The Gone-Away World (61 page)

In any case, she has more important things on her mind. Shortly after she went away to study, Wu Shenyang—never a surrogate father, but a person whose suppleness of mind made a true friendship possible across decades of impossibly different experience—was killed by fire and treachery. He had as much as warned her such a thing was possible. Elisabeth, knowing better but steeped in the culture of feuding schools which is the cinematic heritage of
gong fu,
expected his senior students to leap from the woodwork and snatch her up to join the cause of rooting out his enemies. Nothing happened. Offended, she determined to do the job herself, or at the very least locate the missing seniors and ask them why they weren't pursuing due revenges. She realigned her studies towards this goal, and obtained qualifications as a journalist to allow her to travel and investigate. The moderate support available to her from Evander Soames's estate allowed her a certain leeway in filing stories. She roamed, and searched, and heard whispers: there was a man called
Smith.
He had asked about Wu Shenyang. He had enquired in many places. The tone of his enquiry had left most people eager to forget him. Smith was sinister. He frightened you, and he allowed you to know that this pleased him. He had a way of seeing where to apply pressure, how to bring you to heel. Smith could be friendly, but never nice. Smith was a hard man, and he had chosen his alias because he didn't care if people knew it wasn't his real name; he just wanted to be sure he left no trace. If anyone knew anything about the death of Wu Shenyang, it was this wicked, terrible Smith. Elisabeth set out to find him.

Smith was elusive for such a big man. She would find his tracks, follow him to a hotel or a bar, to a private house or a shop, and she would hurry there to find him gone. Smith could walk into a lobster pot and leave by the back door. He knew the back alleys of the worst part of every country on Earth. Elisabeth got to know them, too. She drank pale beers in a cellar in Phuket and sipped fermented mare's milk in a town in Mongolia. She paid small amounts to border guards—
for your son's schooling, mon Capitaine, because I hear he is a most excellent boy, no, please, I will wait in line . . . well, but if you insist . . . no, no, let there be no debts between us, we are family, your wife taught me to shop for melon
—and smiled with cherry lips at gullible men. She went to baby showers in Idaho and played darts with working men in working men's clubs, and she asked questions in quiet corners and pauses in conversation, and most often she had to claim she'd been misheard. Most often, no one had heard of the Voiceless Dragon, or believed in ninjas (which is a word which can be confused with: ginger, injured, fringes, hinges and many others which might crop up in a casual conversation) and so Elisabeth went on her way smiling, and was not seen again. But every now and again, in quite unlikely places, she would be drawn aside or shushed—
I don't talk about that; I know him; what would a girl like you . . . promise me you won't say I said.

She was following Smith through the conflicted, dangerous maze of Addeh Katir when the Go Away War broke out and the world was changed for ever. She hid and fought and stayed alive, until her meandering brought her into contact with the Pipe at a town called Borristry. She worked as a cook, a cleaner, a fruit picker and a magician's assistant, and finally fell in with a group of travelling mime artists of dubious reputation and curious skills led by a chortling troublemaker named Ike Thermite. Under Ike's mangy wing and in the guise of Dr. Andromas—she had no desire to bring down destruction on the Matahuxee Mime Combine—she continued her quest.

Finally, in Conradinburg, in a yellowing pinewood absinthe den amid the ice, she heard a tale from a whimpering old man with no family and nothing left to lose. His name, when he remembered it, was Frey, and long ago he'd been a servant of the Clockwork Hand. Frey wore fingerless gloves, smoked with his left and ate with his right. He wore a fur coat against the cold, and it smelled even worse than he did because the furrier and the tanner between them had failed to get the stink of rot out of it before it was stitched. Elisabeth breathed through her mouth and drank vodka in small sips to ward off the reek, and Frey gave up a most secret history in exchange for another round and a tin of shag.

