Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  When she and the Mosul were seated, one of them gave the signal to move by slapping the top of the driver’s cab with the flat of his hand. The truck lurched forward, and suddenly Cordelia was no longer observing and cataloguing manpower. She was attempting to cling on for dear life as the truck bucked and bounced over the still-waterlogged ground that had been repeatedly marched and driven over in the last twelve hours, and she found that clinging on for dear life was far from easy when one’s hands were in bondage at one’s sides. For a moment, she thought she was going to roll out and be hanged, but the Mosul on her left quickly put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. Before that, the two had been keeping some approximate distance. Her escort had clearly been given firm orders to keep their hands off her, but that obviously did not preclude practical physical contact between prisoner and guard. Maybe some of that contact, as she had been manhandled through the camp and loaded onto the truck, had been familiar, if not intimate, but, as they drove away, she was growing increasingly confident that their grubby intrusion would not be taken any further. Matters improved considerably once they reached the highway. On the flat-rolled metaling the ride was smooth, and she found they had been accorded priority over other vehicles. The truck in which Cordelia was riding brought up the rear of a small motorcade. Preceding them was another truck that presumably carried Keats and Hodding, the car containing Phelan and the three Teuton officers, and a military police dispatch rider, in leathers, helmet, and goggles, riding a smoke-belching gasoline cycle.

  The use of three vehicles to transport four prisoners was an indication of the emphasis the Mosul seemed to be making of keeping the survivors of the NU98 isolated, as though they were afraid they might attempt to whisper some coded order or instruction or formulate an escape plan with secret hand signals. They had been separated in the very aftermath of the ambush and kept a distance apart ever since. Not so much as eye contact had been permitted during the long and dreary journey from the scene of their capture to the Continental Highway. Cordelia’s hands had been bound in front of her and the long end of the same rope attached to the saddle of the cavalryman who had brought her down. Cordelia had wondered at the time if the Mosul were sufficiently primitive so that, by some barbarous right of capture, she now belonged to him. In the matter of prisoners, the enemy sure must surely be, if not more civilized, at least more centralized. Phelan was also roped behind a cavalry horse, but so far back in the line that he and Cordelia could not speak to each other. Keats and Hodding must have marched with the infantry. As their captors moved out of the ambush point, the four of them were forced to pass a line of bodies, Mosul and their own, as if it were being made clear to Cordelia how her assumption that orders had been given for them to be taken alive had only been partially correct, and, of the five crew who survived the crash, only Keats and Hobbing remained up and functioning in addition to herself and Phelan. The others had been shot in the last frantic dash to get away, except, of course, for Coburn, who had been killed in the first phase of the ambush. Cordelia knew she was at least partially responsible, but too far into shock to feel guilt.

  When they reached the Continental Highway, Cordelia had been led into the center of the camp by her personal captor like the first walking trophy from the hunt. He had turned his horse and jerked her rope, showing her off to the soldiers who stared at her like some exotic specimen and the officers who roughly pushed their way to the front and then did exactly the same. Her attraction was greatly diminished, however, when Phelan was brought in, and the Mosul and Teutons all flocked to him. Phelan’s uniform marked him as the captain of the NU98, and the senior officer, and volumes were said about Mosul worship of authority by the way in which he was instantly surrounded and the questions that were shouted at him. As the captain, the Mosul assumed he would have all the answers. As they had walked through the forest, before their capture, Cordelia had attempted to persuade Phelan to lose his insignia, fully knowing that he would never consider doing such a thing. She was learning how her lover was a classic case of one who did what he imagined was expected of him rather than what was sensible.

  For once, Cordelia absolutely did not mind not being the center of attention. In the current circumstance, the least attention was the best attention. The men were being driven off for interrogation, and she was merely being driven off. So far, the extreme misogyny of the Zhaithan had worked to her advantage. Their contempt for women was strong enough among even the Teutons that it resulted in what Cordelia saw as a blind spot to the potential hazard of a woman considered unimportant. But let them go on thinking she was a girl and therefore of no use to them for as long as they liked. It might prove the window to her ultimate revenge. The idea of revenge obviously begged the question of where and to what they might be taking her. She had asked her two escorts, but, as she might have expected, their response was an uninformative, “You’ll see soon enough.”

  What they might actually do with her if she was of so little importance was something Cordelia probably should have avoided pondering. Madness lay in that direction. She could not, however, help suspecting that she might be destined for one of the grosser Mosul forms of officers’ and gentlemen’s entertainment. She imagined the story of what might become of her as an item in an Albany society gossip column. Will Lady Cordelia Blakeney become a Mosul concert party? A society of men would hardly want her to go to waste. She might be muddy and disheveled right there and then, but she cleaned up exceedingly nicely, and, if some form of erotic servitude was to be her role in the immediate future, she would grit her teeth, think of Albany, and look for a soft spot that could be manipulated to open doors to more elevated forms of survival or even escape.

