Ink

by Hal Duncan

  So the Enakites guard the Book, and study it, and watch the world. They watch, while all the time a war goes on deep in the shadows, in the unwritten margins, each side seeking to free themselves from the word that binds them, each side weaving their plots and their conspiracies into a net that binds us all more surely, more inescapably than even the accursed Book itself.

  We walk between the curses of the Lord and his Enemy, she says. Why? The Adonai or the Shaitan—which would […] rather have own […] soul? she asks. And am […] sure that they are not in fact one thing in its two most terrible aspects: the Lord of the Dead and the Enemy of the Living?

  A Hidden God, a Dark God, split into seven souls. Bound in the Book and in the flesh of all of us, waiting to be released. And on that page the holocaust from which He will be born, a graving of so many lives inscribed in sigils which, […] understand now, can be read as a single word.

  And it only has to be spoken aloud.

  Their Words, Like Swords of Fire

  They walk through rag-doll bodies of every race that calls the region home.

  “So tell me,” Jack shouts over the noise, “is this in your damned Book?”

  “Yes,” says Anat-Ashtarzi Alhazred quietly. “This too is written in the Book of All Hours.”

  “Then damn your Book,” he says.

  He turns away from the warrior woman in disgust, thinking of burning faces on the field at Majkops, screaming faces splattered by the Futurist's new incendiaries, petroleum jelly that stripped the skin right off the flesh. He can hardly see where they're going, or who's still with him, through the smoke and dust of the Enakite attack. It seems even worse ahead.

  “Wait here,” he says.

  He's about to step out into the Silkmarket when the flames bringing down the fleeing mob all round are met with a sudden barrage, fire met with fire, a blast cutting down two of the Enakite warriors, then another. Flattened against the wall, peering round a wooden support beam at the carnage in the square, Jack searches out the source of it, seeing, God, the massacre of the wretches, unthinking in their utter panic as they pour into the square where—

  Fuck.

  The two angels stand upon the remnants of the city walls like guardian gargoyles, one on either side of the Jericho Gate, their words, like swords of fire, scything across the crowd. Many of the mob try to turn as they see the devastation, but the mass behind pushes them onward into the cross-fire set down by, perhaps, the same two creatures who razed this city to the ground however many thousand years ago.

  A word blasts into masonry beside him and he jerks back out of danger, feeling a hand on his arm.

  “Carter Bey! Jack, you must—”

  He whips his head round but the boy's not there, only an echo of a different world, an afterimage gone before Jack even really glimpses it, as insubstantial as the vision from another fold… of the boy lying dead in von Strann's apartment. Jack shuts these from his mind, focuses on the figure cradled in Anat's arms, fluttering on the border between life and death.

  Pechorin raises his head as if to sniff the air.

  “They're coming,” says the Russian. “Can't you hear the echoes?”

  Jack looks at the smirk on the blackshirt's face. It grows wider. “History will be made here today.”

  “Captain Carter,” snaps von Strann. “Jack, pull yourself together, man.”

  Jack's knuckles whiten round the Webley's grip, the gun pointed at Pechorin's head as he rips the bastard's blindfold off with his other hand.

  “Pechorin,” he says, “listen to me well, Major. Were you working for these… creatures alone? Or has your whole damn Reich sold whatever filth they have for souls? Who else knows what you were here for?”

  “Let me kill him,” says the Enakite chief, “whisper a word into his ear that will cut his soul out of his body. He will die, hollow and dark inside, by his own knife.”

  Von Strann lays a hand on her arm, lowers Jack's gun with a finger.

  “He may know where Samuel is.”

  Please, Carter Bey: another whisper of Tamuz in his ear, another glimpse out of the corner of his eye, another flash of a fold where Tamuz is unharmed for now but still, inevitably, dies. Inside, he is screaming at us to let him be, it is too much, he can only live in one world at a time.

  Then Tamuz will live in none of them, we say.

  He pulls back from Pechorin, uncocks the gun.

  “He may know where Samuel is,” he echoes.

