by Alex Pheby
Part Four
The Tinderbox
When you see a ship on the horizon, it is often indistinguishable from the cresting of distant waves. It might rather be a nearby seabird that interposes itself, floating or flying, ahead of the viewer’s eye, fluctuating in the shimmer that the sea creates in the air. It might be a mirage – so the experienced sailor assumes, having been fooled many times in the past into thinking there was something there when there wasn’t – wipe your eyes with your sleeve before you make any assumptions.
If there is a ship it grows ever more gradually, from the speck that causes the suspicion of its presence in the first instance, ever more distinctly out of that line of darker blue that separates the blue of the sea from the blue of the sky, ever more into itself.
If you don’t wipe your eyes the water that forms on the lenses in response to the brisk and briny sea breeze will buckle and blur what you do see, but eventually there will be a ship there. You will be almost certain of it, and will grab the arm of the person beside you, your friend, and you will say:
‘Is that a ship?’
Just to be sure.
Your friend will answer in the affirmative, or the negative, and the matter will be settled.
The ship that Nathan saw did not appear in this way at all, and Nathan needed no friend to confirm its presence, which is all to the good, because who were Nathan’s friends anyway?
This ship came out of nowhere, huge and black, with black sails, and on its black prow stood the Master. It seemed as if this black ship would crash into them, sink them all, and though Nathan could barely move himself, he tried to call out a warning. Even if he had managed to make the words leave his mouth no-one but the Master would have heard them, because suddenly he was on the Master’s ship and the others were nowhere.
Nathan lay on the black deck and the Master strolled down from where he had been standing. His hands were casually clasped behind his back and there was a small smile on his face. ‘Well, well. You have been busy, haven’t you?’ he said. His expression was gentle, almost fatherly, almost amused. ‘I turn my back for five minutes…’
‘Where are the others?’ Nathan whispered.
The Master sat himself down, folding his legs and neatly arranging his jacket. ‘I’ve helped them on their way. Off to Malarkoi. Best to keep a bit of distance for this next bit. Can get a little messy. Which is why it’s best to do it out at sea – nothing much to ruin out here.’ The Master reached over and took from Nathan’s clenched fist the eye of God. ‘I think you’ve had enough fun with that, don’t you?’ He popped it into his jacket pocket.
Nathan tried to get up, but he was too weak.
The sails of the ship were black, and its hull was made from black planks of black-stained oak. Black pitch made the seals and black glass was at the windows. The cannons were of black iron and beside him sat the Master, all dressed in black. And now the sky grew cloudy and a rainstorm was brewing.
Nathan raised his arm and it came free of his shirt. He looked down and his clothes were below him, slumped against the deck. When the ship lurched, he reached out to steady himself and his hand passed through the wood. In his chest the locket remained – his heart beat around it – but then Nathan began to slip and the chain pooled and gathered. It seemed as if he would fall down into the galley below and leave the locket behind.
The Master grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him up. ‘I did warn you not to Spark. Do you remember? Back when you first came to me?’ The Master stood and held Nathan in front of him so that his feet appeared to rest on the ship. ‘You can do yourself a damage, if you’re not careful. Still, never mind. No hard feelings, eh?’
‘What’s happening to me?’
The Master sighed and pursed his lips, frowned a little, pondering, seemingly, whether he could let Nathan in on his secrets. ‘Some might say, Nathan, that now I have you where I want you, I should be generous, tell you everything there is to know. Let you in on it. But I am not a generous man. Quite the opposite. I want everything for myself. Everything, Nathan. Including you. I will tell you this: a boy who Sparks unrestrainedly as you have done, a boy who uses the God-Flesh to avoid his father’s interdiction, a boy who ruins magic books and thereby obviates their protections, a boy who conspires with his enemies, such a boy consumes himself in the process. You’ve eaten yourself up, Nathan, and now, almost formless, you make it possible for me to do what would otherwise have been impossible.’
The first fat, slow raindrops of a storm fell, making ragged circles of darker black on the blackness beneath Nathan’s feet. He held out his hand and the rain did not wet it.
The Master drew Nathan towards him, as if he was protecting him from the weather. ‘Don’t feel bad. You’re only a boy. I knew you wouldn’t be able to contain yourself. I blame Dashini. She’s a bit of a menace. All the destruction you’ve caused.’
The Master put his arms around Nathan, pulled him up and into his chest. ‘You made a real pig’s ear of the Manse, but it’s Bellows I feel sorry for. Of all of it, he is the only thing I can’t fix. Everything else… it will be easy, once I have you. But Bellows?’ The Master tilted Nathan’s head back. ‘I think I might have loved Bellows, Nathan. How’s that for a secret?’ The Master lay the lightest of kisses on Nathan’s forehead. ‘Now, believe it or not, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.’
The Master crushed Nathan to his chest, as if in affection, but then so hard that Nathan thought his bones would break. Nathan could feel the Master’s heart beating and the heartbeat was pain on Nathan’s skin. Then the Master crushed harder, so that Nathan’s ribs were forced inwards against the metal of the locket. Can ribs bruise? Do ribs register pain? To Nathan it was as if his entire skeleton was being compacted in on itself. There was no air for him to scream with, but he would have screamed if he could.
