Falls the Shadow (28 page)

‘I’m afraid our tour is postponed or augmented, depending on your point of view. I have been called before the Set.’

‘Bloomsbury?’ Benny asked mischievously, shaking her eyebrows.

‘Mandelbrot,’ the grey man confirmed dryly. ‘They are the true masters here, the processors of chaos and order. The Mandelbrot Set blurs the distinction between them.’

Benny jerked her lips into a half‐
crook smile.

‘They sound sweet. I’d like to meet them.’

‘No. You wouldn’t,’ the grey man snapped, becoming angry for the first time since they had met. ‘Still, they’ve granted you observer status.
That
is tantamount to a summoning.’

‘My fame precedes me,’ Benny joked, but something vital had left the conversation. The grey man talked about the Mandelbrot Set with resentment and barely concealed terror. Benny stroked her left shoulder, a shoulder that felt like a cold slab of meat.

The grey man was in no hurry to reach his masters. They strolled through the alleys of Cathedral at a leisurely pace, giving Benny time to take in some of the more interesting sights, and for the grey man to point out oddities of architecture, exotic figures, machinery and transport, monuments to commemorate events in the city’s history (many seemed to have been erected at his insistence). The walls of the buildings were sheer cliffs around them, soaring into the black sky unburdened by the constraints of rational architecture. The buildings were too impressive for Benny, who felt trapped by them.
Oppressive
was the word.

The grey man walked beside her. His pace was uncertain, slipping from tiny, shuffled steps to sweeping strides. Benny kept a constant pace.

The alleyway widened and rose up between two buildings, becoming a plain walkway winding round the side of one massive structure. At the same time, it emptied of citizens. Benny and the man in grey ascended alone.

‘This is the heart of the city,’ the grey man explained, indicating the shaft, ‘the Cruakh, court of the Mandelbrot Set.’

The antipathy in his voice was better disguised this time, but Benny still caught shards of it, buried in the subtlest inflexions.

The walkway extended on and up for what seemed like miles. Benny felt certain that her legs should be killing her by now – no pun intended – but she felt invigorated, ready for anything. Her whole body seemed much improved since her death, losing all the aggravating twinges that had afflicted her in life. But it wasn’t really her body. It was the ghost of it.

Bernice Summerfield and the grey man reached the top and stood before the massive gateway that led into the heart of the Cruakh. Flanking it, dwarfed by it, were Gabriel and Tanith.

Benny might have been startled, if she had been alive and if Gabriel and Tanith had been startling people. But she was dead and Gabriel and Tanith were simply odd. The only thing she felt was curiosity.

They were dressed in the same type of leotard which Benny had woken in, and that made them look ridiculous, but kind of attractive – especially Gabriel, though Benny was embarrassed as soon as she thought of it. Their eyes were closed, their heads raised towards the sky, their hair streaming upwards, and that made them look serene.

She turned to the grey man. He was watching her expectantly.

‘Should
they
be here?’ she asked calmly.

‘They were created in this place, though not deliberately,’ the grey man replied. ‘These are only embryonic images of them.’

‘If Cathedral created them,’ Bernice snapped. ‘Cathedral should do something about them. They’re not sociable people.’

‘I imagine they are what this meeting will be about.’

The man in grey strode forward, crossing the flagstones to the gate with easy strides. Benny hurried after him, stumbling over the hem of her gown in her effort to catch him.

‘What
are
they?’ she demanded an answer.

The grey man swung round to face her.

‘Gabriel and Tanith are an accident that has been waiting to happen since the time of my fall.’ His voice was harsh. ‘Their names are written in the history of the future. They have a significance beyond anything they suspect themselves.’ He became terse and curt. ‘Now, the Set awaits us.’

He turned on his heel and strode through the gateway into the Cruakh.

Benny snatched final glances of the pair standing guard on the gate. Their faces were so calm, as if they were sleeping. Benny hoped no passing prince would be stupid enough to kiss them.

‘I wish you were that peaceful in the real world,’ Benny told them harshly, before scurrying after the man. The sentinels offered no response.

Beyond the gate was a corridor, short and bleak. Benny caught up with the grey man at its lip, on the edge of a vaulted chamber, the domain of the Mandelbrot Set.

