Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  There, a mile distant, where the thread-thin line of a stream disappeared into woods, torches were kindled.

  The psyrgeons, robed and hooded against the chill, assembled a group of a dozen patients, some of whom were brought out on stretchers, and, chanting soft hymns, they were led by Frada Corlys along a narrow road which ran by the valley stream. They were followed at a respectful distance by a crowd of silent onlookers, amongst whom were Berylin and Runce, escorted by Matalo Cheyne.

  The stream tumbled around the dim shapes of mossy boulders and giant tree-ferns, becoming louder as they climbed higher towards the lamplight which glimmered among the trees. There they found a small lake formed by the stream cascading down a high escarpment, and steeply overhung by curving branches which gave it a cathedral-like atmosphere. The pool was illuminated by lanterns set around it, and a stone platform like a wide, blunt jetty had been built out into the water. At its far end, the stone was hollowed into something resembling a bath, brimming. She tried to observe everything in as coldly detached a manner as possible, but something about the incessant rushing white-water noise made it hard to focus. Rest, it said to her, relax, be healed. Lamplight reflected from the waterfall’s spray in a ghostly rainbow nimbus, which seemed to be out of all proportion to the number of lanterns. Either her eyes were getting used to the semi-darkness, or it was getting brighter.

  Buster began to whine, very softly.

  Runce was peering at the gauges on the pv-satchel around his neck. ‘Something’s happening…’ he whispered.

  ‘Specifics?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t recognise this profile at all.’

  A restless murmur of anticipation arose from the patients and the crowd of onlookers behind them.

  It was definitely getting brighter. The light was coming from the haze at the bottom of the waterfall. Gradually the haze took shape – grew arms, legs, and a head – until, stepping calmly out from the base of the cascade and across the pool’s surface as if it were no less solid than the earth beneath her own feet, there came the unmistakeable figure of a man: hooded, robed, bearded and smiling. He spread his hands in greeting, and Berylin saw that the ends of his fingers trailed off into wisps of iridescent water vapour. At his back, plumes of spray formed the unmistakeable shape of wings.

  ‘I am the Archangel Gabriel,’ he said to them in the voice of the waterfall. ‘I come in love from the Lord, who brings hope to the despairing, wisdom to the blind, and healing to the sick. Come ye, and be made whole once more.’

  She nudged Runce. ‘Are you seeing this?’

  ‘Yes ma’am. Walking on water. Very biblical.’

  ‘Look at the surroundings, though. Nothing’s changed. That’s unheard of. Either the Event had already started and we entered the zone without realising it…’

  ‘…or it’s kicked off and had bugger all effect.’

  ‘And look, the people are completely untouched too. Nobody’s participating except the sick, and they’re remaining themselves. It’s like there isn’t even a narrative being played out at all. Runce, what kind of dream is this?’

  ‘Just so long as it don’t turn into something that wants to bite me head off, I’m fine with it for the moment, ma’am.’

  One at a time, the patients went – or were helped – up to the glowing figure, who laid a benedictory hand on a limb, a head, a torso; and in the case of those afflicted so badly that they were unconscious or immobile, they were laid in the brimming basin while Gabril blessed the water. With each healing, something effervesced from the patient’s skin – their illness, possibly – drifting up in clouds of bubbles, or ash, to evaporate in the air. Berylin watched Soolie climb out of the basin and embrace her mother with smiles and tears, a clear-eyed and beautiful young woman again in the full bloom of health.

  ‘There now,’ commented Runce gruffly, clearing his throat a little. ‘That’s a sight, isn’t it?’

  ‘I need to speak to it,’ she decided and moved forward through the crowd of onlookers. Buster trotted loyally at her side.

  ‘Ma’am, is that wise?’

  ‘Almost certainly not, so keep your eyes open.’

