by Duncan, Hal
•
The lightprince stands to speaks to the assembled throng with his new-found authority, & every voice is still, in awe of this… pure force now facing them, not gold but white as virgin snow, whiter than bone or ivory, white-hot as burning metal. A rebel plot, he tells them. Murder & deceit. A ruptor bolt to bring his blooder down, a lie to topple him. Now is the time, he tells them, for the old tradition of the hunt, the decimation of daimon humanity. They cheer, exult, wildhunter girl the loudest of them all. He slaps a hand upon her shoulder, tells her she must lead them, sound the call. Thinks to himself of how he will arrange her fall, how he will turn her dogs upon her.
Under the glamour, as they’ll never understand, his dark is there still, not an absence of the light—it never was—but light coiled in upon itself, an energy more fierce because it’s twisted, wound & sealed into a ball of matter. Glory? True glory is a sun so vast that it’s collapsed into itself, falling forever inwards to a point of zero size, infinite density, a black hole where all laws are shattered & all craft undone, all songs unwoven to a single ever-falling note. And now to start a war on war itself, he thinks.
He orders the prisoner let loose, sent back to give his rebel masters notice that they’re coming, that the new lightprince is in his role, & burning brighter, fiercer than was ever known.
— Go to your taverns and your drinking dens, he says, and tell them that we come to slaughter every one in ten. And then…
He holds the stranger’s eye, the two of them sharing a crystal moment from eternities ago, without words, without breaking from their chosen roles, remembering a split of paths:
Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear it call my name?
I can’t hear anything, mate. Nothing.
Exactly.
— And then, he says, we slaughter every one in ten again, and then again, and we keep killing them until we’re hacking pounds of flesh from a few men.
Until there is no human left, he thinks, who is not sworn upon revenge.
Across the Cold Sandscape
And elsewhen, in a helter skelter duststorm, a behemoth like a mastadon on tundra is starkweathering its age of ash across a world of desert night. A shape with lion’s mane, bear-face & giant body of a man on hands & knees, it haunches its low descent into the burning hailfire, shambling thru the hounded land, crawling on as a pilgrim turned dumb brute. Around it, bonesands drift around the shells of ghost towns long since boomed & shattered, dead in the dust & empty of the beat of Empyre’s drum.
To reach the dawn from midnight in this afterworld, the creature crawls thru Hinter’s hells, so lost to survival it’s forgotten that it’s only chasing its own tale, dawn walking on in front of it across the folds, ever westward, ever returning. If he were phased with it, a man could seek the hidden Empyre of the equinox forever, ever the stranger come to slay the temple’s guardian chimaera, marry with the morningstar princess, in Haven after Haven across the Vellum’s Hinter. But this creature follows all the cities’ falls, seeking something it’s become too much a brute to even imagine. All it can do is slouch on thru the desolation of its dreams, hoping for…
The creature that was once a hero lifts its hoary head.
A scent of spring or summer.
•
The billowing bonesands lift in the dry wind they call the maja, blow across the cold sandscape, & scour the hands of the lightprince. His face masked in a jackal-helm of alloyed gold & adamantium, he sails his sloop out of the western sands, the onyxidian sigils on his breastplate glinting jetblack on the gold, his gauntlets held in one hand with the reins, so with the other he can stroke the wind & signal it to his command. The wildhunter & her hellhounds far behind, he rides alone over the waste.
He sights the beast, swoops round & down, sloop shining as a chariot sun & spraying sand in landing. Ruptor blazing at the beast, he hits it hard & true with each shot, & it bellows, staggers. He leaps out to slide his way down dunes that sprout beneath his feet with wheat, with grasses bursting into life to mark the golden hero’s passing. Pride of lions in his walk, swoop of an eagle, of a hawk, by the time he’s reached the beast the very world around him is an idyll singing his praises.
