Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

“S’okay,” Bell said, and ran her other hand through his hair. It was bound and garlanded with thorns. She picked them out one by one. They stung her fingers to bleeding. “We weren’t made for this. We’re not this anymore.”

“Bent to it,” Candle said, and flickered the cold of the tomb. “It’s our job now. Got no other.”

He was cold, too cold. His hair lay rank with smoke.

It set her to burning.

“Never again,” she told him fierce as trumpets, and he sagged into her arms.

She took him home to her flat over the Aniseed Bakery, where old men drank strong coffee in quail-egg cups and told the same stories daily about the last war. She fed him figs and strong cheese, champagne and lobster, and sang him lullabyes in her crow-voice when he shook at night. She hung his room with peacock feathers; they swayed in the breeze and swept rose and poppy petals in tea-leaf patterns on the floor.

She lay awake when he slipped in at three, four in the morning, and stripped off his paints and pearls and torn pantyhose, and ached as he hummed hearthsongs.

On Midsummer morning he stayed out until seven, past sunrise, and brought in the post with him. Bell sat at the kitchen table with a mug of weak tea, stirring it this way and that with her lace-covered index finger. “What’s that?” she asked, alto. The bitterness seeped through her fingers and soured the tea.

Candle held it out between fingernails painted like galaxies. It was tied with a ribbon, musty, yellowed, stamped with symbols in running black ink.

“From Book,” she said, and put on her boots and hat.

Bell, Book, and Candle met at the Cafe Mariposa, and Book hunched over the wrought iron table. Ladybugs fluttered around his balding head and landed, freckled with concern.

“There’s word,” Book said, and squeezed his old hands in hers. They came away bloody.

“Book,” she said, mouth open. “What’s happened?”

“I lost a bet,” he said, and closed his eyes—Book never lost bets. The seams between lid and lash were so thin she thought they did not exist. “They made me call.”

Bell caught her breath. It tasted like a poison scream deep in her throat. She looked up at Candle’s eyes, and the life in them flickered, guttered, dimmed.

“Run,” she choked.

Wool-coated men blocked the door to the Cafe Mariposa, even though it was high summer. Wool-coated men lined up on the patio, a masked and cloaked barrier between the glass-dangle birds and the street. Bell backed against Candle and Candle picked up Book. They had not been called for centuries: she’d watched the inquisitors put to the sword and wept, oh help her, wept for the loss of their purpose.

Where had they all come from?

Somewhere behind them struggled a young man, bound at wrist and ankle and roughly gagged. His terror straightened her spine. “We’ve come,” Bell said automatic, and clamped her hands over her mouth.

The high magistrate smiled. She could see it through his mask. She could see through his flesh and bones. “Do you serve?” he asked, and the cream on the tables soured.

“Run,” Candle whispered, and levered into the tree.

Bell dug one leather-booted toe into the gaps of the hatstand tree and climbed. Rose-thorns pricked her stockinged legs. Bell grabbed the knobby hat hooks of generations past, levered herself up between the rivers of moss, the beetles that fished them and lived on their shores. Candle flitted upwards like a burning rainbow, Book slung over his shoulder, birds querying anxiously into his delicate pierced ears. The inquisitors swept in after them, dangled their prey on a hat-hook, displacing a thin shawl printed with acres of puffy-clouded sky. Thorns thickened and spiraled about them, tugged at her feet, blocked out the light.

Candle reached down and hauled Bell into the nest of branches of the Cafe Mariposa’s tree. The thorns closed around them and sealed the exit. Bell, Book, and Candle huddled together in the waving, endless leaves and breathed hard.

“Do you serve?” the high magistrate called, and she quivered.

“You speak,” Book whispered, arms cradling his slit belly. “Just don’t answer.”

Bell pressed her palms against her ears and shut her eyes tight tight, clamped her lips down on the words that centuries of ritual had hardwired onto her tongue. She shook her head once, twice, focused on the jerk and fly of her short-cut hair instead of the burn in her throat.

Won’t. She thought. Never again.

Where had they all come from?

The acid bubbled up into her mouth. It was going to burn her voice out, it was going to scorch her throat for good and she’d never sing again even in a voice mutilated from centuries of screaming—

“We serve,” she choked out, and wailed as the ritual took her.

“Keep her quiet,” Book hissed—he scribbled and scratched, dipped pen in his own seeping blood to keep it wet and live.

“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors—” the magistrate said, and the tree shook with anger, leaves raining down in a rustling diving assault. “Ring the bell.”

Weeping, she opened her mouth to speak, and the words were stopped by Candle’s lips upon hers. Candle’s tongue in her mouth. Candle’s hands on her waist.

“Ring the bell?” the high magistrate called, a fearful note in his voice, but she felt nothing but Candle’s kiss.

Bell spoke. Book carried messages, saw, described, deciphered. And Candle—Candle burned. Candle’s kisses warmed her to the centre, set her hips rising below his flower hands, shuddered through her like the end of a spell of rain. His hands danced upwards, splayed and expert upon her breasts, and the doom receded from her throat.

She smelled cinnamon and honey and baking on his skin. He lifted her skirts with one practiced caress.

“Ring the bell—” might have come up plaintive, and then Book notched a satisfied note in pen and blood in his battered notebook, and silence. The pen dripped red-black on the page, and Book’s book looked much bigger for a hot, fevered moment: millions of pages and dates and names, the cover all of spidersilk, the ink blotting out each name sooner or later until it was pages and pages of night sky.

Candle parted her legs, and the tree shuddered with her as he pressed inside.

“Once I was an angel with a bright sword,” she gasped, whispered, wept. “Once I was a guard on the road to the city, at the gate to the city, and I stood alone and burned. Once I had a voice that sang not screamed, and wings of powdered silver and when they scratched me I did not bleed but sunlight poured out of the holes in my flesh and I would have swept down flaming and singing and they would fall upon their knees with the alleluia chorus—”

“Shh,” Candle whispered back into her mouth. “Shh.”

When it was done she lay curled-up in the arms of the tree, feeling its slow sap heartbeat spiked with the scent of tea leaves and time, the faint clinking of dishes and the hiss of a barista machine. When it was done she shook herself like a cat and sat up, summer light filtering through the branches onto her hand. Candle leaned against a branch opposite, looking cool and sleek as ever, his golden hair touched with flame.

“There’s no word,” Book said, still holding his stomach. The bleeding had slowed. He sat better now.

“Thank you,” she whispered, to him, to both of them. “I couldn’t have… I couldn’t have not spoken.”

“That’s why we work together,” Candle said, and wiped the kisses off his soft, hot mouth.

Bell, Book, and Candle were to meet for the five thousand and fifty fourth time on the eve of summer turning to autumn, with the leaves just yellowing at the tips on the broad avenues between Dry Street and the open plains. Bell did not call; there would be no word. But she went down to the Cafe Mariposa.