A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  Kush charged the creature, or tried to, but got bogged down in the mud. He swung his axe at it. The creature deflected the axe with what Kush thought at first was a shield, but then he realised it was a fused growth of bone. He swung again, but weakly. The fused-bone shield caught him in the chest and face, breaking his nose, cracking something in his chest. The force of the blow lifted him out of the sucking mud and sent him flying through the air. He lost his grip on the axe.

  Germelqart had been knocked over when the creature exploded from the mud. He managed to stagger back to his feet and was frenziedly swinging his club at the creature’s flanks. It moved forwards slightly and kicked out with its rear legs, catching the navigator with a glancing blow to his hip. It was still hard enough to send him spinning into the air.

  The horrific crunching noise was heard over the other sounds of violence. Another survivor, a woman Kush was sure had been trained as a warrior, had hit the creature in the face of its human head with the butt of the branch she’d been using as a staff. As the flayed face caved in, the horse’s head lunged forwards. There was a ripping noise as the woman’s face was bitten off and she stumbled backwards when the creature reared. Its forelegs came down, trampling the warrior’s broken body into the mud.

  Then Tangwen was on the creature’s back, its skinless horse’s back, behind where the fused ‘rider’ grew out of the steed’s flesh. Half her face and part of her chest were a ruined smoking mess. She grabbed the creature’s human head and pulled it back, sawing at its throat with her dagger. Red blood bubbled out of the wound, but it was healing even as she sawed. The dagger she carried now had not been bathed in the blood of Britha and Fachtna, unlike the weapons she had taken with her to the wicker man. Kush knew she could not win this fight as he scrabbled in the mud for his axe. The creature circled in the mud, reaching back for Tangwen with its sword-limb.

  Howling, Kush swung his axe hard enough to bury one of its crescent heads in the creature’s torso. The creature shrieked and reared again and Tangwen held on for dear life. The movement tore the axe free. Kush stumbled back from its fury, changed his grip on the weapon and swung again. The axe bit deep, decapitating the horse. The creature tried to rear once more but instead it flopped sideways. Tangwen screamed, too slow. The falling horse had landed on her leg.

  The creature was still thrashing in the mud. As Kush staggered towards it, the ‘rider’ swung weakly at him with its blade. Kush stood on it. The axe came down and Kush harvested another head.

  Tangwen grunted as she pushed her way out from underneath the dead monstrosity. Had she not landed in soft mud, she was pretty sure it would have broken her leg. She staggered to her feet. Blood and melted flesh ran down the ruin of one side of her face, a tear down the other. It was just pain, she told herself.

  Kush waded through the mud towards where Germelqart was lying in the shallow water, groaning.

  Something made Tangwen look to the west.

  ‘What is it?’ Kush shouted to her.

  Distantly she could make out movement in the brightening light.

  ‘The fruits of Andraste’s poisoned womb,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Where did you get that axe?’

  Kush looked up sharply from examining a painful-looking red mark on Germelqart’s side, but he didn’t answer. Blood ran freely down the axeman’s face and he winced with every movement.

  The axe is blessed, she realised, soaked in the blood of gods or heroes.

  ‘Can he move?’ Tangwen asked.

  ‘I don’t think anything is broken in him.’

  ‘Then get him up!’ Tangwen snapped. Kush looked askance at the harshness of her tone but started to help Germelqart to his feet.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Anharad asked, gasping for breath. Mabon was looking all around for danger, dagger in hand. Tangwen turned the smoking ruin of her face towards them. Anharad took an involuntary step back. Mabon could not keep the expression of disgust from his face. He would have been taught that such a deformity made Tangwen less than a whole person.

  Tangwen glanced down at the monstrosity’s corpse and something caught her eye. It looked like horse and rider had, at one time, been separate, and the steed had worn a saddle and bridle. Those items were also fused with the flesh. She reached down and scraped something off the edge of the saddle, which protruded through both horse’s and rider’s flesh.

