Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He clicks his fingers.

  THE SUITS OF SKIN

  As Ab Irim said to his servant Eliezer, my friend, these stories of fruits of wisdom, of the curses of God, of suits of skin, of sons of angels, of days of rains, of cities of destruction … these are only tales we tell to shape our selves.

  Can wisdom be gained from a fruit, you think, my friend? Perhaps wisdom is a little like a tree, growing over time from a sapling, spreading up and outward, branching and spreading down into the soil, anchoring itself and drawing moisture and minerals from the world it is a part of. Perhaps a moment of understanding is a little like the moment we bite into a fruit—an apple, a fig or a pomegranate—the taste of it so sudden and sharp, sweet and bitter at once. But my friend, if knowledge can be tasted, it is in the salt of tears of laughter or grief, and it is as much the knowledge itself that is biting into you. Oh, and where it bites you, my friend, you burn, fevered, hot and cold, as if bitten by a snake. The juice of a bitter fruit, the sweet venom of a snake. Poison and medicine. Fire and ice. Joy and sorrow.

  Good and evil, my friend, is a poor description of that bittersweet wisdom.

  So what is this tree of knowledge of good and evil, my friend, if it is the twin of that other tree from which God said the man of clay and the mother of all living should not eat, that tree of life? What is the twin of life but death? Surely this then is the knowledge gained by Adam and Eve. It is a curse, because to understand this truly is to understand that everything is dust, to be stripped of all illusions, to face one's own mortality. The world becomes poisoned. Nothing matters. But is it not also the cure for all ills? Because to understand this fully is to understand this: It does not matter, my friend, that nothing matters.

  So how did Adam and Eve taste this knowledge which stings like the thorns and thistles of the endless fields, tears choking their throats like dust, knowledge born in pain and blood, just as we all are?

  They learned this, my friend, as the most bittersweet lesson can only be learned … from their children.

  As Ab Irim said to his servant Eliezer, there were two brothers once who sought to summon God with their songs. As brothers do, they argued. One said God is this, the other God is that, and they could not agree. So they should have a contest they agreed, and see which God would answer to their song. And one, a harvester of grain out in the fields, began to sing of the cycle of sowing and gathering. The other, a herder of livestock in the wilds, began to sing of slaughter and burnt offerings.

  My God is a god of the barley and the brewed beer, sang one.

  My God is a god of the wool and the woven yarn, sang the other.

  My God is a god of the vines and the wines, sang one.

  My God is a god of the beasts and the blood, sang the other.

  My God is a god of seeds that sprout in soil, sang one.

  My God is a god of lambs led to the slaughter, sang the other.

  My God is a god of life, sang one.

  My God is a god of death, sang the other.

  And it was then, as Abel tried to summon death with his song, that Cain rose up against his brother, struck him down to silence his insanity, and in so doing lost… everything. For, with his last breath, Abel whispered the name of his God of blood, and Cain saw death in his brother's eyes, and he knew which God had answered to their song.

  There is no lesson harder, my friend, but none so true as the lesson we learn from the death of one we love.

  That tale of death was marked as much on Adam and Eve as it was on Cain, my friend, written on their skin. It was marked on the ground in bloodstains, on the body in its wounds, in the heart of the killer and on the faces of the mourners. They say among my people that it can be spoken in a single word, that truth. But… it is a word that is broken. You see, the full truth was too much to bear for either Adam or Eve; neither could carry that burden alone, and so they broke the word into its sounds and split those tiny fragments of the whole between them so that neither was ever alone with the full truth. Only when they lay together naked would the full tale be told, in flesh touching flesh; then they would hear that word whispering in the darkness and they would remember the full truth, and hold each other all the tighter for it. Only Cain the killer carries the full word, graved on his face. This is why he walked out into the wilderness, to distant lands of other tongues, where those who looked upon that mark would only know it was the sign of some strange crime, and could not utter it to his face and call the God of Abel up again.

