Falls the Shadow (34 page)

‘Cities within cities,’ Benny heard herself say, her eyes caught by the pyramid glare. ‘So how does it help us?’

The Doctor smiled again. His broadest smile in a long time.

‘It gives us leverage,’ he said.

A woman was dreaming in the darkness.

She was mad. The voices told her that. Gabriel and Tanith spoke to her, whispering the truth. She was a queen, wrapped in the one true flag. (
She was an assassin, ruling over a mind in madness, wrapped in a dirty rag
). She was ruler of the red, white and blue land of Do‐
as‐
you’re‐
told, of subjects who loved and cherished her and would fight to protect her and to glory her. She would lead them willingly to war. Nations would fall before her advance. Then when the atlas became too small, she would lead them into space. Imperial Earth! Her dream, the dream of empire. (
That’s right. A dream of empire. That’s all it ever was. A
dream.)

‘Assassin,’ said the voices. ‘Crazy Jane.’

Here sir, ready and waiting and willing for the number from Five, the ticket from Ten, the Voices, the real power, they who must be obeyed. I am here, hear, only obeying orders.

The people want blood. Blood is a part of them, has always been a part of them, it runs in their veins. What’s a death camp but an efficient Roman circus? Blood is strength, nation is strength, pain is strength. Liberty is absolute, hierarchy is truth, anarchy is chaos. Blood, mind, soil!

First, before I do this sir, there is one thing I must know.

‘Ask. We know everything.’

(
They do, they really do know everything.
)

My name. I must know my real name.

‘Your name is Jane Page! Sally Carpenter! Elisabeth Pinner! Christine Dennison! Penny Holmes! Stephanie Lister!’

Page was a little girl again.
Want
my real name! Want! Want! Want!

So they gave her a name.

I knew it, Page sang, I knew it all along.

‘So kill.’

Page took up her gun.

Cathedral’s day passed into night and the sky turned rust‐
red. The surviving towers of the city glowed dim white, failing to dispel the new depth of darkness. A few flames still flickered on the horizon, but there was little left to burn. Benny hugged herself, not against the chill but against the night. It was a slow night, corpse‐
cold. It was the last night of the city. Benny snuggled up against the immobile Mandelbrot head. Its stone exterior smouldered with dying warmth. It was better than nothing.

The tetrahedron lay on the ground nearby, crackling with intense, cold light. The Doctor sat squat before it, hands dancing against its blazing surface, eyes closed and face calm in meditation, trying to change the world. So, Benny mused, he was sticking to what he knew best.

He hadn’t moved for hours. He didn’t seem to feel the cold, or the tiredness, or the oppression, or the hunger that Benny did. She was beginning to recall her time as a ghost with fondness. Little things like that hadn’t seemed important when she hadn’t a body to worry about.

‘Om,’ she said, forcing her numb lips into a smile.

‘Humour is not appreciated,’ the Mandelbrot head rumbled. Benny grimaced but deep down she knew it was right. It wasn’t the right time for jokes, or warmth. The cold would kill both.

Besides, she was worried about Ace.

She hugged her stone head and waited.

Finally the Doctor spoke.

‘Dark,’ he murmured, his voice flute‐
soft. His face was set and solemn, caught stark in the glare from the tetrahedron. ‘Kneel to worship piled relics. Heart and soul become stone, dead, dust. But there’s nobody there.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Benny purred without humour.

‘The old system is dead.’ The Doctor was smiling faintly. ‘A skeleton remains, ragged corpse framework. It’s enough. If anything wants to rebuild control here… It’s enough.’

‘This is as we have said,’ the Mandelbrot began.

‘You keep out of this,’ Benny warned it graciously. She turned to the Doctor, a question forming on her lips. ‘What about Ace? Is she here?’

‘Yes. She’s… faint. Fading. I can’t fix on her properly. There’s something else. Something much stronger than us, swamping us.’

Gabriel and Tanith, Benny considered. They were bound to be out in the city somewhere, loitering with intent. They seemed vague and ambiguous in her memory, as if they were something she had once dreamed. Ace, on the other hand, was stark and vivid but Benny could barely remember the last time she’d seen her, or the last words she had spoken. They’d parted too abruptly.

The Doctor let out a quick gasp. Benny looked up wildly, torn from her thoughts.

‘It’s
not
!’ he pronounced. ‘It’s not Gabriel or Tanith. It’s much
bigger
. A multiplicity of selves and souls. Many and one. It’s beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so… oh!’

