Master of Blood and Bone

by Craig Saunders

  He was aware that his fingers stank of tobacco, but once he got that kick…

  That kick. God, he loved it.

  Loved it about forty times, roughly twenty plates of prawns, salmon, tuna, two bowls of miso and five cups of tea (in the same cup—tea tastes better when there’s a bit of character in the cup). Loved it a lot, right up until his chest began to burn.

  It wouldn’t have worried him, but it carried right on burning. Right around where his clogged-up fat man smoker’s ticker labored to keep blood pumping around his chest.

  Panicked, anxious, pain.

  But not like being kicked by a horse.

  Panic, but tempered with Holland’s sense of calm, a kind of inner peace that you couldn’t buy with yoga or marijuana or some other kind of Idiots’ Guide to Living.

  Panic sloped off, beaten back by reason. Reasoning that began and ended, not with the pain—the pain was still there—but with the smell.

  The smell of burning. Coming from his chest.

  “Fuck,” he said, and with a thick hand he jabbed into the inner pocket of his jacket. Flipped a burning hot book—the book—onto the counter.

  The heat. The heat was intense. He blew his fingers and then shook his hand. The tips of his fingers were actually burned. The book, on the other hand, was the same as it ever was. Somehow, though, it looked…

  Diminished?

  Yes. That felt right.

  Tentatively, Holland reached out and touched the book. It was utterly cool.

  But then he flipped it open. He swore again. Eyebrows among the diners rose, then fell, when they saw the large, ruffled, angry-looking man. Half saw him as some kind of drunk tramp, the rest thought him some kind of eccentric sushi millionaire, surrounding himself with souvenirs of his mad conquest.

  The chef knew Holland, and would have let him eat for free, because having a man like Holland as a customer wasn’t a bad idea at all. Plus, Holland always paid, even though he didn’t have to. And, the chef actually liked Holland.

  He was like a sumo, the way he tucked away food. The chef enjoyed watching the man eat.

  “Holland? You okay?” said the chef—half-Japanese on his mother’s side.

  Holland took the book and put it back in his jacket pocket with a smile for the chef, who he’d known well enough to pass the time with, but not well enough to share this kind of confidence.

  “Just a bit of heartburn, Ichi,” he told Ichiro. “Too much good stuff and not enough of the bad.”

  Ichiro smiled. Holland ate fish and rice and never any vegetables.

  Vegetables were the enemy.

  “Good feed?”

  “Best ever,” said Holland. “Better stop now, though,” he said, pushing himself up. The big man nodded and thanked Ichiro, then with the aid of his stick clomped to the till at the front and paid and went back through the city.

  The book didn’t matter anymore.

  He threw it in a bin at the corner of the park. It wasn’t worth anything to anyone. Nor was it dangerous anymore.

  Every single word in the book had disappeared.

  He knew where those words had gone, too.

  He’d read it. Ank had read it.

  But Holland wasn’t special, was he? She was.

  The words, those dark words and wicked magic were in his daughter.

  21

  Black worms swam in Ank’s vision. Worms, but words, too. She saw that now, though she couldn’t read them. They didn’t make sense, too close to make out. Every inch of her body was covered, she saw, pulling up her T-shirt and pulling down her jeans a little way. Like she’d been inked in some bizarre ritual.

  And now, she was becoming afraid.

  She couldn’t read the words, those black worms—they were obscuring her sight. She knew if she looked in a mirror, she would see them squirming across the filmy surface of her eyeballs.

  But then the words weren’t just in her eyes anymore, and she wasn’t reading them, like a passive thing. They were as real as her. She was inside the story and the story was inside her.

  That insane book that should never have been read.

  But maybe it sought her all along.

  And now it was within her, eating her, showing her sights she didn’t wish to see. She could not close her eyes against the words because they had eaten their way to her very core.

  The words, written in an old, old language that she did not know, began to breathe, to exist, to stalk her.

  They began to make an awful kind of sense.

  “And with a terrible snarl, each tooth dripping venom, the basilisk struck out…”

  She could not close her eyes as the beast in the book became real and it wailed and spat poison at her. The poison burned her face, through her skin and flesh and right down into her bones. Through her cheek and onto her teeth it dripped, sizzling the nerve endings and dissolving everything as it tore through her face.

  Ank screamed for the first time in her life. Full of pain and terror, her face ruined, she screamed at the nightmare beast while her skin burned and bubbled and sores erupted. Her eyes burst in their sockets.

  She was blind and dying in the book, but just as real as she had been moments before.

  The creature’s great maw snapped.

  22

  How does a book end? Does it end when the writer runs out of ink, or the reader sighs and closes the book at last, the pages devoured? Or, do books finally pass away when they lay forgotten in the dusty boxes of an old widow’s loft?

  Ank Holland read a book, once. Her last book, to the last page.

  But does a book ever really end? Is there not, always, a story that exists somewhere, a thread, waiting for someone curious to come along and tug?

  Ank Holland read a book and became a thought within the words and the words…

  The words were magic.

