I do, and nothing happens. No surprise there.
Suzanne touches my head. 'You were thinking about it far too much. Just lift your arm.'
'Right, right, just lift my arm!' I say, flapping my arms like I'm doing some crazy impersonation of a chicken. 'Nothing, see -'
Dust swings around me, up and down.
But the moment I realise what I'm doing, the dust drifts away. A good bit of it gets sucked into my lungs. Suzanne watches me cough, her eyes crinkle.
'Good work,' she says. 'So much of what you need to do must be done without thought. Without reflection. That's the power and the danger of this job. It must be effortless. If it's too much one way, everything becomes mechanical, without soul, without rhythm. Too much the other, and it is all chaos. Even too much balance is wrong.'
'Why?'
'Death isn't effort. It's consequence. It's as natural as breathing, and all the skills that we possess – to shift, to hear the heartbeats of our region, all of them – come from that. Give yourself over to it, and in the giving you will find that there is so much more time to explore the consequences of your actions. If you are always struggling, you can never ask yourself why, or what might be. Now, lift your arm again.'
I lift, extending a finger. The dust lifts too. I draw my fingers into the bed of my palm then flick them out. Dust shoots away from me, five trails of it. I lower my hand and it drops. I can feel it around me, waiting for my motion, my guidance.
Suzanne winks at me. 'Well done, Steven. I expect to see you tomorrow. But not here. Tomorrow we can meet in my office.'
And she is gone.
Wal pulls from my arm. The last thing I expect to see him in is a little Santa hat.
'What the hell's Mortepedia?' I ask, lifting a finger, and watching a slender thread of dust rise up to touch it.
Wal spirals around it. 'Some sort of treatment for dead feet? No, that's Mortepodiatry.'
I glare at him. 'Rillman nearly killed me tonight.'
'But he didn't,' Wal says.
'He managed to kill one of my bodyguards, though.'
'Well, that's the problem. You don't need bodyguards. You're an RM, you should be able to look after yourself. You don't sleep, you can shift through space, and even make dust do… things. What do you need bodyguards for?'
'Lissa -'
'Lissa's stronger than you give her credit for. Think about what you two had to go through just to be together. You think Lissa was being all helpless in that? Lissa's only a weakness if you let her be one. If you let her be a strength…'
'When did you get so wise?'
Wal beams at me. 'Always have been, mate, you just never listened.'
PART TWO
THE MOOT
27
The barbecue's sizzling, and I'm there behind it, nursing a beer. Dad used to do this. No turkey, no ham on Christmas Day. Just meat cooked to within millimetres of inedibility and salad. Beer, too, of course. We have a couple of dozen stubbies of Fourex and Tooheys Old swimming in ice in the laundry sink.
It's a pretty grim Christmas. Last year there were so many more people. There doesn't seem to be much of a chance of backyard cricket. I look down at the lawn, which is in need of a mow – I'm not going to have time to do it in the next few days. But the kids don't seem to mind. Alex is down there with Tim and Sally. I'm glad I invited him. Christmas is a busy time for us, but for a moment we can pretend it isn't.
A hand slides around my waist. 'Look at him down there, bailed up by your cousin. Do you think they're bitching about you?'
Alex is listening intently to something Tim is saying.
'Of course not, they respect me too much,' I say, kissing Lissa on the cheek. I like the feel of her next to me, though she's a bit too bony at the moment, her cheeks too wan. After the Moot in two days I expect our stress levels to improve. Our staff intake is rising, not to mention my own involvement in the business. It's amazing what more than twelve hours without someone trying to kill you can do. But it doesn't feel like it's enough.
Lissa and Tim were right. I was letting things slip out of control. Well, I'm back now. And I know I'm getting better at the job. I've learnt so much in the past week.
The more people in this house, the less space there is for ghosts to fill it. And I'm doing my best to ensure that there are no more ghosts in the near future. I miss Oscar's and Travis's presence. But Wal is right, I can handle this. I have my own eyes and ears around the house, some of which are eating beetles. I wince and take a deep swallow of my beer. They're not the greatest taste, even second hand.
