Again and again.
He wriggled higher, shredding the cloth of his coat on the jagged rocks jutting out of the wall of the crevice, until he worked himself far enough up into the shaft that he could draw his knees into the chimney and brace himself properly whilst freeing his hands up.
With his hands free to search out handholds further up the shaft, Locke was able to ”walk” up the chute a few feet at a time until he could feel the cold night air on his face. It had never tasted so sweet.
Locke summoned the last few ounces of stubborn will to reach up over the top of the crevice and clutch at the broken road. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest but he forced himself to remain deaf to their pains for one last surge and boosted himself up. His shoes scrabbled up the layers of dirt and he crawled forward onto his belly and lay there, gasping, half-in, half-out of the wounded earth.
He couldn’t move for the longest time, and then he looked up. For one dizzying moment he felt like Gulliver clambering into Brobdingnag as he came face to face with the lopsided leer of the fallen Father London lying beside him amid the ruins.
That explained the last huge tremor that had collapsed the tunnel—the Golem had fallen. Looking at it from where he lay, it didn’t seem any worse for the fall. There were no visible signs of damage beyond the dents and gouges left by the buildings it had fallen upon. It was superficial damage at best. It was a pity the same couldn’t be said for the houses up and down the street, and judging by the smoke and dust clouds, as far as the eye could see and then some. Anyone in those buildings was dead, and even if they weren’t, they would be before rescuers could dig through the rubble and find them. It was harsh, but that didn’t make it any less true.
Locke picked himself up and started to dust himself off, but the pointlessness of the effort was quickly apparent. Instead, he shucked off his coat and threw it aside. It was ruined anyway, and the added weight only served to encumber him. His shirt was torn and bloody at the back. He felt out the cuts tentatively. He had felt every one of them being delivered during the cruel climb of a thousand cuts, but he hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of worrying about them until now. His hand came away bloody. There was a lot of it but the cuts didn’t feel too bad. They stung but they didn’t leave him doubled up when his fingers dug into them. Leaving them untended meant risking infection, but he could hardly treat them in the middle of the street. Not with unfinished business lying in the street at his feet.
So, instead, he turned his attention to the fallen Golem.
It was a thing of majesty fallen from the sky.
He hadn’t known what he had expected to see when he looked into its eyes—not intelligence, certainly. A chamber within filled with gadgets and levers, valves, gauges and pulley systems, like some kind of bridge on an insane steamship, perhaps? A crazed dwarf at the helm pulling all of the levers and flicking the switches and pressing the buttons and wrestling with the mechanisms that drove the giant’s legs? The preposterousness nature of the image made Locke smile despite himself.
The reality of the situation was far more banal.
He walked a careful path up to the Golem’s face, standing less than five feet away from its enormous eye socket, and braced himself on the iron brow as he leaned forward to peer inside the construct.
It was hollow.
Iron girders braced the skull, holding the external plates in place. Rust had a grip both inside and out, tarnishing the ”skin” of the Golem a flaking, burnished orange. He could see the welds where each of the girders was anchored to the superstructure. In reality Father London was nothing more than a giant hollow statue. There was nothing he could see that would explain its ability to walk, nor the intelligence it appeared to exhibit. Without thinking, Locke stepped forward, as though to enter the body of the Golem, only to be driven back by some invisible force. The air around his crackled and filled with the odour of singed flesh.
He pushed at the barrier again, and this time, aware of its presence, he was able to feel out its limits without being shocked back by the recoil that met his tentative contact. He couldn’t see or feel a way through, at least not through the eye socket. As he moved further around the side of the fallen Golem, he saw more of the innards. The rust wasn’t the only thing on the interior surface; he saw literally hundreds of sigils engraved into the metal. Hundreds upon hundreds, and he recognised next to none of them, but it was safe to assume most if not all appeared on the papers he had stolen from the Sanctuary.
He reached down for the saturated pages, knowing he was no more likely to be able to decipher the stuff now than he had been before. He didn’t know what he hoped to achieve beyond perhaps matching a few of the symbols, but it wasn’t like he was going to win points for playing alchemical snap. But he didn’t know what else to do.
Even in the poor light it was easy to see that a lot of the top pages had been ruined by the soaking they’d taken. The words blurred out of any recognition. He peeled away page after page until he started to reach ones where the words were still barely legible.
Locke teased the first one free of the pile, and scanned it quickly, looking for something, anything, that might help him get inside the construct. He wasn’t entirely sure why it was so urgent he get inside, but something, something beyond sheer curiosity impelled him. The construct might have fallen, but it was anything but dead. Again he was struck by the repetition of the phrase Soul Golem on the page, and it was patently obvious that despite appearances to the contrary, Father London was anything but empty. It was a soul catcher, a magnet for the near and dear departed. There could just as easily have been a thousand dead souls swirling around trapped within the Golem as none.
Locke shivered at the thought, knowing he was right.
But knowing you were right and doing something about it were two entirely different things.
