Camera Obscura (16 page)

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Authors: Lavie Tidhar

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THIRTY-THREE
Lord of Light
 
 
The silence lay between them, as heavy as a gun. She said, "How long ago…?"
  He said, "It is only a story. It happened long ago, in another time and place."
  "I hardly knew my parents," she said, not knowing where the words came from. "I came on the ship. My father died in the war–"
  "Which war?"
  She shrugged, a helpless gesture. "It was not an important one. It did not justify having its own name."
  "Most wars are forgotten," he said. "And most of the dead."
  She said, "My mother was with me on the ship… I remember the waves crashing against the hull. I remember being very sick. She was with me… Then, one day, she wasn't there. And then we arrived in this new continent, this new alien world, where people had pale skins and spoke an alien tongue. And I was alone."
  "But you survived."
  She said, "I had to."
  Master Long stirred. She had not realised how still he was – as still as an automaton, she thought. He said, "And now you work for them."
  "For the machines," she said. He looked at her for a long time. "The world may have been a very different place," he said at last, "without the presence of either lizards or thinking machines… Whether it would have been better or worse, though, I cannot say."
  She let it pass. She said, "What happened to the boy? From your story?"
  He smiled, though there was sadness in it. "Centuries later," Master Long said, "the boy's people conquered Chung Kuo, the land of the Han. Then they fell back into their old ways. They still roam the desert, still raise camels and cows."
  "And the boy?"
  "It is said," Master Long said, and smiled, and his single eye glittered, "that he journeyed for many years, beyond a mortal's life, and found at last an isolated place in the high mountains and stayed there. And though he grew up he never grew old, and he communed with the Emerald Buddha, and learned much that was hidden, and practised wushu and Qinggong, the way of light…"
  "What was his name then?" she said, and the old man shook his head. "Who can remember?" he said. "It is told that a man who was not exactly a man had lived in the mountains and there, over the years, others had found him, and came to learn with him. It became a monastery, of a sort, and its name was Shaolin. But these are only legends, and there had been many such places over the centuries, followers of the Emerald Buddha – for it is told that the Buddha is asleep, and had been for thousands of years, but that one day it would wake and change the world. I once spoke with a woman who told me there are many worlds, all lying close to each other. It is said the Emerald Buddha is a key, a way to open doors between the worlds. The orders of the Jianghu were formed to guard it, to keep it sleeping. There is great danger when two alien worlds meet."
  She thought of what he said and they sat together in silence, the tall Dahomey woman and the short Master Long. "What happened three years ago?" she said.
  "The Change," he said. "Yes… you ask good questions, none of which I have answers to. Perhaps the fat man you are seeking can answer that one."
  One moment he was sitting down. The next he was on his feet, and offering her his hand, though she did not see him move. "But it is too late now, or too early. The sun is climbing once again into the sky, and you should sleep."
  She took his hand. He pulled her up to her feet. "I have to keep going," she said. "I have to find–"
  "The answers will wait," Master Long said. "They have waited long enough, after all. Rest, and tomorrow you shall have your answers – though at what cost even I do not know. But we will help, as much as we can."
  "An old magician told me I would be…" She swayed on her feet. She was suddenly so tired she could barely stand. "I would meet a tall dark stranger and go on a long journey… Are you that stranger?"
  Master Long laughed. "I am not exactly tall," he said.
  "And he said…" She swayed again. Her eyes were closing, the darkness closing in. "He said, a weapon won't be enough. That I should… I should have to
become
a weapon. What do you think he meant?"
  But there was no longer any answer, or if there was, she could not hear it. Her eyes closed and wouldn't open again, and she felt herself sinking into the blackness, into a thick and dreamless sleep where nothing came.
 
