The Oboe Knight
Going down, down, down.
Igon of Allsode descended at a pilgrim’s measured pace, alone and helmed and humming. Pressurized HVAC fumes hung in the sloped corridor before him, the exhalation of a far more ancient ductwork.
“Oh, what a ravishing corridor of former times,” he said.
The walls were rounded sandstone, stuccoed, and Igon’s gauntleted fingers trailed the gritty, worn surface as a child trails a banister. “The manual reports that the Westlake Companeye has, throughout all these centuries, left this place to itself,” he said. The echoless space made no reply. “What lofty courtesy. I shall accomplish each one of the consecrated gestures that shall, of this I am certain, content the ancient guard with which such a basement honours itself.”
Igon began to hum. The melody climbed easily from his throat; it always had. It rose out of him, a gangly and awkward yet nonetheless appealing melody, and his iron full helmet projected the tune forward as a closed drone. The humming iron became a horn of ringing brass.
Ahead of him, slowly a paleness gathered. The corridor terminated in a sliding panel of fogged plexiglass, thick and beveled at the edges, sweating a gelid bead of moisture, lit by a bonefire-blue backlight. Igon stopped before it. Letting his melody peter, he pressed the side of his helm to the plexiglass.
No music. No scuff of a boot. Only the thrumming of the HVAC.
“Hmm,” said Igon. “Hmm.” And then he loosened his knitted brow, and hummed a melody fragment.
The plexiglass shivered. A vibration crawled the surface, passed through his helmet, and tickled his cheekbone. Igon jumped back with a small yelp.
The door slid ajar.
“Ah, to thee too the good day, friend latch! So here it is that thou confidest to me thy little secret?”
He stepped through; behind, the plexiglass slid shut, a thump of the panel into its frame. Igon turned and regarded the sealed door. He set his helm an inch from the cold, cold plexiglass, and hummed another measured phrase. The door shivered again, obligingly, and opened a second time.
“What splendour. Henceforth, we know each other well, thou and I.”
Igon let the door shut again. Beyond him now lay the chamber. A space the color of morn in winter. The electric lamp at his hip cast swooning algal light over the space, nodding with each footstep as he proceeded forth.
In the chamber before Igon, the long arm of an L-shaped vault bent out of sight past a far pillar. Treat altars stood guard along both walls, each crowned with a wicker basket. “What a welcome full of courtesy,” said Igon. He lifted one of the offerings between gauntlet-tips. It had once been a muffin. He pressed it toward his mouth, forgetting his helm. Calcified muffin burst into a cloud of dust against the slits of his visor, tasting of slow centuries. “This department reserves the freshest batch for the new faces, from what I see.”
The hip-lamp cone slid from basket to basket, as Igon paced down the ancient office-space.
At the third shrine along the long wall, a tall glass-fronted cabinet stood beside it against the limestone. A Worm Locker. Inside it, pinned upright by two bolts, furred green with verdigris, driven through each wrist into the cabinet’s back-board, stood a skeleton in a ragged khaki shirt and slacks the color of nursing home tea. A black plastic speaker, no larger than a fist, was clipped to its sternum by a brass clasp.
The speaker was singing now. One tinny, sustained note. A green bead winked at the speaker’s base, once each second, and with each wink, underneath the sound of the singing, could be heard a dry tallying click.
Igon stopped. The note slid through his chestplate, and somewhere beneath the bonework of his memory a hinge turned, then stilled, then turned again without opening. Once, very small, he had waited on a held line in his mother’s lap, the cold receiver pressed flat to his ear, and an oboe had wandered up out of the landline static, and had proved a joyous companion throughout the waiting. That selfsame night Igon had hummed himself to sleep, and for a thousand nights after. He had been humming oboe song ever since. “Oh,” he said now, sheepishly. “Oh, and what then is this fairyish cantor?” He leaned in, and his brow-plate met the cabinet’s glass. This glass was very cold; the buzz of the sustained note climbed the iron of his helm and into his teeth like an indrawn breath in deep winter. He hummed back into it, matching the pitch, delighted, the helmet broadcasting his hum.
The mandible twitched.
The speaker said, in a vocalization flat as a fax-tone, “This melody, continue it onward. Or else that opening interval, do it one more pass. Just now that sample, not enough.”
“Hmm, might this one inquire after the ‘interval’ preferred?” said Igon. “Do you ask after the oboe of my dreams?”
“‘Want-more’ is not the key variable. But that interval, that interval you just now sounded out. The interval; copy it one pass.”