  This is the tale that Enoch gave to Noah, that was kept safe through the Flood, that was stolen from him in his drunkenness by Ham, and handed down to Nimrod. This is the tale that Ab Irim brought out of the ruins of Babel, up through Haran and down into Canaan, as we traveled with your people. This is the tale of death written in the Book of All Hours.

  A PATH OUT OF THE MAZE

  25th March. It is all but over now. There is one final episode to be played, one last act before the final curtain, but the roles were written long ago and the players know their lines. I almost wish there was an audience to appreciate the end. But there is just the six of us, we players and our chorus—the last remnants of the Enakites—still singing against death and ice.

  The angels circle the city on strange wings of silvery-steel they have sung into existence with their Cant, Azazel one way, Michael the other, circling like hawks but never swooping in beyond the circle of salt pillars that now stretches round the full perimeter of the broken city walls. It is the line of their defensive shield, a binding that the Enakite song cannot break through, marked out by the pillars of those of us who have tried. This time in Sodom it is not those who look back upon the horror who are turned to salt, but those who seek escape from it.

  Siege and rout. Siege and rout. War is an eternal bloody cycle and we can no more escape from it, it seems, than from this city. Just as the Turks surrounded and invaded, just as the Enakites surrounded and invaded, so once again the city is under siege. Streets blasted into paths of broken wall, roads blocked with rubble and bodies, it is a labyrinth we have had to inch our way through, turning and backtracking in our circuitous return to the Beth Ashtart, ducking and diving to avoid the angel's hail of fire.

  I think of Pechorin slamming me out of the way of one blast, almost killed by it himself, and now I don't know what to make of the man. Did Anat's whisper strip him down so far he no longer even has his Futurism to believe in? When he pulled me to my feet, there was a look in his eyes that said he might just as happily have died. Perhaps we are not so very different in some ways.

  I think of all those journal entries, of the madness of trying to piece them all together, trying to find a path out of the maze. It's what I've been doing all my life, blundering about within the maze of my own … potential, trying to play the hero, slay the monster in its heart.

  Mad Jack Carter.

  I find myself grinning.

  The city belongs to the sons of Sodom once again, but it is only a matter of waiting for the inevitable. It is the story retold to destroy those who survived the first time, and the second time; those who survive in every version of the tale, the Noahs, and the Lots. They want their story pure, the angels, I now realize. Azazel and Michael, death and ice, are angels of such purity, ghosts of Ahab come out of the dead soul deeps to murder Ishmael too. Their words rewrite the world as we walk through it, folding it, tearing at it, trying to force us down paths where Tamuz has his throat slit by Pechorin, where he's shot by the Turks, where he stands alone on the roof of the Beth Ashtart, gazing at fire raining down from zeppelins in the sky, not shards of angel song but bombs that will blossom into an all-engulfing firestorm.

  Slivers of a million deaths sting my arm, thrown up to shield the boy as the angels rain their fury on the streets of Sodom. The dust of pointlessly perfect tragedies blinds me as it whips up around us. All we can do is huddle and stumble, our own weapons pitiful against the sheer firepower of archangelic majesty, against the binding circle of their ab
solutism.

  God or Destiny, Pechorin called it. Well, I have seen destiny written out in a book stolen from God, kept hidden by the Enakites for four thousand years. Now, it appears, their work is at an end, while mine …

  I had a notion at the Jericho Gate, to end it all there and then, and I wonder now what would have happened had I carried through on it. Crouched down, with the Book in its box before me, Hobbsbaum's journals in my satchel there beside it in the dust, I wondered if the Book was worth it, if I might not just.

  But that was not the path I chose. God knows, though, if it had …

  “Fuck!”

  The box slips from where it's wedged under his left arm, and Jack shifts his weight to balance it on a hip while he adjusts his hold. With his other arm supporting Tamuz even as he tries to keep his pistol trained at all times on Pechorin, it's a bloody nuisance.

  “Here,” says Anat.

  He feels the boy's weight lift as she takes the lion's share of the burden, freeing him to find a more secure position for the box. Following behind Jack and Anat, MacChuill supports the limping von Strann with an arm around the Baron's waist. In front of them, Pechorin, unbound now after the umpteenth fall while scrabbling through the ruins, steps up toward Jack, a hand reached out.

