Adornments of the Storm

by Paul Meloy

  “This must be it,” he said, and slotted the end of the throttle lever onto the awaiting thread and tightened the nut with his fingers.

  The Despatrix shrieked and backhanded Eliot across the cheek. He staggered, dazed, with blood pouring from his nose. The Despatrix rounded on Alex but he was already charging in, and caught her a blow to the stomach with the sole of his boot. The Despatrix howled and fell to her knees. She pressed a hand against her belly and glared up at Alex from beneath her swaying fringe. Black blood squirmed between her fingers, slow and heavy, and when she stood again Alex could see a wound, reopened by the force of the blow, where the white edges of an old scar were gaping.

  “Eliot!” shouted John, and lobbed the other Instrument towards him. Eliot caught it and, despite the situation, held the brass cylinder in his hand for a second, a smile spreading across his face. He wiped blood from beneath his nose with the back of his hand and walked towards the Despatrix.

  The Despatrix was crouching at the far side of the tracks. The tops of her thighs were sheathed in cold, congealing blood. She moved her head back and forth from the boys to those standing crowded on the edge of the platform. She snarled. She wanted one of these boys very badly. She darted forward, slender hands hooked into claws, and went for Alex. She would have the small one, tear out his throat. She would take one of them with her.

  Eliot stepped between them and swung his arm in a low arc. The Despatrix barreled into him but he braced his legs and leaned his shoulder into her. The Despatrix’s face registered shock. Her mouth opened wide and she squealed. Alex jumped forward and seized one of her flailing arms. Eliot pushed again, and slid the entire shaft of the kaleidoscope into the hole in the Despatrix’s belly.

  The Despatrix bucked and flailed with her other arm, but Eliot ducked beneath it and grabbed hold of the end of the kaleidoscope with both hands. He twisted the object chamber and heard—above the scrape of feet on cinders and the agonised mewl of the Despatrix—the familiar and always oddly wistful sound of the tiny coloured beads falling into new and unique patterns: churrrr churrrr.

  The Despatrix screamed and clutched at her gut. Eliot shoved a final time and the end of the kaleidoscope disappeared inside her, thrusting upwards beneath its ribs. He grabbed her other arm and he and Alex held the Despatrix in a restraint as her legs buckled and she sank to the rails in shock.

  Colin was peering down at them from Railgrinder’s cab. His face was grim but he had a resolute look in his eye. He reached up and pulled on the chain whistle.

  The Despatrix lifted her pointed chin and glared at him as the mournful note rose, fell, and echoed through the train shed.

  Colin released the brake and grasped the throttle lever. Railgrinder hissed and belched a great raft of furious, white-hot steam against the roof of the shed. It jolted forward and the grinding wheels beneath its engine carved sparks off the rails.

  “Step away from the dirty bitch,” he said.

  The boys let go of the Despatrix’s arms. They went to the side of the platform and were helped up by Index and Daniel.

  The Despatrix was shaking, her hands in the hole in her belly, trying to pull the kaleidoscope out, but there was too much heat, and she slid her burning, blackened hands from her guts and held them before her face in despair. The kaleidoscope was glowing, filling the Despatrix’s trunk with good, clean light. She sank further onto her haunches and put her smoking fists in the cinders. Her eyes bulged and flared as the light filled her, and then ruptured as Railgrinder bore her into the ground and passed over her.

  Nobody rejoiced, no voices rose in cheers as the body was folded over itself and turned to paste beneath the grinding wheels. Those that watched did so with white faces. The others turned away. Colin was hunched down in the cab and only engaged the brake when Railgrinder had gone a yard past where the Despatrix had been kneeling. The engine fumed and trembled, the remains concealed beneath it.

  Eliot had watched, Alex had not.

  DOCTOR MOCKING AND Chloe walked on, passing Loom after Loom, each one towering over them and throbbing with unlimited energy, until they reached an alcove set between two of the Looms. The area was wide as a building site, its surface scarred and pitted. It contained the relic of a Loom, the walls that remained blackened and jagged. They stepped off the road onto the crumbling bay and stood beneath the bulk of the Loom.

