String City

by Graham Edwards

  Jason scampered back up the stairs to the wheelhouse and spun the wheel hard to port. The Argo lurched starboard, straight toward the wharf. For a second I thought we were going to make it, but the container vessel was turning too, as slow as seduction. The ship’s transparent sides thundered past and through the glass I saw crates stacked high, row upon row. All the crates were stamped with the same two words: MUSCAE MORTUUS. There was no time to puzzle what that meant because two seconds later the Argo smashed straight into it.

  The impact tossed me all the way to the Argo’s stern. I landed in a snake pit of tangled ropes. The whole port side of the Argo caved in. She rolled like a dead dog, lethal water climbing the deck.

  I ran to the mast. The water chased me. The container ship glided on as if nothing had happened. I found rungs, started to climb the mast. The Argo heeled over; I felt like bait on a rod. The waves snapped like hungry crabs at my heels. The stone wall of the wharf loomed before us, tantalisingly close. The container ship had slowed to a crawl, ready to dock. I reached the crow’s nest. Beneath me, the Argo was sinking fast.

  “Jason!” I shouted.

  He was clinging to the wheelhouse roof. When he saw me, he found a rope, swung on it like a monkey. He eeled up the mast toward me. The water pursued him. I reached down.

  He was three feet away when the water splashed his foot.

  Something like moonlight crossed Jason’s face. He opened his mouth to speak, forgot what he was going to say. I tried to stretch down but the nest’s ropes had me hamstrung.

  Jason screamed.

  I snapped my spyglass to full extension, held it out.

  “Grab the glass!” I shouted.

  Jason lunged, snagged the rim of the lens, lost his grip.

  Fell into the river.

  There was a single second before his face went completely blank. Just one second. I thought he was going to call my name. Then the moon-look settled over his features and Jason went away, all of him, forever. Next minute he was just another face under the water.

  The dockside was just five feet away. I jumped from the crow’s nest over open water to dry land, hitting hard and jarring my ankles. I tucked and rolled. The mast smacked down beside me, splintering to matchwood. I staggered to my feet, shaking all over. I looked back at the river. With a groan like whalesong, what was left of the Argo disappeared beneath the waves.

  33

  I LIMPED THROUGH the fog to the base of the pyramid. The huge structure rose into the murk in a series of gigantic steps, each ten times the height of a man. The blocks it was made from were smooth marble, coarsely veined. Instead of mortar, some kind of sticky black liquid oozed from between the joins. It smelled like corpses.

  I walked along the side of the pyramid until I found a door marked NO ENTRY. I tried the handle; the door was locked. High overhead, a crane jib hefted crates from the hold of the docked container ship. The crates flew in silence, vanished into a cavity high in the pyramid’s side. The crane came out empty, went back for more. Cold wind gusted the fog. I shivered.

  Poor Jason. All those years at sea searching for the Golden Fleece, only to end up as a two-bit dredging captain lost in the boondocks. Once he’d been mighty; he sure had fallen.

  I thought of his face, all moonstruck and empty.

  And again I thought of Laura, her face. How must my wife have looked as she’d shed her clothes and walked into the waters of the Lethe? Had she looked like Jason? Had there been a single second of doubt? Of despair?

  A gang of mudlarks saw her go in, and they were the ones who sounded the alarm. To this day I don’t know why they did that. It wasn’t like there was any hope for her. As soon as the phone delivered the news, I hurled myself riverside. While the cops steered their dredging boat over the spot she’d gone under, I found the shapes of her feet, still pressed in the mud. The S-shape of the glass-cut scar on her right heel. Professional as ever, I took a plaster cast. After that, my memories go to mush.

  The cops found her body somehow, hauled it up from the deeps. They called it suicide, even though it wasn’t. Laura hadn’t wanted to drown herself—she’d wanted to wipe her memory clean. Death was just a side effect.

  That was the hardest part. That was what kept me awake in the small hours, shivering in the cramped cellar bunk of a two-bit mid-town detective agency while the roaches played craps and the tokamak ticked. Even in waking hours, the thought could stab me any time, any place: a cold, rotten knife in my heart. A question like an icicle.

