by F. G. Cottam
He would have the news by now about the public death of his wife. Dray was sorry that the king had thought it necessary. She had been of far more practical use as a hostage than as someone whose execution would provoke an intense and quite natural desire for revenge. Her execution just perpetuated the seemingly endless war. Making it a public spectacle simply made the count of Sarth more resolute in his hostility. The conflict had been going on for centuries. It was Dray’s secret ambition, one of many secret ambitions, to bring it to a peaceful and mutually acceptable conclusion.
In the meantime, he thought the test useful. What was done could not be undone. The countess could not be brought back to life. The test would indicate the progress the count had made in the selective breeding of his soldier slaves. There was a wonderful economy, Dray thought, to the paying of one’s warriors in blood. Defeat inflicted thirst. Their reward for victory was visceral and immediate. Their impulse to fight was constant. They were a cheap and willing army.
He would not have shared these conclusions with Slee or with the king. They were too close to open admiration for the count and what had been achieved by the Parasitic Kingdom. He was philosophical and objective in a way that his ruler and the alchemist were not.
Dray was surprised Slee had seen the point of using Martin Prior and the other three spreaders of mischief on earth he had recruited. At first, of course, he had not.
‘Why not simply tell the people of earth the truth about the Great Lie?’
‘They would think it too fanciful; they would not believe it. And if they became convinced, what good would it do? They would be alert generally against us; they would strive for retribution.’
‘Remind me, Sebastian. What is the point of the stories to be spread by this boy you wish me to enchant?’
‘They are well made and difficult to refute,’ Dray said.
‘Granted, but to what end have they been so carefully forged?’
‘They will sew disharmony and distrust and encourage turmoil,’ Dray said. ‘Faith in the noble motives of other nations is the foundation upon which earth’s goodwill is based. We will shake it.’
They had a moment to study the parasite before the arrival of Maul and the test. It was manacled to the wall of the testing vault. They viewed it from behind the safety of bars through a high window, so they looked down on it. And it looked up at them when it scented the sweet warmth of their blood, almost immediately they took their seats.
They had been pale and flaccid once. The pictures and engravings of the past proved it. They had been eyeless too, the maw their only distinguishing feature, though they had been able to smell and feel, and capable of orientation and the efficient hunting and killing of men. This one was not like that. The maw had been muzzled in precaution by a heavy arrangement of leather and steel. The eyes above it were small and black and alert. The creature was naked. Its skin was translucent and taut over a musculature so hard it seemed almost brittle, like an insect carapace. They moved like insects too, Dray thought. The sudden, spasmodic speed of them in attack was quite shocking if you had not seen it before.
‘Have you handicapped or maimed it in any way?’
‘No,’ Slee said. ‘It is as you see it. It is a healthy specimen.’
‘It will be thirsty.’
‘Very.’
‘Maul will have his work cut out.’
‘It will be a proper test,’ Slee said. He grinned. Dray was reminded that the alchemist enjoyed this sort of thing.
The keepers entered the vault. There were three of them. Two were armed with barbed steel harpoons they held from either side pointed at the creature’s throat while the third man unfastened the manacles. The work was done swiftly and their backwards retreat to safety was equally rapid.
Freed, the creature did not move at all at first. It stood with its long and muscular legs still splayed and its long arms aloft in the attitude in which it had been restrained by its iron fetters.
There was no warning before it leapt. The leap was too rapid for the eye. It was just there against the bars, pulling at them, tearing free and tossing back the muzzle, stretching for Dray and Slee as they scrambled amid the plumped cushions of their box to escape its groping reach. There was the dead flesh stink of the maw. Dray felt a talon graze his shoulder as they wrestled their way through the door and down the steps to elude it, hearing behind them the groan of iron under strain as the parasite tried to rip the bars from the stone into which they were rooted.
Maul must have seen what had happened from the spyhole in the vault door. He stood outside it when they reached the ground, grim-faced with a rifle between his hands. There would be no test. The creature was vastly too dangerous for sport. Its strength and speed were sobering, Dray thought. How many more had the count bred like this in his dark domain to the north?
The features under the purple ink of Maul’s facial tattoos wore an expression Dray had not seen there before. He never betrayed emotion. But for once the assassin looked conflicted.
On the one hand he was a purist who liked his killing to be intimately accomplished with weapons of cold steel. On the other, he was a pragmatist and an expert at killing, and the size and ferocity of the creature made the rifle only practical.
They heard a sound from it, then, from high on the wall of the vault where it crouched and writhed against the bars of the spectator box. It could have been a parched grunt of thirst or a roar of defiance, Dray thought. But as Maul raised the rifle and took aim through the hole drilled for observation in the door, he thought it sounded much more like a chuckle of contempt.
Adam found Jane seated before a cold teacup in a café at the pier’s end. She looked a pale, almost broken figure, her fingers interlinked on the table top in front of her, he thought to stop them trembling. It was dark and they were clearing up and trying to close.
Jane seemed unaware of the busy, pointed fussing of the waitress and the loud pantomime of the bloke cashing up at the till. She raised her eyes to him. They looked blank with shock. He put a gentle hand under her elbow, raised her to her feet and steered her out into the exposure of the night.
