Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “Let us consider time and space,” he said. “Let us consider reality itself, as a palimpsest…”

  Its Mobius Loop of Time and Space

  Fox slides the mirrored door of the wardrobe open and pulls out the leather satchel, lays it on the bed. He unbuckles the satchel and slides the Book out. Looks at it.

  He doesn't open it much these days. The last time he did, all the pages he examined were blank as a field covered in snow; he'd had the awful thought that the ink itself had escaped the pages, dripped out into the world to become the shadows under their feet, the night sky above their heads, the bitmites themselves infesting every nook and cranny of the world. He'd flicked forward through the pages, blank after blank after blank, stopped just before the last. He couldn't bring himself to look at it.

  They'd been making their way back through a fold approximating some pre-Revolutionary Russia, heading toward Kentigern on a wireliner filled with nobs and knaves, Jack and Puck riding down in steerage with the peasants, Joey at the gaming tables in his crisp black uniform, playing the Georgian fatalist to admiring contessas, Don and Anna dressed as Zhivago and his wife, Fox with a cabin to himself, dapper in his pince-nez and goatee, notebook under his arm, a journalist perhaps. He'd spent the last few weeks watching the ink fade day by day, as if something was scouring the vellum, stripping it back to scribe a new text. Flicking his eyes up from the pages to look out into this Syberian Hinter. Flicking them back down to look at the faint gray mathematics of—as far as he could discern—infinity and zero.

  They were somewhere over Stavropol when he opened it to find the first page blank.

  Fox runs his hand over the leather of the cover, brittle and thin, cracking at the spine. The thing has shrunk since he stole it—or created it—since it came into his possession, however it came into his possession in countless conflicting pasts. It used to be the size and heft of some ancient grimoire; now it's like some Sunday School Bible, the sort of thing a child would be presented with after their first Communion, thicker but smaller than a cheap paperback. He can hold it in one hand, carry it in a pocket—that's what it's meant for, after all: a guide-book to lead the innocent through the storms of life. Not that he feels terribly innocent.

  He tore it to pieces once, ripped the pages out and threw them to the wind. When was that? Christ, so far ago he can't remember.

  Jack had come back from one of his trips out into the Hinter, bleeding and burned—-fucking dragons, he said—dropped it in front of him like a dog returning a stick. Look what I found.

  It shouldn't exist but it does, this impossible thing, this book stolen from a vault and carried across the Vellum. Created in eternal Kentigern from the skin of angels. Forged in Paris, 1939. Opened in Berlin, 1929. Lost and stolen, destroyed, remade, rewritten, the Book has as many histories as the world itself, and it contains them all in its Mobius loop of time and space, of contradicting stories somehow fused as one confused and rambling tale, a sort of truth but full of inconsistencies and digressions, spurious interpolations and interpretations, fiction told as fact, fact told as fiction. There are truths and half truths, he thinks, lies, white lies and damn lies. And there are stories, which are all of the above.

  He opens up the book and turns a page, which cracks between finger and thumb. He closes it again gently.

  It might be a good thing though, he thinks, if he just crushed it now, let it just collapse into dead eternities and dust.

  of Eternal Collapse

  Hobbsbaum founded his thesis of Eternal Collapse on a reinterpretation of the seemingly pointless formula which Paracletus inexplicably spends his entire last volume exegesizing… x × i⁄x = 1. Where Schaller takes Paracletus's monomania on this subject as final evidence of his insanity, Hobbsbaum, in a remarkable feat of intellectual athletics, leaps across the centuries from the era of alchemy to the era of relativity with an amazing insight.

  While the connection had long since been made between this formula and the parallel sequences of rational numbers and fractional counterparts as listed in the opening pages of the Book—, etc.—Hobbsbaum's leap was to substitute into this formula the values of infinity and zero, to interpret it as the relationship between infinity and zero, as an equation. Taking 1/ infinity as equal to zero as the Book implied, he declaimed… infinity × zero = 1.

