Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it?
Then screw you, too.
A man who tortures in white cells; who hates and has no appreciation of the beauty of what he destroys; a man who takes what is not his over and over and over again, who would casually shatter the strange, beautiful library of Edie Banister’s brain: for the first time in Joe’s entire life, here is someone he can hit as hard as he knows how, without fear of going too far. There is no such place. He can hear Polly Cradle and her brother saying something like “go” which is more probably “no,” but in Polly at least he can hear the rawness which is also in him, and her soul’s approval even as her mind urges caution.
Joe feels his face wrinkle up in a boar’s-head snarl, and charges straight at Shem Shem Tsien. He hears a furious warble which resonates in his chest, sees the dog, Bastion; he scoops up this unlikely ally in a single motion and carries on. The dog’s growl becomes a song of war.
Come, horologist. The old, dead man offends me. Let us be about him.
Ruskinites converge, black linen dolls with grasping hands and empty hoods. Halloween ghosts. Man or machine? Joe dumps Bastion on the first one and the dog latches onto the man’s cowl and gets to work, does something appalling which will leave scars, Joe knows it will because he can hear screaming. He had no idea Ruskinites could scream, until now. His anger takes note: pain works.
Joe fields the second monk and lifts him bodily from the ground. The Opium Khan is firing his gun and the Ruskinite takes the hits, one, two, three. Six. Don’t guns have six bullets? This one has more. An automatic can have fourteen, Joe dimly remembers, but it doesn’t matter anyway; the distance is short. He throws the Ruskinite directly at Shem Shem Tsien and finds his arms occupied with more of them, but they’re so light, so clumsy. He bites one of them horribly, grabs another with his hands and forces his arm in a wrong direction, hears something snap and crack. HAH!
Someone is next to him, a stout, grey-haired figure with a crowbar: Bob Foalbury, former Chief Petty Officer, in defence of his wife. “Bollocks!” Bob is yelling. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!” and with each shout he slams his crowbar, to good effect—but he is slowing, old muscles betraying him. Joe grabs the crowbar—no, it’s a length of Victorian iron pipe, even better—and yells to him: “Get Cecily! Get her out!” And Bob says “Aye aye,” which almost makes Joe smile despite everything, and off he goes. Joe turns to find the next enemy, slaps him open-handed and spins him around, then slams an elbow down and across in the opposite direction. He follows with the pipe, hears a clang as he smashes a metal head.
He recalls his epiphany in the white room. Survival rests on an absolute lack of compunction. Martial artists achieve this through repetition: the decision to harm is taken in advance, the motion practised. The average person hesitates in order to judge what is necessary. Humanity requires the calculation: what to do, how far to escalate? Joe Spork is not escalating so much as he is erupting, straight up, from a deep well of anger at the world’s injustices, at his mother’s chill and his father’s ease, at Frankie’s abandonment of Daniel, at Daniel’s weak response. Joe need not hold back. He is fighting machines and monsters, and beyond that, he is not fighting. He is fixing something broken. The world having Shem Shem Tsien in it is a flaw, like rust in the cogs. He feels no compunction at all.
They hit him. Often, they hit him quite hard. He knows it’s happening, but pain is a register of inconvenience, and he has a great deal he wants to express to these people through the medium of crippling blows and wrenched limbs, and a little thing like knocking him over isn’t going to stop him. Injury is different, and he guards against it—but there’s a magic in forward momentum and molten rage: anyone wanting to injure him must come within reach. From the ground, he grabs a man leaning over him by the soft flesh under the arm, and heaves. The man screams, hauls back, and Joe Spork rides the movement upwards, regains his feet, reverses the position; softness underfoot. Shem Shem Tsien draws a line across Joe’s arm with the sword, and he feels ice and then blood running freely. He yells, and the Opium Khan grins, steps forward again, blade teasing, tapping Joe’s shoulders. Joe bellows, and tries to catch hold of him, plucks at his sleeve as Shem Shem Tsien steps lightly past him. The gun is in Shem’s other hand, but he shows no inclination to use it. He closes down Joe’s defences, whispers in his ear almost like a lover. Joe can smell brimstone on him, and realises he is breathing the shot which killed Edie. Hellfire, indeed. The Opium Khan’s breath is minty, and his fingers are like Daniel’s vise.
“You delight me, Mr. Spork. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I should have the privilege of killing Frankie Fossoyeur’s grandson in person. It’s too good of you.” The gun comes to rest under Joe’s ear.
And then a storm wind hurls them both across the room. Glass cases burst and papers whirl in a blizzard as Edie Banister’s last piece of exploding Tupperware goes off belatedly and fills the room with smoke and flame.
Joe spins around and around, imagining Shem Shem Tsien doing the same, then finds a wall and moves along it, looking for… he doesn’t know. He staggers to his feet, brushing himself down, preparing to go another round, knowing this time that he will not win. What does it take to beat him? How, how, how? Joe grinds his teeth. He will find out. He will.
Polly Cradle appears directly in front of him with Bastion, and it takes him a second to realise that she is reaclass="underline" an angel in faded jeans, ushering him out. In the corridor is Mercer.
“Move,” Mercer yells roughly. Then, into what appears to be not a cellphone but an actual satellite handset, “Bethany! It’s Mercer Cradle. The word is: ‘Passchendaele’. We’re crashing the shop, do you understand? We’ve been caught—you may be under direct threat. Burn the boxes, drop the shutters and turn the key. I say again, ‘Passchendaele’.”
Crashing the shop. Noblewhite Cradle’s last gasp, in the face of utter destruction: records gone, guilt erased, favours called in. Money takes flight to the Caymans, to Belize and the canton of Thun and the Bahamas. House of Cradle flees on predetermined routes. The company is born again abroad. The U.K. is considered scorched earth.
“Mercer,” Joe Spork says, “I’m sorry.”
“Get a move on!”
“Yes,” says another voice, “you had better do that.”
Shem Shem Tsien stands in the smoke. He has lost his gun, but he still has a sword, and he is flanked by two of the remaining Ruskinites.
Joe growls, feeling the heat in his chest again, the urge to tear something with his fingers, and then Bob Foalbury steps smartly past him and with comical precision presses a stud in the wallpaper.
A vast, clanking iron curtain falls into place between them, and then another, and water pours from the ceiling. Somewhere, an alarm klaxon sounds, like an old-fashioned air-raid siren. From behind the screen comes a howl of thwarted fury.
“Cop that, you murdering sod,” Bob Foalbury says, with feeling. And then, to Joe, “Fire and theft system, Baptiste Frères of Marseilles circa 1921.” He turns sharply, beats on the metal grille. “Come into my house? Threaten my wife? Call me an old man? Well, I beat you, didn’t I? My name is Bob Foalbury! With an F, you bastards!”
Cecily puts her hand on his arm, and he folds down onto her, relieved and afraid and tired.
“No time,” Mercer says.
Joe Spork follows the Cradles back to the street and into yet another anonymous car. His exhaustion feels like a great, dark lake on which he floats and which will shortly drown him. And yet, at the same time, as he slips gratefully into the back seat for a few minutes, for an hour, for however long until his next staging place, he hears a part of himself—aloud or not, he does not know—asking a question.