A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘I don’t think we can,’ the other said. The shame was written all over his face.

  That at least is honest, Tangwen thought. ‘Fine, kill her,’ Tangwen told them. She could feel Mabon looking at her. She glanced down at the boy but couldn’t decipher the expression on his face. She looked back up at the two Brigantes, but neither of them had moved. ‘Or do you want to leave her here for what follows?’

  ‘We were hoping that—’ began the one who had spoken first.

  ‘That I would do it? If she asked me to, then perhaps.’

  ‘Then you carry her!’ the same man hissed. Others were starting to look over at the three of them.

  ‘No,’ Tangwen said simply. She could not be bothered to explain that her skills were of more use to them elsewhere. The man sat down hard on a rotted log, his head in his hands. ‘We will not always be trudging through this wood, fleeing Andraste’s brood. One day we will be safe, warm, rested, our bellies full. We will be seated with friends and family. How do you want to remember this day then? I can’t force you to carry her.’

  The man on the log stared up at her with unbridled hatred. Tangwen walked away. She did not look back but she heard them picking up the litter. She would speak with Twrch and some of the stronger ones, get them to help. The thing was, the two men were probably right. Essyllt would most likely die, but Tangwen could not face losing any more people.

  Kush had told her that one of the reasons why the Will of Dagon had been such a successful trading vessel was because Germelqart appeared to be able to see perfectly in the darkness, and therefore navigate at night. This meant that the ship could move further and faster than their competition.

  Tangwen moved quietly to where the navigator was standing in the woods, looking north. She would rather have been in those woods on her own, scouting ahead or hunting for food for them all, but she needed to be at the head of the column of survivors, leading them. Kush, whose skin colour alone made many of the survivors nervous, was at the back of the column, chivvying them on, making sure none fell behind.

  Kush’s command of the language appeared to be improving daily. He was a quick learner. She was pretty sure Germelqart’s speech was improving as well, but the navigator kept very quiet.

  ‘Can you see something?’ Tangwen asked quietly.

  ‘I thought … movement … but far away,’ Germelqart said haltingly.

  ‘Andraste’s brood?’ Tangwen whispered.

  The Carthaginian shook his head. ‘Not like that.’

  Tangwen could hear the others coming up behind her. She had no choice but to go on, for dealing with anything that lay ahead was better than what lay behind. She was too tired to think beyond the task of trudging onwards. The ground was rising in front of them and they had glimpsed a line of hills through the trees ahead.

  As they continued, Tangwen became more and more convinced that they were being watched. Keeping pace with her, Germelqart was also anxious, darting his gaze one way and then another very suddenly.

  ‘More than one,’ he said quietly.

  Tangwen felt as if she was being hunted, and was frustrated that Germelqart was seeing what she could not. Suddenly he pointed forward. At first Tangwen thought it was one of the strange fusions of creatures that Andraste had made, for it looked like a person with the tufted head of a lynx. It took her a moment to realise that the lynx head was made from thin, light wood, leather and furs. It was not unlike the snakeheads her people wore when they went to war. She was sure the figure was a woman. She wore a short cloak made of lynx fur, which had helped hide her in the woods, and beneath that soft, supple leather with moulded pieces of stiffer leather sewn to it to protect various parts of her body. She held a bow and a short sword and a dagger hung at her hip. Germelqart started looking elsewhere the moment she appeared.

  ‘She’s showing herself to us,’ Tangwen said. That meant there were others she could not see, ready to act if the survivors proved hostile. She knew that whoever they were, they invoked the spirit of the lynx to hunt, as she did the snake when she wore the snakehead. This would make them difficult to spot within the woods.

  The others had seen the newcomer now and stopped. She heard a few gasps and the sound of makeshift weapons being readied. She held up her hand. The lynx-headed woman took her time looking them over.

  ‘Counting,’ Germelqart said quietly. Tangwen nodded. The scout was taking a good look at them. Finally the strange figure made an exaggerated step to one side and pointed north.

