Conflagration

by Mick Farren

Jesamine closed her eyes. “Yes. I know it has to be done. I’m entitled to ask ‘why me,’ aren’t I?”

  “You’re entitled to ask, but no answer is ever guaranteed.”

  The eight women entered the former ballroom in a procession of pairs, preceded by a small girl swinging a copper censer, spreading skeins of pungent blue smoke that smelled of rose petals and opium. Four of the women wore yellow robes, four were dressed in blue, and each blue walked beside a yellow. Argo had half expected that Harriet Lime would be one of those de Wynter had contacted, since she had been among the last people to see Cordelia, but when he asked de Wynter about this, the only answer had been, “Harriet has a previous engagement.”

  Raphael and Argo moved to the end of the room that was farthest from the star in the circle and the sixteen flickering candles. They stood beside three squatting and blindfolded musicians—bodhran, guitar, and hipzither—whose music was an integral part of the ritual, but who were permitted to see nothing of what actually took place. The eight women moved silently to equidistant positions on the gold circle. Raphael had expected de Wynter to be part of the group, but, after donning the only scarlet robe in the room, she stood to one side. The robes all had deep voluminous cowls that hid the wearer’s face, but when, at a softly spoken instruction from de Wynter, the guitarist stroked out a progression of minor chords, they pushed back the cowls revealing faces still concealed by elaborate masks. Gold, and silver, leather and feathers, complicated lace and embroidered fabrics, some were set with colored gems. Each mask was unique, but they all concealed identities, sublimated personalities, turning those round the circle into cloaked aliens or mythic beings, rather than human women.

  The bodhran, beaten by the blindfolded drummer at the tempo of a slow march, joined the guitar. Now Jesamine entered the room. It might have been an illusion, but the perfume in the room seemed to become noticeably more musky and intense. Jesamine was dressed in a simple white shift of raw silk, and a lace veil that hung from a plaited chaplet of velvet cord. The hipzither came in, high-octaves above the other instruments, as though reaching for notes in the space between nebulae. Keeping time with the beat of the bodhran, Jesamine walked slowly around the circle and then turned, passing between the two women at the apex of the star, and proceeding to its center where she bowed and kneeled. She settled back, upright on her heels, spine stiff, head held high, her face still veiled. The thud of the bodhran ceased, and time seemed to hang, waiting on a motionless tableau. Then the percussionist went to work again, faster and more urgently, and the guitar and hipzither spun stabbing and serpentine interchanges. A woman sang a perfectly pitched ululating note, and Raphael felt his body hair stand on end. Other voices joined the first, soaring even above the stringed instruments, but then, rehearsed and precise, all snapped to silence, and the women, as one, with a synchronized shrug of their shoulders, threw off their capes, and stood naked, but with each oiled and gleaming body heavily jeweled. Every woman wore a wide and opulently decorated belt secured with a clasp that was a larger replica of the rings worn by Anastasia de Wynter and Harriet Lime: the spider with its eight legs holding a semiprecious stone. The ties of the belts were wide and hung like narrow aprons. Heavy, intricate necklaces that also incorporated the spider design depended between their breasts. The spider motif was repeated in bracelets and anklets, and decorative bands around their thighs and upper arms.

  For a moment Raphael saw it all as a lavish erotic vision, but then the singing resumed while the instruments forced an even faster rhythm. The women started to sway, but not the sinuous provocation of the cooch joint, the harem, even the dances at the Beltane fires. The dominant sexuality was constrained, and every move of every body, and every note of the wordless song, was focused on the generation of pure and pervasive energy. The movements of the eight were not in exact unison, but neither were they free and individual extemporizations. They all conformed to a definite and clearly preset theme, but each woman, in her own way, improvised within those limits. When they began to raise their arms, however, the move was fully coordinated, and that was the moment when Jesamine began to respond. Her head lolled back, her spine arched, and she was suddenly wracked with violent sobs. Raphael thought that he heard her cry out. “No! No!” But, over the singing and playing, he could not be sure. Then Jesamine ripped the veil from her face and tried to stand, but she staggered instead, and dropped again to her knees. She shuddered, convulsed, finally curling into a fetal position. Both Raphael and Argo started towards her. Something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe the energy created by the ritual was somehow at odds with the power that moved The Four, or maybe the ceremony itself was a total fraud. Raphael’s overwhelming instinct was to get Jesamine out of there before any more harm could be done, and Argo, who was right beside him, seemed to share his resolve.

