Ink

by Hal Duncan

  It's New Mexico. April 1st, 2037.

  But it's so much like home it hurts.

  Calling them angels isn't right, though; it's an old habit that she's trying to break. What's missing in this fold is unkin. That's the right word for them. Like her, underneath the Cant, they're just human beings who caught a little mojo sometime … somewhere… somehow. A peyote trip or a friend dying in your arms—all it takes is one little glimpse of the fields of illusion and the river of souls that runs right through it, and it changes you. She knows that only too well, what it's like to take a look out of the back door of reality. There have been unkin walking the world for millennia, people who along the way happened to hear a word that changed the way they saw the world, and just decided not to die.

  A Covenant grunt she interrogated once, he told her he'd stopped dying some time back when, at the age of twenty, in the middle of a war he didn't own and dressed in a uniform that hated him, he decided he'd get wasted in another way. He was lying in a foxhole, stoned and tripping, he'd said, when he heard the Cant—like some gook caught on the wire, he'd said, just calling my name over and over again, but it wasn't a human voice. It was like the tracers and the guns and the bombs themselves were talking to me. So he'd walked out into fireballs and gunfire, walked out and kept on walking. She's known other unkin that could walk through a hail of bullets; some can walk through rain without a single drop hitting them. For the unkin, luck is something you can taste in the air, spit onto your palm.

  Of course, that Covenant fucker's luck had run out on meeting her.

  But all this fold has is the Cold Men, and if they're unkin, well, they're the only unkin in the whole of the Vellum who aren't caught up in the War on one side or another, who aren't too busy playing cowboys and Indians to concern themselves with the humans caught in the cross-fire. There's something about them that's close enough it worries her.

  “They think they're outside of life,” Finnan had said to her, “something different. Sure and some of them I wonder if that's where the stories of vampires come from. I've heard of some with no body heat, no shadow, no reflection. They like to think they're beyond the flesh, you see, beyond mortality. ‘Cause sure and all the rich flesh of the world, all that blood and dust, that's just a prison we need to escape from.”

  For him, he said, reality had never been a trap.

  So he spent a long time keeping out of the way of all their rituals and incantations, living this quiet kind of life out in a trailer park inhabited by whitetrash Jesus freaks and acid heads who treated him as one of their own. And Phree and her brother Thomas used to sit with him at night, chugging beer and listening to his tall tales, until one day an angel came knocking at his door with call-up papers for the apocalypse, and Phree—she found herself standing between them. Long story. Not a happy ending. She still wonders what happened to him when reality came apart, when the birdman played the last trump and called down the apocalypse upon them all. That was twenty years ago, in this fold, an eternity for her.

  But in this fold…

  Did the blind and godless hosts of heaven and hell just wipe each other out here behind the scenes or did they finally, in some strange act of translation, make the leap they always wanted to and disappear entirely from the world of flesh to their banal eternities? All she knows is that there's not a single angel in this fold. Not one. So it's not like the Evenfall, not like the Hinter.

  So maybe this is somewhen else entirely.

  one

  MORTAL REMAINS

  Dawn in Jerusalem

  he zeppelin glides down through cloud, through wisps of cloud, until the S city is unveiled ahead of them and to the south. It must be clear skies to the east, for the city shines, catching the low sun with that golden quality of morning light on sand and stone, bright against the dark clouds of retreating night; sharp shadows cut the jumble of walls and rooftops, and the streets seem little more than chinks of darkness from this distance. From this height, with only the muted thrum of the engines to break the silence of the gondola, he might almost imagine the Holy City a haven where all men—Christian, Mohammedan and Jew alike—must surely live in peace, leaving the warfare to more temporal institutions than religion. From this height, there are no lines dividing Turkish North from British South, no Jewish quarter here or Arab sector there. The city seems a crisp golden vision of harmony. Dawn in Jerusalem is a wonder to behold.

  It's the 14th of September, 1929, three weeks since the Arab riots and the massacre in Hebron.

  Pray God, Samuel wasn't in Hebron, he thinks.

  Carter folds the newspaper on his lap and lays it on the empty seat beside him, rubs a smudge of ink from his thumb. The coming weeks will, he's quite certain, offer little rest and peace of mind during his furlough. One only has to read the headlines to know that the whole situation is a shambles. The very idea of a neutral Palestine, joint British-Turkish control; it's a joke, absurd.

  The two Turks seated across from him look sullen and hostile. The Russian lounges in the far corner by the door, legs spread out and cap pulled down over his face. Carter, sitting alone on his side of the cabin, finds the seating arrangement grimly amusing. The Russians in the Caucasus here, the British in Persia and Mesopotamia/jere, and the Turks, well, just where are the Turks positioning themselves these days? It's common knowledge that they're watching what happens in Georgia and Azerbaijan with great interest indeed, waiting to see if the Russians can consolidate their victory in Tbilisi.

  A part of him wishes that right now he were back at the Front; he knows how desperate the situation is. Every day the Futurists push farther, and only the winter weather and the fractured support of their Cossack allies prevents them from breaking through. If the Futurists take Baku, everyone knows, then Yerevan is next. God, if they take Kurdistan, they could march right down the Euphrates to the ink fields of Mesopotamia.

