Ink (9 page)

THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL

pread-eagled, the sand cold beneath his back, Metatron, the onetime Voice of God, gazes up into the sky. It's so clear out here in the desert that the stars seem a liquid spray across the black—no wonder that they call it the Milky Way—goes back to Hathor, he remembers, self-styled cow-goddess of the Egyptians, claiming sovereignty over the heavens themselves … and just another jumped-up unkin like himself, really. What was it the Irishman had said about them, about the Covenant and the Sovereigns?

Underneath the bullshit you're exactly the same thing.

Finnan was right; it was true. Under all the talk of Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, it all came down to the Cant in the end. It all came down to power, to Metatron thinking he could use the Cant to keep the hawks in check, set them against the vultures and then, finally, when the War was over, regrave the survivors into doves. Three millennia spent: building his Republic of Heaven; signing ousted gods and goddesses up to the Covenant; giving them new names, new roles, as his angels; leading the newbloods through the veil into the Holiest of Holies, to kneel before an empty throne; sending them out as soldiers in one last great war against the scattered remnants of the Sovereigns. It shouldn't have been much more than a clean-up operation, the so-called apocalypse. He had it all planned.

Metatron feels something crawl across the palm of one hand, an insect or arachnid scuttling. Gabriel would clench his fist and crush the thing, as would Michael or Uriel. Sandalphon would gaze at it for hours, turning his hand this way and that as birdman and bug explored each other. Metatron just lies there, looking up at the sky, feeling this little life in the palm of his hand.

Metatron, the vizier of a One True God who never existed. Metatron, never thinking of himself as the
leader
of the Seven but, still, the one who made the plans, who graved their destinies in ink upon their skin, who wrote the history of the future. Metatron, the scribe of the Book of All Hours.

So where is it now?
Finnan had asked.
Oh, that's right—you lost it.

He
had
to lose the Book though, had to hide it deep in the Vellum, in a fold where unkin only moved in shadows, so that none of them—not even he himself— would ever be able to change the order he'd established in its pages. He kept rough copies, backups for reference only—tablets of clay, scrolls of parchment, leather-bound books; even now he can feel the last of his copies, an electronic palmtop resting on his chest, in the inside pocket of his leather coat. The original, though, is hidden so deep that even Metatron himself doesn't know where to find it. He… excised that knowledge from his own graving.

So when the copy began to change, and the past and present with it, the future became as unknown to him as to the creature now tickling his palm with its searching legs.

He lets his head fall to the side. The spider seems a thing of glass or ice. Beyond it, across the frozen sand, an old Airstream trailer on stilts of brick shines silver, glittering with moonlight on metal and frost. Everything, Slab City and the desert it fills as far as the eye can see, even Metatron's own hand, the leather of his coat, is coated in the brittle white hoar of Hinter.

This is where it all started to go wrong, with Finnan and the Messenger girl and her brother. He has no idea how it went wrong, why it went wrong, but he knows that this is where it started. That's what brought him back here to die.

Gabriel sits on the throne that should be empty now—at least that's where he was when Metatron left, when he decided to take the long walk out into the Vellum rather than serve another unkin playing God. Raphael dead, Sandalphon disappeared. And it all began, he's sure, the day he arrived in Slab City to gather Finnan to the Covenant or be damned, the day the Messenger girl, this little hatchling of an unkin, stood up to him in Finnan's place, making the choice the Irishman refused to accept.

It all ripples out from that moment: the hunting and slaying of her brother, Thomas; her playing Covenant and Sovereign off against each other as she tried to save him; Metatron sending two insignificant newbloods out to drag the girl free of hell; his own bitmites somehow altered in the struggle and unleashed upon the Vellum, now with their own incomprehensible agenda; his own bitmites as
the storm of Evenfall, attacking Covenant and Sovereigns alike; Finnan, wired to a chair in an abattoir, a meat hook in his chest, the bitmites swirling around him, echoing the rogue unkin's defiance back in Metatron's face.

