String City

by Graham Edwards

  “Honey, bosquadrilles live a long, long time. Chances are Raymond was here centuries before this city was. Before even the castle. He’d have seen some things.”

  “Like Robin Hood?” Seemed like she was listening after all.

  “Maybe. Mind you, Hood isn’t what folk think he is. Not at all. When we get back to String City, maybe I’ll take you to the wildwood. You can ask him yourself. Meantime, your story—it isn’t finished, is it?”

  Zephyr fetched up a long sigh. “You’ve probably guessed the rest. After I’d killed Raymond—once I came to my senses, I mean—I realised I couldn’t stay in the flat. What on Earth do you do with a dead boar in the middle of Nottingham? So I ran.

  “I ran through the streets, not caring where I was going. It was raining—pretty soon it had turned into a storm. I found myself up at the castle gates. It was night, so they were locked, but I squeezed through. It’s a sad place now; there’s hardly anything left of the original walls. But that night it was... different. Perhaps it was the lightning—all that flashing made things look strange and magical. I felt detached, in a kind of limbo. I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye, catching glimpses of old buildings that shouldn’t have been there—towers and battlements. I saw shadows, people running, orange light like flames. It was as if I was in two places at once.”

  I nodded. “Anomalistic interbrane entemporation. Extreme emotion can trigger it.”

  She glared at me, continued, “I kept walking. The castle was much bigger than it should have been. I went through gates that shouldn’t have been there, down passages, through great halls. I could hear men fighting, but I never saw them. I went through another gate, under a portcullis, and suddenly I was out in a street—just a regular city street. It was still raining. I assumed I’d had some kind of hallucination and decided to go back to the flat. Maybe I could clear up the mess after all. Then I started looking in the shopfronts, and at the beggars in the gutters, and at the birds that were swooping overhead. The birds were as big as Airbuses. That’s when I realised I wasn’t in Nottingham any more. The weird thing is, I didn’t question what was going on. I felt, I don’t know... energised, more myself than I had for months. It was very peculiar.

  “I walked the rest of the night and through into the next day, until I found myself at your office. Something made me stop outside your door. That’s when I saw the ‘Help Wanted’ sign on the glass. And... well, the rest you know.”

  Forbidden love. No wonder she’d freaked when she’d seen that movie poster in Harry’s Holodeon. It was a story I’d heard a hundred times before. Love between species. Love between worlds too.

  Folk are always slipping between worlds. Emotion opens the doors, but the reason the doors are there in the first place is the wildwood. The wildwood’s like fungus: it grows everywhere, and underneath it’s all connected. Its roots run deep, go back a long, long way. The oldest forests of all lie north of String City. Folk still go there to hunt, gather berries, make voodoo. Occasionally they come back.

  Thing is, the wildwood winds its roots into people too. Most folk don’t realise we’re all part sap. It’s the sap that draws people across, when the weather’s right, and the time’s right. Draws them along the strings, through the roots of the wildwood, across the bulk. Plucks them from one unlikely place, sets them in another. That’s what happened to Zephyr. She was just one more transaction on the purchase ledger of the cosmos.

  Trouble was, the books weren’t balancing.

  Something made me stop outside your door.

  That’s what she’d said. It was the biggest of all the things she’d said, and she’d all but thrown it away.

  The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling like boar quills.

  “What exactly was it that made you...?” I began. But she put her hand on my mouth, pushed me back against the tree.

  “Be quiet!” she hissed. “Look, over there. Here I come again!”

  52

  ACROSS THE STREET, a bus had pulled up. A small thin girl with short dark hair got off. She was carrying plastic bags full of shopping.

  She was Zephyr.

  Zephyr—the Zephyr who was with me—gripped my hand. “Please,” she said. “Oh, please, let it work this time!”

  I stared at her. “Let what work?” I said. “Zephyr, what have you done?”

  “Just watch.”

