The Ironclad Prophecy

by Kelleher, Pat

  Mathers threw his arms wide. “It is a gift from Skarra, the gift of tongues.”

  Chandar let out a long low hiss, but its eyes fell on the empty hip flask in Mathers’ hand and it fell silent, lost in thought.

  Mathers felt the overwhelming scent of fear from the message rousing him to panic. He felt the urge to flee, and might well have done had not a spasm in his stomach sent him doubling over as ripples of pain washed though him. He rode each agonising wave until they subsided and, with them, the feeling of fear.

  “Something, I don’t know what, was coming. It arrived. They fled,” he said, still panting though the pain.

  “That’s it?” said Atkins, unimpressed.

  Mathers stood, steadying himself against the wall as he pulled himself to his full height. “Can you do better, Corporal?”

  “No sir. But we already know about the dulgur.”

  “If that is what they were talking about, Corporal.”

  A SHOT ECHOED around the chamber. It came from the concourse. “Gutsy, Mercy, stay here. Keep an eye on that lot.”

  Atkins ran to the opening and peered round, ready for anything. Anything but what he found.

  He was greeted by Pot Shot with an anguished looked on his face. “It’s Prof.”

  Prof? Atkins couldn’t see with the others gathered around but, as he approached, they parted. Between them he could see a large pile of rubble, and protruding from behind it he could make out a bare right foot. That was all he needed to see.

  “Oh, Prof.” Atkins groaned. “You stupid sod.”

  Prof lay slumped against a pile of debris. He had discarded his puttee, boot and sock to one side, his bayonet to the other. The top half of his skull had been blown away and his brains splattered over the rubble behind him. His rifle lay along his chest. Nellie knelt by him, but there was nothing she could do.

  “He was sobbing quietly for a while. I thought it best to leave him, then I heard him say ‘sorry,’” said Pot Shot. “I never thought –”

  Suicide. Not always easy for a soldier. Some just stuck their heads above the parapet and waited for a German sniper. Others, well. The barrel of the Enfield was too long. You couldn’t just stick the muzzle in your mouth and use your finger to pull the trigger. You had to take your boot and sock off, then use your big toe instead.

  For some of the Tommies, the only thing that kept them going was the fact that they might find a way home. There had been a flurry of suicides when they’d first arrived, and every so often they found another poor bugger who’d found he couldn’t take it anymore, in a trench or a dugout. With the discovery of the Bleeker Party came the realisation that that there was no way home, that they were stranded on this hell world. It was just too much.

  “You know the routine, Porgy,” said Atkins quietly. “Paybook and disc. Redistribute his bombs, rations and ammunition.”

  Nellie shook her head slowly in disbelief. “Why would he do that?”

  Gutsy put a big fatherly arm round her and steered her away from the sight. “He’d just had enough, love. He hasn’t been quite the same since Nobby died. I think perhaps finding them emigrants was the last straw. It takes something like that, when you’re a long way from home.”

  Although there was no love lost between them, the tank crew hung back, and gave 1 Section the space to briefly mourn their dead comrade.

  It was then Nellie caught sight of Alfie. Her mouth formed a silent ‘o’ of shock when she saw his eyes, but he shook his head to dissuade her from any action. She relented, reluctantly, and only for the moment.

  They piled blocks of rubble and debris over the body, burying Prof where he lay. Chalky muttered a hurried prayer before they moved on.

  Atkins was angry now. If it hadn’t been for Mathers and his blasted quest, Prof might still be alive. But he had his orders. If they were going to get Mathers and the tank back, they had to kill this blasted creature. Atkins turned to the masked Tank Commander. “Right, let’s get this done. Which way, Lieutenant?”

  Mathers paused for a moment, considering the options, then pointed to one of the passages leading off the concourse. “That way.”

  ATKINS AND 1 Section fell in behind him. Mathers nodded, and the tank crew brought up the rear as they began to descend into the edifice’s subterranean levels.

  Nellie fell back, snatching a chance to talk to Alfie.