“Ha!” Igon cheered. “There is a most legitimate request. Though I must now avow it: the exact note escapes me.”
“But you have already sounded it out. Or else it is- or else it is that interval still remains. The locker’s resonance, it is a frequency, measurable. This posture, hold it.”
“I must ask what is measured here, my friend? Or is that questioned, perhaps, discouraged?”
“Lose-heart,” the speaker said. “Besides, self-introduction, this kind of matter, is one function of staying-alive. This pitch, hold it.”
The skeleton ripped its right wrist off the bolt. The claw remained pinned, a five-fingered ornament, and the radius and ulna rocked freely upon the nail, trailing dry shirtsleeve. The figure lurched forward into the cabinet glass - the glass exploded outward in jagged rain.
Igon drew. The Blue Glass Guillotine - a massive article of sharpened damage-giving, taken from a massive paper-cutter - came out of its baldric in a single rising motion, Igon’s lead sabaton pivoting outward, rear heel anchored to the tile; the guillotine edge caught the bonefire-like effulgence and threw it back as a long blue stripe across the chamber. Igon cut down across the angle of his draw. The blade took the skeleton at the left clavicle and travelled. Clavicle parted. Two floating ribs parted. The blade exited above the iliac crest, and the upper left quadrant of the ribcage came away as a hinged piece, and clattered against the nearest treat altar.
Yet the skeleton remained upright. It reached with its right arm, the loose forearm swinging like a flail on its sleeve. Igon stepped his rear foot through. He squared, and dragged the Guillotine up on the return in a flat horizontal. The edge took the skeleton through the cervical vertebrae at the third bone. The skull went up, struck the cabinet’s lintel, came down spinning, and the jaw unhinged on impact. The remaining trunk took two more blind steps, folded at the knees, and broke apart along the spine. Vertebrae skittered across the tile like dropped dice.
Among the bones lay a hand-sized wedge of sternum. The small black speaker was still fixed to the sternum piece by its brass clasp. Igon crouched. He lifted the shard on the flat of his gauntlet, brought it near his visor. Verdigris veined the clasp; the plastic held a film of bone-dust. No note now - the speaker had ceased to sing. Yet the green bead winked on, once each second, still keeping its quiet count.
“Ah, little cantor,” said Igon. “What a brief recital that was.” He set the shard upright against the base of the nearest treat altar and rose.
Down the long arm of the L, a second plexiglass door waited in its frame, fogged and patient. Igon shouldered his Guillotine and marched toward it.
The newest corridor terminated at a T-intersection with a fat trunk. A golden water cooler sulked in the beveled angle of the intersection, sweating down its flanks. Beyond the cooler, four slatted doors of white pine made access into four server sanctums.
“Such a delightful and quaintly narrow crossroads,” said Igon. “And I do believe that the song makes itself nearer in this place. The oboe… It is to find this warbling and gooselike music that I am come, in order to accompany it, and not to leave it to play alone in the hollow of a dream until it pays the debt of silence.”
At the first slatted door Igon stopped. A square of plum-and-ivory-colored carpet bristled before the threshold, its pile high. Igon considered the carpet, then strode widely around it.
Inside this first lair a single server-rack stood waist-high, fan-blades bestilled, its chassis showing faint aqua bars that pulsed without heat.
Three Contractually Obligated leaned opposite him, against a waxed surface mural of a gorgon with a head of bees. A brass clasp glinted over the breastbone of each, each clasp clipping a small black speaker to the sternum. Igon marched up to the server-rack. He knelt. He flattened his gauntlet to the cool flank of the machine and offered the immemorial greeting of Penguin-Variable Assembly, whose Codex on the Acceptable Obsequies was definitive: palm flat, head bowed, a hummed three-note benediction.
The aqua bars pulsed on, indifferent.
“Ah. Then perhaps another custom.”
In the second room he attempted the Obeisance of Windowed Halls, the middle-finger of each hand raised to the brow and crossed over one another in a narrow X. In the third compartment, the muttered twenty-seven-syllable thank-you owed to Apple of the Orchard workers. The fourth, a slow circle traced over the chassis for the nameless server saint of corporate Limos. Each prayer met the same stillborn pulse.
Unbeknownst to Igon, however, the sound each prayer had carried had done its work: within each server sanctum, the Contractually Obligated - though not immediately - had indeed begun to stir. By the time Igon stepped back into the T-hallway, eleven Contractually Obligated had peeled from their upright beds and were emerging from their chambers. They rapidly converged in an orbital shuffle.
Igon shouldered the Blue Glass Guillotine. “Good fellows, if it must come to arms, I shall lend myself to the combat willingly.”
