The Lovelace cuts through the wall, spraying concrete, brick, stone and mortar. The carriages shunt together, slotting into one another so that their combined kinetic energy is passed along the spine of the train to the front in a great heave. The black iron is thick and solid, the stress of the impact rebounds through interlocking buffers and supports is dispersed as heat and deafening noise. Rivets pop and wood panels crack. The engine shrieks. The great pressure tank sobs and moans.
But it holds.
Of course, it holds. This is what it was made for.
Just like me.
Joe is moving before the train is fully stationary. He surges from the driver’s cab and down onto the burning grass, knowing somewhere inside himself that these first seconds will count, that the first battles will sway the outcome. Whoever flinches will fight uphill from then on, will lose momentum. He snarls and crouches low. A shadow skitters towards him on heron’s feet, bobbing and weaving. The thing takes an iron pipe full in the chest and flies backwards, and Joe lets loose a yell of heady rage. That for Edie! And that for Ted! And that one for Billy and Joyce, and one for Tess and however many others along the way. And for me. Oh, yes. For me. He stalks through the fog, bludgeoning and crushing, teeth bared. When he feels them begin to gather around him, he steps back towards the wrecked train and a curtain of burning-rubber stink. Metal hands and swords flicker after him.
He’s already gone, silent on his big feet.
Behind him, from the Lovelace, the small but righteous army of Crazy Joe emerges into the beachhead: a collection of thugs and muggers, glad beyond anything they had expected at the chance of a day’s heroism; retired boxers and questionable bodyguards, occasional assassins and professional leg-breakers, hearts uplifted at the prospect of a good fight, the right kind of fight, just this once. This one time, to pay for all. Behind them come Fifth Floor Men and safebreakers, for ease of access; and behind them the Waiting Men—a dozen mournful faces with broad shoulders from carrying coffins, retired soldiers who came by their Acquaintanceship the hard way. Not just an army. A wrecking crew.
The engine howls and grumbles. The fire in her gut is still burning, the steam still building. There’s nowhere for it to go. The safety valves are blocked, the catches bent and hammered shut. One by one, fail-safes click on, and off again, each one meticulously sabotaged by a capable hand.
In the fog, Polly Cradle can hear her lover laughing at his enemy. She can see the shadow of his coat and hat, flicking, taunting, drawing them in. She can feel the steps of his dance, the rhythm of his humour.
She hopes he is fast enough. That he isn’t having too much fun to remember the plan.
She raises her hands, gestures. From his place in the bag over her shoulder, the dog Bastion whiffles.
The wrecking crew slips away from the fight.
Joe Spork laughs in the smoke, laughs through the bandit’s handkerchief over his nose and mouth. A long metal shaft slashes towards him. He lets it pass by, then tugs on it, then scampers away. He has them now, close behind him. He takes a second, gets his bearings. Yes. Yes. So, and so, and so. Snickersnack, as one might say.
Little by little, he draws his foes back towards the train, and the groaning engine. He wonders, briefly, if he will carry this through. There are men here. Real people, for all that they are unmade and mad. They may die. Then he thinks of Polly, and her brother, and of the whole, wide, impossible world beyond, which will stop if this night goes badly. And he thinks: these are my torturers.
So fuck ’em.
He laughs again, very loud, and hears them coming after him. He clangs his feet on the engine steps, then slides on his knees across the metal floor and ducks down and out the other side, off towards Polly Cradle and the others. He counts strides: onetwothreefourfivesix … twenty … thirty …
He hears the clank of metal on metal, of men and machines by the engine housing. They are looking for him. The Lovelace moans again. Too hot. Too full. Too much.
Joe Spork wrenches his body around into a sliding turn, skids into a ditch between two low walls, and points his father’s gun at the body of the engine, the great steam tank with its pent-up rage. He pulls the trigger.
Bangbangbang. And then: bang.
The night is white and orange, and the world is made of noise.
If he thought the crash was loud, now he knows the meaning of the word. Debris zings over him, whistling and whirring. A piece of wheel embeds itself in a statue. He lies on his back and laughs, and cannot hear himself. But here, at least, all the Ruskinites are gone. He picks himself up, and looks back at the site of the explosion.
