‘Oh, come on, Norma, it’s late, I’ve got a fucking great lump on my head, courtesy of the Quizzies, I’m cold and fed up, and I’m most certainly not in the mood to answer damn-fool questions.’
‘Please, Vanka.’
Silence.
‘Please, Vanka.’ For some reason getting an answer had become important to her.
‘Okay, a hero is an inspiration. A hero persuades people to rise above themselves, to try to be more than they are. A hero is a wonderful dream made real. A hero shows people what they could be, if only they had the courage … if only they could be persuaded to get out of bed.’
‘But what makes a hero?’
‘Courage.’
‘What sort of courage?’
‘The toughest kind: the courage to stand alone.’
Alone. Now that was a word that resonated with Norma. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘You see, Norma, it’s easy to be courageous when everyone agrees with you, when you’ve got the mob at your back, but when a man or a woman stands alone against the mob for what they believe in … that’s real courage. There aren’t many people who are able to do that. That’s what makes a hero and that’s why I’ve never met one. I don’t think they exist outside the pages of penny dreadfuls.’
‘You’re such a cynic, Vanka.’
‘Not a cynic, Norma, a realist. Look at the Demi-Monde. If ever there was a world crying out for a hero it’s this one, but all we get are ersatz heroes, and ersatz messiahs, who fool the people into believing that they’re doing ABBA’s work when all they’re doing is elbowing their way to the trough.’
Norma sat up a little straighter on her cot. She had never heard Vanka sound so impassioned before. ‘So what’s the solution?’ she asked.
‘I don’t have one, Norma, and I’m no hero. I oppose war and violence by ignoring them. It’ll take a real messiah to change things.’
Norma was just about to challenge Vanka further when she heard a noise coming from outside of the prison. ‘Vanka? What’s going on out there? Why are all those people shouting?’
Norma was right: there was a lot of noise coming from beyond the walls of the Bastille. With a moan of protest from his bruised body, Vanka decided to check it out, and as the only window was the tiny one set high up on the back wall of his cell, this required him to stand on his bed, the mattress making a horrible squelching noise under his boots as he did so. The window gave out on the front of the prison and Vanka found himself looking down onto a crowded Rue Saint-Antoine. Much to his surprise, there appeared to be some sort of demonstration taking place outside the prison’s front gates. He guessed the demonstrators were members of the UnScrewed-Liberation Movement, that is if their placards were any indication. He particularly liked the ones that read ‘Liberty, Equality or no Fornification’ and ‘UnFunDaMentalism: Fuck No!’ He also liked it that the demonstrators were women and that all of them were dressed as ‘Liberté’ with one of their breasts exposed. Vanka had never realised that political dissent could be quite such an erotic experience.
Unfortunately, the GrandHarms who were attempting to dissuade the women from demonstrating weren’t being given much of an opportunity to appreciate such a marvellous display of female flesh. There was a Hel of a lot of UnScreweds pushing and shoving against the police cordon, so many that they were threatening to overpower the fifty or so GrandHarms defending the entrance to the Bastille.
Ever the gallant, Vanka was moved to assist the women. He carried his overflowing slop bucket carefully across his cell, and then spent an entertaining few minutes ladling its contents out of the window and onto the heads of the GrandHarms below. He was pleased to note that the ten days he’d spent as a reluctant guest of the Committee of Public Safety hadn’t impaired his ability to pour shit on bastards with unfailing accuracy. He did though feel a moment’s sympathy for the poor sod who’d looked up at just the wrong moment.
But as always, good things didn’t last. Just as Vanka was running out of ammunition, he heard the rattle of a key in the lock of his cell door.
In the opinion of Sergeant Henri Aroca, it was the soggy turd landing slap bang in the middle of Captain Lefèvre’s face that turned the mood of the demonstration from one of polite confrontation into one which was decidedly more violent. As the captain tried to wipe the shit from his face with his sleeve – which only succeeded in spreading the ordure around – his expression darkened and his eyes flashed.
‘Draw batons! Drive these bitches back!’ the enraged captain screamed, and his men dutifully, if reluctantly, did as they were ordered.
