Merciless Reason

by Oisin McGann

THE NURSERY WAS FAST BECOMING AN INFERNO of burning furniture, toys, and curtains. Fire spread in quickly-rising flames along the carpet. Daisy took one last look at Elizabeth and Nate still locked in a stand-off, weapons pointed at each other. Both were coughing badly, struggling to breathe. They were trapped now on the far side of the room by the fire. Daisy hugged Leopold to her and made for the door.

  A shovel-sized hand pushed her aside and Brutus bent low to squeeze through the doorway. Nate’s newly resurrected father surveyed the scene for a few seconds, then grabbed the door and wrenched it from its hinges.

  “Go,” he croaked to Daisy. “Get Leopold out of here.”

  Without looking to see if she obeyed his command, Edgar Wildenstern threw the door down over a burning grille of rafters that had fallen from the ceiling above. Using it as a bridge, he jumped across it to where Nate and Elizabeth stood.

  “Brutus!” Elizabeth gasped. “I knew you would come!”

  With startling quickness, Edgar thumped her once across the head with his engimal claw and caught her unconscious body with his left arm as she slumped to the floor. He grabbed Nate’s arm and shoved him ahead, towards the fallen door which even now was beginning to catch fire. Nate did not need telling twice. He leaped across, darting to the doorway and seizing Daisy’s outstretched hand. They ran along the hallway, coughing and gagging, their faces blackened, their nostrils and throats lined with a coating of soot.

  Edgar followed them, covering distance quickly with his long strides, Elizabeth’s body tucked under one arm like an overnight bag. Behind them, the ceiling of the nursery gave way as the burning roof above crashed down into it. Flames, smoke and charred wood spat through the doorway, as if giving chase to the fugitives.

  They were on the second floor, and as they crossed into the tower Nate peered out a window into the chaos outside at the back of the manor house. Pieces of burning debris were falling from the floors above. Some, like fragments of paper or fabric, fell slowly, even spiraling to settle onto the gravel and cobblestones. Others dropped like a hellish rain, bouncing off the ground in explosions of sparks. Through this spectacle rode a figure on a velocycle. Nate immediately recognized Gerald’s unmistakable form. His cousin was carrying something over his shoulder—a body. A body dressed all in black, but with long blonde hair dangling down Gerald’s back.

  “No!” Nate shouted, hauling the window open. “Don’t you bloody dare, you bastard!”

  Gerald either did not hear, or did not care to respond. He disappeared off into the darkness, in the direction of the church. Looking desperately around, Nate tore down the long drape off one side of the window, pulled out his knife and cut it down the middle.

  “Nate? What are you doing?” Daisy asked, turning to wait for him.

  “Go on with Edgar,” Nate said, as he tied the two halves together to make a section of material about twelve feet long. He was faced with no choice but to trust his hated father. He came up to her and kissed her hard on the mouth, ran his hand through his son’s hair and then said, “Gerald’s got Tatty. I have to go.”

  Daisy’s expression turned to one of dread, but then she just swallowed painfully and nodded. Turning away again, she hurried off along the hall. Nate spared his father a glance, wishing he could fathom what was going on in the mind of that bizarre combination of two human beings. Edgar locked eyes with him for an instant, then strode away after Daisy. Nate shook his head and knocked out the panes of glass above the window sash, tied the fabric around it and let it fall out the window. The air was fresher, cooler outside and he realized how hard it had been to breathe, even after they’d run from the nursery. The house was slowly suffocating.

  “There’ll come a time,” he grunted as he sat up on the window sill and swung his legs out, “when I’ll just have to stop jumping out of windows.”

  Then he seized the length of drape and dropped out into the night air.

  The fabric only reached down past the first floor and part of the way to the ground floor, but it was enough. Nate slid down, let go, dropped the remaining twelve feet, hit the ground and rolled. He came up and immediately began running. The rain of fiery debris continued around him, and he had to brush off a couple of pieces as he ran. In the stables off to his left, he could hear the shrill whinnying of panicked horses. Courageous grooms were risking their lives to free the animals as the roofs of the buildings caught fire.