There were twenty‐
three Mandelbrot in total. Benny didn’t bother counting them, the knowledge was there in her mind from the moment she entered their realm. They occupied different levels, sitting squat in niches and hollows carved into the wall that rose opposite the entrance. The wall was red, painted in blood, and where it was not red, it was ivory white. There were shapes, images, cut into the ivory wall, but Benny preferred not to dwell on them. She latched onto the Set itself.

At first, she mistook them for decorations, built into the walls. But they began to speak as she entered the chamber and the illusion was shattered. The Mandelbrot Set were heads, stone heads. They reminded Benny of the brooding statues of Easter Island, of the Karet’ah Tika on Plaemus Tau, ringing the ancient city of Tunq on Kristin’s World, of a hundred different places she had visited or read about. It was a big galactic mystery, it suggested a common cultural inheritance across Earth’s sector of the galaxy. There had been hundreds of experts researching this field by the time Benny was born; Oxford University’s Cultural Studies Sub‐
Department of Easter Island Heads had grown so large it had its own car park.

The Mandelbrot Set spoke in a chorus. Twenty‐
three stone voices, rich and resonant, echoing across the courtyard.

‘Greetings, grey‐
walker.’

Benny shot a surprised glance at the grey man and was surprised to find him shifting with uneasy embarrassment.

‘Pretentious courtesy,’ he muttered.

‘Oh,’ Benny mouthed, turning back to face the Set.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Observer status requires only that you appear, Summerfield,’ a Mandelbrot addressed her in tones so polite they could only be a threat. ‘Your participation is not compulsory.’

In short: belt up, or find yourself in the foundations of the Cathedral bypass. Ah‐
ha!

‘I am here,’ the grey man announced, making it sound like a guilty secret.

‘You were summoned. We have considered the existence of these Gabriel and Tanith. We are decided that they are no longer conducive to our programme. Their presence accelerates generation of entropy, draws forth the time of levelling and the end of all things. We now predict this several metacenturies earlier than expected.’

‘I know,’ the grey man mumbled so that only Benny heard.

‘We are decided that your methods in removing this particular threat to the programme also undermine the smooth functioning of the programme!’ another Mandelbrot chimed in. Entropic decay circuits have kicked in on three of the major arcana. Many of the minor arcana flood already. Such events would have happened not had you acted promptly.’

‘If I had acted promptly, without due care, then I would have attracted attention to myself,’ the grey man protested. ‘Then where would your programme be?’

‘Then there are these effects on the personal level. Considerable is the death‐
toll and rising.’

The grey man’s teeth began to grind impatiently.

‘That is underhanded. You see these deaths in terms of statistics. I see them as they really are. That makes me even more determined not to burst in on Gabriel and Tanith and blow them away like something from a power fantasy. Violent solutions have never been my forte. They only make things worse.’

‘This is your opinion,’ three or four Mandelbrots sang as one.

‘That is the principle on which the whole of Cathedral is built!’

‘These are destabilizing agents…’

‘
We
are a destabilizing agent!’

‘…generating entropy!’

‘
We
generate entropy!’

‘But our cause is just. These Gabriel and Tanith do it – colloquially – for the hell of it.’

‘You will never understand.’ Benny heard the grey man, but she doubted that the Mandelbrot Set had. His head was lowered like a man defeated.

I am its conscience,
he had told her,
I am its soul.

‘We are decided,’ the Mandelbrot Set roared in unison, sounding like a gaggle of schoolchildren screaming abuse at things they couldn’t comprehend. ‘You will return to plane physical. You will seek out these Gabriel and Tanith. These will be destroyed. This is what you will do.’

‘And Bernice?’

‘Summerfield remains.’

The grey man hummed thoughtfully.

‘Go,’ Mandelbrot voices echoed off the walls.

The grey man moved close to Benny, taking her unresisting hands.

‘I could hardly refuse,’ he said. His voice was wistful. He almost sounded happy.

‘That was a threat,’ Benny hissed angrily. ‘They were threatening me!’

The grey man nodded, but stared to the side of her, as if distracted by his own thoughts.

‘I fear this may not be easy for you,’ he said. ‘But it removes the element of certainty from the threat. I’d like to thank you before I go. If you had not been here I would never have chosen as I did.’

And with those words he pulled her into a tight embrace. It was too brief, but while it lasted Benny felt like a baby again, held securely and with love in the arms of her father. She didn’t flinch at the intimacy.

