A clink of stone in a ruined building jolted him out of his ennui. He whirled, gun in hand. A scruffy mongrel with mottled yellow ochre-and-brown fur emerged from behind a wall. It was not particularly large or heavily built, and showed no sign of aggression, so Jameson relaxed.
He pursed his lips and whistled. “Here, boy.”
He was pleased to see the dog. It was the first animal they had come across in the dead, silent city.
The dog watched him, sniffing the air. More crept out of the rubble, spreading out to encircle him and Karla. They were near identical in size and color so they could not be mongrels, but equally they were no breed he recognized. They made no sound, no canine whines of welcome or even threatening barks. Jameson felt cold. They behaved like a pack of African hunting dogs. They might be descended from family pets but they were now completely feral.
Karla laughed delightedly.
“Here, little hunters,” she said mockingly, stepping towards them and beckoning with her hand.
Two attacked without warning, no growls, no threat displays, just naked aggression. They split like a well-trained combat team to hit her simultaneously from both flanks. Compared to Karla they were as slow as engine oil flowing down a dipstick. She ran at the one on the left and kicked it like Beckham faced with an open German goal. The dog bounced over the ground, head flopping on a neck bent at an impossible angle.
Momentum swung Karla round and the second dog took the opportunity to leap for her throat. Jameson started forward but he moved in slow motion, even slower than the dog. Karla was quicksilver in comparison. She caught the dog by the neck, talons sinking through the fur. It wriggled and snarled, the first sound it made—and the last. She squeezed and crushed its windpipe until its tongue lolled and its eyes streamed blood.
The rest of the pack watched silently. One dog advanced a few steps and looked around at its pack-mates, as if seeking support. Karla hurled the corpse at the animal. It turned and fled back into cover, breaking the spell. The rest of the dogs followed. The only sign that the pack had ever been there were the two bodies.
Karla laughed delightedly.
“I do wish you would not provoke trouble,” Jameson said. “One day you are going to give me a heart attack.”
“They would have followed us and attacked sooner or later,” Karla said. “Better it be on our terms rather than theirs. Now the little hunters know.”
“Know what?” Jameson asked.
“That we are death, not food,” she said with her usual succinctness.
“We need to get on,” Jameson said. “The Sun is going down and I don’t fancy being here after dark.”
They walked on until they came to a strange structure in the road. It was a skeleton of thin strips of wood. Two large box shapes were connected by a central spar on which was attached a plywood egg. Thin strips of tattered canvas hung from the frame, presumably the remains of a cloth skin.
Jameson walked around the, whatever-it-was. A trail of wreckage suggested that there had been more canvas-covered boxes behind.
“What on Earth have we here, some sort of water storage?” Jameson asked, not expecting an answer.
Karla had little curiosity about such matters, but he should not complain. Her monofocus had advantages, as, unlike him, she was unlikely to be distracted from what mattered.
He stood on tiptoe to peer into the egg. It was open at the top and had a thin seat inside surrounded by levers. Pulleys suggested that they had once operated cables long since rusted away. His imagination conjured up some sort of signaling device, but communicating what to whom? And what was it doing lying there in the middle of a London street? It had no wheels or any sign that it had been attached to anything that might have lifted it up. It just seemed to have dropped from the sky.
“Of course,” Jameson said. “The light build is a clue. It’s a primitive airplane—as it has no engine, a glider.”
He grinned in delight at Karla, pleased with his own cleverness. She smiled back, happy that he was pleased.
“It must have looked like two box kites with some sort of tail,” Jameson said. “What a strange contraption. Hell to fly in something so unstable in anything but perfect conditions.”
His smile faded as a thought occurred. “I know where we are.”
Karla looked at him gravely, picking up on his swift change of mood.
“This is a drachenflieger, kite-like gliders carried by German airships in Wells’ War in the Air. They attacked enemy airships, like planes operating off carriers. I suppose this is what the German airships did to London.”
He spread his arms out to indicate the city.
“That’s why there are no cars,” he said. “It was 1900 or something. But there should be human and horse bones from the purple plague that depopulated the city before its destruction.”
He frowned, recalling the feral packs of dogs. Chewed bones would be scattered in amongst the ruins.
“Wells predicted the destructiveness of air warfare. He saw the airships as unstoppable, so the war went on until civilization collapsed. Of course, the German airships turned out to be easy meat for the new fighter planes when real Zeppelins attacked London.”
No wonder this city looked so sad. It was a cenotaph to a lost empire, a dead civilization. The Otherworld was full of the relics of human disasters, both real and fictional.
“What a bloody depressing place,” Jameson said.
“Do you think so?” Karla asked in surprise. “I rather like it.”
That didn’t surprise him. Karla’s concept of pleasant surroundings bore as little relation to human preferences as her other likes and dislikes.
“Is the gate near?” he asked.
“Yes,” Karla replied.
She hesitated and Jameson raised an eyebrow.
“This air war story?” Karla asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it very popular?”
“No doubt at one time but almost forgotten now, I should think,” Jameson replied. “Wells may have been prescient, but the novel wasn’t very good. It had too much political preaching, too little story, and was overtaken by real events. People didn’t need air attack on London fantasies after the World Wars. They had a bellyful of the real thing.”
