Falls the Shadow (30 page)

‘Angels in marble,’ she told Winterdawn, winking at him.

She raised her arm, ready to bring the poker down to make contact against Tanith’s neck. She held her arm high just for a second, enjoying the heaviness, the sense of satisfaction, the potency of the moment. She held her arm high for a second too long. Winterdawn stepped forward and snapped a hand around her wrist. He was stronger than Ace would have expected. The swing would not come, the moment was lost.

‘No, please…’ Winterdawn sounded reasonable but pleading. Ace was disgusted, frustrated. She caught him with a curious, aggressive gaze. Ever since she’d first laid eyes on him, she realized, she had really, really wanted to beat him into a whimpering mess.

‘Bastard,’ she spat. ‘You sold us out.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Winterdawn mouthed. Ace stared at him, seeing not a betrayer but a worthless old man. She saw him withering in her gaze, his brittle body sinking into itself.
Worthless
. She dismissed him unthinkingly and turned back to the two still figures. They were still, defenceless. Beautiful, frozen angels in a beautiful, frozen tableau. They were the real enemy.

And it was beautiful.

Ace’s eyes were painfully raw, ready for bitter tears. She raised the poker, weighing it eagerly in her palm. She was enjoying this too much. This was a locked moment, filled with energy and aggression that begged to be freed. This was a moment of
potential
. She would remain calm. She would smash them, without feeling, definitely without relish, because it had to be done. She would try not to enjoy it. She owed that to Benny.

But it was still beautiful.

‘It is our considered opinion that violence solves nothing.’

The potential was spent, exhausted before its time. Ace’s body sagged in disappointment, the poker slipping from her hands and hitting the floor with a crash. The howl that perched on her lips, ready to sing, vanished in a slipstream silence. Someone spoke and the magic went away. She scooped up the poker and thrust it at Gabriel’s shoulder, striking it at an awkward angle. A juddering pain drove up Ace’s wrist. Ace snarled bitterly. She could still smash the statues of flesh and bone before her, but the thrill of destruction was gone. She’d lost the poetry.

She blamed Justin Cranleigh. He was framed in the doorway, arms folded and face smoothed into an expression of sympathetic melancholia. There was as much sadness in his eyes as there had been in his voice. Madness too, Ace reckoned, but a
coherent
madness. Ace didn’t dwell on the miracle of his recovery. She was too angry to focus on anything other than the immediate.

‘What did you say?’ she hissed, raising the poker. It was supposed to look threatening but Ace’s hand was shaking and the poker shook with it. It ruined the effect. Ace felt her self‐
confidence crumbling.

Cranleigh was calm and composed and everything that Ace wasn’t. She hated that.
Hated
.

‘Violence solves nothing,’ Cranleigh said softly, trying not to match Ace’s glare. His eyes were focused on a patch of the carpet beside the door frame. There were shadows round his eyes. Ace saw this and felt nothing.

‘So, what’re you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing. Nothing.’ Cranleigh jiggled his head and a light smile came to his lips. ‘I just think you should think things through.’

‘I’ve thought things through and I’m going to kill them,’ Ace spat. ‘I’m going to smash every bloody bone in their bodies! Now shut up and let me get on with it.’

Cranleigh nodded. Ace grunted, satisfied, and hefted the poker.

‘It won’t work though.’

‘What?’ Ace snapped.

‘You won’t kill them. They’re
statues
. Flesh statues with bones and nerves and blood, built to house spirits. Smash the bodies and the spirits grow new shapes. You’re working off your aggression on inanimate objects.’

‘You’re so smart.’ Ace decided to call his bluff. ‘Tell me where their spirits have got to.’

Cranleigh shook his head wearily.

‘We don’t know. They’re communicating with us from a great distance. They want us to defend their bodies in the absence of spirit. If you attack they want me to intercede on their behalf.’

Ace blinked.

‘We refuse. We don’t do that. We’ve known the darkness, the shadows. We know what is pointless and what is not. We know.’

A brief pause, punctuated by a moan from Winterdawn.

‘Oh,’ Cranleigh said, the sadness on his face growing. ‘They… are unbinding the DNA of our host. Cranleigh will dissolve. When it is gone he will be dead. But our minds will be annihilated. There is no hope for us.’

