by Hal Duncan
“Where are we going?” Carter calls over the head of a little Jewish girl in black dress, white pinafore, rag doll dangling from one hand while the other clutches the hem of her mother's skirt, to whom Carter nods—excuse me, pardon me—as he sidesteps past, to stand beside Tamuz at the glass and shining steel revolving doors, the main entrance of the Ben-Abba Airfields terminal.
“Tell el-Kharnain,” says Tamuz.
The boy holds up a hand, palm out. Wait here. Walking backward into the revolving doorway.
“I will take you to Tell el-Kharnain,” he calls back. “You will wait. I will bring the driver. Trust me. We go now,” he says. “Tell el-Kharnain.”
THE RUIN OF LIFE
As Ab Irim said to his servant Eliezer, my friend, it is said that God gave suits of skin to Adam and Eve when they had eaten from the tree in his garden and gained the knowledge of good and evil, to hide their nakedness. It is said that, after he had risen to Heaven, Enoch gave these same suits to Noah to keep safe from the flood, that they were stolen from Noah by Ham, and that from Ham they were passed on, through his sons, until one day, so it is said, these tattered suits of skin, long since torn into pieces by the ravages of time, came into the ownership of Nimrod, King of Babylon. And Nimrod looked at these skins and saw that there were words upon them.
What does this mean? Nimrod asked the idols on their pedestals.
We do not know, they answered. But surely it is the Word of God.
And what is that Word? said Nimrod.
Death, they told him.
Being a king, and more powerful than wise, Nimrod had no understanding of this word, so believing he had the Book of Enoch, the Scribe of God himself, believing he had the secret of Heaven in his grasp, he gathered wise men from every corner of his kingdom to study these scraps of skin, great men of learning, astrologers and priests to explain its meaning.
They worked on the scraps of skin, joining them this way and that, trying to find a meaning that the king would understand. They produced study after study, and they found an infinity of meaning in the scraps of skin. They found all of the world's legends in the countless permutations of a few simple symbols; they found mathematics and poetry, science and religion, elaborate theories full of wisdom which seemed true but which were full of contradictions. They learned so much that Nimrod had to build a tower to house this learning, the Tower of Babel, but still they could find no single, simple meaning that a king would understand, only the same theme that appeared time and again.
What does this mean? Nimrod would ask them.
We do not know, they would say. But surely it is the Word of God.
And what is that Word? said Nimrod.
Death, they told him.
Being a king and more powerful than wise, Nimrod had no understanding of this word, so he came to believe it meant his overthrow at the hands of some young pretender. So he gathered his soldiers from every corner of his kingdom, and he sent them out to kill every newborn boy.
Seventy thousand of them he had slaughtered because of his fear. Only one escaped, the infant Ab Irim, whose mother hid him in a cave and gave the soldiers the child of a slave in his place. In the cave Ab Irim was raised by the angel Gabriel himself—for before Sammael fell, and before the angel of fire was sent with Michael to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Gabriel, with his horn, was the angel of music. So he sang the child to sleep when he was tired and suckled the child with milk from his finger when he was hungry. Then when the child was grown into a boy, Gabriel picked up Ab Irim and put him on his shoulder and brought him to Babel, to stand before Nimrod as his accuser.
What does this mean? Nimrod asked them.
You do not know? said Ab Irim. But surely it is the Word of God.
And what is that Word? said Nimrod.
Death, said Ab Irim.
And Ab Irim's words shattered the very idols on their pedestals, it is said. It sent all the men of wisdom mad, confounding their tongues and scattering them to the corners of the world. It panicked the soldiers so that some thought to flee and others thought to fight; but not knowing what to flee from or what to fight, they fought each other and fled from themselves, and fled from each other and fought themselves. And the great tower that Nimrod had built to contain the wise men's learning came crashing down, and the suits of skin were lost in the rubble. And the great empire that Nimrod had built to protect him from his fear came crashing down. And Nimrod finally understood death.
