by Duncan, Hal
They come out of the black, their weapons blazing with a hundred voices made of harps & rivers, screaming, streaming thru the crowd a wash of pain & pleasure, fear & fury, with a ruthless passion. I see the boy beside me—so familiar, a name on the tip of my tongue—turn & shove, be shoved himself & turned within what, in an instant, is a mob. I watch a bolt of hailfire smash the doors behind the reacher, hear his scream, & hear my own scream; then I too am turning, shoving. I look on in horror as a man in front of me is howled away into a scattering debris of fields & forces, waves & particles, a dust. Some instinct in me dives me thru the gap & twists me past a splash of violent colour. Then I’m running for my life—whatever, in this place, that life might be—turning again & again.
Smoothly, the hawkeyed soldier kneels &, with one hand, curls the reacher’s weakening grasp around the palmtop (I see the old man gasp, clutching the thing to his chest) while, with the other, raising his own disruptor, he switches his thumb across a flick & snicks it on into a low buzz, scans & sights, steadies his arm & studies out his target, softly speaks a word. It flames. An angel cannons off a sandstone wall & falls. The soldier scans again.
•
I feel the panic of the crowd, as real & personal as my own, stray thoughts & memories of everyone I touch splashing across my mind—momentary visions thru their eyes. I stagger back against a wall, have to touch its stone for some solidity, unable for a second to identify which voice of terror echoing in my head is mine. Flattened back into a doorway, knuckles white around the Book tight to my chest, I only have to see the face of someone in the mob to know, right then & there, each liquid thought that roars within their heads. I see thru all their eyes, a multifacet vision; & for a moment it seems this sum of scenes, the chaos of it all, is a far clearer view of what this world is than I’ve ever known alone. A chorus of voices that somehow fuses into singularity. My senses flick from merchant to sandminer, from a dying reacher to—
•
The pothealer’s apprentice runs & weaves his way around the sounds of thunder. A cold grip latches on his arm & whips him round. An angel stands upon the earth before him, steelframe wings enfurled, her gray ribbed synthe armour etched with flashing silver, & the crossbow-crucifix of her disrupter raised & blazing straight to right; the angel isn’t even looking where she fires but stares with mirrored eyes into the boy’s trapped gaze, murmuring sweet mayhem.
The reacher raises the palmtop above his head, raises his head, raises himself up off his knees, raises a roar above the crowd that rises bitmites in a cloud of black. He screams his fury at the angels & it blasts right thru the crowd, even as he himself is blasted to a spatter of black dust, a stain, a scorch, a shadow on the gold doors of the basilica. Shreds of leather & shards of glass & circuitboard, green & gold, scatter down the steps.
A merchant in full finery crouches to grab a pickaxe from the ground &, swinging it high over his head, runs screaming murder at an angel. His last thoughts run riot in his mind—his wife, his children, the price of grain, the blood of his brother—as the angel shatters him with a word.
The soldier fires.
•
The angel flickers, flashes, shatters, & the pothealer’s apprentice falls back, seraph’s artefactual exoskeleton collapsing on him as he splashes into black of bitmites. The flood of blood washes across his hand & into him. He rolls the steel away, untangling the clanking metal off him, stumbles to his feet; his vision smears a second & the square around him veers aloft left, right down, & he tumbles to his knees. The voices of the angels rain upon him & the threads of shreds of skin blow thru the air, torn from the mob dissolved by hailfire, but the flood of shadows curl around his hands & arms, & whip & slip around his back, across his face. The darkness snarls him upright & uncircles him; he flings him forward in a run, to find a way, escape the loudscape. Somewhere in the rapture of the raptor angels, the soldier fires again.
Wings of Steel
The angels stand upon the rooftops all around the square, in gray & silver armour of synthe, their wings of steel uncurled, or fly across the skies & dive down into them, their ruptors strafing. They rake the mob with quiet words they whisper to their weapons. With their just & merciless commands, they lay their reckoning upon the crowd & they… disperse it.
