Errata: Fourteenth Episode - The Story I Told Nessa

I remember the night when, high on barbecue fumes, I glimpsed infinity in a grain of sand. While clouds straggled across the moon like ragged seaweed I sat on an old oil drum examining a particle of red volcanic grit stuck to the back of my hand. My ability to perceive detail began improving exponentially; eyes like microscopes I zoomed past platelets, follicles and the fat trunks of hairs down to the cellular level and beyond, plunging into subatomic space, aching distance and eventually an entire cosmos replete with star clusters, great attractors, planets like acne. Accelerating through detail into a gauzy troposphere I saw oceans and landmasses, and at last I discovered myself tiny and replicated, squatting on an identical oil drum, squinting at the back of a duplicate palm like someone trying to read a smudged phone number. The sand grain was waiting there, perfectly copied within itself, a red gift box jittering with complexity. I increased the magnification, discovering still deeper levels of fractal intricacy, universes blossoming and repeating like a kaleidoscope.

By the fourth iteration I was bored to shuddering, bitter tears. Reality was full of itself, same upon same upon same. We looked away in our countless billions, babushka dolls hollow with disgust.

I felt a jag of that porous despair as me and Two Blade dropped in a torrent of crapwater, falling end over end like tossed pennies towards the voidgate's wishing well jaws. I reflected that the bug-zapper fzzzt of oblivion isn't such a bad way to go ' non-existence being the most even-handed of all possible states, after all ' when suddenly there was a whump whump like canvas snapping in the wind and thick banded toes clamped round my torso, pinning my arms to my sides. A grandé flamehawk squeezed us in its charred talons, thumped its wings and rose.

Multiply a negative by a negative and you get huge spike in the opposite direction. Jones' goon Columpton was more than the sum of his pants ' he belonged to a special order of imbecile, his stupidity of such magnitude that it became a kind of superpower. Of all the creatures to solicit in an enclosed space seething with volatile gases, the chump selects one that's on fire. Right then I knew our standard deck of bluffs and ruses didn't mean squat against his rhino-hide idiocy. Columpton had the intellectual capacity of a dreidel and was just as tough to second-guess.

I pondered this as Teeb and I dangled over a giant death vat, casting freaky shadows while beneath us green acid fizzed and glubbed. Got to hand to that rentagoon ' he sure knew how to tie knots. Having ransacked the Phase Vault and posted the cube back to the Fleshbroker, Columpton lugged us to the old Chiso chemical plant down in the one of the industrial district's grimy flab folds, stringing us up over a corroded tank of something caustic and nasty.

I watched him try to make another call, mashing the dainty buttons on his mobile with fingers like punchbags. Leakage from numerous interphase calls had made his phone ear swell up like a pastry conch; bright puce and sensitive as a plague boil, it would shiver moments before he received a text. The remainder of his head was unremarkable, a bearded meatball worthy only of scorn.

Me and the Blademeister were tied back to back, hanging like a brace of horrifically altered poultry. 'What's happening, Chief?' he squawked. 'All I see is wall.'

'The apeman's dialling for pizza.'

The hornet drone of a dead line wafted from Columpton's phone speaker. He scowled, snapped his cell shut.

'No luck, princess?' I said.

'You shut your cakehole, Firework. I've had it up to here with you flapping your gums two-hundred to the dozen like anyone gives a monkey's. If I want you to speak I'll give you a signal ' like sticking a lighter under your unmentionables.'

I sighed so hard it became an imploded groan. 'You're just not going to let yourself be blinded by reality, are you chuckles? If I really was Klaus Firework, don't you think you'd have had a harder time catching me?'

'Nah ah.' Columpton shook a podgy index finger. 'The gaffer said you'd try leading me round the houses with mind games ' I ain't listening.'

'But I don't look anything like Klaus Firework!'

'No one knows what he looks like.'

I bucked and spat like a hogtied king rat. 'Then why choose me?'

'Woah, easy Chief,' said Two Blade. 'Ex nay on the sudden movements, uh¦ ay. This is one sorry piece of twine we're hanging from. Don't rock the boat if you want to remain a solid. Sure there are plenty of skeletons in my closet ' who cares? It's the one wrapped in meat and stashed under my skin I want to keep from seeing sunlight.'

'Teeb, if he calls me Firework or any derivation thereof just one more time I swear I'm going to cut the cord myself.'

'With your hands tied?'

'I'll find a way.'

