by Gwynn White
~Oh, buck up. You’re an incurable. You ought to be accustomed to pain. Then again, I suppose you never had to lead scouting missions in the Spanish desert with broken ribs, or hunt the stag with a fever of a hundred and three.
~I never had those privileges, no.
~Chippy, chippy. Hello, what’s going on here?
Alyx stood by the wall, holding Ran against her. “Is—is that you, Sire?”
“None other,” Val heard himself say. It was his voice, but not his accent or diction. He sounded like a king. Shock rippled across Alyx’s face. “Alyx, sweetheart. That child.”
~Don’t you call that bitch ‘sweetheart’ after what she’s done to me. Val’s fury blazed all the hotter for being impotent. The dead king was the stronger of them. Val couldn’t break Tristan’s control of his body.
“Who is he? You’ve cut his hair, but he looks uncannily like my nephew Randolph.”
The boy wrenched free of Alyx’s restraining embrace.
“Well met, nephew.” Impelled by the king’s will, Val limped towards them. The boy moved faster. He gave Val one look of horror, then bolted out into the snow.
“Better catch him. It may have escaped you, but now that my grandson is dead, he’s my heir. His survival would cramp our plans.”
~What plans? Val found that he could not read the private thoughts of the soul sharing his brain. He’d shared the king’s memories only because Tristan had willed it.
~ I’ve promised to name her my heir. The law will have to be changed to allow female succession, of course.
~Are you mad? She’s your mortal enemy!
~Bad times make for strange bedfellows.
~How are you going to pull that off, anyway? I can’t claim to be you.
~No, but I ought to be able to forge my own signature on a document of adoption to be conveniently discovered at the Tower of London. Then the new queen will acquire a trusted consultant: myself. Or rather, you. But in fact me. On which note, it’s about time for you to be going.
An onslaught of sheer willpower attacked Val. He felt himself losing his grasp on his own thoughts and memories. He struggled to remember Greta, her blonde hair incandescent in the sunlight. Then Mihal, laughing at a bar in Kabul. The lanterns reflected on the lake. The smell of donkey dung. The taste of whiskey. He would not be forced out of his own body, never to taste a drink again!
~Bloody hell. The dead king’s onslaught abated. Val felt him laughing. ~I knew that love has the power to defy death. But the love of a drink?
“We’d better move, Sire,” Alyx was saying. “I don’t know if my Kraut contacts are out there or not. But if they are, we’ll need to get to them without the Sauvage gang seeing us. I’d say our best move is to lie low in the trees out there and slip between them when they come through the perimeter.”
“Your ‘Kraut’ contacts would be the BASI agents you mentioned?”
“Yes, Sire. Mainly this fella called Flambeault. He wants to pay me for my secret. We can use him.”
~Don’t go out there! Val thought urgently. ~She thinks she can use anyone, but she’s never met Stephane Flambeault. The only thing she’ll get from him is a one-way trip to Germany. They’ll torture her until she gives up her secret. And I’ll get a bullet in the head. Then you’ll be fucked, too.
~Are you sure about that? Yes, you are, aren’t you? Of course, cowardice is a form of certainty.
Alyx danced with urgency. Conn and Ragherty had already left the building in pursuit of Ran. Donnchla kicked the fire out. “What are we waiting for?”
~This chap, Tristan mused. ~He’s a fairly accomplished magician, isn’t he?
~Yes. I thought he was just a hedge wizard. I was wrong. He was only waiting to be let off the leash.
~Is he better than you?
~Yes.
~Can’t have that.
Val was still leaning on Donnchla’s rifle. He raised it, aimed with an off-hand expertise that Val himself had never possessed, and shot Donnchla in the heart.
“Aaaagh!” Alyx screeched, rushing to the jerking, dying man. “What did you do that for?”
“You may have heard that kings don’t like competition.”
