Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “I'll let him introduce himself,” said the Cossack.

  So the heavy introduced himself—his first name Fist No. 1, his second name Fist No. 2, one on each side of my face. After the formalities were over, I sat there for a bit, nursing my jaw, working at a loose tooth with a finger. I guess whenever you meet someone new, you kind of get these uncomfortable silences.

  “Pleased to meet you both,” I said after a while. “I'd offer you all a drink, but I don't think this hotel has room service.”

  The Cossack sat down on the edge of the table.

  “Let's talk,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “How about them Yankees?”

  The Cossack shook his head.

  “Let's talk about the Book.”

  “I'm not much of a reader,” I said. “I like the funnies, though. You read the funnies?”

  Fist No. 1 made a witty retort.

  “Who has the Book, Mr. Carter?” said the Cossack.

  So Turk and the Cossack were after the Book as I'd reckoned, and they thought I could lead them to it. I've been in this line of business long enough to know that there are times when it's a smart idea to keep your mouth shut and times when you should sing like a canary. Unfortunately, I've always had bad timing.

  “Take a hike, Cossack,” I said. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “Mr. Carter,” he said, “take a look around you. You have no way out. Eventually one of you will break, and when he does the other will become … superfluous. You don't owe the Baron anything. You might as well just cut your losses and keep your life.”

  “I got a debt of my own to repay,” I said. “Name's Sam Hobbes, and he used to be my partner till his car met with a little brake trouble on a mountain road.”

  “Accidents do happen, Mr. Carter. The roads outside the city can be treacherous. Your friend should have taken more care.”

  “Or maybe someone took care of my friend,” I said.

  The Cossack looked thoughtful for a second, tried to drill me with his eyes, and there was something about it that rang an alarm bell in my head. Suddenly I had this funny feeling he was stringing me along. He didn't know what had happened to Sam any more than I did.

  “Mr. Carter,” he said. “Who was your friend working for? There are a lot of people looking for the Book, you know. People who will go to any lengths. Who hired your partner to steal it? Gentlemen George Curzon? The Mason Brothers?”

  “The Mason Brothers?” I said. “What are they, a new beat combo?”

  The Cossack sighed. He leaned over the desk to push a button on the intercom, and a loud buzz was followed with a hissing yes?

  “It seems our guest is reticent, gentlemen. We may have to resort to more persuasive methods.”

  A second later, the door opened and two more guys walked in. These weren't your average goons, though; hell, they weren't even on the goon curve. I could see straightaway that neither of them was packing, didn't need to be; they were armed with perfect teeth and manicured fingernails, the kind of wiseguys who let others get their hands dirty for them. From the way they oozed control, I had to peg these slicks as the Cossack's bosses—or partners, at least—which made this a whole lot more complicated than I'd first thought. Either these guys, Turk and the Cossack were all one big happy family, or the Cossack had a little side bet running and Turk's goon was just too dumb to know it.

  “I don't believe I've had the pleasure,” I said.

  One of the slicks took out a silver case, clicked it open to reveal a vial and a syringe. He stabbed the sticker into the vial and drew up liquid into it, squirted it to get any air out, tapped the needle with a fingernail. A manicured fingernail. The other motioned the goon into position with him, either side of my chair.

  “My name is Mike,” the slick with the needle said. “This here is Bill.”

  “Short and snappy,” I said. “I like—”

  Then I felt the hands on my shoulders and forearms, clamping me to my seat. Next thing I knew there was a needle in my arm and a bright light in my head, kind of warm and fuzzy, in a three-too-many-drinks way but without the cigarette and the cute brunette beside you in the bed the morning after. I was just wondering where the brunette had gone when I realized things were getting a little strange.

  “You know… I always wanted perfect teeth,” I managed to say, before the Mickey Finn took me completely out of reality.

