Chapter 19
One Catastrophe at a Time
The Realm Malachy traversed the Protean Society into was filled with new dangers.
They emerged from the hasty portal and were swallowed whole by the devouring darkness beyond. Panicked whispers erupted in the pitch-black. Two dozen mages tripped over the rubble-strewn ground and gagged on the relentless stench.
A blinding beam of light swept over their heads like a scythe, illuminating their frightened faces.
“Duck!” Malachy hissed.
They clambered into an alley between ramshackle buildings and cowered in a huddle until the light passed. No one dared breathe as the harsh clip of footsteps and voices passed the mouth of the alley.
If the uniformed men angled their helmeted heads and blinding torches ever so slightly, they would spot the interlopers in their Realm, ensnared in a new and much worse trap.
At last, the steps and voices faded. Tension eased among the huddled mages, but not for Malachy. He silenced the Proteans’ whispered speculation with an upheld hand, straining to hear for more patrolmen. Hearing none, he motioned for them to follow.
The mage supremacists trailed after him like mortified ducklings as he picked over piles of brick and splintered wood, the bones of a once bustling manufacturing district where the war had burned the hottest and left only ash.
Tumbled-down factories and toppled warehouses slumped over like the ribcages of fallen leviathans.
In tense silence, he navigated them through the oily darkness. They passed through the charred and gutted remains of building-shaped rubble, haunted by shell-shocked ghosts who wandered the wreckage and watched them with wary eyes from hollow faces.
Signs, written in bold red letters and papered on every corner, declared the penalty for violating any of the Kaiser’s many executive orders.
After confirming the area was both uninhabited and unpatrolled, Malachy led them into the bombed-out carcass of a bank. Spent artillery shells littered the caved-in floor like glimmering insects.
“What is this place?” Ari Razaq asked in a fearful undertone when they had gathered in the far corner.
“Another London,” Malachy replied. “An even worse one. It’s a parallel Realm stacked on top of our own. In this one, the Allies lost the Great War. So if you don’t speak German, keep your fuckin’ mouth shut. English has been outlawed here.”
The mages merely stared at Malachy in astonished silence. He’d take that over screams or tears.
“Listen up, superior ones. Keep your fuckin’ heads down. If you wander outside, be mindful of the patrols. You getting killed or stuck here isn’t my problem. Once the dust settles on the other side, we'll traverse back.”
Making a portal between Realms required absolute precision. The parallel Realms were overlaid such that the coordinates in one London aligned with the other. Precision saved one from traversing into the middle of the Thames or someone’s parlor.
The Proteans slumped to the destroyed floor in a wave of exhaustion.
Malachy was too wired to sit still. It had been some time since business had compelled him into Parallel London, and curiosity nagged at him to explore what he could.
He also had some private words he’d like to exchange with a certain Umbramancer and Ferromancer.
“Razaq. Borges. Let’s grab a drink. I know a place.”
Rune didn’t hesitate to follow at the word “drink”, but Ari froze. His dark eyes rolled around the burnt skeleton of the bank in bewildered uncertainty.
Without waiting for an answer, Malachy strode down the eerily quiet street into an alleyway, Rune close behind him. Ari was breathless when he caught up to them.
“Have you come here many times?” Ari asked.
“Not if I can help it.” Malachy cut a circuitous path through the blitzkrieged city, reduced to pock-marked rubble in the damning aftermath of the German’s final air raid.
“Do we exist here?” By the quaking of Ari’s voice, he was deep in the throes of an existential crisis. “I mean, do we exist here already? Is there another Ari Razaq here? Another Malachy Bane?”
“I’ve never met myself in another Realm.”
“But what if we do?” Ari pressed.
“Prepare for an unpleasant paradox.”
“Achtung!” blared a man’s voice.
They stopped, heads spinning for the voice’s origin.
“Achtung!” rang out again in a booming echo that rippled over the streets.
The warning had come from the loudspeakers overhead, stationed on the corner of every block. Malachy translated the gist of the broadcasted message with his rough German as: The nightly curfew is in effect. Get off the streets or get tossed in the gulag.
Grand.
There were no respectable establishments left in Parallel London to patronize for a drink, of course.
The den of vice Malachy sought appeared at the end of a maze of narrow alleys.
Char stained the brick face of the building like blush, and rusted snarls of barbed wire crowned it like curling locks that draped over the spires of snapped lamp posts in deadly garlands.
