by Mick Farren
Jesamine read the situation unerringly. “Out! Out now!”
They dropped back into the real world to find themselves buffeted by a cacophony of gunfire. Bullets and musket balls ricocheted from the brickwork, and billows of black gas made the air almost unbreathable. The defenders all had their gas masks in place, and some of them could only have been firing blind, in a blurred confusion, as sweat fogged the glass eyepieces. Slide yelled quickly to Argo. “What did you do out there?”
“As much damage as we could, and then we got out.”
“At least a dozen of the damned things burst like huge, ugly bubbles.”
“Then we must be doing something right.” He looked to the other three. “Back in?”
They nodded. Their adrenaline was pumping. “Back in.”
Back in. The Dark Things were ready for them this time. They came into the Other Place and were met by streams of red globes, a hail of Other Place fire that they already knew was lethal to them in the form of the Four. The red globes were augmented by spinning spiky pale blue stars that could only be equally as murderous, but suddenly they had an added advantage. Maneuverable shields were around them with which they could deflect both the globes and stars and at the same time continue their own attack with the razor-sharp rectangles.
“Who made these things?”
The thought-voice of Jesamine supplied the answer. “I think I did. I realized we needed something, and it came to me, just like the weapons have come to Cordelia.”
The globes and stars smashed into the shields with a noise like the pounding of heavy rain on a hollow roof, but the new protection held, even though each impact came with a completely out-of-proportion countershock. It took a few subjective moments for the Four to adapt themselves to these rewritten laws of Other Place physics, and in the course of this learning process, Raphael would have been brought down by a slashing vulture beak had not the Dark Thing in question suddenly let out a hideous violet scream as it cringed away from the impact of a slow-moving yellow particle, and then vanished.
“Who did that? What was that yellow thing?”
More of the yellow particles drifted lazily down the length of the spiral that represented the tunnel, and each time one collided with a Dark Thing, the creature screamed color and then disappeared.
“It’s Slide. Those yellow things are bullets from his guns.”
“We must be in a highly accelerated time stream if his bullets are moving so slowly.”
“But so are the Dark Things. They just keep coming.”
“We have to locate the source.”
“The Dark Thing Mother.” It was the voice of Jesamine again.
“What?”
The thought traffic between the Four was thick and fast and tended to jumble and distort when they all reacted at once. “I don’t know. It was another of those ideas that just came to me.”
“Has a way to destroy it come to anyone?”
Argo’s thought felt profoundly unhappy. “I think I know a way.”
“You do?”
“Use the weapons and shields to push forward to the other end of the tunnel. I believe we’ll see the source.”
It took all of their collective strength to move forward at the same time as manipulating the shields and maintaining the streams of destructive, cutting rectangles, and twice the Four almost came to a common grief when the shields slipped out of alignment and claws or beaks attempted to slash through the gap these errors created. They pushed on down the tunnel for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a fraction of a second in the real world and were approaching the threshold of exhaustion when a thought flashed from Argo, who seemed to have adopted the role of scout.
“There!”
A monstrous nonform of slime, black light, and raw plasma was exuding shapeless quasilife that immediately grew beaks and talons, expanded into full-grown Dark Things behind the slashing and cutting appendages, and then moved down the tunnel to augment the attack.
“That’s it.”
The Four instantly launched a quadruple stream of cutting rectangles at the Dark Thing Mother but were shocked to see their previously effective Other Place projectiles harmlessly deflected by some kind of invisible barrier that could only be detected by a faint shimmer each time it was struck by one of the rectangles.
“Cordelia, do you have anything else?”
“Nothing comes to hand or mind.”
Under attack, the Dark Thing Mother retaliated. Clouds of tiny red globes, no larger than pinheads, like blasts from a real-world shotgun, and quite as deadly as their bigger counterparts, screamed at high speed at the Four, who struggled to deflect them.
Jesamine’s thought took on an aura of alarm. “We have to pull back.”
“No!” It was Argo. “I believe I know what to do. I have to drop back into the real world.”
“You’re crazy. You’ll be right in among them.”
“You’ll have to shield me.”
Jesamine picked up on the thought. “It’ll be the same as when Argo scouted the tunnel, only in reverse. He’ll be in the real world, and we’ll be here covering for him. We’ll have the advantage, because we’re moving on a much faster time scale.”
Jesamine, Cordelia, and Raphael positioned themselves. “Okay, go.”
Argo went.
