“All of you are mental!”
“That British arrogance extends even to its slave race on Mars, I see,” Sabu said.
“Martians are slaves to no one!” Hand retorted. “We are by choice British, and Mars would be a far better place had we all the same choice.”
“What a pathetic race you are, grovelling before an Earthly Queen and thinking you are better for it,” Sabu sneered. “Your slave race will soon have new masters, beings of infinite majesty and terror worthy of your worship…and your blood.”
“Cut me loose, you’ll see just how worthy I am, you weak-minded pillock!” Hand snarled, wrestling against the unbreakable fibres. “Human or Martian, I’ll teach you Britons are not to be trifled with!”
“Oh, I know all about the British,” Sabu assured him. “My father, the Blue Raja of Myannadore, thought an English education would benefit me, make me a more civilised man, so I was sent to live and study among the infidels. I fear it did not have on me the ‘civilising’ effect my father wished.”
“Do you think your father would be proud of you now?” Hand asked. “Thrown in with a bunch of cutthroats?”
“Probably not, were he alive,” Sabu answered. “He objected when I wanted to turn my country’s treasury to the work of the Avatar of the Dark Gods, so I killed him.”
“Cor! Your own dad?”
“Yeah, I killed me own dad,” Sabu mocked in an sarcastic imitation of Hand’s voice and accent. Then he spat in Hand’s face. “Your British mawkishness is offensive. You will answer me now!”
Unable to wipe the spittle from his face, Hand merely glared at the man.
“What brought you and Captain Folkestone to Venus?”
“An aethership,” Hand answered, “The Captain, he thought we should walk, or maybe swim through space, but I…”
Sabu slapped the sergeant hard across the face, but Hand did not grimace, did not cry out.
Sabu snorted derisively. “Stiff upper lip and all that rot, eh? I guess we will find out just how British you are before we finish.”
“You’re wasting my time, you dirty little yob,” Hand said. “If you’re going to kill me, you might as well get it done…be better that listening to your whiny addlepated yammering. Besides, what is there that I, a low-born Martian of the highlands who never went past grammar school, could tell a high-born well-educated hooligan like yourself?”
Sabu scowled and drew back his delicately formed hand as if to slap the Martian again.
“Oh, I take that back,” Hand said. “There is one thing I could tell you about.”
The dark man lowered his hand. “What is that?”
“Manners, chum,” Hand replied with a smirk. “I can tell you about manners that you should have had caned into you at…”
Sabu delivered the slap he had delayed.
Hand smiled.
“You will answer my questions, Martian!”
“No, I don’t think so,” Hand answered calmly. “Giving you any information would betray my honour as a British soldier.”
“Honour,” Sabu sneered.
“That’s okay, chum,” Hand quipped. “I ain’t going to tell you what that is either. Beyond your understanding.”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t answer my questions.”
“That’s no threat,” Hand pointed out with a wan smile. “You are going to kill me no matter what I do, or don’t do, so there you are. You can keep on hitting me, but you’re going to hurt your delicate little hand before you do anything to me.”
Sabu stepped back and glared at the Martian, hands on his hips. This was not going at all as he had planned. They needed to know how much was known, but the truth of Hand’s words was in his eyes. Better to just kill Hand and report his ignorance than delay further. He clapped his hands twice and Yizak appeared.
“Master?”
“He knows nothing of importance,” Sabu murmured. “Take him to the dreaming den. Make sure it looks like an accident.”
“As you wish, Master,” the old Venusian replied.
As Hand started to speak, Sabu kicked his head as hard as he could, rendering the Martian unconscious. Yizak looked askance at the young human.
“Take him now,” Sabu ordered. “Do it quickly.”
Yizak nodded and watched Sabu leave the chamber. The old Venusian reached down, picked up the bound Martian by his wrists and slung him over his shoulder. Yizak had for many long decades sailed upon the wild seas of Venus, and long years of hoisting sails and pulling nets had developed muscles that made this little bit of a Martian a small burden. He glanced back the direction Sabu had went, shook his head, and started down another passage.
