Ink (30 page)

A flash of thigh—his heart beats faster—till the girl fastens her fawnskin where it's come untied.
Hush, girl. Sit nice.
Elixir, crouching in the bushes, blushes as he peeks, ashamed but more in awe than anything until he sees …

Snakes curl around the dappled hides, tongues darting out to lick the women's cheeks.

“And there were others wearing crowns of ivy, oak or flowering bryony. With gazelles held in their arms like—”

“—mothers with full breasts of milk for babes at home in town. They're out there suckling the whelps of wild wolves even—”

“—now she takes her thyrsus, strikes it down into a rock, I swear, and then this stream of clear, fresh water gushes—”

“—out it spouts, a spring of wine, a fountain where she drove her wand into the—”

“—ground where they had scratched a fingertip, these streams of milk flowed, all they wished for—”

“—trickling honey from—”

“
—staffs wreathed in ivy.”

In the babble of the gathered herdsmen, all these strange, incredible events rush out. The boys war with each other for the floor, talk over one another, try to shout each other down.

“O you who live up on the mountains …”

Over the noise within the hut, Accordion's voice resounds. He's got a skill of speech, learned from his time in town, and when he stands up in the midst of them they listen.

“You who live up on the holy mountain heights,” he says. “What do you say we do the Basilisk a favor, chase his mother from her Bacchic rites?”

A murmur goes around the crowd, but they're not sure; there's tales of what the Bacchae do to those who interrupt their rituals. Some are keen—there's Chrome and Mainsail eager to begin the hunt—but others seem quite unconvinced, like Thirst and Palomino, who both argue that it's not their place.

But in the end it is Accordion who wins his case, and so they go.

And now Elixir waits in ambush, hidden among the thick of leaves again. It's time. The rites of the Bacchae start with waving wands, and then, in chorus, they call on Iacchus, god of beer and brine, the son of Deus; and the wild things answer. The whole mountain echoes with their shout. The whole of nature roars as they set out upon the hunt.

The airtram shudders from side to side as it hurtles along its thread, the banshee howl of its chi-jet engines drowning commuters’ shouted conversations inside, setting feral dogs to barking frenzies in the streets below. It Dopplers past the un-derlit Wagnerian architecture of the concert hall and retail galleries at the top of Buchanan Street and roars over the swastika-bannered pedestrian precincts of Sauchiehall Street, passes the waiting platforms of Cowcaddens altogether, arcs wide by St. George's Cross, swinging ever westward. One, two, three stations where it should have stopped, and still it thunders on across the sky. But, then, airtrams tend to do that when you throw the driver through the windshield and fire a chi-beam point-blank into the few controls still left intact after a bareknuckle slamfest worthy of the Trynovantium Colosseum.

I brandish the chi-gun with psychotic zeal as I kick through the splinters of the separating door and sprint down the carriage, passengers throwing themselves
out of the way. A window shatters to my right, a suit is cut down to my left, as my pursuer's chi-beams slice the air around me. Striding down the aisle, punching passengers out of his path, Joey Narcosis comes after me, slow and steady, a dogged hellhound on my trail, in suit and overcoat as sharp as his eyes, as black as his heart.

A chi-beam glances off my shoulder and I spin, unbalanced, firing as I turn and dropping to one knee. I hit him square but he shrugs off the blue-green blast of energy like a lightning rod catching St. Elmo's fire, channeling it down to the ground. Fifth-dan aikido, I would guess; not bad at all. Course, I can take him anytime.

With a considered casual callousness, he picks off every commuter between the two of us, blasting through the padded seats they cower behind, cutting them down as they dive in panic for the emergency cord, for doorways, for any escape. Clearing the decks, I think you call it. When there's only little me left, he grips the gun two-handed, raises it, takes aim …

I leap for the broken window, grab the upper rim of it and swing my full weight out and up and over, onto the roof of the airtram. Wind whipping my longcoat out behind me, I stand up from a crouch, boots clamped to the metal roof, and start to run for the front of the carriage, as chi-beams pierce the steel under my feet—from below and from the skies above, militia ornithopters strafing me. It's like a swarm of fucking locusts overhead. I leap to the next carriage and keep running, jumping, running, pulling a stick of dynamite out of my jacket. No love grenades this trip; something more drastic is called for.

