Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  “Where the hell have you two been?”

  “Outside. There’s a fucking war going on. The Mosul broke through the line, right by the blockhouse.”

  “When?”

  Jesamine paused for a moment to catch her breath. “Maybe an hour ago. There’s Mamaluke cavalry and Mosul infantry units within plain sight of the house.”

  “Some of the men we saw said that Dark Things are trying to break into the tunnel from here to the front.”

  “Why didn’t you wake us?”

  Cordelia looked truculently at Argo. “We didn’t think we needed to.”

  “Have you seen Slide or T’saya?”

  “No.”

  Raphael knew exactly what they should do and cut in on the exchange between Argo and Cordelia. “We have to go to the tunnel. We can be of the most use helping to stop the Dark Things.”

  The other three all nodded, but no sooner had they turned and started for the stairs that would lead them to the concealed tunnel entrance in the cellars of the manor than a massive explosion rocked the house. A sound like the clap of doom left them temporarily deaf, the lights went out, dust and smoke billowed, and fragments of ceiling plaster rained down on them.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I think we can assume the house has been hit.”

  “Is everyone okay?”

  Three strained voices confirmed that they were, and, feeling their way, the Four descended the stairs, which still held up despite some ominous creaking. At the time, they assumed that the manor house was under artillery bombardment, but later they discovered that it had only been a lucky hit from an enemy mortar. On reaching the ground floor, however, they found that the mortar shell had been more than sufficient to bring down the cellar steps and block all interior access to the tunnel.

  “We’ll have to go outside and see if we can get in by the entrance under the stables.”

  Jesamine frowned. “That’s a long hundred-yard dash over ground that may well be coming under fire.”

  Argo cursed, and Raphael checked his revolver. “Can you think of a better idea?”

  Both Jesamine and Cordelia shook their heads. “No.”

  “Then we have to at least give it a try. We have to see if it’s possible.”

  RAPHAEL

  As he crouched in the kitchen doorway of the manor house, scanning the ground between the house and the stables, he told himself this was the kind of situation for which he had been trained. The extended misery of the Mosul training camp had to be put to good use, and it fell to him to take responsibility for seeing that others at the very least made it to the tunnel without being shot down before they could even commence to fight their own strange fight. Cordelia might be the one who set the pace in the Other Place, but here in the damp-ground reality of bombs and bullets, elementary infantry tactics, and the craft of negotiating an open space under attack, did not come out of thin air, and he was the only one with even the most meager skills. He was going to have to care for the lives of the other three in the same way that Melchior had cared for the squad of Provincial Levies, but with only a tiny fraction of Melchior’s experience.

  “The stables are still standing.”

  The Mosul must have struck in an overcast and mist-shrouded dawn, hitting the near-exhausted defenders in heavy concentrations. If it was true that they’d broken through by the blockhouse, they must have pushed enormous numbers of men across the river and taken horrible casualties in the process. Raphael knew enough not to unquestioningly believe every battlefield rumor, but distant figures of men and horses were visible through the threads of the river fog that had yet to burn off as the unseen sun climbed above the horizon.

  “The fog’s going to help us. We need to keep low and use every bit of cover. Our objective is the tunnel, not to get caught up in some other poor bastard’s firefight.”

  He started planning a possible route to the stables. A loud and sudden flurry of gunfire from the other side of the house, from the direction of the railhead, reminded him that this was a situation where nothing could be counted on to remain static. The Mosul could mount a rush on the house at any time. He gestured to the others and pointed. “Okay, here’s how we should do it. You see that stone wall on the other side of the kitchen garden? That’s our first piece of cover. If we can make it to the wall without being seen, or at least without being shot at, we’re halfway there. After that, we move along the wall to the corner by the stables, and then across the stable yard, and we’re there. The wall will be easy, but there’s no easy way to get across the stable yard, so in the last stretch just run like hell. It’s only about twenty yards, so we should be able to do it, if no one spots us and figures out what we’re up to. Okay?”

  The other three gave their assent. “Okay.”

  “Keep low and don’t bunch up. We’ll go one at a time at ten-yard intervals.”

