Ink (63 page)

Those are the sort of slaves who make trouble.

Jack puts his hand on Tamuz's shoulder—
it's OK
—and the boy relaxes, steps out of the way. Von Strann tips him a nod and Tamuz returns to his work, to preparing for their departure.

Outside, far off, dogs are barking.

“You have to understand the peril we're in,” says von Strann. “These are treacherous times, and our enemies, they are… what makes them dangerous is as much what we have in our hearts as what they have in their hands.”

He hefts Carter's holster with its Webley, hands it to him.

“A gun in the hand is of less import to them than the fear and hatred in a man's heart.”

“Who are these enemies?” says Jack. “The Futurists?”

“Worse,” says von Strann.

“That word,” he says, “that word I…
used
on you, you understand, there are those who speak this language more fluently and to more effect than you or I can even imagine. I think… Samuel thought… that the Book was created to keep them in check, to bind them into a world where
this
is right and
this
is wrong,
this
is true and
this
is false. If they have control of the book, then they could… change it, shift the balance in their favor.”

A scream in the distance. Breaking glass.

“Balance,” says Jack.

Ten years since the Great War ended, years of madness, anarchy, bloody holocaust. The war to end all wars, he'd thought, when he signed up to fight the Kaiser, to save Belgium, to stop Prussian militarism in its tracks. Ten years fighting genocide in Kurdistan.

“What balance?” he says.

“Captain Carter, I beg you,” says von Strann. “I am not your enemy. And my people, Tamuz's people, we want to find Samuel every bit as much as you. So he stole
from us? We do
not
believe in revenge. Believe me. We are not barbarians. We do not lie. And we do not murder in the name of justice. Not for any book. We—Anat and I—we only rode out after him to… we were trying to save his life. To save all our lives. We have been searching for him since he left. We found…”

“What did you find?”

Von Strann swallows. He opens one of the flaps of the saddlebag.

“We found the carcass of his horse, a scorched and charred piece of carrion, torn apart by vultures; we knew it only by the metal on its halter. And we found this, buried inside the horse's bowels. Someone had cut the creature open… had hidden it among the poor brute's entrails.”

Von Strann scatters loose papers from the saddlebags across the table.

“If you will not trust me,” he says, “trust Samuel's words. But stop delaying us with your obstinacyp/eese: if we are not out of this city within the hour, I doubt we will get out alive.”

Jack picks up one of the pages:

…know now how to translate the language fully, unlike […] and false are signaled, […] think, in the[…]so that the Cant, as
[…]
have come
[…]
and words as weapons, tools
, […]«
sword of fire…

“And I suppose this enemy will be using their
swords of fire
against us,” says Carter. “Words as weapons, eh? I doubt words would be much use against a Lee-Enfield.”

“No?” says von Strann.

The blackshirts are arriving as I kick the last Mod in his parka through the pastry cabinet of this little Italian joint, all Formica tables and espressos, that I've tracked my horsey to. I slug a shot of Java back with one hand, with the other flick my jackknife through the air and into a plain clothes SS man's cold heart. He drops, and a chi-gun skitters from his hand across the lino floor toward me. I dive for it, and roll, and come up blasting.

Fuck the Fox's plan, I think. You wanna party, come ahead.

As my cover runs for cover, I take down the blackshirt who's about to shoot him in the back—
bad form, old chap
, as Fox would say. With his black Ray-Bans and polo-neck, our guy looks more groovy cat than cunning fox, but it's him all right; there's no mistaking that little goatee and mustache. Two newcomers
shoot out the windows and come diving through, their chi-blasts shattering tabletops and sending splintered wood and splatterings of ketchup, mustard, clouds of sugar, salt and pepper up into the air around me. I sneeze and shoot the ceiling down on top of them, a lucky fluke. Fuck, I think. All hell is breaking loose. The mission's not just in jeopardy, it's full-scale fucking abort, baby. The enemy were waiting for me. Some bastard's sold us out and, when I find out who, they're going to pay the piper at the gates of hell.

