The Black Rose

by James Bartholomeusz

  “Where is this?” Sardâr demanded, leaning to grab Nimue by the shoulder and shake her.

  The fairy cackled again. “You guessed right before, just for the wrong question. This room is in Nexus; probably in the Precinct of Despair.”

  Sardâr dropped Nimue and stood, ashen-faced. He was not looking at any of the watchers. His gaze was fixed upon Adâ, curled upon the ground like a starving cat. He looked as if he was about to reach out and touch her but instead took hold of the mirror and muttered a syllable. In the last moment of brightness before the image was sucked into the glass, Jack thought he saw a tear escape Sardâr’s eye and trickle down his angular cheek. But as the natural daylight returned, it was gone.

  There was silence. The fairies, from the maple to the cedar, looked aghast. Dannie and Ruth shared a grim expression. Jack could tell what they were thinking, because he was thinking the same. First Bál, and now all four of the other group who had left Thorin Salr had been taken by the Darkness. Their numbers had been sliced to a fraction.

  “I think,” Sardâr said after a long time, “that we should deal with this fiend. We need a while to think about everything else.”

  Two fairies passed him and, touching Dannie’s arrow to dissolve it into the air, hauled Nimue to her feet between them. She was breathing heavily as they half-marched, half-dragged her over to the edge of the glade. Jack followed, keen to see what was to come of her. They dropped her roughly to the ground directly in front of a tree.

  An oak drew up to stand over her at his formidable height. “Nimue, you have a criminal record which stretches back long before the events of today. Most recently the Avalon commune of fairies has charged you with environmental destruction and murder. We have all agreed that these crimes deserve the harshest sentence our custom shall allow. Under the Titania Pact, which ended our last civil war, all violence and corporal punishment have been forbidden. We therefore sentence you to a fate of your own design: imprisonment within this tree until the very end of your lifetime.”

  Nimue’s eyes widened. “No! You cannot! I am an archbishop of the Cult of Dionysus; I cannot be—”

  But all were deaf to her protestations.

  The oak raised one leafy arm to point directly into the Cultist’s face. “Be gone.”

  The bark of the tree behind Nimue began to ripple as if it were wind-disturbed water. She was pulled back, yanked by a gale that only affected her. She dropped to the grass, clawing at the mud with her twigs, trying to gain some traction, but it was no use. The raven demon appeared from her shadow and beat its wings, trying to escape the fate of its mistress, but in vain. Nimue’s body contorted, flicking between many different figures like an early animation film: Lady Osborne in her nightgown, her human shape in a black cloak, several others they had never seen, and back to the gnarled grey of her fairy body.

  She shrieked as her feet disappeared into bark, followed by her legs, torso, arms, and finally her head. The raven demon was sucked in after her, and the moment the tip of its ebony beak passed out of sight, the wood froze.

  If Jack had never seen that tree before, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But, with a little imagination, he could just make out the form of a body frozen in time and two tiny jewels positioned like eyes, below a beak and beating wings.

  Chapter XVIII

  the path to nexus

  Jack was listless for the rest of the day. He wasn’t afflicted by even one of the emotions he thought he should be feeling: shock at Bál’s disappearance into the Darkness, anger for the destruction of the forest, hatred for the Cult, savage pleasure at Nimue’s suffering, guilt at Lucy’s predicament. It was as if all of them were attempting to cram into his mind at once and had halted each other in the process. Above all, he felt tired: in the wake of the day’s events, the rest he had managed to recoup aboard The Golden Turtle seemed to have dispersed.

  Sardâr and Ruth kept their distance from each other and from him, all taking turns pacing, attempting to sleep, or engaging the fairies in conversation. Jack supposed they must be thinking hard about what to do and within a few hours would have their next move planned out to the tiniest detail. He couldn’t even begin to think beyond sleep, and yet whenever he lay down he found himself restless.

  The fairies had spent several hours deliberating what to do with the remaining Cultists, during which time the sorcerers were held, incapacitated, by various trees and shrubs. Despite their part in the battle, the fairies were resolute in their pacifism.

