by M. Suddain
‘We accept,’ said the old man.
*
They were being assisted into a carriage on the back of a giant scorpion. It was taking a long time. ‘We really do appreciate your efforts in killing the worm,’ said the man. His name was Valkilma; he was youngish, perhaps only in his thirties, with limp jowls and lizardy black eyes. He was Diemendääs’s Lord Mayor. ‘Tell me, where did you get the idea to punch through his brain-pan with a rocket? So bold!’ He leaned forward eagerly. ‘And how were you able to target its tiny brain so precisely?’
‘I would not want to bore you with the details,’ said Fabrigas, and Miss Fritzacopple coughed politely.
Upon entering they saw that their sting-tailed taxi contained a small and slightly pudgy boy. He wore white britches and an embroidered silver-buttoned coat covered in medals. ‘Is this going to take all day?’ he said. ‘I would have stayed in my room if I thought they would smell this bad.’
‘Ah-ha-ha,’ laughed the mayor, nervously as he took his own seat. ‘This is His Majesty, Prince Panduke. He insisted on coming along today.’ He spoke, as a dentriloquist does, through gritted teeth, ‘… Even though we explained how long it might ta-aaaaake.’ In his nervousness he sang the last word. In the pristine carriage our friends suddenly became aware of their filth. Their clothes and faces were streaked with mud and sap and chunks of goo. Fabrigas’s beard looked like a sparrow nursery. Lenore’s face shone as if a team of snails had performed a dance routine upon it. ‘I’m suddenly aware,’ said Fabrigas, ‘that we smell somewhat … gamey.’
‘Not to worry,’ said the mayor, ‘we will disinfect you thoroughly before you enter the city.’
‘What is that?’ said the prince, pointing at Lenore. He looked terrified. ‘She’s green. I don’t like it.’
‘Am I green? I would never have known.’
‘And why are that one’s eyes made from glass?’
‘Ah-ha-ha-ha,’ laughed the mayor. ‘So inquisitive!’
‘They’re my glasses,’ said Kimmy, ‘I need them to look at things.’
‘Well, I hope you’re not going to look at me,’ said Prince Panduke.
‘I wouldn’t need glasses to see you,’ replied Kimmy.
‘Ah-ha-ha, wonderful!’
‘I’m bored now. I hate this place. I only came to shoot a bear.’ Then the train departed, leaving the clearing, the escape pod and the body-shaped indentations in the moss.
‘It seems like a lot of fuss for little old us,’ said Miss Fritzacopple.
‘Nonsense!’ said the mayor. ‘You’re all heroes now. It was rather uncanny that you landed right in the heart of our Forbidden Zone. It shouldn’t actually be possible. Our best scientists are working on it. But we’ll soon have you out, and that’s the main thing.’
They came to a gate: a black iron structure whose posts were topped with laughing gargoyles and a sign cast in black steel which read ‘This Is Not A Gate’. ‘A gate!’ exclaimed Fabrigas. ‘I thought there was no way out.’
‘As you can see from the sign it is not a gate,’ said Valkilma. ‘We use a gate to send the prisoners in. This is the first time we’ve ever had to make a retrieval. You are going to love our city. It is quite magnificent.’
Miss Fritzacopple stared forlornly at her feet. ‘I hope that bear enjoys my boots.’
‘I despise bears,’ said the prince. ‘I think they should all be shot.’ Kimmy clicked her tongue. ‘I keep owls,’ he continued.
‘Of course you do,’ said Kimmy.
‘Now you might find the scene beyond the gate slightly shocking,’ said the mayor. ‘Rest assured that it is not representative of our great city and the experiences you will surely have there.’
And as they passed through the portal the Forbidden Zone vanished, and they found themselves on the burning edge of a battlefield.
