Theatre of the Gods (51 page)

‘Quite. But then everyone you know is a stranger, isn’t that so? You don’t have a person in the universe you could say you knew for sure.’

‘I have my friend, My Ladies.’

The botanist’s laugh filled Lenore with dread. The band had stopped. There was near silence in the Grand Ballroom. Some of the guests were snoring faintly.

‘You … put everyone to sleep?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s the finest trick.’

‘A simple parlour trick, like your wizard’s gag with the fake knives. I could teach you if you like. I know many tricks.’

‘I have some for my own.’

‘Indeed you do. And plenty of time to practise. It must be hard to feel as alone as you.’

‘I don’t feel so alonesome.’

‘Do you not? Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Really? You have countless billions of miles to travel and no one to travel with. The most powerful beings in the Infiniverse want you dead. And even if you did manage,
somehow
, to escape me, someone else would come along to kill you. You fled the universe and we found you. Does that not make you feel desperately alone? You want to get home, but where is home? You have no place, no family. You know this in your heart. You are an alien creature. You don’t belong here. The best thing you could do would be to end it all now.’

‘Is that a fact?’

There was a pause in the conversation. ‘My word,’ she heard the hijacked botanist say, ‘you do have a strong mind. Slow claps for you,’ and at once all the sleeping citizens in the Grand Ballroom began to clap in time, a resounding clap for every second, like the report from a line of rifles at a funeral.

The clock in the Grand Ballroom struck eleven and the pair waited for its chimes to fade.

‘You simply have no idea, Lenore, of the power you have.’

‘I don’t?’

‘No. But how could you? You have
real
power.’

‘More than you?’

‘More than I and all these sleepyheads combined. But unfortunately even you can’t stop what’s coming.’

‘Well, why do you not just kill me now?’

‘I will. But first I’d like to peel open that skull of yours. Take a
look at that miraculous little brain.’

‘And you are waiting for something else. The file. You must have the file.’

‘Very good. You are very good.’

‘I don’t know of any file.’

‘Of course you don’t. Don’t worry your pretty head about that. Once I have it I can kill you.’

‘I’m not afraid of dying.’

‘That’s because you don’t know what it’ll be like, Lenore. When people die, they sleep. When you die you won’t sleep. Even when I’ve killed you you’ll lie beneath the heavy soil, rotting all the while to bloody jelly, the fat worms coiling through your ribs, maggots seething in your soggy abdomen. But your mind will live on. Your ice prison was a few millennia. Imagine an eternity. Now tell me that doesn’t frighten you.’

Lenore was alarmed to hear the clapping cease as the clock struck twelve, though but a few seconds had passed since eleven bells. She heard Miss Fritzacopple say, ‘Gosh, the ice in my glass has melted.’

The band swelled into life again: ‘Our Lady Lives On’.

THE NECRONAUT

The captain had left his ball hours earlier. He had seen a fuss around the carriage park as teams of guards set off in pursuit of the explorer who had kissed a general’s wife without asking. He drifted through the darkened halls, whispering darkly in his wiry head, stroking his scars and incanting magic spells of misery. His black eyes roamed the stone arcades, scanned the shimmering shadows for movement, drifted up to the dreaming spires where the evening bells tolled softly, to the dark mountains above, to the stars beyond, and his dry lips parted for a moment. He had felt her watching him home on many an evening. But tonight was different. Tonight she walked with him, her soft arm through his. He found himself in a corridor where statues of half-angel creatures rose and spread their wings, as stiff and ready as vultures. In the windows of the arcade the curtains filled like sails and released, it seemed, with heavy sighs. The captain thought he could hear an ocean. He found himself in a doorway where a woman’s voice said, ‘At last. My champion. I was calling. Did you not hear? Why did you not come when I called you?’

He found himself saying, ‘Because I’m afraid.’ He found icy hands touching his face. A single frozen finger ran the length of the scar on his cheek. Icy blue hands touched his and brought him forward. The next thing he felt was the sun.

463171: THE ONE WHERE NO ONE’S READY

That night Fabrigas had the strangest and most vivid dream. It was perhaps the
most
strange and
most
vivid dream he’d had since all those centuries ago when he’d survived the cannon and dreamed that there were infinite universes, all singing together like voices in a choir, that life was a continuum of possibilities, that the separation between objects was an illusion, that reality itself was one great glorious game.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello there.’

