Ink

by Hal Duncan

“Put the page down on the altar beside the boy, and go stand beside the captain, please.”

  A quick flick of the eyes, as she moves slowly in between Tamuz and—

  “No, go round the other way, please. Behind the altar, yes. Thank you.”

  He rises steadily to his feet, circles sideways and in, until he's standing behind the altar, barrel of the rifle pressed to Tamuz's temple, putting the wooden box down on the boy's chest and picking up the page. He unsnicks the latch of the box, opens the lid.

  “My colleagues will be pleased. The Secret Name of God. The Book of All Hours. And when their… anointed arrives, as he should do very soon, they'll have all they need to—”

  As he fumbles to get the page into the box with the rest of the Book, Pechorin glances down and stops. He looks at Jack and there's a question on his lips, in his eyes, and the barrel of the rifle is rising to force an answer, but, with the rifle pointed at him now rather than Tamuz, Jack is already making his move, swinging sideways as his Webley snaps up. Two shots fire at the same time, and Jack hears the mosquito whine, feels the buzz of a bullet past his ear, but he's frozen in the moment, still as a frieze, eyes locked on the round red hole in Pechorin's Adam's apple. The blackshirt staggers back against the altarpiece, looks at the page in his hand, and then slides down, the rifle clattering to the floor.

  Jack vaults the altar and Tamuz grabs the page as it flutters out of the blackshirt's slackening grip, folds it roughly—it cracks, dry and brittle, as he does so—and stuffs it in his trouser pocket with a quick glance over his shoulder. He snicks the latch of the box shut and tucks the box under his arm, kneels down beside the crumpling man, and holds the blackshirt's lolling head as the eyes blink at him. Breath gutters wet between lips trying to shape the words, to spill the secret. The only thing Pechorin can spill now though is blood, frothing in red bubbles from his throat and mouth.

  Jack listens to him as he speaks a name that can be spoken only with a man's last breath. The Y of the tongue reaching up to the palate as if to cup saliva or blood to swallow or to spit. The first H a sharp intake, air rasping through a suddenly dry, constricted throat as the chest spasms in a panic of realization, of suddenly, Oh God, knowing that this is death. The W of lips brought together, not closed but tightened a little, pursed in pain and confusion. This word, this YHW, is WHY sucked in backward as a gasp, a last grasping at breath, at life.

  And then the air seeping out through a larynx relaxing, the rough aspiration of that final H drawn out—HHHH—slowly dissipating, softening into hhhhhh, and then fading into silence.

  YHWH.

  And the silence after it which is the Secret Name of God.

  Jack closes the dead eyes, lets the head roll to the side and down.

  If gods can die, he thinks, then Death is god of gods.

  The Opening of the Way

  They stand on the roof of the Beth Ashtart, Jack and Reinhardt, looking out over the city of Tell el-Kharnain, the city that has fallen once, twice, a thousand times, that seems to still be falling even now, as if in some eternal destruction. Both Azazel and Michael have settled on the Jericho Gate, one on each side, perched on pillars of stone, wings folded behind them like vultures. The Silkmarket below them is filled with salt statues of the Enakites, the tribe wiped out now but for Anat and her brother.

  “Perhaps the other gate…” says Reinhardt. “If we stay together, if we can get out into the desert, we can disappear. Anat and I know how to survive there—”

  “No,” says Jack, “Samuel's notes are clear. We hit these bastards head-on. You take Tamuz… for safety. The rest of us open up the way for you. With Anat's little toys we should be able to break through the circle, hold them off till we get you to the airfield. You go on foot, on horse, even car, and they'll catch you, believe me. We need to get you to an ornithopter.”

  “What if Samuel's notes were wrong? The Book has as many lies in it as truths. What if he translated it wrong? And now we have…”

  Jack grins. No way to know, he thinks. He runs his fingers absently across his chest, unscarred now… cleansed by angelfire.

  “Into the valley of death,” he says. “Charge of the Light Brigade and all that. Just trust me.”

  “But Pechorin mentioned an anointed. Did the notes—?”

  “Trust me,” says Jack. “Besides …”

  Jack points out to the northwest horizon where the sky is clouded with black specks, like a swarm of flies or a great flock of crows in the distance. Prussian merchant zeppelins outrigged in Syria, fitted for war, and flying now under the Futurist flag.

