by Hocking, Ian
So I play the knight.
He was standing in a petrified forest. Behind him and ahead, a mist obscured the beginning and the end of the path. Cory felt certain that each direction stretched to infinity. If this were a planet, the path was an equator. Next to the path, a horse ripped at the short grass. It wore a metal faceplate. The saddle was loaded with bedding, a broadsword... and the bird.
It was perched on the haft of the saddle, watching him. Cory’s instinct was to step back. Its crest was reddish brown and the breast black with blue streaks. The raptor-like eyes were trained on Cory, who put his hands akimbo and said, ‘So what now?’
The bird – if it was a bird – leaned forward and opened its mouth, black tongue pointing as though to vomit.
‘Ee-caw!’
The screech could not mean anything, but it meant everything to Cory. Suddenly, he knew that the program running this simulation was about to stop. The program existed on the device in Saskia’s head, and as she died, the program died. This knowledge came to Cory as though he had always known it; yet he also realised that he had not known it before the bird had screeched.
‘Show me,’ he said, climbing onto the horse. The bird flung itself upward. It galloped into the white sky, became another of the black dots, then returned to Cory. The curve of its fall became a tangent and it skimmed the path at great speed. Cory wheeled his horse after it, flicking his reins left and right, Western style.
~
The horse cantered for a time that Cory could not measure. A sun appeared ahead, above the bird, and wintered to a bloody eye. In that instant the path widened to a clearing and Cory found himself at the edge of an immense wall of thorns. Their twisted branches looked ancient. Cory’s horse trotted around the perimeter of this wall and it became clear that there would be no easy way through. He looked for the bird, but it had gone. Not that it could help. He knew he had to cut through the barbs before this program, and this reality, failed around him. He pulled the horse up and withdrew his sword.
As he dropped to the ground, his armour clanked. He took one breath. Two breaths. He ran at the wall and swung two-handed strokes with such ferocity that five strides were his before the tendrils began to close in and he swung again and again, huge figure-of-eights, and the tangles parted on the edge of his blade. His ankles snared but he ripped them free. Fingers of wood hooked his elbows and slipped around his neck but he continued his berserk onslaught until the darkness changed to evening and he was finally through, his arms burning, and he was crouching in the dust of a vast, thorny cavern that held a full castle in perfect gloom. Only as Cory struggled for air – an illusion – and leaned on his sword did he see that the blade was marked with a spiralling rose.
Cory did not linger. It was possible that he could die here if he had no time to prepare his escape before this illusion failed. He used the sword to help himself stand. Then he walked through the barbican. The drawbridge flexed and rattled. He looked up at the murder holes. He was ready to dodge, but there was nobody. He passed through the lower bailey, where a hunting dog slept in the shadow of a cart, and entered a cloister. Its pumiceous lawn was dying. Through the open roof of the quadrangle, he could see three towers. Thorns obscured the sky yet by some illumination the walls of the towers were bright as porcelain and their pinnacles gun-metal blue.
He crossed the quadrangle and kicked open the door to the great hall. Around the table, a king and his retinue drowsed on their plates. Cory scanned their faces. None was Saskia. Even disguised, he would know her. She had to be in one of the towers; they were the truest places of safety in this illusion.
He hurried past the King and Queen, their crowns tilted. No heat shone from the fireplace. Stopped clocks read noon. He caught himself looking at his wrist, but time was not trustworthy here, however much he worried about its passing. He pushed through a second door, then a third, and climbed to the flagstones of the keep, the castle-within-a-castle. The three towers rose from its roof.
Cory rushed for the leftmost tower, then stopped. The door had a lintel embossed with a stone swan. The letters ‘Pb’ were cut into the swan’s wing. He sheathed his sword and strode for the middle tower. Another stone swan on the lintel, this time with ‘Ag’. And the third tower held a swan with ‘Au’.
He spun in frustration. Should he charge each tower in turn? No, he thought. She might have countermeasures, like before.
A twig fell onto a flagstone. Cory looked up. The simulation was dying.