  ‘What is it?’ Anharad asked.

  ‘I think it was lime, once,’ Tangwen told her.

  ‘So?’

  ‘The Corpse People paint their horses with lime.’

  She touched the ruin of her face. The land was changing. She had to change, too.

  ‘We cross now,’ she told the survivors quietly. They started to move out onto the mud.

  10

  Birmingham, 6 Weeks Ago

  Inge Street was on the edge of Birmingham’s Chinatown. Bars, restaurants and a theatre huddled at the end of the street closer to the town centre, while the adult shop and cinema lay at the other end.

  There weren’t many people out and about on the cold, dreary, wet Wednesday afternoon as the woman made her way unsteadily towards the adult shop and cinema. She pushed open the door and walked in, ignoring all the garish pictures of human bodies reduced to product, all the costumes and toys, and made straight for the stairs leading down to the basement cinema.

  ‘Oi,’ the man behind the counter shouted. She wasn’t the first woman to come into his shop but it was pretty rare that they wanted to visit the cinema. Oddly, given that the cinemagoers were there to look at women in an objectified form, the presence of an actual woman tended to put off the masturbators.

  The woman didn’t look quite right, he thought, as she made her unsteady way downstairs. She was in her late thirties, early forties, attractive in a slightly mutton-dressed-up-as-lamb way in her low-cut top and miniskirt. Or would have been if not for the slack expression on her overly made-up face and the drool coming out of the side of her mouth. Her long hair looked like it had been bleached once too often.

  ‘You need to pay!’ the man behind the counter shouted as he heard the door to the cinema open and close beneath him. ‘Fuck’s sake.’ He glanced at the monitor showing a black and white image of the cinema. He tried not to look at it too often because he didn’t want to watch portly middle-aged men wanking. The woman had slumped down in the front row. He sighed, lifted the countertop and headed downstairs.

  ‘I’m sorry, love, but you either need to pay or get out,’ he told her. She didn’t respond. He leaned down to shake her, trying to ignore the smell of stale cum and desperation in the cinema. She didn’t respond. She did not look at all well. ‘Oh, fuck,’ he muttered. It wasn’t the first time, he thought. An old guy had suffered a heart attack during a particularly spicy scene in Latex Anal Queen Two. He took out his mobile phone and started dialling. The few other punters in the cinema began to sidle out. ‘Hello, ambulance, please.’ He reckoned he had about four minutes to hide anything particularly dodgy in the shop upstairs.

  The air/spacecraft was designed to look like an experimental stealth military version of the EADS Astrium commercial spaceplane. That was only for show. The shell of the aircraft and its internal workings were nearly pure L-tech, and artificial gravity simulated an Earthly 1G. The cabin looked like the inside of a luxurious executive jet.

  Du Bois was seated in one of the comfortable chairs in the cabin, hand propping up his head as he stared down at Earth from orbit and brooded. He could just about make out one of the Circle’s orbital facilities but only because he knew where to look. It was little more than a dot against the rising sun. He’d swapped his white linen suit for a pair of jeans and a smart, tailored black shirt.

  ‘Fucking Birmingham!’ Grace threw her phone down onto one of the leather chairs. She slid off the table she’d been using as a seat and joined the phone in the chair. Du Bois wasn’t paying any atten
tion to her. She watched him brood for a bit. ‘I said, fucking Birmingham.’

  ‘Silas has returned there. We go to Broadmoor first,’ du Bois said, and then lapsed back into silence.

  ‘Control do it all the time,’ Grace told him, meaning the removing of sensitive data from their memories. ‘None of us likes it, but we live with it because of the need for security.’

  Du Bois looked over at her. ‘I understand all that.’ He didn’t like the feeling that he was being patronised by someone many years his junior, though he knew she was only trying to make him feel better. ‘What I don’t understand is why he was allowed to live. Silas was a clear security risk. He ate the brains of one of our people. He clearly had access to S- or L-tech, we don’t know which. If he interrogated the archer’s nanites then he could know a great deal about us.’