  Eventually, after ungagging and negotiating with a cruel-looking but obviously intimidated follower of Nimue, the fairies agreed that the Cultists would remain imprisoned in the commune until a given time after the Apollonians’ departure, when they would be allowed to go free and return to Nexus. Sardâr had begun to interrogate a Cultist but was obviously too ashamed to extract information by force. It quickly became clear that there was nothing to be got out of them.

  As the sun dropped below the tree line and darkness fell, Jack went to sit up against a birch at the edge of the glade. Dannie was a few feet away, engaged in lively conversation with several fairies. The fairies seemed utterly unfazed by the trauma of the sorcerous attack. But then, despite the damage to the forest, they had not sustained a single injury among them. Dannie, unlike the other visitors, had also seemed to bounce back immediately.

  That made Jack smile slightly. He really liked Dannie. She was fun to be around and always friendly. He hoped she’d come with them and join the Apollonians, not that he knew where they’d next be going.

  He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. An owl welcomed the night somewhere in the trees behind him. The breeze rustled the leaves slightly. Like Dannie and the fairies, the forest seemed to have recovered remarkably quickly from the Cult attack. He could hear the interplay of Welsh and Cockney accents drifting past him on the night air.

  “…so what’s the deal with this place? How come we never hear of you down in Albion?”

  “We’ve never had very good relations with your sort. There were several hundred years where our people and yours vied for control of the land: our Republic of Avalon against your Kingdom of Albion.”

  “In the end we agreed to a peace treaty: we would control the forests, and you the plains. That lasted pretty well until the humans started clearing the trees to feed the appetite of their new machines. You think you control them, but which of you is really slave to the other?”

  “But why don’t you fight back? The forest needs to be protected.”

  “During our last civil war, Nimue was banished for sealing our greatest alchemist, Merlin, inside a tree. You see, that was the irony of her sentence…”

  “That war ripped us apart. Our society had never seen such horrors. At the end of the fighting, we swore a vow of peace. But now, I think all of us are reconsidering. We fought alongside you because you overcame the Shard’s protections. Perhaps violence is justified to protect the good—maybe there is such thing as a just war.”

  “Yeah, how did I do that? Get the Shard, I mean. What’s so special about me?”

  And Jack was finally asleep.

  He was woken by someone shaking him roughly. Twisting, he tried to pull himself into an upright position. He had slumped against the tree and his upper back and neck were bent into stiffness. He cracked his neck and squinted upwards. It was morning, and the person who had shaken him was silhouetted against the sun. He stood and, seeing the person before him, almost fell back again.

  “Dannie! What happened?”

  The person before him was still recognizably Dannie. However, superficially, she was almost entirely changed. Her skin was the gnarled bark of a tree, and maple leaves on branches sprouted from her head, shoulders, and forearms. Her factory attire was still on, just, though healthy twigs had ripped through the cloth in several places. It dawned on him that she must have used one of the eggs from The Golden Turtle to appear this way. He was beginning to wonder why: her identity didn’t need protecti
ng, but her next words cut this thought path clean off.

  “I’m a fairy!”

  “You’re a what?”

  “A fairy.” She grinned at him as if nothing better had ever happened to her than discovering she was actually a tree.

  “But… but…” Jack struggled to marshal his objection. “How can you be a fairy? You’ve been a human up until now! With skin and everything.”

  “Fairies can change their form, remember? Nimue did it, and this lot do it automatically when they move around. One of my parents, or even both, must have been a fairy. I grew up in Albion looking like a human because everyone else did—I needed to blend in. I think it works like a sort of natural camouflage. And that’s why I can use this!” She rattled the Shard around her neck.

  Jack stared at her, speechless. He felt as if a close friend had just come out of the closet. He wasn’t ashamed, just surprised, and struggling to compute the fact that someone who was essentially a plant could be so good at mechanics.