“You royal bastard.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Tristan said mockingly. “You had your chance to wield the Worldcracker, and it proved that you were not the true queen. But you couldn’t give up your ambition, so you came up with this wild scheme to steal the throne. Well, I’m grateful to you for bringing me back, but I will not be your servant. I think it’s best that we understand each other from the outset. You will be the queen … and I will defend the realm. From such as him, among other threats.”
He added to Val, ~We absolutely must recover the Worldcracker. She’s lost interest in it, now that she knows it won’t serve her ends, but you and I should be able to locate it without her help.
~What for?
~To save the world, you dolt. That’s why I came back. One needn’t spend long in the Otherworld to understand just how bad things are getting, and how much worse is to come.
Alyx pouted darkly. “I’ll not be ordered about by any Wessex, be he dead or alive.”
For the first time, Val understood how tragically petty her quest for power was. She stood at the center of the dark storm gathering over the world, and yet all she cared about was getting the respect she believed due her.
The insight freed him from the bond that had tied him for so long to her. His love for her had been a shackle. Now he was free. And freedom was strength.
Catching the dead king off guard, he seized control of his own body again. He staggered on his bad leg and fell against the wall. The relief was indescribable, though perilous—he could feel Tristan fighting him tooth and nail. The words he spoke next were his own, and unpremeditated. “For fuck’s sake, Alyx, run!”
But Alyx fell to her knees by Donnchla’s body. She was staring at the ghostly trees which stood where the fire had been. “By all the saints!” She pointed with a shaking hand “What’s that?”
62
Leonie
At The Same Time
A shout went up. Leonie jumped out of Pod’s car. The Wall of Fear must’ve given way at last, for the pointyheads were moving.
Mobile platforms rumbled between the floodlights. Single cops ran ahead, outdistancing the vehicles.
She wrestled the Myxilite off its sling, checked the lever was on automatic.
I’m coming, Dave.
She jogged behind the attackers. The barbed wire had been cleared away from the gap between the nearest towers. The rough ground halted two of the mobile platforms, while the other two lurched forward into the snow-blanketed wasteland. Already several men had fallen, writhing in the floodlights. Medics dashed forward to retrieve them. Leonie ran with them, and kept on running.
Ahead of her, the pointyheads strung out in a line. A loudhailer bellowed at the terrorists to surrender. Gunfire drowned it out.
She dropped to the ground. The weeds scratched her face, deposited blobs of snow down her neck.
“Surrender! You are surrounded! Surrender immediately!”
Leonie raised her head. Through the falling snow, she could see a small, half-ruined brick building. That must be where they were holding Dave. She started to crawl again. There was at least one gunman on the roof of the building. They could hold off an army up there, but only until they ran out of ammo.
She reached the cover of a hillock, got up and ran, staying behind the police firing positions on top of the rise. The pointyheads’ weapons continued to bark sporadically but their advance had halted. The loudhailer kept squawking, somewhere to her rear. She could have told them it was pointless. Alyx MacConn would not be surrendering.
A vehicle loomed out of the snow. A LongHOG, the combat version with a .50 turret gun. The first decent piece of kit she’d seen all night. A group of pointyheads huddled behind it, fitting together a faceted shape that she recognized as a ‘turtle,’ a wooden h
alf-shell designed to protect them from bricks and bottle-bombs thrown out of top-storey windows. Not from bullets.
Another man crouched behind the engine block of the LongHOG, his long coat puddling around his heels, his pistol aimed over the bonnet at the building. Her heart flipped over.
“All right, lads,” she said, pointing the Myxilite in the air. They hardly noticed her, frantically screwing the turtle together.
Sir Alec Northumberland turned his head as she approached him. His face was blank as stone. He didn’t recognize her from Cornwall.
“Any joy, sir?” she said.
“Remember we’re here to take them alive. There’s a reward for every man who captures one of them.” He said it mechanically, then noticed that she was a woman. He eyed her warily, wondering where she fit in.
“Dunno if you can capture them, sir. But you can’t kill them. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They don’t go down.”
