Authors: Stephen Palmer
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic, #Cyberpunk
She explored a few rooms, keeping silent. She felt frightened. Her imagination devised things which might have made the noise, and that noise repeated in her head, lonely and eerie and lethal. The darkness seemed now to be an enemy, not an ally.
She heard a noise – a clunk. She stood rigid at the door. Outside lay a marble balcony. She peered out and saw a woman.
Some noise must have escaped Graaff-lin’s lips. The woman turned, shrieked and stepped back, hands reaching for the balustrade. A cat skreeked... then the marble gave way and the woman fell to the floor below, screaming. There was a thud, and crashing rubble.
The cat skittered away, tinkling as it did, as though wearing a collar. Graaff-lin remained still.
Silence returned.
Some minutes passed before aches in Graaff-lin’s body forced her to move. She peered down into the concourse and saw amongst marble chunks the woman, dead, her robe spread around her, metal things glinting in the torch light.
She resolved to investigate the intruder. But now she felt an overpowering need for a weapon, and she ran down the steps towards Mysrioque’s room, the room Katoh-lin had once occupied, where she found several cabinets standing charred. In one she found a heat rifle. Caring nothing for anybody else who might be in the temple, she tested it on a chair. It worked. Lights indicated seventy per cent charge.
Back in the concourse she walked up to the woman, to discover that she was a priestess of Felis.
Revulsion took her. She could not believe it – that the woman could have entered the temple – and she prayed to the Dodspaat for guidance. What had the woman done? Why was she here? Graaff-lin dared not think on this sacrilege.
The robe was made of catskins sewn together with gold wire. Around her head was a fur headband. Her clothes too were catskin, shorn of fur and dyed ginger. The repugnant symbols of her religion hung on chains around her neck; cat claws in silver, whiskers sheafed by gold bands, a foot dangling from a quartz disc. Graaff-lin stamped on these, feeling sick, closing her eyes as she spat saliva upon them before making sure they were well greened.
Scuffling sounds. She turned to see two metal-legged cats running towards her. She fired and they disintegrated into blood and steel.
Then a fit took hold of her. Her mind became hot. She wanted only to annihilate all the cats in the temple. Ordinary restraint evaporated to leave a desire such as she had never known, a desire accompanied by sweating skin, dry mouth, involuntary speeches praising herself.
She returned upstairs and began systematically to search the rooms. In the third a cat chewed a rat. She destroyed it, then screamed with joy. The omnipresent self that used to observe her, used to watch her little self to make sure she did nothing silly, or embarrassing, or wrong, this self had gone. She simply was not herself.
Another cyborgised cat jumped at her. She vaporised it. Soon she had been through half the upper rooms. She returned to the concourse and went through that; went through all the ante-chambers, all the privies, all the meditation rooms, all the pyuter booths. Three more cats were destroyed.
Then she returned to the body and vaporised that too, until the rifle’s glimmering rays faltered, went purple, and died.
She could not remember what she had done.
Then she remembered that there had been a purpose to her coming here: the acquisition of components. But since there was nothing left to salvage she knew that all she could do was to seal the temple. She ran upstairs and began barricading broken windows.
The first hints of dawn had just appeared in a cloudy sky when she finished, and it was raining softly. At the concourse front, the main doors were already barricaded. She checked the rear doors, bringing furniture up to some so they would be too difficult to force, until one last door remained, the one through which she had entered.
On this, a latch had broken. She took screws from pieces of wood, found a shard of metal with an edge, and repaired the latch. Darkness outside was receding. She did not want to spend the day inside the temple. Stepping outside, she noticed a machine chunk on the ground, which she put in her pocket. After checking her clothes and kit, she pulled the door shut. The latch clicked home. She pushed. It was firm.
Now she was exhausted. Her eyes smarted. A twenty-minute jog awaited her, and she knew that by the time she reached home, if she did, it would be light enough for people to shoot with accuracy. She ran down alleys, splashing through them, until Hog Street lay ahead. She slipped, got up, ran on. As she waded through the alleys approaching her home, pulling the strings of algae away from her thighs with gloved hands, testing the ground underwater with a pole, she heard more gunfire and then an explosion, as though dawn had heralded some grotesque hunting season. At last she saw her house. Nobody was in sight; she had heard no voices here for days. She fumbled for her card, rushed inside, and locked herself in.
