Ink (53 page)

he Duke Irae strokes at his grand white beard and runs an idle finger .X up the venous scar that splits the left side of his face from cheek to hairline, over the shattered socket where a mirrored ball now sits in place of his lost eye. War has its price and this is a small one; others paid more dearly, with their lives, their souls. Raphael dead. Metatron lost. Gabriel—he doesn't like to think of what happened to that lord of fire out in the Hinter. And then there was the little pissant pacifist Sandalphon—a pity about that, but
c'est la mort.
He was useful in the end. There's only the three of them now; but three is as holy a number as seven, and it makes for a tighter and more stable ruling structure anyway. Michael and Azazel, archangels of ice and death, bringers of Peace and Mercy, the right hand and left hand of the Law. And the Duke who was once known as Uriel, Glory of God.

His grizzled, chiseled features seem carved out of granite, his impiteous, stony gaze unmoving and unblinking as he studies the abyss below, the vast fluming chasm of the largest chi-mine in all of Albion, stretching out beneath the balcony, down, down through a storm of sickly greenish vapors riven by electric blue, down, down into the core of orgone energy, chi-energy, the engine of pure chaos at the heart of everything. The ink under the Vellum's skin.

Ah, yes. If God were really dead, this would be his open grave—a strip mine in the very substance of reality, yielding an inexhaustible supply of raw power.

Above him and around him, the monstrous impossibility that is the city of Dunedin hangs from the ceiling of the cavern. Stalactite streets of stone run vertical,
horizontal and diagonal; buildings hang like bats from rafters that are bridges, ups and downs all folded. But the Duke ignores this banal labyrinth; it's the monster below he's fascinated by. He stares down into the geomagical machine that for twenty years or half of an eternity has helped to power this little Haven, this glorious mirage of an Empire On Which The Sun Will Never Set. For once a smile plays across his lips; the sun can never set on an Empire hidden underground. His secret kingdom.

History is on their side. This shaft piercing down into the Vellum's depths is a useful legacy of Crowley's brief, inglorious reign as Lord Protector. As it turned out, even the Futurist Revolution in the Eastern Bloc, the Great War itself, had served as a wonderful excuse for the industrialization—the
exploitation
—of this power source. And, with Mosley's restoration of the monarchy, those like the Duke Irae who had remained loyal to the Traitor King had been rewarded with unprecedented access to the very source of Albion's might.
To do with as you will, for Albion's sake.

The Duke Irae has reason to be pleased with the sham reality that Kentigern is built on; it couldn't have worked out better if he'd written the script himself.

The tempest of chi-energies reflects across his mirror-ball eye, distorted by the curvatures so that the center of it, the dark corona of the event threshold, looks for all the world like a blackly piercing pupil. As if, within the eye, he has a singularity for a soul.

“How very … Nietzschean,” he says.

At his side, Dr. Arturo, biochaocist and bodhisattva, looks an even glummer bear than usual; inoculated against all infectious enthusiasms by his self-prescribed regime of medication and meditation, he remains, like all good scientists, impervious to all the world's temptations. For Arturo, the abyss below is only his own inevitable oblivion, the dark nirvana that he yearns for as release from hopeless servitude. Even in the hopelessness of his abject surrender to the mechanisms of the State and, in a wider sense, to the Wheel of Fate itself, there is the tiniest part of him that still yearns. The drugs do help, however, and the utter lack of anything resembling an ego in his heavily narcotized psyche serves him well in helping to maintain his professional objectivity, no small matter given that his work for Albion's most powerful duke is in so many ways quite deeply ethically objectionable. At this moment, as he pops another pill, his subjugated conscience sinks back down into its usual slumber and he's left with only a cold appreciation of the expedience of misery.

“Wagnerian, even, m'sire,” he says.

——

The Duke frae nods approvingly. A collector of the Nihilist master, he has a number of Wagner's more famous paintings in his galleries now. The scene below is so reminiscent of his tour de force,
Inferno in Blue and Green
, Something in the crushing rawness of it and in the mention of the great pre-Futurist artist sparks a thought in him, and he raises his hoary head to turn, looking not at Arturo but at the bioform scribe behind him, the psychic yet mindless archivist of His Lordship's every moment.

hope that you're getting this all down.

The bioform nods blankly, integrating its own action into the greater narrative of its master.

Without turning, the Duke Irae speaks to Arturo.

“We are, indeed, the masters of this world,” he says. “Now. How is our architect doing?”

“Secure,” says Dr. Arturo. “Safe as houses. And on schedule. The Circus should be sealed off in a matter of days.”

“Good. And Project Moonchild?”

“The gestation period is complete. We're making the final preparations for the drop right now; we have Magi working round the clock, binding the shell to its destination. When we release … it should fly truer than a bullet from a hero's gun. I have no fear but that it will hit its target dead-on.”

“You have no fear of anything, Arturo. You have no hope.”

“True, m'sire.”

The Duke gazes down into the maelstrom. If he could only see through the blue-green storm, down the well of histories, to this fold of the Vellum where, according to Arturo's scrying eyes, his prying prophetic spies, the Book is even now emerging … if he could be certain …

But nothing is certain in a world without God.

The black abysm of time stretches down below, the storm shimmering over it like light on oil, iridescent ink, all blues and greens, the colors of a peacock's tail; but in all the chaotic splendor of it there is no curiosity, no judgment, no passion. No
will.

Soon, though, thinks the Duke. Soon.

“Soon!” calls Tamuz. “We there in no time now. Look!”