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Carl.’

Carl sat on a rock and considered the waves. He looked handsome in his polo-neck sweater.

‘Pleased to meet you, Carl. Have we met?’

‘No. I am a friend.’

‘Oh. And why am I standing on a beach?’

‘Because you are dreaming.’

‘Oh. And what are all those starfish doing?’

‘Very little. They are your friends, too. We’re all your friends.’

‘Oh. That’s pleasant.’

‘It is. We’ve finally found a way that we can talk to you directly. Having our friends at Dark Hand send you all those letters was very difficult. And you don’t sleep much.’

‘I never have.’

‘We wanted to encourage you. We need to tell you how important it is that you keep trying, and that you don’t get sick-hearted. Things are about to get strange and tragic, but it is vital that you stick to your mission and bring these kids home to the beginning of time. Or as close as you can. That boy has a lot of important information in his scruffy little head. But it’s encrypted with a quasi-infinite prime-number key. With an infinity in front of us we should have just enough time to extract the information and prepare for the great battle.’

‘But you always taught me time was irrelevant.’

‘Ha! You clever thing. Time is like a river to an ocean.’

‘Because it flows?’

‘No, because it makes us think.’

‘I lost Roberto. It’s my fault.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up. He’s a clever kid. Maybe the cleverest. He’ll find his way back. Right now he’s in another dimension helping an advanced civilisation fight a giant monster.’

‘Is he now?’

‘Oh yes. Like I said, he’s a smart one. But the code in his head reveals, among many things, the hidden structure of a universe. And we can’t have that just roaming around.’

‘We can’t?’

‘No. But there isn’t time to explain why just now. It would take at least a dozen of your lifetimes. Your enemies from your old universe have sent some fearsome adversaries to kill you all. You can’t defeat them with weapons, or by running. Sometimes to keep your mind you have to let the monster in.’

‘I’m very, very tired.’

‘We know you are. But we’re confident you can find your old spark. You just need to remember what set you sailing through this great expanse in the first place. For small creatures like us the vastness is bearable only through love. Well, we should probably let you
go. It looks like there’s someone at your door.’

Fabrigas woke to hear a heavy and persistent banging on his door. ‘Things are about to get messy again,’ said Carrofax.

‘You’re back! Did you find our ship?’ said Fabrigas.

‘No,’ said the demon, ‘I did not. But I can tell you that the
Necronaut
does not sail in this dimension.’

‘I already know this.’

The banging on the door grew louder.

‘It gets worse. Some fools from your old universe have signed a pact with a monster.’

‘I know this too!’

‘In any event, you have more immediate dangers to worry about right now. Is your beard on tight?’

CELL

The cells in Diemendääs are bright and sunny. They have comfortable furnishings and paintings on the walls. One painting is of a brave soldier holding a child at arm’s length, but that isn’t important right now. Brave Captain Lambestyo leaned against the wall – he still wore his evening coat and boots – and mused upon a picture which was much less rousing than the ones he’d seen at night during the past weeks. This one was of a pompous-looking sailor holding a sextant as he gazed towards the stars. The captain smiled. He was happy. Though he was now a prisoner he was happy for the first time in a long, long time. He had tasted paradise. It was as if he were lost in a beautiful waking dream.

He could hear his lawyer talking to Fabrigas. ‘I’m afraid this is very serious,’ explained the lawyer, an earnest young woman called Solman. ‘He was caught in Our Lady’s quarters, though thankfully she was elsewhere at the time.’ The captain smiled. ‘But the family are very distressed, especially the Emperor. For him to make his way through nine heavily bolted doors and past countless guards shows someone who desperately wanted to get to the Empress.’

‘But how,
how
,’ said Fabrigas, ‘could he have managed to get past all that security? The guards saw and heard nothing. He would have needed inside help.’

‘Doors don’t seem to stop this man. He’s already broken out of his cell once: if only to make himself some tea.’ Solman began to
put away her papers. ‘And it does not change the fact that he is charged with the most serious crime possible of any in this city.’

