The fairy sticks out a long, black, pointed tongue and is gone. The woman crouches beside Todd and lights a cigarette. She’s in her forties, hefty in leather jacket and trousers. There’s a strip of leopard fur like a cropped mohawk on the top of her shaved skull. She carries a machine pistol fitted with a flash suppressor.
Todd says, ‘You’re in charge? I’m an American, an American reporter. This is my cameraman. You should keep these soldiers of yours under control. Someone could get killed here.’
‘Someone will kill that drone if you leave it up there,’ the woman says. She has a German accent. She emits a powerful smell compounded of woodsmoke and old sweat.
Without looking around, Spike says, ‘No shit.’
Todd says, ‘We need to record all this. Please. Are you in charge?’
The woman laughs. ‘In charge? No one is in charge here.’
Todd starts to explain that he escaped from Captain Spiromilos’s mercenaries, but the woman cuts him off and says, ‘Did this Spiromilos have any other prisoners?’
‘I didn’t see any.’
The woman tells them that her name is Katrina; she’s the only human here. ‘You come with me, I’ll show you a safe place.’
Katrina leads them through the centre of the town, past spires and struts and soaring buttresses. The old paving is as fragile as pumice, mined by fembots for material used to reconstruct the ruins. At the far side of the little town, Todd and Spike follow Katrina up a stairway untouched by fembots. There’s a long room, its floor dense with stalagmite growths, its walls covered with crawling veins of stone like petrified veins. Todd crouches beside a window and finds that he can see past the curtain of fire to the polymer lake and the terraced slope rising to the forest edge, where the mercenaries have established their position.
Katrina tells Spike, ‘Will you keep that fucking drone down! It’s drawing fire!’
Todd no longer feels afraid, although his mouth is bone dry and his heart is pounding and the big muscles in his thighs keep jerking. He tells Spike, ‘Let’s not put ourselves out of business.’
‘The point is that Spiromilos wouldn’t fire at the drone,’ Spike says, but it dips down all the same.
There’s a stutter of gunfire along the ridge overlooking the town. Something tears the air with a heavy rumble like a freight train. Todd has been in enough war zones to recognize heavy ordnance, and ducks down as a level plane of fire guillotines two of the fragile towers. The tops of the towers, burning but otherwise intact, plummet straight down, turning to dust before they hit the ground.
‘TDX,’ Katrina says. ‘Gravity polarized explosive.’
Todd says, for his own reassurance as much as anything else, ‘It isn’t much of a force. There are more fairies than men.’
Katrina nods. ‘All we have is fairies. Look at the silly fuckers.’
The fairies have been stirred up by the explosion. Spilling around the ends of the curtain of flames, they rush forward to the edge of the polymer lake, fire towards me mercenaries’ position, and rush back to rejoin their fellows.
Todd says, ‘I saw some of them flying.’
Katrina says, ‘The flyers are as much against us as for us. Like the warewolves, they believe this is their place. They are no allies. One reason why the fairies lit the fire is to keep the warewolves from coming back out of the forest and attacking their asses.’
‘And it fucks up the thermal imaging, too.’
Katrina shrugs. ‘I doubt they think of that.’
‘You don’t think much of the fairies, do you?’
‘These are feys. The Angry Ones. They fight for their lives. You did not know a prisoner of Spiromilos? Or perhaps of Glass, or of Glass’s woman? His name is Alex Sharkey. Perhaps there was also an old woman, and a fairy.’
‘Spiromilos brought us along. No one else.’
‘Then he is dead, or the Twins have him,’ the woman says. ‘In that case, we have lost. Unfortunately, the Angry Ones will not believe me. They will fight to the death.’
Another mortar round takes out a big tower. It falls slantwise, like a tree, taking a score of lesser towers with it. The sound, more like breaking glass than fractured stone, is incredibly loud.
‘The Angry Ones found a fuel store,’ Katrina says. They filled a trench with fuel oil, set it alight. Sent mobile lights crawling over the building. Things like beetles. They space themselves out, react to each other. I don’t know what crazy kinds of ideas the fairies have, but I do know they know nothing of warfare.’
‘You really don’t like them.’
