58 HOURS, 52 MINUTES, AND 5 SECONDS
"The figure of the Red Death
himself: standing on a cliff and literally painted red with what
looked like the blood of his enemies. Despite the huge black
beard with framed his grimace, Aerin still recognised his face
instantly. He wore some steel vambraces on his wrists, the pelt
of a monster whose stuffed face roared at the viewer, and a gold
metal eyepatch decorated to look like another open eye. In his
right hand he held an axe, bloodied by the elvin soldier who lay
dead behind him. And in his left hand, raised defiant against
the black night, was a flaming red scimitar.
“But...he’s…” Aerin trailed off.
Dhubagèl turned to him. “He’s...what?”
“He wasn’t always the ‘Red Death’ though, was he? He had a
hereditary title, you said, so he must have been from a family
of note, surely? And a well-travelled man if he could guide his
army through Orcadia and Astor, some kind of...adventurer.”
“We don’t know.” Dhubagèl shrugged. “There’s nobody that fits
the profile, and if there ever was any record of the man’s
identity they would have made a point of destroying it.”
“Nobody that fits the profile?” Aerin forced a little sardonic
laugh. “Are you sure?”
“Why? Oh!” Dhubagèl leaned forward. “Do you have a fan theory?”
“I mean…that’s,” Aerin swallowed. “That’s John Boss, right?”
Dhubagèl narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“Yeah. John Boss. I mean, comes from a famous family, one of the
most well-travelled humans of the time, big bald guy with a
beard, arms thick as cows and overdone...performance abs.”
Dhubagèl stepped back, arms folded, squinting as he walked over
to a nearby wall. “The hell have you heard about John Boss?”
“Not a whole lot, actually. But I intend to get the exclusive.”
“Your enthusiasm is…” Dhuabgèl paused, visibly considering the
most polite phrasing. “Creepy.”
“Wh-” Aerin scratched behind his neck. “What happened next,
anyway?”
“Hm?”
“It just seemed like you had more of your story left to tell.”
“Ah, yes. Well.” Dhubagèl hauled an empty crate away from the
wall. "You don't need me to tell you that the Red Hand is a
fallen organisation. We used to be rather big, busting human
babies out of the farms in huge quantities and smuggling them
around the kingdoms to grow up in various safe outposts." Even
in the dark corner of the room, Aerin could see the elf smile.
"Not me, though. I did administration, mostly. Making sure a
couple in a South Valenshire cell who wanted a little boy got
one; making sure a girl with asthma got to a post with trained
doctors. That sort of thing."
Aerin sat down on a little wooden stool in the middle of the
room. "So what happened?"
"They found headquarters about six months ago. After that, we've
been struggling to restore communication lines with the other
branches. HQ's important files were encrypted a hundred
different ways, which is why we're still alive to have this
conversation, but that place was the centre of all our
operations. That, and the archive they had." He stood up and
rummaged around the shelves. "See this crawlspace? These
bastards had an entire cave, and the cave was full."Dhubagèl
knocked a small metal object off its shelf with his elbow, and
he picked it up off the dusty floor, wiping it down on the
sleeve of his tweed jacket. He pressed the small cuboid around
the dust-free square of exposed bricks like a stethoscope, and
something clicked. "Right, enough storytime. Let's get you
moving again. You're expected."
"Yeah, about that: I still don't actually know why I was sent
here," said Aerin, who surely meant to gesture to the room
around him, but anxiously flail-shrugged at the world and
cosmos.
"Me neither, to be honest.”
“Really?” Aerin replied, having coaxed nothing out of the elf.
“I just got a call along the lines of...actually...I'll play it
for you." Dhubagèl abandoned the wall and worked his way over to
a little table nested between two shelves, on which sat a chunky
device with an aerial and two tape reels. He put on some large
headphones and fiddled with the buttons, causing the reels to
spin back and forth before he found the right configuration. The
machine popped as he pulled out the headphone cable.
He pressed a button and a strange, slurred voice shouted: "RIGHT
YE WEE STAIN, YIR JOB IS NOW TO FIND ESS PRICK CA'AD 'AERIN
LIETTE' AN' MAK SURE HE GETS TAE YIR SHITEY WEE LIBRARY AT 11:54
ON THE..." Aerin could make out the sound of rustling paper.
