He smiles. “No.”
The Opium Khan moves forwards again with that same lighthearted fluidity, and Edie swirls to meet him, arms outstretched. Her feet brush the ground as she steps, and her face is a serene smile of certainty.
Her arms collect Shem Shem Tsien’s, the little knife deflecting the sword’s edge as he changes direction at the last minute, and she corkscrews down and around: Yama Arashi. They blend into one.
Shem Shem Tsien tumbles through the air and lands on his back. Edie follows him down, her hand on the sword to bring the blade close across his neck, but the Opium Khan changes his grip and does not release the blade. He holds her off, and smiles upward into her eyes.
“The limitations of Yama Arashi, Commander Banister,” he murmurs almost fondly.
“Oh, yes?” Edie growls.
“Yes. It works with swords. Less well with a pistol.”
And as realisation dawns Edie looks down, to see his other hand pressed to her chest, and the muzzle of a small modern gun against her ribs.
“Look after Bastion, please,” she says calmly to the room. “He doesn’t do well by himself. And I’m sure I told you all to get going. Young people today…” And then she glances back at her enemy. “You think you’ve won, don’t you? But you’re in real trouble now, you silly sod.”
Shem Shem Tsien arches one eyebrow, and pulls the trigger. Edie Banister’s back erupts sharply, a narrow hole spraying bone and blood. She shudders once, and then she dies, collapsing to the ground as rags and bone.
For a moment, there is silence, like the end of a piece of music. Then the dog Bastion locks his pink, sightless eyes on the Opium Khan and makes a hard noise in his chest. You are mine, old fiend. Mine.
Shem Shem Tsien gets to his feet.
“Oh, Mr. Spork. How very uncouth of you to bring old business into all this. Old baggage. Really, it won’t do. I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a coarse sort of person, in the end.” He indicates his bruised forehead, the faint yellow smudge of an impact.
Joe Spork just looks at him. Yes. The beard, the wild eyes, the straggly hair, all gone, and in their place, this smooth, appalling man.
“Vaughn Parry,” he says.
The other man shakes his head.
“No. I am Shem Shem Tsien. The Recorded Man. Vaughn Parry is dead. A coat I wear. A vehicle of flesh that I inhabit. An avatar, if you prefer.” He smiles.
“If you aren’t going to run—and I’m afraid Commander Banister was entirely correct in saying that you should—let me tell you a story. Unlike the last one I told you, which was of course entirely fictional, this one is true. It is the true story, Joshua Spork, of the rebirth of a living god—so you may wish to consider it a new Bible story.”
The Opium Khan gestures, and the Ruskinites move to surround the little group. As they go past the corpse of Edie Banister, they seem to stutter, even bow.
“Once upon a time,” Shem Shem Tsien begins. He is circling them, almost casual, a fastidious cannibal considering whom to eat next. “Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a boy born in the nation of Addeh Sikkim, in the royal palace, who wanted nothing more than to lead his people into a new world of prosperity and hope. He was suited to the task: clever and able and well-favoured.” The Opium Khan looks nostalgic.
“I locked him in a steel box and burned him alive. I used the ash to dye my mourning cloth, and I took his kingdom for my own. I needed it, you see, to understand divinity.” Joe Spork steps slightly to one side, keeping Shem Shem Tsien in front of him. The Opium Khan nods approvingly, and moves on. Behind him, the Ruskinites bob, in unison with their master.
“I tested God quite scientifically. It was the commencement, after all, of the true scientific age. I assumed His role in every particular. I abused His servants—of every creed. I racked His people. I healed the sick and raised the dead. I reached out and found a magician, a foreign woman who could show me the universe as God sees it. And when, in the fullness of my own life, I began to wane, I realised that I must submit to the last test of godhood. I must return from death myself. Only then would I be able to meet God as an equal. Only then could I become Him.”
Bastion growls in his bag. Polly Cradle watches Shem Shem Tsien as he moves past her, sword and pistol held lightly in his hands.
“She was right,” he murmurs, indicating Edie’s corpse. “You are so very like her. Not physically. But you have that same infuriating, utterly unmerited confidence in your ability to match me.” He moves on, going back to his story.
“I caused myself to be recorded. Written down. Transcribed. I became, in the modern parlance, information. Do you see? I carved the pattern of my life into the world, in words and images. I measured the actual activity of my brain. And I stored it. I had a ready stock of test subjects in the orphans of the Wistithiel experiment. While I was still alive, I refined my apparatus by using it on them. I played them fragments of my life and taught them—with electric shocks and so on—to emulate me perfectly. Each of my Ruskinites is an aspect of my self…” He gestures, and the Ruskinites around him echo him, fluid motions indicating one another.
“Of course, I never allowed the whole to be shown to anyone. And to be honest with you, the Ruskinites are imperfect. They were neither entirely erased nor willing to learn. One had to employ crude, Pavlovian teaching methods. Pleasure and pain.
“Vaughn Parry was different.”
He considers Cecily and Bob Foalbury now, reaches out with the tip of the sword towards them.
“Vaughn was an empty corpse walking. He had nothing inside him at all. He was a natural miracle: a body pretending to be a living man. And in that corpse, a desperate hunger to be a real boy… he studied so hard. He learned and learned and practised and practised and eventually he knew it all. He moved like me. He felt what I feel. He was surgically altered to look like me.
“And then he sat, day upon day upon night upon night, wired to my machines, and matched the pattern of his living brain’s impulses to my own. Until, little by little, I returned. Do you not see the genius of it? No? You object, perhaps that there is a soul, a part distinct which I do not possess? But consider: if there is, that part fled when my body died, but my mind persists. In which case, I am the first man ever to possess not one soul, but two.”
The attack comes as he says the final word, but his breath is completely even. He flourishes the sword around and back, light glinting on the blade, and as he does so his other hand stabs out towards Polly Cradle, pulling the trigger, and he screams a feral howl of triumph and delight.
But Polly Cradle is no longer there. Joe has caught her up, was moving even before Shem Shem Tsien was, knew instinctively the denouement of the Opium Khan’s speech. Because that’s what bastards do.
It begins in his chest as a heart-attack tightness, then unravels immediately in all directions like an electric shock. When it reaches his fingertips and toes it bounces, and his eyes fly open very wide. He can see now, quite clearly. The strange monochrome of his vision has receded, given way to sharp, vibrant colours. He’s pretty sure he’s glowing from within like Jack O’Lantern. The bounce reaches his stomach and there’s a weird instant of calm before he can put a name to what is happening, and when he does it seems insufficient to the thing itself.
Rage.
It’s not like a red mist or a thunderstorm, it’s like a weight lifted from his shoulders and a clear light falling across the world.