She came home, and finally ran across Smith again in a place called Harrisburg, only to find him looking to acquire the services of one G. William Lubitsch. Alarmed, she broke a lifetime rule and sent Gonzo a message:
Don't take the job,
but of course the warning made no difference at all. Since Smith had—she was now reasonably sure—engineered the demise of the Voiceless Dragon, and since Gonzo was—sometimes—a part of the school, she followed the Free Company to Station 9 to keep an eye on him. So she saw the ninja, and the moment of my creation, and later the moment of my assassination as well.

“That was bad,” Elisabeth Soames says meditatively. Watching your first love attempt to murder part of himself and toss the wreckage from a moving truck. Yes. I suppose it was. Good old Comrade Cow.

She is looking at me with a kind of intensity. The moustache is gone again, thank God, vile little rat-fur thing that it is, and her face is very pretty. Dr. Andromas's costume, once you know it is occupied by a woman, is quite fetching, and a little bit daring. The shirt is a narrow, deep V. White skin and dark eyes. If I breathe through my nose, I can smell liniment. If I breathe through my mouth, I can taste her, somehow, still on my lips. I choose my mouth. We do not speak. It's one of those moments when things could go in any direction. I have missed a few of these in my life, always through ignorance or indecision. I don't know how this one will go. I don't know how I want it to go.

“There is an old tradition,” says Elisabeth Soames at last, “regarding rescues of this kind.” She leans towards me until her face is all I can see. The electric fire is very hot on my bare left side, so that her body makes a heat shadow, a cool place. On my chest—still tender, still prickly—I can feel the cotton of Dr. Andromas's shirt, and beneath that I can feel Elisabeth Soames. She is slight, feathery, and the resilience of her body commands attention. She continues.

“The rescue-er and the rescue-ee are recovering from their ordeal, you see, and the rescueee goes all weak at the knees and says something like ‘But how can I
ever
repay you?' and the rescueer jumps on the rescue-ee and doinks him lustfully and with great attention to detail. It is taken as non-binding owing to the stressful circumstances of the initial lunge, but certain liens and possibilities are established with a view to more thoughtful and long-lasting consummation at a future time, when the present danger is abated. I am wondering,” she says, “whether you intend to honour this fine old—” But exactly what “fine old” it is she does not get to say, because I grab her and stop her mouth with mine, and her hands are busy and avid. She wraps herself around me, strong, long limbs, and if any pigeons remain within earshot after my earlier noises of agony, they take off and hide on the next rooftop until we are done.

This is quite some time.

And later, when we are covered in a medley of blankets and rugs and drinking hot chocolate heated over the two-bar fire, Elisabeth looks at my arm and says “Huh.”

“Hm?”

“You've got a mark.”

“Where?”

She shows me. There is indeed a strange shape on my shoulder, the bruise made by Humbert Pestle's shoe. And in the centre there is a pattern, almost a brand: the imprint left by the engraved crest which forms his heel. From this angle it looks like a new moon, or a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. I have seen it before. It is a pestle sticking up out of a mortar.

Glinting in the sad light of Drowned Cross as we raced across the main square: not a cuff link or an earring or a key fob. Humbert Pestle's missing cleat.

He was there. And more than that. Monsters do not make day trips.

“Who is he?” I ask. “Humbert Pestle?”

“I don't know, exactly,” she says. “I know who he's
been.
”

“Who?”

“Smith,” Elisabeth says.

Smith. Smith is Pestle and Smith is the enemy of Master Wu. Pestle is Smith and Pestle can walk through me as if I am nothing. Sifu Smith then. Sifu Humbert. Master of the ninjas, also sometimes called the Clockwork Hand Society. Plotter.
Enemy planner.
The man who sends ninjas out to do his bidding, to kill Gonzo's parents, to attack him during world-shaking blazes. Saboteur. Murderer.
Cui bono
no longer. Now, the question is
why?

“Tell me about him.”

She does.

I
MAGINE A HOUSE
with a white front and high, arched windows. It has three floors and is covered in wisteria and grapes, like a house in a French storybook. It is an old house, a house built when such houses were merely respectable, rather than staggering, and the family who own it now owned it then. They are still only respectable, so they own no other houses, no jets and no yachts (unless you count the inflatable dinghy resting on its side in the garden shed). The house itself is in need of some minor repairs—the west wall could do with some fresh whitewash and the guttering leaks in wet weather, showering the kitchen garden with great gouts of water, flattening the tomatoes. It hardly matters. The sound does not penetrate the thick walls, and the tomatoes are immune to such indignities.

