by Simon Kewin
Feeling exposed now that they were outside, Fer concentrated on the spell she was maintaining to alter their appearance. It would fool most people glancing at them, but she knew a higher undain wouldn't be deceived. There would be cameras on them, too, watching them, capturing their images. Would her magic still work when it passed through the machines? She didn't know. They'd seen quite a few police cars on the roads, and here at the concert, there were security guards in gaudy orange tops, watching the crowds with blank expressions. But so far, no one had paid them any attention.
She glanced at Johnny. The whole situation had to be strange for him. What would happen if the people around them knew who he really was? She saw his true appearance and, overlaying him, the version of him she'd fashioned. Roughly the same height, short hair, a very different face. She'd modelled him on a lad from back home, Arik, whom she'd admired from afar. A fact which Johnny didn't have to know anything about.
“You're sure this is going to work?” she asked. “You just show them the tickets on your phone and they'll get us in?”
“So the wyrm said. VIP passes too. Stupidly expensive but apparently the dragon's acquired quite a hoard of gold trading on the internet.”
When they reached the front of the line, a guard eyed them suspiciously but waved them through when the tickets checked out. Inside, a large crowd already filled the cavernous space. Many of them sipped at drinks as they milled around or sat on the floor in little groups. Crashing music blared from somewhere, although no one was playing on the distant stage. One or two figures in black fiddled with the various bits of machinery the band would presumably use once they started. The crowds were denser toward the front; the people there standing crammed together rather than sitting. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. She could feel the anticipation coming off them like a glow.
Johnny led her through the throng to another line of security guards near the stage. After more expressionless glares they were admitted into the inner sanctum of the VIP area. This was much less crowded. Soft seats lined the walls, and food and drink were freely available. She should have been hungry but couldn't face the thought of eating.
“OK,” said Johnny. “Time to work your voodoo and get us backstage.” The archaeon hadn't been able to acquire these tickets as, apparently, they had to be on paper.
She could see the guard studying them as they approached. Other people she'd seen wore brightly-coloured necklaces. These, she assumed, were needed to grant access to the mysterious backstage, like some artefact with magical properties. In truth she couldn't conjure such things easily, especially as she didn't understand any of the words written upon the necklaces. But people she could work with. All she had to do was convince the guard they were supposed to have the necklaces and all would be well.
She strode up to him. Looking like you belonged, that you didn't expect to be turned away, was half the battle. Maintaining the glamour that hid both of them as well as working this new magic would cost her, although she wouldn't admit it to anyone.
With a blink of her eyes, she reached gently into the guard's mind and whispered quiet suggestions to him about the thoughts he really should be thinking.
For a moment, the briefest moment, she thought he wasn't going to respond, that his mind was too severe, all hard surfaces. Or that some magic or machinery protected him. Then he stirred into life. Not looking at her, he reached into a brown box beside him and picked out two of the colourful necklaces for them to take.
Resisting the temptation to thank him in the tongue of Andar, Fer nodded and took a necklace, slipping it over her head. Behind her, Johnny did the same.
Once inside, they made their way down narrow corridors around the back of the stage, past machines and lights and enough ropes to rig a hundred of the coasters that sailed in the shallows of the An.
At one point, they brushed past a group of four people dressed for the stage in bright colours and exaggerated make-up. They had to be Johnny's band mates. Fer tried not to catch their eyes. One, a woman, stopped and frowned as they hurried by, her eyes on Johnny. Had she seen something? Sensed something? The glamour was still in place but the woman must have known Johnny well. After a moment, she shrugged and moved on.
The robot Johnny stood on a platform at one side of the backstage area, its head slumped forward as if asleep. Up close it was clearly a machine, clever cogs and metal rods and wires making up its body. It looked like it could move its head and arms but that was about it. The legs were simple metal columns attached to a small platform. The hands, through, were as complex and jointed as real ones, designed to perform the intricate movements required for playing the guitar. The machine's face, lifeless and rubbery, nevertheless bore a striking similarity to Johnny.
