She looked up at the big four-limbed ’sect holding her. ‘Hey, Vic.’
‘Hi, Elodie.’
‘You guys have really fucked up this time, haven’t you?’
‘You have no idea, darling. I’m going to put you down. Hold on to my P-sat, okay?’
Elodie nodded. The big ’sect lowered her to the deck and his P-sat – handgrip already extruded – zipped around to hover by her head. She reached for it and took a quick glance around. She was in a well-equipped loading bay.
‘What happened to the Basilisk?’
‘Scab sacrificed it to the Church.’
‘Yeah, they really want to speak to him.’
On the other side of the airlock/loading bay, Scab was already taking off his combat armour’s helmet.
‘You making their life difficult?’ Vic asked, following her gaze to Scab.
‘Well, they didn’t ask nice. I really don’t like that bald bitch, and she seems really angry with Scab. What’d he do, fuck her?’ she asked absently, still looking at Scab, who was ignoring her as he unclipped his armour.
‘No,’ Vic said. ‘Yes.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Not really. It was complicated. They weren’t themselves.’
‘Vic,’ Scab said. ‘Shut up.’
Elodie turned back to Vic, put her arm around his head and pulled him down to her level to kiss the armoured chitin.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Sorry we bought trouble your way,’ the ’sect replied.
Elodie started to hop towards Scab with the P-sat’s help. Her internal drug supply meant she was feeling no pain now and her knee had healed into a stump.
‘I don’t like your new girlfriend,’ Elodie told him. Scab ignored her. He was almost naked now. ‘How’d we get away? Are we in Red Space?’ Scab still didn’t say anything.
‘Yeah,’ Vic said from behind her.
‘I thought you couldn’t do that,’ she said.
‘Church secret, and the Basilisk II here is rocking one of their stolen bridge drives.’
Elodie glared at Scab, fear and anger warring within her. Engines weren’t transferable. Any messing with bridge tech usually junked it, and then you got a visit from the Church. Anyone capable of successfully swapping engines had to have Church knowledge. That was heresy. And the Church hunted down and exterminated heretics, destroying their ships and anyone even remotely connected to them. At best. There hadn’t been a heresy capable of manipulating bridge tech in over a thousand standard years.
‘Is that why my life is being disturbed? Is that why I’m half a leg short?’
‘Not even close,’ Vic said.
‘Vic,’ Scab began, just the trace of a warning in his dead voice.
‘Fuck, and you, Scab,’ Vic said quietly.
Elodie stared at Vic. Nobody spoke to Scab like that. Certainly the Vic she knew wouldn’t have dared. Scab, naked now, straightened up to look at his ’sect partner.
‘What?’ Vic demanded over Elodie’s head. ‘Threats getting a little redundant now?’
‘Which means I have to start acting on them.’
‘Fine. I’ll go and plug myself into a torture immersion.’
Scab opened his mouth but Elodie got in first.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Why am I here? That wasn’t a rescue – you don’t do that.’
‘I need you,’ Scab said simply.
‘Of course you do,’ she said angrily. ‘Getting in somewhere, or getting something out?’
‘Getting someone out.’
‘Where?’
‘Suburbia.’
Vic started muttering angrily behind her.
‘It can’t be done,’ Elodie said.
‘You had contingencies in case you ever got caught.’
‘No, I had ideas.’
‘I’ll take ideas.’
‘You’re like a meat-grinder, aren’t you?’ Elodie demanded. ‘Unrelenting.’
Scab crossed the deck to her. She grabbed his face. Envenomed nails pierced armoured skin and smoking, poisoned blood scored a line in his make-up.
‘I will kill you,’ she told him, and meant it.
She heard mandibles clatter together behind her and detected a release of pheromones. It was what passed for a ’sect chuckling. Scab just shook his head.
