‘What worries my sister is the herd on the border. I thought if we could move it away…’ He sighed and made a helpless gesture. ‘It would buy us time, at least. But the operation would have to be quick and clean. If the manticores move towards the border…’
‘Queen Blue will use the neutron spell?’
‘She might. Dammit, she will! I know Blue.’ He looked at Corin. ‘Can you find enough men for the job? They’ll have to be sensible and quick off the mark and able to follow orders precisely and have enough initiative to deal with emergencies – if a manticore left the herd, for example.’
‘It’s a huge herd,’ Corin said, shaking his head. ‘We’d need an awful lot of good men.’
‘So you can’t do it?’
‘I didn’t say I couldn’t do it,’ Corin told him. ‘If you supervise the making of the torches, I’ll round up the men.’
Fifty
‘Something’s happening,’ Henry said quietly. There was no change on the Operations Table yet, but it looked like definite movement on the viewglobes. He leaned forward for a better, closer look.
There was a lot of noise in the Situation Room – people talking, people moving, people shouting orders – but Blue seemed to be attuned to him because she was at his side at once. ‘What’s the matter, Henry?’
What was the matter was that the manticores were moving. He was almost sure of it. And if he was right, it was war and his wife would vent the fury of a neutron spell on Haleklind. ‘I’m not sure,’ Henry said. ‘Maybe nothing.’
Blue stared past him at the globe. ‘You think they’re moving, don’t you?’
‘Blue,’ Henry said, ‘about the neutron thing -’
‘Don’t make this any more difficult for me, Henry. I must preserve the Realm.’
‘Yes, but not that way. Not by killing thousands… probably tens of thousands…’
Blue said tiredly, ‘Tell me another way. You were here when we discussed it. Tell me a better way.’ When Henry didn’t answer, she turned her back on the globes. ‘There’s no sign of troop movements,’ she said firmly. ‘They won’t use the manticores without conventional back-up. It would make no sense.’ She stopped to stare around the bustle in the Situation Room, then added almost dreamily, ‘I’m sure Madame Cardui will alert us to troop movements.’ Henry thought she looked exhausted, which she probably was. They’d both missed sleep lately.
He turned back to the globes. The technology was not a million miles away from what he was used to in his own world. The feed came from cameras strategically placed at points along the border. What the cameras saw could be changed, at least to some degree, by remote control. Since the equipment used magical energy, the enemy could cut no cables, could block no television signals; and the cameras themselves were so well protected they were virtually indestructible. But there were three serious flaws. The first was that the picture quality was poor. The second was that the pictures themselves were small, with no means of enlargement. (Mr Fogarty had once explained why: something to do with a geometric progression of energy needs.) The third, and most troublesome of all, was that the picture could not be refreshed in real time. Instead it reacted to the position of the moon. The result was that in certain phases, the pictures on the viewglobes ran as smoothly as a movie, while in others the update was jerkier than an old dial-up internet connection. Unfortunately they were in a jerky internet moon phase at the moment.
Blue was probably right. If there were no troops to back them up, it would make little sense to send the manticores stampeding across the border. Except that he thought he’d spotted movement close to the herd. Not troop movement, to be sure – so far there were only a few figures – but maybe the preliminary to troop movement: forward scouts searching out the best positions for an approaching army. Or maybe nothing at all, a small party of Haliklind tourist hikers who’d wandered off the beaten track. Henry shut his eyes. He really would have to stop thinking the worst in every situation. If this went on, he’d start imagining Lord Hairstreak had made a miraculous comeback and was plotting to take over the planet.
‘Excuse me, Consort Majesty, Lord Hairstreak wishes to see you and Her Majesty the Queen.’
Henry stared down at the messenger, a fresh-faced young woman in uniform, wondering if he’d misheard or was just hallucinating. He noticed Madame Cardui was standing beside the girl and switched his attention to her at once. ‘I thought Lord Hairstreak was dead – or as good as. Isn’t he on life support?’
