The Black Rose

by James Bartholomeusz

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said as he prepared to hoist himself up. She smiled and stroked his hair lightly.

  Despite the situation, he was struck again by how beautiful she was: her skin the tone and texture of warm chocolate, her eyes like large onyx jewels set in milky oases. The pain seemed to have made everything a little more poetic. He felt the almost euphoric urge to slide his fingers around the base of her neck and press his lips to hers.

  The face of an irate dwarf plugged the empty space in Jack’s vision, somewhat ruining the moment. “Have you learnt any healing alchemy yet?” Bál said.

  “No,” Jack replied, trying to restrain his annoyance, “but I guess I can give it a go.” Trying to stave off the pain a little longer, he placed his right hand on the dwarf’s shoulder and closed his eyes. He knew healing alchemy was tied to Light, and so he focused on accumulating the powers of the different elements around him: the street lamps for fire, the dampness for water and air, the stone benches for earth. He channeled all of this into the Seventh Shard. Seeing it shining even through his eyelids, he allowed it to flow down his right arm into the dwarf.

  He opened his eyes.

  Bál felt his bruises again. They seemed to have faded considerably.

  “Great, now try you,” Ruth said.

  Jack looked down at his limp left arm. He thought he’d probably pass out again if he tried to move it. It looked broken in two places, judging by the way he seemed to have mutated additional joints on the bicep and below the wrist. A month ago, he reflected, this would have been monumental. Now, though, it seemed an expectable part of the whole sorcerer-fighting experience.

  He placed his good hand on the bad arm and closed his eyes again, summoning the same elements as before and channeling them through the Shard. It was much harder this time, not only because his energy was diminished but also because broken bones were a much bigger deal than bruising.

  He opened his eyes. The breaks seemed to be gone—his left arm was smooth—but something was wrong. He swung his legs down from the bench to sit up straight. There was only a slight twinge of pain, but he could feel the healed arm was now several inches shorter than the other one.

  “How does it feel?” Ruth asked sympathetically, clearly having noticed the difference.

  “It’s okay. It’ll have to do until Sardâr can take a proper look at it. Is he okay?”

  “I hope so. He’s breathing, but that dark fire stuff can’t have done any good.”

  Jack got up and checked the elf’s breathing. His face was pale and plastered with sweat, and he winced even in sleep.

  “So this is prison, then? How long have we been here?”

  “I don’t think this is actual prison. I think it’s just a jail cell. And I’m not sure how long we’ve been here. A few hours, maybe?” Ruth, sitting with her knees to her chest, looked anxious. Jack remembered she’d been imprisoned in Nexus: their current predicament couldn’t be doing much to assuage her panic.

  “So how do we get out, then?” Bál demanded.

  Jack had to suppress another flare of annoyance. They were all in this cell. Just because Bál, a member of a royal family, had enjoyed free rein all his life didn’t make this experience any worse for him than for anyone else.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “We can’t do much until Sardâr wakes up. I don’t really want to try any alchemy on him. I’m not sure exactly what’s wrong with him. Ruth, don’t you have that egg for The Golden Turtle? Can’t you call up the crew?”

  Ruth shook her head sadly and produced a mangled mechanism from her pocket. “It shattered in the fall. Ishmael gave that to me too.”

  They passed the next few hours in uneasy silence. Jack put an arm around Ruth, and she rested her head on his lap. The cell stank—an unpleasant combination of urine and stale food that, contrary to expectations, seemed to become more noticeable the longer they stayed. Sardâr didn’t move at all. Though very uncomfortable against the stone, Jack eventually followed the other two into sleep.

  After some imperceptible amount of time, Ruth shook him awake. She was sitting bolt upright, pointing at the barred window.

  Blinking to adjust to the darkness of the cell, he tried to see what she was gesturing at. Something obscured the streetlight: a crouching figure, rattling the bars.

  Bál awoke with a start and, as if by instinct, reached for his axe.

  Jack stood and, motioning the others to stay back, crept towards the window. “Hello?”