  Sticking two fingers to his lips, Nate let out a piercing whistle. He heard a roar in response and the sound of wood shattering. A few second later, the door of the one of the stables was kicked outwards, splintering its painted boards, and Flash emerged. The velocycle spotted Nate and set off on a diagonal course away from the house to intercept him as he ran. Nate leaped onto its back without slowing down, seizing the beast’s horns and tapping its sides with his heels.

  The creature bunched its shoulders, tensed its flanks and hurled itself forward, gravel spitting from under its wheels as it raced across the yard in pursuit of their quarry. Its eyes probed the darkness ahead of them, following the tracks of Gerald’s mount. Behind them, Daisy and Edgar ran out of the back door of the house, each carrying their burden in their arms. Daisy called urgently to the grooms for horses. Edgar dropped Elizabeth onto the ground without any particular care, once they were a safe distance from the house, and grabbed the reins of the largest horse he could reach. As he made off at speed after Nate, Daisy called to Hennessy, who was overseeing the rescue of the horses. Pushing Leopold into the head grooms arms, she caught the reins of the only saddled horse she could see and climbed onto it. Urging it into a gallop, she set off after Edgar. She could only guess at the ogre’s motives, but she was determined not to let Nate face Gerald alone.

  Overhead, thunder cracked the clouds, as if a dark force lay above the cloud cover, pushing to get through. Gerald did not go far. Nate tracked him to the copse that surrounded the graveyard, and through that to the grounds of the church itself. There Nate stopped, still in the tree line, and studied the church. This was where their conflict had begun before, after Gerald had sabotaged Berto’s funeral and nearly killed everyone in the previous church. It was where Nate had found out how cunning and treacherous an enemy his best friend truly was.

  Nate breathed deeply, letting his senses stretch out and take in all that they could. What might Gerald have planned? Booby-traps were not out of the question, nor were armed henchmen or even engimals driven to attack. Last time they had fought, Gerald had used his music to turn Flash against Nate. There was no question that he still intended to play that hand. After what Daisy had told him about the organ Gerald had designed—the one built of engimals’ bodies—Nate knew his cousin had mastered a new level of control over the intelligent particles.

  But Nate was counting on Gerald to use his music.

  Leaning down close to Flash’s ear, he whispered:

  “He took your mind from you last time, but I’m not going to let that happen again.” He placed his hands on Flash’s wide skull, near the roots of its horns. “I am your master, your friend, Flash. You’ll never forget that again.”

  Nate opened his mind, feeling just a hint of the storm of sensation that raged beyond it. Like a door opened just a crack, with a sandstorm blowing outside, Nate braced himself against the force trying to push open that door. He reached through that narrow opening and felt around until he touched Flash’s mind, feeling the raw, savage thoughts of that feral machine, many thousands of years old. He let out a gasp as he made the connection and drew the mind to him, sharing its powerful instincts, enclosing them, protecting them. Then he closed the door as far as he could, keeping hold of Flash’s thoughts.

  This was the final secret Nate had learned about the intelligent particles. They were designed to bond with the human mind. If you understood them, and accepted what they could do, you could control them as instinctively as you would your own limbs. You didn’t need any music.
It was the truth that Nate struggled to hide, the truth Gerald must never discover.

  Nate was about to start forward again when he felt the ground tremble beneath his feet. Strains of music began to seep from the church. Gerald was playing the organ.

  “Oh, shit,” Nate murmured. “He’s playing Bach.”

  The staggered, rising notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor lifted into the night air. It was a tune that Nate had always thought apocalyptic, and it seemed a fitting choice for this night. A jolt passed through the ground and Flash growled. Then a groaning, creaking sound erupted from the walls of the church. Ripples ruptured the earth around the building. Cracks ran like fast-growing roots up the stone walls. One of the stained-glass windows bloomed into a flower of cracks, then shattered altogether as its frame twisted. More windows burst outwards. The music rose in tempo, growing louder. Nate could have sworn there were notes going beyond his hearing range, notes that squealed high enough to hurt his teeth and others that thudded deeply in his chest. Or perhaps that last was his quaking heart as he contemplated facing Gerald. He knew any other human would have been overwhelmed by Gerald’s music by this point.