“So if the book is forgotten, what fixes this reality?” Karla asked.
That, Jameson thought, was a good question. The imaginations of masses of people created the shadow realms of The Otherworld, so this city should have faded away when people forgot Wells’ story. Someone must have a contemporary use for this place, and the fact that it appealed to Karla rather than Jameson suggested that the someone was not human.
“The way here was too easy,” Karla said. “Like we were invited in.”
“Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly,” Jameson said.
Karla nodded.
He checked his pistol again as you never knew in the Otherworld. The bolts might have been breeding. Unfortunately, he still only had one round. When he looked up, Karla was disappearing between two ruined buildings. He hurried after her, and they pressed on to a forest of tangled bushes and trees. A rhododendron bush was in full flower, covered in hemispherical purple flowers like the decorations on a Christmas tree. It looked cheerfully out of place in the abandoned city.
It was the sound that he first noticed, a rhythmic squeak like the slow turn of a rusting wheel. They found the children’s playground in amongst the bushes. The top of a slide projected out of a bramble patch and a wooden play-wheel rotated slowly, making a grating noise as it spun. It had once been brightly painted in blue and yellow, but the colors had faded. It slowed, stopping completely after three or four more revolutions. Jameson wondered who or what had started it spinning in the first place. He could still hear the squeak.
“I’m over here,” a woman’s voice said.
Jameson moved sideways to see around a holly bush without getting too close. He did not want to come face to face with the owner of the
voice unexpectedly.
A tall woman in a long yellow-and-white floaty summer dress sat on a child’s swing, her blond hair permed into waves in a style that reminded him of the 1930s. She rocked backwards and forwards, and the swing’s chains squeaked where they passed through metal hoops on the supporting frame. Jameson kept his gun trained on her. She looked harmless, which proved exactly nothing.
“Go on, give me a push,” the blond said.
“Sefrina!” Karla said from behind Jameson.
Jameson kept his pistol centerd on the woman. If Karla recognized her, there was no doubt in Jameson’s mind of what she was, how bloody dangerous she was.
“Spoilsport,” Sefrina said, pouting. “I heard your latest pet was quite hunky, but the gossip didn’t do him justice, Karla. I don’t know how you pull them at your age and with your dress sense.”
She looked Karla up and down with a sneer. Karla’s leather jacket and trousers had seen better days.
“I think you look damn sexy,” Jameson said loyally to his partner.
Karla shot him a smile.
“What do you want, Sefrina?” Karla asked, moving in front of Jameson but careful not to block his line of fire.
“It’s not what she wants but what I want,” said a male voice.
A man in precisely pressed fawn chinos topped by a navy blue polo shirt emerged from the shadows under the trees. He looked like a politician dressed in smart casual for a photo-op on his holiday. Of course, politicians didn’t usually hold an automatic pistol.
“Still playing with guns, Max,” Karla said. “You surely don’t imagine that toy would stop me.”
“Not you, Karla, I wouldn’t use anything less than a cannon to stop you,” Max said. “But it will make a nasty mess of your little pet there. I am willing to bet you aren’t ready to lose him.”
“And my bolt pistol will make a nasty mess of your girlfriend,” Jameson said, getting a little fed up with being treated as a passive part of the background.
“I doubt Max cares,” Karla said to Jameson.
“Not quite true,” Max said. “Sefrina has her uses. It would be annoying to have to find a replacement.”
If Sefrina was upset by his callousness then she bravely managed to conceal the fact.
He put the gun in his pocket and walked slowly towards them. Karla tensed.
“But there is no need for any unpleasantness. I only want to talk.”
“So talk,” Karla said, folding her arms.
Max bowed mockingly.
“This little pet of yours is a Commission enforcer, is he not?” Max said. “Karla and Jameson, the invincible kill team, the toast of Old London Town.”
“So?” Karla asked.
“You always had a way with humans,” Max replied, “but this time you’ve surpassed yourself. Subverting the entire Commission is truly impressive, my darling.”
It was an insight of how Jameson’s relationship with Karla must look to other daemons. They could not conceive of how she had been bound to him, so they would assume that it must be all Karla’s doing. They thought she must be running some complicated plot. The fact that they could not work out what she was up to merely proved how subtle and cunning she was.
Karla looked bored. “And you’ve always been a windbag. Any chance of you coming to the point?”
Max sighed. “You are a bit of a mystery, Karla. I heard you had sunk into the madness of the blood fugue. No one comes back from that, but you did. How is that?”
Karla grinned humourlessly. “You are nearly as old as me. Why haven’t you succumbed to the madness?”
“Good question. I’ve always thought that it was because I have a purpose. I am the last of the Protectors,” Max said.
Karla laughed. “A purpose with no purpose.”
“What’s a Protector?” Jameson asked.
“They were a pact of my kind that expelled one of the ancient daemon lineages from the world,” Karla replied.
“What did you fight over?” Jameson asked.
“Humans,” Karla replied. “They fed on humans and would have used you all up. We could not permit that.”
