Age of Legends

by James Lovegrove

  An arrow transfixed its skull, right between those bright crimson eyes. The black dog let out a sharp yipe and fell.

  Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones started prattling incoherently. The swagger he’d shown when Ajia was cornered was all gone. He was scared almost to the point of inarticulacy.

  “Please,” he burbled. He cast his gaze this way and that, looking for whoever it was that had slain his two allies. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’ll be good. I swear. I’ll be a good boy from now on. I won’t eat anyone ever again. Please don’t––”

  An arrow pierced his throat from the front, its tip emerging from the back of his neck. With a wet gargle, Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones slumped to the ground. His gaunt body twitched and shuddered, then lay still.

  The forest was silent for another full minute. Then, gradually, a chirrup here, a twitter there, the birds resumed their chorus.

  Ajia waited. Whoever had killed the three monsters didn’t seem ready to show his or her face. She had no idea whether or not the person was going to kill her too. Perhaps the archer was even now lining up another shot. Had she just been rescued or was she fourth on the hit list? Until she knew the answer, she was going to stay put in the oak, whose foliage at least afforded some cover. Not much, judging by the ease with which the archer had picked off the hairy man, but it was better than nothing.

  “Goodfellow?” It was Smith, calling out to her from by the road. “Goodfellow, where have you got to?”

  She didn’t reply. With luck, he might head in the wrong direction. If he came this way, he could wind up as the archer’s next victim.

  “Goodfellow?”

  His voice was a little louder. He was getting closer.

  She had to warn him away, even if it was at the expense of her own life.

  Before she could open her mouth, however, a male voice said, “Smith?”

  The speaker appeared as if from nowhere, rising sleekly out of the undergrowth some thirty paces from the oak. He was dressed in jeans, olive-drab combat jacket and desert boots. His hairline was receding but he had plenty of stubble on his chin, as if to demonstrate that some of the follicles on his head still functioned. Green and black camouflage cream streaked his forehead, nose and cheeks, and there was a longbow in his hand and a quiver full of arrows on his back, similarly coloured.

  Smith came crashing into view.

  “It is you,” the archer said.

  And he nocked an arrow and took aim.

  Chapter 15

  “NO!” AJIA YELLED, even as Smith came to an abrupt halt and raised his hands.

  Both men glanced upward into the tree, Smith in surprise, the archer with an ironical smile.

  “Don’t shoot him,” Ajia said, starting to clamber down. “Don’t you dare. I’ll fucking kill you if you do.”

  The archer archly arched an eyebrow. “Who’s the girl, Smith?”

  “A friend,” Smith said.

  “Well, I’ll have you know I just saved her life, this friend of yours. See these three creeps lying dead on the ground? They were going to have their wicked way with her. I recognise two of them––Black Shuck and Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones––and the hairy bastard’s the Lubber Fiend, I think. Three of the finest bogeymen Britain has to offer. You’ll note that each has an arrow or two sticking out of him, courtesy of yours truly.”

  “Thank you for that,” Smith said. “It’s much appreciated.”

  The archer bowed his head a fraction, neither taking his gaze off Smith nor lowering his bow. “You’re welcome. Nice outfit, by the way. String vest and longjohns combo. Fetching. Now give me one good reason why I shouldn’t plant an arrow in you too.”

  “Because you’re showboating. You wouldn’t really kill me. You don’t hate me that much.”

  “Don’t I?”

  The bowstring twanged. The arrow shot past Smith’s head, thudding into a tree behind him.

  One of Smith’s dreadlocks twirled to the ground. It had been severed just half an inch from his scalp.

  The archer already had another arrow in place, bowstring drawn, primed to fire.

  By now, however, Ajia was back on the forest floor, and she was fuming. Without hesitating she raced towards the archer. His eyes tracked her. Even though she was going at Puck speed, he was able to follow her movement with his gaze. But he still couldn’t move quickly enough to prevent her snatching the arrow out of his grasp and snapping it in two over her knee.

  She held up the broken halves to show him.

