by Gwynn White
Dripping blood from its severed throat.
“That’s a human sacrifice,” Val said, his voice cracking.
“Away, you hypocrite,” Donnchla said. “You’d not have let out a peep if he were shot and lying dead in the snow. How is this any different?”
Val smelled burning chemicals. He stumbled closer to see what perched in the fire’s heart.
A human head. Ripped from the tank, saturated with acetone solution, slowly charring.
Alyx motioned to the head. “I picked that up at the Tower of London while the lads were trying to get the Worldcracker. They’ve got a plastination suite in the White Tower. Crystal tanks and virtue-proof carpeting. Really high-class.”
“Whose head is that?”
“I’m scundered.” She sat down on the floor and lit a cigarette. Her eyes reflected the firelight.
“It’s my uncle,” little Randolph Sauvage said. “It’s the head of Tristan Wessex.”
Donnchla squatted by the fire, dipping his fingers in a jam-jar and tracing runes on the concrete. Those glyphs were older even than the Latin. They took their power from death. He sneered at Val. “What’s your trouble, Sullivan? You can’t stand the fact that I’m a better magician than you?”
A giant cleared his throat in the distance and smacked the wall with a fist. Bricks fell.
Val grabbed Alyx’s hands. “Come away with me. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. Far away from here. We’ll have a little cottage by the sea; a garden, a dog. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“You’ve nothing to give me, Valery Sullivan. You don’t even know what I want. Anyway, I’m not one to run away. That’s you.”
“I never ran away!”
“You did! Your mum and dad got it in their heads to emigrate to the East and you went with them, like a good wee boy. You left me alone in that horrible orphanage. And then my mother came for me, and what was I meant to do but go with her?”
“Alyx!” Val said, stunned. He’d never known it had hurt her so much. She’d never said. He reached for her.
“Not another step,” Donnchla said. He wiped the blood off his hands, picked up his rifle and aimed it at Val.
Alyx looked away.
Val took another step towards her, and then another. He’d known Donnchla all his life. Donnchla wouldn’t shoot him.
“You stupid cunt,” Donnchla said, and did.
57
Vivienne
A Few Minutes Earlier
Bob Griffin topped up his drink from the limousine’s mini-fridge. As he straightened, the limo swung into a hard turn. He plumped back into his seat next to Vivienne, spilling gin on her. Cheerfully, he apologized and offered her his handkerchief.
Deliberately snubbing him, she looked out of the window. They had turned off the coast road onto a rutted lane. Sleet slanted through the headlights.
“It’s turning into snow,” Griffin observed.
“Let me out,” she said. “That is an order.”
“Sorry, m’lady. Did you say something?” Griffin chuckled.
How wrong she had been about this man. He owed everything to House Sauvage, so she’d overlooked his sadism and his petty tyrant’s ways. She’d taken his loyalty for granted. It had never crossed her mind that he might betray her.
All that remained was to learn who he’d betrayed her to.
He had forced her out of the Griffin’s Eyrie at gunpoint, bundled her into his limo, and refused to answer any of her questions. She didn’t know what had happened to Colin Argent or the IMF magician, Mihal Zalyotin. Colin Argent had promised to show them where Ran was being held. Did Griffin know about that?
Spindly trees and a policeman in her own livery popped up in the headlights. Griffin stabbed the button to lower the privacy shield. The policeman leaned into the car, snow swirling around his head and shoulders. “Douse your lights! This is a restricted security zone, eejit!”
“Are you blind?” the driver barked. “Whose car d’you think this is?”
“Take his name and ID number,” Griffin cooed. “Then let him do his job.”
The hapless policeman looked as if he’d swallowed a toad. “I’ll direct you to the staging area. K-k-keep the speed down, if it’s no trouble.”
The limousine crawled on with its headlights off, following the white belt and boots of the police officer hurrying ahead. The undergrowth along the road thinned. Torch beams freeze-framed fans of sleet. The limo swung in a wide arc. Vivienne saw the blurry glow of windows. They stopped.