A yawning black crater steams and smokes, strewn with bodies. None of them makes a sound.
He swallows guilt, and feels a tight burst of pride instead, a battlefield satisfaction, lets it rise in his chest.
Joe slings the tommy gun across his back, gathers his troops and gives orders. The wrecking crew strip the dead machines of their robes and everyone moves forward through the grounds, into the house.
Once upon a time, no doubt, this was a fine old manse, with marble floors and columns, and those big windows were the windows of the Empire Room, the Beaverbrook Suite and the Lady Hamilton Apartments.
Not any more. Now it’s just a shell in which something else has taken up residence, like those eerie ocean worms which grow in the flesh of crabs and eventually devour them from within.
From the glass cupola of the tower on down, Sharrow House has been consumed, walls knocked through to make a space like a cathedral. Here and there, upright pillars of brick, strands of wallpaper hanging off, have been allowed to remain, bearing the weight of stark steel joists. Black cables lie like creepers along the walls across what remains of the ballroom. The hand-painted frescoes have been drilled through and the statues clubbed and cut and shunted to one side. Even with the residue of the Lovelace’s fiery end still in his mouth, Joe can taste the broad rubber flavour of hot electrician’s tape, like a bar across the back of his tongue. In the middle of the floor, a gaping hole sinks down and down into the earth.
Of course. Everything must be as it was. The Opium Khan is living a fight from the last century, playing out his victory over Edie Banister and her lover and Abel Jasmine and Ted Sholt, over all of them. It isn’t important that they’re all dead. What’s important is that he wins, and sees himself winning.
From out of the chasm comes a sound like breathing, and in the same moment that he becomes aware of it, Joe recognises from above, somewhere in the distance, the deep, alien drone of a hundred thousand wings.
The bees are coming.
The pathway to the pit is lined with pipe and electrical gear; Shem Shem Tsien’s version of Frankie’s machinery lacks her economy, her sense of humanity. Instead of hives and metaphor, this is brute industrial technology, fit for the launching of missiles and the incineration of nations. It is all instrumentality, without heart.
They follow the trail to the inmost chambers of Sharrow House, where a gaping maw has been cut or ripped into the old stone floor, and the cellars and crypts of the castle have been opened to the rooms above. The drop to the bottom is as far, easily, as the top of the spire above them; a vertiginous two hundred feet. The way down is a makeshift staircase like a Bailey bridge, supported by a scaffold of girders and ropes. The cabling wraps around it or hangs beside it in a curtain of thick, choking vines.
Joe Spork peers. Down among the vines, he can see scarecrows. Or—no. No, of course, not scarecrows. Not for Shem Shem Tsien. No happy turnip-headed figures made from stuffed pyjamas and straw. Real people. Maintenance men and security guards and lab technicians, dead and hung out like so many rags. Newly dead; less than a day. Perhaps he intends them as messengers to God: a calling card before knocking on the door. Or possibly they were just in his way. Or for no reason at all. The Opium Khan never needed reasons, according to Edie Banister. He did what pleased him, and very often that was bloody and vicious.
Joe feels his face
stretch in a rictus of anger, draws it back and holds onto it. He will need that. No sense sharing it up here.
The dog, Bastion, squirms out of Polly Cradle’s grip and scurries away, blind eyes searching for his enemy. From the gloom come flashes of electric light, like a thunderstorm in the depths of the sea.
Joe hefts his gun and leads the way down into the dark. The stair spirals, and at every turn there’s another body, gathering insects. The scaffold shakes as they go down, too many feet and too much weight, and Joe Spork reaches out to steady himself. Polly Cradle hauls his hand back and glowers at him, furious.
“Idiot!” she growls. “Use your head! Use your eyes!”
She points at the guard rail. It glistens, sparkles. He peers. Cut glass, and a smell like marzipan.
“What is it?”
“Cyanide, I expect. It ought to be, oughtn’t it?”
One of the bruisers has already cut himself. He collapses, choking, on the second landing. When his mate goes to help him, a trapdoor gives way beneath them and they fall into an electrified net.
