by Heide Goody
Gingers around the rooms laughed. Worse, they tittered, lightly and lovingly, as though Morag was some YouTube kitten tripping over her own feet, or a toddler saying ‘pasketti’ instead of ‘spaghetti’. The Venislarn who felt they had some grasp of human modes of behaviour joined in with variously successful hoots, clacks, rasps and flatulent parps.
“I should think you would share my concerns,” said Morag. “The kaatbari is missing and I want my daughter back. If the Handmaidens have—”
“If they have her,” Brigit interrupted, “they will pay for their impudence, the offence they have caused.”
“Pay, Lord Morgantus?” said the smooth female voice of a Handmaiden of Prein.
Seven of the creatures approached from the darkness, their shells ghostly in the dim reflected light. Shara’naak Kye was at the front. Some at the back had cracks in their plates, and seeping wounds. Seven Handmaidens remaining.
“What have you done with my daughter, bitch?” said Morag.
Shara’naak Kye’s carapace tipped slightly as though considering, but the Handmaiden ignored her. “We not have come to pay but to collect, Yo-Morgantus,” she said.
Brigit steepled her fingers. Strips of flesh ran from her underarms to the throne. She looked like the tensing wires of a suspension bridge. “Your gods are near and you think you can make demands of me.”
“The armies of Prein approach with the fortress of Hath-No,” said Shara’naak Kye. “And with them, the blind gods of Suler’au Sukram. You rule here and now, but who will rule hereafter?”
“Morgantus rules now and Morgantus will always—” Brigit hesitated. Her arm twitched. “Lord Morgantus knows there will be transition. Lord?” This last was spoken in a different tone. A query from Brigit herself, questioning things she had not previously known.
“Transition,” Omar whispered to Morag.
“I heard,” she replied.
Morgantus was playing his cards close to his chest.
Morag strode to meet the foremost Handmaiden. She should have been scared. The Venislarn were playing power politics in this very court; human lives would be secondary concerns. “What have you done with my daughter?”
Armoured plates ground together. “We do not answer to you, reviled one.”
“You adn-bhul better, missus, or gods help me—”
Morag wasn’t sure what the end of that sentence was going to be. It was cut off by a sudden buzz of noise from the Croyyi-Takk in the room. The desiccated insectoid flyers were abruptly agitated, wheeling to and fro in their dozens. A murmur set up among the Venislarn.
“Fe horrh-a bas tito?” said a Presz’ling near to Morag.
She whirled. “What? What kind of fruit makes a noise?”
* * *
Steve the Destroyer stood on the restaurant-lined pavement between the towering Cube building and the smaller but still massive Mailbox building. To his left was a drop to the lower level and the rippling canal. To his right, the bars and restaurants were all empty shells. A fire had ripped through them all at some point in the night, and now the only movement within was the coiling acrid smoke. The soldiers of Dr Kathy Kaur’s Forward Company had to come this way to reach the Cube, and Yang had been quite insistent in her tactical analysis (before dashing off to merrily slaughter the soldiers in look-out positions on other buildings). If they were to have any hope of keeping Prudence alive, they should isolate and rescue her before Forward Company got into the building.
And so, without reinforcements, Steve stood in the middle of the rubble-strewn walkway and watched the soldiers movingtowards him. They were big and well-armed and numerous, and he was but one outrider of Prein trapped in the body of a badly stitched doll, armed with only a pencil (albeit a sharp one). But Steve was ready for them.
He had adopted the pose: legs akimbo, arms out to make a spiky star of his body, the pencil held aloft. Tensing stomach muscles he didn’t possess, he constricted his throat and let forth the high-pitched wails that were the call of the tito fruit. He even wiggled his body a little to produce the correct wavering ululations.
The lead soldier took up a position not three strides from Steve and hunkered down behind the cover of a charred floral planter. With one eye and his gun’s sights on Steve, the man pressed a button on the side of his weapon and spoke.
