‘That little bastard. He sold us out in Paris, and he will do it again.’
‘Things have changed,’ Alex said, but Katrina was not convinced. She went out two hours before sunrise, and now the medical relief team is here and she is not.
Now, Alex tells the commander, ‘She had to run a little errand. She’ll meet up with us, I’m sure.’
‘This isn’t in the arrangements.’
‘Well, you can always go without me.’
‘Of course not. Is that all you have?’
Alex has brought his computer deck and a small kitbag. He lets one of the men stow his stuff away and then, with difficulty, he climbs up beside the commander.
They take the Kakavia road. Katrina is waiting a kilometre outside town, sitting amongst dry roadside weeds upwind of-the gallows where a shrivelled, crow-pecked fairy corpse hangs. Mr Avramites isn’t with her. Alex has a bad feeling about that, but now isn’t the time to ask.
The two jeeps of the medical relief team are semi-intelligent models equipped with fat mesh wheels that conform closely to the rough contours of the ruined road as it swings through the high pass. The little convoy moves at a steady fifty kph, ahead of a rolling tail of dust. The sun strikes down from a white sky. Alex, sweating into the back of his shirt, is glad of his big black hat. Behind him, Katrina is sprawled in the jeep’s narrow loadbed, seeming to sleep, biding her time.
The commander of the medical relief team is a straight-backed muscular young man with a neatly trimmed pencil moustache and a grasp of English that slips at convenient moments. Alex tells him of the time he was held captive in Macedonia, and the commander shrugs and says they are crazy wild people up there.
‘They claim that they have lived there three thousand years, and why not? Men like that could have fought off the Spartans, believe me. They are like wolves.’
‘Because they know the moon rides before the sun,’ Alex says.
The commander pretends that he doesn’t understand. He stares ahead, sweating into his many-pocketed blouson and running a finger along his moustache. The other five members of the team, all men, wear pressed camo trousers and white T-shirts. They might as well be in uniform. Alex wonders when the guns will be pulled out.
After an hour, a small black shape, jiggling in the heat rising from the road, appears ahead of the little convoy. As the shape grows nearer, Alex sees that it is Mrs Powell, riding sidesaddle on a skinny donkey. She is wearing a hunting jacket and twill trousers, and has rigged a lacy parasol to shade herself from the brutal sun. She waves to Alex as the jeeps sweep past, and Katrina wakes up when Alex tries and fails to make the commander stop.
‘She went past me while I was waiting for you,’ Katrina says. ‘She seemed happy enough.’
‘This is bandit country. We can’t let her roam around alone.’
‘You are our only passengers,’ the commander says.
‘One more won’t make any difference,’ Alex says, but the commander only shrugs.
The little convoy turns off the road and zig-zags up steep, overgrown pastureland, making a long detour to avoid the border town of Kakavia. The town’s ruins shine on the far hillside, white as bone. It’s a haunt, the commander says. Warewolves, giants, mantids, many other kinds of bad creatures. Alex would ask more—he’s professionally interested in the uses insurgents and fairies have found for gengineering and fembot morphing—but the commander won’t talk about it.
‘They eat human flesh,’ he says, and touches the knuckle of his thumb to his lips, the sign of warding evil. It gives Alex an idea he knows Katrina will like.
They cross the border just before noon, rejoining the road near the burned-out remains of the old Albanian and Greek border gates and customs buildings. Half a kilometre beyond is a bunker, half-buried behind a berm and capped with a ceramic blast shield like a bleached tortoise shell. A mast studded with microwave relay dishes rises above the trees that grow right up to the border fence. A few refugees are camping there, and naked children chase around the jeeps when they draw up at the steel gates. Alex buys a carton of Coke from an old woman and tries to pay no attention to the handful of Nationalist soldiers who amble out of the bunker. No one seems to be in charge. One soldier barely glances at the sheaf of IDs the team commander offers; another unlocks the gates; the two jeeps are waved through.
There’s a new road across the border, of carbon fibre mesh laid on vitrified rock. It roars and roars under the jeeps’ wide wheels. The open oak woods have been burned back a hundred metres on either side; the jeeps space out, in case of ambush.