This is the way of things, it is said. Madness is the ruin of wisdom. And chaos is the ruin of order. The word of an innocent boy can bring down an empire at its foundations, scattering the people in confusion. An angel may have a sword that flames and a finger that flows with milk. We are all made of such contradictory natures. So too is death the ruin of life. And if God is life, eternal and spiritual, his Word, from which all creation was made, must be ephemeral and material, and we ourselves only its echo.
All men must die, my friend, for we are death itself, the Word made flesh.
Mortal Remains
“Escuzi ma. Perdun, m'sire.”
Carter steps back automatically as he looks up, mumbles apologies to the woman in the panama hat and linen suit who smiles her thanks as she brushes past and out through the revolving doors of the terminal. He tracks her as she tip-taps down the steps and turns toward the head of the taxi rank, so terribly modern in her mannish clothes, striding, breezing, a Sapphic sophisticate.
Carter scans the letter given to him by Tamuz. It's from von Strann—the Eyn, as the boy calls him, whatever that means—urging Carter to wait with the boy at his studio until he can return. Return from where? thinks Carter. The letter only says that he'll meet Carter when the time is right; for now he has to trust the boy; when he sees the rest of the Herr Professor's notebooks he will understand the need for secrecy. My home is yours, the letter reads, to do with as you wish; and I am certain that Tamuz will make sure you are comfortable until such time as I return to play the proper host to you, good Captain. There's no address.
He folds the letter and tucks it away at the back of Samuel's notebook. The boy must have been gone for a good ten minutes now, Carter realizes, and as he taps Hobbsbaum's notebook idly against his leg he wonders whether to go looking for the lad. He holds the notebook in that way all readers used to interruptions do—one-handed, thumb holding the cover almost shut, forefinger inside keeping his place. He opens it again, but his eyes are drawn to the doorway, the revolving glass doors and the wide concrete steps down to the road filled with slow-moving cars and carts, taxis and trucks.
The leather binding of the notebook is dry and cracked and a few of the pages have come loose inside. There's something about it that bothers him even apart from the contents; it's not a personal journal, so it's not that he feels that he's invading Samuel's privacy here, but somehow it's as if… it's the way he remembers feeling any time a lad died in action and their kit had to be searched for smut or suchlike before being sent home (couldn't have a boy's parents finding pornographic penny dreadfuls among the letters from back home). It's the feeling of rifling through a dead man's life, the sense that this scrapbook or journal or pack of cards or locket is as much the mortal remains of the dead as the flesh now rotting in the mud of No Man's Land. A person's shorthand is as individual as their handwriting, often more so. It can become so personalized that others might see only a scribble when they look at it.
Carter glances out the door again. Still no sign of the boy.
The air is warming up outside now. Taking a second to peer over the crowd and get his bearings, Carter sights a falafel stall, its owner a good man to ask if he's seen the boy, Carter reckons. He starts down the steps.
“Captain Englishman! Spare a few lira for a crippled soldier, Captain Englishman?”
Carter turns, looks down. The claw of a left hand missing all but forefinger and thumb tugs at his sleeve, and he starts back at the sight of the poor beggar who owns it, knee-jerk horror hitting him like
… the first time he saw a leper, a dead comrade, madness in the trenches.
“A few lira for a crippled soldier, Captain Englishman?”
The beggar is a wrecked thing. Right arm dangling dead at his side, dark and withered, with a stump where the hand should be. He sits on the steps, rags scattered round in knotted bundles, some large, others small, a Turkish army cap upside down in front of him containing a few coins. Apart from a pair of khaki trousers—one leg cut short, folded over and pinned up where his knee ends in a stump—the creature is naked but for the grime and dust that crusts his sun-shriveled form. Weathered, leathered, he looks like some madman mystic of the Indies. Or he looks, thinks Carter, like some mummy that's crawled here from its looted tomb to beg for grave goods in eternal penury. He might be forty years old or four thousand.
Only the one good eye peering up at Carter from a ruined face puts a hawklike challenge to his horror, shames Carter into blinking, looking away, and back, at the human being within the ruin, who tilts his head, stretches his left hand out again—what's left of it, anyway.
“Of course,” says Carter.