  Not that the Russians are the only threat. The Turks have never forgiven the British for the Uprising that lost them Kurdistan. IfAtaturk were alive today, you hear them say. It's no surprise the Young Turks aren't satisfied with this pared-down—albeit rejuvenated—Ottoman Empire; they're revolutionaries, and all revolutionaries are proud. The Turks will stand beneath Mount Ararat again, they mutter.

  Yes, he thinks, the Russians here, the British here, the Turks here. All that's missing is ayoung Bedouin boy running wild around the middle of the cabin, firing his Lee-Enfield in the air—Faisal's Arabia.

  The Ben-Abba Airfields north of the city come into sight, strangely modern in the primitive Palestinian wilderness. Fat cigars of air technology float, moored on slender metal berthing towers, high over the confusion of warehouses and hangars, passenger terminals out on the far edge toward the wells of the desert. Carter notes a few BOAC passenger ships, or here and there the colors of this nation's flag or that, but four out of five of the airships wear the black cross of Germany on their envelope, the heraldry of Deutschland International Airlines. Nobody makes airships like the Germans. Here and there among these cruisers outfitted for either passengers or cargo but generally of a size, a few slimmer shapes stand out, sleek and beautiful among their more rotund brethren, vessels of the vedette class built for high speeds and light cargoes. These ones will be carrying airmail, no doubt, but Carter is all too familiar with the other uses they can be put to; he saw that firsthand in Tbilisi. Nobody makes airships like the Germans, but nobody buys them like the Russians, like the damned Futurists.

  He should be there with his men right now, Carter knows, his personal concerns set aside in this time of wars and pogroms. But this is a matter of honor. If Samuel is still alive, he will find him. And if he is dead, as this von Strann fellow believes, then by God but Carter will bring his murderers to justice. He feels the letter from his old friend now where it sits in his breast pocket, like a dagger in his heart, or like the threat of one.

  It's only the latest in a series that the old man's sent him over the years, increasingly bizarre, increasingly
worrying, written in tones that range from utter despondency to fevered jubilation. I've found what I was looking for… My hopes are crushed… This is the answer, Jack, you understand, the answer… Lost. Lost, God damn it. Every trace has been destroyed. There was a time when Carter saw his old professor as a new Schliemann on the verge of unearthing Troy, a latter-day Champollion in that eureka moment of discovering the name of Ramses on the Rosetta stone, translating that first cartouche. But then…

  Even as a student, before the Great War, he'd come to realize that Hobbs-baum's great success was in a past slipping away from him. For all the groundbreaking discoveries of his youth, Samuel was never the most political creature and academia remembered his present eccentricities more than his past glory. After the War he talked endlessly of the old days, names of old friends littering his conversations as if Carter would clearly recognize these strangers. His son had died in Flanders and somehow, Carter suspects, it is that loss that's been at the heart of all these years of wild-goose chases—the undiscovered city of Aratta, the true site of the mythical Kur—whatever it is the old man thinks he's looking for, perhaps beneath it all is a much simpler yearning.

  Eight years ago, Carter almost joined him on his mad quest—he had the chance—and maybe if he had, he could have steered the old man back to a safe harbor. But we can't change the past, he thinks.

  He feels the letter in his pocket, near his heart.

  A STERLING FELLOW

  Dear Jack, it begins.

  If you are reading this letter, the time I feared has come. I will be gone by now and can only pray von Strann was able to get this letter into your hands. It may be that the full circumstances of my disappearance are a mystery to the Baron, and I regret that I can offer little explanation at this point; this communique may be intercepted and we cannot afford the perils of indiscretion. Believe me, Jack, this is a matter of deepest import, and you must put aside all thoughts of our friendship; yes, I knowyou, Jack, and this is not the time for per sonal vendettas. The future of the world—the past, the present and the future of this world—hang in the balance and I hope, I know, that you can bring us through. I pray that this letter reaches you and I urge you, Jack, to make all speed to Palestine, to von Strann. I know your feelings about the Prussians, Jack, but he is a good man, an artist not a warrior, and you must trust him implicitly. You may have to trust him with your very life before all this is over. May the Lord have mercy on us all, Jack. The enemy is not what we thought.

  Samuel

  And then there's the notebook that came with it, with pages which read, once you decipher Hobbsbaum's shorthand, like articles drafiedfor the history books:

  … around this time von Strann crossed paths with none other than Mad Jack Carter, on leave from the Caucasian Front and recently arrived in Palestine in search of Hobbsbaum.

  Jack Carter. Leaving aside the fantasies of recent Hollywood movies little is known with any real certainty about Captain Jack Carter prior to his famous victories in Kurdistan. We know that he studied under Hobbsbaum at Oxford, but there is no record of him at Eton, where he claimed to have been schooled beforehand. We know that he joined the army at the outbreak of World War I using a forged birth certificate, rising through the ranks at a remarkable rate, gaining his first commission in the field at the age of nineteen, captain by the age of twenty-one. But while such a speedy elevation through the ranks (at a time when officers with blood other than blue were rare) might well suggest some sort of secret patron pulling strings behind the scenes, the rumors that he was the illegitimate son of this or that duke all appear quite unsubstantiated. Scores of historians have failed entirely to trace his mother with any certainty, let alone his father. Von Strann's biographer, Golding, even goes so far as to suggest that Carter started the rumors himself in an attempt to mask quite humble origins.