The Doctor howled and leapt back from the tetrahedron. Concerned, Benny rushed forward to steady him. In the light of the tetrahedron his face was blanched. She imagined she caught a glimpse of fear, of revulsion, of apprehension, of admiration, almost of love. And guilt. Intense, fascinating guilt. Something inside her jarred.

‘What did you see?’ she asked. She expected his reply to come slowly and weak. Instead his voice was strong and forceful. Almost too strident for the Doctor. She guessed he was trying to hide something. There was a dangerous quality to this lucidity.

Par for the course, she supposed.

‘Patterns,’ he said calmly. ‘The pattern underlying everything. It’s like a kaleidoscope. You and I, Ace and Truman, Gabriel and Tanith, Page and Winterdawn, and… and Cranleigh. Enough, maybe… I never thought murder could seem so beautiful.’

‘Doctor!’ Benny squawked, wondering if some spring had finally snapped in the workings of his mind.

‘I’m sorry. I saw something that disturbed me,’ the Doctor apologized. His words came tumbling now, like stream‐
water splashing down a hillside. ‘And that’s rare. I saw a connection, clear and bold in my mind. It had always been there and I was too stupid to see it.
Gabriel
and
Tanith
! I know them now.’

‘Well that’s nice,’ Benny judged. ‘There’s also this small question of stopping them…’

The Doctor placed a soft, warm hand on her shoulder. He was smiling benevolently. Benny wasn’t fooled for an instant.

‘I think we can be afford to be obvious.’

‘You stopped being obvious a long time ago…’ Benny hummed wearily.

‘Gabriel and Tanith have destroyed Cathedral,’ the Doctor continued. ‘But its structure remains intact. I think they’re waiting to seize that, to step into the places occupied by the Mandelbrot Set. Imagine what they could do then. No, there’s a simpler question: imagine what they couldn’t do. They’ll take the universe apart. Nothing will
mean
anything. And I like things to have meanings.’

That sounded simple enough.

‘So, we field our own candidate for the job?’ Benny suggested. The Doctor nodded. Benny let her eyebrows dance questioningly.

‘What we need,’ the Doctor explained, ‘is someone experienced, someone with a thorough understanding of the way this city works, someone with a head for the heights of power, someone utterly ruthless and determined, someone with a noble countenance.’

‘Who’s the lucky candidate then?’ Benny asked, feeling revitalized enough to try some dishonest sarcasm.

The Doctor smiled like the devil. He patted the immobile Mandelbrot head on its prominent nose. Benny regarded it with disgust.

‘Finally, you agree. Finally, you accept,’ the head twittered with renewed arrogance.

‘Doctor…!’ Benny began, bristling with anger and resentment. She’d told the Doctor what the Mandelbrot Set had done, how they’d run the city, how they’d sent the grey man to die for them and then torn themselves apart in the ensuing panic. Hadn’t he listened?

‘I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution,’ the Doctor shushed her. He continued, and the distaste in Benny’s mouth was matched in his voice: ‘With our candidate here installed in power, I imagine Cathedral will declare total war on Gabriel and Tanith and they’ll destroy each other in the minimum time with the maximum effort. That’s the way these things tend to work out.’

The head roared, its mouth swinging open and closed in rapid succession, crushing the flowers too slow to react.

‘Conflict swift and vivid! Victorious we will be! Gabriel and Tanith will be crushed from their lives!
Our eyes have seen the glory
!’

Its face was unmoving but Benny seemed to see it glowing with proud energy. She made her own face flat and contemptuous in response.

‘I know how you feel,’ the Doctor whispered reassuringly. ‘But it’s better this than Gabriel and Tanith.’

Benny stared at the jubilant head and wondered if that was right.

‘Carry us!’ the head crowed. ‘Carry us to our Cruakh, to our throne. Carry us, King of Kings! Carry us! Carry us!’

Benny took a weary step forward. The Doctor seized her by the shoulders and flung her aside. She landed hard against her side on a pile of rubble, the Doctor’s modest bulk crashing down beside her. Her head spun round wildly, in time to see the stone head, last of the Mandelbrot Set, King of Kings, vanishing in a fireball. Its voice soared with the flames, then died. A shower of pebbles fell across the square, one glancing sharply off of Benny’s scalp.

A few scattered stones remained to mark its passing.

