by M. Suddain
‘Seriously? Has everyone here gone soft? All right. As you wish. It will be very cold, and very dark.’ The Well Dressed Man took back his blade and it vanished into his jacket.
Before she was taken away the Black Widow said, ‘I will prove myself to you.’
‘You already have, woman,’ Fabrigas replied bitterly.
She was taken to a cell at the army barracks. It was indeed very dark, and very cold, and had just a small skylight in the roof. The rectangle of light at the end of the corridor shrank to a thin line and she was left in blackness with only the ghosts of her past for company.
RETIREMENT
‘Sir?’
Carrofax had stayed silent through most of the night, unable to cope, as always, with the inky depths of human feelings. He could understand their violence. He could almost understand their lust. But their sadness, misery, the way they seemed to make every decision in their lives from within a cyclone of feelings, these were depths the phenomenal spirit could not fathom.
‘I only wanted to go away to a moon. To find my father and my nanny. Was that too much to ask? To live in peace?’
‘Sir, I just wanted to let you know that the girl is safe.’
‘I don’t care about the girl. I don’t care about anything now.’
‘I still have not found the ship, or Roberto. Though I have found out who this Calligulus –’
‘I don’t care about them any more, Carrofax.’
‘No?’
‘I am done with it all.’
‘You are … done with it?’
‘Yes, the ship, the boy, the girl, the spies, the giant slugs. I’m done with it. I wash my hands. I am retiring.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I am officially retiring. I have had a true revelation in the past few weeks, a revelation which goes far beyond discovering the secret to travelling between dimensions, or proving that you exist. I have discovered that none of this matters.’
‘It doesn’t?’
‘No. If all possibilities exist simultaneously in a continuum, and my experience of this continuum is but a subjective dream, then there is little point in concerning myself with the outcome of those experiences. I am not a hero in some action cine film or 8-bit novel. I am a real person.’
‘I see.’
‘The Emperor has offered me a dukedom here. Once the Pope leaves he will lift my house arrest and I can have my apartment, live out my final years in peace. There are more miracles here in this city than I have found in all my travels combined. Could I ask for any more?’
His spectral manservant could never remember being speechless before.
‘The Pope will extract his toll here before he leaves.’
‘Then let him. When the Pope and all his ships have gone I’ll stay here, in peace. I’ll die, go to heaven, end of story.’
‘To … heaven?’
‘So.’
‘But …’ how exactly to word this sentence? ‘… there is no heaven for you, master. I can tell you that for a fact.’
‘Well, the beyond then! Wherever.’
‘Humans do not travel to the beyond. Why would they?’
‘Because … well … humans possess an immortal … thing, it …’
‘Why would you presume such a thing?’ His demon spoke gently.
‘I … I don’t know, I just …’ and he didn’t know why.
‘Why would you assume that a frail creature such as you would be given not only the precious gift of life, but the ultimate gift, also – the gift of immortality? Even we spectral beasts aren’t immortal. We live, we die.’
‘Enough! You are free, Carrofax. I release you now. Go back to wherever it is you came from.’
‘You … release me?’
‘Yes. Was I not clear? I no longer need your assistance. I thank you for your services and I hereby release you to return to … the wherever.’
‘I see. If that is your decision. Once you say it a third time nothing can be done.’
‘It is my decision.’
‘Sir. I have known you since you were a small boy. If you only knew how close you are to finding –’
‘Carrofax, I don’t care! A man can search for a thousand years and be no closer to the truth. I just want to be left in peace.’
‘Well then. If there’s nothing else I can do.’
‘You can go and help the girl. She is partly your own kind after all.’
‘Actually, she is not …’ Carrofax decided to leave it aside. ‘You know I can only do so much.’
‘Do what you can.’
‘I will. It has been an honour to serve you. A third time, then.’
‘Yes.’ He turned to face his servant. ‘Carrofax. I release you.’
It was strange, but at that moment Carrofax experienced a sensation that he thought might be close to a real human feeling. But perhaps not.
Fabrigas stood most of the night on his balcony. His apartment overlooked the courtyard of the royal barracks. There was a small nest with four eggs near his window. Each egg shone like a moon. He went in and dozed fitfully until sometime before dawn when his dreams were invaded by the sound of a prisoner being brought in across the way. The man was shouting in a voice that could have been coming from the old man’s own skull.
‘This is an outrage! The general’s wife and I had simply gone into the storeroom so we could have a moment’s quiet to discuss the concept of gravity. Her girdle was unhooked because she was desperately hot. This is an insult of the highest magnitude!’
So, they had finally caught the man who had canoodled with the general’s wife. He must have been a clever man to stay at large for so long. The man blustered all the way to his cell and then was silent.
