She said, “The boy is probably at City Hall. They have a makeshift prison there.” Unless he was dead. Which was possible, even likely. But Dex must surely know that, and Linneth didn’t want to say more in front of the mother.
The Stockton woman said something about a neighbor who had seen the soldiers taking her boy into City Hall—so at least Clifford had been there, not long ago.
Dex said slowly, “There may not be much of a guard. All the Proctors are gone by now. Soldiers, though, maybe.” He looked at Linneth.
She thought, He wants me to decide. Then: No . . . he wants my permission.
Because it was her life at risk, too, not just his own.
She thought, But we might die. But surely that was true no matter what. People were already dying. More would die very soon, and she would probably be among that unfortunate majority—and so what?
The Renunciates had taught her that if she died outside the Church she would be scourged by the angel Tartarouchis with whips of fire, forever. So be it, Linneth thought. No doubt Tartarouchis would be busy, with the war and all.
City Hall was five blocks behind them. She told Dex, “We should hurry,” wanting to get the words out before her courage failed.
He smiled as he turned the car around.
Symeon Demarch sat braced against the plushly upholstered rear bench of the Bureau car as his chauffeur mumbled to himself and drove at a dangerous clip east toward the highway.
Demarch had stopped thinking about Evelyn. He had stopped thinking about Dorothea, or Christof, or Guy Marris, or the Bureau de la Convenance . . . he wasn’t really thinking at all, only gazing from this sheltered space at the pine-green and cloud-gray shape of the exterior world. He faced the window, where each flake of snow that lighted would cling a moment before it slid into wind-driven dew.
“Some trouble at the military barracks,” the chauffeur said. The chauffeur was a young man with pomaded hair and a Nahanni drawl: a civilian employee, not a pion. Demarch saw the nervous way his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.
They turned onto the highway heading south. This road connected with the route to Fort LeDuc, but it also passed the motor hotel that had been commandeered as a military garrison. Demarch said, “Is that a threat to us?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant, but it may be. See that smoke up ahead?”
Demarch peered forward and saw nothing but snow, the same snow that sent the wheels askew whenever the car turned a corner. “Must you go so quickly?”
“Sir, if I slow down we might end up spinning our wheels for traction. I prefer a little momentum.”
“Do what you think best.”
A few moments later the driver said: “God and Samael!” And the car lurched sickeningly as he pressed the brake.
Ahead, on the left-hand side of the road, the military barracks was burning. It was a strange sight in the falling snow and Demarch was mute, marveling at it. Black smoke billowed from the many windows of what had once been the Days Inn. The flames rising from the embrasures looked almost like faces.
The road was blackened with soot but passable. “Don’t stop,” Demarch said. “Not here, for God’s sake!”
Then a window shattered. It was the front window, driver’s side. The chauffeur jerked and turned as if to look back, but his visible eye was full of blood. His foot convulsed against the gasoline pedal and the car bucked sharply as he slid away from the wheel.
The car rolled into a mile marker. Demarch was thrown forward by the sudden stop, and before he could right himself he saw the chauffeur’s bullet-cracked skull staining the upholstery with slurries of blood. A cold wind came through the broken window. Demarch looked past the clinging tines of glass to the pine woods opposite the burning motel, where soldiers were emerging through flags of smoke. They carried rifles. Most of their rifles were aimed at the car.
The soldiers took aim as Demarch scrambled from the right-side rear door. He was wearing his Bureau uniform; even at this distance they would know him for a Proctor. Glass exploded all around him in brittle showers, and he heard the whine of bullets and their hammering impact on the snowbound roadway. When he stood to run, he felt the bullets enter his body.
Then he was on the ground. The soldiers shouted and waved their weapons, but that sound faded into noise. Breathless, Demarch turned his head to look at the burning building. The roar of it was all around him. The fire had melted the snow into mirrors of ice: mirrors full of sky, fire, ash, the world, himself.
