by Heide Goody
The first floor was one enormous office area. A screen filling the far wall crawled with the esoteric codes and numbers of financial data. The outer spaces by the tall windows were lined with desks and computer screens at which sat Mammonites in pin stripes, ugly ties and those shirt sleeve armbands (that Rod had never seen on anyone but croupiers and steampunks). The room buzzed with a dozen conversations. It was, Rod guessed, no different from the workspace of any financial institution – apart from the enormous mosaic of Yoth Mammon set within a ritual magic circle that spanned much of the floor, of course.
“Wow,” said Rod. “That’s… vivid. A lot of red and pink and…”
“It’s a mostly stylised depiction of our holy mother. It’s hard to truly encompass her scale.”
“Yeah, and those teeth…”
“The green marble hardly does them justice,” said Lodge-Mammonson. “But it’s a constant reminder of why we’re here.” He gestured onward. “We trade in stocks, shares and international currencies for her greater glory, schluri’o bento frei. The very lifeblood of the world’s economy flows through here. It’s a great honour, for us all and for me personally, to serve our mother and help build this great nation we live in.”
Rod waved his hand at all the machines.
“But what do you actually do?” he said.
“We buy and sell. We invest. Without the kinds of financial services we offer, businesses wouldn’t have the capacity to expand and grow.”
“Gotcha,” he said, nodding. “You’re like a bank, lending people money.”
“Well, no,” said Lodge-Mammonson. “Although we have loan arrangements with some individuals and do trade in bonds, we are not a lending bank.”
“A building society then.”
“No. We invest. We buy up companies, or shares in them.”
“And do what?”
“Do?”
“Once you’ve bought them.”
“Well, our investment and the price we buy the shares at shows confidence in the company which gives others confidence in the company so people might also want to buy shares or do business with the company. And so, the company grows.”
“But you’ve done nothing, apart from buy up bits of companies?”
“The right companies,” said Lodge-Mammonson.
“I see,” said Rod. “Got it. It’s gambling.”
“Well, no…”
“It’s just backing the right horse.”
“There’s a lot of mathematics behind what we do.”
“You’ve got a system. Sure.”
“It’s not a ‘system’.”
“But you’ve got a method of working out which companies to pick.”
“Our expert team has a keen understanding of what investments to make.”
“I think that’s called a system.”
The Mammonite looked helplessly at Vivian.
“I’m afraid you’re dealing with a northerner, Mr Lodge-Mammonson,” she said. “Not only are they mostly red socialists, but few can comprehend business models that don’t involve digging things out of the ground.” She looked at the giant screen of share prices. “It occurs to me that you might be privy to certain insider knowledge,” she said, “as part of the em-shadt Venislarn.”
“One can’t help but pick up certain titbits,” he conceded. “The sinking of the Ranger Four oil platform by Kozzoth Ek’en earlier this year and the sudden fall in fortunes of a certain energy corporation had no impact on our clients’ portfolios. But a surprise turns of events – say, the destruction of a chocolate manufacturer’s principal factory in the UK by an awakened and understandably angry Zildrohar-Cqulu – are beyond our prognostication skills.”
“Yeah. Our bad,” said Rod, holding up a hand.
“And you aren’t just trading in… earthly commodities,” said Vivian.
“There are currencies beyond the ordinary,” agreed Lodge-Mammonson. “Ones that mortal men are either unaware of or unwilling to trade in.”
“Indeed,” she said. “I think we’d like to see the prisoners now.”
Lodge-Mammonson gave her a frank and deliberately uncomprehending look. “We hold no prisoners here, Mrs Grey. We hold stock. We hold collateral. We hold business capital. No prisoners.”
“The humans,” said Vivian.
“Oh, them,” he said. “You should have said. This way.”
Mrs Atraxas pushed herself out of her armchair with considerable effort. Cats on shelves, window sills and the top of the Welsh dresser followed her with their eyes as she rocked back and forth and eventually up onto her feet.