THE MESMERIST AND THE MIND
The Well Dressed Man knew what a young girl’s mind should look like and this was not it. A young girl’s mind was a sweetly confusing place. Nothing was solid. Everything was constantly in flux, sliding and subsiding like an ice floe of pinkish consciousness. He had woken at dawn, excited to begin work on breaking into Lenore’s giggly mind-palace, and had instead found a kingdom with a solid and precise architecture. This labyrinth had been here for, it seemed, countless millennia. Its walls were old and caked in moss, and there were carvings along the way that told the story of her life, the people she’d met, loved and lost. The newest part, of course, was still under construction, and the children in bright yellow hard-hats looked up briefly from their work as the Well Dressed Man passed by. He could travel at will through this girl’s mind, as with any person. It was like a game to him, a simulation. But unlike other young girls’ minds he couldn’t change anything here. If he moved to pick up an object, a stone or a hammer, the object would vanish and reappear somewhere else, or he’d receive a sharp slap on the hand from a baby-builder, or a swift bite from a sleeping snake, or the object would burst into flames. It was extremely vexing. But worse than any of this, when he travelled back through the maze, back through the years, he eventually came to a great wall of ice. He couldn’t break through, and the wall was limitless in every direction. He’d spent hours flying out at speed in each direction, but the wall had flown with him, on, and on, and on. He’d conjured fire to melt a deep hole in the ice, but it had taken all the strength he had, and at the end all he’d achieved was a crater a few feet deep which had frozen over in seconds when he’d stopped.
But it wasn’t time to give up yet. It was important that he broke through this wall, because behind it was the secret to her power, and if there was one thing the Well Dressed Man liked more than killing, it was power. As his mentor always said, ‘You can learn a lot from your prey before you kill it.’ And with this girl his words were never truer.
‘When you’re finished playing inside of my head I would like to taste water.’
Lenore sat upright in her chair. The Well Dressed Man sat opposite, leaning forward, his elbow on his knee and his hand on his chin. He had removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves
.
‘I’ll give you a glass of water if you tell me who you are and where you came from.’
‘That does not sound like a good deal. And I hardly know.’
The material of his trousers – a blend of the finest imported baby mountain goat wool and spider silk – swished as he changed position. ‘Then tell me, where is your friend, the boy?’
‘Roberto?’
‘Roberto. Yes.’
‘I have no ideas. He abandoned me.’
‘Cad. Did he say anything before he left?’
‘Such as what?’
‘Such as where he might be going?’
‘He might. Why would you want to know about Roberto? He is just a stupid boy.’
‘Don’t get me started. I was just making idle chit-chat.’
‘That’s fine,’ said the small girl. ‘We have all the time in the universe.’
As the Well Dressed Man stared into the hideously beautiful abyss that shimmered in the small skull on the slender shoulders upon the wooden chair opposite, he began to wonder for the first time who was really being kept against their will.
‘Lenore.’
‘It is me.’
‘I know what it’s like to be alone. To be unique. We could rule, you and I. The power we’d have together. If we could blend our talents there is no limit to what we could do. That Pope, with all his war machines, is nothing compared to you and me. I could be the father you lost. We could bring your friend Roberto back. We could retrieve your captain from the Forbidden Zone.’ For the first time, a quiver. He felt her mind vibrate slightly. Love. The weakness of her human hemisphere.
‘And wouldn’t you like to have Roberto back again? If you tell me where he is I can help to bring him back.’
‘Why are you so interested in Roberto all of a sudden?’
There was less assertiveness in her voice now. She was melting. He ventured in cautiously. He saw that she had carved two words in the hard white wall.
‘I had no idea a girl your age knew such filthy words,’ said the Well Dressed Man.
‘I’m a very fast learner.’
*
But she wasn’t the only one.
Diemendääs woke to a strange tyranny. Most were already aware that the city was now surrounded by battle stations. They blackened the sky, they upstaged the silvery sphere Bespophus. The end had finally arrived. Even the besiegers camped at the western wall halted their attack and sat around on their siege machines, staring up in wonder at the shapes which blotted the suns. But worse, as the locals awoke, they knew instantly that their minds had also been blotted. There was no panic. People went about their business. Or, to be precise, they went about his business. The Well Dressed Man ran the city like a puppet show. He instituted new laws with a flip of his mind: such that every citizen now found themselves skipping to work, and yelling ‘Chicken!’ before they entered a room. It was a strange spectacle.
Even the Well Dressed Man was surprised. He’d always been able to control the minds of small groups of people. And usually that was all he needed. To control an army, after all, you only had to enchant its leaders. But since he’d ventured inside Lenore’s phantasmal mind his powers had multiplied. Now he could control an entire city. He did it effortlessly, while reading, or talking to the Emperor. He made legions of citizens perform complex recitals from his favourite operas – complete with choreography. And he loved it.
To make things even more bizarre, the Pope had made it snow. He had announced that it was the week of Festivus, and added that there was no such thing as a Festivus without snow. The Emperor had protested, pointing out that his people had never even seen snow before: ‘They won’t know what to do!’ But the Pope was firm. And so his great snow-makers had descended from the clear, tropical skies, and they had covered the city and its mountain in a layer of feathery druff. The people came, stunned, to their windows, they pressed their noses to the glass, then they ran from their houses, pausing only briefly at their doors to exclaim, ‘Chicken!’
‘We won’t be troubling you for long, Emperor,’ said the Well Dressed Man. They stood on the Emperor’s balcony admiring the fat white flakes which fluttered from above. ‘Soon I’ll have what I want and the Pope and I will leave.’
