Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  “You cutting us out of the fun, Yancey?”

  “Go get yourselves drunk, boys, and maybe I’ll give him to you later if he’s difficult.”

  For a long minute after the mountain men exited the tent, Slide simply stared at the Zhaithan. Somewhere across the camp, a lone voice was singing.

  In the valley below, lads

  In the valley below

  I’ll never be leaving,

  The valley below.

  “Understand me, Zhaithan, I can fuse your cortex and have you contorting on the floor.”

  A spotlight, hooked up to an outside generator, had been placed over the seated prisoner, positioned to cause him the optimum discomfort. The Zhaithan slowly raised his head and, squinting against the harsh electric glare, looked first at Cordelia, and then at Slide. “This is a charade. You won’t harm me.”

  During this opening exchange, Cordelia had stood stiffly in the shadows, unsure as to what to do. She experimentally flexed her crop, and discovered that she liked the feeling. The smoke of Slide’s cheroot drifted into the cone of light, and Cordelia decided to join the drama. She took a measured step forward. “You don’t think so?”

  “Your monarch, your Carlyle, issued an edict. What was it he said? ‘We treat our captured opponent with humanity, otherwise we are no better than him.’”

  “You are very well informed.”

  The prisoner smiled unpleasantly. “We have agents all through your capital.”

  Cordelia tapped her crop on her gloved palm. “Then, by the time we’ve finished, I guarantee you will have told the name of every last one of them.”

  “You are wasting your time with this posturing.”

  “Perhaps, but let’s start with your name.”

  The Zhaithan had no trouble with that. “Borat Omar.”

  “And what is your rank, Borat Omar?”

  “Fourth Adept.”

  “What was your function in Faysid Ab Balsol’s command?”

  “I’m not required to tell you that. Name and rank is all you’ll get from me.”

  Slide sighed. “Borat Omar, I think I should tell you something. My name is Yancey Slide, I have no rank, and, as I already told you, I am not of this world. Some would call me a demon out of the most evil legends, and you should know I pay little heed to the dictates of any human monarch. Does the name Slide mean anything to you, Borat Omar?”

  Borat Omar betrayed himself with the just the slightest flicker of fear, but then he set his jaw and made his face expressionless. “My name is Borat Omar, and my rank is…”

  The prisoner suddenly gasped, his spine stiffened and then his body twisted, almost upsetting the chair. At the same time, Cordelia experienced what she could only describe as a vision. It only lasted for a split second, but, in that brief instant, she saw them with great clarity. A boy and a girl, but otherwise identical; albino twins with an apparent age of eight or nine years, who stared at her with wide-eyed, knowing expressions that seemed beyond their years. Cordelia did her best to deal with the glimpse without betraying herself to the bound Zhaithan. Slide had said sniff the metaphysics, but this was more than a mere whiff of the paranormal. The Zhaithan sagged forward in the chair, almost toppling, seemingly in a swoon. She took a couple of steps back, out of the prisoner’s hearing and, when Slide joined her, she whispered urgently. “What the hell did you do?”

  Slide dragged deeply on his cheroot. “I just ruffled the surface of his mind a little. A taste of what he could expect if he continued to resist me.”

  “Your ruffling cut loose a full-flown vision.”

  “A vision of what?”

  “The white twins we’ve all been dreaming about.”

  Slide’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced thoughtfully at the captive Zhaithan. “And what did these twins look like?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “It was very fast. I saw two children, a boy and a girl, identical twins with white hair, but then they were gone.”

  “So we have to find out what the subject of your dreams is doing in the mind of Borat Omar?”

  Cordelia stared thoughtfully at the prisoner who still hung limp, supported by his bonds. “Can I take a crack at him?”

  Slide extended the hand of interrogator generosity. “Be my guest.”

  Cordelia again approached the prisoner. “Do we have your attention now?”

  The Zhaithan made no move, remaining bent forward, apparently staring at the ground. Cordelia placed the tip of her riding crop under his chin, and raised his head. “I asked if we had your attention.”

