Theatre of the Gods Read online

  And yet …

  *

  Her death is incomplete. For if you would happen to walk up to that silvery block, put a hand upon the ice, or (for the heavens forbid) put your ear to it, you would hear, faintly, the knocking of a living heart.

  Tests reveal that the girl has been suspended in the ice for as little as ten thousand average human life spans, and as many as a million. The royal physicians thaw her slowly, slowly, as word drips and trickles out around the Empire, passing from lip to lip in ghastly croaks. ‘A girl. Frozen in ice but not dead! It is an omen, most certainly. The end is coming!’ Each day an inch of water pools around the foot of the physicians’ steel table, and every drop is kept, because these doctors know it can be put in bottles and sold to the wealthy for unholy sums.

  As the ice falls away, as the bergs shatter on the hard tiles, the heart beats soft and regular, the outline grows distinct, those fine, small features, the slightly pointy nose, the large and limpid eyes … open … and that sickly green complexion. One day she lies before them on the table, fully thawed, and they can see her breathing fast and shallow. She smells of roses (the thorns, not the petals). These men of science are aghast. ‘Is she even human?’

  One evening, just as the night nurse has finished her checks, when the whole annexe is quiet, she turns to the basin to wash her hands, then turns back to find the girl standing there before her, hair afloat, eyes ablaze. The scream is heard throughout the complex. In the morning the nurse has vanished. She has fled the clinic, the hospital, gone back to her home world. She will later be committed to an asylum and live out her days freezing crickets into cubes of ice.

  *

  She stands but a few feet tall in her hunting boots. She wears a handsome hunting coat. The greatest physicians of the Empire arrive and line up to examine her. They bring instruments. None can explain her origin, or how she survived the ice. ‘She is made entirely from meat!’ exclaims Dr Racosta. The girl points to Racosta’s right coat pocket and giggles. He is cajoled into removing a cupcake wrapped in a silk napkin. ‘I am, I am the talisman,’ she brightly burbles at the startled master-surgeon. This alien creature knows their communal language, the Internomicon. Or she has absorbed it in a few days just by hearing it spoken.

  After a thorough examination – to which she submits with a terrifying serenity – she is declared fit and normal (though the cruel ice has robbed her vision). While being examined by a famous doctor called Mexisi, the girl turns to him and burbles, ‘You treat me so roughly, you do, Mexisi.’ ‘You are my patient and I will treat you however I like,’ declares Mexisi. ‘Now I must take some of your blood.’ The girl says nothing. Her blood is palest purple. The needle leaves a pretty violet bruise. The doctor holds the vial up to the light, laughs, his hand glints; outside the spheres outshine the stars, and twelve hours later Mexisi falls dead from heart failure.

  *

  It is discovered that this girl has a phenomenal sense of smell. She can describe to a person what the last soul they met had for breakfast just by the faint traces of breath left on their skin.

  There are calls for a royal audience, but the Queen, a jealous kind, declines to visit. ‘I am not in the habit of meeting my prisoners, no matter how phenomenal.’

  The Empire works itself into a frothy mess. Who is this girl? Where did she come from? How did she get here? How is it that she can appear to be human, yet have no mechanical parts? No human, except the Pope, is made entirely from meat. She is called a ‘Miracle’, a ‘Saint’, ‘Our Lady’, although the name that seems to catch alight is ‘Vengeance’.

  She is the Vengeance. ‘Here is the one who will restore our imperial honour. Though our foes are everywhere, she will protect us. If she can have revenge on a doctor who insults her, imagine what she can do to our enemies!’ they seem to cry. ‘The heavens have chosen us to furnish this gift upon. Vengeance is ours!’

  The Vengeance is bemused. ‘What nonsense do they say. That Mexisi was as old as the moons.’

  *

  Whipped raw by public pressure, the Queen at last agrees to visit. She is flown to the security complex by private airship. She comes in on a 15,000-year-old silver chair and dismounts slowly, stands crooked before the girl; her pink gums glisten, her eyes are wet and wild. But mercifully the girl can’t see the awful face afloat before her. Though she can sense the things that delight her visitor. ‘Love you the blackberry?’ she whispers. ‘Wish that I could taste some.’