THE EMPEROR KARN KARN-ZHENG
Karn Karn-Zheng was a great emperor. He ruled the state of Qin (formerly of the Xo) for thirty years. He was intelligent, clever, capable, and strong in battle. People called him Daffodil, because when his aides were speaking to him his head would bob continuously, like a flower in a gentle breeze. When he took over as ruler his state was on the brink of chaos. Zheng not only saved his state from destruction, but he reunited it with several neighbouring states, expanding his empire considerably. He called himself Zheng Shi (First Zheng). He divided his state into prefectures. He unified the weights and measures. He standardised the money. He fixed the axle-length of wagons, the height of masts, the length of skirts. He developed a new writing language. He built an impenetrable wall around his city. He built himself a citadel shaped like a daffodil head. He made all the men wear hats. He shut himself inside his citadel, never leaving. He collected his urine in jars and arranged the jars on the floor of his bedroom suite in the shape of a pentagram. He had everyone in the capital city lose one finger in his honour. Finally, he sent his entire standing army to lay siege to a city called Diemendääs so that he could capture the most beautiful woman in the universe (whose face he’d never seen). Then, when his citizens were nearly in revolt because they’d suddenly lost their supply of honey, he declared that his army should only attack the western wall of the city.
The path to greatness has not gates.
A thousand roads lead to it.
When one passes through this gateless gate
He walks freely between heaven and earth.
DIEMENDÄÄS
The great army was throwing itself against a wall a mile high and thick along the top with defenders. Bees poured from the fortifications to tip cauldrons of boiling honey on the invaders, while the invaders attacked the wall with iron siege machines. Behind, a line of trebuchets threw spiked explosive devices. Some smashed into the battlements, raining fire on their own men, and some sailed high over the wall. Behind the siege machines were legions of soldiers waiting for a breach in the fortifications.
‘Emperor Karn Karn-Zheng has been attacking our wall for decades. His army has come for our own Empress, don’t you know!’ The mayor laughed nervously and put his hands to his face.
‘The Empress?’ said Miss Fritzacopple. A siege machine groaned and crumpled in the distance; the troops on the battlements cheered.
‘Of course. The Empress is the most beautiful woman in the universe. Any ruler would give his manly parts for her. If you saw her, you’d understand. But you’ll never.’ He pointed a finger to the ground; it was unclear why. ‘Fortunately they are limiting their attack to our western wall. Unfortunately, this is where the gate to the Forbidden Zone is located.’
‘I thought you said there was no gate.’
‘There is not.’
‘But why attack just the western wall?’ said Fabrigas. ‘With their numbers they could easily surround the whole city.’
‘Oh,’ said the mayor as he studied a nail, ‘we’ve signed a treaty that they’ll only attack from the west. They are one of our biggest honey traders after all.’
The old man’s shoulders rose and slumped. In the distance, another siege machine crumbled, arms flailing, like a stricken giant, and the troops along the battlement cheered again, but soon another had been wheeled forward to take its place.
‘Look at that,’ said the mayor. ‘It’s been going on like this since I was a boy.’ On the horizon above the battlefield and nearly three hands at arm’s length wide was a black moon. ‘Is that Bespophus?’ said Fabrigas as he raised a bony finger.
‘Oh, you know of Bespophus? Yes. It comes six feet-inches closer every year. Eventually it’ll smash into us. If we aren’t killed instantly we’ll have those plants to deal with. Honestly, will our troubles ever cease?’
Valkilma excused himself and went over to an official-looking tent. He was gone for fifteen minutes. When he returned he said, ‘I have contacted our enemy’s diplomatic office. We should be given passage through soon. Fingers crossed!’
And soon enough a trumpet call was sounded and the battle stopped. ‘Forwar
d easy,’ said the mayor, and their caravan moved forward through the field of tents, through the lines of weary enemy soldiers, through the idle siege machines. They saw piles of burned and broken corpses. They heard wounded soldiers crying out, they heard the wind moving banners and signal flags. And when they approached the massive city gate – and this truly was a gate; don’t get me started – it opened. The enemy troops stood patiently by their steam-powered battering ram, just feet away from the soldiers on the other side. The convoy passed through the gate and they heard it close behind them with a stroke of thunder. Then they heard the battle stagger to its feet again.
‘I sense our deaths here,’ said Lambestyo, and Fritzacopple nudged him.
‘I just don’t understand how all this can be about a woman,’ the botanist said.
The mayor laughed. ‘My dear, it’s always about a woman.’
