Usher sucked his teeth.
“Very little. Look lady, I think you may have found talking to the monkey, when what you want is the organ grinder. I’m good at soldiering, always had a knack for it. You want me to tab across a desert, slot a couple of insurgents, I’m your man. Ghosts and goblins, all it means is different bullets, different kit, and different tactics. I kill people that threaten me, my team, and all those people out there just trying to have their dinner in peace. You want all the lore and background stuff? Wrong guy.”
Ursula stared at him, seemingly surprised. “You have absolutely no idea what you are fighting do you?”
Usher laughed. “No I don’t think we do. What matters is that we fight, isn’t it? We endure to fight and survive another day. You wanna give me the Idiot’s Guide version?”
“I will try. Though some of it may not translate.”
Ursula looked out to the black ocean and seemed to fight for the right words.
“Usher. The Unseelie Kingdom and my Kingdom are two halves of the same coin. Your world is a patchwork of many fragments, sand and water, hills and cold canyons, great cities and tilled fields. Where I come from there is only forest above and darkness below. Above is an endless forest filled with wonders. It is wild and perilous, but it is not evil. The magic that created it is the magic of wild things. It is as powerful and beautiful and dangerous as an earthquake or a thunderstorm. This is where I am from. This is where the creature aboard the ship is from. In my world, he is not a monster, but what you would call a gardener of sorts.”
“A gardener. Well that’s not what I expected. ”
“Is that the right word? Originally he was what we call a Treemaker. A specialist in forest magic, who can warp and change the forest into shapes that suit us. It is how many who live in the forest grow their cities. He can change the property of wood and root. Quite a craftsman where we are from.”
“A craftsman? A craftsman whose blood can make monsters. So if the Unseelie don’t live in your giant forest, where are they?”
“They are far beneath it, in a realm we call the Deep. A system of caverns and tunnels that stretch beneath us, as vast as the forest itself. It is a place of fear and crawling nightmare, governed by their leader, the King of the Dark. Their power and magic is of a completely different sort to our own, drawn from loneliness and endless night. Everything you could ever fear is in those dark tunnels. The endless caverns of the Deep are where the Unseelie come from. We do not know how they discovered this world, or how they found the thin spots that lead here, but for them your world is the light that leads out of the darkness. They will never leave you alone, and they will leave none of you alive.”
She passed the cigar back to Usher.
He took it and sucked in a mouthful of smoke. Her saliva had soaked into the tobacco leaf and it tasted metallic, almost like electrical burning.
Usher watched the waves roll in far below.
“So who is he, this gardener of yours that they have captured? What are we dealing with?”
Ursula’s aquiline face seemed to soften for a moment.
“This thing is a …difficult creature. He is a force of nature, hard to reason with, as cruel as the sea but no more in control of itself. He has caused much trouble here in your world in the past, before he went to sleep deep in the ice of the north. He is perhaps asleep still and unaware of what is happening to him. In his blood is something wild that can make beasts of men. Like the things that attacked your people in London. It was when I saw them that I knew the court had found Arrik’s place of the long sleep. Usher, we think he carried something with him over to this world that could prove even more trouble than his blood.”
Usher raised a brow and sighed.
“Worse than those giant ogre things?What?”
“A box.”
“A box.”
“A box of seeds. That grows a very special kind of tree. If the Unseelie can find and use the box then your troubles are only just beginning.”
Usher finished the cigar and threw the stub over the edge. It caught in the breeze and flew off out to sea for a moment then fell, vanishing from sight.
“Marvellous. Well that’s a situation we can’t allow. If there’s one thing we can’t abide here on earth it’s special trees.”
Usher glanced wryly at the creature next to him. To his surprise he found that he was enjoying this stolen moment of peace. Ursula regarded him gravely with her strange eyes.
“So I can rely on you to do everything you can to ensure that the seeds are recovered and Arrik returned to us? We must restore everything to normal.”