I catch a glimpse—a motion in the corner of my sight—and fire as I turn. There's a look of horror on the beatnik's face as he smacks back into the mirrored wall panel. His girlfriend—blond beehive and horn-rimmed glasses, sky-blue twinset—screams as Jacques Reynard Cartier slumps and slides down, cracked and lumpen, to the floor.

“Fuck!” I shout. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
iuckfuckl”

As civilian casualties go, this takes the biscuit, the big, salty, semen-sodden biscuit.

I slide in a football tackle across the lino to kick out the legs of yet another militiaman, blow his superego out the back of his head as he falls, and pry the chi-gun out of his twitching hand. From the floor, chi-pistols crossed, wrist over wrist, I shoot another three blackshirts as they jump out from the armored air-van's sliding doors. Sirens are screaming outside on the streets, and getting louder. Firing two-fisted, furious and frenzied, I take out the last few of the militia squad, and turn back to scope the torn-up cafe. The girl is cradling the dying beatnik in her arms.

OK. So I'm going to have to improvise.

I tuck the guns into my belt, unzip my jacket and pull out the little case with the syringe filled with my silvery squirt of soul, the distilled Essence of Jack meant to go into the poor fucker dying on the ground in front of me, to seed the soul of an angel assassin deep inside.

“And what about the cover?” Anna had said to Fox. “Afterward?” “A little dance with death” [he'd shrugged] “might be exactly what it takes to turn a pawn into a rook.”

See, according to Guy, well, I'm the fire on the Fox's tail that keeps him running. I'm the trickster in the traitor that means Joey's always on our side no matter who he's being paid by. I'm Anaesthesia's anger, Puck's perversity, Coyote's cool, Finn's fire. I'm the id unbound, baby, the time bomb in your heart that
makes you tick-tick-tick till the alarm goes off and you wake up and smell the coffee. I'm the one who lets the real you out into your head.

Everyone's got a secret self that's locked away inside them, see, and if you want to let it loose, you've gotta let the firestarter blow your storm doors of perception open with a Sekem Semtex moment of satori. Then it's exit Jack into the night and, out into the light, out of the smoking rubble, walks a new you, as a Princess or a Puck … or as a Fox.

That's Fox's theory anyway.

I crouch down by the beatnik.

Fuck.

This should have been easy, but the paradox shielding is probably kicking in already and… I look at the Jacques Reynard Cartier who will never now become a savvy Fox with savoir faire and Savoy flair. I can see the Guy in him now, staring back with hollow eyes, dying in front of me. And there's no telling what effect this'll have on our own king of thieves. I'm only hoping there might still be one last chance …

This is the Vellum after all; if I wasn't inside the shield walls of the Circus, I could blow my own head off and wake up a world away, in Sumer, in the Even-fall, or in the wilds of the Hinter, with just a little eternity to walk to find my way back to this fold. But this is the last Haven of the Lords of fucking Order; they got rules here, the fuckers. Still, maybe if I shoot him up with a little extra me, maybe if I can get a little sample of his psyche back to Fox before the temporal shock wave rips through our reality. Maybe …

Ah, bollocks. Fucked if I know what I'm doing. Tactical metaphysics never was my forte; I'm just the shock troops on the urgrund.

But I push one of my sleeves up to the elbow, start to roll up one of his to find a vein. If I'm the avatar of anarchy, who rips reality apart so anything is possible … well then anything is worth a try.

“Sorry, old man,” I say. “Plan B. Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit.”

Outside, there's militia sirens in the distance.

A scrap of page pocked with scorch marks, burn holes:

…can read the language […] know what the stories say, but […] are always changing
[…]
if every time you open the book
[…]
different
—
and while it may well contain our
futures written […] pages, what good is that if it contains all the futures that will never happen as well as those that will, if you can't tell the[…]ference!

A napkin stained with red wine, inked in capital letters:

YHVH. NO VOWELS. NO NOTES!

A scrap of page splattered with inkblots, thumbprints:

…von Strann's […]Anat-Ashtarzi, she wanted to know what was true and […] was false.

She thought
[…]«
clue in the writing itself, something that her people did not fully understand.

And[…] think that […] may have found that clue.