Hand regained consciousness as they traversed a corridor lit irregularly by tiny lanterns. Sensing he was being carried, he struggled. His reward was a casual but effective smack.
“Settle down, Martian, or I’ll drop you on your head,” the Venusian said. “You’re going to die soon enough. No need to hurry it along. The little master wants it to look like an accident and while I think crushing your head is as good an accident as any, I have my instructions.”
“What are you going to do?”
Yizak knocked him in the head again.
Hand saw they were approaching what appeared to be the terminus of a dead-end passage. They paused at the brick wall, the old Venusian touched a pattern of bricks, and the wall swung open noiselessly on a darkness filled with choking smoke. At the first whiff, Hand began to struggle furiously, but Yizak battered him until he fell motionless.
Though almost insensible, Hand felt himself dumped into a wooden framed bed with a harsh ticky mattress, and knew that the smoky darkness was filled with other beds arranged one above the other, the stacks of beds very close lining a circular wall.
His nostrils flared.
Dream-spice.
“Ah, you recognise the smell,” Yizak said with satisfaction as he began stuffing crystals into Hand’s mouth, holding his lips closed until the chemical dissolved.
Hand began to tremble.
“It is normally smoked,” Yizak said. “Very slow acting that way, hard to receive an overdose, though still very addictive. Eating the crystals themselves…directly into the bloodstream…only a fool Martian…if the brain does not burst, the heart surely will…”
The old Venusian was talking, but Hand only managed to catch snatches of what was being said, and soon not even that. His blood was on fire. Colours and sounds were cascading through his mind, flashes of memory, people and events he had thought long banished. Vaguely, he was aware his bonds were being cut, but he could not take advantage of it.
Yizak’s deathly pale face filled his sight, like an apocalyptic moon. “So very sad…ignorant Martian…dishonouring his uniform by indulging…illegal vices…”
The face vanished, his words echoing to a dead silence.
Hand tried to move, but it seemed he had no body. The only things that seemed real were the lights and colours whirling through him, the iridescent swirls of sound.
He knew the symptoms of dream-spice usage, as did all who were involved in the suppression of it in the Empire. And he knew the effects of an overdose. The connections in the brain would fire rapidly in a spasm that would eventually involve every portion of that organ, even the ancient depths and those apparently dormant portions of the brain that were of mysterious and enigmatic intent. Left unchecked, the spice-induced conflagration would eventually reduce the brain to something resembling burnt oatmeal. But it almost never reached that point – the increased adrenaline and vascular pressure nearly always burst the heart long before that point was ever reached.
Sergeant Felix Hand’s clockwork heart tick-tocked on, not missing a single even beat.
His mind plummeted through cosmic vistas of infinite maybes and might have beens…
Hand’s mother attended his funeral. No, he shouted at her as she threw red dirt upon the empty coffin. Not a single person in his small highland village could see anything but the uniform. O
nly his sister saw him, but she could say nothing…
He saw Captain Folkestone grabbed by the ghosts and taken into the depths screaming…
The stars sang to him…
A giant black fist grabbed him and threw him into a flaming whirlpool of green fire…
He fell down the long corridors of time…
He saw London in ruins, smoking, the Thames dry, strange machines everywhere…
He saw uninhabited Mars and a dry Venus…
A tattered Union Jack fluttered in the dust…
He saw a whirl of Londons, like a magic lantern show – a black banner fluttered above the Mosque of St Paul, fighting machines marched about Piccadilly Circus, the Queen offered a sacrifice to Jupiter, airships filled the sky, America ruled England with an iron fist, dinosaurs trod the streets, fiery mushrooms rose across the land consuming all…
A great voice shouted across the land…
“Sergeant Felix!”
The streets flowed with blood and smoke…
“Sergeant Felix!”
Steam was discovered and lost, the world unwinding…
“Sergeant Felix!”
Someone was slapping his face. Why does everyone want to hit me all of a sudden, he wondered.