‘Bird!’ he shouted. ‘‘Pb’ is lead. ‘Ag’ is silver. ‘Au’ is gold. What’s the answer?’
Beyond the dome of barbs, he heard a distant, ‘Ee-caw!’
And he knew. Three caskets, one each of gold, silver and lead, were offered to suitors of Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare had adapted the idea from a manuscript called the Gesta Romanorum. Lead: Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. Silver: Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves. Gold: Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.
She wants me to think that it is gold. It must be lead.
Cory ran to the left tower, marked ‘Pb’, and pushed the door. It opened easily. He took the spiral stairs in skips of three. He stumbled as a wash of nothingness passed underfoot and again there was a sensation of no time passing. Glitches in the simulation.
Just as the forest had seemed infinite to him, stretching around the planet, so this spiral went on and on. He considered with unease the notion that his ichor and Saskia’s wetware device had taken one another in a deadly embrace, and that his mind was trapped in a loop.
Then – and had any time passed? – he saw the door to the attic. He laughed with relief and burst through. The attic was empty but for a simple bed, whose blanket he pulled away. His grin froze.
The cot was empty.
He did not flail at the sheet with his sword, though he wanted to. He moved to the open window and checked the sky. The dome of the thornwood was falling as dark rain, lightening the battlement with sunlight. Deep growls of collapse echoed about like cannon shot. He hurried down the staircase and ran onto the flagstones. The door of the middle tower, marked ‘Ag’, had split under the weight of moving stones, but the tower had not yet collapsed. Cory kicked in the door and climbed the identical stairs to the attic room.
Saskia Brandt lay on the cot beneath the small window. She was dressed in her shirt, jeans and cowgirl boots. Every item was intact and clean. Her hands were clasped below her breasts. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance apart from the length of her hair: in this world, it was shoulder-length.
Cory frowned in the doorway. His breath came in gasps and he wanted to cough. He let his sword fall against the floor. The sound was muffled, as though the air was losing its capacity to conduct sound. Saskia slept on. Cory approached the cot, took a handful of her hair and prepared to shake her.
Saskia awoke.
She had no eyes. The sockets were red and dry and infinite as the paths and stairwells of this world.
Bricks fell from the roof as Cory stared at her. He wanted to break her neck but he knew the gesture would be pointless. More bricks fell. They split in chalky puffs against the floor. Abruptly, the tower shifted. Cory braced himself against the wall and looked through the window.
The bird was coming.
‘To me!’ he shouted. ‘Quickly!’
This reality was folding away. With that, the information he needed would be lost. He heard the steady flap of bird wings. The idea of the bird no longer horrified him. Here. Carry me home to
(Camelot)
the mountain.
Then the sun extinguished and not even an afterimage remained in his eye. Reality stopped. The tower was gone, the castle with it, and Cory could not be sure who he was. There was nothing but the bird holding his shoulders and the rushes of air as it flew across emptiness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Each of his bodily senses returned with petitions for attention. He
staggered back against the chipboard partition. Touch competed with sight. In the instant before they synchronised, Cory imagined he was aboard a rolling ship as it crested a swell. He ignored the oncoming nausea and waited for the inconsistencies to cohere. One, two... yes, the hut. The mountain. He was standing over the body of Saskia Brandt in a hut, on a mountain, in Germany, in the year 2003, and he was eighty-eight damn years old and not finished.
The castle and the battlements, and the thornwood and its sun, were as gone as melted snows. Dead, like everything on this planet. Walking archaeology that refused to get with the programme, to lie in its grave and cool. He booted the cot and it knocked against the fine mesh that covered the wall. He did not touch the body. Saskia was dead. It was pointless; it would diminish him still further in his own eyes to attack her now.
Through a rent in Saskia’s shirt, Cory saw part of her breast. Without the steady expansion and contraction of the cavity beneath it, the curve was subtracted of its power. A statue could be beautiful, but not a corpse.
How much do I need you, Saskia?
He decided.