BLACK CITY
Towers, miles high, stabbing at the misty sky. Countless forbidding towers the colour of dark honey: liquid-skinned towers caught, it seemed, in the act of melting. Supporting the towers from below were black-eyed monoliths carved with coiling serpents and gargoylish beasts from a disturbed imagination. All about the towers was a shifting haze of dots like the imperfections in an old film, a grain to every surface moving with the faint jungle breezes. Bees. Like a black rain, like notes cascading from the pages of the music of the universe. And from the towers came a hum. Not a low, peaceful hum, not the sound of a field in summer – assuming you have experienced such a thing – not the sound of a hive, not even the sound of a field of hives, but something much, much greater. It was a music which made you feel as if the individual grains of your body were shaking loose and dancing you to joyful oblivion.
‘This city is …’ Miss Fritzacopple had not the word to hand. She leaned from their carriage to hear the buzz. The air in Diemendääs is like a spider’s web; it tickles the skin. She saw a row of temples carved with dancing dipping demons, their mouths wide and fanged, some weighed down by powerful phalluses. The demons challenged every visitor to the great city, and they seemed to turn to watch these strangers as they came down a boulevard thick with carriages hauled by giant creatures. She saw their scorpion’s claws rasping at the pristine paving stones. She breathed out so hard that she forgot to breathe in again.
‘I know this place!’ cried Fabrigas, and then to undermine his exclamation: ‘Do I know this place?’ He was leaning out of the other window like an old wolf. ‘I travelled here on one of my earliest adventures, I think. I drank tea with a mystic. He showed me how to vanish my own reflection from the shiny back of a spoon. I rode a raft down rapids into an almost bottomless cavern. I …’ For a second his great brain seemed to break its banks and his eyes fluttered.
The old man is recounting all of this to me, he remembers each event precisely. Each moment is stored like an ancient artefact in the great palace of his memory. And yet he yells at me now, in the darkness of the basement of the mansion on the moon: ‘How could I not remember I had been there before?!’
‘But you clearly have not been to here,’ Lenore huffed from her seat in the carriage upon the scorpion’s back.
‘No,’ the old man replied heavily. ‘This is obviously a different city, in a different universe. Though not everything is different.’
From the journal of M. Francisco Fabrigas
With all that has happened I have had little time to write. We crossed over from our universe, despite it being technically impossible to do so, and despite me sabotaging my own engine, and despite a fleet of our own ships trying to destroy us. We wound up on a man-eating moon. It is a tantalising outcome, for it proves substantively the existence of alternate realities, and thus the possibility that somewhere in the Infiniverse is a moon upon which my father and my nanny, Danni, still live. Such a place inevitably exists.
In any case, we are now in a city called Diemendääs. This Gothic city sits at the foot of seven sleeping volcanoes. It is frightening to behold. And yet its nature compels the visitor to keep his eyes wide open. Its name in the traditional local language cannot be translated, but it loosely equates to … ‘Glory passes’, or perhaps ‘Flesh is brief’, or perhaps ‘Rest in peace’. It rises up in broad plateaux to battlements containing inner suburbs of exquisite geometry, before becoming a series of spires and castles (known locally as the Royal Lily-pad – the home of government and the ruling family), then terminating, finally, at sheer mountain cliffs into which are carved its very ancient monasteries. Inside this labyrinth live ten thousand monks who, our host tells us, expend their lives excavating the catacombs. They work like moles, running through the caves with lamps attached to their foreheads. They are piecing together evidence from their city’s past so that they might learn the precise date on which their city, perhaps their universe, will end.
We have arrived, by fair wind, or not, at the precise hour of the beginning of their most sacred month, the Festival of the Dead.
That is all I know so far.
I must accompany my suit and cloak for decontamination.
Tonight there will be a banquet in our honour.
THE EMPEROR
Our friends were taken to a decontamination centre, then to their suites where they bathed and rested. Their clothes were kept for further decontamination. At 500 local time the guests were taken by boat to the royal banquet hall for a feast in their honour. Perfume River was six miles wide and thick with pleasure boats, carnival ships, multi-storey steamers, many as high as six levels; their paddles flashed in the foggy air and from one bank you could not see the other.