  The figure drew out what looked like a glowing green wire from somewhere. There was a noise like a buzz saw, and the remnants of the bars jangled on the cell floor.

  “Quickly,” hissed a Cockney voice, “someone will’ve heard that.” A rope was slung down to him.

  Jack glanced into the cell, held up an index finger to Ruth and Bál, and proceeded to ascend the rope. It was a mark of his recent burst of fitness that he was able to do this with an injured arm: being bellowed at for his inability to climb a rope had been a recurrent feature of PE classes.

  He pulled himself through the window, trying not to scrape the remaining edges of bars, and hauled himself to his feet. They were in a side alley, and the first vestiges of daylight were breaking over the soot-encrusted sky.

  Jack looked at his rescuer and started. It was the boy from the factory. “Dannie! What are you doing here? I mean, it’s great, but how—?”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to talk in a minute,” the boy replied, “but let’s just get your friends out first. Oh, and there’s something you should probably know.” Dannie pulled off his flat cap, and a tightly concealed bundle of dirty-blonde hair was let loose. “It’s actually Danielle, but the name Dannie’s fine.”

  Jack stared at her blankly for a moment. “Erm, okay then. Let’s help the others up.”

  Getting Ruth and Bál out was easy, particularly once the dwarf got over the initial surprise of being rescued by a factory colleague… who’d turned out to be a girl.

  Sardâr was more difficult. Whatever was wrong with him, he wouldn’t wake up, so they had to find a way to maneuver him out of a window that was practically on the ceiling. In the end, they managed it by Bál supporting the elf’s weight whilst Jack levitated him out alchemically. It looked a little like an alien abduction.

  “Right, so where are we going? Back to The Kestrel’s Quill?”

  Ruth shook her head. “No point. The Cult will have left the city by now. And there’s the small problem of us now being bankrupt escaped convicts. I think we should head back to The Golden Turtle.”

  They made their way down to the river as quickly and quietly as they could, a job made much harder because they had to carry Sardâr like a corpse. To any passersby, Jack thought they must have looked very suspicious.

  The rising sun shimmered through the clouds of smoke and reflected off the rain-smeared rooftops as the river came in sight. The early risers were already up, including a newspaper vendor. Ruth peered round the corner of an alley to see her own face—badly rendered and made to look older and nastier—glaring at her from the front of a newspaper.

  It was next to similar portraits of Jack, Bál, and Sardâr under a thickly printed headline:

  THIEVERY AND ARSON AT CITY MANOR

  She waited until the vendor was distracted selling a paper, then signalled for the other three to follow her across the road. Jack and Bál hobbled along with a limp, Sardâr clutched between them.

  “I guess we won’t be coming back here anytime soon,” Jack said as they reached the riverbank.

  “What a tragedy,” Bál replied darkly.

  The Golden Turtle was exactly where they had left it—or, rather, the rail surrounding the top hatch was still floating unnoticed several feet from the bank. Ruth dived in, followed by Dannie and then Jack and Bál, who dragged Sardâr through the water as if they were towing a kayak.

  Ruth scrambled onto the railing and pulled open the hatch. Dannie hopped in after her. Bál lowered Sardâr to
them and climbed down. Jack took one last look at the filthy city rising from the riverbank and followed Bál, not at all regretting their departure from Albion.

  Chapter XII

  dannie

  The first thing they attended to was Sardâr. Dripping river water all the way through the ship, Jack and Bál carried him to the command deck and laid him out on the map table.

  Ruth had summoned Quentin, who apparently, in addition to being first mate, was the ship’s doctor. He had brought a large leather case, which he set next to the elf’s legs and opened to reveal a plethora of implements. Affixing a pair of thick-lensed spectacles to his nose, he made a set of initial observations before speaking.

  “The fellow’s been hit by some kind of Dark alchemy,” Quentin confirmed in his natural Etonian accent, for once making no attempt to sound pirate-like. “I need to give him a rather strong stimulant to wake him.” He searched his case and retrieved a syringe. Emptying a vial of clear liquid into it, he tested it and raised it over the elf’s body.

