by Tim Clare
Butler looked up. ‘There’s another thing as well. It mentions a subject whose body produces flames. He’s kept with S. The author thinks their powers may balance one another.’
‘That’s my father. It must be.’ She felt dizzy and sick.
‘If Anwen’s daughter is still alive, and she’s half as powerful as these notes claim . . .’ Butler took another hit of cloudy white booze. ‘And the Grand-Duc arrives in less than two days . . .’
‘And the cliques are arming themselves to rise up against the perpetuum,’ said Patience.
‘Or each other,’ said Butler.
‘The idea Fat Maw might burn doesn’t seem so far-fetched,’ said Patience.
‘Then let’s go!’ Delphine banged her fist against the desk. ‘We can get in there and stop this atrocity before it starts.’
Butler eyed her up and down. ‘You need food, rest. And a bandage round that stab wound.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’d be surprised how often I’ve heard that from someone just before they die.’
‘Here’s your chance to get rid of me.’
The old vesperi narrowed his eyes. ‘Patience needs to transfer the last of our gear from the boat to the jail. I need time to look over these maps properly. Take some painkillers. Sleep. You look your age.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation. The cliques are on the verge of civil war. Infiltrators on our own side want us dead. Someone may be preparing to unleash the single most powerful weapon since the Hilanta Wars. Why on earth would you want to step into the middle of that?’
She necked the last of her booze. She shivered as the burn washed through her.
‘People I love are still alive.’
Delphine swallowed a couple of ibuprofen and codeine with a tumbler of dark liquor that Patience called it ‘killdevil’, then smoked a pipe before bed. The storm passed and the air grew stifling. She couldn’t lie flat – her shoulder hurt too much, even under the numbing layer of booze and medicine – so she made a nest of pillows in a big chair next to the hammock and settled down to doze.
Alice lay sleeping on her front with her arms spread cruciform. Delphine kept drifting into murky half-sleep, her thoughts growing gnarly and surreal. She and Martha had some fruit picking to do – they had to fill the baskets and drag them down to the storehouse, which was Delphine’s shed, only inside it was colossal, and there was a vending machine with tea and coffee and hot rolls.
Sometimes, when she woke, her heart was racing for no reason. Sometimes she thought she heard footsteps in the hall. Once, through the fog of sleep, she thought she sensed a pale light, and a touch on her wrist, but when she opened her eyes, she and Alice were alone.
The next morning, she washed in seawater brought up by bucket and windlass. Salt stung her wound. Martha helped her change the dressing. She ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, smoked fish, and soft pale kernels soaked and boiled into a spiced porridge. She took a pot of coffee up to a room in the east wing and drank it all and smoked three cigarettes and listened to waves crashing against the rocks. She had woken late. The cigarettes were bent and damp and tasted rank.
When she glanced out the window, Alice was talking to Reggie in the courtyard. She felt a little jolt; her stomach clenched. Why was she feeling strange? They were only talking.
She took her mug down to the scullery then descended to the dungeon room, where their recovered equipment lay in messy piles. Working one-handed, she unrolled a tarp and set the machine pistol and Remington on top. Her wound ached under the bandage. She felt a bit queasy.
She pulled out a carton of 9mm cartridges and rattled it – still half-full. She tipped them out onto the tarp and began checking each in turn, standing it on its end when she was done.
Facing death crunched one’s life down to an almost monastic simplicity. No time to worry about letters that needed sending, or hospital appointments, or looming environmental catastrophe. She found her sickle under some mooring ropes. She knelt and rifled through the toolbox for a whetstone, trying to ignore the nauseous, worming doubt in her heart.
She wondered what Alice and Reggie had been chatting about. Alice had been looking up at him, squinting against the sunlight. She had passed a hand through her hair, nodding.
She sat down on a plastic crate and began sharpening the blade’s inside edge. Did she secretly crave it? The urgency and pain? The way adrenaline emptied her mind? Algernon had once admonished her that she would hate war: It’s ninety per cent waiting around, ten per cent doing what you’re told.
