Errata

by Duncan, Hal

  •

  A lick of finger, a flick of digits, & a page turns. Outside, in the midnight furnace, shadows burn with questings, calls & challenges, with rumblings of rumours of a way. Outside, in this moebius city where they dwell, the dead or dreaming war for towers built higher than any Haven, pits dug deeper down than any Hell, daimoned humanity & unkin angels in a fire-fight for the rock of ages. Inside, in the still of his sanctomb sanctorah, the darkartist flicks thru mysteries of myths & histories. A prince of end times, fool of dreams, he tastes a touch of fingertip to tip of tongue & turns—

  •

  — A way. There has to be a way, the darkartist whispers to his sylph. He turns another page, unfurls the map bound into it & smooths it straight. He tries to trace a way in or a way out of the city. The book contains it all, they say, explains it all, the carter’s tale of how the world fell to the bitmites, how they came here, the beginning & the end. But his hands are all fingers & thumbs, too clumsy to follow every intricate articulation of this pidgin tongue of creole nations, the bitmites’ twisted, twisting Cant. He thumps the book closed, clenches his frustration into a fist of silence. Has to will his hand back open to rest it, palm flat, on the leather binding of the book. A bitmite artefact itself, the book seems somehow still—so warm it is to touch—alive.

  — There are copies of this everywhere? he says.

  •

  The consul, standing by the window, nods; he can hear the motion in the stillness.

  — The book is spreading thru the mob, m’sire. Like wildfire.

  No, the young unkin lord thinks. No, not fire, but ink drips soaking into sodden paper, blotches smeared to clouds of grey like mist or mold.

  Light catches icegrey eyes as he opens them & stretches from his hunch to rise back from the blackash desk & hurl the book he’s holding at the window where, outside, the city slouches in a silhouette he sees but also hears in the echoes of the Cant, hears as a bestial roar over the waste.

  The book explodes to shreds of brown & yellow, leather & vellum, & black powder. They call it daimon dust, the humans, the nanite ink that writes their world.

  Anarchaic Arachnidae

  The bitmites scrabble a babble across the window, obscuring the city in a screed of indecipherable creed. They eat, excrete designs like frosting on the pane, strewing an archaic & anarchic glass graffiti in their wake.

  Anarchaic, he thinks.

  Across the glass they etch the fine delineation of two circles, one inside the other. At equidistant points around the inner circle, ticks appear—at twelve & six o’clock, at two & four, at eight & ten. At each of these, two arcs diverge from the same point, moving towards the outer rim, but curving from each other so they merely touch that rim as they turn in upon themselves in spirals like ram’s-horns.

  •

  He looks at the empty circle in the centre of it, wondering if they’re trying to tell him something. The semes they spin seem senseless, but the bitmites are the artificers of the city, weaving the loose threads of all their afterlives into one wide web of a world, a city at the end of time.

  Anarchaic arachnidae, he thinks, and unkin archons.

  All of them are caught up in that web in one way or another, unkin just as much as any human. As the court’s darkartist he’s, perhaps, the most enmeshed of all. So they should know him, might well have a message for him. They might understand the questions that he’s asking himself now; the bitmites crawling in the city-streets & every book, scrawl also in the shadows of his mind.

  •

  His consul, footsteps echoing solid in the maze of volumes, crosses to the window, lays his hands upon it, gathering the swarm of logos locusts & semantics ticks, all the burrowing bitmites, into his own metaphysique. Veins in his hands, like vines pulsing alive under his skin, flow black a second & then fade. As he turns back to face the prince, his hand still up, a faint line races, traces a half-remembered scar across his palm. The scraps of book fallen at his feet crumble to dusts & breezes; they dissolve, engrain themself into the smoothline texture of the wooden floorboards.

  •

  — There has to be a way.

  — A way to where? the consul asks.

  That’s what he doesn’t know though. Where they are. Where they might be. There are maps all round him, in his books & in the city, in the world. But he has no idea now how to read the world. The Cant that was so clear once seems to be… evolving; it’s as if the bitmites are developing their own tongue, wiring words together into new sense—nuisance nonsense most of it. He gathers papers on his desk, squares them into a sheaf & adds them to a pile six inches high, six inches deep. He turns to gaze coolly & blankly at the consul.

  — Are they waiting for me in the Hall?

  — The wake can’t end without you.

  Are they still a wake, he wonders idly, still awake at the wake? He pushes his hair back from his face, as if to clear the bitmites’ chaos with it.

  — Let them know I’m coming, he says. I’ll be down there soon.

  A Gaunt Construct of Tensions

  As the consul leaves, the prince of end times wanders to the window, to a vision of night streets lit with a volcanic light. He’s strode the city, dwelt & dealt with rebels, studying the tumbleword litter in the rumblestreets rolling, steel grafitti in the sanctuaries of teaching, temples strewn with rubble of illuminated stone, all broken, all defiled. It took him years to find the book the reacher talked of, in the mob’s hands now, bought from a market stall of tee-shirts, texts & postcard after postcard, anarchist pietas of the fallen heroes of the revolution. And the book amongst them. Bought by the future king of all this… carrion. The very dark prince in the tower himself, the bastard prince, the crown prince now, to be.

