String City

by Graham Edwards

  “What’s that?” I gasped.

  “I do not care.”

  “So why are you here?”

  Another long, slow blink. “To end this.”

  “So I was right.”

  “Right? About what?”

  “Loose ends...” Hyperion’s fingers gripped my neck like the forks of a front-loader. I was fading fast. Summoning the last of my strength, I croaked, “Let me... help you... tie them...”

  A great growl rose in his throat, like he’d swallowed Africa. His fingers tightened; my vision tunneled. My head fell forward and the sleet slithered down the back of my neck. I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was back in the yard, face down in a puddle.

  I tried clambering to my feet, got as far as my knees. Something like an avalanche crashed to earth in front of the forge, but it was only Hyperion sitting down.

  The Titan began to speak.

  19

  "WHAT I SAID about business at the casino being slack,” he said, “that was not the half of it. The Tartarus Club has been struggling all year. You saw the security footage, gumshoe—you saw how empty the place was.”

  “You’ve got other sources of income,” I said. “Fall back on them.”

  “I cannot. Everything is going south in this city. Time was we could have got by on protection money alone. These days nobody pays their insurance. We turn the screws, they just show us their empty wallets and take their punishment. The bottom has even fallen out of the moonshine market. And with inflation at a billion percent we cannot even print our own bills any more—Hades, even the Mint cannot keep up. You know the score—do not tell me your business does not suffer too.”

  This wasn’t the time to disagree. “Times are hard,” I agreed. I decided to play a hunch. “Is that why you had something valuable stashed in that safe? Your own insurance to protect the Titans against the fall?”

  “Could be,” said the Titan. “Could be a certain client made a certain deposit—security against gambling debts. Could be that deposit had a certain extraordinary value.”

  This was getting interesting. “What client?”

  “A shipping magnate, name of Pyx. Suffice it to say he lost to the house and I was forced to retain his deposit. He died the next day, trapped in the cargo hold when one of his ships went down. A tragic accident.”

  “House always wins, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “So that’s what was in the safe? Mr Pyx’s deposit?”

  “Yah.”

  “How much money?”

  “Not money.”

  “What then?”

  “High explosives.”

  Beside me, the cyclops whimpered. I had a hunch I knew the rest of the story, but I wanted to hear it out loud. I had another hunch too: as soon as the story was done, I was a dead man.

  “Explosives? What kind of gambler pays his bills with—well, whatever it was, it sure wasn’t nitroglycerin.”

  “No, it was not nitro.” Hyperion hesitated. “It was scathefire.”

  “Scathefire?” I swallowed hard. I thought about the single grain of what looked like salt that had blown my baryonic rasteriser into a million pieces. I thought about the size of the Titans’ safe, and imagined it packed full of the stuff.

  “Scathefire was banned centuries ago,” I said. “The Thanes put out a Universal Order and had it all railroaded out to Oblivion.”

  Hyperion nodded. “How Pyx got hold of it I do not know. All I know is sixteen sacks of scathefire ended up in my safe.”

  I was reeling. I looked at Steropes. “So the explosion... Brontes didn’t blow the safe at all, did he?”

  The cyclops shook his head miserably. “Brontes, he knew the... what it called? Combi... combi...”

  “Combination?”

  “S’right. He say Titans ain’t got no imagination and they always uses a birthday. So he tries all the birthdays and he in.”

  Hyperion scowled.

  “So he wasn’t planting the explosive—he was stealing it!”

  “I guess,” said the cyclops.

  I tried to picture it: Brontes cracking the lock and opening the safe, climbing inside, carrying out the scathefire one bag at a time. Toward the end something must have gone wrong. I imagined the safe door swinging shut accidentally, the cyclops dropping one of the bags in surprise and learning the hard way that scathefire is volatile as all hell. It probably exploded on impact and blew a hole right through the floor of the safe, killing Brontes instantly and dumping his body down into the cellar. Not to mention throwing a plume of purple flame into the skies over String City and launching the Tartarus Club’s neon sign on a hyperbolic trajectory that finished up smack against my office door.

