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 misunderstood 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.”