Dogleg Hinterland 7

When she awoke she saw someone new sat a distance off from her. She would not have recognised him if it were not for the blue lines etched deep under his eyes. He was watching her silently and she sensed that he was not moving so as not to alarm her.

‘What are you?’ she asked, sensing that to ask who he was would not be the right question.

‘A Water Element. This my place. I live in the heart of my brother, an Earth Element.’

‘Your brother is the desert?’

‘Yes, and my sister is the sky.’

‘So you are never lonely.’

‘You might say that.’

‘Is the joy here just the water?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

Mr. Magpie was sat there again. His arm was elbow deep inside his hat.

‘What do you have to tell me Mr. Magpie? Aren’t these visions that you sent me the message? Why do you keep popping in?’

‘Me? I’m a nosey varmint. I have always been told that I can’t leave well enough alone … but I can’t resist shiny things, and you are that. This is not a world where much shines anymore, and my flock that comes after will steal that shine.’

‘Are you trying to help me? Why? You’re from The Nest.’

‘Like your father said, nothing here is just one thing. When you steal something, do you not have it become part of you?’

‘So you’re a little bit wolf too?’

Mr. Magpie smiled, ‘You have not yet entered into the complexity that is your inheritance. I am a creature of black and white, or I was before I came here. Sime may look at this time and think that it is before, but I am not so sure that it isn’t the after.’

‘You seem scared. I never thought that anyone from The Nest would be scared.’

‘Why? You think of us as just one thing? We are many.’

‘Where is the joy in this Magpie? Where is the joy in this Water Element?’

‘All is not lost, is it, young Madrigal, if the birds can learn a different song?’

‘Cup your hands. I give you two handfuls forever after, and the water shall come from here.’

‘I don’t understand you and the Water Element.’

‘Do you need to?’

She cupped her hands, and there was a silver cup. And the oasis was gone.

Her journey began again.

Dogleg Hinterland 6

Heat haze led to heatgaze, that was what she was thinking. How far behind her Regrew felt now. You couldn’t back-track out of Cerebellum,the way the city fathers had designed it was so that all travellers were forced into going forward. Hindsight was not something they condoned — superstition had seeped into the architecture. This desert they called The Desert Of The Singing Sands, it was rumoured to give tongues to many wandering souls.

A man dressed in black and white appeared at the edge of her vision. He was wearing a top hat and fanning playing cards. He threw one at her and it felt like it bit into her like a blade. One for sorrow.

He sat there. Headdress made from the skin of a wolf. A ghost of a bonfire before him. He had a mouth-organ that he was blowing through; an old tune that she half remembered.

‘You?’

‘You recognise me? I was not sure my aspect would be the same.’

‘You look older, and there’s the wolf headdress.’

‘It’s who I’ve been running with of late, under the moonlight.’

‘You’re still alive?’

‘After a fashion. There are many gates into other worlds, and not all of them mean leaving the place. I exist in the hinterland; The Dogleg Hinterland.’

‘It’s the place of the wolf?’

‘For now. But there are Cuckoos abroad.’

‘The Nest?’

‘You know of The Nest already?’

‘Doesn’t everyone know of them?’

‘They didn’t used to know. Not when I walked in the skin of a man.’

‘Things change.’

‘Why no tears for me, Madrigal?’

‘The sorrow sits in me like a stone, father. How old do you think the grief is? You recognise me only because the magpie brought you here and told me it would be to speak to me. How does an emissary of The Nest summon someone from The Pack?’

‘You saw him — he manipulates the cards. They are shuffling everything.’

‘Are you Heatgaze, or are you here?’

‘I’m maybe a little of both. Things here were never one thing or the other, Madrigal. That is true of everything here; hinges in the meaning.’

‘Father, what is your name? I do not remember.’

‘I am Rondeau.’

‘Was there anything else you wished to say to me. You have been following me, as I walk, towards a spring. It is a spring in both senses: it is a source of water and it is coiled potential. Do you know of water that it can both flow around and it can pound it’s way through? It can split a stone. There is something you must learn here.’