The Master’s face was in front of his eyes and he was screaming too, though his mouth was shut. His jaw was so clenched that behind his lips his teeth were shattering. His eyes were so wide that his eyelids were ripping.
Rain fell and around them the black wood splintered, first the planks nearest – they split and separated, revealing the whiteness of the oak beneath the stain – and then, as the Master crushed even harder, the unvarnished centres of the planks came apart, and the black iron cannons crumpled, and the sails collapsed. Nathan’s ribcage was like the cannons and the splintering wood, his skin was like the sails, his bones were like the nails that bound plank to plank – tortured into pieces.
The Master’s muscles and ligaments tore at the effort required to compress Nathan, even though the boy was half gone already, and the wind drove the storm in sheets against them.
Nathan’s pain disappeared as he died, and rather than a boy in a boy’s body, Nathan became a ghost, anchored on the pieces of himself but not the same as them. He was detached from the agony of it all, the sadness, and he watched while the Master was in torments. All the efforts he was making – they were having appalling effects on him. Unbearable, possibly.
The ship around them disintegrated and the Master, coiled around Nathan’s body, dropped like a sounding weight, or an anchor, into the sea. Beneath the waves the Master shrieked. If the crushing was excruciating it was only the beginning, because the shrieking boiled the water away, parting the sea, revealing the seabed, turning the rain to mist before it could touch them.
The Master fell in a ball and Nathan went with him, but now, if he had arms, he would have reached out and tried to soothe the Master rather than break their fall. Nathan’s father’s face had looked like this – suffering against all bearing, veins bulging, capillaries breaking across the cheeks, indecorous sprays of spittle.
What could be worth it?
They hit the sea floor, which was already baked as hard as clay in a kiln. The Master took a huge breath, got to his feet, planted them amongst the brittle shells. He screamed at a pitch so high that it trembled the air and passed out of so
und.
Nathan’s remains the Master now held between his two hands, and he was moulding them together, putting all of his energy, all of his pain, all of his magic, all of his power into the structure of his fingers, his palms, each thumb, strengthening them with his screaming. The Master wanted Nathan to become small enough that he would be contained by the locket – it was obvious now, from the distance a ghost can take to the world. In order to achieve this, he needed to push the matter of Nathan in on itself, increase the density of it, and to mould his form into something smaller, without losing anything. For a solid boy, this compaction would have been too much, but for Nathan, as insubstantial as he had been? He had done the Master’s job for him.
To what end? To make a mess of Mordew? The Master possessed the corpse of God, Nathan’s Spark was God’s spirit, and once he had both, what would stop the Master from being God?
A city is a small sacrifice.
Nathan could do nothing to stop it. Not now. Perhaps if he had never Sparked.
His body was like the pellet an owl makes of a mouse, and his ghost was anchored to it; the Spark was anchored to it. The Master, tears in his eyes, blood on his lips, dropped what was left of Nathan, locket and all, onto the seabed. He cast a simple spell – the last one – to invert the locket on itself. It snapped open, flipped, hinged the wrong way, and snapped shut with Nathan inside.
If he had not been a corpse and a ghost, contained, he would have seen the Master kneel and pick up the locket from amongst the shells. He would have seen the Master loop the chain around his shoulders, then arrange it neatly. He would have seen his father’s index finger left behind, seen the Master tread carefully on it, grind it down with his heel.
He would have seen the Master smile.
But Nathan was trapped in the locket, so he saw nothing.
When the sea waters returned in a rush, drowning everything again, and the rain made a turmoil of the surface, the Master was already gone.
Glossary
Adam
The name of the older brother of the Master of Mordew’s chief factotum, Bellows. In his youth he was sent to Malarkoi on a mission and was lost. Imagining him dead, Bellows mourns, and the smallest hope that his brother might yet live is insufficient to salve his sadness.
Alifonjer(s)
Ancient megafauna now extant only in the Zoological Gardens in Mordew. Famous for their enormous size, prehensile snout and mournful visage, it is supposed that these creatures are highly intelligent, though, as a species, they were unable to avoid being rendered almost extinct. What is intelligence, if it is not the ability to think of ways to flourish? Can any creature truly be called intelligent if it allows itself to be driven from its ancestral lands and held in a cage? Surely the intelligent prosper while the stupid die? By examining the rheumy eye of an alifonjer, thoughts such as these may be seen circulating, just as the creature circles the enclosure in which it is imprisoned.
All gods
God is the originator, the creator and the weftling and to him goes the title ‘God’, but there are others who are almost entirely God (only not quite as in concert with the weft). There are also those who are sufficiently godlike for them to be recognised as gods, and there are demigods, pseudo-demigods, and weft-manipulators, all of whom can do the things that gods are wont to do, but who are not worthy of the title ‘God’. These godlike beings are grouped together under the category ‘all gods’ to indicate that they are plural in number, alike, but not deserving of the singular title (or to be called the weftling). The term is often used by the Assembly, which has specific god-summoning machines for each of the different sorts of god (and God) and hence is required to make the distinction for practical reasons.
