Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  ‘You can’t go down there. There’s something in the woman we found… it’s not human. Not even an animal, I don’t think. It’s got Vessa, and it killed the… the boy. What did we bring back, Ennias? What the fuck did we bring back?’

  Ennias considered for a moment and then tossed him a set of car keys. ‘Get that thing started,’ he ordered, indicating a van parked further along the hard shoulder with its hazard lights flashing.

  ‘While you do what? Piss off again?’

  ‘While I see with my own eyes. Or am I supposed to just start trusting you now?’ Without waiting for a response he disappeared over the side.

  Steve climbed into the van, started the engine and waited as his thumping heart calmed. A line of flashing blue police lights raced along the overpass above this one. Agents of the mysterious Hegemony, if Ennias was to be believed. People like that bloke in the gallery. He looked at the marks on his throat in the rear view mirror. They were real enough. Therefore the thing that had made them was real. Therefore everything that Vessa and Ennias had told him must be true. It occurred to him that he could take off now and put the whole thing behind him. Jackie had been right: he’d been a fool to get involved with Vessa in the first place, and a complete moron to do it a second time. There’d never been any hope of finding Caffrey; he was gone for good, and the hole that Steve had climbed down into to look for him was full of lunatics and monsters instead. Vessa belonged with them – she was welcome to them – meanwhile, he had real people like his sister and her boys who needed him to look out for them. Because if the world really was full of things like that creature, his loved ones needed protecting even more.

  His hand was on the gear-stick when he saw Ennias in the mirror, sprinting towards the van. ‘Drive!’ he was shouting. ‘Fucking floor it!’

  Ennias leapt up into the passenger seat and sat staring straight ahead, panting, his face pale.

  ‘Where?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Just get us out of here. Quickly, before they lock down the motorway. We’ll argue about a destination later.’

  ‘Are we going back for Vessa?’

  ‘No. Yes. Later – possibly. I don’t bloody know. Just drive, will you? I need to think.’

  Steve drove.

  2

  Within ten minutes of shutting down Spaghetti Junction, the tailbacks were over a mile long. Traffic came to a standstill along the entire length of the Aston Expressway, gridlocking Birmingham city centre, and half an hour later the M6’s major junctions with routes west and north jammed solid, effectively immobilizing the road transport hub of the entire country.

  Maddox gave a shit about precisely none of this.

  He refused to answer a single one of the panicky phone calls from the Highways Agency, police, or government ministers demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He stared, fixated, at the image of the woman in the bloodstained dressing gown which the remote feed was sending to his car. He was parked on the flyover directly above where she sat cross-legged and perfectly serene on the deck of a small canal boat; lying next to her, apparently unconscious, was a second woman who had just been confirmed as Sophie Marchant – or Vanessa Gail, depending on which wittering bloody psychiatrist you believed.

  ‘But we still don’t have a confirmed on Miss Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt, is that what you’re trying to tell me?’ he asked, unimpressed.

  ‘Not as yet, sir, no,’ admitted Morris, his Ops Deputy, a protocol-obsessed little brown-noser with more OCD tics and twitches than a sleep-deprived meerkat. Working for the Hegemony for too long tended to have that kind of effect on a person; Maddox’s personal answer was to channel it into displays of astonishing brutality, but that was by the by. Facial recognition software had so far failed to place the strange woman on a single passport, driver’s licence or identification card anywhere in the world – or the bits of the world which had such things – and that worried him.

  ‘What are the wake-sensitives saying?’

  Morris called up a report on his tablet. ‘There’s been nothing active since the m-breach which our buoys picked up, but that was big enough: at least twice the size of Degan’s discorp. But even just sitting there she’s packing one hell of a wallop – Niagra Falls on legs, one of them said.’

  ‘So what in buggeration is she carrying?’

  ‘Whatever it is, sir, it’s big.’

