Chasing Embers

by James Bennet

  The Queen was hours ahead of him. She was heading for Cairo and the Pschent. Bardolfe and the CROWS had travelled there too. The web was large and full of secrets. There were threads here, unseen but all around him. Tripwires. Snares. Hints and shadows. All the strands, it seemed, met in Egypt, returning to their ancient source. And was Rose there too, stuck in the middle and guarded by the spider?

  Thoughts of the CROWS prompted thoughts of Atiya climbing from her tomb. No, others had summoned her. The girl, Khadra, had opened Pandora’s box, but she had not turned the lock under her own steam. Someone had given her the key, pushed a map and a shard into desperate hands. Dhegdheer came with promises. Secrets…She told us how to raise her. It wasn’t lost on Ben that the giver of those gifts had been a hunchbacked old woman, a hag with a drooping left ear and long crooked claws. A hag…but not a witch. Even in the current crisis, that was highly unlikely. Only the Three were currently awake and active as per the conditions of the Pact, and Ben couldn’t see any of the witch’s aspects suffering another, a threat to her…their…its position. Some creature from folklore, then. In other words, a Remnant. Albeit rare, it was true that some Remnants were simply themselves, unique to begin with rather than belonging to any particular tribe. Black Annis, the Wild Hunt and the Wandering Jew, for instance – all had retreated into mystery and myth, but they were out there somewhere. Was it so strange for Africa to have similar oddities? Ben didn’t think so. The hag, Dhegdheer, had told Khadra’s mother the location of the tomb, and in return Khadra’s mother had sent the girl out into the waste, dispatched to raise an old and vengeful power.

  Ben was beginning to grasp the breadth of the web and the will of those who had spun it. But why now? Why, after centuries of so-called subdual, had the CROWS chosen this moment to strike? He considered the heart of the web, where all the strands met, and his blood ran cold as he thought of Bardolfe, the venerable chairman of the Guild. If Ben’s suspicions were correct and Bardolfe was conspiring with House Fitzwarren and the Three, then Rose must have fallen into the chairman’s clutches, because Ben had seen her, hadn’t he? Through that weird sheen in the atmosphere, that bubble between the gates of the British Museum. He had heard the witch’s laughter just before they had sprung their spellbound trap, using his former lover as a taunt. Or a lure.

  Think of her as a fish on a line. Think of her as bait.

  Ben shuddered. It was all connected somehow. He had yet to figure out what role the chairman played, why he had betrayed the Guild and thrown in with the Coven Royal. He could only imagine Rose’s terror, finding herself caught up in these tenuous schemes. If he was right, Rose was in the clutches of Remnants, creatures that to her mind would belong in fairy tales, nightmares that had stepped right out of books and into the real world.

  Ben spat flecks of blood on the snow. There was nothing more real than his rage. Weariness clung to his body and he had no time to heal fully. It was Sunday morning and the last sands in the hourglass were sifting away, threatening to steal all he believed in and all he held dear. He had no time for hesitation. No time for doubt. No time to hear the envoy whisper in his ears.

  Know that you fly to your destruction.

  Ben spread his wings and took to the sky.

  He had a long way to go. He judged the distance at well over a thousand miles. This final push would test his strength to the limit, and he’d still have to deal with whatever was waiting for him in Cairo, a grim and troubling thought. Wings pumping, discrete gills rushing with air, he could not let such thoughts delay him. He flew south, following the Adriatic coast, a blue sweep far below that soothed his reptilian self. He saw a scattering of islands, fleeing the shredded shore like ill-advised ships. He soared on over the Balkans, lands that he knew as Croatia, Albania and Greece, although he saw no dotted lines between them or distinguished any difference in their mountains, forests and fields. A thermal current shot him inland towards Athens, and here, at last, his strength ran out. It was almost midday. Precious minutes trickled through his claws. On this side of Europe, the time zone was uniform. Clocks could not help him, buy him any time. Sheer stamina couldn’t help either. His exertions of the night before, his battle with the Queen and subsequent burial had all but finished him. If he pressed on, he would soon find himself drained and falling, a latter-day Icarus tumbling from the sun, hissing into the Mediterranean Sea.

  But come hell or high water, he couldn’t give up. Giving up wasn’t an option.