Of course not, Jameson thought, stupid question. Why do shepherds protect sheep from wolves? The idea that suckers could have pacts was worrying. He had not thought them capable of such organizational skills.
“Quite right,” Max said. “What a boring world it would be without humans, boring and hungry.”
“Don’t worry about it, Maxy. It’s you that’s the endangered species, not us,” Jameson said, with a sneer.
Max snarled, displaying long canine teeth. “Keep your pet under control, Karla, or I will have to discipline him myself.”
“You can try.” Jameson moved his gun hand slightly to draw attention to his bolt pistol.
“You wanted to talk, Max,” Karla reminded him.
“So I did.” The easy smile was back on Max’s face. “Your pet is not entirely wrong. We are an endangered species, but then, so are humans. The Sith are back.”
Karla sucked in her breath. “Impossible. The Protectors hunted down every last one and sealed in the survivors. They can’t get back. Unless . . .”
“Unless some idiot on this side of the barrier opens a hole,” Max finished for her.
“What the fuck are the Sith?” Jameson said. “And I will shoot the first sucker that mentions Star Wars.”
“What is this Star Wars?” Max asked. “Snow White mentioned them.”
“Snow White? As in Grimms’ Fairy Tales?” Jameson asked, utterly confused by the direction the conversation was taking.
“You’d know her as Rhian,” Max replied.
Jameson looked blank, unenlightened by the explanation.
“How interesting, I assumed she was one of yours,” Max said.
Jameson quickly smiled as it was a firm rule that you never gave anything away to a daemon. They had no concept of idle curiosity. Everything they said or did was directed to their personal goals.
“I find it difficult to believe that you’ve never heard of Star Wars,” Jameson said skeptically. “Where have you been for the last four decades?”
“I was—resting,” Max said. “Until the Sith, that is.”
“What are the damned Sith?” Jameson asked, again.
“The Daoine Sith, Elves, Fairies, the fair folk, the Lords and Ladies,” Karla replied. “You people have lots of names for them.”
“But fairies are just a myth,” Jameson said.
“So are vampires,” Max replied, showing his teeth.
“Okay, point taken, myths can have cores of truth, but fairies and elves are harmless,” Jameson said.
The three suckers laughed at him, like adults amused at the naive credulity of a small child. Jameson felt a pang of jealousy that Karla was siding with her kind against him. Karla picked up the emotion immediately and turned to him.
“Humans have erased the real memory of the Sith from their collective memory. They were too awful, so you sanitized them with fairy tales.” Karla said. “They fed on your pain and terror. Look up some of the old Irish myths about the Sidhe or the Svartálfar in the Scandinavian Edda and you will find echoes of the true nature of the Sith.”
“Never mind the history lesson,” Max said. “The Sith are back because someone in London is opening holes in the barrier for them.”
“We noticed the holes,” Jameson said.
“At the moment the gates are unstable and soon shut, but the problem is getting worse. If they get a permanent gate it will take a major war to expel them, like the one that brought down the human empire.”
“Rome,” Karla said in answer to Jameson’s unspoken query.
“So what you are saying is that we are in deep shit,” said Jameson, summing up.
“As deep as the ocean, little man. I need the help of the Commission to seal off the Sith. I need human magic.”
“Yah, suckers don’t do magic,” Jameson said, thoughtfully.
“Sith do,�
�� Max said.
“I can’t quite remember, it’s been too long, but wasn’t it a human who created the barrier?” Karla asked.
“The sorcerer Merlin,” Max said. “He was a Sith-human hybrid.”
“Sith breed with humans?” Jameson asked incredulously. Sex between humans and daemons was hardly unknown, he was living proof of that, but hybrid issue was something else.
“They can,” Max replied. “It helps them consolidate their position. Full Sith can only tolerate the world for short periods, but hybrids are immune.”
He took a deep breath as if what he was about to say next would be physically painful.
“So, I want a blood pact with you, Karla. I need the magic of your Commission witches.”
“I’ll think about it,” Karla said.
Max nodded, as if he had not expected an immediate decision.
“Talking about immunity, I’d be curious to know how you protect yourself from the Sun. Word is that you’ve been seen out in the real world in daylight,” Max said.
“Really,” Karla replied.
“Really, and don’t give me any rubbish about suntan cream or pills. Like that hasn’t been tried and failed. It’s something unique, something new, something to do with him?” Max gestured at Jameson.
“You are boring me now, Max,” Karla said. “How do we get home from here?”
“You go that way,” Max said, pointing to a path through the trees.
Rhian felt as if she were living in two overlapping worlds. Here she was, walking to work along the same old mundane London streets, filled with the same old mundane London people. A Rastafarian, dreadlocks held up in a red, gold, and green woollen cap, walked past with a rhythmic gait. He nodded and clicked his fingers to a beat only he perceived. The whiff of holy ganja trailed him. A lycra-covered cyclist shot past, moving faster than the cars. Across the street two heavily made up women in sensible business suits tapped their feet and checked their watches. A sign in the small front garden of the terraced house behind announced that it was for sale, so they were estate agents waiting for a client. Given the state of the economy, it was a buyers’ market. He would be as late as he wished or he might not turn up at all.
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