  But whether “Carter” was his mother's name or his father's trade, by all accounts, this young blood was a soldier first and foremost—the Sword of Yerevan no less—and one has to wonder what he would have made of an elegant and effete aristocrat like the Baron von Strann. And, indeed, vice versa. By the time that circumstances brought von Strann and Carter together, the latter must have been the very embodiment of everything the Prussian aristocrat and pacifist both loved and hated.

  Carter remains in his seat, reading this utterly disquieting sign of Hobbsbaum's madness. The shorthand is so cramped it's almost illegible…but not quite. He almost wishes that it was…

  A letter written by his superior, Major Hamilton, it says, to the Persian viceroy prior to Carter's citation for the VC. reveals, perhaps, the most we know about Jack Carter as a man, describing him as “a sterling fellow, his only flaw the recklessness of youth.” For the fearlessness with which Carter personally held off the enemy at the Battle of Majkops, allowing every man of his command to escape, Major Hamilton “can only commend him in the highest terms, foolhardy as his action was. When one looks into his eyes, one senses that he acts not just with passion, but with a razor-edged understanding of the situation. I do believe he is exactly the kind of chap the Empire needs.”

  But in many ways Carter's army career is even more of a mystery than his life prior to enlisting. We know that he spent three years leading a mixed guerrilla force of British soldiers and Kurdish and Armeni tribesmen against the Turks, across what is now northern Iraq, that his routing of the Turkish Nationalist forces at Karadut on the slopes of Nemrut Dag may well have been a turning point in the uprising which resulted in Free Kurdistan. We know of his five years as a military attache in the service of the shah of Persia, another five leading a new guerrilla force of British, Kurds, Armenis and Azeris against the Futurist forces now pressing down on their Asian fronts in the Caucasus, reclaiming the territories lost to them in the chaos after Stalin's death …

  And Carter remembers squatting on the barren mountainside of Nemrut Dag, scree slipping underfoot as he sheltered behind the massive stone head of the fallen statue of King Antiochus, aiming the Lee-Enfield and knowing that if they did not hold… knowing that behind him old men and women and children sat cowering in fear against fallen walls and piles of rocks engraved with ancient Greek inscriptions while their village burned down below. It will be a massacre, he had reported back, begging for more troops, more ammunition, more supplies, as the Turks swept their eastern territory free of the “undesirables.”

  “The Armenis are a filthy people, Carter Bey,” his lieutenant Mehmet had said. “They are only being moved—”

  “And the Turks one day will say the same about the Kurds,” Carter had said.

  Mehmet had stood there, eye-to-eye with him, for what seemed forever, and Carter remembers knowing, somehow knowing that this moment meant the world. A line in the sand, he had thought, a line in the sand. All it takes is one good man.

  “Very well, Carter Bey,” Mehmet had said. “We will save the filthy Armenis.”

  A Twitch of Jaw Muscles

  Sunlight flashes off the silver skin of a moored zeppelin, catching his eye.

  “An awkward situation, no?” says the Russian. “But we are not at war here, are we, Captain? Shall we not be … civil with each other out of deference to our hosts?”

  Carter keeps his head turned to the window—has done since Damascus, when he wasn't making a show of reading the newspaper. The Baghdad-Damascus leg of the journey was quite pleasant, but now… he can't say he's happy sharing the cabin with an officer of the infamous Black Guard. The most reviled of Russia's echelons, the Black Guard are the worst sort of Cossacks in his opinion, turncoats against their tsar and their countrymen, the most vicious devotees of revolutionary Futurism. He's no stranger to this type of man; he's heard the stories of internment centers in the heart of Europe, of the pogroms and so-called purification. He's seen for himself what the Futurists have done in Russia; God, even the savages of Africa would balk at such inhuman acts.

  And this creature has the arrogance to speak as one gentleman to another.
r />   “Major Josef Pechorin,” he says. “The famous Captain Carter, is it not?”

  “Indeed,” says Carter.

  “Can I trouble you for a cigarette, perhaps, Captain Carter?”

  A strained silence.

  “Of course,” says Carter.

  There's little courtesy in his voice, only contempt; he has no interest in engaging in polite conversation with the man. Still, Carter can't help but glance across at him as he holds out the silver case, to note the face matching the tone of voice, the supercilious air of one who knows some secret giving him the upper hand. A cold, quiet smile plays on the man's face as he puts one of Carter's cigarettes in his mouth. A Russian black for a Russian blackshirt: how appropriate. Carter snaps the case shut. Although the Turks and British are the only two real powers in this region, this blackshirt's attitude is full of indolent, insolent superiority, of casual disdain. Still … the Turkish forces stationed here and there through northern Palestine or in their Syrian protectorate may be no threat to him, but there's a British garrison south of Jerusalem, and checkpoints in the British sector of the city where this man could be shot on sight for a wrong turn. One might hope.