  Big. He’d once heard a rumour that one of the North American offices had got their hands on an asset which carried some kind of giant underground worm thing, but that it had levelled two city blocks before they’d been able to collar the bastard. So big was bad. That wasn’t what bothered him the most, though.

  Neither was it the way she seemed to be totally ignoring the presence of the Lynx helicopter he had stationed overhead and the two fast-response boats manned with snipers in each direction along the canal, or the fact that she’d already shrugged off the effects of a tranquiliser round which would have taken down a horny megalodon. What gave him the crawling horrors was the amount of blood and body parts around her – more precisely, the fact that she’d spelled out his name in them on the boat’s roof. There was no way of avoiding the unpalatable truth: he was going to have to talk to her himself.

  ‘Fuck it.’

  Maddox got out of the car.

  Morris tried to get a stab-vest and a sidearm on him, but Maddox snarled him away. He passed the outer cordon of crowd-controlling ordinary plod, then the inner ring of his own people – not all of whom were, strictly speaking, people – then down to the tow path and the canal.

  The woman was waiting patiently, with Marchant an unconscious heap next to her.

  ‘I am Lilivet,’ she declared, standing. ‘Once of the Oraillean Department for Counter Subornation. Once, also, of the nameless hosts of araka in the dreaming space between worlds. Now of both, and neither, and here also, in this place which we call the Realt.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ he replied, unimpressed. ‘Since you already seem to know who I am I’ll skip all that, if you don’t mind, and get straight to what it is exactly that you want.’

  She held out her hands, wrists together. ‘I want you to arrest me,’ she said, smiling playfully. ‘I want you to take me to your leader.’

  Maddox considered this for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said, and waved forward the men with the handcuffs. Pleasingly, she didn’t seem to be expecting them to be electrified.

  3

  Ennias ordered Steve to drive west and out onto the Hagley Road, a busy arterial linking the city centre to the M5 and lined with hundreds of low budget chain motels, bed-and-breakfasts, and conference centres catering to the jetset lifestyles of middle-management executives and travelling salesmen. He led him up the rattling rear fire escape of an ancient guesthouse which might have seen better days as a bail hostel, and into a cramped bedsit.

  Steve looked around in dismay. There was a sagging bed, a sink, a television so old that its screen actually curved, and a panoramic view of the delivery yard. It smelled of damp plaster and nicotine. ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘You live here. At least for the moment.’

  ‘Here? Are you insane?’

  ‘Oh, I do apologise,’ Ennias replied acidly, ‘but all of my better properties are kind of security-compromised at the moment by the feckless idiots I have to keep rescuing – not to mention fucked up with blood and guts. This is the only safe-house I have left.’

  ‘Safe as in safe for everybody else except me, right?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  Steve tested the bed’s squeaking springs and ran some water in the sink. It was brown and there was no plug. ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘Three, maybe four days. I’m going to find out where they’ve taken our girl.’

  ‘Screw that. I’m coming with you.’

  Ennias gave the kind of sigh generally used when att
empting to explain very simple things to very simple children. ‘McBride, listen to me. I have to approach some secretive and nervous people who won’t say a thing, and they might very well kill us both, if you’re with me. The best thing you can do right now is keep your head down here and stay out of everybody’s way. Also, at some point in the next twenty-four hours what you laughingly refer to as your brain is likely to go into existential meltdown because of all the weirdness it’s had to deal with in the last three days, and it’s going to be much better for you, me, and everybody else if that happens behind closed doors. That way you can gibber and scream and wipe the walls with your own shit and nobody has to know. If on the other hand you don’t do a complete Renfield,’ he shrugged, ‘so much the better. We’ll talk about insane then.’ He lit a cigarette. Steve tried to open the window, but the frame was warped with damp.

  ‘But what about my job?’ he complained, thumping at it. ‘What about Jackie? I have to let people know I’m all right!’