  Clown prince.

  •

  Mirrored in the window dark with night behind, he sees himself, reflection of a shadow, crisp in white silk shirt, black suit & tie. Roundwound in overcoat of fine black wool, his pale grim surface skin is stritched over a frame of bone, a gaunt construct of tensions. For a moment in the dark his graving shows, wiring his face with lines of onyx black as fine as filigree, a mask of tribal tattoo like some ancient worm-faced deity. He rakes fingers thru his crowblack hair & spits a word of Cant at his reflection, shatters the window & its indecipherable sign, scatters the shards of glass out to the night.

  We drift back in as dust too fine for him to see.

  •

  Read him, we say to you, ridden by riot, graved in black on bleak. His rage is a book written in wrath, wrought on his skin, a book of bones all wracked with shattered spine, soul skinsuit ripped off page by page, stitched back to hide his hollow soul. Read him. The graving that marks him out as monster, villain, is the tracks of tears unshed. This thing is sorrow, walking in the night, gone wild, a furious massacred slaughterhouse child.

  He has walked thru the madness of the city, watched as his angel kin swooped down on wings of synthe, disruptors blazing, to disperse a crowd, disperse them to dust. He has walked thru the madness of the city; now it walks thru him.

  •

  He puts his hand upon the pile of papers on the desk &, as his eyes burn bright with icegrey light, he whispers just a little word. The notes ignite. The writing burns beneath his hand, the wasting of a lovetime’s learnings, journals full of all the names & all the games his blooder played with him when they were younger. All the same: infant dances of death & love; diaries of a fallen dove; snapshot of a boy with spectacles & flowers, straight out of the sandpit, in his finest hours. These are the pages of his years, given to cold fire & dark ash, sorrow & hate.

  The Kith of Destiny & Fortune

  Ash flits from the desk into the breeze that blows in thru the broken window. The prince runs a finger thru it, smears the grey with a thumb.

  When did he become this prince, this dark son? What was he before? He can’t be sure. There was a time he had another name, a home, a huma
n aim, before his blooder & the others found him, called him out & made him unkin; but that was too far ago to recall much more than snatches, too long away to rebuild more than a handful of images. He might have been fireteen or twenty-yore when he heard the Cant for the first time. All he recalls is stepping out into Illusion Fields, feeling bonesands acoarse his skin, awireness flowing in his nerveins, bloodlust of eternal regenerations. All he remembers is how his first scries pierced his airdreams.

  He was on his knees when they came to him, shadows like crows in the blue sky above the corn, & raised him to his feet.

  •

  Adamantium armour gleaming; hair the colour of the corn; words that made the world shimmer like summer: his blooder. Others hinter him.

  — Join us, he’d said, graving the Cant into his soul.

  So he had sailed the skies with them on silvery steely wings of synthe, & come into the holy city as a newblood gathered to the host. He had flown over streets built out of song itself, raised from the symphonaesthesia of the Cant. He had wondered that this whole confugued musaic of consonance did not crumble in dissent, every man or woman or child seeking to sing a palace for themself.

  — The mob? his blooder laughed. Can they speak the language of the angels, shape the shadows with a word? No, they need us to do it for them.

  Glint in his eyes & in his grin, his blooder thought they were heroes.

  •

  — The gulf that sifts humanity & unkin, said his consul once when he was still a mentor, is not one of time & space, but tame & spice. It is an altaring of perspective that comes only to the few, the kith of destiny & fortune. You are a lord of the Illusion Fields, m’sire, both born & borne to this beyond.

  But even as he followed his golden blooder’s rise up thru the ranks, shadowing his footsteps, he was never happy with the rule of the role, more of a wordman than a birdman, more concerned with the humanist than the numinous.

  — That’s why I’m proposing you for darkartist, his blooder had said.

  Lightprince already by then, he’d said he needed someone used to standing up to him, staying his arm, speaking for peace. No more street-battles with ruptor-wielding children, no more razing daimon strongholds, just devotion to a study of the Cant itself—he could hardly refuse.

  And now? Centuries of his life within this room he’s spinned, researching, searching for some sacred secret—sacret, he thinks—that could tale him the truth about the unkin & humanity. And found nothing that could salve as answer, sooth his senses, not even in the book that was supposed to answer all.

  •

  We try to hissper it into the tomb & womb, the grave & cave, that is his broken head. We try to code it in the peaks & troughs of enformation, in the emanations of identity. But, lost, seeking a refuge in his fugue, he sees only the black ink of us, not the white space between that gives us meaning, the clear quiet absences where voices silence & we simply are. Find the me hidden in themes, we try to tell him. His face is the very image of this shattered city of shadows, does he not see? Ink & vellum. Black line & white space in tension. All awareness is a whereness, is intension & release.

  Your rage is only sorrow trying to break free.