He stands, one hand on the windscreen to steady him, the other pointing to
two o'clock, pointing down into the Jordan Valley, through the white swirling dust, to a thin line of dark green that winds down from the north to—

Tell el-Kharnain. Straddling the river where it flows into the pale blue of the Dead Sea, it rises out of the wasteland like the stumps of twin towers blasted down and built upon, a great city raised over the ruins of two ancient myths. The jumble of it is built of the same bleached golden stone you see all across Palestine, but for some reason that material strikes Carter differently here. Here it seems to have an added quality of salt and bone, of living flesh ossified, brittle and crumbling to the elements. That same pale, yellowy brown which makes Jerusalem seem almost a structure made of light on paper or parchment, a vellum origami, clean-lined, sharp-cornered, here seems scoured thinner, shredded at the edges. Tell el-Kharnain has the same minarets and domes rising above its roofs, but everywhere the skyline of it is broken up by—as they rattle ever closer, he can see—dark, fluttering rags.

He has to shout over the car's gruff complaints at MacChuill's rough handling, ramming it from one gear to the next, treating the road like an assault course.

“What are the flags?” he shouts.

“Goatskin, Carter Bey,” says Tamuz. “Is good luck.”

Carter nods—
of course.
He knows a little of the culture of this city; Samuel's letters dwelt in rather too much depth on the apocryphal tales of wickedness and punishment, sin and torment, tales of how, after the War in Heaven, the Archangel Michael opened up a crack in the desert of stone to bind the fallen angels under the Dead Sea Valley. Of how the two mounds that stand on each side of the Jordan and that give the city its name—the Mound of the Horned One—are in fact the horns of Sammael, leader of the rebels. To Carter these
tells
are, of course, simply the signs of ancient civilization, the buildup of layer upon layer of human detritus, of cities built over towns built over villages, visible everywhere across the Near East.

But then for the Bedouin tribesmen who inhabit the wilderness to the west of Tell el-Kharnain the mythology and the history are not entirely incompatible. They identify the mounds as the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, refusing to set foot within the city walls because, they say, to stand upon the horns of the
Shaitan
, the Enemy, is an abomination in the eyes of God.

While the rest of Palestine was built in honor of a God of light—synagogues, scriptoriums and strongholds—Tell el-Kharnain, the hated city, the cursed city, was not built at all, they say, but gathered as legends and rumors around a forgotten
story, a cloak of darkness blown in folds over a dead king. Before Petra was carved into the desert rock, before Masada fell, before En Gedi was abandoned, before Qumran acquired its store of scrolls and scriptures from the Essenes, before even the Temple at Jerusalem was built, the city of Tell el-Kharnain stood, proud and pagan, a city of blasphemy looking out over a lifeless sea.

They drive down into the valley of salt, toward it.

15th March,
he writes.
Tell el-Kharnain, city of sin, more notorious for its flesh-pots than Whitechapel. Having heard its reputation, I cannot say that I've ever had the urge to see it, but with my only clue to Samuel's whereabouts residing here among the hellions, what choice had I but to go down into this sinkhole of a city. Anna, I swear, the noise and stench of the Ben-Abba Airfields seems the very heights of civilization now. One enters Tell el-Kharnain along the Salt Road, where one gets a fine view of the squalid shantytown they call the New City, before driving in at a snail's pace through the slow crowds of the Jericho Gate and the Silkmarket. It is the strangest sight, this city with its outcast citizenry, not entirely unlike their neighbors in terms of dress and customs, but changed just enough to make the whole place utterly alien. Women in abayas and jilbabs down to their ankles, but made of saffron-colored silk. Men with yarmulkes and braided forelocks, but dressed in scarlet-and-purple patterned frock-coats as gaudy and as gauche as their Ashkenazi counterparts in Jerusalem are austerely black. We passed shopwindows filled with Hadith and Mizraim opened at pages of glorious illustrations, stalls selling rugs with verses from the Koran woven through scenes of birds and beasts, of men and angels. I don't know if you appreciate how anathema such sensual imagery is in Levantine culture, Anna. The Jews and Mohammedans hate such icons, such idolatry, with a fervor matched only by the most zealous Ulsterman, I should think. I had understood this to be a city of apostates, but now I realize that it is a city of heretics, blasphemers.

Carter opens the
Song of Songs
that lies on the table to the side of his journal. Captured by a passing glance, he bought the delicate little thing perhaps an hour or so ago, from a shop they passed on the steps of the narrow curved street leading up to the archway, the courtyard within, and then von Stranns attic apartment. Its parchment pages flick lightly over at the touch of a finger
—
page after page of illustrated Arabic script, intricate as a medieval manuscript or a Moorish mosaic, bawdy as a Hindu sculpture, and in the finest Siddim ink so slickly dark it looks still wet.

May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine.

——

He closes it over.

Here at hast, in von Strann's apartment
, he writes,
as I wait for the boy Tamuz to return, gathering my thoughts within this journal, here at least one has some respite from the broiling masses; one can relax without the expectation of a knife in one's back or a hand in one's pocket.

But he's lying to himself, he knows. He cannot relax; God knows, he wishes that he could, but twice on their journey the car was stopped and papers asked for. The Turkish military are everywhere and, given that it can only be a matter of weeks before the Turks sign themselves over to the blackshirts, those few Europeans he saw wandering casually through the markets in their linen suits and panama hats seem like fools to Carter. Mind you, from the looks he saw given to the militia by the locals, he suspects the Turks maywell meet some resistance here when the time comes. There is no love lost between these people and their overlords. The Ivans and Mehmets would do well to remember all the Roman blood spilled by the zealots and sicarii.