Chasing Embers

by James Bennet

  Was she a witch? Some kind of ghost? Ben was too stunned to guess.

  The audience erupted. He fought his way through the stampede. The great and the good of the Royal Society surged toward the exit, bottlenecked into a jostling stew. Gold-rimmed spectacles crunched underfoot. Necklaces snapped, spilling jewels. Perfume and cologne curdled into a cloying morass. The auditorium shook with the thunder of feet, the soundproofed walls absorbing shouts and screams for help. People scrambled over the seats, some gasping and falling between the rows, sinking under the human tide. Others climbed over them, clawing at arms and legs for leverage, hands and high heels pressing on flesh. The crowd choked in the open double doors, the light from the foyer beyond casting a shadow play across the screen onstage, before which Winlock quailed, clutching the Jackal’s Crook to his chest.

  The woman, borne aloft on crackling tongues, was heading straight for him.

  “Ey!” Her alien cry split the air. “Jiir!”

  The words meant nothing to Ben. All the same, her fury was plain. Struggling past the press of bodies and into the aisle, he watched her rise, sailing upwards on ropes of lightning, the bright blue zigzagging strands bearing her slender weight. Sparks played in her braided hair, circling her breasts, trickling between her thighs. Rushing after her, Ben came up against a wall of pressure, ethereal, magnetic, slowing his pursuit. His tie flailed over his shoulder, his jacket flapping open. Alkaline force stung his nose and throat, the taste as sour, as organic as blood. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself on, reaching out for the woman’s feet as she hovered over the stage.

  Winlock, his lecture forgotten, was a china doll awaiting her judgement. He waved the Crook feebly before him, too frightened to run.

  When the woman spoke next, Ben understood. The word was English, cold, and brooked no denial.

  “Mine.”

  She moved forwards just as his hand closed, her ankle slipping beyond his grasp.

  “I am Atiya, Queen of Punt.” Her voice crackled, a detuned radio dropped down a well. “The heqa-siin is mine.”

  Professor Winlock sank to his knees, static dancing all around him. Sweat glistened in his moustache. The Crook was an ivory blur as he held it out to the airborne woman. An offering. Amends. A surrender.

  The woman who called herself queen frowned and clicked her tongue.

  “No, nacas. You do not give. I take.”

  She reached out and snatched the relic. With her other hand she grabbed the lapel of Winlock’s tux and wrenched him into the air with no more effort than if he were a book or a bag. Veins stood out on her arms, her muscles taut. Winlock went limp in her grasp, his capacity for awe capsizing his senses, and the woman flung him like so much trash into the auditorium. He landed in the fourth row. Bones cracked, a distinct sound that cut through the shouting in the theatre. Ben took a step in that direction and heard the little man groan. A weak sound, but at least he was alive.

  Gall turned Ben back to the stage.

  “Was that entirely necessa—”

  The Queen wasn’t listening. Eyes closed, she held the Crook in both hands, pressing the relic against her navel. Ben’s breath caught in his throat as her torso grew transparent, the flesh swirling into thick black smoke, breaking apart vaporously. In the hollow of her navel, something glimmered, a fist-sized glassy object much like an uncut diamond.

  The Star of Eebe?

  The woman, Atiya, placed the Crook in her open gut. The smoke wove lacily back together, shadow stitching to shadow, and her navel was whole again, flat, sealed and bare. A sheen rippled over her breasts and into her face, and Ben observed a brief transparency – the Queen’s face rounder and younger than before, as though she had dropped a gossamer veil. A childlike visage gazed out at him, precise cornrows on a bony skull, a wasted, desperate stare shining from a rich, dark face, a shared ethnicity with the blazing woman.

  Then it was gone, replaced by spite. Atiya was looking down at him, her eyes an azure fire.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  She didn’t care for the question. A descending storm, she was on him in a second, swooping down from the stage. The surprise more than the impact threw him on to his back, the coruscating woman astride him. He tried to get up, but she gripped his wrists, pressing his arms against the ground. His spine arched, electricity jolting through him. The surrounding carpet crisped and charred. Ozone filled his nostrils, and the sweet stench of burning flesh. Clinging to consciousness, he focused on transformation, summoning a layer of protective scales, red rippling over pink flesh. The pain receded, but cerulean tongues licked all around him, promising incineration.

