Ink

by Hal Duncan

  I catch a glimpse—a motion in the corner of my sight—and fire as I turn. There's a look of horror on the beatnik's face as he smacks back into the mirrored wall panel. His girlfriend—blond beehive and horn-rimmed glasses, sky-blue twinset—screams as Jacques Reynard Cartier slumps and slides down, cracked and lumpen, to the floor.

  “Fuck!” I shout. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck iuckfuckl”

  As civilian casualties go, this takes the biscuit, the big, salty, semen-sodden biscuit.

  I slide in a football tackle across the lino to kick out the legs of yet another militiaman, blow his superego out the back of his head as he falls, and pry the chi-gun out of his twitching hand. From the floor, chi-pistols crossed, wrist over wrist, I shoot another three blackshirts as they jump out from the armored air-van's sliding doors. Sirens are screaming outside on the streets, and getting louder. Firing two-fisted, furious and frenzied, I take out the last few of the militia squad, and turn back to scope the torn-up cafe. The girl is cradling the dying beatnik in her arms.

  OK. So I'm going to have to improvise.

  I tuck the guns into my belt, unzip my jacket and pull out the little case with the syringe filled with my silvery squirt of soul, the distilled Essence of Jack meant to go into the poor fucker dying on the ground in front of me, to seed the soul of an angel assassin deep inside.

  “And what about the cover?” Anna had said to Fox. “Afterward?” “A little dance with death” [he'd shrugged] “might be exactly what it takes to turn a pawn into a rook.”

  See, according to Guy, well, I'm the fire on the Fox's tail that keeps him running. I'm the trickster in the traitor that means Joey's always on our side no matter who he's being paid by. I'm Anaesthesia's anger, Puck's perversity, Coyote's cool, Finn's fire. I'm the id unbound, baby, the time bomb in your heart that makes you tick-tick-tick till the alarm goes off and you wake up and smell the coffee. I'm the one who lets the real you out into your head.

  Everyone's got a secret self that's locked away inside them, see, and if you want to let it loose, you've gotta let the firestarter blow your storm doors of perception open with a Sekem Semtex moment of satori. Then it's exit Jack into the night and, out into the light, out of the smoking rubble, walks a new you, as a Princess or a Puck … or as a Fox.

  That's Fox's theory anyway.

  I crouch down by the beatnik.

  Fuck.

  This should have been easy, but the paradox shielding is probably kicking in already and… I look at the Jacques Reynard Cartier who will never now become a savvy Fox with savoir faire and Savoy flair. I can see the Guy in him now, staring back with hollow eyes, dying in front of me. And there's no telling what effect this'll have on our own king of thieves. I'm only hoping there might still be one last chance …

  This is the Vellum after all; if I wasn't inside the shield walls of the Circus, I could blow my own head off and wake up a world away, in Sumer, in the Even-fall, or in the wilds of the Hinter, with just a little eternity to walk to find my way back to this fold. But this is the last Haven of the Lords of fucking Order; they got rules here, the fuckers. Still, maybe if I shoot him up with a little extra me, maybe if I can get a little sample of his psyche back to Fox before the temporal shock wave rips through our reality. Maybe …

  Ah, bollocks. Fucked if I know what I'm doing. Tactical metaphysics never was my forte; I'm just the shock troops on the urgrund.

  But I push one of my sleeves up to the elbow, start to roll up one of his to find a vein. If I'm the avatar of anarchy, who rips reality apart so anything is possible … well then anything is worth a try.

  “Sorry, old man,” I say. “Plan B. Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit.”

  Outside, there's militia sirens in the distance.

  And the Angels Will Come Again

  A scrap of page pocked with scorch marks, burn holes:

  …can read the language […] know what the stories say, but […] are always changing […] if every time you open the book […] different—and while it may well contain our futures written […] pages, what good is that if it contains all the futures that will never happen as well as those that will, if you can't tell the[…]ference!

  A napkin stained with red wine, inked in capital letters:

  YHVH. NO VOWELS. NO NOTES!

  A scrap of page splattered with inkblots, thumbprints:

  …von Strann's […]Anat-Ashtarzi, she wanted to know what was true and […] was false.

