Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  Donnchla said, “And now there’s nothing you can do about it, Alyx, eh? He’s bathed in the River of Sticks. You should have thought it through.”

  “He’s only wee! Would you have had me let him die?”

  They walked faster after that, Alyx setting a furious pace. The fog got darker. Ran had been able to see Conn in the lead before and now he could only see the reflective Overwhelm patch sewn on the back of Conn’s rucksack.

  “Can’t we stop for a while?” Gerry said. “My feet’re killing me, Alyx.”

  “You want to stop? You want to let the Hunt catch up with us?”

  Val said, “The Hunt?”

  “Whatever you want to call them. The hounds of Hell, that’s my mother’s name for them. When you’re in a car, you can be in and out before they know you’re here. But now we’ve been here too long. They’ll be onto us. Catching up.”

  Her anxiety affected them all. They hustled on in silence until Liam, in the rear, shouted, “I can hear them.”

  Soon Ran could hear them, too. When he was with Piers in the forest, they had sounded as if they were singing. Now they were clearly howling. The eerie noise grew louder.

  Ragherty crouched in front of Ran—”Get on my back!” And then they were all running and the hounds kept pace with them, invisible in the dark, howling their eerie song. Alyx shrieked: “Don’t leave the road! Don’t leave the fucking road,” and then she stopped. Everyone stopped. Ragherty set Ran down.

  Ahead, there were no more cobbles. Only weeds.

  Pinpoints of red blinked in the dark. Ran shrank against Ragherty’s side.

  The hounds of Hell moved, closing into a semicircle ahead of the travellers.

  “They can’t cross the road,” Alyx said. “The old straight road. My mother told me.”

  “Yeah, well, they are crossing it!” Gerry screamed.

  Could I kill them?

  Do I dare to try?

  Ran gripped the hilt of the Worldcracker, mustering his courage.

  Water splattered his face. Rain bucketed down, soaking them. Thunder rumbled, as if there were another pack of hounds hunting them through the sky.

  “Oh no,” Alyx muttered. “Rain means the Hunter is coming. He’s my mother’s worst enemy. I don’t want to meet him. I really don’t.”

  “Then fucking do something!” Conn shouted.

  Lightning cracked in the sky. Visible for the first time, the hounds of Hell were the size of cows. Their huge haunches coiled under chiseled flanks. Snaggleteeth crammed their muzzles. They surrounded the group on three sides, so close that Ran could smell their stink.

  “Mum!” Alyx screamed. “Mother! Mum! I need you!”

  Nothing happened.

  “Mum! Help, help, help!”

  Thunder grumbled. The lightning lit the dim silhouette of a rise in the ground, and over it came flying a bird. The bird seemed to take a long time to reach them; the next bolt of lightning showed it scarcely bigger. Ran’s perspective shifted. He realized that the rise in the ground was a mountain peak, poking through the fog in the distance, and the bird was the size of a dragon.

  The hounds of Hell yelped and cringed when the giant bird flapped over their heads. It landed on the road and became a woman. She snapped her fingers at the hounds. They fled, at first on four legs, then picked themselves up and ran away on two.

  “Yes, run!” the woman shouted after them. “This is my land! Tell your master to fuck off out of it!”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t trespass on your territory if you were actually here, instead of playing the fine lady at Castle Galway,” Alyx said, recovering fast.

  The woman smiled and straightened her skirt. She was wearing a bogus army uniform with a very low cleavage. “More fun than hiding in the mountains like you, darling.”

  Ran edged behind Ragherty.

  “As a matter of fact, I was in the middle of something, so …” The woman scanned Alyx, eyebrows hiked up like question marks. “You do look a fright.” Her gaze snagged on the bits of Ran that stuck out from behind Ragherty. “Who’s that?”

  Reluctantly, Ran shuffled forwards. “C-C-Cousin Dierdre.” It really was her. Dierdre with the lovely voice that said horrid things. Dierdre, whom Ran’s mother had once, when she thought Ran wasn’t listening, called a shameless gold-digger.

  What’s she doing here?