Madame Cardui nodded. ‘He was kept alive with a Body in a Box. Nightmare existence: just a head on an onyx cube. But it seems CMS have sold him something better now – I sent a memo to Queen Blue about it. He has full-functioning mobility. Quite his old self, in fact. His old dangerous self.’
There were a lot of things Henry suddenly wanted to know. ‘You don’t think he’s mixed up in the Haleklind invasion plan, do you?’
Madame Cardui said soberly, ‘I doubt it, given his long incapacity. At the same time, I’ve just had intelligence that Lord Hairstreak came calling on the Companion Leader immediately before Mella vanished – an interesting coincidence… if you believe in coincidence.’
Blue, who had been locked in close conference with General Vanelke, was suddenly beside them. ‘What’s an interesting coincidence?’
‘Hairstreak’s here,’ Henry said. ‘He’s managed to acquire a mobile body.’ He looked at the messenger.
‘Majesty, Lord Hairstreak is seeking an audience with Your Majesties.’
‘ Hairstreak? ’ Blue frowned. ‘Where is he?’
‘Above in the Palace, Majesties, waiting in the ante-room to the Throne Room.’ The girl had an excited look in her eye. She hesitated, then suddenly blurted, ‘Majesties, the Princess Mella is with him.’
Despite the need for decorum, Henry was almost running when he reached the ante-room, but had to stop to allow Blue to enter ahead of him. As he stepped inside a pace behind her, it registered at once how tall Hairstreak had become. Madame Cardui was right: he had regained a fully functioning body, and a bigger, stronger one than the body he used to have. If it was made by CMS it had to be artificial, but it looked the real thing. The face on the old familiar head was contorted into an expression of attempted benevolence that made Henry instantly suspicious.
Then, standing to the right of Hairstreak and a little behind, he saw Mella. She was wearing different clothes to the last time he’d seen her and looked a little the worse for wear, but overall, to his intense relief, she seemed fit and healthy.
Blue must have spotted her as well, but was constrained by protocol to say, ‘Lord Hairstreak, how good to see you functioning again.’
Henry, who accepted no such constraints, ran to Mella. As he reached her, he heard Hairstreak said, ‘I have brought your daughter home from Haleklind.’
‘Indeed you have,’ Blue told him, still every inch the Queen. ‘And we are grateful. How may we express it? Will you accept a reward?’
‘Mella!’ Henry exclaimed and threw his arms around her. He’d have her grounded for a month for running away and worrying them like that, grounded for six months for using lethe on them. He’d ban all her favourite foods, forbid her use of magic, deny her all servants, refuse her new shoes, have her travel privileges withdrawn and give her a severe talking to. But all that was for the future. All he wanted now was to kiss her and hold her and make sure she was all right.
Mella hugged him back. She smelled a little different – probably hadn’t bathed in a while, although it was not the smell of stale sweat – and her eyes seemed unusually sober, worried almost, although that would easily be explained if she had got herself into trouble, since she ran away. Or perhaps she was just anticipating punishment, as well she might.
‘There is no need for a reward,’ Lord Hairstreak said. His voice had improved since he found a new body, taking on more resonance and giving him a certain charisma. ‘Mella is my favourite great-niece.’
Mella is your only grea
t-niece, Henry thought inconsequentially.
‘Daddy, I need to talk to you,’ Mella whispered in his ear. ‘Take me out of here somewhere private.’
‘Then you must stay for a meal,’ Blue said; and you would never have thought she loathed Lord Hairstreak… or that the Realm was poised on the brink of war. ‘We have to hear the story of how you found her -’ Blue glanced at Mella for the first time, ‘- and what she was doing in Haleklind.’