‘I am just travelling home to get dream-spice for the trade I just made.’

‘That is one truth, Madrigal; another is that you are on a journey towards something and not just someplace.’

‘How do you know this? Are you dead and a wolf and my father and something else?’

‘You are starting to understand. The skin you wear is a signifier — a communication to those around you, and you can change it.’

‘I keep dreaming I am a wolf and wondering if I am a bird, but neither seems true.’

‘Madrigal, if you were ever taught that you are one thing or the other, if the binding lie of the binary stained your soul, then perhaps that is why I am here. This world woke into its superpositional state earlier than most.
‘The Whispergate Sentinel that first told the story of the worlds beyond the walls learned it when it stared into a mirror and punctured the surface.
‘Many of us learned it when the wings of the first emissaries of The Nest fluttered in our skies and stirred the clouds to storm, birthing The Whether Front …’

‘I am not sure you’re my father.’

‘I am what I need to be. The singer or the song being sung. How do you hear me? How do you see me? Look forward and see the water as it awakes.’

A spring in the desert. Here amidst the singing sands, suddenly she heard many voices. A vital mirror; a charm of magpies; the liquid throated wolves of mother moon; her own grief rising up from the heart of a shattered stone. She stood frozen. Her father next to her.

A golden eagle stood before her. It spread its arms in a gesture that said behold all of this. Nested tables. Matryoshka. Reality stacked within the hollow notion of reality.

‘Where do we lay our eggs, young Madrigal? In the fertile soil of young minds. We pollute the water of this place, and we are swallowed daily. This lone wolf, his pack — they are nothing to us. But you? You are something different. We are hungry for difference. We will meet you soon.’

The water spattered onto the thirsty sand, it splashed her and splashed through the ghostly form of her father. Where she had been awake, she suddenly crashed into the depths of sleep. An oasis sprang up around her. The world dreaming as her Heatgaze vision disappeared, and her father returned to the moon.

Dogleg Hinterland 5

A wolf runs beneath the moon. Pawprints filled with rain. Its snowy hide shining under the light of the skull above.

An eagle flies beneath the sun. The light makes it look as if it is dipped in the essence of stars.

You wonder if you are a wolf or bird. Are you perhaps neither? Sat here with a lizard, trafficking in the stuff of dreams, the question is, does it matter?

‘You look deep in thought, Madrigal.’

‘Sorry.’

‘One cannot help when one’s mind wanders, when the magnets that pull it exert such a strong force. Only with much practice have I managed to master Farsight. There are many things nearer that I find it much harder to look at.’

She smiled and she handed him the bag she had been worrying with. He smiled back at her, something she found a little disconcerting.

‘Where did you gather the ingredients for your dream-spice?’

‘In The Hushlands, from whence I hail.’

‘And there is plenty there?’

‘If you know where to look.’

He chuckled, ‘And I take it you do.’

‘I do.’

‘And you will bring me an endless amount of it in exchange for me giving you a way into the Mara-Mirror trade.’

Her poker face, such as it was, transitioned into her shocked face.

‘I have Farsight, and I have connections, and I know my business. Do not worry so, young girl. Just because I know all this, do not forget what I said earlier — that you are a rare breed these days. I need to trade with you.’

‘I take it you already have a fair price in mind.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then do we need to play through the pretense of bartering for this?’

‘You are so direct, young Madrigal. It almost takes the fun out of it. Do you not want to ask at least a little more for the danger of your travels?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Are not the wolf and the bird abroad?’

‘I do no think that the wolf is a threat to me.’

‘Ah, but The Nest may be, eh?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them.’

‘But the dreams, eh? You dream freely. Your tattoo is aflame.’

‘You know a lot about me and my kind.’

‘It is my business. Your father and I were friends; he told me much.’

‘So, what do you know of The Nest?’

‘Birds of a father flock to gather, as they say. Truth is a feather and honour is a mountain. Many things one hears about the birds. There are birds that sing and there are birds that repeat. There are birds that push people out of their nests.’

‘Do they trouble you here?’