Certainly she had not envied anyone fighting in the North African campaign, nor at Normandy. But war is a subtle paramour. Her experience on the Home Front had been a strange blend of absence and abundance. Long days in the fields, working till her arms grew hard, her palms rough. Heady, vivid trysts with homesick Land Girls. Hunger. Death the gap between breaths. Windfalls. Ice cracking under boots at dawn. The Apocalypse hunched amongst red-drenched aspens come sunset.
She continued working the whetstone over the curved steel; the motion and sound were calming.
She held up the sickle. Candlelight picked out a thin milk-white crescent. She tested it in either hand, practising hammer-swings, parries, backhands, sometimes thumbing the button so the shaft snapped out to full length.
After a time, she became aware that someone was behind her, watching.
‘What?’ she snapped.
Footsteps scraped on the gritty stone floor. Without turning round, Delphine set the sickle down and began searching through the equipment for batteries for her Maglite. ‘If you’ve come to make one last appeal to my pragmatic self-interest I’m afraid you’re out of—’
Rik-ik-ik.
Delphine turned. Martha stood in the doorway, her eyes pulsing a soft marine green.
‘Oh,’ said Delphine. ‘Sorry, I thought you were Butler.’
Martha walked into the room. She was holding a mug of coffee which, judging by the sickly sweet aroma, was thick with honey. She stood and looked at Delphine.
‘I’m just getting ready,’ said Delphine. ‘You all right?’ She felt oddly self-conscious. She went back to digging for batteries, not so much to find them as to distract herself. ‘Didn’t get much sleep.’ She talked to fill the silence, her voice echoing off the stone walls. ‘Shoulder hurts like the Dickens. Alice said . . .’ Her throat dried and she coughed. ‘Mm. Well.’ She took a pack of Duracells out of a zip-up toolbag.
Martha flipped open a crate and took out a spiral pad, yellowed and corrugated from repeated soakings. The paper crackled as she flattened it out with her thin, twig-like fingers, and wrote in pencil.
hagar was here
Delphine read it a couple of times and frowned. ‘What? When?’
Martha took the pad back and wrote again. today. patience saw her coming & locked the dungeon door so she wouldn’t find you. they talked. i watched
‘And?’
Martha wrote furiously. She produced several pages of exchanges, marked p: and h: respectively, then slapped the pad into Delphine’s hands. Delphine was used to Martha’s prodigious powers of recall, though she used them for the oddest things – writing takeaway menus from memory, or recording barcode numbers in a red notebook.
Delphine read the contents. Without any inflection or context the conversation was difficult to parse.
‘Did she seem . . . hostile?’
Martha shook her fist for no. Then she wrote:
p says it’s best we leave soon. if h has visited it might not be long before the cliques follow
‘Right. Thank you, Martha.’ Delphine turned back to the equipment. Her heart was racing. They were going in.
A tap on her arm. She turned and Martha was holding out the pad.
delphine. i am getting the sense again.
‘What sense? Oh.’ Delphine shook her head. ‘Martha, with the greatest respect, now is not the time for one of your existe
ntial horror jags.’
he was here. in the city
‘Who?’
Delphine knew from the first pencil stroke. Down, then an arc. She felt the name in her stomach, felt as if she were writing it herself. Martha held up the pad.
henry
They ate a patchwork meal of soft cheese, olives and salty little fish the pink of sticking plasters. Delphine did not feel hungry but she knew it was best to set off on a full stomach. Alice was there, and Butler and Martha and Patience and Reggie. She avoided catching Reggie’s eye, but snuck glances. His face had a few days’ beard growth. He did not speak. He ate heartily.
She spent a long time over her final fish, picking tiny translucent bones from between her teeth, chewing slowly, savouring the briny, slimy, if she was honest not-terribly-pleasant flavour. At last, she pushed her plate back.
Patience used her teeth to pull a white cotton glove over her human hand. She spat a thread.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘Reggie has procured a boat. He’s going to wait in the south quay.’