  “Air travel is the way of the future.”

  “How do these work?” says Jack.

  Anat and MacChuill sit on a bench in the corner of the Beth Ashtart, working on their contraptions—Turkish rifles and Enakite spears, railings and barbed wire, jingling dog tags, rosaries and God knows what else, salvaged from the ruins around them and lashed together with strips of leather. They look like harpoon guns, crossbows, insane and monstrous, bastard hybrids of weaponry from every time in history.

  “Unsympathetic magic,” says Reinhardt.

  Jack takes the weapon offered by Reinhardt, aims with it, testing the weight, the balance.

  “You say the word I taught you as you pull the trigger,” says Anat. “The bullet will carry it through their shield. Aim well, Captain Carter. We do not have many bullets. Take what Tamuz has finished.”

  Sitting up on the altar now, the youth is scratching sigils into bullets with the point of a knife, loading them into cartridges; his tongue sticks out from one corner of his mouth, a picture of concentration.

  “Hey,” says Jack.

  Tamuz doesn't look up—but of course. Carter walks over and taps him on the shoulder, points at the cartridges—are these ready? Tamuz nods, mouths the word yes, but there's no sound.

  There's no sound at all within five feet of the boy. A silent echo of the Name of God hangs around him as a cloak, a zone of absolute quietude which no language, not even the Cant, can penetrate. It will die, fade away as echoes do, but if it holds for the next few hours …

  The rest of them will have to stay outside of it in order to use these disrupters, but if Reinhardt sticks close to Tamuz all the fire of Heaven won't be able to harm a hair on his head. Jack picks up two full cartridges, tucks them into his belt. A hand on Tamuz's arm—the boy looks up into his eyes, smiles.

  They don't really need the words, but he mouths them anyway.

  “Captain Carter, are you ready?” says Reinhardt. “Captain Carter?”

  Jack closes the wooden box and turns to the open doorway of the Beth Ashtart, where MacChuill and Anat stand silhouetted against the daylight. A single shaft of sunlight streams into the temple through the opening, catching blue wisps, the smoke of us, as we dance in the dark air. From the single eye of the Weeping Angel we gaze down on him. We gaze down fondly on the many Jacks in our multifacet vision, all these Jacks who have fought their way to this sanctuary of chaos, fought for love, fought to the death. Over there he lies dead upon the altar, beside the body of Tamuz. Over here he lies just short of it, arm stretched out and reaching in his final moment, tears streaming down his face because he does not have the strength. He sits huddled in one corner, rocking back and forth, insane. And slumped in another, with his back to the wall, a cigarette in his mouth and a revolver in his hand, waiting for his death. The room is as full of Jacks as it is of us, though the others do not see this—just as they do not see us shifting on the walls, only the painted glamour of pagan illustrations. They hear us, Anat, MacChuill and Reinhardt, but they hear our whispers as the echoing of the Cant.

  Only Tamuz hears us properly, understands us entirely, in his hearing, his understanding, of the silence that gives our whispers meaning.

  Jack, of course, both hears and sees us as we do ourselves, the closest to us in the nature of his soul, in the shapeless force of his Sekem. We love Tamuz, the fluttering-eyelashed, fluttering-lifed Ba, the v
ery heart of us. We do not hate the shadowy Pechorin, the Khaibit, this thing of darkness which is also ours. We are in awe of Anat, our ferocious warrior, our huntress Khu. We smile upon MacChuill, our cursing and complaining Sekhu, serving us well for all his mutterings. And Samuel and Reinhardt…

  “Captain Carter, are you ready?” says Reinhardt. “Captain Carter?”

  “I'm ready,” says Jack.

  He turns back to the altar, where Pechorin's body now lies—a shadow offered to the shadows, a betrayer betrayed—and draws the copy of the Song of Solomon out of his pocket. He lays it upon the dead man's chest, unsure if he's offering them both to the Weeping Angel as a sacrifice or for safekeeping; it just doesn't seem right to leave a part of our soul with no marker for its grave.

  As MacChuill's gruff voice urges him to get a fuckin move on, Jack picks up his disrupter and walks out into the blinding sunlight.

