Theatre of the Gods (54 page)

‘I’ll give you a glass of water if you tell me who you are and where you came from.’

‘That does not sound like a good deal. And I hardly know.’

The material of his trousers – a blend of the finest imported baby mountain goat wool and spider silk – swished as he changed position. ‘Then tell me, where is your friend, the boy?’

‘Roberto?’

‘Roberto. Yes.’

‘I have no ideas. He abandoned me.’

‘Cad. Did he say anything before he left?’

‘Such as what?’

‘Such as where he might be going?’

‘He might. Why would you want to know about Roberto? He is just a stupid boy.’

‘Don’t get me started. I was just making idle chit-chat.’

‘That’s fine,’ said the small girl. ‘We have all the time in the universe.’

As the Well Dressed Man stared into the hideously beautiful abyss that shimmered in the small skull on the slender shoulders upon the
wooden chair opposite, he began to wonder for the first time who was really being kept against their will.

‘Lenore.’

‘It is me.’

‘I know what it’s like to be alone. To be unique. We could rule, you and I. The power we’d have together. If we could
blend
our talents there is no limit to what we could do. That Pope, with all his war machines, is nothing compared to you and me. I could be the father you lost. We could bring your friend Roberto back. We could retrieve your captain from the Forbidden Zone.’ For the first time, a quiver. He felt her mind vibrate slightly. Love. The weakness of her human hemisphere.

‘And wouldn’t you like to have Roberto back again? If you tell me where he is I can help to bring him back.’

‘Why are you so interested in Roberto all of a sudden?’

There was less assertiveness in her voice now. She was melting. He ventured in cautiously. He saw that she had carved two words in the hard white wall.

‘I had no idea a girl your age knew such filthy words,’ said the Well Dressed Man.

‘I’m a very fast learner.’

*

But she wasn’t the only one.

Diemendääs woke to a strange tyranny. Most were already aware that the city was now surrounded by battle stations. They blackened the sky, they upstaged the silvery sphere Bespophus. The end had finally arrived. Even the besiegers camped at the western wall halted their attack and sat around on their siege machines, staring up in wonder at the shapes which blotted the suns. But worse, as the locals awoke, they knew instantly that their minds had also been blotted. There was no panic. People went about their business. Or, to be
precise, they went about
his
business. The Well Dressed Man ran the city like a puppet show. He instituted new laws with a flip of his mind: such that every citizen now found themselves skipping to work, and yelling ‘Chicken!’ before they entered a room. It was a strange spectacle.

Even the Well Dressed Man was surprised. He’d always been able to control the minds of small groups of people. And usually that was all he needed. To control an army, after all, you only had to enchant its leaders. But since he’d ventured inside Lenore’s phantasmal mind his powers had multiplied. Now he could control an entire city. He did it effortlessly, while reading, or talking to the Emperor. He made legions of citizens perform complex recitals from his favourite operas – complete with choreography. And he
loved
it.

To make things even more bizarre, the Pope had made it snow. He had announced that it was the week of Festivus, and added that there was no such thing as a Festivus without snow. The Emperor had protested, pointing out that his people had never even seen snow before: ‘They won’t know what to do!’ But the Pope was firm. And so his great snow-makers had descended from the clear, tropical skies, and they had covered the city and its mountain in a layer of feathery druff. The people came, stunned, to their windows, they pressed their noses to the glass, then they ran from their houses, pausing only briefly at their doors to exclaim, ‘Chicken!’

‘We won’t be troubling you for long, Emperor,’ said the Well Dressed Man. They stood on the Emperor’s balcony admiring the fat white flakes which fluttered from above. ‘Soon I’ll have what I want and the Pope and I will leave.’

‘The deal was you’d leave when I handed over the wizard and the children. My wife and I have done what you asked.’

‘Yes, child
-ren.
I need the boy to come back. Was that not clear?’

‘No. It was not.’

‘Well, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t take long. That girl in the cave up there will share her secrets soon, I’m sure. When I’ve got what I
want I’ll hand her to the Pope and he’ll leave. That boy will come back, I just know it. This saga could hardly end without him.’