Usher shook his head as he looked out to sea.
“Lady, I just smoked a cigar with Big Bird. I don’t have much of a good reference point for normal these days. But I’ll do my job, and I’ll do what I can.”
They sat staring out into the dark expanse of the Mediterranean. Usher felt the cold breeze on his skin and the tiredness suddenly washed over him. He felt every bruise, every cut and graze. He knew he had a lot of work ahead, but tonight he felt old and tired. He was not sure he had the strength of will anymore.
He turned to Ursula but as he did so she was on him, her cold lips caressing his, her tongue forced into his mouth, crackling static that made every hair on his body stand on end. It was bizarre, the current that ran through her, the contradictory feelings hard to reconcile.
On one hand kissing her had the chemical electrical charge the same as licking the end of a battery, on the other hand it brought a physical charge that flowed through him like a shiver of pure pleasure.
She pushed Usher down onto his back, and through the crackling charge he felt all the pain leave his body, or rather the pain was converted, misinterpreted as tingling ecstasy. There was fluidity and inevitability to her movements, his resistance was token but he could still feel the terrible strength.
Before he knew it she was on him, a lion with a gazelle and in the blur of time he was inside her. Looking up, her athlete’s frame was silhouetted against the moon. He did not know how long she moved upon him. It wasn’t that he came inside her, more that his essence was drawn from him like a poison, and he was left, sober, healed and invigorated. It left him with a cry and then he collapsed into the grass beneath him.
She looked down at him, and smiled when she saw his confusion that his burst lip had healed, and the booze fuelled fugue had left his body.
“I offered you a tonic when we first met, Thom Usher, remember?”
Usher let his head lie back on the grass, breathed out a sigh of relief, and felt his strength return.
“You did. And I just took a whisky. More fool me.”
Then he watched as she stood up, towering above him in her ruffled half torn biker gear. She smiled down at him and nodded.
“I have given you a gift of the Valkyrie Thom Usher, you should be grateful.”
Usher propped himself up on his elbows. He felt amazing.
“I am grateful. The what?”
“The strength I have given you will not last, but you will need it to combat what you are about to face.”
Usher sighed. “Can’t you just let me afterglow in peace without all these portents of doom?”
Ursula took a step back towards the cliff. Usher held a hand out to warn her to be careful.
“Take care Dragon slayer. I’ll be watching.”
The she stepped back off the edge.
Suddenly huge wings fanned out from her back with a sound like a sword unsheathing, each feather topped with a silver blade. Instead of falling, Ursula rose up on the air, peering down on him with a terrible majesty Usher had not seen there before.
In his now sober mind, the sheer strangeness of the evening hit him like a train. He stared at her as she drifted away from him, out into the Mediterranean night above the sea. Over the breeze he heard her voice, now metallic and cold.
“You may yet find your family Thom Usher. They may not be full gone.”
Usher watched her disappear up towards the Moon, until she became no more than a tiny black shape that could pass for a sea bird.
He checked himself.
Wild night.
Usher barely remembered what normal was, if he had ever known.
Suddenly up the hill came the headlights of a taxi. It slowed at the clifftop viewpoint and the back door opened. Usher stood staring in confusion for a moment before Christi popped her head out.
“Thom, we gotta go now. Greystone’s packed us on an earlier flight with some marines going home. Leaves the base in two hours.”
Usher sighed.
“What’s happened?”
“There’s been another terrorist incident in London. They need us back on line ASAP.”
11
The lift doors opened and Ariel and Carver stepped out. Ariel looked to his side, and thought that Carver looked like a cultured diplomat, a veteran of scientific fundraising and awards ceremonies. He wore his evening suit like a comfortable second skin.