‘They hate us because of what de Morey did to them,’ she said.
‘They gave him ample reason. They hated us before the few of us aware of the conflict hated them. And what de Morey did was only a symbolic retaliation. The body counts hardly compare.’
‘Most of the Black Death victims were peasants,’ Jane said. ‘They would not really have signified in feudal times. De Morey laid waste to the elite of the shadow world. He befriended the king’s rival for the crown and trained his sons in combat. He killed the king’s champion and butchered the king’s favourite and defied the Miasmic Sea.’
‘He wouldn’t have been flavour of the month there,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll give you that.’
‘I wish you had not slept with Delilah Crane,’ Jane said. ‘I wish it with all my heart.’
They had been walking back towards the promenade. Adam stopped. ‘Why do you wish it?’
‘I want you to myself. I mean, I wanted you to myself.’
‘I didn’t sleep with her.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘Weren’t you tempted?’
‘Yes, I was tempted.’
‘Did she want you to?’
‘Yes, she wanted me to.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘It’s really simple, Jane. And it’s really obvious. I love you.’
‘Hold me,’ she said. His embrace was warm and the strength of him solid and comforting. ‘Bloor was here,’ she said. ‘He knows my sister. He must pass, Adam. He implied he knows Dora well. I think I understand now the look he gave me in the forest at Cree.’
Chance is how we describe events when we don’t yet know their purpose. Adam was thinking of something Delilah had said over their breakfast together, about how the secret traffic ran both ways and always had.
Jane raise
d her head. Her face was pale in moonlight. ‘Do you honestly love me?’
‘Yes. And now I have told you so.’
‘And how does that make you feel?’
‘Oh, you know, foolish and vulnerable.’
‘Don’t feel that way. Feel loved back. It’s much more sensible.’
They kissed and then laughed together. They were nineteen and resilient. They were like buoys bobbing unsinkably on the tide. Adam thought that they would need all their resilience. Bloor’s appearance was a gloomy portent. But he felt elated at what he had told Jane. He had wanted to tell someone the truth of how he felt about her. She was the person he had wanted most to tell. They resumed walking, arm in arm.
‘It would be Brighton, wouldn’t it?’ Jane said.
‘What do you mean?’
She punched his chest and then pulled him towards her. ‘Dirty weekends in seafront hotels, is what I mean. This is the classic location for booking into somewhere with groaning bedsprings and a dodgy landlady as Mr and Mrs Smith.’
‘It isn’t the weekend.’
‘Don’t be deliberately dim. We’re not waiting for the weekend. I don’t think time is really on our side. I don’t want to be gloomy or pessimistic, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t ever go to bed with you. And I need you tonight, Adam. I need you asleep beside me.’
‘Well, I suppose we might go to sleep,’ he said, ‘eventually.’
They went back to McGuire’s flat. Grayling and McGuire were still studying Martin’s website. The four of them sat together in chairs facing the doctor’s desk.
Martin thought about the two-headed abomination fashioned in Babylon, snarling at itself in its dark cupboard over against the wall. He thought about the bird kept in flightless confinement along the corridor. He looked over at the shelf where he had seen the Sarajevo swordstick, but the weapon was no longer where it had lain in its dusty retirement. Recommissioned, he thought, shivering at the memory of the nauseous stink of the bird.
‘Martin appears to be one of four bright new conspiracy theorists duped into spreading corrosive lies about history,’ Grayling said. ‘Their work has the hand of Sebastian Dray all over it. He has turned a Mexican who communicates in Spanish and a Hong Kong native writing in Chinese. The fourth of his little helpers is a Hindi speaker based in Calcutta.
‘So that’s the world’s four dominant languages neatly taken care of. The stories are well fabricated. Their narratives and visuals seem very authentic, but they are fundamentally untrue. Their job is to make the world a more uncertain, fearful and divisive place. They are a part of the undermining.’
‘I don’t really understand,’ Adam said. ‘When I first came here to see Doctor McGuire, he told me that the conflict is kept secret from most people on earth because if they knew about it, they might lose hope. Why doesn’t the shadow world just turn to open hostility?’
‘They want us to turn on ourselves,’ Jane said, ‘that’s why. Maybe they don’t dare tell the truth because they think us more resilient than the people here sustaining the secret do. Maybe they fear revenge.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Adam said, ‘our obsession with keeping the conflict secret plays into their hands.’
‘It’s a bit more complicated than that, philosophically,’ Grayling said, ‘geopolitically, too.’
‘Explain,’ Jane said.
‘If all the world’s ills could be blamed on Endrimor, unscrupulous leaders of delinquent nations would take full advantage. No country would be obliged to face full responsibility for its own actions. They could claim interference.’
‘The shadow world would become their get out of jail card,’ Adam said.
‘Exactly,’ said Grayling.
‘How do you think they made a believer of Martin Prior?’ Jane asked. ‘I know him pretty well. At least, I knew him pretty well before he became all evangelical on the internet about the apparent sins of the superpowers. He was clever and witty. He was also vain, cynical, superficial and self-serving. The only things he was really passionate about were partying and clothes.’
