The Insides (21 page)

“I gotta call my roommate,” she says, fishing her phone out of her pocket for the thousandth time today.

“Go for it,” says Ulysses.

She dials. Victor answers.

“Ollie,” he says. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I think so. This whole situation is pretty fucked.”

“No kidding,” Victor says. “Where are you?”

“I’m with Ulysses—we’re driving around Manhattan. I think we should—come get you? Maybe?”

“What? Why?”

“ ’Cause there’s some maniac running around shooting my friends, that’s why. And—this is going to sound crazy, but I think he’s after that knife.”

“It’s not a knife,” Victor says.

This gives Ollie pause. “What do you mean?” she says.

“It’s not a knife,” Victor says again. “It’s a piece of a sword.”

She considers this, imagines it as the tip of a sword, embedded in a handle. It explains the weird dual edge and the lack of a bolster. And she thinks suddenly back to Rufus, and his crazy theories, and she remembers that World
Knives
wasn’t the phrase that he used, it was
swords
: World Swords.

“How do you know that?” she asks, carefully.

“Well,” Victor says. “Let me back up a minute. Guess where I went this morning?”

“I have no idea,” Ollie says.

“Well, with everything so royally fucked, as it is, it would be uncharitable to force you to guess, so I’ll just tell you. I did what we
should
have done Sunday morning: I went to Manhattan, and found the parking lot where our old friend Rufus works, if
working
is the word you would use to describe someone who sits in a glass box reading Hermetic manuals all night. Regardless: I caught him at the end of his shift and I told him if he came to our apartment and told me everything he knew about magic blades that I’d make him the best breakfast he’d ever had. I told him I make an amazing popover. So let me just say it’s been a pretty interesting morning.”

Ollie blinks. “Wait, is he there now?”

“He’s here; he has popover in his beard; the whole thing really is magnificently disgusting.”

“Did he have information about the knife, or the sword, or whatever the fuck it is? What did he tell you?” Ollie asks.

Victor pauses. “To some degree I’d have to say it resists summary,” he says.

“Jesus Christ, Victor, I’m running for my life here, you think you could just give me a straight answer?”

“Straight’s not exactly my forte, my dear, but—wait—Rufus, don’t, we don’t
grab
in this household. Ollie, I am gathering that he has an interest in speaking with you directly. His hands are impossibly filthy so I’m just going to put you on speaker”—scuffling sounds—“and set the phone down right here, juuust out of reach. Can you hear us?”

“I can hear you,” Ollie says. “Hello? Rufus?”

“Monarchs!” Rufus exclaims. “Royals!”

“Hi, Rufus,” Ollie says. “Can you slow down a second? Which royals?”

“Warlock-Kings and Witch-Queens! Impossible monarchs of the oldest Europe! Europe before Europe! Time as tissue!”

“OK,” Ollie says. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “I need a verb. Can you give me a verb?”

“The Swords,” Rufus intones. “The World Swords. They forged the Swords to enact their will.”

“All right,” says Ollie. “So they use the Swords to get what they want—but what in the fuck do a bunch of old world kings want?”

“Ollie,” Victor interjects, “they’re kings. What do you think they want? They want to rule. They made the Swords so that they could rule the world.”

“Look,” Ollie says. “I’m sure there’s something to be gained from this history lesson but mostly I just need to know one thing: Should I chuck this thing in the river or not?”

“No!” Rufus exclaims. “Water won’t lose it. The primal Sword was sunk before—then found! Every schoolchild knows! The lake. The lake in the story.”

Ollie’s scalp prickles suddenly. “What story,” she says.

“Think monarchs,” Victor says.

“I’m thinking monarchs,” Ollie says.

“Think monarchs with swords,” he continues. “Monarchs with special magic swords that allow them to enact their will over an entire country—?”

“Motherfuck me,” Ollie says, “you’re talking about King
Arthur
?”

“Bingo,” says Victor.

The woman is moving. The woman and someone else. Maja can feel it happening, even in her sleep, like something snagging on silk, tugging. She stirs, wakes, sits up, presses her fingers into the corners of her eyes to remove the specks of morning grit.

