Everville

  He had no way of knowing his true scale here, of course. Perhaps he was tiny in this formless form—like a mote seen in a shaft of sunlight—in which case all that was congealing around him was not titanic, as it seemed, but he, its witness, a fleck. Whichever was true, he felt insignificant in the presence of these cohering shapes. He turned his sight around, and in every direction, rising to the domed darkness above him, where ragged shapes moved as though it were the breeding place for men-o’-war, down to the pit—lined with heaving abstractions—below him, was a latticework of encrusted matter.

  He was by no means certain that these sights were real the way the body lying beside the temple pool below had been real. Perhaps they were simply thoughts in the head of Iad Uroboros, and he was present in the midst of some Iadic vision of heaven and hell: a firmament of unfinished angels, a pit of nonsenses and in between a sprawling and infinitely complex web of knotted and corrupted memories.

  There were places, he saw, where the strands seemed to become clotted, forming large, almost egg-shaped masses. His curiosity as to their nature was enough to propel him; he’d no sooner puzzled over them than his spirit was moving towards the largest in his immediate vicinity. The closer he came to it the more its appearance distressed him. Whereas the encrustations on the web were organic, the surface of the egg was of another order completely. It was a mass of overlapping forms, like the pieces of a lunatic jigsaw, each failing to quite mesh with the one below, and each worked with an obsessively complex design.

  Nor was its appearance the only source of distress. A sound was emanating from it; or rather, several sounds, swarming together. One was like the whispers of children; one was a slow, arrhythmical throb, like the beat of a failing heart. And the third was a whine that wormed its way into Joe’s thoughts as if to disconnect them.

  He was tempted to retreat, but he resisted, and pressed his spirit on, more certain with every moment that there was great pain here; nearly unendurable pain, in fact. The surface of the form was a catalogue of lunatic motions: tics and spasms and twitches, the jigsaws pieces coming away in a hundred places like shed scales, while others, thorny and raw in their budding form, unfurled.

  Off to his left, something iridescent caught his eye, and he looked its way to see that the shedding had momentarily revealed what lay beneath this maddened, whispering mass. He moved towards it, and for the first time since approaching the egg had the sense that his presence had been noted. The motions became more fevered the closer to the sliver of iridescence he came, and all around the place the scaly pieces oozed a dark fluid, as if to conceal the spot while they bred a more permanent cover. Joe was not deceived. He closed on the sliver, certain there was some vital mystery here, and in response the motions became more frenzied until suddenly the tremors seemed to reach critical mass and a dozen shapes rose from the surface, surrounding him.

  None of them made much literal sense. He could not distinguish a limb, or a head, much less an eye or a mouth. But they gaped and twitched and swelled in ways that evoked a parade of abominations. Something gutted, but living; something aborted, but living; something decayed into muck, but living and living. Though he’d left his body behind him and thought himself free of it, these horrors reminded him of every wound he’d ever suffered, of every sickness, of every weakness.

  He had come too close to the iridescence to be frightened off, however. Turning his sight from these manifestations he slipped through their net, and into the midst of whatever secret they concealed.

  He was delivered into a curving channel, down which he flew. It rapidly began to narrow, and narrow, as though he were in an ever-closing spiral. The light that had called him here did not diminish as he traveled, but remained steady as the curves tightened, the channel so narrow now he was certain a hair could not have been threaded through it. And still it grew narrower, until he began to think it would wink out of existence completely, and perhaps take him along with it. He’d no sooner formed this thought than his progress seemed to slow, until he was barely moving. Even at a creeping pace, however, the spiral was here so tight he kept turning and turning on himself, until at last all motion ceased. He waited in the gleaming channel, puzzled. And then, slowly, the realization rose in him that he was not alone. He looked ahead, and though he could see nothing, he was aware that something was staring back at him.

  He returned the gaze, without fear, and as he did so images began to erupt among his thoughts: beautiful, simple images of the world he’d left behind.

