Theatre of the Gods (17 page)

His father’s ship was far from on the rocks. Publishers would send him samples of their best volumes in the hope that the baron would agree to distribute them. ‘See, baby wolf, I get these publishers from across the universe who think that theirs is the only book among the stars. And what am I to do with them all?! Each book costs a packet for the rights, a quarter that to print. Shipping costs me more money and sleep than I can spare. Then there’s insurance, handling, a case of wine for the shipping managers, the reviewers, the Queen’s censors. Then what’s a humble merchant left with? I need a margin, or what am I in the business for? Fun? Take this volume of Bartellio’s
Black Holes and Other Anomalies
you’ve been leafing through and muddying up with your fingers. It is science, which is always a poor seller, but if it isn’t too stodgy it might sell to the academies. I could sell a few tens of thousands, and maybe make a little selling this edition to a dealer – if you hadn’t laid your paws all over it. A small
margin is what I’ll get. Meanwhile the publisher cries to me, “You’re squeezing us out of business! You demand too great a cut of meat! You leave us chewing on the bone and sucking marrow!” I say. “My cut of meat might seem large, but that’s because I have to share it with a horde of beggars! There is nothing left at the end but a sliver of fat.”’ Young Fabrigas would look around the drawing room, at the priceless paintings, the antique lamps, and think to himself that it was a miracle what a sliver of fat could buy. ‘“Oh!” these publishers say. “But what of the poor fool who wrote the thing? He has to live in a garret and suck on his boots for sustenance! He must heat his hands over a passing rat!” I say, “I am not thy author’s keeper! If he has chosen the life of an artist he must starve like one! I have ninety-nine problems of my own, the hundredth is yours to keep.” Just look at this edition of
The Dictionary Internomicon
. A thousand volumes all cased in wood. What am I supposed to do with it? Who will buy them? What shall I do with any of them?!’

His son replied, ‘Father, I have read Bartellio’s book. It is fine enough, though it does have four errors in mathematics, and nine in usage. You might well be able to negotiate a discount. As for the
Internomicon
, I have only read the first volume, and so far it has few errors. Any wealthy family in the Empire would want one, since it has all the words a person would need to dazzle in conversation.’

His father was amazed. ‘Baby wolf, you are a marvel!’ He sacked his readers, saving a small fortune, pulled his boy out of school and set him to work reading full-time. Each day new books would arrive in the delivery bay of the mansion in Carnassus, and young Fabrigas would unpack them carefully, read each thoughtfully, and make notes. These notes were like gold to his greedy father, and his boy’s mind expanded like a galaxy. Every evening his mother would have to come up to his room and fetch him for his dinner. Sometimes he was in such a trance that she had to shake him violently just to rouse him.

‘Start with the onions and be patient,’ the old man murmurs at
the table in the basement. ‘Don’t boil the soup too fast, let it mature.’ He can babble on, trance-like, for hours, a medium channelling the ghosts of memories. I must be patient when he slips into the depths, wait for him to rise gently to the surface again. He was in his eighth year when the plague came. When the Black Cloud arrived it brought screams, bloody mobs, and fire. Then silence. The young Fabrigas thought he’d gone deaf. At dawn, twelve days before his eighth name day, he woke to hear Carnassus silent. It had never been silent. All across the city the same tiny dramas were playing out: people were leaning over the beds of loved ones who were leaving in a cloud of sweat and sickly odour. His mother went quickly, mercifully. The boy mopped her brow and listened as she used her fading strength to tell him where the most important of his father’s papers were hidden, which of those were to be destroyed, and confessed to the boy the very worst of her husband’s crimes. Then she used her last breath to tell him that she loved him with all her heart.

Can you know what it was like? His father was nowhere to be seen. That evening a message came through on the home telegraph machine.

Baby wolf. Stop. Have diverted towards the moon where your aunt and uncle have their house. Stop. With luck they still live. Stop. Your nanny, Danni, is with me. Stop. Follow when you can. Stop. The world is in chaos. Stop. But I know you have the wherewithal. Stop. I know you have the balls. Stop. Check for money in the safe and destroy the folder in my office marked ‘Critical Heat’. Stop.