  The Queen licks her lips, audibly, but says nothing.

  The following day ten thousand blackberries are delivered to the suite, though they are as rare as a newborn’s teeth. Most rot before the girl can eat them.

  *

  The months too rot away. The Vengeance sits in her small, sterile apartment as a stream of doctors, dignitaries and well-wishers file through to take, in order: her blood, her blessing, her picture. Though it is not recorded in the archives of the Empire, or in any of the public newspapers, or anywhere but a few low sources, three attempts are made on her life in that year. The first, an attempted poisoning, fails thanks to the girl’s fine nose. A single drop of ‘odourless’ plasma hidden beneath the skin of a fragrant apple leaps out at her with the power of a kick. The second, a noxious gas released through the ventilation system of her rooms, kills her guards and keeps her deathly sick for a month. A pair of exploding shoes go off while being transferred to her quarters, killing their carrier and dismembering another hapless guard. No one knows which agency would want her dead, or why, or why they chose shoes to do it. The guard around her apartment is expanded to become a small army. She is allowed no more visitors.

  I am, I am the talisman.

  *

  A year after her discovery, the girl disappears.

  It happens at the Worlds’ Fair – the greatest symposium of science and industry ever held among the common empires. She is invited as a guest for a starlight charity celebrity dinner at the Elektrotek Ballroom to honour the winner of the 3,145th Beauty of the Universe Pageant. She is brought there in a heavily armoured cargo ship, in the company of a battle fleet. The Elektrotek Ballroom is surrounded by ten thousand troops. Not even a fly can enter without first being scanned and her possessions searched. It is as much security as is given to queens, or to the Pope of the Holy Neon Empire. And yet it is not enough. If you read official accounts you will find a bold and gory story: a team of heavily armed assailants, a terrible battle, many guards dead, the Vengeance vanished.

  But read the classified report presented by the Ministry of Secrets and you’ll learn that there was no great battle. There was a lone assailant, a single low-yield bomb which failed to incinerate its target, one small explosion. In the chaos the girl simply walked out of the grand ballroom, through the dead and dying guests, past the soldiers choking in the smoke and heat, and into the wide, wide universe.

  Where she went after that is a grand mystery.

  The navy is mobilised, every merciless agency of the Empire called to task – the Special Police, Black Ops, the Imperial Postal Service – all powers are given to the state machine to search, seize, interrogate. This girl is extremely dangerous, the official reports say, and should not be approached. Grave threats are issued. Then offers of reward. Then threats again. But nothing works. The greatest treasure in the universe has melted away, and not one of all the countless trillion souls who live within the Empire seem to have the faintest idea where to look for the small green girl who is made entirely of meat, who came, perhaps, from another dimension, and who smells of raw new roses (the thorns, not the petals.)

  *

  There is one more event worth mentioning here. A long, long time before the appearance of the viridescent girl, a team of oil prospectors found another vessel in deepest space. This was a one-berth saucer capsule of unusual design. When the prospectors opened the saucer they found a lone, male traveller – delirious, emaciated, lost inside the black nest of his beard, but alive. The man said, ‘I am M. Francisco F
abrigas, and I am here!’

  The man, who claimed to be an explorer, also claimed, extraordinarily, to have explored his way from another universe. No one believed him, of course. As the people of this Empire pointed out, he had left them just a few months earlier on a mission to the next universe. He became a laughing stock; ‘Time’s Fool’. And it stayed that way until two encounters in deepest space. The first, terrifying enough; the second, far too terrifying for those involved.

  BOOK ONE

  It starts with oil. Oil in the air, in a deathly cloud partway between a drizzle and a fog. Oil underfoot, in sickly pools, in dull rainbows on the surface of the murky puddles, sticky drops ka-platting on the steel catwalks, on the armoured helmets, on the felt ship-hats, on the heads of cackling babies, on the snouts of ragged dogs. In Carnassus it had always been and always will be; the sign that stands at the gates is coated in rich, buttery oil …

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE AIRPORT OF CARNASSUS. PUBLIC PERSONS WHO VENTURE PAST THIS POINT DO SO AT THEIR GREATEST PERIL.