  “What I don’t get,” I said, looking Hyperion square in the eye, “is how the cyclops got past your security in the first place.” Sometimes hunches are like itches. They burn so bad you’ve just got to scratch. “So why don’t you answer this for me, my old Titan buddy—when exactly was it you hired Brontes to rip off your own casino?”

  Steropes’s jaw dropped open, all the way to his chest. Hyperion swelled like a pufferfish. I wondered which fist he’d use to mash me into the ground.

  Then, suddenly, the Titan deflated like an empty blood bag. His shoulders sagged. I’ve never seen something so big look so spent.

  “Last week,” said Hyperion quietly. “I set the whole thing up last week. Only thing I could think of. I thought—and I guess you already figured this out for yourself—I thought if I could stage a fake heist I could claim on the insurance, get the casino liquid again. Then maybe downsize, consolidate, restructure...”

  “Downsize?” I exclaimed. “Consolidate? You’re a Titan! Holy Mother, have things really got this bad?”

  Without a trace of sarcasm, Hyperion said, “Yes.”

  “And what about the poor cyclops brothers? What did they get out of it? Steropes—how much did you know about this?”

  “Don’t know much of nothing,” said Steropes. “Brontes—he was the brains.”

  “That much is obvious.” Hyperion barked out a bitter laugh. The forge he was leaning against trembled. “You did not even know that your brother had a habit—the kind of habit the Tartarus Club was built for. Brontes had been throwing his profits across our craps tables for years.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Brontes agreed to do your dirty work, you agreed to clear his gambling debts?” Hyperion tipped his horns—a rare Titan gesture of respect. “So what did you tell Brontes to do with the scathefire? Dispose of it? Was that part of the deal?”

  “Dispose of it?” said Hyperion. “Dispose of something as valuable as scathefire? Are you insane? You never know when you might need to make a big bang.”

  I scrunched my eyes and worked my brain. “So as soon as the insurance claim goes through, Brontes brings the scathefire back? You wipe his slate clean, maybe slip him a small bonus if all the bags are intact? Is that how it was going to work?”

  “More or less.”

  “Why bother bringing me into it?” I was running out of things to say. With Titans, when the conversation stops, the action starts. And with Titans, the action mostly hurts. “Was it really just to pacify your siblings?”

  “Partly. Once you helped me finger the golem, I was going to use your report to butter the insurance boys.”

  Hyperion stood up so fast a whole new weather system formed around him. The sleet turned to snow, peppered yellow by the smog. The snow congealed around the forge like sick clotted cream.

  “Talking is done,” said the Titan. “Time I collected what I came here for.”

  Something was making a banging sound. At first I thought it was Steropes’s hammer. Then I saw it was the cyclops’s knees knocking together.

  “And what exactly did you come here for?” I said to the Titan, my heart sinking.

  “The scathefire, of course,” said Hyperion. “It is my property, after all. And I want it back.” He winked a huge, hideou
s wink. “Like you said, gumshoe—the time has come to tie the loose ends.”

  Just as I began to wonder what Hyperion would do when he learned his precious explosives were at the bottom of the River Lethe, the dimensions split open again.

  20

  THE OTHER TITANS came through all in a rush: Oceanus and Rhea and Tethys and half a dozen others whose names I didn’t know. Between them they opened a snag that ran from the Carr Industries power complex all the way down to the elevated highway. Even as they materialised they were tearing into each other. Whale-sized arms swung haymaker punches while screaming jaws belched foundry fire. Pocket hurricanes whirled around them, turning the air into an electric cocktail. Lightning struck three of the six Carr plants, which went critical instantly, nuclear fuel belching out on screaming waves of syren song. The three remaining cylinders kicked into overdrive to cope with the surge. The acid snow went from yellow to red. The ground began to melt.