"...EIGHTEEN. NINE. TWO TWO ONE FOUR. AND YI FUCKIN BETTER,
BECAUSE IF I COME DOON THERE AND HE'S NAE EXACTLY FAR I WUNT HIM
I'LL HUNT YI DOON, RIGHT? I'LL GET MA MATE SOLVENT - AND
SOLVENT'S FUCKEN MINTAL RIGHT, MA MATE RICKY BUMPED INTAE
SOLVENT IN THE STREET ONCE, HE'D BEEN WALKING HIS DOG WHICH WIS
A PITBULL THAT HE'D NAMED MR. WORLDWIDE FUR A BET BUT ONYWAI; HE
WIS GA'AN DOONTOON TO GET A RAKE FUR 'IS MAW’S GAIRDEN, AND HE'D
BUMPED INTAE SOLVENT AND SOLVENT WINT FUCKEN MINTAL RIGHT,
STARTED SCREAMING AT HIM ON THE STREET, IVERY WORD WHISTLIN FAE
THE PERFECT CIRCLE THE CRYSTAL METH HAD BURNED THROUGH ‘IS
TEETH, BUT RICKY JIST WALKED AFF AND DIDNAE APOLOGISE OR NUHIN.
SO THE NEXT NIGHT-” She cut herself off to address a thudding
noise. “HERE FUCK OFF AM THE PHONE AYE?” She paused. “SORRY IT’S
ONE A THEY FUCKIN FILIPINO BOYS, RIGHT. SO RICKY WIS OOT WAE 'IS
PALS TRYIN TAE PULL SOME RANDOM BURD OR SO HE SAYS, BUT STEPHI
WIS THERE ANAW. NOW: WE AH KEN HE FUNCIED STEPHIE FOR YEARS AND
NOO ESS WIS HIS CHANCE. IT WIS AH GA'AN SMOOTHLY FUR HIM, BUT
THEN STEPHI - ESS WIS AEFTER SOLVENT AND STEPHI BROKE UP BIT
BEFORE THEY GOT BACK IGITHER - GOT A TEXT FAE SOLVENT LIKE, 'AH
KEN YIR IN THERE WAE RICKY. FUCKEN GET OOT HERE, AV SUMTHIN TAE
SHOW YIS'. SO RICKY STEPPED OOT ONTAE QUEEN STREET ON 'IS OWN SO
HE COULD PLAY HARDMAN FUR STEPHI OR SUHIN. BUT FIT - *FIT* DID
RICKY FIND OOTSIDE AT NIGHTCLUB? SOLVENT...HAD *KILT* MR.
WORLDWIDE. WAE. THE RAKE.”
She breathed in, then the speakers rattled with a sandpapery
smoker’s cough. “NOO AH KEN TALENT FAN AH SEE IT. AV GOT SOLVENT
ON FUCKEN SPEEDDIAL READY TAE PULL YIR TEETH OOT, SAW YIR HANDS
AND FEET AFF AND PUNT YE AFF THE CLIFFS BY THE QUARRY. ARITE?
ARITE. IT WIS NICE SPEAKIN TI YIS ONYWAI, AM COMPLETELY
BLOOTERED SO AM AWA BACK TI THE PARTY. THIS IS BRITTANY
SUMHINORITHER, OVER AN OOT. TRY NAE TI DIE, CIAO FIR NOW."
The sound cut out, and Dhubagèl stopped the machine.
Aerin took it upon himself to speak first. “Where was that
from!?”
Dhubagèl rummaged around paper clippings and tearings on the
desk. “They used all the callsigns, so it’s legit, but the only
identification they gave for their location was…” he unfolded
the scrap and leaned forward to read in the dark. “...‘the
middle phonebooth on Drummers Corner’. Mean anything to you?”
Aerin shook his head, and gestured to the seam in the wall.
“Should we be going now?”
“Ah, yes.” The metal object had cracked open some kind of secret
door hidden in the building's internal brickwork. When Dhubagèl
opened it, the dark room was flooded with harsh yellow light
from the small hole. "Right, it's through here, mind the drop."
He smiled. Aerin got on his hands and knees and crawled through
the hole, clinging to the concrete rafter as he looked down the
bottomless elevator shaft. His voice trembled. "Where is...it?"
Dhubagèl extended upright again, the section of brickwork
automatically slipping back into the anonymous grid of gray
rectangles. "Just shimmy around the corner, there's a ladder
down the side of the shaft."
