Once he was satisfied that there were no gaps, the magus filled the basin with a poisonous black brine. He drove rivers outwards from it and joined them to the rivers that ran through the true Realms of the Land.
The magus paused for a beer and a cigarette. He stood upon the razored cliffs and looked down about his filthy new sea. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck you all.”
The Poison Sea did not respond. It lay quiescent and flat in its bed, reflecting nothing up to the bruised and bloodied sky that the magus had cruelly stretched over it.
The magus flicked away the cigarette butt and bent to draw some runes upon the surface of the water.
The brine rippled and frothed as the magus taught it to ebb and flow. It was not an easy lesson to teach, for the water had to make its own tides in the absence of a proper moon. Still, the magus was adamant, and eventually the Poison Sea learned to do as he bade.
The magus cultivated blind and ravenous things to live beneath those uncertain waves. Hideous fish creatures, all jaws and spines and tendrils, abhorred of light and land and air. In the poisoned depths they thrived; preying upon each other; breeding greater horrors yet.
The magus felt something alien, then. Something that was not like hate or loathing or jealousy. Something greater than satisfaction, but less than joy. Pride, he supposed. He swore and spat and retired to his tent to finish the six-pack he had started at breakfast.
When he awoke, the magus found that his mind was racing with designs for merfolk and sea goblins, corals and ships and submarine cities. Even through the hangover he could barely contain his excitement. He stumbled back out to the edge of the cliffs to gaze once more upon the thing that he had made.
But the sea was gone.
While the magus had rested, the rivers had turned away from his island of water, and the Land choked down its poisoned contents. The sky had split and parted and the suns and stars of the true Realms had claimed the remaining night. Nothing remained of the magus’ work but salt-cracked wastes and crumbling bones.
The magus surveyed the ruins of his work in silence. He had nothing left to say.
On the cliffs above that dried-out seabed, the magus raised a tower. He did not build it from stone and wood and mortar, but cast it whole from rune and ritual and will. And the tower rose up; dark and jagged; so slimed with evil that it stained the very skies it broached.
The magus sealed himself inside the tower and there he remained, with only his hatred of all things to sustain him. And though he did not age another day in all the countless years that remained of his life, the magus remained mortal forever.
Book 3
Kith and Kin
1. Legacy
The mortal thought that she was the last of the line, until she heard him mentioned in her father’s will. She had an uncle, and he was still alive.
She had inherited everything, with only one proviso: the estate would continue to pay a monthly stipend for the treatment of this mysterious relative. Bank records showed that her father had paid the fee every month for twenty years, and that he had taken on that responsibility once his own father had died.
She spent the rest of the week in her father’s old Grimsby flat, sifting through piles of ancient paper documents. Her search yielded but a single piece of evidence that this uncle did, in fact exist: an old colour photograph showing her father’s extended family standing in front of the Tower of London. The family smiled stiffly, squinting into the sun, the Traitor’s Gate standing in its arch behind them.
Her father knelt in the front of the photograph with the other children. He was wearing a school uniform: short pants, knee socks, and a collared shirt. His tie was askew. On the back of the photograph, which was dated 1994, someone had written the names of everyone in the shot. All of them were now dead; and their children, and their grandchildren. All of them, except for this uncle of hers.
He stood in the back row and to the left of the others, slightly detached from the group. He looked to be in his late twenties, although he might have been eighteen and he might have been thirty-eight. Average height and build. Clean-shaven and handsome, though he owed his looks more to a lack of blemishes than to pleasingly formed features. He seemed pale, though he was no fairer than the others; shadowed, though the sun shone as directly upon him.
There was nothing else.
The mortal made a call to the hospice and asked to speak with her uncle, who she identified with his patient number. She could not bring herself to speak his name aloud.
The receptionist also referred to him by his number when she replied that he was not available. She asked that he return her call when he became so. The receptionist informed her it might be a while—he had been in a coma for almost three decades and showed no sign of rousing. She had to ask twice before the receptionist would admit that her uncle was permitted visitors.
The mortal took the tube to Victoria Station, and then a train out to Bournemouth. She hired a flyer from an agent near the pier and took it up. It was a cheap, new model Suzuki: zippy and economical and a little rough on the stick. She swung east, buzzing over the Old Harry Rocks and then dropping into the steady stream of traffic heading north. Salisbury and Stonehenge were up that way. Her destination lay somewhere beyond them.
The hospice had originally been housed in a big-windowed and be-chimneyed Victorian mansion. The old building itself was now used exclusively by the administration, while the medical facilities and housing had been moved into the newer structures that had bloomed up around it like fat concrete toadstools.
The mortal introduced herself at the front desk. After about forty-five minutes, an orderly in a white uniform came to escort her to a toadstool at the far north-western corner of the complex. The air outside smelled of ozone and clipped grass. She saw nobody coming or going from any of the buildings.
