Then the Princess sighed, and it was a sound so terrible and tragic and filled with love — not love for me, exactly, but love for someone and something that the Princess could not have, love for Love-Itself, I suppose — that she was neither Princess Joy nor Princess Death, but something else entirely, something for which there was no word, because there had never before been anything or anyone like our Sidonian Princess.
Then, at the Princess’s whim, I assume, Time resumed, and she drew from her holster some sort of terrific black weapon, huge and bulky and terrifying, covered with knobs and blades and multiple barrels, and she spun it in Theera’s direction, stabbed our soldier to Theera’s left, shot our soldier to Theera’s right, and the two men fell from the cliff and drifted down into the grey mist. I began to ascend the ridge, but I would not reach them in time.
I aimed and shot at the Princess, but my target was too far in the distance, and the bullets blew harmlessly away. The Princess swung the blade at Theera, who ducked and flipped into the twisted hemlock tree, and the Princess shot bullet after bullet, blasted away branches, gnarled bark blistered off the tree trunk with the Princess’s attacks, the tree cracked in half, its eastern side swung perilously over the cliff edge, and dead-brown leaves drifted into the void; Theera scuttled about the tree trunk and up to the highest dead branches, which wobbled and cracked and crumbled beneath her.
Of course, Theera, our own supernatural warrior, had no choice but to defend herself. She swung from the tree moments before it fell from its cliff-side perch to clatter into the abyss. This time, the magical sword at last hit its target, went straight into the Princess’s heart and came out cleanly, and the beautiful young specter shrieked, raised her arms to the such-as-it-was sky, the grey clouds swirled overhead, her beautiful red hair burst into an even redder flame, and she exploded with a terrific blast, a pop and a hiss.
I believe that Master Yu was gratified that his wonderful sword — revealed to him by a talking dog, bequeathed to him by a camel-headed dragon, and zealously guarded by the terrible poet ever since then — had finally proved useful and had fulfilled part of a prophesy and achieved a bit of its destiny, even if, so far, it had only erased a Looee.
Well, what happened next perplexed us all — the Princess was a Looee, nothing more than a TV-image that the Sidonians projected throughout 枉死城 , just an image that Allen Jerome had thought up one day, a beautiful void who might inspire the rabble to revolutionary victory, but when she died, the mountain and the valley below, and the armies who faced each other in the basin, were bathed red at once in the blood of the revolutionary warrior made real by the dreams of her followers and believers, and perhaps by her own yearnings.
And then, after a few moments passed, her blood turned blue-green, like an octopus’s blood.
She had to have known that she would die. Maybe that is what she wanted, her own death, to kill the part of her that Allen Jerome had programmed.
It would have served no purpose for me to tell Theera that the Princess and I had been friends, of a sort. That in a way we had understood each other, and that I was sorry that she’d had to die.
And so I didn’t tell Theera this, not on the day the Princess died, and not ever.
In the end, the Princess was not a formidable opponent. But her appearance had distracted our armies, and the loyalists continued to advance.
Some of our soldiers on higher ground fled the swords and axes of the enemy army, and turned and sought escape in the dying forest in the near southwest, but even the tallest trees fell during the onslaught and were crushed underfoot, and the forest was soon littered with bodies, some bullet-riddled and other felled by stab wounds, and then they in turn were crushed underfoot as well, as the loyalists spread out across the countryside. Arma, the god of the barren moon, threw his spears with his muscled, greyish arms and some of them missed, some of them hit the mark, and some enemy soldiers died, but others persevered.
It was then that I saw her, the young Voltairine de Cleyre, all in black, wide-eyed, happy, excited, giddy and almost girlish, and the battle seemed to pause around us. She was far away, up on the mountain across the chasm, but it was as though she were right in front of me.
“I will,” she said breathlessly, “open the pacquet.”
She ripped the paper and twisted the little box open.
I knew what was in there; or rather, I knew what she had told me was in there, when we met at the bottom of a hill in a dead forest on the outskirts of Hallitanud, that morning that felt like years ago, long enough ago that Voltairine de Cleyre had aged backwards, from an old woman to a young one.
The blackness inside the little box seemed infinite, a black hole, and then it began to thrum, to flutter, and then the blackness moved, shifted, and began to emerge from the box and spread into the world around us, a great shadow. And soon, the shadow rose above us and spread through the air, like ink. Black moths covered the sky, for indeed, Voltairine de Cleyre’s pacquet had been filled with black moths, and her black moths shot dark poison over our enemy, which quickly covered them, blackened them, shredded their uniforms like acid, and ground through their skin, which grew red and shredded, blood streamed from their body as they staggered about, black husks, in the muddy lake Vializ had become, and the lake grew ashen, dusted by the soldiers’ disintegration.
This was what Miss de Cleyre had described to me at the bottom of that dusty hillside, outside the Hallitanud stable, and back then I had laughed a bit. Who knew that moth turds could kill a body? But there they were, hundreds of black dusty corpses scattered all about, the victims of moth turds, and it wasn’t funny anymore, although it came as a relief nonetheless.
