Ink

by Hal Duncan

  She'd watched Don grow up as they traveled together, farther and farther out into the Vellum, watched him grow up and grow old, grow into the eyes that had always seemed to hold this wisdom beyond their years. In the end, he'd gone as well, though, ready to lay down his life for fifty slave girls that they'd rescued in a fold of the Vellum that was all too comfortable with the idea of lords and masters. He never made it to the rendezvous, and she never found out what had happened to him, just like she never found out what had happened to Jack.

  Phreedom looks down into the angel's pleading eyes, and she wants so much to just sink into that blue again. It could be him. It could be.

  Time flickers and she knows she's on a cusp. She's often wondered if deja vu comes from your life reversing itself, playing itself over again to some point where you made the wrong decision the last time. Time in the Vellum is complex, convoluted. Maybe in that dreamtime you get an eternity of second chances.

  “It's me,” says the angel, this would-be Duke of Hell on Earth.

  She spits to one side and closes her eyes, feels them rolling up in the sockets; she doesn't listen to the angel's pleading voice, or to the voice of her own reason, just lets the moment, the passion, the inner truth of it possess her. Then she takes his left hand in her right and stands, planting a foot on his chest. The bitmites coursing through her arm give her the strength to tear the shoulder from its socket.

  The angel screams.

  She walks away as Indo and Autonomy and the rest all set to work on the fallen creature, tearing at its flesh with eager fingers. One leaps on the arm as she drops it, like a lion taking down some prey. Another swings a leg above her head, the armored boot flying off.

  The angel's scream and their triumphant yells fuse as a single animal cry, until his breath gutters and chokes and stops, drowned in his own blood.

  “His ribs stripped by their ripping nails,” Elixir sobs, “his body torn apart, his heart burst under a rough rock, his broken limbs thrown from blood-spattered hand to hand, his cock”—Elixir chokes—”thrown deep into the woods.”

  He crumples to the floor, his knees pulled up, his back against the wall.

  “They'll never find it all,” he says.

  Accordion closes the door quietly and comes over, crouches beside the boy.

  “His mother took his head,” Elixir says, “and fixed it on the point of her disrupter, like it was a mountain lion's.”

  He starts to pant, trying to find the breath to sob as well as speak.

  “She's coming now,” he says. “She's left her sisters and the maidens dancing and she carries it down through the meadows of Mount Zithering. Down from the hills at last, she's entering these very walls, entranced.”

  Elixir stares at the closed door, right through it at what's on the other side, this distant horror, coming closer all the time.

  “Sheglories in her victory over this sorry foe,” he says. “She calls out to Iacchus still, her partner in this crime who's helped her triumph in the kill. She doesn't know.”

  Elixir's voice is shrill with fear.

  “She doesn't know her only prize is tears.”

  Columbine's Return

  “I will leave this pitiful scene,” says Guy over the screams, “before the queen reaches the palace.”

  He jumps down from the stage and skirts the wreckage of the rigging, courtiers and serfs backing away as he walks round the carnage, the Duke's body in the center of the hall, the pool of blood and bitmites, Phreedom standing there, her hands red as her hair. The consul panics, makes a run toward the door … where Joey picks the dirt out from under his fingernails with his knife.

  “Self-restraint,” warns Guy. “Respect for the divine. For those who value mortal life, these are the wisest paths to follow … to my mind.”

  The consul thinks the better of it, backs away to join the others now all spread out round the walls. Guy takes his place at Joey's side. He nods to me and then at Jack, still standing on the wagon's roof.

  “Come, let us praise in choral song the spirit of the pack,” I sing out in the Cant. “Come, let us chant the fall of Pierrot, this son of venom, Pierrot, who wore a woman's dress, led by a bull to certain death, led on by his own blind stubbornness.”

  Phree spins the sword around her head and, as she hurls it from her, up into the air, Jack pounces from the roof. He hits the springboard on the stage and sails up, with a somersault, a double twist, to snatch the sword. He lands on the Duke's back with an almighty crack and drives the sword into the corpse, stands there, his hands still on the hilt.

