Ink (64 page)

Read on, our jaguar Jack
, we urge from every corner, every crack and crevice of this room, and in the chambers of his heart.

Another page:

20th March. A day of fighting draws to its close and the Baron and I are lucky to be alive. Tamuz is not so lucky, nor MacChuill, both dead at the hands of the Turks. Both might still be alive if I had listened to von Strann when he told me of the treaty between the Turks and the Futurists, of the airfleet heading toward us from Syria, of the police and army scouring the city for us at that very moment. But instead I refused to leave, asked him how he could know these things. All that time wasted, Anna, in damnfool stubbornness, even with Tamuz pulling on my sleeve, begging me to believe, to trust the Baron. He tried to place my hand upon his breast—that ritual of trust again—and I shoved him away; he fell to the floor.

There will be a reckoning for this. That is all von Strann has said since we made it back to the apartment. He cradles the body of the boy and mutters these words to himself, over and over. He looks at me with the same cold hatred that I've seen in Cossacks, Prussians, my own comrades, in survivors of countless atrocities, even in my own eyes on many a morning since Majkops—or, God knows, since the Somme perhaps. Not that it's really me he's looking at. Not personally. Not alone, at least. It is a hatred all the more chilling because it is it not really directed at what's in its path. It doesn't really know you're there even when it looks straight at you. No, it is a hatred for the world that has allowed an unforgivable horror.

There will be a reckoning for this.

I do not disbelieve him now. Today it is Tell el-Kharnain, tomorrow who knows? Tomorrow … As we wait here in von Strann's rooms, tomorrow hangs above
our heads, a Damoclean sword. The Turks have taken the city now and any fighting is sporadic. It is only a matter of time before they find us here. But I know also that, as von Strann says, there will be a reckoning. It seems insane but if what these Enakites believe is true—and I am certain now that it is—then everything we think we know is a charade. I would scarce credit the notions were it not for the fact that I have read … look, Jack, I know that you are reading this now. I know that you do not trust von Strann, that you think him a fool infatuated with some dream of desert life. You are wrong. I was wrong. All I will say to convince you of this, Jack, is the secret you have carried in your heart for ten years.

Thomas Messenger.

Jack lets the page fall to the table. Something in him knows that, even if this is Samuel's hand, it is his
own
words, or those of another Jack. It's as if he knew it already, as if the truth were only slumbering in his soul, waiting to be awoken by his reading of the bloody tattered remains of Samuel's notebooks. Scribbled translations from a book which contains all stories, all futures including his own. With himself and von Strann waiting for the Turks to flush them out, MacChuill already captured, and Tamuz dead.

He has a cigarette in his hand, poised at his mouth; he wasn't even aware of taking it from his case, but it's there. Like his future. Just waiting quietly for him to act.

“Tamuz,” says von Strann, “enough. I'll finish up. Go fetch MacChuill. Tell him to bring the car round. Go as fast as you can, but be careful; if you see a Turkish patrol—”

“Wait,” says Jack.

He buckles his holster.

“I'll go.”

I crouch for a second on the stone of Northbridge, a gargoyle with a grin of grim determination, then I leap, the chi-blasts of the blackshirts shattering the air around me as I fall. Feet-first, I smash through the glass roof of the Waverley Terminal, shredding the trenchcoat, landing catlike in a shower of shards among a chaos of commuters. They mill, they bolt, they scatter all around me and I try to tune out the cacophony of their panic as I brush the glass out of my hair. Above, the whole roof of the Circus's central wireway terminal blows in as the black-shirts open fire again. People scream under the rain of glass.

I look up and I'm glad I don't have vertigo; up is down and down is up here on this topsy-turvy twist of Escherspace, the blue-green vortex of the bottomless pit hanging high above us as a hole in the sky. Airships follow wires that slice the dark like searchlights at all angles, but curving away before the event horizon to disappear into tunnels. The fuckers must have footholds in other folds already, trying to build their Empire back up from below. Which Havens have they already linked to from this nerve center, I wonder—Liverpuddle? Godchester? Christ, they could've jump-started the very Heart of Albion, the city of Kaerlun-dein.

Things are definitely not peachy right now.