  Cordelia moved forward. “I’ll go first.”

  Raphael stopped her. “No. This isn’t the dream-altitude.”

  “So?”

  “Let Argo go first.”

  Cordelia scowled. “Are you saying that because I’m a girl? If you are, it’s quaintly old-fashioned but hardly applicable.”

  “I don’t want to see you killed.”

  “Then don’t watch.”

  And with that she skipped around him and started for the wall in a low, crouching run. Raphael cursed and looked at the other two. “I’m going next. You two follow. Don’t bunch up.”

  With this final instruction, he sprinted after Cordelia.

  CORDELIA

  Raphael seemed to have an ability to straddle a line between sweet and irritating. Trying to protect Cordelia in the middle of a firefight like she was a damsel in distress was the perfect example. She could only think that Mosul schools and military basic training must have really messed up his mind and made it impossible for him to enter the modern world. She certainly did not want to die, but whether she made the run first or last made precious little difference. She was sure that the odds were pretty much the same either way. She raced through the kitchen garden of the manor house, over rows of flowerpots, over autumn herbs and glass cucumber frames, and reached the wall unscathed. Raphael was coming after her, and she hoped the fact that she had taken his virginity was not going to cause him to start following her around like a puppy dog. They were locked into the Four together, with no appreciable way out, and she prayed that he would not start acting like a lovesick calf. It would be an intolerable way to fight a war.

  Raphael made the cover of the wall and waved to Cordelia to start moving. She edged along in the direction of the stables, pressing her body as close to the brickwork as she could. The manor house had taken a serious hit. One wall was half caved in, and it looked little short of a miracle that the old building was still standing and that they had not been buried under several tons of beams and masonry. From her new vantage point, she could see that a skirmish line of Mosul infantry was moving up on the railhead behind the house, but then a heavy Bergman, turret mounted on one of the cars of an armored train, opened up. Four Mosul were hit in quick succession, and the rest of the line scattered and dived for cover. Almost immediately, an underofficer was screaming and kicking the men to their feet again, seemingly working on the principle that the grunts feared him more than death. His theory worked for maybe a half minute, and then the underofficer himself jerked round and fell as a heavy caliber Albany bullet took him in the chest. Cordelia knew that she was now seeing war up close and in all its deadly and futile stupidity.

  She was at the corner of the wall, and the stables were in front of her. Raphael had been right. The stable yard was an uncomfortably exposed space. She braced herself for the final dash. Argo, followed by Jesamine, was running through the kitchen garden, heading for the cover of the wall. Some Mosul that Cordelia could not see must have spotted them, because musket shots rang out and lead balls kicked up dirt around their feet and smashed a large earthenware pot. Mercifully, nei
ther of them were hit, and they fell against the wall, breathing heavily, and paused for a moment to catch their breath. Raphael was edging along the wall towards her, and she knew that she could not delay the dash across the stable yard any longer. She took a deep breath, focused on the open double doors of the stable and the refuge that she would find inside, and ran. She heard shots but did not falter or look back. Every moment she was in the open she expected a musket ball to slam into her back and pitch her forward, mortally injured, but then the stables were in front of her and she dived forward into the safety of the darkness.

  JESAMINE

  When they entered the tunnel, down the spiral stairs in the shaft that had been dug out under the floor of the stables, they found Yancey Slide already there. A number of the small trolley cars that normally shuttled between the manor house and the front had been overturned, and a combined squad of Rangers and men from the 3rd Infantry crouched behind it, weapons at the ready. The lights were on at the manor end of the tunnel, but they only remained that way for about fifty yards, and then all was darkness. Water dripped from the brickwork overhead, and a strange booming came from the far end, as though a giant hammer was beating on an iron door a long way away. The soldiers were tense, obviously waiting for an attack they knew was certain to come, and Jesamine noticed that they had rubber gas masks hanging from their belts, presumably to be used if the Dark Things released the black gas. Slide had risen slowly and nodded as the Four reached the foot of the iron stairs. “I guess I should have known that you four would figure it out and come down here.”

  “Are the Dark Things coming?”

