by Mick Farren
Her attention was only diverted from this negative introspection when the car, and the truck that followed it, drove right by one of the huge, steam-driven, iron fighting machines. She had often seen the big, lumbering battle tanks from a distance, but she had never before been allowed so close to one of the ungainly products of the forges and factories in Damascus and the Ruhr. Stokers had kindled a flame in the boiler, and the crew watched as they now attempted to raise a head of steam and set the metal monster, with its riveted, battleship body, in motion. As the car rushed by, both the crew and stokers stopped what they were doing and came to attention, obviously believing that the Zhaithan pennants on the staff car meant that someone of significant importance was dashing through the night. Cordelia laughed and looked gleefully at Jesamine. “The bloody fools are probably firing up that thing to go and save the Bunker from its attackers. Little do they know the attackers just drove past them and they saluted.”
Cordelia seemed to be treating everything as though it was some marvelous schoolgirl prank and forgetting how, just a short while before, the pair of them had been stripped and ready for torture. Jesamine had never been a schoolgirl. It did not work that way under the Mosul, and she did not have the ability to switch moods quite so capriciously. She wondered if this knack for levity was the prerogative of aristocrats or if it was shared by all in Albany. In truth, Jesamine was daunted by the thought of Albany. She had been a slave of the Mosul in one demeaning capacity or another for as long as she could remember, and she was not sure how well she would adapt to an entirely different world. Of course she did not believe all the horror stories about Albany that were spread by the Zhaithan propaganda machine, but she still had her doubts about how she would survive there. How would people in Albany accept her? Surely they would see her as nothing more than a combination of runaway slave and enemy whore. How would she manage on her own in what promised to be a very foreign environment? Then, finally, Jesamine caught herself. She was not going to be there alone. She would have companions. She was one of the Four, and the one thing that was no longer in doubt was that the Four were real. Cordelia might be irritating, but Jesamine’s irritation might only be a shield against the plain fact that she was walking into the unknown with all of her insecurities and lack of self-respect at full jangle. Phaall, and all those who had come before him, had taken great care to beat and bully the self-esteem out of her. Over and over she had to repeat to herself that she was one of the Four, and they were the children of destiny, no matter how hard that might be to believe. They were the Four, and they were a force with which to be reckoned. They were the Four, and the rest was just a reaction to that overwhelming single fact.
Besides, T’saya was also with her, and just the presence of T’saya was a great comfort to Jesamine. T’saya meant she would not be completely shut off from the past, no matter how horrendous that past might have been.
ARGO
Argo could not believe that he had killed a man face to face and, in so doing, entered the exclusive club of men like Madden and Barnabas. He equally could not believe that it had affected him so little. The man had come at Madden out of nowhere, and he had raised his revolver and fired without thought or hesitation. He was taken back to that last night in Thakenham when he had been unable to shoot his stepfather. Things had changed so much since then, and he wondered why he did not really feel any different. In what privacy of mind he still had, he continued to feel like the frightened boy who had run away from the impossible, but he now appeared to be doing the impossible. He was not so desensitized, though, that he would soon forget the flat, sweating face of the Mosul he had shot or the look of pain and resigned chagrin that this was all there would ever be for the poor bastard with more rage than sense. In fact, the memory was still so vivid that he did his best to avoid it by concentrating on the moment at hand and how he was back on the run with the Rangers.
He was not able to see much from the back of the covered truck. The road stretching behind was visible over the tailboard, but even that view was limited by the form of Penhaligon bent over his Bergman gun. Argo, Raphael, and the Rangers did not even see the huge steam tank until they had already passed it, leaving its crew, clearly taken in by the flashy Zhaithan pennants of the staff car, at attention and staring after them. On the other hand, Argo’s country-boy nose was not about to let him down. The stench of the Mosul-fouled Potomac was growing stronger and stronger by the moment. The river could not be far away, and their time in the dark flatbed should not be prolonged.