Anaximander
The name chosen for himself by the magical dog, Bones. Dogs exist to fight and work, but the Master of Mordew bred Bones to speak and now he goes about the world with a man’s voice. Since a man’s voice requires a man’s mind to operate it, he has this too. But a dog is a dog still, and the body has an influence over the mind that is underestimated. Who could deny that the whims of the body have an effect on the thoughts? No-one, surely, who has ever felt pangs of hunger, or lust, and felt obliged to act on them. So, the body of a dog and the mind of a man form the persona of a third thing, neither one nor the other. Whether it is this unique nature that caused him to choose his name – which some think references a man from prehistory – is something only he knows, and since any record of an original Anaximander is lost in time, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions as to whether there is meaning in the choice. Perhaps scholars of the future will puzzle over this matter, if Bones’s actions in the world make him noteworthy.
Angel
A man is a thing of the material realm, a ghost is a thing of the immaterial realm, and God is of the weft. Each of these things is typical of the realm from which they are spawned, but what of creatures that straddle realms, or are born in an intermediate realm? A thing mostly material, but a little of the immaterial and a little of the weft, that thing is called a demon. A thing mostly immaterial but a little material and a little of the weft – that thing receives the name ‘angel’. As a demon is concerned with the lower material concerns – violence, hatred and ugliness – so an angel is concerned with the higher immaterial concerns – thought, love and beauty.
Ankuretic(s)
Cities in which the boundaries between the material and immaterial realms are not rigorously policed find themselves in short order overrun with ghosts. These return from the immaterial realm, through the loosening of the consistency of the weft contingent on careless magic use. Ankuretic machines both tighten the weft, preventing further ingress from the other side, and dissolve any entities left in the material realm. Both functions are effected through an oscillation of the threads of the weft and are part of the one process, but observers of this process only ever see the dissolution of ghosts – something that is troubling to watch, since it seems to cause pain in them – and hence the machines have an evil reputation.
Antechamber(s)
The living spaces of Masters, Mistresses, God and all gods, and other manipulators of the weft are carefully protected, since no-one, even the weftling, can defend themselves well when they are asleep. It would be an act of enormous over-confidence to place one’s residence in a location where enemies have easy access, yet one cannot always be at an inconvenient remove from the place where one conducts one’s affairs (which is generally the same place where one’s enemies are to be found). To resolve this problem protected antechambers may be created. These are rooms that are connected on one side to the safe place the weft-manipulator prefers to rest, and on the other side to the place where their affairs are best conducted, even if these places are very separate. In the Master’s Manse the antechamber is a link between the external structures of the building, and so to Mordew, and the internal spaces which the Master has placed in one of a series of closely related and contingent intermediate material realms which are not entirely the same as the material realm in which his enemies dwell. Things which happen in these realms are affected by and effect changes in the realm in which Mordew proper resides, but without knowing which of the intermediate realms the Master has chosen to be in at any given moment, even if an enemy were to attempt an assassination, then they would find the Master somewhere else and not in a place where he might be murdered (though they would not know of this fact since the realms are all very similar indeed, only differing in some very minor detail, often invisible). Of course, a weft-dweller would be able to see through, and would be able to identify where and in which realm the Master was at any given moment, but there is only one weftling, and he is dead.
Other antechambers are less sophisticated and are merely trapped and well-protected rooms.
(The) Ark of Noah
A hastily constructed and possibly fictional boat which protected pairs of the creatures of prehistory from drowning at the whim of God.
(The)
Assembly
Mordew is not all there is of the world, nor does it end with Malarkoi, nor yet with Waterblack, but extends in all directions for unmeasurable distances. A man walking straight across the water from Mordew (if he had the magic at his command to force the sea to hold him up) with the intention of not stopping until he met the end of things would find himself exhausted before that eventuality came to pass (if, indeed, it ever would). Much of the territory he passed over before he gave up and returned is under the control of the Assembly, a militantly humanistic, atheistic, communistic, rationalistic, democratic federation of conquered territories. For decades the Assembly has turned its attentions to lands in the East, but of late they have remembered Mordew and their vendetta against its Master (and all theistic organisms). Their Seventh Atheistic Crusade almost resulted in the complete destruction of Mordew, its aggression only barely incapable of the work it set itself by virtue of enormous sacrifice on the part of people of the past. Who knows, now, what the Assembly has discovered in the east, and how it might help them tip the balance?
(The) Atheistic Crusade(s)
The Assembly is against God and all gods, since theistic organisms oppress humanity. The existence of deities subverts the weft of the world, bending events away from the eventual liberation of all people. God and all gods are incapable of leaving the weft, and they are immortal unless killed. Consequently, the Atheistic Decree has gone forth from the Assembly that God and all gods should be killed. The Atheistic Crusades are charged with the realisation of this decree and Crusaders volunteer for training in God-Summoning, God-Killing and counter-theistic re-education.