  He was thinking about circling down to rest for a while on the slopes of Mount Parnitha when, for once, Providence smiled. Some distance behind him, he spied an aeroplane, approaching fast. The sleek white dart sprayed fumes over the ocean, a commercial jet that probably bore a load of tourists from Budapest or Rome, some far-off northern clime. He strained to see, calculating risk. Blue stripes on the neck and tail, radiating from a watchful eye, adorned the plane’s tubular body. The best part about it was the logo on its flanks. EgyptAir in bold italics.

  Usually Ben avoided airline routes, climbing several miles higher into the stratosphere, steering clear of potential collision or passengers catching sight of him. In human form, he had enjoyed the luxury of aeroplanes. When not, he had cursed them for invading his erstwhile territory. He had never hitched a ride on one before. As it stood, his options were running out. So, if he could time this right…He folded his wings and whistled downwards, surfing the buffeting updraughts. The plane roared in below him, cruising at five hundred miles per hour. Ben shot through layers of pressure, his bulk dwindling to human size as he drew near the jet, a vaguely horned crimson shape with scaled limbs extended. Shrunken wings tensed to steady him and muscles resisting the screaming wind, he settled on top of the plane, alighting near the tail with a gentle clunk. Head down and shoulders braced, he flattened himself as much as possible, a red barnacle melding itself to the aerodynamics. He dug his claws into smooth metal, anchoring himself to the fuselage.

  The plane roared on, an oblivious beast with Ben its new-found parasite. He closed his eyes, wishing that he had a god to pray to, someone to petition for Rose’s safety. But all the gods were dead or sleeping, and the only one he’d met had almost killed him, dropping half a mountain on his head. So much for faith. All he could do was trust to his wits and hope for the best. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  Ben rode the aeroplane south and gathered his strength for the coming storm.

  TWENTY

  Flight MS792 slowly lost altitude over the north Egyptian coast. Ben heard the Boeing deploy its flaps, a faint bump in the freezing wind as the plane increased its angle of descent. The wings bounced, bleeding off airspeed. Inside, seat-belt lights would be flashing on, magazines would be folded away and drop-down tables pushed upright. Flight attendants would leave the aisle to strap themselves back in. As the captain buzzed a thank-you over the intercom, first in English and then in Arabic, businessmen would glance at their watches and hope that Customs didn’t keep them too long, while tourists gazed out at the afternoon sun, already tasting the cocktails by the hotel pool. Locals returning home would fuss with their kaftans and veils, their attire shaking off any European looseness, tweaked for the stricter observance of home.

  It was easy to imagine these everyday scenes. Inside the plane, normality reigned, a world of airsickness pills, taffeta eye masks, inflatable pillows and freeze-dried meals. A world where the monsters belonged to the in-flight movie and the gods were invisible, taken on trust. The mundane reality of Modern Man rumbled on in trivial conversations, plastic earphones, shuffling feet and the background drone of giant turbofans. To Ben, a lizardine lump clamped to the fuselage, the plane was one big metallic metaphor, symbolising the Loreful division, an arrangement he now thought flimsy at best. All it would take was a punch of a scaled fist, a few slashes of his claws, to bring the two worlds crashing together. Nevertheless, he hoped for a less violent collision for the earth’s separate realities. If everyone and their mother was right, and a new age was to ri
se from the ashes of the Pact, he hoped that some kind of peace was possible, whether the Fay returned or not. The Queen had plucked out that hope in the Alps, regarding it on the end of her claw like a fly found in a wine glass. You long for a normal life. Like the Guild of the Broken Lance, she obviously thought that exposing the Remnants to the world at large could only lead to destruction. Unlike the CROWS, she appeared to care little for dominion, had no wish to subjugate all that was human under a tyranny of myths. Atiya’s vengeance centred on the past, a ghost calling to ghosts, and he wondered whether her revenant self, fuelled as it was by mortal flesh, was merely replaying the scenes of her tragedy in modern times, like an after-image of lightning, an echo of thunder, her betrayer long since gone to dust along with the world she had known…

  Secrets. Dominion. Vengeance. Ben was caught, it seemed, in a trinity of dangerous goals. Was it wrong that he could see another way? In the eight hundred years since he’d signed the Pact, humans had grown and evolved. Wasn’t there at least an outside chance that they could come to accept that the world and its weft was not all it seemed? That magic and myth endured? Endured with the same need to survive. Lived and loved with the same fire…