  “Try that again,” she said, “and I’ll shove these where you least want them. Sideways.”

  The archer studied the sundered arrow, then burst into laughter. “Fuck me. I thought I was fast.”

  “You have no idea. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for what you did. You’re also, I’m pretty sure, the person we’ve come to see. But even if you and Smith have some kind of history, which you seem to, you’re just going to have to set it aside. We’ve travelled quite a long way to get here, wherever ‘here’ is, and speaking for myself, I’m tired and I’m pissed off and I don’t have time for any bullshit. Do you understand?”

  The archer seemed more than a little amused. “You’re a feisty one, and no mistake.”

  “Don’t call me feisty,” Ajia said. “That’s so bloody patronising.”

  “I do beg your pardon. What would you prefer? Spunky? Spirited? Go-getting?”

  “What I’d prefer is you putting down that bow.”

  “There’s no arrow in it.”

  “I’ve seen how quickly you can reload. And when I say put it down, I mean on the ground.”

  The archer deliberated, then bent and set the bow down at his feet.

  “Good,” Ajia said. “Maybe, at last, we––”

  The archer hooked a toe under the bow, flipped it up, caught it and nocked a fresh arrow, all in one swift, fluid movement.

  “Seriously?” Ajia sighed.

  The next instant, both bow and arrow were in Smith’s hands. He looked somewhat bemused to find them there.

  “You are fast,” the archer said wonderingly.

  “When I need to be,” Ajia said. “Now that I’ve confiscated your toy, can we just have a civilised conversation?”

  “Well, okay. But there is one thing I’d like to do first.”

  The archer strode over to the hairy man and snatched the digital camera off his shoulder. He held it up to his face, frowning into it. Then he raised a middle finger to the lens, dropped the camera on the ground and stamped on it until it was in smithereens.

  “Paladins are after you, yeah?” he said. “Must be. This wasn’t some random attack. The Three Fucketeers here were released from Stronghold and sent to take you out. The camera says as much. It also says the Paladins don’t care if you know they’re after you. Because they’re like that, the arrogant twats.”

  Ajia masked a smile. In spite of his hostility towards Smith, she found herself warming to this man. It wasn’t just that she owed him her life. He had attitude.

  “I’m not happy, though,” he added. “I’m trying to stay off the grid, and the two of you have brought trouble right to my doorstep.”

  “Three,” said Smith. “Auberon LeRoy is with us.”

  “Mr LeRoy? So Summer Land has finally deigned to come up this way? Wonders will never cease.”

  “No. There isn’t a Summer Land. Not any more.”

  “Paladins?”

  “Yes.”

  The archer took the information on board. “Shiiiit. All right. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s bad. Then you’ll be looking for somewhere to lay low for a while, won’t you?”

  “Any chance you can help with that?” said Ajia.

  He grinned. “As it happens, lass, you’ve come to the right place.” He spread his arms wide. “Welcome to Sherwood Forest, home of the professional hider-outer.”

  “Sherwood…?” said Ajia. The penny, belatedly, dropped. It might have sooner if she hadn’t been busy climbing trees and disar
ming the archer. “Oh God, don’t tell me. You’re…”

  “Robin Goodfellow,” said Smith, “meet Robin Hood.”

  AT THAT MOMENT, some 150 miles due south, Major Wynne sat in the operations room at Stronghold and began reviewing the footage which had just been beamed back from the camera attached to the Lubber Fiend.

  The op itself had not gone wholly to plan. Three assets lost, with not a single casualty on the other side. However, if Wynne had learned anything during his stint in the army and his years heading up a counterterrorism unit at MI5, it was that nothing was a waste as long as you gleaned some useful intel from it. And he definitely had.

  He rewound to the point where the Lubber Fiend, along with Black Shuck and Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones, homed in on their target. The jerky footage showed the black dog questing eagerly through the undergrowth. The lumbering Lubber Fiend could barely keep up. Audio captured his panting breaths and the grisly mutterings of Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones beside him.