  With a crunching, wrenching sound, the wall over the front door of the church collapsed, the remains of its windows tinkling among the falling stone. A long snake-like shape stretched up and out, and Nate wondered if this was some new engimal he had never seen before, a serpentine over forty feet long.

  But then more of the things drove through the walls of the church, planting themselves into the ground beyond its foundations. Parts of the walls tumbled inwards as the haunting music continued to play. The volume increased and the walls that contained the organ fell away. The tentacles—for that was what they were—braced themselves against the ground, and with a single powerful thrust, heaved a portion of the building into the air. A few clinging pieces of stone and masonry fell away from it, revealing the church’s organ, housed in the body of some enormous engimal—a leviathan, Nate thought, one shaped like an octopus or perhaps a squid. Its body must have measured nearly thirty feet, the largest tentacles at least twenty feet longer. But where its head should have been, Gerald had transplanted a church organ, some of the pipes rising up like the smokestacks of a train, others, running under the hide of the creature.

  It moved clumsily at first, swaying under its own weight, its tentacles unaccustomed to carrying its massive bulk on land. But Gerald’s will coursed through it, transmitted through his fingers and the keys of the organ, and the precise but powerful flow of the music.

  Oval and diamond-shaped markings glowed blue along its grey-green flanks as the rain began to fall heavier again. The monster raised itself up to its full height, and Nate saw Tatty’s limp form clutched in one of its eight tentacles. Gerald looked out from his seat, twenty feet above the ground, grinned maniacally at Nate and then turned the beast around and walked it right through the side wall of the church, demolishing what remained of it, and on through a gap in the trees and down the slope towards the bottom of the mountain.

  Nate sat there, awestruck and terrified, for nearly a minute. Even Flash had its head low, cowed by the sight of the mighty sea creature. A leviathan—the largest of the engimals on Earth, the creatures that could make sounds no other engimal could, that could transmit them further than any modern, man-made device. There could be no denying it, Gerald had pulled out all the stops. Nate had no idea how to launch an assault on such a beast—not without getting himself killed in the process.

  “That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” he muttered to Flash. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  Kicking his heels into Flash’s sides, he set off in pursuit of Gerald and his monstrous creation. Behind him, Daisy slowed her horse, pulling back on the reins as she saw the leviathan disappear over the edge of the hill, with Nate speeding after it. Edgar was galloping up behind her, his horse slower because of his great weight. She gazed in dismay at the scene of devastation Gerald had left behind him.

  “I don’t believe it,” she gasped. “He’s destroyed another church.”

  XXXVI

  REQUIEM

  BY THE TIME NATE EMERGED from the trees and caught sight of the leviathan again, it had turned around. Gerald was waiting for him, gently playing scales on one of the keyboards. And there was no sign of Tatty. Nate slowed Flash’s pace, coasting down the grassy slope as he cast his gaze around, searching for signs of a trap. He pulled up on a hillock overlooking a low bank, staring at Gerald’s creature, which stood quietly some forty, yards away. Another hundred yards behind that, Nate could see the Wildensterns’ private railway line cutting down into the woods as it descended into the valley to the right.

  “What’s this all about, Gerald?” he called out, waving at the monster. “The chap with the biggest organ wins?”

  “One can always count on you to lower the tone,” Gerald called back. “But then, you never did have a good ear for music.”

  “Where’s Tatty?”

  “I’ve tied her to the railway tracks, just round the curve,” Gerald told him, indicating behind him. He lifted his head and stared off to Nate’s left in an exaggerated manner. “The family will be along any minute now, on board their train. You should just have time to save her, if you hurry. But I’m afraid you’ll have to go through me first. It’s time we had it out, old boy. Can’t, have you cramping my style, don’t y’know.”

  Nate ground his teeth and eyed the railway line. He was sure that Flash could cover the ground faster than Gerald’s beast. He could get round and hope to reach the tracks before Gerald caught up … but it would mean running from that huge thing, turning his back on it. He had no idea what it could do, but he knew Gerald was counting on this; using Tatty to break his focus, to distract him from the fight.

