by M. Suddain
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Some are even saying criminal charges should be brought against you.’
‘Criminal charges?!’
‘Obviously it is nonsense. This is just a vocal minority in Parliament. But we must be patient. We will continue to offer you the finest hospitality. In the meantime I have an invitation from the Empress.’
‘The Empress! At last we shall meet this famous beauty.’
‘It is not for you, I’m afraid. Just the girl.’
‘Lenore?’
‘Yes. My wife is very curious to meet her.’
SUPPER
Lenore was taken by carriage through the quiet streets to the royal residence. She was taken through corridors lined with heavily varnished wood and marble. She toyed with the gift she’d brought for the Empress. The Emperor had made it very clear that she should bring a gift, but, having few possessions, she realised she would be forced to give the only thing she had. She was led by two servants. She was brought to a set of doors whose handles burned with traces of a man whose hands had held a brandy glass just minutes before. An ancient odour crawled out from beneath the door.
‘Do I knock?’ But she realised the servants had left.
‘The door is open,’ said a voice from the other side.
*
The room had tall windows, heavy curtains, the odour of a stagnant lake. The only furniture in the room was a table with a small armchair, and a bed set on heavy velvet paws. The voice spoke softly. ‘Come in, mouse, your supper is ready.’
Soup. A small glass of wine. She sat before the soup and breathed deeply. She couldn’t sense her host. It was as if only her voice had come to supper.
‘I hope you don’t mind eating late.’ The voice was so soft you could hardly hear it, like a sigh. ‘I always eat late because I sleep poorly otherwise.’
‘I know that you do,’ said the girl.
‘The girl that knows too much. Let’s drink a toast to you becoming a woman then. In Diemendääs the older children are allowed a bee’s-nose full of wine with dinner. Here’s to you and all you’ll soon become.’
‘They say bad things will happen when I become a mature woman. I hear them talking.’
‘Never mind about that. I too had a troublesome adolescence. We become what we become. Drink.’
Lenore took a sip and suddenly she was no longer in the room. The ways seemed to part, the heavy flesh vanished, and she found herself inside a humming cloud where for a brief second she could see the colours dancing. The sensation vanished in the flick of a wing.
‘Isn’t it wonderful? In human tradition wine is drunk to escape life. In our tradition it is a sacred thing, a revealer of life and truth. In reality we are so much more than the cages we live in.’
Lenore felt as if she’d just been told a great secret. ‘I have brought you a gift. They said I should.’ She produced the starfish from her pocket. For a few seconds, as she held it up, she thought her host had left the room. A vacuum seemed to tear open in the air.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Oh, we have found them along our way. They arrive where we are.’
‘Girl, this is one gift I cannot accept. She is your guardian, a living thing.’
‘She is my guardian?’
‘Yes, and you cannot give your friends as gifts. You will need her where you’re going. She is bringing you home. You are about to go on an adventure that will make everything you’ve been through so far seem mundane. But to get there you have to be prepared to face a terrible enemy, and to lose the people you love.’
‘I don’t want to do either of these things.’
‘But you have to.’
‘He’s a man. A man in a suit. He takes people’s minds.’
‘Very good, yes. Destroying him will be a big test.’
‘I’m too frightened to face him.’
‘You don’t need to be frightened. I can protect you. I can show you a secret you can use against him. He won’t be prepared for your power. But you’ll need to give me something in return.’
‘I don’t have anything to give you.’
‘Yes you do. You just don’t know it yet. You must make a choice: do you want to give me a small gift, something you won’t miss, or to die?’
‘It depends. What is the small gift I won’t miss?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Then it’s decided. As a reward for your good work so far I’m willing to let you ask me three questions. But choose very carefully.’
‘I dreamed my captain left us. Will he leave us? I loves him.’
The voice, deep yet light as air, made a sound as if to laugh but checked itself.
‘And you say you have nothing to lose. You don’t know love yet. Love is pain, not fulfilment. You need to get used to losing friends, because you’re going to lose many. Forget about the captain.’