  “Pierrot held the staff of Harlequin,” I sing, “the sure sign of his doom.”

  The Cant echoes around the room.

  “Maidens of Themes, see how it ends in sorrow and in tears, this glorious victory you've won. Is this nobility, to dip your hands into the blood of your own son?”

  Phree holds a hand up.

  “Hush,” I say.

  And in the silence you can hear the drip.

  “Wild-eyed Columbine,” I say, “mother of Pierrot, king of tears and son of sorrow.”

  Phree turns to me as I speak to the house. Her eyes are wild, a child on speed, and all I want to do is go to her and hold her, tell her that it's over now. Christ, Phree, it's all been over from day one. If she could only understand. This fucking war's already over—all the Dukes, the Havens, all the angels and the demons, they're just fucking dreams, dreams given solid flesh in the Hinter by the bitmites, but still dreams.

  I look at Jack, our Harlequin, Dionysus, lord of everything chaotic. Sexy, twisty Jack. Quite possibly psychotic.

  Welcome to hell, I think. Come join the revels of the spirit of the pack.

  “My sisters from the distant land of ash,” Phreedom begins.

  She comes toward me and I clamber off the stage.

  “Look at the gift I've brought home for you, a tender kill fresh from the hills.”

  The happy hunting ground, I think. The Hinter with its nightmares born from the fucked-up hearts of all us fools who love our lies of good and evil, dark and light, and monsters slain by noble knights. Phree, that's all right inside the pages of some book but when you let those lies loose in the world, Phree, when you choose to see it all as a crusade, ajihad against everything you hate … the bitmites give us everything we want.

  “I can see it,” I say.

  But I don't look at what she's holding in her hand, just put my arms around my little sister, say my lines.

  “Welcome to the celebrations,” I say.

  Her hand comes up to stroke my cheek, to make sure that I'm solid, real. She mouths my name. Thomas. Her fingers are still wet.

  “Hail,” I say.

  And I choke and clear my throat and swallow.

  “Hail and well met.”

  SAFE HOME

  We come out of the fire, over the Bridge to Nowhere, shapes carved out of night and flame, a chi-gun in one hand, a jackknife in the other, and rats—little red- eyed plague carriers—scattering before our silent tread. They stream past us, scattering out into the park, these black and burning ghost rats, up the slope and spreading out around the Circus. Rattle of machine guns, shrieks of soldiers dying in their botched raid on the Rookery mingle with the rodent chitter. Louder still, though, is the boom of Fox's gun emplacements. Louder still the crack of doom, the roar of earth opening up beneath our feet.

  The river of fire at our backs licks upward, lurches north and south as ground cracks, seams of methane catching, a solid wall of flame and billowing noxious smoke arcing like wings behind us, black-green with the orgone-drenched fuel of rotting landfill and seeping mine shafts.

  Geysers of flame blast ornithopters from the sky. Jets of blue-green fire spray up into the air. The Rookery has a new line of defense tonight.

  Here and there, a few rats explode into the bitmites that they're built of, shattering into insectoid mechanisms. A chatter of souls, they gather the scraps of skin around us as we walk, the bits of blac
k woolen overcoat burned off, long-coat abandoned on the scorched earth. Shreds of self, we gather them to us, bits and bitmites both. We are them, after all, and they are us, the blood of angels graving the Vellum itself in a black tattoo that marks the true map of this world not in the streets but in the lines of power, the seams of what they call the chi here in this little Haven in the Hinter. We are the coal, the oil made of crushed souls under the skin of time.

  We are ink.

  The low, low tone of Don Coyote drones on, muffled and distant but insistent.

  “—so they say. Well, hell, they been saying that since the world began, and it hasn't happened yet. The only thing that's falling, far as I can see, is Albion's boys in black and blue. They're going to have to call in reinforcements, I'd say. Yes, they're going to have to call the big guns in because, the way I'm looking at it, Fox has won this fight. But, hey, it'sjust one little battle, right? One little struggle through one winter's night. And, as they say, my friends, tomorrow is another day.”