  “Ran! By all that’s unholy. Do you know your brother’s about to go to war for you? I’m actually helping him to plan it. What a disappointment it would be if it got called off at the last moment.” Dierdre turned back to Alyx. “Darling, perhaps you could hold onto Ran for a while? And don’t let anyone know you’ve got him.”

  “He’s coming with me to Belfast, anyway.”

  “What of these others? You I know, you, and you … who are you?”

  “I don’t think we’ve met before, m’lady,” Val said evenly. “Honored.”

  Dierdre raised her eyebrows. “Honestly, the company you keep, darling. I didn’t give you the gift of the River of Sticks so that you could waste it on every Jed and Jimmy in Belfast.”

  “Then why did you give it to me, Mum? Do you even know yourself?”

  “Because I love you,” Dierdre said, and Ran thought of his own mother, who always said it in that same way, carelessly, without looking straight at you, so as not to have to see your face.

  “Fuck off, Mum,” Alyx said, clenching her fists.

  Ran sidled towards Alyx. “Please don’t let’s talk to her anymore,” he whispered. “Please let’s just go!” He knew what he had to do now. He had to get out of here and warn Guy and Mother that Cousin Dierdre was not what they thought she was. She was not human.

  “Wait. Ran.”

  Unwillingly, he turned to face Dierdre.

  “What’s that?”

  She was looking at the Worldcracker.

  “Let me see it.”

  He wanted to draw the Worldcracker and hit her with it. Kill her dead like the Shackler. The strength of the impulse terrified him. He pulled the sword out of his belt and showed it at her, hilt first.

  “Ta,” she said, and grabbed it. She thrust it through her high-fashion arms belt.

  They all stared at her, stricken.

  “Give that back to him!” The voice came from the fog beyond the road. “It’s not yours for the taking, my lady.”

  “Piers!” Ran screamed.

  He dashed past Dierdre and threw his arms around his brother. Piers felt bony, and he looked crumpled, like the suit of armor their great-great-grandfather had been killed in, which was still displayed in the Old Keep, rents and all. But he held himself erect, and he said to Dierdre, “Give that back to my brother.”

  Dierdre laughed. “Make me.”

  “Ran,” Alyx called. “Ran, come here. That’s a ghost. We don’t mix with them.”

  Piers glanced at her with icy condescension. “What are you doing with these people, Ran? You’re the Lord Protector of Ireland, the heir of House Sauvage. They have grossly insulted your person and your House. Don’t make friends with them, hmm?”

  “I’m not—I mean, they—Piers, don’t let her take the Worldcracker!”

  “Well?” Piers said to Dierdre. “It’ll do you no good, you know. It’s his. No one else can wield it.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Dierdre said. “These things aren’t as black and white as you English like to believe.”

  Piers’s lips twitched. “Philosophy, from you?”

  “I was worshipped as a goddess once,” Dierdre said. Her lovely voice changed. Now it sounded high and buzzy, like flies whining around a piece of meat left out in the sun. “Men laid their spoils before me. They slaughtered thousands in my name. I led armies and won undying victories. For my greater glory, the flower of Ireland went down, down, down to the cold land. My land.” She gestured around the barren landscape with a slow elegant sweep of her hand. “Here too thou’lt linger at my pleasure, who wert once a lord.”

  “Bollocks,” Piers
said. “I was baptized. I shall stay here as long as I like, but not at your pleasure. The days are past when you could command men to your will. Now the only man you can command is Cyril Argent. Rather a comedown, I must say.” He laughed in Dierdre’s face. Ran had never loved or admired him more. “Now give back the Worldcracker—demon!”

  “I will not,” Dierdre said. “Begone!”

  She leapt at Piers, knocking Ran over. Everyone shouted. Something melon-shaped, with a long tail, bounced past. Dierdre ran after it and kicked it again. Piers chased it, half-leaping and half-falling, reaching blindly ahead of him with both hands. He was headless. His neck stuck up a couple of inches from his shoulders, still adorned with that jaunty green scarf.

  Ran dragged air into his lungs and screamed.

  “See you in London!” Dierdre shrieked. She laughed—a harsh, mirthless caw—and jumped into the air, spreading ragged black wings.

