Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  The physics of this place are strange. No sun. You can't see with no light, and yet you can see. No air, but still you breathe. You can hear. You never get tired, never get hungry, but the beard grows. I try to think about this in terms of science. 'Quantum' is the best and only word I have for it. I'm not even entirely certain what that means. So I just say 'quantum' to sound smart. And sometimes, 'tachyon'.

  Find a park. Relax. Smoke a bit. I didn't bring a book. Bored already, but better bored than dead. For now, anyways.

  We found the Hollow in here. Jon used to love this place.

  He was never that much of a magician, Jon. Not in the way I am.

  He could work a trick or two, no doubt. But the words and rites never meant that much to him as they did me and he was a terrible study. No, it was the more martial side of things that worked for him. He used to talk about hard qi and eightfold paths and inward techniques and things like that.

  Jon could meditate more ways than anyone I've ever met. He had an unearthly calm about him at times. He loved to talk shop about it. He used to follow me around as I took the shaman walk. As I went out into the city, walking without lust for revelation or lust for result. Simply walking, pretending or understanding that everything that took my attention was a message from God, or the universe, or Odin, or the telluric currents. Finding significance in whatever was before me.

  Used to love it when we worked cases like that, amused that a man like me could trust pure intuition over facts. But that's magic, isn't it? Set your feet one way and it'll be delighted to break your goddamn ankle.

  He'd bore his dates. He used to drag me to these gay bars where he liked the music and the view; I felt weird and exposed and he'd talk softly about the strangest things, ignoring the guys who cruised him. Five nations in his ancestry, none of them white, and he stood out everywhere. His hair was too straight, his eyes too curved, his skin too coffee, his cheeks too wide – he was a guy everyone used to puzzle over.

  I remember when he came to the foster house, I used to ask him where he was from. 'The city,' he'd say and the first time I pressed him, curious, he twatted me one in the face. He was wilder then and the places he came from, someone asks race, it can get bad quick. He wasn't just wild. Scary, if I tell it right.

  I got him into the martial arts when he was, what, twelve or something? That changed everything for him. He'd no longer skip school to hunt down the big kids just for an excuse to tame his own hate with violence. And if you knew Jon's story, you'd know there was flatline hate ringing in his head every damn second of every damn day.

  He never liked the science stuff of it. Never liked the mechanical practice. This was before MMA, before you could measure the pressure of your punches and that. Soon, we tracked down the stranger dojos for him. The ones with old men from obscure countries who showed you one punch a day then talked about lotuses. That eased the street feral out of him. Those places, didn't matter your race or even how hard you could hit. They weren't interested in being tough, or being strong. They cared about excellence. They were arts for real.

  I used to take a lesson with him now and again. I can throw a punch. I can break a lock. But I never had the instinct for the fight. Jon said I had to ignore the urge to protect myself. Take the punch to deliver the punch, but I never could.

  I like protecting myself.

  Besides, the fitness regime alone makes me want to puke.

  When I went to the Library, he came too. There's always a need for muscle, and the Library is bad at recruiting it. Mercenaries, mostly. Jon was perfect. Smart and lethal and loyal to me.

  Money. Man. We were so poor together when we met, me thirteen years old, him ten. Suddenly the Library was paying the bills. You know how many cults in the city can do that? Two. Well, one now.

  Maybe a third, too. The Old Man. Think about him soon.

  I get up. Wander down town through the chiaroscuro street.

  Jon used to love it here because it's so quiet. The cars don't make sound and will pass through you like a cloud across the sun if you stand in their way. Sun never rises or sets, just stays there, radiating it's weird unlight. He loved to train here and I'd watch him, startled by how beautiful he was. Scarlet used to like to watch him work out, eating yoghurt and whistling and I could hardly blame her. More than that, he used to like that it was just him and me, all alone in a whole world.

  He had lovers. Friends from the fighting circuit. He even liked some Librarians. But I was the only person who treated him as anything else than the kid who slit his uncle's throat with a can lid. Jon was loyal to me and the reason he stayed that way was that I never took advantage of it.

