And she opened up.
“And for Maya!”
She kept the trigger squeezed for longer than was really necessary, until the four soldiers were reduced to shattered bone and meat scrags, and only then did she cease firing.
Blessed silence rang in her ears.
She was stepping around the bloody remains, and moving from the clearing, when something glinting silver in the grass caught her eye.
She knelt and picked up something on a fine silver chain.
Elvira’s lucky charm.
Weeping, she slipped it into her pocket, next to her bloody knife, and ran from the clearing.
As she approached the Humvee stationed on the lane leading to the woods, she unslung the machine gun and readied herself behind a tree.
The last remaining Paladin had left the safety of the vehicle and was moving cautiously along the track, speaking into a lapel mic. She heard his frantic, “Sergeant Bryce, come in, come in…”
She smiled to herself.
Sergeant Bryce would never again come in.
The track passed within two yards of where she stood in the cover of the trees, and it would have been simplicity itself to kill the Paladin.
But something stayed her hand.
She would gain no satisfaction in killing just another mindless thug––but how wonderful it was to anticipate the man’s fear, his terror, when he entered the woods and discovered the fate of his colleagues. He would creep back to the safety of the Humvee, in mortal dread that whatever occult force had accounted for the others would bloodily end his own life.
She allowed the Paladin to pass unharmed and, when he was well out of earshot, she took off.
She entered the woodland on the hilltop a minute later, and was aware of many sets of eyes on her as she approached the little group.
Daisy said, “Elvira?”
She handed Bogdan the machine gun, and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.
She pulled the elf’s good luck charm from her pocket, wiped it on her shirt, and passed it silently to Ariel.
“We need to be moving,” she told Mr LeRoy.
“We’ve been discussing that need in your absence, Ajia, but without––”
She interrupted, recalling the white van the Bradfordian had offered to sell them earlier that evening. “I have an idea,” she said, “if Paul is willing to cough up a hundred quid.”
Chapter 27
THEY HAD MOTORED through the night, heading north-west towards the Lake District.
Shortly after leaving Bradford, Smith had suggested they ditch the van and buy another vehicle. He reasoned that the Paladins, on the warpath after suffering their second drubbing that week, would have investigators in the area who would soon learn about the suspicious trio––one of them brown-skinned––that had bought the van for cash with no questions asked.
At nine that morning, Smith and Fletcher had walked into the market town of Gargrave and bought what turned out to be a clapped-out, ex-council delivery van from a dubious second-hand dealership.
It was a tight squeeze, but Daisy had had the bright idea of making the ride more comfortable by coaxing a strand of Virginia creeper into the rear of the vehicle and, with her magic touch, having it proliferate lushly before cutting off the main trunk and standing back. “Hey presto!”
It wasn’t exactly a luxury mattress, Ajia thought, but it beat the van’s original oil-stained hardboard flooring.
Now they were parked up at the side of a muddy farm track, resting for the rest of the day until they recommenced the journey at sunset. Ajia lay between a silent Ariel and a snoring Bogdan.
Wee Paul had proved himself a hit with the three remaining brownie girls. To aid the congestion in the back of the van, Paul had offered to shrink himself––though Ajia was pretty sure he had ulterior motives.
Now he lay on his back, hammocked in Persephone’s crotch, with his hands laced nonchalantly behind his head and his tiny legs crossed at the ankles as he regaled the entranced brownies and elves with tales of his troubled life.
“That’s the trouble with being different,” he said, his piping tones reaching Ajia as she snuggled deeper into the ivy, “you find yourself being the butt of the frustration and anger of cowards and tossers with inferiority complexes.”
“That’s right,” a brownie murmured, and a boggart grunted his assent.
“I played all the clubs in the north, and some of the bigger ones down south, but the pubs and clubs around Yorkshire and Lancashire were my bread and butter. But at every other gig some drunken lout, egged on by his mates, would have it in for me.”
“It must have been terribly frustrating,” an elf said with quaint understatement.
