Ink (77 page)

“Christ, but there's fuckin hunners ae them. An a’ tae burn a city that's a'ready a fuckin wasteland.”

“If Pechorin isn't the only blackshirt working with the angels,” says Jack, “they're probably more concerned with smoking us out.”

He has one more glance back at the place where his old friend Samuel Hobbs-baum spent his last few hours on earth, planning, scribbling or maybe just deciding, and then finally burning his own name out of the page that it was written in, burning himself out of existence. One small act which might well have graved
that silence, that absence, into the very Name of God, and saved them all. Not that this will stop the angels from trying their insane scheme. Carter slips his hand into his pocket to touch the folded vellum, turns and sees MacChuill pointing up into the sky.

“Whit the fuckin hell is that?”

A rift in the cerulean sky, a burst of indigo, a thunderbolt of purple, a blue-green electric rip in reality, tearing straight down through the clouds and through the first zeppelin.

“I'm guessing that's the angels’ anointed,” says Jack.

And his grin is snickety-sharp and glinting white.

Joey Narcosis brushes a speck of white fluff off one shoulder of his long black woolen overcoat, and steps up to the edge of the gantry. Behind him, the archivist notices, Arturo is busy rewiring the computer, sabotaging the laboratory. The archivist finds this vaguely interesting but is in two minds whether to stop the scientist or to join in. In other circumstances, the archivist would have been in panic mode, broadcasting alarms on all channels, long-established post-assassination protocols kicking in—
Emergency! Emergency!
Thopters would be scrambling, paradox shielding deploying, work routines being reset, whole life histories being rewritten; every resource in the Circus would be working in unison now to jump-start the Duke back into existence. Circumstances change, however.

Arturo would be—should be—at the heart of this, bringing a clone out of cold storage, uploading into it the copy of the Duke's graving from the virtual vault it's stored in, transferring the unkin soul into a new host in a metaphysical reboot. Instead, he's reprogramming the emergency evacuation procedure so it will release a thousand sex-starved, orgone-crazed bonobos on the streets of Dunedin. Although more than aware of the mad scientist's newborn relish for life and its innate absurdity, the archivist does not really have a sense of humor about this.

But we're still working on him.

Joey is dead calm, ever the cool and collected one. He stands over the chi-mine, looking down into the depths of the chaosphere and evaluating his options. Fox's Plan A was for Joey and Jack to both jump down the rabbit hole to Palestine, 1929, where Jack would play the hero and Joey the villain, working with
the angels but double-dealing and conniving to bring them down with the black-hat avarice and pride that always bites the bastard on the ass. Plan B was that, if only one of them made it through, he'd try to set it all up himself; to do that Joey will have to tweak and twist the Jack of that fold, lay down a paper chase for him, hope he follows the script. Plan C—which is Joey's own potential plan—is that he screws over both sides, takes the Book for himself and sees just what you can do with the Secret Name of God and the programming manual for the universe. It's a thought.

Around the hole of his soul, Joey feels the modifications to his metaphysique making him itchy about all of these plans. The dust in the air around him dances to some distant song. He feels like his skin is golden armor, his eyes silver orbs, his heart made of ice. He feels like he could kill someone with the touch of his shadow. It would be a shame to let that power go to waste, but at the same time he has no desire to play God … though it might be nice to be the hero for a fucking change.

Somewhere in the back of his head, he wonders if Fox has his own Plan C and all of this, even betrayal on his part, is included in it. No matter. He swings first one leg then the other over the rail of the gantry, spreads his arms. Then lets himself fall forward.

We all die someday, he thinks.

And his overcoat billows and flutters as he rolls and straightens out into a dive, going down in a diagonal, an arrow with a vector through all three temporal dimensions, moving back through linear time, off-beam in sidereal time, deep inward through the strata of residual time.

He sees the blue-green storm of the chaosphere rushing up to meet him, dives through wafts of vapor clouds, through glowing nebulae, through sparking and arcing electric tendrils that whip around him, flick across his face, smear into his slipstream. He hits stratocirrus and then cumulus, a thick brilliant glow of chaos, psychedelic as projections in a sixties discotheque, smashes out of the corona and down, into: a black space of darting spirals, branching scrawls of light like paths of particles in collision; a whirling vortex of lensing effects, warped and weird around him, pitch-black below him, and up above him blinding white, as if all of the light of history is pouring in behind him as he pierces the event horizon.