‘And he was your friend,’ Adam said. ‘On the basis of which, I’d really hate to be your enemy.’
‘I think you’re mistaken,’ Grayling said, looking at Jane. ‘Actually, I think he was pretty passionate about you. I think he might still be.’
Jane coloured. ‘What a horrible idea.’
‘He’s been indoctrinated,’ McGuire said. ‘If you like, he’s been brainwashed. We know that Jacob Slee is a very powerful mesmerist and with the other, dubious tricks they’ve perfected down the centuries, it would be easy to bend a boy as malleable as Martin Prior seems to be to their will. They are shrewd judges of character. They would have exploited his vanity and ambition.’
‘You sound as though you’ve met him,’ Adam said.
‘I have, very recently. He had carried out an impressive piece of background research on a catastrophe he could only have learned about from them.’
Jane looked at him. ‘Would you care to tell us about the nature of this catastrophe?’
McGuire glanced towards Grayling. Grayling nodded almost imperceptibly. But Adam wasn’t falling for it. He thought McGuire the real manipulator here. The man who had exiled his father and insisted he change his family name was the man in charge. Without McGuire’s say-so, he was sure they would never have seen the de Morey deposition.
He told them the story of Incomparable, without disclosing the fact that he had been witness to and part of it.
‘My father was immune to the Miasmic Sea,’ Adam said. ‘I wonder why that was.’
‘There are a number of possible explanations,’ McGuire said. ‘His ancestor de Morey walked across it unscathed.’
‘That was a consequence of freezing weather.’
‘He did so after killing the man who had enchanted that ocean in the first place. Perhaps the slaying endowed immunity.’
Adam shrugged.
‘Or it could have been the charm that the count of Sarth insisted he wear. We don’t know what that was.’
‘Whatever it was,’ Jane said, ‘it was no mere charm. The count lied about that. He did so for a selfless reason, I think. He wanted to protect the man from earth he had come to love as a brother. But that pendant possessed the power to terrify the king’s alchemist. Without it, I actually think de Morey’s mission would have failed.’
‘There was no altruism in the offering of the charm if it did possess occult power,’ Grayling said. ‘The count was ruthless. De Morey, a sentimental man who liked him, nevertheless admitted as much himself. It was in the count’s interest for de Morey to succeed.’
Adam was having difficulty keeping his mind on all this. It was important and possibly even crucial. The detail concerned his own ancestor and he did not think he had ever come across a man in history braver or nobler or more determined in his duty than Sir Robert de Morey. But Adam kept thinking of the prospect of Jane, naked between cool and spotless cotton sheets.
Her composure had returned. She reclined on her chair with her long legs crossed at the knee, curling a stray lock of hair with a finger. She was pale – her colouring made her naturally pale – but she no longer looked like she had in the pier café. The bright red blush of her lips and the sparkle in her eyes had reappeared.
Adam looked at the two men in the room. He was sure that both of them had deliberately killed other men. They might not be killing machines, the guided missile of the medieval world his ancestor de Morey had been, but they had taken lives with skill and premeditation, he was certain of it. He did not want to dwell on the fact. On the whole, it was much more pleasant to think about the prospect of making love to Jane.
McGuire stood. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ he said. He looked at his watch. It was just after six o’clock. He turned to Grayling. ‘And then I must tell our two young guests what really happened at Sarajevo.’
Jane glanced at Adam. He winked at her a
nd said, ‘Could we have a proper drink, Doctor McGuire?’
‘Of course you can,’ said McGuire. ‘Firstly, though, I shall give you good reason to need one with a short preamble to the tale I am about to tell.’
His tone of voice had changed. They both sat up, alert in their chairs.
‘I was born in Aberdeen in 1882. I have lived for far too long. My name when I was born was Angus Robert Haydn Grayling. My father was a physician. Stuart there is my great-grandson – a finer forebear, no man could reasonably wish for, but that’s by the by. My first proper occupation was as an espionage agent working in the service of the Crown. I first became aware of the existence of the shadow world as a student member of an occult brotherhood at Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1910.’
Adam let out a whistle. Jane merely stared.
‘Now, I’ll fetch those drinks,’ McGuire said, making for the kitchen and the fridge.
‘You lied about him,’ Adam said to Grayling.
‘At that stage, you would have thought me mad if I’d told you the truth. Doing so would have been self-defeating.’
‘I think you have a talent for deceit.’
‘Given the circumstances, it’s as well that some of us do,’ Grayling said.
‘Stop it,’ Jane said, ‘both of you.’ She looked at Grayling. ‘You should have fenced, as Adam did. You would have been good at it.’
‘I did,’ Grayling said. ‘And I was.’
McGuire came back in, carrying a tray bearing little cans of mixers and a bucket of ice, and a chilled bottle of white wine and a beer for Adam.
Jane had taken a sip of her Chablis when she said to McGuire, ‘You were aboard her, weren’t you? You were on the gun deck of Incomparable when she was lured into the Miasmic Sea.’
He had his back to her, over at his drinks cabinet, pouring whisky for himself and Grayling. He stiffened. ‘I was.’