  “Get…the fuck…off me…”

  “Weak mas.” Atiya spoke casually, as if they were nibbling canapés in the foyer outside rather than joined together in a scintillating death lock. “When I found your hiding place, I expected a challenge worthy of a queen. Ha!”

  Ben grunted, thrashing under her.

  “What do you want? How…did you find me?”

  “I am serpent. I am huntress. I breathed in the air of your city. I caught a distant fire, a scent of embers. And I followed it like smoke in the desert.”

  Sparks flickered, dripping from her to him, a sputtering web enfolding them both. Caught in the strands, vague impressions passed between them, a chill, invasive transmission. Ben realised she was searching his mind, probing his innermost secrets. In return, he caught his own mental shreds, thoughts overflowing her cerebral brim. Desert ruins half swallowed by sand. A young black girl in grimy football shorts. New York under the stars. The images meant nothing to him, his pain the logic threading them together.

  Atiya pressed against him, her eyes boring into his skull, sharp sapphire blades. Even in his torment, he could sense something sexual in their clinch, an animal friction hissing between them. Her thighs gripped him like a vice. Despite the pain, Ben felt himself growing hard. The Queen leant in closer, unmoved by his excitement.

  “You are nothing.” She hissed in his ear, a soft furnace between her lips. “You hide in your lair like a beaten dog, drunk and alone, shackled by the laws of men. You bring shame on all serpentkind.”

  Then she was off him and standing in the aisle.

  “You are not even worth killing.”

  He looked up as she brought her fists together. She may as well have crossed live wires. A blinding bolt spluttered upwards, striking the theatre ceiling. With a tooth-jarring crunch, bricks and plaster showered down, peppering the vacant seats. Ben shielded his head, debris thumping down all around him. Through locked arms, he watched the Queen leap upward, thrust by lightning into the breach.

  He was on his feet at once. The last of the crowd squeezed through the doors, falling over each other as the bottleneck broke, spilling people into the foyer. He heard tables crash over, pyramids of glasses fall and shatter, the screaming guests heading for the stairs. The ozone lingered, a bitter pall. Shaking himself from his stupor, Ben looked up at the ragged hole. Beyond the breach, a resounding clamour, charging through the museum above him. He grimaced. His thighs swelled into haunches, ripping through his trousers, half-formed reptilian legs bulging with mythical brawn. Claws, each one the size of a breeze block, made short work of his shoes. Between two states, bestial and human, he crouched, muscles flexing, and leapt up into the hole.

  Past pipes and girders, snapped wires and ruptured marble, he came crashing into the light. His natural armour absorbed the worst of it. Chunks of concrete dribbled from his shoulders, clattering on the rubble-strewn floor. He was in the Great Court, the steel and glass roof a hundred feet above, triangulating the sky. From the stairs on his right, shouts and screams echoed to his ears, the birds of panic flurrying toward him. He wasn’t concerned about them. His eyes were only for the great glass roof and the giant shadow swooping under it, scudding from one wall to another, its bulk turning in the yawning space like a whale trapped in a bay. Or a pterodactyl caught in a net.

  Ben staggered backwar
ds. He almost fell into the hole behind him and only saved himself by dropping to his knees. Speechless, he watched the Queen rush by over his head, circling the central reading room.

  Against the surrounding marble, Atiya was an ink spill on pristine paper. Her sleek scales overlapped tightly, forming a hide so dark he could barely make out the separate sections. Her fore and rear legs hung under her belly, terminating in razor-sharp claws – one of which, he now realised, had no doubt left the glyph on his door. Tail lashing, she struck out at the sheer white walls, gouging powdery scars. Blades lined her body from snout to tip, a barbed, shimmering spine. As she made another turn, Ben stared into her eyes, each one ablaze with frustration. A tiara of twisting black horns, similar to those of a ram, edged her narrow, scabrous head. Immediately, this rack was bearing down on him.

  Lightning crackled, scorching marble. Ben ducked, shielding his head, as Fulk Fitzwarren gloated in his mind.

  The Pact is null and void, Garston. You’re not the only one any more.

