King of Morning, Queen of Day (50 page)

She stands by the emergency exit, unable to act. Her hand rests on a rectangular protrusion on the wall. What?
In case of fire…

It had worked for Paul Newman in
Torn Curtain.

She whips out the
tachi,
shatters the glass with a blow of the
tsuba.

Never underestimate the power of fear. Spirits are
c
ontagious, Sleeping may be passed on. Yawning may be passed on, Fear may be passed on.

“Fire! Fire!” Bells begin to ring. “Fire!”

The crowd shrieks and surges, wheels to look at itself, ask itself questions, wheels again toward the exits.

“Fire! Fire!” The warehouse goes up in one great scream as the spirit of panic passes from person to person: Fire! Fire! They scream, pointing at flames that do not exist yet which they can clearly see. She sees Saul’s face swirled away through the storm of mythlines in the blind rush for the exits, sees feet catch on Phaedra’s Marie Antoinette crinoline and pull her down, down, under the trampling feet. The alarm bells ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and ring. Enye leaps up onto the stage, fastens the computer to her
obi,
draws the
katana.

The girl dancer applauds slowly.

Enye pushes up her mask.

The guitarist sets down his backpack. Behind him, the Warped Ones fret at their confinement. The stage area is the dead eye of a cyclone of mythlines. The guitarist takes off his mirror shades.

Pale skin covers the sockets where eyes should be.

She understands why she could not find them. She could not find them because, like her, their control is conscious. They leave no footprints in the unsurface of the Mygmus, set no mythlines trembling with their passage because they are so fully subsumed into the world.

The warehouse is empty. Even the crushed and trampled have been taken away.

Enye shifts her hold on the
katana
to the light, floating, intentionless grip taught by the Masters.

In that momentary shift of spirits, the gateway opens. The Things spill out onto Earth. And the girl attacks. Fast. So fast. Cartwheeling across the stage. Enye cuts, grip still unsettled. The sword draws blood only from air. The dancer tucks and tumbles over the blade. A blast of pain, a kick, the
tachi
goes spinning from her hand.

The dancer lands on her feet, hands on hips.

Enye thinks her wrist is
broken.

The falling shadow alerts her. She rolls for the
tachi
as the guitar falls. It strikes splinters from the wooden staging. The guitar has extruded blue steel blades from its body.

She barely sees the kick coming, rolls with it just fast enough to avoid a broken neck.
Stomach.
She must protect her stomach, protect the child. She slashes out with the
katana. Never slash. Cutting is strong, slashing is weak, desperate.
A crash. A detonation of two hundred-watt bulbs. She must have knocked over a stage-level lighting battery. A smell of burning: hot bulb, the usual back-of-the-monitors litter of paper cups, burger boxes, is smouldering. Wielding the blade-studded guitar like an axe by its machine-head, the eyeless boy advances on her. He does not need eyes to see. He can see her quite clearly by the light of the Mygmus. Blade rings on steel. Enye recovers, uses the Body Strike to fling the eyeless one back across the stage. The pin spots swing and play across the battle. Enye reaches out for her
tachi.
A bare foot deftly kicks the short sword away, comes down on her wrist. Framed by the shock of peroxide hair, the girl looks down at Enye with immense curiosity. Bare foot draws back for killing kick to neck… She back-flips away from the blade in Enye’s free hand, singing down through the air, crouches, hands and feet flat on the staging, like an animal. The blind guitarist has regained his feet. Enye stands between them.

Across the abandoned dance floor, between the drinkables eatables sniffables smokables, the Things move: things like an ambulatory toadstool covered in hair. Things like a woman dressed in the severely cut grey suit Kim Novak wore in
Vertigo,
except that where Kim Novak’s head should be is a single enormous eyeball. Things that look like a dwarf in chain mail with a cannon for a head. Things like a pair of bagpipes walking upon three grasshopper legs… From another world entirely, the Doppler wail of fast-approaching fire engine sirens. The smell of burning is no wishful thinking. A wisp of smoke. A tongue of flame. Fire. Real fire.

Enye uncoils the computer lead from her
obi,
connects it to the
katana.

