Too Like the Lightning (67 page)

Of all men, reader, Mycroft Canner does not deserve to have been blessed with so wise and trusting a lover as Saladin. “All right,” he answered. “There's a logic to that, I'll accept it. I won't make you look, but you have to stay close to me. If this stalker scares Mycroft, I'm not letting you out of arm's reach for an instant: it's not safe. I'll carry you piggyback, and you can keep your eyes closed. Once I see what the stalker's done, I may be able to figure out why they're doing this, and how to end it. Sound good?”

Bridger's nod was more than half sob. “Mm-hm.”

“Let's see if the coat likes you.” Saladin lifted the hem and draped it over Bridger's arm, which promptly vanished, leaving only grass. “The coat says yes.” Saladin fished inside the coat, the Griffincloth wriggling like heat distortion. “Let's see, this thing hooks to that thing and pull this … there.” He slipped his left arm out of the coat and let it fall halfway off. “See, there are some straps there that you can sit in like a little seat, see them? You can climb on my back and sit your butt in this loop and hold on to this strap, and then I can cover you with the coat and no one can see either of us. Alley-oop!”

Bridger folded himself into the piggyback seat, a bit too lanky to snuggle. “That's really cool.”

“Yeah, it's for moving injured people. This is the best coat ever, when it's feeling cooperative.” At Saladin's command the back stretched itself enough to cover his wriggling cargo. “Want me to take your bag?”

“No!” Bridger tucked the satchel carefully against his side as the coat fell over him. “No, I got it, and you have to promise to never ever look in it, okay? It's a really, really secret secret. Mycroft wouldn't want you to see.”

A chuckle of thinned patience. “All right. If there's anything else you need before we leave here, tell me where it is in your cave, I'll look for it.”

“Leave?”

I wonder what kind of tone Saladin would use trying to be comforting. “After I read the gore, I'm going to take you to some friends who have a safe house ready, somewhere far away where I can make sure whoever's after you can't get at you. Once you're safely there, then I'm going to hunt Mycroft down and bring them back to us, no matter what. Sound good?”

“What kind of friends?”

“Some old criminal friends of mine and Mycroft's.” Saladin stepped carefully, almost tripping over Boo. “They'll take very good care of you, because they know if they don't I'll drag them into an alley, hack chunks off them, and eat them while they're still alive.”

“I like that you're honest. Most people wouldn't say stuff like that in front of a kid.”

“I like that you like that. You know who Mycroft is and what they did, right?”

“Yeah. Mycroft doesn't keep secrets from me.”

“I'm sure they say they don't.”

“I'm sorry.”

“What? Why?”

“I got snot on your shirt.”

A gentle, growling laugh. “Don't worry about it.”

Watch my Saladin now as he slides soundless through the grass, his wary eyes ranging the walls, the bridge above, as a fish watches for insects it can strike, and gulls who might strike back. Have you ever been in the true wilds, reader? There are some still, the deep protected Amazon, the arctic fringes, parts of the Great African Reservation, not the retrogressive towns where warlords cling to their thrones and borders, but the dark wastes where the full spectrum of wild beasts roams in herds and packs, including that rarest hunter, man. Out there you are responsible for yourself, no cars, no cops, no restaurants, no good Samaritans. That world does not exist to help you, does not need you, does not care, and will forget you as soon as the brush has grown over your footprints. For scavengers, our cities are such wilds too: for the pigeons who feast or starve by callous chance, for rats, for strays who have never known the ritual of ‘feeding time,' and so for Saladin.

“Is this the place, these plastic sheets under the bridge?”

A shudder prefaced the answer. “Yes. Please be fast, I can already smell it.”

Saladin released a slow whistle as he stepped through the tattered doorway. Red spattered the walls, and garlands of red crepe paper twined around the wreckage like toilet paper after a tornado. In the center of the cave, a manikin lay sprawled on the wreck in a red child's wrap, with a long curly wig and paper entrails pouring out of a hole cut in her gaping gut. Her face, chest, and arms were striped with painted knife wounds, red trickling from their depths, so the paint-blood coated the books and toys beneath, the plastic food and doll clothes carefully stirred to let bright gore coat every one. “So that's how you kill an imaginary friend.”

“It's not less bad because they were imaginary!” Bridger cried out. “They're still dead!”