  But before they were even close to the circle, de Wynter was in front of them, still in her red robe, but somehow larger and more powerful, blocking their way, and silently shaking her head, while the now-screaming music howled around her.

  JESAMINE

  The act of entering the Other Place was totally unlike the way it was with The Four. It was more akin to a painful birthing, a violent push from out of the womb of one reality into another dimension, tearing the actual membrane in the process. For the very first time, she realized how easy it was for them. The Four could slide into other materialities like effortless shadows. They all tended to forget just how much skill and talent they enjoyed, and in a strange comparison, how easily it had all come to them. Then she saw the Other Place into which she had been launched by the Morgana women’s ceremony. She was totally surrounded by circles of gold that blazed like the sun, and filled her with a sense of comfort and protection such as she had never felt before. The pain of the entry had been replaced by perfect bliss, and she could have basked there all day except for the dark pillars and triangles of plainly toxic energy that reared in the middistance, reminding her that she had a mission. They stood like infinite cylinders of impenetrable evil with countless tiny points of darkness moving inside them, some rising, some falling, but all radiating a tangible misery. Jesamine did not want to go anywhere near the things that stretched back as far as she could perceive, but her trained instincts told her that it was the direction she would have to take if she was to find Cordelia.

  She was still reluctant to move, but she found she had no choice in the matter. The instant she knew what direction to take, a golden path preceded her, a shining tunnel into the zone of darkness. She found she had no need to make any effort of her own, the energy was being supplied by the eight women in the perfumed room in London. All she had to do was think it or need it and they provided, the only thing they could not give her was a means to locate Cordelia. For this she needed to rely on her own resources. She had to define a way to recognize the mind-flare of Cordelia’s power, and so far she had detected nothing. This was, of course, assuming that Cordelia was conscious, functioning, alive, and capable of a flare. This manifestation of the Other Place was so unlike anything that Jesamine had ever encountered before that she was less than certain she would recognize it even if it presented itself. She was both protected and concealed by the golden light around her, but she was also aware that she was looking through it, and the possibility had to be taken into account that she was perceiving everything as if through a distorting lens or an unaccustomed filter.

  This moment of doubt and concern caused a side-slipping yaw in her basic paranormal equilibrium. Think it or need it and it will be supplied. Jesamine was being supported. She had help and she needed to trust that help. She blanked her mind of all concerns regarding how and what was happening to her, and how the present reality functioned.

  “I simply have to find Cordelia.”

  In the vision of an instant, perhaps a nanosecond, she was beside a tranquil lake and a light wind breathed through stands of birch, and brought her the voice of Oonanchek. “The Quodoshka will be with you.”

 
Again she made the mistake of questioning. Was his voice a prompted memory or was he somehow in contact with her? Which, in itself, was a pointless paradox, because she had no idea of how time might or might not function in this place, and the pointlessness for a moment sent her spinning sideways, until the golden light righted her and even, momentarily, took her to a warm place where her hands were bound with a scarlet cord, and the pale shape of a loping wolf was moving away into the golden distance.

  “Wait!”

  The golden wolf halted and turned. “You only have to follow.”

  The wolf had the voice of Jack Kennedy and Jesamine shuddered. The lake was gone and so was the light; she was plunging through a threatening purple cloud with bursts of black all round her, plunging headlong from a great height. Did the enemy already have her? Were the Zhaithan, or Jeakqual-Ahrach herself, or unknown evils from this reality already coming at her through her own memory?

  “You only have to follow.”

  Again Jesamine slowed her thoughts and cleared her mind. She immediately heard the voice of Magachee. “It’s the questions that make you fall. My darling Jesamine, stop looking down. Do not grieve. Simply act.”

  The wolf was again looking back at her, with knowing eyes. “We will make our own Quodoshka.”

  “I’m following you.”

