‘What?’ said Harper. ‘Like a Midsummer Hallowe’en present? Like a box, and ribbons and that sort of thing.’
Gunkin flashed the horrible smile again. ‘Exactly.’
__________
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ said Celeste.
‘Analysis...confirmed.’
Celeste had been tramping all over the Garden for weeks now, moving the scout ship every now and again when she needed a rest cycle. The seeker-beams had activated, which meant the orbs were here, and had found something that interested them. But since then—nothing. She’d put out homing beacons for the orbs, she’d done scans for Astarian technology—there was plenty of that here, she knew now, and some of it was ancient—but as far as actually locating any of it was concerned, she had drawn blank after blank. It was almost as if the orbs were hiding from her. Which was...
‘Just ridiculous,’ she said, frowning, wondering if it really was.
Although she’d been following procedure when she’d introduced herself to the Green Man and that rude man on the metal horse, since the seeker-beams had split the sky and she’d confirmed that the orbs had found something, she’d thought it best to keep contact with the locals to a minimum. She’d turned on the ship’s visual shielding, and she, too, had gone cloaked while she tried to find the orbs, or—she held her breath even as she thought it—what the orbs might have found. But this planet was hot and she was bored of tracking orb activity by hand. She assessed her options and swept her rectangular instrument around again.
It beeped. In fact it beeped and went ‘squeeeeee.’ For the first time in two weeks, it beeped and went ‘squeeeeee.’ Celeste frowned at it, sweeping the scanner around again more slowly. The ‘squeeeeee’ sound grew in pitch and volume as she aimed it at the cottage up ahead. Celeste frowned at the cottage. ‘Have picked up a trace of orb activity in a nearby dwelling,’ she reported. ‘Am deactivating cloak at this time, and going to engage the occupants.’
‘Proposed course of action directly contradicts previous search methods,’ Alpha chided, Celeste’s headband flashing in time with his words.
‘Yes, well look where they got us,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve been walking around this world getting absolutely nowhere but hot, and tired, and I really wish I’d brought my hoverscoot, did I mention that? I’m changing the search methods. Bio-mech Alpha, do you wish to further question my judgement at this time?’
A handful of seconds passed in silence, as the bio-mech seemed to be considering the question.
‘Your actions and reasoning will be duly noted in the ship’s log,’ he said.
‘That is not an answer,’ said Celeste.
‘Confirmed,’ said Alpha.
Celeste huffed. ‘Disengaging cloak—now.’
__________
Alditha dripped a layer of candle wax into all the bottles of horrid black goo, and pushed a cork into the neck of one bottle, two bottle–
She straightened up. She felt a prickle at the back of her neck. ‘Well, come in if you’re coming, whoever you are,’ she said.
The door of the cottage disappeared, all at once. A young girl stood in the doorway, dressed in an odd outfit and waving a rectangular, beeping box around.
‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘My name is Celeste. Have you seen an orb around here lately?’
__________
‘Stop.’
They had kept to the outskirts and the disused paths on the way from Odiz’ house to the border of Skoros’ family’s land. Now, at the wizard’s word and a button-press on his wand, the orb made Odiz stop walking.
Skoros stepped in front of him. ‘I’m going to have to do something a little unpleasant now,’ he warned the mage, as though killing his housekeeper and kidnapping him in the middle of his afternoon nap had been nothing but jolly playtime fun. ‘You may find you panic. In fact,’ he said, grinning just a little, ‘it’s almost a medical certainty that you’ll panic. The paralysis ray has levels, you see. I’m sure mages are made of stubborn stuff, and I need you to be unconscious. Rather pointless leading you by the hand to where I’m going to, shall we say, entertain you, only to have you remember the way and tediously try to escape, no?’
Skoros chuckled, and Razor threw in a half-hearted squawk. ‘That’s where the paralysis ray comes in handy. With a press of a button, I can turn it up, from general paralysis which allows you to walk, to a rather more compelling level. I’m going to stop your lungs from moving, Odiz. Stop the blood flowing to your brain for just a little while. It will feel like you’re suffocating, like you can’t get your breath. Because of course you won’t be able to. I advise you to go with it—the faster I can get you where you’re going, the sooner I can wake you up.’
