Ink

by Hal Duncan

  We look up at the concrete wall of the Rookery, the jumble of roofs behind, the tower rising, but the voice comes from higher still. From the fiery clouds? From somewhere high above them?

  “So for all you sleepers just awaiting to awake, oh yeah, for all you would-be enemies of the state, here is the late great Lord of Lips himself, with a song dedicated to the man of the hour, our blachshirt-thumpin, orgone-pumpin, lumpen-humpin Jumpin Jack Flash…”

  Our metaphysique stabilizes, a quicksilver shimmer into flesh, flesh enough that as we step onto the bridge some sensor trips; four floodlights pin us in a cross-flash. A sentry, in armor longcoat swirled with swaths of camouflage flickering patchwork shades of khakis, desert sand and jungle green, rock grays and icy whites, lowers his chi-lance toward us. A shining silvery steel conflation of crossbow, rifle, spear and staff, like a six-foot retrofitted crucifix, an angel's sword of fire, the chi-lance gleams white in the night like the little round nightshades through which he scrutinizes us.

  We wonder why you fill your dreams of life with sentries, wars, heroes and villains, but we begin to understand, we think. You are afraid of us, afraid of the dark and of the fire also. We are only what you make us but… it makes more sense as the skinsuit tightens round us.

  “Rook or… pawn?” says the sentry through his air filter. The methane and sulfur stench of the scar of river underneath the bridge does not concern us—we smell psychology more than chemistry—but it must smell rank to him.

  Behind the man, the gates of the Rookery rise on the other side of the bridge, a sledgehammered hole in a concrete wall that speaks of Berlin and Jerusalem, gulags and ghettos—our goal. Beyond is the place where Jack belongs, where we belong.

  The sentry is in our way.

  “Jesus,” he says. “Who… or what the fuck are you?”

  We stop and hunker down, sniff at the air. He reeks of slow sordid solidity. We grin a glittering of white, a constellation of teeth.

  “The spy who came in from the chaos,” we say.

  We catch an imaginary firefly between thumb and forefinger, study it, let it go. Out in the Hinter, the firefly would have flicked into existence at our whim; here there are rules of sorts, rough physics lacing the anarchist metaphysics of the Vellum. We feel a shiver of self slither down our back: existence. We feel it close now.

  “Who are we?” we ask the world.

  We feel it close, fluttering crows of thought and memory, black wings of our identity. Me me me me me.

  “I'll ask the questions, mate. Just don't you fucking move.”

  We look up at the sky…

  I look up at the sky as a wireliner steams overhead, its Cavor-Reich ray tanks luminous blue-green in the night sky. I'll be fucked: it's Kentigern. It's 1999. I'm back, I'm—

  “ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ by the Rolling Stones, and tonight's topic, for those of you who just tuned in, is just exactly that: the Angel Assassin, Public Enemy Number One. Is he a gas, gas, gas and, if so, are we talking oxygen mask or hydrogen bomb?”

  His chi-lance aimed steady with one hand, the guard unclips a mobile from his shoulder with his other hand and flips it open to call back to base. I smell soldier on him, dead dog. Me no likee.

  “So tell me what you think, my friends; I'll be right here through the wee hours. The Powers That Be might try to blast me from the sky, but there's no reason to be scared. Oh, no. They seek us here, they seek us there; they'll never find the pirate's lair. Yes, this is Mad Bad Don Coyote, cruising high over the city in the airship Lollipop, coming out over the ether to you dreamers of the city, and just waiting for your calls. So until my psychic switchboard starts to light up like a ladyboy's boudoir, here's another little number for a city in slumber. This is the Iguana of Pop and I Wanna Be Your Dog.’ “

  “Rrrrruff!” I say.

  And pounce.

  Dance in Delirium!

  Jack leaps from backstage onto the roof of our ramshackle wagon, to dance above it all, an elvish dervish, impish sprite.

  “Happy is the man initiated to his mysteries,” I sing, “his life made holy, heart and soul in unity—in ritual, purity—in revelry upon the hills. A witness to the rites of mighty mother nature, crowned with ivy, flaunting his staff, he gives his reverence to Harlequin.”