After crossing a slender bridge that arches over a deep gorge, the two jeeps stop beside an extensive swathe of trees killed by some post-Great Climatic Overturn syndrome. At the turn of the century, before weather systems stabilized in a new pattern of colder, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers, it rained almost continuously for three years along the European coast of the Mediterranean. The white skeletons of the trees, long ago stripped of bark, rise out of banks of dusty fern.
There’s an anxious moment when the commander takes out his pistol. Alex thinks that Katrina might try to take it from the young man, but she meekly submits to being cuffed with plastic bracelets. The commander says that Alex will be spared this indignity, as will the life of his woman, provided they both cooperate. He tells Alex more or less what Alex and Katrina have already guessed, that the relief team is in fact part of Glass’s small security force.
Katrina, to her credit, gives a believable performance. She curses the commander, and, with her hands cuffed behind her back, manages to get to her feet and make a run at him. One of the men trips her up. Amidst much laughter, the commander tells her, ‘We were told to take care of the man, but nothing was said about you. Keep quiet, or we will leave you here.’
Katrina gets to her knees. Her nose is bleeding. She says thickly, ‘I fight anyone who has the balls to go against me hand to hand. You let us go if I win.’
‘Shut up, Kat.’ Alex’s blood is singing.
‘Fuck you, Sharkey. I give these fuckers a chance at a fair fight. Their problem if they refuse.’
‘Maybe later we play games with you,’ the commander says. ‘For now be quiet. We give you something to eat, something to drink. It is eight hours more to travel, over rough roads.’
The security guards break out their rations. They don’t set a perimeter watch, Alex notices. They aren’t soldiers.
The food is reconstituted but good. After he feeds Katrina, Alex eats enough for two men, especially savouring the sickly sweet honey cakes.
‘Two minutes,’ Katrina says.
It is very hot. Crickets make noise in the ferns. Some of the men are napping. The commander is virched up, masked in state-of-the-art video shades and manipulating the air with gloved hands as he conducts an apparently one-sided conversation.
Alex inserts filters into Katrina’s nostrils, then into his own. There’s a thump behind them as the gas canister explodes. Katrina hid it in the empty canvas sacks in the loadbed of the lead jeep, and sacks, some on fire, are blown high into the air. The commander pitches forward. Only one man was outside the spreading boundary of the narcotic gas, but now he runs towards his fallen comrades and collapses. The gas stings Alex’s eyes. The filters clog his nostrils, and it is an effort not to breathe through his mouth.
‘Fish in a barrel,’ Katrina says, as Alex unlocks the cuffs with the key he found in the breast pocket of the commander’s blouson. She takes the cross the commander wears around his neck and puts it around her own.
‘I’m not entirely sure if that’s appropriate,’ Alex says. ‘All things considered.’
‘It isn’t meant to be a sign of allegiance. Maybe it will protect me against vampires.’
‘That’s bad semiotics,’ Alex says.
‘Fuck you, Sharkey. You never could take a joke.’
Katrina finds a machine-pistol and shoots out the brains of one of the jeeps. She hunches over his computer deck in gog
gles and mitts, negotiating with the other jeep. Alex collects up the rest of the team’s weapons and throws them into the gorge, then turns the unconscious men on their sides, so that if the gas makes them throw up they won’t choke on their vomit.
‘You should shoot them all in the head,’ Katrina says. She has taken off her goggles. The jeep isn’t cooperating.
‘I don’t think they’ll follow us,’ Alex says. ‘They’re not what you’d call real soldiers. And even if they do follow us, there is something we can do to make sure they don’t get very far.’
He tells Katrina his idea, and she smiles and says it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard.
‘I thought you’d like it. What did you do with Mr Avramites, by the way?’
‘What do you think I did?’
‘It was stupid, Kat. You should stop and think. We can’t go back, now.’
‘Good.’
‘We have to agree on what we do.’
‘What else could I do? The old fucker sold us out.’
‘Of course he did. Everyone is for sale in a war. Can’t you get that thing to obey you? The gas doesn’t last forever.’