  A field of lush grass, through which a tidal wind was moving. A porch, overgrown with scarlet bougainvillea, where a child with white-blonde hair was laughing. A doughnut shop at dusk, with the evening star above it, set in a flawless blue.

  Somebody was dreaming here, he thought; yearning for the Helter Incendo. And it was someone who had been there and seen these sights with their own eyes.

  Human. There was something human here. A prisoner of the Iad, he assumed, trapped in this gleaming spiral, and guarded by reminders of flesh and its frailties.

  He had no way of questioning it; no way of knowing if it had simply folded him into its visions, had comprehended that it was no longer alone. If the latter, then perhaps he could liberate it; lead it out of its dreaming cell.

  He turned his curious spirit around, and began to make his way back along the channel, hoping that the prisoner would follow. He was not disappointed. After a few seconds of travel, the channel widening once more, he glanced back and felt the eyeless stare upon him.

  The escape, however, was not without consequence. Even as he picked up his pace, fractures appeared in the walls around them, and the fluid he’d seen ooze between the scales when he’d first approached the channel trickled into view. It was not, he now comprehended, the blood of the Iad, but rather its raw stuff, turning even as it appeared into the same wretched, sickening forms.

  But for all their burgeoning vileness, there was something about their spread that smacked of desperation. Did he dare believe that they, or the mind that directed them, was afraid? Not of him, perhaps, but of whatever came on his spirit-heels; the dreamer he’d woken with his presence?

  The further the two spirits traveled, the more certain he became that this was so. The fractures were fissures now, the Iad’s mud spilling into their path. But they were quicksilver. Before the Iad could block their path with atrocities they were escaping the spiral, dodging between the entities that had risen from the prison in all directions. Some seemed to have fashioned wings from their flayed hides, others had the appearance of things turned inside out; others still were like flocks of burned birds, sewn into a single anguished form. They came after the escapees in a foul horde, their whispers rising to shrieks now, their bodies colliding with the strands and dragging them after, so that when Joe glanced back the web was shaking in all directions, and sending down a rain of dead matter, which beat upon his spirit like a black hail.

  It rapidly became so thick, this hail, that he lost contact with the dreamer completely. He tried to turn back and find his fellow spirit, but the horde had grown apace, and came at him like a raging wall, pressing a gust of hail ahead of it. He felt himself struck over and over, each assault beating him back and blinding him as it did so, until he could no longer see the dome or the pit, or anything between. He reeled in darkness for a few moments, not knowing which way he had come, and then, to his astonishment, a blaze of light enveloped him and he was falling through the empty air.

  Below him he saw the dream-sea churned into a frenzy by the Iad’s approach, and beyond it a city in whose harbor the ships were lifted so high they would soon be pitched into the streets.

  It was Liverpool, of course. In the time he’d adventured in the Iad’s head or belly the creature had strode across Quiddity, and was almost at the threshold between worlds. He had time, as he fell in the midst of Iad’s hail, to look along the shore towards the door. It was still wreathed in mist, but he could see the dark crack, and thought perhaps he g
limpsed a star gleaming in the sky over Harmon’s Heights.

  Then he struck the waters amid a hail of Iadic matter, and before he could free his spirit of its weight a wave rose beneath him, and bearing him up amid a raft of detritus, carried him on towards the city streets, where it left him, stranded in the shadow of the power that had shat him out.

  SIX

  I

  Lucky Joe,” said the face looming over Phoebe. It was as cracked as Unger’s Creek in a drought.

  Phoebe raised her head off the hard pillow. “What about him?”

  “I’m just saying, he’s damn lucky, the way you talk about him.”

  “What was I saying?”

  “Mostly just his name,” King Texas replied.

  She looked past his muddy shoulder. The cave behind him was vast, and filled with people, standing, sitting, lying down.

  “Did they hear me?” she asked Texas.