‘I’ll not forget him.’
This time the voice did laugh. ‘You’ve already wasted one question on a boy. That should be your first lesson.’
‘Who am I?’
‘You are Lenore. There’s no one like you.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I can’t tell you what you are. It’s something you have to discover.’
‘Then what good are you?’
‘Be careful.’
‘I’m sorry. That was not one of the questions.’
‘I will grant you that. You are a genetic aberration, a glitch in the great and ancient code. Much like the starry creature you wear around your neck. That is why people want to destroy you. You are like a beacon in the blackness, drawing moths of destiny towards you.’
‘I am, I am the talisman.’
‘I suppose that’s another way to put it.’
‘And you are what?’
Again the voice laughed. ‘I am a lonely woman. A lonely woman and a prisoner in my own city.’
‘You have powers.’
‘Sometimes power is a weakness. You’ll learn that soon. And I am just a whiff of what you’ll be one day.’
Lenore felt the world rushing away and she felt very alone.
‘Don’t be sad. You’re going to see things that no one else can dream of. Just be brave. And remember, there’s no such thing as death. And now the secret I promised to tell you.’
Her secret, sacred words enveloped Lenore like a fog. She felt as if she was leaving her body, and then a face began to show itself, dimly, a face so luminous and beautiful that Lenore forgot to breathe. The face vanished.
‘You must tell no one what I’ve shown you.’
But later, Lenore could not even remember, and she had no idea what price she’d agreed to pay for the secret she’d been given.
CAPTAIN
Hadley’s People’s Almanac has several Carlos Góngora Lambestyos, among them one who fits the basic story of the man we’ve come to know. A bastard baby born to a young prostitute via a prominent naval officer. The baby was left at the Royal Naval Hospital for the officer shortly after he returned from a campaign against the Vangardik hinterlands near Bohemia. To cover up the scandal, he paid the woman off, enrolled the boy in a secret and elite naval school. The mother returned the money, along with a note, shortly before she leaped from a bridge. The baby received state-of-the-art naval mods, and a first-rate education from the day he turned one. He flew his first mission aged ten, and was a decorated Black Ops pilot by the age of fourteen. At fifteen he was lost during a top-secret mission. No attempt was made to recover his remains. Details from here are sketchy at best.
There was little to see of the young hero in the captain these days. The city had taken the life from him. The noise of the bees had become an infuriating fuzz inside his skull, like the static from a modern radiogram. All he cared about was drinking in the Land’s End, the old tavern by the space docks.
Fabrigas had gone to find him the previous day, but he wasn’t in the
reeking den. He had waited as patient as a toad as the hours passed, observing the grimy sailors come and go. He would never admit it, but it made him happy to sit in such a place and watch the comings and goings.
It was almost four hours into his meditations when he looked up to discover a boy at his table. And what a face this boy had, such a face you’ve never seen. When the old man addressed him he raised a pair of glassy eyes. It was as if he did not even remember sitting at the old man’s table just a few seconds ago.
‘I’m becoming sadder by the hour. I no longer sleep. I feel like my spirit is being drained from me. I lose whole days. Where do they go? I can’t tell you.’
This tavern did not have jasmine tea. Fabrigas took a pot of gingered beer and listened to the boy as he talked endlessly. It was necessary, he thought, with all this boy had been through, with all he’d seen, to be constantly in motion. A person might describe this feeling as ‘wanderlust’ – if that person was an idiot. Wanderlust is the feeling that if you don’t take a trip you might start knocking people’s hats off. What this boy had was the feeling that if he didn’t move soon, he would die.
‘Everyone is very worried about you. We are like a family now.’
‘Don’t talk to me about family. You abandoned me. You gave me poison soup. You were going to leave me in space.’
‘I know. There are some things I need to work on.’