  She was instantly in a new and very total realism. She and the wolf walked on the dirty, oil-slick waters of a befouled river. The banks were lined with blackened ruins, in which small children kept watch, some armed with muskets and crossbows and others manning catapults and ballistae. A low, flat-bottomed barge was drifting towards them, and, on the deck, near the vessel’s blunt prow, Cordelia stood with a group of people. She looked tired and pale, wore tear-streaked brothel-clown makeup, and was wrapped in a disreputable black coat in which, under more normal circumstances, she would never have been caught dead. Could it be that easy? Had Jesamine really been brought to her missing companion with so little effort? The water around her heaved and boiled for a moment, and the golden wolf looked at her reproachfully. “Questions?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Make contact. We are exposed here and cannot stay.”

  Jesamine projected. “Cordelia?”

  On the boat, Cordelia twitched, but none of those around her gave any sign of having noticed. “Cordelia, it’s me. I was sent to find you.”

  Jesamine could sense that Cordelia was tired and had to make an effort to direct her thoughts. “Jesamine. Is that really you?”

  “I was sent to find you.”

  “Are the others here?”

  “There’s no time to explain. They are helping me. Where is this place? Where are you?”

  “This is Paris.”

  “Paris?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “Are you going back?”

  “I’m not really here.”

  “Tell the others, and Windermere, that I am the prisoner of a woman called Sera Falconetti. And Jesamine…”

  “Yes.”

  “Please get me out of here.”

  CORDELIA

  “The first thing you have to remember, Lady Blakeney, is that the way of thinking here is probably very different from anything you’re used to. In Paris, everything is relative and everything is variable. This is a den of thieves, heretics, aberrations; a place that shouldn’t exist, and is therefore very different from those that have a more conventional raison d’être. On any given day we are the enemy of the Mosul, and yet, the same night, they may turn out to be our partners in crime.”

  Cordelia looked hard at the man who acted as though he was king. “So, if it suited you, you’d give me up to them?”

  Damon Falconetti laughed, flashing a mouthful of gold teeth. Sera Falconetti’s father had a deep booming laugh that echoed around the venerable stone walls of the room, and perfectly matched his bearlike physique. “Of course. In an instant. That hardly needs stating.”

  “It doesn’t make me very comfortable.”

  “I’m sure you’re well aware that your comfort is a very minor concern, and it certainly isn’t why you were brought here.”

  “So why was I brought here? Someone seems to have gone to a great deal of trouble.”

  “You are here because you are an asset, and like other assets you can be bought, sold, traded, given in tribute, or bestowed as a gift in return for favors. You can also be held onto and preserved in the hope that you will attract other assets to you.”

  In fact, although Cordelia would never have admitted it, she was not, right at that moment, at all uncomfortable. She sipped her tiny cup of thick, sweet Ankara coffee and bit into another of the small, sticky honey and almond pastries, happy in her secret that the rest of The Four at least knew where she was. As far as she could see, Damon Falconetti lived in a manner that was piratical and untidy, but opulently lavish. Her guess was that the large chamber Damon Falconetti and his gang used as a banqueting hall and throne room had once been part of the old-time Parisian sewer system. Despite the tapestries and brocades, the satin pillows and velvet drapes, and the fine, if ill-assorted furniture, the sense was of a brigand’s lack of permanence, and that Falconetti père and the men and women of his crew could have everything packed, cleared, and the stronghold vacated at a moment’s notice, without so much as a backward glance, should the situation call for a rapid escape.

  Damon Falconetti was apparently in a talkative mood, which made a refreshing change after all the silence and secrecy to which Cordelia had been subjected. He gestured to one of the henchmen gathered around him. “Take old Temps Perdu here.” A small sinewy man with wrinkled leathery skin and a network of scars down the left side of his face grinned and raised a silent thumb to identify himself, then went back to the turkey leg he was gnawing on with intense concentration. “Old Temps had seen it all. He survived the uprising at Loudon, and then escaped the massacres that followed, only to find himself impressed into the 101st Provincials and shipped off to the African front to do battle with the Zulus under Cetshwayo, arriving right on time for the debacle at Mubende which turned out to be the worst Mosul defeat since they were routed at Volgograd by Joseph the Terrible.”