“Aythaneshia?” he murmured.
Something bitter, some kind of leaves were being shoved into his mouth, the worst thing he had ever tasted. He tried to spit them out but a soft and feminine hand held his lips closed with unwonted power. The thick acerbic juices from the leaves flowed sluggishly down his throat; he gagged at the noxious syrup, but could not expel it.
Ice coursed through his veins.
All the myriad worlds revolving in and out of his mind began to collapse in on each other, one impossible reality after another, until he was left with one.
He opened his eyes.
“Aythaneshia,” he murmured. He started to remove leaves from his mouth.
“No, let them remain, till they totally dissolve,” she warned. “It is the only antidote to dream-spice.”
He looked around, saw that he was in a foul den filled with a sickly sweet smoke, a diluted form of dream-spice, enough to numb the mind and little more. He sat up, bumped his head on a wooden slat, then slid down from the bunk into which he had been placed. He saw white faces in other bunks, and a few not nearly as pale, but they saw nothing but the dreams conjured by the smoke. He took in his surroundings, and his still-careening thoughts flashed to the world outside and the planets beyond. He shook his head, but could not rid himself of the sensation that he was trapped in yet another dream, not that the reality he had known all his life was in any way insubstantial, but that it was just as valid as all the other realities he had glimpsed – where dinosaurs never vanished, where Christ was never born, where Rome never fell, where the British Empire never rose, where the power of steam was never…
Aythaneshia was tugging desperately on his arm. “We must escape, Sergeant Felix. The people who did this to you are not far away. They will return to ensure you are dead.”
Her words began to sink into consciousness.
He nodded and looked around the chamber with the cool eye of a soldier appraising a situation caught behind enemy lines. He thought he knew the location of the panel through which he had been brought, but discounted that as an escape. He glanced to the centre of the circular chamber where a bent figure tended a brazier.
“It is the Keeper of Dreams,” Aythaneshia explained softly. “her mind is too filled with what-might-have-beens to pay attention to the now.”
Hand’s mind was clearing quickly of the fogs and lights, a reaction to the leaves Aythaneshia had stuffed in his mouth. He started to swallow the dregs remaining.
“No, Sergeant Felix, let them dissolve,” she advised.
“What is it?”
“They are called therol, the leaves of the plant from which dream-spice is made.” Seeing his confusion, she explained: “The crystals are made from the roots; the plant naturally provides an antidote to itself in its leaves.”
“We’ve searched for years for…”
“It is one of our many secrets, not shared with any outsiders, not even those who trade it to worlds beyond the veil,” she said. “In my Order, it is how young girls are prevented from going too deeply into the folds of space, how we are acclimated to larger doses of the holy drug.”
“You mean…” He shook his head in disbelief as knowledge swept through him. “That’s why the girls are…”
“Please, we must go now,” she whispered urgently. “I must help you escape this place.”
“You’re coming with me, Aythaneshia,” Hand said, resolute in his purpose, now more than ever. Now that he understood the nature of the Orders to which the young girls of Venus were taken, he could not allow her to return to that life, especially now that he knew the terrifying nature of the spaces and times into which they were forced to peer. “I’ll get you off Venus, no matter that I have to do. We will find freedom amongst the stars.”
She smiled sadly. “I have heard of the stars, but they are not for me to see with my eyes.”
“Come on,” he said, grabbing her wrist in a firm but tender grip, pulling her across the chamber.
They passed the Keeper of Dreams, an ancient Venusian woman with blind white eyes. She paid them no mind.
They reached a narrow flight of stone stairs and made their way quietly upward. In the curving passage the darkness was nearly absolute, and he pulled her closer to him. They passed others in the blackness, but Hand could not see them anymore than he could be seen by them. The chamber into which they exited was thick with pillars supporting an unseen roof, arranged in such a way that it was impossible to see for more than a few yards in any direction. Hand dodged from pillar to pillar as they made their way toward a grey light that promised the coming dawn. Abruptly, she pulled away from him, running among the pillars at a right angle from his path.