‘You’d better be worth this.’
There would not be enough ichor in his spit to do the job, so he had the factor form a lancet while he shrugged off one arm of his jacket and exposed his radial artery. His incision released a gout of blood. He directed this towards the tracheotomy hole and allowed some to splash over it.
The blood was golden with nanoparticles. He commanded them to enter an emergency reverse-entropy mode that would draw upon all energy in the vicinity to effect repair – except that within Cory’s body. Immediately, the liquid fizzed. The oil lamps guttered and the stove light weakened. Pinpricks appeared on the face of the corpse: intrasomatic tubules that pulled the oxygen from the air. Cory became dizzy and half-dreamed the buzz of piston-driven propellers, smelled leather and sheepskin, and felt the very boards beneath his heels rock as though the hut had swung in a steep bank.
Through this disorientation, he saw the swollen mass of Saskia’s forehead detumify with a hiss.
He remembered a mountaintop.
Tupungato.
A place to observe the stars.
Saskia convulsed once, and old blood, crisp as rose petals, burst from her mouth. A gasp followed, then an exhalation. In the dust, bright blood mixed with the old.
As once it did, thought Cory, in the city of Our Lady, Saint Mary of the fair winds.
Saskia’s arm slipped from the cot, almost tipping a nearby vase. Cory stared at its three flowers and pictured flowers on a grave. Flowers for...
Movement behind him: a flutter of cloth.
Cory did not turn. He said, ‘I see you, Jem.’
The cloth rippled once more.
As Cory turned, he wore the expression of a thoughtful man forced to pinch the life from a bug. The expression changed to fury. Jem was gone. He had not been thinking clearly. He glanced back at Saskia and decided that the ichor needed several minutes longer to heal her to the point where a verbal interrogation was possible. In the meantime, she was going nowhere.
Move it, Georgia.
Cory hurried to the veranda, where he searched the night. Then he jogged upriver. His cheeks were ruddy with embarrassment. When the divots became lost in bushes, Cory stopped. He brooded on the forest. Its wood had closed about him. His visual modifications counted six glimmers of heat through the trees, and any one of them could have been Jem.
He looked at the sky, selected the crest of a sturdy fir, and discharged his gun. A bone-coloured grapnel plumed upward. Behind it trailed a hawser. Cory felt the weapon lighten as the grapnel reached the treetop and bit the trunk with the hunger of a sprung trap. He turned and wrapped the hawser about his chest. The material fanned to a sling beneath his shoulder blades. He detached the gun – now skeletal – and placed it in his outside pocket. He zipped it shut.
He thought of Sergeant Blake from Base Albany. There, climbing had been the easiest of his tradecrafts.
I said, ‘Move it.’
He locked his knees and walked the trunk.
A starfield of snow fell by. When he was five yards from the top, he settled his boots and let the line pull him vertical. Then he hooked an arm around the tree. The sling was tight around his back, and his old lungs worked hard.
The soundless vista stilled him. Its passing, baggy clouds recalled the moon phases on the pocket watch given to him by Catherine’s father on that afternoon, a humid Tuesday, when Cory had sought permission to marry his daughter. How the collar of his new shirt had scratched. Catherine had worked the knot of the tie while they looked in the mirror. She had given him luck with a kiss and whispered that her father was a pussycat really.
Cory forced his gaze into the dark cavities of snow. A sense that the wood guarded Jem infused his perception and, with it, came the bitterness of foreboding. But he smiled when an electromagnetic burst flared in the middle distance. Jem’s phone.
Cory zoomed in. There: Her heat made an intermittent blip as she ran between the trees.
Gotcha.
He unzipped his pocket, pulled out the gun, and let it acquire lock.
Head shot, he thought. End it.
The weapon bucked. The tiny sound reminded him of a kiss. Catherine’s kiss in the mirror.
Damn it.
Trajectory change. Take out the phone.
He sensed the projectile swerve and pass through the plastic case. Beats of his tired heart later, the projectile returned to the gun with a gentle kick.