‘Who’s we?’ Ace purred.

‘The many minds. The might‐
have‐
beens. We’ve been brought together in this vessel. It’s an incredible experience. So many different ways of thinking, so many cultures. We’re getting along well. A little acid‐
head anarchist commune in JC’s skull.’ Cranleigh paused. ‘We can’t last. Not without a body.’

‘You’re a sad, sick man,’ Ace growled. ‘You need help.’ She turned away from the madman and swung the poker against the side of Tanith’s torso. There was a satisfying crunch of harsh metal against soft flesh.

But Cranleigh was whispering another gobbet of madness in her ear.

‘I think you should know,’ he purred, ‘there are others of us Gabriel and Tanith could call on, more amenable to their cause. More destructive too. In fact, we suggest you hit the floor – now!’

Then there were hands shoving her shoulders. Ace overbalanced and, once again, the floor leapt up to attack her and the sore texture of the carpet bruised her exposed hands and face. Moments later a chunk of plaster exploded out of the wall beside her. A bullet lodged in the fabric of the house. It was followed into the room by Jane Page. Wrapped around her clothes was a ragged, dirty towel, hanging limp from her shoulders like a loose cape. Her eyes were covered by a white handkerchief stained a distinct red.

‘Behold, the woman!’ Page declaimed. The grandiose arrogance in her voice was new to Ace. It was an arrogance that had lost all claim on sanity. ‘We are amused. We declare holidays from the tedious condition of life. Step forth Ace that we might knight her in a manner befitting.’

Silently, Ace sat up. She was wary, but she sensed little danger. Page had checked out for lunch and she wasn’t coming back. What remained of her was so grotesque it was entertaining.

‘It may seem to you, Ace, that I have departed for that realm where madness rules as queen,’ Page purred, fingering the trigger of her gun. Her old sardonic sanity had returned to her voice but Ace wasn’t worried. It was an act, no more. ‘While I might seem strange at times, you’ll be glad to hear that not only have I retained skill, speed and sharpness, but I have been transfigured with new vision!

‘
I have no eyes but I can see!

‘I see clearer than before. And I will find you. I am invested with divine vision. I am the monarch of assassins, and my power derives from God.’

‘You don’t believe in God,’ Ace sneered.

And suddenly there was the barrel of a gun pressed against her temple but by that time it was too late to make right her mistake.

‘That was stupid.’ It might have been the old, saner Page. Mad or not, she pulled the trigger.

Winterdawn’s body smashed into her side and knocked her gun arm wild.

Ace found herself breathing and was surprised. She decided to let surprise give way in favour of survival. She pounced up and pitched herself through the door, narrowly beating Cranleigh in the flight from the room.

Gunshots exploded behind her. She felt nothing. There was a passageway before her, stretching in two directions. Winterdawn was at one end, disappearing round a corner into the dark confines of his house. Justin Cranleigh pushed past her and fled down the other passage.

A bullet drilled into the wall beside her and Ace took a snap decision, hurling herself into one corridor and running and running and running until she was lost in a maze of delirious architecture. This time though, the maze was built by little more than her own perception, and a terrible fear of joining Benny in the arms of death.

Bernice Summerfield had lived alongside death for most of her lifetime. She’d faced it many times and lived to compare experiences. There were no good ways to die, but many bad ones. The very worst she could think of was death by hanging. It was the last thing she wanted to experience.

So now the citizens of Cathedral were going to hang her.

She was taken to Golgotha, the place of execution. She went directly to Golgotha. She did
not
pass go. She did
not
collect two hundred pounds. She was taken there by the city militia, tall citizens in heavy black robes and no faces beyond their cold steel masks. The masks were blemished by grooves and pock‐
marks but there were no holes in the blank wholeness of metal.

Benny was taken to the place of execution aboard a vehicle that the grey man had pointed out to her during a more pleasant moment – a war machine constructed to fight back the Great Snake that had breached the city walls millions of years earlier. It was a bloated, overgrown mess of engineering; every gear, every piston, every cog, every working part was exposed and fluid. The machinery growled and throbbed and churned and pumped and seethed. Clouds of soot erupted from the chimneys at the machine’s rear. At least ten robed citizens sweated as they shovelled tonnes of coal into the engine, attempting to satiate its ceaseless hunger. At the aft stood the helmscitizen, arms strapped to the wheel, waiting for the chance to steer the beast. Where the helmscitizen was patient, the machine screamed with mechanical expectation. Once Benny was safe aboard, a signal was given – a harsh peal of a bell – and the machine roared with joyous life. It lurched forward under a black pall, ploughing through the streets towards Golgotha.