  As though renouncing the blinkered world, he unhooked his claws from the fuselage and swan-dived into space. Far below, the green diamond of the Nile delta spread its skirts on an ocean of sand. The Sahara surged in umber and gold, dunes sweeping to every horizon like waves crashing on a narrow shore, this verdant vein that spanned countries, defying the arid waste. In all his years, Ben had never flown so far south, and the desert’s immensity stunned him, fascination drawing him down into its embrace, sailing on dusty winds. The aeroplane was just a speck above him when his wings spread to their full span, blasting streamers from the dunes. His tail snaked out, a proud red flag. He had reached his destination and there was no time for discretion. Below him flowed the wide brown Nile, the longest river in the world, where the drooping palm trees dipped their roots and the fields drank in their limited green.

  The proximity of water no longer soothed him, its inherent comfort cancelled by the sun. Ben didn’t trust that sun. Soon the moon would come, sliding across its fiery face. Syzygy. Eclipse. Abandonment. Downfall. Occult bodies aligning in the sky, a celestial convergent act, exchanging day for night. Exchanging, perhaps, reality for myth. Light for darkness. Peace for war.

  Below him, a city sprawled, a pall of smoke on the sands. Cairo the Conqueror. The City of a Thousand Minarets. Ben had heard the grandiose names over the years. He didn’t need the sight of the Pyramids, those three ancient, crumbling wonders, their geometric bellies hoarding secrets, to recognise his location. Atiya’s scent threaded through the air, a cerebral fragrance overlaying the confection of fumes – factory belches, shisha pipes, burning rice and camel shit – that led him down and on, swooping over the tombs of the long-dead pharaohs, Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. The Great Sphinx, a hybrid bulk of lion’s body and human head, watched him sweep east and into the city with enigmatic, stone-faced empathy.

  Riding the sirocco wind, Ben traced the Dark Queen, his shadow painting the rooftops and the riddle of roads. He sped over a concrete mosaic, the urban heights predominantly flat and open to the elements. Satellite dishes bristled next to clapboard huts, the luxury of TV beside the rooftop dwellings of the poor. He saw roof gardens, billboards, firebombed ruins. Here and there, office buildings and new hotels broke the Escheresque vista, a thousand suns sparkling in glass.

  Screams shattered the general hubbub. People looked up, saw the beast overhead.

  Ben’s wings stirred up dust, rattling washing lines and aerials. The westering sun and warbling adhan told him that the hour was roughly three p.m. As much as his sense of preservation urged him to pick out a rooftop and continue to follow the trail on foot, his fear yelled that the day was wasting. If he could catch up with the Queen, surely she could tell him where to find Rose. Fuck her threats. He would face her again, even if it meant his death. In a city of millions, Bardolfe and the CROWS could be just about anywhere. Thus far, they had failed to show their hand. A game of Pin the Tail on the Witch was more than Ben could afford right now.

  He swept on, anxious but undeterred. He veered north-east, drawing near the city’s heart, his passage leaving a wake of terror in the streets below. He couldn’t let their panic stop him. A latticework tower appeared ahead, rising from an island in the Nile. The great river flowed around the island and stretched on through the city, the waters greased by industrial waste. Sailboats bobbed down there, tossed by the beat of his wings. He banked between the tower and a bulbous hotel, diving between two parallel bridges and rejoining the urban sprawl.

  The Queen’s spiritual scent was stronger now, vibrating in his skull. Following her beacon, he spiralled down to the place where he felt the pull most. The building was a neoclassical hulk of rust-coloured brick, its pillared arch a wide white mouth flanked by granite pharaohs. The palm trees at the front rose almost as high as the domed roof. An Egyptian flag rippled above the courtyard, the red, white and black bands dancing in the gusts of Ben’s approach. Sphinxes guarded the plaza below, set before a wide rectangular pool, lilies floating on the ruffled surface. At this time of day, the Museum of Antiquities – Ben recognised the building partly from books, partly from Atiya’s insights and partly from a near-crushing sense of inevitability – should have been swarming with tourists.

  Instead, it was swarming with soldiers.