‘They’re not rational.’
Spike points and says, ‘Spiromilos is sending out his dolls.’
‘Maybe not Spiromilos,’ Todd says. ‘I think those Web cowboys have got some sort of tele-presence control. As far as they’re concerned, this is just like a fucking arcade game.’
The dolls come down in a line, running fast and without discipline, so that the line soon breaks up into discrete individuals. They are carrying their plastic riot control rifles, and fire short bursts as they run.
The fairies defending the ruined town rush out to meet the attacking dolls. The two ragged lines meet in the middle of the expanse of polymer and dissolve into knots of furious turbulence. Todd watches in amazement. In real war, you hardly ever see the other side; the only time the infantry use their rifles and sidearms is when they harass civilians. Even in Somalia and Mozambique they had mortars and rockets, tanks and helicopter gunships. Here, there are only distant figures running and struggling on a slick, flat plain. It’s almost exactly like the shoot-’em-up combat games you can play in the Rotterdam arenas.
Suddenly, the dolls turn and run. The fairies chase after them until the mercenaries lay down covering fire that winnows both fairies and dolls like wheat in a storm. Fairies dance in triumph like their ape ancestors. The harsh red light of the wall of flames at their backs casts their capering shadows far across the polymer lake.
Katrina says, ‘The Angry Ones are crazy fuckers. All life is cheap to them. Their lives and our lives. They were born in pain out of incomprehension, and so they don’t fear death.’
Todd says, ‘Say that again when things are quieter. We’ll use it in one of our clips.’
Katrina says, ‘No one will want to see this madness.’
Spike says, ‘You’d be fucking surprised.’
Todd says, ‘We can put this kind of thing out across fifty or sixty subscription newsgroups. If you help us we’ll cut you in on, say, two per cent of the residuals?’
Katrina gives him a hard look.
‘OK, OK, maybe three per cent. It doesn’t sound like much, but the potential audience is huge.’
‘I do not think you understand why I’m here.’
‘We’ll interview you later. Listen, they won’t kill us. They’ll kill the fairies, that’s what they do for a living, but not us.’
‘Don’t be too sure,’ Katrina says, and turns to watch the battle.
Spiromilos’s men start up the bombardment again. Half a dozen mortar rounds walk back from the centre of the ruined town, and the last scatters air-fuel bomblets that ignite in a blast of white fire and knock down almost every tower and spire.
Todd is on his knees, half-blinded and half-deaf, his face scorched. For a moment, he’s back in the firestorm of Atlanta. It was all a dumb mistake really, or dumb luck. His driver misread the map, and they ended up two kilometres closer to the centre of the groundburst than they should have been, on the outer edge of the suburbs of Hell. The driver and cameraman would have turned back, but Todd, young and foolish, persuaded them that this was the scoop of the decade. They put on breathing masks and protective suits and drove in as far as they could, their Blazer rocking in the tremendous winds which were rushing in to fuel the fires that stretched from horizon to horizon. With the camera running, Todd kept up a ceaseless commentary, not even knowing if it was going out on the air. They stopped on a flyover of the Interstate, above blocks
of ordinary houses burning in unison. Only when the Blazer’s tyres burst because of the scorching heat did they turn back. They were arrested and put in hospital for decontamination treatment; Todd was having his second change of blood in twenty-four hours when his editor finally got a message through. His coverage of the agony of Atlanta had spanned the networks, pushing aside scheduled programmes. He was famous.
Katrina is shouting into Todd’s face, asking if he can hear, if he can see. Todd opens his eyes. The long room is full of dust; part of the ceiling has collapsed. Todd and Spike and Katrina beat out smouldering fragments that have lodged in each other’s clothes. Spike is still running the camera drone; it’s at its ceiling now, riding at the western edge of the town, waiting to capture the mercenaries’ final push.
But things quieten down after the airburst. The fire curtain has been blown out. Grey light slowly spreads along the eastern rim of the sky. Only single shots from Spiromilos’s position now, at annoyingly irregular intervals. Spike brings down the drone and goes to sleep.
Todd must have slept, too, because he wakes to find a fairy grinning in his face. When it sees that he’s awake, it turns to Katrina and says, ‘Tell him we win. Tell him they want to surrender.’