Cory made a funnel with his hands.
‘There’s nowhere you can run!’
Catherine – no, Jem – had tripped and fallen. Her heat stain was a distant star. She writhed. ‘Fuck you!’ came a moment later.
Cory smiled. Then dread smothered his amusement once more. Her sprawl recalled the dead woodsman, who had dropped inches from the hut, his fingers mixed with the tarpaulin. Sure, Cory thought, uneasy. The man wanted cover. But, more than this, Jem’s shape brought to mind Saskia as her dead hand slipped towards the vase next to her cot.
There was a metal mesh on the ceiling of the antechamber. And its walls.
‘I see a fine mesh.’
‘I see knots and whorls in the wood.’
‘I see a window, also covered by mesh.’
Cory watched the dissolving tusks of his breath.
He had made a tremendous mistake. The woodsman had not been reaching for cover. He had wanted the home-brewed battery.
‘Also covered by mesh.’
Cory swerved in his crow’s nest. Information streams jammed at his centre: the angle of the gun, Saskia’s likely position within the hut, wind speed, and the gloom that he had been outdone by a woman in a coma.
Saskia. Head shot.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Saskia Brandt twisted in the cot. She was past agony. Her back was shattered and her legs broken clean. Her ribs were cracked and her nose was smashed. Despite this, she was healing. Her left eye had opened and, with it, she tried to focus on the pink carnation in the vase. Then she tried to reach for it. Her arm swung like a boom. The bloody stump felt cold.
Take my hand, she thought.
They felt like the only words she knew. She did not mean take my hand. She meant-
Help? came a soft voice. So let me help you. Do you see the carnations? Reach for them. Push the vase.
The arm swung again.
Good. You touched it. That proves you can do it.
Saskia smiled.
Take my hand, she thought.
Soon. Now the flowers. Aren’t they pretty, Saskia? Push the vase.
~
Cory willed the projectile to go faster.
Hurry.
~
Beneath the tarpaulin, whose corner was closed in the hand of Tolsdorf, there was a crude pipe. At the end of the pipe was a ball bearing. A wire attached the bearing to a tractor battery and a homemade rack of beer-bottle capacitors. A second ball bearing was suspended a
t the top of the pipe. It too connected to the battery. The second ball bearing was held in place by string, which led through the wall to the neck of the vase in Saskia’s anteroom. As the vase fell, the string released the upper bearing. It connected, clack, with the lower. The spheres exchanged a spark. An electromagnetic pulse, its lifetime less than one quarter of a millisecond, flashed through the forest.
Cory’s orphaned bullet tumbled, lost speed, and dashed the hut like the knuckle of a night caller.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jem watched the chalky outline of Cory convulse, then fall. The crackle of broken branches reached her a moment later. She could not begin to imagine what had happened to him. Had he been shot? She reached for her phone and brushed the snow away. The phone’s keyboard had been destroyed by the bullet but the screen was still bright and the battery compartment intact. The display was a solid block of pixels. She removed the battery and reinserted it, but the phone would not boot. Only the backlight worked.
Jem rose. Part of her wanted to find out the extent of Cory’s injuries, but she had come here for Saskia. She walked towards the hut. Her steps were high in the deep snow. She put the mobile phone in her pocket to smother the glow of its screen.
As she looked up, something moved to the left of the hut.
Cory? The woodsman, perhaps?
She paused at the last tree that provided cover from the dooryard. She waited, side-on to the trunk, breathing through her nose, watching.
Another movement.
She remembered how the darkness in that Berlin church had seemed to gather into the shape of Saskia. Could she have come back to life? The idea was
(stupid)
possible.
What are you really, Saskia?
Curiosity killed the cat.
Satisfaction brought him back.
Who had she seen?
Brought him back.
Jem left her hiding space and walked around the hut. She could hear her heart. When she saw the person-shaped shadow again, this time in front of the woodpile, and caught the eyes watching her, Jem snatched a breath and held it. Then she raised her mobile phone.