  He smiled conspiratorially. “No,” he said. “Only me.”

  “Have I broken any bones?” she said, looking down at her body.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’d never let a woman’s blood be spilled down here.”

  “What is it? Bad luck?”

  “The worst,” he said. “The very worst.”

  “What about Musnakaff?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he survive?” King Texas shook his head. “So you saved me but not him?”

  “I warned her, didn’t I?” he said, almost petulantly. “I said I’d kill him if she didn’t turn back.”

  “He wasn’t to blame.”

  “And neither am I,” Texas said. “She’s the trouble. Always was.”

  “So why don’t you just put her out of your mind? You’ve got plenty of company.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “What about them?” she said, pointing to the assembly on his back.

  “Look again,” he said.

  Puzzled, she sat up, and scanning the assembly, realized her error. What she had taken to be a congregation of living souls was in fact a crowd of sculptures, some set with fragments of glittering ore, some roughly hewn from blocks of stone, some barely human in shape.

  “Who made them?” she said. “You?”

  “Who else?”

  “You really are alone down here?”

  “Not by choice. But yes.”

  “So you made these to keep you company?”

  “No. They were my attempts to find some form that would win Mistress O’Connell’s affections.”

  Phoebe swung her legs off the bed and got to her feet. “Is it all right if I look at them?” she asked him.

  “Help yourself,” he told her, standing aside. Then, as she walked past him he murmured, “I could forbid you nothing.”

  She pretended not to hear the remark, suspecting it would only open a subject she was not willing to address.

  “Did she ever see any of these faces?” she asked him, wandering between the statues.

  “One or two,” he replied, somewhat mournfully. “But none of them made any impression upon her.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood—” Phoebe began.

  “Misunderstood what?”

  “The reason she doesn’t care for you any longer. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the way you look. She’s half-blind anyway.”

  “So what does she want from me?” King Texas wailed. “I built her highways. I built her a harbor. I leveled the ground so that she could dream her city into being.”

  “Was she beautiful?” Phoebe said.

  “Never.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “No. She was antiquated even when I met her. And she’d just been hanged. Filthy, foul-mouthed—”

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  “There was something you loved.”

  “Oh yes . . . ” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “The fire in her, for one. The appetite in her. And the stories of course.”

  “She told good stories?”

  “She’s got Irish blood, so of course.” He smiled to himself. “That’s how she made the city,” he explained. “She told it. Night after night. Sat on the ground and told it. Then she’d sleep, and in the morning what she’d told would be there. The houses. The monuments. The pigeons. The smell of fish. The fogs. The smoke. That’s how she made it all. Stories and dreams. Dreams and stories. It was wonderful to watch. I think I was never so much in love as those mornings, getting up and seeing what she’d made.”

  Listening to his reverie, Phoebe found herself warming to him. He was probably a fool for love, just as Maeve had said, and clearly that had made him a little crazed, but she understood that feeling well enough.

  There was a rumbling now, from somewhere up above them. A patter of dust fell from the cracked ceiling.

  “The Iad has arrived,” he said.

  “Oh my God.”

  His pebble eyes rolled in his sockets. “I think it’s overturning her city,” he said. There was a calm sadness in his voice.

  “I don’t want to be buried down here.”

  “You’re not going to die,” he said. “What I told Maeve is true. The Iad will pass over, but the rock will remain. You’re safe here with me.” The tremors came again. Phoebe shuddered. “Come into my arms if you’re nervous,” Texas said.

  “I’m okay,” she replied. “But I would like to see what’s going on up there.”

  “Easy,” he replied. “Come with me.”

  As he led her through the labyrinth of his kingdom—on the walls of which he’d configured and reconfigured his face ten thousand times, rehearsing it for a love scene he’d now never play—he meditated aloud about life in the rock. But with the turmoil from above escalating with every stride she took, and the walls creaking and stones pattering down, she caught only fragments of what he was saying.

