The nightmarish creature suddenly heaved itself into a different configuration. Its elbows flexed, raising its long scaly body a foot off the floor. It was a dragon. It pressed its blunt, scaly face to a grille set into the glass. “I’m hungry,” it mewed.
Geathla laughed. “I bet you are. Well, you won’t be getting me.”
“What the hell is it?” Colm said.
“I am a limethion,” the creature lisped. Its mouth was overstuffed with teeth. “I come from Mitheikua. They’re holding me captive. Please …”
Geathla raised his hand threateningly. “Shut the fuck up.” He said to Colm, “It’s an alien.”
“Is this whole zoo full of …?”
“Aliens? Yeah. Hundreds of different kinds. We went to a lot of planets before we found our way home.”
Colm shook his head. It was all too easy to imagine the Ghosts berserking their way across 8,000 light years, carrying off anything that caught their eye. The plight of the captive aliens horrified him. But worse was Geathla’s admission that they had been searching for Earth all along.
Home …
“It took centuries,” Geathla said. “There are so many stars out there! So many planets! And no one knew the way.”
“Not even the Magus?”
“He’s not that old.”
“Who is the Magus, anyway?”
“I’ve already given you something for nothing. Now how about you tell me how to build those fire and water engines?”
“Steam engines,” Colm said. “They use water as a working fluid to convert heat energy into kinetic energy. The kinetic energy drives a motor with an electromagnetic winding … The concept was invented by a Scotsman, James Watt.” Colm didn’t mention that he had actually got the idea from Tim Jenkins, a neighbor of his parents, who’d built a steam tractor. Colm had seen it on his failed visit home, when he met the Magus for the second time.
“You’re talking gibberish,” Geathla complained. “Tell me something, do the Lizps understand that chatter?”
Colm was fairly annoyed with the Lizps right now. Especially with Diejen. “They can fix rivets where I tell them to, and that’s about all.”
“Well, the old ways are the best ways.” Geathla pushed himself up off the bench, wincing. “I’ll be going now. Want to come?”
“To Atletis?” Colm was unhappy here, but it could be worse. It could definitely be worse.
“To Earth, of course,” Gaethla said, going out. The limethion mewed hungrily behind them.
Outside, the shadows did not seem to have moved an inch. The unchanging sunset gave a surreal hyper-solidity to the trees and the scattered cages, but it was getting colder. The wind wrinkled the ornamental pond. The sun had moved after all, because it had been shining on the water and now the pond lay in darkness, with the reflection of Cerriwan wobbling in it. Atletis was a dark spot on the gas giant.
Colm said, “Maybe Diejen didn’t mention it, but I can’t flit. I’m not that kind of mage. I got here from Lizp Province the old-fashioned way. On horseback. Thousands of miles, stopping at all the towns along the way to burn them.”
In fact, he didn’t know if it had been thousands of miles, but it had felt like it. Diejen had ridden most of the way with him, because she had Janz in tow, and the freeman couldn’t flit either. They had travelled from the snowbound sub-Arctic where the Lizps ruled, through endless forests that made Colm think vaguely of Canada, camping out at night and exchanging stories about their childhoods. At last they had reached this somewhat more inviting climate where plantations covered the valley floors. He had not seen the sea yet. The Ghosts had no need to transport things by boat; even their roads hardly existed. What mattered to them was power, so all their towns were built on rivers. All their energy went into the construction of dams. Their maps looked like database tables, with cities defined by the amount of ‘work’ their hydro plants produced—‘work’ being the sketchy unit of measurement they used instead of watts. Colm had no idea if Kisperet had more than one continent, or how big it was, or even if he was on a continent or just a large island. He had completely lost the perspective you got from flying.
“So come with me,” Gaethla said. “This planet is a shithole, though I was born here. The rebels can have it. I’ve got loads of booze and food at my headquarters in Edinburgh. Girls, too.” He winked. “You can show me how to fix those big power plants they have—”
“Are you deaf? I can’t FLIT!”
“That’s what they told you, is it?”
Colm hesitated. Geathla, standing in the shadow of the not-yew tree, smiled. He suddenly looked cunning, his big square face half-Scot and half-troll.
