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by Hal Duncan


  It all ripples out from that moment: the hunting and slaying of her brother, Thomas; her playing Covenant and Sovereign off against each other as she tried to save him; Metatron sending two insignificant newbloods out to drag the girl free of hell; his own bitmites somehow altered in the struggle and unleashed upon the Vellum, now with their own incomprehensible agenda; his own bitmites as the storm of Evenfall, attacking Covenant and Sovereigns alike; Finnan, wired to a chair in an abattoir, a meat hook in his chest, the bitmites swirling around him, echoing the rogue unkin's defiance back in Metatron's face.

  Inside the Airstream, as he found it when he arrived after his long walk through the gray chaos of Evenfall, the white desolation of Hinter, the girl's name is still spelled out in magnetic letters on a fridge door: PHREEDOM.

  It can't be that simple, thinks Metatron. It can't be that crude.

  The stars above seem to fill the sky, a film of frost on an obsidian mirror. He can feel his heartbeat slowing now. All it took was a decision in the back of his mind, a whisper on his breath, the slightest adjustment to his graving—the addition of an ending, a full stop. Peace.

  “So you're just giving up?”

  The voice is gentle, amused but not mocking. Metatron opens his eyes. The face in his vision flickers, ghost images of a man crouched over him, a youth, really, in a hundred different guises, all superimposed over each other. He has long auburn hair or a scruff of punkish green, black skin or blue or copper, kid horns like some latter-day Pan, a goatee, viridian eye shadow, beads and chains and dog tags hanging round his neck. Only the eyes remain the same—deep brown with flecks of emerald and jade.

  “You're dead,” says Metatron.

  Thomas Messenger cocks his head, smiling down at him.

  “No,” says the boy. “If I keep dying, how can I be dead?”

  “We killed you. Carter and Pechorin. I sent them to—”

  “Hush,” says Thomas “You made me a myth, old man. I just wanted to show you.”

  He reaches into Metatron's pocket and pulls out the palmtop, opens its leather-bound case and taps a few keys before laying it down on Metatron's chest, screen angled to face the dying angel. Glyphs and sigils dance across the screen, the hopelessly meaningless gibberish that the Book's become. Metatron tries to raise a hand to push the cruel image of his failure away, but he's too weak now. All he can do is turn his head, look at the trailer.

  The voice is close, whispering in his ear.

  “You just have to learn to read it right… to understand it. Look.”

  And then the voice whispers another word, a word in the Cant—there's no mistaking the shiver it sends down Metatron's spine—but it's a word he's sure he's never heard before, not ever before, in all his millennia of life. He looks at the screen, and out of the chaos order suddenly emerges, a story of sorts: Tammuz, Dumuzi, always running, escaping, being caught, and dying, always all of these things. But there's a hole in the story, the emptiness of a shepherd's fold, like dust, given to the winds.

  The word, as Metatron whispers it on his last breath, is one without translation. It describes the vellum and the ink that graves them, circumscribes the cosmos they inhabit, bounds the absence of them in it, their lives, their deaths, in one little single-syllable word… one word …one word…

  Thomas closes Metatron's eyes with his hand, stands up.

  He scans the horizon, listens for the echo of that word, bouncing back from the farthest reaches of the Hinter, from north or south, east or west. Thomas has understood that word for a long time, has his own varied… approximations of its indefinable multifacet senses—love as joy and sorrow, madness as glory and grief— but none of these are sufficient, so what he focuses on to hold that fragment of Cant in his understanding is only a placeholder, a token, a name that means all of this and more, a face with blue eyes, blond hair.

  Where is he?

  THE DEATH OF POETRY

  “Home?” says Jack. “I don't know where my home is anymore.”

  Seamus stares out through the door of the Caveau de la Huchette at the rain pounding down, cold and gray, on this narrow backstreet just off Boulevard St. Michel. It doesn't seem like a week since they were in Barcelona and the last parade of the Internationals, sure, and they have nothing to be ashamed of, no, so why does he feel so fookin down? Why does it feel so much like a defeat? Like a betrayal.

