Falls the Shadow (31 page)

‘They’re not in the mood for it,’ Benny called lightly through her clenched teeth, ‘but you’re not very funny, and it’s not you they’ve come to see.’ Benny felt cheated. Even on the occasion of her death, she felt like she was on the periphery of the action.

The dignitary straightened up, raising its cane towards the crowd. The rod was held horizontally, clenched in a firm fist that extended from the citizen’s body on the end of a rigid arm.

‘All the world’s a stage,’ the figure whispered, so that only Benny could hear.

Then the dignitary’s arm was flung back, curving in a smooth, violent arc. Its hand was empty, palm flat and fingers splayed. The crowd’s silence became deeper, gaining a dangerous quality. The staff impaled the executioner: its sharp steel point erupted from his back. Blood bubbled from the wound, dribbling lazily down the death‐
robes. The executioner fell over, probably more from surprise than from death.

Benny’s guards kicked forward. Knives erupted in their hands. The dignitary seemed unconcerned. The crowd buzzed expectantly, their blood‐
lust well satisfied. The guards fell upon the murderer and the light blazed off the angles of their knives.

An anonymous citizen mounted the platform so quickly, in the midst of such turmoil, that its entrance almost went unnoticed. Benny saw it first. She was the first to see the machine‐
gun cradled in its arms. Fire blazed from the barrel, accompanied by the spit of bullets. Two short bursts. The militia fell. Blood flowed freely on the wooden floor of the gallows.

The armed citizen turned to the crowd and, with a burst of gunfire into the sky, created a wave of panic. Its comrade had already snatched up one of the fallen knives and was scurrying across the stage towards Bernice.

The dignitary tore the noose from Benny’s neck, then slashed the cord binding her hands together. Benny found herself breathing again. The rose slipped from her teeth.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Bernice Summerfield,’ Benny replied wearily. Her eyelids flickered heavily, a sudden exhaustion gnawing at her heart.

‘Middle name?’

She was too tired to speak.

Surprise.

A hood was thrown back and a mask stripped away.

Tanith smiled, producing a second machine‐
gun from her robes.

‘Welcome to Golgotha! Can you use one of these?’

She didn’t wait for an answer, preferring to shove it straight into Benny’s waiting arms. Benny stared down at the gun, wondering numbly what it was and what she was supposed to do with it.

And then she woke up. And she understood what she was holding and how she might use it. With cold deliberation she raised the gun so that it aimed directly into Tanith’s face.

‘What are you doing?’ she hummed in a voice thick with lingering suspicion and potent aggression. Tanith reacted with a rich, wet smile.

‘Tanith! Benny!’ Tanith’s co‐
conspirator called. It was now wearing both the voice and the face of Gabriel. Startled back into a practical frame of mind, Benny lowered the gun and inclined her head to see the object of Gabriel’s concern.

Golgotha was covered in shadow. A thick, fat, cigar‐
shaped shadow cast by the largest of the dirigibles hanging over the execution square. Three stone‐
featured Mandelbrot stared over the side at the insurrection.

‘Surrender! Surrender!’ squawked all three Mandelbrot heads together, though not quite in unison. Their voices overlapped each other, turning the chant into a chorus of chaos, noise and discord. Below them, the Cathedral militia were strutting warily across Golgotha towards the stage. Each was armed, radiating an air of caution.

Benny’s eyes flicked from Tanith to Gabriel and back again. Gabriel’s face was depressed and revealed nothing. Tanith was still smiling. One of her hands was hidden in the shadow curves of her robes. Benny looked closer and saw a small black globe cupped in the palm of the invisible hand. A fuse was strung from the globe’s surface – a long, thin cord whose end flickered with fire. Benny looked into Tanith’s eyes and saw the same fire there.

‘Come now,’ she whispered. ‘We’re good sports.’

In one single, smooth motion, she pulled the globe out of the lining of her clothes and pitched it into space.

It flew through the air, the fuse burning low. Gabriel and Tanith had already thrown themselves flat onto the floor. Benny joined them but not before seeing the globe land perfectly at the feet of the leading citizen.

