Force Majeure (22 page)

She dropped on hard cushions of water through black, measureless tunnels before coming to rest in Doctor Arkadin’s most splendid and most secret Folly, the cavernous cathedral of shit beneath the city. She sloshed down in a pocket of clean water in the sizzling lake of sewage, her body gradually submerging itself in the mire until only the tip of her face protruded above the surface, like an iceberg, breathing. Around her, vast spider-gears powered by methane and perpetual-motion machines churned and sifted the nightsoil; diplodocus-head cranes raised it in buckets; and Archimedes screws whisked it back up towards the distant farms and roof-gardens of the city. Unseen by Kay but lit by glistening, sugary stalactites, Candida spilled its precious waste from every wall, through pipe outlets carved into the shape of dragon-mouths. And she dreamed; in Candida, Kay dreamed.

That was how they found her, hours later.

The flat boat prowled slowly across the poisonous surface of the lake, its two glass-eyed, bare-breasted pilots pushing carefully towards her with long punt poles. Reverently, Luna and Quint hooked her and lifted her sopping and stinking to safety. After that, she slept undreaming.

Kay dreamed three dreams in Candida, in the water, in Candida (where dreams are true). This was the first of them:

Armed with broom handles, shielded by dustbin lids and carried on commandeered bicycles, loyal officers of the Order of the White Horse prepared to storm the headquarters of the enemy. A small advance guard, including Captain Ernesto de Broca, Captain Emilio Esteban and six other warrior-poets, entered the building mid-morning. The plan was to evacuate the Club, confiscate any weaponry and – if possible – arrest the ringleaders of the coup and their hired thugs. Secretly, Esteban, with his first-hand experience of the threat, had little faith in their prospects, though there had been encouraging omens. There would be minimal resistance, as most of Prospero’s private army was laying siege to the old free house. The invaders were a small force and they were divided. The arrival of the mercenaries had also split the conspiracy within the ranks. Fear had turned half the officers against Prospero; half of the remainder had gone into hiding; the last quarter stayed allied to the coup only out of fatalism. They were monkeys with their fists caught in slim-necked pots, unable to let go of the prize they’d sought to snatch. He sympathised with them.

There were more soldiers coming. He couldn’t put that out of his mind. There would be more helicopters. There would be more guns. Even if the officers captured the clubhouse, there was still the larger force at the old free house to deal with, and that wouldn’t be easy. There would be deaths. Ancient rumours were already circulating that Doctor Arkadin was long dead, that he had committed suicide. No matter how events fell, Candida would be a changed city by the end of the day. Esteban hoped there might still be whores and officers and dreadful poetry, and money that flaked and shrivelled in your pocket, and trust, and Kay – and Kay –

– and Kay was, technically speaking, one of the enemy, one of the leaders. He expected he would find her in the clubhouse and it would fall to him to arrest her, maybe even fight her, maybe even to the death. Or perhaps she would have fled the city by now. He hoped fervently she had simply gone home, as she’d promised, and he hoped just as fervently – he glanced up the mountainside to the old free house, wracked by explosions and gunshots – that she had lied to him.

The previous night, after he had reported to his fellow officers, he had returned home and destroyed every single photograph of Kay that
challanco
had bequeathed him. He hadn’t been able to rationalise it; he could have pretended he was protecting her or himself, but the truth was, he was simply compelled to it. Each picture had flickered and burned at the touch of a match, another moment of Kay’s past consumed, another of
challanco
’s oblique accusations silenced. Days later, the victors of Candida would venture into the service tunnels below the city and find that the great metal head had fallen permanently silent, that a crack had opened across its scalp, revealing the smashed clockworkings of its brain. Sombrely they would break it apart, like an egg, bringing the age of Doctor Arkadin to an end.

A harsh wind rose up from the valley, and de Broca’s team shivered in their ludicrous, mock-military party coats. Esteban glanced up into the clouds, expectantly. The wind had a distinct character, it was the type that would bring the first wet drops from a summer storm. There was no rain, the rush was dry, even warm, and the horizon was thickening with black clouds. The helicopters would fall out of that, from the sublime vista behind the mountain.