I light it, lob it and leg it—back the way I came—and leap through a plume of blue-orgone vapor that hisses from a ruptured ray tank, straight into the face of my would-be assassin, the two of us almost crashing off the roof together in our collision. I push away and hit him with a kung-fu kangaroo kick (spring-loaded boots—a kick with a kick) but he rolls backward and comes out of it on his feet. Great Western Road flashes under us. Next stop, Kelvinbridge and the Rookery. Overhead, the ornithopters thunder.

“You're dead,” says Joey Narcosis. “You're fucking
dead
,”

“Aren't we all?” I say, as the dynamite explodes in the driver's cabin and the airtram, roaring through flame and smoke, careens off its thread and screams downward, down toward a streak of Ian dulled filth that used to be a river.

“By rivers of a sophist, down through valley fields which bear full fruit, rich harvest for our themes, we come. Through towns below the peak of zither, on we come. To his eye and her other eye, we come. The flame that does not burn us in our hair, we speed like hawks, we sweep the air with evil aim, we swoop and scatter all, and gather children from their homes, our game.

“We come to her, agaves queen and anesthesia princess, our eternal Columbine, mother of sorrow, she who leads us.”

Phreedom ignores the bitmites’ babblings and slings the antique rupters of brass and iron, one over each shoulder. There are latches, straps on them where they're meant to be clipped to angel armor, but she wears them slung diagonally across her back so there's no danger of them falling to the dust. The leather straps form an X on her synthe-vested chest like bandoliers. The crossbars of the rupters, fluttering with angel scalps, look like the pinions of some creature's wings. But then that's pretty much what they are. She flexes her right hand, gazing at the ivory talons where her fingernails used to be, the black filigree of bitmites that sleeves her bare arm. Too long in the Hinter, she thinks. Still, the claws make her feel more at home out here, one of nature's children. And they have their uses; who needs cold steel when you have a hand with eagle's claws?

The bitmite tattoo on her arm, the scar of the C-section on her belly, the clawed hand which, she swears, she'll use one day to rip the heart out of the last unkin, Phreedom's metaphysique is just one reminder after another of what she's lost—her brother, her son, her humanity. She no longer blames Finnan for teaching her the truth of the unkin and the Cant. She no longer blames Metatron for what his Covenant spear carriers did to her brother and to Phreedom herself. But that's largely because the blame has been replaced by hunger.

Down in the valley, the grazing cattle look plump and appetizing. One of the Bacchae at her side sets up a howl.

The sleek calf gives a scream, bucking its head, whites visible around the edges of its panicked eyes, legs skittering as it goes down beneath her. She digs her claws into its throat like it's a lump of clay her fist is ripping off. Blood sprays as, with her other arm locked round its jaw, she twists its head to break its neck. The others dive into the scattering herd like wild dogs, tearing heifers limb from limb with claws and teeth and sheer brute force. A white bull snorts and charges, glaring down its horns; it turns, tossing its head in rage and fear, and barges at another
pack, but as it plows into their midst it's tripped, dragged down by countless hands. Its broken bits of carcass bounce above the crowd, hurled hand to hand this way and that, all ribs and hoofs, the flesh stripped quicker than a prince could blink in shock and gag into his perfumed handkerchief.

It's over within minutes.

One of the women holds two broken horns up to her head and bellows, charges laughing at her fellow hunters. Others are still breaking animals between them here and there. A group of four heave, two at each side of a rib cage, trying to split it open like a corpse in autopsy. One girl hammers on a severed head with a splintering thighbone. But most are simply gnawing on the pieces.

Phreedom runs her hand over strips of flesh that drip where they hang from branches on the pine trees, licks the blood from her open palm.

The force of the chi-dart knocks her sideways as it hits her shoulder, and she staggers back to catch her footing. Though the bitmites in her body won't let her bleed, she feels the cold iron of the thing like poison in her body, claws at her shoulder to pull it out. Bastard!

“Ambush!” she shouts.