  It was cool in the sudden shadow, the shafts and pillars that remained were dull and lifeless. It had been hollowed out, so that it looked like the shelving remains of some great, ancient fortress, crenellated and empty of parts essential to its function.

  They went further inside, beneath a high lattice of bare stanchions, while all around them the Loom clacked and hummed, dormant, vast and alien, its servers jammed, its power re-routed.

  There was a sound from the rear of the Loom, a crackle, and a sudden discharge of sparks. The floor beneath them shuddered.

  Doctor Mocking peered into the depths of the Loom, his neck bent and his eyes narrowed.

  There was another brief display of sparks and a man shouted, “Shit!”

  Doctor Mocking saw someone coming towards him, shaking his right hand as if to rid it of dirt, or dispel a sudden pain. The man was slight of build with short, dark hair. He was wearing glasses, which reflected the Compartment light behind them and looked like gold coins in his face. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to past his elbows and his trousers, particularly the knees, were blotted with oily handprints and powdered with dust. In his left hand he carried what appeared to be a soldering iron.

  Doctor Mocking exhaled a long breath and went to meet the man, to embrace him, all the time laughing with astonishment and blessed relief.

  Robin Knox smiled a small, crooked smile, and hugged the Doctor in return.

  "SEVEN YEARS,” ROBIN said. “Wow. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here a day. Cade’s dead?”

  “Yes. We got him.”

  Robin looked relieved. “He was strong, enraged. He caught me by surprise. After a struggle he threw me off the Gantry and into the Compartment. That’s when time stopped for me.”

  Doctor Mocking looked around, at the blackened shell of the Loom. Robin watched him for a moment, anticipating his questions, and then spoke.

  “That’s how the Autoscopes travel to and from the Quays. They fire one, it burns out like a bulb in an old radio. They aren’t meant to use them, but they’re allowed certain latitude it seems. I think it expends tremendous energy and effort. I’ve only seen one other like it. I saw it take off, and it burned and smoked and screamed. It was miles away but I imagine there are hundreds of thousands amongst the trillions here in this Compartment alone but the chances of finding another are equal to finding a precise atom in an ocean of seawater.”

  Doctor Mocking turned to face Robin, his expression curious.

  “I wanted to keep busy,” Robin said with a small smile and a shrug. “Doing what I do. Trying to make myself useful if I was going to remain stuck in here. Tinkering.”

  Doctor Mocking smiled too, at the thought of Robin tinkering with the great Looms of Dark Time. Of them all, he had always been the bravest and most pioneering engineer.

  “I wanted to find out how the Autoscopes used these, how they forced them to operate, and whether I could stop them. But the golden Looms were flawless and impenetrable. I needed to find one of these.”

  “How did you find it?” Chloe asked.

  Robin knelt by her side and put a hand on her cheek. “I’ll show you something, but you’ll have to be brave. You might feel very sad.”

  Chloe looked into Robin’s eyes, saw the gravity there and gave him a solemn nod.

  “Come with me,” Robin said.

  Doctor Mocking took Chloe’s hand and followed Robin into the dark recesses of the Loom, and the wreck of the thing that was concealed there.

  IT WAS A camper van. It sat on four wheels tilted on buckled axles. The windows were gone, shattered by whatever had befallen the vehicle. Chips o
f glass still protruded from the perishing rubber sills. The sliding door in its side was gone, lost from its runner, and the interior was bare, stripped of its original furnishings. Beneath its sagging chassis a pool of oil had spread out across the floor of the Loom. Despite the dents and scrapes, and the lack of light this far back in the body of the Loom, Chloe could see, where paint remained, that it was green, and had once been bright and cheerful.

  “Oh,” she said. She let go of Doctor Mocking’s hand and put her fingers to her face, to cover the trembling of her lips. Her eyes blurred with sudden tears. She felt a wrench in her belly, a sensation of loss as though something had reached a cold hand inside her and stolen a chunk of her core. “Babur,” she whispered.