  ‘Which is the direction we were going anyway,’ Tangwen muttered. She gestured for the others to follow. Glancing behind her, she saw that Kush had moved up the line, his axe at the ready. She motioned to him that everything was okay and then moved closer to the lynx-headed woman. Now she could feel them, the others in the woods. She saw a branch move in her peripheral vision. It’s movement that gives you away, she thought. They would have arrows nocked but not drawn, watching her.

  ‘Can you understand me?’ Tangwen asked. The lynx-headed scout nodded, once. ‘Cythrawl,’ she said, using the word for the worst evil her people knew. ‘Follows us.’ The lynx-head nodded. ‘Your people cannot fight it.’ There was no movement from the scout. ‘Will you have to learn this with your death?’ There was no immediate answer, but finally the woman pointed north again. Tangwen turned to watch the survivors pass. When Kush was level with her she joined him, and after one last glance at the scout she headed north with the rest.

  ‘Do you know who she is?’ Kush asked. Tangwen just shook her head.

  It was close to nightfall when they found them. At the base of the hills they’d seen in the distance, they found a trench that ran in either direction as far as the eye could see. In the trench were warriors and horses, more of each than Tangwen had ever seen in one place before. The ones closest to Tangwen wore armour made of metal chains like the type the traders from Gaul were always trying to sell her people, but the heavy armour would only be a hindrance in the marsh. A number of them wore thick cloaks of bear fur and the skulls of bears as headdresses. They carried heavy, long iron swords and large leather-covered shields stained black. The hafts of both their long and casting spears were also stained black.

  A few of them glanced up but paid little or no attention to the ragged band of survivors. Scanning along the ditch, it was clear there were warriors from a number of tribes here, and it looked as though there were more out of sight. Tangwen estimated there could be as many as two hundred warriors.

  She had seen ravens and other scavengers feasting on bodies scattered among the trees. This was the inevitable result of warriors from many different tribes jockeying for status and position.

  ‘They’re going to try and fight,’ Kush said quietly.

  ‘They have no idea what is coming,’ Tangwen all but whispered.

  Carrion eaters took flight as the stones glowed from within. There was a bright, pulsing, blue and white light, then water swamped the stones, the force of it tearing off the corpses hanging from them and carrying them away. The light stopped and with it the flow of water, though what was left spread out, soaking the surrounding dry earth.

  Fachtna had caught a glimpse of one of the glowing stones rushing towards him as the freezing water carried him along. Then everything went black. He awoke to pain and nausea and managed to stagger to his feet. He found Britha, whose wounds made her look more dead than alive. He had told his blood what to do when he forced it into her mouth. He vomited his blood onto her wounds and then into her mouth, praying to Lug, whom he knew he had wounded deeply through his actions. He needed her to have held on to just a vestige of life. Then he blacked out again.

  ‘How do we get back? How do we get back?’ It was a shriek.

  ‘We can’t,’ he said as he struggled to consciousness.

  ‘Liar! Child thief! Murderer of dryw!’ Each accusation was punctuated by a kick. Fachtna managed t
o open his eyes. He had never seen her so angry. He had never been so pleased to see her. She was naked and covered in blood but her wounds looked healed, though her body had feasted on itself to do so. She was gaunt and would need to eat soon. He was less than pleased when he saw her hold up his sword. The blade was dull, though, and there was no song. ‘The laws are the same in the Ubh Blaosc as they are anywhere else. The price for killing a dryw is death!’

  ‘No!’ he managed, but the sword plunged down. His armour hardened under the blow, but even though it was not alive, the sword point was sharp enough, and she put enough force behind it to pierce the armour. He felt it go through, the blade driven deep into the sodden earth beneath him. It started to grow dark again. He reached for Britha as she turned from him and walked away. He had seen the tears in her eyes.

  ‘Did you feel that?’

