“Ahh, everything I do makes him more perfect…” Armeggon cleared his throat and shook his wings. “Well, I think some plastic surgery is in order.” He leapt to the fallen length of Nelson’s column and grasped it in both hands. His muscles bunched and swelled. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the pillar of stone lifted and swung into the sky. Lightnore tensed, his head cocked, but he braced himself in the wrong direction. Nelson’s Column smacked into his side, sending him high over the ruins north-west, in the direction of Buckingham Palace.
“Fore!” shouted Armeggon, one hand shading his eyes, the other holding the enormous pillar of stone over his shoulder at a jaunty angle.
“Good shot, sir.”
“Yes,” Armeggon said, watching the Lord of Light dwindle into the distance. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you hold the sword of my arch enemy in your hands. Would you care to explain?”
Mirror gulped. “He ah, didn’t have a pen.”
“Reeeeeeaally.” Armeggon slipped out from under Nelson’s Column, letting it shatter on the rubble-strewn plaza. He turned his gaze on Mirror. His pupils swelled until his eyes were completely black. Mirror clenched his thighs together to stop himself peeing in terror.
“I know,” said Armeggon softly, “that you have never really been on my side.”
“I have—I am, always! You’re awesome. I couldn’t–” Before he could say anything really pathetic, Armeggon lifted one clawed finger. Mirror’s mouth closed with a snap.
“Why did you join me, Mirror?”
“Because I hate the hypocrisy of the other side, sir.” If he hadn’t been holding the sword, he would have saluted.
“Go on.”
“They say they value honesty but–”
“But they can’t bear to hear your truths. Yes, yes.”
Armeggon nodded and Mirror began to breathe again. Perhaps he would survive this.
“Whom do you want to win, this day?” Armeggon asked.
“Me? You, of course.”
“Mere factions aside, look at yourself with that super power of yours. Whom do you want to win?”
Mirror blinked. He did not know. He never used his power on himself. He didn’t dare. “I can’t,” he said. “I have to be impartial for it to work.”
“So, impartially tell me the answer.” Armeggon grinned. His many silver teeth glinted in the sunlight.
“I… I…” Mirror tried. He really did. He found the calm and aimed it inward. Something inside him bowed and stretched under the pressure of his gaze, but did not break. He knew with a sick certainty that if it snapped, he would never see clearly again. “I can’t.”
“I pity you,” said Armeggon. “How empty you must be with no desires of your own.”
Mirror looked at his feet. He had plenty of desires, just no… preferences. “Yes sir.”
Armeggon’s crackling presence approached, and Mirror tensed for the final blow. How sad not to see the end after all, he thought. But instead of swiping off his head, Armeggon hooked one claw under his chin and lifted him until his heels left the ground. Through the pain, Mirror met Armeggon’s gentle, brutal gaze. His eyes filled with tears. He did not know why.
“So, should I too give you a gift?” Armeggon’s voice was silken. “To keep things balanced and impartial?”
“There’s no need,” Mirror said, trying not to squeak. “I’m fine.”
Armeggon pulled him closer with his hooked finger. Mirror felt the Dark One’s other hand cup the back of his head. Hairs all over his body lifted in the electric aura of power. And then they kissed. Waves of pleasure swept through Mirror’s body, bouncing off his ribs, shaking his pelvis, ricocheting down his hollow legs and bouncing back upwards leaving his toes curled and aching. His knees collapsed. The Dark One held him upright, drinking from him, spilling his own dark desire back into Mirror’s open mouth. Mirror felt one of his teeth break. Armeggon hooked the tooth from his mouth with his tongue and swallowed it without breaking the kiss.
When Armeggon pulled back, Mirror felt as if his soul slipped out too, trapped between those silver teeth. He opened his eyes to find the emptiness inside reflected by a gulf of open air all around. He straddled Armeggon’s knee, Lightnore’s sword dangling from his hand. Five hundred feet below, a perfect circle of blackened concrete showed the precision of his master’s lunar explosion.
Drop me, he thought. Nothing can top that kiss.
