The Crooked Letter (21 page)

‘They were the first to discover America,’ Hadrian put in.

Ellis held out her arms as though to embrace the entire vessel. ‘Just look at this. We don’t really know who she was, the woman they buried in this thing. She’s a complete stranger. Yet here we are, admiring what someone left behind to honour her. That’s real love.’

‘What’s love got to do with it?’ asked Seth, screwing up his face in puzzlement.

‘Well, you wouldn’t go to so much trouble because of a crush,’ she said. ‘Some flowers on the grave, perhaps. Maybe a note in the paper. I don’t suppose anyone will leave me a sailing vessel or two to take into the afterlife.’

‘A rubber dinghy, perhaps,’ said Hadrian with a smile.

‘If I’m lucky.’

Seth rolled his eyes and strolled to the other side of the prow. ‘You’d think she’d have written her name. Scratched it on the side somewhere. What’s the point of going to so much trouble to be someone and then no one knowing who you were?’

‘There are more important things.’ Hadrian watched Ellis as she walked back the way she had come to examine the far end. They were leaving for Stockholm the following day. He had plans to get her alone during the day, so they could talk properly.

Seth, watching her too, said, ‘Not when you’re dead.’

* * * *

Hadrian and Kybele came to a second intersection. The city was nothing
but
intersections, he thought, as the car slowed. If one took away all the buildings and all the cars, the streets would remain, carving strange patterns on the Earth. From the air those patterns might look like writing, or pictures, or arcane symbols, but what would they look like from beneath, as centuries of traffic wore down soil and bedrock, imprinting itself into the surface of the world? Where the lines crossed, the pressure was obviously greatest. Intersections would shine like heavy stars. Beings living in the core of the Earth would look up through an atmosphere of magma, and see, atop the rock-clouds of their universe (which humans might call ‘continents’), the strange specks left behind by human civilisation. And make what of them?

Hadrian wondered if that was what Mimir’s head had been: the fingertip of a core-being, reaching up to tap at an intersection that had, just for a moment, wobbled in the firmament...

In this intersection was a tree, massive and green-leaved, bursting up through concrete like an explosion in slow motion. Its existence didn’t strike him as strange until they had slid to a halt under its boughs and he remembered that every other tree he had seen in the city was dead. He got out of the car, amazed by its fecundity.

At his first breath, though, he choked on the smell of rot and decay.

‘What —?’ He put a hand over his mouth. ‘Jesus.’

Kybele pointed up into the dense canopy and there he saw the source of the smell. A dozen dead people hung from the branches with ropes tied around their feet. Among them were the bodies of smaller creatures, such as cats, dogs and rats, similarly suspended. Their eye sockets gaped emptily down at him; their tongues protruded.

He stepped out from beneath them, away from the shadow of the tree. He felt as though its touch had tainted him, as though some of the darkness had stuck to him, like shit. The tree seemed to be feeding off the bodies, sucking the life from them in order to maintain its own existence. He wondered if this was part of what Pukje had described as the city turning cannibal and eating itself.

The Galloi stopped him from walking off, barring his way with a single large hand. The giant and his smaller counterparts were always nearby. There were now six of the Bes, and no explanation had been offered for the increase.

‘It won’t hurt you, but feel free to go around if you prefer,’ said Kybele, striding unflustered underneath the befouled branches. ‘There’s a statue on the far side. I’ll meet you there.’

Hadrian swallowed chocolaty reflux from his last meal. The tree watched him as he skirted the hideous stains and splatters under its branches. The green of its leaves no longer looked entirely healthy; he was put in mind of pus and creeping infections. The blue sky filtering down the sheer walls of the buildings around him was insufficient to keep the horror of its shadow at bay.

Would he become immune to the foul morbidity of the city, given time and increased exposure? Did he
want
to be immune?

If you stand still, waiting for a halo, you get eaten,
Kybele had said.
Nothing is fixed, and there are no deep truths.

A statue stood on the tree’s far side, as promised. It was seven metres tall, with a wide, square base. A giant copper Queen Victoria sat atop the base, her broad, regal face staring dispassionately at the locus of so much death. Over the usual metallic finish of such statues, her face and shoulders had been daubed with reddish paste. Thin streamers lay draped across her head and upper body, as though a miniature tickertape parade had recently passed her by. The violence and incongruity of the colours gave the queen’s usual stoic demeanour a slightly deranged, disgruntled air.