  The newly-arrived Titans rampaged through the industrial park, kicking over factories, spearing warehouses on their horns, punching aside the cranes and derricks of the railroad loading stages. They were barely managing to keep control of their scale—one second they were as big as hillsides, the next they were vast like stars. Oceanus squashed himself small to squeeze under the aqueduct, but as he closed in on the forge he started rising again like bread in the oven of the gods. His eyes were fixed on Hyperion. All their eyes were. If they were fighting each other, it was only in competition to be the first to reach the brother who’d betrayed them.

  As his furious siblings approached, Hyperion swelled up, ready to take them on. I looked for a bolthole, but Steropes was one step ahead. He picked me up, ran me out of the yard and across the tracks. We huddled in a coal heap and watched the fireworks.

  They fought like dogs, the Titans. Dogs bigger than ocean liners. For a while the night sky was all horns and teeth and crimson blood splashing down through acid-yellow storm clouds. Everything they trod on, they pulverised. The industrial park turned to dust and flying bricks. The chaos spread. Soon the whole east side looked like crushed toast. Sewer pipes burst, sending high-pressure muck ballistic. One of the Titans picked up a bridge, used it to smash another into the ground. The sky filled up with fighting; the ground went dark with the fallout.

  We watched in silence, me and the cyclops, as the industrial heart of String City was systematically demolished.

  Even Titans can’t take a beating forever. Tethys died first, speared by a sibling wielding a makeshift sword that looked like it was once a radio mast. It’s something to behold, the corpse of a Titan. When they die, they revert to natural size. Natural size for a Titan is too big for this or any world. They unfold like origami, all kinds of hidden pleats popping into existence—dimensions you never knew were there. They get big in so many directions you can’t keep track, so you just look away. When you look back, they’ve expanded all the way out of sight. That’s when you cover you ears, to stop the sonic booms liquefying your brain.

  The carnage continued. One by one, the Titans bit the dust. Eventually only two remained: Hyperion and Rhea. Brother and sister faced each other across the wasteland that used to be the energy capital of String City. Under their feet, a single remaining power plant bravely squirted its juice to as much of the metropolis as it could.

  “You betrayed us,” said Rhea in a voice like thunder.

  “How did you find out?” said Hyperion. He was bleeding from more places than he had skin left. The blood made a lake that was badly in need of a dam.

  “We managed to reboot the cellar CCTV. You were caught on camera, brother. Following you here was easy—you left a trail as wide as my ass.”

  “But I zipped the dimensions behind me.”

  “Your flies came open.”

  They faced each other in silence. Rhea was holding something behind her back. I couldn’t see what it was; the smoke from the ruined factories was too thick. Hyperion reached out, touched his hand to her cheek. It was like watching worlds collide.

  “Where did it all go wrong, sister?”

  “When we started trusting you.”

  She brought her fist round like a prizefighter. It was bunched around something she’d picked up off the street. It was one of Theo Carr’s power stations.

  The cylinder’s thermonuclear core cracked like an egg on the point of Hyperion’s jaw and a sonic beam of pure syren song jetted out. A black mushroom cloud burst from the top of the Titan’s head. Two seconds later he was radioactive dust from the waist up.

  It took a while for his legs to fold. By the time they did, Rhea was long gone. Last I saw of her, she was stepping over the horizon and into darkness. She was the last of the Titans, and she never came back.

  As for me and Steropes, we stayed in the coal heap a while, watching things fall down. The cyclops sobbed like a baby until he was all out of tears. I asked him what his plans were. He said he didn’t know. I asked him what Brontes would have had him do.

  He said: “Who’s Brontes?”

  Poor sap. Barely enough brain to keep his head from caving in. On the other hand, maybe—just maybe—that made him the luckiest guy in the world.

  “Too bad you lost the scathefire,” I said. “You could have sold it. Set yourself up.”

  His face brightened. “I forgot. That what I done!” He delved in the pocket of his apron, came out with a fistful of bills.

  “Where did those come from?” I said. I’m used to surprises, but this one made my gut turn over.