  I miss him.

  When he changed, that was just about the last thing linking me to the Library. Except for Scarlet.

  We were hunting a guy who had found access to this place. He was on a robbing-spree and a few of the lesser sects had petitioned us to help them out. We did the divining and discovered he was moving through this place, using it like a skeleton key.

  Jon was coldly furious.

  'It feels like there's someone in the bedroom. Touching our stuff. The Black City, that's ours.'

  Untrue, of course, but there it was. Jon was determined to find who was moving in and out of the place. We laid a trap. Found him. Jon stopped him, sneaking in close and punching the guy in the back of the head. We looked closer at him. The guy wore a lacquered leather mask. Damn thing was terrifying.

  I looked at it. Looked like I look. Took a second to figure it out in the Black City as it always does.

  'Jon. Don't.'

  It was the last thing I said to him. To him.

  In the time it took me to find calm, he'd put it on.

  'I'm Hollow.'

  And that was it. The Hollow was on him. He changed. It filled him up with nothing. Not human in the head. I'll never know why he didn't listen to me. I'll never know what happened in those three seconds between him strapping the fucking thing to his face and bonding with whatever the fuck that mask is.

  We couldn't be together after that. Couldn't work together.

  He didn't want to. I couldn't. And when Scarlet saw how badly I took that, it was the last straw for her. Who can blame her for that, too?

  Me.

  The streets are... bruised.

  Something is wrong in the Black City.

  I start to walk faster, ignoring the grinding pain in my leg. There's no longer a weakness in the southern neighbourhoods. Everything is deformed. Pulled to the south. It looks wrong, an octopus elasticity, and ragged tendrils of shade wave like thick weed beneath the sea.

  This is. No. I've never seen the place look like this before. The buildings here curve and loom, but these are stretched and sick, frayed or stretched.

  What the fuck it this?

  I keep jogging, never getting tired. No lactic acids to weigh down legs.

  I run downtown to the old bus depot. Turn the corner, and it pulses like cancer. Some shape that an eye can't follow, leaking a phosgene light as if from an abyss. I feel mine trying to trace the outline and turn my back.

  Like getting touched by an uncle. Like getting a fax call over the phone at too many decibels at a pitch that vibrates in your eye. It's a Sigil of maximum order, leaking cancer into the world.

  I've felt that kind of thing before. Fucking serious business. Stare at that too long and I'd condense, steam into water.

  Back away. This is nothing to fuck with. Nothing to pit your strength again. I walk away.

  This is far from where the Old Man has ever worked before. We've never heard of him working downtown.

  Now I've seen it, I can feel it always. A wound in this world. Primal magic, the True Science.

  Fuck.

  Thirty-Three

  transcript session iii

  12/07/12

  dr. indra recording.

  Indra: OK. Let's start again. Why don't you pick up on last time.

  Patient: The scroll.

  Indra:
Yes. That.

  Patient: I used to be... involved in a group. You know that.

  Indra: Yes.

  Patient: But before that, I was a professor. I was an expert in Middle Eastern languages. Ancient ones.

  Indra: Yes. You were [pause, shuffling of papers] the head of department. Twenty-five years tenured.

  Patient: That's right! Anyway. I was bought in to read a Scroll. Let me tell you about it. Very old. Very old. Very beautiful in its way. And, and this is the thing, it wasn't in any language I ever read or heard of, although you could see some similarities with certain alphabets.

  I won't get technical.

  But here's where it gets interesting. You can, I could, I could read it.

  Indra: You could read a language that, as far as you aware, never existed.

  Patient: Yes, you must think I'm crazy. [laughter] You've probably heard that before. I'm sorry. I wonder if a poor sense of humour is pathological.

  Indra: Please go on.

  Patient: And it told me a story. I have a suspicion it would tell you a rather different story if you read it.

