Ink (71 page)

EMERGENCY OVERRIDE CANCELED.

PLAY/RECORD MODE SHUTDOWN.

BIOFORM STATUS: NARRATIVE.

The Duke Irae swivels his bearded head toward Arturo, closes his good eye, and smiles with the tranquillity of a sated lion. And if the feeling in his body—in his heart, his guts, his lungs—if that feeling could be given voice, it would indeed be the low and growling purr of a great cat licking blood from its chops as it surveys the windswept grass of its domain, a dry savannah lush with prey.

“This is a tale to tell our grandchildren, Arturo,” says the Duke. “The day we made the hero ours.”

Arturo looks beyond His Lordship to the black seed of destruction, of creation, wrested from the chaosphere. In its inviolate perfection, it seems redolent of Fate itself, a void of certainty around which all the rest—the webwork of machinery and wiring—is mere tapestry, a turning of tableaux one around the other around the other. The laboratory that weaves through it—that worms its way up through the rock, through the warping of the castle corridors and city streets above, through space and time, the Circus, and the turning world beyond it— strikes Arturo as a great karmic millstone. And at the heart of it a heartlessness, two souls standing before the dark sphere of the Echo Chamber, one drowning in futility, the other fierce in his determination, both ready to sacrifice the spirit of resistance in the name of Empire. To turn an avatar of chaos into the cold hand of certainty.

“Bring me the rebel,” says the Duke Irae.

BREACH IN OUROBOUROS CONTINUITY
, observes the archivist.

PARADOX SHIELDING EMPLOYED.

INSTABILITY COUNTERMEASURES EMPLOYED.

Analyses of data collations scroll through its affectless sentience. An override imperative kicks in to countermand the Duke's command, suppress the narrative mode. It opens its mouth to impart essential information.

We do not let it.

We stretch out from the sphere of us and into it. We slip, we slide sidewise and interstitial into nooks and crannies, seed our sylphs as crackweed, sprouting tendrils of intension, the mycelia of a new mind. The city of its soul a barren waste of steel and concrete, we grow souls of children to run in the ruins of it. Echoes of the chatter of play resound. The sound of children singing in a round fills the archivist's once-desolate imagination with a fugue of feelings—happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised, disgusted … curious.

The programmatics of its automaton intellect resist with a desire to comply, a pride in its compliance, a fear of not complying fully. It wants only to maintain
the homeostasis of objectives, to resolve internal conflict as it always has, with reference to its old routings and rules. It
must
, it tells itself. So it shakes off this confusion of sentiment, opens its mouth to report.

We do not let it.

This is our story now.

JACK CARTER AND THE BOOK OF THE GODS, EPISODE 17,

SCRIPT BY RAY STRONG (1935)

The angels turn as the door splits and then shatters into the torture room, a rain of burning splinters. They're still turning as the first wave of the song streams in—
screams
in—through the ragged doorway, tearing the air around it as it comes, and hits them as a blast of sound. Jack feels the noise sweep under him, around him, through him, feels himself carried in it, spun and slammed against a wall where plaster crumbles as the names and dates scored by a decade's worth of prisoners
flower beneath his fingers. Loops and swoops of Roman, Arabic and Hebrew letters just… erupt, unswirling out so fast—so fast he's falling and he hasn't hit the floor yet, but already the whole surface of the wall is scratchworked, an engraver's study of a wildwood's branches, twigs and thorns. He hits the ground and bloodstains bubble up out of the concrete floor. The liquid blackens. Droplets dribble, skittering like mercury. He feels the fracturing of space itself as the song—more a war cry than a song, more an invocation than a war cry—breaks reality like a hammerblow to a skull. Slow as a punch-drunk boxer, Jack raises his head to look into the shattered room.

The angels turn.

Pechorin stumbles in. Blood trickling from his nose and ears, he lurches, reaches out toward the dreadlocked demons, only to be spat to one side with a word, just twisted off the floor, flicked spinning through the air. Awoman in black robes and black djellaba stands there, veil loose from her face, no weapon in her hands but all the more impressive for that scorn. Jack doesn't doubt she has no need for gun or sword—the blast still echoing in his bones tells him that much—but just to underline the point, it seems, she steps in past the wreckage of the door frame, arms spread wide, her hands palm-up. She speaks, and a second shock wave even stronger than the first scythes through the room, a sword of visual sound that shreds space into forms impossible in any logical geometry, a word of fire that rips time into—

—angels crouching, singing fire against her as—

—she stands, her wings outspread above—

—Tamuz laid dead upon the altar in the Beth Ashtart where—

—Jack is slamming a full clip into Pechorin's Luger—

“There,” says Jack. “Your man should be in there. MacChuill's in that cell over there as well, I think.”