  When I looked back, the bus had already pulled away. The parallel Zephyr was walking up the path to the house. She went inside and, a minute later, appeared at an upstairs window. She knelt; now we could only see her head. Something out of sight cast a big shadow up the wall. A shadow with spines.

  The parallel Zephyr got up and disappeared through a door. The adjacent room lit up. She rummaged in a drawer, came up with empty hands, then ran her hands through her hair, looked puzzled. She rummaged again, in vain. Then she left the room.

  Beside me, something glinted in the moonlight. I looked down, saw my own Zephyr holding up a silver crucifix.

  “I went inside the apartment earlier,” she said. “I keep going in there, rearranging things, trying to make things different. Trying to change my past. Trying to stop myself from killing him. This time I took the murder weapon.”

  In the flat, the parallel Zephyr reappeared in the living room. She bent again, lifted up one of the shopping bags. She drew out something long and shiny. Seemed she’d been shopping for silver candlesticks.

  She bludgeoned the boar to death.

  My Zephyr threw the crucifix in the dirt, buried her face in her hands.

  “It never works!” she sobbed. “Whatever I do, she finds a way round it. I glued up the door locks—she smashed a window to get in. I herded the boar out into the garden—she bludgeoned it to death with a spade. I’ve spent three weeks trying to erase my crime from history, and nothing works! What am I going to do?”

  “There’s nothing you can do. History is history. You have to let it go.” I took her arm; she shoved me away.

  “Don’t tell me what I have to do! I’ve been sent here for a reason! I know I have! I’m here to make up for my crime! I have to make things different! If I don’t... I don’t think I can live with myself!”

  “You did what you did. Crime of passion. Who’d blame you?”

  She thumped my chest. “I blame me! And who are you to call me a criminal?”

  “That’s not what I meant, honey.”

  She glared at me, her anguish just as bright as the moon. “Help me, please. Isn’t there something you can do? I’ve seen you do things, incredible things. Isn’t there some magic you can work? I’m not asking you to rewrite the whole history book, just wipe out one mistake. I’m begging you, please!”

  I held her, feeling her sob. She seemed very small. I felt sorry for her. For Raymond too. Bosquadrilles are noble creatures, rare and old. It was wrong, what she’d done. Even though I knew I might have done the exact same thing myself, if love had pushed me that way.

  “There’s something,” I said slowly. “It’s not magic exactly, only a trick.”

  “I don’t care what it is. I only care if it works.”

  “It’s dangerous,” I said. “It’s nothing I’ve used before.”

  “You can make it work.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I believe in you.” She put her head down, her eyes up. A small and vulnerable woman in the moon-shadow of a tree rooted deep in the place where outlaws once ran.

  So help me, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  53

  THERE WAS ONLY one safe way back to String City: the Dimension Die. Even if the dimensions hadn’t been screwed up, I’d probably have used it. Alternate realities are sneaky things: if you don’t use the same route back you used to get in, everything can get redoubled. A parallel String City wasn’t somewhere I cared to explore. A city like that, things could get really weird.

  “Stand back,” I said. “For this trick to work, we need to take something with us.”
/>
  I took off my coat, flapped out the creases. I turned it inside-out seven times until it was a combination weave of white alpaca and six-dimensional twill. I spread it on the ground, unfolded it until it was twice its usual size. I let it settle, unfolded it again. Twice more and it covered the whole garden. I kept unfolding, doubling the coat’s size each time until it was bigger than the street. Then I flipped it over and folded it back up with the street inside.

  Zephyr watched me work, her mouth hanging open.

  “That’s a good trick,” she said.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  I put on the coat. It was heavier than usual.

  I took out the Dimension Die, held it up in the moonlight. Two black faces left. If I used it now, it would be good for only one more roll.

  “Zephyr...” I began.

  The hope on her face shut up my mouth and made up my mind.

  She held my hand.

  I rolled the die.