  We clamber up the rusted steel ladder and step out onto tarmac, into a low-roofed tunnel that forks in front of us, the old contours of the exits from the park still followed by the solid blocks of garbage that make up the Rookery's defensive outer wall. Here and there the plaster has crumbled from the walls of crushed cans and boxes mulched with glue, and in the low light of the tunnel you can make out labels of foods and products long since discontinued. Designs going back to the fifties and beyond, boxes for things made out of Bakelite. It's not the smartest move in the world, some would say, building your defense from paper and tin, but it's twenty feet thick or more, and higher, a shell of concrete on the outside giving the Rookery a more impressive face to show to Kentigern.

  A stone statue stands at the fork as sentinel, sunk into the wall, a grim gray Victorian gent with a bushy beard, and a broken hole and smudge of spray paint where his nose once was, staring out at the pile of furniture and sandbags beside us, staring through it at the corrugated iron blocking off the bridge at this end, staring beyond that, maybe, through the hill that slopes up to the Circus, and through Kentigern's sandstone streets of shops and offices, through the Merchant City, through the Necropolis that sits at the edge of Kentigern's eastern wall, and through that wall out into the Hinter itself, looking east, toward the dawn.

  “So anyway, talking of time, it's time for me to go because that new day's getting closer by the second. So tune in at the same time tomorrow night and hopefully we'll have another show. Will I be here? Do any of us really know? Until then though, hey, I have been, and always will be, yes, your one and only Dusk-Till-Don Coyote, signing off his nightly Notes from the Geek Show with a simple message for you folks in slumber-land. The midnight oil's burning low, and there's that fiery glow of daylight or damnation out there on the perimeter. So it's time to wrap those shades around your eyes and stumble out into the cold light of reality. And remember, folks, the sky may not befalling, but there ain't no harm in wearing a hat. Safe home, my friends. Safe home…”

  A squad of Rookery guards stationed under the shadow of the statue lower their rupters, wave us past.

  We take the right-hand fork and follow the tunnel up to where it opens out into the Union Gate. Kiosks and stalls fill the Avenue, which runs downhill from the Hub, its academic architecture—mock-Gothic clashing with neoclassical—all but swallowed among the shacks and Portakabins that have sprung up over decades, eating every inch of free space, built one on top of another, maybe five or six stories of them. In the dark and gorgeous chaos of it all you can hardly make out the rusting barreled and vaulted roofs of the streets for all the washing lines and makeshift bridges crisscrossing between these latter-day tenement blocks. Kids hang from the monkey-frame of scaffolding among the ladders and the strings of arc lamps and the jerry-rigged porches of wooden planks with plastic chairs and patio tables.

  And we remember how we were Jack and Joey, growing up here, clambering over the scaffolding, leaping in dares, learning the acrobatics of survival. Stealing paints and starting fires. In the shattering and scattering of self we feel it fresh as the bitmites swirl between us, taking the pieces back to their rightful owner, confused because they are so similar in this way, that shape. So we notice discrepancies in the scraps of skin being stitched back into place, these shreds of memory being laced back into human shape.

  One of us stops a second, peels a patch of skin from his shoulder, slaps it on the other's back.

  “That's yours, I think.”

  The other stops, brow furrowing. He shakes his head, reaches behind and scrapes the skin off, sticks it to the other's arm.

  “Fuck it, you have it. It's more you than me.”

  Columbine's Return

  Cofurnuine's Return

  “Look here,” she says. “I caught this lion cub without a snare, a tender pup, the whiskers soft on its young cheek under its flowing mane of hair.”

  I hear the whisper of the bitmites underneath her voice, not quite in sync, the rolling rhythm with its ups and downs that little bit ahead, as she recites the lines they feed. She lifts the dead lump in her hand to show it but I stop her arm. Not yet.

  “The hair z's· like some wild beast's,” I say.

  But I'm not looking at the severed head, but at the smear of red upon her cheek, the hair that falls across her eyes. I push it back behind her ear and let my hand brush down her face to wipe the blood spot with a thumb.

  “Come, share the feast,” she says.

  “Where did you catch it?” I say. “In what desert lair?”

