The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  Holly’s body wants to groan and retch, but I keep it in a state of deathlike stillness while I work out … What? I don’t have enough voltage left for a single psychoprojectile. Try to save my soul? Egress Holly, try to cloak myself, and hover nearby as she is slain or decanted, until the Blind Cathar notices the frightened little piggy, hiding in the corner? I almost envy Esther. At least she died in the false belief she had won Horology its ultimate victory.

  The surviving Anchorites take stock. Pfenninger’s still standing at the center of the rhombus nave. Constantin, D’Arnoq, Hugo Lamb, Rivas-Godoy, Du Nord, and O’Dowd remain. One or two of the other fallen may wake in a while, or may not. The Anchorites will be knocked back, but they’ll have lists of possible Carnivores, and in a decade or two they’ll be operating, and abducting, at full strength. The Chapel of the Dusk is unscratched. Beyond the upended table and benches, and a lesser icon hanging at the wrong angle, there is no sign of the battle that raged here only a minute ago. I don’t know what to do, so I just stay inside Holly’s head, paralyzed by indecision.

  Elijah D’Arnoq asks, “What was that light?”

  “A Last Act,” says Pfenninger. “A powerful one. The question is, who invoked it?”

  “Esther Little,” says Constantin, “in incorporeal form. The Counterscript never acknowledged her death, as you know. I sensed her. She attacked the Chapel’s doubt-line, in hopes of splitting it open and making the sky fall in. Who else but her could have engineered this attack? We’re lucky her last big bang wasn’t quite as explosive as she hoped.”

  “So we’ve won the War?” asks Rivas-Godoy.

  Pfenninger looks at Constantin. As one, they announce, “Yes.”

  “Oh,” admits Pfenninger, “there’ll be a few mopping-up operations. We have a few wounds to lick, but Horology is dead. My one regret? That Marinus didn’t live long enough to learn how utterly, how miserably, she had failed. The Blind Cathar must have slain her at some point between killing Ōshima and Arkady.”

  “Let’s tip the Sykes woman after Sadaqat,” says Constantin, stepping over towards us. She asks D’Arnoq, “Why did Marinus bring her along? I don’t … Wait a minute.” She peers at me with not-quite-human eyes. “Mr. Pfenninger. I do believe we have an afterdinner mint.” Constantin takes a few cautious steps closer. She smiles. “My my my, Holly Sykes is—what’s the term?—playing possum. How—”

  A ROARING, PERCUSSIVE KA–BOOOO​OOOOO​MMM … fills the Chapel. Constantin falls to the floor, as do the others. I-in-Holly stare up at the crack, terror transmuting into hope, then a savage joy as an uprooting, tearing, steel-hull-on-a-reef noise howls louder, and the hairline crack becomes a black line zigzagging down the north roof to the back of the icon. Slowly, the sickening sound dies away, but it leaves behind a heavily pregnant threat of more … From where I-in-Holly am crouching I see the halo-shaped gnostic serpent swing, then drop. It smashes like a thousand dinner plates, fragments dashing and smattering across the stone floor, like ten thousand little living fleeing beings. A chunk as big as a cricket ball just misses Holly’s head. I hear Baptiste Pfenninger declaim a histrionic “Shit! Did you see that, Ms. Constantin?” It occurs to me to test Holly’s own psychovoltage, and I find a deeper reserve than I expected.

  “That’s the least of our problems,” snaps Constantin. “Can’t you see the crack?” Silently, I invoke an Act of Cloaking. If a psychosoteric looks at me directly they’ll see a faded outline, but it’s better than nothing, and the seven Anchorites are now worried about the Chapel’s fabric. As well they should be. Moving along the wall towards the west window, we hear the creak of stressed stone.

  Elijah D’Arnoq notices first. “The Sykes woman!”

  O’Dowd, the Eleventh Anchorite, asks, “Where did she go?”

  “The bitch is hosting,” booms Du Nord. “Someone’s cloaked her!”

  “Shield the Umber Arch!” Constantin orders Rivas-Godoy. “It’s Marinus! Don’t let her out! I’ll evoke an Act of Exposure and—”

  An ogre groans overhead and stones rain from the crack, which now widens into a jagged gash. I understand. Esther’s Last Act worked, and only the Blind Cathar has kept the Chapel intact. But now even his ancient strength is failing.

  “Pfenninger, MOVE!” shouts Constantin.