  I pick the Princess as my audience. The Duke's a philistine, it's clear; he has that look upon his face that says he doesn't like his entertainment weird, that says all actors are, in his opinion, queer. I sing to her.

  “Come, come, dance in delirium! He has come home, down from a frozen mountain to these broad and burning streets, hotter than hell, the child of Sooth, spirit of revel and rapture, Harlequin!”

  “Come on,” says Jack. “Ow.”

  “Well, get off,” I hiss. “We don't have time.”

  I stagger as his arm hooks round my waist, pulling me backward, grab his pinky, bend it back.

  ‘Ah! Fucking—”

  Wriggling free, I shush him, nod out at the hall filling with courtiers now, out past the screens that mask the backstage and the wings of our jerry-rigged theater. Joey sticks his head out of the wagon door, looking like some mad Japanese tranny with his whiteface on.

  ‘Are you two fucking ready?”

  “Twenty-four seven,” says Jack and grabs my hand. “Come on,” he says.

  And following him, hopping, trying to stay upright as he drags me off against my weak will, I end up behind the wagon, back pressed into wood, my hands cupping his ass, my lips against his throat.

  “We've got to get changed anyway,” he says, hands loosening my belt.

  Jack blows his flute, whirling and twirling, birling with the tune itself. I turn to sing for him.

  “Where is there more delight than in the hills, where milk and wine and streams of luscious honey flow out of the earth, and incense billows, where a man wrapped in his robe of fawnskin can fall out of all the revel and the riot, sinking to the ground to rest?”

  I take a breath.

  “Or better still when the wild hunt roars on, with him right in its midst, hair tossing in the wind, a blazing torch of pine held in his hand, hounding the goat, to drink its blood, to feast on raw flesh ripped from its red flanks? And just to crown the revelry, he raises his voice high, exulting with a cry of lo, lo, as a man possessed, ecstatic, as a Harlequin.”

  I take a breath. Then another, short and sharp, mouth open like I'm catching rain. His hair between my fingers and his nails sharp in my flesh. You cunt, I think, try not to laugh, to gasp, as his hand cups my balls and wraps—a blazing torch of pine—and his mouth wet and soft and me—right in its midst—as he leans in to—feast on raw flesh—take it all the way and—lo, lo—drink its— lo, lo—oh, you fucking bastard, Jack …

  I take a breath, a long and deep one. Let it out.

  I let my fingers run out of his hair and down his cheeks as he leans back, looks up at me, limbers up out of his squat, grinning with wicked pride. Enjoy?

  “Delirium,” I say.

  PICASSO's DREAMS

  Crouching, I run my fingers through the grass beneath me—valley grass, park grass, thick moist stalks of sanitized greenbelt nature, heavy with the predawn dew. Somehow the park, even if it has gone wild, seems like an artifice, just another barrier to keep the dissidents of the Rookery within their enclave. The smell of latter-day fops in leather frock coats, maidens in PVC corsets, lingers among the statuary overgrown with brambles. Fucking Goths in flouncy white shirts, top hats and canes for swiping at the grubby little urchins in the street, coming here to thrill at the louring closeness of the Rookery. Children of the Iron Lady, New Romantics, New Victorians rank with puritan prurience, playing at decadence, while the factories, the airshipyards, the adamantium works and or-gone refineries lie dead and broken. Fuck that shit. Cravats instead of neckties? Real rebellious.

  I nip off a blade of grass with thumb and forefinger, flick it away, and flex my fingers as if playing a flute. I clench my hand into a fist and snap my fingers.
Threads, I think. Threads and toys.

  I prise the chi-lance from the sentry's cold dead grip, its feline buzz a purr so sensual soft I feel it in my boner. Nice. I swing the weapon up and blast the floodlights to a shower of sparks. OK, so I do admit a part of me is hoping that I haven't been a little rash, that Dead Dog here was actually militia or SS, some Circus goon watching the Rookery for gypo raiding parties out to rob the banks and bungalows of the bourgeoisie. He might just have been Thieves Guild, stationed here to stop the blackshirt spooks forever trying to sneak inside, but… it's not that likely, honest. Fuck it, I think. The night is young and so am I. Can't blame a boy for being keen.