  What was it my wife had wanted to forget?

  Was it me?

  I turned my coat inside-out until it was made of zibeline. Zibeline keeps the damp out and the warmth in. I felt in the pocket for my skeleton key, then remembered I didn’t have it any more. Pity—that key and I had been through a lot together. It was an old acoustic model, with a voice that could vibrate the tumblers loose on any lock in a twelve octave range. Now it was singing soprano in the Vaderkvarn Orchestra. Talk about a career change.

  I rattled the door handle, frustrated. I could have used the dimensions to translate myself from one side of the door to the other. But short hops are especially hairy—it’s easy to get straddled on the strings. And, given the uproar I’d been experiencing lately in the deep dimensions, there was every chance I’d flip straight into the jaws of a boundary wolf.

  Besides, I’d made myself a promise: from now on, everywhere on foot.

  There was a low-relief symbol on the door: an ear of corn packed with kernels. On an average day, most of String City’s maize supply was stacked in this pyramid. Time was the grain was guarded by a dread serpent with gleaming metal wings. These days, Quetzal Imports made do with CCTV.

  The corn kernels were painted gold, except for the outer ring which was picked out in copper. I counted the copper kernels: there were twenty-four of them. When I tapped one, it depressed: a button. The gold kernels were all fixed in place. Interesting. It struck me the corn stalk looked a bit like a handle. I tapped a few more of the copper kernels at random, and pulled the stalk. There was a dull clunk, then all the buttons popped back out again. A cheerful automated voice said:

  “Failure. You have three attempts remaining.”

  The ring of copper kernels was a keypad. All I needed was the code. I waited, fearing my failed attempt might have triggered an alarm. Nothing came running.

  The crane swung overhead. I watched as it carried more crates into the pyramid. Through a break in the fog, I spotted the big Quetzal Imports logo painted on the side of the crane’s control booth: a giant golden feather. The feather was patterned—spotted, actually. I counted twenty-four copperey spots arranged in a ring. Nine of them had a tiny black dot in the middle.

  Surely it couldn’t be that simple.

  I punched the nine copper kernels corresponding to the pattern on the feather. I held my breath and pulled the handle.

  “Failure. You have two attempts remaining.”

  The buttons popped out again. I looked harder at the feather painted on the crane, let out a curse. I’d got the pattern wrong by a single button. I pushed the kernels again, double-checked. When I was convinced it was right, I tried the handle again.

  “Failure. You have one attempt remaining.”

  It figured. What corporation would display a security access code in its logo? It was a tease, probably intended to make schmucks like me punch in the wrong code and set off the alarms. I was back at the start with just one chance left.

  I released the handle, and saw that the end of it was shaped to look like a dragon—the dread serpent Quetzalcoatl, to be exact. Once upon a time, Quetzalcoatl had been the guardian of the dawn. Must have been quite a sight, those big gold wings popping up over the horizon every morning. One hell of an alarm clock. Then Ra and Apollo had muscled in with a time-share operation. Unable to compete, Quetzalcoatl had given up on light-bringing and gone into the import/export business: mostly cheap stationery, diaries, calendars, that kind of thing.

 
I held the thought. Back in the distant past, before Quetzalcoatl had hit on the old wings-over-the-horizon trick, there had been no day, no night. Time had just oozed along in an indeterminate river of sludge. Quetzalcoatl had brought order to chaos, inventing routine. Inventing the twenty-four hour day.

  I counted the buttons that ringed the keypad again. Twenty-four.

  “Midnight,” I muttered, stroking the button at the top of the circle. I moved my finger to the bottom. “Midday.”

  That morning, with winter fast approaching, the sun had risen over String City just a whisker after six. I counted six kernels round the ring and pushed the button. Just one button. The time of today’s dawn.

  I gripped the corn-stalk handle. Steeling myself for the alarm. I pulled the handle.

  “Thank you,” said the automated voice, with just a hint of disappointment.

  The door hissed open.

