The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [147]
I peer at the woman in pink. In one hand, she holds a shiny metal briefcase; the other arm is stretched rigidly down, close to her body, as if she has a ruler up her sleeve. I try to focus on the sparkling around her: Class three glamour, at least, I realize. She’s taller and younger than Eileen, and if I squint—I look past her at her reflection in the glass—red hair—
“What do you expect?” asks the woman everyone but me seems to think is Eileen Billington. “She’s not a movie hero, is she? And neither is he, for that matter.”
“Not now that I’ve terminated the reel,” Billington says briskly. “You, you, and you, go chuck the piranhas overboard, fill the fish tank with seawater, and get it over here—”
“Really?” asks the woman. “Are you sure it’s all over?”
Billington glances at her. “Pretty much, apart from a few little details—mass human sacrifices, invocations of chthonic demigods, Richter-ten earthquakes, harrowing of the Deep Ones, rains of meteors, and the creation of a thousand-year world empire, that sort of thing. Trivial, really. Yes, it’s all nailed down, dear. Why do you ask?”
“I was curious: Does it mean we’re safe from any risk that the Hero-designate playing the archetypical role is going to leap out of the shadows, armed to the teeth with specialized lethal hardware, and wreck all our plans?”
Billington begins to turn. “Yes, of course. Why are you worrying about—”
To my necromancy-stunned eyes it all seems to happen in very slow motion. Her clenched fist unclenches: a bone-colored bow drops down her sleeve like a concealed cosh until she grips it by one end and brings her hand up to unlatch the briefcase. Both sides of the case eject, leaving her clutching a handle and a sling attached to a pale violin that she raises to her chin in a smooth motion that speaks of long practice. The halves of the case contain compact amplified speakers, and there’s a stark black-on-yellow sticker on the underside of the violin: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. I start to shout a warning as Ramona begins to stir, her gills flexing limply against the base of her throat and her mouth pouting, and Billington begins to inscribe a sigil in the air in front of his face—
“This is a song of unbinding,” says Mo, and the bow slides across the faintly pulsing things-that-aren’t-strings, glowing like gashes in my retinas and trailing a ghostly haze when she moves. The first note sounds, wavering eerily on the air and building like the first breezy harbinger of a hurricane. “It unlocks—everything.”
Across the room, a particularly alert black beret shouts a warning and raises his MP-5. The second note wavers and screams from the body of the instrument, resonating painfully with my back teeth. Every hair on my body is trying to stand on end simultaneously. These aren’t sounds the human ear is supposed to be able to hear, the psychoacoustic model is all wrong: I feel like I’m suddenly listening to bat song, the noises that drive dogs wild, the raw and bloody notes of silence. The brief hammering of gunfire drives nails into my eardrums then stops in a shattering of glass and a brief scream as Mo squeezes the fingerboard. The bow string is glowing red. A third note quavers weirdly out of the instrument, somehow building simultaneously with the first and second, which haven’t stopped—they’ve taken root in the air of the room, thickening and turning it blue—and there’s a popping noise as the buckles of the straps holding me down spring open.
More screams, Billington, being non-stupid, dashes for the door onto the catwalk outside. The bow reaches the end of its arc and begins to slice back across the bridge of the violin as lockers burst apart, spilling paper and supplies across the floor: zippers break, belts unfasten, doors fly open. The noise is so loud now that it feels like a god is ripping the two halves of reality apart: the sound of tearing inside my head is deafening. I can’t hear or feel Ramona anymore, and the lack of her presence is a huge vacuum in my soul, trying to split me in two. The noise of another