Henri quickly decided that this was a mistake. Up until then it had been the rather upper-class women who had so respectfully delivered the petition demanding the release of Jeanne Deroin and Aliénor d’Aquitaine, who had been in control of the mob of women pushing so ineffectually against the line of GrandHarms protecting the gates of the Bastille. But as soon as the first baton crashed down onto the unprotected head of one of the women, everything changed. Enraged, a knot of UnScreweds hurled themselves at the GrandHarms, using their placards as spears and clubs. It was obvious that these were protesters who didn’t spend their time discussing the rarefied nuances of ImPuritan dialectics in the fashionable salons of the Latin Quarter, or reciting the latest lyrical polemic fashioned by a popular troubadour. No, these were working women, who knew how to handle themselves, and their fists and their boots.
Such was the ferocity of the attack, led by a particularly vicious cow who looked worryingly like Henri’s daughter Odette, that the line of GrandHarms buckled and then stepped back. That was a fatal mistake. There must have been a couple of thousand UnScreweds gathered for the demonstration, and as the GrandHarms retreated the unspoken message radiated out through the crowd of women that victory was theirs. In an instant the demonstrators became an incensed mob, the sheer press of bodies unsustainable. The GrandHarms began to look urgently around for somewhere to run to.
‘Stand! Stand!’ screamed their shit-faced captain, but then he was felled by a particularly savage blow from a placard – Henri was sure it was Odette who had wielded the placard: he felt quite proud – and the GrandHarms’ resistance crumbled.
As he held on to the throat of one hellcat who was trying to claw his eyes out, whilst simultaneously defending himself from the blows raining down on his head from another harridan wielding a broken broom handle, Henri realised the game was up. They had to get back into the safety of the Bastille and, with the captain lying broken and busted on the cobbles, Sergeant Henri Aroca was now in charge.
‘Back!’ he shouted to his men. ‘Hold the line and gradually step back.’
‘Belay that,’ came a rasping order from behind Henri, and out through the Bastille’s gates swept a squad of heavily armed and very resolute-looking Quizzies.
Hauled out of her cell, Norma was not a little unnerved by how events were unfolding. She found herself being fitted with manacles, shoved along dark corridors, and then, finally, being pushed unceremoniously into an enormous hall where shadows from burning tapers skittered eerily around the walls. It was bitterly cold in the hall, and she shivered under her thin cotton gown. The stench of garlic was so unbelievably strong in the hall that it took a real effort not to retch: the Quartier Chaudians seamed obsessed with the stuff.
But distracted though she was, she ordered herself to stay alert; she had a sneaking suspicion that, as always in the Demi-Monde, she’d need all her wits about her. The one thing that raised her spirits was the sight of Vanka standing to one side of the hall, guarded by two Quizzies. He might be looking a little worse for wear, but if the wink he gave her was any indication, he was in good spirits.
As her eyes became used to the gloom, Norma realised she was standing facing a man seated on a large wooden throne at the far end of the hall. Although he was partially hidden in shadow, there was enough light for Norma to register that he was a thick-set individual with a boxer’s face, a broken nose and close-set eyes that
peered out at her from behind a leather half-mask. He was dressed in an all-enveloping black cassock and his hair had been razored into a Roman tonsure.
God, he’s ugly! If ever there was a man in crying need of a make-over, it was this guy.
A Quizzie edged closer to her and whispered in her ear, ‘You must kneel before His Excellency the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, and abase yourself to his power and his majesty.’
Tomas de Torquemada!
Reluctantly dropping to her knees, Norma inwardly cursed herself for not taking more of an interest in her history lessons. She trawled through her memory, trying to remember what she could of the PreLived Tomas de Torquemada. It wasn’t much: as best she could recall, he was the maniac who, while he had been Inquisitor General in Spain during the fifteenth century, had tormented and tortured the poor souls deemed to have been the enemies of the Church. And she guessed that like all the other Singularities she’d met in the Demi-Monde, he was a thoroughgoing bastard.
As a chained Vanka was brought to kneel beside her, the Quizzie made an announcement in a loud voice. ‘These are the two acolytes of the Daemon and sorceress the Lady IMmanual.’
‘I have no use for lackeys and lickspittles …’ snarled Torquemada.