  38

  Leonie

  Two Days Later. November 27th, 1979. Oughterard, County Galway

  Leonie climbed the path as high as it went, and then climbed further. She circled above a concrete picnic pavilion where a few locals were eating chips out of newspapers, despite the cold. Pushing between gorse bushes and the crooked elbows of blackthorn, stepping around sumps of toilet paper and empty lager cans, she reached the top of the little hill.

  Everywhere was a hill in Ireland, and every hill had greater ones overtopping it, up to the dark cloud slicing off the snow-capped head of Ben Corr.

  In the valley between Leonie and Ben Corr, the town of Oughterard lay like a crushed snail.

  She picked gorse needles out of her jeans, her face set against the wind. She did not want to drive into Oughterard.

  It had taken them almost two days to get here. Their trip on the car ferry had been terrifying, but as it turned out that had been the easy part. The Mini had broken down not twenty miles from Cork, defeating Leonie’s hopes that the engine would hold out at least a week. She’d managed to nurse it as far as the nearest village, but she’d had to pay seventy quid to get it bodged back into running condition, and that had eaten up a whole day. Luckily the bloke at the garage had been a boss-eyed old fart, approximately a thousand years old.

  It wasn’t him she was worried about. It was Lady Elspeth. Who had heard Madelaine talking about Oughterard.

  Leonie looked down at the wayside shrine where she’d parked. The shrine sat in a cutting atop the last hill before the town. From here, the road swept down through a roundabout and past a shopping center.

  Turn around, she thought. Get back on the minor roads. Box around the town and approach from the north, they won’t be expecting us to come that way.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing. She climbed back down towards the shrine, a half-barrel chapel built out from a concave rock face overhung by brambles. Pilgrims queued outside the chapel, and no wonder: it looked like no one was charging. Free saints that actually had virtue in them were few and far between these days. She heard the ting, ting of prayer timers, and shouts of thanksgiving. People were getting healed in there.

  She caught herself wondering if it would be worthwhile hauling Sam across the water to see this saint. Then she put the thought back in the locked box where it belonged.

  On this side of the shrine there were public loos and a rest house, where successful pilgrims could sleep off their cures if they hadn’t got anyone to drive them home. On the other side, a row of stalls trailed around the parking lot, selling fish and chips, bread-filled sausages, deep-fried chocolate bars, and souvenirs. The Mini was parked in the middle of the lot.

  A black car came up the hill from Oughterard and turned into the parking lot. Leonie watched two men get out. Swollen upper bodies in black leather bomber jackets, sun-gigs, heads cropped nearly bald. They started across the parking-lot towards the shrine, bodybuilder thighs rubbing together.

  Here we are, then. It’s the Invisible Men.

  Folk in Ireland called MI5 the Invisible Men because they were always as obvious as a bulldog’s bollocks.

  They’ve caught up with us.

  She veered behind the rest house. Her trainers squelched into the muck, sodden by runoff from a gutter pipe.

  The first Invisible Man went into the loos.

  She squeezed between the rest house and the cliff. There was just enough of a crack for her to get around the other end.

  The second Invisible Man stood smoking a cigarette, idly observing the queue of pilgrims.

  His mate came out of the loos, hitching his jeans.

  Leonie walked fast, casually, towards the parking-lot. They had not seen her face, only her back. She put a clump of people between them. A tour bus had just rolled up. When she got around that, she started jogging.

  Madelaine and Fiona were not in the car.

  Leonie wheeled. The princess sauntered towards her, carrying the baby. A red balloon bobbled from a string around Fiona’s wrist. A Present from St. Aoife of the Blessed Virgin, it said in sparkly lettering.

  “I just thought I’d take Fifi to see the goldfish,” Madelaine said. “There’s a little man selling them over there: catch your own, to keep in a bowl or add to a fry-up, I suppose. And then I bought her a balloon. I don’t see how even you can object to that.”

  “Get in the car. Now!”

  The balloon bobbled in front of Leonie’s face. She slapped it over the back of the seats and started the engine.

  “Is something wrong?” Madelaine finally sounded alarmed.