  The magic was a man who knew the makings of such things. Lost arts, perhaps, taught in Assyria, Persia, Maya.

  A wizard and a mage. No hedge magician, but a man out of time.

  And that man woke to screaming agony and a face that bore far too many teeth struck out at him. The creature’s venom burned through his cheek, his teeth, his tongue.

  For a moment he cried in agony while the venom burned and the terrible face of a creature from his past leered and dripped caustic bile on his ancient flesh. The wizard, never an attractive man, was now as awful to look on as the tormentor that loomed over him.

  An impossible creature from stories and sun-bleached lands. A dark-skinned woman’s face, but with far too many teeth. Each tooth was pointed and hooked like that of a predator, but those teeth were too large for the mouth. Tiger’s teeth within an African, maybe Arabian, face. Hair grown wild down her back, striped and furred, with paws for hands and claws for nails. A barbed tail that could even have been saurian.

  A manticore.

  The wizard wasted no more time on doubt or observation. He could not move and soon the venom in the creature’s every tooth would burn through tongue and throat and the bone that held his head on his body. His head would either tumble free or he would mere lay paralyzed while the manticore lapped his bubbling blood into its gawping mouth.

  Completely immobile.

  Dying.

  But not dead.

  Not dead, he thought. Because he lived in a book, didn’t he?

  He should know. He wrote himself into it, millennia ago. Laid the traps and wards upon it, preserved it.

  Why?

  He could not remember. He had forgotten so much. The book had driven him to the brink of insanity so many times that the abyss beyond had become a thing of beauty to bathe in. But a man—a mage—who could live within a book? Surely he had some kind of power, even in this savage story that had turned against him?

  And, so thinking, he could move. His face burned and he was blind, but he could move.

  Power of a sort returned to his limbs and his slowly dying body.

  Power of a different sort. Not blun
t magic, but something unfathomable and entirely fey, even to the man from the dawn of all things.

  A woman’s magic. A visitor in this, his nightmare.

  He wasted no time on wonder. Move, he thought. Move. While you still can.

  23

  The wizard flicked a hand and the manticore shrieked and wailed, threw itself upon the stone floor, whipping the evil, poisoned tail across the floor, scoring it with venom and strength.

  But the wizard was not afraid of the manticore. The creature might have the face of a human, one of the forgotten races, perhaps, but it had no cunning. It was dumb. A mere tool, yet perhaps a hammer to crack the prison he’d made for himself, and his chance. His chance to defeat not only the flailing idiot creature, but the enemy that had placed him within this nightmare and find, at last, freedom.

  The enemy that was himself.

  The gateway?

  The wizard grinned as his sight returned and his mind unwound. The gateway was a woman called Ank Holland, and she was about to die.

  The man born in a book barked a harsh command and the manticore howled in rage and spat. The wizard did not look behind him to see if the creature followed. He knew it did, because he spoke an ancient tongue that could not be denied.

  He drew a blue-burnt symbol on the dead air in this cell that existed solely in his mind and stepped through the flaming sigil with pet in tow to a different nightmare.

  In short, he turned the page.

  One moment, the wizard was at the mercy of the manticore.

  In the next instant, he stood before the woman Ank Holland. Her terror was evident despite losing most of her face. With another awful, dark command, the manticore leapt forward and tore into another creature out of time.

  As the manticore tore into the basilisk, the two creatures’ gazes locked. Poison flowed from the manticore’s tail into the basilisk’s hide, and the basilisk’s stare turned both manticore and itself to some fluid, shifting, nauseating black stone.

  All the while, Ank’s face was dripping onto the sand beneath her body. In this place she was real enough. This, after all, was a world within worlds, a book that could never end as long as it lived.

  And now it lived within Ank Holland, in her unusual mind, in her unusual body.

  Through the rent that had been her face, the wizard could see those black worm-words squirming and coalescing into a story once again.

  The book was healing itself. Becoming a jail once again.

  And when the tale became solid, the book would fill. The wards upon it would see to the book’s survival, forevermore. And the wizard’s chance to live again, as a man, no longer an idea within his own story, would be gone. He had to act.

  Move, he told himself. Leave.

  Be cold. Like death and ice and the dust of stars.

  Be like it was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the screaming woman, but her face, her eyes, were ruined. She was beyond apologies, blind and deaf to his words.

  And he was cold as death itself.

  “I’m not sorry,” he said, this time speaking the truth. And he pulled the remainder of her skull to pieces and climbed within Ank’s mind and the worm-words to the other side. To a place with no borders; a story, a book, with no end.

  To be free.

  24

  You can’t drive in a city. Not really. It’s stopping, starting…defensively holding your place in the horde. A horde rushing so fast to get somewhere, pushing against each other, that they could barely move.

  It was futile and frustrating. Holland didn’t swear, though. It was what it was. Swearing wasn’t going to get him home faster.

  Peace, he told himself.

  But as soon as Holland hit the country, the small places of England, narrow roads with no cats’ eyes, no lines in the road, he drove the car as hard as he could. He pushed it on with his heavy feet on the small pedals, making it moan.