“Enough of that superstitious croaking.” The pistol in his hand was a slender little weapon, probably a PX .38. He wouldn’t be able to fire a Magnum, not with only one hand—no matter how strong his right arm was, he wouldn’t be able to control the recoil. The PX had a single-shot and a semi-auto setting. She could guess which one he’d picked, which meant she wouldn’t have that split second of time after the first shot for him to manually pull the slide back and reload. So she couldn’t let him get even one shot off.
She had one big advantage: she was on his bad side, the armless left side, and he couldn’t turn around, not without putting his back to the building.
“I need to talk to you, sir,” she said softly. “It’s about Acton Castle.”
His gaze went past her to the men working on the turtle. Apparently judging that they wouldn’t overhear, he jerked his chin.”Yes?”
She took a knee beside him in the shelter of the engine block. This allowed her right hand to fall naturally to her ankle. “I saw everything,” she said.
“Saints. You.” He laughed out loud. “I thought it was unlikely that Madelaine had got all the way here by herself.”
“Well, it was my duty. But I’ve had enough of the Wessexes now, sir. I’ve had her moaning at me and hitting me with her pretty little hands all the way from Cornwall, and I’m fed up, I am. So I’ll keep quiet about Acton Castle—and Arundel Castle—for a price.”
“And that would be?”
Leonie had been working the hem of her jeans up, millimeter by millimeter, unpeeling the masking tape that secured Dave’s knife to her ankle, and now her fingers closed around the hilt. “Your life,” she said, and she brought the knife up underhand and stabbed him in the throat.
The blow knocked him backwards. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders to hold him in place. Their heads banged together, and she kept hers there, as if they were the best of friends, while she drove the knife in deeper, forcing it through the gristle of his larynx, until the tip scraped on his spine. His hair smelled murky-spicy, an aristocratic scent. Blood squirted over her face and hands, defrosting her fingers, splattering on the side of the HOG.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. The pointyheads hadn’t noticed anything, jumping at shapes in the snow as they wrestled with their turtle.
Sir Northumberland’s pistol clattered on the bonnet of the HOG. His hand scrabbled at the blade in his throat but the strength was going out of him. He made a frighteningly loud belching noise and died.
She propped him against the wheel-guard of the HOG, more or less the way he’d been before, and stuck her knife back into her sock. The snow boiled like fire. Her scalp felt taut, as if the air were being pulled out of shape, gathered up like fabric in some massive hand. Holding the Myxilite in one hand, she kitten-crawled towards the building on her toes, one hand, and an elbow. After about five yards, she suddenly felt sick. She collapsed onto her elbows and vomited, tasting the chocolate she’d eaten earlier, panting through the puke and willing herself to be quiet.
A figure darted out of the building. Every trigger finger in the area twitched at once. The bad guy kept running through the hail of bullets. Leonie saw that he was very small. She suddenly remembered the little boy from the Aching Head estate. “Don’t shoot!” she screamed, unheard over the noise.
The LongHOG trundled past, engine grinding. It stopped between Leonie and the building and sat there for a while, as if it’d stopped for a think. Then the turret gunner opened up. The building started to disintegrate from the top down.
Dizzied by the noise, Leonie staggered to her feet. “Dave’s in there,” she said, unable to hear her own voice. “Don’t. Stop.”
The front face of the building caved in. Dust opaqued the snowstorm. The .50 paused as if for breath. Pointyheads rushed past her.
The rubble-filled cave of the building started to vomit great dark chunks into the light. Shapes leapt over the snow towards the advancing men. They looked like dogs, but they were the size of horses, and they ran sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two. Leonie emptied her Myxilite into them, but there were more of them than she could count. and oh my God my God they were fast.
She reached the LongHOG just ahead of them. Sheer terror boosted her onto the roof. The turret gunner gaped witlessly at her. “Fucking open fire,” she screamed, and he scrambled out of his turret and dived over the side. The dog-things had him before he hit the ground. They pulled him apart and threw the pieces up in the air, killing for the sake of it, not because they were hungry.
A few people were still shooting back.
Half a dozen dog-things surged around the LongHOG. She bashed their heads with the butt of the Myxilite.