At 535 local time they arrived at the banquet hall, a mile-long open-sided hall placed in the middle of the river. The hall was filled with Diemendääs’s greatest citizens: artists, poets, leaders, generals, the conspicuously wealthy; they all stood to applaud our friends, their jewels and medals tinkling merrily. The people of Diemendääs applaud in time, did you know? They were escorted to the far end, to a raised platform below a throne some eight feet high and carved with serpents. At 548 local time Lenore complained of a fever. ‘Miss Lady, I don’t feel good. This place is all too much. There’s a beating in my head.’
‘It’s just the heat. Drink some water.’
At 549 local time Lenore drank some water.
At 600 l.t. the royal barge came through the mist like a river monster, and the assembled guests rose, a gangplank fell, a figure emerged, a tall shadow in a long coat who spasmed in the hot and hazy air. The figure lingered along the gangplank and spent a minute staring down the river, and Miss Fritzacopple would observe later (at around 2213 l.t.) that he seemed lonely, and the captain would observe (at roughly the same time) that he seemed ‘stupid’, and Fabrigas would comment that he didn’t seem to be the man he remembered.
‘That’s him?’ said Fabrigas.
‘If you mean the Emperor,’ said the mayor, ‘then yes.’
‘I’ve met him. I think. I do not remember him ever looking so … imperious.’
‘Our beloved ruler has many things on his mind,’ said the mayor. ‘With the giant worm, the armies camped at his western wall, the terrible virus that recently struck our bee community, the outbreaks of dancing sickness, the monks who every day proclaim the coming end – even our own moon wants to destroy us. The stress has begun to show … And of course there’s the deaths.’
Yes, a series of mysterious deaths in the steamy jungle city.
At 616 local time, with several thousand heavily armed guards surrounding the venue, with ‘frog-men’ in the river, and snipers with blow-dart tubes hidden in the eaves and on the roofs, and several thousand guests each holding a fluteful of wine and a lungful of foggy air, the Emperor turned and walked briskly to his throne. He was followed by three boy-servants, one carrying a ceremonial bowl, one carrying a golden egg and one carrying a lamp with lighted wick. The Emperor ascended his throne and sat stern, motionless. The pudgy Prince Panduke arrived, stood by his seat at the lower table and frowned.
‘So it’s you people again.’
‘Yes, hello, I will have a brandy or strong wine,’ said Lambestyo, and the prince snapped, ‘I’m not a wait-boy, insolent fool!’ Kimmy and Miss Fritzacopple smiled behind their hands. There was no sign of the Empress. It was 618 local time.
‘Honoured guests,’ said a young crier, ‘you bless the royal family with your presence. You have destroyed a creature which could have ridden across the city’s walls as if they were made of chalk, smothered us all beneath its blubbered belly. But you killed it with a manned bullet through the brain-pan, and for that they are royally grateful.’
‘Who? Us?’
‘Shhhh.’ The botanist glared at the captain. ‘Put down your fork.’
The captain put down the fork and turned his chair, slung one arm across the back. He did not enjoy long speeches.
‘… Our city is suffering a tide of misfortune. The worm, the outbreaks of the initially hilarious, but now tragic, dancing fever; the invaders massed upon our western wall, though fortunately not our eastern!’
A shudder of agreement passed through the crowd.
‘Oh, oh yes,’ the captain gestured with a steak knife, ‘not the eastern!’
‘Shhhhhh,’ said Fritzacopple. ‘If you don’t behave I’ll send you home.’
‘You aren’t the boss of me.’ But he put down his knife.
‘And of course,’ continued the crier, ‘there are the recent misfortunes, those which have made us all afraid to leave our apartments, mansions and bungalows.’
Killings. He could have said ‘killings’ and heard no less a desperate wind pass through the room. A plague of brutal and mysterious deaths had beset this city. The city’s elite had begun to dispatch themselves in increasingly bizarre ways. Only a few days before, Krugg Micentrappen, acclaimed for his adorable photographs of babies dressed as vampires, was found suffocated to death, his mouth stuffed with several cubic feet of purple velvet, though there was no sign of forced entry to his apartment.