Ariel reached his hand under his collar and tried to stretch it out away from his own skin. It had been chafing him since he put it on and he had developed a red itching rash on the back of his neck. The jacket was a little too long in the sleeve, the shoes a little tight around his toes. He looked at best like a head waiter and at worst a nineteen seventies working man’s club comedian. His stomach was still turning over and he was belching constantly under his breath. He felt his nervous sweat soaking into the starched white shirt he wore under his jacket. He had not eaten since seeing the Thing down in the lower labs, and had secreted two bars of chocolate in his inside pocket in case he developed a sugar low during the next hour.
Hazelnut chocolate. That was the closest Ariel had to a weapon in his battle against the forces of darkness.
He swallowed hard and stepped out of the elevator into an office that would have put most land bound CEO’s to shame.
One entire wall was a thick reinforced window that offered a view out over the stormy night to the twinkling lights of Longyearbyen a few miles away. Once again Ariel wished he was there, in the bar of the world’s most Northerly hotel, sipping a beer and reading a book by the fire. Safe, unadventurous and normal, the way he liked it. Instead, he was alone and isolated in the lion’s den.
The rest of the office felt like the chambers of a Roman Senator. High ceilinged, with pillars rising to the roof, that was arched like a church. Not the sort of place he expected to find on a ship. The long tiled floor leading to Argent’s desk was lined with pedestals topped with glass domes, and beneath each one, an Unseelie artefact that his colleagues back at the lab would kill to be allowed to study. Ariel tried to hide the flash of scientific interest as he passed them. He was not supposed to know what the Unseelie Court even was.
Each pedestal was lit with a small spotlight, which were the only light in the vaulted room apart from a lit brazier at the side of Argent’s desk. The desk itself was a colossal dark slab of stone, polished to a dull shine, and behind that desk, like a hunched crow and bathed in the orange glow of the coals in the brazier, sat Isaiah Argent.
As he and Carver approached the desk, he saw Argent clearly for the first time.
Abraham Lincoln with radiation poisoning.
That was the first impression that Ariel had when he looked at the old man, but he did his best to be a good spy and keep his poker face.
Argent smiled and rose creakily from his chair. The smile was unpleasant, as the gums had severely receded from the grey stained teeth, making them appear too long. He shuffled around the desk, leaning heavily on his cane, and extended his hand. The fingers were thin and also extremely long. Argent fixed Ariel’s eye with a feverish glare and maintained the smile, which seemed to take considerable muscular effort. Ariel reluctantly reached out and gently shook the old man’s hand. He felt Argent stroke the back of his hand unpleasantly, like an elderly auntie driven crazy by the youthful fat of a baby’s cheek.
“Dr Speedman, nice to meet you. Forgive me for my ignorance at the heli-pad, I am not a good flyer. Don’t trust those machines. Always has a bad effect on my mood, and when I’m in a bad mood, everyone else usually gets the brunt of it. Old man’s crankiness, not an attractive quality, but there I am.”
Of course you don’t. You don’t trust or understand any machines. That’s why you hire people like me. The way humans hire wizards to try and understand the magic of the other side.
“I completely understand Mr Argent. It’s wild out there tonight. Beautiful in here though, incredible office.”
Argent returned to behind the great stone slab that was his desk, and poured three glasses of what Ariel took to be tawny Port.
He handed one to Ariel and one to Carver, then raised his own glass in shaking hand.
“Well, welcome aboard anyway Dr Speedman. You came very highly recommended, and I trust you will be able to find a way to, er, use your scientific expertise to mass produce our new product. It will make us a lot of money, can’t imagine many militaries that wouldn’t want it. Soldiers that don’t get tired, don’t get scared, don’t care if they bleed, heal if they do. Remarkable that we look to old methods for future problems.”
Ariel nodded.
“I have never seen anything quite like it, and I must be honest I’m still reeling. I deal in facts, in evidence, in viable well tested theories, experimentation. This is, uh, is more like…”
Argent offered his equine smile.