She was already on the floor with her head held low when the globe exploded. She didn’t see the explosion, fortunately. The flash would have burned her eyes dry. She felt the winds dragging at her, fruitlessly trying to tear her from the safety of the gallows. She heard the screams of the militia as the winds caught them, sucking them into the heart of the brief, angry firestorm.

The screams didn’t disturb her. They weren’t human screams. They were only imitations. Cathedral wasn’t real, nor were its citizens.

They just sounded real.

The screams didn’t disturb her until she thought about them.

When the screaming stopped she looked up and saw that a large area of Golgotha’s flagstone floor had turned death‐
black. There were no bodies. Only the citizen who stood closest to the globe remained, as a white shadow burned into the heart of the black.

Other citizens had been distant enough to escape the nukeflash. Some carried small arms and skidded across the blackened square, firing at the gallows. Bullets and chunks of wood exploded round Benny and she threw herself to the ground again.

‘Shoot them down!’ screamed the Mandelbrot. ‘Wade in gore!’

Gabriel and Tanith threw themselves from the gallows platform, leaping joyfully across the square, howling as they returned fire with enthusiasm to equal that of their enemy. Certain in the knowledge of their survival, they charged berserk to the battle. The ground that had been stained black became stained red.

Benny kept her head held low. She didn’t want to kill anyone, but she had the disquieting feeling that she had started this massacre, the events leading to it. The vicious glee her allies brought to the slaughter sickened her. They revelled in the tide of blood.

But Cathedral was not a real place and the only real person who had ever lived here was dead.

She reached for her gun, finding its weight and the feel of its cold skin unpleasant. She raised her head, wondering where to begin.

‘Summerfield!’

The Mandelbrot voice was close and spiteful. It rekindled the anger Benny had felt in the Cruakh chamber. She hated that voice. For the first time since taking up the gun, she had the urge to use it. The Mandelbrot airship was lower now, the passenger cradle level with the gallows stage. Less than three yards gap separated Benny from the closest head.

She leapt to her feet, her caution smothered by a thrilling, aggressive anger. The air between her and the airship was empty and she kicked herself through it. A citizen of the militia was waiting for her, a vicious, short‐
bladed knife in its hand. Its mask was blank.

Benny shot it. Once. Twice. Three times. Benny fired until the knife fell from its hand and the body collapsed on the deck. Her nerves and her mind were numb. It wasn’t real. It was only a game.

Benny felt nothing.

When the crew member’s body was twitching on the ground and dead beyond doubt, she turned to train her gun on the helpless stone faces of the Mandelbrot Set.

‘Take this airship to Cuba!’ she demanded.

‘You will die for this!’ one of the heads declaimed and Benny killed herself laughing. Then she saw the body on the deck.

Silence reigned locally – both Benny and the Mandelbrot Set could hear the gunfire from the square, but as the moment stretched longer, the sounds became less frequent. Then total silence asserted itself.

It ended less than a minute later when Gabriel and Tanith climbed aboard, bloody and victorious.

‘Permission to come aboard?’ Gabriel called. Benny nodded, suppressing a smile.

‘This is piracy!’ roared a stone head but no one, least of all Benny, dignified it with attention. The Set grew aloof, saying nothing more to the boarders. The pirates themselves were too busy at the controls of the airship to say much. The flight began in silence.

Golgotha Square fell away until it was a small grey dot in the vastness of the city. Cathedral was no less ugly, seen from above, but now the ugliness was revealed as a magnificent, sprawling design. The towers of the city were like grasping hands, reaching up to drag them down from the sky, but it was too late. The airship rose high into the clouds over the city, beyond the height of the tallest towers. It was so high now, the crew could see the stars through the grey smear clouds.

The city was on fire. Whole areas of the city burned, flames licking as high as the Cruakh itself. The stench of the burning wafted into the atmosphere. Benny caught the stench and began to gag.

‘They’re burning the myths,’ Tanith said solemnly, no trace of humour in her voice. ‘They’re purging the city of the cultures that flourished in its streets, the creatures nurtured by Cathedral’s soul.’

‘They?’ Benny asked.

‘The Mandelbrot Set,’ Gabriel intoned. Both he and his sister spoke in sadder voices than Benny had ever heard them use before. ‘You’ve known us a while, Bernice, you might think we don’t care about anything.’

