String City

by Graham Edwards

  “You’re looking good,” I said.

  “Not as good as I used to,” the undead angel replied. “I may be the only zombie left on the force—the only one left in String City, probably—but the power of the divine won’t hold me together forever. I’m afraid my days are numbered.”

  “Cheekbones like yours,” I said, “they never go out of fashion.”

  Deliciosa raised decaying fingers to the holes in her face. “The new look suits me just fine. I always said beauty was skin-deep.”

  “Real beauty’s deeper, and you know it.”

  Deliciosa let out a sigh. Given the state of her, her breath should have smelt like rotting meat. But the aroma I caught was warm cinnamon. “We could have made one heck of a team, couldn’t we?”

  “Guess we’ll never know.” I gave her a what-might-have-been kind of look, then returned her sigh. “So what happened here anyway?”

  “Someone blew up the Birdhouse.”

  “That’s so crazy it’s off the scale. How did they manage it?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “Any way you can let us down there?”

  “I’m sorry. The whole area’s sealed off. Pick any cop you like and they’ll tell you the same thing: go home.”

  “But you’re not just any cop, are you?”

  Throughout the conversation, Deliciosa’s face had been drawing closer and closer to mine. Her peeled lips parted, her jawbone grating with the movement. I remembered how once we’d kissed, and hoped she was remembering it too.

  “I knew you’d show up again,” she said. “It was only a matter of time.”

  “Time is something I don’t have a lot of. Please—can’t you let us through?”

  She considered this for a long time. At last she stood tall and spread her wings wide. Firelight glowed through torn feathers, turning them to brilliant orange flames. She drew in a single breath and lit up the day. Onlookers gasped. If Deliciosa hadn’t been undead, they probably would have screamed. Seeing an angel up close... it gets to you in ways you never knew existed. Trust me, I know.

  She stood like that for ten seconds, the ultimate diversion. By the time she lowered her wings again, Zephyr and I had snuck deep inside the blast radius of the explosion that had cracked String City’s toughest vault like an egg.

  44

  "WHAT WAS ALL that about?” said Zephyr as we clambered down into the crater.

  “Long story,” I said.

  She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up short. “You say that every time I ask you about anything. Well, it’s not good enough! Not any more. Not if you want me to follow you into somewhere that looks like the jaws of hell!”

  “The jaws of hell you have to pay admission,” I said. “This is different. Probably worse.”

  “There you go again. What is it with you? You’re always hinting at things you never actually talk about. Everything’s always ‘another story’. Well, I’m sick of it! If you want me to be your partner you’ve got to come clean. No more secrets!”

  “Everyone’s got secrets.” I stared her down.

  She dropped her eyes, briefly, then fixed me again. “All right. Okay. Maybe I haven’t told you everything about myself either. But can’t you at least tell me what we’re doing here, and why that angel-thing bothered to let us through?”

  Wind pounded us. It was blowing down into the crater from all sides, blowing hard. That bothered me; I wasn’t sure why. The smoke inside the crater was thick. The ground was littered with gold coins and silver bills, badly charred. Everything was tilted. The air felt spiky.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Maybe it all connects. The angel’s name is Deliciosa—you probably caught that much. We met inside the Birdhouse, a while back now. Back when she was alive and... well, beautiful.”

  “Did you fall in love with her?”

  Dust caught in my throat, made me choke. “Hard to say.”

  “What were you doing in the Birdhouse?”

  “Surveillance. The rumor was someone was trying to crack the vault where they keep the Still Point of the Turning World.”

  “Still Point of the what?”

  “Turning World. It’s what the Thanes built the Birdhouse to protect.”

  “You’re losing me again.”

  The wind fired banknotes at us like paper bullets. Other things flew past too: scraps of fabric, scraps of flesh. A lot of folk worked in the Birdhouse. Or used to.

  “Everyone’s got their own idea what the Still Point is,” I said. “Some say it’s like a dance. Others say it’s more like the center of a dance: without it, the dance couldn’t exist. Me, I’ve got two left feet, so none of that figures. All I know is, the Thanes say the Still Point needs protecting at all costs. And I mean all.”

