by James Bennet
But first things first.
“I think it’s time for my friends to join us,” the shadow said. “The more the merrier, don’t they say?”
As if his words were a signal, the Phantom’s rear door swung wide. Beyond, the interior of the cab revealed only darkness, an enclosed abyss that stretched into cold, uncharted depths. The sunlight shrank from it, dispelled by the murk spilling from the car. The shadow felt Mahmud tense at his side, his professional veneer cracking at the sight. A figure climbed out of the cab, clanking heavily on to the tarmac and standing to its tall, ungainly height. Radiant splinters darted through the shadows as the newcomer took a couple of steps and clunked to a standstill, its movements slow and oddly mechanical. Metal creaked. The blade the thing carried scraped across the ground. The figure looked up at the mezzanine blankly, nodded once, and assumed a stiff, statue-like pose.
“Very good,” said the shadow, and then addressed the little girl. “Nan, if you’d do the honours. For the sake of privacy, we can’t have all these drudges around.”
Mahmud El Azhary turned to jelly, his nerve finally failing him. Propped up by the shadow, he watched the little girl, so innocent-looking until she smiled, as unnaturally gleeful as the doll she held. She lifted the plastic baby before her and sang a lilting chant, what might have been a nursery rhyme if not for the taunting tone. Then she turned and showed the doll to the shadow, a child seeking praise.
“Look,” she said.
The shadow looked. A persistent buzzing filled the air, humming under the sound of machinery around them. Something small and dark crawled from between the doll’s lips, climbing the moulded pink surface to rest upon one cheek.
“Excellent,” he said and reached out a hand. The small dark thing hopped on to the end of his finger. He held it up for Mahmud’s inspection, the bug distinct against his glove. “Say hello to Apis mellifera, or at least a semblance of it. This little creature is a feisty hybrid, a cross-breed of the Western species and their migrating African cousins. Of course, the colloquial term is killer bee, but you’ll find that’s misleading. It is no more potent than any other bee, its sting painful but not deadly.” He blew on the insect’s wings, and angrily it took to the air, darting around his head. “Having said that, this variety is quick to swarm, as you’re about to see.”
The buzzing grew louder, competing with the industrious racket. The shadow, the girl and El Azhary watched as the darkness below resolved into a dense black cloud, pouring out of the back of the Rolls as though someone had taken a truck-load of match heads and thrown them into the air. The car park thrashed with insectile rage, the cloud swirling around the figure down there, which remained stiff and unmoving, protected as it was from the swarm.
The bees rose as one and spilled into the refinery, a smoky tide rippling under the mezzanine, snaking beneath their feet. Still more bees poured from the Phantom, a dark deluge crashing over the pipework and through the latticed walkways.
The shadow released Mahmud and watched him flee for the stairs, his fez falling off and bouncing on the floor. There was no need to chase him. He didn’t matter now. The shadow had pressing business to attend to and his amusement had waned. The afternoon sun would soon wane too, and his destiny was waiting.
He tipped his head to one side, listening. As the first screams echoed to his ears, he smiled at the little girl.
“Come, Nan. Time to prepare. We stand here at Death’s door. Let us turn the key.”
TWENTY-ONE
Like a large ungainly firework, Ben burst through the dome of the museum, his wings shaking off wreckage. But the pyrotechnics were not down to him. The tanks greeted his reappearance with a swift and deafening salvo, bullets and shells spraying the sky, their clatter and boom reporting off the building’s façade. This time, he was ready for them. Holding his breath against the cordite stench, he shot directly upwards, pinions tensed in a powerful thrust. The palm trees in the courtyard bent and fluttered. Soldiers and journalists staggered back, trying to keep hold of their guns and cameras, shielding their eyes from the flailing grit. The tip of Ben’s tail wove through the smoke and out of range, a bright red V sign waving goodbye.