  “Let me help you with the boy, Captain Carter.”

  Jack eyes him for a second, shakes his head and hands the box to the black-shirt instead, gives his gun to Anat.

  “Watch him,” he says. “I'll take Tamuz.”

  He hefts Tamuz up into both arms and turns to carry the boy up to the doorway of the Beth Ashtart. Every second or so there is a sharp and rasping intake as the ever-dying boy breathes in another last breath. Another last breath every second or so… and yet there is no final gutter, no last release.

  We do not let this happen. None of us will let this happen.

  We deny it.

  We defy it.

  THE KALI YUGA WALTZ

  Click.

  In an instant Joey has his Scorpio 99 out and Jack in his sights. Jack—down on one knee for added drama—has his Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-pistol pointed at Don, whose service snub in his trenchcoat pocket—assuming that's not just a sneaky finger—is now aimed at me. I nod to his side so Don clocks that my gun is aimed at Anaesthesia rather than him, her rupter being trained, in turn, on Joey. It's all rather tense, with us locked on each other like mortal enemies … except for Puck, who, sitting on the bed, hair over his face, gaze down as he buckles his belt, remains blithely oblivious of the whole five-way standoff.

  He looks up and—slowly—round the room.

  “Guy?” he says.

  “Please let's not have anybody doing anything rash,” I say. “I was rather hoping we could have a civilized discussion. About books.”

  I bring the Liebkraft paperback out of my trenchcoat pocket.

  “The Book of All Hours,” I say.

  The wallpaper on the room ripples and changes pattern. Prints on the walls become photographs. Another temporal aftershock, more fallout from Jack's botching of the Orpheus Operation. You can always rely on Jack to screw up a plan. Get himself killed. Send the wicked king insane … and then the rightful prince too, for good measure. Murder your father before you were born. One has to have a lot of backup plans with an agent like Jack. Honestly, the hours I spent cutting words and letters, commas and full stops, out of this tattered Macro-mimicon, pasting them onto other pages until they described this scene in, well, these very words.

  Inscribed this scene, I should say. Graved it.

  “So?” I say. “Pax?”

  I flick the gambling gun back up my sleeve with a twitch of wrist. Anna and Don exchange a look, a nod, lower their weapons. Joey and Jack, of course, just snap round instantly to mark each other in their sights. With the last ripple in the chaosphere I can see the slightest shifts in them, in the narrowing of their eyes—recognition, suspicion.

  “Joey,” I say. “Jack. Trust me.”

  Joey turns his impiteous gaze on me, black pupils of an empty soul, a void of meaning. The only thing Joey Narcosis trusts is the certainty of death. That can make working with the man a dicey proposition at best, but one must have faith in one's own choices, if nothing else, and I believe I know Joey Narcosis rather well. I may know more about them than they do themselves, though even I have long since given up mapping the complexity of the relationships they play— father or brother, sister or mother, enemies or lovers. Sometimes it seems it's all a game to them, Shiva's Tango of Destruction. The Kali Yuga Waltz.

  ‘As long as Jack the Whack here doesn't decide it's a good day to die.”

  “It's always a good day to die,” says Jack.

  ? better day to live,” says Puck.

  Outside, the sky is brightening with the first pale light of morning. A chorus of birds starts up.

  “Let's talk, then,” says Joey.

  I wonder how to explain it to them, that we were fools to think that we could change the Book, that if we could find where it all went wrong then we could change it, remake history. Start from scratch. Another chance. Another book, a copy of the original but different, better. If we'd just won the Spanish Civil War. If Stalin had died. If. If. If …

  I have come to believe that there was no Book before the bitmites decided to give us what we want, set out to give us all those changes, trying time after time to resolve them into a coherent unity, a definitive text. And one might well ask: If the Book of All Hours is the authoritative history we wanted—written in blood on the skin of angels—my God, what does that say about humanity?

