Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  But nobody was paying attention to him any more.

  Lachlan reached out to the boy. ‘Jophiel, please don’t do this,’ he whispered, hoarse with denial. ‘Not after...’ but he couldn’t finish.

  ‘I’m sorry, Da. He wouldn’t have believed any other way.’ Joe was thinner now, his flesh becoming translucent and yet oddly brighter at the same time, and then Bobby realised why: it was the scales. The sun shone on the silvery integument that was Jophiel’s real skin, revealed now that his human disguise was finally sloughing away. The oddness in the way Joe had come swimming to rescue him also made sense now; gills quivered beneath his jaw. Like sparks from a fire, Allie had said. Except that this spark had created its own fire in turn.

  ‘I was Mama’s dream anyway,’ the boy continued, even though there wasn’t much left of him which was very boy-like. ‘We both know that.’

  ‘No. Don’t say that. You’re my son.’

  ‘I’m less than a dream, Da. I’m a scrap of a dream feeding off someone else’s need for something to love. I’ve been trying to hang on since... since that thing took her, but it’s just too hard. I’m too tired. It’s time for me to go. I only ever wanted to make her happy. Did I? Did I do that?’ Joe’s eyes, once the strangest thing about him, were now the most human. The overpowering need to know this one last thing was all that still bound the shreds of his human form together.

  ‘Yes, son,’ said Lachlan. ‘You made her very happy. You made us both happy.’

  Jophiel sighed deeply, as if having been given leave to rest after a long labour, or permission to depart. He kissed his father and walked to the very edge of the raft, but changed his mind and went over to Bobby. The soldiers let him go, drawing back fearfully.

  ‘You’ve made friends,’ said the boy, ‘out there.’ And he nodded towards the open ocean. ‘They’ll help you if they can. You’ve made them strong, but the araka is still alive, and it’s a lot stronger.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ said Bobby. ‘It blew up – we both saw it happen.’

  Joe shook his head sadly, pieces of his shape scattering in bright fragments which evaporated in the sunlight. His form existed now only as an after-image on the retina, in the middle of which something sinuous gleamed.

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ it replied, and turning to Runce it added, ‘nor did your daughter. I’m sorry – so truly, truly sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘She’s not...’ my daughter, Runce wanted to reply, but what was left of the boy had already gone over the side, leaving only the last shreds of its dream-wrought humanity to melt on Stray’s deck. A shining, rainbow eel with fins like angel’s wings rippling along the length of its body paused for a moment to dance in the warm shallows, and then threaded itself in curving stitches down into the depths.

  4

  They laid the woman as gently as possible in the Cella’s single cramped cabin, where Ennias tended to her wounds while Steve and Vessa hovered helplessly. When he’d done the best job he could, he joined them back on deck.

  ‘And you’re sure you have absolutely no idea who she is,’ he said to Vessa. She shook her head.

  ‘But you were trying for Caffrey?’ asked Steve.

  Vessa shrugged. ‘He was there. I could see him. But it was all confused – there was a lot of fighting. People running around and screaming.’

  ‘Was someone attacking him? Or her?’

  ‘I can’t remember; it’s fuzzy. You know when you wake up from a dream which was so clear and you can only remember bits of it?’

  ‘Vessa,’ said Ennias, ‘when you said “it’s free, it’s under the boat”, what did you mean? What got free?’

  Her voice, when she explained about the araka, was so quiet that they could barely hear it. This was the last thing she wanted to tell anybody. When she’d finished, Steve had his head in his hands and Ennias was glaring at her coldly.

  ‘Finally something that makes sense,’ he said, and she recoiled from his anger. ‘That’s why the Hegemony wanted you in the first place, wasn’t it? Nothing to do with any link between there and here, because you didn’t know you could do that until you pushed Caffrey in, did you? All along they’ve been after your Passenger – this araka. Something like that… the things they could do with it…’ he broke off, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘And it’s loose out there now, is that right?’

  She nodded. ‘But I didn’t know! How could I have known? I’d never have tried to bring anybody through if I’d known that it was loose. You have to believe me!’

  Ennias sighed. ‘Yes, there is that, I suppose. As it is, all we’ve done is gone and plucked some random stranger out of the world. This is completely fucked.’

  Steve raised his head. ‘Still, it proves that she can do it.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Ennias’ sarcasm echoed off the concrete all around them. ‘As silver linings go, that’s a corker, isn’t it?’ He threw his coat on and jumped from the deck to the towpath. ‘I’ve got some calls to make. I need to find out if this has been noticed. All this concrete, though, it plays hell with a phone signal. Do not,’ he jabbed a finger at the Cella’s cabin, ‘tell that woman anything if she wakes up, and do not let her leave. Got it?’

  And without waiting to hear whether or not they’d got it, he was gone.

  5

  She awoke in narrow darkness. The part of her which remembered being Berylin Hooper recognised the feeling of strange bedclothes from her nightmare at the pool of Bles Gabril, while the part of her which was still araka sensed the weight of water all around – held at bay by only a flimsy steel hull – and remembered its entrapment under Stray by the witch-girl Sophie. Panicked by both, she screamed herself into full consciousness.

