The Crooked Letter (51 page)

The sound of the Swarm was rising again, a metallic screeching that never fell far behind and promised never to let him go. A hint of dawn glowed to the east, but that proved no deterrent to them. Weird shadows stirred in the windows around him; dust lifted in violent but short-lived vortices; dead trees shook. The city sensed the things passing through it, and was afraid.

I
will not give in to terror,
Hadrian told himself.
I’m not alone, and I’m not helpless. I can escape.

The fact that Pukje appeared to have fallen asleep on his shoulder did little to increase his confidence.

Instinct urged him to turn left, down a winding alley. He followed it without hesitating, skirting a block that had been utterly reduced to rubble. Instinct hadn’t served him wrong yet. He had turned no corners to find the Swarm waiting for him with arms outstretched and vampire-teeth grinning. There were even moments when he thought the Swarm might be slipping behind. But those moments never lasted. Either fatigue — punishing his battered body — forced him to slow, or the Swarm caught a lucky break. They were soon on his tail again, unleashed and hungry for the kill.

Through it all, the bone in his chest throbbed steadily, a second, magical heart giving him strength when he most needed it. That, if nothing else, convinced him that Pukje meant him no ill will.

An intersection came and went; he felt no impulse to turn. He jumped a tumbled bin and almost landed on the skeleton of a cat picked clean by unknown teeth. A black shape — one of the ghastly flapping creatures he had seen in Lascowicz’s lair — swooped overhead, and he ducked out of sight just in time. From a narrow, pipe-lined niche, he peered out and upward, taking the opportunity to catch his breath while it flew by.

We do it together, or neither of us does.

Kybele had once said something about strange alliances forming before the end came. He had never expected one this strange.

‘Pukje!’ he hissed, shaking the creature drooling on his shoulder. ‘Wake up!’

‘What? Eh?’ Narrow eyes flicked open. ‘You’re doing just fine, boy. Keep going as you are.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m just running in circles.’

‘I doubt it — but if you are, then it’s for a reason.’

The imp’s eyes closed again.

‘Damn it!’ Frustration threatened to get the better of him. If there was some pattern to the way he was moving through the city, it was hidden from his conscious mind. What was the point of that? If he didn’t know where he was running to, he was just as trapped as before.

The caterwauling of the Swarm was getting louder and closer. As soon as the flapping thing had gone, he hurried along the alley to the next intersection, where his gut told him to turn right. Out of defiance, he turned left, just to see what would happen.

He regretted it almost immediately. Any feeling he had that he might outrun the Swarm quickly evaporated. With every step he went down the left-hand path, the more chill the air became and the less colour there seemed to be in the world. The cloudy sky faded to mottled black. Reflections writhed in muddy puddles.

A deep, resonant hiss joined the screech. It came from ahead of him, at the end of the street. He stumbled to a halt, suddenly terrified. The sound reminded him of the boiler under the hospital, dark and dangerous. Gravel and dirt danced on hearing it. He didn’t want to see what made a noise like that.

A tide of blackness turned the far corner and rolled like a cloud along the street towards him. He turned and fled before its heart came into view. When he reached the intersection at which he had turned left, he kept running along the right-hand path, the one he should have followed in the first place.

Too late,
his instinct told him.
You screwed up. It’s all over, or will be soon.

He shook his head in denial and ran as fast as he could.

Behind him, the darkness of the Swarm grew in intensity. It knew he was close.

‘Geometry,’ said Pukje sleepily in his ear. ‘It’s all about geometry.’

‘I was never good at maths,’ Hadrian gasped.

‘No wonder, the way it’s taught these days. Geometry is the language of truth, and teachers make it look like a conjuring trick. Doodles and illusions are all they peddle. Maybe if they hadn’t forgotten what it was really
for,
your people might have withstood this invasion a little better.’

Hadrian couldn’t argue with that. For one, he was out of breath. For two, he suspected the imp was right. The power of the metaphor that had killed the draci was enough to demonstrate the truth to him.

