3 - The Royal Cock Pit
The walk between the Athenaeum club and Downing Street was eerily quiet. Chadt's eyes never left Tian as they strolled down Horse Guards Road.
St James's Park spread its sickly foliage to their right. The cold silence, deep as a cemetery, was only interrupted by the occasional lament of a duck.
Chadt could almost forget it was not real.
Tian's feet hovered slightly above the ground. The strange creature stood out more than him in this world of steel and soot. Chadt's mind was still swamped by questions that wouldn't stop pouring in.
"If you're from the future, do you know everything that will happen?"
The angel's lean legs went slack. The body kept sliding along.
"The archives are sparse," the angel replied. "Most records were lost during the Singularity. That's precisely why we're doing this."
Chadt's gaze went to the envelope in his hand.
For a fraction of a second, everything was different. The pond in the park simmered with thick blood. It spread over the grass, climbing up white stone buildings. A cold, metallic smell hit the back of his throat.
In the middle of the crimson ocean, a massive black cube shook the air with a deep throb.
Then it was gone, replaced by a building Chadt recognized from the news.
The beating heart of the British Empire. 10, Downing Street.
The iconic obsidian door was crowned by an iridescent lantern. On either side, fences sliced the cold air into solemn strips. The overly polished facade blinded them with the sun's reflection.
"It's supposed to be yellow," Tian interjected.
Chadt blinked. Turned. The angel's wavy hair framed a pale, grinning face.
"Everybody forgot about it. The smog turned it black, then they kept it that way."
"Aren't you scared?" Disbelief bled into Chadt's voice. "Isn't this the best protected place in the world?"
"Maybe in the Real Plane. But it's also very famous, which means easy for us to map. Everything always leads back here. The Royal Cock Pit is like a rite of passage for students in my department."
"The royal cockpit?" asked Chadt snarkily. "Do they call it that because it's where they pilot the country?"
"No, we call it that because it was a pit with actual chicken. Henry VIII built an arena for cockfighting right there, with guest lodgings next to it."
Tian gestured towards the right. A trail of light followed.
"It became a theater for a while, and then the seat of government. The cock fighting never really stopped though."
Tian snickered. Chadt didn't. The angel studied him.
"Did I do humor wrong?"
"I'm a little distracted because you're sending me into the last dungeon of the British empire," snapped Chadt.
"Trust me," replied the angel with clearly unearned confidence. "This is barely the starting zone."
The wind howled. Chadt shuddered.
"So how do we get in?"
Tian repeated the pointing gesture exactly.
"We can enter through number 11. It was condemned when they joined the houses, but here a door is a door."
"What about the security? Is there an army of steampunk guards?"
"Actually, this place has historically been quite unprotected. It's only the fellows at the door."
Tian gestured towards two black shapes that Chadt had not noticed. The imperial guards had petrified into the wall, their proportions far exceeding those of normal humans. They did not breathe.
"We'll bypass them, so we'll only see staff and ministers, much too busy with their own chores and their own selves to pay us any mind."
"You're blue and sparkling," observed Chadt dubiously.
"And you really underestimate how self-involved British politicians can get. Still, you're right to be cautious."
Tian went still for a moment, and both of their clothes faded to a dim, transparent grey.
"I weakened our signal," Tian explained, darting ahead. "Of course, the best way to not get caught is to minimize exposure time."
"Wait!"
Chadt's hand passed through Tian's arm.
"What happens after the ritual? What's our way out?"
The angel looked surprised by the question.
"I figured you would just wake up."
Chadt did not know what to say to that. He supposed this was a valid strategy.
They slipped through the smaller door numbered 11.
It opened onto an antechamber that looked like a museum. The floor was checkered and slippery. The walls were grids of portraits of white men, whose pompous attire made it hard to tell them apart.
In every direction, slightly different arches gave onto slightly different halls. An infinite recursion of yellow walls and stiff collars.
"The Halls of Power are easier to navigate when you know the way," commented Tian.
They turned right, then left, then forward. Chadt quickly lost all sense of direction. A couple times, he thought he saw in the distance a robed silhouette waving too many metallic fingers. But it went away as soon as he focused his gaze.
Finally Tian stopped.
They had arrived in a house at the back of the building. Ahead, a large white door failed to contain an agitated voice.
Chadt's heartbeat accelerated. Cold sweat crept down his spine.
"Be careful from now on," whispered Tian. The advice was completely unnecessary.