  “Then let me tear that knowledge from him,” says Anat.

  “The Beth Ashtart,” Pechorin mutters.

  Tears run down his cheeks from under the blindfold as whispered hatred echoes in his head, perhaps forever, an infinity of voices flooding rational thought out of his mind. He's told them all he can, where he first met the angels Azazel and Michael, and where Samuel Hobbsbaum was last seen kneeling beneath the Weeping Angel.

  The blackshirt does not know what happened. The angels had tracked Hobbsbaum down to the derelict temple. They were just about to seize him when… time broke, space folded. One moment they were entering the Beth Ashtart, Pechorin and the angels, closing on their prey, and the next they were standing by the Ink Wells on the edge of town, looking at the rising vapors, with the sun low in the sky. When they returned there was no sign of Hobbsbaum in the temple. There was no sign of him in the whole city.

  Out in the Silkmarket, the angels and the Enakites have stopped slaughtering civilians—no longer by design, at least—turning their attention to each other instead. Anat is already yelling orders to her people but they're at a disadvantage; the angels have a perfect killing zone set up. “The Beth Ashtart,” mutters Pechorin.

  THE WINGS OF SOME PEACOCK ANGEL

  The adamantium coffin settles on the steel grille flooring once again. Technicians unclasp clips, unbuckle straps, unfasten hasps and snap grips back to free the coffin, like assistants to some complex magic trick approaching resolution. One puts his hand upon the lid of the sarcophagus and—as blue-green steam jets, hissing, from the casket's seals—snatches it back immediately as if burnt or chilled right to the bone. He backs away, looking to Dr. Arturo for an answer to a question that he can't put into words.

  Arturo, silent as a man awaiting an execution he has come to accept, steps forward, brushes the technician aside and lays his own hand firmly on the door. As he opens it, we open up his heart.

  Inside is only a sleek blackness, rippling and reflective as oil, filling the casket as it had once filled the sphere. Arturo gazes into its depths with the closest feeling that he has to awe, not awe itself, but something quieter, a sort of yearning to reach his hand out into it, to touch it, to step into this strange liquid night; it is, he supposes for an instant—the analytic aspect of his mind examining his own reaction as he would study any experimental subject—quite similar to the vertiginous desire that draws one to the edge of any precipice. He makes a mental note that he should probably increase his daily dose of his adrenal inhibitors so as to extinguish such subjective responses in the future. He is still calculating the new amount of his prescription personality-killers when the figure comes out of the darkness.

  And, for the first time in ten years, Dr. Arturo weeps.

  It comes out of the darkness, shadows sliding from its cool face as if it's rising from a pool of ink, and as it comes we shadows follow it, curling, furling around it and behind it, shifting from black to blue-green, iridescent like the wings of some peacock angel. We wrap ourselves to it, adopting the contours of its body, withdrawing a little here and there, until eventually it stands there—he stands there—a man with eyes gray like a wolf, with hair crow-black and slicked back, in a simple black suit and black tie over a white shirt, a long black woolen overcoat draped casually over one forearm like a waiter with a towel.

  The Duke Irae studies Joey Narcosis, and Joey studies the Duke, an old lion and a young panther, prowling round each other, silently because the feline growl of their natures comes through in every qu
iet cultivated movement of their bodies.

  The Duke admires this thing he thinks his own creation, this sixfold soul as close to God as they can come without the Name, pure chaos bound into the order of the grave.

  “The hero is dead,” says the Duke. “Long live the hero.”

  The barest flicker of emotion passes over the dream-killer's face and the archivist finds itself oddly unable to pin down the nature of this brief instant of affect, for while its own mindlessness allows the bioform to eavesdrop most effectively on all those who incorporate themselves into the narrative of His Lordship's life, in this case it seems to hear only an echo of its own emptiness. Joey Narcosis looks at Arturo, and the tiniest hint of a wry, bittersweet smile plays across his lips. Arturo understands it in an instant. We tell him everything, in an instant, and he understands how he has failed the Duke, how he has wonderfully, gloriously failed the Duke. He tries not to laugh.

