Sixth glances sideways at Adjutant of Second. “We need a detour, I’m not waiting for that to cool down before we advance,” she says. “See to it.” Adjutant of Second salutes: ten minutes later the cavalry column re-forms and is moving again, bypassing the burning rubble of the Arndale Shopping Centre and smashing a path through suburban Headingley in the direction of Woodhouse Moor—the shortest route into the city center.
Meanwhile, three kilometers away in the aforementioned city center, college students Ami Goldsmith and Jan Baker are applying the finishing touches to their makeup before they head for the Animation Festival. They’re sharing a cramped Travelodge room with a couple of friends who are crashing in sleeping bags. They’ve come up from Sheffield for a weekend of videos, cosplay, and partying: they’re young, mostly broke, and so intent on making the best of their time that nobody complained when Jan’s phone alarm woke them all at seven.
This morning is a big event: the main screen is due to show the first two episodes of Book Three of Legend of Korra: Change starting at ten—at least, that’s the excited rumor that’s been going round—and nobody wants to miss it. Ami’s cosplaying Kya, and Jan—well, Jan’s much Galadriel, very pre-Raphaelite, wow, as her ironically detached hipster friend Gilbert would say. Which is maybe why he’s back in Sheffield polishing his unicycle this weekend.
“You ready yet?” Piglet demands intensely. She’s bouncing up and down on her toes like an impatient ferret, all black-eyed manic intensity. “We’ll be late!”
“No we won’t,” Jan assures her, smiling stiffly as she shakes out the dagged sleeves of her dress. “Ami? Got your tickets?”
“It’s Kya!” she insists, reaching unconsciously for the leather belt-purse she found in a charity shop the week before last. “Yes.”
“Well come on then!” Piglet is vibrating with energy. Eight thirty and she hasn’t had any coffee—or breakfast, breakfast is extra and they’ve agreed to hit a Greggs or McDonald’s after the showing for an early lunch, penny wise—and hunger makes her tetchy.
“Oh all right . . .”
They get as far as the lobby of the hotel before they realize something is wrong. The breakfast bar in the restaurant is closed, but it’s full of people—out-of-town festival-goers and a couple of very hungover stag-night parties, all talking at the tops of their lungs. The receptionist is out from behind the counter and flapping around before the front doors, which are shut. Outside the streets are deserted, but for a flicker of red and blue emergency lights.
“What’s going on?” shouts Ami.
“I don’t know!” Piglet heads directly for the lobby doors and is intercepted by Miss Front Desk, who is looking increasingly rumpled and desperate in spite of her company uniform. “What’s going on?” she demands.
“You can’t go out! The police say there’s some sort of emergency outside and the whole city center is cordoned off. I’m on my own here! Day shift hasn’t been able to get in, that’s why the kitchen’s closed.” The woman is about their age and has been hung out to dry on her own, to keep a lid on roughly two hundred guests as they wake up on a Sunday morning and discover that breakfast, beer, and Legend of Korra are no longer options.
Ami comes up behind Piglet, who is looking nonplussed and increasingly irritated. “You can’t go out,” repeats Miss Front Desk, “it’s not safe—”
Behind her back one of the stag-night parties makes a bid for freedom. Four lads in hoodies and jogging bottoms emblazoned with BATLEY NIGHT OUT duck around her back and shove the powered sliding doors open. Two of them stroll out into the drop-off area up front: “Hey, tha’s talking bullshit!” one shouts back at Miss Front Desk, as she stands in the doorway calling them back.
“Stand aside, miss,” says another lad—improbably polite, Ami realizes—then he pushes her aside and shoves through the door himself. “Wait up!” he calls to his mates as they head towards Briggate and the city center beyond.
“Come on,” Jan murmurs to Ami, “they’re right, this is bullshit. You can’t lock everyone in a hotel with no food, ey? And Piglet’s right, we don’t want to miss—” They drift along in the flow of bodies emptying through the open front doors—
There is no traffic.