‘They want you to give in,’ Katrina says, with weary disgust. There’s enough light to see the bruised skin around her eyes.
The fairy shrugs. ‘We kill them all. Kill them dead. They come down, they’re dead.’
It is taller and burlier than most of the fairies. Bloody claw marks stripe the blue skin of its shoulders and hairless chest. It has a kind of belt or bandolier of ears slung over its right shoulder. They are like fleshy leaves, each as big as one of Todd’s hands.
Katrina says, ‘You should run for the hills.’
‘We’re the Angry Ones!’
Todd says, ‘What does that mean?’
Katrina says, ‘They take drugs together.’
‘We share blood.’ The fairy fingers the knotted string around its waist. ‘Many are one. The enemy knows we cannot be defeated. The enemy wants to talk.’ It points to Todd. ‘Talk to you.’
The fairies have a shortwave transceiver. They were using it to shriek defiance at the mercenaries after the air-fuel explosion, but when they started to wind down, Captain Spiromilos got a message through. The fairy, which calls itself Eater of the Sun, tells Todd it will be all right, no one will shoot him, but Todd feels a tingling across his whole skin as, in his scorched orange coveralls and shower sandals, followed at a discreet distance by the camera drone, he walks out across the polymer lake. He’s dropped a tab of Serenity, but it isn’t helping much.
Fairy and doll bodies are strewn across the slick, undulating surface of the polymer lake. A few are still alive. A doll that seems able to use only one arm and a fairy with a bloody gash where its eyes should be are trying to strangle each other. They writhe like maggots in a hollow where their own blood has collected in a shallow pool.
Walking around them, Todd feels a certain detachment, just as he did in the burned-out church in that little mountain village in Somalia on his first foreign assignment. The church was filled with the charred bodies of children. Some had been shot, but most had been burned alive. He stood there in the stench and heat, big, bronze flies loud around him, racked with the dry heaves yet recording, recording. It is what you do. You record. You show the world its underside, the forgotten overlooked deaths. The death dispensed by men who think nothing of death.
Todd stops at the far side of the polymer lake, beside a telegraph pole that cants out of the slick surface at a steep angle. It’s warm, and a soft dawn wind is blowing from the east. Todd can hear the noise the wind makes in the trees at the top of the ridge, where the mercenaries are.
Presently, Kemmel’s motorcycle roars out of the trees and ploughs its way down the eroded terraces. He brakes the bike next to Todd in a flashy slide that gouges the polymer. His forehead is lividly bruised, and there’s a bandage across the bridge of his nose.
He says, ‘You’re on the wrong side, journalist.’
‘I don’t take sides.’
‘That’s not how it seems to Captain Spiromilos.’
‘He never was a real Captain, Kemmel. He promoted himself. The hell with him. Are you having fun? I’m sorry about knocking you out back there.’
‘This kind of mess isn’t my idea of a good time, but it’s weakened the enemy. Not many left alive, eh?’
‘But I guess there are still too many for Spiromilos to risk a frontal assault. Or I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.’
Kemmel looks at Todd with a pretty good imitation of contempt. ‘You go back to that side, dig yourself a big hole. Better still, you get the fuck out of there.’
‘I’m right, aren’t I? Spiromilos underestimated the fairies.’
‘We’re coming through that place.’
‘Is that your message?’
‘Oh no,’ Kemmel says, showing a lot of white teeth. ‘You tell those blue-skinned fucks to run away or face up to their makers.’
‘I don’t think they’re going to run away.’
‘If they stay, they’re going to be killed. I don’t mind that, but if they run we’ll just do what we came here to do, no more, no less.’
‘You’re looking forward to that, Kemmel? A turkey-shoot involving over a thousand people?’
‘We aren’t going to shoot them,’ Kemmel says. ‘We’re going to process them. There’s a difference. It’s a necessary thing.’
‘That’s what Spiromilos tells you? You believe that? It’s murder, whatever you call it.’
‘Now you take sides again,’ Kemmel says. ‘You make the fairies pull back, and Captain Spiromilos might be more friendly towards you.’