He brings his arms out to the side, splays his hand to feel the histories streaming through them, feel the currents and eddies, the flows, feeling for the
thread he wants; and he finds it, snaps his arms in to his side and twists and shifts and—

—slices out into a blue sky, a blue-white sea and pale sand below, a valley of salt, and a fleet of silver cigar shapes scattered across the sky, one straight ahead, coming up so sudden he just crashes straight through it, shredding his coat and losing drag. He rolls, tries to compensate, spreads his arms to grab time, like fucking Tarzan trying to catch a jungle vine, but it rips right through his fingers.

All we can do is swarm out of the shadows under him to armor him in a glint of scales and feathers as he plummets, Joey Narcosis, a great falling peacock angel, hitting the Ink Wells outside Tell el-Kharnain like a meteor out of space.

The light hits them first, a jolt of blue-green sudden as a camera flash, so blinding that it almost feels, Jack thinks, like some mad scientist had sparked an electrode, prodded this or that cell in his brain, causing a flash as sudden as a memory. Then comes the noise of impact, the almighty DOOM of this strange comet out of time hitting the earth, which quakes under their feet—the shock wave. A plume of smoke billows up and out, swallowing the first wave of the zeppelins. There's black in the smoke and gray, but there's as much purple, green and blue in it as it furls into the air, a pillar, a fountain, rising and collapsing over itself, a vast mushroom-shaped monster.

“Come on,” says Jack, “it's time to make our move.”

He hands the box to Reinhardt, and the Prussian takes his place behind Tamuz. MacChuill to the right, Anat to the left, Jack between them and in front, they come together into a tight formation, silence dropping like the switching off of a radio as Jack enters the zone of safety around Tamuz. The silence makes it all so eerie and unreal as they move out into the square, the airships quiet in the sky, the fire of the angels a ghostly barrage, shattering buildings around them, the earth under their feet, even the air itself shimmering but utterly harmless within the circle.

As they start up the North Road, Jack raises the binoculars to study the angels, smiles at the fury and frustration twisting Michael's face into a mask of hate, baring his teeth as he spits his futile venom at them. He nods with satisfaction at the way Azazel now glances nervously over his shoulder at the pillar of smoke still rising, belching up from the impact in the Ink Wells, spreading out across the sky, not dissipating in the wind but stretching in volutes and trails, moving out into
the Futurist fleet like some blind amorphous ocean thing, more plant than animal but alive enough to reach with hungry tendrils and snag passing fish in its stinging wafts of frond.

That's right, you cunts, thinks Jack, we're coming for you.

And, as they move out into the Silkmarket, Jack gives the signal, and the three of them with disrupters step out of the circle of silence, into the thrum of oncoming airships and the shrieks of angels and the rumble of a distant storm. MacChuill breaks right and Anat left, to draw off the angel fire; they head for the edges of the square, using pillars of salt for cover. Striding out in front of Tamuz and Reinhardt, disrupter blazing as he fires at Azazel, Michael, Azazel, Michael, Jack sings his way toward the Jericho Gate of the fallen city of Tell el-Kharnain.

He runs, turning now and then to kneel, fire back at the two angels pinned down in their sniper positions over the Gate, by MacChuill and Anat. He runs and fires, fires and runs, leaping over bodies and boulders, through the rubble and the babble of this hopeless battle in this unholy war.

He bundles Tamuz and the Prussian toward the larger of the thopters, taps the wooden box and mouths the words
Curzon
and
Basra.
Reinhardt points to the sky, to the zeppelins moving slowly toward them, almost overhead now. Jack nods.
I know.
He points at the other thopter, the Eagle painted on its fuselage.
Interference.
Reinhardt gives him a thumbs-up, swings himself up to clamber into the cockpit, reaches a hand down to pull Tamuz after him. Tamuz looks at Jack, shakes his head.

No, Jack.

Go.

A pause. A tear running down a cheek. A kiss. A goodbye.

