Terminal World Read online

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  Through the remains of the screen the cabman said, ‘You got anything for me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Meroka said. ‘Advice. Keep your fucking head down.’ She began to empty the revolver again, popping up to shoot through the door’s ruined window, the long barrel jerking up with each shot. Her bullets ripped ragged holes through the ghoul’s clothes and flesh, yet he absorbed the impacts as if they were pebbles being tossed into a deep lake. Even when Quillon leaned out of the other side and fired the smaller revolver - the little gun whipping back into his hand with fierce recoil, for all that it looked like a toy - he had the impression that he was shooting into a mirage, an insubstantial figment that wasn’t really there.

  Then - just when he had begun to think nothing they had was going to do more than slow him - the ghoul staggered again, one of Meroka’s shots blasting half his hand away, along with the revolver he had been carrying. The ghoul knelt down and retrieved the gun with his good hand. He staggered up and forwards, continued shooting. He had now crossed half the distance from the abandoned cab.

  ‘What’s that sound?’ Meroka asked as she paused to slip bullets into the revolver.

  ‘What sound?’

  ‘The one coming from the angel gun.’

  Quillon had had too much on his mind to notice it until she spoke, but now that she had drawn his attention to the gun he couldn’t ignore it. It was on the back seat of the cab, where it must have fallen out of his pocket. It was buzzing, and the buzzing was growing steadily louder, as if an increasingly angry wasp was loose inside it. He reached for the gun, closing his fingers around it, and it was hot, so hot that he flinched back and yelped involuntarily. The buzzing grew stronger. A pink glow leaked from the previously invisible seals where the weapon had fused together.

  ‘I think you’d better do something with that,’ Meroka said.

  He put down the revolver and dug into his coat pocket for a handkerchief. He bundled it around his hand and grabbed the buzzing gun. The heat penetrated the cloth almost instantly. The gun was rattling in his hand, as if it was on the point of shaking itself to pieces. He leaned out and was about to lob the gun in the direction of the ghoul when the rattling ceased abruptly, the gun still hot, but no longer buzzing.

  ‘Cutter!’ Meroka snarled. ‘Throw the damn thing, before it blows us all up!’

  But Quillon brought the gun back towards him. He still had the handkerchief wrapped around it, but even through the fabric sensed that the weapon’s form had altered slightly. Although the gun remained hot to the touch, he had the conviction that it had completed some profound, larval transformation to a more primitive state of being.

  He aimed at the ghoul and squeezed the trigger again. There was no energy discharge this time, but there was a result. His aim had been approximate, but as he fired he thought he felt the gun twist in his hand. Now there was recoil, and the thunder of a bullet being released from the chamber.

  Then there was silence, and the ghoul wasn’t coming any nearer.

  Meroka waited a minute, then got out of the cab and walked carefully over to the last point where the ghoul had been. She still had the heavy revolver aimed in front of her. Quillon climbed out of his own side, leaving the medical bag in the cab, and followed slowly behind her.

  ‘Do you think he’s dead?’

  Meroka found something pink-grey with the tip of her boot, an offcut of soiled meat, and kicked it into the dirt.

  ‘Say that’s a fair bet, Cutter.’

  ‘I didn’t expect him to get as far as he did.’ Quillon looked down at the scattered remains, mentally reassembling the parts that had not been blown out of all recognition. He could see how the ghoul worked. He had been an angel once, and then knives and genetic intervention had remodelled him for life under the Celestial Levels. It was the same kind of forced adaptation that had been worked on him, but less elegant, less refined. If Quillon had been remade with watchmaker precision, the ghoul was a disposable cigarette lighter.

  ‘You think this was a suicide mission?’ Meroka asked.

  Quillon still had the angel gun in his hand. His hand was shaking. ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘What made them come down here, they knew they were going to die?’

  ‘Belief, I suppose. The burning conviction that they were acting correctly, serving the true cause. Aided and abetted by some form of psychosurgical brainwashing, I don’t doubt.’ He paused, studying her expression for the slightest clue that she knew his true nature. ‘It’s all entirely feasible.’