‘What do we need a boat for?’ said Delphine.
‘To escape. We can’t just come back here.’ She smiled as if she thought Delphine was joking. ‘You do realise that, don’t you? If your father is there, or Anwen’s daughter, and we rescue them, we’ll be pursued relentlessly.’
‘What do you mean, “we”?’
‘Oh. I’m coming too. You didn’t think I’d let you attempt such a stupid thing alone, did you? Leaving this island is a violation of my house arrest. Once they notice I’m gone, I’ll be a fugitive.’ She glanced around at the silk hangings and wrought-iron lamps. ‘Can’t say I’ll miss the place. Oh God, it’ll be good to stretch my legs.’
‘You’ll forgive me if the prospect doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Last time I tried to save someone you put a gun to my head.’
‘Then let me put things right.’
‘You can’t!’ Delphine thumped the table. ‘What’s done is done. There’s no fixing it.’ She winced at a twinge in her knife wound, sat back. She looked from Patience to Butler. ‘All we can do is save the future.’
‘Where will we go?’ said Alice. Reggie glanced at her and Delphine felt sick. So stupid.
Patience and Butler exchanged a look.
‘That’s . . . still a live question,’ said Butler. ‘For now, the threshold is off-limits. It’s unclear what allies we have left.’
‘A problem for tomorrow,’ said Patience, guillotining a pickle with her incisors. ‘For now, let’s focus. I’ll help Reggie transport some of our belongings to the ship. Then, we go.’
In the deepest part of the dungeon, ochre water stood ankle-deep. Granite blocks lay piled in one corner of the room. Patience’s angel arm split into a web of gummy pink strands. She opened a black portal in the floor beside her. Another began to form beneath the blocks, bubbling and smoking. The blocks began sinking into the godstuff. One by one, she dragged them out the other side, until she had cleared the way to a hidden passage behind.
‘This will take us beneath the bay to the undercity,’ she said. ‘Be careful. In some parts the water gets deep.’
Butler pulled up the hood of his long black cloak, his pistol in a shoulder-holster. He lit an oil lamp with a rush taper, fixed the glass mantle in place and trimmed the wick. He was grimacing, his ears pricked.
Delphine’s stomach was turning over. Pragmatism be damned, Patience’s presence made her uneasy. She took a swig from a plastic bottle, swilled water round her mouth and spat. She had the Remington hanging on a sling-swivel, solid slugs in the stock mount, shot shells in the sidesaddle. The sickle was in a sheath in her backpack, blade down, along with water, dried fruit, a plastic bottle full of paraffin and a blister pack of codeine. The air from the tunnel was musty and cool.
‘Ready?’ Alice stood beside her in boots and a light shirt, her white hair tied back, a velcro ammo belt strapped round her and the machine pistol in a hip holster. She looked martial and out-of-place and so, so young.
‘You don’t have to come,’ said Delphine.
Alice nodded. ‘I know.’
Martha walked up to Delphine and raised her hand. She was clutching what looked like a desiccated tangle of rust-red seaweed.
Delphine took it a little uncertainly. The tiny lobes felt prickly and strange.
‘Thank you.’ She tied it to the barrel of her shotgun. It hung there like a foxtail.
Delphine gazed into the darkness of the tunnel. We shall have to go soon, she thought to herself. And she stood, and she savoured each breath.
CHAPTER 18
THE DAY OF THE INAUGURATION
Rough hands forced Hagar down onto her knees. Her breaths were hot and moist inside the leather hood. She felt sick and thirsty, a pulse pounding in her temple.
No ambient noise. She was probably indoors. Her wrists were bound behind her back, the air cool and still against her bare hands. The ground beneath her knees was hard, with little ridges.
She remembered the hollow clatter of boots on boards, then the slosh of oars, the creak of a boat moving through the undercity. A handover. Shoved into a crate barely big enough to hold her, the lid nailed down. A long time waiting. Hot, cramped space. She must have passed out, because the next thing she knew was rocking, jostling, the clatter of carriage wheels on cobbles. The crate lifting. Knocks and thumps. Then a crack as the lid was levered off, and now this.