Thanks to these black moths, Voltairine de Cleyre would walk out of Hell, awaken from unconsciousness in her bed in Philadelphia and forgive the poor soul who had shot her, and then continue her hopeless crusade for a better world.
I looked East, and on the front lines I spotted the heroic Ch’ao-Hsing, firing a longarm; I thought I saw Minnie and Milton in the throng, and then I didn’t, and I never saw them again, or at least not that I can verify; from the West, Denter Fleckt led a hazy battalion of demons, perhaps a thousand, of all sizes and shapes, from gnats who could sting to a twenty-foot-tall giant who could crush a foe beneath the soles of his boots; the demons were invisible, but we knew they were there, because they destroyed suddenly fearful Falsturm soldiers, and they crashed across the Gates, which cracked and shook, and we knew what they “looked” like, just because that’s the way invisible demons work; Warlord Hua Nau smiled, and the demons in his lungs rose to join the demon army, and then he fought with a redoubled energy; and behind them, Rugæ, the wizard from Hua Nau’s fortress, in his tattered and mud-speckled blue robe adorned with half-moons, rode astride a bloody great winged rat and led a legion of similarly attired wizards who rode similarly bloody great winged rats; and I laughed, because I believed that no one could defeat us now.
But battles are battles, and wars are wars, and I was younger then, and I still had some hope in my beatless heart.
Chapter 37
We rode together triumphantly towards the Southern Gates. A spectral and hovering image of the Sidonian Princess rose from the ether and floated above her dwindling troops, exhorting them to battle right at the Gates, but the Falsturm soldiers and the Eyebrows did not need any inspiration to fight. Their city was rubble, they were up to their waists in floodwater and muck, and they were surrounded by their own marauding and vengeful victims without hope of egress, and thus quite willing to fight. The exhortations of a beautiful and recently dead Princess had nothing to do with it, but still she screamed:
They will be cursed, confused, stricken
with insanity, with blindness, and
with bewilderment, until we destroy them
and they quickly vanish;
other men will rape their wives;
other women will seduce their husbands,
and steal their children;
with oozing
sores, and
with dry lesions,
yellowing face, unquenchable
thirst, cut through with the
sword, until they perish;
the skies above them will burn
like copper, and the earth below them like iron, until
they succumb;
they will go out on one road
but let us make them flee before us on seven roads, make them
a terror throughout all the kingdoms and nations
and throughout all the Worlds in
the Universe.
I have died for the love I hold in my heart for all of you
My children
Win the War out of the love you hold in your heart for me, your dead
Princess
Perhaps this was a pre-programmed memory that the soldiers might keep for the future, an image to guide them in the years to come, as the greater war continued and grew. Because there could be no other purpose to it. This battle was lost.
Over her left shoulder, Yama’s image appeared in the sky.
“And remember,” he said solemnly, “that the soldiers of Hell cannot be defeated. Remember that there is no possible escape.”
And then the Princess seemed to decay, she dissolved into the lightening sky, and I realized that I had just seen spectral decomposition with my own eyes.
Even the last vestiges of opposition melted away. Some of our enemies were dead, some fled east, to hide from us in a Hell that was melting around them. Others threw down their weapons, surrendered, and now marched with us toward the Gates, towards Malchut, jittery smiles on our faces.
Then, of a sudden, an unimposing man stood before me, bespectacled and bow-tied. The crowd parted around him.
He smiled, and it was a nice smile.
He wore a blue suit.
“Wilfred Munsen,” he said. “I am the Otherworld Fabricator whom I imagine you have been fleeing.”
I nodded.
“I knew you were here,” I said. “I allow that I have been running from you. I didn’t know your name was Wilfred Munsen. I didn’t know that you wore a bow-tie. I have pictured you as more fearsome.”
Making fun of his bow-tie was an over-confident move, but I was feeling over-confident.
I’d just won a battle against the armies of Hell, and Wilfred Munsen was a pasty-faced toad who stood in the dust in a wrinkled suit and a crooked bow-tie.
He sighed, and he looked disappointed.
“Oh, Mr. O’Hugh,” he said, smiling sadly, “I am indeed fearsome. I control universes, do you understand? I create life. I do not need to scream or boast, or occupy some sort of terrible physical vessel.
“I might sit in an office in the Grey City, behind a desk. I might have fountain pens and note pads on my desk.
“You see? I created the Otherworlds that will destroy you.
“You, on the other hand, are tall.
“You have just defeated an army made up of starving peasants, Aegean pirates and various of the Earth’s dispossessed.”
He looked at his watch.
“Yester-day I would have killed you,” he said. “But to-day I will congratulate you on having eluded me since my arrival in 枉死城, which was not without some skill. And I will congratulate you on your military victory, which was less impressive than you believe, but perhaps a victory nonetheless. And on your striking height, which I know is much-admired.”
He held out his hand, and I shook it.
I thanked him.
“You and I will meet another day,” he said. “Perhaps in an office, overlooking the great Grey City thoroughfares.”
He thought.
“Once I have completed the requisite paperwork,” he added, “and scheduled the necessary meetings, I imagine that I will feed your liver to Grey City’s hawks, and I will feed your bowels to Grey City’s wolves.”