  “On Zithering,” she says. “Yes”—quiet, almost questioning, as if she's only now uncovering a truth long buried deep inside—”Mount Zithering,” she says. “That's where he died.”

  I know I have to take it slowly, coax her gently through the puzzle of the past, from abreaction into anamnesis; brutal Phreedom with her heart brittle as glass.

  “Who struck it first?” I say.

  “That joy was mine. Among our band I'm known as happy Columbine.”

  She looks down at the body of the Duke, the slick of black that's taking it apart. Jack crouches down at one side of the mess. He's cut the ropes around the wrists and rolled the body over, ripped the bodice open; he's examining the graving on its chest.

  “My sisters struck the creature after me,” says Phree. “Yes, after me, they did the rest.”

  ——

  “Fate smiled upon your hunting then?” I say.

  She points at limber, nimble Jack, his head cocked like a dog's in curiosity.

  “The spirit of the pack,” she says, “inspired the maidens as we chased our kill and dragged it from the lion's den.”

  Jack's finger traces the hatchwork of scars.

  “He is,” I say, “a hunter with great skill.”

  “Then you approve? The progeny of Pantaloon—and my own son Pierrot, too—will praise me soon for capturing this prey”

  I pause. The body of the Duke lies crooked-armed, the skirt pushed up to show one leg twisted beneath the other. One hand seems to reach out, open, with its palm up, like a beggar's, reaching out to me, to Phreedom, to anyone. Phree looks at me, a cat that's brought some bird with broken wings and lolling head home, as an offering. A strange sort of prey I think, and strangely caught.

  “Of course,” I say. “It's what you had to do.”

  It's what she needs to hear.

  I let a hint of hidden meaning enter into what I say. But… be gentle.

  “You're proud of what you've done?”

  “I'm pleased,” she says.

  Her voice is empty though, repeating what the bitmites whisper in her ear, and with the smell of entrails spilled onto the floor making the bile rise in my throat, that burning taste of sick, I wonder what cruel fucker said revenge is sweet.

  “I've won a victory for all my land to see,” she says.

  I feel the slightest tremble of her shoulder as I turn her round to face the audience and the slick of gore. I still ca
n't look at what she's holding in her hand—or I don't want to. Really I don't want to. But every one of us here in this room, courtiers and servants, players just as much, and Phreedom, my poor Phreedom most of all, all have to see. To really truly understand.

  “Let's all gaze on the glory of the prize you've won,” I say.

  She holds it up by its long hair, the head of the dead Duke.

  “Go on,” I say “let's all take a good look.”

  LADY LIBERTY

  The townsfolk scatter as Phreedom strides into the agora, overturning stalls and barrows as she passes. She takes the steps in front of the Basileus's marble hall two at a time, wheels round within the portico. Framed by Corinthian columns, under the pediment's relief that shows the legendary Sacking of Washington, she holds the angel's head up.

  “Citizens of fair-walled Themes,” she says, “come see the fierce wild beast we girls have caught.”

  Sandminers whisper in a gruff group. A silk salesman gathers yards of sleek purple cloth out of the dust of a toppled stall. Fishmongers, bakers, fruitmen and matchgirls, all stand wary guard over their goods. Butchers reach for their cleavers.

  “This is no idle boast,” she says, “by men with weapons bought from armorers’ stores. We caught this prey and tore the monster limb from limb with our bare hands,” she roars. “No catapults or spears or traps.”

  No, she thinks, none of that crap.

  “Where is the old man? Call him here. Where is my boy? Tell him to bring a ladder, raise it up against the house and nail this lion's head up on the wall, my treasure from the hunt.”

  Don slips into her memory like a dream, a seamless interpolation, just a simple, subtle alteration. He simply walks round from behind the Basileus's hall.

  “Follow me. Roond tae the front, men, wi’ yer burden in yer arms. Aye, follow, wi’ the corpse of Pierrot. It took a long an’ weary search tae find it as ye see it, torn tae bits and scattered a’ through Zithering's glade, wi’ no two bits thigither. Bring it hither.”