Ami twitches and grabs Jan’s arm. “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” Jan seems bemused: or maybe she’s just getting in character. She walks left, along the curving street that leads towards the dock and the conference center where the festival is being held.
“Where are the frigging buses?” Ami hisses.
“Buses?” Jan takes a step back. Piglet stops dead in the middle of the pavement.
“Ami, are you all right?” Piglet asks. Then she follows Ami’s gaze in the direction of the bus station. “Uh.” She starts to frown. There’s a vibration in the ground like distant underground trains. Overhead, the sky is completely clear, a vacant blue bowl unblemished by the surgical tracery of jet contrails. She sees flashing blue lights in the distance, stationary, abandoned, nobody else in sight. No police, no firemen. No buses.
“They must be filming a movie or something,” Piglet rationalizes. “They do that early in the morning on weekends, don’t they? When nobody’s about. They stop the traffic—”
Smoke rises in the distance. Somewhere out towards the edge of town a building is burning, but the breeze is carrying the smell and smoke away from them. The drumming underfoot isn’t going away, it’s getting more intense, as if they’re trespassing on the tracks and an express train is hurtling towards them.
“I don’t like this,” Ami’s voice catches in her throat. “Something is wrong and I am going back to bed until it’s over.” She starts to turn towards the hotel doors, now almost sixty meters behind them, and pauses.
A torrent of magic has crested the top of Vicar Lane and is flooding downhill on a thunder of hooves.
Nightmarish knots of light writhe and glow around the column of mounted knights in silvery armor, who sit astride giant chargers with mad-eyed blue stares and vicious spiral horns. They ride five abreast down the four-lane-wide high street, holding maces with green-glowing heads that spit sparks of lethal lightning.
Ami freezes. An idiot lyric from her granddad’s CD collection repeats in her head: Guided by the beauty of our weapons, guided by this birthmark on our skin—
Around her people are screaming and falling, some of them writhing in tetanic spasms, others doubled-over and projectile vomiting. Ami is one of the few unaffected, blessed by an accident of heredity with some natural resistance to the Host’s glamour. All she can see is the terrible beauty of the onrushing nemeses, and the instinctive apprehension that it would be a really bad idea to be standing here when they arrive, to be standing anywhere in sight while all around her are dying—
She grabs for Jan’s hand. “Run!” she shouts. Jan is rooted to the spot, shuddering and gaping as if she’s touched a live wire. Ami tugs and tugs: finally Jan stumbles and nearly falls, then begins to limp alongside her, dull-eyed and panting.
Ami looks over her shoulder, then forward at the hotel doorway, which is clear. Forty meters to go. The nearest riders are between a hundred and two hundred meters away, slowing and diffusing into the side streets as they face off towards the hill with the big government building and the Playhouse on it. At the top of the hill, smoke begins to pour from the roof of the Odeon, and to either side of the riders the shops lining the street erupt in pale flames. She can feel the heat on her face as she turns back towards the hotel. “Let go,” Jan whines, tugging her hand free, “I’m going to be sick—”
Ami feels her friend’s fingers slide through her grip. She hesitates for a moment, then cold terror grips her and she breaks into a run. The CCTV camera under the awning over the hotel door is rotating towards the high street. She reaches the doorway and darts inside, then turns to shout encouragement to Jan: “It’s only ten meters and there’
s a toilet in the lobby, silly—”
Galadriel flashes quicksilver-bright and explodes before her eyes: an echoing flicker like flashbulbs going off saturates the lobby with the terrible light of a hundred human candles, until a patchwork of retinal purple blocks her vision completely. All across the death ground around the foot of Quarry Hill bodies are bursting into flame: from the spearhead squadron led by Sixth of Second Battalion to hungover stag-night tourists and pointy-eared anime fans. SCORPION STARE’s targeting neural network has given up discriminating friend from foe, and decided to kill them all and leave it to whatever gods machines have faith in to sort them out.