‘There is barely any love in the universe. And where there is it is an evil magic. It is a superstition of the heart, yes? You told me this. So don’t talk to me about family. You abandoned me and you’ll do it again. That botanist does not care about anyone but herself. The girl is a monster. Everyone else is gone. Even the man who swore to hang me has abandoned me.’ He laughed. ‘But it’s not the first time he’s done that. I forgive him. I forgive him for everything. Let’s drink some more and forget. Let’s let the booze delight our minds with forgetfulness. Let’s become like old men.’
‘It won’t be long, boy. They’ll give us a ship. And then we’ll find the boy.’
‘That boy! What’s his name?’
‘Roberto?’
‘Yes! The crazy boy. Whatever happened to him?’
‘… If you remember … he vanished with our ship.’
‘Why are we waiting here, then? This city is eating our days. It is stealing our minds!’
‘For now, we have no choice. We must be patient. The Emperor is attempting to arrange a ship for us. We could try another meeting.’
‘No more meetings! He is Emperor, he should be able to conjure a ship like this!’ He tried to snap his fingers. He could not snap his fingers.
Fabrigas went back to the others and expressed concern. ‘A boy like that can’t stay still for long. A boy like that needs to stay in motion or he’ll drown in his own black waters. A boy like that is like a shark!’
‘Yes,’ said Fritzacopple, ‘a shark.’ The others nodded, then returned to their activities.
Late at night, when the innkeeper finally kicked him out, the shark would drift back home through the halls and outer palaces, dunking his head in the fountains and snorting at the ostentatious royal portraits that hung along the marble warrens. Tonight was particularly quiet; his boot-falls boomed along the passages, and the warm air swooned and wobbled. There was one painting he always stopped to see and never snorted at. She stood in leaves, a white gown falling over her like seawater. Behind her was a forest; blood-red limbs enfolded her. She seemed to be about to step from the frame into the real world, but also to be retreating, falling away. The strangest thing about the painting was that every time he looked at it he saw something new. Last night he’d noticed that on the lake in the distance was a small rowing boat with a man in it. His face was just a smear of paint. Tonight he noticed a second man, a twin; he held a knife to the first man’s throat. Captain Lambestyo felt a predatory breath upon his neck, then looked round to find nothing.
What preys upon a shark? That is an excellent question. You really do ask very good questions.
SOUND AND VISION
A week became two, then three. Strange and awful things had begun to happen in the city of Diemendääs. Or perhaps that should be stranger and awfuller. As if the mysterious self-killings had not been enough to keep the populace terrified, the remains of a palace guardsman – half eaten, as if by a beast – were found in one of the courtyards. People reported bizarre distortions of their familiar realities: doors that appeared from nowhere, that opened into forests, or caves, or other people’s living rooms. One night it rained green crickets, and someone even reported seeing a large, shaggy creature with a pretty muzzle. The city’s Secret Police had finally acknowledged the fact that malevolent forces were involved in the recent self-killings, self-mutilations and auto-decapitations which had scythed through the city’s wealthy classes, and they decreed that until the killer was caught, every citizen should be home by a certain hour.
There was still no sign of their old ship, or word of a new one from the Emperor. Fabrigas took an apartment overlooking the river and began to fill it with books and things as if he never planned to leave. The city’s great minds arrived like moths, drawn to the light and heat of scientific speculation. They spent the nights sucking coffee through their teeth and flitting from one grand subject to another.
When Fabrigas wasn’t holding court at his bachelor pad he could be found in Dray’s laboratory. Lenore had started coming along too, since Miss Fritzacopple had begun to exclude her from her field trips with the Emperor. ‘It is far too dangerous now to take the children to public places.’ The Emperor agreed.
‘Running across the place with the older man of marriage,’ said Lenore. ‘Is that how the woman behaves?’
The two men ignored her. ‘My experiments have determined that the membrane between our universe and the Forbidden Zone has weakened significantly,’ said Dray. ‘That might explain why you cherubs were able to enter the zone without any advanced equipment. Very troubling, tortoise, yes. We can’t just have any old thing entering the zone.’
