Previously: Steven Chance and his new ally, Faith, brought together by the copper-coloured rings they both wear, have entered the realm of the men of property, the ruling class in the hidden city of Empire Street. Having crossed the floor of the Vanity Fair, by good fortune Steven's friend Rebekah has given them an introduction to her employer, Lord Harlequin…
Part Five
The Hill of Lucre
Lord Harlequin occupied a suite a dozen floors higher up the building. You couldn't describe the accommodation of the man of property as an office, resembling as it did sculpted ornamental paths and terraces set a dappled meadow, a stream running through it splashing playfully in ornamental pools, and diminutive trees providing shelter from the artificial sun in the ceiling.
Bekah's card had gained them access to the ninth Celestial Gate: a private elevator with no buttons. A Constable had taken the card and placed it in a slot that read the bar code, and the elevator had brought them here and nowhere else.
They were met by guards in black and red tunics, taken to a terracotta patio on the edge of Lord Harlequin's miniature forest and placed at a rustic table.
The wall beside them, the outer wall of the building, was tinted glass from floor to ceiling and, Steven suspected, probably bullet-proof. He looked out into empty space. Two hundred metres away, judged by Steven's aerialist's eye, was another wall of dark glass and steel. An identical skyscraper. By pressing his face to the window, he could see further towers to left and right, trapping an enclosed plaza in a well of dim light.
Somewhere above, way, way up, even from this exalted height, was the Vault of Heaven.
Steven twisted, trying to see far enough up for a glimpse of this ultimate destination, but couldn't get the line of sight.
Between him and the heights there hung bizarre anachronistic structures of rope and bamboo, of iron and lacquered bronze and jade: a medieval fortress wrapped around the upper floors of the skyscrapers like a mutant parasite.
Many white flags fluttered from rusted iron ramparts, marked with a Chinese pictogram in stark black:
黑太阳
In English it meant "the black sun". It was the sign of a Tong. Steven shuddered and abandoned his attempt to see the Vault of Heaven.
There was a discreet cough and both of them turned to see a golden-skinned woman in a scarlet cheongsam decorated with lilies.
Behind her, a small procession was approaching along the woodland path: a smooth-faced black man in an expensive Western business suit was surrounded by three Chinese in traditional pao and two Europeans, one of them a woman. One of the Chinese was speaking quickly and quietly into a mobile telephone; another was waving a hand-held screen.
When she saw that they had acknowledged her, the oriental woman approached, smoothing down her dress.
"Lady Faith, Master Steven, yes?"
"Faith'll do."
"Hello there."
"You may call me Athena. I am Lord Harlequin's appointed legal representative."
The black man and his entourage had by now also arrived. He sat himself at the head of the table at the far end from Faith, and his associates positioned themselves around him. Very much the king and his court, thought Steven and then his jaw dropped. Of course, this was Lord Harlequin.
The woman, Athena, was speaking again.
"I am here today to ask why Lord Harlequin should want to meet you."
"Can't he talk for himself—" Faith protested.
"I," interrupted Steven hastily, "am looking for work. I'm the best flyer there is. I've done the odd job for His Worship before. I was wondering whether he had anything on. I'd like something a bit more permanent if it's on offer, but frankly, lady, I'll take whatever he's got."
"And your… companion?"
"I'm his air stewardess, ain't I," said Faith sarcastically. "I serve the nuts."
There was an awkward pause and then Lord Harlequin barked out a deep, rich laugh.
Athena cocked her head slightly towards him before saying, almost to herself: "Employment for one, sir?"
Still chuckling, the Lord put his head on one side to consider for a moment.
"The Argentine Project?" he suggested.
Athena turned her impassive gaze back to Steven,
"Would you be willing to travel abroad? To Latin America, perhaps?"
"I'm a flyer, lady… uh, my Lord… I'm always travelling."
"And what is your risk threshold? Do you have an aversion to what might be described as difficulties?"
This was starting to sound like the interview he'd faced in Downfall, and he was getting used to the answers.
"So long as the rewards are worth the risks."
"A good answer," tossed in Lord Harlequin. Athena's mouth twitched as though tasting something which didn't please her.
"What is the job?"
"Transportation."
"People or cargo?"
"Some personnel. Mostly cargo."
"Of what kind?"
"Technology. Small, portable, not in large volume. Mostly high tech."
"Do you mean foreign?"
"Foreign?"
"I don't mean 'Argentinian'."