— Matre min ent Deos en d’Haeven, someone sobs before he dies, enflamed. The apprentice catches a fragment of the word that fired him & is hurled across the square by it—sinsensous—falling under, down & dazed by wonder—sensense—as the word of the lord resounds inside his head. He lies—synsensate—looking up & sees the sky afire with angels.
•
We scream as their disruptors shatter the substance we have given all these souls, for they are us & we are them. We are the unrequited loves you lust for. We are the lost ones that you longed to see again, the enemies you dream of conquering. We are your fathers & your mothers, yes, your sisters & your brothers, yes, your enemies & lovers, yes, & we are you.
We are the sylphs you always yearned to be, & the shades you are afraid you are. We are the voices of your reason & your passion that you hear but do not listen to. We are the ancient guides & the imagined brides of you, the face that looks back from the mirror at you. You have seven souls & we are all of them, all of them unbound in the black dust of bitmites as you made us.
Why do you send your angels out over the city to destroy us?
•
Reynard runs. The body of soul that is still somehow Reynard ducks & dives & weaves his way thru the destruction, with a memory of shards of clay pots rough & sharp within his child’s fingers, & another memory of stroking his grey, grizzled beard, hand tight around his rupter as he tried to come to terms with all the reacher’s words of once upon a time before the afterworld became a kingdom. And there’s another memory, a memory that blazes bright inside his head, so bright it almost blinds him—the face the reacher looked upon & cursed the day the bastard took the throne. And as he runs, the snatches of the blasted lives latch onto him as their only hope, snarling his thoughts like seaweed, tripping him. Reynard falls & the Book falls from his hand, spine bursting on the ground & pages flapping loose & free, kicked underfoot in the panic. Reynard shouts, snatching out a desperate hand that’s knocked away by the legs & feet all round him, watching the pages kicked & cracked & crushed, dissolving in the shadow liquid, burning in the angelfire.
The soldier fires, an angel falls, a bell tolls Evenfall.
•
We are the Seven. You might call us Gabriel & Michael, Raphael & Azazel, Uriel & Sandalphon & Metatron.
Or call us Saturn, Sun & Moon, Tew & Odin, Thor & Frea.
Call us the Ren & Sekem, the Khu & Ba, the Ka & Khaibit & Sekhu—the Secret Name, the Power, the Winged Guardian, the Heart, the Double, the Shadow, and the Mortal Remains.
Call us Persona, Id & Anima-or-Animus, Self & Shadow, Ego, Mana.
Call us these rotted names that have no meaning anymore.
We are still you.
We weep for the war you wage among your selves.
The Mirrorshard Mosaic
The blast’s last echo dies down in the remnants of the city. The pothealer’s apprentice sits, crosslegged, in the dirt, a bloodstream trickling from his forehead, patting the ground to pick sharp glinting mirrorshards out of the murk, arranging them in front of him into a rough mosaic. He stares with a blank, blind gaze at the shattered reflection he’s unable to see, mouthing words to himself like someone only learning how to read for the first time, like someone learning how to speak for the first time. He understands some of the ideas of his master now, on order emergent out of bits & pieces.
— You alive, lad? You need help, na?
The apprentice turns his head towards the voice. The sandminer waves a crusted hand in front of the boy’s white unblinking eyes & frowns.
— I’m putting the pieces back together, the apprentice explains.
— You’s hurt
, lad. You need help.
The sandminer looks around him at the broken streets of fallen stone, the cracked pavements already blackening with the spread of bitmite night. Screams, gunshots in the background. Now that the angels have laid down their law & left, the night will take the streets. The boy will probably be dead by morning.
— You’s from min quarter, na? Pothealer’s prentice boy.
— Not now.
•
The boy places another shard of mirror into his mosaic, testing, touching it gently into place with tip of finger. He taps the mirrorshard mosaic with his fingernail.