  “What have they done to you?” she hissed angrily.

  “Not here,” he begged her. In the dark, his fingers found hers. He squeezed her hand to placate her. “It’s all right, it will pass.”

  She glanced at him with suspicion.

  “It’ll pass,” he reassured her.

  Frank gave Alfie a shove from behind. “No fraternising with the enemy.”

  He let go of her hand, taking comfort in her soft golden glow, as she returned to Napoo’s side. She glanced back, searching for reassurance. He offered a smile for her sake.

  Small galleries and chambers led off the curved passage at regular intervals. They searched each set. Atkins barely noticed. None of it mattered. It was all dry as dust, and dead, just as they would be. All he could think about was Flora, how he would never see her again. Never smell her perfume again, or see their child growing up. His child. He imagined the life he had lost, married, with the child, little William. He could feel his weight in his arms and smell its hair. See his smile as he recognised him. Gone, all gone.

  Atkins became aware that someone was talking to him.

  “Only,” Gazette was saying. “Chalky’s found something. I think you ought to see it.”

  Atkins looked at Chalky. “Show me.”

  Emboldened, Chalky took the lead and showed him a tunnel running off the main passage. Chandar accompanied him. Chalky pointed to the far wall of the chamber. “It were down here. I was just checking and saw it glinting in the torch light. There.”

  Atkins saw the glint on the floor by the wall. He walked over, sank down on his haunches, and picked it up.

  “What is it?” asked Chandar.

  Attached to a small scrap of bloodstained khaki cloth was a brass button. Atkins examined it, rubbing it clean with the pad of his thumb. There upon the button, in relief, was a bomb, fuse aflame, with crossed rifles and a crown, all cradled in a wreath. It was the crest of the Pennine Fusiliers.

  He blinked and looked up at Gazette. “Check your uniform buttons,” he said, his voice imbued with a sense of urgency.

  After a little fumbling, it became clear that they all had the requisite number.

  “It’s not from any of us,” reported Gutsy.

  Atkins hardly dared think it. There was only one man who might have made it this far. One man.

  Gutsy stared at him. “Christ, you don’t think –”

  Atkins nodded. “Jeffries. Who the hell else could it be?”

  SKARRA CONTINUED TO mutter in Mathers’ head. In the confines of the edifice, his heightened awareness was flooded with new sensory details. The information was pressing in on him and he was powerless to stop it.

  “I can see him,” said Mathers, taking the bloodstained scrap and staring fixedly at it.

  “Who?” asked Atkins.

  Mathers waved the button at him. “Jeffries.”

  The corporal stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I can see him, his scent on it. I should be able to track his scent trail if there is any left to follow.”

  “You can do that?”

  Mathers looked at the chatt. “Skarra tells me I can.”

  He was aware of the chatt watching him intently as he concentrated on the scrap of cloth. Using the shapes, sounds and textures that danced around it, Mathers was able, with some effort, to draw Jeffries’ scent out of the surrounding kaleidoscopic mists. He watched as vaporous tones of purples and reds coalesced and evaporated rapidly around each other, trying to confuse and deceive. They shifted and changed, into blues and yellows, like a snake shedding skin after skin, as it sought to slip beyond even
his heightened perception, but he held it fast in his attention. Under the haze of stale, sour human aromas, he had his base note now; that part of a man that was immutable, unchangeable, distinctive. It resolved itself into a thin green thread of scent that he could follow.

  He had no doubt that others in his crew, Clegg or Perkins even, who had received such a concentrated dose of petrol fruit juice recently, might see something of what he saw, but they lacked the education, the intuition, to make the connections he was now experiencing.

  Fascinated, he began to walk haltingly, following the fragile drifting airborne trail, constantly checking it with the control scent of the khaki scrap. The others followed at a distance. Slowly, he became attuned to it, to the dancing particles of scent, sweat and blood. At first, it was nothing more than a scent echo, a faint trail hanging in the air, then it began to take on a phantasmagorical shape. Indistinct at first, it coalesced into the faint, ethereal figure of an infantry officer. Hardly daring to breathe, he followed the redolent wraith as it continued its journey. It entered a series of chambers. He watched as it crossed to a wall and crouched down, inspecting something there.