Fabrigas nodded gravely.
‘And look what I found when I checked my equipment today: another starfish!’
Dray handed Fabrigas another silvery star. ‘Well I never.’ The old man held the creature up to the light and examined the fine old markings on its surface.
‘Anyhow, we’d better get you kittens home, the curfew is nearly here!’ He reached for his coat.
‘What in the black hole sun is that?!’ Fabrigas exclaimed. He had a bony finger pointed at a large gun on a wooden tripod pointing at a black cloth screen.
‘Oh, now that is special,’ said Dray as he hung his coat on a chair again. He had been trying for more than an hour to get his visitors out the door. ‘That’s a new remote viewing system I’ve pioneered.’ He pulled a switch and a set of lamps came on with a heavy chank, throwing the room into brightness. ‘This machine here,’ he said, patting the gun instrument, ‘is an image-capturing device. Keep your eye on that vision unit.’ Fabrigas peered at the glass-fronted wooden box. It was black and empty behind the glass, yet when Dr Dray walked in front of the capture gun he appeared instantly behind the glass, a tiny version of himself, waving.
‘Sweet-smelling stars above!’ the old man shouted. ‘You’re in two places at once!’
‘Don’t be silly, chook,’ said Dray. ‘That’s only a facsimile image of me in the box. My image can be transmitted to another location, or recorded for later.’
‘How does it work? Magnetically charged ethers?’
Dray snorted. ‘This invention is going to revolutionise the way we communicate. No more telegraphic messages, no more hyper-space pigeons, just instant audio-visual contact.’
‘Audio-visual,’ whispered Fabrigas breathlessly, and he reached out to tap his finger on the glass screen.
‘We’re putting those boxes into thirty thousand homes across the city, duckling. Think of the possibilities. The Emperor will be able to personally address h
is people. We can stage dramas and readings for the citizenry. It will be useful to have something to help people forget about all this “end-time” nonsense. Soon, everyone in the universe will be talking about Omnivision™.’
‘Omnivision™,’ whispered Fabrigas.
‘I’m right now getting it ready for a trial run at the Ring of Iron next week. Tell you what, sugar-pips, why don’t you perform a dramatic reading from your journals – as a warm-up act?’
‘I am not much of an orator,’ said Fabrigas, ‘and it’s unlikely we’ll be around for much longer. As you know we have a rather pressing mission.’
‘Ah yes, the girl. Astonishing specimen. Potentially quite dangerous.’
‘I’m right here in the room,’ said the girl.
‘So you are.’
*
It only took a few more minutes to persuade Fabrigas to appear on Dr Dray’s Omnivision™ to perform a dramatic reading of their plight at the hands of the cannibal cult.
‘Thom! The drum sounded. The Marshians raised their blades. Bright they gleamed and silvery as a moon’s dreadful edge, despite the greenish sickly light. How bright the single star that hung upon their deadly tips. How dread the thom! which rang twelve times the dismal hour of our deaths!’
As you can well see, the old man has an artful prose style. Though, in my opinion, a tad overcooked. But the whole city tuned in to watch his reading. Those who didn’t yet have Omnivision™ sets crowded into neighbours’ houses, and thousands packed theatres whose proscenium stages had been adapted to support screens. Our friends watched from the Emperor’s own private viewing room and were amazed. Even the Emperor seemed to enjoy himself. In fact, they had all noticed a remarkable transformation in the man during the time he’d spent with the children and their attendant botanist.
Fabrigas capped off his appearance with a short magic show, even persuading Miss Fritzacopple to be his beautiful assistant. (And she was a particularly beautiful assistant, people remarked.) He performed, for the people of Diemendääs, feats of showmanship, suggestion and misdirection. He performed the trick of vanishing, the trick of levitation and, most dramatically, the trick of pretending to stab Miss Fritzacopple through the heart with a real dagger.