For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Read online

  “If we ask it to be in there,” said Joe, gesturing to a doorway, “it will be?”

  “It’s a theory,” I replied, “and there really is only one way to prove it.”

  Filling myself with as much conviction as I could muster, an utter, unshakeable belief that I would open that door and find what we needed, I marched up to it, turned the handle and found myself face to face with a saloon bar. I closed the door immediately, accepting that this building might know me better than I had given it credit for.

  “Well?” asked Hope.

  I decided to experiment.

  “Looks about right to me,” I said, “though I’ve not seen it before, take a look for yourselves.”

  They opened the door and stepped inside.

  “You were right,” said Hope, “it is the Observation Lounge.”

  Which proved that my theory was right in principle but would take some getting used to in practice. What was needed in this place was a clarity of thought and intent that I had spent the vast majority of my life striving to avoid. I could only hope I’d develop the skill of it; if I planned on staying in the Dominion any longer it was something I needed to learn.

  Simply stepping into the Observation Lounge was an act of bravery. It seemed to be entirely made of glass, hovering over the world, its walls and ceiling filled with sky, its floor looking down on the earth beneath. Currently, that view was of the plain outside Wormwood, the large camp that we had all so recently been a part of until Alonzo had brought us in here, ignorant cogs in the lunatic machine of his plan.

  “The view changes,” Hope was explaining, walking across the invisible floor in utter fearlessness, “depending on what you ask to see.” She closed her eyes, focusing on Alonzo’s face. “Find him,” she commanded and the plain blurred and sped away, making me fall to my knees in disorientation. I could only imagine the effect the room would have on a drunken man, or one let loose from his senses by opium. It would be more than either could bear.

  The view was now closer to home, the white walls of this very building visible to one side. We were looking on the outside of the Dominion, though, not the garden at its centre but a desert of off-white sand. Lying in this sand was Alonzo, his face vacant, a pair of ragged holes in the front of his shirt, blood seeping into the cotton. The first thought that entered my head was surprise that he could even bleed; surely, I thought, that was the province of mortals. Then, the absurdity of that came second, he clearly was mortal: he was dead.

  “The celestial are not quite as invulnerable as I always assumed,” I said, leaning back against the far wall so as to remind myself that the room was solid and that I wasn’t about to fall anywhere.

  “How can he be dead?” Hope wondered.

  “If God can take a bullet that doesn’t offer much hope for anyone else, does it?” suggested Joe.

  The view was changing once more.

  “What did you do?” I asked, slapping my hands against the wall to steady myself.

  “Nothing,” insisted Hope, Joe shaking his head.

  “It has something else to show us,” I said.

  The view now was of a white circle, pulsing with a liquid light. It was like molten rock, rippling and glowing with a brightness that suggested unimaginable heat. Around this circle, the ground was also on the move, rocks swaying, sand undulating, as if the entire area was living, unable to be still.

  “What is it?” Joe wondered.

  “Who can tell?” I said.

  “It’s the Fundament,” came a voice from the air above us and we looked to see an ethereal form moving around the uppermost corners of the room. The shape descended and, briefly, it took on a face we all recognised: Alonzo.

  “You’re not dead then,” said Joe.

  “Death is just a change of state,” the voice said. “When mortals experience it they pass from their world to one of the Dominions. When one of the inhabitants of the Dominions experiences it they pass into the Fundament. It’s where our essence, our souls if you like, go. It’s the core of all life, in a few moments, my essence will merge with it and, one day, I will have flesh again. It will be different flesh and I won’t remember the actions of the old but that’s probably for the best.” The form soared towards the ceiling once more, hitting it and dissipating in all directions, like smoke blown against a wall. After a moment it coalesced again. “I did my best,” it said, “but I’m not sure I will be fondly remembered so ignorance will be a blessing.”

  “On the subject of ignorance,” I said, “what exactly are we supposed to do now?”

  “Whatever you like,” it replied. “It’s no longer any of my concern.”

  And with that, it vanished.

  “Well,” said Hope, “that was helpful.”

  We sat there for a few moments, continuing to stare at the Fundament. Then Joe got to his feet. “I’m not going to hang around here,” he said, “not if there’s Paradise to explore.” He looked towards Hope.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  “I’d like to stay a little longer,” I said. “Maybe see what’s happening to my friends.”

  “There’s nobody left behind I care for,” said Joe, “the future’s here.” He extended his hand towards Hope who took it with a happy smile.

  “I’ll find you later,” I told them.

  They left and I settled down to get to grips with the workings of the Observation Lounge.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PRICE OF POWER

  1.

  ON THE PLAINS of Balthazar, just north of that viscous and unpleasant place known locally as the Bristle, a lone rider made his way towards the city of Golgotha.

  The Choir of the Heat watched him as he passed, their cracked and dusty eyes grinding in their sockets as he crossed the horizon, trailing a dissipating tail of red earth behind him. As always, they sang their opinion on the matter, the birds in the sky above them circling away from the advances of those sharp and lethal notes. The rider, pre-warned, had taken his own precautions, his ears clogged shut with mud from the banks of the Bristle. It fizzed and popped, filling his head with a sound like cradles burning.

