Colm felt as if he were back in the early days of his exile on Kisperet, when the things people said frequently did not make sense, although his brain faithfully converted their strange Teanga into English. “Friendly competitions? Like the Olympics?”
“Not exactly friendly. The winners, of course, would have the so-called honor of becoming soldiers in the Magistocracy’s war.”
“Like me,” Janz said, cuddling his rifle.
“The Games used to be friendly.” Diejen’s green eyes grew wistful. “There were plays and poetry contests.”
“Tell me about it,” Colm said.
So she told him about the festivals where the best mages on Kisperet would compete to produce stunning effects, filling the skies with fish and the streets with stars, and little Diejen and Dryjon had ridden on their parents’ shoulders and laughed and laughed at the comic poets who performed skits in between the contests, and ice cream dripped over their hands onto their best clothes. Dhjerga had been a wild teenager. They’d lose him and the parents would panic until he invariably turned up somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.
Colm shifted over on the bench and reached out to clasp one of the slender hands white-knuckling her horse’s reins. “This’d be as good a place as any to set up the cart.”
He meant they’d be safe from stray shells. The arena looked as ancient and impregnable as the blockhouse that the artillery had been pounding at without result. He wondered how long the Ghosts had been on Kisperet. Everyone he had asked said “Forever,” but if that was true, why did they speak a corrupted form of Gaelic?
A plaza surrounded the arena, offering good sightlines. He drove around the colossal structure until he found the gate. Diejen directed him to the stable beneath the arena seating, a cavern which opened onto the stadium via a row of high arches. Even in here it smelled of butchery and smoke. Janz wandered around smiling at the garish fresco portraits of Games champions on the walls. Each one was wreathed in the colors of a Family. Colm knew most of the Families by now; there were only about a hundred on Kisperet. He added the capital letter in his mind to distinguish them from ordinary families. Of course the freemen had families, too, but as far the mages were concerned, they were the only actual human beings in the universe.
Half of them had joined the Lizps’ uprising against the Magistocracy, and the other half had stuck with the devil they knew. But the momentum was on the rebels’ side, thanks to Colm’s steam engines. He had also written and distributed a handy manual explaining how to make voltaic piles, which were much more practical than either Leyden jars or bathtub batteries.
He sent a couple of the freemen to look for the water mains, and told the others to fire up the furnace again. Soon Diejen was back on her camp stool, cranking out copies of Janz. The artillery rumbled in the distance and the steam engine’s smoke drifted out over the grass-furred running tracks. Before nightfall the city fell into the Lizps’ hands.
CHAPTER 18
FOR THE FIRST TIME Dryjon had captured a Magistrate. He presented this man to the rest of the Lizps with an apologetic grimace. Colm soon understood why. Burly, with a square jaw, blue eyes beneath cropped blond hair, and a horrendous sword-cut across his forehead, this Geathla Moro had formerly been Diejen’s fiancé.
This was a worse blow for Colm than he wanted to admit, even to himself. Lonely in his exile, he’d become entranced by Diejen’s elegant profile, melancholy green eyes, and wry sense of humor. He’d even convinced himself that he loved her occasional fits of homicidal lunacy. They had travelled together, worked together, shared laughs and danger, and Colm had believed their moments of closeness meant something. Now he found out she’d been engaged to someone else all along.
She still cared for Geathla, too, judging by her reaction to his appearance. She went pale and sneered, “Were you too slow to get away?”
In previous cities conquered by the rebels, the Magistrates had always fled when they judged that the battle was lost. Being mages, they could simply vanish at the last minute, leaving their slaves and freemen to their fate.
“We caught him sneaking around the power cart on the eastern approach.” Dryjon said. Three steam power carts had contributed to the conquest of Ilfenjium, including the one Colm was personally in charge of. “I assume the Magus told him to gather intelligence about these new power sources. Well, that didn’t work out very well for you, did it, Geathla?” Dryjon swung away, upending a bottle of wine to his lips, and stumbled over an ammunition crate on the floor. He was already drunk, Colm thought.
