I cleared my throat. “Thank you, sir.”
“I will be advising against any kind of official reprimand, but you know how the Procurators can be. If you suffer any recriminations for your conduct I will fight them with everything I have. Do you have the item?”
I passed him the book, Sanguinem Mittere, gingerly, as though it might explode.
“With apologies, sir, you put us through all that for a book?”
He was already thumbing through it, a smile dancing on the corner of his mouth. “This book may be the most important item I’ve ever held. But I regret the terrible things that happened in its retrieval.”
I nodded. “Until what happened with Billy, none of it was exactly real. Just illusions created by the Fallen and the gy . . .”
“Gyscarl. “ He finished for me. “Yes. Although they say that, even though it promotes paranoia and anxiety, it can’t produce any thoughts or feelings that weren’t already present, subconsciously. So in a way, everything that happened, barring the eventual deaths, was real on some level. On that note, I think we’re done. Have your full report written by tomorrow.”
“Before I go, sir? The gyscarl . . . the name sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it.”
He leaned back in his chair and offered a grim smile, as though pained by the knowledge he was sharing, but still glad I’d asked. “It’s one of the components in regulation combat stimms,” he said, and his eyes fixed on mine, taking in my reaction. “Dismissed.”
Shaken, I got up and made my way to the door, then turned back with one last question.
“The Fallen showed us our worst fears. ‘Killed’ us with them.” I allowed myself a wry smile. “I can’t help but wonder what you would have been shown. What are you afraid of, sir?”
He didn’t smile at that, just looked at me for an uncomfortably long moment, until I was sure I’d have to apologise. Then he tore a slip of paper from his note pad and wrote something hurriedly.
He turned it for me to read it, then pushed it across the desk to me, keeping his fingers on it.
It read: “I’m afraid that we are a part of something terrible.”
Then he slid the note back and ripped it into tiny pieces.
*
The following week, I took a trip to Caldair and visited the old house that used nightmares to protect dreams. My judgements meant nothing to the righteous intent of the Procurators, and the house had been reduced to ash and rubble. I searched the ruins, but the devastation was too great to allow me to tell if the Fallen and the people she protected had escaped.
I returned the following evening and planted something to, in some small way, make penance for my many failures. Now, every summer, a small part of Caldair is entranced by the sweet smell of lavender in the ashes.
A Mutual Truth
I lay in the dark, mercifully without need for air, arms folded over my chest, my cross heavy against my skin, seeming to hold me down, hurting me. Why did He want to hurt me?
You know that feeling you sometimes get of a morning, where you’re technically awake, or nearly, but can’t move for a couple of seconds? That’s how it felt. Perpetually.
In my mind’s eye, I knelt before an altar, drinking the ‘blood’ of the Exalted and doused with colour from the sunlight pouring through a stained glass window. Trapped in the dark, the musty smell of earth all around me, my mind sought any escape.
***
I tried to escape into the glass, watched the light of the diminishing day refract over the angles cut into it, as I swirled the amber liquid around. My wife chastised me, yelled. Bad enough that I had been demoted, that I had the stigma of the Guardian House incident on my record. I should be grateful, she said, for the second chance they’d given me, not waste it by drinking myself into the grave. She kept ranting until her voice failed, but yelling and sniping had been normal for her since before we were married, so I paid it no mind and retreated further into the glass, reclined further into my chair and . . .
*
I woke up to the sound of my Purifier’s alert pulsing and whirling. Word knew how long it had been running for. Being in uniform from the night before made things easier. My whiskey had spilled and soaked into the carpet. There was no time to clean. I was out the door in less time than it took to holler an apology to the wife.
At the rendezvous, Turcotte was addressing the unit and giving orders to each remaining member: Roberto, Fisk, Troughton, Moriah and Gibbs. It still didn’t seem right, Turcotte making the strategy in Andreas’ place, but he’d slipped into the role naturally enough.