The acrid smell of coal smoke smothered them as they approached slowly.
"Look through the keyhole," advised Tian.
"What about you?"
"I see what you see."
Chadt pushed the implications aside, and leaned in with extreme care. The lock seemed to expect an enormous key, so he had no trouble getting a clear view.
A thin, oval table filled most of the room, surrounded by a battalion of cushioned chairs. In the middle, six imperial ministers sat on one side, observing with various stages of boredom another gentleman shuffling through piles of paper.
"That's Georges Curzon," came the voice of Tian in Chadt's head. It reminded him of the manor escape and sent his heart for another spin.
"He's the only opposition left. Once he falls, they sign."
This was a battle.
Inside, Curzon called upon the Lay of the Land: The air crackled and turned dry.
"You have never been there, Mr. Balfour. I have been, many times. I say this with no pleasure. The water scarce. The land is dry. The population already exceeds what it can carry. It simply cannot sustain more people."
His voice was cutting and precise, delivering a verdict, not an argument.
On the other side of the table, an elderly, languid man listened with amused judgment. His nonchalance contrasted with the impassive detachment of the gentleman sitting in the presiding chair. The other imperial ministers were so uninterested they might have been asleep.
Once Curzon was done talking, the old man did not answer immediately. The opponents stared at each other, under the icy watch of the Prime Minister.
When Arthur Balfour spoke, it was with the tone of a patient teacher correcting a child so utterly wrong it was endearing.
Balfour countered with Psychical Spiritualism: Shimmering ghosts in expensive clothes gathered around him.
"You speak of soil and water, Lord Curzon, as if matter were of any real importance. Man's existence is a brief and transitory episode on one of the meanest of planets. The Earth itself will go tideless and inert."
Balfour's demeanour dismissed everything else as insignificant. Chadt had seen this arrogance too much in his own time. His fingers pressed deep into the ornate doorframe.
"Our measure cannot be the material. I anchor our policy in a moral law, immutable, eternal. In its governance alone do spirits find their true freedom."
Balfour denied reality with a whimsical smile. Curzon's clean-shaven lips trembled under the blow.
Chadt held his breath.
The rigid bureaucrat rummaged hastily through mountains of papers, foraging for something solid to hold on to. He finally found it, and brandished a Census of the Victims: The sharp mechanical click of a calculator echoed.
"You speak of souls, Mr. Balfour. Let me offer a count. Seven hundred thousand Arabs already live there. All accounted for right here. You are promising someone else's home."
The cold number sank deep in Chadt's chest. It barely made a dent in Balfour's aloofness.
Balfour smoothed a hand over his overly oiled hair, tucking a white strand into place. His high-pitched voice was flat when he responded:
"The weak point of our position, of course, is that we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination."
Chadt's body turned stiff.
Balfour chuckled and invoked Race Theory: The gaslights dimmed, drowning the room in half-shadow.
"But men are not born equal. I am sorry if that offends the modern sensibility, but it is a fact."
Heat climbed up Chadt's neck. His nails bit into the painted wood. Balfour examined his own fingers as he continued unperturbed:
"The white and black races are not born with equal capacities. You cannot build a policy on the fiction that every soul weighs the same."
The floor began rumbling under Chadt's feet. The politicians did not seem to mind.
"We have to stop him," Chadt determined.
"We can't," replied the angel. "It has already happened. If they kick us out we'll have to start over."
The walls fractured. Outside the window, thick black clouds poured a crimson rain.
"Please," Tian advised. "Stay calm."
Portraits fell from the walls all around them.
"Calm? Do you even hear these men? How many hundreds of thousands lives was it?"
"I know," whimpered Tian. "But there is nothing we can do..."
On the other side of the door, the old gentlemen carried on, oblivious to the ongoing collapse of their environment.
Curzon was struggling to maintain composure. The metal corset that usually elevated his presence now made his silhouette look monstrous in the red ambient glow.
Curzon grabbed a paper, took a deep breath, and brandished Cascading Violence Predictions: Blood seeped through the wall cracks.
"I must insist. All you are doing is provoking bloodshed. And not in Palestine alone."
The gaslights flickered. Yet the words kept coming.
"Every government on the Continent will have the pretext it wants. You are stamping every Jew a stranger in their own countries. You are giving their persecutors a conscience. Heaven knows they endure enough already."