‘The fairies won’t listen to me.’
‘Listen, journalist, the fairies are nothing more than dolls with a different kind of control chip. They were made to obey people. You find the right way of telling them, they’ll listen. You don’t, it will be bad for them, and worse for you.’
Kemmel revs the motorcycle engine, rides a right circle around Todd, and yells, ‘You better run, motherfucker. I think Spiromilos wants to kill you personally. And I want a piece of you, too.’
Then he’s gone in a cloud of blue smoke, his bike leaving deep tracks as it slithers across the polymer, then gaining traction and roaring away up the slope.
Todd walks back. The entwined fairy and doll seem to have settled deeper in the polymer. The legs of the blinded fairy are encased in a bloody sheath. It has its teeth in the throat of its one-armed opponent, but seems too enfeebled to be able to complete the gesture.
Todd lifts his shower-sandalled feet, one after the other, frowns, then walks as quickly as he can, followed by the little camera drone. He walks past the burned-out trench and walks through the blackened ruins of the little town, fembot-stuff crunching and crumbling under his feet.
Spike and Katrina and most of the surviving fairies, about fifty of them, have retreated to the far side of the town, at the edge of dusty, weed-grown fields. They are sitting around a crater made by an overshot mortar round. The reeking earth in the bottom of the crater is still smouldering, and the acrid fumes catch at the back of Todd’s throat as he repeats Kemmel’s message to Eater of the Sun.
‘Then we all die,’ Eater of the Sun says. It doesn’t look too disappointed.
Katrina tells Todd that he can leave if he wants. ‘No one here will stop you.’
Todd says, ‘What about you, Spike?’
‘You’re staying, right? I’m not leaving you here alone. You can’t be trusted to look after yourself.’
The clear blue sky is brightening above the sawtoothed line of the forest. It is noticeably warmer. Todd says, ‘Is this polymer stuff thermostable?’
Katrina shrugs.
‘Kemmel’s motorcycle left tracks. And I left footprints, but they started to fill in.’
Neither Katrina nor Spike hear him. They are looking west, down
the overgrown road that leads out of the town. All the fairies are looking that way, too, their big, pointed ears cupped forward.
The camera drone rises up, turning as it rises, its turret of lenses flashing. Spike hands a monitor slate to Todd and says, ‘There are people coming this way. A lot of people.’
Now Todd hears something, faint but distinct. It is the sound of human voices singing in close harmony. It is the Children’s Crusade.
17 – The Horned Man
Someone says, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’
And someone else: ‘Look at the town! They’re destroying Fairyland!’
Alex sways on the wooden chair on the back of the pygmy mammoth. He is burning with fever. Unless he pays close attention, things start to move at the edge of his vision. His computer deck has spread an aerial through the coarse hair of Hannibal’s flanks, and the spider’s web of filaments seems to spin and glitter. Dully, he watches as the fairies run off, scattering into the forest. The horned man lumbers after them and the Twins chase him, shouting in frustration. The horned man isn’t completely cured—Alex still needs to use his hardware—but he’s no longer entirely under the Twins’ control.
Ray, who is leading Hannibal, says again, ‘The Children’s Crusade. Listen. I can hear them.’
Mrs Powell comes up behind Ray. She is crying, yet her coarse, sun-reddened face is full of wonder. ‘How do you feel, Mr Sharkey?’
‘Like shit. I think I drank too much blood back there.’
Out along the ridge, something arches up from the trees. Trailing thick white smoke, it plunges into the little town, and a section of the fragile towers rises into the air, shedding scrolls of fine debris. Skirts of dust billow out as the sound of the explosion, like a door closing, reaches Alex.
Mrs Powell says, ‘It’s all being wrecked. We must do something, Mr Sharkey.’
Alex gathers his thoughts. His head seems to be packed with cotton wool. His mouth and sinuses burn with a dry febrile heat. At last he says, ‘The town isn’t important.’
But Mrs Powell is still upset. She has been looking for Fairyland for so long now, and here is Leskoviku, made over by fembots into a semblance of a fairytale castle with shining turrets and minarets as fragile as icing sugar, under bombardment by Spiromilos’s mercenaries.
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