Inside the Airstream, as he found it when he arrived after his long walk through the gray chaos of Evenfall, the white desolation of Hinter, the girl's name is still spelled out in magnetic letters on a fridge door: PHREEDOM.

It can't be that simple, thinks Metatron. It can't be that crude.

The stars above seem to fill the sky, a film of frost on an obsidian mirror. He can feel his heartbeat slowing now. All it took was a decision in the back of his mind, a whisper on his breath, the slightest adjustment to his graving—the addition of an ending, a full stop. Peace.

“So you're just giving up?”

The voice is gentle, amused but not mocking. Metatron opens his eyes. The face in his vision flickers, ghost images of a man crouched over him, a youth, really, in a hundred different guises, all superimposed over each other. He has long auburn hair or a scruff of punkish green, black skin or blue or copper, kid horns like some latter-day Pan, a goatee, viridian eye shadow, beads and chains and dog tags hanging round his neck. Only the eyes remain the same—deep brown with flecks of emerald and jade.

“You're dead,” says Metatron.

Thomas Messenger cocks his head, smiling down at him.

“No,” says the boy. “If I keep dying, how can I be dead?”

“We killed you. Carter and Pechorin. I sent them to—”

“Hush,” says Thomas “You made me a myth, old man. I just wanted to show you.”

He reaches into Metatron's pocket and pulls out the palmtop, opens its leather-bound case and taps a few keys before laying it down on Metatron's chest, screen angled to face the dying angel. Glyphs and sigils dance across the screen, the hopelessly meaningless gibberish that the Book's become. Metatron tries to raise a hand to push the cruel image of his failure away, but he's too weak now. All he can do is turn his head, look at the trailer.

The voice is close, whispering in his ear.

“You just have to learn to read it right… to understand it. Look.”

And then the voice whispers another word, a word in the Cant—there's no mistaking the shiver it sends down Metatron's spine—but it's a word he's sure he's never heard before, not ever before, in all his millennia of life. He looks at the screen, and out of the chaos order suddenly emerges, a story of sorts: Tammuz,
Dumuzi, always running, escaping, being caught, and dying, always all of these things. But there's a hole in the story, the emptiness of a shepherd's fold, like dust, given to the winds.

The word, as Metatron whispers it on his last breath, is one without translation. It describes the vellum and the ink that graves them, circumscribes the cosmos they inhabit, bounds the absence of them in it, their lives, their deaths, in one little single-syllable word… one word
…one word…

Thomas closes Metatron's eyes with his hand, stands up.

He scans the horizon, listens for the echo of that word, bouncing back from the farthest reaches of the Hinter, from north or south, east or west. Thomas has understood that word for a long time, has his own varied… approximations of its indefinable multifacet senses—
love
as joy and sorrow,
madness
as glory and grief— but none of these are sufficient, so what he focuses on to hold that fragment of Cant in his understanding is only a placeholder, a token, a name that means all of this and more, a face with blue eyes, blond hair.

Where is he?

THE DEATH OF POETRY

“Home?” says Jack. “I don't know where my home is anymore.”

Seamus stares out through the door of the Caveau de la Huchette at the rain pounding down, cold and gray, on this narrow backstreet just off Boulevard St. Michel. It doesn't seem like a week since they were in Barcelona and the last parade of the Internationals, sure, and they have nothing to be ashamed of, no, so why does he feel so fookin down? Why does it feel so much like a defeat? Like a betrayal.

Well sure and it was a fookin betrayal—wasn't it?—with the likes of Major Pickering and his cronies and their open letter to the
Times
, praising Britain's policy of nonintervention and lambasting the Internationals as bolsheviks, traitors; well, it's fookin Pickering that's the traitor, if anyone is. Him and the whole fookin British establishment.

