Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology

by Mark Lawrence

  The thoughts churning within me were difficult to keep in that small, dark box in my mind, hidden from the Duke. The box was a gift, given unknowingly to me by my father. His memories resided there along with my own secrets.

  “As you wish, my Duke. I am meeting with Dr. Bandrel at the scene an hour after shallow. I will report all my findings to you as I have them.”

  “Very good,” the Duke said. He plucked a dark bird from flight and examined its frightened eyes.

  “Finch,” he whispered to the bird, reading the bright black eyes of his captive. The bird squirmed within its cage of pale, cadaverous, fingers. The Duke released it. It fluttered up beyond the Aviary’s ceiling and out into the darkness.

  He turned with a flourish of his great scalloped cape that rustled like his namesake. His human guise expanded, and then diffused into the darkness like a drop of ink in water.

  The cries that echoed in the great hallway that led back to the lift were a frenzied amalgam of scream and song that traveled with me long after the lift had departed the Aviary.

  #

  I regarded the red dawn from the worn steel catwalk where Kolvino had perished.

  Turning away from the killer, I looked down at the piles of bones and dust around me. My father’s remains rested here with all the other generations drained to satisfy the hunger of Kolvino, my Duke, and the other Beloved of the Hive. Now one of their own joined the ash of mortals, all equal now. As the dawn crept across the carpet of skulls, I wondered what had passed through Kolvino’s ancient mind as death had come to him.

  Though they had enjoyed briefly death’s cold company, the Beloved no more understood death than I did. They were still subject to it. I liked to believe they still knew fear and regret in their final moments, it made them seem more understandable.

  Dr. Bandril’s labored breath announced his arrival.

  Bandril’s skin was like yellowed paper. His long tangled hair was the color of fireplace ash. He wore robes of purple and black that announced his station. He had been old when the Bug had nearly destroyed humanity and the Beloved had shown themselves to the survivors. Now, he was the High Attendant of Her Dark Majesty and royal surgeon for the Hive.

  Bandril was accompanied by one of his students, a heavy-set man, who helped him up the stairs.

  “Couldn’t pick my nice, cozy house to meet me in, could you, Prefect Finch?” he said gulping for air. He steadied himself on his young apprentice and then rested against the rail of the catwalk.

  “I thought you might wish to view the crime scene yourself, master physician,” I said, flicking away my cigarette into the bone yards and bowing in Bandril’s direction. “I thought perhaps you might have missed something or had…”

  “I miss nothing,” Bandril snapped with a hiss and spray of spittle. “My agents are well trained, better than your clumsy magistrates. They provide me every detail, every insight. I have already visited this place many times, High Attendant. Why should I bother to actually come here?”

  “Of course, doctor. I mean no disrespect. What news have you?”

  The old man reached out a wrinkled claw to his assistant. The apprentice opened a cracked leather medical bag, faded white with wear, and handed Bandril sheets of green and white striped computer paper. The Doctor examined it with rheumy eyes.

  “You realize, of course, that when the Beloved are exposed to direct sunlight, it produces a violent and virtually complete exothermic reaction at the cellular level. Almost nothing remains after they have been consumed.

  “I was able to acquire a small trace of fatty tissue clinging to the underside of the catwalk you and your men bumbled about on for hours. Not much, really, just a tiny speck of grease. It was sufficient for a chemical examination, however. Would you like to know what I found?” he asked, like a petulant child, teasing.

  “Yes,” I said, “please.”

  “A powerful coagulant,” Bandril cackled, brandishing the green-and-white computer analysis paper like the royal scepter. “Some type of hematological ester, a manufactured molecule that produces tremendous viscosity in human blood. It would have caused one of the Beloved great pain and terrible difficulty in movement for many hours as it froze the blood within their veins. A most efficient way to render such a powerful being impotent, yes?”

  Poison. A dreadful connection snapped close in my mind. I tried to push it into my mental box.

  “Then this was definitely introduced into the Duke’s body? There is no way this could have been any sort of disease or natural condition?”

  Bandril looked at his assistant, for strength, and then sighed.

  “I detest repeating myself. I said it was man-made. I have studied our divine benefactors and their anatomy for over two centuries, while you were still a temple boy. The drug was introduced into Kolvino’s body, most likely by a gradual process, since such a chemical would require time to build up sufficient dosage to overcome one of the Beloved’s preternatural stamina. Yes, yes, many hours of exposure to the chemical would be required.”

  “What would this chemical do to the blood of a mortal?” I asked already knowing the answer.

  Bandril snorted as if the question was not worth the effort. “Why, kill them, obviously. Slowly, painfully, I would hazard; very painfully.”

  #

  The Temple of the Servant was a wide, squat dome of stone the color of bleached bone encircled by great rings of smooth blue-gray granite stairs. Four massive arches of shimmering obsidian set at equidistant points around the temple lead into the cool, cavernous interior. The Temple was at the very center of the Hive; in truth, it was its heart.

  I entered through the eastern arch, along with hundreds of vessels that had come to offer tithe to the Beloved. “Offer” may not have been the correct word; it implied a choice in the process.

