“Wait a mo,” Nijel said, as droplets of condensed fog flew off his hair in his excitement, “only virgins are allowed tay cross the Fallic Bridge.”
Brianna snorted. “Fallic Bridge? Are you serious?”
“Fallic is one of our most important gods, I’ll have ye know,” piped up Roopert. “He is the three legged diety of entrances and exits and this is his bridge. Now show some respect.”
To Roopert’s extreme discomfort, Brianna was heaving with laughter. “Well, I’ll say this for your clan, you have a sense of humour.”
“I said, this island is for virgins only,” Nijel repeated, wagging an accusing finger at Brianna, “how do we know you’re, um, unsullied?”
Cevin nudged Nijel in the ribs. “Aye, ye make a fair point indeed. She is a bonny looking lass. Hard to imagine she’s escaped the clutches of some lucky young lad.”
“Well, for starters your chief took my word for it and, for desserts, how do I know you’re virgins? I mean, with personalities like yours, and you being such fine figures of, um, men, the lasses must be lining up.”
There was a general shuffling of feet as the three guards calculated whether Brianna was genuinely complimenting them or mercilessly taking the piss. Realism won out in the end.
“Oh, ha ha,” Roopert said, “but, anyway, I mean to say…”
“What he’s trying to say is that we’re the guards, you know. Big responsibility…” added Cevin.
“We’ll be girl magnets when we return from our tour of duty.”
Brianna smiled and puffed out her chest. When she was in Velicity’s company, she went pretty much unnoticed, but here, on a little island with this audience, she was a goddess and they her willing acolytes.
“So, who’s going to show me where this portal is, then?”
If only the three of them could have put as much effort into being soldiers as they did arguing, they’d make decent guards, thought Brianna. Cevin took first dibs as he’d been the one to originally challenge her, but Nijel suggested they fight for the right and Roopert’s contribution was to loom over the other two, stoking the flames. In the end, Cevin’s suggestion that they use the traditional (amongst nerds) method of settling the argument prevailed. And so Brianna watched as several rounds of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock eliminated first Nijel and then, in a thrilling match-off, Roopert made the mistake of pitting his Spock against Cevin’s Lizard.
“I got the girl!” Cevin bellowed - the one and only time in his life he would be able to use those words. Then he looked at Brianna’s rock-like expression and shivered. “But, of course, I only meant, I mean to say, that I won the honour, the signal honour, of being privileged to accompany y…”
“Shut up and show me the portal,” Brianna said.
Cevin who, if anything, was even more enthused by being spoken to so severely, waved Brianna to follow him as he wobbled his way towards the centre of the little island which, it turned out, was around 50 yards away.
“Well, that was an arduous journey,” Brianna snarked.
Cevin bowed, his double chins slapping together in his haste. “We have come to the ancient heart of our realm where, legend tells, the forefathers of our clan fought with the demons of the otherworld and forced them back whence they came.”
As he straightened up, Brianna spotted these hallowed words embroidered into the inside of his silken shirt sleeve.
“So, where’s the portal, then?”
Cevin huffed and flounced his way into the gorse bushes, wincing as one of them sprang back. After a few seconds bush wrestling, he gestured at a spot on the ground.
Brianna looked down. There, embedded firmly in the rocky soil, was the remains of an archway. It looked as though it had been tipped over centuries ago, and, although it had landed almost entirely intact, it had since filled with mud and stones. Tree roots had crept between the stones forcing them further apart.
“When did the portal last open?” she asked flatly.
Cevin puffed himself up, before taking a surreptitious look at his sleeve. “It was in the year of Flimbard the Bold,” he announced before, catching the look in Brianna’s eye, “five hundred and fifty-three years ago”.
“And has it changed at all in appearance in recent times?”
“Well, we brush it every day, but apart from that, no. Now, since you’ve seen it, could ye just pay your toll and leave?”
“What?”
Cevin wobbled. “It’s just that, visitors are supposed to pay after they see the portal. Like a sort of offering to the, err, gods.”
“Fallic, for example?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Cevin said, beginning to unravel.
Brianna sighed. “This is a fake portal isn’t it?”
“What? Of course not!”
“It’s a tourist scam,” Brianna sighed, “no real portal would be guarded by such a group of utter incompetents. Some chieftain came up with a scam to enrich himself and created this entire pantomime, didn’t he?”
“No!” Cevin’s face had gone purple and Brianna realised, with a cold shock, that he had believed it all and was, only now, beginning to see that he’d been duped.
“Look,” Brianna said, “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t. It’s not you I’m angry with, you’re just an innocent boy caught up in someone else’s evil plot …”
She paused for a moment and stood, swaying slightly, as Cevin froze like a deer caught by the gamekeeper nibbling at his lordship’s nuts. “... I have to go after him,” she said.
“Go after who?” Cevin’s face had resumed its naturally pallid complexion as he realised he was no longer in the crosshairs.
But she wasn’t listening. Cevin watched as she ran back towards the bridge, bits of her wobbling in ways that would feed his dreams for years to come, until she was enveloped in the mist.