  I stopped. My mind had flashed back to Jason and the Argo. I remembered staring down into the Maelstrom. The eye of the whirlpool, the place where everything appeared to be at rest. I suddenly knew what it had reminded me of.

  Zephyr was pondering what I’d said. “Are you trying to tell me somewhere in this city there’s a safety deposit box containing the... what, the heart of the universe or something?”

  “Not the heart. A heart’s a thing. The Still Point’s not a thing, it’s... oh, think of it more like a container.”

  “A container for what?”

  “For the only thing that matters.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s got a name, but I don’t think it means very much.”

  “Tell me it anyway.”

  “It’s called the Glory.”

  Zephyr sighed. “Talking to you is like peeling an onion. Every time I think I’m getting somewhere, it turns out to be just another layer.”

  “Believe me, honey, if you ever saw the Glory, you wouldn’t be able to hold back the tears.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Bad. Good. Everything between and beyond. Everything. The Glory is the lifestring of the cosmos. Without it, there’s nothing.”

  “Okay. I get it. I mean, I don’t get it, but I get it. The Glory is some kind of shining light. And the Still Point is what it’s wrapped up in. And the Birdhouse is the vault where the Still Point is kept. It’s like a set of Russian dolls.”

  “If you like. And right here is where the Birdhouse is. Or was.”

  “Until someone blew it up.”

  “I don’t understand how they did it. The Still Point’s got a lot of protection. Not least a guard dog the size of a small town. Actually, not so much a guard dog. More a behemoth. And the Still Point... honey, it’s big. No, more than big. It’s everything. Look, have you heard enough yet?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “All the same, we have to keep moving.”

  “Okay. But I reserve the right to ask more questions as they occur to me.”

  “I never thought you wouldn’t.”

  Further into the crater, things got raggy. Pits like shrapnel wounds leaked curled-up dimensions. Planck whirlwinds whipped out of nowhere, each one hiding a nasty dimensional snag at its core. A crack in the ground spewed cosmic string like an Indian rope trick. There was a background howl: boundary wolves on the prowl for anyone playing chicken with the edges of reality, and sounding far too close for comfort.

  The Still Point of the Turning World.

  Everything.

  This had been no ordinary explosion.

  Zephyr clutched my arm. “There’s something not right about this. Not right at all. What happened here?”

  “A bigger bang than I thought,” I muttered.

  A tiny tornado wiggled our way. Rogue laws of physics flew from its spinning edges, squeezing demon faces from the air, transforming the rocky ground to crumbling chalk, to hard diamond, to spitting lava. I pulled Zephyr out of its path.

  “You don’t want to get caught in one of those.”

  “It only comes up to my knee.”

  “Small is worse.”

  “What happens if they
get you?”

  “You get sucked out of this world and into another. No telling which.”

  “Like The Wizard of Oz?”

  “Not much.”

  The tornado zipped past, leaving a trail of altered terrain. Pale powder flew in its wake. Something slapped against my ankle; I grabbed it, held it up. It was a strip of hessian, ripped, burned. Letters were stenciled on it:

  THEFIRE

  “‘The fire’?” said Zephyr.

  “Not ‘the fire’,” I said. The back of my neck was crawling up under the brim of my hat. “‘Scathefire’. Second time I’ve seen it in as many weeks. There are way too many coincidences stacking up here.”

  “What’s scathefire?”

  “You heard of high explosives? This stuff will blow more than your mind. Now we know what they used to crack open the Birdhouse vault.”

  “Never mind the vault—it looks to me like they blew a hole in the whole world.”

  Something burst from the charred soil a hundred yards away. Teeth like fighter jets chomped the smoke. Dog-breath washed over us like industrial waste.

  “What is it?” cried Zephyr.

  “Boundary wolf! Run!”