  He looked up as the Queen, before him in bestial guise, navigated a final turn in the Court. Then she spread her wings, a sixty-foot span of leather casting the cavernous space in gloom. She beat them once, twice, propelling her bulk up into the tessellate web. Countless frames screeched and twisted. Glass rained down, smashing like hail on the ground. A section of the roof lifted, splitting upwards and apart, the burst skin of some metal fruit. Then she was through, her wings melting into the night.

  Ben climbed to his feet, a shocked figure shaking his head.

  You think that the Guild wouldn’t have known? A disturbance in the Long Sleep? The Lore so dramatically breached?

  Sir Maurice’s words came back to haunt him. Here was the proof that put the lie to them, undeniable in scaled flesh. Here were the wings that had crashed into the Javits Center, leaving no trace of explosion or fire. Here was the reason for Fulk’s attack and the CROWS’ exultation. Here, in sharp claws and blazing eyes, Ben read his own death warrant.

  There was another dragon in London.

  EIGHT

  Ben stood in his tattered suit at the top of the museum steps. Faux-Greek columns loomed on either side, supporting The Progress of Civilisation. Squeezing his neck like a wringer, his face taut with unease, he scanned the orange-tinged sky. Midweek traffic on Bloomsbury Street drowned out the fading beat of wings. Marble dust mixed with the lingering stench, an acrid, carbonised pall. Having claimed what she had come for, absorbing it into her flesh, Queen Atiya was gone. The night skies were empty.

  This is just the beginning. She’ll track down every last one of her gifts and kill anyone who gets in her way.

  Like Fulk, Babe Cathy took a ride in his head these days. But the witch was out of luck in terms of her threat. He was still alive, wasn’t he?

  The Queen’s presence answered a question, but she had left a dozen more in her wake. In his mind, the sixty-foot-wide jagged maw in the face of the Javits Center laughed even harder. So he could pick the thief out of a line-up; that didn’t mean he understood her motive. Mine, she’d said. The heqa-siin is mine. And there was more to this, wasn’t there? Because in all his years in this dirty old world, Ben had never seen the likes of her before. She was a dragon all right, but she wasn’t quite…typical, her breed unknown to him. Just how far did the Lore extend? How deep did the Long Sleep go? And who the fuck had roused the Queen from slumber?

  Only the Guild could give him these answers.

  He looked over his shoulder, jogged from his thoughts as Winlock’s guests burst from the museum. Hair in disarray, jewellery forgotten, they must have picked their way through the Great Court, avoiding the debris and choking on dust. One or two of them gawped at him, this ragged man who was at least a man again and not some flame-eyed freak from a late-night creature feature. He turned from them, arms dangling at his sides, his clenched fists making wires of his veins. Dust powdered his hair, dousing the spiky red mess, but even dust couldn’t hide his dismay, his wide green eyes searching the sky, his jaw hanging open. The guests’ shock rendered them immune to his presence, and they flitted past him and down the steps without a backward glance. Survival, the great mitigator. He watched the last of them vanish through the gates, staggering out into Great Russell Street. Tomorrow, the tabloids would scream bombs and fanatics. The Daily Mail would see a surge in new material.

  Ben chewed his lip. What should he do? Take to the sky and follow the Queen? With Atiya’s sudden appearance, this was a fight-to-the-death situation. Only one member of each Remnant group could officially function in the world. That was the Lore. Those were the rules. That was what had granted Fulk the right to attack him, publicly and without fear of censure. And soon enough, others would come, not just agents of the Guild, but the Whispering Chapter too, and who knew how many more previously restricted enemies? The Pact was a magically binding agreement, sealed by scroll, prayer and harp song eight hundred years ago. Broken by the Queen’s awakening, how long would it take till the Chapter learnt of it? How long before that austere and pious arm of the Curia Occultus came baying for his blood?

  So what then? Hunt the Queen down and demand answers? He might not be the Brain of Britain, but Ben knew better than that. As if she would suffer him. Engage her in single combat? When was the last time he’d fought one of his kind? Yen-King, China. Way back in the Middle Ages. Some beasts had resisted the Pact more violently than others, thrust kicking and screaming into the Long Sleep. The scars that Ben bore to this day wouldn’t let him forget Mauntgraul in a hurry…But that had been centuries ago. He was out of practice, growing soft. To go up against someone his own size? Someone apparently stronger? Well, it didn’t seem wise.

