Ink

by Hal Duncan

  As he speaks to the head, flesh crumbles off it as a dust of bitmites, bone gleaming white as it's revealed.

  “My precious child,” he says, “I'll always think of you as mine. I'll always think of you … your tender tug upon my beard, your call, your curt demand, M'sire, who has insulted you, old man? Who pricks your heart, a thorn stuck in your side? Tell me, old man. I'll have his hide”

  The head is stripped now of all flesh and Don walks with it, talks with it, playing Pantaloon, an aged fool, as if poor Yorick stood with Hamlet's skull.

  ‘Although you're dead,” he says. ‘Although you'll never do these things again …”

  He tails off, sinking into silent sorrow for a moment.

  “If any man denies the truth of the divine, let him remember Pierrot and Columbine, her sisters too. Have pity for this prince's death and then believe …”

  Believe in chance, I think, though. Chance and chaos. In a god that dances, drunk and mad with wine. What else is there that offers us relief?

  THE PROPHECIES WE LISTEN TO

  ‘Ah, lass,” says Don, “we're come to a hard pass. You and your sisters… I don't

  know if your old man can help you now, my child.”

  ‘Alas,” she says, “old man, our fate is set. It's misery,” she says. “Exile.” The bitmites whisper it, but she can feel it deeper in her than their voice. It's part of her, the graving all along her arm, the intertwining serpents of her nature, all the conflict and the strange peace born from it, written on her skin, carved in her as this prophecy that she was fool enough to listen to so long ago. It's the prophecy of her journey through the Vellum with Don at her side, their stops on strange shores and Don growing older, herself unchanged. It's the prophecy of them urging slave girls rescued from the houses of aristos before them like cattle, as rupter blasts shatter the ground under their feet. Don waving them on, staying back to hold off their pursuers, so fucking noble, so fucking stupid, so fucking …

  Go on without me.

  She missed him so much.

  ‘Ah, poor child,” he says.

  He wraps his arms around her. In the white robe of his costume, he seems like a frail old swan folding its snowy wings around a cygnet. The bitmites whisper her next line and, as she says it, part of her is Phreedom, part is Anaesthesia, part some other girl called Anna. But a part of her, she knows, is truly Columbine.

  Old man,” she says, “I'll weep for you. Farewell.”

  “I'll cry for you,” he says, “and for your sisters too. Farewell… if one like you can fare at all well in this world.”

  “I'll find my sisters and they'll share my exile and disgrace. We'll go someplace where Zithering can't see my face, where that damned mountain is beyond my gaze, where Harlequin's vine-covered staff, if it is praised by other members of the pack, is never raised.”

  In this strange prophecy of her past graved on her arm, it seems so simple really, just another tale of loss, with Tom and Finnan, and the Evenfall, Don finding her in New York. They'd traveled so far together, gone so far together, looking for some place that would be safe from angels and their wars… then after all that, he was gone as well. How this war of hers felt like salvation then. How every angel head upon a spike gave her a sense of… peace.

  She'd led her tribe back out into the Hinter, half barbarian, half hellion, sacking city after city with her army, Haven after Haven, burning every temple, every tomb they came to. She remembers the day they raided the Oracle of Locks, and afterward, her at the head of the pack, leading them all on the long march through the Hinter. A widowed bride, she'd led her children through this cold land of the blessed, toward a home they'd never find, and she knew that her ache was a torrential river she would never cross. She'd never really be at rest.

  “Farewell, my home, my native land,” she says. “The Harlequin has laid his fury on us with a heavy hand.”

  The consul stands holding a serving girl's arm, slightly in front of… Sara, her name is. She has a name, just as the consul is called Etmundt. And there's Merton and Rosai and Taner and… she knows all their names. These courtiers and serfs, these maids-in-waiting, water boys, they all have names and places in this Haven, under the Duke's roof, every one of them, and these few terrified souls just a fraction of a whole society of scribes and cooks, cleaners and gardeners, the choirs who sing every morning in the domes around the walls, bellringers and watchmen and whipping boys and guards. She wonders what they'll do now that the Duke is gone. She wonders if she's sad, knowing that she can't stay here any longer, because she'll miss them or because she's never really known them well enough to miss them.