“Alpha point. There’s a thing here.” He paused, listening. “A thing. A little man. Like a voodoo doll.”
There was a brief burst of gunfire. It wasn’t nearby, perhaps on the other side of the building or elsewhere. Somewhere down the path, Prudence called out. “Steve! Steve! I’m here.” A child’s hand momentarily appeared from behind the cover of a fire gutted building and waved, before being yanked back behind cover.
“What’s he doing?” said the soldier. “Nothing. He’s got his arms up and he’s got a pencil and he’s … he’s sort of wiggling his hips.”
Steve did not react. He held his pose and continued with the tito fruit impression. Committing to the part was very important if it was to have any chance of success.
“It’s sort of a bit like an Elvis hip wiggle,” said the soldier. “But the pose… He’s going for more of a Freddie Mercury type thing and—” He stopped, listening to the voices in his ear. “Threat assessment? Christ, I don’t know. It’s a rag doll doing a dance.”
The soldiers further back were beginning to move forward, bunching towards this guy.
“No, no reason,” said the soldier, adjusting his grip on his rifle as he aimed.
There was a crash from on high. Steve dared to angle his gaze upward. Windows had exploded outward high up on the side of the Cube and a swarm of Croyyi-Takk were pouring out into the sky. They spread out in a funnel as the mass corkscrewed round and down towards the ground and the soldiers.
“Dinner time, gobbet!” spat Steve triumphantly. Abandoning his artful and enticing tito fruit impression, he ran for cover.
05:58am
Prudence stared as the Venislarn flying creatures dived on the troops: huge Croyyi-Takk with scissor-like jaws of bone and, darting among them, Tud-burzu with their flaming mouths and curling backs and little legs which clawed the air as they swooped.
“GLAMS,” barked a soldier across from her and Kathy. He crouched behind a chunk of fallen masonry and slotted a fat grenade projectile into the launcher thing below his rifle. From the Mailbox building behind and along the walkway, other grenadiers were already firing theirs.
With dull thuds projectiles were launched upwards where, at a height, they unfolded rotor blade appendages and hovered. A Croyyi-Takk collided with one, and the hovering drone exploded, blasting a chunk from the creature’s thorax.
“Aerial mines,” said Kathy, grimly impressed.
But the flying Venislarn were crashing into the drone mines faster than new ones could be launched. The leading edge burst through. Soldiers opened fire and suddenly everything was noise. Prudence tried to put her hands to her ears, but one was strapped to Kathy’s.
A Croyyi-Takk landed heavily on the pavement by the Cube. Even as a soldier tried to get a decent shot at it, the creature knocked him back and pinned him to the ground with its skewering front legs.
Kathy was shouting into her headset. “What? What?”
A soldier came up behind, hooked his hand under Kathy’s arm, lifting her bodily from her crouched position, and waved her forward.
Soldiers had to engage the defenders at close quarters now. Explosions stuttered, guns rattled. Invisible bullets whistled and shots sang out from the shooting positions on the buildings all around. There was smoke and the smell of something sharp that Prudence felt on her tongue, like the taste of blood.
Something – she didn’t know what – drew her attention upward. She saw Venislarn creatures pouring down the side of the building. Climbers and creepers and things that moved with forms of locomotion that defied description.
Forward Company believed they could just walk her into the Venislarn’s lair. It felt like th
ey were all going to be slaughtered before they even reached the door. She looked around for Steve, wondering where he had run off to.
* * *
A corner wall of Yo-Morgantus’s court room had been torn away as the Croyyi-Takk launched themselves through (in search of fruit or battle, Morag still couldn’t fathom).
In the wake of the creatures teeming out of the hole after the Croyyi-Takk, Morag drifted inevitably towards the opening. The city spread out before them. The sky was a ruin of colours. The halted nuclear explosions had faded over the past hour to become a filigree of wild yellows among the swirling clouds. The shield that had held it back was a bruised purple and green. And now there was a growing hint on the blurred horizon that dawn was coming and the sun would rise on Earth’s final day.
