When he wakes, he finds himself on familiar ground. The car turns a final corner, through a private drive—the Cradle slush fund has been at work—and over someone’s front garden and onto the road again, and there is Harticle’s, its great fortress doors open to receive them.
Joe glances at Polly. She shrugs. “Mercer’s better at this part than I am. I get very cross when he tells me how to investigate, so I do as he says for things like this. We can’t get you out of the country tonight. And if we could, I’m not sure where you’d go. So you have to go where people care about you and hope for the best.” She glances at Edie, who nods.
Joe Spork contemplates a world on the brink of chaos and disaster which still finds time to hunt for a bewildered clockworker.
He wonders whether they should call ahead, then thinks of all those movies where the fugitive briefly activates a cellphone and is immediately traced. He realises Mercer has been without his this entire time. It’s practically like seeing him nude.
They get out into the damp of the small hours. The car flashes its lights twice, orange lamps illuminating the gutter and the curtained windows of Guildholt Street, and wait.
After a moment, Mercer growls. “There should be thugs. I asked for thugs.”
“Stay or go?” Polly says.
When he hesitates, Edie intervenes. “We stay. If we’re buggered, we’re already buggered. If we’re not, we run from a safe place. Maybe your thugs had to take care of a scout.”
Mercer nods: possible. Joe the habitué leads the way up the steps, smelling the wet oak and iron. The door, unlatched, slides silently back at his touch. The corridor is discreetly dark, welcoming. He breathes in old carpet and lubricating oils. For a moment his nose tingles at a scent like pepper and he stops, but the flavour is gone and he cannot recapture it. Edie dawdles, peering at the pictures and the glass cases, and at an ornate waste basket (cut iron and laburnum wood, circa 1920). After a moment, she drops a lunch box into the bin, and carries on. It seems an odd moment to be cleaning out your handbag, but Joe supposes that when you’re old, the time is always now.
“Bob?” he murmurs into the dark.
From within, the sound of voices, a sense of a presence, but no reply. Edie shuffles forward, Bastion snuffling alertly from her bag.
“Cecily?” Joe calls.
“In here,” the gruff voice answers. Joe Spork smiles and half-runs to the reading room.
Cecily Foalbury sits in her usual chair at the long central table, surrounded by papers in a great pile of chaos and consilience. Two sets of false teeth lie discarded among the debris, along with the container for a third set and a plate of chewy caramels. Cecily looks tired and worn, and she smiles wanly at Joe and then looks away to the great, friendly log fire in the grate. The smell of woodsmoke wafts back, and the crackling flames give the hall a kind of medieval vitality. Joe grins at her, at the place, so far from the white room at Happy Acres.
The door is barely closed behind them before the dog Bastion starts to howl.
“I’m sorry, Sporklet,” Cecily says brokenly, looking up. “He got here five minutes ago.” Bob Foalbury takes her hand, but cannot raise his head at all, so great is his shame.
“Good evening,” a voice murmurs softly from the armchair by the fire. “It’s so nice to have you all here.”
Joe Spork stares at the craggy face and the cavernous eyes, the wild beard now trimmed close to the chin in a severe, grand vizier’s crop, the fresh purple bruise on one side of the head, and at the hooded, faceless figures bobbing on either side.
Vaughn Parry.
Edie Banister growls “You!”—and reaches for her gun.
XV
The limitations of Yama Arashi;
the Recorded Man;
the most orange place in England.
Hello, Joe,” Vaughn Parry says conversationally. “Commander Banister.” The Ruskinites beside him rustle at the name, and one steps softly forward. The others duck in behind it. Parry holds out his arm at chest height, and the Ruskinite stops.
“I’m so sorry to have been less than honest with you, Joseph,” Parry murmurs gently. His voice is different, shorn of its friendly West Country tones. Now it is deeper, more elegant, more insinuating. A voice to speak blasphemies and reveal secrets. “My name—my real name, which most closely approaches an accurate summation of my history—is Khaygul-Khan Shem Shem Tsien Sikkim, of the nation of Addeh Sikkim. I was a soldier and a scholar and an emperor of thieves. More latterly a monarch, and then a fugitive, but always, always, I was on a path to something greater. Something which cannot be prevented. Because when I am done, it will always have been inevitable. I am a tautology.”