  ‘Well, you won’t be if you try it, and neither will I. Up until now the only reason that the Hegemony might possibly have been interested in you is to get to Vessa, and they’ve got her now, which means soon they’ll know about me. If you pop your stupid head up above the parapets grinning and waving at everybody, they’ll come for you – or they’ll come for those closest to you – to get to me and the other exiles. Apart from anything else, I’ve also got to tell my own nearest and dearest to get out of Dodge too. I have absolutely no intention of letting you see anybody I know or care about while you constitute that kind of a risk.’

  ‘It strikes me that you’d be a lot better off just dumping me in a canal or something.’

  ‘Don’t think it hasn’t occurred. That was a joke, by the way,’ he added, dead-pan. ‘Probably. But I think you can definitely kiss your career in the arts sector goodbye.’

  Ennias left Steve with money, some old clothes which looked like they wouldn’t fit him at all well, and a cheap mobile phone which he was told to never under any circumstances use. ‘Your tag words for the next seventy-two hours are “low” and “profile”, got it?’ he said, and disappeared back down the fire escape.

  Steve sighed and turned on the TV.

  4

  Maddox is on the Wall again.

  An icy north wind whips over the border-land fells and snaps his prefect’s cape behind him as he surveys the day’s repair work before him. There is a broken gap in the Wall, and large blocks of limestone lie scattered on the green turf around him. Some are clean and new-cut, lying in neatly organised stacks for the Wall’s ongoing programme of construction and expansion, while others are damaged, broken and scorched – already testament to its strength against the incessant Pictish attacks. One would have thought that the rows of barbarian heads on pikes above each of the milecastles would have taught them the futility of attacking the Wall by now – but apparently not. It has become something of a competition amongst the commanders of the milecastles to see who can boast the largest crop of heads. Nobody seriously fears the Picts. The Wall is too strong.

  As praefectus fabrus of the Second Augustan Legion, he sees to that. He issues orders to his men and they set about their tasks: hammering, chiselling, and cursing the blocks into fitting obediently with their neighbours. The ringing sound of their tools echoes out into the desolate wastes of the fells, and he thinks with savage satisfaction that it is the closest those heathens will ever get to civilisation. He makes it a point of personal pride to inspect each block as it joins the Wall – some are engraved with information about the day’s events, and he needs to ensure that everything is organised clearly – but even though he knows that this is not really possible, it doesn’t bother him too much, since this is only a dream, after all.

  Not a dream in the ordinary sense, of course. Such things are far too dangerous for a man in his position. A “creative visualisation” is how the Legion’s psychological analysts described it to him when he first enlisted; a near-lucid imaginative construct designed to provide a framework for his mind to collate and process memories and information from the waking day rather than run the risk of ‘normal’ REM dreams.

  One of his men accidentally drops a block on another, causing both to split. It’s Maddox’s fault – he hasn’t been concentrating on the construction – so he doesn’t berate the clumsy soldier, just smiles tolerantly and turns to lend a hand. His men love him. In the back of his sleeping mind runs the understanding that one of the characteristics of non-REM dreams is that they are far less driven by fear and aggression, which probably explains why he compensates by being such an utter bastard to his subordinates in the waking world.

  It also helps to explain why, when the woman who calls herself Lilivet climbs casually through the broken gap in the Wall as if she’s out for nothing more than a mid-morning stroll, this doesn’t bother him too much either. She is wearing very little. Her bare skin – and there is quite a lot of it, he notes appreciatively – is painted in swirls of blue, while curving golded bands decorate her arms, legs, and throat.

  She looks around, nodding in approval. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you certainly proved difficult to find.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ he replies affably. ‘The Wall wouldn’t be very secure if everybody who worked on it started digging tunnels whenever they slept. It also means that people like you can’t hijack your way into the brains of people like me through our dreams, which is what I imagine you were intending to do.’

  She pouts. ‘Now you’ve gone and spoiled all the fun. I suppose I’m going to have to actually persuade you.’

