Prophet Margin (7 page)

Again, the feeling that he'd forgotten something relating to money.

His thoughts were neatly incised by a slow knocking at the door.

"Yes? Come in."

The portal swung open with a creak. It had never done that before.

"Oh." Harvey found himself relieved that he was already sitting down. "Mr Stix."

"Yeah."

"C-can I... ah." He swallowed. "L-look, I don't know what you're... Y-you shouldn't still be here, Stix. Way I heard it, you killed another Dog in cold blood!"

"Didn't kill him."

Harvey tried on his best smirk. "So how do you explain the fact that he's dead?"

Stix blinked. Slooowly. Harvey's smirk faltered.

"Geek fell over. Suffocated on air. Not my problem."

"S-sneck it, Stix! What do you want?"

"Seen Alpha. Here. Just left. Looked busy."

"S-so?"

"He on a job, Harvey?" Stix stepped deeper into the room, lidded gaze doing unpleasant things to Harvey's bladder.

"W-what's it to you?"

"Concerned friend. Want ta... watch his back."

"Pull the other o-"

"Who's he chasin', Harv?"

"Grinn! Sneckssakes, Grinn!"

The killer was so close Harvey could almost feel the cold radiating off him. His eyes smouldered, like embers at the heart of a mausoleum.

The lip curled. "Grinn?"

Harvey's powers of speech deserted him. He squeaked an affirmative.

"Grinn's bounty. How much?"

"Muh... million."

Stix nodded. "Mine."

Then he was gone.

SIX

Wulf awoke to the unpleasant sensation of an electrical charge passing between his ears. Lights danced in front of his eyes, his fingertips spat sparks and the outermost regions of his beard appeared to be making a break for freedom.

He grabbed upwards to rip away whatever device was responsible, but instead of the electrodes he'd expected his fist rebounded from sheet metal; lodged immovably in place.

The charge faded to a dull ache, and filled with morbid curiosity he ran his fingers upwards and found two long, curling protrusions - one on either side of his head.

"By der gods..." he hissed, humiliation boiling his blood. "Is der helmet with der horns!"

A familiar voice broke through Wulf's misery and forced open his eyes. He was in a box, he saw immediately; clear plastic on every side. Outside, rising away into the gloom of an unlit auditorium, attentive faces regarded him with fascination.

"And now," said the voice, its showbiz cadence sending Wulf's fists clenching, "it's time to introduce the real star of this show - besides me, of course, ahaha - an actual specimen from the ninth century!"

Marteh Gumption, dressed from head to toe in messianic white, struck a pose from his dais and gestured towards Wulf.

Who went nuts.

Thirty seconds later his knuckles were sticky with blood, his toes and knees were aching, and even the unshakeable helmet with its impressive spikes had failed to break the glass of his cage.

Gumption commentated upon Wulf's tantrum with gusto.

"As you can see, the average Viking warrior possessed a truly savage temperament. The individual you see before you was liberated from his primitive life by a temporal incident. His... ah... excitement at being here is palpable."

Wulf screamed a particularly foul threat in his native tongue, calling down the wrath of Fenrir and Jormungand upon Gumption's head. The professor remained unperturbed.

"You needn't worry about your safety, ladies and gentlemen," he smarmed. "His viivarium is totally unbreakable, and comes complete with one-way soundproofing. We felt it best not to distress you with his cries." Gumption leaned down, favouring the front row with a sickening grin. "I assure you, ladies, his vulgar imprecations are not for the faint hearted."

Wulf had always wondered what a "swoon" was. Now he knew.

Gumption made a great show of aiming a small remote at Wulf, depressing a button with a smile. The helmet's electrical charge returned, dropping him to the floor with a yelp, the stink of burnt hair making him choke.

"A low-strength pacifier," Gumption explained, voice thick with faux reluctance. "Of course, it grieves me to use such crude methods. But, ladies and gentlemen, take heart! The Viking's synapses are so primitive that a, haha, a little zap like this barely registers. Plus, of course, it keeps the specimen from harming itself."

The audience applauded in humane appreciation.

Wulf snarled like a cornered swamp-possok and threw himself around the interior of his box. "I give you der sneck eating irritation, worm man with no real job und der stupid smile und der-"

"At any rate," Gumption continued with a flamboyant toss of floppy hair, blissfully ignorant of the stream of abuse, "our mutual friend here will serve as the basis of my research. With his testimony and genetic material, I aim to create a filmic masterpiece that will capture the raw brutality and pulsating savagery of Viking life, preserving its tribal culture for all of eternity. Ladies and gentlemen,
Horns of Hell
shall be my magnum opus!"