He takes another sip of his beer and turns back in from the November misery outside to face his drinking companion, his comrade, and the man who once, an eternity ago, ordered him to shoot his best friend. Captain Jack Carter of the Sixth Royal… no, of the British Battalion of the International Brigade, he corrects himself. Forget that other shite. It's gone. It's all gone in the mud and blood of the Somme and the dust and blood of the Ebro Offensive. And hasn't he had a hooner chances to put a bullet in the man's back? Yes. And did he take them? No.
And why not? Because the fookin bastard's saved yer fookin life over a hooner times and because it wouldn't change a thing. It wouldn't change a fookin thing.

“Sure and isn't yer home in jolly ole England, Jack?” he says. “Or are ye meaning that ye've gone doolally on us?”

He smiles wanly. Sure and his heart's not really in it.

“I don't belong there anymore,” says Jack.

“Look, Jack, this isn't the end of it,” he says. “It may look like it is, but it isn't, man, I'm telling ye. They think it is, the fookin politicians back home and across the water. They think they can shake a hand and slap the fascists on the back and make a deal with them. They're wrong. And, fookin believe you me, they'll learn it the fookin hard way.”

And Seamus knows he's right, sure, cause he has the Sight an’ all; he knows that now. He can see the whole world erupting, maybe a year from now, maybe less, Hitler pushing out from Germany and into Czechoslovakia and Poland. When he has his turns these days it's not the past he sees but the future, and it's not him that's babbling nonsense in a language that he doesn't even understand, it's Chancellor fookin Hitler up there on his podium with the banners flying red and black and white behind him. Jesus, but Spain was just the start of it. He knows there's a bigger battle coming and that this time the whole world will have to sit up and take notice. At the same time, though, just as he's reassuring Jack that, sure, don't worry, man, ye'll get to kill more fascists yet, he knows that there's a terrible truth under those small words.

This isn't the end of it.

The question is: Where
is
the end of it? But he doesn't ask himself that and he doesn't know why. It's like a blind spot in his sight, sure, or like he's standing at a station, watching a train pulling away, not knowing where it's going. And for some reason he's too afraid to ask.

Jack just sits there brooding over his beer. Jesus, but this fookin weather's getting them all down.

“Lorca?” says Seamus after a while.

“Sorry?” says Jack.

Back in Barcelona, there'd been some cub reporter from the States wandering round the Internationals like a right arsehole, asking stupid questions.
So what made you come to Spain? Are you a communist? Do you support the overthrow of democracy? What do you think of the Spanish people now?
Sure and he'd wandered round the comrades after they'd been dismissed, with his notebook and his list of
questions, asking each of them if they supported the bolshevik revolution. It's a touchy subject with Seamus, so it is, since he saw the way old Joey Stalin's loyal followers tend to twitch if you mention Trotsky. Sure and one of the fookin bright young things, a real Party boy all the way from Moscow, why he actually accused Seamus of being bourgeois, just for asking a fookin question of him. But there's more important things than some wee lad with a big gob and not enough sense to keep it shut.

“Well what d'ye fookin think I came to Spain for?” Seamus had said to the reporter. “To shoot some fookin fascists.”

Then he'd rattled into the rest of the answers before the eedjit even had the chance to ask them, saying, aye, I'm a fookin socialist, so ye fookin might as well say I'm a communist, seeing as ye probably don't know the fookin difference, aye, and we were here to
support
fookin democracy, in case ye didn't notice, against a fookin military coup. And the man had nodded and backed away, thanking him and turned to Jack to ask him the same question. He'd given just one word as his reply.
Lorca
, Nothing else. Just
Lorca
,

“Lorca?” says Seamus. “Is that really what brought ye to Spain?”

Carter feels his cheeks burning and brings his beer up for a sip partly to hide embarrassment. It's not the full reason; really, it was a glib comment that seemed… pointed and sufficient at the time. After Finnan rattling on in his soapbox way, it seemed a succinct sucker punch of a comment, something that implied a certain contempt, an air of
what other reason do you need?