'Christmas always makes me feel a little sad,' Lissa says.
'You missing your parents?'
Lissa nods her head. 'It's been more than a year for me. I've already had a Christmas without them.' She squeezes my hand. 'I know how hard it must be for you.'
'Yeah, but having you here makes it easier.'
'Is that smoke I smell coming from the barbie?' Tim yells, and I realise that everyone is looking at us. The barbecue is definitely smoking.
'Must mean the sausages are ready,' I say, stacking them onto a plate. Sure they're a little charred, but you've got to keep up tradition.
We sit around a dinner table laden with beer, soft drink, blackened sausages and bowls of salad. The kids groan when Tim kisses Sally. And everyone ignores my quick pash with Lissa.
Here is what I'm fighting for. This family. These connections old and new. We eat together, we laugh together. And seventy people around the country die. It's not too bad. And there are Pomps for every single one of them.
Perhaps, despite my doubts, the system's working. Our guests are gone by early evening. The sky is smudged with the last tints of sunset. The city's quiet, the suburbs marked by the distant rumble of an engine, or the bark of a dog. Crows caw in nearby trees and noisy mynas live up to their name, chirping, chirping, chirping, as they hunt cicadas or try and push another bird out of their territory. They avoid my Avians, though, and shoot from the yard every time they hear the whoosh of black wings, the thrashing beat of a crow taking flight.
I sit on the back porch thinking, Lissa curled up next to me. Finally, some time to talk.
'So you're telling me the Hungry Death is real,' Lissa says.
'Yes, very much so.' I smile at her. 'I call it HD.'
Lissa groans. 'But I thought the Hungry… I mean, HD was destroyed,' she says.
'No. More like redistributed.' I tap my chest. 'The Orcus, we're all the Hungry Death now. And the other thing – Christ, I really couldn't believe it. Did you know pomping was once addictive?'
Lissa lifts to one elbow. 'Where are you getting all this information?'
'Mr D. He's been quite forthcoming of late.'
Lissa smiles. 'I'm glad you two are finally connecting.'
'All it took was a fishing trip and a run-in with a giant shark, among other things.'
'They say giant sharks are very much part of the male bonding process,' Lissa says. She yawns, lays her head down on my lap. 'Let's continue this conversation later. Say, once I've had a nap.'
I watch her fall asleep, stroking her face, pulling her hair away from her eyes. Having Lissa here this Christmas has made it just about bearable, but my parents' absence is palpable and agonising. I finish my beer. My head dips, my eyes close and I'm in a dream at once.
The Hungry Death laughs, and dances around the corpses of Lissa and my family. This new family. The one I haven't lost yet.
But you will. The shadow that is the Hungry Death dips into a bow. Merry Christmas, Mr de Selby.
In one swift movement it wrenches Lissa's head from her shoulders, and hurls it at my face. Her dead eyes open, unseeing, never to behold me again.
I wake with a jolt. Only a moment's passed since my eyes closed, scarcely more than an eye blink. Lissa's still next to me, her heartbeat is strong. She's a thousand times more alive than when I first saw her, and I will not see her dead again. Never. I refuse to.
And it's so l
ovely to know that that is inside me, and is part of me in such a fundamental way. So very lovely indeed.
'You know,' I whisper to it. 'All I really wanted for Christmas was a pair of socks.'
I slide away from Lissa. There's an ibis on a nearby roof, looking like a weathervane. It turns its long beaked face towards me.
'Lissa's sleeping,' I say. 'Keep an eye on her.'
It dips its head, and scrambles across the roof for a better view. A crow shoots above me, landing on our roof with a scrape of claws. I get a confusion of perspectives looking in towards Lissa and away. The suburb is quiet, but for kids riding their new bikes, or people getting ready for a late Christmas dinner. Aircons are sighing, beetles are whirring. There's a clatter and a snap from up on the roof, and for a moment I can taste the crow's gecko dinner. Ugh.
