Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  Cordelia wrenched her eyes away from the baleful hallucination of the Twins, and they retreated a little from her reality. “These abominations are not gods.”

  All of Cordelia’s instincts told her that Jeakqual-Ahrach was lying. Whatever the White Twins might be, they were not gods incarnate, but that didn’t exclude their being potentially very evil, very powerful, and very dangerous.

  “You don’t believe that gods can journey to the human plane?”

  “It’s something I’ve never given much thought to, but, if they did, I doubt they’d be clinging to the skirts of an evil crone like you.”

  “You’ll believe it when you feel their power.”

  A wave of hate struck Cordelia like a fist, and it was all she could do to stop from reeling. Mercifully, her own fury kept her on her feet. “I can believe they might have the power of some vile monstrosity that was conceived in iniquity and grown in some loathsome vat. Or could it be that your unholy brother somehow mated and begat these spawn?”

  “You will suffer!”

  Even allowing for the excesses of propaganda, Jeakqual-Ahrach and Quadaron-Ahrach were reputed to enjoy a particularly unique relationship, even in the perverse annals of human depravity. Maybe she had guessed close enough to the truth for Jeakqual-Ahrach’s comfort. Again the White Twins seemed to be taking on solid form, as though they were about to move into her reality and hurt her. The malign energy of the Twins and the force of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s rage threatened to overwhelm her. All Cordelia could do was to take a step back and scream to the full extent of her lungs. “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  And, in that exact moment, Jeakqual-Ahrach and the White Twins vanished, as though snuffed like a candle. Cordelia couldn’t believe that she had driven them off so easily, and then the voice came from behind her. “Cordelia!”

  RAPHAEL

  Cordelia staggered back from the stern rail of the Ragnar screaming at the top of her lungs, “GET AWAY FROM ME.”

  Argo raised his pistol and raced towards her. “Cordelia!”

  No target presented itself, and he was at a total loss. Cordelia stumbled and almost fell, but Argo was quickly beside her, supporting her with one arm while he still looked for an attacker. Raphael and Jesamine were quickly there, taking her from him.

  “What happened?”

  Cordelia let out a long sigh that ended in a sob. “Jeakqual-Ahrach found me. The blackwitch bitch from hell knows we’re on this ship.”

  Argo whistled under his breath. He had hoped that Cordelia’s visits from the blackwitch were a thing of the past. Seemingly this wasn’t so. “On the wind?”

  “She windwalked to a battleship in the middle of the ocean.”

  “Damn.”

  Argo lowered his pistol. “Where is she now?”

  “She vanished. It was either me screaming, or all of you showing up. Maybe she didn’t want to take on all four of us.” She took a deep gulp of air. “How did you all get here?”

  Raphael and Argo looked at each other. “We felt something.”

  “Felt what?”

  “We’re not sure. Some kind of threat. Something indistinct but intimidating. That’s how it was for me.”

  Raphael joined in. “For me it was more like a sudden claustrophobia, a need to get out in the air.”

  Argo concentrated on Cordelia. “You heard her voice in your head?”

  Cordelia nodded. “Yes, I heard her voice in my head. But that was only for openers. She quickly showed me that she could be a full-scale, full-color, life-size, virtual fucking vision.”

  Argo rolled his eyes. “Damn.”

  At which Jesamine snapped, “Can’t you say anything else?”

  Argo treated her to a bleak look. “Maybe not right now. I’m processing the information.”

  Raphael decided it was time to intervene. “I think the information would be better processed after we get Cordelia back to her cabin and, at the very least, get her something to drink.”

  Cordelia nodded weakly. “I think that’s a very good idea.”

  Raphael supported her on one side and Jesamine on the other, while Argo brought up the rear, watchful and with his pistol still in his hand. Once they’d reached the girls’ cabin and settled Cordelia in her bunk, Raphael looked around. “Do you girls have anything to drink?”

  “We have some gin.”

  “And this Norse soda pop called Vimto.”

  “Forget the Vimto.”

  Jesamine passed Raphael the gin bottle. He found glasses, poured four stiff shots, and handed them round. Cordelia swallowed half her gin in one gulp. “She brought the White Twins with her.” If Cordelia was looking to create an effect, she had no need to be disappointed. Raphael was rendered speechless, and Cordelia managed a smile. “That got your attention, didn’t it?”