  Joey looks at the Duke and there's a glint in his ice eyes, a light too fiery to be silver, too bone-white to be gold, but wild like adamantium, a flash. Like the flash of the knife as the overcoat flips from his arm in a slick quick flip and flick which sends an adamantium blade deep into the Duke's forehead in the instant that the Duke himself also understands, too late, that he has bound not the hero but the traitor.

  Joey turns to the edge of the abyss below, the bottomless pit with a little side tunnel into Tell el-Kharnain, 1921. Enough with the gazing into it, he thinks.

  Time to jump.

  Errata

  —

  The Fury of Seamus Finnan

  nki lies on the floor. Metatron lies on the floor. This poor deluded bastard who was once a human being, who's been stripped down to the cold bones of identity, rebuilt in needle and ink, and now nailed to the truth of himself by the Cant—he lies on the floor, his face, his name, his fucking soul itself flicking back and forth, caught in that moment of transformation by the bitmites crawling in the substance of his self. We feel no pleasure in this, only the fury of our friend, the fury of Seamus Finnan.

  “Yer man Sammael never resigned,” snarls Seamus. “He didn't walk away. He didn't break the Covenant. He was neverfookin part of it.”

  Phreedom and Harker have his arms, trying to pull him back, but we root him to the spot. We show them what the scribe is seeing, let them hear the scream of desperation in his head as, in the regraving of his identity, he finally understands how he created destiny itself.

  “Ye had it all planned out. Sure and ye had the part all written for him. God's right hand, eh? The eternal rebel. It was me, ye see, Phree, or at least it was Sammael as was supposed to be the one sat on the throne. Yer man here knew that one day the empty throne wouldn't be enough. Oh, we have to have our fookin heroes, our fookin darlings of destiny, and sure but who better than the great fookin Shamash with his blond hair and blue eyes, god of the fookin sun shinin out of his fookin arse. Captain of the fookin angels. Bringer of the fookin light. Fook that fer a game of sodjies. Fook it all sideways with a fookin French letter on.”

  “Except he told ye to fuck off. And while ye were busy working this into your fookin bullshit story, cutting the lie so deep into yerself that even you believed it, yer man Sammael just left yez all to yer fookin self-delusions. Now if I were him I'd have just fookin hid. The Vellum is a large place, ye know; there are folds half dream and half delusion and… if I were him, fuck knows, I'd try and forget I'd ever heard the word unkin. I'd forget the Cant entirely, leave yez to hunt and gather yer spearchuckers, leave yez to wipe each other out in one big game of cowboys and fookin Indians.

  “But yer man, he made a right eedjit of hisself all through history trying to make it right, before I was finally born and he had this last-ditch attempt to sort things out. You and me, ole man. You and me, we've got some history together in the future… so I hear. Sammael, Phreedom, Sammael. Sammael's what I become, and a right ole damnation it is too.

  “I think he thought he could change things, save himself all the pain and horror of fucking fighting forever, and so… and so…”

  Seamus scrapes the chair across the floor so he can sit on it looking down over the angel.

  “So he fucking found me staggering home from a fookin pub in Dublin in fookin 1914, having left all the lads talking their grand schemes of signing up for the sake of poor little fookin Belgium.”

  And Seamus tells them of this young lad, of this eedjit of a man, ready to go off with the lads, and how one drunken night changed all that, how even before he had to shoot his best friend for a coward, even before Seamus himself had to shoot the young boy he's fookin sworn to his sweetheart he'd protect, sure and even before he's got through it all alive, blessed and cursed now with the stirrings of the Cant in him, even before he starts to get these fookin visions of a Great War even worse than the fooker he's just come out of, before he learns that sure and it's a little more than shell shock or the second sight, even before all that… how the Cant was already graved in him.

  “He went through yer fookin war,” says Seamus, “and he came out the other end, and he tried to tell me, see, he passed on a few things about who would live and who would die in the Somme, and how and for what and, Jesus Christ Almighty, I didn't want it to be true… but I could see it all happening as he told it to me. And, for all that I fookin buried it so deep in me, for all that I never knew how I knew it, even as I was ordering Thomas to his death… Oh, Christ, Phree, he told me in the Cant and I fookin lived it all.