  Mathers stepped closer to see.

  As if sensing him, the wraith turned. Mathers recognised it as Jeffries. It looked directly at him. A disdainful smile spread across its face as it stepped towards him. With the guilty start of an eavesdropper caught red-handed, Mathers cried out and lurched back, out of reach of the apparition as it advanced on him, and lost his concentration.

  In that moment, it seemed to him that Jeffries gesticulated and, upon that gesticulation, proceeded to evaporate until there was nothing left of his incorporeal form but a faint drifting trail suspended in the air.

  Mathers reeled from the chamber. “He was here. He was reading... something on the wall.”

  A wave of pain rippled out from his abdomen, through his torso, up his spine and down through his limbs, causing him to double over. He’d been away from the tank for too long. He fumbled for his hip flask. He’d forgotten it was empty. He grunted with frustration and pain, pulling his splash mask and helmet from his head, and sucking in great lungfuls of air. The plaques on his face were now red and livid and his eyes, iridescent swirls on black, seemed unfocused and inhuman.

  “Easy sir, I’ve got you,” said Jack Tanner.

  Following her instincts, the FANY approached the group, her eyes catching Alfie’s as she passed. “Let me help,” she said.

  Cecil stood up, held out his arm, and refused to let her pass. “It’s all right, miss,” he said belligerently. “We’ve got him. He don’t need nobody else.”

  “She can help, sir,” Alfie insisted.

  Mathers turned his head and looked at him through the slits of his splash mask.

  “No, Perkins, you know she can’t.”

  LEAVING MATHERS TO the care of his crew, Atkins took a torch and pushed past them with impatience into the chamber. Holding it high, he could see the markings on the wall. They were not like the chatt glyphs. With a swell of frustration, he realised they weren’t in a language he could read either. He couldn’t make any sense of it. But it was familiar. He brushed his hand briefly over the scratched graffiti with curiosity. It looked like the coded script he had seen in Jeffries’ journal, the one Lieutenant Everson pored over obsessively. Then he saw something he did recognise. His brow furrowed. He fished in his top pocket and pulled out a folded piece of tattered paper. The leader of every patrol had one, Everson insisted upon it. He unfolded it to reveal a carefully copied symbol. He compared the two now. There was no doubt.

  It was the Sigil of Croatoan from Jeffries’ journal.

  Atkins’ mind was a flurry of thoughts, like a shaken snow globe. He found an ember of hope in the ashes of his world.

  Jeffries had been here. It couldn’t have been by chance. He had a map. Had he expected to find this place? What was its significance? What information did the coded writing contain? What did it all mean?

  He had no answers. One thing he did know was that Jeffries was his only lifeline, and his mind seized on it and wouldn’t let go. If Jeffries wanted the information, so did he. Somehow, Jeffries was the key. Maybe his boast back in Khungarr, that he was their only way back, wasn’t just a desperate tactic to buy himself time to escape. One way or another, Atkins wanted to know the truth. Taking a pencil stub from his pocket, he laboriously copied the symbols on the back of the piece of paper.

  With his mind consumed with thoughts of Jeffries, he exited the chamber. He turned to the tank commander, who had recovered his composure and replaced his mask and helmet, once again hiding the ravaged face and the unnerving eyes that, Atkins now knew, saw things beyond the reach of normal human senses.

  “Sir, you said you could follow Jeffries’ scent trail. Lieutenant Everson expressly ordered that any leads on Jefferies’ whereabouts be reported. I need to know which way he went from here. Can you do that much?”

  Mathers looked up at him. Around him, his crew glared at Atkins with undisguised suspicion. The young lad, Cecil, watched Atkins like a hawk, his fists balled by his sides. Mathers put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and he relaxed slightly.

  “Once I have killed this spirit and taken its power, and not before.”