Curzon marked a calculated pause for emphasis. He shot a discreet glance at the Prime Minister, who remained as stonefaced as ever. Trapped in their own scene, neither of them noticed blood crawling up their chairs. The bureaucrat concluded:
"You are not solving the Jewish question. You're drowning it in never-ending violence!"
Curzon sank back in his chair, exhausted. The calibrated line failed to elicit any reaction from his slouched opponent.
Around the intruders, the other rooms vanished in a blur of colors. The crimson liquid was pooling at their feet.
"I want to leave," Chadt begged.
"You have to stay."
There was a flicker of panic in Tian's voice.
Arthur Balfour finally leaned forward. He still looked out of place, like a carefree professor in the middle of serious politicians.
He rested his chin on steepled fingers and revealed his Antisemitic Deportation Aspiration: All light and color vanished, leaving vague shapes in darkness.
"My dear Lord Curzon, you do dramatise so. It's no different from the position of an Englishman who leaves his country for the United States."
He punctuated his explanation with a hollow laugh.
"Except, of course, that in the present position of Jewry, the assimilation was often felt to be incomplete. The Jew remains a people apart, only intermarried among themselves."
Nausea built up in Chadt. The warm liquid slithered up the skin of his legs.
"We gain no advantage in harboring people of divided loyalty. Our civilization has too long been tormented by the presence in its midst of a body which it regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Our declaration solves this for good."
Chadt was suffocating.
A loud rumble erupted. The room shattered down around them.
The blood covered Chadt's hands. It pressed upon his chest. It squeezed his throat.
"We're losing connection," screamed Tian somewhere.
The last of the ministers drowned.
Paintings lurched in an infinite red sea.
"Breathe."
Chadt couldn't.
The crimson liquid was filling his lungs. He tried to rub his hands, but his body did not answer.
There was no more body, there was only the blood.
Then, from somewhere, a touch against his hand.
Something electric, both cold and warm, impossibly alien. And in front of his face, a reassuring smile, and azure wavy hair.
"I know it's hard. But we must bear witness."
The words were soothing. Those that came after had a different ring:
"You have to see it."
The turmoil had quieted, but the Imaginary Plane was holding by a thread.
Chadt and Tian were swimming in a warm liquid, in a sea of splintered portraits. A few steps away, the oval table ebbed with the currents, occasionally blinking out of existence. The imperial magistrates on their chairs floated around, entirely busy staring at each other.
For a while, not much moved. The silence was only disturbed by the noise of the waves and the wheezing breath of Curzon.
The exhausted bureaucrat had shrunk significantly under the sharp gaze of the Prime Minister. He could still reach the table, though.
He grabbed a final document with a trembling, childlike hand.
Curzon gathered his strength and recalled the McMahon-Hussein Pledge: A long-forgotten perfume filled the air.
"Mr. Balfour, we agree on more than you think."
The shaky voice was barely audible.
"I concede the paramount strategic importance of securing Jewish goodwill. But you are raising expectations you cannot fulfil, playing with fire on the most dangerous powder keg in the world."
Curzon swallowed with difficulty. The waves were intensifying, under a glacial howl carrying countless screams.
"Our priority must be retaining the Christian and Moslem Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. We can't alienate our assets in the region. We already purchased them with the same promise!"
Chadt's heart sank as the waves rose higher. For Curzon too, people were nothing more than chips in a game. They did agree on more than they thought.
"How are we to keep any control if our word counts for nothing? We are gentlemen, Mr. Balfour. Our word is meant to hold. If it does not, then what are we?"
For the first time, Balfour was taken aback. His face twisted as he tried to recall the precise terms of the McMahon-Hussein Pledge. His chair bucked like a mad beast.
The dark clouds had come back with thunder and fury. The wind sent sharp splinters lashing everyone's faces.
"Focus, Chadt," ordered Tian. "Don't fail me. It is almost time. I don't want to have to try again."
Something in Chadt snapped.
The words.
The gap between the words.
Between Tian's words and Chadt's experiences.
Between the old men's words and the lives they wrote off.
Between his own words and the thoughts they failed to grasp.
The gap between so many different words and the one same reality.
But there was no reality.
There was only blood.
Balfour's eyes lit up.
He rose on his seat.
Fear flashed in Curzon's eyes.
Torrents of blood poured down a never-ending pit.
The Prime Minister pointed at Chadt.
The envelope burned.
Chadt screamed.
Space fractured.
An all-consuming gap devoured everything.
Words dissolved.