Diejen laughed wildly. “Now you’ll be spending the rest of the war in gloves! We will all have to feed you and help you go to the toilet.”
Geathla already wore huge unwieldy mittens, like leather oven gloves, that went over his elbows and were joined by a chain behind his neck. They were similar to the ones Dhjerga had been wearing when Colm freed him from the Magistocracy. They had a high-potential rubber lining. The Ghosts knew about non-conducting materials, and used them as handcuffs for mages: with these on, Geathla could neither flit nor do anything else magical. The Lizps had taken the extra precaution of chaining the gloves to Geathla’s belt, with only about six inches of play.
Geathla scowled and nodded at Colm. “Actually, I was looking for him.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” Dryjon said. “He’s the reason we’re winning.” He sat down by the fire. They were camping in the Lizps’ own house on the lake. The Magistocracy had defaced the gracious villa with obscene graffiti and dogshit murals. They’d even taken the trouble to carve the two-headed eagle into every door and window in the house. When he saw that, Dryjon had set the slaves to ripping all the doors and windows out. The noise of demolition resounded through the house. With the windows gone, a chilly wind blew into this large, austere parlor, which faced the lake. Even in this temperate region of Kisperet, it got cold after dark. Slaves were tacking curtains, fetched from the Lizps’ estate of Dam Lizp Hol, over the glassless holes. Dryjon uncapped another bottle of wine and offered Colm some.
“Thanks.” Getting drunk seemed like a sound option.
“Where’s your brother?” Geathla said to the twins.
“None of your damned business,” Diejen said, and Dryjon just grunted. But the question resonated among the other Lizps and their associates who had begun to gather at the villa. Colm saw on their faces an echo of his own fear that Dhjerga was gone for good.
Geathla joined them for supper. The villa got quite crowded with cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends breezing in from other combat theaters, which might lie hundreds or thousands of miles away. The steam engine racketed away in the front garden, allowing the mages to come and go and fetch supplies from their distant headquarters. An atmosphere of febrile jollity took hold, partly as a result of the mead they had found in a cellar overlooked by the Magistocracy, and partly, Colm thought, for Geathla’s benefit. The mages were terrifically proud and would never admit in front of an enemy what they all knew to be true: they might have conquered Ilfenjium, but that meant little as long as the Magus sat on Atletis, unhurt, untouchable, ready to spring a counter-offensive the moment they let their guard drop …
… if Dhjerga did not come back.
Colm watched pink roses bloom on Diejen’s cheeks, and kicked himself for ever having thought she might be interested in him.
An entire pig roasted on a spit in the hearth, dripping into the fire. The meat was tough and tasteless. Colm’s first meal on Kisperet of bread and cheese and apples was still the best one he’d ever had. The Ghosts seemed to eat nastier things, the more money they had—eels, pigeons, offal, salads of flowers and bitter herbs, puddings of sour berries and honey. In the field, however, food was an existential problem. It could not be fetched. Why? “It’s neither alive nor dead,” the mages would explain, but that made no sense to Colm. He had once unpacked a crate of ammo with a disgusting oozing lump tucked in among the shells. Diejen had laughed and said, “Whoops! That used to be an apple!” Colm sus
pected the problem was related to the Ghosts’ mysterious energy-mass conversion technique. All those proteins in food would have to be reassembled perfectly, and food had no sentience, so it couldn’t ‘remember’ what it was supposed to be like. Nor did the Ghosts know what it was supposed to be like. They didn’t have degrees in molecular biology.
This obviously did not apply to animals. Therefore, armies in the field survived on a meat-only diet of chickens and pigs, which could be fetched, as long as they were alive. Any Ghost army camp witnessed the regular spectacle of thousands of slaves catching their supper as it staggered squealing and clucking out of the Shadow. And that’s if the mages even bothered to feed them. Dryjon had explained to Colm that he and Diejen were actually breaking the law by feeding their slaves; the Magistocracy just let them starve when they were no longer needed. It was a form of social hygiene, to prevent the planet from being overrun by half-daft copies.
It seemed only fair that the rulers of this hideous civilization did not eat much better than their slaves did. Tonight’s tough roast was supplemented with porridge made from millet gathered in the fields, and one of those mouth-puckering salads.