Soon, he reckoned, the army would scramble some jets and come screeching after him. Missiles wouldn’t be so easy to avoid, not when locked on to his considerable heat signature, and he wasn’t about to knock them from the sky, scattering debris and death on the city below. Not unless I have to. As it stood, he still had the advantage of surprise, and he arched up into the blue, the museum a spinning red dot under his claws. The tanks couldn’t follow him here.
Looking down, he saw that they meant to follow him regardless. More machines were rumbling down the road, and he felt horribly exposed, an easy target for GPS, a flaring blip on a screen. His presence here was desperate and rash, but the consequences would have to wait. He was sure that there were going to be some – and not just from Paladin’s Court, if the Guild still even existed. People might put the sight of him down to a hallucination when it only concerned a bridge, a museum or a cable car, but half a capital city? This went well beyond a feature in the weird weeklies…
He was in the shit. What else was new? For now, he had unfinished business.
Swooping around in a circle, he tried to get his bearings. His bond with the Queen pulled his snout around like a magnet, and before he questioned the change in her scent, how determination now hummed with distress, he was speeding off south, leaving the army behind. Minutes later and the city surrendered to desert, the snarled conurbation petering out in dusty roads, derelict shacks and abandoned factories, all half swallowed by the sands. This was a parched and gritty land, far removed from the greenery of home. The only greenery that flourished here did so in rustling clumps, palm trees that stooped over muddy pools like tall and thirsty old men. In England, rivers flowed everywhere, the land rising to misty peaks and sinking into marsh, the rain a constant source of complaint. The natural bond that Ben had with water, an affinity born from his basic morphology, stirred a profound sympathy in him. Khadra’s need in the Alps was still with him, a desperate hope he might never shake off, and he marvelled at the fact that life could survive here, clinging to the manna of the Nile like a baby to its mother’s teat. He recalled the waste that the girl had shown him, the dry creeks and buzzing flies. The swollen bellies and dull eyes. The reaching, grasping hands…The thought of a land without rivers, without rain, horrified him, seeming to him like the lowest Hell. Thirst the cruellest death. His dread for Rose had overshadowed this insight. Now he grasped the depth of Khadra’s plight, what had made the girl and her mother ripe for manipulation, driving them to breach the Lore and raise a goddess from the sands. It had been a mistake, a desire that could only bring doom – but one he understood at heart.
Seen from above, Egypt presented a yellow mirror to everything he knew. Irrigation ditches glimmered and flashed like runnels of silver, spindly in the sun, but mostly what flowed here was sand, a jitterbug of dust devils, a scatter of grit, changing direction in the scorching wind. And then he saw people. People running. Their wails threaded through the air as they hurried across the dunes. Their movements confused him. He could see no sense in them, except that the group fled en masse, arms flailing, in a race for the fringes of the city. Mostly he saw men in overalls. A few women in office skirts, their high heels abandoned to the drifts. Eyes narrowed, he made out something else down there. Motes swirled around every head like personal storm clouds, occasionally breaking and swelling out to join a greater cloud trailing above them. The frantic mass was too large for birds, too fluid for smoke, and as the crowd stumbled by below, a berserk pageant across the waste, an angry buzzing filled his ears.
The sound was unmistakable. The cloud was a swarm. A swarm of bees.
What the fuck? Out here in the desert, there was only one place these people could’ve come from, a hulking grey structure ahead, some kind of gasworks or factory. Smoking turrets and bulbous tanks, all encase
d in a knot of pipes and intersecting gridwork, lent the place a palatial air, a fairy-tale castle at the end of a quest, walled by a high steel briar. Yeah, right.
The Queen’s emanations rippled from the place, a rock of torment and rage thrown into the pool of his mind. Why had she come here? Regalia regained, he had expected Atiya to head for home, the Land of Punt that was now Somalia, returning ghost-like to the scene of her murder, hoping to face down a priest who was centuries dead. And Ben had summoned up the strength to follow her, meaning to prevent her by any means possible from her intervention, her futile revenge, her ill-advised summoning of rain, both threatening to shatter the Lore completely. Instead, she’d come here. Why?