  But the First Anchorite, whose survival instinct has perhaps been dulled by two centuries’ Black Wine, health, and wealth, looks up to where Constantin is staring before, not after, he dives to safety. A slab of Chapel roof the size of a family car is the final thing that Baptiste Pfenninger sees before it smashes him, like a sledgehammer striking an egg. More masonry explodes off the floor. I revoke my cloak and invoke a body-shield. Du Nord, a French captain who followed the Shaded Way from 1830 to the present day, is too slow to protect himself from a volley of shrapnel, and although it doesn’t kill Du Nord, yet, his current wife wouldn’t recognize him. Three or four body-shielded figures are running for the Umber Arch but, like an ice sheet calving icebergs, the south roof slides down and blocks the exit. Our tomb, then, is sealed.

  Through the crumbling gaps in the roof, a roiling, grainy, smoky tentacle of Dusk spills, gropes, and uncoils into the Chapel. It hums, not quite like bees, and mutters, not quite like a crowd, and susurrates, not quite like sand. A tendril of the stuff uncurls behind Elijah D’Arnoq as he shifts backwards to avoid a falling slab of rock. Unimpeded by his body-shield, the Dusk brushes D’Arnoq’s neck, and he is turned into a man-shaped cloud of Dusk, whose form lasts only a moment.

  “Marinus, is this you in here?” asks Holly.

  Sorry, I suasioned you without permission.

  “We beat them, didn’t we? Aoife’s safe.”

  Everyone’s family is safe from the Anchorites, now.

  We look across the rubble and body-strewn Chapel. Only three of the ember-red shielded figures are visible. I recognize those of Constantin, Rivas-Godoy, and Hugo Lamb. In its corner, the icon of the Blind Cathar is peeling and decaying, as if spattered by acid. The place is growing darker by the second. The arms of the Dusk fill a quarter of the Chapel now, at least.

  “That Dusk stuff,” says Holly. “It doesn’t look so painful.”

  Sorry I let you get tangled up in this.

  “It’s all right. It wasn’t you, it was the War.”

  It’ll only be a few moments now.

  A SPLITTING NOISE from the northern corner turns into the discordant jangle of a bell. Where the icon hung, an ellipse has opened up, emitting a pale moonlight. “That noise,” says Holly, “sounded like the time-bell at the Captain Marlow. What is it, Marinus?”

  A few feet away, the psychosedated body of Imhoff is licked into nonexistence by a tongue of Dusk.

  I have no idea, I subadmit. Hope?

  Certainly the three surviving Anchorites reach a similar conclusion and make for the north corner. I-in-Holly follow, or try to, but a long plume of Dusk sweeps in through the now-unshielded east window. I slip in a puddle of what used to be Baptiste Pfenninger, and dodge into a safe pocket of clear air that drifts up the nave, before a column of the swarming gray forces me over to the west wall. The Chapel is now more than half Dusk, and the thirty paces to the ellipse are a shifting airborne minefield. I stumble over my old body, lying at an undignified angle, but in mere seconds Dr. Fenby will cease to be. Miraculously, our luck holds, and we arrive at the ellipse. Constantin and her two companions are nowhere in sight. Some sort of emergency chute? It doesn’t feel like a design feature of the Blind Cathar. The oval glow brightens as the Chapel darkens. It’s a membrane across which clouds appear to stream, like speeded-up sky. I take one last look at the Chapel, now Dusk-filled. The eastern roof slides in. “What do we have to lose?” asks Holly.

  I fill my host’s lungs with a deep breath, and step in …

  … and out into a passageway, little wider than a person, little taller, lit by the Chapel’s dying light and the surface through which we just passed, apparently harmlessly. The bellow of the disinteg
rating Chapel is still audible, but it sounds a good mile behind us, not a few meters. The passageway slopes down ten paces before reaching a wall, then branches off to the left and right. It’s warmer here. I touch the wall. It’s skin temperature, and has the Mars-red hue and texture of adobe. If sound, light, and flesh can travel through the membrane, however, then I’m afraid the Dusk will soon be following us. A body-shield would be wise, especially with three Anchorites up ahead, but Holly’s psychovoltage is low and mine is virtually spent, so I walk down the passage to the end. Both the left-hand and right-hand corridors curve away into darkness. It feels like necropolis, I subsay to Holly, but …

  “The Blind Cathar doesn’t bother with bodies, right?”