She buttoned her mantle, pulled her hood up, and waited until the door was unlocked from the outside. After the warm interior, the cold bit cruelly. She walked towards the lights. Griffin trundled at her side, calling out cheerful greetings. A group of policemen crossed their path, rolling an immense spool of cable. Other men were lugging pieces of machinery.
“What are you about here?” Vivienne said through her teeth.
“We’re rescuing dear little Randolph, of course.”
So Colin had told Griffin, or been forced to tell him, all he knew.
“These are dangerous terrorists, and they’re using magic. We have to hit them hard. But don’t fret, my lady, we’ll get Lord Randolph back safe and sound.”
“So that you can turn him over to the treacherous swine who’ve arrested Guy?” Griffin had made sure she heard the announcement on the radio herself. I should have gone to him … Was her fate always to be torn between her sons, and to choose the wrong one?
Griffin looked offended, or pretended to. “I’m shocked that you’d accuse me of conspiring with House Stuart and their lickspittles. We shall triumph yet, my lady, believe me or not, as you like!”
“Guy had the best regiment in the country, and he failed.”
“Well, maybe we’ve got something even better than a regiment.”
A large building loomed out of the snow. The lights came from chinks around tarpaulins tacked in its empty door and windows. They stepped into a shell with girders for a ceiling, pieces of roof fallen on the floor. Electric heaters held the cold at bay. The tang of burning dust combined with barracks odors of cigarette smoke, bulling fluid, and coffee. But the hectic activity in here looked to be civilian in flavor. Suits checked lists, prised open crates, wrestled with field telephones. Lamps in cages sat on the floor, casting weird shadows that seemed to trail like questing stalactites from the emptiness overhead. Trestle desks formed a C on the far side of the room, where a bearded knight in his fifties was carpeting a subordinate.
“My lady, welcome!” The knight was English, at least. He had broken veins in his nose and a calcified-looking paunch, the signs of a drinking man who nevertheless kept in shape. “It only looks as if we’re all at sixes and sevens. Everything is in hand.”
“Have you made contact with them yet, Brakespear?” Griffin said in an almost humble tone, not the hectoring manner he usually used to his subordinates.
“Not yet. There are no telephone lines in there.” The knight, Brakespear, gulped from a mug of tea. Who was he? Vivienne knew she’d seen his face before somewhere. “In fact, you’ve just missed our second attempt to penetrate their defenses. Didn’t work. We’ve sent for the IMF chap, but I’m not holding out much hope.” Brakespear indicated a pair of civilians standing nearby, apparently arguing over the contents of a plastic shopping bag. One was a woman. “She said an hour ago that she’d be able to crack it in five minutes.”
“Those are Germans,” Vivienne said. She actually felt calmer with her suspicions proved correct. “Pray, whose people are you?”
Brakespear ignored her enquiry. The woman stomped over and complained to Griffin, “The materials are insufficient.” She displayed the contents of the shopping bag. A jar of pickle, a canister of Bedbug-Be-Gone, a miniature of cognac. “This, you are joking with me. As well I need a cat. It must die naturally. Black is better.” She spoke English the way uneducated Germans did, butchering the language.
Vivienne’s gaze travelled to the
other civilian. Rotund, he sported a grey knight’s knot that was probably a hairpiece. His paternal smile spoke of infinite tolerance for the follies of men. She had wasted enough of her life in meetings to be attuned to shadings of authority. This was the one. Even Brakespear and Griffin were subtly deferring to him.
“Honored sir, I am Vivienne Sauvage.”
“Of course I know who you are, my lady, though I would not have dreamed of presuming to introduce myself.” He spoke English with a French accent. “Stephane Flambeault. I’m a great admirer of your work. I have a piece—Unhorsed. So very moving, it brings tears to my eyes every time I look upon it.”
