__________
The machine was hissing and whirring, steam escaping from some joints.
‘Raark,’ said Razor as Skoros strode through the doors. He tended to stride all over the place, rather than just walking about. Camouflage, thought Razor, though he’d never have dared say as much. Trying to make himself look big. He ruffled his feathers to get rid of such dangerous thoughts. ‘All ready, O Dark Lord Of All You, Raark, Survey.’
‘I’ll operate them myself,’ snarled Skoros, pointing his corkscrew wand at a side panel in the bronze-covered desk. It opened, and he yanked out a skullcap, just like the one Razor had worn earlier, only larger. He plugged the cap into the main power circuit, brushed his hair back and snapped the cap’s pins into two small holes on either side of his head. Then and only then did he sit down, his hands working as if under the control of some distant programming. ‘Activate the mirror,’ he droned, his voice lifeless.
Razor muttered and whistled, complaining against his lot, but he hopped onto the mirror’s crank handle and curled his brass claws around it. Then he began to flap his wings, harder and harder, till the crank handle swung forward. He stopped, swinging back, then flapped again, repeating the pattern until finally the handle went all the way around, carrying Razor with it. He kept flapping, and the handle went round, and round again, something in the mechanism catching, and the mirror coming to life just as Razor lost his grip and tumbled into the wall with an angry ‘skrrrrraaaaaark.’
‘CyberBats, run awakening protocol,’ Skoros intoned, as in the mirror, a dim scene of dangling bats in a cave flickered into view, and all at once, the bats’ eyes flicked open. At the same time, Skoros closed his eyes—they wouldn’t be needed for this operation.
‘Oh no, don’t worry yourself, I’m fine,’ squawked Razor from the floor.
On the screen, the bats unhooked their grip on their upside-down world and began flying, soundless and in formation, out of the cave. Skoros pressed a button, and a single bronze and wooden joystick emerged from a panel in the desk. He took it and began to move it slowly, his movements fluid.
‘Switch to sonar output,’ he said, and the mirror’s image switched to a reddish blur. Skoros was directing the bats now, his mind linked with them all at once, the joystick simply a way of focusing his thought patterns to get them to go where he wanted. He drove them upward, to look at the lightning that still streaked across the sky. The bats’ sonar readings, converted into data, told him what he already knew—it wasn’t ordinary lightning. He had difficulty understanding what he was reading—it had an intelligent matrix. It had been programmed, with a search and locate function. Questions flooded Skoros’ mind—who had programmed it? Celeste and her kind? How many of them were here? Might the others be more open to persuasion than she had been? Wait, no, there were more important questions—what was the lightning searching for?
He sensed something out there. Several somethings, in fact, flying about but giving off power signatures that weren’t organic, weren’t alive.
‘Intercept,’ he said, pushing the joystick forward. The CyberBats flew forward, homing in on the objects Skoros had sensed.
__________
Alditha rarely used her wand in private, it was more for show than anything. Witch magic worked in lots of ways, and most of them were much more subtle than pointing a stick at things and turning them into frogs. Now though, she drew her wand from its holster in her right boot, and began to fly in a broad circle around the remaining trees in Skoros’ forest. When she’d made three full circuits of the area, she aimed her wand.
‘Life of leaf and life of root,
Hear my plea and grant my suit,
Evil seeks to do you harm,
While you stand so still and calm.
Gather up your life and hear,
You have enemies to fear.
So when this, my charm, is done,
Self-defend, fight back or run,
Be alive as men do live...’
Alditha swallowed, knowing what the last line of her spell should be.
‘And Green Man, may my spell forgive.’
From the tip of her wand a fine golden spray seemed to pour, touching every leaf and every tree in the remaining forest. The golden spray glowed strong and yellow, then sank to green, to white, and was absorbed into all the trees.
There was the most remarkable sound Alditha had ever heard. It was like the forest stretching, yawning, and scratching itself as it woke up, rustling leaves and shaking branches. She smiled, though she knew she’d have to face the Green Man later, and that he wouldn’t be pleased. She was about to fly down and introduce herself to the trees when a dark shape caught her eye. She squinted. Then she made a mental note to apologise to Harper, too—Skoros had got his bats out in daylight after all.