  “It was when big rig sank in the river. I gets out and waved it bye-bye. Then this man—he comes up out of the water holding all the bags.”

  “The scathefire?”

  Steropes nodded. “He asks me do I want it and I says he will keeps it but only just so long as he pays me some money. So he pays me some money and he takes the bags away.” He waved the cash excitedly. It would keep him in cheeseburgers for about a week.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “A guy walked out of the river? The River Lethe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who was he?” I said. “What did he look like?”

  Steropes looked puzzled. No surprise there—he’d forgotten his brother; what chance he’d remember this?

  “Dunno,” he said. I sighed. Then he added, “Just some guy with a hood.”

  I pumped him some more, got nothing. This last twist worried me. Worried me badly, actually. But, as far as this witness was concerned, I knew I’d reached the end of the road.

  “You need to get out of here,” I said. “I suggest you head north. When you reach Oblivion, hang a right. You’ll go a long way before you hit trouble.” I scribbled a list of motels he could use where the roaches were clean and the management didn’t care how many eyes you had. “Can you read?”

  “Dunno. I’s stupid, me.”

  “Just keep walking,” I said. “Keep walking ’til you stop for good.”

  He thought about it, frowned, said, “I heard that somewhere. Who told you that?”

  “Smartest guy I know.”

  21

  BY THE TIME Steropes had gone, I was up to my knees in acid snow. I could feel it burning the legs of my pants, so I turned my coat inside-out three times until it was alkali tweed and stretched it down to my ankles. I waded through the snow to the highway, figuring I’d thumb a lift, but the highway was just a mess of ice and broken asphalt, studded with Titan toe-bones. The traffic was as flat as cardboard. Nothing moved, all the way out to forever.

  The entire east side of String City was dead, flattened by the Titan showdown. And I was stuck there.

  The snow drifted round my waist. Behind the devastation, the sun was coming up. The light felt good; it was the only thing that did. The loose radiation from Hyperion’s remains was sparking random pockets of evolution, and the shadows were starting to move of their own accord. So was the smog. The weather was growing teeth.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to be there.

 
But how to get back to the office? The road I’d set Steropes on was a one-way street straight out of town. A last resort for no-hopers. Well, that wasn’t me. Not yet, anyway.

  That just left the strings.

  The snow buzzed at the level of my chest. The shadows multiplied. The smog grew claws.

  Luckily I had a last resort of my own.

  I shoveled my hand down into my coat pocket and pulled out the Dimension Die. The Dimension Die was another of the gumshoe gadgets I’d found in Jimmy the Griff’s crate. I’d never seen another one like it. To me, it was more precious than scathefire. It looked like a regular die, only without any spots. Just a small no-nonsense cube. Six sides, each side no bigger than my thumbnail.

  A Dimension Die does a simple thing: when you roll it, it creates a disposable reality you can hop through to wherever you want to go, instantly. It avoids the strings altogether, leaves them right out of the equation. In short, it cheats.

  A simple thing, but powerful as all Hell. And where there’s power, there’s a catch. Which is this: the die’s got six sides, which means you get to use it six times. After that, there’s nothing left. You might as well roll it down a craps table at the Tartarus Club for all the good you’ll get. Six sides, six rolls, six clean trips through time and space and most of what surrounds them.

  Six last resorts.

  Five of the die’s faces were black obsidian; the sixth was white ice. That was because I’d used it once already. Lent it, actually, to a couple of friends who’d needed a fast exit from a semi-dimensional self-reticulating oubliette inhabited by an insane spider queen. But that’s another story. I turned the die in my fingers. Did I really want to use up another of its sides? But it was my deus, and I sure was stuck in a machina.

  The acid snow closed like a Titan’s fingers around my throat.

  I rolled the die.

  22

  MY OFFICE LOOKED just as I’d left it.

  At the same time it felt utterly wrong.

  I checked the singularity latches on the door, counted the walls, rooted around in the cellar. Nothing missing. Then it hit me.