, Phut gave him only a series of shrugs, the incomprehension of a stupid foreigner.
In the end, Sir Russell was drawn in, and Stephens, too. The brigadier-postier, in charge of the baggage cars, had his own questions to ask, and then the conductor went through it all again. Phut eventually allowed Sir Russell to pull from him a simple tale—that he’d gone to offer a native remedy, only to find the two men leaping from the train.
“He is a dab hand with the remedies, I can attest to that,” Sir Russell chimed.
As to their reasons for fleeing the train, Phut took care not to venture so much as a guess. He shrugged, as if the motivations of all save himself were irredeemably cryptic. Eventually the inquiry lost impetus for lack of new questions. Sir Russell, Stephens, and the conductor all agreed that there was something awfully rum about those fellows, and that what they had been up to might never be known. An Italian army colonel on leave intervened in the discussion to say that he thought one or both of the men wore shoulder holsters. Sir Russell proposed that they must have been bandits, that the one man’s sickness resulted from nerves, and that they had risked injury over discovery. The authority of his reconstruction carried, and the colloquy broke up. Sir Russell returned with Stephens to their table for a round of cognacs, Phut trailing behind them. Uncharacteristically, Phut signaled his desire for a drink.
“Cognac, Phut? This is a day of wonders.” Sir Russell nodded to the serveur, indicating his assent to his manservant’s order.
When the drink came and Phut brought the glass to his lips, he saw that his hand trembled. He reminded himself that, if the calculations were to be trusted, only a few weeks of this remained. Sir Russell would be diverted from his petty game in Istanbul, then conveyed to Urfa to be inducted into the great one.
As aqol-pazh, he could only be an unwilling participant in what was to come. It would hardly console him to understand that, of the possible outcomes of the dawning alignment, the one Phut pursued was the most amenable to human goals. If Phut’s people won the reconfiguration, there would still be humans—of a sort. That Sir Russell would take such a long view was not to be expected. To attempt to impose this perspective upon him would, Phut had decided, constitute a cruelty. The Englishman’s ordeal could not be softened, but there was no call to gratuitously worsen it.
It was Phut, as the one who knew him best—as the aqol-aqol— who would have to mete out the torments. After geometrically precise placement on the altar beneath the hidden ruins, Sir Russell would receive the lunar salve, to keep him conscious and fully sensate throughout the rites of disassembly. He would be pumped with the milk of the black earth goddess, to preserve his life far past the threshold of ordinary endurance. Then the ceremony proper would commence. Over the first five days his skin would be slowly teased from his body, the muscles beneath packed with Dead Sea salt to amplify the agony. Then would come the five days of bone removal—the left foot, the left hand, the right foot, the right hand. The flautists would be summoned to feast then on his pain. Finally, the last five grueling hours, for which Phut had prepared since the cradle yet still regarded with faint apprehension. Every flick of the scalpel demanded unswerving precision. Yet, however great the rigors of his task, Phut was certain he could accomplish it.
There was no choice. The other outcomes were without exception too appalling to entertain. Yet in a way the prevision of Sir Russell’s fate disturbed him.
Despite all, he was coming to like the man.
ENGINEERED
ARI MARMELL
ONE LONELY DROP IN A torrent of humanity, I boarded the train from the Gare de Lyon. That station is among the finest in Paris, but with eyelids heavy and luggage dragging behind me, I was in no position to appreciate it. Exhausted as I was, I’d scarcely even noted the magnificent arches, the soaring clock tower; nor had I allotted any time to seeing the sights of Paris. This was hardly my first experience of that city, but on any other visit I’d have taken an evening or two.
Not this time. Too many travels yet ahead of me.
For all my preoccupation, though, I couldn’t suppress the tiniest frisson of excitement at the sight of the rich blue and gleaming gold of the sleeper cars, the sharp uniforms of the staff, and, of course, the name itself, emblazoned proudly for all to see.
If I must spend more time aboard a train, I could at least take solace in the comforts and luxuries offered by the renowned Orient Express.
“Might I assist with your baggage, sir?”
A hint of an Eastern European accent drew my attention to a dark-haired, thickly moustachioed fellow in a porter’s cap and vest. I was fairly sure I could place said accent as Bulgarian, although that particular region has never been one of my specialties.
“Second car,” I told him, fumbling at my ticket to assist my fatigued memory. “Room, ah, seven.”
With a “Very good, sir” and a tip of the cap, the porter hefted my ponderous trunk as though it weighed nothing and set off down the corridor that ran along one side of the train. Allowing myself a much more leisurely pace, I followed.
It took little time to settle, as the bed was already folded shut, transforming the room into a tiny study. Everything w
as neat, squared away, ready for use. As I required.
Also as I preferred. I can’t abide untidiness. Or at least, at the time, I couldn’t.
I rested my eyes, leaning back in my chair, until the train was on its way. The world shuddered and clacked and swayed, by now a most familiar sensation. Doors thumped opened and shut, I heard the sound of passengers assembling and conversing as they waited to be ushered into the dining car, and I knew I must be about my work.
In a procedure now as automatic as fastening my own tie, I snapped open the trunk and removed the familiar bundle of maps and papers. In the same order as a dozen times before, I began to spread them out across the minuscule desk, and once again resumed the Sisyphean task of pinpointing one man in the whole of the continent.
I’d not bothered to do any further investigating in Paris, even though one of his last telegrams had originated there. Some of his earliest communications had come from there, as well, and I had already made three separate attempts at tracking him down in that city. The gendarmes were, I am certain, well and truly sick of my inquiries.
Paris. Liverpool. Budapest. Salzburg. Odense. Warsaw. Nantes. Berlin. Venice. And dozens more. They glared at me, mocked me, from the envelopes, the telegrams, and from the map where I studiously marked them all. As I had so many times before—so often my nail had left imprints in the map—I attempted to trace any route that made sense. As I had so many times before, I gave up in searing frustration. Some cities appeared but once; some two, three, even up to five times, at wildly differing dates. A contact from Strasburg might be followed by one from Sofia, very nearly across the continent, and then one from Zurich—less than a day’s journey from
Strasburg! If there were any pattern to his movements, or any schedule to his communications …
Well, I could no longer deny it, for all that I’d spent weeks avoiding this conclusion. There was no pattern here. No logic. Whatever mad theories he pursued, his movements offered up no discernable clue. To judge by the deteriorating contents of his messages, there was little even remaining of Harold that could aspire to logical behavior.
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