Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

Joe Spork swears under his breath. He doesn’t say “be careful,” because no one in his crew is stupid. Hard, and angry now, but not stupid.

The room at the bottom of the stair is a chasm, a blending of the house with open space from the Tosher’s Beat, cellars and tombs and all. It’s a giant whispering gallery, like being in the dome at St. Paul’s—sounds echo from the walls, from the upper floors, and from the tower and the sky above. Here the sound of the approaching bees is like a constant grumble, the hiss of static from a radio between stations.

The Opium Khan is waiting for them on a great wrought-iron throne, surrounded by his machines. The beehive from Wistithiel sits in the middle of all of it, crudely sliced open and wired and invaded. Black gooseneck flexes run out to huge banks of computers, and back again to another, half-familiar edifice, like the one in the indoctrination room at Happy Acres, but so much bigger: the archive of the Recorded Man.

All around, the flare of lightning, actinic snaps and pops from the older, stranger work of Frankie Fossoyeur, and a few remaining corpses fizzing and jerking on old electrified frames.

As Joe Spork steps off the stair and onto the floor, Shem Shem Tsien smiles, and pushes a lever to his right, and the whole apparatus shudders and boils. The beehive shrieks.

“Hello, Mr. Spork,” Shem Shem Tsien says.

“Vaughn.”

“Oh, please, spare me that, at least… You’re too late, by the way. It is done. The machine will show me Truth, and I will become as God.”

“And everyone will die. Even you. You’ll cease to be a person. You’ll just be…” Oh. A copy. A pattern, endlessly repeating.

Shem Shem Tsien opens his hands. “You see? I am the future. And, in fact, that is truer than you can imagine. When the world has been made ready by the Apprehension Engine, I shall bless you all with my own mind. With the calibration drum, I can use the Engine as a transmitter. Like my Ruskinites, Mr. Spork, you shall all know every detail of me. And, gradually, you will become me. I will be everyone, and everything, for ever. My perception will be the only perception. My mind, the only mind. Your mind, Mr. Spork. You will be part of me.

“I will become God. It is too late to prevent this. It has always been, will always have been, too late.”

After a moment, Joe Spork shrugs. “If I was too late, we wouldn’t be talking.”

Abruptly, he knows quite clearly and simply that this is true, and a moment later, he realises what that means: the Apprehension Engine is working. Stage one, Frankie called it. The thing she wanted. The safe zone. But that will change, very soon.

In a corner of his mind, the echo of confirmation.

He looks up, and sees a waterfall of bees, a tumbling, beautiful, appalling stream, and everything changes.

The Opium Khan snaps a command and men appear from the shadows, hard-bitten bastards to look at, and used to working together. Drug soldiers, maybe, or mercenaries. Mercenaries . As soon as Joe has the thought, he feels the rightness of it.

The bees descend, filling the air. They’re all over London, he knows that, too, and there’s a growing fear, an understanding that what is coming is very bad.

Shem Shem Tsien is laughing. Joe probes the edges of that name in his mind, but it seems there are limits to his comprehension; when he thinks of his enemy, he has no sense of who the Opium Khan truly is. A misunderstood question, then, insufficiently refined for the answer to be true or false. But soon that won’t matter. Soon, the redefinition will attend the asking, and after that, questions will cease to exist at all.

Death by footnote.

Battle is joined, brutal and intense. Street fighting, without an elegant kick or a clever trick in sight. The noises of it are grim and desperate: grunts, tearing sounds, cries and impacts; slicings and shatterings. This close to the machine, both sides are nervous of guns. With their hands and feet and old-fashioned weapons of mayhem, the mercenaries fight. The bruisers fight back.

The bees descend into the chamber, a humming cloud of confusion and dismay, and abruptly the whole scene is glossed. Each man has a life, a history, apparent and real and immanently understood. At this moment, Joe Spork suspects, Frankie imagined that war would be forever impossible, just as the theorists of poison gas and the atomic bomb fondly cherished a notion of mankind which made such weapons unusable and which would understand the stricture of them, that war is wasteful and pointless.

The fight continues, if anything more bitter.

Amid a haze of golden bees zinging to and fro, the botched and butchered remnant of the Apprehension Engine is running, deepening, and every answer is more and more fractal, more complete. It cannot be long now before everything is too late. Joe knows immediately exactly how long, can feel the measurement of time not in seconds or minutes but with the perfect timekeeping of atoms. But in minutes, yes, he’s right: not more than five to the end.

Joe charges forward through the tumbling, struggling figures, seeking Shem Shem Tsien. He slams his fist into a man’s face, ducks a counter, and laughs as he tips his foe over on his back and stamps on him. Laughs, because he can see his victory reflected in the other’s movements before it happens. He wades through the fight, knowing exactly where he is going, and where he needs to be. Briefly, he is beset by too many, even for him, but then a man cries out in alarm and horror and clutches at his leg, now missing a chunk of calf where Bastion’s narwhal tusk has torn into him. Joe ducks through the gap, weaves, engages and retreats. The dog vanishes into the melee, and his progress is audible in shrieks and curses.

Joe howls a berserker laugh, spreads his arms wide and springs forward to carry men down to the ground, rolls past them and onto his feet. He feels fingers underfoot, stamps and hears a curse, slips away. His path is a shifting ripple in the room, but he walks it with perfect certainty and his hands are full of power. He lets himself understand the pattern, knows his destination, can feel it drawing ever closer. And then, in the very middle of the swirl, they are face to face.

The Opium Khan and his enemy, in perfect balance. They are the fulcrum. What happens here will determine everything.

They know it to be true.

Shem Shem Tsien raises his hand: stop. Joe does the same.

And there is stillness, of a sort, over the moaning of the broken.

At the edges of the room, Ruskinites appear from the shadows, robes torn and bathed in smoke. Shem Shem Tsien smirks. “It is genuinely satisfying, Joe Spork, to have you here. To have an enemy to destroy while one ascends to godhead.”

Joe does not reply. He waits.

The Ruskinites reach up and draw back their hoods, revealing the faces of Simon Alleyn and the Waiting Men. The Opium Khan stares at them for a moment, bewildered, and then his face cracks into a broad smile. “You found the Waiting Men! You found them and brought them along as a special surprise! Oh, Joe. It’s too good. Did you think that would bring poor Vaughn back to life? Scare me with the terrible undertakers and up he pops, my old, buried soul? A struggle for dominance inside my own head, a master stroke? You did ! Let me just take a moment to savour it. It’s splendid. And don’t you worry, Brother Simon. I’ll be with you directly.

“Do you know, Mr. Spork, I honestly think that under other circumstances, you and I—”

Joe Spork sighs. “Windbag,” he says. He rolls his neck to loosen it, tosses his hat to the floor, then screams his fury and his hate, and leaps…