  The healings continued until the figure of the Blessed Gabril started to dim and become hazier around the edges. This apparently signalled the end of the miracle, because the healers stopped bringing patients forward, even though there were many more who could have come. While the figure of the person who dreamed himself to be an angel drifted back towards the waterfall, Berylin saw her chance to get closer without interrupting the proceedings. She dodged through the crowd to the edge of the stone platform and called out to the retreating figure: ‘Wait! Please!’

  It paused and looked back. From this angle, she could clearly see the wings, which were folded down and melting into something resembling a long cape trailing behind it across the water.

  ‘What would you have of me?’ it asked. ‘I am weary.’

  Berylin’s heart thumped with a nervous excitement she hadn’t felt since her first work with the DCS. Never had she been anywhere near this close to having a coherent conversation with the author of a subornation. To be this close to actual answers made her stumble and stammer like a child.

  ‘Who… who are you?’ she asked. ‘Please, name yourself.’

  ‘I am the archangel Gabriel,’ it replied. ‘I am…’

  ‘No. You are not.’ She could hardly believe that she was interrupting it. ‘You are simply asleep and dreaming this. Who are you really? What are you?’

  A shocked silence fell across the lake and the onlookers, and a momentary terror stabbed at her: what if it really was an angel? Would it strike her down?

  ‘I am… dreaming?’ The angel’s expression darkened with confusion.

  ‘Officer Hooper!’ called Frada Corlys in alarm. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  She ignored him. ‘Yes, you are dreaming. You are asleep, at home in your bed. I need to know where that is. I need to know who you are!’

  ‘I am not…’

  ‘Hooper!’ Cheyne yelled angrily. ‘Step away this instant! You don’t know what you’re doing! Imbecile woman!’

  Runce laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. ‘Watch your tone there, sonny Jim,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I… am… real…’ Gabril was even more indistinct now; a nebulous, agitated shadow.

  ‘No. You are not. This place is real. These people that you’ve been healing, they’re real. I am real. My name is Berylin Evangeline Hooper of the Oraillean Department for Counter Subornation; this is my world, and I order you, phantasm, to tell me your NAME!’

  Several things happened simultaneously then, so fast that it wasn’t until afterwards that she was able to piece together the sequence of events. Frada Corlys lunged at her, crying something about “outrageous sacrilege”, but he was intercepted by Runce, who, to make his point clear, shoved quite an ordinary pistol in his face; not the tez gun, but it was enough to cause a panicked stampede of terrified pilgrims. Buster launched a furious tirade of barks at the figure on the lake. In the meantime, something from the boiling shadows under the waterfall howled ‘I AM NOT A DREAM!’ as an agitated curl of darkness snaked at her. Instinctively, she caught it, intending to hold the phantasm here and interrogate it, but it was unimaginably strong, and before she could do anything more than cry out to Runce in alarm, it had dragged her off her feet and into the roiling nightmare.

  Chapter 16

  Cut Loose

  1

  There was a moment’s disorientation as she fell through a crushing and suffocating blackness, and then she found herself inexplicably struggling awake in a strange bedroom.

  Sickly orange light seeped between a pair of curtains, but everything was distorted, as if she were viewing it from underwater. Her movements were sluggish as she struggled with the unfamiliar bed linen – this coverlet fel
t like it was made of marshmallow – and…

  There was someone else here.

  She could feel him overlapping her thoughts like she was one of those Kalevian dolls nested inside one another. He was old, confused and frightened. He’d been having the angel dream again – more and more these days it gave him some comfort as the cancer ate away at what was left of his life – but this time something had gone wrong. Something had come back with him, and for some reason he couldn’t wake up properly.

  Who’s there?

  ‘Whose voice is that? Yours or mine?’

  Oh dear sweet lord Jesus it’s inside of me something is possessing me our Father who art in heaven…

  ‘Shut up! Stop your superstitious babbling, old man, and talk to me!’

  …hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come…

  ‘SILENCE!’

  Silence.

  ‘Who are you? Where am I?’