  Black blood running in veins along the steel letters. Oil running down the poles and chains. Oil on the hands and in the brain. Oil running down the chin and down the neck. Oil wetting the gears of limbs and organs, beading brightly on the beards and lashes. This oil greases up the crashing blades and torture racks the Empire builds to make her prisoners sing and die. It wets the throats of thirsty cannons pointing at the gates and walls of traitor cities. Oil powers up the death fleets, it flares from the torn stomachs of the ships, it turns the darkness into daylight, it creeps silently up wicks in lamps along the dormitories of the factories and workhouses. It illuminates the faces of the hungry children. It burns inside the ancient lamp that leans above the quivering eyelids of the Queen. These are the end times, people say. Soon there won’t be any oil. The Queen sent her elite Black Squadron under the radar screen of the refinery at Manchurious IV. Now the oil there is hers. For now. The Vangardiks attacked the oil-rich mega-comet Odessa, deposed the brutal Vascemon Vascemi, and installed their own tame dictator. And on Zapotek, the city at the centre of the universe, the battle for another kind of oil continues: the oil of forgetting; the oil of dreams. The Vangardiks have blockaded the Morphium routes in an effort to deprive their enemy of this ancient tonic. In dark dens across the Holy Neon Empire, in the crooked pipes of lonely fools, the last of this dreadful oil burns. There is a sense of approaching catastrophe all around the Cosmosphere.

  In Carnassus you would not know it. In Carnassus it has always seemed as if the universe was ending; ending in a towering wave of oil. Oil. Everywhere. Oil in the air. Joyful oil underfoot, in lovely pools, in perfect rainbows on the surface of puddles. Hopeful oil. Oil running over grimly muscled hands. Oil in the hair, in the beard. Oil making every face in the port of Carnassus shine horribly. Oil keeping their joints, their spines, even the lids of their wrinkled, weary eyes well greased. Oil giving breath. Oil keeping every atom of the Empire moving. Oil coming out and coming in, like a tide, like a breathing. Oil, the reason for life, and for leaving.

  BLACK STEEL IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS

  Since the day M. Francisco Fabrigas had wriggled free of his oily red rag to tell the executioner that his cannon was jammed and was about to explode, ripping him and his whole squad to bloody chunks, killing a number of innocent bystanders (a maid, two water carriers, a monk, ten baby birds), but leaving its intended victim (M. Francisco Fabrigas) unscathed, he had been dogged by a single word. It followed where he went, it licked at his earhole. Even as he shot through the steaming alleys of Carnassus he could hear it scuttle from the shadows, snuffle at his heels, vanish into the gloom.

  ‘Wizard.’

  Of all the insults: to be called a tugger of rabbits, a stroker of wands, he who glowers in the darkness, whose only friends are the owl, the smoke, the mirror, the beard.

  ‘Pah!’

  The old-beard flew down Blackgate Avenue and on towards the Ten Bells, his eyes boiling away the air, the smoke and ash curling behind him in ghostly ciphers. He was here to catch a pilot. It had all been arranged. This time they would trap him. He could see a number of pilots. One lay unconscious on a mound of morphium rags, mouth gaping, steel knuckles dimpling a puddle of oily water. Another was propped up in a doorway with a sign: ‘Dead Broke. Please Catch Me.’ But these were not the sorts of pilots he was looking for. He swung left into Smell-Feast Row. To the right, where St Stigmata’s Shambles takes you tumbling into the Fathoms, the great slums of the city, was a sign …

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE AIRPORT OF CARNASSUS. PUBLIC PERSONS WHO VENTURE PAST THIS POINT DO SO AT THEIR GREATEST PERIL. THIS WAY LIES HARM, DEATH AND MADNESS.

  ARRIVALS →

  DEPARTURES ←

  ENQUIRIES/LOST LUGGAGE →

  He went straight on. He felt the tunnels enfold him like a serpent’s gullet, the black iron wet with oil, the pouring steam vents, the women bent low across their fires, the urchins nipping around like reef fish, darting out of the shadows to snap at wallets, pearls and watches, dipping out of reach of flailing constables. And the merchants, back beyond the boundaries of the light, as still and blue as drowned men.

  Wizard.

  Wizard.

  Wizard.

