For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3)
Page 7
Finally, the elevator reached the bottom and, after a pause that felt like a breath, the doors opened and the cool of the foyer had been replaced with an icy cold that brought clouds of condensation from his lips.
“Welcome, Mr Jones,” came a woman’s voice. It was as sharp and precise as a newly minted coin, a voice of business and professionalism. “May I welcome you to the corporate floor? It’s an honour to meet you, I’m a great fan of your work.”
“Nice to know.” Jones stepped out of the elevator, taking a ‘read’ on his new companion. She was small, wrapped in what he assumed from the smell was a fur coat. “What is that?” he asked, leaning in and taking a sniff. “Rabbit?”
“The coat?” She laughed. “Not quite. It gets quite cold down here, one has to take measures.”
She reached behind her to where a short rack of coats were hung, selecting one from its hanger and opening it up for him. “Please, I’m not sure how long you could stand the temperature in the boardroom without it.”
He let her help him as he pulled on the coat. It clung to him with warmth and the musk of the dead.
“Do follow me,” she said, leading him along a narrow corridor that opened out into a large cavern after a few steps.
He couldn’t get an accurate sense of how big the place was. Their feet rattled on a metal gantry as they crossed the space but it was so large the echo was all but nonexistent. The cold that surrounded them made him glad of the coat. He had recently survived a bout of exposure, his skin frostbitten, his fingers turned ragged until the attentions of a deluded angel had healed them. This was far colder. This was ice colder than the mortal world could ever create. He leaned over the gantry. As far as his senses could tell there was nothing beneath them.
“If you had eyes,” the woman said, “that would have been more than your mortal soul could bear.”
“My mortal soul can bear more than you might think.”
“You’ve proven as much, true. But even a dangerous animal like you has its limits.”
Jones was aware that she was intending compliment rather than insult.
“The abyss,” she continued, “is not something that should ever be stared into.”
“What’s down there?”
“Nothing. At all. Which is why it’s more than most can stomach.”
To Jones, not a man with a mind that leaned towards the philosophical, this sounded like a nonsense. He had no interest in pursuing the matter and they continued on their way.
At the end of the gantry, his escort pushed open a pair of large doors and Jones once again found himself in an environment he could partially understand.
It was a large room, dominated by a central desk. The light in the boardroom was dim, offered by three flickering lamps spaced across the arced wall. Twelve figures surrounded the desk and from a distance, or to a blind man, they might appear perfectly normal. But look beyond their silhouettes and their true nature was revealed. Six male, six female, dressed in formal suits, the magic of them began at cuff, collar and hem. Wherever skin would be exposed there was nothing but dark shadow. Look closer, if you could bear it, and perhaps you might get the impression that the blackness had depth; it wasn’t simply an absence of the person in the clothes, cut from reality as if with a pair of sharp scissors, it was an opening to the abyss. These people had given themselves to that absence and it had sucked them from the world.
“Mr Jones,” said the woman at their centre. She lifted her hole of a head as if to look at Jones and her auburn hair twitched, revealing itself to be a wig. If Jones could see the true nature of these figures he might wonder what was keeping that wig in place, and indeed, what was filling out the shirts, blouses and jackets they wore. Or perhaps he would simply accept it as another dark miracle of the Dominion of Circles. It takes a lightness of heart to be impressed by the otherworldly, an inclination towards wonder and fear. Jones was too grim to acknowledge either.
“It’s excellent to have found you,” the woman continued, her voice carrying a slight echo as it travelled up through the emptiness at her heart.
“You didn’t find me,” said Jones. “I came of my own free will.”
“Which is interesting,” said one of the male figures, a solitary monocle hovering where his left eye should be. “And leads us to conclude we have something you want.”
“Is that true?” Auburn Wig asked. “Have you come to make bargains?”
“We do respect a good bargain,” added another woman, her absent head capped off with a smart bonnet, its ribbon tightly knotted around nothing at all. “They’re the oil that greases our engine.”
“The salt that flavours our meat,” said another man, polishing the lens of his wire-framed spectacles with a silk handkerchief. He placed them back on the memory of his face and the lenses magnified the emptiness beyond.
“I think you wouldn’t have let me be here if it wasn’t you who was after the bargain,” Jones replied.
“Ah,” sighed Auburn Wig, “even if that were true then you couldn’t have known as much when you entered the city. You bluff well but you came with an offer in mind, I think.”
“An enticing offer,” said Monocle. “A tasty offer. Perhaps we let you get this far purely because we were curious to hear it?”
Jones couldn’t argue the logic of this.
“The Dominion no longer has a ruler,” he said, “that’s what people tell me. Once it was a kingdom, now it’s nothing but a collection of sovereign states.”
“This is true,” agreed Spectacles, “though we like to think we have a certain influence over those states.”
“But do you have all the influence you want?” Jones asked.
“We are the Exchange,” said Auburn Wig. “We are the heart through which all the blood of the Dominion must be pumped. We control the worth of power, we are the measuring stick by which power is measured.”