Captain Lambestyo smiled again and shook his head. He could still hear her voice, faintly. ‘Champion, my champion. You belong only to me.’

*

The captain’s trial took place in a private hall away from the public. It was a fair trial, conducted well, but the crime of consorting, or attempting to consort, with Our Lady was a crime which carried heavy punishment: expulsion from this reality into a compartmental auxiliary punitive dimension, otherwise known as the Forbidden Zone.

‘I am aware that at the time you were in a fragile state,’ said the judge, ‘but I have no room for leniency in this instance.’

The captain by this time had cast off his spell, and the full weight of what he’d done bore down on his head and shoulders.

Fabrigas had gone to the judge, the prosecutors, even the Emperor to try to win the captain’s freedom. He pleaded with Dr Dray to tell him the ‘cheat code’ for the Forbidden Zone. ‘If we can sneak him out a back door we can be gone and no one will be the wiser!’

‘I wish I could help you, froglet,’ said Dray. ‘But they would find out, and I would be tried as a traitor. I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to sacrifice my life for your friend.’

‘And I would not expect you to.’

Given a rare few moments alone with his captain, Fabrigas had whispered, urgently: ‘So this is a tight spot. In a high-security prison and about to be cast into the Forbidden Zone. What is your plan for escape?’

‘For escape?’

‘Yes. It is a difficult challenge, but if you need WD40-X I think I can make you some.’

‘I cannot escape from here.’

‘Come now. I’ve seen you get out of much worse than this.’

‘Jess. Let me put it some other way. I
will
not escape from here.’

Fabrigas blinked rapidly at him.

‘Even if I escape from this prison, I still cannot escape from her. I am her prisoner. Even if I go a billion light-years away I’ll always come back. It’s just the way it is. She’s just one of those women.’

Miss Fritzacopple, too, pleaded with the Emperor, but she couldn’t get him to grant the captain clemency. ‘Once a person falls under the spell of Our Lady there is no hope.’

‘Then let us leave! We’ll fly to another place, we’ll leave for ever!’

‘He would return. My dear, we’ve been here a thousand times. Why do you think we have a Forbidden Zone? Why do you think we put men there? Why do you think there’s an army at our western wall?’

*

And in the Lotus Garden, Prince Panduke told Kimmy that when he was finally Emperor he’d destroy the Forbidden Zone and free her friend. Kimmy let him hold her hand for exactly one minute.

*

Our friends farewelled their captain at the gate-which-wasn’t-a-gate and they wept. Even the great army of the Emperor Karn Karn-Zheng ceased their assault on the western wall and stood by to watch a ritual they had seen hundreds of times: the banishment of the mortal fool.

‘Farewell, friend,’ said Fabrigas. ‘We’ll rescue you when we can. I almost guarantee it.’

‘I don’t want to go into the Forbidden Zone,’ said the boy. ‘It’s boring.’

‘I know. But the bears will make life interesting.’

‘I have something to tell you,’ said the boy. ‘I tried to tell you on the ship, but I fell asleep. I’m not really the Necronaut. I was his cabin boy. He died while we were at sea. I didn’t throw him overboard like I said. He went of natural causes. Too much rum. So I took his life. Apparently he had once done it to another man called the Necronaut. Only the bosun knew.’

‘I knew.’

‘I was an army pilot, though. And I did get this scar from a woman.’

‘With you it’s always a woman. But you’re a fine captain. You have done well and should be proud.’

‘So you aren’t angry?’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘And my fee?’

‘We’ll discuss that later.’

‘Please tell Commander Descharge that I’m sorry he’s missed his chance to hang me. I’m sorry to disappoint him again.’

Lenore threw her arms around him and whispered, ‘I’ll not forget.’ Then she pressed a star-shaped object into his hand. ‘It’s to protect you,’ she said. ‘I was told not to give Gloria to anyone. But I am the boss of me.’ Even the stoic Maria Fritzacopple approached him to say goodbye. She put her hands on his shoulders and said, ‘You are a maddening fool.’ Then she smashed her mouth against his with a passionate intensity which made them all shield their eyes. Lenore said, ‘I smell odd things. What’s happening?’