The orderly opened the airlock-style entryway to her uncle’s ward and led her inside. Handrails embedded with fluorescent strips ran along each wall. Lines on the floor marked out routes to the rec room, the dining hall, the therapy suites, and the showers. There were no signs indicating the way out.
The orderly located the correct dormitory and they moved down amongst the rows of skeletal steel beds, until they came to her uncle. The orderly said: “I hope you brought something to read. I’ll be back for you in half an hour.”
Her uncle lay on his back. The blankets had been pulled up to his armpits and his arms lay exposed. Tubes were needled into his veins. Monitors showed his vital signs to be measured and steady. The bedclothes were neat and unrumpled; the bed had been made over him and he had not moved since.
He had not aged visibly since the photograph had been taken, nearly thirty years earlier. He looked well, for a man who had been in a coma for most of that time. Thin, but not emaciated. He looked rested.
“Hi,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “I’m your niece.”
She was not surprised when he opened his eyes. He sat up and turned his head towards her smoothly. “Hello,” he said, with not even a hint of sleep congestion in his voice. “I’m your uncle.”
“Your brother’s dead,” she said.
“I expect so,” he replied. “He must have been quite old.”
She stared at him. “I didn’t know you even existed.”
“I barely did.”
“You haven’t aged at all.”
“I can explain that,” he said. “If you’re truly interested.”
“I am.”
Her uncle plucked the catheters from his arm and freed himself of the life support machinery, which immediately began to bleep with alarm. He drew back the blanket, swung his feet off the bed, and stood up. He did not stretch.
He looked around the room at the beds, the machinery, the other patients. When his eyes fell on the cabinet beside his bed, he bent and opened it. Inside was a set of pressed but m
usty clothes, a pair of scuffed old army boots, and a small canvas rucksack. He looked inside the bag and smiled.
The orderly came sprinting back into the room. Her uncle looked up at him and smiled. “Hello.”
The orderly skidded to a stop. “Did you…were you…weren’t you just—”
“I have risen.”
“But…you were…”
“My great niece and I require a place in which to discuss some family matters. Would you be so kind as to find us an empty room?”
“I, uh, yes…” said the orderly. “I should call a doctor.”
Her uncle reached out and shut off the bleating life support machinery.
“You should find us a quiet room,” he said.
The orderly took them to an unused examination room. It was furnished with two chairs, a desk, and a high bed. A bench with a sink lay against one wall. Her uncle sat on the chair beside the desk; she sat on the bed.
She had a lot to ask him. She wanted to know about her family and her father. She wanted to know why she had never heard his name before. But the question she asked was: “Tell me your story.”
“It’ll take some time.”
“If I’m bored I’ll stop you.”
“No,” he said. “Once I have begun you will not interrupt me. Afterwards, I will permit you no questions.”
“Fine,” she said. “Whatever.”
And so the mortal told his mortal niece how he had sought the most beautiful thing in all the worlds. He explained his sojourn in the forest and his transition into the Land of the Faerie. He spoke of the beasts and beings he had met; of the wonders and horrors that he had witnessed. He told her of the magus, and the dog-man. He told her how he had come to find that Zelioliah, the Queen of the Warriors, was the most beautiful thing in all of the worlds. His voice remained low and calm and without emotion, though his eyes shone with pride when he told his niece how he had made the Queen his own.
As he spoke, the mortal showed her the souvenirs he had kept, which he had carelessly tipped out of the rucksack and onto the bed: the skull of a badger-like animal; a small silver lighter; an artificial hand made of glass and sprung steel; a ring of purple metal; an obsidian mask; an emerald embedded in a sliver of impossibly soft leather; a straight razor.
“What’ll you do now?” she asked him.
“I will remain here,” he said, carefully packing his trophies back into the rucksack. “It’s your turn to quest.”
“What am I supposed to quest for?”
“I can’t determine that for you.”
“Well, I can’t think of anything.”
“Surely there is something you desire,” he replied. “A truth, a vision, a weapon. A queendom. A cause. Wealth. Power. Love. Justice. Vengeance.”
“There’s nothing I want that I won’t get eventually,” she replied. “If I work hard. If I meet my obligations.”
“Some would envy you your life,” he said.
“And you?”
“I do not stand in judgment.”
“But you think I need to go on a quest.”
“Even if you don’t know what you are seeking, if you do not seek it you may as well lie cold upon a slab.” He looked at the door, in the direction of the bed he had occupied for so many comatose years.
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” she said. “What exactly drove you to run off to Never-Never Land intent on killing the prettiest fairy queen you could find?”
“I told you I would answer no questions,” he said. “You must find your own answers. You must take your own quest.”
“Are you actually listening to what you’re saying?”
“Certainly. Are you?”
She made a noise in her throat. “I’ll…I’ll think about it.”
“You will indeed.”
“What about you? Are you going to go back into…into the world? This world, I mean. Or…the other?”