The grey man said nothing further to her. He simply smiled and flowed from the arena of the Mandelbrot Set, back into the black corridor and beyond that, into the material world.

Benny didn’t watch him. Her attention was fixed on the ranks of the Mandelbrot Set. She was smiling, and she wondered why. And even as she wondered, her smile cracked and she burst into tears.

The sky was a churning sea, dark and ominous. Subtle pastel shades coloured the clouds, lining the darkness for fleeting moments before being swallowed by the overall greyness. The clouds swirled. The grey man watched patterns form and dissolve. He felt no cold, but shivered.

This was ominous weather.

No – he quickly dismissed the thought as superstition. The weather was the weather, no matter how bleak. It simply set the tone. The grey man considered this wearily before starting the journey to the house. He was in no hurry. He did not relish this moment. His path led either to death or compromise – he wasn’t certain which would be worse.

The earth was silent, as if life had been extinguished in his absence. This, the grey man mused among a jumble of pessimistic thoughts, is a world holding its breath.

As he reached the bottom of the hill, he saw Gabriel and Tanith already there, dark shapes invisible against their context. He halted beside them, breaking the fragile silence with a sigh.

‘I don’t want to fight you,’ he said, perhaps apologetically.

Tanith turned her head towards him, and it seemed to the grey man like the slowest action he had seen in his lifetime.

‘We know,’ she replied.

‘Nice weather for it,’ Gabriel remarked, folding his arms against the cold. ‘We could rustle up some thunder and lightning if you want.’

The grey man shook his head, forcing a smile onto his lips.

‘That would be needlessly Wagnerian.’

He found himself warming to the atmosphere here. Here was a cheery vein of nihilism which appealed to him. In better circumstances he might get along well with this couple.

‘But appropriate,’ Gabriel continued languidly – there were three people here and none of them were in a hurry. ‘Götterdämmerung.’

‘Twilight of the Gods,’ the grey man said, almost to himself.

‘Or Dawn of the Gods. It depends,’ Tanith was as listless as her partner, ‘on the translation.’

‘Tell me again,’ the grey man caught the prevailing mood with a bland monotone, tempered by a wry smile, ‘which of us here rank as gods?’

Tanith giggled. Gabriel shrugged.

‘There’s no point to this,’ Gabriel said softly.

‘Does there have to be?’

‘Yeah.’ Tanith grinned. ‘You’ve come to display your moral superiority to us by beating us into bloody pulps.’

‘You are threatening the structure of things,’ the grey man said, realizing how unnatural this must sound from his lips, ‘eroding the balance of time and space. With regret, I must put an end to you.’

Gabriel snorted. The grey man blushed and pulled his head away, deeply aware of his hypocrisy.

There was nothing more to be said. The grey man turned his back on his enemy – he supposed he should call them that – and climbed back up to the top of the hill.

‘And when they were up,’ he said to himself, ‘they were up.’

He turned to take up a vigil over the house. It was a stark shape beneath him, black as death, devoid of light. Only its outline hinted at the monstrous majesty of the architecture. It was a solid black anchor against the turbulent sky. Gabriel and Tanith had made it derelict, uninhabitable – a place tainted with their pure negativity. The grey man tried to harden his heart for the fight, but found it difficult.

His wait did not last. Barely a minute had passed before they appeared. They were levitating, rising smoothly upwards to hang in the air above him. Their outlines were jagged shapes cut into the sides of clouds. The grey man breathed heavily before stepping off the hillside to join them in the sky. A gulf of air separated them, physically empty but filled with crackling anticipation. Three inhuman things in human shapes wheeled slowly round the sky. The man sensed that Gabriel and Tanith were waiting for him to make his move, that he would have to strike first. It occurred to him that this was how their minds worked, by
reacting
to others. He let the thought go.

Time slipped.

The grey man hung in the sky. Orange light danced on the canopy of clouds. A sickly‐
sweet perfume filled the air. Accompanying the smell was the sound. A low howl that spread out across the land and silenced the world.

Time and memory were brief patterns cutting in and out of darkness in a random manner. There was nothing stable, no references. Memories had been plucked from his mind and stretched wafer‐
thin over wide frames. Each became a world in itself – perhaps this was memory in its purest state.