‘Chicken!’ A page entered and placed a bundle of correspondence on the Emperor’s in-tray. ‘Chicken!’ and he left.

THE
NECRONAUT

They returned Roberto to his cage. After the jump, everything was silence. Silence beyond all possible silence. And then, from above, there was a scream: low at first, then rising to a pitch only possible from someone under insufferable pain, or insufferable fear. Soon the entire crew was joining in – a choir of unspeakable terror. Then, silence again, for a breathless minute, and then Descharge heard the creaking of the stairs. Slowly, one step at a time, the stairs muttered like a toad. A figure was descending slowly, and soon a pair of red legs came into view. When the figure reached the bottom of the stairs Descharge beheld a sight so terrifying that his heart spasmed, and his cry caught like a bone in his throat. It was a tall, muscular figure, a man of pure flesh, only this man’s outer flesh had been stripped from off his body, leaving only his red, raw muscles. He had nails punched through various points in his body – points which seemed to plot a web of satanic meridians – and on his shoulders were the raw, bony stumps of severed wings. Despite his state, the man – if indeed he was one – showed no signs of pain. He moved languidly from the stairs, leaving a pattern of bloody footprints across the room, until he stood before the cage. Then he turned his sad eyes on Descharge.

‘Why have you made this crossing?’

It seemed like a simple question, but Descharge was unable to speak. He turned to Roberto, who sat staring, his face frozen like a boy who has perished of fright.

‘I ask again: you are the commanding officer of this vessel. Why have you made this crossing? This crossing was not supposed to happen. This boy has endangered the entire operation. The Infiniverse is now in more chaos than it ever was.’

The flayed man’s voice was not particularly menacing. It was calm, well mannered.

‘We had no choice. They were going to skin a girl.’

‘His actions have meant you’ll all die. The whole of reality will descend into chaos. Is this better?’

‘I acted out of conscience.’

‘Your conscience is of no value. You need to undo what you’ve done. When you regain control of your ship, set a course nine clicks below the artificial meridian: 77.7 degrees magnetic Norde. This will give you the slimmest chance of success. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

Descharge nodded. The visitor turned towards Roberto and fixed eyes with him. Slowly, the look of terror on the boy’s face subsided. He nodded twice. Then the flayed man left. The screaming resumed above, then died.

Descharge slept fitfully. Roberto slept not at all. Descharge woke to find a curious scene: Roberto had his arm extended towards the far wall by the stairs. The wall had a small transformer box bolted to it. The clever boy had managed to remove his bonds and the rubber gloves – his hand sparkled blue, and there was a faint electrical haze extending from his fingers to the box on the wall. He sat frozen like that for minutes, brow wrought in concentration, until finally he dropped his arm, exhausted, and groaned in sheer frustration. Then, after a few minutes’ rest, he raised his arm and started again.

Nothing had been heard from above for a long while, but then they heard the poet’s shrieking voice. ‘We are lost! Lost! Lost! You have doomed us all!’ Then there was a scuffle, boots could be heard scraping across the deck. Then Braika, the boy who brought them food, came down again and said, ‘The surgeon tried to stab the poet
but stabbed the cook instead. He should recover, unfortunately.’

‘They’ll soon kill each other,’ said Descharge. ‘I just hope they don’t kill us all.’

It continued like this for roughly a week: hours of deathly silence followed by cataclysmic arguments. Roberto kept at his electrical meditations, and now the haze of energy around his hand was so bright it was hard to look at. Occasionally the food boy would come below to deliver news. ‘Nobody is talking. It’s very grim.’ Descharge knew that they were becalmed. He knew by the tilt of the ship and the tension in the hull that there wasn’t a breath of sunlight to shift them. He knew that the magnetic propellers were still broken. He knew by the fact that their meals had been cut to one per day that supplies were running low. ‘They must have been eating like pigs.’

One night the cook, the poet and the surgeon floated down the stairs. They were gaunt, exhausted, and in the dim blue light of the gas lamps shining through the hatch they looked like spirits. ‘Would you be willing to glance at the charts and tell us where we are?’ said the surgeon delicately.

‘It’s useless,’ replied Descharge. ‘We don’t have charts for every universe.’ Idiots.