“I see that.” Saladin tiptoed through the red and wreck with awe, like an entomologist through jungle, afraid of disturbing the morning's perfect spiderwebs. “It's perfect. Absolutely perfect, every touch.” He leaned close to a twist of plastic entrail and breathed deep, the smell of paint becoming blood salt in his mind. “Who did this, Bridger? I have to find them. You must know something, a name, a description? You said they left a note that you should meet them. Where? When?”

“I don't know. I destroyed it.”

“You must remember.”

“You can't go, something horrible will happen.”

“You're forgetting what I am, kid. If there's another liberated human out there, they're either my disciple or my rival. Either way, this is a challenge.”

“No! I don't want Mycroft's best friend to get hurt.”

“I'm going to track them down anyway, it's just up to you whether it's going to be fast and easy or whether I'm going to have to comb through this whole cave for hairs they left behind. Not everyone has our special shampoo.”

The child whimpered. “Please don't. Let's just hide and be safe.”

Saladin took a long breath. “Bridger, did you ever see the photos of the Mardi killings?”

“Some.”

“Did what this person did to Redder look familiar?”

The answer did not want to come. “It looked kind of like what Mycroft did to Senator Aeneas Mardi.”

“Exactly,” Saladin confirmed, “this is exactly what we did to Aeneas Mardi, cut for cut. It's a re-creation. Bridger, how many imaginary friends do you have? Seventeen? Eighteen? This is a declaration of war. After the stabbing of Aeneas Mardi comes the sound and electricity torture of Laurel, then the guillotining, then feeding Leigh to the lions, then Chinese water torture on Jie, European water torture on Makenna, and by this schedule Geneva Mardi would already have been on the cross a few days.”

“No! No, they already have the others! Aimer, and Pointer, and Nostand, and Nogun, Nogun's been missing for two days! They're not imaginary, either, they're already real!”

“Then tell me the address. Either one of us turns up there, or your friends die like the Mardi bash'. There are no other options.”

“Dominic Seneschal. Paris, the alley behind Chateau d'Arouet, [XX] boulevard [XXXX], 20:00.” It was not Bridger's voice. It was the Major's, rising from the coat at Saladin's back, as if from the speakers of Bridger's tracker.

Saladin would have liked the flavor of that voice. “Who are you?”

“Bridger's very short-tempered guardian angel. Can you kill Seneschal?”

“If I can't, no one can. I do like hunting hunters.”

“Don't mess around. Take them from behind, a shot to the back, an ambush, anything that will score an instant, certain kill. We can't have that kind of monster around Bridger.”

The hunter's eyes narrowed. “I'm a torturer, not an assassin. I don't kill prey until I've given them a proper taste of death's epiphany.”

“This time you have to. There's too much at stake. Kill Seneschal and I can find the hostages myself.”

“I'll kill them, but I'll kill them my own way.” Saladin started to climb the wreckage around the paint-smeared corpse. “I don't take orders from angels.”

Bridger whimpered as he felt Saladin's body tilt. “What are you doing?”

“Last rites. You don't want to leave your friend like this.” Saladin gathered the paper guts and fed them gently ‘back' into the ‘wound.'

“We can't burn them here,” the Major warned. “The smoke will draw attention.”

“I know. But we can do more than nothing.” Laying the body gently on the floor, Saladin scraped a handful of dry earth and sprinkled it over the body, muttering a few words of Greek.

Bridger sniffed, trying not to drip again on Saladin's shoulders. “Do you think Redder'll be okay now? Do you think they're off somewhere, okay?”

“No idea.” Saladin closed the coat around him now, so his passage through the plastic sheeting seemed like nothing but a breath of wind. “If you want to pray for them, try Hermes. Gotta figure Hermes likes imaginary friends.”

It isn't easy to make the Major smile.