Kybele stood at the statue’s base, running her fingers over a time-stained plaque. Her fingernails were square and neat, unpolished.

‘Pattern is the key,’ she said. ‘Pattern, shape, form — even humans understand the value of this. Know the shape of something, the way it is, and you can control it. I’m not just talking about things; you can know the shape of a sound, a movement, a person. If you capture it, hold it, you have power over the way it changes — and that, my friend, is what you call magic.’

Kybele looked up almost respectfully at the face of the long-dead monarch and put her hands in her pockets. ‘Nature allows such change, under the right circumstances. When the First and Second Realms are in conjunction, pattern and will combine to allow all manner of works that would not be possible in either realm alone. Since the last Cataclysm, when the realms were separated, such works have been difficult. Humans tell stories of the fading of magic — a distant memory of times when wonder leached out of the world. Willpower alone isn’t enough without the laws of the Second Realm to back it up. We’ve had to make do with things like electricity, magnetism and entanglement instead.

‘But now, at last, the new laws are fading and the old laws are returning. Because of you.’

‘Because of me and Seth,’ he said, his mind reeling from the thought that something as simple as the death of his brother had wrought such a change. ‘Because we’re twins.’

She nodded. ‘The pattern you make is unique. You are reflections, perfectly mirrored. Your symmetry has been broken, and nature abhors such a fracture. The realms collide in order to repair the breach. You know what happens when your eyes lose focus: you get overlapping images until you focus properly again. This is what reality is trying to do, and by bringing you together it brings magic back to the world.’

‘But —’ He frowned. There were so many points to quibble over, and the smell of death was curdling his thoughts. ‘But there are lots of identical twins. Why doesn’t this happen every time one of them dies’’

‘Who says it doesn’t? Most such reflections are imperfect, flawed in some way. But identical twins are inevitably connected by the patterns they almost share. When such dyads are broken by death, weird things happen. UFO sightings, poltergeist hauntings, strange visitations, time shifts — the incidence of such paranormal events always increases. Empires have been founded or fallen around the fate of such twins. Rome is just one example of many. Every time a twin dies,’ she concluded, ‘magic reappears briefly in the world — then fades again, for without absolutely perfect mirror twins and the will to drive them together, the realms will always bounce back to where they were. Yod, this time, will ensure that this does not happen.’

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’

‘That depends on your viewpoint,’ Kybele said. ‘Some genomoi, like myself, exist quite happily in the First Realm, although we’ll use magic if it’s available. Just as we’ll use technology. Beggars, as they say, can’t be choosers.

‘But with the arrival of the Second Realm comes increased competition — for territory, for resources, for power. That I don’t like at all.’

She turned to face the statue and pressed her left palm against the plaque.

‘Come here and put your hand next to mine.’

Hadrian hesitated, and she looked at him with her hard, grey eyes. Her spiky white hair and flawless brown skin couldn’t have been more different to that of the statue of the queen looming over them, but she possessed some of the same austere authority.

‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked. ‘Me, or what you might be capable of?’

He shook his head, unsure of what lay at the heart of his confusion.

‘Understand that I’m trying to help both of us,’ she said. ‘You want this Ellis of yours, and I can help you find her. But I can’t do it without you. You’re my lodestone, my magical battery.’ The analogy was bizarre, but she didn’t smile. ‘You’re the anode to Seth’s diode. Why not see how much current we can draw before someone else gets their hands on you, eh?’

He was tempted; he had to admit it. The idea that magic was both real and at his fingertips was a powerful lure, but at the same time he was afraid of it. If everything Kybele said was true, then he was partly responsible for all the death and mayhem visited on the world by a soul-hungry god. What if she was just leading him on with vague promises of finding Ellis, using him although she had no intention of delivering what he wanted?

Your brother is dead.

He stepped forward and put his hand resolutely next to hers. He wasn’t responsible for what had been done, but he was responsible for whit he did with the chances he now had. If even part of what she said was true, he told himself sternly, then this was his best chance to find Ellis, if nothing else.