  Leonie backed out of the space, U-turned, and pointed the Tiny towards the road. “MI5.” She jerked her chin at the black car. The license started with a 1 for London. “Don’t look!”

  The Invisible Men were sauntering back towards their car. Madelaine had the sense to keep her head lowered. She was wearing Leonie’s sweatshirt with the hood up to hide her face. Two women and a baby in a clapped-out car with Cork plates (she’d switched them at the garage). No one’d ever give them a second glance … except the people who were looking for them.

  “Why are we going this way?”

  Leonie had swerved back the way they came.

  “They came from Oughterard. They’re already there. We’d be pinged the minute we got into town.”

  “We have to go into Oughterard! My father said she lives near here.”

  “I’m not staying on this road, either.” Leonie slung the road atlas into Madelaine’s lap. “See if you can find a route that’ll get us around the town.”

  Madelaine limply opened the atlas. Fiona seized a page and ripped half of it out. “Oh, God!” Madelaine shouted, prying the crumpled paper out of the baby’s fist.

  The rearview mirror remained uncluttered. Leonie took the first turnoff anyway, her heart banging. She drove between scruffy hedges, and there was a road sign embedded in a clump of hawthorn, so old that its post was striped in rust-flecked MacConn colors. Lough Inagh 6 ¾, it said.

  Lough Inagh.

  Leonie said it out loud in her head.

  Lowena.

  “Lowena!” she whooped. “Your Highness, we’ve found it! We’re there!”

  “Lowena?”

  “Lough Inagh. Say it with the Irish pronounciation. Lowena. Good old Floyd.” She swung the Tiny onto the turn-off. “This’ll get us out of the Invisible Men’s way, anyhow.”

  Madelaine leaned her head against the window and sighed. Fiona ripped another fistful of pages out of the road atlas.

  Pitted with potholes, the road climbed out of the valley where Oughterard lay. Leonie prayed the car didn’t break down again. At last, topping a rise, she saw the dull glint of water.

  She braked on the shoulder of the next rise, which was hardly distinguishable from the road at this point—grass without potholes, as opposed to with. “I’m going to do a quick appreciation before we go any farther.” She took the Z4. She didn’t like leaving it in the car with Madelaine. Didn’t like carrying it openly, either. It was small enough
to stuff under her coat if she had to, but she’d look like a woman with a machine-gun stuffed under her coat. Top of her wish list was a sidearm. Right up there with a clandestine pick-up organized by Madelaine’s friends on the Continent. That is, if the gormless cow had any.

  She angled away from the road, scrambled to within a few yards of the crest, then got down and crawled, the Z4 bumping under her chest. Damp grass tickled her chin. She smelled sorrel. She peeked over the skyline.

  A lake flexed under the wind’s invisible buffing rag. Hills fell sheer to the water at the north end. The road curved around the near end and climbed over rough pasture to a cluster of houses, a church standing on a separate little knoll. Higher up behind the village, an old pithead. Leonie yearned for binoculars. But even from here, the place looked uninhabited. No color relieved the grey stone of the terraced cottages, except for a spot of white at the lower end of the village, which could have been a dead sheep. The church was ruined.

  She waited five minutes. Nothing moved except a few crows.

  She returned to the car and relayed her observations to Madelaine.

  “Uninhabited? I’m afraid that’s nothing out of the ordinary,” Madelaine sighed. “The Sauvages have been confiscating the land of what was once the MacConn Corporation for decades. Daddy did make a policy of financing local enterprise. But apparently a lot of the Sauvages’ bondsknights are awful crooks, so the money doesn’t trickle down as it’s meant to. It’s all so futile.”

  “Well, we’re here now. We might as well take a look around.”

  “I suppose.”

  Leonie coaxed the Mini along the lakeside ruts. In a couple of places she thought she saw tyre tracks, but rain had washed away any clear sign. As they approached the village, she saw that someone had been here more recently than the nineteenth century, anyway. That spot of white was an estate car.

  She parked at the bottom of the rise where the church stood, fifty yards below the village. Turned the car around to face back the way they’d come. “Come on, then.”