He dropped into the real world with a bone-jarring jolt. Somehow, in the Other Place he had been maybe eighteen inches off the physical floor. Dead Mosul were under his feet, bullets flew around him, and Argo was hard-pressed to think of a more perilous environment. He was in the middle of a black mass of Dark Things that immediately snapped and leaped to consume him, but no sooner did they move than they exploded. The others had him shielded, and the worst that happened was that he was splattered with foul-smelling pulp. A part of him wanted to vomit, but he sublimated his urge to gag. He looked up and saw his objective. A sagging sack of leathery skin, almost three times the size of any of its offspring, sweating an oddly discolored fluid, clung to the roof of the tunnel. On the underside of the atrocious monstrosity, an orifice in the dead flesh spat out globules of black puss that dripped squelching to the floor and then proceeded to grow into the spheres he knew and loathed. He swung his real-world carbine, the dead man’s gun, from his shoulder. He knew it would not have the same magick as Slide’s extradimensional pistols, but surely the Rangers must have endowed the carbine with something, or otherwise why would the thought have come to him that the weapon would be of use against the abomination hanging over him? Argo raised it and fired. The skin of the Dark Thing Mother puckered under the impact, and it let out a banshee wail that came close to damaging eardrums in the confined space of the tunnel and must have been heard in the Other Place, because alarmed thoughts from the commonality crowded his mind.
“Argo, are you alright?”
“Argo, get out of there!”
Argo ignored them and pumped the trigger, firing again and again, until the clip was spent. The screams of the Dark Thing Mother rose in pitch, and the part of him still linked to the Four knew that the soldiers at the other end of the tunnel were reeling backwards, hands clapped to their ears. The monster’s skin was punctured in a number of places, but it was far from dead. Indeed, he could sense it was preparing to retaliate. In what seemed like slow motion, it was detaching itself from the tunnel roof. He knew it was going to drop on him, to smother and absorb him. He tossed aside the empty carbine and pulled the only weapon he had left from his belt. As the monster freed itself from the brickwork with a gross sucking sound, he held the double-barreled pistol vertical so it was directly under the horror’s reproductive orifice. He quickly cocked both hammers on the “cuckold’s special,” the one made by George and James Bolton of Jamestown, and waited for the thing to fall. Then, in the moment that it did, and without knowing what good it might do, he pulled the twin triggers and discharged both barrels with his hand actually inside the ghastly opening.
And the Dark Thing Mother
burst apart. Argo was showered with unholy and sickening filth. He felt himself losing consciousness, and, as he spiraled into merciful oblivion, the last thing he saw was a vision of the face of Quadaron-Ahrach twisted in thwarted and cursing fury, silently vowing the most hideous revenge he could conceive.
EIGHT
CORDELIA
“Leave me the hell alone.”
Cordelia had been in the furthest depths of a deep and dreamless sleep and saw no reason to awaken. She had trouble grasping why T’saya should be shaking her by the shoulder. They had fought the Dark Things and triumphed, although Argo had almost died or worse. What more did they want from her?
A voice was speaking to her, but what it said made little sense. “The Mosul are pulling back.”
She opened her eyes, wholly unfocused and disoriented. “What?”
“The Old Guard has broken. They’ve been turned. There are reports that some of them shot their officers so they could retreat.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Battle of the Potomac is over. We’ve won.”
“We’ve won?”
Finally she could see. T’saya had a tray on which reposed a cup of black coffee and a balloon glass of cognac. “Brandy for breakfast? Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“You’ve slept for fourteen hours.”
“Even so.”
“Who alive today ever saw the Mosul in full retreat?”
Cordelia sat up and took the coffee. Now that the manor house was largely uninhabitable, she was in a railroad sleeping car parked on a siding by the railhead. “They’re retreating to Savannah?”
T’saya shook her head. “No. That’s too much to hope for, but they’re pulling back to Richmond.”
Cordelia sipped her coffee, took a deep breath to clear her head, and the immediate past suddenly came back to her. “How’s Argo?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“I wish I was.”
“He screamed for a long time.”
Cordelia nodded. “He was screaming after we brought him out of the tunnel.”
“He screamed for another three hours. Finally, I was able to give him some morphia.”
“You don’t have anything of your own better than morphia?”
“When it comes to pain, there’s nothing better than morphia.”
“But he’s okay?”
“He’s okay.”
“And sane?”
“We’ll see how sane he is when he wakes. He’s strong.”
Cordelia reached for the cognac. “I really hope so. Should I go to him?”
“Let him sleep. Jesamine’s with him.”
For a minute or so they were silent. Then Cordelia flexed her shoulders, wincing at the stiffness and laying aside her concern for Argo. “So are we going after the Mosul?”
T’saya shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Why the hell not if we’ve got them on the run?”
“We have a few wounds of our own to lick.”
“What turned the tables?”
“Taking back the tunnel was crucial. Without it, Dunbar could never have moved in the reserves to plug the gap. You four are heroes.”
Cordelia looked at T’saya dubiously. “I hardly think we saved Albany on our own.”
“The rocket bombs also helped.”
“Rocket bombs? The Norse rocket bombs? They were finally used?”
T’saya looked at Cordelia in disbelief. “I thought you knew. You were on the NU98.”
Now Cordelia was completely confused. “I don’t understand.”
“That was why the NU98 was diverted to Baltimore to meet the Cromwell. It was to pick up the Norse specialists who were going to make the rockets operational. The airship was supposed to take them to Brooklyn.”