She replied with a tittering laugh. Eyes turned on him. The silence seemed heavy. Awkward.
Steven was grateful when the silence was broken by a "Yeah?" from Faith.
Athena composed herself. "I'm sorry, my Lord. But you know what they are implying."
"They're embarrassing themselves," said Lord Harlequin, his voice low and deadly.
"Oh right," Faith was getting the bit between her teeth now, "so this is high tech kit developed in, where? Ipswich?"
"Silicon Valley," his Lordship replied flatly.
"Is that Silicon Valley, Earth or—"
"Enough! The provenance is immaterial. Do you want the job?"
"If you're offering," said Steven at once, cutting off whatever Faith might have been about to reply.
Athena wasn't done: "Are you available for work immediately?"
"Almost immediately. There's a matter that I need to take care of first."
"What matter?"
"I was, ah, hoping to prevail on his Lordship's good offices. Maybe call it an advance, if you like, on those rewards you mentioned. Perhaps."
"His Lordship is not accustomed to—"
"I pay by results, flyer. You can't deliver; I can find plenty of men who'll…"
Before he finished, Lord Harlequin was interrupted by the arrival of another of the red-and-black clad guards, a woman this one. She hovered at the fringe of the group until his lordship beckoned her forward whereupon she bowed from the waist and hurried up to him. They conducted a rushed whispered conversation. At the end, Lord Harlequin stood up.
"We'll be leaving immediately," he announced. "A local difficulty has arisen. We'll be taking my helicopter."
"What's going on, Harley?" snapped Faith. He looked at her with bald astonishment.
"A riot. Apparently. Coming up from the depths. Do you know anything about this?"
"No, no, nothing," Steven was again quickest to answer.
"Hmm." Lord Harlequin, it seemed, was not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. "This may have occasioned some… conflict between security forces. Fighting, even. Lord Peterloo, perhaps. Possibly Lord Jamestown, who is my friend. There has been some… rivalry."
"The Peterloo boys for certain were busting for a barny," said Faith. Harlequin again regarded her demotic with contempt.
"Are we coming with you?" Steven wanted to know.
"No," the Lord said deciding instantly.
"Then what are we supposed to do?"
"Stay or go," he said dismissing them. "It is all the same to—"
An explosion shattered the moment!
All eyes went to the picture window. It was cracked, a huge crack like a giant five-legged spider, from a smouldering crater in its centre. As they watched a ball of something like grey putty struck the window close to the crater, struck it and stuck. For a moment it hung there and then it suddenly glowed and—
A second explosion!
And this time the window shattered inwards, huge blades of glass breaking across the table and terrace. Everyone dived for cover.
In the space outside, ropes bound with fawn suede to match the colours of the tinted windows where now visible hanging down the building, and there were men out there, dressed in matching soft beige camouflage. Two, nearest the window, struck out with long poles to clear shards of glass from the edges of the hole they'd opened while many others came swarming down the ropes over them and in through the gap.
Ninjas! Steven thought.
There came a staccato coughing from a machine pistol. Steven assumed, obviously, it was one of the guards, but no, the ones who were still standing were rushing Lord Harlequin away into the scant cover of the little trees. The gunman was Athena, from behind the cover of the table.
She managed to bring down two of the invaders, then a third. A fourth, she caught still on the descending rope, and he toppled away into the drop below, stoically refusing to scream for a fearfully long time.
But then a spinning shuriken struck her in the shoulder. The spray of bullets shot wildly over their heads before snapping off as she was somersaulted backwards. Steven had no idea if she was wounded or… worse.
Rather stupidly, he realised that he and Faith were still sitting at the table. A part of him wanted to protest that this had all happened too quickly.
Then there were ninjas pinning him down, pinning Faith down too.
Then a sweetly smelling rag.
And then darkness.
Dāizhàng Fortress 1
It was still dark when Steven awoke. Not night dark; pitch black, the black of dungeons and villains' hearts.
He was hungry. His body ached. He felt filthy. And he had an uncomfortable need for the toilet.
He tried moving and found himself dragging at a weight attached to his left wrist. Someone groaned. Surprisingly, it wasn't him.
He was handcuffed to someone, Faith he guessed. She, if it was her, remained slumped on the ground. The ground, now he thought about it, was cold and rough. Like stone maybe. There was a sense of space around him, as though he was in a big empty room. He tried shuffling a little to see if he could find a wall, but had no luck.