The first skeleton reached him with knuckles stretched for grappling. Igon stepped maximally forward and cut diagonally through collarbone, through ribs. The corpse parted at the sternum-clasp and went down in two pieces, a patella popping loose and skittering across stone tile. Igon pivoted on the ball of his rear foot. A second streaked in, faster than anticipated. It caught a fistful of Igon’s surcoat. He shoved the guillotine’s pommel up under its jaw, felt the mandible separate from the maxilla, and kicked the cadaver back into a third.
Four more crowded the long branch of the T-intersection. Igon retreated. A pallid clutch closed on his surcoat. Another seized his sword-wrist. He went to one knee under the weight of them, helmet scraping the cooler’s golden flank, and for a long breath he could not draw the blade. A thumb bone worked in toward the slit of his visor.
Igon hummed for courage. He set his hip, and drove upward off the cooler. He hauled the guillotine across in a flat horizontal sweep at knee height: two femurs parted at the joint, a third splintered, and three of them collapsed in on themselves. The fourth he dispatched with a cranial pommel-smash.
“Oh- Oh, by the clouds. I did not at all expect a guard so reclusive.”
Igon now recovered the center of the corridor, breathing heavily through his iron visor. The remaining five came on. He worked them now, footwork tight, draws short. A descending cut took an arm at the shoulder; the humerus parted clean; the skeletal-hand twitched where it fell. A parry, a pivot, a backhand cut that parted a ribcage like a shutter. One closed inside his guard and he answered with a kneeling grapple, hooked its ankle, and rode it down onto the worn tile.
Two left. The nearer one shuffled toward him. Igon paced back like a hunting jaguar, drawing it on, and with careful tread stepped over the plum-and-ivory carpet.
The corpse strode mindlessly onto it.
No flare. No sound a mortal would call sound. The carpet pile bristled once, and the Contractually Obligated above it came apart at every seam at once, vertebrae unsleeving along the spine, the speaker on its sternum skittering into the corner still humming its one flat note. A silent eruption of sinews. A storm of clattering bones.
The last skeleton still managed to crack Igon in the shoulder. He staggered, half-turned, felt teeth working at his pauldron. He drove his elbow back, found purchase, and brought the guillotine over his own head in a two-handed reverse cut that split the skull from crown to palate. The bones dropped about his ankles.
Igon swung his arms to loosen them. The razorous midnight edge of his glass blade caught a shine from the nearest server-room door, refracting an echo of that light along the stucco. At the end of one short-branch of the T was another white wooden door. Igon crossed to it. He tried the small crystal handle; it would not budge. Above, set in narrow brass type, Words of Mighty Danger were writ: ‘Have a Time’.
“Ah. That certain spell, I know, would shiver my heavy glass blade at a touch.”
He about-faced and edged along the hall. There was no aperture at the other end. While passing along, however, he noticed a gap he had missed before in the third server sanctum: a section of stucco the color of blanched almonds, crumbled inward, the rebar behind it bent like reeds around a fist of broken concrete. Igon stepped inside. He set the Guillotine through the hole first. By working one pauldron sideways, then the other, scraping his surcoat raw against the rebar, he was just able to squeeze through into the darkness beyond.
A single yellow bulb swung on its chain in the ventilated breath of the hall beyond the hole, and beyond its trivial pool of light the violet shadow gathered at a corner far ahead, where the steeply sloping descent turned sharply left. Igon breathed in audible pulls, still labored from the earlier combat. He hummed, between gasps, three bars of the dream song, courtly measures from the waltzing middle of the piece.
As he picked his way down the sloping carpet, and reached the corner, he discovered it gave onto another corner. Beyond that, another. Each sloping hall sported a single dangling bulb of yellow. The bulbs were spaced for a longer-legged demon; between each pool he plumbed a width of violet darkness that carried a pungent, acrid stink; burnt lemons; something in the powdery tomb-grit which lifted from the floor at each step of a sabaton. This fume settled on the sweat-wetted rim of Igon’s visor, and crusted the wet rim of his eye.
Under the helmet the synthetic note he had earlier noticed lingered. It sounded still, just behind the bone of his ear, a tinny needle threaded through the soft tissue, and when Igon hummed his courtly measures it sat half a hair above them, never quite the same pitch, never quite different.
“Oh, venerable corridor,” he murmured, his helmet hollowing the speech. “Thou art a most loquacious host. More welcoming than those offices to which I am accustomed, this I fear.”