* * *
The world flashes black around Alex as he leaps at Cassie. Her expression is frozen in shock, gradually twisting into indignation—the obvious misinterpretation of his move—as he ploughs into her shoulder-first. He manages to curl an arm around her head as they fall and, falling, he mumbles his final trigger word. A ring on Cassie’s left hand flares crimson with a laser-speckle of coherent light, building up a spike of energy. His blindsight tells him that behind them Highest Liege is raising a mace which is carrying a monstrous charge, an aviation canon to Cassie’s handgun. The alfär are stupidly wasteful, throwing raw thaum currents at each other as if they don’t understand the elegant mathematical underpinnings of magic: How inelegant, his inner detached observer thinks scornfully as the new macro he triggered begins to count up from zero.
“Get off—” Cassie begins to struggle. She’s strong, but Alex is a PHANG and he’s on top and he’s not afraid to push back, locking his knee and elbow joints and using his weight to hold her down.
“Keep down,” Alex hisses in English.
Behind them, First Liege chuckles. The skin in the small of his back tries to crawl right off his spine because he’s heard that kind of laughter before, from Basil a moment before the lights came up, and all bets are off if First Liege wants Cassie dead more than she wants to add another PHANG to her string—
But the macro has now reached double digits and the voices in his head are beginning to react to a cacophony of incoming feeders and he knows it’s working.
Cassie goes limp beneath him and he shoves his face against her neck and tries not to imagine what it would be like to bite his way through her sweet-smelling skin to the febrile, panic-juddery arterial pulse of blood. (Never mind what she says about high-caste People being immunized against V syndrome, he can imagine how it would feel, his lover’s blood entering his soul, filling the hole in his heart: and he shudders with need.)
“Get off her, Magus.” First Liege uses the imperative-command case and Alex’s limbs jerk spasmodically despite his best efforts to control them—
But the feeders are arriving, one by one, responding to the summoning wrapped in the counter macro that he just triggered. Calling a single eater is a trivial exercise, so minor that any CS undergraduate can master it in a couple of hours. (Surviving the summoning is a trickier matter.) Summoning up 65,535 of the fuckers is also trivial, if somewhat inadvisable: you just wrap your summon-an-eater macro in a loop counter, much like the loop you wrote earlier as a wrapper around the crowbar that unlatches your V-symbiotes’ attention from a pile of spilled sugar granules, one by one. It’s called automation, suckers. Surviving the attention of (216-1) eaters without first making sure you’re safely inside a well-prepared summoning grid is not an intern-ready task, and protecting your girlfriend at the same time raises it to do-not-try-this-at-home levels of inadvisability, or maybe a thesis defense: but Alex is not sanguine about either of their chances of surviving a psychotic dragon queen’s attentions. So he shoves his tongue against Cassie’s neck, seeking the closest contact he can get short of blood-to-blood, and prays that three different leave-me-alone macros and the presence of a bunch of hungry territorial V-parasites will keep the eaters away from her and that he’s got enough self-control not to lose his shit completely, because she’s the most delicious thing he’s ever smelled in his life, and, and, focus: friend not food, focus!
There’s a fierce scream, cut off abruptly, and a flare of power behind him that feels like a giant oven door opening. The side of the tent in front of him disappears in blinding daylight. A deafening cicada chorus of mindless voices yelling hunger reverberates through his skull. Cassie tenses up, quivering with terror or fury or both. The edge of daylight burns closer and closer as the buzzing swarm of hunger descends. A couple of hoarse gasps come from First Liege’s body as she resists, her will-to-power straining to hold back the tide of the eaters. There are a couple of percussive bangs and something hot bounces off Alex’s back: it’s probably a protective charm or ward cooking off.
In the corner of his vision, an hourglass full of salt grains trickles up, not down, as the eater-summoning macro counts its way through a busy loop that might take as long as ten seconds—Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it’s semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty—but then the hourglass inverts. Jagged shards of glass scream in Alex’s ears as the eaters are torn from their feast one by one and sent packing in reverse order of summoning.