  54

  WE MATERIALISED IN the cellar of my office. Above our heads the trapdoor was shut. The street grille was clogged with bloody thunderbird feathers. Everything was dark.

  “Should we let Bronzey know we’re back?” said Zephyr.

  “Let’s finish our business first. Then we’ll rap with the robot.”

  I tripped the override on the tokamak, turned the dial to low. The fusion burners lit up then immediately damped down. A baleful glow settled on the cellar. I took an iron key from the run of hooks above the mattress. My hand brushed the smaller brass key hanging beside it, knocking it to the floor. Zephyr picked it up.

  “What’s this for?” she asked.

  “Nothing important,” I said.

  “Is it for that?” She pointed to the vague outline of the bricked-in door in the corner.

  “No. It doesn’t matter. Like I said.”

  I hung the key to my empty house back on the hook.

  Zephyr was staring at the bunk. “Don’t you get lonely? Working upstairs, sleeping down here? I’d go crazy.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  I went to the crate of gumshoe gadgets, popped open the secret plank in the side. A hidden lock shone in the light of the tokamak.

  “Jimmy told me only to open this compartment in an emergency,” I said. “I figure that’s what we’ve got.”

  “You keep mentioning this Jimmy,” said Zephyr. “You told me he was the detective who owned the business before you, but who actually was he? How did you know him? And don’t tell me it’s a long story.”

  I smiled. Felt like a long time since I’d done that.

  “The short version is, Jimmy and I grew up together. Not here, someplace else. We were like brothers. Then we fell out, like brothers do, went our separate ways. Jimmy trained as an architect, ended up working as a short-order chef. We met up again during the Titanomachy—that was a big war between the gods and the Titans. And I’m sorry—that really is a whole other story. Anyway, after the war we got separated again. Jimmy fetched up in String City. That’s when he set up the detective agency. Meanwhile I’d gone on the road, got myself married, eventually found my way here too.”

  “I remember you telling Kisi Sunyana you were married. What happened to your wife?”

  “There were two. The first one cleaned me out. Not that I was rich. The second one—Laura her name was—made me rich in ways I hadn’t known existed.”

  “What happened to her? To Laura?”

  “She got sick and died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.” I held up the iron key. “We’re wasting time.”

  There were two kinds of gadgets in the crate. First were the gimmicky ones—like the doppelganger compact that was still burning a hole in my pocket. One-shot devices, occasionally useful when solving really obstinate cases. Second were the ones in the secret drawer. These I rarely used, on account of how they all had hidden consequences. Prices to pay.

  I opened the secret compartment. Brought out the quantum zoetrope. Gave it to Zephyr.

  “It looks like a snowglobe,” said Zephyr, turning it in her hands. “Only there’s nothing in the globe.”

  “There will be.”

  I took off my coat, folded it in half, then in half again. I kept folding until it was the size of a postage stamp. Then I slipped it through the slot in the zoetrope’s base.

  The zoetrope shook. Workings whirred. Shapes condensed inside the globe. Snow started falling. When the snow stopped, there was a miniature street inside. The street I’d brought here from the Wishbone.

  “This zooms it in,” I said, touching one of the knobs on the side.

  Zephyr turned the knob. The street got bigger. Now a single building filled the globe: a terraced house.

  “It’s my apartment!”

  The zoetrope spat out my coat. I shook it out to normal size, turned it inside-out four times until it was calfskin, tossed it on the bunk.

  I showed Zephyr how the zoetrope worked.

  “These knobs on the side work the view: zoom, pan, so on. The rest of it’s like your basic movie editing suite. These dials shuttle the timeline backward and forward. You can make selections, cut and paste. Edit.”

  “What am I editing?”

  “Your past.”

  55

  I LEFT HER in the cellar, went to join the Scrutator up in the office.

  “I deduced you had both returned,” said the robot as I came up through the trapdoor. “However, I was reluctant to interrupt whatever activities you had chosen to undertake in the cellar. I am, of course, aware that there is a bunk down there.”