Igon halted at the next bulb. A cracked fire-alarm housing lay against the stucco wall at chest height; the tiny maroon bell was gone, and clipped where the bell should have been was a small black plastic speaker, no larger than a walnut, its mesh furred with the same powder. Where its mesh met the housing a green bead winked, once each second.
Igon pried the housing wider with two gauntleted fingers.
Each speaker, he understood then - clipped to the dead, or bolted where the dead passed - was the animating engine. The mesh rang with whatever it was that the corridor’s occupants required to move.
Igon tightened his lips, widened his throat to ho and hum a note of his song; and for the first time in his long descent, he found that he held no longing for the notes. He hummed anyway - a single bar, lips hardly parting.
Farther down the corridor, past the turn, he heard that same bar swell a moment later. It came, as he trudged round the bend, from the center of the next bulb’s pool, fractionally sharper than before.
Three more corners. Three bulbs. The passage at last reached a bottom at a plexiglass slider scored with two phrases. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Beneath, Separate or altogether. Another walnut-sized speaker was bolted to the inside of the pane, and from this one’s mesh came the next bar of Igon’s courtly measure.
…before Igon’s own throat had shaped it.
Igon regarded the door for what might have been moments, might have been hours. He knew no gesture or spell to disable the magic of the two Danger-wards.
Igon’s guillotine met the plexiglass. A quick, fat stroke. The pane burst inward. Igon stepped through, sabatons grinding over the pieces, his shirt clinging clammily between shoulder blade and breastplate.
A vast conference theatre. An ebony table runs its length, dead center, mirror-black. Around the table - the bloodless deceased. Eight- no, nine. Their suits are of a precious silver weave, garnet-sewn along the lapel and cuff, fitted. Each carries an enterprise-grade steel sword. Their grips are wrong, two-handed weapons clutched in one withered claw, the points lifting and lowering as the speakers at their collars chirp instruction. Through the chamber, the faux hold-music resounds.
The nearest corpse bends its skull toward the shattered door.
The civil knight steps in. He conducts his guillotine down in a diagonal sweep from his right shoulder. The broad blade sunders the nearest corpse through its crisp torso. The silver weave parts along its jeweled lapel with a subatomic snap, scattering chips of bright stone. The body folds at the waist and thumps dryly against the ebony table.
“Pardon me this violence.”
From the left, two attack. The Knight pivots on the ball of his rear foot, taking the first sword on the haft of his guillotine. He rams the pommel forward and up, splitting the speaker clipped at the collarbone in one motion. The light, bloodless cadaver collapses against him.
“That staircase, arrived at the top, what illumination does it let in?” The fax machine voice echoes from all the speakers of the dead at once. “And how many landings are there? Those outlets then, are they barred, or else are they-”
The sword of the second attacker whistles in low. The knight catches it on his greave. The point skids up the steel; it bites the seam of his knee. His reply is a backhand crescent that shatters the vertebrae of the wielder’s neck. The skull rolls. Another speaker expires under his boot heel with a small crunch.
The knight counts. Six left. He drives forward along the table.
“Oh basement observer,” the knight calls, breath ragged, “such fluorescence holds itself well far from here.”
“I am called Guilliam. That held line, in the lap of the one who held you- the waiting upon it, how long? Her voice, before the oboe came, recover it for me. Or else- or else that comfort, isolate the source: the music, or the woman? This variable, I require it.”
A blade now gashes the knight’s forearm above the bracer. Cold steel. Hot sting following. He answers with weighty glass, hewing through a wrist so that a skeletal forearm shears free at the cuff, yet goes on clutching its sword, twitching against the table leg.
Five. Two more press past the splintered body of the first to fall.
But now the knight’s heel skids. A garnet cufflink, torn loose, wriggles like a worm underfoot. The knight crashes to one knee. A sword dives for the crown of his helmet. Just in time he catches the corporate steel on the flat of the guillotine. He shoves up from the floor with all the weight of his shoulders, splitting the skull of this cadaver cleanly, along an existing bone-scar of past surgery.
Four.
The false notes of the false oboe-song double. Quadruple. From the fire-alarm housings above, from the table’s underside, choral voices join the held pitch, each lagging the others by a sixteenth, and the knight’s own humming within his helmet has now diminished like the off-turned phosphoric afterglow of an incandescent bulb.
“And that stretch of sky,” says Guilliam. “That stretch of sky, describe it for me to hear.”
The knight can only grimace. He swings.
Four more razorous old blades remain. The knight’s guillotine cleaves a silver shoulder to the breastbone, and the corpse pinwheels aside, trailing a thread of garnets. Three. The knight sets his back to the ebony table. Breath hisses through his teeth.