He digs in his pocket, crouches down to put a few coins into the hat and finds himself looking into the man's eye again, on his level now. The man smiles at him, teeth white in the sun-darkened face as he motions a blessing, touching forehead and chest with his pincer hand.
“God be with you, Captain Englishman.”
Carter makes to rise but finds himself still staring into the man's eye. He's seen men crippled by war before but never…
He tries to find the words but can't. The old soldier, old beggar, gives a bitter laugh, nods.
“I see your thoughts, Captain Englishman,” he says. “You ask yourself what happen to this man. What terrible thing happen to this man? You have time for an old soldier's story, Captain Englishman? You have time for my story?”
Tamuz is still nowhere in sight.
“I have the time,” says Carter.
ALL THE KING's HORSES
I lean one elbow on the table as I quick-flick through the crib notes, the brief history of this horse I'll be riding like a vodoun loa. Captain Jack Carter, World War I hero, Yerevan, Baku, Tell el-Kharnain, etc. I skim through seven pages of ripping yarns and waxed mustaches and blah blah fucking blah to see just how gay the gay blade is. I'm just not built for boredom. Give me a chi-gun and point me at an army, but don't try and schedule the rebellion, baby, or I will drift off. By the time I'm flicking the last page, I'm gazing over the paper at the dinkiness of Puck's ear and … Fox snaps his fingers, breaking my randy reverie.
“Right. So I'm the hero.” I shrug. “Peachy keen. Do I go boom? Glorious death in battle and suchlike?”
Fox sighs, blows a billow of cigarette smoke up into the air.
“I was rather hoping that you wouldn't self-combust this time.”
I swirl a slug of absinthe round my mouth, and swallow with a smack of lips.
“It's what I'm best at, Foxy.”
“This is a heist, not a hit,” he says. “Jack, I need you to try and hold it together just this once. That's why I'm sending Joey in with you. We need to keep the dynamic tight here. No subtleties, no nuances, just heroes and villains, good and evil, black and white—”
“—and fucking red all over. No offense,” says Puck, “but are you bonkers? Send those two in together and you're begging for a bloodbath. Have you read what that fucker's like in this fold, Jack?”
Puck flicks a page up in front of him, points it at Joey.
“Don't poop yer pants, pumpkin,” I say to Puck. “I'll make sure he doesn't drown any kittens. How bad can he be?”
“Jack,” says Fox, “have you actually read the brief on this Joey?”
“Yes,” I say.
He stubs his cigarette in his ashtray, says nothing as he looks at me.
“No,” I say.
I flick a few pages further through, ignoring the notes that have less than four exclamation marks, natch. Even at a glance it seems safe to say that this Josef Pe-chorin is a very bad man. Sired in Georgia during the Terror of 1901, illegitimate son of a White Russian contessa and her Cossack rapist. Murdered his own mother at the age of sixteen during the Purge of Tbilisi and led massacres of the Yezidi across Georgia and Armenia. Recruited by the British Falangists in Persia as a potential asset in the war against the Futurists. Sold his bosses down the river for a position in the Black Guard. Same old same old, far as I can see. Something about a disappearance on the slopes of Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus—
“Kur,” says Puck—he waves the page—”he's been to Kur.”
“That's not certain,” says Joey. “The Intel's sketchy.”
“We're not even sure,” says Fox, “if Kur's part of the picture in this fold.”
But I can see Puck's point. A psychic hunter-killer working only for the highest bidder, a white-hot tracker with a black-ice heart, Joey's more than happy in most folds to play nemesis to my schizoid superhero; I've lost count of the number of times we've crossed swords now, mostly ending in fatality for one or the other of us, if not both. And a Pechorin kitted up with the Cant against a Carter who's not even heard of it in this fold …
“Fuck it,” I say. “I can take him.”
Besides, much as it's nice having Joey onside, I kinda like it when he's trad and bad. Existence can be a trifle inchoate when you've got little more to sustain you than your own chaotic potential. At least with Joey, I always know who I am: the hero to his villain.
“Yeah,” says Joey, “like you can always trust Jack Flash to save the day.”