The Waverley, last of the old propeller wireliners still in service, is pulling out of its deep berth and rising, steams of blue-green orgone venting with a foghorn bellow. I run for it. The blackshirts are still firing, cutting down the crowd and cutting up the marble floor behind me. The whole concourse of the terminal has become a kill zone for the goon squad up on Northbridge. Can't be good for Fox's “no civilian casualties” condition; all I can do is hope the slaughter slows them down.

This is fucked up. This is incredibly,
inedibly
fucked up. Even with my soul-juice in his veins to turbocharge his spirit, I don't know if our beatnik boy will live. Even with the little bit of him I shot into my own veins, I still have to get him safe and sound out of the Circus. Then there's the castle, glowering over it all on its basalt plug, visible through the shattered roof of the terminal, where, somewhere, Joey Narcosis is being dragged toward a dungeon doom he's not going to thank me for.

And clicking the heels of my ruby-red jackboots three times isn't going to get us back to Kansas, Dorothy. It took serious juice to get us in; it'll take the same to get me out.

Ducking and weaving along the platform, I sprint for the Waverley, the steel superstructure of the roof providing some protection as a sheltering web that breaks the blackshirts’ aim and blocks their fire just enough for me to reach a boarding ramp and run at full speed, hop, skip and jump with spring-heeled jackboots, reaching, reaching. I grab the side of the gondola as the antique airship rises up into the air, out of the wide Victorian maw of the terminal and away.

“Cease fire,” the SS sergeant shouts, as his men continue blasting at me. They can't afford to hit the ray tanks of the wireliner; the explosion would take
out the terminal and everything near to it, including themselves. Might even do serious damage to Dunedin. Like the fuckwits that they are, of course, they keep on shooting.

I breathe deep and try to quell my flred-up nerves as the chi-blasts rock me, loosening my grip.

“Cease fire!” the sergeant roars.

I calm down my adrenal overload and focus on the general surge inside, deep in the heart chakra. I latch on to it, harness the hate and love and open up that inner flute of chakras one to seven, taking a deep toot on the fields of force, all that loose chi in the air. Stretch out my lust and think fast—think Fast Puck. I reach out to my tantric partner, my loveline link back through the chaosphere to home, but the connection's broken by temporal ripples. I can't remember where I first met him, Kentigern or North Carolina, 1916 or never. Shit.

A chi-blast hits me in the shoulder—bodyblow of an electric sledgehammer—but I manage to hold on, toes on an inch-thick edge of girdering, one hand clutching a porthole where a fat cat in a business suit has his nose pressed to the glass, looking out at me in shock and horror. He looks even more worried when my other hand, the chi-gun held in it, comes up past the window, to take aim at the ray tanks directly overhead.

There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

I fire, and the blast shatters the world around me.

“Damn you!”

Jack walks down the center of the street, screaming hate and firing shot after shot after shot at the soldiers. One drops like a stone. Another drags the half-clothed woman up and round in front of him as a human shield; Jack puts the bullet in his forehead. As the other two scatter, pulling their rifles up, MacChuill runs past Jack, level with the woman and her child, puts the Lee-Enfield to his shoulder, and takes one of them down with a bullet in the back. The fourth sends a shot buzzing past Jack's ear before the bullet from the Webley thumps his chest, spins him backward into a wall and down. Bent double, shoulder on the ground, he tries to push himself up to his knees and fails, flops, flails, kicking the family's possessions
that lie scattered on the street. Clothes and furniture. A small bronze statue, a bird but with a human head.

Jack picks up the soldier's rifle, slings it over his shoulder.

Everywhere there are shouts, the clamor of feet, doors opening and slamming, women screaming, wailing. Everywhere there are the sounds of war, the sounds of a blood-soaked modern war of murdered innocents, of doors being kicked in and machine guns turning human beings into meat and bone. Everywhere the Turks have thrown themselves into a campaign of terror, dragging men, women and children out into the streets, killing the men and boys, raping the women and girls. Webley in his hand, Jack stands as if at the center of some whirlwind of events, a storm, a whirling pillar of smoke and flame in the desert, facing a deity that's not a wise old man with a white beard but a god of the storm, a dust-deity of wrath.

MacChuill is trying to peel the woman and her daughter away from the body of her husband, to persuade her that she can't stay here, it's not safe. She just sobs hysterical, unanswerable questions in her own language. Armenian, Jack recognizes. He crouches down to speak to her.
You have to go. Now. For the sake of the child.

