by G. D. Penman
The other one was a lot more interesting. She was standing coyly a few steps away from the door, looking for all the world like a naked woman with long black hair. Sully’s eyes automatically completed their tactical assessment of the monster by running up and down her body. Definitely naked. She was also smiling and holding a pair of handcuffs. All of these elements were usually good omens for Sully but judging by the jagged teeth in that otherwise pretty mouth and the dull way that the moonlight was reflecting back from a pair of manacles that were clearly made from cold iron, she suspected that fun probably wasn’t in the cards.
One of them, Sully’s bravado insisted, she could have handled. If there had been only two of them, she still would have taken a swing. But three of them, with civilians so close. With Marie so close. It wasn’t a gamble she was willing to make. The woman bowed gracefully at the waist with the faint sound of rustling feathers and then introduced herself. “Iona Sullivan, I greet you. I have had many names, but those gathered here call me Alecto. Behind me are Tartalo and the last gryphon. I believe you have already met.”
Sully stayed very still so that nobody got the wrong idea. “Don’t suppose you care to tell me why the four of you have been trying to murder me all week?”
“We had very strict instructions not to murder you, in fact. But with the pain comes a loss of focus and purpose. I apologize for any confusion we have caused you.” Alecto’s smile was not reassuring.
“So who is giving you these instructions?”
“Lord Blackwood of the British Empire made his requests, and his offer.”
Of course it was the British, who else would it have been.
Sully wondered aloud, “What could those pompous pricks offer you to make all this worthwhile?”
Alecto’s polite smile faded and her pupils dilated until they filled her almond eyes. “An end to our curse. Oblivion is our reward. Imagine an eternity of pain, Iona. Wounds that will not heal but cannot kill you. Do you wonder that we can be bought with the promise of release?”
Sully tried to imagine living with the pain she was feeling right now for a year. She remembered the bottle of gin that had kept her company after Marie left her, and the next bottle of gin, and the next. She could understand wanting oblivion all too well. “The British aren’t your only option, you know?”
“It will take a wish to undo what a wish has wrought.” Alecto stepped a little bit closer to Sully. Danger radiated from every inch of her gaunt frame.
Sully kept her eyes locked onto the creature and wet her lips. “I’ve got a whole hell full of demons on speed-dial.”
“We have had an eternity vexed by this curse. Do you honestly think that we did not try the children of chaos? They could not help us. The British have new allies—strong allies—that can”
Just as she had suspected. Not that being right helped much if you were dead. “Can you at least tell me how you found me?”
“My kind have a gift for tracking. We can sense an oath-breaker wherever they may be. You broke your compact with the British when you turned against them. It was a small oath that you put little of yourself into, but it was enough. The one lurking behind you would be so much easier to hunt. Breaking an engagement has left a stain on her that my sisters and I could taste from a world away.”
Marie cursed softly under her breath, then stepped forward carefully to rest her hand on Sully’s back.
“Are you going to introduce me to your friends, darlin?” There was barely a quaver in her voice when she spoke. Sully felt suffocated by her pride in her lover.
“Alecto and her friends are working for the British. I think that I am going to go away with them now. But first they are going to give me a minute or two to say goodbye?”
Alecto nodded indulgently, so Sully stepped back into the guest house, closing the door just as carefully as she had opened it.
Marie started shaking the moment the door was shut, and pink- tears started to roll down her cheeks a moment after. “You’re just giving up? You?”
Sully smiled. “I can’t beat all three of them. Not like this. If I go with them . . . The British want me alive. I’ll escape. I’ll come back to you.”
“Darlin’, if you can’t get away from them now, how are you going to do it in chains?”
Sully’s smile slipped. “If I fight them, you’re going to die. I can’t—that can’t happen. That can’t ever happen.”
“If I bite the leader and she loses her magic, you can take the fried chicken and the grass man. Right?”
“They aren’t Magi. They’re monsters. They don’t need magic to do the things they do, they’re just different.”
“So you can just—”
Sully caught Marie around the waist and dragged her in for a kiss. At first Marie slapped helplessly at Sully’s arms, but gradually they melted together. When they parted, her tears had already started to dry in red streaks down her cheeks. “I need to go now. And you need to stay inside until I’m gone.”
Marie opened her mouth to object, but Sully stopped her with a finger across her kiss-swollen lips. “I love you Marie, and I am going to come back to you.”
Marie pushed her away and forced bravery back into her smile. “You’d better.”
Outside, Alecto was arrayed in all her glory. Six wings were spread out behind her back, huge and black feathered. Sully hadn’t seen the injury on her before, but now it was obvious. The wings hung heavy with pus and rot and for every feather there seemed to be another broken arrow shaft lodged among them. Marie gasped in awe in the corridor behind Sully. “An angel.”
Alecto’s grin spread until it threatened to take over her whole face, jagged and terrible. “A Fury.”
She tossed the manacles to Sully. “We must depart. Put them on.”
