Camera Obscura (15 page)

 
 

She went into the underworld through the Toymaker's shop. The wide stone stairs were wet with moisture and when she finally reached the dark floor she knew she was under the Seine.

  The gun was with her. It was a strange contraption, more similar to a blow-pipe. She had five bullets. The bullets were grey. The grey moved as if it were alive upon the metal. "Whatever you do," the Toymaker said, "never touch them with your bare hands."

  Wearing thick gloves, he had loaded the weapon for her. "I don't know if it would kill him," he told her. "But it might just slow him down."

  Which was not all that reassuring.

  She walked in the darkness under the Seine. Gradually, lights came on, small fires burning – for even here, in the secretive tunnels below the river, there were lives, the refugees from above-ground, those who had nowhere else to go but down into darkness.

  She paused there, under the river, imagined she could hear the tug-boats passing overhead, the fish swimming. The British had their whales in the Thames; the Seine, so it was said, had bloated corpses.

  She thought about Tom Thumb. She had no doubt he was not killed for his involvement, or rather, not entirely: he was killed as a message for her.

  The killer knew her. And she thought – he does not want the missing object. His goal is different than that of the rest.

  There were many searchers, she thought. The Shaolin girl, and the Empress-Dowager's emissary. Herself, of course. But not the killer.

  And not, she realised, the lizards. Or, if they were, they were doing it very quietly…

  There was the Grey Ghost Gang… She did not understand the world she was entering. Mistress Yi had tried to tell her, a little, on their way from the riverbank. She spoke of Wu Xia, which meant something like Honourable Fight. She spoke of the Code of Xia, of warrior monks without regard for whoever sat on the Imperial Throne in – the Forbidden City? – but only for righteousness, and for–

  There was an ancient object that these societies had been guarding. Yet it was – stolen? Had somehow disappeared? – and this all came back to that. The object gave the adherents of Xia power, of sorts, something the girl called Qinggong – The Ability of Lightness. She had seen them fight with the Grey Ghost Gang–

  It was all too much. None of it concerned her. Only the killer did. She walked on under the Seine and the ceiling dripped water as she passed.

  The denizens of this subterranean world were all around her. Shadows fleeing from shadows… A girl holding an eyeless doll stared at her as she passed. Milady knew that if only she turned to the girl, the girl would flee – just as she herself would have done, at her age. It could have been her standing there – it
had
been her. A metal beggar shuffled past in a series of click and whirrs. Through a natural opening in the rock face she saw two lizard boys, moving away as she spotted them. She wondered if the killer would come for her here, in this twilight world. She hoped he would.

  Instead, it was a beggar who came to her.

  She had crossed the river and the tunnel branched ahead. A lone, elderly beggar was sitting cross-legged against a wall. He had long white hair, a black eyepatch over his right eye, and he was dressed in a loose-fitting robe, like a monk's. His eye was closed, but opened at the sound of her footsteps.

  An Asian man, but then more than several of the underworld's denizens here had escaped from the above-ground Chinatown. His eye was very bright. His mouth curved into a smile and he said, "Milady de Winter," with only the trace of an accent.

  She stopped. The man remained serene. "I had hoped you would come this way," he said. "We have much to talk about."

  "Not again," she said, and his smile grew wider. "You think there are many of us searching," he said. "And you are right. You have entered the world of the Jianghu, Milady." The smile faded a little. "It is a dangerous world."

  "Which world isn't?" she said, and the man nodded. "Please," he said. "Sit down with me. We will not be disturbed."

  She said, "Jianghu?"

  "The followers of Xia," he said. "Beings like yourself, Milady."

  "I follow no code–"

  "No code but the one that matters," he said. "You are
Xiake
– a follower of Xia, whether you know it or not. Though you lack the skills of the initiates – of those of the Wulin – nevertheless you are one of us."

  "And you are?" she said.

  "Please, sit down, for just a moment. The night is ending, and the day is near, and you are tired. The one you seek will not reveal himself this close to dawn."

  And now he had her interest. But – was dawn so near? She suddenly realised how tired she was. Time had slipped her by, and she hadn't noticed.

  "Please," he said, gesturing with his hand, and she nodded, and came closer. When she sat down, opposite him, the old man nodded approvingly. "You move in the way of a cat," he said.

  "I'll take that as a compliment," she said dryly, and he laughed. "Who are you?" she said again.