  Falconetti the father was drinking what Cordelia recognized as the finest de Richelieu cognac and paused to refill his antique balloon glass. “Now, Lady Blakeney, you might think, by this point, that Old Temps would be more than ready to jack it in and die, but oh no. Not him. Mais non.”

  Old Temps Perdu shook his head. “Not me. Mais non.” He tossed the turkey bone to a waiting wolfhound, who seemed disappointed at the lack of meat left on it and treated him to a look of canine reproach as Damon Falconetti resumed his story. “Somehow he contrives to be one of just twenty who the Zulu take alive, and, moreover, he even manages to convince the officers of the Impi who captured him that he’s nothing less than a Mosul master gunner, which greatly interests the commanding general, because he had just captured a field-full of Mosul cannon and, as anyone who’s faced them is well aware, your Zulus may be deadly hand-to-hand killers, but they have something of a problem with artillery, and are pretty much unable to hit the side of a hill at two hundred feet with a muzzle-loading howitzer. More by luck and unmitigated gall than any skill, judgment, or calculation, Old Temps does manage to hit the side of a hill with a howitzer, and, instead of being impaled up the jacksie on a large and lethal stake like the rest of his comrades, such being the Zulu way of it, he is put in charge of a detachment of artillery.”

  Damon Falconetti extended the bottle of cognac towards Cordelia. She nodded and he filled her glass. Falconetti was dressed in the uniform coat of a ranking officer in an army that probably no longer existed, with a barrel chest full of decorations that she suspected he might well have awarded himself. Under the tunic, he cut a dash with a flowing dress shirt and leather riding pants with buckles down the outside of the leg. Cordelia sipped her brandy, because the story of Old Temps Perdu was
not yet over. “So everything might have been well and good, and Perdu might have become a Zulu national hero with fucking statues of him all over Soweto, but he got a little too good at what he was doing and found himself running the guns on a Zulu trireme. The galley was sunk by Caribbean privateers and he found himself fished out of the drink and sold in the slave market in Marseilles, from which he managed to escape, and ultimately wound up here in Paris. Isn’t that true, Perdu?”

  Old Temps Perdu nodded and reached for the cognac. “Every word, boss, give or take?”

  Cordelia smiled as though highly entertained. “And the moral of the story?”

  “The moral, Lady Blakeney? The moral is that everything and anything, absolutely without exception, is capable of changing when the times demand it.”

  Cordelia observed that the senior Falconetti had called her “Lady Blakeney” three times, and seemed impressed by titles. She noted that for further use.

  Although she had not slept, Cordelia felt considerably better than she had since she had so unwillingly been removed from the driveway at Deerpark. Since she arrived in Paris, she had been allowed to bathe, and Sera Falconetti had lent her a change of clean clothes that actually fitted her, and then, dressed in a pair of snugly-fitting cotton pants and a loose silk shirt with flowing sleeves, she had been brought to Falconetti Sr., who had wined and dined her and treated her to his most amusing and informative discourses. She had hardly minded that some verged on the self-indulgent and long-winded. Paris was not as daunting as it had seemed when the big black Benz had stopped beside the dirty, mist-shrouded river in the very first light of a grim, gray dawn, and she had been transferred by Sera and her two male companions to the flat-bottomed barge that seemed to be the favored mode of transport in the ruined and partially flooded city.

  As she had stood near the bow of the barge, cold, scared, and miserable, hunched in the old greatcoat that was a leftover from a Boulogne brothel, she had wondered if drowning herself in filthy, scum-covered water might be a better option than facing whatever horror presented itself next. Cordelia had been in tight spots before, but had never previously contemplated suicide. Later she would explain her near-terminal despair to herself as a result of being in multiple shock from the death of Jack Kennedy, her own kidnapping, and the frightening encounter with the White Twins beside the huge Amiens Pyramid. Not to mention the lingering effects of absinthe, chloroform, and benodex. Cordelia, however, was hard to keep down. The barge had floated between the blackened Parisian ruins, and she had found herself once again starting to take notice of her surroundings, if for no other reason than the city, although supposedly destroyed, was very much alive.