  Sounds of movement on the deck overhead.

  She was in a small cabin. There was barely enough room for the bed in which she’d been laid, with a few shelves and a door beyond her feet, and a curtained porthole above her head. She twisted around and knelt up, discovering that Berylin’s sodden clothes had been replaced by a thick robe, and drew the short curtains aside.

  The world outside was grey. Scum-covered water lapped a few inches from her nose, with a concrete shore further off, planted with concrete columns which supported a concrete sky.

  She was in the Realt. Someone had dragged her into this place that was the source of all nightmare and horror. Dear Reason, she was…

  ‘Alive,’ she realised.

  There was at least that.

  Alive and – something more.

  This was a canal. She was in a narrowboat on a canal beneath a motorway flyover. She knew this because Degan knew this and she had eaten Degan and everything of him. More precisely, the araka had eaten him before it in turn had become a part of her – or she a part of it. Impossible to tell. Locked in a killing embrace, the two of them had been dragged here and – what? Fused? Conjoined? Consummated?

  The thought appalled her.

  At the same time, it was glorious.

  Degan had known a great deal about the Realt, it seemed, and specifically about what Passengers were capable of when they arrived here. He knew about a man called Maddox, and a power called the Hegemony, and the tools that they employed to monitor and control this world. She was surprised to discover that far from being trapped, isolated and powerless here, she probably had more options available to her than at home for putting a stop to the curse of subornation once and for all.

  A slow smile curved her mouth. She felt the sharpness of her teeth – several rows of them – with a tongue which was no less dangerous.

  Correction: tongues. Plural.

  That brought her close to panic again. She lurched across the bed to the narrow wardrobe, yanking it open, and found what she needed: a mirror on the inside of the door. Her reflection seemed normal: the same hair, same hazel eyes, same nose that had always been a little too big for her l
iking. She bared her teeth at herself and found those to be normal too. A bit mucky, perhaps, due to life aboard the Spinner, but not the razor-edged points she’d felt a second ago. Was she going mad? Had her subornation into this place broken her mind? If it had, could she be sure she was in the Realt at all? Maybe she was in a padded cell in Beldam, shackled to a wall and drooling. Angels in my brain.

  Almost afraid to look, she started to open her robe to examine her new body.

  ‘Is everything okay? We thought we heard someone calling out.’

  The witch-girl was peering around the door in concern. The araka wanted to leap across and slaughter her on the spot, tear the screaming face off her skull and bathe in her blood as payback for the torment of its long starvation in her mind, but Berylin was more cautious. It was obvious that this wasn’t Sophie. Sophie was still in Tourmaline. This was the other, the one that Sophie had conjured into being to trap the araka between them. If anything, it hated her more. But the araka’s knowledge was her knowledge now, and it knew everything about Sophie Angela Marchant, having spent long enough tormenting her and being tormented in turn. The girl was far too useful to be wasted on the simple gratification of bloodletting. That would come later.

  ‘Who are you?’ she whined. ‘What place is this?’ She clutched the robe at her throat and backed away to the end of the bed in a facsimile of confusion and fear.

  ‘I’m Vessa, and you’re safe,’ the other answered, taking a tentative step further into the cabin. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

  What a question. The simplest one in the world: who are you? And yet for a moment it nearly broke her. She wanted to lash out at it, to destroy it and the woman who spoke it, and she felt her teeth sharpen again. More than that: now she felt things coming alive at her neck, armpits, elbows, groin and knees – wherever she was joined together – and suddenly the answer came to her. She smiled at Vessa with all her teeth, enjoying the way she shrank back in terror.

  ‘Lilivet,’ she said. ‘You can call me Lilivet, sweetie.’

  Before Vessa could scream or do anything like try to push her out of the world, Lilivet bounced her head off the cabin wall so hard that she saw stars.

  ‘Not this time, sweetie,’ Lilivet purred. ‘You’re dealing with the professionals now.’ And she slammed Vessa’s head again, this time so hard that everything exploded into darkness.

  Chapter 26

  Compromising Positions

  1

  Steve wasn’t having much success trying to coax the hradix out of the scaffolding. It clung and swung from the bars, growling at him, having changed its hands and feet to curved, opposable claws. There was absolutely no way he could pretend it was just some kid gone schizo, but even so he couldn’t bring himself to feel afraid of it. It looked like it was trying to revert to its natural form – whatever that was – and when he saw the talons sticking out of the ruins of its school shoes, his guts twisted in sympathy for the poor child that was possessed by it. Still, sooner or later a passer-by was going to spot this ‘poor child’, and probably get eaten by it. He could hear sirens faintly somewhere overhead on one of the curving slip-roads, and wondered how Ennias was getting on up there.

  ‘Look,’ he called up to the hradix, ‘if you don’t want any of these I’ll just have to eat them all myself, won’t I?’ He crunched a mint loudly. ‘Mmm! Yummy!’

  It swooped down, snatched one and shot back up into the maze of pipes, grinning. It was playing, he realised. He wondered if there was a ball anywhere on board. Maybe there was a way of encouraging the human personality to take more control.