  He skirted around the Forest of Truth, having no wish to hear its leaves pronounce on his future. Whether their name was accurate or not, he wasn’t a man who believed in destiny. You made your own way in this world or any world, you carved it out with bullet, knife or tooth.

  As Golgotha rose in the distance, the road widened and began to fill with other travellers. Carriages of people, carts of produce, the occasional car, foul, black smoke pouring forth from their exhaust pipes. The rider stayed to one side, not comfortable negotiating so much traffic.

  At the edge of the city, a lone beggar baked in the dirt by the road. Desperate for cool air, he had pulled the flesh of his head away to hang around his neck like a glistening scarf. The low sun glistened off his wet skull as he brushed the flies away from their egg-laying in his shed cheeks. As the rider drew close, the beggar stared at him, eyeballs dry from a lack of blinking. If he had lips he’d not have looked so happy.

  “Spare a memory?” the beggar asked.

  “None I’d be willing to share,” the rider replied.

  He continued along the road as it began to curl between the buildings.

  He had once spent a little time in New York. The city had felt suffocating to a man like him, used to the feeling of space and distance. Of course, later had come prison and then he had known real suffocation.

  Golgotha was not unlike New York. As in so many parts of the Dominion of Circles the landscape was influenced by the mortal world, some would say infected by it.

  He was surrounded by demands on his attention. Signs begged him to buy their wares, everything from a hot meal to a hearty fuck presented to him at bargain rates. Their pleas went unnoticed. So much smoke and steam billowed from the sidewalk gratings and the open windows that the whole city looked to have been built on a fire, every building on every street ready to become kindling. To him it wa
s just chaos, a crowding in on his senses that made him desperate for the simple, easily negotiated world of the plains.

  “Long time on the road?” a man shouted from the sidewalk, scratching at a face of shedding skin. “Got what you need to relax and unwind.”

  “Doubt that,” the rider told him, continuing past him.

  “Don’t know what you’re missing!” the man shouted after him.

  “I know exactly,” the rider replied, more to himself than the seller. “Wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  After a few more minutes, he had to stop. The constant barrage of people and buildings felt as if they were choking him. He had sunk low in his saddle, flinching from things that weren’t there, sick to his stomach by the smells of cooking, sweat and death.

  “You look just about done in,” said a voice to his left. “Not used to the city life?”

  It was a young girl, though he knew better than to take such things on face value. He was about to tell her to begone when common sense kicked in.

  “I’m heading for The Exchange,” he said. “Lead me there and I’ll see you well paid.”

  “How about I see some proof of your worth first?” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

  He took off his hat and scarf, the latter stiff with dust and spittle. He turned his face towards her. “You can take me at my word or not at all.”

  She gave a small laugh. “Maybe I can at that. You the man they’re all talking about? You don’t smell familiar.”

  “Maybe. What are they saying?”

  “That they want you dead, for the most part. Reckon I could be set up just fine if I took you there. Bet there’s a reward.”

  “Then it’s your considerable good fortune that I want to go. Hop on and lead me there.”

  “And I can get whatever they’re paying for you?”

  “As long as they pay upfront, and don’t make no stipulations about my being dead first. I don’t think you want to take on a deal that risky.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, what would be the point these days?” She climbed up onto the rakh. “Now cover your face back up. I don’t want someone else trying to take you off me.”

  “I’m all yours.”

  As they moved through the streets he tried to blank out the ceaseless assault on his senses. The crowds moved like a storm raging around the buildings, flowing in and out of every available space. While some appeared human, other species loomed on either side of them that could not be so easily placed, absurd, grotesque shapes that he didn’t even try to process. Monstrousness was not something you judged from the outside, it lay at the heart of you. How could he not know that with a heart as black as his?

  Shadows passed over them, cast by unseen behemoths in the sky. If the beasts wished to hunt they’d need to do so on open ground, there was no way that creatures of such size could pass between these buildings.

  “We’re here,” said the kid, halting the rakh opposite a tower of grey brick that reared up in front of them. It stood at the heart of a paved, circular space, the stones winding in a screw towards the building, making it look like it was a long, brick shaft that had been forced into the earth, perhaps to stab the world in its corrupted heart.

  “You need to announce yourself before they let you in,” the kid said. “They like their privacy, turn up unwanted and you’ll be a stain on the sidewalk begging for a bucket to pour yourself into.”

  “You do it,” he said, “it’s your bounty.”

  Her confidence wavered slightly as she made her way towards the entrance to the building, a large revolving door of stained glass. “I’ve found him for you!” she shouted. “And wish to claim my reward.”

  For a moment there was silence then the revolving doors began to spin, a low whisper of cushioned metal sliding through its groove.

  “You’ve found who?” asked a voice so barely audible it sounded like its speaker was some distance away, possibly underground.