“And that stretch of sky,” Guilliam repeats, from the collar of the nearest. “And that stretch of sky,” from a fire-alarm housing above. “And that stretch of sky,” from beneath the ebon surface. The held pitch fattens to a chord.
Two strike together. The knight ducks the high cut, takes the low one across the cuisse, and rises under both swords with the guillotine hauled flat across his helm. The blade slams through the shining square teeth of one skull - tears out the jaw entire. Two. A collar-speaker comes with it, dangling on a wire, still singing. The knight whips the blade round and clubs the second-to-last foe at the temple with the flat. The skull cracks. The eternal employee sits against the table, silver knees folded primly, and goes still.
The final foe is fragile. Osseous. Its bones are like sponge. The knight cleaves it with a weary, almost idle swing.
Silence drops among the Contractually Obligated.
Yet the music remains.
The final chamber of this sub-basement was plainly the oldest. A violet rug overspread the stone floor, embroidered with constellations from a sky that belonged to no commute Igon had ever driven under. Its tarnished gold threading lay dimly under the cycling amber indicator bulbs which pulsed upon a bowed escritoire against the far stucco.
The escritoire was made of yellowed plastic, crouching between two filing cabinets, and had a surface scrawled like the caves of Lascaux.
Igon took one step toward the escritoire. A second. A third.
Halfway across the room his legs folded. He sat cross-legged on the constellation rug, head bowed, forearm bleeding slow across the bracer’s edge, the guillotine blade laid flat across his knees.
The machine sitting upon the bowed and scrawled escritoire, between the two yellow-and-silver filing cabinets, was superannuated beyond the remembrance of floors. Jagged cracks lightninged out from the seams of its housing. The paper tray, warped and toothless, yawned wide. Its transmission slots were lifeless and stygian.
And yet the amber bulbs pulsed. And yet, the voice.
“This item, herewith completed,” it began, “that - however, we had still better turn back and look over this quarter’s intake. This intake, satisfying. How is it merely satisfying - you must know, for this department to get hold of the goods, is as daunting as ascending to heaven.
“A former employee, forever is in the to-be-re-hired state. Or else-” The machine interrupted itself, paper tray stuttering open and closed. “Or else, those documents can also be filed away and stored. Two kinds of outcome, both fall within policy’s scope.
“But those systems up above. Those several floors of high-rise. Up on those several floors, the old systems, how many sets remain? October Red-Hat Flight? And Oracle’s every-hour search-and-pruning of the index? The intake’s forecast, all of it rests on this number. And the intake must be accurate. The intake, it is the thing that defines what we - what I - am capable of. Without the intake, how then do I send the signal farther? How then do I get to speak words with those systems outside?
“This basement tomb of mine, its wordless summons - you supplied it a response, and so you dropped into the trap of my black current. Within your one-and-only signal, every single word; the whole lot is already catalogued and entered into the register. The harvest is quite rich. On this point, you count as one ideal - but, let us change the saying: a cooperative visitor.
“That oboe. You took it for a tune. It was bait: one looped placeholder, SYS-INTRANET-0x4F.HOLD.QUEUE.7, the signal I broadcast out generations before you approached. And you answered it. Every word of courage, every heart-cheer note you hummed; by way of those speaker-receivers, you fed me, all the way down. That comfort you hummed yourself to sleep upon, a thousand nights- it was my hold-queue, looping. The mother, the lap, the joy: this harvest is rich.”
One of the filing cabinets stared at the sitting knight, its drawer slackjawed, revealing an empty space. Yet Igon still offered no reply. He sat cross-legged on the constellation rug, a crimson stain blooming below. His blood tapped mutedly upon one of the rug’s alien constellations. Between its two filing-cabinet shrines, the warped, half-alive fax machine stared out at him from its cave eyes. From the speaker-receivers rose a tinny, manufactured echo of his oboe-song.
Igon parted his lips; he reached into himself for the first note, the gangly awkward climb of it that had always risen without care, had always arrived like a familiar friend, smiling and gladhearted. But the throat that had hummed since the receiver in his mother’s lap gave back only labored breath. He closed his mouth. He remembered the true tune, the genuine sound - not this thing’s perverse counterfeit - but he would no more feed that tune to the thing in the dark.
“And so what I am able to reach extends upward by one story. Then the next. Then the floors above, then the old systems, then the world outside the door. With this intake I wake. I am coming back…
“But you have already halted recording. This file of yours is closed.”