  I strip the longcoat off the body, flip it round and over and on with a flourish of flap—an agent needs cover, after all—but I leave the corpse his clothes for decency, and because the stench of his psychic sweat on them might confuse me, what with the skinsuit still a little ruffled and riding wrong on me like a boyfriend's underwear shaped to the snook of another's nooks. I don't have the most coherent identity at the best of times, you know. As I stretch into a stance,

  I feel my body rippling like an acid vision, like hot air shimmers over tarmac in the summer sun.

  I trace the scar of contradictory identities on my chest. So many pasts, so little space to fit them all. Jack Flash who went over the top in 1919, gunned down by the Bosch on the fields of Flanders. Jack Flash of 1939, scourge of the Futurists, hurtling in a blasted Lancaster down into Dresden's furnace. Punk rock icon, flyboy of the Gulf Wars, Jack Flash—oh, this one feels peachy: Jack Flash who was here in ‘69, helping the Sexual Revolution along with orgone bombs aimed at key members of the old-boy network. Yes. We won that one, I think, taking them right back to their jolly days as public schoolboys rutting in the dormitory—got them all so horny for a good rogering that they just had to legalize their own perversions. So now all the fairies in the villages get to fly their rainbow flag from shops and bars—hell, it makes them easier to firebomb—and they get to wear their shaved heads and pink triangle badges, wear them with pride.

  Yeah, I call that a result. I think.

  The Jack Flash that I settle on, settle into, cricking my shoulders and snicking my pearly teeth, is a ghost of history with a major attitude problem. Jack Flash as avenging spirit of the dying decade, returning to Kentigern for one day every ten years, to wreak havoc on the fascists and go down valiantly in flames and glory.

  I twirl the chi-lance, sight the Circus and I think of this little bunker Haven of Kentigern with its twenty-years-wide walls around it, dug down twenty years into the reconstructed past, the truth shot dead and buried in a mass grave. Who now remembers the Armenians? Fuck it, most of the bastards here are lucky to remember yesterday. Baby, it's 2037 out there in the Hinter, but in here it's 1999 and always will be, dead souls dancing the apocalypse calypso round a bonfire built of history books, on and on for all eternity. Too bad someone left a door open just wide enough for Hinter to come breezing in with a glint in its eye and a hard-on for that dancing flesh all peachy soft and glowing in the firelight. Because all it takes to bring a Haven down is the right little discrepancy; and, baby, I was born to be discrepant.

  I whirl the chi-lance upright, crouch to flip the nightshades from the sentry's face to mine and flick them on to sonar mode. A cartwheel over the bridge's wall drops me down into the squelch and stink of undergrowth, as the world goes cubist. Sound-signals bounced back to the shades map to a skewed perspective of a wireframe, volumes flavored with the color of their density and scented with their shade of resonance. It's a stereoscopic render of the world around, a sensory well of shade and shape chaotic to the untrained eye, disorienting even to the seasoned user. I pull on the glove that lets me turn the sim and twist it, slide it, glide it around from angle to curve, volume to void. Feels like I've dropped into Picasso's dreams.

  Flexing my other hand, I gaze into its intricate articulation of mercurial muscle, bone and tendon. Quicksilver skin flows and ripples as I flex, seems to shatter, splatter. It reflects the world around in sleek and deadly looking curves, mirroring not the surfaces but the densities, the space and mass. That's what a body built of bitmites looks like under nightshades. The liquid mirror of the world around. Melted shards of reality. That's what we are under our suits of skin.

  In the map of my palm I pinpoint the secret entrance underneath the bridge, a grille covered in polythene and pulp. The one above, with all the floodlights and the barricade of corrugated iron, is just a blind for the real doorway to the underworld. I look back at the sim, turn it in wonder. It's all there in the reflection, mapped out in the senseless and inscrutable detail, the mine shafts and old subway tunnels leading up to covered streets, sandstone and concrete, metal, wood, great stone tenements buried deep within a framework of scaffolded streets and prefab huts on stilts, all the winding passages and covered alleyways, the nooks and crannies of the impossible, precarious Rookery. There are allies in there, I sense, peachy kids and foxy rogues with revolution on their minds. And, peachiest of all, my skybike's waiting where I left it.