  34

  THE PYRAMID INTERIOR was hot and dank. I snuck down corridors, following my nose. That black goo was everywhere, pooling in the cracks where walls met floor. The deeper I got, the worse the stench became.

  Whenever I reached a fork I turned left. Most architects are right-handed. They put all the stuff they want you to see on what they think of as the good side. Everything else—air-con and plant rooms and garbage chutes, all the secret spaces—they park on the left. Trust me, if you want to get under the skin of a building, make yourself a southpaw.

  I passed a garbage chute and the stench got worse. The corridor narrowed, darkened, got grimy. Then I hit a ramp that took me up toward a shaft of light. I stepped out on to a catwalk. Steel mesh flexed under my boots; smoke bit my eyes. I looked out and down, into the heart of the pyramid.

  The first thing I thought was that I’d flipped into the dimensions without meaning to. There was string everywhere, all stretched and knotted and braided, a thousand cats-cradles trying to do the Peppermint Twist in a triangular hangar big enough to hold two dozen thunderbirds. The catwalk I was standing on hung halfway up the wall. Above me, the pyramid’s stepped sides converged to a point, hung all the way with platforms and bridges of string and all manner of cradles and ziplines, the kind of adventure playground that nightmares are made of.

  Then I blinked and saw it wasn’t string; it was silk. I wasn’t in the dimensions. I was in the biggest spider’s web this world had seen. Any world, for that matter. I suddenly knew what the black goo was.

  Ichor.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone knew who lived on the wharf: Arachne, the spider queen. She’d retreated here after besting her old rival Pallas Athene in a street brawl. Their feud went way back, and it was me who’d brought them together to finish it. Under duress. It had been quite a sight, watching a giant spider beat seven bells out of a goddess who wore a Gorgon on her chest.

  Soon after Arachne had holed up on the wharf, she’d started making babies. Word was the father was a tarantula who came in on one of the last banana boats from the Unknown Worlds. She’d had her way with the poor eight-legged sap, eaten him, got on with the business of laying eggs and never stopped. When her children reached the millions, the Thanes built the perimeter fence and put the whole dockside into quarantine. Everyone knew Arachne wanted to rule the cosmos. No sense making it easy for her.

  Arachne’s web filled the lower half of the pyramid like cotton candy. It seemed like there was more silk down there than air. But the silk was sheer; you could see right through it. Clinging to an enormous knot in the middle of the web was Arachne herself. She was really just a giant spider but she’d worked some kind of charm, faking up parts of her body to look like a woman’s. Some of it was halfway to being convincing, but mostly she resembled a butchery victim recovering from a road traffic accident.

  Behind her, slung upside-down in a hammock of silk, was the corpse of Pallas Athene. The goddess was a giant, ten times the size of a normal woman, and someone had embedded a fire hydrant in her neck. Beneath the spout was a pool of faintly glowing liquid—ambrosia. Why would someone want to drain a goddess of blood when she was already dead?

  Cocooned in the shadows beneath Pallas Athene, tiny in comparison to the dead goddess and the spider queen, was Zephyr.

  Covering the floor were millions of spider eggs.

  Swarming on the web were millions of baby spiders.

  I backed into a shadow. Zephyr was alive—I could see her cocoon moving as she breathed. Unconscious though. Why hadn’t Arachne eaten her already? More urgently, how I was going to get her out? I wouldn’t get ten yards across the web without the spiderlings taking me down. Again I considered a dimension-hop. But I could sense that Arachne’s silk was messing with the local cosmic geometry. Well, she did used to be a spinner of worlds.

  I made inventory of the weapons I’d picked up from the filing cabinet: the Colt, also an abseil pistol and a pocket flamethrower. I guess I’d had some crazy notion of swinging off a ceiling, torching everything in my path—the whole hero bit. Now I was here I could see that was a bust. If I started spraying fire the whole web would go up like knitted kindling. The resulting flames would light the fuse on several million angry spiders.