  “He’s not going to enjoy this,” Quentin remarked drily and punctured Sardâr’s breastbone.

  The elf snapped up into a ninety-degree position, inhaling sharply, his eyes open so wide that white could be seen all around his pupils. It took several minutes for his breathing to return to normal, at which point he thanked Quentin with a pat on the shoulder.

  “You can’t keep on like this, old chap,” Quentin reprimanded him. “All these damn scrapes you get yourself into. First the incident in the volcano, then that nasty business with Zâlem, now this. Your body can only take so much alchemical injury before it snaps for good.”

  Satisfied that Sardâr was going to remain conscious, they all took a break to get cleaned up and changed. Jack was given a renewed sense of just how much soot and oil had become encased in his skin. After a long shower and having changed his filthy shirt and trousers for the tunic he’d worn as an elf, he felt a lot more comfortable.

  Whilst running a towel through his hair, which had grown much longer in the weeks since he’d left Earth, he took stock of his belongings. The Albion clothes were in a pile ready to be taken to the laundry room and perhaps added to Quentin’s theatrical collection from different worlds. His bag still held a selection of toiletries snatched from his room in Thorin Salr, which he had emptied onto his bed. The really important stuff was now on his person. The gauntlet from the goblin Vodnik, awarded to Jack for saving his life, was clasped onto his left forearm. The language ring was on the fourth finger of his left hand. The Seventh Shard, as always, was threaded around his neck under his tunic.

  He glanced at the bed absently, half-expecting to see Inari there, but, of course, he had sent the fox to keep an eye on Lucy. The pang of guilt surprised him: she had barely been in his thoughts. It had been less than a fortnight since they’d parted ways, and though she’d been away on family holidays longer than this, it seemed like a lifetime since he’d seen her.

  He joined the group on the command deck. The water they’d spread into the room had been mopped up, and everything looked just as they’d left it a little over a week ago: banks of high-tech computer monitors, murky water beyond the glass, and the large oak table in the center, where Ruth, Sardâr, Bál, and Dannie stood.

  “About time,” Ruth said as he approached. “We were wondering what had happened to you.”

  They were all looking down at a piece of paper. “I managed to take this from the desk in Osborne Manor,” Sardâr explained. “We think it shows where they might be going. Can you read this, please?”

  Jack leaned to have a look, wondering why it had to be him. The map was very minimalist, with a few lines showing the city and a river running eastwards. A route had been traced westwards from the city to a forest upriver. An X was marked in a glade of trees, and a single word had been scrawled in thin handwriting. “It says commune.”

  “What does that mean?” Dannie asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Sardâr replied, for some reason still appraising Jack. “Though we know from our look into the black mirror that Nimue was searching for the fairies of this world who supposedly guard the Third Shard. We have yet to discover why she ended up in a human city instead. We know from those plans that they’ve constructed some kind of machine. I think if we follow them to this commune, we’ll find out more.” All of them nodded.

  Sardâr handed the map to one of the crew members operating the computer consoles. Moments later, bubbles were rising beyond the glass dome as the ship dived and began its journey upriver.

  “Now,” Ruth said, rounding on Dannie, “you’ve got some questions to answer.”

  Dannie smiled sheepishly. “Fair enough. I haven’t really explained anything.”

  “So you work in the Goodwin factory?” Jack prompted, trying to temper Ruth’s accusatory tone. “But why did you rescue us? And, for that matter, how did you know where to find us?”

  Dannie grinned now, and the phrase grease monkey found its way into Jack’s head. She was fairly short and very thin, skin still thick with ingrained dirt even after a shower, and her shoulder-length blonde hair fell in oily curls around her tanned face. She had opted to keep her own clothes, and, despite the new revelations about her gender, the boots, trousers, shirt, and flat cap suited her.