  The dispatch rider’s cycle came equipped with a siren, and he used it to warn other traffic to pull over and let them through. For Cordelia, from her handcuffed, backward-facing vantage point, the ride up the Continental Highway was like a review of the Mosul army on the move. Trucks stacked with supplies and trucks loaded with men were all moving north, and very little was going south. Most of the men in the trucks were the same raw Provincial Levies who had made up the numbers in the search parties. In a possible precursor of what might be the shape of things to come, a recruit yelled something obscene at her from one of the transports they passed, but, straightaway, an underofficer jumped up and smacked him for his impertinence. So good manners still counted for something in the ranks of Hassan IX? She doubted it. More likely the boy had been told to sit still and keep quiet, and it was more about discipline than the way a soldier should treat a lady. As they pulled ahead of the truck in question, she suddenly noticed another recruit was staring at her with huge, dark eyes, eyes that seemed to draw her in with their infinite sadness, and, for a moment, something that she did not understand, but she was certain came from outside her, clutched at her breath, and she had to fight down a sob which she would, in just seconds, be at a loss to explain. Not at as much of a loss, however, as she would be to explain the voice that, just a moment later, would say just two words, clear but as though from a great distance.

  “Lady Blakeney!”

  RAPHAEL

  A military policeman on a gasoline cycle with its siren howling and a car and a truck in its wake was rapidly overhauling the line of slow-moving troop transports. Someone or something of importance was coming through. Maybe the survivors from the airship had finally been caught. Raphael and the rest of the squad had been pulled off the search some hours earlier. For a while they had stood around and waited while their officers wondered if they could be put to any further practical use, but then it had been decided that enough idiot replacements were wandering around the Virginia woods on a collective fool’s errand, and Melchior had ordered them back on the truck to resume their interrupted journey to the front. When Melchior had used the phrase “a walk in the woods,” he had intended it as a metaphor. In reality, that was all that it had been. A long, squelching march through the wet forest, burdened with their newly issued rifles, durin
g which time they had been given no chance to use the new weapons, even as a threat, and had seen nothing except other searchers moving as purposelessly as they were, unless you counted the couple of brief but impressive glimpses of the crashed airship. They had not been permitted to savor the sight, however. The wreck, like the skeleton of some huge metal mammoth with shreds of silver fabric attached to its bones, was surrounded by crack Teuton troops, well armed and full of self-importance, who had quickly moved them on before they could see too much.

  Their transport slowed and moved to one side so the cycle, followed by the car and truck, could roar past with imperial speed. The squad, glad of any diversion on the long road from Savannah to the Potomac, had turned their heads to watch the vehicles pass, idly looking for an explanation as to what all the fuss was about. But then, suddenly seeing the figure in the back of the truck, they craned with much more urgency. Sitting between two guards was a young woman with pale skin and red hair. Her hands were locked down at her sides in a restraining belt, and a collar and chain were fastened around her neck. Her hair was matted, and her clothes so torn that one of her breasts was fully exposed. One of the Lowlanders turned in his seat, leaned out of the truck, and yelled an obscenity. Melchior was instantly on his feet, in front of the Lowlander, legs braced against the swaying. He smacked him hard on the side his head, below the protection of his helmet. “Did we ask to from hear from you? Was your opinion sought? Or were you just demonstrating your ignorance?”

  The Lowlander rubbed his ear and blinked. “It was just a bit of fun, Underofficer.”

  “Fun? Did you hear me give any order for fun?”

  The Lowlander did not have the sense to just shut up. He insisted on defending himself, which, to Raphael, set new outer limits in his already clearly demonstrated stupidity. “But she was a prisoner, Underofficer.”

  Melchior smacked the Lowlander again. “She was what?”

  “I…”

  Smack!

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “I didn’t know…”

  Smack!

  “What?”

  Smack!

  “I didn’t know, Underofficer.”

  Melchior straightened up. “You didn’t know. That’s your trouble, lad. You never know. You don’t know anything. You don’t know that woman’s name, or who she might be, or what she might be. You don’t even know enough to know that when you don’t know, you keep fucking quiet.”

  At first Raphael had been totally confused. Why should Melchior get so irritated about a few words shouted at a woman who was so obviously a prisoner and quite helpless? Then it slowly dawned on him that a lesson was being taught to the whole squad. In the dangerous world of Mosul combat, anything could be an enemy ruse or a Zhaithan loyalty trap. The lesson being taught was that you never reacted or spoke without thinking, and you did nothing to reveal or draw attention to yourself. Melchior had said it all in his last eight words. When you don’t know, you keep fucking quiet. That might be the very key to survival. The realization had come slowly to Raphael, not because he was loud, coarse, and ignorant like the Lowlander, but because his last long look at the girl in the truck had left his head spinning. She was one of the two women from his recurrent dreams. He had never expected to see her, but there she was, alive and in the flesh and being driven up the highway under what was clearly close arrest. Without committing the crime of assuming too much, he was certain that she was one of the survivors of the air crash for whom they had been hunting. The multiple coincidences alone would have been enough to keep him preoccupied all day and long into the night if the terrible, wrenching sense of irrational loss he experienced, as the truck carrying her had pulled away and been lost in the distant traffic, had not overshadowed everything else.