  “That’s what we’re expecting.” They moved to where the armed men waited behind the makeshift barricades, and Slide made a warning gesture toward the other end of the tunnel. “Keep your heads down. There’s been sniper fire. We’ve lost two men already.”

  He directed them to a sheltered spot behind the men who crouched over their rifles. “How are things up top?”

  Raphael answered for the Four. With his military training, he seemed to be assuming the leadership role now that they were involved in the war in the real world. “There’s fighting around the railhead, a lot of shooting and skirmishing, and we saw some cavalry in the distance.”

  “Mamalukes?”

  “I think so.”

  Slide nodded. “The 17th Hussars are supposed to be moving up to counter them. All the reserves are being moved in to contain this.”

  “So can this breakthrough be contained?”

  “That remains to be seen, doesn’t it? The Mosul have been high-plains nomads for twelve centuries. They excel at fighting in open spaces.”

  Jesamine found a place beside Raphael and Slide. “A shell or something hit the manor.”

  Slide frowned. “Is it still standing?”

  “Yes, just about, but almost an entire wall is gone. This isn’t good, is it?”

  Slide shook his head. “No, my dear, this isn’t good at all.”

  “How did the Mosul break through the line?”

  “The way we always thought they would. They switched from the broad attack and concentrated on two points. Then they threw in everything they had. They forced a breach by the blockhouse and started streaming through. It would have been a whole lot worse, except one of their battle tanks blew its boiler in the narrowest part of the breach, and our boys were able to finish it with flamethrowers. It created a bottleneck so no more of their mechanized armor could get through.”

  Cordelia had been listening intently, and finally she spoke. “Everyone always said if the Mosul broke through to open country north of the river, that would be the end of Albany.”

  Slide looked sadly at her. “Everyone could well be right.”

  Jesamine felt fear grip her. After being free of the Mosul, even for so short a time, she had no intention of falling back into their clutches. “So is it the end for Albany?”

  “Not quite, but the odds have definitely shifted in favor of Hassan. We might shorten them a bit if we can keep the railhead and this tunnel open.”

  Argo now joined the urgent conversation. “What makes the tunnel so important?”

  “It’s a route to bring reinforcements up to the river right under the Mosul breakout. If we can clear the tunnel, we have a good chance of closing the gap and cutting off those who have come through already. If we can plug up the breach so no reinforcements get through, we have the firepower to destroy all of the enemy who are left north of the river.”

  “But the Dark Things are in the tunnel?”

  Slide nodded gravely. “That’s what I sense. I figure you must have sensed it, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have been so motivated to come here.”

  Jesamine turned to the others. “We should find out for sure.”

  Argo sighed. “I think it’s my turn to walk the point.”

  “You want to go into the Other Place and see if there are Dark Things at the other end?”

  Argo nodded, obviously less than happy with the situation. “Yeah, I’ll go in and see. I’ve the most experience of this sort of thing. I was scouting the Other Place when I was riding with Slide, only I didn’t know it at the time.”

  Cordelia voiced what the others were thinking. “Are you sure about this?”

  Argo shrugged. “You see any other way to play it?”

  They shook their heads. “No.”

  “So let’s get to it.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  Argo quickly became businesslike. “I want to go in fast, see what I can see, and get out fast. If Jesamine could stand behind me, half here and half in the Other Place, and Cordelia and Raphael remain in the real world as an anchor, we could probably pull it off.”

  Jesamine raised an eyebrow. “We’ve never tried anything even close to this. We’ve never attempted to be in two places at once.”

  Argo’s jaw was set. “We don’t have the time to go away and rehearse. We’re going to have to make this one up as we go along.”

