“Drugs,” Marlin was saying again, and she didn’t waste words arguing, though she was certain he was wrong. The only drug in the assassin’s system had been purpose, and that would not lay him low, tonight or any other.
4
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER HE HAD TAKEN ESTABROOK to the encampment in Streatham, Chant realized he would soon be having a visitor. He lived alone, and anonymously, in a one-room flat on a soon-to-be-condemned estate close to the Elephant and Castle, an address he had given to nobody, not even his employer. Not that his pursuers would be distracted from finding him by such petty secrecy. Unlike Homo sapiens, the species his long-dead master Sarton had been wont to call the blossom on the simian tree, Chant’s kind could not hide themselves from oblivion’s agents by closing a door and drawing the blinds. They were like beacons to those that preyed on them.
Men had it so much easier. The creatures that had made meat of them in earlier ages were zoo specimens now, brooding behind bars for the entertainment of the victorious ape. They had no grasp, those apes, of how close they lay to a state where the devouring beasts of Earth’s infancy would be little more than fleas. That state was called the In Ovo, and on the other side of it lay four worlds, the so-called Reconciled Dominions. They teemed with wonders: individuals blessed with attributes that would have made them, in this, the Fifth Dominion, fit for sainthood or burning, or both; cults possessed of secrets that would overturn in a moment the dogmas of faith and physics alike; beauty that might blind the sun or set the moon dreaming of fertility. All this, separated from Earth—the unreconciled Fifth—by the abyss of the In Ovo.
It was not, of course, an impossible journey to make. But the power to do so, which was usually—and contemptuously—referred to as magic, had been waning in the Fifth since Chant had first arrived. He’d seen the walls of reason built against it, brick by brick. He’d seen its practitioners hounded and mocked; seen its theories decay into decadence and parody; seen its purpose steadily forgotten. The Fifth was choking in its own certainties, and though he took no pleasure in the thought of losing his life, he would not mourn his removal from this hard and unpoetic Dominion.
He went to his window and looked down the five stories into the courtyard. It was empty. He had a few minutes yet, to compose his missive to Estabrook. Returning to his table, he began it again, for the ninth or tenth time. There was so much he wanted to communicate, but he knew that Estabrook was utterly ignorant of the involvement of his family, whose name he’d abandoned, with the fate of the Dominions. It was too late now to educate him. A warning would have to suffice. But how to word it so it didn’t sound like the rambling of a wild man? He set to again, putting the facts as plainly as he could, though doubting that these words would save Estabrook’s life. If the powers that prowled this world tonight wanted him dispatched, nothing short of intervention from the Unbeheld Himself, Hapexa-mendios, the all-powerful occupant of the First Dominion, would save him.
With the note finished, Chant pocketed it and headed out into the darkness. Not a moment too soon. In the frosty quiet he heard the sound of an engine too suave to belong to a resident and peered over the parapet to see the men getting out the car below. He didn’t doubt that these were his visitors. The only vehicles he’d seen here so polished were hearses. He cursed himself. Fatigue had made him slothful, and now he’d let his enemies get dangerously close. He ducked down the back stairs—glad, for once, that there were so few lights working along the landings—as his visitors strode towards the front. From the flats he passed, the sound of lives: Christmas pops on the radio, argument, a baby laughing, which became tears, as though it sensed there was danger near. Chant knew none of his neighbors, except as furtive faces glimpsed at windows, and now— though it was too late to change that—he regretted it.