•
The roughest & most bestial of the ancients slumps down in the wilderness, falls to one side, breath steaming from its nostrils, sandscape slowing all around it, shimmering. Hunger, thirst & other lusts billow away. Long-dormant memories rise & fall in the dust devils, settle into place. Lines of force & fields of truth come clear &, in the shifting desert dunes, it glimpses lives in grains that seem to glint with sunlight: a caverned rock; an under-river; & a city lost & sunken where lush garden green clings to the golden stone & draws its liquid life from dead soul deeps, a city at the end of everything, graved in the antique song, the Cant, the Cant it too once sang. It hears it now over the rasp of its own dying breath, the last gasp of this slain apocalypse creature, even as the flowers spring up around it as the lightprince walks into the meadow of its death.
He crouches down to close the dead thing’s eyes then rises, looks around. A glint in the distance, a flash of his own sunlight sylph reflected, & he turns in curiosity, stepping forward, hair flown in his face.
The bolt hits him.
•
He lies in the grass looking up at a blueblack night sky turning paler, thru azure towards cerulean, with dawn sweeping in so fast, time speeding up, his heart slowing down as it empties his blood onto the red soil thru the hole in his neck & the fingers clutching it, three shadows standing over him, the one with flame-hair asking if he’s dead, no, & another pulling him away, a third in silhouette saying they have to go, but, no, he wants to stay, to wait & see him slip away, but it sounds like he’s whispering for him to stay a wake, no, stay awake, to stay awake, he’s saying, as a way to… no, no, it’s too late, no, there’s no hate, all that’s already slipped away, but wait, he has a message, he has words to say, he has to stay, wait, no, don’t go away, you have to say to him, tell him to find a way, a way to say we cannot stay, to say his toast to all the host, when they arise for me, when they full feast on roasted beast, ask him to say, to drink the red wine down & all away, & say there is a way, there is a way, a way away…
No, wait.
He feels death’s kiss. Silence. A hiss.
Say only this…
The Whenever at the City’s Heart
“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’”
— Wallace Stevens, The Man With The Blue Guitar
One Second to Midnight
A wait, a weight of wait, a click, a tick-tock crocked. Ah, cock! It’s twelve o’clock & all’s hell, all’s hell in the city, drunken angels screaming firebombs into crowded taverns, sandminers rioting in the Litan Quarter, host princes & rebel reachers murdered in unending vendettas. And the Watch Tower itself playing funny buggers with the time.
Rumpled, stumpy, glancing askance at the skanda scanners as he passes them, the old watchman ascends on the clockwork spiral of steel-scaled grating escalator, gyring up into the tick & talk of turning gears & sproinging springs, the whirl of mirrored cogs & jam of hammer-and-bell that should be knelling, telling time in rhyme & reason, chimes & seasons… but is not. The pendulum that stretches down the whole height of the watch tower, hung on wire as thin as a dimension, snicks & cocks & rocks this way & that still, but it seems it’s marking off one second to midnight, one long second to midnight, one drawn out & stretched second to midnight, time & time again.
So, with his tools ajangle on his belt, the watchman clambles up the ringing rungs of ladders, raises a trap door overhead, & huffs himself up into the Mechanism.
•
As clockwork clutters the room, so lenses & lasers flutter the air with light, glittering on glass & brass, a
dance of candelabra that fills the vast space of the Watch Room—the Waltz Room he once called it—with its temporal orrery charting the orbits of each planet of a boulevard, each satellite side-street in the city, this one faster, this one slower, here a smooth elliptical & there a swirl of partner avenues, each following its own path thru the three dimensions of the city’s time but each one synchronised to the strict tick of the pendulum. Every elsewhen of the city is mapped out in miniature in this machine, this clockwork whirl of an exploded hologlyph in the tower’s heart. Even the Watch Tower itself is microcosmed, a slender sentinel of stone carving its long slow circuit round the perimeter. That’s why he’s here.
He climbs up into the leather chair of the teleoscope, swivels wheels, adjusts dials & pulls levers. Mirrors & lenses snap to angles, click to tracks, & set off on their own trajectories to peer into the heart of the machine & snap reflections back—like players circling on a field, spinning to pass a ball between them—back to the eyepiece of the teleoscope which he looks into now.