  “God forgive me for my crime,” she says. “I know I've sinned, but this is too unkind.”

  The Harlequin, his eyes so blue beneath the mask, takes the Duke's skull out of Don's hand.

  “Why wait?” he says. “Why do you still delay your fate? Columbine, if you'd only recognized me as the son of the divine, at the right time,” he says, “if you'd seen sense before it was too late, Columbine, you'd be happy now. We'd be on the same side. But even though I am divine, no son of mortal man but Sooth himself, I suffered your disdain. My name had no respect in Themes.”

  He reaches up behind his head to pull a cord. The mask falls, and she sees the face that haunts her dreams. She's known it as an infant in her arms, and as an aging angel using all his charms to save his skin, but this is Jack not as some noble warrior but as a Harlequin, not as a Duke but as a Dionysus with a snicking grin.

  “You know,” he says, “some say the gods are fools to let their passions sink so low, but long ago…”

  He holds the skull of the Duke up. Bitmites crawl in the sockets of the eyes, eating the thing away from the inside. He gives a little blow and it bursts into dust.

  “My father,” he says, “made it so, and so we must.”

  “The soul takes many forms,” I say, “and many fates transpire. So what we hope for may not always come to be, but we find ways to bring about events we fear …”

  The white dust floats out through the air, the bitmites clearing in its path.

  ‘As we, I hope,” I say, “have shown you here.”

  There is no final curtain, just the dimming of the lights. We take no bows. The crowd stands silent as Jack pulls a lever here and there. A clang, a whine of motors and the stage begins to rise, Jack kicking polystyrene rocks out of the way. As Don leads Phree up to the wagon, Jack's already sliding open a compartment in the roof, retrieving hidden rupters. He drops one and then another down to me, and then a third. As the wagon's side wall judders into place, he pulls a fourth out for himself. He flicks it on, jumps for a rope and slides down to the ground beside me. Don is clambering out into the wagon's driving seat and slipping on the gloves that drive it. I take the rupters over to Joey and Guy while Jack, with one eye on the cowering audience, flips tarpaulins off the Waldo horses round behind the wagon, locks the harness straps on them, kicks out the blocks from under the wagon's wheels and swings up on the running board.

  His hands held out in front of him as if he's playing a piano, Don brings the giant claw-things into life. The harness straps snap tight and the Waldo horses pull the wagon forward, trundling slowly round, out of the scaffolding of rigging, out into the hall. He steers it past most of the wreckage, though a few chairs crack beneath a wheel or have to be kicked off to one side by a finger flick.

  As Guy and I follow the wagon out through the wide doors we came in by, Joey strides into the center of the room to pull the Duke's sword from the wreckage, and jogs back to join us. I catch a look at the consul's face before Joey and Guy swing the doors shut, the way he puts himself between us and the serving girl. I notice the old courtier at his other side, holding his hands in front of him, hiding the wet patch at his crotch. All in an evening's entertainment, I think.

  Then the doors are shut and Joey is jamming the sword between the handles as a makeshift bolt; it might give us just a little more time. Guy clambers up onto
the bench beside Don, and I jump up onto the running board, scrabble up a ladder onto the roof. The corridor in front of us is long and gray and there's a lot of guards and gates between us and the outside world. But at least there's six of us now—not much against an army, but just one man short of the Magnificent Seven.

  And at least we've got Phreedom back.