Leave the wizard well alone, she told herself. You’ve already animated his forest this morning, and he’s not going to be pleased. She bit her lip. Leave the wizard well alone, Alditha. Leave the wizard-
‘Oh to heck with it,’ she muttered, crouching low over her broom.
‘Broom, broom, ride the air,
Stealthy mind, let’s not be there.’
There was a shimmer in the air, and Alditha and her broomstick seemed to disappear. As illusions went, it wasn’t perfect—they looked like a perfectly innocent patch of sky, but as they moved, they’d look like exactly the same patch of perfectly innocent sky, moving about as if it was whistling cheerfully and saying ‘nothing to see here, folks.’ But if the wizard was able to sense things through his confounded bats, it would give her a better chance of not being noticed than just flying up and saying ‘What’s all this, then?’
‘Please state your destination,’ whispered the broom in stealth mode.
‘Bats ahead,’ she told it. ‘Follow and hover a safe distance from the...’ She realized she didn’t know what a collection of bats was called. ‘Bats,’ she finished.
‘Specify safe distance,’ said the broom.
‘If they start attacking us, you’ve gone too far,’ Alditha hissed.
There was a silent moment, and Alditha thought the broom was probably sulking. Then slowly, a perfectly innocent patch of sky began to drift towards the dark mass of the bats.
__________
‘It’s this thing,’ said Harper, waving a beak at the teacup. ‘It’s those whizzing balls, and this thing, and now the sky. Bet you the invasion’s controlled from in there,’ he added, hooting involuntarily.
‘Invasion of the teacups, Harper old chap? That doesn’t sound right, somehow.’
‘Y’know what I think?’ said Harper. ‘I think it’s not really a teacup. I reckon it just looks like a teacup, and inside its probably full of...of...worms, and beetles and things, all just waiting to scuttle out and slither around the place and do their invading...thing.’
‘It was full of a young girl,’ said the Green Man, his voice level. ‘And Alpha, whatever that is.’
‘Exactly,’ hooted Harper in triumph. ‘Whatever that is. S’probably the King of the Beetle-People.’
‘Astarians,’ the Green Man continued.
‘And what does that mean when it’s at home, eh? Come to that, where is home for these Astarian beetle-creatures? I don’t know, do you?’
‘Astaria?’ The Green Man shrugged. ‘What does it matter? People have come to the Garden before without anybody flapping about the place calling it an invasion. Somehow they get on with their lives.’ He shrugged. It really was an impressive and complicated gesture for a living tree.
‘Not this time,’ Harper declared. ‘This time it’s all metal balls that won’t stand still and teacups that probably aren’t teacups at all and mysterious girls. If she is a girl, that is. After all, if her teacup’s not a teacup, how do we know she’s not a beetle disguised as a girl, eh?’
The Green Man scratched his head. ‘We don’t, I suppose,’ he admitted. ‘Seems a bit of a silly way to go about invading places though, pretending to be gir
ls—and quite polite ones at that.’
‘Lulling us into a false sense of...thingy,’ said Harper.
‘Girlishness?’
‘Exactly, yes,’ said the owl, who couldn’t quite remember the word he really wanted. ‘A false sense of girlishness. Then, when we’re all happy and smiley and “Oh, would you like a marshmallow?”—boom.’
‘Boom?’ asked the Green Man.
‘Boom,’ insisted Harper. ‘Before we know where we are, it’ll be scuttly, slithery brain-sucking invasion time.’
The Green Man blinked. ‘I really don’t think it will, you know,’ he said.
‘I’ll prove it to you, shall I?’ demanded the owl. ‘I’ll go and face all manner of scuttly, slithery brain-sucking death in the belly of the beast, shall I?’ He flung an accusing wing at the teacup again.
‘Do teacups have bellies?’
‘It’s not a teacup.’
The Green Man said nothing.
‘Right, I’ll show you,’ said Harper, flapping and not looking at the sky, where he knew all the horrid creatures were still trying to break through into the Garden. He flew to the side of the cup and along it, trying to find the door. ‘’s’probably beetle-shaped,’ he muttered. Then, as if by magic, a slab of darkness opened in the cup, and Harper hooted in alarm.