The girl dancer grins and purses her lips in poisoned kisses at the sight of the disruptor glyphs anointing the sword.

The eyeless boy launches himself across the stage.

“Tō!”
She gathers her spirit into one Void-timed “fire and stones” cut: hands, body, spirit, blade, all cutting strongly, rhythmically together. The
katana
shears through the neck of the guitar, encounters the truss rod and is blocked. The back-shock almost knocks the blade from Enye’s grip. Glyphs fountain into the neon air. Enye struggles to extricate her weapon. The blind one grins, moves his guitar to trap her blade. She feels the displaced air as the dancer comes tumbling toward her. The girl catches hold of a lighting boom, swings, lands legs locked around Enye’s neck. Nylon-smooth thighs crush her windpipe. Enye can hear the girl’s breath, panting, excited, in her ears as long, chrome-polished nails seek out the pressure points in her neck and squeeze.

White pain fountains up through her brain; flame, smoke spins around her, but the dumb, mindless motor nerves keep tugging tugging tugging, trying to tear her
katana
free. The air is fire in her lungs. Her blood is molten lead. She can feel the neurons burning and snapping, one by one. She is dying…

With the end of her strength she tears the
katana
free from the guitar. The blind one swings his axe in the middle attitude cut. With the dancer choking the last scraps of life from her, Enye reverses her grip on the
katana.

“Ya!”

She drives the blade upward, at her enemy’s head. Howling, the dancer grabs a roof-mounted fold-back monitor and swings away. The warehouse is ringed by the woo-woo sirens and pulsing blue lights of Emergency Services. Cutting to left and right, Enye leaps from the stage into the roaring wall of mythlines, darts between the shuffling Things to recover the
tachi.
The dancer crouches on top of a speaker stack. From her hair, where they have been acting as ornaments, she produces two sets of blades connected to a bar gripped in the fist. Twenty centimetres of steel times six glitters between her knuckles.

With a bird cry, she leaps from the stack over the burning front of the stage, arms spread, blades poised.

And with the perfect timelessness of the masters, Enye cuts her in two with the middle attitude stroke. One cut.

You can win with certainty with the spirit of one cut, for it is the strategy that comes from the heart.

Before the radiance of the dancer’s dissolution has died away, Enye has vaulted onto the stage. The Shekinah is a great anthem within. She advances through the whirlwind of mythlines. The blind guitarist raises his weapon, but Enye can see his spirit. He retreats before her until he reaches the other speaker stack. Then he can retreat no farther. Enye rests, reading the time, reading her body and spirit. She disconnects the computer. The glyphs fail and fade. She hefts the
katana
in her left hand. Hurls it.

The guitarist moves to deflect the blow.

Slow. Too slow. Too, too slow.

The sword pins him to a speaker, the blade a line of steel entering just to the left of his nose, exiting through the back of the skull. The thin ichor of the Mygmus-born leaks from the hideous wound, but still he does not die. He does not die because he has never lived. Enye is upon him in a flicker of movement. Short and quick. She can hear the firemen and policemen taking up station around the warehouse. Glyph-light and fireglow illuminate the faces of the woman and the phagus. She plugs the lead from the Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi into the socket mounted on the
katana,
poises her finger over the
Enter
key. The flames go up behind her.

“Do not think that because we are the last, we are the only ones,” he whispers. “Others will come; others will always come, until you face the Adversary. You have won the battle, but the war is not yet ended.”

“Nice speech,” says Enye. The blast momentarily outshines the light of the fire and the banked spots and strobes.

The fire burns hot. The windows crack and shatter in the heat. The smoke tries to choke her, but the Shekinah burns hotter. It touches the edge of her talent and ignites it. With its vision she sees her talent go forth from her, like a great breaking wave, like the ever-breaking hollow of the Deep Sea Wave in the print by Hokusai. She sees the disease-coloured light from that other place beyond the gateway break against it, and fail, and fade. Her talent goes forth from her and it is like a wall, or a rushing mighty wind, halting the Warped Ones in their advance, driving them back, centimetre by centimetre, driving against the power thundering from the Gateway. Its power seems irresistible but little by little, centimetre by centimetre, she drives them back, the Kim Novak thing and the lung thing and the dwarf thing and all the other things that lie within the imagining of humanity, back into the Gateway, back out of the world into the place they have come from.