  Errata

  —

  A Hunter, A Gatherer

  hey say they saw my brother in Dresden. In Dresden, London, Nagasaki. v’ But they say nothing of me. They say nothing of me walking in Berlin on Kristallnacht, among the broken glass and broken lives. They say nothing of me walking with the damned to Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen, and the iron gates closing behind us. They say nothing of me kneeling on the tiled floors covered in shit and piss, kneeling to hold the hands and hold the last thoughts of those dying round me. They say nothing of me, the last of all the thieves they'll have to suffer.

  But in Siberian gulags, Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, villages in Vietnam, Bosnian towns, wherever there was pain and misery in those days, I was there unseen, unheard, but seeing and hearing, knowing everything the dying ever were—as broken and tattered as that now was—and gathering it into the river of souls that flows within me.

  I wanted only to escape the hunters of this world once, live my own life free of responsibilities. Instead I have myself become a hunter, a gatherer, and while my life is not my own, all others, it seems, are my charge.

  I would not say I hear the whispers of the souls as they issue from the still cracked lips in the pause after the last intake of breath of those about to die, before the final guttering. I do not literally hear them, but it is like hearing, like a memory of what's been heard. At first I thought these voices in my head were mere imagination, mad hallucinations as the doctors would say, standing by my bed discussing me as if I were an animal. So indistinct they were at first, distant and confused, I had no thought of them as having meaning, content.

  Over time though, like learning a new language from the babble of voices in a café that you sit in every day for months, I came to understand them as the unspoken fears, desires, remembered joys and sorrows of the other patients and the staff around me, always there but only truly crystallizing in the last gasp. And not heard but remembered from the Book, from the roar of ghosts within the room the day my brother brought us both from our world into this one.

  I have heard the lives of all the dead of this dread century recited in a single, rushing moment, all the hours of those lives poured out and swirling round me. I cannot help but to remember them when I am near their owners, especially when that owner is remembering their precious personal history for the last time.

  The River of Souls, the Thief of Lives

  Should I let all these broken lives drift off into eternity, lost and forgotten? Should I stay silent, let them sink back into slumber in my flesh? When I first opened my mouth and poured these ghosts out to the doctors of the Institute, I did not mean to shroud myself in wraiths of memory. I caught the fleeting whisper of forced sterilization in one doctor's thoughts, and a hint of something even worse; I thought if I could only make them see that we too had moments of meaning in our pasts then … they would see that we were human. I did not know…

  I did not know that I would find myself not only flooding my surroundings with the river of souls but also caught and carried in that river, out of the prison that I was in, away into the place and moment of this memory or that. Climbing onto a train beside two meeting lovers. Out on a street where a mother is scolding her daughter for her lateness. I only meant to be a witness to those who had been forgotten. But each word I speak of their lost histories is a step through time and space. And so, whatever prison I may be in I can walk away from, and whatever death camp they may take me to, as another nameless numbered member of the herd, I can always escape into a dead man's past.

  Am I only a scavenger then, fooling myself with dreams of mercy? Do I seek them out to take their last unspoken confessions only because the more of them that I remember, the more free I am to travel anywhere and anytime within the lives written within the Book? Am I the guardian and witness of their souls or just a thief of lives? In truth, I think I am a little of both. And while many might say that it's not my place to gather what belongs to Death, I say that Death, who rules this world, demanding sacrifice and supplication, stakes his claims in fire and blood. And I will not accept those claims, because I know his face. I know the face of Death, the one true God whose only answer to our prayers is our destruction. I know my brother's face.

  I do not see myself as any sort of hero, but if I can steal those lives and, in my own escapes, take them with me out of the nightmares of this here, that now, I will do so. Oh, no, a thief of lives is not a hero, for a hero knows that what he does is right and I have no such certainty. Nor do I desire it. It is the heroes—men who would be gods—who tear this world apart with those blind, brutal certainties, and it's the rest of us who're left to stumble through the ruins, gathering our dead.

  eclogue

  DEAD ETERNITIES AND DUST

  The Príncípaea Cosmogonea of Gíoseppus de Paracfetus

  ccording to the great seventeenth-century scholar Gioseppus de Paracle-tus, the Book of All Hours begins with a list of all rational finite numbers— l, 2, 3, 4 … and so on, four hundred numbers on each page, in forty lines often numbers to a line. There is no zero in this list, zero being a step outside finity and therefore beyond the remit of a tome dealing primarily with the existential. Rather, on the facing pages of this list of numbers, scrawled in some annotator's nervous longhand, a list of fractions runs in tandem— … and so on.

