the roach of a skinny joint, his disrupter pointed straight at the sylph's head. Behind him, the Way Station looks as dead as the rest of the dreamtime scheme, but more stable in its squat single story, fenced off and guarded.
The sylph is unconcerned. Steel and concrete, guards and guns, might have kept the Haven safe once from the riots of the dislocated when the world was still as firm as flesh and survivors huddled behind barricades, shooting shambling things that came at them out of the cracks in reality. But it's different now; now the shadows and reflections released by the bitmites, creatures like the sylph given strange fluid substance by the angel dust, come as inscrutable supplicants that simply cannot be refused. They slide in through the niches in the back of someone's mind, in the highlights in a person's eye, and even scattered by disrupters they fall, flow and re-form. The only real defense the enclaves of reality and order have against such things is to invite them in.
The sentry studies the sylph for a second and it feels itself solidify under his gaze.
“Lingischt?”
says the sentry.
“Italiano?Français?Deutschen?”
The sylph's perspective snaps, a cut to close-up.
“Angelish,” we say.
We growl, shake our head, force the word out right.
“English,” we say.
He seems to relax a little at this. One of his own, he thinks; we smell corned beef on him, chip shops and lager, kebabs and curry. A spiderweb tattoo is just visible on his neck. Football chants curl in the smoke that rises from his spliff, and the steam of his breath. He misses the lads more than the missus or his ma and da, and he's not cut out for this malarkey, so he's not, you know; all lost in the Evenfall they are, as he was when the militiamen found him, lost in the diasporas and disappearances of where did all the people and the places that he used to know go into that's a no-go area of rubble and smoke and—
“Got any papers?” he says.
“No,” we say. “No identity, no papers.”
“I mean cigarette papers. Skins. You got any cigarette papers?”
We hold our hands out, palms up.
“Worth a try,” he shrugs. “On you go, mate.”
“Don't you want to know our name?”
He laughs.
“If you had a name, you wouldn't be here.”
We sniff at him as we pull open the unlocked gate. His disrupter is switched off— no telltale odor of ozone and cum, just blackcurrant, petrol and apathy. The filth of four weeks living in a corner shop without a toilet, raiding its shelves for tinned food, as the Evenfall raged outside. The fish-oil smell of fear when he came out into the still black night, and the city was gone and he was in the Hinter, ash falling like snow across the dereliction of a hundred suburbias. He was lucky that the search party found him or he'd never have known that this slumscape of houses torn from their original moorings is accreted into a barricade around an entry point, a Way Station.
A Way Station. The low-bulked building doesn't look like it could hold a city within its walls, but that's how the Havens are. Hidden among a twenty-years-wide novagrad, buried decades, sometimes centuries, down beneath the ruin, just a door or window showing here or there, through which they can be entered. Time is wide in the Hinter, wide and deep.
We walk across the yard of hopscotch chalk marks, up the steps, into the bunker that will take us home.
A
Grandiose Ruin of Gray Stone
“So here I am, back in grand Themes,” says our Iacchus Bacchus. “Jack is back, the son of Sooth and Simile, born in a flash of lightning, out of the east. I've shed the spiritskin, and taken human shape to show myself at Hinter springs and Sumer's falls.”
The painted backdrop of the wagon's fold-down stage portrays a grandiose ruin of gray stone obscured and overgrown by green. Don, Guy and Joey melt back into it as Harlequin commands the stage. Jack's in the spotlight. Out in the hall, the audience are shades.
‘And here I
The sylph is unconcerned. Steel and concrete, guards and guns, might have kept the Haven safe once from the riots of the dislocated when the world was still as firm as flesh and survivors huddled behind barricades, shooting shambling things that came at them out of the cracks in reality. But it's different now; now the shadows and reflections released by the bitmites, creatures like the sylph given strange fluid substance by the angel dust, come as inscrutable supplicants that simply cannot be refused. They slide in through the niches in the back of someone's mind, in the highlights in a person's eye, and even scattered by disrupters they fall, flow and re-form. The only real defense the enclaves of reality and order have against such things is to invite them in.
The sentry studies the sylph for a second and it feels itself solidify under his gaze.
“Lingischt?”
says the sentry.
“Italiano?Français?Deutschen?”
The sylph's perspective snaps, a cut to close-up.
“Angelish,” we say.
We growl, shake our head, force the word out right.
“English,” we say.
He seems to relax a little at this. One of his own, he thinks; we smell corned beef on him, chip shops and lager, kebabs and curry. A spiderweb tattoo is just visible on his neck. Football chants curl in the smoke that rises from his spliff, and the steam of his breath. He misses the lads more than the missus or his ma and da, and he's not cut out for this malarkey, so he's not, you know; all lost in the Evenfall they are, as he was when the militiamen found him, lost in the diasporas and disappearances of where did all the people and the places that he used to know go into that's a no-go area of rubble and smoke and—
“Got any papers?” he says.
“No,” we say. “No identity, no papers.”
“I mean cigarette papers. Skins. You got any cigarette papers?”
We hold our hands out, palms up.
“Worth a try,” he shrugs. “On you go, mate.”
“Don't you want to know our name?”
He laughs.
“If you had a name, you wouldn't be here.”
We sniff at him as we pull open the unlocked gate. His disrupter is switched off— no telltale odor of ozone and cum, just blackcurrant, petrol and apathy. The filth of four weeks living in a corner shop without a toilet, raiding its shelves for tinned food, as the Evenfall raged outside. The fish-oil smell of fear when he came out into the still black night, and the city was gone and he was in the Hinter, ash falling like snow across the dereliction of a hundred suburbias. He was lucky that the search party found him or he'd never have known that this slumscape of houses torn from their original moorings is accreted into a barricade around an entry point, a Way Station.
A Way Station. The low-bulked building doesn't look like it could hold a city within its walls, but that's how the Havens are. Hidden among a twenty-years-wide novagrad, buried decades, sometimes centuries, down beneath the ruin, just a door or window showing here or there, through which they can be entered. Time is wide in the Hinter, wide and deep.
We walk across the yard of hopscotch chalk marks, up the steps, into the bunker that will take us home.
A
Grandiose Ruin of Gray Stone
“So here I am, back in grand Themes,” says our Iacchus Bacchus. “Jack is back, the son of Sooth and Simile, born in a flash of lightning, out of the east. I've shed the spiritskin, and taken human shape to show myself at Hinter springs and Sumer's falls.”
The painted backdrop of the wagon's fold-down stage portrays a grandiose ruin of gray stone obscured and overgrown by green. Don, Guy and Joey melt back into it as Harlequin commands the stage. Jack's in the spotlight. Out in the hall, the audience are shades.
‘And here I
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