The Black Tattoo (20 page)

"What?" asked Jack.

"Hur, hur, hur."

Jack frowned.

Hur, hur, hur, hur," he heard.
 
"Hee hee hee HEE!"

"What's so funny?" asked Jack, an irritating whining note coming out with the question before he could stop it.
 
The scratchy laughter ceased abruptly.

"Thass not your name," said the voice.

Jack stood in silence, staring at the wall in the direction the voice was coming from.

"
Fresh meat
," said the voice.
 
"Thass your name."

HOME

Esme lay on the floor of the Light of the Moon, in darkness, remembering.

"You lost," said Raymond.

Esme lay flat on her back.
 
What had just happened had happened so fast that she hadn't even broken her fall properly:
 
her head still rang from the impact as she'd hit the floor, and her vision was full of darkness.
 
In the middle of it, she could see the big man was standing over her.
 
His face was flushed and sweaty but he was grinning from ear to ear, delighted.

"You lost," he repeated.
 
"How?"

Grimly, biting back frustration, Esme closed her eyes.
 
The last move, the kick — that was where she'd overextended herself and left herself vulnerable, obviously.
 
But how?
 
How had it been possible?
 
Concentrating, she played the fight back in her head.

This latest bout had begun much like all their others.
 
Throughout the opening exchange, she'd pulled back before committing herself to every attack she'd started.
 
This was for the simple reason that each time she'd started a move, Raymond had already been moving to anticipate her, just as he always did.
 
But this time, Esme had tried something new.

Gradually, as the bout continued, she'd allowed a little desperation to come through into the way she was responding.
 
To a spectator, the two of them would have been moving almost too fast to watch — but as the fight went on, Raymond would have noticed (she hoped) a little raggedness, a little roughness in her usual glassy-smooth technique.
 
In due course, her strategy had been rewarded:
 
the big man had apparently become more confident, letting himself come a little further into her striking range than he usually did.
 
So Esme had launched her main attack.

She'd begun the move in textbook style, leaping off her left foot into a spinning midkick with her right.
 
If it had all gone according to plan, Raymond should have lowered his hands to protect himself, at which point Esme could have completed the feint by folding her right leg into a further 180-degree spin, letting her left foot scythe up over Raymond's guard to take the big man up under the chin.

Pretending to attack with one foot only to surprise one's opponent with the other was a classic move.
 
It had taken Esme many months of hard training to master it, but she had pulled this one off, she knew, flawlessly.
 
There was no way, therefore, that Raymond could have anticipated what she was going to do.

And yet, he had read the feint for what it was.

He had not reached to the approach of her right foot in the least — just stayed absolutely still.

And when Esme was fully committed to the follow-up — when she was in the air, well and truly past the point when she could pull back on the kick or prevent what was about to happen from happening — Raymond had stepped
toward
her.
 
His hands were in exactly the right place to catch her left foot effortlessly as it passed its target.
 
Keeping an easy grip around her ankle, transferring his weight smoothly, he too had spun, once—

—and released her, letting her own momentum hurl her halfway across the room, to land in an undignified heap on the butterfly room's hard, matted floor.

"You
knew
," Esme spluttered up at him, furious.

"About the kick?"
 
Raymond pretended to think for a moment, then grinned again.
 
"Yup."

"How?"

Raymond's bushy beard bristled as his smile widened further.

"I'll tell you what it wasn't, if that's any help," he said.
 
"It wasn't magic.
 
I didn't read your mind or anything like that."
 
He leaned over her.
 
"And I hope you're not going to tell me about
strength
.
 
Are you?"

"No," said Esme sulkily.

"Well?"
 
Raymond held out a beefy hand to help her up.
 
"How do you think I knew?"

Esme looked at his hand, made a contemptuous sucking noise with her tongue against her teeth, and got to her feet by herself.

"I failed," she said.
 
"I wasn't good enough, that's all.
 
Something in the execution must've told you what I was planning.
 
I need more practice.
 
Obviously."

"No, petal," said Raymond, shaking his head.
 
"You're wrong there.
 
For what it's worth, it was beautifully done."

"Oh, yeah?"
 
Esme stared at him, exasperated.
 
"If it was
that
beautifully done, how come I didn't get you with it, then?"

Raymond's smile faded.
 
He sighed.

"Petal," he began, "just answer me this one question.
 
Who do you think taught you all about feints and combinations?
 
Who do you think taught you all about putting you opponent off guard?
 
About anticipation?
 
About control?"

"You!" snapped Esme, not seeing what he was getting at.
 
"It was you, of course."

"So," said Raymond, putting his beefy hands out to his sides in a
 
small shrug.
 
"How did you think you were going to take me by surprise?"

Esme froze.

"Eh?" added the big man.

There was a long pause.

"I..." began Esme, then fell silent.

"You've been a pleasure to teach, petal," said Raymond quietly.
 
"I've never met anyone to touch you for dedication, concentration, or focus."

"But right now," he added, "everything you've got comes from
me
."

*
       
*
       
*
       
*
       
*

"So how am I supposed to
beat
you?" asked Esme.

Six years later, lying on the floor again, she realized she'd spoken aloud.

For a long time, she just lay there.
 
The light from the Fracture had vanished when it had closed.
 
Every lightbulb in the Light of the Moon had exploded in the battle that had just taken place.
 