The bar, a generous term, was a stiff breeze away from collapsing in on itself. Malachy climbed the sagging steps and swung open the busted door. Its creaking protest sounded like a gunshot in the night’s unnatural hush.
Inside managed to be even uglier than outside. Everything—every chipped surface and grimy bottle, every broken person perched in a broken chair—was sticky. An oily sheen covered the men’s clammy foreheads and gray clothing.
The meager patrons weren’t scrambling home for the curfew; it must only apply to those on the streets, not those hunched over their own miseries in a dilapidated bar until the curfew lifted along with the rising sun.
Malachy’s boots stuck to the groaning floorboards as he made his way towards the plywood slanted in the approximate shape of a bar.
Behind it stood a humorless lump of a man wiping a dirty rag on a dirty glass.
Without lifting his head, the barkeep’s yellowed eyes gave the three newcomers a narrow-eyed onceover.
“Muttermilch,” Malachy said. The local specialty was a moonshine made from an opportunistic rotation of unlikely and unpalatable sources, fermented in a toilet or trough by the rancid smell of it.
The milky opaqueness spared one from seeing what they were actually drinking; its only redeeming quality. “Drei.” He held up three fingers.
The barkeep’s eyes narrowed further. His gaze flicked from Malachy in his grime-speckled suit to Rune and Ari, similarly disheveled behind him. His lips thinned.
“Fremdvolker?” the barkeep grunted.
Malachy recognized the German derogative for foreigners. Evidently the Portuguese Ferromancer and Egyptian Umbramancer did not meet the barkeep’s stringent criteria for the master race.
From his wallet, enchanted to have more folds than the slim leather would imply, Malachy withdrew more marks than necessary for the drinks.
Money solved most problems in every Realm he had traversed to, and this shittier London was no exception.
The marks disappeared into the greasy folds of the barkeep’s stained apron.
He slapped three foul, frothing mugs on the plywood and turned back to dirtying glasses.
Rune and Ari followed Malachy to a precarious table near the back. He sat in a rickety chair with a full view of the door. Over the rim of the foul drink he pretended to sip, his watchful eyes made a continuous circuit of the dingy interior and its inhabitants.
Ari eyed his mug warily. “What is it?”
“Mother’s milk,” Malachy said. “Tastes worse than it smells.”
“What’s it made of?”
“Nothing anyone would miss.”
Ari pushed the mug away with a disgusted look.
Undeterred, Rune glugged his drink like water. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and loosed a loud belch, setting the mug down with a clatter.
“Mr. Bane, I…” Ari leaned forward, uncertainty clouding his features. “I want to thank you for getting the Proteans out of there so quickly. I also want to offer my sincere apologies for our unfortunate introduction at your club the other evening. I was out of line. It will not happen again.”
Malachy lit a cigarette and studied the Umbramancer. The young man’s expression was earnest, without a touch of guile. But on the wall behind him, Ari cast a too large shadow. One that seemed to twitch independent of Ari the longer Malachy stared at it.
Dr. Jekyll might be all polite, cringing smiles, but Mr. Hyde lurked just below the surface.
“Although,” Ari went on. A cold spark in the depths of his dark eyes caught into a flame. “It is curious, is it not, that the police knew our precise meeting place tonight when the Proteans have no fixed location nor written communications. And we had only one new member join us.”
His accusation hung, suspended like dust motes, in the flickering light of the greasy bulb overhead. The audacity, Malachy thought with growing appreciation for the Umbramancer. Ari wasn’t wrong. In fact, he was proving himself to be a worthy adversary.
Rune contemplated his mug as if surprised to find it empty. “Where is that damn wife of mine?” he grumbled, rubbing his paunch ponderously. His gritty eyes flitted around the bar like her absence was an intentional irritation.
“Camille didn’t come through the portal,” Malachy said.
“Blast.” The Ferromancer’s beringed fist smashed on the table, loosening several already loose screws. “Does save me some trouble, though. I have been thinking about turning Camille in for a younger model. For science, eh?”
Chuckling, Rune elbowed Ari in the side. The Umbramancer spilled his drink over the table, adding another layer of sourceless stickiness to its archaeological record. Ari seemed relieved the Muttermilch was gone.
“I have taken my husbandly duties seriously, I tell you, but after all those years of Camille working at the Gilded Lily… I am starting to think I've been ploughing barren fields.”
“Or overploughed ones,” Malachy offered.