“I noticed you didn’t eat your salad,” he said.
“What the fuck’s that got to do with it?”
“You should have eaten it.” Geathla pulled down a branch of the not-oak and ripped off a handful of the small dark leaves. He stuffed them in his mouth and chewed. “Good for you,” he said through his mouthful. “Try some.”
Colm belatedly recognized that the leaves of the not-oak did, indeed, look like the side salads at Ghost meals, which he always left. He also remembered Dhjerga pulling leaves off bushes on Juradis, tasting them, and spitting them out.
“Is there something special about that tree?”
“You bet your arse there is. Oh, there’s other special plants, too, but this is the tree we brought from the groves in the Great Flit.” Geathla grinned. Bits of leaf stained his teeth. “Did they really not tell you?”
Colm shook his head.
“I’m not surprised. They didn’t want you to flit off home and leave them. You’re far too useful.”
In a trance, Colm moved towards the tree. He ripped off a handful of leaves. Could it possibly be that these had the same effect on the brain as tropodolfin? He bit a fragment off one. It was as bitter as he remembered. His education cautioned him that bitterness meant poison. He ate a whole leaf, chewing thoroughly, and then another.
“Not too much all at once,” Geathla warned. “We start on this stuff in childhood. By the time you get to be my age, you hardly need it anymore.”
But Colm had been dosing himself with poison for years, off and on—in the form of pills, in his arm. He ate the rest of the handful.
The world sharpened. He felt a twinge of dizziness, and a heaviness in his head. He touched his stomach.
“It’s working, is it?” Geathla seemed newly edgy. “Right, let’s leg it.” He reached for Colm’s left hand.
“No,” rasped another voice, faint and yet strangely resonant. The whole zoo seemed to fill with that whisper: No.
Both men flinched. They stumbled around to face the shadows under the tree.
Those shadows had thickened. At the foot of the tree sat a hump of tarry blackness. As Colm stared in horror, the tree shook slightly. A muddy boot slid out of the shadow. It came down with a perceptible thump between the tree roots.
Geathla muttered, “Oh fuck. The hypocaust heating system in the limethion house. It’s battery-powered. Forgot to turn it off.” Louder, he gibbered, “Sorry, sir. Sorry, sorry.”
“He is mine,” whispered the trees and the wind.
“Yes, sir. Sorry.”
Geathla turned and fled uphill. Colm could not move. He was rooted to the ground with sheer terror, as he had been when he was six years old, when he saw the Magus for the first time.
“You are mine,” the Magus whispered.
Hiding behind the settee in the living-room, Colm had watched with his heart freezing in his chest as the shadow in the corner stretched out a bony finger to touch his baby sister. At least Bridget wasn’t here now. She was far away in Scotland—dead, or alive?
“Come here,” the zoo whispered, and blue glints flashed in the heap of shadows.
He’d screamed and his father had woken up. His father wasn’t here now. The last words Colm had spoken to him had been hard ones.
“If you won’t come to me, then I must come to you,
” whispered the shadow. Colm’s mind shrieked no, no, no. But his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He swayed backwards as the shadow rushed at him.
It didn’t hit him. It humped away in the blink of an eye to the far side of the pond, and rested there, quivering, a mound of blackness deep enough to drown stars. Those were stars drowned in it, or were they its eyes? It plonked a muddy boot on the low wall around the pond. The shadow leaned over the water, burgeoning like a mountain, with those two blue glints at the top. A finger stretched out of it. Colm swallowed a scream. The finger had at least six knuckles. But all it did was stir the water. The reflection of Cerriwan broke up.
“I will show you something you want to see,” the Magus whispered.
Despite himself, Colm edged forward to the pond, keeping the water between them.
It was mirror-still now, despite the wind. As he watched it changed from dark to blue, and then to green. He seemed to be looking down from a height, as if the pond were a hundred meters deep, and he felt a spasm of vertigo—it had been so long since he flew, he had forgotten the feeling. Far below, it seemed, a rough green hillside fell into mist. A burn tumbled down the hill, and a woman trudged out of the mist towards it, carrying two jerrycans on a metal rod over her shoulders.