  The leviathan still had a consciousness of sorts—Nate could feel it, just beyond his reach, and he knew if he reached out further with his mind, he might be able to touch it … but it would mean opening the door to that sandstorm that raged just beyond his awareness. It was a door he didn’t know how to close.

  Gerald played a few bars of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain, and then tooted one of the organ pipes like a train’s whistle.

  Nate let out a snarl and dug his heels into Flash’s flanks, launching the velocycle off the hillock and charging down the slope. Gerald began playing something lively by Haydn. As Nate made his first pass, the tentacles whipped out, snatching at him and trying to knock him from his mount. He dodged through them, Flash banking right and left through the coiling tendrils, avoiding their grasp but failing to get Nate close enough to the platform on which Gerald sat.

  Nate scrambled out into rough, open ground and swung Flash’s back wheel around, cutting a semi-circular slash through the bog, hearing the engimal give a rumble of satisfaction. Then they hurtled back towards the leviathan. Gerald did not wait for them to come within reach of the tentacles. The rear of the engimal opened out like a flower, diamond-shaped petals overlapping around a round, shallow hollow, complete with a cone-like stamen protruding from the center. Nate stared as the engimal aimed this dish-shaped flower at the sky.

  Gerald changed key, his music rising in pitch, and the rain began to lash down harder, soaking the ground. The wind picked up, gusting violently. Nate’s heart turned cold as he saw black dots start to coalesce in the air. It was as if someone had sprinkled pepper in the sky. These were intelligent particles, swarming so thickly they were becoming visible. Gerald had found a way to communicate with the particles in the air and in the earth. Wind lashed the rain into Nate’s face, blurring his sight as the music went lower. Crevasses split the ground, forcing Flash to leap to one side, then the other, lunging back and forth across the cracks in the earth as they reached out from under the leviathan.

  A tentacle slammed down in front of them and Flash vaulted over it, landing solidly and then jumping again, twisting in mid
-air as they passed between two more tentacles, one of them scraping Nate’s shoulder, the other suffering a skidmark from Flash’s back wheel. They landed harder this time, off-balance on the wet slippery ground. Nate felt his revolver fall from his waistband and hauled back on the engimal’s horns to spin his mount round before another tentacle crashed down in their path, nearly crushing Flash’s head and shoulders. The tentacle went to rise up again, and Nate caught hold of it as it passed over his head. He was yanked from Flash’s back, barely holding on to the wet and writhing ceramic surface. But using the movement of the snake-like limb, he swung himself up through the air and over, to drop neatly onto the platform where Gerald sat.

  “Touché,” Gerald said, working his jaw, all the expression gone from his eyes. “I’m intrigued. How are you defending yourself from the music? How are you protecting Flash?”

  “Shove it, Gerald. Let’s just get this done.”

  Locking gazes with his cousin, Nate was reminded of a reptile, or a shark. Gerald stood up from his chair and Nate lunged at him. Gerald kicked the chair round, jamming the back of it into Nate’s stomach, then he struck the side of Nate’s jaw with the heel of his right hand. Nate rode the blow, stepped round the chair, blocked a left punch and drove his left elbow into Gerald’s sternum. He followed it quickly with a hook into the floating ribs, but Gerald seized the back of his neck and swung his own elbow into the side of Nate’s head, knocking him straight to the floor. He pushed himself up, and Gerald kicked him under the chin, flipping him over onto his back. Nate groaned and rolled over to rise to his feet again. His cousin was much stronger, much faster than he remembered.

  “It’s all about making the most of the particles in your own body,” Gerald told him. “You’d be amazed what I can do now. It’s a pity we can’t share it.”

  Nate didn’t reply. He attacked again, jabbing punches and kicks at Gerald, who evaded some, blocked others and replied with fast, vicious strikes of his own. Nate took a punch to the nose and another to his throat and staggered back. Gerald followed, but Nate planted a front kick into his stomach that knocked him towards the edge of the platform.