  Please let me go. I can’t wake up. Why can’t I wake up?

  Berylin could feel the threads of sleep loosening from around her, his voice growing weaker as they did so, and she was seized with sudden panic: was she going to wake up for real, here, in this place and this body? Inside the dreamer? Was this what happened to all those suborned victims who had disappeared? She knew that the adrenaline surge which came with the panic would only awaken her more quickly, but she was powerless to prevent it and raged impotently at him.

  ‘Damn you! You and all your kind! I don’t care a whit whether you meant well or not – your dreams are not welcome in our world. Let me go, damn you, let me go!’

  And then the world – whichever one it was – filled with purple fire tearing over and through her body, and she screamed with two voices.

  The shock of cold water slapped her to her senses. She was thrashing in the freezing pool of Bles Gabril – except that there was no angel and never had been. Just a frightened old man dying of a terminal disease and consoling himself with a recurring fantasy that he could heal the sick.

  An old man in another world. The Realt.

  For the first time in her life, the fact that she was right held no comfort for her, and when Runce dragged her ashore before Frada Corlys and Councillor Cheyne and the other Dravanese, she accepted their recriminations and held her tongue.

  2

  Runce stood at the stern-rail of the Spinner and watched their escort of three Amity warships dwindle behind them. He’d expected to feel relieved now that they were finally out of Dravanese waters, but he found that instead his disquiet was stronger than ever. Something wasn’t right.

  They’d been kept under house arrest in Bles Marique for four days while diplomatic clatters bounced back and forth between Drava and Oraille. The only reasons they’d been let out were to be dragged before one self-important politician after another to explain what exactly it was they thought they were doing, committing such outrageous sacrilege upon one of their holiest sites, not to mention the unconscionable crime of threatening a member of court with a sidearm. Runce wasn’t sure what “unconscionable” meant, but in any case wasn’t in much of a mind to explain himself to a bunch of foreigners, especially since at the time he hadn’t really been thinking much of anything at all. He’d simply reacted to Berylin being threatened the only way he knew how. He did, however, know enough about how the diplomatic food-chain worked to understand that the only way anybody from the Spinner was going home was for someone to get thrown to the sharks – and that was him. He was the one who’d fired the tez at Gabril (or whatever it really was); he was the one who had threatened Corlys. By rights, he should be political fishbait. And yet here he was, free.

  ‘It just don’t make any kind of sense,’ he said to himself for the hundredth time.

  Plainly, some big, nation-moving favours had been traded on their behalf, and he shuddered to think what that implied about their mission.

  Berylin hadn’t said anything to him about what she’d seen. Nor had she come out of her cabin since they’d got steam up, choosing instead to shut herself away for hours, having incomprehensible philosophical discussions with Harcourt, of all people. He didn’t mind not understanding anything of what was in the loop, but being kept out of it altogether made him twitchy and cross, so he kept himself here at the stern and as far as possible out of the crew’s way.

  3

  From Drava, they island-hopped towards the Flats, picking up morsels of rumour and hearsay. Most of this was the standard mariners’ fare of sea monsters, ghost-ships and lights in the sky, but the closer they got, the stranger – and oddly, more believable – it became. They heard about holes which appeared without warning in the surface of the ocean to swallow hapless fishing boats and disgorge horrors from the depths; about compasses which spun uselessly and alien constellations which confounded navigation; about a floating, man-made island in the middle of the Flats.

  Finally, half-a-day’s steaming from an insignificant fleck of land called Danae, they heard from the captain of a merchantman a name which they were able to put to all of this:

  Stray.

  Chapter 17

  Moon and Sixpence Bay

  1

  Bobby’s hands were shaking as he drank kaff with Allie in the bright market square of Timini, Danae’s single port and only town of any considerable size. He watched the townsfolk coming and going about their everyday business and tried to see it as he had when they’d arrived – what – only two hours ago? How could that be? Far too short a time for an entire world to be destroyed and another created in its place. It must have been a thousand years at least since they’d moored Tatters and stepped ashore. Everything had happened just as Allie had predicted.

