Ink (56 page)

Nothing, thinks Carter. There's nothing here of any use. Two hours of questioning and none of the workers even remember either Samuel or von Strann; and one would have thought two crazy Europeans coming out to this parched hellhole in the midday sun, to ask God alone knows what, would stick in one's mind. Carter studies MacChuill sitting casually on the running board of the car, smoking his cigarette and watching the clamor and crunch of heavy industry in motion, conveyors carrying lumps of black crystal already melting in the sun. If the Scotsman's a liar he's a bloody good one, the sort that should be on the stage or silver screen rather than squandering his talent as chauffeur for a Prussian pornogra-pher with an eye for pretty, copper-skinned boys.

“Workers change a lot here, ye ken,” he'd mused. “There's guid money in it, but it's a filthy job, like. Ah mean, ye can smell it, can ye no?”

It's brimstone and burning rubber, oilsmoke and rotten eggs.

“No tae mention the danger; ye hit a liquid seam when yer diggin fer ore and… well, Ah worked there for masel a bit, but after a while ye realize the money jist isnae worth dying for. Drowning in ink… Christ…”

Carter sits now on the low rubble of a wall built by Templars, watching black vapors drift up from the ink crystals on the conveyors, curling in ornate arabesques not unlike the writing the ink might well become once it's been purified, packaged and exported to some distant corner of the world. The wells have been here for over two thousand years, but any remnants of past cultures that might interest Samuel have long since been cleared to make way for this modern, mechanized industry. So why would he come here?

“And the ink, ye know,” MacChuill had blathered on, “it disnae jist wash aff like coal dust. It stains ye, like, gets right under yer skin. Christ, ye can still see it on ma haun in the right light.”

MacChuill had held his hand up for Carter to see, turned it this way and that until he got just a glimpse of a mark, faint from one angle, like a tattoo blurred and faded by time, but flashing clear and crisp and black for an instant, impossibly clear and crisp and black. A trick of the light and—

“I think I need to sit down for a second. Feel quite giddy all of a sudden. Bloody heat.”

So MacChuill sits casually on the running board of the car and Carter sits in the shadow of a Templar ruin, trying to work out what on earth would have brought Samuel here and, indeed, if he really came here at all.

And we watch him as we drift in tendrils through the air, dreaming of the words we will become.

“Death itself,” says the Duke Irae, “is less magnificent.”

He circles the Echo Chamber like an art critic appreciating an installation of the most unique originality. It should be more magnificent than death, after all, this egg from which the One True God will hatch. In death, the seven souls of a being are torn apart, dissolve away, one by one, but this … this will be the reunion of them all. Sekhu, the mortal remains. The dust of the angel Raphael gathered in a radioactive ruin that was once Damascus. Ka, the double. The empty armor of Gabriel taken from a desolate Haven out in the Hinter, the sculpted faceplate of his helmet a perfect mirror of his countenance. The Khu, the guardian angel. Uriel himself—the Duke Irae, as he's known in this piddling little fabrication of a fold—he's given his eye to the project, to watch over it from within. Just as Michael and Azazel gave of themselves. The Ba, the prince's heart. And the Khaibit, the shadow of the angel of death. And the sixth soul, second-highest of them all, the life, the energy, that burning song of spirit, the Sekem? The scream of Sandalphon as Uriel graved these other souls into him still echoes within that bubble of chaos, falling down forever toward that singularity of infinite energy, zero size, pure possibility, a void, a deep, waiting for a whispered word. For the secret name, the Ren, of God.

That was Gabriel's mistake, the Duke knows, to think any one of them could keep the throne themselves. An angel of fire on the throne of God will only make a hell of heaven … and none of the remaining three would fare any better. Besides, he's never been so ambitious or foolish himself; at heart he's just an old soldier, he likes to think, who'd rather stand behind his king as guardian and loyal adviser.

So, no, if he wants to restore order to the Vellum, he's going to need a little bit of all of them, and in Metatron's absence that means the Book, the lost, hidden, stolen, torn, scattered, remade Book of All Hours. Not some pissant little sampler patched together from fragments but the one and only, the Cant that writes the world,
all
worlds, graved for eternity on the skin of angels in blood ink.

And the wonderful thing about the Vellum, about the Book that carves its folds and all the souls that live or die in them, is that even if the Book is in shreds, one of those shreds, one of those broken, twisted fictions, contains, of course, the Book's own story. Everything that ever was or will be, might or might not be, is written in the Book of All Hours; how complete would it be with no mention of itself?

And how complete would it be without the ultimate invocation, that one little word of Cant that might exist, and therefore
does
within the Book, one little word by which the Lord of Lords can be called and bound into the flesh of this world?

“It
is
beautiful,” he says. “Glorious.”

“Indeed, m'sire.”

Dr. Arturo nods, deriving no pleasure from His Lordship's approval. For him, magnificence is an irrational—

EMERGENCY OVERRIDE.

NARRATIVE MODE: SHUTDOWN.

BIOFORM STATUS: PLAY/RECORD.