This was confirmed when the truck lurched to a halt, throwing everyone momentarily off balance. Leaving the Bergman where it was, Penhaligon swung over the tailboard and dropped to the ground. Steuben quickly moved forward and handed the weapon down to him and then jumped down himself, glancing back at Argo and the others. “All aboard the skylark, lads. Now we have the boat ride.”
The truck had halted under a grove of trees on a small knoll of high ground surrounded on three sides by polluted wetland that was choked with weeds and the skeletons of rusty, shot-to-hell vehicles and beached and beat-up landing craft. Billy and Cartwright were already waiting for them. They had been detached from the rest of the squad to wreak havoc with the mortar, and they had been responsible for the blowing up of the burning Ziggurat, the multiple gallows, and the other shells that had fallen on the parade ground. Having caused the right measure of mayhem, they had made their own way to the rendezvous point and now looked relieved that everyone had emerged from the attack on the Bunker unscathed. When Hooker walked back from the staff car, he quickly looked around. “What did you do with the mortar?”
“Broke it down and dumped it in pieces, just like you said, Captain.”
The next phase of their escape was to make their way, hummock to hummock, across the oily bog to the open water where the Ranger’s canoes were concealed and waiting. Hooker took a hand-drawn chart of the route to the canoes from his map case. “I’ll walk point on this. Penhaligon, you bring up the rear with the Bergman in case of some bad-luck pursuit.”
Penhaligon nodded. “Covered.”
“Very well. I want everyone to follow in my footsteps as accurately as possible. The bastards may have dumped mines and booby traps in this mess, so be really careful.” He paused for a moment to see if anyone had anything to add. “Okay then. Let’s go to Albany.”
CORDELIA
The defenses of Albany looked formidable by the light of a smoke yellow half-moon. Massive earthworks, concrete blockhouses, high stone walls, pointed dragons’ teeth, and miles upon miles of barbed wire, coiled, strung, and threateningly entangled, all combined to give the impression that the armies of Hassan IX were going to pay dearly for every square foot of ground they so much as touched on the north side of the Potomac. The wire went not only all the way to the water’s edge, but continued into the river to become a maze of cruelly submerged, flesh-ripping snares. The night had covered the surface of the water with a layer of hanging mist, and Cordelia pulled her borrowed cloak around herself against the damp and chill. The hem of her less-than-adequate garment was wet and slimy where it had been dragged through the swamp. The party had crossed the odious margins with haste and efficiency, although a number of even the Rangers had missed their footing and sunk at least knee deep in the reeking ooze. The canoes had been swiftly located and launched. They were long, aborigine-style craft of pounded bark and cured leather stretched over willow frames, each with the curved and pointed front and rear design that had made the native people such masters of the American waterways. She had found herself seated in the prow of the lead canoe, and, perhaps due to some still-maintained Ranger idea of gallantry, she was not required to do galley-slave duty. Behind her, Argo Weaver and four Rangers dug in with their paddles, while T’saya and Yancey Slide sat idly in the stern. The demon, it seemed, was with the women when it came to superfluously exerting himself. The second canoe followed with Jesamine in the prow and Penhaligon, seemingly inseparable from his Bergman,
in the stern.
The boats were steering a long, downriver diagonal course from one bank to the other, using the current to their advantage and moving east to where the Potomac widened out and the Mosul were not so concentrated along the water’s edge. The canoes were painted dull black, and their occupants crouched low, offering as small a target as possible to any enemy picket that might feel like firing on them. Aside from being damp and chilled, Cordelia was also more than a little nervous, and she hoped that someone had somehow warned the defenders of Albany that they were coming. She said nothing, because it probably would have seemed irrational, but her sudden and overwhelming fear was that after having been through so much, she would end up being shot by one of her own, sharing the same ironic and legendary fate that had befallen Colonel Mahogany Jackson, in the oft told tale. When you were killed by friendly fire, that seemed to be all that anyone ever remembered about you.