“You have finished your coffee?” she asked.
Morag Junior glanced at the tall mug on the ornamental table next to her. The thick and certainly aromatic slurry in the mug had not magically disappeared. However, an industrial-looking grey scum had formed on the surface.
“Yes,” said Junior. “Finished. Definitely done with it.”
“Good,” said Mrs Atraxas. “Now it is time for the hair cutting.”
The woman waddled off into the kitchen, pushing lazy moggies aside with her foot as she went.
“Mrs Atraxas?” said Junior, standing. “I don’t know which of us you think is having a haircut but that’s not why I’m here. Oh.”
Mrs Atraxas stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing a pair of oven gloves and holding a disgruntled looking long-haired cat. It twisted and contorted in her grip and bit savagely at the gloves. Mrs Atraxas thrust it at Junior.
“You pin it down. I will do the hair cutting.”
“I don’t have any gloves,” said Junior.
“Oh, I think you should wear gloves,” said Mrs Atraxas sagely.
The interior of the Black Barge was larger than the exterior, not wonderfully and magically so, it just was.
The bargeman and his band of filthy mute underlings had unloaded much of their stock onto the towpath. The presz’ling and a loitering Shergai apmaisier collected what was theirs and the apmaisier loaded several bundles onto the back of a beast of burden that seemed to be mostly arms and hands. Jeffney Ray followed Mystic Trevor and the smattering of other speculative browsers on board and down into the hold.
The walls were slick with damp, knobbly with inexplicable calciferous build-up. The floor was so dark as to be invisible but soft and silent underfoot. Worn rails stretched the length of the ceiling, securing the hooped ends of the barge slaves’ chains. Every wall was lined with ridged shelves crammed with treasures. Junk shop boxes, welded into place with nacreous cement, overflowed with a miscellany of trinkets, effigies, preserved bones, shards of unknown material and fragments of sculpture that hinted at a horrible whole. Rot-blackened baskets held bundles of dried plants or smoked meats. Stacks and slim recesses housed books, scrolls, inscribed plates and inked hides.
Nothing was locked away. Neither the bargemaster nor his scabby team kept watch. Simply: no one stole from the Black Barge. No one had told Ray why this was but he had never questioned it. He was wary of the Black Barge – frightened? No, of course not – and, besides, he knew better than to even touch items he did not properly understand.
He was looking for something in particular and when he failed to spot it, he whistled to one of the barge slaves. She shuffled over to him, dragging her ceiling-mounted chain with her, and gave him a questioning look. She was a filthy looking bitch, maybe the same age as Ray but no tits or nothing. Even if she scrubbed up, she’d be lucky to get any attention from Ray, not unless she really begged.
“Darling, li’renqor ist khei-ba drel?” he asked.
She frowned.
“Khei-ba drel,” he said.
She shook her head. He sighed.
“Tuf? P’ye nav tre-cha soi p’ye nav ren’chlo?”
She shook her head again.
“Christ’s sake, love,” he said. What was the point of having mute slaves if they couldn’t answer simple questions? Rubbish customer service was what it was.
Her chain rattled as the
bargemaster yanked it. The dirty little scrubber scuttled away and the greasy lump of a man waddled over.
“What?” he said.
“Li’renqor ist khei-ba drel?” asked Ray again.
“English,” said the bargemaster.
“You don’t speak Venislarn?” said Ray.
“You don’t,” said the bargemaster, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. His voice had a light European accent. Dutch or Danish or something, from one of those countries Ray would be flying over on his luxury sunshine holidays when he’d finally made it big.
“I asked if you have any khei-ba drel.”
“What you asked and what you wanted, two different things,” said the bargemaster. “How much do you want?”
Ray held out his hands. How big was the last bag he bought?
“A pound?”
“Half a kilo,” said the bargemaster, sniffed and slouched off.
Ray waited and idly watched the scabby girl slave going about her chores. God, yeah, she’d have to beg him if she wanted a bit of Ray.