Jane Page stood on top of a mound of debris on the edge of the square. An old towel was draped reverently round her shoulders. A handkerchief covered her face – stigmata blossoming on the fabric over her eyes. Slung on her shoulder was a rocket‐
launcher, its tube daubed with Cathedral symbols. Benny guessed that it had been abandoned by the city militia during the fighting.

‘Death to all kings!’ Page shouted, voice reverberating off the distant buildings. She hurled the weapon aside and pulled a gun from within the folds of her jacket. It was more compact than the rocket‐
launcher but Benny found it no more reassuring.

‘History is bunk,’ Page declaimed. ‘Burn everything! No one gets out of here alive!’ She descended from her mound and began to pace towards them.

‘It’s a time for new learning,’ she announced stridently. ‘Practical learning, of what is real and what is myth. There’s no time for abstraction, and no place for professors or doctors.’

Benny began to move aside cautiously. The Doctor placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. She rounded on him, whispering harshly.

‘Doctor, she’s blinder and madder than a bat that thinks it’s Napoleon. I’m getting out of here before she starts shooting.’

‘No,’ the Doctor said calmly. ‘We’re responsible for her.’

Benny frowned.

‘Don’t think I don’t know where you are,’ Page called. She was moving closer, pacing towards them with even strides. ‘I can’t see you, but I know. They taught me how to use my hands and ears. They…’ she trailed off. When she began again her voice was laced with sadness and quiet thought. ‘It’s funny. I have to kill you and I thought you were both already dead.’

‘You don’t have to kill us,’ the Doctor said sweetly. ‘Unless you believe Gabriel and Tanith.’

‘That’s right,’ Benny added. Page was close to her, almost in touching distance. ‘You’ve more in common with us than them, surely.’

‘Oh yes,’ Page said. Her voice had become weary and wistful. She slipped forward and placed a hand against Bernice’s face. It was warm and smooth, fingers trembling, memorizing the details of the face. Benny didn’t flinch, surprising herself. ‘I’ll tell you. I don’t want to kill anyone. I never did. None of us did, none of us who really believed.’

‘You don’t want to kill people?’ Page’s hand still played across Benny’s face but she felt secure enough to manage a few cheery words. ‘I imagine that’s a drawback in your line of work.’

‘Please,’ Page murmured. ‘No, we wanted to build a better world. But the people are shackled by their false beliefs. Even Marx recognized that. You know, the flower on the chains?’

‘Not personally.’

‘We realized that we would have to destroy the idea that there is anything special or unique inside people. We had to kill their souls. Maybe there’s a clean way to do that, an easy way to suppress all the rubbish. That was our dream.’

‘A dream to some…’ the Doctor said, distantly.

Page smiled. Her teeth seemed as lonely as ice.

‘We had to do it somehow!’ She blurted the words. ‘There’s only one really effective way of killing someone’s soul.’

Her lips trembled into a wistful smile. Her other hand rose to meet Benny’s face, her gun lodged tight in her small fingers. Benny was suddenly and sharply afraid. Her eyes focused into the barrel.

‘You don’t know how happy this makes me feel,’ Page said softly.

The Doctor appeared by Page’s side. Benny saw his shape as a blur in the corner of her eyes but paid him little attention. Her world had grown tight. The Doctor, on its edge, seemed less important than death.

In a smooth, casual motion he seized Page by the shoulders and tipped her over. There was a gunshot, distantly. Reality – what was left of it – slipped back before Benny’s eyes.

Page was on the ground, stunned. The Doctor crouched beside her, his hands pressed against his knee, blood seeping between his fingers. The pain on his face was vivid.

‘Jesus!’ Benny pronounced, darting forward. The Doctor waved her back.

‘A graze,’ he insisted in a heavy voice. ‘We have to go, she’ll be coming round soon.’

Benny ignored his frantic gestures and stepped closer, slipping a hand round his shoulders and helping him to his feet.

‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’ she murmured, glancing at his wounded knee and seeing that his diagnosis was accurate. ‘Everything’s falling apart.’

The Doctor shook his head grimly. With Benny’s help he began a slow hobble towards the edge of the square.

‘We try another approach,’ he suggested. ‘There’s a better solution, one more final. It’s not one I’m keen on.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m scared of the truth,’ he said. He glanced over his shoulder and turned back, speaking more urgently. ‘We have to find Cranleigh. And quickly, she’s starting to come round.’