  We fled hand in hand, running downslope, heading deeper into the crater. Behind us the boundary wolf bayed. I looked back; its snout was right on our heels. I kicked dust in its eye. It snarled, fell back, came at us faster. Its shaggy mane crawled with fleas the size of housecats. Its shoulders pumped like beam engines. We hurdled a shattered wall. The bricks were melting, running together. The wind pushed us on. The wolf howled again, a sound like ten thousand elephants being drawn through a mangle.

  Without warning, a quantum tornado swept right between us and our pursuer, collapsing five of the eight local dimensions. Pure good fortune. The howl of the boundary wolf went supersonic. The wolf itself folded up, vanishing into a space the size of my fist. The emptiness burst like a balloon and the ground closed, clanging like a gong.

  “What happened?” said Zephyr.

  “We got lucky.”

  We ran on.

  The deeper we went, the bigger the crater got. The dimensions were definitely misbehaving. Riemanian anomalies kept opening up around us, spilling out string and fine slices of brane before snapping shut again. It was like crossing an icefield, feeling it break under your feet, just waiting for the ocean to reach up and drag you under.

  All around us the ground was splattered with enormous chunks of flesh. We passed a heap of intestines resembling a freeway interchange. Zephyr screwed up her face.

  “What kind of creature did that come from?”

  “Behemoth.” I looked sadly at the carnage. “He used to guard the Still Point. For a big guy, he was a real softy.”

  “Let me guess: another story?”

  I shrugged, too sad to speak.

  Eventually the ground leveled. We’d reached the bottom of the crater. Ground zero. The place where the Birdhouse used to be.

  The wolf-howl undercurrent died away. The smoke smoothed to a haze. The dimensions stopped trying to break through, contented themselves with bubbling round unseen corners. We slowed to walking pace. We didn’t stop holding hands.

  Something loomed out of the mist.

  I peered, trying to make it out, which is why I didn’t hear what was coming up behind us. If it had been a boundary wolf, our tale would have ended there. But it wasn’t.

  Deliciosa landed beside me with a flutter of feathers and rotting flesh. My arms grew goosebumps. In a place like that, it was comforting to have a twelve-foot angel at your side. Even if she was coming apart.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I thought you might need some help.” She pointed. “Have you any idea what that is?”

  “It looks like a man,” said Zephyr.

  “Yes, it does,” said Deliciosa.

  Zephyr stared at her, then me. “But it isn’t a man, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

  “Then what the hell is it?”

  45

  CROUCHED ON THE ground in the middle of the crater was a hooded figure. My arms must have got a taste for the goosebump thing, because they were doing it all over again.

  “It’s a Fool,” Deliciosa told Zephyr. “I did a quick flypast before the barriers went up. Stupid of me really, but I had a lot of friends who worked in the Birdhouse. I wanted to see if any of them had survived.”

  “Had they?” I was resisting the urge to run. I’d sparred with a Fool once before and didn’t relish a return bout.

  “What do you think?” The angel bowed her head before going on. “We’ve been getting reports of hooded figures for months now. They’ve been coming in from all over the city: appearing in witness statements, on CCTV footage, anywhere there are shadows. It’s almost as if they’ve been waiting for something.”

  “I know exactly what they’ve been waiting for,” I said.

  “You do? What?”

  I told Deliciosa about the Tartarus heist. How a mysterious hooded figure had duped a couple of cyclops saps into emptying the Titans’ safe, and especially how the safe had been packed full of the most powerful explosive the cosmos had ever known.

  “Scathefire?” said Deliciosa. “I thought that was just a myth.”

  “Trust me, it’s real. And it’s clearly what the Fools have been looking for all this time. They’ve dreamed of blowing open the Birdhouse for eons. Looks like their dream finally came true.”

  “I hate to sound like cracked vinyl,” said Zephyr, “but what exactly is a Fool?”

  I shared a grimace with Deliciosa. Talking about Fools is a dirty job. But someone’s got to wear the rubber gloves.