‘That’s not the way I’ll be going out.’ He ’faced a command to the ship and the airlock/loading bay opened into the plush interior of the yacht. Elodie saw a terrified-looking, attractive, young human woman dressed in black, gauzy clothing. She was staring at Elodie. Scab picked the feline up and carried her past the other human.
‘Who the fuck is she?’ the woman demanded.
‘Fuck you, monkey girl,’ Elodie told her. She was doubtless another one of Scab’s victims.
‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
The Templar’s AI, dressed in full knightly regalia, watched the recently cloned human rage. There was little in the clone lab to destroy but soft-machine-augmented muscles were denting panels. The phrase was bandied about, but few people ever saw a genuinely murderous rage.
They’d had to reconstruct the last moments of her memory from footage of the confrontation with Elodie on Ubaste. She’d died too quickly, and there had been too little of her left to upload.
With a sigh, the AI overrode the Monk’s internal systems and flooded them with enough sedative to calm her down. He was only able to do this because she was so recently cloned that the medical systems still had access to her neunonics. Even so, it took a while for her to calm down. A couch grew out of the smart matter for her to slump into.
‘I need you composed.’
‘Fucking twice,’ she spat. ‘The same way both times.’
‘Which suggests that he doesn’t want to take you down personally.’
‘Don’t fucking placate me,’ she snapped. The image of the AI stared at her. AI copy or not, he wouldn’t tolerate being spoken to like that. ‘Sorry,’ she said, calming herself with difficulty. ‘It didn’t stop him in the Living Cities.’
‘I think that was a test. He hides shrewdness behind psychosis, but he’s more calculating than he appears.’
‘Benedict/Scab was right. He took the drive out of the St. Brendan’s Fire so he could bridge into atmosphere.’
‘So where did he acquire the expertise to do that?’ the AI asked.
‘The Church,’ the Monk said. ‘A breakaway heretical sect? But we wiped out any with that knowledge millennia ago.’
‘And yet …’
‘I thought you were supposed to be an angrier, more warlike and less irritating version of him.’ The Templar was the fastest light cruiser in the Church fleet. As a warship its AI was based on a younger, more aggressive version of Churchman.
‘Somebody has knowledge they shouldn’t possess. And Benedict/Scab also predicted he’d go for Miss Negrinotti—’
‘No,’ the Monk said. ‘He guessed.’
‘Nevertheless, he guessed right. Which means he requires her skills for something.’
‘He got lucky, but it suggests he wants to steal something. Steal what? He already has the most valuable thing in Known Space.’
‘Or he wants to break in somewhere. But why bother?’ the Templar’s AI asked. ‘Pythia was a test run. He needs to find a way to profit from what he has without being destroyed, that will be difficult.’
‘So one of the Citadels? The Cathedral?’
‘As with Miss Negrinotti, the answer has to lie with what he knows. His past.’
The Monk sighed. ‘He’s on board, then?’ she asked.
‘Transferred from the poor Lazerene as she limped back towards the Cathedral. Still limbless, no neunonics, and I’m holding him in a secure airlock.’
‘Therapeutically, I need to kill him.’
The AI kn
ew she didn’t mean it. She wasn’t that sort of person. But she had meant it before the sedative, when she’d been caught in a rage.
The door opened. In the constant light pollution, the diminutive figure with the tall hat sitting in the wicker bath chair cast a long shadow. The chair rolled forwards. Security had deprived him of his faceless automaton attendants. In front of him was a marble desk so large it looked like a piece of pre-Loss architecture. The tall man behind the desk was difficult to make out even with augmented eyes. The harsh glare from the large window, which looked out onto the core world’s crowded high orbit, turned everything into a silhouette.
The lizard ’faced an instruction to the bath chair and it stopped just in front of the desk. The door closed behind him like a tomb being sealed. He wasn’t sure – information on the man behind the desk had proved elusive – but the lizard had the feeling he was on the board.