  Well sure and it was a fookin betrayal—wasn't it?—with the likes of Major Pickering and his cronies and their open letter to the Times, praising Britain's policy of nonintervention and lambasting the Internationals as bolsheviks, traitors; well, it's fookin Pickering that's the traitor, if anyone is. Him and the whole fookin British establishment.

  He takes another sip of his beer and turns back in from the November misery outside to face his drinking companion, his comrade, and the man who once, an eternity ago, ordered him to shoot his best friend. Captain Jack Carter of the Sixth Royal… no, of the British Battalion of the International Brigade, he corrects himself. Forget that other shite. It's gone. It's all gone in the mud and blood of the Somme and the dust and blood of the Ebro Offensive. And hasn't he had a hooner chances to put a bullet in the man's back? Yes. And did he take them? No. And why not? Because the fookin bastard's saved yer fookin life over a hooner times and because it wouldn't change a thing. It wouldn't change a fookin thing.

  “Sure and isn't yer home in jolly ole England, Jack?” he says. “Or are ye meaning that ye've gone doolally on us?”

  He smiles wanly. Sure and his heart's not really in it.

  “I don't belong there anymore,” says Jack.

  “Look, Jack, this isn't the end of it,” he says. “It may look like it is, but it isn't, man, I'm telling ye. They think it is, the fookin politicians back home and across the water. They think they can shake a hand and slap the fascists on the back and make a deal with them. They're wrong. And, fookin believe you me, they'll learn it the fookin hard way.”

  And Seamus knows he's right, sure, cause he has the Sight an’ all; he knows that now. He can see the whole world erupting, maybe a year from now, maybe less, Hitler pushing out from Germany and into Czechoslovakia and Poland. When he has his turns these days it's not the past he sees but the future, and it's not him that's babbling nonsense in a language that he doesn't even understand, it's Chancellor fookin Hitler up there on his podium with the banners flying red and black and white behind him. Jesus, but Spain was just the start of it. He knows there's a bigger battle coming and that this time the whole world will have to sit up and take notice. At the same time, though, just as he's reassuring Jack that, sure, don't worry, man, ye'll get to kill more fascists yet, he knows that there's a terrible truth under those small words.

  This isn't the end of it.

  The question is: Where is the end of it? But he doesn't ask himself that and he doesn't know why. It's like a blind spot in his sight, sure, or like he's standing at a station, watching a train pulling away, not knowing where it's going. And for some reason he's too afraid to ask.

  Jack just sits there brooding over his beer. Jesus, but this fookin weather's getting them all down.

  “Lorca?” says Seamus after a while.

  “Sorry?” says Jack.

  Back in Barcelona, there'd been some cub reporter from the States wandering round the Internationals like a right arsehole, asking stupid questions. So what made you come to Spain? Are you a communist? Do you support the overthrow of democracy? What do you think of the Spanish people now? Sure and he'd wandered round the comrades after they'd been dismissed, with his notebook and his list of questions, asking each of them if they supported the bolshevik revolution. It's a touchy subject with Seamus, so it is, since he saw the way old Joey Stalin's loyal followers tend to twitch if you mention Trotsky. Sure and one of the fookin bright young things, a real Party boy all the way from Moscow, why he actually accused Seamus of being bourgeois, just for asking a fookin question of him. But there's more important things than some wee lad wit
h a big gob and not enough sense to keep it shut.

  “Well what d'ye fookin think I came to Spain for?” Seamus had said to the reporter. “To shoot some fookin fascists.”

  Then he'd rattled into the rest of the answers before the eedjit even had the chance to ask them, saying, aye, I'm a fookin socialist, so ye fookin might as well say I'm a communist, seeing as ye probably don't know the fookin difference, aye, and we were here to support fookin democracy, in case ye didn't notice, against a fookin military coup. And the man had nodded and backed away, thanking him and turned to Jack to ask him the same question. He'd given just one word as his reply. Lorca, Nothing else. Just Lorca,

  “Lorca?” says Seamus. “Is that really what brought ye to Spain?”