The gunfire and explosions from below were echoey and distant.
“The army?” suggested Morag.
Omar shook his head, unsure.
“Humanity’s last stand,” said Brigit.
Morag looked back at the woman on her throne of flesh.
With many of the Venislarn now gone to join the fray below, the hundred or more redheads in the room seemed to fill the space more. In the light of magic and fire and the dawn to come, stripped of the concealing shadows, the sea of nakedness was both horrifying and ridiculous.
“You guys picked the wrong side, you know,” Morag said, the words bubbling up within her. “I don’t know what you thought you’d get by giving yourself to him, but it wasn’t worth it.”
“Watch your tongue,” said Brigit.
The Handmaiden Shara’naak Kye stepped swiftly across and raised a leg, held it above Morag’s chest, to slash at her or to flick her backwards and out of the wall opening.
“Give her to us, Morgantus. Yech an’hi idah.”
“You do not get to make demands, Handmaiden,” said Brigit. “The true gods come and they will decide.”
06:00am
At some point, the stars over the black and silent lake went out and the barge sailed through total night, a rippling arrow between darkness above and darkness below. Even before Rod had noticed the stars were missing, silence had wrapped itself around him, and he sat on the cabin roof in a state of thought-free contemplation. The barge thrummed silently beneath him, a gentle rhythmic vibration, not an engine sound, but something more organic – like breathing, or the whooshing chambers of a glacially slow heart.
A light appeared ahead, a semi-circle of brightness on the horizon. Silver ripples of reflection dotted the water.
“What is that?” he wondered, thinking it might be a rising moon.
He tried to stand to get a better look. Before he’d even got to his knees, his hand touched something rough and solid above him, and he sat down hard in surprise. He put his hand up again and it brushed against cold and clammy stone.
The vanished stars. The cold ceiling. The semi-circle of light. “We’re in a tunnel,” he said.
Further back, Sven croaked with laughter.
“You’ll need to be sharper than that if you are to last the day,” said the King of Crimson in Rod’s ear. Rod didn’t realise how much he had been enjoying the deathly creature’s silence until that moment.
They approached the opening. The light, as bright as the moon initially, found form and definition, fading into to a dusky grey. It was a canal tunnel (of course it was, he mentally chided himself). There was the light, and a towpath, and the hint of buildings beyond.
“Birmingham’s still standing, then,” he said.
The King had no comment on that.
Rod rapidly considered his plans: moor up, find Nina and Morag and whoever was still alive, and get up to a hundred human souls back on the barge and away to Sven’s otherworldly port. It was not going to be much of a victory over the Venislarn, but it was something.
The view ahead expanded. There were puffs of smoke and strange shapes in the oddly coloured sky. He thought he heard the patter of distant gunfire and the flat bang of munitions.
Rod checked his pistol. “And you’ll keep me alive until we’re done,” he said to the King.
“I do not have to do anything,” the King replied.
“Until I punch out a god.”
The King made a dismissive sing-song hum. “My powers are to use as I wish.”
“Then stay out of my way, right?”
The black barge emerged into thin light. The sun was not yet risen, Rod blinked against the change in brightness. It took him two seconds to recognise where he was. He was unsure of the name of this particular stretch of canal – the names all blurred and merged in his mind – but it was the stretch which ran up from the south, past Birmingham University, and into the city centre. Ahead there was a squat brick bridge, a hundred yard gap, a longer footbridge, and the big turn in front of the Cube before Gas Street Basin.
He looked behind him. The tunnel they had emerged from was no longer there. It had served its purpose, and was now gone. Rod wasn’t keen on sneaky magic. Things really should stay as they were. Even weird Venislarn things should have the decency to maintain some consistency.