‘The deal was you’d leave when I handed over the wizard and the children. My wife and I have done what you asked.’
‘Yes, child-ren. I need the boy to come back. Was that not clear?’
‘No. It was not.’
‘Well, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t take long. That girl in the cave up there will share her secrets soon, I’m sure. When I’ve got what I want I’ll hand her to the Pope and he’ll leave. That boy will come back, I just know it. This saga could hardly end without him.’
‘Chicken!’ A page entered and placed a bundle of correspondence on the Emperor’s in-tray. ‘Chicken!’ and he left.
THE NECRONAUT
They returned Roberto to his cage. After the jump, everything was silence. Silence beyond all possible silence. And then, from above, there was a scream: low at first, then rising to a pitch only possible from someone under insufferable pain, or insufferable fear. Soon the entire crew was joining in – a choir of unspeakable terror. Then, silence again, for a breathless minute, and then Descharge heard the creaking of the stairs. Slowly, one step at a time, the stairs muttered like a toad. A figure was descending slowly, and soon a pair of red legs came into view. When the figure reached the bottom of the stairs Descharge beheld a sight so terrifying that his heart spasmed, and his cry caught like a bone in his throat. It was a tall, muscular figure, a man of pure flesh, only this man’s outer flesh had been stripped from off his body, leaving only his red, raw muscles. He had nails punched through various points in his body – points which seemed to plot a web of satanic meridians – and on his shoulders were the raw, bony stumps of severed wings. Despite his state, the man – if indeed he was one – showed no signs of pain. He moved languidly from the stairs, leaving a pattern of bloody footprints across the room, until he stood before the cage. Then he turned his sad eyes on Descharge.
‘Why have you made this crossing?’
It seemed like a simple question, but Descharge was unable to speak. He turned to Roberto, who sat staring, his face frozen like a boy who has perished of fright.
‘I ask again: you are the commanding officer of this vessel. Why have you made this crossing? This crossing was not supposed to happen. This boy has endangered the entire operation. The Infiniverse is now in more chaos than it ever was.’
The flayed man’s voice was not particularly menacing. It was calm, well mannered.
‘We had no choice. They were going to skin a girl.’
‘His actions have meant you’ll all die. The whole of reality will descend into chaos. Is this better?’
‘I acted out of conscience.’
‘Your conscience is of no value. You need to undo what you’ve done. When you regain control of your ship, set a course nine clicks below the artificial meridian: 77.7 degrees magnetic Norde. This will give you the slimmest chance of success. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
Descharge nodded. The visitor turned towards Roberto and fixed eyes with him. Slowly, the look of terror on the boy’s face subsided. He nodded twice. Then the flayed man left. The screaming resumed above, then died.
Descharge slept fitfully. Roberto slept not at all. Descharge woke to find a curious scene: Roberto had his arm extended towards the far wall by the stairs. The wall had a small transformer box bolted to it. The clever boy had managed to remove his bonds and the rubber gloves – his hand sparkled blue, and there was a faint electrical haze extending from his fingers to the box on the wall. He sat frozen like that for minutes, brow wrought in concentration, until finally he dropped his arm, exhausted, and groaned in sheer frustration. Then, after a few minutes’ rest, he raised his arm and started again.
Nothing had been heard from above for a long while, but then they heard the poet’s s
hrieking voice. ‘We are lost! Lost! Lost! You have doomed us all!’ Then there was a scuffle, boots could be heard scraping across the deck. Then Braika, the boy who brought them food, came down again and said, ‘The surgeon tried to stab the poet but stabbed the cook instead. He should recover, unfortunately.’
‘They’ll soon kill each other,’ said Descharge. ‘I just hope they don’t kill us all.’
It continued like this for roughly a week: hours of deathly silence followed by cataclysmic arguments. Roberto kept at his electrical meditations, and now the haze of energy around his hand was so bright it was hard to look at. Occasionally the food boy would come below to deliver news. ‘Nobody is talking. It’s very grim.’ Descharge knew that they were becalmed. He knew by the tilt of the ship and the tension in the hull that there wasn’t a breath of sunlight to shift them. He knew that the magnetic propellers were still broken. He knew by the fact that their meals had been cut to one per day that supplies were running low. ‘They must have been eating like pigs.’
One night the cook, the poet and the surgeon floated down the stairs. They were gaunt, exhausted, and in the dim blue light of the gas lamps shining through the hatch they looked like spirits. ‘Would you be willing to glance at the charts and tell us where we are?’ said the surgeon delicately.
‘It’s useless,’ replied Descharge. ‘We don’t have charts for every universe.’ Idiots.
‘But perhaps if you were to look at the features around us you might recognise something. It would be in your interest. We’re about to ration food to a few bites per day.’
‘I can tell from down here that there are no features. We are not within sunlight, and so we can’t move. Besides, if the ship comes under my power I’ll simply take us back to rescue the others.’
‘There’ll be none of that,’ said the surgeon. ‘You’ll be the first to be eaten if we need to.’
‘If you take a step inside my cell I’ll kill you,’ and he took his hands from behind his back to show that they were no longer bound.