17th March,
he writes.
Events become more curious. After my wild-goose chase out to the Ink Wells yesterday, I woke this morning in a foul mood, so frustrated with the runaround I've been getting, I decided that today I'd do a little exploration on my own. The boy woke while I was in the middle of my ablutions and was all for coming with me. I imagine he wasn't happy at all when he got back with MacChuill to find me gone. But I half believe now that my little loyal native guide has only been leading me to the shops he knows Samuel had
not
been at. He seems a decent enough lad, but he's clearly been told to try and keep me out of harm's way, to keep me from setting off on Samuel's trail without his master. Whatever Samuel says in this Prussian's favour, my patience with him grows thinner by the hour. The boy will tell me only that he's out in the desert; it's clear from the way he talks though that the
Eyn
, as he calls him, is deeply involved with these people. Tamuz insists that
Eyn
is only a mark of respect, but it does have the ring of a tribal title to me, as if the Baron is another of these White Arabs, Anna, gone native and prancing around in robes and headdress. It seems that noble blood is noble blood, whatever race it belongs to. I
used to
I cannot say but that I have my own ideas upon the nature of the
truly
noble man.

Whatever
Eyn
means, though, it's a part of the puzzle.

He'd picked up on the word the moment Tamuz first used it, out on the airfields, but had shrugged it off as some local dialect. It was only last night, tackling another entry in Hobbsbaum's little notebook, that he'd come across it in… well, in
another of those disturbing little flights of fancy. The translated shorthand is now inscribed on the facing page of his own journal entry:

From the few records that survived the destruction
, it reads,
it is impossible to reconstruct the language with any degree of accuracy, but the eminent paleolinguist M. Ventris (1987) argues a strong case that the Enakite tongue, while containing many Semitic loan words, is not a member of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages at all. Ventris speculates that the Enakite
eyn
may even be derived from the Sumerian
en,
meaning
lord.

It's not just the dates, the references to works unwritten, wholesale inventions of future history, as if Samuel were working on some fantastic novel in the vein of Wells; it's the detail that disturbs him, and the lack of context. Without any clue to the origins of these scraps of ersatz academia, he feels like a doctor lost in the private language of a patient's delusions, the sort of calm, matter-of-fact insanity he remembers from the Somme…

Alook of cold hate and a shake of the head from the chaplain as he walks into the dugout. Sketches on brown paper scattered everywhere. Obscene drawings of Carter naked, with fire in his eyes, with wings.

“Don't you see the angel,” the boy had said, “when you look in the mirror, sir, ye know? Oh, and don't you hear the voice in your blood?”

Brown eyes in the gray light of dawn, more sad than scared.

“It's time,” says Mad Jack Carter.

“Isn't it always?” says Private Thomas Messenger.

Focus
, he tells himself.

If Samuel's lost his grasp of reality out with some kif-smoking tribal storyteller, these notes may have no more meaning than the automatic scribblings of a spiritualist charlatan. The future isn't written yet, not like the past. And there's no such thing as angels, he tells himself. No, when von Strann returns he may have more of Samuel's notebooks, according to Tamuz. But for now Carter has something more solid to work with, from his own investigations. The world has no angels in it, he tells himself, no magic, no prophecy; that way lies madness … like Samuel's… like the Messenger boy's…

Focus, goddammit.

It didn't take me long
, he writes,
to find the less reputable traders with more valuable antiquities, those who deal in genuine, albeit looted, grave goods rather than the counterfeit trinkets sold to tourists. And, after only the briefest of enquiries, I now know of an incident a fortnight ago or so where Samuel and von Strann saw off two assailants
—
after a book Samuel was carryingon him, it seems. The stall owner was rather exaggerating, I suspect
—
she
made a great fuss over afire that got started in the struggle, how it could have wreaked havoc upon the kasbah, ruined her business, merciful Allah
—
but her description of the two “foreign rogues” seems worth the price.

“No, they were not Arab. Pale skin, blue eyes. Americans, I should think, from the way they talk. But Americans who have lived in many places.”

The trader stuffs straw packing into a box as she nods to herself. She looks up at Carter from her stool beneath the canopy at the narrow entrance to her shop, a dark room crowded with shelf after shelf of shabti figurines, Jericho skulls covered in clay with shells for eyes, stone statues, cylinder seals. The kasbah seems an easy place to snatch and run, to disappear into the hustle and bustle, but Carter can see how easy it would also be to bungle a robbery in these cramped conditions, to knock an oil lamp over, start a fire.

“Strange men,” the trader says. “Hair like snakes.”

She shakes her head, switches to Arabic to explain—not like a woman's flowing down the back, but down to the shoulder in matted, braided, thick, wild locks. Like an African, she says with some disdain before launching again into her bitter complaints about the fire and how she nearly lost her livelihood.

“That fire was not natural.”

The voice comes from inside the shop, an old man hobbling out of the shadows to peer at him with a face as timeworn as the cracked clay on the Jericho skulls, cataracts in his eyes white as the seas hells.

“Go back inside,” she says. “Ignore my father. He is blind but he imagines he can see better than—”

“I
hear
well enough, my girl. And I heard his voice; I heard the word the angel used to start the fire.”

“It was a lamp, a broken oil lamp. Ignore him; he is old and—”

“Did you find any broken glass, eh? No. I know the voice of the one who took your mother. I know the voice of the angel of death.”

“Father… enough. Please go, sir. Please. This is not good for him.”

The woman ushers her father back inside with waving arms, ignoring his protests—/
heard it, I heard it
—and Carter finds himself backing away down the street—/
heard the voice in my blood.
He's thinking of Samuel's letters and crazy notes, of the madness that believes in myths and magic.