Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  “Can’t you let go of that?”

  “Would you?”

  Sera thought about this. “I guess not.”

  Lime used the discussion as the starting point for another chance to save herself. She tossed her head, to remove hair from her eyes. “You know you can’t kill me, Cordelia.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  “Think about it. Jeakqual-Ahrach will be contacting me. If I’m dead, she can’t do that, and you lose a vital source of information.”

  Sera took Lime’s point. “You should hear her out.”

  Cordelia ran the plaited leather of the knout between her fingers. “Keep talking.”

  “The White Twins are arriving in Marseilles, and going to the pyramid.”

  “We already know that.”

  “But I’m the one who will know when and how they will come there.”

  Cordelia frowned. “You’re saying that you’ll totally sell out Jeakqual-Ahrach?”

  Lime did her best to look helpless. It was not hard. “What other choice do I have?”

  Cordelia continued to play with the knout. The temptation to lay it hard across Lime’s thighs or breasts was very strong, part of a nasty aesthetic desire to watch her suffer. “I don’t know, Sera. If we keep her alive, we’ll have to watch her all the time.”

  “I’ve been with Jeakqual-Ahrach longer than anyone imagines. I know a great deal.”

  Cordelia scowled. “That only makes me even more inclined to take a whip to you.”

  “She turned me years ago. In Muscovy. No one ever suspected. I’m telling you, I have a lot of information. I’m valuable, dammit.”

  Cordelia flicked the whip. “But are you sufficiently humbled?”

  “I’m sufficiently afraid.”

  “That, on its own, may not be enough.”

  “I even know about her rejuvenation techniques.”

  Suddenly she had both Sera’s and Cordelia’s attention. “Are those the procedures she was talking about?”

  “That’s right. She’s really very old. She’s the twin of her brother Quadaron-Ahrach, and she needs them more and more.”

  “Needs what more and more?”

  “It’s getting to be a longer and longer process. She spends all this time with these evil old men from the East, and there are rituals, and blood, and sacrifices, and then she goes into this long trance, while all these chemicals and potions are pumped into her veins through tubes. But when she comes out of it, she looks … well … young again.”

  “And she’s having one of these done right now?”

  Lime was puzzled. “How do you know that?”

  Cordelia smiled nastily. “You forget I overheard your whole conversation with her manifestation.”

  “She needs her strength before this ritual with the pyramid and the White Twins. That’s why you really need to keep me alive and intact, because there’s more to it than anyone can imagine.”

  Cordelia knew there was a core of truth in this. “How much more?”

  “She’s attempting to mess with the basic fabric of dimensional reality.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, but I’ve overheard talk about stuff like the Dirichlet boundary conditions, and the Endpoint, and, most important, the manifold of something called the D-brane.”

  “The dee-brain?”

  “No, D-brane.”

  “This is all nonsense.”

  “It really isn’t.”

  “Are sure you’re not just saying all this to save your pretty flesh?”

  “No, I swear.”

  Cordelia was suddenly angry. Lime was making a fool of her. “I’ve listened long enough. Let’s see where a little physical motivation takes us.”

  Cordelia swung the knout with precision, it cracked, and Lime sobbed. A livid welt appeared across her white skin, and more would have quickly joined the first had the door not suddenly opened, and an authoritative voice stopped Cordelia in full stroke.

  “Easy, Cordelia. What Lime is saying may be more important than you know.”

  Cordelia spun round, unconsciously dropping the knout. “Slide? Is that really you?”

  She wanted to run to him and hug him, but she knew this was irrational because no one ever hugged Yancey Slide. Instead she stood awkwardly. Sera, on the other hand, was staring in awe, the first time Cordelia had ever seen her even approach such a loss of control. “Are you really Yancey Slide?”

  Slide pushed back his hat, and lit a cheroot with his fingertip. Cordelia suspected he was doing it to impress Sera Falconetti even further. He nodded. “Some of the time.”