He could take a wild guess: Bardolfe and the CROWS. Atiya’s presence here must surely have something to do with them. Whatever had thrown the Queen off her intended destination – perhaps some summoning or spell – Ben followed regardless. If there was magic at work in the vicinity, who else could it be but the CROWS? The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and of course Atiya played her part. Fulk had even said as much in the underground car park in London. She’s dragon enough for what we have in mind… Ben grasped the fact that the beast he pursued was wrestling with another’s will – the will of Khadra, the girl inside her, her beating, earthly heart, who meant to steer the Queen towards salvation and yet found her hope usurped by a stronger resolve, that of a god…He shook his horns in the crazy understanding. He thought it unlikely that Khadra, so thirsty for rain, would have steered the Queen to this dry place, even if she could have done. So what then? Had Atiya been lured here? And if she’d been lured, would Ben find the bait dangling at the end of the line?
Lucky me. I’m about to find out…
Whichever way you cut it, the Queen was as mixed up in the Three’s rebellion as he was. And if Bardolfe and the CROWS had chosen this site for their revolution, then there was a chance that Rose was here too, alive or—He snapped off that train of thought and swept down over the fugitives, beating his wings. Sand rippled and bees swirled, the swarm dispersing in tumbling dots. Immediately it regrouped and came at him, but the bees were like seeds thrown against stone, his tough hide resisting their stings. Another beat of his wings and the insects scattered all around him, bouncing off his snout and neck, droning, feeble specks washing into his speeding wake.
Gaining altitude, Ben covered the remaining distance to the refinery. He hadn’t needed to play detective. The huge logos stencilled on the tanks announced the fact:
EKOR
And printed smaller underneath it:
THE EAST KATAMEYA OIL REFINERY
He coughed in the stink from the distillation towers, his snout wrinkling at the bitter, sulphurous odour. His enemy had chosen clever ground. There was no way that Ben could risk fire here; the place would go up like Krakatoa. A slow circle around the refinery confirmed his disadvantage. Scanning the labyrinth, he saw that the stench was due to several leaks in the pipework, deep dents and star-shaped holes, no doubt the result of a magical assault. Thick black lines trickled down the sides of the feed tanks, dripping off the tangled tubes and splattering the surfaces under them, pooling in the loading bays and at the edges of the car park. There was a Rolls-Royce down there, a Phantom IV. Ben met the sight with a growl. In the rippling heat, the vehicle mirrored the seeping oil. The CROWS had turned the place into a time bomb.
Gliding back around, he passed over one of the feed tanks, a flat-topped circular turret in the middle of the structure. Four narrow walkways radiated from it, leading into the guts of the refinery. A stairway curved around the bastion, coiling down to the concrete quadrangle that stretched between two glass-fronted office buildings. Sand wove across the area, wind-blown fingers from the Sahara. He took in these details from the corner of his eye, a pilot surveying a target, his attention fixed on the top of the tank and the figures waiting there.
Keeping a cautious distance, he made out the man in the tux and the little girl beside him clutching a plastic doll. Bardolfe, he reckoned, and the last aspect of the triumvirate, The Three Who Are One. Her pigtails and frilly green dress did not fool him. Both were typical of the Coven Royal’s sense of humour, innocence masking warped intentions. The girl was surely Nan Nemain, the maiden aspect of the triple facet that the grande dame of the coven had years ago adopted, a choice archetype to shroud her fickle flesh. The Remnant had made a joke out of age, just like Babe Cathy on the Brooklyn Bridge and Miss Macha mocking motherhood in the underground car park. The girl below was those creatures combined. Ben knew she would greet him with the same Texan drawl, the same arch contempt. He was surprised she wasn’t smoking a cigar.