They stood side by side, their shoulders touching. The tips of her light brown fingers dipped into the indented copper letters like claws.

‘Hold on tight,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to.’

He clutched the cool metal plaque as — with a wrenching as violent as though the tree had reached down from behind him and snatched him off his feet — the world snuffed out and he was flung into the web of the city.

* * * *

They called it a ship. That was the word Seth heard, through Hekau. Shaped like half a walnut twenty metres long, the ship was propelled by a dozen elongated paddles that trailed, wriggling like snakes, in its wake. A yellow-clad crew member stood where each tentacle terminated in a ridged bump as large as a sleeping bear on the inside of the shell. They guided the tentacles by means of long, bony staffs protruding from the bumps. The staffs swayed and tilted in time with the thin, crooning song of a pilot riding high at the prow, watching the ship’s progress over the edge of the shell.

The interior of the ship was hollow except for a tapering scaffolding in the centre on which the captain and her guests stood. Seth clung to a rail halfway up and tried not to worry that he could see neither ahead nor behind. The only sense that he was moving came from the surging rhythm of the shell beneath him and the gradual progress of the pipe’s ceiling above. He couldn’t decide whether the ship as a whole was alive, or if the tentacles had been added to an inert shell. Either way, the captain called it
Hantu Penyardin,
prefacing orders to her crew with a cry of ‘Hantu!’ and using the full name in conversation. Her name was Nehelennia, and she could have been Agatha’s much older sister, with pale green eyes and golden hair that sat close to her scalp. Where Agatha wore orange, however, Nehelennia’s uniform was a deep blue-black and bound about with wide belts and silver buckles. She reminded him of a pirate.

‘Human, eh?’ she had said on meeting him, speaking to Agatha while scrutinising him minutely. ‘They’re thin on the ground these days. This one’s particularly fresh, if I’m any judge. His stigmata are only just beginning to show.’

‘My what?’

‘Your true skin, boy. Humans turn inside out when they come to the realm. There’s no hiding the inner face here.’

Seth remembered Barbelo talking about one’s true self bursting out, and looked down at his body to see what was showing. He saw no scales or fangs like Xol, or any of the oddities he had seen in Bethel. His body looked the same as it always had. Even the scratches he had earned during the fight with the egrigor had faded.

‘Don’t bother looking,’ said Nehelennia. ‘You won’t see it from within. I think that’s the point, in your case.’

‘Great,’ he said, ‘do you have a mirror?’

‘There are no mirrors in the Second Realm,’ said Xol. ‘False faces are defused automatically by Hekau and stigmata. Outright lies are uncommon as a result: it takes great presence of mind to deceive when the heart of anything is open for all to see. Most who try succeed only in confusing, not convincing.’

Like being a twin, he thought. It had been almost impossible to keep a secret from Hadrian — although that hadn’t stopped him from trying.

‘Truth is a dangerous thing,’ said Nehelennia. She frowned suddenly. ‘It does not like to be hidden.’

She turned to Agatha, her voice rising in tone and pitch. ‘I see him for who he is, now. How dare you bring him here?’

‘Because I need your help,’ the tall woman replied.

The captain’s expression was one of deep outrage. ‘He is our undoing, our nemesis! We should destroy him, not aid him! Is your mind bent to Yod’s will? Are you its instrument too?’

‘I aid the realm,’ Agatha insisted, bristling. ‘I am loyal. It is Barbelo’s will that we come this way. I would not call on you if I had another choice.’

‘
I
still have choices, and I say that I will not carry him. Get him off
Hantu Penyardin.
Begone, and good riddance!’

Agatha took the older woman aside and talked to her in hurried, urgent tones. Nehelennia’s replies were angry and insistent. Their words were clouded by the flipside of Hekau — they were not intended for Seth’s ears — but he had heard enough already to know what they were saying. Nehelennia didn’t want him aboard her ship because he was marked as an instrument of Yod. Agatha was insisting that she should reconsider — but not because she felt differently about it from Nehelennia. Agatha had called him a liability in Bethel. She would have abandoned him at the slightest opportunity if Barbelo hadn’t insisted she help him. She was bound by a sense of duty to look after him, even though it galled her to do so.