  No. Like Sadaqat’s corpse, the psychodecanted are just ejected.

  I look up the corridor behind us. The ellipse is fading as the Chapel dies. I subask Holly, What do you think? Left or right?

  “Marinus, I think I just saw letters, on the wall, at waist height.”

  I peer down and find, inscribed like a sculptor’s mark:

  “JS?” says Holly. “Jacko? Marinus, that’s how he used to sign his—” A noise like a bell struck under water interrupts her, and we can tell by a change of the air that the Dusk is following us in. “Left, Marinus,” Holly orders. “Go left.”

  There’s no time to ask if, or why, she’s so sure. I obey, hurrying us along the narrow, curving, claustrophobic, and graphite-black passageway. Holly’s fifty-six-year-old heart is pounding hard and I think I sprained her ankle in our last dash across the Chapel. She’s a decade older than Iris, I need to remember. “Trail my fingers along the wall,” she tells me, in little more than a whisper.

  If you’re up to driving, I’ll hand you back the controls.

  “Yes. Do it.” She steadies herself against the wall for a moment until her vestibular sense rights itself. “Christ, that was weird.”

  I could light a psycholamp, but it might attract company.

  “If my wild guess is right, I won’t need light. If I’m wrong, a light won’t help. I’ll know one way or the other fairly soon. This passage is still following a curve, wouldn’t you say?”

  Yes. It’s an arc, for sure. About a hundred paces so far.

  Holly stops. We hear her ragged breath, her thumping heart, and the murmuring of the Dusk. She looks behind us, and a monochromatic gleam blooms in the darkness. Holly holds up her hand and we see its black outline, and even the faint sheen of her wedding ring. The Dusk has its own phosphorescence, I report. It’s flooding the passage behind us, at walking pace. Keep moving.

  “Diabolical,” says Holly. She sets off again, and although I’m tempted to scansion her present tense to see what she’s thinking, I decide to trust in her. Fifty more paces and Holly stops, out of breath. Her fear is charged with hope, now. “Am I imagining that, Marinus? What are my right fingertips touching?”

  I check, and double-check. Nothing.

  She turns to her right, putting out her palms against a void. She touches the sides, and we feel a narrow entrance in the wall. “A little light now, please—just a match-flame?”

  I half egress from Holly’s chakra-eye, and invoke a faint glow. My host has seen too much today to be taken aback by light shining from the center of her forehead. In front of us, a short connecting tunnel ends five paces away at another left-right junction. To our left, the original passage curves away. To our right, the Dusk is not far around the bend. “We’re in it,” Holly whispers. “Light off, please. I’d rather trust my memory than my eyes.”

  If you can talk and walk, I subsay, I’m very, very curious.

  Holly walks forwards through the connecting tunnel until her palms meet the wall of a new left-right passage. Holly turns right. “The last time I saw Jacko,” she keeps her voice very low, “I was packing a bag to leave home. Did Xi Lo ever tell you any of this?”

  Maybe—I don’t know. It was so long ago.

  We’ve gone about ten paces through the darkness when Holly’s left hand registers empty air. Another “connecting” archway. She enters it, walks five paces to another left-right passage, and turns left. These corridors appear to be concentric to one another. “Well, as I was packing, Jacko appeared, with a—a—a labyrinth. He used to draw these big, intricate mazes, just for fun, like. There should be another one opening soon …” After another ten paces of curving darkness, Holly finds a gap on the right and goes through it. For fear of putting her off, I say nothing about the maze Xi Lo once designed for King William of Orange. Through the arch is another left-right branch. Holly goes right. “The labyrinth Jacko gave me that day, though, it was plainer. Just a nest of nine circles, with a few connecting gaps between them. He made me promise to learn it. To learn it so well that, if I ever needed to, I could find my way through it in the darkness, without one mistake …”

  And now we’re in it, I finish the sentence.

  “Now we’re in it. I s’pose how hardly matters?”

  Transubstantiation. The Blind Cathar’s soul became the Chapel of the Dusk. Xi Lo’s soul, I believe, entered the fabric of the Chapel during the First Mission. Once it was inside, Xi Lo became this labyrinth. Like a benign cancer, perhaps?

  Holly hurries on. “But why would he do that?”

  So that there would be a way back to the world after the Second Mission, but one that only you could navigate. Anyone else … Both Holly and I think of the three Anchorites who arrived here before us, trapped in a dead end, with a wall of Dusk closing in.