The audience went wild. Wulf went wilder. It didn't do any good.

To make matters worse, his armour and weapons were gone. Beyong his gronkskin tunic not a single item of his original clothing remained; replaced instead by a shaggy kilt, a plastic chain mail jerkin and black leather boots with gold engravings of the gods around each shin. Given the proliferation of tentacles and spikes amongst their pantheon it was a fair bet they'd been invented by whatever alien cobbler had synthesized the leather.

He looked utterly, utterly ridiculous.

"And now," Gumption said, beaming, "are there any questions?"

A forest of limbs and tentacles shot into the sky, awestruck fans positively aching to speak with their hero.

"Gosh..." Gumption blushed.

Wulf bashed his pointy head against the glass, reasoning that even if the wretched stuff wouldn't break he'd be too concussed to listen.

"I have a question," a voice shouted, its owner apparently unphased by the chorus of irritated snorts from the rest of the audience.

"Um," Gumption faltered. "Yes...?"

"Yes. I wanted to ask when you were planning on admitting that everything you've said today is a complete fabrication?"

Silence dropped like a ton weight. Wulf leapt to the front of his cage, scanning the audience for the speaker.

"Yes!" he shouted, uselessly. "He is speaking of der truth! All is being lies und made up!" Naturally, nobody heard him.

A solitary man with a clipped white beard and a grey cassock walked slowly along the aisle of the lecture hall, hands clasped. Heads (and eyestalks) craned to regard him.

"Uh... Y-you, ahaha. What do you m... uh." Gumption had turned a pleasing red hue. "Y-you can't prove anything!"

"I don't need to," the man said, drawing a blaster from within the folds of his robes and racking its arming bolt with a clatter.

The audience, as if well rehearsed in spontaneous pandemonium, shrieked. Gumption whimpered, the white-bearded man raised his gun and a five-strong squad of figures, all dressed equally as plainly, shuffled into auditorium's rear with a medley of arming guns and charging lasers. Wulf punched the air, anticipating imminent release.

The man with the beard dented his enthusiasm proficiently:

"We know you're a fake," he hissed, "because in His eternal wisdom the Great God Boddah teaches us that history is a lie conceived by Ogmishlen, the reality devil!"

Members of the audience exchanged uncertain glances. In his box, Wulf groaned. If there was one thing more depressing about the twenty-third-century than the prodigious number of cheats, liars and criminals, it was the abundance of lunatics.

"W-what?" Gumption squealed, staring down a barrel.

"The universe was created one hundred and eighty six years ago!" the bearded man chanted, froth catching on his lip. "Everything before then is an illusion, seeded in the minds of the impure by the rumour-wasps of iniquity! So sayeth the Book of Boddah. Hail!"

"Hail!" the other cassock-wearers chanted, slightly out of time.

Someone in the audience coughed.

Gumption appeared to be recovering his composure. "S-so. What you're saying," he said, "is that every person in this room, myself included, is... ah... contributing to some universal falsehood?"

The bearded man nodded. "Exactly! You are agents of Ogmishlen and shall be purged!"

"All eight hundred of us?"

"Yes!"

"All of us shall be purged by you and your, ah... five men?"

"Yes."

"In a hotel that has fifty armed security guards in the reception?"

"Y-yes. Um." the voice suddenly didn't sound quite so certain.

"Using the guns that you're carrying?"

"Yes. Look, th-"

"Which, I can't help noticing, you don't appear particularly comfortable with."

This, it would seem, was one smuggism too far.

"Comfortable enough to blow your snecking brains across the stage!"

Gumption's increasingly confidence ego resumed its "gibbering terror" status. Wulf went back to beating his head against the glass.

"L-l-let's, ahaha, let's not be hasty, shall we?" Gumption prattled. "I mean, we, ahaha, we of the historical community have always been v-very prepared to listen to... uh... opposing point of views."

"The Illuminated Children of the One True Boddah do not discuss matters of faith with devils. Hail!"

"W-well I just wondered what you m-made of, uh... of him..." Gumption gestured towards Wulf's box. "He comes from the ninth century, you see."