She probes at the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Dry: she hasn’t been drinking enough water these last few days. In the bathroom, running the sink, she works a hole into the polyethylene wrapping of the single-use cup the motel has provided, but when the vision of a petrochemical refinery begins to loom in her mind she just sticks her head under the tap instead. Swishes, spits, takes another swig and this time swallows. The faint taste of minerals in her mouth. Images of layered stone deep within the mountains to the north: a suitable basis on which to found a morning. A point from which she can work.

She sits at the desk, spreads out the maps, tries to align
her sense of the woman’s movements with the rendering that’s there in front of her. She puts her finger on a highway, considers it, moves her finger to a different one.

The Archive looks at the names of towns, notes the ones that it finds funny.

Once she’s reached a point of suitable certainty, she lets herself into Pig’s room. He’s still asleep, his breathing labored through his bruised and broken nose. He’d brought ice with him to bed last night, and now a clear plastic bag filled with water rests on his pillow, beached there, distended, like a jellyfish on a shoreline.

“Wake up,” Maja says. Pig doesn’t stir. “Wake up,” she says again, a little more loudly.

“Fuck,” Pig says. “What time is it?”

“It’s not early,” she says.

Pig groans, rolls over in the bed, pushes the bag of water away with the edge of his hand.

“They’re moving,” Maja says.

“They,” Pig repeats.

“The woman. The knife. Someone else traveling with her, I can’t quite get it. A man. A friend.”

“A bodyguard,” Pig offers.

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

“Where are they headed?”

“North.”

“That’s all you can give me? ‘North’?”

“I’m not a fortune-teller,” she says. “I can’t give you the future.” The future appears to her as it always does, shapeless, inchoate, terrifying in its inability to be known by the precise location of its things. “But,” she continues, setting
these thoughts aside, “I can tell you what’s happening now, and what’s happening now is they’re headed north.”

“OK,” says Pig. “North.” He pushes himself upright, throws his bare legs over the edge of the bed, gathers the sheet around his waist. He’s not wearing a shirt and she examines his tattoos. On one shoulder, three heavy black bars, arrayed in a configuration that resembles a trident. On his other shoulder, a cross in a circle, again made from heavy, dark lines. Across his chest, a wild pig, in profile, head lowered, tusks up. Taken together as icons they create a sinister effect, the suggestion of coercive force.

With any other client, she’d take this opportunity: read the tattoos, learn more about where he got them, when, why. She begins to do it, but the tattoos, like everything else about him, are clouded by a halo of noise, a history that’s been reworked somehow, cut up, spliced back together. She gets a vague sense of them as images on flags, being waved by hateful crowds—but the image is jumbled, low-quality, like video footage she might see on a news broadcast, shot chaotically in the midst of a scuffle.

She could ask him. She’s not in the habit of using conversation as a way to learn about people’s backgrounds; she’s never had to do it so she’s never really developed the skills that are necessary. All the same, she recognizes that it is a thing that is humanly possible to do.

Pig touches his nose gingerly, winces.

“All right,” he says, blinking himself the rest of the way awake. “They’re moving. Do we know mode of transport? Plane, train, what?”

“They’re on the road, I think,” Maja says. “They’re
moving fast, but not as fast as a plane would take them. And it seems to only be the two of them, so probably they’re in a car. I’d feel more people if they were on a train or a bus.”

“On the road, in a car,” Pig says. “So we can catch up with them.”

“They can’t drive forever,” Maja says. “They’ll have to stop somewhere.”

“And anywhere they stop will be better than here,” Pig says, experimentally, as though checking the veracity of the observation.

“I would say yes,” Maja says. “Most places that aren’t this city will confer advantage to us. Fewer people, lower density, less surveillance.”

“Not as many cops.”

“Not as many cops.”

“OK,” Pig says. He smiles, showing teeth.

“So—so—so wait a second,” Ollie says. “Are you saying I have a piece of King Arthur’s
sword
?
Excalibur
?” She can feel the incredulous expression on Ulysses’s face without even having to turn to look at him.

“That’s—no—that’s not exactly it,” Victor says. “Rufus says Excalibur is still where it should be. Where you’d expect it to be. Like, in Britain. But—there’s more than one.”

“OK,” Ollie says, her head whirling. “How many are there?”