“Well, it was before I died and was reborn,” Paul laughed. “I mean, think about it, there I was, three foot five and not exactly endowed with muscle. What could I do when a group of piss-heads decided to have some fun?”
“What did you do?” a boggart asked.
“What else? What I’m good at. The gift of the gab. I talked my way out of trouble. Joked and took the piss––often at my own expense. And it did nothing for my self-esteem, I’ll tell you that for nowt. But it didn’t always work. Some louts just wouldn’t be pacified, and the number of times I was tripped up, grabbed and flung into the air…”
He fell silent. Ajia opened her eyes. His face was too tiny to make out clearly, but she saw him quickly rub tiny fists into his eyes.
Persephone asked, “What happened?”
“I was in Morley. Just finished a gig at the Con Club and was crossing the car park when this big ginger lout, backed up by his rat-arsed mates, decided to have a bit of fun. I’d seen him inside––couldn’t miss him. He’d been heckling me all night, and I’d put him down a few times to the amusement of his mates. Now he wanted to get even.”
The two brownies on either side of Persephone covered their faces with their tiny hands. “Oh, no!”
“So the ginger-nut yells that he wants my autograph. I was in two minds, make a dash for my car, or play along with the thug. I sensed things could turn nasty. But my car was on the far side of the lot, so I decided to face the music.”
Wee Paul climbed to his feet, stretched, and walked up the incline of Persephone’s thigh. On the summit of her knee, he sat cross-legged and resumed his story, looking around at his rapt audience.
“I was reaching into my jacket for the signed photos I always carried, when ginger-nut grabs me by the throat and throws me onto the roof of the nearest car. His mates surrounded the car and every time I tried to get down, slide over the bonnet or the boot, they’d punch me. After about ten minutes of this, they got a bit stalled. Then one of them had another bright idea and put it to ginger-nut, who liked it.”
“What?” a brownie shrieked.
“A couple of them grabbed me and carried me over to an old banger belonging to one of the bastards, put me on the roof and told me not to move. Then ginger-nut climbed into the car, started the engine and drove off.”
“But what did you do?” Persephone asked.
“What? After pissing me’sen?” Wee Paul laughed, self-deprecating. “Well, I did my best not to fall off––but try doing that on the curved roof of a car! And when ginger-nut, with his whooping mates following us around the car-park, decided to speed up… Well, I fell off and went arse over tit.”
“Were you badly…?” an elf began in a whisper.
“Badly injured? You could say that. I hit my head on the tarmac and died.”
A stunned silence filled the van.
Wee Paul went on, “To cut a long story short, the manager of the club had seen what’d happened and called the police and an ambulance. I was rushed to hospital and miraculously––according to the paramedics who attended to me in the car park––came back to life. Ginger-nut and his mates were arrested and charged with aggravated GBH. Ginger-nut got sent down for a year, his mates let off with fines. A year! I was angry, I can tell you.”
<
br /> Paul piped a laugh. “But then a strange thing happened.” He looked around at his audience. “I started having dreams. I was the size of a mouse, being chased through a forest by ogres. I put it down to trauma from the attack, but the dreams persisted, and this is the funny thing. In them, I found I could control my size by simply snapping my fingers. And then one night, when I woke up from one of these dreams, I tried it. Snapped my fingers… and shrank. Like bloody magic, I shrank! After the shock, I found I could control how small I shrank to––though more’s the pity, I couldn’t make me’sen grow any taller than my original three foot five! Anyroad, I had an idea. Ginger-nut was out on bail, and I decided to have some fun. I knew his address from attending the court proceedings, and one night I followed him and his girlfriend home, shrunk me’sen and snook in before they closed the door. When they were in the bedroom having a bit of hanky-panky, I assumed my normal height and made a nuisance of me’sen––crashing about the bathroom, spilling things, then moving to the kitchen and doing the same there. When I heard him swearing upstairs, I made me’sen titchy again and watched ginger-nut’s bewilderment and growing alarm. I kept this up for a week, and by the end he was begging the authorities to bang him up, I can tell you!”