Cordelia saw the lights when the canoes were at a point a little to the Albany side of midstream. She had glanced back to see that the second boat, with Jesamine in the prow, was keeping up. She was somewhat concerned about Jesamine. While Cordelia had been elated, Jesamine had seemed remote and withdrawn since they had escaped from the Bunker, and Cordelia was wondering if she were suffering from some sort of delayed shock. Cordelia’s first and obvious reaction was that the lights belonged to a Mosul patrol boat coming downriver, following their wake, and if that was the case, they were in trouble. The only problem was that the lights of a gunboat, either from the Mosul or from Albany, should have been distinct pinpoints, and these were not. What Cordelia was seeing in the distance was an unhealthy and diffused orange glow. She supposed that this diffusion could have been a result of the low-lying river fog, but somehow she thought not. She leaned close to the Ranger behind her, the one called Steuben. “There’s something behind us.”
Steuben, whom she had noticed fancied himself a comedian, saw nothing funny about the lights when he glanced back. “I don’t think I like the look of that, miss.”
“A gunboat?”
Steuben shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What then?”
“I’d hate to say it and then be wrong.” He pulled his paddle out of the water and signaled silently to Slide that they were being followed. Yancey Slide looked and then hissed a low warning.“Dark Things on the water!”
“Shit! I don’t want to be seeing this.”
“I’m afraid you are, lad. I’m going to warn the others.”
Cordelia questioned Slide in a loud whisper. “Can we outrun them?”
Slide shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
He waved for Hooker’s attention, and, using Ranger sign language, directed the captain’s attention to the lights. Hooker gestured to Penhaligon, indicating with a throat-cutting gesture that the Bergman was not a solution. Cordelia wanted to know, “Can the Four do anything?”
Slide was firm. “No, you can’t. You don’t know enough yet to take on Dark Things in an open boat. They are repositories of pure loathsome rage.” Then he suddenly grinned. “Don’t worry, though. Even repositories of rage can be punctured.”
“Punctured?”
“Let them get a bit closer.”
“Who would have sent Dark Things after us?”
Slide drew on his hand-cupped cigar. “Quadaron-Ahrach or his sister at a guess. We pretty much made fools of the Zhaithan tonight, plus we stole two of the Four right out from Jeakqual-Ahrach’s clutches. The siblings have got to be spitting mad.”
Black spheres were now visible within the glow, and no matter how those with the paddles exerted themselves, digging deep in the water and going desperately for speed instead of quiet concealment, the glow and the spheres came rapidly closer.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to have sent a gunboat? Dark Things seem like an awful lot of effort to catch poor little me.” Cordelia knew she was only being flippant to cover up the fear that seemed to be moving up her body to grab for her brain. She could already feel the presence of the Dark Things bearing down on her. The closer they came, the more her flesh crawled and she found it hard to breathe. Unfocused flutterings attacked the edges of her mind with half-formed visions and unintelligible whispers that hinted at fire and darkness, pain and impossible perspectives. Her hands were starting to shake, but she smiled bravely at her own inane question.
Slide at least had the compassion to laugh, and Steuben also grinned despite himself. “Listen, miss, if we can’t outrun or run off a Mosul gunboat in the dark, we’re in the wrong business. They’ve brought up the big guns.”
Slide agreed. “They want poor little you rather badly, my dear. It’s become personal. The evil siblings want to punish us for our audacity. It’s not just you Four. They’ve probably figured out that I’m here, too, and the Ahrachs would really like to get their hands on me.”
“You say they can be punctured?”
Slide drew one of his strange and otherworldly pistols. “A bullet from another thread of time, fired by a equally displaced pistol; that should fuck up their nastiness.”
“I don’t really understand.”