  Ben had seen the news. Trouble in Cairo was nothing new. Civil unrest, Molotov cocktails and gunfire flashed across his mind’s eye just as they had on his TV in London, reports of violent demonstrations, warring sects and capsizing governments as the country strove for democracy. He was far from an expert in world affairs, but his adventures in the criminal underworld had not left him without experience. He would recognise the stench of explosives anywhere. Tanks waited in the road below, their khaki bodies parked in a loose semicircle outside the museum gates, their engines idling like drunken bugs. He didn’t think their presence was due to the local riots. In an instant, he noticed three things. One, the building’s crowning dome was shattered, a portion of the structure reduced to twisted wreckage on the roof. Two, the tanks’ gun turrets had turned on their axes as he descended. Three, all the long barrels now pointed at him.

  A welcoming party. Great.

  One of the tanks lay on its side, its gun bent, its tracks upended, a police car crushed beneath them. Furrows that could only be claw marks scored the tarmac around the vehicle, charred streaks showing evidence of fire. Or lightning. He sensed the Queen’s scorn and her urgency. She would not let the army stand in her way. He pictured her entrance into the city, a dark cloud crackling from above, spurring panic and men to action. Traffic lined the surrounding streets, cars and trucks stalled and abandoned. Crowds huddled in the lee of buildings, staring up at the sky. Staring up at him. Their shock and fright hit him like a cudgel. Raised mobile phones winked in the sun. A press van wove at speed down the street, tyres screeching as it reached the junction where soldiers guarded a low barrier, no doubt hastily erected, the wooden crosses draped in barbed wire. A soldier tensed and raised his machine gun as reporters spilled babbling out of the van, their microphones waving, film cameras propped on their shoulders. If Ben didn’t move, and fast, the local press would make him famous. Worse, the troops would blast him from the sky. Whether Atiya was in the museum or not – her trail was stark, an ache in his skull – she had left him facing a shit storm.

  The first shell exploded a few feet above him, narrowly missing his wings. The payload scattered in acrid smoke, tainting the afternoon air. Ben skimmed sideways as another tank took aim, bellowing shot towards him. Again, the shell burst over his head, hot grit peppering his horns. He shook it out of his eyes, growling. Do they need a bigger target? The volley pissed him off, but he wasn’t about to hurt these people. With no time to explain or allay the shock of his presence, he couldn’t blame them for do
ing their job, even if their job meant killing him. Hell, if they succeeded, his skeleton would probably end up in the museum below. The thought hurled him into a roll, zeroing in on the roof. He noted that the tanks had aimed high. They didn’t want to damage the building or the artefacts inside. That gave him his chance. As machine-gun fire riddled the sky, bullets whining off his horns and spine, Ben closed up like a broken umbrella, his tail wrapping around his legs as he dropped through the remaining space and crashed into the ruined dome.

  Bricks, rafters and plaster flew. In a cascade of dust, Ben reduced his size to fit his surroundings, the symbiotic suit blooming over his body. Human-shaped with incongruent mass, he landed on flagstones punched by an earlier impact, further cracks riddling through the marble to meet the rotunda walls. The museum boomed as rubble clattered down around him. He stood, the dust clearing, and shook himself off.

  “Close, but no cigar.”

  He saw that he was on the upper floor. A jumble of acquisitions – statues, jewellery, papyrus and coins – lay strewn around him, the antique contents of the display cases, half of them reduced to splinters and shattered glass. Atiya didn’t care about these relics. They were trivial to her, Ben sensed, the commonplace items of her age. Two corridors ran off the rotunda, one heading into the east wing and the other into the west. Ahead was a gallery, a broad open space suspended over the ground floor. He started towards the balustrade, but pain brought him up short, embedded bullets needling his buttock and leg. Some of the shooters had hit the mark after all. His flesh was healing under his suit, muscles working to push out the metal. Wincing, he limped onward, his bare feet crunching through debris. Shards and splinters bit into his skin, but he did his best to ignore them. Rose and the syzygy would not wait.

  The orbit of damage ran out as he neared the balustrade, indicating where draconic bulk had become smaller and human-shaped like his own, the Queen proceeding into the museum. Looking for the Pschent. The atrium yawned below, a grand white space bordered by porticoes. Statues and sarcophagi lined the chamber. At the far end, a monumental pharaoh and his wife presided over all, their faces impassive under carved headdresses. The atrium was empty – but cameras, guidebooks and handbags littered the floor, informing Ben that the day’s tourists had recently fled, hurrying for the exits when the Queen had arrived, her talons bursting through the dome.