  "My name is Long," he said. "Master Long. Here, I go by Ebenezer. Ebenezer Long. Are those enough names for you?"

  "You have others?"

  "I have many names. Names are… fluid. What, after all, is in a name? You yourself have had several, have you not?"

  "Master Long…" she said. "You seem very well informed."

  "I have been around for a long time," he said.

  "And you are from – what?" She tried to recall the names. "Wudang? Shaolin?"

  He laughed. "As much as I belong," he said, "you could say I am of the Beggars' Guild."

  She said, "Just how many guilds
do
you have?"

  He shrugged. "Over the centuries there have been hundreds. Some change, some disappear. New ones are formed. We are all of us of the Wulin, the followers of that which is now lost."

  "And which you are all trying to recover?"

  "Indeed. Though it is not here, in Paris, that it lies. What came here, I suspect, is only a fragment of the object called the Emerald Buddha – though its outer casing is made of pure jade, not emerald, despite the name – an object which should not have existed and, though it does, should have never been activated."

  "You talk as if it is a kind of machine."

  He said, "Oh, it is most certainly that."

  So the object had a name. And what had been surgically inserted into Yong Li's belly – was that a fragment of this thing? She said, "What is the Emerald Buddha?"

  Master Long said, "That is a good question. I am not sure I know – that anyone truly knows."

Riddles upon riddles… She said, "So what
do
you know?"

  "It is the pure jade statue of a royal lizard," he said. "Pure on the outside, at least. Its eyes are emerald. Its inside had never been examined, though not for lack of trying. It was found…"

  And there, in the darkness of the catacombs, he told her a story.

 
 

 
 

The Emerald Buddha was found one day by a boy walking along with his camel in the desert. The desert was a great one and the boy loved it. He loved the wide open expanse of sky, the endless horizon, the always-shifting nature of the land. There were sand dunes that rose into the sky and when the boy slid down their sides on his back they made a deep, rumbling sound, as if the sand itself was talking. There were low-lying, evergreen hills, and a place where, between two mountains, a river snaked in frozen splendour, and you could walk upon its surface and, reaching the end, drink ice-cold water as it slowly melted… There were rivers and lakes, and places where nothing grew. There was everything in the desert.

  The boy came from a migratory people. For untold generations they had wandered the desert, through harsh summers and brutal winters, through extremes of heat and cold, pitching their great tents wherever they went, their horses and camels and cattle with them. They made alcohol from the milk of the camels, and drank it on the long nights. The camels were double-humped. The boy's camel – his first one, and his alone – was an ill-tempered beast, but the boy loved him for all that. The boy's family were passing through one of the most arid parts of the desert, and the boy had become fascinated by his grandfather's stories, which told of a place far away where the bones of giant creatures jutted out of the sand. They were of some enormous beasts that had walked the world long ago, when the world was young.

  The boy had decided to see them for himself.

  He had packed food for the journey, his crossbow and his spear and his knife, and plenty of water, and he took his camel. The caravan of migrating families moved slowly; he knew he could easily catch up with it, sooner or later. He could read the maps of the desert, and had travelled this road, back and forth, ever since he was born and even before, as an embryo in his mother's womb.

  But he had never seen the giants' bones.

  He saw the small bones of many other creatures on his way. To die in this part of the desert meant to remain forever in the spot where the sun had finally caught you. There were skeletal camels and skeletal cows and, once, a grinning human skull on top of a pile of stones. Where his people passed they had assembled these places, mounds of stones that lay all across the desert, and when they passed them they left small presents there for the spirits of the place – offerings of food and drink, blue ribbons of cloth tied to twigs jutting from the stones – and sometimes their dead.

  The boy found the place two days after having set off. The story his grandfather had told him was true. It was the silent graveyard of giants.

  For a long time he walked amidst the bones, marvelling at how impossible they were. Enormous creatures, with skulls the size of boulders, with ribcages as large as houses. He had been warned by his grandfather that the place was sacred: he must take nothing he might find.

  And the boy was happy to merely look – until he saw the flash of green light in the sands…

  Some time in the distant past, he saw, the ground here had been disturbed. A small crater lay further away from the giants' bones, and the sand had fused into a sort of greenish glass. He walked over to it, for it was not the glass he had seen.

  Something was buried in the sand, in the centre of the crater. Something that flashed a beautiful jade green.