  “What was that? What did he do to me?”

  “Are you scared, Zhaithan? That was just a tiny taste of what Slide can do to you. If I was you, I would be very afraid.”

  “I am Zhaithan. I am not afraid.”

  “I know exactly what you are. And you will be afraid.”

  The prisoner regained a little of his previous truculence. “I doubt that.”

  Without the slightest warning, Cordelia lashed him hard across the face. “That shows how little you know.”

  The Zhaithan gasped and closed his eyes. A livid welt flared on his cheek, and she suddenly laughed. “You thought we wouldn’t harm you?”

  “You can beat me all you want, woman. I won’t talk.”

  “Right now, I don’t care if you talk or not.”

  “I am Borat Omar. I am a Fourth Adept.”

  She lashed him again, backhanded, across the other cheek. “You are whatever I want you to be.”

  The Zhaithan gasped a second time. “I heard there were women like you in Albany.”

  “Women of infinite and inventive cruelty? Women who rule and punish their men? Is that what you heard?”

  “I heard…”

  Cordelia cut him off. “For your information, I was once where you are. I was a prisoner of the Zhaithan. Indeed, I was interrogated by no less than Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach herself. What do you think of that, Borat Omar?”

  The prisoner recovered somewhat from his shock and his eyes turned sullen. “You lie.”

  “I what?”

  “If you had been interrogated by Her Grand Eminence, you would not be standing here now.”

  “You think not?” She struck a third time, creating another welt a half inch below the first. “You underestimate an Albany woman’s powers of survival.”

  She raised the crop as if to deliver another stroke, and Borat Omar flinched. Now Cordelia was smiling. “Two of your kind wanted to push an electric phallus into me.”

  She realized she was giving free rein to a previously unsuspected side of her nature, but made no effort to check herself. “They would have fucked me with it for a full hour of constant electrical shock, if my rescuer hadn’t shot them dead.”

  Borat Omar looked up at her and Cordelia raised a fourth welt on his face. “They started by stripping me naked.”

  The man twisted his head away, so this time Cordelia hit him across his bare chest. “And then they hung me up by my wrists.”

  She laid the whip on his nipples.

  “So my toes barely touched the floor. I can still remember how it felt as they scraped the concrete floor.”

  Cordelia moved behind the prisoner, flexed the crop, getting a better feel for it, and then lashed him twice across his bowed shoulders. “What are you thinking, Borat Omar?”

  She struck him twice more. “Isn’t it humiliating for a Zhaithan to be thrashed by a mere woman?”

  Cordelia found that using the crop on the man was a source of a deep, if angry satisfaction. “Or do you hope that a whipping from me will spare you from Yancey Slide here doing much worse to you?”

  She must have been hurting him because he squirmed away from the next three cuts of the whip. “Nothing is going to save you from Slide, Zhaithan. I’m beating you because I enjoy beating you. I’m beating you because it pleases me, because it’s fun, because I like the feel of the crop in my hand.”

  She made as though to walk away from him, b
ut quickly turned on impulse and deftly kicked the chair over. The man fell backward, and landed on his back with his legs spread. Cordelia brought the crop hard down between them. The man screamed and Slide took the cheroot from his mouth. “Easy, Cordelia.”

  Cordelia stood for a moment, breathing fast. The power to inflict pain was unexpectedly intoxicating. She felt her blood flowing, and a malicious excitement rising inside her. She placed a booted foot on the prisoner’s chest and looked down at him. Slide, apparently conceding the questioning to Cordelia, eased back into the shadows. Cordelia spoke slowly and distinctly. “So tell me, Borat Omar, what do you know about the white twins?”

  To her complete amazement, the Zhaithan’s eyes widened in surprise. “The twins?”

  “That’s right, you fucking worm. You think we do not know about the twins?”

  Borat Omar was still gasping from the blow to his genitals. “I know very little about them. It has been a long time since I was in the Holy City.”

