The Road to Bedlam cotf-2

by Mike Shevdon

  "And why is that a problem, exactly?"

  We passed the lifts and came to the double doors leading to the downward stairway. Raffmir placed his hand against the keypad again and the light blinked green.

  "It will not last. The locks will open to a valid identity, but there is another system that monitors who has access and when they use it. It's part of the security system."

  A loud siren suddenly started emitting a piercing whine. Red lights flashed down the corridor. The keypad on the door blinked red, but the door was already open.

  "It has just worked out," said Raffmir, "that we shouldn't be here."

  He led the way, descending three full levels before he halted. "Wait here," he said.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Below us is the guard station for the secure levels. I will deal with the guards."

  "Can't we…"

  He literally vanished from sight in front of me, fading into the stairway as if he'd never been there. "Raffmir?" I was talking to the empty stairway.

  I gritted my teeth. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

  There was a series of staccato eruptions from below, followed by the dull boom of a shotgun in a confined space. Screams and shouts echoed up the stairway with the acrid smell of smoke and discharged gunpowder. There was a final percussive shot and then silence.

  A breath of air below me turned back into Raffmir. "The way is clear. Come."

  He led me down another level to a bend in the corridor which opened out into a space covered by guard posts on either side. One had the menacing muzzle of a machine gun poking from it while the other had thick glass, now smeared with a red stain. Dead bodies were strewn about the floor, blood pooling beneath them, their weapons lying with them where they'd fallen. The smell of blood and guts was mixed with acrid smoke, making me retch.

  "How many did you kill?" I asked.

  Raffmir shook his head. "Are you keeping score?"

  "No, but I need to know what this has cost."

  "Even if it were a hundred, would you not pay that price in battle to have your daughter back? Blood calls to blood, Dogstar. It always has."

  A young soldier behind a barrier had been rammed into the concrete face first, leaving his features unidentifiable. "This wasn't a battle. You slaughtered them."

  "They prepared to fight the fey – mongrels, half-breeds, the ill-bred and misfits. They have not faced the true fey for centuries. They have become arrogant and complacent. It is their weakness." I noticed then what had been bothering me. The whole area was peppered with iron. The guards had been using iron in their ammunition. Raffmir was right when he said that they had prepared.

  Beyond the guard station was another set of double doors. He put his hand over the keypad, but it flashed red three times and the door didn't open.

  "Now what?" I asked.

  He took hold of the metal bars of the door handles. With alarming strength, he ripped the doors apart. Once he had a gap he used one to lever against the other until the frame screeched and the hinges buckled, leaving the doors hanging limply and leaving the way down open.

  "Bloody hell," I said.

  Raffmir grinned at me. "The strength of the true fey is something to behold. You begin to appreciate the differences between us." He stepped through the gap. "The system triggered the alarm, but they still don't know what they're dealing with. The cameras are useless to them, they will show them nothing. We still have the advantage of surprise."

  I followed him through what remained of the doors. Beyond them was a reception area with comfortable leather chairs and a water cooler. A middle-aged woman in a white coat was trying to barricade herself into a glass-walled office by pushing a chair under the door handle. If she'd seen what Raffmir had just done to the security doors, she would not have bothered.

  There were three sets of opaque glass doors arranged at each corner of the area, leading further into the complex. On each door was a letter – A, B and C. Raffmir ignored the woman in the room, who was now hiding under her desk, and went to the door marked B.

  "This way."

  As I followed there was the sharp double crack of pistol shots. The opaque glass door to the right shattered in a shower of glass. Alarmed, I leapt aside and pressed myself against the wall, out of the line of the ambush. Raffmir pushed through, there was a dull thud and then a man in a security uniform was hurled backwards through the other door, shattering that too. He bounced once on the floor and rolled across the carpet, groaned and lay still.

  I stepped gingerly across the glass-covered carpet to where Raffmir was sweeping fragments of glass from his sleeve. The acrid smell of gunfire hung around him. There was a black pistol on the floor, and I reached for the gun.

  "Leave it," he said. "Its sound will only betray our location. Your sword is cleaner and more certain."

  "Were you hit?" I asked.

  He shook his head, but the smile had gone. "The time has come," he said, "to show them what they are dealing with."

  He shifted form back to the long coat and ruffled shirt. As he did so the air chilled suddenly and the lights flickered and dimmed.

  "Do likewise," he instructed. "Take as much power as you can. Together we can absorb all they have. Without power or light they will be unable to respond."

  The well of darkness within me dilated and I drew in power. The room temperature plummeted and the lights winked out. There was a crackling, splitting sound as the water in the cooler froze and split the container. My hands and fingers were outlined in a white nimbus. The sirens faltered and then subsided into a muted beeping. Emergency lights flickered on then faded to blue and died.

  "Keep drawing power. They are not creatures of the dark like us. We will have the advantage as long as we can hold it. Together we can deny them light, while we can still see."

  He gestured around him and I found I could indeed see, even beyond the faint outlines illuminated by our flickering nimbus. The real world was in darkness, but the shadow world overlaid upon it was like glowing smoke.