The man next to her was Sir Maurice, he saw, his thin hair ruffling, ashen in the sun. The last time Ben had seen him, the old knight had been in his striped pyjamas, an antique revolver in hand. He had led Ben through the gallery in Paladin’s Court, taking in art, weapons and suits of armour, all the while hiding the truth of his treachery. Now he was dressed for the occasion – whatever that might be – but the tux failed to soften his face, hide his advancing years. Under the cloudless sky, Bardolfe was the spit of venerable refinement, his energetic movements belying his age. He was busy fastening a length of golden chain to the railing that ran around the space. Like elegant script, the chain snaked across the surface of the tank and wound around Queen Atiya, a taut, shining web against polished black scales. She lay, snorting heavily, in the middle of the tank. Ben, recalling similar bonds, shared her sense of helplessness. Sorcery, ancient, potent and strange, must have summoned and bound her, the chains etched with the same gleaming glyphs that had immobilised him back in London. Unlike him, Bardolfe and the CROWS had imprisoned the Queen in bestial form, a divine serpent brought low. Her forearms clawed weakly at the steel surface, her talons leaving silvery scratch marks. The knight and the witch had secured her tail, the chains wound around its bladed length, draping off her ten-ton bulk. Atiya’s head rested flat, her ram-like horns rendered harmless.
Ben observed all this in a flash, his dread reserved for the woman behind Bardolfe and Nan. Rose. They had propped her, tied with rope, on top of a pyramid of barrels at the edge of the tank. The reek informed him that the barrels were full, the metal cylinders slick with leakage. Her blonde hair hung in her face and her body slumped, held up by her bonds. It was impossible to tell whether she was alive or dead. To add insult to injury, someone had dressed her – presumably the witch – in a pink medieval gown and a hennin hat, the veil pinned to its conical peak flapping like a mocking tongue.
Bastards!
Smaller objects dotted the tank, but Ben no longer saw them. Nor did he acknowledge the symbols that ran in a precise circumference around Atiya, daubed in some sticky red substance. He might not be able to risk fire, but he was aflame nonetheless, outrage striking the flint of his guilt and igniting into rage. Caution forgotten, he arrowed downward, wings held tight to his flanks. It was a hawk’s dive, speed whistling through his horns and saw-toothed spine, his claws reaching out for Rose. He’d send the barrels flying with a lash of his tail, snatch her up like a mouse from a field, blast Bardolfe and Nan from the top of the tank…
At three hundred miles per hour, Ben struck an invisible wall. The impact shimmered across the barrier, a dense dome of sorcerous force protecting the scene below. He crumpled like mud thrown against rock, scales rippling from snout to tail, wings buckling. Then he was airborne again, rebounding in a graceless arc over the loading bays and crashing into a factory mezzanine. Metal screamed and broke apart, littering the sky, as he punched through the gridwork, a bull charging a paper cage, and collided with the floor below. A diadem of machinery and tools clattered all around him. The floor sagged under his weight. Wreckage drizzled down, girders and pipes thumping into his flesh. For several long, painful minutes, everything went dark.
Unconsciousness only offered him shame. He was back on the islands, the rocky, broken shards of his guilt, afloat, adrift in the da
rkness. March pressed its chilly face up against the big glass window of the Legends bar, 7 East 7th Street. The traffic outside was a river of light, fly-specked, filthy and smeared. Ben was sitting at the end of the bar, the unchecked furnace of his hair and red-stubbled cheek resting on one ham-hock hand. The other clutched the neck of a bottle of Jack – his third, as it happened – and he nodded vaguely along in time with the jukebox (Hendrix was playing, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp”, if any recollection from that night was clear). His jacket, the leather recently stitched at the shoulders and up the back, looked like it belonged to a man with much less money, but he had grown attached to it and didn’t want to buy a new one. The bartender and the waitress did their best to ignore him, occasionally flicking glances his way and all but shaking their heads. The staff had yet to see him fall down drunk, but tonight he was close to it, the drink seeping down to his roots. Still, the gleam of his bottomless green eyes made sure that no one, not the bartender, the waitress or the other few customers, dared to bother him. They poured drinks. Clinked glasses. Chewed peanuts. Spoke to anyone but the broad-shouldered brute who brooded over his tiny half-empty tumbler and all the stuff they couldn’t see – the doubt that had crept into his relationship, a slow poison that had left silence in place of questions, silence in place of lies.