  “But you’ve heard?”

  “Everyone has heard something.”

  “Even here in the Americas?”

  The Zhaithan nodded. “Even here in the Americas.”

  “So even Jeakqual-Ahrach can’t totally keep the secret of her creations.”

  Cordelia had been guessing in the dark, jumping from step to step on pure intuition, but now, it seemed, she had stepped too far. Borat Omar’s eyes flickered from side to side. “No!”

  Cordelia raised the whip. “You dare to say no to me?”

  “My name is Borat Omar, and…”

  Cordelia turned to Slide. “Take him. He knows more than he’s saying. Go inside the worm’s mind and see what he’s hiding.”

  Slide stepped into the light. “You’ve finished with him?”

  “For the moment.”

  Without any apparent effort, Slide righted the chair with the Zhaithan still bound to it. Slide gripped the man by the neck, and a look of terror came over the Zhaithan’s face. “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand what?”

  “They are hers, they are Jeakqual-Ahrach’s creation. I can’t…”

  “What do you mean you can’t? You can’t what?”

  “I already told you. I’ve been here with the army. I only know what I hear.”

  “And what do you hear?”

  “I can’t…”

  Cordelia gestured impatiently to Slide. “Go into his mind. He’s playing with us.”

  The Zhaithan suddenly looked desperate. “Wait!”

  Slide took the cheroot from his mouth. “So?”

  “I tell you.”

  “So tell me.”

  Omar sighed. “The White Twins are the creation of Her Grand Eminence.”

  “We already know that.”

  “No, you don’t understand. The story is that they are the Twin Gods made flesh. That they are Ignir and Aksura come to earth, but that is not the real story.”

  “And what is the real story?”

  “No one knows for sure. No one. They were created in the Flame.…”

  On the word “Flame” his voice choked off, if he had been strangled by unseen hands. His spine arched, his mouth opened wide, his eyes bulged and goggled and, after holding the expression for seconds, he pitched sideways with blood pouring from his eyes and ears. Cordelia jumped back to avoid the splatter. “What the hell?”

  Slide actually looked impressed as what had previously been Borat Omar twitched and shuddered at their feet with fluid running from the hollows where his eyes had once been. Slide leaned down and let out a low whistle. “That was some sophisticated mindfuck.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Not me.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Looks like a complete brainmelt.”

  “Brainmelt?”

  “The entire contents of his skull pureed.”

  Cordelia gazed at the body with shocked revulsion. “How the fuck did that happen.”

  “Some very smart post-hypnotics coupled, I’d guess, with equally advanced destruct conjuration. And all triggered if he ever talked about these White Twins beyond a certain point.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Who knows what a Zhaithan may have planted inside him.”

  Cordelia looked quickly around, suddenly nervous, as if something might be lurking in the darkness of the tent. Slide put a reassuring hand on her arm. “There’s nothing present here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “He was about to tell us.”

  Slide flicked the ash from his cheroot. “He told us a lot. We know that your dreams have a substance behind them.”

  “Created in the Flame?”

  Slide shrugged. “That must have been the big secret.”

  “What can be created in flame?”

  “There are many stories of unholy creatures forged in fire.”

  “You believe such stories?”

  “I neither believe nor disbelieve.”

  “But we did learn something?”

  “We learned something about your dreams, and you learned something about yourself.”

  Cordelia avoided Slide’s gaze. “I was a little carried away.”

  “We all meet the darkness. The trick now is to meet it, control it, and use it.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to use it.”

  “You will. You have no choice. On one level, we are all just equations. We cannot function without the right and left of the equivalency. The dark side will use you if you don’t use it. You know that, don’t you?”

  Cordelia’s voice was very small. “Yes.” She suddenly felt an urgent desire rising inside her. “Slide?”

  “What?”

  “Do you ever make love with human women?”

  “Never, my dear. Not if I can avoid it.”