  The Hero as Destroyer

  Wondering in trash of books pulled down from shelves, the prince stalks strictures of the cage that traps him, kicks disguarded tomes across the room as if he kicks the whole hurled world itself. There are no words to write the wrong of it, to show that unkin are akin to clay humanity. There are no words, only the rotted names of tomes long since corrupted by their age—Toran & Korah & Holy Babel. Angelisch transliterations of diabolistic grimoires. Apocryptographia of old golem gods with faces never seen, names never spoken. Pseudopaedia full of illustriations of idols with feet & hands of clay, gemstones for eyes. All lies.

  •

  He pulls a copy of Wolven von Escherpack’s Partsevil from the shelf, a tale of a poor fool who fell, who fought to pierce the veil, who sought to feel the grail, & failed, got only a glimpse of golden chalice, a scrap of salvation for himself alone. He thinks of Fieryvice, the hero’s halfcast brother with his mask of face graved in black lines as if to chart the faultlines of the wounded land.

  He spits a word, giving the book to flame. Let the fire revise it. Make the hero not the widow’s son, the Hinter’s knight, but his half-brother, yes, his kin, the other with the graven skin. Fuck Partsevil. Let Fieryvice, moorage of light & dark, find the philosopher’s keystone, bring it to base humanity. Let him leave Chapel Perilous in ruins behind, not just the hero, but the hero as destroyer.

  The hiero as deustroyer, he thinks.

  •

  He drops the burning book, looks at his hand unharmed by flame. He turns it, flexes it, not awed by the biomechanism but… curious. Under a sensurround of whorled skin veined by rivulets of green, he sees the musculature of his metaphysique, the stone of fossil bone adjutting at his wrists & knuckles, all the jointing & articulation of his hand. Icefire, the bloodwine runs in his veins, & words are wires in his brain, lines of black ink under his skin, the Cant, the power of the unkin, of the Great Beyond, the Deep Within. It is the song of a cunning vox & an orphan liar, the tangle of tones played on his bones.

  He is a pattern of us, we try to tell him, bitmite-built as all are now, unkin or human, but he does not hear, unwilling to admit that this eternity of flesh was his own fantasy once far ago & long away.

  •

  He glares at all the little flares of fires around the library. His eyes shimmer to mirrors of the flames, cold orbs silvered as metal, an impassive gaze of nickels shining with a cool lucidity. Inside, in all the fine mechanics of his agital emotion, dialog of intellect, still, he feels impenetrable nothing. He’s far off course, of course, insane. He should feel something on this day of all days, on this night of all nights, of the wake.

  No heart, no hurt, he tells himself.

  Full Fierce

  A doom of rod on wood resounds, a formal call. He snarls a blast of chilling Cant to still the fires, leaving just half-burnt scrappings, flutterings of ash, & turns towards the doors.

  A set of stelae, smooth, of wet-slate-gray synthe, solid & impervious as tombstones, cool to touch, are set into the wall, illusion of a doorway. Two pillars framing it are the true portals, two columns of light which seem just one more feature of the architexture of the library’s urnate illuminations, near identical except… one fire, the other flame, one burns, the other blazes, the so subtle sense of such a difference hinted in the quality of colour that reflects off the dark double-doors, a quiet comment that not all would note. The prince has something of an artist’s eye for light.

  •

  — Enter.

  The pillars shift & flicker in the air. Two messagers in blacksuit formalwear step out & stand. Each clicks one heel hard on the deepwood floor. Each bows his head. He notes the solid jut of jawbone on them both, not square but wedge, cuneate with softening curvation, not neanderthal but… anubian, a delicate strength. They are almost identical… not quite.

  He & his blooder were once messagers like this, the prince recalls.

  — M’sire, says one. There are disruptions in the Litan Quarter. The sandminers rise in open riot. We’re quelling now but we require consent to use full force.

  •

  Full fierce, he thinks, the farce of fools, full force.

  — The reacher’s soldier is with them, the other says, arousing rabble. Word is he has some champion named within this book they follow, that they’re gathering to strike while we’re… weakened.

  The prince slicks his lips & sniffs, nods, not affirming but considering. These are the calls he’ll have to make after tonight, after the wake & the ascension. After the craftsmith’s graved the crown prince to his new role, his new rule. But he has freedom for these last few hours.

  — Why are you questing me? he says. Am I the warrior my blooder was? Get your consent from a
ny of the higher host, from one who fights & gives a fuck.

  — M’sire, the higher ranks are gathered in the Hall awaiting…

  The messager trails off.

  •

  — Only you are still allowing access, says the other. M’sire, it is imperative the measures needed are consented to. We need to use full force.

  — No, says the prince.

  — M’sire?

  — Give mercy.

  He says it like it is an unfamiliar concept, as one studying a stranger in the shadows, &—for all the times he’s argued in the past for truces, treaties with the rebels, for humane solutions—it’s not empathy that shapes the words this time but something else, a pitiless decision born of hate. If they want someone bold & firm to take his blooder’s place, to make their rules for them, to call their fates, maybe he’ll cater to their taste, give them a ruthlessness they can’t imagine. Just aimed at another place.

  — Mercy? says the messager.

  He nods & waves the man away. Maybe he’ll give them kingdom with the king himself as traitor to his race.