  Lime apparently knew Slide. “Tell her, Slide, tell her. Tell Cordelia that I’m telling the truth.”

  Slide nodded. “She unfortunately is telling the truth. What little she knows of it.”

  “You understand any of this D-brane stuff?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  RAPHAEL

  To call it a war council was no exaggeration, and the primary subject of debate, to which everyone kept returning, was who should go to war and when. Although Falconetti would never allow the name to be used, he had insisted the meeting should be convened according to the model of what Il Syndicato called a “sit-down,” in which representatives of all interested factions were present, and able to have their say. Raphael found this an oddly egalitarian process for an organization that was basically a hierarchy of brute power. It was thus that those seated round the big circular table in the hall of the Falconetti stronghold came to include Damon Falconetti, his daughter Sera, Old Temps Perdu, and Bonaparte, representing the various levels of the Family; The Four representing themselves; Slide and Windermere, who seemed to share a less well-defined common interest in total war on Jeakqual-Ahrach, and Madden and Steuben on behalf of Albany and the Rangers. A dancer called Hyacinth was also present, who, although she worked for Falconetti, was also the local operative for Morgana’s Web, and had been drafted to replace the disgraced Harriet Lime. A first look around the round table had caused Raphael to whisper to Argo. “If the Mosul set off a bomb in this room…”

  Argo had shaken his head. “Don’t even joke about it.”

  At the start of the meeting, The Four had been given time to catch up and get over their indignation that the kidnapping of Cordelia had been a ruse, connived in no small part by Windermere, to lure all of them to Paris in order to confront the problem of what to do about the Amiens Pyramid, and whatever plans Jeakqual-Ahrach might have for it. Raphael had obviously not been at all happy to have been so manipulated, but, in the bigger picture, he saw how they might be of much more use there than either in London, or even back in Albany, and resigned himself to that which he could do nothing about. Somehow it had been deemed that The Four’s current battle was right there, in among the Franks, and a warrior, even an occult warrior, had no choice but to go where he was sent. He knew that resentment would come later, and much of what wasn’t directed at Harriet Lime would hit Gideon Windermere, and even Slide. He could glean some satisfaction that Lime, who had played them all with crucial duplicity, was currently kneeling naked in the Falconetti dungeon, locked in a set of old-fashioned stocks, “contemplating her errors.” Although Slide had stopped Cordelia from torturing Lime, save for a mere couple of lashes, Cordelia insisted that she should at least be humiliatingly confined until they decided what to do with her.

  The Rangers did some token complaining about how their orders had been to come to Paris to extract Cordelia, but had said nothing about fighting any pyramid. Steuben had done the talking while Madden, chair tilted back, one boot up on the edge of the table, nodded occasionally, murmured “right,” and worked on the edge of his Ranger-issue Jones knife with a small whetstone. They were, however, very easily convinced. The Rangers would never complain too long at the prospect of a fight. After that, some outlaw legalities relating to Cordelia’s situation were resolved. It was agreed that the contract was voided, and that Cordelia was no longer anyb
ody’s property, and was once again her own woman, but Falconetti would retain the payment that had been made to him thus far. That was the price of Morgana’s Web not noticing the traitor in their midst.

  With the more mundane business addressed, the talk turned to Jeakqual-Ahrach and the Amiens Pyramid. Falconetti took the initial position that it was really none of his concern. He and his associates ran a moneymaking operation. They were not in the world-saving business. The Four, Slide, the Rangers, and Windermere could do what they liked about her Grand Eminence and the Zhaithan. He would not interfere, even though their action could well stir up a hornet’s nest among the Mosul, which could be traced back to their ruined city, and easily provoke reprisals. He would contribute that much to the common cause. Having stated where he stood, Falconetti lounged back in his chair, put his boots squarely on the table and ordered wine. From that point on, he expected the rest to convince him otherwise. The obvious weakness of Damon Falconetti’s position was that he totally lacked the support of his daughter, who recognized that even the narrowest interpretation of Il Syndicato’s interests would plainly be jeopardized if Jeakqual-Ahrach turned the Amiens Pyramid into some kind of paranormal weapon. Raphael found Sera Falconetti fascinating, and, while she talked, he couldn’t help staring at her. One time she caught him, and he quickly looked away, embarrassed. It was hardly appropriate to become moonstruck as Sera made the case for Falconetti involvement to her father.