“It’s complicated,” Victor says. “My laptop is open and I open a new tab every time Rufus says something and I have like twenty tabs open now. There’s this list he showed me, on this message board, it proposes there are five, maybe?”

“Five!” Rufus barks. “Unstable number, inverted pentagram, superimposition upon the globe.”

“So, listen, Arthur has the first one, the one Rufus calls the primal one, which, as you know, he uses to rule Britain. And France—it’s like an arms race back in those
days; England has one so France needs one—so you have Charlemagne. Charlemagne
fronts
like a Christian, which is genius, ’cause to hear Rufus tell it it sounds like he’s actually the head of this enormous magical death cult—whatever—anyway, he’s got a sword, Joyeuse, which is basically the French equivalent of Excalibur. That’s the second one.”

“French,” Ollie mutters. She thinks back to the accent of the guy who shot Guychardson. It could have been French. She wrenches her attention back to Victor, who is continuing on, saying something about various wars between France and England—

“—anyway, at some point they get tired of fighting with one another, and instead they start looking outward across the globe. They start making more of these swords. Queen Elizabeth apparently gives the third one to the British East India Company in 1600, which they use to establish company rule over the Indian subcontinent. And then King James makes the fourth one, in 1606, when Britain establishes colonies here, in America. To help them rule us. And part of how we were able to break free is that during the Revolutionary War we get the sword and destroy it. At the Siege of Boston. You remember that part.”

“What happens to the other ones?” Ollie asks.

“OK, so Excalibur—it seems like the Royal Family still has it, somewhere. The American sword is destroyed in 1775 or 1776. The British East India sword is supposedly destroyed, 1857. Shit with Joyeuse is a little more complicated. The French monarchy hangs onto it for like a thousand years, but then it’s stolen and replaced by a fake in,
uhh, 1792, during the French Revolution. The original ends up with Napoleon; he gets his hands on it in 1795, uses it to great success during the Napoleonic Wars—it gets broken at some point, nobody’s clear when exactly. It does seem like the individual shards float around for a while—one ends up with Napoleon III—Napoleon’s nephew—who tries to use it to set up a puppet emperor in Mexico. That fails, but then he uses it to start carving into Asia, basically setting up French Indochina. Looks like that one’s finally destroyed as recently as 1954.”

“OK,” Ollie says. “So the one that I have—”

“Well,” Victor says. “I left something out.”

“Tell me,” Ollie says.

Big sigh from Victor. “There’s this fifth one.”

“The fifth one,” Ollie says.

“It’s also French,” Victor says. “They make it so they can rule Haiti.”

Ollie blinks.
Fuck
, she thinks. “Haiti,” she says, for confirmation.

“Yeah,” Victor says, quietly. “In 1665.”

“Blood and sugar,” Rufus mutters. “Sugar and blood.”

“And that one—”

“The Internet says it’s destroyed, 1803. During the Haitian Revolution. But that could mean—”

“Shards,” Ollie says. “I get it.”

“Scattered shards,” Victor says.

“Each piece hidden,” Rufus says. “Passed from mothers to daughters. Passed from fathers to sons. Separate threads. Draw them together, though, and—make a knot!”

“But even a shard,” Victor says, “would be—”

Ollie completes the thought: “Worth killing someone over.”

“I was going to go with
extremely powerful
.”

“Powerful enough to change the course of history,” Ollie says.

“Maybe. Possibly. So, in conclusion, worth killing someone over, sure.”

“Worth killing a bunch of people over.”

“Pretty much, yes,” Victor says, uncomfortably.

“So what this basically means,” she says, “is that I’m going to die.”

She can feel Ulysses flick a look over at her.

“Maybe not!” Victor says.

“I’m going to get shot,” she says, miserably, “and I’m going to die.”

“I don’t know,” Victor says. “I mean—you’re doing the right thing.”

“Running? Is that what you think is the
right thing
in this situation?”

“Absolutely,” Victor says. “This guy, this shooter—he doesn’t know shit about you.”

“He knows where I work.”

“He knows where you
work
,” says Victor. “That’s nothing. So that’s the one place you don’t go for a while.”

“It’s closed anyway,” Ollie says.

“So what else? He doesn’t know your name. He doesn’t know where you live. He doesn’t know where you’re going. Did he see your face?”