Had he warned de Broca about the other helicopters? Yes, of course he had, even in his addled tiredness; but no-one was prepared to talk about them. Candida had always been vulnerable from the air, but who imagined powered flight at this altitude? He had proposed capturing the helicopter that had already landed, but a scouting party from the back of the Club reported it had gone. That was disappointing. Then again, there were so many things about it that could go wrong.

He imagined himself plummeting to earth. That felt too giddily real, a prophecy.

‘Do we go?’ he asked de Broca.

‘We go,’ said his rival and his comrade.

They went. First they embraced.

The first of the Appeared they encountered was the Club’s secretary, the man called the Nigerian. He confronted them in the annexe to the building, brandishing an automatic pistol with the quiet faith of a man who has a gun to hide behind. With a flick of a broomstick, de Broca swiped the confidence out of his hand, and the pistol fell echoing onto floor tiles. Startled, the Nigerian dropped to his haunches, ready to leap or fly, but caught undecided between the two. De Broca broke the secretary’s nose with a prod from the knob of his broom. Deprived of his gun and sweating blood from the middle of his face, the Nigerian ceased to be a challenge and was sent out meekly into the arms of the waiting officers. The tiny victory cheered de Broca’s team, though Esteban hung back from the general mood, certain it wouldn’t last.

Esteban picked up the discarded gun, holding it between forefinger and thumb like a diseased thing, and dropped it into a carpet-bag they’d brought to confiscate the weapons. Six more helicopters. The silent walls of the steamworks were deceptive and lulling. He didn’t expect the rest of the day to be as easy but – as they crept into the passages and offices of the Club – the sense of unthreatening calm held. Few members had turned up for work the morning after the party. Those that de Broca’s team found were dazed and frightened, checking in to work because they felt it was expected. Some of them had been present at the party and hadn’t grasped the implications of what they’d seen. They went out at the officers’ request, almost relieved.

Esteban began to agitate to head upstairs, to the suites on the upper floors where the ringleaders might be hiding. De Broca let him go, concentrating his efforts on evacuating the club and preparing to face resistance. As he climbed the stairs, Esteban expected to hear the first gunshots, but they didn’t come. Later, he learned that there had been three armed men left to guard the building, but by the time the search party had encountered them it was clear that the day had been lost and won, and there was no fighting at all in the clubhouse after the Nigerian was disarmed.

There was a woman, a girl in fact, hiding naked under the bed of one of the suites. She had Kay’s freckles but was smaller and looked pathetically vulnerable in a way that ferocious Kay, even at her lowest ebb, could never have managed. Esteban covered her up with his Prussian riding jacket. She had an American accent, but he didn’t catch her name.
(Mae, thought Kay, dreaming. Her name is Mae.)
She was frightened but not distraught; she had been abandoned rather than abused. She could walk, so he gave her his broomstick and sent her to find her own way down. On the wall beyond the door to the suite, the bloodstain made by Azure was hardening and ugly. Esteban sat on the bed, staring at the accusing pattern through the jamb and rubbing warmth into his shirtsleeved arms. Azure would never have been a good officer. The old free house was welcome to her.

He found no-one else. In one office there was a strange, incomplete, distorted model of the city, with the old free house secure and unyielding on the mountainside. He left it alone. In an adjacent room there were briefcases full of paper money, nothing from Candida. He recognised Australian and US dollars, yuan, euros, quaint old English pounds, currencies all the colours of the rainbow. He was tempted to lug each case to the window and set them free one by one, rain multicoloured paper streamers on the city. No; tempting though it was, it would give away their game to the occupation forces. No; this was a building full of pipes and sinks. He filled the nearest basin with cold water and drowned every last note and bill, watching them swirl and pulp and mate in the water.

Certain and not undisappointed that the top floor had been evacuated, he went to the roof and scanned the skyline through bronze-rimmed binoculars. Black, unmoving clouds obliterated the sky, hiding all incoming traffic. He swung round to inspect the siege at the old free house, and the old free house was on fire, smoke belching from every window, smudging its façades dirty grey.