Fuck you, too.
‘… bring the one who calls herself the Lady IMmanual before me.’
The Abbé Niccolò led Sister Florence through a maze of dusty, dark and cobweb-bedecked passages until, at last, he brought her to what appeared to be nothing more than a blank wall. But then, after signalling that she should be silent, the Abbé carefully eased back a tiny hinged flap to reveal a spyhole. He ushered the Sister forward.
Florence pressed her eye to the opening and found herself looking out onto the infamous Great Reception Hall of the Bastille, the room where Torquemada presided over the spiritual life of the Medi. The Grand Inquisitor was there, seated on a throne not five metres away from her.
It was difficult for any Visual Virgin to gaze upon a Dark Charismatic like Torquemada. Their auras were so bent and deformed, and the colours decorating them so unsettling, that they made Auralists feel physically sick. When Dark Charismatics had first been identified by Michel de Nostredame, there had been much speculation as to what they actually were, de Nostredame theorising that these brutal, unfeeling and ambitious individuals were a separate taxon, a separate species to Man.
But after careful – and nauseating – perusal of their auras, Sister Florence had come to a different conclusion. Dark Charismatics, by her understanding, were actually a mongrel race, something malignant was conjoined with their humanity, polluting all that was good inside them. And Tomas de Torquemada, sitting plump and pompous on his throne at the end of the room, was the archetypal Dark Charismatic. His aura spread wide from his body: a writhing, pulsating concoction of Lokic blacks – only Dark Charismatics had black within their auras – and ravaging reds, signalling that here was a man who delighted in torture.
A monster.
Florence’s study of Torquemada was interrupted when the great doors of the receiving chamber were slammed open, and two prisoners were pushed towards the Grand Inquisitor and made to kneel before him. Two vagabonds more like: the woman and the man bundled into the Chamber looked as though they had both been in the wars – which, when Florence thought about it, they probably had. But if they were nondescript physically, then metaphysically they were both quite remarkable.
To the Sister’s great astonishment, the slim, long-haired man – this had to be the infamous Vanka Maykov, the Lady IMmanual’s companion, and, some suggested, her lover – had no aura. For a moment Florence thought there must be something amiss with her powers. Everyone had an aura; everyone human that is. She rubbed her eye, then looked again, but still there was no aura. So everyone in the Demi-Monde had an aura except Vanka Maykov? She wondered for a moment if Maykov was such a powerful mage that he could suppress his aura, to prevent even adepts like her reading it. Maybe the reports that Vanka Maykov was a faux-spiritualist were in error; maybe he was a real magus.
Still perplexed, Florence turned her attention to the pale girl kneeling to Maykov’s left. Amazingly, while Vanka Maykov had no aura, this girl appeared to have two! Her body was surrounded by a confusion of light which gave the impression that two personalities – two very different personalities – were struggling for dominance over her soul. One was clearly evil, while the other was a confused vortex of colours, though gold predominated.
Most strange. It’s almost as if …
But that’s impossible.
The hall’s great doors swung open, and Ella was escorted into the room.
At least Norma assumed it was Ella.
It wasn’t just that her wonderful mane of black hair had been shaved off, or that her head was circled by an inch-wide bruise that left Norma uncertain that this was the girl she knew. She had grown. She seemed taller, more powerful, and much more imperious. During their time together in Warsaw Norma had come to associate Ella Thomas with understanding and fairness – she was a good person – but the way this Ella looked out on the world was almost disdainful: she looked like the type of person who would run right over you if you got in her way. And whereas Torquemada seemed to suck all the warmth and goodness out of the huge room, Ella seemed to emit a chilling certainty.
‘You must kneel before His Excellency the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, and abase yourself before his power and his majesty,’ announced the Quizzie.
Ella replied in a strong, firm voice that reverberated around the room. ‘The Lady IMmanual kneels before no man or woman. The Lady IMmanual kneels only before ABBA.’
Bloody hell!
One of the guards raised his baton and made to strike Ella, but all she did was point a finger straight at Torquemada. ‘Have a care, Torquemada, it is the Lady IMmanual with whom you tryst. Visit hurt on me and I will repay you a thousandfold.’