‘Their shadows ink our byways and highways some days, but they have not yet found roost in these regions. We fear they may. It seems inevitable.
‘Look, feel the heft of this bag; this is the amount I will pay you for your regular supply. Once we are three deals deep I will tell you how the Mara-Mirror trade might be made.’

Madrigal felt like it might be rude to count the money there and then, and despite earlier misgivings, she was starting to trust this lizardkind. She had slept safely under his roof, and here he was giving her money in good faith, for she only had a sample on her.

‘How long until I see you again, business partner?’

‘This is enough for a few months at the price I was thinking. The price you knew I was thinking. It may take me that long to return home, but once I am there I can purchase a beast that will allow speedier travel. Is this something that would work?’

‘It surely would. I am receiving no dream-spice currently. Do you wish to stay another night, or do you wish to leave now?’

‘The first stage of our dealings is done. I see little sense in tarrying and indebting myself further by accepting your kind hospitality.’

‘As you will. One further hospitality I will gift you, however, is a full bag of rations to see you on your way.’

‘Thank you.’

They touched open palms, as was the custom here. Bartolph withdrew from the room, and one of his attendants came in and bowed before her, ushered her to the kitchen, where they prepared supplies for her and then set her on her way.

The first footstep outside the Inn Spire of Bartolph Regrew felt different.

Shatter

You don’t really learn how to shatter someone’s skull – they tell you all about it, they give you all the information on where to hit, and how to hit, but at the end of the day it is something you find out for yourself. Some things are so close up and personal that you have to get your hands dirty. He got his hands dirty.

He stood there looking at her laid naked on the bed, her eyes REM-sleep ticking through Meme Dreams, slightly frothing at the mouth, her ident-mask on the bedside table. She was supposed to help him forget what he had done; some people liked drugs to blot it out, and some people liked women.

She didn’t come anywhere near scratching the colossal itch that was shivering through him. He dressed and he stepped outside, chameleon fractal camera projectors booting up and reparsing the environment around him so that no one could see him. Well, unless they were digging with the kind of spades that the people he knew were going to be using – still, it would slow them down at least.

Barron, his commander, circled around the block where he was stood, in out of the rain and the refraction index issues caused immeasurable stutters in the chameleon suit he wore. He smoked a cigarette while he waited for the rain to ease.

All of them were intimate with the act of fist fighting – they had names to match; they were intimate with shattering someone’s skull. Barron had sent Donkeypunch in after him because the man had had success before; for the lack of subtlety in the method of his kill-strike he was harder to see approaching than a cat in hunting mode.

That thump, that fist, that punch – that thing which you had worked so long to perfect, you always knew that some day you would end up on the end of a similarly fashioned blunt weapon.

‘Jerome,’ whispered the man, as his knuckles connected with the back of Jerome’s head.

Jerome thought of the girl again, and he wished he were sinking into the Meme Dream. But his sleep would be so much deeper than that.

Would For The Trees

He looked at the bonsai that he had been growing and pruning into shape. The picture on the wall matched it exactly. It had been a long project. Here he had crafted his first time machine – through the fractal line, down through the rings of age he would travel, deep into the heartwood.

He had heard that many trees had been falling in The Woulds. Many of his contemporaries had taken their Leave, and were in The Wind. They had dug in hard, long ago, and found the underpinning undercurrent of ideational actuation that drove the super-positional data drive that reality was constructed from, and their metaphorical machines represented complex engines running off the deepest substrate of existence.

It was a lost art – the pruning of these vehicles into something usable, and Hent had been studying for a very long time, and he was now the sole expert left. Why had it taken him so long? Why was no one else interested?

They said it began with the Turn Of The Leaf, that that presaged The Fall, and then the rot set in. People were so apathetic, and the world was literally falling down around them.

He stuck his hands into the dirt, and he grabbed the roots of that little tree, all the time holding the image of the larger tree in his mind – The Yggdrasil. It was said that one saw the Hesperidean Apples falling like golden suns before one, when one had snagged a branchline and was being pulled into the subtext. A moment – an endless moment – he was a still center beneath a tree … apples falling … cherry blossom falling … small children scrumping for gold falling.