Persephone clapped and laughed prettily.
“And then, when he did get sent down, I got to know his girlfriend––nice woman, too good for a thug like ginger-nut––and we had a bit of a fling, like. And I heard on the grapevine that ginger-nut went berserk when he found out I was knobbing his bird. Pardon my French.
“And then the dreams got worse––that old ogre was catching me every night. And just when I was thinking of topping me’sen, who should roll into town with his travelling circus but Mr LeRoy. He took me under his wing, told me all about Tom Thumb and eidolons and whatnot, gave me a job and introduced me to the wonderful Maya.” He fell silent, then murmured, “And we all know how that ended, don’t we? Poor Maya.”
THEY HAD TRAVELLED throughout the night and were now in southern Cumbria.
Ajia finished chewing on an egg and cress sandwich and wandered over to where Wayland Smith was sitting at a picnic table. She sat beside him and admired the view. To the north, the rearing hills of the Lake District rose ever higher and ever hazier beyond each other until disappearing into the misty distance.
Daisy Hawthorn locked the van and she and Mr LeRoy led their troupe from the lay-by into a nearby spinney to lie low until sunset.
“We should join them,”Ajia said.
Without replying, Smith leaned forward and, with his hammer, touched a piece of glass between his feet––one of a thousand green shards from a beer bottle. It reassembled itself before her eyes. Smith picked it up and placed it on the table. He did the same with another, this time a pop bottle, and set it on the table beside the first.
“It’s very hard to explain,” he said at last, “but the sense of satisfaction I get from repairing, recreating… It’s responding to something fundamental deep within me. It’s almost as if the need to create, to fix things, is encoded deep within my eidolon like DNA, and deep within me, too.”
“I wonder if that’s why you find it so hard to destroy? You’re a creator, Smith, and always have been, and the opposite of that is against your nature.”
They let the silence stretch. Smith said, “Do you fear what lies ahead?”
She thought about it. “I fear failing,” she said. “I fear what will happen if Drake wins, if people like his Paladins are allowed to go unchecked. Yes, I fear that.”
“But what about the confrontation ahead? Do you fear for yourself?”
She shook her head. “I was arrested by two coppers in London, and beaten up, and tortured––so bad that the bastards killed me. Then as if by a miracle I was given a second chance. No, I don’t fear death any more.” She glanced at him. “You?”
He pulled his handsome, brown face into a frown. “It’s not so much death I fear, but finding myself, again, in a position where through necessity, I face the dilemma of having to cause it.”
She watched him as he worked his magic on another broken bottle. “I think Mr LeRoy will have you use your ability to defend us, Smith. He wouldn’t call on you to kill, and nor would I.”
Smith sighed. “Perhaps the eidolon chose me because, at heart, it saw me for a coward.”
“No you’re not.”
Ajia looked up.
It was Reed Fletcher. He stood beside the table, and she wondered how much he had overheard. Fletcher sat down across from them and shook his head. His bright green eyes looked from her to Smith.
“You’re not a coward, Smith, because your actions are driven by principles. By fundamental beliefs. Not by fear of any harm you might come to. That’s the difference.”
Smith look up at Fletcher. “Just after what happened at the warehouse, after I ran. You called me a coward then, Reed.”
Fletcher shrugged. “In the heat of the moment, and in the months following, that’s what I might have thought. But I was wrong. I’ve had time to think about it, and perhaps I overreacted to what you did back then. I think I saw in what you did… something I didn’t like in myself.”
Smith looked at him. “Your insularity, the way you hid yourself away from the world in your little Sherwood Forest hobbit-house?”
Fletcher smiled, Ajia saw, and shook his head.
Smith tucked his hammer into his belt, stood up and nodded towards the spinney. “I think I’ll join the others.”
Ajia watched him as he left the table and wandered down the narrow track, soon lost amidst the trees.