Clifford Stockton had slept a little during the night. Lukas Thibault had not.
Each had been given his own cage in the basement jail at City Hall. They were separated by a dusty space in a room that had once been the building’s archives. All the filing cabinets had been moved out and their contents burned when Delafleur took over the building. The walls were concrete. The ceiling was white acoustic tile. The floor was green linoleum, and it was as cold as winter earth. Clifford had learned to keep his feet off it; his snow boots were scant protection. He spent most of his time on the tiny hemp cloth cot the Proctors had provided.
He woke to the sound of Lukas Thibault’s cursing.
“I want my breakfast,” Luke was shouting. “Assholes! We’re starving down here!”
Brief silence, then the rhythmic banging of Luke’s fist against the bars. Clifford didn’t bother to look. He could see Luke’s cell only by forcing his head against the bars of his own cage and peering around an L-bend where the cages followed the wall. It wasn’t worth the effort.
He was grateful for the relative privacy. Clifford emptied his bladder into the crockery pot provided for the purpose, embarrassed by the sound. It was cold enough this morning that the pot steamed for a few minutes after he was finished.
He sat back down on the cot and wrapped the blanket around himself.
“Fuckers!” Luke was screeching. “Cretins! Bastards!”
Clifford waited until the soldier had lapsed back into silence. Then he said, “They aren’t here.”
Luke said, “What?”—startled, as if he had forgotten Clifford was in the basement with him.
“They’re not here!” It was obvious. For hours after dark the building had been full of sound: legions of feet upstairs, doors opening and closing, motors roaring and then fading away beyond the high, dust-clogged windows that vented the basement. “They’re gone. They evacuated. Today must be the day.”
The day of the bomb, he didn’t need to add. That was why Luke was here: for talking about the bomb.
That was also why Clifford was here, though no one had told him so—no one had talked to him. The soldiers had just put him in this cage and gone away.
It was too late now to do anything but wait, and he told Luke so.
Thibault called him a little idiot, a criminal, a liar. “They can’t leave me here. Sons of Samael! Even the Proctors wouldn’t do that!”
But the morning ticked on and Luke lapsed into a despairing silence. Clifford knew it was past dawn by the faint light in the vent windows. That was his only clock. The shadowy fluorescent tubes overhead were the only other light—and most of those were burned out.
Clifford gazed at that patch of daylight far up at the margin of the ceiling for a time he could not calculate; it was interrupted only by the sound of Lukas Thibault’s sobbing.
Then there was another sound: gunshots, and not far away.
“Sophia Mother!” Luke cried out.
This was a new threat. Clifford was dismayed: better the bomb, Clifford thought, than a gun. He had read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb washed everything away in a tidal wave of light. The people were gone with only their shadows left behind. He had resigned himself to dying in the bomb blast, but this gunfire was different. It worried him.
The shooting paused, crackled for a time, paused again.
Then the door marked FIRE EXIT swung open, and here was the Proctor Delafleur wide-eyed and with a pistol in his hand.
CHAPTER 27
In the beginning was the Ennoia, and the world was made of light.
Then Sophia, a thought of the Uncreated God, committed the sin of creation. Cast out from the primordial Nous, she fashioned base matter, the hyle, and fertilized it with her spiritual principle, the dynamis, which is both seed and image of the World of Light.
Thus the world was both created and separated from its origins; it was matter with a kernel of spirit in it, neither kenoma nor pleroma. It was incomplete, less than whole; it was asymmetric.
Here was the metaphor Stern had found so compelling. It resonated with modern cosmology: pull a linchpin from primordial symmetry and everything cascades forth: quarks, leptons, atomic nuclei, stars; eventually kittens, dung beetles, physicists.
And in all this there is embedded an unquenchable epignosis, the memory of that ancient isotropic unity of all things in the uncreated world.
Sophia, abandoned, wanders the infinite shoals of hylic matter with her terrible longing for the light. And yet—
And yet . . . Sophia laughed.