•
Here in his tower, he defines the world’s horizons in infinitesimals. Rumours are that at the core of his machine is something called the Houri’s Eye, the hawkeye of a deus of desert river nomads, plucked & sliced, cut into halves & quarters, eighths & sixteenths, fractioned on to a myriad of minutiae. Now here & reconstructed in this tower, it’s said, the Houri’s Eye is an infinity of zeros, holographic fragments each containing an image of the whole. Some say the streets follow their paths thru time because it is these fragments of the Eye that bind them to the Mechanism, others that the orrery, the Houri’s Eye, is bound more to the city than the city’s bound to it.
Either way this is the lens the watchman sees the world thru.
•
Our own mosaic gaze studies him as we anticlockwork bitmites, all clicked snug together in a scarabesque form of devilish devising, land & fold our wings away behind. Cogs, gears, wheels aturn beneath our carapace speak of a tense intensity, a high-strung need for a release to spring. We chitter, our driving mechanism an insect agitation.
— Life is a momentary matter, we say, your death inevitable, for dust thy heart, & into dust thou shall reburn.
He doesn’t hear, intent upon his task. The pendulum ticks & the orrery turns, but it is still one second to midnight. Somewhere in the Mechanism there must be—he spots it—yes!—leaps from his seat—a cog unlocked, a tock unclocked. He crooks a screwdriver in a crack of panel to lever & twist it loose a clang. He unscrews a tiny pinwheel inside, checks the chimes & screws it back, kicks the machine. Finally, finally, that one second ticks on &, somewhere above, the hammer strikes the bell.
DOOM.
Upon the Parchment of Their Souls
Sitting crosslegged in the centre of his strange mosaic of objects, the blind boy scratches another line into the dirt, places two scraps of cloth at one end of it, side by side. Plastic doll’s heads, shards of pottery & mirror—the yard is covered in such junk now. The sandminer stands in his doorway, resting one hand on the timber frame, & watches the boy pick a rusted kettle from the pile beside him, find a place for it. It scares him. Is not right. All the… things of this mosaic, they seem to serve as symbols of a sort, conjure sensations of all kinds—sunflower yellow, dry heat, pepper, the aroma of rosewater. He only has to glance back at the fear on his wife’s face to know she feels it too, this field of memories surrounding the blind boy. It is as if he paints upon the parchment of their souls some dark art of abstraction formed of glyphs which, in the proportions of their placement, in the relationshifts & resonances between them, utter the truth itself into reality.
Is not right. He shudders, tells the missus, stay inside.
•
The sandminer’s eyes flick in saccadic movements out to temporary fixations, shifts of focus & smooth tracking shots, & everywhere the memories bloom like wildflowers—here the screams of a crowd dispersed by armoured angels, there a bird’s-eye swoop of the Litan Quarter, here the stink of charred flesh, there the feast hall of the host. The scope of it all encompasses, like being engulfed in echoes, swept off in a river of sensation that might wash him all away.
The boy puts a potshard into place—pothealer’s apprentice, he was, before the riot & rout that blinded him—& the sandminer feels a flash of a taste of dust, human flesh scattered by angel disruptors in the marketplace.
— Taste is the best, the boy had said, simple stamps of salt and sweet and sour and bitter, neh, like compass-points? Then… a thousand smells to taint it, all different, a big crazy code of chemicals. Is the most… symbolic sense.
The sandminer can’t even read & write the linguischt of the city, let alone understand what this strange child is trying to say in a script of flavours & aromas.
•
The daimon dust flows everywhere around the symbols, & it’s this as much as anything that judders the sandminer’s stomach into a knot, shivers the weirdness from his spine like a dog scattering rain from its wet fur. The bitmites are everywhere in the city at night, but the flood of them that fills the yard is not black now but a melted rainbow of oil on water, rich with tones beyond the normal spectrum. He’s seen colours unknown to many—infrared & ultraviolet—thru his nightshade goggles, in the dark shafts of wooden shoring & wet sands where they dig for souls out in the Hinter beyond the city. But now he sees metayellow, sees transorange & subgreen, sees graybrowns that are not dull but intralucent. A phrase from forever ago turns in his thoughts: a terrible beauty.