“Hey, now that's one good looking robot,” said Johnny.
“But where's the guitar?” said Fer.
“They'll tune it and bring it out when they're ready. Can you do the hocus pocus thing to make me look like that?”
She couldn't follow the complexity of those hands. “I doubt it. Not so it looks believable.”
“So, we wait for the robot to be set up with Mr. Shankly and then do the switch. I'll bet there'll be a guard so you'll have to spoof them. Send them to a happy place while I take the place of the Terminator.”
She thought she understood. “I can probably do that. So long as the guard isn't some undain lord.”
“Nah. Probably won't be. Come on, let's lurk in the shadows until it's time. I'll show you where you can watch the gig.” He looked at her, suddenly troubled by something. “You know, back in Andar, we don't really have music like this. Nothing so loud for one thing. Are you going to cope?”
“Don't worry about me. Just make sure you get the guitar.”
She remembered his words with some bitterness when the concert finally started. It wasn't simply loud, it was deafening: a huge sound like solid rocks hurled through the air as the lights blazed into life. Instinctively she covered her ears. A passing man in black, one of those setting up the instruments, handed her something, a grin on his face. Protectors for her ears, ridiculous looking yellow hemispheres like two halves of some piece of fruit. She slipped them over her head, and the sound was immediately muffled. She stood, trying not to get in anyone's way, fascinated and intrigued, while song after song crashed over the audience.
When the concert finished and the band came off stage, Johnny, now harnessed onto the little platform in place of the robot and holding Mr. Shankly, still hadn't moved. The guard she'd bewitched stood in front of him, occasionally muttering into a little machine in his chest. She was confused. Were they not going to do this special song after all? She removed the protectors from her ears. The audience was chanting and cheering, roaring for the band to come back. People stood around waiting, expecting something to happen. It was like they knew the band would return and it was all a game. Or a part of the ceremony of the thing. She'd have to ask Johnny about it.
Then the little platform was suddenly pulled upward, and the band members reappeared. Fer decided to try without the ear protectors. The noise would be huge and terrifying, but she'd found she was starting to enjoy it, too. It vibrated in her rib cage, shook her whole body, but there was something thrilling about it. It moved her in ways she wasn't used to music moving her.
The lights went back up, and the woman who'd half-noticed Johnny earlier spoke to the crowd.
“Thank you. I honestly can't tell you how much that means. We'd like to play one more song. You probably know what it is. You may also know we used to have a guitarist called Johnny, who's no longer with us. It's strange though, sometimes I think I can feel him nearby. Maybe, who knows, if we all shout loud enough, he'll appear during this song. Let's give it a try. This one's called Beyond the Veil.”
And they were off again, the sound a solid wall of noise blasting into the audience. Half-way through, at some pre-arranged signal Fer didn't see, the noise cut out. Everyone in the audience clearly knew wha
t to expect. A sea of faces peered upward into the darkness.
There was the briefest moment of absolute quiet. Watching from the side of the stage she could feel the excitement, the anticipation, coming off them like something solid in the air.
Then lights lanced down, as bright as the sun through gaps in clouds. And there was Johnny, high up, seemingly floating in the air. More lights picked him out, making him glow.
And he began to play, so loud it made Fer jump, although the sound was sweet and clean, notes as clear as birdsong. His left hand ran up and down the neck of his guitar like some great spider as he played faster and faster. How did he remember all the notes, the movements? It was dazzling. He held her, held them all, rapt.
Fer, glancing across the stage at the other band members, saw something else, too. They knew. They stared in clear amazement, glances of confusion and delight passing between them. They could tell when it was the machine, the robot, pretending to be Johnny, and they could tell the real thing. Here he was. The long-lost, presumed-dead guitar player of Screaming Machinery, impossibly restored to them and playing the guitar, his guitar, in the air above them. For a minute or more the band were at one with the crowd. Awestruck.
