Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

Bell hung her cloche on Cafe Mariposa’s gnarled hatstand and left her gloves on. She worked in a fancy dress shop on the other end of town and was wary of needles and pins. Book had got them a table. He hunched over it, tweed and brown, his hair thinning monklike at his spiraling centre part. A rough-shouldered gambling man slipped him a twenty, and he smiled sharks-teeth and made a notation in his brown leather notebook.

“Book,” she said in greeting, and ordered a cardamom coffee; her voice plucked violin counterpoint to a glam-fusion-rockabilly band. She hummed a few bars with them, but her singing voice came down rough, stuck on the gears between the march of the wooden soldiers and Jack getting ready for the chorus.

Bell blushed. Book patted her hand. He smelled like binding glue and the sweat of fine horses.

Candle was late.

He arrived on the arm of a Duchess, and bright sea-green ribbons twined through his trouser laces. He hung his hat on the tree that grew through the floor of the Cafe Mariposa, and it sparkled with forest-dark velvet, gold trim, a feather that bowed down in passing to waiters and witches and kings.

“Darlings,” he said, bright-flushed and drunken, and perched on his seat like a fairy. His shirt was trimmed with lace. Bell wanted to touch it with her naked hand.

Book pursed his lips. “You’re late.”

Candle laughed and heads turned. Candle waved and a drink was brought. He tossed it back, and the Cafe Mariposa watched the duck and swell of his long golden throat. “So tell me,” he said, his voice striding through shattered conversations and dancing on the shoulders of the stereo music. “What word?”

“No word,” Book grunted. Bell’s shoulders sagged. No word.

“Of course there’s no word.” He waved his hand expansively. It glittered with jewels; they refracted light over the tables around. Hands reached out for a million reflected rubies and closed fingers around air. “There’s never word.”

“Wick,” she said, and took his right hand. He pulled it away. “We’ve just got to be patient.”

He shot her a dark look—even his darkest look was dazzling. Hearts trembled, thighs warmed under the edges of his scorn. She put her hands between her knees to keep them prim and straight. “If we were to be called for, they’d have called for us already.”

He was likely right. It had been centuries. But Bell always felt like that when he was in the room. “We just have to be patient,” she repeated, and because she was the voice he subsided and drank his liquor, a fizzing bright-coloured thing that was not as bright as he.

“One day I won’t come when you call me,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek with a nip that drew blood.

He left on the arm of a Baron, and the lustre of the moss between the world-tree’s bark faded when the door slammed shut behind him.

“Want him?” Book asked, and Bell blushed high and hot, sunburned with desire.

“Everyone does,” she said, and put on her hat to go.

The snow fell. The fairy lights were strung and restrung over shopfronts and around trees: the electricity strangled dryads and kept the brownies away. Bell, Book, and Candle gathered at the Cafe Mariposa, where the speakers threw Bing Crosby at crumbling stucco murals of Puerto Rico and false butterflies glimmered in the ceiling foliage.

The leaves had fallen off the hatstand tree. They crunched underfoot on the flagstones as the waiters danced between wrought-iron tables, bearing sugar-plum tea on silver trays. It smelled like winter and cinnamon inside.

Bell ordered hot cider spiced with rum; it warmed her hands through the black kidskin gloves. Book waited in muffler and fedora, his thick suit pilling at the lapels, his breath redolent with sixteen-year-old highland whiskey. “There’s word,” he said, and scratched another notation onto a curling crimson page.

Bell almost spilled her drink. “For when?”

“Tonight.” Book’s hands shook. The gamblers stayed well away, threading through the corners of the room and fingering bills in their pockets. Book’s hands frayed and fretted at his old quill pen’s feathers.

Bell rubbed at the absence on her shoulder blades until they were sore. And asked for more rum in her cider.

Candle swept in like the Puerto Rico summer, wrapped in a red velvet gown that flared and dragged behind him heedless of the dirty churned snow. Holly and mistletoe girdled his waist; the admirers he pressed close gasped as it pricked their bellies and then stared after him, dabbing the blood away. He took off his curled honey-coloured wig and doffed it to Bell elaborately, and there was a chorus of laughter and sighs.

“There’s word,” Bell told him. Flat and unmusical.

Candle clenched a fist. The chandeliers in the Cafe Mariposa trembled, hissing with electricity, and every bulb blew in a shower of sparks.

Bell, Book, and Candle walked single file down Dry Street South in the snow, picking their way around puddles: Bell’s patent-leather boots and Candle’s stiletto heels clacked one-two against the concrete. Book consulted notes taken in his own arcane hand, scribblings and arrows and dashes and dots, and they stopped at the Grand Cathedral at the centre of the city. It twisted with sculpture and screaming mouths and rubble: it was long-ago ruined. Bell tightened her hat.

The doors of the broken cathedral were open. The ironbound wood hung slick with rot: a night insect crawled out of one hole and into another. Bell kept her hands clasped behind her back and squinted into cobwebbed darkness.

“Book,” she whispered. “What do you see?”

Book took her elbow, eased her carefully aside. “An altar with the gems dug out,” he said. “Tapers rusted into their chandeliers. Rats in the nave. Bats in the belfry. The ringer’s rope, frayed, and the vestments in dust.” He paused. “Light.”

They followed the light.

It glowed soft down halls with niches of marble, stripped of their statues and gilt. It glowed brighter along the curving stairs to the crypts, the sea-kissed crypts where coffins floated and the dead screamed to be saved from drowning whenever it rained all night. Bell lifted her skirts and followed Book down into a chapel cleared and dusted, ringed with men in coats of brushed, severe black wool. They wore inquisitorial masks. Bell’s skirts hissed and tangled from her trembling.

“We’ve come,” Bell said, and the room echoed with ringing like a cathedral mass. “We didn’t think you’d call again.”

“We are still here.” A voice, bitter as strong coffee. “We’ll always be here.”

“We… we serve,” Bell said, hesitant. It had been so long since they’d been asked for. She’d forgotten all the words.

Candle took her hand and squeezed it so it hurt.

“Who is brought before us?” asked the man with the voice like coffee, and the gathered rumbled a reply, a name magnified into nothing by the stones of the falling crypt. Men moved up to surround them, cloaked and hooded, marked with cross and censer and axe.

“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors, from the precious body and blood of the Lord,” he began, and Bell’s back straightened with the anxiety of ritual, the reflexes of performance. Someone whimpered beyond the light, mashed flat by cloth and rope. Words blurred in her ears. Voice built in her throat, hot and poisonous.

“Ring the bell,” the high magistrate said, and the cork on her mouth loosed and Bell screamed.

“Close the book,” the high magistrate said, and fairy glamour passed over Book’s eyes and smoothed them away.

“Snuff the candle,” the high magistrate said, and struggling to contain him, the soldiers of the Inquisition slit Candle’s throat.