  THREE

  ARGO

  Argo leaned on the bow rail of the Norse destroyer Ragnar, almost hypnotized by the rise and fall of the great body of water, while the slipstream of the ship’s passage ruffled his hair and plucked at his clothes. This was his first time on a seagoing ship of any size, but he took to the experience as though born to it. His ancestors had left Europe and crossed the Northern Ocean to settle in the Americas, and now he was returning. Indeed, when he turned and looked back at the Ragnar’s forward-pointing fourteen-inch guns, he could feel that, along with the rest of The Four, he was returning in style. Just weeks earlier, he would have dismissed as impossible the idea that he, Cordelia, Raphael, and Jesamine should be on board a ship, on their way to the lands of the Norse Union. Yet here he was, on the Norse warship, the pale blue flag with its white North Star flying overhead, heading east into the morning sun. If nothing else, it was a testimony to the power of politics, and what could be achieved when sufficient incentives were in place.

  Through five tense days after the victory at Newbury Vale, all of Albany had waited for the relief column that had been marching to the aid of Faysid Ab Balsol to make its next move, and, when it had finally broken camp and started back towards the south, a great jubilation had broken out. The Mosul were out of Virginia and again in retreat. For a second time in a week, church bells had pealed and cheering crowds had thronged the streets. Some had thought that Dunbar and his army should have commenced an immediate pursuit, but Dunbar had vetoed that idea. He had already pushed his forces to the limit, and he had no intention of taking the fight to the enemy for a second time with regiments still battered from the first encounter. The best that he could do was to deploy against any surprise counterattack, bring in replacements, and let the veterans of Newbury Vale bury their dead, heal their wounds, and regain their strength.

  With the military marking time, the politicians had gone into high gear. From the cabinet on down, Newbury Vale was seen as maybe the beginning of the end. This optimism was, however, tempered with caution. The total expulsion of
the Mosul would only be achieved as long as the Norse continued to supply the irreplaceable rocket bombs, and their ships and submarines harried and impeded the enemy supply convoys from Cadiz and Lisbon. That the Norse would assist Albany in meeting their military needs was already a matter of treaty and agreement, but the extra munitions that would be needed for an all-out assault on the Mosul base and nerve center in Savannah were still a matter of debate and negotiation. A faction within the Norse elite was less than certain that a complete Mosul defeat in the Americas was altogether in the Norse Union’s best interests. The concern was that the Mosul Empire, with its crude slash and burn economy, sustained itself on continual conquest. Like a shark, it moved forward to survive, and if Hassan IX found himself shut out of the Americas, he might start looking to Northern Europe. More than a few in Stockholm, London, and Oslo saw the continuing conflict in the Americas as a useful safety valve for an enemy that was only just across the English Channel from the Union homeland, and the great provincial capital of London.

  Fortunately Prime Minister Kennedy had been negotiating with the Norse since the very start of the Mosul invasion. Vice President Ingmar Ericksen was a close friend, and he could always expect a sympathetic hearing from President Inga Sundquist, but, despite this, Albany still needed popular Norse support for “little Albany, standing alone against the horror of Hassan IX,” while the munitions deals were done, and deliveries made, in secret if need be. Kennedy and Ericksen had decided, after some high priority discussion, that the most efficient way to accomplish this was a state visit with all possible pomp and circumstance. As the details were refined, a plan had evolved whereby Kennedy would pay an initial visit to London and then go on to Stockholm and Oslo, where he would be joined by King Carlyle for a full scale royal address to the full Norse Union Senate. While possible opponents were dazzled and largely kept quiet by the flags, the uniforms, and the parades, the hard bargaining could be conducted behind closed doors.

  “A drink, Major Weaver?”

  Argo turned. He realized he had been standing transfixed somewhere between strategy and the sea. Stanley, the wardroom steward, was standing beside him with a gin and lime juice on a tray. Argo blinked and looked a little puzzled. “Thank you, Stanley, but I didn’t order that, did I?”