He has just gone, although his haunted face seems still to hang in the silent space before my eyes…and now Elizabeth is standing at the head of the stairs in her nightdress, asking me who it was and what he wanted.
The light from the porch throws a faint light up the stairs, and her fair hair is tousled from sleep.
The slim column of her throat draws my eyes like a magnet and within me stirs a compulsion do intense, so awful, and so complete that I can only obey it.
I realize now that he is right, and only when all of them are like us will there be any escape from my terrors.
“Go to bed,” I tell my wife. “I’ll come up and kiss you goodnight.”
ASSASSIN, by Andrew Darlington
The wall is two thousand kilometres long, one kilometre high, and half a kilometre thick. But walls are no obstacle. He’d known of the walls of Babylon in ziggurat mudbrick tiers, the walls of Tiberian Rome guarded by the geese sacred to Juno, the aluminium walls of Mao-Citadel in Zhongguo fifth millennium. Yet in terms of permanence this wall is impressive, as if grown from the musculature of Earth beneath, an extrusion of basalt stratum, of ruptured millstone. With the flimsy city about its base as ephemeral as skin, to be sloughed off in flakes, its loss neither missed, nor affecting topography to the slightest degree.
Adsiduo Sicarius, the assassin, enters the city as night falls, thick streamers of veined cloud boiling above the abrupt horizon, spliced and subdivided by geometric columns of fading light. His skin, in the visor penumbra of his titanium helmet, is ebon, his jerkin of reflecting vinyl molded into thick ridges mimicking bone structure, a deliberate exoskeleton to exclude all attempted penetration. But despite the psychological armor it is difficult to staunch the tide of foul-smelling memories, cities of the Tigris, of the Ganges, of the Delaware, of the Seine, alike in their squalor. This city — a detritus of triple-layered hovels, lean-to’s and shanties interspersed with the stone-built holds of the merchant trader class — laps at the foot of the wall like the diseased tongue of minions.
The constant murmur of voices hangs in the air, pale-skinned people, vendors disseminating small containers of human flesh grown in vats fed on embryonic fluids, selling sinscmilla marijuana from Ukai on the world’s edge, selling mandalas and hexes from the sunken continent Merique, selling renewable virginities, or opium derivatives for astral projection. Beggars, dwarfs and mutants clawing from cages suspended from pantile roofs, or from grilles set into the runneled paving, grasping at legs or loose drapes of clothing in the names of charity, Zoroaster, Thai, Guatama, the Crize, or the fifteen mercies and 305 sub-mercies of penance. But Sicarius does not pause. He wears anonymity deliberately, like a cloak, an invisibility adopted by subtle nuances of slouch, posture, physical alignment, and fluidity of movement learned by experience.
He halts briefly, at the intersection of a central thruway where a laden chain of ox carts groans by. Have oxen always had six legs, or is this just a locally induced mutation to achieve greater strength? It’s difficult to recall. Heavily armed military escorts pace beside the sweating beasts. The assassin notes the age and range of projectile artillery, selecting potential modes of entering their armor, and the preferred weapons he’d use in case of armed encounter. As he does so, a leprous hand seizes his leg pleadingly. The assassin glances down, and crushes the beggar’s single limb with his heel.
He looks up. Twilight thickening, the shadow of the wall clinging to him like slime, like accusation, like guilt. Congealing into mere loss. Now the ox train has gone. He can see across the cart-tracks, and directly beneath the wall the decaying row of cubist buildings strung together with precisely angled struts disguising the equatorial bulge of settling architecture. His eyes spider first along the elaborate facade, then up one, two, three stories, across the steeply sloping slate roofs, to the now Erebus-black wall itself. A vacuity under the lesser darkness of sky, the first stars, and the pulsing amber beacons of a drifting dirigible.
He crosses the rutted thruway, fireflies forming hieroglyphs across buildings backing directly onto the wall, glow-worm lights twisting and transmuting into trade-names, or proclaiming attractions. ‘THE ANDROGYNE CATHOUSE’ flicks at his attention, between a plethora of ragged political posters. He approaches the egress, entering through a low multi-arched corridor. The globular room beyond, divided into stepped levels by thin perspex floors, is awash with repetitive atonal music. Roils of heady smoke are cast clinical blue by light coming tip from the floor. This is the place they’ve agreed. Sicarius needs to eat, to drink, and concentrate his energies, but first there are connections to be made. He paces uneasily round the circumference of the room ignored by its other occupants, some shrouded and masked orientals, others naked, but all earnestly furtive and intense.
At length the assassin crosses to an alcove formed by the protuberance of grotesquely erotic sculptures, and sits down across from three figures. After a pause of some seconds, the music, emanating sourcelessly from the empty core of the gallery, completes its complex phase and begins to destucture in preparation for its next cycle, and as though this is a signal, the man in the center slides his hand beneath the elaborate folds of his dark synthsilk robe. The assassin focuses on him, tracing the physiognomy, ghosted as it is by blue shadow. The forehead is unnaturally high, domed by fringed black hair elegantly beaded. The nose almost non-existent, yet double-helixed with small jewels drawing attention from the surrounding features which are smoothly planed — artificially so, eyes paling almost to white, inset correction lenses giving them a glazed glaucomatous appearance.
He produces a small holographic icon and nudges it across the table.
“You know this man?”
Sicarius recognises the idealized image moving within. “It is Vhed Varah. I know his face from the posters.” A diminutive man — one third of the city’s ruling Presidium. This is to be his target.
“The image in this holo is deliberately slanted, as though viewed from beneath, as if he is seen through the eye of an insect, don’t you think? The artist has done that to flatter Varah’s vanity, to compensate for his lack of stature,” he continues conversationally. “The artist was one of many commissioned. He was subsequently honored, and the icon widely distributed. The unsuccessful candidates were ruthlessly abacinated as a matter of course.”
The assassin absorbs detail which is already becoming blurred, merging with the thousand shifting faces of other victims — dictators, tyrants, libertarian benefactors, slaves, lovers and deposed pleading gods incarnate.
“My name’s Erason,” says the man tonelessly. “And Vhed Varah is an encumbrance. Our trade suffers.”
The assassin strains to recall the wedge-shaped cuneiform script on the posters. “I thought he claimed a policy of neutrality, non-alignment with either of the warring protagonists. Trade with both sides?”
“Is it important you should know our motivation?” A voice — female, but distorted by the white porcelain mask she wears, the atmosphere filters visible beneath its lower lip, and the vocal synthesizer set into her throat. An off-worlder? He’d heard stories of dimensional portals. But there are always stories. And then again, the human form is infinitely pliable, particularly in this wretched age. Sicarius himself — he smiles wryly — is more than proof of that.
“No, it’s not important. I merely ask.”
“Curiosity is less than a requirement. Indeed, it is a trait to be discouraged,” Erason snaps, impatient to bring the subject to an end.