CHAPTER 23
DeKray sat alone in the pyuter room of Clodhoddle Cottage. Rigs here were permanently alive, and so a message sent from the temple of the Goddess by Arrahaquen, saying that she would return with Zinina tomorrow morning, and that the abortion had succeeded, was received without difficulty.
The place was powered by three fusion batteries, rare and ancient devices not unlike those sunk deep underground to sustain Kray’s electronic networks. Above him, fans of memory had twisted around to maximise light caught from the perspex window. Some were sending out pale new modules in response to the warmth and the increased hours of daylight.
On deKray’s mind was the Cowhorn Tower. In Arrahaquen’s remarkable description of events in Gwmru, she said that she had definitely seen
his
body lying outside it. That must mean something. He and the tower were both forty years old. He knew what went on in there, but had, of course, never been inside.
Perhaps it was time to visit the tower. A weakened Zinina could not stop him.
He passed the following day pleasantly enough, chatting to Ky on the procedures used to synthesise knowledge into escape plans. The procedures were impressive – but the plans were not.
As night fell, deKray separated himself from the Holist women and in the bedroom dressed himself for Kray. He armed a needle pistol and put it into his pocket, while every item in his kit he restocked until the satchels bulged.
He still kept with him at all times the copper pear he had found in the Cemetery. Zinina knew nothing of it. It was his secret...
his
secret, for some reason he could not fathom. He placed it inside his greatcoat.
Silently, he departed the house, leaving a note.
It was a long way to the Cowhorn Tower. The route he devised would take him north, then west along the Gardens. He climbed Driftwood Passage to its northerly end, then followed Judico and Buttercup Streets through to the Old Quarter. The streets here were greened, but not so devastated as those of Westcity. Paving slabs, though cracked, were visible. Gutters were choked with leaf debris and the bodies of vermin – sometimes with the bones and decaying limbs of people – and water swirled along the streets. Many houses remained standing. DeKray walked in shadow, using every arch and passage, checking ahead for signs of life, for spent cartridges, for people strangled in the street by liana. From rooftops, deadly ropes hung, laced with nerve poison. In the rain these were difficult to see. From his kit deKray took a telescopic pole, extending it to a yard’s length and clipping to the end a circular saw in case he needed to slice something ahead.
The slime that had pelted the city after the collapse of the Citadel had around here grown into mounds like beached jellyfish. Blocked alleys formed ponds filled with reeds and bulrushes, dotted with lily leaves and stinking islands of refuse. These deKray waded through. He encountered no signs of people.
With heavy heart he paused to look back at the Citadel. No lamps burned there. He could make out cracks, and black patches as of some ghastly technological mildew.
At the top of Buttercup Street he encountered the Clocktower. Its pebbledash walls and red door were washed by rain. The digital timepiece in its summit read 30:OA:9F. DeKray blew a warding note with a blade of grass then hurried on.
The river bank took him along the western edge of the Andromeda Quarter. To his right, crickets stridulated and tropical birds and monkeys whooped. The leaves of hostas and black japonica thrummed under the worsening rain. At the Aum Bridge he left the main road, which was too choked with bushes and other foliage, and followed alleys, many now swampy with an influx of soil and debris flushed down from the hills to the north. He walked the Carmine Quarter and arrived, eventually, at the pleasure park surrounding the Cowhorn Tower.
Though it was night and raining, deKray could see that little of the city remained so far north. Across Sphagnum Street a few dwellings stood, but these were the exception. All was ruined walls, piled mortar and verdure. The streets themselves were lengths of turf edged with bladderblade and slender trees thrashing in the wind. Nocturnal frogs croaked.
He walked around the Cowhorn Tower, pausing at the place where in Gwmru Arrahaquen had found his body. Was that a depression he noticed in the grass?
All his life he had known this area, and now it seemed a foreign place, as though he were a stranger to it. Yet did some connection still exist?
Cigarette in hand, sheltering under a laburnum tree, deKray considered. This tower and the Clocktower existed in Gwmru. Of all the buildings in Kray, only these two towers seemed to be present in the land of the noophytes.
‘Hoy, hoy,’ said a voice behind him.
He span round. Two revellers, pistols and syringes in their hands, stood only yards away. They were dressed in rags and laced-up boots with steel toecaps. Both women had spiral designs tattooed upon their cheeks. In the dim light, the rain whipping across them, they looked deadly. DeKray, too shocked to feel afraid, tried to think what he should say.