Chapter 31
CHORTLEY FITZMICHAEL IGNORED THE SOUNDS of tramping boots in the corridor outside. He was sharing a cell with McGuff and Clegg and each of them had been hauled away for a form of questioning made up largely of a surfeit of pain and an absence of questions. Chortley was, by this point, past giving a toss - he only hoped that, this time, they’d be coming for one of the others.
Brief cries from outside heralded the clamour of metal on metal, followed immediately by a double thud on the outside of the door. A door that then exploded inwards, showering the occupants with splinters.
“We go!” Thun roared through the apocalypse.
Yanked from his half-slumber, Chortley leapt up, half dragging Clegg off the one bed and pushing him towards the door. Wordlessly they followed the barbarian through the dark corridors, followed by Epocrypha who was checking for pursuers.
“Wait!” Chortley hissed.
They halted and gathered round.
“Begging your pardon, Cap’n, but we must be going. They’ll be after us soon, sure they will be,” Epocrypha whispered.
Chortley sighed and said words he never thought he’d hear himself utter. “I can’t leave my sister.”
“Is that the sister who ordered us to be tortured?” Clegg muttered.
“I’m not asking anyone else to come, but I have to help her. This mess hasn’t been entirely her fault and I need to know what that hobgoblin’s game is.”
Chortley was a man who saw the world in terms of (mainly) black and (occasionally) white, but the fate of his sister went beyond that. She was family and, though the default position of one Fitzmichael to another is generally somewhere between disdain and loathing, heavens help anyone from outside the family who picked a fight with one.
McGuff tried to snap a salute, but could barely bend his arm. “I’ll go with you sir,” he said.
Chortley shook his head. “You’re in no condition, sergeant. Go with Epocrypha and wait for us…” He turned to the Fanni. “I assume you have a rendezvous point?”
“Oh yes, sir. There’s a boat waiting for us on the docks - it’ll be headin’ out with the tide just after daybreak.�
��
“Hold on a minute, what about me?” Clegg said from somewhere in Thun’s orbit.
“You’re volunteering to come.”
Clegg’s shoulders slumped. He looked up at the barbarian’s face grinning at him in the half-light. “Oh.”
Chortley scanned the dark corridor for anything he could recognise. No, he had a nasty suspicion he was in the areas frequented by servants which had been, until now, invisible to him. “Hold on,” he said, as he squinted from side to side, “I can smell something foul down that way. It’s either the kitchens or the servant’s privy, neither of which will be near my sister’s quarters. We’ll head the other way.”
Epocrypha gestured to McGuff to follow him towards the smell. “Come on, Sarge, this is the way out, I knows it.”
As the oik went, Chortley grabbed his shoulder. “Hold on, private, I have a question for you.”
“Oh yes, sir?” Epocrypha responded, his face frozen in terror.
“Who sent you?”
Chortley’s mind had only just become functional enough to turn to this matter and it irked him. Thun and Epocrypha would have known where they were heading, at least in general, but they wouldn’t have disobeyed his order to wait for them.
Epocrypha relaxed. “That’s easy, it was a gentleman by the name of Ignis, Ignis Bel. He said you’d be in trouble by now and we was to go and fetch you.”
“Did he indeed?” Chortley said, sounding out every word.
“Well, yessir. He seemed to know our business, so he did. And he was quite persuasive. Had the bearing of a gentleman he did,” Epocrypha stammered. “And he was right, after all, wasn’t he?”
Chortley’s mouth didn’t move as he replied. “Apparently,” he said, then slunk off along the corridor without looking back.
He became more confident as he reached the more salubrious parts of the building, the bits with gilt embellishments and velvet cushioned chairs45. This was familiar territory, places he’d haunted since birth. They arrived, finally, at an ornate stairway that led to the staterooms on the upper floor. Oddly, the guards he’d expected to find at the foot of the stairs weren’t there. A chill speared through his stomach. “Come on!” he said, gesturing to the others to follow him as he sprang up the stairs, all caution gone.
She was lying on the bed, gagged and bound, looking like nothing more than a skinny, frightened, child. When she caught sight of him as he leant over her, she squealed and tried to shrink away.
“It’s alright,” Chortley said, with a gentleness that surprised even him, “I’m not going to hurt you.” He pulled the gag down and quickly slit the ropes binding her hands and feet together. “What’s happened here?”
Aggrapella went to open her mouth and then spotted Thun looming over Chortley’s shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s on our side,” Chortley said.
“Pretty lady hurt?” the barbarian managed. “Thun kick shit out of him what done it.”
“That’s the most he’s ever said in one go,” Clegg said, joining them at the bedside, “you seem to have made an impression, my lady.”
Chortley sighed. “I imagine it goes with the territory, you know, rescuing damsels in distress. Although if he thinks my sister is your typical princess he’s seriously mistaken.” He looked back down at Aggrapella to find her making doe eyes at her massive rescuer. “Look, we haven’t got time for this. What’s going on?”
Aggrapella’s momentary good humour vanished. “It was that hunchback!” she spat. “Him and his two stooges. They trapped the household guard in the dungeon, then tied me up!”