Skoros pressed a button on his wand, the corkscrew end turned, and the thick red beam of colour coming from the orb deepened. Odiz’ eyes bulged and stayed wide open, even when he fell to the ground.
__________
Skoros’ family estate was huge, as was fitting for a family led traditionally by a line of evil wizards. It hadn’t started out huge, but along the way, various ancestors had turned up at people’s doors and explained to them, either in polite voices or with the visual aid of burning torches, that they didn’t live there anymore. And that the inclusion of the word ‘there’ in that sentence was conditional on them running away.
The Maze had been the brainchild of Salu-Valek The Merciless when he’d run out of conventional dungeon space—there were, after all, only so many hours in any given day that could be dedicated to torturing prisoners to death, and he’d found himself in need of a holding area, a space where his victims could be brought while he worked out his disagreements with his more immediate prisoners. Salu-Valek had many, many disagreements with people. He tended to disagree that they should be breathing.
Skoros walked up to the outside wall of the Maze. It looked horrible, a tangled mass of black and blood-red vines and thorns that slithered over one another as you looked at them. It hissed and made the air taste of metal.
Odiz was laying on his back on precisely nothing at all, the orb’s deep red misty beam joined by a pale blue light that bathed him and kept him suspended, pulling him along in the orb’s wake.
‘Open up, it’s me,’ Skoros snapped, and the hissing of the vines intensified as they snaked apart to form a hole large enough to let them all through.
‘Raark. Ermm, if it’s all the same to you, boss, I’ll stay out here. This place gives me the right heebie-jeebies,’ said Razor.
‘What do you have to fear, little one?’ Skoros oozed. ‘After all, you’re a bird. You could fly away at any time.’
‘Raark. Pull the other one, O Lord of All You Survey. I know what this stuff is, don’t I? Wasn’t hatched yesterday,’ muttered the bird.
Skoros smirked. ‘Come,’ he commanded.
‘All right,’ whispered Razor to himself, ‘but if one o’them things comes near me, they’ll get a pecking they won’t forget in a hurry, that’s all I know...’
Slowly, but following Skoros’ purposeful stride, Razor went into the Maze.
__________
‘Welcome to my cottage, friend Celeste,’ said Alditha, stalling for time. ‘My name’s Alditha. You’ll be putting my door back, of course. Only manners.’
Celeste blinked. ‘Oh. Yes, of course. Apologies, Alldeet-ha.’ She stepped indoors, waved her little bleeping box at the doorway, and nodded with satisfaction when the door reappeared on its hinges.
‘It’s pronounced Al-dith-a,’ said the witch. ‘I’m much obliged to you, Celeste. The Green Man told me about you. You’re from the teacup, yes?’
Celeste’s young face looked blank, and when she spoke, it wasn’t to Alditha. ‘Query teacup.’
Her headband glowed, then from the ends just above her ears, two beams of soft blue light emerged, forming an image of a teacup.
‘Oh,’ she said, waving her hand through the image to disperse it. ‘The scout ship, yes. It’s not really a...tea
cup, it just has a system that chooses a local object, and then disguises the ship as that object, whatever it is. Helps to not upset the locals.’
A smile twitched at the corners of Alditha’s mouth as she recalled Harper’s terrified reaction. ‘And that works, does it? Usually, I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Celeste, ‘usually. So—orbs?’
‘Metal balls with wings that fly about the place,’ Alditha said, nodding once. ‘Found one. Heard tell of another. What’s it to you?’
‘I’m looking for them, because either they shouldn’t be here, or they should. Either way, I need to find them to know why they’re still here.’
It was Alditha’s turn to blink. ‘No, sorry, you’re going to have to do a bit better than that,’ she said, sniffing. ‘You can come in, by the way, sit yourself down.’ She gestured to the kitchen table, and one of its simple carved wooden chairs slid out, revealing a red and white checked cushion.
Celeste smiled. ‘Thank you. I’ve been walking for-’ She paused, and her headband pulsed, then a voice said ‘Seven hours, local time.’ ‘-Seven hours,’ she finished, as though nothing had interrupted her.