 

C
HAPTER THE
THIRTY-SECOND

That There Are Two

This History has two halves, reader, strange as it is that seven days should take two books to tell. But they were dense days, not just with events, but with inhabitants, many, different, like these wildflowers in the trench where all began. Here one stray footstep snaps many different plants, releasing different saps, and smells, and stirring up the insects hidden underneath. The surge is just beginning now, the armies of crawling life which swarm forth, as if born from the broken stems. You do not see their full numbers yet, but I hope I have, at least, shown you enough to realize that these first scouts you do see, like the others that will follow, were not born from the stems. These swarms, these changes, were all waiting in their sleepy tunnels, all with causes that you can now understand. You do not have to believe. You only have to believe that we believe, that I, that Dominic, that Carlyle who stumbled on so much, believe in Bridger, acted on that belief, and that we believe too in the second Thing that Providence placed in Carlyle's path on this, the morning of the twenty-seventh, in that same fitting spot where, four days prior, he first saw Divinity reveal Itself. Perhaps you will not be satisfied. This last change I am about to show you is too subtle. You want politics, apocalypse. I will show you that, too, as an addendum, the scissors that can still beat paper, perhaps even our deceptive, one-piece house of cards. But if, this morning, Carlyle comes to Bridger's trench once more, despite Ockham's command, it is because Ockham, the cars, the Humanists, the theft, the Earth, are on a different scale. Not on the scale of miracles. Bridger is as much more important to Carlyle, as much more real, as your clothes, your friends, your problems, the floor beneath your feet are more real and more important to you than we and our problems of an age now passed. This is the true last chapter of this first half of my history, the last chapter for Carlyle, for me. Here we glimpse the full and concrete shape of the Intervention—still shadowed but a shape in darkness instead of just darkness, a form with edges, definition, so we may say with certainty ‘I saw Something'—the Intervention of Our Maker. The rest is merely what that Maker made.

“Bring 'em out! Bring out Mycroft Canner! We know you're hiding them, you filthy shitsack Servicers!”

Sticks and stones were not to be found in the clean glass tiers of Cielo de Pájaros, but trash flew just as hard, raining down on the heads of the Servicers who cowered amid the grass and petals of Bridger's flower trench. Their attackers were on the bridge above, five lamentably sober Humanists, who had pried open a garbage robot, baring yesterday's deposits ready to burst and smear.

“Bring the monster out here or there's a lot worse where this came from!”

I must say this first, reader: I am no Beggar King. My fellow Servicers have never considered me their leader. If some gather around me in the dorms it is because I am resourceful, and there are certain problems one does not take to the Cousins who are our babysitters. Criminals tend to have unfinished business, which often threatens the bash'es left behind. Many of these Servicers would have moved mountains in the past to save friends and family, but cannot anymore. I still can, begging favors from Madame or MASON when I dare, and when the need is great. So, when my need is great, the others are eager to give back.

A shout rallied the Servicers below: “Protect the food!”

Servicers have few things we can call precious, but a good meal justly earned is chief among them, so this picnic laid out on checked blankets on the grass was as worth fighting for as all the gold in Troy. They formed a makeshift wall, sheltering plates and platters with scraps from the dump, empty boxes, their uniforms, themselves, happy to accept a splatter if it would save a sandwich.

The attackers spat. “You're gonna lose a lot more than your lunch if you don't send Canner out! One call's all it'll take to have my whole crew down here, you'll see what damage a rugby team can do!”

A leader stepped forth among the Servicers, bristling with rage, but nameless here thanks to Kosala's censorship. “Look! We don't know anything about Mycroft Canner!”

“Don't give us that shit! The cops may be trying to cover it up, but the pictures are all over! Canner's hiding out as a Servicer!”

What was once chili struck the Servicer's shoulder, spattering rancid juice across her cheeks. “There are a couple hundred thousand Servicers worldwide! What makes you think we'd even know if it was true?”

The rot rain did not stop. “We're not buying that! Canner had a whole pack of Servicers with them when they came back to finish off that Mardi survivor. You're all in it together!”

Carlyle Foster rushed up behind the attackers now, his wrap and long scarf fluttering like silks around a fleeing nymph. His talk with Bryar Kosala the afternoon before had done much to revive his spirits, though he would have risen full of strength that day regardless, for March the twenty-seventh was sacred to Asclepius, Dionysus, Rama, the Bodhisattva Tara, the Egyptian powers Neteret Renenutet and Neter Nepri, and to St. Rupert of Salzburg, a day on which men honored their Creator in many ways in ages past, and still do today. The good Cousin charged in, ready to place a restraining hand on the nearest Humanist, but their last claim froze him. “There's a Mardi survivor?”