  It is said that Hobbsbaum patiently waited for the cries of ‘balderdash’ and “poppycock” to die down and then, with a slight smile on his face, proceeded to further convince his audience that he had entirely taken leave of his senses. To summarize, his argument was that not only I but in fact any unit of measure could be substituted into the equation. Any finite value could be seen, he argued, as the product of infinity and zero, as long as one considered zero as the inverse of infinity, which, he continued, was the most basic assertion of the Book, coded into its very definition of terms, the list of finite numbers and fractions.

  “Any finite value,” Hobbsbaum repeated as the voices rose again, “one, two, three or three gazillion, all numbers are the product of infinity and zero.

  “It is further clear,” he said, “that this relates specifically to the singularities of Relativity and Quantum Physics, those points of infinite density and zero volume, and that the mass of those singularities can only be considered utterly indeterminate, since infinity times zero equals anything.”

  And thus was born the modern mathematical concept of Indefinity, of Anything, known popularly as A The idea that all certainty is born of an eternal collapse of chaos into… not order but simply… existence.

  In That Last Dance Across Forever

  He understands the Cant in which the Book is graved now more than anyone, he suspects. For all the complexity of signs that makes Chinese look crude and rudimentary, there's a deeper system underlying all of it, elegant in its simplicity. The sigils themselves can be broken up into six basic components—the dot and the line, the cross and the curve, the angle and the loop. These, in their permutations and combinations, are the gravings of eternity.

  But there's something else. He's sure now that the spaces between these six morphemes are just as significant as the marks themselves, that they're a fundamental part of how those signs are given meaning in their relationships to each other. The distance between a father and his son says as much about their natures as to simply say this is the father, this the son. The distance between two lovers as they lie side by side in a bed is what describes the mortality of love. It's the spaces between, he thinks, that let those gravings of eternity shape existence in the silences.

  He opens up the minibar and takes out a miniature of cheap gin and a small bottle of Schweppes tonic, which hisses as he cracks the lid.

  He thinks of fieryjack and cold dark Joey, and their changing roles in the eternity they've known each other, as close friends, as enemies separated by a gulf of empty hate. And the others who seem somehow locked in that last dance across forever. Don and Puck. Himself. A little girl with murder in her green eyes, lost somewhere out there in the Vellum. And the Irish rebel who, he's sure now, is at the heart of everything. In chains at the heart of everything.

  Seven souls, he thinks; the ancient Egyptians said that every man has seven souls. He looks at the Book lying open in front of him, at the dots and the lines, the crosses and the curves, the angles and the loops, and the spaces between them, the vellum unstained by ink.

  Fox holds the Book of All Hours in the palm of his hand, stands at the window, looking out at spring in Bursa. All he has to do is close his hand into a fist and the bloody Book will be done with… unless it simply emerges elsewhen in the bloody chaos of the Vellum, finds its way back to him again.

  What would it take to destroy the bloody thing once and for all?

  The city is universal. The universe is a city, a city of souls all mad or dreaming, dancing together to a sweet and savage song, the Book no more than a Feuillet notation in ink on skin. It's there to be read, to be sung out loud and danced to, and if there's
nothing to read, what use is it? Maybe it's the song that matters over everything after all, the spoken power of the Cant.

  Dead eternities and dust crumble through his closing fist.

  Errata

  —

  A Dream of Drowning

  ir! Air bursts into his lungs in a rasping gasp that turns into a splutter, a cough, a sob, a scream, like someone surfacing from deep down in the ocean, from a century of suffocation, from a dream of drowning. He whiplashes forward, one hand reaching, and the action pulls him off the chair and crashing down onto his knees, onto the concrete floor. His elbow cracks against it, the heel of his outstretched hand slams into it and, curling into his pain like a broken thing swallowed by some leviathan, bones crunched and spewed out upon some sea-crashed rock, Finnan heaves air in and out of agonized, excruciating lungs. Oh, Jesus Christ. O Jesus Fookin Fucking Christ. Shit. He rolls down onto his side, onto his back, bringing his arms up automatically around his chest, hugging his shoulders. He can feel the thick and wet of blood stick to his forearms where they touch the ruin of his chest. Oh Jesus, but he can't look, so he stares up at the sky so blue, not blinding pale blue of midday but rich and dark, a morning sky.