‘You don’t,’ Benny said bluntly, recalling exactly who her allies were and what they had done.

‘Perhaps not, but we can mourn.’

‘After this, the Set will turn on the functions of the city, the citizens. They need to make things nice and homogeneous. The only things they will allow to live are the other Mandelbrot. Then they will fight among themselves until one remains, where a city once stood, crowning itself Monarch of All Time and Space.’

That was terrible. One thing among many.

‘But not now!’ Gabriel announced with considerably more enthusiasm than before. There was a vicious smile on his lips, and Tanith’s too. Brother and sister locked arms and began to dance around the deck whooping and howling and laughing in the eye of the storm.

‘Cathedral dies,’ one of the Mandelbrot voices intoned, too low for any but Benny to hear. ‘Your insurrection destabilizes structure. The entropy we control consumes us now. You have killed the city.’

And as Benny watched, a star fell from the sky, landing on the city and exploding in a spectacular display of light and fire. Others followed its path to the ground. Gabriel and Tanith were laughing. And Benny felt nothing.

It wasn’t real.

The Doctor dropped the tetrahedron. Its surface was burning his palm.

Benny was falling. The wind lashed her, tearing her hair, her face, her clothes. She plunged through a funnel of rushing air, hearing the voices of Gabriel and Tanith merged as one. The words were memories. She had heard them before, on the airship, just before she had jumped overboard.

‘This was the point. The whole point.

‘We can’t touch the city because we are its children and we do not yet share its power.

‘So we needed to introduce an independent mind into Cathedral, when the city was in its most critical state. The smallest disturbance could wreck this place. An independent mind could do that.

‘Sucker!

‘We have an appointment with Sandra Winterdawn now, but that’s okay.
We
can leave. There’s no way out for you.

‘You’ll stay here and die with it.

‘Die!

‘You killed it for us. We used you so easily.

‘Because, you see, we are tied to this place. We want its corpse. Then we will be free.

‘What’s the matter? Why aren’t you
laughing
?’

At that point Bernice Summerfield jumped overboard. As she fell, she heard Gabriel and Tanith speaking again. And again. And again.

The ground accelerated towards her and she was fully conscious when it hit her.

The sky was a bleak grey, the colour of tears. The grass was the colour of stone. The food had the texture and taste of excrement. They were three; Winterdawn and his daughter, and one other who was not there and appeared as a shadow. Winterdawn hugged himself, loving this dream. Sandra was a statue with a robot voice that broke the cosy reminiscence. Winterdawn loved her.

Her questions were awkward. Questions like:
where’s mummy?
Like:
why can’t I see?
Like:
what came first, the chicken or the egg?

They springboarded into existence out of nowhere simultaneously,
Winterdawn told his daughter seriously.
We call this the Free Lunch theory.

Winterdawn opened his eyes and lost his memory.

He was in his daughter’s bedroom.

In the middle of the room were the two people he recognized as Gabriel and Tanith. They were smiling at him, vicious little smiles that stabbed at Winterdawn like hot needles.

Their clothes were red‐
wet, butchers’ aprons.

‘Sandra,’ Winterdawn said. Not his voice, too distant.

‘You can thank us now,’ Gabriel said, happily.

‘Her eyes…’ Winterdawn continued in his quiet, wistful little voice.

‘Over there.’ Gabriel gestured and Winterdawn did not look to see where he pointed.

‘I’ll kill you for this,’ he said calmly, though there was a note of bitterness creeping in. ‘Kill you, you bastards. Kill you, kill you dead.’

‘You’re too late!’

‘We’ve won!’

‘Here comes the night!’

They left the room and Winterdawn made no move to stop them.

There were scraps of Sandra’s clothing lying on the floor.

Why can’t I see, Daddy?

Pain lurched up his leg, momentary, agonizing. Weakened, he sank to his knees. The strength in his legs was leaking away. He fell against the floor, and his immediate thoughts were concerned with how soft and wet it felt.

He was in his daughter’s bedroom. Without thinking he began to cry.

Where can I find a weapon that can kill universes?

The Doctor stared at his feet, at the object pulsing with a light which no longer burned as bright as it had done.

‘A weapon that can kill universes,’ the Doctor said. His voice was dry and his face plastered with a grim smile.