Colm picked at it, and took away the taste with wine. On his third trip to the toilet, he found that Geathla was following him.
“If you think I’m going to help you get your dick out—”
“No need. I’m not the one who’s been drinking like a fish,” Geathla said. “They really knock it back on Earth, huh?”
“I’m the planetary drinking champion.” Colm had taken to making up tall tales to put off people who asked him about Earth. “Where I come from, in the Highlands, we have cows that give whiskey instead of milk. We’re a nation of inventors. You’ve got to do something when the weather’s dreich, which is more often than not …”
“You’re telling the truth about the weather, anyway,” Geathla said. His blue eyes caught the light from the parlor. “When I was in Edinburgh—”
“You’ve been to Edinburgh?!?” That was only a couple of hundred miles from Colm’s hometown in Western Scotland.
“I’m a senior Magistrate. I’ve been commanding our forces in Britain. I was ordered home a few weeks ago to deal with the Lizp situation.”
Colm’s mind filled with questions. As sometimes happened when his emotions were running high, his tongue got tangled up, and he couldn’t form words because he kept noticing that his lips and tongue were shaping different syllables from the ones in his head. He finally managed, “So what’s the news?” Cad é scéal? his own voice mocked him.
“We’ve won,” Geathla said.
“That—that was quick.”
“That’s what Diejen used to say.” Geathla winked at his own crude joke.
Colm went to the toilet. He hoped Geathla was just trying to psych him out. But the stylized faces tiled on the wall of the pissoir turned into the faces of his family. Mam, Bridget, Dad … Were they all dead? Fear curdled his buzz. He clumsily did up the stupid button fly of his trousers and tucked in his newly fetched white shirt.
The villa was laid out like a five-pointed star, with covered archways stretching out from a central atrium. Colm crossed the dark atrium and stopped at the entrance to the hall that led to the parlor. Geathla was still there, leaning on the wall, shunned by the other people wandering by. The mages had total confidence in the gloves: with them on, Geathla was in a mobile jail. He couldn’t get away.
But he was no longer alone.
Diejen stood in front of him, the light from the parlor outlining her slender waist and the fall of her specially fetched dress.
Colm couldn’t hear what she was saying. They were having a sing-along in the parlor, and the power cart outside was still clattering away.
Suddenly Diejen and Geathla started down the hall towards Colm. He stepped back into the atrium. He hid behind a pedestal where a bust of the twins’ father had been replaced with a crucified dog, which the slaves had removed, leaving only a stain. Diejen and Geathla crossed the atrium and went out. Colm followed them. He told himself that he needed to grill Geathla about the situation on Earth. He just wanted to be sure he wasn’t interrupting anything.
Shadows lapped over the garden. It was twilight—the long twilight of Kisperet, when the tidally locked moon’s orbit had begun to carry it to the dayside of its gas giant parent. Cerriwan bulged over the pass like a round mountain. The sun seemed pinned to the opposite horizon, shooting long shadows across the reservoir. Fruit trees, whose branches the Magistocracy had vengefully hacked off, cast their own mutilated shadows. The far side of the lake blazed with camp-fires.
Diejen and Geathla slipped away beneath a pergola hung with dead vines. Colm mooched down the drive, past the power cart. Two giggling Lizp cousins were fetching musical instruments for the ceilidh indoors. Slaves struggled with a harp; the strings twanged. The furnace roared and the pistons thudded. There were still plenty of people about. Colm’s heart thudded like the steam engine as he saw Diejen and Geathla going out onto the road.
The garden had no wall. No house or estate on Kisperet was fortified in the sense Colm understood. He momentarily thought of the Free Church Manse, his great-grandfather’s house on the Isle of Skye, which he’d wanted to buy and renovate. It would have been a safe refuge for his family when the Ghosts reached Earth. He clenched his right fist on the hilt of his sword—useless goddamn toy. He only carried it because no mage would be seen dead without one.
But what kind of a mage was he? No magic. Just a basic grasp of the principles of engineering. He hadn’t even practised his conjuring tricks for months.