‘But perhaps if you were to look at the features around us you might recognise something. It would be in your interest. We’re about to ration food to a few bites per day.’

‘I can tell from down here that there are no features. We are not within sunlight, and so we can’t move. Besides, if the ship comes under my power I’ll simply take us back to rescue the others.’

‘There’ll be none of that,’ said the surgeon. ‘You’ll be the first to be eaten if we need to.’

‘If you take a step inside my cell I’ll kill you,’ and he took his hands from behind his back to show that they were no longer bound.

‘We can wait.’

‘No you can’t.’

Later that night the cook entered and asked if he would be willing
to join with him in overthrowing the surgeon. ‘I have the surviving seamen in hand, and all the children.’

‘Let us out and we’ll consider it.’

He did not let them out. Later, Descharge heard a hoarse shouting on deck, then a weak scuffle, then silence. Knowing that the time had come to make his move, he woke Roberto. Roberto nodded. He raised his small hand and summoned a flossy streak of energy from the transformer on the wall as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When he touched a glowing finger to the magnetic latch it popped without protest. They crept upstairs. On the engineering level Roberto put his hand to the wall, and Descharge felt the ship sigh as all its non-essential functions were instantly shut down. ‘Good boy,’ he said.

The scene they found on deck was so bloody, so frightening, that I can hardly bring myself to describe it to you. Roberto was sick into an empty water barrel. A number of seamen lay dead. G. De Pantagruel and G. Scatolletto lay in a twisted heap. As they lay dying, the pair had become entangled in a deadly
soixante-neuf
, with each continuing to try to eat the other’s leg. The poet lay bleeding in a sluice-gutter. Only a faint sobbing came from his hip. The surgeon was almost dead. He looked up at Descharge, smiled, and said, ‘Onward,’ before passing on himself. The children were cowering, weak, in the galley. Descharge went first to the engine room where he broke open the reserve refrigeration condenser and drained the water. He was able to fill four buckets with the precious liquid, which he put through the ship’s filter. Then he and Roberto went around the children and surviving seamen and gave them each a mouthful of water. Following his instincts, Descharge made a thorough search of the surgeon’s cabin and found a small cache of food. Then he went to the private cabin he’d been given aboard the
Necronaut
. It had been searched, though not well, and he recovered his secret supply of chocolate – a present from his mother – and he gave each of the children a small square. Then he went on deck and gave the cook a
spoonful of water. ‘Oh, thank you, boy, thank you,’ said the cook.

‘You’ll be kept alive so you can be hanged,’ said Descharge. Then he went to the galley and placed all the supplies on the table and said, ‘This is what we have to survive. Anyone who tries to take food will be hanged. I want the flesh and organs of the dead cured with salt and placed in the refrigeration area. They are a last resort. Anyone caught eating raw human meat will be hanged. You have one hour to get this ship back in shape and then you’ll get another piece of chocolate.’ And that’s how Descharge retrieved the very last crumb of his unconquerable fleet.

*

Descharge loved to sail. His father had taught him how to navigate by the stars; he showed him how to sit in the bow of his boat and steer with the weight of his body, so that even a rudderless craft could make it home. Descharge didn’t know where they were. All he had was an obscure coordinate given to him by a fleshless angel of death. But it was better than nothing. He knew that Roberto could take them back to the others – if they could somehow find a place to replenish their ship’s fuel. They had no energy left to run the ship’s magnetic engines, they would have to make do with the sails. He took a magnetic reading and picked up the weakest signal from a shipping channel. He picked up a faint energy from a group of old stars and tacked along it, and slowly, as happens in a frictionless environment, they picked up speed. He threw every piece of surplus equipment overboard to lighten their load. He ordered all the dead’s machine parts to be ‘buried’ in space, except for the batteries for their pacemakers, which he kept, cleaned and stored away. He rigged a gravity pump, normally used for heating, to give them thrust. Descharge stood in the wheelhouse, read the almost undetectable shifts in light, and watched the stars in the distance grow brighter. Somewhere among those stars, he hoped, was a society
who could give them food, give them water, give them the energy to power up their RIPS so that they could return to their shipmates. Weeks passed. The poor children wasted away.