  “Fools are worse than bad,” I said. “Literally. It’s like... well, imagine light and dark. Now imagine neither. That’s Fools. Life and death, good and evil, right and wrong... you take it all away, what you’re left with is the Fools.”

  “So they’re the bad guys?”

  “Not exactly. More like... look, take the Thanes.”

  “The Thanes? Those are the people who run String City, aren’t they? Sort of like the government?”

  “Thanes aren’t people, but that’s close enough. Now the Thanes, most would say they’re on the side of good. Thanes are... well, they shine. Am I right, Deliciosa?”

  With tears in her deep, decaying eyes, the angel said softly, “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “Thing is,” I said, “while the Thanes might be good, the Fools aren’t really bad, not as in evil. Fools are outside all that.”

  “So what do they do? What’s their thing?”

  “They meddle. What a Fool likes most is to take things apart. There’s some say that’s their right, since Fools can create things too, and that’s a skill more rare than you might think. I don’t mean create as in paint pictures or write computer code or think up new flavors of ice cream—I mean really create. Fools make things that never existed before.”

  “So they’re like gods?”

  “Not in the least. Fools do like to create, but for them it’s just a hobby. What they really like to do is see how things work. You meet a Fool, the first thing he’ll do is shake your hand. Next he’ll strip your fingers to the bone to see how the joints work. Then he’ll unpick the nuclear forces holding your atoms together. When he’s finished, if you’re lucky, someone’ll sweep what’s left of you into a bag.”

  “So what’s this one doing here?”

  “I think I know,” said Deliciosa.

  Before I could stop her, she’d marched right up to the Fool. She bent down, grasped his hood and ripped his cloak away. The wind snatched the cloak from her worm-ridden fingers and threw it into the sky, leaving the Fool naked and revealed.

  Zephyr put her hand to her mouth. I heard her stomach trying to climb up inside her throat.

  If Deliciosa looked bad, the Fool looked worse. Fools are neither dead nor alive. They’re not even undead. They just are. Or aren’t. It’s a tough call wh
ich.

  The Fool had all the parts of a man, in all the wrong places. There were bones on the outside. His skin hung like washing inside his ribs. His organs were anything but internal. His skull was smooth, faceless. His eyes were stapled to his fingers, the better to see his work.

  There was something in the Fool’s lap, nestled on a cushion of intestines spilling from his exposed pelvis. It shone like a small sun. His eye-capped fingers were busy with it, darting in and out of its light, constantly burning up before regrowing, like everlasting candles. Each time they dipped inside the little sun they came up carrying something random and bizarre: a peach, a haystack, a pocket watch, a cumulus cloud. Most of these surprises were impossible—either too big or too small to be really there, impossible even to handle at all. But the Fool handled them all the same.

  Handled them, took them apart, then tossed them aside like orange peel.

  Littering the ground at the Fool’s gore-streaked feet—and gradually getting bigger—was a heap of golden dust. The fundamental components of all the things he was deconstructing.

  “Is that sun-thing what I think it is?” Zephyr whispered. She didn’t need intuition. When you get close to something like that, you just know.

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “That’s it. The Still Point of the Turning World.”

  “He’s taking it apart.” Zephyr started backing away. “What happens when he’s finished?”

  “The Glory will be exposed.”

  “And then?”

  “You ever build a house of cards?” Zephyr nodded. “You know the one card at the bottom—the one that, if you take it away, makes the whole house come down?”

  “Stop! Don’t say any more.”

  The Fool’s fingers worked faster. More and more things were flying out of the Still Point. Most of them were things I didn’t recognise, didn’t even want to see. The Fool was dismantling cosmic secrets, and even the dust they were made of could burn your eyes from their sockets.

  “Time to go!” said Deliciosa. Her wings were buzzing, ready to lift her off.

  Planck tornadoes whipped up from the soil. Big ones.

  “You fly ahead!” I shouted over the rising wind. “We’re right behind you!”

  I grabbed Zephyr’s hand. Before I could close my fingers, a Planck tornado whipped up out of nowhere and started sucking her toward it.