 
INTERLUDE:
The Other Side of the River
 
 
Days became nights and nights blended into days, until he could no longer distinguish the periods of light and dark or the changing of the seasons. The world Kai walked in was shifting around him, changing in unexpected ways. It was a twilight world, an autumn world, where the bright green of rice gave way to the murky colour of a flooding river. It was like walking through perpetual mist, through low-lying grey clouds.
  The statue still spoke to Kai, but more and more he felt that the statue's attention was turned elsewhere. The statue spoke of
energy burst source unknown subsystems brought online
, and about
trans-dimensional shift parameters aligned
and about
prox
imity cluster confirmed, bipolar transfer engaged
and, last and unexpected:
home.
  Home was something he no longer had. Chiang Rai disappeared behind the mist as if it had never existed, the steam-filled shop and his father at work and Kai playing with the other kids in the road and reading wuxia novels by candlelight – all gone, washed away by rolling grey mists.
  He travelled on foot, became used to the thick jungle, knew to avoid the poisonous plants and the lairs of bears and snakes and tigers and the isolated homes of the Karen people. He knew where to find their traps and knew how to make his own, which fruits to eat and which to leave. He avoided roads and whenever he saw elephant prints he hid, afraid of riders nearby.
  At last he came to the big water. Mekong, he thought, the word rising in him like a lone bubble. The river was wide and filled with water to the banks and it rained every day, lightning lashing across the sky like a whip, the thunder like cannon fire echoing all around him, the sound of war. He walked along the bank in the direction of the mountains.
  There were people using the river, of course. There were villages with bamboo huts standing on stilts above the water, and fisherfolk in canoes or wading through the shallows with nets. There were children playing in the water and there were barges and cargo boats travelling in both directions, many of them Chinese, like his father, and some of them from Siam, like his mother had been. And many others, too – dark men from the mountains and light ones from the lowlands far away, and Europeans – he had once seen one, an exotic creature visiting the town of Chiang Rai. There were steamboats, too, and he marvelled at them, delighted with the way they moved and churned the water, these great hulking beasts that belonged to the king of Siam. He hid when boats passed and he stole food from the villages if he could, and caught fish and small birds and animals. All the while he was going somewhere, but he didn't yet know where.
  One day he stole a canoe and crossed to the other side of the river.
  It was during a thunderstorm. The statue liked the storm. Somehow, it acted as an attractor for the lightning, yet it never hit Kai, nor the statue. The lightning struck all around them, him and the statue, and it was as if they were encased in a bubble, and it glowed in blues and greys, crackling with electricity, and the statue would talk of
utilising natural energy sources
and
renewable power supplies
and
reinforcing multi-dimensional
boundaries
. When he crossed the river he was very scared, though the fear was different now, the fear was like a polished stone that he held in his hand, a force that could be transmuted into pure power, be made into a cold hard fury and be controlled. When he crossed the river it was as if the two banks would never meet, as if he had left one behind him while the other kept receding away in the distance. The current was very strong and soon he was being borne along it without control, his choices reduced to none. He let the current take him where it would. On the river, the two worlds, the two banks seemed impossibly distant from each other, the outlines of two separate worlds. In one was laughter and sunlight and new shoots of rice, ginger and jasmine and dry cleaners and steamboats and love. In the other was… what? The unknown. The statue longed for it – a darkness, and strange stars, and massive structures floating in the inky black…
  How long he drifted on the river he didn't know. He drank the water of the Mekong and caught fish with bare hands, and ate them raw. Boats came and went but never seemed to see him. When the storms came he huddled in the small canoe and the lightning danced around him, and the statue glowed as if satisfied. Then, one day, he came around a bend in the river and saw a city.
 