Diejen and Geathla walked along the road, back towards the dam. They were close together, but not touching. Between the road and the reservoir there was a strip of woodland. At least that’s what Colm thought it was, until Diejen and Geathla turned in through an ornamental gate, beneath a sign in the Ghosts’ rune script. He half-closed his eyes and let them go out of focus. Ilfenjium Zoo.
Beyond the gates, tall trees flanked a downhill sweep of cobbles. Iron-barred enclosures cast jail shadows. At the bottom of the hill, a circular ornamental pond reflected the sunset. There was a nose-prickling smell of manure. Colm thought he had lost Diejen and Geathla, and then he saw them standing in the shadow of a brick building, maybe a concession or public toilet. The Magistocracy had not vandalized this place. He sneaked down the hill, staying in the shadows, feeling like a right Peeping Tom.
Diejen was talking. Geathla was gesturing with his grotesque gloves, his range of motion constrained by the chain securing the gloves to his waist. Colm couldn’t hear what they were saying, and if he went any closer they’d see him. He stayed put beneath a tree rather like an oak, which grew everywhere on Kisperet. He had brought a flask of mead with him. He drank that, while Diejen got angry with Geathla. She looked her best, unfortunately, when angry. Her throat flushed and wisps of caramel hair came loose around her face, and several times during the past months he’d only barely restrained himself from kissing her.
She reached into the folds of her skirt. Colm hoped she was going to draw a gun and shoot Geathla dead. Her anger was always only a hair away from Ghost-style murderousness. But instead she drew out something small and bright. She reached for Gaethla’s gloves.
It was a key.
The chains fell loose. Loudly, Diejen said, “Go, damn you! Now, before I change my mind!”
She walked back up the hill, looking neither to left or right.
Colm stood frozen in the shadows of the not-oak.
Geathla pulled off the gloves. He hurled them into the enclosure behind Colm’s tree. He massaged his fingers, staring up the hill after Diejen. He touched the cut on his forehead and muttered, “Fuck.”
Then he called to Colm, “You can come out now.”
CHAPTER 19
COLM WAS SO SURPRISED that he did walk out of his hiding-place. Geathla looked at his sword hand, and then at his other hand, which was still holding his flask.
“Can I have some of that?”
“It’s all gone.”
“This cut stings like a motherfucker.”
“Why are you still here?”
Diejen had freed her fiancé. Colm supposed she had expected him to make off to safety.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Geathla said.
“So talk.”
“Let’s sit down.”
Gaethla turned his back on Colm’s sword, displaying bravado. Shoulders rolling, he walked around the front of the brick building and pushed its door open. The squeak of the hinges underlined how quiet it was here, away from the hubbub at the Lizp villa, away from the war.
Colm weighed his options for a moment, then followed Gaethla into the building.
Gaethla was sitting on a bench, facing a glass window that ran the length of the building. Glass on Kisperet was Victorian style: hundreds of little streaky panes. Gaethla moved over to make room. Colm didn’t sit. His heart was crushed. He felt stupid and full of hate. “She shouldn’t have freed you.”
“She’s a good girl. We’ve been engaged since we were both knee-high.”
“What would they have done to you?”
“Oh, killed me, probably after dark when they had more drink in them. Crucifixion, or maybe they’d have stripped me naked and thrown me in with this fellow.”
Geathla gestured at the glass. The sun, shining through the high windows, reflected off it. Colm heard a dragging sound. He stepped closer and involuntarily recoiled.
A tangle of scaly limbs, like snakes with elbows, lay in a bare brick cell. Claws the size of dinosaur teeth. Dull, globular eyes staring out of the coils. He’d never seen anything like that on Kisperet, and he’d seen a lot of Kisperet at this point. All the animals here were Earth animals, with the exception of a few insects. And nowhere on Kisperet was hot enough for reptiles …
The nightmarish creature suddenly heaved itself into a different configuration. Its elbows flexed, raising its long scaly body a foot off the floor. It was a dragon. It pressed its blunt, scaly face to a grille set into the glass. “I’m hungry,” it mewed.
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