The air was cold. Cold and thin. High up, then. And not air-conditioned. There were sounds. Sighs and pops of the room around them, the building as it shifted and resettled itself. And, distant and muffled, shouting and maybe metal hitting metal. After a while, a scream.
His fellow prisoner was shocked awake. It was indeed Faith, and she swore quite colourfully.
"Good morning to you too," said Steven wryly, though his mouth was too dry to do sarcasm proper justice.
"Oh. Yeah. Hi," she said.
Abruptly a spotlight snapped on. After the darkness it was quite intensely painful for a moment, and they couldn't look. The figure in the spotlight was, at first, no more than a shadow, like a blackened twig.
Purple stars exploded across his sight. Blinking them back, Steven squinted into the column of light. The sticklike shape stalked towards them with a strange gait, like a puppet. No more than two metres away it stopped and appraised them.
The dou, or chest-piece, and sode, huge shoulder-pieces, of a traditional Japanese samurai armour, made from individual silvered iron scales, laced together with silk and lacquered to form armoured strips, and the skirt-like haidate, thigh guards, made of smaller scales stitched onto cloth and linked with chainmail. Iron gauntlets encased the arms to above the elbows and the legs too were sheathed in metal plates around the shins. On the feet were curious two-toed metal shoes.
The head… the head was a mask, a huge silver crescent moon, with a face at the widest part, eyebrows arched, eyes wide, the mouth open, lips parted in an expression of shock or surprise.
There was something insect-like, something mechanical about the way it moved, abrupt tiny twitches. Behind the open mouth, only the grill of a loudspeaker or vocoder was visible, but the staring eyes, flicking wildly in all directions, were human.
"You were," startlingly, the thing spoke, "given. A thing. Surrender it now."
"Piss off," said Faith.
It cocked its moon-shaped head, then scuttled crabwise in a circle around them so that it faced her instead of Steven. He twisted to try and keep it in sight. It bent sharply at the waist, its huge head suddenly very close to hers. A gauntleted hand snapped out and, with incredible delicacy, gripped her chin and gently tipped her head up to stare into its face, although its eyes continued to dart madly every which way.
"Surrender it now."
"Mister Moon…" a rich warm-toned voice filled the cold room, languid, even bored.
The great metal head snapped ninety degrees to the left.
"Mister," it grated, "Sun."
A second spotlight flooded on. Another metal figure stood taking its ease, armoured like the first, but golden where Mister Moon was silver, portly where Moon was lean, and his masked head was an enormous saffron sunburst, a beaming benign visage at the centre of a radiating field of sinuous sunbeams.
He came towards them, gracefully, almost dancing across the floor. But somehow with the same inhuman mechanism that Moon had displayed.
"Children," he said beneficently, reaching out to lay a hand on Steven's head. He grasped Steven's skull in his golden grip, painfully, and hauled him to his feet. Faith scrabbled to get up with him or have her arm wrenched by the handcuffs.
Moon straightened himself as abruptly as he had bent.
"Children," repeated the kindly voice of Mr Sun. "You will give us what we want."
"Surrender now," interjected Moon, as though agreeing the point.
"Because we are going to torture you. And the sooner you tell us, the sooner we may stop."
"Last chance," said Moon.
"Oh no, Mister Moon," said Mister Sun. "No, I think we will now torture them anyway. Just for a while. And then maybe we will ask them again."
"Last chance," repeated Moon.
"He's so fixated," sighed Sun, "whereas I…" he lifted Steven further, dragging his feet off the stone floor. He placed his other metal hand on Steven's chest just above his heart. There was an electrical discharge. "Whereas I… enjoy my work," he concluded. As Steven began to scream.
Dāizhàng Fortress 2
When he came to again, he had nothing but memories of pain. Mr Sun had held him, and passed electrical current through him. Just that. Over and over. Sometimes he would pause between shocks, sometimes for minutes, and Steven could do nothing but listen to the snicking sounds and the whimpering that came from whatever Mr Moon was doing to Faith. Surgically and precisely and unemotionally. And then Mr Sun would shock him again. And again.
His mouth was full of the taste of blood from where he had bitten his tongue over and over. His feet and toes were battered and bruised from where, spasming, he had uselessly kicked them against the stone floor, or Mr Sun's metal legs. There was a burn mark on his chest and presumably another one on his scalp, but other than that Mr Sun had not seemed interested in physically damaging him. Fingernails, teeth, eyes, other bits, all still attached. At some point, he realised, his clothes must have been cut away. Which was probably a good thing because he recalled pretty quickly losing control of his bowels. That shamed him.