‘We should shoot them all in the head,’ Katrina says again. ‘Then we’d know they wouldn’t come after us.’
‘But their friends would. She wants me, Kat. Don’t you see?’
‘She wants you in a cell, out of the way. That is, if these fuckers are working for her. Which we don’t know.’
‘The commander said he was working for Glass.’
‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘But I was right, wasn’t I? Morag Gray saw truly, back in the Magic Kingdom. All that time she was hiding in plain sight—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Katrina says. Who the fuck is that?’
Someone is coming across the bridge. After a moment, Alex laughs. It is Mrs Powell.
‘Shit,’ Katrina says. ‘Tell me we’re not taking her along.’
‘She must have ridden straight through that haunted town. She isn’t as superstitious as our friends here.’
Mrs Powell hallos them and vigorously shakes the donkey’s reins, which makes no difference at all to its ambling gait. Despite the parasol, her fleshy face has been burned by the sun to an even brick red. When she reaches Alex and Katrina, she looks down at the sleeping men and says, ‘I see you have had a difference of opinion.’
Alex says, because he has always wanted to say it, ‘I was misinformed.’
‘My late husband always said that he’d as soon trust a shark as a lawyer. Oh, do forgive me, Mr Sharkey. I didn’t mean anything by it.’
‘No offence taken, Mrs Powell.’
‘I must say that the pass Mr Avramites sold me did work, although the bribe was considerably larger than I had been led to expect. I was wondering if you could perhaps give me a lift. This donkey is rather less than ideally comfortable.’
Katrina says, ‘We’re not going anywhere you want to go.’
‘I have no particular destination in mind,’ Mrs Powell says, ‘so your destination will be as good as any.’
While Katrina works on the jeep, Alex shares out the last of the security guards’ food with Mrs Powell. Alex thinks that, for all Mrs Powell’s vapourhead belief in a cosy, ecologically and politically correct fairyland, she has resources that may prove useful. She may be a hippy chick who has never grown up, but she has made it this far. It says something for her stamina, if nothing else.
‘You know something about the wild fairies,’ she says to Alex. ‘I can tell that you do, Mr Sharkey.’
‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’
‘And so am I. We have a joint interest. I knew it as soon as I learned who you were. Ghost, wasn’t it?’
Alex is surprised and flattered. ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Such an interesting drug. It’s a pity no one does that kind of work any more. Fembots are so inelegant, don’t you think?’
‘You’re trying to natter me, Mrs Powell.’
‘I don’t try and natter everyone, Mr Sharkey.’
Finally, Katrina whoops and punches the air, then strips off mitts and goggles. She has won over the jeep. Its ceramic motor whirrs into life; she unclips the computer deck and takes the wheel.
They drive two kilometres down the road, and find, as promised, a little side road running away into the forest. It hasn’t been used in a long time, and the jeep leaves a trail of broken pioneer saplings that a blind man could follow. After about three kilometres they stop and unload their gear. The jeep makes a careful three-point turn before moving away at not much more than walking pace.
Katrina tells Mrs Powell, ‘It’ll reach those fools just about night fall. I fucked over the other jeep, so they’ll be glad to jump on that one and get out of warewolf country before moonrise.’ She throws back her head and howls.
‘I don’t think you should do that, dear,’ Mrs Powell says. ‘It isn’t a good idea to mock the Powers.’
Alex says, ‘I was wondering how you got through Kakavia. Our friends wouldn’t go near it.’
‘Let’s say that the Powers are not capricious,’ Mrs Powell tells him. ‘At least, not by day. By day, we’re little more than dreams to them.’
Katrina says, ‘That’s the first true thing you’ve said. As for dreams, we have some of our own.’
She staples a little infra-red source to the trunk of a tree, and fixes the sensor and the little projector to another tree on the other side of the road. It takes no more than a minute.
Alex tells Mrs Powell, ‘Anyone following us will trigger a hologram. A little clip from an old horror movie.’
Katrina howls again, just to make Mrs Powell wince.