  “There was no funny business,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “Is Zephyr in good health?”

  “She’s okay, I guess. A little mixed up. I’ve given her something that might help. What’s been happening here? Are the deadlocks holding? I still don’t like that big crack in the door glass.”

  “The office is secure, despite increasing levels of violent activity outside. According to the police wavelengths—and based upon what I myself have observed through the windows—I can report that, while the municipal department has been clearing the streets of downed thunderbirds, String City’s major residential zones have come under the occupancy of a substantial invasion force consisting of anansi-asansa.”

  “Arachne’s spiders!” I said. “So she’s launched her attack after all. I guess the explosion at the Birdhouse was the perfect diversion. Given what the scathefire did, I’m surprised there’s any city left to for her conquer.”

  “String City is indeed experiencing severe dimensional disruption,” said the Scrutator. “A powder storm is raging on an unprecedented scale. The strings are transmitting rumors of devastation through the bulk at unprecedented speed. Worlds are falling. I can hear it all.”

  “What are those?” I said, peering through the window. The sky was full of big silver shapes, flying high.

  “I believe they are B29 Superfortresses, transported here through a convolutionary wormhole, possibly from an earlier age of the Wishbone, or a world like it.”

  “Let’s hope Enola Gay ain’t up there.”

  Out in the street, a mob was engaged in a running battle with a squad of spiderlings from Arachne’s army. Mobs in String City are exotic affairs; this was more exotic than most.

  Centaurs chased legless lizards. The lizards had coxcombs and spat brimstone. Golems blundered after the lizards; nymphs were driving the golems on, shouting in their ears. A trio of Gorgons went past dragging a cauldron. The snakes on their heads were feeding on their eyes. The street itself moved like it was alive; sewer grates popped open, spilling steaming gloop over the asphalt. Black feelers poked from the underworld, scenting for prey. Scurrying between the feet of the passers-by, everywhere you looked, were the anansi-asansa. Spiders with iron fangs.

  “Any new clients?” I said. A two-headed hippo trotted past with half the Seelie Court on its back.

  “I regret to r
eport we have taken on no new cases today.”

  “It’ll pick up later.”

  Zephyr came up from the cellar. She was carrying the zoetrope like it was the crown jewels.

  “I’ve finished.” She looked flushed, happy, like a child wanting to show off a painting. “Do you want to see?”

  She set the zoetrope on the desk. We crowded round it. She pushed the button marked PLAY.

  Inside the globe, a scene unfolded. A bus pulled up in the street. Zephyr climbed off. There was a jump cut, then Zephyr was in the apartment. Raymond was there. A couple more jumps and they were dancing. A waltz. Tinny music wafted up from the globe. The dance went on, jumped, repeated. It repeated over and over. In her man’s arms, the miniature Zephyr was crying. She looked very happy.

  “That’s it,” said the real Zephyr, the one at my side. “It doesn’t look much—it was hard getting the joins right. I suppose it’s a bit jerky.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “What I wanted to ask you was—well, these edits I’ve made in the zoetrope, do they... is this what’s happening back in my world, back in Nottingham?”

  She didn’t seem to notice my hesitation. “More or less. The edits percolate out through the dimensions. Like music through harp strings. They set up harmonies in every parallel world they can find. In most versions of the Wishbone, you and Raymond are now together.”

  “So this new sequence of events I’ve made—it’s true?”

  “As true as you want it to be.”

  The blush spread from her face down her neck. She looked as happy as the Zephyr in the globe. “Then I’ve done all I can. Only, I was wondering—what should I do with these?” She held up a sheaf of little cards, like Polaroids. “These are all the bits I cut out. Like the, you know, the part where I stabbed him with the crucifix. Each time I made a cut, the zoetrope spat out one of these. They’re like little moving pictures. I don’t know what to do with them.”

  She held them at arm’s length, nose wrinkled, like she didn’t want to touch them.