'You're a right couple of pilchards, ain't you?' Columpton shook his head, grinning with the full radius of his bulldog underbite. 'You jander into town with your gobs full of fancy chant, giving it all that and acting like every Tom, Dick and Bob's your uncle ain't fit to lick your shadows. You reckon just cos the pair of you can talk a bit that means you can pull the rug over my eyes. I got news for you.' He hooked his thumbs round his braces and stretched them like catapults. 'I already stuck you up for auction on the BabbleNet. Three things the gaffer said: one, follow Firework till he reaches the Phase Vault then nick his access codes; two, get the little box out the Vault and send it to me; three, get rid of Firework however the fuck you like. You doughnuts are going to the highest bidder. There's plenty of people 'll pay big wonga to get their hands on the legendary Klaus Firework ' you're the kind of bloke who leaves a lot of geezers, uh¦ disgruntled, shall we say? Who wouldn't want to clamp hot tongs round your knackers?'

'And when they realise I'm not the real deal?'

'They ain't going to, cos you are the real deal.' Columpton pressed two fingers to his eyeballs, then jabbed both digits towards me. 'Evidence of the old peepholes, innit. And they ain't going to swindle me cos I'm demanding cash up front.'

'Uh¦ how are they going to get it to you?' said Two Blade.

'I told them to bring it here. Once I seen the colour of it they can do what they like with you.'

I felt Two Blade flinch. 'You put our location on the BabbleNet?'

'Well bloody done.' Columpton doled out a golf clap. 'You're a quick one, ain't you? Course I stuck in the address ' how else are they supposed to find me?'

I looked to the nearest windows and saw spear-wielding silhouettes rise in panes translucent with grease. Streetlights blazed like mob fires.

'Uh chuckles?' I said. 'You ever stop to consider that telling the whole city where they can find Klaus Firework might bring more heat down on your ass than mooning a dragon?'

'What you chuntering about?'

'The shitstorm brewing outside,' Two Blade said, straining to turn his head. 'Can't you hear the war drums? I'll bet there's a ring of City Peace right round the building, all holding hands like paper dolls.'

I nodded sagely. 'They don't do subtle and they don't negotiate. Why go fishing with a rod and patience when you're packing a boatload of dynamite?'

'That meant to scare me, Firework?' Columpton pushed his paunch out and rocked back on a perilously inadequate spine, chortling. 'I ain't worried about a few rozzers. Kicking heads in's what I do best.' He flexed his fingers. 'Shame your hands are tied, else I 'spect you'd appreciate a round of bobby-koshing.'

'So untie me!' I glanced down at the smoking emerald froth beneath us. 'I mean, escort us to a safe distance, then untie me.'

Columpton shrugged. 'Sorry mate. If circumstances were different I'd love to go on the rampage with you, God's honest, but business is business, know what I mean? I got a contract to see out.'

'All Jones wanted was the box,' said Two Blade. 'This whole slave auction ruckus is your masterpiece.'

Columpton shrugged again. 'Yeah, that's true. Oh well, s'pose I'm just a bastard.'

And a pane shattered, pale shards falling like cherry blossom as a SafeStave lanced into the building. Columpton jinked and it missed his shoulder by a whisker, its heat trace a streak of bendy air beside his left jowl. The superhot prong thunked into the base of the gunk vat beneath us.

He turned to gawp at the quivering shaft. 'Jenkins almighty! That nearly took my bleeding-'

A jet of acid sluiced from the breached tank and hit him full on in the face. Columpton's scream transitioned to a ruined gargle, melt-spray cascading down his chest and munching through fabric into flesh. He moved his hands in slow herky-jerky circles as acrid mustard-yellow smoke rinds twisted from his gut, runoff burning holes in the steel toecaps of his boots.

'Chief? What am I missing?'

'Oh, nothing horrific.' Raw tissue sloughed from the bone scaffold like wax under a blowlamp, his skeleton a beached galleon emerging wet and jagged. And what do you know? He really was big boned. 'A beautiful meadow just sprang up ' he's skipping through a rainbowed lake of petals, glee drooling out his tear ducts.' The stink was unbearable, a mix of burgers and bleach. 'Aww¦ a puppy just bounded into his arms. He's giving it the biggest hug you ever saw¦ It's licking the bristled sandbar of his primary chin¦' Collapsing in on himself like a melting witch, Columpton became a hissing puddle of beef and pureed innards. 'Would you look at that? The aura of joy and serenity's so strong it's manifested as a luminous pink bubble car¦ He's putting the puppy in the back seat and climbing in... Aww Teeb, I'm all choked up¦ He's waving to us as they drive off¦ Bye guys! Love and light you crazy bambinos!' As the acid jet slowed to a dribble, Columpton was gone save for a soot-black blast pattern across the concrete.