And he was falling, out through the boundaries of the room, his body and the small tree folding out through a bright point of light, a tear in the fabric of spacetime, through the twisting throat of a tesseract stint, into the smooth tube of a wormhole, and wham, out through one of the ancient Singularity Gates, and there you are – escaped into something other, something larger.

Hent stands and he looks around him, and he sees no Woulds. He sees dun brown of all the dones, no longer dunderheads … they got here: here to the promised landing zone. Refugees from a Reality Collapse. Hent grabbed something from his pocket – he walked out past the boundaries of the settlement – a long walk (a good sign), and he did as tradition demanded: he scattered the handful of seeds he had brought with him.

Defect

He was an on-target Communist who regularly hit the Marx. Sat there, stroking his prodigious beard with his tattooed hand, he wondered about all those visits to Lenin that he had made. So long ago. Now he drank vodka in a bar in St Petersburg, Florida, and pondered how little return he had got on the investment of defection.

Vladimir was smoking cheap Russian smokes and watching the bar’s regulars mill around, turning circles through the dullness of their daily routines, until the momentum petered out and they pitched forward into their pitchers of beer.

He didn’t work now – he had invested well, and he had an amazing amount of resources. He had been a heavy in Mother Russia, and he had used his tendency towards mercy to garnish his pay quite handsomely – let someone off, take a little bit of information, and go and invest based on it. If it worked out badly and the information was bad, you could always locate creatures of habit easily, and you could break a few bones until they either paid up or remembered how to be useful some other way.

People came to ask him questions – students mostly. He was a swarthy good-looking fifty, and he bedded some of the sultry language students looking for a bit of danger. It was not how his life was supposed to turn out. He had been a straight up gangster since he got kicked out of school, and he had been building something of an empire. That period when the underworld was suddenly flooded by ex-KGB was hard though, and he had pissed a fair few of them off. He had to leave – given the death threats and the injuries he received, it did not take much to convince his liaison that he needed asylum.

It was cold outside, but it was bright, he walked down past the art museum to the park, where they sometimes showed movies, and he sat under one of the trees, looking up at the fairy lights, thinking about all he had lost; thinking about how long he had mourned those losses. It was time to go home, time to walk through the town, get on the bus, and make his way back to that little room. He never escaped his Russianness – it was the first thing anyone here noticed about him. He was proud, but it made him sad. Sat on the bus, he fell asleep, as he always did, and he dreamt of walking across the permafrost, seeing the twinkling ice crystals in the air before him – he woke up remembering how warm he always felt in Russia; he thought about how cold he felt in Florida. He laughed – life was a joke most people didn’t get. How often he was one of those.

Brown Out 002: Ecru

And then Tommy grew up.

That event, which had helped him to coast through adolescence without event, to navigate his twenties without hiccup, came back to haunt him.

Even in a world such as the one that they lived in accidents occured. One happened to his parents: they were killed in a car accident. He would deal with it.

The powers that be had begun to notice that a lot of people were becoming immune to taupe: the works didn’t work anymore. But the government had been unwise with its spending of late – throwing it at problems that couldn’t be solved by money; not that they could be told such problems existed. The result was, that when there was a shift over to ecru, a stronger treatment for society’s ills, there were not enough resources to monitor and enforce the taking of the drug. Some people fell through the cracks. Tommy fell through the cracks.

After the supply of taupe ran out Tommy became distracted. He did not go to pick up his supply of ecru. He did not care about ecru. He remembered his sister. He had not been home for a while so he had not seen her. Relatives were taking care of her.

When he walked through the door to her room she did not move. When he sat down next to her she did not react. When he kissed her cheek, something he had never done, she did not even notice. How, he wondered had he ever thought this was normal? How many people out there were starting to wake up?

His relatives, with their cold empty faces, came into the room and told him that his sister was fine, though he could see she wasn’t. They told him that it might be best to leave her be. He whispered in her ear that he was called Thomas now, and that he would be back for her.

He left the room and he left his relatives, refusing their offer of some ecru. They thought this strange, though they didn’t say anything, not wanting to draw attention to something so obviously odd.