— Look. There’s a secret story behind every shadow and reflection, if you can see it. The sandminer automatically looks to where the boy is pointing, &—
Let us show you the cosmogonies of Athens, Thebes & Jerusalem, we whisper in his ear, of elohim, netjer & theos. There is order in chaos in the ephemeral aether, in the breath of air heavy with moisture, breath of the elohim upon the deep.
We show him: order in chaos, hidden in the dark waters of the formless night, in the genesis, in the emergence of erotic, erratic, airy artifice out of the void; order in chaos, in the child on the lotus, garlanded with narcissi & hyacinths, concieved in the heart, shaped on the tongue, born in the word, in the name hatched out of a golden world; the name that Orphan used to sing the afterworld into existence, to christen his own gnosis, to create a corporeal eternity for his lost love, life.
We show him this.
•
The sandminer falls back from the mosaic of mirrorshards, shaking his head, grinding fists into his streaming eyes, falls back against a wall, & gasps a breath of air deep into his lungs.
— World is fucked! Craziness and chaos. I don’t know these names.
He points at the mosaic, too troubled for that fraction of a second to think that the boy can’t see him.
— I don’t know this stuff, none of these names, people, places. Athens, Thebes, Jerusalem! Made up places. Not real. Not here! Not now!
The sandminer starts to back away, still shaking his head as if to deny the boy & his mosaic any reality at all.
— Wait, says the boy.
He reaches out blindly.
— I used to be a pothealer’s apprentice.
The sandminer looks into the boy’s white stare, clenches his hand into a fist, bites at the thumb of it. He walks back & put his hand on the youth’s shoulder.
— Come then, crazy boy. We take you home, if it still there.
•
He leads the boy thru narrow streets where cobbles melt into black tar & walls lean unsteady if they stand at all, away from the Court & the City Chambers, into the alleys & backstreets where the sounds of mayhem are the quietest. With gruff hands & rugged voice, he pulls the boy, around & over & under & thru the collapsed & fractured scapes of Empyre. Frontages of awninged shops, derelict, steel shutters soaked in grafitti. A carter’s yard littered with shreds of packing paper. A beggar with piercing eyes sat in a doorway clutching a tiny firegun, a sign in front proclaiming, souldering work done cheap.
The boy remains silent all the way, though even if he were to speak it would be drowned out in the clamour of calls & cries that pierce the night, names shouted out as curse or plea, bouncing off the crumbling edifices of the buildings, sandstone & concrete facades, glass & brick, this style or that. To the sandminer, the boy seems strange in his serenity, as if listening to a song that only he can hear & gazing upon sights that only he can see, impervious to the ruin around them.
— What your name, boy?
Thomas, Tawus, Tammuz, Dumuzi, Damu, Adam, Atum, Aton, Adonai.
— No name no more, says the boy. Washed away.
He stops & turns to the sandminer, reaches out a hand for the man’s face, touches the man’s rough, weathered features. He holds up a forefinger tipped with ochre grime.
— All dust, he says. Bodies, time, words, names.
He rubs his thumb across his fingertip, brushing it clean.
— All dust.
The Empyre of Errata
I hold the torn, burnt scrap of vellum in one hand, trying not to look at it, afraid of what it has to tell me, unsure if I’d even understand it. It is the only page of the Book I saved, the only page of the Book that now exists perhaps. What have I done? What kind of city have I come to?
Theories of this afterworld tumble thru my head. For every denizen of the city, it seems, there is a different story of what this world is, how it came to be. Some think this place a Haven, some believe themselves in Hell. I remember sitting on my grandpere’s knee, the smell of pipe tobacco & the wet fur of the red setter at his feet, & a tale of tiny machines that turned our blood to ichor, healed us of all sicknesses, gave us immortality. How once they’d finished working on humanity the bitmites started on the world around us, their only aim to give us everything we wanted, even that which we ourselves could never have imagined possible. They took reality apart, rebuilt it in the image of our dreams. And yet the grandpere I remember was no more my own than is the memory.