  He walked on into that spectral dark, and I followed.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I followed him into the shadows, seeing beyond the walls into offices and corridors. Shadows shifted in those spaces and I realised there were people, moving shadows of smoke within a misty framework of walls and doors.

  Amidst the misty world were things that stood out, stark and grey. We approached a vertical rectangular grid. It resolved in the faint light of Raffmir's nimbus into a barrier of iron bars.

  "The door is reinforced iron, designed to be proof against our power. The lock is iron too, so our kind cannot affect it."

  "Can we get past it?"

  He grinned and in answer his glow intensified for a moment and then he vanished. There was a moment of deeper darkness and then his glow reappeared on the other side of the door and he began drawing power once more.

  "It seems," he said from the far side of the bars, "that there is a chink in their armour."

  I followed his example and gathered power into me. I could see the iron bars of the door, the impervious nature of it, standing stark where all else was smoke. Between the bars, though, was space, and space was ours. I didn't go through the door, but simply stepped around it, moving from one side to the other without passing through the distance in between. Where we could see, we could go.

  Beyond that door was a short corridor and then another door, identical to the first.

  As we approached the second door there was the loud crack of another pistol shot. This time Raffmir jerked at the impact. Behind him, I dodged sideways, avoiding the line of fire as bullets sprayed into the space, showering us with chips of plaster and paint. The ringing of the pistol shots, the muzzle flash from the gun, the smell of cordite and gunpowder catching in my throat, made the confined space suddenly claustrophobic. Raffmir flattened himself against the wall.

  "Are you hurt?" I asked.

  He smiled grimly, then pressed his hand against his
shoulder and opened it, showing me the blood.

  In the darkness beyond the door, a man crossed the corridor, trying to gain a clear shot where I was pinned against the wall. I watched in slow motion as he raised the pistol and aimed at my head.

  Instinct saved me as I slid behind the curtain of reality, emerging in the corridor behind them. The shot was still ringing in the corridor as I emerged.

  "Shit!" The man said. "He vanished."

  As I drew my sword, they realised at once that the danger was among them. There were three men. The first, the security guard who had aimed at me, turned to point his weapon. My sword arced down, blade flashing in the dark, severing the arm at the wrist. The weapon fell and bounced off the carpet, the hand still grasping it. The second guard raised his gun and my sword swept under his chin. He stopped and shuddered, and his head snapped back as a fountain of blood erupted from his neck. The third stepped back clear of his comrades, trying for a shot. I closed the distance in a single long thrust. The sword thudded under his breastbone. He jerked, the hand with the gun flailing, colliding with the wall. The gun clattered heavily to the floor. He gave a wet cough and slid backwards off the blade on to the floor, red blooming across the front of his white coat. He looked down at the spreading blood, his chin unshaven, his eyes wide with surprise. Then his head fell back and his eyes glazed.

  Looking down at him while he died, I could see that he looked like a medic. I had just killed a doctor. What kind of doctor carried a pistol?

  The fight was over so quickly. All those months of training, long hours of step and parry, turn and slice, and the real fight was over in seconds. It was unreal.

  I was standing over him, trying to stop my hand from shaking, when Raffmir appeared beside me. I still held the sword in my hand, watching the blood drip from the end of the blade on to the medic's coat. I could feel my heart thumping now that the adrenalin had nowhere to go.

  "That was nicely done," he said. It was the first compliment he had ever paid me.

  He shrugged out of his coat and let it fall on the ground. Underneath, the blood was soaking into the shirt around the gory hole in his arm. He glanced down.

  "Careless," he said, shaking his head gently. "More haste, less speed."

  He went back to where the guard whose hand I'd severed was sitting, leaning against the wall, cradling the stump in his lap and rocking back and forth. Even in the faint light of the glow around Raffmir I could see the sweat beaded on the man's skin, the way his eyes were wide and staring at nothing.

  Raffmir picked him up by the front of his uniform and held him one-handed against the wall.

  "Does it hurt?"

  The man's eyes were staring but seeing nothing. Raffmir smiled. "Not for long."

  Dappled moonlight spilled out into the corridor.

  "Raffmir, don't…" But it was already too late.

  Black tendrils of power extended from Raffmir's outstretched hand into the guard's skin. His flesh sank against his bones and his eyes bulged as Raffmir consumed his life essence in front of me. For once I understood what Blackbird had meant when she said that such a thing was obscene. What was left of the guard fell through Raffmir's hand.

  He glanced sideways at me. "Squeamish, cousin?"

  "Was that necessary?"

  In answer, he drew back the shirt from his arm where the blood caked the cloth, revealing a newly puckered scar where the gunshot wound had been.

  He prodded it gently, checking for tenderness. "I do believe it was," he said.

  He reached down and retrieved his coat, putting a finger through the hole that the bullet had made. He shrugged back into it, covering the blood-soaked shirt. His glamour shifted slightly and the hole in his coat also vanished.

  He squared his shoulders. "Come," he said. "We are almost there."

  Beyond the iron doors was different. Where before there had been offices and computers, carpets and corridors, this was more like a hospital than an office building. The floors were dark vinyl, the walls painted white without pictures or pattern, and the air smelled of antiseptic.