‘Dragon’s breath!’ he swore.

Then he heard the first distant thump of the helicopters. He turned back to the horizon, and through his binoculars caught a glimpse of the half-dozen strong swarm as it broke through a gap in the clouds then vanished into the gloom. ‘Shit!’ he swore, and dashed the binoculars to the ground. He didn’t turn, and so missed seeing the red shape that erupted through Kay’s window and into the air.

And this was Kay’s second dream:

There was no fire.

There was smoke, but it wasn’t made by the blasts or the bombs of Prospero’s men. Flower-of-the-Lady had sent the house’s mauve-coloured maids down into the boiler rooms, rubbish chutes, service ducts and ventilation wells where they would be out of immediate danger but also useful. There was a plan that had been put in place centuries earlier, long before Doctor Arkadin’s day. At her desk in the library, the-Lady sat in reverie, recalling how she had sat at the feet of her mother and her grandfather as they had described the workings of the trap to her.

She’d made her own modifications to the plan since becoming chatelaine.

The barbarians were at the gate breaking through. She could hear them thumping at the doors with guns and explosives and blunt axe-heads. Less than an hour earlier, she had sealed and barred the same entrance. The ranks of servants, almost all of whom had chosen to stay and put the plan into effect, stood in the vaulted front-stage antechamber of the house, waiting for her word, armed with mounds of cloth and rags, with frothing buckets of water, with wood blocks and oil. At her request, they went down into the conduits of the house and lit their fires in the places where the air carried. So there was no great, single conflagration raging out of control, consuming the house. That was the illusion, that was the trick. Instead, there were many tiny fires contained in tight makeshift braziers. Before the intruders had even breached the walls, the maids were soaking and burning rags.

The smoke rose and filled the house, the dragons waking from a secret slumber.

Once the doors finally gave, the mercenaries spilled inside as an unthinking human tide. This wasn’t a base to be secured but a symbol to be torn down and smashed. That needed little finesse or strategy. They were facing courtesans armed with carelessly flung pots of human waste, with kitchen knives and bondage toys. They had backup riding in on helicopters. They had guns. They were in no danger. They blundered into the pall, without masks, without even handkerchiefs to protect them. Once inside the house, they Disappeared.

The sound of guns faded away, replaced by the softer, more-human chorus of retching and coughing. The burning rags were soaked in water mixed with a chemical solution that stung eyes and lungs. From behind her desk, the-Lady gave orders for the marvellous mechanical traps to be switched on, the engines built into the fabric of the house. Then she rose, put on her mask and set out for the battlefront.

No-one died in the turmoil. The uselessly-armed men staggered through the smoke-filled invisible passages, unable to find targets, unable to shoot. Their eyes by now were bleeding. The secret machinery that separated the front- and back-stages had come to life at the-Lady’s command and turned the topography of the house into a treacherous shifting maze. Rooms revolved. Doors vanished. Passages turned into inescapable boxes. Panels slid aside like bulkheads. Corridors tipped upside down. Trapdoors opened beneath unprepared feet. Lights flashed on and off, deceptive beacons like sirens or wreckers’ lanterns, drawing the invaders further into the maze.

And there were monsters in the fog. They flitted out of nowhere, becoming briefly solid to shove and kick and trip the intruders. The monsters had big, glass gasmask eyes and black gasmask snouts. They grew more daring, snatching guns out of unsuspecting hands, tugging at belts, stripping off jackets and pulling down trousers. The defenders, on their home ground, recognised each other silently, touching fingertips against exposed breasts. Prospero’s army, in panic, yelled desperately to each other in a babble of languages. One by one, the enemy seized them or lured them into their unsolid world. The men vanished into soundproofed cubicles filled with incense and pillows and specula. In those rooms, in the care of the ladies, they would be torn apart and rebuilt. When they emerged – if they emerged – they would no longer be recognisable as the men they once were.