Joe Spork swears under his breath. He doesn’t say “be careful,” because no one in his crew is stupid. Hard, and angry now, but not stupid.
The room at the bottom of the stair is a chasm, a blending of the house with open space from the Tosher’s Beat, cellars and tombs and all. It’s a giant whispering gallery, like being in the dome at St. Paul’s—sounds echo from the walls, from the upper floors, and from the tower and the sky above. Here the sound of the approaching bees is like a constant grumble, the hiss of static from a radio between stations.
The Opium Khan is waiting for them on a great wrought-iron throne, surrounded by his machines. The beehive from Wistithiel sits in the middle of all of it, crudely sliced open and wired and invaded. Black gooseneck flexes run out to huge banks of computers, and back again to another, half-familiar edifice, like the one in the indoctrination room at Happy Acres, but so much bigger: the archive of the Recorded Man.
All around, the flare of lightning, actinic snaps and pops from the older, stranger work of Frankie Fossoyeur, and a few remaining corpses fizzing and jerking on old electrified frames.
As Joe Spork steps off the stair and onto the floor, Shem Shem Tsien smiles, and pushes a lever to his right, and the whole apparatus shudders and boils. The beehive shrieks.
“Hello, Mr. Spork,” Shem Shem Tsien says.
“Vaughn.”
“Oh, please, spare me that, at least … You’re too late, by the way. It is done. The machine will show me Truth, and I will become as God.”
“And everyone will die. Even you. You’ll cease to be a person. You’ll just be …” Oh. A copy. A pattern, endlessly repeating.
Shem Shem Tsien opens his hands. “You see? I am the future. And, in fact, that is truer than you can imagine. When the world has been made ready by the Apprehension Engine, I shall bless you all with my own mind. With the calibration drum, I can use the Engine as a transmitter. Like my Ruskinites, Mr. Spork, you shall all know every detail of me. And, gradually, you will become me. I will be everyone, and everything, for ever. My perception will be the only perception. My mind, the only mind. Your mind, Mr. Spork. You will be part of me.
“I will become God. It is too late to prevent this. It has always been, will always have been, too late.”
After a moment, Joe Spork shrugs. “If I was too late, we wouldn’t be talking.”
Abruptly, he knows quite clearly and simply that this is true, and a moment later, he realises what that means: the Apprehension Engine is working. Stage one, Frankie called it. The thing she wanted. The safe zone. But that will change, very soon.
In a corner of his mind, the echo of confirmation.
He looks up, and sees a waterfall of bees, a tumbling, beautiful, appalling stream, and everything changes.
The Opium Khan snaps a command and men appear from the shadows, hard-bitten bastards to look at, and used to working together. Drug soldiers, maybe, or mercenaries. Mercenaries. As soon as Joe has the thought, he feels the rightness of it.
The bees descend, filling the air. They’re all over London, he knows that, too, and there’s a growing fear, an understanding that what is coming is very bad.
Shem Shem Tsien is laughing. Joe probes the edges of that name in his mind, but it seems there are limits to his comprehension; when he thinks of his enemy, he has no sense of who the Opium Khan truly is. A misunderstood question, then, insufficiently refined for the answer to be true or false. But soon that won’t matter. Soon, the redefinition will attend the asking, and after that, questions will cease to exist at all.
Death by footnote.
Battle is joined, brutal and intense. Street fighting, without an elegant kick or a clever trick in sight. The noises of it are grim and desperate: grunts, tearing sounds, cries and impacts; slicings and shatterings. This close to the machine, both sides are nervous of guns. With their hands and feet and old-fashioned weapons of mayhem, the mercenaries fight. The bruisers fight back.
The bees descend into the chamber, a humming cloud of confusion and dismay, and abruptly the whole scene is glossed. Each man has a life, a history, apparent and real and immanently understood. At this moment, Joe Spork suspects, Frankie imagined that war would be forever impossible, just as the theorists of poison gas and the atomic bomb fondly cherished a notion of mankind which made such weapons unusable and which would understand the stricture of them, that war is wasteful and pointless.