“You’re bankers,” said Jones.
“By mortal standards,” Auburn Wig replied, “that is accurate. Power is worth nothing unless it has comparative value. How much is a memory worth? What is the going price for a fix of Buzz? How much the price for another’s head? We are the balance, the scales that measure each state against another. In return they all pay a percentage of their earnings to us.”
“Which makes you the wealthiest of all?”
“Naturally,” Bonnet agreed, with a trill of amusement. “How better to place a value on power than being the most powerful of all? We are what they aspire to.”
“For how long?”
“We do not understand,” said Spectacles.
“How many times do the states pay you what they owe? How often do they hold back a little? How often do they screw the figures? I hear one of them, a guy by the name of Greaser, even worked in partnership with the opposition, not paying you a cut at all.”
“We don’t really see the Dominion of Clouds as opposition,” said Auburn Wig.
“That’s not the point and you know it. Your power’s been slipping. People are deciding they’d rather keep what’s theirs and cut you out of it. And that’s only going to get worse.”
“Explain,” said Spectacles.
“You have a whole new Dominion to take into consideration, the mortal world.”
“That is not a Dominion,” Bonnet insisted, “it is simply a place of transience.”
“Don’t kid yourselves,” Jones replied, “it’s a whole world of new business opportunities. Dollars and dimes. You’re going to be weaker than ever if you don’t take advantage of it. You need to go back to the old system. One ruler, one power.”
“The Exchange is not interested in war,” said Monocle, “at least, not as a participant. There is no profit in it when you’re the one fighting.”
“There’s no need for war,” said Jones, “power is won by fear. I’m offering you something the rest of the Dominion will fear, something they will bow to and call their one true king.”
Bonnet laughed. “You?”
“You could not have killed Him had He not wished it.”
“That’s neither here nor there. Nobody knows that for sure, one more show of power and nobody in the Dominion of Circles would dare stand up to me.”
“Show of power?” said Bonnet. “What power? You’re just a mortal, a damaged one at that.”
“You said yourselves, power is about comparisons. It’s about perception. It doesn’t matter how powerful I am, what matters is how powerful I appear to be. And with you on my side I could appear to be pretty fucking powerful indeed.”
The Exchange were silent for a moment, deliberation curling around in their hollow heads.
“There is merit to your plan,” announced Auburn Wig, finally. “But we would have to be clear as to our agreement. You may be the figurehead but we would be the authority. We will not simply be a tool for you to use as and when you wish.”
“I’m a man of simple needs,” said Jones, “and there’s really only one thing I want.”
“Your eyes?” suggested Bonnet. “That would be easily done.”
“No,” said Jones. He had thought about it but what use did he have for that which he’d never known? He had never seen the world as others did and was by no means sure that changing that now would be a benefit. “I want my wife. She’s somewhere here in the Dominion of Circles. The way things are, with no central control, it could take me lifetimes to find her. But if the whole Dominion was mine to govern...”
“Then she would be brought to you,” said Monocle. “How sweet. He wishes to rule Hell out of love.”
“Does the reason matter?”
“No,” Monocle admitted, “in fact it’s entirely acceptable. Your wife is our penalty. If you attempt to trick us, if you betray us in any way, it won’t be you who feels the pain and suffering. It will be her.”
“We will lay eggs of agony in her heart,” said Bonnet.
“We will make legends of her misery,” agreed Spectacles.
Jones had expected such threats. They were just words. He wasn’t lying when he said he had no real interest in the power. He would let The Exchange use him as they saw fit. There was no shame in it. “Agreed,” he said.
“Which leaves us with only one question,” said Auburn Wig. “What show of power did you have in mind?”
For the first time, Jones experienced genuine discomfort. “You’re not going to like it...”
2.
THERE ARE THOSE who have described cities as living things, likening the streets to veins (or perhaps, in less attractive districts, lengths of bowel). They name its thriving centre as the heart, the food quarter as its stomach, the financial district as its brain. In this somewhat contorted analogy, the city’s population are often likened to ants, or fleas, scurrying across the body of the great beast, feeding and destroying with equal measure. Of course, in truth, not even the most enlightened metropolises have quite attained such autonomy, not even in the loose domain of metaphor. Golgotha, for all it may have appeared miraculous to the mortal eye, was no different. Its streets had been paved not grown, its buildings the slow accumulation of hard work, bricks and mortar laid by hand layer by aching layer. It would have been nothing were it not for the hard work, patience and investment of each and every one of its founding citizens.
Still, much of that work, certainly much of the investment, had been provided by the Exchange. It was there, at that awesome tower, that the poets would have claimed Golgotha’s heart.
For Golgotha’s residents, the Exchange was the shadow that fell over them. It was the raised hand, ready to strike. That it should fall was something not one of them would ever have dreamed or hoped.
Yet fall it did.