  ‘You know a lot about how they operate.’

  ‘As I said, it helps when they’re after you.’

  Meroka found another piece of meat and stubbed her boot against it. ‘Good call with the gun, by the way. You were right not to listen to me.’

  ‘Can I get that in writing?’

  ‘Quit while you’re ahead, Cutter.’

  Then she bent double and ejected a thin stream of vomit over the ghoul’s remains.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Quillon clutched his medical bag as if it were his final link to his life of the last nine years. They were on the upper deck of a rumbling, rattling steam-coach with hard wooden seats. They had walked for an hour before finding it, leaving the hapless cabman to make his own way back to Neon Heights. The coach was gas-lit, the few other passengers on the upper deck huddled in coats and scarves. Above the windows were monochrome advertisements for brands of soap and bleach, distemper and cold remedies. Quillon recognised none of them. He had travelled only a few leagues from Neon Heights and already it felt as if he had sailed off the edge of the world.

  ‘Slight change of plan coming up,’ Meroka said. ‘Can’t risk the trains any more, so we’ve got to find ourselves another way down.’

  ‘What will that entail?’ Quillon asked, clutching his medical bag to his lap.

  ‘A trip to the bathhouse. There’s a man there can help us, name of Tulwar. He’s a friend, associate, of Fray’s. Looks after Fray’s interests in Steamville, now that Fray can’t get down here so much these days.’

  ‘Is this someone we can trust?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we be able to trust him?’

  ‘In all the conversations Fray and I had, I don’t think the name Tulwar ever came up once.’

  ‘Tulwar’s reliable. He won’t fuck us over.’

  Quillon looked out of the window, abject tiredness and zone sickness dulling his will to continue the conversation. If he had to trust this Tulwar, so be it. It was only one remove from trusting Meroka, or Fray, for that matter. He had never felt so hopeless.

  Buildings slid by outside at little more than a brisk walking pace, the architecture not unlike that of Neon Heights. But the lights were brown, quivering and quavering with the random flickering of gas filaments, and nowhere was there the cold, steady radiance of televisions, the pink auroral glow of neon tubes, the actinic flash of slot-cars and electric trains. Electricity existed in Steamville - the continued functioning of his own nervous system attested to that - but the machinery needed to generate and distribute it on a useful scale could not be made to work reliably. Steam and gas power, on the other hand, were still readily applicable technologies. There had been efforts, Quillon knew, to pump electricity in from outside the zone, and to make machines that were rugged enough to continue functioning once inside it. But all these efforts, along with similar endeavours elsewhere in Spearpoint, had come to naught. There was an old adage amongst Spearpointers: what works, works.

  As the steam-coach trundled from block to block, so the signs of inhabitation and civilisation grew steadily more apparent. The seedier tenements gave way to long rows of well-maintained facades, each frontage bathed in its own lemony pool of gaslight from the tall black lanterns lining the avenues. They passed pedestrians and horseback riders, abroad even at this late hour. Meroka had chosen well with her own clothes: they had looked unremarkable in Neon Heights, and unremarkable here. Quillon presumed that he h
ad achieved a similar effect with his own garments, although that was undoubtedly more by luck than judgement. With his long black coat, black-brimmed hat and anonymous black bag, he fancied that he cut a vaguely clerical figure, a minister or priest conveying some fallen child to sanctuary.

  ‘Show me the angel gun,’ Meroka said.

  Quillon withdrew it from his pocket. It was still warm to the touch, but not as hot as before. Furtively, he unwrapped the handkerchief and let Meroka look at the weapon, keeping it low down in his lap where the other passengers wouldn’t see it.

  ‘It shot something,’ Quillon said. ‘Not a beam this time. Some kind of bullet.’

  ‘Whatever it was made a serious mess of that thing chasing you. Must’ve been high-explosive, I reckon.’

  ‘I don’t think it has any intelligence left in it now. It’s just inert metal. Probably can’t change again, either. And I’ve no idea how many shots are left in it, if any.’