Edie points the gun directly at him.
“You are dead,” she says. “You are dead, and before you were dead you were old. You are not here, and you are not, not, not young, not … you! It is not possible!” This last, in what is almost a shriek, and as she says it, she pulls the trigger.
Shem Shem Tsien—Vaughn Parry—Brother Sheamus—moves from his chair with impossible grace, letting the bullet fly over his shoulder and on into the wall. If he is old, it is a strange, new kind of old, a serpentine kind where bones melt and become muscle and frailty becomes sinew. He whips his hand around and produces a narrow blade like a gymnast’s ribbon, and forward he comes in the same appalling motion, the blade a flicker of light slashing this way and that towards Joe, Polly, Mercer, Edie, around and about and back, ever closer even as he weaves away from the line of Edie’s aim as if the gun is nothing more than a long, heavy spear and he can duck the bladed point. From behind him, with him, come the Ruskinites, heron shadows bobbing in line with his own eerie, awkward, perfect steps.
Edie Banister, knobbled finger pressing the trigger with painful slowness, fires again, misses again, then uses the trigger guard of the gun to guide the blade past her shoulder, and barges her bony hip into her enemy’s gut. He rocks back, ripples his shoulders like a juggler rolling a ball, and the pommel of the sword smacks sharply into her wrist. The revolver skids away across the floor. They draw back from one another, assessing. Edie moves her weight to her back foot, settles her hips. Somewhere inside, a joint goes pop, and Edie winces. Shem Shem Tsien shifts the line of his body by a fraction, and exhales.
After a moment in deadlock, the Opium Khan smiles contentedly. “Yes,” he says. “Yes. It is finished between us.”
“Run,” Edie says over her shoulder, offering the dog in his bag to Polly Cradle, fiddling briefly with the contents and then seemingly changing her mind.
Polly keeps her eyes on the sword. “What about you?”
“I’m not leaving.”
“We can—”
“No, we can’t. Don’t you recognise this? He’s having fun. He’s better than I am. He always was, and now he’s younger and faster, too. Just run, girl. Take the boy. Do what you can.”
“Edie—”
“You’ve got what you need. Aglœca.” She grins. “Now, go.”
“They won’t let us—”
“Of course they will. This is a step on his path to godhood. It’s not … legendary enough if he just mows you down. It has to be dramatic with him. Canonical.” Edie points at them. “He’s saving you up for later. But me … I’m old news. Old and tired. And … it’s time. I can do this. The rest is up to you.”
She thrusts the dog into Polly’s arms, then turns and shakes her hands lightly and winces. She smiles a fey little smile and stands waiting. “Go,” she says again, without looking back.
Shem Shem Tsien raises his sword behind his head.
Bastion sets up a feeble howl from Polly’s arms, but it has little defiance in it, only an old, bone-deep sorrow too big for a small dog.
Edie’s feet flicker across the floor, smooth and very definite. Small steps, perfectly chosen. Her back is straight, her hands out like a schoolteacher conducting an orchestra. She moves again, and the point of the sword slips past her as if her opponent has simply m
isunderstood what it is for. She sways towards him and her palm flicks out towards the weapon’s hilt, catching nothing but air. They separate, regaining distance. Edie smiles, and waves her hand. A tiny circle of light glitters: a crescent of metal. Shem Shem Tsien glances at his hip and finds an empty sheath. Edie opens her other hand, palm down, letting a few hairs drift away. “Nearly had you.”
He smiles. “No.”
The Opium Khan moves forwards again with that same lighthearted fluidity, and Edie swirls to meet him, arms outstretched. Her feet brush the ground as she steps, and her face is a serene smile of certainty.
Her arms collect Shem Shem Tsien’s, the little knife deflecting the sword’s edge as he changes direction at the last minute, and she corkscrews down and around: Yama Arashi. They blend into one.
Shem Shem Tsien tumbles through the air and lands on his back. Edie follows him down, her hand on the sword to bring the blade close across his neck, but the Opium Khan changes his grip and does not release the blade. He holds her off, and smiles upward into her eyes.
“The limitations of Yama Arashi, Commander Banister,” he murmurs almost fondly.