'Bye!' called Two Blade. 'Drive safe now!'

On my distaff side more glass smashed at the behest of flung SafeStaves, enhancing street noise, adding smoggy breezes. One whooshed past my treasured nose, crisping my eyebrows and leaving the world a fluxing dreamscape through the heatwarp. Another struck the vat below, which rang like a gong.

'Chief? Can't you do something?'

'Hope, T-Blade. I can hope so hard all the veins stand out on my head.'

Then a SafeStave slit the rope above us and we dropped gallows melancholy into the gunk tank.

We did not liquefy, but landed on our feet with a clank. Pierced by spearheads, the vat was empty. Our bonds fell slack about us. For several seconds I stared into my unconstricted palms, dazzled to be alive. Then I smelt an aroma like toupees roasting, and realised acid residue was eating through my boot soles.

I made the passes, shot a magenta tendril out of my sleeve and watched it wrap round a distant ceiling pipe. Two Blade grabbed my waist and we rose like a misshapen yoyo, SafeStaves hurtling past us and embedding themselves in the walls and floor. It was a hail now, a brutal barbstorm. We landed, ducked behind a defunct generator, its flywheels and capacitors downy with pinmould.

'A plan, Chief, a plan!' Crouched and sweaty, Two Blade made his hair a priority, sculpting ravaged locks with a series of curt tugs.

I reached for my inside pocket, found the tanned apeskin cover of my little black book. 'This is a situation,' I observed. 'No sense dicking around with budget mischief-makers ' I'll dial-up some real muscle on credit. We can settle the tab later.' I slapped through hot ochre pages that stank of leaf smoke until I happened upon an apposite bugger. 'What you think, TB?'

Two Blade sucked air through his teeth. 'Ouch. I think you must be feeling saucy and/or fat of wallet.'

'Desperate is as desperate does, ma cheri,' and I etched bright glyphs in the air, opening a channel. Embers snicked like a lighter miscatching; static lifted our hair and snatched dust from the floor in flurries. Lucent waffle-iron meshes drifted together, forming a gate. One moment SafeStaves hissed through the bright coagulation as if it were a hologram; the next, they were clunking off a steaming black portcullis wound tight with strangleweed.

Every window burst in a single scampish crescendo; we heard the whir of ziplines and twigged that bastards were storming the factory. I slammed my back against the generator, crumbs of mould peppering my hair and cascading down the nape of my neck. We were positioned roughly in the centre of an area the size of a small hangar; most of the vats, machinery and pipework had been stripped out by scavengers, evidenced only by rust patterns like spray-paint round a stencil. Sure, there were nooks we might have tucked ourselves into, but it was no ninja's paradise ' with upwards of a hundred armed grunts on our tails, even the deepest cranny was less a hiding place, more a cheap tomb.

Boots against concrete; the scrip-scrape of owners retrieving flung SafeStaves.
I flashed Two Blade a grin. 'This is going to be messy.'

Strangleweed went tendon-taut then snapped like dock ropes as the portcullis rattled upwards. Visuals flexed round the portal, yielding to Underspace's familiar tug.

The basic principle of Soliciting is this ' you call up whatever you can boss around. Lickspittle imps angling for promotion, Painsmiths, semi-sentient stuff like organs, tentacles, noxious mists, animals sometimes, Dwynes, Styxpigs, Wolfcopters¦ anything small, anything starved of attention and desperate for an innings in a coat of meat. There are bigger fish, of course ' 'personalities', if you will ' but it takes a certain force of character to keep them under control, and for the most part I prefer my insides to stay true to type, thanking you kindly.

And then you find yourself in a pinch, and you wheel out the four-word affirmation that's dad to a trail of snapped necks and surprisingly grievous puncture wounds ' I can handle it.