  He asked the obvious question. Someone had to. “So what did they look like?”

  Cordelia took a slow breath, considerably recovered and clearly relishing the melodrama. “They looked like two horrid little baby vampires, all white and disgusting like they had crawled out from under a rock, and with these huge pale blue eyes that stare right through you.”

  Raphael looked hard at Cordelia. “Vampires don’t exist.”

  Cordelia looked up at him with a flash of her more normal impatience. “I didn’t say they were vampires. I said they looked like vampires; like seven year-old vampires with sharp little teeth and these evil eyes.”

  “You thought they were going to hurt you?”

  “That was my distinct impression.”

  “I thought they were a windwalking vision.”

  “It was like they were going to come through to this side.”

  “So how did you get away from them?”

  “That was the weird part. Jeakqual-Ahrach was clearly showing off. The blackwitch expended a whole lot of energy, just to impress me, but then you all came on the scene and she vanished, like she fled, rather than risk facing us all together.”

  Argo frowned and reviewed the facts. “So Cordelia was confronted by an apparition of Jeakqual-Ahrach, I felt an unformed threat, and Raphael became claustrophobic. It’s like Cordelia was the primary target and the rest of us caught the backwash. Does that sound logical?”

  Cordelia and Raphael nodded. Argo looked at Jesamine. She avoided his eyes, but Cordelia supplied an answer. “She didn’t feel anything. She was fucking Jack Kennedy at the time.”

  Jesamine’s eyes flashed. “Fuck you, Cordelia.”

  Raphael looked up at her in mild surprise. “Is that true?”

  “And what if it is?”

  Argo refilled his glass and poured another for Cordelia. He offered the bottle to Jesamine, who angrily shook her head. “Will you all stop looking at me?” When nobody said anything, she changed her mind and grabbed the bottle from Argo. “Okay, so it’s true. Who wants to comment?”

  Raphael sat down on Jesamine’s bunk. “The fact that you were fucking would not necessarily have stopped you being aware that some bad stuff was happening to another of us.”

  Jesamine pouted. “Well, pardon me for not paying attention.”

  Argo let out a long breath. “Having it off with Jack Kennedy is flying pretty high.”

  “I was hardly the first.”

  Cordelia raised a cynical eyebrow. “Maybe the sexual energy of Jack Kennedy knocks out all other wavelengths.”

  “You might be more right than you know, girl.”

  Raphael gestured to Argo to pass him the gin. “Do you think we could forget the Prime Minister and Jesamine, and concentrate on what happened to Cordelia?”

  ARGO

  Argo took a deep breath of clean sea air. He’d drunk a lot of gin, but he wasn’t drunk. He was tired, but he didn’t want to sleep. Grit was under his eyelids and a hundred thoughts and feelings had his head spinning. The Four had talked through the night. At one point Cordelia had burst into tears, and, at another, she and Jesamine had almost come to blows. In a moment of perplexed frustration, t
hey had clasped hands, and attempted to share visual memories, but, like all the times they had tried it in training, they were unable to forge the link. Cordelia’s description of the children was graphic, but it took them no further forward than what she already knew. It was agreed that they could only be some weapon or force, but beyond that, the sinister children’s true nature was anyone’s guess. Equally problematic was their origin. Cordelia, in her confrontation with Jeakqual-Ahrach, had accused the Zhaithan witch of growing the things in a vat, or that they were the product of some twisted relationship between her and her brother. One of these spur-of-the-moment guesses seemed to have goaded the woman into a fury, so maybe one or the other had been uncomfortably close to the truth. The Zhaithan knowledge of sorcery, conjuration, and necromancy was so advanced that the creation of artificial living entities might be possible. Jesamine had voiced the one major objection to the idea that the Twins might be the product of some strange Ahrach-sibling incest. “Can you really see Jeakqual-Ahrach going through the pain and inconvenience of childbirth?”

  To which Cordelia had posed the counter argument that “She wouldn’t carry the damn things herself. She’d have them implanted in the womb of some poor fucking slave girl and then ripped out when the time was right.”

  At the words “poor fucking slave girl,” Jesamine’s face had hardened. All through the night the knife edge of some conflict over the matter of Jesamine and Jack Kennedy had been a petty but tense subtext to the discussion, and both were ready to offer or take offense far too easily. Argo quickly steered the discussion in another direction. “Maybe we should ask ourselves why she should want to reveal the twins to us?”

