“My lord.” begged Romney, “This is not of my doing. I had to bring this complaint as high as I could. If they are set on corrupting the natural ways of Hell, then surely they must be stopped before they go too far?” There was a silence and then laughter that sounded like waves breaking on a far shore.
“And if Hell knew that this was happening?” It sneered, “What if Hell sanctioned it?”
“I do not believe that is the case my Lord.” said Romney haughtily.
“Fool.” said the voice of the white plains, “You are wrong. Hell knew about this. It is sanctioned.”
“To what purpose my lord?” said Romney, anger in his voice now, “It seems to me that this changes one of the basic tenets upon which Hell interacts with the mortal plains. It underlies everything that we stand for; that we are.”
“Blood bound is blood bound.” said Victoria and she felt this invisible being shift its attention to her, as if the air itself around her was heavier somehow.
“Silence, less than mortal.” It said. “You have no sway here. I look at you now and see that you are no more than a puppet; a plaything.”
Victoria growled almost. She was nobody’s plaything!
“The necklace I wore was blood bound, Lord of the First Circle. Is the lord of lies now entrusting his minions to do as they see fit with the basic laws of all?” she said.
“You know nothing.” said the voice, and it sounded amused almost. “We have seen what the plans are of what those who did this to your amulet are and it pleases us greatly.”
“I see.” said Victoria. “Such is the nature of evil then.”
“Fool. You assume that evil is the absence of good?”
“Of course.” said Victoria. “They are diametrically opposed.” There came the sound of laughter like thunder in the mountains, growing in volume until it was almost a howl and then it ceased.
“What then, mortal if I told you that you are wrong and that Goodness is the absence of evil?”
“You try to trick me with words.” smiled Victoria. “They are of course both the same.”
“Victoria,” hissed Romney from somewhere nearby. “Wait.”
“They are not the same at all.” said the voice, mocking her. “Consider it. One differs from the other as it is the most prevalent state that withholds in the absence of the other.”
“Explain.”’ said Victoria.
“Evil prevails everywhere. Look at you all on the mortal plain, scrabbling to hoard your money and your food, to lust and strive to win your partners and lovers. You are no more than rats scrambling over filth in the sewers. Yet in the absence of evil shines goodness. Those who believe they can rise above the power of evil and make a difference to it and those who look beyond. Take it from me, child, evil prevails, and goodness is the exception; not the other way around.”
“Forgive her lord.” said Romney, she has no concept of such things of course.” Victoria felt the creature's attention shift away from her and then she realised that she wasn’t breathing. She gasped and coughed aloud. “However. There is a violation here.”
“Of what do you speak, demon of the third circle?” it roared, “Tell me.”
“The freedom of will.” said Romney, and Victoria thought she saw him moving slightly in the whiteness to her side, blazing like a bonfire of outrage, and then he disappeared again. “The device installed this woman takes away her will and she has no power over that. The necessity of choice; whether to do evil or good has been removed. She chose to accept me as her blood bound, and that has been sullied by a defiling of the power of being able to choose. Even the most high lord Satan himself would not make that choice. The power of whether to choose good or to choose evil is irrelevant. What is important is that you have the power to choose. This action removes that choice.”
There was silence, and a breeze blew through the whiteness, and then a sigh that seemed to last forever.
“Very good, demon.” It said, “Very good indeed. You have the amulet?”
“I do.” said Romney and there was a pause as if it was being handed over but all Victoria could see was the whiteness.
“It is done.” said the voice, fading with a snarl as it did so. Victoria felt dizzy and staggered slightly as something was placed around her neck but she could not see herself or indeed anything and did not know what it was.
“Boss?” said Romney’s voice inside her head.
“Romney?” she said.
“Yeh. Come on. Jump to it. We have work to do.”
She laughed, and the white turned to black.
***
Victoria felt the necklace slip around her neck and memories flood into her mind that she had not seemed to have before.
“Have we just been to Hell?” she gasped.
“Sure have, boss.” said Romney in her mind. “Glad to be back. Now we have a puzzle to solve, and next to no time to solve it. Dawn is about an hour away.”
“What puzzle?” asked Victoria, pulling information from her computational engine. “The detonation zone is in fact forty-five minutes away.”
“No pressure then.” giggled Romney in her head. “The question is this: why did they go to all of the trouble of changing your blood group and destroying the necklace in the first place? The computational computer has embedded commands that could have made me invisible to you at a word.”
“But you would still be there.” she said, the ship's wheel in her hands. She still could not move.
“Correct. The commands would work on you, but not on me. A demon of even the third circle cannot be bound to a mechanical device no matter how complex it is without its permission.”
“As you are bound to my necklace.” said Victoria.
“That was a mutual choice.” said Romney, “And there’s no way I would agree to what they did to you. So why do it?”
“I don’t know.” said Victoria and she felt Romney searching through her mind, looking through the computational engine’s logs and then there was a slight click and she felt lighter somehow.
“release the wheel Victoria.” said Romney.
“I can’t.” she said.
“Just try it.”