They leap out onto the track that leads from town; they come from behind and from the side, come crashing out of hiding all around. The villagers rush toward them with weapons even more archaic than her own in their hands, ancient needlegun-crossbow things that fire wildly, furiously, at the pillagers. Another chi-charged quarrel thumps into the tree beside her, sparking blue-green.

“Come on, you bitches! Grab your weapons! Follow me!”

Bitches, harpies, furies, Phreedom's girls are on their feet in seconds, swatting iron darts aside like gnats and streaming out into the mob of villagers, stolen rupters flashing, shattering the rash attack. Boys playing at cowboys and Indians, angels and demons, Hinter's knights against her brood of dragons, they don't have the first idea of what this kind of fight is really like, and her guerrilla force, hardened with years of warfare in the wilderness, hits them like foxes let loose in a chicken coop.

It's a rout. Wounded men run from the women, firing blind behind them as they try to escape being torn in pieces by the Bacchae, shouting prayers for some deity's intervention as they fall. Phreedom brings one of them down and straddles him as he lies there scrabbling on the ground, screaming for mercy. She hushes him with a hand over his mouth and nose, clamped there until his heels stop drumming.

She cups her hands under the stream of water trickling from the rock and takes a sip, splashes the rest over her face; it runs down red over the chicken-bone necklace
and between her breasts. Across the ridge, the others kneel before their own created springs, washing off the blood. The rupters driven into the stone look like strange mountain shrines, she thinks, crosses raised upon the rock and hung with fluttering hides, the half-naked scarlet women on their knees before them, hands moving from spouting water to their faces as if in ritual or prayer. A low hum comes from all the staffs, rising and falling in the rhythm of breath, the sound of streaming water merging with it. It's the music of power, of the chi-energies of the earth beneath their feet, of the Vellum itself being tapped, and the bitmites on her arm snake in time with it; she feels them stretching up over her shoulder, tickling her neck, licking her jaw, her cheek. They're a part of this world now, in the dust that blows upon the wind, in the soil, the rock, and in their own flesh. She used to think of them as hers, these black sprites that have turned the world into heaven and hell on earth. Now she just thinks of them as
her.

She pulls the brass disrupter out of the rock and feels the hum of it die in her hand. Even the weapons designed to fight the bitmites have been transformed by them, rebuilt to specifications that the bitmites gleaned from dreams and nightmares. The angels still fire bolts of brute energy but these weapons, her weapons,
their
weapons, carry information in their blasts, signals that can turn an enemy to dust, yes, but that can just as easily drill a hole into a world of water or a sea of wine hidden beneath the surface of some ragged patch of Vellum.

It's really quite simple, she's come to understand: The bitmites have no hidden agenda of their own, no secret schemes to steal the world, only a basic need to answer every voice, to serve, to give humanity what it desires—power and freedom, justice and revenge, a simple life, a glorious death.

And what does she want? Her brother back? The son they stole from her? The heads of the fucking unkin bastards that tore her world apart: angels, demons, the fucking lot of them? To be drunk with Finnan under the stars in a trailer park in the Mojave Desert, laughing at his crazy fantasies of mystery and magic, thrilling at the thought of all the wild adventures possible in his imagination? To find the angel Metatron, demand that he rewrite the destiny graved in her flesh—her past, her present and her future too—demand he give her back Thomas and Jack? A revenge or a… return?

What do any of them really want?

“So whoever he may be, m'sire,” says Guy, “accept this spirit here within the city, suffer him or flee. His powers reach so wide, my lord; I've even heard it
said he gave the vine to us as sorrow's cure. And if you drive the wine away, then every human joy is dead.”

“And you?”

Pierrot glowers at me.

“What do you say?”

“I am afraid to speak my mind before the king,” I sing. “But I will say one thing. There is no spirit greater than the Harlequin.”

“You hear this?” says Pierrot. “The audacity of these wild beasts right here among us.”

He points at Jack, at me, but he's addressing Guy.

“In all hell's eyes,” he says, “we're all disgraced. We must act now, swift as electric fire. Go to the gate and give the order. Tell the soldiers—buckle on their swords and bring their shields. Gather the riders mounted on their steeds, and bring my archers out to make their bowstrings sing. We march against the whores!”