“What time do you call this, Mister Starsmore?” he asked as I approached. The tone was jocular, but there was an undercurrent of reprimand beyond Turcotte’s usual clipped, no-nonsense manner.
“Slept late,” I replied, feeling like a little boy late for Education.
“A word,” he said. The others drifted along the streets, some to fulfil their orders, others waiting at a distance for their signal.
“Frank, listen to me,” he put a hand on my shoulder, “I can’t believe that you are a lazy man, I’ve never imagined you as a layabout. You have always worked hard for this unit. If you are having trouble sleeping, see a head doctor, or a Procurator if it’s your conscience troubling you.” He was looking me in the eye, getting exasperated as he tried to get through the wall I had put up since the incident. “If your heart isn’t in this any more you can come to me about that, or take it up with the Exalted himself, but if you are doing what I think you are doing . . . If you are drowning your guilt . . . if . . . I don’t know what to think anymore, Frank! World damn it, Starsmore! Talk to me!”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I muttered. “I overslept. Won’t happen again.”
“You had better mind that it doesn’t. Go attend your duties. You will be assisting Roberto on reconnaissance for this mission. Dismissed.”
*
“So what’s buggin’ you, Franky baby?”
Our newest recruit, Bobbo, sat on the edge of the rooftop, legs swinging over the edge. I was perched next to him, squatting. We could see the entire street below. Our job was to raise the alarm if anybody passed but we knew nobody would or, if someone did, it would probably be some innocent pedestrian in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Same thing as you, I’d wager,” I said, adjusting my mask so it bit into my neck a little less. “This doesn’t feel right any more. I go home and I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve spent the day doing. I can’t figure out what I feel worse about, wearing this uniform or betraying it.”
“Doesn’t the wife help ‘take your mind off things’?” His round cheeks spread apart in a cheeky grin.
I snorted.
“How about praying? You always go to church don’t you?”
I didn’t answer. That wasn’t quite the same either. My relationship with the Exalted was almost as strained as my relationship with my wife. I couldn’t help feeling like we had let each other down. I had betrayed Him and He’d been unforgiving, or maybe it was the other way around.
“Anyway, don’t let it get to you. I’m thinking of bugging out on this gig anyway, you should do the same.”
“What’s making you doubt?”
He was silent for a long time. Below, nothing passed by except for sheets of paper blowing in the wind. We were on a four-storey hab-block, looking across at another building of the same size, and nobody came to their window. No curtains opened or even twitched. People knew we were there.
“It’s not the same without Andreas, that’s all.” Bobby said. “I always felt he had my back. Turcotte too I guess, but not in the same way. Andreas I always thought wanted to do the right thing, wouldn’t let things go too far. And I worry about him, you know?”
“I know.”
From around the corner of the parallel hab-block a woman stepped out. Skinny, deep-set eyes, black hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a threadbare dress and no shoes. Attractive, in a way
.
“Hold on,” Bobby said. “I’ll call it in.”
I reached for his arm as he took out his radio. “Let’s investigate first,” I said, and we hurried down the fire escape ladder as fast as we could. As we hit the ground, the woman looked around, afraid, and ran down a large tunnel under a stone bridge.
By the time we’d gotten across the road, she was gone. Or, rather, she was making a heroic attempt to appear to be gone, hiding behind a cardboard shelter at the far end of the tunnel. I picked her up by the back of her collar like she was a kitten and she tensed up with a look of stubborn terrified defiance on her face, as though she expected me to take a knife out and open her throat. Instead, I put her down and turned her to face me, keeping a firm grip on her shoulders.
“Name?” I asked.
“Trixie,” she replied.
Bobby looked over her shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised, a smirk spreading across his face.
“Name?” I asked again.
“Sara,” she replied.
***
I dreamed of my last night as a mortal, of walking home and confronting my wife, her eyes staring in the slip of moonlight through the window. The dream wavered, blurred, and rippled apart, and I found myself in the dark again. The cross was burning my chest.
