Myajes decided he’d turn right here, but had to stop, as a large crowd had gathered under the screen to see who was listed, blocking the way on. It was interesting to consider that although many herd seemed quite interested in who was on the list, few if any would actually like to meet one of them in the flesh. Myajes pushed his way through the crowd as best he could, trying to continue, but he couldn’t help but look at the screen as he passed. Chance was that he was on that list somewhere, and though he’d deny having such an ego, he couldn’t help but wonder what number he was.
The screen started a new cycle. A large ‘1’ accompanied the first picture in the top left corner of the picture. The picture itself was that of the Lesser Matriarch. The legend beneath proclaimed that too, with the comment to the side that her real name was unknown. She was beautiful, very deeply striped and with very yellow eyes. It had been said that even herd had fallen in love with her image, and Myajes himself still found it hard to believe that anyone so lovely could exist, despite the fact that he saw her in the flesh nearly every day.
Next was the Lesser Patriarch. He was quite a contrast: fairly handsome, but his stripes were virtually non-existent. If it hadn’t been for his eyes, he could have probably passed for herd without having to wear any makeup. He was quite a contrast from the deep the coloring of his wife.
The third was a herd. Myajes didn’t know him and had never heard of him, but the legend on the screen claimed the man was some sort of renegade, a card-carrying member of the Church of the Goddess. He had apparently attacked and killed a number of soldiers to free a group of besieged Herbaht. It was true that occasionally a human with stronger-than-normal feelings about the Goddess would take up arms against his own people on behalf of the Herbaht, but they were few and far between, though there were a few notable historical examples. Nevertheless, Myajes was skeptical, and he felt it was far more likely to be some elaborate hoax, an attempt to get some herd into the confidence of the Herbaht.
The fourth was also human and fairly young. It seemed that this one had nothing to do with the Herbaht at all. He was a young drug baron who had built up a small empire in the center of the city. Normally this wouldn’t be enough to get him to fourth place, but according to the blurb, he had recently wiped out a rival during a gun battle in the streets that had endangered and indeed killed many innocent citizens.
The fifth was a group picture, a group of seven Herbaht who appeared to actually be posing for the picture. It seemed that other than being Herbaht, which was usually crime enough, they had robbed a series of shops. There was something not quite right about two of the figures in the picture; maybe it had been enhanced or something.
The sixth picture was Myajes himself—not a very flattering picture, but then he wasn’t exactly standing still so they could take it. The legend explained to the crowd that Myajes was the bodyguard of the Lesser Matriarch. That, it seemed, was all that was needed.
The next three pictures were of each of the other bodyguards. One was male (his brother Jamick), the other two female (his half-sister Hamdrill and her half-sister Mickie).
By the eighth image, though, Myajes had scrambled through the crowd and was strolling down the road relatively unhindered, except perhaps for the other people going the same way that seemed to have no feeling of urgency.
Myajes was lucky that the soldier he suddenly noticed approaching with the sniffer dog was downwind of him, so he smelled the soldier before the dog got scent of him. The soldier was alone, likely just walking the dog and not expecting an encounter.
Sniffer dogs were trained for the smell of Herbaht. Usually they would bark to notify their handler that they were on the trail.
Myajes had had a long day; he really didn’t want to kill the man, thus revealing himself to all those watching. It was a crowded road, and even if the crowd panicked and scattered he’d have a hard time getting away before more soldiers were sent for. Besides, how many of those in the crowd might have a go themselves? Many were likely armed, and if only one percent of those armed in the crowd tried to shoot him, he’d be dead before nightfall and no use at all to Lara then.
There was this one herd by the name of Slim Dorris, (Myajes was sure that wasn’t his real name), but he had gotten a reputation as a Herbaht killer by being in a crowd such as this when three Herbaht had been forced to break cover together. This herd was called a hero now. How many ‘heroes’ might there be waiting to prove themselves amidst this crowd?
He headed back towards the shopping mall. Hopefully he’d be safely in the mall before the dog picked up his scent, and if the soldier had half as much trouble as he had had getting through the crowd gathered at the big screen, he could use the time to escape.
Again the crowd insisted on blocking his way, and he heard the dog barking long before he had entered the mall. He looked back, unable to resist seeing where the soldier was and what he intended to do.
The soldier was looking up into the crowd. Myajes was sure that he and the soldier made eye-to-eye contact across the distance. The soldier must have known he was the one the dog had caught the scent of. And there was plenty more crowd to work his way through. He then knew the soldier would have no trouble following; he’d just ask the crowd to let him through. Tell them he was chasing a Herbaht and he’d be on Myajes before he made it to the mall.
The soldier looked down at his dog, then up into the crowd again. He seemed to be smiling directly at Myajes, and then he pulled the dog’s leash and started heading back the way he had come.
Myajes felt his entire body relax. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. The soldier hadn’t wanted a confrontation either, especially not as he was on his own. It seemed that discretion was the better part of valor.
He even felt a bit of respect for the soldier; Myajes knew who he was, whereas the soldier had no idea who the dog had caught scent of. He was sure that he had imagined that the soldier had been looking at him now. The soldier hadn’t allowed testosterone to make him act rashly and get himself, and probably Myajes, killed.
