Camera Obscura Read online

  He had packed food for the journey, his crossbow and his spear and his knife, and plenty of water, and he took his camel. The caravan of migrating families moved slowly; he knew he could easily catch up with it, sooner or later. He could read the maps of the desert, and had travelled this road, back and forth, ever since he was born and even before, as an embryo in his mother's womb.

  But he had never seen the giants' bones.

  He saw the small bones of many other creatures on his way. To die in this part of the desert meant to remain forever in the spot where the sun had finally caught you. There were skeletal camels and skeletal cows and, once, a grinning human skull on top of a pile of stones. Where his people passed they had assembled these places, mounds of stones that lay all across the desert, and when they passed them they left small presents there for the spirits of the place – offerings of food and drink, blue ribbons of cloth tied to twigs jutting from the stones – and sometimes their dead.

  The boy found the place two days after having set off. The story his grandfather had told him was true. It was the silent graveyard of giants.

  For a long time he walked amidst the bones, marvelling at how impossible they were. Enormous creatures, with skulls the size of boulders, with ribcages as large as houses. He had been warned by his grandfather that the place was sacred: he must take nothing he might find.

  And the boy was happy to merely look – until he saw the flash of green light in the sands…

  Some time in the distant past, he saw, the ground here had been disturbed. A small crater lay further away from the giants' bones, and the sand had fused into a sort of greenish glass. He walked over to it, for it was not the glass he had seen.

  Something was buried in the sand, in the centre of the crater. Something that flashed a beautiful jade green.

  "Those who tell the story of the Emerald Buddha tell it differently," Master Long said. "It is said it was made in India, many centuries ago, and had since travelled widely across the civilised world – around Asia, I should say – always claimed, never resting. From India to Ceylon, and from there to Burma, and from Burma to Luang Prabang, and to Siam… The king of Siam lays a claim to it, and so do half a dozen other emperors and kings, from the Forbidden City to Angkor Wat. It is a statue of jade in the shape of a royal lizard – and here lies its mystery, and the wrong at the centre of the tale. For how could an Indian artificer, however talented, fashion a statue in the shape of beings not seen in the world at that time?"

  She tried to imagine it, and fear took hold of her. The lizards had changed the world when they were awakened by Vespucci all those years ago. They had claimed the British Isles for their own, and set about conquering the known world, assembling to themselves colonies and protectorates as if they were blocks in a child's game. How long had they lain dormant on Caliban's Island before being awakened? And where had they come from?

  From space, if the stories were true…

  "Stories," Master Long said, "are true for what they tell us about ourselves more than for their own internal truth." He smiled, though it seemed to her there was mostly sadness in the expression. "Let me tell you about the boy…"

  • • • •

  What it was he didn't know. And yet it seemed to speak to him, a babble of voices rising in his mind, saying unfathomable things.

  Testing language modules… initiating geo-spatial surveillance… mind scan initiated… complete… audio-visual reconstruction activated… longrange scan returning negative… help us, boy! We are in the sand.

  Something hidden, something talking to him, confusing his thoughts. The camel watched him for a while without much interest, then wandered off in search of shade. The boy tried to dig into the sand but it was hard as glass. He tried to smash it but it was strong. And all the while the voices spoke, an insane babble of them, promising him untold riches and eternal life…

  "The boy was young then, and had dreams of glory," Master Long said. "Of riches beyond compare, and dusky maidens, of conquest and victory and admiration and glory… but I suspect that, even without it, he would have liberated the statue. For nothing but curiosity, Milady. It is what makes us human, in the final count. More than love, more than hate, more than dreams of immortality or glory – it is curiosity that–"

  "Killed the cat?"

  "What?" He looked at her, then shrugged. "Quite."

  The boy's hands were bloodied, the nails torn, the knuckles bruised. Still he worked. With knife and spear until they broke, and then he used rocks, smashing them against the ground again and again, unheeding of the need for food or drink or shelter.

  The voices spoke their insane babble: Biological life form unrecognised. Checksum negative. Biological energy levels low. Initiating molecular restructuring. Feasibility study incomplete. What is this place?

  The sun burned him. The camel was nowhere to be seen. Time held no meaning to him.

  Only the thing in the ground.

  At last, he managed to dig a small hole. Underneath, the sand was soft and he cleared it away and pulled out his prize.

  A green monster of a lizard stared back at him.

  "It was not yet jade, you see," Master Long said. "That came later, and the eyes. What the boy saw was a lizard, yes, but it was slimmer then, without the camouflage of human workmanship. It was an alien thing, something he did not – could not – understand. It was made by tools and beings unknown and, I think, perhaps unknowable. It was made of a strange green metal–"

  She thought of the green metal the lizards had brought with them from Caliban's Island. Master Long nodded, as if reading her mind.