  “The winds of war have shifted. Whether we like it or not, Paris has become a focus of resistance. We cannot hang back and let others do our fighting for us. Falconettis aren’t raised to be spectators.”

  Falconetti drank his wine from a pewter tankard and waved away her appeals to his better, or more heroic nature. “Paris has only become the focus of all this because outsiders have made it the focus. The Norse and Albany, and Slide here, wherever he might come from, want to drag me into their war.”

  “The Norse or Albany aren’t dragging you into anything. You think Albany declared it wasn’t their war when the Mosul landed at Savannah?”

  Falconetti belched. “I seem to recall that Albany took its sweet time to get mobilized. So long, in fact, that Virginia fell, and they did nothing about it.”

  Cordelia became irate. “That’s a damned lie.”

  Argo had to say something. “Actually it’s not. We had a saying, even a song, back in Virginia after the invasion. It was, “Why Doesn’t Albany Come?”

  Cordelia glared at Argo. She seemed about to say something but changed her mind, deferring instead to Sera who continued. “Irrespective of who did what back when, it was Jeakqual-Ahrach who brought this on all of us, and we need to respond accordingly.”

  At this point, Slide rose in his seat. Raphael knew Slide was powerful, but he had never seen him gather his power like this before. Damon Falconetti removed his feet from the table, took a quick drink, then put down the tankard, as Slide slowly scanned each face in turn. “This argument rapidly becomes redundant in the light of the new information Cordelia’s forced from the woman Lime. Jeakqual-Ahrach’s plans for the Amiens Pyramid are far more perilous than we ever imagined. She is about to attempt a planned disruption of dimensional reality, and, should she even come close to her intention, Paris, in its present form, and all of you along with it, will simply cease to exist.”

  Falconetti swallowed hard and almost choked. “What do you mean, cease to exist? You mean we will all die?”

  “You have to have lived to die. When I say ‘cease to exist,’ I mean like you never were. Like there never had been a Damon Falconetti.”

  Jesamine raised a tentative hand, like a pupil who wanted the attention of an intimidating teacher. “I don’t understand all this dimensional reality. I know there’s here, and I know that there’s the Other Place, but in all my training we were taught that was it, give or take.”

  “You and your companions have made jumps to a handful of very specific extremes to encounter what you term magick, or the paranormal. In between those extremes are an infinite number of other possibilities and alternatives.”

  Jesamine shook her head. “I really don’t understand.”

  Madden looked up from his knife. “For what it’s worth, I don’t either.”

  Windermere added reluctantly. “I find it hard to conceive just how it all works.”

  Raphael would have happily added his expression of bafflement, but Slide retreated under the brim of his hat. “Human minds really aren’t designed to conceive of how it works.”

  Cordelia sniffed. “That sounds inhumanly snotty.”

  “Maybe, my dear, but it’s the unfortunate truth. I have moved, mostly at random, through thousands of dimensions, and I know what I’ve seen is only a tiny fraction of all the possibilities.”

  “Are you saying that every time a choice is made, or that there are a number of possible options, a new reality is created in which each one happens?”

  “That’s one theory. I’ve seen realities where man never evolved on this planet, and others where humanity had mutated all the way beyond the physical and was running on pure magick.”

  Old Temps Perdu was sucking on a pipe. “You ever see one where the monkeys took over, like in those Zulu comic papers?”

  Slide shook his head. “I never did, but I have every confidence there’s one out there somewhere. Maybe one or maybe a few hundred million.”

  Argo was frowning. “So how can Jeakqual-Ahrach make use of all this if, as you claim, she’s unable to understand it?”