Beetle Elmutt was tired from a day of manning his food stand, face sweating from the glow of its flames, hair slick from the oil vapour that surrounded him. He was turning off the gas, mentally accumulating his take. You didn’t get rich filling the bellies of passersby. He had only the briefest of memories in his purse: the smiles of loved ones; the feeling of cool water on the skin after hours in the sun; the odd laugh at a joke or rise of excitement from a story well told; an orgasm or two. You had to have one of the classy places on fifty-ninth if you wanted to get rich from food, the sort of joints where you waited aeons for a table and offered up years of your life for a solitary plate. That was OK though, he didn’t have the skill to run a kitchen like that. He was just a man who knew how to heat meat and pour sauce.
Looking around to make sure none of the guards were watching, he poured the dirty oil from his pans into the gutter where it slowly crept down the street gathering dirt.
Putting the empty pans on the lower shelf of his cart along with his uncooked food, he prepared to wheel his way home.
He passed by Riligius, one of the lower demonic caste. Riligius used to joke with the few in Golgotha that put memories in his begging bowl, that he had fallen even further than Lucifer. The last time he had consumed his day with actual work was in the middle ages, plaguing a neurotic baker from Ghent who eventually expired in one of his own ovens rather that than put up with Riligius’s ham-fisted attempts at possession any longer. He had been found by his overworked apprentice, a blackened loaf of meat. The apprentice hadn’t shed a tear, at least not in mourning, he had kept the bakery going throughout his master’s ‘lunatic spell’ and considered this the final act of irritation from a supremely annoying employer.
Riligius had returned to the Dominion, out of work, out of pocket and down at heel. He had been begging ever since.
“Not much for you,” said Beetle, tossing the demon the memory of a particularly fine Chinese meal, “but at least it’ll make you think your belly’s full for awhile.”
“They never last,” said Riligius, “you’re hungry again an hour after experiencing them. Thanks anyway.”
Across the road, Sylvestre de Vroot was winding down the shutter on his store. He knew the metal wouldn’t keep the determined burglar out; if they wanted his charms and poisons enough, they’d soon break through. Of course, everyone in the area knew that de Vroot had extra protection, a curse across the threshold that threatened to desiccate anyone fool enough to enter without muttering the right safe code.
“Good day?” he asked Beetle.
“Shit and corruption,” Beetle replied. “If I wasn’t eating my own wares I’d starve to death.”
De Vroot had strong opinions on Beetle’s wares and thought he’d rather die than subsist on them. He wasn’t callous enough to mention as much though, just shrugged as if to say ‘what can you do?’
“I used to think life would get better,” said Riligius, “now I just hope it doesn’t get worse.”
“Not sure it could,” said Beetle.
It was the sort of dramatic irony that would have pleased the poets, still fresh from describing Golgotha as a living, breathing beast.
The hot air was filled with the sound of tearing foundations, stone, concrete and earth torn apart as the Exchange tower suddenly thrust upwards, as if in a last fighting attempt to stab that boiling sky to its core.
Thousands of heads turned, including those of Beetle, Riligius and de Vroot.
“What in all the fucks was that?” wondered Riligius as the tower hung for a moment, as if trying to find its balance.
Then it toppled, the long finger slowly sinking towards the earth. There was a rush of displaced air that sent Beetle’s cart toppling. Riligius, damned if he was going to be pulverised on an empty belly, savoured his donated memory of a meal, distracting himself from the impending pain. De Vroot looked to his steel shutters and sighed, throwing the keys to the floor.
The tower hit, crumbling buildings and residents with equal ease, reducing Beetle, Ri
ligius, de Vroot and several hundred others like them to paste of meat and powdered stone.
Death in the Dominion was never a permanent affair, flesh corrupted but souls lingered. Golgotha would be a haunted city for years to come as those souls drifted, awaiting the call of the Fundament and a chance to inhabit new bodies and new lives.
In the aftermath, a voice was heard. It carried it with more strength than a human throat could give it, greater even than the sound of the tower hitting the ground.
“Now hear me,” said Henry Jones. “I am the God Killer, I am the wasting, I am the bullet in a thousand backs. I have taken the Exchange and toppled it. It didn’t please me. Will you risk the same? There’s a new power in the Dominion, and it is the ultimate power, the only power. It is me. And you would do well to remember before I come looking for you too.”
In the rubble, the sound of his words still echoing through what was left of the streets, Henry Jones turned to his rakh, left standing by magic or luck he neither knew nor cared. He climbed on its back, a young girl’s voice calling up to him before he could ride away.
“I got my reward,” she said. He recognised the voice, the kid that had led him here in the first place. “And my punishment.”
He couldn’t see her eyes of course, now absent, windows to the abyss at the heart of The Exchange; but he knew she was now nothing more than a vessel for the powers that controlled him.
“We thought it best to borrow this body,” she said, and Jones wondered which of the Exchange was speaking, if indeed they truly existed as individuals rather than several facets of one entity. “That way we can keep an eye on you.”
He nodded, and held out his hand to pull the girl onto his rakh. “Fine,” he said, “then you can start as you mean to go on and steer me out of this place.”