*

There was no money in the safe. There was little food in the house. He was smart enough to know not to drink the public water. He snuck out at night for scraps and drain water. He ate nothing but
soup for that whole year. Whatever he could find went into the soup. He became very good at making it. He could make it in the dark. He had to. When they came to put the marker on the door of their home they smelled soup and were bewildered.

‘Ghost soup!’ they cried and never came back.

It was such a fiercely miserable time that he can hardly take it even now.

But he kept a good ship. He rose at dawn to clean and dress. Then he did his studies. Then he went out. He went below the house, through the cellar, the sewer, and into darkness. He went deeper than anyone dared. He went down to where Princess Malvia rested, still clutching her dead lover’s paintbrush and her husband’s sword. He went down among the royal bones, where no one ever dared to go, and found treasures. Then he went up into slums. The merchants were astonished to see a well-to-do child in an expensive coat rising from the Fathoms, brushing a fleck of filth from the sleeve of his jacket and saying, ‘How much for this iron cross, sir? It is very old.’ But no merchant would trade with an orphan. At best he managed to swap some of his treasures for sacks of rat-gnawed food. So he went up. To the markets where he scurried below the grills and scavenged onions that had rolled away unseen. Start with the onions and be patient. Then he went up. He went into the morphium dens to find the rags dropped between the boards and he sold them to the rag-men. He soon realised that a sackful of these scraps could fetch more than a brass funeral urn which had taken him a whole morning to scavenge. The rags could be sold to paper pressers who would turn them into creamy sheets to make the very books which each day were still piling up at his door. Whenever he came home he found a new stack of these end-fruits in his delivery bay, sent by publishers far away who still had no idea that the Black Cloud had descended on Carnassus. A treatise on military strategies; the complete works of Shiva Danzig; Wolff ’s famous book on probability. He could have sold these books
for a small fortune. But he did not. No matter how empty his stomach got.

He learned, too, that if he offered a morphium-soaked rag to a desperate fool with no credit at the dens he could get the shirt from off his back as well. And so his business trebled.

Then he went up. He went up into the night-dens. He used his knowledge of the laws of chance and probability to sell advantage to the gambling men. He made better money than he did hunting rags and old treasures. He went up. As dawn broke he would go to the chapel and give the priest a coin to say a prayer for him. The priest would take his money and buy booze, and he never said a single prayer for the boy. ‘What will happen to all these lonely people?’ the urchin would say to himself as he wandered home. ‘How does the universe keep making them? The old lady who picks up rice in the church after a wedding: why is she so lonely? It could be because she screams bad words at children. Ah well.’

At night the noises became consuming. The cries of the desperate. The gnawing of the rats. He had retreated to the attic and walled himself in with his books. They blocked out the noises, and let not a thread of lamplight out. There were barely enough scraps for soup. His belly was a cave.

It occurred to the boy at that time that every volume he added only illuminated another which was missing. It seemed as if every single answer bred a hundred questions. Gradually, his studies turned from the concrete and technical – what is light? What is the organic structure of the plague organism? – to the abstract – what is pain? Why is it necessary for a human being to suffer the plague of loneliness and despair, and can it, like a disease of the body, be cured? Am I alone, truly? And if so, can this loneliness be plotted on a graph? Was it, in fact, his own experiments with the Forbidden Geometry which had brought the Black Cloud to Carnassus, and brought his loneliness with it?

His boyhood was a period of such pain and hardship that even
now, if you ask him to talk about it, his eyes will cloud over and he will flatten his beard with the palms of both hands and look about the room as if searching for a familiar friend. It took me a long while to get him to describe those years.

Load up the cannons, bring your chums,

It’s fun to sing and drink ye rums,

She’s over-bored and self-assuuuuuuuuured.

…We know a dirty word – Oi!