“Oh, yes?” Edie growls.
“Yes. It works with swords. Less well with a pistol.”
And as realisation dawns Edie looks down, to see his other hand pressed to her chest, and the muzzle of a small modern gun against her ribs.
“Look after Bastion, please,” she says calmly to the room. “He doesn’t do well by himself. And I’m sure I told you all to get going. Young people today …” And then she glances back at her enemy. “You think you’ve won, don’t you? But you’re in real trouble now, you silly sod.”
Shem Shem Tsien arches one eyebrow, and pulls the trigger. Edie Banister’s back erupts sharply, a narrow hole spraying bone and blood. She shudders once, and then she dies, collapsing to the ground as rags and bone.
For a moment, there is silence, like the end of a piece of music. Then the dog Bastion locks his pink, sightless eyes on the Opium Khan and makes a hard noise in his chest. You are mine, old fiend. Mine.
Shem Shem Tsien gets to his feet.
“Oh, Mr. Spork. How very uncouth of you to bring old business into all this. Old baggage. Really, it won’t do. I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a coarse sort of person, in the end.” He indicates his bruised forehead, the faint yellow smudge of an impact.
Joe Spork just looks at him. Yes. The beard, the wild eyes, the straggly hair, all gone, and in their place, this smooth, appalling man.
“Vaughn Parry,” he says.
The other man shakes his head.
“No. I am Shem Shem Tsien. The Recorded Man. Vaughn Parry is dead. A coat I wear. A vehicle of flesh that I inhabit. An avatar, if you prefer.” He smiles.
“If you aren’t going to run—and I’m afraid Commander Banister was entirely correct in saying that you should—let me tell you a story. Unlike the last one I told you, which was of course entirely fictional, this one is true. It is the true story, Joshua Spork, of the rebirth of a living god—so you may wish to consider it a new Bible story.”
The Opium Khan gestures, and the Ruskinites move to surround the little group. As they go past the corpse of Edie Banister, they seem to stutter, even bow.
“Once upon a time,” Shem Shem Tsien begins. He is circling them, almost casual, a fastidious cannibal considering whom to eat next. “Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a boy born in the nation of Addeh Sikkim, in the royal palace, who wanted nothing more than to lead his people into a new world of prosperity and hope. He was suited to the task: clever and able and well-favoured.” The Opium Khan looks nostalgic.
“I locked him in a steel box and burned him alive. I used the ash to dye my mourning cloth, and I took his kingdom for my own. I needed it, you see, to understand divinity.” Joe Spork steps slightly to one side, keeping Shem Shem Tsien in front of him. The Opium Khan nods approvingly, and moves on. Behind him, the Ruskinites bob, in unison with their master.
“I tested God quite scientifically. It was the commencement, after all, of the true scientific age. I assumed His role in every particular. I abused His servants—of every creed. I racked His people. I healed the sick and raised the dead. I reached out and found a magician, a foreign woman who could show me the universe as God sees it. And when, in the fullness of my own life, I began to wane, I realised that I must submit to the last test of godhood. I must return from death myself. Only then would I be able to meet God as an equal. Only then could I become Him.”
Bastion growls in his bag. Polly Cradle watches Shem Shem Tsien as he moves past her, sword and pistol held lightly in his hands.
“She was right,” he murmurs, indicating Edie’s corpse. “You are so very like her. Not physically. But you have that same infuriating, utterly unmerited confidence in your ability to match me.” He moves on, going back to his story.
“I caused myself to be recorded. Written down. Transcribed. I became, in the modern parlance, information. Do you see? I carved the pattern of my life into the world, in words and images. I measured the actual activity of my brain. And I stored it. I had a ready stock of test subjects in the orphans of the Wistithiel experiment. While I was still alive, I refined my apparatus by using it on them. I played them fragments of my life and taught them—with electric shocks and so on—to emulate me perfectly. Each of my Ruskinites is an aspect of my self …” He gestures, and the Ruskinites around him echo him, fluid motions indicating one another.
“Of course, I never allowed the whole to be shown to anyone. And to be honest with you, the Ruskinites are imperfect. They were neither entirely erased nor willing to learn. One had to employ crude, Pavlovian teaching methods. Pleasure and pain.