  ARGO

  Had anyone been with him to listen, Argo would have freely admitted that he was scared. The experience was like nothing he had encountered before. He felt like a ghost between two worlds, and found a disconnected part of himself wondering if this was how death felt. The physical world existed like a shadow, grey and unsubstantial, but still there. The tunnel was still damp and claustrophobic, and the Rangers and infantrymen still crouched behind the overturned trolley cars waiting for the coming attack. The real difference was that he could see—or, maybe more accurately, sense—what was going on farther afield. He could cast outward for fleeting impressions of the fighting around the railhead, and he could perceive the desperation of the Albany forces in among the freight cars and locomotives at the manor house railhead. On the flat meadowland to west of the tracks, the Albany hussars wheeled to face the Mamaluke lancers, no longer in their flamboyant plumes and breastplates but now hunched over the shafts of their leveled weapons in drab camouflage and flat-peaked caps. Again the breathlessness, the combination of excitement and fear, was interwoven with the filmy vision, the pulsing emotions of men not only fighting for their own survival, but for the survival of their country, their world, and their way of life.

  “Focus, Argo. You’re not there to see the sights!”

  Yes, focus, Argo. Jesamine was reminding him that he was not where he was to merely observe, but to search out the enemy and report its actions. She stood next to him, more in the real world than in the Other Place, but closer to him and more solid than any of his other surroundings, and linked to him by a thick lifeline of energy that then went on back to Cordelia and Raphael. It was a totally untried configuration for the Four, and Argo had no idea how it might work out, but he still had to focus. He sent his perception into the darkness of the tunnel and all but wished he hadn’t. Mosul soldiers were edging forward, muskets and breechloaders at the ready, and behind them, Dark Things, what looked like dozens of them, were massing. Argo had expected that the
Dark Things, if they were there, would be coming from above, descending the real-world stairs from the blockhouse, but these were spontaneously forming out of nowhere. They began as small globes, no larger than a child’s ball, but then rapidly grew and expanded like inflating balloons to their normal size of between four and five feet in diameter. They kept on coming until they were packed one on top of the other, filling the tunnel space with their reeking malevolence.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Yes, and it’s not good.”

  “Should we pull you back?”

  “Wait. Let me see one more thing.”

  Argo again looked at the far end of the tunnel. The mass of Dark Things was closer. As he had feared, they were moving forward, following the lead of the human cannon fodder.

  “Okay, get me back. They’re coming. They’re coming slow, but there’s a hell of a lot of them. They’re coming.”

  THE FOUR

  The Four braced for the coming of the Dark Things. Slide issued his final instructions in a low voice. “Don’t go all out. Be circumspect with your energy. Do what Argo did. Be here and there at the same time. That particularly means you, Cordelia. No showboating.”

  Cordelia looked bleakly at Slide. “After being shot at in the stable yard, I have no intention of taking any risks, or showboating, as you call it.”

  Argo faced the other three. “We need to make quick jumps. In and out. It’ll be strange at first, but don’t be distracted. There are regular Mosul humans up front. I think they’re intended as a diversion. There’ll be shooting, but let Slide and his soldiers deal with them. We need to go up and over and destroy as many of the Dark Things as we can and get out. Everything indicates that they are very stupid, particularly if they don’t have the Mothmen telling them what to do. So we may be able to repeat the process a number of times before they figure out what we’re up to. Remember, though, bullets will be flying, so take care of your physical selves. Keep your bodies well under cover.”

  The Four jumped for the first time, and the tunnel became a spiral. They were farther into the Other Place than Argo had been during his reconnaissance, and they rolled with the curves. The Dark Things were now in their Other Place forms, the unnameably impossible entities that Raphael had seen all the way back on the Continental Highway, with angular, disgusting limbs, slime-coated and seemingly without bones, and huge, revoltingly distorted vulture heads that pulsed with dimly obscene energy. In front of them were the shadow shapes of the advancing Mosul, but they would be the concern of Slide and the men in the real world. The gross mass of Dark Things was the target for the Four, and, as on the previous occasion that the Four had gone on the offensive, it was Cordelia who had conjured the weapons. A stream of flat, sharp-sided rectangles flew from her Other World form and sliced viciously into the creatures of the enemy, and a terrible nonhuman screaming started. The others followed suit, and for a moment it seemed like a massacre was taking place. The Dark Things took a few subjective moments to respond, but without doubt the dark red globes that suddenly streamed from the screaming mess would have done terrible damage if any of the Four had been touched by one.