The bearded man glared at Wulf with a look of deep revulsion. "No," he said, "he does not. He is a spawn of Ogmishlen's unspeakable loins."

Wulf threatened the man with several imaginative types of painful end, many of them involving unspeakable loins.

"His death will please the Boddah greatly," the bearded man nodded. He turned the gun away from Gumption and onto Wulf.

"Bollocks of Odin," Wulf mumbled.

The gun roared, everyone screamed, the other cultists opened fire, mayhem ensued.

In the end, forty-two people died. Not an unimpressive figure given that the killers had almost certainly never attempted to fire, say, a SegaColt Fragblaster .76 before.

The Illuminated Children of the One True Boddah were rapidly overcome by the hotel's security goons, who
had
fired high calibre weaponry before and weren't in the habit of being outgunned by religious weirdos.

In interviews after the event a roguishly dishevelled Marteh Gumption shyly confessed that, yes, it had been him who had summoned the security guards during a daring sprint to the nearest exit. Any suggestion that he'd been seen dashing through reception in a pair of piss-stained trousers whilst calling for his mother were, of course, a fabrication.

When he was informed by the interviewer that his authentic Viking specimen had escaped, probably due to a poorly aimed monofilament flechette shattering the adamantiplex of its cage, Gumption burst into tears. "I-I was just worried about how that poor devil would fare alone in the wild," he later explained.

At any rate, the entire episode was clearly a source of trauma for the celebrated guru. The preproduction for "
Horns of Hell"
was cancelled and Gumption announced his retirement from the world of movies to concentrate on his poetry.

Perhaps tellingly, his first published work was titled "
Forgiveness is a Viking Virtue"
.

It ran to three hundred pages, was favourably reviewed by the "
What For...?"
journal of abstract expression, and sold approximately seventeen copies, galaxywide.

The van doors opened with a clang, flooding the interior with daylight. Shelves groaned beneath bulky cameras robotic sound recorders, microphones jostled in hat stands, lenses twinkled, portable lightmounts dangled and, somewhere near the back, two curled figures muttered and grumbled at the sudden light.

"Out!" said the woman who'd opened the doors, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. "Welcome to earth."

Johnny pulled himself upright and dropped onto a tarmac floor. Around him a concrete landscape sulked beneath a grey sky - corrugated warehouses lined up like tombstones. "Nice to see it hasn't changed," he muttered. The woman stood dusting down the lapels of her fluidcolour work suit - currently calibrated with blue tiger stripes and perpendicular barcodes. "Where is this?" he asked her.

"Place used to be called 'Elstree'." she said, watching Kid Knee clamber from the van.

"And now?"

"TeeVeeTown." She nodded towards the warehouses. "Those're studios. Welcome to the glamorous world of showbiz."

Right on cue, it started to rain.

Johnny regarded the sombre complex. "This is where they shoot the science show?"

"This is where they shoot everything."

"But it's deserted."

"That's CGI for you."

"So which one was Koszov in?"

"Studio 72. I'll show you in a minute." The woman rummaged in her slicing-edge-of-fashion handbag, hair crackling as whatever nanohairspray she wore succumbed to the rain. "There's something I want to ask you first."

Johnny raised an eyebrow. The usual I'm-so-cool-it-hurts twang was gone from her voice, replaced by something worryingly like embarrassment - an attribute he'd never have associated with Nickle Reggo.

The self declared Queen of British Style (documentary presenter extraordinaire,
enfant terrible
of investigative journalism, hyper-chic fashion avatar) withdrew from her bag a small gun, decorated in a cheeky pink-and-blue Mandelbrot fractal pattern. Aimed, Johnny couldn't help noticing, directly at him.

"What's stopping me," she said, "from handing you over to the police? You've been on the exile list since the war. I checked."

Johnny glanced up to see if he'd get any help from his partner. He should have known better. Kid Knee stood rooted to his spot, hands raised in terror.

The motorcycle helmet he'd puttybonded to his headless shoulders in an attempt to look normal - if such a thing would ever be possible - was sagging, giving him the look of a dead man hanging on barbed wire. His other "ingenious" innovation was to wear a hockey mask over each knee, supposedly a "fashionable pair of kneepads", to conceal his true mutation. The overall effect was of a punk with no neck and no sense of style. Reggo threw him a cursory glance and discounted him as a threat. Johnny couldn't blame her.