“What’s. Going. On,” Cassie hisses angrily, but Alex doesn’t dare break skin contact for long enough to tell her, not while there are more than 60,000 transient parasites passing through his focus, embodied in his mind’s eye as desiccating white crystals. She bucks and heaves under him, pushing his head dangerously close to the line of daylight. “What did you why hasn’t she killed us wait what’s this why do I feel so—”
The eaters take longer to banish than to summon, but the last of them finally flicker out of his perception, buzzing and turgidly replete. Alex closes his eyes and forces himself to pull his tongue away from her throat. He’s weak-kneed with hunger, or desire, or a questionable titer of both. The mindless keening of the V-parasites is deafening and his limbs feel like lead as he pushes himself off her. “Eaters,” he gasps, rolling on his back and trying to sit up: “I had to keep skin contact to protect you.”
What’s left of First Liege lies in the shadows of the back half of the pavilion, black and withered as a slug that has died in a dish of salt: wisps of smoke rise from her curled limbs.
Cassie pushes herself to her feet, looking dazed and very angry. “If you ever do that to me again”—she bends over the body and deftly pulls the mace from a mummified claw—“I will—” She blinks, and bites back indignation. “WhatWhat?”
“I’m hungry.” Alex takes a deep breath. Then another. “I need blood. Also cover. Then we need to run.”
“Run?” In the sudden silence Cassie’s eyes widen. “What did you do?”
“Your father took my phone.” Alex looks her in the eye. She’s lovely: I could gobble her right up, part of him thinks. “Do the People have GPS? Or drones?”
“No, but the air defense—” Cassie blinks and finds her feet abruptly fascinating. “Let’s get you fed and clothed.”
“Where is he?” Alex wraps his arms around his stomach, trying not to rock with the force of the hunger pangs.
“He’ll be with the—” She stops and takes aim as two guards clatter around the back of the tent. “Halt and obey the Heir of the All-Highest,” she commands, in the same voice of authority that set Alex’s hair on end when her father used it. The guards freeze. “Oh my,” Cassie says in English for his benefit, her face slowly brightening into a luminous smile. “I could get used to this.” She points at the guards. “Step inside. Do not look at this magus—man. Remove your helmet.” The guards seem hesitant, stumbling as if drunk. “I order you to disarm and kneel!”
The words batter at Alex’s ears like brass gongs, and he’s not even the subject of their terrible imperative. The soldier Cassie pointed at slumps slightly, knees going out from under him. The other turns as if to run and Cassie begins to raise her mace, but before she points it at him he collapses like a p
uppet with its strings cut. Blood trickles from his nose and ears, but Alex can tell instantly that it’s no good for him: V-parasites can’t eat the dead.
He watches, woozy with hunger, as she pulls the kneeling soldier’s helmet off and pushes his head down towards the ground sheet in front of his feet. “Eat, dammit,” she snaps. Frustration rises in her voice: “Why are you standing there? What are you waiting for, why won’t you feed?”
Alex watches himself as from a great distance while he shuffles over to the kneeling sacrifice and crouches close to the rushing, frightened pulse—
I can’t do this, he thinks despairingly. The kneeling man is paralyzed like a mouse beneath a venomous snake. When you’re dying your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes, but Alex finds that in this situation he stands witness to someone else’s life. Not a good life, perhaps, but not a life nearing its end in a hospice bed, riddled with cancer or dying of dementia: this is a healthy adult in his prime, with many years ahead, who kneels terrified before him with throat bared. I’m not a murderer—
“Alex,” Cassie says, close to his ear, “if you won’t do this, we’re both going to die here. I can’t carry you.” There is a tiny quaver in her voice as she adds, “And I’m not leaving without you.”
Shock rushes through him. Then disbelief. She’s bluffing. Isn’t she? Then embarrassment. It’s blackmail! Then pragmatism: He’s an enemy soldier and if he wasn’t under her geas he’d be trying to kill us both—
“Just do it. Blame me. We can work it out later, YesYes? But I won’t let you die here—”
Alex blanks. When he opens his eyes again, his mouth is full of warm wet love and he has a painfully sensitive erection: the V-parasites are crooning their satisfaction in his ears.
The Nightmare Stacks Page 41