Ink (50 page)

Only the one good eye peering up at Carter from a ruined face puts a hawklike challenge to his horror, shames Carter into blinking, looking away, and back, at the human being within the ruin, who tilts his head, stretches his left hand out again—what's left of it, anyway.

“Of course,” says Carter.

He digs in his pocket, crouches down to put a few coins into the hat and finds himself looking into the man's eye again, on his level now. The man smiles at him, teeth white in the sun-darkened face as he motions a blessing, touching forehead and chest with his pincer hand.

“God be with you, Captain Englishman.”

Carter makes to rise but finds himself still staring into the man's eye. He's seen men crippled by war before but never…

He tries to find the words but can't. The old soldier, old beggar, gives a bitter laugh, nods.

“I see your thoughts, Captain Englishman,” he says. “You ask yourself what happen to this man. What terrible thing happen to this man? You have time for an old soldier's story, Captain Englishman? You have time for my story?”

Tamuz is still nowhere in sight.

“I have the time,” says Carter.

I lean one elbow on the table as I quick-flick through the crib notes, the brief history of this horse I'll be riding like a vodoun loa. Captain Jack Carter, World War I hero, Yerevan, Baku, Tell el-Kharnain, etc. I skim through seven pages of ripping yarns and waxed mustaches and blah blah fucking blah to see just how gay the gay blade is. I'm just not built for boredom. Give me a chi-gun and point me at an army, but don't try and schedule the rebellion, baby, or I
will
drift off. By the
time I'm flicking the last page, I'm gazing over the paper at the dinkiness of Puck's ear and … Fox snaps his fingers, breaking my randy reverie.

“Right. So I'm the hero.” I shrug. “Peachy keen. Do I go boom? Glorious death in battle and suchlike?”

Fox sighs, blows a billow of cigarette smoke up into the air.

“I was rather hoping that you wouldn't self-combust this time.”

I swirl a slug of absinthe round my mouth, and swallow with a smack of lips.

“It's what I'm best at, Foxy.”

“This is a heist, not a hit,” he says. “Jack, I need you to try and hold it together just this once. That's why I'm sending Joey in with you. We need to keep the dynamic tight here. No subtleties, no nuances, just heroes and villains, good and evil, black and white—”

“—and fucking red all over. No offense,” says Puck, “but are you bonkers? Send those two in together and you're begging for a bloodbath. Have you read what that fucker's like in this fold, Jack?”

Puck flicks a page up in front of him, points it at Joey.

“Don't poop yer pants, pumpkin,” I say to Puck. “I'll make sure he doesn't drown any kittens. How bad can he be?”

“Jack,” says Fox, “have you actually read the brief on this Joey?”

“Yes,” I say.

He stubs his cigarette in his ashtray, says nothing as he looks at me.

“No,” I say.

I flick a few pages further through, ignoring the notes that have less than four exclamation marks, natch. Even at a glance it seems safe to say that this Josef Pe-chorin is a very bad man. Sired in Georgia during the Terror of 1901, illegitimate son of a White Russian contessa and her Cossack rapist. Murdered his own mother at the age of sixteen during the Purge of Tbilisi and led massacres of the Yezidi across Georgia and Armenia. Recruited by the British Falangists in Persia as a potential asset in the war against the Futurists. Sold his bosses down the river for a position in the Black Guard. Same old same old, far as I can see. Something about a disappearance on the slopes of Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus—

“Kur,” says Puck—he waves the page—”he's been to Kur.”

“That's not certain,” says Joey. “The Intel's sketchy.”

“We're not even sure,” says Fox, “if Kur's part of the picture in this fold.”

But I can see Puck's point. A psychic hunter-killer working only for the
highest bidder, a white-hot tracker with a black-ice heart, Joey's more than happy in most folds to play nemesis to my schizoid superhero; I've lost count of the number of times we've crossed swords now, mostly ending in fatality for one or the other of us, if not both. And a Pechorin kitted up with the Cant against a Carter who's not even heard of it in this fold …

“Fuck it,” I say. “I can take him.”

Besides, much as it's nice having Joey onside, I kinda like it when he's trad and bad. Existence can be a trifle inchoate when you've got little more to sustain you than your own chaotic potential. At least with Joey, I always know who I am: the hero to his villain.

“Yeah,” says Joey, “like you can always trust Jack Flash to save the day.”