  The beds in the wards were mostly empty. The few patients lay comatose, immune to gunfire and violence. Beyond them I could see where people hid in the wards, concealing themselves behind curtains or beds, trying not to be noticed. When we came near, they scurried away into the dark and I could see that most of them were medical staff. Raffmir ignored them, though he was more cautious after the encounter with the guards.

  As we continued, the wards gave way to rooms, each with a single occupant. The wall facing the corridors was glass, as were the doors, but the glass had a peculiarly solid quality. The locks on the doors stood out dark and cold, a simple key lock in each, but made of iron.

  I halted. "What are these?" I asked Raffmir.

  "We have reached the inmates' accommodation," he replied, walking on without pause. "This is where your daughter has been kept. I did try and use my influence to get her moved, but the staff here are a law unto themselves."

  "These people are gifted?"

  In the nimbus glow, flickering light illuminated the dark room. A young boy was curled in the centre of the room, arms wrapped around his knees. He appeared to be mumbling something to himself, again and again. I moved to the next. An old woman sat on the bed platform, staring at us through the glass. In the room opposite, a large man stood leaning against the glass, hands cupped over his eyes, trying to see out.

  "Do not be distracted by trivia, Dogstar. We do not have time."

  "But they're like me."

  "After tonight, I doubt this facility will continue."

  "What will happen to them, then?"

  "Do you want your daughter or not?"

  "What will happen to them?" I repeated.

  "I don't know." His voice held a lie.

  "Get me a key."

  "We do not have time, Dogstar. Your daughter is this way." He gestured with his sword down the corridor.

  As if in answer, there was a dull boom from the way we had come.

  "What was that?" I asked him.

  "They are rallying their defences. Because we have disabled the power, sealing the door locks, they are having to force their way into the building.

  "Get me the key to these doors," I said.

  "There's no time."

  "If we let them out, anyone coming after us will be delayed, while they deal with the escapees," I pointed out.

  He paused for a second and then strode back to the wards. Disappearing for a moment he returned with a young nurse, her arm twisted painfully behind her.

  "Get me the key to these cells," he said, pushing her into the corridor.

  "I don't know where it is," she lied.

  His sword flashed once in the dark. There was the beginning of a startled shriek which fell abruptly silent. Her headless body fell to the floor. He kicked the head ahead of him, back into the ward. Marching after it, he re-entered the ward. There was a hail of protests before he dragged an older woman out into the corridor. She swatted at him with her hands, but he ignored her, propelling her forward. She stopped in front of the headless corpse, breathing hard.

  "Your colleague said she didn't know where the key to the cells was." He nodded at the corpse, speaking calmly.

  Without hesitating the woman pointed to where we had come in. "The guard station," she said, her voice quavering.

  "Bring it to me," he said quietly.

  She ran down the corridor towards the guard station.

  "If you do not come back," he called after her, "I will come after you."

  We waited in the dim light.

  "Maybe she can't find it in the dark," I said.

  "If your daughter is dead by the time we reach her, remember it is you who wanted a delay."

  The nurse advanced towards us, holding the key out gingerly.

  Raffmir's hand shot out and took her wrist, holding the key up. "Take it from her," he said.

  "It's iron," I pointed out.

  "I
know that. You wanted the key, there it is."

  She tried to pull away, but he held her easily, tightening his grip so she gasped.

  "Take the key." I knelt down and drew the coat of the headless corpse towards me. The woman watched me, eyes wide. I ripped the pocket off the coat with one clean swipe, then used it to take the key from the woman's hand, wrapping the scrap around the key, so I didn't have to touch it. Even so, I could feel the iron through the material, a curious ache from having it so close.

  Raffmir twisted the wrist, so that the woman lifted her chin in pain. The sword arced brightly and another head arced away into the dark to bounce wetly along the corridor. The body spurted blood as it fell, dribbling red down the glass wall of the nearest cell in sticky dribbles.

  "Another corpse to your tally?" I asked him.

  "If you had not wanted the key she would still be alive."

  "Don't blame me for your actions."

  "I do not blame you, but she knew how many we are, and that we are sensitive to iron. That is too much knowledge to fall into the hands of our enemies. Now hurry. We are late."

  I went to the cell with the boy and used the key wrapped in the scrap of cloth to unlock the door. Close up, I could see that in the glass there was a fine mesh of iron layered into the glass. I pushed the door open.

  "You're free to go." He did not move, but simply sat on the floor.

  I went to the next cell. The woman watched me while I unlocked and opened the door, but did not move.

  "Come on. You have a chance to escape. Get out while you can."

  She stood calmly, brushing down her grey overall. Then came to the door. As she reached the door I stepped back, but she came close and pressed her hand to my cheek.

  Her eyes glowed lilac, momentarily.

  She shook her head. "So much brightness…" Then she jerked as if in spasm, her eyes opening wide so that the whites were exposed in a ring around the dark of the pupil. I tried to thrust her hand away, but it was as if it were welded to the skin.

  She leaned close, whispering into my ear. "The sun will rise, and they shall fall."

  "The what?"

  She snatched her hand back and cradled it as if it had been burned. Then she slipped past me and ran into the dark.