It was easy for Sister Florence to identify the Lady IMmanual. Men like the Abbé Niccolò might doubt the girl’s divinity, but for Sister Florence the evidence was there before her eyes. But whereas she had expected the girl reputed to be the Messiah to be swathed in an aura of gold, this girl was surrounded by a halo of the purest silver. Sister Florence blinked, not quite believing what she was seeing. She had never seen a silver aura before; indeed she had never seen a halo so bright before, so bright that it was impossible for her to detect if there were other colours lurking beneath it. The girl’s aura spread out almost three feet from her body, which signalled to Florence that she was gazing on someone very special – someone ordained by ABBA to do remarkable things.
The Messiah!
Sister Florence felt her legs go weak with excitement. The people of the Demi-Monde had been waiting so long for the Messiah to come and now there she stood, ragged and dirty to be sure, with her head shaved and bruised, but still proud and determined. Yes, it was her: the Messiah who would lead the Demi-Monde through the final Tribulation and to Revelation.
‘Is she truly the Messiah?’ the Abbé asked, his voice soft and low to avoid being overheard beyond the thin wall separating them from the Great Reception Hall.
‘Verily she is. In this matter there can be not the smallest of doubts, Your Grace. The Lady IMmanual is the Messiah.’
Florence felt the Abbé make the sign of Mannez across his chest, and heard him breathe a whispered ‘Hallelujah.’
‘And what does her aura tell you about her?’
‘Only that she is divine, Your Grace,’ admitted Florence. ‘Her aura is so bright and so intense that her humanity is quite hidden from view beneath it.’
‘Then listen carefully, Sister. It’s your responsibility to help me to bring the Lady IMmanual – the Messiah – safe to Venice. And believe me, Sister, there has never been a task so important to the salvation of the peoples of the Demi-Monde. We must rescue her from the grip of the Inquisition and to do this we must beard Torquemada in his den.’
So proud and compelling was E
lla’s voice, as it echoed around the room, that the Quizzie was frozen by indecision, his baton raised motionless above his head. There was silence for a moment as Torquemada sat transfixed, nervously fingering the large silver cross he had hanging round his neck, obviously trying to weigh Ella up, assessing whether her threat had substance.
He must have come to the conclusion that it had. He waved the guard away. ‘Very well, wench, thou mayest stand, though it will make thee no benefit. It has come to our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that thou hast announced most plain and straightforward that thou art the Messiah. More, I am close advised that thou didst, through most devious employment of the foulest magic and maleficia, contrive a most unnatural breaching of the Boundary Layer, and thus offer sanctuary to those spawn of Loki, the nuJus. Speak, Shade, art thou the same wench who is most deceitfully puffed by those benighted and malicious nuJus as the Messiah – as the divine saviour sent by Our Lord, ABBA? I ask thee straight: art thou the Messiah?’
Ella seemed to stand a little straighter. The room tensed, waiting on what she would say. Then, ‘Yes, I am the Messiah. I am the one sent by ABBA to free the Demi-Monde from the pestilence of Dark Charismatics such as you, Torquemada, and bring purity to the Nine Worlds. I am the one ordained to contest with the Beast in the final battle that is Ragnarok.’
Jesus, she’s flipped.
As announcements went, it was a real stunner. There were gasps around the room, and several of the UnFunDaMentalist monks gathered there hurriedly made the sign of the Valknut across their chests to ward off evil.
Ella had changed big time! From what Norma had seen outside the Porte Saint-Martin checkpoint, she had been more embarrassed than anything about being called the Messiah, about being worshipped, but here she was proudly admitting that she was ABBA’s right-hand woman. It didn’t make sense.
‘How canst this be?’ sneered Torquemada. ‘The holy books speak of the Messiah as being a man – a man who would come to us bedecked in a halo of gold, a man whose very holiness would be such that mere mortals might not gaze upon him lest they be blinded by his piety. How canst thou, a dirty, bedraggled Shade girl, claim to be one blessed by ABBA? Recant thy duplicity. Know thou not that all those who would counterfeit divinity and claim falsely to be the Messiah will be subject to auto-da-fé?’
Rod Rees - [The Demi-Monde 02] Page 15