“She is stronger than you,” the Magus whispered.
The woman reached the burn. She knelt on the stones to fill the first of her jerrycans. She wore a camouflage-print fleece over cargo pants and wellingtons. Her hair was pulled back into a bun. Dew-silvered, it was the same ginger hue as Colm’s own.
“Bridget!” Colm yelled, recognizing his sister.
She looked up. Their viewpoint swooped lower, cranking up Colm’s vertigo. Bridget dropped her jerrycan and rolled into cover between the stones. The rod on which she had been carrying the jerrycans was a rifle. She aimed it up at him and fired.
He flinched violently. The scrying broke up. He found that he was on his knees on the ground, sprawled over the wall, elbow-deep in the pond. Another few instants and his face would have been in the water.
He reared back, reaching for his sword.
The Magus’s boot came down on the wall, inches from his hand. “She is a mage, too. But you are stronger.”
His bones were freezing, his breath burning his lungs. So cold.
“I’ll have her, and then there will be one. Then I will have you, and there will be no mages left on Earth at all.”
He looked up. Straight into the shadow, and rolled onto his back, slashing out wildly with his sword.
The sky shook. The trees tossed. The water rose into little waves. Far away at the top of the hill, someone was screaming.
*
Colm half-ran, half-staggered up the hill. He reeled out of the zoo onto the road. He could still hear the screams. He thought at first that they were in his head but when slaves passed him, running, he realized that the screams were coming from ahead of him.
From the Lizps’ villa.
He stumbled through the garden. The shadows doubled back at him. Firelight leapt between the trees. Slaves clustered with their backs to him. Colm pushed between them.
The power cart stood on the drive where he had left it. But the roof was gone. The boiler was gone. The flywheel was missing from the engine assembly. The furnace door hung open, bathing the drive in flickering light. Gaethla stood with one hand stretched towards the electromagnetic motor. He had returned to steal the steam engine.
Diejen’s teenage cousins, who had been using the cart to fetch cushions and books and musical instruments, sat on the grass beside the drive. It was the youngest one who was screaming. Another moaned and thrashed in the third cousin’s lap. Her face was severely burned.
The electromagnetic motor vanished. Gaethla dusted his hands together and studied the mutilated power cart as if deciding which piece to take next.
“You! Dog!”
Dryjon reeled out of the villa. The slaves on the front steps parted to make way for him. He waved his sword. Diejen, her hair falling all over her face, swung on his sword arm, trying to pull it down.
“How dare you fuck with my sister?” Dryjon bellowed.
“She can’t resist my manly charms,” Gaethla said.
“I’ll fucking spit you like a pig! I’ll drink toasts out of your skull, and the Magus can come take it back, if he dares!”
Dryjon’s eyes were glazed, his gait unsteady. He shook Diejen off and made a rush at Gaethla, who sidestepped. The big man caught Diejen by the hair. “You should’ve come with me when I asked you to, sweetheart.”
“I told you to go!” Diejen screamed, struggling. “I spared your life! And this is how you repay me? Traitor!”
“Traitor? No, that’s the pair of you.”
Dryjon whirled his sword in an overhead cut. Gaethla pushed Diejen in front of him. Dryjon pulled his swing just in time to avoid hitting her. Gaethla stepped outside his guard and grabbed his arm.
“I’ll give your regards to the Magus,” he called, catching sight of Colm.
The air shimmered.
Then all three of them were gone.
The furnace puffed smoke over the empty drive.
Too stunned to think clearly, Colm moved towards the cart. He needed to quench the fire, although it didn’t really matter, with the boiler missing.
The voltaic pile was still there. It was a stack of silver and zinc discs, interleaved with paper, in a wooden barrel six feet tall. It had an output potential in the kilovolt range. Colm had been quite proud of getting the design to work. Diejen had copied all her jewellery to get enough silver for the piles, over and over and over until the original bracelets and necklaces faded to tarnished wisps.
The cousins stared in shock at the place where Diejen and Dryjon had stood.
Colm wanted to say he’d give all the silver on Kisperet to get them back.