Howard had found the phrase in Stern’s notebook, circled and underlined and crowned with question marks.
Sophia laughed.
Howard calculated that he had to walk a hundred yards across the parking lot of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory to reach its central building, the collapsed concrete-block structure where—perhaps—Stern had died.
It was not a long distance, ordinarily. But this was no longer an ordinary place. He had passed the boundaries of the ordinary. He was inside the glow.
No snow fell here. The air was suddenly moist and warm; the neat bordered lawns near the workers’ quarters were green, though the grass had not grown since the spring. Did time pass more slowly here? If so, Howard thought, his attempt to reach Stern might be futile; the bomb would detonate between one footstep and the next.
But he could see the snow falling only a few paces behind him, and it was falling at its usual pace. So time didn’t pass especially slowly here, though he supposed it might pass differently . . . and he took another step forward.
His vision was obscured. The eye didn’t like this environment. Nor did the other senses; he felt dizzy, awkward, alternately too hot and too cold. Most confusing, though, was this refusal of any solid object to hold still and be seen. Images curved and lost proportion as if the act of seeing them challenged their reality.
Observation, Howard thought, was a kind of quantum guillotine: it sliced uncertainty into this or that, particle or wave. Here there seemed to be no such effect. The collapsing wavefront, the moment of isness, was imprecise, too fluid, as if he were experiencing time a fraction of a second before anything happened. For instance, this asphalt under his feet. Glimpsed briefly, it was the lab parking lot, spaces marked with whitewashed numbers, 26, 27. Stare too long and it became granite or glass or grains of crystalline sand. And the temptation to stare was immense.
He understood why the firefighters had beat such a hasty retreat: too much exposure to this would surely affect more than the senses. Madness must look like this, Howard thought.
But he took another step and another after that.
The light around him was bright but sourceless. It wasn’t daylight. It pervaded everything; everything was lit up from within. Colors were divided, split as if by a prism into countless bands. Every motion was a blur.
He took another step and another, though his stomach was churning. There was a turbulence all around him. The air itself seemed to solidify and take form, as if translucent bodies were moving through it. More ghosts, he supposed. Maybe they really were ghosts, the restless remains of the men and women who had died in these bunkers the night of the explosion.
But Howard doubted it. There was something purposive in the way they crossed his path, circling the laboratory buildings as if they were trapped here, and perhaps they were: maybe these were the creators of the fragment, still attached to it, orbiting it a helpless half step out of time.
He shook his head. Too much speculation: that had been Stern’s downfall.
Stern, who was calling him onward. Set aside the rationalization and that was why he was here: Stern had called him. And Stern was calling him yet.
You might be as smart as your uncle, Howard’s mother used to say. It was a compliment, a suspicion, a fear.
Stern had always loomed over him like a monument, stony and unapproachable. In Howard’s family no one talked much about the important things. But Stern always came with a baggage of big ideas and he always shared them with Howard. Teased him with them: You like this morsel? Then how about this? And this?
Howard remembered his uncle leaning forward from the cane chair on the porch, on a summer evening alight with stars and fireflies, his voice obscuring the faint rattle of china dishes on a faraway table: “Your dog sees the same world we do, Howard. Your dog sees those stars. But we know what they are. Because we can ask the right questions. And that’s knowledge the dog can never share. By his nature: never. So, then, Howard—do you suppose there are questions even we can’t ask?”
Fireflies here, too: sparks in his vision.
He was approaching the central building. Its roof had collapsed, but the concrete-block frame was intact. A crack ran through the steel door. On closer inspection, the brickwork was filleted with jewels; diamonds clung like barnacles to every wall. There was something seductive about these faceted surfaces and Howard was careful not to stare too long. There were other horizons here, not his own.
He touched the door. It was hot. This was real heat, and he was probably close enough to the core event that he was being bathed with real radiation. Enough to kill him, probably, but that was of no concern any longer.