  Speakers mounted inside the entryway carried a mellow, parental voice repeating instructions and direction in a variety of languages.

  “Today you undertake the most awesome responsibility of your existence. Your sacrifice serves the good of all. Through you, the Beloved and all of Humanity remain strong and vital. Please wait patiently for an Attendant to obtain your information.”

  Two young attendants with radio headsets and tablets screened the vessels as they entered: name, address, and Red Lottery number. It was all encoded on a plastic card worn around the neck. The same card had hung around my father’s neck.

  Most of the people in line looked more bored than frightened. Several watched the televisions mounted on the wall as the line slowly shuffled forward, or looked at the pictograms in the newspapers. A few of the children rocked nervously back and forth, nervous and excited at this first time of being called.

  It had been very different two hundred years ago. The Hive then was little more than a vast, hollow concrete cave with tattered survivors within and the Bug, hungry and hot, without. The Red Lottery was almost always a death sentence in those days, but the odds of staying alive were better with the Beloved than with the Bug.

  I had first entered the Hive when I was 10 years old, holding my father’s hand through our Biohazard suits. We shuffled in along with thousands of other refugees with no place to go, now that our world had become a graveyard. My father’s face seemed indistinct to me now behind the plastic shield of the suit, but his muffled voice had lingered with me over the centuries, like my memories of the sun.

  “It will be all right, Aaron. Don’t be afraid. We’ll take care of each other, son.”

  “Prefect Finch?”

  The voice shook away the vague shadows of my fading memory. It was one of the attendants from the entrance. She was standing beside me.

  “Yes, Bora, isn’t it?” I said, stuffing my father back in the bolthole in my mind.

  “Yes, sir. I understand that your new duties will require more attendants. I would very much like you to consider me for induction into the House of Dying Leaves.”

  It was a bold move. I would never have had the
nerve to do it myself at her stage of initiation.

  “You have completed your training here at the temple?”

  “Yes, Prefect. I am awaiting selection to a household and I would very much like to be selected by yours. I know two of my fellows were recently inducted for special service.”

  “You do understand that the House chooses the Attendant, not the other way around?”

  This seemed to deflate her somewhat but she hid it well. Very good.

  “I apologize for my enthusiasm, High Attendant. I only meant…”

  “I understand,” I said. “I will review your records and speak with your instructors. If I deem it appropriate, I will discuss the matter with the Duke.”

  “Thank you, High Attendant,” she said, a smile peeking through her discipline and nervousness. I tried to recall what it was like to be that young.

  “Where is Attendant Kestrel at this hour?”

  “The Hall. She is teaching.”

  #

  “Why do we serve the Beloved?” Kestrel asked the assembled acolytes, a sea of shaved heads and crimson robes.

  Behind her was a sweeping view of the main donation floor. On the floor, attendants went about the business of collecting tithes of blood from hundreds of vessels, strapped to donation tables.

  Slender intravenous tubing dangled down from the ceiling, like lazily drifting tentacles from some giant man o’ war. A brief whisper of praise for good citizenship in the vessels’ ear, a needle slid into a plump blue vein, bee-sting quick. The dark, potent liquor of their hearts crawling upward, through the tubes.

  Attendants helped pale, staggering vessels, whose number had come up too often, into the recovery rooms. They would be treated, returned to their homes and their lives, until the next time their number came up in the Red Lottery.

  “By our service and loyalty does the covenant that saved the human race remain intact,” Kestrel intoned as she paced before the assembled hall of fresh faced acolytes. “But it’s much simpler than that, isn’t it?”

  Her hair was the color of autumn leaves—gold and fire. Her eyes were green spring promise. Her lips were the color of dried blood. She wore the same crest and colors as I.

  “Survival,” she said. “Boil down all that noble and selfless verbiage and you get simple survival. We serve the Beloved because it is what we must do to survive as a species.”

  Her eyes locked with mine. She nodded faintly.

  “Pretty words from a textbook that mean nothing to you will not gird your heart for the toll centuries of service will inflict. You must cling to what you really know, in your marrow, in your heart. Those things will sustain you.

  “Students, I must retire for a moment,” she said. “In my absence you are to meditate upon the reasons you desire to serve.”

  “What do you want, Finch?” she asked in the hall.

  “That substance we once discussed, that was never to be used, has been used to murder Kolvino.”

  “What?” Her surprise seemed genuine but with Kestrel it was always hard for me to be sure. I could never read her, even when we were children.

  “Has it begun?”

  “And if it had, Finch, whose side would you be on?”

  She walked quickly down the hallway, her sandals echoing in the empty hall. We ducked into a small study alcove, off from the main corridor.

  “You told me the plan to use the drug had been vetoed, that too many agreed with the warning I gave you.”

  “A very passionate plea. Pity you didn’t have the nerve to give it yourself.”

  “I am not a party to your little rebellion,” I said.

  “And yet, you come to me now, alone, not with your hounds. You whisper in alcoves with me, Aaron. Why is that?”

  “You know damn well why. Because you and your fools will get us all killed.

  “If they even suspected your little network existed, they would kill every Acolyte, every Attendant, in the Hive. They might not stop there. Imagine it, every man, woman and child in the city strapped into those infernal machines day after day, bred and milked like cattle without even the pretense of freedom and humanity to cling to.