It almost brought tears to her eyes to remember that picture now. She had painted Ran limping out of the lists, leading his pony, after yet another fall. “Save him,” she said. “He is all I have left.”
“But my lady, of course. Everything possible is being done.”
“Hey, Flambeault,” someone shouted in German from across the room. Vivienne, of course, understood that language as well as English. “They’re gonna turn on the lights!”
Flambeault rolled his eyes. “Excuse me.”
She went back to stand in front of Brakespear’s desk. He was talking into a field telephone. When he put it down, she said, “Now I remember you. You were a captain in the Wessex livery.”
His smile was an absolution, as if she were the one who’d betrayed Tristan, not he.
“Why?” she said.
“The sanctity crisis is real, my lady. Something has to be done. And if no one else understands that, BASI does.”
“You made a mistake when you got rid of Tristan,” she said. “You’re tilting against champions now. They will leave you in pieces.”
“I doubt it. They’ll need someone to run the show over here.”
She laughed. “And you actually believe that will be you?”
Brakespear smiled at her, stiffly. Her cheap gibe had stung him, proving how frail his armor of confidence was. But his next words destroyed her calculations. “Be of good cheer, my lady. When you are dead, your son Randolph shall rule Great Britain. He’ll be a good king. I’ll see to that myself.”
The lights in the command center dimmed, spat, brightened. Outside, day seemed to dawn.
Brakespear followed her to the door and stopped her from going outside. “My lady, we would not prevent you from observing the operation.” His hand was a steel restraint on her elbow. It was the first time any of them had actually dared to lay hands on her. “But you must leave it to the professionals. You are in the way here.”
A pair of stocky men, one naturally bald and one shaven-headed, materialized at the doorway and led her out. They were MI5, sworn to the Crown. Is there no bottom to this quagmire of treachery?
They led her across snow-freckled gravel. Diesel generators rumbled. Beyond a battery of floodlights, concrete towers soared into the sky. Barbed wire tangled their bases. Suddenly, the false day around the towers brightened further, light stabbing into the sky from the far side of the power plant.
Over the noise, Vivienne heard a baby crying.
She hurried towards the sound. The MI5 men hurried after her.
There was a row of vehicles parked behind the command center. One of them was a black estate car. The baby’s crying was coming from inside it.
Vivienne wrenched the car’s door open and came face to face with Madelaine Wessex.
58
Leonie
At The Same Time
Leonie plodded around the power station, following the surviving Ravens. They weren’t talking to her anymore. Nettles tangled her legs. The pointyheads had turned the lights on. A dozen high-powered floodlights were positioned around the outside of the cooling towers, buzzing and spitting. Crazily overlapping shadows everywhere made it hard to tell movement from optical illusion. There’d been a bit of shooting around the other side, but it had stopped almost immediately. The pointyheads had figured out that they couldn’t get past the Wall of Fear. Next, they’d figure out that bullets were no good against the people inside.
A tall civilian moved towards them, followed by four or five livery cops. He moved in aimless spurts, stopping and starting, leaping over the barbed wire and then scrambling back again. In his left hand he brandished a short stick, and every time he climbed over the wire, he jabbed the air with it.
“Who the fuck’s yon loon?” Neal muttered.
As they passed the queer character, she glimpsed a hooked nose, black hair plastered to bony temples. Eyes staring, lips moving, he seemed not to see them, or anything.
“More magic,” Boogan said. He spat and made the sign of the chain.
Leonie privately hoped he was right. Anything, anything that might improve their chances of rescuing Dave, she was all for it.
They skirted the floodlights and arrived in a staging area where men and vehicles were forming up in columns. Half the Belfast police force had to be here. Their equipment was tragic. “Tell me they’ve got live rounds, at least,” she said, but she’d lost Boogan and Neal, or they’d lost her. She was alone in the chaos.
