Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “Never been here before,” says Finnan.

  “A new customer's an old friend, far as we're concerned. Come on back in, old friend. We'll fix you up with what you want. A little love? A little money? Maybe a little good-time honey to keep the bed warm at night? Am I right? Trust me. Trust yourself. What we can't give you, it's not worth having. We are… resplendent in our range.”

  Finnan half admires his blarney with a wry smile. But he doesn't trust the fucker for a second; there's a lilt in his voice, a croon of Cant. Fucker may not be unkin, but he's as near as damn-it.

  “Just tell me what you're looking for,” says the Cold Man.

  Little girl who stole the world, thinks Finnan.

  “Truth,” he says. “Maybe you've got a little knickknack made of chickenbone that smells like horseshit whenever someone's talking out their ass? That might be useful.”

  The barker laughs, all jovial and phony as a tour guide. It's part of the act, thinks Finnan, something the marks expect, something they want. He's no stranger to the idea of roguish charm, the way you can win someone's trust by telling them not to trust you, with a twinkle in the eye.

  “You're a man of practicalities and logic,” says the barker. “I can tell that you know what you're looking for, and it's no business of mine.”

  He flourishes his hand toward the market.

  “Wander at your leisure. Browse. Question.”

  He smiles, waves Finnan on and in.

  “One thing, though, old friend. A little advice.”

  “Free?” says Finnan.

  “Free and gratis.”

  Finnan takes a draw on his smoke and waits.

  “Just ignore the man behind the curtain,” says the barker.

  Cold as ice and eyes like steel, he tips his hat, wheels and stalks off.

  “Be seeing you,” says Finnan to his back.

  Dreamcatchers and Sand Faintinqs

  The mission at the far end, with a square in front and a few ruined buildings round it, there's really only one street to the place—but somehow, trying to walk from one end to the other, that street seems to stretch out, twisting as you go, space winding round you like a bad-trip snake world. The way the world is now, Finnan wonders how much of it is the confusion of the multicolored stalls and wide-eyed searchers rooting among them, and how much of it is a bona-fide reality fuck. He's been out of it for a long time—fuck knows how long, really—but he's up to speed on the Evenfall now and the long Hinter that followed it, the deep dark night of dreams he slept right through. As he ducks and winds his way toward the mission, past stalls selling shit from every corner of the world, anything that might remotely be considered lucky, he seems to be going one step forward, two steps back and to the side, and never getting any nearer.

  He pushes his way around blankets laid out on the ground, scattered with North and South Americana, dreamcatchers and sand paintings, vodoun and Santeria saint statues and shrines, potions and charms. He skirts stalls selling Scandinavian runic necklaces, Hindu Ganeshas, Chinese Kuans, Celtic staffs, African fetishes. Yin/Yangs, alien blood samples, glow-in-the-dark Madonnas, mirrors with the images of Jesus, Elvis or Diana embossed on them, skull rings and evil-eye rings, pentacles and rosaries, prayer rugs and shawls, drums, pipes, rattles, crystals, bondage gear and vampire candles, tarot cards and I Chings, holy water, silver bullets, rabbits’ feet and lucky white fucking heather—there's no order to the way the stalls are laid out, no avenues to the tat, just a random distribution of mojo like a minefield that there's no straight path through.

  After five minutes’ steady weaving, he can tell it isn't just bad planning.

  Everywhere, he notices, the people are buying this shit—tourists, pilgrims, searchers for that one little something that might charm their lives back to the way it used to be. Suburbanites with cameras and kids, living far enough out of the cities not to feel the full shock of the world coming apart, but close enough to it to be worried, they just want a little security, Finnan knows. He's eavesdropped on enough low conversations now to know their stories. How it started when they'd tried to phone some friend or relative and couldn't get through. How the bus they normally took to work became a tram. How they watched the news the night it covered the Dissolution of Prague, and they weren't entirely sure where Prague was—Russia, maybe?—but they knew a scary story when they saw one. In diner after diner, as he walked the Journey of the Dead Man, Finnan had listened in on their fears, pieced together the disintegration of reality, Evenfall and Hinter.

  Out in the sticks around Alamosa, an old gas-pump jockey had asked him what he was looking for.

  “Angels,” Finnan had said.

  “Shoot, fella,” the man had said, “we all looking for the angels. You find them, you ask them where the hell they been while the world going crazy. You ask them why my Sarah got Raptured fifteen years ago and they still ain't shown up for the rest of us.”

  “I'll do that,” Finnan had said.

  “Fifteen years, and no Antichrist or nothing. You ask them.” Finnan had taken the last slug of his Mountain Dew, crumpled the can and chucked it in a waste bin, nodded. Looked a distance up the road.

  “You ask them,” the old man had said again in a voice more desperate than angry.

  Finnan can feel the Cant at the back of his neck now, like a warm hand wet with sweat. He can feel it all down his spine and across his shoulders, the feeling that any minute something's going to rip out from his shoulder blades and uncurl claws and wings, lashing tentacles—an animal energy that he can only barely just contain. Call it luck, call it mojo, call it the fucking Force, it's stronger in this place than it is in most unkin, and it's making him feel edgy as fuck. It has teeth.