  Bress was alone on the curragh as it made its way up the river. Many of the slave warriors were close at hand, but he was always on his own. Looking down at the river, he could make out the dark shape of one of the ‘giants’ swimming close to the surface as they headed further inland. The people from the settlements along the banks of the river had fled. The Lochlannach had raided this area when they were taking people for the wicker man. The people here knew to fear the black curraghs.

  Even though he was alone, he felt Crom Dhubh all over him like a treacherous, diseased lover. Bress closed his eyes and nodded.

  ‘I want to know,’ the Dark Man whispered.

  16

  Birmingham, 5 Weeks Ago

  Grace leaned back on the chair while Du Bois sat on the edge of the bed, concentrating. They had been reviewing the data internally.

  ‘He can’t have gone from spending more than two centuries in a hole to being able to hide from the most technologically advanced organisation on the planet,’ she said through a yawn. They had been looking for him for the better part of a week now. All the CCTV cameras in the city were linked to a recognition program and they’d run down thousands of possible matches in facial features and stature. The city and the surrounding area was under geosynchronous surveillance from one of the satellites in the Circle’s ancient network. They had seeded the local rat population with nanite cameras but found nothing. Given that most of this work could have been done from anywhere in the country, du Bois was reasonably sure they were being kept in Birmingham as a punishment of some kind.

  ‘We may be technologically advanced but our operation’s small and our resources stretched tight – particularly at the moment. And he had help.’

  ‘You believe the rumours, then?’ Grace asked, scratching absently at her legs through her fishnets. They were in his comfortably appointed room at the Malmaison in the Mailbox, close to the centre of Birmingham. They were in du Bois’ room because you could see the floor.

  ‘Which ones – about the Pacific situation, or that the Brass City is planning something?’ Grace shrugged. ‘I think the situation in the Pacific is getting worse, and the Brass City is always planning something. That doesn’t help us.’

  They had found CCTV footage of Silas Scab at Crowthorne railway station, and then again at Reading. After much enhancement, the grainy images appeared to show him carrying some kind of goblet. After Reading, they’d lost him.

  ‘Do you think he’s still being helped?’

  It wasn’t the first time they’d discussed this. ‘Of some kind. It doesn’t have to be direct.’

  ‘The cup?’ she asked. Du Bois shrugged. ‘He must have gone somewhere else,’ Grace suggested, not for the first time. She lit a cigarette. Du Bois glanced at her irritably.

  ‘But there’s nothing anywhere else in the world, as far as we can tell, that fits his MO. And if you’re going to do that, could you at least open the window?’ Du Bois enjoyed smoking as well, but he tended not to do it in the room he was staying in. Grace ignored him. ‘Control must have a reason for keeping us here.’

  ‘You’re such a good boy, aren’t you?’ Grace earned herself another glare. ‘“I lied”,’ she mused, referring to the words the dead woman had written on the cinema screen.

  ‘Well, she did,’ du Bois said simply. It had transpired that Linda Galforg was not such a nice person after all. She advertised herself as a psychic but wasn’t a true believer, apparently. In fact, according to those who had known her best she was something of a con woman who prayed on the desperate, the gullible and the bereaved.

  ‘So does he care that she lied?’ Grace asked. ‘Is he punishing liars? Because he will be very busy.’

  ‘They didn’t really have psychological profiling the first time around.’

  ‘But you caught him quickly.’

  ‘Because he didn’t know to expect us,’ du Bois said. ‘He thought he was unique, a god.’

  ‘But you killed his father.’

  ‘He probably rationalised it as a freak occurrence.’

  ‘Did he give you the feeling that he would care about lying?’

  Du Bois lay back on his bed. ‘He appeared to be most interested in causing pain.’

  ‘Which suggests that if he was bothered by her lying, it was because it got in the way of something he wanted.’

  ‘To do what he does, he has to be able to objectify his victims.’ Du Bois was relying for this insight on the criminal psychology books and papers he had downloaded and assimilated into his neural systems.