“Think of it as a first instalment,” said Armeggon. The wind whipped his cloak out behind him like smoke. “Tell me, Mirror mine,” he said. “Are we equal now?”
Mirror sighed. “You sure are.”
Armeggon tutted. “Are we equally matched,” he said. “Now that he is blind and has no sword. Will I win?”
“Oh.” Mirror took a breath and felt super-clarity fall over his blushes like cool rain. Victory was always uncertain—as both Lightnore and Armeggon accrued the powers of their fallen enemies, it was inevitable one of them would draw momentarily ahead. Lightnore had been more powerful for months, using his sword to double his own super-strike power. But Armeggon was faster by say, fifteen per cent, had recently gained Mr. Bendor’s super-stretch power, was far more ruthless, and cleverer too, and now Lightnore was blind…
For the second time that day, Mirror could not answer. “Too close to call,” he said.
“Those are my kind of odds.” Armeggon spun Mirror round, clasped one arm around his chest, and they dropped from the sky.
Lightnore waited in the centre of the Women’s Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath. He stood on the rippling, green surface, his knees flexed. His face tracked them unerringly down through the sky.
“He’s using the water as a sound board,” whispered Mirror. “He can hear us through the soles of his feet.”
“So stop whispering,” hissed Armeggon.
He dropped Mirror into a rhododendron bush and landed near the water’s edge. Mirror spat out twigs, grabbed the sword from above his head, and pushed through the foliage into late afternoon sunshine. The broken tooth had cut his tongue, and he had a long scratch down one shin.
Armeggon faced Lightnore over the shifting water. Mirror forgot his pains at the sight of them. What a privilege, he thought, to be here for the end. He wondered if they would have an at-last-old-foe-the-time-has-come type conversation, but they both just nodded and raised their right arms, palms outstretched. A straight power duel then. He smiled. Nothing like a classic.
At no signal Mirror could see, bolts of energy tore the air with a staccato roar. Lightnore’s beam flared white with streaks of electric blue; Armeggon’s flashed a colour the other side of black, shot with unearthly purple. The bolts met and exploded above the water, sending up clouds of steam exactly at the midpoint between them.
The skin on Mirror’s face tightened and he shielded his eyes against the heat. Lightnore slid backwards across the surface of the water until his white boots lodged in the far bank. He crouched and the glare from his open palm brightened until Mirror had to look away. Steam boiled into the air, hiding the combatants. Gusts of wind, hot and cold, tousled Mirror’s hair. A bolt of lightning struck a tree somewhere to his left, and the earth shivered under his feet. He craned through the smoke and steam, but could see nothing for long minutes. The steam dispersed when the pond boiled dry. The duellists had dropped to one knee but their beams blazed even stronger. Mirror asked which would win, but his super-power showed no advantage, nothing that would turn the fight one way or the other.
In the centre of the dry pond, beneath the conflagration where the beams met, the earth glowed orange and crumbled away. Mirror swore and jumped to one side, as a crack snaked across the pond bed towards him. Still the two increased their power. Lightnore’s body shook, but he raised his free hand, and a twin white beam joined the first. A writhing vein in Armeggon’s te
mple popped and one eye turned red. Crimson lava dripped from between his teeth. He screamed, and from his gaping mouth a bolt of fire speared to join battle against the good.
It was the most glorious, mind-blowing, utterly awesome thing Mirror had ever seen. Better than fireworks. Better than sex. Better than being kissed by the Dark One himself. He jumped up and down and shouted. He stabbed the air with Lightnore’s sword. He turned and saw Armeggon’s eyes and his exhilaration slipped away like a body under ice. Mirror saw fear there, desperation, and an unspoken entreaty. He turned and saw Lightnore had also lifted his face to him, and he too seemed to plead. Both fighters shrank, weakened as he watched.
“What?” asked Mirror. “What do you want?”
But he knew.
Nobody would win this fight. Both would drain themselves. Both would die in a final futile blaze. They wanted him to decide.
“Oh no,” He shook his head. “Not me. I’m witness, not participant. No way.”