  Something was happening down on the floor. A battalion of spiderlings was making its way toward the pyramid’s far corner. Perched on her knot of silk, Arachne turned to watch. A door opened, throwing pale light up one wall. The light glanced off a ledge directly opposite the spot where I was crouched. Leading from the ledge was a short passage, beyond which I could just make out a second chamber. It was dark and full of big square shapes: the stacked crates from the container ship.

  I turned my attention back to the door. Someone was walking in.

  The spiderlings swarmed around the intruder. They scrabbled under his feet, lifted him up and swept him up the web to Arachne’s lair. I recognised him at once.

  It was Kweku Sunyana.

  35

  SUNYANA WAS TALL—taller than me. Still he was dwarfed by Arachne. He didn’t seem scared though. When the spiders dropped him at their queen’s many feet, his face broke into a smile as wide as the Styx. He was sporting teeth different to the ones I’d seen through the window of his office. Still made of iron but bigger, sharper. Serrated.

  Arachne leaned her crude woman’s torso over her swollen spider’s abdomen. She blinked a few eyes. She had a mouth, mostly human. When she spoke, it didn’t move an inch.

  You are wondering why I have called you back to my palace, she said. Her words seemed to come from everywhere. They made the web hum like a tuning fork.

  “Always a pleasure to be in your company, Arachne.” Sunyana sounded suave and confident, but I could see he was seething underneath. His long fingers kept clenching and unclenching. When he spoke, his teeth moved with a life of their own.

  You are a magnificent liar, said Arachne. Nevertheless, you are wondering.

  “I am curious, I’ll admit,” said Sunyana. “Last night you made it quite clear you didn’t need my services any more.”

  Do I detect a note of resentment?

  “Not at all. I’m just sad we’ll no longer be doing business together. We made a great team.”

  Arachne threw back her head and laughed. Her voice bounced round the web, triggering laughter from her children. Soon the whole pyramid was filled with cackling spiders. Then, as abruptly as she’d started, Arachne stopped. Silence gripped the web.

  We were useful to each other, for a space of time. Now that time is over.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” said Sunyana. “I’ve had some ideas.”

  Arachne folded her arms across her chest. Arms and chest were mostly human, provided you ignored the broom-bristle hairs. She smiled, revealing big black teeth made of chitin. I wondered if she and Sunyana shared a dentist.

  I have a keen appreciation of ideas, she said. Tell me yours.

  As Sunyana spoke, I understood what was bubbling under his suave exterior. It was desperation. “Look, Arachne. A year ago you agreed to supply me w
ith all the raw meat I needed to keep my factories running. When I came to you, the city livestock business was in bad shape. Last month it collapsed completely. Every last cow carcass has been stripped to the bone. The poultry farms can’t scratch a living any more. Mad-tail has decimated the swine herds. I’m the only trader left with stocks in his freezers. If the people of String City want meat, they have to come to me. But I’m down to just one supplier: you.”

  A sorry tale. Tell me, does the population know what it is really eating?

  “Are you kidding? All the meat I get from you I process—and I mean, process. I don’t do steaks or chops or joints any more, just hamburger and sausage, reconstituted loaf. Anything to disguise what it’s actually made of.”

  One might take offense at such a statement.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Arachne, but if I told people the entire city had been eating spider meat for the past three months, there’d be a riot. Or worse.”

  There is such narrowmindedness in the world. They should be grateful for my generosity.

  My stomach flipped. I’d picked up a Sunyana burger from a kiosk on the way over. Wolfed it down. Now I knew what was in me, I wanted it out again. Worst of it was, it had tasted good.

  Ignoring my rising gorge, I thought it through. Spider meat! For Sunyana it made a sick kind of sense. I wondered what was in it for Arachne.

  “So please,” Sunyana was saying, “can we renegotiate? I know I’d have to reduce the order, but it’s just that... Arachne, the city will starve.”

  You overstate your case, Arachne replied, and thus betray your true fear. Let your precious city eat cake. What really concerns you is loss of trade. The collapse of your business empire. She leered, tarry ichor drooling from the corner of her mouth. Bringing shame upon your family.