He stepped to one side.
“After you, Mr. O’Hugh.”
I left him, and when I looked back, he was gone.
Chapter 38
It certainly seemed as though our Triumph had been well-planned, hard-fought and deserved. But the Fabricator was correct: this was a victory over a weak and abandoned enemy. And Master Yu was also right: it was all too easy. It did not seem easy at the time, but it was too easy, nevertheless, because it should have been impossible.
I woke one night in 1928, and I realized then how, on that day in 枉死城, we might have sealed our fate during the Coming Storm, how the seeds of our ultimate destruction were planted far beneath the sands of Malchut in our victory over the soldiers of Hell. I am always one or two steps behind Madame Tang and Billy Golden, and they are, we now know, always two or three steps behind the Falsturm.
He had bested us again. Our failures were part of his plan, but so were our victories. Mathematics!
It is almost too painful and stupid to tell.
Instead, for now, let’s bask in our perceived triumph.
I remember well the joy of that day.
Madame Tang turned to the right and doubled back, until she was riding along beside me.
“In the end, the day was saved by invisible demons, moth shit and wizards on giant rats,” she marveled. “Exactly according to plan!”
Sort of a joke, delivered Madame Tang-style, grimly and with a frown.
“It is 1905, O’Hugh,” she said. “1905 and 1881, at once. Look.”
The landscape split before us, on one side, the world of the future, on the other side, the world of to-day, I saw the buildings grow and vanish, trees crumble into dust. The Gates of Hell were now visible in Malchut, casting a shadow over crowds awaiting the return of their loved ones.
It was raining and sunny. We were here and not-here. The world was old and young.
“You see?” she said. “For some of us, it is 1905. For some of us, it is 1881. You understand? We do not choose.”
She said that this was like a fork in the road. I said that this didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me; if I came to a fork in the road, and she came to the same fork in the road, I could choose to turn right if she chose to turn right. She said, “Not if there were an earthquake that split the road in half.” I said that I had just found her again, my old friend with whom I’d broken out of prison in Wyoming, hatched the Lervine job, defeated Weedville’s militia ... and now smashed the Gates of Hell. We had, indeed, been through much together, and I certainly hoped and expected no earthquake would split the road in half right now.
“Your path is to the left. Mine is to the right,” Madame Tang said. “I am not one for sentimentality, O’Hugh. I find that such things do not gain us any advantage.”
“Honest human feeling is not sentimentality, Madame Tang,” I said. “You have friends. That isn’t sentimentality.”
“Shortly our world will split in two,” she said. “Do not pretend you wish to fight in 1905 as a young man, to lose these decades with the only living woman whom you love.”
She held the reins, and she glanced over at me and she tried to speak gently, but gentleness fit her like an ill-tailored topcoat.
“You will learn much in the years to come,” she said. “You will grow ever-less-stupid with each year that passes. There are 19th century fights to join. If you survive them, there will be a position for you in my army, right beside me, as my general, when we meet again in 1905. You and I, and Master Yu and sons, and Flip Tidwell’s army, and Angela, who once made coffee at the American Cigar Distribution Company, and Louisa Satterlee, and the Peking Indian battalion, and that bounty hunter who is the son of the famous murdered marshal.”
“I will not see you for twenty-four years,” I said.
“And you have a question? Something you do not want to wait another twenty-four years to ask?”
She waited.
“You have a question for me that you wish to ask, one that has troubled you since Lucy sent you back to Ch
atham Street.”
I shrugged.
“Let’s sit down,” she said.
We sat on a little hill that looked out over miles of scrub-brush. Still in 枉死城, still on this side of eternity. Not even worried about it anymore.
“You want to know,” she said, “whether the Falsturm killed your parents. Whether Rasháh killed your parents at the Falsturm’s bidding. And why you survived.”
I said that was correct.
“Your father made the mistake of confessing to friends one day,” she explained, “that your mother had brought a family heirloom from the old country. An old jewel, something that she might wear around her neck if the occasion ever presented itself, which, on Chatham Street, it did not. And thus, the thieves — your father’s friends, whom he trusted — killed your parents and took the heirloom. They didn’t want to commit murder. They believed your parents were not home; they believed wrong. The jewel currently resides in the collection of a gentleman in Manhattan named Victor Hobnorth, who bought it for his wife. Not Mrs. Hobnorth’s best piece. She wore it only once. But on a bad day, a forgotten necklace in the bottom of an heiress’s jewelry box can be worth the death of a young Chatham Street mother. You survived only because the thieves saw no need or reason to kill a baby. Lucy Billings took you under her wing, hid you, protected you from the authorities.”
She glanced at me cockeyed.
“Did you imagine your parents were some sort of anti-Falsturm rebels? Brave soldiers? Did you imagine that all of this was your fate, from before you were born? That you were our chosen one? That you had a surfeit of midichlorians?”
Tang was quoting from a “moving picture” that I had not seen, and I didn’t understand any of it; I didn’t even know what a “surfeit” was.
“Did you think,” she added, “that you were the boy who lived?”
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 31