***
It was late afternoon, and the sun was fading as I approached the chapel. My cousin, Lucian, was there passing a goblet around the worshippers, as though nothing had happened. When he had finished, I saw him surreptitiously drain what was left of the wine . . . then refill the goblet.
“What is it . . .” he asked the room in general, “defines us as human? What separates us from lower life forms, from animals? The Exalted imbued us with the divine spark of consciousness but what use is that without moral direction? Consciousness is ours as a given but our souls, our sense of what is good, our ability to love, that is where we feel the Exalted’s touch.” He sounded so impassioned, but I knew better. I could detect the slight sway in his step and slur in his voice that I knew of old. The listlessness in his eyes told me he was reciting a script. “Only if we let the Exalted into our hearts can he grant us these things. So what is it that elevates us above the animals? Our ability to love the Exalted unconditionally and be imbued with his love in return.”
I genuinely struggled to think of anything else besides faith that did demonstrate my humanity. My love for my wife had shattered, if it had ever existed at all. I ate and slept and killed. If my faith faltered because I lacked the strength to do the Exalted’s will, what then made me different from rats and wolves and other predators and scavengers?
When Lucian had a moment to himself, I coughed softly to draw his attention. He raised his infamously piercing eyes, moistened his thin lips, shoved his hands into his pockets, and wandered over to me.
“Hello Frank,” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure. As . . . momentous as this occasion is, perhaps you’d like to explain your presence?”
“Momentous?” I asked.
“It means ‘important’.”
“I know what momentous means. Why is this momentous?”
He clasped my hands, briefly. “Because I haven’t seen you in so long. And you’re terrifying my congregation. Look at them, sat there goggling. Go on, have a good look!”
“I am.”
“I’m talking to them, not you.” His glance panned across the room as he mumbled distractedly. “Coming here, every week, just to sit and stare. Bastards probably don’t understand a word I say.”
“Know how they feel.”
“Know how they . . . ? Ha! Yes, of course you do. You and your simple giant’s frame and ogival parietal protuberances are most welcome and entertaining but, I ask again, why have you chosen to break our long standing estrangement? Please say it’s not to complain about your problems.”
“I wanted to be right with the big guy upstairs, is all,” I told him, taking a drag from my cigar, making him wrinkle his nose.
“Well yes, commendable, truly. That one, there. No, don’t look!” He glared at the man, regardless. “Comes here dressed like that, must be carrying half of Llangour’s fleas between his many coats. Fancies his sister,” he hissed. “Can’t bloody stand these people.” Then he drained the wine from the chalice again.
“You don’t mean that . . .”
“So, thank you most sincerely for coming here. You can drag me into a long self-pitying speech about the world being out to get you, and tell me about all the arguments you’ve stumbled into with your wife and your General because . . . because you were too bloody dumb to avoid them. Go ahead, anything, so long as your formidable presence drives away some of these other leeches.”
I’d gone there for assurances, reaffirmation of my faith. Andreas’ rebellion had shaken me, made me question. Lucian’s display of contempt wasn’t helping.
I turned to leave.
“That’s it, stomp away. Go home and stroke your beard. It is your best friend after all. Your beard doesn’t care if you know what momentous means. Bye bye, see you again in another three years.”
“No, you don’t get to do that,” I said, rounding on him. “I’m not going to stand here and watch you throw insults at my back as I walk away.” He smirked. I knew I’d said something stupid. “Don’t laugh at me. You were welcoming me a minute ago. Now you want to sink the barbs in to convince yourself it’s me that’s pathetic, when really you know it’s you. A little bit of spiritual guidance, Lucian. Is that beneath you now?”
“You want . . . me . . .” punctuated with a disbelieving hand pressed to his chest, “to help restore your faith? I am flattered, truly, but not the right man for the job. They force me to play nursemaid to these waifs and . . . arseholes. Yes, it’s beneath me. Makes one question the whole purpose of the Meritocracy. Is it to create and protect chattel like those?” He made a sweeping gesture between a man picking his nose and a woman staring at the wall open-mouthed.