Now was her chance to get out of the way before someone nobbled her. She slung her Myxilite inside her anorak and did the zipper up as far as it would go. Slipped between the police squads, through a blast of fumes from generators mounted on the backs of a pair of low-loaders. Snow collected on the windscreens of a row of cars. Police sentries stamped their feet. At the far end of the line stood the building they were using as a command center. The other way was the gate of the power station. The sky over the marsh was whitish-brown with snow.
She took note of the oldest cars, the ones she’d be able to hotwire just by pulling the wires out of the ignition.
Her heart thudded.
That’s the Rover the Ravens came in.
It stood at the end of the line of vehicles nearest the command center. It was the same one, she could tell by the dents.
The princesses. They’ve caught them.
Weariness settled on her. She’d failed at everything, then.
Someone mooched into view around the cars, shoulders hunched against the wind, smoking a fag.
“Pod,” she hailed him.
Astonishment brightened his face, but it didn’t last. “What’re you doing here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“On the job, aren’t I? Here, hop in.”
He was offering her sanctuary. The two-faced shithead. She got into his car.
“This is Oliver, he won’t let me smoke in the car. You ought to get on.” A morose-looking operator, sandy fringe of beard around his plump face. Pod settled into the front passenger seat. Leonie sat in the back. It felt good to be out of the cold. They had the engine going to keep the heater running; the steamy warmth smelled of mould.
She leaned between the front seats. “I trusted you,” she said. “More fool me.”
“Don’t look at me,” Pod said. “Turns out MI5 knew about this place all along. That’s why we were lifted off the Aching Head address. They were setting their own trap.”
“MI5? How? How’d they know she was here?” Leonie had the strange feeling that they were talking about Madelaine and Alyx in the same breath.
Oliver twisted in his seat. “They’re double agents,” he hissed. “That’s what we’re taking orders from now: the English branch of BASI!”
“MI5? You’re having me on. Those tossers couldn’t organize a round of beers.” But they’d organized HM’s murder, with a little help from their friends in the ROCK.
“That’s right,” Oliver said. “It’s the Germans in charge of this little show.”
“No—no, I mean, yes, I believe you. But MI5 hasn’t got the authority to bring in the Belfast police. Who swung that?”
“Lady Sauvage,” Pod said. “They’re holding her hostage in there, too. Oh, yes, you may weep now.”
“But why? Why’s everyone so hot for Alyx O’Braonain all of a sudden?”
&
nbsp; “There you’ve got us,” Pod said. “Can’t work it out.”
“Is it true about Sir Guy? I just heard on the radio.”
“Yep,” Oliver said morosely. “He murdered CP Michael, the bloody maniac. That’s not on the radio yet, but it will be soon.”
Oh, no. Oh, poor Madelaine.
Leonie took a deep breath. Why not chance her arm? They had nothing left to lose. “Listen, blokes, maybe House Wessex isn’t finished yet.”
“Eh?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.” She tried to catch Pod’s eye. “Remember that baby I was looking after?”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly alert.
“All right, well, see that hardtop Rover down there?” She reached past his shoulder and wiped the condensation off the window, pointed. “D’you know anything about how that got here?”
“We brought it in,” Oliver said. “There was a girl and a baby in it. MI5 whisked them off sharpish.”
“Oh,” Leonie said. “Oh, well. That was only Princess Madelaine and Princess Fiona. You could have looked at them. All you saw was the short hair and crap clobber, I suppose. So much for your observational skills. Shame MI5 isn’t fooled as easily.”
Pod cursed for some time. Oliver just sat back with one hand over his eyes.
It felt good to vent her fury and grief, and Leonie revved up to berate them some more. Instead she said, “Here, what’s that noise? Sounds like a chopper.”
“It’s kicking off,” Oliver said, but he was wrong.
They got out of the car. The police were still waiting, huddled on their mobile platforms. Waiting for what? The noise got louder. Heads twisted. All at once the chopper was upon them, pouncing down out of the blizzard. Its rotor wash slung horizontal gusts of snow into their faces.