"The entire shaft?"
"You’re complaining now but wait ‘til you’ve to climb back up."
Aerin gripped onto the ladder's grubby rungs as he climbed down
the eight floors of Dhubagèl's building, stopping and pressing
himself against the wall when an elevator came croaking down
past him on metal strings.
The ladder went down to a cage in corner of an underground
basement floor overrun with pipes and humming machinery. "Now if
you just follow me over to this end, see that?" Dhubagèl pointed
at an anonymous door hidden in the dark. There was a triangular
sign of a man being struck by lightning nailed into the wood.
"You know when you're little and you always see these kinds of
doors with 'janitor only' or 'electrical hazard' and you wonder
what goes on inside, what sprawling, subterranean arteries
they’re trying to hide? Why only one or two people are allowed
in, and what exactly they get up to in there? But then you grow
up and you tell yourself-" he waved his limbs around and flapped
his lips "-'oh it's just the Janitor's cupboard' or 'oh it'll
just be some fuses or some electric thing I'm just too stupid to
possibly understand'?"
"Yes.” Said Aerin. “Absolutely."
He smiled. "Well, open the door. Just this once. See what The
System doesn't want you to see."
Aerin stepped forward, turned the door's dusty knob and pushed
it open, casting light where no light had been cast before; his
eyes taking in sights had once been the dark secret of an
exclusive cabal of people in overalls and boiler suits.
"It's empty," said Aerin.
"Yeah it’s a cupboard innit?” said Dhubagèl, placing a hand on
Aerin’s lower back. “Get in.”
Aerin shuffled into the middle of the small room despite the
gentle sound of something scuttling in the corner. Dhubagèl
closed the door behind them and they stood in total darkness for
a few seconds. Something creaked open at the back wall of the
room, and grubby electric lights buzzed into life in a line that
stretched for at least fifty meters. The dull green light
spilled into the room and Aerin looked down the narrow corridor.
"You've got a secret tunnel?!"
"I've got a secret tunnel." Dhubagèl closed the hole in the wall
behind him and led Aerin down past the crooked and misshapen
bricks.
Aerin inspected the walls with his torch. "I assume this tunnel
isn't another of your 'special features'. It looks older than
the rest of the building."
"Much older, it's a remainder of the sewer system that existed
long before the city got destroyed and rebuild to Praeon's grand
design. This place used to have character. Filthy,
disease-ridden, lethal character."
"What happened when the city got destroyed?"
"His all-consuming majesty decided that the city should be
divided into six sections by the rivers. He had an idea that
societies weren't made up of people, they were made of...orders.
Hierarchies. Forged in the mind and reinforced by architecture
and association. If you programmed your will into the bones of
the city, the city would move accordingly. The city would watch
its people from glass eyes in concrete sockets and would
invisibly shepherd them through life according to the orders it
was given by its architect."
Dhubagèl didn't see Aerin raising his eyebrows behind him. "I
never thought about it like that."
He spun around impatiently. "Oh, that's an Aerin Liette quote!
From...In The Shadow of The Valley?"
"Oh." Aerin tried his hardest to seem coolly indifferent. "Is
that one any good?"
"Eh. It was alright. His novels definitely got better as time
went on.”
“Do you think?” Aerin considered it. “I suppose, even as you
lose the flowing inspiration of youth the sheer craftsmanship
only ever improves with age. It’s a comforting thought.”
“I meant that censors upon censors slashed those things down
into coherence over many decades.” He chuckled. “I don’t think
that quote survived the third edition. Don’t remember how many
versions of every book there are but I’d say each was a
seven-man job, at least. ‘Valley’ is one of his better books
though, technically unfinished before he died aged-”
"ANYWAY," Aerin hastily interrupted. "I'll have to read it
sometime if you have a copy lying around."
The narrow tunnel became a decrepit, disorienting maze through
which Dhubagèl navigated almost automatically. Eventually Aerin
was led to a ladder which took them up through a heavy iron
trapdoor into some obscure corner of the city's current sewer
system.
Aerin looked up and down the vast sluiceway. "Shouldn't we turn
off these torches now? What if somebody sees us?"
Dhubagèl kept walking through his memorised route. "The only
people with access to these tunnels are the sewer company."
"What if somebody from the sewer company sees us?"
"Nobody from the sewer company will see us."
"You don't know tha-...You know that, don't you?"