Faith, from what he could tell, was in a similar condition, if not worse. Where Mr Sun had used electricity, Mr Moon appeared to prefer knife work.
There was a man approaching them.
He wore a loose white business suit and moccasins and, about his face, a skin-tight black leather mask. As soon as he approached, Sun and Moon went down on their knees and then onto their bellies, kowtowing to him. He ignored them.
"I am called Jin Yin Chi," he said, "but you, of course, will not have heard of me by that name, so understand that I am First Dragon of the Tong, an important figure and I assure you not a patient one. I have contracted to supply certain items. You have those items. These incompetents have so far failed to obtain them from you. I will not. Therefore, will you please give me what was given to you?"
Steven tried to say yes, certainly yes, but before he could make his blood-caked mouth work Faith spat out:
"Over my bloody dead body!"
"Agreed," said the man called Jin Yin Chi simply.
And he shot her dead.
"Take it take it!" Steven managed to gurgle, thrusting his hand with the copper ring towards the Tong lord.
"Moon," directed Wu Chi.
Mr Moon unfolded from his bow, coming to his feet like a clockwork automaton. He crossed to Steven and gripped the ring between the metal fingers of his gauntlet. And pulled. The ring bit tightly into Steven's flesh, seeming to shrink and grip tighter still, the skin bunching about the knuckle above it.
"Stop wasting time," Chi snapped.
An instant before it happened, Steven guessed what was about to occur. He tried to pull his hand from Moon's grip. There was a metallic "chunk" as the fingers of Moon's gauntlet shifted from vice to secateurs and…
"No! Please! Wait!"
Snick.
He fell backwards in blood and pain.
Moon handed the ring – and Steven's finger – to Jin Yin Chi, who nodded, turned, and left.
Dāizhàng Fortress 3
Darkness ended in light. An explosion ripped through the wall of the room, spilling sunlight and wooden splinters everywhere. The room, it turned out, was large, but not as vast as it had become in Steven's imagination.
Soldiers in blue berets began jumping through the gap in the wall. There was a buzzing drone in the air and a helicopter gunship was glimpsed briefly as it flashed past the gap. From the sounds there were more of them out there.
The daylight caught Moon and Sun lifeless, slumped pose, like rag dolls dropped after the game was over. At the intrusion, they instantly sprang to life, running towards the gap, but one of the first of the soldiers dropped to one knee pointing a funnel-like weapon and some kind of compression blast slammed them backwards across the room, smashing them into the far wall. They fell like broken tinker-toys, samurai carapaces cracked and clockwork spilling from their exposed guts.
More soldiers entered, securing the room, kicking open doors, throwing grenades of stun gas, shouting orders. Someone called for a medic, and after a while Steven was mildly surprised when a young field surgeon appeared at his side, examining him and binding up his hand. Meanwhile the chaos of the invasion seemed to pass beyond, penetrating further into the Tong fortress.
A figure who seemed like he should be familiar strolled into Steven's field of view. A young captain. English. Ah…
"Mister… Jones… wasn't it?"
"Mister Chance, a pleasure to see you again. I'm relieved to see you're all in one piece… oh, sorry."
Steven winced but managed to squeeze out: "Forget about it."
"Well, I think the least we can do is another clean suit for you."
"Yay!" said Steven weakly.
"Look, I'm sorry I have to ask: who is, ah, was, ah who's the girl? Do you know?"
A soldier with bolt cutters was separating the handcuffs. Steven looked sorrowfully at what was left of his companion. In life she'd never looked this vulnerable.
"Faith…" he said at last, "she was called Faith. We… worked in… a similar line."
"Right. I'm sorry. I'll make some inquiries."
"Is this…" he gestured vaguely with his uninjured hand, "all a coincidence?"
"Not entirely. There's a riot going on down there. All hell broken loose in the lower levels. Though I don't suppose you know anything about that."
"Oh give me a break, man."
"Yes. Yes of course. Sorry. Well we've been planning this raid for ages. But when the Tong took advantage of the chaos, we just followed their lead."
"Nice. Lucky me."
"Look, this isn't the time. We'll get you cleaned up, dressed. Maybe then you won't mind answering a couple of questions."
"Like I know anything."
"It won't be an interrogation. Here, let Corporal Gilbert look after you. I'd better go see how the fight's going."
Richard Flowers
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