He pulled his car over to the side of the road. Cars zoomed by with shocked faces in the windows staring at him. What could someone possibly be doing stopping by the side of the road?

Thomas was in a place he was ill-equipped to cope with. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He had to rescue his sister, but where could he take her? What could he do with her? Wasn’t she happy just sat, pumped full of ecru? Goddamnit, the world had seemed so simple, why had the works stopped working?

No one answered him. The only answer he had ever needed was taupe, but now the world was full of colours, and he was cut adrift.

Brown Out 001. Taupe

Mum took the plastic comb and straightened dad’s hair until it looked symmetrical on both sides of his head. A timid smile broke and faded like sunrise and sunset cheek by jowl as mother gave him a reproachful look. Too much emotion was not good for the digestion. They had a nice plate of beige in front of them.

The works were on the table. Tommy had been told that they were called works because they made people work. Before they ate they took the works and they helped to shoot each other full of taupe. Tommy used to smile but he was a good boy and was learning that it was not the done thing.

Jessy, his sister still had outbursts. She was resistant. Much longer and she would be taken off to the re-psych-link plant. She upset them. No one likes to be upset. Tommy had been a quiet baby. They had loved Tommy.

After they had eaten their taupe: each bit of it, they were allowed to leave the table. Jessy was playing up again and Mum was at the end of her tether.

It had been coming for a long time and Tommy wasn’t surprised when it happened. He had never seen his father move so fast. He had still – strange to find himself thinking this – expected his mother to stop his father. But no, his dad kicked Jessy hard in the stomach and, as she lay screaming on the floor, he told mum to fetch the works.

‘We’re gonna make her work if it kills her,’ he said in a scary voice Tommy had never heard before.

Tommy had never seen someone be injected with so much taupe. Surely it would kill her. But no, she just quietened down.

Tommy would always remember this day in the times to come. The day his sister was cured. She never spoke again. She was easy to live with. She always ate her beige and happily subjected herself to the taupe injections. Life was, well, life.

Grit: Takeaway

Grit was pissed – pissed as much about the need for him to be pissed as about the thing which got him there. Fucking people – the bastards always let you down. Whenever someone else let him down he actually felt more let down by himself – annoyed that he hadn’t seen how something was going to play out; fed up that he had not judged someone’s character right.
When you’re running different scams and you bring someone in to help out in the management of one of them you should be straight up and lay it out there who it is that a person is getting into bed with. Now he finds out, when he’s neck deep in the shit, that he’s dealing with the Triad and that his ex-partner, whose body is now scattered across numerous takeaway dinners, has left him with a debt that he can’t afford to pay.
Barney was a numb nuts and had saddled him with someone who seemed to have read the handbook on stereotypical inscrutable oriental gangster. Cho was still knee high to a grass-hopper but it was rumoured he had the legendary death-touch at his command and plenty of people could testify to the one inch punch. Cho was a name that, when it was dropped, stopped someone dead in their tracks. No one knew the real meaning but in the thesaurus of hard bastards it had pretty much come to stand for insanely dangerous motherfucker.
Grit was perturbed – what was it with him lately? Cursed? That didn’t even begin to touch it – if he’d opened a pyramid and stuck his cock in the Pharoah’s  favourite he couldn’t have been more cursed.
As soon as he saw that little bastard’s tattoos he knew he’d trod in the biggest pile of shit he’d ever been near in his life. He didn’t ever do too well in circles where sense of honour was a factor – business was the be all and end all for him and he knew that didn’t cut it with some people.
What he would normally do was to just off the problem, but that wasn’t an option here. So, how to take out a problem without appearing to be the one who is taking out the problem? It was a tried and tested method – he found someone else to do the job, and who better than another Triad?
He started to seed rumours that Cho was weakening and ripe for the picking, and then he also started to push rumours that he had been bad mouthing his contemporaries: a perfect recipe for causing anger at the man.
Some might think it was cowardice to operate in this way, but Grit thought it was smart to be an invisible component in this whole machine. He saw a low fire burning in the network of Triad gangs, so he put some tit for tat killings on the fire as fuel.
Weeks of low level fighting began to build, began to take on form. Grit knew what was coming next – the slow burning fuse had to eventually reach the charges and Cho’s world went up in flames.