  She thought […]« clue in the writing itself, something that her people did not fully understand.

  And[…] think that […] may have found that clue.

  A page of a journal censored with scribbling so heavy that it grooves the paper: …how can […] betray that privilege? She has told […] so much about […] and about those forces in this world who know of the existence of[…] and seek to possess it, not just as a relic but for its power. How then can […] even contemplate this course of action…

  And then there are the time lines, biographical notes for people not yet born, descriptions of future technology, lists of authors and books that Jack has never heard of, historical sketches of imaginary cities, and long quotations from who knows what—one of them seems to be The Iliad. Here and there the texts are ticked, crossed out, or labeled with a question mark.

  Another page from the journal:

  …the word Lot means “hidden” in Hebrew. Is it possible that what dwelt in Sodom, what escaped from it, was not a man but a secret? The book itself? Or some more specific secret written in the book, in a language that specifies pitch, intonation […] that be what the angels came to Sodom for, in search of a secret lost to even them?

  A note, headed Genesis 4:17.

  …it mean that Cain built the first city and named it Enoch, after his son or that Enoch […] and named it afterhis son? […]n Enoch, father of Irad, and Enki, god of Eridu, seen […] their oldest city and situated at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. Sumer, known to the Sumerians as Kiengir—Land of the Kien. Kien = Enki.

  A page with a single sentence on it, smeared with blood:

  And the angels will come again to Sodom.

  Jack reads on.

  THE CHAMBERS OF HIS HEART

  20th March. A day of fighting draws to its close and the Baron and I are lucky to be alive. I hardly know what to think now, now that I have fought side by side with him against the Turkish forces. Tell el-Kharnain has fallen, and all we can do now is pray that MacChuill can hold his tongue. I curse myself that I refused to leave when von Strann begged it. God forgive me, if we had only left when we had the chance, then MacChuill would be with us. And Tamuz would be alive. I dug my heels in, Anna, and now I will be haunted for the rest of my life, I think, with the drill of the machine gun, the image of Tamuz dropping as he ran toward me, and the Turks behind him in the entrance to the courtyard.

  Tamui unscrews the camera from its tripod, wraps it in a folded pair of trousers and deposits it in the trunk. He clacks the legs of the tripod together.

  He was going to fetch MacChuill, didn't even make it to the Avenue of Books before we heard him running. We were at the bottom of the stairs. We were ready. If we ‘d only been ready sooner. While I took two of them down with my pistol, the third would have made his escape but for von Strann's reaction. It took me only an eternal second to react, but he was a madman in an instant, Anna, a force of vengeance. I was only just out on the street in time to see him with the last Turk, one hand clamped across his forehead, pulling his head back—God, he couldn't have been much older than Tamuz, the soldier, eighteen or so, and I could see the fear in his eyes as von Strann's other hand slashed the knife across his throat.

  Von Strann picks up the pages Jack has read and abandoned to one side, starts placing them back in the saddlebags.

  Von Strann carried Tamuz's body back up the stairs while I did my best to conceal the three dead Turks in the courtyard. We were praying those few shots fired and some blood on the ground would not g
ive us away, that we could at least make it to MacChuilPs lodgings and the car before the place erupted. We made it there in time to see the militia dragging him out into the street toward a truck, heard it before we saw it really, the air turning blue with his curses. MacChuill fought like a wild man and I swear to God, if there'd been just a few less of them I doubt they could have held him. As it was, if von Strann had not dragged me back out of the headlights of the second truck that arrived just then, carrying twice as many Turks again … I'm not sure I would be writing this now.

  We are back in von Strann's studio now, Anna, the body of Tamuz laid on the bed. Gunfire sounds across the city. A day of fighting, and the Baron and I holed up like rabbits, our exits cut off. I have read much of Samuel's notes now, the true and the false, alternative histories and unknown myths. My own past. A stranger's present.

  A score of futures and in all of them the boy dies.