  A BOY NAMED JACK

  “Yes, mis amigos, this is Don Coyote, howling in the night up at a moon so bright. I'm calling out to you over the astral airwaves, and tonight, tonight, I'm saying listen up and listen good, because there's something going down, and it ain't pretty, it ain't witty, but a word to the wise from your eye in the skies; I'm telling you, I have a tale to tell. That's right, at last, at last, the truth is to be told, and if I may be so bold as brass, so crass, I'm going to tell you here and now the answer to the question that's on all our lips:

  “Why is this world more fucked up than a psycho on an acid trip?

  “Well, mis amigos, once upon a time there was a boy named Jack…”

  I lob the first grenade left, count to one then—fuck it—chuck the second one underhand to the right, into the path of the scattering suckers.

  Boom-boom, motherfuckers.

  I scope for my exit route, but a quick glance past the carnage shows a score more of the bastards pouring out onto the roof from the stairwell. Fuck. I lob another couple of sex bombs as a smokescreen, flip my mayashades down and scan the building underfoot. Toward the nearest edge, all there is is the yawning space of twenty stories below, and a whole lot of air between here and the roof of the Hilton opposite. Only upside is an airtram line running past maybe two or three stories down; it'll have to do. As the chi-blasts start churning the air around me, I sprint for the edge of the building, hit it running and kick off into freefall, arms in flight position, seeing the cable coming up toward me kinda fast.

  Piece of piss.

  I catch the cable with one hand, blast it with the chi-gun in the other and swing round and down, a Tarzan of Escapes, heading in a wide arc for the French windows of a hotel room. Inside I can see some dodgy deviance going down; a fat cat, flabby and foolish in school shorts and blazer, is fondling a peachy punk, stripping his T-shirt off over his head.

  Look out, my little lust buddies, I think. Incoming.

  I smash in through the window, bounce off the bed and crash shoulder-first into the mirror on the wardrobe door, land in a crouch. I shake the glass out of my hair like a dog shakes rain from its coat. Tinkle tinkle, little shard.

  “My God,” says the fat cat.

  “No,” I say. “Close but no cookie.”

  I've got the chi-pistol leveled at them both, a finger to my lips, but the fat cat's in full panic mode already. The hustler just looks strangely … irked, arms folded across his chest, brows furrowed, little nose all cutely wrinkled. I say “hustler”— that's what I'm hoping, ‘cause his sugar daddy reeks of power and money and the kid, well, he's a salty-sweet treat with his green scruff of hair and his aura blue as a Prague porn star. I'd hate to think he wasn't getting paid to fuck this freak. There's standards, for fuck's sake.

  The fat cat looks from the kid to me and back again, eyes wide with terror, panic, shame, every bad vibe in the book.

  “Whatever they're paying you, I'll double it,” he shrieks. “Just don't—”

  I fire.

  “Hushtnow”

  He slumps off the bed onto the floor.

  “Jack,” says the kid.

  His voice has a bad dog tone that makes me want to roll over on my back. Fuck it, he can rub my tummy any day.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he says. “Fox is going to be … Jack?”

  “Do I know you?” I say.

  Then the temporal aftershock hits us.

  NEVER AGAIN

  As Ab Irim said to his servant Eliezer, there was a time once when angels walked upon the earth. Some say that these
were angels who rebelled, who rose up against the Lord, fought beside his Enemy against Him, and fell. Some say that these were angels who fought for neither side in the great war, and so were hated by both, a host not of Heaven nor Hell but of the Earth. In your Torah it is told of how these angels married the daughters of men, how from this union all the mighty men of old were born, the builders of cities, the great hunters in the wilderness. But what if I told you, my friend, that it was the other way? That the sons of God were horn from the daughters of men, that they were not fallen to earth but raised in the dust. That it was these living, breathing angels who fought for power, fought against one another or fought together, and that the Lord you worship was only one among these mighty men of old, the greatest of them all but still a man, like you, my friend. The Lord God of Gods, the Highest of the High, Baal El Eliyoun—the Lord Ilil, they called him.

  They did not call themselves angels in those days, those mighty men of old. They called themselves gods.