  It should be obvious from this that it is only on the turn of the last page (which one never seems to reach no matter how long one spends flicking forward through the Book) that the reader will finally be faced with infinity on one page and zero on the page facing it. Zero, as the discerning reader of the Book will no doubt understand, is no more a concrete measure of actuality, of things, than is infinity. Like infinity, it is an abstraction of the idea of measurable units of actuality. From our existential experiences of something(s) we abstract the ideas of everything (infinity) and nothing (zero); but these are, by their nature, nonexis-tential, transexistential… metaphysical.

  Should the reader have the stubborn resolve to persist in flicking pages for eternity, however, Paracletus tells us that the Book of All Hours, having crammed infinity into the first four-hundreth of its infinite pages, follows on from this list of finite numbers, plunging quite suddenly into mathematics proper, at first merely laying out the basics of simple arithmetic but very quickly elaborating and expanding its range of transformational symbols so as to describe quite complex geometric and algebraic relationships.

  It has long been suspected that Paracletus drew heavily from the Book in composing his Principaea Cosmogonea, and that his initial division of principles and theorems into Macroscopica and Microscopica, with the former inscribed on the even-numbered pages and the latter inscribed on the odd-numbered pages, may well reflect a similar structure in the Book itself. Given the continuing relevance of this work to modern-day mathematicians and theoretical physicists—who still glean its pages for inspiration in constructing their theories of Relativity, Quantum Physics, Superstrings, Twistors and Random Truths—it would indeed be remarkable if Paracletus were alone responsible for this surfeit of ingenuity.

  More Solid and More Staged

  Around the corner, the incessant beep beep beep of a reversing lorry cuts over the distant vroom of vans and cars delivering products and assistants to the shops of Sauchiehall Street. Fox listens for the song of birds among the early noise but hears none. Winter in Kentigern, and it won't be dawn yet for another—what?— three hours, and dark again by 4:00 p.m. He flicks his collar up and steps down from the doorway to the street, hands jammed into his pockets. He should have brought an overcoat.

  It's cold but not cold enough for snow.
It seldom is in Kentigern this time of year. With the Gulf Stream keeping December mild and wet, White Christmases are few and far between in Kentigern, so the midwinter season has a darkness that you don't get in many cities round the world. Lit by the orange streetlights glistening on wet pavements, the decorative lights in shops, the long nights in Kentigern lack that blue-white quality of snow in the air or plowed along the gutters of New York or Berlin. It's more the light of bonfires built for dancing round, of Yule logs crackling in the hearth, candle-shaped bulbs in brass candelabra in a warm pub where you go to meet your friends. You can live through days without a glimpse of natural light here, going to work in the dark, going home in the dark. It can be miserable or it can give your life a strangely artificial air, a chiaroscuro that makes everything at once more solid and more staged. Like the whole world is a Caravag-gio painting or a Rembrandt. The Prodigal Returns.

  They're all prodigals in some respects, Fox thinks, at different stages: Joey brooding and bitter, always trapped; Jack in the first flush of wild ecstatic liberation; Puck resting, out in the wilds, in some orchard that he's sure will always keep him fed. And Guy? He's the prodigal who's been out in the world now for a while, he supposes, and is starting to see life's not as simple as it looks, starting to see how dangerous the world is, but unwilling to give up.

  He turns the corner past the flashing light of the garbage truck, veers past a garbageman with a quick apology and a nod.