‘Um . . .’
‘You armed?’ said one reveller.
If he lied now and they discovered the needle pistol, they would kill him. These were Cemetery revellers, not the wandering or the green variety, and they had their own twisted codes of honour. ‘I carry a pistol,’ he said, ‘but I intend returning now, and I shall leave you alone.’
‘Hoy!’ they laughed. ‘A mouthy peg bloom! You not gotta shouster to look after you, bulgy pants?’
‘I am alone.’
‘Chuck us y’ pinspitter now. Fire an’ y’ dead.’
DeKray, with no other option, threw his pistol to the ground. At least they were talking to him. ‘May I depart, now?’
‘Shut up. Lone peg blooms don’t have no business round here. You come with us.’
It was his masculinity they were intrigued by. A solitary man in Kray was unusual at any time, let alone at midnight. ‘Where will you take me?’ he asked as they indicated with their weapons that he should walk the path up to the Gardens.
‘To see granny.’
In silence they walked. Anything could happen. Those few insights he had received from Zinina concerning the life of the Cemetery revellers convinced him that he was in great danger, most of all from irritating or offending them in some way. The less said the better.
At the Garden gate they took an alley along the wall until they reached the southern limit of the Cemetery, where deKray was made to climb the wall and then walk on. Soon, tents started to appear between the yews and the open graves, and revellers began to peer at them. DeKray tried to make himself appear as noble as possible, as if he was important in some way. As they walked he thought of possible stories with which to save himself. From some tents came the sounds of fiddles, zithers, and reed pipes; at others, groups huddled together under canopies and drank what looked like tea.
‘Stop right there, no-bloom,’ the revellers said.
One of them entered a large tent while the other guarded him. A minute later, as curious revellers crowded round to examine him, an old woman appeared from the large tent, dressed in a gown, slippers, and a brimmed rain-hat. Cemetery revellers, who of all Kray’s peoples lived the longest, could sometimes live long enough to become grandparents. She looked unhappy about being woken up.
‘Who you, peg-artiste?’ she demanded, her voice croaky. She circled him, looking him up and down.
DeKray took his hands out of his greatcoat pockets and stood straight. Time to bluff. ‘I come to you from the temple of the Goddess. I used to reside there. Now I come to deliver a message from glorious Taziqi, and then return.’
‘Oh aye? Whassa green fatty want wi’ me, huh?’
‘There have been minor conflicts between your people and Taziqi’s, have there not?’ That was a guess. ‘It is time for them to stop. Taziqi promises not to come near you in return for peace from your side. I am commanded to say that any message you wish to give is to be returned by me.’
The grandmother chuckled. ‘Come ’nside me cloth, young snapper, an’ we’ll see.’
DeKray was led into the tent; the odour of incense heavy in the air. Carpets lay everywhere. One desk and one couch, obviously used as a bed, were the only pieces of furniture, but there were many plates with crumbs on them and pitchers of liquid standing around. DeKray sat when the grandmother pointed to the floor. She lit an incense stick.
‘So, the fat green mama wants peace, huh? Hoy, that’s a near fish maker. You gotta smart face, coming here gone midnight and spending me time lightly! Wanna die?’
‘No,’ deKray replied. ‘I respect you completely. I am merely the vessel of the temple of the Goddess.’
DeKray felt dizzy. He concentrated on the grandmother’s words. ‘A peg bloom comes here,’ she mused, ‘and mouths lichen slime at me? Seems a bit manky to me, an’ I’m not one for spinning around and looking here and there like a gormless sop.’
‘Um...’ DeKray felt his head become heavy. His eyelids... they closed. He tried to wake up, but couldn’t.
‘And me with hundreds, hoy, good as thousands of shousters to care for and say the graves can be dug, or not. Seems bad and knacky to me...’
~
It was cold. A wind blew about him. He was tied to something.
The night had been chased away by his drugged sleep, and now it was dawn. Drizzle was falling. DeKray stood bound by leather straps to an object behind him.
Dressed only in leggings and shirt, he was alone in the open space beside the grandmother’s tent. Revellers glanced at him; he called to them, but they ignored him.