She turned to Fletcher. “What did you mean, ‘something I didn’t like in myself’?”
So Reed Fletcher told her what had happened in Helmand Province more than ten years ago. How a routine patrol had turned into a nightmare when a landmine destroyed two Humvees in their convoy and they’d come under sustained fire from the Taliban.
“My best mate, a lad from these parts as it happened… He’d been blown from our armoured car and lay on the far side of the road, perhaps ten yards away. There were plenty of lulls in the fire. I could have sprinted across and helped him, done whatever I could to stop his bleeding.”
“But you didn’t?”
“I was petrified. Frozen with fear. It was all I could do to shoot back at the fundies, but it didn’t help that I couldn’t see where the enemy was. It was hell. But I know I should have acted, instead of sitting tight and waiting for backup.”
“What happened to…?”
“He died before backup arrived, Ajia.”
Fletcher told her how he had been discharged with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and had tried to adapt himself to civilian life, burdened with guilt and shame he’d kept secret until now.
“But you lived with it,” she said.
He laughed. “I didn’t! That’s just it. I even failed to live with it––because I killed myself.”
She recalled that time a week ago when he had told her that she should never, ever, talk about taking her own life.
“One day the guilt became too much. I’d been stockpiling sleeping tablets and paracetamol, and one night I bought a bottle of whisky and necked the lot, the Scotch, the pills… And I died and came back to life in hospital, the medics calling it a ruddy miracle. Then the dreams began. Dreams of the greenwood. And something drove me to take up archery which gave my life some purpose, and I developed an affinity with the world. I mean the real world, the natural world. And then the dreams turned to nightmares. I was lost in a wildwood that was hostile to me, not the woods I knew and loved. I started drinking. Drinking heavily. Drinking so that I couldn’t think. Wouldn’t have to think. Until Mr LeRoy found me.”
Ajia said, “He’s the person we all have in common, Reed. Mr LeRoy. Our saviour. Our…” She smiled to herself. She had been about to say, Our father.
She said, “Have you told Smith about your time in Afghanistan, about what happened?”
He shook his h
ead. “No.”
“I dunno, but perhaps you should. It might help him a bit, don’t you think?”
He nodded, staring into the spinney. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps it might.”
Chapter 28
WYNNE SAT BESIDE Lieutenant Noble and the pilot as the chopper headed north through the grey dawn light.
He had planned to be on hand last night to watch the slaughter in the woodland outside Bradford. In the event, the commander on the ground had deemed that an imminent attack on the bus and its passengers would achieve maximum effect. At eight yesterday evening, he had reported that the mission had been one hundred per cent successful: the bus was destroyed and every one of its passengers killed.
Wynne’s triumph was tinged with only slight regret. He had really wanted Ajia Snell arrested. He had fantasised, for the past day, about just what he would do to the girl when he had her in his custody.
He stared down at the awakening countryside far below.
He had considered notifying Drake of his success immediately, but no doubt his boss would be busy shagging Harriet as if there were no tomorrow. What had suddenly got into the pair, he wondered. Harriet was no longer answering his calls or texts, and on the few occasions they had briefly met face to face, the bloody woman had cut him dead.
“ETA, Lieutenant?” he asked.
Noble conferred with the pilot. “Bang on six, sir. Ten minutes.”
“Very good.”
He sat back, enjoying the ride. He would enjoy, too, surveying the battleground. He would never forget the scene of carnage that had greeted him at the nursery in Derbyshire, the massacre perpetrated by Snell and her murderous terrorists. This was delicious payback.
And he would be once more in Derek Drake’s good books.
Minutes later Noble pointed at a patch of woodland down below to their left. Wynne made out a drift of smoke rising from the centre of the woods and a Paladin Humvee stationed on an approach track.
They came down on a patch of level moorland a hundred yards from the vehicle. A dozen Paladins emerged from the back of the chopper, formed into two groups of six fore and aft of Wynne and Noble, and led the way across to the Humvee.
Age of Legends Page 32