‘Handy, your little oojamaflip,’ said Alditha, nodding at her headband, which glowed almost immediately.
‘No known translation for oojamaflip.’
‘Means thingummybob. Or whatchamacallit. Or doofer,’ said Alditha, watching the rapid pulsing of the headband that followed.
‘No known translation for thingummy-’
‘Doesn’t know everything though. Good. I don’t like things that think they know everything,’ said Alditha. ‘People neither.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘So, about these orbs of yours?’
‘Standard reconnaissance orbs-’
‘Come again?’
Celeste’s headband glowed. ‘Reconnaissance—the finding out of...stuff,’ said Alpha.
‘So, standard finding out of stuff orbs,’ Celeste continued, raising both eyebrows.
Alditha nodded.
‘The most recent ones were sent ahead of me to search for any evidence of Astarian technology on the worlds in this sector.’
‘Asswhatian?’
‘Astarian. People like me. People say the Astarian homeworld itself was lost hundreds of thousands of years ago, but no-one really knows anymore. It seems likely our people destroyed or polluted their world to the point where it became uninhabitable. Though others believe that our sun and planetary system was captured by a massive passing star and pulled into a new orbit. Either way, whatever happened, the Astarian fleet has been roaming the galaxy ever since.’
‘Not big on history, you Astarians, are you?’
‘Not anymore,’ agreed Celeste. ‘Records were kept originally, but what with even three-dimensional space being the size it is, the chances of finding out what really happened seemed so absurdly remote, we’ve more or less just decided to go forward with our lives.’
‘More or less, is it?’
Alditha snapped her fingers, and on her working surface, a knife cut bread, another slathered it with homemade sheep’s butter, and a spoon glooped into some of Old Ma Hazelbrook’s plum jam, which was spread on the bread. A plate flew out of a neat rack and scooped up the bread and jam like a passenger, then it slid through the air and across the table to Celeste, who looked at Alditha, curious as to what had just happened.
‘Food,’ explained the witch. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You do eat, I take it?’
Celeste reached into one of her invisible pockets, and pulled out a sleek metal rectangle, which she pressed to produce a small, thin white brick. ‘Nutrition pills,’ she explained, offering one to Alditha. The witch took it, narrowing her eyes at it along the line of her nose. Then she shrugged and popped it in her mouth. It tasted of absolutely nothing, like a long Sunday afternoon with nothing to do and nobody to do it with.
‘Nutrition ain’t what it used to be,’ she judged, nodding at the girl to try her bread and jam.
Celeste picked it up, turned it round, as if trying to decide on the best way to tackle the unfamiliar object. Then she bit off a corner and chewed. Her eyes went wide.
‘Oh...’ she said. ‘Oh, my...’
Her headband flashed like an alarm. ‘Chemical ingestion index violation—complex carbohydrate, animal fat, fructose-’
‘Shut up, Alpha,’ said Celeste simply, and the voice cut off. ‘This is amazing. This is just-’ She bit and chewed some more, hardly seeming to breathe between mouthfuls. Bread and jam tasted so much better than strawberry marshmallows.
Alditha smiled again, a tiny triumph glinting in her eyes. She snapped her fingers again, and the process began to repeat itself on her working surface.
‘So, if you’ve given up on history, what are your finding out stuff orbs trying to find out?’
‘Mmmeepers,’ said Celeste through a sticky, buttery mouthful. As she spoke, her bright blonde hair pulsed pink, then purple, then stood up stiff on end. She swallowed. ‘Sleepers,’ she said again.
‘Ah,’ said Alditha. ‘And who are they when they’re at home?’
‘Mmmmnotatome,’ said the girl through another bite of bread and jam. ‘Lost. There was an expedition, long ago. Thousands of years ago.’
Her headband flashed, slowly, almost as though it was sulking. ‘6.8 thousand years ago, Galactic Standard Time.’
Celeste licked some jam off her thumb. ‘Exactly—6.8 thousand years ago. No-one’s entirely sure where they were headed, but they sent a report back to say they’d found a planet that would be ideal for the fleet to colonize. A new home,’ she said, sounding wistful. ‘But something went wrong. The data compression-’ She looked at Alditha, who raised one eyebrow. ‘The message with directions to where they were?’ she tried, and Alditha nodded. ‘It never came through. Only that they were going to come back and lead us there, because there were dimensional anomalies.’