He twisted to see where he was, and jumped from shock, abrading his skin on the straps. He was tied to a pole made of heads. Hundreds of varnished heads had been made – coagulated – into a great column twice as tall as him. From its top, smoke emerged; was it hollow? Dead and preserved eyes glared at him. He turned and hollered again, trying to get a reveller, any reveller, to come and talk, but they paid him no attention. Cold from standing soaked in the wind, he tugged and struggled, but he had been well tied. Calming himself, he wondered if he was to be sacrificed. Some revellers, Zinina had said, worshipped a repellent, chthonic goddess Eskhthonatos, the shovel-headed harridan of the underlands, who supposedly lived in great caverns dug by troglodytic pyutons at the dawn of the ancient world. DeKray, believing none of this, was terrified by the sight of the pole, and the almost nonchalant revellers around him.
Then he noticed the grandmother approaching him, three revellers dressed in black at her side. ‘So,’ she said, standing only a yard from him, ‘you’s come back from lethey, huh? Still fancy y’sel as a peg from the green mama, huh? No-bloom! You got no brain and no life.’
‘Wait!’ deKray called as they turned away. He was desperate to keep talking, for in talking lay his only hope. ‘I am not an enemy of yours. I am a friend. I know much of the reveller life. I admit I carry no message. I see that you realise that. But I live with one of your kind, and I understand you.’ DeKray felt he had to make himself one of them, if only for a few moments, so that they might untie him.
‘Hah!’ they replied, spitting on the grass and grinding the mucus into the soil with their boot heels. ‘No likely!’
‘It is true. My friend is Zinina, a very close friend–’
Had they straightened at the mention of her name? Was it possible they remembered her?
‘Yes, Zinina is my friend,’ he continued, feeling that in Zinina he possessed his only link with these barbaric people. ‘I know her well. She has versed me accurately in your folkways.’
But the four revellers walked away, and all the shouting and struggling that deKray then tried was in vain.
A mist swept across the campsite. It smelled sweet, as if emanating from the citrus groves atop the cliffs, and soon became a fog so thick deKray could see nobody. Sound was dulled.
Something moved at his wrists and ankles. Knowing the end was at hand, he struggled, heart thumping, terrified of a knife slipped between his ribs; and then he fell forward. The straps thudded to the ground. He crawled away from the pole of heads, looking around, awaiting the strike; but there was nothing. He ran away from the tents into the bushes behind the pole, grabbing a stick to prod the ground before him.
The mist cleared. He saw a shadow and lurched away from it. He froze, hearing voices to his left and right. Where could he go? No choice but to move forward. He saw the shadow of a gravestone before him, and, thinking to hide by it, approached. Clothes had been slung across it.
His clothes. His boots, hat, and his beloved greatcoat, which still retained in its lapel the thick copper pin that he had owned all his life. Astonished, forgetting the peril around him, he picked them up and felt them, checking their condition. They seemed unharmed. In the inside pocket of his greatcoat he found the copper pear, his pocketbook, and even two packets of menthol sweets. Nothing stolen.
Within minutes he was dressed for the city. Now he knew he had to move. For whatever reason, he had escaped. Perhaps some reveller had taken pity on him. Perhaps some vermin had chewed his straps.
But he ran, looking over his shoulder when he could to verify that nobody chased, using bushes and the trunks of yews as cover, dodging open graves, circumnavigating mausoleums and the ruins of marble domes, until he found himself at the south-western gate of the Cemetery. He ran back down to the Cowhorn Tower.
Two figures with some beast on a leash stood in the pleasure park. A bark, a shout, and he was spotted.
But as he ran, and they closed, he recognised the voice. It was Zinina. He turned. Pulled along by the huge dog, falling then dragged, Zinina and Qmoet stumbled up to him. Zinina rushed up. Expecting a hug, deKray smiled. Instead, blows rained upon him.
‘You idiot!’ she screamed. ‘What were you doing? Where have you been?’
Qmoet tried to calm her. ‘Zin, don’t chuck your fists, eh?’
He clutched her arms, managing to calm her. ‘I merely needed to explore this area,’ he said. ‘But I am quite safe.’
She sniffed at his coat; then grabbed his shirt and sniffed at that, too. The dog, a beast the size of a pony with a skin ten sizes too large and the biggest, wettest nose deKray had ever seen, tried to copy her, depositing drool over deKray’s clothes. Its tail wagged like the rotor of a fan.