  ‘Got to hand it to them angels - they’re clever. But why can’t they do something useful with that cleverness, like making life easier for the rest of us?’

  ‘They’re not as clever as you think,’ Quillon said, choosing his words carefully. He had already slipped a couple of times, mentioning to Meroka that he had been living ‘down here’ for nine years. She seemed not to have picked up on it, but he was wary of making any more similar errors. ‘They’re good with gadgets, with making little toys like this gun. Sometimes, it seems as if they’ve made something genuinely new, something that didn’t exist in the world before. But it’s almost never the case. All they do is dig back into the past, hundreds or thousands of years if necessary, and find a solution someone already came up with. There’s nothing new under the sun, and if you asked an angel to explain how this gun really worked, how it locked on to my blood, how it changed itself, I don’t think you’d be very satisfied with the answers you got.’

  ‘So angels are as dumb as the rest of us, then. They’ve just got shinier toys.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You ever been up there, Cutter?’

  ‘To the Celestial Levels?’ The directness of her question unsettled him. ‘No. I’ve had no cause.’

  ‘Never been sick enough to need their medicine, then?’

  ‘I’m healthier than I look.’ He bundled the gun back into the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Ain’t ever needed their medicine. If I did, I’d spit it back in their faces. Rather die than let one of those fuckers touch me.’

  ‘And does Fray feel the same way you do?’

  ‘You know him that well, why not ask him yourself?’

  ‘Not exactly an option now,’ Quillon said.

  ‘I guess it isn’t. Still, you knowing him as long as you have ... exactly how far back do you go, anyway?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re interested in me all of a sudden.’

  ‘I’m interested in Fray’s past. You’re a piece of the jigsaw, that’s all. You’re his drug supplier, or one of them - I figured that much out. But when did you get mixed up with him? And what’s he got on you to keep you bringing the goods?’

  Quillon grimaced. Exactly how much did Meroka know of his past? How much was she deliberately testing him on? He had no idea what information Fray had given her, only that to have told her almost anything beyond the bare essentials would have constituted a grievous betrayal of trust.

  ‘You know of Fray’s old line of work, I take it?’

  ‘Him being a detective and all? Not exactly the biggest secret around here. ’Specially as he still hangs his badge behind the bar in the Pink Peacock. You meet him on one of his cases?’

  ‘Something like that.’ He sighed, knowing that this would not be sufficient to end her probing. ‘Fray was working on a murder investigation, one that had been dropped by the rest of the department. A body had been discovered at the bottom of a lift shaft in a pharmaceuticals warehouse in the Second District. I happened to feature in that investigation.’

  ‘Suspect, or a witness?’

  ‘Both. I didn’t kill the woman in the lift shaft, but he was right to have his doubts about me. I had killed two people.’ When Meroka said nothing - he’d been expecting some kind of reaction, either dismissive or admiring - he coughed and went on: ‘But I only did so because they killed the woman, someone who mattered to me.’

  ‘And Fray found all this out?’

  ‘Fray worked out what had happened. I stated my case. At that point there were just the two of us. No one else knew about how far he’d carried the investigation.’

  ‘You think about killing him?’

  ‘There’d been enough murder. I’m a doctor, a healer. I’m meant to put lives back together, not end them.’

  ‘Which is why you were so keen to keep your hands on that shiny little gun, I guess.’

  ‘There wasn’t a lot of time to think things through,’ Quillon said. ‘If I made the wrong decision, I apologise.’ He waited, in vain, for Meroka to offer him a crumb of acknowledgement, then said, ‘Fray left the force soon after. When he started expanding his activities, so to speak, he found that he had to cross over into the other zones more often than he had before. I was able to supply him with clinical-grade Morphax-55, stronger and purer than anything he could have obtained elsewhere.’

  ‘So that’s all it was. Simple protection racket, like I said. You fenced him the drugs or he turned you in.’

  ‘No,’ Quillon said carefully. ‘There was more to it than that. Fray helped me. Fray kept helping me. I owe more to him than just my freedom. That’s why I came to him this time.’