  ‘And he’s the worst kind of criminal, because with access to S- or L-tech he can make his fantasies come true.’ Grace had assimilated the same information. ‘In which case he’ll only care about the lying inasmuch as it affects him.’

  ‘Which suggests he was expecting Galforg to be a real psychic,’ du Bois said, somewhat sceptically.

  ‘Bit naive, isn’t it? So much for the Age of Enlightenment.’

  ‘I grew up believing in dragons,’ du Bois pointed out.

  ‘You may have been right.’ Grace was grinning. ‘So we think this was a practice kill, and he’s actually looking for a real psychic?’

  Du Bois sighed and closed his eyes. The smell of Grace’s cigarette was both irritating him and making him want one as well. They’d been down this route before. They’d cut themselves and left veritable networks of nanite bugs in the vicinity of just about every ‘psychic’ they could find in Birmingham. So far nothing.

  ‘Do you know what really bothers me?’ du Bois asked.

  ‘The abandonment of feudalism?’

  ‘I mean other than the emancipation of women.’

  ‘I will cut you.’

  ‘He killed one of us—’

  ‘The archer?’

  Du Bois nodded. ‘He also ate part of his brain. Now, I think he did that because he was insane. Because he wanted to symbolically steal the archer’s knowledge. But what if he actually did? What if the tech subconsciously obeyed his desires? He could know a lot about us.’

  ‘Two-hundred-year-old information,’ said Grace, and then thought about it for a moment. ‘He wouldn’t know about me,’ she said brightly.

  ‘No, but he’d know about certain key things that just don’t change. That’s why I still don’t get—’

  ‘Why Mr Brown took him prisoner,’ Grace finished for him.

  ‘And why he was so lightly protected. The guy is a walking security risk.’

  ‘So something else is at work here?’

  ‘There’s certainly something we’re not seeing, and Control won’t tell us.’

  Grace just shrugged. ‘Well, in the absence of anything worth doing, I’m going to head out, get outrageously drunk and start fights.’

  ‘You know it’s not fair fighting them, don’t you?’

  ‘Does it offend your chivalric code?’ Grace mocked. ‘Besides, it’s fairer when I’m drunk.’ She stood up and wandered towards the door before turning back to du Bois, who was looking up at her. �
��Perhaps some sport sex with multiple partners as well!’ She grinned, taking pleasure in du Bois’ obvious discomfort before heading for the door. ‘You stay here, have fun. You can put on your best hair shirt, maybe flagellate yourself for a bit,’ she shouted over her shoulder as she left the room.

  It was a private facility not far from the centre of the city. He could not believe how much things had changed. Everything was overwhelming, but how the world treated the mad had come a long way. Admittedly the wealthy had always been able to provide better facilities and care for members of their families who fell ill. Even if that meant locking them up somewhere else in the house where they couldn’t embarrass anyone.

  The goblet the demon had given him spoke to him. Told him everything he needed to know. Perhaps he shouldn’t have trusted it, but his own demons had assured him it was under control. Without it he was sure he would have been discovered curled up sobbing in a ditch somewhere, overwhelmed by the world he found himself in.

  A prick of his finger, a drop of blood touched to the electronic lock, and he was in. The ‘phone’, which had been born of the goblet, sent electronic information to the cameras in the hospital, making them record false images. A slash from one of the knives he had forged from the goblet released the demons in his blood and the staff fell asleep. He would keep the inmates – sorry, the patients – in the secure mental hospital awake, though. He would let them see him. He was pretty sure people would think he was like them. He wasn’t. He had just enough insight to see it for what it was. A joke.

  Through the thick metal security doors the hospital was clean and white. Nurses, orderlies and security staff were asleep on the floor, where they had fallen. He stepped over them carefully. The goblet had shown him how to make the demons in his blood surround him and remove traces of his presence that were somehow visible to modern forensic science, which to Silas’s mind bordered on necromancy. But he was invisible now, a ghost and a near-god walking among them.