“Vaughn Parry was different.”
He considers Cecily and Bob Foalbury now, reaches out with the tip of the sword towards them.
“Vaughn was an empty corpse walking. He had nothing inside him at all. He was a natural miracle: a body pretending to be a living man. And in that corpse, a desperate hunger to be a real boy … he studied so hard. He learned and learned and practised and practised and eventually he knew it all. He moved like me. He felt what I feel. He was surgically altered to look like me.
“And then he sat, day upon day upon night upon night, wired to my machines, and matched the pattern of his living brain’s impulses to my own. Until, little by little, I returned. Do you not see the genius of it? No? You object, perhaps that there is a soul, a part distinct which I do not possess? But consider: if there is, that part fled when my body died, but my mind persists. In which case, I am the first man ever to possess not one soul, but two.”
The attack comes as he says the final word, but his breath is completely even. He flourishes the sword around and back, light glinting on the blade, and as he does so his other hand stabs out towards Polly Cradle, pulling the trigger, and he screams a feral howl of triumph and delight.
But Polly Cradle is no longer there. Joe has caught her up, was moving even before Shem Shem Tsien was, knew instinctively the denouement of the Opium Khan’s speech. Because that’s what bastards do.
It begins in his chest as a heart-attack tightness, then unravels immediately in all directions like an electric shock. When it reaches his fingertips and toes it bounces, and his eyes fly open very wide. He can see now, quite clearly. The strange monochrome of his vision has receded, given way to sharp, vibrant colours. He’s pretty sure he’s glowing from within like Jack O’Lantern. The bounce reaches his stomach and there’s a weird instant of calm before he can put a name to what is happening, and when he does it seems insufficient to the thing itself.
Rage.
It’s not like a red mist or a thunderstorm, it’s like a weight lifted from his shoulders and a clear light falling across the world.
Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it?
Then screw you, too.
A man who tortures in white cells; who hates and has no appreciation of the beauty of what h
e destroys; a man who takes what is not his over and over and over again, who would casually shatter the strange, beautiful library of Edie Banister’s brain: for the first time in Joe’s entire life, here is someone he can hit as hard as he knows how, without fear of going too far. There is no such place. He can hear Polly Cradle and her brother saying something like “go” which is more probably “no,” but in Polly at least he can hear the rawness which is also in him, and her soul’s approval even as her mind urges caution.
Joe feels his face wrinkle up in a boar’s-head snarl, and charges straight at Shem Shem Tsien. He hears a furious warble which resonates in his chest, sees the dog, Bastion; he scoops up this unlikely ally in a single motion and carries on. The dog’s growl becomes a song of war.
Come, horologist. The old, dead man offends me. Let us be about him.
Ruskinites converge, black linen dolls with grasping hands and empty hoods. Halloween ghosts. Man or machine? Joe dumps Bastion on the first one and the dog latches onto the man’s cowl and gets to work, does something appalling which will leave scars, Joe knows it will because he can hear screaming. He had no idea Ruskinites could scream, until now. His anger takes note: pain works.
Joe fields the second monk and lifts him bodily from the ground. The Opium Khan is firing his gun and the Ruskinite takes the hits, one, two, three. Six. Don’t guns have six bullets? This one has more. An automatic can have fourteen, Joe dimly remembers, but it doesn’t matter anyway; the distance is short. He throws the Ruskinite directly at Shem Shem Tsien and finds his arms occupied with more of them, but they’re so light, so clumsy. He bites one of them horribly, grabs another with his hands and forces his arm in a wrong direction, hears something snap and crack. HAH!
Someone is next to him, a stout, grey-haired figure with a crowbar: Bob Foalbury, former Chief Petty Officer, in defence of his wife. “Bollocks!” Bob is yelling. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!” and with each shout he slams his crowbar, to good effect—but he is slowing, old muscles betraying him. Joe grabs the crowbar—no, it’s a length of Victorian iron pipe, even better—and yells to him: “Get Cecily! Get her out!” And Bob says “Aye aye,” which almost makes Joe smile despite everything, and off he goes. Joe turns to find the next enemy, slaps him open-handed and spins him around, then slams an elbow down and across in the opposite direction. He follows with the pipe, hears a clang as he smashes a metal head.