  ARGO

  Argo dreamed of a world of fire, a cavernous place of glowing red and leaping shadows where salamanders slithered and danced in the hot coals, a sinister hunchback presided, and black, shapeless things moved among the leaping, breathless flames. The overcast of smoke was filled with dull metallic flying machines of all shapes and sizes but that he knew instinctively were both dangerous and evil, fell transport for even more terrible weapons. Huge land juggernauts ground forward, crushing charred and brittle skeletons beneath iron wheels and steel treads, taking their implacable firepower to a yet-unseen conflict that was almost as old as time. Argo had no question that his dream had brought him to a battlefield so old, a darogad so constantly fought over, that a simple excavation of the smoking ash with the toe of his boot would easily unearth a corroded weapon or a venerable skull. A single name was whispered on the superheated air. Quadaron-Ahrach. It infiltrated the roar of the conflagration and the rumble and reverberation of distant explosions with the insistence of a holy mantra. Quadaron-Ahrach, Quadaron-Ahrach. And even without conscious intervention, Argo had no doubt that two long years under the Mosul occupation had left any number of hooks planted in his mind on which the enemy might exert its strain. Quadaron-Ahrach, Quadaron-Ahrach. The heavy-handed Zhaithan reprogramming of Hassan IX’s conquered peoples had plainly sown the seeds of the images he was now seeing, but, where once he might have been at their mercy, he now stood tall and faced the fire. A tunic of the Albany Rangers was draped over his shoulders, and the garment was torn and charred as though it had already been through a lifetime of conflict. A sword was in his right hand, a pistol was in his left, and he defied his enemies. He was less than clear about whether his defiance was the recklessness of the potential victor or the desperation of the last stand, but either way he was not yoked by his previous fear.

  Without any logical transition, he found himself on a bridge, a narrow span carved from living rock that arched across a seemingly bottomless volcanic abyss. Smoke rose on either side of him, and he knew it was vital to his survival that he cross to the other side. The chanting was now even louder. Quadaron-Ahrach, Quadaron-Ahrach. It rose from the chasm beneath like a tectonic grinding. Quadaron-Ahrach, Quadaron-Ahrach. Three figures appeared at the other end of the span. The smoke made it hard to see, but they seemed to be two girls and a boy, waving, making wide and urgent gestures that he should hurry to them. They were also shouting something, but it was drowned out by the booming from below. Quadaron-Ahrach, Quadaron-Ahrach. Argo started forward, moving as fast as he could on the narrow and slippery surface of stone, but the bridge immediately began to vibrate. Cracks appeared under his feet, and fragments of dust and rock were shaken loose and dropped away into the vast fissure. Argo realized that he was not going to make it across to where the other three waited, and, with that realization, the final break occurred. The bridge shattered and fell from under him. He had one chance to scream before he plunged into the burning depths, struggling to wake. “Lady Blakeney!”

  Out of nowhere, reality became Yancey Slide standing over him. “You surface from the nightmare calling her name?”

  Argo blinked. “What?”

  The sun was high, and his formerly damp clothes were quite dry. Recall came back with a mighty solidity. He was with the Rangers. They had emerged from the forest, and finally, indicating an outlying copse at the top of a long slope of open meadow, Hooker had ordered the team to halt and rest until after sunset. While half the squad kept watch, the others relaxed, removed their boots, inspected their feet, changed their socks, and ate cold food straight from the open can because Hooker was not prepared to risk the smoke from a fire. Argo, feeling dead on his feet, had taken off his jacket and, using it as a pillow, immediately fallen fast asleep.

  He had woken dehydrated. Maybe that was what the world of flame had really been about. A part of him still believed that dreams should be read most of the time with a stark simplicity. He struggled to sit up. “I need something to drink.”

  As though in anticipation of his need, Slide was holding a canteen. “Here.”

  Argo took the canteen, swallowed, and shook his head. “The dream was so damned vivid.”

  “It could mean you’re getting cl
ose to something. What did you see?”

  Argo wondered how long Slide had been standing over him, if he had been waiting for him to wake so he could question him about his dreams. “I saw fire all around me. I think, though, that could have been the sun, and the fact that I was thirsty.”

  Slide dismissed the too-rational interpretation with a gesture of impatience. “What did you see?”

  “I saw flames, and I saw a bridge, and, on the other side of the bridge, three people beckoned, a boy and two girls. I can only suppose they were the others of this Four you keep talking about.”

  Again, Slide did not want to hear Argo’s commentary. “You crossed this bridge?”

  Argo shook his head. “No. I tried to, but the bridge collapsed under me, and I fell. That’s when I forced myself to wake.”

  “You fell calling out the name of the Lady Blakeney?”