“There are many other worlds,” he said. “Although the Faerie Land is, perhaps, the most popular.”
“You know what I meant.”
“My quest is over,” he said. “Return to me when your quest is done…if ever you complete it. I would like to hear of it. In the meantime, I think I will sleep again.”
“Pleasant dreams,” she said. She wished him anything but.
2. Raising the Tree
The mortal returned to her quarters in the East End and retired to her sleeping web without taking a meal. The alarm woke her at 0600, cleaned, clothed, and rested. She left the house without breaking her fast and rode the tube to the office.
The inertia compensators on the lifts were still broken—or they had fallen into disrepair again while she had been away—so she took the stairs up to her floor. She did not trust the old-fashioned cable elevators.
At 0823 the mortal emerged from the dank stairwell into the artificial brilliance of the cube farm. She was early; her workmates would not arrive until 0900. Blinking, she went directly to her workspace. She sat down at her node, spread her hands on the interface plates, and got to work.
First, she raised a forest; allowing the system to populate it with random species of trees, spaced at a medium density. Then she swept an empty blue sky above it. She set the climate to British-Standard, and all other parameters to Earth-Normal. She filled the forest with British-Native fauna, and she cleared a narrow path through the trees. At the end of the path, in the middle of the forest, she drew up the bedrock and cut the vegetation and topsoil away from it.
The software she was using did not have sufficient intelligence to model for her a tree of indeterminate species. Reckoning that her deficit of botanical knowledge was all she needed, she set about manufacturing one from scratch.
She began with an upright cylinder, from which she extended limbs using a fractal branching algorithm. She truncated the structure when she judged that the out-growing bulb was of sufficient size, and applied a variety of transforms and filters to warp the hard-edged shape into a more natural one. She coloured it brown, mapped the first tree-bark texture in the library, and finished by scattering tiny green diamond shapes upon it to give the semblance of foliage.
It was 0833. Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since she’d left for the hospice on the previous day.
She pressed down hard onto the interface plates and they yielded beneath her fingers. Machinery gently enveloped her hands; sensor coils crept up her arms and over her shoulders. Spider-tendrils settled in place over her spinal column, her cranium. The tendrils of the virtual immersion apparatus had been warmed to body temperature, but she nonetheless shivered as she closed her eyes…
…and found herself high in the foliage of a virtual forest, looking down upon the crude shape of her avatar. Virtual birds sung to her in surround-sound. When she moved her avatar, virtual critters fled before its virtual footsteps. Maintaining a third person viewpoint, she located the pathway quickly and sent her avatar jogging along it. It did not take long to reach the fractal tree.
The tree looked odd and unnatural, even amongst the virtual trees in the virtual world. She had built it from imagination, not from observation, and she had been clumsy with the tools she had used: she was a programmer, not an artist.
The mortal descended into first person and walked her avatar around the tree three times. On completion of the third circuit she found that a small aperture had opened at the base of it, where two roots had split the trunk around a spur of rock.
She opened her eyes and withdrew from the virtual world, choking on the recycled office air. The apparatus whipped free as she tore her hands out of the interface.
0834. She looked up. The maze of bench-tops and cubicles extended away in all directions, sectioned up with low, blue-carpeted partitions. There was nobody else in the room.
She set her jaw, closed her eye
s, and let her hands fall back into the interface. Once more the virtuality enveloped her, and she stood before the distorted and unfinished tree. Its surface was tattooed to look like rough bark, though it was smooth to the touch. Limbs branched from their parents like crystals from a block of salt. The leaves were perfect, two-dimensional green diamonds. They did not grow from twigs, but were embedded in the branches like shrapnel from exploded munitions.
The aperture at the base of the tree was still there.
There were a number of ways in which she could proceed. Like her uncle, she could climb the tree and hope that another opening would appear for her there: a spiralling silver chute that would bear her down into Faerie Land like a slide at a waterpark. But that seemed undignified. She did not fancy the notion of sliding down into another world on her arse.
Of course, if dignity was her greatest worry she could unplug herself, de-allocate the nonsense forest, and get started on the backlog of email that had accumulated while she had been out of the office. After breakfast and half a dozen coffees.
She decided to scale-down her avatar and simply walk through the aperture.
3. The Star Below
The inside of the tree was black. She had not specified any features or sources of illumination inside its trunk, but there should still have been light shining in from behind her. When she turned around, she found that the aperture was gone.
She grunted and added a small, asterisk-shaped beacon to her avatar. It hovered a foot above her virtual head, casting a blue-white light about her in all directions. The ground beneath her was flat, hard stone. No ceiling or walls were visible.
She started walking. Her virtual feet were soundless on the virtual stone floor. Presently she saw a small light in the distance. A tiny flame, such as a candle or a match might give off. Or a small, silver lighter.
She went towards the flame. “Hello, Uncle,” she called. “It’s me.”
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