Esme lay on the ground, in the darkness, alone.
 
After a while, though, as if from far away, she began to be aware of the pain of her injuries as they started to heal themselves.
 
It was the pain, really, that brought the facts of the situation home to her.

The Scourge had escaped.

Raymond was dead.

She, strangely, was alive.

Slowly, carefully, Esme freed herself from the pile of objects that had held her trapped and stood up.
 
Then, because no better ideas seemed to occur to her, she started walking, a step at a time.

She went up the stairs.
 
She went out the door, out of the pub, out into the warm, sickly air of the London summer night — and she set off back toward the theater.

Her insides felt like they were filled with broken things.
 
Shattered clockwork, jagged glass:
 
the wreckage moved and ground and ripped at her with every small step that she took, and something cold and dark was in the place where her heart had been.
 
But she kept walking.
 
And soon, almost before she'd expected it, she was home.
 
She climbed the stairs up to the Brotherhood's headquarters, and to her it was as if she were walking into a dream.

It was no different, she realized.
 
Her home still looked and smelled and felt exactly the same as it always had, in all the years of her life that she had shared it with Raymond.
 
It seemd inconceivable to her that it could still be the same, when the man at its heart, the man who had made it what it had been to her, was gone.
 
It was incredible.
 
Enormous.
 
She felt like she was balancing on the edge of the world and could fall of it into nothingness at any second.
 
The nothingness feeling was too much.
 
It was going to swallow her.
 
So she got enough of a grip on herself to make a decision.

It was now nearly five in the morning.
 
On a normal day, in a couple of hours, she would be waking up.

She would act as if it were a normal day.

First, she set off toward the bathroom.
 
She stripped, got under the shower, and turned the hot tap on full blast.
 
Hard jets of scalding water drove at her skin like needles, but Esme hardly felt them.
 
She stood under the shower numbly till she'd had enough, then she switched it off and got out.

Next she combed her hair — then pulled it back, hard, and tied it in place with six ordinary rubber bands, just like normal.
 
She hung up her dressing gown on the back of her bedroom door and changed into the gear she always wore for her morning workout — a clean pair of loose white cotton trousers with a thick elasticized waistband and her second-favorite red hooded top.
 
Then she headed down to the butterfly room.

Esme opened the doors and flicked on the lights.
 
Then she paused.

The room was empty.

Felix — the man who was supposed to be lying on the table in a coma — wasn't there.

He'd gone.

Strange.

Esme frowned for a moment but decided she couldn't deal with that right now.
 
Setting all thoughts of Felix aside for the time being, she concentrated on preparing herself for her morning workout.
 
She fetched a broom and, mechanically, trying to ignore the gaping butterfly-shaped holes in the paint on the walls, she swept her dojo clean.
 
Then she got started.

Ever since that day six years ago, the day of her failure with the feinting kick, Raymond had let her set her own training regime, contenting himself only with a few judicious suggestions once in a while.
 
For six years now, therefore, Esme had always started the day in the same way, with her own combination of yoga, Pilates, and tai chi.
 
After about thirty minutes, when her circulation was up to speed, she moved on to some gymnastics:
 
slow handstands to begin with, followed by rolls, cartwheels, and finally some combination handsprings from one end of the room to the other.
 
Next she turned to the makiwara boards.
 
After perhaps an hour, when she had built up the speed and power behind her attacks until she was outpacing her body's magical ability to repair itself — when all five of the dark oak surfaces carried their telltale smudges of red and the muscles of her body ached with strain — she stopped and picked up her sword.

It was a bokken, a heavy, Japanese-style training sword, a rounded, gently-curved black pole exactly two feet eight inches long, also made out of solid oak.
 
Raymond had given it to Esme for her sixth birthday, when the sword was not much smaller than her:
 
back then, she'd been unable to lift it for more than a few minutes at a time.
 
Now, for the next part of her morning regime, Esme assumed a horse stance (feet parallel and apart, with her legs well bent) and held the sword out in front of her.
 
Though she had built up her strength until she could stand like that for much longer, nowadays she was content to keep the horse stance for just another hour.
 
This, she had found, was long enough for the energy of her workout to spread around her body and for her mind to settle.
 
Standing alone in the butterfly room, Esme waited for the spreading warmth, the sensation of being alive and awake, the relaxed-yet-focused singing of her blood in her veins that time in this stance usually gave her.

It wouldn't come.

It was a mess, she decided, after a time.
 
Her whole life was a mess.
 
Her whole life she had trained, her whole life she had waited for the chance to defeat the Scourge — and she had failed.
 
The Scourge had escaped to Hell.
 
She had failed, and Raymond had died.

Esme felt sick inside:
 
sick and empty and confused and hopeless.
 
She didn't know what to do.
 
And the longer she stood there, hoping for some peace and calm to return to her through the act of going through her daily routine, the more hopeless she felt.

Still, she stood there.

Still, she waited.

And suddenly, the doors to the butterfly room burst open.

Kicked in by heavy boots, the doors swung round on their hinges and smacked into the walls.
 
Ten — no, fifteen — men, all dressed identically in black, with gas masks covering their faces, poured in and fanned out, the noise of their combat boots on the floor resounding round the room.
 
Seeing Esme, they froze, and there was a lot of ostentatious ratcheting, racking, and clicking from the several varieties of guns that the men appeared to be carrying, as they pointed them all at her.