  "Was it some tool of the lizards, unknowingly discarded? Had it come with them from their home and fallen down to Earth? It is possible. Other things have materialised that should not have been. It is said the Bookman himself was once a creature of the lizards… has been said, and very quietly, at that, these past three years."

  "There had not been a Bookman assassination in all this time," Milady said. Master Long nodded. "Three years since the Bookman was last heard of. Three years since the revolution on the British Isles. A lot can happen in three years, Milady de Winter."

  And she thought – the grey manifestations had began less than three years ago – began, perhaps, just after the time of the upheavals…

  The boy held the statue in his arms, cradling it as he would a baby. When he went looking for his camel he did not find it, though the skeleton of a camel lay nearby. He could not remember when he had last eaten or drank, but the voices spoke to him and comforted him and offered him nourishment.

  He held the statue and began to walk across the desert, searching for the caravan of his family and his friends.

  "But he never found them," Master Long said, and there was infinite sadness in his voice when he spoke. "Time had passed differently in that place of old bones in the desert, and when the boy returned to the world, the world had irrevocably changed.

  "He never saw his family again."

  THIRTY-THREE

  Lord of Light

  The silence lay between them, as heavy as a gun. She said, "How long ago…?"

  He said, "It is only a story. It happened long ago, in another time and place."

  "I hardly knew my parents," she said, not knowing where the words came from. "I came on the ship. My father died in the war–"

  "Which war?"

  She shrugged, a helpless gesture. "It was not an important one. It did not justify having its own name."

  "Most wars are forgotten," he said. "And most of the dead."

  She said, "My mother was with me on the ship… I remember the waves crashing against the hull. I remember being very sick. She was with me… Then, one day, she wasn't there. And then we arrived in this new continent, this new alien world, where people had pale skins and spoke an alien tongue. And I was alone."

  "But you survived."

  She said, "I had to."

  Master Long stirred. She had not realised how still he wa
s – as still as an automaton, she thought. He said, "And now you work for them."

  "For the machines," she said. He looked at her for a long time. "The world may have been a very different place," he said at last, "without the presence of either lizards or thinking machines… Whether it would have been better or worse, though, I cannot say."

  She let it pass. She said, "What happened to the boy? From your story?"

  He smiled, though there was sadness in it. "Centuries later," Master Long said, "the boy's people conquered Chung Kuo, the land of the Han. Then they fell back into their old ways. They still roam the desert, still raise camels and cows."

  "And the boy?"

  "It is said," Master Long said, and smiled, and his single eye glittered, "that he journeyed for many years, beyond a mortal's life, and found at last an isolated place in the high mountains and stayed there. And though he grew up he never grew old, and he communed with the Emerald Buddha, and learned much that was hidden, and practised wushu and Qinggong, the way of light…"

  "What was his name then?" she said, and the old man shook his head. "Who can remember?" he said. "It is told that a man who was not exactly a man had lived in the mountains and there, over the years, others had found him, and came to learn with him. It became a monastery, of a sort, and its name was Shaolin. But these are only legends, and there had been many such places over the centuries, followers of the Emerald Buddha – for it is told that the Buddha is asleep, and had been for thousands of years, but that one day it would wake and change the world. I once spoke with a woman who told me there are many worlds, all lying close to each other. It is said the Emerald Buddha is a key, a way to open doors between the worlds. The orders of the Jianghu were formed to guard it, to keep it sleeping. There is great danger when two alien worlds meet."

  She thought of what he said and they sat together in silence, the tall Dahomey woman and the short Master Long. "What happened three years ago?" she said.

  "The Change," he said. "Yes… you ask good questions, none of which I have answers to. Perhaps the fat man you are seeking can answer that one."

  One moment he was sitting down. The next he was on his feet, and offering her his hand, though she did not see him move. "But it is too late now, or too early. The sun is climbing once again into the sky, and you should sleep."

  She took his hand. He pulled her up to her feet. "I have to keep going," she said. "I have to find–"

  "The answers will wait," Master Long said. "They have waited long enough, after all. Rest, and tomorrow you shall have your answers – though at what cost even I do not know. But we will help, as much as we can."

  "An old magician told me I would be…" She swayed on her feet. She was suddenly so tired she could barely stand. "I would meet a tall dark stranger and go on a long journey… Are you that stranger?"

  Master Long laughed. "I am not exactly tall," he said.

  "And he said…" She swayed again. Her eyes were closing, the darkness closing in. "He said, a weapon won't be enough. That I should… I should have to become a weapon. What do you think he meant?"

  But there was no longer any answer, or if there was, she could not hear it. Her eyes closed and wouldn't open again, and she felt herself sinking into the blackness, into a thick and dreamless sleep where nothing came.