At the first touch of the metal Sully shuddered. Her magic blinked out. The well of power that had burned within her since her first memory was just gone. This wasn’t like the gentle respite that Marie’s bite brought her. She felt like someone had taken an apple-corer to her insides and left her hollow. She dutifully strapped the manacles onto her wrists until they made a clicking sound and then turned to take one last look at Marie. “Goodbye, darlin’,”
“See you soon.”
Alecto pressed against Sully’s back, draping her arms around her with obvious relish. “No, she won’t.”
Then the wings started to beat around them, the arrow shafts rattling together with each stroke and thick black ichor trickling down to patter on the ground beneath them as her wounds were tugged open. They took off, and without her magic, Sully was a dead weight. She watched the immortals scatter away from the plantation. Then she stared down at Marie, standing proud and safe in the courtyard as they rose up into the sky, until the clouds took even that away.
November 9, 2015
The flight to England had been pretty unpleasant the first time that Sully had flown there, what with the cold and the demon beneath her. This time the company was more aesthetically pleasing, but the conversation was worse, not to mention the putrid smell. She had tried asking Alecto a few questions as they traveled but the answers had been abrupt at best. She had been around for as long as there had been humans. She had been cursed after a little misunderstanding regarding an evisceration. She had kept to herself for a while after that, hiding from the sight of mankind, whom she considered to be inferior to herself. She had met the other immortal creatures during the long silence following the war, when the demons had started to cause trouble. Sully got all of these answers in quick succession, but very little more. Maybe the long periods of isolation had made the Fury socially inept. Besides, Sully didn’t feel like she had anything more to say to the monster that was dragging her off to execution or worse. Somehow the boredom, combined with the intensity of the last few days, lulled Sully off to sleep somewhere above the Atlantic. Sully had seen it many times a
t the IBI—when she finally caught the bad guy and they knew that they were going to be executed, all of the stress that had been haunting them faded away and they slept like babies.
The tightening of Alecto’s grip when London came into sight stirred Sully from her dreams.
The gothic spires rose up ahead of them, as tall as any great skyscraper that New Amsterdam could boast, but grown rather than built, born from the curse that kept the city spreading ever outward, consuming all in its path. Someday, unless the curse was undone, all of mainland Britain would be London and it would stretch tenuous bridges out to all of the islands nearby and consume them too. Nobody was certain which of Britain’s enemies had cast the curse. The more poetically inclined said that it was the Romans who flung it out as a final vengeance as their cities burned and the Veil was erected. The prosaic strategists placed the blame on the Mongolians, whose spies had reported back that the Empire was close to overspending its resources, even without the strain of an ever-expanding city. Sully didn’t care for either of the political theories. To her it felt personal. Somebody had fallen in love with London once upon a time, just like Sully had fallen for New Amsterdam, and when the relationship finally went sour, they lashed out in the way that people do. There were rumors of a second curse, one that made all the people who lived within the city forget about the very existence of a world outside, but that just sounded like living in a city to Sully.
Having spent a lifetime in New Amsterdam, the spread of London beneath her shouldn’t have felt so impressive. She felt almost treacherous, looking at another city that way, but it was just so damned big. She was lost almost immediately and that was looking down on it from above. She couldn’t even imagine how the people in the streets made sense of it all. New Amsterdam was a grid laid over the land, but London coiled and tangled in ways that made no sense at all. Side streets and stairs led to nowhere. Main streets came to abrupt ends at monuments and fountains commemorating battles and generals that nobody could name anymore. To go north you had to walk east. To go south you had to walk north. The only constant seemed to be the clouds of pigeons that the Fury snapped at as they passed, and the coating of shit the birds left on everything.
Alecto swooped down into the streets of London and dropped Sully neatly between a pair of redcoat guards outside an unremarkable building made from white marble. They seized her immediately and gave Alecto such a brief glance that Sully wondered how heavily the Fury was doused in illusions. Sully hadn’t expected anything further from her, but the creature swooped down for one moment and placed a sharp-edged kiss on Sully’s cheek. “I thank you for your sacrifice. I will think of you as I receive my reward.”
Standing there in enemy territory, in enemy hands and in chains, Sully did what she always did when the odds felt insurmountable. She grinned. “Just make sure you get paid fast. I don’t plan on hanging around all day.”
Alecto launched herself back up into the sky, lost to sight in the smog and shooting straight through the wide circle of pigeons that hung over Sully.
The guards jostled her into the building and into an elevator, and she didn’t resist. Not yet anyway. She wasn’t going to get away until she found a key to her shackles, and she doubted that these meatheads were at that pay grade. Sully’s smile was robust. “Lovely city you have here. Shame I never got to visit as a tourist. I hear you’ve got the best libraries, and more pubs per head than anywhere else in the world.”
The redcoats didn’t engage with her, which was probably sensible, but it made for a very boring journey down into the bowels of the city. Without knowing how fast the rickety elevator was traveling, she couldn’t work out just how far down they had gone but the journey seemed to go on for much longer than it should have. Sully half expected to step out into the earth’s molten core when the doors finally opened.