I felt a hot wind like a dog lapping my face and he stepped out: Baal-Moloch was thirty-foot of raw hurting muscle, horns splayed high and proud like a boxing cad's audacious moustache. His eyes were blood oranges glistening in the cramped hillocks of his taurine visage, casting about as he snuffed clouds of brimstone from his muzzle. Naïve as a rich man's cloistered daughter I expected some kind of wrestler's thong strapped coyly round his hips and groin but oh the balls, oh the thick dark haft of gristled vigour, big enough to pound a saloon car flat. Sweat beads shone on his biceps, glinting like little geodesic domes in the valleys between pulsing arteries. He stepped forward on huge cloven hooves, swinging a brass censer shaped like a baby, black contrails streaming from its eye sockets while a fire waxed in its guts. Holes bored in its skull made a wailing sound as it spun; the noise seemed to goad him into ever deeper furrows of rage.

I dropped into a sprinter's crouch and fixed the bull daemon with what amounted to a desperate squint. I willed the bastard not to notice us, to sniff and catch the alkaline tang of the Peace's bulk-washed environmental suits. I gurned with the effort, pushing my lower jaw up towards my nose. He had to obey me. I had to be stronger.

Thank Jenkins for Peace brutality. City grunts espied the beast and charged in a rowdy gang, one javelining his weapon as he drew near. The throw was weak but the tip of the SafeStave turned Baal-Moloch's tough hide to ice cream on contact, punching through hideous viscera to exit just west of his spine. The daemon did not break stride, behaving as if the shaft had missed; slinging the censer underarm on a soot-grimed chain he popped a grunt's head from its shoulders like a kid who kicks a soccer ball and decapitates a snowman. The suited body ran a few more steps then sat down, surprised.

Baal-Moloch jerked the censer back towards him with a flourish ' it went keening over his head then he whirled his wrist and the brass infant rushed through a fast loose arc. The Peace were coming from all angles; their formation described a near-perfect circle, thus the censer met them like a radar sweep. Some got bludgeoned by the baby itself, blasting open in the manner of éclairs; others were split widthways by the chain. Drunk on the glut of sundered corpses Baal-Moloch span his weapon faster. The baby's wail built to a high-pitched shriek; flames of jade and whitegold flashed in its empty sockets. As censer contrails melded into a gluey circumference of tar-black smog, hellsmoke billowed outward in thick concentric ripples, meeting ranks of Peace and smutting their visors.

I swatted smoke from my face, turned to speak to Two Blade, but he'd gone.

I blinked, looked again. No three ways about it. He'd split.

Stung? Impermanence is how it works ' this much I know. I shrugged and got on with it.

Cordite jinxed the air and steel scaffolds gave way in crippled skeins as the Peace hefted Hoax Bombs, shot-put sized explosives with long fizzing fuses like cherry stalks. Matt black and embossed with a skull and crossbones, they served as ambassadors for countless R & D dead-ends encountered during the Distraction Wars. Anti-personnel technology lacked the glamour of heavy ordnance but with grant money exiting City Hall in gold-plated wheelbarrows plenty of labs chanced their arms; the upshot was vast stockpiles of glitchy surplus weaponry. Hoax Bombs were unstable, sure, but with the LawNet rendering all guns novelty paperweights they stood unchallenged as purveyors of gory havoc. I watched a Peace trooper stoop and bowl one with granddad precision; it sidled to a halt beneath Baal-Moloch and blew.

Lifted by the blast, the daemon's huge manhood swung up and chinned him. Spittle frothed from his kisser and he clumped backward, stunned. The flaming censer lost momentum; its bronze ass skidded on concrete, spilling sparks and smashing troopers' legs out from under them. Off in the background, part-obscured by surging hellsmoke, a grunt lit his Hoax Bomb wick on the tip of his SafeStave, leant back on his good foot. It went off prematurely, shredding him in a blast of glass-sharp pink confetti.

Baal-Moloch shook himself back to alertness just in time to bat aside an incoming bomb. It wedged in a support stanchion, then detonated, spraying magma across a ten metre radius. The whole building groaned. I looked up, and realised the sky was falling.

Girders, glass, huge defunct strip lights, sections of ventilator shaft and rust-scabbed pipework dropped like junk rain. A trooper found himself in shadow, glanced up and got pulverised by a massive ceiling fan. I cast about for a likely escape route but everywhere was dust, explosions, thundering debris. A chunk of concrete big as a meteorite cleaved through the generator behind me and the impact knocked me off my feet.

And it was there, on my hands and knees, peering through a gauze of smoke and tears, that I saw Baal-Moloch's portal, still open.

I descended into Hell.