RAPHAEL
The vapor trail of a rocket bomb arced across the clear sky like a soaring symbol of victory and freedom. First Raphael had heard the elongated boom as the chemical propellants ignited and the projectile roared up its railed ramp some five miles to the north, then the hissing wail underlaid with a rhythmic coughing as it climbed steeply into the sky. Finally, at the peak of its upward journey, all sound ceased with a final cough. The tiny silver speck continued to ascend for a minute or so longer and then abruptly curved downwards, gathering speed as it fell like a falcon on its prey. With nothing to relate it to, it was hard to see, way up in the air, where the rocket might ultimately land, until the explosion, the flower of orange flame, and the eruption of dirt and smoke in among the retreating Mosul. Field Marshal Virgil Dunbar shook his head as the rocket exploded a mile or more beyond the Potomac, to the south, where the last of the Mosul horde was straggling away in the direction of Richmond. “Poor bastards.”
After all that he had been through, Raphael was no longer in awe of any rank, no matter how elevated, and he looked at the field marshal with a puzzled frown. “They are your enemy, sir. I thought you hated them.”
“Hate them, boy? Hatred is the fine line that every soldier walks, from private to general. Of course I hate them. I hate them for what they’ve done, and I hate bloody Hassan and all that he stands for, but the men on the ground? Are they that different from our own? We kill them, but can we really hate them? They bitch and complain, and they bleed and die, just the same as our own. You should know, young Captain Vega. You were one of them until a little while ago.”
Raphael stood on the roof of the charred and shell-shattered blockhouse, looking across the river. He was again in the company of Slide, Dunbar, and Dunbar’s retinue of officers, in the identical location from which they had watched the start of the Mosul assault, except now they were seeing the Mosul evacuation. If, as little as a month earlier, anyone had told Raphael that he would be doing such a thing, he would have doubted their sanity and doubted it even more if they had told him that he would hold the honorary rank of captain in the Royal Albany Rangers and be considered something of celebrity, and maybe even a hero, but such seemed to be the case. He had woken from his long sleep to find that a new tunic had been placed beside his bed; one that carried the full insignia of a Ranger captain, but even though he had supposedly been fully accepted and even commissioned into the fold of Albany, he could not help but look with shock and considerable awe at the scene in front of him.
Where the massed lines of tents and bivouacs had once stood, where cannon had been arranged in neat lines and drab green legions had scurried about their regimented business, in the places where cavalry with titles from legend had pranced and paraded, and Raphael had seen men flogged and hanged, nothing remained but scorched and scarred earth and the sad and hideous debris of retreat. Gaping and still-smoking craters dotted the land to the south of the Potomac: the huge earth-wounds where the terrible rocket bombs had fallen, and the smaller shell holes gouged by the near-perpetual artillery barrage, while networks of abandoned, half-caved-in trenches disfigured what had for so long been the Mosul side of the river with an empty tracery of rout. Torn tent canvas flapped forlornly, like abandoned ensigns, and the charred uprights of burned barrack huts and supply sheds stood like black grave markers for the thousands of unburied dead who lay contorted and bloating amid the shattered guns, the now-silent fighting machines, the collapsed watchtowers, the broken wheels of overturned caissons, and all the other less-identifiable litter of a failed conquest. In the middle of it all, the blockhouse, although soot-stained and damaged, still stood.
Dunbar caught Raphael’s stunned survey of the monstrously blighted landscape. “The field of victory can be far more daunting than the field of defeat, boy. When the end comes, the vanquished have either died or removed themselves. The victor is left with the blasted earth, the shattered trees, the counting of the dead, and the contemplation of the enormity of what he’s done.”
In Raphael’s view, the dead seemed too numerous to even count. They not only occupied the land but seemed to cover the surface of the river. The corpses of men and horses still choked all but the deep water
, caught like rotting logjams by the snags of half-submersed pontoons, sunken barges, destroyed landing craft, and still-floating but empty rafts. Telegraphs had come from the Norse cruiser Cromwell telling of a continuous stream of bodies and smashed and burning boats that had flowed past the ship since the start of the assault. The Cromwell had been stationed at the mouth of the Potomac, where it flowed out into the Chesapeake Bay, taking no part in the hostilities but ensuring that the Mosul had not been able to bring up maritime reinforcements.
Dunbar faced Raphael as the pillar of smoke from the latest explosion dispersed in the upper air. “You know, boy. If you and your friends hadn’t given us back that tunnel, we might never have been able to do this. We would never have been able to move the men and guns in underground to plug the gap, and the Mosul would have reached the launching ramps before we ever got a single rocket into the air.” At that point, however, a look of sadness had passed over the field marshal’s weather-beaten face. “I fear, though, that these creations of science, just like the magick that you and Slide have brought to us, will be the end of warfare as my generation, and those who went before us, have always known it. In the future, wars will be fought at great distances and in places and ways that I cannot even imagine, and the old concepts of honor and chivalry will be anachronisms.”