He cursed Fabian under his breath. The man had sacrificed himself halfway through the fight. That was tantamount to abandoning them. Of all of them Fabian was the only one capable of deciphering the ins and outs of the magic at work here, and Fabian was dead. Locke felt sick with guilt, realizing he was cursing a dead man. It wasn’t as though Stark had chosen to die for fun. He had given his own life to save theirs. He couldn’t have known the fight wasn’t over. They hadn’t, after all.
But that didn’t help him now.
The words were no more intelligible for Stark’s sacrifice.
He was about to screw the page up and toss it aside when one of the markings caught his eye. He had seen it engraved on the back of the Golem’s skull. If he understood the archaic script beside it, he was looking at a soul trap. The realization solidified the niggling suspicion that had been plaguing him since he had first seen the phrase Soul Golem. This thing was more than just an iron statue, it was a trap for the dead … and almost before the thought had finished forming Locke felt a shiver chase down the bones of his back and saw the face of his friend picked out in the wings of the ravens.
Dorian was in there.
He had known it from the first time he had seen the birds, he just hadn’t known he had known.
If the soul trap worked like other sigils all he had to do was break it and its hold on Dor’s soul would be undone.
All …
Locke stared at the hollow iron man. He didn’t know what to do. He braced both of his hands against the construct’s overhanging brow and screamed his frustration and doubt right into the heart of it … and saw part of the barrier shimmer into something approaching visibility. It was only a small area, little bigger than his mouth. Ripples eddied inwards, suggesting the scream was penetrating the barrier. A moment later the ripples in the barrier eddied outwards and single low note echoed back to him from within the iron man.
It took him a moment longer to grasp the implications of that.
He yelled at the barrier, and then shouted, pitching his anger high as though trying to shatter glass.
Always the same low tone—and only that singl
e low tone—echoed back to him.
He didn’t know how it helped him, but he needed to believe that it did.
Locke tried to think it through: sound had entered and sound had escaped the invisible barrier in both directions. No, that was fallacious thinking: a single low tone had escaped. He couldn’t tell how much sound had entered the soul trap. Was that it, was it something to do with the frequency of souls? Did souls exist on an electrical level, vibrating outside the normal range of human hearing? The notion made a certain kind of peculiar sense. After all, why shouldn’t souls still resonate on this plane? Wasn’t that precisely what poltergeists and other restless spirits were? Resonances? Vibrations? And those resonances, those vibrations, needs must generate sound, surely? So there had to be a frequency of souls.
Locke changed tack, instead of barraging the barrier with a wall of sound, he tried a single note, pitching it high again. Nothing. The tone had no visible effect on the invisible barrier.
”Curiouser and curiouser,” he said to himself, trying a different tone. He began to doubt his logic as he moved down through the octave without making any visible dent on the barrier.
It was only as his voice lowered substantially that the barrier began to ripple, and then only as he touched on a particular tone—a single resonant frequency. It was impossible to ignore. He was onto something, but what?
The thing was a Soul Golem, the sigil at the back a Soul Trap, surely it wasn’t that simple? But of course it was. It had to be. The Golem served as a soul cage, so souls had to be able to pass in, but not out, so that note, that tone, he hit in his screams, somehow mated with the frequency of souls, allowing it to enter, but once inside, only the residual sound, the unnecessary excess of sound, found its way out.
What did that mean, though? Did he have to kill himself to enter the Golem? The idea didn’t hold a great deal of appeal, no matter how much he wanted to help Dor, he wasn’t Stark and he wasn’t the suicidal type. So what then? He threw out another low tone, down at the basso profundo register. Even making the sound hurt his throat.
And then it hit him. It wasn’t that the barrier allowed excess sounds to escape, it was a single tone. He couldn’t believe he’d been so close, and yet so dense. It was the sigils. It wasn’t just the frequency of souls; the frequency was tied into the way the sigils themselves were formed. That single low tone was allowed to pass through the barrier because it resonated at the same frequency as the sigils themselves. Quite simply, they couldn’t block themselves.
Locke punched the air triumphantly.
And then stopped dead, staring at the Golem and the soul trap engraved into the back of its head.
Understanding didn’t change anything.
He couldn’t simply walk through the barrier because he knew how it worked. And, for that matter, he couldn’t replicate the tone with any sort of sustained accuracy … certainly note accurately enough to cloak himself in it and sneak through to the other side.
Or could he?
He held up his hand and studied it. It was an utterly unremarkable hand. It had the lines and mounts of any other hand, and whatever a chiromancer would have wanted him to believe, didn’t map out his fate or the length of his life. It was a square hand, with short, almost stubby fingers, complete with rough skin and callouses. But just because he didn’t believe didn’t mean he was ignorant. He knew that chiromancers linked their divinations to the alchemical world of earth, air, fire and water. His own hand marked him as a child born of fire. Supposedly, it meant he was predisposed to be a hot-head, a firebrand, full of energy and cursed with a short fuse, which would have made him McCreedy, but of course, McCreedy had long, almost delicate, piano-player’s fingers to go with his fiery temper. But people wanted to believe what they wanted to believe.
He held his hand a whisker away from touching the invisible barrier.
He could feel the raw energy shivering through it.
An idea was formulating, but as much as he wanted to believe it could work, all he could think was that it was quite simply barking mad.