A battle was taking place over at the Cube, mostly on the far side, by the Mailbox. Venislarn things, none of which Rod could name, were crawling all over the artsy shaped cladding on the front of the Cube building, skittering madly like ants about their nest. In the sky, spikey flying things buzzed and soared and occasionally exploded as they tangled with robot drones peppering the area. There were some soldiers in position near the long footbridge at the corner of the cube, and in firing positions by the canalside. The focus of the aerial attackers suggested the bulk of the human forces were out of sight, round the other side of the building.
“Not good,” said Sven as the barge heaved to the side of the canal, slowing. “Not good for business.”
Rod stood and prepared to jump to the towpath. “You’ve got business with me. A hundred souls to the Port of Cellophane, or wherever.”
“Celephaïs,” said Sven. “And you’ve not even paid me.”
“I’m working on that,” he said and jumped ashore. He drew his pistol. “Just wait for us, yeah?”
Without waiting for confirmation, he scuttled forward to the relative shelter of the brick bridge. He took out his phone to check the time and to see if, by some miracle, there was a phone signal. It has just gone six a.m. and, no, there was no signal.
He’d have to go to the Library and hope to meet his colleagues there. The shortest route was along the left bank, round the corner, up along the canal basin, past the Tap and Spile pub, and then through the International Convention Centre and into the Library. The path ahead would take him right beneath the firefight and across some areas of exposed towpath with no cover. Longer, but possibly safer, would be to zig-zag anti-clockwise around the Cube, away from the fighting, and down past the Peace Gardens, the Keg and Grill, the Craven Arms and then back up to Centenary Square.
It was a solid enough plan although the fact his mental map had unnecessarily made use of pubs was perhaps a reflection of what he would really like to do if he (and the world) survived the day.
The King in Crimson loomed behind him, all tattered and bloodied bandages. “What are your intentions, patron?” he whispered, perhaps a note of condescension in his voice.
“Can you run?” said Rod. He looked at the trailing rags around the King’s hidden feet and then shrugged. “Don’t care, really.”
He jogged up the steps to the side of the bridge. He kept close to the solid iron parapet as he crossed. He heard a shot ricochet off metal as he scurried but couldn’t tell how close it was. Down the other side, now on the same bank as the Cube, he clung close to the apartment building which edged the canal, and moved onward. In the brick-paved alley between the apartments and the Cube he saw a body, twisted and bent. The soldier had either been thrown by an explosion or dropped from a considerable height.
Rod was tempted to inspect the body and pilfer the weapons, but whatever had killed th
e soldier might still be around. The entrance to the shopping arcade on the Cube’s lower level was directly in front of him. Through the thick glass he could dimly see an empty open area. With a glance to the rooftops and the surrounding area, constantly reminding himself that urban warfare was a three-dimensional affair, he nipped from the shadows of one building and into the arcade doorway.
“I thought you might be trying to circumnavigate this battlefield,” suggested the King in Crimson.
“Shut up,” said Rod. “I’m just cutting through.”
“I bow to the experience of a military man.”
Rod pulled the glass door open. In a normal building he’d be clearing his path room by room, slicing the pie and checking his angles at every corner, but he was entering a world of glass partitions and open spaces. It was effectively a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arena. The main passage, cutting a diagonal under the square footprint of the Cube, ran between restaurants, gyms, tanning salons and spas. A woman’s face grinned from a teeth-whitening advert in a shop window. The incongruity of that smile was so grotesque it held his attention for a half-second too long; he almost failed to spot the soldier moving along the towpath outside.
They saw each other at the same moment. The soldier raised his rifle and fired on full auto. That was a mistake. There was a training gym between the two of them with plate glass walls, one at the shopfront, one of the canalside. The soldier’s shots crazed the glass, ruining his vision for the second or more it took the glass to fall. Rod ducked forward, moving through a shattered pane and into the gym itself. A bank of cross-trainers was hardly ideal cover, but he could position himself by the bases of the machines.
Rod maintained a low position that would nonetheless allow him to move and react. Either the soldier would move on, or he would enter the gym through the smashed window. If he did that, once he was near enough, Rod would subdue him.