His cool gaze, pointed as his comment, is on the botched, blotched pile of angel hide sitting on the table in between us. I snick my Zippo open, spark my hash cheroot back into flame. Hey, everyone makes mistakes.

“OK,” I say, “so what's the plan?”

“Fuck that shit,” says Joey. “No fucking way. You're talking an Orpheus Operation and those always go tits-up. Eurydike … Lot's wife …”

“Salty,” I say, and lick my lips and slip a wink at Puck.

“We can do it,” Fox insists.

“Without the full team?” says Anaesthesia. “Without King Finn?”

“The Irish rover's lost,” says Fox. “You know how deep we'd have to go to dig him out. Deeper than dreams. Deeper than death.”

“Deeper than the shit we'll be in if the unkin hear we're trying to snatch the Book?” says Joey.

“He'll come back,” says Anaesthesia. “You can't keep a good story down, and King Finn is a timeless fucking classic. And once he's back in the game …”

“Then there were seven,” says Don.

The magic number, I think. Seven days of the week. Seven Heavens, seven Hells, and the Magnificent Seven souls of Humpty Dumpty humanity scattered all in itty bits across the Vellum. The mass unconscious is a seven-headed dragon, and even a full-on avatar like yours truly is really just one head of that big beast. A single piece in a great game of chess where all the pieces have their own set moves and you can only win if they all work together. A knight needs a queen to defend valiantly, a bishop to crisscross his path, a king and a castle, even a snub-nosed little pawn to stroke his horsey and keep him warm in the dark. Problem is we're one man down.

But who needs Prometheus when you've got the fire itself?

“The once and future king?” says Fox. “No, Finnan handed on the torch and walked away, and we can't wait for his return. You've been out in the Hinter, Anna. It's changing, isn't it?”

She nods. Kentigern's not the only Haven where we've got the munchkins on the run, the whole city being one big Rookery these days. No, there's a scent of something in the air, a change of seasons, a new age, a new day or a new page.

“If we don't strike now,” says Fox, “trust me,
they
will.”

“Thing is,” says Fox, “the fold we're aiming for isn't just a jaunt across eternity. You're going to have to take the hard route.”

The poker table has an arcane intricacy shimmering above its green baize now, vodoun veves and sigils inscribed in the air by Anaesthesia's dancing fingers. She runs a finger round a scratchy spiral, and another branches off it, then another. She rotates it, tweaks it into shape, building the sim of the city's substructure, tunnel by tunnel, wormhole by wormhole. Used to be you could just skip across the moments, pick up a beer in a bar in Mexico and chug it down in Madrid. You're just as likely to slam the empty stein down on a table in a Middle-Earth tavern these days. So the munchkin unkin stick to their Yellow Brick Roads now, safe and snug from the Hinter and hooligans like us. Anaesthesia's sim models their routes, the subways and the sewers that join with mines, ley-lines and dragon-lines, seams of chi-energy that turn and twist through 3-D time as well as space. Tunnels in time.

“It's kinda pretty,” says Puck. “Looks like a three-D snowflake.”

The Maps of Hell, a Jesus freak might say, but Christians are a dying breed in a Haven where Youngblood won the secrets of the Kali Yuga in his
Bayonets to Shangri-la
hour of glory, brought all the mysteries of chi and kundalini back to dear old Blighty. Here, in mechanistic mystic Kentigern, this is a mandala of Maya, the Vellum's veils of illusion, and it ain't God that's at the center of this maze but the biggest wormhole of them all, a vertical shaft that drops straight down through centuries of strata to the core of the chaosphere itself, with a thousand side shoots going God knows when. A door into the Emerald City. A passage to Erewhon. The Gates of Heaven, Hell and Never-Fucking-Never-Land. Or a road to Palestine, 1929, 469th Parallel, Eon X-7.

Thing is, as is all too clear from Anaesthesia's sim, those tunnels are all coiled up under the one place in this Haven where
angel
isn't a swear word and the man who freed the city isn't a hero. At the top of the model, over the mouth
of the pit, like a woodworm-ridden tree stump with its dead roots stretching down into eternity, the Circus is our only way in. I hope Fox has a good plan.