  “It’s his van,” Robin said. “It was here when I found the Loom. It called me here. Before I gave it to Babur, I fitted it with a device that could track us all when we were in the Quays. When I reached this Loom, after what might have been days, minutes, centuries – I have no way of knowing—of walking, my beacon was alight and flashing.”

  “Despite the wreckage?” Doctor Mocking asked.

  Robin shook his head. “The van was beaten up, but I’ve stripped most of it for parts. There were tools here, and water in the bottle beneath the sink, which was welcome. Pleasant, if not entirely necessary. I don’t get hungry or thirsty here.” He indicated a dark corner recessed into the wall of the Loom. There was a couch and table there. “Took those out and made a camp. I can sit there and think. The battery was fine, so I’ve salvaged that, but everything else was fried when Babur hit the EMP.”

  “The alternator,” Chloe said, still staring at the van. “Plays havoc with it.”

  “Yes,” said Robin. “I sent Babur to find you, before you were born.”

  Chloe nodded, still looking towards the camper van. She remembered being in a town full of bookshops, being older than she was now, but innocent and unknowing in a way even more profound than her present child-state. All was new, and she recalled the sound of the van as it came into town, and the sight of it, bright and hackled with antennae and dishes and devices; the thump of the EMP as it discharged, destroying the advancing spiders; the first sight of the old man climbing out of the cab, stretching his back and going around to the rear of the van; the sound of his voice; the rush of emotion at his first touch – a handshake and a reassuring pat on her shoulder.

  “I only met him once,” Chloe said. “Not for long. But I loved him.”

  “He loved you, too,” Doctor Mocking said. “He did this for you. For all of us.”

  “My parents told me what he did,” Chloe said. “But it’s hard, seeing this here. Was he...?” She left the question unasked, but Robin answered it for her.

  “No. He was gone. I don’t think he suffered. There’s no sign of him, no sign of injury. I hope to meet him again, one day, in a Quay somewhere. When this is all over.”

  “That will be wonderful,” Chloe said.

  ROBIN HAD ONLY been able to theorize what had happened, but Doctor Mocking was able to complete the story for him. How there had been a battle in the road outside a pub in Daniel’s Quay, and how Babur had driven the camper van into the Autoscopes’ Incursion Gantry, sacrificing himself to close the Gantry.

  “The EMP shut it down,” Robin said. “I knew it was powerful, but I wasn’t sure if it could do that. Awesome.

  “And this was the Loom they used to force their way into the Quay. Either the EMP blew it apart or this is what’s left once they’ve used it. Can’t tell at this point, although the one I saw taking off was certainly breaking up. It looked like footage of a shuttle disaster.”

  “What have you discovered?” Doctor Mocking asked.

  “Well, I don’t think I can get this to work again. It’s like the van’s alternator. Knackered. But I have had better insight into how our whole system works. It came to me when I first saw the van. How what we do is about simultaneity, coincidence, the faith in quanta and how dreams are an effect of a kind of limitless energy we are able to use and modify. Me finding this van was more than blind luck. What do you call it, temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events?”

  Doctor Mocking looked impressed. “That’s Jung,” he said. “Synchronicity.”

  “That’s right, of course. The Unus Mundus. It’s what we deal with, isn’t it? The unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns. That’s this place, the source of all things. I have been able to estimate a measure of the energy that self-exists here.” He held his thumb and index finger a sliver apart in front of his face, squinting through the tiny gap. “A square micron of the fabric of this place contains more energy than a thousand suns. It’s the zero-point energy of God, the ground state of the Creator. Imagine converting that energy to matter and you could grow a galaxy on the palm of your hand.

  “It’s why the devil-in-dreams wants control of the Night Clock. To blacken these Compartments, burn them out like cancer spreading throughout eternity. It’s heat-death in perpetuity. The razing of all creation-energy. Think about it. A God that can no longer create is no God at all.”

  Doctor Mocking looked around, at the landscape vast yet once familiar.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Any ideas?”