  ‘They must have wiped him. Or at least removed any sensitive data,’ Grace said.

  ‘We kill,’ he continued as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘But we serve a greater purpose …’ He shook his head.

  ‘Sounding hollow?’ Grace asked. She was leaning back in the comfortable leather-upholstered chair, her boots up on the table as she took long swigs from a bottle of beer. The spaceplane was flying itself, piloted by a limited AI. Both of them had the skills to take over the flight, either remotely or physically, hardwired into their systems.

  ‘Is that an excuse?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t like where you’re going with this,’ Grace told him.

  ‘You question and even disobey orders all the time.’

  ‘I’ve always seen them as polite requests – suggestions rather than orders.’ She gave this some thought. ‘Those were orders? Really?’

  Du Bois ignored her. Grace was a lot younger than him but older than any other naturally aging human. She was still much better at adapting to the spirits of different ages than he was.

  ‘Is your first instinct to kill?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, but nor is it my last resort.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow. He didn’t want to answer that. ‘I’ll give you a moment to torture yourself, then I’ll answer for you, make you feel better.’

  ‘How? Moral relativism?’

  ‘It’s either that or vast amounts of drugs and alcohol.’ Grace grinned at him as he looked at her ruefully.

  ‘This doesn’t bother you?’

  Du Bois got up to help himself to a glass of twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie.

  ‘We sometimes have to do bad things,’ she said. ‘I don’t like that, so afterwards I go on a bender, do some damage to others and myself. Y’know, generally torture myself for a bit.’

  ‘Is that what was going on in Seattle in ninety-two?’

  She nodded, taking her legs off the table and leaning forward. ‘It was after what happened in the Balkans. Nobody deserves that.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment and then took another swig of the beer. ‘Other times, the people we take down have it coming and I’m glad we’re here. Remember that fucker in Tibet?’

  ‘Yes, somehow it’s very difficult to feel bad about killing Nazis.’

  ‘What about Spitalfields?’ Grace asked. Du Bois looked over at her. He could still see the filthy, terrified but brave street urchin he’d first met back then.

  ‘That gave me no pleasure. Hawksmoor was one of our brightest minds. I was sorry that went as far as it did. Killing him was an act of mercy.’

  ‘He got too close,’ Grace said quietly. Du Bois frowned at her. ‘Whatever it is, whatever’s coming, I think his genius gave him insight, somehow, perhaps even contact.’

  Du Bois just stared at her. Perhaps she was right, but he didn’t like to think about it.

  ‘You don’t like killing, Malcolm. You like action, and sometimes killing’s a part of that. If you want to torture yourself about it, then go ahead. I think more often than not, you do the right thing. When you can.’

  ‘Is that an excuse, though? Few can stand up to me.’

  ‘The Brass City can. Hawksmoor’s constructs could. We’ve found more than a few independents who gave us a run for our money.’

  Outside the window was fire. They had barely felt the spaceplane start re-entry. Through the flames, du Bois could just about make out the British Isles so far below, his adopted home since the suppression of his order.

  ‘The question isn’t, Do you enjoy killing? I don’t think you do. This guy, this Silas Scab, he enjoys inflicting suffering, and I’ve seen you make others suffer. You’re a bastard when you want to be, but you’ve always got a reason. I think if you went a hundred years and didn’t kill, you wouldn’t miss it. He kills for fun, for sport.’

  ‘I’ve certainly seen that before,’ du Bois said quietly, thinking back to a hot, dusty, blood-soaked land.

  ‘Besides, you can always go and pray for forgiveness from your god. The one you know for certain doesn’t exist.’ Du Bois turned to glare at the punk girl. She was grinning at him. ‘Seriously, though, you know they can hear this?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ du Bois snapped. ‘I don’t understand his continued existence. What possible reason can there be to let such a creature exist – especially one with access to the tech? Silas exists for one reason – to create atrocity. How can that serve us?’