  ——

  Jack watches Tamuz sliding the folded tripod into a carpetbag and feels himself caught in a kaleidoscope of realities, insane, unreal, impossible. He still can't accept—he won't accept—this rot about angels and books in ancient languages, but every heartbeat seems a drum that marks another step toward at least one of these futures written in his words in Hobbsbaum's hand. And that heart… he's only known the lad a few days, but the image of him falling to a bullet in the back, the image of his body laid out on the bed… his beating heart feels hollow as a ransacked tomb, tight as the drum skin pounding out the boy's doom.

  Read on, our jaguar Jack, we urge from every corner, every crack and crevice of this room, and in the chambers of his heart.

  THERE WILL BE A RECKONING

  Another page:

  20th March. A day of fighting draws to its close and the Baron and I are lucky to be alive. Tamuz is not so lucky, nor MacChuill, both dead at the hands of the Turks. Both might still be alive if I had listened to von Strann when he told me of the treaty between the Turks and the Futurists, of the airfleet heading toward us from Syria, of the police and army scouring the city for us at that very moment. But instead I refused to leave, asked him how he could know these things. All that time wasted, Anna, in damnfool stubbornness, even with Tamuz pulling on my sleeve, begging me to believe, to trust the Baron. He tried to place my hand upon his breast—that ritual of trust again—and I shoved him away; he fell to the floor.

  There will be a reckoning for this. That is all von Strann has said since we made it back to the apartment. He cradles the body of the boy and mutters these words to himself, over and over. He looks at me with the same cold hatred that I've seen in Cossacks, Prussians, my own comrades, in survivors of countless atrocities, even in my own eyes on many a morning since Majkops—or, God knows, since the Somme perhaps. Not that it's really me he's looking at. Not personally. Not alone, at least. It is a hatred all the more chilling because it is it not really directed at what's in its path. It doesn't really know you're there even when it looks straight at you. No, it is a hatred for the world that has allowed an unforgivable horror.

  There will be a reckoning for this.

  I do not disbelieve him now. Today it is Tell el-Kharnain, tomorrow who knows? Tomorrow … As we wait here in von Strann's rooms, tomorrow hangs above our heads, a Damoclean sword. The Turks have taken the city now and any fighting is sporadic. It is only a matter of time before they find us here. But I know also that, as von Strann says, there will be a reckoning. It seems insane but if what these Enakites believe is true—and I am certain now that it is—then everything we think we know is a charade. I would scarce credit the notions were it not for the fact that I have read … look, Jack, I know that you are reading this now. I know that you do not trust von Strann, that you think him a fool infatuated with some dream of desert life. You are wrong. I was wrong. All I will say to convince you of this, Jack, is the secret you have carried in your heart for ten years.

  Thomas Messenger.

  Jack lets the page fall to the table. Something in him knows that, even if this is Samuel's hand, it is his own words, or those of another Jack. It's as if he knew it already, as if the truth were only slumbering in his soul, waiting to be awoken by his reading of the bloody tattered remains of Samuel's notebooks. Scribbled translations from a book which contains all stories, all futures including his own. With himself and von Strann waiting for the Turks to flush them out, MacChuill already captured, and Tamuz dead.

  He has a cigarette in his hand, poised at his mouth; he wasn't even aware of taking it from his case, but it's there. Like his future. Just waiting quietly for him to act.

  “Tamuz,” says von Strann, “enough. I'll finish up. Go fetch MacChuill. Tell him to bring the car round. Go as fast as you can, but be careful; if you see a Turkish patrol—”

  “Wait,” says Jack.

  He buckles his holster.

  “I'll go.”

  THE HEART OF ALBION

  I crouch for a second on the stone of Northbridge, a gargoyle with a grin of grim determination, then I leap, the chi-blasts of the blackshirts shattering the air around me as I fall. Feet-first, I smash through the glass roof of the Waverley Terminal, shredding the trenchcoat, landing catlike in a shower of shards among a chaos of commuters. They mill, they bolt, they scatter all around me and I try to tune out the cacophony of their panic as I brush the glass out of my hair. Above, the whole roof of the Circus's central wireway terminal blows in as the black-shirts open fire again. People scream under the rain of glass.