I walk back to Lissa, kiss her on the brow. She startles me by actually opening her eyes.
'Where are you going?'
'Somewhere you can't come. Don't worry, I'll be safe – well, safeish. I've got work to do.'
'It doesn't stop for you, does it?'
I smile. 'You know, there was a while there when I thought it did. That I deserved a break. But when I stop, people die, people who I care about. And when they die, I die a bit, too.'
Lissa touches my face, with a hand so perfect, so clear in my mind that I could hold it forever. 'Merry Christmas,' she says.
And I think about HD, and its last words to me. I can't let it spoil this. I'll be damned if I'm going to give it even a minor victory.
'Yeah, merry Christmas.'
Then I shift, leaving her and my Avian Pomps behind.
28
Even this early in the morning Suzanne's Boston offices are a picture of efficiency. People work behind terminals, tapping away furiously, calculating the best routes to a pomp or a stir. A stocking taped beside a noticeboard is the only concession I can see to Christmas here.
Suzanne used to base herself in New York, but found it too noisy; 'too clamorous', as she put it. I can understand that – such a big city, so many beating hearts hard up against each other. Washington, she'd never cared for, just as I could never imagine basing myself in Canberra. Capital cities are modern constructs. Our regions were built on different models.
The blinds are up, and it's snowing outside. Suzanne and Cerbo are both waiting for me.
'Merry Christmas, Mr de Selby,' Suzanne says, and pecks me on the cheek before I even realise what she's doing.
'You, too, Ms Whitman.'
Suzanne leads Cerbo and I into her office. 'I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to spending a few days in Australia,' she says, once she's shut her door and sat in her throne. 'I've actually booked a room at the Marriott, a couple of blocks away from the bridge. Beautiful view.'
I'm not here for small talk. 'Things are getting worse,' I say. 'Stirrers are growing in numbers and I can't detect them.'
'We've had problems here, too,' Suzanne says. 'The god's presence is making them almost reckless. You've seen it, you can understand why.'
'Rillman isn't helping, either.' I describe the symbol Rillman designed, and its powers. I'd emailed the details out to every RM, but it doesn't hurt to go over it again.
'No, he is proving to be something of a trial,' Suzanne says.
'That may be the biggest understatement I have heard in my life. Are you practising for a political career? A trial? Christ! And I need to know as much as I can about this god. Is there even any hope of stopping it?'
Suzanne nods at Cerbo.
'All I can tell you is this, and it goes back a ways,' Cerbo says, pouring me a coffee, which I didn't ask for but accept none the less. 'Six hundred million years ago something happened. Call it Snowball Earth, call it whatever you want, but after that, life grew more complicated, and the Stirrers' grip on this world ended.' His voice speeds up: words tumble into each other with his excitement. I've never seen Cerbo so wound up. He's a nerd of the apocalypse. 'You can see it more clearly in the Underworld. Look at the base of the One Tree; you'll see stromatolites crowding in like slimy green warts. We even have intelligence -' Cerbo looks at Suzanne, and she nods. '- we've even had intelligence that the Stirrers keep some in the heart of their city. Get out on the Tethys, go more than a few miles out, and what do you find? Nothing, no echoes of anything. Life hugs the shore. There's probably patches or places that correspond roughly to life and death on the earth but the sea of Hell is vast and I haven't found them. Believe me, I've looked.'
'So what are you telling me?'
'What you probably already know, and what you will know as time goes by, ever quicker for you – that life is precarious. I think the Stirrer god existed before the Stirrers; a long time before. Maybe it's as old as the birth of the universe and Underverse itself.'
'Old doesn't mean smart,' I say.
'But it does mean tenacious and robust. That Stirrer god may be the most ancient consciousness in existence.'
'So that's what we're up against?'
Cerbo nods.
I think about it for a moment. Try and find the most positive outcome. 'Well, life won before, obviously. We're all still here. Things are alive. Life can win again.'