Even though the Dark Things had halved the distance between them and the canoes, Slide turned and looked hard at Cordelia. For a moment she could have sworn that his eyes had become almost sympathetic. “Time is like a river, Cordelia. It moves as one, but within in its depths are a million interlocked eddies and moving microcurrents. In the same way, across the breadth of the time stream, an infinity of variations move side by side, similar but with different sequences and different variants of reality. You humans exist in but one of them, and, for the most part, you are unaware that, just a split, sideways-second away, a hundred other Hassan IX’s make war with varying degrees of success, and a hundred other Cordelia Blakeney’s are caught up in those wars. As you move outwards, at right angles to your familiar three dimensions, the terrain becomes a whole lot more alien and queer, and that’s where Quadaron-Ahrach harvests his Dark Things and brings them back here to feed and grow mean on the worst poison of men’s minds.”
“Didn’t you ought to be watching those things and not talking to me?”
Slide grinned. “We have a little time.”
Cordelia was sure that Slide was being overconfident, and she was not sure she liked it. The Dark Things were now sufficiently close that she could see they were more than just pitch-black spheres. They were gelatinous blobs, and far from perfectly spherical. The Dark Things had smooth and shapeless exteriors, like thick, living sacs that sweated beads of dark red liquid the color of congealing blood. The three of them rolled across the surface of the river in a tight V-formation, protected by the unhealthy orange glow. Where their undersides touched the water, it hissed and boiled and made it look like they rode on a surface of trailing steam. Slide, however, seemed unworried.
“Let them get a bit closer.”
Slide now seemed downright cocky, and Cordelia had to ask, “Are you really a demon?”
“And what’s a demon, Lady Blakeney? Just a being who is able to jump the time streams, one to the next, and find a foothold wherever he might land. Now that the Four of you are together, you will learn some of the same.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Then think about it later. I estimate our foul friends are close enough. Watch and learn.”
Slide crouched in the stern of the canoe and aimed his pistol with two-handed care, resting his arms on the upcurve of the gunwale. He fired three times in regular succession, and the pistol responded with a rapidity greater than any weapon Cordelia had ever encountered. He hit the lead Dark Thing three times in a grouping no more spread out than the surface of a small plate, but nothing happened beyond three raised and quivering blisters that appeared on the grotesque and supernatural monster’s hide. Otherwise it was not so much as slowed in its rolling. The voices and intruding visions were now more that merely peripheral. They were threatening Cordelia like water ab
out to close over a drowning swimmer. “I thought you said you could puncture them.”
Slide scowled and aimed again. “I didn’t say it would be easy.”
He fired two more fast shots, but again nothing happened, or so it seemed for the space of about ten seconds. Then a small rent appeared in the leading Dark Thing’s hide, at first just a tiny split, but rapidly elongating as though under some kind of internal pressure that it could no longer contain. The interior of the Dark Thing became visible and then started to spill out and run down its skin. Cordelia could only think of the inside of a pomegranate as what looked like sticky, dark red, segmented seed pods were vomited from the wound, but she knew the mess she was seeing was not seeds and had nothing to do with reproduction. They hissed when the water touched them as though they contained a powerful acid. The Dark Thing wobbled to one side, seeming to lose all ability to maintain its direction. The other two also spun away from their original course, as though navigation had been some combined process.
It only took two shots to puncture the second Dark Thing, and this one proved to have no pomegranate interior. It deflated like a burst balloon with wrinkled rags of hide flying off to drop into the water and dissolve. Slide whipped out his second pistol and holstered the first. Seven shots had exhausted the clip. The remaining Dark Thing came to a halt and slightly settled a few submerged inches in the water, toadlike, as though considering its next move now that its companions were gone. It slowly changed color from black to a highly offensive purple. Visible pores opened in the thing’s hide from which a black gas flowed with a growing pressure and density. Slide cursed as though this was the very last reaction he wanted. He snapped back the slide on his fresh pistol, aimed at the now stationary third Dark Thing, and pumped three bullets into it. Three ragged holes appeared in the body, out from which poured more black gas. The last Dark Thing was fast sinking into the river but spewing as much poisonous vapor as it could before it drowned. Slide shouted a warning as the gas rolled onto them like smoke on the water. “Cover your faces! Don’t breathe too much of the black gas. It’s been known to drive men permanently crazy.”