  ‘Sorry about that. We’ve been doing this rather a long time. Still, no hard feelings, hey?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she says, and kicks a small fragment of stone sulkily.

  He concentrates on putting a few more of the day’s blocks in place while she wanders here and there, picking up things, inspecting them and then dropping them again, bored. When he reaches a natural break he sits down on a large block next to her in the sun, enjoying the sensation of the north wind cooling the sweat on his brow. He offers her a drink from his water bottle. ‘So,’ he says. ‘What exactly is it that you wanted? Other than to possess me and turn me into a drooling vegetable, that is.’

  ‘You don’t seem particularly threatened by this notion,’ she observes.

  He shrugs. ‘It’s a side effect of shutting down the fight-or-flight parts of the brain which cause the dreams that link my world to yours. Besides, I assume that you’re clever enough to have a plan B.’

  ‘Are you patronising me?’

  ‘Just a little bit. I think I’m entitled.’

  She takes a long drink from his bottle and passes it back. ‘This really is a most impressive wall,’ she says, in an apparent desire to change the subject. ‘I’d be flattered if you would show it to me.’

  He is happy to oblige.

  ‘Is it herbal or pharmacological?’ she asks as they walk. ‘This dream-killer that you use. In the DCS we used nutmeg in our tea. It helped to suppress dreams somewhat.’

  ‘It’s a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. A kind of hydrazine, if that means anything.’

  At that she begins laughing, hard enough to have to stop briefly.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Sorry, a private joke,’ she apologises, wiping her eyes. ‘Yes, hydra means something to me.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain it to me one day.’

  ‘I’ll show it to you in person,’ she promises. ‘I have come to offer you an alliance. If all I had wanted was to suborn or kill you, I could already have done so a dozen times over.’

  ‘Oh, I strongly doubt that,’ he laughs complacently.

  ‘Really? Your countermeasures are designed to work against passengers from my world trapped in the bodies of people from your world, and their control of the subsequent energy overspill between the two realities. B
ut that’s not what I am. Not in the slightest. Besides, I would hardly have come bearing a gift, now would I?’

  ‘You mean the Marchant girl?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘What makes you think I have any interest in her?’

  ‘Your man Degan told me. In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘A manner of speaking. Did he also tell you how much I hate enigmatic bloody double talk?’ Despite the generally tranquil nature of the construction, he can feel himself becoming rattled. Or it could be her semi-naked proximity which is doing it. ‘Why do you think I would value an alliance? What makes you think that I can’t simply take what I want from you?’

  ‘Mr Maddox, I know that you believe you are arguing from a position of strength – and who knows? It may even be that you are. You saw what I did to the first person who tried to get in my way, and I’m reasonably confident that I can do much the same with the men you currently have imprisoning me. It might even be amusing to try. But it wouldn’t get us anywhere, now would it? I’d be dead, and you would have lost your best chance at obtaining some real power for once in your life.’

  ‘Real power? You will let me know when you’re getting to within shouting distance of a point, won’t you?’

  ‘Explain something to me, Mr Maddox,’ she says. ‘How is it that you are in command of an operation to control and enslave people with powers that most ordinary humans would kill for, and yet you do not possess any yourself?’

  The sounds of stonework cease. The Wall is abruptly deserted except for the pair of them. They’ve stopped walking. Why in God’s name is he still listening to her? She is so close that he can see that her eyes, which he has previously taken to be simply an unusual dark blue, are more unusual still. Their colour shifts between blues and greens so dark as to be almost black, like shafts of sunlight in water at the very limit of visibility.

  ‘Fear, that’s what it is,’ she continues. ‘Fear. Like all tyrants, you fear those whom you enslave. You believe that they are freaks and monsters, not people, and you fear the process by which these people have gained their powers. You might be tempted but you believe that it cannot be controlled, and you fear losing your mind, which is why you hide in childish constructions such as this. I mean really, a Romish centurion on Hadrian’s Wall? Bless.’