 

"Those who tell the story of the Emerald Buddha tell it differently," Master Long said. "It is said it was made in India, many centuries ago, and had since travelled widely across the civilised world – around Asia, I should say – always claimed, never resting. From India to Ceylon, and from there to Burma, and from Burma to Luang Prabang, and to Siam… The king of Siam lays a claim to it, and so do half a dozen other emperors and kings, from the Forbidden City to Angkor Wat. It is a statue of jade in the shape of a royal lizard – and here lies its mystery, and the wrong at the centre of the tale. For how could an Indian artificer, however talented, fashion a statue in the shape of beings not seen in the world at that time?"

  She tried to imagine it, and fear took hold of her. The lizards had changed the world when they were awakened by Vespucci all those years ago. They had claimed the British Isles for their own, and set about conquering the known world, assembling to themselves colonies and protectorates as if they were blocks in a child's game. How long had they lain dormant on Caliban's Island before being awakened? And where had they come from?

  From space, if the stories were true…

  "Stories," Master Long said, "are true for what they tell us about ourselves more than for their own internal truth." He smiled, though it seemed to her there was mostly sadness in the expression. "Let me tell you about the boy…"

 

• • • •

 

What it was he didn't know. And yet it seemed to speak to him, a babble of voices rising in his mind, saying unfathomable things.

  
Testing language modules… initiating geo-spatial surveillance… mind
scan initiated… complete… audio-visual reconstruction activated… long
range scan returning negative… help us, boy! We are in the sand.

  Something hidden, something talking to him, confusing his thoughts. The camel watched him for a while without much interest, then wandered off in search of shade. The boy tried to dig into the sand but it was hard as glass. He tried to smash it but it was strong. And all the while the voices spoke, an insane babble of them, promising him untold riches and eternal life…

 

"The boy was young then, and had dreams of glory," Master Long said. "Of riches beyond compare, and dusky maidens, of conquest and victory and admiration and glory… but I suspect that, even without it, he would have liberated the statue. For nothing but curiosity, Milady. It is what makes us human, in the final count. More than love, more than hate, more than dreams of immortality or glory – it is curiosity that–"

  "Killed the cat?"

  "What?" He looked at her, then shrugged. "Quite."

 

The boy's hands were bloodied, the nails torn, the knuckles bruised. Still he worked. With knife and spear until they broke, and then he used rocks, smashing them against the ground again and again, unheeding of the need for food or drink or shelter.

  The voices spoke their insane babble:
Biological life form
unrecognised. Checksum negative. Biological energy levels low. Initi
ating molecular restructuring. Feasibility study incomplete. What
is this place?

  The sun burned him. The camel was nowhere to be seen. Time held no meaning to him.

  Only the thing in the ground.

  At last, he managed to dig a small hole. Underneath, the sand was soft and he cleared it away and pulled out his prize.

  A green monster of a lizard stared back at him.

 

"It was not yet jade, you see," Master Long said. "That came later, and the eyes. What the boy saw was a lizard, yes, but it was slimmer then, without the camouflage of human workmanship. It was an alien thing, something he did not – could not – understand. It was made by tools and beings unknown and, I think, perhaps unknowable. It was made of a strange green metal–"

  She thought of the green metal the lizards had brought with them from Caliban's Island. Master Long nodded, as if reading her mind.

  "Was it some tool of the lizards, unknowingly discarded? Had it come with them from their home and fallen down to Earth? It is possible. Other things have materialised that should not have been. It is said the Bookman himself was once a creature of the lizards… has been said, and very quietly, at that, these past three years."

  "There had not been a Bookman assassination in all this time," Milady said. Master Long nodded. "Three years since the Bookman was last heard of. Three years since the revolution on the British Isles. A lot can happen in three years, Milady de Winter."

  And she thought – the grey manifestations had began less than three years ago – began, perhaps, just after the time of the upheavals…

 

The boy held the statue in his arms, cradling it as he would a baby. When he went looking for his camel he did not find it, though the skeleton of a camel lay nearby. He could not remember when he had last eaten or drank, but the voices spoke to him and comforted him and offered him nourishment.

  He held the statue and began to walk across the desert, searching for the caravan of his family and his friends.

 

"But he never found them," Master Long said, and there was infinite sadness in his voice when he spoke. "Time had passed differently in that place of old bones in the desert, and when the boy returned to the world, the world had irrevocably changed. 

  "He never saw his family again."