  Indra: I'm very interested in the narrative you found in the scroll. Please do go on with that.

  Patient: Tell me, did you ever read Blake?

  Indra: Blake. William? No. I'm afraid my tastes in poetry are rather limited.

  Patient: Shame. My wife is. Was. A scholar and her special interest was in what she called 'London visionaries.' The scroll reminded me of Blake and his strange poems.

  Indra: That's interesting.

  Patient: It was my wife. Wait. It's all confused, I'm afraid. I want to talk about the scroll now.

  Indra: I'd like that too. Are you alright, Doctor XXXX?

  Patient: Yes. Just. The scroll. The story.

  Imagine... Imagine a world before this world. No, that's not quite right. These aren't human concepts. Imagine our world is embedded in another world. Matrushkas, you know. Or that there's, say, a matrix of world. A refracting crystal. I don't know.

  But in certain worlds, or the bigger world, there are creatures. Entities. Archons.

  Indra: What's an archon?

  Patient: God, read your Plotinus! Aren't you required to read Jung anymore in your profession?

  Indra: I'm a psychiatrist, Doctor. Jung is rather too mystical for my tastes.

  Patient: How dull. You claim to treat minds and you ignore the greatest thinkers on human imagination.

  Indra: I treat brains. Alright then. Let's talk about Archons.

  Patient: I imagine you are thinking this is the locus of my obsession?

  Indra: I just want to hear what you have to say.

  Patient: What a bore you are. You and your kind.

  But imagine, then, that these Archons are able to enter our reality and rewrite the rules. As in. [pause]. Imagine you had only lived your life in a river. Submerged in it. Then imagine one day you saw a man jumping from bank to bank. A stream, then, not a river.

  Wouldn't his ability to live outside the stream, move around in another dimension, wouldn't that be miraculous?

  Archons are like that. They can... they're bigger than us. They have more options.

  No. They're like gods. More. Titans. Vast, macrodimensional intelligences that can't come into our world because it's too feeble for them. A petri dish, if you like. We're like liquids to their solids. They forge their weapons in black holes, their ribs are the size of solar systems. There are fast-breeding factories in their wombs, creating demon-litters that could disassemble stars. If I say to you they have as many eyes as there are stars, I want you to recall that I speak of trillions.

  But they like our world. They're curious about it, as we are about the bacteria that crawl on slides. Anthills. Pick your metaphor. They are bigger than us. Our world is a sock puppet to them, awaiting a fist. They are powerful. Powerful. As strong as mathematics.

  Luckily for our species, there are ways to hurt them. Tame them. The best of which, the easiest of which, is to simply play them against each other. There are three hundred and thirty three of them and they are enemies. Primal chaoticians who are beyond kinship! Imagine that! Imagine seeing a battle like that! Laws of physics mined out of universe to be wielded like blades! Shooting at each other with philosophies that would haemorrhage human value systems!

  Indra: Doctor XXXX. Calm down, please.

  Patient: May I have some water?

  [water is poured. Deep drinking.]

  Patient: So someone appealed to more than one Archon, to fight another. How you could talk to them is quite beyond me. I imagine you'd have to have nerves of steel.

  Indra: Can you talk to them?

  Patient: God no. Can you talk to entropy of the weak electro-magnetic force?

  It can talk to me. But it's more like getting a transmission beamed in that scribes or scrimshaws the inside of your skull.

  Now do you want to hear my XXXXing story?

  Alright.

  So someone, and I can only imagine this person as Solomon or someone like that engineered an alliance, archon against archon. And they transformed this particular one into... into language. Into a story. And they sort of... beamed it into some scholars head, who wrote it down. You see, an archon can't die, no more than you could kill... radiation. Or an inch. How do you kill an inch?

  Indra: Here, please take this.

  Patient: No more pills. They make me fat and rubbery in my head. I'm a scholar, you know.

  Oh alright.

  Indra: Thank you.