  Cordelia had obviously been shocked and frightened by Jeakqual-Ahrach’s paranormal visitation, and the shock and fear were now manifesting themselves as a growing belligerence. “In case nobody noticed, she revealed them to me.”

  Raphael reminded Cordelia “We’ve all seen them in our dreams.”

  Cordelia mouth was a tight, down-turned scowl. The combination of post-trauma and gin was making her mean. “They didn’t try to come through from the Other Side, and try to bite any of you.”

  Raphael took a deep breath. “They were also observing the attack of the small dark things on the battlefield.”

  The others all looked at him in surprise. “What?”

  “At the very end, I had the briefest glimpse of them watching the action.”

  Jesamine voiced what all of the others were thinking. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell us?”

  “It was so fleeting, I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.”

  “Fuck you, Raphael. We all need to know everything.”

  Argo though about this. “There are two obvious options. The first is that, for some reason of her own that we don’t yet know, Jeakqual-Ahrach wants to frighten us with the Twins, maybe to keep us off balance.”

  “Or?”

  “Or she doesn’t totally control them.”

  Silence reigned for a moment as everyone digested this thought. Finally Cordelia spoke. “Whether she made them, and whether she controls them, it seems to me that they could very well be a direct answer to us. A countermeasure, if you like.”

  “The Two against The Four?”

  “Something like that. I mean, although we have Slide and T’saya and all of the others advising and helping and training us, we do, to a great degree, operate according to our own free will.”

  Argo rubbed his chin. He was starting to need a shave. “That may only be because no one understands what we are.”

  “And maybe it’s the same with the Twins. Maybe Jeakqual-Ahrach no more really controls the Twins than Slide controls us.”

  Jesamine looked up sharply. “Has anyone asked themselves why Slide decided that he’d sail alone on the Constellation rather than cross the ocean with us on the Ragnar?”

  Cordelia held up a hand, at the same time, shaking her head. “No. Let’s not even go there. I really don’t want to get into a discussion about Slide and what he gets up to. You all know as well as I do that what Slide does is so totally his own affair that we shouldn’t even guess at it.”

  Raphael, however, was still thinking. “Maybe if Slide had been around, Jeakqual-Ahrach wouldn’t have been able or prepared to risk doing what she did?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? I said I wasn’t going to start getting into a whole lot of speculation about Yancey Slide. It’s the path of total fucking madness and I’ve had enough madness for one day.”

  Argo shrugged. “Okay. Forget what Slide might be up to. There is a way that we could find out more about these Twins for ourselves.”

  The others stared at him with a measure of suspicion. “How?”

  “We could jump into the Other Place and try to look for them? Maybe even try to link minds while we were in there.”

  Cordelia was already shaking her head, and Raphael right along with her. “Not a fucking chance. Linking minds and trying to suss out those nasty-looking beasts could be nothing short of a suicide mission. While we were looking, it could leave us blind to every kind of strangeness. The Other Place is the combat zone, and to go into it with any other intention is just plain crazy.”

  “We’ve scouted there before.”

  “Not hoping to find an enemy with totally unknown powers. I’ve seen those things close up. They’re dangerous. Very dangerous.”

  Raphael was in total agreement. “Cordelia’s right. It would be foolhardy to say the least. To go in wide open, looking for something we can’t even make an informed guess about, could just leave us sitting ducks for Dark Things, Mothmen, and any fresh paranormal enemy unpleasantness that might come at us.”

  Argo admitted defeat. “Okay, so it was a bad idea. There might be another way to go about it.”

  Now all of the others were shaking their heads. “No.”

  “Enough.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  Jesamine sighed. “It’s been a long day and I want my bed.”

  For a moment, Argo though Cordelia was going to make some feline remark about Jack Kennedy, but mercifully she didn’t. The two boys got to their feet, and made their exits. Outside in the corridor, Raphael looked at Argo. “Bed?”