Victoria stood back and pulled first one hand from the wheel and then the other. She stood looking at her hands for a second in surprise and then Romney chuckled in her head.
“They wanted to get rid of me because I can switch off the computational engine commands.” he said.
“Quickly.” she said, bracing herself against the wheel. “Eradicate all the hard coded commands.”
“Will do boss.” said Romney and Victoria sagged as her head seemed to explode and then slowly settle. She looked for the computational engine and found it easily. It was still running. She flexed her left hand and a knife blade shot from her knuckle and then withdrew.
“Try it.” she said.
“Sure.” said Romney, “COMMAND: Icarus.” Victoria did not move. The command had no power over her at all.
‘What command was that?” she asked, “I had not heard that one before.”
“Of course not.” said Romney, “It was a self-destruction command.”
“Ah.” said Victoria, “So you were quite confident that you had done the job properly.”
“Of course.” said Romney, and Victoria had a quick vision of Sebastian chuckling at her in her mind. “Ninety-nine percent sure, anyway. Now, turn the micron bomb circuits off.” he said and the zeppelin bucked a little and began to turn, the cabin swaying as it did so.
“Already done.” smiled Victoria. “Now this Zeppelin has an appointment with the depths of the English Channel that I am somewhat eager to keep.”
“Oh good idea.” said Romney, “Very good idea indeed.”
***
Prentice put down his newspaper and picked up his teacup, sighing deeply as he did so. Outside Big Ben chimed ten o’clock and the streets outside were dark and quiet, night having fallen quickly several hours before.
It had bee
n a busy day, and all of the days since the sudden disappearance of the Pegasus Zeppelin some seven days before had been busy. He was exhausted. First and foremost, he had to explain to the government that the masterstroke they were to employ against the Germanic states had faltered somewhat, and after that he had to explain also why over the course if a week several members of the scientific community who had been instrumental to the creation of the micronic bomb had suddenly disappeared into thin air, without a word of explanation to any of their fellow scientists or family.
It had slowly begun to dawn on him that the Micronic bomb project without the scientific brains behind it was dead in the water. He could reorganise, regroup of course, and he knew that he was just the man for such a job, but several committee members and higher ranking government members were at best sceptical that he was to be trusted, given that it had all fallen apart under his command last time.
Still. So far, so good. He still had a long way to go before a new bomb could be built but he knew it was possible and above all that he could do it. Yet he could not understand what had happened to the Pegasus in the first place. The logs that the scientists had been able to run before they began disappearing showed that the Zeppelin and therefore the Micronic bomb had been nearly at the detonation point when the system had completely shut down just before the ship swung around and headed back the way it had come. Fishermen in the channel had reported a massive zeppelin crashing into the sea and rapidly sinking, so its location was more or less known, even if it was lost to them for in that part of the channel salvage was all but impossible so deep were the waters and strong the currents.
He stood up from his desk and looked out over the Thames as it flowed past the houses of Parliament. The lights of London bridge were lit, the sky full of zeppelins moving to and fro, criss crossing the city. He stood there for a moment and there was a small buzzing sound from his desk. he did not turn immediately however, and when he did so he did so slowly.
“Hello Victoria.” he said, and very slowly slipped into the chair behind his desk. She was dressed in a tight synthetic suit, the ocular device on her right eye spinning and turning as she focused on him.
“How did you know I was here?” she smiled and he pointed at his desk.
“Small tracker device fitted to your computational engine.” he said. “Minimal use as its range is only twenty feet or so. Thought it might come in handy one day though.”
“I know.” she said, and there was a small pop and a puff of smoke wafted up from a draw in his desk.
“Oops.” she smiled. “I thought I would leave it on for a while. Sadly, it seems broken now.,”
“Well.” smiled Prentice, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk and clasping his hands together, staring at her as he did so. “It hardly matters now you have returned.” he said.
“Oh I won't be staying long.” she said, moving towards him slowly, “I have just come to kill you.”
‘Is that so? he smiled. “Tell me. How did you do it? I am rather curious.”
Victoria leaned forward and slowly from inside the blouse of her suit pulled out the necklace. The eye in it glowed red, as if glaring at him.
“You could say I dared hell and all.” she said as Prentice stood quickly.
“COMMAND: Icarus” he said and Victoria smiled, turning her head at an angle to look at him in the same way a cat does before it attacks its prey.
“Oh dear.” she said. “Your toy seems to be broken.”
“You don’t appear to be broken to me.” said Prentice.
“Not in the conventional sense no. Everything you gave me still works. It is quite useful too I must say. What does appear to be broken however seems to be that you have no control over me anymore.” Prentice stood by the window, his face red as he gulped down air, his hands clawing at his tie as if it was about to strangle him.
“Don’t kill me.” he pleaded, and looked as if he was about to throw himself at her feet, but Victoria sneered at him and he reconsidered moving towards her.
“Oh I could kill you in so many different ways. I have the pulse cannon in my hand, or the knife. In fact, I could keep it simple. You have made me so strong I could snap your spine easily.” She smiled widely and took a step forward. Prentice shrieked and moved backwards.