  He tries to source the feeling. For all the charms and trinkets that are on the countertops and blankets spread out around him, the feeling isn't coming from there, but from the broken-down adobe houses and, most of all, from the mission, the Mission of Sante Manite as it's marked on the map. He glances around at the Cold Men hawking their snake-oil quick-fix solutions for the deep soul fears, feeding off this place like vultures on a piece of carrion, tearing off little chunks of skin and flesh. He picks up a Chinese coin from the stall at his side; there's a hint of the Cant in it, an electric tingle in his fingers, but it's a resonance, a reflection. The real power's based in the mission building.

  Christ, what have these bastards got here, he wonders, the fucking rotting corpse of God?

  “God's not dead,” a voice says from a stall behind him.

  Finnan stops and turns toward the Cold Man. He stands behind a bookstall— New Age self-help and mysticism. Tantrafor Twats. How to Use Friends and Manipulate People. How to Play Victim and Win.

  He remembers playing cards a long time ago, another life ago, during a war, playing cards with nudie women on them. Was it France or Spain now, sure? No matter; he remembers thinking how reading a person's attitude, their hate, their fear, their need, is something every poker player and every officer, every lying, cheating cunt of a control freak has made his greatest skill. Tuning in to every little tic and twitch of muscle, flex of fingers, blink of eyes, shift of scent, pause, glance and wait. There's a logic of challenges and chances runs through people's bodies, a touch of the Cant that reveals the bets, the bluffs, the truths. You don't read their minds, but you read them. You know their hand and you say just the right thing to make them play it the way it suits you.

  The Cold Man is smiling quietly, knowingly, keeping the punch line until asked for it.

  ——

  “Hit me,” says Finnan.

  “He's only sleeping,” the Cold Man says, nodding to himself. “You're trying to get to the mission, yes?”

  I'll check, thinks Finnan. He's giving nothing away just yet.

  “The market's pretty busy,” he says.

  “It can surely be that way. There's a lot of demand, right now.”

  Raise the stakes.

  “Kind of tacky, some of this crap, is
n't it?”

  “All genuine magic. Works like a charm, you could say. But I guess this is the first time you've seen a place like this. Pretty cynical about it, I'll bet?”

  “Sure and I love places like this,” says Finnan, laid back. “Very… eclectic.”

  “Something for everyone's taste.”

  “I'll bet,” says Finnan.

  Call you.

  “So you looking for something in particular? Let me guess, something on Quantum Interconnectedness, Chaos Field Theory?”

  Finnan picks up a book, glances at the back and lays it down, browses another couple, turns a few over and back again. Pseudo-histories, folklore and crank science.

  “Sumerian mythology,” he says. “Heard of something called The Book of All Hours’!”

  The Cold Man blinks and Finnan can see his mind go click. Cards on the table and the dealer is bust, I'm afraid.

  “No, don't think I have.”

  I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to leave.

  “Shame,” says Finnan. “Be seeing you.”

  He turns to go.

  “Wait. You want to get to the mission, yes? I can give you directions.”

  Finnan shakes his head.

  “Feel kind of thirsty, though. You know where I can get a beer?”

  “A beer?”

  “Forget it. I'll find somewhere.”

  Finnan starts to walk away, pauses.

  “But, hey…”

  “Yeah?”

  “If I find what I'm looking for, sure and ye'll be the first to know.”

  two

  A SHADOW OF JERUSALEM

  A SINGULARITY FOR A SOUL

  he Duke Irae strokes at his grand white beard and runs an idle finger .X up the venous scar that splits the left side of his face from cheek to hairline, over the shattered socket where a mirrored ball now sits in place of his lost eye. War has its price and this is a small one; others paid more dearly, with their lives, their souls. Raphael dead. Metatron lost. Gabriel—he doesn't like to think of what happened to that lord of fire out in the Hinter. And then there was the little pissant pacifist Sandalphon—a pity about that, but c'est la mort. He was useful in the end. There's only the three of them now; but three is as holy a number as seven, and it makes for a tighter and more stable ruling structure anyway. Michael and Azazel, archangels of ice and death, bringers of Peace and Mercy, the right hand and left hand of the Law. And the Duke who was once known as Uriel, Glory of God.

  His grizzled, chiseled features seem carved out of granite, his impiteous, stony gaze unmoving and unblinking as he studies the abyss below, the vast fluming chasm of the largest chi-mine in all of Albion, stretching out beneath the balcony, down, down through a storm of sickly greenish vapors riven by electric blue, down, down into the core of orgone energy, chi-energy, the engine of pure chaos at the heart of everything. The ink under the Vellum's skin.

  Ah, yes. If God were really dead, this would be his open grave—a strip mine in the very substance of reality, yielding an inexhaustible supply of raw power.