  “And so I fookin killed him, God help me, I fookin killed him.”

  And we bitmites show this fooker nailed to the floor just how it was, how before ye know it, before ye fookin know it, ye find ye're standing there with yer own fookin blood on yer hands and a body layin at yer feet, and yer staring into yer own fookin face and knowing how and when yer going to die. And that's when ye fookin realize, sure, that's when ye fookin feel it howling in yer fookin bones and tearing through yer body like a thousand fookin volts.

  When someone tries to save yer life and ye fookin kill him.

  “And you,” he says to Metatron, “ye fookin bastard motherfucking cunt, ye brought it all back with yer fookin binding. Ye rewrote yerself and yer fookin Covenant eedjits so yez forgot it all; but he knew yer war was pointless, and he told me, and by fuck it graved itself so deep in me I couldn't face the truth of it, or of what I'd done in the face of that truth… until you brought him out of me.

  “Sure and maybe we should grave my story onto you, ye fookin cunt. Ye fuck with the scribe and ye fuck with the Book, eh? Sure and isn't there a little bit of sunlight in yer fookin soul, that ye might just have a bit of the ole Shamash in there, Enki.”

  Just the subtlest inflection warps the name, twists it with his fury, and we blast a shock wave through the scribe's soul, a new history and a new future, as an Enki who thought he could change things, save us all the pain and misery, if he just found this young fool with his dreams of peace, persuaded him that he was on the wrong track, that the Covenant wouldn't end war, only offer the purest excuse for it. That it would all end up in one almighty battlefield full of corpses and crows.

  We make his lesson brutal.

  A Maze of Destinies

  He was only a boy when his brother, when his other, found him in the fields, gathering wild grain with a stone sickle, and dragged this ungraved lord of the earth, Enoch, Enki, En Ki, Ki En, screaming into the Vellum, into—

  —a charnel house of great lamassu, bulls with the wings of eagles and bearded heads of men, hung by their hind legs, upside down on conveyor belts of hooks; men with wings and horns and leather aprons slitting them open, pulling entrails out to slather down onto steel grilles and gutters of blood; row upon row of production-line slaughter; this young boy with dark skin and dreadlocks, loincloth and beads, slipping, sliding away to cower against a wall; the madman in his leather longcoat, broken by the apocalypse he's wrought, shouting at him—Ell show you sacrifice; dragging him to his feet and back out into the
fields; the terrified boy sobbing at the vision shown him by this god of wrath, trying to appease his tormentor with a handful of grain, slapped from his hand and scattered to the wind and the sand whipped up around his feet; a disgusted cry—this is nothing, nothing the madman venting his own self-loathing until the boy finds himself swinging the sickle and—

  Enoch, Enki, En Ki, Ki En, lord of the earth, quayin in Hebrew, craftsman Cain stands over the body of his brother, his other, his self, whose name will be remembered now as the Hebrew word for pride… Abel.

  We release him and the room is suddenly still, Finnan's fury spent, Enki's sobs fading into silence as we withdraw into the shadows.

  “So sure and I don't know if I can change my own future—looks like I wasn't very successful the last time I tried—but, Christ, yer fucking apocalypse was bad enough for me to die trying once. I mean, knowing what I know now, knowing that I wouldn't listen, that I'd just end up dead and the other me still going through the same fucking pointless …”

  He laughs, desperation mixed with scorn.

  “Sure and I'd probaby still be eedjit enough to try. But fuck it, we have to try something, Phreedom. Time in the Vellum, Phree. Who was it said it's not that simple? Maybe we can just walk away and break the loop. Maybe we can all just walk away and break the loop.”

  She shakes her head, looks at Harker. We feel the ambition in her, the Inanna in her, this New Age goddess with her host of Cold Men, dead men raised by her call, waiting to be graved with the names of dead gods.