Holly looks at me, at Arkady, at Sadaqat, at me.
“Dreamseeding,” I comment, “is one of Arkaday’s métiers.”
“My range is lousy,” says my colleague, showing off his modesty. “My room was across the corridor from yours, Ms. Sykes, so I didn’t have far to transverse. Then, when my soul was back in my body, I hurried back here. In a taxi. Dreamseeding of civilians runs counter to our Codex, but you needed some proof of the wild claims made by Marinus the other day, and we’re at war, so I’m afraid we dreamseeded you anyway. Forgive us. Please.”
Holly’s at a nervous loss. “Who are you?”
“Me? Arkady Thaly, as of this self. Hi.”
Up in the low cloud an airplane drags itself along.
“This is our warden,” I turn to Sadaqat, “Mr. Dastaani.”
“Oh, I’m just a glorified dogsbody, really,” says Sadaqat, “and normal, like you — well, ‘normal,’ eh? Call me Sadaqat. It’s said ‘Sa-dar-cutt’ with the stress on the ‘dar.’ Think of me as an Afpak Alfred.” Holly looks none the wiser. “Alfred? Batman’s butler. I take care of 119A when my employers are away. I cook. You’re vegetarian, I am told? So are the Horologists. It’s the”—he twirls his finger in the air—“body-and-soul thing. Who’s hungry? I’ve mastered eggs Benedict with smoked tofu, a fine breakfast for a disorienting morning. Could I tempt you?”
119A’S FIRST-FLOOR GALLERY is dominated by an elliptical table of walnut wood that was here when Xi Lo bought the house in the 1890s. The chairs are mismatched, from various eras since. Pearly light enters through the three arched windows. The paintings on the long walls were gifts to Xi Lo or Holokai from the artists: a blushing desert dawn by Georgia O’Keeffe, A. Y. Jackson’s view of Port Radium, Diego Quispe Tito’s Sunset over the Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Faith Nulander’s Hooker and John in Marble Cemetery. At one end is Agnello Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. It is worth more than the building and its neighbors combined. “I know this one,” says Holly, staring at the Bronzino. “The original’s in the National Gallery, in London. I used to go and see it in my lunchbreak, when I worked at the homeless center at St. Martin in the Fields.”
“Yes,” I say. Holly doesn’t need a story about how the National’s copy and the original got switched in Vienna in 1860. Anyway, she’s moved on to the Bronzino’s unworthy companion, Self Portrait of Yu Leon Marinus, 1969. Holly recognizes the face and turns to me accusingly. I nod, sheepishly. “Absurd, of course, and sheer arrogance to hang it in this company, but Xi Lo, our founder, insisted. We keep it there for his sake.”
Sadaqat enters from the door by the astrolabe, bringing our drinks on a tray. Nobody has the stomach for eggs Benedict. He asks, “Now, where is everyone sitting?” Holly chooses the gondola chair at the end, nearest the way out. Sadaqat asks our guest, “Irish Breakfast blend, Ms. Sykes? Your mother’s Irish, I believe.”
“She was, yes,” says Holly. “That’s grand, thanks.”
Sadaqat places a matching willow-pattern teapot and teacup, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar on a mat. My green tea is brewing in a black iron teapot owned by Choudary Marinus, two selves ago. Arkady drinks coffee from a bowl. Sadaqat puts a lit candle in a stained-glass cup as a centerpiece. “To brighten the place up. It can get a little tomblike in here.”
In a parallel universe the man’s a design fascist, subsays Arkady.
“Just what we need, Sadaqat,” I say. He leaves, pleased.
Holly folds her arms. “You’d better begin. I’m too …”
“We’ve invited you here this morning,” I say, “to learn about us and our cosmology. About Atemporals and psychosoterics.”
This sounds like a business seminar, Marinus, subsays Arkady.
“Hold on,” says Holly. “You lost me at ‘Atemporals.’ ”
“Prick us, we bleed,” says Arkady, cupping his coffee bowl, “tickle us, we laugh, poison us, we die, but after we die, we come back. Marinus here has gone through this — thirty-nine lives, is it?”
“Forty, if we include poor Heidi Cross at her bungalow by the Isle of Sheppey.” I notice Holly watching me for signs of a second head or a maniacal cackle.
“I’m still a newbie,” says Arkady, “on my fifth self. Dying still really freaks me out, in the Dusk, looking over the Dunes …”
“What dusk?” asks Holly. “What dunes?”
“The Dusk,” Arkady says, “between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It’s a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which, of course, isn’t really a sea at all, but—”
“Wait wait wait.” Holly leans forwards. “You’re saying you’ve died? That you’ve seen all this yourselves?”
Arkady drinks from his coffee bowl, then wipes his lips. “Yes, Ms. Sykes, to both your questions. But the Landward Wind blows our souls back, like it or not. Back over the High Ridge, back into the Light of Day, and then we hear a noise like … a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits.” Arkady asks me, “Fair description?”
“It’ll do. Then we wake up in a new body, a child’s, usually in need of urgent repair, just vacated by its previous owner.”
“At the café,” Holly turns to me, “you said that Hugo Lamb’s lot, the Anchorites, are immortal ‘with terms and conditions.’ Are you and they the same?”
“No. We live in this spiral of resurrections involuntarily. We don’t know how, or why us. We never sought it. Our first selves died in one of the usual ways, we saw the Dusk as Arkady just described, then forty-nine days later we came back.”
“From then on,” Arkady unthreads and rethreads his ponytail, “we’re stuck on repeat. Our second body grew, matured, died; bam, we’re back in the Dusk; then, whoosh, forty-nine days later, we’re waking up back on earth — in a body of the opposite gender, just to well and truly screw your head up.”
Swearing won’t make you more credible, I subreprimand him. “What matters,” I tell Holly, “is that no one pays for our atemporality. Its cost we alone pay. Our phylum, if you will, is herbivorous.”
From the street below we hear the screech of brakes.
“So,” asks Holly, “the Anchorites are all carnivores?”
“Every last one.” Arkady runs his finger round his bowl.
Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking … vampires?”
Arkady groans. “Oh, the V-word! Here it comes again.”
“Carnivores are only metaphorically vampiric,” I tell Holly. “They look as normal, or as abnormal, as any other subset of the population — plumbers, bankers, diabetics. More’s the pity they don’t all look like David Lynch villains. Our work would be easier by far.” I breathe in the bitter green-tea steam and anticipate Holly’s next question. “They feed on souls, Ms. Sykes. Carnivores decant souls, which means abducting people, ideally children,” I hold her freshly unsettled gaze as she thinks about Jacko, “which means killing them, I’m afraid.”
“Which is not nice,” says Arkady. “So Marinus, me, and a few other unthanked individuals — Atemporals for the most part, with some mortal collaborators — make it our business to … take them down. Individual Carnivores rarely give us that much bother — they tend to think they’re the only ones, and operate as carelessly as shoplifters who refuse to believe in store detectives. The problems begin — our War started — when they hunt in a pack.”