‘Smells Like Sea Spirits’ – traditional shanty

MERCENARY

Bounty hunters are not fierce. Bounty hunters are not cruel. The best don’t have a lust for blood. For the hunter, retrieving is a business. They find, they kill, they get paid. It is a job. They don’t do it for pleasure. They are like the shark, or the tiger, or the tiger shark: for them, the hunt is the road towards the meal.

Six bounty hunters were hired by the Man in the Shadows to hunt and destroy a fugitive child in possession of a top-secret file. A simple task, no? Hiatus. The Medusa. San Dusty Von Furstenberg. Klaus Bugle. Penny Dreadful. And a new hunter, one that none of the others had even heard of, one who refused even to give over his name, but who came highly recommended by certain shadowy groups whose knowledge and power distort the envelope of believability.

The Well Dressed Man had left Carnassus in his private ship and set a course for deep space. He went with a fully stocked library, fourteen cases of finest Effervesco (an exquisite sparkling wine made exclusively on the wine-producing moons of Champagnos XT471), a caged bird, his prized viola, and the knowledge that, after a sequence of bizarre events, all five of his rivals were dead.

Hiatus, the youngest hunter, had accidentally fallen from the balcony of his 785th-floor penthouse apartment in Belgravus. San Dusty Von Furstenberg had, for reasons understood only by himself, handed his silver pistols to a ‘mark’ and encouraged him to shoot a peach off his head. The Medusa had somehow managed to pull an
eight-by-six-foot wall-mounted mirror shaped like a swan on top of herself. Klaus Bugle, famous for his skill with knives, fatally injured himself with an antique letter knife while opening an envelope. The envelope was addressed to ‘Stab Yourself ’ and the sheet of expensive letter paper inside was blank and unmonogrammed. Penny Dreadful, arguably the most renowned of the small group (and arguably the best in the Holy Neon Empire), decided, in an astonishing act of fair play, to message her home address to every mark, crime boss and fellow hunter in the galaxy. She was able to stay alive for a very respectable forty-five minutes before she fell from the Perfume Bridge in a hail of poison darts.

So now this Well Dressed Man found himself the only remaining mercenary from the star group hired to delete a top-secret file, and the child who carried it. The fact that he was now the only hunter on the case didn’t make his chances of finding them any greater (they were, after all, two very small things in a very big universe), but it did make the chances of him taking the full share of the very generous reward
very
likely.

All he had to do was follow the trail and be patient. His instincts never lied. Just that morning, as he’d been meditating on images of the fugitive, another image had spontaneously popped into his head. It was a bird of prey, and its wings were wide and white. ‘An owl? How strange.’ In moments of quiet he could discover great truths.

From the journal of H. Q. Gossipibom, poet

Though it has been four days since the horrible incident my heart has hardly stopped its pounding. This ship seems to be a ship of grand horror and misfortune: staffed by fools, bound for hell. And that woman we rescued has a malicious streak, I can see. I would not trust her.

*

From the diary of Miss Maria Fritzacopple

I have been rescued, and now am on a ship called the
Necronaut
. It is a ship which seems to be setting sail for madness. It is packed with awful specimens, none so much as the surgeon. He wanders slowly all around with steepled hands and steely eyes, and watches all as a cat watches fish in a bowl. And then there’s the old man, who rants to himself upon the observation deck. The crew are plotting his death, but the captain is on guard and he has the bosun onside. No one with any sense will cross the bosun. This man-giant towers above everything but intellect, and his body is a hellish canvas. Two spitting beasts are locked, necks entwined, in combat on his chest. An eagle, black and terrifying, rises from his back, a cluster of arrows in its talons. His arms show signs of dark and forbidden magic, such as those you’ll find in the old heathen gospels. His right shoulder declares ‘Mother’, and for that I’ll give him credit, and I won’t describe the rest, suffice it to say that I will be asking
the captain to ensure that each man locks his washing stall when he is in it. I cannot understand how some women are attracted to such low beasts. Certainly, if you could take some magic sponge and carefully wipe away his adornments then I could, perhaps, see some attraction.