  Now, this was a proud little god, for among the gods of fire, the gods of the sun and of the moon, the gods of grain and wine, this was the god of kings. And is the god of all kings not then the king of all gods? Oh, but there were those who would not bow to him, those who defied him, and even as his power grew they multiplied. They spoke against him, challenged his authority; they were… a nuisance. And so one day this god of kings called for his scribe and told him to release the flood, to drown these voices that were such a nuisance, to drown the noise of these gods who loved the earth, who loved humanity more than they feared his majesty. To destroy it all.

  His scribe was not a cruel man but he was a loyal servant. A god of wisdom, a man of wisdom, he knew that his master was the god of kings, the king of gods, and as such, why, he had to be obeyed. He had walked with the Lord all his days, and the Lord had raised him up, made him his scribe, to write all that the Lord decreed into the Book of All Hours. And now the Lord called upon him to blot out every name from that book, to pour out the flood upon the world, to destroy every trace of every living thing.

  But if it is in a king's nature to punish, it is in a steward's nature to preserve. And so his scribe hatched a plan.

  ——

  You speak of the flood as a deluge of water, my friend, in your Torah. Is this not so? You imagine the world drowned in forty days and forty nights of unrelenting rains. But in our stories, my friend, we speak of the flood as the weapon of the giants, the abubu weapon, of how they opened their mouths and it poured out, washing away all that stood before them. A sword of fire, a river of voices, my friend, a flood of ice. You imagine that if you dig down into the rock you will find the clay and the bones of all who drowned in this great deluge? You are wrong. This is a flood that pours through time itself, washes away the world, a hundred worlds, washes away even its own tracks, leaving only the odd abandoned—what is your word?—anomaly here or there. A dead angel on a beach. A city under the rock. A ship washed ashore on a mountaintop.

  A ship with two of every animal in the world, my friend? That would have to be a very large ship indeed. Is that how you would save a world? A bull and a cow, a sheep and a ram, and so on? The people who wrote your Torah, my friend, must have had poor livestock if they raised their herds from only one dam and one sire, breeding sisters with their brothers; any herdsman knows that this does not produce a healthy flock.

  No, my friend, to save a world you save the knowledge of that world, the knowledge that there were bulls and cows in it, that there were sheep and rams in it, that there were men and women who lived and died. If your world is to be destroyed, all you can save, my friend, is the memory of it, to restore what you once had, to mourn that which can never be restored.

  This was the plan of the scribe. This was the charge he gave to the man we call Ziusuzdra, the Far-Seeing, the man who survived the flood, drifting in the deluge to the mountains where the city of Aratta would one day be built by our forefathers. He gave our people the book of all the lives of the world which came before our own.

  In your Torah, I believe, it tells of a covenant made between man and god after this flood, of an altar to the Lord and offerings sacrificed upon it. Of how this king of gods, this god of kings, seeing that some had escaped his fury, was appeased not with a plea for mercy but with an offer, a trade of life for life, an accounting in the blood of every animal, and from every man. Of everything, the firstborn. In return he offered a promise, a covenant.

  “Never again,” he said, “will I destroy everything.”

  This is the covenant written in the Book, my friend, and we who walk between the curses of the Lord and his Enemy, we are the guardians of that covenant. Never again. As keepers of the Book we are the keepers of this promise. We keep the word of the king of gods.

  Because you cannot trust a king of gods to keep his word himself.

  The King of Lies

  Pechorin separates out the pages Carter has written over with longhand transcriptions, laying the ones that have only Hobbsbaum's own scribblings to one side. He's methodical about it, disconnected, pausing only once or twice to take a sip of his brandy or to relight his cigar. He pays little attention to the stories of writing that came down from heaven with the fallen angels, graved upon their skins. Whatever. That's just the sort of thing the feather-cloaked medicine men of some savage tribe might think up, daubed in their war paint. And whether it's true or not is no matter; Pechorin despises the weakness at the heart of all religion; he's not about to waste his time on ancient history, not with the future shining bright before him.

  He looks for British troop movements, Allied war plans amid Carter's translations of Hobbsbaum's notes.