Henry felt a surge of admiration for his wife. She too must have been beside herself to hug Mella, kiss Mella, find out if Mella was all right, but she was coolly, calculatingly putting her Realm duty first. If Hairstreak agreed to stay for a meal – and protocol insisted one should never decline an invitation from the Queen – Henry could imagine her subtly quizzing him about the Haleklind situation (and the reason for his recent visit) under the pretext of asking him about Mella. There was only one problem with her plan. Now Hairstreak was equipped with a brand new artificial body, had he begun to eat again? Henry was fairly sure that when the little crud was just a head on a cube, he’d lived on sunlight.
‘Daddy!’ Mella hissed urgently.
Henry turned his attention back to his daughter. ‘We can’t leave yet,’ he whispered. ‘It would be impolite to Lord Hairstreak. And your mother will want to talk to you in a minute.’ The exchange was attracting the attention of Lord Hairstreak, who glanced towards them. To his surprise, Henry noticed that his daughter caught Hairstreak’s eye and a most curious look passed between them. Then Lord Hairstreak turned away and the moment was gone.
Mella stood on tiptoe and leaned forward until her mouth touched his ear. ‘If you don’t get me out of here at once, Daddy, I intend to pee, very publicly, on your foot.’
Fifty-One
Pyrgus had done something like this before when he was a boy, and he still loved it. Corin’s men weren’t at all what he’d expected. He’d assumed the best his old friend could do would be members of the Society, and probably not even activists. Instead he produced soldiers – tough, hard men with marine training. They didn’t carry weapons (at least not visible weapons), which was a small disappointment, but they wielded their torches like projectile rifles. Corin introduced Pyrgus as their new leader and they all came to attention, saluted smartly and stamped so violently that the nails in their heavy-duty boots emitted sparks. Then they trotted into marching formation, shuffled into final positions and fell in behind him. It was a fantastic feeling, spoiled only by the fact he had to ask Corin where they were going.
The march – it was a proper march with rude counting songs and everything – proved fairly easy, which was just as well since Pyrgus quickly discovered he was disgracefully unfit; at least by comparison with his men. He felt a distinct sense of relief when Corin whispered that they were approaching the manticore plain that abutted the border. But when they topped a rise and looked across the plain itself, it was immediately obvious something was wrong.
‘Where are the manticores?’ Pyrgus asked. There was not a single beast in sight, let alone a herd.
Corin looked as surprised as he was. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’
‘Yes,’ Corin said. ‘Of course.’ He pointed. ‘That’s the border over there. If you look carefully you can see the shimmer of the securities.’
‘But there aren’t any manticores.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ Corin said. ‘They must have… gone.’
‘This is turning into a really stupid conversation,’ Pyrgus said grumpily. ‘Of course they’re gone, otherwise they’d still be here. The question is where? They were massing on the border, Corin, I can promise you that. You know what I told you.’ He looked at Corin and nodded knowingly. He had to be careful what he said because of the men who were now pressing up behind them, but once Corin thought about it, it had to be obvious that a manticore herd, bred as weapons and poised for an invasion, didn’t simply wander off somewhere. If there had been any sign of major movement, any sign at all, the Table of Seven would have ordered them driven back to their former position at once. Even Pyrgus’s own plan to move them back from the border was only a way of buying time.
Corin lowered his voice. ‘Perhaps the invasion has started.’
Pyrgus stared at him in sudden shock. It said a lot for his naivete that the thought had never occurred to him. But now Corin had expressed it, Pyrgus realised, with a sweeping chill, it was the most obvious explanation. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘I don’t know,’ Corin said. From his face he was as shocked and worried as Pyrgus himself. ‘But I think we should find out.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘We go down there and look at the tracks.’
‘Manticores aren’t easy to track.’ Pyrgus frowned. He’d had a hard enough time following the one that escaped from him and she wasn’t on open ground where there were no broken bushes to give a clue.
‘Not single manticores, no,’ Corin agreed. ‘Those pads don’t leave much of a mark. But a herd’s different, especially a big one; and especially if it’s moving quickly. They extend their claws and that chews up the ground. If we go down there, we’ll soon know where they went – which direction, anyway.’
There was something else worrying Pyrgus. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know if the Table of Seven have viewglobe cameras set up on the plain?’