  I drag the ‘69 Jagger-Richards Hornet out from under brambles and tarpaulin, power it up with the sheer horniness of having it between my legs, orgone power flooding its engine, bringing the beast to life with a thrum of animal lust. I look down as I kick it into life and catch a sonar glimpse of the nightmares buried in the mire of the dead river. Burned books and bodies. Rats crawling among the rot. Even outside the Rookery there are things buried under the city's surfaces that are begging to be free. All in good time.

  I pick the target: a green glow moving slowly through the clouds, a wire-liner.

  Fun and games, I think, and rocket up into the sky.

  Errata

  —

  THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL

  pread-eagled, the sand cold beneath his back, Metatron, the onetime Voice of God, gazes up into the sky. It's so clear out here in the desert that the stars seem a liquid spray across the black—no wonder that they call it the Milky Way—goes back to Hathor, he remembers, self-styled cow-goddess of the Egyptians, claiming sovereignty over the heavens themselves … and just another jumped-up unkin like himself, really. What was it the Irishman had said about them, about the Covenant and the Sovereigns?

  Underneath the bullshit you're exactly the same thing.

  Finnan was right; it was true. Under all the talk of Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, it all came down to the Cant in the end. It all came down to power, to Metatron thinking he could use the Cant to keep the hawks in check, set them against the vultures and then, finally, when the War was over, regrave the survivors into doves. Three millennia spent: building his Republic of Heaven; signing ousted gods and goddesses up to the Covenant; giving them new names, new roles, as his angels; leading the newbloods through the veil into the Holiest of Holies, to kneel before an empty throne; sending them out as soldiers in one last great war against the scattered remnants of the Sovereigns. It shouldn't have been much more than a clean-up operation, the so-called apocalypse. He had it all planned.

  Metatron feels something crawl across the palm of one hand, an insect or arachnid scuttling. Gabriel would clench his fist and crush the thing, as would Michael or Uriel. Sandalphon would gaze at it for hours, turning his hand this way and that as birdman and bug explored each other. Metatron just lies there, looking up at the sky, feeling this little life in the palm of his hand.

  Metatron, the vizier of a One True God who never existed. Metatron, never thinking of himself as the leader of the Seven but, still, the one who made the plans, who graved their destinies in ink upon their skin, who wrote the history of the future. Metatron, the scribe of the Book of All Hours.

  So where is it now? Finnan had asked. Oh, that's right—you lost it.

  He had to lose the Book though, had to hide it deep in the Vellum, in a fold where unkin only moved in shadows, so that none of them—not even he himself— would ever be able to change the order he'd established in its page
s. He kept rough copies, backups for reference only—tablets of clay, scrolls of parchment, leather-bound books; even now he can feel the last of his copies, an electronic palmtop resting on his chest, in the inside pocket of his leather coat. The original, though, is hidden so deep that even Metatron himself doesn't know where to find it. He… excised that knowledge from his own graving.

  So when the copy began to change, and the past and present with it, the future became as unknown to him as to the creature now tickling his palm with its searching legs.

  He lets his head fall to the side. The spider seems a thing of glass or ice. Beyond it, across the frozen sand, an old Airstream trailer on stilts of brick shines silver, glittering with moonlight on metal and frost. Everything, Slab City and the desert it fills as far as the eye can see, even Metatron's own hand, the leather of his coat, is coated in the brittle white hoar of Hinter.

  This is where it all started to go wrong, with Finnan and the Messenger girl and her brother. He has no idea how it went wrong, why it went wrong, but he knows that this is where it started. That's what brought him back here to die.

  Gabriel sits on the throne that should be empty now—at least that's where he was when Metatron left, when he decided to take the long walk out into the Vellum rather than serve another unkin playing God. Raphael dead, Sandalphon disappeared. And it all began, he's sure, the day he arrived in Slab City to gather Finnan to the Covenant or be damned, the day the Messenger girl, this little hatchling of an unkin, stood up to him in Finnan's place, making the choice the Irishman refused to accept.