  “Does Jacko know we’re here, do you think?”

  Transubstantiation is an arcane, powerful act. I can’t invoke it and I don’t know its modii. Xi Lo never even told me he was studying it. The Blind Cathar knew we were in the Chapel, however, so it stands to reason that, yes, Xi Lo—Jacko—knows you’re here.

  Holly finds an archway in the right-hand wall, and enters.

  If the labyrinth’s round, I subpoint-out, we’re now moving away from the center.

  “You have to go out to go in again. This next junction should be a crossroads. A little light, please?” I egress and glow for a moment. A crossroads. Holly takes the left branch. I ingress and fade.

  You kept your promise, then, I subsay, to memorize the path.

  “Yeah. Those were Jacko’s last words to me. I stormed off to my boyfriend’s house, and never saw my little brother again. Ruth, my sister-in-law, she was into jewelry making, and turned his sketch into a sort of pendant, made of silver. When I left home I took it away with me. Probably every week of my life I’ve studied it. Left turn coming up.”

  We take the left, and pain explodes in our head. Holly spins as she falls and tumbles. Fresh pain shoots through her ankles and knees, and our scorched retinas are dazzled by petals of temporary colors. Through these, as my host lifts her head, I glimpse Constantin, her chakra-eye glowing rose-red, standing over us. “Show me the exit,” the Second Anchorite says maternally, “or I’ll turn you into a screaming human torch to light my path.” Her palm-chakras are glowing red too, a psychobolt in each ready to make good her threat. Holly’s shaking and muttering, “Please don’t please don’t please don’t.” I don’t know what Constantin just heard, how much she knows, how much psychovoltage she’s retained after the battle. Enough to kill us both several times over, I think. I decide to draw her away from Holly, back to the Dusk, so Holly at least has a chance of getting out alive.

  I egress, glowing.

  Icy and scalding, Constantin demands, “Which one are you?”

  Marinus, I subannounce.

  “Marinus. It would be. Time’s short. Lead.”

  If you kill us both, you die too.

  “Then I’ll die happier, knowing who I killed in the last scene.”

  Before I can think of a strategic reply, Constantin’s chakra-eye goes out, her head tilts back, and she slumps to the floor. “I TOLD YOU!” Holly makes a throat-scraping, berserking yell, and brings down an indistinct clublike object on our attacker’s head
a second time. “NOBODY THREATENS MY FAMILY!” And a third time. I glow brightly to find Holly panting over the slumped form of Immaculée Constantin. The Second Anchorite’s head is a mess of blood, white-gold hair, and diamonds. I ingress back into Holly, finding a supernova of fury melting into many other emotions. A few seconds later, Holly empties her stomach in three powerful bursts.

  It’s okay, Holly, I say. I’m here, it’s fine.

  Holly vomits a fourth time.

  I synthesize a drop of psychosedative in her pituitary gland. Okay, I think you’re finished now.

  “I killed someone.” Holly’s shaking. “I killed. It just … sort of … It’s like I wasn’t me. But I know it was.”

  I tweak out a little dopamine. She may be alive … sort of. Shall I check?

  “No. No. I’d rather not know.”

  As you wish, but what’s the murder weapon?

  Holly drops the thing. “Rolling pin.”

  Where did you find a rolling pin in here?

  “I nicked it from your kitchen at 119A. Put it in my bag.”

  Holly stands up. I sedate her ankle and knees. Why?

  “You were all talking about the War, but I didn’t even have a Swiss Army knife. So—yeah, I know, hysterical woman, rolling pin, big fat cliché, Crispin would’ve rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, come on!’ but I wanted … y’know … something. I hate the sight of blood so I left the knives in the drawer and … so. Shit, Marinus. What have I done?”

  Killed a 250-year-old Atemporal Carnivore with a fifty-dollar kitchen implement, after putting on a fine impersonation of a sniveling, scared middle-aged woman.

  “The sniveling part was easy.”

  The Dusk’s coming, Holly. Which way now?

  She pulls herself together. “A bit of light, please.” I half egress and glow, illuminating the narrow crossroads where the woman lying dead or dying ambushed us. “Which way were we going?”

  We spun as we fell, I remember. And Constantin moved around us before she threatened us. I glow brighter, but this just enhances our view of a dead ambusher and a puddle of vomit. I can’t be sure.