  On a deeper, primal level, something ached in him besides bruises. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, this niggling underlying feeling, one he could only define as yearning. Firm thighs pressed against his heat. Hot lips at his ear. Animal attraction. Despite his close shave in the lecture theatre, the coming of the Queen meant that he was no longer alone.

  The thought made him feel weak. No. He wasn’t ready to face her…

  That left the treasure hunt. The quest. Find out more about these stolen relics and get a better idea of who, or what, he was dealing with. He recalled the witch’s chant on the Brooklyn Bridge. It wasn’t hard to guess where the Queen was heading. She’d be after the Pschent next, wherever it was. The why of things would have to wait. For now, he was living on borrowed time. He had never been keen on detective work. Perhaps it was time to visit a friend, if he could call the envoy extraordinary that. With Queen Atiya winging over London, it was clear that he was out of his depth.

  He turned back to the museum, intending to check on Winlock and call an ambulance – maybe follow the professor to the hospital and wait to pump him for information – when a movement by the gates snagged his attention. One glance and he slowly turned to face the street again, drawn by a magnet of shock. The air rippled, gauze over water, a glimmer working across the space. Energy. Magical energy. Through the haze, he made out a figure between the gates, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes blue and confused.

  “Rose…?” At the sound of his voice, she turned towards him. The aqueous barrier rippled with the motion, a liquid mirage. What trick is this? The image was surely an illusion. Rose couldn’t be here. Could she? Either way, he found himself running down the steps and across the flagstones, tie flapping and fists bunched. He made it halfway across the courtyard before the gates clanged shut ahead of him. Close Sesame. There was no one around to shut them. No one he could see, anyway. Rose, or the illusion of Rose, drifted into fog. Vanished. He looked up at the surrounding buildings, seeing only empty windows. The mirage ballooned to envelop him, the museum and the buildings sinking underwater, some latter-day urban Atlantis. The air felt thick and close, and growing colder than a witch’s—

  The thought slammed into him. He wasn’t running any more because he couldn’t move.

  Fuck.
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br />   Ben looked down. He was standing in a circle, a broad hexagram sketched in chalk on the flagstones. Familiar symbols bordered the ring, scrawled white glyphs. Udjats and inverted crosses. Sun wheels and dead man’s runes. All-seeing eyes and swastikas. An alphabet of adversity. The symbols flashed, stirring into life, activated by his presence. They revolved slowly, a sluggish zodiac fencing him in. When he tried to edge forward, it was like trying to walk through stone. Somewhere nearby, a woman was chanting. A man laughed, gloating and gruff. Bile rose in Ben’s throat. Vertigo clawed at his guts. The symbols spun faster, an occult merry-go-round. The world became a blank white blur.

  Ben slipped into the nothing.

  Interlude: A Shadow at the Door

  Hospitals, the shadow thought, only delay the inevitable.

  In one room, a newborn gave her first cry. In the next, a cancerous grandfather spluttered out his last. A weeping woman entered A&E. A man left reception whistling. Somewhere in the spectrum, the revolving door of accident, healing, disease and decline, there lay a central truth: humans are fragile and all humans die.

  Death laughed in places like these. Laughed at all the bleeping machines, the bottles filled with unpronounceable pills. Laughed at the children lying in bed. Laughed at the doctors rushing back and forth, the nurses in their starched blue skirts. The pale, fidgeting visitors clutching flowers and cards. In the end, Death took them all. The game of life was stacked in its favour. So Death laughed. Laughed at human beings and their weakness.

  But Death did not laugh at the shadow.

  Not any more. No.

  Guy’s Hospital, Southwark, was much like any other. Every room was more or less the same. The same tired linoleum, worn by countless feet. The same drab wallpaper and TV on the wall. The door with the porthole, looking out on an empty, featureless corridor. The usual drip, fat with saline. A heart monitor pulsing with beats, a visual countdown to the inescapable…

  There was the bed, of course, and its latest occupant.