“Where’s he gone?”
Aggrapella shrugged. “I don’t know. He said something about the time being right and finding his master. He seemed incredibly pleased, the little traitor!” She went to stand up and collapsed back on the bed.
“What he do to you?” Thun asked.
“Oh it wasn’t him, it was that slimeball de Grey. I think he had other intentions for me, but I kicked him in the privates and he hit me.”
Chortley straightened up. “How long ago?”
“I don’t know,” Aggrapella said, “a couple of hours maybe.”
“Come on,” Chortley said, heading towards the door.
Aggrapella leaned up on her elbows. “I want to come!” she said.
“You can’t walk,” Chortley responded, without looking, “we need to move fast. I’ll come back for you.”
“No!” Agrappella cried. “I want to see the bastards pay!”
Thun lumbered over to the bed. “Thun carry,” he said before picking her up gently. She lay in his arms as if relaxing in a garden hammock, a look of adoration on her face that was enhanced when she caught sight of his chiselled pecs.
“Now I’m ready,” she said with a smile.
#
He found them exactly where he’d left them, all those days ago. The machines stood, like carved trees, in the little clearing - two large figures, two smaller, a hint of moss about their joints. It took some time for them to react to Bill’s return but, eventually, one of them turned its head creakily and its eyes brightened.
“Bill, you came back, I am glad,” the machine called Nessa said. As she spoke, the big machine began to reanimate as if it’d been under an enchantment. “When you did not return, we decided to hibernate as we do not know how long the power you gave us will last, we believed it was expiring and so it has proved.”
“Well, I can help with that,” Bill said, grabbing the power point on her back and, with an effort, expressing some energy into the machine. He repeated the process with the male machine and that, combined with the underlying exhaustion that is a fact of life when you’re being pursued by an angry dragon, left him feeling barely capable of holding a conversation.
But he had no choice. “Look, we have to move away from here as soon as possible,” he said, “I have the source and we need to keep it away from the dragon and out of the hands of Humunculus while we find a way to make it safe, not just for now, but forever.”
Daven seemed to become more animated at the mention of the source. “You have found it? Where is it?” he said, his eyes now searchlights in the dusk beneath the trees.
Bill fished beneath his weather-worn coat and produced it. The jewelled box sat in his hand, looking as ordinary as a box worth the weight of a kingdom could manage.
“Will you open it?” Nessa asked.
Bill shrugged. It was odd, but he felt not the slightest compulsion to do so. It was as if he knew that opening the box would be disastrous. He was curious, of course, but something more innate was overriding his curiosity, keeping him calm. In fact, he was more curious about his lack of curiosity than anything. “No,” he said, “I don’t think that would be wise.”
“No matter,” Nessa responded, though in a manner that made it obvious that she was disappointed. “But how do you know that it contains the source, if you’ve never opened it?”
“Well, mainly because it had a dragon sitting on it,” Bill responded, “and it was at the end of a heavily guarded tunnel in the heart of the elfen kingdom. It obviously isn’t the egg the dragon believes it to be, and she’s been protecting it for centuries. And also because I know it is the source. I can’t explain it, but I’m absolutely certain.”
Daven nodded his head ponderously. “Yes, you are right. There is something about it - I can feel the energy from here.”
Bill took a step back as Daven leaned forward. There was a greed about him that was unsettling. But then the machine straightened itself again and the moment passed.
“What is your plan?” Nessa asked.
Bill shrugged again. “Mainly to avoid incineration, to be honest. I haven’t thought much beyond that.”
“And how do you intend to stay out of the way of the dragon? We have seen it, you know, flying over the countryside. She landed just outside this little wood and, for a moment, we thought she had seen that we are not trees. We feared her fire. But she left and so we went back
to waiting, conserving our energy.”
“I don’t know. Above all else, Humunculus mustn’t get his hands on it.” Bill was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the way this conversation was going. In fact, he did have a plan. He intended to find the portal and remove the dragon egg, or whatever it was, from this world and out of the reach of the Faerie King. But he somehow imagined this would not go down well with the machines.
“For now,” he continued, “I need to get some sleep. We can decide what to do in the morning.” Without another word, he turned away, found a relatively comfortable looking tree and lay down against its trunk.
#
Bill opened his eyes, gasping in a lungful of air as he was yanked from a deep sleep. At first, in his muddled state, he thought it was daytime, but the blinding light swung this way and that before a voice tore him into full wakefulness in an instant.
“Are we awake, sleepy head?”
Bill, sprung up, but a heavy hand thrust him downward into a heap at the foot of the tree. “Humunculus!” he spat.
“Yes, indeed. How delicious,” purred the Fairie King triumphantly. “And you’ve brought me a present, I see.”
In the mechanical hands of the body that contained the spirit of Humunculus sat a jewelled box.
The clearing seemed to be full of machines, and Bill could see Daven and Nessa being held forcibly, their bodies rigid and unmoving.
“Uncle?”
One of the machine children had appeared at the feet of Humunculus, its wooden and metal head level with that of Bill as he slumped beside the tree.
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