  Robin shrugged. “I’ve been trying for seven years, apparently, without any luck. Without any synchronicity, I should say. I understand more, but I can’t translate that understanding into practical use. What I think is, this place isn’t responsive to intellect or physical work. It needs something more… creative.”

  Doctor Mocking agreed. “Things need to come together at the right time. It’s what happened before.”

  “Tell me,” said Robin. “It might set something in motion. It might be what we need to move this on.”

  Doctor Mocking told him.

  HE STOOD BEFORE the giant, his friend Bismuth, with the golden light of the Compartment all around. Doctor Mocking considered the terrible sadness borne on the other man’s face. Exhaustion had discouraged his features of expression, his eyes of focus. He stood, hands loose at his sides, the levers in loops on his belt, head lowered, defeated.

  Doctor Mocking reached out and took hold of Bismuth’s arm, guided him away from the edge of the boulevard, embraced him.

  “Come home,” he said. “Old friend, come home with me.”

  Bismuth shuddered, and Doctor Mocking realised that the man was sobbing.

  “There’s no way back,” Bismuth said. He stepped away from Doctor Mocking, his eyes blazing, wet with sudden pools of reflected gold.

  “We go together,” Doctor Mocking said. “The same way we came in.”

  Bismuth threw his arms wide. “And find an open Loom in all of this?”

  “We walk until we find one.”

  Bismuth laughed, a defeated exhalation. “I’ve not seen one in all my time here. Leave me to wander. You’ve come here for nothing.”

  “There are others like us, waking up, coming together. We’re being called.”

  “We are all lost.”

  “No. Not any more. We are being found again.”

  Bismuth turned, started to move away.

  “Wait.”

  Bismuth stopped but did not turn.

  “Take out your Compass.”

  Bismuth did not speak, but his head lifted at the command.

  He put his hand into the right pocket of his long coat and withdrew an object. He held it tight in his fist.

  “Show me.”

  Bismuth held out his hand, uncurled his fingers. Doctor Mocking approached him, came to his side. He said, “Look.”

  Bismuth looked down. His Compass, the Instrument that led him on his journeys through the Quays, lay against the deep lines of his palm. It was small and silver, its face parchment with no cardinal points. A slim silver needle span slowly, drawn not by magnetism, but by a force far greater and more mysterious: faith.

  “Trust it,” said Doctor Mocking, “Follow its lead.�
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  They walked together, Bismuth watching the needle, his eyes never leaving the Compass on his palm. He felt its pull, and cupped his fingers around it as if expecting it to fly out of his hand. As they walked, the needle settled, and pointed them ahead.

  In this timeless space, they walked, the great and fathomless distances turning above and around them. They passed by a million Looms, all vast but silent, unfired, awaiting engagement that might never come.

  Without time, frustration existed without the protraction into an unknowable future and so was mitigated each moment by their progress throughout the Compartment and the seeming urgency of the needle.

  And at last they turned a corner and felt the ground tremble.

  They both looked up from the Compass, their legs unsteady. Bismuth closed his hand and returned the Compass to his pocket. It had brought them here and could do no more.

  They waited, tense and expectant, unsure what was to come, or from where.

  Then, to their left and perhaps half a mile away, they saw it blast into the air.

  They stumbled, grabbed at each other to keep their feet. Already, the Loom was miniature against the wheels and nebulae that turned parsecs above them, but the trail it drew behind, the thread of the Gantry, was there, pulsing up from the labyrinth in its spectrum of metal colours.

  They had no way of knowing how long it would stay open, so they ran.

  They ran, and they were laughing.

  THEY HAD AGREED, breathless on their race towards the Gantry, that they would not stop, would not wait. As they reached the glittering shaft of light they joined hands and threw themselves between its teeming, upravelling curtain of atoms, and into it.

  AND CAME TO, as if from sleep, standing in an orchard that overlooked a narrow stream between two bridges.

  A hot air balloon lay deflated across the grass, its basket and burner upright beneath an apple tree.