  Then the trio had their quarry cornered against a tree. A young woman, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Dark, straight hair, olive-tinged complexion. Wynne recognised her from Summer Land. She was one of the three who had escaped in the Land Rover Defender. He watched as she darted to and fro in an attempt to evade Black Shuck. She was little more than a blur. With a few mouse clicks, he slowed the footage down to twentieth speed. Even then the girl was just a roughly human-shaped smear sliding across the screen. The outlines of Black Shuck in motion were, likewise, almost indecipherable. His glowing eyes registered on the screen as zigzagging lines, like bolts of red lightning.

  Reverting the playback to normal speed, Wynne watched the Lubber Fiend pursue the girl up the tree. The Lubber Fiend almost had her, until suddenly the footage became a whirling chaos of leaves and branches. The image juddered and went still. The camera was now on its side, as was the Lubber Fiend, lying on the ground. Black Shuck disappeared offscreen, and the audio track relayed faintly the sounds of his death. Wynne was then able to make out the death of Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones, just. The angle was not good but it was clear that the creature got skewered through the neck by an arrow.

  Shortly afterwards, there was a conversation between the girl and a man with a bow and arrow, whom Wynne could only assume was the person responsible for eradicating all three assets. The dialogue was muffled––the camera’s microphone was probably buried in the forest leaf litter––but it was apparent that some kind of standoff was happening and that there was a third party involved, somewhere out of shot. The girl disarmed the archer, there was more talk, then the archer stooped to pick up the camera, leered into it, gave it the finger, and dropped it to the ground. The image degenerated into ragged, overlapping fields of colour, while the audio was a maelstrom of static. Then blackness and silence. Signal lost.

  Wynne leaned back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head.

  So. The survivors of the assault on Summer Land had sought refuge in, of all places, Sherwood Forest. That was the first tick in the plus column. The Paladins now had a good idea where they were, although whether or not they were going to stay put was another matter. The forest wasn’t that big. If they had any sense, they would get the hell out of the area ASAP.

  The second tick was that the footage contained decent shots of the girl’s and the archer’s faces. Wynne would send the file down to Stronghold’s tech department, who would run matches against the national ID database and pull up names and background details on both.

  The third tick was that Wynne now knew that the girl possessed preternatural abilities. She could move as fast as Black Shuck––and that was fast. The dog had been clocked at over a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

  The biggest tick in the minus column, Wynne reflected, was the loss of Black Shuck. Of the three assets involved in the op, the dog’s destruction was the only one that was in any way regrettable. All three were monsters, but there was something so repellent about the two human-looking ones that in a way Wynne was glad to be rid of them. Prisoners at Stronghold, they had agreed to take part in the op on the promise of various special privileges. In the case of the Lubber Fiend, this meant the opportunity to molest horses, one of his peccadilloes. Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones, meanwhile, had demanded a living child to feast on as his fee, in addition to consuming the flesh of at least one of the targets the three of them were assigned to kill. Wynne had had no intention of granting either’s wish, but both had been too dumb and gullible to realise that. They were cannon fodder and he had few regrets about expending them.

  Black Shuck, by contrast, had been useful, and it was a shame he was no longer alive. Developing the dog as an asset had not been easy. A police K-9 unit trainer had spent months working on him, on the Paladins’ behalf. The man had managed to tame him up to a point, although he had admitted to Wynne that the beast would never be fully obedient. “I don’t know where you found him,” he’d said, “but that’s the fiercest fucking hound I’ve ever encountered, not to mention the fastest. And don’t get me started on those eyes. I mean to say, what breed has eyes like that?”

  Earlier in the day, Wynne had arranged for Black Shuck to sniff pieces of clothing from several of the caravans at Summer Land, shortly before the Paladins set about torching the entire place. One item in particular had excited the dog: a Justin Bieber T-shirt, of all things. Once Black Shuck had indicated he had caught a scent trail, Wynne had unleashed him.