  I look up and I'm glad I don't have vertigo; up is down and down is up here on this topsy-turvy twist of Escherspace, the blue-green vortex of the bottomless pit hanging high above us as a hole in the sky. Airships follow wires that slice the dark like searchlights at all angles, but curving away before the event horizon to disappear into tunnels. The fuckers must have footholds in other folds already, trying to build their Empire back up from below. Which Havens have they already linked to from this nerve center, I wonder—Liverpuddle? Godchester? Christ, they could've jump-started the very Heart of Albion, the city of Kaerlun-dein.

  Things are definitely not peachy right now.

  The Waverley, last of the old propeller wireliners still in service, is pulling out of its deep berth and rising, steams of blue-green orgone venting with a foghorn bellow. I run for it. The blackshirts are still firing, cutting down the crowd and cutting up the marble floor behind me. The whole concourse of the terminal has become a kill zone for the goon squad up on Northbridge. Can't be good for Fox's “no civilian casualties” condition; all I can do is hope the slaughter slows them down.

  This is fucked up. This is incredibly, inedibly fucked up. Even with my soul-juice in his veins to turbocharge his spirit, I don't know if our beatnik boy will live. Even with the little bit of him I shot into my own veins, I still have to get him safe and sound out of the Circus. Then there's the castle, glowering over it all on its basalt plug, visible through the shattered roof of the terminal, where, somewhere, Joey Narcosis is being dragged toward a dungeon doom he's not going to thank me for.

  And clicking the heels of my ruby-red jackboots three times isn't going to get us back to Kansas, Dorothy. It took serious juice to get us in; it'll take the same to get me out.

  Ducking and weaving along the platform, I sprint for the Waverley, the steel superstructure of the roof providing some protection as a sheltering web that breaks the blackshirts’ aim and blocks their fire just enough for me to reach a boarding ramp and run at full speed, hop, skip and jump with spring-heeled jackboots, reaching, reaching. I grab the side of the gondola as the antique airship rises up into the air, out of the wide Victorian maw of the terminal and away.

  “Cease fire,” the SS sergeant shouts, as his men continue blasting at me. They can't afford to hit the ray tanks of the wireliner; the explosion would take out the terminal and everything near to it, including themselves. Might even do serious damage to Dunedin. Like the fuckwits that they are, of course, they keep on shooting.

 
I breathe deep and try to quell my flred-up nerves as the chi-blasts rock me, loosening my grip.

  “Cease fire!” the sergeant roars.

  I calm down my adrenal overload and focus on the general surge inside, deep in the heart chakra. I latch on to it, harness the hate and love and open up that inner flute of chakras one to seven, taking a deep toot on the fields of force, all that loose chi in the air. Stretch out my lust and think fast—think Fast Puck. I reach out to my tantric partner, my loveline link back through the chaosphere to home, but the connection's broken by temporal ripples. I can't remember where I first met him, Kentigern or North Carolina, 1916 or never. Shit.

  A chi-blast hits me in the shoulder—bodyblow of an electric sledgehammer—but I manage to hold on, toes on an inch-thick edge of girdering, one hand clutching a porthole where a fat cat in a business suit has his nose pressed to the glass, looking out at me in shock and horror. He looks even more worried when my other hand, the chi-gun held in it, comes up past the window, to take aim at the ray tanks directly overhead.

  There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

  I fire, and the blast shatters the world around me.

  A Dust-Deity of Wrath

  “Damn you!”

  Jack walks down the center of the street, screaming hate and firing shot after shot after shot at the soldiers. One drops like a stone. Another drags the half-clothed woman up and round in front of him as a human shield; Jack puts the bullet in his forehead. As the other two scatter, pulling their rifles up, MacChuill runs past Jack, level with the woman and her child, puts the Lee-Enfield to his shoulder, and takes one of them down with a bullet in the back. The fourth sends a shot buzzing past Jack's ear before the bullet from the Webley thumps his chest, spins him backward into a wall and down. Bent double, shoulder on the ground, he tries to push himself up to his knees and fails, flops, flails, kicking the family's possessions that lie scattered on the street. Clothes and furniture. A small bronze statue, a bird but with a human head.