Johnny descended as he played, the lights and wires cleverly arranged so that he seemed to be walking down the white beam of a spotlight. He passed directly over the audience, playing all the time. A round platform had been set up at the back of the crowd, on top of the fenced-off area where people sat pressing buttons and watching screens, presumably controlling all the dazzling lights and smoke and noise. People in the crowd reached up to try and touch him as he floated over their heads, still playing.
He touched down, struck the final few screaming notes of his solo, and then the rest of the band came crashing in, drums and more guitars and singing, all a vast roaring din as lights blazed on the stage once more.
Fer couldn't stop herself from covering her ears, but everyone else waved their arms or jumped up and down. Even one or two of the security guards. They shouted and laughed their delight even though their voices couldn't be heard. There was a sense of something unexpected coming from them: beyond joy or adulation. A sense of being part of something. Something wonderful. Something bigger than they were.
This world continued to amaze her. Odd delights turned up in surprising places. That sense of togetherness, of submerging yourself into the greater whole. She recognized it. It was something she'd always been wary of, although now she understood something of the joy and power of it. Because the only word she could really find to describe what she was witnessing was coven.
She was tempted to stay, enjoy the moment. But it was time to leave. She slipped past the security guards protecting the backstage area from invaders, through the VIP area, and out into the crowd. It was easy enough to weave down the side of the room with everyone pushing forward to be near the stage or Johnny's platform.
Johnny was facing the crowd and stage as he continued to play Beyond the Veil. Fer watched as he took his hand from the guitar during a pause and waved to them all. Simply waved. And she knew without needing to be told that the robot he'd replaced never did this. Couldn't do this. This was Johnny saying to them all, Hi, yes, it's me. Here I am. And also, because she knew what was coming, thanks and goodbye.
Then the song ended in a huge crescendo and the lights cut out. The roar from the crowd swelled to fill the void. Fer pushed to the back of the fenced-off area, where more guards stood to keep people away. The crowd was sparse here because the stage wasn't visible. She only had a moment before Johnny appeared.
Closing her eyes to summon the magic, she reworked the glamour on his appearance, altering him before anyone saw him coming down. She was weary from the sustained effort of it, grateful for the blank expression she needed to reproduce. Believable faces were the hardest part of this spell. Nevertheless, between the new magic and maintaining her own appearance, she experienced a moment of dizziness and nausea. The floor lurched sideways and threatened to tip her off. She tried to ignore it. This was how it was when she worked magic. But everything depended on her getting this right.
Johnny appeared. She saw him clearly as he really was: the daft grin on his face, the straggly hair. The look of pure joy in his eyes. But she also saw the form she'd given him: one more security guard, powerfully-built, grim-faced. Across his back, where the guitar was really, a black backpack. She'd done it. Now they only had to creep away and get back to the Cathedral.
The hand that grasped her arm from behind was iron-cruel. “Don't move, little witch-bitch. Or I will eat you alive.”
16. The Lizard King
Fer twisted around, desperate to pull herself free from the undain that had seized her. There could be no doubt this was a horror from Angere come to this world. Its mind was an emptiness where it should have glowed with light, and the sense of malign wrongness coming from the creature made her sick. It was a walking corpse, a devourer of others' lives. And it had hold of her.
For a moment, the crowds, the guards, Johnny, everything faded. There was only her and the creature. She met its gaze, and recognition flashed through her. She knew this undain. She had met it before. That same handsome face and raven-black hair. On the banks of the An one bright morning, walking north with the spice merchant Merdoc. Memories she'd blotted out, partly from the pain she'd experienced, partly from something else. Hellen had asked her more than once to try and recall what had happened, how it was she'd killed the flying undain. The memories she'd buried since then rushed back bright and clear…
The undain horror approached Andar after its long, impossible flight over the waters. It was clearly exhausted, its movements broken and ragged. Between each pained beat of its wings it dropped farther and farther from the sky. For a moment she thought it wasn't going to make it; that the waters of the An would swallow it, sweep the horror away and leave Andar untainted. But with one desperate effort, the creature lunged for the wooded bank. Coming, so it seemed to Fer, directly for her. She stepped back into the shadows of the boughs. She would have to face the nightmare. There was no one else. The winged creature was half-dead, but the undain on its back, the rider, watched her with cold malevolence. A tall, raven-haired man, impossibly beautiful, one hand on the flying beast's reins, another held aloft as if preparing some magic to hurl at her.