“Go home,” he told me, pleadingly. “Read something. Anything. Preferably something illegal. That goes for all of you!”
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”
“Yes.” He pressed a finger to his lips, shushing himself. “Didn’t mean that,” he laughed. “Of course I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . it as . . . a test. To see who would stay and . . . who would go. And since you all stayed, you . . . passed! Well done!”
*
When I got home, Tanya was looking into the smoky fireplace that I should have cleaned weeks ago, waiting for me. She looked more serious, and more frail, than I had ever known her to be. For the first time in months, I felt a faint echo of the love we’d once shared.
“Will you sit?” she asked politely, almost timidly. “I think we should talk about things. No yelling, no guilt, I promise. Let’s just talk.”
I sat on the sofa beside her, and felt it shudder beneath my weight. Tanya flinched. I think she was always a little intimidated by me. On the mahogany table in front of us was our wedding album, open where she had been looking through it.
“Remember how happy we were?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” I flicked through, found my favourite picture, of the two of us gazing into each other’s eyes. I was sweeping her up in my arms and she was laughing. There was a raven perched in a tree, looking down at us.
“It isn’t you I’m unhappy with,” I told her. “It’s what’s happening. The situation with Andreas, him taking the blame for what we all did. Even now, we don’t know what’s going to happen to him. It’s being a Purifier when I’m not even sure what I . . .”
“Shh,” she put a finger to my lips. “Don’t speak so.”
“But it isn’t you . . .”
“It’s partly me. I know I’ve been hard on you. But I have faith in us. I believe that we can make it work.”
I honestly wasn’t so sure I could go on blindly accepting things the way they were, ignoring all the evidence that said Tanya and I didn’t make
sense together. I kept worrying about the consequences of our marriage failing, about it shining a spotlight on us and attracting the scorn of the Procurators. That wasn’t the right reason to stay.
I looked at the lines of her face, her dry skin and tired eyes, her tolerant mouth. But my mind kept thinking of my job, of the things I’d done, the people I’d killed, and the rebellion, and my eyes kept drifting to the drinks cabinet.
“Say something, please,” Tanya said. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. All the things on my mind were either things I wanted to keep private, things I didn’t have to the words to explain, or things that would prompt an argument.
I turned away, and she stopped talking and just sat next to me, awkwardly. When I glanced round, the firelight was reflecting off the tears on her face. I reached out for her, but she shied away, then got up and walked to our bedroom stiffly.
That night, I prayed. And when the Exalted didn’t answer I prayed to the bottle instead.
***
Immortality plays tricks and teaches us lessons. Fallen memory is astounding, almost eidetic. Mortals can only imagine what it is like to never forget anything. Can only imagine the horror of it. All of today’s mistakes and pains stay with us, never decaying. We change continually, but our pasts stay with us, stay the same. Hurts from a century ago will still be fresh after another century. Andreas rightly espouses Fallen rationality, our ability to suppress emotion, but no matter how deeply we bury our feelings they remain, preserved.
***
We were yet again on surveillance detail, which was meant as a punishment but was more of a blessing. Bobbo and I stood in the window of an abandoned hab-block apartment, watching for suspicious activity. Intel indicated that a black-market trader was operating from this street, meeting clients to exchange drugs, books, artefacts from false religions, blood and contraband.
Bobbo looked particularly twitchy that day. We had let Sara go, but Turcotte had been cagey with us ever since. He knew someone had passed through our zone but couldn’t prove it, and perhaps couldn’t let on that he knew. Bobbo kept breaking from his watch to pace around the bare apartment, which wasn’t customary behaviour for him.
“Stop it, Bobbo, please,” I asked, trying not to let my voice give sign of my headache and irritability.
Facade of Evil and Other Tales from 'Heathen with Teeth' Page 5