As he entered the mall, he thought for a moment that at least the prison camp wouldn’t have any sniffer dogs. With the number of Herbaht prisoners they had, the dog’s barking would drive the guards crazy. Of course, they might have normal guard dogs there.
There were four levels of the mall, with escalators and elevators and even stairs going between each level. The big important department stores were on the lowest floor where the rent was highest, and some of these were on more than one floor themselves, having their own elevators or stairs to move from one floor to the next.
The third and fourth floors were smaller and more specialized. Some of these shops were even in the price range of small business owners who still felt they were paying too much for their little space.
Myajes hadn’t really planned to come into the mall at all, but now that he was here he tried to make his way through the stinking crush of bodies to the bottom of the nearest escalator. There was a map of the mall and a list of the shops in the mall here. Spending a couple of minutes here could save him a lot of time.
On the fourth floor of the mall was a map shop. It didn’t mean much to him; he had been in a lot of map shops so far today, and not one had had anything that might be of use. They all had the same maps of London and nothing of the forest to the west.
He was tired and his mind was feeling numb from the day’s search, but he couldn’t afford to allow even the slightest possibility of a lead to get away. He got on the escalator and made his way up to the fourth floor.
It was a small shop. A small opening between two glass walls allowed ingress. A very bored-looking shopkeeper sat at the counter to the left of the entry as he walked in. The shopkeeper looked up briefly but seemed more interested in the book he was reading than in potentially making a sale. To the right of the entryway there was a set of cascading shelves containing books of maps, books on maps and books on the history of mapmaking. The other two walls see
med to contain wine racks, but the various partitions were currently being used by large rolled-up maps. In the middle of the shop there was even a table so these could be unfurled and checked properly to see if they were really what the customer was looking for.
Myajes turned to face the shopkeeper, but the man seemed so engrossed in his book that he didn’t respond at all.
‘Do you have any large maps of the forest?’ Myajes asked. He didn’t think it likely, but he had to ask.
The man grumbled to himself and placed the book he was reading grumpily down on the counter, keeping it open to the page he was on. ‘Which forest?’
‘The one just to the west of us,’ Myajes responded, a little surprised. What forest did the man think he meant?
‘Which era?’ The shopkeeper walked over to the further of the two wine racks and began to check through them.
‘As recent as possible!’ Myajes replied.
The shopkeeper shook his head slowly and moved away from the racks. ‘I have nothing of that area printed in this century. I guess the roads that pass through that part of the country don’t change enough to require new maps all that often.’
Myajes couldn’t help wondering how often the streets in London itself changed, since there seemed to have been a deluge of such maps during his search.
The man moved over to the rack of books and pulled one off the shelves. ‘I seem to remember seeing an old one in here, a historically important map because it’s the last one ever made of the area.’ He flipped through the book until he found the right page and then handed it to Myajes. It was quite a large format book, maybe eleven inches by nine, but the map shown only took up half a page.
Myajes looked at the map for a moment, finding it very hard to make out any of the details. The caption claimed it was printed over seventy years ago. ‘Do you also sell magnifying glasses?’
‘I don’t,’ the shopkeeper commented, ‘although I have no doubt you can find one in the mall somewhere. I do, however, have one for incidental use. I just can’t sell it to you.’
‘Is it powerful?’ Myajes asked.
‘Well, it’s intended for use with the larger maps, but I’m sure it’ll be better than nothing,’ the shopkeeper replied. He fetched the glass from its normal home behind the counter.
Myajes didn’t have a lot of hope as he examined the map, but the Cattery had been there for a few hundred years, so maybe there would be some clue on this map. If only it had been bigger. No doubt the publisher had been given instructions not to print a readable-sized version by the same people who had prevented any map being printed since.
The roads seemed to have no real form to them. If there was any clue in where the roads went, then he wasn’t seeing it. A couple of the roads seemed to lead nowhere. The words ‘nature reserve’ sat on the ends of these roads; they were unlikely to put something like that in a place they didn’t want people to visit.
Something then caught his eye. It was a road in the forest leading to a small camp that bore the legend Army Training Camp and Grounds – Keep out. It was true that there might have been an army camp there seventy years ago. There might even be a good chance it was still there. A forest like this might be ideal for those in the military who wanted to put on the occasional war game, and a nearby billet would be perfect, but something about it seemed wrong. Myajes couldn’t be sure it was the right place, but it’d be a good place to start. If he was wrong, he’d just have to study the map again.
‘Do you want the book?’ the shopkeeper asked.
‘I’ll take it,’ Myajes responded, ‘and if you can tell me where I might find a magnifying glass of my own I’ll be most grateful.’
‘One of the stationers on the first floor ought to have what you want,’ the shopkeeper replied as he made his way back behind the counter to ring up the bill.
3
The Professor And His Pet
Professor George Lomax, late of the University of London, sat in the back of the patrol car watching the two police officers in the front calmly. The driver seemed quite angry, almost frantic. His partner, fingering a laser pistol that sat on his lap in the passenger seat, was trying to talk to him calmly.