Nina clicked her finger.
“You’ve had sex,” she said.
Morag Senior stopped at the foot of the humpbacked bridge and looked at her colleague. Nina had a can of Lynx deodorant and a Boots sandwich meal deal in a little carrier bag. Morag had no idea why she had insisted on buying them on the way.
“Yes, I have had sex,” said Morag. “I am a woman very much on the depressing side of thirty. It’s a reasonable assumption that I’ve done the nasty at some point in the last couple of decades.”
“I don’t mean you’ve ever had sex.”
“But I have.”
“I mean, there’s a spring in your step.”
Morag looked at her feet as though there might be a tell-tale sign in her practical heels.
“A spring?”
“A spring. And I figured it was because you’d shagged someone.”
“Ha. Fat chance. It’s been” – she did a mental totting up of days – “a good few weeks.”
“I thought you and your weirdy-beardy neighbour were…”
Morag gave her a wry smile. “Richard. God, no. He’s lovely but that’s a very special relationship.”
She wondered briefly whether Morag Junior was keeping to the bargain and making the social rounds of her neighbours. Richard was truly lovely company but romantic material? Hell, no.
Nina hummed in thought.
“Not sex, then what is it?” She clicked her fingers again. “Your bagpipes have come back from the cleaners.”
“No, but that would make a great euphemism. I guess I’m just happy today. Lord knows why. Another day on this doomed fucking planet. Actually…” She looked at Nina askance. Nina was too young and indiscreet to be an ideal confidante but Morag was still the new girl in town and had a limited supply of friends. “Okay, there’s this guy.”
“I knew it!” said Nina, leading the way onto the canal bridge. “My spring-in-the-step spotting, sex detecting senses never lie.”
“We haven’t had sex. Well, not in years. He’s an old boyfriend. Works for the consular mission. He’s coming down from Scotland today. And I’m really looking forward to seeing him.”
“Gonna rekindle some of that old tartan magic, huh?”
“Would you quit with the casual racism, Nina?” said Morag.
“Sure. I’ll just stick to ginger jokes. Speaking of which, there’s a couple of your brethren over there.”
Morag craned her neck to see over the brow of the bridge. Down on the spit of towpath on the other side, a very loose group of people milled around a moored barge, most doing their best to pretend the others didn’t exist. Standing off to one side were a man and a woman, both natural redheads.
“Yo-Morgantus’ representatives,” said Morag. “Are they gonna cause a ruckus?”
“Doubt it.”
Morag looked at the Black Barge. It was a barge as designed by HR Giger, as though a short-sighted facehugger had forced itself upon Boaty McBoatface and this was what had burst forth.
“It’s not black,” said Morag.
“Yeah,” said Nina. “But Grey Barge… just sounds naff, doesn’t it? Right, let’s go have a quick poke around and then get some drinks. Reckon it’s gonna be a sunny day.”
Inside the Black Barge, Ray waited patiently for the bargemaster to return. A pod hanging from the ceiling drew his eye. It was hard to tell if the brown, vaguely diamond-shaped thing was a manufactured ornament or some sort of dried seed casing. Ray reached out a finger to poke it. A bat wing unfurled and a small, sleepy tentacle extended to meet Ray’s finger. He drew it back quickly.
“Maybe not,” he told himself.
In a wicker basket on a shelf were little plastic baggies, tied off with elastic bands. The contents looked like rice paper squares, painted with intricate ideograms. They looked achingly familiar.
The bargemaster rolled back, a linen bag in his hand. “Half a kilo.”
“Great,” said Ray and opened his briefcase. Of his sheaf of soul cash notes, Roy offered him four. The bargemaster took five and then spat on his hand to seal the deal.
“I’m not shaking that, mate,” said Ray. “What are these things?”
The bargemaster looked at the baggies of rice paper squares.
“Summoning runes of Kal Frexo,” he said simply.