Grit: Complications

‘Complications.’
‘Huh?’
‘You heard me. I know you did.’
‘Everything’s a complication.’
‘Grit, why do you have to be such a wiseacre all the fuckin’ time? It get’s boring, you know?’
‘No, I don’t. Keeps me amused; and as far as I’m concerned that’s the most important thing. So what’s the news? What has you wetting your draws?’
‘We were given bad info.’
‘And, what have we done?’
‘Killed someone on the wrong day.’
‘Early or late?’
‘Early. They didn’t get to sign something they needed to.’
‘And the repurcussions are?’
‘A contract on our heads.’
‘Fuck me; I knew this was amateur night the moment I stepped through the door and saw you were on the crew.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means, Colin, you dumb fuck, that I wouldn’t trust you adding one and one together.’
‘Fuck you, Grit.’
‘No, fuck you, you fucking liability.’
The gun was in hand and discharged the second the sentence had ended. Shit, he thought – might have paid to find out exactly who’s been sicced on us. Still, that wouldn’t be that complicated.
He picked up the phone and called his present employer.
‘Fred?’
‘Is that you, Grit, you cunt?’
‘Yes, Fred, it’s me – what is this bullshit? We carried out the job as per instructions and now we’re dodging bullets ourselves?’
‘You did it early.’
‘I was told a time and I did what I was asked to when I was asked to do it. Colin fucked up his part of it and he’s dead.’
‘You killed him?’
‘Yes, does that concern you?’
‘Course it doesn’t – I paid to have both of you put down.’
‘OK, look, if I take out the other person responsible for the fuck up are we square?’
‘Yeah, we’re square, but that doesn’t mean the guy who’s out to kill you is gonna stop.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I wired him the money up front and he maintains radio silence up until he has a confirmed kill.’
‘If I put a bullet between his eyes is that going to be a problem?’
‘He’s just a hired hand, so no – not really.’
‘Can you give me a name?’
‘They call him Stack.’
‘OK, well you know who the other fucker I’m after is – don’t you? Bennett – the intel man.’
‘Grit, do you have to? He’s useful a lot of the time.’
‘Sorry, Fred, he has a debt to settle. Is this something you can live with?’
‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’
‘No, you don’t. I mean, I want to be cool with you, but this has to go down a certain way.’
‘OK. I’m sure we’ll speak soon, Grit, when you’ve done what you need to.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said and hung up.
Bennett was a cinch to find – well, at certain points in the day he was a cinch to find because he was trying to make some money by selling the information he had come by. When he went to ground to dig up intel he was the hardest fucker on earth to find. Grit knew his window of opportunity and he took it.
Bennett was a brown-nose, especially when he thought you wanted to buy what he had to sell, so getting him to go outside was the easiest thing ever. When Grit pulled the gun on him he wasn’t necessarily surprised; he wasn’t pleased but he wasn’t surprised. He must have known that the info he had provided last time had somehow got fucked up – usually it didn’t come to this, but if it was going to end the promise of it ending this way had always been there.
When they found him the police pretty much instantly gave up on any chance of finding the perpetrator of the crime – grasses and intel men were never short of enemies and they had better things to do than waste their time tracking down who it was that had finally grown tired and offed the bastard.
Grit wasn’t keeping a low profile at all, and if the person hunting him had any smarts at all he might have wondered at that; might have wondered at the perverse lengths Grit seemed to be going to to draw attention to himself. Stack seemed to miss the clues though – hadn’t spotted that he was walking into a bloody great trap.
The room was dark and Stack thought he was sneaking in – that was outfoxing someone.
‘How,’ said Grit ‘Did a dumb fuck like you ever get such a good reputation?’
‘Um.’
Um was not an answer that was going to impress Grit – his gun had a much more to the point remark to make. Stack died with a look of surprise on his face – for Grit that pretty much said it all.