  Abruptly the hradix stopped scampering and froze into an angle formed by three poles, hissing and glaring at him. No, not at him – past him. He turned and saw the strange woman from Tourmaline stepping from the Cella’s deck and onto the shore, coming towards him.

  ‘Sod you, then,’ he muttered, and headed back down the tow-path to meet her. She was still wearing the bathrobe that Vessa had found for her, but it was hanging half open in a way which displayed more flesh than he was comfortable seeing. For all he knew, that was how they were wearing things in Tourmaline this season, but still.

  ‘Morning,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Are you, ah, feeling any better?’

  Lilivet stretched. ‘Marvellous,’ she yawned. ‘Absolutely marvellous. I feel like a new woman.’ She laughed, and the hradix whimpered at the sound.

  ‘Riiight,’ he said slowly, looking anywhere but at her. ‘Um, is Vessa still down there? I need to talk to her about a thing.’

  ‘Oh poor you,’ she replied, in tones of great concern. ‘You really are still smitten with her, aren’t you?’

  It wasn’t quite the last thing he’d expected her to say, but it was pretty close. ‘Sorry? How did – what has she been saying?’

  ‘Nothing. She didn’t have to; we’ve known each other for a long time.’

  ‘Really? She said she’s never seen you before.’

  The woman shrugged as if it made no difference. ‘Figure of speech. It’s a pity, really – she never had any genuine feelings for you. She’s incapable of them. She’s not even what you’d call a proper human being.’

  He didn’t like the way this conversation was going at all. He’d been expecting her to be confused and disorientated, and possibly even aggressive. Not this – whatever this was. She was still drifting slowly towards him, even though she didn’t actually seem to be paying him all that much attention. She was staring at the reflections on the water as if mesmerised, and at her bare feet as they moved on the gravel. The sirens were louder now. Closer. He stepped to one side, planning to skirt a cautious distance around her and head back the Cella.

  ‘Vessa?’ he called. There was no reply. Her absence was beginning to actively alarm him now.

  ‘I know,’ Lilivet sighed, even though he hadn’t said anything to her. ‘You’ve followed her all this way, and all it’s got you is dead. You and everybody else in this world.’

  Steve tried to run.

  He got about three feet.

  Her araka limbs whipped out, taking him around the torso and throat, and surprising herself almost as much as him. She hadn’t known she could be so fast, or so strong. She reeled him in like a struggling fish, thinking that now would be as good an opportunity as any to test the limits of her new capabilities: how much damage they could cause, and how dextrous they could be in inflicting pain. ‘I know this is small consolation,’ she said as he choked, ‘but compared to what’s going to happen to the rest of this world, I’m doing you a favour. And don’t worry; I haven’t killed her. She is going to serve a noble purpose in helping to rid my world of a great evil: yours.’ The tip of one tentacle brushed his brow, taking the skin with it, and he tried to scream.

  Then the hradix launched itself at her, tearing and biting. In its attack rage, it had shrugged off more of its human shape; Steve saw patches of grey, reptilian skin through the holes in its tattered school uniform. Its hands and feet were all claws, and its jaws looked like they were lengthening even as it bit. Then it was at the woman’s face, and she dropped him to defend herself, the pair of them tumbling backward in a pinwheeling storm of limbs and teeth.

  Steve scrambled away from the towpath and up the bank, retching for breath, and found his way blocked by a chain-link fence which followed a line of support columns. He remembered Ennias saying something about an escape route up the scaffolding (and where exactly had that useless bastard gone, anyway?), and he ran along to where he’d been trying to coax the hradix down, trying not to hear the awful noises coming from behind him. It sounded like a bobcat being torn apart by a pack of wolves. Halfway up the scaffolding, a stab of guilt made him pause.

  It’s just a kid. You can’t leave it to be killed like that.

  He looked back, but it was already too late. Blood painted the canal bank and clouded the water, and in the midst of it a crea
ture of thrashing limbs tore at a small shape too badly savaged to be recognisably human.

  And Vessa. Are you going to run out on her too? Just like you did when the Swarm attacked? Just like you did when Sophie came?

  He might be able to make those things up to her, but if she were still alive on board the Cella, all he’d accomplish by going back would be to give her someone else to mourn. The best he could do was to find Ennias and hope that he had some clue how to fight that thing. He climbed, fuelled by adrenalin and terror, and eventually collapsed onto a maintenance platform attached to the crash barrier of a busy slip-road.

  He lay for a moment, gasping, while cars and trucks roared past.

  ‘McBride!’ Ennias was running towards him along the hard shoulder. ‘What the fuck? I told you to stay with the boat!’

  Steve struggled to his feet. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he coughed.

  Ennias pulled up short, taking in McBride’s condition: the mud and blood and marks on his throat. ‘Words of one syllable,’ he demanded. ‘Now.’

  Steve floundered, trying to explain something which barely made sense to himself. Ennias allowed him a second or two of stammering like an idiot before dismissing him. ‘Fuck this for a game of tiddlywinks,’ he muttered, and headed for the maintenance platform.

  ‘No!’ Steve shouted, grabbing at him.

  ‘Ah, so it does speak.’