Gabriel and Tanith. At some point they must have re‐
engineered the state of his mind or the flow of time. A dangerous ruse but an effective one, requiring more imagination than he would have granted them. They deserved his respect if nothing else.

The grey man perused each disjointed memory in turn, seeking some clue that might define his present condition.

He extends an arm. Hand open, flat, fingers splayed. Cold fire streaming from his shaking fingertips. No light, no sound, no effects. Pain and fire striking at Gabriel, absorbed by mental shields.

Stretched to slowness, split‐
second action seeps over an hour.

Counterstrike: Tanith: ostentatious, pretentious, hedonistic. She loves effect, the urge to play with fire. Her attack is a light‐
show. She weaves a spiral web of energy from the sky. The grey man cannot dodge its complexity. Even as he clicks his tongue to disapprove of her display, it snares him.

Pain: fire crackles through nerveways.

Energies are exchanged, blink‐
of‐
an‐
eye bursts of sound and fury. Without subtlety, without imagination, without irony. The grey man hears snatches of intermittent, internal conversation carried on the wind.

Gabriel: dark, brooding, stylish. Seeing the world from behind a veil of shadows. A lover of many things (though never for more than a minute).

Tanith: thoughts on a string. A love for beautiful, shiny things. Dicewoman, precious and vain, dancing in the light, lover of pain.

They hate him.

End‐
game: up until now the grey man has been playing with this couple. He grows weary.

Memories: his city, his Cathedral. Professor Summerfield. The crude faces of the Mandelbrot Set. A friend he would never see again. The first world, the world on which he learned despair.

He steps into the path of the attack.

Power surge, ripping through mind and body. The grey man hurls back his head and screams. The scream is silent but it echoes. It rolls through the sky, reverberating across the surface of this world and a thousand others. Children shiver in fear of imaginary horrors, believers make the relevant symbolic gestures against evil, sleepers thrash in fits of night terror, the animals and the demented and the poets howl out their inner rage.

Something old and powerful is dying.

In the eye of pain, the grey man is rational. His body smoulders and explodes. Tongues of flame – insubstantial streams of colour and heat – lick hungrily at his limbs and torso. His hair burns, his skin sizzles, his clothes grow black in the inferno. Despite the pain he feels calm. He knows he is dying, that the destruction extends far beyond his body, that the energy network that lingers after the death of his physical shell is tearing itself apart. He is dying. His soul is dying. It is the final death.

He hangs still in the air, consumed by fire. His memories break up. He discards them one by one, losing himself.

He is afraid.

Time slips.

The grey man died. The burning corpse slipped from the sky, plunging towards the ground far below. By the time it impacted against the cold earth it was a blackened thing, burned beyond recognition.

Gabriel stepped out of the sky warily, wandering up to the dead, hot shell and watching curiously. Tanith appeared beside him. She found the manic light of triumph playing in his eyes.

‘God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!’

Tanith shrugged wearily, unable to share his enthusiasm.

‘No big deal,’ she muttered. ‘I thought it was anticlimactic.’

With no spirit left to hold it together, the corpse was beginning to decay into dust. There was little left to burn. Tanith felt something like sadness.

‘It was fun while it lasted,’ she mused.

Her brother’s voice hummed by her ear.

‘I believe it’s time to make our move. The encore.’

Tanith nodded, smiling.

‘This will have driven the Set into a tizzy.’ She bared her teeth in a zealous smile. ‘I do so believe in striking while the iron’s hot.’

They left what remained of the grey man’s corpse and trudged back towards the house.

‘We should burn this place,’ Gabriel said. ‘Kill everyone, destroy the house and set sail for the real world.’

Tanith was in broad agreement. ‘It’s become tiresome. The people here aren’t fun any more. They’ve lost their novelty value. What happened to the really interesting ones?’

‘We killed them.’

‘Yes…’

They reached the front door, opening it with a tiresome mental command. Standing on the threshold was Professor Jeremy Winterdawn, an arm pressed against the door frame to steady himself.

Gabriel and Tanith exchanged glances. This had not been anticipated.

‘Good evening,’ the Professor said languidly. ‘We’ve not been introduced properly but I think you’re the sort of people I could do business with.’ He paused to clear his throat. ‘Can I offer you a deal?’