‘Stop it, Steve!’ he was saying, almost shouting, ‘There’s no way of knowing how many cats there might be.’
The driver seemed to ignore him, but there was burst of speed from the vehicle, showing the driver’s annoyance with his partner.
On the road ahead the Professor could see the article of the driver’s anger. It was a small yellow van of the sort that might be used to deliver to small, privately-owned shops. There were words on the side of the vehicle, but it never turned at the right angle for George to see them clearly. There were also a number of burn marks across the rear doors that had been made when the current occupants had first stolen it. A face peering through the rear windows of the van at the pursuing vehicle in which George was sitting confirmed that it had been stolen by Herbaht.
‘Steve, please, there are special units trained to deal with cats, and there are only the two of us. Please stop!’ He continued to finger his pistol nervously, sure he would need it at any moment.
George leaned forwards as far as he could to get a better look at the two officers and the weapon that one of them was playing with. He didn’t get any better view of the actual vehicle they were pursuing, no matter where he moved to on the back seat.
The driver, Steve, continued to ignore him and, if it was possible, actually gave the vehicle yet another burst of speed. In fact, they didn’t seem to be going much faster, but the engine roared as if to suggest it was laboring at a faster pace.
Then everything changed. Suddenly George was no longer in the back of the patrol car. Now he sat on a hard wooden bench in the back of the yellow van that the police were chasing. There were four Herbaht in the back here, all of them heavily armed and wearing some sort of body armor. Three of them sat on benches similar to the one George sat on; the fourth was peering out the back of the van towards the pursuers. As well as these four, there were two more up front, the driver and the one driving shotgun.
‘They’re still following!’ the one at the window said. ‘Surely they must know they’re no match for us?’ There was a kind of snarl to his voice, making him sound more like a cat than Herbaht usually did.
George sighed audibly as the conversation continued a little more inanely than he’d hoped. Sometimes he wondered why he’d ever bought the holoviewa; there was never anything decent on. He reached to the small control pad on the arm of the bench, ignoring the fact that this bench shouldn’t have an arm, and turned it off. Perhaps he just wasn’t in the mood to be entertained these days, not since they’d kicked him out of his lecturing job at the university. He was only forty-two, far too young to be thrown on the scrap heap. But someone had decided that the material he taught wasn’t vital enough to keep him on, and when the university had been told to make cutbacks, he had been one of those cut.
George enjoyed the silence that turning off the holoviewa had brought. He allowed his mind to wander, and eventually, as they always did, his eyes alighted on the portrait of his wife that adorned the wall furthest from the entryway to the room. It would be the first thing anyone saw when they entered the room, and it was big enough that they couldn’t miss it. She had died in childbirth, and the baby had died with her. George often liked to remember his life with her, and sometimes he’d try to imagine that she was still alive and just in another room. Occasionally he’d think of her tending their son, but that was harder because he hadn’t spent any time with the child before he had died and had only seen the baby at all because he’d insisted.
On either side of the portrait of his wife were the portraits of his two pet cats. These portraits were at most a quarter of the size of the centerpiece, but his eyes still drifted between all three. To the left was the portrait of Jojo. She was also dead now. It had been an unfortunate accident. He still wasn’t too sure what had happened, but he had fo
und her hanged in her room with her bedclothes; he was sure she hadn’t done it on purpose. George had been distraught about it for quite a while, and Kitty, his other pet, whose picture adorned the right side of his wife’s, hadn’t left her room for two months after the incident until George had forced her to. She still moped about it now and might even have been doing so as he sat here thinking about her. George had been told the two cats were sisters when he’d first bought them.
For a moment he thought about how cats had started to be made pets. It had started seven hundred years earlier. Everything important that was cat-related seemed to have happened seven hundred years ago, as if it had been some sort of golden age for the cats. Seven hundred years ago there had even been a yearly truce between the cats and the humans. It had started on Christmas Eve and lasted two weeks until the sixth of January, which, it had been claimed, was the wedding date for the Matriarchs and Patriarchs. The truce was supposed to encompass a human and a Herbaht holiday, and during this time the Herbaht didn’t hunt or kill humans. It was said that the cats could walk openly among the humans, but George doubted that; it would only take one human out for revenge to destroy the truce, and the truce had lasted nearly a century before someone had broken it. They had never tried to reestablish it afterwards.
Nevertheless, it was during this time that many humans and Herbaht had wanted to extend the truce. They had worked out a number of plans involving people who donated their bodies to the Herbaht as food, but it was rejected because the families of the dead most likely wouldn’t agree to it, whatever the wishes of those donated might be. The humans wouldn’t say so, but they also feared that with no check on the Herbaht numbers, they would soon outgrow the number of people volunteering to be fed to them when they died. The Herbaht would hunt again, and in such numbers that simply couldn’t be checked. There were even fears that it might lead to the Herbaht trying to take over the country. As it was, the cats had taken over supposed control of a small town called Sou’nd, situated about forty miles to the east of London, just on the north side of the Thames estuary. There were still many times more humans than cats there, but the humans that lived there still did so in abject fear.
London Wild Page 6