“But I am not going to do any of that in fact.” she smiled, and moving past him she took hold of the small leaded glass window and tore the whole frame out of the wall, throwing it across the office where it landed against the door, crashing loudly as it did so. “In truth I feel I have deserved a year off. The remuneration my computational engine has ...shall we say… secured from your office’s coffers is really quite embarrassingly high. Enough to drive you over the edge if it was ever found to be missing I would say, and missing it most definitely is. Well to you, anyway. Not to me however.”
“Out of the window.” she said, and Prentice crawled backwards to the window, squealing as he did so.
“No.”
“Out of the window.” she said and she lifted him up, but only enough so that he was standing upright. Once happy that he was standing on his own two feet she backed away from him a little way.
“We are ninety feet from the ground.” he gasped.
“Precisely.” she said. “Jump.”
Prentice looked at her and then leaning forwards spat in her face. Victoria smiled but said nothing as the civil servant turned away and with a scream leapt out of the window.
“for you…”
Prentice felt the air on his skin, and spinning saw the ground hurling towards him and then everything went white, and he was aware of something watching from the brilliant whiteness, waiting for him.
“Ah. Prentice.” came a voice that seemed to shake the very ground itself. “We have been waiting for you…”
The Strange Case of the
Denwick Beauchamp Fairies
Victoria Neaves sat in her somewhat spacious lounge looking through the leaded glass window and across the front lawns down her drive almost like a cat awaiting the arrival of a somewhat plump mouse. Beyond the high privet hedges she knew lay the village of Little Cookham, where no doubt the locals were currently in a state of great agitation at her recent arrival in their midst.
That she came from no particular well to do family (that they were aware of) and that her furniture upon arrival had all seemed to have been of the highest quality (apparently) and was delivered by almost a fleet of Automata from one of the finest removals firms from the city (allegedly) would, she knew, only drive the locals’ curiosity into an even higher level of excitement.
She focused her left eye on the path, scanning the hedges with a high infrared frequency, looking for any telltale heat signatures of approaching habitants bearing a cake or tea or the like, but found nothing. To the casual observer, Victoria looked as if she was merely squinting, but six months ago her rather unique talents had been called up to work for the government, and after that things had never been the same again.
Her body was augmented in numerous ways, her frame strengthened and honed to perfect condition. Her hearing was remarkable, her eyesight equally so, and she had a Babbage computational device embedded in her skeletal frame that was so advanced that the British Government if pressed would refuse to admit that it existed at all.
So she had been press ganged into service, but it was not a harmonious arrangement and now she was a free agent. Her previous rooms were too cramped she had thought, and her severance from government circles having remarkably coincided with a rather large transferal of money into her private reserves, she decided to leave the city behind her and re-establish herself in a more rural setting, but still remaining within a short airship journey of the big smoke itself.
“Give it an hour.” Said Romney, her level three demon that was blood bound to the orange eyed opal necklace she currently wore about her neck. The voice was in her head of course - only she could hear it. Nevertheless, she chuckled quietly to herself.
“At best.” She said, “An hour at the very best.”
The evening before his right reverend Charles Withers had arrived to welcome her to Little Cookham, the village in Berkshire where she now resided, having moved in but two days before. He had been polite but not overtly obtrusive, yet at the same time he had obviously been pumping Victoria for information as he went along. Information that was now without a doubt common knowledge amongst the occupants of Little Cookham.
“Civil service you say?” The vicar had asked, tucking his long flopped forward fringe to the top of his head and smiling brightly.
“Retired.” Said Victoria, “I thought it time I renewed my association with green fields and fresh air so to speak.” She said brightly and the reverend had nodded enthusiastically.
“Yet so young.” He had said, obviously attempting to lead her on into disclosing more, but to no avail.
“Indeed.” Victoria had said and that was that.
“Will we be seeing you at church miss….?” He began and Victoria smiled again. Already she felt as if her face was beginning to ache.
“Neaves.” She said, “Victoria Neaves, and I am not really a very regular church-goer I am afraid, reverend. Too much time in the civil service tends to make you shall we say recalcitrant in ecclesiastical matters I fear.” She laughed politely, and the reverend responded likewise, though the vaguely confused look on his face seemed to indicate that he was not quite sure why he was responding in such a manner.
“Well you are always welcome if you change your mind.” He said, smiling, “Unlike like some areas of the country we are not going to insist. If you want to visit pray do so.” He looked vaguely into the distance and then chuckled quietly. “Oh I say.” He said, leaning in closer to Victoria as if imparting some great secret, “I seem to have accidentally made a pun.”
“Quite.” Said Victoria, escorting the reverend towards the front door and quietly wondering whether she would engage staff or not, “Well thank you for calling.”
“You are very welcome Miss Neaves.” He said, and off he had gone down the long path and off into the village, no doubt already searching for someone anyone in fact, to share his new found information with.
The Complete Adventures of Victoria Neaves & Romney Page 6