  The drone of zeppelins is getting louder out here.

  Anat takes his hand, clasps it with a strong and certain grip.

  “I wish that we will meet again someday,” she says. “In another life.”

  “Heam,” he says. “May it be.”

  “Mektoub,” she says.

  He looks at MacChuill, who just snorts.

  “Aye, an’ wan day Partick Thistle'll win the League.”

  The old soldier shades his eyes with a hand, searching the sky to the north. The zeppelins are visible now as cigar shapes dark against the blue sky, but flashing silvery now and then with reflected sunlight. The first of them looks like it must already be over the Ink Wells.

  “Christ, but there's fuckin hunners ae them. An a’ tae burn a city that's a'ready a fuckin wasteland.”

  “If Pechorin isn't the only blackshirt working with the angels,” says Jack, “they're probably more concerned with smoking us out.”

  He has one more glance back at the place where his old friend Samuel Hobbs-baum spent his last few hours on earth, planning, scribbling or maybe just deciding, and then finally burning his own name out of the page that it was written in, burning himself out of existence. One small act which might well have graved that silence, that absence, into the very Name of God, and saved them all. Not that this will stop the angels from trying their insane scheme. Carter slips his hand into his pocket to touch the folded vellum, turns and sees MacChuill pointing up into the sky.

  “Whit the fuckin hell is that?”

  A rift in the cerulean sky, a burst of indigo, a thunderbolt of purple, a blue-green electric rip in reality, tearing straight down through the clouds and through the first zeppelin.

  “I'm guessing that's the angels’ anointed,” says Jack.

  And his grin is snickety-sharp and glinting white.

  WE ALL DIE SOMEDAY

  Joey Narcosis brushes a speck of white fluff off one shoulder of his long black woolen overcoat, and steps up to the edge of the gantry. Behind him, the archivist notices, Arturo is busy rewiring the computer, sabotaging the laboratory. The archivist finds this vaguely interesting but is in two minds whether to stop the scientist or to join in. In other circumstances, the archivist would have been in panic mode, broadcasting alarms on all channels, long-established post-assassination protocols kicking in—Emergency! Emergency! Thopters would be scrambling, paradox shielding deploying, work routines being reset, whole life histories being rewritten; every resource in the Circus would be working in unison now to jump-start the Duke back into existence. Circumstances change, however.

  Arturo would be—should be—at the heart of this, bringing a clone out of cold storage, uploading into it the copy of the Duke's graving from the virtual vault it's stored in, transferring the unkin soul into a new host in a metaphysical reboot. Instead, he's reprogramming the emergency evacuation procedure so it will release a thousand sex-starved, orgone-crazed bonobos on the streets of Dunedin. Although more than aware of the mad scientist's newborn relish for life and its innate absurdity, the archivist does not really have a sense of humor about this.

  But we're still working on him.

  Joey is dead calm, ever the cool and collected one. He stands over the chi-mine, looking down into the depths of the chaosphere and evaluating his options. Fox's Plan A was for Joey and Jack to both jump down the rabbit hole to Palestine, 1929, where Jack would play the hero and Joey the villain, working with the angels but double-dealing and conniving to bring them down with the black-hat avarice and pride that always bites the bastard on the ass. Plan B was that, if only one of them made it through, he'd try to set it all up himself; to do that Joey will have to tweak and twist the Jack of that fold, lay down a paper chase for him, hope he follows the script. Plan C—which is Joey's own potential plan—is that he screws over both sides, takes the Book for himself and sees just what you can do with the Secret Name of God and the programming manual for the universe. It's a thought.

  Around the hole of his soul, Joey feels the modifications to his metaphysique making him itchy about all of these plans. The dust in the air around him dances to some distant song. He feels like his skin is golden armor, his eyes silver orbs, his heart made of ice. He feels like he could kill someone with the touch of his shadow. It would be a shame to let that power go to waste, but at the same time he has no desire to play God … though it might be nice to be the hero for a fucking change.

  Somewhere in the back of his head, he wonders if Fox has his own Plan C and all of this, even betrayal on his part, is included in it. No matter. He swings first one leg then the other over the rail of the gantry, spreads his arms. Then lets himself fall forward.

  We all die someday, he thinks.