  “Well, I am a factory worker, but I guess I’m a sort of detective as well. It’s a long old story, but I’ll give you the short version. My dad was a laborer for this small manufacturing firm. It was a pretty good setup, but then Fred Goodwin bought it out and fired the whole workforce. That pretty much did Dad in. So when I was old enough, I decided to get back at Goodwin. I’ve been investigating his operation for a while now, trying to dig up some of the dirt everyone knows is there but no one can find any hard evidence for. So I was working undercover at the factory.

  “Then, just over a week ago now, this Osborne woman shows up and a lot of manufacturing firms’ profits practically double overnight, including Goodwin’s. Very shady. So I do a bit more digging and find that someone else is asking the same questions as me”—she nodded at Sardâr—”and so I kept an eye on you. I followed you to the Osborne place and saw you jump out of that flaming window. And then the bobbies got you. Of course, I didn’t know you were all connected until then!” She pointed between Sardâr, Jack, and Bál.

  “But what took you so long to get to the prison? We were there for hours!”

  “I lost track of the paddy wagon, so I had to go round all the police stations in the city searching for you. You were in the fourth or fifth one I tried. Nearly got it badly wrong a few times. I’d got the rope down on one before I realized I was busting out a deranged murderer! Now that would’ve been a mistake…”

  “And so you’re coming with us now?”

  “May as well. I’m interested to see what this Osborne woman’s up to. If I can catch her, I’ve got a good chance of pinning something on Goodwin.”

  Jack had half-expected this. Dannie was well-intentioned and sharp, but she clearly had no idea who was really behind all this. He nodded his assent to Sardâr, and he saw Ruth and Bál do the same.

  The elf smiled exasperatedly. “Well, it would be me doing the explaining, wouldn’t it? Very well. Dannie, there are some things you should know before we get to the forest…”

  Sardâr told her everything—or at least everything Jack knew: about the different races and worlds; about the Apollonians and the Cult; about the Cult’s plan to create a superweapon; about the legends Isaac had come across; about the Shards of the Risa Star and an Übermensch and the race to find them.

  For the most part, Dannie took it surprisingly well. Considering that for Jack and Lucy to be convinced, it had taken a Cult attack on their home, being transported to another world, and fighting a demon inside a volcano. Dannie, conversely, was positively nonchalant about the whole thing.

  “So,” she said, once Sardâr had finished and she’d computed everything for a few seconds, “you’re an elf, you’re a d
warf, you’re a human—so what are you?” She looked lastly at Ruth, who looked back at her, confused.

  It was then that Jack caught sight of a new golden egg set upon one of the maps—a replacement for the one that had shattered outside the manor. It made him remember something. “Dannie, what was it you used to get us out of the cell?”

  Dannie grinned again and rolled up her shirt slightly, undoing a thick leather belt from around her waist and laying it out on the table. It held a line of various metal implements, like a mechanic’s tool kit. She unclipped what looked like a pair of skipping rope handles.

  “Pulse wire,” she explained, pulling the handles apart to reveal a thin line of green energy between them. “Can cut through pretty much anything, including prison bars.”

  “What else have you got in there?” Ruth asked, obviously impressed.

  Dannie replaced the pulse wire and pulled out something that looked like a cross between a key and a screwdriver. “Thunder key. Sends an electric pulse through a lock to align the tumblers. And my personal favorite.” She swapped the key for a small pistol. “Memory gun. A blast from this and you’ll be hazy for about five minutes… until you realize your incriminating documents have been swiped from your safe.”

  “And where did you get all this?” Sardâr inquired coolly. It was the same reproachful tone he had adopted toward King Thorin when he’d suspected that explosives had been stolen from another world.

  “I made them. Alchemically enhanced technology. Like this whole place, right?” She gestured around at the innards of the ship.

  Ruth raised her eyebrows. “I think you’re going to fit in around here.”

  Chapter XIII

  the cave of lights

  The journey to the Cave of Lights was the toughest challenge Lucy had ever faced. Leaving the goblin encampment, they had struck out north across the frozen plains, crossing the river via an ancient-looking bridge—provoking a twinge of memory of Thorin Salr—and begun the long ascent.