A page of a journal censored with scribbling so heavy that it grooves the paper:
…how can
[…]
betray that privilege? She has told
[…]
so much about
[…]
and about those forces in this world who know of the existence of[…] and seek to possess it, not just as a relic but for its power. How then can […] even contemplate this course of action…

And then there are the time lines, biographical notes for people not yet born, descriptions of future technology, lists of authors and books that Jack has never heard of, historical sketches of imaginary cities, and long quotations from who knows what—one of them seems to be
The Iliad.
Here and there the texts are ticked, crossed out, or labeled with a question mark.

Another page from the journal:

…the word
Lot
means “hidden” in Hebrew. Is it possible that what dwelt in Sodom, what escaped from it, was not a man but a secret? The book itself? Or some more specific secret written in the book, in a language that specifies pitch, intonation
[…]
that be what the angels came to Sodom for, in search of a secret lost to even them?

A note, headed Genesis 4:17.

…it mean that Cain built the first city and named it Enoch, after his son or that Enoch
[…]
and named it after
his
son?
[…]n Enoch, father of Irad, and Enki, god of Eridu, seen […] their oldest city and situated at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. Sumer, known to the Sumerians as Kiengir—
Land of the Kien. Kien = Enki.

A page with a single sentence on it, smeared with blood:

And the angels will come again to Sodom.

Jack reads on.

20th March. A day of fighting draws to its close and the Baron and I are lucky to be alive. I hardly know what to think now, now that I have fought side by side
with him against the Turkish forces. Tell el-Kharnain has fallen, and all we can do now is pray that MacChuill can hold his tongue. I curse myself that I refused to leave when von Strann begged it. God forgive me, if we had only left when we had the chance, then MacChuill would be with us. And Tamuz would be alive. I dug my heels in, Anna, and now I will be haunted for the rest of my life, I think, with the drill of the machine gun, the image of Tamuz dropping as he ran toward me, and the Turks behind him in the entrance to the courtyard.

Tamui unscrews the camera from its tripod, wraps it in a folded pair of trousers and deposits it in the trunk. He clacks the legs of the tripod together.

He was going to fetch MacChuill, didn't even make it to the Avenue of Books before we heard him running. We were at the bottom of the stairs. We were ready. If we ‘d only been ready sooner. While I took two of them down with my pistol, the third would have made his escape but for von Strann's reaction. It took me only an eternal second to react, but he was a madman in an instant, Anna, a force of vengeance. I was only just out on the street in time to see him with the last Turk, one hand clamped across his forehead, pulling his head back—God, he couldn't have been much older than Tamuz, the soldier, eighteen or so, and I could see the fear in his eyes as von Strann's other hand slashed the knife across his throat.

Von Strann picks up the pages Jack has read and abandoned to one side, starts placing them back in the saddlebags.

Von Strann carried Tamuz's body back up the stairs while I did my best to conceal the three dead Turks in the courtyard. We were praying those few shots fired and some blood on the ground would not give us away, that we could at least make it to MacChuilPs lodgings and the car before the place erupted. We made it there in time to see the militia dragging him out into the street toward a truck, heard it before we saw it really, the air turning blue with his curses. MacChuill fought like a wild man and I swear to God, if there'd been just a few less of them I doubt they could have held him. As it was, if von Strann had not dragged me back out of the headlights of the second truck that arrived just then, carrying twice as many Turks again … I'm not sure I would be writing this now.

We are back in von Strann's studio now, Anna, the body of Tamuz laid on the bed. Gunfire sounds across the city. A day of fighting, and the Baron and I holed up like rabbits, our exits cut off. I have read much of Samuel's notes now, the true and the false, alternative histories and unknown myths. My own past. A stranger's present.

A score of futures and in all of them the boy dies.

——

Jack watches Tamuz sliding the folded tripod into a carpetbag and feels himself caught in a kaleidoscope of realities, insane, unreal, impossible. He still can't accept—he
won't
accept—this rot about angels and books in ancient languages, but every heartbeat seems a drum that marks another step toward at least one of these futures written in his words in Hobbsbaum's hand. And that heart… he's only known the lad a few days, but the image of him falling to a bullet in the back, the image of his body laid out on the bed… his beating heart feels hollow as a ransacked tomb, tight as the drum skin pounding out the boy's doom.