It was to be a public occasion, one of the militia said: half Cathedral would be there. There was a sense of enthusiasm and expectation in the streets, driving out the uncertainty left by the death of the city’s soul. Benny caught a snatch of the atmosphere and cheered up for a moment. At other times she brooded. She understood exactly what was going to happen, but harsh reality of death hadn’t stamped itself into her heart.

There were airships floating over the city skyline. They gathered like a swarm of black, bloated insects over Golgotha Square, hovering in anticipation of the revels. Cradles of all sizes hung from the bodies of the airships, but the largest and best decorated were reserved for the watching stone heads of the Mandelbrot Set. Even they couldn’t resist the allure.

Vultures.

As the machine growled closer towards Golgotha, one of Benny’s guards bound her wrists together behind her back. She didn’t resist. She had caught futility. There was no escape from the city, save for the path she was offered. A second guard held a flower to her face. A glorious, healthy red rose – its stem covered in fine thorns. The guard pushed the stem into Benny’s mouth and told her, in curious, cracked tones, to bite on it.

She bit. She tasted chlorophyll.

‘Keep it clenched between your teeth,’ said the guard. ‘Eventually it falls of its own accord.’

Benny shivered.

Golgotha Square was a vast openness, a plain of grey slabs at a point where major roads intersected. In the centre was a gallows, beckoning. A crowd gathered round it, waiting for someone to die. They stood shoulder to shoulder in still and formal ranks. There was no real enthusiasm there, only what the city itself had instilled in them.

Benny was dragged to the gallows while the crowd watched with rapturous silence. Benny saw masks and robes around her – time became muted and fluid and the world washed around her. Fleeting impressions, so unreal. She saw the steel faces of her guards; the black‐
wrapped outline of the executioner, two fat hands fondling the lever that would open the door to oblivion; the chessboard‐
patterned mask of the officiating dignitary – a stooped creature, bent to half its height, standing only with the help of an obsidian rod.

There was a rose in her mouth; there was a flimsy trapdoor beneath her feet; there was a noose around her neck. Finally Bernice Summerfield knew what was happening and she began to panic. It was a quiet panic, she trembled in silence. She wanted to say something, but there was a rose between her teeth, and when it fell it would be too late.

She still liked to think of Cathedral as a computer. The grey man wouldn’t have liked it, but she suspected that he simply had a habitual dislike for technology. No, Cathedral was a computer network. Everything she perceived was distorted images of the matrix of data surrounding her. She was corrupt data that would be erased painlessly. She had died once, she could die again. It was a good analogy.

No, it was a stupid analogy. This wasn’t a computer. This was real and she was going to die.

She stared across the panorama of meaningless masks and featureless faces. She wondered if they knew what was really happening now, how significant it was. Trembling, she wondered how much longer she had. The anticipation was killing her. In a minute she was going to cry, and she wanted to be dead before she started.

The dignitary shuffled forward, still resting on its rod. The staff was a long shaft, tipped with a sharp metal point that squealed against the wooden floor as its owner moved. The sound set Benny’s teeth on edge. She almost laughed at herself for dwelling on something so petty.

‘Citizens of Cathedral,’ the hunchback announced. ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way here!’

The crowd was unresponsive. Unperturbed, the dignitary continued:

‘A very peculiar thing indeed happened. There are rumours in the night, rumours that we are all lost on a tiny ship floundering in the storm of all oceans.’ Now the ancient voice seemed to echo, each deeper than the last. The response from the crowd remained underwhelming.

‘I’m sorry,’ the voice of the citizen continued to drone, perhaps a little smoother, a little sadder than before, ‘I never said I loved you, I just want your money. I’m reminded of a similar occasion, on the eleventh of September, seventeen seventy two, at Aix in France, when the Marquis De Sade was executed in effigy because they hadn’t caught him yet…’