  ‘Self-doubt won’t—’

  ‘It’s not me I’m doubting. And frankly, if the Circle doesn’t like it they can send the American, or Wassermann, or the Pennangalan, though I notice she rarely leaves his side these days. And they want us to catch him—’

  Grace’s message came in across their occulted link. They had set it up in the sixties and were pretty sure the Circle didn’t know about it. He heard her answer directly in his head.

  ‘He doesn’t have to survive.’

  Du Bois didn’t nod or show any outward sign that he’d received any communication.

  ‘But do you know what pisses me off the most?’ du Bois said.

  ‘People using the acronym “LOL” in conversation?’

  ‘Now, that is an example of when you can kill without a trace of guilt,’ du Bois admitted. Grace laughed. ‘No, relocation from Pohnpei, a tropical paradise, to fucking Birmingham.’

  ‘Yes, that truly sucks,’ Grace mused. Du Bois looked less than impressed by her use of language.

  Du Bois and Grace were in the cockpit as they came in over the Channel, looking down at the maps of towns drawn by their street lights. They followed the Thames, making their way over London.

  Re-entry had been easier than the subsequent landing in the rain with high crosswinds in the early hours of the morning. They taxied the aircraft to the small hanger the Circle kept at Farnborough Airport. There was no visible human security, no customs or passport control, nobody to bother them about the weapons they were carrying.

  They walked across the hanger to their vehicles, which Control had arranged to be brought to the airport. Grace threw du Bois her kitbag, which he loaded, along with his own, into the back of the black, armoured Range Rover. Grace had changed into her bike leathers in the spaceplane. She straddled the Triumph Speed Triple motorcycle.

  ‘It’s cold and wet – are you sure you don’t want to come with me?’

  ‘You know I don’t feel it,’ she said, sorting out her helmet. ‘Besides, you drive like an old person.’ She put the helmet on, started the bike, gunned the engine, then spun the bike around and shot out of the hanger. Du Bois watched her go.

  ‘I am old.’ He climbed into the Range Rover.

  Grace and du Bois sat on the bonnet of the Range Rover, drinking tea and smoking, watching the sunrise. Behind them were the high razor-wire-topped walls of Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital. The institutional red-brick Victorian buildings housed some of the most dangerous patients within the British legal and health systems.

  The sun was coming up over w
ooded, somewhat swampy-looking moorland. Beyond that was a small suburban area that his internal systems told him was called Owlsmoor, and he knew the wooded area he could see beyond the suburbs was part of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the officer training school for the British Army.

  ‘It’s one of those places you never really come to, isn’t it?’ du Bois said, nodding at Owlsmoor. ‘There’s no reason to visit. It’s neither one thing nor another.’

  ‘I have a theory about suburbs,’ Grace mused. They still had an hour to go until their appointment. ‘I think it’s where it all happens.’

  Du Bois gave that some thought. ‘Expand.’

  ‘Well, so many people must live in them now. People don’t just go into suspended animation when they live in boring places.’

  ‘They’re sedated by television and prescription antidepressants.’

  ‘No, I think it all happens here, all the great crimes, kept hidden until they’re too loud to contain. Quiet perversions, quiet substance abuse, quiet violence, quiet art. We just don’t hear about it until something big happens. You mark my words – in one of those houses down there is a man with a needle in his arm, fucking a dog whilst composing the greatest poetry since Homer.’ Grace nodded, happy with her explanation, and took another drag of her cigarette.

  Du Bois was staring at her. ‘I’m not sure you’re all right, Grace.’

  ‘Really? With everything you’ve seen, that shocks you? With your sister …’ Grace said, eyebrow raised. Du Bois just about managed not to flinch at the mention of his sibling. ‘How is Alexia?’

  ‘Enough,’ du Bois told her. Grace knew she’d pushed him too hard. His relationship with his brother/sister was problematic at best. She held her hands up in contrition.