Pasha had a plan
, the beggar begins. His English is broken but it's good enough to tell how he served in the Turkish Ninth Corps under Enver Pasha, how Pasha wanted the ink fields of Baku as his prize, and more.
Yes, Captain Englishman, he had a plan.
So they marched over the Allah Akbar mountains in December 1914, to draw the Russians away from Kars and Ardahan, ambush them at Sarikamish. Halfway between Kars and Erzurum, they met, ninety-five thousand Turks and sixty-five thousand Russians. It nearly worked—the Russians started retreating— but the weather…
The Russians are cold men inside
, he explains,
and the Turks do not like the cold.
Five days of fighting and five nights of freezing in the deep snow of the mountain heights, he tells Carter. Soldiers getting lost at night. They tried to light fires. Many of those who fell asleep never woke up again. Thirty thousand men lost in the battles, more in the biting cold, and by the time they reached Erzurum two weeks later, defeated, four-fifths of them were gone…

“And this hand is then the claw you see now, Captain Englishman. What is your word? Frostbite, yes, frostbite.”

He snaps his teeth with an audible
clack.

“Bit off my fingers and leave me with… this.”

Enver Pasha blamed it all on the Christian Armenians, of course.

And then—
ah yes
—he tells Carter of Suez in February of 1915. Another great plan, to strike with a surprise attack—
it will he easy, they say
—to cut the very jugular of the British in the East, the Suez Canal, push through and raise a revolt in Islamic Egypt.

“Hah! They are blind like I am blind now, here … this eye. British bayonet steal it, would have steal my life if I not kill its soldier first.”

Was the Captain Englishman at Gallipoli? he asks Carter. Does he know the smell of corpses left rotting on the battlefield?

Carter wasn't at Gallipoli, but he knows that smell only too well.

The beggar picks up his withered, stunted right arm with his claw, pulls it up to his forehead in a travesty of a salute. Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal Bey, he explains, great Atatürk himself, was in command there. A man of will.

“Every soldier who fight here with me,” says the beggar in a bitter mockery of military bluster, “he know that honor ties him. No retreat. Not one step. And you
want rest? No! There no rest for our nation, not forever. No rest until we throw the enemy into the sea.”

He lets his arm go and it drops, a dead weight.

“Plans and speeches, Captain Englishman. Very important in a war.”

It was May
, he tells Carter. Each side had dug in and, after all the attacks and counterattacks, a stalemate had held for a month or so. The Australians cramped in their little line of trenches, the Turks knowing that sooner or later they would have to strike. Then the reinforcements started to come forward—
boys
, he says,
no combat. They see my eye patch, my hand, and they piss in their boots.
But quietly, secretly, he tells Carter, they fill the trenches till the British spotter planes can hardly miss it.

“I tell them it will be a massacre. But they are deaf. Like me, Captain Englishman, in this ear. One of your grenades when we go over the top. Shrapnel slice it off. They dig shrapnel out of my head.”

He laughs. The doctor had told him he was lucky to have survived.

“Do you not think I am so very lucky, Captain Englishman?”

He closes his eye and leans forward, the elbow of his good left arm propped on his thigh. Outside the airfield terminal, it's gone quieter, the crowd thinned out so that Carter now has room to sit down on the dusty step beside the beggar. He notes the stares of passersby, looks of disgust and shame and blank dispassion. The old soldier stares straight forward with his eye closed. Chin up as he looks at nothing, thinks Carter.

“Where did you lose the leg?” says Carter. “And the arm?”

“Leg first,” says the old man.

He had lost his leg to cold steel also, he tells Carter. It was October 1917, and the British were about to attack Gaza again. The Turks knew this because Al-lenby's artillery had been bombarding the garrison there for four days, five days, six. Two or three divisions had been deployed. More on their way, so the rumors said. Bristols flying overhead looking for weak spots in the Turkish line. Oh, yes, it was clear that a full frontal attack was coming soon.

So he had felt safe in Beersheba—little, unimportant Beersheba out in the desert—until the cavalry came charging from all directions.

He still remembers the sight of the Australians’ horses in the evening, charging through the smoke and dust of a battle that had raged all day. How he stood in wonder as the cavalry rode down on them, breached their defenses.
Horses weak with thirst, dying of thirst, Captain Englishman. But so beautiful.
How he stood looking down a line of sandbags and soldiers, seeing these beasts leaping here, and here, and here, and here, over the Turkish lines, a wave washing over them.
So beautiful.