  At first he’d simply been amazed at the sensation of walking on solid ground for the first time in weeks. Then came the sensory overload of being surrounded by things rising up above him again, where Stray was almost uniformly flat to sea level.

  Danae was shaped very roughly like a crescent moon, with white sand beaches on its broad inside curve, and a small round eyot inhabited only by barking sealions between its two points – hence the name Moon and Sixpence Bay. A ridge of hills formed a spine around the outer curve, clustered with red-roofed houses which were surrounded by terraced orchards and narrow fields walled with white limestone. Where the island narrowed to its northernmost point, the ridge tumbled down through Timini’s steep, switchbacked streets, lined by tall houses with flat roof-gardens and wrought iron balconies. Allie had moored Tatters a short distance away from town, at a ruined jetty in a sheltered rocky cove – explaining that while she was fairly certain there’d be no trouble with the locals, she wasn’t taking any chances – and led him up and along steep cliff paths into Timini itself. Within minutes of landing, Bobby had developed a crick in the neck trying to take it all in. There was so much up.

  And colour – colour everywhere.

  From walls covered in flowering bougainvillea to the boats bobbing like upturned, iridescent beetles in the harbour, market-barrows of tomatoes and gleaming aubergines, men in insanely patterned trousers and women in rainbow headscarves – compared to these, Allie’s and his own sun-bleached clothes made them look like ghosts. He helped her trade their mother-of-pearl for sacks of rice and dried fruit at a market which was a riot of colour and noise – surprised to find that everyone spoke good English, though with an accent which he couldn’t place – and was so evidently agog that she had to draw him aside and calm him down for fear that he would draw too much attention to them.

  ‘This isn’t a package tour,’ she warned, half amused despite herself. ‘I told you, we’re not too popular here. Try not to stare so much. I thought you were used to foreign places, anyway.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He pulled himself together. ‘I am. It’s just a bit of a culture shock, that’s all.’

  ‘Understatement of the century, right there.’ She waved away a gorgeous youn
g man trying to sell them bunches of grapes the size of golf-balls. ‘So,’ she tilted her head sardonically at Bobby. ‘Still want to find a way out of this awful hell-hole?’

  He shrugged helplessly. ‘How can I not?’

  ‘Come on then, Mr Frodo,’ she sighed. ‘Let’s get you back to the Shire.’

  And that was when everything she’d said on Tatters came true – including the part about how she’d be standing right behind him when the sense of unreality mounted so badly that it seemed to spill out of his head and into the world around him, making the solid ground tip and sway like the small raft on which he’d first awoken, and all he wanted to do was sweep it aside, crash through everything and run, and keep running until he found someone or somewhere he knew. Her hand was on his shoulder as he was about to take it out on yet another confused fisherman – he could feel his fists balling themselves in baffled rage – and that hand was the only solid, sure thing in the world, so he obeyed it and let himself be led away.

  The kaff was sweet and scaldingly hot, but it gave him something to focus on. She let him take his time.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘No more bullshit rationing. Where?’

  ‘I used to be a doctor in Minneapolis,’ she said by way of an answer, ‘up until just under a year ago, when I got a bad case of bacterial meningitis. Not that there’s any such thing as a good case, you understand, but there you go. That’s the problem with hospitals – full of sick people. Do you know what that particular bug does?’

  He shook his head, not having a clue what this had to do with anything.

  ‘It causes inflammation of the membrane lining the brain and spinal cord. This is not a fun thing to have. In bad cases it can, amongst other things, put people in comas, which is what happened to me – heavy-duty antibiotics, endotracheal intubation, the works. See this scar?’ She stroked the navel-like dimple in the hollow of her throat. He’d seen it but been too polite to ask. ‘And then one day I woke up here. Well, not here, obviously. Stray.’