He had used the word awestruck in the past without knowing what it meant, but now he understood it. He was stricken by awe, consumed by it; it obliterated even his fear.
This was the place where his uncle had crossed the border of the world.
If Stern had brought them all here, did that make Stern a Demiurge?
Had he found this world or actually made it? Constructed it, consciously or unconsciously, with the aid of the Turkish fragment, from his own fears and hopes?
If so . . . then, like Sophia, he had made an imperfect thing.
Everything he had wanted from his ancient books, a key to the pain and the longing he felt, a cosmogony beyond physics, here in the world of the Proctors it was all transmuted into something base: a lifeless dogma. Everything noble in it had grown calcified and oppressive.
Maybe Stern was lost, Howard thought. Trapped in his own creation and helpless to redeem it.
Am I prepared to face a god?
He shuddered at the thought.
But he opened the cracked and jeweled door.
CHAPTER 28
With daylight, the town surrendered to panic.
Fire broke out in the Beacon Street business district and there was no one to control it; Tom Stubbs had headed west, along with most of the Volunteer Fire Department. Flames swept through the Emily Dee Large-Size Fashion Shop, the New Day Bookstore, and an empty corner property with boarded windows on which the faint words COMING SOON! ANOTHER FRY CASTLE FAMILY RESTAURANT were still faintly legible.
Refugees approaching Coldwater Road encountered a roadblock manned by a detachment of soldiers—word of the escape attempt had leaked—but the lead cars, including Calvin Shepperd’s, each carried three sharpshooters and the cream of Virgil Wilson’s collection of semiautomatic rifles. The gunfire began before dawn and continued sporadically through the morning.
Three truckloads of soldiers, turned back from the road to Fort LeDuc by steel gabions and a skirmish line of tanks, passed through town at high speed.
One truck made it nearly to Coldwater Road before a rear guard of armed civilians caught it in a crossfire. The driver was killed instantly and spared the knowledge that his last act had been to steer the vehicle over a barricade and down a vertical embankment into the shallow ice of Po
well Creek.
The second truck headed north in a vain attempt to cross the firebreak and reach safety; it broke an axle in a snowy hydroelectric right-of-way. Twenty-five soldiers without winter clothes or adequate supplies formed a line and marched into the dark woods, hoping to outrun the angel Tartarouchis.
The third truck turned over in front of City Hall, spilling a cargo of angry draftees who fanned out and began to empty their rifles into the unblinking facades of these alien houses, in this town on the edge of the Abyss, this Temple of Grief.
Dex started a turn onto Municipal Avenue when he saw the soldiers among the trees on the City Hall promenade—and the soldiers saw him.
Taken by surprise, he twisted the steering wheel hard right. The road surface was too slick for traction. The car slid at a skewed angle toward the sidewalk and Dex fought to keep the wheels out of a drainage ditch. Something pinged from the hood: he saw the new dent and a gleam of steel where the paint had been scoured by a bullet.
He told Linneth to get down. “And keep her down, too!”—Ellen Stockton, who was gawking at the soldiers with boozy incomprehension.
The car stopped shy of the ditch. Dex threw it into reverse and stepped on the gas with as much restraint as he could muster—but the wheels only raced on a slick of compressed snow.
He worked the gear shift, rocking the car forward and back. When he spared a glance down the street he saw a soldier maybe a hundred yards away—a kid, it looked like, barely voting age, aiming a big blue-barreled rifle at him. It was a mesmerizing sight. The soldier’s aim wobbled and then seemed to steady. Dex hunkered down and goosed the gas pedal again.
A bullet popped two of their windows—back seat, left and right. The safety glass fell away in a rain of white powder. Linneth emitted a stifled scream. Dex stomped the accelerator; the car roared and leaped forward in a cloud of blue exhaust.
He worked the vehicle into a turn and steered away from the soldiers. He heard more bullets strike the trunk and bumper, harmless pings and thunks—unless one of them happened to find the gas tank.