  AS THE PARTY readied to move off again, Atkins led the way, eager to pick up whatever kind of trail Jeffries had left, clambering over a low mound of rubble partially blocking the passage. As he held out the torch into the stygian space beyond, an arm reached out of the darkness and pulled him off balance. A hard, calloused hand, that smelled of dirt and sweat, clamped over his mouth and Atkins felt a blade bite into his throat, under his Adam’s apple, as he struggled to catch his breath...

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “The Far Gone Dead...”

  THE TORCH FELL from Atkins’ hand as he grabbed the wrist holding the blade to his neck.

  “Be still,” said an insistent voice at his ear, “or you will die here.”

  He recognised it. It was Jarak, the ousted shaman from the urmen’s forest enclave.

  The shaman swung him around as a shield between himself and the soldiers. Atkins saw his mates bring their rifles up. The tunnel, however, was too narrow for them to flank or get a bead on his assailant without hitting him, too.

  The shaman adjusted his grip, dropping his free arm across Atkins’ chest to grab his webbing, the knife still at his throat.

  “Go on, kill me,” Atkins growled at him. “But the moment I drop, they’ll shoot.”

  Jarak ignored him. “Where is your shaman?” he barked at the soldiers.

  Mathers stepped forwards.

  “You shamed me before my people,” the shaman said, the fury in his voice barely under control. “You took my place.”

  “You could have stayed and served me,” said Mathers.

  Napoo shook his head. “No, he could not. He has but two paths to regaining his place with the clan now. Banishing the dulgur, or killing his usurper.”

  Jarak sneered at Napoo and jerked his chin towards Chandar, half hidden behind the soldiers, and snarled. “You consort with the Ones, yet do not wear their mark. What trickery is this?”

  “No trickery. The One is our prisoner. The Tohmii are free urmen, like you, like me. They are a powerful clan. They have fought the Ones and triumphed.”

  “Now I know you lie.”

  “You have seen their power for yourself.”

  “The urman speaks the truth,” Chandar chittered.

  Napoo turned his attention to the shaman. “And where is the rest of your party?”

  “The shaman’s party is dead,” said Jarak bitterly. “The dulgur took them; the dancers, the dreamers, the warriors. What use is a shaman without his party, without his apprentices? Who will safeguard the clan now? You?” he snapped at Mathers. “Your crawling god is mighty, but I have seen you. You are in thrall to it and it will drag you with it into the underworld. You are not long for this place, and what will the clan do then?”

/>   Atkins might have felt for the shaman; he, too, had lost everything. He, too, was between a rock and hard place, no thanks to Mad Mathers, but the pressure of the blade on his throat cancelled out any sympathy he might have had.

  “And you,” he growled into Atkins’ ear. “Your sacrifice at the precipice would have saved my enclave then. Perhaps it might do as much now. If you are such a powerful clan, then maybe your sacrifice may be acceptable to the dulgur, and it will leave my enclave alone, and I shall regain my place among my people. I will return to them in glory having banished the spirit by my own deeds, or else revenged upon my usurper.”

  The blade rocked against Atkins’ throat as the urman shifted his weight and began to drag him back down the passage.

  “Stop!” shouted Mercy, but Jarak wasn’t listening.

  Atkins missed his footing and the blade bit into his skin as he struggled to keep his balance. He glanced down and saw the passage was coated with a thin layer of black deposit.

  There was a warm, foetid breeze from the depths of the passage behind Atkins, as if something large and fast were pushing the air before it, causing the flames from the torches to gutter wildly in the dark.

  “GarSuleth preserve this One!” hissed Chandar, sinking as low as it could.

  The rasp rapidly became a slick sucking sound, and the shadows around Atkins grew darker as an oily cloud billowed round their feet. He scrambled to maintain a footing on the slick residue.

  The sound stopped. For a heartbeat there was silence.

  The shaman screamed as he was ripped away from Atkins, his knife raking across Atkins’ neck. As the great black tide retreated into the darkness, the shaman was dragged with it and his cries were swiftly smothered, like those of a drowning man.