  ‘Helped you how?’

  He couldn’t tell her about the wings, of course. Couldn’t explain how they had to be cut away, the wounds stitched closed, while the pain of the cutting - it could only be done under a weak local anaesthetic - caused Quillon to thrash and writhe on the makeshift operating table where Fray did his sterile knifework. All the while knowing that the wings would start regrowing almost immediately, and that this pain would have to be revisited upon him at increasingly short intervals.

  He couldn’t tell her any of that.

  ‘He helped me to keep ahead of the people looking for me. That’s all.’

  ‘Sounds like he got the good side of the bargain.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Quillon said.

  They exited the steam-coach a few blocks further on. Meroka led him through the bustle of late-night revellers spilling out of bars and bordellos and gambling houses, barging through anyone who didn’t have the wisdom to get out of her way, Quillon following in the wake she opened up. Jugglers, fire-breathers and hustlers provided rowdy entertainment, while a big-busted woman with too much make-up was standing on a pile of crates, bellowing along to the music from a steam organ. The calliope had been wheeled into the middle of the street and was piping its way through a score punched onto cards, while its operator kept it stoked with wood and monitored the steam pressure. Quillon recognised the tune as belonging to the singer Blade.

  ‘I didn’t know they had her music down here,’ he said.

  ‘Got it arse over tit, Cutter. That tune’s been doing the rounds here for years. It’s Blade who’s picked up on it.’

  He smiled at his ignorance. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  ‘City’s more complicated than people figure. Ain’t just shit and bricks crossing between the zones. Spend some time moving around and you realise that Spearpoint’s more like a living thing, with stuff flowing in all directions. Shouldn’t need to tell you how tangled up bodies get inside.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t.’ Quillon let Meroka pick a path through the hurlyburly. ‘You like it here, don’t you? In Spearpoint, I mean.’

  ‘Damn right I do. Left the place enough times. Got to be something dragging me back to it.’

  The calliope stood in front of a pale green, wooden-boarded building with an elaborate portico and many red-painted balconies. Chains of pastel-colo
ured paper lanterns illuminated the frontage. A carved serpentine lizard lorded it over the entrance, entwined around a sign identifying the premises as the Red Dragon Bathhouse. Evidenced by the lights, and the amount of steam issuing from its windows and chimneys, the bathhouse was still open for business.

  ‘This is the place,’ Meroka said.

  ‘How do you know Tulwar’s going to be in?’

  ‘Tulwar’s always in. Being in is what Tulwar does. It’s sort of his party trick.’ She paused. ‘You got a strong stomach, Cutter?’

  ‘I’m a pathologist.’

  ‘Enough said.’

  Meroka walked up the steps to the entrance and spoke quietly to the burly, long-whiskered doorman waiting under the portico. He gave

  Quillon an appraising glance, then nodded once, admitting them into the bathhouse. Meroka clearly knew her way. She led Quillon along a winding corridor from which branched various steaming chambers, bathing pools and changing rooms. The air was oppressively humid, reeking with scented oils and perfumes. Quillon already felt stifled under his coat, sweat beading around his collar and forehead. He removed his glasses quickly, wiping and replacing them before Meroka had a chance to look at his eyes. Now and then a towelled patron passed them by - it was always a glistening, overweight man, ambling from one room to another. The bathhouse girls wore long silk dresses, their hair elevated off their necks by jewelled pins. They could have been made from wax.

  At the end of the corridor was an office. Meroka knocked on the glass-panelled door and entered. There were two women in the office. An older woman sat behind a lavish leather-topped desk, dipping a pen into an inkwell as they arrived. Her grey hair was tied back with a floral-painted papier-mâché clasp. A much younger woman - one of the bathhouse girls - was in the process of being reprimanded, judging by the severe expression on the older woman’s face, and the way the younger one kept her head down, her chin trembling slightly as if she was trying hard not to cry.

  ‘Let this be a lesson, Iztle,’ the older woman said. ‘Go now, and we’ll speak no more of the matter. But I won’t give you the benefit of a second warning.’