  The wizard is here – in this very port!

  It wasn’t always wizard. Sometimes it was ‘varlet’, or ‘sorcerist’, or ‘man-witch’, or ‘wand-fondler’, but it amounted to the same: the idea that he lived a life of ignorance and superstition. ‘Call me anything!’ the old-beard would often cry, even when no one in the universe had broached the subject. ‘Scoundrel! Nut-hook! Buffenapper! Flesh-bot! Man-baiter!’ (He could go on listing them for hours.) But wizard! The shadiest trickster. The one who closets himself in pretend schools to play with sticks and perfect the pointless art of turning men into chickens.

  ‘This universe has enough chickens!’ he shouted at a poor soup lady. The lady stepped quickly back inside her hut, and took her chicken with her.

  Now he turned left into Broken Cross Lane where the blue sparks from the steel merchants’ hammers sparkled brightly in his beard, then left onto Wormswood Street. (If you should turn left again you’d be in Teddy Bear Row, a long lane of workhouses where the poor children slave to sort luggage, make ship’s biscuits, stitch slippers for the weary long-haul travellers. Right was Morphium Row, where many passed the dreamy hours between connecting ships. Right again was the Connections Lobby, a horizonless plaza where a sea of souls waited for announcements for flights they might have only dreamed of. There were people here, it was said, who had arrived with their families as infants, who now were elderly, their families dead. ‘You might be better off,’ some locals said, ‘on Morphium Row.’ ‘Come, come with me. I know a man. He’ll give you sofa for an hour for free. He’ll tell you when your flight connects. Come, come into the Fathoms.’)

  Fabrigas had seen the dens, smelled the sweat and acrid smoke, heard the dreamy wails of dying men who’d forsaken the stars for a sunless cellar.

  He gunned his board and rode into Cannons Street. As he eased across the iron grate he saw, below, a newborn cannon, burning orange as it was lifted carefully from its bath. He felt the heat lift his cloak, he felt the breath of a memory of the day he’d stood before the cannon, the day he’d wormed free of his red rag to tell the general that his device had been loaded incorrectly. It was at that moment that his destination in life had changed. It had been his making, and his unmaking.

  Wizard.

  The wizard is here! He came right on past my store!

  Word had spread like the slum-blazes that sometimes erupt through these oily passages.

  ‘Young Fabrigas stared into the black eye of the cannon and read its mind!’ people had said. ‘He truly is a great wizard!’ they’d shouted.

  ‘I do not believe in majick!’ the old man cried. Two fortune-tellers turned and squinted as he passed; the breeze from his cloak made their cards take flight. His voice woke two sailors sleeping tenderly in each
other’s arms. A man came from the shadows with a knife. ‘Begone, fool!’ yelled Fabrigas, and the man stepped back, for he was elderly, almost blind, and had only wanted to offer him a slice of mango.

  Fabrigas turned right into Breaktooth Street and saw the Ten Bells swimming in the fog. His pilot was here somewhere in this port, he hoped, and this time they would be ready for him.

  *

  Carnassus: Gateway to the Empires, named for the baron found hanging from a gantry on his seventieth birthday because he could no longer bear to look upon the monster he’d created. The iron core of the city was once the crypt to an extinct empire: that of Her Majesty Queen Arcadmius IX. Millions were entombed here in a honeycomb of vacuum chambers. When Princess Malvia III died of ennui she was placed here, still clutching her dead lover’s paintbrush and her husband’s sword. When half her family fell to laughing plague they were buried therein, the hideous grins still locked upon their faces. When the old mega-crypt was turned over to the Royal Transit Authority, the fleshless legion it contained was roughly woken from its slumbers. The new owners stacked layers of slum housing on the crypt. On that they bolted shipyards, naval depots, the great airport, and from that sprang the many million cranes and gantries, and from one such gantry swung the Baron Carnassi: because the poor man could no longer bear to see the endless ships full of strangers coming in; the coral growth of steel expanding into the velveteen blackness. Also, he was depressed.

  The airport is not only ridden with old bones, but ghosts as well. The ghost of Princess Malvia III. The ghost of Baron Carnassi. The ghosts of lost travellers. The ghosts, some say, weep black, oily tears.