Pattern is the key,
Kybele had said.
If you capture it, hold it, you have power over the way it changes.

‘But how can it help us now?’ he asked, turning right then hard left onto a main road. Buildings loomed over them in two solid masses, like ravine walls. Empty windows stared at him with the eyes of corpses, reminding him of the city’s dead. If he didn’t think fast, he would soon join them. ‘The Swarm’s never going to let us go, even when I do what the geometry says. I can’t run fast enough.’

‘That’s because you’re not following the geometry to its logical conclusion,’ Pukje said. ‘You’re thinking in two dimensions. Take your mind out of the map and wonder where else you could go.’

Out of the map.
‘You mean we could fly?’

‘I suspect not. And we would be unsafe even there.’

As if to prove Pukje’s point, the flapping thing hove into view out of a laneway directly ahead of him. Its underbelly was deep in shadow. Hadrian saw glowing red eyes on stalks swinging to fix on him. It emitted a triumphant shriek.

He froze, knowing it was too late to run. The next intersection was too far away to reach in time. He could turn back, but every nerve screamed that this would be a bad idea indeed.

‘Instinct is all very well,’ Pukje whispered in his ear, ‘but it must be combined with intellect to be truly effective. A sword in a fool’s hand is little more than an artfully pointed stick.’

‘I’d give anything for a sword right now.’

‘You have one in your mind. Use it and we will survive.’

A sword?
At that moment his mind felt like nothing so much as an overheated lump of jelly. There were only two ways to go: forward or back. The flapping thing was moving toward him, its many legs flexing, its sharp talons quivering. Behind him, the darkness was gathering. The screeching of the Swarm had taken on a new note, one even more piercing than before.

If he couldn’t go forward and he couldn’t go back, he asked himself, where
could
he go? What use was instinct when it had so few options?

A reflection in one of the windows across the road caught his eye. A black wing slid across panes of mirrored glass like an oil slick, hideous and malevolent. In moments the flapping thing would be upon them.

The reflection triggered a thought about Kybele, and kitchens. There
was
another way. Forward and back might be blocked, but there was always sideways.

‘Yes,’ said Pukje as he turned and ran into the nearest building. ‘I was beginning to think I’d have to spell it out in large print.’

Hadrian ignored the comment. The building seemed little different to the many others he had explored in the days since he had found himself alone in the city. Its foyer was all marble and shards of glass. Brown shrubs hung as limp as barflies over planters, as dead as everything else in the city. Doors behind the reception desk led deeper into the building. A bank of elevators stood like mausoleum slabs off to one side.

His instinct was momentarily vague on where to go next. Outside, the flapping thing’s claws scratched at the window glass, setting his nerves on edge. The Swarm was getting nearer by the second, pushing the dawn out of the sky. Just entering the building wasn’t enough to guarantee his safety. He had to do much more than that. The question was:
what?

He went behind the reception desk and tried the doors. Both were locked. He fished through a scattering of personal effects on the desk — trying as hard he could not to notice the faces on the ID cards and photos of loved ones — and found a ring of keys. He was trying them when glass crashed behind him, and the flapping thing roared.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Pukje when he turned to look over his shoulder. ‘They’re not on the same side. Let them fight it out. Be glad they’re giving us a few extra seconds and keep right on with what you’re doing.’

Hadrian found the key and opened the door. As he slipped inside, he caught a gut-watering glimpse of the creatures outside quarrelling over him. A terrible wind had sprung up, melting the road surface and sweeping it up into a funnel around the flapping thing. Black, elongated shapes danced in the wind, their song ghastly to hear.

Gratefully, he shut the door on the sight, and although the gesture seemed futile he locked it.

A short corridor led to a communal area with coffee urns, a small fridge and a television. His gut told him that this wasn’t what he was looking for. The geometry was wrong: too static, too self-contained. He needed something fluid, interstitial.

He kept moving, trying not to hear the noises behind him. Pukje was right. He had to think clearly, not be panicked by things he could do nothing about.