Instead, she was greeted with a beige corridor and a fresh duo of redcoats with slightly more pips on their lapels who took her deeper into the catacombs of bureaucracy. She was handed off twice more and she started to suspect that this was all an elaborate farce and that they were walking in circles. Eventually they stopped in front of a walnut door with a tiny brass plate on it that read The Archive. They knocked three times, then stepped back to let the door open. Inside of what could easily have been a broom-closet there was an archway carved out of a single solid piece of ivory and completely encrusted with pictograms and runes. Sully couldn’t feel the magic radiating from the archway, but even crippled as she was by the cold iron, she could see the pool of radiant light that was bound inside. The redcoats dragged her, reluctant, into the light.
Pratt had theorized about a place like this. Somewhere that you could keep records of every wish ever made without their being obliterated when the universe was changed again. A little cul-de-sac off the regular planes of existence where you could keep your paperwork in order. Sully couldn’t conceive of anything that more fundamentally explained the British than this. An infinite cosmos of planes to explore and they set up camp on their own front lawn and started filling out the appropriate forms.
In practice, it didn’t look vastly different than the building that they had just come from, although here the walls were blazing white constructs of pure force rather than plaster. Every breath felt stale and everywhere that Sully looked there were shelves. Row after row of shelves stretching off toward every horizon. Beyond the portal and its far newer twin there were enough card catalogs to make a librarian orgasmic. In the midst of the endless files there was a neatly appointed desk and behind that desk sat the smuggest man Sully had ever seen. Most of the British politicians that had crossed her path enjoyed their working lunches a little too much, putting considerable strain on their waistcoats as a result. This one was almost skeletally thin, and his expensive clothes hung off of him like he was a coat rack. He had thinning hair slicked over to one side, a pencil mustache, and bugging eyes that would have made him look perpetually surprised if they hadn’t been so sunken. When he glanced up from the papers he was working on, he let out a sigh.
“How many times do I have to kill you before you stop coming back to trouble me, Iona O’Sullivan?”
Sully stared straight ahead and said nothing. She had done enough interrogating in her day to know that offering up information just got you to the hangman faster.
“I apologize for my terrible rudeness. I may have met you many times before, but for you this is our first encounter. I am Lord Blackwood, and as far as you are concerned, I am the British Empire. His Majesty may sit on the throne and the great and powerful may gather in Westminster to debate details of policy, but I am the one who turns their proclamations into reality. In short, they may know that a killing has been ordered, but I am the man who knows where the bodies are buried.”
Sully suppressed a groan. He was like a skinny, white version of Pratt. She wondered if maybe the Fury had killed her and this was her own personal hell. Blackwood rambled on. “Have you ever wondered how it is that such a tiny island as Britain came to dominate every part of the world? We had no special advantages. We are not particularly numerous or strong—indeed in the early days of our great nation our magic could not even compare to the Celtic savages or the invading Romans—yet we noble few have mastered this entire globe at one time or another. Did it never strike you as strange?”
Now that he mentioned it, Sully wondered why it had never occurred to her before, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that.
“It is quite simple really. The truth is that history is a terribly malleable thing if you have the correct tools and the correct environment to work from. The Romans discovered this in their conflict with the Greeks. The ancient Greeks had their own pocket dimension where they could track the comings and goings of the “gods” that they made sacrifices to and how their prayers were fulfilled. After the Roman conquest, the dimension became theirs and they laid claim to half of the known world. As each gre
at empire rose, it found a place like this or it was wiped from the page of history by those of us who had the wherewithal. This is the great game of empires. Not shuffling troops and brokering deals. Rewriting history and carefully observing the ways that others have rewritten it so that we may benefit from their poor planning.”
“Why wouldn’t you just wish them away?” Sully’s face snapped back to neutral after she realized her mistake, and she mentally kicked herself.
“Ah, Iona, I am so pleased that you have decided to join the conversation. There are two glaringly obvious reasons that we do not simply wish our foes away, the first being that each of our real competitors has a bunker rather like this one, from which they could remake their empire, in some form, with a wish. The second, and rather less expected, is that the gentlemen downstairs are creatures of honor. They will not undertake a wish if it runs contrary to one that has already been granted; therefore, wishing away the possibility of our annihilation in the service of an enemy’s wish is the rather standard line of defense. Indeed, the abject impossibility of undoing a wish is the entire reason that we are having this conversation.”
He paused to see if she would slip up again, but Sully remained silent.
“As I am sure you can imagine, the remaining empires have been at something of a stand-off for many decades now as a result of that inability to countermand a previous wish. The demons’ usefulness was depleted more and more with each wish that was granted until we came to the current sorry state of affairs. Or rather, the sorry state of affairs before you turned the entirety of the hells against us in one fell swoop. Things proceeded without interruption for millennia, played out painstakingly by my predecessors and me, until you took our trading partners among the gentlemen downstairs out of operation. It would have given me great pleasure to toast such an excellent move in the great game, and to admire your mastery, were it not for the tragic fact that you performed it entirely by accident, without any grasp of what you have done.”