  Argo shook his head. “I think I’ll take a walk around the deck and clear my brain.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Up on the deck the daylight watch was taking over the running of the ship, and the smell of breakfast wafted from ventilators, reminding Raphael that, despite the gin, he was hungry. A few sailors nodded, but most ignored him and went about their duties. The general bustle seemed to indicate that the destroyer was being prepared for something, but, being unversed in the ways of warships, he had no clue what that something might be. After standing in the bows for a great deal of time, simply staring at the gray ocean dawn, he asked a passing deckhand, who paused and looked at him in surprise. “Why bless you, sir. Didn’t no one tell you? We’re nearing land.”

  “We are?”

  The man pointed directly ahead. “Those clouds…”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the Eiren coast. We’ll be in the Bristol Channel by this afternoon.”

  FOUR

  CORDELIA

  Half of England seemed to have turned out to greet them. Or, to be more precise, to meet Jack Kennedy and those who might be with him. Kennedy was more popular with the Norse than the King of Albany. Although some of the Norse states had retained their monarchies, most notably the English, the Swedes, and the Danes, they kept them under strict constitutional control, and were not impressed by royalty for its own sake. Kennedy, on the other hand, had earned the respect of the Norse people for the historic stand that he had taken against the old autocrat, Carlyle I, and the former King’s attempts to terminate democracy in the Kingdom of Albany; then, much more recently, it was reinforced and magnified by how he had faced down and ultimately turned back the Mosul invaders in the Americas. The Ragnar was proceeding up the Bristol
Channel, to the city of Bristol, the most westerly of the Norse Union’s great English naval ports, and the reception had begun while they were still well out to sea. The destroyer’s two escorts, the Loki and the Rob Roy, had fallen back and taken up line astern positions, then the three ships had proceeded at a slow and stately speed, while a flotilla of other Norse vessels moved into position to escort them to safety. Overhead, the single dirigible that had escorted them across the Northern Ocean was joined by three more of the big cylindrical balloons and numerous biplanes.

  These other Norse vessels were bringing the Ragnar home with sirens blaring and flags flying, but Cordelia knew that there was more than just ceremony to all this stately naval display. Neither the Prime Minister’s visit nor the means by which he had crossed the Northern Ocean could any longer be a secret, and although it was highly unlikely that the Mosul would be crazy enough to attempt any last ditch suicide attack, no chances were being taken. This major concern for security was also why their destination was Bristol, and they were not proceeding on up the English Channel and then making the turn into the Thames estuary and docking in the Port of London, in the shadow of the ancient Elizabeth Tower, and the landmark dome of the Cathedral of Mithras. To do so would have involved the Ragnar in steering a course that was only a matter of ten miles or less from the Mosul defenses on the Frankish coast, making the destroyer too tempting a target for enemy guns should the Mosul have decided that killing Kennedy was worth an international incident. Thus Kennedy and his party would disembark at Bristol, and then travel on to London in a special railway train. Although it might have been nice to sail into the historic provincial capital of London, Cordelia was hardly disappointed. She liked trains almost as much as she liked boats, and she did not doubt that they would be fêted all the way, and, even better than boats and trains, Cordelia liked attention. In addition, it also appeared to be a lovely day to be welcomed to another country as a visiting celebrity.

  Although Cordelia had no actual firsthand experience, she could only imagine that this was a perfect spring day in Southern England. All too often, in saga and storybook, the English territories of the Norse Union were pictured as a damp and overcast island, a place of fog and drizzle when it wasn’t actually raining, but on this day a blue-green sea was canopied by a blue sky garnished with fluffy white clouds, scudding from the southwest on a light breeze. As many of the Ragnar’s crew who could find an excuse were either on the deck or clinging to some part of the superstructure, and Cordelia had made sure she was among them. She had slept too late to stake out a vantage point but had used all of her charm and wiles to ease her way to the bow rail, at what she had taken to referring in innocent and disarmingly childlike terms as “the sharp end.” Obviously Cordelia knew the correct terminology for the basic parts of a warship, but a pose of airheaded naïveté was regrettably guaranteed to get her what she wanted. She tended to view such silliness as a kind of therapy after all that she had been forced confront and endure. She was well aware that all of the pomp, circumstance, and attention of their coming reception in England was not designed solely for her, but that wouldn’t stop her pretending that it was. She had played crucial roles in two major battles against the Mosul, and if the Norse in general and the English in particular wanted to greet her like a heroine she would totally permit them to do so. She smiled to herself as a phrase came into her head. “I am Major, the Lady Cordelia Blakeney, look on my charms and adore me.”