Alditha’s eyebrow began to rise again.
‘It was odd,’ said Celeste. ‘Somehow there were complications, and the message got garbled every time they tried to send it. Then-’ Her face clouded beneath her purple-pulsing, sticky-up hair. ‘Then things got worse,’ she said. ‘They couldn’t make orbit, they said, couldn’t get away. A major problem...an unforeseen accident involving the scout ship. So they went into their cryo-chambers-’ She didn’t even bother to look at Alditha this time. ‘They went to sleep. A sleep that kept them alive for a long time. But since then, we’ve heard nothing from them.’
‘Been lookin’ for ’em all that time, have you, these Sleepers of yours?’
Celeste fixed her with a quizzical look. ‘Space is big,’ she said, as if talking to a child. ‘Really, really big. But actually, no. We sent out probes for a while—a thousand years or so—but nobody found anything. It’s only recently that we’ve-’ Again, she paused, the cloud passing over her face. ‘We’ve needed to look for them.’
‘So what are you doing here? Never heard tell of any snoring Astarians in the Garden. Sort of thing somebody would have noticed, a bunch of lazy beggars not pulling their weight.’
‘Because some of the recent orbs reported back, obviously,’ Celeste explained. ‘Alditha, you don’t understand...the orbs found something—here, in the Garden.’
__________
‘Wakey, wakey.’
Odiz gasped for breath, and finding suddenly that he could take one, he gasped for another. He was sitting upright, but something was wrong.
‘Back with us? Good, I’d hate to have killed you by accident.’
Odiz said nothing, he was concentrating on getting breath back into his body. His head was pounding, and his eyes felt like fried eggs, still sizzling around the edges. When his body got used to the fact that it was all still there, he noticed something.
Young idiot’s got me bound. Normally, even the impertinence of such a thing would have been enough to secure Skoros a special, no-expense-spared trip underground in a wooden box, but Odiz was noticing a few other things.
Damn
ed Blackheart Bindweed. Nasty stuff. Best hear the fool out. Ach, confound it—he discovered that even his head was encased in a skull-cap of intertwining thorny, hissing vines.
Skoros smiled at him. ‘Yes, it’s Blackheart Bindweed. And you know what that means. You try to escape, you’ll be full of blood-drinking thorns before you take two steps. You try to do magic, the Maze will tear your arms off before you can cast so much as a love spell. I advise you to take that seriously; you probably can’t feel it yet, but there are already thorns embedded in your skull, Odiz. If you even think your incantation, they will know.’ He hiked the smile up further. ‘It would be such a shame to lose all that learning, don’t you think?’
‘What is it you want, you odious, beardless little tyke?’ Odiz barked.
‘Shhhhh, I really wouldn’t get the Maze excited if I were you,’ Skoros whispered. ‘Not when what I want is so simple. I want information, Odiz. That’s all. Not your big house or your fancy housekeeper with the fabulous recipe for shepherd’s pie. Not your books, not your skills, not any of that. Just information.’
‘Ever thought of just askin’, ya rat bag?’
Skoros scythed through the space between them, to spit in the mage’s face. ‘This is me just asking,’ he hissed.
Odiz snapped his teeth together, and Skoros yelped back in surprise.
‘Poke your filthy nose near my choppers again, sunshine, and I’ll bite it off,’ snarled the mage.
Skoros recovered his sneer, pointed his wand at Odiz’ face.
‘Raaark, easy boss. Information, remember? If you kill ’im, he can tell you the square root of beggar all.’
Skoros grunted, stepped back, and pressed a button on his wand. The corkscrew tip whirred, and a bluish light shone out of the end. The light clung together, forming itself into a holographic image. A dark red star, with wings on either side of it.
‘What,’ said Skoros, through teeth clenched tight, ‘is this?’
10
Witches move in all the usual ways that most people do. But witches, being witches, have a whole extra set of ways of moving too—ways which would seem silly or dramatic if anyone else tried to use them. They’re like witchy cheat modes.
Aliens In My Garden Page 10