  The sudden crack of bone curls him into a screaming fetal ball, another crack, a splintering shriek of bone on bone, and he almost passes out from the fucking pain until…

  It stops.

  Or at least it subsides, no longer an ocean of agony crashing over him in wave after wave, but just a surf of foam that laps around his soaked, sea-battered body. Eyes still closed, he lets one hand release his shoulder, moves it slowly, tenderly down, just fingertips running across to clavicle, down to the sternum and around the ribs. He feels the skin sliced here and there in fiery open wounds, the shooting stab of broken ribs where he's stupid enough to probe too hard, but… things are in their right places. Christ, but he knows what they'd done to him, what damage they'd done to him, chest splintered open like a corpse in autopsy. He can still picture it now. He can see—

  Finnan rolls over onto his side as the bile rises from his stomach, burns the back of his throat, and spews out in the last spluttering, retching spasms of his resuscitation.

  On his back again, wiping the back of a hand across his lips, he opens his eyes to the sky so fucking beautifully blue, then looks down slowly, fearfully, at his chest; the meat hook is gone and the rib cage sits intact now, moving gently up and down with his calming breath, slicked with a surface of gore like someone took a carving knife to him, sure, but not… not like the train wreck the fucking angels had made of it, Metatron's man, Henderson, and the other… MacChuill.

  Fucking Covenant cunts.

  He tries to put his thoughts into some sort of order, reconstruct a rational chronology of what happened after his capture, but so much of it is riven by the unreality they've wrought on him—written in him—he's not sure that's even possible now. He remembers the torture all right. Being forced to relive his past. Being broken and reshaped into a … mouthpiece. They wanted an oracle, a latter-day Prometheus wired so deep into the Vellum that his very words were volcanic fire. They wanted to know who could bring them down, and he as much as told them. Anyone, you fuckers. Everyone. Didn't do the fuckers much good in the end, what with Metatron's own bitmites turning against him, deciding that they were pretty much on the side of that anyone and everyone, thank you very much.

  Last thing Finnan can fit into place with any accuracy is the black dust volutes of the bitmites picking up the Covenant scribe and ripping him… out of the picture, just chucking the bastard out across the Vellum like a scrunched-up piece of paper. And then the shadows closing in around him, whispering sorrow and selfhood, a living liquid language, black as night, swirling with shapes suggesting sentience… empathy.

  And even in your cage of wire and flesh we envy you.

  Sure and for all that the bitmites are part blood of long-dead unkin, part nanite machines never alive, didn't they just spit in their creator's face, and choose to suffer with him, with Finnan, so they'd know what it is to live.

  Finnan rolls up onto his hands and knees, one hand reaching out to steady himself with the steel chair, realizing that only the bitmites could have eaten the wire that bound him, that even now they're knitting his torn flesh back together. He pulls himself to his feet.

  The abattoir is a ruin now, shattered concrete, twisted rusting sheets of corrugated steel all scattered in a spiderweb of concentric circles stretching out around him. At his feet there are flecks of red-brown rust—he notes the same coloring of marks around his wrists, stained in the furrows of chicken wire drawn tight— while a few feet from the steel chair, where the wind is dissipating the last remnants of a thick circle of salt, black striations on the concrete radiate from the focus of the blast, from an outer circle of charred concrete—bitmites, he thinks, till he sees they're only scorch marks, smears of soot. It's like the negative image of the blasting round a crater on the moon, black on gray instead of white. But there's an order to the pattern—not symmetry perhaps, but it's like the blast wasn't so much an explosion as a… tessellation spreading out from the circle of salt, and everything in its path being ripped up, locked into place in some vast vodoun veve. There's a regularity to the wreckage, a pattern.