“Jesus fuckin Christ,” says MacChuill. “This is bloody chaos.”

“No,” says von Strann. “This is organized.”

He kneels over the Turkish soldier, Tamuz standing at his side.

“Take a look at the sky,” he says. “Which directions is it lit up? Which quarters are they burning? The Armenian Quarter. The Jewish Quarter.”

Across the wide square of the Beth Ashtart, the night sky above the buildings opposite is lit by fire. Fires, rather, their light gathered in distinct glows, here to the southwest, to the north, one here, another there, maybe five or six separate areas that seem to have been targeted.

“We have to get out of this area,” says von Strann. “We need—”

He stops, looking down the street, and MacChuill and Jack act instantly, Jack dragging the woman from her husband's body toward an alley, clamping a hand over her mouth, MacChuill doing likewise with the crying child, Tamuz behind him. Von Strann flattens himself into a doorway as the Turkish militiaman reaches the end of the street. The beam of a flashlight on the bodies lying on the street. A shout.

And then it's more bloody gunfire, the woman dead while trying to reach the body of her husband, the child bleeding all over MacChuill, and Tamuz, bloody idiot boy, standing out in the open, firing wildly with a Turkish rifle.

——

“I will be OK, eh, Jack?”

The boy grimaces as he's dragged limping and stumbling up the stairs, Jack under one arm, von Strann under the other, rifle dangling by its strap in his hand, clattering off step and wall. His face is pale.

“You'll be fine, lad,” says Jack.

“Wee fuckin scratch like thon, son,” says MacChuill behind them. “Whit are ye, a bloody poof? Ma granny's seen worse—ah, Christ an’ fuckin—”

Jack glances back, as they shoulder the door open and stagger into von Strann's studio, at MacChuill and the child cradled in his arms, hoisted up next to his ear. MacChuill looks up at Jack, shakes his head.

Outside, the city is all locked and barricaded doors, waiting for the army to have its fill. The city is streets filled with those who've taken flight and paid the price for it, with those who've taken up arms to fight the Turks and paid for it. The city is gunfire ringing out from the alleys and back streets. The city is riot and rout. It's massacre and mayhem. Tell el-Kharnain, the city of decadence, of the bourgeois bohemians, this city of sin and sensuality, is falling once again.

MacChuill puts the child on the bed, checking for breath, a pulse, while Jack and von Strann lower Tamuz into a chair. Jack kneels to undo the rip of sleeve knotted round the boy's thigh, double-checking that it's just a flesh wound. Fine. He wraps it round again. Von Strann is tentatively drawing back the bloody bundle of tunic he's held pressed to Tamuz's side all the way back. That's the bad one.

“Let me see. Do you have bandages?”

He peels the sodden shirt open, wipes blood away with his sleeve; it's not too far in, not a belly shot, thank Christ.

“I will be OK, eh, Jack? It does not hurt too much.”

“You'll be just fine. Trust me.”

Jack puts his hand to his own chest, then to the boy's.

“From my heart to your heart.”

And so the wan and gibbous moon shone over the city by night, whilst by day the sun was red and bloated; and day and night, the siege continued. Day and night, the Sons of Sidim uttered their unearthly ululating song of wailing for their dead. Day and night, the Turuq army wrought their awful terror upon the poor, innocent and weak inhabitants of the city of Sidim. Day and night, the warrior
Kartur and his new comrade-in-arms, the artist-prince Vhneszran, watched from the turret room of the now half-ruined Temple of T'hmusz.

By turns, it seemed, the one would pace back and forth and gaze out over the embattled city, stalking the room like some caged panther whilst the other slept a fitful restless sleep. Only the assured patience of Prince Vhneszran, when set against the grim keen glint, the lust for battle, in Kartur's warrior eyes, distinguished the two men in their attitudes as they waited for the moment that both knew would come. The Turuq army was still a mighty force, even in these days of the Turuq Kingdom's decline, but the Sons of Sidim were a proud and noble race, and they would have their vengeance. Day and night, they sang of it in their lament, in that horrible song of murder, guilt and blood. Day and night, the song reached out from beyond the walls of the city to stir an unutterable terror in the heart of every Turuq soldier, young and old, a crawling horror of the certainty of death.