Locke parted his lips, and gave voice to a sound unlike anything he had made before; a deep, swirling, prismatic tone that resonated from the oesophagus but emerged from his mouth like the cries of baby birds in a nest built somewhere inside his tonsils, only to change into a ghostly wind blowing through the desolate streets of the city.
It was an utterly inhuman sound.
And somewhere within that tonal shift he hit upon the note that resonated with the sigils and the barrier responded, solidifying around his hand. Made translucent, Locke was able to see the sound wave ripple through the stuff of the barrier. It was deeper than he had at first thought, three feet thick and more, and the ripple seemed to take an inordinately long time to pass all the way through—longer, in fact, than he could sustain the low note for without having to take a breath. And for each second that he had to sustain the incredibly low sound the more his throat burned.
But he only had to push on through to the other side.
It was a one-way process.
He wouldn’t have to worry about getting out through the barrier because once he destroyed the sigil the barrier would collapse.
At least he hoped it would.
He turned his attention back to his hand, and the glimmerings of that mad scheme, knowing even as he sought to replicate the tone once again it was the only real alternative. He had to make his entire body resonate with that same painfully low tone, basically turning himself into sound. But it wasn’t so different from how he had used his gift to manipulate the crystal chandelier in the Conclave, or how he had broken the lock to enter the Sanctuary. It came down to the same basic principle, vibration. Vibration caused heat within the glass and cold within the metal, but beyond that it created a sound that accompanied the vibration, anything from a high-pitched whine that drove stray dogs to howling or a low thrum that could be felt deep in your bones rather than ”heard’.”
He needed to use his gift to turn his entire body into a single, unified resonant mass—which meant manipulating his own flesh in the same way he had the glass and the metal, and agitating his muscle tissue and bone until he hit that harmonic without boiling his innards or, conversely, turning them to ice in the process.
He didn’t have a choice if he was going to save Dorian, and despite his protestations, he was always going to do everything humanly possible—and inhumanly—to save his friend. That was who he was.
Locke focussed his mind on his hand, whilst singing that deep note, drawing on The Art to make his flesh sing in harmony.
It was almost impossible to sustain both.
His body screamed it’s agony through every nerve and fibre of his being, turning his world to black behind his eyes. Every inch of his skin burned, but it didn’t matter, once his shirt sleeve touched the barrier, the harmonic failed and the jelly-like core of the barrier closed around his hand and spat it out.
The air stank of that unmistakably sickly-sweet smell of burning meat.
Locke looked at his hand. The skin around his fingers had blackened and charred. Gritting his teeth, he stripped out of his shirt, kicked off his shoes, his trousers, socks and pants and stood there in the middle of the smoking ruins, naked. He breathed deeply, once, twice, three times, holding each breath for a silent ten-count before exhaling, and then opened his mouth to sing.
Forcing that one note to resonate through his entire body, he stepped into the barrier.
It was like pushing his way through a wall of gelatine, and any headway he made was tortuously slow in coming. His throat burned. It felt as though hundreds of switchblades nicked again and again at his bare skin, not deep enough to cut but they sure as hellfire stung. And then, as he felt his throat choking with the stuff of the barrier spilling into it, and the song of his flesh failing, he staggered through onto the other side.
The iron cut roughly at his bare feet as he negotiated the girders.
He only had eyes for that small c
ircle of rust-covered iron where the sigil had been engraved.
Locke ducked under an overhanging girder, and as he did he felt hands all over his body, caressing, stroking, where there were none. When he looked down at his body he saw the subcutaneous tissue rippling, like the bubbles of boiling water looking to break free. He felt his heart racing. His breath came in short sharp gasps. He closed his eyes, trying to focus his thoughts, to use his gift to stop whatever it was that was happening to him.
But it wasn’t slowing down in the slightest. On the contrary, the more he thought about it, the more agitated the bubbles became until he was sure one of them would finally erupt through the skin and then more and more of them would rupture, slowly tearing him apart. His imagination was running away with itself.
”Concentrate man,” Locke chastised himself, breathing hard.
He held out his hands and closed his eyes, visualizing the contours of the blisters there diminishing, smoothing his skin out with his mind. Something had happened to him when he had penetrated the barrier, and whatever it was, it wasn’t good. He willed his body to settle itself but didn’t dare open his eyes again to see if it had worked.
And then, standing there naked and with his eyes closed, Brannigan Locke realised he had made a terrible mistake.
The God Particle V
Chapter Eighty-Four
In that moment Fabian Stark died forever.
There was no coming back.
No salvation.
No last minute reprieve.
He became the stuff of the universe itself.
He became immortal in the truest sense of the word.
He became the dust of the stars.
He became the solar winds.
He became the magma at the earth’s core.
He became the wave breaking against the rocky shore and the snowflake melting against the woman’s cheek. He became the rain drumming against the deserted streets and the coal dust choking the air. He became the moisture on the lips of a lover and the mote in the corner of her eye. He became the whispered words of the inspiring muse and the shiver of anticipation at the first touch of skin on skin. He became the leaf budding on the bare branch and the blush of spring. He became the dark heart of winter and the first cry of the baby being born to the world.
London Macabre Page 36