A flight of fire stairs called him. The concrete shaft echoed emptily with the boom of his entry. He automatically went to go down, thinking to escape underground, but hesitated on the top step.
No.
That way led to Kybele’s realm — the world of basements and car parks and subways and drains. She and her dwarf-like minions knew their way around down there much better than he did. They would expect him to take the obvious way, and he would be as unsafe among them as he was out on the streets.

He turned and — although his mind cried that it made no sense, that it would seal his doom — began climbing upward.

‘Excellent,’ said Pukje, ‘you’re a natural.’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m doing.’ He went up two steps at a time, even though he knew he should be conserving his strength. With Pukje on his back, he would soon tire of that pace. ‘Or where I’m going.’

‘Somewhere safe.’ The imp clung tight. Every step upward made him bounce like a backpack — a bony, wriggling, bad-breathed backpack that seemed to think Hadrian knew more than he did. ‘I trust you.’

Three floors, four floors.
Hadrian dropped back to single steps at a jogging pace. He was breathing and sweating heavily. The inside of the stairwell was dark and stuffy, like an oven. When he looked up the central column, he couldn’t see the top.

Five floors, six ...
He stopped. The door to the sixth floor was unlocked. He pushed it open and — although there wasn’t likely to be anyone on the far side — eased himself quietly through. He found himself in a typical office, with cubicles laid out like a child’s Lego set, smelling of synthetic carpets and ozone. With no air conditioning, whirring printers, or computer fans, the air was breathlessly still. He traced a zigzagging path through it, guided by yellow sunlight that carved blocky wedges out of the air. The office took up half the cross-section of the building. A long wall separated it from the other side, but doors led through it in two places, suggesting that both areas belonged to the same company. The one he headed for was ajar. The far side was more opulently appointed, with enclosed offices and frosted glass desks. Where the bosses retreated, he thought; middle-management heaven. He followed a procession of meaningless names along a corridor, turned left at a secretary’s station, and came to another resonant door.

Hadrian hesitated, just for a moment. He knew that the door couldn’t possibly lead anywhere. The building wasn’t wide enough. He was already at the edge.

Still, he opened it and went through into another office, almost identical to the first. This one was L-shaped and had once been extensively greened. A series of desiccated indoor trees led him to the corner of the L, where he turned. Only then did he notice that the light was angling in from another direction — proof, if he needed it, that he hadn’t crossed a bridge to another building. Not a physical bridge, anyway.

Another door. Another stairwell, wider and cleaner than the first. He went up again — five floors this time — then took the exit he found there. Yet more offices, as sterile and lonely as the others. He felt like an intruder, a ghost confined to urban spaces once familiar from sitcoms and shows about lawyers, but now alien and lifeless. He half-expected the howl of the Swarm to start up at any moment, but the spaces through which he travelled were silent.

The view through the windows was of endless buildings marching off to the horizon, with banks of warped, tortured clouds overhead and occasional beams of sunlight stabbing down at hidden streets. Here and there were signs of supernatural activity: skyscrapers connected by sheets of translucent material that cast eerie rainbows when sunlight struck them; numerous towers painted with the eyes of the Kerubim; a single column of continuous lightning that danced back and forth from one end of a distant street to the other, with no obvious purpose.

Creatures that might have been albatrosses but could easily have been giant bats — he ruled out nothing — banked over a communications tower.

The tower’s delicate dishes had all been dashed to the roadside far below. Fire damage was commonplace, and wide swathes of the city lay crumbling or torn down by the battle between Mot and Baal.

Where was Kybele? he wondered. Why was she standing for this?

The streets were hidden from his sight by the bulk of the buildings. The only ones he could see were the ones directly beneath him, and they were deserted. Of the Swarm — or anything else — there was no sign.

‘Kybele is dead,’ he said, thinking it but not really believing it.

‘Perhaps,’ said Pukje in response. ‘Your guess is as good as mine on that score — and on who would rule the towers in her wake. Maybe no one. They are a relatively new phenomenon that many genomoi feel uncomfortable with.’