With the final dregs of her strength, she seals the Gateway and smoothes it away and it is as if it had never been.

As the emergency services people come smashing through the doors with their axes and pneumatic jacks, Enye resheathes her swords and escapes through a window and up onto the roof. While the boys in blue are otherwise occupied, she makes good her escape down the ice-bound fire escape. It catches up with her in the car. She slumps over the Citroen’s steering wheel. Hers is the only vehicle in the car park. The slashed roof is incongruous, and cold, though it is not from the cold that she is shivering. She watches the firemen go up their extending ladders to fight the flames that are beginning to lap from the windows. High-pressure hoses knock in the remaining panes of glass. She hopes Elliot has good insurance. Everyone is looking up. Good. She turns on the ignition.

And a cold cold knife turns in her womb.

She cannot breathe. Cannot think. Cannot do anything but lie helpless, paralysed in the car seat as the cold cold knife slowly disembowels her. It is worse, much worse, much much worse, than the pain the dancer inflicted on her, for there she was afraid she was going to die and here she is afraid she is not going to die. Slowly, slowly, the pain eases. She can think. She can act. Fat drops of sweat roll slowly, slowly down her forehead despite the cold in the car. She has bitten her tongue; the brassy taste of blood fills her mouth. She stumbles toward the flashing blue lights of fire police ambulance.

“Help me! God, help me!”

Sparks shoot upward from the conflagration. The ambulances with their pulse-rotating lights and fluorescent orange stripes are light-years away.

“Help! Me! I think I’m having a miscarriage!”

Figures in Night-Glo yellow vests are turning. Too far. Too slow. Too late. Out of the night, the knife comes tearing with gleeful, vindictive Joy; tearing open her womb and sending her crashing to the frost-patched blacktop.

She doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when after a night of tea and tests and trans-sonic scans the gynaecologist (why do gynaecologists always wear bow ties?) pronounces that baby, if not mother, is hale and hearty.

“I can go home?”

“You can go home, if you’re careful. The slightest twinge of anything like this again, you come see us. And no more warehouse parties.”

The fat friendly nurse with the country accent slips her a card with the address of a Women’s Centre on it.

“Leave the bastard,” she whispers. “I don’t care who he is, what he says, you can’t allow him to do things like that to you. There’s always someone here.” Then, in her professional voice, “Are you staying for lunch? It’s pork casserole.”

A tall, ectomorphic teenager who is supposed to have swallowed a toothbrush saunters into the ward, stares at Enye’s black, hard bruises.

“I think I’ll give it a miss all the same,” says Enye.

She knows what she is to do now.

The taxi leaves her at the end of L’Esperanza Street. On the first day of the new year she walks past the black iron palings and the high-gloss polyurethane doors and the brass knockers.

She stops dead.

Outside number twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street, like a fragment of the previous night fallen into today, are pulse-rotating blue lights, fluorescent orange stripes, static-blurred snatches of voices on radios.

The police.

The front door of number twenty-seven lies open. A woman officer is standing beside Mr. Antrobus’s memorial. By her side is Omry. Two uniformed officers and a plainclothesman emerge from the front door. The uniformed officers are carrying the paraphernalia of her Shekinah factory. The plainsclothesman holds up two plastic Zip-Loc bags, shakes his head.

The woman officer escorts Omry into one of the police cars.

Neighbours peep from behind net curtains, careful not to be seen lest that be mistaken for an admission of complicity.

Enye turns around and walks away. Bursts of police communications crackle from the prowl cars. Engines start and purr. All it takes is for one neighbour to shout, or call. A pointing finger would be more than enough.

She glances over her shoulder.

Two of the three police cars are moving off. One unmarked vehicle remains to await her return. The two cars approach her. Omry is in the backseat between two woman officers.

Enye walks faster.

Faster.

Do not run.

If you run, they will get you for certain.

One of the entries to the laneway that runs along the backs of the gardens is a matter of metres away.

One step at a time. Like the journey of a thousand miles.