Tamuz grabs a strut and clambers up onto the wing, reaches for Reinhardt's hand. Jack turns away, swallowing his emotions. The two-man thopter isn't designed for vertical takeoff, doesn't have the wingspan to just beat its pinions and flurry into the sky as a lighter fighter aircraft would—it needs a run to get the wind beneath its wings—so, as von Strann buckles himself into the pilot seat and Tamuz slides into the seat in front of him, Jack runs round the front to crank the propeller on the nose. He's just pulling the chocks from the wheels when he feels—he doesn't hear but feels—Tamuz's cry.

Anat flies backward through the air, a full backflip, the disrupter flying from her hand. The boy is already out of the thopter and on the ground, Jack grabbing him by the arm. He struggles, flails against Jack's grip, his embrace. The angel of death, Azazel, leaps from his perch, a hawk diving for its prey, but Anat is rolling,
up on one knee, her hand gloved in ink extended as she curses, slams the fucker back with a word. He hits the stonework of the wall, and she's up and running at him now, charging in to close-quartered combat.

Go!
Jack screams soundlessly at Tamuz.

Above his head, their thopter banks east toward the blue sky over the desert, its wings beating hell-for-leather as Reinhardt and Tamuz race away from the Russian fleet, away from Tell el-Kharnain, and away from the swirling storm of ink, of bitmites, of we dead souls buried in millennia of dust, crushed down and transformed by the weight of dead realities into the oil of humanity's lost souls.

We rise, erupt out of the earth, spewing as a geyser of desire and fear, of joy and sorrow, all the power and glory of the human spirit compacted tight and black. Matter is light, coiled in a ball, hoarding its heat in the heart of it, dark only because the fire is trapped inside; let it loose and you can level cities. So, too, we dead seem as ink in our darkness, locked off from the living, but, oh in the skin and bone that rots, in the sand and the stone, in the air, in every atom of us, information is encoded, lives recorded in reality itself, the pattern of it only lost, only faded, never utterly destroyed. We are the palimpsest of the past on which you write your present and your future, the substructure of your world revealed by X-rays, microscopes, the focus of photons fired into our depths, the ricochet of bullets of light. We are laid open to your scrutiny by the scalpel vision of those willing to look so deep.

And now, as in the chamber of a particle accelerator, we react to Pechorin's impact. We spray up into the air, the darkness unlocking into light, brilliant greens, bright blues, burning orange and red and yellow. We pick zeppelins from the sky. We prick gasbags, snarl propellers. They fight back, dropping bombs on the Ink Wells below them, building a wall of flame that sweeps forward as they move inexorably toward Tell el-Kharnain, sweeps in out of the desert and across the new city, across the airfields. But Jack is in the air now, in the fighter thopter, pulling gears and joysticks as the metal machine spirals up into the sky, over the wasted city and around. Blossoms of gray smoke explode in the air around him as the Prussian war machines try to bring him down, but he wheels the machine, turning it in a widening gyre, soaring up and up and up. He spirals up over the city, over the bombs and the guns.

The thopter hangs in the air for a second.

Then, disrupter lashed to the side of the cockpit, he screams Cant and obscenities together, swooping down on the enemy thopters swarming out now from among the zeppelins and banking east to pursue Reinhardt and Tamuz. He
swoops down over the city, rolling the machine as he strafes, glancing down as he flies over the Jericho Gate and sees—

The blast hits MacChuill full-on. The man's head whips round to the side and back, neck cracking, and his legs snap backward under him; Christ, his spine must be shattered—it's like some giant hand just clamped and crushed him, folding him in ways no man could survive. The Scotsman's song dies in a short last scream, and he falls like a rag doll dropped in the dust. As Jack zooms overhead, Michael rises from his crouch on his perch on his pillar and turns his gaze slowly to the east, where Reinhardt and Tamuz are headed straight out into the desert, pursued by a score of Russian thopters.

Michael leaps into the air, his great wings extending as the angel of ice sets out after the Book. His words of fire strafe the air around Jack's thopter and Jack rolls the machine, dodges left and right, weaving through the shattering sky. He pulls back a joystick, spins a wheel, and the thopter arcs upward. Wings in, it turns like a ballet dancer en pointe, and then the pinions are thrown wide again and he's heading straight for the angel of ice, seeing past him to the Jericho Gate where, under the very archway of it, Anat and Azazel are locked in combat, wrestling, Azazel's hands clamped round her throat, her fist jammed in his mouth, their muffled Cant burning the air around them, raining stone and sand, cracking the earth.