  It is a wonderful blasphemy though, he has to admit, to claim that if God's Name cannot be spoken it's out of fear, that no one can look upon his face and survive, because his glory is the terrible mind-shattering awe found in war, in fire, in death. And Carter's reaction to it is… sublime:

  My God is not a God of hloodlust and hatred, Carter has written on one page of his journal. This holocaust, this sacrifice of Abraham's seed, it cannot be the Will of God. These are blasphemies and heresies. These are lies.

  Pechorin stands up from his desk to stretch, his hands behind his head. He wonders which torture is worse for the Englishman: what the Turks are doing to him now; or hearing it done to von Strann in the next room; or simply knowing that his god of vicars and tea, of Sunday School and cricket matches on the common, is as much a childhood fantasy as Father Christmas.

  Pechorin was raised on tales of Baba Yaga, the witch with her wooden house striding on its legs across the steppes, hunting children for her cauldron. He was sixteen when he informed on his bolshevik mother to the Futurists for a handful of rubles, only a few years older when his NKVD patrol was sent in to clear a monastery in the foothills of South Ossetia that had somehow escaped the communists.

  “If Satan is the Prince of Lies,” he had asked the Holy Father in a tone of idle and amused curiosity… “who is the King?”

  A knock on the door.

  “Enter,” he says.

  The Turkish officer opens the door, gives him a questioning look as the two men push past him and into the office. Pechorin ignores the Turk, picks up two glasses from the drinks cabinet and sets them on the desk. His… associates take the offered seats as Pechorin pours their brandies, while the Turk closes the door behind him on his way out.

  “Gentlemen.”

  “Major Pechorin.”

  It is a voice that feels as if the night itself is whispering in his ear, as if the darkness runs its fingers across his skin—the voice of the one who calls himself Baal Adad. Azazel he was once, apparently. Pechorin hands one glass to this un-fallen angel, this risen man, another to his compatriot.

  “What have you found?” asks Mikhail—the Prince of Peace, as cold an Arkangel as the city named after him.

  Pechorin shakes his head, picks up a page and reads.

  “God give me faith, I pray. But then what
monstrous God am I praying to if this is the truth? The dark destiny…”

  Pechorin twirls his hand in the air.

  “And more like that,” he says. “Not much of any use. And you?”

  “The Englishman is … confused,” says Mikhail. “On the surface he seems just another loyal soldier fighting for King and Country, but there's something underneath…”

  “Unkin?” says Azazel.

  Mikhail drums fingers on his chin. A definite maybe.

  “With all the scars and stains on his soul, you could see any graving in it that you wanted if you looked hard enough. But there's no Cant in his voice. There's… nothing. The other? Von Strann?”

  “He has some Cant to him all right,” says Azazel. “But no graving, so he'd scatter himself to the winds with his own breath if he ever tried to use it. He's of no consequence. As for the houseboy…”

  Pechorin lights a cigar as he listens to the angels dismiss his fellow humans with complete contempt, comparing notes on their metaphysical dissections. He's quite aware that they view him in the same way, as an expedient intermediary, a man with the right connections, in the right place at the right time, a good man to have in Moscow once the war is over perhaps, but an ephemeral nonetheless.

  Pechorin puffs his cigar and listens to the angels’ disdain, to the tone of it, the timbre and shifts of pitch underneath their words, in their voices, in the rhythms, the cadences … the Cant. He listens very carefully indeed. It pays to be on guard when dealing with angels.

  THE GUARDIAN OF ANGELS

  […] at the center of the camp. It was impossible to tell what was natural and what the work of man, for these anthill-like formations had been built up and out with the same sandy clay […] reminiscent of structures in eastern Anatolia […] and hollowed further. As with the surrounding city of tents, all of this was a wild rigging of leather awning and pillars of bone […] studying one of these […] composed of what looked like thigh bones, carved spirally, overlapped in a sort of braided pattern and lashed together. The entire twenty feet of pillar must have been made up of the bones of a hundred men at least […] on this plateau?