His cool gaze, pointed as his comment, is on the botched, blotched pile of angel hide sitting on the table in between us. I snick my Zippo open, spark my hash cheroot back into flame. Hey, everyone makes mistakes.
“OK,” I say, “so what's the plan?”
“Fuck that shit,” says Joey. “No fucking way. You're talking an Orpheus Operation and those always go tits-up. Eurydike … Lot's wife …”
“Salty,” I say, and lick my lips and slip a wink at Puck.
“We can do it,” Fox insists.
“Without the full team?” says Anaesthesia. “Without King Finn?”
“The Irish rover's lost,” says Fox. “You know how deep we'd have to go to dig him out. Deeper than dreams. Deeper than death.”
“Deeper than the shit we'll be in if the unkin hear we're trying to snatch the Book?” says Joey.
“He'll come back,” says Anaesthesia. “You can't keep a good story down, and King Finn is a timeless fucking classic. And once he's back in the game …”
“Then there were seven,” says Don.
The magic number, I think. Seven days of the week. Seven Heavens, seven Hells, and the Magnificent Seven souls of Humpty Dumpty humanity scattered all in itty bits across the Vellum. The mass unconscious is a seven-headed dragon, and even a full-on avatar like yours truly is really just one head of that big beast. A single piece in a great game of chess where all the pieces have their own set moves and you can only win if they all work together. A knight needs a queen to defend valiantly, a bishop to crisscross his path, a king and a castle, even a snub-nosed little pawn to stroke his horsey and keep him warm in the dark. Problem is we're one man down.
But who needs Prometheus when you've got the fire itself?
“The once and future king?” says Fox. “No, Finnan handed on the torch and walked away, and we can't wait for his return. You've been out in the Hinter, Anna. It's changing, isn't it?”
She nods. Kentigern's not the only Haven where we've got the munchkins on the run, the whole city being one big Rookery these days. No, there's a scent of something in the air, a change of seasons, a new age, a new day or a new page.
“If we don't strike now,” says Fox, “trust me, they will.”
“Thing is,” says Fox, “the fold we're aiming for isn't just a jaunt across eternity. You're going to have to take the hard route.”
The poker table has a
n arcane intricacy shimmering above its green baize now, vodoun veves and sigils inscribed in the air by Anaesthesia's dancing fingers. She runs a finger round a scratchy spiral, and another branches off it, then another. She rotates it, tweaks it into shape, building the sim of the city's substructure, tunnel by tunnel, wormhole by wormhole. Used to be you could just skip across the moments, pick up a beer in a bar in Mexico and chug it down in Madrid. You're just as likely to slam the empty stein down on a table in a Middle-Earth tavern these days. So the munchkin unkin stick to their Yellow Brick Roads now, safe and snug from the Hinter and hooligans like us. Anaesthesia's sim models their routes, the subways and the sewers that join with mines, ley-lines and dragon-lines, seams of chi-energy that turn and twist through 3-D time as well as space. Tunnels in time.
“It's kinda pretty,” says Puck. “Looks like a three-D snowflake.”
The Maps of Hell, a Jesus freak might say, but Christians are a dying breed in a Haven where Youngblood won the secrets of the Kali Yuga in his Bayonets to Shangri-la hour of glory, brought all the mysteries of chi and kundalini back to dear old Blighty. Here, in mechanistic mystic Kentigern, this is a mandala of Maya, the Vellum's veils of illusion, and it ain't God that's at the center of this maze but the biggest wormhole of them all, a vertical shaft that drops straight down through centuries of strata to the core of the chaosphere itself, with a thousand side shoots going God knows when. A door into the Emerald City. A passage to Erewhon. The Gates of Heaven, Hell and Never-Fucking-Never-Land. Or a road to Palestine, 1929, 469th Parallel, Eon X-7.
Thing is, as is all too clear from Anaesthesia's sim, those tunnels are all coiled up under the one place in this Haven where angel isn't a swear word and the man who freed the city isn't a hero. At the top of the model, over the mouth of the pit, like a woodworm-ridden tree stump with its dead roots stretching down into eternity, the Circus is our only way in. I hope Fox has a good plan.