  A computerised subdermal implant in Black Shuck’s neck not only emitted a GPS signal but permitted some control over him by means of electric shocks. The Paladins had tracked him via satellite as he’d streaked northward and, when his circling movements had indicated that he was closing in on his target, a sequence of jolts from the implant had brought him to a standstill. This was one of the behavioural curbs the K-9 trainer had instilled in him. Black Shuck had waited patiently while the Lubber Fiend and Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones were choppered up-country to join him in the field. The rest of the op had played out as recorded on the camera footage, all the way to its less than satisfactory outcome.

  The question facing Wynne now was whether or not to dispatch Paladin teams to apprehend and kill the fugitives. Sherwood Forest covered 450 acres: a large space to get lost in, with plenty of cover. Paladins could scour the woods extensively and still fail to find them, especially if they were on the move.

  The more prudent tactic would be to contain them. Put up a cordon around the forest, blockading all the main points of ingress and egress. Rather than flush them out, wait for them to break cover. They would have to sooner or later, and then the Paladins could pounce.

  Several factors inclined Wynne towards the latter alternative. He was exhausted, for one thing. He hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. He was keen to supervise the elimination of the fugitives himself, to make sure it was carried out with all due diligence, and for that he needed to be rested and refreshed.

  For another thing, Harriet Drake had sent him a text just half an hour ago, informing him that she required urgent close protection. Tired or not, it was a summons he was reluctant to ignore.

  Wynne found Lieutenant Noble and told him to mobilise every available Paladin. “I want Sherwood Forest surrounded. Nobody gets in or out. Ring of steel. You have full autonomy.”

  Then he picked up his phone and texted Harriet back, making arrangements for a rendezvous.

  Wynne was under no illusion. If the prime minister discovered their affair, he would almost certainly have him killed.

  And if that wasn’t the icing on the cake, the cream in the coffee, the dash of tabasco in the Bloody Mary, then Wynne didn’t know what was.

  THE WEEKLY CABINET meeting, normally a chore, today turned out to be worse: an ordeal.

  Drake looked round the Cabinet Room table at the couple of dozen ministers who held senior positions in his government. All had document folders and tablets in front of them and were looking as efficient and officious as humanly possible. He could divide them up into three ca
tegories. There were the ones he trusted implicitly because they shared his values. There were the ones he trusted but only because they were spineless and unimaginative. And there were the ones he didn’t quite trust because they were ambitious. They wanted his crown. They were waiting for the moment they could take over, jockeying for position to be his successor. Drake had no intention of retiring yet, but someday he would, and there was no shortage of candidates poised to step up when he stepped down. They were dogs nipping at his heels, but for the time being he knew he could browbeat them into submission if need be.

  Every one of these meetings was little more than a series of formalities. One after another, the ministers would deliver brief reports on the business of the sub-committees they chaired. Drake would yea or nay the policies being put forward. His word was final. There was no argument.

  This morning, he could scarcely concentrate. Voices washed over him like white noise. Now and then a question would come through loud and clear, like a lighthouse beam penetrating fog.

  “Prime Minister, this proposal for increasing the budget for security at our ports is modest and reasonable. What’s your view?”

  “Do you think, Derek, that we should trim unemployment benefit by a further ten per cent? The Treasury coffers are hardly brimming.”

  “We at the Digital taskforce reckon the police should have greater powers to crack down on cyber-protest. Don’t you?”

  Drake responded to each query as appropriate, albeit on autopilot. Mostly, he was thinking about the video clip. Him and Tatjana Bazanova on the bed upstairs in this very building. The sight of his own bare buttocks pumping up and down, while Tatjana writhed beneath him, feigning ecstasy.

  Just a taster. Best wishes to yourself and Mrs Drake.

  Vasilyev could not have made it more plain. He would have no compunction about sending the clip––perhaps even the entire video in all its pornographic glory––to Harriet if he felt the situation warranted it.

  But what situation would that be? What would Drake have to do to deserve that penalty? So far he had been a staunch and vocal supporter of the Russian premier, and he had not foreseen this stance changing any time soon. Clearly Vasilyev wanted extra leverage over him. An insurance policy should Drake’s enthusiasm ever wane.