He swallowed, turned his head to look at the Green Man, who was watching him intently, then landed on the lip of the darkness. ‘Right,’ he called. ‘Here I go then. I’m going inside now. I may be some time.’
Owls have extremely good eyesight. They have particularly good eyesight when it comes to seeing things in the dark. Harper stared into the darkness inside the teacup but saw only blank walls and a patch of floor.
‘Course, I may be no time at all if I’m captured and have all manner of scuttly, slithery brain-sucking death inflicted on me,’ he said, ‘but don’t let that bother you.’
The Green Man still said nothing, though he did wave a hand—and several branches, for good measure.
‘Right then,’ said Harper, turning to face the darkness. He took two steps, and the doorway disappeared, leaving only solid wall behind him. As soon as the door became a wall though, the lights came on—low, purple lights illuminating his way down the corridor. ‘Oh yeah,’ muttered Harper, ‘because that’s totally innocent and not at all sinister. No way out and weird lighting. Terrific.’ He walked a few paces, then shook himself. ‘You’re an owl, for goodness’ sake,’ he said, flapping his wings and flying to the end of the corridor, turning right—the only option he had—and then flying down another featureless corridor. At the end of that second corridor, a tall arched doorway stood in front of him, and Harper pulled up, hovering as best he could.
‘Oh well,’ he muttered. ‘Here goes. That’s me for the scuttly, slithery brain-sucking death, then.’ He flew up and down outside the door, until it simply disappeared, just as the outer door had done. Harper looked around.
Knew it, he thought.
7
Owls may have extremely good eyesight, but what wizards are best at is concentration. They have to be, with all the spell-learning and incantations and wrist-flicking—if you don’t concentrate when you cast spells, one wrong wrist-flick can mean the difference between turning your enemy into a warthog and turning a warthog into your enemy. That may sound like no especially bad thing, but you’d be surprised by the number of otherwise excellent wizards who’ve been killed by a stampede of surprised and not at all happy warthogs, all because of a simple lapse in concentration.
Skoros was concentrating hard. Separating his focus across all the CyberBats and flying them in a formation was tricky at the best of times. Getting them to hunt down a specific and fast object like an orb was making him sweat through his wizard’s robes. But slowly, by grouping the CyberBats together only for short periods of time, swooping in, taking bites and nibbles of the orb’s outer casing and then retreating, he seemed to be getting somewhere.
Every time a CyberBat sank its brass fangs into the sphere, Skoros jerked in his seat. Information flared into his mind, like a black and white lightning flash arranged into ten pictures one on top of the other, all at once and bright and brilliant. At first when it had happened, he’d gasped, forgotten how to breathe, and then the image in his mind had faded like hope beneath his heel, and suddenly, desperately, he’d wanted to see it again, to feel that jolt of knowing things. Now he was doing it like a boy who catches butterflies in a net—swoop, bite, lurch, and then he’d use his mind to catch the image, see it fully before it faded, and tuck it away somewhere in the back of his brain till it was useful, as he commanded the CyberBats away again. Retreat, swoop, bite, lurch—and catch another stack of images, another set of squiggles that would mean nothing to anyone else in the Garden. They didn’t exactly mean anything to him yet either, but he was the one person—the one in all the Garden—who understood that they meant something to someone. To the people who’d built the sphere. To Celeste’s people. It had to be them, he knew—there was such a thing as coincidence, but it didn’t play this sort of game. He directed CyberBat 16 to swoop—his last attack from CyberBat 4 had driven the orb away from one cluster, only to face another. Swoop, bite. And there was the lurch again, the flash of brilliant, beautiful knowledge. But wait-
He sensed a change in the orb. It began to weave erratically, no longer seeming sure which direction it wanted to go. A sickly thin smile creaked into place on Skoros’ beardless face.