  Patient: So this scholar, like a cup filled up to the brim, wrote down the archon onto this scroll. Thirty six inches long, twelve inches wide. That's how big the scroll is. Imagine that. A creature that can't conveniently be described by our space-time, put into that little space. It has so much information in its body that it would overwrite us. It's neutered now. Like they maimed it. Castrated it. Trepanised it. I don't understand it all myself.

  But it can get better. It can be healed. Reconstituted.

  It just needs to be read by someone who'll listen to it. Someone who has nothing to lose by meeting it as an equal.

  Indra: So what does it want?

  Patient: It's been here a long time. Many, well, thousands of years. But only as a wounded victim. I rather imagine that it will be reborn again, in the world, still victimised, but in the world. In the world. A ship too big for the bottle.

  Indra: And then what will happen?

  [Pause]

  Doctor? XXXX?

  XXXX no!

  [A dull thumping sound repeated six times. Harsh breathing. Laughter]

  Patient: Then we'll be trapped in a world that it lives in. You stupid XXXX

  Tell my wife I'm glad I did it.

  transcript sealed. do not copy.

  Thirty-Four

  There's no way I'm staying here. This is a bad place now, and I'm not going to stay. My perfect Black City and some motherfucker has spoiled it.

  But what the hell is happening? The Old Man is... he's just a man? I have no idea. This isn't human magic, though. And, well, it's pretty much an axiom that in magic, coincidence is everything. No way these things aren't connected.

  No time to concentrate.

  I have to warn the Library. That isn't an excuse to get to Scarlet. Not this time. I promise. Primal Workings are.... like an assault on the laws of physics. Something from a different world. They are rare. Have always been rare.

  Wait. Stop. Slow down.

  Light up. Breathe deep smoke.

  If I go into the world, the Old Man will know. He had my hair. He can track me and, if he's looking, he'll find me. I've no doubt the sadistic fucker is looking for me. He's fond of lessons. I can't go near the Library. They're warded against me. I can only enter the chapterhouse under strict invitation.

  Rogue.

  It always sounds cool. Sounds.

  Scarlet's little assistant won't respond or listen quickly enough to get word to her. I don't even know any of the other members well
enough to trust them. And I'm not waiting around somewhere, hoping that I get the invite before the Old Man comes.

  I could stay here. Wait until someone realises there's a fucking great monster-work downtown. Why not do that?

  I'm tempted. But that's just serves-them-right sulking.

  Then I wonder about what it is. What could have caused it. When I'll be close to a Primal Working ever again. And I know I'm not staying here and missing out on answers.

  Besides. I'll get bored here soon. No book.

  So where? Anyone I could go to I'll be putting in the firing line. There's no one I hate that much and no one I'm willing to burn all my credit with. Even if I survived and they did, they'd go after me for bringing them to that bastard's attention.

  Like the song says, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  But one.

  One guy who'd at least talk to me and the one guy who I'd bet on against the Old Man.

  Thirty-Five

  I go eastside, feeling the neon hum of the Primal Sigil behind me. Sigil. Hard G, by the way. Sijil pisses me off. You don't say sijnature. The damage fades away slowly. But here's the thing, someone who wrote one can always write another, assuming they survived their calligraphy. That's too great a hope.

  I haven't been this way in a few months and I'm a little lost. There, I locate it. A park. The trees don't sway. Everything is black, like plums. I hesitate. If I go back, I'm in the Old Man's sights. And then I realise that it doesn't matter.

  That curiosity is too great inside me to ignore. Stupid.

  I slide back into the world. It's like walking through a solid sea. Like gravity getting you again, after the rides at the funfair. I ease in and colours swell like a hematoma. Greens and browns and blues stain my eye. Anyone looking at me will start, suddenly realising they'd been staring without seeing. Look at a watch, forget the time, look again. Same thing as that.

  City smell. Bright light. Mid-morning. I shade my eyes and check my watch. Been gone two days. Not enough, goddamnit. But hopefully long enough they'll have moved on to other things, giving me some time to get to where I have to go.