  He was brought to his senses by Sardâr and Ruth coming to join them. By their nonchalance he supposed they had already seen Dannie’s transformation. They both looked more rested than they had the night before, but they shared the same look of perpetual agitation that must have been clear in his face too.

  “We need to talk,” Sardâr said, “about what we are going to do.”

  Jack nodded.

  They followed Dannie in sitting down, cross-legged like children, on the grass.

  Sardâr exhaled slowly, the other three watching him intently. “We know Adâ, Hakim, Lucy, and Vince are imprisoned in Nexus. And we’ve got a black mirror which, it seems, the Emperor doesn’t know has been reactivated. We have two Shards, as does the Cult, presuming that they took the one from the Sveta Mountains and that Alex is also imprisoned there—and one is in the balance because of Bál’s predicament. It seems the two sides are fairly evenly matched.”

  Sardâr paused, gathering his thoughts. “The Cult would think it suicidal for a small group of Apollonians to mount an espionage mission on Nexus—which is why it just might work. We are not well prepared, but then we could never hope to fight the Cult in an open battle: there are far too few of us. But we may never get another opportunity to finally find Nexus. We can use the mirror to track the world’s location and free our friends. We can then regroup, having had an inside look at the enemy’s base.”

  “I guess this goes above and beyond a humanitarian intervention, then?” Ruth commented wryly. “Are you thinking we’d take The Golden Turtle?”

  “Yes. It’s sturdier and stealthier than any of our other dimension ships.”

  “How many of us?”

  “Not so many to attract attention. You, Jack, and I and potentially Gaby or Malik. Remember, once we liberate the others, our group will double in number, so we’ll be a lot more noticeable.”

  Ruth and Jack nodded. Though the prospect of assailing Nexus was daunting, it seemed like the right thing to do. Alex was there, and now Lucy and the others. One of the main reasons he’d joined the Apollonians had been to help rescue Alex: now it seemed they might have a chance.

  “So what about you, Dannie? Are you going to stay here with your people or go back and finish off Fred Goodwin?”

  “What, you think I’m not coming too?” She grinned. “Goodwin’s a tiny fish in a massive lake, and now you’re going off to harpoon the whale. You’re not shaking me off anytime soon!” Dannie’s infectious smile spread to the other three.

  “You’re very welcome to join us,” Sardâr replied. “I’m sure we’ll sorely need the Third Shard in the coming days.”

  Their departure was fairly swift. The fairies had spent the day so far assessing the damage to the surrounding forest and working on alchemy to regenerate the trees. It looked like it would be a long job but not beyond their capabilities. The four Apollonians gathered as many of them as possible to tell them of their plans, thanking them for the Third Shard. After Dannie promised to visit at the next opportunity, they left the glade and retraced their route to the river.

  Ruth and Dannie strode ahead, discussing the mechanics of The Golden Turtle. Jack and Sardâr followed at a slower pace.

  “So Dannie’s a fairy, then?” Jack broke the awkward silence, acutely aware of their disagreement the previous day.

  “It would appear so,” the elf replied. “I had my suspicions as soon as she attained the Third Shard. It seems each Shard latches onto a person the same race as that which protects it, perhaps even the same race as the original bearer.”

  “And she can transform?”

  “Not transform, as such. Merely camouflage. But that’s no great surprise.” He reached inside his tunic and pulled out one of the golden eggs from The Golden Turtle. “We developed this technology from fairy alchemy. I say developed; I really mean stole. As I’ve made far too clear, the fairies I’ve had past contact with haven’t been…” He swallowed. “I’m sorry about what I said yesterday. It was wrong. I know you expect more of me.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s okay. I forgive you.”

  They continued in silence for several minutes before Sardâr spoke again. “Jack… What you did to Nimue…”

  “I know it was wrong. I’m sorry—”

  “No, I quite sympathize with the emotions. Only… did you see what you were doing?”

  It took a moment for the truth to dawn on Jack. “That… that was Dark alchemy, wasn’t it?”