— Is wrong, boy, he says.
•
— Is almost done, says the boy.
The sandminer sees himself now sketched into the picture, not an image as such, but rather a model of him in a space described in curves of pitch & roll & yaw of balance, muscular tensions, a space as strange to him as the sonar surfaces a bat knows or the scentshapes of a snake. It’s an echo of him grabbing the blinded boy, dragging him out of the massacre & into the safety of the sidestreets—you pothealer’s boy, neh? Come! Come or we both die!—but it’s as much the memory of staggering in his inner ear, the heat of a nearby ruptor blast upon his face, as sight or sound.
The sandminer pulls himself out of the memory, looks at this boy he hauled out of the dust of a dead reacher & his shattered book, half-carried thru the storm of angel vengeance, shredded souls. The boy lays a roofing slate in front of him, holds up a broken crayon, the last scrap of his junk.
— Is done, says the boy.
As the blind boy puts the final tile of his mosaic in place, the sandminer sees & tastes & smells & feels & hears the—
DOOM.
A Mote in the Houri’s Eye
Subultrasonic, cacophonic, the second bawl of bell strikes over the city & the Mechanism shakes for all its insulation, dust raining down from the worm-eaten floor of the Bell Chamber above, to sparkle thru the light show of the orrery. Which chundles to a stop.
— Ah, wait a tick, now, mutters the watchman. Wait a tick.
The gears of the great measuring machine grind. Cogs squeak & shriek. Pipes round about the watchman rattle—louder, louder—then spit spumes of vapour from abruptured valves, the episteam engenerators timed to vent their pressure with the clockwork cycle’s turnings all now clattering their frustration that the age of reason, the reasoning of ages, is on hold.
•
— Wait just a tick. Just wait a tick.
This can’t be happening, mustn’t be. The pendulum, the orrery, the bell unsynched—why, it could sink them all. He scowls. There has to be an underlying reason. He ducks steam & weaves thru workings to get back into the chair, handcranks the teleoscope to point towards the glass tower at the centre of it all, the microcosm of their axis mundi, null point of eternity round which it all turns, the whenever at the city’s heart. It stands inviolate, eternal as it has been since the unkin lords first built their crystal keep, this roost of skyscraper from which to reckon the city. Except…
•
He clicks thru lens & lens to magnify the image. At one broken window of the tower a black hole of a silhouette stands, fire behind it & the searchlight of a thopter sweeping over it… & all the light being swallowed. A broken window & a blackness. A mote in the Houri’s Eye.
The watchman swivels his seat with whirling handle to reach out and slam free an emergency release, rotate in front of him the manual overdrive of levers, pedals & pulleys that allows a man to work the orrery under his own steam, to wind the Mechanism on a tick to see the future, if need be. Need definitely be, he thinks. He pedals & cranks. The whole contraption lurches forward a few ticks. A twirl of the teleoscope into focus & he sees… the glass tower crack & slip as if the weighting cosmos slammed it to the earth. He snicks another tick to find a wild kaleidoscope in its place, a cloud of weirdness so empty of time & meaning that it nearly sucks his soul into its senselessness before he snaps his eye away from the teleoscope.
The watchman hears the whirr of springwheel whirling, knows the sound of tension leading up to hammer’s strike, the bell about to knell.
•
Armed with a spanner for the works, the watchman clatters up ringing rungs, fumbling & stumbling thru the trap door to the Bell Chamber. Hope is a horror in his pounding heart, a world within that is about to fall apart. He has to stall it all, give time to raise alarm, let angels rise, take up arms in alarum. He drags himself up to his knees, to see the brass bell large as his own home in the Hobben Quarter, & the hammer falling.