  Above him and around him, the monstrous impossibility that is the city of Dunedin hangs from the ceiling of the cavern. Stalactite streets of stone run vertical, horizontal and diagonal; buildings hang like bats from rafters that are bridges, ups and downs all folded. But the Duke ignores this banal labyrinth; it's the monster below he's fascinated by. He stares down into the geomagical machine that for twenty years or half of an eternity has helped to power this little Haven, this glorious mirage of an Empire On Which The Sun Will Never Set. For once a smile plays across his lips; the sun can never set on an Empire hidden underground. His secret kingdom.

  History is on their side. This shaft piercing down into the Vellum's depths is a useful legacy of Crowley's brief, inglorious reign as Lord Protector. As it turned out, even the Futurist Revolution in the Eastern Bloc, the Great War itself, had served as a wonderful excuse for the industrialization—the exploitation—of this power source. And, with Mosley's restoration of the monarchy, those like the Duke Irae who had remained loyal to the Traitor King had been rewarded with unprecedented access to the very source of Albion's might. To do with as you will, for Albion's sake.

  The Duke Irae has reason to be pleased with the sham reality that Kentigern is built on; it couldn't have worked out better if he'd written the script himself.

  The tempest of chi-energies reflects across his mirror-ball eye, distorted by the curvatures so that the center of it, the dark corona of the event threshold, looks for all the world like a blackly piercing pupil. As if, within the eye, he has a singularity for a soul.

  “How very … Nietzschean,” he says.

  At his side, Dr. Arturo, biochaocist and bodhisattva, looks an even glummer bear than usual; inoculated against all infectious enthusiasms by his self-prescribed regime of medication and meditation, he remains, like all good scientists, impervious to all the world's temptations. For Arturo, the abyss below is only his own inevitable oblivion, the dark nirvana that he yearns for as release from hopeless servitude. Even in the hopelessness of his abject surrender to the mechanisms of the State and, in a wider sense, to the Wheel of Fate itself, there is the tiniest part of him that still yearns. The drugs do help, however, and the utter lack of anything resembling an ego in his heavily narcotized psyche serves him well in helping to maintain his professional objectivity, no small matter given that his work for Albion's most powerful duke is in so many ways quite deeply ethically objectionable. At this moment, as he pops another pill, his subjugated conscience sinks back down into its usual slumber and he's left with only a cold appreciation of the expedience of misery.

  “Wagnerian, even, m'sire,” he says.

  ——

  The Duke frae nods approvingly. A collector of the Nihilist master, he has a number of Wagner's more famous paintings in his galleries now. The scene below is so reminiscent of his tour de force, Inferno in Blue and Green, Something in the crushing rawness of it and in the mention of the great pre-Futurist artist sparks a thought in him, and he raises his hoary head to turn, looking not at Arturo but at the bioform scribe behind him, the psychic yet mindless archivist of His Lordship's every moment.

  hope that you're getting this all down.

  The bioform nods blankly, integrating its own action into the greater narrative of its master.

  Without turning, the Duke Irae speaks to Arturo.

  “We are, indeed, the masters of this world,” he says. “Now. How is our architect doing?”

  “Secure,” says Dr. Arturo. “Safe as houses. And on schedule. The Circus should be sealed off in a matter of days.”

  “Good. And Project Moonchild?”

  “The gestation period is complete. We're making the final preparations for the drop right now; we have Magi working round the clock, binding the shell to its destination. When we release … it should fly truer than a bullet from a hero's gun. I have no fear but that it will hit its target dead-on.”

  “You have no fear of anything, Arturo. You have no hope.”

  “True, m'sire.”

  The Duke gazes down into the maelstrom. If he could only see through the blue-green storm, down the well of histories, to this fold of the Vellum where, according to Arturo's scrying eyes, his prying prophetic spies, the Book is even now emerging … if he could be certain …

  But nothing is certain in a world without God.

  The black abysm of time stretches down below, the storm shimmering over it like light on oil, iridescent ink, all blues and greens, the colors of a peacock's tail; but in all the chaotic splendor of it there is no curiosity, no judgment, no passion. No will.

  Soon, though, thinks the Duke. Soon.

  Proud and Pagan

  “Soon!” calls Tamuz. “We there in no time now. Look!”

  He stands, one hand on the windscreen to steady him, the other pointing to two o'clock, pointing down into the Jordan Valley, through the white swirling dust, to a thin line of dark green
that winds down from the north to—

  Tell el-Kharnain. Straddling the river where it flows into the pale blue of the Dead Sea, it rises out of the wasteland like the stumps of twin towers blasted down and built upon, a great city raised over the ruins of two ancient myths. The jumble of it is built of the same bleached golden stone you see all across Palestine, but for some reason that material strikes Carter differently here. Here it seems to have an added quality of salt and bone, of living flesh ossified, brittle and crumbling to the elements. That same pale, yellowy brown which makes Jerusalem seem almost a structure made of light on paper or parchment, a vellum origami, clean-lined, sharp-cornered, here seems scoured thinner, shredded at the edges. Tell el-Kharnain has the same minarets and domes rising above its roofs, but everywhere the skyline of it is broken up by—as they rattle ever closer, he can see—dark, fluttering rags.

  He has to shout over the car's gruff complaints at MacChuill's rough handling, ramming it from one gear to the next, treating the road like an assault course.