Hand caught up with her, grabbed her, pulled her back. “No, Aythaneshia, we are almost free. Once outside we can make a run for the bridge, my coat around you to keep people from seeing…”
“No, I must not leave, Sergeant Felix,” she cried, her whispers echoing. “If I leave my Order I will die.”
“That is just crazy native superstition,” he snapped. “I love you, Aythaneshia.”
“And I you, Sergeant Felix,” she admitted. “From the moment I saw you burst from out the mist.’
“We can’t let our happiness be ruined by a load of Venusian ju-ju,” he told her. “You must leave all this behind you.”
“I cannot.”
“Do you really want to stay here, stay on Venus?” he asked her, his big blunt hands on her narrow shoulders, staring deep into eyes that had seen too much. “Do you want me to leave you?”
After what seemed an eternity, she shook her head. “In my heart I want to flee with you to Mars, or wherever you are, but…”
“Then that’s what it will be,” he said with a wide grin. “Stay by my side, luv, and don’t look back.”
The chamber was not empty, but because of the pillars it was east to avoid being seen. He saw a doorway flanked on either side by frosted arched windows. Shrugging off his jacket, he hung it on her, shrouding her features and nearly engulfing her lithe form. Walking close beside the unusual sight of a Martian in the Old City, he doubted she would attract much attention at all. All eyes would be on him, and that was what he wanted.
As they approached the exit, a doorkeeper seemed to appear from nowhere. He scowled at the Martian, though without any sense of surprise and Hand thought of the non-Venusian faces he had seen in the dream-spice den, but his eyes went wide with shock when he glimpsed Aythaneshia’s finely chiselled features beneath the folds of Hand’s jacket, and his pale lips parted to form a cry of alarm. The doorkeeper did not see the swiftly moving fist before it smashed into his face. In a single lithe movement, Hand caught the observant Venusian and silently eased him into a sitting position b
y the door. A few others looked their way, but saw nothing more than a troublemaking Martian.
“Come on,” Hand said. “Let’s go.”
Dawn was breaking, at least as much as dawn could break on Venus, the night mist settling, the clotted murkiness giving way to lighter shades of grey. The clouds which had been shot through with writhing filaments of electricity began to churn and whip as the unseen sun’s rays struck the atmosphere, a sort of golden ochre colour fighting through.
As they rushed through the streets, Hand kept his arm around Aythaneshia’s shoulders, kept her pulled close to him. There were very few people about at that early hour, and nearly all of them on errands of their own, too busy to care about what appeared to be two small Martians fleeing back to the safety of the British port of trade after a night of illicit carousing.
Turning into one of the high streets, Hand caught a glimpse of the bridge he had crossed what seemed aeons before, and he breathed a bit easier at the sight. Almost home, he thought; all they needed to do was get over the crossing, then hie straight for the refuge of the Consul’s Office. Once there, the Venusians could rant and rail all they wanted about superstitions and taboos, but they were not going to prevail against the Empire, and if it appeared the monkey-butts of authority might give way, why then Sergeant Felix Hand of Her Majesty’s Martian Rifles would step in. No one, not the Venusians, the British Empire or the gods themselves, would come between him and his love.
Aythaneshia stumbled, and Hand caught her, lifted her, and carried her forward.
She stumbled again, this time nearly falling from his grasp, and her breaths were coming in laboured gasps.
“Aythaneshia, what is it?” he demanded as he pulled her sagging body to his. “What is wrong?”
“I thought I could leave, but I cannot,” she whispered, her mouth close to his ear. “I thought our love would protect me, but their hold is too strong…the dream-spice…too many years…”
“The therol,” he gasped, sinking to his knees with her, holding her close. “If we can…”
“There is none, and it would not work anyway,” she told him. “The power of the dream-spice is strong within me, stronger than I realised. It ties me to my Order, and to break that tie is death.”
Shadows Against the Empire (Folkestone & Hand Interplanetary Steampunk Adventures Book 1) Page 15