But they weren’t staring at him.
Behind him, someone cleared his throat.
Colm spun.
Dhjerga sat on top of the voltaic pile, where nothing and no one had been a second ago. He wore the uniform of a Fleet ground technician. The hi-viz stripes shone garishly in the sunset. “Well, I’m back,” he said. “Did I miss anything?”
CHAPTER 20
BRIDGET WILSON, NÉE MACKENZIE, saw where the drone fell. She fossicked around in the wet heather until she found it, and put it in the pocket of her fleece. Then she picked up the jerrycans and headed back down to the caravan site.
She already regretted shooting the drone down. They used to see them swooping silently around all the time, and they would hold up handwritten signs: 13 Adults 8 Children. Need Meds, Toothbrushes, Propane, Nappies.
That was last year. Now, if she had had a sign to hold up, it would have read: 6 Adults 3 Children.
The Singhs had moved on, and old Mrs. Robertson had died. You didn’t need Ghosts to kill you when a Highlands winter was knocking at the door, and arterial sclerosis had already taken up residence.
Need Meds. It wasn’t just poor Mrs. Robertson, RIP. Bridget’s own mother, Daisy, had arthritis, and Scarlett, her youngest, had a cough that wouldn’t go away. It worried Bridget half to death. What if they’d eluded the Ghosts, only for her daughter to die of some unknown malady because they’d run out of antibiotics?
And they hadn’t eluded the Ghosts, either. They still saw them on their rare foraging trips into Ullapool. The Ghosts had killed every soul in the picturesque fishing village. Now they lived in the Mariners B&B and patrolled up and down the A835. But they never came out to the coast, for whatever reason. That’s why Bridget’s group had survived.
And now, the first chance they had in months of being found and rescued, what did she do? Shoot the thing!
Which had been really daft for another reason, as well: they were down to their last crate of ammunition for the .22, and they depended for food on the rabbits that Bridget and Ted could bring in off the hills, when the sea was too rough to get any fish.
N
eed Ammo, Fishing Line, Sailcloth.
Tromping through the bracken, with the pines dripping down her neck and the jerrycans banging the small of her back, Bridget added more and more things to her imaginary list of wants from a government that no longer existed. Razors, Brillo Pads, Toilet Paper. She was mentally debating the merits of sanitary napkins vs. tampons as she squeezed through the hedge and came out onto the road at the end of Ardmair Point, where a row of caravans faced the sea loch. Her elder daughter and son raced up to her. They had heard her firing the .22. Had she got a rabbit? No rabbit? Oh, Mam. You’re a crap shot … I would have got it, said nine-year-old Ivor, puffing himself up. Morag, twelve, scoffed: you didn’t even hit that sheep the other day … Bridget smiled and rolled her eyes at her children’s competitiveness. Need Large Latte With Extra Shot, she thought. And a Chocolate Chip Muffin.
It was the little deprivations that got to you. They’d adjusted to life without any electrically powered conveniences. At the end of the day it was not a big deal to lose the power, compared to losing one’s life. They cooked on a wood stove, bathed in a tin tub, stayed warm with extra jumpers and sparing use of the propane heater. Bridget forced herself to appreciate the benefits of their medieval lifestyle. After all, she and Ted had seen this coming. They had prepared by buying the caravan, equipping it with the wood stove and a gravity-fed water filter, stuffing the trailer with essential supplies. They’d always dreamed of packing in their careers, living the simple life, getting back to their roots. Three generations under one roof ...
And there was Bridget’s biggest problem, the three generations bit.
Oh, Ted’s parents were fantastic. His father, Oliver, came to help her with the jerrycans as she plodded towards the caravan they used as a kitchen and dining-room. “Sunita’s on lookout duty,” he said. “Daisy’s having a lie-down.” Bridget forced a smile. Her mother, Daisy, spent all too many days ‘having a lie-down.’ It was partly because of the arthritis, but in her mind Bridget assigned causation for the arthritis, too, to her father.
The Nuclear Druid: A Hard Science Fiction Adventure With a Chilling Twist (Extinction Protocol Book 2) Page 12