‘I like your reputation,’ the human started. His voice was so deep that the lizard found himself becoming aroused by the vibrations. With a thought he rearranged biochemical stimuli so he didn’t embarrass himself. ‘Unlike many bounty killers, you are not simply a gunman. You know how investigate, how to track.’
‘I come from a clan of hunters.’
The tall human’s nod was slow, almost ponderous. ‘Can you find him?’
‘With the resources you’re offering me? I believe so.’
Mr Hat suddenly found himself in credit.
12
Ubh Blaosc
Hollow animal skulls looked upon her. The horse of winter held her down on the warm, moss-covered stone altar. She knew it had been a trick. The ritual sex, the joining with Fachtna, it was in preparation. They wanted her with child. That would make the sacrifice all the more powerful. One life, some of it spent, and a new life, full of potential.
She tried to struggle but the frail-looking hand was surprisingly strong. Words were spoken from behind bone in a language she almost understood and she froze, unable to move. Then she really started to panic. There was another robed figure wearing an animal skull standing over her. Britha was sure this one was a woman under the bone. She moved a wand of ash over Britha’s naked body, chanting some kind of invocation as she did so. Britha tried to shout at her but found she had no voice.
The horse of winter was smearing some kind of ointment onto her skin. It was disappearing as it touched her, almost as if it was being sucked through into her body.
The female animal skull held up the wand. Britha was sure she saw some kind of glow from within the bone mask. The horse of winter was looking at the female animal skull, who nodded. Britha heard herself scream as blackness engulfed her.
Her own cries woke her as she sat bolt upright on the cot, touching her stomach. Nausea overwhelmed her. She scrambled out from between the furs and grabbed for a bronze bowl close to the smouldering fire pit. She just managed to get hold of it before she started to throw up. There were muttered complaints from some of the others trying to sleep in Fachtna’s hall.
Britha sat down, feeling miserable, her buttocks on the warm stone floor, the bowl of vomit cradled in her lap, and looked back into the cot she now shared with Fachtna. He hadn’t woken. He slept soundly. Peaceful. Beautiful. It had been so easy. He was not the Fachtna she had known back in her own world. This one was gentle, softly spoken, strong but not boorish, capable but not arrogant. After she had gone with him to the grove, after they had lain together on the stone altar, it had been so easy to keep doing that and time had passed. He was well made, and not unskilled as a lover.
Though no rites had been performed, she lived as a royal lady. She wanted for nothing. She did not work her magics any more. She was not required for childbirth, nor sickness, nor animal husbandry.
She was not herself and she knew it. There was so little strength left in her. People didn’t respect or fear her, and they didn’t seek out her wisdom. She didn’t inflict her will on them, not even when she knew herself to be right.
She remembered the spear speaking to her, the demon in wood and iron urging her towards blood, to make wounds in others. She remembered the sickening feeling, the violation, of Crom Dhubh whispering to her inside her head. The agony of the crystal in her mind. The connection to the Muileartach. That had not been her, either. There had been so many conflicts inside her. Voices foreign to her flesh. When had she last been herself? Had she been herself with Cliodna? Had the selkie done something to her? If she could not recall when she had last been herself, what difference did it make? Let Fachtna provide for her. Make the hard decisions. Shoulder the burdens. Though in this land of plenty, her lover’s responsibilities appeared light indeed. The people were healthy and strong, as were the animals, and the crops abundant.
Except she remembered what Fachtna told her when she first arrived: ‘I went to war. The drui put certain geasa on me. They change us. As warriors we have to behave a certain way.’ Perhaps it had been a long time since she was last herself, but she didn’t recall being the soft and compliant creature she had become. All the knowledge she had learned about the fair folk told her that you should not eat of their food, or drink of their drink. She had done both. Had they glamoured her? Geased her? Changed the way she thought?
Yes, this was comfortable, easy. Yes, it had been a hard time before she was reborn in the cauldron, but she did not like the way that her oaths, her duties to the Cirig, her people, felt so distant. As if that life had happened to another person. As if the memory was wrapped in heavy fog.