  Carter feels his cheeks burning and brings his beer up for a sip partly to hide embarrassment. It's not the full reason; really, it was a glib comment that seemed… pointed and sufficient at the time. After Finnan rattling on in his soapbox way, it seemed a succinct sucker punch of a comment, something that implied a certain contempt, an air of what other reason do you need?

  Federico Garcia Lorca. Poet, playwright, prodigal Lorca with his Gypsy Ballads (which are all that Carter's actually read, and in translation, to be honest) and experimental plays. Friend of Dali. Founder of La Barraca, a touring theater company that traveled round Spain bringing theater to the masses. Modernism that blended puppet-show traditions with melodrama and high poetry. One night in August 1936, right at the very start of everything in Spain, Franco's Falangists came and took him away from the house of a friend where he was hiding out. He was never seen again.

  Carter has a newspaper clipping with a picture of the poet in his wallet but he doesn't take it out because he could never show it to this man, not to Sergeant Seamus Finnan of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, not to the only other man certain to recognize the face. The same dark eyes with those long lashes. A round face just too old to be a cherub but still impish. It's a face that Carter remembers seeing in a trench where he huddled up to his waist in water, shells rocking the ground around him as he gasped for breath, that face blue-white and bloated and smeared as it stared out of the wall of mud at him, where the sandbags had collapsed. And it's a face that Carter remembers seeing laughing with Finnan and the other Irish lads on their way into the mess hall, back in the supply trenches before they were all sent forward and …

  Maybe the resemblance isn't that strong, he thinks. Maybe it's just his memory playing tricks with him. But, even so, when he saw that photograph in the Times, for all that the man looked older, heavier, darker, it was close enough. When he came to Spain he wasn't just seeking to expiate his sins; truly, he wasn't. It was just…

  He thinks of Federico Garcia Lorca and he thinks of Private Thomas Messenger of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

  “One death is every death,” says Carter.

  two

  THE PALACES OF PANTALOONS

  FIVE MINUTES TO SELF-DESTRUCT

  skim the skybike low over the chimney stacks of the Circus, slaloming between the chi-blasts from the thopters overhead. The cross-fire of the gun emplacements pounds the sky all around me as I dive right down through it into the inner circle of the terrace, with its tarmac road and little grassy park where SS analysts are tucking into their packed lunches. The SS info-monkeys scatter, dive for cover as, chi-lance held out at right angles, I strafe each Georgian town house in passing, shattering windows, splintering doors, scarring sandstone with the blue-green beam of jizz-juice. I rip through the terrace, round and round again. It's neat. The thopters’ blasts cause almost as much damage as I do, melting tarmac, torching trees and bushes with each near-hit. Some of them spear parked aircars, the shrill alarm of one going off like an air-raid shelter suffering an anxiety attack. Woop! Woop! Woop! Five minutes to self-destruct, I think. But isn't there always?

  With the blackshirts pouring from the doors of offices all round the terrace now, firing from windows, roofs, I reckon that it's getting a little hot for comfort. Time to call it quits while I'm ahead. I lock the chi-lance into its holder and hit the brakes to spin the skybike up and round, like some latter-day black knight's steed rearing in evil fury. Orgone vapor spumes from the lateral vents like steam from flaring nostrils as I turn her on a button, riding one-handed so I can quick-draw my Curzon-Youngblood, carve a lightning flash above the doorway marked as Central Office, and holster it with a twirl in one swift motion. I kick the brakes off and lean forward as the bike rockets up in a sixty-degree climb aimed straight at the lead ornithopter.

  ——

  Man, I could count the beads of sweat on the thopter pilot's forehead, I swear, as he bucks his vehicle out of the way and I zip past him, close enough to shower sparks where my ray tank clips his wing. I roll with the bump, let it add a little extra chaos to my naturally erratic flight path. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee? Fuck that, I'm a dragonfly on speedballs, a psychotic midge kneecapping every fucking daddy longlegs dumb enough to be in my way. I break right, roll and come up headed straight for the white tower of the old church that holds the easternmost gun emplacement of the Circus complex. Brilliant blues and greens whiz past my head, pretty fireworks for this winter's night. I love these fuckers. Really, honestly. They make a pyromaniac feel so welcome.