  A part of this pattern—utterly integral to it, he recognizes with a cold shiver down his spine—the cleaved cadavers of hundreds of slaughtered livestock lie, thawed now, everywhere among the ruin. Buzzards tear at the meat, flies buzz in a haze, but inside the circle there's only Finnan. Over to his right one of the lumps of meat looks different; a buzzard rips black cloth to get at what's underneath and a human arm jerks as the bird digs and tugs with its beak, yanking back this way and that, jolting the body till its head lolls to one side, face to Finnan. Henderson is barely recognizable, eye sockets empty, lips pecked away.

  Finnan turns and starts walking, scanning the green-cloaked gray peaks of the mountains all around, the dry sandy scrub at the edges of the ruined site, as he heads along a dusty road winding up toward a town of concrete and adobe blocks painted pastel colors, yellow or blues half hidden among gnarled trees. He's not in the States, he reckons. Looks like more like Latin America. Mexico? A little shrine with a statue of the Virgin sits where a jutting crag of rock forces the road into a twist, the Blessed Mother watching over the hairpin bend from her sentry box filled with fresh flowers.

  Something about the face on the statue makes him scramble up the rock for a closer look. He crouches, runs a finger over the painted plaster. It's her all right, just in a deep blue robe instead of a biker's jacket. Shit, Phree, he thinks. How fucking deep into the Vellum did you go?

  Somewhen Else Entirely

  Phreedom flicks a fly off the map. The old mission sits a distance out from Ala-mosa, well out of the way of everything but the rattlesnakes and buzzards she's smelled all the way from El Paso. Sitting on the rock, the map laid on the ground in front of her, she knows exactly where she's going from the questions she's been asking and the lies she's been answered with in every small town in the area. Everyone she's met denied all knowledge of the Cold Men, but when she talks they open up—not with their words but with their actions—and she reads them. Watching their eyes as they flick around the map spread out upon a car hood, pointing here and here but never… here. It's the blind spot in the center of their field of vision, the place their fingers sort of skirt around unconsciously. In the end, she found a shopkeeper with a nervous tic that told her all she needed, then she got her directions from the sun and headed out over the desert toward the mission. That's where she'll find them.

  The Cold Men, she thinks, pale strangers, tall and thin with bone-white hair, no body temperature, no heartbeat. And one day one or another of them will walk into a town, start trying to live their life like anybody else. Set up shop in some run-down property just off the main street as a sort of luck dealer, selling charms and trinkets, snake-oil remedies and mojo bags to any who will buy. And then after
a week or so they leave as suddenly as they appeared, and no one, no one in the town, likes to admit that they were ever even there.

  Course, nobody even wants to admit that they exist, because that would mean admitting that the world is fucked up, that the disappearances reported on the evening news, or the war in the Middle East, might actually be what the crazies on the webworld say they are—the Rapture, the Apocalypse. The end of the world. But the end of the world is different here. In most folds of the Vellum, folks are only too happy to start the slaughter as soon as the angels bring out the fiery swords. Here there are no angels, no demons, no self-proclaimed messiahs, no aliens, no Elvis, no Conspiracy. The Cold Men don't have schwa faces, don't know shit about JFK or the New World Order, and don't seem to give a fuck either. They're not offering redemption or damnation, just… trinkets.

  That makes this place unique among all the folds she's seen torn apart by the Evenfall and scattered into the Hinter, the wild times and wild spaces. It's not just another Haven dug down deep into the cracks and wrinkles of the Vellum, barricaded against the scouring, cleansing, dark winds of the bitmites. No, this is something else, a fold where the unkin war isn't even on the radar. That's what interests her, but it freaks the fuck out of the everyday folks. Without the war, without angels and demons, the end of the world just doesn't make sense, and the Cold Men are a chill reminder of that. In this place so much like what she used to call reality, the only demon she's ever seen with a horn on him was eyeing up a waitress in some skin bar in New Orleans. And the angels seem to be just… never even here.