  The creature that spoke was a corpulent thing, dressed immaculately in a concierge’s uniform complete with gold braid and the woven hair of innocents.

  The rider stepped off his rakh and walked forward, unwrapping the scarf from his face as he did so.

  “You want to keep back, boy?” said the concierge. “You don’t want to get me on the defensive, I can be unsettling when riled.”

  “I’m no boy,” the rider replied, tucking the scarf in his pocket and lifting his face up to be seen. “I’m Henry Jones, and I’m the man who shot God in the head, so forgive me if I’m slow to unsettle.”

  The concierge inclined his head in acquiescence. “I can see that might be the case.” It inclined its head towards the girl. “You claim this man as yours?”

  “I do if there’s a bounty.”

  “There is. A generous one. There is also a penalty for anyone found harbouring him. Surely both are your due. Which do you wish to claim first?”

  The kid thought for a moment and then sighed. She knew when she’d been outmanoeuvred. “Fucking cheat,” she cursed, turning on her heels. She spared a final look to Jones, though she knew his sightless eyes wouldn’t appreciate the fact. “Watch out for them, my little outlaw,” she said, “they’re tricksters all.”

  “I know it,” he replied.

  “Can the man that killed God be tricked?” asked the concierge, amusement in his voice.

  “Of course,” Jones replied, “but he can bite back pretty fucking hard when it happens.”

  “I just bet he probably doesn’t need my arm to guide him either?”

  “He does not.”

  “Walk this way then, God Killer, the council have been looking forward to meeting you.”

  As Henry Jones entered the building, the cool air that washed over him was most welcome. His boot heels echoed around him, bouncing between marble floor and a vaulted ceiling.

  Out of the chaos of Golgotha’s streets, his ‘sight’ began to return to him, that heightened sense of his place in a room. He could map out the size of the foyer, could sense the spiralling stairwell that ran from its end, descending down into the earth for an immeasurable distance. He could also sense the solitary elevator, its doors open, that lay next to the stairwell. Had there been anyone else in the foyer but himself and the concierge, he would have sensed them too, rocks around which the air of the room flowed.

  None of which allowed him to fully appreciate the tone of the place. He could sense a sculpted structure at the centre of the room, could even discern its shape. He couldn’t, however, take in its subject. He didn’t recognise the various human forms that went into its construction. Perhaps, had they been more isolated by the sculptor, he would have recognised them for what they were. That had not been the artist’s vision. The bodies curled and flowed into one another, as if the subjects were terrified at the thought of being unique. It was a grotesque sight as they fought to enter and be entered, not a sexual image, not given the look of terror on their faces, rather a curse that forced them to try and bond, fist into gullet, foot into anus, until there would be only one, amorphous mass left at the centre.

  He could tell that they were surrounded by paintings, their heavy gilt frames standing proud from the walls. But he couldn’t see their subjects.

  In one, a procession of schoolchildren formed a happy queue at the open door of their headmaster. They laughed and jostled one another, peering inside to watch him as he slit and carved, a master butcher at work, breaking them down into their respective cuts on the tiled floor. At the head of the queue, a child, eager to help, was sketching out dotted lines across his skin, helpful directions for the knife to follow. The headmaster appeared quite content in his work, though the artist had worked to bring a sense of exhaustion to the man’s face—when would this work be done?

  In another, while the brushwork was different, a theme was shared: the human animal. Man, woman and child frolicked in the pig pen, naked and jubilant. They ran, copulated, defecated and fought, wild and happy in the straw and shit.


  Yet another, this the product of a very angry painter if the brushwork was anything to go by. In places the canvas looked at the very threshold of having torn, distended and uneven, held together by the paint. The subject was presumably the infernal equivalent of Bosch or Blake, wishing to purge the horrific into art. Not for this artist the landscapes of Hell or depictions of a medieval devil. Instead they had presented a lamb, its fleece aglow with sickly light.

  The concierge stood back to allow Jones into the elevator. For a moment, the outlaw wondered if this small steel box was a trap, but he entered it anyway. If the residents of The Exchange wanted him captured they would have plenty of opportunities to do so. In truth, he had been theirs from the moment he had crossed the threshold.

  “Someone will escort you once you arrive,” the concierge said. “I never leave the foyer.”

  “Who wants to get in here anyway?” Jones asked.

  “Oh, nobody,” the concierge said. “My job is to keep people in, not out.”

  It reached inside the elevator and pressed the final button on the panel, the lowest floor. The Exchange was nothing if not traditional. In the world of mortals, the most important residents occupied the penthouse, reaching up towards the heavens. In the Dominion of Circles honour went in the opposite direction.

  As the elevator descended, Jones’ sensitive ears began to pick up other sounds over the creak of winch and cable. As he passed each floor, sounds faded in and out: laughing; screaming; a rattling of sewing machines; the chinking of metal; the lowing of animals in captivity, abattoir music; a sound like, but not quite, the chopping of firewood; the plucking of tuneless harp strings; the stretching of rubber; the whisper of the confessional... The work of the Exchange was busy and varied.