  All the little hellhounds well and truly on my trail now, I rip open the throttle on the bike and give it full jets on. It's straight ahead from here, next stop Charing Cross, and the City Centre after that, beyond the blossoms of chi-blasts that light my path, left, right, up, down and shaking my ass all round about.

  I reckon it's only a matter of time now. There's a fuckload more chaos still to be caused, but my little wake-up call on the Circus should be more than enough to get their arses in gear and their fingers out (not the best metaphors to mix in terms of savory images, perhaps, but what the hell). Yes, I suspect that very soon somebody's going to be looking at that lightning flash over the Central Office's burnt and splintered door and figuring out exactly what it means.

  Excuse me, Mrs. Police State, can Joey come out and play?

  The Song That Tears the World Apart

  Joey stalks the boards of the stage. It's still two hours till the curtains go up, but already he's getting into character and that means it's best not to go near him. Jack's on the roof of the wagon practicing his flips and flops, Don's setting up the SFX, and Guy is sitting on the wagon's steps, head in his hands and muttering about the younger generation, philistines and, in particular, those of us with the voice of an angel and the attention span of a gnat.

  “OK,” I say. “OK, I'm sorry. It's just—how does anything call like a frieze? It doesn't make sense.”

  “It's not meant to,” he says. “You're in love with Harlequin, delirious, mad with love for him, your reason gone.”

  “My reason for what?”

  “Just sing the bloody line,” he says.

  I shrug.

  He sighs.

  “OK. Let's take it from Come, come, you timeless golden pride” he says.

  “Come, come, you timeless golden pride,” I sing. “Run, dance into delirium! Dance to the thunder of the drum that beats in time with pounding feet, and sing the praises of your spirit, joy. Call like a frieze across the centuries, sing out your ancient songs in answer to the holy flute that calls you out to play with sweet sad song. A colt in pasture at its mother's side bounding along, joy in its heart—this is the song that tears the world apart.”

  And whirling, twirling, birling, furling and unfurling from a pirouette that spins on like a skater on the ice—how does he do that?—Jack breaks out of it into a sweeping bow.

  “The song that tears the world apart?” says Joey.

  He comes striding to the stage's edge, steps off and lands soft, almost silent on the stone floor. He's in character all right now.

  “You don't think the Duke will read that as a reference to the Cant?” he says. “You don't think that's a little fucking obvious? Hey there, unkin fuck
er, we know all about you and your language. You don't think that's just asking for trouble?”

  You can see it in his narrowed eyes, the quiver of jaw muscle as he grits his teeth. Guy stands up from the wagon steps, hands up, placatory.

  “Joey, it's a metaphor for love.”

  Joey holds the psycho stare for a second then blinks and rolls his shoulders in a visible release. It's like someone threw a switch.

  “Forget it,” he says [shakes his head with a wry smile]. ‘As you were.”

  Bloody method actors, I think. Guy sits back down, gives a nod to me to start again. I watch as Joey climbs back up onto the stage.

  “O Themes,” I sing …

  “O Themes,” I sing, “you gardeners of Simile, garland yourself with ivy. Burst and bloom with blossoms of lush green bryony and bring boughs of oak and pine to join the revels. Put on your motley coat of fawn skin trimmed with tufts of silver fur, and sport your wands with wild devotion.”

  I skip this way, that way, cross the stage, hands reaching out, calling the audience themselves to join me in my madness: Duke and Princess; courtiers and serfs.

  “We'll have the whole land dancing to the Harlequin's hail,” I sing. “Come, come with us into the hills where mobs of maidens leave the spinning and the weaving of the loom to spin and weave instead in frenzied dance, caught in the frantic and frenetic, schizophrenic trance of Harlequin.”

 

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