“Un-uh,” said Ray. “The runes are lost. Even I… I mean, everyone knows that.”
“Not all of them.”
Ray still didn’t understand. “And what do they do?”
“Party. Rave,” said the bargemaster. “Put under tongue and you will see.”
“Ah.” Ray grasped it. What were LSD and shrooms for if not summoning alien visions? He was taking Tony T and his crew to Broad Street clubland that night and he knew exactly who he could sell this kind of shit to. “I’ll take a bag.”
The bargemaster tugged at two soul cash certificates.
“I can’t pay that,” said Ray. He did a quick mental recount. He needed all the remaining notes to make today’s payment to MMI. “Cash price.”
“Euros?”
“Pounds.”
The bargemaster made a gargling throttle sound of displeasure. “Three hundred.”
Ray groaned inwardly. The price wasn’t unreasonable – he could already see himself making a two-hundred percent return on the rune papers – but he didn’t have that kind of cash on him. But he would after tonight and he reckoned he could make a tidy little profit on a piece of information he’d just picked up…
“A loan,” he said.
“Loan?” said the bargemaster.
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Collateral?”
Ray sighed. The bargemaster smiled. He stamped his foot to rattle his chain.
“Ten years.”
“Make it a hundred,” said Ray, bouncing the git’s smile right back at him. “I’ll have your money.”
Morag Senior nodded to the two gingers. Part of her felt stupid for doing it, like they were all part of some Great Ginger Conspiracy. But she knew the court of Yo-Morgantus and she was known to them. Half a mile down the canal from here and just about visible over the rooftops was the Cube: a huge tower of glass and irregularly shaped cladding, like a titanic greenhouse that had been repaired with Duplo bricks. For the most part, it was offices and apartments for those who felt that being in spitting distance of the fashion boutiques, wine bars and eateries of the Mailbox was worth the sky-high rents. However, the top two floors were home to the Venislarn court in Birmingham, a hodgepodge of humans, eldritch gods and unspeakable horrors that would have sent Hieronymus Bosch running for his paint set. And, sitting above all of this, both figuratively and literally, was Yo-Morgantus, whose physical form in this world was a suppurating sea of flesh, both featureless and infinite in form.
Parliaments and councils and the apparatus of civilisation could pretend what they liked but Birmingham was Yo-Morgantus’s plaything and he was its absol
ute monarch. His eyes and ears and mouth in the city were the ginger slaves who had sold themselves into his service. Yo-Morgantus had a fondness for redheads, much like a lion has a fondness for crippled zebras.
“Just observing?” said Morag.
The ginger woman gave her a piercingly unpleasant look but said nothing.
Nina tapped Morag in the ribs and pointed to a round fellow who had the doubly alluring qualities of wearing only leather (and not enough of it) and having grease-smeared sweat flowing over the portions of his body not covered with leather (of which there was definitely not enough).
“The bargemaster,” said Nina.
“What’s the chain for?”
“He’s property of the boat, just like all the people on it. Let’s go have a chat.”
A slender youth in a suit that screamed spiv and with a face so covered in scratches he might well be using glass as a face scrub stepped out of the boat, looked at his phone and with a “twenty-four hours, mate” for the bargemaster, headed toward the bridge. He leered at Nina and Morag as he passed and made no bones about letting them know he was looking at them.
“Ugh,” said Nina, not bothering to keep her voice down. “You see that? Being an absolute fox is a burden sometimes, you know.”
“He could have been looking at me,” suggested Morag.
“Even pervs have standards, grandma.”
“Sorry. He’s your boyfriend. I understand. He’s all yours.”
Nina sniggered and went up to the bargemaster.
“Sven,” she said.
The bargemaster grunted in non-committal greeting.
Nina held out the Boots bag.
“That’s an all-day breakfast sandwich and salt and vinegar crisps for you.”
The bargemaster took the bag, removed the can of deodorant, twisted the cap, sprayed and sniffed.
“That’s Lynx Apollo,” said Nina.