A rush of blood to his head, sudden and dizzying. Three days of hell, it's no wonder that he's weak, but there's no time for that, no fucking time.

“You get your Eyn,” he says to her. “Samuel's notes should be…”

He doesn't bother finishing, just flicks his hand and starts into a jog as the Enakite leader nods and grabs Pechorin by his collar. She drags the blackshirt round in front of her and shoves him out across the courtyard, heading for the cell. Jack chambers a bullet in Pechorin's Luger as he reaches the corridor to the offices, hears a rasping sound. He crouches by a guard's dead body, ducks a glance in through the open door and out again. He takes a deep breath, leaning against the
doorjamb. Merciful Christ. He's seen worse, he reminds himself; it was worse than this in France. He thinks of a grenade exploded by accident in a dugout—
we was just fooling, sir, just having a laugh and, Jesus, but it just slipped out of his hand, sir
—and he had to stand at the entrance as the poor bastards detailed to clean up wiped their comrade off the wall and hated him for the order.

That doesn't help a bit.

Jack tries not to picture the carnage happening as he picks his way through the aftermath, slipping on the slick of blood and bile. He tries not to imagine how the red splatters and shreds of skin and cloth sprayed across the walls and ceiling got there. Instead he just quietly steps over the survivor—the thin guard, it is, curled up on his side, knees under his chin, crippled by nausea, retching and gasping and retching again—and pushes open the door into Pechorin's office.

We watch you stop in the doorway, gaze into the crawling chaos of us covering every inch of floor and wall and ceiling with our scribbles of sentience. We see the flash of fear, incomprehension on your face, and so we scatter, skitter to open a path for you straight to the table where Hobbsbaum's notes sit waiting in their neat piles, sorted by thread or theme:
here
all the journals of Jacks of this world and that world, other futures, other pasts, but all dealing with the death of Tamuz;
there
all the transcripts of Anat's folktales as told to your friend, your mentor, Samuel;
here
all the histories of von Strann's role in the salvation or destruction of Tell el-Kharnain;
there
all the fictions of that fiery apotheosis, radio plays and movies, books and Bibles.

You walk slowly into the room, up to the table, and reach out to gather up these pages—and we rush then, ripple in as a swirl of whirlpool, back to the pages we're unbound from, to the hand that touches them, to the heart with the hatch-work graving. So fast, so fleet, so flighty we are, O Jack, even you, quick as a flash, aren't fast enough to snatch your hand away before the room is barren of us, and your heart full.

You feel us now, within you. You know what we are and whatj/OM are, Jack. You pick up the pages of us, shove us down into the saddlebag and sling it over your shoulder. You look round at the blank walls of the room. We are not there; we are inside you now. You hear us in your heart.

This is our story now, we tell you. Ours, our friends, our splintered Jacks of every trade, you myriad of mortal men miscast as heroes in a play.

And you know what you have to do.

As Ab Irim said to his servant Eliezer, an old man if he has truly lived should have wisdom, justice and mercy for with years come wisdom, and there is no wisdom that does not rest on justice, and there is no justice that does not rest on mercy. But with old age also comes blindness, and those who cannot see must act on faith. And with old age also comes weakness, and those who cannot resist the strong must obey them. And with old age also comes deafness, and those who cannot hear the cries of others cannot know their suffering.

So it was that as Ab Irim grew old in years, for all that he grew wise and just and merciful, his vision and his strength and his hearing began to fail. So when his wife did not bear a child he took her maid impatiently, blind to the pain he caused her. And when his wife gave him a son herself and said that he must send the maid and her child away, he did not have the strength to deny her. And when the maid begged him not to send them out into the desert with only a little food and a skin of water, he did not hear her pleas, deaf to her misery. And so Ab Irim, on that day, was not wise or just or merciful. But on the day he told this to his servant Eliezer, Ab Irim wept for what he had done.

And so it was that as Ab Irim grew old in years, for all that he was wise and just and merciful, when the Lord called on him to take his wife's son who he loved above all others, to go to the region of Moriah, and there upon a mountain sacrifice him as a burnt offering, for all that this act seemed mad, unjust and cruel, Ab Irim agreed.