 
PART III
The Man in the Iron Mask
 
 
THIRTY-FOUR
The Woman in the Mirror
 
 
Drippety-drip, drippety-drap
the sound came, light fingers tapping on the window, a low wind blowing pipes of poisoned darts, the darkness pulsing like a heart,
drippety-drip, drip
pety–
Splat.
  Her eyes opened.
  She was lying in her bed.
  She had no recollection of how she had arrived there.
  Outside the window it was raining, and the wind was howling a mournful tune. When she got up she half-expected more assailants to come through the door but the house was hushed and empty. She went into her drawing room and Grimm was there, curled up in the fireplace, and she stroked him, and the metallic insect turned its head so it rested in the palm of her hands. Its skin felt warm. The hiss of a tongue touched her palm like a kiss.
  She knew she was close to the killer. She had missed something, she thought. But she knew he was close, that he was hunting her just as much as she was hunting him. For the moment, the question of the missing object did not occupy her as much. Also, it seemed obvious to her that when she found the killer, she would find this object, this key. Had it been used already? She thought of the killer, a grey grotesque shape in the dark of an alleyway. The corpses Viktor showed her in the under-morgue… yes. It had been used, and if not this one then another like it. And something had come through from the other side… or something here had been corrupted.
  When she stepped into her waiting room there was an envelope on the table. She tore it open. It contained a ticket to a ball, to take place that evening at the Hotel de Ville. An appended note was stamped with the Council's emblem, and a handwritten scrawl said, "
British ambassador and entourage
to attend – V
."
  She was going to a ball. Wasn't there a children's story about this sort of thing? She smiled, though the expression felt grim on her face. She didn't feel like dancing – she felt like shooting someone. Some thing.
  She had a feeling it would not be long before she had her opportunity.
 
She watched herself in the mirror. The long coat trailed down almost to her feet, the gun in its shoulder-holster, the other gun on her hips. She wore a dark scarf and a silk blouse and her black leather pants, and when she looked at herself in the mirror she saw a tall dark woman with eyes reflecting grey. Her nails were a dark red. As a final touch she put on her old hat, from the Barnum days, her time in the ring. Lowbrimmed, it shaded her eyes. The horse riders of Vespuccia wore those when they rode the trails, on that massive open continent where the buffalo roamed…
  She went back to the fireplace and Grimm rustled awake. "Stay close to me tonight," she murmured, her hand on its head, and the creature blinked in acquiescence. The gold bracelet on her arm would let Grimm know where she was. And now she stood up, ready to face the coming night.
The ball, yes, but first–
 
The silent coachman dropped her off at Place Pigalle. She looked around for watchers, saw none, knew they would be nearby. She had begun to realise her role in this investigation, her real purpose there. No one cared if she caught the killer, the Council least of all. No – she was there to bring them all out, rather, all the silent watchers – bring them out into the open so they could be seen and studied and made known. She passed the cemetery on the way to the gendarmes. Something seemed to call to her from inside that factory of graves. There had been stories… She walked away and into the station, and almost ran into the Gascon.
  For a moment, their bodies had almost collided. She felt the warmth of him, his tautness, no fat on him, a wiry man as driven as she was–
  The Gascon pulled back. She could not read the look in his eyes. He examined her slowly, from head to toe, and shook his head. Around them a silence fell like snow. "Gunslinger," he said at last. She smiled, touched the brim of her hat in acknowledgment. "Inspector," she said. "What do you have for me?"
  "Very little," he said. "I heard you found another corpse. You seem to have a knack for finding people dead."
  She said, "Tom was a friend."
  He nodded. "Mademoiselle L'Espanaye is safe," he said. "My men have tracked down the killer's escape route." He hesitated. "It seems he had made his way to the cemetery – beyond that we lost his tracks."
  Somehow she was not surprised – and now she said, "What happened in the cemetery?" and watched his face. Yes – the question hit him hard. "What makes you think anything happened?"
  She thought of the corpses in the under-morgue. And now
she said, only half-guessing – "Have any graves been robbed in the past two years?"
  The Gascon stared at her, not speaking. "And you can offer me a cup of coffee while you tell me," she said, and he slowly smiled. "Yes, Milady," he said.
  When they sat down the man seemed to relax a little. He said, "Yes, there have been. We've kept it quiet – as much as possible. Rumours got out, naturally."
  "Naturally," she said, without inflection, and he gave her a sharp look before catching himself. He shrugged, ceding her the point. "There is a… caretaker in the cemetery," he said. "But he would not speak to us, and I'm afraid we can't press him."
  And now he watched her, waiting – "Who is it?" she said, and his smile was predatory when he said, "
What
he is might be a better question, Milady."
 
 

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