Nausea surged through her again. She drooled and spat vomit into the bowl.
Fachtna was awake when she finally climbed back into the pallet they shared. He didn’t say anything to her, just wrapped his long, powerful arms around her and held her. Strong, calloused fingers found just the right points on her back to rub and press to ease her discomfort. He kissed her hair.
And Fachtna was nearly perfect. Accepting him was easiest of all. Except he wasn’t Cliodna. Except he wasn’t Bress.
Maybe this is happiness, she thought, and I just can’t accept it. She felt Fachtna touch her stomach. Of course I would end up with child, Britha thought, the dryw lie for the good of their people. She knew this because she had done it all the time. Back when I was a ban draoi. Distantly she wondered when she had stopped being one.
The chariot was sleek and fast. Its armoured skin looked like handsomely carved wood inlaid with semi-precious and precious metals. Not too ostentatious, just enough to let you know that the warrior who rode in it was someone of rank and means.
Teardrop shaded his eyes from the sun to watch it land. There was nothing difficult about the manoeuvre but it was obvious that the charioteer knew what he was doing. Part of the larger rear section – the weapon’s cupola – split open and Fachtna stepped out onto the plain. He walked to the arrowhead-shaped forward compartment and spoke a few words to Adarc, his charioteer. He was dressed in thin woollen trews and a light shirt, his skin already darkening. The Forge burned fierce, hot and close above them. They were beyond the shade of Lug here. Teardrop was more bemused than insulted that his friend still wore a sword and dagger at his hip. No torc, though, he noted. His position notwithstanding, the metal got hot in this climate.
Fachtna walked through the haze and dust towards the Croatan. He smiled and held out his hand. They grasped forearm to forearm, and Teardrop pulled the grinning Gael to him as they hugged. Stepping back, Fachtna looked down at Teardrop’s lean, hard body. The other man was stripped to the waist, wearing only buckskin leggings and calf-length moccasins. His long, dark hair was tied back in a simple braid.
‘You’re looking good,’ Fachtna said. There was little or no fat on Teardrop’s lean frame. ‘The warrior’s path must agree with you.’ For a moment, a shadow appeared to cross Teardrop’s face.
‘It’s a simpler path to walk. It must be if one as foolish as you can excel at it.’
; Fachtna laughed, shaking his head. ‘Sword, spear – I will meet you with whatever weapon you wish.’
‘Wit?’
‘And already I see where this conversation is going.’
Teardrop laughed as well then and turned, leading Fachtna towards what appeared to be a large crater in the plain. There were a number of Croatan warriors around the crater, and more further afield on the fast ponies they bred specifically for their warriors. Fachtna knew there would be many more he could not see, and that the Croatans’ medicine people would have also spun many protective wards around the site.
‘And how is your mortal girl?’ Teardrop asked. The humour had gone.
‘Don’t call her that,’ Fachtna said quietly. ‘You should visit. She remembers you.’
Teardrop was already shaking his head. ‘She does not remember me. Never me. Laughs told me what that Teardrop was like—’
‘He was in pain. He was going to die.’
‘This’ – Teardrop pointed at the crater – ‘this is a better way.’
‘We didn’t know where and when to find Bress,’ Fachtna said. Teardrop nodded, looking grim. ‘He lives yet.’
‘That can’t be our problem any more. We’ve given enough.’
‘We didn’t give anything.’
Teardrop stopped walking and looked at Fachtna. ‘What?’
‘What we’re doing, it’s wrong,’ the Gael said.
‘Providing for her in a place of plenty. Where she can always be healthy, never has to worry about her next meal, about being attacked. I’m not sure we’re quite the monsters you want us to be. If she so chooses, she can stay here, live for ever.’
‘We’re manipulating her. I’m manipulating her.’
A Quantum Mythology Page 17