Around them, widely spaced oak trees rise into the late afternoon sunlight. It is cool and shadowy beneath their thick canopy. Their mossy roots grip lichen-spattered boulders. Katrina’s howl has been absolutely absorbed into the intent silence of trees drinking sunlight and exhaling water and oxygen.
Then, faintly, distantly, a howl rises in answer.
Mrs Powell shivers. Katrina grins and shakes the little silver cross she took from the commander.
Mrs Powell says, ‘I don’t think that will do much good. The Powers are so much older than that, after all. Would I be right in thinking we’ve disturbed a warewolf?’
‘As you said, they only come out at night.’ Katrina pats the stock of the machine-pistol she liberated. ‘Besides, I’m better armed.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Mrs Powell says. ‘I believe they have been getting weapons from the Muslims. When I was living in the woods I saw many things. I once saw a troll—’
‘Trolls aren’t anything,’ Katrina says. ‘They suffer from fused joints, and are as stupid as a bunch of rocks because of hormone imbalances.’
‘This one was armed with a grenade launcher, dear. The automatic kind with the big magazine.’
It takes them two hours to walk the rest of the way. Mrs Powell matches Katrina’s steady, unforgiving pace more easily than Alex. The overgrown road dips down into a narrow valley and makes a tight turn around an outcrop, and then one side of the valley drops away.
Mrs Powell claps her hands with girlish delight.
The ruined shrine stands in a kind of hollow or grove. It is no more than a line of truncated, badly weathered pillars and the knee-high remnants of walls of rough, unmortared stones, shaggy with weeds. The turf between the walls has been kept down by rabbits, although the black and white mosaic floor for which the shrine is famous (although no tourists have dared come here since the turn of the century) is now overgrown with creeping grass. There is a wall of naked rock to one side, and a steep tree-covered slope falling away to the other.
As the three people enter the ruins, something bolts away on the far side of the line of broken pillars. Alex glimpses the white deer as it leaps through a shaft of sunlight: then it is gone. Katrina throws off her pack, but Alex tells her to let it go.
‘It might be one of t
heirs. Remember what happened to Actaeon.’
‘I try not to think about all that bullshit,’ Katrina says. In any case, we’ll need some kind of sacrifice. The little fucker enjoyed giving me precise instructions.’
Mrs Powell looks at her, but says nothing.
‘It’s merely a token of good intent,’ Alex says, and sits down on a large stone.
The walk has left him breathless and drenched with sweat. There’s sweat in his hair and eyebrows, and he must keep blinking away pearls of sweat that gather on his eyelashes. He feels a watery weariness in his knees, and his pulse is pounding behind his eyes. He is too old and too fat for this kind of adventure. Wiry, hyperactive Max should be here, while Alex watches over all from the Web. Except Max would never modify his immune system. For all their affected disdain for their bodies, for the meat that anchors their minds, hackers are surprisingly squeamish when it comes to gengineering.
Katrina says, ‘There are many deer here, despite the war. Or perhaps because of it, for now men hunt men instead of animals. There are wild boar and chamois also. I’ll get what we need.’
‘Perhaps we should have brought my donkey,’ Mrs Powell says. ‘Although I think it would be too tough for even a warewolf.’
‘We’ll need something,’ Alex says, ‘and it had better be bigger than a rabbit.’
‘Anything you say, boss,’ Katrina says, and then she is crashing away downslope.
Mrs Powell takes off her straw sunhat and elaborately pats her brow with a white handkerchief. ‘I’m pleased you brought me with you,’ she says. ‘I can still be of much help.’
‘Perhaps,’ Alex says.
‘I’ll find out about this place,’ Mrs Powell says, and ambles off amongst the weedy stones, scrolling through her pocket guide.
Alex smokes a cigarette, letting the old woman discover the remnants of the altar, and the spring running from the little cliff that backs the shrine. He stretches out on crisp, sun-warmed turf and wakes with a start when Mrs Powell returns.
‘My guide tells me this place was sacred to Asklepios, the god of the Illyrian coastal town of Butrini,’ Mrs Powell says. ‘A beautiful town, Mr Sharkey. You should visit it. I have been to Butrini, to protest about the use of slave labour in the docks.’
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