  Sardâr nodded slowly. “I recognize that it was an exceptional situation, but it would be wise to restrain that side of things in the future. We’ve seen all too clearly where that path leads…”

  Jack continued on in silence, troubled. What concerned him most was the knowledge that this hadn’t been the first time. He had thought he’d only been that enraged when Alex had been abducted, but now he remembered another occasion: facing the demon inside Mount Fafnir. At that point, he had been lent alchemical strength far beyond his capabilities. Sardâr had put it down to the influence of the Seventh Shard, but now Jack wasn’t so sure. It was an emotion his memory most strongly associated with Icarus, Alex’s kidnapper. He wasn’t sure that, when he and the Cultist inevitably came face-to-face once again, he’d be able to control it.

  They reached the riverbank. Ruth must have called ahead, because the golden dome had surfaced and the ramp was already stretched out as a bridge.

  Quentin stood next to the hatch. “Jolly good, you fellows made it out of there alive, then?”

  “Yeah, cheers for the help, guv’na,” Dannie said as she scrambled up the ramp and disappeared down the hatch. “We almost got crushed by a giant spider cannon. Where were you lot?”

  Quentin ignored her. “Where, might I ask, is Mister Thorin?”

  Sardâr motioned for Quentin to climb down and began to explain what had happened to Bál. Jack followed, leaving only Ruth.

  She looked up at the forest, the trees like a bank of glistening emeralds in the morning sun. It was so idyllic here, yet they were about to depart for the place she least wanted to visit. Her nightmares had become more frequent, as if reaching a crescendo before her return to Nexus. She thought she might find some answers there about her past, yet she was afraid what she might discover.

  Taking one last sweeping look at the landscape, she clambered down the metal ladder and slammed the hatch shut.

  Chapter XIX

  the serpent

  Alex was sick after using Dark alchemy for the first time. He had fainted and awoken in his bed and spent the following day sliding in and out of uneasy sleep. But worse than the physical sickness was his disgust with himself. He didn’t know what was more disturbing: that he had stooped to the Emperor’s level or the ease with which he had done so.

  His captor visited him a few days later, and they repeated the exercise. Alex had vowed to keep strong and not allow it to happen again, but he sensed in the pit of his stomach that he could not promise this to himself. And it did happen again and again and again
, every time the Emperor struck out at him and invoked his past against him. Each time, Alex’s pretensions to resistance were shattered by a renewal of the anger simmering just below the surface. Something had snapped within him, some control valve, and he felt he had become the conduit for a raging current.

  Several training sessions later, all concept of time having evaporated, the Emperor came to Alex and told him they were going elsewhere. Receiving only silence, like so many times before, in response to his protestations to know what was going on, he followed his captor down the steps and out of the Cathedral.

  They were on a thin walkway, supported by columns, stretching high above the city to a skyscraper on the other side. Alex had been here before, and with aversion he recognized the Precinct of Despair: the high-security containment facility in which he had first been imprisoned. Was he, after all this, to be thrown back into a cell?

  No. They reached the elevators and, after a retinal scan, were admitted to an open-air cube which plunged downwards, far lower than Alex’s cell had been, penetrating the deepest parts of the facility, beneath street level, into the rock on which Nexus was suspended.

  The lift slowed and stopped, and the doors flashed open with a metallic clang. This was, as far as Alex could tell, the lowest level in the building, perhaps in the entire city. The corridor was lit by the same neon glow as above, with only a single door at the opposite end. As they approached, Alex became aware of echoing screams, which all seemed to emanate from the other side of the door. He shivered.

  The Emperor pressed a key on a panel to the right, and the door slid open. The screams became instantly more pronounced. With trepidation, Alex joined the Emperor on the other side of the door.

  The chamber was colossal, perhaps even bigger than the Cathedral. Cells, cubes of about five feet square, were stacked next to and on top of one another to create walls of clinically lit glass stretching as high and as far as he could see. In the wide central aisle, black-cloaked Cultists moved about or floated among cells on levitating platforms. The cacophony of wailing was intense; the prisoners within sounded as if they were being faced with the greatest agony they could possibly endure.