  Holland wasn’t a great driver. But he was as good a father as he was able, and his daughter had…

  Absorbed the book?

  That didn’t feel quite right, but she’d read the book and now the book was an empty vessel.

  She was in trouble. He felt it. Knew it. Pre-sentience, maybe, maybe just sense.

  It was midafternoon when he hit the outskirts of the city. He headed north to the small places of Norfolk county, past the airport and out into woodland that led to farmland, and villages, and then, isolated houses set back from the road that might have been farmhouses or holiday homes or retreats for Satanic or Christian cults.

  After an hour or so, Holland pulled to a stop, the tires spitting gravel, beside his and Ank’s home. Something felt wrong the moment he stopped. She wasn’t at the window, waiting for him to light his customary post-drive cigarette.

  It’s more than wrong.

  He shook his head and heaved himself free of his car. The wind tugged at him and the sand and sun stung his skin. It was a feeling that always reminded him of home…but it was tempered with disquiet this time. She wasn’t there…she’d been with him for seventeen years.

  There was an emptiness about the place. A sense of abandonment, dereliction.

  Holland unlocked the kitchen door knowing he wouldn’t find her.

  The cottage by the sea was cold despite the summer sun, bare, despite the smells and essence of Ank and him, which lingered in the pores of the house.

  With his cane click-clacking against the tiles and his big shoes slapping, he made his way through the cottage. Touching furniture and then frowning. He sat on the couch. Thought for a while, then pushed himself up and went on his rounds yet again.

  He ended up in the kitchen, taking a bottle of whiskey from a Welsh dresser.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, Holland poured himself a large tumbler of good whiskey. He took a long drink before he lit a cigarette with a match.

  Smoke drifted in the bright sunlight, motes of dust danced in the haze. Holland smoked and drank. The more he drank, the darker it got.

  Finally, the whiskey was gone and he had but one cigarette and three matches left.

  And he was more lonely than he’d ever felt in his life.

  Ank wasn’t just gone. He couldn’t see her, nor feel her. He had no sense of where she’d gone.

  In the book, he thought, but shook his head.

  No. Not in the book. The book had been empty.

  He’d thrown the book away.

  What if she was in the book, though?

  Holland realized he was actually doubting himself. Doubt wasn’t him. Wasn’t the way to find answers. Doubt sent you round in circles, like some dippy PC fresh on the job, like young French.

  Holland wasn’t fresh. He wasn’t a cop anymore.

  He was drunk, full of tobacco and bile and angry and lonely as fuck.

  Are you angry, Holland, or lonely? Which is it?

  He didn’t waste any more time on doubt. He knew which it was.

  He folded himself up on the couch, rather than in his bed where he’d be comfortable. He didn’t want to be comfortable. Aching on the couch, Holland slept, sweating, snoring, but sleeping lightly despite the drink. Almost like he had one eye on the light. More waiting than sleeping, thinking than dreaming.

  Cold despite the summer’s night, angry, alone. He moaned in his sleep. A man stalked by memories.

  When he woke up, he set all the shit in his mind aside, and just concentrated on angry.

  Angry worked just fine for him.

  25

  In the early hours and the dull bright rising of the sun over a city, the wind picked at loose club flyers on traffic signal posts, fluttered chip papers and polystyrene fast-food containers with their assortment of pitta, lettuce and long green chilies, flipped dead burger buns over and over along almost deserted streets.

  Two young men kissed in one corner of a park. In another corner, under a bench rather than atop it, a homeless girl no more than sixteen years old slept fitfully, dreaming dark dreams that no manner of runni
ng would ever still.

  Drunk men and women walked through and around the park. An early police car, a taxi, a high-sided van delivering papers to a newsagent on Prince of Wales Road.

  Bethel Street police station across the park, sirens getting distant, dragged away by the wind that now whipped through Norwich City. A dry and angry wind, the kind that makes people grouchy for no good reason.

  In a block of flats to the south of the park, people sweated and curled themselves into quilts and sheets tight enough to dream they were strangling.

  The homeless girl’s dark dreams turned warm and bloody.

  Drunk people felt sick. Four students on acid in a shared house a mile from the park thought it a good idea to try smoking nutmeg while coming down. One died, as did a twenty-year-old office worker on her first ecstasy pill, who was stabbed in the throat by her sister’s boyfriend after he’d tried to rape her and for some reason was more worried about his inability to get an erection than the attempted rape or the successful murder.

  By full sunrise, a little after five in the morning, the wind was an evil thing. It howled, dry and rancid, some kind of rabid African predator. A thing that blew down shop signs and tore the morning papers from business people’s hands, sending broadsheets flying off down the street. The kind of wind that was strong enough to blow over a steel bin at the corner of the park, near the police station, and send an empty book fluttering through the air.

  Until the book grew too heavy even for the wind, a gale. The book flew, then, suddenly, like someone had switched to a heavier kind of gravity, it thumped loudly to the street.