A small group of human figures struggled out of the rubble of the building. None of them was Dave, and the dog-things were leaving them alone.
She slid down into the turret, heaved the lid shut, kicked her legs out of the saddle, fell against the back of the driver’s seat. “What are you bloody waiting for? Drive!”
The driver twisted around, snarling in panic. A pistol lurched up. She clamped both hands over the barrel and threw her weight forward. The bullet ricocheted into the tin-can darkness behind her. She twisted down. The pistol came out of their hands and skidded away on the floor. The driver tried to headbutt her, then got his door open and jumped. The dog-things got him before he hit the ground. Leonie hurled herself feet first across the driver’s seat. Teeth snatched at her trainer, just missing her toes. She kicked, lost the trainer, slammed the door on the dog-thing’s head.
Ignition. Clutch. Gearshift.
The LongHOG’s heavy-duty wipers were still going, flicking calmly at the snow. It climbed the rubble, bouncing and swaying.
The dog-things scattered in pursuit of easier game.
When she’d driven as far forward as she could, Leonie idled the engine, fished around on the floor for the driver’s pistol, slid out.
Dave’s body had been sheltered from the building’s collapse by the last intact piece of the roof. He looked unhurt but he was dead. She got his collar open and confirmed the ID number below his brand. That was that, then.
She heaved him onto her shoulders, staggered back to the LongHOG, and laid him on the floor in the back. Her trainer-less left foot was numb, her sock shredded into bloody rags. She borrowed Dave’s boots and sat beside him to put them on. He’d been small for a man. His boots fit her as close as made no difference. She crawled back to the driver’s seat and put the LongHOG in gear.
It was difficult not to run over the pieces of pointyheads lying in the rubble. The snow was red in splotches. Whichever way she went, she was driving into the floodlights, blinded.
A dark shape wandered ahead of her on two legs, not four. She braked, then realized how daft she was being. If it was still moving, it was enemy.
She accelerated. Her teeth jarred together. The LongHOG was not built for speed but even so, even over rough ground, it was faster than a human being. She ploughed down saplings, closing in on the fleeing figure. Then she saw there were two
people ahead of her. The other was the little boy from the Aching Head estate. She overtook them. The man was hobbling, favoring his left leg.
Leonie jumped out.
“Val Sullivan, senior reliquary expert,” she said in shock.
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. You don’t know me.”
The floodlights went dark. Night-blind, Leonie fumbled for the little boy’s hand and pulled him towards the LongHOG. She was scared to linger with the dog-things still in the area. “You’re too little to be out here. Come on, come with me and we’ll get you back to your mum and dad.”
“My father is dead.” To her astonishment, the child sounded nobly born.
“Your mum, then.”
“I don’t think she wants me back.”
“Where’s Alyx O’Braonain, then? D’you know who she is?”
“She ran away.”
“That’s the cherry on the bloody cake, eh? Oh, well. Come on, hop in the vehicle before those fey brutes come back.”
The little boy glanced nervously at Val Sullivan, the IMF man whom Leonie had last seen making a surreptitious exit from the Queen Sabrina estate in Southwark.
“Don’t need your permission, cock,” she told him.
He drew himself up and made a show of looking confident and commanding. “Leonie Grant.”
She froze. How did he know her name?
“You do have a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time. But I am very glad to see you. I owe you a great deal, and I will soon owe you more, if you do as I say.”
Bloody hell, he sounds noble, too!
Before she could react, Sullivan’s face and his whole demeanor changed. So did his diction. “Quick! Listen to me! I’m not me. I am but I’m not. Don’t do anything I say. I—” His face contorted with pain.
Barmy.
“I understand,” she said with fake sympathy, and then kicked him in his bad leg. “You can get yourself into the vehicle or stay here for the dog-things to tear you apart. It’s all one to me.”
“They’re hounds of Hell,” he said wretchedly. “Donnchla broke the circle when he died. His body fell across it, smudged the runes to shite. They got out. You must cut their bodies into quarters, burn them, and scatter the ashes in running water.”