Cerbo shakes his head. 'But you see, I think that was an accidental victory, a consequence of forces that just slipped in life's favour. That is, if you can even call it a victory. Life exploded after those events, but the desolation beforehand… And this time…'
'And if the world shifted that way again?'
'It may well be worse than the Stirrer god itself. You don't know how bad the earth would be if we returned to those minus-fifty-degree Celsius temperatures.'
I shrug. 'I've seen The Empire Strikes Back.'
Cerbo's smile is thinner than his moustache. 'Humour is an inadequate defence. And it would be nothing like that. The planet Hoth would be a walk in the park on a summer's day compared to that.'
'What do we do?'
'I don't know if there's anything we can do.'
Suzanne grabs my hand. 'See? See how difficult this is? This is what we are up against. I ask that you not judge any of us for the choices we may have to make in the days ahead. You, least of all.'
I open my mouth to speak. Suzanne's phone rings, and mine follows a few moments later. We look at each other. When an RM's phone rings it's never a good thing.
It's Tim on mine. I answer it, trying to work out just who is calling Suzanne.
'Steve?' Tim asks. He sounds a little frightened. He'd been laughing at my table only a few hours ago. I immediately think the worst.
'Yeah.' Just give me the bad news.
'Neill's dead.'
I look at Suzanne and Cerbo. They're both pale as sheets, both getting the same message.
'Dead?'
'Yeah, it seems that Rillman has had better luck in South Africa.' An RM? Someone has managed to do what I thought impossible. 'Is it a Schism?'
'No. David, Neill's Ankou, called me. Let me tell you, the guy was in a state. Someone came at Neill with knives, cut him up badly. Cut him into little pieces, is how David put it.'
Then Tim's voice falls away. He's still talking, but I can't hear him. Something is clawing its way into my chest. A force, a strength that's part dark chuckle, part dread fear, part chest imploder. I recognise it at once. With Neill dead, a twelfth of his share of the Hungry Death is drawn into me.
I drop to the floor, maybe black out, because the next thing I see is Cerbo hesitating between Suzanne and me. We're both on the carpet.
'Well, can you help me get up?' Suzanne says, the first to recover. Her eyes are bright.
And yet, Cerbo hesitates. 'That hasn't happened yet,' Suzanne growls. 'Here, now. Focus on me.'
Cerbo runs to Suzanne's side, pulling her to her feet.
What the hell was that about? I wonder. I'm shaky, but standing now. Suzanne glances at me.
'This is not good,' she says.
'But Neill has been dead for a while.'
'I thought you said the transition needed blood,' I say.
'Well, there was plenty of it – Neill's blood,' Suzanne says grimly.
'This changes things,' Cerbo says. 'Surely you can -'
'It changes nothing.' Suzanne smiles so viciously at Cerbo that he quails.
She looks at me. 'Tend to your region, Steven. I must tend to mine.'
'What about Neill's region? Who's tending to it?'
'Charlie Top. At least, until we can organise some sort of transition. A Schism and Negotiation is messy, but this is far worse. It will have to do. We've two days until the Moot. We can organise something then.'
I try and imagine something messier than a Schism. I can't, but then I'm not really the most knowledgeable RM. What I really don't like is the stronger HD inside me. The mere thought of all that carnage pulls at my lips. He pulls at my lips, from the inside. It's an effort not to smile, but I won't give HD that satisfaction. This is my body.
Suzanne waves me away with one hand. And I go. I shift to my office, my head pounding with this new fragment of the Hungry Death. I tumble into my throne and the comfort it provides. The throne is slightly bigger, its edges harder, and yet I find it more comfortable to sit in. I decide I don't like that and I get to my feet, walk about my office, pull open the door.
The office is busy, but that's what you expect at this time of year, and in this trade. Holidays mean nothing – other than a serious inflation of the payroll, according to Tim.
Word has spread fast about Neill. Lissa's left a message on my phone, she's coming in straight away. I look at my watch. It's getting late. People glance hurriedly away as I catch their eye. This is an office that is spooked. I don't blame them.
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