Dhubagèl turned to him. "I eliminated their nightshifts.
Inefficient, sure, but who’s to stop me?”
"An art-collecting newspaper overlord who owns a sewer company?"
"It’s not suspicious. Bought a floundering sex shop for a laugh
last week.”
They arrived at a short waterfall - about ten feet high - where
one tunnel tumbled down into the other. The walkways had become
narrower as they'd made their way through the dark and reeking
tunnels, and this one ended at a ladder up to the level above.
“...that’s something I was meaning to ask. Monarchies are built
on foundations of myth and history, why would Praeon erase so
much of it?”
Dhubagèl tossed his torch up onto the next floor and climbed the
ladder. “History is fossilised, some would say. Myth is fertile,
oral. Disappointed that there were no lands left to conquer,
dissatisfied with being the greatest and most terrible of the
mortal beings, Praeon wanted to conquer all of time. He
established machineries of government that rewrote history
around him, as if he were its main character. This served a
second purpose. The history of our world has unity: every event
must be the inevitable result of every event that came before,
and every event must serve to make the next more inevitable. In
re-charting the boundaries of the past, Praeon wanted to contain
the future in his shadow. And he did, we fight for a sick and
dying planet where hope vanished with the seasons. It’s more
likely than not that his stories will be the last ever told.”
Aerin stood at the bottom of the ladder and tried to imitate
Dhubagèl's physical, radiant cool: throwing his torch up to the
narrow walkway next to the river. Splash. Dhubagèl leaned over
the rail above. "It's about to drop, if you reach out you could
catch-"
Aerin looked just in time to see a beam of light subsumed by the
flow of rancid water, dropping down into the river and stopping
at a gate of iron bars between it and the larger tunnel into
which many rivers joined. Aerin considered reaching into the
reddish-brown murk to retrieve it, but decided his arms weren't
that long.
"It's fine," said Dhubagèl. "I haven't changed the batteries in
months, it'll likely fizzle out in a couple of hours if the
water doesn't destroy it first. If anyone did happen to find it,
they'll think it was from a maintenance worker."
Aerin didn't verbally reply, his limbs mired in awkwardness for
a few more seconds. He nodded and just climbed the ladder. “What
was that you were saying, about the ‘dying planet’?”
“They do actually teach you fucking nothing over in Collisterra,
do they?”
Aerin didn’t reply for a few minutes, looking at the ground.
“What has you so interested in history anyway?”
"History was the only subject I really enjoyed at school. Elvin
would later prove useful with many a beautiful stranger, but I
hated it at the time. So when I noticed a contradiction between
my shiny new school textbook and the big leather-bound bastards
collecting dust in my uncle's home library I thought 'oh, isn't
that strange' and I started actively hunting them down. It was a
girl at university who found me. The place was a draconian
castle where I met half of today's parliament and most of my
future business rivals-slash-victims. The girl's school was
another building across the river, and their smoking spot in the
forest was across the river from our smoking spot in the forest,
so there was a lovely and at points literal cross-pollination
between the two groups. One night there's some mass
prayer...thing in the school's chapel, so obviously I'm down by
the river on my own. It's a lovely indigo evening, and then I
see this orange light flicker in the black of the trees across
from me. So I shout over and then we talk for a few minutes, and
then I decide to uncover the ladder we kept beneath the autumn
leaves and cross the river. She's a history student too. We know
Prayer Thing lasts at least an hour and a half, so there's no
rush. After that night we sent letters. Her cover story is that
they're from her dad, so, figure that out for yourself, and in
the midst of my memories of abandoning prayer and lessons for
talk and instruction, I remember her saying 'People think
history's this dry and stale thing that happened and grew still
and collects dust, but it isn’t. History is a slow tsunami
coming in from the future, and everything around us will be
washed away'."
He spun around to Aerin, smiling. "That’s the sentence that
ruined my life. History took her too, she just sort
of...vanished, over time. In the slow and completely mundane way
that all the most important people do.”
Dhubagèl's nostalgic smile faded. "Anyway, I decided from then
on I would endeavour to be on the right side of the tsunami. If
anyone’s getting washed away, it isn’t going to be me. These
days the history books are written by unreliable narrators, and
the ink is never dry. It is written in the gutters, and more
often than not, in blood. Which is where I’m taking you now,” he
declared. “Welcome to ground zero."