The fight continues, if anything more bitter.
Amid a haze of golden bees zinging to and fro, the botched and butchered remnant of the Apprehension Engine is running, deepening, and every answer is more and more fractal, more complete. It cannot be long now before everything is too late. Joe knows immediately exactly how long, can feel the measurement of time not in seconds or minutes but with the perfect timekeeping of atoms. But in minutes, yes, he’s right: not more than five to the end.
Joe charges forward through the tumbling, struggling figures, seeking Shem Shem Tsien. He slams his fist into a man’s face, ducks a counter, and laughs as he tips his foe over on his back and stamps on him. Laughs, because he can see his victory reflected in the other’s movements before it happens. He wades through the fight, knowing exactly where he is going, and where he needs to be. Briefly, he is beset by too many, even for him, but then a man cries out in alarm and horror and clutches at his leg, now missing a chunk of calf where Bastion’s narwhal tusk has torn into him. Joe ducks through the gap, weaves, engages and retreats. The dog vanishes into the melee, and his progress is audible in shrieks and curses.
Joe howls a berserker laugh, spreads his arms wide and springs forward to carry men down to the ground, rolls past them and onto his feet. He feels fingers underfoot, stamps and hears a curse, slips away. His path is a shifting ripple in the room, but he walks it with perfect certainty and his hands are full of power. He lets himself understand the pattern, knows his destination, can feel it drawing ever closer. And then, in the very middle of the swirl, they are face to face.
The Opium Khan and his enemy, in perfect balance. They are the fulcrum. What happens here will determine everything.
They know it to be true.
Shem Shem Tsien raises his hand: stop. Joe does the same.
And there is stillness, of a sort, over the moaning of the broken.
At the edges of the room, Ruskinites appear from the shadows, robes torn and bathed in smoke. Shem Shem Tsien smirks. “It is genuinely satisfying, Joe Spork, to have you here. To have an enemy to destroy while one ascends to godhead.”
Joe does not reply. He waits.
The Ruskinites reach up and draw back their hoods, revealing the faces of Simon Alleyn and the Waiting Men. The Opium Khan stares at them for a moment, bewildered, and then his face cracks into a broad smile. “You found the Waiting Men! You found them and brought them along as a special surprise! Oh, Joe. It’s too good. Did you think that would bring poor Vaughn back to life? Sc
are me with the terrible undertakers and up he pops, my old, buried soul? A struggle for dominance inside my own head, a master stroke? You did! Let me just take a moment to savour it. It’s splendid. And don’t you worry, Brother Simon. I’ll be with you directly.
“Do you know, Mr. Spork, I honestly think that under other circumstances, you and I—”
Joe Spork sighs. “Windbag,” he says. He rolls his neck to loosen it, tosses his hat to the floor, then screams his fury and his hate, and leaps …
Except, he doesn’t, because instantly he begins the motion, he knows infallibly what will happen if he follows through. He can feel the Apprehension Engine working inside his head, intimately and perfectly perceives action and consequence from every angle:
Joe leaps, huge hands grasping. Shem Shem Tsien receives him and they fall, together, rolling over and over. Joe bites off a piece of his enemy’s ear. The Opium Khan breaks two of Joe’s fingers. They tear one another apart; skill and savagery, evenly matched, so back and forth they go. On and on and on until, suddenly, nothing. The world stops. Finis.
Seeing him freeze, understanding in the same way the same causality, Shem Shem Tsien laughs and steps forward, raises his narrow sword, then stops:
The Opium Khan lunges. Joe twists to one side, the blade scoring a line along his hip. He brings up his gun and fires; a bullet bites the Opium Khan’s arm. They close.
“I’m very sorry, Brother Vaughn. It’s time.”
Simon Alleyn has covered the distance between them so fast it seems that he must have flown. He rises up behind Vaughn Parry, strong limbs reaching. His left arm folds across Parry’s throat, fingers reaching to catch the crook of his other elbow in a wrestler’s lock. He pushes Parry’s head forward from above, and slowly, slowly, the veterbrae separate, and the spinal cord snaps.
Angelmaker Page 56