Once upon a time, a boy lived here, in this splendid house, a boy with a most unfortunate name. He kept his things in a great oaken trunk he had from his mother, bound up with iron bands. When he went to school—which was seldom—he emptied the trunk of some of his treasures and left them in safe places around the house, in nooks and corners and on shelves, and a very few under the floorboard in the back of his cupboard. When he came home again, he went around each room and gathered up his things, and put them all back in the trunk so that he would know he had them.

On the occasion of his ninth birthday, the trunk contained: a paper crown; a calico cat; an Aston Martin car like the one James Bond had, with a red button on the bottom which made a metal plate shoot up at the back to deflect bullets (he had never seen the film and couldn't understand how James Bond got out of the car and pushed the button when he was driving, but grown-ups were forever making their own lives difficult and so he didn't worry very much about that); an old book in a language he could not read; a fossilised frog; a plastic soldier some ten inches high, complete with full pack and cyborg eye (through which, if you opened the panel in his skull, you could descry things a very long way off—they were supposed to look closer, though they tended to look smudged owing to a quantity of jam on the lens); drawings of dragons and animals seen at the zoo; a compass in metal and glass given him just that morning by his father; and a vast collection of invisible goods which he alone could describe or enumerate, but whose values exceeded the tangible items by an order of magnitude.

The house itself was no less wondrous. Through the wide wooden door, each room was a separate mystery wherein a young man might discover strange countries. The living room had a vaulted ceiling where—in the dusk—gargoyles could be seen flying from roost to roost. The den, used by both his father and his mother in the winter months for long, whiskied evenings in front of the black-tiled fireplace, was populated with gnomish metalworkers making legendary swords and lethal pikes. If he was good and quiet, and nimble when required, they had no objection to the tiny human child watching and learning as long as he swore (with hand on heart and one foot on an iron peg) never to reveal their ways. In the kitchen, between bags of taters and onions on a string, the stove whispered to his older self surprisingly accurate advice on romance, winning him willing compliance from a certain girl and surprising sensations hitherto unknown. This was a house of marvels.

In the third of the long, hot summers which the world endured around that time, the boy with the unfortunate name (his father was old Caspian Pestle, of Tennessee, and his mother a stick-like woman from the East, so far in that direction as to be near enough west, instead) came to man's estate, and went out of his home town to make his way. He toiled as a soldier in a far-off jungle (this being the custom of his nation and his father's people, and a noted part of the process of making a child into an adult fit to vote; sadly, it also stripped Humbert Pestle of a number of society's preconceived notions of morality, as war is apt to do) and then as a student in a place of learning (this being a new necessity in the world just then). On returning, he found that his father had evicted his mother from the house on the grounds of his desire to install a newer replacement, and they fought. He informed his father that this was the action of a weasel, a phoney and a cheat. Caspian Pestle received this information without argument, even going as far as to add to the list the descriptions debaucher, Lothario and libertine. This recognition—coupled with an aggressive lack of repentance—drove Humbert into a fury. He discovered a moment later that he had struck Caspian Pestle backhanded. He did not recall doing so, but he found himself not unhappy with the decision. Leaning on the sofa which the child Humbert had envisaged as a pirate vessel, Caspian invited his son to depart. He did.

Humbert Pestle travelled, and joined a reputable firm, and worked to forget his irksome paternity. He found that while the old man faded rapidly from his mind, the house remained very much alive within him, and dreaming of it caused him considerable pain. He aged somewhat, and was promoted, fell in lust and out of it, fought in dojos and occasionally in bars and alleyways to assuage his anger, and grew bored and disenchanted with everything he had. And then, on a Monday in October—while I was struggling with university admissions—he chanced to encounter his mother's brother, Mr. Eliard Rusth.