In response, the two jerked and shuddered and increased the fury of their beams. Gusts of howling wind buffeted Mirror, shoving him to his knees. In his hands, Lightnore’s sword burned in resonance. He turned to crawl away, but stopped. If he did not intervene, both would die. The Earth would never see such men again. The loss burned deep. Mirror would be alone in a world of suspicious and vengeful survivors. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to look inside himself.
“Oh no,” he said. “Oh shit. Oh no.”
Mirror tried to find his inner super-calm, but the howl of air drowned out his thoughts. How could he choose between them? It was impossible.
Armeggon’s eyes closed. Across the fire pit, Lightnore nodded, or perhaps he just trembled. Mirror took a deep breath. The sound of the battle faded. Again he felt the surface within him bow under his questioning pressure. A sick dread churned in his stomach. He gulped and swallowed. Sweat poured from his forehead. Who did he want to win?
Two futures blossomed in his mind. In one, Armeggon ruled, inventing ever new ways to enjoy pain, offering free will to terrified survivors, only to crush them with the futility of their hope, time after time. And people always hoped, so he always had dreams to crush.
In the other, Lightnore helped rebuild. He single-handedly carried supertankers loaded with supplies to starving cities, set up refugee camps, unsealed the source of the Thames, and let the river flow. With time, he became a city vigilante, catching drug lords and child traffickers, after he had established a society that could support such things, of course. And in the end, he sat in a rocking chair, recounting his adventures to his disciples until one day they buried him under an enormous bronze statue… and forgot him.
It became icily clear to Mirror, while clashing fires raged, light and dark combining to form a rainbow spray of colour across the sky. If he killed Armeggon, then Lightnore died in that same instant. Armeggon could survive his adversary’s death, but Lightnore would become a has-been. An ex-superhero, with his charity projects and official biographies. He would never be this glorious again. And by all that was great, all that was more than mundane, Mirror wanted another kiss.
Something broke in him then. A flare of energy blasted the calm away and he flinched in a storm of leaves and smoke and screaming power. He knew what he had to do. He fought to stand against the wind, drew back the sword, and threw it as hard as he could—
Time slowed.
Black fire boiled in slow motion against white. The sword swung end over end. It sliced the air with a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh above the low, crackling roar of the battle. Mirror held his breath. Lightnore’s blind eyes glowed blue. He smiled.
“Terrifying to find out what you really want, eh son?” The voice echoed in Mirror’s head like a choir.
“What? Lightnore?” Mirror glanced towards Armeggon. His master’s mighty wings had shrivelled to nubs. His eyes rolled back in his head.
“If you get off that fence, you’ll find it only comes up to your waist,” Lightnore said, while sprays of silver fire fizzed in a slow torrent from his palms.
“What are you talking about?” Mirror had an absurd desire to shout—Watch out! But he gritted his teeth. He could not back out now.
“Here. Remember.”
Mirror gasped. A map appeared in his head. Deep underground vaults glowed green. “What’s this?”
“Arcs,” said Lightnore. “Survivors. They’re your job now.”
“What? Lightnore, the sword–”
If anything, the hero lifted his chest to meet the blade. It pierced his sternum without a sound, only stopping when the hilt thumped against his silver breastplate. The blow shoved Lightnore back. His hands flew apart. The white beams of power died. Time returned in a rush. Armeggon’s deadly bolts converged on the falling figure. For an instant, Mirror saw an inverse silhouette, a white skeleton impaled on a black background and then the darkness swarmed and Lightnore was consumed.
Armeggon’s beams blinked out. Mirror’s ears popped in the sudden silence. Leaves and dust fluttered down around him. At first he did not understand why the world glowed red, then he saw the setting sun caged behind a row of skeletal trees. Night was coming. A chunk of glowing mud slipped into the crumbling chasm where excess superpowers boiled like lava. Sparks rose into the twilit sky. On the far side, the sword stood upright in a pile of silver ash. As Mirror watched, the sword tipped and fell.
He walked away.
The Dark One stirred as he passed. “Mirror… Help me.”
Mirror ignored him and walked on around the pond bed. An itch grew between his shoulder blades until he had to look back. His heart lurched to see Armeggon drag himself towards the glowing, heat-wraithed hole.