Other memories, other tales: wanderers who claimed that they were avatars of an absent architect, a creator of complex, mechanistic simulacra of his own reality, awed to find in it the stirring sentience of its agents; prophets who claimed the world was naturally disordered in its origins, only approaching rationality over eons of eternities of time laid down upon time, like a cloud of silt slowly settling in water, in layer after layer of sediment, building up to an eventual solidity far in the future.
•
What I know is that this is a city of oilcan fires, a city of angels rumbling with daimons, a city of wires, a new city of rusted steel & crumbling concrete towers, & an old city of sandstone streets & marble mausoleums. This is a city of fall & restoryation, raizing itself out of history, beyond the spake-tome continuum, into mythstory.
Out of this rotted carcass, graven with history, grows the city state. Cried in its ages by resounding terms—Urauk or Enoas, Babalon or Atlantium, Byzantis, Arom—its new inscryption names it as the symbol of a new whorled order, gathering place of the global village elders, ruled by a warrior-king-god. They call it Empyre now.
But I have a scrap of the Book. And I have a fragment of the reacher’s memory, so I know this city was known first as Errata, & I know the name, buried beneath the dust of broken enemies, of the creature sitting on the throne.
•
I know all of this & it scares me, even as I huddle here, hidden in this alley, crouched behind a crate, with the sound of the massacre ringing in my ears. I know it all the same way that I know so many details of the lives I saw, the souls I touched in the moment of their destruction. I realise that I have been muttering my name over & over again—Reynard, Reynard, Reynard—in absolute terror that this last fragment of identity will be stripped from me in the torrent of others’ memories, of all the nicknames & coined familiarities crashing over my mind. Not one of them remembers clearly who they once were. Not one of them knows what they are now. Not one. Except for me. At least I still remember that I had a name & what that name was.
I fret that whatever I once was is dead, & as all dead things drift to Eratta, down the road of all dust to the city on the edge of everything, I too will end as just another nameless denizen of Empyre. Dead souls & dead dreams. Dead languages & dead cultures. All things that die come here, afterwords, to tumble & crumble. I’m afraid. I never thought a hereafter would be so full of flux.
I wonder how long night lasts in eternity.
•
I finally bring myself to look down at the scrap in my hand. It is stained with the shadow stuff that flows in the pavement cracks & between the bricks & stones all round me. It feels somehow less brittle than it was, soft as kidskin in my fingers, almost. I read:
& there is no terrible dark will under the cosmos, only chaos—deep, sublime & slumbering—only the dreamings of a grievi
ng lover, of the wild child god, the eriphos, the ′imera, the ′imerah—the kid, the lamb, the word—the orphan asleep in moonlight like Endymion &
Further down, it carries on in the same vein.
& this world began, it says, on the day a solemn voice was heard by passing fishermen, calling out from a Greek island & across the sea: Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead! But Pan lives on in death; he only sleeps within the living, dreaming of a life for all the dead. For all this history of myth, this myth of history, this is the only body of the only god; we are the craftsmen & the architects of our own souls &
I crumple the page & throw it at a wall. Empty sophistry. Pointless, pompous, philosophical claptrap with no sense to it at all. Then, a thought occurring to me, I reach over & pick up the scrap, flatten it out & fold it over. A lump of charcoal from a blasted door is good enough, I reckon, & I use it to scratch upon the parchment's back.
Reynard.
I fold the page over again & stuff it in my pocket—a reminder, just in case.
The Prince of End Times
"I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death."
— W.B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
Fool of Dreams
Across the yellowed vellum of the book, across its pages thin & dry as parched skin, the black ink of the bitmites crawls in scribbles, scrawls a texture of text upon the parchment that the prince’s fingers, drifting over living braille, cannot make smooth, cannot unrumple meaning from. Here all the curlicues of Arabic, there the restraint of straight Roman, here the kaballababble of Hebrew, there mute mathemantics of the Greek, the bitmites spell out an entrancing dancing gibberish, that must mean something, so he thinks, but what?