  INTERLUDE: The Other Side of the River

  Days became nights and nights blended into days, until he could no longer distinguish the periods of light and dark or the changing of the seasons. The world Kai walked in was shifting around him, changing in unexpected ways. It was a twilight world, an autumn world, where the bright green of rice gave way to the murky colour of a flooding river. It was like walking through perpetual mist, through low-lying grey clouds.

  The statue still spoke to Kai, but more and more he felt that the statue's attention was turned elsewhere. The statue spoke of energy burst source unknown subsystems brought online, and about trans-dimensional shift parameters aligned and about proximity cluster confirmed, bipolar transfer engaged and, last and unexpected: home.

  Home was something he no longer had. Chiang Rai disappeared behind the mist as if it had never existed, the steam-filled shop and his father at work and Kai playing with the other kids in the road and reading wuxia novels by candlelight – all gone, washed away by rolling grey mists.

  He travelled on foot, became used to the thick jungle, knew to avoid the poisonous plants and the lairs of bears and snakes and tigers and the isolated homes of the Karen people. He knew where to find their traps and knew how to make his own, which fruits to eat and which to leave. He avoided roads and whenever he saw elephant prints he hid, afraid of riders nearby.

  At last he came to the big water. Mekong, he thought, the word rising in him like a lone bubble. The river was wide and filled with water to the banks and it rained every day, lightning lashing across the sky like a whip, the thunder like cannon fire echoing all around him, the sound of war. He walked along the bank in the direction of the mountains.

  There were people using the river, of course. There were villages with bamboo huts standing on stilts above the water, and fisherfolk in canoes or wading through the shallows with nets. There were children playing in the water and there were barges and cargo boats travelling in both directions, many of them Chinese, like his father, and some of them from Siam, like his mother had been. And many others, too – dark men from the mountains and light ones from the lowlands far away, and Europeans – he had once seen one, an exotic creature visiting the town of Chiang Rai. There were steamboats, too, and he marvelled at them, delighted with the way they moved and churned the water, these great hulking beasts that belonged to the king of Siam. He hid when boats passed and he stole food from the villages if he could, and caught fish and small birds and animals. All the while he was going somewhere, but he didn't yet know where.

  One day he stole a canoe and crossed to the other side of the river.

  It was during a thunderstorm. The statue liked the storm. Somehow, it acted as an attractor for the lightning, yet it never hit Kai, nor the statue. The lightning struck all around them, him and the statue, and it was as if they were encased in a bubble, and it glowed in blues and greys, crackling with electricity, and the statue would talk of utilising natural energy sources and renewable power supplies and reinforcing multi-dimensional boundaries. When he crossed the river he was very scared, though the fear was different now, the fear was like a polished stone that he held in his hand, a force that could be transmuted into pure power, be made into a cold hard fury and be controlled. When he crossed the river it was as if the two banks would never meet, as if he had left one behind him while the other kept receding away in the distance. The current was very strong and soon he was being borne along it without control, his choices reduced to none. He let the current take him where it would. On the river, the two worlds, the two banks seemed impossibly distant from each other, the outlines of two separate worlds. In one was laughter and sunlight and new shoots of rice, ginger and jasmine and dry cleaners and steamboats and love. In the other was… what? The unknown. The statue longed for it – a darkness, and strange stars, and massive structures floating in the inky black…

  How long he drifted on the river he didn't know. He drank the water of the Mekong and caught fish with bare hands, and ate them raw. Boats came and went but never seemed to see him. When the storms came he huddled in the small canoe and the lightning danced around him, and the statue glowed as if satisfied. Then, one day, he came around a bend in the river and saw a city.

  PART III

  The Man in the Iron Mask

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Woman in the Mirror

  Drippety-drip, drippety-drap the sound came, light fingers tapping on the window, a low wind blowing pipes of poisoned darts, the darkness pulsing like a heart, drippety-drip, drippety–

  Splat.

  Her eyes opened.

  She was lying in her bed.

  She had no recollection of how she
had arrived there.

  Outside the window it was raining, and the wind was howling a mournful tune. When she got up she half-expected more assailants to come through the door but the house was hushed and empty. She went into her drawing room and Grimm was there, curled up in the fireplace, and she stroked him, and the metallic insect turned its head so it rested in the palm of her hands. Its skin felt warm. The hiss of a tongue touched her palm like a kiss.

  She knew she was close to the killer. She had missed something, she thought. But she knew he was close, that he was hunting her just as much as she was hunting him. For the moment, the question of the missing object did not occupy her as much. Also, it seemed obvious to her that when she found the killer, she would find this object, this key. Had it been used already? She thought of the killer, a grey grotesque shape in the dark of an alleyway. The corpses Viktor showed her in the under-morgue… yes. It had been used, and if not this one then another like it. And something had come through from the other side… or something here had been corrupted.