Her neck hairs prickled. Someone was watching her.
What if she had misjudged? No. Arthur had promised. He was capricious, insolent and gullible, but she did not think he would lie to her. Unless . . .
Footsteps. Coming or going? The hood made it hard to tell. She strained, heard only the rumble of blood in her skull.
She flinched at movement near her face. Someone gripped her shoulders. The drawstring slackened. The hood yanked upwards, sloughing off.
A river of stars in blackness.
She blinked. Cool air bathed her sweaty skin. She was in a huge open chamber, like a church, surrounded by hundreds of white candles burning in iron holders. The glow picked out spiral pillars twisting up into gloom. She looked heavenward, gazed into darkness.
A figure stepped into her field of vision.
‘Bichette.’
Her breath caught. A tongue ran across wine-stained teeth.
Morgellon stood before her, holding a single fat white candle in his palm. He wore dark blue dress breeches fastened with silver buckles below the knees, a dark blue double-breasted waistcoat and a heavy black riding coat with long tails and a hood. The left side of his mouth wore that mischievous upward kink, the legacy – he had once told her – of a childhood broken jaw. He looked less like Lord Jejunus, the Terrestrial Grand-Duc, the Endless Sentinel, Guardian of the Free Peoples of the Perpetuum, and more like some cosseted civil servant from the capital.
‘My lord.’
She invested the two syllables with all the scorn she could muster. It felt good, after all these years. The naked spite.
‘So,’ he said.
‘So.’
Her eyes adjusted, revealing candles in a wide horseshoe shape, loosely conforming to the walls of a sunken section of floor. Behind Morgellon was a sarcophagus of black marble, haloed in soft orange light. An onyx statue rose over it, eighteen feet of exquisite detail – the soft pleats of the mantle, the embossing on the discs of his cloak clasp. She could not stop a sigh escaping. Almost three centuries had passed. And yet. Mitta.
Morgellon glanced past her. ‘Ensure the doors to the surface are locked. No one is to come down here.’
‘As you will it, my lord,’ said a deep voice behind her. The sound of hooves on stone echoed away.
She waited, shivering in the chill. Morgellon’s breath curled out in moustaches of vapour as he stood watching her.
She let herself examine him one last time. His hair was shorter, his beard trimmed and oiled. She marked the little flaws in her memory – how his eyes were smaller tha
n she remembered, keener and more leonine. She realised the image in her head had been a composite, partly influenced by his portrait in the Library of the Six Bridges, which squared off his jawline and took considerable liberties with his hair, showing it flowing in great billowing foxtails, blasted by sea-spray and lit from behind by a great trident of white-blue lightning.
‘You’ve achieved your purpose,’ he said. ‘You’ve drawn me out of hiding. What now?’
Hagar felt the impulse to dissemble, to flatter, still strong after all these years. Servility corroded the soul. Lying is not merely a sign of weakness, Hagar. It is a cause of weakness.
‘I’m here to kill you.’
His upper lip peeled back from his teeth in a sneer. ‘What a coincidence.’ He brought the candle towards her. ‘Ah. There you are.’ His gaze crawled over the contours of her face, performing a slow inventory. His breath stank of wine. The bright yellow-white flame came so close she felt its heat against her cheek. She winced one eye shut, expecting him to set light to her hair.
He withdrew. She sagged – she could not help feeling relief, hated that already he was manipulating her emotions, punishing and rewarding.
‘Did they harm you?’ he said.
‘No more than was necessary.’
‘Good.’
A searing pain in the heel of her palm. She jerked, tried to twist her hands free, then saw the runnels of melted wax dripping onto Morgellon’s open hand. He was aware of it, of course, but he did not experience it as pain – just information. She bit down on the inside of her cheek, trying to make space for the burning amongst the great range of sensations she was experiencing. The cool musty air of the pavilion. Coarse rope against her wrists. Her tongue against the backs of her teeth.