  Slide puffed on his cheroot for a moment. His face was grim. “That’s what makes her so fucking dangerous, and why she has to be stopped. She has absolutely no clue what she’s really doing.”

  “But she’s doing it anyway?”

  Slide nodded. “She’s doing it anyway.”

  “But what is she doing?”

  “As far as I can figure it, she’s looking to use the pyramid to smash through into another dimension. In the Other Place, you have only seen the distant extremes, the dimensions of the Dark Things and the Mothmen. There are other, closer realities, only fractionally different from this one. I suspect that she wants to break in where the Mosul Empire exists, but is in much better shape.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “She takes control of this other reality, without being hampered by either Hassan or her brother. For her, the battle in the Americas—or anywhere else, for that matter—has become functionally irrelevant.”

  Madden was thinking hard. “But isn’t she going to meet herself coming back, so to speak?”

  “I imagine she either plans to co-opt or dispose of her Other Self.”

  Falconetti was frowning. “And what about this reality right here?”

  “It ceases.”

  “Just like that?”

  Slide nodded. “Out like a light.”

  “Really?”

  Slide shrugged. “Again it’s a theory, but losing all this may well be the very least of the sustained damage if she does what she intends and ruptures the D-brane manifold. It could rewrite the boundary conditions, and that could be the end, quite literally, of everything. Endpoint, or one version of it.”

  Cordelia sighed. “Damn, Slide, are we into all the D-brane business again?”

  “I’m afraid we are.”

  “Can’t you make it more simple?”

  “It’s as though a goldfish believes he can rule the world if he just breaks the glass of his bowl and escapes.”

  Sera asked the obvious question. “Can Jeakqual-Ahrach really be that stupid?”

  “It’s one of the side effects of being a tyrant, and it frequently brings about their downfall. She has a great many people around her telling her what she wants to hear, rather than what she needs to hear. Plus, she lives in that place where magick meets mathematics, which makes her vulnerable to all kinds of nonsense. She has somehow been led to believe that there’s a means to rupture the interdimensional membranes and come through intact.�
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  “And is there?”

  “I’ve never heard of one. Quite the reverse. The best thinking is that a single rip on any interdimensional membrane could reproduce itself infinitely, and there goes the current universe.”

  Raphael’s head was starting to ache from trying to grasp multiple infinities. Round the circle at the table, others were showing symptoms of the same. He noticed, however, that Falconetti seemed to be easing away from his original position. Even if what Slide was telling them was impossible to fully grasp, it was having its effect. Falconetti was now leaning forward on his elbows, paying rapt attention. “So, whichever way you slice it, she has to be stopped right now.”

  “She has to be stopped on any level you look at it.”

  Instead of trying to understand, Steuben went for monosyllabic practicality. “How?”

  “That’s right, how?”

  Slide stared hard at Falconetti. “Does that mean you’re in, Damon?”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m in and it doesn’t mean I’m out. It means that I want to know what’s going to be involved right here on the ground.”

  Sera rounded angrily on her father. “Damn it, just give me the use of some men, so I don’t go to this thing on my own.”

  Old Temps Perdu laughed. “I’ll fucking go on my own tab. I fancies blowing me up a pyramid.”

  Falconetti’s face darkened. “You seek to shame me, daughter?”

  Sera didn’t waver. “If that’s what it takes.”

  Falconetti slapped his hand down on the table, hard enough to make his tankard jump. “Damn it to hell, Sera. I taught you too well, didn’t I?” He looked all round the gathering. “Okay, I’m in. The Falconetti Family will take the fight to Her Grand Eminence, and let’s hope there’s a chance for looting. But like the Ranger Sergeant already so succinctly asked, how do we do this?”

  ARGO

  Old Temps Perdu’s smile was pleasantly evil. “Start thinking with your brains and not your assholes, lads. We don’t have to construct a bomb. The best bomb we could come up with is already right there.”