Unbidden, unexpected, words whispered to Fer as a girl rose to her lips. Her family's secret. A story, or a guilty truth, or a nonsense rhyme. No one knew which. Words she'd repeated until she knew them by heart. Words that made no sense to her, alien sounds in an alien tongue. Their meaning had been lost over the centuries even if their importance wasn't. A secret passed down through the generations, whispered in the darkness from mother to daughter, father to son. Remember this. Tell no one else.
Had she spoken the words purely out of fear and shock? Or had she known, somehow, that they needed to be said? That here, finally, was the moment?
The creature crashed to the bank, half of its bony grey body still in the water. It still lived, its jaws a gaping hole of serrated bone teeth, snapping at her. The syllables tasted like iron spikes in Fer's mouth as she hurled them at the clashing, snarling horror.
The cost to her was great. There was strong magic to the words, magic of a sort she didn't understand, magic far removed from the gentle coaxings and persuasions the witches used. Pain tore through her and she screamed, terrified she had done some fatal damage to herself. The creature screamed too, an agonized, mindless roar of despair.
The world faded as Fer lost consciousness, her mind fleeing the pain. Dimly she was aware of the rider, the undain lord, leaping from the stricken creature's back and hurrying away, leaving the winged beast to its fate. She couldn't let either escape into Andar. She had to slay both of the nightmares before they could sully the land she loved.
She tried to fight off the fog engulfing her. Pursue the rider. Protect Merdoc. Protect everyone. But it was no use. The terrible words had exacted the
ir price. The undain lord, its shape already altering into something smaller and hunched, disappeared into the trees toward Merdoc and his cart. The winged creature, with one final clash of its sawed-bone jaws, crashed to the ground and died. And Fer fell to the ground with it…
The undain in the concert hall spoke again, its grip on Fer's arm tightening. “We meet again, witch whore spawn of Ilminion. If I'd known who you were when we met last time you wouldn't be alive now. You'd be strung from a hook in the dungeons of the White City, holy blood dripping from your carcass.”
Did the undain know what she'd done to the winged creature on the bank? What magic she'd wrought? The words rose to her lips once again. She had no other weapon. In desperation, she spat the syllables at the creature, careless of the cost to herself. A tearing pain cut through her, but she wouldn't relent.
The shock on the face of the undain was clear. It thought she'd worked some mundane magic by the river, some weak witch's incantation. It didn't think she could do it any real harm. Didn't know about the family secret passed down to Fer from her distant forebears.
The undain screamed. It struggled as if she had it pinned down. It tried to resist the magic she'd thrown. This undain was far more powerful. It wavered and writhed, its features fluid for a moment.
“Vile abomination,” it rasped, its voice rough. “You'll pay for that.”
The creature's human appearance was reasserting itself. She knew what she had to do. The family secret wasn't just the words. There was another element. The blood. Our blood. Ignoring the pain of it, Fer bit into the soft inside of her own cheek. The metallic taste filled her mouth. She spat her blood at the undain's face, then threw the foul words at it for a second time.
This time the effect was immediate. With an agonized scream, the creature faltered and began to melt. The hard features it had adopted sank into formless grey flesh. It collapsed to the ground, writhing in its agony. For a moment she saw the dog-like animal Cait had described, then the man again, then a broken mess of bone and muscle and ancient, string-like sinews. After a moment it was still.