‘Bound to,’ Corin said. ‘Their military would want to keep an eye on the herd. And the border, of course. Are you worried about being seen?’
‘A bit.’ Actually he was less worried about being seen by the Haleklind military than he was about being seen by Blue, who thought he was on a diplomatic mission to Kremlin Karcist. When he had planned on moving the herd, he knew the manticores themselves would shield him, and in any case he was unlikely to be spotted among a mass of milling beasts and men. But if he went down on to an empty plain, he would stand out like a sore thumb. Blue would know at once what he was up to, of course. They’d been so close since childhood that she could practically read his mind. At which point she’d go ballistic.
Corin, who was quick on the uptake, said, ‘Is this that you don’t want the men seen, or you don’t want to be recognised personally?’
‘Recognised personally – it’s a complication I really don’t need. It doesn’t matter who sees a party of men wandering about, not now: not in an empty field. But I’d rather -’ He broke off to ask, ‘What are you doing?’
Corin was holding a spell cone under his nose. ‘Easily fixed,’ he said.
Pyrgus drew back suspiciously. ‘Where did you get that?’
Corin grinned. ‘I may not like the Government, but I’m still a Haleklinder – we carry spells for every occasion. This one’s a NewFace ^ ®. The kids use them a lot at dances – they make you look handsome.’
‘I’m handsome already,’ Pyrgus grinned back.
‘Matter of opinion,’ Corin told him. ‘But in any case they change your whole appearance: your own mother won’t recognise you. The best thing about it though is that when you get fed up with looking different, all you have to do is rub your face vigorously and the effect dissipates.’
‘Crack the cone!’ said Pyrgus briskly.
Corin proved right about the tracks. Once they went down to the plain, it was obvious a manticore herd had grazed there; and recently. It was a little less obvious where they’d gone – parts of the plain were so churned up they looked as if they’d been ploughed – but fortunately one of Corin’s men had experience as a tracker.
‘They moved into the forest,’ he said.
‘That’s not possible,’ Corin said at once. ‘Plains manticores dislike the forest and vice versa.’
The man shrugged. ‘Only telling you what the tracks show.’
Pyrgus felt a cautious flooding of relief. If the manticores went into the forest, it meant there’d been no invasion yet. But like Corin he was still unsure about this information. He turned to Corin and as
ked, frowning, ‘Where would they go in the forest? Where does the forest lead to?’ He didn’t seem to be making himself clear, so he added, ‘I mean, if you go right the way through the forest, where do you come out?’ His grasp of Haleklind geography was abysmal, but the thought occurred that there might be better living conditions for the manticores on the other side. The beasts were nomadic to some extent and could simply have taken off in search of better pastures. Plains manticores might not like to live in a forest, but they might be prepared to pass through one. Against that, if the Table of Seven was planning on using them as a weapon, had moved them to the border and had cameras tracking them, it seemed very unlikely they’d simply have been allowed to wander off. Or if they had wandered, wouldn’t their military minders be appearing soon to bring them back?
Corin looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘The forest has a long stretch northwards and it eventually extends right into the Realm if you go south, but if you move directly across you reach the grounds of Kremlin Karcist eventually.’
‘That’s where I’m supposed to be,’ Pyrgus muttered thoughtfully. His mind was running at full speed. Wherever they might be, the manticores were no longer massing by the border, so the mission he’d set himself was accomplished, even though he’d had nothing to do with it. Which meant he could now get on with his official mission. If he reached the Table of Seven quickly, he could start his search for Mella at the place where she was last seen and at the same time find out if there was any diplomatic leeway in the current threatening situation. He was actually more optimistic than he had been when he started out. He kept thinking about the missing herd, finding it difficult to imagine anyone other than the Haleklind military might have moved them. And if the military had moved them, that marked a change in the situation, just possibly a change for the better. He came to a decision and turned to Corin.
The Faeman Quest fw-5 Page 27