“Magic? Monsters? Yes, it must come as a shock to you, especially as a man who trusts his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes and his common sense. But not as shocking to you as it would seem to others aboard this ship or elsewhere, eh? You’ve already seen many a strange thing in your life, kept a diary of it all on this internet. What do you people call it? “
“A blog sir.”
Argent nodded slowly and mouthed the word back to Ariel.
“Yes, that’s right. Of course you realize that you work for us now? That anything you see or hear aboard this ship is of the utmost secrecy.”
“I understand Mr Argent. You mentioned old methods. What kind? It’s impressive the scientific equipment you have on board, but I’m not sure that creature obeys the laws of nature or adheres to any scientific rules at all.”
Argent tapped his fingers slowly on the table and his mouth worked.
“We think it’s been buried under the ice for a long time. We managed to extract and adapt some of the chemicals from its blood, what I would called an elixir in my quaint old fashioned speech, but it seems to be able to prevent us doing that anymore. We think in the past your Vikings were positively drunk on this concoction, enabling them to terrify the world in their day. The creature is still asleep but we know it’s aware of its surroundings; it’s listening to everything going on. Doesn’t seem to like us. Perhaps you can reason with it Ariel, you seem like a personable sort of fellow.”
Beside Ariel, Carver drained his glass and was staring at him, waiting for his response.
“I’ll try communicating sir, see what I can come up with, but I can’t promise miracles.”
Argent’s face lengthened and his port stained tongue licked his lips.
“Oh we don’t want miracles Ariel. Nasty, bright uncompromising things. They age you.”
Ariel looked at the CEO of the Chromium Project, tried to place an age on him, but couldn’t, Because he looked like he had already died. He knew the company had been started in seventeen seventy six reportedly by Isaiah’s distant ancestor, but Ariel’s suspicions were now that there was only ever one Argent in the family, and he was looking at him. There was something of the founding fathers about the cut of his jib. His accent, something Mississippi there perhaps, but his speech seemed awkward, anachronistic somehow. He wondered if this man was one of the longest serving sleeper agents of the Unseelie Court on Earth. How much damage had he really done over the centuries, how many things that were put down to man-made causes that the STG had missed?
/> Argent grinned unpleasantly at Ariel.
“Would you like to see my version of a miracle Dr Speedman?”
Ariel felt his stomach turn and tried to nod his head but failed. He knew it was a rhetorical question.
Argent glanced to either side of him and from the gloom stepped three of his enormous Feral bodyguards. They wore combat fatigues and boots but were shirtless and for the first time without their balaclavas. Ariel wondered how they could ever be mistaken for human.
Two of them carried their long machetes in an almost ceremonial way, as if they were guarding a pharaoh. The third carried the box that had been brought with them from the helicopter. The bodyguard carrying the box knelt before Argent and presented it to him.
His scientific and occult mind worked in unison trying to record every detail of the creatures.
Up close Ariel estimated that they were around eight feet tall and approximately four hundred pounds of solid muscle. The neck and trapezius being particularly hypertrophied, giving them a brutish, simian appearance. The skin seemed thick and almost leathery, a deep elephantine grey as if smeared with ash. Their faces had an overdeveloped jaw and prominent brow ridge. Beneath this ridge flashed deep red irises filled with ferocity. Two of them sported extensive tribal facial tattoos like pacific islanders; the third that carried the box had a long braided beard. All of them wore strings of body parts around their necks and wrists. To Ariel they looked like Ogres of legend. He had to admit up close they terrified him.
Argent leaned over the open box with an expression of mock delight. “For me? Oh you shouldn’t have.”
He reached in and brought out what looked like a large acorn yet it glowed with a faint green light. Argent held it up as if it were a diamond he was inspecting. He glanced at his bodyguards then at Ariel.
“Impressive fellows aren’t they? We’re still tweaking things of course, but this is the results of our elixir. An improvement on humanity’s puny little frame I’d say. I intend to mass produce. That should make all the world’s skirmishes a little more interesting.”
The Last Line Series One Page 10