  And his overcoat billows and flutters as he rolls and straightens out into a dive, going down in a diagonal, an arrow with a vector through all three temporal dimensions, moving back through linear time, off-beam in sidereal time, deep inward through the strata of residual time.

  He sees the blue-green storm of the chaosphere rushing up to meet him, dives through wafts of vapor clouds, through glowing nebulae, through sparking and arcing electric tendrils that whip around him, flick across his face, smear into his slipstream. He hits stratocirrus and then cumulus, a thick brilliant glow of chaos, psychedelic as projections in a sixties discotheque, smashes out of the corona and down, into: a black space of darting spirals, branching scrawls of light like paths of particles in collision; a whirling vortex of lensing effects, warped and weird around him, pitch-black below him, and up above him blinding white, as if all of the light of history is pouring in behind him as he pierces the event horizon.

  He brings his arms out to the side, splays his hand to feel the histories streaming through them, feel the currents and eddies, the flows, feeling for the thread he wants; and he finds it, snaps his arms in to his side and twists and shifts and—

  —slices out into a blue sky, a blue-white sea and pale sand below, a valley of salt, and a fleet of silver cigar shapes scattered across the sky, one straight ahead, coming up so sudden he just crashes straight through it, shredding his coat and losing drag. He rolls, tries to compensate, spreads his arms to grab time, like fucking Tarzan trying to catch a jungle vine, but it rips right through his fingers.

  All we can do is swarm out of the shadows under him to armor him in a glint of scales and feathers as he plummets, Joey Narcosis, a great falling peacock angel, hitting the Ink Wells outside Tell el-Kharnain like a meteor out of space.

  A Thousand Books in One Page

  The light hits them first, a jolt of blue-green sudden as a camera flash, so blinding that it almost feels, Jack thinks, like some mad scientist had sparked an electrode, prodded this or that cell in his brain, causing a flash as sudden as a memory. Then comes the noise of impact, the almighty DOOM of this strange comet out of time hitting the earth, which quakes under their feet—the shock wave. A plume of smoke billows up and out, swallowing the first wave of the zeppelins. There's black in the smoke and gray, but there's as much purple, green and blue in it as it furls into the air, a pillar,
a fountain, rising and collapsing over itself, a vast mushroom-shaped monster.

  “Come on,” says Jack, “it's time to make our move.”

  He hands the box to Reinhardt, and the Prussian takes his place behind Tamuz. MacChuill to the right, Anat to the left, Jack between them and in front, they come together into a tight formation, silence dropping like the switching off of a radio as Jack enters the zone of safety around Tamuz. The silence makes it all so eerie and unreal as they move out into the square, the airships quiet in the sky, the fire of the angels a ghostly barrage, shattering buildings around them, the earth under their feet, even the air itself shimmering but utterly harmless within the circle.

  As they start up the North Road, Jack raises the binoculars to study the angels, smiles at the fury and frustration twisting Michael's face into a mask of hate, baring his teeth as he spits his futile venom at them. He nods with satisfaction at the way Azazel now glances nervously over his shoulder at the pillar of smoke still rising, belching up from the impact in the Ink Wells, spreading out across the sky, not dissipating in the wind but stretching in volutes and trails, moving out into the Futurist fleet like some blind amorphous ocean thing, more plant than animal but alive enough to reach with hungry tendrils and snag passing fish in its stinging wafts of frond.

  That's right, you cunts, thinks Jack, we're coming for you.

  And, as they move out into the Silkmarket, Jack gives the signal, and the three of them with disrupters step out of the circle of silence, into the thrum of oncoming airships and the shrieks of angels and the rumble of a distant storm. MacChuill breaks right and Anat left, to draw off the angel fire; they head for the edges of the square, using pillars of salt for cover. Striding out in front of Tamuz and Reinhardt, disrupter blazing as he fires at Azazel, Michael, Azazel, Michael, Jack sings his way toward the Jericho Gate of the fallen city of Tell el-Kharnain.

  He runs, turning now and then to kneel, fire back at the two angels pinned down in their sniper positions over the Gate, by MacChuill and Anat. He runs and fires, fires and runs, leaping over bodies and boulders, through the rubble and the babble of this hopeless battle in this unholy war.