“No–”
But his master rolled over the edge and disappeared with hardly a sound.
Mirror asked himself if he cared, and found that he did. A lot. But what could he do? He would fall in, too, and be just as dead. He continued around the circumference of cracked mud until he reached the pile of ash. Gingerly, he took the hilt of the sword and shook dust from its blade. Was it his now? Could he keep it? He had no one to ask. The sound of earth shifting made him turn. The sides of the pit slumped and fell inwards. The ground trembled.
Bat-wings arched high above his head, Armeggon rose renewed and glittering from the depths. Twisters of energy spun off him. His cloak lifted and hung in the shimmering heat waves, and his eyes shone, utterly black. Poised and perfect, he floated to the shore. Mirror could not read his expression. He stepped aside as Armeggon glided inexorably past. The Dark One knelt by the pile of ash. He slid his fingers deep, and lifted twin palmfuls to his face. With horror, Mirror thought he was going to eat Lightnore’s ashes, but Armeggon just stared at the silver grains trickling between his fingers until his hands were empty.
“Are you… happy?” Mirror asked. “With me, sir?”
“I loved him,” said Armeggon. “And he is gone.”
Mirror blinked in shock. Of course, he realised. Who else was worthy of Armeggon than the Lord of Light?
“I will never forgive you, of course.”
“Sir?” Mirror’s breath caught. He would never get that kiss. “What… what are you going to do?”
Armeggon lifted his head. His pupils shrank to black pinpoints. “You are marginally more interesting to me now, Mirror,” he said, “but infinitely less useful.” He turned back and began piling Lightnore’s ash onto his cloak. “How could I trust anything you said? How could I know you weren’t just trying to please me?”
“I can have an opinion and still use my power, sir,” Mirror said. “It’s the truth.” But was it? Had he not felt something snap?
Armeggon did not look at him. “Who is the fairest?”
“Sir?”
Armeggon continued to scoop and pile silver ash. “Who is the fairest? Tell me, Mirror.”
“Look inside.” Armeggon’s voice was a low rumble.
Mirror dared not disobey. To his surprise, clarity fell over him like a veil. He saw himself holding a gifted sword, his shoulders smudged with ash. His back was not bowed. He looked solid, competent, weary. His exterior did not reflect the joy that danced within him. He still had his gift. He could still see!
“No, it’s still you,” he said. “I couldn’t compete.”
“You see?” said Armeggon. He gathered the cloak into a bundle, and stood. “You have no idea. I am full of worms.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
But Armeggon did not explain. “If you are still here when I return, I will kill you.”
It was a dizzying, unexpected blow. Tears sprang into Mirror’s eyes. “Sir… I just wanted to be with you.”
“A glory has passed from the Earth,” said Armeggon. “Prepare for the Time of Darkness.” He lifted into the air, spinning slowly. The last rays of the setting sun painted him red and gold. He spread his wings to blot out the sky and in a thunderous pulse of wind, beat once—and was gone.
Mirror sat down on a fallen tree. A crushed stem of yellow flowers glowed in the last light where the ashes had lain. He pointed the sword at it.
“Zap,” he said.
Softly, with no fuss, the stem straightened, petals unfolded, and a faint scent of peppermint reached Mirror’s nose. He looked at the sword, and the flower, and then the sword again. “Zap,” he whispered. “Zap.”
Leaving a trail of exotic flowers blooming from the charred branches, Mirror climbed away from the devastation. He didn’t know where to go. He had half a mind to return to Armeggon’s cave and try to join forces with the Dark One once again. But then there were the arcs full of survivors under the Cairngorms and the Welsh valleys. Something needed done about them, too.
First, he decided to scrounge the ruins, hopefully find a coffee and some strong cigarettes. As he walked, dusk fell on Hampstead Heath. Fragments of the shattered moon streaked across the sky in a silver rain. Or perhaps it was Armeggon scattering ashes, screaming his triumph and his grief, far above the atmosphere. Mirror did not ask and so he did not know.
The Lavender Menace Page 2