CyberBats—feeeeeeeed. He commanded, and all at once he felt them swoop, land, bite, sinking brass fangs into delicate layers of metal and wire, diodes panicking, flashing lights flickering frantically as the CyberBats hacked and bit and tore at the orb’s electronic innards. And in his chair in the secret chamber, Skoros shuddered and convulsed as though he were on fire—which in a way, he was. The information burned in his mind, bright and clear and swirling round and round, like a boxful of jigsaw puzzle pieces sliding over each other, searching for the holes that fit. And piece by piece, he began to see the sense of the sphere. If the data kept coming, he knew, he could understand it all, right there and then.
Keep it coming, he almost begged his CyberBats. Just a little longer—keep it coming.
Almost as he formed the thought though, he was thrown forward onto the desk, and back into his chair. He felt the orb go dead, dropping to the ground, and taking the CyberBats with it. The power disappeared. The knowledge tried to follow it, tried to dissolve itself from Skoros’ mind before he could reassert his will on it. The plugs that kept him connected to the CyberBats were ripped out of the holes in his head and he lay for a minute, feeling like all he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and keep the knowledge warm, in the hope it might grow in the nest of his head.
Skoros snapped his eyes open suddenly, gripped the arms of his chair.
‘Raaark?’ said Razor, somehow making it sound like ‘Are you all there, ya great big loony?’
‘I’ve got to find it,’ Skoros growled. ‘Got to have it.’ He stood up, his hat almost falling backwards off his head in the suddenness of the move. ‘Razor, come.’ He decided the moment was worth an evil chuckle, and he gave one. ‘We’re about to take over the Garden.’
‘Raaark,’ said Razor, rolling his eyes and whistling, as if to say ‘Yep, he’s gone. Absolutely, positively bonkers.’ But he hopped up onto his master’s shoulder anyway, and had to cling on tight as Skoros broke into a run, out of the castle and onward, while the last memories of where the CyberBats had been hunting stayed with him.
__________
Knew it, thought Harper. Knew this place was no ordinary teacup.
The room he’d flown into was large and round, with three seats at the far end of the circle. There were large banks of some kind of mirror in front of the seats, with lots of lines and squiggles moving all over them like multi-coloured worms.
Maybe it’s the invasion of the Worm-People, he thought, not the Beetle-People after all.
Then there was a no
ise like nothing he’d ever heard before, like thunderstorms fighting cats for a set of bagpipes. One of the chairs swung around, fast, and Harper knew it wasn’t the invasion of the Worm-People. It wasn’t the invasion of the Beetle-People, either. It was the invasion of the Things That Were Unspeakably Worse than Either Of Them.
The thing in the chair looked like it could once have been a person—it had the right number of arms and legs, and a head like an upturned egg pretty much where you’d expect a head to be. But the whole thing was skinny and spindly and pale, almost the colour of moonlight on milk. It looked like it hadn’t eaten a meal in a year, but yet it seemed, somehow, appallingly strong. It got out of the chair quickly, and Harper noticed its feet didn’t touch the floor. It was floating, flying towards him. The head, the horrible upturned egg of a head was pale too, with just two puncture wounds where a nose should be, and a terrible thin slit for a mouth. But the eyes...
The eyes were big black almonds that took up most of its face and had no pupils, so when you looked at them, you felt you might get lost, swallowed up and spat out somewhere unimaginably cold.
It spoke.
‘Intruder alert. You are an intruder. You must now leave or I will be forced to initiate security procedures. Intruder alert. You are an intruder...’
Its lips never moved. The sound seemed to come directly from its throat and fill the room, and it took Harper a few seconds to realize what it was saying.
There are moments in life when people are scared, when they have one of two reactions. They decide either to fight or to fly. Harper didn’t know what he was dealing with, but he knew that he was almost certain to be more scared of it than it was of him. He chose to fly, turning in a tight arc, and heading back out of the door. The monstrous thing followed, floating steadily after him, repeating its warnings.
‘You are an intruder. You must now leave, or I will be forced...’
Harper flapped like he’d never flapped before, flapped till his wings ached, and headed for where he knew the door to the outside world had been. Sure enough, as he got close, the wall dissolved and he shot out into the air of the Garden. He didn’t look up at the hideous things in the sky that only he could see, and he didn’t look down at the Green Man. He just kept flying, determined to get as far away from the horrible invading thing as he could.
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