  “It’s not solid at all,” he said at one point, “everything flows, if you watch it for long enough . . . ”

  And a little later: “A fossil heart, that’s what I’ve got . . . but it still aches and aches . . . ”

  And later still: “San Antonio is the place to die. I wish I had flesh still, to lay down in the Alamo . . . ”

  Finally, after maybe ten minutes of such bits and pieces, he led her into a sizable chamber, the entire floor of which was raked and polished. There, in the very ground beneath her feet, was a periscopic reflection of what was going on above ground. It was an awe-inspiring sight: the seething darkness of the Iad’s body invading the streets of the city she’d been walking in just hours before, carrying before it remnants of the places it had laid waste on its way here. She saw a head lopped from some titanic statue rolling down one of the streets, felling entire buildings as it went. She saw what looked to be a small island deposited in the middle of a city square. Several ships had come to rest among the spires of the cathedral, and their sails had unfurled as if to bear it away before the next wind.

  And among this debris, in numbers beyond counting, were creatures trawled from the depths of the dream-sea by the Iad’s passage. The least of them were fantasias on the theme of fish: gleaming shoals of visionary life, thrown up in waves above the city’s roofs, then falling in glorious profusion. Far more extraordinary were the creatures drawn up, Phoebe supposed, from Quiddity’s deepest trenches, their forms inspired by (or inspirations for) the tales of mariners the world over. Was that glistening coil not a sea-serpent, its eyes burning like twin furnaces in its hooded head? And that beast wrapping its arms around the masks of a grounded cutter, was that not the mother of all octopi?

  “Damn it,” King Texas said. “I never liked competing with that city of hers for her attention, but this is no way for it to end.”

  Phoebe said nothing. Her gaze had gone from the debris to the Iad itself. What she saw put her in mind of a disease—a terrible, implacable, devouring disease. It had no face. It had no malice. It had no guilt. Perhaps it didn’t even have a mind. It came
because it could; because nothing stopped it.

  “It’s going to destroy Everville,” she said to Texas.

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe about it,” she protested.

  “Why should you care?” he said. “You don’t love it there, do you?”

  “No,” Phoebe said. “But I don’t want to see it destroyed either.”

  “You don’t have to,” Texas said. “You’re here with me.”

  Phoebe pondered this a moment. Plainly she wasn’t going to get him to intervene on her behalf. But maybe there was another way.

  “If I were Maeve—” she began.

  “You’re too sane.”

  “But if I were—if I’d founded a city the way she’d founded Everville, not with dreams but with plain hard work—”

  “Yes?”

  “And somebody protected it for me, kept my city safe—”

  She let the notion trail. There was fifteen seconds of silence, while Liverpool shook and trembled under their feet. Then he said, “Would you love that somebody?”

  “Maybe I would,” she said.

  “Oh my Lord—” he murmured.

  “It looks like the Iad’s giving up on the city,” she said. “It’s starting to move along the shore.”

  “My shore,” King Texas said. “I’m the rock, remember?” He crossed the mirror to where she stood and laid his mud hand upon her cheek. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve given me hope.” He turned from her, saying, “Stay here.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Stay, I said. And watch.”

  * * *

  II

  During the voyage to Mem-é b’Kether Sabbat, Noah Summa Summamentis had spoken of the Iad Uroboros’s power to induce terror by its very proximity, but until now—when Joe entered the streets of Liverpool—he had seen no evidence of that power. In b’Kether Sabbat the Iad’s malevolence had been held in thrall to the ’shu, and by the time it had been unleashed Joe was a spirit, and apparently immune to its influence. But the survivors who wandered through the shaking desolation were plainly victims, shrieking and sobbing for relief from the madness overwhelming them. Some had succumbed to it, and sat in the rubble with blank faces. Others were driven to terrible acts of self-harm to stop the horrors, beating their heads against stones, or tearing at their chests to still their hearts.