  But here's a more important if: If the bitmites created the Book then there was a time before it, there is a time, a fold of the Vellum, where the Book does not exist, before the Hinter and the Evenfall, before the death of that lost deus of Sumer. Or perhaps a time after it. I've been watching for the signs of that… that spring. And I think I've found it.

  As the birdsong starts outside, I lean forward in my armchair and click my fingers. Suddenly—

  Suddenly the forest-green wallpaper of Club Soda's back room surrounds us, dark as a wildwood at dawn. The six of us sit round a table, drinks in hand instead of guns. A stitch in time.

  “Palestine, 1929,” I say. “Four hundred sixty-ninth parallel. EonX-seven.”

  The Secret Name of God

  “Fuck's sake,” says MacChuill, “it's like a fuckin’ inside-oot Easter egg.”

  Inside the Beth Ashtart, the walls, the wooden pews and altarpieces, the museum cases and exhibits, everything, the Weeping Angel most of all, writhes with an ink that is not black but every color in the world. The greens of vines and veins, of glass or grass, we are. The blues of skies and robin's eggs and oceans, azures and ceruleans and indigos, we are. Scarlets and purples from the robes of emperors and madonnas, we are, crimsons and vermilions. Red, brown and yellow ocher of the autumn leaves, we are. Ambers, umbers, embers, we are. We are a crucible of color.

  Only the altar do we leave pristine and clean for Jack to gently lay Tamuz on, push the hair out of his eyes and ask the barely conscious boy a simple question.

  “Where is it?”

  Tamuz smiles weakly, raises his arm just high enough to point at the altar-piece behind the last of the teraphim.

  “There is a gap,” he says. “Where it meets the wall.”

  Anat's face is all confusion and disbelief, but Tamuz nods at her and she walks over to the wall, kneels down by a panel carved with some pagan version of the Last Judgment. She leans in, shoulder pressed against the wall, hand squeezing in between wood and stone, searching and finding, pulling something out, and—

  She starts cursing Tamuz—Jack assumes its cursing from the tone, at least—in whatever common tongue the Enakites use between them at the hearth or on the horse, when they're not laying waste to cities; it sounds very much like a dialect of Yezidi. The lad shakes his head, replies with his excuses, pleas of innocence; it's so much in the tone of domestic sibling banter—as if th
e boy had read her diary, thinks Jack, or rifled through her private things—it brings a wry smile to his face. Von Strann is laughing, MacChuill letting loose profanities filled with wonder— ya sneakit weefuckin bastard—and Jack finds himself laughing, his hand on the lad's shoulder.

  “The Professor,” says Tamuz so earnestly, “he tell me to do this. Exactly this. Tell no one until now, this moment here. He tell me it must be this way.”

  “I know,” says Jack.

  “I am sorry. I do not want to lie to you, Jack, to hide—”

  “I know,” says Jack. “It's OK.”

  He looks at Anat, standing there with it in her hand, held up for all of them to see, a single page of vellum covered in a profusion of cryptic marks, a mass of tiny flicks and squiggles, curlicues and accents all somehow so familiar in a way that Jack can't put his finger on. There are bloodstains on it, and one corner of the page has been burned away to a scorched crinkle, whatever symbol was once written there now lost forever to the fire.

  Six million lives on one page, thinks Jack. Minus one. Minus Hobbsbaum, who had burned himself out of the book of life rather than suffer his bloody written destiny.

  It happens so fast. Von Strann's sudden slump, his crutch of a rifle clattering to the floor, MacChuill's distraction, cursing as he tries to get the man to a bench, Pe-chorin on the floor before they know it and then up again, the rifle in his right hand, steadied along his knee, the box under his left arm. He points the gun at Anat.

  “I will take that, Princess Anat. The page, please.”

  Pechorin swings the rifle round even as Jack reaches.

  “No, Captain Carter, I know what you're thinking. One shot, then I have to reload, and by then one of you would be on me. You are willing to risk the sacrifice, as is she. I have no doubt of it.”

  He swings the rifle round to point at Tamuz.

  “I think neither of you wish to sacrifice the boy, though. Am I right?”

  Carter raises his hands. Still watching him, Pechorin addresses Anat.