  “How long do you think it would take, Julia? Without us to keep the rabble in line, keep them from annoying the Beloved with the demands of their existence? With being human?”

  I turned away from her. My anger recessed back into the vault of discipline I had allowed it to escape from.

  “And my name is no longer Aaron,” I said to the wall.

  “Aaron…Finch,” she said, “Those ‘rabble’ are your people, enslaved in this tomb. Better to die free than live like this.”

  Her hand came to rest upon my shoulder and I realized I could no longer remember the last time I had experienced the touch of another human being. I reveled in the simple feeling of connection, of empathy.

  I suddenly realized just how seductive Kestrel’s rebellion really was. To feel whenever you wanted, however you wanted. To not have to guard your mind and emotions constantly from beings that could read both like examining bacteria under a microscope. To trust in touch and scent and all our old instincts that had lain fallow so long in this, their world.

  I brushed the hand away and turned back to face her. She was close to me. I breathed in her life and exhaled it in a sigh of regret.

  “You were an infant when you first came here,” I began. “I remember you running, laughing, down the halls of this temple when you were three. You don’t remember the Bug, the way it killed, what it did to us when everything began to fall apart. We were finished and then they stepped out of the shadows and saved us.”

  “They saved themselves,” she said, stepping back from me. “Like farmers trying to save their crop from blight.”

  “Yes, and that’s why I trust them more than I trust us. Where do you think the Bug came from? Some lab where we were trying to perfect a way to kill as many of our own as efficiently as we could. The Beloved don’t scare me; what we can do to each other, that’s terrifying.

  “We are their food; they need us. It’s in their best interest to keep us alive and happy and quiet. They saved us out of enlightened self-interest and they will continue to keep us alive and relatively free as long as we don’t make the price of our freedom too high.”

  Kestrel ran a hand across her face. Her shoulders dropped like someone weary from a long journey.

  “You must have heard the same stories I have, she said. “The blood orgies, the indiscriminate killings with no lottery, no warning. A pretty face strikes the fancy of one of them and then that pretty face disappears. The rumors of an arena somewhere where we are slaughtered like animals for their amusement.

  “Could anyone live as long as they have and remain sane? Tell me Finch, if even some of the rumors are true, are you so sure they can be trusted? That they deserve your loyalty?”

  “Duke Kolvino’s demise was not an assassination?” It was time for the masks again.

  “Someday, high attendant, you will have to choose a side,” she said. “No. We did not sanction Kolvino’s murder.”

  “Do you know Kolvino’s high attendant, Perin?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He recently joined us. I did not recruit him myself. I remember being concerned because his loyalty to Kolvino was said to be as strong as yours is to the Duke of Dying Leaves.”

  I ignored the barb. “Did he have access to the drug?”

  “He could get it from one of our sources,” she said. “You suspect him as the killer? Why?”

  “If he joined your group, obviously his loyalty was not as steadfast as reported.”

  Unless…the faces from the paintings on their small shrine.

  “Are your people hiding him?”

  “If we were, I wouldn’t tell you.” The space between us was back to its proper distance—two nemeses, circling the same singularity of mutually assured destruction.

  “No matter. I’ll find him,” I said.

  #

  Wren was leani
ng against a crumbling concrete wall across the street from the old woman’s home. The rain cycle had just begun and my oldest and most-trusted magistrate had the hood on his worn leather coat pulled tight to ward off the cold reclaimed water as it fell from the dome’s dark ceiling.

  “Anything?” I asked as I approached him from the alleyway.

  “I think I’m getting a cold,” he sniffled. “Other than that, they are all in there and they had company.”

  “Oh?”

  “Two of them. I made them for attendants, but I didn’t recognize either of them. Looked like their hair had just grown back in.”

  “Young?”

  “Even if it weren’t raining, they would be wet behind the ears.”

  “Are they still in there?” I asked, trying to light a damp cigarette.

  “No, milord. They left about an hour ago. The old woman definitely looked relieved to see them go.”

  “I know two of my fellows were recently inducted for special service,” Bora had said at the temple.

  “Thank you, Wren. Go home.”

  “All the same to you, sir, I’d just as soon stay for a while.”

  “No.”

  “This has gotten political, hasn’t it?”

  I nodded and gave up on the cigarette, tossing it into the rushing waters of the gutter at out feet.

  “I hate political,” he said, barely audible over the rain.

  “Go home, Wren. I’ll be fine.”

  As I crossed the empty street, I wrapped my coat tighter around my body, hiding my badge of office. I knocked on the battered tin door. The house number was marked in shaky lines of black spray paint.

  A slender blade of light appeared as the door was cracked and the face of an elderly woman peered out. Fear glazed her eyes.

  “Hello,” I said softly. “My name is Aaron; I’m an associate of Perin’s. I wonder if I might come in.”

  #

  The Duke of Dying Leaves allowed me to wait in the cool echoes of the Aviary for over an hour while he sang to his smallest servants.

  Then en mass, they ascended in a shrieking whirlwind of sound and motion, circled him for a moment, and then departed through the openings in the dome.